#omg this is the store where i got my scale bar. CHECKS OUT...

[lovemesomesurveys]

Do you prefer bar or liquid soap? I use bar soap in the shower, but liquid soap to wash my hands. 

What's the speed limit on your street? It’s 25mph in residential streets.

When was the last time you wore your favourite article of clothing? My favorite articles of clothing are leggings and oversized graphic tees, which I wear all the time.

Do any of your family members have an upcoming birthday? I just had mine, next up is my mom’s in September.

On a scale of 1-5, 5 being the best, rate your last kiss. 5.

What is your favourite flavour of Jolly Ranchers? Watermelon was the best. Wow, I haven’t had a Jolly Rancher since like high school. I used to love the Jolly Rancher suckers, especially.

Where was your Facebook profile picture taken? It’s baby photo taken at a photo studio.

Do your parents smoke? No.

Would you rather bake cookies or a potato? A potato. I love baked potatoes. 

Who was the last person to stay the night at your house? My aunt last September.

Do you live close to a park? Yeah.

Is your favourite animal endangered? They’re considered at risk. :/

Have you eaten pizza in the last week? No. I haven’t had pizza in awhile.

Who was the last person you added to your contacts list? I don’t recall, it’s been a long time.

How long does it take you to shower? Like 30-40 minutes.

Do you prefer a brand of bottled water over others, or is it all the same? I typically drink Dasani, Aquafina, Crystal Geyser, or store brand.

Have you used Wikipedia today? No.

Are you better at writing fiction or non-fiction? Non-fiction.

Do you know anyone who has moved to a different state? Yeah.

How many pens can you see from where you’re sitting? One.

Have you ever dated someone one grade/year above or below you? A grade below.

What language do you think you’d be good at? I took Spanish all 4 years in high school and a semester in college and I did well. 

What language do you think you’d fail at? Chinese because of the characters. 

Do you still have a landline phone at your house? Yes.

What is your current desktop background? Alexander Skarsgard.

How big is the television you last watched? The TV in my room is a 42 inch.

Have you ever been stung by a bee or a wasp? No, thankfully.

How many schools have you been to in your lifetime? 5.

Are you of legal age in your country? Yes.

Why did you last visit a doctor? To get my prescription refill. 

Would you prefer an ice cream cake or a regular cake? Regular cake.

How old is your best friend? My best friend is my mom, who is 54. 

What is/was your high school’s mascot? I’m not sharing that. Do you carry pain relievers with you at all times? I always take my prescription pain med with me if I go somewhere.

Where is your mother right now? In her room, asleep.

What was the last thing to make you smile? Something in the YouTube video I was watching.

Are you currently saving up for anything? No.

What’s the view like from your bedroom window? Not much of a view, I just see the fence, my neighbor’s roof, the top of some trees, and a little part of the sky.

Generally speaking, do you prefer sweet or savoury? Savoury. 

What would you do if you got home and you saw your house had been destroyed? Destroyed??? Omg.... I would be in a state of shock initially. Like, wtf??? Then I’d be angry, upset, confused and just utterly devastated. 

When did you last go outside, and what for? I had to go to a doctor appointment this past Tuesday. 

Who is your favourite Sesame Street character? I don’t have a particular favorite, but I think the name “Snuffalluffagus” is fun haha.

How often do you check your emails? Everyday. I keep the notifications turned on for my email on my phone cause it gets me to check it daily (gotta get rid of the notification) and not let my inbox build up. 

Do you have any plans for this Thanksgiving? My family and I will have Thanksgiving dinner like we always do, just us. We haven’t had a big family get together for Thanksgiving the past few years, so covid won’t affect anything in that way.

What colour is your backpack? I’ve been using a mini gray Adidas backpack.

Would you slap the last person you talked to for twenty dollars? Absolutely not.

What search engine do you usually use? Google is the only one I use.

How much did the shirt you’re wearing cost? I don’t recall.

Patrick Stump or Pete Wentz? I like Fall Out Boy’s music, but I don’t have a preference for any of the band members.

Do you know anyone who gives way too many hugs? No.

What time do you usually wake up on Sundays? I wake up around 230/3PM everyday.

Have you whispered today? No.

What grade did you get on the last test you took? An A.

[fantasticcats]

In which I go to London for 3 days: Fantasticcats attends the Professional Development Course from Punchdrunk.

A few ground rules, and the rest will be under a cut for the spoiler averse and because it is long as hell.

Things I can do: Describe what we did and show you photos of what my team created in two of the blank canvass spaces. Things I can’t do: Give you photos of the fully dressed Fallow Cross village. You can find some via this article though so you have an idea of what is there. Things I won’t do: Draw you a map and tell you how to get there or go into detail about the children’s programs they’ve created in the space.

London was having one of those snow storms I thought only people in Portland freaked out about, and after navigating cancelled flights and summoning the will to travel into a mess, I made it on time to the Saturday 1 day Design Masterclass with Punchdrunk Creatives. The email we’d been given noted that this was to be the last design class (ever? This year? I don’t know.) and we were given a copy of the short story The Lottery to read prior to arrival.

After standing outside with a bunch of equally confused and possibly lost folk, I found myself lead into an old classroom. It was that pale blue color of old public elementary schools everywhere and there was a nice skeleton hanging out in the corner. We sat facing our two hosts (which I’m also not going to name because: privacy) and introduced ourselves, revealing a variety of people whose interest in the workshop ranged from professional: museum exhibit designers to actors and video game designers to “because they really liked Punchdrunk!” I fell into an abstract category- being the only person who had come from ridiculously far away and also because I am curious how their design process might work with the art I’ve been creating for a few years now as well as my own home’s aesthetic.

We began by looking over photos of various Punchdrunk sets, and speaking about their use of repetition, scale, and creating tension. They told us that they like to create levels of tension and have spaces that are like breaks for the audience. They like to put the places that will have the most tension in the middle of spaces or floors, and have the breaks on the outside- like a sandwich. Think about your favorite Punchdrunk show and about the spaces and what happens in them and see if you can find this strategy. I definitely can with SNM NYC.

They also talked about how they are different from a lot of theater companies in that they can’t create a lot of the props because when you touched them in the show you’d realize they weren’t real, so the set creators spend a lot of time shopping to fill a space. DREAM JOB!

After the chat it was time to see Fallow Cross. They walked us through how the school children who had visited had the space revealed to them, and then recreated that moment for us. We knew what was coming, but I am pretty sure if I was a child and had that happen I’d lose my goddamn mind.

Some thoughts about being in the space: It’s bigger than it looks, with secret rooms, pass throughs, and second floors to discover. My favorite places were the candle maker’s shop, the church, and the optometrist (or was it an ophthalmologist?.....let’s go with eye doctor.) I loved the tones and Fulton-esque vibe of the eye doctor’s office, and the church had little hidden back rooms that gave it depth beyond it’s welcoming pews. We got to walk around unmasked for a while with the full lighting effects and Punchdrunk drone soundtrack we all know and love. I do feel like smells were missing, but it is also a lot colder in there due to the weather so that might have been part of it. When we chatted about the space later, it made me smile how many people found the mayors house- that was full of taxidermy- scary, or how they felt like people might jump out at them in other spaces.

They’ve said Fallow will never house a full show, and I think one reason for that is the density of the set design. The doll house maker’s shop has hundreds of dolls and doll parts crammed into shelves. The bric-a-brac shop looks like every small town antique shop you’ve ever been in. The candle maker store is like a more organized Hecate’s apothecary with lots of real candles and a tiny store room full of glass containers. Basically, a full audience would destroy this place in an hour. Maybe it was this sensory overload (or lack of a mask) that made me reluctant to touch or really interact with anything, but I loved every second of walking through the buildings and seeing what was around every corner.

After the space exploration, it was time for the first practical exercise. We were shown to a far corner of a village and three dwellings whose doors had been locked during our walk around. Our hosts divided us into 3 teams and assigned each a house. We were given a plastic bin containing big rolls of white paper, some string, some markers, a staple gun, a few chairs, scissors, and push pins, and told that we could staple and paper to our hearts content in the spaces. On the door of each space was an envelope containing a scene we had to create using only the items in the bucket.

We were given 10 minutes.

If you watch any competitive cooking or design reality shows and have ever played along with what you would do in the allotted time, you can imagine what this was like. Now imagine you’re in a Punchdrunk space with Punchdrunk creatives watching you and the combination of howfuckingcoolisthisomg and oh holy hell I have to work with strangers and also omg now I only have 9:30 min left. So yeah, it was like that.

Our team was assigned the creation of a train carriage. We knew that once people from the other teams walked through that they would have to identify our space, but we were a little foggy on how much story we needed to get in the scene. We set our scene fairly simply, but I did make all One Way tickets and a sign that only had departing times and then they placed candles on the seats. A lighting tech came in with an iPad and asked how we wanted the scene lit, and adjusted things for us directly on his pad. And that’s another thing about Fallow Cross- despite looking like a quaint little town, it is wired in ways you don’t expect. One space is even completely soundproof, but you’d never know by looking at.

The time flew by. Once it was over, we were given time to tour the other spaces, and then we got together to guess at what we’d seen and if we got it right. While we didn’t have a very high intensity scene, everyone knew what it was, and someone did mention my one way train tickets, so I was happy about that.

The next practical exercise was my favorite, but I wasn’t allowed to photograph it. We were sent back into the main village where the street was filled with more giant bins, each containing detail pieces. Imagine files, photos, clothing, books, cards, trinkets, and basically anything you’d expect to find when looking through the drawers in someone’s house if were the kind of creeper that did that in the real world and not just Punchdrunk sets.

We were assigned a partner and a space in the village. I was paired with a person and sent to the eye doctor’s store. Our task was to read the description placed inside the envelope they’d tacked to the door, and use detail pieces to convey that description. I think we had 15 minutes this time.

As someone who has been deeply influenced by Punchdrunk’s set design for 5 years, I cannot begin to explain the joy this was for me to do. Short of actually working for them someday this was the best possible thing I could be doing.

AND OH MAN. I couldn’t think of anything more me than what we got: The optometrist is unhappy with the local church. They are drawn to the Pagan religion in a neighboring village and have been visiting there in secret.

I grabbed a screen in the room to create a barrier between the main office and the desk. After that I used playing cards laid out as tarot cards, found a great book called The Devil, and my partner went to work creating little notes with runes and sigils on them. After we had the desk set up we covered half of the scene with a cloth, turned the chair on its side like they’d rushed out, and I semi-trashed the office space in that “I don’t have the energy to manage my business with these assholes” kind of way I’d imagine it would be.

Our space seemed to be a success. Many people totally got what we’d done, and the facilitators liked how we’d split the room to make people want to walk behind the screen to check out what was there.

I also really enjoyed what other teams had done. One example was the bartender in the pub had a crush on the preacher’s daughter, and the bar was set up totally normally…..but if you went behind the bar you saw they’d set up a shrine to this woman. So perfect.

After that it was lunchtime. Time had sped by, and it was difficult walking from the lovely darkness of Fallow Cross into the chilly daylight.

Following  lunch was last practical exercise. We were taken back to the blank canvass homes again and handed back our buckets of paper and office supplies. This time, however, in the outside seating area, was a large bin of stones. It was time for our Lottery scene.

Three teams again, and each of the houses got a character from The Lottery. If you don’t feel like reading the story, I suggest this super quick short film so you get the general idea of who was who.

We got Old Man Warner, the cranky guy who bragged about how many lotteries he’d survived. Our team got to work pretty fast in the small home we were given. We were told not to invent a new story but to try to draw on what we knew about him and infer things. Other things they wanted us to consider was if our house was before, during, or after the lottery, and what effect would that have on the level of intensity in the space. We asked each other questions such as “Is his home neat? What is he reading? What are his other interests?” It forced us to really dig into what kind of man we thought Warner was.

We decided he definitely lived alone now, but had surely lost a loved one to the Lottery- and his determination to keep it alive was so they wouldn’t have died in vein. We set up a little memorial to the deceased (his wife) next to his bed. If anyone picked up the envelope under the shrine they’d find the ominous slip of paper with the black dot inside of it.

Next, we created 77 slips of paper and tacked them to a board to display, with a single chair and spotlight facing them in the dim lit room. We used the paper to create a wall, so that people walking through the door would want to look around the corner to see this set up.

Elsewhere in the room we put things we thought he’d be interested in: almanacs, newspaper articles about crops, and a giant sign that said 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon,' happily displayed for all to see. Outside of the building we created a paper garden with a sign to remember the lottery!

We had a bit longer on this project—I think maybe an hour? So we were able to really get in as much details as our material afforded us. Using only paper and string to create a full scene, especially when you’ve been in a Punchdrunk space all afternoon, takes your imagination and ability to make something from nothing to a new level. Once the time was up we toured other spaces, and after downloading the story into my brain for a week straight it was actually kind of unsettling to see it realized. The other two spaces were Mr. Summer’s house and the Hutchinson house.

One thing that really struck me was in the Hutchinson home, where it seemed to be set while the lottery was taking place—they’d created a dining room table and each place setting had a stone with the family member’s name on it. It was a powerful image.

After we finished visiting and critiquing the spaces, we gathered for tea & an informal Q&A in The Siren—the pub in Fallow Cross, before leaving. The day had flown by so fast, but I felt inspired and armed with practical strategies and a deeper sense of how putting the right effort into a process can capture attention, inspire a sense of mystery, and guide an audience.

I can’t speak for the entire class but those I did talk with seemed to have a really positive experience and were really happy they were there. While I know it’s totally nuts that I flew to London for 72 hours just to do this, I was happy I was able to make it happen and if they ever offered more design/creative based classes I would go again in a heartbeat.

This is already insanely long so I’ll just thank you all for reading. If you’re curious about the spaces other teams created I am happy to tell you all about them.

[frekdisco-blog]

Anxiety

Anxiety. I’ve never dealt with something like this before. When people would mention it i’d be like, “Yea, nervousness, i feel that. I’ve felt nervous before. I know what that’s like.” Yet, I knew nothing. it was hard to understand anxiety because it went through the same fame ADHD did. “OMG IM SOOOO ADHD I LEFT MY SHOE ON THE ROOF OF MY CAWR OHMAHGAWD.” It became an inside joke. Of course everyone had ADHD, being silly and forgetful = ADHDduhhh. But in reality, no, hardly anyone has actual ADHD. My cousin who literally cant concentrate and used to run amok has ADHD. Becky from high school does not. That’s what happened with anxiety. People talked about it so much that people who didn't have it made it into a joke, “I could be great if it wasn't for my crippling anxiety lol.” People regurgitated this information because that’s what they had heard and used it as a joke/excuse for them not being able to get their shit together. In actuality, people with anxiety actually experienced these issues and they literally cant do anything because of anxiety. It’s really hard for someone who hasn't experienced full on anxiety (not just a little nervous) to understand. 

I had my first full on panic attack a little over a month ago. It was my wife's birthday week. We went to Bend, OR for a few days to check out the town and see what it was about. We walked around the town, stopped at a few bars, had some bomb Thai food, ran into the tip-toer (separate story) and just all around had a good time despite the horrible air conditions due to forest fires. On the morning of our departure we had decided to take a nice hike around smith rock. I’m reaaaally out of shape right now so i knew that i didn't want to go over the top because that hike looked brutal. so we decided to take the easy route around the park kinda just cruising. After about an hour we’re on the other side of the park and my wife asks me if i’m down to “go all the way around” i said yea, we’re almost halfway around anyways i mean why wouldn't we? what i didn't realize was that the trail didn't go all the way around the park. It made you scale the rock and go all the way to the top and down the other side. It was essentially doing the hardest trail possible, backwards. I didn't realize it until we were maybe 20 minutes into the incline. I started running out of breathe and felt a little weird. I asked my wife to stop by the bush/tree/thing so i could rest up for a little bit because i thought i was overheating (i was wearing all black: black shirt, jeans, shoes, socks). I just poured some water on my head, drank some gatorade and kept walking.

After about another 10 minutes of incline we got to a set of switchbacks that led to the top. It wasn't too many switch backs. I had definitely hiked not only harder trails, but longer ones. We got about 1/4 of the way up and halfway up a switchback when it happened. I got insanely dizzy and scared out of nowhere. My breathing became fast and uncontrollable. I literally thought i was going to die. All i wanted to do was get away from the heights where we were and get on the ground. People were hiking down towards us about 15 feet away, but i didn't care. I dropped to the floor and laid on my back immediately. I was covered in dirt but it didn't bother me. I was in full on freak out mode. My wife tried to console me but i was too far gone. I pleaded with her that we should head back down, that she should call a park ranger, that i needed an ambulance, SOMETHING. Luckily she kept her composure. She convinced me to at least finish the switchback so we could get out of the sun and into some shade. so i did. As soon as i got to the top of the switchback i fell to the floor and laid on my back. My wife told me to take my shirt off. I did. I used it to cover my eyes and tried to relax. I watched the rock climbers next to us climb, saw hikers walk past us, drank gatorade and poured water on my head. My wife kept telling me that i was going to be fine. Oh, but the worst part was, that a thunder storm was moving in, and we had about an hour to get up, over, and down to the other side.

My wife kept telling me i was going to be fine and that i could make it over the top. That i could do it and everything would be fine. Laying there on the side of that rock I honestly didn't believe her. I thought it was impossible and was sure i would die there. Even so, eventually my breathing and heart rate slowed enough for me to continue hiking. I pushed myself and did another 2 switchbacks, just trying to get it over with. But when we got to the top of the second switchback, it happened again. I got really dizzy, thought i was gonna die, and had to sit down immediately. luckily there was a small wooden wall at this one so i sat against it and tried to relax. I drank the last of my gatorade, and my water. At this point we only had maybe 4 short switchbacks to make it to the top. So to keep myself calm i used my hands as horse-blinders and wouldn't look down the slope. slowly but surely we made it. My wife led the way, keeping a steady pace as when i lead the last time i walked too fast and had the second attack. We made it to the top.

Unfortunately neither me nor my wife could admire the view at the top as i was still kinda freaking out and she was very worried about me. However, being at the top and away from that slope that i was sure was impossible to traverse helped a TON. I was still nervous and shaking, but i could keep focus on just walking now. On the other side of the rock it was surprisingly a lot higher. I was glad we took the long route because this side was a lot steeper with less room to pass people or stop to rest. The hike down was easier. I did have a few episodes where i would start to get really nervous and a little lightheaded, but i was able to control it enough to get down. Seeing the patch of green grass we passed bat the beginning of the hike in the distance definitely helped. I had to stop a couple times to regain my composure but i eventually made it. we got down, went to the car, and drove home. I did have a small episode while driving through mt hood but not as bad.

Since then I've been having episodes randomly. I have them at work while driving, at home on the couch, while trying to sleep, while walking to the grocery store, etc. I cant control it. and it sucks. I now understand what it means to have crippling anxiety. I had to call out of work because of an episode and i was scared it would happen again. i KNOW it will happen again. I just hope i can find a way to stop/reduce them. Self medicating with alcohol works for a bit, but i know its not good in the long run. I may have to see a therapist soon. I really really really really hope this isn't permanent. Its only been about 6 weeks and i’m ready to give up. I cant imagine living the rest of my life like this.

[theliterateape]

This New Road Will Some Day Be the Old Road, Too

by Don Hall

There were many things I enjoyed about London but London was not one of them.

It was best in the earliest hours on either end of the day - before anyone has risen from sleep, as the streets are slightly abandoned or after most sensible people have retired for them night and the only folks out are the desperate or the lucky.  Even then, however, the place was too jammed in like an entire city population too fat for the skinny jeans they had been squeezed into.  And dirty.  Not dusty.  Wichita is dusty.  Sedona is dusty.  This was grimey as if a layer of greasy soot coated the cracks and spaces untouched and made your skin feel like you were being slightly prepped for sautéing.  

It was decades ago but the realization that I only love New York City for a maximum of two days in a row before I want nothing more than to leave solidified over several trips to The Big Apple.  To fully enjoy NYC, I need to not be staying in the city but just outside of it and for as few days as possible.

Leading up to our third wedding anniversary, DMJ and I decided at first we wanted to go to Edinburgh, Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but decided that August was a bit too early for the trip and we didn't want to be landlocked to the non-stop activity that takes over Edinburgh that time of year.  We talked it over and decided it would be London in September with a day trip to Scotland if we wanted to in the moment.

I perused the Priceline deals and things went from a $4800 trip to a $2600 trip and we nailed down flights (the cheap tickets included a seven hour layover in Detroit going there) and our modest hotel and we were set.  Travel guides were read, plans were planned and discarded and planned again.  Ten days in London, England.  Rock On. 

CHAPTER ONE: NAKED TV and PLUSH PLAGUE RATS

We stayed in a small 3-star hotel on Bayswater (a few blocks from Hyde Park and the Paddington Station hub for trains and the Tube.)  The room was tiny but the bed was adequate.  The bathroom, however, was so Lilliputian that I could rest my chin on the sink while dropping a deuce (seated sideways because of spacial constraints...) 

The first night found us watching British television.  We landed on a strange dating show called "Naked Attraction."  Like any other dating show except that the choser gets to see the six possible dates naked before he/she chooses, starting with the feet and working up.  Obviously, it's the genitals that get the most on-air attention.  And, of course, we were fascinated.

This show set a stage for some fairly bizarre stuff we encountered on our stay.  

The documentary on penis size.  I mean, a whole documentary about guys with giant dicks.  DMJ loved it.

The random Persian guy who was suddenly very friendly, who thought he'd ingratiate himself to us by telling us how much he loved Trump, who tried to get us to hang out with him by quoting his father "Where there is a contact, there is a contract." Insisting that we have coffee with him.  He was holding a book - “From MTV to Mecca” - and insisted that the author was his girlfriend but the book seemed brand new, she hadn’t signed it and maybe the Trump-love colored my perceptions but he seemed off.  I'd watched enough Better Call Saul to know where that was going so we got away from him and felt certain at coffee there would arrive a friend of his and the task of separating our money from our persons would be in play.

And, at the Globe, in the gift shop, the plush toy Plague Rats.  Seriously.  Someone thought in a store filled with reminders of Shakespeare, a cuddly stuffed rat that had brought the bubonic plaque to England was a real seller.

CHAPTER TWO: Finding Wonder in a World of the Driven

DMJ and I always have a specific source of dissonance when we go on holiday: she prefers to avoid anything touristy and enjoys walking about the place discovering things that make her smile while I prefer to immerse myself into those historic and/or gaudy places that give me a sense of the history of the city.  In other words, DMJ is all about the present as discovered in the now and I am all about the past as discovered by paying a serious fee to enter and avoid being sold plastic bullshit along with the history.

There were many things we both loved about London but London itself was not among these things.  The city felt like New York City 200 years after the Empire had fallen - the Center of the Universe, the Hotbed of Commerce and International Focus Left Behind.  The sense of seas of unhappy faces streaming into the Tube or along the streets to their jobs, dressed for business rather than comfort, the rat race embodied, was far more standard than my expectation of Europe.

On the other hand, amidst the hustle of the business class swarming the city in search of pounds, we discovered or paid for a series of lovely experiences in London.

Madame Tussauds was the London version of the place and sort of like Wax Museum Central worldwide.  For some unexplained reason, I LOVE wax museums.  So, of course, we had to go.  DMJ had never been to one and now can say she's been to the best, therefore she never has to go to one with me again.  This one provided one of my favorite photo ops of the entire trip:

Sir John Soane's House was one of DMJ's planned outings.  An architect and collector, his house was three floors and a basement of the most meticulous hoarder or architectural ephemera imaginable (including a sarcophagus.)

The British Museum was one that DMJ passed on but I had to go experience.  One of the oldest museums in the world and free at that, this place could've taken me two days to truly explore but I managed to get a solid visit in under four hours and was amply blown away by the sight of ancient shit, mostly taken legally, from all over the known world.  Mummies, busts, the Rosetta Stone, a clock made by Copernicus.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was kind of amazing.

Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens.  DMJ loves to be outside in the sun among green stuff and people.  Therefore, we toured almost every park and every garden (including an incredible little Oriental Garden in the center of Holland Park) in London but the biggest and best was the giant park just blocks from our hotel.  The Kensington Palace, tributes to Diana, an Italian Gardens, the Serpentine Gallery with an extraordinary exhibit on the nature of being black by Arthur Jafa.  We also managed to run into Robert Neuhaus and his wife Amy - we agreed that after me leaving "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" it was far more likely to hang out in London than in Chicago.

Covent Garden Market was one of several open-air marketplaces in the city that we visited.  This included a woman singing opera in the courtyard, some of the best gelato ever, and a Moomin store.  I had never heard of Moomin but DMJ went apeshit when she saw there was a store.  Of course, we bought things there.

Of course there were more minuscule and grandiose pockets of extraordinary places we encountered.  Buckingham Palace, the Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, and the Leighton House Gallery with a unique Alma-Tadema exhibit that DMJ had a Moomin-like reaction to as well.

And fucking Abbey Road.

CHAPTER THREE: Wherein I Realize That, While I Am in Relatively Good Shape, My Body is as Fragile as a Fucking Faberge Egg

Sunday afternoon, after a quick nap from walking all creation and back, I get up, bend over to put on my shoes and my lower back goes into a spasm that is an eight on the OMG Pain Scale.  Later, my mother tells me that, in her opinion, these back spasms hurt worse than childbirth.  Having never given birth, I can't corroborate but it fucking hurt in a huge WTF?! surprise that left my brain spinning and my body immobile.

DMJ went out and bought me heat packs, ibuprofen, and made a makeshift cold pack.  I lay on my back with my legs elevated.  I slept on the floor in agony that night.  The next morning, I was in pain but could get up.  We went out but I realized pretty shortly that , while I could walk, I couldn't sit down for more than 20 seconds before a shooting pain went from my back down my legs and up again.

I felt like I was suddenly 94 years old.

We ate in a restaurant on Portobello Road called The Distillery.  The food was maybe the best meal we had the whole time and they were gracious enough to allow me to stand at the bar to eat instead of stand at a table like a bizarre jackass.

I was just a walking ache but managed to muscle through it for the most part.  I mean, what the fuck are you gonna do?  Stay in your hotel room, lying on the goddamn floor, 6,000 miles from home?  Nah.

The worst I had it was three days after.  The pain was rough and I had eaten something odd the night before.  We were walking around downtown London, checking things out, when I was suddenly hit with some intestinal distress.  Like most major cities, there are no public toilets in London.  DMJ suggested a church.

Which is how I found myself dropping a massive deuce in 15-second increments because it hurt so much to sit down and shit that I had to keep standing up in the bathroom of a 500-year old place of worship and stretch my back.

Back in the States, I've mostly recovered with the exception that the skin on my right thigh up to the right half of my crotch is numb.  Which is weird.

CHAPTER FOUR: Scotland Makes Me Wish I Had Been Born There

The afternoon three days before we were to head back to Chicago, London had begun to take her toll.  DMJ had wanted to go to Somerset House and, while it was fine, between her missing home and/or Paris and me feeling like I was being twisted in half 65% of the time from the waist down, we were both feeling less than upbeat.

I decided to head off on my own to the British Museum, she decided to go back to the hotel.  I did go to the museum and loved it, she instead drank red wine for a few hours.  When she came back to the room she was a bit lit and in a rotten mood.

"Let's go to Edinburgh tomorrow.  Anyplace but here!"

So I booked our high-speed rail tickets and splurged on a $400 a night hotel room smack dab in the center of the city.  The next morning, we packed for an overnight stay and headed to Scotland.

I had been to Edinburgh for a month in 1995 when I took two shows to the Fringe and had maintained a sense that Scotland was magical.  I frequently told people that Edinburgh was the one other place on the planet I could live outside of Chicago.  As we trained our way across the beautiful, green countryside, I wondered how much of my love for the place was an exaggerated thing exacerbated by the distance of 22 years.

It was not overblown.  From the second we pulled into the station, I felt a unique calm and delight.  I felt like I was home again.  The hills.  The green.  The castle turrets.  The craggy rocks.  The brick streets.  The sights and sounds.  The smell.  And DMJ felt it, too.  Suddenly, the trip took on the wonder of traveling someplace amazing that we had hoped we'd experience in London.

It was lovely.  We went and toured Edinburgh Castle.  We had whisky and I had a deconstructed haggis that was outstanding.  We walked through cemeteries and up hills and drank and talked about the things we loved about London.  It turned out we had enjoyed ourselves more than the last few days seemed.

And then again, back to our little hotel room and out the next day to fly ten hours home.

EPILOGUE

The most important thing on this entire trip was that we flew out to the United Kingdom to celebrate our third anniversary and we did.  The night of September 12, we walked a few blocks to a traditional pub called "The Swan," went upstairs, ordered drinks and food and dessert and toasted our good fortune at finding one another.

In Edinburgh, in a quaint courtyard square that housed the Writer's Museum, there were engraved stones peppered about on the walkway.  One of them nailed exactly how I was feeling:

"And yet - And yet, this New Road will some day be the Old Road, too." - Neil Munro (1863-1930)

My life with DMJ is just that - a series of New Roads that quickly become Old Roads (or at least roads we have travelled upon together) - and in my imagination of what has come before and what new roads and adventures lay ahead, it is the together part that makes it worth doing.