It’s amusing to me how quickly and how completely I fall back into my routine after getting back from traveling. Stuck again, but not exactly stuck.

I think the perfect living situation for me would be to have like a dozen places where I live on rotation. Tonight the punk warehouse co-op, tomorrow the house in the burbs, the next night on my friends’ futon in their basement. Sometimes I’ll do this to myself, either by driving off somewhere and staying a night in a motel, or just sleeping on the couch instead of the bed. It all helps disrupt the patterns.

The patterns are killers, especially the at-the-computer-all-day one. There’s stuff I should have done today that I didn’t, because it’s so easy for the Inner Autistic Brat to avoid them. I have lots of self-discipline, but that’s *still* not up to the task when the threat of anxiety attack is on the table. Going off to a motel disrupts the pattern, but still allows avoidance, so it’s not that great a solution.

Ah well. One day I’ll get this crap figured out.

Once I finally got to Las Vegas, things took a turn for the surreal.

Marco and I met a married couple, but they didn’t have much to say.

Then we were sucked into the vortex of the Fremont Street Experience.

I felt overexposed.

It was a brave new world of technology that only malfunctioned a little bit.

Frank Zappa was there.

I felt like a fish out of water. (“Realistic ‘GASPING FOR LIFE’ Action!”)

Marco turned into a demon… And I hadn’t even ingested psychoactives!

He took me to a lake of fire. I guess all those TV preachers are right: Vegas is demonic.

Click here!

On The Way To Las Vegas

I drove for two and a half days through fog held in place across most of the American west by a static inversion-layer-making high pressure system. Like, all the way from Yakima to the southern Utah border. Like this, for eight or nine hundred miles:

The only exception was the stretch through the always-lovely Blue mountains of eastern Oregon. You can see the fog at the bottom of the valley (I’m trying to come up with a ‘foggy bottom boys’ joke here, but it’s just not working):

This valley is where I saw the first bird of prey on the trip, which looked to be a red-tailed hawk, but probably wasn’t. I took a picture of it, but my new super-spiff camera only has 3x zoom, so here’s what I got:

Truly, an inspiring photo.

The southern edge of the fog wore out just in time for me to take a detour into the western edge of Zion National Park, in the Kolob valley. Maybe one day I’ll make greeting cards with this kind of stuff on it:

More to come.

Any tribe.net folks out there?

If so… Will you be my friend?

(I’m not sure that link will work, because tribe.net’s linking system is completely undecipherable by human beings.)

Here’s some news, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Bush’s King visit scorned
President’s self-invitation a problem, organizers say

By CHARLES YOO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

President Bush’s visit on Thursday to observe what would have been the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 75th birthday isn’t sitting well with area tribute organizers.

They say Bush invited himself to their party and will potentially force the cancellation of some events due to security concerns. What’s more, they say, Bush will profit from a fund-raiser he will piggyback with his visit to Atlanta.

About 3:45 p.m., the president will lay a wreath at the late civil rights leader’s crypt at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. The president announced his visit on Friday.

But the MLK March Committee, a group of area civil rights activists who worked with King, say they have worked for months on a program to honor the civil rights leader at Ebenezer Baptist Church, across the street.

“They told us that the Secret Service wanted us out of there by 2 p.m.,” said the Rev. James Orange. “We are not leaving the church.” The Ebenezer program from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. focuses on human rights.

Ya know what? I have an Amazon Wish List.

I mention this because I just added a book called ‘Mind Wide Open,’ which is one of those science books for non-scientists, and the topic is neuroscience.

I want one of these.

Also, from the Washington Monthly, a really good essay on the flight of the creative class from the US.

It’s got a Lord of the Rings tie-in… Basically, Peter Jackson sucked Hollywood dry. It seems Americans working in highly technical creative jobs find it hard to return to George W. Bush’s US after spending three years in New Zealand making LotR.

I just got back from Las Vegas, where I met a small number of the folks working on the Cirque Du Soleil‘s ‘O‘ production, and most of them were from other countries (including Mexico. Hi, Marco!). The US likes to think of itself as drawing the best of the best from around the world towards itself, but that trend is reversing. In fact, Cirque is based in Canada, and is taking over Las Vegas. The most successful shows on the strip are in some way related to the Cirque, and in fact, the ‘O’ theater was built before the hotel/casino which surrounds it, The Bellagio.

I made it back alive from Las Vegas, with enough mind fodder for about twelve different ‘blog entries. But for now here are some pix:

One of the living statues at The Venitian shows her gang affiliation.

I came extremely close to going to this show. For real.

This is in a mall that’s right on the strip, called Fashion Show. The post-it says ‘Do Not Count.’

At The Fremont Experience with MarcoPolo