Who does what in which cafés? Check out links on right.
As the rain pounds down outside. No umbrella, which would be useless anyway on my bike so I write in the new journal. Quite a journal to write in. Almost too beautiful, but what the hell. It’s all they were selling. It will be strange to carry this with me across the continent, 1500 km there and 1500 km back…. A long way to carry this little black book. We’re leaving tomorrow so I bought her. She’s a she, soft and female, very strong in the binding. We must have something female about us. I wasn’t prepared to write, had to fix the pen, stubborn little pen it was, bouncing and springing across the room. But I captured him, yes he’s a he. Pen man. He was hard to bend to my will, but now that I have, it’s a cozy relationship we’ve started here. Him writing up and down her body, impregnating her with words and me hoping a sweet birth without too much pain. There has been too much pain, hasn’t there? To birth a smart little baby, round and bouncy with good health and the promise of a long life. It would be nice to have a baby. So here we are fertilizing the page with what we hope is a bit more than just manure. Here we are on a stormy Monday afternoon before such a long, long drive across Europe. I can’t see the rain anymore, but I smell it on the wet clothes as people enter into the room. Is that thunder I hear? Well I may truly never make it home again. Do I care?
Some rains never end, just like this text...
Quite nervous about setting out on this trip. Setting out to the East, unimaginable East. I can’t hold it in my pocket. It doesn’t fit in my ears… It’s out beyond what my mind can grasp at the moment. That is thunder I hear and lightning reflecting in the big wide café mirrors. I may indeed never get home again. I’m all rolled up in a corner in the very back of the café, rolled up and around myself like a cat that isn’t sure where it belongs, if anywhere, but content just the same, to be. We cats, even when we don’t know where we are or who to be, we know at least what position to curl our paws up in. So that’s that. The storm continues. I want to stop. I muse on, allowing thoughts to travel out before me. I’m scared of the Alps. As if the jagged skyline could cut into my soul, open me up and spill me out. I’ll then trickle down to oblivion, eroding away as peices of rock and silt. Stuck out of the rain in a café. It had better soon stop raining. I’m not so sure this free association writing is all that therapeutic.
POSTPONED. While I was wrestling with a pen in a smart little Parisian café, something fishy was going on at the Jacques Cousteau summer camp, which was apparently poisoning my children with rice gone awry… Upon arriving to pick them up, there are firemen, ambulances, doctors, all serious and severe. A quarantine of 70 sick children is no laughing matter. Below Ra’s vision of the events:
Cousteau Camp food poisoning
Needless to say we didn’t leave the next day.
Wilhelmina Tunnels Blog 