like a phonecall from a friend; a breathless catchup

Oh how time flies and so do I!

We are at the end of our first do-nothing day in over a month. We travelled from New Zealand to Los Angeles, then Kansas, then San Francisco, and now I am resting up and having the time of my life here in Tukwila Washington, at the Days Inn by the Shell Station, the motel with the motto: “We tried to get a sign as tall as that Starbucks on the corner, but they must know someone special cos when we put our sign up the city made us take it down.”

We learned this from the airport shuttle driver, a nice motherly woman who told us she’s been mad at Starbucks for two years because they got her hooked on the Mint Mocha Midnight Madness frappuccino, then stopped carrying it. She also v. sweetly told us that “if we looked to our right, we would see the Tukwila mall, the largest mall in the entire Washington state.” I couldn’t believe this, since the last time I lived in Washington the Auburn Super Mall was the largest, it said as much in its name, and I told our driver this. Turns out she lives in Auburn and was as suprised as me, but they did construction on the super mall which in her opinion ruined it since its now just a food court and a Burlington’s, so Tukwila took a shot at the crown and added a second floor and multiplex.

My god, I’ve experienced a lot this month–my grandma’s funeral, and coming back to the states, and the decentralized web camp, and exploring hacker spaces and seeing friends in Oakland–and I choose to write about a shuttle bus conversation. But the most recent memories are the most vivid, and I wanna tell y’all about the last nice vivid thing and this Tukwila day is that.

Angelica and I had a nice nothing day today. We ate waffles from a golden malt machine, then bussed up to the Uwajimaya in Seattle, and played boardgames in Ballard and spent a too-fast hour at the amazing Push/Pull comics (also in Ballard) before eating vegan tacos at El Burracho and reading the new Liz Suburbia comic on the bus ride back (short review: SO GOOD READ IT ALL NOW!) This comes after workshops on crushes and cyborg yoga we ran in a mushroom farm south of San Francisco, and poetry readings held in a storage closet that was retrofitted to be an art installation about exctinct birds, and sleeping between church pews in the Internet Archive, the holy server holding half the internet buzzing above us and a hundred ceramic statues of former archive employees arranged around us. All of these memories point to good stories I also wanna tell you about, but I only got so much time (and 7% battery on this computer), and the main thing I wanted to write down now was that at the Jackson gas shop at the corner by our hotel the cashier commandeered the security cam TV’s to display 80’s hair metal instead, so when I walked in to grab an energy drink this morning, the Final Countdown was blaring, with the tour footage playing, from a ceiling mounted tv pointed for only the cashier to see. I found it so charming, and I find this world so charming, and I def. feel like I need to write to you dear diary a lot more than I do.