Seasonally subdued starry lights

Posted on by KarenW

Yes, flat was found. Back in the good old days of summer (Zomer as they say in Dutch). Well, I was away from the posting for many months as it took me longer to get acclimated here than I thought. But I am! Acclimated. One of the things about moving without much warning is you don’t get the ramp up time to wrap your head around it all. So that had to happen once I landed. There’s a period of wondering what just happened and looking around and thinking, oh this is beautiful, and then wondering where to be homesick for…Ireland or the US? The whole process doesn’t just nudge you to grow, it makes it imperative that you grow. Pushing aside doubt, fear and anxiety is crucial to moving forward.

And Utrecht is beautiful. It’s a strange mid-sized city where bad things don’t seem to happen. I’m keenly aware that Amsterdam lies just up the train tracks, but for now (and for my budget) Amsterdam isn’t quite calling my name. Though I do like to take the occasional jaunt into De Pijp and enjoy a meal out or some strolling and shopping. If I buy a flat here in the Netherlands, which I am saying out loud more and more, I will look at all options for long term digging in. But variables still persist. Among them, family back home, friendships that are well worth the maintenance, and the state of the world itself.

And as to that, yes…I witnessed the making of US history from afar as well. I went with another American up to Amsterdam to watch an election party, but it was clear by about 2am that the MAGA tide had rolled back over and was ready to suck everything good back out to sea to drown it all. The good citizens of the USA have decided instead of the US being a country, it is now a greed driven profit machine and should be run like a corporation. It was inevitable if you look at history. Which people don’t really do.

S. was visiting after the election and at one point we were talking to a young man from Malaysia about this at a local Utrecht cafe. He was all very excited about Musk and Trump and the prospect of those who want money and power in the world being enabled to do away with the check and controls that limit them from getting it. He was pretty naive. With no critical thinking skills. He doesn’t read fiction or anything beyond what his curated news and video streams offer. This is true for many of the people of the world, now. Was Generation X the last generation to have critical thinking baked into college education? Were the Millennials that last to see college as important? In Utrecht, I am practically living on campus of one of the largest and most respected universities in the Netherlands. It feels like some kind of Dark Academia time warp.

As for myself, I am looking to drown myself in writing this winter. That and the gym and studying for certifications for work. But always the gym along with submitting the writing. And we have a small trip coming up this month. To Estonia we will go at the near end of January. To the city of Tallinn. It will be the last country on our Baltic Bingo Card and we figured before the future possibly takes an even darker turn, seeing it now is the way to go. Hopefully there will be snow on the ground.

We were out wandering, as we do, taking the long winter gloomy walks and making them fun and laughing at things and stopping off at places randomly to write things down in the notebooks. We stopped at a cafe that S. used to love back when he lived here in the early 2000s, the Café Marktzicht that overlooks the little linen market that sells large bolts of cloth on the weekends. We slipped in through an old wooden sliding door to be greeted with an old brown bar with a smattering of denizens chatting quietly and playing chess at candle lit tables. We carefully hung our winter coats up on pegs on the wall and sat at the oval shaped bar, also adorned with a few candles. The light was almost gone outside, just that china blue delft color just before it goes. The bar keep gave us a greeting and served us and then went back to the table with the chess board to take his turn. I snapped a picture.

A bit later, we spoke with an American woman who was there with her Dutch husband. She had moved to the Netherlands around the same time as myself. They had a one year old baby who was just learning to walk and already strolling about the wooden floors with a sweet sort of confidence. I asked where she was from and she reported Lexington, Kentucky. She’d met her husband in London and they moved back to his home country and here she was. They live, she described, in a house out in the canal bisected farm fields of Gronigen to the north. Very isolated. Just farms, windmills, and cows I would imagine. She seemed happy though. Like she had settled in her mind.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures, not much. The Dutch are very particular about their holiday lighting. It has to be well spaced, not too garish or colorful so it is appreciated with a subdued effervescence. In Ireland, the pubs were bursting with color and song and poetry and talk. Here, the dial is turned way down. With the Dom Tower introduced to the holiday season draped in color from artistic renderings of it projected on its exterior each night after 5pm. Crowds gather in front taking pictures. In Amsterdam, bigger celebrations take place, but so far I still appreciate the size and scale of where I am. The calm lap of existence is a welcome gear shift for now.

Flat was found

Posted on by KarenW

So I did find the flat. A flat was found. Flattery under the factors that conspire against a universe of many minds. I often find the mind that challenges. But what I have found here, in the land of the Dutch, is a keep it simple errand of the soul. Not overthinking everything is the key that unlocks the lock to a canal sitting flat built in the oldest part of the oldest city of the Netherlands.

Which puts me, theoretically, back on top of the ancients and their tunnels and their burial mounds and their designs on the spirit. The flat is three rooms and a kitchen and a smaller bathroom (I am already after myself as to why I didn’t spend more time checking on the water pressure). But unlike Irish bathrooms, it comes without the all holy Immersion Switch. And what is that? That is the Irish ticket to guilt. You turn it on 15 mins, but ideally, an hour before a shower or bath. And gawd help you if you forget to turn it off after you are done. Because you can watch the gas bill escalate each forgotten hour after. The Immersion Switch is to heat the water. By gas. And gas is quid, money. There is nothing like going on a two day trip, only to realize on the train, you didn’t turn the Immersion Switch off.

So the Dutch flat is on a canal. You look out the window and there is the water. The bedroom is large and downstairs, down a tiny spiral staircase that reminds me of a seashell in its shape and closeness. And the upstairs is glorious. Wide rooms with tall ceilings and long tall windows allowing the furtive light in.

It is across the narrow medieval street from the Humanities Bldg. of Utrecht University and a block and a half from Domplein (where the 13th century tower is that marks the heart of Utrecht) and a block from the larger boating canal that runs through the greenery and parks of the city.

I got lucky. The woman renting it out was looking for a woman, working professional, who was living alone. I qualified. I also have a small backyard and the entrance is over a small bridge from the quiet street. The woman lives above me, is a retired doctor (of what, I am not sure) and her husband seems to be departed.

So here is where my original dream picks up again. Having a place to myself, within budget to sink into a new branch of life. A writing space, a place to continue painting, to allow for friends to stay in their own room. A gas stove kitchen where I can finally cook again. It’s been 3 years since circumstances dictated living with others. From the large Janis Joplin house in the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco (loud front facing window, great house mates who all moonlighted as DJs, and the history of my spirit woman who lived there).

I move in two weeks. So I will enjoy the last of Lombok, the neighborhood where I am now, while I can. I am at the KanaalZicht Cafe near the studio. The weather has been dark and cold all day, but for the time I have been here typing, the sun rolled out for twenty minutes. The people all relaxing and speaking in Dutch. I have been reading some poetry, writing some towards the novel, and keeping my mind and soul firmly in the moment. Moving overseas can unleash many dragons of anxiety and I am learning the key. Living in the moments.

——-

I was in London last weekend with S. and we saw a baseball game. Mets vs Phillies. In London! For a few hours, we were both transported back to the America of innocence. The America of summertime and memory. Chili dogs. London is not my favorite city. But we walked and walked on Monday, up at 6am and made good time from King’s Cross to the Borough Market. The to Whitechapel. Exhaustion nipped at me for the next days after that, but the memories were there. Life is more normalized. We saw baseball in London.

The deer hunter and travels to the other side

Posted on by KarenW

I am making friends. I go into my favorite cafe, one on the canal. I need to learn the names of things. Like the actual canal. Think ear canals, how they fill with water and pressure. That’s my recently departed head cold right there, filling me with its words.

In this canal cafe, the Delft ink blue plates glow on walls, soft yellow stained glass catches and change the light some. A long lost, but not forgotten (no because they put a thick clear glass seal over its top) medieval stairs disappears into crumbling blackness under the floor right as you step in.

A corner table up by the bar (when it’s too cold for sitting out in front) and the canal on one view and the people watching the canal on another view. Hardly anyone in there usually. Except Hans. Hans is retired and he’s helping me look now. For a place to live because it’s hard to find anything here. Hans, retired with not much to do, but his blue eyes are alert and Hans is fit and tall (Dutch tall) and Hans likes coming in here to catch up on what is going on in the city of his birth.

You’re from Utrecht?
Right there, he says pointing out the door as if obvious, right there
Hans wants to know what I write in my notebook. What is it? He asks.
I dunno, trying to stop time with words I guess. Hahaha. We laugh.

So there is a cat that is either the overall cat for the city or all cats were created in the image of one orange cat with a white chest. I am not sure. They all look alike. There is a cheese shop next door too and I never thought about Gouda (say Hgggoooggddaa like that from the back of your throat like you’re going to spit and that’s how they announce the stop for Gouda on the train so it must be how they pronounce the cheese) this much but now I find there are so many Goudas and flavors they mix in and the cheese here is good. Kaas is the Dutch word for cheese. Kaasblokjes means cheese blocks or cubes and they make for handy snacks.

Market days are Saturdays. That is today. I just finished my laundry and hung it to dry here in my little room at the AirBnB. The woman who is effectively my roommate until April 7th is a soft spoken person learning organic farming. She is kind and we get along and she has offered me ten days at a deep discount because she knows, everyone knows, what it’s like to look for flats here.

It’s silver grey out. Rain will come in soon. I think it’s a great day to walk. To perhaps take the train to Amsterdam and practice the walk to the office. Because I start on Tuesday and knowing the path is key. Bit by bit, things go from unfamiliar to part of some new land that fits into memory.

I keep reading about layoffs in the States. Whenever I second guess my decision to stay here (yes I wake early in the mornings sometimes in a sweat at times), I read about what job losses are like now. I think about no one talking to no one anymore about the Divide. I think about pickup trucks and long highways. A small twinge there. Strange the things you miss. I miss the vast wilderness. I don’t miss watching conservatism and Christianity. I miss proper New Mexican food. And landscapes. I don’t miss the crime. The fentanyl. The predictable lack of curiosity the younger Americans are showing now. Here, at least, the culture has not given in totally to phones. Here people sit and talk more. Phones are put away (and polite jokes if you are staring at yours too much). They enjoy the smaller details of things. They are not killing themselves to make more. That kind of obsession is not evident here. And after killing myself to get ahead, to make more in the States, I welcome this new slower pace and month long vacations. And protections are in place for me here too, in case of layoffs. Hard to know if I’ve done the right thing. But I don’t think I’ve done the wrong thing. But sure, I miss things and I miss people fiercly.

The bar tender at the cafe is in his young thirties. He’s a real pro, knows his bar. The Dutch don’t drink a whole lot compared to other cultures, but they like to sit and chat and the bar keep is good with this. Pouring coffee and the white Dutch beers that have to have the foam cut off. After, living in Ireland it’s hard to watch this beer pour. Not letting the head settle. Pouring it perfect. They just guillotine the foam right off and smack it down on the wood surface.

He says: You’re from where in America?
I say: I’m from California
He: I’ve always wanted to go, but you know why?
Me: Why
Him: Guns. I’ve always wanted to shoot a gun. To go hunting.
Me: What would you want to hunt.
Him: Deer. And pheasant.

Black oil grease smell of the gun barrel. I was raised with guns. Had my hunting license at 14, cleaned guns. And never really found an interest in them. But hunting seems reasonable, always has to me. Deer meat is good and there are enough of them out there. I ask him where he would want to hunt. You tell me! he says. I suggest Oregon or Washington. You could do both there, the birds and the deer. He thanks me and stares off dreamily. We all have our other sides to travel to in the end.

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Rolling canals and a fragility of sky

Posted on by KarenW

I am writing this from a small medieval street in the center of a town in Holland called Utrecht. How I got here is how I get anywhere. The dragon of change opened its mouth and fire came out. Or maybe it was just the new job I was offered at the end of January. Layoffs became all too familiar in Ireland as January ground on. I had quite a few interviews, quite a few final rounds and was told I was too experienced. A lot of jobs were steering me more into account management stuff with clients, things I didn’t want to do. But I got an offer from a company in the Netherlands and so to the Netherlands I went.

The office is in Amsterdam. Utrecht seems about my speed though. A university town with canals and creatives. Music, art, and it’s the most car unfriendly city in the Netherlands. So I’m looking for a flat now. I start work on April 2. It’s all coming together, the new life. The sudden new shift into yet another reality.

Utrecht isn’t necessarily out of the blue as S. Has lived here before. So we spent a few days traipsing through the dark medieval streets in the morning. Watched the sky change between fifteen different moods, listened to the various melodies of bells all over the place. The brown green canals slowly roll beneath, colors lighting the tunnels at night with Delft blue ink colors and glass green. There is mystery here. The people are different than they are in the Den Haag, where I stayed for a week for a point of comparison. There, the people were cautious. Incurious about things. Safe. Probably because it’s a diplomatic town and run by lawyers.

I have been to Amsterdam. Twice. It’s a marvelous city. But overrun with tourists and British, many there to get high and drunk. And it will be twice the price and harder to find a flat in. It is difficult to find places to live in European cities these days. Everywhere I seem to move, it’s a housing crisis. Where have I lived where there wasn’t one?

Anyway, time to put all the power of the positive thinking energy into finding a flat. But first a room. I have to make it to my April paycheck still.

I’ve been laying low the last few months otherwise. I had to prepare for moving (again) and there was a lot of research to be done. Entered a few writing contests, began writing some new work, and I went back to working on the novel I’ve started while living in Ireland.

More soon as events unfold. For now, I am in my usual place of stepping stones: rent room for a month or so, start job, look for flat, move into flat, settle. Be calm. Write. Enjoy a softer footprint, a more tranquil city, an ever changing and fragile sky that breaks into light and rain and moon with occasional sun at unpredictable moments.

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Winter’s branches

Posted on by KarenW

I’ve lived in a lot of places with bad weather. Dark skies, sub zero temperatures and snow that clumps and hardens and catches your foot right as your trying to get up your front stairs. I’m no stranger to the funk and the bleak feelings weather can impart. I’m odd in that I also experience a dread of summer, but that’s more based on physiological reasons than anything else. I hate hot weather and I don’t fare well under it.

I have a housemate who is effectively gone to a remote island for awhile. And I am job hunting and on my own in the freezing cold house for now (gas heat is expensive as hell here). The job that I found several months ago was far less stable than it led me, or others, to believe in the interview process. I’m no stranger to layoffs. They come and go in a predictable tidal fluctuation that eventually takes the oldest and weakest of us and washes us far out from shore each time. Can you make it back? Are you a strong swimmer? Since 2008, I have dutifully spent far too much time building tech skills. I don’t have a partner with someone in my life where another’s money is there for mutual safety. I depend on myself and I like it that way, but when layoffs hit, no matter how hard I’ve worked on my skills, some amount of self-doubt creeps in. It’s all part of the game. In 2008 I lost what money I had. And it took a year to find a new job in Seattle. It was a hard time, a hard test. But you know, I’m thankful for that.

But it’s not just job status or the weather. It’s the digging deep for strength that is nipping at me right now. Grappling with uncertainty. Thankfully, I had a nice Christmas in France with S. and that really helped in many ways to let go from worries. But the holiday season goes on for so long here in Ireland that it feels like an eternity. I’m also not a Christmas fan and have always preferred a quick conclusion to the holiday season. Still, I feel a temporary lapse of something inside. Feeling unsure of myself. Did I say the wrong thing? Did I present myself well on the video call? All that is heightened right now.

So, as a response or something, I’m rereading “Housekeeping” by Marilyn Robinson. Why not read a darkly atmospheric tale set in Idaho about two sisters being raised by various women in their family after their father was killed in a train accident (where the train itself slides into the very lake they live on)? it wrestles with dissolving boundaries between dreams and waking life, inner and outer selves, all that. The family house is in a small town called Fingerbone set on a frigid and uninviting glacial lake. It is a town “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.”

So there is my current winter reading! And a few other things thrown in.

Predictably, the gym helps and I try and go four times a week or so. Not sitting around watching the shadows crawl. Finding more books, shows to watch, walks to take, and urging myself to get back to making art. Writing so I can continue muster up my connective tissue. But this winter brought some bad news with it. Not just the job loss, but my nephew passed from the world suddenly in October. He was part of my birth family and I don’t feel much like elaborating, but he was someone you couldn’t help but love and admire and worry after all at the same time. He was a really good soul. And I miss him.

So, now I am embracing the Dry January and will likely continue doing it past one month. All part of saving money and keeping a clear head while job hunting. Entering some writing contests here and there and preparing for interviews that will involve all sorts of challenges. The market definitely dipped, and I have not relaxed much in my career. So I should be fine. I just wish I had more time for creative makings.

Found this quote today by Ursula K. Le Guin and I like the tree branches in winter. I take far too many pictures of them!

“In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimate confidences to those who love it. It is indeed a superficial acquaintance that depends upon the garb worn for half the year; and to those who know them, the trees display even more individuality in the winter than in the summer.”

Here’s one of my collage pieces. I have to say, the whole process is more calming to me. And I’ve been home most of the day, time to go hunt down something for dinner and see if I can’t find a movie before heading back home.

Peace comes dropping slow…

Posted on by KarenW

The madness started in late April or May. Bilbao, a slow river and sun mixture of a city, shoulders of Basque mountains. “This all used to be factories,” a cab driver said to me pointing down streets all leading to art museums.

In the evening, the sun sets slowly and there’s a gold tinge to the alleys and old quarter. No one speaks English. I am lost and I have been on a boat for two days. And so after a few days here, I find a cheap flight. Bags on my feet, I’m in Venice. Bag over my whole body, the rain is close in there. Canals rise. They say welcome to the disappearing city. Welcome to the mystery of beauty.

Then the steady stream of people visiting Ireland. Friends all with their own way of seeing Ireland. Understanding themselves in Europe. Some just want to play pinball, others are looking for an origin story. Sling shot visiting and guiding and the toll and taxation of engagement. I’ve become more introverted. I moved to change and had to change to move. But all the while, there’s still a steady pulse underneath.

Last week, the slingshot inside sent me on another train (of the many trains I’ve ridden in the last 20 months) with a friend who came simply to play cards with me. And play we did. On trains going to places on the island. Belfast, Sligo, and back to Dublin. There was a sadness up there, in Belfast. And newfound joy. New music, a gay bar filled with laughter and he and I danced and then the next day, my friend got to stand where the giant ships were built.

I’m home alone. Roommate is off to France and sends me a picture of the moon above Lyon. I draw in my notebook, charcoal has a life of its own. The thick lines, smudges, erasures, grating bits of charcoal onto the white page and smearing it. Gazing at it until a face appears like the shroud of Turin. The Shroud of Turin is a fraud. Yet, a haunting fraud. I erase and blend what I think I see. It’s the live wire anxiety I carried all my life. It’s a face of time. It’s badly drawn. Can’t tell if it’s a boy with a headscarf or a woman from Inishbofin island from back in 1893.

But the moon was out last night. Ivy covering the buildings around my collection of estates is turning red. The rain drifts through and the clouds moved off for a half hour and I could see the faces in the moon. I could feel the difference now. The peace. Like an ice shelf broke inside. Will it flood the canals?

So far, whatever it was that I carry in some odd side pocket in this life is turning opaque. Dissipating. An odd kind of peace, one that drops slowly, is collecting. One doesn’t always get that kind of chance. To rearchitect your own world into a smaller house further away. To learn how to lift heavy weights at a new gym and feel the new muscles on every climb up the tiny dark stairs in the drafty old house. How to walk aimlessly every day. Learn how to make your own enchilada sauce. Learn how to not aim the arrows into the dark interior. To finally see the moon as your own mirror that never reflects and only gets seen on rare occasions, like some searchlight from the other side of things.

Resolution is just an illusion of dynamic shift

Posted on by KarenW

An hour ago, I was going to finally leave the house to go to the gym. It was oddly sunny today. Well, foam clouds that were sheep in the meadow white and then some ladles of sunshine and then I got distracted by writing all day. I wrote all day yesterday too, except grocery shopping to make a Lebanese chicken and falafel with salad type meal for me and my housemate. But it’s a three day bank holiday weekend so it is about snatching writing and studying French and other such moments from the air no matter what the weather outside.

And with three days, it’s even better because I can keep putting off the deep cleaning of my room. The reorganization of the drawing and painting supplies. The need to take a walk at a place further south where, one day, I saw from the bus window a river stretching into some rather green and mossy woods and a mysterious walking path next to it. But I have not moved much from my writing. I was going to go to the gym earlier. It was sunny. And then I stood up and then right then I could hear the roar. The gulls chuckling on my roof flapped away and their inane noises faded.

Just the roar and whoosh of water pounding. My windows was covered in it, the water. The gas station (I always think how Hopperesque this gas station looks) across the street looked like a hunched thing under the deluge. So I gave up for another hour, sat down, read two more poems. Marveled at the various ways we approach the short story form. Why can’t I ever find the ending? Is it too final?

I open my French verb book (yes, I am back to practicing my French…so I am somewhat optimistic) and it falls open to the word: Résoudre, which means To Resolve. Of course. And so I practice the conjugation, as if to really drive the point home, right? How many fresh story starts can one have just lying around?

And then the rain left, the roar hissed off and the gulls returned. And as I type this very sentence, the sun leans onto my window as if it were a casual friend giving me a nod in passing before sauntering on. That’s Ireland, I suppose. Even though I did nothing today, it was dynamic and shifting. Time for the gym. Running in place, no discernible ending in sight there either. Just the treadmill Stop button and a whole lot of sweat.

John Lennon’s island, July rain, and barefoot pilgrimages for the jesus….

Posted on by KarenW

“It was one of those summers you’re nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things.”
― Kevin Barry, City of Bohane

Photo by Jennell (a friend)

Here we are everyone. The mental midpoint of summer and its whole rippling form that it’s taken on across the globe. Except for those places underneath the cap, so to speak. Like some sort of undulating beast with many heads, its obviously taken on many heat heavy forms around the world. Here, summer struck out on its own starting in (if you listen to the Irish) the month of May up here in Dooblin Town. There might have been one, maybe two days, where the temperature crept about 80F. Other than that, it’s been a lot like a typical San Francisco summer. Just replace the fog with light rain and keep the temperature the same.

And to be fair, we had a bit of the good weather here and there in late spring. But the month everyone here still talks about with deep nostalgia and sacred reverence was the now distant past of June. June, the whole month, promised the steamy swamp of summer. Long legged languid days swelling with that grassy smell of ripeness. The scent of life relaxing, unfolding. It prompted me to immediately purchase not one, but two fans (or ventilators as they call them here), for my dread of hot days is absolutely legend (to use an Irish turn of phrase).

But I didn’t begrudge those finally getting their own weather that they had dreamed of, you know? The kind of raw heat and sweat a lot of people long for in every stunted winter day’s waking dream. Look, I get it. They, no all of us, have paid the price. All of us coming awake each morning to darkness and fallen back under afternoon’s early night for many months. A cold bitting dark rife with wind and slashing rain. Really fucking HIGH gas bills (thanks to the war in Ukraine). And then all the other usual problems of a city these days stirred in for good measure. Housing crisis and low salaries forcing the young (20s and 30s) to still be living at home. Jobs are plentiful, but the pay is not. The crime (I don’t feel like the crime is that bad here, but the Irish do and it is a smaller place here so, ok…), the homeless, the drugs (there’s no fentanyl here but everyone dreads its eventual arrival), all swirling around in their miserable rain blender.

In June, everyone assumed the reckoning had come in the form of summer’s hot light falling from the sky out of some holy forge above. Little heat coins for the pockets of all the weary denizens of this little green island in the north. Many of whom feel torn absolutely ragged by the bite of the two seas (the Atlantic and the Irish Sea) and the one Channel (St. George’s Channel) to the south. Water everywhere. The constant breath from it on the neck even. But also, let’s not forget, the Irish love to complain. And the weather is top of the list.

And now here we are in July, what with Jesus or the lord or whathaveyou having killed off all promises of hot, sultry sunsets at 10:30 in the evening. July is the new October. So now, every single conversation is traced to one single origin; The Weather. Greetings are now summarily disposed of at work meetings on our video calls and instead the weather is trotted out for at least 5-10 minutes of commentary about the unfairness of it all. I couldn’t be happier with this development. I have enjoyed, thus far, a summer of overcast skies, light rain along with the soft grey light that fades late. You would think this would increase my writing time, but I did over commit myself to traveling with friends at the beginning of the month and am just now recovering from that mentally and physically (eating all the time on the road with scant exercise takes too much out of me, also I’ve noticed that I’ve grown far more introverted since moving to Ireland).

But today showed itself to be the typical overcast July day again and having re-established better routines the last two weeks, I was ready for an all day writing marathon. I’ve neglected consistent schedules for my own writing, my letters out to loved ones, and this blog as well. Sitting for hours and writing and reading and writing is just the medicine I’ve been needing for well over a few months now. I have been traveling pretty solidly since May. And then was in Paris in April. Thanks to the last job that took forever to eliminate my position and handed me many months of free time (with complete uncertainty behind it as none of it was really explained until later) as a parting gift.

That is to say, I suppose I don’t really have fuck all to say today. Just the practice of moving my fingers across the keyboard helps tremendously. A new mechanical keyboard at that! The new job has been limping along, having started out in layoffs of the very people who hired me and then my having to re-cement why I’m there with other people who are difficult to figure out. In short, all these companies are pretty much alike. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. But I like being an architect, I want to do a lot more of it and less politics. And more than anything, write and write and wring out the last drop from the washcloth of the mind as much as possible.

It’s almost like the last several months gave me TOO MUCH information and experience to process. And I got overloaded. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And now, aside from going into work, I stay in my room in the house in this old fort comprised of many old houses. And I love the strange curves of the ceiling, the rib bones of the roof curving inward. Like being inside of a whale. I love living with another writer whose book collection resembles the one it took me almost two years to dissolve back in San Francisco. In fact, she has a lot of the same books I once had. And so it’s a full life right now, despite relegating myself to the room. I am going to the gym each day to mitigate and then going to the market for food, then home to cook, then all that is usually done by 9 or 10. A movie then bed. Routines, rituals. All coming back.

Just a few pictures will follow of July while traveling in the west (around County Mayo and then Sligo). I was there with friends from Seattle (so see, they’re used to the rain) and we found ourselves out there in Westport, a charming little Irish village in the west everyone bangs on and on about when given half the chance. I had never been there, but I will say, yes it is small and charming. But in the summer it is littered with the Americans and the Heritage Hunter types, and there were rednecks from Mississippi who made loaded comments at a nearby table during dinner about the Feds and the national parks and it was like, jesus christ, gie it a feckin’ rest, ya? Other than that we learned there is a highly revered barkeep in the village who is from Scotland, and yes, therefore Scottish. His name ended in Castles which made it a bit fun to try going from pub to pub to ask, “is ___ Castles here?” and then watching everyone collectively swoon over this guy. Like both women and men. It was a small stab at entertainment on the heels of exhaustion on our last night. Regardless, we learned a lot about his life from practically every barkeep in the village, including the fact that Wednesday (the night we were there) was his night off. The next day saw us off to Sligo on a country bus. Frankly, I was quite eager for Sligo, my most favorite town in Ireland.

We miscalculated slightly on the departure. The bus, as it turned out, did not take credit cards (and I could not extract cash from the ATM in the village as it was broken). We had been to Scotland a few days earlier and one of us asked if we could offer British Sterling in place of the Euro. This, and I should have known, is the wrong thing to ask in Ireland.

“Fuck no!”, said the driver. A few laughs from the bus seats. Then a tiny old woman came up and donated some money, other people did too. Pretty much the whole bus contributed to the one last ticket we didn’t have cash for and got my friend on. It takes a village, indeed. I mean, I’m pretty sure we all used some light karma there as well. But we would have done the same with positions reversed and we would have done so happily.

We thanked everyone as we sheepishly made our way to the back of the bus and one woman in her 30’s asked me abruptly, “why do you have British Sterling”?

I answered, “We were in Scotland. Edinburgh. We forgot to change it out in the airport.”

Everyone seemed satisfied with this answer. Smiles and nods all around. And we spent the rest of the next two hours gazing out the window at the rain soaked green fields, stone fences and the dreary strip malls of Castlebar as the bus rolled through. It’s a market town in the west. I don’t recommend it, really.

But while in Westport, we did do a small boat tour in the Clew Bay. I had a hankering to see Dorinish Island, the subject of Beatlebone, one of my favorite discoveries this year. What a mad book. A type of narrative that found its way into my inner life during the entire time I spend in Copenhagen and then in the west of Ireland on this trip. And yes, I was in Copenhagen with my friends for a few days. It’s too much for me to take on the description of that leg. All you should know is that we saw a concert, Depeche Mode, and Copenhagen is lovely, elegant and seems like a social paradise.

I leave you with summer photos from the west.

And a follow on from the last…

Posted on by KarenW

I published the last post today as I had meant to publish it sometime ago, then left it in draft state. But now it’s been released into the wild and it’s time for a new post, a new update. But christ if I don’t have it in me tonight. It’s already 9:30pm and the light outside makes it seem like 5pm and I just got done with 1.5 hrs at the gym, a shower, a dinner of a sad Caesar Salad at a local joint and tomorrow is another work day at a new job, because yes, I was made redundant and then immediately found a new engagement here in Dublin.

All is well. Just recovering from far too much traveling which is a sentence I never thought I would utter on paper or otherwise. But I am wrung out and exhausted. It’s hard showing others around when they don’t have an agenda, so it’s extra. And then I had my own enjoyment of things too. But now it’s time to dive back in to the life of the work, of the writing, of focus. All that.

In the last few months I was fortunate enough to circuit between Bilbao, Spain, then Venice, back to Paris, back to Dublin. Then a few days later to the States to check in with the family and friends circles and then back home to Ireland. Then some friends came and I met them in Copenhagen, managed a 23 hr layover in Scotland and then back to Dublin and it felt like setting them free in Ireland, they might not know what to do, where to go. So we went together to the west of the island and now I am back. It took about 3 full days of recovery at home to get my brain back to a functional state. And now tomorrow, it’s back to the business of work again. New job. New demands.

The summer this year is grey and warm. Nights are still long and looking forward to getting back to writing on the daily.

Sub-plots and odd diversions…

Posted on by KarenW

It’s been difficult in the last month to look for time writing here balanced against writing fiction, which is what I’m slowly but surely making the grand switch to right now. It’s a new challenge for me. I like it. And am practicing with structuralist approaches, which at least one of my writing friends is perplexed by. Because the best stuff is “written into” without knowing the path very well in the first place.

But I get lost still. Finding too many sub plots and strange diversions along the way and then this results in giving up before the path is really set upon. But looking at the way other stories are structured, intentionally or not, helps.

My birthday came and went in April and I think I’ve reached an age where it’s harder to imagine but yet you know you are here, that you arrived somehow, and the only thing for it is to keep pushing on. I was in Paris visiting S. For the event of the birthday and it was a good four days consisting of continuous walking and realizing that Paris never dulls with familiarity. I have asked those who live there if this ever happens to them, if the city loses its beauty with multiple years of walking the same streets, surviving countless riots and strikes, burning under the heat, growing fed up with walking up countless flights of stairs and the answer is always no.

I even saw someone I grew up with, who by happenstance, showed up in Paris to show the city to her daughter who is turning thirteen. So we spent a few hours catching up after close to twenty years of not really being in contact.

Right before I left Dublin to go down to France, I received word that my job might become “redundant” which is how the Irish (and perhaps other countries in Europe) say laid off. They terminated most of the Americans without warning but they have to follow Irish law when it comes to me. So as of now, I’m still employed and I’m waiting to see what they come back with as far as responses to the myriad of questions I asked them during our first meeting. And, yes, the market looks tight right now. Still I managed to squeeze an interview in before I left and I guess the real question is, how will this play out as far as finding another position at the company or accepting severance and shopping myself around with a visa sponsorship in tow.

I’ve been reading plenty in addition to writing. A new discovery is David Searcy via the Travel issue of Granta Magazine. A well done essay that I continue to chew on. And really committing to Beatlebone by Kevin Barry. A real mind bending experience that involves time tears into portals in the middle of Irish fields, possession by strange spirits on a forlorn island off the coast of Galway, and John Lennon’s imagined experience of coming to Ireland during a mental breakdown to run from himself and then, at once, find himself.

I will say, walking my five or six miles a day in the Dublin spring with Beatlebone intoning (Kevin Barry reads it) in my ears does wonders for inspiration and perspective.

“ There is a show tonight in the Highwood, John. There will be all sorts of people to play music there. We must go tonight to the Highwood, john. we’ll breathe in the music and the cold-starred air.

*

And Cornelius has taken down the moon – hasn’t he? – with gleam-of-eye and giddying snout and his touch on the wheel is delicate as the spring, here a soft tip, there a glanced tap for each swerve of the road as it runs the country and turns.

Oh this is the knack of it – John can see clearly now – the carefree life, and he envies him the spring.

And before we know it, John? The summer proper will be in on top of us and the woods will be whispering.

Fuck the whispering woods, Cornelius. Just get me to my fucking island.

But he is snagged again; he turns helplessly.

How’d you mean, about the woods?

Cornelius beams –

There are things we can’t describe, he says.

Go on?

What we see around us is only at the ten per cent level, John.

Of?

The reality.

And what’s the leftover?

Unseen.

How’d you mean?

Well, he says. The way sometimes you’d walk across a field and a sense of elation would come over you. Are you with me?

Okay…

You’re half risen from the skin. the feet are not touching the stones. The little heart is about to hop out of your chest from the sheer fucken joy. And the strange thing about it?

Go on.

That patch of happiness could be floating around the field for the last ten years. Or for the last three hundred and fifty years. Out of love that was had there or a child that was playing or an old friend that was found again after a long time lost. Whatever it was, it caused a great happy feeling and it was left there in the field. You’re after walking into it. And for half a minute you’re lifted and soaring but then you’re out the far side again and back into your own poor stride and woes.

You’d find a sadness just the same?

Or an evil, John. Or a blackness. Or terror, John, or fucken terror, because there’s plenty of terror in the world. Always was and has been.

A soft whisper –

I mean take a look out the window.

A sweep of the arm for the greys and sea-greens of the moonful hills, the pale night as they pass by –

I mean why’d you think I’ve the fucken foot down, John?”

― Kevin Barry, Beatlebone