Category Archives: Play

Chapter 5

Sci-fi, Writing

In which there’s a finale. (See chapter 4.)

25.

“Oh dude,” I said. “That would be awesome. I don’t know how to test the water, or if the soil will support earth seeds–”

“I can teach you,” the baby said. “I have knowledge that was supposed to be accessible to you.”

Someone on my comm yelled, “All that shit’s in the wiki, Jenny! Ask him what he is!”

I turned down my comm speakers. “So, giant alien baby. What are you? And why do you look like a giant human baby?”

“I didn’t know that these were many dead individuals. I thought it was one dead individual and asked it how to be an infant. This is what they showed me. I’ve never seen many dead individuals.”

“Whenever you encounter dead individual, you ask it how to be a baby?”

“Yes, and then we’re a baby, and we grow up, and we die. Until someone else asks us how to be a baby!” Giant baby was overwhelmed with happiness by this and clapped his hands.

We talked for an hour, and then I took pity on everyone else and set up a board and read their questions from it, and the giant baby answered them, and the visit spawned about seventeen Martianbaby wikis as he talked. He was really good at telling us the human knowledge he had absorbed, but was maddeningly vague about himself.

Before I left the dome, he let me take a sample of him. I approached with a sample collection pack he had located for me, and touched his fat knee with a swab I then sealed into a tube. I also made a couple of slides. He wasn’t smooth; he was dusty and pink. His skin looked more like something you’d find in your shop-vac than anything else, and I had the impression that he’d blow away in a strong wind.

“Would you blow away in a strong wind?” I asked him.

“Um, yeah. No? We’re not sure. We’re very big!” He clapped again, but he didn’t disintegrate, so maybe not.

“Well, when the dust storm comes, you’ll have to wait it out in here,” I said.

Continue reading Chapter 5 →

Chapter 4

Sci-fi, Writing

In which there’s a fourth chapter. (Go to chapter 3.)

19.

“My dome? What?” I replied, grabbing my helmet so I could actually talk to the guy. “What do you mean?”

“There’s something wrong with the cameras, Fred,” someone said calmly.

“It’s a fucking Martian! Ye gods, even worse: some bastard child of human DNA and Mars!” someone else shouted.

“Can you see the video feed?” asked the man from Higher, who was apparently called Fred.

“Nope, I’m in the restaurant,” I said. I can just walk over there–”

“She can fix the cameras,” voice #2 said.

“No! Don’t go into the dome until we establish communication with it!” said voice #3.

“Restaurant?” said yet another voice.

“Listen, listen!” Fred said, and I could literally hear him flapping his arm for silence. “It looks like there’s a life form in the dome. We want audio. Can you manage that?”

“A life form,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“In the dome.”

“Yeah.”

“The dome is filled with dead people, Fred,” I said. “All my friends’ bodies are in there, Fred.”

“Get somewhere you can see the video feed and call back, okay, kid?”

“Okay,” I said.

“And then we’re totally gonna need audio,” Fred said.

“Whatever,” I said.

Continue reading Chapter 4 →

Chapter 3

Writing

In which there’s a third installment. (Back to chapter 2.)

13.

Every single day I cursed my wretched, useless public school education.

Why didn’t I know basic chemistry? Why didn’t I know how to test melted Martian ice for drinkability? Why didn’t I know what was poisonous and what wasn’t?

Why did I need a fucking calculator to find out how many years worth of water I had left?

Why didn’t I have better reference materials? I had my wiki copy, of course, but it was too broad to be an in-depth learning tool.

Why, if I was so damned smart, hadn’t I known to bring proper reference materials to a hostile goddamned planet? I had ten years worth of movies, but no basic chemistry classes. Typical idiot American, I thought, and gunned my little forklift as I made my daily commute to the dome.

14.

Not that it really mattered.

I had a lifetime’s worth of food and power and no way to have children. The settlement, such as it was, had already failed. I might see another human being eventually, but it wouldn’t be for years. Landing sites were spread out all over the planet, and only one had been equipped with vehicles capable of going long distances.

I turned away from my sustainability issues and focused on communications. Hours of research revealed instructions for blowing the comm right off the ship; when I armed the sequence and retreated the regulation ninety meters, there was a synchronized series of tiny explosions and a whole chunk of the ship fell off and landed on airbags on the regolith.

Pretty trick.

A day and a half of removing panels and airbags and I had the comm – a big rack filled with computer components. I built it a shelter between the ship and the dome, stocked with everything a data center would need: screens, boards and pointers, speakers, chairs with wheels, and a hot beverage dispenser.

Continue reading Chapter 3 →

Chapter 2

Writing

In which there is a second installment. (Back to chapter 1.)

7.

It took my stupid-tired self about fifty minutes to shut down the dome. I didn’t want the bodies exposed to air and heat; they’d just rot. Somebody would want this site preserved for forensics or something.

Maybe.

Plus it was a waste of resources, running an entire dome for a bunch of dead people. Life-long near-poverty had made me nothing if not frugal.

I’d walked around, still inside my suit, and looked at them – the people on my team, the people I’d applied with, trained with, and traveled through space with – for a morbidly long time. Some just looked like they were asleep, but many of them had done the sorts of things you’d expect during a real death. They were in weird positions, eyes open or half open, and I was glad I couldn’t smell the air in the dome. Once I realized that they were all actually, literally, and unequivocally deceased, it became important that I shut off the dome. I knew they were all filled with bacteria that wanted to turn them into puddles, but they were humans – from earth – and precious to me. I wanted them intact.

When the power whined down I realized I should have vented the air first. Now I’d have to operate the airlock manually. I sighed, and waddled over to the lock.

Continue reading Chapter 2 →

A Spore Called Moral

Writing

In which there’s a short story, apropos of nothing.

1.

His name was Randy and he was a total pud, but he was so big and lurking and earnest that putting up with him had the advantage of keeping all the other jobless, vid-playing puds out of my personal orbit.

“I’m going because it’ll be like being a cowboy,” he enthused. “Like the wild West. Real men, real women. No fuckin’ rules!”

“I’m going because I can’t find a job,” I said for the hundredth time. “Just like you.” I studied his flat, bland face again. He looked like he lived in his mother’s basement and delivered pizzas for beer money, but he’d passed the tests which meant he had to be at least as competent as I was. “I’m telling you, it’s not a video game. It’s a planet where you can’t go outside without a space suit. It’s gonna be rough up there, man. And we’re never coming back. Do you know anything about Mars?”

“Yeah, I watch FoxComm,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity. We’re colonizing a whole new planet!” The guy was utterly sincere.

“Whatever, kiddo,” I said, and turned back around to face the front of the line. If it was such a great opportunity, I thought for the thousandth time, the rich would be going instead of us lower middle-class meat baffles.

I’d originally presented for emigration in Omaha, where I’d passed the primary entry with flying colors. It had consisted of three days of basic testing – reading comprehension, basic math, grade school science – with number two pencils, a lot like sitting through competencies in high school, and an afternoon of pushups and jogging that had neatly cut the obese who had made up well over half the applicants. Then I’d received about three pounds of paperwork on actual paper that I was admonished not to lose and spent three sticky, smelly days on a bus in a convoy of obviously retired Greyhound busses on the way to the south.

In Texas we’d been issued pup tents and MREs and directed to set up in orderly rows in an abandoned football stadium. I’d been taking PTA baths in a bathroom sink for 72 hours and was seriously thinking of renting a motel room with the last of my money just for a real shower. At night, they showed educational videos on the stadium’s screens so we’d know how to operate airlocks and what death by Martian exposure was really like.

Most of the males continued to look at the whole thing like a glorified video game. I don’t think they really understood that Mars was a real place, and that dying there didn’t include respawning back at the base for another run. Most of the women were like me: single, childless, squeezed out of various obsolete corners of the tech industry. We chatted amiably enough in the bathrooms, but it seemed none of us were really prone to networking. The men outnumbered us ten-to-one.

“Man, this line is long,” Randy said again. Continue reading A Spore Called Moral →

Seeing Amma

Spiritual, Travel

In which I share the story of my 2010 pilgrimage to Mother’s feet.

Amma's Feet

Guru brahma gurur visnuh
gurudevo mahesvarah
guru saksat parambrahma
tasmai srigurave namah

(I prostrate to that Sri Guru who is Brahma, Vishnu, and God Maheshwara, and who is verily the Supreme Absolute Itself.)

At the very front of the archana book, there is a 3-and-a-half page manasa puja. I read through it once several years ago.

I don’t remember having any particular response to it other than perhaps the vague opinion that it was a simple or childish form of worship.

Now it elucidates my longing so much that I wish I’d written it myself.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
The Seattle programs are awkward. There’s a public program, then a paid retreat, then a public program. The only way to get to both public programs is to be in Seattle for three days; if you’re going to be there anyway you might as well sign up for the retreat. And, if you can’t afford the retreat, well, only one public program for you then.

I couldn’t afford the retreat. Hell, I couldn’t even afford transportation to Seattle. The only reason I was able to see Mother at all this year is because a friend, Toni, saw my sad complaint on Facebook and offered to drive me across the state.

When I asked her why she wanted to do that, she said she’d “felt compelled” to take me to Amma. When I sent her a link to amma.org, she cried looking at an image of Mother.

“It happens,” I told her. “If Mother wants to meet you, She’ll meet you.” How lucky am I, that Mother found me a ride?

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After getting a ride, I got the very last room in the “Amma Tour” room block at the Hyatt, but it was $109 per night. I later found a motel through Priceline for $65. It was five miles away from the program, but at least I could afford it.

So my friend Toni picked me up at 8:45 on Monday morning and drove me across the state in her little red late model car so that I could see my beloved Sat-guru, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.

My Amma

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
At the motel I loaned Toni a green punjabi, and dressed myself in a white skirt-and-top set I bought at a Chicago program a dozen years ago.

We looked at the map in the phone book for awhile, then we left to find the Hyatt Regency Bellevue. Toni navigates almost entirely by vibe; when I admitted I hadn’t seen the Hyatt where I’d expected it to be (I was looking at the wrong side of the street) she laughed and flipped a U-turn and drove us straight to it.

Parking, miraculously, was free. (We’d already filled the tank. Between the two of us, we had maybe forty dollars.) We went into the Hyatt and got in line with hundreds of devotees. I saw the clothes and the hair and the jewelry and the tattoos and wondered vaguely why humans like to adorn themselves as tribes… I felt some relief: I feel weird about the way I dress because I’m basically the only member of my tribe where I live.

The line started to move. We got to the hall and were handed darshan tokens. Then we followed the directions across the hall and sat for the puja. Toni has bad knees from a car accident she was in, but magically we were seated on the right side of the stage next to the wall so she could stand up when needed without bothering too many people. There were over a thousand people in the hall. Most of the people around us were wearing retreat bracelets.

Devi Bhava

I sat and relaxed into the vibe. These people had all spent two days with Mother; was that what felt so wonderful? Or was it my own expectation of seeing Mother? Or was Mother thinking about us? If God is everywhere and we’re all capable of producing this ourselves, why don’t we? What made this different than any other gathering of people in any other room?

Amma arrived. Toni said she had a clear view of the pada puja even though it was all the way across the hall. (I don’t think I even knew about pada puja for several years. Everyone’s experience around Amma is so different.)

Holy Water

After the holy water was distributed, something about the shape of the ceiling magnified the sound of thousands of lids being snapped onto thousands of little cups into this wonderful groovy clicky-popping sound. “I LOVE that sound!” I whispered. “I want to sample it RIGHT NOW!” The guy next to me and I started giggling and couldn’t stop.

“It’s like a crooked Zen koan!” he replied. “Like, ‘What is the sound of many lids that don’t fit?'”

Each time one of us stopped giggling, the other would start again. Silly, non-ironic, joyful, childlike laughter. It felt WONDERFUL.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Mother gave satsang. I took notes on my iThing. This is what they say:

Dispassion, three types: temporary, gradual, intense.
The body is like a rented house
Awareness – like a bird on a dry twig (at any time it could snap)
When we develop intense dispassion we get peace of mind.
What is the point of blaming others for our sorrow?

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
When Swamiji began the Ma-Om meditation, Toni, who had had to stand up during the satsang, came and sat back down. Meditating in Amma’s presence was, as always, a lot like stepping

calmly

off the edge of the world

into an eternal abyss.

The rest of the puja completed, Mother went into the temple to change and they closed the curtains. Toni and I went for a walk because she’s not used to sitting on the floor so much and her knees were killing her.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Dinner was pretty good (especially the mattar paneer).

Devi Bhava

I would have had Indian snacks instead, but there aren’t any at the Seattle programs; I guess there aren’t really any Indian devotees in the area to make them. I can’t even tell you how much I was hoping for idli and sambar and pakora. OMG what I would give for some samosas! Srsly.

Our tokens were numbered O-3. I told Toni we wouldn’t be getting darshan until three or four o’clock in the morning. We hit the bookstore. I bought a rudraksha japa mala and a new bottle of Marikolundu.

I got some chai. Eventually Toni went and found a couch and napped.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
I went up to the stage and stared at Amma for a couple of hours.

Well, when I could see Her at all I stared. The devotees doing their various sevas on stage insisted on standing directly in front of me, and I kept crying to Her in my head: “Let me see You! I can’t see You! This is my only time with You all year and this guy has to stand there!” I was feeling extremely sorry for myself that I didn’t get my usual three days with Mother and instead had only a few hours with Her and that guy! Why couldn’t he freakin’ kneel when he wasn’t actively doing his freakin’ seva?! I paced like a caged cat up and down the side of the stage, looking for a glimpse of my beloved Mother. Eventually I perched sideways behind a chair and I could see Her, but it took a toll on my neck and meditating was out of the question.

I went and sat down in front of the stage in a place left empty because the corner of the temple blocked any view of Amma, and meditated for about forty minutes. I’m not sure, but I think I may have fallen asleep. I didn’t nod off or start to fall over – usually a good indication that one has passed out – because I had very carefully arranged my body so that it took no effort to keep it upright, but there was a definite lack of conscious continuity.

Maybe I slept, maybe I had a very deep meditation. I don’t know. The issue caused me to wonder what the difference between “awareness” and “consciousness” might be. Do I have to be one to be the other?

I guess that I possess “consciousness,” because popular opinion and scripture alike say I do, but honestly I don’t know how to define it. I think I’m here and that I’m me, but I can’t tell you why I think that. Am I still conscious when I’m asleep? Can I be conscious without being aware? Can I be aware without being conscious? Most importantly, how do I know I’m me? I don’t have an unbroken recollection of my life; I have chunks of memory bordered by periods of sleep: each iteration of myself as the doer is utterly discrete, and yet I insist that these memories are all beads on the same string. Why do I think that? And how, if indeed at all, does this small-s-self relate to any capital-S-Self I might be trying to become?

I don’t meditate regularly because, honestly, the ever-changing world is more charming than whatever I find inside myself. I understand that the space within is infinitely vast (I can fit a model of the entire universe in there with room to spare), but it doesn’t draw me like the manifest world does. At best, meditation – even in the presence of my Satguru – is no better than just really pleasant, thank you very much.

So it follows that either I’m Doing It Wrong or that I’m missing the point. What is the point? When we see images of saints deep in samadhi, it sure looks like there’s a point. What are they doing in there? And why after twenty years of meditation don’t I know the answer to that question?

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After a yummy masala latte, I went back to the right side of the stage and found myself a place sitting on the floor directly behind the stairs. From that position, I could see Mother’s face more often than not. (I wanted to be much closer to Her, but everyone was being invited to sit after darshan and between them and the prasad people I figured I’d get booted in a couple of minutes anyway.)

I leaned against the metal banister and rested my chin on the floor of the temple and wondered, as I always do, why She bothers to do this. Why come into the world and do this incredible, endless job of work? Each year She comes, and each year she bootstraps us out of our mess, and we go back into the world full of love and compassion and ready to serve… and slowly, we forget. The next year, She does it again, and so do we. Rinse and repeat. She could just be sitting somewhere in samadhi. Why pour this little bottle of milk into the vast ocean?

“I’m a waste of Your time,” I thought. “These others probably utilize Your grace much better than I. I’m lucky I get even one darshan this year. I deserve less than even this, to sit where I can see You.” I briefly considered leaving without darshan, but even at the time I saw it was some sort of self-pitying ego dance. The mind really is a terrible thing.

“All I care about is You. All I want to do is be around you. Everything else is a waste of time.” I wondered if I wasn’t being a passive Westerner: I have ONLY A FEW HOURS IN HER PRESENCE and am I really just going to sit here? She’s right there! I thought about begging myself onto the prasad list: “I used to be one of the Iowa seva coordinators, but three years ago I moved and now I don’t have a local satsang and I’ve done no seva all year and this is the one and only chance I have to see Mother. How about it, can you get me up there?”

I cried because She’s so perfect and so beautiful. It seems that I had, compacted into my eight hours in Her presence, the same journey I would have had in three days if I’d been on the retreat.

Eventually, the sign said O-1. I went to find Toni. We got into the darshan line. It moved much too fast for me. I was on stage before I knew it, and in the lap almost instantly. I’d been in line between two first-timers, and had harbored a fantasy about sitting right next to Mother for a couple of minutes. Or maybe I’d get to be in the lap while She did mantras… but suddenly, moments after I got into the temple, She hugged me. I thought, “I love You so much, Ma, and all I want is You,” and started to cry, and then my darshan was over. She smiled at me as She handed me my prasad. She knew me – I quit wondering if She recognized me years ago – but there was no super special darshan for me this year, even though I’d been feeling so sorry for myself about only getting the one.

I got the impression I had been officially weaned off of Her form a few years ago (the first time I had had the “I really need to look within and see what’s in there” revelation) and that She knew I knew that. I mean, I remember it. This child doesn’t get long silly darshans; this one is supposed to be doing seva or meditating.

The sevite near the stairs motioned me to sit on the side of the stage. Toni sat behind me after her darshan. The monitor was making the front row get up and leave every 60 seconds. After scootching forward twice I was behind the assistant prasad person and finally close enough to Mother… a minute later I was asked to leave so the people behind me could get their turns too.

I most emphatically DID NOT WANT to leave, now that I’d gotten where I wanted to be.

I left the stage anyway, because I was supposed to.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
I considered staying until the end of the program; I could maybe catch a cab back to the motel, or Toni could come back get me… After walking to the car and sitting for a few minutes, I decided it would be selfish not to leave. Yes, I was wasting the four to six more hours I could spend in Amma’s presence, but I didn’t have cab fare and it was clearly unfair to steal sleep from Toni, who had so graciously driven me to Seattle in the first place.

It was four o’clock in the morning. We’d been awake for over 22 hours and had driven for over five of them.

We left.

I imagined Mother behind me, giving darshan endlessly, and sniffled a little. The sky was lightening in the east and birds were beginning to sing.

We set an alarm for 10:30 and crashed for six hours. I slept wrapped around my Amma doll.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
After brunch at a Red Robin in Bellevue, we drove back to Walla Walla. It was overcast nearly the entire way. I plugged in my iPod and we rocked Amma bhajans the whole time.

Driving home

I did a lot of japa. I got a mocha in Cle Elum. We stopped at a fruit stand-slash-antique store outside of Yakima and browsed for an hour.

I was starving by the time Toni dropped me off. I nuked a bowl of rice and beans immediately. I tried to stay up until a decent hour but I was so tired I failed. I went to bed around six and slept for a very, very, VERY long time.

. .. … .. . .. … .. .
Today I found the manasa puja in the front of my archana book and recognized in it literally all of my current feelings. “Oh Mother,” it says. “You are pure love. I am too impure to deserve Your Grace. I know that my egoism and selfishness must be repelling to You. Still, bear with me. Mother, please be with me. You are the holiest river. I am a stagnant, filthy pond. You flow to me and purify me, overlooking my shortcomings and forgiving my mistakes.” I miss Her so much, and doubt entirely my ability to do anything at all of use outside of Her influence.

Something wonderful must be going on in there, because why else travel the globe merely to hug creatures like me? If enlightenment is loving all of creation as Self, well, it must be more wonderful than it sounds.

~ Om Namah Shivaya ~

Related links:
Amma’s 2010 North American tour schedule
My Flickr picture set

Amazon and DRM.

Gadgets, Soapbox

In which I’m torn between really liking a device that works well, and feeling like I should never use it again.

Last December, I bought myself an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas-slash-layoff present.

Can has shiny new Kindle!

I bought it not because I didn’t already have a way to read ebooks (I have four separate ebook apps on my iPod Touch) but because I had device envy: the Kindle was a sleek little number with a 3G connection.

Plus, NLW said I’d like it, and she’s usually right.

The 3G connection was the kicker. I could buy books anywhere – in the car, at the store, in an airport! Imagine how great it would be to finish the second book in a trilogy and be able to download and begin reading the third book without even leaving your chair, man. That’s just plain hawt.

So now I have a Kindle, and it really is a slick little device. I carry it around with me more than I expected to. I currently have 77 items on it, from full-length books to short stories to today’s New York Times and this week’s Amritapuri news.

Since acquiring my Kindle, I’ve changed the Amazon bookmark in my browser to take me to the Kindle store instead of the main page. I have 31 items in my Kindle account, which means that Amazon got much more money out of me then they ever did when all of my ebook money went to Fictionwise and Baen and Mobipocket.

My Kindle works really well. It recently received an operating system update that made it even cooler than it already was. For the first time in all my years as an Amazon customer I started a second Wish List, so I could track the Kindle books and accessories I’m lusting over.

But then there’s Amazon’s party line:

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

– Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Which means, in a nutshell, that Amazon can brick your Kindle remotely whenever it likes. Which means you don’t own your ebooks, you’re just licensing them. (They’ve already mass-erased books from lots of devices.) If you decide to break the DRM and read a Kindle book on another device, you’re breaking the agreement and possibly even the law as well.

Cory Doctorow refuses to sell his works in Kindle format – you can get them for free from his website, but you can’t buy them from Amazon.com: he’s that against DRM and all it implies. He says that book ownership predates even the publishing industry itself, and he’s right. The ideas in a book might belong to the author, but the book itself belongs to its owner.

In the olden days, after you bought a book it was yours. You could read it, burn it, loan it, re-read it, let 11 family members read it, and then sell it: it was YOURS.

Now I’m giving money to a company who can brick my device if they merely think I’m acting funny. I have to back up all my Amazon ebook purchases and DRM-strip them just in case, or I risk the possibility of having rented rather than purchased the works in my account.

All of this pisses me off. I want to use my cool new technology, and they make it really easy for me to do so, but I don’t want Amazon thinking they’re getting away with this. They probably think the majority of their Kindle users are morons, and the more we use our Kindles and the more we accept their crappy licence agreements the more proof they have that we really are.

Yes, I still buy books from the other sites, but it’s just so much easier (and often cheaper, because Amazon sells the majority of their ebooks at a loss) to buy them directly from the Kindle itself.

Read The Future of Reading. It’s short and sweet and says most of what needs to be said.

I’m wondering if I shouldn’t abandon ebook reading on both the Kindle and the iPod Touch and find some other way of doing it. Isn’t it my duty to vote with my money?

My epic Portland weekend was epic!

Reading, Travel

In which I recap my madcap, whirlwind, SUPERfun trip to the cit-ay!

By 8:30 Friday morning I was in Sheila‘s van, heading west. Her awesome daughters let me ride shotgun, which was supercool of them. The ride was lovely – watching the land change from desert to rain forest is beautiful every single time I see it – and the company was lovely.

Columbia river

I was at the Hollywood TC before one in the afternoon. I called Dave. He told me to start walking down 39th and he’d come and get me.

I can’t tell you exactly how long, but it’s been a loooooooong time since I last saw Dave. We were in the MHCC jazz program together in the late 80’s. We had beers, and his neighbor (who also happens to be his bass player) set up an ad hoc wireless network for me so I could get online.

Beers!

Adie came and picked me up after she got off work, and we went to her house, where I was attacked by terriers!. (Hah!) I put my bag in the guest room, changed my clothes, and after a bit we wandered over to Alberta for dinner at The Hilt. (Falafel! Hummus! Mojitos!)

Alberta

My friend Leila dropped in and had a little nosh with us. It was a wonderful visit. After she took off we walked home, watched some TV, and were in bed by 10:30. Continue reading My epic Portland weekend was epic! →

Portland, OR: I can haz eet.

Travel

In which there’s about to be a wee bit o’ travel.

I’m going to Portland this weekend!

PDX

My girl from the paper saw my tweet about wanting to go see Cory Doctorow sign books at Powell’s and offered me a place in her van! I’ve got a ride up the Gorge and back! Squee!

I texted 80 and asked if I could crash at her place and she said yes. I texted Leila and told her I’d be in town. Via FB, I told David and Maija and Lisa and Jana that I was coming and hopefully some of ’em will have time to hang out.

Sometimes the very best thing to do is get out of town for a night or two. Plus: Cory fucking Doctorow, can a fangrrl get a hell yeah?

Update: My schedule’s filling up nicely! Hang with db on Friday afternoon, see Adam & 80 Friday night, catch Miriam’s Well at the Saturday market, hit Powell’s on Saturday afternoon, mebbie sit in with db on Saturday night… Oh yeah. I’m totally gonna need a transit map.