MemeMachineGo!

Since moving to California almost 9 years ago, I’ve only seen naturally occurring frozen water a handful of times — a couple of hailstorms, a couple of mornings when there was frost.

But this weekend, I finally saw snow. A whole mountaintop full of it. I even threw a snowball. Pocahontas and I went to Mount Shasta . This may have been our honeymoon — we’re not sure.

All the cliches about the mountain continually changing are true — see for yourself on the ShastaCam . We didn’t get to see any lenticular clouds though.

Mt. Shasta has a history of being considered a sacred place and is at the heart of several delightfully whacked newage hypotheses.There’s a Lemurian city under the mountain. It’s the place to be if you want to meet an Ascended Master . And everyone’s favorite cryptozoological critter, Bigfoot , lives there, too.

We stayed in a town called Weed, home to the Village Oracle , and if I ever start an earthy-crunchy Internet cafe/vegetarian restaurant/concert venue, I want it to be just like that. As I was driving Friday night, I remembered I’d forgotten to renew three library books due Saturday — at $.25 a day, that’d be $1.50 before I could return them Monday, and I wouldn’t have gotten to read them either. But thanks to the Village Oracle, I renewed them Saturday. And they get huge bonus points for using Linux (not sure what flavor — they were running the Gnome desktop manager, though.)

Weed’s social calendar for the year was posted at the Visitor’s Information Center. Pocahontas worried about the Chinese Auction item from February — people would think I’d bought her there. (A reader might be forgiven for having assumed Pocahontas was Native American, but her parents are Taiwanese. She chose “Pocahontas” as her nom du blog because Disney’s Pocahontas had been suggested for her in “What celebrity do you resemble?” conversations. When she first told me this, I thought it sounded silly, but then I looked up some pictures and they really do bear some resemblance to her in eyes, mouth, expressions.)

I serve as Pocahontas’ authority on matters newage, which sometimes leads to difficult questions. For instance, she asked me what the fifth dimension was. I began racking my brains for my not even half-remembered and not ever even half-understood knowledge of superstring theory. Then she indicated that this was in regard to a claim that the Lemurians existed in the fifth dimension. That made it much easier.

There were newage bookstores and crystals for sale. I especially enjoyed the sign for one very large crystal explaining how it so greatly pained the proprietor to put something so vulgar as a price tag on any crystal and that this one was so ludicrously expensive special that he wouldn’t do so, but if you had the resources to offer it a good home, you should talk to him.

Weed has a restaurant called the Hungry Moose, which had someone in a moose suit standing outside with a sign, waving to cars, pointing to the restaurant, and rubbing the suit’s furry belly. We wondered if the Moose had furries chatting him or her up.

Laurel’s Mountain View Cafe in Mount Shasta City had about the best vegan dessert I’ve ever tasted, prosaically named “vegan tofu bars.” I will stalk Laurel until I get the recipe. Well, okay, stalking would be a pain from several hundred miles away, but I will mail her a self-addressed stamped envelope and a polite request, see if I don’t.

While we were there, I eavesdropped on a conversation between two gray-haired guys that featured Pleiadian energy , converting a car to run on orgone energy , legal wrangling over possession of a car that put me in mind of my tax evaders as fanboys entry , and some third party who was an intergalactic commander.

The people were friendly, the mountain was incredible, the weather was beautiful. A good trip.