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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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There you go, raising the bar, you guys.
Rik, that was so stark and to the point.
And Wayne, I've never been on a Mexican holiday. The guys in C4 used to go on about the life on the beach in the off-season. That sure brought back some memories of wanting to go there myself.
Here's a photo from Rik of a stone from the Trinity River...but which Trinity River, Rik?
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 11, 2016 - 10:24am PT
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Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
Mary Elizabeth Frye
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Nov 17, 2016 - 03:39am PT
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Business as Unusual
There appeared nothing too unusual
The day was just a normal day
Overcast a little but
Like some I'd have to say
The crew was busy working
And I helped them where I could
The job was going smoothly and
At first the customer seemed good
The people stopping on the street
Inquiring for bids
Were numerous and welcome
To the kind of work we did
But some time around noon that day
I noticed something change
As the job was near completion
The customer started acting strange
We were wrapping up the work
As the client visited with a friend
As I inquired about our payment
The outcome became in question then
The lady asked that I return
For payment at a later date
While addressing the contract terms
Then fell the tragic hand of fate
In the sky then flashed a silver light
The ladies screamed with opened eyes
As I turned to look to the northwest
A mushroom cloud climbed to the skies
Then a flash of arc light to the west
Cracked the silent cloudy heights
As another column to my disbelief
Shot skyward through bright bolts of light
"Oh come on, really?" I said to myself
Bearing out my first reaction
Could this of happened at a worse time?
Interrupting my business transaction?
Then the horror of what had just transpired
Woke me from the nightmare dream
Blasting full force the raw perspective
Of the present state and silent scream
Oft' times our world hangs in the balance
Threatened by malevolence so dark
Enslaved by all manner of retribution
Ours is no walk in the park
And are our dreams the harbingers
Of days to come and worlds on end?
Are they portents of the future
Or just letters that our hearts would send?
I found buried in the mail today
An unopened returned envelope
A letter I'd mailed once to someone
With best wishes and a prayer for hope
As I seek answer to my questions
More questions they just come to me
Like a Mad Hatter in a Wonderland
My own riddles never comfort me
As we worry for our future
Is there hope for us the human race?
In a world of such natural beauty
In all its grace might we find grace?
-bushman
11/17/2016
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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Nov 17, 2016 - 11:37am PT
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Bushman, you're amazing!
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 19, 2016 - 05:11am PT
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Sprock Is Back In Town
Long ago and in a faraway galaxy...
Or just the other day in Yosemite
A dude came looking to climb some rock
He goes by the name of Dr. Sprock.
His laurels are few but his name is great.
He seldom climbs much but it’s never too late.
His mind is keen and his tongue is, too.
But I doubt he can spell the word kletterschue.
He reeks of dank and his eyes are red.
He’s constantly feeding his swollen head.
He’s the life of the party with a lampshade on.
He’s not here often and he’s generally gone.
His rope’s nearly new and so is his gear
Maybe he’ll go climbing sometime next year.
I don’t care if he never climbs
Or if he secretly writes kids’ nursery rhymes.
He’s a Taco brother and that means much...
He seems hard-boiled but he’s a soft touch.
I enjoy his posts because it’s all in fun.
He means no harm, not to anyone.
Yes, Sprock is back in town
He’s just another Taco clown
He’s always up and never down
He’s just a scarier version of zBrown!
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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Nov 19, 2016 - 05:36am PT
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Hilarious, Mouse ! Well said and well done!
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Nov 23, 2016 - 11:16am PT
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Religiopoliphilosotics
When we speak religiopoliphilosotic
We're like to make the heart grow sick
And those of us who act the dick
Shall feed upon and wet their wick
On arguing fervent points of view
With nothing changed and nothing new
When it comes to this it will not do
But to say goodbye and to bid adieu
As we tumble down the road of life
We are like as not to cause some strife
To those who follow like the fife
Or the children, husband, or the wife
So with religion, philosophy, or politics
It's like a game of pick up sticks
We have to take our victories and our licks
But what few deserve the 666
Letting differences go to our heads
To judge the world as either good or bad
To release the jinn, a route so sad
To that end we'd be as good as dead
When it comes to the religiopoliphilosotic
We're like to make all hearts grow sick
When life is so balanced upon the pick
Of buttons we were never meant to click
-bushman
11/23/2016
All that aside, may everyones thanksgiving be a time of joy.
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Nov 26, 2016 - 01:42am PT
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Riding Strawberry Ponies through Candy Land Times
It's a simple kind of reason
When darkness and the fire grows cold
Or the things that that people tell us
Fed by hatred and mistrust
That any such information
About the godless or the feared
Be a knowledge and a history we deny
What we never would want to know
Erasing all un conforming history
Whenever it is displeasing to the mind
It's less challenging to our views
Regardless of what hard lessons we might find
Pulling the blankets over our eyes
To leave the world behind
Hoping dream upon dream
We won't awake to find
This place that we have come to
To stand there in the cold
And stoke the embers and go outside
Where the woodpile is empty
Our feet have become cold
And in the darkness we are blind
-bushman
11/26/2016
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Nov 26, 2016 - 08:29am PT
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The Rhyme Maker
Once long ago in brighter times
There lived the master king of rhymes
A jester who with humble heart
Did make the rhyme his sacred art
Using all manner as the gaffe
He worked to make his patrons laugh
But always thought to raise sublime
The melody of a clever rhyme
His name is lost among the rust
Of empires buried in the dust
He lived from hand to mouth in strife
He never married or took a wife
And every night misplaced his britches
Accounting for his lack of riches
To travel forth with every tryst
Lest jealous husbands raise their fist
The rhyme maker and poet king
Would find a troupe and often sing
'Till late at night he'd find his riff
Imparting drunkards with his gift
Eyeing the tavern owners maid
Or mistress better yet instead
Whom he might solicit for a coin
To purloin her purse whilst love enjoined
But alas he was wont to lose his grift
As easily as he gave his gift
From concert hall to country fair
He sought the damsel with flaxen hair
A muse to rouse his heart with words
Alighting like the the morning birds
Alike the long lost memory
Of a mothers love on bended knee
And therein lie his secret desire
From princely fop to lowly squire
To spark all hope with stealth and mirth
He played the house for all his worth
And gave to truth with what belies
The light of laughter in men's eyes
To seek in us what we're yet to know
Such joys that cause the heart to grow
Once long ago in brighter times
There lived the master king of rhymes
A jester who with humble heart
Did make the rhyme his sacred art
Using all manner as the gaffe
He worked to make his patrons laugh
But always thought to raise sublime
The message woven through a rhyme
-bushman
11/26/2016
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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Nov 26, 2016 - 10:44am PT
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^^^^^^^^!!
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 26, 2016 - 12:26pm PT
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We Were The Jewels
Yosemite’s Camp 4 in the sixties
We were the jewels on the walls of the valley,
The young and the beautiful, rebellion on granite.
Climbing our passion, our family camp 4
We loved and we trusted our lives to each other
On the end of a rope. A sexual high,
As is flying, rappeling with tinkling hardware,
Pitons and beeners chiming on stone,
Breathtaking slow motion, our music drifts down,
Ignoring Viet Nam, final exams, anxious mothers,
And more. We were poor, but we ate and we drank
Like the royalty we were.
The tourists in campers were our quarry for food.
Together we foraged our family’s meals
From their blanketed compounds complete with RVs
And TVs ignoring the glory around them.
Their steaks and wine were fine with us,
Just so long as they didn’t dine with us.
Hope Meek
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 26, 2016 - 01:01pm PT
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Bushman, I would not let my daughter out of my sight with that dude around.
He belongs in Camp 4.
Brilliant, my man. Just sparkles.
Jewel on the valley walls, like.
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Nov 27, 2016 - 03:49am PT
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This Tin Foil Hat's A-kilter
Looking out the gas mask brain holes
From inside and through these great big skull holes
The inside plush green and leopard camo
Diamond tuck upholstered flannel
Like PJs cushioning my brain
You'd think I'm weird or quite insane
Hey I don't chose this stuff you know
The thought police they make it so
They've made it rough
But I am tough
So I'm prepared for all out war
Against conformity and more
And I'm prepared to make them suffer
For making us feel like the duffer
There's no waiting here in limbo
While others take a stance akimbo
Mocking and deriding that
Which some to wit decry all that
What once before is coming back
Socratic method out the door
Will I find what I am looking for?
This soliloquy is growing old
While embers flick, the feet grow cold
Desdemona falls once more
Manipulated with allure
Despicable this treachery
By false champions of misery
But I've made it no mystery
A world afire and on its side
It's easy for us to deride
The turmoil swirling all around
The many bounders that abound
As we the people swirl and writhe
Like maggot piles to stay alive
So staring out my comfy den
With brains at rest a 'snuggled in
This helmet fortress cranium
Built subconsciously by delirium
Battened down to weather the din
Of mankind's only mortal sin
Our hubris lying fast within
Incited, brandished by our pain
To shout we can be 'great again'
As though some cold and heartless slob
Culling diamonds from the angry mob
Their pockets picked and fortunes robbed
Unaware it's been an inside job
They don't know they don't need him at all
To inspire the heart or so enthrall
Our humanity to hear the call
To go about and make good works
Instead of acting like spoiled jerks
Entitled by our lineage
And self talk of our heritage
As though we're destined to nobility
Imperialists with inferiority
Complexes like Japan or Germany
Before World War Two
How'd they do?
Tell me how that worked out for them
Less tens of millions, they've borne the stain
So if human beings would have no worth
I ask what are we beyond all such dearth?
As I drive my helmet and protruding duckbill
On down the road to the next windmill
-bushman
11/27/2016
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Nov 27, 2016 - 02:32pm PT
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I thought I saw Tobin today
I was making morning coffee
Having slept in 'till past eight
The sun was out
It had been days
Since it came out to warm and stay
When something caught my eye
In the window to the east
High above and where the snow flies
Over Yosemite above the trees
Riding above the ridge tops over the western slopes
There was a cloud formation that looked just like heaven
As one imagines it might be
Majestic on the breeze
Mountains of golden clouds
A range below what must be starlight
I thought I saw his spirit climbing
With his axes and crampons still moving up
He would still be up there at sunset
Mists trailing off at his feet
Sparks of stardust glinting off of his breath
I thought I saw Tobin today
And do miss him and would still mourn him
But he's out there somewhere now
In whatever transformation he would need to be
So if you were to see him
Please give my love for me
-Tim Sorenson
11/27/2016
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Just a Natural Born Child
Strangely, as I listened to the lady
Conversing with voices in her head
Her illness was not so out of place
For perhaps her angels were there to grace
Her due to some tragic circumstance
For which she had not the will to face
Adrift, alone, a stranger to this foreign place
An affliction not for me to judge
To each their burden and path to trudge
Besides, I carried my own grudge
Personal, experienced, a witness let's just say
To acts most cruel and unkind
A man made calamity in childhood years
Remembering the scars within my mind
But I no longer feel the victim to
Or resentment for the unmasked fears
Not going so far as to be thankful for it
I would not be so bound as it turned out to be
So shredding the yoke I set myself free
But still carried my heart upon my sleeve
With my pain laid bare for all to see
So I stifled it with drugs and alcohol
Because all along I'd been deceived
For what man or religion should make the call?
Or tell me in which God I should believe?
For I had never truly heard such things
No voices or angels whispers ever spoke to me
Only the sounds of a mothers soft encouragement
Were at first that intimate or had meaning to me
Like my own voice of curiosity and reasoning
And so was set free the child in me
This natural born child of the universe
Evolved of mud, a wolf pack boy
Unshorn, unclothed, I swam the sea
And I saw the world of men's hypocrisy
We man beasts who once killed so wantonly
We're now hold claim to an advanced society
Such an elevated civilization have we
Cultured, sophisticated, as it were, ahem
All held together with the spit and phlegm
Of our prisons and wars and the dogs of men
The police state and nationalism
And our pious religious institutions
And last not least a mythological deity
To cast our souls in chains eternally
For the sins we commit so eagerly
As the self talking lady started up again
I agreed in thought, while I tried to eat quietly
And as the lunch counter traffic waned
It all made sense but seemed so inane
Beyond what we are told back when by whom
We are what we have told ourselves to be
For I was just a natural born child from the womb
And like the stars we can see with our naked eye
These objects of such enormous power and beauty
They live, they die, it's what they do
As we, like the sun, shall die someday too
-bushman
12/03/2016
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Sandals, Flies, and Winter Skies over Maui
Beneath the tall bananas trees
Along the waterfall trail
High above the bluffs
From on a bridge
We looked down through the mists
To calm waters below cascades
This island bliss
North of Hana on the way
Past the Seven Pools
Which we cautiously avoided
Due to tourist crowds
And traffic jams
Then we lingered in the afternoon
In an offbeat botanical garden
Beneath the banyan
By the orchid beds
Where we stayed until the fog arrived
And left to darkness on our way
Bushman
12/03/2016
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Dec 10, 2016 - 11:32am PT
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the Lonely Stance
Of what I know
Lost in the past
It sits upon the tarmac
Weighted, overloaded with the baggage of my heart
Of what I was
There is little value
Stories told to the young and interested
Uninformed, uneducated as to what true sacrifice
Was made by my compatriots
Better trained and more committed
To the life of the ax
Knowing well at times
The uselessness of the rope
Of mountains climbed
Were few I knew
Shasta, Moran, and of ice I climbed little
But made acquaintance with some true hardmen
And some alpinists of unusual grit
Of life I've lived
I chose marriage
And fealty to hearth and home
Over noble quiet death
On a cold north face
It would not be my fate
Nor hardly a sane choice
Though such quietude deserves respect
Of those who've found
Their end and peace
In the halls of mountain Kings
Having taken fight
Upon the wings of dedication
They have earned their stance
In our legend and in our mythology
-Tim Sorenson
12/10/2016
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Bushman
climber
The state of quantum flux
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Dec 10, 2016 - 09:00pm PT
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For the Birds
I might have written more poetry
More stories and more words
But I've wasted time and energy
With pablum for the birds
I've raised hell with life and folks I've loved
For no reason I can see
Beyond those selfish illusions
Of the man I used to be
Today I saw the sky grow dark
And ominous with clouds
So suited to this gloom of late
To which I am endowed
I even thought to leave myself
At the curb with all the refuse
But the lottery folks keep telling me
This time I cannot lose
So come what may I'll make the choice
To try another day
And take what life is offering
Though it might not go my way
And I don't agree with most things
But am willing to go along
Because the story is in the telling
And some music is in the song
Tonight I'll try to put down
A few more simple words
No matter what becomes of them
Or even if they're heard
Though thinking might be easier
If I tried to get some rest
I'll write some things down anyway
And add them to the rest
And though I've tried to understand
What others might go through
When loneliness and hopelessness
Is all there is for you
I'm guessing that the sadness
Is just more than some can bear
When no comfort can be found at all
Except when God is there
For what it's worth I've tried to endure
The emptiness and the cold
Though accepting what comforts others
Is just part of growing old
Though the evilest of all demons
Still resides in the minds of men
What we do with our own destinies
Of this we should defend
And writing of such platitudes
Elicits little hope
Especially when some are out there
At end of their own rope
It's a metaphor of such desperateness
Please forgive me if I smirk
But a place from which I've risen
With an immensity of work
Though I've witnessed death and pestilence
But never famine or war
The horsemen are still out riding
Yet to knock upon this door
So as sands still pour and days go by
Within this hourglass
I'll try harder now to dwell on things
Worth more than my own ass
For I might have written more poetry
More stories and more words
But it's hardly worth the time at all
If it's only for the birds
-bushman, tim, sorenman, something, something, that guy
12/10/2016
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