lots of typing means I'm working... right?

I'm clinging to the couch as the movers, two burly men who communicate in grunts and nods, carry it into the stairwell...

A handful of regulars from my writers group get together on weekends to "write". We meet at a coffee shop, or occasionally in someone's apartment, with laptops, notebooks, and books. Sometimes editing happens, sometimes actual writing happens, and sometimes it's just brainstorming, research, and poking around the internet. Socializing, however, is a given. It always takes more than an hour, often more than two, for us to consume our beverages and settle down into those private mental spaces where imagination happens.

We're at Mike G's place today, and it may be the last time the five of us are together like this, absorbed in our laptops, which harmonize in a concert of cpu fans. (Jess is playing the rhythm section, shuffling and flicking index cards on the desk as she reworks a plot, perhaps the only one engaging as a capital-W Writer.)

I'm longing for this now, doing my best to experience and capture this time with these friends. Mike G and I are sitting on his couch, one of the few pieces of legitimate furniture left in the room. The couch, Mike, and I are all on our ways out of here. He's headed to one end of California, myself to the other. I wonder where the couch will go. Though even if I met it, center of many fantastic, rambling conversations, again, I probably won't recognize it.

Sara claimed the slipcover, comparing the army green waffle fabric it to the paint swatches. Bobby pulled the swatches from his bag with a flourish and showed me the colors of his future. Their future. Bobby and Sara will be housemates soon, a topic which makes me collapse with exaggerated grief each time it's mentioned. Even as I'm moving away, they're getting closer, Bobby moving into the idea space of "housemate" I used to occupy.

After a long stretch of silence, Mike digs into the cellophane bag of hard pretzels. Bobby takes one, then Jess wanders over, then I take one and offer the bag to Sara. So the silence is broken and our crunchy pretzel break begins. Having commented earlier that the rhinestone ampersand would be "cooler" if it was a pretzel, I took my crusty sourdough specimen and strung it on my necklace. "Check out the bliiiiiing!" We laugh. Sara tells me to wear it to the pub tonight. "Then the guys will really be all over me."

Every so often Bobby points to something else in the apartment and says "You getting rid of that?" Reading lamp, reading chair. Curtain rods, now the paper Ikea lamp hanging over what used to be the dining nook.

They're talking about Firefly now, and Doctor Who, the conversation floating over my head as I keep typing and contemplating my fate. Who in California will talk up Cowboys and Aliens to me? Who will spring into a religious debate that rages from old testament to new testament to literalism and back, then peacefully ends with no love lost? Who will smash strange words together and contemplate the pirninjas and the econopocalypse?

"I grew up on Star Trek!" "So did I. You wanna dance with me?" "Check out this picture of Worf." "I know that episode." "It's time for a new generation of Star Trek" "Done by Joss Whedon" "I wonder what he's up to now."
Side by side on the couch with our laptops, Mike and I both go to look. He hits wikipedia, but I go for imdb.

And twenty minutes later, three laptops are simultaneously playing a youtube vidoe dildo lightsaber duel.

---

"I've been hosing my plant down with chloroform."

Ok. This is just getting silly. But that's just why I love them.