I was in London last week and during my trip I intended to film it and update this blog with regular (but brief) entries. Very quickly I knew that I wasn’t filming anything, and not so quickly I realized I wasn’t going to be doing any writing or entries. Why? Well, a few reasons:
1 –I didn’t film because I had friends in town and I didn’t trust myself carrying my camera everywhere. We’d leave the flat for long stretches and I didn’t know if I could confidently say, “I won’t lose my camera.”
2 – Drinking.
That pretty much sums it up. Let me digress and give a one-week-later London reflection.
It doesn’t help the situation that I’m from the land of beer (Milwaukee) and I was staying with my friend who also was from Wisconsin, and who happened to be hitting a 3-day work hiatus. Also, I had two of my best friends (also from Wisconsin) come visit for two days. When the four of us got together it was as though we could all see into the looking glass and what we saw were pints and hangovers.
Do I wish I had better self control, yes, of course. But my self-control ties into a larger issue with being in London – people like to drink, a lot. There is a pub on nearly every corner. It was as though every stereotype that has ever been said about London was true. I guess stereotypes exist for a reason. Also, I can’t help it if drinking and fun occasionally go hand in hand. I can’t help it that I really like to talk to people and when you’re in a pub getting shitfaced (whoops, excuse me, getting “pissed”) people become more talkative. I can’t help these things. I can only experience them, and that’s what I did.
My drinking experiences directly tied into my lack of motivation to write or do anything. There was one night when I was laying in bed and whipped out my laptop, started to type and this is the actual entry:
Man, what the F d over am I
Yup. You may notice that doesn’t make much sense. There may be a child sitting in preschool somewhere who is going to write the same thing in about 30 minutes. The beauties of drinking. For every great night of conversation there is an incoherent phrase waiting to be muttered.
Moving on from the perpetual state of drunk – London is pretty awesome. I’d be lying if I said that I knew where I was half the time; I couldn’t get my bearings. I kept asking people which way north was and half the time people didn’t know. Of course the monuments and landmarks are beautiful, outside of the city is peaceful, the culture is interesting, the curry was great… The world is fucking awesome.
That’s my takeaway.
That’s always my takeaway when I go somewhere I don’t know. Even if I hate the places I go to, I love that I hate it. I love knowing there are other experiences in the world. There is no substituting experience in life, you either have them or you don’t.
This is it. This is my one-week-later London refection. Pretty in depth, right? I kind of wish there was more to this but I think I need to blame the drinking for lack of substantial memories. There’s just a lot of fragmented good times, and really, how do you express fragmented good times? The best way is probably through video…
Shit.