Climbanomix

Anyone who climbs often dreams about extended climbing trips where crisp textured rock is contrasted by bright blue skies. A few months on the road where you live simply, explore beautiful places and climb until your fingerprints are permanently altered. With every passing week you feel like a chamber inside you opens up, surrendering yourself to the journey, the excitement that comes with every new day and the challenges that you might cross (like your first 8a). In time your forearms will battle lactic acid Huriyama-like during 45 minute on-sights, your power will be Sharma-esque and your lead head will be full-on Croft-y.

Unfortunately this is no longer the era of sell your car, drop your lease and tell your girlfriend, “It’s me baby, really. It’s not you, it’s me.”. We have to be more astute these days about how we fit the life-altering climbing adventures into the modern world. Job resumes with employment histories that show a turnover every year or so are generally frowned upon. There aren’t many occupations that allow you the flexibility of being able to take off every once in a while for three weeks to a month, let alone a few months (a tear emerges).

If you were considering sponsorship, well let’s just say in-house development becomes the priority when layoffs and shrinking budgets are becoming the norm. If you worked in the trades, there is a good chance you no longer have a job. If you worked in investment banking there is a good chance you no longer have a job. If you worked for Starbucks, there is a good chance you no longer have a job. But this current period of economic recession just might be the telephone booth you and Clark have been looking for to change into your super-climber gear (picture that great 80s neon and lycra).

Before running off uninformed about why you can do this, let’s quickly cover what a recession is and why they are special. Classically a recession is defined as two or more consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Or as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) puts it, ‘a significant decline in economic activity lasting more than a few months’. If you’ve been reading the finance headlines you know this is not new. Yet when you look closer you realize that recessions are natural in the economic cycle. Just like forest fires are mother nature’s way of cleaning house, recessions bring a bubble economy back to it’s fundamental support levels. What does that mean? Things often look worse than they are.

Lets look at the basic forecasting tools of a recession: GDP, inverted yield curve and unemployment. Looking at current GDP stats, each quarter has still been higher than than the preceding quarter, though just by a lesser extent. In times of economic turmoil people are not out buying cars, homes and washing machines. Instead they are buying lower ticket items because, face it, the US doesn’t understand how not to go shopping. Retail soft goods and discount markets often weather the storm better than capital goods, and domestic travel becomes preferred to international travel. You’re reading this magazine aren’t you, because you can’ t think of giving it up, especially now.

Let’s not get technical about inverted yield curves and the psycho-social analysis that goes into expectations and consumer confidence. Better to leave that to the dismal science. However, it is a tool forecasters use in investing. Normally we expect returns (the yield) on any given investment to be higher in the long term than the short term. An inverted curve says people are investing in the opposite manner and expecting the short term gain to be higher than the long term, thus a negative future outcome.

In comparing this to a red-point, you get involved with a route because of the probability of you sending the route in the future. Thus the potential to gain more in the long term than in the present. If you are just climbing 5.10, you could probably send a 5.10a/b almost every session and maybe the occasional morphologic 10c/d. But if you want to start bagging easy 5.11 or even break into 5.12 you need to start investing time and energy towards that now. It may mean foregoing the satisfaction of going out and slaying all of the easy 5.10s you can find, but in a short period of time you’ll be blasting through 5.10 and projecting grades harder.

So if this is reversed, and all that invested energy in the future forecasts to give less benefit than now, logic says take the instant benefit. Cha-cha-ching. The lack of instant financial gratification on the market chart vertical should then result in instant satisfaction on the vertical horizon: it is the time to go climbing.

The obvious knee jerk response by anyone with a sense of fiscal responsibility would be, ‘Are you crazy?’; as It is true that it will be more difficult to find work in periods of economic downturn. Unemployment is rising, the labor pool is saturating with qualified candidates, thus the competition for every open position is increasing. If you are really excited about your work or knee-deep in parenthood then maybe this isn’t the right choice for you. But for anyone who is dissatisfied with what they do and lacks any form of ball and chain, this is the perfect exit point.

Many employers are willing to negotiate severance packages that reduce their overhead while basically paying you to take a hike (or a climbing trip). In times of recession individuals often turn to further their education or obtain training in another skill so as to widen their range of possible prospects. Why not kick it off with a month in place with delicious regional cuisine and a square footage of rock per square mile that would make Bishop blush?

Climbers are evolutionary chameleons that are innovative and strategic by nature, this can only aid us in our future employment pursuits. Just like altering your style from sandstone to limestone to gritstone, we must fit our surroundings in the current economy. After your hiatus, return to the job market renewed and pursue what you have yearned to do for years. Span the financial gap by selling your story to a publisher and inspiring others to reach out towards their dreams.

If you want to pick up a new side of the sport or another sport in general, you normally require a solid block of time to be able to learn your way in. Looking to bump your bouldering up two grades, live in a tent and make it happen. Think you have the endurance to put twenty pitches of any consistent grade together in a day, harness yourself a partner and find out. Still have that cherry alpine link-up waiting for an FA, buy a plane ticket and get it before someone else does. Inspired to put up new routes, pick a place where you can live for few dollars a day and develop an area.

Two thousand and nine can be the year you talk about as the year that you fulfilled your climbing dreams. It is projected that, well, projects will get dispatched this year at an unprecedented rate. If 2008 was looked upon as a bad-ass year, with all of the crushing that US climbers did in Europe, Jumbo Love and all of the headpointing that went down, just wait for 2009. You might want to get that pre-order in for Dosage VI, because it’s going to be off the hook.

Possible cons to the situation are navigable, aside from not getting a job for a while when you get back. The US dollar is probably shot to hell from the monetary expansion used to fund the stimulus package, so you will probably be doing DiGiorno and not delivery at your casetta down by Sperlonga. However, other more exotic (code for third world) destinations are close and have a low cost of living (aka cheap eats, treats and sheets) and bountiful concentrations of local climbing. This might be when we start heading south over the boarder and exchanging identification with the guy you share the cactus with while avoiding the coyotes. He might have family not far from El Potrero Chico. There’s always the back-up of sleeping on a friend’s couch when you get back, the stories take at least a month before they get old. And if all else fails, Barack will hook you up with a personalized stimulus package.

An Inauguration for the Ages

Sitting here in Dunkin Donuts, in a town that resonates middle class America.  As I watch the TV and the beginnings of the day of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama there is a welling in my chest.  This is monumental.  It can be felt and we may not be sure exactly why, yet innately, we all do know.

The world is at a crossroads between the way of the few or the way of the many.  This is a turn down the way of the many.  In one of America’s biggest economic slumps, where the news about commerce, war and people is in the doldrums, the morale still swells.  There is something stunning happening today, as if we are all becoming better people just for being a part.

Reflecting back on the elections and my conversations with those who voted Republican, the votes were cast along party lines.  Where those with certain agendas maintained their loyalties because that was the right thing for them to do, for their minds and, mostly, their wallets.  Yet even though Obama took the election, there are very few, even those who voted for another candidate, that feels like they have been wronged or the improper person is about to take office.  Everyone that I have encountered, putting blatant racists and the top .01% of the wealthy aside, feels like this is the right step for the nation.

Barack Obama instills a sense of duty, a sense of thoughtful patriotism reminiscent of our forefathers that has been absent in many of the last presidents.  If this man does not solve our problems he would still stand to be one of the greatest tenants of the White House ever.  If this man would lead our country into war, one could hypothesize that it would be for the right reasons, that people would even enlist to support our nation.  This man would make Mark Twain proud of his government again, because it would be equaled with being proud of one’s country.

Sitting here waiting for my car to get fixed, I feel like my national soul is coming out of the shop.  This day is uplifting and brings about a feeling of being vechlempt.  Tears well up and may fall upon these often dry cheeks and the reasons may not be known why.  Perhaps you know why, perhaps you empathize with the feelings that are running hot right now.

583 miles away from the packed National Mall I rose from my pink an orange table for the taking of the oath of the Office of the President.  Our new 44th president, the hope for a proper guiding light, is now in position.  This bodes well for the majority of people in the world.  There is very little bad news today, aside from Ted Kennedy’s seizure, except for the injustice to John Stewart.  What is he going to do for material without Bush in the White House?

After eight years of one of Lucifer’s minions and his Howdy-Doody doll running amok in this world, we finally have tenants in the White House that, we can be almost sure, will be able to get their deposit back.  And early on we are getting the picture that even gods have tarnishes.  Similar to the first week of Governor Patterson of NY, when he quickly spilled the beans on extra-marital affairs after taking over office from a corrupt pervert.  We have a candidate that is coming clean early, while still in the safety shadow of predecessor’s blunders.  As Obama’s cabinet is confirmed there is extra attention on the now Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, former head of the NY Fed.  He forgot to pay $34,000 in social security and medicare taxes from self-employment payments, and he failed to monitor the immigration status of a housekeeper that had worked for him.

For one, I doubt this guy does his own taxes.  Two, he knew via a 2006 audit that he erred in 2001-2004 in his taxes (at least he’s consistent) and had already paid back half of it.  Three, the pay was from work he was doing for the IMF, a fairly respectable agency.  Four, he is the best qualified individual to hit the ground running (despite that MythBusters proved this physically would not really help you get up to speed faster) to assist in brokering the most adequate and comprehensive financial bailout and recovery plan that is needed, at a time when it is really needed.  Who better to help rewrite some of the oversight and regulatory copy then someone who intimately understands government and markets.

And lastly, number five, anyone who has had domestic help knows how when you have good help you don’t let them go, illegal or not.  And if the government learned to use some low-wage labor every once in a while, we may not have such a hefty tax burden.  I do not even know how this tangent started, but it could not be stopped and it is all relevant to today.  Though we may expect the most from these public servants, they are still human and can fault as such, and calling them out on it is part of our public duty.

Still, there are so many questions.  Will we be able to overturn any ’safety’ measures taken by the last administration so that key figures can be held accountable for, oh you know, say minor infractions like making large decisions that negatively impact the well being of the nation.  Going against the Geneva convention; deliberately falsifying evidence so as to justify invading nations with the obscured premise of oil; for repealing some of the most basic EPA regulations to payback the favors of big business; to make shady transactions between the government and private companies that are oh so altruistic in their ‘rebuilding effort’ in war torn nations; being consciously blind of the vagaries, fraud and corruption running rampant in the financial industry as it ran further off the leash from the Fed and SEC.  There are so many of these blatantly irresponsible misuses of power that it’s best to just forget about it.  The power of attraction should not be wasted for that, but for the good that is karmically coming our way.

2009 is a new start, not just for the nation, not just for a new president, but also for many out there looking for jobs.  This current economic debacle is going to reorient our economy, our investments and our lives.  Many of those in manufacturing may decide for a brighter future and accept job traning for another career.  Many of those who indirectly defrauded people out of their pensions will hopefully go to jail and get fucked, thus opening up positions for people with a greater conscience.  Many people may start to see the world more as ‘our’ place than as ‘my’ place.  May this infect us all for the sake of our economy, for the sake of our environment and for the sake of the generations to come.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways.  – Corinthians 13:11

The Secret

After a few tries I finally had a break through with a no-knead dough recipe.  The crumb was not sticky, it rose well and the crust was ideal.  Though there were still no mega fissures that make me think I cracked the code (yes, multilevel pun intended).  I’m going to have to will cracks into the next Boule or at least make some cuts to invite them.  It is the law of attraction, right?  I want a good cracked crust so I shall envision it and it will happen.  Or is it that statistics on the surface tension of baking bread correlated to escaping moisture will probably rule in my favor before long.  My trick was just actually kneading the thing for thirty seconds because somewhere deep inside of me I associate dough with kneading.

Let’s, however, revisit this Law of Attraction thing.  So maybe I am a little late for the bandwagon, though it is thousands of years in the rumbling, but I never really caught on to this secret phenom-hype.  A proper origin in the eyes of modern media seems to be back with the Babylonians, then through every great mind in the last few thousand years before it came back around the turn of the century with Haanel’s The Master Key System.  More currently we have seen the movement that started with What the ^&! Do We Know and, then, The Secret.

This faith system, based on wanting, believing and receiving seems to ride the fence between sacred and silly.  There are few people who would want to believe this more than myself.  That there is a methodology, a practice if you will, about believing so hard in what you want that it eventually, and coincidentally, arrives at your feet.  Whether by mail or by you walking there I do not know.  I do not know because I have not progressed beyond the trailer.  Every alternative media source, including Youtube, seems to have an issue with their version of The Secret.  The strange thing, and I shit you not, is that all the videos lock up after two seconds on the timer.  This happened with almost a dozen efforts at different sources.  Who and/or what does not want me to discover the secret?

It seems that I might have to will the dollars out of my pocket to find out more.  In Borders today I sat down and read a handful of pages and felt that the small, only sold in hardcover according to the sales clerk, book had a repetitive message about asking (politely I would imagine), believing and then receiving.  Does this mean that if I want to go to Cuba with some friends that I can will my ticket and the non-stamping of my visa?  Or does it mean using my AmEx and greasing a couple palms along the way?

Blog after blog had skeptics or hand-over-fist believers.  Anything that carries two extreme sides is definitely worth looking at…I mean take our current bipartisan political system.  Some tout that the hooey is beyond belief and that platinum shovels were hand-forged for this effort, citing all sorts of thoughts and opinions.  My favorite satirical remark was by Emily Yoffe, a contributor for Slate magazine.  She references the fact that The Secret labels Einstein as a master of the secret, and a teacher too.  Yoffe printed a quote from Einstein that did not make it into the film: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Does this mean falling for the secret is part of our fallible nature or looking by something so simple is the plight of our specie?

Inside of me is the x-files lover of unexplained phenomena that wants to believe.  Does it seem remarkably simple?  Yes.  This is part of why this book is found under the genre: metaphysical; on the shelf next to the fill-in-the-blank self-help series.  But what if it is just a basic strength-of-mind trick that allows us to breakdown unseen barriers and find ourselves in opportunistic situations where we empower ourselves to make a decision that grants us a new opening.  Coincidental or not, we have all had things happen to us that have seemed oddly situated and plucked us out of a negative situation and into the womb of positive.  I have the perfect example.

In the late summer of 2002 I was running a kayaking outfitter in southern New Jersey, yet dating a girl in eastern Ohio who was assistant coaching the Buck Eyes field hockey team.  On a whim I decided to drive out and surprise her for the first game of the season that started at noon the next day.  I left at one a.m. on a ten hour drive.  For the mathematically challenged, this does not leave me with much room for error.  I felt this to be a testament as to my affections, so I drove for four hours and pulled over near Harrisburg for a short road nap.  Awaking to a complete fog that had settled on the highway amidst agricultural fields I attempted to start the car.  No dice.  Not even a small click.  Before falling asleep I forgot to turn the lights off.  Now I would never make my narrow window of time.

Exiting the car gave me no more information.  No mile-markers or highway signs were visible in the two minutes I ran in both directions.  The milk-mustached blonde bombshell on the billboard seemed to taunt me in my predicament.  Inside I almost cracked as I wanted to be there with her so bad, but I could not will the situation any more.  Standing outside of my car, ferrari red Riot Glide on top, hull down, I began to dial AAA for assistance, not sure what I would tell them.  Maybe they could triangulate my position.  Before I could hit send, a Jeep Cherokee emerges from the fog and passes me.  It has three white water boats on top.  Stopping a hundred yards ahead, I soon hear the unmistakable whine of a car backing up a high speed.  The driver was a guy I met almost two years before running my first river in Massachusetts, he was on his way to the Youghiogheny River in western PA.

In five minutes my battery was charged, the car running and we were both on our way.  I still have his business card that he gave me that day.  On the back I wrote, ‘get out of jail free card’.  Never would I forget why.  I had not seen him since I ran the Deerfield two years before and I have not seen him since.

Back in my ride, amp’d by the forces that converged on that six am pea soup on the highway between no where and no where, I drove with purpose.  In the end I did get to see Erin before her first game, arriving wired and ecstatic maybe thirty minutes before the start.  She was truly someone who I wanted to see and something allowed it to happen.

So when I ask myself if I believe, I think I do.  I mean…ahem, I do.  But what I do not believe is in paying that much more for it.  In my life I can say I have met one person who wills things and they happen, a true alpha if I ever met one.  Anyone who has crossed his path knows exactly what I am talking about.  Tim Kemple is a guy that makes things happen.  I have a lot of friends that have prospered and been successful on different paths, but Tim always seemed different.  More mono-focally directed.  Whether or not he believes in the laws of attraction, I do not know.  I have not asked him yet, but I am sure he would talk about it.  If anything, Tim just makes what he wants, because that is the way it should be.

We all have an innate ability to create opportunity.  Just like we all have had some wildly perfect experience that has allowed us to make things happen.  We also all know someone in our lives who was the person you never doubted to obtain that which they put their mind towards.  Putting ourselves on the line more often would reveal this.  If there is something I have learned from climbing rocks it is this: want it, envision it, make it happen.  It is that simple.  So simple I may be able to talk myself out of it, before I realize that I already believe it.

Having now re-convinced myself in the power of positive thinking I will aim to apply it to a handful of goals upon which my focus rests.  Positive thinking will entail doing the proper research, being experimental yet scientific.  Taking logical steps from the intermediate outcomes and trying to always be psyched.  This whole process does not sound like much of a secret, just a lot of work.  But we often find that if the work is towards a goal we want, then it feels a lot less like work.  And when breaks are made in our favor we can look at them as coincidental or predicated by the endeavor we invest.  I am reminded of a quote that an old friend gave me my freshman year of college.  Originally it is attributed to Socrates, but when he gave it to me it was through another source: The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

Right now I would settle for the secret to a great bread.  My own endeavoring got me a $40 enameled cast iron pot that I named Castirona.  I thought I was going to have to throw down two hundred bones for a Le Creuset pot.  Instead I endeavored and the solution appeared.  Now I will endeavor my next crust to appear to crack.