Whatever, Reader

When I decided to hike the Chilkoot Trail—a 33-mile journey straddling the border of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory—no one could have prepared me for what lay ahead. I was an active 23-year old and had managed a tough hike only days before. I was in decent shape. No need to train for a touristy hike like this one. After a long day of drinking, a couple of my friends threw out an idea: let's hike the Chilkoot and get back for work by Tuesday. With the dull threat of a hangover dragging my sleep-deprived body, I would have been wise to reconsider making a journey like this in under 24 hours, but hey, it's Alaska. You go on adventures, you suffer the consequences, you have stories to tell, and that's exactly what I got in return. 2011 boasted some of the century's worst trail conditions. Hitherto flat, dry paths were now flooded with waist-high rivers we couldn't avoid—something we would've learned had we registered for the hike, but the park ranger...

The bruise on Dolores’ thigh grew by the minute. She scratched and scratched, tried to put pressure on the wound, but it just kept spreading its darkness over her leg. She heard footsteps coming down the stairs. She lowered her skirt to hide the wound. Her sister Helen entered the kitchen and gave her a gentle but cold embrace. "Are you okay?" smiled Helen, eyes wide. Dolores just looked at the floor. "Well?" Helen pressed. "Look, I’m sorry about what happened, but you know you don't have to suffer like this." Dolores lifted her gaze from the floor into Helen's eyes, narrowing beams of hot, vaporizing fury. Helen pretended not to notice the chill she suddenly felt. Their friends and neighbors said Dolores had kind eyes, but they wouldn't think so if they saw her now. "You know I love you," said Helen. Dolores sat silent for a while. "I know," she said, looking down at the floor. Her jaw squeezed as she winced at the ...

wikipedia.org “My name is Gio, and I’m confined by sadness.” “Hi Gio,” his group responded in unison. “Today marks 3 months since I began my journey back to happiness, so I’d like to tell my story to anyone who will… well, I just have to tell it.” “Gio, I just want you to know,” the group leader said, gesturing to the group, “how proud of you we all are. You are positively beaming.” Gio had no response. He didn’t feel radiant. The group leader went on. “Even in just these 3 months, I’ve seen so much sadness leave you. You’re working hard, and it shows. You’re turning that frown…” he looked back at the group. “Upside down,” they all chanted in unison. “Go ahead, Gio,” said the smiling group leader, “tell us your story.” “My dog meant everything to me. Wherever I went, he came too. I snuck him onto buses, into hotels, restaurants. It didn’t matter. He was my best friend. When his health started to fail, I made an appointment to have him put down so he wouldn’t suffer. ...

Storm over the Black Sea - Ivan Aivazovsky Captain David Townsend watched as another wave swelled up before the HMS Diligence . The storm this afternoon was dangerous, though not altogether impossible to navigate. The captain's entire life had been spent training to sail through storms like this. A gale had forced him to cut the main sail. He would have to turn the Diligence toward the waves, but they would endure. D ifficult, but not impossible , he thought. The Diligence surfed a 40-foot wave. The captain laughed. Hell , he thought, this is fun . His ship caught speed. Her crew was capable, and Captain Townsend spared no effort in keeping the ship in mint condition. He was afraid, but no one else knew. Great captains before him had navigated storms just like this. Another wave crashed on the main deck, this one more jostling than those before. "Captain," a crew member yelled, "we've lost the foremast!" The captain, positioned at th...

As an elementary school rascal in Upland, California, I attended the G.A.T.E. program—gifted and talented education. Classes centered around developing pattern identification skills to better draw connections between disparate things or ideas. Was I proud? You bet I was. A young kid among the local intellectual elite. Here, though, I want to write about why my opinion on that has changed. Intelligence isn't an apex trait, just another attribute of the complete human. How do you define intelligence? Street smarts? Ethical reasoning? Imagination? Appeal? Wit?  The geniuses of art make their messages easy to digest. They don't have to be complicated, and even when they are, they provoke emotion more than they bewilder. Albrecht D ü rer's symbolism stirred questions, while Jackson Pollack's splatter paintings introduced a whirlwind in which viewers could find their own place.  Did D ü rer predict the Krampus? In Room 237 , a documentary that explores Stanley Kub...

"I don't know if I like it or not," my cousin said after trying a Mediterranean Olive Oil Triscuit . I love this statement. It always rings my Pavlovian bell. Familiar, pleasing flavors are arranged so savorlessly that the taster is shocked into doubt. "I don't know," really means, "I don't like it enough to say I like it." It is flavor without punch, harmony without a melody—rarely does it succeed alone. As a preeminent authority on flavor and opinions, I want to share my findings about the flavorless nature of how I and others discuss stuff today. Perhaps it's always been this way, but I see so much contradiction that occurs on social media. I know, big surprise. The loudest critics police others' appropriate conduct, and violations are called bigoted, misogynistic, idiotic, misinformed, etc. If opinions were bowling balls, these people are the lane bumpers. They hammer out all mistakes until the ball lurches through a random path...

My reading list these days suggests that I haven't been all that creative. On my nightstand sits a copy of Introduction to Marketing , Ogilvy on Advertising , Getting to Yes , Interviewing for Journalists , and even Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder to try and remedy my piss poor vocabulary. I bought a new thesaurus. I bought a book on grammar. I even started one of those Bill O'Reilly books my cousin suggested. Didn't last long though. All this reading is in an effort to create better stuff.  Sometimes I sit and watch TV, drink a few beers, and remain in a state of self-sabotage for hours before suddenly, out of nowhere, something of inter-dimensional importance hammers into my thoughts. It could come from a TV ad, the static on the radio, or a speck on the wall. There's a question so profoundly stated back to myself that I feel like I'll erupt if I don't write it down immediately. It's a truth, and I know it, and until tomorrow morning once I...