Now, voyager.

First things first! I will be attending: UNDEAD INVASION. Paris Edition! One of the Paris expat groups is forming a team and I am ON IT.

In other news: French bureaucracy is actual hell. Hell, hell, hell. I have been through several circles of it today. But that's finished. I have a few more blazing hell-hoops to manoeuvre tomorrow and I think they will be a piece of gateau after the miseries of the day which were of course only compounded by the having to have an official ID photo taken. Rules include: DO NOT SMILE. Why? Because that will interfere with the government's biometric face scanning software to be used in conjunction with security cameras, etc., into which database all official ID photos must be ready for entry.

I only wish I was shitting you. Sadly, I am NOT shitting you: these are true facts. AKA, "stuff I am going to throw in the face of the next froggins who tries to tell me that la France est plus libre qu'Amerique, for real. All hair has to be pulled away from the face. No glasses may be worn, even if you wear them every day. You have to hold very very still so they keep you perfectly in the digital crosshairs at exactly the right angle. Needless to say: my pictures are not awesome My hair is doing the wacky also. But whatevs. Operation ID photo is: complete.



It took a long time. I rode the bus. I like riding the bus. However, there are a few tricks to managing the bus to Paris, and one of those tricks is having a pretty good mental map of the city. Otherwise, because the buses go in tight little ellipses of highly variable width, you can end up riding on a bus for 30 minutes to get to a location from which you were, at an earlier stop, 2 blocks from on foot. Also, locating a bus stop can be a hoot. My dawgs are barking, kids. I think that today I made it - one way or another - through about eight arrondissements?

   

Sometimes you think to yourself "Bordel, j'aimerais rester mes pattes." (Translation: "Bordello, I would like to rest my paws!" - nothing like television to really improve one's colloquial French) but there is no bench in sight. Not for metres and metres and metres. Eventually you see a nice outcropping of beton, a little concrete ledge in front of the bank. It swims into sight like an oasis. You push off for it, lurching slightly, your brain feverish with the longing to freakin' sit down for a sec and not have to pay five bucks for a coffee to do so. But as you get closer, you see that the bank has anticipated this lawless longing, this anti-establishmentarian impulse to perch, this downright non-capitalist, non-enriching-of-anyone activity of unpaid for ass-sitting, and they have thwarted you. OH YES:They have thwarted you BY INSTALLING STEEL SPIKES INTENDED TO PIERCE YOUR LAZY TOURISTIC ASS. Spikes which clearly serve no security or anti-pigeon function: they are purely anti-cul, anti-fesses, anti-pause. It is a remarkable piece of fuckyouery.

  

I stand there and laugh at the spikes, because that is the option I prefer in public places, with the other option being: cry. Then I notice that someone has written a note pointing to the spikes in French (proof perhaps that the French occasionally also like to rest their fucking cyborg legs) reading: LCL Vous Aime. Le Credit Lyonnaise loves you!



Yeah, they love you like a sadist loves his gimp. They love you like a cranky old man loves his gout and the kids on his lawn.  They love you like this lady loves pretty, happy girls:

  

This is a bunch of people waiting for the 38 to come to the Place St Michel. This lady? Pure evil. A very pretty young girl who also waiting for the bus was talking on the phone to a friend of hers, and when the pretty, vivacious girl said that she'd had a really wonderful day, a super day, this crone spun around and gave her the most venomous, hateful, spiteful look I think I've ever seen one stranger give another. Took my breath away! Let me never be a bitter old woman wot dies her hair red and gives the evil eye to happy girls. What a witch. Good news is that the girl's public armor is formidable - if she even noticed, I couldn't tell.

Eventually got my ragged, busted paws back in the Marais and seriously, I love this neighborhood. I love my neighborhood with its sweet, superfriendly gay men and their adorable babies and kids and their adorable dogs, and its beautiful little shops and pretty lights, and all the funky kids rocking their personalities with actually individual senses of style (minus a few typical goths wandering around glowering at people, which I find cute like growling puppies, but I try to look appropriately impressed - they try so hard!). I love it so much I nearly melted from the relief that washed over me when I rounded the corner that brought me back into the Place des Arts et Metiers. I felt better. It was like magical gay feng shui. No matter how bad a day goes in the middle, it starts and ends here, and that truly does make it all better. It truly does. I stopped at Tiny Franprix for a bottle of wine and ended up with a bottle of wine, a box of muesli, two little jars of apricot clafouti, 12 liters of water, and a whole pineapple.

The 5 day supply of water weighed about four tons more while carrying up the stairs than it did in the store. (It actually weighed 26 pounds). It took a semi-Herculean effort to buy the muesli, which was very nearly the only cereal NOT made out of chocolate, or with chocolate, or with chocolate chunks/sprinkles/etc in it. I love chocolate and all, but that much sugar in the morning just makes me Captain Bitchcakes of the USS Crankypants by noon.

The vitamin monster possessed me to make me buy the whole pineapple, which I never do, but I will probably eat it whole, spines and all, while in some kind of trance, like what happened with the red pepper. I need to buy some actual vitamins. I almost spent 10 euros on a smoothie today at La Vie en Fruits. It's like being David Banner except with a fondness for produce instead of mayhem. HULK EAT FRUIT! 

Am now sitting on couch inhaling one of the litres of Evian (more than half gone in less than a minute) and munching peanuts and gnawing on a sandwich de campagne which I had to convince the guy to sell me on account of the bread looks like it's made from gravel. YUM. And I am fervently hoping to be asleep by midnight tonight. Last night I didn't sack out til nearly 4, and that was with the help of the last Halcion.