misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

My furious writing rate has slowed, now that I've returned to work and lost the mental and intellectual stimulation experienced only while traveling. Initially, I was going to resume blogging about conference calls and Lexapro pitches, but I think I'll first clear out my "potential blogs" list, which I kept in London when my brain was more active than it is now. Here are the current topics on this list, with a corresponding explanation:

Irish Pubs:
This was to be a blog about how my trip to London confirmed how much I hate Irish pubs (and possibly Irish people, though that is a different blog). It baffles me that the Irish Pub, with its faux mahogany wood bar, overpriced Irish nachos, and overflow of drunken frat boys, has become the icon of drinking across the world. No matter where you go in the world, you are guaranteed to find two things: A Chinese restaurant and Irish pub. Why not a British pub? With its cask-drawn ales, bountiful seating, and fireplaces, it is much more enjoyable than an Irish Pub. Walking be an Irish Pub right next to a British Pub in Chiswick brought this all into emerald-clear focus. The world is being cheated.

Walking around London eases your fear of death:
I jotted this down during my second walking tour of London, upon the realization that everyone in London is dead, with a few rare exceptions, including Lee and Sy. Everywhere you go, the dead have left behind their belongings: churches, houses, pubs, statues, bridges. You can literally feel them all around you, like if I had special paranormal glasses I could see them all walking around. London is this huge community of dead people, where being dead is actually more valuable than being alive, insofar as being respected by the general public. For centuries, every citizen of London has, at some point or another, died. And when they did, they joined this huge, ever-growing club with a pretty impressive guest list. When it comes time for me to go, I'll take comfort knowing a whole shitload of people, mostly from London, have paved the path for me.

churchill - anticipation
I don't really know what the hell I was thinking about here .... Hmmm .. Oh right ... In London, I went to the Churchill museum, which was built into his actual WWII bunkers, complete with original equipment used to conduct war operations from underground. Looking in on the concrete rooms people slept in for four years, it finally dawned on me that people once lived in total isolation from the world in a way I never have. I am connected to every one and every thing at every moment of every day, via computers, television, radios, cell phones, instant messaging. These dudes would sleep at night, fully unable to check what was going on in France, or North Africa, or with their wives, or children. Letters would take months to get delivered. Phones were limited access, and mostly only for military purposes. So you just had to get ok with the idea of patience with anxiety and suspense in a way we will never be. Today, if I have to go four minutes without knowing the score of the Chargers game, I basically freak the fuck out. And if I can't IM Jill to tell her to pick up tortilla chips on the way home, my night is ruined. How the hell did they just sit there, day after day, depending on newspapers to get some sort of idea of what was going on in the world? How could they plan an invasion (based on maps and thumbnails), then get no updates on the invasion for five days? How could they have gone without reading this blog? I would have lost it, big time. The misAdventures of Workmonkey award of the day goes to people from the 1940s.

the only way to see something is an illustration
I think I already put this point in a blog. To summarize: There once existed a time, if you wanted to see what a zebra looked like, you had to look at a drawing and imagine. Perhaps now you can see why I didn't turn this gay thought into a blog.

So there you are. Cleaned out my list, and gave you four blogs within a blog. My work here is done.