Awesomeness: the Scottish Tourism Epic

Now with a 7 hour plane ride between me and Scotland, I have had some time to reflect, because although I don’t have a thing for shitty weather, alcoholism and kilt-clad lads, I do have a special fondness for Scotland.

And after some consideration I think it’s really an appreciation for the perpetual cultural zeitgeist which, to be sociologically blunt, pretty much amounts to “… Fuck it!” Nowhere is this better exemplified than in their tourism industry.

Scot the Scottish Tourism Apprentice and his master are drinking ale by a fireside...

But Sir… our weather is dreary and depressing and the only thing we’ve ever done arguably better than other countries is make whiskey!

I know my boy, but...Fuck it! We’re gunna make it work.

How?

We’ll start with the weather. You know the moors?

You mean our many “ open areas of land- usually above sea level- with poor drainage?”

That’s right... We’re gunna sex that shit up.

Excuse me?

You heard me lad. We’ll get some product placement in those newfangled ‘chick’ novels… the crappiness of the weather will represent… tempestuous relationships… women love that shit. Get those batty Bronte bitches on the phone.

But sir, who would want to read that?

Nobody but… fuck it. We’ll make pretentious English departments in other countries feel like they’re being sexist and unsophisticated if they don’t force every single goddamn student they ever get their hands on read it!

Oh I see! What about that Shakespeare Fellow? I heard he’s writing something that takes place in Scotland right now… it’s called Macb-

Stop right there.…. Fuck it. From now on it’s called the Scottish Play. Send some of our goons to every single place it’s being performed and have ‘em smack the shit out of someone with a blunt object anytime they say the name. It’ll catch on. Fuck I’m brilliant.

But sir… even if we get people here… how do we make them stay?

We get them piss drunk of course. We’re good at that. Here’s how I want the main street arranged: pub, fruit-stand, pub, pharmacy, pub, pub, pub with prostitutes in the back of the pub, charity shop, pub.

What if they don’t drink?

Then they’re idiots! And idiot tourists love two things: old stuff and magic stuff. We’ll give ‘em tours of the castles.

You mean the crumbling piles of rock all over the place? But they’re just… old walls.

…Fuck it. We can make up anything we want to say because the only physical evidence is a bunch of fuckin’ rocks. Battles! Bravery! We'll sell swords in the giftshop. And then for magic…

Yes?

Hmm… you know what? Fuck it. Giant fish dragon. In a lake. Is it magical? Is it a dinosaur?

Is it?
Exactly. They’ll eat it up. Go round up some drunken fishermen, a half broken camera, and a noodle with an eyehole cut out. And while you’re out- you know those ridiculous tablecloth skirts people wear because we like to go commando? … fuck it. We’ll sell ‘em to tourists at $200 a pop. Oh! And you know that obnoxious squeezebox thing that sounds like you’re squeezing a dying cat?

Sir… you can’t mean… the bagpipes?

Get a whole bunch of guys, I’m talkin’ like 500 guys, playing the dead cats and wearing tablecloths. We’ll get people to pay $60 a seat, get the audience wasted and then… set stuff on fire.

(Here we have the Edinburgh Military tattoo... thousands of $60 seats booked more than a year in advance.)









Sir… you’re truly a genius. How can I ever repay you for all you've taught me?


Go make our national animal the most hilariously fruity thing you can possibly think of. Oh- and get me a drink. or five.

Anything for you sir.

And the official animal of Scotland is (…fuck it)
a unicorn! That’s right, who needs biological taxonomy when you have whimsy?

Even better, true to the nature of a loveable drunken bum who you might poke with a stick, but a looong stick just incase he ever musters enough motivation to lunge, Scotland’s motto is
“Nemo me impune lacessit” which means “no one provokes me with impunity.”

So you can provoke Scotland. You can poke and provoke and overtake its monarchy all goddamn millenia. But sooner or later… (probably later) you’re gunna get… well... (they haven’t gotten around to that part of the slogan.)

But you do not have provoking impunity, sir. There are consequences. Oh Yes. Something of undetermined nature and magnitude at an unknown future date is going to… do something. You will be somethinged. Badly. And that’s what you get for fucking with Scotland biatches.

xox
H (no one facebookpokes me with impunity) annah

E(R)epiphany

There's nothing like sitting next to a once ten, now three-toed man gushing blood to make you reevaluate your own 'problems.'

My brother Sam has been experiencing tons of strange and intense wrist pains, and today's fun kicked off with his hands going numb, turning blue, and deforming into a creepy crippled claw-like position which made him look like the Crypt Keeper.

"Umm... what the hell should we do?" I ask the reception staff at the physical therapy place.
"Does he want a biscuit?" says a chubby receptionist
"A what?"
"A biscuit. Chocolate or oatmeal?" she asks cheerily reaching into her purse.
"Are you serious? He's shaking and turning blue."
"So... he doesn't want a biscuit?"
"No. No he doesn't want a biscuit. He wants some pain killers. Do you have anything for the pain?"
She looks at me suspiciously and puts down the biscuits.
"Just popping out for a cigarette I'll be back soon." she declares.

Well fuck.

Eventually biscuit lady and I decide to call an ambulance, which, aside from how scary the afternoon was, is actually kind of exciting. I feel suddenly like I'm on Grey's Anatomy and although I have no medical training and the phone connection is fine I find myself shouting seemingly authoritative things at the 911 (or 999 over here) person. "He is 18! He has blue hands! He is breathing! With his mouth! And nose! Stat! Shit!"

In the ambulance Sam calms down a bit and I try to get the paramedic to assure him he hasn't damaged his hands for life. Sam is the best jazz piano improviser I've ever fucking met and is understandably upset at the prospect of losing his playing capabilities. The guy goes on and on about tendons and oxygen and calcium and seems really nonplussed. I try to coax him into straightforwardly assuring Sam that he'll be fine.

"He'll be fine, right?" I nudge
"Looks like you're the one who's not doing so fine lass.. calm down there."
"I am calm."
"You've got a wee vein popping out in your forehead says otherwise."
"I'm fine."
"Do you always turn red when yer fine?"
"Listen, why are we stopping at every red light? Isn't this an ambulance?"
"I hope so, otherwise this is the worst-stocked iced cream truck in the whole damn county" he laughs, pointing to a cabinet full of splints.

Har d har har.

Then we proceed to the emergency room where we wait for 2 hours only to be moved into a small room where we wait for another 2 hours, then a nurse comes in and takes blood while she tells us about how she lives near the world's largest puffin sanctuary.

"Are you concerned the hands are blue?" I ask
"Beautiful birds."
"But-"
"Very regal."
"What?"
"The puffins. The royalty of marine birds. Did you know they can live 30 years?"
"And the hands?"
"They're blue."
"Umm... thanks."

Eventually they rule out the crazy-bad diseases my mother and I have been driving ourselves insane with worry researching on WebMD, splint him, drug him, and send him home.

The weirdest thing is that the whole day is free- they don't take a health insurance card or ask for a billing address. Thank fucking God for free national healthcare (wtf America, I'd put up with snarky paramedics and ornithological enthusiasts for this kind of treatment anyday). When we finally walk out of there 12 hours later with a bagfull of codeine and wrist splints and haven't paid a penny, I feel like I've pulled off a major jewel heist.

Sam is sleeping and no longer in constant pain, though he can't use his hands even to feed himself Thai food or go to the bathroom, and I cannot help but feel guilty for all of the complaining I've done thus-far on this trip, even right here on this blog.

It's easy to feel very far away from everything we'd like be and to have. Lists of our unfulfilled desires multiply with overwhelming perceived flaws in an ever-mounting mountain of reasons to be unsatisfied, frustrated, just plain depressed.

But for tonight at least, dazed from 12 hours of ER tracklighting and shitty BBC waitingroom television and gushing toe blood and unhelpful cookie-wielding receptionists and the yicky smell of antiseptic and vomit, I'm taking a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the too-often under-appreciated fact that I can go to the bathroom all by myself and feed myself chicken satay without having to use my feet, ending up with Thai peanut sauce lodged in my nose, as Sam pathetically demonstrated before bed.

And although being a superhero billionaire, or an Oscar winning astronaut, or a magical shape-shifting genie that can talk to dogs might be super awesome...compared to toe-less Joe, most of us with all 10 little piggies are having a pretty good night.

I mean, I can pee and eat chicken all by myself. Seriously. Woohoo! And if you can too, then you should smile wide, and you should give yourself a pat on the back for Sam, because he can't even pat himself on the front.

(See Ned- I don't just complain on this blog. I can be positive. I can be uplifting. I could uplift Oscar the Grouch, Squidward, and Eeyore and still have enough lifting power to lift your grumpy bum into sillyville and back- I'm like the Jewish Oprah. Suck it. Mwah.)

much love and limb limberness,
H

Dirty Little Secrets for Cheap Laughs

Hooray for the Fringe!

Today I met up with fellow college grad G, who is spreading his carefree youth wings for the last time before September when he will be caged into official corporate servitude (don’t feel too bad, he’ll have enough cash to buy you and your family and force you to dress up in hilarious animal costumes for his afternoon entertainment before he’s 30). We have seen a host of shows ranging from complete shit to nonstop laughs.

One show opened with two gorillas emerging from orange puffs of smoke, then peeling off their fur to reveal leather, bikini-clad babes who proceeded to have an elaborate boob-jiggling sword fight before falling prostrate on the floor where they lay for the entirety of the show. Then the comedian of the evening came out dressed like Conan the Barbarian and shouted “Because I fucking can!” before starting his standup.

And he fucking could because he was fucking funny. Last year, G and I were brave/stupid enough to enter Yale’s Last Comic Standing, and we were... not. Seeing as that when I am not craving attention I am a neurotic recluse whose fear of rejection is only eclipsed by her fear of public failure, that may well have been both my debut and my Waterloo on the standup stage.

But in the written word I’m a lot more comfortable and can be flanked by my badass literary posse Captain Edit, Colonel Thesaurus, and General Wikipedia, so I thought I’d try out a popular theme I’ve noticed in the good acts here at the Fringe which I like to call the “I’m fucking crazy and here’s why” admission monologue. So here, in no particular order, is my list:


I have alternated between genuinely thinking I’m the laziest most worthless person that has ever lived and genuinely thinking I am the fucking messiah, or maybe more like a badass revolutionary who’s a cross between Che Guevara, that Terminator kid and Cheetara from Thunder Cats.

I often change clothes 3 times before walking out the door because, depending upon on where I’m going, I feel compelled to delicately navigate between being casual but not looking like a fucking hobo, trendy without looking like I'm trying to be trendy, hippie without the crunchiness, sexy without the sluttiness, and quirky without being one those obnoxious “LOOK AT ME!” girls who prances around in fairy wings.

Sometimes while you are talking, I hum a song in my head about all the things I would rather be doing than listening to you talk. (watching Schindler’s list on repeat, giving birth to quintuplets without anesthesia on an airplane that’s about to crash, swimming in snot, etc.)

Even though, as compared to 99% of the world, I come from a super comfortable financial background, if you have a trust fund, no matter how nice you are, not only am I jealous of you and completely dismissive of your ‘problems’, but I am probably doodling an imaginary Uncle Moneybags from Monopoly mustache onto your face as you talk.

I rage against all the bullshit masochistic anti-feminist swill in the media, but secretly love those old movies where the guy calls the high-collared straight-laced ingenue “doll-face” and passionately kisses her against her will and then she smacks him in the face but secretly absolutely loves it and goes in for another.

I love to be in charge, but will readily cede power and delegate responsibility in order to have a scapegoat in case things go wrong.

If I date you, I will test you with a formula which is as elaborate as it is illogical, and no matter how spontaneous you think we are being, I will have already determined whether or not you will ever get to touch my boobs by test number 3.

I am suspicious of, and only feel at ease with beautiful confident women once I am able to identify what about them is sufficiently fucked up (anything will do really, crippling fear of spiders, dead parents, lazy eye, lisp, lupus, hot but pants-on-head retarded…)

I think my farts smell like a delicious magical bread factory in a swampy but lovable bog.

I make fun of religions people, but have earnestly prayed at one point or another for all of the following things: blonde hair, a tomagatchi, chocolate cake, rock hard abs, a pony, a bag of pot as big as a pony, sparkly shoes, my own island, and an island of ponies wearing sparkly shoes and smoking pot... thank you Jesus.

I consider having children because I think there should be more of my DNA out there than other people’s. Darwin would have wanted it that way.

Feel free to share your own anonymous dirty little secrets. It might even inspire me to share the real ones... More on the festival to come.

xo
H

Bombs Balls and Bullshit Biology

So just in case you thought the world has never been worse, and that for the first time in history we finally have the full capability and propensity to terrorize eachother into post-apocalyptic paramilitarized cults of religious zealotry and commercialized zombiism, Scotland's SECRET UNDERGROUND BUNKER is here to tell you that compared to the media of the cold war, Fox news is mother fucking goose. Check out this winning headline entitled, creatively, HOLOCAUST encased in a giant mushroom cloud:















Welcome to the 60s kids, a time before Madonna, before MMORPGs, before smoking pot was only for the cool kids. And it wasn't all daisies and folk music, no back in the day everyone was genuinely fearing for their lives as the possibility of nuclear attack loomed large. Much more terrifying than that, however, was the fact that every leading authority figure from here to Hiroshima (got the short straw there, huh guys) claimed that the best method of avoiding skin melting radiation and lung ravaging fallout was to crawl underneath pieces of wooden furniture, chair, desk, table, what have you, and put your hands over your head. This was a very bizarre exhibit but also heartening in a way- things have always been insane, and at least nowadays the government has stepped up the transparency of their idiot advice by telling us to use duct tape and plastic to cover our windows when the biobomb strikes instead of hiding under wood.

Scotland's Secret Underground Bunker was built under an unassuming farm house (though I assume SOMETHING was assumed based on all the thousands of tons of concrete steel and supplies being carted in an out of town whose former largest traffic source was a double row of sheep crossing the road). Housing full medical, living, radio station, radar, and communication facilities, this place was meant to keep the leaders of Scotland safe and give them a base in the event of nuclear attack. And then in 40 years they turned it into a tourist attraction complete with retro action mannequins:


here's one sexy lass who looks like she's been hitting the bottle a little hard since news of nuclear apocalypse













Here's me and dashingly handsome General Plasticock.















For some reason museums here really enjoy letting little kids dress up in clothing which smells like your grandmother's knickers drawer, and at the risk of getting lice I communicated some key military information to the zombie hunters aboveground in this authentic army helmet.







And me and Midge the sassy secretary directing some very important top secret calls:
















Then, if that wasn't enough fun for the whole family for our entire trip, we visited the St. Andrews golf museum, which also had fun costumes. Here' me dressed as a dapper golfer circa 1810:
















They had thrilling exhibits on the history of golf, the history of holes, the history of clubs, and (steel yourself folks) the history of ballmaking:










Then we went to the aquarium. At the aquarium, which, as I mentioned before, I will refer to as Aqua Alcatraz, they ran out of exhibit thrills after the dead crab and this giant fucking lobster thing, (which I'm pretty sure is just what a supermarket lobster looks like if you feed it butter instead of eating it with butter). Never ones to give up at AA, instead of throwing in the towel they decided to display whatever the hell else they could get their hands on, on no matter how irrelevant and anti-educational. Examples include: a chocolate display, an assortment of alien shaped erasers, and this neon orange dinosaur vehicle. "Dinosaur is an animal!" says McMoron the assistant curator.















and finally, here is me caught between flipping you the bird and giving you a peace sign as my brother Sam collapses on the bed in a blissful ambien-induced stupor. I'm having a claustrophobic time here but we're finally at the Edinburgh fringe where we will be in the same place for more than 2 days, which i'm really looking forward to. Keep me posted, take care, eat your veggies, and remember that even when the world seems at its darkest to be thankful that we're not back in the days when we thought duck and cover would save us. Now, at least, we know we're totally screwed.


much love
xo
H

Wee Mad McGreggor

Staying at an Inn on the coast in Fife which was built in the 1600s and smells like a barn, possibly because it was a barn not too long ago. I also learned in the literature that it is haunted by a mean horse as well as an alcoholic midget with bells palsy named Wee Mad McGreggor who drooled. Copiously. Seriously, it's right there in the freakin' literature. And if the only way you can hype up your creepy old Inn is to dig back hundreds of years to find a crazy guy with a half paralyzed face who passed out here and never woke up, maybe you should throw in the towel and open up a pub like everyone else in this godforsaken country.

And despite the ridiculous description of Wee MM, the 7 year old girl inside of me still wants to sleep with the bathroom light on because ghosts are freakin... scary. And notoriously untrustworthy. And a paranormal being able to pierce the interdimensional barrier is really going to be intimidated by my bathroom illumination.

Even so, I feel slightly safer here than at that aquarium. Yesterday we visited the St. Andrews aquarium which was about the size of my bedroom and included a dead crab, a half dead seahorse, a seal with green fungus growing all over its mostly immobile body, a giant crayfish frantically clawing at the glass seam, and some shrimpy things banging themselves into a rock over and over again as baby sharks swam in circles over and over again in some kind of synchronized depression dance. It was like aqua Alcatraz.

A horse haunting you is one thing but an angry shark ghost is entirely another... those mutherfuckers can probably swim through walls and bite through faces in a single chomp. Or maybe they'd savor it and sample you VanGogh style before the big finish. In either case I've succeeded in freaking myself out before bed. Picture post to come. Hear all about the... *drumroll please* golf museum! Yes that's right folks, if fish who have lost the will to live and handicapped ghosts wasn't thrilling enough for you, Scotland keeps bringing the wows with the greatest golf museum in... you know what? it could be the greatest golf museum in the land of music extravaganza chocolate puppies psychadelic orgy town and it would still be a museum about guys hitting balls with sticks. Then making up 8 zillion rules to make sure they are the supreme ball hitters and that other ball hitters can't join their club. Ridiculous. Check for pics soon.

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)

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

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.