Carcosa Bound

The travel is done for now, and travelogue with it.

Coming home from a holiday sucks. Previously, I’ve avoided this and generally gone for one-way tickets; stepping into new lands and lives, total forward escape.

This time is different. I’ve got a greater sense of something to return to, and of the value I can bring here.

Writing on the road (didn’t really work)

The biggest lesson so far is writing on the road is much harder than I thought it was going to be. In a new place, possibly for the only time ever, you get busy with the actual experience.

However romantic the idea of knocking out some trenchant piece, on seeing a place for the first time – maybe overlooking a vineyard, or at a cafe – it’s pretty inescapable that (for me) any writing of quality involves shutting out world outside and staring into a computer until it’s done.

Phones are a great compromise – especially during downtime on longhaul travel – but, as many have noted, it’s a downgrade to reduce your input capability from two hands to two thumbs.

But also: A lot of the insights I noted down just weren’t that good. Ideas and story hooks you think are cool and smart and hopefully original at the time dissolve when you try to do something with them.

Maybe these flashes were intended for the recipient alone. Cities speak to those interacting with them, and they love creatives and dreamers most of all; this is the language they use to let you know they see you.

The next leg of the adventure

Content will fall into various pillars, to be further determined experimentally and experientially.

These, initially, will be:

• Occult adventures, fuelled by obscure books and delicious cocktails.

• Research and forays into weird technologies and cybernetic enhancement. This will take an, ahem, more inclusive and expansive view; more likely building from giants like Gregory Bateson, Wilhelm Reich and Michael Bertiaux, than the prosiac lifehack wannabe-wirehead dudebros.

• Some attempt to make sense of this; so, an exploration of the philosophy and aesthetics.

• Other thematically-appropriate stories and reflections, experiments and notes, as may be useful.

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Ad Astra,

Hamo