The Massholes Have Landed

LL and I are in Pennsylvania and happy to be out of the car. Very, very happy. We didn't hit any traffic and actually made very good time, but it's still a long drive. Our GPS unit, AKA the Lady in the Box, decided to throw a tantrum a few miles outside of Scranton but hey, who hasn't thrown a tantrum or two around there?

Our rental car for the trip is a 2009 Chrysler Sebring. It would make an excellent golf cart. Still, it got good mileage and we've arrived in one piece. That's all that matters.

Our hotel room is quite adequate for our purposes for the evening... sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a tremendously fun day.

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Fossil Fuel and Fossilized Thinking

Every time the price of gasoline goes up there's renewed talk about drilling for oil in parts of the United States that had previously been off-limits for it. Whether it's in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico, the idea is a seemingly simple one. We'll drill some new wells, pull the petroleum out of the ground, and before you know it we'll be paying 99¢ per gallon at the pump. Happy days are here again.

The latest incarnation of this notion comes from John McCain and potential vice presidential nominee Governor Charlie Crist of Florida. Crist had previously opposed drilling in the Gulf of Mexico but now that he stands a chance of advancing politically as a running mate to McCain he's changed his tune. Both Democrats and Republicans in Florida's legislature oppose the idea, though, and so it's unlikely to happen.

For some reason people feel that if you go out, drill these holes, that the price of gas is going to go down... There are oil spills and there are a hell of a lot of them... You get a spill and you're shutting that beach down for 10 or 15 years.

— Dennis Jones (R-Pinellas County)

If I had to vote on it right now, I would not vote for drilling offshore.

— Ron Reagan (R-Bradenton)

A very good question to ask at this juncture would be, "Why are there still politicians running for national office who are thinking about oil as a solution?" This is fossilized thinking. The solution to the problem can't include depending on continuing the same problem into the future. What we need is a New Deal for Energy.

If drilling off of Florida and the like were permitted today, it would be at least five years before production began and then the impact of that production would be to drop the price of gasoline about 3¢ to 5¢ per gallon. Gasoline is already $4.10 per gallon on average across the country. By the time production started, we could reasonable expect that the price would average, conservatively, $5.50 per gallon. At best, we're talking about savings of perhaps 10%, and that's being rather optimistic. Even if the risk of doing harm to already stressed ecosystems were as ideally small as some believe, in terms of risk vs. benefit that's hardly worthwhile. Moreover, if the US increased production, that still leaves us open to the threat of other countries cutting production to keep the price of oil high. A few new oil wells are not going to change the bigger picture in terms of where world reserves actually lie, and even if we conserve energy not only will our demand likely continue to increase — albeit at a slower rate — but demand in India and China will also grow. This doesn't look much like a solution to me.

We really need to start thinking about some fundamental changes, and a good place to start would be to make automobiles less necessary. We need to have a massive project in public mass transit. I don't mean only within the limits of large metropolitan areas, I mean that the US needs to build a mass transit system that can get people anywhere in the country that they want and need to travel. Cars should be relegated to a last resort status. It should be more expensive to travel by car than by mass transit, even if one were going all the way from New York to Los Angeles.

This hypothetical national transit system needs to be designed for flexible energy sources, too. It should be capable of being powered by multiple means — solar, wind, gassified coal and biomass. In fact, it shouldn't matter what the fuel is. It should be able to run on anything, at least in the great majority of applications. If we're low on one energy source, or if we find a new one, it should be a matter of simply plugging that new source into the grid.

I don't think this is a solution that could feasibly be left to the alleged free market, either. It's been more than 30 years since the United States experienced its first massive fuel shortages and we still travel primarily by automobile. If the free market were ever going to fix this situation, we'd have real solutions by now. Corporations see profits by minimizing expenditures and maximizing returns; they'll take the most immediately cost-effective, bottom-line-boosting route every time. That's not what's needed here.

What we need, I think, is a solution that looks a lot like the public works projects of the Great Depression Era, or like the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950's. Both of these revolutionized America's infrastructure, and we need another such revolution right now. This is too big a project for a patchwork of corporate interests to tackle. A centralized solution is needed. Personally, I don't care if such a solution looks like something that one might see produced by Socialism. Who cares? The only entity that can potentially pull together and coordinate the enormous resources necessary is the federal government. They'll screw some things up, no doubt, but right now the closest thing we've got is AmTrack, really. That might be part of the planning, but it's certainly not the solution itself. We need much, much more to happen and the time for waiting for it passed us by in the 1970's. We don't even have a viable alternative energy system after all this time. A top-down approach is called for.

And while we're talking about alternative energy sources, why not horses? Yes, it sounds antiquated, but why not put some horses and buggies on the roads for people traveling relatively short distances in cities and towns? Oats are a lot cheaper than oil. We can even recycle horse manure into fuel for the rest of the national transit grid if we're smart about it.

I'm not an urban planner or engineer, but I don't think one has to be one to realize that big changes are warranted here. We should be looking at the end of the automobile era at this point. We should be looking at solutions, not at putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. America has done it in the past and we can do it again if the national will is there and we have people in national office capable of thinking of long term, big picture changes that won't leave us right back where we started by the time one or two more presidential administrations have come and gone. Fossilized thinking that relies on fossil fuels isn't going to cut it anymore. Poking a few more holes in the ground and hoping that rotten Carboniferous Period plant juice will come gushing to the surface is something that might mollify those whose own lifetimes probably won't extend a decade or two but it isn't going to change anything in the ways they need to change.

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Why Don't All Taxis Have GPS Units?

I was on my way home from the lab just now and stopped off at the Mobil station at Main and Mill to pick up a pack of smokes. As I left the store, a Yellow Cab driver approached me and asked me how to get to Webster. He'd never been there before and had to pick up a fare there. I've never been there either as far as I know, so I first told the cabbie that I didn't know. I wasn't really thinking; it has been a long day.

So the cabbie went back to his cab and started fumbling with a map. I got back to my car and remembered that I have a GPS unit. I took the "lady in the box" out of the glove compartment, switched her on and approached the cab.

I knocked on the window and asked the cabbie to give me the address he was trying to get to, then punched it into the unit and there they were, turn by turn directions right to the door where his far was waiting in Webster. The driver, an African fellow, thanked me profusely and waited for me to pull out of the lot ahead of him.

Now, this is reason to ponder. Why aren't taxis equipped with GPS units? There are always places that some driver is bound not to know how to get to, and a GPS unit is a lot better for such things than a paper map. As someone who absolutely lacks a sense of direction and relies on both a car GPS and a hand held unit to get me where I'm going on-road and off, I can attest to how indispensable these things really are. Moreover, I can't figure out how cabbies can earn a living these days with the price of gas through the roof. I'd imagine the last thing a driver wants to do is waste gas; every excess gallon burned is money out of his pocket and I'd be willing to bet there's not a lot in there to begin with these days.

Why, then, don't the owners of taxi fleets provide drivers with GPS units that they could sign out if they wanted them? It would probably cut a few minutes out of the time it took a driver to pick up a fare and get them where they were going, it would likely save gas, and it would help new drivers learn their way around. There are some pretty good deals on the things these days and I'm sure someone buying multiple units could work out a deal on price with a supplier.

Paper maps waste time and money. Get with the digital age, fleet owners!

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The Crosswalks of Worcester: Police Crackdown and Pedestrians on Crack

This morning's Telegram and Gazette brings news of a police effort to make certain pedestrian crosswalks in Worcester safer:

Police play pedestrians to ensure walker safety

With police seeing a steady increase in pedestrian accidents, the Traffic Division is rolling out “Operation Safe Crossing,” a crackdown on motorists that will have police officers dressed as pedestrians using crosswalks in different areas of the city.

“The most important part of it is the focus of high pedestrian traffic areas,” said Lt. Timothy P. Walsh of the Traffic Division. “We will focus on areas where children and elderly cross because they are the more vulnerable members of the community..."

Pedestrian accidents overall have increased according to Police Department statistics. There were 177 in 2003 and 176 in 2004. After 2004, the numbers hit 200 in 2005 and 223 in 2006. There were 238 last year and, as of last week, there have been 40 so far this year...

While I think this is an admirable effort, I hope that the police will also enforce the other side of the coin on this. Far more often than I see drivers failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, I see pedestrians crossing streets in a manner that makes me think that they must be a bit out of touch with physical reality.

My driving often takes me down Main Street, and let me tell you, it's scary. It's not the other drivers I fear. I've found that drivers here, for the most part, are courteous — far moreso than had been my experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Tampa or Tallahassee. I see motorists stopping to let old people, young people, and everyone in between cross the street, even when they're not in a crosswalk. This is so much the case that I know that I will usually have to stop two to three times in just the distance between the intersections of Main and Mill and Main and Maywood. It's a sure bet that there will be people crossing outside of the crosswalk around Santiago's Market, for example. That's just part of driving here. No big deal.

Still, it gets quite scary at times, worse and worse as I travel north from home toward downtown. LL likens it to driving in Beirut; it's an obstacle course. One has to stay sharp to avoid any number of pedestrians who simply ignore traffic and stroll into crosswalks to cross against the lights. In fact, the heck with crosswalks. Pedestrians routinely appear from between parked cars mid-block and walk into the roadway as if there were no traffic at all. During the winter months this would often be someone dressed in black at night while I was trying to pick LL up from the train station. One needs very good brakes to avoid accidentally killing someone at night on Main Street between Maywood and Franklin. The behavior of some of these pedestrians is so irrational that I suspect a good number of them may have altered brain chemistry. Whether this has occurred due to disease or willful self-manipulation I cannot say, I only know that sane people don't fling themselves in front of moving vehicles like that. I wonder how many of the incidents cited in the T&G story have nothing to do with bad drivers and everything to do with addled ambulaters.

Drivers who drive irresponsibly as a matter of habit eventually get their licenses suspended. What's to be done with reckless pedestrians? Can they lose their walking privileges? At the very least, I believe the city should mandate that they wear a warning device of some sort visible from a distance. Perhaps they could have a flashing red strobe strapped to their heads. That way, responsible drivers would be alerted to their presence even before a bad walker once again hurled his body into traffic. We should be able to see them before they leave the curb and so have the opportunity to begin braking before the wacky walker has the chance to turn himself into an unwanted hood ornament.

Massachusetts state law is such that drivers must yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk no matter what. That's a good thing, but such a law relies on the responsible action of the pedestrian every bit as much as it does on that of the driver. I can't yield to something that I don't have a chance to see in the first place!

P.S. — A question that begs asking of the T&G editors: What exactly does it mean that police officers will be "dressed as pedestrians?" Is there some particular way that pedestrians dress? The only difference I've noticed between pedestrians and non-pedestrians in terms of their outfits is that drivers are usually "wearing" a motor vehicle and pedestrians are not. I think the article means to say that plainclothes officers will be stationed at the crosswalks. The only garb required to look like a pedestrian is some sort of footwear, I suppose.

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The Day Ends Not So Gloriously

Today was a really nice day right up until the end. Lab even got done early. I walked back to my car at 8:00 PM sharp, opened the driver's side door and that's when I noticed the glass on the seat. The passenger-side window had been smashed and my $120 MP3 player stolen. Nothing else was taken (the thieves missed a much more valuable GPS unit). Typical smash-and-grab. My insurance covers the glass with no deductible and our renter's insurance will even pay for the lost MP3 player.

I had to file a police report, and I had to wait for an hour for the police to show up. So much for getting home early; lab usually ends at about 9:00, and that's when the cop arrived. He took the same information I had given when I called in the first place and essentially told me, yeah, my window is broken and the MP3 player is gone. I felt much better after he'd cleared that up for me.

I usually take my MP3 player with me when I park the car, but I was in a hurry tonight because I was running a little late. I forgot it. I'm mildly annoyed by the whole thing, moreso by the fact that I would much rather have been at home watching a horror flick than standing there for an hour. On the plus side, it's a warm night and it isn't raining. The glass repair people are going to come to my house tomorrow morning and everything will be taken care of in that regard.

While I was waiting, there were a bunch of male students hanging out on their porch having a barbecue and drinking beer. They had twangy country music blasting. What would an injury be if there were nobody around to add a little insult?

Oh well. It's not a big deal, but I suppose today was much to good of a day to get away with. There's nothing for it but to go ahead and watch Neon Maniacs as I'd been planning on doing all day. Life in the big city and all that.

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Boston Skeptics in the Pub

I have just now walked into my apartment after the drive home from Cambridge. The first lesson I learned, even before arriving at the get together is this: don't drive to Cambridge. It is a crazy place in which to drive and an even crazier one in which to park.

The meeting itself was quite well attended and Skepchick Rebecca was an affable, even ebullient, hostess. For those who haven't met her in person, she actually does look quite like her cartoon avatar. Thanks to her for organizing the meeting as well as for giving me the occasion to use the word "ebullient" today.

Mike the Mad Biologist spoke about communicating about evolution to those who can't or won't wrap their heads around the concept, citing examples from his own study of bacterial genomics and the useful applications that arise therefrom in treating and preventing disease. Even most Creationists should be able to understand, he reasons, the connection between evolutionary theory and disease and so come around to understanding why disregarding good biology in favor of poor theology is an undesirable goal. The tactics he suggests using sounded very much to me like what I do anyhow — at least most of the time — so I don't plan on changing much based on his talk. I did get to lob a question his way about how to talk to people to whom the language of heredity might as well be Aramaic. His suggestion about how to talk to such people is, again, something I've tried. Unfortunately, I generally find that people who haven't the first clue about genes and the mechanisms by which they change and the ramifications of all this that we know about are frequently in such condition because they don't care enough to learn about it in the first place. They just want to put forth an opinion, which wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many of them and they didn't bother electing equally ignorant representation at various levels of government. Nonetheless, he gave a well-reasoned answer that was the best he could muster. Perhaps he'll someday find himself in Baker County, Florida or thereabouts and get a better feel for the sorts of people whose attitudes toward these things are rather hard for me to describe in a 30-second question.

I met a few other people as well while enjoying a bit of Erdlinger Hefe-Weisen and shepherd's pie. I'm not sure if any of them have blogs, though I believe they know where to find me now and let me know if they do. There was a Josh, a Brian, an Elvin (who is working on computer modeling of human vision; neat stuff) and a British fellow whose name I didn't catch but with whom I happily conversed about probability and John Allen Paulos' Irreligion and other fun and skeptical, rationalist things. I also met a fellow whose name was Kerry or something close; my hearing problems make it hard for me to pick out words sometimes and one can only ask another to repeat his name so many times before it becomes a little embarassing and, I'm sure, annoying. However, this fellow also spoke of an interest in mushrooms, particularly chanterelles. It may have been CarrieP, author of Garlic is Love.

There is, I'm told, another meeting in the works for next month and I hope to attend once again. The Asgard is a fine place and has rather good shepherd's pie. I parked in the wrong garage tonight, though, being unfamiliar with the area. I pulled into the Lansdowne Street garage which, I noticed after I parked, is only intended for tenants and visitors of University Park. There is supposedly a $30 fine for parking there without getting one's ticket validated by University Park. Luckily for me there was no attendant on duty and the machine that takes payments didn't know I had no such validation, so I got away with shelling out only $7 for my spot. Next time, though, I still think I'd be better off taking the train. As Rebecca kindly pointed out, I could have drunk quite a bit more if it weren't for having to schlep the 60+ miles back to Worcester under my own power.

And now, sleep. I have to teach tomorrow.

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Back from the Dead

I haven't updated in five days due to having too much else to do. The biggest single item was getting out a first draft of a review of Cordyceps (now Elaphocordyceps, Metacordyceps, Cordycipitaceae and Ophiocordycipitaceae) research which, I'm happy to say, I finished yesterday afternoon. I probably could have written something in here as well but the temptation to procrastinate was very strong and it was time I couldn't afford to put to other purposes. I had to make a deal with myself not to use my computer for anything but the task at hand until it was finished. Besides, I didn't feel much like writing anything else. I had to start the draft at least four times before the material finally came together enough in my head to roll through what has turned out to be a review just over eleven pages long.

I also received the lien release needed to get the duplicate of the title for my car. It arrived late Friday and is now on its way to Florida. The odds are extremely high that my registration will expire before I can switch it over, so there will probably be a few days where I won't be able to drive it. Still, I'm hoping that this will be my last interaction with a Floridian bureaucracy.

LL and I did manage to get out for a bit on Friday night. We saw Shutter and had dinner at a little place called Nick's on Millbury Street. I'll talk about those in their own entries.

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How Appropriate: It's Pi Day and I've Been Going in Circles

Today, I was finally going to get done with moving to Worcester. I know, I know, I should have done this awhile back but I so hate dealing with bureaucracy and so like doing just about anything that isn't dealing with bureaucracy that today, finally, I was going to transfer the registration on my car to this state. No big deal, right?

Wrong. Because, you see, bureaucracy is involved and, in particular, ass-covering bureaucracy.

I found out today that somehow, between the time I paid my car loan off about four years ago and this morning that the state of Florida's DMV screwed up something with their records. They apparently lost some data and never fixed the problem or fixed it wrong. I was, of course, caught in this lovely techno-bureaucratic cock-up. I found out today that, according to the state of Florida, the large financial corporation that issued my car loan had never told Florida that my loan had been paid off and the title transferred to me. At least that's what shows in Florida's records.

Was I a little surprised by this? You bet! How did I find out it was Florida's screw-up? When I called the large financial corporation and they pulled up my record, the rep on the line with me immediately said in a low-pitched voice, "Oh. You're from Florida. We've been getting numerous calls from Florida. I bet you need a lien release, right?"

Well, yes, that's exactly it. Apparently I'm not the only one this has happened to. The rep knew what I needed before I asked based on where I had been living when I paid off my loan. Not good.

So, because of Florida's screw-up, my former lien holder has to send me the lien release. I then have to send that to Florida so that they can update their records. Then, and only then, I can transfer my car registration to Massachusetts. This is despite the fact that the Florida DMV sent me a title in 2004 that said that the car was mine-all-mine because I had paid off my loan.

There really is something in the water down there.

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Getting the Hang of This Snow Thing in Worcester

The weather is calling for accumulations of 14 inches or more between tonight and tomorrow night. So much for our week-long stretch of beautiful weather.

In preparation for the storm, we've done our grocery shopping and laundry. Worcester is pretty good about keeping the streets passable, but there's a good chance that the car will be buried and the hill iced over, so driving may be more difficult and dangerous than it's worth for the next day or two. Why bother with the car? I have perfectly good legs and a bus route a couple of blocks away, too. As long as I've nothing heavy to carry, there's no good reason for me to drive.

Besides which, Monday is the first day of classes at my university. Parking is likely to be more difficult than usual, especially if the side streets I usually park on have snow piled high along the curbs. Rather than even risk the whole thing becoming a frustrating experience and deal with the potential game of bumper cars, I'll eschew driving for the day. Walking a mile in new snow gives one the opportunity to appreciate a bit of transient beauty; driving a mile in new snow gives one the opportunity for nothing better than a fender-bender on Main Street.

If you're a Worcester driver, please keep this important information in mind while thinking about whether or not to drive tomorrow morning! The blood pressure you save might be your own.

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Providence Tomorrow; Whatever Happened to the Worcester & Providence?

Our original plan was to spend tomorrow at home and head over to do the family thing in Providence on Tuesday, but we've been talked into going over a day early. The plan now is to get the oil changed in the car in the morning and then drive over. We'd been hoping not to drive The Beast, but there isn't a train we can take directly from Worcester to Providence; we'd have to go to Boston first. The train ride would cost $50 and take 2.5 hours each way, not counting time spent waiting between trains. That's crazy; Providence is only 45 miles away! Taking a bus doesn't leave us in much better shape. We're driving.

Considering that there is a Worcester and Providence Railroad that still exists, I'm a bit amazed that it can be so difficult to catch a passenger train to Providence. It shouldn't take any longer, nor be anymore expensive, to get to Providence than it is to get to Boston. But there you have it; we're driving.

Our first stop will be Lovecraft's grave, then over to the relatives' house. We should be back, and I should be back online, sometime on Wednesday.

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Dear Worcester Drivers

Fellow Worcester Drivers,

I know I'm fairly new in town and have lived in places where there was no snow for the past 16 years, but there's something I still remember that I think you need to keep in mind, too.

You cannot drive a Mini-Cooper in 4" of snow.

This applies equally well to a Nissan SX or a Ford Fiesta. While small cars are great for gas mileage, they pretty much lose that benefit when you spend 20 minutes spinning your tires in the snow because you haven't got enough weight to get any traction. Moreover, you cause everybody else to unnecessarily burn gas and patience when two of you get stuck in the same intersection, resulting in long lines of immobilized traffic.

OK, OK, I admit that I'm just in a pissy mood because it just took me nearly two hours to drive the mile from campus to my home, a trip that normally takes no more than 15 minutes at the peak of rush hour. I guess sitting there and wondering if I'd be able to get out of the car before it became completely buried frayed my nerves a bit, and having a couple of little cars fishtail perilously close to me didn't help much either. I know your commute sucked, too, and I'm sure you were already aware that lots of people were pissed off about the whole thing.

But please, do us all a favor... when the weatherman says that we might get more than an inch of snow, please leave the Miata at home and call a professional. If he tells you that he can't help you out, odds are you might as well just stay home.

I still love you for sometimes letting me make a left turn before you go straight through an intersection. I still want to be friends. Just try to do better, OK?

As for me, my own over-sized monster of a vehicle handled the snow like a trooper. I kept it in low gear the whole way, since I never did more than 5 mph anyhow. I couldn't get up the hill that leads to my street, so I managed to park my car at the bottom and walked the rest of the way. I don't expect to drive tomorrow morning, and most of the snow will likely melt by afternoon.

When I said I wanted to play in the snow earlier, this is not what I had in mind!

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Thanksgiving 2007

LL and I spent Thanksgiving with my family. We started out with Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York and then moved on to another Thanksgiving in central Pennsylvania at the Nittany Mountain KOA camp, which is owned by my sister-in-law and her partner. Yes, two Thanksgiving dinners. I don't remember the last time I ate so much. My family is rather non-traditional; aside from my sister and brother-in-law, nobody is married to one another, so we're all partners, but still family. I'm not sure what that means, if anything, but I think we've all sort of come to the same conclusions about the institution of marriage in general. It's an unusually diverse group of people, too, in terms of ethnicity and education and everything else. We're certainly not the typical 2.2-kids middle class model. We can certainly eat, though.

LL and I stayed in the cabin shown above. One of the first people we met at the camp was a nearby camper who goes by the name of Snooky. Snooky is obsessed with blowing leaves. He spends whole days, from sunrise to sunset, with his leaf blower. Things could be worse, I suppose... he could be obsessed with an axe. To say the guy is eccentric is probably an understatement. Meeting him made me wonder if Stephen King has ever written a story about a leaf blowing maniac.

Of course, there were other things to do beside blowing leaves. My niece, for instance, prefers playing miniature golf to just about anything else. She has her own rules for the game, the first of which is "I win!" When she got tired, she had the good fortune of free and unlimited access to the camp store, so she could always "sugar up" on candy and hot cocoa when she started getting tired. I've sat through hurricanes that packed less energy than that kid. For her, the long weekend consisted of miniature golf, Spongebob and sugar. Oh, and telling all the adults how to play whatever game she made up at the moment. It's too bad none of us had nearly the same energy she does.

There's a petting zoo at the camp. LL made friends with a couple of goats. My niece, for whatever reasons, wasn't generally too interested in the animals. Not all of the animals present were from the petting zoo; my brother-in-law's mother (my aunt-in-law? I still don't know the proper kinship term) brought along her pug, Zeus. Also present was a ridiculously friendly three-legged cat; he lost the fourth leg in a jaw trap some years ago and makes do with the remaining limbs as best he can. There was also a very hyperactive Maltese named CD and a few other critters lurking about.

What family gathering would be complete without at least one faux pas? Ours took the form of a social misstep by my sister-in-law's partner's daughter's boyfriend (I dare anyone to give me the kinship term for that relationship!) delivering a line about how mean Arabs are while LL was sitting at the table. This was made a bit funnier by the fact that the guy is half Italian and half Jamaican himself and was meeting the family for the first time. It was all taken in stride with good humor and a quick comeback from LL resulting in a blush and an embarrassed "Oh, are you Arab?" from Alfredo, the boyfriend in question. I don't think anyone will be letting him live that one down anytime soon.

We stayed at the camp and ate ridiculously well through Saturday night, then left early on Sunday morning to begin the trip home. I decided to take a detour through Binghamton on the way to check out a few places that were part of my life about 20 years ago when I lived up there. The first stop was at 160 Conklin Avenue, a house that I lived in during my first stint at university. I lived there with five other students, including one girlfriend, in a sort of commune that resulted in the place being called Helter Shelter. There were a lot of drugs and craziness. The place is essentially the spot where my life absolutely went to pieces and I felt a need to revisit the site of the most traumatic time in my existence. It hasn't changed at all. In fact, it looks as if it hasn't seen so much as a coat of paint since I left in 1988. To me, it seems a dark, brooding, decaying place, perhaps a bit Lovecraftian in its presence. It's like a combination of fossil and historic landmark in my life. Standing there at the corner of Conklin and John was surreal; I felt as if I were dreaming, especially because LL was there with me. My room in the house was the one with the windows just above the door in this photo. The door itself was the spot where, in 1987, a guy named Jimmy Puccio drank a votive candle full of hot wax thinking it was a shot of tequila and then passed out. He's probably long forgotten about the incident, wherever he is now. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would certainly be haunted by the spirits of many acid trips, not to mention some devastating heartbreaks. I wouldn't want to be the poor slobs living in it now in that case. In my mind, at least, this is a place with much mojo.

After my pilgrimage to Helter Shelter, I headed to the SUNY Binghamton campus. Everything was closed and parking was no problem. We visited College-in-the-Woods, dorms I'd been tossed out of years ago after my roommate and I accidentally set a fire in Oneida Hall that got the place evacuated at 4 AM in the middle of a winter night. You see, we wanted to find out whether Bacardi 151 was really flammable, so we filled the cap of a peanut butter jar with the stuff and lit it. It ignited, of course... and then my roommate jerked his hand away and knocked over the entire bottle onto my desk. That set off the alarms and destroyed a couple of my textbooks and all of my notebooks, too. The next day, we were told that we could no longer live on campus. We wound up finding a place in Johnson City, right on Main Street. That's what's shown in the image to the right; our apartment was the top floor of the building to the right of the one with the "1892" decoration on the top. I lived there for about a year with my roommate, Duncan, as well as the son of the Fijian ambassador to the United States. After that year, I took some time off from school. By the time I got back, Duncan had graduated and I wound up living at Helter Shelter. The store with the blue awning, now a clothing store, used to be a sub shop called The Pig Out. It had the best spiedies in all of Broome County, and I'd been hoping to take LL there, but it's gone. Actually, most of the storefronts on Main Street are empty these days. Downtown Johnson City is a very sad, desolate place. Even Fat Cat Books, an institution for Triple Cities comic book and RPG fans, moved out of downtown. The building it once occupied, just across the street from my old apartment, now sits empty.

We spent some time poking around the area and then got back on the road home. Along the way, we got hungry and stopped for lunch in Cobleskill. Not wanting to hit the usual fast food places, LL chose our lunch spot, a diner on route 9 attached to the Colonial Motel — the Diner Motel. Not the Motel Diner, mind you, but the Diner Motel. Seeing that they'd gotten the name wrong on the sign, we probably should have known better than to eat there... but we went ahead and did it anyhow. I ordered grilled chicken on a pita, expecting something like a gyro. What I got was a piece of grilled chicken on a pita and nothing else. This was easily the most literal lunch I've ever eaten. It was exactly one piece of chicken breast on half of a pita with no lettuce, no tomato, no onions, no nothing. LL ordered a proper gyro, but that was bland and useless, too. After lunch, we agreed that the best thing about the food we'd just had was that it probably wouldn't make us sick.

Because our own GPS unit is in the shop for repairs, we were traveling with a loaner. Quick qord of advice here; avoid the Mio GPS like the plague. We told the thing to avoid toll roads and, as if to punish us, it took us on the most backwards, time-wasting route home possible. At one point we even wound up on a dirt road (Tory Hill Road) somewhere near Central Brunswick, NY. We were trying to avoid taking the Mass Pike, but we finally gave in and took it and paid for that mistake by getting stuck in a traffic jam that easily added close to hours to our trip. We finally got off 90 and picked up 20... but that was backed up, too. The final insult came when we got off 20 and onto Stafford Road, just a couple of miles from home. I was pulled over by a cop because I had a license plate frame. No kidding; license plate frames are technically illegal in Massachusetts, and this particular cop decided to stop me because of it. Luckily, he gave me a warning instead of a ticket. By that time, though, we'd been on the road for more than twelve hours. Ugh. We left New Columbia, PA at 6:00 AM. By the time we got back to Worcester, it was 8:30 PM. It was an awful trip. Next year, we'll do things differently. I don't know how, but I'm not doing that haul on a holiday weekend ever again.

The weekend was great, the road trip sucked, and I'm now functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, having awakened at 1:30 this morning for no good reason I can fathom. I have to teach lab until 9:00 tonight, too. It's going to be a looooooooooooong day.

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Packing Progress

More progress has been made, and so there are more boxes. My car is in the shop; I won't even know the estimate until Monday, but I expect it will need significant work to be roadtrip-ready.

7 days to go.

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Packing Progress

The dining room is packed, including all the murtis I own. I've disassembled the hutch, but I need to figure out the best way to pack the glass shelves. Tomorrow, I'll get all the paintings and photo prints packed away. I also need to take the car in for work. It's going to need a couple of new tires, new brakes and a tune-up. It means I probably won't have a car for a couple of days, so maybe I'd best wait until Friday to do that because I need it for Thursday night.

I'm tired out from all the packing. I think a shower and a nap are in order.

Tycho is not happy about this. He doesn't like change much. He climbed out of his cage and watched me packing. He looks very confused and at one point decided that he wasn't going to let me at my tools anymore. He sat on top of them and turned his beard black, a sure sign of dissatisfaction. He keeps wandering around the room as if he's looking for something now that I've stopped working. Somewhere in that tiny lizard brain, he knows something is going on and he doesn't approve of it at all.

On the other hand, Tycho loves to ride in the car. He likes to climb up on the dashboard and bask in the sun while we're driving. He'll like the long road trip; he just doesn't like his territory changing.

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