15 April 2007
79. The First Hash
Atlanta H4 - 19 January 2002
Holy crap, my life sucked.
Five years working the graveyard shift will do that to you. And for about eight years, everyone I knew continually moved out of Atlanta. So I started hanging out with people from work. Take a guess how that ended up.
Most of my co-workers were boring. We either ended up at a bar (I hate blowing an entire night at a bar) or at someone’s apartment bitching about work (I really hate talking about work).
The beginning of the end was when the last remaining person I could call my “friend” hosted a dinner party. I crammed a huge cooler with food and all the necessary cookware, went to her apartment and became the chef for the night. On the menu: Risotto, BBQ chicken and BBQ veggies. Listen to me bitches: Cooking all that from scratch takes time. And patience. And just a little skill. I was wielding a 16-inch cast iron skillet among other huge cheffing implements. And no one wanted to help. So I stood in the kitchen prepping while everyone else stayed in the living room hanging out, bitching about work. Occasionally someone would walk into the kitchen and stare at me like I was on fire. I was the curiosity of the evening. The entertainment; no different than if they rented out a two-headed female midget and had her growling through a cage in the corner of the room.
“Hey, who wants to poke at her with the bottle opener?”
People finally got hungry enough to volunteer to help, but it was only after I had almost everything done and they smelled the kick-ass skillet of risotto simmering on the stove above two burners. A week later, I took my friend out to lunch and told her I couldn’t do the work-group thing anymore. She never talked to me again.
I hate New Year’s Eve more than any other day of the year. Long story. While I was hiding inside the Drunken Scientist Lair on the last crappy night of 2001, I took a good look at what my pathetic life had become. I had always been working too much to find anything interesting to do, and I was so broke, my options were limited anyway. But that night, I decided I was going to do SOMETHING.
I shaved my head the next day. Beard trimmer, then Norelco. A day later, I got an earring. My new mentality: I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. Or what anyone says. I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want, and anyone who doesn’t like it can lick my ass.
Aim for the bunghole, please.
At that point, the only thing I really liked was running. So I went on the Atlanta Track Club’s website to find something to do. I was running up to 10 miles at a stretch, so I called the Ultra guy about their training runs. “Oh, we’re still winding down from our 50 mile Ultra, so we’re ONLY running 20 miles on Saturday.” Thanks, but no thanks. There was another entry for some single’s running group. Gee, I love advertising when I’m alone and unable to make relationships work. Why don’t I just get the word "shithead" tattooed across my cranium?
Then I remembered the thing that gives me more joy than anything else on the planet: Booze. Wasn’t there something that combined Running and Beer? I went through my papers from advertising school and dug up the one fake ad campaign they let us do. I did mine on “The 6-pack 10K,” where you drink a beer every mile. Even back then I was positive something like that existed, and I was obsessed with how to market it. Now I was obsessed with how to find it.
I found AH4’s website on January 5th. The hook: They said they didn’t give a shit whether new people showed up or not. Show up if you want. And if you show up, the trails are held rain or shine. OK, I would bite the bullet the next weekend.
The “rain or shine” sentence was probably the most important one on the website. At least for me. Because on January 12th it was pouring. All day long. Two guys named Little Easy and Big Bore were haring at Georgia Perimeter College. It was going to be a 50-mile round trip from my house.
(Flash forward a couple years. We were making 700-mile round trips to Fayetteville for Trash trails.)
I drove to GPC that afternoon to find empty parking lots. There was a scattered car here and there. But at the back of the farthest lot were a couple cars close together. I did a drive-by and noticed people sitting inside, so I parked and got out. I felt the rain hit my newly shaved melon and had one more reason to like being bald. I walked up to the closest car. Some guy rolled his window down and grimaced at the deluge and the cold wind. This wasn't what I was expecting from people I thought were close to adventure runners.
“Are you hashers?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m a virgin and don’t know what I’m doing.”
His name was Boner. He got out of the car with an umbrella. Soon, there were two umbrellas and five guys. Me, Boner, Pussy Pilot, Big Bore and Little Easy, amid the downpour and the runoff sliding downhill past our feet. I asked them why they even bothered with umbrellas if they were hashers and someone said it was because they still didn’t know if they should do trail. Because of the anxious virgin and the fact that they never missed a trail, even during the blizzard/Storm of the Century in 1993, they decided to go ahead.
There was no flour. No TP. We simply followed the two hares through flooded shiggy and mud. I was on mental overload, so even following everyone was a challenge. The three of us made a wrong turn at a sewer easement and we backtracked to the intersection to find one of the hares sitting down cross-legged in the soaking grass, waiting for us to return. Things got a little harder when my sweats finally soaked up as much water as they were going to hold and started weighing me down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was wearing sweats. Hush. I didn’t know that the fuck I was doing. I was even christened with a massive amount of mud when we climbed out of another easement by way of a small but slippery vertical hill to the street above.
The hares finally gave up and we took streets the rest of the way to the end. Drivers gawked at us. We wound our way to some park and approached a huge awning. I figured this was the end because the herd of dry people underneath saw us coming and started cheering. See, that’s what a virgin needs: Attention before he’s even introduced to the crowd. I was paraded around and met way more people than I would have expected at the end of one of these cold-weather things. Condo handed me a beer. Ouch and Tripod were sipping cider. I don’t remember everyone else. There were too many people with too many different names. Many were impressed that some Virgin would subject himself to these extreme elements their first time out. My response? Hey, I played in puddles as a kid. Here’s an excuse to keep doing it.
A semi-not-sober hasher suggested I change, and I turned around to see the four other guys tearing off their soaking clothes near their dry bags. I looked back at the crowd and noticed no one was gawking. No one gave even the remotest of shits. Fellow drunks, it was at this exact moment I was hooked on the hash. Beer. Running. Shiggy. No one giving a shit.
There must have been a circle. I don’t even remember. All I recall from that last part of the afternoon was people with cool names asking me if I’d be back. I looked down at the beer I was holding. “Uh, let’s see. . . either stay at home pulling my pud or do this again. Can I pull my pud on trail?” Much cheering and applause was heard, more beer was consumed, and a good time was had by all.
Holy crap, my life sucked.
Five years working the graveyard shift will do that to you. And for about eight years, everyone I knew continually moved out of Atlanta. So I started hanging out with people from work. Take a guess how that ended up.
Most of my co-workers were boring. We either ended up at a bar (I hate blowing an entire night at a bar) or at someone’s apartment bitching about work (I really hate talking about work).
The beginning of the end was when the last remaining person I could call my “friend” hosted a dinner party. I crammed a huge cooler with food and all the necessary cookware, went to her apartment and became the chef for the night. On the menu: Risotto, BBQ chicken and BBQ veggies. Listen to me bitches: Cooking all that from scratch takes time. And patience. And just a little skill. I was wielding a 16-inch cast iron skillet among other huge cheffing implements. And no one wanted to help. So I stood in the kitchen prepping while everyone else stayed in the living room hanging out, bitching about work. Occasionally someone would walk into the kitchen and stare at me like I was on fire. I was the curiosity of the evening. The entertainment; no different than if they rented out a two-headed female midget and had her growling through a cage in the corner of the room.
“Hey, who wants to poke at her with the bottle opener?”
People finally got hungry enough to volunteer to help, but it was only after I had almost everything done and they smelled the kick-ass skillet of risotto simmering on the stove above two burners. A week later, I took my friend out to lunch and told her I couldn’t do the work-group thing anymore. She never talked to me again.
I hate New Year’s Eve more than any other day of the year. Long story. While I was hiding inside the Drunken Scientist Lair on the last crappy night of 2001, I took a good look at what my pathetic life had become. I had always been working too much to find anything interesting to do, and I was so broke, my options were limited anyway. But that night, I decided I was going to do SOMETHING.
I shaved my head the next day. Beard trimmer, then Norelco. A day later, I got an earring. My new mentality: I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. Or what anyone says. I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want, and anyone who doesn’t like it can lick my ass.
Aim for the bunghole, please.
At that point, the only thing I really liked was running. So I went on the Atlanta Track Club’s website to find something to do. I was running up to 10 miles at a stretch, so I called the Ultra guy about their training runs. “Oh, we’re still winding down from our 50 mile Ultra, so we’re ONLY running 20 miles on Saturday.” Thanks, but no thanks. There was another entry for some single’s running group. Gee, I love advertising when I’m alone and unable to make relationships work. Why don’t I just get the word "shithead" tattooed across my cranium?
Then I remembered the thing that gives me more joy than anything else on the planet: Booze. Wasn’t there something that combined Running and Beer? I went through my papers from advertising school and dug up the one fake ad campaign they let us do. I did mine on “The 6-pack 10K,” where you drink a beer every mile. Even back then I was positive something like that existed, and I was obsessed with how to market it. Now I was obsessed with how to find it.
I found AH4’s website on January 5th. The hook: They said they didn’t give a shit whether new people showed up or not. Show up if you want. And if you show up, the trails are held rain or shine. OK, I would bite the bullet the next weekend.
The “rain or shine” sentence was probably the most important one on the website. At least for me. Because on January 12th it was pouring. All day long. Two guys named Little Easy and Big Bore were haring at Georgia Perimeter College. It was going to be a 50-mile round trip from my house.
(Flash forward a couple years. We were making 700-mile round trips to Fayetteville for Trash trails.)
I drove to GPC that afternoon to find empty parking lots. There was a scattered car here and there. But at the back of the farthest lot were a couple cars close together. I did a drive-by and noticed people sitting inside, so I parked and got out. I felt the rain hit my newly shaved melon and had one more reason to like being bald. I walked up to the closest car. Some guy rolled his window down and grimaced at the deluge and the cold wind. This wasn't what I was expecting from people I thought were close to adventure runners.
“Are you hashers?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m a virgin and don’t know what I’m doing.”
His name was Boner. He got out of the car with an umbrella. Soon, there were two umbrellas and five guys. Me, Boner, Pussy Pilot, Big Bore and Little Easy, amid the downpour and the runoff sliding downhill past our feet. I asked them why they even bothered with umbrellas if they were hashers and someone said it was because they still didn’t know if they should do trail. Because of the anxious virgin and the fact that they never missed a trail, even during the blizzard/Storm of the Century in 1993, they decided to go ahead.
There was no flour. No TP. We simply followed the two hares through flooded shiggy and mud. I was on mental overload, so even following everyone was a challenge. The three of us made a wrong turn at a sewer easement and we backtracked to the intersection to find one of the hares sitting down cross-legged in the soaking grass, waiting for us to return. Things got a little harder when my sweats finally soaked up as much water as they were going to hold and started weighing me down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was wearing sweats. Hush. I didn’t know that the fuck I was doing. I was even christened with a massive amount of mud when we climbed out of another easement by way of a small but slippery vertical hill to the street above.
The hares finally gave up and we took streets the rest of the way to the end. Drivers gawked at us. We wound our way to some park and approached a huge awning. I figured this was the end because the herd of dry people underneath saw us coming and started cheering. See, that’s what a virgin needs: Attention before he’s even introduced to the crowd. I was paraded around and met way more people than I would have expected at the end of one of these cold-weather things. Condo handed me a beer. Ouch and Tripod were sipping cider. I don’t remember everyone else. There were too many people with too many different names. Many were impressed that some Virgin would subject himself to these extreme elements their first time out. My response? Hey, I played in puddles as a kid. Here’s an excuse to keep doing it.
A semi-not-sober hasher suggested I change, and I turned around to see the four other guys tearing off their soaking clothes near their dry bags. I looked back at the crowd and noticed no one was gawking. No one gave even the remotest of shits. Fellow drunks, it was at this exact moment I was hooked on the hash. Beer. Running. Shiggy. No one giving a shit.
There must have been a circle. I don’t even remember. All I recall from that last part of the afternoon was people with cool names asking me if I’d be back. I looked down at the beer I was holding. “Uh, let’s see. . . either stay at home pulling my pud or do this again. Can I pull my pud on trail?” Much cheering and applause was heard, more beer was consumed, and a good time was had by all.
# posted by L&F @ 10:11 AM 
