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Locus Party in north Oakland 12/09/2017
#1
It's a big house.  A monstrous house.  I was afraid there'd be trouble parking, because this is officially Oakland and close to Berkeley; but the streets are wide, and all the houses are big and spread out, so there's an abundance of street parking.

After entering and exchanging greetings with the hosts, we head to the kitchen area to get something to drink.  Lady Cranefly finds something non-alcoholic and heads off into the bowels of the house.  Me, I head for the table of wines.  It's been a long drive.  There was a multi-car accident on 880.  Enough said. There's thirty to forty bottles of wine clustered on the table.  I'm alone there, except for a distinguished elderly gentleman sitting nearby staring off into space.  Ten of the bottles have been opened, and they're all empty.  So I fight to open another one.  The corkscrew is majorly screwed up, but I'm getting there.

The gentleman looks my way and asks, "What's that?" nodding at the bottle.

I look at it and say in my most self-assured voice, "I don't know."  I don't have my reading glasses on.  But I hold it out towards him so he can read it, though he likely needs reading glasses too and isn't wearing any.  I notice his glass is empty.  After opening the bottle, I offer him some.  He holds out his glass, and I pour Robert Silverberg a glass of wine.

There's a lot of people at the party, spilling throughout the many spacious rooms of the spacious house.  I'll just drop spacious now, and whatever I say, just understand that it's spacious.

I don't talk much.  I do chat briefly with Rudy Rucker.  He's working on a sequel to The Hollow Earth.  I watch some of Mad Max: Fury Road, which is being projected (without sound) on a wall in one room.  Once I've loaded up on food and drink, I go down in the basement where there's a pool table and home entertainment system, and I chat with a couple friends who are also hiding out down there.

Later, upstairs, Lady Cranefly and I enter one of several living rooms and listen to Ken Scholes as he sings and plays guitar and harmonica for most of an hour.  The highlight for me was a duet of sorts, where he alternately sings in the voices of the Queen of England and Bob Dylan.

He's good.  He performs in small venues up in Seattle on a weekly basis, and will travel if paid.  He's just getting back into writing after a long absence -- essentially, he stopped writing after the death of his best friend Jay Lake.  So it's a melancholy occasion, watching him perform, enjoying his set, but also reflecting on his and our loss and others who have departed too soon or are soon to depart.

There are screeches now and then during his performance -- maybe eight girls ranging from very young to pubescent running about playing hide and seek.  But Ken Scholes is enough of a professional to be unfazed.  The highlight of the game of hide and seek comes when, to everyone's amazement, a cabinet opens next to us and eight girls spill out one by one.

Because of course a house like this has secret passages.
I'm nobody's pony.
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#2
Jay Lake is dead? Robert Silverberg is still alive? I had no idea.
the hands that guide me are invisible
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