Now here's somewhere a man could kick back and chew over his place in the world and more than likely come to the conclusion that his place in the world was not worth chewing over.
If he was smart, he would figure out those mountains had been around long before he was even a starseed and will be there for many moons after too. Even those rocks sitting beneath the surface of the water have a longer lifespan than he does and in all likelihood, probably provide a far more useful purpose in the world than he does too.
But that's not a good reason to not even try.
Still jet-lagged to hell and back here. More time in the air than on the ground in a short four day period is not good for your equilibrium. I wrote a little - not as much as I would like, but enough. I did The Bad Thing and watched an airplane movie which knocked on to another and then another. Worth talking about are 500 Days Of Summer and Our Kind Of Traitor - both are good investments of your (wasted) time.
I'm not going to tell anything about my trip here. It will make a good extra chapter for the Cities of the Dead collection - it was also the first time I have ever got in an uber car. It's very much the same as being in a regular cab in that you sit in the back while somebody drives you, but the reality is, it's more like being driven somewhere by a friend of a friend in a nice car that somebody gives a damn about. I can see why it works and how it is absolutely the death of the taxi as we know it. Then again, all it takes is one singular uber-murder scandal and the whole world will come crashing down around its ankles.
I wonder if cab drivers moonlight as uber-drivers during their time off.
I picked up a couple of magazines at the airport too. One of them was the latest edition of Wired. Somewhere in there is an article about a company that hosts residential courses for kids who want to be You-Tubers when they grow up. It really is a thing. It says that five years ago, kids mostly wanted to be app developers but now they want to be You-Tubers making money for simply being themselves.
Meanwhile, I mailed my friend Wayne Simmons a pic of his book on a Waterstones shelf yesterday - a pic from the period in which he wrote (and made his name with) horror. On one side of his book was Pride, Prejudice and Zombies and on the other side, a classic edition of Frankenstein. In that 'horror' section, there was a whole collection of Stephen King books but hardly anything else to speak of. No Ramsey Campbell, no Clive Barker and no James Herbert.
Maybe horror fiction is resting. Maybe it's waiting for somebody to come out and lay waste to the world. Maybe Stephen King must die for people to pay attention again... but it didn't make any difference when James Herbert did, so that's a very poor answer to the problem.
Or maybe, horror authors need to become You-Tubers to regain their mojo, though I can't think of anything more boring to watch than a video of somebody staring out of the window before occasionally tapping some keys.
If you took a poll in an average school, I wonder how many kids would say they wanted to be a writer these days and how many of them would say they wanted to be a horror author - and just who would they want to be like? Who are their role models? I wonder exactly how many schools you would have to visit before you found a kid who wanted to be a horror author and said as much without being prompted from a list of previously arranged choices.
Note to self: never buy Wired again. Wired is Cosmopolitan for the Samsung generation. It suggests the new world is built on algorithms and there is nothing we can do about it. It hosts adverts for apps that will close your blinds for you when you're not at home. It promotes great design discussed over many pages for items such as football boots and lamps.
It tells me the world is more connected than ever but does not even begin to explain why everybody feels so fucking alone.
Welcome to the true face of horror in 2016 in which horror writers now freelance for tech mags.