I can't take pictures, so I take melodramatic close-ups and pretend they're artistic.

Today was a good today, and not just because we had the opportunity to rescue gear for hot straight boys.

We saw an area while hiking around that wasn’t in a guide book yet, and I managed to talk Laurie into it, so we just meandered on over and started climbing routes and the grades were whatever we decided they were.

The Red hasn’t changed much.  It’s still the place where all the men are ripped as shit, even the ones showing up with gear that arrived in the mail yesterday and who are struggling up the 5.7s.  The whole place oozes sex.  It’s the kind of place that gay men would be embarrassed about, but straight people don’t seem to have any sense of shame about what feels like a bathhouse for straight people.  But let’s face it, that’s what it is.  Everyone fucks as many people as possible.  And if that’s not what you’re doing, it’s because you’re not making enough trips to the beer trailer, or you’re not paying attention.  It’s the only place where I’ve heard someone say $2.50 for a PBR was “expensive”.

Homos don’t yet have a really homo climbing campground, but it wouldn’t have the same je ne sais quoi; homos get all shamey about fitting the slut stereotype, unlike the straight whores who would probably just take pride about how glow-y the campground showers would get if exposed to a black-light.

Favorite quote from last season: “I fucked this chick who was on her period, it was like a ketchup bottle,” (squeezing motion) “pfffffbbbbt.”

Laurie testing for parasites

So me and Laurie went climbing and there wasn’t a whole lot noteworthy other than that I rope-gunned all day, rescued the cute straight boys’ gear, and praised baby Jesus that I had brought my aviators so I could check out the view without looking pervy.

We forgot to take photos before we got to the parking lot. But we totally sent the shit outta some shit. Trust us.

The Red makes me feel a little bit like a fake person. Some kind of carapace.  I remind myself that like the people on my ultimate frisbee team in high school, there’s no point in trying to impress them because I ain’t gonna see none these motherfuckers in ten years, and most of them will have stopped climbing by then and be fat and drink a lot of beer and eat chew and replay things they’ve already seen on the DVR.

Or they’ll be late thirty something health nuts getting botox injections, which is probably more depressing.  I’m not sure where I’ll be, but if I’m lucky, I’ll be dead from some motorcycle collision or bizarre sex act (regular readers will know that I refer to this as “going out David Carradine style”).

But maybe that’s the problem, the hollow “this isn’t going anywhere” feeling of transient relationships with transient people.

Laurie is doing something at the campground table that I don’t understand, but it involves large schematics, and making corrections to large schematics to a marker, to make sure that large steam plants don’t explode and kill tons of people.  It reminds me of putting together a criminal defense trial in my underpants.  Although her work is slightly more important because mine doesn’t prevent a fiery flesh-melting doom for hundreds of people.  She smashes a bug on the schematic.

“What are the cloudy lines?”

“It means everything inside the cloudy line has changed.  But this is…” she crosses out more things.