Quotent Quotables

Paul said to Peter, 'You gotta rock yourself a little harder.  Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire.' - Josh Ritter

How could one ever be bored with so many good things to see and feel!  This unity with our joyous surroundings, this ultra-penetrating perception gave us a feeling of contentment that we had not had for years. - Yvon Chuinard

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life. - Jack Kerouac

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair [...] You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names.  You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world.  Come to it any way but lightly. - Stephen King

"Oh dear Jesus, Oh dear Jesus" - 10 year old girl on my tour yesterday (with a thick southern accent) every time she went across a zipline

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins most?  I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you?  You'd be wrong though.  It's Hambone.  - jack handy

Today was a good day.  It was better than most.  Didn't see me no demons, didn't fight with no ghosts. - Joe Purdy

"to hell with facts, we need stories!" - ken kesey

You know what else gets a bad rap?  Fiction. When I was young, I was taught that in order to distinguish “fiction” from “non-fiction,” all I had to do was think “fake” and “non-fake.”  The trick was helpful, but you can see how fiction was pre-disposed to fight the uphill battle.  I mean, what’s good about being fake?  We’d rather have cold hard facts right?  We’d take the truth over the un-truth any day.  (This is a lengthy blog entry, so if you’re strapped for time, I’d suggest just moving on, maybe come back later.)

You might remember a book by James Frey called A Million Little Pieces (2003), the captivating memoir of a drug/alcohol addict who nearly died, but through a series of incredible events learned through relationships and rehab to like himself again, and eventually, to attain sobriety.  In 2005, Frey’s book had topped the charts as a New York Times bestseller for 15 weeks straight; Oprah Winfrey chose Frey’s memoir for her book club.  Then, in a classic case of media vs. celebrity, a series of investigations revealed that Frey had fabricated a number of the events in his memoir.  Oprah brought Frey back on her show  (the episode was called “the James Frey controversy”) and tore his reputation to shreds on national T.V.  The media jumped all over the story, publishing articles like A Million Little Lies; even “South Park” did an episode about the debacle.   Frey’s publisher, Random House Publishing, was eventually forced to offer a full refund to any reader who claimed they had been “misinformed” (nearly 2,000 readers have since been refunded in full).

If anybody understands our culture’s cravings, it’s the big wigs in the entertainment industry.  This is why you see horror flicks that are “based on actual events,” or love movies that are “based on a true story.”  The question I always hear about Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is: “well did he really do those things or is he just making it up?”  I guess there is a place for these questions, but it’s a tragedy when they distract us from what is truly important: the story itself, and the lessons therein.  For me, Frey’s book was one of the most powerful discourses on “addiction” I have ever been exposed to, extending far beyond the realm of chemical addiction.  I just can’t understand throwing his story into the fireplace, even if, heaven forbid, he was only actually in jail for two months instead of the supposed four.

Besides, “fact” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Remember how it rocked your world when you found out that your history textbooks might not be 100% factual?  That they might be a “little” bit biased since they were indeed written by the winner?  You would think that, if anything, we could trust a textbook to tell us the truth.  Or how about those discrepancies you found in the Bible, like in the various gospel accounts?  

Here’s the truth, and yes, I mean the cold hard truth.  You ready?  Any time a “story” gets told – the very second that a human being takes charge issuing a narrative, whether it be a novel, a movie, or a simple account of what he or she ate for breakfast that morning – any time a person tells a story, “fact” goes out the window.

Just imagine every member of your family trying to recount the events of a certain Christmas, or two different sports teams giving an account of a game they played against one another.  No matter how hard you try to stick to what “actually happened,” you will never get it perfect.  James Frey is not a liar, neither was Kerouac, neither were Matthew Mark Luke or John (not by any means to compose some list of comparable authors).  They are all beautiful storytellers, and I hope we spend more time appreciating those stories than trying to figure out if they were “real” or not.  If I was a walking video camera, and you were a walking video camera, then maybe we’d give the world a true story or two; it’d be a lame and boring world, but hey, at least we’d have ourselves some facts.

Right now I’m reading a fictional story by Thomas Wolfe.  Wolfe grew up in Asheville; the town in his fictional story is called Altamont.  Now Wolfe called his book fiction, likely to avoid falling into a James Frey-esque controversy, but his novel is undoubtedly based on his young impressions of this area.  When the novel describes springtime, or the nature of the local people, or the patterns of the sky – well let’s just say, it has taught me a lot more truth about my backyard than any National Audubon society field book ever could.

So for anyone who reads “non-fiction,” and refuses to see a movie unless it was “based on real events,” I hate to break it to you, but I doubt that your sought-after stories contain any more “truth” than J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings.  -This may sound like a heresy, and I hope it does – but even if you can’t quite stretch that far with me, I hope you can justify a place for fiction in your mind, and I hope that when it comes to certain “facts,” you can expose the man behind the curtain.

welcome to the show

Often-times, “entertainment” gets a bad rap.  The word carries a lot of baggage into the conversation.  Likely, upon hearing the word “entertainment,” you picture someone in a movie theater, face a-glow from the busy screen, cheeks full of popcorn.  The problem with entertainment is that it connotes being passive, even lazy, being distracted from real life.

I think there is a sense in which entertainment needs to be loosed from its bond, relieved of some of this baggage.  The beautiful thing about entertainment, and I think what needs to be emphasized more, is this:  in the process of being “entertained,” an interaction is taking place, and what’s more, that something valuable is happening in the midst of this interaction. 

All writing is entertainment.  Right now, I am entertaining you.  I am offering you something – ideas, visuals, some sort of stimulation.  You aren’t just sitting there lazily, letting everything I say drift into your mind.  It’s much the opposite.  You are actively engaging yourself in my words, you are processing for yourself what they are worth, and in this way, we are conversing.  Your mind is working on this idea, just as my mind worked on this idea, and so we come together on a certain plane of thought, and both of us are changed, in some small way, because of this interaction – isn’t that sweet?  Humans need entertainment, we crave it, we seek it out; we can’t live without it.  We need something outside of ourselves to come into our heads and stir things up; it’s how we learn.  Without entertainment, we would never learn to speak, to read, or to develop any complex ideas.

(And so now comes the admonishment).  Depending on what you believe is valuable in life, I hope you steep yourself with movies, books, conversations, etc… that actually have something worthwhile to offer you.  

Because the idea is this:  if I don’t watch movies about religion, and I never read any works on religion, and I don’t spend much time thinking about religion – then I shouldn’t expect to have anything smart to say about religion, or at least I shouldn’t expect to know anything more than what I learned when I was a kid, or whenever I last took a class on religion.  In other words, you are what you eat.  My favorite thing to eat are books, but there are a million and one ways to entertain yourself.  A lot of beautiful people out there have a lot of beautiful ideas; the best thing we can do is seek them out, in order to learn, and in order that we, in turn, become better entertainers.  

hold on to your butts

Hold on to your Butts!  Luts of things to see places to know people the meet and posit the know.  Here in North Caroliney are the brass buckle shiny belts shiny, here in the east is a maple leaf feast, a moot modern mystery scheme stars local gossiping locals.  On Cinco de Mayo, met me a wife-o, took her and a knife-o down to the bayou, carved us a bed out of hickory-ash, wed neath the stars as fed the wild turkeys.  For here is the land of the sky, and every body wel-bred in Weaverville yes ma’am.  Tour a give and look a tip, fire up to car the downtown trip slice of glimpse of swimming night of through sleeps and sheets on a firm mattress.  Universe winks and the closing dead of darkness ?.......? but still the healthy harken of the first still sun of man.  Must be dawn when Peter Rabbit on the lawn, perks an ear for robin’s song, singing that she knew it all along.

Quick Prosedy

Sitting in the ampitheater park up on the side of mount tabor while the basketball players play and the bikers pedal past the runners jogging.  Some small child stepped in “Dog Poo!” and his dad keeps saying “walk this way son.”  Up tall flights of stone stairs past the water reservoir with signs saying “anyone who throws such and such into such and some is subject to the maximum whodahum as stated in subject three six one four of the Oregon such and suchamitee”.  Now sitting on green park benches as I said in the ampitheater park of small black porous gravel sprinkled on top by miniature yellow crispy leaves littered in all such corners.  The stage in front of me is backed by a chivalrous row of 12 or so cedars (red or yellow?) that I can imagine project the sound toward the benches:  “Nice acoustics Zarathustra.”  12 mid-height cedars standing to attention like 12 apostles.  Remember how Holden Caulfield was so put off by the 12 disciples.  He says “yeah but they were chosen at random, and all they ever did was get in Jesus’ way.”  I don’t know I mean I like the apostles, sure they’re frustrating like when they argue over who has the bigger biceps but I mean everyone knows they are only human.  As if that was some kind of excusable excuse.  “C’mon man, I’m only human.”  Yeah but the problem is that you are all human… I don’t know.  “Wait just a minute, you expect me to believe that all this misbehaving grew from one enchanted tree?  And helpless to fight it we should all be satisfied with this magical explanation for why the living die and why its hard to be a decent human being?”  Well yeah David Bazan what’s your problem with the myth of the tree and the fruit and the snake I mean its beautiful in a way.  At least its something right?  It’s an explanation.  Take it on faith or don’t take it at all, they say.  Like they say every sort of belief requires big faith whether you’re Richard Dawkins or Joseph Smith himself.  What I do like is when Bazan says well “in what medieval kingdom does justice work this way?”  And that to me is identifiable because you see I have this problem with history she never sat right with me and we haven’t spoken in weeks.  I have this thing like why should I come into this world cursed and broken and without a say, you know?  Guilty until proven otherwise I guess.  But something inside of me has always believed the opposite of everyone, even enemies, even friends, even God:  Innocent until proven otherwise.  You see I entered into this crazy story in the year 1986 when everything’s been pretty darn well established by now, you know?  Its not like there are any original ideas, you know?  Its not like it hasn’t already been tried or written.  If you haven’t read about it yet, that only means you haven’t found the right book, I mean it’s out there somewhere for sure.  And see when I came into this world in 1986… well, see the world is full of mini victories overshadowed by giant history-repeating failures and there’s always the haunting grandfather time wearing suit and a tie up behind the podium with a microphone clipped to his coat pocket everything smooth and black or white ironed and starched except for his hands.  His hands you can’t help but noticing how they are all wrinkled and cracked and worn, they are so full of sins you have no idea the depths of the canyons.  But he speaks into the mike with that ancient southern drawl “and there is nothing new under the sun.”  What?  That’s not even fair.  And I guess that’s what I’m getting at – it just isn’t fair.  When I was a kid I was obsessed with the concept and I don’t think it ever left me.  Of course when you’re a kid, fair only matters so that you can be sure you get yours.  And when I came into this world in 1986, I feel like I was somehow robbed of my portion, you know?  A life where I inevitably make mistakes that have already and will always be made but still somehow I’m supposed to feel guilty about it?  Like I shouldn’t have done those things?  But it was inevitable.  But I could at least feel sorry for doing those things.  Well screw that.  Screw feeling sorry or bad or guilty for the fruit that was already eaten, or even for eating the fruit when it’s the longstanding tradition you were born into.  What a tragedy when people are motivated into good deeds by guilt or shame.  From now on I feel lucky, I feel blessed, but I’ll never feel guilty – for telling the truth or telling a lie or screwing up or succeeding, whatever that means… Traditions die slow, Joe.  When I was three years old I watched the Berlin wall fall down.  And when I was 23 years old I learned about the prejudice and the poverty and the downright unfairness that still goes on everyday between east and west Germany.  We’re always making these little victories and they always pale in comparison.  Which brings to mind Mom Teresa saying no great things are done only small deeds with great love.  I mean the damn civil rights movement was forty years ago and we still sit around making racist jokes.  And yeah, every once in a while I laugh, you know?  It doesn’t matter who or what or why or which color or which nationality or which party there is always the prejudice.  The “guilty until proven innocent” clause.  Man I hate that idea.  We’re all just so done up from the get-go.  But there was this one man who got it right.  Man he really got it right on the freakin nose.  The only thing in the entire universe that’s new and original and worthwhile is this selfless living bit.  Its so gosh-darn ridiculous that it makes sense.  It doesn’t even seem natural.  Deny yourself, live outside yourself.  Its so stupid that it makes me happy, I think.  I just wish people could come to live selfless lives because the love strikes them, or because they exhaust all the other roads to happiness and never find it, but not because they feel obliged.  I oblige you to do nothing son, but I trust the goodness inside you to work its way out – maybe that’s just too optimistic.  Anyway I see how my religion works, it was the history I was born into, choose it or not, and it works for me – but how foolish to spend your whole life convincing others that their birth-clothes are no good in comparison to yours.  Conversion’s such a finkish word, darling.  Work with what you were given, and just as you should never be proud for anything you were lucky enough to be blessed with, like your skin color, or your size, or your smarts, stop feeling guilty for the things you happened to inherit, it doesn’t help the situation.

sneak preview

tours are running full-swing this weekend at Navitat.  everyone on staff is super excited, all the guides are in motion and the slick new t-shirt designs are on display.  we've had lots of media/film/news crews out in the last few days.  below is a link to a cool, albeit long, video that really does a great job of advertising the course.  besides the crazy thrill of zip-lining, you get some great insight into the philosophy behind the course and it's design - two things that really set this course apart from others in the industry.

http://vimeo.com/11528611

times they are a-changin

here in Weaverville, NC, we get our kicks.

about 2500 people reside here: there are plenty of children, and plenty o' elderly, and its safe to say that brad joel garrison and I account for the town's mid-20s population.  most weavervillians work in nearby Asheville, many others work for Arvato Digital Services - the world's second largest replicator of CDs and DVDs and the towns most prominent facility. the Well-Bred bakery and cafe is our favorite hangout; we sit in the corner with our computers and watch as crowds of residents and the occasional flash-happy passerbys flow indoors and outdoors. the bakery is more often than not packed to capacity.  other than Well-Bred, the downtown Weaverville strip boasts furniture and pottery shops, a pizza joint and diner, a drug store, a town hall and a small park with a big old-fashioned lamp-post clock.

the current hot topic is a tuesday vote that will determine whether or not selling liquor by the glass becomes legal for the first time in town history.  there is a liquor store in town, but restaurants/vendors are limited to beer and wine.  a few days ago, I was writing in the bakery when an impressively annoying news reporter trailed by a large camera on legs went from table to table fishing for opinions on the upcoming vote.  I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the diverse array of opinions, and was proud of all my fellow townsmen.  Yesterday, a somber middle aged man made his position clear by standing in the middle of town with a giant sign around his neck (a universal sign of seriousness); it read: "liquor by the glass in not progress, it is a sin, vote no on tuesday."  I give him a ten for succinctness.  Tuesdays vote will show whether or not the campaign was successful, and I promise to keep everyone updated.

no lie, it's fun to be the boys from "out west."  for me, the West evokes sister-words like vast, open, young and new.  it's so fun to be in an area of the country champions a new set of characteristics, like maybe history, tradition, respect.  Of course, these are petty generalizations, and all fall apart once scrutinized, but there is no denying some blatant differences between "here" and "there."  Thomas Wolfe, a great early American author, grew up in Asheville and based many novels on the area.  Civil War memorials abound here; in fact, the land rented by our employer, Navitat, has a great history involving a father and four sons that all fought on different sides of the war, lived to tell about it, and continue to pass their property down through the generations.  

All this to say, it is exciting to be here in Weaverville, to plant roots in a new town, and to marvel at tradition so deep that all a newcomer can manage is to admire the budding spring leaves, much less try and comprehend the roots that are responsible for today.  A favorite quote from a favorite author goes something like "You would have to spend a winter here to even begin to understand."  After a few years of tossing this quote around in my head, I am really beginning to appreciate it's depth.  -  So here's to being a newcomer, and here's to being an old-timer.  And for the record, could I vote, I'd vote no on the new liquor proposal in Weaverville.  I honestly hope this town stays the same for as long as it can; and if I get thirsty, I'll just go to Asheville, it's cooler anyways.