Dicey Origins

Now that the website Dicey Weather is completely defunct and no longer on the internet, I am posting some of my articles here, just in the name of having it all in one place.

“What are you going to do in Reno?”

That’s the question I repetitively faced when I told my college friends and fellow Seattlites that I was moving back to my hometown. There really was no answer. I was a recent college graduate with a prestigious yet ambiguous degree in the all-encapsulating English department. After getting out of college, I struggled as a waitress, an intern and a salesgirl and ended up not finding that post-college job with the holy grail of benefits. I was broke and tired of eating Ramen and freezing to death in my subterranean apartment that had black mold growing underneath the carpet. So I gave up the jig and decided to move home.

I came back to Reno and quickly got a 9-5 job where I have my own cubicle, and I sound like a robot all day. In this economic climate though, it is impossible to complain. I bring home a paycheck, and that is really all one can ask for at my age. But, the frustration never left. What happened to being a kid and following a dream? Or being in high school and being the change you want to see in the world? Even in college, weren’t we told that first come the passions, and a paycheck will soon follow? No longer. We grow up and realize that before dreams and passions come shelter, food, and loans.

I was quietly feeling like a failure when my old friend Danguole and I took a road trip to Las Vegas. We talked about how much we wanted to explore our passions: photography, writing, poetry, music, art, nature. We didn’t want to be trapped in our day to day. We also spoke a lot about how awesome Reno is. It’s natural to rebel against one’s hometown. But now that we are older and wiser and have seen more of the world, Reno is an awesome place to be from, no matter what Comedy Central says.

There was no outlet for people like us, our age group, trying to figure out a way of life in the biggest little city. There was no publication we could really embrace. So we got to thinking about starting our own. What is truly unique and amazing about our generation is how technology has allowed us to embrace the American dream like never before. Anyone with a computer or even a library card can start their own website, their own business, do their own thing. We went from a country with local/national newspapers to a country with millions upon millions of blogs. We went from record companies and radio stations to home recordings on iMacs. You can even publish a novel at Kinko’s.

So why not us? Why not here in Reno? As Sean Astin put it in Goonies, “Up there it is their time; down here it’s our time!”

Our next step was to recruit other quarter-life crisis folks that we thought might be interested. We wooed them over casino buffets, returning from each buffet trip with more ideas to spring on them, to get them involved. So we had a handful of people who were just as excited as we were and many more who were hesitant.

How do we describe ourselves? What are we trying to accomplish? While considering a variety of names including “Hookers and Dice,” “The Legit,” and something along the lines of “Illegal Centaur,” we settled on Dicey Weather. Why? It felt right. It felt like a perfect metaphoric description of not just Reno but of our lives. You never know what the weather will be like in this town, and we do not understand or know what our lives will bring us. Maybe we’ll end up on some reality show or maybe we’ll die of swine flu. Plus, you know, Reno has gambling, so like dice. Yeah? Get it? We were tired and thought it was clever.

So similar to playing house as kids, we set up a headquarters complete with not one whiteboard, but two. We designed a logo and began to dream big. Launch parties, bumper stickers, special editions. Our lives were back on track dreaming big, and we were getting ready to rule the world.

So here we are, fellow Renoites.