So I'm totally in Olympia, Washington right now. I had a fifty-five hour Amtrak ride up from Albuquerque, which should totally be a band name, totally, Up From Albuquerque, I like it, I totally do. I rode first the Southwest Chief, great name, and then the Coast Starlight, not such a good name, and not such a good train, either. Amtrak rents Union Pacific's lines, and are thus forced to stand aside for all of Union Pacific's freight trains, which unionpacific their fannies on down south with dull regularity. Our train spent half the time sitting by the side of the tracks, and the passengers got to stare out the widthy windows into small patches of trees and rocks and little round bushes you in the east would not recognize. We were staring at the sort of place I've dodged away from trains into. Not much goin' aaahn. And so, over night, while I was adjusting and readjusting the seat, trying to find a comfortable sleeping position, not finding it, and sleeping somehow anyway, and waking up smelly, the train lost SEVEN HOURS.

The next day it moved in spurts up the coast, literally on the coast for some beautiful stretches, and as my odors grew, I read and tried to avoid the loud mother and her louder four year old. Their usual schtick was to run back together from the café with soda and buckets of grease stuffed into the form of hamburgers, the mother chiding the girl and the girl crying "Mommy, how can I make it up to you, how can I be good for you" and the mother saying, loudly, "do you have to be so loud? Why are you so loud? loud, loud loud!" The girl also played "Baby," a game which consisted of her shrieking in a mimic baby cry repetitively and the mother saying, "Whay are you crying like a baby? You're not a baby." (I'm not being sarcastic, mind you. This really was a "game" the girl played.) The girl was mildly overweight, dressed in tight pants and ill-cut shirts with miss-matched colors, crooning at every other little girl that passed, "You my friend!" and the other little girls running away. The mother was monstrously fat, kind of like Jabba the Hut only bigger, and wore a tank top that had a "provocative" hole in the back, and which displayed her blue bra.

I was seated near the connection between trains, and my car had a door that slid closed as if it were retarded, squeeking shut as slowly as possible, taking about a minute and a half, leaving revealed the banging and rattling and clinking and huffing of the space in between cars to shout at us as we tried to sleep. The attendents made maximum use of this door between the hours of midnight and eight a.m., and courteously made no announcements, so that no one would know what station it was, or if we could have a cigarette break.

Ah, cigarettes. I've made up with you since I got back on the ground, now haven't I? In two days I was able to get maybe one cigarette every eight hours. There was no smoking car. There had been on my previous Amtrak ride, which led me to believe this trip would be better than a Greyhound. And maybe it was for all that. Next time, however, I will get a sleeping car, which even has a shower and paid meals. As it was, my underwear were fused to my ass by the time I got off, and I mainly ate microwaved Gardenburgers fused together with grease.

And now I am in the home of American Indie. Eric has grown progressively weirder. He now wears a head scarf, a bracelet and rings; still has a shaved head, and still wears clothing much too big on him, for he is still bone thin. His apartment has two identical cats, a mother cat and her son cat. Both are black and bug-eyed and huge. The mother cat has nine distinguishing features on her belly, but otherwise they are a perfect pair. The mother is called Salome, and the son Babylon. My brother never managed to get his Nebiru cat. It's ride kept falling through.

Eric has five very tiny rooms: two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and the nonesuch. The apartment's probably intended as a single, but he has a roommate, whom I've not met yet. He's fed me mainly peanut butter so far, which is what he generally eats all day. He has found no job yet, but makes some money modelling for thirty six bucks a pop, which he gets roughly twice weekly. (No, it's true, really. Everything I've said.)

I'll be leaving here next Tuesday on a plane for Chicago, and then will drive with crazy Will back to Maryland. See you soon, Scott; Anne, don't drown; Noah, I don't believe you exist anymore, but if you do, shalom. If I don't write again soon, huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugs.