weekend and the fish

WARNING: this post may change as i get my pictures back.

there was one place i wanted to be this weekend and it was about a four-hour drive away from where i ended up - but you know, what I had a fantastic (if painful) time anyway.

saturday was the six-month anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson's suicide and he was flying high for the last time. so while the hanger-ons, revelers and hullabaloos where crowding around Aspen CO to memorialize a strange character in US history and his equally strange Gonzo Journalism (the fist is two feet taller than the statue of liberty, by the way) - we - my brother, his girlfriend, Hamlet and I - were having our own little ceremony.

(drunken girl, fire & camera = a potentially dangerous situation)

this involved a roaring camp fire, blackened catfish, jack daniels, old chub, gravity and song (ok, no singing, but it fits nicely in the memory). my bro and i toasted many a drunken time to that infamous outlaw and i paid my tribute by falling off a rock (many times) and nearly knocking myself out on a chair(don't ask). the afternoon rain had left enough mud to get my new hiking boots dirty and even though i deserve one, i didn't end up with a black eye.

before sunset and this drunken carrying on, we off-roaded a bit in a truck nearly too big for the jeep-trails, karate-kicked burned-blackened stumps of trees and shot each other with paintball guns in an improvised game of king of the hill.

by the time sunday came around i was hungover, bruised, battered and disoriented, but happy - happy we didn't accidently set forest aflame, happy to be out of the house for a few days, happy that i had some good camp-coffee and breakfast burritos to wake up to, happy to be alive and in nature and if you think that sounds cheesy, you're really weird.