i’ve uploaded a ton of images from my trip to pdx over on both the .83 galleries and some less-bikey ones on my flickr account.

notably i really like this panorama i took from the top of the marquam bridge, aka i-5:

i feel like i have so much more to say here but i don’t know how to say it. stupid words, why must you be so inadequate? i would like to go back to a simpler time. a time when i could sit on the swingset and be entertained. a time when happiness had fewer complications and felt more solid, more easily embraced and less likely to slip away. all i know is that i don’t want to be here anymore, but i don’t have any clue where would be better.

for those of you who are interested, i posted an extremely long pdx ride report over on the .83 forums. hopefully pictures will be uploaded soon.

what a weekend. i am worried that i might be out of (useful) words. i don’t think the ones i have left can do anything – as far as i can tell they’re doing nothing for me at the moment – so it should come as no surprise that i’ve got nothing further to share with you. hopefully that won’t stop me from trying again at a later date.

how is it that people can ever understand each other? the massive amount of context we assume when we communicate is staggering.

today i found myself retracing familiar steps – around the house i grew up in and the county fair i’ve been to 25 of the last 27 years. of course with time these things have changed, but even in trying to think of how to describe them or capture them in photographs i realized that it seems impossible. the writer or photographer faces this most difficult of tasks – to convey their context to another, compacting everything present for them into a shadowy representation of the moment.

even if i had brought you with me to the fair today, your experience of it would be almost completely distanced from my own. from the way the musty smell of the livestock barn makes me hungry for the fresh milkshakes i know are on the other side to the way i can look out over the new ampitheatre and reminisce about how i used to play in that same field when we stayed there with our camp trailer. or, in walking around my house to see how the blackberries are ripening, you could never feel the sheer familiarity of the coarse grass on your feet or the memories tied into the very slope of the hill.

of course not. but i would like you to.

we all pack around with us decades of stored content, sensations that our sophisticated pattern-matching brains have analyzed and stored away. i think part of communication is conveying at least tiny parts of that context to one another, at least enough so that conversation can have some kind of a foundation. but how do we ever get there? and what if we longed to express ourselves more thoroughly, would it even be possible?