More new REALbasic plugin stuff. This time an update.

In case you’re curious.

A little behind the times, but what do you know… In January, our esteemed President banned unions from some Justice Department sections. The reason? The ever-present boogey-man of national security in the wake of 9/11.

What can one do but scratch one’s head?

Through no fault of my own (heh), I found myself looking at Wil Wheaton Dot Net. And you know what? I’ve decided like the guy. He plays NetHack on his PDA, he built his own web site (it’s in PHP), he ‘blogs about appearing at Star Trek conventions, and when he talks about the actor who played Kirk, he calls him ‘William Fucking Shatner.’

What’s so bad about little Wesley Crusher?

A while back I made a ‘blog about J.G. Ballard. In it, I mentioned a story I had written.

Well, lo and behold, the story’s still out there on the web. Scroll down to ‘After The Shipwreck.’

Reading over the whole e’zine, I miss those times. Tamer Shrew (the e’zine) was the product of a BBS called HoWL, in Houston, TX. It was a huge philosophical-poetic wank, but it was a decent collection of people.

A day and a half after having been solicited for a blowjob in a rest area, I found myself in Medicine Bow National Forest. It’s around I-80 in southeast Wyoming, just west of Laramie.

There had been a snow storm the previous night. I drove through the weather pattern in Colorado, north on I-25 between about Pueblo through Denver. Anyway, the point is that it had snowed the night before. The locals (at least the ones on the radio) were saying how it was nice to get the one last snow of the spring.

I’d been to the recreation area part of Medicine Bow before. I took a whole lot of pictures there, all of which were lost in a catastrophic hard drive failure a while back. Some were quite nice. So, since the sun was beginning to come out, and since there was snow, I stopped off again, digital camera in hand.

The landscape was a lot like this. The picture gives the impression that there’s more snow on the ground than there actually is. It also shows you that low-flying snow clouds were zooming over my head; one minute it would be overcast like in the picture, and then it would be relatively clear and sunny.

..Like in this picture. I showed this to a friend and they said, ‘Nice pile of rocks.’ Of course it’s not a pile.

I like to take pictures of little tiny absract things, such as these ice crystals, these tiny rocks with a tiny snowdrift, and this lichen that made me think of Mark Rothko.

This tree was attempting to preside over the proceedings. The sun was coming out, and the snow in the branches was melting, making it rain under the tree but no where else.

I found this. It took my housemate a few tries to figure out what she was seeing. I told her to get closer to the monitor, to look more carefully, and she said, ‘All I see is some finger smudges on the glass…’ I can’t complain, though, because I tried to make it subtle, and I guess it worked.

That last one and this one are my two favorites.

I left Medicine Bow national forest and zoomed along the highway. I made it to just east of Boise, ID before sleeping in yet another rest area.

“I never thought those stories were true until it happened to me…”

The night before last, I slept in my car in a rest area on the high plains of Texas. Texas is big. Very very big. If you stick around Conroe long enough to have some face time with your brother and his wife, then you’ll never make it out of Texas on the first day. Not a big sacrifice, by any means; I was glad to see them.

The point of this story is that I fueled up in Wichita Falls and drove to the rest area just west of there on US highway 287. There to sleep. After peeing of course. By the time I’ve gotten there, I’ve worked up a bladder full of waste fluid.

I parked the car and went into the bathroom building, still in a bit of a daze from driving too long, and from having to pee really, really badly. In the bathroom, there’s a urinal and a john, but the urinal is occupied. The guy at the urinal glances at me and says, “Hi,” when our eyes meet. He looks a little too happy to be in the bathroom. I go over to the john and unzip, ready to release the floodgates. Then I notice some fairly new graffiti on the john itself. It says: “3/23/02: Trucker fucker ready to give you a BJ. Tap your foot.” Since I travel a lot, and I stop at rest areas, I see this kind of graffiti a lot, and I’ve always wondered how successful it is, and how dangerous. Then it dawns on me. Today is the 23rd. That man is happy to be in the bathroom. And down on the floor, next to the john, is a picture of a beautiful young man with a huge honkin’ erection. I glance back to the guy at the urinal. He’s checking out my package.

Suddenly, I can’t pee. There’s no way. It’s just not going to happen. If only I had noticed after I had started. I turn around and, as I’m leaving, I say, “Sheesh. Now I’ll never get to pee.”

Eventually I did pee. He left the bathroom shortly after I did, and got in his minivan, and I went back in and unloaded. The same message was on the urinal, as was more porn. Once I was done being annoyed, I began to think about what it must be like to be a gay man in Wichita Falls. Then it occurred to me that this was a rare moment in my anthropological studies… I was planning to stay at this rest area anyway, and I could observe the trucker fucker and see how it all played out. So I sat in my car and did a bad job of reading a book while observing.

The trucker fucker wasn’t all that interesting, compared to the reactions of men going into the bathroom. They’d come out looking really angry, as if they had been violated simply by the presence of gay porn. They’d look around, as if searching for the guy who had put the porn there. Then there was one guy who seemed interested. He came out and conspicuously tapped his foot and went back in. Then he came back out and went behind the building, in the shadows. My pal the trucker fucker wandered into the bathroom… What a delicate mating dance. Then he came out and circled around the building, just as the other guy started circling, too. They missed each other, and both got back in their cars. The interested guy drove away. Trucker fucker stuck around a little longer.

He gave up after about another half-hour. I went into the bathroom to search for clues as to what had happened, and the graffiti and porn were gone.

I spent the night there in the back of the car. It was relatively comfortable. I woke and made it to Amarillo before noon, so technically I made Amarillo by morning.

I promised a Big Overview of my happy few days in Austin, but it was unsettlingly happy enough that I’m still trying to pull the words together.

In other news, last night’s dream was a two-parter:

1) Some friends of mine were having a full-on pagan wedding in a county courthouse, so they could sign the papers and perform the great rite simultaneously. I didn’t know anyone there except my housemate X, who was playing drums.

2) Somehow that became a dream about visiting the Vorlon homeworld. (This is a Babylon 5 reference, illustrating what a total geek I actually am.) I was on Vorlon with someone else who was supposed to be John Sheridan. We were figuring out some kind of puzzle, when it became obvious that the Vorlons had visited earth back in the 20th century and were behind the original series of Star Trek. Then Gene Roddenberry was there, and we all had a laugh.

My dreams are funny a lot of the time, but only on reflection. While they’re happening, I’m immersed, with no perspective. It was unique that we were laughing about how silly this sci-fi dream was.

I’m currently using my parents’ iMac to read Xanga. It turns out they have Faith No More’s ‘Epic’ in their iTunes. Heh.

(Probably because they have no idea it’s there, installed by default when you get your iMac. Folks at Apple have good taste. There’s Lou Reed and k.d. lang and Phish and all kinda other folks my parents will never hear.)

I thought I’d make a ‘blog about my experiences in Austin, but you can just read it and see pictures on voice and anole‘s sites. I’ll probably do a summation later, maybe with some kind of Quest For Deeper Meaning attached, because that’s my modus operandi.

I can say, though, that the itch to return to Texas is harder to scratch, but only if Austin is my destination. I don’t think I’ll be making that plunge for a while, but it’s something to consider.

Note: I’ve tried to post this three times now. Ignore duplicates. You know the drill.

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I’m on the road. I’m in a motel just south of Little Rock, AK, typing away.

This isn’t the first motel I’ve stopped at tonight, either. The first one had the prisoner transport bus parked in the lot. No joke. The second wanted $60 for a room for the night. The third was nasty. The fourth one…

The fourth one was a Motel 6, which is a chain that’s usually done OK by me. Not the Savoy, but what do you want for $33?

So I pulled up, and went to the night window, because it was around 11pm. Everything went smoothly with getting the room, except there was something that struck me about it, for reasons I couldn’t quite figure out. At one point, the silent two-way radio on the desk sprang to life and whoever was at the other end said, “You OK?” The woman who was helping me answered back, “Yes, it’s fine.” Then we continued with a little bit of banter and I got the room.

Went out to the car, got my stuff, went back into the motel. On the way in, there was a young woman outside the front door, who hadn’t been there before. She looked a little nervous and a little drunk at the same time, like maybe she had just slammed a beer in order to deal with something horrible. I thought, ‘Oh, great. Some couple is having a drunken yelling match in this motel. Maybe it’s on the other side of the building from my room…’

Room 227. I went in, and up the elevator to the second floor. 227 is just to the left of the elevator shaft. I’m standing in front of it. I notice some people in the hallways; a man who looked to be in his 40s, a young woman, a young man, all black. The older man standing in a room doorway, giving orders to the younger man, who’s leaning against the wall opposite. Standing guard. The woman shuffling down the hall, looking dejected. They all seemed to know each other. My room is next to the older man’s. They’re looking at me.

Some part of me took over and feigned not being able to locate my room. I walked down the hall, through and past this scene, looking clueless, comparing room numbers to the little cardboard sleeve the keycard had come in. No, that’s not it… No, that’s not it either. Finally I doubled back to my room and ‘found’ it.

I went inside. No noises from the next room over. Very quiet. Just the sound of a young woman in the hallway outside saying something. Then a bit later, some traffic in the hallway, and another young woman saying something. And so forth for about five minutes. I decide to split.

Gather my things, go to the elevator. Yet another pathetic young black woman wearing a t-shirt, a towel around her waist, and glitter makeup approaches the elevator while I’m waiting. She’s mumbling to herself and gives every indication of being psychotic, probably due to some illicit substance ingested earlier. The door opens, we both get on. I push 1, she pushes 3. She’s still mumbling to herself, oblivious of me until I glance at her, and she smiles a very practiced smile and says, “Hello, sir.” This smile immediately vanishes, she turns her head away from me, and she’s back to mumbling.

Thankfully, the elevator goes down. No telling who’s waiting to enter on the third floor.

Get off the elevator, head to the night window. “What you need, hon?” I love that about the south; you become ‘hon.’

I say, “I’m just here to get some sleep, and there’s a lot of, ahem, activity on the second floor. And I think I’d just like to get a refund.” I actually said ‘ahem.’

She spoke in carefully-chosen words, with a certain slow cadence, “Well, we have, you know, security posted.”

“Well, how about you just give me a refund?”

“Things quiet down after about midnight, and, like I said, we have… security.” She smiled like the Cheshire cat.

“I appreciate that, but I just want to get some sleep, and I don’t want to be in anyone else’s business.”

This convinced her, but she added:

“OK, but if you think it’s, er, noisy here, then let me tell you. Just west of here is the Hampton Inn, the Comfort Inn, and the Days Inn. And if you go past those, then don’t stop until you get to Denton, Texas, because if you think this is bad, it ain’t nothin’ compared to every place in between.”

She handed me a form to fill out, which asks for a reason why I’m a dissatisfied customer. Should I put: ‘Wasn’t expecting den of iniquity’? I write ‘Too much noise.’

So now I’m in the $60 Hampton Inn room, but I have to wonder if this isn’t just a higher class of whorehouse. It’s certainly… quieter, though.