Pierce Hawthorne

When I said it was time to put my nose to the grindstone. I meant it.

At the moment I’m regularly working seven hour shifts, five days a week. I’m making a bunch of money, but that’s not everything in this world. I’m tired of talking about my work or anything like that, seeing as I’m headed there in just under 2 hours. So let’s talk about longboarding, because you can never blog too much about longboarding.

A 3 day crisis has come and gone. I have finally ordered the Ripple Ridge. The main problem was the Comet Noah Sakamoto guest model deck, which seemed like an equally good purchase. I started having second thoughts, found reasons to not like the Ridge, debunked them, and eventually tried to order the board. If you’re wondering why I would almost change my mind after months of planning, watch the promo video for the Noah Sakamoto.

Nevertheless, I eventually decided on the Ripple Ridge by flipping tails three times in a row (3 times!). Then I go to the Landyachtz website, and spend like two hours trying to get the payment system working. I eventually gave up last night and went to bed. I’ve always been a little miffed when payment systems fail, like the debit machine breaks at a restaurant, or the cashier can’t give change. I mean, I’m trying to give them money, and they’re unable to accept it. I had bleach rash on my hands last night and I used the money from washing dishes to buy a skateboard. I’m trying to give them MY money. It just seems weird that they designed a system that makes it difficult to pay.

I (we) got it working eventually, but fuck man. That was a pain.

I still want the Noah Sakamoto, maybe if I have some cash lying around after I get back from California I’ll buy it too.

I’m looking forward to having the Ridge done and assembled. There’s something really visceral about longboarding. You’re carving back and forth across the street, and you can feel this pavement beneath you, and it’s a really interesting way to experience the ground. You have to watch out for the bumps and cracks, the obstacles and cars. When people say that skateboarding is an interaction with the urban environment  they don’t mean just getting around. You feel this kind of flow when you’re having a good ride. It’s a kind of connection. You’re in-tune with the world.

That’s what got me hooked and I think it’s what has hooked a lot of other people.

It will (probably) get here on Sunday. So, obviously, expect a post.

-A

 

Soy Milk Seagull

The past week has been crazy.

I’m not saying that because I’m trying to find an excuse for not posting, it was actually crazy. I’m just stating.

I started work, (sort of) moved into my new apartment, and (partially) fixed a toilet. It was the kind of week that you don’t use definite articles to describe (kind of). It was the kind of week that had those sneaky bracket-ed factors of uncertainty that could trip you up at any step (almost). I shouldn’t even speak in the past tense, it’s (kinda sorta) not over yet.

Nevertheless, I’m really digging living in Victoria again. I love this city, and I’m doing my best to appreciate it this time around.

I remember saying that I wouldn’t post about what made my time in central america so great. But I think this would be permissible. Over the month, my dad and I met some really amazing people. People who travel, as a general rule, are pretty interesting. People who decide to move to another country are, as a general rule, even more interesting. 

I was going to list off a bunch of the people who we met in Guatemala, but there is a seagull attacking an abandoned carton of soy milk on the sidewalk outside this coffee shop and it is one of the most entertaining things I have ever seen. Somebody left the soy milk on the garbage can for a few minutes while unloading their truck, and this bird knocked it off, punctured the carton, and started drinking the fluid in about thirty seconds. The seagulls in this town are as opportunistic as crows, but bigger, with more personality and less caution.

Anyways. There were a lot of people on our trip who were super interesting. I can’t remember all of their names, so I’m just going to say what made them interesting.

There was the Turkish guy who smoked like a chimney and drank way too much Cerveza.
The Englishman who ran a hostel and cooked really good pizza.
The two guys from Denver and Ontario, respectively, who played music beautifully together.
The Irish guy who ran a restaurant called The Clover, who was a stage tech in his Irish life.
The drunk jerk who kept asking one of the boat captains if he was going to the town they were currently in.
The endless Australians on vacation. Seriously, do they never go home?

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. Believe me, there were many, many more.

Anyways. Work. I have to go there soon. Last night I worked an 8 hour shift, 5 or 6 of which were spent in the dish pit. I just want to go back to making croissants. There is one upside though.

-A

Back In The Land Of Bacon And Bears

I have a headache.

I’m wearing the gorilla slippers.

Let’s blog.

The funny thing about having a long day of travel, is that the time between waking up in the morning in one country and falling asleep in another feels like a month. It felt like that on Thursday when my Dad and I flew home from Guatemala. Our itinerary was exactly the same as our trip there. Guatemala City – Houston – Vancouver. The only difference was that we didn’t have to stay for 7 hours in Texas. Thank god. The accents were starting to jackhammer their way into my subconscious. By that, I mean I would start dreaming in a Texan accent or something, my psyche is generally good at doing stupid things like that.

I was happy to be home, in a weird sort of way. The grey skies and overcast weather can get old pretty fast, as can the chilly temperatures, but this is where I’m from. It’s my home climate. Central America treated me well, but it’s time to get my life rolling again.

I guess I’m obliged to do some sort of reflection. Some conclusion that “Guatemala is a nice country, with some rough spots”. One would imagine that it’s the least I can do, seeing as I allegedly had such a fantastic time there.

I did have a great time there, but I’m not going to write this entire post about it. I think there’s some value in giving an incomplete picture of a place. Knowing a lot about somewhere can make it seem less interesting in your head, you don’t really think of it as an adventure if somebody else, especially someone you know, has already been there. Guatemala was one of the few countries I didn’t know a lot about. That was one of the reasons I was more receptive to the idea of going.

I know it sounds like a bad excuse, but the mystery of going somewhere is sometimes what drives the going. Also, I’m lazy and tired and jet lagged. To make things up to you, I’ve uploaded all of the photos I took into an Imgur album which can be viewed here.

Anyways. It’s the 1st of a new month. Which basically means it’s time to put my nose to the grindstone. I’ve been setting my self up mentally for this month to be my make-as-much-money-as-you-can month. And spending time with family. I have to do that as well. But yes, money. For various reasons, including the fact that I need to pay for a lot of my trip to Turkey, and that I need to pay for the laptop with which I am currently writing this post.

RambleRambleRamble I’m going to go have a post-dinner snack.

-A(ppetite)

A Plea To The Unconvinced Reader

So. Here on WordPress we have a dandy little thing called subscribing. If you have already subscribed to LFTGWN. Good job. You need not read on.

If you are not currently subscribed to this blog, let me swoon you with my siren call of self promotion.

Here are a few excellent reasons you should subscribe by either email or with your WordPress account.

1.For every subscriber to my blog, I become more inspired to put out more content. This results in a cycle of blogging and subscribing that can shoot me into the stratosphere of inspiration.

2. If I can get 100 subscribers (a feat that I am already 1/5th of the way to achieving , I will purchase the domain from WordPress and become a real pseudo-independent blog! Becoming lettersfromthegreatwhitenorth.com!

3. I will love you forever. If you take the 2 seconds it takes to subscribe, It would mean a lot to me on a deep emotional and human level.

That last one was distasteful and sappy. I’m sorry.

Anyways. Do what you want. Subscribe, don’t subscribe, I’m not going to guilt you. But consider it. Please.

That is all.

-A

The Dude Abides

For the past week, I’ve been really digging life, man.

We’ve been staying in San Marcos La Laguna. Which is this little town off of Lake Atitlan. To contextualize this, here is a friendly little map to describe the area.

For a whole week, I didn’t wear shoes. My days would consist of eating really fantastic food, swimming, and answering emails. It was the kind of blissful living that you know can’t go on, but you enjoy it so much that you don’t want to think about it ending. It was also the kind of blissful living that makes you forget to blog. So please accept my most sincere apologies for not doing this.

While we were in San Marcos, my Dad and I were at a pizza night at one of the hostels. We had become friends with the guy who was running the place, an Older English gentleman by the name of Stewart. Anyways, there was this little two-man band playing by the name of ‘The Lone Om-Ers’, a reference to one of the guy’s yoga careers. They were amazing. Paul and Eric played covers of songs by Flight Of The Conchords and Neil Young.

To make a long story short, we had a great conversation just before they started playing, about permaculture and urban farming. Both of them were really knowledgeable about that kind of thing. Coming from a hippie neighbourhood (and let’s face it, part of the world), urban farming is very much of interest to me. The insane concept that it’s possible to grow and produce all the food you need has had me interested since I was a kid. Just the idea of sustainable farming and crop rotation is fascinating. Knowing how to replenish the soil with key vitamins and minerals just by rotating cabbage and soybeans? That’s a real education.

It’ll be a few years until I’ll even have the option of buying land, let alone wanting to. But someday I’m going to be self-sufficient for food. That’ll be a good day.

Our conversation with Eric and Paul also got me thinking about cooking, something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently anyways, seeing as I love it so much. I really like challenging myself to do crazy things, like going off HFCS for 6 months, or asking out girls who I’m pretty sure will say no to me. I think I have a plan for another one.

For one month, I am going to make my own food. I can only eat the food I have personally made. Now this sounds super easy. So to make it more fun, for that month, I can only make food from scratch. This means I can make pizza dough with flour, but I can’t top the pizza with cheese or sauce that I haven’t made myself. I want to do it during a month on the calendar, not just a thirty-day period. So I’ll have to do it in February, seeing as I’m going to be pretty busy with travel until then. So there. Goals. I tend to collect those.

I’m going to go charge my laptop, eat Falafel, and enjoy the pleasant climate before being plunged back into 4° weather (39.2° for the dinosaurs).


-A

My Brother Daniel

Hey everybody. So, for the past little while it’s been a little difficult to find blog topics. Not impossible, but a tad difficult. Mostly because I’m travelling so much and am in a state of mostly constant tiredness. Anyways, I was chatting with a good friend of mine, and he suggested I should write a post about him. Here are his exact words (we were talking about the new wallpaper).

So yes, now I know what to write about. So let’s get started.

This is my brother, Daniel.

Daniel is about four years older than me. He’s currently living in Toronto to get his BFA in dance. Daniel is the kind of brother who has his life in order, but likes talking all about how he’s a mess. He says things like “God I’m such a mess right now” and “I’m just so overworked” he generally does overwork himself, but he is far from a mess.

Most of Daniel’s friends are girls, due to the large female population in his classes. He’s easy to verbally abuse, and his friends do. Often. 

He is so nice, that you just kind of want to verbally abuse him, once you’re good enough friends with him, of course. He’s also incredibly cheap, and likes hanging out in his apartment eating unflavored cooked lentils in his underpants.

Nevertheless, Daniel is a great big brother. He’s a jackass, but he’s a great big brother.

And that’s all I’m going to write about him.

I’m well aware that Daniel reads this, so be careful what you suggest, jackass.

-A

Finding Work Is Hard Work

A lot of people my age generally don’t like the work that is available to them. What’s more, a lot of them don’t have work available to them. I talk to a lot of my friends in the states and they tell me how hard it is for a teenager to get a job. And it’s true. There is a pretty big difference between how teenagers get jobs and how ‘adults’ get jobs. The adult route is pretty straightforward, submit a resume, talk to people, get a job. The shitty thing about trying to get a job as a teenager is that we don’t have a whole lot of stuff on our resumes, and we generally aren’t allowed or trusted enough to get the jobs that adults do. What’s more, our social skills can sometimes be lacking when it comes to talking to our potential employers.

It’s a rough system. After a couple of weeks of job hunting the adult way, it’s easy to get downtrodden by douchebags who don’t want to hire teenagers.

Nevertheless, once you’ve got one or two jobs on your resume, it becomes obvious that you have a decent work ethic, know how to take orders, work with others, that kind of thing. References are a bonus as well. I’m pretty lucky that I was able to sneak my way into a dishwashing gig while my brother was working counters. The first job is the hardest one, but after that, getting jobs gets easier and easier.

I think it’s important to have dream jobs, that way, even if you have a totally shitty job, you don’t just think to yourself “this is all there is”. I have a separate life goals/bucket list, but this is my ‘dream jobs’ list.

– A worker at either the Landyachtz Longboard Factory, or the Rayne Longboard Factory
– A Bricklayer (my grandfather is a retired Bricklayer and there’s something romantic about continuing the family trade)
– A grave digger
– Lighthouse manager (you live in a lighthouse far away from civilization for at least a year)
– Trip leader or Trip staff for a Unschool Adventures trip
– Manager of a successful online T-shirt business (in the works)

Maybe one day I’ll look back and find this post and realize that I’ve done all of these jobs. God I hope so. In the meantime I’ll just keep dishwashing.

-A

 

The Free Prisoner

It seems like right now, world travel is becoming more and more popular. Planeloads and planeloads of people are flying to new countries and new cultures, they stay in places that are in this kind of niche. On one side is the places that too many people go to, like Mexico, on the other side are places that are too dangerous to visit, like Afghanistan. Places like Guatemala fit right there in the middle.

My vast generalization aside, it kind of seems like a lot of people who travel have something to escape from. Work, family, their tiny hometown, they take it all with them. Eventually they settle down in a backwater area like where I’m staying now. These people smoke like chimneys and do most known drugs, but is it really worth it?

Don’t get me wrong, travelling is great. It opens your eyes, I advocate it as much as the next world traveller. But a lot of people get lost in travelling. I met a Turkish gentleman in Antigua who told me he stayed in San Pedro La Laguna for six months drinking. And he wasn’t the first. It’s like a lot of travellers here have something to hide from, and they’re escaping their lives with self-destructive habits. To not have a ‘home’ that is, to not have a place where you like living and have an a decent life, can be very destructive. So, world travel isn’t some quick fix for every life problem that you may have. It never was.

Here’s something I’m not ashamed to say. I’m looking forward to going home. My life as a traveller and my life in British Columbia are the same. One is not an opposite of the other. I have nothing to escape from. I love travelling, but I also love Eggnog, which for obvious reasons can’t be procured here. I love the little bump the plane makes just before it makes contact with the concrete landing strip, but I also love longboarding to work.

My advice? Think about why you’re travelling before you go. If it’s to escape your life, you may never experience a place the way you wanted. You’ll just run in circles, thinking about things that don’t matter, like a dog chasing it’s tail.

But travel.

Because travelling is good.

-A

The Plan

For the past few weeks, I have spent a ton of my free time researching for a project. Not a single detail has been overlooked. The same way when you’re planning a bank heist, you count the number of steps on the staircase, or the dietary restrictions of one of the tellers. Nothing has been overlooked. I’m going to use my birthday and Christmas to finance the purchase of a new longboard. Every piece will be bought separately  then they’ll come together the same way a symphony comes together at the finale of a masterpiece.

Skating has been in my life in one way or another since I was 5 or 6. I have been longboarding since I was about twelve, and then shit got serious. It is probably the funnest thing I’ve even done. The reason I’m getting (financing) a new one, is because I want to move into street skating more, having done a ton of pintail-cruising and more recently, freeriding. Let me lay out the plan.

I will purchase the most expensive part, myself. The deck will be a Landyachtz Ripple Ridge.

The trucks will be asked for for Christmas. I’ll have them shipped to Livermore because the company is located in California and I’ll be there just after the holidays. They’ll be Independent 169’s.

I’ll also ask for the wheels for Christmas, because they’re made by Abec11, a classic California company. They’ll be the 60mm NOskoolZ in 78a.

The bearings, however, are small enough to take with me to California (where assembly will happen), so I’ll ask for them for my birthday. They’ll be the Zealous bearings. With built-in spacers and speedrings (thank the fucking lord).

When I get back to BC I’ll re-grip the board with vicious griptape so that it stays grippy in the rain. I’m not getting paid somehow by these companies to put links in my blog to their products. I just thought linking to them would make it more realistic and not just hot air.

Anyways, it’s still a while until I can put the plan into action, and I still need the cash to buy the board. Many dishwashing shifts lie ahead. 

-A

Portrait Of A Guatemalan Dog

This, is Dog.

As far as I can tell, he has no collar, and no owner. Chances are that he doesn’t have a name either. There are dogs everywhere in this country. Spaying and Neutering is pretty uncommon, so overpopulation is the norm here, and a lot of them go hungry.

In north america it’s pretty normal for government-enforced fixing of animals, and people are pretty happy to pay for it, since pretty much nobody wants their pets running off and getting freaky with the neighbour’s pets.

Here, the most common view is that if there are puppies, then you can sell them, and get some money out of it. Really, I don’t blame the people here who think that way. From what I’ve seen, the poverty here is crippling. In a perfect world, every puppy from every litter would get bought by a family who would be able to consistently provide a good home. In this world, a lot of the puppies go unsold and grow up quickly to procreate. Hence the overpopulation issue. Here comes the really shitty part. Kind of awful actually.

The population can’t grow indefinitely, there would just be too many dogs in the towns. So, to quell the growth, the locals band together and (sigh) put out poisoned food for the malnourished dogs to eat. This results in, a lot of dead dogs. In effect the only dogs who survive are the ones who have owners who can prevent their pets from eating the poison. It’s pretty sad, really. It’s an endless cycle of unhappy dogs. But whenever you visit another culture you always have to be the observer, never the judge, and just tell yourself ‘that’s just the way it is’.

The good news, is that a group of people have hired a few veterinarians and have set up a by-donation fixing service. Once or twice a month, these vets do a circuit of the villages around the lake, and fix dogs. So there is change happening, it’s just can’t come sooner.

This post isn’t meant to make you sad, or inspire you to move to central america and start an animal clinic, it’s an example that while people in north america are pretty lucky compared to central/south Americans, the animals are pretty lucky back home too. When there’s more to go around, everybody benefits. Even the pets.

-A