It's 2010! Where's my f#@$#ing jet pack!?!?!

Anywho.

New Year, first blog of. Won't be long 'cause I'm busy. I'm currently engrossed in writing what started off as a short story and is slowly turning into a novella about an American who moves to Iceland and inadvertently kick starts a minor apocalypse by releasing a bunch of Lovecraftian huldufolk.

When not obsessing on that, I'm trying to decide the moment and the manner in which I will be heading back to far Cascadia to try to experience the land of my birth as an sane adult, something I've never really done.

There are 4 options on that. Option the first is to be smart, save up as much as possible, take August off (paid vacay) to tie up loose ends and jet home in September. Option the second is to save up as much as possible, go hang with the Spanish contingent outside of Logrono for the summer and fly home in September. Option the third is pretty much the same except that I bum around Europe for a month or two, doing the grand tour and all.

Then there's option the fourth. The option that scares the crap outa me while twitterpating me at the same time. Ship most of my stuff home in May. Fly to Boston. Get gear together. Start with my bike's back tire in the Massachusetts's Bay, hook up to the Northern Tier Trail, and don't stop until my front tire hits Commencement Bay in Tacoma. I have no idea if I'd be physically capable, mentally capable, or financially capable of doing this. But I want to. Badly.

'Course, all of this is dependent on my getting a job in Tumchuck Ilhallee. Which isn't exactly easy at the moment, so I'm dusting off the ol' resume' and trying to network out to friends and fam that might be able to hook me up.

That said, I need to leave Iceland for a while. Surprisingly it not the depression, the politics, the xenophobia, or the poverty that's driving it. It's just straight up homesickness.

I've dreamt Washington for the last two weeks. Vivid, evocative dreams that leave me aching for a home that hasn't been "home" for nigh-on 16 years.

Time to go.

Be it further resolved...

...that I'm not gonna bitch about work on the blog anymore.

This has nothing to do with any improvements at The Children's Correctional Gulag #108. It has everything to do with getting Annageek to stop with the excruciating mocking of me.

You win, OK?

No seriously, you win!

Stop!

So now that that's out of the way, I've been enjoying my Xmas books immensely the last couple of weeks. I started out (literally on Xmas morning before I'd even finished opening the other goodies) reading Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life.

Incredible! Inspiring! Fascinating! I love this book, love it love it love it!

Which, considering just how much I usually despise biography as a genre,especially the pretentious and utterly egocentric Icelandic autobiographies that every single Icelander is required by law to publish before or shortly after they die, is pretty surprising.

(Let me repeat it one more time: THE THREE VOLUME COLLECTED MEMOIRS OF AN INBRED SHEEP FARMER IN DALVÍK SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER BE A BEST SELLER!)

Oddly enough, the only other autobiography I've ever really like was also by an Anarchist and contemporary of Goldman's, Peter Kropotkin. His Memoirs of a Revolutionist was nearly (thought not quite) as good as Living My Life.

After Goldman, I indulged in a little brain-free fantasy, devouring For a Few Demons More, the fifth in a wonderfully fun series of post-(quasi) apocalyptic fantasy stories featuring bi-sexual vampires, bad-ass pixies and a the hottest (although unluckiest) red-head spell caster since Willow.

ahhh....Willow....

After that I tore through China Mieville's brilliant Perdido Street Station and his orgasmically good The Iron Council.

Yesterday I started Plenty, a book by two Vancouverites who decided to try a diet consisting of only foods produced within a 100 mile radius of their home. So far, its a fascinating read. I was hooked from the first chapter-heading quote, a bit of graffiti the author found in the city: "Man is born free and everywhere in chain stores".

Lucky for them though that they live in the hot-bed of C.S.A. that is the Cascadia. They may have a hard time getting wheat, but my ol' neck of the woods grows damn near everything else. I'm excited to finish the book.

All this reading, especially when combined with two other books I received Xmas and look forward to re-reading, E.F. Schumacher's enlightening Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered, and Kirkpatrick Sales' rowdy Rebels Against The Future have left me with a peculiar longing to go back to the States...or more accurately, to go back to Cascadia, and take an active part in the slow local revolution that's sprouting up from the home soil.

Not that I will. I just want to.

My ma, The Honorable Peggy, has been working with the Cascade Land Conservancy to protect and develop sustainable farming in the upper-reaches of the Carbon River Valley area before the last of its incredibly fertile soil gets paved over with ugly track-housing. The red-neck (not the cool I.W.W. kind, the Jeff Foxworthy kind) town I went to High School in has its own local brewery now, and the "eat local, act global" meme has even caught on amongst the folks who used to rail against "tree-huggin' faggots" and thinks that anyone who didn't like Bud was "a city-slicker snob".

I'd love to help her out.

Plus it would give me an excuse to visit my newest nephew (two in three months!!!) Nathan. Congrats Jen and Daryl!!!!

But the way things are at the mo', I'll be another year or two before I can manage anything other than the typical 2 week trip home.

Oh well...the women are better looking here....

That's all for now dear blogadytes...more on the flip.