Driving on the left side of the road was nerve wracking as hell. The roads in Scotland seem to be much more narrow than the roads I’m used to, and Anne kept telling me that I was veering close to the left shoulder, almost letting the wheels go off the road.
It took me nearly two full days of driving, but I did get used to it, and I even figured out the proper way to navigate a roundabout, which was not the victory it may sound like, because it was the final roundabout I used before we returned the rental car.
Scotland was the most beautiful place I’ve been that wasn’t in the South Pacific. The highlands were just breathtaking, and for some reason we got perfectly clear skies and sunshine the whole time we were there. The thing I wasn’t prepared for at all, though, was how dark it got at night. There weren’t any streetlights. Now, Americans, let me be clear: I don’t mean that there weren’t a lot of streetlights, or that the streetlights were dim. I mean that there were literally zero streetlights. When we drove back to the house we were staying in after dinner in Portree one night, I could only see as far as my car’s headlights, which wasn’t even 30 feet, before the darkness swallowed up the light.
We took 8 hours of trains yesterday, from Scotland, to get here for Destination Star Trek, the only Trek convention I’m appearing at this year.
It was an amazing and beautiful ride, and it made me wish that America had a train system that was even half as useful and relevant to where people actually travel as the British Rail System is (I don’t know if it’s supposed to be capitalized, but it earned it, so there.)
We are now in a hotel, and I said to Anne this morning that it feels anticlimactic to be here. After several days in the Scottish Highlands, sleeping in cottages, and driving down tiny sheep roads to get from place to place, it just feels … plain. It’s nothing against the hotel or anything, but if you have an opportunity to travel, even though hotels are familiar and predictable, I highly recommend giving the alternative a try.
Scottish countryside, from the train.
I’m going to miss Scotland. In fact, I already miss Scotland. It was so beautiful, and it was such a wonderful experience for me, I feel like I recovered a lot of HP and Mana that I didn’t know had been depleted. I’ll have more pictures to share and more words to write about it once I’ve properly processed and reflected upon the time we spent there.
Anne and I have spent two days in the HIghlands, and we love it here. We will return someday, when we can spend more time and do more things.
I took about 5000000000000 pictures, but the Internet is slow and wonky where I am, so I can’t upload them at full resolution. Here’s a few of them, resized:
This castle is very old.
This is Urquhart Castle, which is on the shore of Loch Ness. That ruined tower has been ruined longer than my country has existed.
That’s Loch Ness, as seen through an ancient window in the castle.
They’re very good castles, Brad.
This is Eilean Donan, which is famous for being in many movies including Highlander. I’d list the others, but there can be only one.
We didn’t go into this one, but we did have tea in their little restaurant and it was awesome.
There really are sheep everywhere in the Highlands, and no matter how much I try to befriend them, they aren’t having it. I’m kind of glad they always run away when I get about 30 feet from them, though, because there aren’t many things in the world as funny as watching sheep run, with their stupid little legs.
My incredibly small sample size of about a dozen people indicates that everyone here is incredibly kind, and they don’t make fun of my accent.
Sometimes, I feel like I don’t look terrible in a photo.
Just about one year ago, I took an honest look at myself and I didn’t like what I saw. I needed to reset a lot of habits, make some significant changes to the way I approached just about everything in my life, and keep working at it, even when it was hard.
I can’t even believe that it’s already been a year, and that it’s only been a year, because time feels like that when you’re 44, I guess.
Here are the things I decided to address:
Drink less beer.
Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
Write more.
Watch more movies.
Get better sleep.
Eat better food.
Exercise more.
Some of these things have been easier than others, and from month to month (and even day to day) what happens to be easy and what happens to be hard are constantly changing. I know that’s an obvious thing, but I say it because we can forget that, and consequently be unfairly rough on ourselves when we don’t live up to our expectations.
But most of the time, I look like this.
I know a lot of you who are reading this have been doing reboots of your own, and I want you to know that, no matter where you are in your personal journey, I am super proud of you. I’m not the boss of you or anything, but I give you permission to be proud of yourself. Go you!!
So let’s dive in here and see how things are going:
I’ve been busy in 1983 for the last couple of weeks, working on this thing that I thought would be about 3000 words, but is now ten times that, and isn’t as close to being finished as I thought.
Yesterday, I worked really hard to get out not a lot of words (under 400), but that’s okay, because I was working on a scene that’s super important to the rest of the story, and if I got it wrong, it would be like one of those mathematical errors that’s may be only slightly off, but compounds over time until your spaceship ends up crashing into the sun instead of landing gently on Titan.
I was still unsure about yesterday’s work when I started today, and I’m unsure of it right now, but I decided that I have to trust my instincts, not overthink it, and just keep going. I even said to myself, “the only way to keep going is to keep going and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.”
Once I accepted that it may not be totally right, but was not totally wrong, I was able to get back into the narrative. We’re still at Universal Studios. Here’s a little bit from when the tram drove through the backlot exteriors.
It was totally magical to me. They were all just facades, and none of the sets were dressed with anything more than signs painted on the windows, but I thought it would have been the coolest thing in the world to be on any one of those streets when they were being filmed. To look around and pretend that I was in New York, or Chicago, or the Old West, or wherever Dracula was from – Bulgaria, I thought? – and only have to use my imagination a little bit, because set dressing and lights and costumes would do most of the work … that was incredible to me. At this point in my life, I’d only done a couple of small parts in some little things that have been lost to time (they don’t even exist on YouTube, and I know because I’ve looked), and a handful of commercials. I didn’t want to be an actor as much as my mother wanted me to be an actor, and most of the time if you’d asked me I would have told you that it wasn’t something I wanted to do when I grew up. But riding past all those fake buildings and seeing all that movie magic –
“What’s wrong?” Evelyn said.
“Huh?” I said.
“You … you look … sad.”
This still happens to me. I think about things, I get lost in my imagination and in my own thoughts, I retreat from the world and the people who I’m close to, I’m told that when I go to that place in my head, I always look sad, even when I’m not.
“I’m okay,” I said, “I was just thinking.”
This is a work of narrative fiction, mostly stuff that didn’t happen with stuff that did happen mixed in. Some of it, like my memories and thoughts about working on a backlot, are real, and other parts of it are … less real. It’s fun to imagine and remember, remember and imagine, and listen to the characters when they have something to say or do that I wasn’t expecting.
In real life, I was always disappointed that there wasn’t more of a backlot at Paramount when I was working there in the 80s. There is now, and it’s pretty cool, but back then it was just a single facade for the TV show The Bronx Zoo. When I go to work at Warners for Big Bang Theory, I always drive through the backlot, and I’ll even go for walks through streets I know from The Twilight Zone, The Dukes of Hazzard, even Casablanca, when I have long enough breaks during production. I don’t think I’ll ever become immune to the magic of a studio backlot, or a set that’s totally immersive, a little bit of imagination made real on a soundstage.
The version of myself who is in this novella probably doesn’t grow up to be an actor like I did. I’m pretty sure he grows up to be a writer, because … well, that’s all in the story and I should probably just leave it at that.
As I get closer to finishing this thing, I don’t plan to keep doing updates like the ones I’ve done the last week or so, because I want to keep the story behind the curtain more than I have. These parts have been fun to share, though, because I enjoy knowing that they spark some of your memories about the early 80s.
Driving on the left side of the road was nerve wracking as hell. The roads in Scotland seem to be much more narrow than the roads I’m used to, and Anne kept telling me that I was veering close to the left shoulder, almost letting the wheels go off the road.
