Eight things I loved about May

~ 8 ~ Finishing the academic year: "There's another day done," an old man commented to me Sunday as Jenn and I walked past him on the disused railway path that runs from Penarth station.
Because I was wearing a cowboy hat, we assumed it to be some kind of Old West reference. The only thing turned up by a Google search, however, are the lyrics to a song by Genesis. For the old man's sake -- because he seemed a nice enough fella -- I'm going to assume he didn't know he was quoting Phil Collins. Perhaps it was just a turn of phrase that came to him. It was, indeed, the end of the day -- the summer light turning golden as the sun shifted low and westward. We have been experiencing a spate of genuine summer days and at the end of each of them one feels a certain sense of satisfaction and content. Another day done, and a good one at that.
Monday saw another academic year done. Teaching Welsh is a great uphill struggle, literally and metaphorically. Literally: after travelling an hour and a half on a train to Ebbw Vale I have had to walk two miles uphill to the building where I teach. The actual process or journey or whatever term you want to use of getting a room full of people from the point of not being able to pronounce the sounds of Welsh to being able to make simple statements about who they are and where they live is equally uphill and exhausting. I fear I don't make the greatest leader on these journeys. Persisting with the trekking metaphor, I have a tendency to teach as I walk -- plodding forward, somewhat insouciant of others. Some people have simply slipped away. In one class, I started the year with 13 students and just four showed up on the final day; in another class eight became four; in another class nine became four.
It has been uphill in a financial sense; the money earned simply is not enough to make ends meet. It is hardly enough to even move the Sisyphean stone of financial burden. I mentally decided I was done with teaching back in January, when I had to face the reality it could no longer sustain my owning a car. Take an American's car away from him and he will turn against you forever.
I stuck with teaching out of sense of duty, and because no other employment opportunities have presented themselves, and because I have taken some quiet pleasure in getting to know my students. I especially loved talking with a retired teacher whose face would contort like an excited child when he grasped some new element of the language. He is an infuriating Welsh nationalist but still one of the most likeable people you could ever meet, the sort of person who induces in you an inclination to pray: "God, please let me be like that when I'm 80. Or even now."
Another student: a retired steelworker who spends a lot of time painting, a hobby that I think gives him greater descriptive power when telling you about life in the Ebbw valley. He remembers orange sulphur clouds wafting across the football pitch as a boy, and the holiday trips that seemingly the whole town would take en masse to Barry Island.
Another student was incredibly quick and witty but had almost no formal education beyond community classes and so seemed bound to stay on the dole ("on welfare" for those of you playing along at home) forever.
I enjoyed the process of coming to see Ebbw Vale as a real place. Not a real place I would want to live, perhaps, but also not a caricature of a town, which is how the south Wales valleys are generally seen: "Here be chavs."
There be indeed chavs -- great, depressing failures in the human experience -- but also plenty of people who are warm and take to you quickly and use your name at the end of every sentence: "Lovely weather today, isn't it, Chris? How's your misses, Chris? Can I get you a tea, Chris?"
It was warm and summery as I stepped out of the LAC Monday evening. Another year done, and this one my last. Golden sun lit the soft green hills of the valley and birds sang. Mischievous children shouted to one another as they swarmed past me on Razor scooters. A woman smoking a cigarette outside the Conservative club held a conversation with another woman leaning out the window of a building across the street. As I walked out of town and down closer to the bottom of the valley, the moist summer smell so familiar to my Texas and Minnesota childhood drifted up from the river. I felt a certain sense of satisfaction and content.

~ 8 ~ Getting a (part-time) job: I likely would not have returned to teaching in the autumn either way, but the fact I now have work in Cardiff Bay makes it a hell of a lot easier to stick to that course. I feel like I shouldn't outright state who I'll be working for, though that's information easily found on my LinkedIn profile. And I'm sure it will become obvious in the future when I am waxing poetic about this or that British landscape. Suffice to say, it is a role that puts me back in my comfort zone of media/PR and it is one of those situations I have always wished for -- being able to apply my talent toward something I care about rather than descriptions of house fires and pit bull attacks.
My only lament is that it is not full-time. But, I will take home slightly more per week than I have been and spend roughly 12 hours less in commute. And I get holiday pay. And a pension. And I will see Jenn at night. And there will be plenty of time to focus on writing my book(s). For the first time in a very long while I find myself not just hopeful but -- oh so slightly -- optimistic about the future. Hope can exist anywhere. Optimism, I feel, is a positive view of likely outcomes. It is easy to hope, to dream; it is more difficult to be optimistic. I am optimistic for what can come with hard work and, admittedly, a bit of luck.

~ 8 ~ The Avengers: Dude. Did you see the Avengers movie? If you did not, why? Do you hate good things? Does awesomeness make you miserable? Are you coolness-intolerant? Honestly, go see it now. It was like riding a roller-coaster on a track built of rainbows and the laughter of children and explosions.

~ 8 ~ Walking from Penarth to Rhoose: Finances are always tricky in the Cope-Champion household but May was especially challenging. We spent the final fortnight of the month living off credit cards and potatoes. The potatoes we ate, of course; the credit cards we used to buy the potatoes.
With so little money to hand, we were left to seek whatever adventure could be had by walking out our door. At the first little sign of warm weather, we decided to pack lunches and walk a stretch of the newly completed Wales Coast Path, trekking from Penarth to Rhoose -- about 15 miles.
The phrase "newly completed" is somewhat misleading because it implies that more was done than simply looking at existing routes along the coast of Wales and seeing how they all link up. Really, the Wales Coast Path is the result of someone's obsession with maps, like when I used to try to work out how one could travel from Mission San Diego to the Hollywood Bowl using only non-Amtrak rail-based transport.
So, the "coast" path leads you through a fair bit of urban area as you pass through Barry, along busy roads and not within sight of anything that could be described as coast. But things eventually got pretty again and I found myself thinking I'd like to try to walk all the way around Wales at some point, making use of the Wales Coast Path and the Offa's Dyke Path.

~ 8 ~ Summer weather: In Britain, we use adjectives like "scorching," "sizzling," and "boiling" to describe weather that Texans would describe as "cool," "fresh" and "you might wanna take a wrap." But it has been summery by British standards, and Jenn and I are desperately making the best of it: sitting in beer gardens, visiting friends for barbecues and running during the hottest part of the day (sometimes I even sweat!). Ice cream cones are consumed and hours are spent sitting in the park reading. Our windows stay open and at night we kick off the duvet. We go for long walks and I even get to wear my cowboy hat (which Welsh people are physically incapable of avoiding comment on).
I don't remember growing up wild for summer. I enjoyed it, of course -- swimming, running, sweating. But I grew up in places where one could be confident of its annual arrival. Here, where summer seems to show up every six years or so, and usually only for a week, I feel a kind of rapturous panic: MUST ENJOY SUN! I am desperate to cram everything in, to compensate for the long, long, long months of wet, dark, cold that turn me into a miserable depressive.
I can do things now, I can believe in who I am and who I can be, because the sun is shining. But because I know how rare is this meteorological condition, I am fearful of what happens when it goes away. Summer in Britain is never long enough for you to pine for other seasons.

~ 8 ~ Rioja night: I don't know how we fell into this habit, but we've taken to splitting a bottle of Rioja on Sunday nights. Arth Wine, the wine shop down the road, sells a Rioja fruity and flavourful enough to overcome my general dislike of wines. We pour the wine into a decanter to let it breathe for an hour or two and then have it with dinner. It is the sort of middle-class activity that I simultaneously disdain and delight in. Jenn and I both work for organisations with an environmental focus, we are card-carrying members of the National Trust, making dinners using organic ingredients from our weekly Riverford box and drinking red wine that we have let "breathe." We are intolerable. Our only redeeming quality is that we also never miss an episode of NCIS: Los Angeles.

~ 8 ~ The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver: Never mind her tendency to get lost in great fields of prose on the experience of motherhood, nor her proclivity toward over-simplistically singing the virtues of communism (despite a distinct lack of historical evidence to suggest such a system is truly sustainable beyond the idealist realm), Barbara Kingsolver is one of the best living authors the United States has. When she is no longer living, she will simply be one of the best American authors ever. Put her in the same breath as Vonnegut and Hemingway; teach her in schools; etc. But I think the reason I particularly loved reading The Poisonwood Bible is that it helped me achieve one of my New Year's resolutions: I have now read 12 books.
I am carrying on, trying to read as much I can, and thankful to the anonymous person who suggested that I read Leif Enger. I am reading So Young, Brave, and Handsome at the moment and really enjoying it. Living now in a Kindle-based world, I don't tend to think in pages anymore, but I read 45 percent of the novel in one day. If anyone else wants to suggest something, t'would be appreciated.

~ 8 ~ Seeing the Olympic flame: Remember that scene in Blues Brothers when Aretha Franklin comes charging at Jake and Elwood like a bull moose, shouting: "Don't you blaspheme! Don't you blaspheme in here!"
That's kind of how I am when someone speaks ill of the Olympics. I have found myself systematically eliminating grumpypants types from my Twitter feed because of their inane Olympics hating. It's the Olympics, for the love of Pete! How terribly dead inside are you that you would genuinely sit there and complain about the Olympics? It's the Olympics! I feel actual sadness for you -- to be so utterly devoid of the capacity to feel happiness. What do you do in the morning? Kick a few puppies before your breakfast of wood shavings, then bathe in your own effluent?
I love me some Olympics, yo. I love just about everything about them, even the bits that I find boring. I love the philosophy behind them. I love the opportunity for safe patriotism -- a chance to wave a flag and paint your face and cheer for someone solely on the basis that they were born in (or moved to) the same country as you. I love cheering for people whose countries I would struggle to find on a map. I love that the huge lumbering circus-machine of the Olympics can induce dramatic civic changes that no amount of politicking ever could. I mean, a light rail in Salt Lake City -- that would have never happened without the 2002 winter games. No, I won't watch swimming at any other time, or gymnastics, or rowing, or, in fact, most of the sports featured in the Olympic Games. But I feel that's some of the point: an opportunity to go wild for people who work really hard and usually don't get to hear people going wild for them. I am fully aware of creating in my mind a false state of interest, a kind of suspension of belief I would use for watching a film or reading a book, and I feel that's perfectly acceptable. Why not cheer for people who try? Why not take joy in such a thing?
And to have the games now in the country in which I live, just 150 miles away from ol' Caerdydd, I find incredibly exciting. I am heartbroken that I could not afford tickets to any of the events, but eager nonetheless to travel to London when the games are taking place so I can mingle in the atmosphere of so many people all come together to wave little flags. With money from my writer's bursary, I plan to buy a large TV so Jenn and I can watch the games in style. It is exciting and it is incredibly likely that I will never again be as physically close to the games as I am this year.
So, it was a given that Jenn and I went to see the Olympic flame as it passed through Cardiff. Hundreds of people packed together on the street, and the whole thing lasted approximately 15 seconds (it would have been less had the torch-bearer not been walking), but I am happy to have seen it. A little tiny piece of history, and I was part of it.

Friday night in P Town

It. Never. Stops. Raining. I am baffled at times that people live in this country. Not that I would expect no people at all -- people will live anywhere. It wouldn't be a surprise to find a few hardy, muddy souls in the caves and hollows of this island. But that there are so many people, that is sometimes confusing.

There are millions upon millions of them. Literally millions upon millions, all stacked up on top of each other and squished together, covering every little bit of space with narrow, pockmarked roads, crumbling walls and litter. This country would be half it size without litter.

All types pass by on the glossy-wet street below. Some stumble off and on the pavement like a silent film drunkard. Young people, seemingly in competition to see who can dress the most ridiculously, wrap arms around shoulders and necks in an attempt to create a kind of multi-legged creature more suited to the challenges presented by an undulating world. Big-bellied, arm-swinging, bald-headed grinning fools lurch forward as if pulled by a rope. Barefoot women with too-thin cardigans held over their heads wave their shoes in the air.

Most people walk without noticing the rain, though it falls hard. It is drunkenness, perhaps. More likely it is Britishness. They either walk as if always in rain, or walk in the rain as always. I can't decide.

A group of men orbit themselves as if following badly drawn concentric circles, eating chips from styrofoam square bowls. They cross the roundabout by its diameter. One drops his styrofoam container right at the roundabout's centre, lets it bounce off his leg and pays it no attention.

Taxis speed past, take the corners hard. Slope-shouldered men's faces are lit blue by the screens of mobile phones. Fat women huddle together. Voices call out. The world is orange and glistening. It is Friday night in P Town. And it keeps raining.

Eight things I loved about April

~ 8 ~ Writing: Why, yes, I have added this to every eight things list this year. So? I still love writing. Though, sometimes I'm not sure "love" is the best word. I feel compelled from deep within to string letters into words and words into sentences and on and on. I feel incomplete if I go long stretches of time without doing so. I love telling stories, I love yammering on, and I love the feeling of my mind spinning. The way in which all of that most obviously manifests is in the experience of writing.

The actual act of writing is, in fact, quite wearisome and nowhere near what films always lead you to believe. I frequently lament this -- that I have no great oak desk, for example, buried beneath wobbling towers of paper, and sat in a sun-bleached room of a cabin or beach hut or whatever. I have, instead, a hallway and a cheap pine table from IKEA. I hardly move when writing, so my body grows cold. My eyes start to ache and blur slightly from staring at the screen of my laptop. I do not write things by hand -- that is stupidly inefficient and whole strings of thought are too easily lost in the time it takes to scrawl out a phrase rather than type it on a keyboard. Nor do I use a typewriter. I prefer a laptop and have grown quite fond of my Macbook, specifically. I bought a typewriter once in high school and enjoyed using it only slightly more than walking around with a fish in my pants.
Actually, I have never tried walking around with a fish in my pants; I might enjoy it.

Once I have finished writing a passage I am left to go back over it, think about it, think about it, think about it, and usually hate it. Jenn comes home and I am either still lost in my head and un-talkative, or inclined to moan about how whatever it is that I'm writing isn't good enough and what if no one will print my book and what if I never amount to anything and woe is me.

But it's what I want to do. Being a writer isn't a great deal of fun. Neither is cleaning a toilet, however. The former activity gives me far more a sense of purpose and worth than the latter. So, I love doing it. I would rather not do anything else.

Thanks to the Easter holiday, April provided me with a fortnight of time to work solely on my book. I am never happy with what I manage to accomplish in any given space of time but I did get a lot done. At the moment, I am a little over the 50,000-word mark, with about 30,000-40,000 more words to go before I have a complete first draft.

~ 8 ~ Various day adventures: Money is tight these days. It's rarely otherwise where Jenn and I are concerned, but we make do as best we can. Fortunately, her majesty's United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland affords a fair number of opportunities to do things for little or no cost. Such is the beauty of things like the National Trust and the National Parks system. The UK is not unique in these things, admittedly -- indeed, such areas are far larger and more wild in my home country -- but the benefit here is that it is better integrated; these places are usually closer to where all the people are.
In both cases, of course, enjoying things that are free or low-cost usually hinges upon agreeable weather. It rained through most of April, but Jenn and I seized whatever opportunities we could. Early in the month, we cycled from our flat in Penarth out to Dyffryn Gardens, which is one of our favourite spots. Originally the estate of some extraordinarily wealthy person it has been in the care of the Vale of Glamorgan (the county in which we live) for a few decades and will soon be taken over by the National Trust, which will likely bring a boost in funding and help to ensure that it remains a very pretty place to spend an afternoon.
On the other end of April we got it into out heads to walk along the River Usk, from the village of Usk to Abergavenny -- an overall trek of roughly 16 miles. The trip was mostly along scenic river valley and only once did we have to run across railroad tracks, followed by a four-lane highway followed by an airstrip. No, really, the path actually led us on such a comically dangerous course.

~ 8 ~ Getting to see Jenn do something she cares about: Jenn started work in April for an organisation that helps to promote sustainable transportation in Britain. She is part of a project aiming to inform people in Penarth and the immediate area about the sustainable transportation options available. I knew already, of course, that the aims of the project were important to her, but had I needed any additional proof it came on her first day of work when the number of flirting texts I received through the day dropped considerably. She is focused and keen to work hard. She comes home at the end of the day completely exhausted but does not complain and would not have it any other way. I am happy for her and just a little bit jealous; I think we all wish for that job where we feel like we are affecting positive change.

~ 8 ~ Eating candy with Sarra Elgan: Oh, the places you'll go. The Welsh language, for all the unpleasant experiences it has delivered me has also, I have to admit, quite often added colour to the great pinging hullabaloo that is life's path. In April, for the purpose of marking no particular occasion, I was invited to the studios of BBC's Radio Cymru to be a guest on the "Dafydd a Caryl" programme. It is your basic mid-morning chatter of the sort that is so popular in the UK and so uncommon in the United States. Americans seem to prefer to listen to screaming people (be it about politics, religion or sports) at that time of day. In the Soggy Nations, it seems, we prefer to listen to people talking about affordable fashions or how to make good Welsh cakes or the mundane affairs of mundane celebrities or just about anything else unlikely to induce a screaming test of Godwin's Law. In the case of my visit, the conversation topic was candy: which side of the Atlantic Ocean has the best.
When I got into the studio, the show's producer eagerly showed me an entire tray of British and American sweets. She explained that Goobers would be pit against Maltesers and these against those and that against this -- about 30 different kinds of sweet in total.
Regular host Caryl wasn't in on that day and was being replaced by guest host Sarra Elgan, of whom I have spent many years saying perverted things in Welsh. In my book, Cwrw Am Ddim, there are a number of paragraphs dedicated to the idea of knocking boots with Sarra Elgan. I had never met her before, but now here she was, sitting right next to me and I spent the whole time feeling like a pre-teen boy who is meeting a WWE Diva and trying very hard to: A) be cool; B) not stare. She was friendly and charming, which is one of those talents that attractive people seem to pick up, and laughed in that sort of way that gets you all excited when you are a bit starstruck ("Hey! I said something to make her laugh! I am the most awesome person ever!"), and the half hour or so of radio slipped by. In the end -- to my surprise, because I was intentionally trying to favour the home team -- American candy was deemed the best. I walked out of the studios feeling happy and energetic, and as I stood on the Danescourt platform, waiting for my train back to Penarth, I suddenly realised that it had been my most fun, most enjoyable experience in the Welsh language since going to visit Llŷr at Oxford in November 2009 (a).
And I have to admit that made me a little sad. Almost three years had passed since I had felt really, really happy in a Welsh-language situation. Too often my Welsh is only used to talk ad nauseum about my Welsh. I talk about the language and learning the language and being an American. Though, should any BBC types be reading, I should probably point out that I do not mind so much talking about American things, such as elections or candy or traditions. I just tire of talking about me as an American and how Americans are different and, oh, isn't it fascinating, in a flea-circus sort of way, that an American would teach himself Welsh. And I find myself indebted to Lowri Cooke, who, it seems is behind almost all of my opportunities to speak Welsh outside of the American Welsh Learner context. She was responsible for my being on a programme many moons ago about Cardiff, and again for my spending a surprisingly long time talking about mince pies on live radio in December, and again for my getting the chance to swoon next to Sarra Elgan as I ate Hot Tamales.

~ 8 ~ The return of Great British Menu: Unintentionally, I seem to have a rule about British television, which is this: if it's not on the BBC I won't watch it, and if it is on the BBC I will watch it, no matter what it is. This can be the only explanation for my tuning in to Great British Menu, the programme that pits top-level chefs from various British regions against each other, whittling them down to a super catering team for a banquet of 100 really special people. In America, this programme would somehow involve things catching on fire and, perhaps, a fair bit of shouting. In Britain, this programme is just three blokes in a kitchen, each staring intently at potatoes and lettuce -- sweating profusely as they attempt to balance said items on a bit of carrot.

Still, Jenn and I are faithful to this silliness, regularly cuddling up on the couch to find out what will happen next in the great saga of uptight white men who all effectively make the same thing but in different ways (ever notice that desserts are about as inventive as an episode of Davey and Goliath?). At the end of it, they get to cook for olympic athletes, which, I would think, should not be all that difficult. Give them something other than a protein shake and they'll be happy.

~ 8 ~ Signing up to get a weekly Riverford box: Jenn and I have a National Trust membership, she works for a sustainable transportation organisation, and now we are having organic vegetables delivered to our door each week. Middle class, we are you.

~ 8 ~ The Artist: About a month or two after everyone else, Jenn and I finally went out to see The Artist in April, which was, surprisingly, just as good as everyone says it is. You get the sense that such a thing is really a one-off concept, though I am certain it will be copied several times before people accept that to be true. Nonetheless, it is well done. It's no Silent Movie, mind (I mean how can you best anything featuring Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise?), but still pretty good.
It reminded me of my college days in Moorhead, when the head of the film department would organise evenings at the Fargo Theater in which they would bring in a Wurlitzer organ and have someone play a silent film's soundtrack, as would have been done in the silent film era. In doing a quick internet check, I see that the Fargo Theater is still there, which makes me feel a little better about the world.

~ 8 ~ Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen: I really liked the strength of writing in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Interestingly, though, the more distance I have from it, the less I like it. It was a novel about New York depressives being depressed and doing the New York depressive thing of having a kind of scab-picking addiction to bad life decisions. Thinking about it now, I feel exhausted and frustrated. At the time, though, I enjoyed the book well enough that I really was not able to put it down. Perhaps my memory is being unfair, because immediately after reading Freedom I read Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, which is, essentially, another novel about New York depressives being depressed and doing the New York depressive thing of having a kind of scab-picking addiction to bad life decisions. So, maybe my mind has looped them together into one enormously long and tedious experience. Maybe not. Freedom is plenty long and tedious on its own. But still strangely good. I find a lot of the themes to be annoying, but I would recommend it.
Primarily, however, the reason I list it amongst my eight things for April has more to do with the fact I am loving reading so much more in 2012 than I did in the year previous. At the moment, I am reading my twelfth book of the year, which means I am soon to have accomplished one of my New Year's resolutions. Reading the book also got me thinking about the modern American literary voice: what is it? And I would like to find some good modern (i.e., published within this century) American authors who are not writing from an East Coast perspective. I'd like to avoid the California voice, as well, I think, because it, too, is so prevalent. One thing I'd really be interested to read is quality work from a Southern or Latino author (or a Texas or Minnesota author, because of the personal connection). Anyone want to make a suggestion?

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(a) I feel I should also mention the fun of being a goof with Anni and Gwilym during our graduation ceremony last summer.

She has not seen the pan

This is a passage from an email my mother sent me recently; a story about my grandmother, Libba:

In addition to the four herons who are nesting and raising their babies in her pecan tree, she's had a couple of episodes with bats inside the house.  The first involved a bat that was flying, running into the ceiling, knocking itself out. The second time it did this, she was prepared with a big pan, which she used to cover it.  Now familiar with the bat protocol, she called the police even though it was 11 PM.  Two of them came to the house promptly but with no more than a paper sack.  Borrowing a large vinyl garbage sack from Lib, though, they were able to capture the bat, pan and all and remove it to be tested for rabies.  She has not seen the pan, but the report came back negative for rabies.

May.day

No one has ever fit so perfectly in my arms as Jenn. You would expect me to say that, she is my fiancee, but it is also genuinely true. My arms wrap around her easy, we entangle into perfect holds. Strange, wonderful submission holds. The cuddle trap.

That I could feel so strongly about her after a year and a half -- still wanting in all moments to hold her close and breathe her in, indeed, wanting her more than ever before -- suggests a longevity to our relationship that is at once incredibly comforting and just a little bit terrifying. Always and forever means always and forever carrying the mistakes, as well as the good times. I am fearful of making really bad ones. Of course I will leave the toilet seat up or spill wine on her favourite dress or awkwardly joke with her brother about his sex life. There will be mistakes. But I fear making big ones -- mistakes that never become funny with time, mistakes that erode, mistakes that somehow act as tiny burrs to ruin those perfect moments when we are wrapped in each other.

It is the first morning of May. May Day. We are lying on our sides, pressed warm and safe and happy against one another, our arms and legs in a tangle. The alarm rings for the third time and I can feel in the muscles along her ribs that Jenn is really going to get up this time.

"OK," she sighs.

And already, at 7:15 a.m., the best part of my day is over.

I bury my head in her pillows and breathe her smell as she gets up and heads to take a shower. There is the sound of her moving around, getting something from the kitchen, the bathroom door closing, and now just the rain. It has rained nonstop since I can't remember when. It seems my feet are always wet. I feel the last time I saw the sun was five months and 5,000 miles ago, when Jenn and my father and I went for a walk along the Minnesota River, though I know that to be factually untrue.

I hear the rain hit the windows and the pavement below and the roof of our downstairs neighbour's almost-certainly-not-built-to-code extension. The rain finds its way into all corners of our 130-year-old building and drips down from a crack in the ceiling to a waiting drinking glass set on the window sill. Drip. Drip. Drip.

My throat is on fire and my body feels weak, aching and shaky. Odd hours, unhappiness and an inability to take care of myself have again conspired to make me ill. This would be deserved if I were coming home from the pub at midnight thrice a week. But my hours are a result of teaching night courses and having to rely on public transportation. My life is a string of minor illnesses. I feel the last time I was really healthy was back on that walk along the Minnesota River. Though I know this, too, to be factually inaccurate; I had a fever on that day.

My world of raindrops and Jenn smell and pillow softness bends time and Jenn is now back in the bedroom. I hear her rubbing on body lotion, rustling through her drawers, her hair dryer.

"Do you want to get a little more sleep, babe?" she asks.

"No," I say. "I want to have breakfast with you."

I roll to my side of the mattress, feel under the bed for the tracksuit bottoms I wear as pyjamas and hold them without moving. I hear the kettle roar and click. Time bends. I hear Jenn scraping butter on toast.

"M'up!" I shout, finally throwing away the covers and searching the floor for yesterday's underwear.

There is tea and toast and two kinds of jam. Jenn eats muesli, which, if you've never had it, is exactly as appetising as its name. Muesli. It sounds like a Victorian ailment: "Me da' can't work the mines no more. He got the muesli, he does."

Jenn is running late, as usual. I have never known her to operate in anything other than a tornado. She does this with a kind of amiability, though -- chatting about her day ahead, how cute the dog is of the person walking by on the street, what she's going to make for dinner, and our plans to see a movie tonight as she consumes museli in great spoonfuls, occasionally jerking her head to look at the clock. She finishes breakfast before me, kisses me, says "I love you" six times and heads to work. The door shuts and again it is just me and the sound of rain. The radiator. The clock.

I finish my tea, find some ibuprofen to help with my throat and spend an hour or so looking for jobs. I want to work in Bristol. There is no particularly solid reason for this, but for the fact I am so burned out on Wales and, more to the point, my constant applying for jobs in Cardiff, Swansea, Newport and all points between has not resulted in employment despite more than six months of real, actual, not just saying I'm trying but really trying.

At midday I take the train into Cardiff city centre to attend an informal interview at a temp agency.

"How did you find the test?" asks a young woman in a headscarf. "Alright?"

I am lost in trying to decide whether I know her. I feel like I do, but can't guess where from. She looks to be of Somali origin and suddenly I feel a kind of embarrassment as I wonder whether I think I know her just because I am, in fact, a dumb white guy who deep down inside thinks that all black people look alike. I tell myself this is not true and quickly recall the distinctive faces of various black people to prove my point: Carl Weathers, Florence Griffyth-Joyner, R. Truth. I have probably just seen her around town, I decide. Cardiff is not so big and I have lived here six years.

This all takes place in an instant. Her question about the skills test I took a fortnight ago finally filters into my head. Strangely, my brain offers the Welsh phrase "digon syml" as a response and then stalls out in searching for a tactful, intelligent English equivalent.

"Oh, uh, uhm," I say.

"No need to be worried about it," she smiles. "You did exceptionally well. You scored 98 percent."

She asks me questions about what work I'm doing at the moment, my availability, whether I'm willing to travel, and so on. She does not ask me what kind of work I would like to be doing, but I volunteer this information, anyway.

"If it were at all possible, I'd love something commensurate to my experience and skills," I say.

She smiles at me gently, as if to say: "You'll get what you get."

I emphasise my Welsh fluency and my two university degrees and all my years of experience and the fact I am good at all kinds of things, knowing that telling her all this doesn't matter but needing to because there is no one else to tell it to. I have had just one job interview in the last year. She listens politely and writes nothing down.

"At the moment," she says, lilting her voice in that South Wales way of letting you know that whatever follows is going to be disappointing, "we're probably looking at nothing coming up until July. So, don't be concerned if you don't hear from us for a while."

July.

I walk back to the train station, almost getting run over by a bus I didn't see. On the train platform there is an old lady wearing an eyepatch that is decorated with a silver bespangled butterfly. I cannot help but grin. Rain patters on the metal awning and I hear a sea gull tumble-walking just overhead. Trains roar and announcements rattle and brakes squeal and it rains and rains and rains.

Back home, I take off my wet shoes and make lunch. I eat my hamburger sitting in front of my laptop, watching YouTube clips from the previous night's Monday Night Raw. I watch wrestling a lot these days. It is so ridiculous and predictable, it is about the only thing I know will not make me cry.

Afterward, standing at the window and eating an orange, I find myself thinking of the doctor's office down the road. I went in to be treated for depression in January and was put on a waiting list. I am still waiting. I think, too, of the white trash fathers of some of the friends I had growing up in Dallas or Houston. I don't know if they were drunk -- I was too young to identify such behaviour -- but I did know they rarely seemed to be anywhere but the couch. I can remember wanting, even at that age, to reproach them, wanting to say: "You know, I don't ever see my dad in the middle of the day. Because he has a job. He's working."

Their laziness annoyed me. It felt like some kind of weird airborne disease -- the muesli -- that you could breathe in and never shake. I hated being in those friends' houses. Once, when I was a very young boy, my mother had to console me because I had woken up from a nightmare in which I had grown old and amounted to nothing. I feel now that wastefulness, that uselessness is on me. Despite the work ethic of my own parents and my friends and all the things I've achieved, I feel I cannot shake the sapping illness of being a big waste of space.

My throat hurts. I feel ill. I feel old and tired and stupid and far away. I feel like a big mistake.

A letter home: 27 April 2012

My dearest Emma --

Greetings from the cluttered, cheap IKEA table that is my desk, in the drafty, windowless hallway that is my study. I have been uncontrollably homesick lately, Emma -- so much so that at times I melodramatically feel it could literally stop my heart -- and that is a condition that induces thought of all the things I am and am not. This desk is where I tell myself I am a writer; it is where I sit and feel frustrated that my claims to such a title have not been quite as profitable as I would have liked. It is where I feel overwhelmed by the exhaustion of chipping away at success.

I have to modify my lament about profit, of course, because some of my writing has actually paid off. Welsh-language magazine Barn pays me for the columns I write; with no real promotion whatsoever, at least one copy of The Way Forward is bought every month (who are these people, Emma? I love them); though no one is buying Cwrw Am Ddim anymore, I can't really complain about the rental car it paid for, a few years ago, when I went on a road trip in the United States; nor can I really complain, considering the overall lack of success in my previous efforts, about the generous bursary recently awarded to me by Literature Wales.

But you, Emma, being a figment of my imagination, know better than anyone that I can't help but complain, anyway. I may be a writer, but I am not a really successful one, which is something that bugs me to no end. Especially when I can't afford to buy Jenn dinner, let alone pay for tickets for us to fly to the States, so I can overcome some of this homesickness.

What I wish, Emma, is that I were successful enough to own a little cabin on some lake in Minnesota. Like the cabin on Nameless Lake in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, but without all the infidelity and tedious middle-aged unfounded personal misery. I would go to that cabin for weeks at a time and write novels that would sell more than one copy a month. Occasionally in the summers, I would travel down (or up -- I gots love for southern Minnesota, too, yo) to the Cities to sit in the back yards of friends' houses, drinking Miller High Life and saying snide things about the Twins bullpen. The rest of the time would be spent here in Her Majesty's Soggy United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, because they don't have Toby Keith here, and I wouldn't want the burden of homesickness to shift to Jenn's shoulders.

All this may be a tad unrealistic. Probably it is. I mean, this two-home-owning, straddling-the-Atlantic-Ocean fantasy seems to assume that I will develop an interest in the Twins' pitching staff. Presently, I cannot name a single player on the roster, save Joe Mauer. And right after typing the previous sentence I felt compelled to quickly check that Mauer is, indeed, still on the roster.

So, one of the questions I ask myself when I sit at my table/desk and pine for better days is: what is Good Enough? At what point can I feel not so unhappy with my career, not so false in claiming to be a writer? Is that point a monetary thing? Not really. Though, I do want to be focused primarily on writing and, by extension, I feel that means not being distracted by other income-aquisition methods.

Certainly, at the moment -- and especially on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays -- I feel I would be doing Good Enough if my writing could somehow get me out of teaching Welsh classes. The connections to that world (Welsh-language society) are very painful and I am frustrated that I am still not able to sever them.

Though, I'll admit that some part of me would miss Ebbw Vale. In a strange way.

You should have seen it recently, Emma, as the town did its best to get spruced up for a visit from the Queen. She and Prince Phillip are taking a road trip up and down and across the UK in celebration of her 60 years of rule. I'm not sure why Ebbw Vale was placed on the visit list. Perhaps, sensing that death is not so impossibly far away, she is keen to visit places that will help her feel better about a permanent departure from this sceptre'd isle.

Whatever the reason for the visit, the townsfolk were keen to give her a welcome. Stretching through the whole of town were brightly coloured bunting (pennant flags), swooping back and forth across the road, from building to building. Individually, the flags looked ragged, like discarded women's underwear, but the overall effect was festive. In each shop, cafe, hairstylist and even tattoo parlour were hung Union Flags and more bunting, featuring the Queen's face (I wonder what it must be like to always have people waving pictures of yourself at you everywhere you go). Flower beds were installed near the non-functioning built-too-look-hip-and-modern-but-now-looks-old-and-busted-in-its-painfully-obvious-and-failed-effort-to-look-hip-and-modern town clock. Enough barricades to hold back the population of the entire Ebbw River valley were set up. And the Scouts were sent out to sweep, or, at least, stand around with brooms and high-visibility jackets and occasionally shout at girls whilst God did the actual work of cleaning the town by simply making it rain nonstop.

On that particular day, I didn't mind so terribly that I had to be in Ebbw Vale. I felt kind of happy about it and thought about how much I like the Queen and how she and all the silliness inherent in the continued existence of her position is one of the things I love about living in Britain.

I like the British monarchy, Emma. I will make no attempt to defend the idea of a monarchy, but its hollowed-out form here is quaint and totally harmless and loveable. It is like a grandparent one never has to worry about losing. One day, theoretically, there will be no more Queen Elizabeth II, and that will be sad, but her awkward son will be there to take her place, and then her awkward grandson and then his awkward son or daughter and so on. They will always be there to put on silly clothes and wave uncomfortably at whoever happens to wave at them. They will be there to offer a kind of consistency, a tiny feeling of comfort that some things will remain always the same. It is like the way my grandfather would always give me a pack of Big Red gum when I was a boy. The way my grandmother still always makes poundcake when I visit. Tiny, unchanging things. But with the added comfort of knowing they will always be there.

Imagine that, Emma: imagine if someone could say to you, "There will always be a place where poundcake will be waiting."

There will always be silly people in their silly clothes to wave at you and even, maybe, woodenly shake your hand if you've managed to do something special (like, perhaps, sell considerably more than one novel per month). That promise of an always is something you don't get too often in real life.

One of the greatest pains of homesickness is knowing there will be change; there is change, and it is happening without you. They will bitch about the haplessness of Carl Pavano (I looked him up) without me. Their kids will grow and all the huge, universe-shifting changes inherent in child-rearing will take place beyond my scope. Get-under-the-coffee-table summer storms, and thank-God-we-have-plenty-of-hot-chocolate winter blizzards, and I-cannot-believe-a-tree-can-make-me-cry-like-this autumn colours will come and go and come and go without my seeing them. And as they do, the things I know will shift. And perhaps, Emma, the home I am sick for will disappear. It will become something different, something I no longer know.

But then what about all the open-every-window-in-the-house soft breezes that blow in the British spring and summer? What about bottles of wine and big, eight-hour dinner parties? What about making snide comments about Strictly Come Dancing? What about watching the children of Jenn's friends grow up? What about getting to spell "colour" with a U, and dusty old churches, and comically tiny roads, and actually getting to be one of the people the Queen waves at ?

And that is the worst thing about this homesickness, Emma: I realise there is no escape.

At least, not until I sell a few more novels. So, I suppose I had better get back to work on the book I'm writing at the moment.

Elsewhere, things here are OK. I have been unsuccessful -- despite intense effort -- in finding full-time work, but I keep applying. Jenn is liking her new job and trying not to think of what will happen when her contract ends in August. The previous two facts don't bode well for my wish to buy a new TV in time for the Olympic Games, but I remain hopeful. The weather has done nothing but rain for the past week. I am trying to improve my health by going to the gym more often. I remain on a waiting list to see a doctor about my depression; they put me on the list in January.

I miss you, Emma. Usually you are where my heart wants to be, so I don't really know where you are these days. I hope you are, at least, well. Please send nude photos.

I remain your faithful friend,
~ Chris ~

Eight things I loved about March

~8~ Turning 36: I'm not sure I'm exactly happy about turning 36 years old. I suppose I am happy that I didn't not turn 36 years old -- i.e., I'm happy I lived to be 36 years old -- but I didn't really do a Finally Made It To 36 jig on the morning of 20 March. Perhaps I should have. After all, as of that day I became two parts eligible to run for president of the United States (I remain ineligible, however, because I have not spent the last seven years living in the country). Additionally in the United States, I became old enough on that day to legally have sex with someone half my age. Here in Britain, I think Jenn would strongly object to the latter and probably not be all that keen on the former, either.
Jenn took the day off for my birthday and we went on a walk along the coast, near Llanilltud Fawr. We ate our lunch on a windy sea cliff and Jenn produced a bottle of ale to go with our sandwiches. Then she put a candle in a lemon cupcake and spent five minutes unsuccessfully attempting to light it. It was the sort of thing that would be in a Why Chris Adores Jenn montage in the film version of my life.
Turning 36 has induced a certain amount of introspection leading to all kinds of laments about whether I could have built a better life by now. I suppose that all depends on the unit of measurement -- something I can never decide on. I too often change the rules on myself to ensure that I lose.
The negative spin is that of an unemployed, bankrupt and artistically limited misanthrope growing a year closer to his death. The positive spin is a budding author sitting in the soft, thick Marram grass with a beautiful girl -- the two of them in love and laughing as they share a birthday picnic -- knowing that he has within him the ability to fulfil his ambition. 

~8~ Progress Wrestling: Celebration of my birthday carried into the weekend, when Jenn and I travelled out to London to visit with my old friend, Jennifer, and her husband, Dave. Seeing Jen and Dave is enough a treat in itself. I've generally come to put them in the mental category of "family" rather than "friends," so fond am I of them. That fondness has rubbed off on Jenn to the extent she will sometimes copy their style in decorating our flat.
The weekend was one of good food and games and deep talks and cheesy jokes. But it was highlighted by the fact that we went to see a show put on by the fledgling Progress Wrestling promotion. It's pretty well-established that I am fond of professional wrestling and one of my favourite wrestlers, Colt Cabana, was part of the show. I was looking forward to it but worried it would bore/annoy my companions. As it turned out, we had a great time. The crowd was vocal and it turned out to be one of the best overall wrestling shows I've ever seen (though I've seen better individual matches).
One of the highlights was getting to meet Colt Cabana and shake his hand. I walked away from the experience with an autographed Colt Cabana T-shirt, which is now my favourite article of clothing ever. I may insist on wearing it on my wedding day.
There's a fair bit of footage to give you a feel for the show on my vlog from that weekend.

~8~ Writing: I've been adding writing to my list of eight things for a few months now, but keep in mind that I spent almost all of 2011 in a kind of writer's block. Memory of that writer's block keeps me in a state of constant fear and uncertainty about my writing. I still feel I am not really clicking as I could, and I am terrified to wake up one day and find that I have again lost that strange mental-emotional filament that connects talent and ambition and industriousness to create good writing. Each month that passes in which I can claim to have actually written something more than a Welsh-language column and an Eight Things post, is one for which I am thankful.

~8~ Being awarded a bursary by Literature Wales: At the moment, the primary focus of my writing is on the book I've tentatively titled Tales of a Toffee-Covered Llama. In March (and the last few days of February), I received an emotional boost in writing the book when I got some good news that I wasn't allowed to tell anyone. I made reference to it in February's Eight Things post. I can now finally tell you the good news is that I am to receive a bursary from Literature Wales to work on the book. I wasn't allowed to publicise that until the unsuccessful candidates had been informed. Myself having thrice been an unsuccessful candidate for this bursary in the past, I could imagine how much it would suck to have received rejection in a secondhand way like that. Rejection is shitty, but it's worse when it doesn't come through official channels.
When the 2009 Book of the Year list was being compiled I thought I might have a shot with Cwrw Am Ddim. I found out that I was not on the long list when Siân mentioned her book, Y Trydydd Peth, being on the list well before it was released to the public. For some reason, finding out that way made it hurt worse.
Tales of a Toffee-Covered Llama will be my second English-language book and I am hoping it will have a bit more support/momentum/success than The Way Forward. The fact I've received this kind of an endorsement from Literature Wales makes me optimistic and has given me a sense of purpose that I was somewhat struggling to develop before. I am hoping to have a solid version of the book, ready to be torn apart by an editor, sometime in mid- to late-summer.

~8~ One year of vloggery: As one creative outlet builds the other ebbs. March saw the completion of one full year of vlogging every day. It was an interesting project and has provided me with an audio-visual record of thousands of little moments that are otherwise lost in the day to day. It was a good reminder that life is not so horrible as I sometimes feel it to be when lost in the grip of my swingy-uppy-downy broken brain. But the daily vlog was also incredibly time-consuming. "Writer" is the single word I am so desperate to use in describing myself. Being a daily vlogger was, I think, cutting into that. So, as soon as the anniversary was reached the nature of the vlog was changed. I am now putting up videos just twice a week. That may change, too. We'll see.

~8~ Jenn getting a new job: There is some sort of bloggery conventional wisdom that suggests I should not tell you the organisation of which Jenn became an employee in March, though I'm not entirely certain why it would matter. Without doubt, Jenn is very happy to have gotten the job and proud to be doing something that makes a difference in terms of both health and environment. For the next several months she will be part of a campaign encouraging people to make more use of sustainable transportation like trains, buses, bikes, feet, etc. I am very proud of her and, I will admit to you, just a bit jealous that she has an opportunity to do a job that actually means something. It is one of those jobs I've always dreamed of having.

~8~ Interviewing for a job: This one is kind of a lie. I didn't love interviewing for a job. I didn't love the job for which I was interviewing. I didn't love being rejected for the job. I didn't love how the job for which I interviewed mishandled that rejection. I didn't love continuing to be poor. I didn't love continuing to be out of full-time work. Indeed, there is nothing to love about the fact that I have been mostly unemployed for so long. It has become a kind of weird mental plague of its own, sapping me of my limited self-confidence. And it is something which exacerbates my natural swingy-uppy-downy broken brain. It is a slow, inescapable muck that makes me bitter and fills me with sickness (physical and mental). I hate how useless and impotent I feel, and that anger spills all over the place into things that may or may not be directly linked. For instance, few are the days I do not want to open the window and shout, "FUCK YOU, WALES," despite the rather valid argument against placing blame for the global economic downturn on the shoulders of one of the global economy's least influential players. That's just how I feel, man.
But what I do love -- and when I say "love" what I mean is "take melancholy pride in" -- is that I am carrying on. The job interview I had in March was the first in more than a year. Being rejected was crushing. But I am back now to applying constantly, building contacts and trying. Always trying. I have dreams of one day selling books, but in the meantime I am pushing, trying to find something that will pay the bills, something that will help us build up enough money to pay for a wedding, something that will help us build a better life.

The art of wrestling

Eddie was supposed to be the bad guy, Edge the good guy. That's the way it works in professional wrestling: there is almost always a goodie and a baddie, a face and a heel. The themes are pretty ancient, though we rarely diverge from them in any other art form. It is basic storytelling, the stuff they explain to you in literature courses when you are 11 years old: there is a protagonist, an antagonist, a building of action, a climax and resolution.

The tradition of pitting two individuals against each other and paying to watch them beat the tar out of each other is ancient, of course. As is the tradition of staging such a thing. In Shakespeare's As You Like It, the plot turns on Orlando's success in the ring. There is no real reason to have the scene but to amuse the crowd, in the same way there is no other reason for the five minutes of fart jokes in Macbeth. Some theatre companies see the connection between the modern and what Shakespeare was doing. Many moons ago, when I was a member of the Guthrie Theater company, I taught the actor playing Charles the wrestler how to strut like Ric Flair.

Professional wrestling as an art form in and of itself, however, is generally attributed as having developed in the carnival sideshows of the early 20th century. And yes, it is an art form. Think of how you would define art -- especially any art that involves movement, such as dance -- and professional wrestling will fall into that definition. It is a violent art; its themes are often simplistic; it still possesses a great deal of its old sideshow feel; but it is an art.

There is beauty and skill: the wrestlers arc and turn and twist their bodies to create forms of action and power and grace. Before and within the match they tell a story of conflict, struggle, triumph and defeat. The easiest comparisons are those to dance or bullfighting, but wrestling is also very much like poetry in that there is quite a lot of it that is awful.

Just about every moody teenager has at one point or another attempted to apply to him- or herself the label of "poet" because he or she has the ability to string together a handful of melodramatic and heavy-handed phrases. I am quite confident in stating that the overwhelming majority of all poetry is shit -- in the way the majority of the planet's surface is water. Similarly, yes, the majority of professional wrestling is embarrassing to watch (for example: anything involving Christopher Daniels). But we live our lives on the land; we pick out the poetry that has beauty and worth. 

This match is the one I often use to support my argument that wrestling is an art. It is a match between Eddie Guerrero and a man known simply as Edge, which took place in November 2002 in San Diego. In a way, it is a strange example to use because its internal story forced a change in the external narrative. It is an example of wrestling's beauty in part because it breaks with wrestling's norm.

In the WWE -- easily the most-recognisable of the literally hundreds of wrestling companies around the world -- the matches are often part of a greater narrative. This is done to build the emotion of the in-ring stories. If you spend weeks learning that Person A dislikes Person B because A used to be B's best friend but became jealous of his success and felt, too, that B had spoiled his chances of finding true love with the woman B now so poorly treats (even though, said woman doesn't see it this way), and so that is why he sabotaged B in front of his family, it adds to the in-ring story. B isn't just fighting to win, as he and every other wrestler does almost nightly, he is fighting for pride and revenge. And on and on. The themes, as I say, are pretty ancient.

Frequently, though, the narrative isn't so complex. In the old days, it was as simple as a good guy fighting a bad guy. In some companies the bad guys all wore black boots, the good guys white boots, so the fans knew whom to boo and whom to cheer. In the match between Eddie Guerrero and Edge things were somewhere in between. Eddie was a bad guy because, well, that's what he was. Edge was a good guy because, well, that's what he was. 

Watching the video, you see that as soon as he steps out from behind the technicolor wall, Eddie is insulting the crowd, lurking toward the ring with his shoulders hunched, occasionally stopping to snarl and insult people. He had been doing this for a while. This is what he did. 

Edge runs out as the good guy. He excitedly cheers the crowd as they cheer him. He climbs all over the ring posts and ropes and poses and encourages the crowd to be a part of the noise and excitement. He had been doing this for a while. This is what he did.

There was no real explanation of why Eddie was bad and Edge good. They just were and had been that way for a while. And as such, they had fought each other a handful of times in the weeks previous. Because bad guys fight good guys. The commentary on the video is misleading, though. It reflects knowledge of the result. Listen with headphones and you can hear clipped audio that was put in after the fact. The announcers try to make more of the animosity between the two than had actually been displayed before the match, because they know it is rare and beautiful and are trying to fulfil their roles of heightening the emotional pull.

I was in the arena that night, sitting roughly 20 feet from the ring. We were all there to see Rey Mysterio Jr. and Kurt Angle and Undertaker and Brock Lesnar. This match between Eddie and Edge we knew was just TV filler. We knew this, in part, because there had been no build-up. There had been no segments showing them speaking to or about each other, no video montage reminding us of their rivalry. It was just a good guy and a bad guy. When Edge came out we all cheered. When Eddie came out, most people booed (I didn't boo because Eddie Guerrero was from El Paso, Texas).

The video clip shows a somewhat altered version of what actually happened. As I say, a certain amount of the commentary was clearly put in after the fact. That reflects the reality of the in-ring story: no one knows how the story is going to go. The end is predetermined, of course, but a great deal of what happens in the wrestling ring is made up in the moment. This is some of the art of it. The wresters read the crowd and piece together sequences and steps along the way. Watch them in headlocks, or when Edge swings his hair down into his face -- the two are communicating, giving quick instructions to one another. Throughout the match there is a hidden conversation about what comes next.

Early in the match, the story goes according to the usual script. We cheered the good guy and chanted, "Eddie sucks," at the bad guy. Eddie tries to cheat on a pin, in Spanish he tells the San Diego crowd (where roughly 40 percent of the population speaks Spanish) that they are a bunch of "goddamn wetbacks;" Edge gets out of a headlock by encouraging the moral support of the crowd.

But somewhere along the way, things shifted. The in-ring story stepped beyond the narrative and you saw instead the flow and movement and line and beauty and story. It became something amazing rather than just a cliché battle between good guy and bad guy. For those of us in the crowd, I think the shift came after a ladder was introduced and then seemingly abandoned as a weapon.

A ladder as a weapon. It's art, but certainly not in the classic sense.

The wrestling fan gets used to looking for a "high spot," a particularly impressive sequence that is often a wrestler's signature. Usually that move leads to the match's end. And in WWE, usually that end comes in about seven to eight minutes. And, indeed, at about seven minutes into the match Eddie sprints up the top ropes and flips Edge over his shoulders and back down to the ring. But no pin. Edge "hotshots" Eddie out of the ring and charges at him with a ladder. But no pin. The match moved back into the ring and Edge delivered his signature move, a "spear." But no pin. The match kept going.

Watch the crowd at about 12:30, after Eddie has again flipped Edge off the top rope. Eddie goes for the pin and many jump up thinking he has won. The metanarrative is being played with; people are cheering the bad guy. A few minutes later, you can hear people chanting his name. I was one of them, though, by that point, you likely would not have heard me. I screamed so much during that match that I actually lost my voice for two days after.

The "sunset flip" is what sealed my voice's doom. With both men atop a ladder, Eddie dives over Edge, grabs him at the waist and brings him into the ground. When Edge kicked out from the inevitable pin you can see that we all went nuts. Not because we cared about the good guy anymore but because we couldn't believe the match was still going on.

"What more can they do?" I remember shouting. "What more can they do?!"

When the match was aired, I found that several minutes had been edited out of the match. Watch it from about 16 minutes and you see the crowd is jumping at everything. This actually carried on for a long time. The two spent a great deal of time soaring through the air at each other -- flipping, turning, twisting. A strange dance to the rhythm of crowd cheers. After each "spot" we would cheer the wrestler's names.

Then, at the end of the match, after Edge has secured the good-guy win, the good guy/bad guy narrative struggles to hold together. The commentators, of course, praise Eddie's effort but the scene you are supposed to see and hear is one of celebration for Edge's hard-fought victory. But that's not actually what happened.

We cheered the match, of course. But as Edge is celebrating you can see that most people have, by now, actually stopped making noise. They are standing and staring not at Edge but at the immobile Eddie, hoping he is OK. They are pointing to the blood coming from his forehead, looking at him in concern. As Edge is limping up the ramp, notice that the cheering stops abruptly. It's an audio flub; we weren't cheering. We were all looking at Eddie.

Eddie sat up but stayed pretty still for a long while, far longer than is implied by the video. Indeed, the video becomes incredibly misleading at that point. In real life, Edge's music faded out and all the cameras shifted back to their spots to prep for the next segment. Only then did Eddie finally roll to his feet, which got all of us up and cheering, chanting his name. Clearly the cameras were still rolling and some of that footage was captured and aired. The video makes it seem that Eddie's music played in the arena. It didn't.

There was no music. It was just an exhausted man and thousands of people standing and knowing we had witnessed that rare poetry that can come in something so ridiculous. Edge came back down the ramp and the two hugged and we cheered and chanted both their names. I lost my voice.

I had long been a wrestling fan before then, and long argued that it is some kind of art. But that match is when I felt there truly was something strangely wonderful to be found. There is beauty to be found there.

-----
Eddie died almost exactly three years later, his heart giving out after years of drug and steroid abuse. He was 38 years old.

In April 2011, Edge retired after suffering a number of neck injuries, which have left him suffering numbness and occasional loss of feeling in his limbs. He is 38 years old. 

Eight things I loved about February

~8~ Jenn's birthday: Easily, the highlight of the month was celebrating Jenn's 29th birthday -- not so much for what we did but simply for the fact that Jenn is awesome. It's fun to celebrate the people you care about, even when your method of celebration isn't all that creative. As we did last year, we celebrated Jenn's birthday with a trip to the Thermae Spa in Bath.

Bath's name, of course, comes from the fact that it is home to natural hot springs that have served as a draw since the pre-Roman age. For a while, though, it wasn't actually possible to bathe in said waters because the British people are like that: people come to a place for thousands of years to experience something and then you just sort of close it down for a few decades. It's like not having music in New Orleans -- just a museum where you can look at musicians.

But all is well these days. My favourite part of the Thermae Spa is the rooftop pool. It's a pool on a rooftop, yo. Does anyone know if we have such a thing in Wales? Hell, do we even have any outdoor pools in Wales?

After lounging in the rooftop pool (and mineral pool and steam rooms) until our fingertips were wrinkled, we went to dinner at a Tibetan/Nepali place that is now toward the top of the ever-expanding list of reasons why I love Bath. Someday, Historic Bath, I will make loads of money and live in you. I will have a house near the centre of town and friends will come to visit and tell me that my life is like a film.

The next day, a number of Jenn's friends came over for a birthday lunch that dragged into a birthday afternoon, a birthday dinner and a birthday evening. One of the things I love about Jenn's friends, Clint and Laura, specifically, is they remind me of characters from Hemingway's life.

~8~ Writing: I know I listed writing as a thing I loved about January, but I was still writing in February and still loving it. In February I found a bit more of my stride and the half-term break allowed me a week off teaching to focus on the book that I am now certain will actually become a book. When I wrote The Way Forward (only £1.97?! What a deal!) and Cwrw Am Ddim I had a belief that there existed some magical word-count point of no return: a number of words which, once written, would ensure completion of the project. Because who would write, say, 25,000 words of something and then just walk away?

This guy. I did that with the never-to-be-completed Sgidiau Caerdydd (your loss, Welshies) in 2010. To some extent, I feel that action initiated or, at least, exacerbated my very long stint of writer's block. Each time I would start in on something, some part of me would think: "Hmm, what if I abandon this project, too? Well, in that case, why am I even starting it?"

I seem to have a good head of steam for Tales of a Toffee-Covered Llama, however, a clear idea of where it's going, and a relative sense of how long the whole thing will take. Knowing how a book ends and having at least a vague idea of when I'll get there helps in its writing, I think. I write best when I've drawn a good map. I have long said that if I were to ever teach creative writing I would spend a certain amount of time focusing on the task of plotting shit out.

~8~ The good thing I can't tell you about: It's a secret, bitches. I promise to tell you later. Feel free to offer guesses in the comments.

~8~ Masterchef: I'll be honest with you, my brothers and sisters from other mothers and misters: February wasn't the most exciting month. Jenn and I spent the bulk of it fretting about money and I'm pretty sure the sun only came out once. Finding eight things to love about it is a challenge. Writing and celebrating Jenn were enough that I will not have this February eliminated once I become President of Time, but it was not so great that I shall enter it into The Great Book of Awesome Months. I struggle to think of eight actually loveable things. February was a month of muddling through. One way we did so was occasionally losing ourselves in unchallenging television.

Masterchef, for those of you playing along at home, is an example of such television. It is a programme in which a great slough of amateur cooks are whittled down to one, who is then given a kind of trophy that looks very much like that old paperclip fella in Microsoft Word. Each of them insists that cooking is their "passion" and that it "means everything" to them that they win and that they hope to one day open a restaurant. I always find this last part to be especially ridiculous. Do you know anyone who runs a restaurant? They are the picture of stress and woe. And here are a load of people who can't even remember to put their damn panna cotta in the blast chiller on time. Fools, I tell you. Damned fools. 

But Jenn and I enjoyed cuddling up on the sofa and watching it all.

~8~ The long train journey from Penarth to Ebbw Vale: You probably wouldn't identify a five-hour roundtrip commute as something to love. And often it's not. Such as when I'm standing on a cold train platform at 11 p.m., wishing I could just be home with my fiancée and watching bad TV. But there is all that time to read and think, which I have come to really value. I like finding a seat over one of the rattling, inefficient heating vents on the train and simply getting lost in a narrative -- my own or someone else's -- as South Wales blurs past. It is not the sort of luxury or style I envisioned when I thought of myself living in Europe -- Arriva Trains Wales is the Dodge Aries of public transportation -- but it is pleasant in its own rundown way.

~8~ Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey: One of the books read on those long journeys up and down the Ebbw valley was Parrot and Olivier in America, a book about a French aristocrat visiting 1830s America along with his begrudging servant. It is a book I had wanted to read for a while, since I heard it reviewed on an Economist podcast. I am a total mark for the Economist. They sell themselves as being a magazine for intelligent sophisticates and I fall for it like those boneheads who vote Republican because they see it as a party of the rich and they want to be rich. The Economist sells itself as something for the intelligent middle-class, and I buy it because I want to be intelligent middle-class. Well, actually, I don't buy it; I can't afford it. I listen to the free podcasts. And on that podcast I once heard them talking about Parrot and Olivier in America and decided it was a book I wanted to read because people with posh accents were talking about it. A few years later, I finally did read it -- on a Kindle, on a train, in Europe -- and I felt very good about myself. Although, I'm not entirely sure it was all that great a book.

~8~ Blogging just a tiny bit more: I seem to be managing a blog post a week these days. It is not always gold, I'll admit, but I suppose I don't really mind since the number of people reading could fit easily into a Ford Aerostar (two economy car jokes in one blog post! Boom!). As I am happy to be writing a book, I am happy to be producing extraneous stuff. My mind is working, yo, I am alive and not dead. Which is usually a pretty good thing. Unless you are Franco. If you are Franco, you really should be dead -- Spain buried you more than 30 years ago and they aren't all that fond of you anymore. Go back to being dead, sir. It's best for all involved.

(Wouldn't it be funny if my blog was the first point of reference for zombie dictators?) 

~8~ Breathing: I search my memory each month to think of things to put in these Eight Things posts, but there are often simple things left out. Unlike Franco, I am not dead. And I'm sure I'm not thankful enough for this simple fact. I have a body and mind that usually function relatively well; I have a beautiful fiancée; I have food to eat; I have a place to sleep. Air comes in and air goes out -- all the time, never stopping. The other day, the sun was shining and I found myself walking down the street humming the chorus to Brother Ali's "Fresh Air" and thought, too, of the song's first line: "I'm the luckiest son of a bitch that ever lived." In our own ways, many of us are, indeed, pretty lucky. I am, too. The air keeps flowing in and out of my lungs. I watch crappy television and rumble along on outdated trains and dream and read and think and live. What's not to love?

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi yng Nglyn Ebwy

It is St. David's Day in Ebbw Vale. The feeling of life, though, comes more from the sun -- far rarer on this island than the days of its myriad patron saints.

Along the row of houses opposite the train station there is a church I had thought abandoned. Today a man stands precariously at the end of a ladder, stretching to scrub clean one of its windows.

"What's the best way to Tredegar," a girl asks me. 

"Not sure," I say. "I usually walk into town. From there, I guess I'd look for a bus."

"Oh. Close, is it?" she asks.

"About two miles."

She communicates inaudibly that two miles is not close. I point toward a bus stand and let her know a service will be along in about 40 minutes that can take her up the hill. Probably to Tredegar, too.

The sun is shining as I walk along Festival Drive. Behind me the last of the morning fog blends with blinding sunshine so the valley is radiant in soft white, as if a Glamour Shots photo. As I near town, the once-beautiful buildings have a new feel to them. Each defect is clearer. It is hard to say when Ebbw Vale looks most sad: in the rain, when misery soaks into the stone; or in the sunshine, when there is no greater misery to disappear into.

On Church Street I can hear the call of a rag-and-bone man, singing out over a megaphone as he drives along. You might have to look up what a rag-and-bone man is. They are things of the past, but they exist still in this valley where many other jobs don't. Atop one of the buildings a group of men sit on scaffolding, listening to the radio and hammering at something. I suspect they do not really know what they are doing. I suspect it does not really matter. It is one of a whole row of abandoned buildings. 

Further up, a county worker, in shining high-vis jacket, swings into a handrail with a large, splintered chunk of wood. A car has run into it and he is trying to put it back into place.

There are more people to be seen as I near the Seven Arches. Phlegmy smoker's coughs echo down the street. All around is the hollow clink of cheap NHS crutches -- fashion accessories of the South Wales Valleys, worn to assist in the pursuit of state benefits. The sun shines as I reach the wide stretches of pavement along Bethcar Street and I am struck by the colour-drained, well-worn nature of the coats and jackets shuffling here and there. Faded brown, weary black and the occasional dirty pink.

"For fuck's sake, mun, no," shouts a girl down a phone. "I don' fuckin' wan' tha' does I? Jus' pu'my fuckin' 'hings whe' I cahn fuckin' fin' 'em an' fuckin' go, like."

No one notices her. An old woman with tree-trunk legs stands at the edge of the road and darts her head around like a bird before crossing. 

A wide group of wild-eyed skinny men flank each other and stretch across the whole of the space before me. They walk with that mad drunk-drugged strut. I wonder when they last spent 48 hours sober. Three are walking down the middle of the actual road and as a car pulls up behind them, one looks over his shoulder and seems to taunt the driver before slowly drifting to the pavement. He ends up being right in front of me. In an instant, he sees me then pretends he doesn't -- because these guys are tough only when they don't look you in the eye. I stop walking, stand and let the group part around me. As they do, I breathe in the cider and cigarette smoke so strong I can taste it.

Large women stand in groups chatting, smoking, scolding their children. Simply shouting, "Rhys, fuckin' stop it!" causes four different boys to snap to attention. When there are just two women, they stand face to face, their meaty arms folded across their wide chests. Outside the Wetherspoons, two bent-over old men hold to each others' shoulders and gesture with cigarettes as they talk.

My classroom sits on the second floor of the LAC, or the first floor, depending on which country you're from. From its window I look out past town to the soft, old hills that rise up on either side of the town. Old stone walls divide it up like a children's drawing. Sheep and horses graze. Jackdaws circle and dive and soar across both worlds, seemingly the only connection between the two.

"Sorry I wasn' here las' week, Chris," says one of my students. "But I finally had a chance at gettin' a flat, you see. I been waitin' almos' a year, I have."

My head processes that she has been on a waiting list for a council flat. Some part of me tries to form an opinion about welfare housing. It seems that's the sort of issue on which a person should have an opinion. But I don't really.

"Canolfan means centre, don't it Chris?" she says.

"Yes. Da iawn," I say.

"Yeah, I saw it the other day when I was signin' on," she says. "Always learnin' I am."

Another student shows up with Welsh cakes for the class. They all get lost in a discussion of how awful the English are. Wisps of cloud stretch across the low blue sky. Arrow-straigt contrails seem to stretch the horizon. Two horses chase each other on the hill in the distance. Along Market Street a tall transvestite walks with a dirty, wooly dog strapped to his waist.