We’re alive and well, about 30 miles outside of Nashville at a Hampton Inn in Dickson, Tennessee. There’s free wi-fi and a pool. Life is good.

It was an easy drive, minus the traffic in Louisville, KY and a close encounter with a T-Rex:

If all goes well, tomorrow night we’ll be in Dallas.

For New Year’s, our friends were nice enough to invite us up to their place on Lake Chautauqua in western New York.

“You can stay in the boathouse,” they said.

After two hours on the highway, they drove us to this boarded-up shanty.

“Here’s the boathouse!” they said.

Then they laughed at our horrified faces and drove us to the real boathouse.

On the way, they told us “Chautauqua” means “gunny-sack-tied-in-the-middle” in Indian.

Stupid Indians, I thought. Who knows what a gunny sack looks like?

It occured to me over breakfast that this would be a great place to write a book. I could sit at my desk and stare at the lake, white as a virgin sheet of paper, just waiting to be defiled with ink.

Here, some ice fisherman are defiling the lake with drills.

What a pretty scene for a defiling!

The Famous Fish Platter at GUPPY’S is outstanding. There’s a reason it’s famous: the fish is flavorful, and the french fries are crispy, with just the right amount of seasoning.

The decor was tartar sauce on top of the fish: above our table was a Christmas wreath decorated with a golden Budweiser sign.

It was my kind of restaurant.

No New Year is complete without a game of Drunk Scrabble. Drunk Scrabble is played after at least four glasses of wine. Proper nouns, abbreviations, and acronyms are all welcome and encouraged. Proper verbs, are included, too, like Google, even though it’s damned near impossible to end up with two Gs and two Os.

I am pleased to note that I came up with the evening’s top score: a whopping 33 points for “feat.” (The F was on a double-letter score, and the T ended up on a triple-word score.)

Happy New Year!

LONDON, PARIS, & ANY PLACE THEY DON’T SPEAK ITALIAN

London is my least favorite city on the other side of the pond. Everything is expensive, the food isn’t all that great–it’s basically a big American city with a funny accent. Paris is beautiful, and despite people who claim otherwise, Parisians are friendly and smell just fine. But I haven’t seen nearly enough of either of them to claim any kind of authority. In Paris, I remember loving the Left Bank, near Notre Dame. Read Let’s Go, or Lonely Planet, or Rick Steves, and figure out what you want to see. For hotels, you can’t go wrong in any city using TripAdvisor.com. My heart, and my good advice, lies in a magical country called Italia.

ROME

Rome can be done in two days. Start out by checking into a place called the HOTEL DIPLOMATIC. Good price, huge bathtubs and clean rooms. Then spend the rest of the day and the evening walking the main strip of Roma, seeing the Colosseum (I never went in), the Pantheon (glorious), the Spanish Steps (good place to sketch), and the Trevi Fountain (watch your camera). Drink some wine, eat some gelato, and get a good night’s rest. In the morning, you’re within walking distance of the Vatican. Hit St. Peter’s at 7:30 in the morning, when the nuns are still out. Say hello to the Pieta for me, and then head over to the Vatican. Now, what follows is controversial: it’s totally acceptable to race straight through the huge Vatican museum to get to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement and the Sistine Chapel at the end. Afterwards, there’s a lovely little cafe run by a family nearby, but I’d have to close my eyes and let my subconcious take me there. Walk down any street and when you find a small, bald man smoking a cigar, with black socks and sandals, you’ve arrived.

FLORENCE

I want to die in a cottage built in the hilly suburbs of Florence. Florence can be done in one day, but it would be criminal. Give it at least two, and I highly suggest three. Meghan and I cut a day off Venice just to spend a fourth in Florence. The city is small enough that you can walk anywhere, so stay at a place called the Gould Institute (Instituto Gould), south of the Arno. Ask for a room away from the street, preferably off the courtyard, where you can sometimes see small children playing. The magic room is #249. Do the art-seeing and the touristy stuff north of the river, sleep, loiter, stroll, and eat south of the river. See as much Renaissance art as you can–hit the Uffizi and all the churches–but be ready to pay for it. You absolutely must walk the Boboli Gardens, take a hike up in the hills past the Fort Belvedere over to the Church at San Miniato al Monte to the Piazza Michelangelo (with the David replica statue) just in time for sunset. Breathtaking.

VENICE

The thing about Venice is…it’s sinking. I personally think Venice is max-ed out after a full day. My advice is to stay one night and splurge on a fancy hotel room: everything in Venice is expensive, so even the dumps cost 90 euros a night. An overlooked part of Venice is the Jewish Ghetto. This is where I like to eat. There’s no real hope of navigating Venice by map, memorize a few landmarks, and then use the signs around the city to navigate the labyrinth streets. Hold hands and get lost: it’s the best way to do it. Watch out for gondoliers: when I was there the first time I ended up getting drunk with three of them. Also: if three drunk gondoliers offer you a free gondola ride, go against your better judgment and TAKE IT!

You are in search of pumpkins. In the cold October rain, you head out of Mordor south on 71, the trail of tears and construction. Southern Ohio greets you with water towers, trailer parks, and Adult! Video signs. You pick up old friends, and head for the show.

The clouds part for the smell of fried food. You eat pork tenderloins. You eat breaded cheese on a stick. You go thirds on a blooming onion, but insist on your own piece of pumpkin pie.

You run into people you thought you’d never see again. You ask them what they’ve been up to.

“Just workin’,” they say. “Just workin’.”

You live in a city with many immigrants. A man sells t-shirts that read, WELCOME TO AMERICA, NOW SPEAK ENGLISH!

Your protest is a chuckle.

A woman in a scarf buys a Fried Twinkie. She shares it with a man wearing assless leather chaps and white tennis shoes. You are too busy gawking to notice the carnies are heckling your girlfriend.

Who are these people? you think. What is this place?

Once upon a time, I spent six months in Cambridge, England, living in a closet-sized apartment, reading Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, missing a woman with whom I’d just fallen in love, sketching a world that was 5000 miles away, and losing twenty pounds to a culture of bad food and worse weather.

Around my second term of study, and at a point when my mental health was slipping, I wound up playing keyboards and singing backup for a singer/songwriter named Jeremy Warmsley. Jeremy was rounding up a band to play a series of shows for the May Balls at the end of term, and our mutual friend Mike set us up. We got along nicely: I introduced him to Toots and the Maytals; he introduced me to Kate Bush. J’s songs were straightforward pop songs with a lot of chord changes and complex vocals. Our band consisted of a good bloke named Bob on guitars, two interchangeable drummers who looked about 12 years of age, and a pudgy, pathological liar named Dan on bass. (Dan claimed to have lost his virginity to two 18-year-old lesbians.) Once, we found an old Roland Jupiter-4 synthesizer in the Churchill College practice room–it weighed about 40 pounds and made wild, orgasmically phat sounds until it crapped out on us. We had a punk song where I jumped into the audience banging a cowbell. At one of the May Balls we drank beer until 6 a.m. and took turns riding a mechanical bull. At a time when when I had almost abandoned playing music, it was an escape that I desperately needed.

A year and a half later, across the pond, I got an e-mail from Jeremy: “Long time no hear from. how are you. i am about to sign my record deal. fame and fortune.” I checked out his new stuff on his website, and was pretty blown away: those straightforward pop songs were still pretty straightforward, but the band had been replaced with a backdrop of cut-up drums and Bjork-like arrangements. Not to mention, J. had a fantastic animated video done for his new single, “I Believe In The Way You Move.” Turns out his new EP is coming out in England in a few weeks, and is getting a pretty good amount of buzz.

But Jeremy isn’t the only amiable spector from my Cambridge days that is having good success: my buddy Dave Mitchell has just had an article published as the lead in the DUKE JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE & INTERNATIONAL LAW. He slaved over this opus in Cambridge many a night that could’ve been spent in the pub. Dave’s not only an academic, he’s also an All-American cross country runner who has a great chance at the Rhodes. Dave was in Cleveland this weekend, and Meg and I met him and his girlfriend Michelle in Coventry, where he presented me with a signed off-pressing of the article.

The moral is this: keep in touch with the people you’ve known–they might be headed for great things.