Mom’s safely in London, doing everything. Apparently a mild bombing isn’t enough to shut down anything cool. She saw Brian Dennehy in Death of a Salesman. Live. My mother has seen Brian Dennehy on stage and I haven’t!
Category: Travel and Acronyms
Crystal’s Adventures is pretty amazing. She’s in Asia on a grant this summer (she’s in grad school at Tulane, although I don’t know her degree program); in May she wrote for an adolescent health website in Bangkok, after which she and two friends traveled overland through Laos to Hanoi, where she’s working on a sustainable community development grant proposal.
This sounded a little scary and exciting to me, as somebody whose only knowledge of Laos and Hanoi comes from old Doonesbury comics. Crystal’s account–which is well-written, clear and reasonable–makes it evident that this is a batshit loonball psycho death trip. Also that she is an action hero. Check out the part where she watches a cargo truck flip off a mountain, almost has her own bus do the same, stays in a house that uses old bombshells for dishes and scares a biker gang into carrying her down the mountain for three bucks. Man!
I found Crystal’s blog through her domain-co-resident and fiancee, Clinton Roosevelt Nixon, a name very familiar to indie RPG geeks who don’t read this. My Nobilis ballers may recognize him as the guy who wrote The Shadow of Yesterday (and, ergo, invented Keys).
Today’s Hitherby Dragon, The Land Where Suffering Is Remembered, is one of the best I can remember. It reminds me of a story we used to listen to in the car all the time, about frogs and a witch and three dogs and grains of magic corn. My mother knows a magic trick, which she used when telling this story aloud, to make a glass of milk turn blood-red.
My mother is flying to London now, with my great-aunt and -uncle and her best friend. Be safe, Mom.
Epiphany Meal #2
Yesterday my sister Caitlan arrived in Cincinnati, home safe from a three-week (I think) trip to Greece and Italy. Caitlan sucks. But actually she rules.
Before we let her sleep, my family went to dinner at Le Relais, where Ian’s roommate Jesse is a chef. Jesse had arranged a “tasting” for us, which was pretty cool–we got VIP treatment at what is widely considered the best restaurant in Louisville, if not Kentucky.
I was expecting a selection of small courses, which is kind of what we got, only there were six courses plus dessert, and even with small portions that was still a tremendous amount of food. Every bite was incredible. Duck breast and paté with whole-grain dijon, pan-seared sea scallops and hyacinth bulbs (!), medium-rare fillet in veal reduction sauce, five kinds of cheese and pistachio pound cake with saffron ice cream. And I don’t even like cheese! My favorite was the pan-fried red grouper in lobster stock reduction, which was like eating butter if butter was a fish.
Like the first Epiphany Meal, I felt a bit transformed afterward (and not just because I could barely move). I never really knew I liked French food. Maybe it would have been better for my waistline if I still didn’t.
Issues of concern to people who ride TARC a lot
I need to write about the three locally available tabloid-style free newsweeklies in Louisville (LEO, Snitch and Velocity) one of these days. I don’t have time right now. But in case you need a quick way to figure out which is by far the worst and most vapid, I pose this question:
Of LEO, Snitch and Velocity, which would bald-facedly publish the sentence
“Think precious, not pompous: The 36-page books, which sell for $12, teach values and lessons and record special moments, which is exactly the purpose of literature.”
?
(That’s right. Exactly the purpose of literature.)
If you live in Louisville, of course, you’ve already guessed the answer.
Maria and I went to San Francisco last weekend, and it was pretty great. We left very early Saturday morning and got back very late Monday night, and although we unfortunately missed hanging out with Kris, we did get to play games and bum around with Leonard and Sumana a lot.
It was like every few hours we gained a new and spectacular privilege: aside from Leonard’s food, to which I’ll get in a moment, we discovered the mafia geese of Fairyland; we gained admittance to the residence of Kevin (more on this soon too); we got a quick-but-personal tour of Berkeley; we spent big wads of money at Games of Berkeley; and we played arcade games both vintage and new. Hell, Maria attended the national American Academy of Pediatrics conference practically by accident, and I got to have one of the first looks at Leonard’s newest awesome secret project (so awesome, he got banned from the API of at least one site!). It was that kind of weekend.
Now, Leonard’s food. It should be sufficient to say that Leonard’s fondue made me–the guy who hates cheese–like fondue, but I’m going to say more. We also got to eat his first-ever attempt at home fries, which were unfairly perfect, and his first-ever attempt at pie ice cream, which was also pretty freaking great. Leonard’s food is world peace. Leonard’s food is the answer.
As for Kevin’s house: when Ian and I were younger, we had on our 386 Magnavox computer a program called Floorplan Plus. Because we were dorks–huge dorks, the budding dorks of legend–we spent hours on that thing, designing about a million floor plans so that both of us could completely fail to go into architecture.
My houses were silly, but I always tried to make them sensible. Ian, on the other hand, was constantly reinventing a place he called Jamhouse. You can pretty much imagine what it was like: the perfect residence, as envisioned by a ten-year-old boy. And Kevin’s house is that house, but with a better sound system and more art. It is my future house’s role model.
I need to say something about Sumana too, because she was a major part of the weekend and I’ve barely mentioned her. We stopped for lunch in Berkeley at De La Paz; it was warm and we’d already walked a lot, and Maria (who is hypoglycemic) was getting kind of dizzy. Sumana got up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but first snuck over to the bar to have the lone waiter express-deliver a Coke to replenish her blood sugar. That is the kind of friend Sumana is.
Before February of this year I’d never been west of Minnesota, and now I’ve been to California three times in eight months. Two-thirds of that is due entirely to Leonard and Sumana, whose hospitality and thoughtfulness are boundless and unfailing.
I’m going to Minnesota with Maria and her brother Michael! I’ll be back Monday! That’s four capital Ms in a row!
Actually I’ll be back Sunday, but I think you saw what I was trying to do there. Anacrusis will hopefully be updated as usual.
- Gave away what, 60 copies of HONOR? Something like that. Two of them I traded for other ashcans (Yeperynye and The Last Sane Cowgirl), which I totally count as sales. And every copy given away was to somebody whose work I (or Will or Stephen) really respect, which is a worthwhile transaction, in my opinion.
- Left my hat at Preview Night. Never got it back.
- Got to meet a lot of cool people from the online.
- Cool people I met from the online all had a curious need to run off to important, distant engagements within seconds of meeting me. Either I smell bad or I’m Creepy Interweb Fan, or (probably) both.
- Had a really good time with Monica, Will, Stephen and Maria. And Stephen’s lady Erin, at whose residence we crashed, is maybe the coolest person on the whole planet.
- Ran out of plane-ticket money and was unable to visit Leonard and Sumana. That was a pretty stupid mistake, and I feel really bad about it. Hopefully, a post-student-loan trip is in the works.
- Tycho and Gabe were the coolest, most professional people at the whole freaking Con.
- Speaking of Tycho and Gabe, I had one of the world’s most random encounters: passing by their booth, I recognized Paul Mattingly, a great guy who was in Richmond Children’s Theatre with me a billion years ago and who now works as a Klingon and Second City understudy (!) in Vegas. I literally hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He even has a site, The Famous Paul, though I understand that’s mostly a placeholder for the moment.
- Getting to California by train was interesting, right enough, and I’m glad we tried it. but the people who work for Amtrak seem unhappy and unhelpful and it’s very bumpy. I think I’ll pretty much be flying from here on out.
- I thought about taking a whole bunch of stuff to get signed, but eventually decided against it. I had a better idea. Thanks to the unlined pocket Moleskine my family got me for my birthday, I now possess what can only be referred to as
The Greatest SKETCHBOOK
Ever In The History Of Time
which basically means I win.
I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.
I highly recommend the Brother HL-1435
There exist exactly 100 copies of HONOR, the first comic book anthology from The Fake Middle Names Collective. They are in a box. I helped make a comic book! Life goal #22 gets a BIG FAT CHECK!
We were supposed to print it this morning and leave by 1, and it’s been kind of a torture test on the printer and humans involved, but it’s done. And now Maria, Monica, Will and I roll for Alton, nine hours late but moving fast.
CALIFORNIA HO!