Doing things is awesome. Unquestionable no doubt. But some things feel better to do than other things. Over the past few years, I have been compiling a list of some of the best things I like to feel - now every single feeling i've felt hasn't been taken into thought, because usually I'm to involved with feeling them.
Best feelings chronologically (more or less - because all these feelings are the shit):
Taking a really big poop.
SneeZing
Climbing back into your bed on a cold morning
Dunking your head in a waterfall fed by snowmelt
Jumping in cold pool on a hot summer day.
Itchin a mosquito bite.
summit beer
summit cig
Taking off a tight pair of climbing shoes
Taking off your heavy backpack after hiking for more than 4 hours and 27 minutes.
Carrying fresh hot laundry right out of the dryer.
eating yogurt and granola WHILE taking a shower - its awesome
drinking or eating anything else in the shower really, i assume the more awesome the pallet the better.
Q-tipping your ears.
"shnuggling"
Eskimo kisses.
Getting petted
having a warm cup of coffee in your hands on a cold day
just being in a hot shower
Putting your hand on the vent in your car so your sleeve is covering it, and having the hot air blow up your sleeve.
Drinking cold water
Right after a brain freeze
hearing the noise when you step on a light layer of snow
Laughing so hard you have to pee your pants.
putting lotion on really really dry skin
Gargling listerine.
Smelling new car smell
I encourage you to think about all the awesome things you do and feel on an every day basis, you might think of some peculiarly-amazing things.
I vividly remember the first time I ever stole anything. It
was a few weeks after I had started working my first job at a local pharmacy. It was hot. The summer heat was lingering as long as I had hoped it would. I
said to the pseudo-boss/pharmacist I was working with, rather matter-of-factly,
that I was quite thirsty. I started walking toward the sink with the intention
of dunking my parched mouth for a few seconds.
He called after me, “Riley, grab me a soda while you’re grabbing
yourself a bottle of water.”
“You mean soda from the cooler?”
“Yeah, just take them.”
Now you might say that this hardly qualifies for stealing,
but to adolescent Riley, it did. So what if I had permission? The permission from mr. boss-like guy brought me as close to white-collar crime as I’ve ever been. Finally, I was in the big-time! The real deal! The big cheese! No
sneaking around necessary, just casually munching some bags of kettle chips
and a Dr. Pepper. Real boss-man would never know as long as boss-esque guy didn't spill the beans. The perfect crime.
Soon, every employee, except real boss man, at this small,
independently owned, conveniently located, neighborhood pharmacy was helping
themselves to candy bars and refreshing teenage-beverages on a regular basis.
We’d eat half a bag of any candy or snack we could possible desire,
then stash the rest in the drawers behind the cash register for another mischievous
pharmacist’s assistant to finish off. Whoever said there is no such thing as
free lunch never worked at this pharmacy. We sensed the urgency needed to take
total advantage of this situation, and we acted on our impulses like never
before. To say that life was good would be like saying summer heat is sweet and
precious. We all knew it. But no one wakes up in the morning and declares the sweet fleeting heat a temporary blessing. You just bask in the oppressive lava and take for granted all the sleeveless shirts in your wardrobe. Similarly, our luxury was a mostly unspoken but not-so-unacknowledged bliss.
One afternoon in the bleak, late, Philadelphia winter, I came in to work ten minutes early, as I was
taught to do by my gym teacher (“to be early is to be on-time, to be on-time is
to be late” he would say). It was months after the water bottle incident and we were all fat and happy from successfully thwarting any sort of punishment from the big-man. In front of me sat the most dour looking teenage
cashier I’d ever seen. If I didn’t suspect a connection to the sticky fingers we had developed, I would have thought he had just bombed the SATs or been
rejected from Temple University. “What’s up, dude?” I asked, with only partial
interest in the response. He pointed to the open and empty drawers behind the
register with the only words one can possibly muster up in a situation like
this:
“Check this shit out.”
Caught.
Nowadays, my mock-stealing days are over. No more free
lunches taken with the permission of my bosses. Now I am a respectable
member of society with short-ish hair and mostly presentable clothes. I ask to take things and I pay for my Cheetos. Well
on my way to cubicle land, you might say. And perhaps I am, but I’ve got this idea I’ve been joking about with friends
for a few years. If you could steal anything, what would it be? It has to be a
physical object, able to be carried by one or two people. Bags of money from a
bank? A huge case of Cheetos? A flat screen television? The temporary tattoo
dispenser at the local burrito joint?
Yes, reader, those are all great ideas.
Certainly, I would love to eat a whole case of Cheetos. If you stole them, I would even bring my ear plugs so the crunch would be that much louder. But personally, these are not the things I would steal. If I was a bolder and more muscle-y man with less to lose, I would steal signs. I don't mean stop signs or speed limit signs. I mean signs that make people laugh. You know?
There’s a sign on interstate 81 in Virginia that reads, “Cave Mountain Lake National Forest – Exit 180A”. I pass it on the way from Philadelphia every time I come back to Swannanoa. Imagine that! Probably a super majestic mountain lake cave forest! Right there in the middle of Virginia! It takes me off guard every time, and I giggle without hesitation. Every. Time.
There’s a sign in east Asheville that reads, “AC Reynolds Elementary: Building Future Rockets.” I wonder, what are kids coming out of a rocket science elementary school like? Seems like a bad idea to me, having kids build rockets. They should be learning to ride bikes or playing tag. Not building future rockets.
There’s a sign in Chimney Rock, North Carolina that looks remarkably phallic. I point it out to everyone I’m in the car with as we creep past at 20 miles per hour. “Dude, look at that overly pointy, skin colored sign!” It gets everyone, and it never gets old.
I've dreamt up a list of many signs, and maybe in another world they'll all be mine. Dreams, huh? Ask me some time, I'll tell you all about it.
Merry
Christmas Jackson, you have been so. so. good.
Tonight,
the greatest gift of all was a single act of supreme greatness. My baby cousin,
the one that I am completely in love with, who makes me want to make my soul
purpose in this life to discover what she is interested in, so I can like it,
and we can be friends and do cool stuff together. She, just hours ago, asked
her father, “daddy, can I have knucks?”.
That’s
right, she asked her dad… to pound it. MY baby cousin! I taught her to pound it
the other day, and she’s just knucks’ing everyone in sight! Given, her knucks are the cutest knucks I have ever received, they feel almost exactly like a kitten kneading dough on your fist. Also, she doesn't really just pound it, she kinda throws a knuck at your knuck. Either way, I am delighted with
her bro’intellect.
I told
her tonight, that her existence on this planet was Christmas present enough for
me, and she need not get me anything this year, because every word she spoke
and every breath she took was pure magic. I mean, she did kind of ignore that sincere compliment, but I am still completely captivated by everything she does - honestly, I haven’t been so enthralled with something since Mario
Kart 64. I am also amazed at how she is probably clueless to how enchanting she is, because the whole family basically just watched her all night.
Thank you
Santa,
Mario
Kart 64, now this? What will you come
up with next!?
Decompression is a word. It’s just like any other word you
may or may not have made up in your free time. It’s got a prefix and stuff. This idea of decompression has laid siege on
my soul. On Saturday, I slept until 12:30. Upon waking I watched the rest of a
movie I started the night before (Die Hard), and then proceeded to watch
another (Die Hard 2). This morning, I ate a mountain of Colombian food with a
mountain of good friends. I drank some of the best life-blood coffee ever.
Tonight, I’ll be dining on wine, cheer, and lasagna. Tomorrow we all get a
bunch of cool shit. If an alien were to look at my life right now, they would
most certainly judge me for my life of unending excess. Shame isn’t the word.
Perhaps you could describe it as sheepishness. Or just full.
I think there is a mandatory grace period. I was unsure
about its existence earlier, but I am fairly certain now. You can’t call it
relaxation, because people do that all the time. I relax every single day. Decompression is an altered and very intensified version of relaxation. You
know? Drink two beers, eat six cookies, watch two and a half movies, sleep until
noon, turn off your phone. Overindulgence
to the point of euphoria and nausea (same thing, right?). This time it is
especially necessary, too. Everyone is freaking out about life, or Christmas, or their puppy, or their professor who assigned an essay due right after christmas. But nothing is going to bother me for the one (two) single day(s) after I arrive home, because I
won’t let it.
I’ve left my house once in the past three and a half days, and I
have yet to change my pants.
My little 2 year old cousin was sitting in her sweet ass high chair. Which by the way is the coolest thing in the world. It has a tiny table in front of her with little sections laid out for her to put various items in various locations, and some type of fashionable cushion for her to lounge back on. It's got wheels on the legs of the chair so she can scoot along, and you can take the table part of it off so she can get in and out. Sweet. Super sweet.
So she's sitting in her awesome chair, and asking her mom in a cute baby voice, "can I have a cake mom?" Super cute, not even whining, just cute.
So I turned to my mom, and asked in a similar cute baby voice, "can I have cake mommmm?"
The whole family started laughing, except for one... the baby.
My baby cousin, named Erin, was sitting in her throne, staring directly at me. Her face was no longer cute can I have cake face. Her face was now scrutinizing. She was giving me the stink eye, glaring at me, with such sad disapproval eyes, scorning me. My heart started to cry.
She somehow knew I was mocking her, and without a single word, turned the whole family against me. Do not mock babies. I don't think they can understand sarcasm.
-Jackson
PS: On a happier note, I taught her how to give me knucks. And that, is just the cutest thing that has ever happened to me - baby knucks.
This picture does not do the evil eye justice - this is half evil eye, maybe even one third evil eye.
There are two cement slabs on top of a hill I live near. I
discovered them within a week of moving down south, and they have been probably
one of the only constants I’ve had in these whirl-pool-years. Maybe you've seen them? They are simple, like words are often not. They have been the setting of kites on sunny days, sleds on cold and not-so-snowy days, and hammocks on windy
days when studying just could not be a priority. I once happened upon a group of graduates with glasses of bubbly, toasting to the same
uncertain future I watch my friends toasting to now. Their faces were washed with sunset and I could tell their posture was the best it had been in four years (more or less). They knew something, and I wanted to know as well.
So, the other day I ventured out to the slabs, as I do often, to
meet two superdawgs. Upon arrival, there was something amiss. The piano was out
of tune. The milk tasted funny. The mustache was gone. The book was missing a
page, and the story was incomplete. There
was another slab. That makes
THREE. Three of these cement-island-refuge-oasisies floating in a sea of cow shit
and majestic views.
If I was a bigger banana head, I could talk about juxtapositions,
chaos, and the like. Cement in a pasture? How conflicting! But really, these slabs
are just nice things to sit on. They keep your butt clean, which is maybe the
most important part of the outdoors? Just kidding. They make an otherwise muddy
field accessible on any day of the year, regardless of recent rainfall. They
orient people toward a view. They provide a stage for your best dance move. They
give you a platform from which to scream your best rebel yell.
And I think a lot about where I would have gone on Saturday afternoons
had I not lived down the road from the best pasture in the history of pastures.
Where would I have met my friends after classes? Where would I have had
contemplative beers with melancholy bros? A couch? No, we’re not those kids,
sitting on the couch. The soccer fields? Too well lit, too little view. The
cafeteria? Too ballsy, too much of a view.
There was an afternoon in 2009 when I got a call from my
friend Erika. She said, in her own words, “Dude! Riley! Please come to dogwood!
There are lots of friends here and it’s super fun! Meet us at the cement slabs”
About thirty minutes later, I met three of the best friends I’ve ever made. We
were the five super-best-friends, the inseparable cool kids, the
gang. And we had just discovered what it really meant to be free. We loved
hanging out with each other so much more than we loved getting up at six for
the breakfast shift in the dishroom every day. We were living beyond our own
means, but gosh, easy street never felt so right. Where would we be in the absence of
these unlikely surfaces?
The third slab is a welcome addition, in my opinion. The
things that define our nostalgia are often simpler than we expect. A specific root on a specific trail can easily punt you right into the memory vortex. With
the loss of lofts in dorm rooms, bubbas, and Ed Raiola, comes yet another place
on this too-huge campus for the all-important reflection necessary for staying
sane in this fucking weird commune. The next generation of kids needs these
four by six platforms for their sanity. You can take the fun out of the
college, but you can’t take the hippy out of the pasture. God save this place.
