what a weekend! well really i guess it was just saturday that was so fantastic — friday was a disappointing happy hour followed by sitting at home for the night, and sunday was consumed primarily with buying and constructing moderately priced furniture for the new apartment. and although i am proud to be the owner of a handsome new dining room set and balcony furniture, i will forego the tale of “gino and brian mount a rod on their kitchen wall from which to hang pots and pans in an attractive largest-to-smallest fashion” in favor of the hopefully more pleasing “robots go to joshua tree: an illustrated essay”.

someone suggested around wednesday of last week that we go camping at joshua tree this weekend, and being adventurous to some degree, three of us seized that idea and convinced a fourth to come along after some goading. a quick two-hour drive out of LA on saturday afternoon and we were rising out of the 100-degree desert wasteland into the 80-degree desert mountains. quite a step up in scenery. we set up a basic camp and spent the next few hours of daylight scrambling all over the huge boulder formations of the park, sometimes leaping across death-defying chasms, as seen in picture one of me completing one of said feats (in arms-up action pose). it was a lot of boyish fun.

after climbing our third, final, and tallest very large boulder pile, we decided to sit back and relax for a while to enjoy the sunset over the mountaintops from our perch, all while making fun of the people down below who came all the way out into a national park and ended up sitting in the ruins of an old building — oh, the delicious irony. it was beautiful and serene and quite enjoyable, as you can see in picture two of josh (L), myself and mike (R) gazing out over our domain.

in the not-quite-darkness between the sun sinking into the mountains and the onset of actual night, we clambered down and went back to camp to start a fire and crack some cold ones (the first of many). as barbeque enthusiasts on regular days, that night we were especially salivating over tasty burgers grilled on a campfire after a day spent climbing and jumping all over the place. it would have been almost too savory to handle, were we not well-practiced in this area of enjoyment, seen in picture 3 of josh (L), justin, myself and mike gobbling up our gourmet.

as the night went on stars came out in full force and we looked for constellations in the sky. that is, until we were taken by one of the coolest scenes i have ever seen, a full moon rising over the eastern mountains. we could actually see its motion as it came up over the ridge, and it was so bright it lit up the whole basin we were in and cast shadows on the rocks around us. it was spectacular. photo four is an attempt to capture it, but not being photo experts the result isn’t nearly as breathtaking.

then we got down to the real business: sitting around a fire and drinking beers. 12 beers apiece, actually. how did that happen? when we bought it we figured we’d be tired and enjoy a few before getting to bed, and still have a whole case or more left for when we went home the next night. we sure showed ourselves. we ended up staying awake until almost 3am watching the fire and drinking and telling stories. we climbed on some more rocks in the moonlight which was so bright it was no problem (i put on sunglasses — because i am so cool — and could still see, it was so bright). this sadly led to peeing off of ledges and mike twisting his ankle on the way back down. we also noticed the people at the site next to ours were sleeping in the back of their SUV and laughed at them. overall we were probably much too loud for a state park at night, but we did create a mighty pile of entirely empty cans and bottles, shown in picture 5. not bad at all.

the sun woke us from our tents at 7am. justin sat up and moaned, “the sun is roasting my nuts off, jesus christ.” we were hot and felt terrible and mike was limping around like an old war vet, so we decided to get going. a few granola bars and a lot of water worked their wonders, and next thing you know we’re at home. a fucking glorious 18 hours.

[now hearing this: i’ve nixed the song of the week in favor of a new plan that is a little bit less pressure; the payday song! an occasion to celebrate by rocking out, for sure, and this way it’s only the 1st and 15th instead of every seven days. the new payday song will be one we had in our heads and decided to listen to while rocking the van back and forth at our campsite at 2am instead of communing with nature. that is to say, the streets’ sweet little track, has it come to this. hope you enjoy it as much as we did.]