Ski Days & Blog Posts

During the first half of 2019, I gave up blogging. It wasn’t a deliberate choice per se, but the omission of an act is functionally the same as making a definitive decision. I ended the 2018 season with a write up about the State of TheSnowWay. That post might as well have been called “The State of my Life: Externalizing.”

TSW went radio silent from January-July of 2019. My first post of this year was in August, an externalized photography postmortem called Ubiquity & Bewilderment. The post ends “I’ve never posted less during a single season. Yet, I’ve never had more to say.” I knew something had gone horribly wrong. The thread was there. I just needed to summon the will to pull it.

In the State of TheSnowWay, I wrote that “Part of writing a blog is process. I love process. But I am no longer inspired by the blogging process.” By November 2019, I found my love of process again. Writing reinforces identity. What did my lack of blogging say about my identity? I wrote about recasting my tale in Narrative, the first TSW “trip report” written before the trip. Since then, every ski day of the current season has been accompanied by a blog post.

Music

Tool’s latest album Fear Inoculum had a significant impact on my recovery. The observant Tool fan will have noted several key words and phrases lifted from Fear Inoculum’s lyrics pepper my recent posts (particularly “recast my tale”). The tracks Invincible and Descending are particularly resonant, especially the latter (“Stir us from our / Wanton slumber / Mitigate our ruin / Call us all to arms and order”) (“Rise / Stay the grand finale / Stay the reading of our swan song and epilogue”). If Lateralus suggested we “spiral out”, Fear Inoculum asks “now what?”. It’s the first album that has brought me to tears in as long as I can remember.

Almost twenty years late to the party, I discovered King James Version by Harvey Danger. The album is loaded with wit and sarcasm right from the start (“I had a lovely brunch with Jesus Christ / He said two words about inanity: fundamental Christianity”). The lyrics explore relationships and juxtapose positions through clever and pithy wordplay (“When you like something, it’s an opinion / But when I like something, it’s a manifesto / Pomposity is when you always think you’re right / Arrogance is when you know”). The lyrics and music blend together viciously. This may be the most neglected follow up album ever for a one hit wonder rock band.

Finally, I was slightly less late to the party with Metric’s latest album Art of Doubt which was released in 2018. Back on form after the very forgettable Pagans in Vegas, this is Metric’s best album since Fantasies. Focused on dealing with a chaotic world and a chaotic mind, the self reflective lyrics and music are on point, catchy, and familiar to Metric fans without feeling too repetitive of their previous albums. The track Now or Never Now is one of the most righteous rock tracks that I’ve heard in recent memory.

Rollercoasters 

Last year was “the year of the rollercoaster.” My partner and I planned long weekends and vacations around amusement park road trips. After years of neglecting this passion, we finally returned to Cedar Point for the first time in over a decade and visited seven different parks in total. I doubt our 2020 amusement park travels will be half as extensive as last year. But I am glad to have rekindled the interest and I am looking forward to at least a few trips next year.

Cedar Point was the highlight of 2019 travels. Easily topping the rating list is Steel Vengeance, a coaster almost universally agreed upon as the best in the world. Coaster manufacturer Rocky Mountain Construction single-handedly reignited my interest in coasters two years ago when I first learned about their new track style. And while Millennium Force has been outclassed in the twenty years since it was built, it was great to get back on it.

By far the most intense coaster that we experienced during the trip was Intimidator 305 at King’s Dominion, featuring an almost guaranteed gray out on the first turn and rip-your-neck-off turn transitions. Rounding out my favorite rides from this past year is another 300 footer, Leviathan at Canada’s Wonderland, a speed monster with an amazing first drop and some great air time moments.

Books

Atomic Habits by James Clear is the rare self help book that keeps things actionable and concise without needless page-count-increasing-passages and author ego trips. The key concept that I took away from Clear is about self identity rather than habits: “Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs. The second person declines by saying “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.”

It sounded a bit outlandish to me at the time but I ran with it. I was no longer doing the things that I enjoyed and not doing those things impacted my self identity. So I decided to flip the script. I’m a skier. I’m a blogger. I’m a music lover. I’m a book reader. I’m a hiker. I’m a cyclist. I’m athletic. I’m adventurous. Therefore, I need to do those things to be consistent with my self identity. I flipped the script, recasting my identity.

These Truths by Jill Lepore tells the history of the United States from the perspective of echos and rhymes with the present. Quotes from the past read as if they were just written or said today in terms of race relations, power struggles, demagoguery, populism, nationalism, civil rights (or lack thereof), etc. all filtered through an evolving media landscape that started with the newspaper and morphed into the telegraph and beyond.

It is easy to think about how bad things are now. But we can easily lose sight of how much worse things were in the past. The history of this country has always been and will always be the story of a people attempting to live up to aspirational ideals that are perpetually out of reach. This book makes me want to help move the story forward rather than wallowing in the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist which has been amplified by a media that has (and has always) profited enormously from division, distrust, hate, angst, anger, and fear. This book is strongly recommended reading for everyone.

Philosophy & Social Hope by Richard Rorty has been sitting unread on my bookshelf for over a dozen years. Rorty has gained posthumous recognition for having predicted Trumpism brought on by the failures of neolibralism and the change of the Left’s orientation from reformist to culturalist. While this book touches on those topics (which are found in detail in Achieving our Country, which I also read this past year), the focus of this book is on Rorty’s version of Pragmatism (the philosophical school, not the dictionary definition).

Rorty is incredibly dry and constantly referential to other philosophers to compare and contrast his own views. While I read a lot of philosophy, I’m not a Philosopher with a capital P. Much of the book is philosophical wankery. But there are many fascinating passages that challenged my conceptions of things. That said, I found that James W. Loewen’s critique of Rorty rings true for me: “Evenhandedness is bad history. So is throwing up our hands and saying, with neopragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty, often cited by postmodern historians, “We should drop the idea of truth.”

The Junk

One of my most rewarding projects last year was removing things from my life. It is almost unfathomable how I changed during the past twenty years. Back when I was a poor recent college grad, it was easy to hang my hat on the Fight Club quote “The things you own end up owning you.” But as debts were paid off and promotions gained, my salary increased substantially, and so did the amount of “stuff” in my life.

In August, I decided that I had had enough. I began a rapid fire sell off of things that I would never use again or no longer wanted. I closed out a storage unit (a savings of $100 per month) and put over $4000 into my bank account from eBay sales. That was just the opening salvo. The highest monetary value and least used stuff was the easiest, there is so much more materialist alleviation to be done.

Selling stuff was easier than throwing things out. There is a lot of guilt associated with the waste of money and environmental impact of needless accumulation, trashing something just adds insult to injury (donating often just shifts the burden). But the damage to the environment was already done, the waste of money is a sunk cost. The mental damage will continue as long as useless stuff clutters my life. The purge will continue in 2020.

My Tale

After a few years of progressively increasing difficulties, I finally reached out for help last year and made an appointment with a mental health counselor. I’ve never had a mental health issue at any point during my life. While I understood mental health issues from academic and sympathetic perspectives, I’ve never been able to fully empathize or understand the toll it can take on an individual until it happened to me. The insidious nature of the issue is that you (and other people) don’t realize or understand the fundamental nature of the change and the helplessness of not being able to resolve the issue by yourself.

I was diagnosed with having a depressive episode and a few appointments with a mental health counselor completely changed my trajectory. I am still in a recovery phase. But things are substantially different than they were just a few months ago. I’m skiing and blogging regularly again, I’m reading again, I’m listening to music again, I’m exercising again, etc. and I look forward to doing those things. I also have a healthier relationship with work despite continuing to dislike my current job. My outlook is substantially improved and I am now in control of my narrative for the first time in years.