HOLY MOTHER FUCK, people, they have me in Worthington Labs. I am staying at Worthington Labs. Savvy? The cab pulled up to the hotel and I turn to my friend Dave and I says, "that building is from the future," and he says "actually it's from the X-Men." And then I got a little bit too excited. I am about ten floors up and ten rooms over from where the Angel jumped out the window after he decided that he did want to be a mutant after all (after he had already decided he didn't want to be a mutant any more). Man that fucking movie made no sense. Dave said he knew a bunch of people who were extras in the protest crowd outside Worthington Labs for that scene. I said "at least they were protesting the right movie."

I was up out of bed at about 4:15 this morning after not so much sleeping as shivering all night. Five minutes out the door when I realized the one thing I hadn't ingeniously tucked into my single small backpack worth of luggage was my camera, so there will be no photos of Stanley walking in Stanley Park. Otherwise all's well. I was in the line at Tim Horton's for about twice as long as I was in the line at security. Comes the flight; I find my seat and the one next to me is empty, and I know that's too fucking good to be true so I start watching the cats coming in the door to try to pick out my seat-mate. And with metronomic regularity (like on a 90-second interval), "small, asian hottie" starts being the demographic of choice. And every one that comes in, I'm like, please let that be the one sitting in 30-B. Not just because of the hotness but because of the pure pragmatism of the thing: she needs a little less space, I need a little more space, we interlock, it's like Lego. But no suchers. Who gets 30-B? Motherfucker exactly my size, like down to the last brass tit. The one dude in all the world I could wrestle at a stalemate for as long as you let us wrestle because we are exactly the same height, build and weight. Oh and he prays during takeoff and landing. I snap the Macbook open on the tray table and watch both Hard Candy commentaries and then listen to SModcast, all by way of drowning out the world. By the time I'm off the flight I'm cursing like Aunt Ginny when she's been into the spring wine, and I don't even have an Aunt Ginny. So's the business.

There's mountains in these parts, my friends. Like actual large chunks of earth-tits sticking up in the air and shit. There's also an uncanny ability to have six different weather systems happening simultaneously. From the office window once I was reunited with my colleagues I could see bright sunshine, pouring rain, hail, and a bit of snow. (And a tornado and an earthquake.) What kind of backwards gin-soaked burg have I fallen into? Well, it's all right. There's screaming kids next door and I can't decide if I want to eat or go into a coma, but who cares, they've got me at Worthington Labs. Gosh knows I fell into this shit but it's like sugar candy when it works.

This post was published in Pacific time.