Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved toys. She surrounded her working space with little doodads and bibelots all chosen to  give her something to do with her hands when she was bored. She was a fidgeter, a finger-tapper; someone who could not talk without moving her hands, or listen without running beads over and over through her fingers.

When especially absent-minded or unself-conscious, she played with her hair. Mind you, that was something lots of people could not resist. That cable of red hair, hanging all the way to her hips, was a sure-fire draw for babies, small children, cats, parrots … and adults who were on intimate terms with her. Kage didn’t like to touched casually, but those in her closest circle knew they could tug on that braid or run it through their own fingers like a string of pearls. Our nieces loved to brush and braid it.

Her hair was extraordinarily thick. She called it coarse, but the individual strands were pretty fine – there were just so many of them! What had been baby curls when it was short was pulled by gravity into long waves and curves when she was an adult and it was 4 feet long … getting a hand or a brush into that mass was no simple trick. It defanged combs. It spat out barrettes and other hair dressing. Only reinforced scrunchies and leather ties kept it in place.

And the colour! Red hair is – different. Those of you who know or are redheads are aware of the truly strange colours that go into being red-headed. Natural red hair has qualities that could only be achieved in a dye job by individually hand-painting every single strand. The basic hue of Kage’s hair was a copper-bronse shade. But mixed it into that were strands of metallic gold, multiple blondes (ash to sunflower),burnt umber, red ocher, burgundy and bright polished copper. There were strands in every colour bred into minks, and strands like fine-drawn wire of several unlikely metals.

It was nothing as simple as highlights. If one could have embroidered or knit with it … As she got older, it went gold. Redheads don’t go exactly grey. They get blonder, and then it goes white. Her hair increasingly looked like cinnamon-sugar.

She liked to twist it into small plaits and knots. She never did learn to braid, but she made a killer box-stitch lanyard (which was beyond me): she often made them from the ends of her own hair. She would twist fantastic faerie-knots in it, sometimes getting her fingers stuck; often, she couldn’t get it untwisted again. I suspect some strands were dipping in and out of alternate dimensions, possibly forming Klein bottles.

When it was thoroughly stuck, the knot had to be forcibly removed. Momma was always cutting knots out of it, in loud despair; which is why Kage was constrained to keep her hair short until she left home and had to deal with it on her own. Her solution, once it was that long, was just to snap the knot off where it emerged from the mass of hair. The strands always broke with a sharp crack! – like glass. Not like hair at all.

In her time, Kage knotted herself accidentally to most of the chairs in the household, her bed frame, all her fingers and the cords of her hoodies. Pens, pencils and paintbrushes. Other people’s hair, if they sat still and long enough and too close. Several lovers.

In humid air, it expanded. Frizz is too mild a word for what it did – it was more like nano foams. By the time it dried after a shower, it was a cloud a foot wider than she was. In dry weather – it sparked. Big fat gold and white sparks of static electricity, quite visible in the dark and as audible as static. You know how cats will pad across a rug and then shock you with a sudden touch? Kage did that to cats.

My own hair is no way as interesting. It’s brown. It refuses to grow much below my shoulder blades. It makes no noises, and emits only the palest, spineless sparks even in a thunder storm. I’m getting some nice silver in it, but not near as much as Kimberly, who is a year younger than I am – but who, also, to be honest, has a large son just out of adolescence; Michael could give grey hair to Yul Brenner.

Still, something is simmering under my plain hair. The fires that burned so high in Kage’s head have sparked at least a bed of coals in mine; the flames aren’t visible on the outside, but I can feel the heat and rising wind of conflagration behind my eyes. It keeps me awake at night, writing paragraphs and outlines. It keeps me doing this.

And every now and then, in a book or a sweater or a half-finished piece of knitting, I find a strand of hair – inhumanly long, electric wine-red or burning copper. So I know her fires are still with me.

Kage Baker was the eldest daughter of George Henry Baker. Kage got his black eyes, his cheekbones, the dimple in his chin. Also an inhuman determination.

George Henry was the eldest boy of 18 kids (mobs run in the family), a Catholic boy from Hamtramk who spoke only French until he was 4. He was a survivor of the Great Depression and WWII, a postman, a long distance traveler. A hero.

He’d been a sharpshooter, a powder monkey, and an itinerant chicken medicine salesman in his pre-Dad youth. All his knuckles were broken in a career as a welterweight fighter (he was tall but skinny). He was American Indian, black haired and onyx-eyed; and when his hair greyed, which it did early, thanks to battle wounds, malaria and a heart attack,  he turned out to resemble Humphrey Bogart. That was how he looked  throughout Kage’s life; she said he was pretty much changeless from her first memory until he died.

Kage admired fatherly men. Popular folklore says we all look for men like our Dads, but I don’t think so – and except for liking ’em tall and skinny, Kage did not favour the kind of grim-eyed warrior Dad was. She liked gardeners, poets, healers; men of their hands, makers and builders.

However … quiet old men with memories in their eyes made her feel safe. She liked to curl up on a paternal lap, shelter in some war cloak and be told stories. It was the Young Lord who evoked all her song and passion – it was the Father to whom she prayed. The heart being a complicated place, she had no trouble balancing this and still considering herself a Christian.

“It’s the Mystery of the Trinity,” she would say, waving one dismissing hand when I sometimes brought this up. (A classic theological education makes for some odd dinner conversations …) “It was made for people like me!”

“It’s supposed to be a Unity, not a pantheon,” I would observe snarkily.

“You could get your nose punched in any bar in Constantinople for that argument, once upon a time,” Kage would ponder. Then, “Hey – how are icons supposed to work? How could they be made to really work? How would an icon work on …. Operatives?”

It all leads back to creation, somehow, doesn’t it?

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.

George Henry Baker

Kage Baker was a shy person, intensely private. She didn’t like to share personal information with strangers – or, for that matter, to hear strangers’ revelations either. If she knew you, it was different, but she was definitely not Facebook material.

“Even I don’t care about the minutia of my morning routine,” she observed irritably once, observing random posts from friends over my shoulder. “I really don’t care about anyone else’s. Who cares what toothpaste someone uses, or what their breakfast looked like?”

“Oh, chill out,” I responded. “It’s just a way of connecting with people.’

“Don’t want to connect with anyone,” she grumbled.

Which was not really true. She loved her friends. But she had no gradations in her affection. If she liked you, she trusted you utterly and you were an intimate; if not, you were a stranger. There were no casual acquaintances for Kage. She learned to smile broadly and say “Good to see you!” when people came up to greet her at Conventions or at Fair, but as they walked away she would ask me, “Who the hell was that?”

“No idea,” I usually had to admit. But, courtesy being satisfied, Kage never gave it much thought.

She was sensitive about her eyes , and never looked people in the face until she knew them well. (Her left eye wandered, due to primitive eye surgery when she was two.) She wouldn’t let me tell anyone about her cancer until just the month  before her surgery. But there was one subject on which she spoke freely and openly – to my astonishment. The first time she did it at a Convention, I dropped my knitting. I had to crawl around on the floor finding stitch markers while Kage glared at me from the podium …

Kage had Asperger’s Syndrome. And she talked about it. She started around her own birthday several years ago, because June happens to be Autism Awareness Month – and while not everyone feels Asperberger’s is a form of autism, it’s included on the autism spectrum in the DSM. Kage used to tell people she had an “autiform disorder”, which was accurate enough and also a nice piece of technical persiflage she invented herself.

Asperger’s is not autism in my opinion, either. I am entitled to an opinion; half the family has been diagnosed with it over the last 15 years, including Kage, Kimberly, and me; also, both Kimberly’s husband and son. As far as we are concerned, this is not a disease; it’s just a different way of being wired. Kage’s personal opinion is that it comes via our Neanderthal relatives. Of course, when she came up with that idea, no one admitted Homo sapiens had Neanderthal genes – but now it’s been discovered that, surprise! We do! And a lot of them are specifically about brain function … Kage was right about at least some of it.

If you asked her how she did that, she would answer solemnly, “I got the Sight. I’m psychotic.”

No, but she was an Asperger person. She had some problems with face recognition, though that was probably exacerbated by being unwilling to look into people’s faces in the first place. I can’t recall what so-and-so looks like, she might fret. Tell me when we see her.

If you’d look at her, you’d know!

I don’t care what she looks like, so why should I look at her? I just want someone to tell me when we see her.

Oh, screw you …

Kage had an uncanny focus on what interested her, and total disregard for what did not. She was linguistically gifted – while kids with autism are most clearly characterized by losing their speech, Asperger’s kids talk early, and well, and non-stop … they may make you nuts by their intense concentration on only what interests them, but by God! They can communicate!

I repeat: Asperger’s is not a disease and does not need a cure. That was Kage’s conviction as well. But it’s a difficult thing to come to terms with (mostly for your relatives, if they don’t have it) and the standard educational system doesn’t do well by kids with Asperger’s. A lot of the nightmare of Kage’s grade school years was caused by  her teachers shouting angrily across an abyss they could not even see. So Kage talked about it, to bring it to people’s attention, to ask for help for the youngsters coming to terms with it, to encourage parents and children both to be tolerant of one another.

“After all,” she said one afternoon, holding up her own left hand, “it’s just another way of being wired, like handedness. Do we punish kids for being left-handed?” She mimed slapping her own knuckles, as Sister Edmond and Mrs. Goldberg used to do to her. “Oh, wait. We do.”

Kage looked out over the audience then and asked, “Don’t you think we should stop?”

Yep. It’s June, Dear Readers. Be aware of autiform disorders, and lend a hand to someone dealing with one. You’re all related to us, after all.

Kage Baker loved summer vacation. After 12 years of schooling, that break over the hot months was ingrained in her; she was also a creature of ferocious habit, and anything that imprinted over 12 years was never going to leave her system.It was the pivot of her personal year – around her birthday you started having the days free, and they stayed yours until the myrtle trees bloomed in September.

That was the way it was supposed to be. There was no firmer proponent of “the way it ought to be” than Kage Baker. Ever. Faith may move mountains, but simple stubborn habit can alter space-time continuae.

This was not, however, some hippie attempt to drop out. Kage was always willing to work. She just didn’t want a job that would make her work through the summers. And if she had been able to maintain her household by office work that let her work at home from June through September, she might never have bothered to try writing for a  living. But it became obvious over the years that the only way to get those golden days of freedom back was not to have a conventional job at all.

Throughout her 20’s, Kage tried very, very hard to make her living with her art. We spent weekends at art shows and street festivals; she took itinerant lettering and illustration work; she painted signs and glass frescoes and nursery walls. (Remember the demon bunnies in the nursery from House of the Stag? She always wanted to paint those …) She almost succeeded. Which is not a bad track record, in the arts. Eventually, though, even she had to admit she needed a regular paycheck, and so she entered the Pink Collar Ghetto.

She was 27 when she got her first “real” job. A lifetime before that spent working 24/7 until a project was done (Sleep? Breaks? What are those? The first coat is dry; back to work!) had endowed her with a ferocious work ethic and inhuman powers of concentration. She was lauded by her employers; she got promotions and raises. And she hated every minute of it. Especially during the summer months …

She wrote constantly at home. She longed for summers to herself.

The American workplace folklore says that if you work hard, the natural rhythm of the economy will reward you. And so it was with Kage: she worked steadily for almost 20 years, then the economy collapsed and she was fired. She was “too qualified” to get another job, by which you may understand that her cinnamon hair was now liberally adulterated with sugar. Some reward? No, it was just what she needed. We moved to Pismo Beach, she finished a novel, and she found an agent.

We had found the Summer Lands, and Kage was free in them to do whatever she wanted.

The last 15 years of her life were, mostly, bliss. She wrote all the time; she stayed up late and got up when she pleased; she gardened when she wanted. And she took all summer off. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, she remained happily uncertain of what day of the week it was. Unless it was a Friday when we were driving to a Faire, and even then she didn’t much care.

I stuck it out longer in the job world, mostly just through the luck of not getting fired. But I too missed that ancient cycle of summer and winter. It was all right, though; we knew I’d get out. We figured we’d manage on our combined resources until retirement age; Kage would keep writing, I would retire, and we would slowly turn into Entwives – happy, productive, fat old ladies. We’d always been so poor that Social Security really would be an improvement. We’d be professional aunties, living in our cottage by the sea; which one of our nieces ecstatically described as always covered in birds and flowers.

I could resort to a popular euphemism here and state that Kage graduated before I did – she has gone on to that Eternal Prom, and her date is certainly King. Endless Summer Vacation! Screw that. While she may indeed be slow-dancing with God (probably is, in fact), what she did was DIE. And it was hard and nasty and grievous, and I cry nowadays as much for relief that her pain ended as outrage that mine persists.

But, you know what? It’s summer, and somehow – I am free. Gotta be grateful for that. Gotta open the doors and turn up the music and light some incense, and rock out. This is the Summer Country, man, these are the good old days: nor am I out of them.

Kage Baker was never lost. Never. She always knew exactly where she was, and could confidently state the direction we needed to go. She did get testy when her driver was unable to understand her directions, which were always precise but tended toward jargon and sacred language unfamiliar to the layperson – cult phrases like North, and Left, and Half a mile.

She eventually learned to  reduce her oracular utterances to Over there and That Way. Supplemented by pointing, and given in a loud, firm voice so as to be heard over the panicked cries of said driver.  I become upset when I’m lost, and also tend to get lost very frequently. Screaming and crying result, with much castigating of travel-inclined deities and blaming of the navigational staff. It hasn’t happened as much lately as it used to, but that is due only to accidental circumstances. I’m not traveling much right now (which makes it harder to be lost. Not impossible, though …) and I’m not traveling with Kage at all.

Because, while Kage saved me from being lost a million times, Dear Reader, a truthful narrator must reveal that she usually got me lost in the first place. We wandered the wilds of Hollywood afoot for years, and never had a problem – but as soon as I learned to drive, it became apparent that Kage and I were operating on different space-time referentials; our star-charts did not match, we swayed to different magnetic poles, she had magnetite in her hippocampus and I evidently had kitty litter in mine.

There are places in the Hollywood Hills where roads are sort of a generally agreed-upon convention. They are paved, in that at least one coat of asphalt (or at least Henry’s Roof Emulsion) has been laid on over the last 50 years;  pot holes are filled by shoveling in local rock slides and driving over them once or twice. There is no stretch that runs straight for more than the length of two cars, which means that every six feet there is a blind curve and no one can ever park or pass. Of course, they do anyway, and so parked cars must be maneuvered around on the verge – which is usually either someone’s front garden, or the edge of a canyon filled with poison oak.

In the winter, these streets are streams – after a month or so, literally streams, as by then all the gravel and bitumen has been washed off, up, and into little reefs. In summer, they are full of drifting leaves, gravel and occasionally wild fires. Coyotes, deer, pumas and skateboarders race along them; passing cautious drivers with one sidelong arrogant gunslinger’s glance and then shooting effortlessly ahead to disappear amid the hillsides.

On every ridge, at bottom of every canyon, on every flat intersection of two vertiginous hills, are houses. They were built before it occurred to anyone to actually alter the shape of the land, and so were engineered to fit into the strange nooks and crannies between the oaks. They were built by people who did not know how to build, out of substances never intended to form housing – pieces of sets, stolen pallets from grocery stores, dead busses. Some illegal plumbing and a coat of stucco and behold! A house that stands, more or less, for the next 30 years; eventually someone gives a name to the stream bed by which it crouches, and paints an address on a rock in the front garden.

And the strange inhabitants continue to glue mosaic tiles and broken glass and salvaged chrome and chance architectural elements to it, until it glitters through the trees like an opium dream. At night its lights shines through blue tarps and Home Depot lattice, and sketch out walls wider and higher than anything that shows by day; they shine through the trees, hinting at streets and driveways and people with wine glasses in their hands, a vision to the two little girls in the wild dark garden down the slope, watching for UFOs between the eucalyptus trees. And some morning, they drive up there, the little girls, in their mother’s van, hunting for the windows that shone those summer nights.

We found a lot of these little architectural curiosities by being lost. At least, I was lost. We usually found them by operating on the actual expectation of my losing my way somewhere along there  – knowing it would inevitably happen, we could forge on fearlessly and see what lay up countless new roads. Kage, after all, was never lost …

Kage Baker was born in the Hollywood Hills. Well, actually, she was born in the old Queen of Angels Hospital near downtown, but that was in clear sight of the Hills. It was to the Hills she was brought home, and up the slope of the home Hill that Momma carried her – up the 50-odd red steps in 6 levels that rose up between the roses and fruit trees; into the long sea-green and ivory living room, lined with mirrors like a sorcerer’s cave.

There was a polar bear rug there when we were very little. Kage liked to sit on his head and kick her little sandalled heels (she had a juvenile thing about sandals). Momma used to whittle spare teeth for the poor bear out of wooden clothespins.

The house – a Green & Green knockoff,  very like the C.P. Daly House in Ventura (http://www.usc.edu/dept/architecture/greeneandgreene/139.html), white stucco walls and red roof tiles – stood on the very crest of a ridge. The front yard ran down in many steep terraces on either side of that long red staircase, every terrace carpeted with manicured lawns, flowers and fruit trees. The back yard ran down in one long slope with a barrier of eucalyptus trees along the western edge to prevent small children from rolling down into the canyon.

Every level place was home to forts and playhouses and wading pools; the pool was set up in the same place so many summers that the area was rubbed bald down to the golden granitic bedrock – we called it the Druid Circle. Sometimes we found weird square-headed nails – John Fremont’s US Army headquarters were literally right up the hill – or pierced shells buried by the Tongva in their time. Or other kids’ old toys, mouldering tin cars and zombie baseballs.

Kage was always finding caches of coloured glass marbles: blue and green and lavender, buried in the earth like the seeds of a tropical ocean. Some of them were still in her jewelry boxes when I packed out the house last year. She attributed great and mysterious powers to them, what she called the seaglass stones, when she was small … and probably when she was grown, come to think of it.

The movie image of the Hollywood Hills is of sparkling pools and glassed-in patios and immaculate grounds keeping. But those are for public display, in places where people have not lived for very long. The older inhabited places are different. Our house was beautiful, but not like that – it was rather more feral, and went through rises and falls in fortune and tidiness. Most of the time, the garden  was neat and purposeful close to the house, and gradually got weirder and wilder as you wandered away to the edges. When I read Tolkien’s description of Ithilien, the Garden of Gondor, as a ” .. dishevelled dryad loveliness …” I saw Momma’s gardens in my head. I always will.

Kage explored the gardens as a child, and just naturally wandered off into the Hills at every edge. Usually, it was the Hollywood Hills; but she insisted that sometimes she found her way into the Hollow kind instead, and things got … different. She may have been right; I  certainly roamed those slopes and ridges with no clear idea of where we ever were, relying on the compass in Kage’s head to guide us home. We may have gone through any number of fey lands while she was following some deer-trail, or some line of mysterious stone wall between the oaks. There was nothing so intriguing to Kage as the suggestion of ruins; she followed old walls and driveways and foundations all over. And I followed her.

There are houses up there that we only ever glimpsed as walls between the oaks, at an afternoon-lit distance. Driveways and access roads were barricaded, when we could even find them. Some of those walls had arcades and windows that changed shape and number every time one saw them – I remember. There were lots that were empty by day and showed lights by night; places where the moon appeared to settle in the trees and glow at ground level in the summer darknesses.

There were doorways everywhere in the Hills. Kage found them all. Or built them, or dug them out of the golden grass and golden stone of the cliffs – who knows? I only know that she learned the world was porous so early, so young, and so successfully that she never, ever learned differently. Maybe that’s the easiest way to learn to walk between worlds.

Because what we learn as children, we never forget.

Kage Baker viewed the structure of time as a great helical Moebius strip, woven and interwoven into something like a tube. She really did; it wasn’t just a way to explain her time travel story line. Rather the opposite, in fact, as her decision to write time travel stories arose in part from her personal conviction that “time” was an artifact of human perception and actually operated in a non-linear manner.

“Everything happens at once,” she explained to me many times over (for lack of a better word) the passage of years. “It only looks like it’s going forward because that’s the way our senses face.” This is a theory of the Arrow of Time iterated by Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking as well, which pleased Kage no end. She figured that was a coincidence – she and mathematics were not even in  parallel universes – but it was satisfying nonetheless.

She was also intrigued by the fact that gorillas -at least, based on the sketchy metaphysical conversations possible with a non-human primate via ASL – seem to be facing the other way: what they see is the past, and what is coming is a total mystery. Humans are not much more aware of the future, but that is the way our temporal vision faces – it’s the past that we have to turn our heads to see. Sir Terry Pratchett must have come across this interesting observation as well, as he gives a gorilla-like time perception to his trolls.

Kage always lived much more in a constant “now” than I did. Time was vast, fluid and universally congruent. She could walk through the streets of a town and be commenting on what used to stand there, with utter lucidity – we’d stroll past Chele’s Restaurant at Cypress and Pomeroy, but what she was seeing was the Cowgirl Cafe (1990’s; best sausage on the Central Coast) overlaid by the old Red Rooster Pool Hall (1950’s) and the Peppermint Twist Lounge (1960’s, of course; a seaside hive of scum and villainy). But those watery reflections on the ceiling? Those were from the days when the building housed an indoor salt water bathing pool; which abandoned natatorium still lurked dreaming in the darkness under the planked floor … and yet she knew it was 2004. That label just didn’t matter very much to her, because it was all still happening.

Some of our neighbors over the years undoubtedly thought Kage had vision problems, as I habitually took her arm at curbs. But, despite using only one focusing eye at a time, she had fine vision. Her problem was attention. I was always afraid she’d step off a curb in our childhoods and end up under a truck from our 40’s …

We once navigated our way across most of San Francisco, with Kage in her habitual role of navigator, to find a particular square somewhere to the west of the City. After a while, I noticed peripherally that Kage was no longer consulting the map much.  “There’s something wrong with it,” Kage complained. But we got to our destination – where a perusal of the offending map revealed she had somehow been holding it upside down. She got us to our destination by triangulating between what she remembered from written accounts of the Sunset District, Inner Richmond and Sea Cliff.

Part of what Kage remembered reading about wasn’t even there any longer. But she knew where it had been, and used that. It worked. Cartography lost a miracle worker when Kage Baker decided to write fiction.

Now that I am in my second year back in Los Angeles, I have begun emerging slightly from reclusivity. I am taking little side trips and excursions back into the Lands I Used To Know: the dubious edges of the Hollywood Hills where Kage and I grew up, and lived until our 30’s. And I find that navigating by landmarks is working better than Google Earth, even though some of the landmarks have changed. Or mutated. Or maybe migrated back into whatever faerieland birthed them in the first place; because some of the roads we used to drive back then were curious indeed.

Nonetheless, I am finding the dear old places. This weekend I took a misty grey morning drive into the Hightower area above and behind the Hollywood Bowl: not a large nor well known area, but we lived there for 20 years. I know every dead end street (And most of them are. Some of them dead-ends on both ends. It’s a strange place.), every illegally but creatively subdivided house we lived in. I even remember how to get turned around in the cul de sacs without driving off the hillside or through someone’s breakfast room. The houses are better painted these days, the ones that have not been covered like Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Copa d’Oro or bougainvillea or roses; but I can still recognize the shapes under the blossoms and the thorns.

I was a girl here, to paraphrase old Ebenezer Scrooge. Kage and I used to sit on the corner right there, eating French rolls and Rose’s Lime Marmalade, ignoring the glares of homeowners who weren’t quite sure how to chase off two book-laden girls in parochial school uniforms; Kage would gesture round at the golden hillsides and unlikely houses, and state with great conviction: “Someday we’ll live up here, kiddo. We’ll found an Embassy. The Embassy of us.”

And we did, too. And to my amazement, its memory is still burned on the air up there.

Tomorrow: some tales of the Embassy on the Edge of Another World.

Kage Baker was a firm devotee of Walt Kelly and his merry  Okefenokee Crew – Pogo Possum, Albert Alligator, Howland Owl, Churchy La Femme the turtle, et al.

One of their trademarks was a (quite warranted) dread of Friday the 13th. Churchy was especially unnerved by the phenomenon, though he was a trifle uncertain about the details of the event. Whenever the 13th of a month rolled around, he would exclaim in horror, “Friday the 13th come on a (fill in the day of the week) this month!” And he’d panic and head for safety and seclusion.

Kage thought this made sense, and greeted at least half the 13ths in the year this way. She didn’t always retreat to her hermitage safe room, but it was a great excuse if you were so inclined … “Friady the 13th come on a Thursday this month,” she would declare. “We need to drive to Cambria.” And we would.

Well, Dear Readers, this month Friday the 13th come on a Monday. And I quit. Besides, it’s already 6:17 and the Top Gear lads are driving hilariously through Bolivia. Or trying to. I’m gonna go enjoy the predicaments of people whose problems are worse than mine – I am not, after all, stuck on a raft in the middle of the Amazon River in a Toyota with a flat tire.

Later, dudes and dudettes. Must go now. As Albert always was wont to say, “The Cherokees is escaped from Fort Mudge!”

Kage Baker loved movies. One of the great things about our lifespan was the proliferation of movies at home. She adored sitting about in her jammies, watching classic films in her own armchair – every change of media made better films available, and she was an avid collector.

The last couple years of her life she discovered Netflix, and went on a mad treasure hunt. Kage absolutely doted on silent films, and Netflix enabled her to locate things she had loved for years. But prior to disks in the mail, she’d had to rely on hunting down revival festivals and finding rental stores with a “Silent Classics Section” – which usually amounted to 3 Charlie Chaplin films and “Broken Blossoms”. She started tracking things down and buying them when she could, when the Internet began to beckon. But Netflix was the mother lode for Kage.

She got so into silent science fiction and fantasy movies that she did a whole series of reviews for Tor Online: amazing, unheard-of, uncelebrated films. Real classics, and real High Weirdness, too – I remember that the stories of Santa in the off season were especially peculiar. Not to mention the soft B& D porn of Harry Houdini films … the series was entitled Ancient Rockets, and the blog began here:  http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/01/ancient-rockets  I recommend them – you will get a guided tour through silent cinematic insanity with Kage Baker officiating. If you haven’t read these reviews before, you will be discovering a whole new aspect of her voice. It’s great.

I watched all these with her, and the dozens of others she consumed over the years. I’m not as fascinated by silent films as she was, but our family history in Hollywood makes them all at least a little interesting … and, being Kage, she was never satisfied with one viewing. Everything was viewed over and over and over, wrung dry for nuance and implication, thoroughly digested. You know the Film Festival in Mendoza In Hollywood? As I’ve mentioned before, that scene is written from life. We watched Intolerance every night for over a week. Sometimes twice. I see it in my dreams … as do the other guests at the time, I am sure. A lot of the dialogue for that scene came out of the comments of Kage’s test audiance, on the 4th or 11th or 14th showing.

(“What is that woman wearing on her head?” I remember a young man demanding repeatedly, his head in Kage’s lap and a martini glass of rum balanced on his chest. Kage gave his lines to the traveling salesman Operative; most of the rest of him ended up in Ermenwyr …)

The final night run out into the dark empty lots of Los Angeles, with Imarte chasing Babylon and everyone else chasing Imarte – that was more or less from life, as well. Though to my knowledge none of us were immortals. I’m sure I’d have noticed eventually. But we certainly ended up dancing in the misty moonlight, with wreaths of dusty wildflowers in our hair and Ranier Ale cans in our hands. Don’t judge! We were young and poor.

Kage also liked special effect movies, and was a wild fan of summer blockbusters. Things that glittered and exploded and crashed! Decent costumes and an intriguing villain, and she was as happy as could be. One of the things I deeply regret her missing has been the recent evolution of Netflix that lets us watch films at home. I’ve been re-watching tons of good old B movies from the last 20 years or so, right at my desk – how Kage would have loved that! Though for her I’d have had to run cable to the flatscreen TV she so adored, so she and Harry could curl up in the wingback chair and watch the 42 inch screen … Kage liked an expansive viewing experience.

So far this summer I have managed Thor and POTC IV, and Super 8 just today. X-Men was in and out of the good old Vista off Hyperion Boulevard too quickly for me to see it yet – I will have to catch it at some inferior house, where the manager doesn’t dress in costume and the popcorn isn’t as good.I can recommend Super 8, too: a grand film, no end of fun, and a perfect evocation not only of summer B movies, but of being so very young and earnest so very long ago …

But the Vista WILL be getting Cowboys & Aliens! I can hardly wait. Daniel Craig was one of those actors on whose masculine pulchritude Kage and I agreed – I must go and admire that pale English complexion, those fine mean eyes and bull dancer’s body for the both of us now.

Ah, the movies on a summer afternoon – that’s a good time, that is.

Kage Baker was subject to overloads. Sensory, mostly: too much colour or noise or scent or humidity. Often, too much emotion; brought on by over-indulgence in strongly-flavoured movies, music and waters.

It was why she was not very social. She avoided crowds for the simple reason that she didn’t want her head to blow up. Which is what she said it felt like, when the input got to be too much. Noises that happen in your head are technically “phantom” – in that they bypass the ordinary nervous channels – but they are real enough to the temporal cortex, which has to process them. When Kage was stressed by crowds, especially, she would develop migraines and synesthesia: overload.

A curious facet of the dedicated sensory portions of the brain is that the sight, hearing, etc. centers have no choice but to interpret input by their specific rulebooks. If nerves feed activity to your vision centers, you’re gonna see something; if to your hearing centers, you’re gonna hear it. You can demonstrate this easily right now – press a finger to your (Closed! Closed!) eye: you will see patterns in the dark. The optic nerve  interprets pressure as visual stimulation, and passes it on as such. Under ordinary circumstances, it has no choice.

But blending can occur. Wrong numbers. Crossed circuits. Maybe this is one of  the sources of synesthesia, that fascinating phenomenon  wherein people taste colours and see music and so forth. Everybody’s got a little of that. Some people have a lot. Some people cannot cope with it; others learn to enjoy always perceiving the letter E as male, green and smelling of stone dust … it’s probably just part of the normal sensory interpretation spectrum, and some are more subject to it than others. As long as these customized perceptions don’t interfere with daily life, it’s basically a who-cares situation – like hearing an extra octave higher, or seeing a little in UV light (which some rare humans do. They have 4 kinds of cones, not just 3,  in their eyes.)

A friend of mine and Kage’s sees a faint blue light a few seconds before an Aurora display begins: he has never been able to duplicate it in any medium, because no one makes paint or ink or glass or chalk that colour. And if he did duplicate it somehow, the rest of us wouldn’t see it. We don’t have those cones. But he does, and he vastly enjoys it.

There are cases of people who did not realize they had kinesthesia until told – no one ever thought to inform them that not everyone “tastes” the colours of Crayons they pick up. Just like no one thought to tell the blind Helen Keller that the ocean was salt water – when she first encountered it, with the sensory array that was “normal” for her, she got a considerable shock. I think most kinesthetics have that kind of problem.

When it works smoothly, all is normal and there is nothing to remark upon. You smell roses and see a pale orange light behind your eyes: that’s normal. It’s only when our senses get disarranged – and as Charles Dickens point out, so many things can do that to them – that the sensory input gets jarring or excessive. The wise person then retreats to some venue with less input – and if they don’t, the brain wallops them with a migraine and enforces some down time.

That happened to Kage a lot. It doesn’t happen as much to me – Kage always said I was better wired than she was – but from time to time we all get it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I am sleeping so much these days; I am wading through Kage’s mind when I am awake, and that is deep and active water … no wonder my brain is shorting out from time to time.

Time for some chemical amelioration, I think. Caffeine, fresh nectarines, aged cheese. Walnut pound cake, and the warm breathing velvet of the cat sitting here on the desk. And chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate.

Not even Kage ever overloaded on that.