Boy day/girl day

Life continues in the pre-season at Philmont. Somehow I had it in my head that training week started two days ago (ie last Friday); as it turns out it starts next Friday. It's a good thing that there are so many cool people here. Brenna from Michagan and Katie from Illinois have been inseparable since they got off the train together. Dan, Anton and Kevin (the COPE boys) have already established a rule that if they say anything that should offend Christy (also from COPE) they have to do ten push ups; for her part Christy insists that she is impossible to offend. I don't really know the other PTC staff all that well yet, but so far there isn't a person under Greg's command that I would have any problem working with.

Also very nice is that the other departments seem downright eager to hang out with us. We eat almost every meal with Dory from the Seton and Alisha from the Wranglers. There are a couple of other Wranglers that will call out to say hello to us from the other side of the dining hall. The first couple of days we played games with the Ranger Trainers (this kind of stopped afterward, but I think it's mostly because they're working pretty hard right now). Yeah, we've got a couple of creepers around hanging out just because PTC tends to get the cutest girls or because we tend to be nice to people even if they are annoying, but for the most part everyone is genuinely trying to break down the barriers between our side and theirs.

There is one major problem out here right now, and that is what to do with time off. The backcountry's closed, only about four of us have cars and the people you play with are still the people you work with. A couple of us, when faced with the prospect of the three day weekend we're on, wondered if there might be any work we could be doing. Yesterday we discovered that if you want to go bowling anywhere on the 25, you've got to call ahead.

Today, however, was Boy Day/Girl Day. I took the COPE boys to Trinidad while the girls all went out to Taos. We shopped at Walmart and had lunch at Wendy's, and then we followed the testosterone. We went to a tack and hunting store every bit as big as the Walmart: we tried on leather jackets and chaps, we looked at guns and played with things probably meant to do unspeakable things to horses. Then, being men, we headed out to the pub for a beer. That's right, Trinidad CO has a brewery (I reccommend the Strong Scottish Ale). The conversation turned to topics that should have had us doing push-ups until our arms fell off, but that's what being manly is all about. Then I drove home to the ranch with the boys sleeping soundly to the soft melodies of Enya.

What more can I say after that?

Philmont round ten begins

I'm here! Okay, I don't know if it deserves an exclamation mark just yet, but I'll take the leap. Of course, I stopped in with the Halters on the way to Philmont and played nerdy games, watched Star Trek, generally lazed about and baked in the Arizona sun. That's not all that different from what I usually do, except for the heat and the movie, but somehow doing it on a kind of vacation makes it fun and relaxing rather than the tedium of everyday life. Having good friends around helps a lot.

Star Trek was good, but it was good enough that it made me want to criticize it, and I'm not sure if it quite held up.

I arrived at Philmont at about eleven local time and moved into a tent which I later discoved was slated to be my own anyway. The next day was planting day - the elementary school kids from Cimarron came out and planted flowers around PTC. This time around I worked with the first graders; cute, but there was one that decided she was my boss all day.

Set up has begun. So far there're only a few group leaders but we've been compensating by hanging around with a few wranglers and rangers. I'm really hoping we can keep this up all summer, but our track record speaks otherwise; once work starts it gets hard to hang out with anyone who doesn't live two tents away.

I found some photos from last fall recently, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get them up. Stay tuned.

Never hear the end of this

A while ago my mother brought a pile of boxes to me claiming that all of the stuff in them was mine. This happens fairly frequently, and I find that my best defense against this is to leave the boxes lying everywhere so that she doesn’t bring any more. Occasionally the boxes contain fond remembrances of times long past, such as the red suspenders presented to me as employee of the week at Hual-Cu-Cuish. More often they contain things like old retainer cases, pins and buttons from various travels, dream catchers made in handicraft, a mardi gras mask, a large rubber eraser shaped like a cat, patches from well loved and unfortunately entirely forgotten participants, and at least one petrified Gatorade packet (yes a great deal of that was an inventory of what was once in a box and is now on my floor). The trouble is that even the stuff I do want to keep I have no real place for, thus the boxes.

My mother also has a certain fondness for baubles and outdated technology. The family owns several dozen VHS tapes and audio cassettes. Our shelves overflow with angels, elves, pixies, authentic Norwegian trolls… all right, that last one is mostly mine, but you get the idea. And every box that I hesitantly look inside has a handful of 3.5 floppies. This time around I got sick of moving these from box to box and started shoving them into my (thank goodness) six year old computer to erase their contents and feed them to mom’s behemoth of a camera.

That’s when I found them: two discs from back when the whole world was a little leery about this whole “digital pictures” thing. Apparently I had taken a bunch of pictures with my good old film camera and brought them into a drugstore or Wal-Mart and received not only the photographs in question, but a disc containing the pictures as well. Ironically, I probably shoved them into a box myself; after all, I had the real photos. What did I need digital copies for? Now I have no idea where the old photos are but I have the digital copies on my computer. And a big serving of humble pie, of course.

The retreat effect

Ah, the post retreat season. Hmm. It's a good introduction, provided you know about the retreat and what it tends to do to me, but there's a good chance that some of the people reading this don't have any idea what's going on here. It may be time for a little background.

Every year, the church group I help out with does a confirmation retreat. We take a hundred teenagers out into the woods and show them what their lives are and where their selves, faith and families fit in. We spend about three months preparing for an event that takes up only three days. That's six meetings at an hour and a half a piece, plus four all night planning lock-ins coming in around six or seven hours of work each. If you do the math that's around 35 hours of planning. At the retreat itself, the confirmandi (participants) arrive around seven on Friday night and go to bed around midnight (in ridiculous theory). Breakfast on Saturday is at eight and again they go to bed around midnight (again, in our wildest dreams). Sunday breakfast is at eight again and we usuallly have the teenagers out and on their way home by twelve thirty. I bet you can see where I'm going with this: We spend 35 hours planning for an event that is scripted at 25 and a half. There's set up before and tear down after, and nobody ever listens to us when we tell them that they should really get some sleep tonight, tommorrow's going to be tough, but there you have it.

So what does this have to do with me personally? Well, start with the fact that it wears me out. Though we provide a generous slice of time for sleep, we don't get to do it until everyone in our cabin is at least pretending to do the same. I had a relatively good group this year; they were pretty well settled by two each night. I had to get up an hour before them each morning, but that's just how life is sometimes. I got in a total of eight hours of sleep all weekend and spent my waking hours working harder than I am accustomed to. Last night I went to bed at around six thirty and got up around seven thirty this morning.

Believe it or not, the exhaustion is really a secondary concern. Yeah, a lot of the people working that retreat had to go to work or school today, but really the effects of sleep deprivation wear off after a day or two. The really tricky bit is what's called the "retreat high". Without revealing the content of the retreat to possible future generations, I can say that we hold a mirror to these kids' lives, both the everyday and the whole span of it and show them that God really is beside them. By the time they head back to their cabins on Saturday night, half of them are in tears, and that emotion is contagious. Add to that the hope and the fear and the anticipation that the leaders get from trying to make sure that all of this works and doesn't fall apart in our hands and we end up a lot closer to our emotions than we are usually comfortable being.

I personally don't let my emotions show very often. It's not some psycological block or some need to feel safe or any other issue, I just seem to run colder than most people except for one week a year right after the retreat. That's when I have a tendency to send off half a dozen emails to people telling them how much I love them and miss them and am glad to be a part of their lives. The emotions are real, and they don't go away for the other fifty one weeks of the year, but I always feel like I should appologize afterwards for the shock. There is an event on the retreat that my friend Kurt likes to refer to as a bittersweet blessing: it's a beautiful moment that really and truely lets people know that they are loved here and now by the people that they see everyday. What makes it bittersweet is that while everything they learn in that moment stays true, it may not, and one might even say probably will not ever be experessed this clearly again. That's kind of what happens this week for me; I finally have the strength to say what I mean to say, but it will go away soon enough.

For those of you wondering about or fearing the approach of your own letter, don't worry. Darby seems to have taken the brunt of it this year; I'm definately slowing down after the hour and a half I spent writing to her this morning, but I'm not done yet. There are a few people I'd still like to contact specifically, and it doesn't seem like enough. The only link I know of to this page comes from my facebook page, and every one of my friends there is someone I know in the flesh, someone I have worked beside and talked with and laughed with. I can say unabashedly here to all of you that I do love you, and I'm glad to have you in my life.

Amen. So be it.

Life in the movies

The job hunt continues, though in a different form. Alright, I did send in an application to Philmont, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to grow up and get a job that lasts more than a few months at a time. I'm taking a slightly different tack right now; I'm looking for an agent to take some of these screenplays off my hands. The process is as grueling as looking for a job anywhere else: it took me an hour and a half at the library to even come up with anything remotely like what I wanted, and this turned out to be a three year old list of agents that somebody considers credible. Highly convincing, I know. Some of the companies have folded, others never seem to have serviced screenwriters in the first place. Most of them don't have web sites, meaning that I have to just stick a query in the mail and hope that the person that opens it even has a clue as to what I'm asking about.

The one thing I do like about the process is the query letter. The query letter is much like a resume, but not as presumptuous. With a resume, you try to drown your reader with facts and history and accomplishments and hope that you've done a better job than all the other guys. With the query letter, you are apparently rewarded for making it as short as possible. No florid prose or drawn out pleasantries are required. You write it with the expectation that you have three lines to impress the reader. Fail there and he'll never even get to your signature. You've got time for a title, a logline (sum everything up in two sentences, and they'd better be good) and that's about it unless you have credits to your name.

I wonder what a resume would look like if you wrote it like a query letter:


Dear Mr. Employer

I'm looking for the full time possition: PROGRAM DIRECTOR. I'm a cold but intelligent individual, trying to use my years of camping experience to turn your plucky little camp into a juggernaught of the tourism industry. But conflict arises when old, hidebound employees encounter my forward thinking attitude and must be quelled by my unusual people skills.

Please contact me for a full manuscript.


Cut, print, toss it on the slush pile.

Continuous typing

I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to keep up the once a week postings, partly because I’m rapidly running out of things to say, and partly due to the embarrassment of realizing that people are starting to read it.

I finished writing the pilot that I first started thinking about two weeks ago. The statistics on this project are like a dream; neither good nor bad per say, but utterly surreal. It took me eight days to plot out a season of the show. I took a day off. I started writing the pilot. Four days later it was eighty six pages, with commercial breaks plotted in at what I think are appropriate intervals. When I finished it I just stared at the computer, as if one of us had had a terminal malfunction and the other one didn’t know what to do about it. I’m not sure which was me.

Whenever I finish a project, anyone I mention this to asks me if I get a feeling of accomplishment. The fact is, all I feel is drained. I practically can’t speak for all the words I’ve poured out of myself. Even when I write a new opening or closing program for PTC, my brain checks out for an hour or two and for that brief window I never want to write again. It can be a useful phenomenon; I can’t stand to play video games for about half a day after I get to the end of one, which means hours of time dedicated to more useful things.

Finishing this pilot – named “Fantastic” for lack of anything else to call it – was particularly rough, since I had also finished playing “Final Fantasy X” earlier that day. I can’t describe or even fully remember the sensation of the total vacuum in my personal world, but I can tell you the curious phrase that popped into my head when everything else rushed out. It was “I feel like someone just opened the top of my head and peed in it”. Vulgar as it is, I have no idea what it was supposed to mean, except that it felt extremely appropriate at the time. In the immortal words of Lewis Carroll: Curiouser and curiouser.

Reflections of an old man

Yesterday was a day of contemplation for me. It's a strange thing, somewhere in my mind, I already was thirty; I had accepted my thirtyness entirely and even had to correct myself once when someone asked my age because I jumped the thirty gun. And then yesterday came along and I was suddenly, totally and irrevocably thirty and it landed on me like a ton of rectangular building things.

I never thought my life would be like this at thirty. It's a terrible cliche, but as Terry Pratchett says, cliches are the hammer and screwdriver in the toolbox of communication. I actually started thinking about the ramifications of the phrase before church yesterday and discovered that it was true. Certain people will tell you that there were things that they always wanted to do, which is a stretch, but to say you never thought something, well that's pretty easy. So here's what I did think:

When I was in elementary school, I figured my latent super powers would manifest sometime before high school (laugh if you want to, I bet you did too). In junior high I really didn't even expect to make it to high school, having been crushed under the weight of the world. In high school my destiny was to have my first novel published by the time I graduated college (I didn't even finish writing my first novel [which was published by a scam firm] until the year after I graduated). In college, I discovered several expectations, my horizon of ignorance having expanded. I still expected my novel to be finished and on the shelves before I graduated, but I added to this a belief that I would be a youth minister, get married and have a little house somewhere in North County before I hit twenty-five. 0-3.

At the quarter century, I think I finally gave up on the time restriction. I still wanted a place and family of my own. The job has shifted from a youth minister to working year round at a camp somewhere, or possibly becoming a professional screenwriter (a job I am not convinced I would like but one that I fully believe I have the talent for). I think that the big change in my thinking is not where I'm going, but that there really isn't a feeling of expectation associated with it any more. I expect to break my hip again sometime before I hit fifty. I expect to suffer from dementia in my early eighties. I expect to give the Reaper a good run for his money, but I expect he'll win that race eventually. As far as expectations go, that's about it, but as in Greek mythology, there's always one thing left sitting in the bottom of the box. I still have hope.

On a less philosophic note, I called Philmont this morning and asked for a job.

Sorry, my fingers turned to lead there after a I wrote that and I had to start another paragraph. Don't get me wrong, I love Philmont. I love the place, I love the people, I love the job, I even love the bizarre, ridiculous situations I somehow always run into out there. The problem is that Philmont lies at the border between reality and imagination. It's as if there are people and places there that are half here in the corporial plane and half in the etherial realm of the heart. When you go there, you become a little imaginary yourself, and I've been there so many times. It's almost as if my life has become imaginary, and yet something always comes back to California, driving my car, greeting my friends, punching the keys at my computer. I could be content to live in that storybook world and fade away into the legend I have been called there, or I could live in this real world with the buildings and television sets and neckties. The thousand miles in between are what tear me in half every time. With half a year in one world and half a year in another, I never feel like a whole person.