Sticky Notes - Ouch.

If I were some sort of therapist therapizing an individual struggling with patience, I'd tell them to go on a ski trip and try their damndest not to implode.

A ski trip is less a vacation and more so a wildly inconvenient (and at times downright painful) practice in becoming a "passenger" of life. 

No matter how intentional you are about the planning of your ski trip, no matter how obediently you follow Murphy's Law, preparing diligently for all the shit that could go wrong, shit will inevitably go wrong that even Nostradamus couldn't have successfully predicted. 

The 4-runner one of your buddies was insistent on renting will be two-sizes-too-small for your 6-man crew.

Someone will drink too hard the night and vomit dragonfire out the side of the window as their sins slosh around in their stomach like the contents of a witch's cauldron.

The Airbnb won't have enough beds; folks will have to double up and someone will have to take the couch.

The groceries you ordered on Instacart to save yourselves from walking the aisles of some grocer you've never heard of won't ever arrive because you're on the side of a fucking cliff-face.

The lift tickets will cost double what you thought they would and your rented ski boots will eat into your shins like greedy piranhas chew into the ass of some poor dying beast.

The lines to obnoxiously named lifts will be so goddamn long they'd make a wait at Disney World feel like a Nascar pit stop.

You'll get lost from your party on the mountain at some point and you'll beg for the ghosts of Lewis & Clark to reconnect you with your brethren.

You'll take massive efforts to dress as warm as humanly possible but you'll find that your gloves aren't warm enough or your cap isn't toasty enough or that you wore cotton socks when you were supposed to wear wool.

At some point, you'll hit the ground so hard you'll see Jesus and you'll wonder to yourself as you lick your wounds why you just paid $225 for a ticket up a mountain only to fall down it.

Then, at the end of all of this, when your body feels like it's been cracked by a Mack Truck, you'll have to hoist your skis over your shoulders and make a long awkward walk home in your shin-eating ski boots, sporting a gait that resembles a squirrel with a pinecone shoved so far up its ass that its breath smells like a car air-freshener. 

At some point, during all of this, you will wonder if it wasn't all a mistake. If you should just pack your bags and catch the next flight out of town and head back home to Tennessee where the weather is a hell of a lot warmer and there isn't a ski lift anywhere in sight. 

Right around this time, you'll throw your hands up in the air and whether it's conscious or unconscious, you'll suddenly accept the fact that you don't have any control; that your sense of control was a security blanket; that your sense of security was as delicate as paper tigers in a hurricane; that you're nothing more than a passenger on a rickety spacecraft. 

It's here where you can begin enjoying the ski trip and I think it's here where you can begin enjoying life, when you let go of your constant need to control. 

Then, if you're like me, you'll walk along the pavement at the end of your first day on the slopes, piecing this newsletter together in your head, fleshing out this grand, holier-than-thou lesson in patience and you'll suddenly hit a patch of ice, crack your back on the ground, lay there for longer than you'd care to admit, eventually, hoist yourself up as stranger after stranger asks you if you're hurt and then walk your sorry ass over to the place you rented your ski equipment earlier that morning, return all of your shit a day early and eat the cost of your next day's ski pass. 

All that to say, I will close with this...

You don't go skiing for the skiing, you go skiing for everything that happens when you're not skiing: the humbling, the practice in patience, the cold Kentucky Mule after a hard days ride, the camaraderie with some of your favorite people on the planet, the deep conversations 30-feet in the air on the ski lift, the gentle high as you drift off to sleep to Inglorious Bastards with some of your best friends.

I think we go skiing because it gives us an excuse to spend 3-4 days with the people we love, even if those 3-4 days are spent in hell.

And, in the moments when this hell becomes too much to bear, we get the fuck off of the mountain a day early and take back our control at least for the remainder of this year's ski trip.  
 
But, I digress.

By Cole Schafer.

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Though few and far between, there are days like today where I find myself wrestling with the possibility of kicking off my Red Wings, mauling my typewriters with a tire iron, grounding the mouths of my ballpoint pens shut and walking away from writing entirely.

This, obviously, isn't something I would admit publicly.

But, that's why I run this small, intimate newsletter... so I have a private place to take a knife to my demons and my fears and my insecurities and my worst days and splay them all out on a butcher's block to provide some momentary reprieve for myself and, perhaps, an interesting perspective for you.

From the outside looking in, I'm a writ

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