Thursday

Okay, that’s Parts Two and Three been through and edited, to a fairly satisfactory standard, and felt like a good productive day yesterday. Not sure how I’m doing on the timescale though: 22 days to go, and three parts and maybe sixty thousand words still to write and polish; s’gonna be tight. But on I go in any case.

            Do feel, though, that I need to write a little something about Charlottesville, to sort of clear it and my thoughts about it from my head, since that’s what I’ve been immersed in this last four or five days. Man, it made me miss it, all that remembering and memory-jogging. And reading The Musings of The Gus; that boy sure could write – and funny with it too. In fact, I sort of feel in the shade a little by him, having soaked up so much of his bygone words, wishing I could capture the moments the way he did. But what can you do? On and on, and what will be, will be, etcetera.

            I’ve reconnected with some old Charlottesville friends and acquaintances in the past week, via facebook and myspace. Such lovely people! And that makes me pine so for that American life, that openness and spirit of adventure, the wildness and the community, the socialisation. I don’t know whether I’m just older or whether it’s England – I tend towards the latter – but I don’t find that here. I knew so many people back then. And even though it was a fucked up and mental and severely inebriated life, and I was a bad, bad boy who acted atrociously to so many good people, it makes me want it again. In these moments of reliving, I miss them: Leah, Matthew, Gus, the driving, the freedom, the madness. I didn’t make even a small percentage of it that I should have done: in so many ways, I blew it. Imagine, a small boy like me from some arse-end of the world place like South Elmsall being granted the opportunity to live a good life in what has regularly been voted “America’s best place to live” and making such a cock-up of it that I was basically chased from town. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

            Needless to say, for about the first time in years America is featuring most prominently and most favourably in my thoughts. I would love to go back there. I would love to see Charlottesville again. And I would love to have a chance just once more to find old friends and shoot the shit, and maybe recreate a few of those good times in a more sober and adult and less damaging way. I must go see about getting me a visa one of these days…

            And closer to home, Perlilly and I played a gig last night in Oxford – getting on well again – down at The Cape of Good Hope. It was nice to see these new friends I’m making down there – one of whom has offered to fund a drivin’ ‘cross America trip next year, after having read of my exploits – but the set was a bit wank, to be honest. Not that we didn’t play well, but the people didn’t listen. And I generally can’t be arsed when people don’t listen – when they just talk amongst themselves and you have to fight to be heard. I’d rather be at home doing something useful. Or anywhere else, for that matter, doing anything else. Perlilly’s too good for that crap. We must be more selective in the places we play. Last weekend, at the gig in Thame, was too rocking and too amazing to go back to crap like last night.

            Cheers!

            Rory