all i do is crash my car and cry
September 1st, 2025
As I am quite busy applying to jobs for this upcoming winter season, this blog will be a short one! After a long hot August in the fields and forests of the New River Gorge, lugging my backpack pesticide sprayer around, I am happy to report that I am currently wearing a jacket. As custom, all the empty strip mall store fronts have metamorphised into a Spirit Halloweens, and I had to drive into the neighbor's lawn to avoid a school bus tearing down Prudence Road. My sweater drawer is open, my body is ready for how gorgeous the nrg is going to look in her autumnal colors... guys I love fall!But I'm getting ahead of things, because this blog is about August. My first and only trip this month was back home to Charlottesville, VA... so exciting. I was there to grab my sewing machine, a few sweaters, but most importantly to say farewell to my bestie and sister Judy, who just moved to Los Angeles to get a graduate degree in experimental animation at USC! She texts me about all the cool things she's doing, like working with her professor, Sofia the robot, to make animatronics. So cool! It was once a dream of mine to move to LA and work in animation, so I've enjoyed living vicariously through her success, haha. On Saturday, Judy and I went thrifting in Richmond. I got a pretty good fit going, and got to visit my favorite taxidermy shop in the world, Rest In Pieces. Walking around the city and seeing all the fashionable young people with their tote bags and airpods gave me pretty severe FOMO. I wondered how I ended up spending the formative years of my life living in Bumfuck West Virginia... chat, am I wasting my twenties? Shouldn't I be drinking matcha and vaping and having gay sex and buying labubu's... or whatever people my age do? I don't even know... I think I want a queer friendgroup. I think I need to move to a major city, right now, at least for the winter! Ah, what am I going to do! I've applied to some jobs near Denver and San Francisco. Eventually, I hope to crash with my sister in LA, and live there seasonally. Even though fall, peak climbing season, has just begun... god I need to get out of here!
Oh, and in other news I crashed my car twice in one week. Now there's these big crater's on each cheek of the bumper. Hey, my car has dimples just like me! I was gonna let them be, because who cares, but last Saturday I got pulled over by a little piggy of a cop. He accused me of driving suspiciously, being drunk, having a broken tailight, etc. etc. but his attitude switched on the dime when he saw I was wearing a bikini. All of a sudden, he's helping my find my insurance card online and I'm driving away without a fine. Gross! Ever since I got this cute-ass haircut, I've noticed a huge shift in the way people treat me. I get free things from older guys, like a sticker at the coffee shop or a locking carabiner at the gear shop. It's not really a creepy thing I think, people are just nicer to you when you're hot, haha. I've started dressing like a haunted baby-doll to lean into this new phase... maybe it's the cunty bob, maybe it's my declining mental state, but I've been waking up and feeling like sabrina carpenter lately. Lol! Time for me to seek help!
As the weather cools, my enjoyment of my job increases exponentially. This month we've had some fun adventures, rafting the Lower New River, hiking the kaymoor miners trail, and catching dragonfly larva to test them for mercury. Coolest place I've been is the giant's footprint in kaymoor, which is just an enourmous patch of kudzu overgrowth. It looks quite apocalyptic, and if human's ever die out I am sure our cities will look just like this. Last week I went on a nature walk with my boss, and was able to correctly identify a lot of plants. We were both suprised! Hey, I'm learning things after all! A lot of my internship is quiet peaceful work, looking at plants, killing plants, spending hours walking around the forest in deep thought. If you've ever read/seen Vinland Saga, there's an arc where the main character Thorfinn, a viking boy troubled with a childhood of violence and betrayal, spends years working at a farm, silently ruminating on his past. He ends the arc with the conclusion- ' I have no enemies.' I'd like to think I'm in my farmland arc right now, but I can't say I've gone through any character development lately. Actually, I might have regressed!
It's been a bit too hot to climb lately, so I've spent a lot of time at the lake. Check out this photo I got on the lyra! Through the few times I have climbed, I've discovered a love for crack roofs and offwidth, thanks to a few cool partners from mountain project with some very big gear. From the moment I started climbing, I knew I was a trad climber, and this month I solidified my confidence in leading trad 5.10's. 5.11's... that's still a work in progress. Some highlights include Smooth Operator (5.9), a five star fist jam ruined by a very dirty ending, Triple Treat (5.10), three amazing crack roofs that get progressively easier to pull, my project Marionette (5.11), a dainty finger crack with a slam dunk crux, and the offwidth I couldn't even get up, Let's get physical (5.12), which requires you to invert and jam, feet first. Hm, I never thought I'd say this, but I think I'm winding down from a very intense summer climbing season, even though fall is supposed to be the stickiest and busiest time of the year for my fellow rock slappers. I've been looking for new creative projects, gotten into sewing a bit, and just did my first tattoo with my 30$ amazon machine. I've also been on shrooms like every weekend, trying to find a good spot inbetween 'colors are brighter!' and 'i am rolling around on the floor'. Does anyone else have the carnal instinct to be horizontal and roll around while tripping? Looks like I have some more experimenting to do!