gadget

i say o, i say h-i-o

a cloudy bicycle through ohio

Autumn 2018, fresh off of the Pacific Crest Trail and a freeform cross-country hitchhike, i hopped on my craigslist touring bike and set out to bicycle from my hometown near Ann Arbor, MI down and across to DC. A jaunt across Ohio separated my start from Pittsburgh, and from there the Great Allegheny Passage Trail mapped my course to DC. The Ohio leg was wildly freeform though, no routes or destinations planned ahead.

A glimpse at my planning for this journey: a probing of ‘there is a town over here,’ ‘i could take this road for a while in this direction’ or ‘this place looks like i could find a spot as wide as me to sleep,’ as i started to the south and continued to the east. My laissez-faire hitchhike trip i had just completed had me feeling real loosey goosey for this one. The only proper record of my path remains on some forsaken server in google’s mind, i did a poor job of documenting this one. Some stretches of road and towns perk up to me when i look at a map of the middle of nowhere Ohio. I enjoy how much space in the states i have that relationship with.

Pictured above was my cozy villa for a night at a closed campground, lake adjacent. Generally my beds were not so developed and idyllic, usually they were in thickets of trees along country roads, or underneath bridges on the common nights of rain i met.

One night early on i set up beneath a highway underpass at the edge of Small American Town, Ohio. Conditions were calling to be difficult, wind and rain, so i curled up in my quilt and started watching nerd stuff on my phone as i waited for sleep. My bliss was disturbed by officers trying to serve and protect. Some concerned local spotted my kit beneath the bridge there and alerted the authorites. I informed them that i wasn’t green, that i was healthy, and i would be leaving at the break of dawn, but apparently that was insufficient for their check-in. Calls were placed up the chain of command asking what the next move would be until we reached the peak of this locality: the officer who drives the SUV. We loaded up my kit into his trunk and i was driven to a motel [in the wrong direction] with a room waiting for me on the dime of the Salvation Army. I made music in the back on the ride over; officer SUV gave me a fiver and said i was good. I spent it on garbage bags from a gas station to aid in waterproofing my kit.

I called out to a local on their front lawn for knowledge about the wildlife area nearby and its viability for camping. Instead i was invited to the backyard for a night around the fire and fed handsomely in the morning. Even upon my own trail does the trail provide.

A cold night, a wet night, a lonesome night, a restless night, a difficult night. The following day arrived with glorious sunlight as i crawled to the small small town of Mifflin to sit on the picnic tables next to the church under construction and this beautiful tree. Gas station coffee and pastries to rally morale, only to get approached by a local with presents in hand: a fresh pair of socks and a bag of snacks. we gonna be okay

One of the final nights brought me to a small town bar. I had my bed location for the night picked out a ways down the road, but it was too visible to set up before the sun set down. Perfect time to eat and drink some food and ambience.

I sit at the bar and present my ID to the bartender. ‘Michigan?!’ Record scratch – the customers turn to look and i survey my surroundings. Crimson and white everywhere, nary an eye without an accompanying buck in sight. The club loyalties of these NCAA football rivalries run deep, the buff lads of Ohio State and the University of Michigan foster a healthy one. I let them know i went to Central Michigan University and i cared little about this region’s conflict and the ambience returned. We spoke of my journey and the owners offered their deck to me to sleep for the night. A wise move on their part because i nearly closed out the bar that night before laying down to sleep, the company was comfy. deck popped a hole in my sleeping pad tho

Many days pedaling down numbered gridded roads through farmlands. Shorter days as the terrain got more textured with hills closing in on eastern Ohio. Plenty of rain too, i waited out a three day rainstorm around Halloween in Bucyrus. My sleeping spots migrated as the rains flooded my dry options, from highway underpass to picnic pavilion to hotel with spirit sodden. It was still cloudy as i left town.

Walking my bike along the bridge to drink in the Ohio River as i crossed to West Virginia. An intersection of dirt roads, uneven angles, on a hilltop crowned with trees. A rock wall outside of a gas station with the morning’s cup of mud. A cold soak ramen while reclined against a stop sign, eaten with the desire to never eat cold soak ramen again as a local drives by and asks if i’m okay. Yes, but not with this sorry ramen jar, friend. The countless times that, when pedaling on the shoulder of a two-laned road, cars and trucks passed by each other right next to me. A morning at the small local grocery eavesdropping on the locals. The talks with lifelong Ohioans about the ways their towns have grown and decayed over time. Many libraries loitered in while the robots fed and i hydrated. The one Sunday morning i spent in a church to hide from a howling rainstorm, one of the fellas in attendance drove me to a truck stop up the road after service was complete. Singing songs i was good at on the first day to bolster my confidence for the days to come. Scouting out couchsurfing options only to always back away because i felt shy. Nightly, laying down and scrolling on the map for a diner or gas station for the morning. The solo ad hoc nature of this one brought about many sentences, segmented moments, fewer paragraphs of full story.

probably waited a little too long to jot this one down lol, it’s squishy in the mind. especially since it stopped at Pittsburgh, it didn’t complete in DC as i had initially planned. the bite of late November sent my willpower away and i quickly followed. this was a thing i did for about two months and i am changed from it.

barking at the fence

weathered fence runner removed from paw-dug ditch finds a perpendicuar line

I spent three weeks out with backpack and hike again, slowly creeping north through Vermont on the portion of trail that is both the Vermont Long Trail and the Appalachian Trail. This conflux made for a powerful churn of hikers. AT NoBos having cleared most of the Green Tunnel were seeing eye to eye with the weathered SoBos who had emerged triumphant from Maine and the Whites. LT SoBos on their victory lap with their finish line fully attainable tutored the rookie LT NoBos and reaffirmed that the north end of the LT does, in fact, get much more difficult. I passed through after most of the bubbles had, thankfully because i heard the densest part of the AT NoBo bubble was ruinous with humans this year.

Amidst all these kinds there was me, hiker trash without a destination or even a physical location as a goal. Brand new kit on my back; a discerning eye would be needed to tell how it was truly a slapdash experienced hiker’s pack instead of a green pack in desperate need of a shakedown [though my luxury item game was a bit outta control i will admit]. My knee has been treacherous this year as well – i lacked the ability to cruise all day to prove my mettle should i want. I lacked the desire to anyways, my mind was fixated on drinking in the lands and the towns, and my eye kept catching the real estate agencies in charge of all their rustic vacant buildings.

John C Heinel came to America in 1869 and decided to settle down in Manchester Center, Vermont. He regularly advertised his hot new styles of men’s and children’s clothes at the best prices in the local newspaper, the Manchester Journal, at around the turn of the century. Then Heinel’s Clothiers closed and eventually the storefront was replaced by a gym. When i passed by the gym had perished as well, wearing a large ‘For Lease’ sign displayed prominently next to this disheveled one, removed from its relevancy. The gym’s lifeless body was still full of machines and equipment and darkness.

I arrived at Bromley Mountain, hungry for a sunrise. Just look at this mountain top, perched so majestically above the seas of green. See? the crown is shaved just for us humans to get a good view! A good view to be sure, the sunset played off of the clouds and painted eastern slopes with the darkest inks. The following morning, calamity! A storm arrived [it graced nearly the entire AT, living up to its reputation as the wet trail in spades] and kept the peak shrouded in a cloud for days. I ate through my entire resupply loitering in the Bromley Mountain Ski Patrol hut, a fully walled, roofed, proper building. There i greeted a cascade of wet, tenacious thru-hikers, pounding their way through the mud pits of Vermont in a downpour, their faces positively glowing as they entered this sanctuary from the elements. Days passed, the storm cleared, and for my final night on the mountain i slept outside under the nearly full moon and greeted the sun with joy.

I consistently find that robot eyes struggle to capture the majesty of the liminal times. Jealousy, perhaps, at the glory of reality? That they are so often tasked with replicating it on their faces, only to have their attempts harshly judged and scruitinized?
In this case it failed to capture the breadth of the color range, as well as the vastness of the sea of clouds that layed between that horizon and my mountaintop, but i must concede that it did do a better job of visually representing the view than i could have done.

I met a good handful of former military out on trail this time. These lads, chewed up and spat out by the complex, acquiring peace and serenity in Appalachia. One i met was freshly into his twenties, we drank at a VA bar that lets hikers camp in the backyard. He shared with me some photos from his enlistment days, including his handsome, dress blues, posed, ‘welcome to the force’ and ‘so long, military’ photos from that time. In the after photo he sported a chest busy with accolades. He also had hard eyes, julienned crispy eyes that had spent too much time in the fryer; in stark contrast to the full potato eyes of a high schooler in the before. He pointed to the before photo, ‘i don’t know who that is anymore.’ woof. He seemed to be finding that which he seeked, and kept me up until nearly midnight in town with his good conversation and supply of peanut butter beers. i’m glad you’re still here, lads, all of you

A beautiful emerald carpet of moss, damp, alive, thrives on the ridgeline in the White Rocks National Recreation Area beneath old old evergreens. Legend says devious gnomes enjoy cavorting here and creating rock cairns at this mystical nexus, much to the chagrin of the rule abiding Leave No Trace agents. Word travelled to me along trail that these agents came to the enchanted forest and stomped out these spawning grounds of mountain magic. As i crossed this nexus my spirit grew at the sight of a rock cairn garden re-blossoming. The battle continues.

That evening i descended down from the ridge to a cozy streamside camp with two LT hikers, No Hitch and AKA. These righteous fellas broke my campfire-free streak, and we weren’t even at a shelter. AKA chainsmoked cigarettes and shared whiskey as we all sang the praises of our Appalachian Trail; the cozy wet social trail. He shared my trail experience on the magnificent PCT: a beautiful nature stroll no doubt, but often much more solitary. The absence of the communal campfire commonality out west drove hikers to their individual shelters early. The views are bonkers, no doubt, but the friendly shelter hangouts of the AT are bonkers in their own right. luv u at

They spun me a yarn, a true story: In the night, a mouse had chewed a hole in her sleeping bag. She stitched up the hole the following morning, and went on with her hike. A few days later a foul smell started to blossom around her. She found that the mouse never left the warmth of her bag. She had to dive into the innards of this nighttime hearse to remove this decomposing passenger. What a fantastic trail name, shoutouts to you, Mousetrap.

I took a brief stop in Cleveland after my short stint on trail. My walk across the city to my airbnb in Tremont brought me through the Flats, an old crossroads, a dried riverside bluff with quiet roads and sundialed monoliths of brick forgotten, a proposed hub from an era before modern America showed up. Murals and placards sang of golden ratios, and equinox and solstice magics in relation to the layout of this part of town. The roads i saw on my walk were more of a colder grid. One of the walls in this area hit me with this. the answer: it was a Carly Rae Jepsen concert

A tribute to the brilliance of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
It is the night of June 27th, 1962 in Paris. Half of a year ago an iron curtain was erected upon some German city about 550 miles away. On this night, under the gibbous moon, the artists spring into action [with explicit scantioning from the city – oh la France, so revolutionary but all too often so governmental]. Methodically they stack oil barrels in one of the narrowest streets of the city until, thirteen feet wide and thirteen feet tall, they fully clog it up. Their message: the Berlin Wall sure is weird, huh? Cutting a city into pieces, dividing a land, they seeked to emulate that feel on this one short banker street [for eight, count em – eight – hours].
Cut to this tribute, placed in an alley between small town American businesses, cutting off the path from the road with storefronts to the classic small town America dirt parking lot flanked by storebutts. Access to this prevention of access was prevented by a secondary padlocked gate.
not sure where the destination is here, it could be how we can’t have nice things in the states, it could be the relationship between the tribute piece and the original art and the scenes they are both set in, it could be my often complicated feelings about the artist. with these theses presented as they are i think i’m satisfied tho

I’ve noticed a number of errors in my past posts as i’ve lately returned to my internet presence. I’m not fond of seeing them, i feel like a doof lookin at an incorrectly placed comma. You fool, that doesn’t read right! This glyphic hiccup is an unnecessary pothole on the path you’re paving! but…these warts are how it was when i placed these words online. That’s just how it be sometimes, yeh? But, ultimately, I am a god unto these words – this projection of my consciousness onto my wordpress corner spinning tall tales of my silly journeys. They may be polished, for i am the sole arbiter of their nature here’s a cat i saw through a window

been gone for a minute

put my head into the kayak and it told me to write this down so i did

So i paddled down the Missouri River in 2020 and finally, after nearly two years, i wrote nothing about it. My kayak did, and this letter will be heading to the home of the man i purchased the kayak from off of craigslist. It did a pretty good job of summing up our journey together, so here i present it in its handwritten final state:

photos of low quality, like my confidence upon the water.
rushed transcription, like my slapdash preparations for the trek.
difficult to see through, like that cursed river.
grand, still holding my pride, like the journey we shared.

boy pokemon go was cool huh

the ghost of a zeitgeist from a year sick with meme magic

Pokémon GO released 3 years and 3 months ago and Pokémon GO lost basically all its mainstream momentum 3 years ago. There have been a few attempts to take the Augmented Reality game throne in the years since, but none have succeeded [sorry, Garfield go, you never got your chance.] This many years down the line it finally has a real competitor stepping up to the plate. Before we get into all that, i wanted to selfishly tell a few stories about what GO can do with its potential.

At the release of GO i was having my first go at car life in western america. I can confirm that those first few months were something special. Shortly after release i spent a couple hours figuring out the base game mechanics near Fountain, CO with a theater kid while she played the Hamilton soundtrack off her phone and walked her dog. I register this as my first encounter of oh so many with that Lin-Manuel joint.

Shortly afterwards i spent a day in Woodland Park trying to conquer all the gyms because Team Valor doesn’t rest until conquest is ours. Shoutout to the gang of three kids on scooters aiding in the glorious red fight. As i passed by the Taco Bell in town an employee on his lunch break joined my party and showed me the hot spot in town where he got his ghastly. Unfortunately the ghastly i caught had bad stats so i don’t have it anymore.

it took me so many resources to get this rhydon when i was in ID and he’s still one of my best lads

When i was up near Seattle i found my way to one of the parks at around lunchtime and it was absolutely flooded with people trying to be the best like no one ever was. The park had a circular path with a grassy field in the center. Around the ring people paced stocking up on all the items they could get before joining the mob in the center that ebbed and flowed towards the hottest spawns. One of the last ones i followed them to was a beefy tentacruel who carried me in many battles in early game. Unfortunately he got outmoded and sent to the candy machine. On that day i partied up with a guy who was wearing a cookie cat t shirt and i kept him out of work for an hour or so longer than he should’ve.

be careful, there’s wild humans in the tall grass

It was thrilling, having all these interactions from a silly Pokemon game but hey there are so many pieces about the cool things it did right around launch. There are also a lot of pieces about how lackluster its features were. So let’s jump forward to 2018 when they had finally patched in basic things, like legendary Pokemon. Also after they’ve added interesting events called Community Days. Also also they added in all kinds of Pokémon jargon.

One of my good friends+her family in MI is more active in with GO than i am. We both got a fancy ex raid pass that let us do this Mewtwo raid event [just look at all that jargon remember when this game was approachable]. It was February in MI so you know it was snowy and slushy and very very cold. Still, as both the raid time and myself approached the raid location i found about 25 people all staring down at their rectangles into the Pokemon world. Turns out there’s an online chat group for the local area where passionate GO players organize and coordinate these things. I got cordoned off into my group of Team Valors because the team that helps the most in the battle gets more chances to catch the dang thing at the end.

The battle started and 3 different sets of 6 of my best battle lads got plastered within seconds, as this giant psychic demon casually waved his hands and i poked my screen idly. All the fantastic godly birds and dragons everyone else brought to the fight held their ground and looked pitifully as i trotted out some golbat i caught last year because i literally didn’t have anyone else competent in my squad. The battle was a victory no thanks to me and i successfully caught me #150: the terrifying cloned abomination Mewtwo and named him twerklord.

here we see the legendary twerklord battling a team rocket grunt in delicious pokemon lore irony

Later that year when the weather became pleasant we returned to that area for a Community Day. These days usually last a Saturday afternoon, and the game goes haywire spawning just one kind of pokemon so you can easily reach the ludicrous price of evolving some of these guys to their final evolution. They also usually debut the shiny variant of this one pokemon, a hot color palette change. Shinies are so rare in the mainline pokemon games that over my almost 20 years playing them i still haven’t seen one.

We roll up to the park and boy howdy it looked like summer 2016 all over again. The sidewalks were positively packed with these thirsty trainers chatting about all the nitty gritty minmaxing they’ve been doing. By this point GO had added in a friends system and gives rewards if you make enough friends. So shoutout to this 10 year old kid named astroteemo who still gives me gifts from the Plymouth Canton area sometimes. At the end of the event they even debuted a new Pokémon from the next mainline game, and it was real cool seeing and hearing people coming to this realization.

only some of the fruits of my labor, each sparkle means they’re *extra* rare

Last week i spent almost a full day exclusively playing GO. In a small town in CO, Georgetown, i moved in and started asserting myself. Five gyms over a few blocks, with the most action packed one at the visitors center right next to the highway. That one required of me the most babysitting, but i still had a lot of downtime when i reigned supreme.

They added in a cute little team rocket random encounter (that should’ve been present near launch) that crashed my game. I tried to do a raid and it crashed my game. I actually got into a raid and it froze up when I won the battle, so i got to helplessly watch the timer tick down and it told me i lost. I was constantly hurting for resources so i had to pass on a lot of wild Pokémon encounters. I was usually cool with that, since a lot of encounters it gave me were for dudes i already caught and fully evolved. A lot of other encounters i got were for dudes from the 4th generation of mainline games, which segues nicely.

There’s too many dang Pokémon. This is a problem that the mainline series is currently dealing with, and now GO is facing. I’ve been casually playing for almost the whole 3 years and i still don’t have all the original 150. With the addition of timed raids, the prospect of getting legendaries seems impossible since i don’t have a crew or the patience to check every hour or two to see if i’ll even get the chance to try to catch one of them. There was just a timed event that let you hatch eggs to get Europe and Australia exclusive guys. None of my eggs got me any of them and that didn’t feel great.

Boy this took a sour turn, huh?

also welcome back, me, to this website

lol not really, future me here, i’ll be gone for another few years oops

megabuses are great cuz they’re cheap and not as sad as greyhounds

pt 4 of the cross-country wedding dash

when last we left off i was setting off to hitch from the last truck stop in wyoming…

oop i forgot to put this picture in the last one when i talked about bojack horseman

The sun continued to climb and i stood by the on ramp with my thumb out. I started off playing guitar and moved on to singing along with Billy Joel songs. The on ramp was next door to a group of cows who were a nice audience to my performance. E came by and stood up on the interstate but i stayed down at the beginning of the on ramp where it was quieter.

At around 11 a pickup stopped and i hopped in. The driver was a nice guy heading back home in Tennessee who goes by the name Ewok. That put me absolutely at ease since i could introduce myself with my trail name.

He’s a wilderness firefighter, so he spent the past few months in California battling the natural progression of forests. He even worked on the Redding fire that plagued my views and lungs for weeks.

ewok saw the lady with this bus the past couple days, they’re heading in the same direction. her headlight was being cheeky but he couldn’t do anything about it

I don’t remember how it came up but we started talking about moonshine after a while and boyo does Ewok know his stuff. Being a good boy from Tennessee he’s got that thick accent so you know he knew what he was talking about. Stuff like proper flavored moonshine etiquette, the silly laws involving the creation of moonshine, and how it was traditionally made. Turns out he also was featured in and narrated moonshine documentaries, Living Proof. He said his accent was a big part of him landing that narration gig and he’s not wrong.

We drove clear across Nebraska, he dropped me off in Lincoln as he turned south to Tennessee. I arrived just in time to hop on a bus to get to the east side of town. The sun was too low for me to try to hitch so i sat in a Wendy’s and had a lot of 50 cent frostys and waited for darkness to fall. I slept that night in a field underneath a large King Kong statue that loomed over a diner. I forgot to take a picture the next morning because my allergies decided to show up again and i stumbled into a gas station for some medicine.

there’s a spot in nebraska without crops!

An unfortunate part of hitchhiking is not knowing local geography. When i got picked up from Lincoln in a pickup the guy told me where his destination was, but since it was somewhere east i was okay with it. It was a short 5 minutes down the interstate. I was kind of okay with that because i wasn’t sure how long i could sustain conversation with him.

I was a very sleepy boy after he dropped me off so i took a nap under the interstate for a couple hours before returning to the on ramp to hitch. After about half an hour a sheriff pulled up and told me that i couldn’t stand there. He said that someone called in to them concerned about my well being but i saw a lot of law cars drive by so i don’t exactly believe that. He was very pleasant, so i asked him where i could stand. He pointed me to about 10 yards away on the road leading up to the on ramp. I made a sassy joke about how silly of a rule that is that made me move such a short distance and he laughed at that, said that i looked like i was doing just fine, and went on his way.

Rush hour traffic started coming by which dampened my spirits as nobody stopped. Eventually at almost 7 an old guy listening to modern pop and dance music pulled up and drove me the short distance to Omaha. He dropped me downtown where i took a bus across the border to Council Bluffs in Iowa, so close to my destination. I found a place next to some corn, surprisingly, and crashed for the night.

the people over there were doing a thing i think to get people to give money to heinz? i was more interested in their art than their cause

It was Thursday morning, one day before my friends would be arriving in Iowa City. Instead of trying to hitch the rest of the way i threw in the towel and bought a megabus ticket. I was concerned about only getting a hitch part way and being stuck in a place with no bus service. I settled on that plan too late and had to get a ticket for Friday midday. That gave me a full day to burn in Council Bluffs.

I started off by heading to a Goodwill. Council Bluffs had a nice paved path that led from where i slept right to it and also a Mcdonald’s, so my plan was made. My first stop at Goodwill was to get some warmer clothes, some more comfortable jeans, and some nicer wedding appropriate clothes. My new jeans are very blue, like cartoon character blue and i love them.

From there i went to Mcdonald’s to drink my body weight in pop again. I hung out there and watched some SGDQ until i got antsy and wanted to sing. I returned to that path, sat under a bridge, and sang for a couple hours until my voice got hoarse and told me i had to stop. By then i returned to the spot i slept the night before to rest for my big day the next day.

she got mad at me when i put my hand on her shoulder #hoverhand

Before getting on that bus i bought a copy of OG Tetris for the OG game boy because i had been thinking about it for a while, and that kept me occupied for the bus ride to Iowa City. The bus got into the city at close to 5 and i got to the air bnb around 6. I dug in on the stoop and waited for my friends to show up that night, but that wouldn’t happen until almost 11pm.

All my efforts paid off in spades when i saw them hesitate as they drove up, confused about the dirty vagrant in front of their air bnb until they recognized it was me and we hugged and it was great.

The next day was the wedding and good times with a group of humans who i’ve known for a very long time. Also i got to meet the bride for the first time turns out she’s cool which isn’t really a surprise. The best man was my friend’s younger brother who recently went to Isle Royale which planted that idea in my mind. Unfortunately the boats have mostly stopped running, and will be all done running by next week so i can’t do that this year.

overcooked 2 is a good game albeit a little buggy but these humans rock

On Sunday we road tripped to Chicago, doing some good sing alongs which is another thing i miss about driving when i go a while without doing it. The highway with windows down and the good music on makes my soul feel good. Getting a cold doesn’t make my soul feel good which is what happened next.

My married friends in Chicago are huge into board games and boy am i not into learning new board games. So while they played Scythe i fought my nose cold and read about the cool world building they did for that board game. The next day i hopped a megabus back to Ann Arbor and now i’m back to being a barista, at least for a short time.

and here we are. i could write about the past few days, walking through what happened but a lot of it is either ‘i’m at work’ or ‘i played some cool video games.’ like i said last post i’m definitely writing bout them next, i’ve wanted to say things about them for a while, since some dramatic moments i had with pokemon gold on trail.

also i played my first and last game of pubg mobile and won it go me

oof this piddled out at the end huh

shortly after he would bicycle to pittsburgh, return to michigan for the holidays and cold, then set off full time in the cruiser once more, all the while posting more on instagram than on here.

for the best tho, i’m less fond of the day to day blog style these days. broad, sweeping, iterative. no thank you, let me distill, refine, purify first.

i’ma keep this one piddled lol. read another story on here it’ll end better or better yet: you tell me one that ends better than this one