So the bus ride was boring, but I managed to catch a few z's. And voila, Sacramento, the first stop on my tour. I was in Sacramento to meet J. Watters, a contributor for Unlikely Stories who also was also published in the late, lamented Sick Puppy Press web-zine. He's a graduate student and teaches animal behavior at the University of California in Davis, a few scant miles from Sacramento. Sacramento itself was pretty dull; a medium-sized city with no greatly interesting architecture (that I saw), nor any hideous architecture from which I shielded my eyes. It was fine, I mean, why be picky. No point in photographing it though. I called J. (or Jason, as he is called by those in the know), and told him I was in town, 11 hours and 40 minutes late. I then called Pablo, to let him know that if he never heard from me again, it was because Jason was a crazed editor-killer. It was Sunday, around 5 in the evening Pacific Time, March 24, 2002.

Jason arrived in the station. He was significantly bigger than I expected, and by bigger, I mean he was actually muscular. Jason's poems are very masculine for a career academic, and I expected a skinny nerd, perhaps with a pot belly of laziness, someone a little shorter than me with the same basic build. Instead, I met a bronzed Adonis with Tai Kwon Do certificates on his walls. It was intimidating. I knew he was a big fan of Bukowski, but most Bukowski fans don't have the muscle for which Bukowski was known. Jason's a manly man.

So I'm starved, and I ask to buy him dinner. He says that his "mate" is putting together a barbeque, so I'd have to wait, but we'd go for a drink first. I ask him what the hell a "mate" is. He says that he hasn't married his "mate," but she's the mother of his four-year-old son and is more than his girlfriend. I tell him that I don't think we have "mates" in Atlanta. Actually, I spent most of the night making fun of that term, and generally tell him he's been studying animal "mating" for too long.

We drove to Davis, which is a simple little college town, and entered the local watering hole. Jason's bartending friend wasn't there, but the two guys tending bar seemed friendly enough. The bar was mostly empty, and certainly empty of females, so I smiled laviciously at the man at the bar who wore leather and looked kind of like a woman.

"I'd like a margarita," Jason told the bartender.

"What kind of tequila?" came the reply.

"I'd like to spend no more than six dollars."

"You can get our best tequila for that," he said.

"And I'd like a double."

"Oh. OK, we can work it out. And for you, sir?" he asked, turning to me?

"The same," I said. I believe strongly that when one is in Davis, one should do as Davisians do.

Jason has a lackadaisical and extremely self-effacing attitude towards his poetry, so I was surprised when he started talking with knowledge and insight about the various magazines and poets on the Internet poetry scene. He made it pretty clear that he didn't want to be quoted saying anything specific about anyone, but we chatted about the better-known and some of the lesser-known sites. When Jason considers submitting to an on-line magazine, his primary interest is how easy it is to navigate. He's huge on that, and I suspect he held off on submitting to Unlikely Stories for a long time, until I worked out all the navigational quirks. I asked him if there was anything I should do to improve my interface, and he told me that I needed to make a bigger deal out of the new stuff with any given update. One can easily get lost in the old stuff, and that's only natural, because there's so much of it. But he told me to bring the new stuff more to the forefront.

He didn't ask me what he should do with his poetry. But he's been sending stuff to me for years, and probably has a very good idea of what I think is good and what I don't like. Plus, I don't think he really cares. I'll come back to that.

We drank and headed back to his house. It was very much like the house of every other home-owning graduate student in America, except that Jason and his mate Shay have chickens. I imagine that doesn't exactly make them unique among graduate students. Anyway, their house was small, comfortable, and ranch-style. The garage had been converted into a woodworking shop for Jason, which I did photograph. Jason had scrawled one of his poems across the living room wall, because it was his first really visual poem and he wasn't sure what else to do with it. I photographed that too.

Shay is a thin woman with a big grin and a short haircut. I'd just like to point out that I don't really believe in the rule that says that if you're telling a story that happens in the past, all verbs should be in past tense. I'd like you to know that I'm not lazy or sloppy, I'm deliberately ignoring that rule. I'm mentioning that now because I really didn't talk to Shay at all, don't know anything about her, and don't have anything intelligent to say about her. She's a handsome woman, and I have no choice (other than making shit up) but to leave it at that