Turning Lead Into Gold

There's a certain measure of cognitive dissonance that occurs when the sensation strikes that you really want to blog, but are certain that you can't write anything inspiring or even funny. . . You just have the feeling you're about due for an update. So I will go ahead and write. I will waste the time of you and the time of me. Graeme keeps organizing these gatherings every week, and we just keep having them. Seems these days people need between 12-24 hours of notice and no more than they are going to a party and they will show up. Fine by me! These things are fun. The last one was so fun we never even left the friggin house. I hope next time to reach downtown though. . . There was hammered karaoke, fake arguments, absurd dialogues about atheists killing seals. Good for us right? Then, in a daring feat of poor judgement that turned out to be the best decision we've made all month, Pipes and I cleared our afternoon schedules for another gorge
run. We realized the gorge was running at 15.5, more than twice the level we'd witnessed last time we went, so there was that. We looked at each other and decided, "If it's warm, or it's cold and sunny, we're going." We woke up hungover, met at our place at 1:00 as planned, looked outside, looked back at each other. The weather report said a low of 2, high of 8 or something like that. It was drizzling, had been all day, with no sign of cessation. Welp, good enough for us! We got our warm shit together, loaded the boat in the face of drizzly adversity and off we went. We got a lucky ride (instead of a taxi) from a prof Derek knew that just happened to pull up as we were dropping gear off at the top and I was getting ready to shuttle down. We had a little crowd of hikers gathered at the put in, I guess it seemed like a cold day to be paddling. We thought so too, but something inside us was telling us we had to do it. We were not disappointed. The grey weather added to the rugged beauty of the gorge, and it certainly deterred too many folks from accumulating there. The higher water flow also kept people away from the river banks and cliffsides, along with the fact that the conservation area is now closed for the season. This required some sneaking around the place and portaging barbed-wire fences with boats at the take out. I tell you, I will take tripping in remote wilderness with natural hazards over tripping in cities where there's people with attitudes and barb wire any day. Humans are more dangerous than animals. It was a fantastic run, we whipped some huge eddy turns and cleaned some technical moves - we were pretty proud of ourselves. We even caught a little front-air off a standing wave and landed in an eddy. Derek almost got launched out of the boat, it was rad.

I think often when one feels inspired to write, but has nothing to write about, it could be that there is a subconcious inspiration that simply needs to be recalled. I think that because I just remembered something I'm pretty excited about. I got this idea. Some poeple I can already hear going "uh-oh". Yeah well, hear me out. I found this book at camp called "Heavy Weather" The nature of the book is irrelevant. The book itself sucks. I found it and read it, and I passed it on to Frankie, who read most of it and gave it back, because it sucks so bad. This made me think. What if it was good? What if she passed it on? What if I knew who she gave it to? What if we made it interesting and she left it somewhere else for someone else to find?
Here's my idea: I start a branch to this blog, name it something that has to do with my plan, and do the following: Buy a cool book that's really short, something with an inspiring story or philosophy of life. Not cheap and contrived, but something that everyone can take something away from. I was thinking The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I remember it fitting this description perfectly back when I read it in high school. I'd write a little note on the inside cover about passing it on to see where it goes, etc. Then I'd make a form on the blog where the finder could write who they are, where they are from, where they found the book, something they liked, such as a quote or an aspect, or how it hit home, etc, and where they left it for the next person. I want to see how far this book goes and how fast it moves around. Maybe I should have a clause in there about if the book gets tattered, or if someone is the 100th person or something to keep it, buy anohter book and then send another into circulation. Maybe I could even have it sent back to me after! Imagine a collection of books that have been all over the place and read by all sorts of people? This is getting cooler the more I think about it. If anyone has any suggestions to add to this, reasons why it wouldn't work, hate messages, or a book they think is better for this than The Alchemist then let me know. . . though I am kind of hell-bent on that book now since I liked it so much. I can't wait to get started on this idea.