Whole set here: Worth checking out, if I say so myself.

And last but not least, I ask you “What the hell is up with this androgynous cowboy?”

We lazed around, recovering for hours, in this huge house. It is a super neat place… old, busted up, needs a ton of work. The kind of place that probably has secret passages and a million dollars hidden in the plaster. It’s the kind of project I’d like to take on if I marry a carpenter. Adam is living in it while the owner fixes it up. You can see Dan on the corner of the porch, probably smoking a cigarette and cursing Jameson.

After finally collecting our brains, we ate a greasy, fried brunch at Huddle House (these gangstas live LARRRGE) where a 40-something waitress wearing a tiara mucked our checks up, but we forgave her because she was a 40-something waitress wearing a tiara.

Then Dan and Colleen left (hope they made it home OK in their clutch-broken car!), Kate left, and I took a nap. Will I someday use up all the hours I’ve been allotted to sleep for the rest of my life? Because I’m well on my way.

It was dark when I woke up, and I drove home to Memphis in a sleepy stupor. Then I went to bed. Huzzah!

Every time I drive on Hwy 51, I see a million things I want to take photos of. I’m always surprised by them on the side of the road, and not quite fast enough to get a shot as I zoom past. Maybe next weekend while it’s fresh on my mind and I can kinda remember where this stuff is, I’ll take a slow photo drive up and back. Guys in suits on skateboards, old men in motorized wheelchairs zipping down the shoulder of the road, dilapidated triangular buildings, that church in Frayser with the neat arches, the Rose Construction sign in Covington and the motel right afterward. All kinds of stuff to see.

And maybe I’ll get a second shot of this truck. If I run into this guy again (and please let it be a guy driving), I’ll jump out and ask him what the hell his bumper sticker REALLY means, and what the hell is in those coolers.

I wish I could say here that I’ve decided to move to the wilderness to report on ecological peculiarities, or that I’ve been asked to study patterns of pedestrians in a packed urban area. But I’m still here in Memphis, in the same old computer chair. Generating maps on bighugelabs.com of where I’ve been and where I’ve got to go. But hey, sometimes a visual reminder is just the kick in the ass we need.

I’ve Gotten Postcards from These Places, I Will Go Here ASAP:

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

And I’ve Been Here, But These Countries Deserve a Second Look:

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

Especially when viewed together, the selected pieces seem to form a continuous organic skin, like a wrapper around…. OKOKOK. I will give up the art talk, because I’m terrible at it. And it makes me feel like a huge douchebag, and like I should be eating through my butt and shitting out of my mouth. The work is organic though. Reminds me of what we see under a microscope, or of satellite images of space. Of the smallest and biggest things we can photograph, coincidentally.

OK I’ll stop now. But seriously, click the links. Beautiful stuff to be seen there.

But, finally, here’s the entry for my last day in San Diego. It’s a win-win: people who enjoyed the story can read one more entry, and people who got bored don’t have to deal with it anymore.

Included: Sea World. A broken camera.

Steven works at a non-profit group home for developmentally disabled adults. He wanted me to meet his ‘clients,’ plus he had to work on Sunday, so in a stroke of genius, he planned a trip for us and two clients to go to Sea World together. Free admission for us, a hopefully fun time for them. We got to the home around 8. Steven was on the clock, so he did some work duties while I helped set up for breakfast and met his co-workers and clients. I don’t really feel comfortable sharing many details of the home and its residents, simply because I only met them once and don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to write about them. But, I will say that they are six fascinating people. I probably could have spent a whole day there just hanging out, listening and watching them do their thing. But, we had some sightseeing to do.

Gina and Bradley were our Sea World companions. Gina’s schizophrenic, Bradley has severe autism. They are also both severely mentally disabled. Gina talks nonstop, Bradley never says a word. The conversation was lopsided, to be sure, but we did communicate. At least as much as we needed to. We got to Sea World early, right when the gates opened. The upside was there were very few people. The downside was, nothing was open. So we shuffled from closed exhibit to closed exhibit, trying to see what we could. Gina got a huge bag of popcorn early on, which she ate entirely (it took her like an hour). We saw dolphins, a tiny aquarium, and seals. Annnnnd, a loose flock of flamingos walked all around us, squawking and flapping their wings and making a whole hell of a lot of racket. Understandably, all the noise scared Gina. And it might have freaked Bradley out too, but he made no sign of discomfort. Right after being caught in the flamingo stampede, we went to the shark exhibit looking for a calm place. Now, we had already been warned that Gina was scared of hills and of going up or down stairs. But how we were supposed to know that the shark exhibit included a dark, hairpin tunnel sloping sharply downward. Even I had a hard time negotiating it. It took us a while, and we knew Gina was getting agitated, but we made it to the bottom. Sweet relief….nope! The bottom was a moving sidewalk inside a glass tunnel, surrounded by water and sharks, and bright and full of people and commotion. Gina, poor thing, yelled “NO!” when she saw it, and shoomp, we slid out an emergency exit right then and there. Steven knew she wouldn’t recover from the scare, so we skedaddled back to the home (but first stopping at McDonalds, which he’d promised them for lunch).

Steven and I had re-entry stamps though. So after making sure they were settled back in at the house, we went for Sea World Round 2. By the time we got back, the place was crowded and hopping. Long lines everywhere. We figured we’d see the biggest attraction first — Shamu. We sat in the splash zone, right up front. Oh won’t it be cute if we get a little wet, we thought. I took a photo of the tank and stage. It was the last picture my camera would ever take. For those of you who don’t know, sitting in the splash zone at the Shamu show is like jumping into a pool with your clothes on. And with your wallet, cellphone, camera and iPod in your pockets. I was laughing so hard, and I didn’t have time to wipe off my sunglasses or even catch a breath before I got pounded again by a massive wave of water splashed over the tank’s edge by an orca’s tail. So, the first thing I do when the show’s over is open my messenger bag to see if everything survived. Yep, looks OK. I take my camera out to get a picture of our sopping wet dumb selves, and pposgjkggghh, fizz. Barrrroooo. Camera’s dead. I got the dreaded “lens error” so infamous with Canon’s cameras. It’s kaput. But hey, now I’m in the market for a new one… a digital SLR? A newer Canon Powershot? The mind boggles with possibilities!

We walked away from the Shamu show so wet that people asked us where we’d been. Haha. From there we wandered, visiting the sharks (and seeing the whole exhibit this time), the seals, the beluga whales, polar bears and penguins. We drank a beer (sheerly for the novelty) while we fed the flamingos. And we saw the Sea Lions & Otter show. I was totally not prepared for how cute and awesome that show was. Trained animals doing impossibly cute things that you have no idea how they learned! A sea lion loading a cannon! An otter carrying a can of Pepsi! A surprise appearance by a trained manatee! OK so maybe it doesn’t sound awesome, but take my word for it. It was.

Sea World took up most of the day. And frankly, all I remember about the rest of the last day was eating nachos at a cool Mexican place and being really exhausted. And I got a sunburn. And I was trying to make every minute last an hour because I didn’t want the day to end, for so many reasons.

Like I said, I’m a bad finisher. So, instead of awkwardly trying to close this up in some witty fashion, I will just stop.

And that, my friends and loyal readers, is The End.

By the wayyyy, if anyone knows how to edit the PHP to refresh that viewer on each page load instead of once an hour, please hook a sista up. Also, if anyone knows anything about computers, typing, CSS, HTML, XHTML or how to keep your calm while seething and banging your mouse against the desk, let me know about that too.

But back to the important stuff. Day Four. COMIC-CON. Includes geeky costumes, scary crowds and Samuel L Jackson.

Hello students, today we’re going to learn Comic-Con: The Basics.

The lessons…

1. Comic-Con is crowded as fuck.
2. Do not expect to get into a panel without spending half the day waiting in line for it.
3. It is considered impolite to sneak photos of people in costumes. In retrospect, this idea is not only disrespectful but also leads to poorly framed, shitty, blurry pictures.
4. If you see something/someone you want to photograph, do it RIGHT THEN because you may never see it again. Like that guy in a dead-on-accurate costume of Terminator 2′s transformed T-1000, complete with bullet holes that I saw for about three seconds as he clawed his way through a crowd. (PS- that guy was headed toward the Terminator Salvation panel line, I shit you not)
5. These are lessons I learned the hard way.

Really, when looking back on my first day at Comic-Con, I am thinking mostly about the missed opportunities and all the things I wish I’d known on Day One. Like, no, you CAN’T just walk up to Tricia Helfer and get your picture taken with her while having a lengthy discussion about Battlestar Galactica spoilers. Or like, don’t worry about how nervous you are about asking someone dressed like Mario to stop for a photo. Or like, 127,000 attendees means 127,000 ATTENDEES. That’s more than my hometown.

So, yeah. Comic-Con was a Comic-Crowd. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have fun. I had a blast. I didn’t take many photos that first day because, well, see above, but also because there are so MANY folks in costumes or weird clothes that a person can become fairly immune to it fairly quickly. Oh, there’s another Storm Trooper. There’s another Asian kid with spiky hair carrying a gigantic cardboard sword. There’s another girl in skimpy anime clothes. And so on.

My first few minutes there are typical of the whole experience…Steven and I register & get our badges. We walk about 30 paces from the registration table, which plops us into the autograph area. It’s been less than five minutes, and we’re still getting our bearings, and who’s at the literal FIRST autograph table that comes into view? Richard Hatch, star of the original Battlestar Galactica and minor player in the new version. I’m stunned, yet…not. Before Comic-Con, I was thrilled at the possibility of seeing him. But now that I’m here, in the middle of all this excitement, he just seems like one more regular guy sitting behind a table signing a gratuitously large array of photos of himself. And in one instant, the thrill is gone. Not for the whole event, mind ye, but for standing in line to get an autograph with him. So, I marvel and freak for a second, then we wander off to other things.

BUT… we did get into three Hall H panels. I specify “Hall H” because that was where the big-dog, mega-special events were. Each panel lasts about an hour. Hall H is a huge, huge room tacked onto the edge of the San Diego Convention Center. It holds 6,500 folding chairs, each one touching its neighbor. Makes for some crowded seating for big asses such as my own. There are three huge HD movie screens set up down the length of the room, so even the people in the far back (like us) can see. And we were among these lucky, chosen few 6,500 people. Haha. We sat through the first two panels to make sure we had seats for the third…

Our first panel was about the new Frank Miller movie, The Spirit (sexy trailer! hot people!). I was interested in this because I am a big fan of Sin City and 300. I was slightly less interested in this because the trailers for The Spirit look exactly like Sin City, same animation style and everything. And while I totally dig it, that’s reserved for Sin City, ya know? Anyway, the panel featured Frank himself, the film’s producer, the star Gabriel Macht, Jamie King, and Samuel L Jackson, who made a point of showing off his t-shirt that read “Mofokos.” And I gotta say… I love Samuel L Jackson. One of the best things about panels, live interviews, etc., is that you can (theoretically) see how actors behave “in real life.” And he’s great. Just as childish and excited and non-jaded as any of us. He seems like a normal person who magically got into blockbuster movies and now loves talking about all his balls-out crazy experiences. Even though this was the Spirit panel, he talked at length about which action figure of him was his favorite (Mace Windu from Star Wars. And yes, that kind of question only gets asked at nerdfest), and how he’s set his different action figures up to fight each other in his office, and about all the huge fake guns he got to shoot in The Spirit. And he sounded just as excited as any geek would have.

The second panel was some animated Star Wars thing we didn’t care about. I did crosswords the whole time, Steven played his Nintendo DS.

The third panel was something Steven wanted to see. And I’m so glad we waited for it. It was hilarious. It was called something like “Entertainment Weekly: The Visionaries,” which translated to “A Panel Of Famous Directors Here to Promote Other Movies.” It featured Kevin Smith, Judd Apatow, Zach Snyder and Frank Miller. I didn’t know, but Zach Snyder directed 300, and was at Comic-Con because he is now directing a movie adaptation of The Watchmen, which Kevin Smith declared was so awesome that he could now stop coming to Comic-Con and die. It’d be hard to recount in writing how funny Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow are, but we laughed the whole time. Even the moderator (EW’s senior editor) was funny! At one point, either Zach Snyder or Frank Miller asked to have a question repeated, and the moderator replied, incredulously, “Uh…what? It’s ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER.” The tone for the whole panel got set at the very first question, which went like this…

Moderator: So, what made you guys get into directing? What made you want to make movies?

Kevin Smith, flatly: I just wanted to get my cock sucked.

And somewhere in there was something like “How does Seth Rogan taste?” “How does Judd Apatow taste?” “He tastes Semitic.”

As well as “Hey Judd, do you know anything about the Pineapple Express car getting towed from in front of the convention center today?”

Judd: “Like…right now?”

“No, earlier today. Uhhh… expired tags or something.”

Judd: “Um. NO. I don’t care about the promotional car. I’m at a point in my career where I don’t have to care about the promotional car………..I mean………I drove it here…..but after that, it’s not my responsibility.”

Tee hee.

And then, after all this Comic-Con excitement, we still managed to get our asses over to Old Town for dinner, where Steven had picked out a sushi place. It’s on Harney Street, and it’s called…Miso Harney. Hawhaw. Fresh sushi. Yum. It was very, very tasty. Too bad we didn’t have more time to shop around in Old Town.

And too bad I don’t have the energy to end this blog gracefully. It’s 2 AM, what can I say. I’m sleepy.