Friday, June 29, 2007

post 353. doodling, 2.

with all the rehearsal that goes into shear madness, i've been tattooing my script over the course of the past month with various doodles and nonsense.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

post 351. a grand night out.

being in a show means having awkward days off, making nights like, say, monday your friday night. we struck out into the heart of lake george in search of nightlife. on a monday night.

to illustrate the difference between the hornet's nest of americade - where bikers from all over swarm the streets for a week of gutteral harley engine-revving - and a normal week in the small village, mike and elyssa relax in the road.

i got the last slice of pizza at a place in the village. with a garlic knot and some sauce, it's the per-feck late night food.

joe, elyssa, and mike.

post 350. a moment of total awesomeness in lake george.




Thursday, June 07, 2007

post 349. prospect mountain, part 2.

pace. that's what i realized i had done wrong the first time i tried to get up prospect mountain. as usual, i just figured i could tackle some physical challenge without thinking it out first. so i tried again, yesterday, to get up prospect.

here's the overpass to get from lake george village to the trail up the mountain. this crosses route 87.

a few helpful-looking walking sticks.

so i took a nice amount of rests, drank my water, ate my gorp, and hacked away at the trail. when i got to the second part - above the highway that i made it to a few days ago - the trail came into this area of sheer rocks, which were all a bit wet, so the going was a little tougher than the first part.

i came across an older gentleman and his daughter doign this second part. the guy was dressed like a vulcan - seriously - in a nice tan tunic-looking thing. his hair was cut short but sported a rat tail. since he and his daughter seemed a little ill-dressed for the terrain, i thought he was either: a) a cult leader looking for a cave in which to store guns, b) a native american (which, if he was, would have made me feel like a complete jerk for having made fun of him), or c) a star trek fan. all three were wrong; he was a floridian. of course.

then, while heaving and panting, i was suddenly overtaken by a st. bernard. a st. bernard? was i hallucinating? here i am, in this treacherous landscape, and this dog is here? in the cartoons, when the st. bernard comes it means you're in trouble. they're rescue dogs. whiskey in the thing around their neck, etc etc. so my first thought was that i had fallen prey to the elements and the ascent, believing that i was hiking but actually laying in a ravine somewhere dead.

but alas, it was only the dog of a hiker who had brought him out here three times a week. three.

sheesh.


ah, the top! it once was bedecked with a hotel and had a rail car that brought people to the top. back then, three bucks was a week's earnings. the rail car ride was fifty cents, and a night in the hotel was three bucks. after it went under, they left this giant wheel-thing that brought the rail car up.

fire? nope. pollen, which covers everything in the area - from cars to my laptop located in my room - in a yellow dusting.

gosh. a two-and-a-half hour trek up and down a mountain sure leaves a fella tired.

Monday, June 04, 2007

post 348. dr. jacoby, jupiter, and the sun.

Suddenly, Jupiter got pissed--Why, it asked, should the sun get to have all the fun?

Dr Jacoby looked to the sky and shook, his jaw dropping as if he found his wife home with his mistress. Mistresses.

"Dear GOD," he said, "Jupiter's ignited!"

"You're damn right," the giant planet seemed to say, and in the midday sun there was another star in the sky--as if God struck a match right over there.

"Whoa, hold on there," God said, his voice booming like the earthquake of armageddon. "I just created the universe. This isn't my work."

And there was a flare of death, with Adrastea and Metis and Amalthea being swallowed up in the first plume of its mother Jupiter's nuclear assault.

The sun shot angrily into the day. Dr Jacoby fell to the ground, and tears flowed from his eyes.

"This is impossible!" He cried, his hand outstretched to the sky.

The day grew no brighter, but the sky was afury with movement.

Saturn's rocky rings chlunked together as rocks fused under new heat. The planet sweat under the blaze from it's neighbor, and groaned it's dissatisfaction. Iapetus and Phoebe cried out in anger, cried out for their planet to defend them.

God smiled over his half-glasses, and then turned back to his drawing board. Idiots, he thought. Now the planets are at it.

The sun puffed out its chest, and Dr Jacoby stood up and began to run in circles. "We're all doomed! We're all doomed! They'll have it out and we're in the middle! We're done for!"

"You've had it in for me since the day you caught all them gases, Jupiter," the Sun said.

"Yeah, and what of it? I'm in the game, now. How long have we sat here circling you? It's mahhh tahhhm to shine, bitch." Jupiter’s moons cheered.

"Jupiter has no solid surface! Jupiter has no solid surface!" Pluto said, it's voice whiny wimpy in the cosmic distance.

"Silence!" the Sun commanded.

God turned back around, took off his glasses, and sat with his hands inverted on his knees.

I looked up. Jacoby was on his cell phone with one of his women, crying, saying he was sorry, he was sorry, but not telling the other party why. The flame over there went out.

Jupiter was dead, it's hydrogen and helium fwooshing out in a giant blast that took its cheering moons by surprise, frying them into black rock and blowing them out of orbit.

"Oh...oh! Oh!!!" Dr Jacoby jangled, dropping his phone. "It's burnt out! The radiation, oh the radiation!"

The sun flared out an arm of solar wind, and it stifled the cast-off remains of Jupiter at the asteroid belt. The moons all flew out in crazed directions, and then we all heard a clunk way off in the distance, which coincided with Pluto's sudden silence. It was actually shy Miranda, with her ugly, grooved surface who first broke the silence: "Well, there goes Pluto. Thank Heavens." Ariel and Umbriel agreed.

Everybody was quiet. The Sun was flamed on. Dr Jacoby still gaped at the various objects in the sky. God went back to work. The voice from Dr Jacoby's cell phone was calling his name. It sounded like his wife.

And the universe went on, one planet less. No one spoke of the incident, but it was in the cores of all the other planets: Jupiter tried, at least. He had his day in the sun.

So to speak.

post 347. prospect mountain.

a few weeks ago, i saw that an eighteen year-old girl had climbed mount everest. as everyone knows, it's a pretty big mountain. so when i came to lake george and asked at the chamber of commerce for a trail map of the area, i was happy to find that prospect mountain had a 1 5/8 mile trail to its peak. sweet, i thought. it's been a while since i've been hiking. time to get my backpack, a trail map, and maybe the copy of fleming's casino royale i bought the other day, and set out.


unfortunately, prospect mountain's smallish trail was quite a bit more...uh...rocky and steep than i thought. the lady at the chamber of commerce said it wasn't too bad. she was about 80 years old. so. i took off up the trail, and was out of wind in five minutes. i think, at one point, i was muttering something about stupid eighteen year-old girls hiking mountains to myself.

at the halfway mark there's a highway that takes drivers from lake george up to the peak. i reached the highway, took a right, and managed to take a look out at lake george from a scenic parking stop and snap a picture or two. while up there i met a nice group of people in town for the americade. they asked me to take a picture of them and then one of them snapped a picture of me since we were having such a nice chat. there's a picture of me out there, somewhere, on a biker's web site. good times.



the trail on the way back down. next time, propect mountain, next time.

post 346. rehearsing shear madness in lake george.