Okay, I’ve set two separate alarms, so I’m ready to go to bed and get up in time for my flight tomorrow. I get so paranoid about oversleeping when I’ve got a flight to catch.

Packing’s a snap, though, ’cause I’ve done so much long-term travel the past few years. I’ve got a quickie mental checklist, and I’ve developed a habit of buying two of anything for the bathroom, so I have duplicate wash kit ready to go at any time.

Yes, I’m off to Prague for a week. I’ve been busy and done no homework; I’m a total ignoramus. Or, put more nicely, I am going as tabula rasa, wu wei, beginner’s mind.

In case anything dire should happen, thanks, it’s been fun.

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Last night was Beltane, the annual pagan-y, nude-y, fire-y rite of spring that happens atop Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. I was tired — I feel quite drawn this weekend, and not in cartoon form — but I couldn’t miss it, ’cause it’s become an important event in my year, both as a bit of local culture and as a special time with friends.

(Forgive my crap cameraphone photography. I could buy a swish expensive camera for taking these shots, but I’d still produce the same result. Photography is one art that eludes me completely.)

Flaming icons on Edinburgh’s folly — the start of the Beltane ceremony.

A red, half-naked female demon spins hula-hoops of doom around her body. It was raining at this point, but nothing could touch her.

[EDIT: As usual, Liz did a much better job of documenting the occasion.]

I’m at a coffeeshop, working (yay!). I’m drinking my decaf coffee black, ’cause I’ve been ingesting way too much heavy and junky food lately. I’d declare some sort of new eating habit to compensate, except I’m going to Prague at the weekend, joining one old friend from Toronto to visit a mutual friend who’s doing real estate development there. The former is a restaurateur and the latter is a flashy entrepreneur with a taste for the high life, so… this is clearly not the time for declarations.

When am I going to finish my novel?

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Mister Savings Accounts is skint. Does this give you schadenfreude-flavoured pleasure after my last post?

Actually, it’s just my pocket money account that’s drained, but it was worth it. This weekend was a heavy social time, starting with a Friday Gang dinner, then a night out on Saturday with Liz and Patrick to one of the city’s subterranean vault venues, where people danced happily, casting shadows through underwater lighting.

Sunday was the first gig for the Edinburgh Gay Men’s Chorus, a singing group I joined a few months back. It was the last thing I imagined myself doing, but…

When people ask me if I miss acting, the only thing that comes to mind that I miss is singing. So this is giving me an outlet for that without all the crazy lifestyle that goes with the career — which I honestly don’t miss at all. I finished with that and retired, fait accompli. (My theatre department is having a reunion in June and I’m going, and while I look forward to seeing everyone again, I’m really happy to be where I am now instead.) But singing in harmony with people is fun, and even though I’ve just been doing it as a lark and really have nothing at stake here, it was rewarding to have the payoff of a public gig. And since the venue was a pub, we naturally stayed on and bevvied it up.

Then in the afternoon I got a call from my friend Tim. Bizarrely, I’d been thinking of him just the day before as I listened to a song by his band, Van Tramp. I was mentally kicking myself: “I think of him as one of my best friends,” I thought, “but the last time we were in touch was sometime last year.” Well, Sunday his band was in town to open for the Sugababes. Not only was that a score for the band, it meant he and I got to hang out after.

I went to the stage door, where the giant rock’n’roll trailers were waiting, along with some of the fans. A stereotypically unhappy doorman didn’t know anything about where the band was, but a text message from Tim let me know to go around to the lobby, where the remaining fans were trailing out (most of them chubby women or little girls wearing sparkly pink hats, strangely). So I got to see my bud again, as well as introduce him to a couple of my chorus mates and meet one of his band members and his label manager. The manager was a bit shaken that they’d sold out of all the albums they had — which were supposed to last for the whole tour. I figure that’s good bad news!

Then last night I went to see my friend Callum sing at a showcase for the music program he’s in. He was really, really good.

Once again, even though it’s not a pre-condition of my friendships, somehow very talented people keep ending up my life. I would like them even if they weren’t gifted, but it’s just too easy to like them when I can be a fan of their work as well.

So a lot of stuff is coming together lately, for me, for groups I’m in, and for people I care about. Yay!

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Yay! I’m sitting in a cafe, working. This is life the way I like it. The neighbours’ workmen are hammering on my wall, and I’m not there.

I’ve finally switched to using a UK keyboard layout, since most of my things are stencilled with that. I keep typing @ when I mean “, but I’ll adjust. Reminds me of the time my mum and I were in an Internet cafe in Brussels or Bruges or someplace, and I was wondering if we should tell the attendant that someone had switched all the keys around on our keyboard. Oops, I didn’t know.

I promise to write about something life-like soon, not just this techie-stuff.

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I laughed out loud last night when I was clicking through the music store in Windows Media Player and a Flash advert came up with a silhouetted woman waggling her arms back and forth, dancing for all she was worth. What was the banner ad for? Mortgages! Sweet f*all to do with dancing or coolness or music or… anything.

I tried with the best of my geeky powers to capture the moving Flash version of the ad so I could post it here, but I wasn’t able. It’s just so shamelessly wrong and stupid and irrelevant that I found it funny. Not “I appreciate that company’s self-aware sense of irony” funny — because it just occurred to me that maybe that’s what they were going for, the “so bad it’s good” factor. No no. It’s just pure, misguided, bad boardroomthink.

Actually, it reminded me of a snort-through-your-nose-funny article on Cracked.com called “If Banner Ads Were Forced to Be Truthful“. While looking up the URL just now, I found that they’d parodied this exact ad.

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Today was “Family Day” in Ontario — whatever that means — so I had the day off. I spent the day out in the city, trying to be productive, though it’s still so easy to fall into tourist mode and just look at this place.

I spent a while planning my projects for the week in Chocolate Soup, a cafe in the Old Town, and just before I left to walk back home, I used their loo. I was taken aback to see that the pipes still had their original insulation: hair. That’s one exposed building material that would be a pretty hard sell nowadays.

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Who’s Your Dandy?2

Another Queer Night of Poetry & Music

Tuesday March 11 — 7:30pm
Word Power Books
43-45 West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh
Free
(we will pass the hat for the artists)

Featuring

Graeme Hawley, Hamish MacDonald, Nine, and Zorras

After a highly successful inaugural event in November, Who’s Your Dandy? returns to Word Power Books on March 11^th with another fun and unusual lineup of writing and music. You’ll be treated to a mixture of performance poetry, fiction, zinester tales, and poetry-music fusion like you’ve never seen it before.

Who’s Your Dandy? is the kind of event that reminds you what’s great about living in a city. Going on a rainy night to a free performance of queer poetic experiments and deeply funky music — this is the anti-Into the Wild. The performers’ voices are confident, incisive, and, best of all, playful. Hold onto your overpriced flat, indie culture’s happening here! SSSS.
“” The Skinny

www.blissfultimes.ca/whosyourdandy.htm

www.word-power.co.uk

Bios

Graeme Hawley was a milkman in Oldham before becoming a postman in Edinburgh. He published his own first collection of poetry, Reclamation Marks, in 2004, and is currently saving up to publish his second collection, Everyday Things. He won the Big Word Slam in 2006 and was on the winning team in the Three Nations Slam in Bristol. He wrote this himself in the third person.

Hamish MacDonald is an author and copywriter who, seven years ago, finally gave in and followed his name back to Scotland. He’s the author of three novels, including Idea in Stone, a magical realist tale about Edinburgh (which you can buy at Word Power). He publishes his novels through his own micropress, printing and hand-binding each book. www.hame.land

Nine grew up in Northern Ireland and moved to Edinburgh in 1996. She writes the zine If Destroyed Still True, and edits the LGBT section of The Skinny magazine. In the past, she bluffed her way through music journalism, and wrote porn for a couple of anthologies. She gets nostalgic for teen angst, travels to places where she knows nobody, drinks too much wine, rants about politics, and writes about all of the above.

Zorras is Sandra Alland and Yudnara J. They blend poetry with music to form a performance that is neither and both. They are dedicated to making you laugh and think. With tape recordings, guitar, drums, singing, a megaphone, poetry and plain old storytelling, Zorras become multimedia superheroes before your eyes.

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, multimedia artist, performer and activist. Her poems, plays, stories and articles have been published and presented across Canada, the US, Mexico, Bermuda, England, Scotland and Spain. Sandra has published two books of poetry: Proof of a Tongue (McGilligan, 2004) and Blissful Times (BookThug, 2007). www.blissfultimes.ca

Yudnara J. is a singer, percussionist and composer. She has performed and recorded throughout Venezuela, Aruba, Spain and the UK, with such musicians as Rigel Michelena, Gustavo Dal Farra, (El Rabo del Ojo), Antonio Bello (4 of Us), Charanga del Norte, Kabanayen and des loups. Yudnara has also performed and composed with Saira and Contrabajo. www.myspace.com/contrabajoband

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‘Cause apparently it’s still snowy as hell in Prince Edward Island (and cold in Toronto).

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Last night I went with the gang to a club night here in Edinburgh called “Vegas”. It’s a self-consciously retro night with showgirls, Rat Pack music — the whole megillah. I’m not a clubby person by nature, but it was a great night out.

The venue is bizarre — sulphurous-smelling brick vaults beneath the Old Town. I love those old spaces, but the flashy nightclub clashed with the dark underworld feel of the place. Somehow, though, it worked. The atmosphere was really friendly, too; I think that’s because nearly everyone there made an effort, they didn’t just roll in off the street. The girls were dressed to the nines in shimmery dresses with moulting boas, and the men were at their gangsterish, swingery best.

It occurred to me yesterday as I was out and about preparing for this that how I experience the day is really given by the story I’m telling myself about it. I know this is called “narrative psychology” and is nothing new, but in that moment I really got it. I told myself that I was having a Big Day, celebrating my life in progress, which is a pretty good one, and the rest of the day really did go like that.

I managed to take some pictures.

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Puny humans! I scoff at your portions!

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