My first attempt at a music article

By October 2006, the band My Chemical Romance, while popular among younger folk for their very sad and very loud songs about life, death, heartbreak, and bullying, had been thoroughly lambasted by the critics and everyone who wasn't a teenager for their first two very sad and very loud albums about life, death, heartbreak, and bullying, and also for their hair. The critics didn’t like their hair.

My Chemical Romance, or MCR, were a pioneering emo band, although they did hate the term. They abandoned rock-star ego and traditional rock subject matter entirely in their songwriting, instead writing songs about 9/11 and, in one of their most popular singles, “Helena (So Long and Goodnight), the death of lead singer Gerard Way and guitarist Mikey’s grandmother Elena. Rock on, amirite?

Critics and parents and the trash newspaper the Sun, all of whom had grown up in the musically happy-go-lucky ‘60s and ‘70s, worried loudly about the effect that this dark depressing music was having on Impressionable Teens. They got it wrong, just as they had a few decades earlier, when the Cure had hit the scene. The music resonated because it reflected pre-existing emotions, not because it magically instilled in teenagers a desire to be sad and angry. Heavy, emotionally involved pop-punk and emo music was for ‘00s teenagers an antidote to the hyperproduced bubblegum pop that dominated the scene (Britney Spears, *NSYNC*, JLo, etc.), just as gothic rock in the ‘80s served as a tonic to the meandering, blissed- and drugged-out anodynity that was the post-Woodstock mainstream.

Today, MCR is most often remembered for their third album, The Black Parade. A postmodern rock opera with influences ranging from Green Day to Edwardian vaudeville, The Black Parade is an exacting, in-depth examination of the emotional fallout of being dying and being dead, with guitars on. Taken all together, the album was everything the mainstream didn’t like about My Chemical Romance—sadness, death, guitar music (don’t forget that guitar bands are always about to go out of style)—but sadder, with louder guitars, and single-mindedly focused on mortality with the focus of people who don’t want to die.

Honesty and frankness run through the lyrics, uncaring of social taboo or sounding “too real.” MCR had always been about candor, and applying their no-holds-barred style to the subjects of illness and death, things we speak about with as much emotional distance as possible—when we are forced to speak about them—made for powerful, well-textured lyrics that, if the listener can get over their instinct to shy away, are very good listening.

Musically, the album is an ode to that which had come before MCR. The band were always students of their genre, and there’s not much in the composition that anyone who listens to a lot of music will find revolutionary. But, and I’ll use a quote here:

“’Talent borrows. Genius steals.’ --Igor Stravinsky.” 

--David Feurzeig

What a smart guy.

Closer to the rock tradition: such luminaries as David Bowie (semiprofessional hair-dye model) and Andy Warhol (best known as the manager for a band called the Velvet Underground until they fired him on the grounds that he had made them no money) liked to tell people that originality is overrated. You could argue that there haven’t been any new rock sounds at all since the late ‘90s, after Nirvana and Bikini Kill made their mark. And on this album, MCR have a lot of fun paying winking little tributes to their influences, from the fact that the chord progression of the opening song is, underneath the radically different sounds, the same one that opened The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, to the throttling synthy guitars on “Sleep” that could be played by Slash himself.The Black Parade fits neatly into the rock tradition, although the rotting lace and a lead singer who looks like a child’s skeleton and sounds like a child’s ghost do set it apart a bit.

The Black Parade opens with the beeping of a hospital heart rate monitor, which sets the rhythm for the chords. “Now come one, come all to this tragic affair,” Way sings in a sunny major key. “Throw on your black dress, mix in with the lot.” The character singing the lyrics is singing his funeral wishes. The song is called “The End.” This will be an unusual sort of tragedy: it’s already gotten as bad as it can get. Hum.

All gothic rock since the Cure has had the spectre of mortality looming over the proceedings, the woolly mammoth in the room that lends more urgency to the lyrical angst. Death is usually implied in eye-socket makeup and skull rings, but left out of the songs themselves. But as we’ve discussed, MCR aren’t too fussed about treading lightly over graves. So, naturally, the second number (and the album’s first normal-length song) is actually called “Dead!” and includes lines like “Have you heard the news that you’re dead?”. Way chides the “tongue-tied and oh so squeamish” listener for their willful emotional detachment. The band tackle the taboo from the get-go, with a sense of humor that safeguards against self-importance.

The next two songs, “This Is How I Disappear” and “The Sharpest Lives”, are perfect pop-punk powerhouses, guitars a-throbbing while Gerard Way introduces you more fully to the things his voice can do, and he can do a lot. From a sensitive, childish yawp to a peculiar tri-tone screech that no non-metal singer since Paul McCartney has done so well, Way is an expressive singer with an emotional range that his metallic tonal quality wouldn’t have you believe. There’s very little sentiment in the music of these numbers; despite their dark lyrics, their stable chord structures, supporting some seriously heavy guitars and vocals, make you want to jump up and down. Death is celebrated, in its own weird way, by being rocked out to. Soon enough, there’ll be a run of four songs that will explore the subject matter in its more depressing contexts; there’s time first to dance and remember, Dío de los Muertosstyle. Glory in the skull makeup, friends.

The title track, “Welcome To The Black Parade,” is MCR’s most popular song, and for good reason. Musically, it starts with the sonic equivalent of standing by a glassy pond, marches up into the eponymous parade, and builds, collapses, and rebuilds in great crashing waves of catharsis. The lyrics fly at you thick and fast, each one a black-lipstick kiss of gallows humor and memory. Gerard Way, when writing about Queen’s 1974 album A Night At The Opera forRolling Stone, said: 

“When My Chemical Romance were making The Black Parade, we watched tons of documentary footage about A Night at the Opera, Queen's best album. [...] But we didn't try to make another ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ Whenever someone tries to do that, they fail.”

Yeah, so they 100% made another Bohemian Rhapsody. Like, no doubt. Maybe it was by accident, or maybe Gerard Way was messing with us, but they tried to make another Bohemian Rhapsody, and boy did they succeed. A quiet piano intro, lyrics about childhood and regret, an explosion into an entirely different sound, modulation through at least five movements; the similarities, if listed without context, would bore you, so I’ll stop.

On this track and several others on the album, MCR employ “through-composition”, writing songs that eschew verse-chorus structure in favor of a mini-suite that can and does change time signature, key, and pretty much everything else. Successful examples of this technique include “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” by the Beatles, “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead, and yes, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The end product, if made well, is often more emotionally and tonally satisfying than a song with a middle and end that can be deduced from the beginning.

Then comes the four-song suite of Deeply Depressing Songs that the band figure you’re ready for at this point. “I Don’t Love You”, the album’s first straight-up ballad, is an elegy to illness that distances the Patient from their loved ones. It also serves as a vehicle for some of Way’s most expressive vocals, from the almost-spoken “I’ll be gone” to the MCR-size chorus. “House of Wolves” is a devil-may-care rumination of the fact that pretty much everyone of the Patient’s faith (probably Catholicism, definitely some sort of Christianity) is doomed to Hell for some infraction or another. “Cancer” details the nitty-gritty pains and indignities that late-stage cancer gifts its bearer, and made me cry when I was eleven. “Mama” is an uncomfortable listen: familial regrets and resentments rise to the forefront of the Patient’s mind, and he rails against his mother and himself over a musical arrangement that starts out equal parts klezmer and mariachi (a nod to the Day of the Dead festival, whose iconography heavily influenced MCR’s touring costumes for the album) and finishes Sondheimesque, after a heavy metal interlude and an appearance by Liza Minelli. (You think I’m kidding?)

“Sleep” is another power ballad, and perhaps the album’s only bit of extra fat. Heard in isolation it’s quite a good song, but coming after all the laments from “I Don’t Love You” onwards, it sounds a bit redundant. It is nice, though, how the guitar lick at the end hearkens back to the beeps that opened the whole album.

Whew. The last five tracks sure were heavy. Good thing the next track is “Teenagers.”

“Teenagers” occupies the same corner of my mind as “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” by the Clash. Both are straightforward, mid-tempo rock songs; both of their performers usually go in for more complicated material; both are a heck of a lot of fun. It’s all well and good to write clever, involved songs that tackle the biggest subjects with humor and insight, but sometimes you need to turn the amps to 11 and jump up and down. The song is still tinged with the dark trickle of MCR flavor that sets it apart from any pretender to the hard-rock throne: notice, if you will, the nursery-rhyme cadence of the chorus that, when paired with the high-school violence that the lyrics detail, makes the whole thing creepily innocent while completely corrupted, like a rotten baby doll. Very goth. “Teenagers” is just a great song, and a welcome reprieve from the musical heaviness of the other tracks.

The more or less penultimate track, “Disenchanted”, is the least theatrical, least pretentious, least fictionalized song on the album. A gorgeous meditation on the band members’ loss of dreams and innocence, it opens with a guitar line that walks through suburbia on a hot summer afternoon as Way sings with a tired minimalism; his vocals, before the time-honored electrification of the second verse turns them into a scream, sound like Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria going through the motions after Albert’s death, or a Daniel Day-Lewis character hanging up his hat and coat and sitting down heavily in a worn-out chair. The actor emotes.

In the chorus, Way winks at everyone still listening to the tail end of the album in spite of all the bad press—“If I’m so wrong / How can you listen all night long?”—while scorning the worst of emo music, “sad song[s] with nothing to say.” There’s a quiet triumph in understanding the sources of your own sadness, and this is what the band celebrate on “Disenchanted.”

The finale, “Famous Last Words”, starts as another pop-punk song, fast and low, surf-rock influences playing in the instrumentals while Way snarls the lyrics through pain-gritted teeth. The middle eight lift it up a bit, then, after a beat of silence, a chorus:

“I am not afraid to keep on living

I am not afraid to walk this world alone

Honey, if you stay you’ll be forgiven

Nothing you can say can stop me going home.”

That’s a perfectly fine way to end an album. After twelve tracks of pain and tragedy, a powerful about-face to fight the forces of gloom and doom with a “throw what you can my way” determination is a hell of a message to send your teenage fans. And that is how the album ends. Until a piano cuts in and Gerard Way starts singing, with a vaudevillian’s exaggerated, self-parodying pomp, a light ditty about vampires. I dare you not to laugh.

An album about endings, that literally starts with The End, ends with neither a whimper nor a bang, but with a wink. And why not laugh a little? We’re all gonna die one day, or so we’ve been told.

Buses > Trains

Prove me wrong.

The Ashmolean Museum, 4/28/2019

Art and history are kissing cousins, hand in hand, traipsing through the field of human past. You could argue that there is no real difference between art and history: they are the thing that a civilization gives to the human record, the things that are preserved; they are both the story that an era tells itself. You’d be wrong if you argued this, wrong in most ways. History is the (usually) professional work of chronicling a period of time in as much relevant detail as can be included while presenting the whole thing in a way that lets the learner see the overlaying trends and traditions that define the space between the past and the future. History is meticulous, emotionless, academic. Art, on the other hand, is fanciful, free, not compelled to represent anything about the time or the place in which its maker lives. Art is chaotic, emotional, open.

That would be the argument used against your vague, stoned-sounding theory about art and science. It would convince anyone who wasn’t paying attention. But it's very, very wrong.

But recorded history is also chaotic, full of fits and starts as humanity ducks apologetically in and out of dark ages. More often than not it is not opinionless, but biased in favor of the ruling narrative, or against the historian's getting run out of the city. And it is certainly not always nonfiction: compare the official stories of the feats of King Rameses II, etched and daubed onto the walls of his pyramid, with the few anecdotal accounts of the same events that have traveled down to us. The act of recording history is an act of making art, just as anything that comes out of an artist's mind is, in some way, reflective of their surroundings.

And the most reliable objects of historical interest, the things that can be trusted to tell us truths about the era they date from, are not words written on clay tablets by a corrupt scribe paid to paint their ruler in a good light, or didactic stories as deeply removed from reality as your priest's anecdote about a woman, recently, at a shopping mall. The touchstones that allow us to trace the histories of entire cultures are the works of art that they leave behind. Somebody said "What a culture chooses to save is what a culture chooses to say about itself." The monumental works of architecture, engineered with precision and built in two generations or more; the finely-cut stones with entire stories etched in miniature; the vases, pots, sacrificial goblets, and urinals that everyone from the Greeks to the Tibetans spun out of clay at some point in ancient history. The art tells the story; the art, and a couple stones commemorating sheep sales.

Art is history, history is art, and art history majors are insufferable (and wise). Every time Neil DeGrasse Tyson says something about the humanities being a waste of time--"We could be building atomic bombs on Mars!" he argues--he gets a little bit more wrong. Good thing we all started paying attention to other people anyway.

It's my mom's birthday!!!

YEAAAAHHHHHHHHH

NOICEEEEE

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU 🎉🎉🎉🎉

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR MAAMAAAAA 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

HAAPPY BIRTHDAY TOOO YOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

and many morororree

Yay!

(PS to be clear, when I said "traveling sucks" I only meant the actual sitting on a train bit. The being places is awesome!!!)

Birmingham picked up where Glasgow left off

"Oh, Glasgow's so dangerous!" "Glasgow's proper dodgy!" "You better keep an eye out in Glasgow!"

It would seem that the good citizens of the United Kingdom are a bit confused about their city names. Glasgow was nothing but lovely, and I caught no vibe beyond "Oh hya, waelcum tae Glasgow!"

If, however, "Glasgow" means "Birmingham," well then, all right.

I'm staying in a townhouse rented by four uni lads, and we'd been hanging out in the living room since Liam (my host) and I got back from a long walk in the park and got some groceries for dinner. Nothing of importance, just playing Mario Kart and chatting. Bonding, you know. Then Chris (a top bloke) poked his head in and said, briefly, "it's going down in the street outside."

Four men, three with shirts, were pushing a man in a white hoodie around on the sidewalk opposite our windows. We didn't move the blinds; apparently, muggers don't like being watched. The man wasn't being hurt, but he was in danger. I asked if we should intervene, but was told that a) they might have knives, b) we would get the crap kicked out of us, and c) the best thing to do was phone the police.

Before I could respond (or do something stupid involving heroism and using bass guitars as clubs), the man hopped on a bike and rode off, the four muggers chasing him for a bit before giving up and looking in the bag they had lifted off him. Turns out he was a Deliveroo biker, and they had just stolen the takeaway he was delivering. Chris tweeted to the Birmingham police and told me the Deliveroo biker would also have a record of what house he was outside when it happened. Things will probably turn out all right.

The man without a shirt had a scarred back, black lines against the brown, walked down the street, shouting something to his comrade. He carried a pair of handcuffs. One open, one shut. He was a desperate man, and probably a bad one, but he looked at that moment like a superhero.

This is a nation without guns. Nobody died out there. As far as I could tell, nobody even got hurt. In America, the police would have shot them all. Now some poor men have food. I think the Deliveroo driver will be all right. I hope their situation improves to the extent that they don't do it again.

Birmingham is covered in graffiti, and it isn't clever graffiti. Just stylized names, really. And whole walls that are painted with Netflix posters. I keep an eye out here, and I don't go out alone. The park I was taken through was really lovely, though. A proper Victorian job, made with money and cared for, without disruption, for nearly two hundred years. A ballet of flowering trees and weeping willows, spinning in place on a stage of even grass. A pond with swan boats, paths from everywhere to everywhere, mini golf that manages to look charming. An oasis, as parks sometimes must be.

I'm not doing much in Birmingham; maybe I need to lie fallow a bit. It's a long trip.

Love to everybody!

Traveling sucks

Please drop a "hi" and an absurd/surreal statement in the comments below. Perhaps the time will pass more gently.

I'll blog later if I have anything to say. :)

The Placeholders

Some places are the past.

It’s not their fault.

It’s yours. Mine. Whatever tense the individual is here.

The places in question were just sitting there, minding their own business, their trees and their grass and their birds and their temperature and their wind, with their own history and their own stories and their own people; but sometimes these places become, for you, your place, and your place only because some concatenation of circumstances triggered a memory for you in a powerful visceral way than normal. And it’s okay to have a place that’s only yours; for all you know, you’re the only person there is. I mean, I know you’re not, but you don’t know that I even exist, so we’ll just have to agree to think we’re both people for now. Or not.

But I’m distracting myself, as I often distract myself. Self-distraction is a hell of a skill to have. I probably developed it on the rowing machine, forcing the minute and kilometers to one side so I could think about whatever I wanted while my body worked. Later, self-distraction became a bit more harmful, taking me away from the real world too easily...but you see, I’m doing it again.

Places.

On a geological scale, each place is a big rock, some dead stuff, a veneer of living stuff, and then an admixture of living and dead on top. Once something is dead, it goes through the live layer into the dead layer, and this happens to all the things. Each place is built on its own past, its plants and animals and objects that made it what it was, when it was that. Whatever it is now is probably different from what it was, in some way or another, but it couldn’t exist as it is now if it hadn’t been what it was then. One day this layer too will be that: just another layer of dead, supporting the next alive. This idea delights me. We’re all part of a broader goal: adding to the flavor of the Earth-sandwich.

So places are their past, if viewed objectively. Subjectively, however (and it’s important to try to view things subjectively, because that’s how you and I’ll be viewing them anyway, so I and you might as well admit it), a place is only as powerful as the memories, associations, sensations, and emotions it evokes in you. You and I are also creatures of our pasts, just like the places we go, and everything that our present selves do is, in some way, a reaction to our pasts.

And so it is with how we perceive what we see. Everything is viewed through our many filtred lenses, and what passes through is all that is significant to us. Sometimes very little will pass through. For example, I feel nothing in a desert, because a) I have no past with deserts, b) almost none of the stories that matter the most to me happen in deserts (as I write this, I realize that this is probably a problem, and I should read more Middle Eastern and Central African literature), c) there is no great beauty in deserts that I can see.

If, however, you put me in a public rec park in temperate weather, flowering trees around me and green, green grass lush on the fields, children playing on playgrounds, parents drinking together, benches that are always more comfortable than benches have a right to be, you will have gone a good way towards transporting me to one of the happiest times of my life (viz. the summers of 2009-2012, in the heyday of my prepubescent summer baseball career and all the memories that come from there). In my recollection of these good times, I’ve stripped my location of its context: removed the Wales, removed the construction sites, removed the luxury hotel on the edge with the red Mercedes that makes me want to turn Communist, removed the fact that the grass is mown for cricket, not for baseball; all of this just to serve my own moment of nostalgia. Looking at it that way, associative nostalgia looks more like a form of objectification than anything else.

And yet I think I’m wrong. I like recreational fields because I had a great time in recreational fields, and now I appreciate them like some people manage to appreciate wine. Each one is different, but each comes from the same idea. (This is how people can appreciate the differences between different wines, and anything that comes in varieties. They have a backbone of what-this-is to work with, so it’s easier to see what makes it unique.) The park I’m in is not the park I sweated on and thought on and cried on and laughed on as I learned how baseball can be a game and an art and a science and a sport and a philosophy and an absolute mindscrew and an inch towards third base. Then another. Then another. This field has its own stories, its own characteristics, and because I recognize the similarities, the differences are thrown into sharper relief. The Mondrian color scheme of the playground. The finely-grained asphalt on the tennis courts that I’ve never seen before. The way each field has a direction, is more than a stretch of grass. To me it will never be “just a park.” No, this is “Town Park, (Conwy, Wales Vintage).”

I’ve been walking through this park for days, collecting flavors, distilling essences, pinching up blades of grass. Soon I’ll bottle it up and put it on my shelf, next to “City Park, (Glasgow, Scotland Vintage)”, on the “2019” shelf.

It’s a nice cellar I keep. None of the bottles are for sale, but you’re welcome to taste of one for free, if you’d like. I’d like to know where it takes you.

4/23

Yesterday was my day off. Sue me.

At some point in this brief but complete blog post, the type goes italic. I don't know how this happened, and I can't seem to fix it. I'm typing on my phone, and the app version of Blogger isn't very good. I suggest the reader roll with the punches and correct for the typographical discrepancy by reading the affected words while tilting at an angle ten degrees to the right of normal.

Today I'm thinking about the past, and how when we're children any one thing represents all things that are that thing. You get nosed too hard by a dog; dogs are bad. Individuals become that which they represent, and generalization is the rule of the game. You get your prejudices, good and bad, and the next step is falling on your face for them. After that comes unlearning the misprisions, and after that comes a better time.

If you think this is an introduction to a personal essay, that I'm winding around to something more emotive and profound, then reader, you are in for a disappointment. I'm just spitballing. People make whole careers out of this. We call them "Professor", and we hate their classes and their handwriting and their glasses or moustaches or tightly-wound plaits, whatever it is that's on the person we have to pay attention to. I can forgive myself this behavior, because you don't have to pay attention to me. You could be reading Wikipedia right now, and indeed their work is more enlightening than what I'm currently typing on a flat smartphone keyboard as I sit in the middle of an unused tennis court, between the inner posts of the two nets. The sun is setting on a cloudy day, and for once I'm not too hot.

Wales is very nice, by the way. Nice people, nice old people, nice (shy) cats. I talk to the middle about the latter. I also pick up litter, because it's better than if I don't, and it gives me a sense of accomplishment.

I think I'll like this--whatever this is. Fill in the blank.

exhalation

I had a very purple day. Landscapes stretched lush and verdant before my feet and the minutes felt like seconds. At eight in the evening I was given a glass of fizzing blackcurrant juice on a terrace overlooking miles and kilometers of rucked-carpet hills the color of sound as the last glorious gulp of sunlight whipped against the hills, and that serves as a noble synecdoche for the last fourteen hours. Today wasn't perfect--I don't think there's been one of those yet, for me or for anybody--but it blended well and went down nicely.

Jesus and I did the same thing today: we woke up before everyone else and buggered off before they could notice. Sure, he did it two thousand years before I did, and sure, I didn't ascend to the kingdom of Heaven, but didn't I, though? I walked along a medieval castle wall in the early-morning sunlight, a silent Welsh city below me in red tile, and I wandered the battlements and watchtowers and flitted from arrow-slit to arrow-slit until I found a sign telling me to stop. A cigarette lighter, lying on the stones of a turret, near the front edge on a chess rook, for those of you following along at home. I tried it; it caught flame. This was where I would unwrap my Easter package.

Back in America, before I left. My mother gave me two small gift bags, the kind that hold cuff links or small chocolates. One red, one white with multicolored print balloons. The red one has a bag of chocolate chips, intended for a day when I felt especially low. Fortunately, I haven't felt low enough to turn to baking since my first night on Skye, when it was dark and I knew nobody. It was too late in the day to do anything but sleep that day, so the chips went unused. Now I'm usually happy, and I think the best time to use the chocolate chips will be when I see the Glasgow art students again, and that day will already be a happy one.

The other bag was stapled shut, and said "AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS" in a Sharpie hand that gave no room for second guesses.

I stayed on Skye for two weeks, and when I left, the bags came with, near the bottom of my bag, just above the ridiculously heavy book and just below the not-enough clothes. When I stayed a night in Inverness, they stayed in the locker under my bed. They survived trips jammed into overhead train compartments and bus undercarriages. I resented the space they took up, but only a little bit. They were a nice anchor to home in a world that had become a boundless sea.

Today my mom told me to go somewhere beautiful and open my Easter package. I found the beautiful spot, and I opened my package, taking care not to rip too quickly and send a staple over the edge. This wasn't the Middle Ages, after all.

The package contained a small hand-decorated note, jelly beans, and dark chocolate that was worked into shapes of eggs and rabbits. The contents were lovely, but lovelier still was their arrangement. One of the plastic eggs that held the jelly beans had burst, and the bottom of the bag was pebbled with them, like a little terrarium in which the dominant plant was the jelly bean, or a pebble beach in a far realm of the Chocolate Factory. It was a perfect delight. Thank you, Mama!

I went back to the hostel, stopping once to sit on a bench in the sun and just sit. I made apple oatmeal in a kitchen that buzzed with parents and children (Easter hols, you know) and reminded me of the best parts of early-childhood trips. The oatmeal went down nicely with some hostel-stock brown sugar and a pitcher of water. Then ho for the druidic stone circles!

It was a ten-mile hike, all in all, and along the way I made friends with two Mancunians in their twenties, Chloe and Tashi. We chatted of that and this as we walked through the rucked-carpet hills, an open coast on one side and ewes and lambs all around us, like sentient soap bubbles that got lost. It doesn't matter what we talked about, just that we talked. Talking small is, I think, an underrated thing. I used to despise it, for the same reasons I disliked plotless books. Why talk (or by extension, write) if you had nothing to talk (or write) about?

That's something I think I figured out on this trip. It's good and important to talk about the big things, yes. But when you lift away such weighty burdens as relevance and social context, conversations can be delicate and beautiful ways to learn another person's mind without distraction. I've done a lot of talking for the sake of talking, now I better understand the books in which nothing really happens. What happens while nothing happens is just as important, in the mind of the right reader, as an epic quest with bows and harps and villages saved.

The rest of the day slipped by like a glass of lemonade; the shower and nap, the dinner out with my new friends, the walk along the quay with ice cream and bird jokes, the lift home and the promise to meet up in Birmingham, the blackcurrant juice, the blog writing. And now, here we are, aren't we?

Here's some more prosaic stuff

I tramp a never-ending journey, said the poet I’ve never read. When I hear his name, I always think of the colour grey. Maybe he was a grey poet, a poet who wrote grey poems; or maybe it’s just because of the picture of him that we all have seen on the back of a yellowing paperback at a book sale in October, a picture in white and grey and black of a white man with a grey beard and a black suit.

(For years, I’ve liked it better when people spell grey with an “e.” It’s a much greyer-lookingword than “gray”, which is too rich, too loud, too Americanto come near a proper evocation of the melancholic, three-quarter-view, diminished shrinking specter that is the presence of the color grey. Most colors add; grey subtracts, taking away the bloat and boast and leaving a subtlety that fills and spreads around objects and people, making the world a much more beautiful place than we imagine we make it, when we assault the buildings and t-shirts and pet dogs with paintbrushes and airbrushes and make all of it a perfect pink and yellow.)

I woke up this morning in a big darkness, punctuated on the far side by the unsubtle light of a phone screen. The hostel room was windowless and hot. It could’ve been any time, but it was 8 AM. I felt oppressively neutral, in such an advanced state of homeostasis that I was without the complicated liability of emotion. Actions lose their punch when I’m in these moods: it’s an effort to continue doing, well, anything, and when anything gets done, it seems to take ages. Civilizations rose and fell as I brushed my teeth. While I waited for the toilet, the English army won a battle. As I stepped into my shoes, they lost the war.

I lay in bed a while after I woke up, worrying about what I should do with the hours available to me before I began a complex dance with the British transit system at 14:43 at Lime Street Station. After a good while of unproductive thought and research, I decided that what I would do was “get breakfast”, and then I would do whatever I darn well pleased.

I saw a homeless man sitting by the sidewalk the second I walked out of the front door of the hostel and I put my headphones on so I could pretend I didn’t hear him asking me for money. I told myself I was too generous, that if I made that a pattern I would go over my budget every single day. It wasn’t even hard to walk by.

A minute later, a few streets gone by, I wondered how I could be so heartless. My soul was beginning to wake up, an hour and a half after my body had. When I passed a beggar, later in the day, I gave him a pound coin. When I passed an old woman on the accordion, I gave her my other pound coin. I don’t regret it.

“Whatever I darn well pleased” ended up waiting a while: I wanted to blog during breakfast, an impulse for which I am grateful, because if I hadn’t wanted to blog I wouldn’t have looked in my bag for my laptop, and if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have realized I left said computer at the hostel. Another walk back, then, in the hot sun with a ridiculously heavy pack doing its level best to dislocate one shoulder or another.

The rest of my morning doesn’t really matter; it’s over now.

HEY GUESS WHAT EVERYBODY, I HATE TO INTERRUPT FROM THE LITERARY NONFICTION INSPIRED BY THE PROSE OF ALI SMITH AND BEN OKRI BUT I JUST LEARNED THAT IF I GET OFF MY TRAIN A STOP EARLY I DON’T HAVE TO BUY A NEW TRAIN TICKET!!!! I CAN JUST WALK TO MY HOSTEL!! GLORY BE!!!!

Well, that’s cheered me up no end. Still proud of what I wrote about emotional numbness, though, and I hope it’s struck a chord. The best (and in my case only) reason to show the world what you have created is this: to show people that they are not alone.

I’m gonna watch some TV.

A paragraph to guard against the specter of not blogging today

Traveling by public transportation fragilifies me. My body is in flux, and success (getting where I want to go) relies on my remaining mentally vigilant despite my natural inclination to curl up and sleep until I get to wherever I’m staying. I’m typing as fast as I can for five minutes before I have to go off and find the next train. After I get off the train, I have to find out if I can get another train to take me to my accommodation or if I’m spending a night awake in a train station while I wait for the morning milker. It’ll probably be fine, but I wish I hadn’t overlooked this earlier. I’m reading The Famished Road by Ben Okri, which won the 1991 Booker Prize and inspired one of Radiohead’s best songs (“Street Spirit (Fade Out)”). It’s good, but the narrator is also in flux, always in transit, always under some sort of stress. The echoes are a bit too resonant for today, so I’ll probably switch to music for the next train.

I have to go now. I’ll blog more, and better, later tonight or tomorrow. For now, [finger guns]

Go listen to The Beatles.

A Bird Pooped On My Leg While I Wrote The First Part Of This In The English Sun, Getting A Tan (I Was Getting A Tan, Not The Bird or Its Excrement)

It’s hard to describe Glasgow. People have tried.

I’ve (and you’ve) always thought of it, as much as you have thought of it, as a rough city. The first action of a Glaswegian in the tourist industry is to reassure the traveler that they aren't going to be given interesting facial scars by a couple locals named Iggy and Ferguson. Why is this? Maybe Glasgow is like Manhattan. (Here the author throws himself under a bench to avoid the projectiles thrown by residents of both cities.) It was rough, really rough, for a long time, and then thirtyish years ago it gave up the rough life in favor of being amazing. The difference with Manhattan is everybody knows that about Manhattan, whereas--well, the blog I wrote the first day I got to Glasgow was a statement of surprised joy at not having been knifed.

So what is it about Glasgow that still makes us think it’s so rough? Maybe Americans acquire an inherent suspicion for the city the minute they learn it isn’t pronounced “Glass Cow.” Having been there, among the not-crumbling Victorian townhouses and well-maintained cobble streets that extend to even the weirdest corners of town, the structures that imply, if not affluence, a civic-mindedness, a caring for the city by the citizens that is at odds with my idea of “rough”, I have a hard time believing the city is significantly dodgier than a Volvo.

Anyway, I had a lovely lovely time in Glass Cow. I got there at noon on a Tuesday, or “happy hour” as it’s known in the city. I forbore from drinking--even at such a socially welcoming time--opting instead to muck about in the Glasgow Modern Art Museum, which is miraculously attached to the Glasgow Public Library. I saw a Warhol Campbell Soup Can in person for the first time. There were some photos of Goldsworthy installations, next to two other Scottish natural artists. A corner on the second floor that looked out a window, had an easel and colored pencils set up, and asked you to create what you saw. I wrote a few paragraphs describing the view in lyrical prose and buggered off before anyone could get mad that I wasn’t drawing properly. If I’d been caught, I’d have said that Warhol would’ve approved; but seeing as he was intolerable in conversation, this gambit probably wouldn’t have played out well.

The highlight of the museum for me was a half-hour long film made by the dynamic Swiss duo, messrs. Fischli and Weiss. Imagine a half-hour-long Rube Goldberg machine in which the transfer mechanisms are magnetic tires, flaming gasoline, swinging sand balloons, and flying nails, the whole mechanism looking simultaneously incredibly high-budget and the cheapest thing two eleven-year-olds with time and a shed could throw together for their dad’s camcorder, and you’ll have some of the picture. I only saw the last ten minutes. Watching it through would probably feel like watching a short Tim Burton film, but with less plot and more pointy. It was cool, thought-provoking, and followed some classic rules of comedy when it came to the timing of things. Wunderbrëd, and all that.

From the museum to my lodgings in the West End. A forty-minute walk that ended in a huge, beautiful dead end of red stone and clear glass, shaped in welcoming three-story trapezoids. The hostel took up several townhouses that looked right over Kelvingrove Park, the largest and most beautiful in Glasgow. I resolved to take a spin in the park the next day, but I had an important errand to run.

ONE PAIR OF ABSOLUTELY SICK VEGAN DOC MARTENS LATER...

[The boots didn’t feel comfortable the first or second day. Today they feel pretty good. Tomorrow they’ll feel great.]

I wrote about the strange dissolving magic of city parks in the last post, and I feel like talking more about my walk in Kelvingrove Park would be retreading freshly stomped ground. I don't wanna do that.

In fact, I'd rather veer off to the fact that "Moonage Daydream" is currently playing, and gosh! was David Bowie good at making unconventional simple chord structures sound poppy and easy despite their inherent alien quality. Of course, he was also known for his alien quality, so it makes sense.

David Bowie was always proud of his chord changes.

I'm tired, and I need some rest. This post could have been written better, but I hafta totter to sleep and sleep in a bit. It's been an eight-day week and it's only Thursday. xxx

Superorganism

The European city park. Usually well-maintained, always picturesque, scattered people in grownup coats walking to their heres and theres. Smooth green expanses almost as far as the eye can see, interrupted by grey statues and fountains. Usually a river nearby.

It's not hard to experience a bit of an ego death when you go into a European city park. Your life and its context wash away, replaced by the asphalt, and that dog over there, and whatever's hidden behind the next corner around the fountain. You cease to exist as a platonic form, and your mind and body become part of the park's biomechanics.

Watch: while you move around the fountain, someone fifty paces away stops on a bridge and looks over to the next bridge. In a wide, field-dominated part of the park, a tired person throws a tennis ball for their discordantly energetic dog, using a plastic arm extender so they don't have to work as hard. By the river, a little further up from the person on the bridge, a young couple pause to pull their larval child out of its vehicle and sit down on a bench, dandling it and chatting about next Tuesday's yoga class that she plans to attend while he watches the baby. It doesn't matter what they're talking about. Not really. All that matters is that they're on a nice park bench that hugs and soothes their aching backs, the baby isn't crying, and there is, for the moment, nothing else to do.

A jogger flails awkwardly along, smiling and mouthing along to whatever's coming through the earbuds. A runner takes focused, soaring steps that take her farther along than seems logical each time she takes to the air. Another doesn't run so much as he lifts himself up a long set of stone steps, heads back down, and does the same thing again, but this time one foot to the left. He has been doing this since six AM, and by now is marvelling at the time it's taking. But a commitment is a commitment, so up and up and up he goes, legs solidifying, face well beyond flushed, lungs doing their best. The park needs his energy to keep an eddy going under that first bridge, so he keeps going.

A pigeon balances on a rail under an overpass, sun in front, shadow behind, preening itself. Not a big day for scraps so far, but it's still early. Plenty of day left before it'll have to try the more fruitful but less hospitable streets. It stares at you as you get closer, considers running while you take your phone out, poses for a cool shot or two, and flaps to the pavement as you pass by.

Jackhammers come from just outside an entrance to the park, but that's an important part of it as well: the park is of the city, and the city is in the park. Even the monuments bear a mark signifying their germination in the brown and busy world outside, which they are obligated to still represent in the heaven in which it has landed.

This one is here because the city got a new water supply in 1861.

This one is here because of a rich American emigrant who didn't forget where he came from.

This one is here because of the trouble the Nazis stirred up, and the local boys who went to take them down.

This one is just a bridge. It's here because this spot needed a bridge.

When the time comes that you drift out of the park, off to whatever mundane destination awaits you, the park diligently returns your self to you, fetching it from the big pot where it keeps these things. It's been mixed up a bit while you were away; there's bits of other selves in there now. The couple, the baby, and the joggers and the pigeons and the rich dead American, as well as a large amount of the park itself, its green leafy watery essence having seeped into the holding pot. Your self is returned to you, but it's not anything like the self that you gave up when you came in.

Your own platonic form will eventually filter all of this out. Life will grind the non-you bits away. Don't worry when you notice this happening; all it means is that you should go to the park again.

I'm in Glasgow and they haven't killed me once!

Yet!

I got off the bus a little past noon, having read about a third of Ali Smith's Autumn and listened to some music. I made the following conclusions:

-Ali Smith is good at writing. I'm glad the Man Booker committee and I agree.

-Lana Del Rey is very good at making it sound like she doesn't care about her vocal quality, even though she's totally paying attention to and controlling her vocal quality.

-Sia's 2004 album Colour the Small One is very different from her current oeuvre. Think minimalist electro-influenced folk sad-on-a-misty-day-in-a-café and you have the cornerstones, if not the second story. It's very good, and includes the stunning "Breathe Me", which I've liked for years.

-Coldplay was, and I make no apologies for saying this, a very good band up to and including their 2008 album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. They stood on the shoulders of Radiohead (who aren't, as a unit, actually that tall) and mixed in a bit of pop sensibility, as well as going the lyrical route of "not making you want to kill yourself with cement bricks", which tends to send you further into the mainstream than Thom Yorke. They had a good run (if you overlook the repetitive, overstuffed, schmaltzy X&Y), with a strong debut in Parachutes, all clear electric guitars and bright-orange vocals; the really quite excellent A Rush Of Blood To The Head (highlights include "Politik", "In My Place" (which takes the drum pattern from Radiohead's High and Dry and writes a happy song over it instead), "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face", and the title track). And the Eno-produced Viva La Vida, in which they wrote ten absolutely marvelous, make-you-grin, brightly-colored widescreen anthems covering topics of a pre-Enlightenment generality, all dressed up in French Revolution paintings and costumes. Great stuff. Alas, the mainstream that they entered eventually corrupted them, and now they're another set of hitmakers, writers of songs rather than albums. At least we have their early work.

Now I'm eating leftover pasta from last night and debating whether or not to spring for vegan Doc Martens. I mean, obviously I should, especially because my walking shoes are falling apart, and on the other hand, of course I should. Glad we could have this chat.

I'm going to see a post-punk band tonight! At a cool-looking club! £6 entrance fee and they said on the website that they don't turn people away for lack of funds! I'm still going to pay full price, of course, but that means this club is good people. AND they have a Tuesday special on vegan burgers! £5 with chips! What a city!

Good luck to Zoey, who today performs a mind-blowing dance with electronic walls for the Grand Viziers of GrooVM.

xxx

Sammy

Notre Dame is still on fire

I don't have any words.

And hey, it's my brother's birthday!

Zeke is 23!  ?

Nice work to Zeke!

Proud.

I know he'll be celebrating most immoderately tonight. Gilbert & Sullivan is the new drug of choice for wild birthday boizzz.

Bye to Skye

My deepest apologies for not posting yesterday. I wrote a lot of a new story, then I spent a long time making a dinner that received the sharp end of a malfunctioning salt-shaker lid, then I went out to watch five aging Scottish men perform the popular pop-country tune "Wagon Wheel", which then made me want to die or go to bed. I chose the latter and am proud to report I got a full nine hours. It does leave us short one blog post, for which I will somehow forgive myself one day.

Today is a little bit sad. I'm leaving in the morning for a night in Inverness, before continuing onto Glasgow for two nights, Liverpool for two more, and Snowdonia until the 25th. I'm saying goodbye to Skye, which has been my home these last fifteen days. When I came here, the island seemed huge, and self tiny. Now the island is large, and I'm medium-sized. I've learned loads in just these few weeks. For example, I can now feed myself well and healthily for an average of £17.64 ($23.08) per day. Even though I haven't been able to run for the last week (chest infection, hooray), I've kept the same approximate shape, with little to no stomachic expansion, by eating mostly whole foods and very little processed sugar. The money I've saved by living light is, in my eye, extra money that I can spend as I wish. This is very exciting.

I've also learned how to present myself as a social unit, rather than part of a family or friend group. I'm better at talking to people than ever (which, if I do say so myself (and I do), is saying something). I've made tons of friends, local and foreign, and I think everyone I've talked to liked me. Being engaging and deferential is a good thing to make a habit of.

Interesting side note: I've also had my derriere complimented by a plurality of drunk Scottish women. They were all harmless, and the compliment was almost maternal, strange as that sounds. I told them that they can replicate my results through jogging and clean living, and that my self-help book ("American Booty: How To Look Like the Polite Foreign Lad in Three Months or Less!") is available in e-book and paperback for £13.99 on Amazon Prime. (I didn't really. I just made that up.)

The views on this island have been legendary, so picturesque that for a while, I refused to believe they were really real. Oh come on, I would think. That's a bit unrealistic, don't you think? And indeed, the island does possess a mythic aura that I'll miss, and the views, once I registered that they were really there, were the best I've ever seen. The people have been kind, and mostly named Ian. A few Floras in there as well, but predominantly, this island is populated by Ians. The Highland Ian is a special breed of man, usually short and rail-thin, with teeth that put one in mind of horrific car accidents, and a heart of gold and nicotine. Very friendly and self-sufficient, all they require for survival is the highland air and a dram of something I could never drink. I dedicate my time on Skye to the Ians, Floras, Aussies, and sundry kind old ladies and gents that made my visit so magical. I also dedicate it to Amanda Palmer, who has ancestors here and whose music sounds even better on a Lord of the Rings back road with improbable mountains rising up on either side.

I finished the story

It's good. It's a story for children, I think. It's about a boy at a fair who finds a father figure in the balloon man. It's about when you first start to notice the people you will spend your life noticing. It's about being let down. It's about traveling with big families. It's about too much at the moment.

I wish it weren't as male of a story, but I hope it deals with the subject matter sell enough that I will be acquitted by the millions of people who read it.

I will redraft once I have fresh eyes. For now, I want to go to bed. Hi, everybody!

1234

Listen, I'm writing a short story today, and it's good, and if I want to make sure the words come from the good-words spring, I have to write as much of it as I can today. So that means it's up to you, the readers, to make this blog post great by COMMENTING something, anything at all. Make it fun, make it deep, make it classy, make it the least tasteful thing I've ever read. Whatever. Let's boost this word count 😎

A post about finding happiness, I think

For a long time, happiness was in the future. Flashes of joy waited around corners, coming from different quarters: after work some days, training at practice some days, at home some days. Moments, here and there, wherein I could forget that my mind was a toxic stew of conflicting emotions and information of no import, and I could see the world in front of me. But if you did a spot-check of my emotions at any given moment, the odds weren’t with you that I’d be happy.

What was it? I was a teenager, for a start. Teenagers don’t get many reasons to be happy. We’re treated like children and expected to act like adults. Our minds are fritzing blenders, throwing out unrefined sparks of genius and idiocy with the volatility you’d expect from anything undergoing massive metamorphosis. We’re ridiculed for the most natural things—naivete, self-expression, any shreds of optimism we retain—loudly and repeatedly, to our faces, by people who hate themselves for getting old. And, most terrifying of all, our own minds and bodies are not under our control, instead held in sway by the hormone monsters, shame wizards, and social-anxiety banshees that live in locker rooms, subsisting on foot fungus and self-loathing. We took our happiness where we could find it, on sports pitches and on the internet, on dates with people we’d never follow up with and in books. Happiness was always a transient thing, never running continuously for more than a week, tops. Teenagers aren’t content.

Or perhaps it was my own special brand of mental spiraling that made me unhappy: the internal monologues about nothing that mattered, the unstoppable muttering through of song lyrics I didn’t even like, the fretting about which leg to start going up stairs with, the hours spent on social media because white noise was better than the alternative and books weren’t cutting it anymore. It started when I was twelve or thirteen, this mental fog that made being present in my life a memory.

I started trying to fight it a few years ago. I'm fortunate enough to live in the most beautiful state in the Union; I took more of my workouts outside, took the dog on walks, worked on the trails at a ski area. There weren't any walls, you see. There's a thing I used to do: I'd take in the gorgeous spread of nature before me, and I would imagine that my conscious wasn't inside me, but in the woods, that the center of my mind and soul wasn't balancing above my body, but spread across the trees and rocks and sunlight, receiving all, free of mundane interference. It worked, for a second or two.

The trip to Skye was supposed to be a transformational event. I was to hole up on a remote, beautiful island and cut past all the shellacked layers of confusion and misplaced self-defense. I would find the bedrock of my true self, and I would be content. I had hoped that by removing myself from the fully-formed life that Past-Me had built (because as someone said on the internet, “you in the past” is just you but dumber), I’d have the freedom to rediscover the joy that had eluded me since the first time I wanted the solace of my own room and loud music. 

But whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes, the Grinch stood on the Isle of Skye, wondering why his life hadn’t changed. It turned out all I had done was get a bigger room with louder music; the wolf still waited at the door, and of course it wasn’t my family, friends, town, and life; it was the mental tics that had made them so intolerable in my eyes.

Yesterday I sat down to write a big essay about all this, about how it was time for me to accept that I wouldn’t change, that it was time to accept a life where I was just me, warts and all, and that any further efforts at auto-reinvention would only distract even more from the world in front of me. It was very clever, and the last nail in the coffin of my childhood dreams. Or so I thought.

I saved the draft, closed my computer, put on some shoes, and went out for a walk. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun waking up the first scent of spring on the ground, the air the very nectar of the gods. Chocolate ice cream glimmered on my tongue, and shy Scotch cats crossed the streets in front of me. I wonder...

The undercurrent of mindless thought was there, murmuring along about David Bowie minutiae or some such. On any walk in the last five years, I would’ve let it get stuck, get caught in a mental holding pattern, and the walk would just be something that happened while my mind turned inwards, oblivious.

But yesterday, I gave it the slightest of nudges...

...and I was free.

There were the mountains.

Here was the music.

Nothing in between.

I don't know how it happened, but I’ve gotten what I’m looking for.

Watch this space

I'm working on something really good for tomorrow. It'll be insightful and pretentious and honestly just the worst. I hope you like it! For now, know this:

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Song for Neist Point: "I Promise" by Radiohead.

Blue blankets have a way of simplifying sunlight. The light comes through the window, so golden and pure that it's hard to believe it's not oozing through, and as I watch it in the air I can see where the Greeks got the "nectar of the gods" idea from. Then it hits the blue-covered duvet that keeps the cold out and the germs in, and the light becomes a pale, chalky, sickly thing, rather unfortunately similar to your author. I woke up this morning with a tacky throat and aching joints, my body giving me enough information that I was confident that today was the inevitable worst day of my cold. I took a hot shower, my sinuses thanking me while my rubber limbs softened and screamed, and brushed my teeth using Tom's and willpower. I tripped into some clothes, retrieved from the kitchen a cup of my camomile and from the breakfast buffet the two croissants (one for each bed I made yesterday), and forced them down with the aid of two tangerines and a banana.

Right, I thought. No outside for you, chippy. Wrap up nice and warm, do some arcane sacrifices to the wifi so you can watch some TV that buffers at the rate glaciers sprint, and spend your day trying not to feel sorry for yourself, which is hard because trying not to feel sorry for yourself is so much work that you start to feel sorry for yourself.

"P'raps if I knock, 'e'll--" *knock knock*

"'lo?" I croaked cheerily from the ground, where I crouched, beblanketed, poking my laptop with a stick. Hailey the hostel-runner buzzed in, and in tow: Carol!

"Oh, he's sick, isn't he, poor dear?" she said (I'm translating from the Aussie).

"Yeah," I intoned.

"Ah, that's such a shame, innit? I was a bit coughy yesterday, Sammy, it's no fun at all. Well I was going to invite you along to Neist Point" [the one major Skye destination I haven't been to] "to try and find some seals. It's not a big walk, and the weather's good, but if you're too poorly--"

"G--" I started, and cleared my throat. I tried again. "I would love to!"

"Are you sure?" Her face a kind crinkle of grandmotherly concern.

"G--It'd do me a world of good."

An hour later, Carol was breakfasted and I was "rugged up." We went on the getting-lost navigational principle, chatting about that, and, occasionally, this. This and that, you know. Carol is fun. She fed me lots of oranges and apples and bananas and pears, and two paracitemol tablets that took much of the awful away.

We got out to look at a very pretty crescent beach--looked positively tropical--and engaged in a footrace with a young man in a wheelchair, who won :( but he and his dad were very pleased with their victory, so good on them, say Carol and I. The walking brought a lot of phlegm up, and every time I started to politely suppress a cough:

"Get it out," commanded Carol, her eyes going black.

We drove behind an old man named MacDonald to our penultimate stop, a seal-viewing beach on which one could view no seals. MacDonald had been in the convenience store while I bought a bag of crisps, and had offered to guide us there in his car. Upon our arrival, he shook my hand twice for my being named Sammy.

"Me dad wus a Sammy. Thei're prrroper claiver, them."

"This young man is more cultured at his eighteen years than I am at my sixty-three," said Carol.

"Aye, that's cuz he's a Sammy."

Our last stop before we journeyed back was Neist Point. Neist is the westernmost point of Skye, looking out on the Pacific with no further peninsulas.

High noon. Mist was rising off the sea, thinly spread but thick enough that the horizon was a gorgeous semicircular haze of whiteish-blue water bleeding into a blueish-white sky. Neist Point, a jutting row of green-growing cliffs painted green, looked like the last real thing there was. It looked like the end of the world.

Get Sikk!!!

Heeeey eeverybody!

I 👏 am 👏 sick 👏👏👏

Why? Because I'm a legend. I hike and run 60 miles in a week and then go listen to live music till 1 am. And because I'm a legend, I hiked and ran 60 miles a week, went out two nights in a row, and did not see this coming. He's incredible, isn't he, folks? Aaaah. Yep. I'm sik. And the C key keeps stikking. So expekt some Russianesque spelling this blog post.

The thing about being sik on an island that you've already explored pretty well is this: you don't care so muh. There's still an island out there, and at this point you know each other well enough that you can just call it up (there's a charge for calling from a US phone, but it's all right). You call up the Isle of Skye (+44 800 MYSTIC ISLAND), and it picks up after five rings.

SKYE: Hchaeilodh? [Skye speaks in Gaelic, which is like a language but if there was a national mandate that all words had to be at least 40% silent letters.]

ME: Hey Skye, may I say you're looking exceptionally fine today?

SKYE: Thaenking yiouiu, I haieve bane meoisteraizing.

ME: Moisturizing? What with?

SKYE: Tourischts.

ME:

SKYE:

ME: Er, right. Well.

SKYE: Whaet are yiouoiou cawleng abooit?

ME: Yes, I'll get to that in a second, but I just wanted to mention--no particular reason--but I've been told by doctors that I'm unusually arid.

SKYE: Izhthait soidh?

ME: Practically desiccated. Two dermatologists have looked me dead in the eyes and said I'm made of the least rejuvenating material they've ever seen.

SKYE: Ai'me nawt gaingng to yews uiu to meoisteraize.

ME: No?

SKYE: Yet.

ME: Right. So. Right. Anyway, I'm afraid I have to call in sick today. Instead of summiting misty peaks and looking out upon a landscape I never thought existed outside Lord of the Rings while thinking deep mature thoughts, I'm going to sit in a bottom bunk and not watch Netflix because the Wi-Fi sucks.

SKYE: Feyn.

ME: So we're cool?

SKYE: Yeah.

ME:

SKYE: don't look behind you

ME: Huh?

SKYE: *click*

So yeah, I'm spending the day in. Called some friends, napped a bit, now I'm writing a blog post. (This you may have surmised.)

Yep.

Yep.

Filling the space. Just fiiiiilling the space.

Filling thdon't look behind youe space.


:)

The Real Heck Of It, or The Dangers of Hostel Wi-Fi

*Hello, wifi, my old friend*

*You've come to anger me again*

I can't upload any of the great pictures of today! Sad! Australian Kate and I (there are so many Australians) went on an epic 6-hour road trip of Skye, seeing All the Things and eating All the Chips, and here I am with no evidence. "Pictures or it didn't happen", they say, and lo! already the morning and afternoon are burning away from my mind like so much overheated tape. (The tape melting to change/end scenes; that's something you don't see in films anymore.) I know you're all as sad as I am that there's no way for you to know that I didn't spend my morning upside down in a barrel of wine, singing sea chanties in a bubbling baritone (did I or didn't I? I guess we'll never know!).

Tell you what we can do: I can't post pictures, but I can provide the captions!

Right, here we go.

[picture]

Here I am with a Highland cow! (Boy, is it fuzzy.)

[picture]

Kate holding up the World's Largest Shrimp! (His name is Cliff. Cliff the Crustacean.)

[picture]

Here I am jumping into the Fairy Pools! They sure were cold, but the magical experience communing with the island's native sprites is worth a few fingers, right? Right?

[picture]

Here's Kate using a chunk of her hair as a tourniquet for my bleeding stumps! Turns out it actually ended up isolating the cold in my wrist, and I lost the hand, but live and learn, haha!

[picture]

Skye hospitals are pretty!

[picture]

Fairy glen! Kate didn't make it out of the circles :/

[picture]

Here's Father MacKenzie, wiping the dirt off his hands as he walks from the grave! (Look at him working.)

***

Haha, Skye sure is wild! Thanks for reading, everybody! I'll write a longer post tomorrow, once I've had some practice typing with one hand. Until then, good craic to you!