Running After My Hat

Taking Off #4: Glimpses of an Itinerary

September 7, 2019 by John 4 Comments

[Map: zeroing in (maybe) on a vicinity for destination #1; you can skip the brief introduction and skip right to the details if you want.]

Over the couple of weeks since I last posted about EuroTour2020 (as I’ve come to think of it), I haven’t at all been ignoring the subject. Over the next few days, I’ll be updating my page of questions-and-answers with some new information. In the meantime, I thought I’d talk about the process of organizing our list of destinations.

In the previous post about the trip, I covered the first-cut list of “we need to visit here” cities. That list was vaguely organized chronologically, top to bottom (not counting the USA cities at the end), but we hadn’t given really serious thought to much beyond the names of the cities themselves.

The current “official” list includes about a half-dozen more cities (with — yes — a few more thrown in even later). It’s also better organized to suggest, y’know, first we’ll go here, then we’ll go there, and so on.

I tinkered with the sequence quite a bit, and even started to drill down to consider how we might go from place to place. But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized in the process a waste of time and energy: we plan, you see, to plan almost no specific details along the way. We don’t know how long we’re going to stay at place X (or whether indeed we’ll stay there at all, vs. just blow through for a brief visit). We consquently can’t make lodging arrangements much in advance, book transit in advance, purchase event tickets in advance…

…except: we need a place and a time to start. That’s the focus of the rest of this post.

[Read more…]

ADMIN: Broken Audio-Player Gizmo?

September 7, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

If a post at Running After My Hat supposedly allows you to play music, but you can’t actually do so, please let me know via email (runningaftermyhatATjohnesimpsonDOTcom) and I’ll correct the situation ASAP. For details, see below. Thanks!

[Read more…]

Oh, Grow Up — or, Well… Don’t

September 6, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Dionisio (You’re Almost There),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For the full-size version and the #jesstorypix-tagged story behind the photo, see the caption here at SmugMug.]

From whiskey river:

Self-Portrait

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers—but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that—so far—
belongs to me.

(Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh) [source])

…and (italicized sentences):

I have a limited stock of furniture which constitutes the materiel of my pictures. My pictorial vocabulary is limited to one tree, one house, one flower, one sky, one face; with these I render the infinite variety of trees, houses, flowers, skies and faces which exist in nature. You see, I know nothing about drawing. I couldn’t even copy a drawing until the year 1926 or ’27. Then, by accident one day, I discovered that I was able to make a likeness of George Grosz, whose self-portrait I had found on the cover of one of his albums. From that day I took pleasure in using pencil and brush. On good days I can draw with a cleaver. I don’t go in for likenesses any more; I am satisfied with reality. Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.

(Henry Miller [source])

[Read more…]

Mortal Satisfactions

August 30, 2019 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Itinerantes #4: Satisfaction,” by Jon Díez Supat; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I wanted to know what product/service/event the poster advertised, and in what language, but Google Translate wasn’t much help: it said the caption in the center translates from Basque as “Bring your payroll now and bring this exclusive Lotus watch.” (Actually, eraman seems to translate more accurately — especially in context — as “take away” or “get,” rather than a second “bring.”)]

From whiskey river:

beasts bounding through time —

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly

(Charles Bukowski [source])

…and:

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Cherries

Fireweed loves the yard
and the fire that conjured it
into the light.

And the scarlet elderberry
loves the old junkpile
it leans against.

The morning glory smothers everything
in an embrace: the fence,
the wood workbench,
the rusted steel.

Here’s a summer day that’s so slow
even the light
moves like honey;

Daisies jump fences
and then just mill around.

Here’s a cherry tree that’s so rich
when it offers its heart to the birds,

every cherry
is a year of cherries.

(Barbara LaMorticella [source: nothing canonical, but found it here and elsewhere])

[Read more…]

Working With What You Didn’t Expect

August 23, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Dempsey and Firpo, by George Bellows. The reason for its inclusion here will be obvious once you’ve read through this post. The fight in question is covered by Wikipedia here.]

From whiskey river:

When you’ve lived as long as I have, you tend to think you’ve heard everything, that there’s nothing left that can shock you anymore. You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all over again that you don’t understand the first thing about life.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and not from whiskey river:

Sunday
(excerpt)

iii at the museum (bellows)
For Alexander Nemerov

The man in the left-hand corner
of Bellows’s picture of the Dempsey-Firpo
fight, the picture a dream, so not a real
fight — a picture of a fight — his flayed hide
just visible under his blue pinstripes,
the watcher and the fighter
indistinguishable, one inside

the other, lion and lion tamer,
the paint daubs faces or fingerprints
and the lights staring and staring across
the fretwork of the ring, and Bellows
himself, next to him, looking surprised,
as if to be there was to give himself up
without our noticing it, as we all do

in a gesture, or word, leaving something
behind we should have taken with us
or even guarded, a way of not letting
something be over and done with.
The fight was over in four minutes flat.
A curious thing about the painting
is that Bellows chose to show us

the moment when Firpo sent Dempsey
careening, with a blow to the jaw,
one of the two times he laid him out,
and we, with the spectators crammed
into the foreground of the picture
have to help push Dempsey back
into the ring where two-and-a-half

minutes later he will defeat Firpo,
who went down four times to his two.
In Assisi, at the Basilica di San Francesco,
in the panel in which Giotto depicts
the moment Francis gives away
his worldly goods, the palm that Francis
raises up to the hand that is reaching

down to him from heaven, a hand out
of the blue, open, ready to give or
receive wonders, is the same hand
in Bellows’s picture raised behind Dempsey
one wing of a dove, the impulse is
to press our own palms to it, and despite
our better judgment to hurl him back.

(Cynthia Zarin [source])

[Read more…]

Taking Off #3: Weather

August 19, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: monthly weather averages for the 30 proposed destination cities in our 2020 “EuroTour.” (Details below.) Click for a larger version.]

As The Missus and I think about where in Europe we’d like to visit, an obvious corollary is: “…and when?”

To some extent, we’re constrained by our personal calendar. We both retire in March, and our lease is up in June, but we’ve got a few family visits in mind in that little ~~three-~~two-month window. Ergo, we assume, we’ll depart these shores sometime in ~~June~~ late May. But with thirty possible cities, scattered all over what’s currently still lumpable together as “Europe,” where to head first? and where second? …and so on.

When one has been working with software as long as I have, one tends to consider thorny questions in terms of data. The data which I think drives an answer to this question: the weather we can expect to encounter.

I started by building a spreadsheet, one row per city, with one column per month between June and January. (We’re not likely to stay that long, but I wanted to leave some wiggle room at the tail end.) Each of those monthly columns was further divided into three columns: average high temperature, average low temperature, and average rain days. I also added a three-column group for “annual” averages of those three figures, across that eight-month period. And for comparison’s sake, I threw in rows for a half-dozen US cities with whose weather we were familiar. (This enables us to observe, for example, “In terms of its average weather, Bath in June resembles Philadelphia in October.”)

When I looked at what I had in the spreadsheet, I confess I felt overwhelmed. So I imported the whole thing into a little database program; from there I could generate a “report” of it all, with color-codings and other ways to highlight information of interest. The result I exported to PDF (converted to a .jpg image) in for display as the image above.

The color coding for the temperature and rain-days figures is explained in a legend at the bottom center. Other things to notice:

The six months we’ll most likely be traveling (June-November) are boxed with a heavy black line.
Three green rectangular boxes start at the top left and then kind of march down and to the right. There’s no magic data analysis going on with those boxes: the rows enclosed in each are those in each proposed “leg” of the tour — British Isles, northern Europe, southern Europe — and the columns cover the approximate range of months we’d be doing that “leg.” [Aside: I really want a better word than “leg.” Ideas?]
The green boxes overlap at their ends, because we don’t (yet? ever?) know exactly when we’ll hop off from one portion of the itinerary to the next.
One interesting thing about those three boxes: across all three of them, we wouldn’t expect to encounter any really severe differences in weather — that is, we only have to pack for one sorta-kinda-the-same climate. This should simplify packing, and make less worrisome the moving around from one region to another.

Of course, the best-laid plans, etc. etc. Famous last words, so on and so forth. If you want the gods to laugh, tell them your plans — all that. But we’ve got to start making some assumptions, on which we can build further assumptions, and so on.

Taking Off #2: Questions (and Ultimately, Answers)

August 17, 2019 by John 3 Comments

Map: thumbnail of our itinerary, so to speak, as of today. Click on it to see a larger, more zoomed-in map which more clearly separates out the destination markers.

As more or less novice international travelers, The Missus and I have loads of questions both general and specific about traveling and short-term-staying in the British Isles and Europe. We know we don’t need answers to all of them before actually getting there, but we also don’t want to forget any questions which might ultimately be in the need-to-know category.

Everyone’s got their own ideas about how to make up a to-do list. This one seems to rather sprawl across categories, though: it probably requires geographic and calendar details, simple bulleted lists and whole paragraphs, lingering questions and firm answers…

After some thought, I’ve come up with a simple dumping-ground page which will function as my running scratch pad. (You can view it here. It’s password-protected, mostly to discourage random drop-ins from strangers and bots, but if you can figure out the acronym for this site then you’ve got the password.) The page’s contents will be flexible, morphing, growing, and shrinking over time, with links to more detailed discussions about some of the items to appear in later posts. So if you’re really into keeping tabs on the current status, that’s the place to bookmark instead of a whole list of individual ones.

A couple weeks ago, we attended a family celebration up in New Jersey, where we shared with various people the rough outline of this whole EuroTrip idea. A few of these folks, especially of the sibling-offspring variety, encouraged us to plan as little as possible — to just let things happen. While there’s a certain adventurous appeal to the thought, really: we’re not that adventurous. We know we don’t need to plan out every detail of every destination, we don’t need to buy tickets to everything in advance, and so on. We do know the pleasure of being caught by surprise. We can certainly let those things “just happen” on an ad-hoc basis. But we also like to have some certainties in hand — a skeleton, as it were, on which to hang all the individual surprises (and not incidentally, mitigate if not eliminate the unpleasant ones). That’s what the “Need-to-Know and Need-to-Decide Index” page will be for.

Wild Semaphores of Gladness

August 16, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Of Permeable Borders,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) When I posted this on Instagram some months ago — as #475 in my “everydaybandw” series there — the full caption read: even when a border’s sharply defined, stuff (and the shadows of stuff) will still pass through. Nowadays, politics seems to infuse everything… and yet stuff still slips through, and if we’re attentive we can see it.]

From whiskey river:

Bargain Hunt

for Tessie

Suppose you found a bargain so incredible
you stood there stunned for a moment
unable to believe that this thing could be
for sale at such a low price: that is what happens
when you are born, and as the years go by
the price goes up and up until, near the end
of your life, it is so high that you lie there
stunned forever.

(Ron Padgett [source])

…and:

The Obligation to Be Happy

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again—
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The reality of our day-to-day waking consciousness and these moments of liberation are so different it is almost as if a mental fence divides the two. On one side of the fence I am caught in my mind; in my thoughts, my anxieties, my judgments, and my fears. I may on occasion recognize that this is all unnecessary, and that it removes me from the present moment; but such passing insights are seldom sufficient to release my mind from the grip of my conditioning. So deeply ingrained is my attachment to what I believe I should be thinking and doing there seems no way over that fence. Indeed, for much of the time I have totally forgotten there is another way of being…

Detachment is not apathy or indifference. It is the prerequisite for effective involvement. Often what we think is best for others is distorted by our attachment to our opinions: we want others to be happy in the way we think they should be happy. It is only when we want nothing for ourselves that we are able to see clearly into others’ needs and understand how to serve them.

(Peter Russell [source])

[Read more…]

Taking Off #1: Some Background

August 13, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

Map: our tentative 'itinerary' (laughing) for next year

[Map: to label this an “itinerary” would be to mislead you. At best, it’s a pre-alpha version of an itinerary. (For reference, I cribbed this from Google Earth in August 2019, but I am counting on its persistence over the next year. We especially don’t want to see any of those countries under water by then.)]

Let’s see now… how to summarize what we’re up to…?

Well, for starters, we’ve realized for years that we’re pathetically under-traveled, to coin a euphemism. Yes, we were married in Vancouver, on a cruise up the northwest coastline; yes, I’ve been to Israel and to Canada for a couple of visits, long before The Missus entered the picture; and yes, The Missus — I think? — has spent a tiny amount of time in Mexico, thanks to a long-ago habitation in El Paso, Texas. Between the two of us, during our lives we’ve at least visited many areas of the USA itself — but almost none of them as a couple.

And that’s pretty much it. See? Under-traveled.

In spring, 2018, we took a tentative step towards correcting that: we spent a week in England, splitting our time between a little town (Ludlow) in Shropshire and London itself. “A week,” I hear you well-traveled ones thinking; “A week?!?” Yes, it didn’t take us more than a couple days to realize the folly.

So here’s the current (very gray, shadowy) master plan for mid-2020:

Post-retirement, visit the UK for two months.
Visit northern Europe for two months.
Visit southern Europe for two months.

To aid in pulling this off, we sold our house this past April and moved to an apartment with about half the floor space. (We have a metric sh!t-ton of stuff in storage — much of which ~~we know~~ I am confident we’ll probably never see again.) The sale and the move afforded us some genuine adventures in their own right, and maybe I’ll post more about it all later.

But for my purposes now, it’s important only to know that our lease expires in June, 2020, and that we have no plans to renew it. Between March (retirement) and June, we’ll prep for the real trip, and we’ll visit family… and then we’ll be gone for a while.

The planned sequencing of those three destinations is driven mostly by our understanding of likely climatic conditions: going to the UK in June-August should help us avoid the worst (i.e, coldest — The Missus hates cold weather!) temperatures and precipitation there; going to northern Europe in August-September should enable us to see at least some of that before anything like, um, articness sets in; and moving on to southern Europe in September-October should feel positively paradisaical after whatever we experienced elsewhere.

(For the record, we’re both looking forward to visiting all those destinations, particularly the UK, but also the Continent. If we were only going to see northern OR southern Europe, though, we’d probably have to face some touchy negotiations: I’m more the northern-Europe sort, and she’s more the southern-. In more general geographic terms, I’m mountains and she’s beaches.)

So that is Stage 1 as we see it.

Upcoming: A New Series or Two about Taking Off

August 12, 2019 by John 2 Comments

As you may know if you’ve crossed paths with me here or elsewhere in the last year, I sorta-kinda retired in July, 2018, after 39+ years in computer-related stuff (principally programming)… and then returned to work a few weeks later. The real retirement — this time, one for which The Missus will join me — will take place in March, 2020. We’re moving in the direction of “planning” for this next stage of life, and accordingly I’ve set up a couple of new categories:

Retirement: a general-purpose umbrella category, for those posts about the subject which don’t fit handily elsewhere (maybe this will need to be renamed — or subsumed into another category named — something like “Old Age,” but I’m not quite ready to cross that bridge).
Temporarily Expatting (a sub-category of Retirement): for about six months starting sometime (May? June?) in mid-2020, we hope to cross the Atlantic to see some of Europe — a couple of months in the UK, a couple in Northern Europe, and a couple in Southern Europe; I anticipate posts in this category will be scratchpad-type things to help me keep track of what we’ve done so far, what we must do prior to leaving, and of course what we’re up to while over there.

If our plan holds, we’ll return to a (one hopes) considerably saner USA towards the end of 2020, depend upon the kind hospitality of family and friends for a little while, and then head off again for a spell of touring around this country. But no category for this yet: let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
____________________________

About the image: this beautiful photo by Aaron Hockley (found on Flickr, where clicking on the photo will take you) is called “Takeoff,” and depicts, well, a takeoff — from Portland International Airport in this case, although I think the picture suits the general theme here. I’m particularly pleased that the airplane is obviously propeller- or turboprop- rather than jet-propelled; this seems to fit our own context much better than one of those high-falutin’ no-moving-parts futuristic thingums.

(Of course, I’m using the photo here under a Creative Commons license, for which thank you very much!)