Connected?

And… Romney didn’t win the election. :o)

I’m sitting up drinking the good beers I scheduled myself to drink, and looking at the results.

Marijuana was legalized in two states, Washington and Colorado. That is, possession and regulated production and sale was legalized, for recreational reasons or just any reason, not just for medicinal purposes.

Another initiative that would have legalized marijuana was in my own state, Oregon, and, although it briefly showed a lead in early-submitted ballots, it failed as expected, but at least I got to vote for it in the year when the line was finally breached.

Also, Maine, and it looks like Maryland and Washington as well, have legalized gay marriage by popular vote.

I am not entirely dissatisfied. *smiles* (That’s a line from an old TV movie titled Remo Williams.)

(And I’d better stop typing soon. These beers I lined up are very good beers. Far too potent for refreshment while typing. It’s showing when I try to look back and see if I need to revise anything.)

***

On Monday morning, as I was helping my mother to the airport on the MAX, which is the electric-train part of our public transit system, I had an encounter. I was sitting with one suitcase, and Mom was sitting some distance away with the suitcase she was carrying, and, after a while, a very nice young woman came over and sat down beside me and asked, “Excuse me… I was wondering who you were talking to.”

I blinked at her.

She said, “Well, you seemed very connected. Very… Were you speaking to someone?”

I said, “I have been puzzling people at bus stops like that for years! No, I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t have Bluetooth, I was just… thinking.” My mother was across the way grinning all over her face.

“Well, is it like you’re just talking to yourself, or is it like…?”

“Oh, I wish I was talking to someone else!” I laughed. “No, I was just talking to myself.” And, to explain what I had said, I told her a little about Gwen and Gwen’s sudden disappearance.

And I’m afraid I was a bit less interesting to watch for the rest of the trip to the airport, because now I knew that someone was watching me. The public veneer had gone up. I said, “Pleased to meet you,” when we got off.

Of course, what I had been thinking would not have explained easily: I was imagining something that I have now and then daydreamed about for years, especially in connection with certain musical tracks – a movie that I imagined being shown, anachronistically, to Victorian Englanders, to their astonishment, this movie depicting a wildly romantic “steampunk” version of their own time as imagined by people in the far future, and titled The Daughters MacMullen.

But this sort of thing does happen to me all the time, although the people around me are usually not so forthright. That’s me: “rich interior life” – or, “I can’t live without moving my lips.”