Tag Archives: travel

Springtime in Prague

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Spring is here! It has nothing to do with the weather, although it is warm enough today for me to wear shorts. There are other signs, the subtle indicators that the season has changed. I was too wide-eyed last year to recognize the signs for what they were, but now I am a savvy veteran of the seasons.

It is road destruction season. Some bureaucrat in an anonymous building somewhere in the city pushed a button on his desk and thus did spring begin. Across the city piles of stones have appeared next to the patches of sand that used to be sidewalks. Entire streets have been dug up, creating larger piles of larger stones. Trams are diverted from their normal courses while crews stand around watching one guy with an arc welder work on the tracks.

I walked through downtown and the number of tourists has jumped dramatically in the last week, as well. Old Cars, tops down, slowly move through the crowds while tourists in the back seat snap photos. Crowds gather on the hour for the crushing disappointment that is the astronomical clock. Even in Strašnice you will find befuddled-looking folks holding maps of the city. There’s not much to see out in the Haunted City, but there they are. Some of the tourist traffic may be related to Easter holidays; we’ll see if it keeps up.

And here and there the signs are appearing in the windows of bars and pubs: Garden Open. Once more beer is available outdoors, and the city celebrates another winter endured, even as they turn a wary eye toward the river. The water level is high and still rising, and there’s a lot of snow in the mountains this year.

Thanks!

The Man Is Keepin’ Me Down

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This just in from the parental news service:

Some of you are probably already aware of my penchant for stacking rocks upon each other when the opportunity presents itself. In Prague, although the streets and sidewalks are often made of stones, pulling them up and stacking them is discouraged. But this! This is an outrage! I think the photo was taken in Hawaii somewhere.
Apparently in Hawaii they don’t appreciate art. Sure, sure, they use rock piles to mark the trails and people would wander off, get lost, and fall into a volcano, but that’s a small price to pay, don’t you think?

You see where this is heading, don’t you? First it’s public safety, just an isolated case, nothing to worry about. But then, once the anti-stackists have a foothold, they will work away, slowly eroding our God-given right to balance stones up one another, gradually stigmatizing the practice until rock-stacking will only be done in remote areas and well-protected compounds in the desert.

I am outraged!

Thanks!

Things I’ve Learned About Japan

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I have in the past months exposed myself to quite a bit of Japanese pop culture, an odd hodge-podge of western and eastern thought as expressed through entertainment. The Japanese, it seems, are accomplished hogde-podgists; even Shinto, the dominant religion (though it doesn’t really fit the Western definition of a religion) seems little more than a framework to hang together anything that comes along that seems like a good idea. Gods and demons aren’t so different from each other, really; it’s more about which side they’re on than whether what they want to do is good for the regular folk.

Japan, it seems, would be a terrible place to be a schoolgirl, unless you are the one girl at each school who is a master of everything (particularly fencing), is the semi-erotic idol of all the other schoolgirls, and can transform into a superhero by calling out the right phrase. The rest of the schoolgirls have it much worse. They are groped, raped, and generally sexually harassed by fellow students, teachers, and the occasional demon; they are cruel and abusive to one another; and they almost never have parents to speak of.

Technology and progressive ideals are just making things worse for little girls. There is a lot of weapons research going on in Japan, and unfortunately for the schoolgirls it seems entirely devoted to transforming humans into weapons, and schoolgirls seem to be ideal for that purpose. I’m not sure who’s funding all this research – it seems to me that if you can deveolop a gun that can shoot down an entire squadron of aircraft, you could find a way to deploy that weapon that didn’t require kidnapping a schoolgirl who just got her first boyfriend and surgically altering her so giant cannon erupt from her arms in times of stress, and then turning her loose again to see what happens. Now, I don’t want to start any cultural wars, but I think in America we would have found a more convenient way to deploy the weapon. And we would have made more than two (the prototype that didn’t work out quite right who becomes a Big Problem, and the second attempt who only might become a Big Problem, but whose humanity remains intact).

Still, one cruel project at a time, damn near every high school in Japan has one of these super-weapons meekly roaming its halls, although most don’t realize it until the school is reduced to rubble. There is a lot of rubble in Japan. Cities are destoryed and rebuilt, only to be destroyed again. The citizens take it in stride – another city destroyed, millions die, but after a couple of days they all agree that it’s time to move on. Often the destruction is visited upon the city by little girls who have been cruelly transformed or engineered up from scratch. Note to Little Girl Super-Weapon (LGSW) Engineers: be nice to the little girls. It’ll go better for you in the long run. Way better.

I’m not sure, actually, why Japan is developing all these LGSW’s; in general the greatest threats to the island nation are Runaway Research (LGSW’s turning on their creators), Evil Criminal Organizations (often abusing LGSW technology), Killer Robots From Space (against which LGSW’s are of limited use, instead Japan has developed its own fleet of Killer Robots), and Demonic Invasion (against which LGSW’s are simply cannon fodder – it takes a male to stop a demon, nine times out of ten. The only exception is the wicked hot female demons, who can be bested by super-popular sword-swinging high school girls.)

While we’re on the subject of wicked hot female demons, it is undeniably true that the amount of sex a Japanese male has is inversely proportional to the number of girls he knows. It is quite common in Japan for a teen-aged boy to find himself living with a whole bevy of hot young women, all of whom are fond of him, without an adult in sight. Not only will this unfortunate lad never get anything more than a fleeting kiss and the occasional accidental boob-grab, all the women will also fall under his anti-sex spell. Japanese cities are filled with abandoned Buddhist temples, unused hotels, and various guest houses occupied only by partially-clad teenage nymphs and the one guy in town who will never, ever, get any. (Japanese regulations require that there be at least one sexy but severe teenage Uber-Samuraiette, one devil-may-care buxom party girl, one ten-year-old who builds killer robots as a hobby, and one super-smart, super-sexy shy martial arts expert who can’t get in touch with her own feelings.) Not even demons, goddesses, or nymphomaniacs from other planets can penetrate the poor guy’s anti-sex aura, try as they might.

There is always something falling through the air in Japan: usually either rain, snow, or plum blossom petals, but occasionally there will be bombs, laser blasts, or killer robots. Most of the time it will be one of the first three, but I advise wearing a hard helmet when you visit, just in case, and if you have an LGSW who’s been brainwashed to adore you, you might want to take her along as well. Just make sure she thinks it’s a special trip just for her, and surprise her with a stuffed animal, while you’re at it. LGSW’s love stuffed animals.

Thanks!

Home

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I was talking to Soup Boy this evening, comparing notes about our holiday visits to the states. We are following wandering stars, Soup and I, and our intersection in this town is more about coincidence than fate. The Boy is younger than I am, and has not settled down on his own the way I did in San Diego. Until this Christmas, however, “home” for him had always meant his parents’ place, the building he had grown up in with the rest of his family.

On his last visit, he realized that something had changed. It was not “home” anymore, it was the place he had grown up. It was his parents’ home. He was there, and he was a visitor. Not to take away from people who cannot afford a roof over their heads, but there’s a difference between homeless and houseless. I sold my house, and I left my home. Now I live here.

Soup Boy and I talked for quite a while about what home is. Actually, he did most of the talking, because he had been doing most of the thinking. He was visiting friends in Los Angeles, and he talked about what he would do when he got home. “You mean, back to my place,” the friend would clarify. Soup Boy came to the realization that for him, home was wherever he was. Soup Boy is a snail, a Jet-Set snail who can traverse continents in an afternoon, but home is with him wherever he goes.

For me, the definition of Home is different. Home to me is any place I can feel I belong, any place that when I walk in people look up and know my face, and I can sit and do my thing and it’s part of the rhythm of the place. Home is where I’m part of the background, contributing my own hum to the room tone. Home is not a perfect place; here at the Little Cafe right now the window is closed and the smoke is making my eyes burn, my lungs ache, and I’m not going to be able to wear these clothes into my apartment. Still, for the hardships, I feel a connection to the people here. Although bartender turnover seems to have been 100 percent in the time I was gone, all the regular dogs are here.

Dog is not a euphemism in this case. There’s a cocker spaniel curled at my feet as I write this, happy that I am home.

Thanks!

The Lodge, Minneapolis Airport

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I was glad I had a window seat as the plane glided smoothly over the prairie. I looked down on the small towns that dotted the land, surrounded by fields now dormant and covered with a light blanket of snow. As we approached Minneapolis the lakes became more numerous, frozen over, cross-crossed by whiter stripes resulting from a glacial version of plate tectonics. As we got lower I saw that the surface of the ice was scored with tire tracks from countless vehicles, and dotted with fishermen’s shacks, some in clusters, others off on their own. On islands I could see houses, isolated in the summer, in the middle of a parking lot during the months of ice.

I have three hours to kill here in the Twin Cities, and how better than to take out a loan so I can afford a single airport beer. Leinenkugel’s Red – a local better-than-awful brew. Sitting near me is a gray-haired man returning to Saudi Arabia after a cruise with his family. He is an engineer working as a contractor for Haliburton, where he specializes in drilling sideways. “Oh, like when you want to set up a well on the border and send it under your neighbor,” I said. “Exactly,” he replied.

Although he has dual Canadian-Saudi citizenship, he is not flying directly into Saudi Arabia, but into Bahrain instead. “When you fly into Saudi, they search you carefully, and confiscate all your porn and everything,” he explained. “Bahrain is just a whorehouse. Then you can drive down the causeway.” He is also planning to spend some time with the whores in bahrain, as lond as he is in the neighborhood.

His family, I take it, lives on this side of the Atlantic, as does he when he is not working. His daughter left a note in his suitcase asking him to stay home more.

He had enjoyed the cruise, but didn’t like how structured the trip was. “The boat won’t wait for you,” he said. “I wanted to golf, but there was no time.” Apparently there was also no time for prostitutes. On a cruise. With his family. We are certainly not of the same world, he and I. I made myself busy on my phone, burining off the last minutes on my account, in part so he would stop telling me things. Man, it’s going to be a long nine hours if we’re in the same row on the plane.

Thanks!

I had an episode, but…

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It was a good episode, too. It started with the line “I woke to the sound of the cat puking,” and described my morning a couple of days ago. Or, at least, it started that way, but quickly spiraled into Fear and Loathing in Ocean Beach. Look for it in a bookstore near you.

Another reason I haven’t posted much lately (besides laziness, of course) is that many of my adventures involve Amy, and despite her insistence on a life of abstinence and purity (she’s pregnant) I still wouldn’t want her to get tarred with my brush. There’s litigation involved. On top of that is The Short Story That Would Not Die, limited Internet access, and the aforementioned laziness to contend with.

But I can share this with you: right now I’m in a little coffee shop, wearing shorts and sandals, looking across the street to where the waves are rolling in to shore. The surf has lost the rampaging fury it showed a week ago when I got here, but it’s still right nice to look at. Life is, without a doubt, good.

Thanks!

Neto’s Passtime Bar, Gila Bend, Arizona

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I hadn’t planned on stopping today, but somewhere between Pistachio Rock and Gila Bend inspiration hit me head-on and I had to stop and do something about it.

It was one of those moments that catch you off-guard, although they seem to be more routine in the desert than elsewhere. I was driving into the sunset, in true western fashion, and let me tell you, it was one hell of a sunset. It started out subtle; the sky an ever-deepening blue, a few wispy clouds adding their own commas and question marks to the sky. I rounded a barren, jagged hill, and across the plain in front of me was splendor. Saguaros slid past, their arms akimbo in gestures of praise and wonder, standing in silhouette against the vibrant pinks and oranges that filled the western sky. Farther away the rocky hills became mysterious shapes, almost reminding me of things.

I spun the radio, and landed on a Spanish-language station without accordions. The next song that came on was achingly beautiful, a woman singing of sorrow in a language any human could understand. I will probably never hear that song again, and I will never know who the singer was. Like the sunset, it was just for that one moment and then gone forever.

The station fuzzed out on the outskirts of Gila Bend, but I decided to stop anyway. I found a hotel that advertised wireless internet and checked in. The signal doesn’t reach my room. The bathtub faucet was dripping — a sign of evil in this arid land — but I could not make it stop. I closed the bathroom door to at least shut out the sound, and realized I had a locked door between me and the toilet. The large Coke and 32-oz Gatorade I had consumed on my desert trek chose that very moment to make it known that their probation was up and they were ready to be released right now.

Back at the lobby to get a large paperclip to spring the door, I asked if there was a bar nearby, where I could sit, have a couple of beers, and maybe get some work done. The lobby staff exchanged a skeptical look. “Just down the street a couple of blocks,” the guy said, “there’s a bar. It’s the only bar in town.”

“Can I just sit in your restaurant and have a beer?”

“They don’t serve alcohol. There’s a circle-K across the street,” he added helpfully.

“Is the bar any good?” I asked.

The guy nodded, and got a confirming nod from the girl. “Yeah, it’s a good bar. I like it anyway.” Good enough for me. I had given him the opportunity to issue a safety warning and he hadn’t. Chances of getting beat up or knifed seemed low enough to take the walk up the road.

Now I sit in a long, narrow building constructed of cinder block, listening to “All My Ex’s Live In Texas”. There are no windows and no chairs that can be thrown in a fight. It is winter, and there is a large box fan set up on the table next to mine. Most of the light in here comes from neon beer signs (the only exception is a string of blue christmas lights), and almost everyone in here is sitting at the bar. The freight trains pass right outside the door, blowing their lonesome whistles through the security mesh and adding to the crooning of Patsy Cline doing a song I don’t recognize.

The only nice car in the parking lot belongs to a guy I assume to be the owner. Someone is wearing an obscene amount of perfume or cologne. I’ll sneak a picture once the locals have becomed accustomed to a guy being in the bar with a laptop. In a way, I feel like Diane Fossey with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. They will accept me, but I can’t do too much all at once.

Beers are two dollars and everything comes in longneck bottles. I won’t tell you what I’m drinking, but rest assured the word “lite” is not in the name anywhere. An obscure Stevie Ray Vaughn song has just come on the juke box and it’s time to order a second beer.

***
Time has passed, just how much I’m not exactly sure. I’ve been here, trying to put a short story out of my misery. A few minutes ago a longneck appeared at my table. “It’s from that guy over there, Gary,” the bartender explained. I thanked her and sent a toast Gary’s way when he finally looked over.

This is a very friendly bar. I have spotted chairs that could be thrown, but I will not revise the above description because I like it, and reality be damned. There’s a good vibe here, the oasis-in-the-trackless-desert vibe. We come from different places, we’re going different places, but at this moment we are together, bound by a common need. And at the oasis there is an eclectic jukebox, and there is joy.

Thanks!

El Parasol

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It is one of the simple pleasures of life, sitting down to a well-constructed cheeseburger, taking a bite, and tasting the green chile, feeling the burn but more than that appreciating the pungent flavor.

There is something going horribly wrong in our nation right now, as restaurants compete to put more and more beef on their burgers. Half pound and three quarter pound burgers are supplanting more rational sizes as the marketing departments of restaurants and fast food chains have decided that More is Better. This is a very American sort of trend, but now we are faced with burgers out of balance. Sure, beef is an important part of the burger, but a carefully crafted hamburger is not only about the beef, it is an ensemble, with each element making a valuable contribution. This is especially true of the green chile cheeseburger.

The pinnacle of humanity’s culinary progress, the properly-constructed green chile cheeseburger is a delicate — and subjective — art form, an organic sculpture that bursts in your mouth with the first bite and lingers long after the final swallow. The chile must be hot and flavorful, and abundant, yet the meat, cheese, and other fixings must not be overpowered. Each ingredient has a role to play, from the crunch of the onions to the smoothness of the cheese.

I just polished off a darn fine green chile cheeseburger here at El Parasol. For those who know the town, it is located where Los Alamos Building and Loan was when I opened my first bank account there a bazillion years ago.

One side effect of not going overboard with the beef: the burgers are cheaper as well. The guy in line in front of me ordered a GCCB, as did the woman behind me. Looking around I see some people with burritos and other New Mexican fare, but the GCCB’s are all around me. And no wonder. Mine was damn yummy.

Perhaps I am being less critical, as it is the first green chile cheeseburger that I’ve had in a long time, but boy did it hit the spot. I wonder what it would take to get them to open one of these in Prague…

Thanks!

A (Chemically) Balanced Breakfast

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I’m in a mall right now, at the food court, surrounded by neon and bright decorations in a vaguely southwest style. Rattlesnake sculptures with glowing red tongues and rattles, gila monsters with neon haloes, and the like adorn the pillars in this boomy place, and all around me are the classics: Wendys, Dairy Queen, Orange Julius.

Of course I sat with a view of the Hot Dog On A Stick franchise. I don’t think they ever sell any food, rather I think the chain is funded by a sadistic old man performing a long-term social experiment to discover the lower limit of human pride by paying pretty girls to wear the ugliest clothes imaginable in public.

I chose none of the above delights to break my fast; I was drawn to a blue neon sign hollering “Ichiban” into the void. They were just bringing the first trays of chow from the back, and I looked over the vaguely asian fare as it lay glistening under the lamps. The red peppers I call “hot little mothers” were abundant in a couple of the dishes, and I knew I had found my chow.

I am woefully out of shape; the hot little mothers are really hot this morning. Still, after eating a few of them, I can feel the endorphins start to work. Add the fat, salt, and sugar from the food, top it off with a refill of Coke, and I’m processing a chemical cocktail that is working very well with the jet-lag, thank you very much. Synergy at its finest.

Now I’m off to Bigass Bookstore to look for a book about pet therapy that is technical, at least 150 pages long, and hasn’t been translated into czech yet. (It’s for a friend! Really!) Wish me luck.

Thanks!

The Ex-Pat Game

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In the previous post I mentioned that on a Sunday morning in the center of Prague you will find many more English speakers than Czech speakers. Soup Boy and I were in Kava Kava Kava, and because we ordered in Czech, the waitress told us the network password verbally, rather than writing it down. She left us to our geeky devices, and I wondered aloud about capitalization. A guy nearby said, “You should have just asked the computer guy,” in a louder-than-necessary voice, and handed me a slip of paper with the password written on it.

“Thanks,” I said, and turned back to my work.

“I’m just happy to hear some English,” he said. “I’ve been in Ukraine for seven months.” And so began the Ex-Pat Game. When you meet any traveler who had been abroad for a long time, one of the first questions they will ask you is, “How long have you been here?” In this game you gain status among other Ex-Pats if you have been abroad longer and if you have been to more exotic places. Noticeably lacking, at least among American Ex-Pats, are questions like “How many languages do you know?”, which might indicate someone who is not traveling with an insulating buffer of Americanness, but is rather making an attempt to integrate with the local culture.

This guy became increasingly annoying as he told everyone who would listen about his time in Ukraine. “They’re so fucked up!” he said over and over. “They have no clue at all!” The Englishman who had luckily installed himself at the table between us attempted to engage him. “The thing to do,” he said, “is when you see something that is obvious to you but not to them, think of it as a business opportunity.” I don’t think the Brit realized – or perhaps he did but still felt the need to fight the good fight – was that Ukranus was playing the Ex-Pat Game, and wasn’t really interested in constructive solutions. He was interested in being an expert, a worldly man, a voice of reason in a land of chaos. Someone Who Knows More Than You Do.

The Unimpressed Ex-Pat is also part of the game, and that’s the part I play. It’s easy, because I’m not acting. It really is frightfully easy to move to another country and live. Certainly it is easier for an American with no Czech to move to Prague than for a Czech who knows no English to move to San Diego. I give myself the right to be an unimpressed ex-pat as long as I remain unimpressed with myself as well. Soup Boy and I sat, unaffectedly unimpressed, trying to ignore the guy as he found new people to tell he had been in Ukraine, and how messed up it was there, and about how he was going back in a few days. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Of course Soup Boy and I talked about a lot of Ex-Pat stuff, too. I mean, heck, this place is different, and it’s about the only thing we have in common (OK, not true. We both know that life is mildly ridiculous, and if you can see that, the rest doesn’t matter). If it was the same as everywhere else, we wouldn’t be here. For me, a guy who doesn’t get out much, the differences are less significant, except for the cost of living, but still it’s fun to compare and contrast cultures. Occasionally I was aware of Ukranus listening in, and I realized that, consciously or no, I was still playing the game. I very much wanted him to know that I’d been around a bit as well, so he could stop trying to impress me. I tell myself that I just wanted peace and quiet, but come on, there’s more to it than that.

There is another community of ex-pats here. Poets, musicians, and so on. There are a few of them I have met that I actually like (the ones who do not fit the following description, and there are thankfully several), and at least a couple are even talented, but as much as a long-term ex-pat will put on airs, the long-term ex-pat artiste can make for a long night at the coffee shop. If their conversation measured up their pretensions they would be a fun and challenging crowd to hang out with, but in the end it is just another extension of the Ex-Pat Game. To be fair, some of the gap is because we have very different backgrounds – I am not nearly as well-read or well-filmed as the rest of them. I don’t remember names well. It stops a lot of discussions short. But I sit and listen to them talk, even among themselves, and I swear I am the only one listening to any of it. Often the conversation is not a dialog but a pair of monologues. The whole game is to come up with something you have read that the other has not, and then expound the virtues of that work. “I’ve read Plato!” starts to sound a lot like “I’ve been in Ukraine for seven months!”

I’d rather sit by myself and get something done, thanks.

So a couple days ago I revived my Czech studies, for four reasons. First and foremost, it’s only polite to speak the language of your hosts. Second, it’s interesting. Third, I’m not finding that many people to hang with among the ranks of the English-speaking residents. Not that I hang out much anyway – Big D, one of the least pretentious and most likable people I’ve ever met, must think by now I’m shining him on. Finally, as an Unimpressed Ex-Pat, I can score a lot of points in the Ex-Pat Game with the question, “How is your Czech?”

Oh, yeah, and there are a lot of pretty bartenders who don’t speak English.

Thanks!

Well, that’s inconvenient…

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Thought I’d drop by the Little Café Near Home yestereve for a bit of writing. It’s a good place for that. Of course, it’s only polite that I enjoy a beverage while I’m there. Beverages cost money. Specifically, cash. My reserves were a little low, but as I hopped off the tram I was surrounded by ATM’s. The closest belonged to a shiny German (perhaps Austrian? Maybe Swiss) bank with a friendly yellow sign. It’s been a good friend on many other occasions, so I ambled into the foyer of the otherwise dark and silent building and inserted my card.

After contemplating just how much money to withdraw and punching a few buttons, I waited. Then the screen flashed:

“Unauthorized use. Card retained.”

I stood there for a moment while it sunk in I would be getting neither money nor my card back.

No LIttle Café then, but a trip back to the homestead and an international long distance call to my bank. The first thing Linda told me, before I even explained the situation completely, was that one of the major networks that carries transaction information was down. Once I explained my problem she started digging into my account info, then put me on hold for fifteen minutes or so.

Finally she came back on. “We tried everything, and we can’t figure out why they kept your card. We’ll work on it again when the network is back up.”

Probably the problem was caused by the network failure – the authorization was lost somewhere in the ether and the fraud detectors went off at the bank. Today I will go down there and ask for my card back. That should be interesting. In the meantime I have another card, but I’m afraid to use it.

Thanks!

Post-Amy Stress Disorder

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I slipped out of San Diego without saying goodbye – just a short phone conversation during her lunch break. I don’t like goodbyes all that much – better just to slip out the side door and move on. I didn’t even wait for Rory to drive me to the airport. I was done with Ocean Beach, my home for the past week, and ready to move on. I was tired.

Physically tired, certainly, and mentally weary as well. It’s been a grinding couple of months, and my stamina has been sapped. Crashing on the sofa of a whirlwind who is trying to figure out if she has a boyfriend or not, who loves wine a little too much, and finds sleep optional is not how you regain your energy. Luckily this time around Amy was starting a new job – a square job with square hours. That meant we only stayed up way too late three-qarters of the time, and I had mornings to recover while she had to go to work. “Have fun,” I’d croak as she passed the sofa on the way out the door. Then I’d roll over and try to sleep some more. That only worked once.

Ocean Beach is a small neighborhood, and is geographically isolated from the rest of the city. That means it has managed to hang on to some of its small-town charm, and it means that if you don’t have a car lying around your options are limited. It wasn’t long until I well knew all the places of interest. There was the brand-new amazingly cheap café with free Internet, run by a really weird guy. There were other, swankier places with Internet, but not for free. Once I had locked Amy’s door behind me I spent my days in those places, trying to string words together, but, in my frazzled state, editing was the activity of the day.

Then it was off to the O. B. Grille, which became my office in the late afternoons when I had no place left to go. This is where Amy knew to find me when she got off work, finished her evening activities and negotiations with Cute Boy, and was ready to play. There was no question of sneaking in any writing later, The only thing that ended the evening was sleep.

Now, in the calm after the storm, I miss that wildness, the unpredictability that is Amy. She is a tiny little Las Vegas, a loud and constant invitation to excess, all bundled up and ready to travel. You know when she is there. As the night begins, there is anticipation. Amy is grinning ear to ear, only a little bit crazy yet, and the night extends before us, a journey into the unknown. Somewhere along the way someone says “one more,” and you know it’s not just one more, and someone has to be the designated walker or you’re not getting home.

Like Las Vegas, that sort of lifestyle can only be sustained for a few days before the brain goes into rebellion, shuts down, and leaves you for another head. When you part with Amy, the rest of the world seems muffled; your ears are still ringing after a sternum-thumpingly loud concert. Cowering behind their defenses, your synapses are still tender, still skittish. When a stimulus punches through the scar tissue it rasps across your raw psyche like a cheese grater. You jump, the look of a trapped animal in your eyes, and blurt out “One more!” You are suffering from PASD, Post-Amy Stress Disorder. It’s in the medical books. Look it up.

As I was driving through the desert my thoughts began to slide into their old grooves; a story was born, teased, and buried (one little bit stashed away for future use). There were too many cars for a Saturday. I sighed, relieved, disappointed, adrift, vaguely missing something, already looking forward to the next time I enter Amy’s world.

Thanks!

Into the Valley of the Pizza Rat

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I was one of the fortunate few to be selected for an extra-thorough security check at the airport yesterday, just another part of the government trying to make you feel safer by inconveniencing you. I have nothing against the people who have to carry out the illusion, however, and I had plenty of time to burn, so it was no big deal. Certified as USDA Grade-A safe, I climbed into a metal cylinder, took my seat, and a couple of hours later I was in San Diego. My bag, it seems, took a shortcut and was waiting for me when I arrived.

As I stood in the airport I was blindsided my Amy and the fun began.

If, that is, you count Chuck E. Cheese as fun. Amy has family visiting, and the family has kids of just the right age to enjoy a place like that. I had never been in one of those places before, but my mind was filled with horrific images of kids juiced up on caffeine and sugar, running around and screaming and puking on someone dressed up as a rat. I walked in and the first sound to hit my ears, the vanguard of the audio assault, was the wail of a crying child. Oh, grand.

In the end, it was not as bad as I feared. The children were running loose, bouncing from video game to video game, but the noise was low enough to make conversation possible. The place is, simply, Las Vegas for kids. Slot machines have been replaced by other games, and the payout is in tickets redeemable only at the casino for junk that you wouldn’t want to buy anywhere else, but the kids have the look of slot machine junkies, automatons plugging in a coin, running the game, and watching the string of tickets slowly growing at their feet. They are hoping for the big score, the lucky break that converts a single quarter into 200 tickets.

I met Amy’s mother and sister. I have been corresponding with Nicole off and on for some time; Amy has long harbored ideas of hooking us up. This put a great deal more significance on the meeting, but I tried not to think about that. Naturally we had each formed images of what the other looked like, and I was pleasantly surprised. I don’t think I made as strong an impression. My best is none too good, but I was looking scruffier than usual. Shoulda planned a little better. I sat down and nibbled leftover pizza and didn’t try to force the conversation. Eventually the two kids ran out of tokens, and after the ritual Selection of the Prizes we were on our way. I had walked through the valley of the Pizza Rat and lived to tell the tale.

Amy drove as only Amy can, to the horror of her mother. Green Bay was playing, and she wanted to get somewhere with the game on TV before she missed the whole thing. We raced back to the hotel where the family is staying and made a break for the bar there. We arrived in time to watch the last thirty seconds of the game. The place had wireless Internet access, however, so while I was there I popped open the laptop and discovered that someone had crashed Jer’s Novel Writer and his file had become corrupted – very bad – and I had managed to piss off one of the main guys behind the Duke City Shootout – also not good.

Not sure just how I gave offense, but without Christopher Coppola there likely wouldn’t have been a Shootout this year at all, and that means he is directly responsible for our opportunity to make Pirates. It is very cool what he and the other organizers have done (an episode dedicated to them is on the way someday), and perhaps in my exuberance I appeared ungrateful somewhere along the way. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is no other festival like the Shootout, and no better opportunity for aspiring film writers that I know of.

So maybe I deserved a little wake-up call to remember to say thanks to these guys, but it didn’t do much for my mood last night or this morning. Knowing one of my faithful beta testers lost some work (not too much, fortunately – he had backups) didn’t help. What did help my mood was Amy. We made it back to her place and just sat and shot the breeze like in the old days. I got the rundown on her life and the juicy gossip about her friends, managed to get a word in edgewise every now and then, and slowly faded.

Then Amy wanted to go to a bar. I wasn’t enthusiastic, but I wasn’t ready to give up on the camaraderie, so off we went for one shot and one beer. The shot was horrible, some kind of mixture that was sweet and clingy. I don’t know why things like that exist at all – if you’re just going to throw it down your throat, why not use some cheap-ass booze and be done with it? The beer was good, though. Stone Pale Ale.

Amy had to get up early this morning; I didn’t. They are all at Legoland right now, and I’m thinking about breakfast and wondering where I can find Internet. It’s almost like I never left.

Thanks!

Around the State

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Time is moving just too dang quickly for me to put up an episode a day, so I’m trying a different approach and doing things by theme. Today’s episode is about driving around. You do a lot of that in New Mexico, and when you’re trying to get everything together for a movie you do even more.

Friday fuego and I went up to Santa Fe to meet with the Air National Guard. It was a good trip, and productive. We met with Major Bob, who was enthusiastic about the whole thing but didn’t have a whole lot of authority. He took is to meet Colonel Montoya, who has only a sketchy idea of what it was we wanted to do. We explained it, discussed location and altitude and other logistical issues. The good Colonel paused, thought, and said, “Yeah, I don’t see why not.”
out latest prop - a blackhawk helicopter
Ladies and gentlemen, out latest prop: A blackhawk helicopter. It will be at our disposal at oh nine hundred hours Tuesday morning for a flyby or ten.

So that was a good day. Yesterday we were on the road again, scouting locations for the b-cam to go to shoot some road, and taking stills to supplement the ones I had already taken for the opening title sequence. The morning was hot and bright when we reached Trinity site, the place where the first atomic bomb was detonated. The place is not open very often, and even if we couldn’t get anything interesting for the flick I was interested in seeing it.

In fact, there isn’t much to see except a bunch of other people standing around thinking that there isn’t much to see. The glass-lined crater has been filled in except for one part where a shed was build to expose one section of Trinitite – the name for the glass created there when the sand of the desert was melted by the blast. We moseyed over to the shed, where there was a door in the roof to provide a view of the crater. Instead we found the door shut, with a sign that said in effect, “This used to be a way to see the crater floor, but now it’s covered with sand in there, so neeners.”

Trinity Cleavage There is an obelisk at ground zero, and we spent several minutes waiting for a moment when we could get a shot without some other tourist standing next to the black volcanic obelisk. Everyone wanted their picture next to the thing, although no one read the inscription, or really seemed to consider what it stood for. It was just that there was nothing else to take a picture of out there. After a few minutes fuego did manage to get one without other people in it, but most of the time the place was like this picture.

White sands leading edge Trinitized and armed with photographs we hit the road again, heading down to White Sands to get some more beauty shots and to get pure clean gypsum sand between our toes. As we headed south we saw thunderstorms forming over Alamagordo and heading in the general direction of White Sands. Not ideal for our photos, but certainly cooler. After pausing in the gift shop so fuego could get a White Sands cap so he could be cool like me, we headed out to the dunes.

white sands We kicked off our shoes and tromped out while raindrops blew in on the gusting wind. There was a good chance we were going to get very wet. As the wind flowed over the contours of the dunes it created a halo of sand, softening the edges of the snow-white dunes against the threatening sky. Lightning would flash in the distance and the rumble of the thunder would roll across the desert for an improbably long time. We tromped around, took pictures (only a few of which didn’t suck) and generally had a good time.

funky rocket After White Sands we continued our research at Missile Park, part of the White Sands Missile Range. The folks were right friendly there. The museum was closed, but there is a little outdoor area with a variety of the rockets, missiles, etc that had been tested there. We took some pictures in case a pirate needed to come up with an anti-tank missile. The one pictured here was my favorite – it looks like it belongs in an episode of Speed Racer.

Finally we headed back north, back to the duke city, hot, clammy, coated with sunscreen and sand, and tired as can be. We stopped by Rudy’s house for Yet Another Location Crisis, and that left us all even more drained. I was in the perfect mood to go home and just read a book for a while, or work on edits to a short story. Instead we went over to Charles the First’s place to discuss the opening sequence. I’m taking it a bit easier today, trying to shed some of the stress I picked up last night.

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Thanks!

Farley’s, Roswell, NM

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I considered filing this one under Bars, since although I spent the day on Pirate-related tasks, I didn’t accomplish much. I spent the morning writing, something I had been pining to do, and then I hit the road. I scouted some more roads, this time to the east of Albuquerque, looking for a better location for the shoot. The terrain just isn’t deserty enough; the only bar next to two-lane that I found was in distinctly alpine territory. I asked some bikers if they had any suggestions, but they couldn’t come up with anything close enough to the city. They were yuppie bikers, as so many bikers are these days, so really all they were familiar with were nice places that get crowded.

So it was I shifted into the second phase of my travels: PropQuest, a thin excuse for a road trip. There are a couple of key props that will make a big difference in the overall feel of the movie. They’re not the kinds of things that will be sitting on truck stop shelves, so I set out to find them. One of the props, I figured, if it existed at all would be in Roswell, NM, and this would be the ideal weekend to come down to visit, as this is the weekend of their UFO festival.

It was late in the afternoon when I got here, and the temperature was over 100 F. There wasn’t much going on at all in the blocked-off section of main street. A few vendors had booths up, but only the snow-cone guy was doing any business. I’ll try again tonight – there’s a parade at 9, after things cool off a bit. There were several UFO crap shops, but none had what I was looking for. Surely I’m not the first person to need a rubber alien suitable for putting in a jar of fake formaldehyde. I’ll try to find it online tonight.

Now I’m at Farley’s, a big place with reasonable prices. It’s a bit boomy in here, but all I really care about is the air conditioning. I’ve had so much iced tea I’m starting to vibrate with an audible hum. After I finish my green chile won tons I’m heading back to the hotel and an internet connection. Tomorrow: White Sands, to plunder the gift shop.

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Thanks!