Nekkid, Clueless and Feelin' Good: March 23, 2001

Friday,
March 23, 2001

Aggiecon bound -- kinda

I'll be damned. After all that to-ing and fro-ing, this afternoon rolled around and I was given the green light to leave town. Hotcha.

Not wanting to give them a chance to change their minds, I dashed home, threw some clothes into a bag, threw this computer into its backpack, threw everything into the car and headed down to College Station via the directions posted on the Texas A&M website.

Useful Note: never rely on Texan driving instructions. Ever. I don't know why, but Texans seem to think of taking the shortest path between Points A and B as cheating. They believe it builds moral fiber and improves your general outlook on life to take the scenic route through two accidents, three road construction sites and ten different speed traps. That's the only possible explanation for these absolutely dreadful Aggie instructions (unfortunately, I was already halfway there where I found the fast route in my just-purchased road atlas. There are still clumps of my hair littering the roadside on Route 6).

Finally, after about five and a half hours (for what should have been a three hour trip), I straggled into College Station. Found the hotel, tossed my bags in my room, staggered down to the Memorial Student Center and purchased my membership, sat in on a panel hoping to find the beauteous Julia (who, it turns out, was napping in her room not fifty feet from where I was wandering), then went back to the hotel to eat at the next-door Applebee's and take advantage of the fact that I wasn't driving and could drink.

Then I wrote. Did I mention that the one silver lining about being stuck in traffic for so long in downtown Dallas was a corker of a story idea? Well, novel idea, to be honest, spurred by the fact that Dallas is simply loaded down with pyramids -- they're on rooftops, pillars, posts, churches, hospitals, offices, everywhere. The city surely must be a locus for pyramid energy, I mused idly, should anyone know how to manipulate such stuff, someone like, oh, an ancient and very, very evil Egyptian queen who plans to come back to this plane while her mummy is on display in a Dallas museum exhibit on ancient queens. Of course, the only one who can stop her is an amateur historian and waiter who also has a wild psychic talent, but first he has to convince the dubious assistant museum curator that some serious shit is about to hit Dallas, and naturally other weird elements such as Southern Baptists, a Grey Panther biker club and the SCA coalesce around them as they desperately try to save Dallas from an ancient, lurking evil that hates barbecue.

The working title is "A Preponderance of Pyramids," I already have a big chunk of the outline and the opening scene written in my head, and now I have to get it all onto paper. How do I get myself INTO these things?

Late Addition: the next entry here will be Monday's, as I'm still working on my con report. As soon as it's finished, I promise I'll post a full review of this weekend -- in the meantime, you can always check out pictures of the dance and assorted folks here.

And no, there are no pictures of me. Who do you think was working the camera?

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