I’ve seen much of the US, but I’ve never been out of the country.  My favorite place is Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Snohomish, Washington would come in right behind those.

Entangledversion also asked, in another message, to tell the story of how Wong and I became friends…

Sometime around 1989, I had an art class that just let me do whatever I wanted. I had excelled past what that teacher could actually teach me, so he just let me kind of hang around and occasionally turn in a drawing. I got bored a lot in that class, and I eventually noticed a quiet guy sitting away from everyone else. From time to time, some of the more obnoxious guys in class would walk up behind him, look over his shoulder, and a giggle about whatever it was he was drawing.

It turns out that they weren’t laughing at his artistic ability — he was actually pretty good. They were laughing at the content. I don’t remember what it was, but I know that he regularly turned in some pretty odd work that would vary from football players running some play, to soldiers sitting calmly down to dinner in the middle of the desert, while bombs went off in the background. The drawing they saw was probably a combination of those two… which he did pretty regularly.

For weeks, I pestered him to come over and sit with me so I could have another artist and warped-humor person to talk to. He never did, so I eventually just started sitting beside him, totally against his wishes. We were polar opposites as far as outward appearances went. He was a conservative kid who didn’t talk much. I was an extrovert who dressed like an 80s metal star — black trench coat, chain belts, fingerless gloves, long hair.

Slowly over time, he loosened up around me and started to talk a little, and I found that his humor was exactly like mine. Which was something huge for both of us back then because counting both of us, there were only three people in that entire town who shared our style of comedy.

The day I knew for sure that we’d be friends was when I picked up his history book. I used to pretend to steal things right in front of him, as if I was being clever, and he’d always tell me, “I clearly saw you take that. You’re not a world class thief.” Then, I’d put it up my shirt, so that the corner stuck out of my neckline, and the material wrapped tight enough around the stolen object that you could see the outline of it through the shirt. And of course, he’d play along with a badly acted, monotone, “Oh no. Where has my book gone? How will I ever pass my history class without it?”

After doing that for the hundredth time, I finally opened it up and started reading it, as if my reading was allowing me to steal the information out of the book. The first thing I saw was a picture of some colonial dude with a gigantic 70s style afro drawn on him in ink. Below it was a caption, calling attention to his “beautiful, luxurious fro.” Next page — same thing. In fact, there was an afro drawn on every picture in the book. And not just on the humans. There were afros on horses, trees, buildings. Afros everywhere. It was at that exact moment when I knew we’d become best friends.