Unknown: that dread which will kill me, but also keep me going, alive.

The most important aspect of our trip was that….I left the apartment, and I have Raccoon to thank for that. I said to Raccoon that I would come to comi-con this year (not quite understand that comi in comi-con stands for COMIC – but it is more than that, it is a manga, publishing, film, TV, media, cinema film festival event). But as the time came closer, I had fundraised to go but I did not want to go. I told Linda that every day.

I was scared.
When things go well I can go outside with someone once a week, I can be awake 12 hours a day but 4-6 of those hours on average are spent doing body tasks to keep me functioning and alive. So, move from bed to computer, and shower once a week, and be on oxygen all the time and be in pain most of the time, but a level of pain where I can function after the first hour or two awake. And with DVD’s, manga and on the weekend postcards, there are aspects of pleasure. With Japanese works of Fiction like the Story of Ibis, or Harmony or Manga like Ooku, DVD sets from the US/UK like Life, Luther and Burn Notice, or films like Bajo la Sal I have the mental excitement again of engaging a mind which is smart, clever and taught me something by bringing me up to a new level. Because who doesn’t need to know how to make a cheap tracking device and set off explosives (Burn Notice, the McGuyver of spy gal). So, good days moments of engaged and alive, and mediocre days, DVD’s like Sanctuary or manga like Otomen or Honey Hunt to keep pain’s claw marks ignored another second and some vocab intact even if I don’t know what city I am in, or who is President/Premier.

It is a cocoon of habit which lets me remember what to do, where to go, and to stay alive while doing it.

What terrifies me is the unexpected, the uncontrollable, the random because that is what makes something which is a painful dangerous condition which will eventually kill me into mind exploding agony where even WITH help, I could die that night, that hour. So when a ‘month of rest’ to get strength for the trip turns into one problem after another, and I am passing out all the time, then hit with a heat wave which leaves me trapped and terrified. Heat hurts. Imagine those hot dogs on the grill or in water as they swell and swell until they skin splits open. That is me. I sleep and all I have are nightmares where my limbs and torso is razored off in layers like a butchers shop does with sandwich meat. And I can’t wake up because I am now in a heat coma (the heat of the blood to my brain is hot enough to give me seizures, but I am too weak to wake up), and if I do wake up, I am paralyzed. That is summer.

And if that pain is not a minute but hours and days and then see what the unexpected and the uncontrollable becomes: pain, terror, loss of function, loss of life (I don’t mind dying for an ideal, I do mind dying because of a heat wave).

A trip to comi-con offered infinite possible problem, like Borges’ shop of mirrors of ‘possible’ from breaking down in a hot California plain desert stretch of highway to a blood clot or stroke (and it WAS in the 90's for several days). It was UNKNOWN, that was the fear. Add in that my medication was running out, and Linda’s job hunting had not resulted in a single short list (problem when over 1,000 managers are let go on an ISLAND where the main employer IS the person who let everyone go – and then they retroactively hired back all of the levels of workers BELOW her, without letting anyone including her apply for the jobs – welcome to British Columbia) or interview. Scary. And of course, being B.C., unemployment is capped far below the poverty line. Scary.

So I cried and begged her to go without me, into the unknown without me, she could take a friend. But I made a promise. And I keep promises.

And the first day I slept 6 hours, the next I slept 4.5, the next 4 hours, then three hours. The damn maps were off and the driving times we planned on were all wrong. There was (surprise!) rush hour in San Fran, in L.A., in San Diego, in empty highway. There was road construction. We pulled up at 1:00 am or 2:00 am and THEN I had to go to the bathroom, finished at 8:00 am, awake at 10:30 am. I almost went to the hospital three times to San Diego. An sane person would have. Except I knew we didn’t have the money and since I figured I would die anyway.... (maybe not a 'sane person').

I made it to the finish line, to opening night, for a few hours seeing steam punk and the sights, and then I wasn’t really human anymore, unable to move, to speak, out on the bathroom floor. For 12 hours, I didn’t know what ‘words’ were, I had nothing going mentally and couldn’t move, I couldn’t even moan my pain.

So a day in bed and when I went out the following day I used Indy and I went to see Moto Haigo, the mother of shojo and yaoi manga, who wrote about things in the 60’s and 70’s wrote about things which aren’t even talked about in the west today, 40 years later. One early manga series was about a young teen whose mother remarries and the step-father sexually abuses him in a brutal and systematic way, while the step father leaves his own son alone. The only way the teen can find a way out is to rig the car to kill the step-father, only to have his own mother in the car when it crashes. His step-brother doesn’t understand the mixture of grief and relief he has at the double funeral and hates him. That’s not an uncommon story, not when churches are giving out payments for tens of thousands of abuse cases, just not a story WE talk about.

Haigo showed a story, Lizard Girl about a woman who gives birth to a girl and to everyone else, the girl is a girl but to the mother, it is a hideous lizard. This was Haigo trying to understand why her mother was active in her disapproval of her career, her life, of her. That classic question of ‘Why? Why can’t they see me?” is answered in an elegent manga.

I went to the Yen Press panel, and found they are releasing another in depth historical manga by the creator of Emaa. I went and got a book signed by the author, for free: and given to me. They promoted Beautiful Darkness, a book on my book list by having the authors sign and give away copies. Score!

And due to crowding I was left in the sun waiting for a trolley for over 30 minutes, and ended up with heat exhaustion and a fever. That's the unknown for ya. We can't know until we go to look, and that's the risk and reward.
But I wasn’t afraid anymore. I had gone BOOM in the redwoods and this is part of what it looked like, and I laughed (and later cried). I went to a museum and had a seizure, I went to old Town San Diego, I went up and down in elevation and my lungs hurt, and I was passing out daily. I was stopping breathing when passed out. But I wasn’t terrified, I was doing. I was seeing.

I realized that for me, the great luxury is in doing. To experience something, to see flowers, or oceans, or forest, or cities, or shops would have bad experiences, and okay ones and occasionally great ones but they are all things I cannot get inside a room. I can’t talk to Nene Thomas inside my room. I can’t see antique original stagecoaches in my room. I could not eat at a mexican surf shop and restaurant in my room. And while I was hurt, emotionally and physically, I was reintroduced to....well, me, or the type of me I prefer: dream it and do it.

A year ago, I risked all to see lava. Now I might need to risk all to see a historical street, or to go window shopping or buy specialty tea, or get turned away as a homeland security threat at JPL (for asking security booth of Buck and Bob where the visitor center we were cleared to visit was located) for trying to get postcards. Just a tip Jet Propulsion Lab, the place where unmanned probes of spaces has info and images rendered: if you DON’T want people to know where you are due to SECURITY then you might not want signs directing us off the highway right to the entrance, and you might not want to fly a GIANT American flag larger than the building on top of it. Just a little security hint.

So do I want to get outside for a wheel and see the stores, or go for a picnic or do I want to live as long as I can?

I want both. But if I don’t get out of room, out of the comfort and fear zone, then I won’t get either life OR living. Winter will be here soon and then I really CAN’T go outside (I get frostbite indoors). I needed to get back in the game, that friction called living. And I wouldn’t have done that without Raccoon.

I could not have gone and keep going without a lot of people: every person who gave florestar, dishes, utensils, medications, in order to give me a baseline of a life. And every person who sent a letter or card that kept my spirits up, who sent stamps or postcards to keep me able to reach other to others, who sent manga, DVD's and gift certificates to allow me to engage in intellect, and for those times when I just need to sit, stare and recover. Because out for 4-5 hours and a day recovering is me living on the dangerous edge of going wild (my 4-5 hours is like your 48 hours without sleeping having a party!). So after 5 hours, even after sleeping staring at Sanctuary Season 2 and watching 'Sanctuary going to Comic-Con' extra makes me loopy and smile and go, "I'm here, they're here, we're all here!" (yeah, just in different years - just keep lying there space cadet girl!) Thank you each and every one who helped me in all those ways.

My promise to Raccoon and his to me of Comic-con got me jump started back into seeing, doing and being (him showing me how to get rid of that extra fluid, Indy style). Doing, being - I might have spent much of the travel experience in the van, might have never left it but once in Yosemite, but I was THERE.

The very thing I feared was the gift that Raccoon gave me: The unknown. Because it not only contains all things I fear, but all things I will fall in love with, all passions, all excitements and joys. And that I might not remember them for more than a couple days doesn’t matter, the habit of living and expecting more, both in life and from myself is an attitude I want to cultivate. I don't know what I can find, not until I try.
Thanks Raccoon.

Road Trip: Mariposa, Yosemite, Steam Trains and wildlife.

After Comi-Con, Raccoon, who comments here, offered to let us stay there for two nights, in order to get our energy back for the drive home. So the plan was to go from Fresno to Yosemite and to the edges of San Francisco in one day. What? That’s totally possible right? Well, it turns out it is possible if you are some sort of driving masochist.

The road into Yosemite has not been upgraded since the 60’s and they had stripped many miles so once in the ‘National Park’ lands the two lane road turned to gravel for miles. The up to 5,000+ feet (a mile high) and down again and up again and down again was playing a bit of havoc with my lungs but the scenery was nice and people even stopped for deer.

On the way up we stopped at the Yosemite Steam Train, which is a narrow gauge train that was used in this region for logging and transport and still runs today. If you look at the picture of the engine, straight down from the steam whistle, you can see the vent and the puff of steam venting as the engine is building power. They combine dinner and a steam engine ride, with the number 15 engine in the shed along with some of the other vintage train cars. We sadly didn’t have time for a ride (but picked up postcards!).

We entered the park inner system where you can go left to go to Yosemite Valley or right to go up to the Mariposa woodlands. We went right and started climbing even more. We had wanted to go to the Sequoia National Park but couldn’t fit it in, and to find that the Mariposa had groves of Sequoia trees as old as 1,800 years was a win/win. There was a trail that I was told, “I wouldn’t even recommend mothers take strollers on it.” So we wheeled on the road and then went a bit off road when needed. The road climbed another 1,000 feet so both Linda and I got our exercise that day. The Sequoia’s are tall and majestic and people have been visiting this area for such a long time, most of the trees are named. In fact there is a tree which you used to be able to drive through from the 1880’s until 1969 when it fell down in a storm. Pictures of people taking their wagon teams through the tree show that people like big trees and they like to go through them.

We encountered a fallen giant soon along the path and it was covered with carved initials and dates, the oldest I saw was from 1934 but I am sure if you looked hard there was some from over 100 years ago. A picture of Linda down near the root system gives a sense of perspective on this mid sized Sequoia tree. The Sequoia are a type of Redwood but unique. One of the unique aspects of them are the LARGE pine cones they produce (do not stand under the tree when they fall!). I think you are not supposed to take them from the park but we saw people walking with them (the one photographed was put back on the display stand after). I also think they release the seeds during a forest fire, maybe someone can help me on that. Which would make sense as if you have a forest of 1,000 year old trees you don’t need new ones every year, but when some of them have been wiped out.

While we were up there we looked up at noise and saw a woodpecker who had already made several holes into a tree working away, I don’t know if you can spot him in the bark, as this is up 40 feet or so.

We saw a LOT of wildlife in a very short period of time, which was very refreshing after staring at bad driving, very bad driving and lots of cityscape (hey drivers, there are things called ‘indicators’ you can turn on before you change lanes….just a heads up!).

Here is a blur of a tree, and that black blur is a black squirrel, which I have a film of. He just kept running round and round and round the tree, so I will put a film up of that later, as motion is so much easier to see with animals in the wild. So consider this ‘coming attractions’ once I get the films uploaded to youtube.

We also saw a small type of squirrel called Peco’s which live around the Sequoia. We saw two of them which were running around the place like it was a giant track, first round and round the tree up and down then on to the next park, over the log, down the fallen log, then racing each other right in front of us and around back to the tree again. They did this several times (getting a pictures of two racing Pecos is harder that you might think). If you look at the tree on the left at the bottom you will see a black shape (one Peco) and the other is a grey stretched out blur approaching the tree, the second picture shows the grey on the tree as the black is about to scamper around the corner. It was amazing to watch, like some Chaplin film, or a high energy comedy energy.

There were also three male deer grazing in the valley down from us but blocked mostly by trees and not giving great pictures. However while looking at them a squirrel or Peco jumped up on the stump behind me and started to chitter in chastisement. I wonder what I did? So the wildlife was literally running up to me, in various forms.

Here is Linda between two of the younger Sequoia’s in order to give some perspective on the size of these trees. Soon after we met a couple from Chester in England who said, “You see one tree, you’ve seen them all.” Which I though odd since in the UK, any Oak Tree of significant age is on the survey maps and named and recorded in a national registry. I like lots of trees, the giant Douglas Fir of Vancouver Island, the Moss and Trees of the Hoh, the Redwoods, the Sequoias, and would love to see the gaint Mahogany trees of South America. We have seen the Oaks of the UK, the Black Forest and looking forward to more.

On to Yosemite, Linda saved me a hard wheel by driving down to meet me. We drove for another hour before the Yosemite valley started opening before us (This was taken by me while Linda drove). You go through a long tunnel and then the valley is there, broad before you with half dome in the back, Angel Falls on the right and El Capitan on the left (apparently this year you have to reserve to do the 3-5 day rock climb up it – just in case you don’t have enough things to do or train for). I guess the park service got tired of people stopping so they put in a view right at the end of the tunnel and I got a picture of Linda and the Yosemite Valley. When planning Linda was ‘Why do we have to drive all those hours to Yosemite?” and I kept saying, “It is just something you have to see.”

Yosemite IS something you have to see, along with the giant mansion sized boulders on the ground which are just a ‘cracked chip’ fallen off of these giant granite faces. Thanks to Ansel Adams (who has a museum of his work here) and others, this valley is preserved and an ad saying “Pepsi” or “Got Milk?” is NOT spray painted across any of the majestic towers.

It was close to 7:00 by the time we made it down into the Yosemite Valley Drive and we didn’t know when the visitor center closed or if it was already. Linda had gone out and took a picture, but on the way back two squirrels were getting ‘busy’ which we were told later was not sex, but just ‘playing’, er, okay, well, here is a picture of them and you can decide (Yaoi: Squirrel Style?). I hit the horn to get Linda to look up as I found the visitor’s center closed at 7:30. We drove, we got lost, we got lost again, and then we found the visitors center, with Linda going ahead to look in the gift store. This picture was taking by a kind and very nice looking German female (hee hee!).
On the way in we had passed a sign reading “Speed Kills Bears” with a picture of a bear. I guess it was supposed to make us slow down but considering most people are scared of bears, maybe it ended getting people to speed up? Linda wanted a picture but in the visitor’s center we found a magnet of it. We also got a FEW (dozen) postcards in the 12 minutes we had. Plus I talked to a Ranger and showed him the videos, and he identified the Peco’s versus the black squirrels.

The Ranger also let me know that because we had the blue badge I could drive on an ‘official use’ and ‘do not enter’ road which went out to Mirror Pond and from there we caught the sun shining the sunset on Half Dome.
Yes, these few hours were a fast and rushed tour of Yosemite and while we wanted more, it was enough. On the way back we saw a male buck with antlers feeding with the Yosemite Valley behind. The park seemed to have animals and scenery everywhere we looked. Two cyclists rode between me and the buck deer while I was about to take the picture, the husband saying to the wife "Deer, what deer, I can't see anything?" as he passed by 10 feet from the deer and rode past and away, never seeing.

The sun continued to descend and up above, in the clouds, the sunset continued. We headed out of the park stopping to make some sandwiches and prepare for drive to San Francisco. Eiki Eiki and I had not left the van much but we had seen a lot and taken a LOT of pictures (ohhh, about 200).
The road down from Yosemite is a twist rapid elevation drop which is the hardest on me and made me pass out complete for about 90 minutes (not sleeping but literally BAM, unconscious). It was as we neared San Francisco that Linda let me know that she wasn’t EXACTLY sure where she had the directions to Raccoon’s house.

Oh. (It turned out she had left them……at Raccoon’s house on the way down).

So we hit a lot of exits since a lot of them got the ‘that looks familiar’ to Linda. As for me, since it was a week ago, I had no memory at all. Eventually I decided we would systematically take EVERY exit, and we had eliminated each one until we had one left. It was 1:00 am and we were both punch drunk from exhaustion. There were orange cones and there seemed to be a gap so I directed Linda into what I thought was the ‘construction exit’. I directed her instead to a police car waiting in the dark which popped on the lights, and started writing things down and checking Linda’s eyes (that red is exhaustion, not drugs, honest!). The police officer let us go, but he didn’t know how to get to Raccoon’s address. He did know that the Trader Joe’s we knew was nearby to Raccoon was ‘around here’. Great.

We didn’t get a ticket and after one final wrong turn, corrected we finally made it to Raccoon’s where I lay down, irritating his two cats who had claimed the futon as their new plaything.

Yosemite was worth it, though I woke up the next morning in shock with blue fingers and shuddering. It was good to know we could have a day to rest up as well. Because after that we were headed into the unknowns of southern Oregon, then a long driving day from there straight back to Cheryl’s (who had flown back earlier).

Camera FOUND! Pictures of Comic-Con opening night and Pasadena

The Camera has been found!

We went right from driving down to Comic-Con, entered the Exhibitor’s Hall as it opened (the rows are like streets starting at 0, 100, 200, up to 5000+: Section 400-1400 is books and publishers, while 3000-4000 was entertainment and major producers). The Exhibitors hall has a mix as everything from penguin and Little Brown are there having signings with free books to lines to get autographs of everyone from the directors and WW from the show Middleman, to Spike from Buffy and Booth from the series Bones. Plus there are games being exhibited and new series being advertised so a touch of E3 as well where games not available are shown as well as signed books not released for months.

I did not appreciate how empty the aisles the first night were as I browsed manga (the bad where the camera was found when packing to leave). I then wheeled over to various sections advertising things like Salt with Angelina Jolie and other films (with real movie or set props). I also didn’t realize that much of the items on the counters, like special artist drawn and stitched book bags were merely ‘give-aways’ for first night people. The SWAG was what everyone but me was grabbing, which included free DVD’s, books, postcards, bookbags, toys and more. The next morning the Director of Pan’s Labyrinth was there but only those in a lottery got to see him and get a signing. I didn’t win.

I did however wander by Square Enix which was advertising their new game in full wall widescreen, along with some Anime set releases. I was offered to play new PS3 and X360 games but turned them down (I didn’t know there would be a line later) and took a look at where people could ‘lift a car’ using a prop car for the new show ‘The Ordinary Family’ about a family of superhero’s (Big theme, also the new Zombie TV show coming out).

On the way down and back we stopped at Pasadena, my ‘home town’ though since my parents moved 18 times between moving from and then back to Victoria, I am not sure what is home. We bought what little furniture from my teen years is left from the parents. So I guess our table is ‘home’. But Pasadena is important to me, where I grew up for almost 10 years. Here is the ‘famous from film’ Pasadena city hall just down from the library. I had stopped to make sure the library had NOT changed over the years. Because THIS was my library, hardwood checkout desk, tapestries and all.
I found the children’s reading room (which I was encourage to leave after finishing the entire summer reading program in less than a week) the same, they only changed some shelving but kept it all the Walnut of the original from the 1920’s.

Here is one of the reference rooms where I used to drag out large books of the first 20 years of superman or batman to read at home. It is the essence of a reading room to me and influences not only how I think about books but about book spaces. My bookstore had hardwood bookshelves and open spaces, my home has dark wood bookshelves and open spaces. This library defined how I looked at books. It was odd rolling past where the Louis L’Amour westerns should be to find they had MOVED them.

We went by the Wrigley Mansion where Mr. Wrigley of Wrigley’s chewing gum lived and where I had jogged past on my way down to the Rose Bowl for training runs
(there is a VERY steep hill on the street by his house, great for training).

We also stopped by the NEW and upscale downtown to Chado’s Tea Room. It reminded me of a tea merchant I went to in Lisbon, Portugal who kept the tea from around the world, sold there for hundreds of years in wooden boxes. Chado’s has a book of 40 pages of teas plus special blends that are not in the book. The owners wrote ‘The Tea Encyclopedia’ and OWN a tea plantation themselves in India. Chado only uses the top tip and first and second leaf, the top three grades of tea possible. They also sell a very enticing collection of teapots.
We bought some tea, as what better gift than some top quality tea from the source, having smelled the 5 pounds of tin in the bin before buying, then ordering by the ounce. It was fun and addictive, and without the help of the tea seller it would have been hopeless as Earl Grey Blends (including dating back to 1814) have more than a page.
That was part of our stop in Pasadena on the way to Comi-Con and the ‘lost’ pictures including those of my library, a place of refuge from LA heat and of finding out how many books I could carry away – I would have them stacked so they were above my head when I carried them – oh, just 25+ books at a time.

We are off to Yosemite, just wanted, with some internet access to let you know what was going on and share a bit of Comi-Con, my past, a gorgeous library and specialty tea house with you.