Hot Hot Heat

I just spent three weeks driving through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and southern California, among other places. In Las Vegas, it was 115 degrees for three days in a row. Then I came home to beautiful Minnesota, known for its icy winters, and today is the first day this year that I have broken a solid sweat sitting stone still. Oh, the irony.

In case you missed it, I am now in fact back in Minneapolis. The trip was awesome, so buy me a beer or three and I'll tell you all about it.

I looked over my old postings the other day and realized that my blog has a split personality. Half the time, it has a fairly conventional "this is what happened in my general vicinity recently, and this is what I think of it" flavor, but then sometimes it goes and does a "these are the drops of commentary that have condensed from the vapor of my thinking on an abstract intellectual topic over the last one to fifteen years." I've been a bit sparse on the latter lately.

I was recently caught making wrong use of a quotation. That is, I offered a quote -- "To hear, one must be silent" -- without fully understanding what I meant by it, and was rightly called on it. So I thought about it, and I think I've found a meaning to exonorate me (which may have been lingering in my mind from the start, and I will pretend that it was). It is this:

I think ideas (beliefs, philosophies) are like wine.

I am a fan of wine, and I encourage anyone with the motivation and the resources to try making wine, because no one can suffer from there being too much wine in the world. Even if it's bad wine, the world can learn something from it by understanding why it's a bad wine, and we can't do that if it's never produced.

But before we can tell if a wine is good or bad, we have to give it a chance. We can tell something about a wine from its color, its consistency, its fragrance, but we cannot properly judge a wine if we're holding a mouthful of something else. So we have to spit out our favorite vintage, cleanse our mouths and take the new contender into ourselves; only then can we know it well enough to say if one is better or worse than another.

Ideas are the same. Many ideas are generated by the din of human thought -- some are very good, others are terrible. But in order to know the difference, we have to let go of our own beliefs and accept a new idea openly, make it a part of ourselves; we must actually believe it. Only then can we see its nature and implications clearly enough to judge its value. So, to hear an idea (or rather, to give it a hearing, a fair chance), one must temporarily silence the old ideas within.

With that in mind, I try to believe every outrageous thing I hear; how else could I know that it's outrageous?

Dawn

I am in Portland, Oregon.
Tomorrow I will be in Vancouver, BC.
I just watched You, Me and Dupree. It was better than I expected.

:)

Vegas! And then Vegas, and.. Vegas.

We got held up a bit in Las Vegas. The original plan was for Mat to fly out of LA, but we moved a bit more slowly than we expected through the south, so we arrived in Vegas on Saturday night, and Mat got his plane home on Sunday. However, Paul also decided to join us in Vegas, and he wasn't going to arrive until Monday night, so we ended up getting stuck here for three nights for the changing of the guard. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'll skip most of the other details, since Natalie is also blogging devoutly about each day of the trip on her trip site, but here's the summary. Saturday night, casino hopping and some gambling, leaving Mat down $60, Natalie down $1, and me up $14. High rollers, the lot of us, you can tell. Sunday night we bailed out of camping in the Valley of Fire (although it offered stunning geology, especially with the red rock all lit up by sunset) and came back to Vegas to stay two nights in the Plaza, a decent hotel/casino in the original casino district, for less than the one night in a cheap motel on Saturday. We should have known better than to be in Vegas on a Saturday night, I guess.

The plan from here is tentative, but will hopefully include San Diego, Tijuana, San Fransisco, Redwood Forest, Crater Lake, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. This will theoretically be followed by a 2300-mile, 3-person driving rotation all the way back to Hubertus, WI. Then I will pick up my car and drive the last 400 miles a second time, going the other way, to Minneapolis, hopefully putting me back home no later than Sunday the 30th.

Somewhere between plotting our course for the trip and pondering my plan for after the trip, I've decided that there are too many roads, each with the same potential to be surprising and fun, or wearyingly boring. The whole process has given me a new appreciation of the tyranny of choice.

But now, I must wake Natalie from her nap to try the rooftop pool, get some lunch, find an internet cafe and pick up Paul. Or maybe I'll just read Kurzweil for a short while.

Adieu.

Everything's Bigger in Texas

I left Madison with Mat around 2pm on Friday, bound for Hubertus, WI, where Natalie grew up and we were set to launch our trip. We meant to hit the road that evening, skirting the hellish Chicago traffic under the cover of night, but discovered as we finished eating that the van's raditor fans weren't working. A local mechanic was consulted and the verdict came around 9:30 -- a faulty Radiator Fan Relay. The Relay, as we learned, sits between the radiator fan motors (which were working) and the thermometer on the radiator (also working), and decides whether to actually turn the fans on. "It's a nothing part, until you ain't got one, and then it appears to be everything."

We made a mad dash into Milwaukee to pick up a replacement from a Dodge dealer that closed at 10, but couldn't get it installed until the next morning. We decided later that it would have been more fun to just hotwire the fans to run all the time, but Natalie's parents insisted on a more civilized repair. At any rate, we were on the road by 11 and drove in shifts through the day and night, until 5 when I finally gave in to park and sleep at a gas station. Natalie was up with the sun, though, and we were moving again by 7. We hit Galveston, TX around 12:30, and the van hasn't given us any problems, although it still has an odd number of wheels; it remains to be seen how that will turn out.

Our adventures since arriving in Texas include swimming in the ocean, burning skin, watching the Houston-St Louis baseball game from a Texan beer bar, and camping in a national park just south of Austin. And, of course, plenty of driving and pictures. After swimming under the (very small) waterfall near our campground this morning, we drove into Austin and have spent the afternoon in a coffee shop, which is suitably away from the downtown tourist district, somewhere between the resisdential expanse and the university. The coffee shop's main attractions are Coca-Cola in glass bottles and free wireless, which we've taken our turns exploiting for good or ill.

We'll camp again tonight, and then it's off to Roswell, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas. We'll hit Los Angeles (or some other suitably large California city) by Sunday, where we'll lose a member; after that, to be announced. Stay tuned.

On the Road Again

Momentarily I'll be on the road to Madison one more time. Tomorrow night we film Local H (of "Copasetic" fame), and then we're off on our road trip. Natalie put together a little site with the general route, if you feel like following along.

I'll probably have some kind of sporadic internet access as we make our way around the country, but I don't expect to be blogging or emailing much en route. I'll probably also have some kind of slightly less sporadic cell phone reception, so feel free to call if you need to get a hold of me. I'm not entirely sure when I'll be back, except that it will still be July.

So, here goes...