There and back again

I first would like to apologize to the British Museum for the whole "pedestal incident.”

It seemed like a great idea at the time. An empty, big space to stand on, right between a pair of ancient Egyptian artifacts…a space that’s too terribly tempting for a jet-lagged tourist who giddily thinks "What a great photo" and imagines striking some Pharaoh-like pose as his wife rolls her eyes and aims the digital camera. "The faster I take the photo, the faster he'll stop being a fool."

I didn't mean to be a problem and I appreciate the thoroughness of the British Museum's security to explain to me, in detail, about how foolish I was and how dangerous the situation was for me to stand on a plywood base not meant to hold up dense North American specimens. Well, okay, they didn't say it like that. I mean, they are British, after all, polite and all that.

It's all a blur, the whole European whirlwind. 5 days in London. A few in Bath. One in York. I black out at this point, waking up days later on the tarmac of Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, racing to comprehend this alien tongue being shoved at me. Oh, I miss London, and the ungodly simple and efficient Underground. I miss the British Library, with one pane of glass separating me from a gold-leafed Koran or the original lyrics to "Help." Paris? Argh. Don't make me think about translating, about conducting conversations. The one thing my French teacher never taught me about the French...they speak their language really, really quickly.

And they all know English.

Damn it.

Why did I bust my ass trying to understand this twisted garble of syntax and modified pronouns when once I do try to speak it, my accent gives it away and they drop into "English" mode, like some preset burned into their motherboard? Oh well, at least I tried. At least I made it to the Louvre. I walked the halls of the Museum D'Orsay. I smelled the terminal scent of decomposing paper at the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore. On my birthday in Paris, I felt snow on my face as I climbed Notre Dame Cathedral, touching gargoyles on their stony backs. I climbed the Arc de Triumph and watched the sun set from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

I remember one morning waking up in our London hotel and me, struggling to find my feet and glasses thinking, "Oh my God, I'm in London." It's that kind of adrenaline that counteracts jet lag. Before exploring the City of Light, I viewed all of London the peak of the London Eye, only to wander on the ruins of Hadrian's Wall a week later, a supreme juxtaposition of design, empire and engineering achievement.

It's all a jumble, a whir of cathedrals and cozy towns, of worn-out feet and unlaundered clothes, of exploring castles, including a ruined Scottish one and, to get to it, wandering through a landscape resembling Tolkien's Dead Marshes. I remember eerie rural silences, dormant orchards, Gothic spires, and London, always London, in its jambalaya of cultures and languages and history...a futuristic steel and glass space-egg of a building nestled next to the stubble of a Roman wall, sectioned off for future generations.

I apologize for going back and forth in time. I started getting sick the day before we came home, and felt myself melting away on the various legs of our Paris to Seattle trip (with Indiana Jones-style, connect-the-dots travel stops in Amsterdam and Detroit). I'm getting over the fever and jet lag now, but I’m still looping in and out of time like the main character in "Donnie Darko," jumping around the time stream with the help of the chronological-liquid umbilicus.

I can't compress the whole event, the whole 15 days, into an easy order of words. They just won't march for me right now. I will post some photos, but for now I want to give you my recommendations.

-Go to London. If you can't have fun in London, there's something wrong with you.

-The London Underground rocks. I said it before, but it's amazing. You can take it anywhere in the city. It's safe, easy to understand and mostly clean.

-The McDonalds at the Amsterdam airport takes American dollars. This is great to know when you get off an airplane and it’s the next morning, but your body is still operating under orders that it’s still last night. Meanwhile, you could each drywall you’re so hungry.

-Paris is great, but do not try Paris as the final leg of a whirlwind European tour. Paris should be its own trip.

-Paris is dirtier than London, but you still have to watch out for pollution in London. Blow your nose and observe the black flecks on the tissue.

-Bath is amazing. It’s low-key and full of Roman architecture and cheap food. Watched my first-ever European football game there (Turkey vs. England...England won, 2-0) and finally understood the fanaticism the sport injects in the public. More than 90 Britons arrested for causing trouble, and the team won. Yikes.

-British tabloids are the only newspapers you can read 20 feet away and still get the gist of the story.

-Going hungry in Paris is akin to being illiterate in London. It's impossible. There's a cafe every 100 yards or less in Paris (it's like a zoning law or something) and even the homeless in the Underground have books to read.

-There's a saleswoman in Harrod's who should be canonized for her ability in getting me the most comfortable hiking socks in the world.

-The British pub and the Parisian cafe are curious and amazing institutions that acts as a "third place" over there the way a Starbucks does in America, except a pub is stocked with alcohol and the cafe is like temporary real estate (you can sit there as long as you want; the table is yours until you pay the bill or the cafe closes for the night, whichever comes first). The pub, though, is the one that still stands out in my mind. Pubs are almost second-homes, frequent hangouts for citygoers looking to decompress after the day ends. Yet there's an air of respectability compared to an American bar, where hanging out there all night makes you look like a lush.

-Scotland had little effect on me. Scotland was, to me, just another chunk of rural England. Edinburgh was a pale imitation of London, or Seattle for that matter. Gray, dreary, sun-lacked faces in a modern city. I don't care for bagpipes or kilts. The whole tartan clan/Robert Burns/William Wallace thing is wasted on me. Plus, my coat got nearly destroyed at Edinburgh Castle. Not that I'm bitter or anything. I could have spent the time in Scotland back in London and not missed anything. (Well, I would have missed one thing. At breakfast in Scotland one morning, our B&B owner brought us a plate of red and brown meat-looking mush. He said one patron ordered a haggis breakfast and then changed his mind when the food appeared...would we like it? Wow, gee when you sell it like that, why not? We sent the plate back again, and I have visions of the cursed entree comes back every morning, like a ghost on the moors, trying to find rest by the hand of one daring guest, only to find its salvation put on hold by a return trip to the kitchen.)

-A note to hotel guests: Some people have to wake up really early to catch a flight out, so please be quiet when you come stumbling in drunk at midnight. Otherwise, the airport-bound guests will return the favor at 4 a.m.

-Our Detroit-Seattle plane got hit by lightning. If I wasn’t blanketed by a DayQuil haze and the exhaustion of a long day of flying, I think I would have seriously gone nanners.

-Another true food story: At the very start of our trip, we flew in to Amsterdam from Seattle and it’s 8 a.m. local time. I’m craving teriyaki chicken something fierce only to find that nowhere at the Amsterdam airport, or in London, or in Paris has a quick and cheap teriyaki joint. Between all my travels to historic sites, I keep an eye out for some street-stand, some hole-in-the-wall with bad neon and heady salty smells of overcooked chicken meat and teriyaki sauce. Nothing.

And then, on our last night in Paris, the last night of our trip in fact, I’m eating dinner at a café on Rue Cler. I order some chicken and risotto dish and find that – surprise – it’s skewered chicken breast pieces marinated in soy sauce with a dollop of white rice. It even smells the same as a cheap teriyaki dish. I giggle evilly as I mash up the chicken bits into the rice, lubricating the whole affair with the soy sauce. I finally got my teriyaki, or something close enough to make me happy…two weeks later, in a Paris café.

-Finally, there's a pub across from the British Library that serves the best damn fish and chips on earth. Period. Ironically, I can’t find the name right now. Still, when you go to the British Library, look for a big pub in the center of the block across the street. Go there.

End of a world

So, I'm reading from one of the free newspapers the European airline I'm on passes out. I'm slipping back into the news stream after keeping away from it for the most part, a self-imposed exile to enjoy my vacation. Yet, I’d break my vow once in a while, watching BBC morning news in England and Scotland or trying to decipher the French channels. On the flight to Paris, I'm reading the Guardian, catching up on the cultural lobotomy going on in Iraq as its citizens celebrate freedom by raiding museums, destroying or making off with their heritage. I try to wrap my mind around it: Is this really what you want to call “freedom,” treating your country to a street-level Year Zero?

Call it the law of unintended consequences at work, this destruction of history. Coming from fresh experiences at museums in London, it breaks my heart to see items from 7,000 years of Iraqi history ripped apart not by a brutal dictator but by people who are on a freedom high.

All about me

I come home, plug my computer back in and find out that "The Weblog Review" did a write up on my blog. I've been dreading this, getting some kind of evaluation from a type of authority figure. When I started this blog, it was just to be an outlet. But, in time, you end up wanting to be the shining star in the ever-growing blog constellation. So, one day, in a fit of Diet Pepsi-madness and being bored at work, I submitted this blog to be examined and picked apart. Months went by, and nothing. Then I learned that there's something worse than being seen and made fun of...it's not being seen at all.

But the day after my birthday, a reviewer named Strixy posted a write-up, giving me (actually, the blog, but we're one in the same, so what the heck) a 3.5 out of 5 as a score. Not bad for having a basic blog template and a whole lot of words. Other blogs I have seen netting a 3.5 have home-brewed templates, layers of code, interactive features and webcams. Me? Maybe four colors and text.

The prose is mostly positive to the point of being flattering, but being the masochist I am, I want to highlight this negative bit here.

As clean and as crisp a design as this site has it only further proves that presentation is a mode of content. The content is as crisp and clean as the layout, both notably lacking that one thing any truly great work of word play may possess – ethos. A writers ability to convey upon their readership a perspective of suffering and passion within the characters presented is what drives the exhibitionistic tendencies online journal readers thrive on. I would simply ask for more commentary on the condition of being SKOB rather then a precisely written highlight reel of what SKOB did and/or does. What little self dialogue that is included is always well observed and tastefully written. I am asking for more because it makes the experience of reading a journal that much more personal.


The fact is, my life is really kinda boring. Or at least I think it's boring. I have no problem posting up what I did today, but it's not that interesting. The commentary on the condition of being SKOB can be summed up in a few words on any given day: I fought through traffic, I hate my job, I'm working on my novel, I love my wife and cats. Generally, I don’t carry any tumultuous baggage or experience dramatic events, so due to the lack of juicy personal material I resort to commenting on the world around me. Plus, I consider everything I post here a reflection about what I'm thinking about...ergo, it is personal. There you go.

If it makes anyone feel better, I’ve going to start making running updates on my novel-in-progress. If anyone else wants to know something about my life, drop me a line in the comment box.