Racist Warlocks and Sunflowers

Spoiler Alert: The end of this post contains the first two sentences of my forthcoming book about racist warlocks. Should you be a warlock purist, I strongly urge you not to read the last section of this post.

I wait until the last few hours to really divulge what I've been doing here all this time. I was really in France, I was writing, but, of course, the blog came second. In psychologically preparing for grad school, I've decided I am going to be a famous writer, if it isn't for literary merit than I will create some racist warlocks and turn them into a classic book (and subsequent series of books) until I can sell the rights for the movies, retire and give my money to politically irresponsible groups of people who will keep my taxes low. That is, of course, if I succeed without literary merit. Let's hope grad school does the right number on me. Although, I think I'd like to write a book about racist warlocks anyway, I feel like it would be funny.

I don't really care if I'm famous but I've got so many "I told you so"s to dole out that I am really banking on it happening or else I am going to have to kill someone that everybody likes and then write the book about it in prison in between joining the Nation of Islam and lifting weights.

So I woke up early most days and I'd sit outside on my back table...

and I'd work for about an hour with some coffee before I'd make some breakfast. I have become a cooking fiend out here, I have a large house to myself (low season here for writers) and a kitchen the size of my apartment in Manhattan. I've made elaborate omelets, crepes, veal AND chicken scallopini, homemade chicken fried rice, pasta dishes, and the like, even merguez couscous (but that was less of me and more of the communal cooking instructor). I feel like I've become an epicurean in only two weeks of being pretentious, which isn't to say that there hasn't been a significant build-up of hope that I would become more pretentious here, which guided me in efforts to cook.

After breakfast, I would try to edit for a bit (usually the work of the day before), then I would read for a while. I've been reading more in my genre while I've been here, which has helped me a lot. I tore through The Liars' Club by Mary Karr, great reading about growing up in redneck southeast Texas with a crazy family, The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (author of Roots), which I must say, is a fantastic book for a guy in his 20s to read. If you are a guy in your 20s and you have gotten this far, you ought to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, it will change everything up a bit for you. I also bit and chew at Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, apropos for this environment, but a little cheesy (which is my job?).

I'd walk around and work a little bit more in the afternoon, sometimes we had trips to Chalabre, a nearby town with a bakery with fresh croissants and tartines and baguettes and a clerk behind the counter who was excessively enthusiastic about food in that warm grandmotherly way. The baked goods, of course, were matchless. In town, there were two butchers and I got hooked on merguez (spicy Spanish lamb sausage) and chicken that was so fresh that I could mock the chicken's impending death as I passed its coops on my bike. Ba-GAWK!

As I mentioned before, there was a bike trail and my day would generally include some kind of epic bike ride, up to 15 kilometers, which is like 26 miles if you do the inverse conversion of the metric system.

The residence was surrounded by cornfields, so I'd pass through those, which were spooky at night...

As I rode out of town, everyone would nod or tip their hats to me and say bon jour and I would say it back, of course, but literally everyone in town says bon jour like it happens in movies like the beginning of Team America for instance. I would ride along the path or on the road, passing all kinds of animals, horses, gophers, rabbits, bats (at night), even a pony...

which I tried in earnest to train to bite off someone's weiner (a la Scott Tenerman).

One route would have me cross a bridge...

and there was a waterfall where I would sit and read or work or have lunch...

and continue on the path with the adolescent parts of the Pyrenees in the distance, the gardens with apple trees and tomato vines, and the farms with cows and rows of sunflowers.

I'd get back into town and depending on when it was, everyone would say bon jour or bon soir and I'd go home to shower, have some wine, eat some cheese, and make dinner. A few nights I worked, a few nights a group of us would all hang out over the 5 liter jug of local wine (5 euros by the way).

Kevin extols the virtues of supporting local wineries (as long as it's 5 euros or under).

We convinced our resident Irishwoman to demonstrate Riverdance but I was too blurry to get a decent picture of it.

In the spirit of reciprocation, I was either going to hora or to line dance, so I chose line dancing, which was a little too uneventful for everyone's flavor. Everyone who's seen me dance knows that limiting the movements is generally to everyone's benefit and overall safety as I am an enemy of gracefulness. Strange things would happen when we drank. Kevin, my housemate for the first week would put moves on an engaged woman and I stunned (and discarded of) a bat that had flown into one of the houses with an umbrella on the first night of such drunken tomfoolery. For the record, as a more sober man, I would have hidden beneath a couch as to not contract rabies from a bat.

One night we went to see a terrible jazz band by the lake, the band wasn't so bad, but the woman was English and stank the place up. The bassist was awesome and he played and sang Red House by Jimi Hendrix on his electric cello.

I didn't have a WiFi card (the French HILARIOUSLY call this WeeFee), which kept me from having consistent internet access and that allowed me to be more productive. I also couldn't download movies or porn like I would have done to entertain myself. Really it was just the community and a lot of time to work, think, or flush enough of the corporate part of my life out of my system. I had some revelations and I won't bore you with them, but I am going to be changing a lot of things now that I've got this clean slate ahead of me in New York with graduate school and more time. I am really fucking excited.

I am off to Carcassonne for a few hours, Marseille for a few days, and then back to London for a night before I fly back to New York. In the meantime, I will allow you to ponder the two sentences from my forthcoming book about racist warlocks:

"How Tom hated his Aunt Rosa; the way she would sing the wrong words to lyrically shallow pop songs while chopping the onions, her shouted solecisms like 'Mission Accomplish!' whenever the same dinner of enchiladas was ready each night. 'Mission Accomplish!' Tom would sing back, feigning enthusiasm, secretly knowing that the gastrointestinal insurgency to take place in the bathroom hours later, would not be the only insurgency to come."