I Am Utterly Tired

I am not about to let myself stop writing just because I'm in America, a land where I come by indolence much easier. Things can be pushed off when you're there for the rest of your life. Unless I'm not, which frankly seems a bit likely. London's calling, as are Glasgow, Glastonbury, Paris, and places I didn't get to: Dover, the Lake District, wherever Freddie Mercury and John Lennon are hiding. American college and American pets brought me back, and it must be said that the rain smells much better here, but England was stellar. I harbor a deep suspicion that I'll do a writing MFA in England if I don't get one in Boston. We'll just have to see what I pull off.

I got to America yesterday at 9pm and 2am. I felt pretty good. The plane ride had been smooth and pleasant--I don't get scared by airplanes anymore--and I made friends with the 22-year-old Franco-American engineering intern sitting next to me. Kate Bush sounded good among the clouds, as did the 1975. I reset my watch to 6pm every hour for the first five hours, which added to the dreamlike serenity that came with chasing the sunset at 30,000 feet above sea level. Customs was seamless, and my family admired my new style and travel-hardened shoulders.

I am pretty jet-lagged, and writing to stay awake. I sincerely doubt that I am writing well, and am apprehensive of the effect that re-entry might have on my writing.

I was nervous that I would lose the independence and personal change wrought in Europe, and I have indeed become less constantly alert and joy-seeking in the day since my re-entry into what I perceive as the real world. What with the senior week events that my brother and the family are going to, the parallel organization of five people's agendas (it would be six, but the oldest is still training in OKC to be an air traffic controller), and the physical labor of moving college students out, my previously necessary self-centeredness has dissipated. I am a unit in the family machine, albeit a much more capable and responsible one than before. We'll see what happens when I get home properly--I think it'll be easier to carve out a new space when there aren't events to sit down at.

Zeke (brother) was officially inducted to Phi Beta Kappa today, making him Harvard Concentrate. He wears a gown that bleeds when wet, and a mortarboard with tassel. You'd think the richest university in the world could cop the graduates marginally well-made gowns, not to mention cooler hat designs, but apparently it's the cardboard placards and oozing nylon dresses for the win. We are all very proud of the young Ebenezer Scrooge who now swoops about his campus, accruing papers and handshakes and honors before he flies off to grad school at the same school, but GRAD SCHOOL, you dig.

There is no conclusion to this blog post.

The End

The buildings in London were so mismatched and colorful and it was so easy to squint, imagine no asphalt and no McDonald's signs, and see the city three hundred years ago. I knew that with a good enough jackhammer, you could go down into the past. London has strata, and I nestled happily into them like I was coming home.

I don't think a trip of this magnitude--temporal, geographical, personal--could be reflected on fully in a single blog post. The fragments will rise through over weeks and years, in the stories I tell, the ways I act, the art I make. The time away from home is ending, but the time that my historians will call "The Era of the Trip" is going to continue for a long while. I'll have to reintroduce myself to my surroundings, and this will be strange. I only recognize the boy who got on the plane to Heathrow because we live in the same body. I suppose I'm the next version of him--the next version of me. I seem to update every once in a while. Everybody does. This trip grew me so much. I fear it might be inexpressible, which isn't to say I won't try.

The Isle of Skye was my first run of taking care of myself, day and night, for a long enough period that I could, potentially, kill myself through neglect. Much to my delight, I survived me with nothing more serious than a chest infection. The island is a paradise, a mind-scorching exposed fracture in the world that has to be seen in pictures to be believed; in person it's far too real. I will certainly be back. I probably owe money to a man named Stuart. Not that I borrowed any money or met more than perhaps three guys named Stuart; it just seems likely on a place like Skye.

The nomadism that defined the next two weeks wrought me into a stoic traveler, a load-carrying, quietly sweating self-transport machine who learned to handle every travel issue with a screen of cool emotionlessness. The bus driver pretty much never got to me.

Glastonbury was one of the best weeks of my life. I wrote about 2,500 words a day in a room whose windows were curved so I was nearly surrounded by the famously magical countryside. One day I got up early enough to see the sunrise through the hilltop Tor. I participated in an extremely camp May Day festival. I met a man named Stuart.

Paris was the quickest two weeks, I think. Pleasant, beautiful, beggaring.

The rest of the trip ensued. You heard about it.

When I was very young, my brother was active in the Champlain Valley Union High School production of Pirates of Penzance. I think we saw the performance twice, and I haven't forgotten how smashing it was, nor how delightful to play with the toy cutlasses in the reception area, being the Pirate King, fighting the fiendish Mr Miskavage, who wielded a music stand, and I knew those evil smooth sharp things could hurt.

My brother had friends at CVU, and I met some of them. I remember the things I liked about his friends more than his friends themselves. In the intervening years, a sort of ideal friend appeared in my imagination. In high school or in college, I wanted to make friends with sort of tall, skinny boys with big smiles and baggy sweaters, boys who would joke about books and theater and always listen to you. Boys with rumpled hair. These were my ideal fellows, the ones who would go forth with me into whatever we were doing, walk around together, comment on the scenery. The kind of friends you'd find in a certain kind of contemporary YA novel.

As it happened, I didn't make long-term friends in high school, and generally found it easier to befriend girls. My brosephs (said ironically) didn't manifest.

I don't know if I'll find this very specific type of steampunk-academic friend in college--it no longer concerns me as much as it used to. On this trip, I've made friends with pretty much any type of person, and I've outgrown the need to look like my friends. In retrospect, it's pretty strange that I would create these strange holograms in my head.

A few days ago, I was getting dressed to go outside. Grey jeans, Doc Marten boots, a blue sweater, and the big floppy leather frock coat that has become a skin. I went to the bathroom for a drink from the sink and caught a look at myself: a man with tired but amused eyes, tufted busy hair, a baggy sweater, looking like he had seen some things. A guy you'd want to talk to in a dorm hall.

At the start of my trip, I liked talking to people but hated how it made me feel: self-conscious, always analyzing from some angle or another, feeling like the least interesting part of the conversation even when the other person was boring me immensely. I didn't like transport, and always felt shouted at by someone. I suspect I didn't like myself very much. Things have changed in these two months. I feel like an adult, but not in the way I always feared. I'm not trodden down, joyless, without imagination, all the things the worst grownups make you scared of when you see them. Instead, I see my life ahead of me: work, friends, college, more travel, whatever happens next (whether or not my writing career happens)--and I feel ready. I don't know if I've ever felt ready for a next step in my life before, but I am now. Eager, even.

And the change, I don't know how, is physical. In aspect, dress, and manner, I have transformed. I don't look like the nervous little boy anymore. I look like the friend I've always wanted.

Thank you to everyone, especially my parents who are kindly funding the last two days of the trip. (I have run out of my own money, lol.)

Uhm uh this is a blog poast

My writing brain is off today. Here is the blog.

My parents gave me a big present today! A blue suit! Zowie! That's amazing!

Thank you parents!!! Xxx

Rolling off the fog

I'm at the Rodin Museum.

It is beautiful here.

Once I'd purchased my ticket, I was directed out of a door and found myself in a huge garden.

The museum starts by being a garden.

More things should start as gardens.

It is beautiful here.

The flowers--rare roses, peonies, things that bees like and indeed there are bees here--are in verdant late-spring bloom. They line the paths and spread into garden squares on diagonal, four facing in. In the middles are statues, risen like great black metal plumes, each expressing an emotion, and each doing it perfectly.

The garden is huge.

I am still in the garden.

I saw the Thinker and wondered for a moment why the gold shine on the knees and elbows was missing; and then I remembered that of course the shine never happened on the real thing, just on the bookend Thinkers that prop up my dad's dusty paperbacks about music theory.

I took several pictures of the Thinker. His butt is more comically prominent in real life.

Honoré de Balzac was a French author. Rodin did a sculpture of him that stands in the next square, the one after DanteCronusHades. He looks like a stuffed Shakespeare.

The plaque said that when Rodin unveiled the sculpture, it sparked outrage. The plaque doesn't say why. I can only assume Balzac's fans didn't like being reminded that he looked like a taxidermied English playwright.

An American woman near me asks her companion "Who even was Balzac?"

For a moment I consider privately scorning her lack of culture, standing up straighter with the knowledge that I could tell anyone who asked who Balzac was, sight unseen, but then I remind myself that I only know Balzac's name and occupation because he was name-checked by an overeducated Russian boy in conversation with Baba Yaga, in a novel I read once called Egg & Spoon, by Gregory MacGuire. I haven't read a word of Balzac, nor do I intend to. It would be unfair of me to sneer, even just in my head.

Rodin's sculptures are quite beautiful themselves, but this afternoon, I am having a hard time appreciating them. I know they're amazing, well-wrought, expressive; I take pictures of the ones my family would like most. But you see, this afternoon my heart sits heavy with a bout of depression.

I don't know the source. I know it's not the disaster of yesterday, when I lost my ticket on the Metro and ended up between €30 and €80 in debt to the city of Paris. (We find out tomorrow  the price of meeting metro agents that the metroman on the phone said were the most overzealous metro agents he'd ever heard of.) It's not the events of this morning, which were nothing but positive: I got up early and made pancakes for the family, went shopping with Segolene for amazing clothes, and had a nice lunch of leftovers from the dinner the night before.

I don't have a reason to be sad, but I know I don't need one. These strange episodes, where my mind is always preoccupied with nothing preoccupying it, just a swirling vortex of preoccupation with a false center, cannot be dealt with rationally.

I am writing.

I'm sitting on a beautiful old decaying bench of wooden slats set on iron frame set into two pieces of stone that bookend the object.

The space I am in is on the borderland of the Rodin Museum. There are no sculptures here.

There are two sandboxes.

A little bit earlier there was a child here, a baby really, with their parents. It looked very like me as a baby, and it was crawling on the rich soft new grass. I got a nice picture of the huge Colosseum of hedgerows with the baby in the foreground and the Museum showing in the archways.

Happy things now.

I got the Jack White red pants I've always wanted.

I got some gorgeous royal blue pants that suit my cherry-red Docs just fine.

I look like Robin Goodfellow in my new green striped shirt with the collarbone scooped neck and the baggy middle.

Amos Wobber invited me to spend a weekend at his house this summer, listening to the music we text about and seeing the places that shaped us.

My French hosts have been nothing but kind and generous.

I'm meeting my friend Isabel for a drink and a chat later.

My brother Zeke is about to graduate from the United States' preeminent university, and I get to see it all happen.

Thomas Hardy wrote with a clever and gentle humor.

Sally Rooney writes with an expressive expediency to her tone.

People say I write well.

I am in a beautiful garden.

I should go back.

A long thesis statement that i hope isnt too boring or bad

My favorite Old English kenning is weardloc, however it's actually spelled. Literally, weardloc (or something)  corresponds to the English words "word hoard." Translated for meaning, it connotes "vocabulary and rhetorical skill." It's first seen in Beowulf, in an early scene of verbal confrontation. A warrior named Unferth, jealous of Beowulf, or scared of him, or looking to score points in front of the warriors of Hrothgar's meadhall, challenges the veracity and splendor of the eponymous hero's deeds. Beowulf, in response to poor Unferth's challenge, "unlock[s] his word-hoard." By dint of superior intelligence, storytelling, and the heroically superlative excellence that led him to do the things he did, wins the first ever transcribed rap battle.

I learned that when I was sixteen, sitting in at a British Literature lecture by Chris Vaccaro, an adjunct professor who was smart and cool and bald, and whom I desperately wanted to impress. The idea of words being a treasure, a tool, even a weapon, struck me. I knew words as a soft safe space, but as a tool used in the real world of chewing gum and inhumanity--gosh. A chest of words that could level an opponent in four paragraphs was as cool or cooler than having a big sword. I'd probably pinpoint that day as the first I started trying to refine my innate proclivity for the English language and write.

It's hard for me to see whether or not I'm writing well on a given day. I think I'm too close to the things I write down to comprehend them fully at first, and I don't always feel like I'm in the driver's seat of what I set to pixels in black and white. I feel like I'm a one-person Civilian Conservation Corps crew commissioned to build the Grand Coulee Dam without the blueprints. All I have is the space I'm working on that day, and what I'm supposed to do to it. I can't see the shape of what I'm making at first, not until I've been doing it for days or weeks. I'm not in charge of anything more than the stretch of cliff face in front of me, and all I can do is jackhammer it as smooth as is in my power before moving on to the next bit of hard, crannied stone.

Words have become more busy and packed inside me in the last four years; it becomes more of a necessity to spill them out. In Beowulf, words are treasured and rare things, like healing nectars and poison-tipped daggers, to be safely stowed and brought out only when their power was needed. Now, in the world of museums and libraries and the internet, words are everywhere. Words are like bees, swirling around us on signs and phones and books and the dashboards of cars.

And there are people who have beehives inside them, and the bees breed. We try to let them out before they overcrowd, overheat, and die, and before we perish from the sickly sweetness of the honey we haven't harvested.

I'm probably sounding very pretentious, as though words and writing are my Great Purpose in life. You may be thinking,

"This is awful big talk from someone with no published stories and essays, saying their expressed ideas and opinions are of some cosmic importance even though, given their background as the demographic who've always been given the most ample opportunity to speak their mind, probably has the least to say of anyone."

If you're thinking something like that, either I'm not writing clearly or you are as judgmental as the part of my psyche that's always telling me that. If my words are construed to mean that I consider myself a literary demigod, then they are misconstrued. I'm trying to say that words have become, through a childhood spent reading books and an adolescence spent writing them, a fundamental part of my being. I used to write because I wanted to be famous. Now I write because to not write is an act of self-harm. I keep this blog to keep myself writing, and on the off chance that anyone enjoys what I write. The world becomes a nicer place. And it makes me happy.

People do the things they do to understand themselves. Or at least I do. If I went through life without trying to process my thoughts and feelings into a comprehensible written form, I would be ridden by a mute gargoyle, a depressive numbness that keeps against sunlight and dappled shadows and smiling at people who need a smile and ignoring people who want to be left alone. I know this to be true because it happens.

Professional authorship used to be a fancy of mine, a vanity of imagination. Now, to be paid a living wage on the strength of my compulsive self-therapy would be the kindest thing that could happen to me. I would be a professional world-observer, a thought-provoker, the person who reminds people in sleeping shells of ordinary to sit up and open their eyes. I desire it so so much. If I fail in this, then I fail in this. Life has no compensatory kindness if I do. And honestly, my biggest fear is, as David Bowie put it about someone he made up, that I'm "made to be an artist, but not a good artist." I write now to keep that fear at bay, because most paradoxically, spilling paragraphs of introspective fear and stubbornness is what makes me the most serene and sure of myself.

I honestly, truly have no idea whether or not I just wrote six or seven paragraphs of good writing or whether it was all self-indulgent schlock. I don't know if I can know one way or another, not when the writing is this personal.

The best I can do is unlock my word-hoard, let out the bees, and see what honey they've fomented in my absence, while I ate breakfast, sat on a train, paid two euro for coffee and a croissant and a visit to the bathroom, and sat down in Luxembourg Gardens to finish a book.

Thanks for reading.

Some things i have learned on my trip

First, something about art. Art is pretty cool. I've enjoyed it, to my memory, since my second-ever memory, in which I read a book for the first time. (Sam sat on Mat in the book. It's thd central plot point. I've felt an enmity with Mats, Matts, and Matthews my whole life, and I suspect the reaction is Pavlovian. We've been at war since my first story. Mattys are okay, for some reason.) As I've grown a brain in odd, non-linear stages and jumps, I've come to think that art is the best thing there is. A shorthand for comprehending the inexpressible; it's someone else's best shot at marking down a corner of the universe. Making art is, on the face of it, a very selfless thing to do. Many people, when confronted with great beauty or sadness or terror or anger, deal with it in some odd private way and go on with their lives. The artist comes out with a synthesized reaction, a gift for anyone else who has ever been awestruck, depressed, terrified, or absolutely bloody furious.

But what I'm learning, as I enter my fourth year of trying to make good art, is that if you're doing it right, making art is the most selfish thing you could do. Good art is an excision of the self, ripping out bits of you that you'd rather have on the outside. Thoughts, ideas, and things more homologous and inscrutable than thoughts and ideas. In many cases, the finished work that the public adulates is just the receipt from a session of self-administered therapy. This makes it all the more beautiful and miraculous when something you've made speaks to other people; you learn that you, in your weird, long-since-illogical mental stews and labyrinths, are not as unique as you feared. The best art unifies people in surprising ways.

This means that complaint, in itself, does not make for good art. I'm talking about the stuff of first poems and bubble-gum pop music: weary lists of doldrums and miseries, complicated and not complex. The artless stuff of bad conversation. (For years I made terrible, complaining-type art. There's a reason I didn't show you, @my family.) Here we see a paradox form, because a lot of the best art is complainy. It's sad, angry, and/or has a bone to pick with society. See, good art digs beyond "I'm sad/angry/belligerent and I want you to know" into the very nature of sadness, anger, and rebellion. Good sad art has things to say about emotions we all feel, sourcing from the specific experiences of the artist/s. They tell you their story, but in such a way that you end up hearing yours much better than usual.

Good art builds from shared blueprints to make something unique. To make good art, I have to be brutal, dig into my saddest, most inglorious memories, rip entire chunks of my life into Microsoft Word and spin a story out of the ooze. Good art is incredibly difficult to make, and I think I might be starting to pull it off.

That's something I learned about art.

Here's another thing: almost every day on this trip, I've been confronted by something of unfathomable beauty. The Cuillin range was the first, pluming up around my suddenly tiny bus on the sunset ride into the highland world of rock and water. The University of Glasgow's bell tower was another;  I saw it from a city park, just as the city evening was gathering its skirts to leave, bats flitting above my head while the Velvet Underground told me what Stephanie said. City metros, for some reason, also command my attention as things of beauty. I've been trying to empty my head when I see things that are so much more interesting; I tried to let the world fill me. This, I think, speaks to a lack of self-esteem, that I would think a mental void better equipped to take in sights of wonder than whatever I'm working with. I'm happy to say I figured out a better way just now.

As I ascended the stairs up out of the metro at Trocadéro, a brace of identical golden-stoned buildings lowered into view, facing each other across an open marble pavilion. I, the buildings, a few hundred tourists, four food trucks, and peddlers of ghastly Francoiserie trinkets, we were all on a rise, elevated from the city center, green trees in the gold light surrounding us. The pavilion opened out to look down at the natural amphitheatre spread before us, and looming in the middle of everything, huge and ghostly, was the Eiffel Tower.

It makes me very happy that something as big, as impractical and improbable and beautiful as the Eiffel Tower exists. It doesn't fit in its surroundings at all. The way cars dart under it and each leg takes up half a city block, you'd think it was an alien ship that landed as the dawn mists rose, and the cacophony of horns and voices is the city's panicked reaction. The Eiffel Tower, like all the monuments I care about, is special to me because of a story. This one is a steampunk trilogy by Kenneth Oppel that I went through three or four times in middle school and which I loved. I haven't been able to find it in any bookstores here, and I don't know if I will find it again, but the stories were some of my favorites, with elements of Jules Verne's surreal animalia, Victorian swashbuckling, and the heartbleed coming of age style that I've always been partial to. As I recall, the stories were set in a 1910s in which airships were the prime mode of transport, islands were still their own secrets, and giant squid kept aloft by helium lived in the stratosphere. Something as audacious and loud and steampunk as the Eiffel Tower fitted quite naturally into the stories, and it's those stories I think of when I look at the highlight of whatever World's Fair that was and enjoy the knowledge that the world is a deeply weird place.

That ^ there is what I'm now thinking when I look at amazing things. Instead of trying to vacuously absorb the views without sullying them with my imperfect language, I'm sullying the Dickens out of them and getting much better at it. It's better, and less cowardly, than assuming I can't. That's something else I've learned.

I've learned how to be happy with myself in all my strangeness and contradiction. I no longer feel the need for anyone's approval; I know what kind of person I like being. I can be a writer and comic and man of charity and feminist and caretaker and salesman and friend and brother and son and someone who likes rude jokes and music aficionado and role model and cusser and child and adult all at the same time without an authority figure giving me the OK. That's very wonderful.

I've learned how to spend time that nobody wants to buy. I've learned how to keep everything in mind so I don't forget anything important. I've learned how to treat people who are sober and people who are off their heads. I've learned that everyone is a Me.

I've learned that some people are born with knives in their chests, and that writing is an act of pulling those knives out. It's hard and scary and completely counterintuitive, but it's the best thing I can do. I'll heal in the long term, and the stuff that comes out when I free myself is the best thing I can give to the world.

I've learned how to write awfully long blog posts on a cell phone.

Thank you for reading, everybody who's reading. I've decided to keep this blog going when I get back to America, because I want to. I'll write about the things that day wants me to write about. Hope you stick along.

Why haven't I been blogging?

I will tell you. Being a legend waits for no man.

I got french clothes today! I look very very chic. Honestly, I look like a model and none of you could possibly handle the freshness. It's unbearable. Joe Strummer came back from the dead to tell me I looked great, and to invite me to join the Clash. I had to decline; I can't be seen with people below my coolness level.

I'm just kidding. That didn't happen. Of course I said yes! Stay tuned for the Clash reunion tour, where I'll be playing the digital watch featured in the second or third verse of "Rock the Casbah."

"Rock the Casbah", by the way, is the best rock song ever written. There is no way I am wrong about this. It was written in 20 minutes and recorded in another 20, and that is the beauty of punk songs: they're so pass/fail. Punk songs are like soufflé recipes; deceptively simple. You nail it or it sucks. And "Rock the Casbah" is delicious. It's centered around the classic "mama don't allow" rock song story arc, except "mama" is an ultraconservative Sharif, who bends his entire forces against a band playing raga (Indian jam music) in the Casbah. The censorship effort fails, because everyone likes the music and joins in listening; even the jet fighters, sent to "drop their bombs between the minarets/down the Casbah way", tune in on the radio and sing along. The Sharif has no choice but to relent. HAA!!!

Plenty of sonic ingenuity in this one, too. Drummer Topper Headon recorded all the instrumentals one morning, leaving nothing for the other three (who usually wrote all the songs) but to sing their bits. Lead guitarist Mick Jones added recorded samples of his digital watch alarm for an added layer, or because he felt like he had to do something. The whole song deserves high volume. The ending ad libs by Joe Strummer are awesome. LISTEN TO "ROCK THE CASBAH" GO DO IT DO IT DO IT

Also wish happy birthday to Jade, who is 16 today*!!

*In French years, idk how it translates to normal time.

xxx
Sammy

À côté d'un étang à la Place de la Concorde

The mallard drakes have purple heads. A pigeon (black) strode up to me. Its feet were red. The water's green. It's all a bit Marc Chagall-y.

There. For you! Two couplets in iambic quadrameter, with a unifying theme that I didn't even have to fabricate. Paris is truly that beautiful, and that surreal.

I think that's why Paris occupies its mythic place in the American psyche. It is a world capital, but intimate. It is foreign, but you know all the names of all the places. It is a city, and it is not a city by any reckoning we're familiar with, us Americans, with our ethos of high-rise blocks and cement and the scrapping and wreckage of entire buildings when it becomes possible to build something more conducive to the God of Progress. Paris does not play such games with its structure and infrastructure. Les pâves portent lâche? Alors, ons remplacons avec les mêmes. Thus a timelessness endures. The Paris you see is the Paris from the movies, just in color.

I've not been to every city, but Paris seems a likely candidate for "most amenable to lounging about." Existentialism was birthed here, et bien, c'est pas un miracle. My desire for constant stimulation is ebbing, and with it my expenditures. On average, I'm spending about seven Euros per day, mostly on the metro and a pastry. It's enough to just be somewhere, with or without a book, letting the mind settle and clarify as the detritus sinks. Serenity is not the word; serenity implies vacuousness. Les mots, hé monsieur Sartre?

In other news, I've been entered into a Twitter groupchat that discusses critical theory in the context of modern Life. Every now and then I take a look at what they're saying, and I begin to understand that theory is not such a foreign beast after all. It's just a rigorous way to express your shower thoughts. I don't think I'll have much to fear from it when I finally start reading the type of books that the plucky heroine always rattles off in lists in a less studied children's adventure novel.

My hosts are great. Family life is nice. The arrangement is pleasant: I cook, I teach the children English, and I draw seven-year-old Timothée's attention for precious micromoments, wherein his parents accomplish the rest of their lives. In exchange, I get life with a charming family, a room, and free breakfasts and dinners (good ones too, if I do say so myself).

I like the French attitude toward breakfast. In America the attitude is "breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Eat as much Protein McEggPeanut as you possibly can. Sure you want to puke. You owe that to yourself. Now get out there and bE a CoG iN tHe SoCiEtAl MaChInE." In France, it's more: "You've just woken up. You're sleepy. You're discombobulated. You haven't even finished your first pack of unfiltered cigarettes. We understand if you can only manage a piece of bread with the best jam you've ever tasted, and a glass of orange juice that the local market presses fresh in a machine that would've made Rube Goldberg hand in his drawing board. There's time for food later. You can have a delicious, protein-rich salad with First Wine, at 09:47." Instead of groaning, replete and sluggish, off to your morning of gazing in a stupor, you're given just enough to keep you ticking, and a refreshing emptiness that runs like a cool current inside you, imparting the alertness that keeps the pickpockets at bay.

I'm having a lot of fun.

The wifi isnt working for me!!!

I'm writing this on my phone which has reception, but know that I have most of a nice good blog written and it just hasn't been letting me update from Paris since I got here. Starting tomorrow I will either fix that or give up and blog on my phone/record voice blogs je ne sais pas pourquoi pas. Alors, ferme tes bouches alors

Paris est magnifique et mon français aussi

Also

I am having anxiety attacks about getting robbed when I get to Paris. Gare du Nord is known to be sketchy, with well-trained pickpockets and people who will mess with people who have luggage. I already know to plan ahead and walk straight through the station, eyes up, face serious and focused, stopping for no one, and get a taxi ASAP, so I'm not looking for advice on how to look (excuse the language) "don't fuck with me" enough. Just please leave a comment telling me how I'll be fine.

Plunging Through The UK In A Haze

PART I

I don’t like nonfiction that tells you what time it is "as the author writes." It goes against the nature of prose, a thing that is meant to be consumed leisurely, without regard for such irrelevances as outside time, to focus so much on the quantifiable specifics that went into said prose’s creation. If the author means to introduce an element of personality to their monologue by confirming that their writing space--just like your reading space!--exists within a four-dimensional system, they fail, because naming a specific "time of writing" raises many issues. Writing is not like birth or death; there is no measurable instance in which an essay comes fully into existence or out of it. Essays are crafted, built up slowly. It makes just as much sense to name the time of writing a sentence that names the time of writing a sentence as it would to etch on a brick the exact time it was mortared into a rising pyramid. It's a caulk that freezes the sentence, the paragraph, sometimes the whole piece, in a sense of self-conscious faux urgency. Of course it's this or that time when you wrote that. It's always some time or another. Your audience knows how to read.

It's 11:12 in the morning as I write this. There. The first sentence of the second paragraph in the first draft of the first blog post in a while that will be worth reading. My muscles ache from walking with luggage; my feet have a feeling to them that makes me dread the smell of my boots when at last I uncase their poor denizens; I am desperately, mind-bindingly sleep deprived.

At 10:43 last night, I was sprinting through London's West End for an 11:00 cross-country bus. Not walking, sprinting, backpack a'clack on my back, the suitcase in my right hand a potent carrier of momentum that strayed too near many innocent figures as I dodged and weaved. Why was I running? Some idiot, some prat, some starch-shirted inbred eighteenth-century nincompoop had decided that Victoria Train Station and Victoria Coach Station were not to be housed in the same building, or even the same street. No, decided Sir Humphrey Alwaysaturd, stroking his fourth chin. Much better that they should be eight minutes' walk apart.

"This is a good idea," he assured himself, taking another toke of Imperial poppy-smoke. As I ran, I coughed at his three-hundred-year-old exhalations and cursed Sir Humphrey Alwaysaturd.

"But Sam," I hear you typing. "Why didn't you leave time for such mishaps?"

"I did," I answer you, (typing, likewise). "Almost an hour's slack time, saved up just for travel catastrophes.”

You see, I spent this hour getting on the wrong Underground train. After five stops I noticed and jumped off that line into another wrong Underground train, in an "out of the frying pan, into the Paddington line"-type situation. My own sleep-fuddled mind (for it was ten o'clock when I embarked from Kensington Gardens, to whom I had to say goodbye) was to blame for the evening's troubles. It's just more fun to make fun of Sir Alwaysabore, P.O.O.

I got to Victoria Coach Station at a dead run, and also at 10:51. I found the bus quickly and selected a nondescript window seat midway down that I thought nobody else would sit at, meaning I could get some legroom during the difficult night ahead.

God saw me make my selection and, deciding I was due a bit of smiting for my faithlessness, directed a cheery group of tall Dutch men to populate all the seats round me, including the formerly free aisle. At a stroke, my legroom-quality ranking dropped from "languorous" to "Shea Stadium, August 15, 1965." The noise level was ranking was more “Live Aid, 1985, when Freddie Mercury did the ‘aay-oh’ thing”, to use the technical term.

I set my headphones to "Oh Christ, Here We Go" and nestled comfortably into a Pompeii life-cast position, knees jammed hard into the hard plastic seat-back that stood about four inches in front of the edge of my own. My leather frock coat made a worthy blanket (that thing keeps accruing value), but I have never had a less adequate neck-support situation while trying to sleep, not since the bat-colony cave in Chile (and what a night that was).

The journey was dark, neon, oneiric without any real dreams. The bus window had a pathetic curtain one could draw over. It had the same feel and look as the antibacterial bibs that hygienists will loop about your neck with the efficiency of hangmen, and indeed it may have been the same material. The bus rocked and lurched with abandon, glee even, as though we were being driven by Peter Pan. The bus ceiling, for whatever reason, was lined with blue lights that would not turn off. I recall as I write this (11:43 AM for those keeping score) a bleary fantasy that swirled into my head that night. In my fantasy, there was a rifle in my hand, magically silent. In my mind, I shot each and every light out. My internalized Americanness scares me; the English passengers probably just imagined drowning the lights in tea.

The Dutchmen piped down about five minutes into the journey, which in the liquid darkness of bus-space felt like about forty. I lay where I was, eyes itching to be opened as my legs told me over and over that they weren't comfortable. Every time I looked up and around, another head had dropped to another chest, as slack and stark as if its bearer had just been knifed in the back. Maybe everyone feels like this, but at times like these I always feel like I'm the last one awake in the world.

There's a power to being the one sentient passenger, holding the night vigil that no one volunteers for, guarding over one's sleeping fellow creatures. Keeping a spark of consciousness aflame on that bus. The bus driver was keeping the bus moving; I was protecting the passengers from the witching hour, for the Things that wait on the English moors can't get near if you have your eyes open, if you know They're coming.

You probably think I'm being silly. I think I'm being silly as well, now I'm in broad daylight, sitting by a third-floor window which I learned when I was ten is called a second-floor window, looking out at an ancient sandstone building whose notes shine bright and various in the 11:55 AM sun. But I certainly didn't feel silly during the witching hour, when I was keeping the world outside the windows at bay.

I must have fallen asleep, but I don't remember it. I just remember 3:30 coming along quicker than I could’ve hoped. When I was awake, I was awake. I watched two episodes of Brooklyn 99 on my phone, until I was drowsy again. I put my music back on, to elevate my head away from the cramps and the soreness. It didn't turn off until 7.

"Guid morning," over the PA, like there had been any interval in which I wasn't perfectly aware what stage of day it was. "Suin to arrive in Glasgow."

I've never been punched in the face. Walking through the bus station, I felt like I had.

When I first stumbled into this Waterstones (8:29 AM), I thought I would just rest here a moment before continuing on. Then, as I went through my bag and realized I'd left my only charger on the bus, I realized there was no "on" for me to go to yet. My uni buddies weren't awake, the museums would commission my firstborn in exchange for holding my bags, and the Airbnb wasn't open for check-in until 1. There was, freeingly enough, nothing of import or worth to do In Glasgow just yet.

I wandered a little ways down the high street and bought a charger, and a new pair of Dr. Martens socks (I did Not bring enough socks, especially of the calf-high variety). Then I came back to the Waterstones café and settled into a corner, having ordered a black coffee for my rent. I couldn't really focus on a book--the first two that caught my eye were Burroughs' "Junky" and Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange", sure signs that I shouldn't be reading--and for a moment I was at a loss. Was I nothing but a wanderer, sitting in public buildings and letting the time slip by?

Was there nothing I could do, nothing that would (ful)fill the time?

And then I got very happy. Because you see, there is a thing I can do now, if I have nothing to do. There's something that I pretty much fully enjoy, and which I'm getting quite good at. Writing.

PART II

“Come on / Come on / You think you’ll / Drive me crazy, well...”

Kelvingrove Park, West End, Glasgow, is just as lovely as when I left.

It was Kelvingrove I had walked through when I sat in a café and wrote about the European city park as macro-organism.

“Come on / Come on / You and whose army?”

Tonight it was chilly, much colder than it had been in April. Scotland welcoming me home. All the people I’d met were busy. I had taken a nap that made me more tired. I was on the moor of melancholy, teetering dangerously, Wile E. Coyote-like, on the edge of the Freaking Huge Cliff of depression.

“Come o-o-on / Come o-o-n / Holy Roman Empire”

They did something to Thom Yorke’s voice on that track. The whole album, Amnesiac, is something unique, even for Radiohead, but the fuzzes and delays on the vocals for “You and Whose Army” have the same abstract beauty as a muted brass instrument. The same colors light up when I hear those two sounds.

“Come on if you think / Come on if you think / You can take us / Aah-ah”

There was a wise glee in his voice as I walked around the fountain that has no water beyond what nature has given. The sky was several kinds of grey, and there were people all around. Radiohead were starting to coax me out.

“You can take us / aah-aaaah”

I’m learning that when I’m at a loss for something to do, when all options seem unfulfilling, the best thing for me to do is write. Art is something that exists in all contexts, lends color and depth to all emotions, even emotionlessness. And writing is like working a muscle: the more you do it, the better it does. And you have to keep it in practice.

“You and whose army?”

Maybe this blog is pre-season training, and the regular season will be the weeks and months that ask for three essays in four days, each insightful and concise, at least one of them on a day I want to do nothing but lie in bed with a headache and stare out the window. Or maybe college itself will be pre-season training for freelance journalism, writing quick and good articles for food, or TAing English while starving through an MFA or BA. Or maybe I’ll make it big as a YA author or a comedian, all because I got good at generating material worth revising through daily practice.

“You and your cronies...”

Imagine being big enough that all the water in the world is a speck of a drop on your cheek.

Here’s the secret: we are that big, if you’re a bacterium. And we are the drop of water, if you’re the universe.

Nothing we do matters. Things get a lot easier if you stop pretending your life is worth more than the things you can do well and the ways you can make people’s lives better. Quick! What’s the cause you would die for?

“You forget so easyy”

It’s 9:11 PM, and I hope by now you’re convinced that it really is annoying for writers to pepper in timestamps. I’m in a pub where free jazz is playing, a guitarist and a trumpeter. Soon, as soon as this blog post is finished, I’ll take my drink outside and watch the night happen before I go to bed.

“We ride tonight”

When is art good, and when is it just random and vague?

“We ride tonight”

Do English professors still understand books when they’re done comprehending them?

“Ghost horses”

That’d make a good story. Thank you, Thom.

“Ghost horses”

All right, I heard you the first time.