Gasoline Hobo: April 2006

Sometimes a Great Notion

That phrase has been drifting like a ghost in and out of my head for the last few days. I'm not really sure what it means. It has a heft to it, a sense of purpose, but it's all promise and no delivery. It seems to work as the start of something, like "Sometimes a great notion struck Rusty, causing him to drop his pork rinds and pick up his pen." I imagine Rusty sitting on the rickety, humidity warped porch of a color-saturated swamp, filled with the sounds of wood creaking under the weight of fungal parasites, small creatures thrashing in the sludgy water, insects droning to each other through the sharp smell of thousands of miles of wall to wall decay.

What is Rusty working on? What sort of Great Notion occurs to a serial pork rind consumer in the belly of a swamp? Is he bending his back to a work of philosophy, a notion that will one day be regarded as highly as those of Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer? Or maybe he's working on a romance novel, stuffed to the brim with sweaty heaving bosoms and virile wealthy young people being carried away by hormones and purple prose.

My guess is that it's a list, though. A list of soaps. Because Rusty has a skin condition.

See? This is the sort of thing that happens when you're feeling very creative but don't have enough of a story idea to channel it properly. It's a sort of omnidirectional, random vomit. All you can do is let it happen, and see what slides down the wall.

Aren't you glad you stopped by?

Blog? What Blog?

Ok, kids, I'm back. Did you miss me? I've wanted to write for quite some time, but I either didn't have the time, or I didn't have the energy due to not having time earlier. Or I was stuck down a well with Emmanuel Lewis. Take your pick.

I know that I promised Scotland pictures to all of you who are still reading this, but it'll have to wait a bit - it takes a long ass time to post those photo journal things and I just don't have it in me right now. So you'll have to settle for this, or for a queued post I've been saving about Islamic Banking Laws. Yes, I'm serious.

So I went to New York again. My company has an office there, so I got to work from there for a few days, which was nice. It's in Rockefeller Center, right across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral.

This was the view from my office:

I wandered around the city a bit:

And then I sang "The Humpty Dance" at karaoke:

The next day started with an exuberant trip to the DONUT FACTORY, where they have the best donuts on the planet. The coconut creme donut is particularly good. In fact, a source who shall remain anonymous described them as having a "heavenly layer of wetness" in them. And that pretty much sums up the experience. We followed that immediately by having the best pizza in the world, at Lombardy's. They have one of the last coal-fired ovens in town, and it really does make a difference. Best pizza + pitcher of sangria + good conversation = a representative sample of what the whole week was like.

Except for the part where I lost my luggage. That wasn't so good.

We Interrupt This Blogcast

You'll note that the previous post contained a promise to update this thing on a daily basis with new pictures from my recent vacation. That obviously didn't work out well, so I'm going to post everything in two shots. One for England, one for Scotland.

On a side note, my Mac Powerbook bit the dust in a big way a few days ago, so I've lost THOUSANDS of high resolution photos. In a way, it's sort of like losing an organ. Optimist that I am, I'm trying to think of it as an appendix rather than a spleen or kidney. Now that I've grossed you out, here are some pictures of London and Windsor. Where possible, I've included links to higher resolution photos.

Westminster Cathedral