the gas works croft

I am still here in Clifden, Ireland, which is in Connemarra, on the coast and near the "quartzile" mountains. It's my fourth day here. I am staying here because I am avoiding Dublin, because cities are still cities even when they are filled with redheads. I have made friends with a Bavarian man named Harry who tells me that I defy his stereotype of Americans because I am "pleasant." We took turns buying each other Irish coffees in three of Clifden's six pubs last night. Mysteriously, when I woke up this morning, my watch was set an hour later than it had ben set the night before. I was laid down by my recurring migraine yesterday so I moaned in bed until noon, then crawled to the bakery for a donut and bought a bag of spinach - I figured the nutrient deficiency of my all Guinness and seafood chowder diet was probably contributing to my headaches - and then crawled across the street and watched "Wall-E" for the second time. The audience of two dozen Irish ten year-olds and their unhappy chaperones talked throughout the movie, failed to laugh when it was funny, and then walked out before it ended. I watched "Sex and the City" in this same theater three days ago when a bout of homesickness led me to the bookstore, where I read all the Rough Guide entries on New York and California, but with the screening of "Wall-E" I did not feel the same triumphalist patriotism that I did with SATC, because whereas in the latter you had a theater full of dowdy forty-something Molly Maguires wearing sweaters spun from their pet sheep cooing jealously at Carrie Bradshaw's Manolo Blahniks, in the former you had a theater full of girls who HOWLED "Matty!!" when "Matty," apparently a very popular local boy, entered stage left right when the pathos reached a fever pitch (you know, the part where Wall-E valiantly sacrifices himself under the crushing pillar of the holodeck so that Eve can return humanity to earth). It is hard to feel triumphant about your popular culture predominating in the world when Irish girls chatter over the touching parts. Then I succumbed to two hours of Irish Olympic boxing and an hour of Irish Olympic speedwalking - ugh - because my love for the Olympics surpassed my distaste of the events favored by the Irish. This is what I do with my days. The lotion retires at night to the basket, which is the squeaky bottom bunk of a six-bed bathroomless dormitory, divided between nice Austrian girls and cold French girls and one grumpy monkey unrecognizeable as an American.

It rained 11 hours straight yesterday and half of young France descended upon the lounge of this hostel and make exclamations about the U.S.A. basketball team. "Trop bien" is all I could understand, and "Eauuuu!!" when Kobe Bryant did something especially spectacular. When the weather is shit - which it always is - I still like to bike and walk the routes this region is apparently famous for, because I find that being soaked and cold distracts me perfectly from thinking about my loneliness, both in the present and in the long term. I am somewhat terrified of the future! But with a day like yesterday, when the weather was shit but I was too sick to leave, I had nothing to do but fill page after damp page of my journal with anxious thoughts. Is this the worst of it? Will it be like this forever? Do I have the patience for this? Should I move to L.A., where it is always sunny and I can write pilots for Asian-American-themed sitcoms?

I ask the sheep, but the sheep have no answers.