Caterpillar blues

I'm having one of those, "I can't get anything useful done today because I feel so bloody miserable" kinds of days and I'm amazed I even submitted some information for a job this morning.  I actually submitted a bid for advertised work involving something I don't want to do at all but could probably do with my eyes closed just because I'm getting that desperate for money.  (Don't worry - we're not talking prostitution or anything, though I imagine someone could do that with their eyes closed...)  I ought to be portrayed in some kind of sci-fi horror film where you slowly watch the character degenerate into something that's not quite human anymore.  Like, "The Fly" but without the transporter machine.  Or the fly.  But maybe a peppy Geena Davis character, at least, as the narrator in my head.

Except this experience is entirely human.  That's what's so sad and pathetic about it.  I am trying to bargain with myself that if I just do my aerobics this evening and call it a day and spend the evening doing nice things that I really enjoy then I can get back to feeling better, have a guilt-free conscience and start afresh tomorrow.  I also got to the point of feeling so low and so isolated today that I had to bring forward my little less-important plan of making a 'Love Folder' and printing out nice encouraging emails from people and putting them in there.

I got the idea from Marie Forleo's team when I wrote them an email with lots of love and gratitude in it myself last week and was told that I had reached the honour of being added to her 'love folder'.  I guess all of us could do with one.  Especially when you're giving out lots of love but somehow not getting the same in return.  Like saying lots of loving, supportive things to someone in a text and then getting a reply of, "thank you very much" and that's it.  And all you feel is just pure disappointment at the emptiness of the lack of reciprocation.  I guess a lot of people are in relationships like this.  I just never thought I'd be someone who would tolerate it.  Anyone out there want to help fill up my 'love folder' by way of commiseration? 

I need to stop feeling so low and remind myself of the fun things I got to do lately.  Namely, lounging in the shade on a hot day on a lovely balcony with a view of the hills of Šumava with a mini, Cleopatra-style bowl of grapes and apple slices:

and pedalling around the island known as 'shooting island' [Střelecký Ostrov] on one of those pedalo boats

followed by a congratulatory new Infinity magnum afterwards which was almost equally as good an experience.  (No photo of the magnum, as I was too busy eating it!)

And I got the cutest ever picture of the cowboy later as he sat with a contemplative look while waiting for food at a brewery/restaurant combined place (his idea of heaven) in Prague 2.  But I can't show you that either, because that wouldn't be fair on him.  You'll just have to take my word for it that he looked super-sweet!

So I'd better get myself up and into my aerobics gear and see if I can revitalise this tired little semi-caterpillar like entity and persuade it to do something energetic now.  I wish I were back in California.  I miss the palm trees.  And the beaches are a good incentive to get into shape.   I feel so landlocked in this country!

Road Trip: Part 3: Hello Farm boy!

When we left the suburbs of north western Illinois, we had a bit of help to get to the interstate and negotiate the junctions by the fact that my parents decided to drive out to take us onto the I-88 in their mini-van.  My Dad was a bit jealous that we were getting to do this amazing trip, though he did admit, he would have been just as happy to be dropped down in Denver and go from there, rather than bothering to drive all the way through Iowa and Nebraska.  We waved goodbye to the friendly red mini-van at the junction for the I-80 and crossed the border into Iowa at about 4.30pm.  

Somewhere along the line, we really felt the sense of being on our own as we were driving along in our Nissan Altima, heading off into the sunset like all the best rambling, nomadic types do.  It felt right.  A bit lonely, a bit homeless, but somehow it was all right because this was the life of the trucker.  This is what it looked like:

There's a line in 'Star Trek : The Voyage Home' (no I'm not ashamed...) where Captain Kirk and the like end up in 1980s San Francisco and a woman he meets there asks him where he's from and when he replies, "Iowa", she says, " Oh, farm boy, huh?"  I never really knew anything about Iowa so I hadn't really thought about it much.  But as we made it there ourselves and all we ever saw out of the window was farmland, it clicked.  Yes, these are the plains.  (Well, when you reach Nebraska it's officially the plains.) 

Our first day ended just outside of Des Moines, when we called it a day and drove up to an Econolodge place and asked for a room.  It wasn't super-super cheap once you added on the tax, but it was a room.  And it had internet, albeit  quite a patchy signal.  And the guy at the reception desk made me laugh by the fact that he was astute enough to realise we weren't from the US, but not astute enough to distinguish my accent from that of a Russian speaker.  (Oops.  Bit further west mate..!)

Iowa and Nebraska looked like this:

And this: 

And this: 

Fascinating, huh?  No, we didn't think so either.  But the country radio was entertaining.  It had to be!  You can't survive out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do unless you have some silly nonsense songs to sing along to, right?  So in Iowa, we got lyrics like, "Where I come from there's corn bread and chicken, where I come from you gotta make a livin'" and on Nebraska's 93.1 "The River" country radio, we heard the delightful, "I want you to love me like my dog does Baby...he never says I wish you made more money...he don't get mad and throw a major fit when I say his sister is a bitch" [Billy Currington] and , "Am I the only one who wants to have fun? Is there anybody out there wants to have a cold beer, hang out til the mornin' light if I have to raise hell all by myself I will, but y'all know that ain't right get your good time on, let's have a good time tonight"  [Dierks Bentley]

Can you sense the desperation for connection with another human being in that last one?  When you're driving in the middle of Nebraska and all you can see is this

it all becomes clear.  There ain't no-one out here but farmers and cattle.  One's soul starts crying out, not for civilisation because that's long gone, but just the simple delight of a beer and a conversation with someone.  And I don't even like beer.

The world and universe

I feel like I've been walking through a tunnel that's lit with strangely orange lighting and I've forgotten what time of day it is outside.  I have not been sleeping at all well and the weirdness of this current point in my life is very disconcerting.  I have flashbacks of times in London in my room in a dark and gloomy West London house, watching ER on Monday nights with a glass of red wine in a shapely green wine glass I got from a charity shop somewhere.  I used to watch ER for the stories that unfolded about the character who started out as a nurse and then became a doctor.  I don't know why I was drawn to that character so much.  She just had a sort of inner strength but also total inability to open up to people that I related to at the time and I found myself routing for her as her stories developed.

I don't know quite how my story is developing at the moment, but I'm having strange incidences of not recognising myself in a situation.  I used to be super-cynical and razor-sharp at throwing out the worst of my frustrations in crystal clear prose or rebellious ranting, but I seem to be being drawn away from all that now.  (Bloody hell, you go to California once, and look what happens..!)  I have found myself listening to Marianne Williamson and Tony Robbins, trying to learn and re-train my brain to stop criticising myself and to try to be more focussed about the things I love and want to have more time for.

I made two videos at the beginning of this week, in order to enter two similar competitions for business training.  I wonder if either will yield anything?  I at least learnt a fair amount about filming and editing on iMovie, which I'm quite pleased about, as that's a useful little string to my bow.  I need to tackle Wordpress.org tomorrow.  I also have to go on a Treasure Hunt tomorrow, can you believe it?!

There's a firm that make these treasure hunt trails for 'team-building' projects for companies, and I'm getting paid tomorrow to go and check that all the things on the list of clues are intact and still visible and so on.  Weird, right?  If only I had enough cash to actually enjoy wandering around Prague for three hours by stopping for coffee and cake at Kavárna Slavia for example.  Unfortunately, as things stand right now, I'm down to 300Kč for food for next week and that might have to include travel for this work tomorrow, until I get paid for it.  But I will at least make the rent that way.

In the meantime, I'm really stressed about a publishing contract that's come my way as part of a (now geographically distant) pool of musicians I know and is subject to a 4-branch 'tree' of collectors/publishers that makes things so complicated and so divided up that I can't even see how much money I would get from it in theory.  I had the reply from the MU solicitor today with my free hour's worth of suggested amendments and advice and the whole thing was brilliant work but totally filled my head with stress and questioning and fear and irreconcilable confusion.  

I had to laugh though, because the solicitor brilliantly and simply crossed out all the bits of language where the contract-writer had sought to appear 'clever' by adding in unnecessary and confusing terms.  I love it when people do this.  Or when people try to use a saying that they think will make them sound grander, but then they screw it up and look like a total prat.  Such as, "it always ceases to amaze me when.." when they meant "never ceases" or a casual misuse of 'literally' for emphasis that just isn't possible.  Or an overzealous attempt at pomp and circumstance that fails when they get to the end of their sentence and can't finish on a flourish for want of a perfect synonym for something they said right before.  (Boris Johnson does this a lot and he allegedly received the best education money can buy, so he's got no excuse!) 

Maybe I've just become impatient with Britishness.  Or I'm finding it irritating unless demonstrated in the finest form of years of tireless, self-motivated education.  Or maybe I'm just wound-up that a company like Sony are trying to rip people off by getting them to sign 20 year deals that can't be negotiated down to less than 10 with no obligation on their part to guarantee any payment during that period whatsoever (and you can forget about an advance..!) while retaining the right to the copyrighted material whether they make any money out of it for you or not.  By god, they put some weird nonsense in those contracts.  I notice the MU appointed solicitor has crossed out the definition of the 'territory' of the jurisdiction of the contract from "the world and universe" to just "the world".  Seriously, who writes these contracts?  Would they like to outline the exact boundaries of the universe, just to clarify?  Perhaps I should ask for that. 

I feel so tired from all these rapid thoughts and corrections of those thoughts.  I can't take the constant sleepless nights.  You'd think I were on drugs or something.  (I'm not.  More's the pity...)  The last two nights I've been ready for bed and about to go to sleep when I burst into tears uncontrollably.  And then that's me occupied for the next hour until I can pull myself together to make a milky drink and try to go to sleep again.  It's been torturous actually.  My head is full of flashbacks and visions of myself as being alone and small and almost invisible forever.  All that utterly calamitous stuff.  It feels like there's some kind of monster within me being exorcised.  And I don't even know when it'll end, or what the world will look like when I come out of all this.  And the really hilarious thing is, I don't even have enough money to buy a bottle of wine to have a glass before bed as some kind of last ditch attempt at a sedative.  But I guess that's probably a good thing.

Cookies and Cookie Monster plasters

I cut my finger while cutting open a mango today.  (What a "cadillac problem".)  A mango?  Oh poor me!  Yes, I had mango and blueberries for breakfast.   But the cut was enough to need a plaster, so I delighted in being able to get out my "first aid kit" which was left over from going 'on the road' which consists in its entirety of a box of Sesame Street plasters. 

I know it's pathetic but they cheer me up.  And lo and behold, the first one I picked out turned out to be Cookie Monster!

I consoled myself further by having one of my favourite biscuits in all the world - Benton's Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.  

I love them.  I'm so glad I still have two left.  I would set up an ordering system of those for myself if I were a millionaire because you can't even get them in the UK, let alone the Czech Republic.  But currently I have to put in orders for them to anyone who goes out to Illinois and can pick some up from Aldi.  Or at least, I think that was the particular supermarket that stocked them.

Anyway, it must have done me good to have both the mango and cookies because I had a rather productive day and even tackled a vicious circle-like bureaucratic problem that I had been putting off for ages because it's so hard to work out which aspect applies to my situation.  And it involves listing all my addresses for the last ten years, which is not only time-consuming because there are 7 addresses to list, but also painful because I remembered just how often I only just got settled somewhere only to have to move again and contrastingly got stuck in places I hated and felt trapped in for longer periods of time.

It made me think of the summer back in 2006 when it was really hot and all the grass in Kensington Gardens went a lifeless beige colour and I spent lots of time in the park, knowing I'd soon have to move house and wondering where on earth I'd end up and if I'd still be able to get to the park within half an hour or not.  The park became my home that summer.  Which sounds terrible.  But it sort of did.  The general routine was to walk along to the nearest coffee place and get some kind of terribly calorific frappuccino thing and then find myself a nice spot under a tree in my favourite part of the park and put out some kind of blanket and sit and listen to Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's "Summertime" on my old and chunky iPod.

It's tragic what completing a bit of useless form-filling does to you.  I suppose I can blame the insomnia too, which is becoming a theme of my life at the moment.  Still, I can revel in the fact that 1) I have an evening to myself now, 2) one of my meetees bought me red roses this week 

and 3) I made lots of progress with working towards important goals of mine today.  So it's not all bad.  And I still have salt water taffy leftover from San Francisco so I can munch on that and reminisce a bit when it all gets too much.

All quiet on the Central Eastern front

The sunshine has come back to Prague!  Hurrah!  I have felt all the better for it, after a confusing and challenging whistlestop London visit where the weather was predictably dull.  I am so grateful for sunshine and warm weather these days, as though my life depends on it, as there seems to be a very quiet 'calm before the storm' theme developing in my life now that I'm back from the epic road trip.

I'm deliberating many things and trying to work out where to start.  First and foremost, I need responses to my ads for offering Skype meetings for anyone with a music career that needs bolstering.  Secondly, I'm trying to pitch article ideas to magazines and am getting stuck in a chicken and egg situation as to who to approach first where an interview is involved.  Thirdly, I'm wondering if I should sign this momentous publishing deal that would last twelve years (that's why it's momentous, not because of the money they're offering of course!) because if they sit on it and do nothing for twelve years, that's my music career well and truly finished and nailed in its coffin with a Black and Decker power drill.

I am imploring the universe like never before because something has GOT TO CHANGE and significantly so, because I have done the work of researching new things, taking new actions, freeing up time for new and better work and now, comes that deafening silence of the wait to see if this time it will be different.  Gabby Bernstein, a spiritual guru type, but not as annoying as some of the usual crowd, said,

"Those who are certain of the outcome can afford to wait and can afford to wait without anxiety."

So I shall not worry and fret.  I shall take the steps I need to take and then switch off my insistent brain and do something I enjoy instead.  I am watching my world get smaller around me here in Prague, as my realisation that I cannot live here forever finally dawns on me, coupled with the realisation that I cannot return to London either and I stand alone in my little waiting room because I don't know what else is left to do.  I felt that emptiness and pang of being "cut-off" here again today and was going to (dangerous though it was) flick through a few magazines in the bookshop I always go to just to maybe cheer myself up, only to find that the magazine section no longer exists and the magazine racks have been simplified and put right behind the cashier desks now.  

So there will be no more taking magazines up to the cafe to read and then put back because I can't afford them.  It's like a strict school mistress has decreed this terribly naughty behaviour a nasty habit that must be eradicated.  I know I want to move to the next level and stop wasting money on overpriced imported magazines or magazine subscriptions that never arrive because of my remote and foreign address and get myself an iPad and a subscription to the online versions of my favourite publications, but I'm waiting to see if that can even be possible within this year.  Have I risked too much by whittling my accounts down to nothing due to going on this road trip?  Have I been too trusting that new actions will yield new results?

I honestly don't know the answers.  I don't feel anxious because I am sure that I have done the best I could, and I wouldn't have done things any differently given a second chance on the last few months' activities, but there is a sadness, a loneliness, indeed a questioning of my relevance to the world while in this waiting room-type silence.  I can only keep going and feel that sadness (instead of frantically trying to do something about it) and hope that something better really is just around the corner.

I'm back!

The routine has fallen out of this blog - of that I am acutely aware - but I am going through a whole host of changes and hope to bring that to this blog in due course, so for now, please accept my apologies and see this site as a 'site under re-construction' deal in the meantime.  It is not that I have lost interest in writing, rather that other interests and necessities (such as earning money) have been tugging at my shirt hem like a three year old needing urgent attention.  

First and foremost, I've been adjusting to being back in Prague, then had a flying visit to London which threw me in terms of climate and didn't help get me back to a sensible sleep pattern.  (Not to mention all this airport stress getting too much.  Though I got a rather nice kind of over-clothes-massage from the security woman in San Francisco.  She said I'd been randomly selected for it and it was, "My lucky day".  The architect stared at this potentially arousing intimate pat-down as she reached around my back to check I wasn't storing a bomb under my bra fastener and, when finished asked me, "did you enjoy that?!"  But most people are finding all these airport checks and restrictions less than amusing: see this )

And now Prague time beckons because all my meet-ees who didn't want to start back immediately due to a couple of Bank Holiday days here that meant everyone took time off, are now booked in and I am down to my last 500 crowns in all Christendom until I get paid and have thus taken to eating sweet corn out of a tin mixed with mayonnaise as my evening meal.  And I'm worn out from the trying to squeeze in an important couple of meetings while in London and slept longer this morning as a result.  So I'm still thrown as to what time zone I'm on and will somehow have to manage to get up and leave the house at 7.30am tomorrow for my first meeting!  Phew!

The good news is, there are positive things afoot, from the spectre of a bit of freelance writing (that will materialise, won't it?) to a possible music publishing deal which is waiting to be assessed by the MU that I've had to re-join in order to access their free "Contract advisory service" which could threaten to send me overdrawn if I don't get some Skype meet-ees in London or a substantial article payment in £s soon.  So I'm on the edge of the platform again financially, but the memory of San Francisco sunshine and palm trees is keeping me optimistic.  For now.

In the meantime, I hope to make the necessary changes to this blog in due course, as well as fill you in on the rest of the road trip experience as and when I can.  And when I get my new website page up and running, you'll be the first to know!  Just for now, I'll introduce the first change:  henceforth the architect shall be known as my cowboy, purely because of the acquisition of this hat:

I can't prove to you how brilliantly it suits him with a photo of him in the hat because it would break his anonymity, but take it from me, all who've seen him in it attest to the fact that he was surely born to be a cowboy!