Day 79: Zero day in Mammoth Lakes

So it seems a zero day in Mammoth Lakes is like a zero day everywhere else: very very busy. Yesterday I had managed to get in my laundry done at the laundromat after my ER visit and right before it closed (last load at 8pm the sign said--I started my load at 7:50pm). And today I dropped by Mammoth Mountaineering Supply to pick up some odds and ends, and the local Grocery Outlet to resupply.

Here's the more interesting stuff:

-- Ate a lot of ice cream. There's a Rite-Aid close to where we're staying (in the same plaza as the laundromat, and across the street from the Grocery Outlet), and inside they've got an ice cream counter where they'll make you a cone. Only I went in and discovered that, off to the side, they have a freezer where they serve pints of the stuff. So I bought a pint, and finished off a pistachio nut pint the first night, and a pecan praline pint the second. Polishing off a pint of ice cream actually comes pretty easily these days.

-- For the room, we had two queen (or were they king?) beds and four people: Dylan and Uno, and Otter and myself. So it was two to a bed. The first night, though, I had the bed pretty much to myself: Otter ended up spending the night with some other friends, didn't get in until 5am or so. But sleeping in the bed didn't turn out to be a good idea: it was too soft, and so I had to flex pretty much all night to keep my body in a position where I could breathe. So when I woke up, my stomach hurt: felt like I'd done an abs workout all night! Tonight I'll probably try rolling out the sleeping pad and sleeping on that instead: it's more firm.

-- There's always the dichotomy between spending time hanging out, and spending time getting chores done. Today, in the early morning, I skewed toward the former, mostly because, in anticipation of the funk DJ tonight, Uno started playing funk music. Evidently Uno's a big fan of funk, stemming from her mom loving the stuff. So she would play song after song, and Otter (who was back and awake by then) would be able to name each track. Otter himself would play some Parliament (aww jyeah), and the discussion of the open-ended composition of those tunes lead to some more discussions on musical forms, lead to him playing some Snarky Puppy, which elicited my jazz response: I laughed in delight at some of the twists and turns in the music. For my part, I contributed with the Ever Evolving Etude by the Avishai Cohen Trio, which Otter listened to and concluded, this is controlled chaos, I'm trying to find the one and not finding it. Which I'd never noted before: I'd always concentrated on the coordinated off-kilter syncopation of that piece, but never thought to listen for the one. I guess since the piece flows so smoothly, I almost regarded it as a classical piece (where the one really isn't that important) rather than a more jazz or popular music piece. But that's a good point: the one *is* tricky to find in that one!

-- For lunch, Dylan picked the spot: a Mexican restaurant just up the street from the hotel. So when Uno and I had finished shopping at Mammoth Mountaineering Supply and the Grocery Outlet, we headed up the street toward the restaurant. When we saw, across the street, AC/DC and Outlast, who were supposed to meet us for lunch, only they were heading the other way. And so, across the busy 4-lane traffic of Main Street, we tried to ask them where they were going. Only Uno doesn't yell (long ago, she tried to call out to me as she saw me ahead on the way to Paradise Valley Cafe, but I never heard her), and I couldn't yell because I couldn't get enough breath in my lungs to do so. So it was a pretty terrible conversation, with a lot of puzzled looks on AC/DC's face and a lot of yelled "what?"s from the other side. Oh well, in the end we all got to the restaurant a bit later than planned, and AC/DC and Outlast got there even later than that!

-- Incidentally, at the restaurant I originally wanted to order a dish with cactus because, I mean, how often do you get to eat cactus? But then I looked at the specials and saw "menudo con tortilla", and I had no idea what menudo was. (Besides, possibly, a boy band back in the 80s.) So, of course, I had to order that: I have a habit of ordering foods that I don't know. (The best is when I can't even pronounce it.) I think it stems from me not really caring what I eat, so might as well eat something different! Anyway, it turns out menudo is cow stomach, which was a wonderful surprise!: I love cow stomach! (Pig stomach not so much--too dry--but cow stomach: that's good stuff!) Granted they served it in a soup, whereas I prefer it dim-sum style: cold, cut into strips, and still crunchy. But still, it was pretty good! See, that's what you get when you order stuff you don't know: the delightful surprise of cow stomach in a soup!

-- In the later afternoon, with most of my chores done, everyone else headed out to a bowling alley (but not any bowling alley, but a happening bowling alley, with a funk DJ spinning the wheels of steel tonight) (supposedly, evidently he never showed and the music ended up being more, umm, generic), while I just stayed in and worked on catching up on blog entries. Didn't entirely catch up, of course, but did try my best. I worked down in the basement of the hotel. There's an indoor hot tub down there (you have to have reservations), but I was just using the room next to it which was previously a common room but had been shut down due to COVID and become just a staff room. And there was staff in there when I went down, and they looked at me funny when I asked if I could take down some of the upside tables, maybe arrange them over here by the outlets, and write. In fact, a few minutes after they left, one of the owners came down to check me out. Yeah, this place has been closed due to COVID, she said, but if you're just down here by yourself, that should be ok. And I was, at a little single-person table next to the wall, my phone plugged into the single outlet, typing away. And chewing on bananas and peanut M&Ms (a bag of which I managed to polish off before leaving). As far as writing rooms go, it wasn't bad: sparse (so without distraction), a bit too muggy (owing to the hot tub next door), but pretty isolated ("closed" due to COVID) and quiet (it *is* in the basement, so any sounds are fairly white). To a certain extent, it reminded me of the carrels in Green Library back at Stanford, a little concentrated space for concentrated work. Not as much pacing here as in Green Library (math problems benefit greatly from pacing; I have yet to try this strategem on blog writing), but beggars can't be choosers!

-- I also picked up my resupply box (actually did that yesterday), and in it were brownies from Cindie Ekstrand from FBCP. And I split them with Dylan and Uno (who were in the hotel room at the time) and we all agreed: man, these are good. These are really good. Even with just half a brownie: these are good. So thanks so much to Cindie, and know that your baking is amazing not only by my friendly palate, but impresses even the impartial tastes of neutral third parties!

All in all, I ended up going to sleep late, trying to get everything done, and also get some writing in. I sometimes think that, if I didn't have to write this blog, things would be so much simpler, and I'd have so much time. But if I'm being honest with myself, I'd find something else--photography, for example--to take up all my time and be in the same boat, under the same sword of Damocles, under the same gun, just it'd be of a different medium is all. You can pick your poison, but they're all poisons!

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Some notes:

-- Dylan came back from the bowling alley with a proposed trail name for me: what do you think about Splash?, he asked. It's onomatopoeic, he noted, a rare characteristic in trail names, and if you're still traumatized, it's fairly neutral. And I wasn't that enthusiastic about it, so he dropped it. But to expand on my recalcitrance some here: I agree that Splash is neutral and, to me, that's the problem. I don't see my fall as a neutral thing: I think of it as a stupid stupid mistake on my part. A trail name for me? How about Asinine?--and if you want to shorten it to a single syllable, how about Ass? Because that's how I feel about the fall: the strongest emotion is incredulous stupidity, the next is overwhelming embarrassment. That's why I don't like bringing up the story: all the emotions associated with it are tremendously negative. So I feel a trail name based on it should be similarly so.