The Bureau

I finished my roadtrip with a journey into the interior of Washington State. Around 40 minutes' drive from Seattle lie the towns of Fall City, Snoqualmie and North Bend, all used during the filming of David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series.

To say I'm a fan of Twin Peaks is something of an understatement. An ex-boyfriend introduced me to it at university and I've returned to it constantly since. I'm a Lynch fan anyway, but something about Twin Peaks stands apart for me, possibly because the atmosphere it evokes echoes very closely the place in which I grew up in the north of Scotland (lots of trees, lots of grey skies, although no handsome FBI agents, sadly).

I'm not going to start analysing TP, but I can say that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the location holds all of the atmospheric magic that comes across on screen. There's a dividing line somewhere on Highway 202, after which I felt a change in the environment that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. First, it gets gloomier, the sky more melodramatic. The dull suburban landscape of the Seattle hinterlands is replaced by mountainous countryside, and as you divert from the highway onto the back roads around Fall City, you notice what made FBI agent Dale Cooper stop in his tracks on his first approach to Twin Peaks: Douglas Firs. Magnificent, swooping evergreen trees that add majesty and menace to the landscape.

I drove on to North Bend, site of Twede's cafe, which was used as the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks. The original building burned down a few years ago (things seem to burn down frequently in this area, adding a nice little link to the 'fire walk with me' theme of the series). The current owners milk the connection by supplying coffee in Twin Peaks mugs, and the compulsory slice of cherry pie. Both the coffee and the pie were excellent, but I was disappointed not to find Norma or Shelly serving behind the counter. Twede's is staffed by young men who listen to death metal in the kitchen. They're fearsomely polite though. My server repeatedly referred to me as 'ma'am', which I kind of liked. There were a bunch of snotty local high street kids drinking malt shakes in there. I think they cottoned on that I was a tourist, and I could hear them talking about some of the old characters in Twin Peaks. The back wall of the diner is covered in memorabilia - some beautiful photos of the actors resting between sets and messing around in the diner, as well as many interesting newspaper clippings.


Damn fine.


Buzzing neon.


Twede's cafe/Double R Diner

After my slice of pie I doubled back to Snoqualmie, which is the home of the magnificent waterfalls that feature heavily in Twin Peaks. In a moment of madness I'd booked myself into the Salish Lodge at the top of the falls, the exterior of which is used to represent the Great Northern hotel, run by TVs greatest crook, Benjamin Horne. There were no members of the Horne family in evidence at Salish Lodge, just obsequiously polite staff (American servers are incredibly polite anyways, but when you're spending a lot of money they really lay it on with a trowel). Once I'd checked in I had time to observe the falls from my window, and then to wander out to the observation deck to look at them more closely. They are over 100 feet taller than Niagara, and the noise the water makes as it hits the bottom is intense. There's an almost smoke-like quality to the spray that rises from the pool. I peered closely and saw a lone swimmer - a tiny figure barely visible in the dark waters. He tried to get close the torrent but couldn't manage it, and in the end resorted to basking on the rocks. I wonder if Agent Cooper ever took a dip?

Great Northern/Salish Lodge


View of the falls from my room.

Snoqualmie itself is satisfyingly weird. There's a railway museum with some excellent burnt out old rail cars and a log that would give the log lady something to think about. I spent longer than necessary hovering the bookstore listening to a truly extraordinary conversation between the owner and a young man. I didn't get the entire gist, but the old man was reminiscing about his time as a reporter during the Vietnam war and both praising and berating the young man for deciding to become a journalist. "You knew what you were signing up for," he muttered ominously at one point.


"My log saw something."

I snooped around the back streets, finding an intriguing crime scene behind the hairdressers and buying some unironic owl mementoes in the hardware store. The man behind the counter was completely deaf, and also slightly doolally. He rung up my purchases three times, giving his wife plenty of time to welcome me to the area and to encourage me to head out on some of the mountain trails. Snoqualmie is dominated by Mount Si to the east, and the actual Twin Peaks to the north. They hover in the skyline, sort of inviting you at the same time as making you nervous. I bought some maps even though I knew I'd have no time for trekking.


Snoqualmie crime scene: but where's the sheriff?

My evening was spent in disgusting luxury: lounging in the spa, drinking very pleasant local wine and eating local cheeses. I fell asleep to the sound of the falls and the crackling of logs from the open fireplace in my room. Everything about the lodge (even the fact that it's called a lodge) was reminiscent of Twin Peaks: from the carpets with native American design to the wood panelling in the corridors. No one pushed a note under the door during the night and I wasn't served a glass of milk by a shaky octogenarian, but perhaps that was just as well.

The next day I went hunting for other famous Twin Peaks locations. I got lost looking for the building used as the Sheriff's department, but I did manage to find the Sheriff, skulking in his car in an empty car lot at the top of a very steep hill. As soon as I arrived he started up his car and drove off in a hurry, perhaps off to an assignation with the bookhouse boys.

I did manage to find the building used as the Roadhouse, which lies at a junction in North Bend. It's still called the Roadhouse, but seems to be some kind of upscale restaurant. I had a quick nose about but by this time I was running late and had to cut short my investigations.


The Roadhouse

As I rejoined the highway I had a sudden sense of loss. Just as the atmosphere had changed when I crossed some invisible line on arriving, so the feeling left me as I moved away. While I was there I told myself to enjoy the experience as much as possible because it was unlikely I'd ever come back. Now I'm not so sure. Aside from its association with a rather bizarre old TV series, it's a place worth visiting for its own sake. I've put the maps up on my wall to ponder.

In Seattle now, theoretically at the end of our journey, in mileage terms at least. We have covered the whole of the west coast, pretty much (should really have started in San Diego). 1040 miles as the crow flies, many many more the way we traveled it: some inland routes, some along the coast. We did everything we wanted to do, except go to Yosemite. We had to make do with the redwood national parks instead.


Redwood!

California
California was long, and hot and overwhelming. Further north it got more relaxed. We stayed in a small hippy town on the coast called Arcata. It was straight out of a David Lynch film. Intensely weird, intensely creepy, shrouded in mist. Three of the tallest men I have ever seen I saw there (two were brothers, I think). We ate in a darkened, cavernous restaurant with a stage and backdrop hidden by thick heavy drapes at one end. The waitress was freakishly beautiful. She was in love with one of the tall men. They embraced in an alcove at the side of the room. She stood on her tiptoes and stared up into his eyes while he stroked her arms. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Something about them made me very happy. I don't know why, except that they radiated love for one another. Maybe that's enough. On the way home that night I got pulled over by a cop for turning right from the wrong lane. I sat quietly and waited for him, knowing nothing would happen. As soon as he heard our voices his whole tone changed. He told us he used to live in Hungary; explained he had to pull over anyone driving erratically as 'this town is rife with people who smoke weed and drive badly'. Wished us a good night and went on his way. I enjoyed the whole experience, like the tourist I am.

Biscuits
I had biscuits and gravy for breakfast one morning. Biscuits seem to be part scone, part rusk, part macaroon (without the coconut). Gravy seems to be more like macaroni cheese than actual gravy. The whole concoction is vile, but I'm glad I tried it.


There's biscuits in there somewhere.

Breakfast
We eat a large breakfast at the start of each day's drive and then skip lunch. Breakfast is always immense, always accompanied by endless coffee, and is always followed by a massive insulin crash (for me) which means I have to sleep in the car for an hour even though I've been sleeping well most of the trip. Sometimes I have French toast, sometimes waffles, sometimes pancakes, eggs, bacon, links, maple syrup, strawberries, cream. It is intense, and addictive, and I am very glad I won't be able to do it anymore when I go home. More and more I am impressed by the many people in this country who have managed not to become obese.


Breakfast: it's political.

Oregon
At first, Oregon is no different than California, except there are more trees. We kind of skipped through this state. It's not so big, and the drive we chose was kind of dull. We slept through Eugene (the low point of the trip for me: tired, overly emotional, fed up of all the driving and searching for motel rooms and no privacy). The second day we made it to Portland, and things improved. We settled in one place for a couple of nights. It's a nice city - not how I imagined it. More spread out, more focused on the river, gentler vibe. We hung out in a student district, ate some very good sushi, watched the expensive people and their expensive mutts. I went to see Food Inc at an indie cinema and promptly regretted everything I'd eaten over the previous ten days. Still stunned by the fact there are only thirteen (thirteen!) slaughterhouses in the whole of the United States of America. We celebrated my birthday on the fourth by driving to the beach. This involved four hours in the car, which has come to mean a short drive in this country. Cannon Beach is beautiful, epically beautiful. Everyone there is happy and wealthy and nice. We stayed on the beach for several hours, reading, digging holes, listening to kids playing (even on a baking hot day the Pacific is too cold to swim in). Some little Asian American kids came over and stood by me shyly. I looked up from my book. They wanted to know if they could have some of my sand (I had a pile of sand beside me). I told them it was ok. They were so happy I almost cried behind my sunglasses. We headed back to Portland for the evening fireworks. Sat by the riverside with thousands and thousands of people, watched the display. It took half an hour, building to an epic finale. People clapped and roared as the intensity of the fireworks increased. By the time they erupted in a final shower of red, white and blue I was clapping too. Went out for drinks with some friends of a good old friend I have recently gotten back in touch with. They told us how untypical of America proper California, Oregon and Washington are. 'The recycling stops on the other side of the mountains,' as they put it.


Portland dawg.

Washington
Washington is colder, sparser, further north. It feels like a relief to be here. It feels a thousand miles away from LA. Our first stop was Tacoma, for a mission most tourists don't get to experience in this country. In 1913, when my then three-year-old grandfather was naturalised an American citizen his address was a residential area of Tacoma. To my surprise, when I entered it into Google maps, up popped the same address, still residential. Not sure why I was surprised, but I was. I guess everything feels a lot less than 100 years old in cities here. It didn't take us long to find it: a rustic house with a wooden tiled exterior, a beautiful tree outside and the gutter hanging off. The whole street was filled with unique, picturesque wooden houses and had a lovely atmosphere. The blinds were drawn but two cars were parked outside. I decided to be brave and knocked on the door. One of the fattest men I have ever met opened it. His name was Art. His wife's name was Sandra. Sandra was also very fat. They had lived in the house for 23 years and were slowly renovating it. They very kindly ushered me inside and answered my questions. During the renovations they had discovered the original insulation materials in the walls: newspapers from 1911, from which they had dated the house. As my grandfather was born in 1910 I guess maybe his father had built the house. Art explained that 'none of the walls are straight'. Art And Sandra didn't ask us any questions: seemed a little shy. I didn't overstay my welcome, but I would have liked to have stayed and sat under the tree for a while (Sandra told me it was a weeping birch, and that her children wanted her to cut it down as it blocked the light but she never would.) It still seems extraordinary to me that I have traveled so far in this strange and alien land, only to have found a tiny patch of my own history - a place that, on some level, I have been to before.


Grandpa's house!


Tomorrow
Tomorrow me and my bro are breaking ranks. He's going to search for Jimi Hendrix's grave in Seattle. I'm going to a place I have visited before many times in my dreams and my imagination. If you know me well, you can guess where I'm going. If you don't, you can guess anyway. Time to go and choose an appropriate shade of lipstick.

The trip has become a trip. Initial wonderment has been replaced by a strange mixture of emotions. There are long periods of driving, through sometimes extremely beautiful and sometimes quite monotonous terrain. There is so much of everything in California - millions of redwood trees, endless miles of sun-bleached grass, vineyard upon vineyard, closer to the coast just mile after mile of grey haar. The haar is almost constant at the coast, which is both a relief after the boiling interior and a nuisance when we want to see the ocean and sit on warm sand. We zigzag back and forth between the two, and it creates a strange natural mirror of my moods: open and optimistic for part of the day, sunken and muted the rest. There is so much time to think. When I'm driving there is almost nothing to worry about - an automatic car and wide empty roads make for an easy drive. When I'm the passenger car sickness means I can't read or move around too much. To be honest this is not much fun. I spend most of my time thinking anyway, and at the moment there is a lot to perturb me. I'd rather the distractions of company and events, but instead I am thrust into an uncomfortable confrontation with thoughts I'd prefer to escape from. In a way it doesn't help that I'm traveling with my brother. Unless something happens on our journey, there's not an awful lot to talk about - we already know pretty much everything about each other's lives. I feel a little guilty for being glum some of the time.

That said, the last few days have been extremely eventful, and there have been some moments where I've thought to myself: "this is one of the coolest things you will ever experience". Some examples:

Driving
I've always been dismissive of Americans and their attachment to their cars, but until you visit somewhere like California and start driving yourself, you can't really comprehend just how dependent this nation is on the automobile. Take somewhere like Mulholland Drive for example. It's IN Los Angeles, and yet it is so high up and isolated from amenities. There are houses all along it, but no gas stations, no stores, no hospitals. It's in the center of a massive conurbation, but if its residents didn't drive, they'd literally starve to death. Out in the sticks the distance between houses and amenities is just staggering. I don't think I could live here purely because I'd feel so vulnerable to the price of oil.
That said, I had the most amazing driving experience of my life the other day. I drove us from Monterey to San Francisco, a drive that takes in an incredible freeway that winds down through spectacular hillsides, and another that cruises up Silicon Valley and then hits the city. We finally got the iPod to work and I caught my first glimpse of San Fran to the sounds of Yello's 'Oh Yeah'. Fans of Ferris Bueller will appreciate the juxtaposition. Driving a big SUV along an American freeway to a classic song - that makes you feel all conquering and all powerful. No wonder these people cling on to that part of their way of life with such defiance.

Animals
On the way up I've had the chance to see elephant seals and sealions up close in their natural habitat. So close, in fact, that I can tell you elephant seals are STINKY, and sealions are total posers. No matter how low I'm feeling, animals always manage to bring me out of myself. They're just so much themselves, so idiosyncratic, and somehow so similar to us. Americans adore their pets. In fact I've even seen anti-PETA advertising exhorting Americans to stand up for their 'right to own a pet'. Our preferred motel has a welcome policy to pets, and so there are generally happy looking dogs bounding about and barking up a storm. It's nice.

Strangers
My poor brother took ill yesterday, after some dodgy Chinatown seafood in San Fran. He was forced to spend the day in bed, and so I was forced to go out and make my own company. We were staying on Geary Street, on the edge of the tenderloin district, which is one of the skankiest places I have ever witnessed anywhere (waaay worse than anything I've seen in Asia). There were people smoking crack on the street, women covered in track marks, homeless guys wandering around in the middle of the road like zombies, doing scary random shit. This gave me a somewhat unfavorable initial impression of 'America's most beautiful city' and I wandered as far from the hotel as I could get. This meant an overdose of shopping areas and tourist attractions, which tired me out. Somewhat disillusioned at the end of my day, I wandered back towards the hotel. Just a few meters up the street I chanced upon a nice looking coffee bar, with some normal looking people inside. I wandered in and began reading my book. It didn't take long before I got sucked into a conversation with the bar owner (a Turkish Cypriot) and a psychic called Elizabeth (a reformed psychic, to be precise). It soon became apparent that I'd wandered into the epicenter of neighborhood social life. Everyone who walked by popped in to say hello, ask a question, share some gossip, try and sell a stolen bicycle, find a partner to play poker with. I must have been introduced to between 15 and 20 people, each of whom had something interesting to say. At some point a local homeless guy came in and asked to play the piano. I sat there, listening to a bunch of amusing strangers discussing the nature of reality as this guy played one haunting melody after another on this utterly tuneless old piano. It was a truly beautiful moment. If it wasn't for the black poker chip nestling at the bottom of my handbag this morning, I'd think it was all a dream.

My little brother is 28 today. He is awesome - not just because he has taken me to the US for my birthday, but also because he refuses to be intimidated by even the most outrageous challenges:


That's a big salad, little man.


But it poses no threat to the man with the bottomless stomach.

By contrast, I am a mere lightweight. Regardez:


3 delicious, plate-sized pancakes with pumpkin filling: No problem, right?


I managed two thirds of just ONE pancake. At this point I had already eaten so much that I felt very very sick.

Happy Birthday, M!

We arrived in LA on Thursday, to be greeted at the airport by my friend, Ji. After giving me as big a hug as a tiny pregnant Korean lady can muster, she said: 'So, while you were in the air Michael Jackson passed away.' I looked at my brother, who by now had adopted his LA outfit of massive aviator shades and a straw hat: 'No way!' was all we could think of to say.

We both stood slightly dazed while she went to pick up the car. We'd been talking about Jacko on the flight, trying to remember where the Neverland ranch was. MJ was a hero to both of us growing up. As a five year old my biggest ambition was to become one of his backing dancers. Jacko is the reason that I love dancing. We had a cassette copy of Bad that we listened to repeatedly as kids, lunging wildly round our tiny sitting room in time with the music. There's no better music to learn to dance to. Each song has its own internal drama; the tension builds slowly, so to dance to it you have to be able to move both slowly and quickly, and to react to sudden shifts in tempo. Then there's the dramatic gestures we all picked up from watching the man on TV: the hip thrusts, the sudden head turns, the weird jerky chicken thing that really shouldn't work but does. My brother won a dancing competition when he was about six for his ability to moonwalk and pull off other classic Jackson moves. We adored the man. My brother refused to read books when he was little, but he made an exception for MJ's biography.

The whole of LA was abuzz with the news. People were talking about it on the street and on the buses, TV coverage was non-stop. On Friday morning we decided we had to go and see the crowds around his star on Hollywood Boulevard. It felt like fate to us, and we knew we'd regret it if we missed out on participating in this particular slice of history.

We arrived there at around midday. There were fewer people than I'd predicted - maybe three hundred, but with many more gathered nearby and on the other side of the street just watching the drama of all the news crews and the pilgrims. We joined a bunch of people waiting to get behind the crash barriers leading to the mini-shrine that had been placed around the star. While we were waiting news crews flocked around us, thrusting microphones at people to ask what MJ meant to them.


'What did Michael mean to you?'

The thing that most struck me was that nobody (including me and my brother) was sad. There was a sense of excitement, and of a sort of respectfulness, but everyone was having fun, even the LAPD officers around us. When one of the officer's horses had to pee, and the road was temporarily covered in a lake of horse urine, the crowd erupted in gales of laughter. This was a kind of celebrity sideshow, and certainly nothing like the mass outpouring of grief associated with Princess Diana. Gradually we were ushered behind the barrier and formed a line waiting to see the shrine.



On the way we trod over such luminaries as Jack Nicholson (it seems weird to tread on these stars, somehow - almost sacreligious). I was touched to see that Jacko's star is almost next to Mickey Mouse's. Somehow, those two belong together. The atmosphere in the line was cheerful. Some nice people offered to take a photo of the two of us; people chatted and admired the handprints in the concrete outside the Chinese theater. Of course, getting to the main attraction was a total anti-climax. We just took photos and shuffled along, conscious of the many cameras trained at us. But the shrine itself was nicely understated: some candles and flowers, a few drawings and stuffed toys, and a single silver-sequineed glove next to his name.



I think Michael Jackson the person ceased to be real to most of us many years ago. His bizarre behavior and the child abuse allegations (which, let's face it, most of us believe had at least some foundation in reality) distanced him from his fans. In fact I wonder if I am the only person to feel a sense of relief that he has gone. This was not a happy soul, and how likely was it that he would have enjoyed a peaceful and rewarding old age? What we were left with was the music, which was so extraordinary that it transcended the collective repugnance we felt at his decline. In the crowd some girls were complaining that no one was playing his music as we waited. 'We could sing,' someone suggested. But no one was keen - it was Michael Jackson we wanted to hear.

Hung out with my granny in her greenhouse this afternoon (thanks comrade Nibus for reminding me she is 98, not 97). Was amazing to watch her moving about the place. At one stage she started sharpening some rusty old knife against a grinding stone. I wondered with a sort of mixture of awe and horror if I'll be able to do that at the same age - if I'll even be alive.

She started rooting through a pile of old stuff and showing me various dusty old objects. Things we found included:
-a very long, slightly bent, handmade nail
-the tiniest screwdriver in the world
-an almost empty box of bone meal
-lots and lots of poisons for killing small creatures

Then we sat down for a bit. The conversation was a bit pish as she is almost totally deaf and I can hardly speak due to a bad cold. Eventually, in order to fill the silence, I pointed at the very old wooden table next to us and said 'that's a nice table'. 'Oh yes,' she said. 'I got that for Tim when he was in hospital. It used to have castors on it so we could wheel it next to the bed.' At first I thought 'who on earth is Tim', then I froze. She was talking about my grandfather, her husband, who died several months before I was born. In the thirty-one years I have known her this is the first time she has mentioned him to me. I've never seen a photograph of them together, never been shown anything that belonged to him, never heard a story about him or a single mention of his name. If it wasn't for my dad telling me a little about him, I would never have known anything about him.

My dad was thirty when I was born, so my granddad and my granny must have been together at least thirty years before he died. Imagine being married to someone for thirty years and then just completely erasing them from your life. Subconsciously I've always felt I should never ask about him. Odd that very old people sometimes drop these pretenses and start talking about people and events from the past. Do they just not care about it anymore, or is there a sudden desire to revisit old memories in the latter stages of life?

I let the comment pass by. I have no massive curiosity to satisfy, but I let my hand linger on the warm wood of the table (it is quite a nice old table). Oddly, I think I'm happy just to have heard her say his name.

My life, which is typically quite eventful, has been in a state of unusual turmoil for some time now. I've been searching for reasons to explain this, and today I came across a couple of interesting ideas.

The Professor (@memestorm) kindly recommended Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness to me after a previous post on my battles with depression. It is the most scientific account of depression I have come across, and yet still manages to retain a human touch. It explains ideas that I'd encountered before but hadn't fully grasped, such as Seligman's Learned Helplessness model and Beck's extremely persuasive ideas about negative cognitions. Wolpert discusses but is rather dismissive of evolutionary explanations of depression, but I found the idea that depression could be adaptive, in the sense that it encourages the depressed person to accept a subordinate position in a social hierarchy, quite compelling. But there are many other compelling ideas in this book, and I haven't even reached the chapters that deal with treatment methods yet. The big punch in the jaw that I got from this book, however, was the thought that some of my recent life 'choices' have been driven by my biological clock, rather than something more rational and controllable.

Almost six months to the day after my twenty-ninth birthday, my biological clock switched on, just like that. For me this has been a very difficult thing to deal with. In my teens I assumed I would want a family one day, only to realise in my twenties that I really didn't. After ten years of trying to justify this to my family, and getting pissed off with people saying to me 'oh you'll change your mind soon enough' it was an awful disappointment to discover that those people were right, and that I did want a child even though none of my rational objections to the idea had changed one iota. Instead, some biological drive I have no control over just clicked into place, making me feel like an animal, like some kind of blind machine whose purpose is not after all to fill the world with love, light and magic, but just to reproduce.

It took me quite a while to adjust to this change - and to realise that a drive is just a drive, and actually we can control them. But what I hadn't realised is that drives are sneaky things, and they affect us on subconscious levels. This particular drive has been making me cling to patterns of negative behaviour I wouldn't normally have allowed. It's not quite that simple, predictably. There are always multiple reasons why we do dumb things, but I think this has been a big one for me, and it helps to acknowledge it.

The second idea that made me stop in my tracks today came from my friend Amanda. We'd been comparing notes about the awful time we and numerous acquaintances of ours have had over the past year. She mentioned the concept of Saturn Return, which I'd never heard of before. It's the idea that roughly every thirty years the planet Saturn returns to the position it occupied when we were born, bringing with it great upheavals. Now I take a passing interest in astrology, mostly because I enjoy the coincidences it throws up, but even if you think astrology is utter hokum, the concept of Saturn Return makes perfect sense for other reasons. Around the age of thirty things do shift a gear. Whether for social, biological or evolutionary reasons our priorities begin to alter; we are leaving youth behind. I certainly have started to feel that the time for experimenting has passed, and that I need to consolidate everything I have learned and start making more discernible progress in life. I built up quite a successful career for myself in my twenties, but for the last few years I have been stalled in the same position while I have watched my peers progress to enormously stressful managerial positions that I most definitely do not covet. Meanwhile I have picked up the interests in law and social justice that I abandoned after leaving university and am retraining as a lawyer and applying for volunteer positions with various advice agencies. This is a process I am ambivalent about. On the one hand I feel compelled to do it, and can see that it will reward me in ways that my current work no longer does. But the flipside is that I will have to assume 'grown up' responsibilities like working in an office, committing to long-term projects, getting up early in the mornings, dealing with the stress of personal interactions; all things I have very successfully avoided as a freelancer.


Cronus [Saturn] devouring his children, Francisco de Goya

At the same time I have been dealing with tremendous ambivalence about my personal life in almost every arena from where I live to how I relate to my family. I both crave and fear resolution to all these crises, as resolution would force me to move on with my life in new and unpredictable ways. The last few years have felt like a rather indulgent exercise in self-analysis. The concept of Saturn Return would have that this is an essential and ultimately fruitful process, but it is beginning to wear me down. I would love for the next stage of my life to be a productive one, in terms of my contributing something to the greater good, rather than simply learning painful lessons that further my personal development.

If you are interested in Saturn Return, this is a neat summary. Of everything I have read recently it encapsulates my life now, at the cusp of thirty-one, more precisely than anything else.