Supafly.com

My buddy Stephen spontaneously flew into Phoenix earlier this week to hike the Grand Canyon with his girlfriend’s family. We met up at Four Peaks at one in the morning after his flight got in. He slept for a few hours at my house and drove out of the city before dawn.

We met up tonight for a few hours before his flight took off back to Atlanta. We had dinner at Chelsey’s Kitchen on the patio and caught up on how our lives are coming around. The orange blossoms of Arcadia were in bloom, so everything smelled beautiful. That’s gotta be the most intoxicating aroma on the planet. You can get high just walking through a parking lot.

It’s been ten years since Stephen and I left Towns County High School for college, and we’ve both done so much since then. We really shot out of that town like a pebble out of a sling shot. Once we left the town limits, there was no turning back.

He’s lived in Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tahoe, and now Atlanta again. I lived in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, and now Phoenix. He’s traveled the country at least 20 times. I’ve traved to 230+ destinations in America. Although I spend more time in an airplane, he’s done a lot more high-altitude adventure. He’s backpacked all over the West. He’s snowboarded down many, many mountains.

I was the first to paddle a surf board into the Pacific (back in 1997), but Stephen has proven to be a more committed and talented surfer. One thing that stays the same is how much each of us love to ride bicycles. He does the more hardcore speed biking. I prefer the mountain bike that lets me explore the back alleys of cities. I’ve settled into a steady job where I get to be creative and productive. Stephen has skipped from job to job, whatever allowed him to live out the adventures he desired.

Both of us first saw our adventurous spirit when we were in Boy Scouts. I was 12 and he weas 11. Most boys that age want some adventure, but they are confined to their dullness of a neighborhood. They end up getting kicks out of being good at a video game or looking at dirty magazines. The two of us explored the east Coast in that Scout van with the rest of the guys in the troop. Over the years we were in Scouts, we spent at least a 100 nights out in the woods, braving the elements.

To this day, I am always thankful for these things: fresh water, enough food to not be hungry, and a dry shelter. I know what it’s like to lay in a wet sleeping bag through 8 hours of darkness. I’ve done it many, many nights. So it doesn’t matter how bad my day gets as an adult, I am still thankful to slide into a warm, dry bed.

So what if bottled water costs too much—at least it’s there, icy cold whenever you want to pay $2 at Circle K. When you are on the top of a mountain and only have ½ a cup of water for you and your tentmate for 2 days, now that sucks. That night I put four wood stakes in the ground and draped my plastic poncho over it like a sunken canopy. I stuffed the hood into a water bottled to serve as a funnel. I surrounded the bottle with rocks, and then went to bed praying for rain. I woke up the next morning to a full bottle of water. That was one of the best mornings of my life.

Candyce flew in from San Diego the same time Stephen was flying back to Atlanta. It’s so much easier to be at the airport when I have nowhere to go. It’s actually kind of fun. You get to people watch and enjoy the action. I was happy to see Stephen off and drive home with Candyce. I know that she and I won’t be able to continue the pace of adventure that I’ve had in the 10 years since I’ve graduated high school. But I do know that just being together is an adventure. Our life will be good together.

Tonight was so random. I was sitting in the grocery store parking lot, patiently waiting for the light to turn green so I could drive home. On the other side of the street, I saw two teenage boys dressed in black run away from what looked like a campfire. The flames rose high and began reflecting off the wall just a few feet away close to someone’s house. I was on the phone with Candyce. “Holy sh!t there’s a fire! I gotta go.”

I drove across the intersection through the red light. It was almost like I was on Frogger. A few seconds later I was dialed 911 before jumping out of the car. I ran through the ditch and my flip-flops towards the flame now 5 feet tall. As the 911 operator picked up the phone, I turned back towards my car and grabbed a gallon of milk I just bought at the store.

(Honestly, I look pretty stupid now that I think about it, talking on the phone while running through a ditch, wearing flip flops with a gallon of milk.)

I tore off the top doused the fire with 2% milk. I could smell the chemicals that teenagers poured on the dry bush. At this point, the excitement was over. I stood next to the fire answering the questions from the 911 operator. I looked to the left and right and realized that many other bushes could’ve caught on fire, and I was happy to be there when I was.

I met a cop in the parking lot five minutes later, and he hit me with the typical questions and officer might get someone who he believes is actually the culprit.

1. Where were you when you saw the fire?
2. Did you say there are how many boys?
3. And you just happen to be here?

I couldn’t help but want a laugh in his face. Really. I’m a 28-year-old man, I have better things to do than light bushes on fire, extinguish them with milk, and then report myself to the police. I gave him a quick thank you and then walked back to my car, just like the impatient New Yorkers do on an episode of Law & Order.

My brother is a police officer, so I called him this morning and retold the story. He got a good laugh out of it to.

Not once in my first 21 years did I call 911, but now that I’m out of college, I feel like I do it every year.

1. Several years ago I called 911 after I heard gunshots in my neighborhood. They said that they would send a police officer right over to check things out. I went back to sleep and forgot about it.
2. Six months later Matt Maher and I woke up in the middle of the night to a gigantic BOOM, the sound is so big that you imagine a dump truck filled with gasoline exploded in your living room. The windows of the house shook. He ran outside with his shotgun and I, well, I just ran outside. The dark street was peaceful. We called 911, and they said they would send someone over to check it out. (To this day, I have no idea what would make that loud of a sound.)
3. Earlier this year, I almost ran into a parked car in the middle of a busy street just after sunset. It was tucked behind a median in a dark corner where there were no street lights. I just knew the people driving through the intersection trying to make a green would rear end this thing and get seriously messed up. So I pulled over underneath a street light and ran to the median and back to the car to see if there was anyone inside.

It was empty and totally trashed. It smelled like cigarettes and alcohol in body odor. I felt so dirty. Whoever drove this car lived a life so unlike my own. The car wouldn’t start, but it did have enough juice in the battery to keep the parking lights on. I hopped in my car and drove off to my appointment. The 911 operator treated me similar as how the cop did last night. She prodded me trying to figure out if this was in fact my car and not someone else’s. I was blunt with her this and it’s not my car. I’m in my own car now I’ve got to go. I very neat car, by the way.

Ultimately, my good deed today with the fire was returned today by Leah, Nick’s girlfriend. She made a trip to the grocery store and picked me up a gallon of milk. There’s a true hero—no good story, no excitement. Just a nice thing to do for someone who really wanted to eat Lucky Charms.

I’m very proud to be marrying Candyce. She’s smart and beautiful, funny and loving. This is the kind of girl I always dreamed of and every day, she surprised me with some new parts of her character. So when it came time to planning a wedding I knew that she that we were to be different.

Quarrelsome people will fuss over details like bridesmaid’s dresses, flower arrangements, and the flavor of the cake. Stupid things. But not me and Candyce. We don’t have drama now, so why would we have drama about the wedding? It always irritated me when people complain about planning their big day. If planning a wedding cause them so much trouble they probably shouldn’t be getting married in the first place.

I already knew what to tell people it would go something like this.

“Weddings aren’t that big a deal…the planning isn’t that much work…don’t let someone else tell you that it’s a lot of work…”

I liked this attitude because I wanted to encourage other people to focus on the most important parts of the wedding by preparing your heart mind and soul for your future spouse someone you would spend the rest of your life with. Plus, Candyce and I are cool about things and we won’t come undone over silly things.

I admit I was confused. I abandoned any hope of having this “it’s not that much work” attitude a week and a half into planning. I went down quick. There are a lot of details that go in to planning a wedding.  And these details matter. If you do not pay attention to these details, your wedding will not be the celebration of joy and family that you wanted to be. In an effort to make things right, Candyce and discuss each detail and come to a conclusion together. It’s a good exercise for a young couple, but it’s also very exhausting. I tried not to complain or moan about this because I don’t want people to think I’m unhappy about getting married or that I’m unhappy about getting married to Candyce. I’m thrilled about that!  I just wish we hurry up and get there.

(Candyce and I both understand that the most important part of the wedding celebration is the wedding Mass. Anything above and beyond this really is insignificant. This gives us a lot of freedom and removes a lot of anxiety that would have plagued us otherwise.)

Tonight the Suns beat the Mavericks in double overtime. These are the two best team in the NBA, and this game proved to be the most exciting game of the year. What made the victory so sweet is that we were outscored in the 3rd quarter 38-16, which helped put us in a 15 point hole in the 4th quarter.

At this point in the game I knew my perfect day had gone horribly wrong. I showed up at Zipps promptly at 5:00 PM for the game, only to see an empty sports bar. All six waitresses told me in unison that the game was at 7:00 PM. I came back home and did some more work. Two hours later I stepped into a Zipps again, except this time it was a packed house staring up the final minutes of the first half were ticking down. I was so angry that I became sick and almost threw up at half time.

(It hard to write about a day that involved a sports game because I feel like I have to be a sports writer. I don’t have the patience to write like that and people don’t have the patience to read about it. So I’ll just stick to my experience of the game, not the game itself.)

This game was super exciting because it was a battle of the  top two MVP candidates: Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitski. Steve Nash scored 10 points in the last 55 seconds of the game. Let me say that again: Steve Nash scored 10 points in less than 1 minutes. Steve made every play his team needed to come out with a victory. He stole the ball, forced turnovers, drew charges, found the open man. Shoot, he even made the defensive rebound that allowed the final second tick off the clock for the victory. He was awesome. Unstoppable.

I was at Zipps with 100s of other fans and I celebrated like a madman. I have no desire to be cool about winning. I yell and pound my chest. I give strangers high fives and hugs. Why? Because I love the Suns. And when and where can a grown up have such raw and real emotion? Zipps was boiling with the joy of victory at the end of the 2nd overtime. It was party!

The Bizarre After Party

Candyce is out in California for the rest of the week, so I had to celebrate on my own. That was until my house filled up with friends who wanted to watch the newest episode of Lost. That party was interrupted by a stocky Indian who knocked on my door and told me he was out of gas. (This is a very Lost-like thing to happen.) His behavior was odd, so I kept two friends close by as I walked out of the garage to his car. At this point he was peeing in my yard. I thumped the can of gas on my shoulder and scolded him, “You can pee on a man’s yard and expect him to give you free gas!” He apologized and began walking away from my palm tree before he had finished his business. It wasn’t pretty.

He drove a beat-up Bronco, a gray version of what OJ got in trouble in. I opened up his gas cap and turned up the can and let it chug. Ten seconds later, and he had his shirt off and started flexing for Nick. Apparently he wanted to have a flex-off with my stocky roommate, but Nick wasn’t up for it. It was bizarre seeing this chubby Indian man flexing his flab in front of my house by the light of my garage. I nodded my head to show how impressed I was.

This little big man proved to be not so bright. I pulled my car around to give him a jump. As his Bronco charged, he explained that he has trouble with his battery because his massive sound system kills his alternator. Thirty seconds later he hopped behind his wheel, fired up his car, and then turned up his Bob Marley loud enough to shake the neighbor’s windows. This, of course, killed his car. The street went dark and silent. The three of us stood their in disbelief by how stupid this guy was.

We had to start all over again. Ten minutes later he was rolling and chugging out of the neighborhood. No woman no cry…

Candyce and I had great seats at 3 Suns games in the past week:

Last night: Suns vs. Hornets
Wednesday: Suns vs. Bobcats
Last Friday: Suns vs. Pacers

We were late for the Wednesday game against the Bobcats, but we got our fair share of entertainment in our overtime victory. We were late again last night up against the Hornets because of dense traffic, but we had an extra bit of fun because Pat Burke left us some “meet the players” passes at the front gate. So after the game Candyce and I winded our way down beneath the stands near the locker room. We got to see Pat again and have a fun chat. Then Marion and STAT came out stopped by our table on their way out. It was a brief encounter with the players, but it was exciting for both of us. They are just such a great team with such great guys.

A big reason why we’ve been to three games in a row like that is I realized it’s after the All-Star break and that means its the road the playoffs. We have a really good chance at the Championship this year, and I can’t miss a minute of the action. So that means we’re going to be downtown a lot for the next month or two. It doesn’t matter how much time I sit in traffic or how much gas I spend at the pump. These are the events I never got to experience as a kid because I lived in a small town. But now I live in the big city, and it’s time to do big city things.

After last night’s game we met up with Danny, Johnny, and Ali at Cafe Boa in Phoenix. It was fun sitting on the patio under the nighttime stars. I just love the winter because you can see Orion’s belt in the sky. Life is good.