chewykolchuk.com

I just deleted my MySpace account.  I don’t know why that felt so good to do, but it did.  With the advent of Facebook and the fact that I don’t live my entire life on the internet, I had stopped logging in to MySpace long ago.  Good bye, internet-ical tether.

Of course, I still have a Facebook account and there’s THIS page as well, but it’s funny how perspective changes with environment.  None of my friends in AK have ever heard of the internet, and they get along just fine.  They also go hiking, and play in boats on the water, and enjoy nature.  Which is not to say that my friends in SEA don’t do the same, but it’s slower here.  It’s like when I worked and lived on Vashon Island.  It’s just slower in some parts.

I could go out to the glacier (see previous post for photos) and sit down without a book, or a walkman, or anything around me at all, and be content to just sit back and watch the glacier just sit there.  And I have.

That’s all.  Digital vs analog.  Cyberspace vs innerspace.  Ones and zeroes vs earth and fire and water and air.  Virtual vs physical.

Carry on.

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My brother and I went hiking around the Mendenhall Glacier last Thursday.  Here are some photos from that.  Some of them (maybe most of them) aren’t all that spectacular, but they are all icons from my youth, since I spent most days each summer riding my bike around there.  Anyway, please to enjoy…

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Day 5 consisted of a picnic, which was the final event of the 20th Reunion.  Zeno and I rode bikes to the event, which was about 15 or so miles and of course we were thirsty when we got there, so we got into more beer, and as it turns out, I’d found a full bottle of whiskey in my bag that I’d forgotten about.  Apparently we bought that along with the 2nd bottle of gin the night of the 3rd.  Oh boy….well, let’s get into that too, I suppose.  The picnic was a lot of fun as we got to catch up with all the old classmates in a more relaxed setting.  One consistent problem that everybody was having was that in the previous activities, alcohol was very much involved, and so I was having many of the exact same conversations with the exact same people because I couldn’t remember what we’d talked about before.  No problem…it’s kinda like this joke:  What’s the best thing about Alzheimers?  You get to meet so many new people.  Afterward, Zeno and I met up with Amie Hickok and her husband.  Amie and I shared a locker our senior year and she is a crack up.  Afterward, we took off and rode to Zeno’s house to crash out, which we did.

Waking up the next morning, I noticed that Lucy, Zeno’s cat, had been nice enough to leave her kill right by where I was sleeping on the couch.  The little blue birdie had been cute in its lifetime that’s for sure and it was a tiny little thing.  In addition to that, there were feathers from a different and MUCH larger bird strewn all about the house.  If the blue birdie was about 4 or 5 inches in overall length, the black feathers were themselves 4 or 5 inches long.  Zeno was walking around the house that morning, crooning to his kitty, “My little sweet sweetie is a killing machine.”  Even better though was when I looked over and saw that she was eating something.  She had it in her paws and was gnawing on it, the same way that a dog will go at a big soup bone.  Upon closer inspection, I could see that she was snacking on a dragonfly.  DAMN!  You go girl!

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SURE, I’LL TAKE A BREATHALYZER.

Days 3 and 4, which were Friday the 3rd and Saturday the 4th, connect for this story because they were pretty much the same day, since I never did go to sleep.  Zeno came over to the house and he and I went to the store for supplies.  The plan was that while there was a boat cruise scheduled for that evening, we were going to bail on that since we were pretty much broke and didn’t feel like taking part in that particular activity.  So we went to the store and good food for the day to cook at home and we stocked up on that and Bombay Sapphire gin.  We both felt like we’d already had too much beer in the previous two days so we switched it up.  Gin/tonics on a warm summer day is always nice, and we were going to go see the fireworks that evening in a parking lot downtown, so were in that mood.  FYI: Juneau has their fireworks display at midnight the night of the 3rd because you have to wait forever for it to get dark and if they did it on the 4th, they’d actually be doing it on the 5th.  That’s my theory anyway.

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THIS IS MY BEER.  THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT, BUT THIS ONE IS MINE!

Day 2, Thursday, went much the same as the previous day.  The reception for our reunion was that night, and I had decided that I’d wear a 70s outfit to it.  So I ironed my $2.00 polyester pants and my $1.50 baby blue thread-bare shirt, and we headed into town for that.  The great thing about having friends like Aaron and Zeno is that the energy level and the immature factor both spike right through the roof when all 3 of us are together, so while Zeno was taking a shower, Aaron and I had a photo shoot with Zeno’s kitty, where Aaron held her up as though he were showing off a prize-winning fish he’d just caught.

After arriving at the reception, it quickly became apparent that I’d horribly miscalculated my choice of attire.  Oh everybody loved that I was being goofy, and we all had a laugh about it, but the synthetic materials made for a very sweaty Chewy.  Firstly, remember in the 70s how a lot of guys would wear the puka shell necklaces?  I had one of those, but instead of shells, I was wearing a candy necklace like you get at the movie theater, or on Halloween.  So here I am sweating like a pig, and my necklace is grafting itself to my neck in a sticky, sugary mess, so I quickly got rid of that.  Then I realized that I was wearing modern, sweat-wicking underwear, but I was also wearing the old polyester sweat-generating pants, so my Bad-touch/Good-touch area was completely confused.  It was like I had matter in one pocket and anti-matter in the other and they were just DYING to touch and annihilate.  Note to self: Don’t EVER do that again.

As one might imagine, there was a lot of alcohol flowing, and everybody had a good time without any goofy drama happening, which I was kind of surprised at, since this is Juneau after all.  But afterward we all headed out to the bar.  I should say The Bar, because while there are a number of bars, the Imperial is the one that people go to now.  When I was 21, it was a place called the Penthouse, and then the Viking became popular, and now it’s the Imperial.  Whatever…now you know a little about Juneau if you’ve never been there.

That night ended much the same as the previous night, with me waking up the next day without a hangover (what is going on here?) and Zeno showing up early in the afternoon.  Standard Operating Procedure.  Little did I know…

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WELCOME TO ALASKA, YOU HAVE BEEN ISSUED YOUR CASE OF RAINIER

Hello there Internets, how have you been?  Me?  Fine.  No, that’s not true.  While I’ve generally been excellent, I’ve also been putting myself through a week of such non-stop debauchery that I think I’ll refer to it as Non-stop Debauchery.

As both readers of this website are aware, I’m up in Juneau, attending my 20th high school reunion.  This coincides with the 4th of July weekend, and in addition to all that, I’m in AK, which means “Fuck Texas, Texas is for pussies…we know how to party, and our days are much longer, so put that in your pipe and shove it up your ass!”  I think I heard my liver say that one just before it passed out, but whatever…

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Well, it’s now Tuesday and I’m finally getting back to “human” status after the last weekend, which encompassed 4th of July as well as my 20th high school reunion.  I wrote some posts and they are sort of long-winded (what? here, me????) so I think I’m going to split them up into multiple posts, so enjoy.

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I don’t even know where to start with this one.  Do I stop and think about it, compose a coherent statement about the subject at hand, or just post the link?  I think I’ll just blurt something out right from the hip first, THEN post the link.

I’m a lefty, commie, blue-state liberal.  I don’t think that we as people, as a community, or as a country should fear Everybody Who Ain’t Us as some kind of foreign policy.  I don’t think that we should go around the world, striking pre-emptively any place that we have decided has natural resources that we want but don’t want to pay for, or places where different cultures live that we do not fully understand.  I also do not believe that everything  (certainly not politics and not religion) is an Us vs Them sort of game.  Current politics is just asinine in the sense that Republicans and Democrats have so thoroughly drank (drunk?, drunken?, drinked?) the Kool-Aid that they can’t actually do their jobs effectively anymore, it seems.  Whatever…I’m getting ready to go off on a big old tangent.  The reality is that some Americans are so fearful of others and then so loud in their condemnation, that our reputation around the world is taking a wholesale nosedive.  I know this isn’t new, nor is it news, but every so often I see some example of it out in my daily life, and for a split-second I get so pissed I wanna pour Sprite on my own computer ON PURPOSE!

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Hello there, sir or ma’am,

Please note that I’ve added new photos to the photo gallery.  Dean had proposed to his girlfriend Molly and so I was on hand to document the making of her ring.  Pretty neat stuff.  Go there now.

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I don’t even know what to say.  Here, just click the picture…

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