Slouched back to SJ...

I’m back in Mountain View, on my futon, behind the helm of the PowerBook of Doom.

I may be without keys with ~ and umlauts over the characters, but I’m glad to feel the caress of Al-yoo-mini-um against my fingertips.

I’m going to make myself stay awake until my usual bedtime of 2300 (dig that Euro stylee).

Regrettably, I know what Cayce Pollard from Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is feeling:

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

I feel my soul winding its way through the Atlantic at the moment (although it keeps telling me that it wants to roam about the cobblestone sidewalks of Barcelona on a beach cruiser.

There is only one cure to this situation: blogging and a Carl’s Junior Western Burger combo.

Yum.

On the way back, I read the second book in the His Dark Materials series, The Subtle Knife. It was pretty strange, I boarded the plane, started on page one, read, read, Coke, read read, food, done.

This second book is excellent – better than the first book Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass).

I read some more of my Eco book Travels in Hyperreality – I have my usual Eco-stylistics irritation but overall it’s going OK.

I wrote all sorts of things (you know, pen, paper, ink) I thought about in Europe….you’ll be seeing them show up here.

And here’s a wish of thanks to the special girl I saw glide out of the Alphonse XIII stop of Madrid this morning - a good travelling partner and the best little sister in the whole world!

My eyes are growing heavy, and I put a fresh set of sheets on the bed before I left – I can’t wait to get back into my bed and wait for my soul to meander westward.

Travelogue