Yanks Abroad

Well, I'm in England. London, to be exact. Chelsea, to be ridiculously exact. I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I made it, I'm alive, and I'm well on my way to getting my first-ever press credentials to cover Rangers matches while I'm over here. The bad news is, some ass stole my credit card and made off with it. I've told the story so many times I'm going crazy, so I won't tell it again, but sufficed to say it's a huge pain in the ass not having a credit card in a foreign country. I can't pay for anything, and London is, to be perfectly frank, a very expensive city. An exchange rate of over 2 dollars to every pound doesn't help matters. Right now, I have shelter (a hotel paid with my father's credit card ... pathetic, I know), and some food (a burger for dinner tasted WAY better than it actually was). Tomorrow, my quests include not just the planned trips around the city and eventually to the train station out, but concentrate mainly on jaunts to the US embassy and a bank to try to make some sort of sensible way out of this. It sucks. Hopefully, by tomorrow, I'll work it out. My bank is shipping a card off to me, but it could take a week, and London is not the sort of town in which one can vacation for a week without any money.

But, like I said, I'm just about set up for my first real live press box, which will hopefully come August 4th in Inverness at the Caley Thistle-Rangers season opener. I will be reporting for Yanks Abroad, a website covering American athletes overseas. DeMarcus Beasley is my particular focus, as he is the only current American playing in the Scottish league.

I just hope I get my money sorted soon. Otherwise, the title of this blog may be suddenly much more fitting than I had planned.

In the airport

... on the way to London. Finally, after what seems like a year of waiting, I'm on my way to England and Scotland for a half-working vacation that I sorely need. I have already lost my phone and almost left my passport a handful of places, but who's counting? Next time I post, I will be in England, and writing furiously. As I've said, I want to come back with a vast array of at least starts for stories, if not a notebook full of poems and stories. The football work I'll be doing over there will be great, but its a means to an end also. Literary work is what I really want to get done over there. We'll see.

Having a try at Yog's

I discovered a cool little zine today called Yog's Notebook, and promptly sent them off a story. They seemed enamored of Lovecraft, from a little joke on their "About Us" page, and so I sent them a story called "Further Study", a little 1600-word short-short about Cthulhu and a scientist that witnesses his near-return. I'll be curious to know what they think of it.

In other news, I leave the cozy confines of the West coast in about a day and a half, first for New York, then for London. I'm hoping that I can find a nice little corner of Scotland to finally relax in, between football games of course. I've followed both my favorite national team (Scotland) and my favorite club (Inverness Caley Thistle) from afar for so long that I can't believe I'm actually going to get to see them play live. Between the matches, though, I'm planning on making writing a full-time job, and I'd really like to come back with notebooks full of work. While I'm here, I find it really difficult to find the time to write, and so I hope a trip to the old country is just what the doctor ordered. We shall see.