Ohio Is Just Like That

Stopped at a service plaza on the Ohio Turnpike halfway between nowhere and nothing, to pee and do anything but stare at moving trucks for a while.

The women's bathroom is wet.

The floors are wet.

The walls are wet.

The stall dividers are wet.

The toilet seats are wet.

The toilet paper is wet.

The paper towels are wet.

The ceiling is wet.

The mirrors are wet.

There is standing water in the wet trash cans.

The bathroom is wet.

There is a wet trail of footprints from the bathroom to every exit of the plaza building.

There is no such trail from the men's bathroom.

Do the men not pee?

Or are they denied the privilege of wet?

One must wonder if the men are happy, deprived as they are of the wet.

---

There is 100 miles to my charge stop.

I pass a tanker of liquid hydrogen.

The right lane is closed.

A sports car passes me at over 30mph delta.

A collapsed farm drifts past.

There is 100 miles to my charge stop.

A field of rusty farm equipment passes.

The left lane is closed.

I pass a tanker of liquid hydrogen.

A line of high-tension towers marches away into free distance.

The sky reaches down to grab the horizon in every direction.

There is 100 miles to my charge stop.

A state trooper pulls out of his hiding spot in the median.

He is so close I cannot see his headlights in my rearview mirror.

He exits the turnpike 25 miles later.

There is 100 miles to my charge stop.

I pass a tanker of liquid hydrogen.

The right lane is closed.

A state trooper memorial sign is falling over.

The left lane is closed.

There is 100 miles to my charge stop.

A driver stands, watching an invisible flame consume a tanker of liquid hydrogen.

The sky gloats at us crawling along beneath it.

There are 100 miles to my charge stop.

---

I enter another county.

A woman screams past on a violet motorcycle, twin braids flying behind her as long as the bike.

The right lane is closed.

My podcast episodes are all finished.

The sky glares at me sullenly.

There are 100 miles to my charge stop.

I enter another county.

I pass a sign advertising food at a service plaza.

None of the logos are familiar.

Gas is $3.119 per gallon.

I enter another county.

There are 100 miles to my charge stop.

A field of radio masts strain up fruitlessly to scratch the leering sky.

I enter another county.

A woman stands on a portable lift, squeegeeing an array of solar panels.

There are 100 miles to my charge stop.

---

The service plaza for my charge stop is deserted.

One woman appears at the pizza counter.

They are out of pizza.

They are also out of salads.

They are out of ingredients for Italian or ham subs.

I can order a turkey sub, though.

I order a turkey sub.

She asks if I want anything else.

I order a drink.

They are out of drinks.

A triple-trailer FedEx drones past.

The flags move listless and limp on the pole outside the plaza building.

Another triple-trailer FedEx drones past.

The red light flashes on top of a water tower.

Another triple-trailer FedEx drones past.

The woman calls my name and hands me my sub and an empty cup.

I try the fountains.

They are out of drinks.

I had ordered the sub toasted.

The oven is broken.

I hand the woman back the empty cup.

She says it is for my drink.

I did not order a drink.

They are out of drinks.

I throw out the cup.

I put the sub in my car and return to the plaza to use the restroom.

The restroom is wet.

You were a good cat. A powerful demon beast without fear and with the intense bravado to make friends and/or fight anything and everything.

How will we know you loved us if you no longer show us with bite and claw?

Making the decision to put you out of your abject pain and misery this week was one of the worst I have ever had to make. But at the same time, I knew it was the right choice, for you and for us. You passed away quietly and quickly between us, content and purring.

We will miss you, Ciaran.

Dark morning freeway

Stars losing ground above to the faint skyscream of cityglow

An ululating flash on the horizon

Stretchers and fire, tractor ripped from trailer, shattered glass and smeared rubber

Darkness again

So I bought a Kia EV6 a while ago, and I now have Thoughts on the common EV DC fast charger networks.

Electrify America

Upsides

Generally my preferred network. Usually one or more 350kW chargers, in good places like near a Meijer or Wal-Mart. Decent prices, and I got like 1000kWh free with the vehicle purchase. Usually easy to tell what power level is available before pulling into a stall.

Downsides

Most often one or more of the chargers at the station are broken, and months go by without attention. Usually only one of the connectors on a charger will work at a time; no simultaneous or split charging.

EVgo

Upsides

Often one or more 350kW chargers. Decent prices, and supposedly 100% green power (though prooooooobably through carbon credits, which, ew). Program card means I can leave my phone in the car. Multiple connectors on the charger are almost always simultaneous and not split.

Downsides

Basically impossible to tell power level without reading the charger manufacturer faceplate or looking in the app; the chargers are rarely marked otherwise. Locations are much more varied and often not as convenient, and the position of the station is often wrong by hundreds of feet. In stations with only one charger, it is often an older 60kW unit.

ChargePoint

Upsides

Uhhh. They are everywhere? And they do do split charging, but...

Downsides

Multiple connectors on a charger will split the available power immediately when a second vehicle plugs in. The station owner sets pricing, and often this means that you pay a) a session fee just to connect b) a per-minute rate (rather that the per-kWh rates that most other networks use) regardless of actual charging speed c) far higher rates in general and d) sometimes even per-minute parking fees alongside the power fees. It is not uncommon to find chargers that are the equivalent to $5-7/gal. The overwhelming majority of chargers are either newer 125kW (which splits to 62.5kW if two are plugged in) or <=60kW. I have even seen ones rated out as little as 20kW which is barely an improvement over the 48A 11.1kW AC rate the onboard vehicle charger can handle. Easily my last resort network.

EVBox

Weird network aimed at commercial proprietary owners. Apparently easy to fuck up the initial setup, making them hard to actually pay for. Usually only AC chargers.

GreenLots / Shell Recharge

A small network, kinda pricy, also pays money to an oil company, but decent enough.

blink

Literally never had one work. All three I have ever tried just failed to talk to the car, much less any of the billing infrastructure.

Unemployment

About a month ago, I was brought into an 07:45 meeting with my team at work, whereupon all of us were informed that, effective immediately, the entire department was dissolved and all of us were laid off. Cool. Over 13 years of work for the same department across three corporations, poof.

So I guess I am looking for work now.

Cider Trip

A few friends invited Jasper and I up to Houghton to make apple cider, as had been a tradition when we were all in school up there.

The trip was great. The colors were close to peak, and the weather was good, that satisfying briskness of fall. My EV6 was a fine car to make the trip in, with charging stops in Bay City, Gaylord, Mackinaw City, and Escanaba. It will be nice when they put one in Marquette.

Relocation

Partway through the trip, Jasper turns to me and says, "OK, so, today is a bad brain day... And I feel better up here than I have in years downstate. I hate my company and job, and you are not currently tied to a job. Wanna move up here? We can invite Jamie too!"

Which was a hell of a thought. So now I am looking into realtors and other relocation information (available options for internet and transgender healthcare, in particular).

Jamie was ecstatic when I invited her. We had already been talking about her moving over to SE MI to be closer anyway, and especially after our (dramatically interrupted) trip to Wausau to visit kumi's polycule household, both of us have had idle dreams of a polycule commune.

But she is also apprehensive of such a comparatively rural area as the UP, even if we choose somewhere like the Marquette tri-city area.

So some discussion needs to happen.

Engagement

As we were departing Houghton, Jasper again turns to me and says something to the effect of "Wanna do a wedding up here next fall?"

Me being already thinking about the possible relocation, I simply replied "Maybe" to a nonplussed boyfriend.

Several hours later, as we left Escanaba after our first charge stop, my subconscious helpfully prompted me to answer correctly, and I clarified that, yes, I was in fact interested in marrying Jasper, and I had been over focused on moving stuff. We laughed and all was well.

I was over at Jamie's place and since the Meijer Gardens were having a butterfly exhibit, we went on a date there. Also there was an excellent temporary exhibition, "Planets in My Head" by Yinka Shonibare CBE, which were amazing works and made me feel lots of things.

Also I took a bunch of pictures! 2022-04-04 Frederick Meijer Gardens trip

So I just published the first three vignettes in the fictional universe that has been living rent-free in my head for the last five or so years.

My polycule a few weeks ago goaded me into writing some of it down, and, uh, suddenly I find I have an entire account at Campfire Write filling up with characters and locations and maps and timelines and aircraft designs. I am asking friends questions about fictional-use callsigns for ham radio and aircraft tail numbers, researching the state of the art in generative design, and generally just finding the ideas pouring out of me.

This is fun! Hot damn.

The universe aims to be a hard science-fiction near-future that develops naturally (if, uh, aggressively quickly) from current technology. I really want to make sure that nothing in-universe is magic.

I am also having a lot of fun making these characters. The core three are already nearly as familiar to me as are my IRL friends. Hell, one of my characters has already taken the story in a different direction than I had anticipated at the beginning; that vignette is incomplete at the moment, but I will likely get it published in a week or so.

I am unapologetically releasing these vignettes in the order I write them; the in-universe chronology is indicated in a heading in each post. Maybe eventually Jamie will help me build a timeline generator for Nikola so there is a place where they are sorted in universe time.

Oh, and as we were joking on Fediverse: anyone not in my immediate section of the polycule deserves $100 to a charity of their choice if they guess what TLMC means before I end up revealing it in-universe. Hit me up on Fedi or elsewhere with guesses.