I’m in a coffee shop in Berkeley, a few blocks from my friend Ben’s apartment. Ben is letting me stay here while I recover from my wild boar attack. I’ve alternately struggled and dealt with my depression for most of my adult life, and being boar-hobbled has me feeling a little down. But the sun is out today, and it helps to be outside and near other people — I’m in a little courtyard area right now, and a nearby couple is talking about sustainable construction techniques. Jefferson Airplane was playing on the stereo earlier, and before that I walked through a gigantic cloud of pungent marijuana smoke with no apparent source. I’m happy that Berkeley hasn’t challenged any of my preconceptions about it.

On the other hand, I got some weird looks and prolonged stares walking down the street today [thanks mostly to my legs], and I’m slightly worried that in a place with a generalized weirdness quotient as high as Berkeley, I’m the one attracting stares.

There’s another person here reading a book with her laptop open in front of her. It’s a 12-inch G4 Powerbook, which was only available from I think 2003 to 2006, and suddenly I wish I could talk directly to the part of my brain responsible for knowing this and persuade it to replace this information with knowledge on what I should do with my life.

Hey Kim, I hope you liked this letter. I wasn’t sure how to finish it, so I drew a caveman playing a keyboard. I talked to a doctor yesterday and he said my legs are in good shape after the wild boar attack and I can “ride the Tour de France” if I want. Personally I think that might be a bit much, but that’s good news anyway. I hope you are enjoying Kansas.

9:22 pm: Good evening, Kim! Right now I am hanging out with a bunch of Bay Area scientists gathered around NASA TV to watch the Mars rover Curiosity land. But right now I really need to touch down in the bathroom and release the number one lander into the porcelain valley, where we’re looking for traces of water.

Sorry, that was weak.

Well, I’m back from the bathroom and we’re still an hour out from the actual landing. The crowd is thinning out. Most of the local commentary in this living room consists of questions about the landing method and remarks about the one guy in mission control who has a mohawk. As you might have guessed from the fact that I’m writing a letter right now, I’m hanging back in a far corner keeping mostly quiet. I think mohawk guy looks like a hard worker who is maybe uncertain on a personal level about where he wants his life to be. But that describes a lot of us.

Waiting to land on mars got boring, so they changed channels. A Kenyan dude is kicking ass on the track. He looks like he’s hardly even exerting himself. Now it’s 9:43 pm.

9:44 pm: An Algerian just peeled out and beat the Kenyan. The American runner looks very vaguely like Abed from Community. Now there’s women’s long jump on TV. It’s really amazing how good these athletes are. Just looking at them, watching them compete, they don’t look like normal humans.

9:56 pm: Now we have the TV showing the Olympics, but the sound is from the NASA feed. This is working really well. It’s like the nerd version of syncing up Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon.

 9:59 pm: “We live in a solar system of riches.” I hope that means there’s gold on Mars!