A piece of yellow police tape, cut free, drifts amongst the 8am traffic.
Touching gutters, brushing along against taxis, wrapping itself around parking meters.
Creating little crimes scenes with a kind of lazy affection.
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Notes from a month spent offline:
After days spent building steps and felling trees and hiking and digging, we eat huge meals. Our bodies become terribly efficient digesting-machines. So much so that one of us paused briefly at the end of his side of a particularly fierce debate to let forth with a long and vehement fart (as if to punctuate his argument.)
It was rich. Triumphant. Melodic.
It had a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It sounded like an old, old elephant that was
finally
finally
dying.
There is a volunteer who, instead of swearing, loudly exclaims “Monkeys!” when something bad happens to him. I like to believe he actually blames a specific group of monkeys for his problems.
“My first words were ‘bugger daddy’,” she tells me. “My family didn’t tell me until I was older. They’d always just told me it was ‘daddy.’”
While trying to get dressed in my small tent, I turn and squirm and, hulk-style, rip a pair of underwear clean in two.
The brief moment of incredible power is the highlight of my week.
There are names are Ingi and þyri, pronounced ‘Inky’ and ‘Theory.’ He is large, bald, and incredibly muscular. He teaches kindergarten. She is quiet and wears strange serapes. They treat us like their children, scolding us in thick Icelandic accents.
Inky and Theory.
I could listen to beautiful Icelandic girls tentatively pronounce ‘windows’ all day. (“We-ind-ohs.”) (I think it’s the ‘ohs’ I like the most.)
“He disappeared like birds die - no-one knew where he went.”
After months of sunshine, it finally starts to get dark at night, and I see a car with its headlights on again. It’s a jeep, and it growls and swerves over gravel, its eyes blazing like some terrible predator.
We spent time trying to prevent paths from becoming too wide or veering off where people have decided to wander off it.
Desire lines.
I spent a lot of my summer eliminating desire lines.
I woke up this morning when a baby wagtail tried to perch on my tent. It fell, sliding down the canvas. I spent today digging holes and had lunch by a large glacial lake. I’ll play some guitar in a little while and then I might cook some dinner. Something with fish, maybe, and rice, and a thick, white sauce.
I like my life.
“I pray for soft soil,” she says in her thick Italian accent.
“Huh?”
“Soft soil. At the camp site, for our tents. I pray for soft soil.”
That’s a nice prayer, I think.
Later she says that she says she has to go because she has places to be. She emphasises the ‘be’. I know it’s simply because the idiom’s not in her native language but I like the idea that there are places that require her to be there. Like she’s fufilling some kind of agreement with a place that requires simply her existence there.
I’ve been offline for two weeks, working out in the middle of nowhere.
Our bright orange waterproofs are made of thick rubber. They are only vaguely the shape of a man. I’d guess the seams were stitched by an industrial machine with a large needle. They smell like bouncy castles.
Someone wrote ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ in the ash that covers the back windshield of the truck. I like to think of it as our Bokonism.
We stumbled across a Viking Rennaisance fair. One viking was smoking a Marlboro, another adjusting his hearing aid. They played the Macarena over the sound system. A tourist wandered by snapping photos wearing a t-shirt that said “Reykjavik Fucking City.”
There are always those people who believe that being a leader is being the guy who walks the fastest, talks the loudest, or is the last to put on sunscreen.
I turned 29 last week. I usually forget about my birthday right until it happens. It’s an odd feeling, realising you’re another year older - like feeling a gear slip in a mechanism of which you were only vaguely aware.
I saw an old couple eating ice-cream cones in a gas-station restaurant near Borganes. They ate them delicately, discussing the ice-creams together. They reminded me of tortoises eating lettuce.
There are golf courses everywhere here. It’s a very popular sport. Where once farmers bit deep into the cold ground, hoping to grow something, anything, to survive, men in plaid um and ah over which stick to use to hit a ball. (The wooden one, man. Always use the wooden one.)
The soil is either rocky and volcanic - hard and small - or like clay - slick and brown and rich and fertile. Steam rises from odd cracks in the ground. The wind howls and runs screaming around the little huts we stayed in like some terrible creature that had been turned loose. This country feels like a place that God hasn’t quite finished making yet.
We spent the last week building stone steps on the side of a mountain. We’d drive stakes into the ground and hit frozen soil a few feet down. We’d hit the stakes harder then, pushing them through, and from 6 feet away you could feel the force of each blow through your boots - like the land was resisting, or perhaps as if with each blow you were brushing up against some terrible power held in it.
“Are you happy?” said the Ranger, talking about some work we’d just finished.
“No.”
“Is okay,” he said, looking down at our wooden steps before peering out into the distance. “Is okay to be happy.”
International Sign Language
Me, in terrible Italian: <Hi. I’m just a tourist. Do you speak English?>
Shopkeeper: Ah, a little. Si.
Me: Do you have any razorblades? For shaving? <mimics shaving>
Shopkeeper: Ah! Si, si. <gestures at large selection of Mach 5’s, blades with moisturiser strips, etc.>
Me: No, um. Razorblades. Like, uh… <mimics shaving, then slitting wrists with same imaginary item>
Shopkeeper: Aaah! Si! Si! <gets some razorblades from behind the counter> €1.50!
Me: Thank you.
Shopkeeper: Enjoy!
I am travelling alone now for the first time on this trip, having previously stayed with friends or friends-of-friends. I like the feeling, though it’ll end soon enough.
(I call it a ‘trip’, but since I don’t have a flat to go back to, everything I own is in two bags I have with me, and I’m doing (a little) work as I go, is it really a ‘trip’? Aren’t I just… here, now?)
I’m in Luzern now, holed up in a hostel for a few days to do some freelance work.
I went for a run along the lake just after arriving. As I run along a gravel path by the lake, freshly green trees lining its length, a group of runners rounded a corner ahead. It was 5 men, each more of a clichéd Swiss man than the last - blonde hair, chiseled jaws, blue eyes. They ran almost abreast and in the same uniform of white shirts, black shorts, and white running shoes. The middle runner ran slightly ahead, the others forming a line just behind him. They weren’t intimidating - they smiled as they ran and seemed to be talking happily amongst one another - but they didn’t break formation for anyone coming in the opposite direction. As they ran past me (my chest stuck out and my belly sucked in, my face set in a grimace of what I hoped looked like vague disinterest), the leader inclined his head in a nod of exactly 15 degrees. No more, no less. A simple, quick gesture of acknowledgement, one runner to another.
I thought about them as I ran around the lake and wondered how different each of their lives were to mine. It helped pass the time. I imagine they wear tasteful, mechanical watches and starched shirts. They’re slow to anger but quick to defend their friends, and they’d be the first to ask a stranger to apologise for knocking over a lady’s glass of wine in a restaurant. Should the stranger not, and dare to insult the lady further, they’d be the last to start the ensuing fight but surely the first to end it. They’d not get hurt in the affray - not seriously, anyway - and any minor wounds inflicted on them would be caused by something dastardly or uncouth on the part of the stranger, like having a metal plate in his head or, being cut from a lesser cloth, simply exploding when punched by so just and earnest a human being. Overly stern fathers, dutiful husbands, firm Believers, constant runners. The kind of man who, in another time, would’ve made a good Paladin or Knight-errant. Somehow imbued with a healing nimbus and +5 against the Undead.
A girl smiled at me on the way back. A simple smile in the afternoon sunlight intended specifically for me. Uncomplicated. It made me happy.
I am in Switzerland.
I travelled by train, the first time I’ve done so between countries. It seems like an entirely different mental experience when compared to flying. Flying is very clear on the difference between the Point of Origin and the Destination: you begin at the point of origin, are ushered into a long metal Purgatory tube in which you are forced to eat terrible food and watch worse movies, and you are, after a specified period, at the Destination Holding Area. You show some Destinational people at Destination some papers and, after they’ve uhmed and aahed (or whatever the regional equivalent of ‘uhm’ and ‘aah’ is), you are told you are now officially at Destination - why not try some of Destination’s famous flans? Or perhaps go watch a traditional Destinationish dog fight? It’s the perfect time of year for it, what with rabies almost never being a problem in the summer. Take the kids! Make a day of it!
Travelling by train between countries feels like more of a gradual assimilation process. After a little while you realise that the houses whizzing by have changed a little, though you couldn’t say how exactly. At some point you realise that the conductor’s deep booming announcements have changed from one language you can’t understand to another you can’t understand (which simultaneously makes you feel both worldly and worried that you not only going to miss your stop but somehow the entire country within which your stop is located.) And then, suddenly, you’re on a platform somewhere and the guy selling cheap train station coffee uses an set of words you don’t know to greet you that differs entirely from the unintelligible greeting coffee sellers in the train stations at your Point of Origin (which you swear you were at only a little while ago) use and you realise you’re at your Destination.
I guess I don’t feel like I’ve ‘arrived’ in Switzerland, so much as I feel like a deep feeling of Switzerland has quietly stolen over me.
Baguette in hand and on my way home, I decided to cut down a small alley in the hopes that it was a shortcut. It was sunny, and I was looking forward to a lunch of a fresh baguette, some chorizo, and some of Paris’s finest cheeses.
I was thinking the happy thoughts of a man in possession of fresh baked goods.
We spotted each other at the same time - he at the opposite end of the alley, the bright sunlight casting his long shadow forward.
He, too, had a baguette.
We both knew what was to be done. It was unstoppable, like the pull of moon or that X-man, Juggernaut.
Baguette duel.
The fight was short but brutal. He was of a newer school, Brutal Unleavened Rye, while I favoured a more traditional style, Mauling Angry Wholewheat. He was young but inexperienced. I was, only briefly, sorry that I would have to kill him.
20 bloody minutes later I staggered to the alley’s exit, victorious but cut deep.
Cut too damn deep.
I collapsed in front of an pair of American tourists.
“My god, are you alright?” the wife said, kneeling.
“Someone call 911!” the husband shouted.
I feebly gestured them closer. My blood pooled slowly on the cobblestones.
“Don’t worry, son, there’s a doctor on the way,” the wife assured me.
“C….ca…” I whispered, my trembling hand clutching my blood-spattered bread-weapon.
“What? What do you need, son? Anything.”
“Do you… have any camembert?” I whispered.
There is a bridge in Paris that is covered in locks. There is one in Moscow, too, that I know of, and I suppose one in New York. I seem to remember finding one in London one evening when I was very drunk and laughing and with friends but I can’t recall whether I made that one up. So potentially the Seine, Moskva, the Thames, and the Hudson all have a lock-bridge.
All I suppose I know is that there is one in Paris and one in Moscow.
Young lovers write their names on a lock, usually in nail varnish or permanent marker, and one evening, perhaps at dusk, they will lock it to the bridge. They will probably make some declaration of love while it is being sealed. Perhaps there is something specific you’re supposed to say. I don’t know. I have only observed the result. Nor do I know how or why this started, or who spreads this idea of love-locks and knows the names of the bridges you are supposed to use.
Once a year, the governments of each country with a lock-bridge employ a civil worker to come and cut the locks off. I wonder whether the workers know of locks’ meaning and whether it’s a task they consider portentious or simply onerous, or whether they even bother to think anything of it at all. I imagine the sound the bolt-cutters make as they snap each lock off, each a different sound given width and thickness and durability of specific locks. I wonder if there are some so sturdy - so large and industrial - that the worker simply gives up on them. He’s only a civil worker, he’ll tell himself. One or two can stay.
Perhaps that’s all that’s stopping the lock-bridges from disappearing - one or two locks which are rediscovered and examined by the next year’s young lovers, their meaning immediately gleaned, before being copied. And so on.
I wonder if you waited on the bridge until late at night - late, late after the bars have closed and the evening is calm and quiet - whether you’ll find some poor drunk soul fumbling with an old box of keys, hoping to unlock their old lock so they can throw it into the river’s deeps, the relationship outlasted by a damned chunk of metal.
I don’t think that happens. That sounds like something out of a movie. Perhaps the locks are simply forgotten.
Paris in Spring, and the trees stream down blossoms while couples cut, cut, cut their names into the old wood below.
Things I have been thinking about
- With a Kinect and a 3D printer you could effectively take a 3D snapshot of someone’s face and create a 3D print of it off right then and there. Would be a neat marketing trick for a booth at a conference or show or something, and would be very cheap. Instant bust, just add Microsoft and open-source.
- With a bunch of light-resistant diodes, a glass ball, and an Arduino, you could create a neat digital Campbell-Stokes recorder that’d give you some pretty interesting data (if you were anywhere but overcast England and were totally into sunlight-readings).
- Why is it that I can cancel my water, gas and electricity - physical services with all the problems that entails - damn near instantly, but my cellphone provider requires a month’s notice?
- Charlie Sheen jokes.
- I decided to tidy up Evernote and had to delete a note entitled ‘Present Ideas for {her}’, and how if I’d written it down in a notebook instead I’d have torn the page out, which might’ve been slightly more satisfying (or as much such an act could be), but really confirming the deletion just made me feel quite the same feelings, and maybe technology hasn’t changed the course of human events and interactions that much. Or at least, hasn’t changed the small, important ones.
- Where do I even buy steel-capped boots and what am I going to do with them after I’ve finished up in Iceland?
So these are the things I have been thinking about.
“burn my man, burn…“ by Mike Bateman
My little brother (the middle of the three of us) is in Nicaragua right now. I’m not entirely sure where.
Prior to that it was Mexico, having biked down from California, having driven from New York, having flown from Norway, having hiked from Italy… you get the picture.
He’s kinda broke at the moment. We talked about it - about what he could sell or do to make some quick money. I suggested he sell some of his photographs.
“It’s the only thing I… make, you know? I don’t draw or write.” he says. “I don’t want money for that.”
(He makes other things, but I don’t interrupt. He’s re-planting a garden now at the hostel / tour center where he’s staying, in exchange for a place to sleep and food. He gets excited when he talks about learning how to grow things; when he talks about lettuces, beans, carrots.)
I tell him film is expensive. He needs to cover his costs. Either that or go back to a digital camera.
“I don’t want want to go back to digital. It’s… there’s a few reasons. Every time I take a photograph now I have to assess it, see if it’s worth using my film for. I have look at how I get the best angle, if the light is wrong, what’s actually happening… If I get a digital I’d just spend that time taking 15 or 20 bad photos.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” I say.
“I just don’t want money to change that either. I don’t want my photos in some travel magazines promoting a place that doesn’t look after the locals and is just filled with terrible tourists. These photos mean something to me about a place and I can’t… I can’t see how anyone else would enjoy them without that.”
The tone in his voice is one of genuine worry. This is something precious he doesn’t want to change, even a little. It means too much.
So he’s just going to keep taking photos slowly and on film. No digital camera. I doubt he’s even heard of Instagram. And he’s not going to sell them, despite the fact he’s a little broke. And he’ll be thinking about the situation each time, and the light, and the angles, and the layout. Most importantly, I guess, he’ll be thinking about the people and places involved, and what it means to him.
And then: *click*.
I really hope that one day I love and worry about something I make as much as my little brother does with every single photo he takes.
I like
The plinking sounds some lights make when they turn on and warm up. That half-awake moment when you remember someone’s sleeping next to you. Cutlery with heavy handles, forks with thin tines. Good whiskey, a solid whiskey glass, clean ice. Quiet, empty, warm offices. Girls who read. The phrase ‘to turn a phrase’. Turning a phrase. The people you meet when you’re both hiking a long trail. Red onion, in look and taste. Flirting with waitresses in foreign countries. Brussels sprouts. Girls who sing softly to themselves when they’re listening to music, especially on buses. Talking with people who have a passion, and seeing them get swept up in their excitement, especially when it’s something I think is boring. Wandering down to my local corner-shop just to buy milk. Tales of valour and honour and other inherently stupid acts. Kids and their enthusiasm for anything and everything. Waking up early on Sundays. Sleeping in a sleeping bag. White fairy-lights hung in trees, especially outdoors. New tennis-balls. Cats. Long train journeys.
I worked at a summer camp in Maine in 2002. It was all kids from rich families - the sons and daughters of judges, lawyers and diplomats - with 3 exceptions.
Two were the camp’s nurse’s kids. Nice girls, if a little rowdy, but nowhere near as dangerous as their mother. She would constantly invite the male counsellors up to her cabin for drinks on their nights off, turn up at bars where we were all drinking, and tell everyone how lonely she was since her husband had left her, all the while staring hungrily at us 21-year olds.
She probably was quite lonely, come to think to of it.
The other exception was “a charity case - a young kid from from the inner-city”. A tax write-off, we assumed. Either that or something for the brochure.
He was 10 years old, in my cabin, and had arrived a little later than the others. A young black kid in borrowed camp-wear (blue shorts and a white t-shirt), he was naturally an object of curiosity. He got angry a lot in the beginning, mostly at all the questions, and would fight and taunt the other kids, but you could tell he was just afraid a lot of time - afraid of being laughed at and of being different (both of which he was).
In the worst of it - when he’d fought with the other kids or thought he’d been made fun of - he’d hide in this big, wooden chest he’d brought along. He was tall but scrawny, and could easily fit inside it. He’d climb in there, hold down the lid, and cry. Hence his eventual nickname: Box.
The other counsellors and I were terrified he’d get locked in somehow and suffocate.
On the second day after he’d arrived he was terribly sick. He’d been supervised on the first day, but on the second day he was left alone at dinner, and it dawned on him that he could eat as much as he wanted - that it was just a giant buffet.
He ate so much he was sick.
Then he carried food back to our cabin in the pocket of his borrowed hoodie. Fresh fruit. The kid loved fresh fruit.
And he tried to eat that too.
I remember sitting by his cot while he cried, vomited and clutched his stomach that night. This kid named Box. 10 years old.
Lying on the floor next to his cot were all the peaches he’d carried back. Fresh and sweet and now a little bruised.
We threw them away the next morning before the other kids woke up.
an open letter to people
Hi people.
Tumblr was down for a day. The staff didn’t kill your kitten, kidnap your child or feed chocolate to your dog. Sure, they may have inconvenienced you. They may have left you feeling slightly off kilter, unvalidated and perhaps you even got a case of the vapors.
Tumblr is a free blogging platform that experienced some problems and went blank for about 24 hours. It’s ok to be aggravated about that. It’s ok to feel like you missed out on something in those 24 hours. But really, look at it in the wide scope of things. Did it really change your world that much? Did it cost you money? Cost you a book deal? Shut down your business? Keep you from living your life?
I’m guessing not. So cut it out with the outrageous outrage and the chastising and finger pointing and belligerence. You want some reliable hosting? Buy a domain name and pay a hosting company. You want something free? Deal with it when shit happens and don’t act like they were eating babies while you were sitting here hitting F5 the entire time.
Love,
Me
I disagree.
People have a right complain about a free service like Tumblr. Civilly and maturely, of course, but they still have a right.
Tumblr hasn’t demanded money. Tumblr hasn’t peppered us with ads. In an age of angel investors and relatively low start-up fees, most Web 2.0 companies don’t, at least initially. A ‘freemium’ or free service now doesn’t want your money in the beginning - they just want you.
Because a prolific creator such as yourself has invested time and sweat into creating content that you want hosted online. You’ve picked them as a host. You’re hosting content on their network and they, in turn, are getting content on their network. You’re pointing your friends to it. You’re encouraging other people to join you on this service. You’re growing their user count, hit rate and all the other metrics of success which, increasingly, are what web-companies are using in place of profit margin.
The money can, thanks to these metrics, come later. Right now, they want to be popular.
It’s not the usual money-for-services transaction, but it’s a transaction - my time and content for a place to put it.
If Tumblr had to sell out tomorrow, it’d go for a premium rate - not because it has money in the bank or assets or infrastructure (though I’m sure it has all that) - but because it’s a rich network of people and content. You have worth. Your content has worth. (Somewhat worryingly) your social network has worth.
And because of this - because you and your content are what makes the service what it is - you have a right to, in my opinion, complain about the problems you see with the service. Civilly and maturely, of course, but you do still have a right to complain.
Yes, as someone else said, they could just sell out or close the service, but if the do sell out, it’ll be because we, the users, have made it something worth selling. And if they do close the service, well, we could just go somewhere else. Go make someone else’s service worthwhile.
At the end of the day, if I complain about Tumblr (and I do), I do it out of love. I’m not ungrateful, nor do I believe Tumblr are doing a bad job. The exact opposite, in fact. But I maintain that I’ve given enough time and content to the service to at least point out problems with it, and to say otherwise to belittle the great stuff you’ve put on it and the worth, however small, you’ve added to it.
(Aside: This is a re-hash / copy-paste of my side of the same debate I had yesterday with another Favrd person.)
Imaginary Conversations, Vol. 19
“Gold? You brought gold?”
“It seemed… it seemed like the right thing to bring.”
“Bloody hell, Mel, we talked about his. We agreed to a £5 limit.”
“I know, I ju-“
“I’ve got myrrh, Cas has frankincense, and you’re bringing gold? We’ll look like utter prawns.”
“I mean, he’s the King of the Jews. I just thought-“
“Of course he’s the king of the bloody Jews. That’s the whole bloody reason we agreed to the limit. I mean, what do you get the Son of God? By definition he has bloody everything. Cas and I just nipped into an aromatherapy shop, picked up a token of, you know, respect, and you… you… gold, Mel?”
“I ju-“
“You know what, it’s fine. It’s bloody fine. I think I saw a petrol station open a mile back. We’ll get some other stuff. Pork pies or something. Bloody hell.”
“I-“
“JUST. Just, be quiet. We’re going to have quiet for a while, okay? Quiet.”
“I-“
”Absolute bloody quiet.”
Alternative Titles For “That’s So Raven”
- That’s… that’s disconcertingly Raven.
- That’s so GLAVIN.
- Hey, woah, that’s a little too Raven.
- I’m sorry. The doctors tried everything they could, but… it’s Raven.
- Is that so, Raven. *glare*
- That’s so Kraven The Hunter.
- That’s so ravin’. *boomksshboomkssh*
