I was in a Scottish mood yesterday.
My RSS feed reader told me that the latest episode of Scotland Introducing, a podcast devoted to unsigned Scottish indie bands, was available. I followed that, throughout the day, by listening to Idlewild, Camera Obscura, Y’All Is Fantasy Island, and I’m probably forgetting one or two other Scottish bands.
Music makes the day go faster.
I had a fair bit to do at work yesterday. I wrote about Gundam models. It wasn’t my best work — I had a migraine, and I wanted to stab myself in the head — but it sufficed. There’s really not a lot you can say about Gundam models.
By late afternoon, though, I had nothing left on the plate to write. So, naturally, when I was offered the chance to leave early, I packed my things up, shut the computer down, and called it a week.
Though overcast, it hadn’t rained. The writer in the cubicle next to mine had said, earlier in the day, that it must have been chilly outside. I told him that it was muggy outside; temperatures in Charm City were in the mid-70s. It just looked nasty outside. It wasn’t actually nasty.
In no real rush to get home, because I had no schedule to keep, I decided to disembark the light rail at a different stop, then walk eight or ten blocks to reach the subway stop that would take me home.
I exited at the Centre Street stop. There’s a park there I’ve seen in passing a few times. Until I walked up the hill, I had no idea that a Revolutionary War monument stands there, three soldiers in their tricorn hats and flintlocks at the ready. A plaque described someone — a man named Howard — who had been influential in Baltimore during the war. The statues were metal, they had a stylized appearance. They reminded me of Adrian Salmon’s Doctor Who artwork — angular, blocky, shadow, all creating a mood.
I walked back north, toward the subway stop, using back streets. I didn’t know, exactly, where I was going. I knew if I headed vaguely in a certain direction, I would get near to where I wanted to be.
I can be such a tourist.
Church architecture fascinates me, and I navigated by steeples and towers. I may not be Christian, but the cultural roots still run deep, and I find myself fascinated with the look of religious buildings.
I saw one building that I thought, at first from a distance, was a church, perhaps an Orthodox church. Then as I approached I noticed its towers were adorned with Stars of David, and I decided it was a synagogue. It was neither. It was a Masonic temple.
I saw a church with flying buttresses. It seemed to me they were more for show than for support.
Eventually, I did have to go home. My walking tour came to an end.
I rewrote some of the dialogue in “THOD“‘s first chapter yesterday. Going back and revising — except to change the name of one of the characters, who had a placeholder name of “Maxwell Edison,” who wasn’t majoring in medicine — wasn’t something I was looking to do at this point, but I just felt the need to rewrite that stretch of dialogue.