What are you up to, Citizen?

I might have told this story before.

When I was at university in Florida, I was in a role-playing group with a bunch of other guys and we'd play all night on weekends. One night we were playing Morrow Project, a post-nuclear-holocaust RPG with all sorts of weirdies, more Terminator than Gamma World, and a whole bunch of fun.

One night around 1:00am while we were playing, there came a knock at the door. We opened the door to two police officers from the Melbourne Police Department peering in at us. "We, ah, we got a noise complaint from one of the neighbors." Now, we were a pretty loud group, I'll grant you that. Shouting, arguing, but mostly laughing. "Got a party going on in here?"

"Kinda," says the guy who owns the place.

"Were you playing music?"

"Not tonight. Just talking."

Some of us are watching the cop's eyes and those of his partner. So take in this scene: the living room of a university rental home, cheap ugly gray rug. There are three items of furniture: a Barcalounger in which sits a skinny guy with pale skin and white hair (it's Elric!) and it's his house, so he's doing the talking, a bookshelf, and a folding table in one corner. There's a boom box, but it's off. There is no beer, only soda pop and three fresh but empty pizza boxes. Six people, four men and two women, sit on the floor, leaning against the walls. Everyone has a loose-leaf binder in front of him or her, and more papers arranged purposefully on the floor. The papers, if you can see them at all, have a surprisingly technical look to them. Some people even have manila-colored ID cards among their papers.

On top of the bookcase is a pistol. You can just see the butt of the handgrip. It's a water pistol, but its owner has done an excellent job of painting it accurate gunmetal colors. On the folding table is a computer on its side, open with wires leading out, some of which are attached to another home-made box with knobs. Next to the computer and its doodad is a stack of Delta Airline Maintenance Manuals.

On the wall behind the guy in the chair is a map, two meters square, of the western half of the United States. (Remember, we're in Florida on the east coast.) Some places are pinned. Some have red circles around them. Others have yellow. A closer look would have revealed that many of the items of interest are military installations.

The cops eventually left us, advising us to just "keep it down." We promised we would.

Today, we'd so be in jail.

Obviously, most of the items in the room are explained by the game itself. The computer belonged to one of the housemates who fancied himself a musician; the stack of manuals belonged to the white-haired guy who was interning as part of his training at Florida Tech's aeronautical school.

Stumbling upon a pinnacle

Have you ever picked up a book, portfolio, comic book, or CD by an artist or performer you didn't know, made you way through the work, and at the end thought to yourself that what you just read was so fresh, so new, so wonderful that you just had to get more of it? And when you did, you were disappointed to learn that what you'd found was either anomalous or the high point of his creative output, and everything that came before that was rough-edged and unready, and everything after was an attempt to recapture that high point?

I had that happen this weekend. A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon Onikubo Hirohisa's manga, Preference for Pleasure (more of that stuff you'll never read in English, sad to say) and his pencils were lush, beautiful, sweetly feminine in a way, and his stories were cute, touching, complex and humane. So I said to myself, "I should get more of this."

After stumbling around the Internet on and off looking for it, I finally found some this weekend and downloaded it. And I had that awful, sinking feeling. The lush pencils were still there, but they were often muddied with really crappy zip-o-tone, or completely unnecessary color (probably commercially more viable). Even when they weren't, the printing was terrible. But worst of all, the themes of the rest of his work is all mean, vicious stuff. Lots of interpersonal violence, lots of unhappy endings, lots of abuse of one gender by another (at least he's relatively even-handed about it in his stories, even if his cover art is mostly unhappy women), the worst of what we've come to expect of hentai without dropping into total guro.

I hate when that happens.

Is that my child?

Omaha and I decided that we're never going to buy a bicycle from Pacific Cycle Manufacturing ever again. Their so-called 24" frames are actually too big for a rider with a 24" step, and we finally had to take Kouryou-chan's second attempt at her new bike, a Murray Dazzler 20" (pink), back to Toys'R'Us because the coaster brake just locked up hard on her and wouldn't come loose. All their crap is now made in mainland China by disinterested laborers.

We did some research. It turns out that every bicycle manufacturer you recall from your childhood is now owned by Pacific Cycle: Roadmaster, Murray, Mongoose, Dino, along with inStep and Eddie Bauer Bikes. Most galling of all: they own Schwinn.

Huffy is still owned by an American, but it's in bankruptcy and has outsourced most of its manufacturing to China. The only bicycles left not made in mainland China that we could buy here are Trek and Novara, and Novara is mostly manufactured in Taiwan.

We went to a local bicycle dealer here in Burien, Bicycles West, rather than Toys'R'Us or Target. He had a 24" that really fit Kouryou-chan just fine and he tried to sell us on it, but she had her heart set on the 20". The 24" didn't have a coaster brake. The one we bought will probably last her a year, and it was twice as expensive, but it comes with experienced local service and warranty, it feels much more solid, and it's mostly made of American parts (although they admit that their kids bikes have some Taiwanese components). If it works for road trips up and down the Green Lake/Duwamish bike path this spring and summer, Omaha and I will be very happy.

We'll see how well it works once it stops raining.

Afterward, we went to Pagliacci's for dinner. Omaha offered that we go to Dilettante's for dessert, since it was right down the street. "Naw," Kouryou-chan said. "It's too rich for me."

Omaha and I were stunned. Is that our child, the one who would only eat sweets? Omaha told her she could eat only a little bit; they'd share a cake. She agreed. I ordered the tiramisu, and didn't finish it. We left sated and happy.