Worstward, Ho!

I went to a bonfire on the beach last night. Bunch of groovy hippies playing fiddles and beating old ancient drums. I sat barefoot under the stars and roasted my skin after all this dampness and all these grey skies. It's been piercingly sunny the last 5 days and though I've been ungodly ill, there's been something extraordinary about it all. I shipped my Joyce and my Beckett and my Irish tweed hat back to my mom's house on Friday and so, 2.5 pounds lighter, and the entire weight of one aspect of history broken from my back, I'm moving forward to Galway. I'm going to start hitching in the morning. Tonight I think we will listen to trad music in the pubs. I met a Cuban woman working on her PhD about US Cuban relations and she invited me to sleep on her couch in County Clare in exchange for help editing her grammar which apparently isn't very good. I think I'll use the time to do a lot of writing. I feel like I'm surfacing from a deep deep swim to some sort of lighted purpose. Nothing pointed, only a general thrust, but it's filling me again and again. I've almost read through Tropic of Capricorn and I'm feeling the kind of inspiration I used to talk about with my old friends in vermont. Challenge is that they are here this time, but I guess that was supposed to be the challenge all along. No supposeds anymore. Only turf and peat bogs, only ice cream trucks singing off of crumbling stone houses with shutters drawn and airy winds coughing over baking days and I remembered, briefly, what it means to sweat. Everything seems a whisper, a cleared throat at the back of an empty auditorium. Every night there are chills and fever dreams and inch by inch everything said or sayable is melting away in a waxen glue of constipated stupid, a loss for what to hold and dearly so. Maybe it takes a life. Maybe it talks a limelightlost, but whatever the current, it shores up the mind and pingpongs it from swerve to swerve. I'm getting lost in a tumbler of babble, and the sprayed out notes of alcoholic oblivion are speaking in tones muffled down beneath the quiet echoes of St Patrick and his poor, banished snakes...off to America, in search of potatoes.