It's the End! The End!

I always knew this day would come: the day I quit Blogger.com and joined the myriad other, better blog-hosting sites out there. The simple, hard truth of the matter is that Blogger is clunky, junky and just plain funky. In all my blogs, I've attempted to make a spare, simple portal that looked clean and read like a paperback novel. And I've tinkered with Blogger to the best of my abilities. I am just out of tinkering patience.

Also, and this is a big also, Blogger.com doesn't work in many foreign countries. I remember "blogging" from Mongolia by sending e-mails to my Blogger.com e-mail address, which would repost the e-mail as a blog. So the entire time I was in Mongolia (3 months) I never got to see my blog or any of the comments. Now I'll be gone for over two years. There's no way in hell I'm investing energy in a blog that I cannot see.

The third reason for the switch to another blog host is that I'm attempting to combine my blog with my online portfolio. I always hate it when you have to go to multiple URLs to read everything a writer has put out there. I hope to make my new blog/website a clearinghouse for my writing, photography, and link-sharing. So, without further ado... here is where you can find the new, improved NARRANTOLOGY:

NARRANTOLOGY

or

http://chuckadams.tumblr.com

Please update your links.
Thanks!

- Chuck Adams

Ethiopia Myopia

So applying to the Peace Corps is like applying to several different grad schools all across the country with a single, universal application. The thing is, only one school gets to accept you and offer you admission, and you don't know which school will be "the one" until two months before starting classes. Kind of frustrating, sure. But then it is also an exhilarating experience.

Today I learned that I'm invited to serve in Ethiopia as an English Language Teacher Trainer. It's funny how life goes sometimes. When I first imagined myself applying to the PC, the string of countries I envisioned myself going to were thus (in chronological order):

1. South Pacific islands
2. Madagascar
3. Romania/Eastern Europe
4. Africa/Morocco
5. Francophone West Africa

And then I learn, a week before receiving my invitation, that I'm actually slated for East Africa. In all honesty, I hardly thought Ethiopia was an option. It was a country tucked neatly into the Horn of Africa, basically out of sight and out of mind. I do remember reading up on African topography and being caught off-guard by Ethiopia's rugged highlands, which seemed antithesis to the flat savanna and sweaty jungles of Postcard Africa. I secretly hoped, should I be sent to Cameroon (as I was convinced early on) that I'd be sent to the mountainous north, if only so it'd be "similar to Ethiopia."

Then, last fall I had a youth on my trail conservation crew who was born in Ethiopia and was adopted by U.S. parents while in his teens. I told him I was going into the Peace Corps, possibly to Ethiopia, and he looked at me dumbfounded, then asked, "Why would you go there?" As if his home country was Dante's Inferno incarnate. It shook me to hear it from his lips, but it made me re-analyze my commitment to overseas service, which is always healthy.

So...Ethiopia. Land of spicy curry-like stews and spongy/sour flatbread. Land of extreme poverty and the HIV/AIDS-afflicted. Land of mountainous highlands and climate extremes. Land of peace surrounded by unstable neighbors. Land of early civilization and the birthplace of coffee. Land of "most UNESCO World Heritage sites in Africa." Land of the fastest runners on Earth.

I can't wait.

The Barstow Dream (2011)

Girl living next door always gets home at four in the morning, is gone to work by noon. One day you catch her on her way to work—really at the turnstile—and she tells you she’s a train attendant. She works the line to Barstow and returns at 4 am.

The ticket counter is full of people waiting to go in the opposite direction—away from Barstow—but there is no one selling real tickets, only fakes. So you buy a ticket for Barstow and hop aboard. The train takes off. You wave goodbye to your girlfriend, standing on the tracks, looking lost.

Halfway there and people are getting on at every stop, swarms of them, crowding the coach, making it a hot, stuffy ride. The girl comes to punch your ticket. “So soon,” she says, “I’ve known you so little.”

“I followed you,” you say.

“You followed me!” she blurts. “What about your girlfriend?”

You shrug your shoulders. She blushes.

She collects your ticket and steps back. “Your ticket is not for Barstow,” she says, eyes raised. “It’s for Beyond.” She says she’s never been beyond Barstow. That once she reaches it she disappears, wakes up in her bed the next day, cloudy-headed.

“This is a one-way ticket,” she says.

“I couldn’t afford a return,” you say. “I just wanted to be with you, to follow you wherever you go.”

The conductor calls out: “Last stop, Barstow!” A fleeting glance from the girl—one of sadness and regret and fear—shakes you to the core. People are evaporating into the dusty desert night left and right. The girl whispers something in your ear but all you hear is the rushing of wind outside the coach window. She is gone and you are alone on the train. Not even the conductor has made it this far yet. The landscape outside is flat, dry, and unforgiving. Soon it, too, will vaporize, along with the train itself and you will be there, floating onward, to who knows where.

The Satirialist

Real people, seen on the street.














Via the Sartorialist.

Day Twenty-Eight: Rehoboth Beach, DE

the thing to do is get yourself up in the morning at, say, 9 AM. not too early (you gotta sleep off the beach-walking and beer-sampling from the night before), but not too late, because checkout's at 11. throw on your banana yellow swim trunks, a singlet, crew socks and your Sanuk sandal shoes. for good measure, throw on your Izzy's Pizza beanie and finger-less wool gloves. then you dash out the front of the Quality Inn and the outside air temps (37 degrees F) slam you for a good bit. you run the 1/4 mile to the Atlantic Ocean. you feel sluggish. the shoes are flat-footed and everything aches. you hop over a dead Raccoon on the sidewalk. then you hit the beach, the glorious beach. it's sunny with just the slightest wisps of cloud cover. the surf is gentle but consistent. joggers are out for their morning run. you run perpendicular to them, strip off your shirt, hat, gloves, shoes and socks, then go for it. into the ocean you go, the calm cascade of water a siren calling to you. when your legs gets lashed by the 35 degree F ocean water, it's like a cold, hard slap. your feet instantly go numb. the water goes from being benign and inviting to deadly and psychopathic. reality hits you like a kiss from a horseshoe crab. you escape to the sand, take a seat and desperately massage life back into your pinky toe. as you do this, the sun gets brighter. you warm up. you feel, for one split second, like it could be summer in winter. this idea germinates and, three minutes later, still wearing only a pair of swim trunks, you stand up and rush back to the water's edge. the ocean merely has to brush up against your toes to remind you this is a very, very bad idea. you curse yourself such cowardly notions. on Feb. 6, Rehoboth Beach hosts the Polar Bear Plunge, which costs you $50 to take a full-body dip in the Atlantic. of course, contestants have huge wool blankets waiting for them. all you have waiting for you is a 1/4 mile run back to the warmth of the hotel. so you retreat. you put your clothes back on, take one last glimpse of the beckoning morning beach panorama (you are such a coastie) and run back. on the way you glimpse red cardinals in the trees and your whole body feels perfectly warm and content. of course this could just be the fact that your body is completely numb now. you hop back over the dead Raccoon and enter the hotel, making a beeline straight for the free continental breakfast, which is over in 15 minutes. you look odd, wearing mismatched articles of clothing, and you probably smell like dead jellyfish, but it's morning in America, and you're hungry for life. when you finish typing this post, you have plans on jumping into the hotel pool and cooling off. this is the life. the pirate's life.

Excommunicado Werewolf Checks-In To Rehab (2011)

The hunt is on for great food and even greater craft brews in this world of suicide pacts and hard-to-follow convos with maniacal men forgiven their sins in the K-Mart shopping lot and the caregivers muster a smile with the faint hint of carefree love in times of battleflag politics ending the minor league goosebump brigade cauliflower tension in the streets of Dover, in the surf of Atlantic, in the mixtures of car-fume empires built of wire-mesh barricade lovers; who knocks this stuff back in front of lamp-lit apartment block windows and expects good will to flood the gutters of refused refrigerator parts, campfire glue sniffers allowed to sleep on library benches in brown-sooted back-alley disco bars, in need of deeper feelings in spiritual mimicry hardly pinned down to exact science or precise werewolf bite-marks; set the Hamptons free with revolts in the garages of our hearts, excommunication polysyllabic retrofit-ready muffler surprise, the new-ish yearlong sacrifice, pumped full of antibiotics and virgin's blood ionized with high-fructose corn syrup; worship weirdness.

Day Twenty-Five: Ithaca, N.Y.

Ithaca is a city of 30,000 Ithacans looked down upon by 20,000 Cornell students and 6,400 Ithaca College students, each school straddling its own separate hill village a few hundred meters above Ithaca proper. From the quads of Cornell, a sprawling, over-sized and self-important university, one can look across the canyon to Ithaca College, much more humble of an establishment, having the look and feel of a commuter community college. At Ithaca College, the men all wear Timberland boots while the women all wear Uggs or Robin Hood shoes. At Cornell, huge groups of co-eds meet up for slow-paced jogging over the snow-slushy campus. Meanwhile, down below in Ithaca, there is a Chinese restaurant that has been the bane of our existence.

The Jade Palace has a menu posted in the halls of Ithaca College's student union, where we set up our poster sale each day with the help of oafish baseball players. There are several outdated piece of information on this menu. First, as we learned on Tuesday night, they do NOT have a dinner buffet. Second, as we learned on Thursday afternoon, their lunch buffet ends at 2 PM, NOT 3 PM. This, combined with the fact that good, delicious, cheap food cannot be found anywhere in Ithaca, has drove us mad. Spurned at the Jade Palace, we retreated to our motel room where Chris ate cold soup out of a can while I bought some Indian food at a local Wegman's Grocery Store. The 2 lbs. of Indian food cost me $14. This job doesn't pay me good enough to allow such indulgences.

But the good thing is tomorrow night we take off. Tomorrow we will be in Pennsylvania or even Delaware, perhaps. Who knows? It all depends on the caliber of caffeine we can shake out of gas station coffee and our ability to maintain on endless, mind-numbing Pennsylvania turnpikes. Keep focus. Eyes on the road. Push it til the break of day.

Only two more weeks and then it's back to Oregon, land of green trees, fresh air, pounding surf. I don't get the East Coast. They pour chemicals on their roads out here to fend off icy conditions but then still freak out when it snows a few inches. Snow accumulation shouldn't be news if there's two feet of snow piled up permanently on every surface other than street and sidewalk. But the weather gets ridiculous coverage. And schools and airports shut down. And commuters (because, after all, East Coast is land of commuters) appear on the evening news crying about the road maintenance they refuse to pay for. There are no smooth roads on the East Coast. Even the expensive toll roads are ridden with potholes. I don't get it.

The East Coast puts me into a mournful mood. Everything is so dead here. Tomorrow we will wake up to another few inches of dirty snow on our rig. We will put on our every layer and move boxes and poster books in and out of trucks and freight elevators. We will set up our poster sale, ring up sales, try to be at least a little helpful if need be, rock some Pandora mixes, walk around aimlessly on campus (our only exercise) during our breaks, then box it all up, pack up the rig, and drive 4-6 hours into the night, chugging cheap coffee and listening to NPR. This is the life. The pirate's life for me.

Day Seven: Greenville, SC

Training was nil. We were given materials, product, keys to Ryder trucks and a gas card and told to 'git. We'd figure it all out on the road. Some of us had a few days before our first sale. We had seven days. A full week to take to the open road, partake in the great American directive to DRIVE THE COUNTRY, and make our slow, meandering way from Pennsylvania to Greenville, South Carolina. We stopped overnight in York, PA, where we learned the hard way that PA doesn't (yet) have a statewide smoking ban in taverns. We killed a few days in Our Nation's Capital, visiting an old friend and walking well over 5 miles to various Sites of Interest: the Capitol, the U.S. Botanic Garden, the Air & Space Museum, the Washington Monument, the Vietnam Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the view over the Potomac at sunset, the Jefferson Memorial ... hopping the subway back to a neighborhood vegan soul food eatery. We parked our rig in the driveway of a foreclosed row-house and left a polite note on the dash, such is the verities of nonexistent parking in the D.C. area. (On a sidenote, Baltimore is beautiful and in dire ruin ... in serious need of revitalization. So much potential...) We departed D.C. in the glare of the January sun and made a beeline for Raleigh, NC, where we would rule the dart board at the Nattie Greene's, remembering (the easy way) what Thirsty Thursday means to college kids across the land. The next morning we encountered an army of photo-op protesters at the capitol building, yelling something about solidarity with Egyptian Copts; ourselves wondering what effect a rally in Raleigh would have in a country on the other side of the world. We made the decision to drive the short drive to Chapel Hill, NC, check-in at the Red Roof Inn and proceed to completely re-organize the contents of our rig in the back-lot patch of grass, abutting an old shack since given over to kudzu vines. A full 3 hours later, and we had finally organized items that had been tossed about in our rig violently, the piss-poor roads of the East Coast causing our butts to jump up and down in our seats with sickening regularity. After a disorienting time buying groceries at a Whole Foods in Chapel Hill, we lit out for South Carolina. The one objective along the way was to stop at every thrift store and look for a duffel bag (to organize all our electronic equipment) and a musical instrument (because a musical instrument purchased in some po-dunk North Carolinan town's thrift store would be AWESOME). We ducked into one such thrift store and the clerk announced they had just sold their sole violin that very morning. Well, shucks! Onwards! Through Charlotte to Greenville. We dropped off the truck and hit the scene. Surprisingly, Greenville is upscale. It even has its own lifestyle magazine (G: the magazine of Greenville). We sample the Blue Ridge Brewery before heading over to The Corner Pocket, where the bar games are nearly all monopolized. The cover band is playing Pearl Jam and Weezer downstairs while upstairs is playing the early-90s alt-rock hits you've since forgotten over the speakers. Football is showing on eight screens while the ninth screen is showing the Bible channel with subtitles. We finally snag a dart board but the darts and board are broken pieces of .... and we finally snag a pool table. Victory is ours, but nobody wants to challenge us. So we retreat to our motel, our transient home for the next month, and stay up late using free wi-fi to watch Hulu specials. The next day, which is today, we drive the ten miles to Traveler's Rest, South Carolina, where our motel for the sale at Furman University is located. The sun is still out but the prediction is for a "wintry mix" to hit the next few days. We do our laundry at a decrepit strip mall and take a long walk into town while our clothes wash. The streets are desolate. The dead leaves crunch underfoot. Not a soul is in sight but countless SUVs and trucks whiz by on the road. Plenty of shuttered stores and derelict houses give the walk a sad, depressed feeling. There must be an alcoholism problem because the gas stations make it well and clear that the gas Does Not Contain Alcohol. The shades of an East Coast winter: browns, bricks, blacks, grays and white skies. There is not much life in Traveler's Rest. Nor, if my watch reads correctly, much rest.

Day One: East Stroudsburg, PA

The cracklight of the Pennsylvania dawn greets us as we step out the door of the Budget Inn and find nobody waiting. We're up too early. The previous day we'd woken at 3:15 AM to catch the series of trains, buses, planes and people-movers that would take us from West Coast to East Coast. A flurry of catnap crashes followed by turbulence & corporate slime. Our pores oozed the sweaty sheen of unshowered travel. We congregated with other poster hawkers in the Philly terminal but nobody spoke a word. The air smelled heavily, creepily like nail polish. Mallrat Hipster is the fashion sense all around this East coast smogasborg. The smokestacks appear on the horizon, ready for another day of heavy coughing...

The Best Movies of 2010

1. Avatar

The first big surprise of 2010 was that it was 2010. Like, wasn't it still 2006? Had a full decade just elapsed? To my surprise and utter bewilderment, time keeps ticking on, and when the clock struck midnight on January 1st, I was in shock to hear the number "Twenty-ten" uttered from my travel partner's lips as we hunkered down at an abandoned beachside bar on the desolate island of Gili Meno in Indonesia to watch the fireworks and pumping rave music across the sea. Here we were, at the start of a new decade, in a far-off land, toasting imaginary cocktails to time past and time present. I'm still in disbelief at it all.



2. I Am Love

Not to wear my heart on my feet, but I fell in and out of love so many times in 2010 I lost count. What confuses me is that it was with the same person. Or at least the same idea of a person. At one point I created a mythology about the whole situation with a friend and coworker of mine, a poet nonetheless. We both needed to talk about our feelings in frank ways in front of ten teenagers who we were certain must remain under the belief that their bosses were sexless, unimpeachable supermen. So we spoke of our 'hunteds' in vague terms, as if discussing recent exploits in the African savanna. This dragged the situations we were both juggling from the murk and laid it flat onto the concrete, literal dock of full examination. What we discovered was what everyone discovers about love: It is limitless.



3. Never Let Me Go

The most haunting realization of 2010 has been that, perhaps against our wills, we all will inevitably let go of our friends, attach hips to semi-permanent partners, and maintain our friendships via artificial respiration networks. Can you feel the gasps? The breathless angst? The Social Network has destroyed our social verities once and for all. Anything that can't be managed from a desktop computer ... including, it seems, government protest ... isn't worth the effort. We also learned that privacy is the new anti-Christ; that we will all soon embrace the back-scatter technology at airports, malls, banks, post offices, supermarkets .... because it exploits our very exhibitionist tendencies. We want to be gazed at, even if we have to videotape it ourselves. Our nakedness is no longer personal, it's our brand.



4. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension

So I signed up for the Peace Corps this year. That was something. It took many years of careful thought and accumulation of skills and wisdom before I could even consider applying, even if it has been a dream of mine for the past decade. But it took one special circumstance this past June to convince me that now was the best time in my life to apply. I never felt so compelled to put into motion a series of events that I knew would bring me heartbreak and self-doubt, which would ultimately shape how the next three to five years of my life would play out. But I was ready for all of that. Many people are not ready, nor ever will be. I've heard nothing but a series of "I wish I could do that" followed by "But..." and then fill in the blank with fear, career, attachments. For myself, I need to figure out how to be happy in a foreign environment, far away from all the crutches and dependencies that prop up false senses of well-being in the modern world. That's a more important skill to maintain than any one job, relationship, act of procreation at this point. It's the dilemma of our generation, beyond the tangible dilemmas of global nuclear annihilation and the downfall of American supremacy. But it will take a shift in our selves to make the environmental shifts in the world that will precipitate the slide back to a center of balance. Until then... it's all hogwash. (Kinda like this blog.)



5. The Complete Metropolis

The rapid urbanization of the world is something to think about. What does it mean? Who will farm our food? Will Kinshasa have its own West Side Story? Which is the best city for young, hip, college-grads who aren't really sure what they want do with their life? The answer to the last question has been, for approximately the past six years, Portland, Oregon. Growing up in a small town two-hours away from Portland, the city has both enthralled me and disgusted me. I like its public transportation but I hate its roads. I like its neighborhoods but I hate its gentrification. I like Portland proper but I hate that it's enclosed on all sides by suburban death camps. I like that nearly all my friends live there but I don't. This is why, for a brief stint in 2010, I lived in Portland, in a cozy breakfast nook in a friends' house near Lloyd Center. Living briefly in Portland was really a retreat. The pulse is quicker in the city, the perfect place to shake up the cobwebs and plan social gatherings. I love summers in Portland. If I could have my way, I'd fall in Maine, winter in Laos, spring in southern Utah, and summer in Portland. But the fact of the matter is that I will probably never call Portland home, just like I never called Eugene, or Ashland, or Ulaanbaatar, or Siena home. But I do call Astoria, Oregon, home, even if I don't live there. But at the close of 2010, I did live there. And this has meant the world to me.