Brock { Abroad }

I wake up with a headache to the sound of a jackhammer chopping up the street below me. There are seven cigarette butts in the ashtray on my bedside table. One is standing straight up. I cross the drab and empty room and enter the bathroom to release my full bladder. There is a streak in the bowl from my violent reaction to a whole round of camembert cheese I crammed into a baguette, my final meal in France and proof that I am incredibly intolerant of lactose. There are curly black hairs stuck to the still damp bathtub and my clothes are laid out on the dresser next to some brochures for the Guggenheim museum, an architectural gem I’ve been waiting to see for years. It was an off start to my first day ‘home’, to say the least. To say the most, I felt pretty damn lonely; and I couldn’t understand why. Read the rest of this entry »

I felt stuck. Not just in the literal sense, but I hadn’t made a great sequence of movements since I began my work in France. London didn’t really count. It seemed more like a vacation where I arrived by air, drank beer, and spent more money than I’d wanted to. Usually, I’m much more, well, cheap, but perhaps making some extra cash on the road working long hours in the middle of nowhere with sick kids made me go a little stir-crazy, I don’t know. Anyways, I fueled my splurging spree by going to see the musical ‘Wicked’ in the West End, buying new shoes, and spending close to the same amount in cocktails in the up-and-coming and very bohemian Brick Lane neighborhood. The museums were free, of course, and I thoroughly enjoyed my days spent at the Tate Modern Museum of Art finally seeing Marcel Duchamp’s urinal and spending the afternoon looking at the Mummies of Ancient Egypt with a Croatian girl who taught me just as much about Ancient Croatia. Mostly, though, London just made me want to buy overpriced things, want to eat overpriced food, and in general, want things I was forgetting I really didn’t need.

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