From a hotel somewhere

Notes from the road,

This is a completely unprofessional start to the week, I know. Instead of the usual Art lovingly crafted by AI, a selfie? Instead of a proper column, a travelogue? Really? Well. If you’re also a reader of the Bleat, you know I have been on a much-needed hiatus for a week. This lamentable lack of the usual content has been compensated by tolerable place-holder until things resume next week. The substack will continue to update, but it will lack the columns that stand on Monday and Friday, holding up the portico of the week. Yes, I am very tired and writing as badly as I can.

I am at present in a hotel that has not changed much since it was built in . . . 1985. That’s my guess. I should Grok but I’ll Google, to coin a phrase . . . and I’m wrong. 1999. Well, it looks like an American hotel in 1985.

The in-room coffee is horrible - it’s that granulated stuff you dump in hot water, stir, sip, then make a face as if you’ve drunk hot hoss pee. I’m going to the bar to have a proper coffee made at the usurious hotel rates, because while I am not a coffee snob I will not drink the granulated crap unless there are no alternatives anywhere on-property. Wife and child are asleep in the room, everyone having stayed up until 1:30 for a wedding, and risen early to vacate and begin the anabasis across the land to get to the airport. It was considered an immense distance once, and to this day the people on one side regard our final destination as very, very far. It is the distance from Minneapolis to Fargo.

It seems as if every summer now includes some time on a nice huge European touring bus, looking out the window at interesting geological formations. Mountains, hills, little villages clinging to the side, full of people who are the 19th generation to raise sheep. The occasional castle, of course, high on a hill with a proud tower. These were places were you went when the guys in the other castle wanted to come to your castle and kill you and take your goblets. I was in the square of one of these castles the other night, the scene of a big happy wedding. Lights strung, every table full of glassware glinting in the twilight, people dancing, little kids running here and there, a DJ playing the classics. And I thought: five hundred years ago there was probably a brutal fight in this very place and the stones ran red with blood and gore. Or, they had a wedding, too. Or, they had a weddings then a massacre.

LATER

The entire trip will be recounted to a presumably rapt audience over at the Bleat, eventually. Now it’s the next morning, and I have to repack, hoping the bottle of wine I stuck in the suitcase doesn’t tip me over 50 lbs, and drag the bags to the airport. It’s a beautiful day here. I am ten days away from home . . . and the journey’s not done yet.