DISCLAIMER: Similar events did take place. However, this author makes no guarantee as to the accuracy of the depiction of events presented below. Some parts of this harrowing account may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. I really have to do more with the leeway I give myself with this disclaimer. It’s been 96% factual so far.
Reader discretion is advised.
Finally hit the point when it was just easier to do two of these at once. I hope you guys don’t mind. I think I said daily at some point but I’m so tired I don’t really care. I hope you guys like the picture at the top, I think it might be my favorite I’ve taken on this trip. Really happy with how the shot framing and everything turned out. You can see my younger nephew on the bottom left. He is, as I have said before, a small boy.
I’m trying hard to remember what on earth happened today and yesterday. We showed our niece and nephews Ratatouille. They liked it. They found it really funny. It’s a funny movie, sure, but honestly it’s a really deep movie. Masterclass of a film. Somehow it manages to be funny and say something really meaningful about artists like us… without feeling generic or yelling the themes at us constantly. Certainly a top 5 Pixar film. You can make a case for top 3.
I remember yesterday we played a couple more Smash tourneys. I swept the first one with Ganondorf, then promptly switched to Wii Fit Trainer and swept the first one. Today I switched again to Pokemon Trainer and Mewtwo. I really should stick to my usual guns.
If you guys know Tsum Tsums, we played a game with those yesterday. Like a pseudo-Olympics thing. My nephews really liked it. My niece got bored of it fast. My niece gets bored of a lot of things fast. She’s sweet but kind of demanding sometimes.
This morning when I came downstairs to eat breakfast she came up to me and hugged me. Aw, you might be saying, how nice. But I’m not exactly a hugger. That and her hugs are very clingy, in the most literal sense. She latches onto me like a little monkey Fitz and tries not to let go. Then she says I smell good. (Remember what I was saying about what you might be saying? You might be saying that again right now. Just wait.) Then she smells my armpits. That sounds disgusting but it’s true. Then she revises her earlier statement and says my armpits smell good. (Told you.) And then (yeah, my niece did a lot with me this morning) she got on my case for not telling her she looks cute. Because, apparently, everyone else in the house has told her she looks cute except me. So naturally I had to tell her she looks cute. I probably sound like the cast of Game of Thrones talking about Season 8. I have to say it anyways.
I want to say we also played some cards. I did not win.
Yesterday my family all got together to watch the Euros, because Group F was absolutely crazy. Germany, Portugal, France, all in one group. Unfortunately the Euros thought it would be a good idea to let third placed teams in groups of four qualify, so that sucked a bit of air out of it, but they were still great games. Germany went behind to Hungary early, which meant that they would have been eliminated (again, in a tournament where third place in a group of four is most likely enough to go through!) despite winning the World Cup as recently as 2014. Chelsea’s Kai Havertz (let’s go Kai) tied the game in the second half, which would have let Germany go through, but then Hungary got another goal literally two minutes later, which, as you can figure, didn’t exactly improve Germany’s situation. They managed to get one more goal, though, so they did end up going through, Germany. Good for them. I wasn’t particularly rooting for Hungary anyways. Germany gets to play England in the round of 16 for all their effort. That’ll be fun.
Portugal playing France was the focus of our watch party though. Apparently everyone in my house is a Cristiano Ronaldo fan, big enough to root for Portugal raucously. Me personally, Ronaldo’s a legend of the game alright, but may I introduce you to N’Golo Kante?
OK, look, I am a Chelsea fan, and Kante is at the heart of the Chelsea midfield. But who doesn’t love N’Golo Kante? He’s one of the hardest working midfielders in Europe, one of the fastest midfielders in Europe, tenacious, intelligent, never puts a foot wrong, and is one of the most humble guys you’ll find in a sport full of egotistical divas (the aforementioned Cristiano Ronaldo, for one, although being Cristiano Ronaldo he kind of has a right to be a little arrogant). He makes hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, and instead of a flashy supercar he drives a Mini Cooper. The rest of the French team – witness Karim Benzema, one of the greatest goalscorers of this age! witness Olivier Giroud, one of the most underrated goalscorers of this age! witness Kylian Mbappé, the vanguard of the next generation of elite talents, and, might I add, the partial model for one of my characters alongside one Daveed Diggs! – is pretty alright as well. I understand I just named three forwards and N’Golo Kante, but oh well.
Anyways, the Portugal-France game is a wild shootout. 2-2 draw, and three of those goals were penalties. My parents and cousins make more noise than I’ve heard them make the rest of the trip combined. It’s pretty entertaining. Bring on the Round of 16.
I let myself get talked into getting dragged to a pet shop today. Two pet shops. Like I’m sure I’ve mentioned before my cousins own a half a dozen birds. Somehow my older nephew wants to add another to the collection. Then we go to the fish shop so my cousin’s husband (cousin in law? is that a thing? how does that work? family trees are unbelievably confusing, I have, like, a billion first cousins once and twice and thrice removed but no uncles, but uncles in law, I think?) can get some food for his fish. Here’s a random photo from the fish shop. Definitely not edited. Contrast is your friend.
I was really bored for the hour. I was told it would be fun. It was not fun. I just stood there and did literally nothing. I should have stayed home and written some music. Speaking of music, my cousins have a random set of drums. I like drums. I’m a big fan of drums. Junkie XL and John Powell both use drums masterfully in their respective scores. I try to emulate them where I can but honestly I have no clue how to begin to understand their genius. I just try my best, scoring The Gatekeeper: The Radio Drama. I write the score in Musescore for TRD and use particular soundfonts from Garageband because they sound more realistic (in fact I think I use more Garageband soundfonts than Musescore, it’s just better quality, export the Musescore MIDI file and slap it in Garageband, it’s real easy, there’s a tip for you composers). But I don’t have any really good drum soundfonts in either. At least not on the level that I’d like. So I went and recorded seven minutes of live drum samples for the Radio Drama’s OST. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go and record seven minutes more. It worked out pretty great. I can’t exactly foresee what I’m going to compose in the future but I know I’m probably going to keep coming back to the pre-established musical themes, so I recorded drum beats to those. I get that most of you guys probably have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m sorry.
Also we went to a park. I thought it was the same park as last time so I took a wrong turn, but then I was told, “no, this way.” So I went along the way I thought I was supposed to go, and somehow I took another wrong turn, and had to be told, “no, this way” again. If you can’t tell I don’t have the best sense of direction. Here’s the park:
It’s a nice park. It’s actually huge. This is but a fraction of the park. I’m told it’s a square mile large. My nephews and niece and siblings feed the ducks. There is a sign that says “do not feed the ducks” right next to them. I point it out to them. My older nephew says that the sign says to not feed ducks human food, and rice doesn’t count as human food because it’s uncooked. I guess you really can’t reason with crazy.
I have had fun here but it feels like long past time that I returned home, to my natural habitat, writing and composing and all that. I have no less than three ideas for new works here. None of them are particularly serious but nothing I do is particularly serious. Maybe you’ll see some of them soon. One is me doing my best Star Wars: The Old Republic impression. I’ve always liked the idea of telling stories millennia before a central story (in this case, my first book, which I have to say now because High Seas gonna High Seas). As both a worldbuilding device, fleshing out the lore and the history and finding the little connections you can make, and a storytelling device, looking at a familiar world through a new lens and finding all the great stories you can tell with that, I like it. I might do it soon. I am not sure you guys will understand it because you have a hard enough time with Winter Winds as it is, but I might do it soon. Another one is a riot, that’s all I’m going to say.
I miss writing. I miss Shadows and Gatekeeper and Winter Winds and Santa’s Midnight Flight and the RoxDoc and Nitefall and High Seas and The Holy Testament of the Lord Gibson and yes these are all real things that I write. I miss the Earth so much. I miss my life. It’s lonely out in space. On such a tiiiiiiiiimeless flight…
And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time ’til touchdown brings me ’round again to find, I’m not the man they think I am at home.
Oh, no, no, no.
I’m a rocketman.
Rocketman! Burning his fuse out here alone…
…days five and six survived.
