bonjour! je suis en suisse. comment-allez vous?

Check it out, I’m a big fucking nerd. But Switzerland is lovely, at least the parts we’ve seen. This has mostly been limited to Gryon, the town in which Chalet Martin resides. That’s mostly enough, as sightseeing is a low priority right now. This is the French-speaking part of Switzerland, not the German side, which is fortunate, as I can more or less communicate passably in French, when all that needs communicating is i’d like a hot chocolate and 100 grams of gruyere, please, and some bread, but I would be lost in German.

Not that it matters much. Everyone who works at Chalet Martin is American, and so are most of the guests. There are some Australians, because there always are, and a Northern Irish woman, but mostly this is the most Americans I’ve seen in one place since football season at Bodean’s. Everyone is friendly and they listen to Wilco and the Red Hot Chili Peppers downstairs obsessively.

But there’s not much call for being downstairs much, really- the view from our room’s window is of a mountain range, and we’re about halfway up a mountain ourselves.

One thing that occurs to you when you’re on a mountain is how sky, as a concept, is different from the way you perceive it. Up here, as the sky goes grey, you can see beneath it, and above it, and it all feels very temporary. Low-floating clouds pass directly by our window, and you can look above some of the higher ones, if there’s a mountain peak poking through to give you the perspective to do so.

Meanwhile, re-writes continue apace. It has been such a long time since I was in the process of re-writing something major that I had forgotten a bit what it was like. I do not like it. I remember now why I never really re-wrote poplife even though Scott Taylor gave me hugely detailed notes that I could have easily drawn from- because it is no fun to hear that something you’ve worked hard on is imperfect, and when I was twenty-three I was certainly too lazy and convinced of my own genius to even contemplate investing much time in re-shaping that which had poured forth from my artist’s mind like fucking Athena leaping forth from Zeus’ skull. Or something.

It’s a battle against instinct to do so now, but the rewards are tangible this time- I have put in a good amount of work on the first several chapters, and parts that I disliked I now like. This is exciting.

It’s exciting if you’re me, anyway. If you’re not, I reckon this is boring, but what can you do? I am paying $1/ 5min of Internet access here, so there is no time to make things interesting. Hell no. I have no idea what’s going on in the world except for what I can learn from weeks-old copies of newsweek left by previous residents of the hostel. I’d just slap up some pictures of mountains and be done with it, but I can’t find the cord to hook the camera up to the computer. This is what you might call a half-assed operation.

But what the hell? We’re sticking with it. London is still many days away, so there is little to worry about right now. Do not desert me, friends, and I will reward you handsomely upon my return. au revoir!