Date Day, No Drama
Ramen Lied To Me
There’s a small ritual we’ve kept for a while now... nothing fancy, nothing planned too far in advance. Weekend rolls around, nothing urgent on the calendar, and we pick a restaurant. New place or old favorite, doesn’t matter much. We walk there, we eat, we walk back. That’s the whole architecture of it.
Today it was Michi Ramen Bar. The name alone sounds like it knows something you don’t.
I’ll be honest, I walked in with some confidence. I’ve had ramen. Plenty of times. Noodles, broth, in those compact little packages. I had a working theory about ramen. Michi, apparently, had a different theory, and theirs involved considerably more nuance than mine. The broth was meaty and spicy at the same time. The noodles had opinions. I sat there thinking... okay, so this is what ramen actually is. Interesting. Fine. Good, even. Not the lightning bolt I was bracing for, but solid. Respectably solid.
The lanterns hanging from the ceiling were genuinely something, though. These big silk Vietnamese-style lanterns in every color, glowing warm against the stone walls, a neon sign above us reading ずるずる... which, for what it’s worth, is Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of slurping noodles. So at least someone there had a sense of humor.
Sometimes a bowl of noodles and a good walk home is exactly enough.
May 15th Keeps Finding Me
May 15th has a habit of catching me mid-stumble. Literally, sometimes.
Back in 2002, it was a sick day that somehow still included mountain biking, because pollen counts and sinus pressure have never been a legitimate reason to skip the trail. The thought never quite got finished. Story of the day, really.
A year later, the focus sharpened into peak bagging in Vermont, racking up Ascutney, Stratton, and Killington on a sore ankle, sleeping in the car, already planning the next sufferfest in the Adirondacks. Seventeen miles. Three peaks with names nobody can spell.
By 2007, it was Missoula life, post-race wounds, chores, bills, the eternal promise to catch up on emails. Then 2008 brought a harder reckoning, with clinical documentation of what stopping costs you, muscle loss, concussion risk, the body’s brutal accounting system. Around the same time, a quieter note: friends at 44, which turns out to matter quite a bit.
In 2012, a new bike disappeared into the landscape the way good equipment should. In 2013, a bear charging out of the Gallatin Range turned out to be a total miscommunication. In 2016, a thought about tagging all human knowledge with GPS coordinates emerged from somewhere between the coffee and the trailhead.
Then 2020 offered a quieter moment in time, 2022 looked back honestly at a hard Livingston Christmas, and 2025 delivered the most dramatic May 15th yet, a torn something behind the knee on a hill too steep to run, the body finally filing a formal complaint.
Twenty-three years of this date, and the throughline is pretty clear. Go hard, get hurt, keep going.