the beach at redpoint

What? Cycling to Redpoint / An Rubha Dearg, Gairloch, Rossshire, Scottish Highlands.

Why? As an hommage to Boards of Canada’s album Geogaddi (which opened my mind so much to what music could be), for its twentieth anniversary. Well, now twenty-first, but I had the idea last year.

Whence? Nice. I’d guess somewhere with flights from Madrid. So, probably Edinburgh.

How long? About 600 km. Say 6-7 days.

Is there a clearer way to visualize the route? Convenient question! Yes, there is.

You went to the trouble of researching and drawing all that just for a whimsical idea that may well just not happen? You know what they say, researching and coming up with a detailed plan to do something renders the idea more real and makes it more likely that you’ll go through with it. Or it serves as a psychic ersatz version of actually doing it thereby making it less likely. You really can’t tell.

Hadn’t you sworn off cycle touring back in ’17? I’d expect things to be less unpleasant this time: the Scottish Highlands seem prettier than La Mancha, and following a National Cycle Network route should allow me to avoid traffic. Maybe a toss-up between wet feet and midges vs. severe dehydration.

Would it be expensive? Probably? Looks to be about 250€ for the flights incl. luggage and bicycle, and I have a checkout basket at the Decathlon website worth 280€ (I can probably get back at least half of that selling it later). Stays should cost me less than 100€ if I can camp, then add about 50€ for the train trip back to Edinburgh. So, add a contingency and estimate about 600€ net?

That’s a lot. Objectively, it is. It is also less than I save each month, so I’ll still be net positive in that month (not to mention all I have and will accumulate during those months in which I don’t go on trips based on titles of electronic music tracks).

Still, feels pointless. I suppose it feels somewhat like doing the Camino de Santiago, and people fly to Spain to do that without second-guessing the validity of it. And — so then what? I still need to do something in the vaguely fun/interesting/memorable space with my free time and spare money.
City breaks? Flying to Vienna or whatever for a weekend to have brunch and visit museums? Vacuous, meaningless, superficial. People go on city breaks, without any sense of self-doubt, to freaking Brussels! For one pretty square and a tiny statue of a peeing toddler! People go to Dubai for “fun”, which anyone with the least amount of self-awareness should give up on life after doing.
Concerts? I did that last year for Ganso and Karate, and tried it for Pavement but all the shows were sold out. Who’s touring this year — Ganso around Portugal on January weekends, and Karate playing Primavera Sound in June? Sounds like rapidly plummeting marginal utility.
Hiking? Fully open to suggestions not immediately near Madrid that are accesible via public transportation.
Golf or sailing or all the other rich old idiot hobbies? I’m not yet at level of wealth, decay, or twattishness.
The only vaguely valid ideas I have at this point are walking foot tunnels and running metro lines — and I could actually do both in Glasgow.

You could learn to play all of Some Boots on guitar, the same way you did for WPSIATWIN ten years or so ago. Actually, I think I never quite managed the solo on Dancing Shoes. Maybe I could, even if In Hundreds feels wholly unfeasible.

You could go to Prainha, near Alvor, where your grandparents have their holiday home, and recreate the shots from the music video for Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode. Uh. That’s… uh. I may do that.

time sensations, now

I’ve always been good at placing specific memories in their correct times — a year and maybe a season — even those that do not benefit from the temporal structure given by school and university years. But, lately, my subjective experience of time elapsed seems, at a macro scale, to have disappeared, such that everything that happened in the past feels coalesced into a formless, unlayered, un-time-lined unity¹, which is disorienting in a way I don’t recall having experienced; I wish the intensity of earlier memories were subject to a gentle exponential decay, allowing me to exist in a vivid now and just-now, rather than in a cacophony of thens.

Yet the magnitude of time elapsed feels vertiginous, both when considered as a myriad of individual days, dizzying and incomprehensible like a mass of earthworms after rain, and as a time-chasm of decades, dizzying and incomprehensible like the great hall in House of Leaves. How can it have been so long, and what was within all that?

I’m alarmed at how easily I let days float by nowadays. In worse times, I predicted I’d eventually end up at deliberate avoidance, conscious refusal of participation, action, engagement. But I seem to instead have got to passivity, to a routine of generating the minimum amount of recognizable human activity able to prevent any sort of intense existential anguish². Maybe this ease, this temporal weightlessness I’m experiencing lately, is what’s made my current perceptions of the past so indistinct; maybe, for this reason in addition to all others, I need reification of time, quantification of progress, calendars, urgency, NOOT NOOT knuckle tattoos.

 

1. For instance, while I know that the two New Year’s Eves that I spent in Portimão happened 11 years apart (spending the entire night awake and alone, either walking outside among the revellers or back indoors reading Os Maias, in 2006-7, and then, in 2017-8, with T., falling asleep before midnight and waking up for the fireworks, then waking up early the next morning to take the train to Lagos and swim in the ocean), they feel immediately coetaneous.

2. To be fair: I seem to have arrived at a momentarily-stable and -satisfying professional situation, as long as there is demand for a lead data scientist in teams developing either pricing models for P&C insurance or “multi-channel” footprint optimization for banks; also, infrequent but exhausting physical exercise and reading books recommended by persons for whom I want to limit my (appearance of) decadence are decent safeguards against psychic degradation, even if incapable of solving structural issues related to something like conceptual internalization and external implementation of a developing self, e.g., lack of goal-setting, growth mindset, structured practice, measurable improvement