california_tahoe ever dumbening Sometimes when watching sports, I marvel at the veracity of the horribly overused cliche: it's a game of inches. The arc of the basketball, the five hole, ninety feet, first down. This is how I feel about Lake Tahoe. Near perfection. Things simply fit. Sports, Tahoe--I don't see them as proof of some higher power, but instead as proof of our moth-like attraction to the idea of perfection. We develop systems and are drawn to areas where the tolerances are tighter than the wildest imaginings of physicists. We don't notice the middle; it's the fringes, the borders that draw the contour lines defining the heights. Driving up 88 from Carson City, I witness the rain. The rain thickens, becomes viscid and sluggish as I elevate. Soon the drops grow bones. I imagine that if given time the drops might start migrating with their new pseudopodia. Instead the evolve again, aching to fly. Finally, release--they dry their wings and loft gently over my windshield. Rarely will a perceptive driver not be rewarded on these roads. My absolute favorite stretch of road, out of all the hundreds of thousands of miles in all the lands that I've traveled, is along the lake's west shore. It's about a hundred yards of pure fantasy. Leaving South Lake Tahoe, 89 bobs gently for a few wooded miles. A brief glimpse of the lake results from the first sharp climb. But with eyes on the road, eyes that have seen the lake a hundred times before, focus returns. A couple of steep switchbacks and the table is set. Somehow, and here is where the eerie perfection encroaches, the road is now a tightrope slicing between the lake's Emerald Bay and its tiny neighbor Cascade Lake. For that one hundred yards the car floats above the two pools, resplendent far below. Blissful vertigo. The civil engineers could have only had the vaguest notion of what was really taking place. ***** Next: skiing. * 020108 ... k2 Skiing Done Snowboarding Done Five day backpacking Done Daylong bike rides Done K1 Done Daily contact Not quite yet Leave for you In a heartbeat 020108 ... ever dumbening Driving state route eighty-nine south, with windshield dry and smeared--fluid or motor frozen. Sun at the wrong right angle. Each turn becomes a new gamble as I head to South Lake, then Kirkwood for another crap shoot, chute. I cannot see when the sun hits. I travel a stretch where the trees and sun conspire to form bars across the road. Now I'm taking the integral of the road. Merging blinding bars of light and cool bars of shade, my mind is appoximating the area under the curve, the area where my tires are more themselves. "Charlie don't surf." Seeing not seeing; if you have enough rectangles, close enough together, you can estimate. Sitting atop a craggly rock, ascended in ski boots, after fifteen minutes snow stepping lung burning. I look at the degrees, three hundred and sixty, and maybe thirty-eight. I am pleased that I hiked above the lift's end, above ninety-nine percent of my fellow sliders for the day. I had guessed, had known, had thought that I would be, pleased. More throat singing, the rocks vibrating under, the air over. I imagine the scramble, in these not intended boots, back down the few feet of bare rock. Seeing drifted snow below, I reckon (rechnen) again, this time with aid. First a small snowball, then larger, then a rock. How deep the snow? How far am I, how heavy? Enough, seventeen feet, one hundred and seventy pounds. PE=mgh or so we're told, with a high degree of certainty. I leap, right after a flash to Lake Mead and another cliff, and land to my waist. No thing is certain. Every moment a calculation, calculus. Advice: just a higher number of slices experienced by the giver. Hope: befriending the slices, in spite of, or because of. Coastline: another fractal, look closer, look closer, look closer; the border between wet and dry, another approximation. Calculated: guess: again. 020204 ... Sapphire Loves Emerald I know not much about California except a man I know who I adore lives there Currently he is having nightly sex with a girl who is glad to oblige and I can't even tell him how I feel yes I love him with EVERY part of my being and my situation now i can say NOTHING there is a God though today I am not so much lately feeling itt 100914 what's it to you? who go blather from