Rodgers Goes Dark
Many years ago my wife and I did a week vacation road trip from the northern California redwoods up highway 101 through Oregon. Our first day was mostly the long drive south, with a stop near Crescent City, CA. While planning the trip, my wife was in charge of finding lodging. She found a killer rate on an AirBnB somewhere in the woods north of Crescent City for the first night. After a long dinner, in the evening light, we drove to find it. Our first red flag was that the directions said “We are not on google, drive to this location where a forest road begins, and take it 4 miles to a bridge, and follow the sign uphill.
The road was not paved, it was a single-lane logging road that was rough. We crossed a rickety bridge over a creek and indeed saw the small sign for the campground. I was already nervous, but I saw another car pulling up right before us, with a couple of older ladies getting out after they parked at the entrance to what was a small clearing and camp in the woods. Seeing a couple of non-threatening older ladies put me at a bit more ease, until one of them turned to me and simply asked “Are you here for the treatment too?”
We were not. We had no idea what “the treatment” was. A teenager came by, directed the ladies up the hill, and chatted us up as he led us to our cabin. It was apparently a small, purposefully off-grid ecovillage with a few cabins and some animals and space for a true middle-of-nowhere experience. The cabin barely fit us, there was no electricity or running water, and we were told the toilet was “the woods” or if we needed it, a home depot bucket with a toilet seat taped to the top. My wife thought all of this was hilarious despite being creepy, and I was trying not to panic, 6 miles deep into the woods on an unmarked logging road nowhere near civilization. Needless to say, I did not sleep that night.
In the morning, the camp actually was charming and we said hello to some goats they had and admired the view. The ladies were gone. Nobody else was around. We packed our things and took the long slog of a road back out. I never found out what “The Treatment” was.
I think about this place a lot, because it seems exactly like the kind of place Aaron Rodgers would go in his downtime to huff toadstools and contemplate the universe. Laughing at Aaron Rodgers is fun because he’s weird, but the thing is, when I learned he grew up in Chico, California, which is smack dab in the upper reaches of the Sacramento valley, all his weird interests suddenly made sense. Apparently, just to drive home the pseudoscience beliefs even more, his father was apparently a Chiropractor. No wonder Rodgers is a loony who believes in chemtrails and ghee enemas and whatever other mystical weirdness he does.
Funnily enough, he also spent time in Beaverton, Oregon, which is a suburb of Portland, my current home. Beaverton isn’t very weird, it’s a typical suburb, but if you’ve ever met any true old-school Oregonians who grew up here, many of them do indeed have that west coast UFO-spotting crystal-healing gonna-share-all-my-feelings hippie energy. I am not surprised Rodgers huffs weird drugs, is wildly progressive in some of his perspectives, but also thinks chemtrails are real and writes 500 pages on bizarre alternatives to vaccines because the government is evil, man.
Aaron Rodgers is currently doing a “darkness retreat” of some sort, which sounds like what “The Treatment” might have been. Whatever “The Treatment” was, Aaron Rodgers would do it.
In case you are curious, the place we stayed is indeed still on airbnb. It looks cute there. It’s probably not a murder compound and if going way out into the woods and chilling with some off-grid hippies for a night is your speed, by all means, go for it. The guy who runs it probably grows some killer weed.
Don’t forget, he played at Berkeley lol. Although quite past the hippie heyday.
That area of the Redwood Coast is beautiful, one of my favorite places for sure
Beaverton sounds like some made up name for an 80s cartoon about a Beaver village/collective. They’d have names like Chiptooth, Slamtail, and Chuck. And every week they’d have some zany adventures involving some dastardly no-good lumberjack named Jack Plaiddington, from the nearby town of Lumberton, who is constantly trying to take down their dam and wash their homes away. He probably has a pet… a dog seems too boring, so maybe he stole a trained otter from a circus and brings it with him when he’s out lumberjacking to catch fish. I’m way off tangent, but this is what comes to me during my own darkness retreats, also known as “going into my basement.”
I would like you to create this cartoon so we may all bask in its glory. In a few sentences on a comment section of an obscure football webcomic, you have demonstrated more creativity than all of Hollywood combined in the last five years.
LOL, I appreciate the compliment, even if it’s wildly overestimating my abilities. I generally avoid bringing up my day job around here, but since it’s directly pertinent to the conversation… it just so happens that my work does involve creating multimedia, illustrations, and animation, so maybe one day I’ll flesh this idea out and try selling it to a few networks. X’D
I was thinking more of an 80’s sex comedy along the lines of Porky’s.
The government IS evil, man, but probably not for to reasons A. A. Ron thinks.
LOL
Lol, Dave is afraid of the dark
My friends and I joke that rodgers is probably doing some satanic rituals in the dark to get his past form back. So if he performs better next year that’s my head canon for why.
Pffffft, please Aaron, we all know you snuck in your Atari Lynx and 40lbs worth of batteries.
He won’t emerge from hiding until he beats S.T.U.N. Runner left-handed…
I remember him appearing on the Manningcast and of course he just had to make sure his copy of Atlas Shrugged was prominently featured in the background.
Yeah I still have a hard time reconciling that with his other less-than-objectivist leanings ….
As a Packers fan, I love the hovertext.
Since you brought it up, would just like to put my 2 cents on chiropracty(?):
I think the whole “you need to have it regularly done” is kind of lame, but I think there are real benefits on an acute basis. My wife was in a pretty bad accident and the chiropracty did legitimately help her. Sometimes your spine really does need to be put back in place and it’s a lot cheaper and less risky than having surgery.
It is still based on pseudoscience but I just wanted to make it known that I do think it legitimately has its uses.
“I thought real doctors hated chiropractors.”
“That is our official stance, but between you, me, and my golf clubs, they’re miracle workers.”
Yeah, at it’s core it is a bunch woo-woo bullshit, but goddamn it when I threw my back out I went to a chiropractor and a few pops later I wasn’t stuck at a 90° angle anymore. Dunno, straighten me out “Doc” but don’t talk to me about anything.
too remote to be on Waze or Google Maps is a plus for me tbh. I’ve done some great casual wildlife watching at Airbnb cabins like that.
Wow, what an amazing adventure! I can only imagine how nervous you and your wife were driving up that logging road in the dark. It sounds like the perfect start to a memorable vacation!
This must have been an easy comic to illustrate.
to be fair, shitting your pants (loincloth, sarong, whatever) is a part of the auyhascua ritual for many.