Thanks for the Memories: A Dumb Eulogy for The Little Grey Truck

Blog Entry, September 2014:

“Sometimes I miss being four years old and waiting all day long for the neighbor kid to get home so I could drive his little battery-operated car that topped out at 2-and-a-half miles per hour around the block, but then I remember that I have a real-life vehicle that (used to) top out at 120 and that that I can drive it anywhere I want because I am twenty-three years old and I get the exact same kind of excited. This particular nostalgic joy is important to my sense of freedom, which feels a bit threatened lately. When my truck finally kicks the bucket this picture is gonna make me sob.”

I am 26 now and last week my loyal little Ranger finally did sort of kick the bucket in an extremely slow-motion-four-car-ice-accident-nightmare.  I did not cry but I sure am sad about it.

On the bright side I have a slightly newer and objectively better Ford Ranger that is four-wheel drive and has 105,000 fewer miles and mostly everything works. We are still in the bonding stage but I am hopeful that we will have new adventures that perhaps the little grey truck was not altogether up for.

I understand that my sentimental attachment to my lovely loyal little truck is unreasonable because to anyone else it is a smelly worthless garbage float but I was the proud Captain of the Smelly Worthless Garbage Float for ten years and when I sit in the ink-and-mud stained driver’s seat and struggle with the ignition until the engine wakes up with a screechy yawn I feel nothing but joy and pride which is very dumb and I know it.

In case you are interested, here is a list of The Little Grey Truck’s, umm, quirks, some good some not, in no particular order:

• The cabin light does not come on because I took it out for uninteresting reasons, but we all have phones with flashlights these days so it’s really fine. If you open the glove box, there is a light inside that creates a warm, romantic glow.
• Tailgate is sort of hard to open due to a faulty handle but is a very fun-and-easy repair once every three years or so using heavy-duty zip ties or really anything on hand.
• Tape player is in tiptop shape. Never doesn’t play the tape, obediently skips forward and backward, pauses when asked.
• Accident-related damage, includes bendy front bumper, fixable smooshed headlight, fixable smooshed taillight.
• Pretty new snow tires and two to four 60-pound sandbags make rear-wheel driving in the Colorado snow “not that bad, really!”
• Brand new trillion dollar heater hose connector is a new and fine addition to a sort of dirty radiator that does not leak anymore!
• Driveshaft is wonkier than it used to be but was recently repaired for a billion and a half dollars. U-joint was also repaired but since repair suspected imbalance causes vibrations from 40-55 mph which are minor and can be accepted or even avoided by never going any of those speeds.
• Check Engine Light comes on periodically, sometimes just for attention, but last inquiry indicates an issue with the Evap control system purge solenoid that made it into 2017’s New Year’s Resolutions.
• Grey color is strikingly beautiful and vehicle has been described as “magnificent artistic treasure,” “aesthetic triumph,” and “glorious adorable masterpiece, precious and dignified in every way."
• Someone pushed the cigarette lighter into the dash one time and only fixed it on a cosmetic level.
• Someone spilled black India Ink on the passenger’s seat on her way back from figure drawing class and did not notice until the next day because the cabin light does not work.
• A high school student wrote directions to a house-sitting job and lyrics to an emo song from the radio on the dashboard in pencil and later found out that erasers don’t work very well on dashboards but layers of dust have since covered up the evidence.
• Gas mileage has been described as “really not so bad for what it is!”
• The driver’s side door does not unlock from the outside. This isn’t a big deal unless you feel that unlocking the passenger door and sticking your butt into the air while holding your pants up with one hand and reaching across to let yourself in with the other is somehow undignified, in which case the solution is to swallow your pride and execute the maneuver quickly and discreetly after glancing around the parking lot two-to-three times.

I know I just called it a Smelly Worthless Garbage Float but it’s actually pretty great and if you or someone you know is interested in owning this wonderful creature please let me know because that movie about that Brave Little Toaster watching his friends get torn apart in a salvage lot really left an impression on me as a child and I’d much rather see it go to a good home where it can roam free, otherwise I may have to store it in my parent’s garage where they have plenty of room I’m sure, and probably won’t even notice it’s there, I bet.

The Game

Sunday night I attended a Professional Football Game on purpose. I am pretty jealous of how these nerds celebrate their beloved team and attending a live event brought me a little bit closer to understanding their culture.

While the game itself was pretty entertaining, highlights included a camera that can fly and a real live horse named Thunder. My favorite part is when, in between innings (?) the camera zooms in on the nerds in the stadium seats; I like to watch them dance or yawn and I like it when they suddenly look up and notice that their yawning or dancing was just broadcasted to the entire stadium. I like it when they realize this a fraction of a second before the screen switches to some other nerd and they only have a fraction of a second to wave.

Here are some things I heard because they were shouted near my ear by people who were actually pretty sober:

In response to a play (I do not know how to be more specific.):

“IT’S A HUGE HOLE OH MY GOSH THAT HOLE IS HUGE I CAN SEE IT FROM HERE IT’S A HUGE HOLE GET IN THERE OH MY GOD GET IN THE HOLE!”

(I do not know what this means.)

When a tie happened and then overtime happened:

“no no no a tie is like kissing your sister oh no oh no”

(I do not know what this means.)

Shouted as if it was an actual suggestion when Number Ten got a touchdown:

“NUMBER TEN YOU HAVE TO WORK ON YOUR TOUCHDOWN DANCE YOUR TOUCHDOWN DANCE IS TERRIBLE!”

A blossoming friendship:

Man in orange jersey: Dude! Man! Yes, you! WHERE did you get that jersey?!

Other man in a similar orange jersey: oh man! Dude! This website--it's like Amazon but in CHINA! TWENTY DOLLARS for this jersey!

Man in orange jersey: WHAT THE HELL NO WAY NO WAY FOR TWENTY DOLLARS OH MY GOSH I AM LOSING MY GODDAMN MIND. (presses hands to face) TWENTY DOLLARS… (adds url to “notes” app on iPhone.)

I'm aware that these are probably pretty regular things to overhear at a professional football game, but this was the first one I went to so it was new for me. The whole ordeal is so passionate.

I've always been a little jealous of the way people bond over the game the next morning, so when my (very attractive) dentist and his (also pretty attractive) assistant started talking about last night's game I thought "this is your moment. you were at the game. you can have input in this sports conversation." But it was not my moment because the giant man-hands of my dentist and the also large man-hands of his assistant were in my tiny mouth covered in my bloody saliva and my lips were numb and I could not make a single noise about the sports game until they were done, but do you know what?  Even though the moment had passed, I brought it up as soon as they removed their hands and took the cotton balls out of my cheeks and we talked about the sports game as one talks about the dry weather we're having and for a moment I felt like I belonged to something bigger and it was excellent. 

A Three-Way and Two Conies.

As a kid I lived in Kentucky for a few years and I had not returned until Friday when I made a pilgrimage to Danville for a family reunion where I saw more dead raccoons than I have ever seen live raccoons, which is saying a lot. To say that I saw 45 dead raccoons is a conservative estimate. Same goes for possums.

In Kentucky and southern Ohio, if you've already had fried chicken for breakfast and you aren't feeling the fried chicken again for lunch, Gold Star Chili's are an extremely Mid-Western option you can settle for. At Gold Star Chili I had to hear my dad say the words: "I Want a Three-Way and Two Conies." A Three-Way, turns out, is spaghetti with chili and cheese, but it was an alarming thing to hear my dad say, nonetheless. My dad loves Gold Star and he loves “Three-Ways.” He looooves them.

Later we went to the reunion at a rented building in a community park where we ate three to four flocks of chicken. My Nana said she "told every woman to bring a dessert, oh well, except for you of course sweet-pea." I was offended for three reasons but I love my Nana a lot so I let it go and tried to make the most of the resulting dessert tables. Here I met my Nana's best friend named Barbie who told me stories about railroad tracks and drag racing and near-death experiences. 

Almost immediately after lunch we went to dinner at the Beaumont Inn. My Nana's mother worked there in 1919 and named my Nana after the owner (pictured sternly below,) when it was a woman's college, so that was pretty neat for me to learn. Despite being a woman's university, there were entire walls covered in pictures of old men all over the place. There was also a pretty fancy restaurant that I wore a hoodie and some old shorts to because I don't know any better. The restaurant features "traditional Kentucky cuisine including our famous yellow-legged fried chicken, two-year Kentucky-cured ham, corn pudding and cornmeal batter cakes."

On our way to the Cincinnati Airport we stopped by Old Fort Harrod State Park, a tourist attraction which I remembered vividly because their realistic reenactments of battles between the settlers and the Native Americans were a lot for me as a child. People died and horses died. I remember they mentioned the dead horses and dead horses are a tough topic when you are five. This time I ate doughnuts with my family in the historic cemetery while we waited for the train to pass and it was still pretty unsettling. 

At the end of the day it was a worthwhile weekend. I revisited my childhood home which was the first place I collected dead things to make art. I ate Kentucky Chess Cake twice in one sitting. I looked at the Hunter's Moon over a spooky black barn. I remembered a lot of things I had forgotten, like Fireflies, or that time my brother got a juniper berry stuck in his ear. 

There is a place called Carter Caves in Kentucky that I sort of thought I had made up in my head, but talking to the people who took me there cleared that right up and if memory serves me (not likely at all) it was amazing and I have to go back to explore the caves as a risk-taking adult, so hopefully there will be more to come on that adventure. Until then, thanks for reading, I promise one of these days my blog post will be about photography.

Mandatory Accidental Self-Reflection

I had to write about myself in 500 characters or less and I spent just as much time on sarcastic bio lines as I did on the actual thing because I am a master of Productive Procrastination. 

"Julianna Woolums is a professional camp photographer who will probably die a professional camp photographer, if she has her way."

“Professional camp photographer Julianna Woolums will continue to be a professional camp photographer until it becomes more efficient for camp to replace her with a remote control flying drone camera.”

“Photographer Julianna Woolums is a pretty insufferable Yellowstone Doomsday predictor in the winter-months.”

“Julianna Woolums just typed her name too many times and is Googling legal name changes. Google results confirm this option is not affordable.”

“Having graduated with a Very Useful Art Degree in 2013, she panicked and ran away to Durango, Colorado where she remains to this day even when she is not physically there.”

“After graduating with a B.A. in Photography she found a spacious place, free of rent, in her parents’ unfinished basement where she learned to play ten to twelve chords on the Ukulele and really blossomed as an adult. She is insecure about her use of a possessive apostrophe after a plural noun but is pretty sure she is right."

“She excels at staying awake, and is proficient in other marketable skills like road-trip DJ-ing, shooing horses back to where they came from, and keeping an eye on goats.”

“In her free time she enjoys brushing dogs, collecting dead bugs, and jogging but only when in sight of athletic-looking cars and other joggers.”

“Her hobbies include looking at Instagram until her tendonitis flares up, trail-running until heavy breathing makes her rib dislocate a little again, and incorrectly predicting the weather with her two-year-old knee injury.”

“She resides just beyond the young and exciting part of Denver with her two oldest female friends and two black cats, one good, one just okay. All are single.”

How the Denver Rock and Mineral Show Exceeded my Already High Expectations

As a rule, I keep my expectations low to avoid disappointment. It’s a pessimistic practice, sure, but it usually works out pretty well and I am delightfully surprised more often than not. But oh boy do I get worked up about Rock and Mineral Shows and they are never disappointing, not even a little bit.

My budget frowns upon rock-buying, so I thought I’d take my camera and do a little work/play and reward myself with a productive Sunday. Inspired by the work of Photographer Garry Winogrand, I switched my DSLR to monochrome and braced myself for the inevitable discomfort of photographing strangers at a public event.

Except it was not awkward! My first few tepid shots of the Madagascar tent led me to Justin, who introduced himself immediately and did not get weird when I asked him to pose with his hilarious smiling agate. (The key is to preface the weird request by acknowledging that you are making a weird request so that people know you know you’re weird.)

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Justin, who is delightful, and his favorite rock, Cookie Monster.

Gaining confidence, I asked the woman from whom I bought several lovely pieces, if I could take her photograph. I was impressively smooth. Smoother than I have ever been. Smooth as polished hematite.

 “I like your shirt,” I said.

(She and her husband had matching custom shirts featuring a marmot captioned “Still Digging.”)

 “Do you mind if I take your photograph, I’m documenting my day at the rock show for a new blog.”

“Of course,” she said.

Nailed it.

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"Still Diggin."

The adventure gave me a much-needed dose of artistic confidence. Launching this website was intimidating; the task has been a nagging unmarked item on my to-do list for more than three years, so creating a whole new set of images and uploading them in less than a day was encouraging. At Colvig I am given a constant stream of new material—pirate-themed lake days, and homemade unicorns are a tough act to follow in the “real world” which presents far less obvious photographic opportunities. When I come back from Durango I’m discouraged by the mundane and I shut down. My hope in paying for a professional website, having business cards, offering products, even going back to school-- all of these forward-motion type-things—is that I can maintain some of the summer’s momentum to expand myself as an artist and make use of the indulgent degree I allowed myself to pursue five years ago. 

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The bats that live in the Art Barn at Camp better watch out because I am getting ideas...

Freaking Out

My first ever business cards just came in the mail and I am Freaking Out. They are amazing. I bought the matte-finish triple-ply cardstock premium option with rounded corners because I didn’t know any better and now I cannot stop looking at them; they are the fanciest things I own. They have a satisfying heavy kind of feeling when stacked and I am reluctant to give them away… Today I replaced my garbage disposal (which has rotted away from the sink due to being sixty-or-seventy years old) and I keep washing the foul debris off my hands and drying them carefully so I can touch these soft fancy cards for no reason.

It’s hard to convince myself that I deserve them, so I’ve been reading up on impostor syndrome* which is a thing all of my 20-something-college-grad friends have and it is ridiculous because they are all capable and qualified and talented and wonderful and they fully deserve the things they have worked for.

Making a website and ordering cards have been my most successfully procrastinated projects of all time-- for five years they have plagued my to-do lists-- but this year I came across a fortune cookie in a van door at the base of a hiking trail near an abandoned mine in Silverton, Colorado that read: “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” There are a lot of boring personal factors that contributed to the kick-in-the-pants that I gave myself this year after camp, but that dumb fortune cookie sure has echoed around in my hyper-active-post-camp-positive-attitude-everything-is-beautiful-in-the-late-summer-light-brain, and honestly it has been life-changing. (Note: I am not exaggerating. I am not fond of hyperbole. That dumb fortune cookie is changing my trajectories in very real ways.)

The point is, little concrete things like a website-that-is-not-a-Tumblr blog and fancy, soft, three-ply business cards are tiny steps towards predicting a future that doesn’t involve living under a bridge shouting riddles at bridge-users, or, more realistically, living in my parent’s basement until I’m sixty-or-seventy years old and I inherit the upstairs part of the house but am too old to make the ascent. I am pretty excited about creating this fortune-cookie-future and it’s 11:11 now so I’m going to go ahead and sign off with a wish that the Yellowstone Supervolcano does not erupt and ruin all of the things I am excited about. **

*Note: I originally typo-ed “impaster syndrome” and if you say that out loud to yourself you sound like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed and it is so funny to me. You should try it.

**Note Note: If you are out there wishing “No one else’s wishes come true,” and I know you are out there, you are the worst and I think you know it.