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A day late

June 22, 2007 /

I keep track of Anacrusis anniversaries in an idiosyncratic way, which means that I don’t notice things like June 21st, the day I first went public with it. But Mister Munson did, two days ago:

“Something seems to have worked in your googlebombing efforts. Bobrulez is higher in the google results than your blog site.

Hey, Happy Birthday to Anacrusis tomorrow, and as a nod to that spirited bit of rhetorical dabbling, I have posted my xanga entry in 101-word-anacrusis form.

It’s no great shakes, but it was fun. It is actually more of a writing exercise, isn’t it? It’s like Soduku for the literate.

Not sure I want to get on face book, it just seems so public. Xanga is so much more anonymous.

By the way, this email was an anacrusis!

I’m hooked.

Bryan”

I’m not sure whether I prefer “Sudoku for the literate” to “fiction for the attention-deprived,” but it is a nice dig at Sudoku. I’m not a huge fan of crosswords, but at least they’re not entirely computable.

After I type this title I am going to shower for about a week

June 19, 2007 /

Fourteen hours ago I was on top of an Alp. Three hours ago I was getting lengthily hassled by Immigration about my months-long residence in the United Kingdom with no visible means of support. Eventually they decided they couldn’t really deport me and grumpily let me back in, but not without permanently detaining–get ready for it–my London library card. That is the pettiest thing I can imagine! I am going to write a book about petty people just so I can use that as an epitome!

But the hassling and bag search and back rooms and subsequent two-hour night bus ride don’t really take away from the experience of looking down on Innsbruck from four miles up (a good quarter of which we hiked) with a really good song on my headphones, learning the secret of Hafelekar summit. The secret is this: it’s fucking covered in poop and bugs. I guess the mountain goats and snow rabbits just love to use the lookout point as their special private time space, but man. They grow the flies big on Hafelekar summit.

June 18, 2007 /

My interaction with the world has always been, and remains, mostly text-based; maybe this is why not being able to read holds a particular terror for me. Seeing the shapes of a familiar alphabet in configurations I can’t parse is a constant reinforcement. That would explain why I’ve handled London better than I did Rio, and why (cognitocultural dissonance ahead) I am now, in Innsbruck, missing London.

I like Battersea, man! I like the little library and the big park and fresh bread every day for lunch. I like living too far away from the bookstore or the electronics shop to spend money easily. I like my housemates most of all, and I’ve only got forty days left there, and it will be very hard to leave.

June 17, 2007 /

Apparently there is wireless all over Innsbruck. And all it costs is money!

I have no doubt that Caitlan will enter a full report that details the fantastic services of Ryanair (you get what you pay for) (although I’m not sure we paid for the riot cops), our midnight bumbling around Bologna, finding our contacts (Christi and Melissa) almost by chance at the train station, and getting vaguely interrogated in our compartment upon crossing the border very early this morning (Polizei: “Gesundheit dachshundt ein knockwurst Deutschland?” Us: “…” Polizei: “… Americans?” Us: “Yes!”).

But we are here now and the mountains keep sneaking up on us. They look like giant matte paintings. I am suspicious that somebody keeps wheeling them around behind the buildings and will eventually jump out to say “Boo!”

We got here at 0700 today and couldn’t check in until 1700, so we crisscrossed the city a few times–almost on purpose–before finally filling our unwashed selves with bread and cheese and fruit and passing out in a park for a few hours. Now we are checked in, and scrubbed up, in a bright and breezy hostel where I understand they will shortly remove our eyes with blowtorches.

Okay! EUROPE!

June 12, 2007 /

On Sunday I was supposed to meet Caitlan here so she could drop some things off before she, Kristi and Melissa went touring in London. The original estimate was that she would show up at 1:00, give or take an hour. Kevan and Holly left to go to Kew Gardens at 2 and Caitlan still hadn’t made it. By 4:00 I figured they’d just decided to lug things around rather than spend time getting here and back, so I decided to try air-drying all my laundry simultaneously. In my small upstairs room, this means festooning every available protuberance (coathooks, shelf corners, light fixtures, etc) with my underpants.

By 6:00, Catriona was home and I went out running. Circa 6:50 I returned and was greeted by Kevan. “Oh,” he said, “your sister and her friends came by. They’re upstairs.”

My life is a sitcom, second in a series.

How I spent my summer abroad

June 11, 2007 /

So some of you may remember that I like Hackers. I like it a lot. I realized some time ago that while I am not into Rocky Horror, if Rocky Horror was Hackers, I would be a full on costume-wearing hot-dog-throwing line-reciting fanboy. GET A JOB, I would shriek. YOU ARE IN THE BUTTER ZONE.

I recently moved to London and into a house where the function of the residents is, essentially, to egg each other on about goofy ideas. Catriona provided the idea of doing read-throughs of plays or movie scripts as a form of participatory recreation, and Holly asked if there was anything I’d like to toss in the prospective-script pile. Could it be really bad, I asked? Because there was one that could be funny.

Later, we were passing around emails about said read-throughs and a possible visit to a museum full of automata. Somehow Holly came up with the joke of steampunk “hackers” as “clockers,” constructing automata instead of programs. I laughed at it. Then I said “clock the Bigben!” Then I said “oh no,” because I really had more important things to do.

Instead, Holly and I spent a few weeks interpolating the movie script into 1860s London, replacing the absurd computer-feats with absurd clockwork and technobabble with Victorian slang. Then we revised and got it printed and got some friends to come over and wear funny hats, and this was the result: Clockers.

Of the people who did the read-through, only Holly and I had read the script or indeed seen the original movie beforehand, and they all did a fantastic job picking up multiple parts and figuring out what was going on. And putting up with my Matthew Lillard impression. Thanks again, guys, and let me know if you want a link under your name on that page.