I was in Seattle (briefly) at the end of last month, and counting on my fingers just now discovered that that Saturday was eleven days ago now, which is six and three-quarters months in Internet time (eight months if you’re using the Canadian Internet calendar), which hardly makes for breaking news if I were to write about it now, but — BUT — I had a really good time when I was there, and got to talk with a lot of cool people, some of whom I’d met before and some not, but all of whom were good to spend time with.  Whew!

Oh!  And there was a Starbucks (see FIGURE 1 above).  The first one ever, at the Pike Place Market, which was much more crowded than the last time I was there, but we still had a good time picking our way through the tables and finding sweet things to snack on.

I came away from Seattle, and that awesome meet up full of happy people and cold beer, with a single directive, multiple persons all sending the same request my way: “Write more, you big hairy ape*.”  So, I will.  Honest!  Because I seem to have a fair bit of free time on my hands these days, since in the eleven days since I visited Seattle I seem to have—

—AHHHHHH!!!  Stay tuned.

(*to be fair, I don’t think anyone actually called me a big hairy ape; I usually use this appellation when addressing myself.)

I liked the comment that Kerri Anne left for this photo on the Flickr that I had to post it here with that title.  I suppose there is something sort of bleak and zombie-like about it.  Of course, now I’m thinking about a zombie outbreak in Portland and wondering — would a vegan who became a zombie stay a vegan?  I can’t help but picture a freshly undead local stumbling down the street, arms outstretched, moaning, “BRRRRROCOLLIIIII!”

(The above joke may be funnier if you live here.)

If you like the effect in this photo I got it with the Spica app; there’s an associated group on Flickr.

From the edge of the table, just out of my sight, she answered, “The nanomachines are in solution in this gel.  After I finish applying it they will swim between the cells on your skin and into the tissue of your leg, where they will begin to repair the damaged nerves.”

I spend a moment there laying on my side taking this in, picturing these tiny mites waving their legs of carbon atoms, crawling across cell membranes like spiders skittering across pond water, coming at last to the fine strands of nerve fiber, whereupon they would scavenge what they needed and begin to weave new tissue, trailing the gossamer strands of new neurons behind them as they wrote new sensation into my leg.  I turned to look at her over my shoulder.  “And so…it’ll just work?  They’ll just…fix me?”

She smiled.  “Yes, it will just work,” she said, and yet didn’t say at all.  As before I found that I didn’t really seem to be hearing her words so much as I knew what she was saying.  Certainly her lips never moved.

I turned away from her, thinking about this.  Wondering what it would be like when they were done.  I could sense the doctor starting to walk out of the room, and suddenly it hit me: she’d put the salve on the wrong leg. “Wait-” I said, turning over  –

–and fell some indeterminate distance, falling solidly upon my bed, face down, eyes opening with a start to focus groggily on my pillow.  Oh, no.

There’s a trick I learned some years ago, one that I can’t teach, can’t explain how it works, where I can push myself back into a dream if I do so immediately after waking.

pleasepleasepleaseplease

I close my eyes again, and slide back into the peculiar floating warmth of the dream.  My bed gives way to the operating table.  Blankets disappear, and I’m in the hospital gown again.

you have to come back, it’s the other leg, you need to do the other one

I open my eyes again, see the doctor in her white lab coat walking from the room.  “Wait!” I call out to her, in the same speechless method she used to talk to me.  She stops, turns towards me.  I start to tell her about how it’s the other leg that needs to be treated…

...for all the good that will do me, I realize.  I already know this to be false, these walls only mist, the doctor only a shadow.  The magic is gone, the sudden reappearance of the hospital room no longer a miracle now that it is revealed to only have been the result of a cleverly placed mirror this whole time.  For years I’ve tried to pull things back with me into the waking world, coming out of dreams with fingers locked firmly around newspapers from my hometown, fine china teacups, hot breakfasts, bicycle wheels.  I’ve yet to return to my body anything but empty handed.  Surely this superscience cure of molecule-sized robots will be no different.  “Nothing,” I tell her.  “It doesn’t matter.”

The doctor smiles at me again, and walks out of the room, no doubt dissolving back into sand as soon as she leaves my sight.

I close my eyes, open them again.  Roll over on my back.  Stare up at the ceiling of my bedroom.

I wonder about my dream counterpart, if he ever gets tired of driving up and down highways along the coast, walking through ever-changing yet hauntingly familiar cities, jumping off building tops to float lazily to the ground, if he ever gets weary of never being cold or having swollen joints.  Maybe he’d like to change places for a while, go sit in my chair in the office, stare blankly at a computer screen all day while I ride a tiger through the park.  Maybe.

Probably not, though.

Dreams, why must you vex me so?

Or, you know, it was just over a week when I snapped this photo when I was in town for a few brief hours last week.  It could be gone by now, and I probably should have published this sooner, but in my tradition of bringing you last week’s breaking news I am just now getting around to sharing it.

And now?  Well, now I have to go prepare for shenanigans with the Canadians later tonight.

Ciao!

Nothing ends, Adrian.  Nothing ever ends.

This made me think back a bit to a link that Neil Gaiman posted on the Twitter, to this story about a man who has a quote from Death: The High Cost of Living tattooed on his arm.  The slant on this quote is a bit different:

It always ends.  That’s what gives it value.

I don’t know why I drew the mental connection between these quotes, other than the arbitrary end of this year by those of us using the Gregorian calendar was rapidly approaching.  Also, I probably spend entirely too much time living in imaginary places.

It’s easy enough in the the hectic holiday season and the ridiculous pressure at work to GET EVERYTHING DONE to turn around and write off the entire year as a complete wash, but honestly I had a good year, and I think I’ve laid the foundations for some better times ahead.  Anyway, I did this silly thing with pictures last year because I was lazy, but I think I liked it enough afterward that I’ll do it again.  Here’s my 2009, in photos:

It’s been an awesome year, and here’s to the next one, and they’re boarding my flight so I guess I better wrap this up omg see you all next year!

I swear this view will never, ever get old for me.

After uploading this photo, I went back through my Flickr stream and found a few more taken from almost this exact spot.  Here’s one taken last year in September, before the green had begun to give way to the colors of fall.

And another one, taken the previous year to that in late October.

With a view like that, can you blame me for going back and taking these shots again and again?  I can’t wait to take some serious hikes up along this part of state next spring.

My coworkers, being both lazy and not very good at keeping details straight, decided to recycle the half dozen Mylar birthday balloons gifted to our accounting manager on her birthday at the beginning of the month by taping them to my cubicle walls.  This is pretty annoying, but they got bent out of shape when I took a scissors to the one they had tied to my monitor so I left them up.

Towards the end of the week one of the girls across the way in another department asked when my actual birthday was and how old I was going to be.   “This next Monday,” I said, “and…thirty-two?”  I scratched my head.  I can’t keep track of these things.  “Yeah, that sounds about right.  Thirty-two.”  I shrugged.

“Cool.  I’m turning thirty-one in a few weeks.”

“Oh, sweet!  Stop by my desk later, I’ll give you some pro tips.  I’m pretty good at this thirty-one thing.”  And you know, I guess I am, though this is more by accident than design.  It’s been a pretty good year.

Anyway, here I go around the sun again.  Thirty two, here’s looking at you.

After a few hours cooped up in my room I decided that what I really wanted to spend my dinner allowance on was a pizza.  A big, greasy pepperoni and sausage pizza.  Yelp! turned up a few promising places; I picked one that sounded about right for what I had in mind, memorized the directions, and wandered down to the parking lot with the truck keys in hand.

There had been few cars when I checked in, but now the first level of the parking garage was nearly full.  Things were a bit cramped, and the truck was a bit longer of a vehicle than I was used to, but I judged that I shouldn’t have too much trouble backing up and driving off in one straight shot.  I climbed back up into the truck and started the engine, slowly backing up and watching the car parked to my left as I turned the steering wheel.  Satisfied that I wasn’t going to scrape up my neighbor on the way out, I turned to look over my shoulder, only to discover that for some reason a man was standing directly in my way.  And when I say directly, I mean it — if I there had been crosshairs mounted on the rear gate of the truck he would have been dead center in them.  Surprised, I stopped the truck, probably less than two feet from where he was standing.

And the man just stood there, looking down.  I could only see the top half of him, and couldn’t make out quite what he was doing.  Was he drunk and had stopped right there to take a pee?  Held frozen in fear by the sight of a mouse?  Being mugged by a dwarf?  No, it wasn’t any of these things, and after a moment I recognized enough of the tell-tale signs to realize that this was a person Playing With His Mobile Device.  I gave him a minute to notice that hey, there’s a big truck immediately to your left, but when he showed no sign of moving along I brought my hand up to hit the car horn…

…and I wondered.

I wondered what it would take to get him to notice that there was a truck right next to him.  Apparently the nearby rumble of the engine in an enclosed parking garage wouldn’t do it.  The bright red glare of the brake lights wasn’t triggering a response, either.  For as close as I was, the exhaust had to practically be blowing on his legs.  Curious as to what it would take to trigger his proximity sense of HOLY SHIT THERE IS A 2-TON TRUCK RIGHT NEXT TO ME, I began tapping on the brake, letting the truck inch slowly back towards him.  So now, in addition to truck noise, diesel exhaust, and giant mass of slowly encroaching steel, he had the added warning factor of bright flashing red lights as I tapped repeatedly on the brakes.  Closer.  Closer.

How oblivious do you have to be to fail to notice a long bed truck slowly filling up the entirety of your peripheral vision?  How had natural selection let this man down that he was unable to detect an enormous truck inching closer and closer to hitting his legs?  How would someone like this fare against a natural threat more dangerous than a tree stump?  I began to imagine him as a caveman on a savanna in mankind’s distant past.

“Moog.  We need to talk.”

“Hey, Buldar!  I found some sticks!  You know, for the fire.”

“Ah…I see that.  Listen, Moog — you’re a nice caveman and all, but I just don’t think you’re going to cut it here.  You can’t hunt.  You can’t gather.  You don’t seem to be able to make fire on your own.  You even got lost inside the cave once.”

“Hey look, if this is because of what happened on the last hunt–”

“Yes, Moog.  This is because of that last hunt, where we were hunting the mighty cave deer, and you were so engrossed watching some beetles that you didn’t notice that stag nearby and it knocked you over into a ditch.”

“That deer totally snuck up on me, Buldar!”

“How, Moog? You were in the middle of a prairie. It just sauntered right up to until it got close enough to hit you with its antlers.”

“But…but…”

“Look…you’re gonna have to go.  Maybe there will be a time after so many winters have come and gone that no man now alive can count them, and the tribe will have grown so large that they can support someone who looks at shiny pieces of obsidian all day but can’t make a decent spear-head or trap a hare, but the glaciers are coming closer and we need everyone devoted to making sure we survive the long cold ahead, and as such there is no place for you in Buldar’s Tribe.  Sorry.”

“Fine!  Whatever, Buldar!  I’ll leave, but I’m totally taking these sticks with me!”

“That’s actually part of an antelope thigh bone and a piece of dried mastodon turd, but you’re welcome to them.  Good day to you, Moog.”

I had to be less than a foot away from him now, and still: nothing.  Concerned that I might actually knock him over, I stopped.  And waited.  And when it seemed that I was going to have to hit the horn and scare the bejeezus out of him, Moog came to the last of his emails and looked up, and then to his left, and made the face that meant WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS TRUCK COME FROM?  Properly embarrassed, he ran around to the passenger window, waving his Blackberry in weak apology.  ”Ha ha, you know how these things are!” he said.  I rolled my eyes and nodded, and continued backing up now that he had vacated the last two feet of empty space I needed to finish backing up.  In an effort to make amends he ran back towards the rear of the truck, windmilling his arms in the direction I was already moving, calling out “YOU’VE GOT PLENTY OF ROOM!  YOU CAN BACK UP MORE YOU HAVE ROOM!”

I shifted gears and gave an absent-minded wave through the rear windshield as I drove away, not sparing another glance for that lousiest of cavemen, hoping that another tribe would take him and his Blackberry in before he froze to death in the coming winter.

(via Pomplamoose Music, via Truth and Beauty Bombs)

Happy Friday, everyone!