It is not polite to ask people to help you move.

I mean it is one thing if you are young and moving into your first apartment. Or your first apartment without roaches. Or even if you are moving into your first house.
But if you are moving into a bigger house, because you outgrew you other house.. again.
Hire movers.
And if there is a piano…

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just my aching back speaking.

—–

Five days off from work was good. Of course, I had plans to get a bunch of stuff done. I did not. My free time mostly just slipped away from me while I diddled on the computer.

I did play with the Mango Radio.
I can now go ‘live’ at will.
I know that you don’t care. But I think it’s cool.

—–

Having gone back to work after essentially a week off, I have decided that I don’t like work. It’s not my job. It’s not bad as far as jobs go, but I don’t like it. I’d rather being doing something else. Making something. Creating something. Not just supporting systems that in turn make a larger system work. What the hell is that?

Being cranky and writing doesn’t go well together.

Be angry works, you pour your rage on to the paper, so to speak.

But being cranky…

It just doesn’t cut it.   You are over critical.  Nothing you write is good enough.  This shit isn’t good enough, but I am going to put up something today.  So this is it.

Maybe it’s the holidays.  Maybe it’s the time off work.  Not that I’d rather be at work, but time off work is that magical time that I would do all those things I can’t do because I’m busy working. But it doesn’t work out that way.

Maybe it’s this cold.

I don’t know.

But I am cranky.  And I can’t write.  This only makes me crankier.

There’s nothing like hitting that lace where everything just makes you more upset.

I could elaborate, but I don’t think I could get my meaning across.

Being cranky and writing doesn’t go well together.
    

I went backpacking again this weekend. I know I just went a week or two ago.  When I’m not so dead tired I’ll tell you about it.  

Right now, it’s the middle of the night.  And I’m still up.  Why? Well mostly because I’m dumb.  I do have the rest of the week off, so it’s cool.  The thing that has me up, however, is Mango Radio.  

I wanted to do a live Broadcast of Shitty Blog Radio for Thanksgiving.  But, on account of me being an uptight control freak, I had to make sure that I knew how I was gonna handle it.  So I went out for coffee with a buddy, he agreed to tune in and give me feedback.  So I’ve been playing classic rock and rambling.

It’s fun. I like this live thing.  I should have been a DJ.  Well, I guess I am.  Of course, no one is listening.  But that’s ok.  I may have to do this again… now that I know how.

Mango is fired up about Intelligent Design.  I’m not sure of it was the headlines from Dover or just right wing propaganda that has him fired up, but he is.  He asserts that Intelligent Design is not a theory and furthermore that making the case that Intelligent Design should be presented as an alternative theory to Evolution is akin to saying that Green Day should be offered up with Beethoven and Mozart in Music History class.

I’m not a scientist, hell I don’t even possess a college degree, but I won’t let that stop me from adding my take on this.  Let’s jump back a moment.  What is Intelligent Design or ID?  If you want a detailed answer, Mango and a-[e] can provide it.  I’ll state it simply.  ID is Creationism dressed in scientific trappings.  

Let me make a few statements before I continue.  I am an Atheist.  I’m sorry about that.  Some would tell you that my lack of belief makes me want to push that on others much the way the Faithful want to spread their faith.  I can only offer you my assurance that your faith or lack thereof is of no concern to me.  Having said that, I don’t think that Christianity and Evolution have to be at odds with one another.   The bible says God created man and the animals.  Evolution says that mutations occurred over time.  I know Christians who believe that those mutations may be the hand of God in the process. By pushing this small change or that one perhaps God did create us, they say.

It seems to me that evolution is not really a facet of biology, but a matter of math.  Applied probability.  Nothing is driving evolution.  It might be more appropriate to say that Evolution is demonstrated by Biology.  I point this out because I think Evolution is demonstrated in other places too, but I’ll get back to that later.

SC&A says, “There is ample scientific evidence that evolution is a fact of life. There is also ample evidence that there is much more. That evidence can be seen in the behavior of man. That behavior defies evolutionary ideals and principles” and Mango echoes the notion.  I contend that these statements are erroneous because there is no such thing as evolutionary ideals or behavior.  Man is successful as a species.  Largely due to his behavior.  I would say that man and his “counter-evolutionary behavior” are only more examples of evolution itself.

Evolution is not about behavior.  It is about patterns.  I may be the only person who sees it this way, but what the hell.  Like I said at the beginning I have no real expertise on the subject matter.

The question I find more interesting is this; why are people of faith so threatened by evolution?

They teach Earth Science in most schools systems.  And in those classes they teach that the Earth is much older than a literal view of the bible would allow for.  Yet, I’ve not heard much outrage about that.  What is about the Theory of Evolution that makes this Fundamentalist Christians want to take to the streets?

I’m too tired to dwell on the subject any long tonight so we’ll have to address that part later.

This blogging thing is hard.  

I know that some of you would be thinking… no it’s not.

OK the interface for publishing is very simple.  Tweaking your template doesn’t have to be hard.  But blogging.  Week after week.  That is hard.

For me.  Anyhow.  I am the kind of person that can make anything difficult.  I tend to over-analyze things.  Everything.  And it easy to analyze this blogging thing.  

I think when I started I decided I would just do this and didn’t matter what anyone thought.  Of course that kind of decision is easy to make when no one reads your blog.

Honestly, I thought I would give commentary on the news and give my take on different technology issues.  It did not take long to figure out that I don’t want to do that.  

I am very sensitive to my readers.  I don’t have many, but there are a few how are very regular.  You wouldn’t want to scare them off.  So as a result, the blog becomes stale.  It sits in a rut.

Finding something to say, something that is worth reading about.  That is hard.  I don’t care what any of you say.  I am convinced that this is the reason that most blogs seem to have trouble lasting more than six months.  I think this is why people close their blogs and opens new ones.  The container becomes restricting.  Even Wil Wheaton who has been doing this well, for a long time, has noted how nice it is to write at his exile site that he has been using while WWdN has been broken.

There are invisible rules that write themselves as you publish a blog.  I don’t want to talk about this, because I know that so and so who is a good reader wouldn’t like it.  That is what makes the blog different than other types of media.  I have the potential to know a great deal about my readers.  There are some I do not know anything about, but others I know well.  I like that.  But I can’t let it limit me.

That’s hard.  There are people from the real world who read this.  There are regular readers who may have expectations.  They might not, but it feels like it.  I can’t allow myself to limited by that.  I think it makes the blog not as good.  And it makes it no fun.

I’m not making any money off of this.  And I never will.  If it isn’t fun, then what is the point?  

So let this be a warning.  I’m going to talk about shit here that I might not say in the real world.  I might talk about things you don’t like.  Oh well.  Sorry about that.  But I am going to do my best not to think about the fact that you are reading this.  I need to focus on the fact that I am writing this.  I may try some different stuff.  Talk about things that I haven’t before.  I may try some short fiction.  Or I might keep doing the same thing I always have.  If you find it offensive or boring or stupid or wrong or bad… well sorry about that.  I don’t know what to tell you.  But this thing is about me.  Not you.  So consider yourself warned.

And now I have written another post about how I blog.  I excel at that.  What can I say?  I am what I am.

We could not have picked a better weekend to go hiking.  The weather was cool and crisp.  The leaves in the trees and on the ground displayed a wonderful array of colors.  It was damn near perfect.

We drove to the trail head Saturday morning.  As we headed north, the clouds overhead were cold and gray.  The kind of clouds that remind you of snow even thought it was too warm for that.  We were about halfway there, when the rain started.  My companions for the weekend, Shutter and my dad, both look at me and start ribbing me about my reputation as the Rain King.

“We’ll drive through it,” I announced, “There are blue skies ahead.”  

I was confident for some reason.  The rain stopped not long after it started, and by the time we had reached the trailhead there was blue sky visible through clouds.  It was cooler than we expected, temperatures in the low 40’s.  We threw on fleece jackets and our packs.  We were on the trail again.

The Trail was broad and well trod.  It traveled up the ridge at a gentle grade. This is not what I expected.  I had anticipated a trail the wound up the ridge from one switchback to the next.  This is the way the Appalachian Trail tends to be.  In this case, we had received a break. The climb, as a result, wasn’t hard at all.  As we sat at the top and had some lunch, I checked the maps.   found out that the ridge we were walking on used to be a mined for coal, and that the trail that we were walking on used to be a stagecoach road between the Villages of Yellow Spring and Rausch Gap.  

As we continued our walk, I looked at my surroundings with new eyes.  I pictured a coal mining community and the business of removing coal from the earth.  I could see hints and traces of this other world around me.  We walked through the remains of the village of Yellow Springs.  There was nothing to see but a Mail Box that had been put there so to hold a log for AT hikers to comment in.  The village itself was gone.  Piles of rocks were all that remained.  I do not know if these piles were all that was left of the buildings, or simply piles of rocks that had been cleared.  It was beautiful and left me thinking back to simpler time.  A time when a man could go off and live in the mountains.

Part of me would gladly give up all of our modern creature comforts and go off to the mountains.  I think I would be content on a little sustenance farm.  Maybe I was just caught up in the beauty of the day.  The last of clouds had drifted away.  The sun was shining but not warm.  The sky was a light blue color that contrasted brilliantly against the yellow and orange leaves.  The leaves were wonderful.  The oaks and the soft wood trees had leaves of every shade of yellow and orange.  Every now and again the yellows and oranges would be broke up by the shocking red of the maple leafs, or the green of the pines, mountain laurel and rhododendrons.  These evergreens seemed oblivious to the approaching winter, even the air carried the chill of winter on it.

I walked on.  As the shadows grew longer, I started to notice odd little hills.  They seemed completely out of synch with the contour of the ridge.  By the time I had passed three or four of them, my curiosity was piqued.  The mystery was solved when I noticed the crumbled black stones, which were exposed by erosion on one of the hillocks.  They were slag mounds.  It amazes me that such a foul by-product of the coal mines given a hundred years, becomes something so beautiful.

We didn’t have to walk much further to find our destination.  The trail to the shelter led us on to a massive slag mound.  It was broad and level.  We walked a third of a mile or so on this artificial plateau.  It was lined with trees on either side of the trail so that it resembled a boulevard leading up to a country estate.  I was very excited; this was an excellent location for a shelter.  

My excitement, did not last.  We got to the shelter; it was set down in the mound, like Uncle Owen’s moisture farm residence.  It was also occupied.  Of course, that is not a problem in itself.  We have shared shelters many times and met some great folks in the process.  But what we saw this time, was something that none of us could have anticipated.  The Yuppie couple that was at the shelter had a pitched a four man dome tent inside the shelter.  Not only that, but they had it set so that the door of the tent opened into the third of the shelter that wasn’t occupied by the tent.  They had used the remaining space to spread out there gear as though the shelter was the front porch of their tent.

Their dog ran loose and came up to greet us as we stood there, unsure of what to do or say.  After a hushed conference, we decided to pitch our tents at the end of the slag mound, about a hundred yards beyond the shelter.  It was a good spot for camping and we know that shelters are never guaranteed to be available or empty.  It did not bother us so much to tent, what bothered us was the lack of etiquette.  There is an etiquette that goes with backpacking, some unwritten rules that are respected by most backpackers.  

You carry your own gear.  If you need it you carry it.  If you don’t carry it, you live with out it.  You don’t eat where you sleep.  You leave no trace when you camp.  If you want privacy when you camp, you pitch a tent.  Shelters are communal in nature.  You make room for other when you are in the shelter. Or as the saying goes, “The shelter isn’t full, until the last person is in.”  And when you bring a dog, you make sure he isn’t a nuisance to others.  Not everyone likes dogs.  When my brother comes with us, he brings his dog.  But he makes sure that if other people are around the dog is on a leash.  And if other people are at that shelter, the dog and he sleep in a tent.

It was upsetting for us to see these Yuppies ignore all of these unwritten rules.  Maybe they didn’t know.  But they didn’t seem to care, even as it became apparent that we had planned to stay at the shelter.  The only redeeming thing was that the woman looked like she was terrified of us.

We made a roaring campfire to keep the chill off.  We made our dinners and drank coffee.  And after a while, we went back to our tents.  It got cold in the middle of the night, but I was comfortable.  By morning, it was nice out, sunny and temperatures approaching 50 degrees.  I made myself a big breakfast.  My dad and Shutter were already packed and ready to go before I had even started to eat.  I hate to rush in the morning, so I told them to head out with out me.  Dad left first, and Shutter headed out about 20 minutes later.  I took my time and packed up.  It was a slow start for me.  My boots weren’t quite right and I knew that I would have a monster blister if I didn’t fix them.  So I stopped after walking less than a quarter mile and fixed my boots.  I was back on the trail and trying to make good time but then I realized I was on the wrong trail, when I noticed orange blazes instead of the familiar white.  I back tracked a couple hundred yards to where the Orange Blazed trail had intersected the AT.  

Back on track, I kept walking.  I shed a few layers as I started to ascend the Second Mountain.  The trail was poorly marked and I had to stop several times to find the path.  I passed the Yuppies from the shelter, on the way up the mountain.  I pushed harder to make sure I got ahead of them.  The trail meandered around the top of the mountain before descending.  

I still hadn’t seen a sign of Shutter or dad.  I descended very quickly, hoping that my knees and ankles would hold up to the abuse.  At the bottom of the mountain I caught them.  Before long, we reached the end of our hike.  We sat down on the side of the road and waited for our ride.  It was damn near perfect.