Kage Baker … oAKY
, FOREST problem is that I just posted this with nothing in it escept kage’s name. The folks among you Dear Readers who get tghis sent directly to your mailboxes are doubtl;ess wondering whatr the heck is going on.

Allow me to explain.

To begin again, Kage always maintained that there are doors everuwhere. to everywhere else. Sometimes they were literally mundane normal doors – doors that once existed and had been annotated on some map (Kage loved old insurance maps; they record everything) but that now no longer were there. Nonetheless, Kage knew about them and could tell me where – in a nicely redecorated wall, or thin air in a levelled lot – they had once stood. And she did. She was endlessly fascinated with architechtural details that had used to be in places we were looking.

Sometimed they were atmosphereic oddities or peculiar places in the landscape. Kage would declare them doors, and often wax volubly creative on where they went. That was fun; soetimes scary and sometimes hilarious, but always A Trip. In many ways … there were times, late at night usually, where Kage would swear we’d gone through some portal and had to reverse the effects. She’d go on and on about where we were abd how it was different, and ultimately concoct some wild way of ostensiobly getting us back in the right Universe.

Whether or not she succeeded is a mtter of faith, I guess. I choose to believe we’re in thw saME deimension qwhere we were born. Although it was also an article of faith with us that Kage could, eventually, get whatever she wanted … we ultimately got every house we every desried; lived precisely where we wanted; worked Faire, travelled just as much as we wanted to. Kage became a writer. We used to joke that she bent the Universe to her will in small but potent ways to acheive this – but maybe she really did.

I don’t know. I do know I can’t do it; except in that ordinary human way that any of us can, if we set our minds to the task and our shoulders to the wheel and invest a lot of sweat equity in what we want. I know how to work toward a gila, and I know it works. But I can’t skip through portals into alternate diomensions, except bty accident. I can fall through just as well as anybody.

I think I fell through one today. It’s one where migraines live in my head and fly in and out of my skull like bnesting swallows under a bridge. When you drive under a brisdge where thety are nesting, they explode before ye like a sky rocket and for an instant you are surrounded by shining shrapnel … that keeps happening.

Today’s entry is uncorrected to show whatr happens when you try to type with amigraine. Amusing, no? At least it’s not the kind that hurts. Just the kind that fries your neurons and overlays the world with metal lace. Like the Terminator’s vision going bad, but with better taste in static.

Tomorrow, I will make more sense. Maybe. I should be over the migraine and have found my way back through the portal, returning to that universe where all the details are just right. Not the one where gunpowder doesn’t work and chocolate was never invented and mice are used by plumbers as drain cleaners .. or wherever I’ve been today.

Of course, maybe only one of those things will get corrected, which could get interesting. Maybe I’ll still have a migraine, which will result in stil mroe nonsense written here. Or maybe I’ll just still bei nt eh land of Gumdrop Trees, which I won’t find out untul October when they are all harvested for the Halloween trade … one never knows.

The Mound Builsder of Cahokia, Illinois, tell a story of the sky maiden Nanabhozo (and that is not a typo, her name really is Nanabhozo), who fell through a hole in the sky while digging up a turnip.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

A generic portal