Adventures in Onionism

I ran a personal best by 3 minutes for 14:49:38 in the Diablo 50-miler yesterday. I was hating life from mile 24-31 because, well, it felt like someone was applying a baseball bat to my groin with every step, so I was having nightmares of hernias, kidney stones, and testicular cancer. Then at mile 31 it magically went away and I was doing OK, but I was still kind of hoping I wouldn't make the 6:15 cutoff at the mile-38 aid station. Then my friend John Bellows came down the trail and met me a mile before the aid station and starting running to pace me. I thought he was trying to kill me. We got to the aid station and Marcus and my friends Dula and Susan Parkinson were there to cheer me on. I was a couple minutes over the cutoff, but I was doing fine, so they let me continue. We pretty much rocked the remaining 12 miles, and that was that. Huge thanks to my pacer John, surprise support crew Dula and Susan, and Marcus for driving cars around so I could get home. Thanks to ...

I just made a website about my upcoming attempt to hike the CDT. It's not very pretty. I should at least add a picture or something.

If I were more tech savvy, this blog would be playing the shitty Swedish band Europe's song The Final Countdown right now . In my mind, G.O.B. is failing miserably at a magic trick, nay, an illusion , at this very moment. Ahh, Arrested Development , how I miss you. Anyway, it's the final countdown because I leave Berkeley in four days (April 30), and I start hiking the Continental Divide Trail two days after that (May 2). Because I am stupid, I'm running a 50-miler with 14,000 feet of climbing on Sunday, April 29. So what's been going on with me lately? Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors (along with Mark Twain, John Krakauer, and Ambrose Bierce) died, so I read his and A Man Without A Country and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater . Favorite quote: Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule...

Marcus is a total goober, so we went contra dancing for his birthday. Which is to say, square dancing but in big long lines of two, just like you hated doing in elementary school. In order to mock me more effectively, check out the Bay Area Country Dance Society website.

Kurt Vonnegut died at age 84.

Not too much to say. I visited my folks in Oceanside a while back; there was only a little bit of yelling, so I managed to stay for around 72 hours. I think Marcus is getting kind of sick of me living on his couch, but I'll only be around for another three weeks (as if that were a short period of time to have a rent-free loafer in your tiny studio). I read another Chuck Klosterman book, Killing Yourself to Live , that wasn't as good as Chuck Klosterman IV , and I really liked John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce , an Into the Wild -like tale about an unstable logger that as an act of protest cut down an ancient and unique Sitka spruce in British Columbia and then disappeared. CDT planning goes well. I've been buying gear I need (Henry Shires' TarpTent , Gossamer Gear sleeping pad, the paper and ink to print all the maps) and trying not to buy the fun gear I may or may not need (UV SteriPen water treatment, GPS system that's on sale at REI ). The task of ...

I finally posted my pictures from Kenya on my website. If you've been reading my blog you'll have seen most of them before, but now they're a little bigger.