Detour

The posts for this trip were often typed in dark, deserted toilet cubicles or under the lonely fluroescent strip lighting that seemed to be ever-present in the rumbling campsite laundries scattered across North America. Long after everyone else had gone to bed, I would squint and blink at the screen into the small hours. Some posts were cut-and-pasted together in the homes of the people that cared for us. Others were carved out in hostel accomodation, or in the score of nameless coffee shops where we loitered with an intent unswerving.
Generally, most were scrawled by my jagged hand in notebooks gifted by friends under torchlight in a small Wal-Mart tent, or in the passenger seat of our trusty Japanese chariot whilst The King of Space worked the pedals and aped the eclectic soundtrack blasting through the speakers with a steady nod or a subtle drum upon on the solar curve of the steering wheel.
These, and a swathe of other memories are set like concrete now in the unsettling fluid rush of the intervening months between this and my last post. Until recently, I had been working in a sunless, overground bunker with a gaggle of lost souls so devoid of fire or passion that they could barely muster the righteous indignation to complain about anything other than the most trivial of matters; if they were to tackle the glaringly obvious, dim-wittedness ignorance of those in charge, they would be broken. Their indelicate fragility smashed.
All for the stuffing of an envelope.
But I work there no more. And today, on my birthday, I sit with all jobs done before I embark upon another adventure. My clothes and books are boxed up. The room in which I have been a most grateful guest of Squiggle (see sidebar) and B, rent free, for these last five months, is cleansed. The King of Space's old computer peers down at me from the top of the stairs. Somewhere across town, my father wings his way towards me this very moment to collect me so that tomorrow we might drive to Poole. The ferry awaits. France will greet us and we will drive its length to reach the rolling beauty of its nether regions. In Gascony I will live in a remote farmhouse belonging to a friend, mostly unaccompanied for the next 4 to 6 months. I will help him renovate, and occasionally work for his parents; a rose grower and a roofer. I will slow burn 400 euros in my pocket. I will to try and get a book written. I will write to my friends because I will miss them, and that will be my only means to communicate; devolution.
Back to the written word.
So, I won't be around here for a while.
If you miss me, take your own journey through this place. The road starts on the toolbar.
It grows late, and I hear a car at the end of the road.