3.21.05

a walking weekend. friday night, sarah and i left a truly horrendous dance show which was in actuality an advertisement for belly dancing classes given by bonnie brooks with a scottish accent. we were overstimulated and at a loss for what to do with ourselves, so we walked down nicholson, recovering from the stifling air of the debating hall. we were accosted by four groups of drunken men, all singing show tunes. we escaped onto the safely deserted melville drive. we wandered up into bruntsfield, stopping in front of my building on the links to look out over the city. the castle is constant in its drama. we stood around bruntsfield place in the newly soft night air, waiting for a cab.

yesterday we walked to leith. leith, it turns out, is much different than expected, particularly on sunday. though the whole of edinburgh is technically coastal, leith was the only place i'd been yet that actually felt like it. ocean fog had rolled in during the night, blanketing the city. we felt like we were walking into the end of the world. the buildings were flat, low to the ground, and the seagulls were screeching; they don't make any noise in center city. all the fish and chip shops were closed and the place was generally deserted. irvine welsh writes about leith more than edinburgh. things were dirtier; more desperate.

we walked and walked, eventually running out of buildings. we were standing on a grassed island in the midst of a network of newly paved roads; in the fog, we appeared to be in the middle of the most random retail wasteland there could be. it looked like an american mall parking lot recently laid in the middle of a raw field, previously ignored. there were strange, tall, blue metal fences everywhere, partitioning empty space. once we moved further into the fog ocean terminal appeared, the fabled but never-before-witnessed 'real' mall of edinburgh. it is literally at the ends of the earth. we walked until we passed it, until we ran up against a chain link fence, until we nearly literally ran into the royal yacht britannia and, despite the lack of visibility due to the fog, reckoned we were in fact at the ocean. there were seagulls who were irritated at intrusive ducks, a dock sprouting all kinds of green, the yacht, the back end of a silent mall, and a silent shipyard filled with large chunks of mysterious metal.

it was strange. it felt more like home than anywhere else i've yet been in the city; it was silent and smelled like ocean.

when i got home, i took out a piece of thread and measured my path on two different maps. i walked ten point eight miles. lots of miles. tired feet.

when i got home, my flat was filled with indie boys i'd never seen before. british indie boys, looking more like lost ramones than anything else. threw me off kilter, having a flat filled with one-night-stand sexing where names of partners were not known. i don't live here.

dad's here in less than a week and then everything will be different. time will stretch out and then, hopefully, contract.

my hair is getting long.