Here I am in Boston, my latest stop and resting place for a while on the thus-far-trés-successful summer tour 2002. Pulled into South Station around 6:30, having only narrowly caught the intended train from Philly at 1:00. Danny was apparently there to meet us, but our eyes and cell-phone calls told us otherwise, so after waiting for twenty minutes or so, I followed Rebecca on the red line and then the two long picturesque blocks to her lovely residence. This was hard on my hands because it meant lugging the poorly-designed pull-handle grip on my big heavy suitcase - the bag whines and clicks as it's dragged along, from the effect of too much dragging with too much weight: the wheels very badly need to be replaced, while the fabric and underlying plastic on the bottom edge is corroded away and I fear beyond repair.

Ruth was out to dinner but the adorable and unbelievably soft Mandy was happy to greet us with puppy high-fives. After we put our feet up for a second and reconnected with the notables we headed out again for some filling and nice-priced Mexican (rice+beans+pork enchiladas and lemonade). Then Ruth took me here, the big pink house on Franklin St., where Dan almost immediately put me to work going through to check some components of his newest piece of equipment, a massive Neve mixing console from the seventies. He's already spent over sixty hours cleaning it, he says, and there will be plenty more over the rest of the summer. It's hardly mentally challenging work, but it has an appealing precision and simplicity, with a heavy dose of nerdiness that I can only begin to comprehend.

As they go, this was a pleasant day of travel - I woke with Alyssa and sat mostly in silence as she ate breakfast, and then went back to bed for an hour; got up, showered, packed, went to the library to say another goodbye, made a sandwich for the trainride, and waited for my ride. I finished Book 4 (proper) and read the unimaginably meta "Epilogue" in Lanark (there are still four chapters left, nearly 60 pages,) and ate a peach and some graham crackers. Becca and I had long and fruitful and interesting discussion, about various things but mostly the people - Petar, Ester, Rae, Joel, Alyssa, etc. - who fill our lives.

Last night, after the blue sky darkened into rain showers, after the beginning of comotion occasioned gangs of t-shirted girls to parade the campus, after a series of mild errands to try to assemble dinner company, there was in fact a trip to Kingdom. Al, Reb, Petar, Sharg and myself (prompted by Rebecca, whose first time it was.) Fine food, though we'll never break the dumpling barrier, and more talk of zombie movies.

Haircut.

Becca and I and Ben watched The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, a Preston Sturges screwball comedy which, I'm pretty sure, lived up to my unclear expectations. The first hour was campy fun, small-town Americana Holllywood-spoof-style, with excellently deployed melodrama; then it just starts getting more and more bizarre (almost in the manner of Mullholland Drive, with lots of inexplicable commotion and hilarious though completely unexpected digs at Canada and Hitler. "Hey Zipperpuss! Someday you'll disappear and all they'll find will be a hair ribbon and an axe." Rebecca was disturbed by some of the stereotyped gender stuff, which is admittedly somewhat hard to reconcile - hard to know what's just being played off as funny and what's being subtly reprimanded as a hollywood cliché. The film was bookended by MTV2 broadcasts of (beforehand) fantastic Slick Rick and Queen Latifah videos and (afterhand) simply stunning clips from Mudvayne and some other similarly misspelled nu-metal group that I'd also never heard of which also featured Kiss-esque face paint, birds-eye-view shots of the drum kit with closeups of double bass-pedal, and persistent guitar imagery amidst the grotesquerie (so as to remind you that it's music, I suppose) - followed by a live Iron Maiden video, which was unimaginably tame and tuneful by comparison.

Paragraph check - okay?

i don't want pork chops and bacon
that won't awaken
my appeti-i-i-i-i-ite inside