B-b-birthday b-b-b-banjo
Happy Weaselfest! I nominated today, first sunny day of the trip, as my pretend birthday.
In the morning we walked through town and picked up some shopping (Heidsieck Monopole Blue Top on sale! How’s that for coinkydink?) and visited Mr Whippy. Because I’ve been very, very naughty. And it’s my pretend birthday.
Then we drove out to the country and had a walk along a public footpath. The whole island is criss-crossed with these footpaths. They’re ancient, traditional rights of way for foot (and sometimes horse or vehicle) traffic. The libertarian in me is horrified that landowners have to put up with — and maintain! — a network of paths across private property to accomodate a steady stream of trespassers. The bunny hugger in me considers them a national treasure. Even if I did put my hand in a stinging nettle.
If ever you visit this country, make sure you somehow wangle a drive away from town. The Brits have done a remarkable job not crapping up their countryside. It’s a lush green sheep-encrusted rolling treefest, especially in May, punctuated with 11th Century pubs and shepherd’s huts and thatched cottages and ruined castles. I’m pretty sure they got the Disney guys in for the preliminary design.
Then it was back home for the traditional Showering of Gifts. I got such a lot of excellent loot this year; the surprise hit was this sporty little traveling banjo. Now everywhere I go, I can carry with me the beautiful, evocative sound of tomcats flossing their anuses with razor wire. Why anybody would voluntarily hand me this loaded weapon, I do not know. Mr Whippy could probably tell you.
Then it was out to my favorite restaurant and home to a nice brew and…I’m pretty sure I’ll fall down the something and break my something later. This is just way too good.
May 18, 2007 — 7:35 pm
Comments: 16
Four bottles of fizz and the world biggest chocolate Easter bunny
Right! We made it! And I got my wifi working!
To kick off Weasel’s Birthday Fortnight (yes, my actual birthday was toward the beginning of the month. This here’s the celebration), I was presented with this fucking ginormous Lindt bunny and several bottles of excellent champers.
The hooch on the far right above is, I think, my favorite. It’s Heidsieck Monopole Blue Top. It was the official champagne of the maiden voyage of the Titanic (which, as you may have heard, was the only voyage of the Titanic). I didn’t know this when I decided it was my favorite, so it’s…fate, not posturing.
Heidsieck Monopole Blue Top is kosher. And not plain old kosher for Passover, but extra specially jewy kosher. I’m a little unclear what that means, but you’ll find the exhaustive account here. Me, I’m only Jewish when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come ’round. I was christened a Presbyterian.
In 1916, a Heidsieck-laden ship bound for Russia was torpedoed by the Germans in the Gulf of Finland. It turned up again in 1998 and over 2,000 bottles of vintage 1907 fizz have been salvaged from it. The water’s cold, the bottles are apparently still drinkable.
This isn’t one of those. It’s an ordinary bottle from the supermarket, but it sure am fine.
And there. That’s the last drop.
Meanwhile, I see you knuckleheads have been writing haiku and trying to trip Akismet. None of it made it into the spam filter, but I suppose you know that by now. It doesn’t seem to care about naughty words. I think it hones in pretty exclusively on links. More than two are guaranteed quarantine.
But, hey, knock yourselves out. You’re welcome to post any wirty dords you like and see what sticks. (You know, I don’t think “wirty dords” really works all that well in print).
May 17, 2007 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 8
Incoming!
Hi! It’s me! Unless things have changed, Logan airport charges for wifi access, so I wrote this Saturday and I’m timeshifting it forward. WordPress software has this neat feature where you can publish a post with a future date and it won’t appear until the timestamp is good. I don’t use it much; it isn’t often I have anything prepared ahead of time.
I’ve thought about using this function to play a cruel trick on myself. Like future post, “you people suck and my phone number is 401-331-XXXX!!!” to go live at, say, three in the morning. Then stumble off to bed drunkenly and see if my paranoia is sufficient to wake me out of a comfortable stupor in time to stop it. I guess this is what happens when you have sadistic and masochistic tendencies: you are amused at the idea of pwning yourself.
Anyhoo, I thought it would be cool to date this for 9am Tuesday, when my plane is supposed to take off. Then if we have engine trouble and go down in Boston Harbor, y’all can be, like, “oh my god! Stoaty’s last post ever appeared at the very moment the plane went down!”
If I survive, catch you tomorrow from Londinium. If not, feel free to phone in to the networks and claim to be my best friends ever. Somebody might as well enjoy my screaming arc of death.
May 15, 2007 — 9:00 am
Comments: 22
Londinium or bust
What does the “or bust” construction mean, exactly? “If I do not reach my intended destination, I will physically explode in some way”? I don’t know. I’ve never known. Forget I said it.
I had hoped work would be a leisurely stretch before my holiday, but some stupid piece of shit job blew up in my face this morning and I chased it the rest of the day. Oh, well. A quick note before I retire, then.
Most Boston-to-London flights are overnighters, arriving right in the teeth of the London morning commute. That sort of flight is easier to catch on the Boston end, but hell on the London end. I don’t sleep well on planes; I showed up punchy and fizzy and spent the whole first day hoping that more than usually tactless things don’t come out of my mouth. Tactlessness is, as you might imagine, a problem for me.
Finally, we found a flight that leaves in the morning and arrives at Heathrow around nine at night. Perfect — just enough time to drive home, settle in, drink a bottle of fizz, eat a meal (toad in the hole. My favorite!) and fall into a deep, weaselicious dream.
But the Boston end? Not so nice.
Still, I prefer to front-load my pain. Who was it said that drunkenness would be moral if you could endure the hangover first? It wasn’t me, but I fundamentally agree: payment first. Then pleasure.
My flight leaves at nine. Not bad. But I have to get a bus to the airport, per their schedule. And I have to get a cab to the bus. And the cab company won’t let me pre-book because it’s a short trip, but they won’t guarantee me a cab because I don’t pre-book. (Yes, I have friends. I wouldn’t dream of waking them in the wee hours to drive me, which is partly why they’re still my friends. Despite that whole tactlessness thing).
So here’s how it goes down: alarm goes off at three in the morning. I get dressed, pack my toothbrush and call a cab for 4:30. The cats begin acting especially cute but very sad, the knowing little bastards, so me and my luggage move out onto the lawn to wait. The cab is late. It is always late. They didn’t take my number, so there’s no way I can know if the cabby is lost and I’m screwed. This is — this ALWAYS is — the low point of the day. I treat myself to a dram of stomach acid. And possibly half a milligram of Xanax.
The cab arrives and drives the short hop to the bus station. (A cab ride all the way in to Logan would add several hundred bucks to the round trip. I could do it, but it would hurt). The bus station is dark. There’s usually a moon. And a pair of young lovers, or a very old lady, or scruffy college students, or all of these things waiting for the Logan bus. It feels poetical. I miss my stupid cats.
The bus ride into Boston is dark but sparkly. I feel like That Girl. I take a lot of artsy, blurry photos out the window. The line at the ticket counter…well, this isn’t Christmas, so maybe not so bad this time. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but I miss my stupid cats.
I saunter around the Gate 33 area. Have a nasty cup of Starbucks airport blend. Borrow a cup of electricity from Massport to charge up all my shit, if I can find an empty outlet. Start to get excited. Miss stupid cats.
The flight East is magic: you fly into the planet’s rotation. The flight is six hours, but the clock says twelve. So the whole day is compressed into cartoon time. They feed us a lot; keeps us quiet. So we go from the rosy fingers of dawn to the scarlet imprint of twilight in less time than it takes to work the morning shift.
Get me! I’m a jet setter!
Miss my stupid cats already.
This is going to be great!
May 14, 2007 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 7
One discarded shell at a time
I was feeling pretty out of sorts Saturday, until a friend called and asked this happy question:
“Want to go explore an abandoned Victorian insane asylum crematorium?”
And I go, “this isn’t like that abandoned military installation, where Security drives up and down in a white van looking for us, and we have to keep flopping down in the bramble bushes when they pass? Because that right there sucked pretty hard. I’ve still got scars.”
“Oh, nonono. This one’s along public nature trail and everything.” It is, too. That’s a little brain-hurty.
The Westboro Insane Hospital was built in the late 19th C as a homœopathic mental hospital: Beds, 1,235. Number of patients treated during last fiscal year, 1,855. Death rate, 6.5%. Most state hospitals had cemeteries on the grounds, plain and sad as they were. Westboro didn’t. This old American Journal of Psychiatry report on the condition of Westboro’s lunatic brains at autopsy makes me think the place indulged in another common practice: using the unclaimed bodies of inmates for medical research. In fact, the grand house on the grounds that I assumed belonged to the director was, in fact, the pathology lab and library. Afterwards, the empty husks were fed into the apparatus pictured above. Where the ash went is anybody’s guess.
Saturday was a hot, sunny day. At last. (Global warming has really let us down this Spring). A top-down-on-the-Weaselmobile kind of day. I think I was fighting some kind of bug. I felt all floaty and disconnected, like my head was drifting around all by itself, tethered to the rest of me by a long, colorful ribbon. Not an entirely inappropriate state for the day at hand.
It was about a thirty mile drive.
Parts of the complex are still in use as psychiatric facilities. Other buildings are boarded up. Typical 19th Century Dickensian madhouse architecture: half fru-fru gingerbread charm, half nightmares and leather restraints. There didn’t seem to be any outside security or gatekeeping at all. The parking lot was fullish, and something about it gave me a sudden wave of the creeps.Then I realized the cars were in a variety of colors, but every one was the identical make and model. Ah. State-owned fleet, then.
The road to the trailhead went down and around and ended at the shore of the pond. Sure enough, there were boats in the pond and civilian cars in the dirt lot and proper Department of Environmental Management trail markers nailed to trees around the water. It must have been — probably still is — land belonging to the hospital. Facilities of that kind were once self-contained communities, with farmland and woodland and industrial areas. It seemed an odd place to deliberately draw the public.
Beautiful forest, though. Lots of big, spooky, gnarly old-growth trees. The path we wanted was a smaller side path off the main path, a half mile away and on the opposite side of the pond from the hospital, but still a proper, marked public footpath. I suppose the idea was to isolate this outbuilding as far away as possible, but it must have been an eerie trip driving that particular cargo.
We came upon a slab of cement flush to the ground — maybe twelve feet by sixteen — with two manhole covers set in it and a bit of old wire around the perimeter. That, as it turns out, was the roof. Beside it, a ramp with a rail (all the better to steer your gurney, my dear) led down into the earth. Hang a left at the bottom. We stared into the dark for a minute without quite grasping what we were looking at.
“Ohhhh…it’s an oven, see? Just big enough for one person. No coffin or anything, I suppose. And there below it is the hole where you’d rake out the ashes.”
“Jesus.”
It was a small room with a puzzling arrangement of ducts and piping. There was open space behind the oven, and I wanted to work my way behind it, but I hadn’t worn my proper heavy boots and we didn’t bring a good flashlight. The floor was covered in broken glass and old bricks and about six inches of filthy water.
The small room directly ahead at the foot of the ramp was puzzling. There were curious openings to the sky, and trees growing up through them. It looked as though it had been half filled with dirt at some point. There were a couple of chunks of an old terra cotta tiled floor leaning against piles of bricks and rusted pipes and grates and other rubbish.
At the far end, bricks had been loosely placed in the dirt to form a small flat surface. On top of this, a few dozen bottles. Not the usual smashed whiskey bottles you find in the woods, but medical vials of various sizes. No labels. One in particular looked old and slightly melted. There were a number of microscopy slides, unbroken. One pair had a wad of human head hair pressed between them. Not a properly prepared specimen; a loose hunk of hair.
Dead people don’t need medicine. What were these doing here? I guess they must have used this furnace to burn medical waste, too. We met a dozen dog walkers and joggers on the path; why were these old things still here, lying in plain view while the world passes the door every day and the room around them falls to bits?
All in all, as urban explorations go, a small, sad adventure. Sadder still: we saw no the real live inmates out in the sun today.
Tomorrow: something really spooky. (If I get time. Going to be a real tight sphincter of a Monday for Weasel).
April 23, 2007 — 7:35 am
Comments: 9