So Here Goes Nothing

One of the things that has been on mind is my overall inability to accept the fact that I'm getting old. Old. Like over 50 now. Old like being jealous of all the kids I work with just because they are still young. Old like knowing the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the train. Old like remembering how all of my parents died.

So I have decided that now is as good a time as any to start writing down events from my life as best as I can remember. I don't necessarily want to include events from before I went to college the first time, but they may creep in from time to time. They will undoubtedly be out of any chronological order, since there seems to be no particular order to how I remember past occurrences. That could be accounted for due to the random nature of memory, and how most memories are "event" triggered. C'mon, everyone has the experience of hearing a song that immediately takes them back to that special event in time in which a song became a soundtrack in their life.

For example......The Clash album Sandinista in the spring of 1986. I was with my buddy Vaughan Kendall driving east out of Aspen, Colorado after kayaking the Roaring Fork river. There were four of us on that trip driving two cars to make shuttling back up river lots easier. We crested out at the top of Monarch Pass right at sunset. The term alpineglow didn't have much meaning for me until that moment. We wound our way up the road, rising past the local treeline. The entire world was suddenly bathed in the most incredible golden glow. Everything was gold, me my friend, the snow, everything. We stopped at the top of the pass, took the boats down from the cars and dragged them up a couple of hundred vertical feet to the small hill that was the highest point next to the road. We slid down the snowy hill in our kayaks, using the paddles for balance and basically to keep our faces out of the snow. We were caught up in the freedom of being very silly while the entire world was glowing. After we laughed ourselves stupid, and probably burned more than our share at 11,000' we loaded up the boats and headed east for a kayak run through the Royal Gorge. The ride down the east side of Monarch Pass will forever be etched in my memory accompanied by The Clash's Charlie Don't Surf, The Street Parade, Version City, and all the other tracks of that amazing album.

The remainder of the trip had some very eventful episodes, but these will be for later blogs.

I've let this blog go too long again, but stay tuned.

Peace.