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I was seven steps from the ghosts on the other side of that door
Searching for something entirely different, I just ran across the transcribed file of the journal I kept for six days in the spring of 1999, when my high school sent its concert choir and jazz band to England and France for a week and a half. It's very strange for me to read now, even beyond the usual disconnect of no longer familiar language. I'd never kept a diary before and couldn't settle on a comfortable tone; the text is spattered with parentheses and dashes and ellipses, as though I couldn't simply let a statement stand; and even with all the hedging, I can still see some of the places where I was condensing or eliding out of frustration at the time it took me to get anything down on paper. An embarrassing number of parenthetical notes seem to be apologizing for the state of my handwriting. And that doesn't touch the really blackmail-worthy material—it's a credit to J. Michael Straczynski that I compared Versailles to Centauri Prime, but the sentence "Earlier we went to Montmartre, to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and a square where the artists hang out, like in 'An American in Paris'" should automatically disqualify a person from all intelligent discourse. (My brother and I were just looking at Toulouse-Lautrec this afternoon, too.) Still, I am not really sorry that the following was preserved:
I wish we had been able to stay in Canterbury longer. They were Roman ruins beneath some of the buildings, Roman roads beneath the modern streets. There was even a museum—underground, I believe, in a villa that had had the city built over it. Romans aside, I just liked the town. There were old buildings, interesting stores, churches faced with flint next to very modern concrete. (Canterbury was bombed very badly during WWII—made me think of "A Tale of Time City")—I just wanted to stay there.
It's good to know one is consistent in certain things.
I wish we had been able to stay in Canterbury longer. They were Roman ruins beneath some of the buildings, Roman roads beneath the modern streets. There was even a museum—underground, I believe, in a villa that had had the city built over it. Romans aside, I just liked the town. There were old buildings, interesting stores, churches faced with flint next to very modern concrete. (Canterbury was bombed very badly during WWII—made me think of "A Tale of Time City")—I just wanted to stay there.
It's good to know one is consistent in certain things.
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I'm glad that mine recorded anecdotes and quotations I might otherwise have forgotten about; I started the travel journal specifically for that purpose, and it worked. ("It's not only after dinner, it's tomorrow. Since I left my own pencil—and binder, worse—in my room a few minutes ago, I'm writing with Peter's mechanical pencil and listening to Steve and Jason debate whether one of them said 'Louvre' or 'loo,' as in 'I will spend all of my time today in the,' because today it's raining. I personally am going to go to the Louvre.") But then I spent several hours reading similar material from college and fell asleep over it, and I think that messed up my head.
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Truer words were never spoken.