Another blog bites the dust…

…for now at least.

I gave it a fair shot. I really thought the angle would work well: a blog about a passionate climber who is not a pro, not a dirtbag, not a world traveller. Just a regular Joe that can write ok and who climbs a lot. I still believe it’s a worthy angle for a blog, but I just can’t seem to keep it going, and I understand why.

The good climbing blogs I read are those kept by climbers with a one-track mind. These guys live and breathe climbing day in day out, and it is because of this unswerving dedication and fervor that we can live vicariously through them.

As for me, I have too many diverging interests to keep a single topic blog going strong. If I hadn’t forced myself to keep the focus on climbing related topics for this blog, you would have had to deal with posts on contemporary literature, German cars, college teaching, raising kids, meditation, the Montreal Canadiens, the Tour de France, the world series of poker, Call of Duty, Entourage, the Modern Life, and iphone apps.

I wouldn’t read a blog about all this, and I sure as hell won’t write one. So this is it for now.

I will focus on the other website I have that deals with the climbing in my region. As it is a registry of crags in my region as well as a place for the regional climbing club to disseminate information, it has a reason to exist beyond my whims and fancies. You can visit it there: http://rochelaurentienne.wordpress.com/

I know I’ve kept a few regular readers for the almost three years that I maintained Climber in Suburbia. To you I say thanks. A couple of hits every week is all I needed to keep me smiling and happy in the blogosphere. Hopefully there were a couple of posts here and there that were worth your while.

I guess in the end the coming and going of blogs is to be expected. It is an inherent part of that weird form of communication and personal expression.

I was very happy for a conversation of sorts I had going for a while with guys like Tissue, Julian, Peter Beal and others. Peter’s blog is still one of the best out there, and hopefully Tissue and Julian will find inspiration yet again to keep their own little island of personal expression going, and if not that’s ok too.

So, until further notice, the climber in suburbia is gone climbing…

The Mid-season Belated Update

It always seems to happen like that: right in the middle of the climbing season, when you’d think there would be a whole lot of things to blog about, there isn’t.

What can I say? The season started on a high note with me going back to Red River Gorge for two weeks of awesome climbing, beer drinking, and just plain ol’ relaxing. I came back in the best shape of my life and started my summer routine with a quick visit to Rumney and a few trips in the Laurentiens to figure out my projects for the summer.

I guess I could report on each of these things separately, but it’s simply not what my blog’s ever been about. I don’t really read trip reports so I certainly won’t bore myself writing one. Rather, I’ll try a bullet point approach to all the little tidbits of info and news and events in my life that could’ve deserved their own blog post…but won’t cuz none of these things would be that interesting on their own. So here goes nothing.

• I have the best job in the world. I’ve been in vacation for a month already and I still have another two months to go before I head back, and that’s only one of the reasons why it’s the best job out there. (that one probably deserves a whole post. Maybe later)
• RRG: even though it may be the best rock in the world to climb on, there is some truth to the “mindless jug-haul” stereotype about the place. Not a criticism though, just an observation. I’d still go back year after year,  no question there.
• Rumney: the routes, though much shorter than RRG, are much more intimidating. Big forearms will get you to the chains of most RRG climbs, for Rumney you’ll need a good head too, or bigger cohones.
• I flashed my first 5.12 at Rumney. Sure it’s a short 4 bolt 12a that could be (probably has been) highballed, but who cares, my ego liked it.
• Highway 15, the one you have to drive on to get to the crags in the Laurentiens, is under construction…AGAIN. There is no way to exaggerate the extent to which this is aggravating. Why can’t they just do it once right and leave it be? Where do they get these cracker jack box engineers that need five years to rejuvenate a 10 kilometer straight line stretch of highway? Stop embezzling money and get it done for f*ck’s sake.
• Because of the above rant, I’ll try changing my geographical zone of predilection for the rest of the season and see what all the FAists have been up to in Lanaudiere. Heck, it’s a different highway so it’s bound to be better.
• I found my new crag car, but this event has become such a headache that it’ll surely get it’s own post/rant later on. The rant, by the way, will be directed at me, who somehow always finds a way to make relatively simple things, like changing cars, into something long and complicated and ultimately frustrating, all that to get a better car than I can actually afford.
• And finally, I was caught in the worst thunderstorm/downpour ever last week at a crag in the Laurentiens. It killed my cellphone, and fed my hatred of meteorologists. 3 hours and a half of driving for one lousy warm-up climb. At least I wasn’t stuck trying to get my gear back from a second pitch like another party there. Talk about epic.

And that concludes my mid-season update. Hope everyone is getting their daily dose of climbing.

This Is Not a New Age Post

I’ve always been very dismissive of cheesy wal-mart self-help book mottoes like: “live fully in the moment,” “live everyday with purpose,” “seize the day.”

Everyone has a new-age auntie who makes her own jewelry out of ‘stones of energy’ and sends you a weekly email with a picture of a sunrise and an inspiring phrase like:  “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.”

These inspirational sayings and quotes are so overused they end up losing all meaning for most people. When you’re confronted to one you don’t stop and ponder, you just see the fundamental delusion on the surface and move on.

And then there’s me, with a family history of anxiety and a retard of a brain I simply can’t turn off. Define anxiety? Simple: an incapacity to communicate with one’s own brain to tell it to stop having stupid irrational thoughts.

The best way to live with anxiety genes, as it turns out, is to try and emulate what all the aforementioned quotes say: Live in the moment as much as possible, do not let worries about the past and the future occupy your head space, clear your mind of everything but what is happening right now, etc.

It is of course much easier said than done. If it wasn’t hard to achieve people wouldn’t need inspirational quotes to remind them. I was led to meditation about a year ago, and though I have come to believe that it may be my salvation on the long haul, I suffer from the same discipline issue I have when I try to train for climbing: I don’t stick to it long enough. But still I always come back to it every time I feel slightly more anxious. And with good reason. Deep down I don’t really care if I climb harder, so of course my motivation for training dwindles. But with meditation it’s very different: if I was able to train my brain not to have thoughts (figuratively speaking), if only for a period of the day, that would be a huge step forward.

And then, maybe you can see me coming, I realize I am already able to empty my mind of all thoughts, and I even do it effortlessly. It happens every time I go climbing outside. When I am climbing, I am fully in the moment. My thoughts never go beyond the next sequence of moves, or the fear of the fall I see happening in the near future. For a moment I am what I do. And that, for me, is the best feeling in the world.

That’s why I climb I guess. It’s become more than a sport or a leisure. It’s become a form of meditation, a way to realize myself fully. And don’t you go and imagine I’m some sort of new age hippie who closes his eyes before every climb and requires perfect silence and talks of climbs as spiritual experiences. It’s none of this. Well, I mean it’s ok to be like that. It’s just not the kind of climber I am. I’m a social climber and I love cragging, so I talk a lot before during and after the climb. I can even talk about my real life and my worries, but when I’m at the crag these thoughts don’t affect me; they are completely phased out by the next climb. This whole climbing as meditation thing is just a way to describe how beneficial climbing actually is for my mental health.

That’s also why I believe in meditation: because I know that that head-space really exists. I go there when I climb. I just have to find a way to reproduce that mindset elsewhere than the crag.

Suburban Perspective…

I’m in an odd mood this morning. I ask peculiar questions about where I live, and they come in the form of short phrases:

The suburb as wasteland; the suburb, where the search for the authentic begins and ends; soccer-moms and hockey-dads; being at best half-awake; not being part of the scene; watching the scene as it unfolds.

What does it all mean.

If I were to create a short video about what my suburb feels like, the video would be shot with a pin-hole effect, so that the larger picture is missing, and would start with a close-up shot of a big green sign over a nearby freeway. The camera would not move and there would be cars in the background moving past, out of focus, and even farther away almost out of the frame would be a few houses, their back to the freeway. Yes, it would be a great opening scene. I already know what music I would use; something by The National, perhaps their song Fake Empire. Yes, that would be fitting.

These thoughts should make me feel depressed, disjointed even, but strangely they don’t. They make me curious. They make me want to understand the place better. Despite the seeming blandness, the conspicuous absence of passion from the suburbs, the inescapable ordinariness at the core of life in the suburbs. Despite all this I am at peace with my suburb. Why?

It’s a knowledge that goes beyond the rational. It’s not so much about the fact that I grew up in a suburb, not so much about the fact that it’s a good place to raise children–I have a nice park and an elementary school a few hundred yards away, sure–but it’s not about that. It’s not about avoiding the speed of the city. It’s not about the remoteness of the country.

It may be about a deeper form of acceptance–about acknowledging where life takes you naturally, and embracing that place… the gentle humming of the pool’s water-pump, the faint sound of a lawn-mower in the distance, children playing in the street, the smell of propane from your neighbor’s backyard… yes.

Breaking News: Some Local Climbers Are Morons

One thing that’s nice about places like Rumney, the Red River Gorge, and probably any other major sport climbing destination: clip-in lower-offs.

You finish your route, clip-in, and your done. No need to anchor yourself, untie, thread, and re-tie at the anchor. It’s quicker AND safer, as all the steps previously mentioned involve a greater risk of human error. And, you know, it’s sport climbing: it’s supposed to be hassle-free and quick.

There are two or three crags I visit regularly in my region. They’re not big venues: 20, maybe 30 routes, all bolted. They were mostly equipped by the same two or three dudes (Let’s get this out-of-the-way right now: I am eternally grateful to them. They did a great job and it was all pro bono, I acknowledge this.) and their anchors are pretty much always the same: two bolts and a set of quick-links or chains, sometimes just two glue-ins.

These are adequate anchors, and I understand their choice: when you want to equip lots of routes, things get expensive, and you’ll want to save on costs where you can; quick links are much cheaper than shutters. And this is where I come in. Last season I started adding extra quick-links and biners to some of these anchors (the extra quick-links to keep the biners perpendicular to the rock). I figured since I do these routes often I might as well contribute that. At first I added brand new regular straight gate biners. Not very durable, but in my mind better than nothing, and not that big a hassle to change when they’re evidently done for anyway. It seemed like an easy way for me to contribute something useful to my local crags. It’s also a fairly common occurrence at sport climbing crags (useful to keep in mind for what comes next).

But then something I didn’t quite expect happened: my biners disappeared. Stolen? But who would steal equipment left there for that person’s very benefit? Of course I started leaving these biners to make my own warm-up routes and projects quicker to dispatch, but I naturally thought everyone would be happy for the more convenient lower-off.

Not so. After starting a thread on a local forum, I was appalled by different replies: One user said he considered any left-behind equipment as booty, and compared my lower-off biners to a nut left-behind at a belay station on a multi-pitch trad route. Another user said he would naturally think they were forgotten there by the previous party, and hence ok to snatch. Yet another said there was no way to know whether the biners could be trusted and would take them down for everyone’s safety (to which I answered he didn’t have to use them if he didn’t trust them, but who was he to take that decision for the whole community). Hell, even the guy who had equipped some of these routes commented that his anchors weren’t installed to accommodate extra biners (?!?), and that I could get some of my biners back if I wanted them.

Undeterred, I started adding stainless steel locking carabiners instead: safer and more durable. I thought it would take care of the trust issue for one thing: if the biner is bigger and heavier than the quick-link over it, what is there not to trust? I also tied them in with tie-wraps. Not that it would prevent anyone from stealing them, but so it would be clear to everyone that they were left there on purpose, and hence not forgotten, not booty.

Still, I went back last week, and lo and behold, the quick-links were there, the tie-wraps were there, but the locking biners were not. And so I conclude: some of the local climbers around here are morons. There is no other logical explanation. They are dweebs, morons, dicks.