So where am I going? I'm flying from San Jose, to Los Angeles, to Honolulu, to Guam, to Yap. It'll take about 15 hours. We stay there six days, do a one-hour hop to Palau, stay five days, do a 9 hour trip to Pohnpei, stay a week, and then travel home via connections so obscure they'll take three days.

I'm going to meet up with my brother Embry in Honolulu, and be with him for the three weeks of the trip. The idea is that we'll do a lot of snorkeling and SCUBA diving together, the Micronesian islands of Yap, Palau, and Pohnpei being primo spots for this.

Embry's five years older than me, and we haven't spent all that much time together over the years. We weren't very close growing up, and as adults we've lived far apart. But he's my flesh, my brother, we have the same DNA, he's the only other person who remembers where all the furniture was in our childhood home in Louisville, Kentucky. The only other person who remembers my parents when they were in their forties. Fellow veteran of the wonder years.

Embry and I have been talking about this trip for months now. In a way, it's a retirement present to myself. My treat. Summer isn't a great time to go to Micronesia, and now I'm free to go at the best season. I really would have liked to bring my wife along, but she has to work.

I was wondering whether to bring my laptop on this trip, but I did. Slight fear of it getting stolen or somehow getting wet — one imagines the Pacific islands as dripping in moisture. But it's five years old, so if I lose it, it's not the end of the world. At one point I was thinking I should leave it at home so as to have a total break from my ordinary life — from the writing and the blogging. Well, okay, I'm not gonna blog during this trip, it wouldn't be practical with, like coconut-shell modems. But, after all, writing is nearly my favorite thing to do. If I enjoy it so much, why feel like I should quash it?

I'm thirty thousand words into a satiric cyberpunk novel called Mathematicians in Love that I'm digging a lot. It's coming along in that nice easy way, almost as relaxing a reading someone else's book. I write a few hours a day to find out what comes next. Another reason for bringing the laptop is that the journal is good company, a friendly ear, my favorite form of psychotherapy. When I get back I can of course mine these notes for a series of blog entries — which is what's happening now.

A big trip like this, so far around the asscheek of the globe, I wonder if I'll make it back. What if I just stayed there for good? Hard to visualize me doing that. The last few weeks I've been wondering if I'll even survive: plane crash, drowning, shark-bite, cone-shell envenomation — I'm, like, let it come down, I'm going. I need this break. I'm very stoked.

I wonder if they do have cone shells in Micronesia, or if they're just down in the Southern hemisphere. I learned about them from Stephen Wolfram years ago; their shells are decorated with patterns resembling the spacetime trails of gnarly one-dimensional cellular automata. My publishers are putting a cone shell picture on the cover of my non-fiction book, and I have some alien cone shells as characters in my novel in progress. I recently learned quite bit about cone shell venom in articles on “conotoxins” that I found on the web.

***

Now I'm on the plane from Honolulu to Guam, a seven hour flight. Sitting next to a Yapese man from Guam, in fact, an unusual-looking fellow, a cross between Polynesian and Asian, as you'd geographically expect. Like Filipinos, with maybe touches of Latino and Indian and African mixed as well. He tells me that parrot-fish are very good to eat.

I'm flying to Micronesia! A place I've wanted to visit for my whole life.

We're over the empty Pacific now. Lots of little clouds down there, like a field of Brussels sprouts or miniature cabbages or bolls of cotton.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2005 at 8:46 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.