Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker didn’t have a formal background in science. Some science fiction writers, do; some do not. What they do have is an interest in ‘What if?” questions; an urgent desire to know the answer to “Why?”  and “How?” It’s the same sort of interest that drives scientific research – that urge to find answers to the questions posed by the world in general.

Kage used to worry, though, that her own background in things like history and literature wouldn’t be taken seriously by her audience. And it’s a fact that there is a contingent among science fiction fans who only seem to respect writers whose non-authorial skills run to mathematics, engineering, physics and other “hard” sciences. I’ve never seen this attitude among writers, mind you – only readers. Kage never got an outraged letter from a single fellow-writer complaining about the science – speculative or actual – in any of her stories.

She got a lot of them from fans, though. Letters that complained there was too much “soft plotting” in her stories, for instance – though those could be chalked up to literary taste (or lack of it). There is a loud and long-standing tendency in science fiction readers to object to stories with humour or romance. Kage called them the “No girls allowed club”, and shrugged her shoulders. Sometimes she asked them why they were reading her stuff in the first place, to which query she got a few stiff and earnest responses that her basic ideas were cool if only she could restrain her impulse to write about … well,  people.

The general subtext was a pretty clear one of cooties.

She couldn’t restrain that impulse. But  even those folks didn’t bother her as much as the ones who complained that the science was wrong. Not the real science (about which Kage was scrupulous in her research). No, it was the invented tech of which these folks complained. They didn’t want antigravity or time travel or immortality.They didn’t like Mendoza’s old-fashioned corn-breeding hobbies.  They didn’t want water on Mars. They objected to Arean vulcanism.  And they wrote to Kage all the time to complain that these things did not exist.

To which Kage replied, “Are you aware I’m writing science FICTION?” A few of the braver ones actually did respond to that, answering that yes, they knew that, but her ideas were so weird … one assumes they wrote to other authors to complain of extraterrestrials, FTL drives and universal translators. Or maybe not; anything that shows up in the movies tends to be regarded as holy writ.

However, Kage stuck to her guns and insisted on pursuing the idea that the frontiers of science might expand in the near future. And – especially on the Matter of Mars – more and more of her speculations have proven true as the years have gone by … there is water ice on Mars, just as she and many, many other science fiction writers proposed. There are growing hints that the heart of Mars is not yet completely cold. There are signs of recent vulcanism, and occasional floods, and frost erosion, and lots of other astonishing things that were not “true” when all the yearning stories about Mars were written. That doesn’t make Kage or anyone else prophetic: it just means they did a lot of research and then – for reasons that their stories required – guessed right.

It’s science fiction. Sometimes it guesses right.

Now Kage’s (and Mendoza’s) preoccupation with corn is showing some fertile cultivars: joke most definitely intended. The first link below is basically just for pretties: the corn described is flat-out gorgeous, and is most precisely what Kage had in mind when she had Mendoza breed corn like gemstones.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/05/15/come-for-the-beautiful-gem-glass-corn-stay-for-a-dose-of-genetics/

And, by the way, the stuff is real. And edible. And tastes quite good. Kage herself grew it for several years and we joyously ate it. Humans digest it pretty well, and Amazon parrots just adore it.

As for Mendoza’s breeding techniques – Kage herself had some doubts about GMO plants. She didn’t think they were intrinsically dangerous, nor that eating them would transform us into pathetic slaves of some sentient vegetable overlords. There is no rational reason to believe that genetically frost-resistant tomatoes will cause cancer or autism or Communism … but the gene insertion techniques were too catholic for Kage’s sense of caution. She figured they could spread those desirable resistance traits just as easily to weeds as to beans – and in fact that is precisely what is happening now.

And monocultures made her nervous. And so did deliberately sterile food crops whose seed sources were held by giant corporations.  So Mendoza bred her corn the old-fashioned way, and ultimately gave it free to the world: no patents, no copyrights, no Monsanto.

The second link here is about a guy who is doing that with several food crops – especially the grains that feed the world. He’s breeding them the old way, he’s stock-piling seeds, and he’s passing them out to anyone who needs them.

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/may/11-big-idea-going-old-school-to-fight-hunger

These cultivars work. They feed more people, better. And they are no more GMO than Luther Burbank’s. Or Mendoza’s. Kage figured there was more than one way to write the future of agriculture. There was the way where someone got a lot of money and everyone else got nutritional diseases. And then there was a way that would work.

It’s all science fiction, after all. But you know what science fiction really, really hope for in their stories?

That they will turn out to come true.

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

Kage Baker adored kaleidoscopes. The inevitable but never expected patterns, growing one out of the other, fascinated her. Each one was a unique vista that would never come again – even if you turned the kaleidoscope back, the result was not the pattern you had just seen. It was a new one.

She didn’t take it for a metaphor for time – I know because I suggested that once, in our 20’s, when she was sitting and staring into the other universes in the cheap cardboard ‘scope she kept on her desk. She’d gotten it at a Halloween Festival in our teens, and had it the rest of her life. And she commented, as she turned it round and round, that she just never got tired of the distances and patterns she could see in there.

“Like time, huh? Each moment unique, never to be repeated.”

“Nope. Time repeats, I think. Or at least you can go back and forth and see it again.” Kage shifted from the bright window to a shadowed corner of the room, and grinned behind the spangled orange tube at her eye. “Boy, that changes the whole palette of colours! Nope, this more like watching the Universe Egg at the Big Bang go off over and over.”

“Right.”

“Or watching other universes go by. Like a Viewmaster with no end,” she said happily. “That’s how time ought to work!”

And in the fullness of itself, that is how Time turned out to work. For Kage.  In her stories, at least.

We all (I have decided. It’s a Revelation, Dear Readers) have a kaleidoscope fixed permanently in front of the eyes of our minds. They run on the wind power of speech, or steam from overheating brains, or maybe a private selection of small rodents on little treadmills … those persons possessed of enormous will-power and strength can learn to turn them with a clear-eyed stare; others, enlightened beyond average humanity, with the serenity of their souls. Most people, though, don’t seem to remember the patterns from one glimpse to the next, and so slide from Universe to Universe without noticing that everything everywhere has changed.

Kage was sure that was how the worlds actually ended. The world ends, the Universe changes, but no one sees it. Only the few people with either clear vision or very strange eyes see it at all.

My personal kaleidoscope seems to have stripped its gears today. There is no regularity in its pace, or its views, or even the colour spectrum of the succeeding pictures; they shift without warning or continuity from bits of glass to views of coloured paper clips; from scarlets and golds to something just this side of visibility from a nocturnal landscape of ultra-violet and ultimate black. It runs along smoothly for a while, and then it lurches.

And I keep falling asleep again! The narcolepsies has got me once more, and I keep falling back into vague improbable dreams filled with porcupines and squids on long car drives. Anybody know how to interpret dreams of porcupines and squids?

I asked Kage once, years ago during a similar spate of kaleidoscope gear strippage, what stuff like this means. And she said, “Stop eating Brie at midnight, you daft cheese fairy.”

And turned her kaleidoscope serenely. And smiled into the infinite flowers inside.

Kage Baker liked going to science fiction conventions for a number of reasons: networking, hotel bars, seeing friends. Putting an enjoyable spin on the necessary promotional activities of being a writer. The dealers room. People-watching.

People-watching is especially rewarding because every single person there is wearing a costume. Sometimes they are very obvious, due to refinements like extra limbs, outre skin colours, or a cheerful and total disregard for copyright infringements on the appearance of a famous comic strip or movie character. But even the people who look relatively normal are actually costumed. Even the writers. Especially the writers! They want to look like sane, approachable persons intent on business, when in reality they are half-crazed hermits who’d rather be chained to their word processors, falling deeper and deeper into their private worlds. Except, of course, for the ones who are normally good solid citizens who happen to be brilliant story-tellers: and they are costumed to look suitably zany for the role.

Kage always went for the twinkly-eyed favourite Auntie look. She wanted to look approachable and sympathetic, but not actively nuts. Hence her fondness for Hawaiian shirts, which she felt gave a nice festive air without her having to wear ray guns or tribal tattoos. (Mine you, if she had ever found a working ray gun, she would have worn it and shot people who asked her where she got her ideas.) For occasions like banquets she opted for black suits. She said she wanted to look like Agent Scully’s eccentric Aunt.

Me, I depended on my omnipresent knitting to costume me as a Nice Older Lady: it’s amazing how many people do not realize that a woman with a bag of knitting is carrying around a dozen stilettos and the makings of numerous garrottes. For the especially formal gigs, I had some Tarnhelm outfits so I could blend into the background.

This time, though, I wanted to be noticed. It was my maiden voyage as the Keeper of the Flame, as it were, and so I wandered about being ostentatiously visible. Hawaiian shirts are primo for this, BTW, as well as being comfortable and easy to pack. But my badge read KAGE BAKER’S SISTER; and Neassa crocheted gorgeous rainbow-hued yarn lanyards for us to hang our badges on. And I still had my bag of knitting: which can be camouflage or eye-catching, depending on what you knit.

I was knitting Monmouth caps. Arming caps, those are. For under helmets. At a science fiction convention, there are always lots of people who know what an arming cap is …

After decades of stage etiquette, though, no way could I bring myself to draw focus when I was in the audience of panels. That is the ultimate rudeness, and there is quite enough of it perpetrated by the regular audience. It’s a peculiar phenomenon that I’ve seen frequently in acting workshops and rehearsals, too. My good friend Tom Westlake calls it “Wait, let me tell you about my character” Syndrome – and it doesn’t matter if you’re running a workshop on accents or choreographing a sword fight, these people just have to turn the spotlight on themselves.

Personally, it reminds me a classmate in kindergarten who used to pull up her skirts to display her pretty panties … at any rate, though, loose writers who are auditing don’t need to contribute.

What I was determined to accomplish, though, was to not be one of the panelists who gets talked over by the others. I probably succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, but hey – I was on a mission from Kage. I’ve been drawing audiences for 30-odd years, just to help sell turkey legs and beer. Keeping Kage’s name and work alive is a much worthier cause!

And! This is a good place to segue slightly to another vital matter of visibility. Nell Gwynne II has a publication date! Marc Bailey shared this with me yestreday, having just pre-ordered his copy from Subterranean Press. So it is now official – Nell Gwynne: At Sea and On Land; Or, Who We Did On Our Summer Holidays is due out this very Fall. A Happy Halloween and a real Thanksgiving!

Can you see me now, Kage? It’s working just the way you wanted it!

Nell Gwynne: On Land and At Sea
Or, Who We Did On Our Summer Holidays

Kage Baker, enthusiastic traveller though she was, was ever in fear of something going wrong on the I-5. That road is so long, so frequently empty, passes through so much utter nothingness and active weirdness – breaking down anywhere else is a piece of cake. Or a fried pie from a conveniently located gas station snack store.

On the 5, you are more likely to be contemplating a meal of unidentifiable road kill. Kage used to speculate on whether or not one could make an acceptable Brunswick stew out of flat, sun-jerked squirrel and the pounds of vegetable that fell off trucks  – it’s not at all uncommon to pass ex-squirrels so fresh their tails are still waving jauntily in the back wash from passing cars, plus tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots and pistachio nuts: all in the space of a mile or so.

I saw just this familiar display on my way up to the Bay area last Monday. Fortified as I was with chocolate-covered raisins and Sour Cream Pringles , I was able to resist.

It’s the views along that Road to Weirdness, Kage said, that make the perilous trips really worth it. There is such a plenitide of strange sights along the way! Classic cars in long, silent convoys along the road: those were one of Kage’s favourites; she said the Fey rode in them. I followed a pod of eight Model A;s in shining factory condition for miles and miles at one point: two by two in the paired lanes, thus preventing the present from sneaking up on them from behind; we had to tootle along in their wake and wonder where they were all going. They peeled off near Patterson’s Landing, and disappeared into the yellow hills.

Another pod of cars was sleek modern white vans. All the windows were darkened. All the front seats had pairs of guys in identical polo shirts and dark glasses. I always think I am passing some Black Ops on a field trip when I encounter one of these.  It’s tremendously creepy when they turn their heads in unison to look at you as they pass … I lost them somewhere near the anonymous, electric-fenced, mysterious-vapour-emitting plant on Fink Road.

I also passed a place where a single haybale was sitting by the road. Hanging on the fence beside it was a ribboned flower wreath; next to it was an aluminum beer keg – American Sankey heads, I think. I figure the whole thing was a migrating seed pod for a Renaissance Faire. Soon a fiddler would appear on the bale, then a quartet of Morris Men and a couple of gypsies. And by it’s too late to stop the infestation; you’ll need tractors and men with ferrets to roust them out.

Still, nowhere in all this bizarre splendour did my valiant Cruiser so much as falter. Even when the autocidal tree branch yanked off my fender and grille in Novato! No, all delays were reserved for my trip home yestreday.

Leaving from Santa Clara, I was determined to take the 5 home, rather than the closer and more inhabited Highway 101 – I wanted to avoid those bottlenecks that occur on the curves of 101, and I wanted to be alone.Kage was much on my mind, after all that time at a Convention … and the I-5 is a great place to be alone. Wonderful Neassa  – who was my entourage all weekend, and very good at it she was – gave me precise direction on how to find the roads to the I-5.

So, I promptly turned the wrong way at the very first intersection and soon found I was headed to San Jose. I drove around in huge circles for about an hour before I suddenly remembered a piece of advise Kage had given me. We were on our way to meet her surgeon, in the last summer of her life; she gestured at the hills to the East and said: “Listen, if you ever have to do this by yourself, keep your eye on your compass and remember: the golden hills to the East are the way out.”

Naturally, I laughed – assuming I would always have the exquisite machinery in Kage’s head to guide me. Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? But that fairy-tale advice finally surfaced in my brain yestreday. And that was what finally got me out of the Celtic knot of roads that embroider the edges of San Francisco Bay. I was crying when I finally zoomed down onto the 580, through the well-loved hills of Livermore; crying for relief, and joy, and missing Kage so much more than my poor shattered chrome grill.

Remember: the golden hills to the East are the way out.

Kage Baker would have been face down and asleep by now. The drive home from Santa Clara was full of the sort of adventures that always made her swear we’d never leave home again …

Details tomorrow, but for now I am too tired to think. However, it was a grand trip, a lovely convention, and I will talk about it all at length. As soon as I get some sleep. In my own bed.

Oh, I love my bed!

Kage Baker was fanatical about meeting deadlines. She also hated being late. This was somewhat amusing – and sometimes maddening – as she never actually checked her deadlines or knew what time it was.

Deadlines were always posted beside her desk, but no matter what enticingly varied coloured inks I used, she never checked ’em, And she absolutely could not, in her heart of hearts, tell the difference between 10 minutes and half an hour. It was also my business to get her to appointments on time; so I kept all the clocks in the house 10 minutes fast…

Today – or tonight – I have missed the deadline for getting a blog entry in. But I plead the service of art and beauty – I was cheering on Regency Dancing until midnight. I myself do not dance; I sit on the sidelines and knit. I also guard reticules, shawls, fans, spare slippers, hats and the like. I unhook fans from lace gloves, tie up hair ribbons, tighten bodice laces and occasionally fetch water for the over heated. I pin up ruffles torn during an over-enthusiastic chasse.

This is a time-honoured and traditional activity for ladies too old and fat to dance anymore. You get to enjoy the music, and you can actually see entire dances instead of just the couples in your set. If there are two of you, you can gossip.

Anyway, I had a lovely time, but the dancing loonies footed it for 4 hours! And now I am tired and am going to bed. This will have to count for today’s entry – and I will do another when I get home to Los Angeles tomorrow.

For now, I seek my pillow with the exquisite strains of the Congress of Vienna Waltz in my head … it was Kage’s favourite.

Kage Baker, as I have noted, grew to quite enjoy science fiction conventions. So did I, and was very much looking forward to BayCon when I left Martinez yestreday afternoon.

I’d been attending the finalization of two dear friends (whom I married, even!) adopting their much longed-for son. The enchanting Alexander Kage Paladini is now legally, morally, ethically theirs! Which means he’s ours – red hair, amazing two-toned blue eyes and darling 4-toothed smile and all. The Man of the Hour wore a snappy linen suit and bow tie to the event, and was unfazed even when all of us hangers-on cheered like maniacs at the end.

And yes, he’s named for his Auntie Kage. If he doesn’t like it when he grows up, he can tell people it’s Japanese for shadow and his nanny was a ninja …

Anyway, I departed from family felicity and headed for duty at BayCon. Along the way I found myself driving through thunder, lightning and hail – on the 680, usually a totally boring road – and then taking a wrong turn somewhere past Sunol. I realized I had somehow missed Santa Clara when I started seeing signs advising me of roads to Vallejo and Martinez – from which I had just left. I was clearly nowhere near Santa Clara.

But a charming Indian gentleman gave me corrected directions(after an interesting discussion with his son in Pakrit, and much patting of a bronze Ganesha) and I ultimately found my way down out of the hills and all the way to the Hyatt Regency.

Along the way, I saw miniature horses, full-sized llamas, a selection of sheep, and a veritable horde of kamikazi squirrels waiting to throw themselves under my wheels and make me feel guilty for miles. Ha! I do not brake nor swerve for squirrels – Nature will make more, and I’m pretty sure it’s a doomsday cult anyway.

When I finally made it to BayCon, Neassa – my volunteer entourage – was coincidentally right behind me. Which was nice, because she has the group brain this weekend. She is cheerfully being my keeper while I wander about forgetting things back in the room and requiring her to go fetch them … she crocheted us necklaces out of a nice rainbow yarn on which to hang our Con passes, too. And since I cannot find any room we want to get to, Neassa is being my seeing-eye friend as well.

So I’ve been dashing about being, as Kage used to describe it, ostentatiously visible. It may help that my badge reads KAGE BAKER’S SISTER. But lots of her fans have been delighted to seem me; lots of both our old friends from Northern and Dickens Faires (all whom seem to be either Con Staff or security) are likewise pleased; and I have even met a couple of fans of this blog.

It’s a weird feeling, to be here without Kage. A year ago, I couldn’t have stood it. Now, though, it’s clearly time to get back into the swing of things, and I am glad to be here.

Even though we had to evacuate the hotel last night due to some  young idiot sneaking a cigarette under a smoke detector. Do not believe that the younger generation is more tech-wise: apparently, unless it has a screen and apps, machinery is just as mysterious to them as it is to their grandparents. Luckily nothing turned out to be actually on fire, and Neassa and I resumed Regency Dancing with no ill-effects.

Then we sat up gabbing and giggling until 2 AM (!) and finally fell asleep to the merry sounds of lost conventioneers wandering outside trying to find their rooms.

Some things don’t change. Thank God.

Kage Baker was, as is well known (now) passionately fond of Santa Rosa plums. She liked stone fruit in general, but the Santa Rosa plum was like catnip and ambrosia to her. During their season, she would happily live on plums and bread – and I think the bread was just for ballast, lest a surfeit of divine plum-ness carry her off.

Although I am here in Santa Rosa – original home of the plum, and home of Luther Burbank who bred the thing in the first place – it’s not quite the season yet. I cannot find any plums yet in the local markets; nor even in the exquisite gardens of the original Burbank House here. I happen to be friends with two of the volunteers there – my hostess Carol is on the Board of Directors – but I think they would notice if I tried to raid the gardens; even if the plums were ripe yet, which they mostly are not …

But here in Northern California is one of the breeding grounds of hybrid stone fruit. Heritage varieties, too – the best cherries I ever had were growing semi-wild in someone’s back yard. They were a bi-colour yellow and red, so Kage always figured they were related to Queen Anne cherries – but they were bigger, and their sweetness had a strong overlay of honey. We never found out what they were, but Oh! They were good.

In the market yestreday I found Saturn peaches, those little flat round ones like pastel tires – Saturn nectarines, too. Red nectarines, yellow nectarines, white nectarines: and white nectarines are without doubt a faerie fruit, delicate and delicious beyond the ways of humankind. Local ripe cherries. Four kinds of apricots, including the red ones I had for breakfast. Those red ones are fantastic, by the way; as large as plums, deep red and velvety-furry on the outside and a deep glorious gold on the inside. The apricot flavour is strong and smooth; I had them with some perfectly ripe Camembert cheese, and fresh-ground  coffee …

Life is so gracious in the North.

There is also a lively cheese industry here in the North, relatively unknown except to the natives and a very few cheese fanatics. Point Reyes Bleu Cheese has recently been finding a broader market (and deserves it; it’s an exemplary bleu) but there are lots of other treasures of the dairy variety. My personal favourite is the Rouge et Noir Cheese Factory, just northwest of Novato on the edge of the wetlands … you can actually get their wonderful cheeses at most Safeways up here. In L.A., you only find them in snobby cheese shops. I shall be making a pilgrimage out there this week, too, so I can eat cheese through the Convention.

And cherries. And apricots. And hilariously flat peaches.

As soon as I get my bumper re-attached.

Kage Baker loved our PT Cruiser. She bought it for me – since she herself couldn’t drive – and carefully added goodies to it to make it just perfect. Chrome, mostly; chrome trim on the outside and wood trim on the inside. A pewter pirate figurine on the dashboard, to point the way forward. A bobble head zombie pirate – decked with Mardi Gras beads – in the back window, since California wouldn’t let her install stern cannons …

Today I drove North to Santa Rosa, in Kage’s – and my – beloved Pirate Cruiser. I’ve a convention to attend; and friends to see and friends to mourn with the friends I see. Rituals await me, and they matter very much.

In the course of finding my way from I-5 to Highway 101,  I chose to  traverse Highway 37. The old Blackpoint Faire site was on 37, just off Atherton Drive. Now it’s a posh housing development. I sneer every time I drive by.

So, this afternoon, I passed. I sneered. I headed for the western end of the 37, where you basically can do one of three things: go to San Francisco, go to Eureka, or drive into a ditch.

At this point, a branch from the gardener’s truck driving in front of me leaped out onto the highway and under the front bumper of my car. It broke almost at once – but as it did so, it pulled my front bumper out like a loose tooth, and levered my chromed grill right off the front of the Cruiser. Spang! The grill flew off into traffic and was promptly run over by some lumpy little green hybrid.

Ascertaining with much profanity that at least my bumper (also chrome) was still attached, I managed the turn on to the North bound 101. I ended up in the parking lot of the Safeway in Novato, where I spent many Faire Saturday nights weeping with exhaustion in the produce section … I crawled under my car to make sure the branch was gone and nothing was leaking or on fire. I crawled back out from under my car (a lot more slowly and creakily) and lay there a moment mourning my vanished grille and loose bumper.

No one looked at me twice; Novato is in Marin County, but only 30 miles North of San Francisco. A woman weeping under a car – as long as it’s a nice car – doesn’t make anyone even blink.

I eventually got up and went into the Safeway, and bought Rouge et Noir Triple Cream Cheese and red apricots. Then I drove on to Santa Rosa, where my dear good friends the Skolds are kind of used to me arriving in a cloud of dust and a narrowly-avoided disaster … they are very patient people. Probably saints.

I’m gonna eat cheese and red apricots for breakfast, and take my car – OUR car – to the dealer to get the bumper fixed. Then I’ll order a new chromed grill. Kage’s tricked-out pirate car will not be diminished! I will not lose anything else I love this week!

Fuck you, Death. And Death of Chrome, too.