21 Sep 2025 6 min read

Pacific Crest Trail - Days 153-154 - Bend, OR

We spend a couple days off in Bend, Oregon relaxing and doing chores to set us up for Washington.

Bend is a great little city. It feels quite a bit like Reno only without the negative externalities that come with basing a municipal economy around gambling (and divorce) for the better part of a century.

We floated the river, ate some fantastic food, slept in, did chores, and packed up a bunch of resupply boxes.

Bend turned an old lumber mill into a shopping district. We took Kristin’s REI sleeping bag to (a massive) REI because the zipper on her bag failed … but since she didn’t purchase it under her REI account, we were told that there was nothing they could do for us, because they 1. Don’t repair gear. 2. Couldn’t exchange it because they couldn’t verify that her REI sleeping bag came from REI … “you could have gotten this from anywhere” WTF. 3. Could only offer us a discount on a new sleeping bag.

In other words, I’m never spending another penny at REI.

We wound up taking Kristin’s sleeping bag over to a place called Gear Fix that repaired outdoor gear and sold second-hand and consignment gear. It was awesome.

$15 and 10 minutes later, her $350 sleeping bag was as good as new with a brand new replacement zipper slider.

Lava Road is what we have ahead of us hiking out of Bend at Mckenzie Pass - 8 miles of lava rock.

Rich looking like a Dad skeptical of his daughter’s new boyfriend.

Shaq makes gummy candies. I was aware of this fact because Liz Cook of Haterade wrote a post about them. They are ok. It’s pretty unsettling eating a bunch of small (although relatively huge for gummy candies) Shaquille O’Neal head shaped candies.

I’ve probably linked it here before, but the Haterade post appropriately titled I Tasted Honda’s Spicy Rodent-Repelling Tape is a strong contender for the funniest recent piece of writing on the internet.

We made a new friend.

Pro tip: when you are baking tater tots on a baking sheet (with parchment paper like a non-Neanderthal) in the oven, pull them out of the oven once they are extra crispy and push them all together into a raft in the center of the baking sheet before covering them with shredded cheese and Mexican hot sauce (Tapatío, Cholula, Valentina, etc.). Place additional shredded cheese piles covered with hot sauce on the sides of the now-centered cheesy tot raft and bake until the cheese on the raft is adequately melted and bubbling. Allow to cool for a minute and serve with sour cream on a plate with the now rigid and baked shredded cheese and hot sauce piles assembled into flames atop your cheesy tots. Serve as ”Tots del Diablo” (that’s Tots of the Devil) to huge applause.

That harsh trail life.

The Blockbuster in Bend is the last franchise of what was once an empire of 9000 stores.

Technology has evolved rapidly over the course of my lifetime.

Now there’s no need to leave your couch to find more media than you’d be able to stream in your lifetime.

David Foster Wallace wrote an essay on the subject of television in 1993 titled E. Unibus Pluram about television consumption and televisions ability to absorb, co-opt, and commercialize any movement in opposition to it. It’s an interesting piece that is as relevant as ever as we’ve almost universally abdicated social and communal responsibility in favor of six+ hours a day of media consumption (not to mention the requisite and futile virtual outrage as activism, of course).

He does end the essay on a relatively positive note. Single-entendre principles is one hell of an idea in present day America (if we can still call this abortion of those founding principles by that same name):

It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged “ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.