Picture Post

If you are like me you have the attention span of a goldfish when it comes to- see there now I've probably already lost you. I always hated information in school which was presented in massive block paragraphs of tiny text with nothing fun to supplement so here, in no particular order, are some pics to illustrate some updates:

Here are creepy fish from the B&B we're staying at.












And here is me with my very first check. I am experiencing something between a brain freeze and a mindfuck at the prospect of being paid to diddle around on my computer.













Here is me and my mom and Amelia the monkey hanging out in the kitchen before we left for the trip. I am annoyed about the fact that they don't want to let me bring the big suitcase. My mother is annoyed that she is going on tour at all. Amelia is pondering the complexities of quantum physics. Or about to poop.











And here is me at the psychadelic fiberoptics museum which I insisted we visit. This is an exhibit on... glowy stuff. In bunches.


Anyways I'm sitting in a coffeeshop and procrastinating another chapter so I should get moving. Leave me a note! xo H

Captain Sarcasm the Intestine-clad Cock

Yesterday I ate some blood pudding by accident and wasn't too pleased. I mean at least they're not pussyfooting around the issue like those sneaky Prairie Oysters... blood is right in the title. And all around the inside too.. globs of it. You cook the meat in blood until it is congealed and then, I don't know, shove it inside lamb intestines or something. I want to know who was the first guy to discover that if you put your cock inside a lamb intestine sheath it'll collect the jizz. Something makes me think he wasn't looking for a responsible way to please his woman when the Eureka moment came. Came. That's right people, chuckle.

I've always been wary of the internet medium as highly misinterpretable ever since that fateful day in 8th grade when I told Chris Nolio that I wanted to show him my TI (calculator) to explain the math problem we were IMing about and it ended up looking like this in my terrible typist wannabe l33tspeek:

Ya I tink I jus
t need to show u
my Titos
how u how I did it

and subsequently being interpreted like this:

"Hey guys, Hannah said she wanted to show me her titties on aol!?"
"No way, liar."
"For real! Check it out I printed it!"

I was quickly and helpfully reminded by every 8th grade boy in an 8 mile radius that I had no titties to be offering a peek at, and my TI calculator explanation wasn't exactly ironclad in terms of getting me off the hook as a giant breast flashing calculation loving nerd.

So I tell you this... I don't really know why. Oh the intestine cock thing- right, so sometimes I feel like the tone is totally lost. Like when I say "wow the rubbery tubey insides of a farm animal can turn me on like nothing else" I might mean that I can think of nothing more repulsive because I'm being really sarcastic, OR you might be missing your one and only opportunity to have me as your devoted loveslave if you don't come to me on Halloween entirely encased in intestines holding a bouquet of roses which are also sheathed in intestines. Maybe it can be, instead, just a bouquet of intestines. And also blood pudding. Because then I'll totally want to show you all around my TI-83. Umm- I think for everyone's best interest I'm going to stop right there. Check back in later for a picture post.

xo
H
P.S. I wanted to put in some funny mathy double entendre up there just now but I have avoided anything that involves more adding than it takes to buy gas for years because I hate doing math, and we might have just gotten to the root of why I hate doing math. In a pathetic attempt to google someone who knew more about math and brought with the funny, I stumbled upon this really stellar pickup line which is not math but science related, but hey close enough, and this, really, this one is for sure the key to any woman's heart. Makes me wet just copying and pasting it:

If I had to rate my cock on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, I would be an Aggregated diamond nanorod, because I simply cannot get any harder.

And with that folks, I'm out.


(of talent readers and good taste)

H to the Nth

I have been evicted room my room because my brother does not want me typing and now I’m in the hallway staring at the B&B fishtank filled with those gross Chinese restaurant fish who look like they had golf balls surgically implanted in their eyesockets. Golf is a huge thing in this town, 8 stores in a row all dedicated to the thing. It was invented here in St. Andrews, apparently, and they’re damn proud of it. I also learned that the longest animal in the world washed up on the shore- a nemertean worm that was 186 feet long. They're proud of that too. And if the two things a town trumpets as their greatest accomplishments are a dead someone hitting a tiny ball with a piece of wood and a dead invertebrate you know you're in for some fun times.

I am having trouble writing. I can’t seem to get into the flow and I feel like If I tell you guys what is going ion inside my head maybe that will make things easer, here goes:

BITCHY HANNAH: What do you mean ‘tell them.’ Who is them? Nobody is even reading this blog you're a terrible boring writer and an allaround lame excuse for a woman.
SENSITIVE HANNAH: I’m not always boring…
PRETENTIOUS PATROL HANNAH: When you’re not being boring you’re being pretentious and nobody likes a know it all. And when you’re not a know it all you are being a poser.
OCD Hannah: Totally a poser. Definitely. Definitely. A huge poser. Also, a bad writer.
CONSPIRACY THEORY HANNAH: Shit. If I say I’m a poser on the site maybe my possible poserdom will shine through even more clearly than it already does… and then people will want to assassinate me.
BITCHY HANNAH: Nobody cares enough about you to even read this blog letalone want to assassinate you you moron.
A.D.D. HANNAH: Wow that fish is freakin’ gross. Hey he kinda looks like Nixon!
BUSINESSLY H: Stop getting so distracted
SENSITIVE H: But look at those googly gills!

I keep checking my word count every 600 words and that makes it hard to keep going. Not to mention the fact that the girls don’t seem to want to be quiet:

BITCHY H: Nobody wants to read this. It’s drivel.
PRETENTIOUS PATROL H: Don’t make a Diderot reference that’s fucking ridiculous you Ivy League baffoon.
OCD H: I think you spelled baffoon wrong. Wrong. So wrong. OMG everything is definitely wrong.
CONSPIRACY THEORY H: Even this right now is boring, nobody wants to read a conversation of yourself and yourself and if they do they will think you’re crazy and the government will notice that you are an iconoclast and will tap your phone lines and then systematically turn your family and friends against you in a plot to undermine your creativity. Damn the man.
FED UP H: You have huge problems. Seriously. Get into therapy.

And then Zen master Hannah descends froma cloud. She has taken a lot of time off to sip tea on clouds, high high up there if you know what I mean.

ZEN H: Don’t worry. This writing thing is for you, do it because you enjoy it.
H FROM DA HOOD: Are you fo real g? I’m doin this to pay da billz billz billz.
P.C. HANNAH: That's totally offensive- like unspeakably offensive.
PARANOID H: This thing better sell a gagillion freakin’ coppies
FASHINISTA H: Then I can be on magazine covers
HYPOCRITE ALERT H: If your message to young girls is to love yourself you can’t go all Hollywood on us and dye your hair blonde and get photoshop touchups that would be totally against your philosophy.
FASHIONISTA H: Not even a little dolled up?
HYPOCRITE ALERT H: No
PROBLEM SOLVING H: I’ll pose for these magazines but insist there is also a picture of me looking normal and makeupless and regular without any touchups to reveal the juxtaposition between the two, the paradox of a person perceived… Ceci n'est pas une Hannah.
PRETENTIOUS ALERT H: Fuck you.
S&M H- what about playboy wold you do playboy?
BILLZBILLZBILZLZ H:Well I guess I would if they offered like $250,000 that would pay off my student loans and then some
FASHIONISTA H: And then some shoes!
ACTIVIST H: Or some orphans in Malawi
REALITY CHECK H: You know what you are a freaking psychopath none of this is happening. What are you doing? Get back to work.
PESSIMIST H: I concur, except that not only are you a hypocrite but a total hack and it’s ridiculous to even consider this type of attention because this book will fizzle and sizzle and die as you have no talent whatsoever and might as well start busking on the street for quarters.
UBER PESSIMIST H: Fuck you. Fuck you. Your writing? Fuck that with a flaming chainsaw.

ZEN H: Just breath Hannah, breath.
SARCASTIC H: Thanks for that update genius.

All the hannahs are getting tired and exhausted and then internet browising Hannah comes along…

INTERNET BROWSING H: I know! How about you google obscure easter eggs hidden in lost on lostpedia!
PESSIMIST H: You know what this reminds me of, that play that you never finished. That sucked. You will never finish that the right way.
TANGENT HANNAH: The floorboards make a nice pattern.
ZEN HANNAH: Within men there are multitudes.
WIKI HANNAH: Who said that? Let’s check…
BUSINESSLY HANNAH: Okay guys, here is the plan. We’re going to just go freakin type and do it and do it and do it and it’ll be done.

Right! Say every Hannah except for internet browsing Hannah who has just found a totally cute video of kittens moving their heads back and forth in synch to music. Look at ‘em all! Kittens! Woohoo! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY0MSuyaKMk


Silence. Silence as the sleep kicks in. I am tired and list making Hannah starts making the day begin before the sun has risen- must write 7000 words or 6 pages 200 pages divided by 11 days…

ANTI-ALGEBRA Hannah: fuck you math
PROBLEMSOLVING H: oh ‘c’mon we can do this one. It’s not that hard.
HANNAH- hey I’m pretty pleased with this whole multiple voices thing. It’s a good way of communicating what’s going in on inside my head. I like it. Right guys?

For once there is no disagreement. Perfectionist thinks of course that now there needs to be a book movie epic novel and life changing broadaway adaptation of this which wins 9 tony awards and sweeps the Oscars in its movie adaptation before it can actually be taken seriously. Pessimist H thinks it could be better. But for the most part we are contented and in agreement. And maybe that’s why I like writing, because after all the bullshit if something is just right, then for a brief moment all the hannahs are in synch. Even Wiki Hannah knows that the only place I will find the truth I’m looking for in exactly the right words is somewhere between all of the voices, and when we find it, (quick note, Pretentious Alert Hannah thinks that using the royal "we" might come off as really fucking pretentious but that stating the concern here openly will absolve us)… sometimes, when we’re all on the same page, I feel like I can write like a motherfucker and I'm on the right path- I don't know where it goes but at least I'm on it. Pause. Breath. Ha! Perhaps an edit. Perhaps an edit or two, A few?

MAD HANNAH: How about a delete.

Okay okay enough already I get the point. I write with a merged mass of minds. I am rarely a phenom but sometimes things ring true and the voices shut up for once. It’s refreshing. It’s awesome. It’s what I hope comes my way more often… here’s to hoping.

xoxo
H
(&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H)

Wee Posting

So I need to do this quickly before my computer craps out- my mother and I have to trade back and forth with the power adapter because the UK likes to be aware of convention, do whatever the fuck they want in the face of it, and extort millions of dollars from the poor hacks who happen to come over here needing to plug something into a socket that isn't designed for three enormous rectangular prongs the size of my thumb... who designed this shit?

Other things I am enjoying immensely about Scotland... I really like the adjective 'wee' that gets thrown around so often around here. It really softens any situation. "Walk right over here past that wee homeless bum and towards the castle" "I'll give ye a wee surcharge for late checkout." Wait- you're charging us for being 3 minutes late? There's nobody else in the hotel, who cares what time we check out nobody is checking in!.... Scot the Scot remains calm... "Just a wee charge sir." And my father, usually nobody's sucker, seems placated by this, nods his head, and signs the bill.

I am learning to love the fact that my family is incapable of getting to anywhere from anywhere without at least 2 major insults which harken back to 2 epic fights in family lore. It's like we all get in the car for 6 hours of misery and windy roads (which incidentally all go the wrong fucking way. Really England? We really pissed you off that badly that you had to go and put the steeringwheel on the other side of your cars? That's not even a cool rebellion it's just annoying. And confusing for all involved. I'm giving you the metric war, we were the dicks there... measuring things based on the arbitrary size of a dead guy's foot is not exactly decimal brilliance but if we agree to convert I fully expect you metric maniacs to get your motorways in order.) Oh so anyways, family, fighting... my mother yelled at my father for being to slow, which is her code for saying that he is boring and meandering and difficult to pay attention to for any length of time because he rambles so much. This is also a dig at the fact that his tempo is so slow, a very measured plodding duuum da duuuum da duum like that of a geriatric elephant. In family speak this means she's calling him not only boring, but also fat, and he's not too pleased about it. Slow means so much more than just slow.

He tells her that she is being 'difficult' This means a plethora of things, some of which I probably don't know and don't want to know, but as far as I've gleaned this is code for: my mother is unsupportive in ways which might have cost him his career, she is negative in ways which might have cost them the marriage, and she is impossible to please. He is basically calling her irrational and also a bitch and also appealing to her sense of wifely duty by implying he does all the compromising and she sits around complaining. All in one word. Difficult. They're clever those two.

For me, hearing that I am being "overdramatic" is the family's code to let me know that I'm a self centered reactionary bitch who doesn't fight fair. And that part is a little bit true- if I'm going to fight why not fight with guns blazing. I'm not sure if everyone in the family has detected the evolution of these words and the history behind them, but having spent a long time thinking about it I am probably best suited to extract the essence of their lessons and use them for my own purposes.

And this sounds totally sick talking about family life like warfare but in terms of psychological preservation, in terms of making sure you stay sane and happy without smothering one of them with a pillow, you need to be tactical. Good cop Bad cop. I told my mother she was my favorite travel buddy but that it stressed me out when she seemed anxious. I was careful not to call her difficult. Anxious implies the negativity but not the willful bitchiness, just the sad state of being anxious. We are getting along pretty swimmingly actually, everyone. I got to 200 pgs today. FUCK YAAA 200 pages of blathering goo which I need to sort through. FUCK NOOOO I'll keep you posted.

KK I miss u! Thanks for commenting i'll write soon.

xo
H

music and mini picture post

Did a great gig tonight on a ferry. The crowd was eerily boisterous, like we were not only playing their favorite song but also curing their favorite fatal disease in the meantime and in perfect modulating harmonies.









This is me trying to look cool with a big twisty piece of metal coming out of my face.














And here is a picture of me fucking up a bass line really badly and cringing. "God I hope that wasn't as loud as it sounds" I think. The perfect time to snap a picture.



















Mom and Sam are watching a documentary on the Galapagos while I try to write, or rather, try to try to write, because clearly now I'm not writing the book I'm writing the blog and I blame that on you. Whoever you are.

This is Sam, totally unable to be silent for even 3 fucking seconds, crafting a musical instrument out of water glasses arranged by pitch based on their volume

Diggin' the Scippies

Wickerman!

We played the biggest festival of tour last night and it was totally a hit- despite the fact that the acoustic tent was retardedly placed right next to the techno tent, somehow we powered through the skull vibrating bass lines and managed to play what I thought was a great show. Some of this might have had to do with the fact that due to poor lighting we could not see the audience at all, they were just some black amorphous goo vaguely distinguishable from the white tent. They made themselves known though, because they were a drunken goo, real good and drunk. Very receptive as a result, signing along whether or not they knew the lyrics. The only unpleasant moment of the night was when I heard one of them shout to another about my brother"Tat wun's his sun, but oo's d'uther wun?" Other answers..."'Must be 'is luver." Gross. Eiw fucking eiw fucking gross.

The festival was full of Scottish hippies (Scippies) which are somehow different fro American hippies- a little more flamboyant I'd say, like they don't have anything to prove. They don't care if you think they're environmentally friendly or vegan or peaceloving or nuthin- it's all gravy. Druuunken gravy. "Do you want to eat some kava kava? I love sleeping bags. Man colors are fucking... great. Everything should be like, 15 more colors than it already is. Especially yellow. And other colors. Man. Colors Bro."

Scottish hippies might seem more silly because they are hard to understand, but I'm pretty sure I sensed a distinct giddiness lacking from US antiBush antiWar antiMeat antiCorporate hippies- these hippies had only one agenda and it was to get fucked up and listen to music. And also to make out. Scottish hippies make out on average 8 times as much as US hippies. My expert calculations took into consideration how many people I literally tripped over in the act of salivaswapping- it was 8. At least American hippies have the decency to take it inside.

Nudity is okay with most hippies but these hippies, as i mentioned before, had a fantastic flamboyance about them with shades of goth, raver, and transvestite from outerspace thrown in. Inspired outfits included: codpiece and tutu, kilt and dozens of glowing lightsticks, many shirtless guys with fancy easter bonnets, dreadlocks underneath a giant inflatable tophat, and my personal favorite, a naked guy in (and out) of a sleepingbag which he cut leg holes in but hadn't figured out a fastening system for.

It was a very civilized festival all in all, they even had a tent specifically designed for people who were having bad trips, all outfitted with soothing music and low lighting. There was a reggea tent, punk, hiphop, terrible atonal drumming spastic beatboxing bullshit, and stuff for little kids as well. I have never seen so many little kids at a festival- that's another defining Scippie characteristic... they don't grow up and become yuppies or corporate hacks, they all seem to just camp out together and continue to get super wasted and loll around in fields listening to music, except this time with baby carriages in tow. This was rather endearing actually, the whole family vibe inspiring me not to try to outrun my parents, as I would have done instantly in previous family festival outings, because there is nothing lamer than trying to flirt with some cute dreadlocked guy and having your dad come up to warn you about putting in your special earplugs because the music is really loud and you might get a headache.

Another endearing surprise in this little down in god knows where Scotland was the tiny parade we happened upon this morning. No warning, no occasion, seemingly no reason for it at all. Out our window suddenly there were marching bagpipers. The parade didn't seem to have a theme, just people who threw glitter and streamers onto their vans, tractors, and in two cases, dumpsters... there was a truck with a gorilla playing guitar, four little girls dressed as bingo balls, a man in drag who looked like Catherine the Great riding a rocketship made out of empty barrels, and one very perplexed looking family in a minivan who had accidentally been caught in the parade and now couldn't get out. Absolutely hilarious.







Tomorrow we are off to... Glasgow maybe? I don't know really, it's all a haze of silly accents and friendly smiles. I'll check back soon. Writing is going... sloooowly. I hate my writing. Then I sit down and write and things are okay, then I check my wordcount and hate my writing, then i write and things are great, then I want a sandwich, hate my writing, want a brownie, check my wordcount, eat a brownie, hate my writing, check the wordcount, check my email, check the news, take a walk, hate my writing, and then am surprised when I check my wordcount for the 400th time to see it has increased by 21 words, most of which are "I hate my writing." I love writing but I feel like I'm in this rut... I need to be planning in earnest and it's hard to feel settled enough to lay out all my ideas when we're in a different place every night. But that is an excuse. A huge one. I know it. Any advice out there folks? I'd love some. Hope all is well wherever you are.



xox
H

P.S. in an attempt to find something to do in the 5 hour car rides that won't make me nauseous, I picked up a crochet kit in a local craft shop, and succeeded in making a swell worm, and then something that kind of resembled a rectangle. here is my attempt at a circle. It would make a swell hat for a small child with an extremely deformed head. For now I'm using it as a saxophone mouthpiece condom.

Drugs R Bad. R Good.

One of the joys of going to other countries, aside from all of that food culture architecture music history nonsense is being able to sample a new set of over the counter drugs which for whatever reason have not been deemed as illegal as they have in the united states. While I was in the Czech Republic making films, or rather, attempting to do what amounted to essentially trying to make a film whilst on a giant water raft careening down the side of a glacier as your crew of professors and actors gets too drunk to function and starts beating eachother with paddles and your camera and microphone requires batteries every 3.4 minutes so you must make heroic leaps off the raft and hitchhike into town and then crosscountry ski your way back to your now unmanned out of control raft as it caromes into rocky shards of further cultural incompetence and despise for your chilly american ass, (there continues to be no verb for this sentence about what I did in the Czech republic but I imagine my poor sentence structure has lost you so I'll start again."

Czech Republic, making films, (etcetcetcbitchbitchmoan) I acquired with my good friend and roommate KK (not to be mistaken with KVK, our Czech professor who set a table on fire trying to light absinthe) a good deal of some kind of codeine substance.

We were depressed and overheated and put upon in a rather dramatic way because we had to be here on a Yale program in Europe making films and they weren't woooorking they way that we wanted them to. Damn society. The injustice of it all. It was simply unbearable, we decided, as we sat on our american asses, and so we took lots of codeine and ate lots of chocolate and watched every bootleg DVD of sex and the city we could get our hands on. This sufficed for a few days until some sketchy kid missing a tooth (nice kid actually, little high risk perhaps but nice) found a source for Czech weed. And also Czech cocaine which I did not sample. It looked and smelled like baking powder. But I was wrong, it was not baking powder, because whoever sampled it promptly became victim to high velocity regugitation out our second story window, which apparently burned like magma and made you hallucinate some kind of hideous face demon, not so called because he had a hideous face but because he was attached to your face with all of his sticky dark hideousness. Nothing quite burns in your mind like watching vomit come out the gap in someone's teeth while they claw at their face. My guess is now maybe baking soda and, oh, I don't know, PCP.RatpoisonLSDFormaldehyde-tini cocktail.

Anyways I took this paracete-pamprin something stuff that they recommended in the gas station for menstrual cramps and step one... no more cramps. step two... slightly elated. step three... allegedly I am singing in a fancy restaurant with a napkin on my head because my sweatshirt hood did not constitute as a big enough hat, apparently I really wanted a big big hat. I probably should not have sampled this stuff on an empty stomach, but googling revealed that the opiates might ahve done me in either way. I dont remember being super happy or super sad, just very very pleasantly neutral and having a strong desire to be flat- flat against the floor, flat against the wall, flat against the napkin which served as my hat. I slept well for the first time in this godforsaken hotel because sam will not. WILL NOT stop playing guitar. And playing is one thing but practicing is another thing. And he's an amazing musician blah blah blah but SHUT THE FUCK UP I DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOU PLAY THE SAME GODDAMN 5 CHORDS OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND- see in my mind I just smacked him with a 2x4 but in my voice I told him to please go outside, and he reminded me in his sweetest little brother voice that I was typing until late last night and this should not be different. But it is. Because when I am typing I am typing. And when he is playing he is KILLING EVERY OUNCE OF JOY AND CREATIVITY THAT RESIDES IN MY BRAIN AS ALL THE ANGER MOLECULES BUST DOWN THEIR HAPPY LITTLE DOORS AND START BASHING THE JOY AND CREATIVITY AND SANITY WITH 2x4s. Neurological 2x4s. Metaphorical 2x4s, but 2x4s nonetheless. Umm... excuse me for a moment while I go get a fucking... while I go take a lovely stroll on the beach.

Where I will get a huge fucking 2x4.

xox
H

Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me.

So the bad part about staying at luxury resorts for free is that you can get evicted if a real paying customer shows up, which one did, and we did. now we are in some unpronouncable town by the sea.



I am almost at my 50,000 word goal for my second cycle and i'm trying to teach myself shorthand so that I can write quickly on paper because the computer for some reason only charges for 45 minutes without the plug and my mother is so worried about money that we decided not to get two and now we have to go swapping back and forth every 45 minutes which leaves me vulnerable to seeing all sorts of horrible things like what I think might have been my parents having sex in a shower. yes. as nauseating and slippery as you suppose.

I went for a walk today on the beach which was very relaxing. there are mounds and mounds of this strange bubbly kelp and as I strolled I rediscovered the game so popular with children called "I'm gunna stamp on that." I stamped on a host of mussle shells abandoned on the beach and they crackled under my weight. I stepped on some slimy seaweed to see what color it looked like against the sand. I stepped on this kelp which seemed aching to be stepped on, all pustuley and crisping in the hot sun, and it made a very pleasing cluster of pops. Pop pop stamp.

This released a not so pleasing cluster of flies whom apparently i had just destroyed the home of and they flew into my face perhaps unanimously deciding that my nose cavity would be their runnerup restingplace. gross. I ran away from them and stamped and stepped on some stinky piles of rotting seagrass, a fishy feculent miasma wafted towards me and the flies appeared out of nowhere fifty fold, tiny little gnats, very excited about this rotting grassy stuff I had uncovered. They totally went to town on the fermenting greenery and I decided that irish beach flies like booze as much as irish bar flies.

We are leaving for dublin tomorrow and already i am certain that i am not cut out for all this meet and greet stuff- i do not care about the weather here. I do not care about what the weather was like before we arrived after we will leave or on the day that you were born. I do not want to talk about the weather with you, person with a thick accent, because my face hurts when I pretend to smile for too long and that is my only defense against being really rude and staring at you the way i really feel which is with an eye roll and a gaping mouth, a mouth which says "i cannot even conceive of how you manage to not throw yourself off of a cliff having to listen to yourself talk about this bland bland blandiness all day long. At least I can excuse myself to the bathroom. When you excuse yourself to the bathroom you have to go along too. If you were there every time I was trying to get some alone time on the toilet I would punch you in jaw you chattering blathering insincere ninny."

I miss... my own room my own schedule my bed my cat my books my closet my ability to choose who I do an do not shmooze with. I am a little bit cranky because I think i need some alone time to recharge and that time on the road is few and far between. on the lighter side I am reading many excellent things and my stampathon has revitalized the child within me- i plan, in her honor, to spin around in circles, run fast in no particular direction, and catch ladybugs in a jar before we leave. Or at least kill some damn flies. they're even in my room right now eating my delicious strawberries. have they no shame.

xox
H

Shriekers and Crooners

Irish children rank slightly under French children in their cuteness and complete indecipherability. I do not know what the little blondehaired boy said to me after his mother swooped him up from his mission to accompany my father on the keyboards but I know he was damned adorable. Children are usually a very enthusiastic audience, bopping along and having no qualms about singing even the most idiotic of lyrics right along with us, but sometimes there's that hellspawn kid who sets his sights on making your night shitty.

Usually you can spot this kid early on- he is antsy and loud and he has usually made a sibling cry with a swift kick to the shin before the gig even starts, but sometimes a regular normal looking kid will turn into a professional heckler out of nowhere and start screaming something incoherent about monkeys. Little kids are like HVI in that once one is infected with obnoxiousness the rest soon follow even if they know it's absolutely not in their best interest. So now you have 2, 5, and then 20 kids screaming something incoherent about monkeys and laughing riotously and around this time one of them has the brilliant revelation that, why just talk when we can bash things? Things to bash include: chairs, table, expensive furniture, priceless heirloom instruments, glasses, and eachother. If they all just beat eachother senseless in some kiddie moshpit that would be fine by me; In fact I'd be the first one to crowdsurf their cute little button faces into the ground, but of course there is always some amount of entropy in the flock so when 19 of them are busy spinning in circles with their arms smacking into eachother one of them is most surely standing behind me right this very moment about to grab onto my skirt and reveal the reason I don't have pantyline showing. Perfect.

This gig was outside and was actually very pleasant, lovely barbq, sunny sky for the first time we've been over here... whoever settled Ireland must have really had that whole brooding thing down pat, or had some kind of skin condition which prohibited exposure to decent weather conditions.

Halfway through the gig some woman came up and requested that my dad and brother accompany her on some stevie wonder song. this should have come as a welcome break but i was completely unprofessionally and irrationally pissed off by this, what i felt to be an intrusion on my microphone. Of course she had a beautiful strong voice and great mic technique and I tried to think of ways to orchestrate having her fall into the river whose shore we were playing on while making it seem like an accident. I mean c'mon, I just got the hang of this whole loungesinger act and I know I might sound like an amateur sometime but you don't have to go showing me up at my own gig. Wait until i'm done or something. Nono it was perfectly within her rights and I just was annoyed because it was a flashback to those cattlecall musical theater auditions where you think you did a great job until some broadway baby gets up and blows everyone away on exactly the same song you did except a 500x better version than the song you did and all that congratulating you gave yourself feels like a pretty pathetic lie. And so to console yourself, as I mentioned, you begin to devise elaborate methods of inflicting disastrous injuries on said person, which is totally sick, and then you are sickened by your own sickness in some sick cycle of psychobabble inside your head and eventually you get so exhausted that you barely want to look at yourself in the mirror letalone hear yourself sing. I know I know.... issues. I'm working on it. I'm introspecting and whatnot what else do you want. Okay speaking of introspecting I have to go write.

Writing is coming along quite nicely. I am almost at my second 200 pg. cycle and although i have no structure to speak of some fat themes are emerging and i think I've found a solid voice... though i'm still wondering about some extras, perhaps footnotes or recipes or maps and doodles and whatnot, hmmm...

xox
H

Green

Here in Ireland at the Wineport Inn.

We have been touring since Tuesday to crowds ranging from shrieking 6 year olds hopped up on sugar and the thrill of staying up past their bedtime (their request that we play something 'better, like don't you know any Britney Spears or PDiddy?' was really quite heartwarming and made all of our hard work seem so damn worthwhile), and 56 year olds who are so drunk by the end of the set that they are singing louder than we are. What exactly they are singing we can never be quite sure, but they seem pretty pleased with themselves and as long as the audience is happy the gig seems to have been a successful one whether or not they know where they are and who they are letalone who we are.

For some reason my father has two very different types of fans. One kind is the extremely creepy, living in mother's basement and never going to move out, diehard fans who do things like bring napkins they collected from my dad 18 years ago. They bring entire albums filled with pictures of themselves and my dad throughout the decades displaying various facial hair evolutions including, my personal favorite, the bedroom eyed afro debuted circa 1970 and cool circa never...
For some inexplicable reason these fans are often about the size of 12 of me put together... perhaps you can even calculate their fandom based on their height to width ratio, which for the diehard extremes is 1:1 at most. "But how diehard can they be?" you might be asking. and even if you are not I will tell you that last week a woman came to our practice gig bearing three dozen homemade temporary tattoos that she had made using cover art and photos from my dad's website, as well as graphics from the web like a baby superimposed over a mailbox for a song about an adoption. The creepiest thing of all was when she proudly extended her amply fleshy forearm to reveal a picture of me. Me and my brother to be exact, in the giant shoe car we helped my father construct during one of his midlife crisis project phases... my mother always wondered why he couldn't channel his energy into fixing the plumbing or learning how to tile the roof but I'm sure the practicality of this baby is evident. Totally.So I can safely say that seeing my own face staring back at me from the limb of an obese woman who probably fantasizes regularly about killing my mother so that she can marry my father, and then having her pull me tightly to her enormous bosum before I had a chance to breath was unheimlich and a half... Freud would be all over this shit. I, however, was quick to duck under her embrace asap so that I could make sure she was not wielding a knife or a pocketbook made out of tanned human livers or something. She was perfectly friendly actually but the tattoo... it was just a little past the line of enthusiastic and into realm of disturbing

The other kind fan is the best kind because they are the absurdly wealthy and inexplicably generous kind- the kind that offer to have your whole family stay at three of the top spa resorts in Ireland for a week totally free if you play a few gigs for their friends. I am sitting in a $950 a night suite and this one is all to myself... I've been sharing with sam for the past few days. We've enjoyed fabulous food (though the sweetbread was an unwelcome if cerebrally scrumptious surprise) and lovely walks through the misty moors and whathaveyou. This room is lovely because now I can stay up and type without Sam bitching about how the clickityclack is bothering his sleep... last night i had to write in teh bathroom because he was aggravated, although even the bathrooms in these places are nicer than most of my house, with heated floors and waterfall showers with cornucopias of french lotions dotted all over the shelves. Having a room to yourself is nice, and having wireless is even nicer. This might be totally gross but I think I'm accurate in assuming that Sam and I are both really happy to have those two very key ingredients in watching and enjoying internet porn because it's been a stressful few days and sleeping in the same bed as a sibling is possibly the biggest cockblock known to man short of sleeping in the same bed as your grandmother.

Must go write but will post later. And by write I mean take advantage of this free internet. And by free I mean I have to go humiliate myself in front of hundreds of people singing songs with my father about S&M, smoking pot, and a lovely little ditty entitled "thank god my penis is just the right size."

...if it got any bigger it'd burst my levis
it used to be longer 'til i got circumsieeeeezed. etc etc. (--bangs head on antique oak table worth 20 times more than the entire contents of my suitcase--)

xox
H