Things are going… failingly. Mom’s putting up with a whole lot from me as I seem to go from breakdown to breakdown, embracing the insane and inane notion that if I just keep doing the same thing over and over I’ll eventually get a different result. I prefer to think of it as hiring a pack of monkeys to bang out pages on typewriters; I’m bound to get a Shakespearean sonnet and at least an act or two of Hamlet in there.
But alas, time is not on my side. I’ve spent the last hour trying to get a decent WiFi connection out here in the French countryside and it seems I have once again ticked off some higher power that is now delighting in messing with me.
This is Day 1 (or is it Day 2?) of my European Tour and it seems there will be little to no postings going up. It’s just too dispiriting and impossible to get things uploaded at the moment. And somehow that perfectly reflects what’s going on with me emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I’m a mess. And so why would I think this blog thing would be anything else?
I screwed up. I booked the wrong hotel. I’m not even sure how I booked the wrong place – it may have a similar name to what I meant to book. But it’s a good mile away from the place I had in mind, the hotel within walking distances of some good reasonably priced restaurants, a supermarket, and the train station. There’s a 20 minute bus that runs to Disneyland Paris, even though if I could hop the fence in the backyard and run across a field I’d literally be in Tomorrowland. Instead, one must circumnavigate the parks and come at them from a different angle, hence the 20 minute bus ride to go less than a mile as the crow flies. That damn crow. It always gets me. Wish I had a lucky feather.
Instead if I didn’t have bad luck I’d have no luck at all. That’s one of three “folksy” sayings I can recall from my childhood that I have tried to scrub from my usage… and yet, there it is, in glorious 1 and 0 binary converted pixels on your screen. Dammit. This is not starting well.
That may be because I haven’t slept… and this was made all the worse as we were far too early to check in when we arrived at the wrong hotel… er, I guess the “right” hotel as its address matches my Orbitz confirmation (a refreshing change of pace when compared to my Sterling, CO, fiasco?). I’m a mess and feeling a fool and a jerk and a failure. Mom’s been a trouper but I suspect a lot of that has to do that this is lightyears from the pod “sleeper car” hotel of Kyoto. That and she’s just understanding and supportive of me even when I’m a colossal screwup. That’s the nice thing about Moms… they always have your back.
We wandered around Walt Disney Studios for the morning and early afternoon. Basically we were waiting until we could check in to the hotel and I had hoped to grab my race kit from the expo. Sadly, the expo wasn’t opening until 3 PM and when we wandered down to scope out the venue the line stretched as far as my eyes could see. I know what you’re thinking, Kevin’s bleary eyes probably couldn’t see very far so how bad could it be? I didn’t take a photo as all it would’ve captured were my tears on the trail that stretched as far as my *bleary* eyes could see… and beyond. The 5K isn’t until 8 PM tomorrow and all the paperwork says I can pickup my bib up until 6 PM tomorrow to allow time to get to the start line; Mom and I hoofed it from the expo to the train to figure out how to get back to the hotel and hopefully catch some much needed shut-eye. I’ll try and regroup and rebuild this tomorrow; for now, a bit of sleep to regain some perspective. Perhaps I’ll feel less a fool and failure; I doubt it. I’m feeling a fool and a fool’s fool; I think that makes me triple foolish which in the shame, shame lyrics I think means shame on me in perpetuity.
So for now, I’m putting everything on hold and going to try and right the ship.