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.