Last Day

This will be the final post I write in Europe. I may write one more while in Toronto, as I have a seventeen (17!) [SEVENTEEN] hour layover there, and I will be desperate to conceive of any means I possibly can to kill the time, before the time kills me.

Currently I sit in the saddest Irish pub I could possibly manage to find in Dublin (which I am quite proud of finding), drinking the worst Irish coffee in the entire world. On the television is the annual budget debate. There is a fight over proposed austerity measures. An Irish Socialist politician is quoting W.B. Yeats. What I wouldn't give to hear an American politician quote Herman Melville!

In any case, I am in a good mood, because I will be headed home in less than twelve hours, and I am very much ready to leave. I have spent 38-odd nights in the top bunk of six different hostels, as well as seven nights on the couch of a beloved friend, as well as four nights in the room of a beautiful Manchester girl. I have made more friends and heard more stories than I am able to count. Every person I have met has proven to be absolutely mad, each in their own way, and without fail it has always taken an hour's time, at most, for them to reveal their maddest selves, that is their best selves, to me. I have said more good-byes than I wish to tally at this moment. The time feels right to head home.

At times I have been pained with thoughts of unworthiness. I am speaking of the opportunity I have had to visit all these places and to experience all these things. Yesterday afternoon I tried to walk to the shore of the Irish Sea, but I was not able to get there because I could not find my way around or past the Dublin port. Instead I found myself wandering through a residential area built within a stone's throw of the big barges and tankers being loaded and fueled in the port.. The houses stood only a foot higher than the top of my head, and there was the black and heavy smell, inescapable, of tanker fuel, which clouded my throat the moment I sensed it, pierced me with a terrible headache, and produced the desire in me to lie down on the grass and stop moving. The people I saw coming out of these little portside houses, were, without fail, mothers with young daughters.

I am aware that I am about to lapse into loathsome sentimentality here, but what did I do to deserve this jaunt around Europe? What more than these women raising their children in the shadow of those behemoths that leak industrial toxins onto their front porches? What might a poor Irish mother have been able to do with the four thousand American dollars I spent to go and play at writing a book while drinking pilsners in Kafka's birthplace (among other things)? I know how sophomoric this all sounds. But it is the thought that plagues me as I prepare to leave here, that I am undeserving of this time, incredible as it has been.

At the time of my departure I have written 30,000 words, averaging out to 600 words per day. I had planned to write 50,000 words, at 1000 words a day, but I was only able to manage just over half that quota. The way I have rationalized this to myself, and the way the many travelers I have encountered on my journey have rationalized it for me as well, is that a person Only Lives Once, that a person must Experience All That One Can, and that there's nothing wrong with work taking a backseat to that prerogative. But that rings hollow to me. What I believe is that anyone who is awarded a two-month writing fellowship is obligated to spend that time writing, damnit, and to do otherwise is to squander an incredible, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime gift. I do not believe that I have squandered this time with a capital S. I am sure there are countless others who wrote nothing, zero, not a word, on their own fellowships, and I must very harshly say that they are very foolish for having done so. But I could have done more.

I want to use this final blog post to admonish those who will be following me on fellowships of their own. Don't be lazy. Don't make excuses. WRITE. This is perhaps the one and only time that life will not conspire to prevent you from doing so. The only conspirator against you will be the most clever and persuasive adversary of all, that is, yourself.

The book I am writing, I should finally mention, is called Thirteen Different Girls. The project currently spans about 55,000 words total. The first draft should be finished before the new year, 2015. I hope it will be published when I am twenty-five years old. I write this here to put my ambitions down for everyone to see, and so I might be shamed if I fail to meet them.

I do think I will write a bit more about my trip before shelving the blog for good. I think I have more to say. But I want to say now, in conclusive fashion, that I believe these last two months have been the most important of my life so far.