Backdated entry: Adventure-time! (3/15/2011)
I'm back to feeling crappy a lot of the time. Every new increase in medication brings with it a 2-3 week period of adjustment, because Lyme disease is a motherfucker like that.
When I have my good days, though, they're fucking stellar - almost no pain, very little fatigue unless I overdo it - and I like to make the most of them.
This is the tale of one such day, an epic tire-hunting adventure in the desert featuring old leather work gloves, a ton of bruises, and more fun than should be legal.
Before I get this story on the road, I must make one thing very clear.
My boyfriend is fucking insane.
He's that special, creative, model-actor-set-and-costume-designer kind of crazy that sees shredded truck tires on the side of the road while we're driving back from San Francisco at 3 am and decides they'd make great components in a postapocalyptic costume concept he wants to throw together for Burning Man.
After months of sitting around saying he wanted to go prowl the highways and byways of Southern California for old tires, he turned to me two weeks ago and said something to the effect of, "let's put on our most ancient, nasty clothes and go stomp around in the high desert for eight hours in search of the 25-100 pound lumps of steel-reinforced scrap rubber strewn here, there, and everywhere along the backroads."
So we did.
We fueled up on truck-stop coffee, called our friend Adam (who agreed to let us store the tires in his giant backyard as long as he got to use some of them for a photoshoot project of his own), and hit the road.
Our strategy was simple - spot tires and ripped up treads, pull over on the shoulder of the road, jump out, snag said tires, and throw 'em in the back of the truck.
(rest assured, dear readers, we were plenty cautious and safe about this whole procedure, and the roads involved didn't have much traffic).
It might not sound like much fun, but it was amazing.
I've gotten some strange looks in my life. It comes with the territory when you're a crazy Southeast Alaskan with a fondness for hijinks, mischief, mayhem, and ridiculous clothing.
The open-mouthed stares of passersby as they took in the sight of a dirt-covered girl in ripped up jeans walking along the side of the road with a big, ripped-up tire in each hand ranked pretty high on the list. On a scale of 1 to 10, they were pretty goddamn priceless.
We started around 4.00 pm, and soon learned that spotting tires at night is a bitch.
We also learned that I've got pretty awesome night-vision.
and that semi tires are ridiculously heavy.
All told, we covered about 100 miles of road and piled up four truck-bed loads full of tires and treads in Adam's front yard (totaling about 1000 pounds of rubber).
He told us that if he didn't answer his phone, we could just throw 'em over the fence and call it good.
A normal human being would have a heart attack if they woke up to the sight of a mountain of scraggly, nasty old tires in their front yard.
Adam, though, is made of sterner, infinitely more awesome stuff than your average person.
When we came back two days later (with four more loads), he told us that when he looked out his front window, the first words that flashed through his mind were "fuck" "yeah" and "awesome." We made his day, and after moving a literal ton of tires from his front yard to his back yard, we cracked open a bunch of beer and spent seven hours planning and discussing the set Adam wanted to build with them.
Being friends with a bunch of creative-nutjob models and photographers is so much fun.
Amazingly enough, I wasn't a wreck the next day.
The worst thing I could complain of was sore muscles.
I had four or five really good days before shit hit the fan again, and getting to spend two of them having adventures like I used was so wonderful. For a few precious days, I had my life back, and it felt like Heaven.
I'm not good at this sitting around waiting to get better business, but it's so much easier knowing that I'll have more adventures waiting for me on the other side of all this.
When I have my good days, though, they're fucking stellar - almost no pain, very little fatigue unless I overdo it - and I like to make the most of them.
This is the tale of one such day, an epic tire-hunting adventure in the desert featuring old leather work gloves, a ton of bruises, and more fun than should be legal.
Before I get this story on the road, I must make one thing very clear.
My boyfriend is fucking insane.
He's that special, creative, model-actor-set-and-costume-designer kind of crazy that sees shredded truck tires on the side of the road while we're driving back from San Francisco at 3 am and decides they'd make great components in a postapocalyptic costume concept he wants to throw together for Burning Man.
After months of sitting around saying he wanted to go prowl the highways and byways of Southern California for old tires, he turned to me two weeks ago and said something to the effect of, "let's put on our most ancient, nasty clothes and go stomp around in the high desert for eight hours in search of the 25-100 pound lumps of steel-reinforced scrap rubber strewn here, there, and everywhere along the backroads."
So we did.
We fueled up on truck-stop coffee, called our friend Adam (who agreed to let us store the tires in his giant backyard as long as he got to use some of them for a photoshoot project of his own), and hit the road.
Our strategy was simple - spot tires and ripped up treads, pull over on the shoulder of the road, jump out, snag said tires, and throw 'em in the back of the truck.
(rest assured, dear readers, we were plenty cautious and safe about this whole procedure, and the roads involved didn't have much traffic).
It might not sound like much fun, but it was amazing.
I've gotten some strange looks in my life. It comes with the territory when you're a crazy Southeast Alaskan with a fondness for hijinks, mischief, mayhem, and ridiculous clothing.
The open-mouthed stares of passersby as they took in the sight of a dirt-covered girl in ripped up jeans walking along the side of the road with a big, ripped-up tire in each hand ranked pretty high on the list. On a scale of 1 to 10, they were pretty goddamn priceless.
We started around 4.00 pm, and soon learned that spotting tires at night is a bitch.
We also learned that I've got pretty awesome night-vision.
and that semi tires are ridiculously heavy.
All told, we covered about 100 miles of road and piled up four truck-bed loads full of tires and treads in Adam's front yard (totaling about 1000 pounds of rubber).
He told us that if he didn't answer his phone, we could just throw 'em over the fence and call it good.
A normal human being would have a heart attack if they woke up to the sight of a mountain of scraggly, nasty old tires in their front yard.
Adam, though, is made of sterner, infinitely more awesome stuff than your average person.
When we came back two days later (with four more loads), he told us that when he looked out his front window, the first words that flashed through his mind were "fuck" "yeah" and "awesome." We made his day, and after moving a literal ton of tires from his front yard to his back yard, we cracked open a bunch of beer and spent seven hours planning and discussing the set Adam wanted to build with them.
Being friends with a bunch of creative-nutjob models and photographers is so much fun.
Amazingly enough, I wasn't a wreck the next day.
The worst thing I could complain of was sore muscles.
I had four or five really good days before shit hit the fan again, and getting to spend two of them having adventures like I used was so wonderful. For a few precious days, I had my life back, and it felt like Heaven.
I'm not good at this sitting around waiting to get better business, but it's so much easier knowing that I'll have more adventures waiting for me on the other side of all this.