In Reno

So, I ended up flying down to Reno last night. A friend's having a rough time. I didn't really want to, but they were really freaking out and I though I should go see them in person, and Alaska has that 9pm late night flight that goes to Reno/Tahoe. Took off from Sea/Tac, and it was a bumpy flight all the way. I paid the somewhat nervous woman next to me to buy me a scotch and soda, so I could get two for the flight. Alaska never comes around twice on those flights, or if they do, the second trip is always just coffee, which makes a little burning knot in my stomach these days.

I spent the second half of the flight sobering up, as she told me this story she'd heard on the news. She was going down to Reno to get a job as a dealer. She was so vague and seedy that I wasn't sure whether she was talking about drugs or cards; some people are just like that.

After I got off the plane, my dealing friend and I parted ways. Still no hint about cards or drugs. I took the bus to the Peppermill, which is the Casino that I usually stay at. They've got all sorts of weird games there, like lobstermania which is my favotire slot machine, and this weird poker slot machine that i always seem to do better at than you'd statistically suspect. They also have this awesome buffet, that I met deeptape and kukiri at by chance the last time I was in Reno.

I've been trying to get my truck that I keep down in NV street legal most of the morning. Mostly, this is just a series of annoying trips to various places. Nevada doesn't believe in emissions checks or anything like that, so I was able to grab a temporary plate (RHD-1138), and since then have been largely going back and forth between the friend's house where I keep my truck and the Schuck's on Virginia all morning. I've been resisting the urge to put any more extraneous lights on this damn thing.

Also, I got a gun, because I'm going to be driving south from Reno for a while, and people outside of the city are crazy. (People in the city are crazy as well, but they're usually either consumed with their crappy casino job or cooking meth, so they leave you alone.) Nevada doesn't have any gun laws, but it does have lots of casinos, so you can always buy pretty much anything you want if you're willing to check out a couple of pawn shops.

Currently, I'm sitting in a felafel shop leeching bandwidth from a starbucks. Mmmmmmm, felafel. Why is it that felafel shops in the US always have weird sorts of soda flavors? I don't mean something like mexican restos, which usually have a couple flavors of mexican sodas (which I highly recommend, because they're tasty and made with real sugar instead of corn syrup like most american sodas. If I liked soda, I'd buy 20 flats of kosher for passover coke every year. Actually, I'm not sure they even sell that in Seattle.) Felafel restaurants generally have Tab, Goat Flavored Diet Rite, and six flavors of snapple that no one's heard about since they had that annoying woman from Roslyn doing the commericals.

Anyway, I'm going to pick my friend Jeff up drive down to Lechon Del Loro now, it's about halfways between Vegas and Reno. I don't know about internet down there, but I'm fairly sure that the modem on my laptop's still working. Probably give another update later after I see what's up with my friend Siobhn. Ideally, I'll be back in Seattle by Sunday or so.

luning

yeah, so luning, NV. I'm at the flying j. wireless is good, but not very fast, so I'm going to keep this brief. I picked Jeff up.

He's still coming down hard from some party he was at last night. I mean, really hard -- eyes rolling, he keeps talking about squares and cubes rolling past when he closes his eyes. Sounds like acid. It's made for something of a bad trip, so to speak. Also, my laptop's keyboard is crap. Very annoying to type as I don't have normal use of the left arrow key. Jeff's house is all messed up. Bunch of bullet holes in the walls, weird designs spraypainted on the inside of the front door. It is sort of a trailer trash / occultist / college professor look. At any rate, he's been pretty freaky, worried about Siobn though.

Strange encounter with the guy who runs this shop. I tried to find out whether the sausages he was serving were pork or not. I'll eat a pork sausage in a pinch, but I don't like to, and won't eat beef. He wasn't very clear about it, and was more confused about jewish dietary practices than I would have thought possible in america. So, he's crazy and vaguely threatening.

Actually, this whole town is boring and sucking. There is a diner on the outside of town, that we're going to go to for lunch, given the completely unsatisfactory nature of the roadside food in this part of the world. I miss the east coast, where there are lots of roy rogers and sbarros and similar. Here it's all indian tacos and old men with dubious sausage.

going to get Jeff and head out. hopefully things will start to get more entertainiing. couldn't get Siobn in the phone here or in Reno. Using a 7-11 phone card because there's no cel reception in this wacky outbacky.

FSCK!!!!

so, back at the flying j with jeff. just stopping to give a quick update while jeff calls the police.

something really bad happened up in the hills. Siobhn's place was wrecked, with one of the walls knocked out. there were bloodstains all over one of the walls of her living room, and her cactuses and other living room stuff were all tossed around.

there was a nevada state patrol car nearby, that looked like it had rammed something really hard. couldn't find any police.

jeff's completely flipping. there were signs like he had on his doors at his place, he says that's why the wall was smashed in. Siobhn's doors were still standing.

No trace of anything, and we weren't going to stay with dark coming.

we're going to vegas now. it's closer. there's nothing between here and reno, and there are miles of slow going through national forests between here and sf.

jeff says the police want us to stay here and wait for them, but we're leaving now and hoping that whatever happened doesn't happen to us.

reno again

Back in reno at the silver cloud. I've picked the hotel in the middle of town, because being in the middle of a lot of lights and people seems to be a good thing tonight.

we were about 10 miles south of Luning when we came upon it. There's a relatively bright moon tonight, and the snow on the ground made everything stand out in stark contrast. Lucky, because otherwise we would have rammed it.

jeff slammed on the brakes. It was tall, taller than me by about 10 feet. Things that big aren't just taller, they're proportionally huge. They're wider, and thicker. Think of an elephant -- it can't have legs like a giraffe because it's volume makes it heavy. This was ponderous, like a tank on two legs.

I was still trying to get untangled from the seatbelt as jeff pulled a u-turn. because the road was narrow, we couldn't get around it, and we couldn't even do a normal u-turn. While he stopped to back up, I put my gun out the window and fired at its legs. When I was taking medical training, they always impressed on us how important it was to stop bleeding to the legs. You get an artery cut, and you bleed to death inside yourself. Funny, the random things you think about. I also thought about that whole 'tori amos makes me want to be a piano bench' joke, but i shot all the bullets i had.

my brain. i've been puking since i got back and thinking about a woman i used to date who liked tori amos a lot. maybe too much. maybe we all want to be piano seats. hard to say.

but i shot it in the leg, and it went down for a second and then got back up, lumbering towards us. we should have headed north. the turnoff for Siobhn's house was south of town. It must have followed us, or cops we called. In the light of the moon you can't tell color, so it was grey like everything else in the landscape and featureless.

jeff started yelling something, i was trying to shove another magazine into my gun while we lurched back and forth in our turn. It was running at us when we finally got going.

we drove fast. when we stopped to refuel someplace south of reno we jumped out of the truck. We smelled like piss, vomit, and gunpowder.

jeff said he knew a man that began all this. while he fueled the car i grabbed new shirts out of the back. we left the gas station without paying, leaving our vomitty shirts behind on the tarmac. as we drove to this guy greg who jeff knew's house, i got more and more nervous. there are some things a man isn't meant to see, and one of my best friends spattered with vomit with piss-dark pants is a couple of them for me.

we went to gregs and knocked on the door, as he came up to check the door, i shot him through the window. i shot him a couple more times. i tossed one of those crappy terracotta potted plants that people in reno think are classy decor through the window. jeff and i went through, went running through the house in a couple of minutes. nothing was there, but more decorations like at jeff and siobhn's houses so we lit some candles and turned on the gas stove full blast and got out of there. shooting a man and watching him die sucking air isn't easy, but i had a reason.

but we're here, it's almost midnight, and we should be safe to see the dawn of another day. i hope.

i'll be back sometime. see you all around.