The Desert Mermaid

To my own bewilderment, I have never, not once, been to Disneyland. Oh, I've been to DisneyWORLD, at the age of nine, and in my conservative opinion it was the GREATEST THING EVER,* but I've never been to the California one.

So my sister has taken it upon herself to fix this sorry situation. Over her fall break next month she and her friend are dragging me to LA, where we will meet my brother for a few days of Disney shenanigans. The bad news is that we have to drive there (I wanted to take the train), but hey, the good news? I'm going to DISNEYLAND.


*Especially since my parents, who at that point had a large chunk of cash to spend, bought into something called the "Grand Plan," an ill-conceived promotional program where you'd spend an exorbitant flat rate for every goddamned thing the entire park had to offer, then spent a week trying to earn a return on it by cramming every amenity, show, character breakfast, parade, and ride in between collecting souvenirs with the fervor of a character in a 90s Rareware game. It was AWESOME.

Alas, my brother’s visit was too short all around. I wanted more time to hang out and chat with himm. I know he wants to move back out this way at some point—I am just hoping it’ll be soon, since we both suck at telephones and IM. I keep trying to convince him to get an LJ, but that’ll never happen.

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The biggest thing we did this week was take his girlfriend down to Moab, largely because it was an excuse to go to Moab. It’s always different down there—this time it was a bit cooler and rainier, like everything in the world right now, and the Colorado was flooded. Also, tragically, the bookstore that sells books you’d actually want to read went out of business, leaving the rest of its merchandise to be assimilated by the pretentious desert bookstore it had merged with last year.

ME: Hey, dude! You should totally get The Way of Kings! Look, it’s right here, and I believe it is exactly your type of thing.

MY BROTHER: Good god, I am not buying that monstrosity here! Do you want me to have to check a whole new piece of luggage?

(I wander over to a display where a tender picture book entitled Go The Fuck To Sleep sits cheerfully mocking anyone who thinks loving one’s kids means never being exasperated by them)

ME: Hey, I heard about this book on the radio! Is it any good?

BOOK STORE LADY: If you have a sense of humor.

ME: That was the conclusion of the radio people, too.

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ME: This condo is a bit overfurnished. How am I supposed to get anywhere with all these chairs and coffee tables everywhere? Should I just parkour my way to my teacup over there?

MY SISTER: YES, YOU SHOULD.

MY BROTHER: PARKOUR, MOTHERFUCKER!


Somehow this became the running (har) gag of the trip, since we all find parkour to be a punchline in and of itself. Need to get out of the back seat of the car? Parkour! Need to get your windstolen hat out of a canyon? Parkour on down! Condo pool locked? Parkour! Hear about another Batman ally? Parkour, motherfucker!

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I spent a lot of time editing. The OGYAFE is coming together, and I’m in that wonderful stage where it all looks GREAT. I’ve started to think I should’ve written it first, since Doctors! is not really marketable for a first novel, but hey, after I get the OGYAFE sold it might be easier to sell the crazy one about alien medical drama.

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Meanwhile, while we were all hiking around the desert checking out breathtaking natural rock formations, my seeds sprouted! The corn and squash and beans are looking good, and the nasturtiums always make me happy. I am especially amused that I found the spot where I dropped my packet of marigold seeds. I’ll have to buy some started tomatoes, and once that happens I am going to have an awesome garden this summer. Unless it snows.

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The last thing we did with brother and his girlfriend was go see the Green Lantern. And we were baffled. How do you take a story about superheroing and aliens, one where the hero can construct any goddamn awesome evil-battling thing he can think of, and make it completely boring? You would think it would be a visual extravaganza. My sister and I are starting to suspect that the writers had no idea they were writing an action movie. They seemed to think it was a pilot for a low-budget sitcom with a sci-fi premise.

Also, I have to admit, I am getting just a little sick of having completely useless women in these fucking superhero films. I am at the point where I’d rather have NO female lead than have a female lead whose only purpose is to be the love interest and offer vague advice about how Mr. Hero has to feel his feelings and commit to responsibility and other such psychobabbly bullshit. C’mon, you even decided to put Amanda Freaking Waller in the movie and there was still no sign of a formidable female. I am half-suspecting that a great sequel twist would be finding out that this "Amanda Waller" is in fact a pod person.*

At least the "green" part meant they scrapped the dreaded Teal And Orange Filter. Small favors there.

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Anyway. That’s the week in highlights. Anything interesting happen to you guys while I was off gallivanting?


*Obviously, that will be the B-plot, since the credits set up the sequel's A-plot already. Even though this movie stinks, I will still be courteous and not spoil it for those of you who are a) not aware of the Green Lantern canon already and b) absolute dumbfuck morons who can't see exactly who the sequel villain is going to be by about five minutes into the film (he has never been particularly subtly rendered). Although to be fair, if you're like me you were waiting for him to be the villain in this film, if it had ever gotten its shit together.

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

• Flash photography really does damage exhibits.
• I knew about the state dinosaur, but I had no idea Utah had an official state cookware. Upon learning this, however, I did correctly guess what it was: the Dutch oven.
• The story of Marco Polo bringing noodles to Europe from China is a myth.
• Every year in Teton National Park at least one family assumes that “bear spray” works like bug spray. So before going on a hike they line their kids up, and … well, I hear the park’s clinic is very good.
• Never try to do a road trip after missing a day of Zoloft.
• There are petroglyphs like EIGHT FEET off the road to Moab. Why have I never seen them before?
• Grendel was a velociraptor!
• Okay, maybe not.
• In the study of prehistoric animals and so-called “transitional fossils,”* the question of whether an animal was reptile or mammal is settled by checking the jaw and inner ear apparatus.
• Psittacosaurus was a great dinosaur—basically a badass parrot.
• Those Wheel of Morality bumps at the ends of kids’ TV shows—Knowing Is Half The Battle, And Now A Message From The POWER RANGERS!—have a distant ancestor in medieval theater, when people would perform stupid farces in churches and conclude with a sudden random promo for Christianity. “And so the shepherds found out their friend had stolen the sheep and pretended it was his son, and they all had a good laugh, in conclusion Christ Child.”
• Speaking of Power Rangers and tolerance, David Yost left the show one day when the homophobic taunts of the crew, who apparently never watched those bumps, got to be too much for him. AND UPON LEARNING THIS, ALL THE PIECES OF MY SHATTERED CHILDHOOD SUDDENLY FIT TOGETHER. All I had known of those dark times was that suddenly Billy was no longer on the show, and so I was no longer watching it.
• Ear drops are more trouble than they’re worth.
• Pets don’t always live their full life span.
• Neither do people.
• Even when you know it’s coming, death is a shock.
• Losing a twin is more traumatic than losing a non-twin sibling.
• Dad is a Led Zeppelin fan.
• Magnetic clasps for necklaces are expensive, but totally worth it.
• Ngila Dickson is my new hero: she designed the costumes for Lord of the Rings, and thus had to figure out what each culture would wear. Also, she had to have each costume made around forty times—and in the case of the hobbits, she had to weave the fabrics twice so they’d fit the same on both the actors and their smaller doubles.**
• YES, CORN IS GRASS.
• Quad-ruled notebooks are the best kind for clear thinking.
• The Hawaiian Islands were, in fact, plagued by wild cattle after Captain Cook introduced them as an ill-advised gift to King Kamehameha I.
• Major depressive disorder is insurable, but PCOS isn't.
• Glass stovetops can be hazardous additions to any kitchen.
• Mint is a thug. Never plant it in your container garden. And thanks to the Awesome Power Of The Internet, not to mention kitmf , I didn’t even have to learn this the hard way!
• The Northern and Southern Air Temples were run by monks, while the Eastern and Western Temples were run by nuns. Just as I suspected!

*This phrase always bugs me.  All fossils are transitional fossils, really.  But it does make sense for the transition of our nomenclature.

**She also gets bonus points for something I noticed a while back: she does the same thing to differentiate Rosie Cotton that they do in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to set Belle apart from the villagers. Notice how both Belle and Rosie are the only ones in their villages to wear blue.

All right! Got my pictures set up. I'm sure you're all dying to hear about the rest of my week, so let's start with the rest of the dinosaurs.

On Wednesday as we sat around trying to figure out what we could do before I went to work, Liz found a suggestion on the internet: the Museum of Ancient Life, a place I’ve always wanted to go to, but which just doesn’t register on my radar. So we got to be tourists together!


The lobby of the Museum of Look At These Fucking Dinosaurs Ancient Life.

The first thing was a travelin’ exhibit on light that would have been pretty cool to spend some time messing with. Unfortunately, it was overrun with kids—and while I’m glad kids are learning Science, it did make it hard to really get around.

After that was a long pointless black tunnel with blue Christmas lights on that wavelength that my glasses apparently refract so that they look 3-D. It was supposed to suggest The Beginning Of The Universe, but I admit I was a little worried that at the end of the tunnel John Cleese would request my liver.


There was a lot to see, but goddamn this is petrified lightning. (Okay, so it’s sand fused by a lightning strike. THE POINT STANDS.)


There were tons of fossil displays and plastic replicas of what those fossils looked like pre-fossil.

This may help explain why I am suspicious of seafood. In my experience, ocean life is something you find embedded in the middle of a rock, and it hasn’t technically been life for quite a while.


I want whoever made this exhibit to do my room.


I really love leaf impressions in rocks.


Boy, that ichthyosaurus sure makes an impression! WAHAHAHAHA I crack myself up.

But despite all this ancient life, we all know what the real theme of this museum is, right?

( LOOK AT THESE FUCKING DINOSAURS )

Well, I’ll be. Thanks to Liz, I am actually finding myself interested in Utah history as Pioneer Day approaches.

Of course, here I am thinking more of the kind of history that our ancestors did not record because, for one thing, they did not have opposable thumbs.

Yes. Tuesday was the Utah Museum of Natural History. Today was the follow-up, the Utah Museum of Look At These Fucking Dinosaurs. I had forgotten that we had this museum because I am a complete idiot and also because for some unfathomable reason I had never been there before.

I HAVE NOW. And I have pictures, but they will have to wait until perhaps this weekend, because tomorrow we are headed off the grid to Moab for a few days. I’m going to try for a hat trick while we’re down there—if it’s not hotter than an atom bomb, I will take her out to Klondike Bluffs and we can look around for the dinosaur footprint I crashed the front wheel of my bike into once. See y’all later!

Well! I’m back, after having watched my brother successfully earn his diploma as an electrical engineer. He is now ready to solve the energy crisis.

Or, at least, to explain his theory of physics in terms of Pokémon.*

Anyway, the point is, he has done a hell of a lot of work, and understands electricity—something that most people still consider as mysterious as magic. It’s impressive.

I also got to hang out with my buddy Josh, Emperor of Denver, who has been accepted to Vancouver’s film school and doesn’t even need to do the foundational year—not surprising when you hear him talk movies.

But damn, how can two days of travel leave you feeling like you’ve been eaten by a rancor? My brother and Mom are driving home tomorrow, so I’m hoping the snows hold off till then. But at least I’m back!


*“Sudowoodo? Good god, how did you fit that in there?”

Well, well. Looks like pretentious twit Terry Tempest Williams has written a lushly illustrated picture book.

The Illuminated Desert is a desert alphabet—an A-Z of Things You Find Around The Colorado Plateau, each Thing embellished with a few random sentence fragments that sound all shiny. I would have passed it by completely, except that the illustrations, by Chloe Hedden, are amazing. I could not put the book down for staring breathlessly at the illustrations. The book could've been much improved if they'd gotten rid of Terry altogether and just given all the credit to Chloe. The creativity the American Southwest inspires seems better served in visual arts than in writing.

Granted, that’s not stopping me, but I learned long ago to suppress the near-overwhelming urge to write self-indulgent instrospective bullshit in first-person present tense about the Deep Meaningful Meaning of this place.* My plan is to sit on the porch on the banks of the Colorado river, watching the rabbits frolic in the shadow of the rusty red mesas and totally ignore the bugs (blasphemy!) while I contemplate the culture of buglike aliens and just generally frantically worldbuild. I have Plans for this trip. There will be Hitchhiker’s Guides, cross-referencing cultures, historical background, conlanging, and even goddamn spreadsheets. Then there will be writing and typing up what I’ve written. Periodically in order to stretch I will go down next to the Colorado River and practice some taegeuk poomsae or the elusive koryo form.

I’ve never managed to put a finger on just why this place inspires so much creativity, but I’m going to use it for good, by god.


*“I drain the last of my lukewarm beer and give some thought to peeling off my hiking boots, but the grit in my socks reminds me of the places I’ve been, and I find I prefer to carry these places with me a while longer. I gaze out the window at the sunset over the mesas. A solitary fly throws itself against the window in a last desperate attempt to reach the outside world.** I know how it feels.”

**There’s a whole lot of contemplation of bugs in this sort of writing.

Will be sporadic or possibly even radio silent for the next few days on account of going to the Empire Of Denver with my brother to finish vacating his apartment and attending his friend’s wedding reception. We will visit cousins and my fellow Kenya-goer Jazmin, but we will not visit my buddy Josh because he’s still at the University of Oregon with its abominably late end to the term.

I ain’t reading everything you write till then, so if anything happens, like a zombie apocalypse or the Rapture, let me know. Unless you’ve been raptured. Or zombied. Or a raptured zombie. In that case I’m sure I’ll hear about it eventually.