Last week's guest blogger, Too Much Coffee Man creator Shannon Wheeler, came to us fresh from the San Diego Comic Convention. He hadn't yet recovered.

Over the last 5 days I've been at the San Diego Comic-Con. I thought I would be able to surf the hotel's wifi and blog at the end of each day. It turns out that every waking moment was stolen by working at my tiny booth at the giant comic book convention. I also went to my opera and I tried to make business connections (i.e. drinking in hotel rooms until 4 in the morning). Also, there was a hot tub at the hotel that was open 24/7. The hot tub did not help my work ethic.

Right now I'm driving back from San Diego. I'll stay in L.A. for a couple of days seeing various friends. Then I'm driving to Berkeley for another week of friends, food, and "networking." Then I'm fated for a 12-hour drive back to Portland with my twin 9-year-old boys. I'm not typing while driving (although I'm pretty sure that I saw someone emailing on their iPhone near the Ventura Blvd. exit). I'm talking into a tiny tape recorder, which is 10% safer.

L.A. is unique because it is different. The United States is becoming homogenous. Southerners are losing their accents because children learn to talk, not from their parents, but from TV; TV that's being made in L.A. I can't help but think behavior, morals, attitudes, lifestyles, prejudices, and obviously, the compulsion to consume, are insinuating themselves along with language. It's as if the world's identity is sculpted by Tivo....

Read the rest of Shannon's post and visit the Powells.com blog every day for book reviews, guest bloggers, Brockman's Book News, and more!

Oreo calls from outside the window.

Fup stirs. "Does he not sleep?"

"He must be locked out of his house."

Of course Oreo knows that Lisa or Ryan — someone — will arrive to open the store later this morning, but he suspects that Fup and Bear are inside. He waits two minutes and calls again.

"Let him in," Fup groans. The cat door around back is latched.

"Must... not... open... my... eyes," Bear replies.

Time to escalate, Oreo figures. They hear his paws work the window pane. When they fail to react, Oreo counters with his signature strategy: Wait just long enough to lull them back to sleep, and then call even louder than before.

"I let him in last time," Fup says, but to Bear it sounds like, "I let him win Pastime" — it's hard to make out the words over Oreo's scratching.

What's Pastime? Some game Bear's forgotten? He pictures dapper old cats in sepia tones, walking canes and monocles, and horse-drawn buggies rolling past lush milk ponds. In the middle of the pasture, a large dog wearing dentures barks at the sky, where — listen — hundreds of seagulls squawk in thick Latin accents...

But then Oreo calls again, and Bear wakes from his dream.