Great read, you're such an awesome writer Dave.
Just yesterday I walked out of a Taco Bell after my order came out over 12 dollars and I just couldn't accept paying that much for stuff that is barely food.
David
10.12
David Learns to Ghost Ride
Disclaimer: David does not support ghostriding. Don’t do it. It can go from great to crappy hella fast.
Cars have never been a passion mine. The point A to B machine has always just served as transportation and I have never had a passion for the guts under the hood. I have of course enjoyed the appearance of the benz or lamborgini but I never had a passion for speed and still don’t. I have a 2004 Jetta that my parents own and let me use and it doesn’t go very fast. I would say 0-60 in roughly an hour. So the following is one of the rare car based stories that I will tell. But it is worth the write.
Backstory: This weekend I went canning in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. To fully understand canning, and then the subsequent ghost ride, let me begin with what canning is. So I go to Penn State University and they run this thing called THON which is the biggest student run philanthropic in the world. It is for kids with cancer and last year we raised 6.1 million dollars. It’s pretty cool that my school raises that much for a good cause. In February there is a 48 hours dance thing where people don’t sleep and they just dance for like, 2 days straight. It’s really intense.
So to get all this money every club goes “canningâ€
David Learns to Ghost Ride
Disclaimer: David does not support ghostriding. Don’t do it. It can go from great to crappy hella fast.
Cars have never been a passion mine. The point A to B machine has always just served as transportation and I have never had a passion for the guts under the hood. I have of course enjoyed the appearance of the benz or lamborgini but I never had a passion for speed and still don’t. I have a 2004 Jetta that my parents own and let me use and it doesn’t go very fast. I would say 0-60 in roughly an hour. So the following is one of the rare car based stories that I will tell. But it is worth the write.
Backstory: This weekend I went canning in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. To fully understand canning, and then the subsequent ghost ride, let me begin with what canning is. So I go to Penn State University and they run this thing called THON which is the biggest student run philanthropic in the world. It is for kids with cancer and last year we raised 6.1 million dollars. It’s pretty cool that my school raises that much for a good cause. In February there is a 48 hours dance thing where people don’t sleep and they just dance for like, 2 days straight. It’s really intense.
So to get all this money every club goes “canningâ€
david
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century264
- Multidex Master
- Posts: 324
- Joined: 20 Feb 2007 12:11
- Location: Burlington, VT
In highschool, me and my friends, including Doug Tank on this forum, ghostrode cars probably more than we should have. When the song about it first came out, we ghostrode the whip I'd say six or seven times. The key with ghostriding is finding a slightly uphill, wide open parking lot to do it in late at night. We have a place called pittsford plaza that afforded us a perfect slope for the cars not to accelerate on and afforded us plenty of space if the car decided to hook or slice one way or the other. It was a really stupid pastime, but has some good memories attached to it. I can say I've personally danced on the hood of mine and a few other people's cars, doing the hustle or maybe some samba moves as we travelled laughing through a deserted 3 am parking lot. A variation on the sport of ghostriding is keeping your car in drive at a stop sign, stopping maybe 15 feet before the intersection and trying to chinese firedrill the car before it enters the intersection. Pittsford New York was a great place to do the stupidest things, now that I look back at all the things that should have killed us.
Ian Pfeiffer
Trampoline owner
Trampoline owner
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shredzilla
- Post Master General
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colefieldhouse22
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David Clavens: magician, world class footbagger, and fashion icon...
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NacddfSMKo0&fmt=18[/youtube]
sorry for the horrendous quality
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NacddfSMKo0&fmt=18[/youtube]
sorry for the horrendous quality
Adrienne Craver
10.17.08
When my parents moved to the house I grew up in I wasn’t in the world, in my mom’s stomach, and perhaps not even in the imaginations of my new homeowner parents. They had my sister who was just a newborn and I doubt she remembers the first walks through the house, the first time the dishwasher was run, the first lawn cutting. My sister has a great memory but I am sure her one year old brain could not capture even those first fingerprints my parents laid on our house.
There are no pictures of the deck being built, just ones of it when it was finished, like the neighborhood had woken up and found the structure erected by magic. The pictures only show glimpses of it, never capturing the full size of the large wooden octagon that sat on my lawn like a castle of fallen trees. There are ones of me on a blanket on the deck to protect me from splinters, pictures of me standing on the stairs that led up to it, my toddler legs not able to make the 7 inch leaps which used to seem so big. I never knew the house without the deck and my come home from the hospital party was held on its wooden planks.
There are some sounds that have stuck with me in my 20 years of hearing on this Earth. They are like the buttons a radio disc jockey has at his disposal, little bits of sound at his fingertips, ready to be recalled and played at a moment’s notice. I have many of these, like the slam of my head against the ice when I was 15, the sound of the metal crunching in my first car accident at 17, the sound of many caskets closing as my family moved from above the dirt to beneath it over the past few years. But there is one sound that perhaps reigns over all, one combination of senses that makes the corner of my mouth perk up on even the worst of days. It is the sound of crickets on a summer night in my backyard.
When I was a little boy in Bethlehem the schedule for summer nights was not up for debate. It was like clockwork. We would wash the dishes and head outside, my mom with a pitcher of crystal light in her hand. My life as a child was not like a TV sitcom but if there was one moment that would fit that mold it would be summer nights after dinner around the age of 7 or 8. The setting for this scripted scene was of course the deck and my backyard which is quite large.
I can remember it so well. The sun would be giving up its daily fight for position in the sky, dripping over the trees in the distance, its last rays promising its quick return in a handful of hours. And then there was a period where neither the moon nor the sun was winning the fight, like they had signed some kind of peace treaty that gave the 6:30 hour up to dusk who would drift in and make the most of the hour he was given each night. The suns fingertips would leave my back and it would get colder then but I didn’t care, I would run around the lawn in my shorts and fall in the grass. I would greet the summer night breeze with open arms inviting it to push me back and forth across the lawn.
There was one thing that made the night complete and perhaps is the very ingredient in the dusk pie that made it so memorable: the lightning bugs. I am not sure if they exist everywhere in the world but I know I have been places where lighting bugs are just a legend, just a summer whisper that has never materialized and landed on your hand, flirted for a moment with you, and then floated off into the night. I feel sorry for those people. For those people who never were an actor on the grass stage of my backyard, chasing the floating light bulbs that just begged to be grabbed. My backyard was electric and unpredictable, flashing left and right, the bugs flickering like a light bulb in its last hours of life.
I would run for what seemed like hours, darting too and fro in my backyard as the bugs disappeared into the night. It was that weird kind of light, not pitch black but not bright. You could see your hand in front of your face but just barely, your fingers blending together slightly. It made it all the much better because the black bodies of the bugs would blend into the night, only their glowing tails able to be seen. One second, a floating ball of yellow was in your face, the next, gone. I would swat at the space in front of me like you do when you walk down a hallway late at night, just groping for a light switch or some sort of security.
My parents would watch from their front row seats on the deck, sipping the crystal light from the plastic glasses my mom would always buy from the dollar store. I never knew what they talked about while I ran my nightly bug collecting rounds but I can still see them sitting there chatting, blurs in the night. At that time they had been together for about 15 years I think. I don’t know if I realized it then but in retrospect that image is what love is to me these days; sitting on a deck in the dusk watching your son chase lighting bugs and still having things to chat about after 15 years with someone.
My dad loved the deck I think. He built it with my uncle the first summer he moved into the house and I think it was his way of putting his mark on the property. It was his period at the end of the sentence that was his first home. I do not know what sounds are locked in my father’s memory but I think the collision of hammer and nail on a summer afternoon might be one of them.
For years my dad would run every Sunday, and he still does. On the hottest days of the year he would come home and lay on the deck for hours. It was quite an amazing feat. The stress of the week would be hanging off of him in sweat and he would plop himself on the wood and lay there. I was always amazed at how he didn’t shield his eyes even when the sun was at its brightest. When he was done he would get up, leaving a snow angel type shape on the tan surface of the deck that would evaporate; his weekly sweat artwork stained on the surface he built.
The deck held a lot of memories for me besides those. I can remember the first bee hive I ever saw, nestled underneath the 2x4’s in the dark shadows. I remember the first groundhog I ever saw who became a tenant of the deck for a few weeks one year. There are many other things, like the countless birthday parties and barbecues, the skateboard ollies and roller skate jumps into the grass, the wood slowly rotting and my mother telling my dad to “tear that thing downâ€
When my parents moved to the house I grew up in I wasn’t in the world, in my mom’s stomach, and perhaps not even in the imaginations of my new homeowner parents. They had my sister who was just a newborn and I doubt she remembers the first walks through the house, the first time the dishwasher was run, the first lawn cutting. My sister has a great memory but I am sure her one year old brain could not capture even those first fingerprints my parents laid on our house.
There are no pictures of the deck being built, just ones of it when it was finished, like the neighborhood had woken up and found the structure erected by magic. The pictures only show glimpses of it, never capturing the full size of the large wooden octagon that sat on my lawn like a castle of fallen trees. There are ones of me on a blanket on the deck to protect me from splinters, pictures of me standing on the stairs that led up to it, my toddler legs not able to make the 7 inch leaps which used to seem so big. I never knew the house without the deck and my come home from the hospital party was held on its wooden planks.
There are some sounds that have stuck with me in my 20 years of hearing on this Earth. They are like the buttons a radio disc jockey has at his disposal, little bits of sound at his fingertips, ready to be recalled and played at a moment’s notice. I have many of these, like the slam of my head against the ice when I was 15, the sound of the metal crunching in my first car accident at 17, the sound of many caskets closing as my family moved from above the dirt to beneath it over the past few years. But there is one sound that perhaps reigns over all, one combination of senses that makes the corner of my mouth perk up on even the worst of days. It is the sound of crickets on a summer night in my backyard.
When I was a little boy in Bethlehem the schedule for summer nights was not up for debate. It was like clockwork. We would wash the dishes and head outside, my mom with a pitcher of crystal light in her hand. My life as a child was not like a TV sitcom but if there was one moment that would fit that mold it would be summer nights after dinner around the age of 7 or 8. The setting for this scripted scene was of course the deck and my backyard which is quite large.
I can remember it so well. The sun would be giving up its daily fight for position in the sky, dripping over the trees in the distance, its last rays promising its quick return in a handful of hours. And then there was a period where neither the moon nor the sun was winning the fight, like they had signed some kind of peace treaty that gave the 6:30 hour up to dusk who would drift in and make the most of the hour he was given each night. The suns fingertips would leave my back and it would get colder then but I didn’t care, I would run around the lawn in my shorts and fall in the grass. I would greet the summer night breeze with open arms inviting it to push me back and forth across the lawn.
There was one thing that made the night complete and perhaps is the very ingredient in the dusk pie that made it so memorable: the lightning bugs. I am not sure if they exist everywhere in the world but I know I have been places where lighting bugs are just a legend, just a summer whisper that has never materialized and landed on your hand, flirted for a moment with you, and then floated off into the night. I feel sorry for those people. For those people who never were an actor on the grass stage of my backyard, chasing the floating light bulbs that just begged to be grabbed. My backyard was electric and unpredictable, flashing left and right, the bugs flickering like a light bulb in its last hours of life.
I would run for what seemed like hours, darting too and fro in my backyard as the bugs disappeared into the night. It was that weird kind of light, not pitch black but not bright. You could see your hand in front of your face but just barely, your fingers blending together slightly. It made it all the much better because the black bodies of the bugs would blend into the night, only their glowing tails able to be seen. One second, a floating ball of yellow was in your face, the next, gone. I would swat at the space in front of me like you do when you walk down a hallway late at night, just groping for a light switch or some sort of security.
My parents would watch from their front row seats on the deck, sipping the crystal light from the plastic glasses my mom would always buy from the dollar store. I never knew what they talked about while I ran my nightly bug collecting rounds but I can still see them sitting there chatting, blurs in the night. At that time they had been together for about 15 years I think. I don’t know if I realized it then but in retrospect that image is what love is to me these days; sitting on a deck in the dusk watching your son chase lighting bugs and still having things to chat about after 15 years with someone.
My dad loved the deck I think. He built it with my uncle the first summer he moved into the house and I think it was his way of putting his mark on the property. It was his period at the end of the sentence that was his first home. I do not know what sounds are locked in my father’s memory but I think the collision of hammer and nail on a summer afternoon might be one of them.
For years my dad would run every Sunday, and he still does. On the hottest days of the year he would come home and lay on the deck for hours. It was quite an amazing feat. The stress of the week would be hanging off of him in sweat and he would plop himself on the wood and lay there. I was always amazed at how he didn’t shield his eyes even when the sun was at its brightest. When he was done he would get up, leaving a snow angel type shape on the tan surface of the deck that would evaporate; his weekly sweat artwork stained on the surface he built.
The deck held a lot of memories for me besides those. I can remember the first bee hive I ever saw, nestled underneath the 2x4’s in the dark shadows. I remember the first groundhog I ever saw who became a tenant of the deck for a few weeks one year. There are many other things, like the countless birthday parties and barbecues, the skateboard ollies and roller skate jumps into the grass, the wood slowly rotting and my mother telling my dad to “tear that thing downâ€
david
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QuantumBalance
- 100-Watt Warlock
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- Location: fractal tyedye nebulae
- Contact:
Remember me ghost riding at Portland Open?
You know what the secret is? You set the emergency brake. and then ease the brake off JUST A LITTLE BIT.. Now you can ghostride at 5mph !
NOW ITS NOT AS DANGEROUS! (still dangerous)
I almost crashed Eric Chang's car.
DONT LET THE GHOST RIDE DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You know what the secret is? You set the emergency brake. and then ease the brake off JUST A LITTLE BIT.. Now you can ghostride at 5mph !
NOW ITS NOT AS DANGEROUS! (still dangerous)
I almost crashed Eric Chang's car.
DONT LET THE GHOST RIDE DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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sonofgenkai18
- Shredalicious
- Posts: 104
- Joined: 30 Sep 2007 11:49
- Location: Tacoma, WA
- Contact:
don't judge me, I'm excited about it.
It is odd how something can trigger a memory. It is like a box you find in the attic full of pieces of your childhood, but you only stumble upon it because you are chasing a spider away from its cardboard shell. It is like the sideshow on the highway you never intended to go to but something inside you told you to get off at this particular exit. So today when I randomly thought about my grandfather for the first time in a couple of months I was surprised. And I realized that these occurrences might become so infrequent that I might forget about the man that I barely knew.
My memory from when I first remember meeting him (this ability comes at about 5 for me) to his death (when I was 9) only spans about 4 years, so his image is one that never really changed. He was a short man, a perfect match to my grandmother in height but the exact opposite in temperament. My grandma was and still is quite nice and gentle. She would make us cream pie when my family would make the 2 hour drive to long island once a month to visit her and my grandfather. Her kitchen table was lined with a plastic checkered table cloth that had a kind of soft fabric bottom and I would always find myself feeling the underside of the table cloth that fell off the table’s edge. I would use that as a napkin many times for my young hands. My grandfather on the other hand was a strong man who rarely leaped into the upper or lower bounds of emotion. He would play cards with me when I was a boy, laying them down on the patio table with certainty and confidence. His hands never shook until he got sick, and even then they only had a few months to do that.
My father and mother had grown up on Long Island and moved to Pennsylvania a bit after they were married. My grandparent’s stayed on the island in the house my father grew up in, a rather large place with a top level I always thought was haunted. At the top of the stairs lived a man in the guest house that I never saw room the many times I visited my grandparents. He was “the renterâ€
My memory from when I first remember meeting him (this ability comes at about 5 for me) to his death (when I was 9) only spans about 4 years, so his image is one that never really changed. He was a short man, a perfect match to my grandmother in height but the exact opposite in temperament. My grandma was and still is quite nice and gentle. She would make us cream pie when my family would make the 2 hour drive to long island once a month to visit her and my grandfather. Her kitchen table was lined with a plastic checkered table cloth that had a kind of soft fabric bottom and I would always find myself feeling the underside of the table cloth that fell off the table’s edge. I would use that as a napkin many times for my young hands. My grandfather on the other hand was a strong man who rarely leaped into the upper or lower bounds of emotion. He would play cards with me when I was a boy, laying them down on the patio table with certainty and confidence. His hands never shook until he got sick, and even then they only had a few months to do that.
My father and mother had grown up on Long Island and moved to Pennsylvania a bit after they were married. My grandparent’s stayed on the island in the house my father grew up in, a rather large place with a top level I always thought was haunted. At the top of the stairs lived a man in the guest house that I never saw room the many times I visited my grandparents. He was “the renterâ€
david
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Senor Grommet
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Paul Agostinelli
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Lycanthrope
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QuantumBalance
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