2003-04-16 - 1:15 p.m.
Watched Buffy last night. Can anyone tell me why it is that evil, woman-hating, vaguely inbred Southern good-ol'-boy fallen-preacher serial-killer-type characters on teevee are always named "Caleb"? Just wondering.
Nice to see that Joss is giving the Firefly cast more work, though.
***
So I'm back from Portland. Did the war end while I was gone?
Some great things about train travel:
* The scenery. Seeing the sun rise over Mt. Shasta and bathe the snow-covered peak in liquid gold was worth the ticket price all by itself.
* Meeting cool people. Like a group of blind folks who are on their way to some conference in Sacramento and spend the trip boozing it up, laughing, and just generally having a grand old time. Or a middle-aged couple from Santee who appear at first glance to be just two more button-down East County ueber-Republicans, but turn out to be unabashedly liberal Democrats who can hold their own during lengthy conversations about books, movies, music, restaurants, and native-plant landscaping.
* Not having to drive. Meaning that you can sleep all you want, read all you want, and drink all you want.
* Getting to Portland and heading straight to Powell's Books from the train station.
* On the way home, sitting at 5 a.m. in the main hall at Los Angeles Union Station (and who says L.A. has no great architecture, anyway?) waiting for your connecting train to San Diego, with an old friend from high school who you still see fairly often but rarely spend a lot of time with, having one of those aimless conversations about the Meaning of Life you used to have while Eurailing around Germany and the Netherlands 15 years ago.
Some not-so-cool things about train travel:
* Delays.
* More delays.
* Still more delays. Some are acts of God, like rockslides blocking the tracks, while others are purely bureaucratic; i.e., the train crew has reached the limit of its Amtrak-mandated maximum 12-hour shift and so the train sits just shy of the next station for 45 minutes until the new crew finishes its Krispy Kremes and shows up to take over. Eventually you start to feel like a character in an Ayn Rand novel, which is never a good thing (unless you're the hero, in which case you get to violently fuck every hot chyk in the book and call it "the mutual recognition of true minds," or something).
* The seats. Fine for sitting in, but unfit for sleeping in anything but restless one-hour chunks. Thank God for Tylenol PM.
* Being awake in the middle of the night when you haven't been laid in way too long and two of the blind folks start loudly macking on each other in the row behind you.
* Meeting not-so-cool people. Like some situationally-unaware Bay Area Boomer who spends the whole trip either watching True Lies on her portable DVD player with the volume cranked up to 11, or crabbing about how she needs a smoke. Or some new-age crackpot "therapeutic touch" practitioner who refuses to shut up about whatever messages she's been receiving from whatever angel-, Grey alien-, and Native American trickster spirit-ridden parallel universe she's currently in touch with.
* Hoping the buddy you're traveling with--a card-carrying member of the Skeptics Society--doesn't either punch DVD Lady, start arguing with Therapeutic Touch Lady and cause a huge scene, or leave sticky bits of brain matter all over the train car when his head explodes.
* Never mind about that last one. That was actually kind of fun to watch.
***
Looks like the mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking has been caught. That means that at last I can write the finale for The Night Leon Klinghoffer Kissed Me and start getting that baby ready for Broadway. Here's hoping that Nathan Lane has forgotten that little incident at Spago and has told his agent to take my calls again.
***
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