dedleg.com

H-hello? Is anybody out there? We’ll see, I guess.

So, I’ve been quite delinquent in my blogging responsibilities ever since I moved out of New York, but Dedleg has nevertheless been on my mind. I suppose I’d been avoiding the little guy, because I was embarrassed and ashamed about being such a bad friend. But we’re still besties, don’t you worry, and I’m going to try to give this heaping pile of free association and creative wind-breaking a little more attention from now on.

Of course, I make this oath to be somewhat more productive knowing full well that I’m moving again at the end of the month. Don’t get too excited — I’m not going back to New York. Not yet anyway. I signed an 8-month lease on the top floor of a cool hideout in Northampton, MA, a whopping 5 minutes down the road from where I’ve been crashing the past couple months.

My brother’s home is nice and all, but… come on, it’s not exactly a hideout, and do you really think Dedleg deserves anything less? I’m the harbinger of death on four wheels, a shadow in a dark room, I’m no mere apartment dweller. I’m more of a castle-in-the-sky type, you know? Anyway, I didn’t quite land a castle, what with my limited income and all, but I did manage to score a place with a balcony.

Anyway, the other day I took a little walk around the neighborhood so you can see where I’m staying. It’s a little rough around the edges, but hey, it’s home.

Tonight is the most hallowed of all eves, the eve of hallowed weens. With that in mind, happy hallowedest of wieners from your friends, Dedleg and Gozer The Destructor. And don’t settle for any bad candy tonight. Unless by “bad candy,” you actually mean drugs. But those orange styrofoam peanuts? Yeah, you can leave those at the door.

No, this is not some kind of dramatized “I’m shutting down the blog” type post. Because I’m… not shutting down the blog. I just moved, that’s all.

Anyway, I took a bunch of photos over the course of my kind-of-gutting last week in the once glorious Dedleg Brooklyn HQ. Man, apartments sure look strange right before you move out of them. Barren, skeletal versions of their former selves, you float through them like a ghost yourself. At least I did, but then again, I was stoned the whole time. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure if it all actually happened. Hey! Where am I?!

Uh, it’s okay… we’re okay. Moving on… uh, no pun intended. But that was a pretty good pun.

The kitchen corner didn’t even smell like late night cigarettes anymore at this point. That’s when I knew time was finally up.

That’s right, I said a taco with no, tomato. No, tomato, you got that?

Ah well, I guess every cloud, and every delicious taco, has a silver lining. Oh, damn it, I said I wasn’t going to get all emo. Shit, fuck, damn it.

You know what’s so great about a new pair of Vans? They’re fresh and ready to skate, right out of the box! Just gotta heat ‘em up!

Psych! This is definitely not a recommended usage. They do taste good if you baste them with a bourbon marinade first, though.

No kidding about that ready to skate, right out of the box factor, though. The board feel on a pair of Vans Eras is the truth. It’s basically like skating barefoot, if skating barefoot wasn’t excruciatingly painful.

Big thanks to my kindly master, Ryan, over at that little skateboarding website you might have heard of that I write for on a weekly basis for hooking this one up for me. I’ve skated exclusively in Vans - save for a couple notable freebies here and there - for my entire skateboarding experience (one could hardly call it a career), so getting a pair on the house is kind of like getting a free beer after tipping a bartender all night. Not necessarily expected, but when it happens, you feel like you earned it, and you want to shake the hand of the bartender, or purveyor of skateboarding-appropriate footwear, and say, “Thank you for being such a gosh darned decent human being.”

Wassup, playas? Same ol’ story over here, I’m afraid. Been busy working… and not working… and not blogging very much either, apparently. If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve recently increased my relevancy by another 15% by joining the hordes of others already addicted to making commonplace photos of food look vintage on Instagram. I’m still not entirely sure where to draw the line when it comes to what I should shoot with Instagram, and what I should shoot with my real camera (yes, those still do exist). So I guess for now I’m operating under the loose guidelines that if I have my camera on me, I’ll use that, and if I only have my phone on me, I’ll use that. It’s stressful being this white and privileged, I gotta tell you.

Anyway, you can catch my grainier-than-normal photography on Instagram by following @dedleg, but you probably already figured that much out.

As for my aforementioned “normal” photography… well, you can catch that right here. Or from one night of unprotected sex, 3 (debatably intoxicated) out of 48 doctors agree. Remember, one small choice can change your life for the itchier.

Looks like we’re finally coming to the end of the trail here, as far as these camping photos from last month are concerned. What timing, too, as my intestinal tract seems to have only just recovered from the days on end of eating nothing but encased meat and baked beans, washing it down with nothing but beer and black coffee, and avoiding the rudimentary toilet (read: hole in the middle of the woods filled with festering human waste) at all costs, even if it meant inviting colon cancer in through the back door, as it were.

Why was shitting in the woods a nonoption, you may ask? Well, feast your eyes on the creature below. A couple of these bad boys were hanging out by the river the same weekend we were there — only they had set up camp under the toilet seat. Figured I’d let them use the facilities in peace. Seemed only polite.

An experienced camper will tell you: you never know what kind of creepy crawlies you might find in your shoes after a night in the woods. They’ll also tell you that if you’ve been bitten, it’s probably already too late to save you. Fortunately for me, this guy had already hopped over to the great cobweb in the sky. Any more alive-looking and this not-so-little fucker would be, well, alive!

All quiet on the St. Croix River. Well, except for the faint buzzing of a swarm of gnats fucking overhead… fortunately the camera doesn’t do the elegant mating dance of the common flying insect justice.

A closer look at the encased meats I was talking about earlier. Looking at these stuffed tubes of animal byproducts and miscellaneous carcinogens now, I’m beginning to understand why we usually waited until nightfall to cook dinner…

And like the campers before us, we were sure to leave nothing but smoldering ruins in the fire pit for the next pack of explorers to investigate. Now what are you waiting for? Go make some absurd stories of your own, while it’s still warm enough for them not to inevitably end with an epilogue detailing your urine-soaked long johns and frostbitten fingertips.

So, as it turns out, it seems Dedleg’s tenure in the Big Apple is coming to a close. But that don’t mean there aren’t still apples where we’re going… they’re just a lot smaller.

Indeed, at the end of the month, I’ll be relocating to the Pioneer Valley… an aptly named destination perhaps as I forge ahead into the unknown. If anything, you can count on it getting a whole lot more scenic around here. In fact, I think Rip Van Winkle is a look I can not only grow into, but really pull off. It fits. The potsmoking hermit tucked away in the quiet hills of New England. Call me the Green Wizard of the Northeast.

Dedleg’s trek east soldiers on. Chicago to Brooklyn to Northampton, Massachusetts. If you’re not from the area, that probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it’s a pot-smoking, pill-popping quaint little college town full of tattooed freaks, and there’s a concrete pool down the street. And that’s good enough for me.

Busy week over here at the Leg. Gotta make that paper, you know how it is.

More later. Stay frosty, Dedleggings.

You thought I forgot, huh?

There is a light and it never goes out. Okay, actually, that’s not true. It goes out at 20-minute intervals because otherwise thousands of migrating birds would circle it for hours in confusion and ultimately die from exhaustion. And don’t you forget it!

After a breakup, your main priority should be taking care of yourself. And there’s nothing wrong with pampering yourself a little bit, while you’re at it. Maybe buy something you’ve been meaning to for a while — a pricey piece of jewelry, or a fabulous new outfit, or maybe even some psychotropic drugs. Go on, indulge, you deserve it.

Remember, an important step in mourning the end of a long-term relationship is hiding from reality, cloaked in a haze of intoxication! I’m not sure which step exactly that is, but it’s somewhere in between the “awkward, regretful one-night stand” and “throwing TV out of window” stages of grief.

This kind of professionalism is hard to find in close-minded areas of the country that don’t like making pots of money (no pun intended… seriously), or aren’t big cities where crime, debauchery and drugs run rampant, like scary old New York. And I guess it’s not that hard to find in not-so-scary new New York. If you know, you know, and if you don’t know, I feel sorry for you.

Well, it seems that fall is intent on making an appearance this year, so I’d better get through all of these summery-ass camping photos quickly! Here’s another dose from my trip to the wilds of Wisconsin in early August. Catch the other posts in this series here and here if you missed them the first time around.

Couldn’t risk smuggling weed in my asscrack on the plane despite the fact that being outside next to a river for three days with nothing to do is pretty much the best time to ever smoke weed. Alas, I had to come up with other ways of keeping it green.

That sun might look like a supernova, but unfortunately the majority of its ultraviolet radiation wasn’t making it to our campsite’s shores. While temperatures in New York were holding steadily around the balls-dripping-with-sweat range, over in Wisconsin things were feeling a little bit more like… well, today in New York. Most days were spent huddled around the fire, silently contemplating… mostly about why I only packed a single, threadbare flannel, but also about nature and shit, too.

So, we may not have had sensation in our fingertips after that first night, but we did have plenty of beer! And really, if you could only have one of those things for the rest of your life, which one would you choose? Come on, be honest.