I Can Has Cheese Blintz?

The WD and the Ess-Dog eye Beck's IHOPian dining

You know, if you investigate the Nyetverse a little more closely, you'll notice that its essential components can be reduced to a series of apologies for not posting interrupted by flurries of text, pictures, links and videos. This is a bit like that vase-face illusion, or possibly an Ethan Hawke rant* about aesthetic grasping in the face of meaninglessness, in that you're only going to put into the foreground what you consider to be important. So if you're in the category that's seeing the sad-sap excuses in the foreground, well it's your lucky day - I apologize yet again for the dearth of recent posting. Sometimes my life is just not that interesting, and involves a near-incomprehensible amount of SAT vocab lists and efforts at algebraic manipulation. I yawn along with you.

*Begin - Ethan Hawke's RB Rant
My parents got divorced when I was 9 years old.
And I saw my father about three times a year after that.
And when he found out that he had cancer...
he decided to bring me here...
and he gives me this big pink sea shell...
and he says to me...
"Son, the answers are all inside of this. "
And I'm all, like, "What?"
But then I realized that the shell was empty.
There's no point to any of this.
It's all just a...
A random lottery of meaningless tragedy...
and a series of near escapes.
So I take pleasure in the details, you know.
A Quarter-Pounder with cheese.
Those are good.
The sky about... ten minutes before it starts to rain.
The moment where your laughter becomes a cackle.
And I sit back, and I... I smoke my Camel straights.
And I ride my own melt.
End - Ethan Hawke's RB Rant

In powerful contrast, though, the past two weeks have been full of pep and vigor, unlike, say, a lugubrious dirge. SAT! Barf. But the past two have been fun, involving not one but two hiking excursions, the first to Squaw Peak in the fat middle of Phoenix. We joined approximately 100,000 other visitors in the ascent of this surprisingly short and steep peak that eventually afforded us a spectacular view of Smog City Minor, USA, aka Sunny Azz Phoenix:

A fun but moderately demanding hike; it's a very well demarcated trail, but it's pretty much stair-climbing all the way to the top - the way up was a quad-burner, and the way down was also a quad-burner / knee burner. Cool, if a bit crowded. We followed it up with a more pleasant, less crowded and decidedly more gradually sloped ascent up the Usery Mountain to the Wind Cave. And windy it was - we happened to pick a day with some 45 mph gusts (those same gusts which fanned the flames in Southern CA) which made our ascent past the caves to the apex pretty treacherous. Beck denies this , but I almost died several times on the way back down, my head full of thoughts of "what the hell is the cost benefit ratio of this?" You can judge for yourself; we had a peaceful sit-down on top of the mountain, but I question if the resulting panoramics were worth it:

I mean, it's pretty and life-affirming and all, but worth risking our lives? Dubious. (Beck insists that our lives were not at risk, it was more like I could have skinned a knee, and that I am in fact a big pansy. So it goes). Also notice that in the middle bottom photo, there's a big sign pointing toward Phoenix. The scary, flaming bird is located to the left, off-frame.

So that's two fun hikes to account for maybe eight hours of the past two weeks - I know I owe you more. But I have to go to work and then play in a to-the-death Ultimate game this evening down in Tempe. The meaningful result for you is this: Enjoy these pics for now, and I promise a more link/text/video/pic intensive intrusion upon your life later tonight.

Until the next apology,
Nyet

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Now playing: The New Pornographers - Testament To Youth In Verse