Hello blog world! It’s been a minute. I’ve been editing my manuscript in a steadfast and masochistic way, forcing myself to sit down at my little wooden desk in the pale light of my single bedroom window for four hours each day and giving myself only about a dozen instagram breaks, and I am happy to report that I’m nearly finished with this stage. There is so much more to do after editing, but forcing myself to edit 150 thousand words, editing being something that I apparently loathe, has definitely been the hardest part. Whew! I sure am excited to share this book with you all, tho. It’s going to be a nice escapist adventure story wherein there are many descriptions of what the clouds are doing and nothing is ever, ever boring. I’ll keep you updated as things progress.

I’ve also been running uphill a lot this month, on the gated forest service road one mile from my front door that climbs up into the Syskiyou mountains. (I love living in Southern Oregon!) Running uphill is hard, but not as hard as editing!! I’m trying to work up to running seventy miles a week with a bunch of elevation gain- I’ve got a frozen gluten-free pepperoni pizza in my freezer to reward myself when I get to that point. I want that fucking pizza! I’m running to train for the Continental Divide Trail, which I start in May. My intention is to lessen the “pain curve” that happens at the beginning of a long trail- the constant pain in my joints, tendons and ligaments that I feel pretty much all day every day for the first month on the trail (and at night, too!). Right now I can feel my body getting stronger and my calves are coming back, which is cool. It sure is hard to be a jock in the off season, tho. Winter makes me want to hibernate in bed with a stack of Faulkner and all the dark chocolate that went on sale for valentine’s day.

There are other things I want to write about here before I start the CDT- but the writing part of my brain has been fried lately from all the editing. I’ll try to get it up to write some new posts in March. In the meantime, check out this trailer for a PCT documentary that a couple of talented hikers are making- I can’t stop watching it! It makes me cry. As far as long-trail documentaries go, I think this is going to be a really, really good one.

Do More With Less | Trailer from Do More With Less on Vimeo.

In other news, today I was going through a box of stuff and I found a stack of my zines from 2008. A zine is a self-published sort of xeroxed chapbook thing one makes of one’s writing to give to one’s friends and/or sell in places called “infoshops”. (Do infoshops still exist?) I wrote one issue of my zine each year- generally I would spend about two weeks regurgitating all my adventures onto paper- trains, hitchhiking, weird letters I wrote to friends from a yurt in the woods- and the thing would end up being about a hundred pages long. I started this blog in 2008 a little after publishing the third issue of my zine, and afterward abandoned the medium entirely, because blogging is free and xeroxing is expensive. (Yes, I’ve been keeping this blog since 2008 and yes there is a lot of embarrassing stuff in the archives.)

This is the last issue of my zine:

Most of you have no interest in one of these weird things from my past, but a few of you are freaky enough to want to read my nascent attempts at limerick writing:

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And you weirdos are in luck, because I’m selling them. I have twenty copies and I’m selling them for $20 each, in order to raise my transportation funds to get to the southern terminus of the CDT.

Here’s the back cover:

This issue is about 80 pages long. I’ll sign them, for what it’s worth. If you’d like a copy (all copies sold).

Ok, it’s time to work on my book. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to procrastinate. As you were!

(Also find me on instagram, where I gleefully post over-saturated photos of my wintertime weekend warrior adventures.)