RoadBoot

I just put up a captioned gallery in place of the old photosets. There are 187 photos, in no categories. The gallery requires flash to view, so if you don’t have it you are out of luck.

Quite a few episodes and people are missing from the collection, and many of our adventures are not mentioned there. By way of excuse I can only say that there simply were things that we neglected to capture with stills. For instance we totally forgot to snap a picture of Slack, even though her interview was the longest of all.

Otherwise I hope you enjoy the slideshow.

Btw, L.Acid was quite liberal with the veracity of his comments. It would not be a stretch to say that at least half of the words in the gallery contain some element of falsehood. More than a few are bold-faced lies.

Mud Bay Coffee, where I long planned the road trip, is still the same. They still roast their own beans, they still serve up delicious espresso, they still give me free refills even after I’ve been inside all day. I love this place. I want to hang a certain big painting over the door to the conference room, if I don’t first give it to some friends Up North.

There is a story about what has been happening since the trip ended. CC, as you all know, made his way back home after we got lost in Portland, and is currently gearing up to return to a heavy workload at school. I spent my last pennies building a box to house and edit the many hours of footage we took over the summer, which was more than a chore. Hard work builds character.

So do problems. The new set-up had problems capturing from the 30 tapes that comprise our minidv collection. After troubleshooting through four different capture utilities, switching between three different cameras, and even performing a test record on a portion of unused tape I determined that my camera screwed up the A/V sync while recording, messed it up enough to make it appear that there is no audio. I remember CC mentioning something about timecode problems while we were on the road, but I thought nothing of it.

I board a plane to Korea tomorrow afternoon. CC has graciously offered to attempt a capture operation of his own, for which I am very grateful, and toward that end I have mailed him all the tapes.

So there you have it. Right now the embryos of RoadBoot Brainchild are making their way through the stratosphere, patiently awaiting more cruel experiments at the hands of desperate amateurs. Before mailing the package I wrote “Pandora” on the box lid, just so that CC knows what he is getting into.

Darn it! I should have written “Hope” on a scrap of paper and put it underneath all the tapes! Ah, for lost opportunities.

Color. What color is sprite blood? Is it the glowing energy seen coming from Matrix’s arm when he donates to AndrAIa? Is it the dark stuff seen when Dot is abducted by the web creature? This debate is years old.

Google Sprite Blood

According to Joxer, sprite blood corresponds to the color of the sprite’s skin. Dot’s blood is green, Bob’s is blue, Ray’s is yellow.

Jiggity jig.

So here I am back at the old haunt, clean shaven and bald as a grapefruit. Chris left from Portland late friday night, and all the tapes (minus one) are sitting in a yellow tupperware in my car.

*spills coffee on self*

Hard to believe that it’s all over. People ask me where I’ve been, and when I tell them they smile and say “cool”, but none of them really understand. I’ve seen America. I’ve driven in New York City, I’ve dodged antelope on the Texas highways, I’ve seen the sun set into the Pacific and rise from the Atlantic, I’ve been lulled to sleep by the waves of the Gulf and woken into the crisp air of the Canadian Rockies. I’ve driven through the Mojave hades, I’ve gone up the Olympic Mountains and held a microphone to the mouth of the god of chicks that kick ass.

All I have to show for the Great Adventure is a little yellow box full of MiniDV tapes. In that box are embarassing memories, bad image quality, worse audio, and poor shot direction. But at the bottom shines a single bright light: hope.

It is good to be home.

Updated, with a mileage counter placed in the text area.

Hildegaard’s is yet another hip and trendy coffee shop, this time located in Georgia. When CC and I entered its air-conditioned interior we were assaulted by a folk singer belting out humorous ballads with a twangy accent. Dot was at a table close to the counter, reading a book.

After the obligatory hugs (human contact, ew!), CC and Dot settled into a steady rhythm of conversation. I was both confused by their seemingly parralel thought processes and worried about the wireless situation, so I borrowed CC’s computer to check my email. When I looked up, both CC and Dot had vanished.

Thinking that they had simply gone outside to escape the oppressive humor of the folk singer (M R ducks. M R not!), I scanned the bookshelf for friendly-looking covers with lots of pictures. Among the literary ghetto of buddhist tracts, stories of personal transcendence, and maps to higher spheres of thought via your personal animal guide was a slim volume titled “Dharma PunX”.

According to the jacket blurb, Str8 Edge was this dopehead in the eighties who used to graffiti the skate parks and alleyways of San Diego with his “tags”. He also did a lot of drugs from the age of ten onward. “Dharma PunX” was his autobiography; an epic tale of personal spirituality, ultimate truth, and the transcendent power of hardcore punk rock.

The author said that one of the common symptoms of opiate withdrawal is paranoia, or sometimes the delusion that one is in possession of secrets that no one else understands. This usually happens when one feels abandoned or worthless, and it is a natural defense mechanism that can be seen at work in that dude downtown with the cats who knows where all the UFOs are. He’s also the head of the CIA, I guess. That’s what he said anyway.

I was enraptured. 54 pages into an explanation of how the chakra median emits a differant aura depending on the strength of the 32nd plane’s tertiary vibrations I realized that my two companions had not returned. I took a walk, but I didn’t see them anywhere. Although the men’s room had a black urinal. I thought that was funny and utilitarian. I will definately put a black urinal in my bathroom when I get around to building that black house.

I sat down on the couch and contemplated the problem. CC and Dot had disappeared. They had been gone more than an hour.

Like a bolt of lightning the solution struck me. Pocket Universes! CC and Dot had chatted online for years, building up mental images of each other’s persons, minds, and habits. To them, the other was not an actual person but a text-based entity composed entirely of mind and feeling, the mythic tabula rasa that absorbed whatever projection the other had fabricated. When they finally met in real life the stress of conflicting realities was too much for our delicate space-time continuum, and the formerly non-existent fantasy world of cyberspace was created in a flash simply so that the online extensions of these two persons could find common ground in a physical space!

This insight was fortified when I remembered that before they had winked out of existence they had been talking in a code language made up of in-jokes and references to past conversations. The private universe that was their online interaction had enough history and culture of its own to transport them into their very own reality!

Briefly I considered how I would finish the documentary without CC, but cheered up when I realized that he had foolishly left his laptop behind. Lucky me. I gathered up our computers and walked back to the car, where they were waiting for me.

“There you are”, they said. “We were waiting for you.”

“Dudes!” I cried. “You transcended time and space! How was it?”

“There’s no point getting offended”, they said. “You could have come out and joined us anytime. It was just too loud in there.”

Can you, dear reader, believe this nonsense? Those two friends actually thought that they had spent the entire time sitting on a bench chatting about ReBoot! Here I was, witness to possibly the only multiple-person trans-dimensional journey ever, and my two cybernauts WEREN’T EVEN AWARE THAT THEY HAD BROKEN THE UNIVERSE! This was possibly the greatest scientific discovery of the past two thousand years and NO ONE even KNEW!

Only me.

From: Peter Buller
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: rebootmaster2001@mung.com
Subject: Re: item request
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Hi RBM,

Sorry about the late reply, but being on the road as we are I know
you’ll understand. A shame that you can’t make the item before we get
to your place, I really wanted to have one for the trip. But I understand.

As for when we arrive at your place- it won’t be for another couple of
weeks at least. We HAD planned on going up to Kansas from Vegas, but at
the last minute I was able to track down an IMAX Ridefilm location that
still had a copy of Journey into Chaos in their closet. The staff was
happy to give us a special showing of the film, and since they were on
the Gulf of Mexico we headed on down. That’s where we are now,
chilling in a coffee shop/bar in Galveston, TX. Journey into Chaos was
pretty good, although not as exciting as the first ridefilm.

From here we will scoot through Katrina Country to the east coast, then
follow a train of locations through DC, up to NY, Montreal, Ottawa, and
back down into middle America. You will be among the last fans we visit
before heading to BC.

See you soon!
–L.Acid

P.S.
By strange coincidence we found both ridefilms inside pyramids. The
Luxor is a giant pyramid-shaped casino, of course, and so was the
Discovery Center at Moody Gardens where we dug up Journey into Chaos.
CC and I need to get Indiana Jones hats.

Here in Flagstaff there is a sweet little bistro called “The Campus Coffee Bean”. Hip and trendy, cool and atmospheric, with good food and great roasts, this artistically influenced coffee shop/deli has everything your intrepid heroes need to pass a pleasant evening. Including Internet. Wireless internet. PAY internet.

WHAT!!!!!! FIVE BUCKS AN HOUR FOR CRAPPY DSL, PLUS THE BILIOUS COFFEE!!?!?!?

Here in Flagstaff there is a portal to hell called the “Campus Coffee Bean”. Within the fiery nether regions of that twice-cursed (*spits*) shop of horrors is a terrible goul named “Connection Unavailable” that stomps out the eyes of would-be websurfers with unnatural and demonic delight. Five bucks an hour! Kill me now and end the suffering.

CC’s battery just died. We’re on our way to Texas to visit Focusly.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Tumwater, chatting with CC, contemplating the future. Just got my oil changed (7 quarts) oil and fuel filters. Also stocked up on fuel filters for the trip, and bought the appropriate tools to be able to do that. Life is good.

-L.Acid