Location: Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 11/08
Randomly Appropriate Music: Black Wave/Bad Vibrations by Arcade Fire (although The Black Angel’s Death Song by the The Velvet Underground & Nico made a strong charge as I recalled the sense of confusion, the wounded pride of it all)

Would that man steal from you? I doubt it…

But he might.

My last post on Mongolia aimed for poetry: the stark beauty and isolation of Ulaanbaatar. This post is slightly more practical. I’ll wrap up next week with some stories from outside the capitol city, which in my mind is the only reason to go to Mongolia in the first place (a fact sadly lost on one my favorite bloggers, Chris Guillebeau, in his Art of Non-Conformity post, Misadventures in Mongolia).

Obviously, you clicked on this post because you want to ensure that next time you go abroad, you’ll be one of the lucky few to be pick-pocketed. Sounds easy, right? Not so fast! To ensure you get the proper treatment from a pick-pocket, who ideally takes not only of your cash but also valuable credit cards, tickets, and identification documents, careful planning is required. You really need to stand out and make yourself an ideal target.

Follow these simple steps, and I promise you, you too will have your pocket picked!

~~~

Step 1: Go somewhere dangerous and/or crowded

It is a sunny day in November.

I am in a market in Ulaanbaatar.

I see a man, eyes rolled back into his head, drunk. His face creased with labor-darkened skin, he bounces from side to side of a wide promenade. Obstacles—a small girl, a lamppost, a pothole, a table—confuse him. He tries to hold onto an idea: forward. Keep moving forward, and it will be alright.

Genghis looks over the mountains near the edge of town

I watch as the promenade narrows and he becomes trapped, a pinball between a pile of packing crates and a table of household supplies. The packing crates are impenetrable, and he turns, leaning his arm for balance on the back of a young Mongolian buying dish soap.

With his left hand, the young man swiftly brushes the drunk back. A foot of space emerges between them, and the young man cracks the drunk squarely on the jaw with his right hand, the creased face, now faced down, darkened with the mud of a muddy walkway.

They touched for three seconds, maybe less. The young man did not hesitate. I would have.

The crowd passes around the drunk like a rushing herd swallowing a downed animal. He is crippled but conscious, now another obstacle on the long walk home.

Welcome to Naran Tuul khudaldaany Tov. The Black Market.

~~~

Step 2: Be overconfident/ignore warning signs

Allow me to tell you how I got here.

Ulaanbaatar’s Black Market (also known as Khar Zakh) is ominously named and about as scary as you’d expect. It’s located well outside the city center, two bus connections away from any quaint charm that Ulaanbaatar might possess in its crumbling concrete walls.

Like many unique foreign locations, it’s absolutely enormous yet hard to find.

Disregarding warnings, I decide to take the bus instead of a taxi.

For anyone who has never taken a bus in a foreign country, let alone Mongolia, let me cut to the chase: yes, buses are that bad.

There are a few public transportation experiences that stick out in my mind for all the wrong reasons: the time I showed up at the wrong airport in Turkey and had to take a $65 crosstown taxi; the subway in Bucharest without maps or announcements (an English speaking local confided in me, “I have no idea where we’re going, I’m lost, too!”); the time I got trapped underneath Tokyo for two hours with a vicious hangover and a persistent “haven’t I seen this before?” feeling about the subway system that bordered on the dreamlike.

Buses, however are always the worst. They are cramped, and it’s impossible to figure out where you are without asking or guessing (which have a roughly equal success rate of about 4%). Unlike American buses, where you enter in the front in a roughly orderly fashion, most foreign buses employ a tout, allowing you to enter any way you can (including the roof rate for the so-called Chicken Buses of Guatemala). The tout squeezes through the bus, selling tickets and making change, somehow keeping track of who has already paid at each new stop.

Every time the bus comes to a rest, you feverishly duck your head, scanning for landmarks. You talk to the driver or the tout, and hope that they will care for you (or at least understand you). You shoot off boldly into the unknown, anxious for much of the ride, hoping that the unmarked vehicle you stepped into will honor the route on the fading bus stop sign and deliver you to your destination.

~~~

A better photographer would have made something of this set, I'm sure of it

As the ancient diesel workhorses of Mongolia’s public transport system expel their passengers into the dirt cul-de-sac, you wonder, “Where am I? Why am I in a dirt cul-de-sac on the edge of town? Shouldn’t the largest market in the entire country be slightly easier to find?”

People rush in all directions. Their body language tells you: anywhere is better than here.

I spy a teenage girl, any seasoned traveler’s most likely bet for directions in English.

“Black Market?”

Blank stare.

I try a family, an older man, a middle aged woman.

“Black Market?”

I am beginning to think I have once again set sail on a lonely sea of missed directions and hours lost. A man in a suit approaches me, mud caked to his brown leather shoes. “You want Khar Zakh? You want market?

“Yes. I want market.”

I follow him. I have not met him. Quite possibly no one I have met has ever met him. Perhaps no one I have ever met has ever met anyone that he has ever met. We are two completely unrelated bodies. We turn right or we turn left; we walk down a muddy street with high steel walls. There are always walls.

A long concrete rampart with a hole blasted through its center lurks around the next corner. Suddenly, there are many more people. They have emerged from this twisted network of walls, blown out buildings, and dust.

Beyond the concrete wall, there is a chainlink fence, torn at one end, held up as you pass under it. I hardly believe it, but this is the entrance to the Black Market. It felt like sneaking onto the rival high school’s football field, if only the rivals played in Communist Russia.

I wish I had proof, but it’s sort of like the Mongolian equivalent of an airport security checkpoint. Slow line. Everyone is tense. Not the kind of place one feels comfortable taking pictures.

Some people are forced to pay on entering, some insouciantly sidle by. It is not clear why this is. You, of course, as a foreigner, have the privilege of paying. Possibly double.

I reach for my wallet, held high in the chest pocket of my jacket, but my friend in the suit beats me to it, paying the small fee for me. He ushers me inside and gives me a look that says, be careful, you are on your own now, and disappears into the throng.

Apparently, in the summer, this market has as many as 60,000 visitors a day. I am in an endless row of large home appliances, beaten washers, dryers, and stoves, their piping splayed like animal innards. Animals, even dogs, are kept to do work here. They are not part of the family. The same is true of machines. They are kept, repaired, sold, and repaired again to do work, to outlast the poverty that keeps them. They are status symbols only for the very rich.

The market is Byzantine, but organized: appliances, stationary, car parts, and clothing stalls that look like airplane hangers, denim and winter clothes from China stretching beyond sight.

I wander, eventually finding my way to the food stalls. I purchase rice, a few root vegetables, and two whole fish.

~~~

4. Always take public transport, especially if you have bags/a backpack

I left as the vendors packed their stalls, and the skies darkened. The drunks, so incongruous in the light of day, began to take over the night. Whether passed out on the street (How would they not freeze? Who will find them?), warming themselves by oil drum fires, or fighting (always fighting), the night is theirs. I hurried to find my bus, confused as always, wishing I had listened to reason and left earlier.

The buses in UB are sorely overcrowded, virtually bursting at the seams. At night, when the market lets out, they are worse. My camera, a Nikon D90 which I prized above all of my possessions (yes, I slept hugging it close to my chest on the 36 hour train ride from Beijing), looked liked a tumor beneath my coat. I might as well have been traveling with a sign that read: RICH FOREIGNER, PLEASE RELIEVE HIM OF HIS WALLET.

My tripod and backpack across my back, my camera to my front, and my arms full of grocery bags, I was uncomfortable to say the least, constantly being jostled, aware that I was about 3 pairs of eyes short of seeing all the hands touching my possessions. Being a foreigner, everyone is often looking (read: staring) at you already. A foreigner taking up more than his allotment of space is no better.

It’s very artful how the pickpockets got me. Learn from this.

Before the stops, it’s clear who is jockeying to make a move, and who intends to stay put. When the thieves sense that you are about to get off, they have the blocker stand in your way and remain as oblivious as possible. As you are fighting to get his attention, you get pushed from behind, squeezed for a brief moment from an angle you never expected. It’s like someone is in even more of a hurry to get off the bus than you are.

And it’s then that a third hand reaches in and makes the theft.

~~~

5. Buy a money belt but don’t use it/make sure to carry all of your most important cards in the same place

I still remember hopping off the bus and realizing it instantly, my limpid zipper hanging down where it had once stood proudly protecting the wallet I foolishly thought was safe on my chest. I remember making eye contact with a boy just as I left the bus, and then like Kevin Spacey in the Usual Suspects, poof, gone. Alone on a cold street, with no money, no phone, no way to pay for the bus transfer home.

The thieves throw the cards away (although I still maintain a solemn hope that a small Mongolian boy has tried to use my NJ Driver’s license as some nonsensical fake ID) as that’s the only thing that will ever get them caught. The cash, they take. All told, they got about 18,000 tögrög from me, not even $15.

I gladly would have looked them in the face and handed them the money, knowing that they probably needed it more than I did, knowing how much aggravation replacing these cards would cause me in the next few weeks.

This was the last time I felt infallible as a traveler, the last time I laughed a little on the inside at the naivety of a poor hostel goer whose bag had been slashed or wallet robbed. Bound to happen, but never to you, never to me.

My pride was a wounded lion, shot not for sport, but for survival, by professionals. Professional hunters. Eat hunters. Eat.

Location: Chengdu, China, 11/08 (but this post is All World, baby!)
Randomly Appropriate Music: Better Things by Passion Pit (when I searched my brain for the phrase “carnival in your ears,” this was the first song that came to mind. It’s a scientific process here at travel culture + music)

This week the traveling blog carnival, Carnival of Cities, comes to town! For those not in the know, think of a blog carnival like a magazine that moves from blog to blog, aggregating a bunch of posts about a certain topic.

The Carnival of Cities is a bi-weekly carnival dedicated to posts about cities. That’s it: write about a any aspect of any city. As I’m currently holed up in the dead of an Omaha winter, I like to think of this carnival as a very lazy trip around the world.

Click to view the February 10th Carnival of Cities (whose host may or may not have thought Jordy is a girl’s name) or my most recent post, Sleepwalking in Ulaanbaatar, about my stay in a ger camp on the impoverished outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

Happy blogging!

Jordy

February 24th edition of Carnival of Cities:

North America

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Limerick Ode To Ted Alexandro posted at MAD KANE’S HUMOR BLOG.

anto.patterson presents The Cathay: My One-Stop Shop! posted at HelloMissPatterson.

Words2Words presents Experiment: Reveal History posted at A Local Perspective: Philadelphia and Beyond, saying, “A look into a few lesser known historical features of Philadelphia. A challenge to take a trip, eyes wide open, and see the hidden sites of a city.”

Katy Unitek presents Sol: A light in the darkness of Haiti posted at Boots On The Roof.

Katy Unitek presents How to Get Solar Training in California posted at Green Jobs Ready.

Jennifer Miner presents Hiking with Kids in Joshua Tree National Park posted at The Vacation Gals – Family travel, girlfriend getaways, romantic getaways, destinations, things to do, travel tips.

Dave G presents Brainerd Minnesota posted at Brainerd Real Estate Team.

Dave G presents Cook Minnesota posted at Lake Vermilion Realty.

Mike Ross presents 12 Bizarre and Fascinating Facts about Mardi Gras posted at Star Costumes Blog, saying, “It is a famous legendary celebration all throughout the world. Aside from the gaudy costumes, marching bands, and decorative floats to huge crowds, there are fascinating facts about its creation and its continuous popularity. Its really good to know some of them to understand its existence.”

June Tree presents Disneyland & Universal Studios, Here We Come! posted at The Digerati Life, saying, “Let me tell you how our L.A. vacation worked out!”

Byteful Travel presents Why the Art Institute of Chicago kept the Seurat posted at Byteful Blog, saying, “Even if you’re not an Art History major (and try not to pass out when I admit that I’m not), you’re sure to appreciate the amazing Art Institute of Chicago. From Georges Seurat to Edward Hopper, the AIC is a tour-de-force of modern and post-modern art. It features many of the iconic images you’ve probably seen before, but seeing them in person delivers a more personal, and more real, emotional impact (many, many photos included).”

Jon presents Nine Presidents Visit Madame Tussauds in DC posted at The PlanetEye Traveler – Washington DC, saying, “Madame Tussauds in Washington, DC is opening a new US Presidents wing, which when completed later this year, will feature all 42 American Presidnets depicted in wax fugures.”

Jim & Martha presents Hiking Diamond Head State Park in Oahu, Hawaii posted at Wanderlust Journey, saying, “Hiking up Diamond Head State Park outside Honolulu, HI.”

Nancy Brown presents Best Things to See and Do in Wickenburg, Arizona posted at What a Trip, saying, “Travel Writer Nancy D. Brown visits Wickenburg, Arizona and shares her Insider Tips, including a visit to the Kay El Bar Guest Ranch. Gitty up, cowboy!”

Anne Simone presents 100 Best Places to Appreciate Art Online posted at Online Colleges.net.

Zhu presents Château Laurier | Correr Es Mi Destino posted at Correr Es Mi Destino, saying, “Château Laurier is quite famous in Ottawa — more than an hotel, it is a landmark and an heritage building. Located between the Parliament, the Rideau Canal, the National Gallery of Canada, the Byward Market, the National War Memorial, the U.S. Embassy, and the Rideau Centre, it is in the heart of the city.”

Europe

Lena presents 3 Facts: Glasgow | The Colors Magazine posted at The Colors Magazine.

Sam presents New !! 24 Wonderful Sights to See in Dublin Ireland, With Pictures posted at Travel Welcome, saying, “Dublin and Ireland are known for ancient ruins and castles, remarkable landscapes, Georgian architecture, St. Patrick and neighborhood pubs. The rainfall creates brilliant gardens, fields in shades of emerald green, and rainbows. This is the musical home of the Irish Tenors, Celtic Woman and Riverdance. In Ireland you’ll find the love for language that nourished great writers and lasting literature, James Joyce for one. You’ll hear legendary stories of druids and leprechauns, and be haunted by the wild romantic coast seascapes. Here are 24 wonderful sights to see in Dublin Ireland. An interactive Google map of of sights to see in Dublin, is at the bottom of this page.”

Travelrat presents Carcassonne posted at Travelrat’s Travels, saying, “A picture and video … not my best, but it was raining & getting dark.”

Jack Norell presents Barcelona in Gaudi’s footsteps posted at Eyeflare – Travel Articles and Tips, saying, “Gaudi is a wonderful artist and architect. In this post, we follow the trail of his work in Barcelona, including the amazing Sagrada Familia.”

reesan presents Champagne posted at loneleeplanet, saying, “Exploring the Champagne region. The fascinating historic province northeast of France.”

Dee Andrews presents Las Fallas in Valencia posted at Travel and Travails, saying, “Astounding cultural experience in Valencia, Spain.”

r0dman presents Lost in Stockholm posted at on the way to somewhere, saying, “I’d never seen snow like this before! Houses were covered (literally) with snow – on the roof and banked up against the walls.”

Andy Hayes presents Helsinki: Daughter of the Baltic posted at Sharing Travel Experiences, saying, “It’s a charming capital city often overlooked for Europe’s more favourable southern climes. But with great food, awesome outdoors, and friendly locals, what’s not to like?”

Jon presents Georgia O’Keeffe Abstracts at The Phillips in Washington DC posted at The PlanetEye Traveler – Washington DC, saying, “A new exhibit in Wwashington, DC showcases over 100 peices of art created by the iconic American abstract painter, Georgia O’Keeffe.”

Jack Norell presents Taking Long Island Rail Road from JFK airport to New York City posted at Eyeflare – Travel Articles and Tips, saying, “There are a few ways to get from JFK airport to Manhattan, one of the easier (and cheaper) is to pick up the Long Island Rail Road from Jamaica Station and go to Penn Station in Manhattan.”

Robin Locker presents Five Wine Bars in Florence posted at My Melange .

That’s it! I’ll be writing more about Mongolia soon, so stay tuned (enter your email address in the space above right to receive email updates with new posts). Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Cities using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of cities, blog carnival.

I step off the bus, and Ulaanbaatar unfurls before me like a burning rug. It is late. All day the coal plants breath black on the horizon, and at night their discharge blots out the bright fabric of the city in the distance. The wind off the steppe breezes past naked earth. It is cold.

I am going home. My arms full of cookie moog, a gift for the children, I cut across the ruddy, washed out plain that separates the ger camp from the road and dip into Yarmag proper, a district on the outskirts of the city. We are far from Ulaanbaatar and yet still inside it. There is a nothing here like no nothing I have ever known. If I walk west I will keep walking and I will see no one and I will die tonight, but if I cross the ruddy plain I will be home. Ulaanbaatar does not end: it thins out into nothingness. We are near its edge.

I am staying with Sabina, her husband, and their two sons. They are poor and live  poorly. Their lives are rough, they are moody, and they are concerned with me if I bring dinner and not concerned with me if I do not. I am on some wild adventure, two and a half weeks in Mongolia, beginning here in the city (if you can call it that), before taking a caravan west to Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur, the White Lake of Arkhangai aimag, and I feel constantly at the edge of safety and at odds with nature. For them, this is life.

I pass the school, two concrete stories holding three languages: traditional Mongolian script (unused in modern Mongolia, a trace of the pride of the brutal Genghis, the Conqueror, shaper of the Khanate. Here, his name is spelled Chinggis, and it is comically everywhere: the name of the airport, the namesake of statues, the brand of vodka most popular in a land where vodka flows freely), Cyrillic Mongolian (the national language, a trace of the brutal communist will of Soviet occupation, who forced an alphabet, an architecture, and so much more on Mongolia), and English (spoken by some, especially the younger generation, a trace of the hope of the future).

I pass the school and then the store, now closed for the evening. Inside: firewood, pasta, washing soap, chocolate, vodka. Outside: the pump, feeding water sold by the liter like gasoline, filling plastic drums which thirst every three days, more if there are guests, or the animals lie sick.

There is no indoor plumbing in the ger camp,  and I will take my turn filling the waist high plastic drums eventually. This far outside the city, near where the buses end, there is no heating, no television. There is a rock that rises a few feet off the skin of the earth, meaning: your bus stops here. There is a mountain in the distance that will kill you before you see it near, meaning: go home, save the night photography for another night.

The wind is moving but static, in the same way that white noise ceases to be noise and becomes a constant. The wind is eternal, forever squalling along the steppe, forever above the rock that just barely breaks through the skin of the earth. It is I that am blowing past, disrupting life. Or so it feels.

I have never been somewhere where so much of existence is wrapped up in the simple process of surviving. Outside the city, it is not uncommon to travel for a day, whether by horse or by car, and see no signs of human life. Yet, more than a fourth of the population is nomadic, working a web of shared, state-owned land and relying on a sparse humanity that stretches across a vast country for information, commerce, and companionship.

I will hire a driver in a few days, Mishka, and he will take a group of us (two young, gorgeous Swedes, two conservative, friendly Finns, and me) across the countryside, driving across fields where there is no track, let alone road, seemingly navigating by some innate Mongolian sense. Mishka will drive straight across a field for hours, and suddenly take a sharp turn toward the hills, stopping at ger that will appear out of nowhere. He purchases airag, fermented mare’s milk, from people who are either dear friends or complete strangers, I could never tell which. The drink is sour and fizzy, but it is such a part of the culture here, the communal struggle to eke out an existence together and remain a people, descendents of Chinggis. To drink it is to share in the cycle of the seasons and the meager bounty the land provides.

Mongolian pleasantries are all based around this bounty, the concept of survival. “Are your sheep fattening well?” passes for hello among nomads. Upon entering a ger, Mongolians shout, “Nokhoi Khori!” (“Hold the dogs!”). If no one answers, you are allowed to enter, eat a fair amount of what is around, and leave. Imagine, a country where it is custom to walk into anyone’s home and take your fill? There are powerful forces conspiring against life here, and so much of the sense of community seems based around combating these forces together, one large, extended family stretched across the steppe.

~~~

It is night, and the high walls of the ger sites block out the lights of the capitol in the distance. A little past the store, I am plunged into a strange darkness: a tunnel shaped void just taller than a man, walled on either side, with its ceiling the shining, impenetrable dome of the night sky. It is a glowing blue-black sky, cloudless and clear, except for its white mole moon.

The street lamps, a surprising luxury, work on the next gudamzj but not on mine. I lose my feet in the darkness, catching only occasional glimpses from light thrown through breaks in the slotted fences. Dogs seem to bark from everywhere, from behind walls and beneath the desiccated earth, and I ride their ululating crest down the road, trying to keep their voices behind me. Near running, passing another wave of sound from time to time, passing others? unseen but for the crunch of pebbles beneath their feet and the dog calls that follow them back from where I’ve just come.

I push back the bolt to the gate, its rime stinging my fingers, and walk toward the dimly lit house’s three rooms: a kitchen, a front room, and the family room, where the four sleep together, huddled for warmth. I am outside, in one of two ger.

As I approach, the larger boy is fetching water from the cistern by the door, his red cheeks scuffed with dirt, his eyes bright, brown, and happy to see me. He runs off with a moog from my bag, and I scold him for eating cookies before finishing his supper: pasta with sour curds and freshly boiled horse meat. He tries to ply me with horse milk, owing to the same provenance as the meat, owing to a neighbor whose plow will now be pulled not so easily, or not at all.

There is an exchange rate in Mongolia that has been passed down unchanged through the generations: a camel is worth one and half horses, a horse is worth a little more than a well fattened cow, and a cow worth five to seven sheep or seven to ten goats. There is even a game, shagai, played with sheep ankle bones as dice, equal parts friendly pastime and powerful source of divination.

The boy looks at me, cookie crumbs freckling his cheeks. I put down my things and try again. We settle on him eating nothing and running around the small kitchen, all elbows. I try to help his mother figure out why the coal stove is smoking again.

The sallow moon: a speck of marbled fat, a tallow dot. It lights the walk from the house to my ger, and I sleep.

BONUS MEDIA:

This is a video of an incredibly stupid thing I did because I wanted see what Yarmeg looked like from above. I had been eying the decrepit concrete exhaust tower every day on my way home…it was calling me…

The view overlooking Yarmeg, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Man Holding Girl, Zaisan Memorial, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Coal Plant, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Location: Shanghai, China and Omaha, NE

Oddly Appropriate Music: Janglin by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

I couldn’t sleep tonight, which usually means I’m very excited about something, or feeling an abnormal amount of self-generated pressure. What I’m excited, or pressured, about has nothing to do with this blog. And that’s exactly why I’m writing a post.

As some of you know, I spend most of my time developing Omaha.net, a community website for the city of Omaha. Yesterday, someone asked me if we were funded by the city. Ha. Funded.

Actually, I am funded, up to and including $5,000 by the good people at Capitol One credit. After being pick-pocketed on the bus last December when I was out getting groceries…in Mongolia…I was funded in the amount of $1,000 by my dear friend Jon, which I have paid back, and when that ran out, for another $1,000 by my dear friend Shaun, which I have not.

I haven’t worked a single day for pay since August 30, 2008.

And on Sunday, my partner in Omaha.net and I are going to take our one, highly nonprofitable website, and attempt to double it, into two highly nonprofitable, debt laden websites by purchasing ?????.?? (redacted).

We will do this by begging friends, family members, banks, and potentially one very rich loan shark (imminent/eminent domainer, Rick Latona) into giving us money.

When it’s all through, I’m literally going to owe cash all over town. And above you is a picture I took in Shanghai of a men’s shirt.

How are these all related?

Good question. If you start to do anything enough, it begins to bleed into the other realms of your life. Our new intern at Omaha.net, Jess, tends to see things in the context of her non-profit pet group, Pug Partners. It’s not that she thinks Pugs are interwoven into the fabric of modern society. It’s just that she’s worked with pugs and pug people a lot. When she deals with large sums of money, it’s because of pugs. Big public gatherings are often pet related. In short, much of her normal, human interaction can be seen through the convex of some pug-related issue.

Since early September, I have worked most of the day, 6-7 days a week, on a website that has currently earned somewhere in the low triple digits. Well, that’s not entirely true. I spent the last 3 days writing about video projects for portablevideoprojectors.com. If we’re lucky, that’ll earn $5 a day in 6 months time.

As such, I’m broke, and my convex is narrow. I view the world completely as it relates to improving one of three distinct areas in my life:

1. Omaha.net

2. my personal blog

3. The climbing wall at the University of Nebraska at Omaha

And unfortunately, all of these areas have become the same thing.

I write on Omaha.net, but I dabble in sales, art direction, strategic vision,  customer experience, marketing, and most importantly office (read: living room) music selection. But that is not why I got into it. Morgan used to pay me a bit to write some words for exciting properties like footcarecream.com and inductionovens.com. I thought it was good to be paid for what I planned to do (write), so I did it.

And I was terrible at it, still am. I take 10 times as long as I should on those sites, obsessing over comma placement, proper MLA quoting, tone, style. I’m either terribly overqualified, or terribly underqualified, and as such, I’m constantly thinking that I should be getting far, far better at this–you know, either using the superior skills I have, or gaining the skills I’m sorely lacking–and actually earning something.

I started climbing for fun, but before long, I had my Flip cam out, seeing if I could grab some “content” for my blog. Or maybe for Omaha.net. Or some other climbing site worth developing. Always, there are other goals in mind because my world lens is confined to growing traffic, exposure, and growth, and somehow doing it in a way that releases me from ever having to play by the rules.

This is my blog. My baby. The place where all the things that do bleed together in my life, my passions, come together. It is my platform to share my version of perfection — and don’t get it twisted, that’s what all artists are always trying to do — and here I am, writing for 20 minutes, and I haven’t once gone back to check a sentence. I haven’t looked up anything on Wikipedia, or obsessed over narrative and grammar. It’s like I can feel my control slipping away.

But really, it’s already gone.

Since I started writing this blog, 4 of my friends have started blogs, 2 people I know fairly well have started blogs, and various other friends have mused about the idea of having a blog.

Everyone has a blog. Everyone.

Not everyone has Omaha.net. And no one without some serious scratch has ?????.?? (redacted). Yet.

So, what’s my point?

I think it’s this: if I am going to blog, I’d like it to reflect the things I care about: travel culture + music. Perfect slices of media in an ever more crowded landscape. But I don’t have the time to craft a perfect blog because I’m slow, obsessive, insecure, and needy. So, I can just not care and let it go, or hide it, and add to the draft pile of posts I have written, but not published, on Hangzhou, China; my cooking hobby and the kitchen I plan to eventually build; climbing at the gym and the sense of comradery I do not feel for my fellow climbers because they are better climbers than I am and I know this and they know this; a road trip to Winterset, Iowa, and probably some others. These could be blog posts, or I could spin them out onto Omaha.net by some clever subterfuge, or they could wither on the vine. The world, as they say, will not care.

But I like that picture of the men’s shirt. I always have. I don’t like how the other exposures, the ones I screwed up, have a lively dog, and a nice man on motorcycle. How people know how to bend the light to their whim, and I only know how to press a shutter button. How the years I’ve spent learning Photoshop, writing — these are now stock. Everyone photographs, everyone writes. Some are great, some are good. The noise is loud, and the signal weak.

Where’s my CN Tower, we’re all asking? 50k Hz of me.

But I also like how being on the phone with Jon reminds me that this doesn’t matter. Writing is not a business, it is a personal hobby, and the senselessness of releasing your imperfection out into the world is not stupider than releasing it onto a page, and having its ugly mug stare back at you. They are both the same. One generates traffic and ultimately ad revenue, and one does not. Take the traffic if it’s there, right? Just don’t forget why you do it, why you have to.

The desire to reread this, at least once, is there. It is calling me. In checking, and rechecking, in the blunt force of time, I will correct myself to greatness, I think. But that isn’t true. In the exigency of the creative moment, that’s where all the good stuff happens. The planning, the branding, the selling: that’s where the money is made. But the good stuff, it’s mercury.

I think Franz Kafka once said something to the effect of, “writing is what keeps you awake at night.” I got that quote from a sticker attached to a Moleskine notebook my brother gave me as a gift when I left for Europe. Often, though, it’s not writing that keeps me awake. But not tonight.

Location: Vacaville, California, 01/09
Randomly Appropriate Music: California Dreamer by Wolf Parade (and not just because of the title, that song is eery)

Yes, I’m fully aware that in my last post I promised a far more lurid tale about being excommunicated by the band that opened up for The Killers on their last tour. The thing is, today was a busy day at Omaha.net Central Command. I had some appointments scheduled, and let me be the first to tell you, this whole meeting face-to-face with people in the real world, très tiring! How do you people do it, day in, day out? If I don’t get a solid night’s sleep and my 12 hours in front of the computer, I’m simply not myself.

So, after a long session of list building on Twitter for @Omaha_NET (you can follow me @jordyclements), I just don’t have the time to do Wild Light the justice they deserve.

However, since @NorCal recently followed me, I’ve stayed in that California state of mind started by my last post. And I like the way the photograph sums up the way I was feeling while finally driving toward San Francisco, the goal destination that for months had kept me a hungry, quick moving traveler.

But I wasn’t there quite yet.

Vacaville. What a name.

While in Portland, OR I had found a ride on Craiglist Rideshare, a service I endorse and use frequently, despite the fact that’s it’s constantly getting me in ridiculous situations. This one was fairly tame on the ridiculous scale (unlike the polyandrous dominatrix I met, which rated 11 out of 10 on the, “Holy Crap Your Life Was So Much More Screwed Up Than Mine and You Scare Me but I Love You” ridiculous scale. Alas, another story for another time).

A man in his mid 40s driving a rented Toyota Prius offered to drive me from Stumptown to San Francisco. For any one who has seen it, that screen in the Prius’ dashboard is mesmerizing. Who knew that watching an animated video of the car tirelessly transferring energy down little flashing wires  into happy little battery packs could be so fun? And how come Sufjan Stevens never recorded a song called Hooray for Internal Combustion? Would have been great on that Michigan album.

Also along for the ride was a kid my age, a hippie type with a dumb accent who had an encyclopedic knowledge of hot springs and rocks and other useless hippie crap. He could point you to a spring anywhere in the West, and probably knew the location of some manna pools and heart chakras and geodesic flavor rods if you probed him.

He had been bouncing around for a while, knew every minor highway like the back of his hand. Called everyone he knew “nice kids” even when they were far older than he was.

The hippie had to make a stop in Asheville, CA, which is one of those leftist outposts that totally creeps up on you unexpectedly. It’s full of the same tidy yards and small town intersections I grew up in. Has the same 20,000 people inside its borders. And yet, people walk there, on the side of the road, going who knows where, totally incongruous to a place with no public transportation. They hang out, looking vagrant-y, and somehow support art galleries and bars where real bands play in the middle of nowhere.

The hippie said he had to pick up some money from a friend who owed him, which sounded fairly implausible at the time, and really became quite laughable as he explained how he didn’t trust banks, and never used them, preferring instead to transport relatively enormous sums of hard cash across our great nation.

As he told us about the rock and gem show he was to work at in Arizona, which is sorta the equivalent of a Muslim making it to Mecca or a Mormon making it to Salt Lake City for bat shit crazy feng shui hippies, we stopped at brown split level. He entered the home, into which we were not invited, and emerged a few minutes later with swollen backpack, and never said another word about it. The girl who answered the door had waist length dreadlocks dyed purple. The man next to her had many piercings. Her boyfriend/husband/father of her child, who ran in between their legs giggling and shirtless, did not come from where I came from. They gave us tasty brownies. They seemed like “nice kids.”

Soon, we continued on the road to San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest already a memory, gaining momentum as the magnet sucked us toward it. Well, at least in theory this was true, if not in practice. On the screen, the little wheels of the Prius spun, and the happy gas flowed into the engine, and flowed out as happy power to wheels going the same damn happy speed as before. But by and by, the animated movie told us that the wheels would spin no more. We needed gas.

And so we happened on Vacaville, clearly vying with Mt. Shasta in a game of cock-dongled one-upsmenship as to which place could have the sillier name.

But there was no fun in Vacaville. No silliness.

The internet would have you believe that Vacaville is a town of 96,735 people, but I know better. Vacaville is a gas stop in the early night. It is empty, and because I will never be back, it will always be raining, like it is always raining for me in Berlin.

The fog had rolled in, a blanket between the ground and the sky. The fog coated everything with wetness, caught the light, made the black glow white under the Big Top. Vacaville is a parking lot, nothing more. Maybe endless, it stretches out into the northern scrub, unbroken pavement clear to the horizon, dotted only by monuments to retail.

No one lives there but big box Bedouins, an oasis on the way back to the civilized world San Francisco represents. It is onyx. And just when you’ve wandered a little too far from the car, past a ghost town of international corporations selling food + gasoline + lumber + dirt but not selling it now, not in the night, and it glows everywhere with signs that are all the same, all saying buy, it is there and it is gone, like a animal biting your heal in a ocean of dark + wet.

It is…

Vacaville…Vacaville…Vacaaaaavillllllle!

Screeee! Slash! Blood! McDonalds! Chop! Horror! Scream! Best Buy! Rrrrrrr! Valero! Ahhhhhhhhhh!

(I totally wish it were easier to do sound effects in text)

Bonus happy shots for people worried that I might be suffering from seasonal depression (how sweet of an omen is this to start a trip with? Just across the Oregon border):

Location: San Francisco, California, 01/09
Randomly Appropriate Music: Buxter Hoot’n or The Cure

I’m in a sour mood, mostly related to Omaha.net. An obvious route would be to churn up some happy memories, blog about some better times, and swallow the panacea of choice on the way to bed: Tylenol PM or Vodka. The thing is, I don’t condone over the counter medication, and I’m in a really pick-axe-sized-thorn-in-my-side sour mood.

So, in honor of Mr. Dave Splash, our newest contributor at Omaha.net, a guy who by all accounts I like, I’m drudging up some foul memories.

You see, in order to get his column ready to publish, I had to find a music-related photo deep in the archives of the Jordyclements.com Photo Vault (it’s sort of like Fort Knox, only with the White House’s security…Zinger!). I don’t find myself photographing bands too often because it tends to take away from my enjoyment of the show. And they play in low light settings, which makes my lens frown. So, I really only had two potential photo locations to offer: some shots I took of my friend Jeremy’s band, Buxter Hoot’n, and some shots of a band I lied to, gained an interview with, and thoroughly pissed off the publicist of, Wild Light.

Let’s deal with Buxter Hoot’n first, shall we?

First question: why is this a sour memory? Good first question. The night of the concert, we were snarfing jelly beans and other goodies (non-candy), as we had been all afternoon, due to the beneficence of Jeremy’s other high paying gig, wedding band drummer. And the weather in San Francisco was gorgeous. He had played at some casino in the desert next to a Jelly Belly factory where they sell the mistake beans by the bag full. They call them Belly Flops. I still get a kick out of that.

Buxter Hoot’n took the gig on a whim. They play a raw, moonshine Americana rag at times, but they can rock, too, and they have some devoted fans. It makes for high comedy to see the audience intermingle, though, because only the Americana fans are die-hards. Their crowd made for a snippet of San Francisco that I won’t soon forget: a true melting pot city like few American places outside of New York.

The best fans, the most die-hard of the roots music lovers, were what I’ll call the Busker Boys. They hid somewhere in the back of the club, maybe in a time machine or something, and, as if on cue, exploded onto the dance floor the second the band came to life. Each one had a look, and that look was usually “1930s Depression Era beggar.” Tired leather shoes, suit vests, rolled sleeves, men’s hats, strange facial hair. Suspenders held between the the thumb and forefinger! Their boot stomping, floor board shaking, knee slapping dances were ridiculous.

It would have been kinda cool, I guess, upper bodies rigid, feet doing this crazy legs routine,  the occasional touch to the toe + heel + outsole perfectly on rhythm, like some DDR combo in black and white. Except I couldn’t shake the idea that it was all an act. The classiest possible incarnation of the indie-scenester, one sartorial step up from an emo kid with eyeliner. They were…silly.

I’ll admit, I was perhaps over-analyzing. I tend to lose the moment from time to time.

They stomped around, I drank PBRs and got progressively more annoyed, which, in a low light setting where I can’t keep my stupid brain busy with photography means writing notes on napkins for novellas that will never be written (and taking far too much pleasure in alliterating sentences to strangers who won’t pick up on it).

I eventually found a cute, stable-looking blond in a crowd of pan handlers/fans of the band. She was with work associates and had no idea there would be music that night. And, drunk as I was, and annoyed, I managed to get her number.

It was one of a few numbers I got after I had left my teaching job in South Korea and began the months long journey traveling back home. This isn’t meant to sound too impressive. Meeting new people every day, wondering if you’ve hardly ever left an impression: I hated hitting on girls, always knowing my story would get the conversation going, my foot always in anyone’s door who would say the magic words, “What brought you here?” I hated hitting on girls with the same old story, but I just did it to feel human again.

And each time it started, I knew I’d be gone tomorrow. Seriously, not in the Bob Segar/Allman Brothers whiskey blues way, but in the literally “I’m leaving tomorrow, and unless you want to go back and make love on the air mattress my friends lent me, I’ll never see you again” way.

I think I had 36 hours to kill by the time I met the blond, so I called the next day, hoped for somewhere interesting to meet for dinner, and got a perky, depressing voicemail message instead. She had given me her work line of all things. Was this perhaps a feeble escape route for someone too noble to lie? Perhaps. These are the things you think when you’re spending a lot of time alone.

I left her a ridiculous voicemail indicative of someone who knows very few people in a very large city and was highly unsurprised when she didn’t call back.

And yet, I had a GREAT time in San Francisco, probably a lot more than I can legally tell you here. But by the end, it was time to go, and when you get that feeling week after week, the “I’m just on the verge of wearing out my welcome” feeling, it tires you. So, no ill will toward a great Buxter show, but seeing this shot reminded me of a time when I was rootless and feeling alone among friends, tired of crashing people’s lives, attaching myself to place after place I had no real foothold in, learning the names of the people that made up a friend’s world, and having to explain my presence all over again.

And now I’m rooted again, sort of, feeling alone among far less friends, and giving a lot of energy to something that could fail quite easily unless we hold its brittle little hands through each step of a long growing process. I hope it works.

And somehow, this has turned into a Live Journal post.

We’ll just have to deal with Wild Light tomorrow. To set the stage, that one hurts a lot, LOT, more. They were a band I really got into at a very delicate time for my bruised ego, and they have a singer I could still drunk dial if I got off on some perverted form of minor celebrity stalking.  It’s a real shame their publicist hates me, and I’ll never stop feeling bad about why. Til then…

If anyone can relate, answer this question in the comments below please: is it easier to meet people when traveling alone (because you have to) or harder (because you have no social capitol and people think there’s a 35% chance you’re carrying scurvy)?

Are you ready to make money blogging? I am. I’ve been thinking about it, leaning toward it even, but I really just decided so for sure today. You see, today was Thanksgiving, built for rest, relaxation, and mastication. And all I could think about was blogging.

Blogging here, blogging on my other site (Omaha.net), getting more unique traffic, more user email addresses, writing better content, doing more, making more money.

It’s time.

So, how do you do it? You know, I’m not totally sure. But I have some ideas. This week, we’re going to dive into Twitter. Consider this your slice of culture with your travel + music. I promise I’ll be back soon with something more Robert Zimmerman and less Mark Zuckerberg.

Twitter’s a social media site, and if you don’t know how to use it, there are plenty of places to turn to. This post is more about how to power use it:

1. How to rapidly drive up your follower count
   
2. Get your Tweets Retweet-ed
3. And monetize the result.
   

I’m going to be doing a lot of linking, so let me make this clear: the people I link to are smarter than me.

Their names are BIG for a reason, and this post doubles as a reading list. If you have limited time, read their content, not mine (the links will open in a new window). I’m adding some value to the noise by giving you a Cliffs Notes version of the many sites I’m referencing.

But promise me you’ll go back and give them their due when you’re not drunk off of tryptophan.

As an added bonus, if you read the whole post, you’ll get a free book from Audible.com. Seriously, I swear it’s in there, you just have to read and find out where (*yea there’s a minor catch, but you’ll thank me if you follow through)

Jason Schoemaker

Jason Schoemaker + the famous Google check for $133,000

Everyone knows that companies use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, heck even MySpace (grrr), to either make money or promote their brand. But you don’t need to be “selling” anything to make money from Twitter. You can get paid just by firing off messages – “Tweeting.”

And you can actually get paid a lot.

Jeremy Schoemaker, founder of Shoemoney.com, has already made almost $35,000 using ad.ly, the Twitter advertising service that promises you 12% of the earnings of anyone you refer. That’s in addition to the sweet MacBook Pro’s they give away. Take the hint, sign up.

Ad.ly lines up Twitter-ers with advertisers, giving people the choice of whether they’d like to be paid to promote a product or service through their Twitter account. Not a fan? Think it’s weird that their website only shows up in text form on my laptop? Yea, I do, too. Luckily, this article lists a BUNCH of other options:

• Happn.in
• Magpie
• TweetROI
• Twittad
• Sponsored Tweets

Bill Bolmeier

Notice that Bill's check is much smaller

Bill Bolmeier is not a major player on the Internet, and is easily the smallest name out of anyone mentioned here (aside from myself, of course). But he seems like a bright guy, and he took one of those Twitter advertising options, Sponsored Tweets, and decided to make some money. He outlines a strategy that will get you in the neighborhood of 15,000 Twitter followers in six months by using services that find people for you to follow. These people then follow you back.

Then, you take all your sexy followers over to Sponsored Tweets and charge $20 bucks a pop for in-line marketing.

It’s a damn confusing game for advertisers to figure out who is a quality promoter of their product, but some general advice for, you, the publishers:

• Don’t post too many ads
• Tell people that you’re advertising

Do those two things, always double-down on 11, and you should be fine.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin was sent from Mars to take over the Internet

Seth Godin, who quite possibly owns the internet, likes to Tweet about his posts using twitterfeed, which automatically makes Tweets for him based on his RSS feed. He’s too busy to write his own posts because of the books, the blog, and because HE FREAKING OWNS THE FREAKING INTERNET. Which is time consuming.

Unlike some other names on this list, he doesn’t seem very interested in Twitter. So, why is he here? Because people Reweet the crap out of his blog posts, essentially using Twitter to do his marketing for him.

Guy Kawasaki

Those teeth are made of $1000 bills

Guy Kawasaki has Retweeting figured out. From what I can tell, he has it all figured out.

To the best of my knowledge, all he does all day is read interesting news stories and Retweet them. That’s about it. He’s not only a professional Twitter-er, with a legion of 194,000 followers and change, he’s a market mover.

Aside from making gobs of money working for Apple in the early 80s, he’s also started gobs of other ventures that make gobs of money. He currently seems most focused on Alltop, an RSS aggregator (which will seem more humorous when we get to our last innovator).

Guy LOVES repeating good Tweets.

And why not? Twitter feeds are brief, no one goes back to look at old Tweets, and people aren’t necessarily on when you’re on (and no one’s on when I’m on, between the hours of midnight and 5AM). To steal his analogy from this post, TV news stations repeat the headlines all day, and so should you (though, this still doesn’t excuse MTV playing The Real World: Gary, Indiana eight times a day).

Guy Tweets 24/7. Apparently, people that are serious about Twitter neither read nor write Tweets on the website. Guy uses TweetDeck on his computer and a duo of apps on his iPhone (TweetFlip and Tweetie). For the record, my $15 Kyocera oPhone, as in old, is fond of the “tip calculator” and occasionally turns itself off without warning. But hey! It has a “world clock.”

Guy’s also into Objective Marketer, which looks like some bad ass software as a service for posting Tweets. Click on the Solutions tab of their website and watch the video — you can write Tweets in advance and post them from a shared calendar, you can get access to crazy Tweet based and campaign based analytics — you can totally take over the world.

And we’re totally going to start using it at Omaha.net just as soon as we find a naïve yet attractive college co-ed to be our first intern/Twitter Tsarina.

Guy also likes TwitterHawk, which for less than .05 a Tweet will do your targeted marketing for you. How’s it do that? It searches for people talking about keywords you’re into and fires off a little Tweet luv in their direction.

Finally, you have to read his piece about attracting followers on Twitter. It might be the best thing I link to in this post, and you should read the whole thing. But the coolet thing I took from it?

You can be an expert on ANYTHING.

Find something that people are looking for that you know about, write 3-5 Tweets a day (using valuable links in your Tweets) on that subject, and people will find you.

Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarella drinking profits like water

Not to hang on Guy’s guy (or member for those of you who like your euphemisms slightly less obscure), but he’s a big proponent of following anyone that follows you on Twitter. His theory is that it’s not only polite, but, ultimately, it helps drive your follower numbers up as more people see your on site activity.

Now, according to some serious number crunching by Dan Zarrella, the amount of Twitter followers matters, but not as much as the content of the Tweets.

Things that are likely to be Retweeted include:

• Content that is timely
• Lists
• Tweets about Twitter
• Blog posts (hint, hint)
• Anything free (like the book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price, which is on Audible.com. Wait for it. For free!)

The Top 5 most common words in a post that gets Retweeted are:

• You
• Twitter
• Please
• Retweet
• Post

What fun. It’s like that M83 album where the track names form a sentence. But seriously, what does this show us? If you want to be Retweet-ed, ask! Write very clearly in your Tweet, Please Retweet this!

Also, post from about noon – 5pm Eastern time. This way, you catch the East Coast lunch and the West Coast day starting. Note: the numbers to back up this trend confirms my theory that most of my friends with cubicle jobs don’t do any work at all for most of the day.

Final thing to take from Dan: if one person starts to RT (that’s Retweet) your Tweets, others are likely to follow, regardless of content. It’s just built into our brains. So, get that ball rolling!

Some dude (OK it was Guy, again) also passed on additional tips to writing Tweets that will get Retweeted. He recognized that people like knowing how to do things. The phrases “How to” and “The Art of” are very popular because people like spreading knowledge when they Retweet. I’d like to add phrases like “The Secret behind” and “The trick with” to that general idea, although if you are really stuck for followers you could always try, “Hairy horse balls! I didn’t know you could do that!” Never know, it might work.

Additionally, break news, especially if you can consistently break it about a certain topic. The more bizarre the better. Put links in your tweets, and if you need to shrink the links to make them fit the 140 character limit, try using a site like tiny.cc or bit.ly. Need to count characters/words, but not on Twitter? Get GRTY.

Robert Scoble

An artist's rendering of Robert Scoble

If you believe Robert Scoble, people are turning away from RSS and getting their news directly from Twitter. While I’d still like you to click on that nifty orange RSS logo up the page and to your right to subscribe to my feed, he makes a good point. Twitter is fast, efficient, and breaks news more quickly than anything else on Earth. Just ask the Twitter-ers of Tehran.

What does this mean? It means that people will increasingly value Twitter users who can deliver them news efficiently.

As a side note, Scoble has some great Twitter lists, which are where he bases his argument on the demise of RSS. I thought he was totally bat turds crazy until I looked at one of his lists and found a sale I didn’t know about at a t-shirt company I like in less than 12 seconds.

So, What Now?

After reading all of that, you should be totally jazzed to either start acquiring more Twitter followers or start using Twitter as a larger part of your every day media stream. In return for this great bounty of knowledge,  I’m going to ask you for a small favor. This blog is still super small, and any one of these three things would help it grow:

1. Join Twitter, follow me @jordyclements, and Retweet this post using the link at the beginning

2. Sign up for the free email updates using the box with the subscribe button up and to the right. This will deliver you an email every time I update the site.

3. Comment below and tell me if there’s anything I could shed a little light on next time. I’m thinking a little advice on how to start a blog (how to purchase a URL, how to use Wordpress) might be helpful. What do you think?

What Cornhuskers do to Kansas State fans

If that doesn’t get you pumped for a new blog post, I don’t know what will! I’ll explain below…but first…

I’ll come clean. It’s been a really long time. Like a fat kid polishing off his 12th Krispy Kreme, I told myself we’d never get to this point, and now we’re here. Well, we’re not quite here. This isn’t a blogspot page about my cat with the last update from Nov. 2006. But still, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted.

Two distinct things have happened since my last effort:

1. I went to the Phish festival in California and came back with Swine Flu. I think (not that I’d know seeing as how Obama hasn’t given me health care yet, so I’m guessing). Knocked me out for awhile, that stuff is no joke.

2. Got really, really busy with Omaha.net. I can now see why people with real jobs sometimes forget to update their fantasy sports rosters. They’re busy! My job involves sitting in front of a computer all day and occasionally interviewing people. I make my own hours. Yet, I still haven’t had a post in awhile. That’s how you know I’m busy.

So, while Omaha.net isn’t paying me millions, stuff is definitely happening, and I’m excited about it. Being entrepreneurial is as interesting as it is scary, and one day, I’ll have to write about it.

Until then, check out a new post I wrote about my first Cornhusker football experience in its natural state over at Omaha.net: The Cornhuskers Did Battle, But I Won the War (a road kill story, lot of pics, and a funny video I captured by this band whose main claim to fame is The Blow Job Song).

Please please please leave me some comments (here, or there, or both!). It really helps me to know what people are thinking, what they’d like me to write about in the future…heck, I live alone, in OMAHA. It’s nice just hearing from people!

Because I’m stupid, I have about 3-5 posts 75% written, collecting dust. I’m banging those bitches out over Thanksgiving, and we’re getting this bitch up and running again.

Tell your friends, bitches! (No seriously. Tell them. Facebook, Digg, Twitter, it’s all just below…)

[viddler id=771a5fa1&w=545&h=349]

[viddler id=c3cf4c5c&w=545&h=349]

[viddler id=ef325568&w=545&h=349]

The rest are on Viddler. Find them. Halloween night is starting, costume donning must commence. For the evening, I’ll be playing the part of ______.

Lance Armstrong died of testicular cancer for you!

Faithful readers, you have not been fooled! There really is a post here, I swear.

It’s right here: click on it.

Please.

The thing is, I also work for (co-own?) this other little web venture: Omaha.net. The post is housed on that website, and since I’m totally into Adsense arbitrage, link building, and various other forms of traffic-related skulduggery, I want you to view it there (besides, Google already knows what websites I own, anyways. There’s no fooling them).

Nah, I’m just kidding. It’s just laid out really nicely there because Morgan, our layout editor (co-owner?), does a great job.

Omaha.net: we're so ice cold we advertise on ambulances

Of course, I’d like to have my posts here to look as pretty as they do elsewhere. I seriously spend half my time on this site being overwhelmed by HTML/Wordpress issues that are beyond me. The whole idea of having travel culture + music was to write about what I care about, share photographs, and make trillions of dollars, and instead, I indulge the perfectionist control freak inside me who screams, “#336699 is not as visually pleasing a color as #006699! They’ll never come back. They’re alllll going to laugh at you!”

That guy sucks.

I’m a busy kid these days and a little behind laying out the new things I’ve written. But  we’re trying to stick to the Monday/Friday schedule, so you’ll get Adventure Racing and like it! Look forward to Friday’s post about Zen Cooking and Zen Climbing.

Also, I’m heading to Phish’s Festival 8* (!) in Indio, California this Wednesday. Look out for some live video blog updates from the concert later in the week.

Happy Monday! Over and out…

*In the unlikely event that someone who reads this is going to Festival 8, here’s my Google Voice number: 502 414 1234. Let’s meet up and discuss Proust over a bottle of Malbec.

Bonus pics for travel culture + music readers of the farmers market after the race:

Lexington Farm, Lexington, NE

Jellies, Lexington, NE

Laughing Honey, Lexington, NE

Big Green Cucumber, Lexington, NE

Grasshopper on Yellow, Lexington, NE

Life and Death, Lexington, NE

Glass Onion #1, Lexington, NE

Glass Onion #2, Lexington, NE

Glass Onion #3, Lexington, NE