Intrepidly reporting from Portland, Oregon: land of zero sales tax, except on hotel rooms. Some hotel rooms have little water glasses covered in paper sitting in the bathroom. Some have cheaper glass or lucite cups in crinkly plastic bags there. This one has disposable cups made of blister-pack material. Such is motel 6. On my left, the fixed-aim tempurature modifier blows ductfuls of hot air over me. I can feel the growing whiskers in my cheeks itch as they catch the warm currents. The sensation of dense, warm air moving over my face is greasy and distracting.

I'm heat-irritable.

On my right, someone is appreciating the warmth. She lies on the two dimensional, noisily printed bed like an apple on lichened rock. This place doesn't really match us, but we fit in here. I've brought some of my intricate junk with me, so I can keep an eye out for approaching emergencies. My laptop has a channel cut through its innards with a hole on one end and a blower on the other; it likes the warmth about as much as I do. Also like me, it radiates thermal energy in a bid to dissapate watts of heat by-products. My metabolism isn't quite as neat, but I make less noise when I'm running. She's sitting across from me now, head down like a librarian.

I've got donuts in reserve. Sitting on the counter like a box of donuts. Making donut noises and living out their short donut lives. Perhaps some of the donuts are revolutionaries. They try to incite the complacent majority of donuts into rising up for change. The docile glazed-cake demographic collectively continues to sit helplessly on its greasy, fried, toroidal bottom. Donuts don't have complicated lives. They sit around at the donut shop, segregated, thinking fearfully about bagels, leathery savages from across the aisle. Donuts want nothing more from existance than to be eaten, perhaps with coffee. Like people, most donuts are hollow.