It’s no secret that D&L is the most popular thing on this blog. Or maybe the only popular thing. As it’s been two months since the most recent chapter went up, I think I owe you, my readers, an explanation.
I have a complete first draft! I have reworked the first chapter, fixed a number of inconsistencies and tried to break up some repetitive language. Currently I am fixing some third act issues. So, fear not, I have not abandoned the work. However I feel so good about this book that I intend to seek proper publication and I think it’s best not to put the entire manuscript online.
So I’m at something of a crossroads with regard to the updates. Do I put one more chapter up? Two? Or do I stop, having most recently put up a strong chapter that I’m proud of?
Anyway I wanted to reassure those of you who have been invested in the story and are wondering if I’m still on it, and if you will have the chance to read the whole thing, one way or another: reckon that’s so.
I like to keep my news updates coming from sources across the political spectrum. That way I can see how stupid everything is.
Let me make this plain: every single human being who draws breath is deluding themselves about one damn thing or another. It’s the universal constant. To act like this is news is to reveal yourself to have the intellect of a child.
Life sucks, and we deal with it by reframing everything into an order that makes sense. Yes, even you.
Wives stay with no-good husbands because they love them. Young girls date awful boys in the belief that they will change. Men stay with cheating wives, even when the child is obviously another man’s. People vote Democrat or Republican in the belief that it makes a difference and that their side is actually on their side.
These are not rational decisions. We are not rational animals. We do things because we have, above all, a need to be happy, and very often we hinge our happiness on things over which we have no control.
The truth is, happiness is not external. It’s about how we perceive the world, and we manage that perception once a day, every day, all day long.
So, yes, people routinely overlook the gross things about politicians when they believe that person is necessary to making sense of the world. This is as old as democracy itself.
If you’re only just noticing it now, you haven’t been paying attention.
As I write this, I’m sitting in Taco Bell. What I’m punishing myself for, I don’t know. What I do know is it’s fun to go into Taco Bell and order some random number of regular tacos and a drink.
I can vaguely remember being a little kid and going to Taco Bell with my parents. They served tacos, and little cups of frijoles, and possibly rice, too. By the time I was old enough to realize I liked tacos, the menu had been ravaged by whatever coke-snorting demon clowns now own not only Taco Bell, but KFC and Pizza Hut as well.
“Yeah, I’d like, uh… I dunno, like four crunchy tacos, and a drink.”
“That’s it? Just four regular tacos?”
“And a drink, yep.”
“You don’t want a Megachupaquesolupachangarito?”
“Uhhhh… no…”
“You don’t want food made entirely from Cheetos and Elmer’s glue?”
“Um, no, the uh… the standard amount of Cheetos and Elmer’s glue will, uh, will… will be fine.”
“Sir that IS the standard amount.”
You know what Taco Bell is to Mexicans? It’s like if you went to Cancun and there was a place called “Burger Bomb,” and the entire menu was just random shit served on rolls.
MEAL DEALS
1) Pizza Burger – a slice of pepperoni pizza on a thick, garlicky crust, served on a sesame seed bun.
2) Chicken Burger – Chicken patty, breaded and fried, with grape jelly and mayonnaise, and a slice of unripe pineapple.
3) American Burger – a bologna sandwich.
4) American Pizza – a flour tortilla, served flat, loaded down with tater tots, Greek yogurt, and Vienna sausages.
5) Traditional Burger – a sausage biscuit and the only edible thing on the menu. You will be shamed by our staff for ordering this.
Coming soon, breakfast burgers!
You hear people talk about cultural appropriation, but nobody ever takes Taco Bell to task over this, that I am aware of.
Throughout my childhood, dreams were a major part of my life. I often suffered from terrible nightmares that woke me screaming in the night, and when I woke up my imagination would turn ordinary objects in my room into visions of terror, which would send me running across the hall and literally flying though the air to belly-flop in my parents’ bed.
As I got a little older, I began incorporating into my nightly prayers a plea to God that the nightmares wouldn’t come. That did the trick; they went away pretty much for good. Later, I began to experience a new kind of dream: the prescient kind. At various times during my adolescence I would have a dream that felt unlike other dreams. The kind that I understood was a vision of things to come. I would remember them clearly upon waking, and the feeling of certainty, of understanding that these events would occur, was beyond my ability to explain. I predicted several events, including the disappearance, return, and eventual death of my neighbor’s yellow Labrador retriever. This ability has mostly left me now, too, but sometimes during periods of great stress or turmoil, both the nightmares and the prescient dreams return. And so it was that I one night came to meet the last full-blooded Piscataway Chief, Turkey Tayac.
He had been dead for twenty-eight years.
One day, in 2006 or ’07, my friend Jeremy and I had driven up to Maryland and, looking for something new to do, made our way to Piscataway Park, a nature preserve beside a Native American reservation across the river from Mount Vernon. We walked the nature trail and came to a place where the last full-blooded chief of the Piscataway Nation, Mr. Turkey Tayac, was buried. There is a plaque there, with his photograph, an older gentleman with grey hair and a plaid shirt, and a brief epitaph beside the picture. Visitors had left tokens, coins and such, along the lip of the plaque. I felt that I should pay respects, but had no coins in my pocket. I turned around and there were some quarters in the grass a few feet away, along the bank of the creek that flows along the property.
I picked up the quarters and placed them on his plaque, and sent good thoughts in his direction. Jeremy and I continued on our way, walked as far along a dirt road into the forest as we dared to, before we felt that perhaps we shouldn’t go any farther, and turned back, along the road, back to Turkey Tayac’s grave, and then along the dirt path and the plank-covered walkway along the creek, back to the visitor’s center and the car.
In October of 2007, a girl named Colleen, whom I was involved with, flew in to Reagan National from Chicago, Illinois, to visit me for a weekend. It was the culmination of many months of communication, via e-mail, instant messenger, and telephone, and the visit was one of the best times I’ve ever had, but when she left, she was heading home into a difficult situation and I knew that her life was about to carry her away from me forever. We hugged a tearful goodbye, and she smiled at me in that special way she had and said, “no regrets. The bitter and the sweet.” It was a callback to an early conversation of ours, regarding the dual nature of life and the universe. That without the bitter, the good things in life wouldn’t taste so sweet. You need both. Two days after she got home, she emailed me to let me know she was moving on.
In the months following, I was distraught, because I loved her and would have been delighted to walk with her to the end of my days, but it was not to be. Then one night, I had the most startling, and moving, dream of my life. I’m not even sure “dream” is the correct word.
I found myself in a field, near a treeline, on a starlit night, walking beside Colleen. A city girl, she was never comfortable in the country, especially in the forest, but I saw a low opening in the treeline and knew we must enter. She was nervous, but she always said that whenever she was nervous, if I took her hand she’d be fine, so I did, and together we ducked through the opening in the edge of the forest.
On the other side was another clearing. Here there was a great bonfire, and singing in a language I did not know. There were drums and wooden flutes, and shirtless men with painted chests and faces danced and sang around the fire. The tongues of flame were ten or fifteen feet all, and the sparks drifted up into the night and disappeared among the stars, which were numerous and breathtaking, a thief’s bounty of jewels strewn across a silken bed of black and blue.
An old man sat nearby, on an old-fashioned folding lawn chair, the tubular aluminum kind with stiff, interwoven nylon bands forming the seat and back. The man’s hair was steel grey, his skin the color of walnut, his lips creased with age. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a blue plaid shirt, faded blue jeans, and brown leather cowboy boots: Turkey Tayac. His features were sober, but kind, and he spoke not a word, but raised a hand and we approached. He motioned for us to sit before him, and we each pulled up a hunk of ground before him. He reached under his chair and produced two carven figures: a swimming baby, and a ginger cat. He let us choose them, then we decided we’d got it wrong and swapped. Colleen held the baby and I held the ginger cat.
The Chief raised his hand again, and the singers, the fire, the grass and the trees and the jewel-encrusted sky all vanished, and we sat in a house. The chief’s chair had become a mission-style piece of interior furniture, all dark wood and big cushions, backed into the corner of a drawing room, and Colleen and I knelt on a hearth rug on the floor. My friends Steve and Heather, whom Colleen and I had visited with during her stay, were there in the room. They were a married couple; the two of them had met in college and I’d known Steve since middle school. Colleen and Heather wandered off to a kitchen counter to talk and drink some coffee, and the Chief disappeared. Now I sat in the corner chair and watched the comings and goings. Colleen and Heather walked away, to some distant part of the house, and never reappeared. People kept presenting me with books, some of which I had written, and then Steve and I disagreed about something and he went away. But all of my belongings were being packed into boxes and moved somewhere, and all around me, the activity continued, family, friends; some I knew and some I did not. The flurry of activity became impossible to follow and at last I awoke, and it was morning.
The next summer, my ginger cat, Lucky, passed away. Steve and Heather revealed to me that there was difficulty in their marriage, and by the following year, they split. Colleen got a new boyfriend, and became a mother. I joined a writer’s group, and Clayton and I started filming our movie. Then at long last I moved out of my parents house and into a place of my own. It’s not that the dream predicted any of this, exactly, but it kind of…prepared me. I was never sure what exactly it all meant, and for years afterward I felt a pull to return to Turkey Tayac’s grave in Piscataway Park, but as of this writing, after nearly a decade, I still have not been back. Looking back on it, the message, as I see it, is that life goes on, and it is full of loss and also of discovery, and perhaps the Chief was saying, don’t grieve, because you’ve only just made your way further along the road, and many adventures remain.
In the summer of 1998 I was home on break from Longwood College and although I had a part-time job at the Dahlgren Food Lion waiting for me if I wanted it, after three summers I’d had enough and opted not to go back there. I never did go to work that summer, but I discovered the joys of internet discussion boards and was quickly made a moderator at the Jedi Council Forums at TheForce.net, at the time the leading Star Wars fansite.
In my time at TF.N I made several friends, many of whom I am still in touch with today (Joel, Jason, and especially Mahesh, I salute you, my good fellows!). I also met two young ladies, one a girl from Wisconsin (screen name Hathor) of whom I have spoken in the past, and the other, a somewhat cold, officious redhead who went by the handle Octavya. Hathor was a bit young for me but I was interested in Octavya (Traci in real life), and struck up a friendship with her. We talked often and for long hours, and I let her know I was interested. She did not discourage me, and only encouraged me in measured amounts, but my first relationship, the one from college, had ended some months ago and I was ready to try again. Since my college girlfriend had refused to watch Empire Strikes Back if anything bad happened to Harrison Ford (true story), I thought a geeky girl who shared my interests was definitely the way to go. But Traci was very career-minded and I have never found motivation in anything other than creative pursuits, so we were an ill match. That did not, however, discourage me much.
Now, Traci was from Michigan but her sister Penny (Elf) and Penny’s fiance, Joe (Staldar), were living in Houston, Texas, and were to be married there in May of 1999, the weekend “The Phantom Menace” came out. Traci may not have encouraged me a lot, but her sister thought I had a shot and not only encouraged me, but invited me to her wedding, where Traci was to be Maiden of Honor, and she thought if I flew out there, we’d find out if there were any sparks. Spoilers: there weren’t.
I spent a weekend in Houston in 1999 hanging out with people who were a little too upper-class for me, or for whom I was a little too middle-class, and after I came home the only thing I could think of was the Garth Brooks song, “Friends in Low Places.” I should probably add that this was during arguably the darkest period of my life thus far, the period between 1997 and 2006, which is oddly framed by the death of my maternal grandfather Walter Rex at the one end, and the death of my maternal grandmother, Florence Rex, at the other. In between this period I had two failed relationships and one failed attempt, quit two jobs, and discovered I had no idea how to adult or how to life.
I never quite fit in with Traci and her family. I wasn’t in a good mental state — I’d been working at AKA Printing & Mailing for two months or so, and was already gaining weight on top of my college weight, so I was fat, socially awkward, and had little in common with the people I was visiting apart from a love of Stars, both Wars and Trek. Traci and I had a little time to hang out – she took me out to the beach at the Gulf of Mexico, we walked around a little and then drove back. We talked less in person than we ever had online. She was cold and quiet and I was shy and nervous, and it never really came together. I remember even trying to initiate innocuous physical contact freaked her right the hell out. I flew all the way out there only to find out once and for all that she wasn’t interested. I remember feeling like I’d wasted my time, and my money, and it was like I had gatecrashed Penny and Joe’s wedding even though Pen had invited me. Blame it all on my roots.
When I left Houston, I knew I’d never see Traci again and that she likely wouldn’t want to talk to me anymore. Fortunately I didn’t grieve long. My first night home, when I signed onto instant messenger, Hathor from Wisconsin told me she’d missed me while I was gone, and had been worried about me, and thought she was falling in love with me. Nobody had ever said those words to me before. I was twenty-two.
So, that’s why I hate Texas, and especially Houston. My associations with the place are negative ones, of not fitting in, of feeling like I shouldn’t have been there, of learning I’d been strung along for a year. But I wouldn’t wish a hurricane on anyone, nor the kind of damage and catastrophic flooding they have been suffering. Destroying the city could not erase the emotional turmoil of that decade. No, Houston, you hot, damp, rashy crotch of a place, please survive.
And to Elf, Staldar, and Octavya, wherever you are these days — I truly hope you all are safe.
Okay, you got me. It’s been almost a month. A few things have happened that kept me from blogging, and without making excuses, the main two are the motherboard of my old computer going kaput, and the hard drive of said computer being somewhat mangled in the process. Then the last week has seen me rushing around like a madman at my paying gig due to the Easter holiday, but at last all that is behind me and I’m here with a new computer, ready to talk about whatever it occurs to me to discuss.
In playing catchup, let me put a few things out there. Recently, a customer at work asked me for Romaine lettuce, then rejected my stock on the grounds that it was too green. I’m not sure what her problem was, but I am convinced that mine is my job. So I started thinking about ways to improve my life. To that end, I have determined that I will self-publish a novel in the near future. I am currently revising one of my manuscripts so that I will feel comfortable publishing it, and hopefully it will not be garbage. I’ll let you all know when it’s available in case you’d like to check it out.
I have also taken on a bit of freelance work co-creating cover art for a friend’s novel, and will subsequently co-create cover art for my own. Having projects helps me feel like I’m not wasting my life, since life has little to do with catering to people who don’t know that Romaine lettuce is green. To that end, I have also decided to co-create a screenplay with another friend, who lives in Florida and pitched his idea to me. So there are various irons in various fires, and I find that’s when I am at my happiest.
There have been a few other things going on, too, in the world beyond the scope of my own interests. For one thing, President Trump has become very aggressive in his foreign policy, blasting Syria with 59 missiles and dropping a MOAB in Afghanistan. Tensions are rising with North Korea. It’s a little bit nuts out there.
I have always believed strongly in national defense. I grew up in a small town whose economy is based almost exclusively on a Navy R&D base, and my dad was employed on said base (and its manufacturing-based sister across the river) for more than 40 years. I am keenly aware that everything I had growing up, I have because of the Federal Government. Indeed, national defense is one of about two core functions that the Federal Government was chartered to perform in the first place.
With that said, though, there’s a difference between national defense and international offense, and despite the media seeming to mostly approve of the president’s actions, I’m not as in love with the current state of affairs. I’m not really convinced that Assad gassed anybody, at least not on purpose (it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, at least on the surface) and I certainly don’t think we need to be torqueing Kim Jong Un.
Then again, I have also never liked seeing my country cower in fear. If the last few months have proven anything, it’s that nobody knows what President Trump is going to do. But I remain convinced of a few things. I think he goes with his gut a lot, I think he remembers the last thing he heard, regardless of where he heard it, and I think he has a natural talent for creating conflict and finding ways to profit by it. I say none of that in admiration nor condemnation, this is merely my objective reading of observable data.
With that in mind, I think you can count on a few things. The first is that all this cozying up to China is probably part of an attempt to push them into settling the North Korea issue once and for all. It may not work, of course, but it’s likely the intent. Everyone who was freaking out about Steve Bannon can rest easy since he got kicked off the NSC, but that may not be what you wanted; he was all about NOT bombing anybody, but Trump listened to Jared Kushner instead, and here we are today. If you were going to vote for Hillary Clinton, though, bear in mind that she’s a hawk too, and the net result would likely have been little different where Syria and Afghanistan are concerned.
I think it’s likely now that Trump is going to continue to move away from the Libertarian/AnCap stance and ever more towards the standard authoritarian, mainstream Republican platform. He may still attempt to pull off some of his earlier promises, like healthcare, if ObamaCare crashes and burns, but I think we can all agree that he is turning out to be not what most of his supporters were hoping for.
However, he still isn’t Hitler, and thanks to a disastrous turn of phrase by Sean Spicer, we can count on basically nobody trotting out the Hitler comparisons against anybody ever again, so there’s that anyway.
I remain excited for Wonder Woman and Justice League in theaters this year; I am less excited than I used to be about Spider-Man Homecoming (it appears they Marvel’d it, for better AND for worse) and I am completely ambivalent about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I’ll get into the movie stuff in more detail down the line.
Remember if you see Steve Stephens anywhere, stay away from him and call 911. I am increasingly convinced they’re going to find him dead in his car somewhere, but time will tell.
I don’t remember the date. Not to the day. I don’t remember the date, but it was spring, thirty-one years ago, 1986. I was nine years old, riding on a British Airways 747 with my mom and dad, on final approach to Heathrow. We had crossed the Atlantic overnight. The cabin was roomy, the seats reclined comfortably, and the stewardesses – air hostesses? – had handed out small pillows and blankets. I hadn’t slept much, I was too excited to be out of the country for the first time, but I feel sure I slept some. The in-flight movie was “Young Sherlock Holmes.”
Window shades were going up around the cabin, and I plugged a pair of white plastic airline headphones into the jack in the arm of my chair, futzing with the ridged wheel until the hums and clicks gave way to British voices, giving a weather report. That was the moment it became real. England. The big airliner bellied down out of the golden sunrise, into the cloud cover, and the misty overcast of a London dawn. Parents reminding me to keep swallowing so my ears will pop during the pressure change.
Heathrow is a blur in my memory, people scrambling about, in jackets and ties, flashing yellow lights, locked doors to maintenance areas, being hauled around by the arm through a massive airport in a foreign land. I think we took one of the big red buses from the airport to the hotel where the government had arranged for us to stay. We rode on the upper deck of the bus, open-air, clutching the bare metal handrail in front of us, an old bald man in a tweed coat sitting across the aisle. See, although it was an adventure for the family, for my dad it was also a business trip. As a civilian employee of the United States Navy, my father had been sent to London, if my memory serves me for two weeks to work on a project with some people from the British government.
A couple of years before a man named Ian Melville had been sent from England to work with our people on base, an assignment that lasted maybe two years, and had necessitated the relocation of his wife and three daughters to our small town in Virginia. The middle daughter, Melanie, was in my class. This was a short visit for us, but we were to meet up with the Melvilles for dinner one night when we were in London. It happened somewhere deep into the trip. Dinner turned out to be a large group of us seated around a long, narrow wooden table in the upstairs dining room of a dark, atmospheric pub where old bottles doubled as candlesticks, covered with many years worth of colorful wax drippings. I remember I sat across the table from Ian’s wife, Jane, somewhat disappointed that Melanie and her sisters wouldn’t be joining us. Melanie was a friend, we’d had some good times.
That first morning, though, our bus ride to our hotel ended at what turned out to be a monolithic, glassy modern box called the London Tara Hotel (now the Copthorne Tara Kensington, I believe). I remember the lobby contained the first digital LED scrolling message board I had ever seen, high on the wall behind the check-in counter. It bears repeating that I was nine years old, bucktoothed and mop-headed, tortoise-frame glasses, corduroys, grey sneakers, and a red VMI zip-front hoodie with white stripes around the biceps. Everything I knew about England I’d seen on TV or in movies, Dickens and Conan-Doyle. I didn’t know what had happened to London over the course of its existence. The fires, the Blitz. I had no idea the old city was like a phoenix, rising endlessly from its own ashes.
This is an entirely different bit of iron fence.
It bears mentioning as well that as an American, I’m used to a country where the greatest threat to historical buildings is mere progress; where whole swaths of our past are dutifully registered and preserved and have never been bombed by enemy aircraft in times of war. Founded in 43 AD, London is old, to be sure; the wagon-wheel layout of its streets tells the tale of its Roman origins. But precious little of antiquity remains. So, that first morning as we walked to a small café for breakfast, in spite of the red buses and iconic black cabs running to and fro, my nine year-old brain could not accept that I was really in London, for real, until the sidewalk at long last took us past a cast iron fence like a rack of spears, outlining the garden front of a Victorian townhouse. I’m pretty sure I made a big deal of it to my parents, and they probably wondered what the hell was wrong was me.
And then we were in the café, little round table with a frilly tablecloth, cups of coffee for the adults, and scones all around. I remember being disappointed with scones. I also remember my dad, who takes his coffee black, being instructed that English coffee is made to be taken with cream and would probably be fairly insufferable black. I’m pretty sure he tried it anyway. I would have. Black is the correct way to drink coffee.
This was a long time ago, before The Shard, before the Millennium Wheel. I remember walking across Westminster Bridge one evening, excited to see Big Ben, and picking up off the sidewalk a smiley face button. Somewhere I still have it. We did a lot of sightseeing. The Tower of London. The Tower Bridge. Kensington Gardens, Marble Arch, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, The Houses of Parliament. The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. There were numerous parks and gardens. In one park, standing on a footbridge over a stream, an old man was feeding sparrows out of hand. He showed us how to do it, though I had trouble holding still long enough for the birds to come. Finally they did. I think my affection for birds may be that old guy’s fault, and I am eternally grateful.
If you’ve ever seen “An American Werewolf in London,” that is exactly London as I remember it. Minus the werewolf, of course, but the proliferation of punk rockers in engineer boots and black leather jackets, all zippers and snaps and buckles, with brightly-colored spiked mohawk haircuts and creatively pierced faces is something I remember seeing everywhere I looked, all of them toting guitar cases and trying to look bad. London in the 80’s.
Silly string was also a fad; I had never encountered it before but the sidewalks and street signs were lousy with the stuff, everywhere you looked some would-be Spiderman had pissed silly string out of a can across the totality of London.
The back half of our trip was mainly spent in Bath, which city we arrived in by train, prehistoric hill figures (perhaps the Uffington White Horse?) visible from the windows on the way by. One of my dad’s colleagues had his luggage stolen off that train. This fellow and his wife were well-dressed and she had brought all her good jewelry. My mom, being somewhat more practical, or perhaps paranoid, had not brought much in the way of jewelry and she and I toured London and Bath wearing hoodies. She wasn’t taking any chances, and I think that day on the train she felt as vindicated as anyone ever has in the history of human civilization.
All I remember from Bath is Bath Abbey, with the Jacob’s Ladder motif up the front of the building, and the actual Roman baths from which the city gets its name. I remember the hotel we stayed in there being a much older, statelier affair, a suite of rooms this time rather than a modern two-bed hotel room. I remember I had my own room there, and a desk at which I remember doing math homework – yes my teachers had sent along a lesson plan for me while I was traveling abroad. At this particular hotel in bath, every morning when housekeeping made up the room they would leave chocolate bars on the pillows. One day I took a bus with mom and some of the other ladies to another nearby city – Bristol, perhaps? – to do some shopping. I remember wet cobblestones and a large record store, the largest I’ve ever seen, possibly an HMV. I remember browing KISS records. Yes, records, 33’s. Thinking how cool it would be to come home with a copy of ALIVE II I’d bought in England. Of course, I didn’t have any money. I was nine.
I remember one day, towards the end of our stay in England, Mom was in a small urban dress shop looking at a kilt, which she did buy, and I was playing with a car or something and stupidly ended up by the front door, when a customer pushed in and scraped two of my fingers somewhat nastily with the bottom of the door. She kept apologizing, and mom rightly pointed out that it was my fault because I was in front of the door. I was mad, but I was also nine, and it was absolutely my fault. Couple of band-aids later I was over it. One of the last days I got, in a card shop, a set of little ceramic figures of the characters from Disney’s The Fox and the Hound – my favorite Disney movie – in fact the only one I have any attachment to. I came home with those, and two other souvenirs: die cast replicas of a London taxi and a red double-decker bus, which were available at pretty much any souvenir shop throughout London. I wanted to get the police car to complete the set, but I never did. The police cars weren’t that great anyway; small white hatchbacks with bright orange stripes down the side and little blue bubble lights.
Why did I choose now to recount all of this? I don’t know, really, it was on my mind Wednesday and I thought maybe, at 40, I should write all of this down while I still remember a good amount of it. Maybe, too, it’s because I keep thinking about how much I miss traveling and how much I’d love to get a lot more of it in, if only I had the money and a lady friend to share the experiences with. A little piece of my heart has been there in London, staring at that one little bit of iron fence for thirty-one years.
Maybe also it’s something more. Maybe it’s because of the jackass who attacked people outside the parliament building on Wednesday. Maybe I just wanted to say, hey, London: I love you.
Okay, you got me. It’s been almost a month. A few things have happened that kept me from blogging, and without making excuses, the main two are the motherboard of my old computer going kaput, and the hard drive of said computer being somewhat mangled in the process. Then the last week has seen me rushing around like a madman at my paying gig due to the Easter holiday, but at last all that is behind me and I’m here with a new computer, ready to talk about whatever it occurs to me to discuss.