Dress For Succes
Hawaiian Shirt? Check. Dust Encrusted Sandals? Check. Kilt? Check. Five-Dollar Mexican Fishing Hat? Check.
What can I say? I dress a little eccentrically around the ranch. What the Hell: odds are good that if you’re kicking around the Black Rock Desert, you’re not exactly dressed like a GQ model either. There are several schools of dress out here in the summer. The first and most popular is Traditional Cowboy: boots, tight jeans, open necked cotton shirt, hat, and scarf or bandana around the neck. It has the advantages of being rugged, practical, and it protects you from the sun. It also has the disadvantage of being a bit on the hot side…. not that you want to be wearing Bermuda shorts when herding cattle.
The next school of dress could be called Classic Desert Rat: Hawaiian or baseball shirts, stained jeans or camouflage pants, flip-flops, faded tattoos, and a baseball cap. All covered in a comforting layer of Playa dust. I tend toward this look myself; only I like to wear shorts (or my UtiliKilt, but only on the ranch) in the summer. It has the advantage of extreme comfort, but the disadvantage of looking like Hell – not that anyone gives a damn.
The final school of dress (excluding the Mennonites over in Smoke Creek) could only be described as Burning Man: kind of a cross between Cowboy, Desert Rat, and San Francisco Alternative Freak. Leopardskin cowboy hat, boots, tooled leather vest, green hair, strange goatee, and a glazed over look to the eyes. I kind of like it, but I don’t want to be it, if you know what I mean. It has the advantage of being strange, but the disadvantage of getting you hit on by even stranger people in Gerlach’s bars.
Completely unrelated to the world of low fashion, I’ve been spreading gravel around the buildings lately. Since I lack the proper equipment to do the job, I’ve hit on what I think might be a novel method. I strap four buckets to my quad. Then I drive down to the dry riverbed, rake the rocks into piles, and shovel them into the buckets. I drive the quad to the location I want to gravel, dump the bucket out, and rake them out evenly. This method has the advantage of being extremely inexpensive and simple, but the disadvantage of being a whole lot of work! Oddly, the quality of gravel I rake out of the old riverbed is way higher than the stuff that “fell off of the back” of a Washoe County Road Department truck (God bless them). I can’t recommend harvesting gravel as a hobby, though.
Other than that, I just keep on working away at things as I wait for the house in Richmond to sell. I have BIG plans for things I’m going to do out here once that happens, but until then there’s really not much I want to buy anyhow. Which is fortunate, as there’s no place to get anything in the Black Rock Desert!
What can I say? I dress a little eccentrically around the ranch. What the Hell: odds are good that if you’re kicking around the Black Rock Desert, you’re not exactly dressed like a GQ model either. There are several schools of dress out here in the summer. The first and most popular is Traditional Cowboy: boots, tight jeans, open necked cotton shirt, hat, and scarf or bandana around the neck. It has the advantages of being rugged, practical, and it protects you from the sun. It also has the disadvantage of being a bit on the hot side…. not that you want to be wearing Bermuda shorts when herding cattle.
The next school of dress could be called Classic Desert Rat: Hawaiian or baseball shirts, stained jeans or camouflage pants, flip-flops, faded tattoos, and a baseball cap. All covered in a comforting layer of Playa dust. I tend toward this look myself; only I like to wear shorts (or my UtiliKilt, but only on the ranch) in the summer. It has the advantage of extreme comfort, but the disadvantage of looking like Hell – not that anyone gives a damn.
The final school of dress (excluding the Mennonites over in Smoke Creek) could only be described as Burning Man: kind of a cross between Cowboy, Desert Rat, and San Francisco Alternative Freak. Leopardskin cowboy hat, boots, tooled leather vest, green hair, strange goatee, and a glazed over look to the eyes. I kind of like it, but I don’t want to be it, if you know what I mean. It has the advantage of being strange, but the disadvantage of getting you hit on by even stranger people in Gerlach’s bars.
Completely unrelated to the world of low fashion, I’ve been spreading gravel around the buildings lately. Since I lack the proper equipment to do the job, I’ve hit on what I think might be a novel method. I strap four buckets to my quad. Then I drive down to the dry riverbed, rake the rocks into piles, and shovel them into the buckets. I drive the quad to the location I want to gravel, dump the bucket out, and rake them out evenly. This method has the advantage of being extremely inexpensive and simple, but the disadvantage of being a whole lot of work! Oddly, the quality of gravel I rake out of the old riverbed is way higher than the stuff that “fell off of the back” of a Washoe County Road Department truck (God bless them). I can’t recommend harvesting gravel as a hobby, though.
Other than that, I just keep on working away at things as I wait for the house in Richmond to sell. I have BIG plans for things I’m going to do out here once that happens, but until then there’s really not much I want to buy anyhow. Which is fortunate, as there’s no place to get anything in the Black Rock Desert!
posted by Jason Walters | 11:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home