Photo Gallery: Lonesome Creepy - Here, There and Everywhere

Surf Motel, Victoria

With Halloween fast approaching (and because I finally had ten pictures to put together) it's time for another Lonesome Creepy photo gallery, wherein you see the world from my point of view.   The locations presented here yo-yo from Victoria to Austin, Texas and back again, with one or two points in between.  As always, all photos have been taken with an iPhone 4S unless otherwise noted.

Once you're done, check out my post "A Strange Little Place" to catch up with the true ghost stories, authored by yours truly, currently running in the Revelstoke Current.

The Road to Olympia, Part 6: Love Me, I'm a Liberal

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:

During my drive to Las Vegas, the Veteran’s Memorial Highway brought me through a handful of Indian Reservations.  I’m not particularly educated on the state of Indian-Government relations but I’ve read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and I’m a fan of Ward Churchill so I have at least a baseline understanding of the savage, locker-room rogering that was Manifest Destiny.  All the same, actually seeing the Godless stretches of sun-withered rock that the government assigned to its defeated enemy really drives the point home in a way that books can’t.

Though I know full well that the Indian people had no voice in the decision I imagine that the U.S. Government, having thoroughly won the American Indian Wars, called forth a representative from the surviving tribes when it was time to assign living space:

U.S. Government:  That is some lovely property you all were living on, wasn’t it?

Indian Representative:  Yes, that is why we liked living there.

U.S. Government:  Well, we need it

Indian Representative:  For what?!

U.S. Government:  Stuff.

Indian Representative:  What stuff?

U.S. Government:  Jamba Juices, hockey rinks, hot dog stands.  White people stuff.

Indian Representative:  But what about us?

U.S. Government:  That’s what I wanted to talk to you about!  Using the most scientific methods currently available we have located the absolute worst parcels of sandblasted hell in America

Indian Representative: Why?

U.S.G: Because we want to give them to you!

Indian Representative: I’m sorry?

U.S.G.:  So you can live there, silly!  All of you.  Bring sunscreen.

Indian Representative: I have a few reservations about this.

U.S.G.:  Great!  That’s what we’ll call them.  Now get out of here you crazy kid.  Remember what I said about sunscreen.

Indian Representative: But I don’t…is that a shotgun?
U.S.G.:  I said get

Since NPR liked to disappear on me whenever I got interested in a subject, thoughts like this were all I had to keep me company.  I’d given up on country radio after hearing Tim McGraw’s “Indian Outlaw” three days running.  It’s a catchy song and I’m not particularly sensitive but every time I heard “You can find me in my wigwam /I’ll be beatin’ on my tom-tom / Pull out the pipe and smoke you some / Hey and pass it around” I wanted to throw up.

A mild diversion came when I saw a sign advertising a Wildlife Viewing Area.  The last several hours of driving had brought me endless vistas of windswept hardpan and I was a little sceptical as whether any wildlife not existing solely at the microscopic level could possibly thrive here.  A tour guide would have to be a Zoloft-popping mixture of cock-eyed optimist and Spalding Grey to sell that particular Wildlife Viewing Experience:

“Here in front of us we have some rocks, heavy ones by the look of them.  To our left if you look closely you can see more rocks, one of which looks like an anvil.  Oh!  Look!  Just over there I thought I saw…no, no…that was a rock too.  Isn’t this fun?  Who else could go for a Jamba Juice?”

Night had fallen by the time I got close to Vegas and traffic had fallen off to almost nothing.  As Highway 95 slipped by beneath the moonlight I had a look at the map and realized I was driving parallel to Department of Defense land.  Then it hit me – this wasn’t just any DoD land – this was the Nevada Test Site, formerly Nevada Proving Ground, one of two nuclear testing sites used by America during the Cold War.  Hey, I read books.

From 1951-1992 over 1,000 nuclear devices were tested on-site, often resulting in fallout that insisted on ruining the day (and genetic material) of anyone who happened to be downwind.  These blessed souls are cheerfully called “Downwinders” by those who take an interest in the subject – I imagine this is because “Boy Howdy, You Are Boned-ers” is too much of a buzzkill.  Over the years there were a number of settlements paid out by the government although the official figures are apparently well-hidden.

Scenes from The Hills Have Eyes came flooding into my head and in desperation I reached for the radio.  Even “Indian Outlaw” was better than that.

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal

The Road to Olympia, Part 5: Like a Bat Out of Hell

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones.

The last thing I did before leaving for Nevada the next day was wash my car.It’s not that I thought it was going to stay clean on the drive to Winnemucca but I wanted to make sure I washed off every trace of John Day before advancing further. I was going to burn my laundry too but my car has suffered enough without the added indignity of coming into contact with my bare ass.

See you in Hell

Fittingly, the car wash was the second worst I’ve come across. The soap smelled like the chemical development team had started off aiming for “lilac” but given up somewhere around “How long has this sandwich been behind the radiator?” It did the job but only after the investment of six dollars and about a dozen passes with what may be the western world’s feeblest foaming brush. 

I hit the highway at speeds that would have made the protagonist from Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” look like he was driving a float in the Tournament of Roses Parade.  Trees, mailboxes and hitchhikers whizzed past as I desperately tried to out run whatever white trash Wendigo haunts that town.

This haste was to blame for the lives I took – for my becoming a murderer.  A mass murderer, really. In my defense it’s hardly my fault – these hapless victims should have known better than to wander directly into the path of a man recklessly fleeing a Mayberry so awful that Andy Griffith would have eaten Opie at birth as an act of mercy.

The victims in question were hundreds of small white butterflies that swarmed the road at several points in the Malheur National Forest. At first I thought there were tiny balls of fluff bouncing off my windshield, then I looked closely and noticed they had wings. 

I do not know how many of them I killed but should there ever come a day when butterflies rule the earth I will be the first against the wall.

Crossing into Nevada was a relief – not only was I able to put Oregon’s weak-kneed speed limits behind me but I was pretty sure that the Wendigo’s house-arrest anklet would stop him from crossing state lines. 

I have no more affection for the desert than I do any other climate that will kill you without taking the slightest notice but I concede that it has a grandeur all it’s own with jagged outcroppings of rock silhouetted against the sky and the way shadows of clouds lay across the mountains like drop cloths.

It’s not all grand, of course.  Much of it is, as my Saskatchewan-born grandfather once said of his own home, “as flat as piss on a plate”, and driving through it can become wearing over several hours.  At one point the boredom became so acute I found myself listening to finance shill Dave Ramsey‘s radio show and being deeply concerned about the fate of those calling in.  I actually teared up after one caller confessed that her husband was adamant about keeping their new truck, even though the prohibitive monthly payment meant they would lose the house they currently shared with their children.

The shedding of a tear not related to immediate physical injury or the loss of a sporting contest shocked me out of my stupor and I snapped off the radio. To reclaim my masculinity I turned up the CD player and sang along to “Sylvia’s Mother” until I arrived in Winnemucca.  Before you talk smack about Dr. Hook all I have to say is this – there is nothing more distinctly male than trying to talk your way past a woman’s mother.  

My hotel room at Winner’s Casino would have been unremarkable under normal circumstances but after the Little Pine Inn it felt like the Taj Mahal - ”I can walk around in my bare feet?  I don’t need to sleep in my clothes?  I have arrived in life.”

And in rarefied company no less

Post Index:

Part 1:  Get on the Boat, Son

Part 2:  Radio Nowhere

Part 3:  By the Side of the Road

Part 4:  Cthulhu & the Dirty Shame

Part 5:  Like a Bat Out of Hell

Part 6:  Love Me, I'm a Liberal

So You Think You Can Write

This year I decided to participate in the Victoria Times-Colonist's writing contest.  The first round was a free-form submission (poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction) of no more than 500 words, due by September 9.  From the pool of entrants, judges would select four finalists who would be given four assignments over the next month (1 per week).  Each batch of assignments would be judged weekly and the winning entry printed in the Sunday Edition of the Times-Colonist.

My entry was a story about two brothers growing up in rural Tennessee, a fictional piece I put together the night before deadline.  Fiction is new to me, so it was a challenge but the characters had been rolling around in my head for about a year so when I finally sat myself down to the work it wasn't as hard as I'd expected.

Almost immediately after this my trip down to the Olympia Weekend in Las Vegas (article forthcoming) and I more or less forgot about the contest.  Then, while at a truck stop in southern Nevada on my return journey I received a call from Denise Helm, acting Editor-in-Chief at the Times-Colonist, informing me I had been selected as a finalist!

My first assignment arrived immediately and so I began work while making my way home, using my voice recorder to take notes while driving during the day and transcribing those notes in motel rooms at night.

As of today the contest is two weeks in and my third assignment was submitted yesterday.  The judges notes will be sent back Thursday and I'll know by Sunday whether or not my piece was chosen out of the four on offer.

Readers are allowed to vote for their favorite piece on the newspaper's web site and the author deemed "Reader's Choice" wins an iPad classic.  Overall winner receives a trip to a writer's festival next year on the Sunshine Coast.

Read my submissions and vote for me (Brennan Storr, in case you were unsure) as "Reader's Choice" at www.timescolonist.com/writingcontest.

Meet Your Olympians: Jay Cutler

This is the beginning of my coverage of the 2011 Mr. Olympia Competition. Further updates will be published on largelythetruthmrolympia.wordpress.com

Current Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler is exactly the kind of person you want as the spokesman for your sport – he’s conventionally handsome, personable and capable of assembling words into sentences that express thoughts more complex than “protein!” and “woman!”.  Granted, many of those sentences concern either the mechanics of lifting heavy things or plugging the various supplements for which Cutler is spokesman, but then this is the sport of bodybuilding and not the National Poetry Championships.  That’s not to say Cutler isn’t intelligent – he has an Associate Degree in Criminal Justice & has invested his contest winnings into real estate rather than, say, an Escalade made out of cocaine – it’s just that erudition and business acumen are not what get him on the cover of Muscle & Fitness.

What gets Cutler’s name in lights is the fact that he looks the way Pinocchio would have if Gepetto had been wishing Sherman tanks into life instead of wooden children.  In an interview given two weeks ago he gave his current weight at 275lbs, which at 5’9” and with a body fat percentage he claims gets as low as 3% (the bastard), means that Cutler is more or less the human equivalent of the marble statues Miami drug lords buy to decorate their atrium.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1973, Cutler grew up in nearby Sterling and attended Wachusett Regional High School where, at least by his own account, his teen years more or less resembled the happier parts of Friday Night Lights.

Football, along with working on the family farm & in his brother’s concrete business meant that Cutler had a well-developed physique even before he started bodybuilding on his 18^th birthday.  But, apparently it wasn’t enough to look like the proverbial brick shithouse, he wanted to be able to life one too. 

It didn’t take long for his competitive drive to take over and in 1993 Cutler won the National Physique Committee’s (NPC) Teen Nationals Middleweight competition.  In bodybuilding, the National Physique Committee is the organization which governs amateur athletes & in order to progress to professional status in the IFBB (International Federation of Bodybuilders) an athlete must first win an NPC pro qualifying national contest.  With help from mentor Bruce Vartanian, a Worcester businessman and bodybuilder, and diet guru Chris Aceto, Cutler swept the 1996 NPC nationals and turned pro.

Since then he’s been top dog in 15 other competitions, including 3 wins at the Arnold Classic, the Golden Globes to Mr. Olympia’s Oscars, but it wasn`t until he claimed the Mr. Olympia title from reigning 8-time champ Ronnie Coleman in 2006 that Cutler became king of the bodybuilding world.  After a surprise loss to Dexter Jackson in 2008, Cutler came back to win 2009 & 2010 and heads into the 2011 Olympia the defending 4-time champion.

The $200,000 Mr. Olympia prize purse is just the beginning of theperks that accompany winning bodybuilding’s top title – there’s also opportunity for product endorsements (Cutler reps for MuscleTech, among others), guest posing spots (paid, non-competitive appearances onstage at bodybuilding events), and merchandising (Cutler’s online store sells his line of apparel and a host of other products).

It`s well that there are other ways for a championship bodybuilder to earn a buck, as the title does not come cheap – in an interview with Muscle Mag, Cutler claimed to spend $30,000 a year on massage therapy alone.  His dietary requirements, between 4,000 and 7,000 calories a day including a full 5lbs of fish (which he despises), translate into an estimated $100,000 annual food budget and in a 2009 interview with the blog Vegas Deluxe, Cutler joked, “I am single-handedly supporting CostCo.”

Showing the kind of foresight one rarely sees in professional athletes, Cutler acknowledges that his career as a professional bodybuilder has an expiration date and he has planned for his future, “I have invested in real estate. I have contracts and sponsors that I continue with even after I retire,” he tells Vegas Delxue.  “I will still promote bodybuilding to the best of my ability.”  He says too that while he intends to continue weight training, his retirement will mean the end of the intensive training he goes through for the Olympia, “I am going to shrink down,” says Cutler. “And I’m going to throw the fish out the window.”

Die-hard fans have said that going into the 2011 Olympia Weekend Cutler looks confident and happy but based on the few interviews I’ve seen I don’t know that I agree.  Physically he looks good but he seems tired and unenthusiastic, but then maybe it’s difficult to summon energy when a camera is shoved in your face shortly after you’ve finished throwing around a few hundred pounds.

One imagines that if Cutler were to lose this year’s Olympia to a contender like Phil Heath or Kai Greene we could see his retirement announced shortly after the Sheru Classic in Mumbai, India, on September 23-24. Bodybuilding is a heavily political sport, however, and the IFBB could certainly use a spokesman like Cutler for a few more years.

Time will tell.

Other Meet Your Olympians profiles:

Kai Greene
Phil Heath

Jay Cutler at the 2011 Mr. Olympia:
Thursday Afternoon Press Conference GalleryFriday Night Prejudging GallerySaturday Night Final GalleryPhil Heath is the New Mr. Olympia

Largely the Truth @ the 2011 Mr. Olympia Competition

You read that right.  Less than three weeks from now, on September 9, I will be firing up Etta, my sleek, silver Corolla S, and driving 2100km down the Veteran's Memorial Highway to Las Vegas for the 2011 Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding Competition.

The culture of bodybuilding has fascinated me since I started lifting weights six years ago.  The behavior I've seen in the gym, from simple preening to grunting that would make a rutting bull in the next room say, "There must be something serious going on over there", is as strange as it is hard to ignore.  Documentaries like Pumping Iron & books like Harrison Pope's The Adonis Complex - presenting as they do a world teeming with insecurity, neurosis and human bodies pushed to extreme - have only cemented that fascination.

Now I've decided to take in that world's biggest event - the Joe Weider Olympia Weekend 2011 at the Orleans Hotel & Las Vegas Convention Center.  My Silver VIP Package (keep your remarks to yourself) secures me access & reserved seating as follows:

• Early Entry to Meet The Olympians - Thursday, Sept. 15, 7 PM
• Olympia Weekend Expo - Early Entry - Friday, Sept. 16, 9:30 AM - 5 PM
• Olympia Weekend Expo - Early Entry - Saturday, Sept. 17, 9:30 AM - 5 PM
• Fitness / Figure / Bikini/ Ms. Olympia Judging - Friday, Sept. 16, 10:30 AM
• Fitness Olympia Finals/Ms. Olympia Finals/Mr. Olympia Judging - Friday, Sept. 16, 7 PM
• Olympia 202 Showdown - Reserved Seating - Saturday, Sept. 17, 10:30 AM
• 202 Showdown / Figure Olympia Finals / Mr. Olympia Finals - Saturday, Sept. 17, 7 PM
• Olympia Victory Gala, Saturday, Sept. 17, 11 PM

From my base of operations at the Circus, Circus Hotel & Casino I will be blogging events, uploading photos and generally trying to make sense of it all at largelythetruthmrolympia.wordpress.com.  You can also keep up with events via my twitter account @largelythetruth.

Meet Your Olympians:

Jay Cutler
Kai Greene
Phil Heath