I think my Dad copped to it, though. I don’t care/am not mad. But still. Puncture wounds from a [very] rusty saw hurt like hell.

Our boys also did us proud, with a fire that had an old Christmas tree in the middle for kindling. Seriously, and not a small one.  It was pretty amazing.

As usual when you come home from a camping trip wherein you’re in close quarters with lots of other men, young men and boys, there are people you miss right away and people whom you don’t want to see again for a while, maybe even a long time.  Like Captain M.O.P. (Mullet On Purpose)# whose only words to me all weekend were a racist remark about home buying and neighborhoods that are “dark in da daytohm, too.”*

Not to mention how tiresome, childish and transparent constantly teasing someone about their fucking education is.  It’s not like anyone gave it to me or like I go around judging people without graduate degrees.  Or how insulting it is to be told that you’re “not a real parent” because you only have one child.  Of course, anyone could say that to anyone with less children than he/she has.  That’s mean and stupid.  There was a lot of mean and stupid this weekend, and I might cop to a little of both myself. “Mullet On Purpose” isn’t very nice.

But getting outside is always good for the soul, and we had spectacular weather Saturday for orienteering lessons (with paper, pen and compass, not a GPS unit), for sitting in the shade with coffee and falling asleep for a little while, and for just relaxing a bit.

A gross confession: For the first time in my life, I had an overwhelming urge to poop in the woods, in a hole.  The bathroom was nasty, but there were showers.  How often do you get to poop outside but then get a shower?  I had shower items ready, babywipes (Dr. Dad never leaves home without them!) and guts mustered and prepared.  I was even familiar enough (from 21 years of camping there) with the area to know where I’d not be disturbed.  I was excited by the whole affair.  And then I remembered that I didn’t have a shovel.

Of course, there was one sticking out of the ground in our campsite, I later found/remembered.  (Maybe next year!)

This is a volunteering commitment that I’ve been slowly backing off from just a bit, as it is starting to eat time with my own family.  I don’t want to miss every Friday night with my own kid (wow, still my kid, even though I only have one…) in order to be with other kids.  But I still go, around every other week and to most outings and camping trips.

Camping and hiking are good for me, and I don’t do enough of either.

There are nice walks to be had where I live now, but it’s even better .6-.7 miles up the road, where we’re moving in a few weeks.  Better shade, anyway.

#(My favorite new term, made of sleeplessness/sleepiness/spite.)
*(Baltimorese for “daytime.”)

After a month of house- and apartment-hunting, rain, hot weather, issues of this crumpling crapshack in which we live (!), Daddy needs to get the hell out of dodge for a day or two.

So when our annual Memorial Day campout arrives this weekend, I’m glad for it.  Sure, I’ll miss my wife and daughter and fans (it’s HOT!).  But, well, being Outside is good for the soul.  And mine’s been kicked in the nuts a lot lately.  My sanity has, at least.  I know it could be worse.  Yes.  It could ALWAYS be worse.  That line of thought leaves no one with permission to bitch at all.  We’d all go crazy and eat one another then, seriously.

I’m out of here at 6pm, riding up with my Dad, who probably also needs to get out for a while.  I don’t even have to cook.  I’m living on cereal and vegetarian MREs.  Add a nice fire, good company and the lack of internet access, and you’ve got about 40 hours of bliss.  Hot and buggy, but there you go.  At least we have showers and cots.

I’m thinking back to before we were parents, especially before we even planned to become parents (as little as two years ago). What the hell did we ever do with that free time?

I wish I’d spent it more wisely.

But I don’t really miss having it. Charlotte’s a blast.

Also, and this is no insignificant thing, I received a food dehydrator as a birthday gift from my parents. “What the hell would a 31-year-old want with one of those?” you ask?

Well, immediately, I can dry a lot of the chilis and basil I grew/am growing this year. Also, well, holy shit, those babies are awesome! No more trail mix full of crap I hate and also without fruit because the stuff at the market is not great (not enough to spend the cash on anyway). Meals ready to eat? Yes. When we go camping, I take my own food so as not to be a pain the ass, since I’m the only vegetarian. This means that I have to lug it all myself, with a cooler to boot. Not if I learn to make my own dehydrated vegetarian cuisine!

This is not to mention that Charlotte and I can make all sorts of delicious things.  I’m picturing her taking bags of dried fruit all over Baltimore during  the winter, from delicious things I got at the farmers market in the summer.

I was raving to my mother a few weeks ago that I grew too much basil this year and had to freeze a lot of it and even murder a plant.  I said I wanted to diversify next year and get a food dehydrator to keep myself (and family) stocked with home-grown herbs all year.  What I didn’t think of until last night is that the chilis that don’t normally dry well and get frozen instead can be dried this way and used for all kinds of excellent goodness!

My mom listened.  My mom rocks.

This could be my relatively boring life.  I never go camping as much as I used to, or travel.  So I sit and obsess over backpacks and messenger bags and what sort of gear I’ll need for my imaginary solo trip around Europe and the near East (which I’ll not only never get to take, but also don’t really want to take; my wife is a great travel companion as well as life companion).  When I was in my teens and camped more, I never really thought much of gear.  I had (still have) a framepack from 1990, and that was that.  My sleeping bag still has a cigarette burn from October 1995, in the mountains of Western Maryland and probably hasn’t even been washed since.

So I sit and read about bags to do things I don’t do.  Look on Flickr at pictures of Moleskines and other tools of writers, while I never write anymore.  I read adventure and manly books to imagine myself doing it.

And I don’t do anything.

I used to convince myself (even until this morning when I noticed a few meaningless broken threads on my precious custom Timbuk2 bag — one of FOUR I own!) that I really just needed to be able to enjoy my stuff, to love it so much that I didn’t care about the universal flaws that things which are made of material always exhibit (namely, never ever being or remaining perfect!).  That’s crazy.  The only entities worthy of being loved beyond their flaws are people and maybe your country.  Not your damned messenger bag that was made in San Francisco just for you or notebooks that have freakin PVC in their covers and paper that’s really, let’s face it, not great.  More properly, I need to regain my love of things like hiking and camping and traveling so much that I don’t care what beat-up piece of crap I carry all my stuff in.  I’ve been actually planning on buying a backpack to take to the mountains this fall.  Why?  I’ll just sit there worrying about and thinking about it.  There’s no point in spending a lot of time on it.  When I was a teenager, my journal was just a big spiral notebook I never needed for classes, and then the books people would give me as gifts.

I’ve gotten to the point where I would be ashamed if the people whom I admire were to learn about my sick ways.  When my dissertation director was here last month, I hoped I wouldn’t slip and admit how much I’d read about the little backpack I had with me at the time.  I’m not quite sure that Thoreau, Hemingway or Chatwin would own four Timbuk2 bags or even that any of them would get anywhere near a Moleskine, especially now that there are better and cheaper alternatives that do the same thing.

There was a time when the only things I was obsessed with were Space Pens, and I just wrote and traveled and camped and enjoyed activities and experiences.  This wasn’t that long ago, merely months before I started blogging, maybe a year.  I need to get back to that.  I don’t think I need to somehow learn to deal with accepting the imperfections of the stuff I am already obsessed with.  I think I need to get rid of and no longer buy the things I’m obsessed with.  Things that don’t obsess me don’t bother me regarding their imperfections.  Hell, I love shit that’s broken in!

My consumerism even extends to how I spend my time online and why the hell I even own a digital camera anymore, but that’s another post for another dark lunch-hour.

Mommy and Daddy both go back to work next week, and we’re not happy about it.

I got nothing but outside time this weekend, and it was fantastic.  From the spiders and deer to my wet feet and chattering teeth, I got a big dose of Mother Nature/Earth on our little camping trip.  But the end of Saturday, I was not bothered with being dirty.  By Sunday morning, shedding layers, sweating and packing/cleaninp up our campsite, I was elated over how stinky and dirty I had gotten.  I smelled like sweat, baby wipes, campfire and coffee.  I arrived home  in flannel PJ pants, a flannel shirt, dirty and wet socked/sandaled feet and visibly dirty.  Awesome.

I love living in the city.  The best way to really enjoy the outdoors is to enjoy it, not cut it down to live in a small piece of it, poison the air getting there and also waterways and the land itself with roads, etc.  I do want to retire and die in a little cabin one day, but that will have a small footprint.  But I haven’t been getting out enough even in the city lately.  Few walks, few cycling trips, little of anything.  Monday, I got three hours to show a nice guy around Baltimore for three hours.  It was his first time in Charm City.  So we walked from Midtown all the way to the Inner Harbor and East to Fell’s Point — and back.  It was tired, and we scored big sandwiches when we got back.  I gave a walking tour of Central Baltimore the next day and earned my pasta dinner.  These are improvements.

But now it’s raining and nasty today, and I haven’t even gone to get my afternoon coffee yet.

Autumn is here, though, and that is damned fine.

And my waistpack smells like campfire, after my friend Zack and I sat around one last night for 4-5 hours, including melting two glass rootbeer (yes, ROOTbeer) bottles in the center/coals of said fire.  For the record, it was Zack’s idea.  I thought they’d explode, even empty.

I also kinda lost my cool and yelled [shortly] at a few kids who, in my defense, totally deserved it and needed to wake up a little to unexpected pains in the ass that come with being an adult and sometimes come when you’re fifteen.  I think it worked for the time, and there were/are no hard feelings.  Unless there’s a heartless revenge headed my way.  In which case, it did not, in fact work.

I am deliriously tired.

I had a burned face from a very hot and pretty immense fire that some teenagers we were leading built.

They put extra stumps in the center of it to make it burn longer, because one of them didn’t lift a finger to help and was assigned to put it out.  They were getting revenge on him for his always-lazy-ness.  He did wind up proving them right when he threw a hissy fit and kicked something when he had to put the fire out after he tried very hard to get out of it.  I mean, it’s easier than finding, cutting and stacking wood.

On one hand, I was proud that they stuck together and glad that the person who always manipulates the rest of them and gets out of doing anything he doesn’t want to do got a small portion of what was coming to him.  The whole thing smelled of justice.  But on the other hand, I was disappointed at their revenge impulse.  There were other ways to get him to work, though I can’t think of them.

Mostly, though, I’m afraid I might have instilled this revenge instinct in these youngins.  I hope not.  They are some nice people.

Friday night, I used my cell phone as an alarm clock.  I wanted to get up first, get a shower, make coffee, etc.  I had it inside my sleeping bag so as not to wake anyone else up.  But when it went off, I was on top of my arms, which were asleep and numb.  I could not move them to shut the dang thing up.

Maybe I’m the only one that thinks this was funny.

I damaged a few pieces of gear this weekend, which usually drives me batty.  But I didn’t really care.  Could it be that I am getting closer to relating to my possessions like a normal person?  At least, the utilitarian ones?

I figured out the source of the bruise on my rear: when I kept falling on top of my metal flashlight during a skit about beans.  The flashlight looks like it got run over by a small car or several bikes from my big butt hitting it repeatedly on top of rocks.

Come on, that’s funny.