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Hi kids,
Did you miss me? Hope you’ve had a nice break from my existential musings, like I have. I was enjoying it so much that I gave myself an extra week. Four whole weeks without bemoaning the state of the universe! I’m so out of practice I don’t even know where to start.
If you were expecting a retrospective on my two week gap yah to Chile, sorry to disappoint. I’m sure I’ll be mining it for content for the rest of my life, but currently I prefer to leave its memory unsullied by not overlaying it with meaning and metaphors. The most impactful thing that happened (before you start: not the BEST thing, not the most MEMORABLE thing, the most impactful thing. Leave Britney alone) was my eventual encounter with food poisoning, after ducking and dodging it for my entire life. It will most likely be the subject of next week’s diatribe, so if you don’t want to read a thousand words about thoughts I had as I stared down at a toilet bowl full of sick, maybe give that one a miss.
So: not writing about Chile. Instead I’m going to write about Peru. Plot twist!
Due to a series of last minute itinerary changes, owing to shifting Covid regulations and a lack of research, I ended up spending the last day of my trip in Lima by myself, while my travelling buddies took an extremely long bus to Cusco. Great, I thought. I’ll have time to dream up some ideas for the newsletter, after two weeks of thinking of absolutely nothing.
I always think that if I could just get some peace and quiet, if I could plop down in a field somewhere and stare at a tree, or sit in a bar in the West Village with a whisky like some Bukowski-ass wanker, I’ll have the kind of deep thoughts that I continue, against all evidence to the contrary, to believe I’m capable of. I just need the background noise to be stripped away, to put my phone on airplane mode, and the ideas will come pouring out and I’ll start scribbling away as if possessed. My friend actually recently sent me a New Yorker article about someone else who believes this (incorrectly) so perhaps, as ever, this isn’t a hot take. But it never happens like that.
One of my favourite parts of one of my favourite books, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, addresses this. She embarks on a three month solo trek on the PCT in the West Coast of America (she says, as if it’s possible that someone reading this hasn’t heard of the book/movie, seen the book/movie, or at the very least seen the Gilmore Girls revival making fun of the book/movie) after her mum dies and her marriage falls apart (sound familiar?), to give her a chance to reset, to take stock, to ‘walk herself back to the woman she used to be’ (that is not one of my favourite lines). No, one of the best parts of the book is when she reckons with the fact that rather than her brain filling with deep thoughts, coming up with new and interesting conclusions to the things that have gone wrong in her life, literally all she can think is: I’m tired. My back hurts. I’m hungry. Is that a bear over there.
It’s the same for me. Whenever I have peace and quiet, or no distractions, my brain becomes a black hole, devoid of interesting thoughts. It is either completely empty or full of the kind of mundanities that even I couldn’t string out into an essay. I haven’t read Walden, but if I did (I won’t) then my biggest issue with it would probably be that I can only assume the dude had all his interesting thoughts after he stopped living in the woods and went back to reality. There’s no way he had them while he was there. When I’m in truly backwater nature, my brain switches into this kind of primal gear where it only cares about basic human needs. Where’s my next meal coming from? Is this water going to kill me? How do you put up this tent? Once those are taken care of, it shuts off entirely, leaving only a vague buzzing noise.
So I was sitting in a bar in Lima, notebook and pen at the ready, and… nothing. In my desperation, I started writing in Spanish, ‘for practice’, but mostly because then my brain could concern itself with remembering grammatical constructions rather than trying to come up with something profound. I ended up literally describing what was around me, and not in a ‘there’s a sad looking woman sitting in the window. This is what I imagine her life is like’. No, a direct quote from it is:
I just ordered a double IPA because I didn’t understand what the waiter said, so when he asked if I wanted a drink with ‘more alcohol’ I said yes, and now I have a drink I don’t want to drink and nothing to write about.
I wonder if this is a kind of coping mechanism that my brain enacts without me being aware of it. If it’s like, oh, we’re relaxing. Okay. Let’s relax. Let’s not think about anything that isn’t relaxing. It won’t let me deep dive into anything, it just floats placidly at surface level. And maybe that’s a good thing? But all it means is that I always have ideas at the most inopportune moments, like when I’m mid-conversation, or in a taxi on the way to the airport when I don’t have anything to write with except the notes app which keeps autocorrecting in new and creative ways. To clarify, the taxi in question was in Lima and only cost four pounds. I’m not the sort of bougie cunt who gets a taxi to Heathrow on the reg because I think I’m too good for the Piccadilly line.
So maybe I’m doing it wrong? Maybe I’m meant to profit from these moments of respite, rather than trying to mobilize them to produce something that will be useful back in the real world. But realistically it just results in me being plagued with anxiety that the ideas well has dried up, that I’ll never write anything again. It would be sweet if my brain could come up with a coping mechanism for that.
One good thing:
During my brief stint in Lima I learned their currency is called ‘soles’, or ‘suns’, which is the cutest spin on capitalism I’ve heard in a while. My previous top two Spanish language facts were that it uses the same word for ‘wife’ and ‘handcuffs’ (a nugget I dine out on so often that it’s actually on my Hinge profile) and the fact that in Spanish when you say you dreamed about someone, you say you dreamed with them. Which I think is really sweet. And allows you to convince yourself that you’re not pathetic for having a dream about your ex, because they were probably dreaming about you too.
One bad thing:
Two bad things, actually. While wandering around Barranco I realised I had managed to put my underwear on sideways, which was not a thing I knew you could do. It only came to my attention when I got a wedgie on one specific side of my ass.
Bad thing number two: there’s a bridge in Lima where it is *rumoured* that if you cross the whole thing while holding your breath, it’ll grant you a wish. My twenty-pack-a-day lungs couldn’t even make it halfway, so I guess I’ll have to grant my own fucking wish. Ugh.