It's been a brilliant week so far - I've been on vacation and have been catching up on sleep, movies, reading & restaurants (in that order). Fox knows I've needed a break after the last month on the road in the US.
So Cecilie & I caught Tarantino's two Grindhouse movies the last couple of nights. I have mixed feelings about Tarantino but these were just a lot of fun. Especially Planet Terror, a sarcastic over-the-top splattercore zombie movie. God I love zombie movies - makes me want to track down a lot of the horrible old Dawn of the Dead flicks. (Incidentally, I caught Land of the Dead on cable in a hotel room in the US a couple of trips ago. I can't remember now which city I was in, but it was great stuff. Had me up well past bedtime.)
I'm hoping my head clears enough in the next couple days that I can start writing again. It's not often I get some time to myself.
So I got about four hours of sleep on the flight over three days ago (until we hit heavy turbulence over Greenland and a woman began screaming and woke us all up). Then eight to nine hours a night since I landed, which is a miracle. But I'm still really lagging. Have been a zombie during the day and then I snap awake around midnight, which I've just done again now. No fun.
Thank fox for sleeping pills, at least I'll get my circadian rhythm back on track eventually. I hope.
Just got back from the US and I still feel like I'm on another planet. It's strange, coming back after more than a month of couch surfing and hotel life. I have to remember really mundane things like where I keep the coffee grinder or how to use the little clip cards for the train.
I was talking about travel with the guy next to me on the flight from Seattle to Denver a couple weeks ago - how it's tough to get your head around being "normal" again after a long trip. He said he knew what I meant- he was a platoon commander in the Army and had to readjust to civilian life after sleeping in a bag in the field for a few months at a time.
Okay, so hotel life isn't *that* tough. I've no right to complain.
More later, as soon as my head comes back to planet Earth. I have pictures, too.
Thomas sits at his PowerBook at the desk in the Factory basement, surrounded by his laundry, papers, rechargers, his wallet lying on the desk next to his Storm series that he’d taken off for the night. He supposes this has been his home for more than a week now. He’s lost track of time.
The frontier has been quiet since he’d last talked to Liine, but he’s seen enough military traffic on the roads to know that the VNO is moving out of town, heading north. He’d passed within a couple of blocks of Chernorukov’s palace again, trying not to look like a foreigner, casting a glance down Ulitsa Karla Marksa to confirm that the troops were still place in the parade square, probably the same three UAZ thin-skin carriers he’d seen before, one of them with the back cut away.
He needs to get to the frontier to see for himself, but doesn’t know how. How does Liine figure in, and the EIB mission? Brief image of Liine’s face in the Bezdna from three days before, secret smile over a glass of red wine. Her too-wide eyes, the perfect circles of her irises, freckles, a strand of orange hair that she’d let hang in front of her face...
No, he pushes that away. He doesn’t have time for that.
A distant muffled thump brings him back to the present, as if something heavy like an iron safe or a steel i-beam had dropped from a great height. A few seconds later, the table lamp flickers, then weakens slowly, like someone was turning down a dimmer knob with deliberation. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up and he has the sensation that his perception of time has slowed. Thomas sits absolutely still – enjoying the strangeness of the sensation but afraid to confirm that his world has changed in a way from which he may not be able to return. If he picks up the brass 100-ruble coin that lies to the right of his PowerBook, and drops it to the floor, will it hang in the air for a long moment, before slowly sliding downwards through the liquid air?
THE WORDS HAVE CHANGED THE GRASSHOPPER LIES HEAVY. A graffito he’d seen once, scrawled in block print on a scarred grey wall. Where had he seen that? San Francisco maybe.
His mind is wandering now, so tired, and the fatigue is making him sensitive. An earlier memory now, walking across a parking lot in thick snow, fat flakes still falling from the black night sky. Ahead, a car was turning towards him, headlights reflecting from snow ahead of the vehicle, angle of headlights about to wash across him, and Thomas had slowly closed his eyes – a moment of suspension in infinite space, the red-pink light of the headlights pouring through his closed eyelids, mixed with the after-image of the reflected light from silver snowflakes, suspended with him in the moment.
And somehow he’d known as he’d closed his eyes, that he’d carry the visual of that coming moment with him in perfect clarity for the rest of his life. It had been a mundane moment, he’d been 12 years old. But he’d known, and he didn’t understand how he’d known.
I just got a phone call from a member of our group's advanced scouting party (we sometimes call them 'the armed reconnaissance'). She landed in Denver earlier today and has been prowling around for a few hours.
Her advice: Don't get on the plane tomorrow.
Uh oh. Bit late for that.
Two days left in Seattle and I'm absolutely knackered. Cecilie flew over to take a look at the place, and we've been lucky to have a pretty busy social schedule nights.
We had a chance to just drive around the city yesterday and last Saturday, and prowl around different neighborhoods. Must say that Capitol Hill rocks. It has a lot of the things that I loved about San Francisco - good bars & restaurants, a healthy dose of contrapolitik, and (from what I could see) a thriving underground.
Very interesting.
The tradeoff to all this is that I've still had to cope with the 16-hour day pre-conference schedule, so my head is just squashed flat. No sleep. At least the US had a holiday yesterday so at least I only needed to be online from 6am till 1pm, when the Europeans finally switched off. Then hit the city all day and watched fireworks at night with friends.
On a side note- I had no idea they had fireworks that explode in a square pattern these days. Crazy - amazing what they've been up to over here since I've been gone.
If I survive Denver I'll put pictures up.
Good news- kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston was just freed in Gaza. It was looking very dicey for a while, so I'm really happy this story had a happy ending.
Good to have you back, Alan.