>> I'll be spending the next few days helping my brother move from Miami to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he'll be doing his anaesthesiology residency. So I won't be blogging. As if I am now.

This will actually be the most time I've ever spent with just my brother, which will be... interesting. We're ten years apart in age, and while we get along quite well, I wouldn't say we're tremendously close. For example, I never came out to him. He knows -- my mom spilled the beans by accident last summer -- but I never told him face-to-face that I was gay. The subject's never come up since, either, which means it definitely will sometime in the next six days. Wheeeee. That'll make the car ride fun, won't it?

I'm not sure if the life I'm currently living here at home is completely fascinating or endlessly boring. Hence my not saying much about it. It's mainly involved walking on the beach, hanging out in houses, and driving around, all with a small collection of close friends. Sometimes that can be profoundly satisfying, and sometimes it's maddening. Today we tried to help an injured bird on the beach at sunset, but wound up leaving it to the mercy of the elements (and, possibly, Animal Rescue, whose machine we left a message on but we never heard from anyone in particular) because we didn't know how to help it without hurting it more. That's the most excitement I've seen in a week or two. I'm also developing an obsession with sea turtles. This is but the smallest fraction of my interior life, but it may, somehow, reflect the whole.

You can't fool me. It's just turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down... *

>> Last night I had a dream where I counselled the members of R.E.M. and told them not to break up, because people were really looking forward to their next album and my generation respected them a lot. I don't actually recall looking at their faces at any point during the discussion, though, so maybe in my dream R.E.M. were being represented by giant badgers in human clothing. I don't know. This all took place at a tropical hotel somewhere that me, Josh, and his sister were staying at. R.E.M. then took pictures of us (well, actually, just one of me and lots of Josh's sister) and put them up on their web journal (which they don't actually have). The picture of me was really good, if I recall; it was flooded with sunlight. To celebrate, I listened to Green while running errands today.

Michael Stipe's been turning up in my dreams a lot lately, but I've also been reading about him a lot, so I guess that's not surprising. Sometimes I'm way too transparent for my own good.

>> I am back from New York, and lo, it was good. Don't ask me how this happened, though.

I have a new cell phone. It's lickle and cute and was a pain in the ass to get configured. If you think you should have the number and it's not already waiting for you in your inbox, then you should e-mail me.

Last night I was forced to watch the finale of American Idol, which was awful, but I also took a long walk on the beach with my friends, which was anything but. I do miss Florida when I'm not there, and sometimes I wonder if I'm cut out for city life after all...

Oh yes, and apparently, fixing the disc drive on my laptop might cost $955. I may die.

So. Now I just have to figure out what the fuck I'm doing with myself for the next four months. And the rest of my life. AS PER USUAL. WOOF.

>> Right then, I'm off to New York City until Wednesday (the 21st). If you'll be in town and want to see me, then drop me a line and we'll try to hook up. Cool? Cool.

Work on the new design is proceeding slowly. I'm gonna take my time with this one, make sure I've thought it all through, do everything I feel like doing instead of rushing into it just for a quick fix of regime change. I won't even pretend to have a launch date in mind, so don't hold your breath...

>> The last few days have taught me this: I live a very, very good life. I really ought to stop complaining.

So: I'm back in the land of overweight shirtless men in parking lots, twenty-two ounce steaks, and endless rivers of automobile traffic. HALLELUJAH. I had a fantastic time with my family in Miami this past weekend; not only is my brother now a real honest-to-God doctor (terrifying), but he and his wife are expecting again too. I am to be an uncle once more, and in two weeks I'm helping them move to Tennessee. And Miami, I have concluded, is the single strangest place in all of America and should be quarantined at once to prevent widespread infection.

I have done nothing more stressful today than swim in the pool, go out for a cheeseburger, and wash a dog. In my defense, it was a very smelly dog, and a very good cheeseburger (Long live Checkers). Tomorrow I'll probably have to go looking for a job, and get a tire changed on my truck, and all that kind of nonsense, but if I can put that off, I will put that off. This is a strange little window of time before I go up to NYC on Friday anyway, it seems so silly to do something productive with it...

So, in that spirit, it's time to redesign my website. Don't mind me if I vanish again for a couple of days, there's work to be done.

>> I live.

More on that later.

>> The paper is done, the bags are packed, the flight is tomorrow morning. I'm leaving the country. In sixteen hours everything about my way of life will have changed, and I'll never live this way again.

I definitely didn't expect it to feel like this, y'know? I am excited to be going home to the US, as anyone who's caught me bitching at various times about the UK's many inadequacies can probably assume. (Heh.) And in a week I'll be seeing Josh again. But there's just so much baggage connected to my experience of London, and it's almost inconceivable that the cord's gonna be cut, just like that. Poof, no more. All that stuff you kept saying you were going to do in London? Sorry, time's up. You had your chance and you blew it. Back off to America now, back about your business, whatever that is these days. I certainly don't know anymore.

I'll miss the obvious things -- the people, the places, all that. But there's just a sensation of losing a certain texture to my daily life, which goes from specific things -- no more daily transfers at Leicester Square, marching down the divided corridor, averting my gaze so the hot guys don't catch me staring -- to the general air and feeling. No more of this particular melancholia about lost causes and missed opportunities, manifested in a far-too-literalist approach to the lyrics of terrible pop music; no more lying on my bed listening to the District line thundering by; no more 2AM trips to Sainsbury's for my 1000th chocolate muffin or jar of green pesto.

I thought I'd end up banging a giant list of places I loved, and places I never saw, and all that sort of thing, into this post. Now I don't have the heart to try to take stock of the last four months in those sorts of terms. I won't know what I thought about my time here until I stop feeling it, I suppose.

I wonder if absence really does make the heart grow fonder?

If all goes as planned, see you again on Sunday. I am officially a travellin' man from now until then...

>> Can't think straight. All packed up. Shipped two boxes of stuff this morning. 3,000 word essay due in two hours. Haven't started writing. Can't think straight. Overslept and still exhausted. Leaving tomorrow morning at 10:45 AM. Can't think straight. Can't think.

Woof. Radio silence will no doubt ensue. I'll be back at a stable internet connection, home in Florida, on Sunday. I don't know what's going on anymore. But I do know the new Blur album is really fucking good. Yeah yeah yeah y-yeah.

Uuuuuugh.

>> Just for the record, I'm going to redesign again when I get home to Florida.

Please don't kill me. I think it will be very, very pretty.

>> Four days. Four days, four days, four days. God damn it.

On the agenda for tonight: packing. I only brought two suitcases over, and they were jam-packed. And now I've got a massive stack of books and CDs and odds and ends to bring back with me, and they're all going to have to be shipped. Which is going to be pricey. And a rather large pain in the ass. Of course I couldn't make it easy on myself, since I just bought a farewell pile of CDs... they were all as cheap as I could get 'em but still. I need to be stopped.

And can I just say how frustrating it is that all of the laptop ports here at NYU (they encourage you to bring your laptop, and then only provide seven working ethernet ports for two hundred and eighty two students. Does that sound like good planning?) are taken at the moment, when all I want is to fiddle around with my site? I can't do that from the machines here in the computer labs... blah. Despite my intensive burst of retail therapy, this is already shaping up to be a dull and disappointing day. Which is a shame, since yesterday especially was so lovely -- a delicious farewell lunch and drinks session with Stuart and Mrs. Hg (thank you again, you kind folks, you) and then a remarkable screening of Batman, of all things, at the National Film Theatre with Jeremy. I should write on that in more detail in the Mediablog, actually...

This post has no overriding agenda, and therefore wasn't really worth reading, was it. But a bit of brain-vomit is required every so often.

>> From CNN.com:


INTO GIANT KILLER BICYCLES AAAAAAH

In other "news," I saw a guy who looked exactly like a grown-up Bart, but with a beard, jogging down my street exactly two hours after Bart left my place this morning. WEIRD.

>>  Woof.

Was out drinking last night with a bunch of fine lads. I drank more than I ever have before, actually -- in fact, probably more than I have, cumulatively, consumed in my entire life to date -- but didn't get drunk at all. I might've been buzzed, but I might also just have been tired and badly in need of a good wizz for most of the night. I don't have experience enough to tell the difference.

That said, my alcohol intake did, apparently, fuck up my sleep big-time (though it might've been the fact that 80% of what I drank had Coke in it that really did the trick). I crawled into bed at 1:15 AM, and at 4:45 AM I became conscious of the fact that for the last thirty minutes or so I had not, in fact, been asleep at all, but my brain had just been firing out repetitive thoughts so fast that I'd gone into a trance. It's hard to describe, really, but I only realized I was awake when the phone rang and broke the feedback loop. It was fucked up.

Of course once I was conscious, my brain switched over to its "Good morning, Chris, here are all the issues in your life that you need to think about" mode, and going back to sleep was impossible. I crawled out of bed and read a couple hundred pages of The Once And Future King in the common room, and now it looks like I'm awake for the day, even though my eyes feel like they're gonna bleed (Not a Green Day reference) and my iPod keeps trying to lull me back to sleep with Coldplay and the mellower Radiohead tracks. They're all out to get me, I tells ya.

...And I don't have much else to say beyond that, other than that I continue to gape in slack-jawed disbelief at the fact that I'm leaving England in six days. Counting today. Holy fucking shit, holy fucking shit, holy fucking shit.