04.25.13 — 2:13PM GMT — Thursday — Holiday Inn, Camden

A long shower, some ibuprofen, a cup of coffee and a lemon poppy muffin later, I’m back on my way to feeling as human as I ever felt to start with, though the whole world still has that film over it that it gets when I haven’t slept. Like looking through wax paper at distorted colors. Would be psychedelic if it it wasn’t accompanied by such exhaustion.

I crashed last night harder than I’ve crashed in a long time. Even as I was riding up the Holiday Inn elevator to get to the room, I said to myself, “Just a little further.” After the last update, I fell asleep for a solid four hours and woke up feeling sick and miserable, barely able to move. At some point, I pulled a muscle in my left calf — I’m looking at you, Big Blue — and so there was a good deal of pain in addition to the fatigue. Writing that live review that went up yesterday took about three times as long as it normally would on account of having to constantly stop and put my head down. Even with the four-hour nap, I was out shortly after midnight. I put the Yankees radio broadcast on streaming and rolled over and that was it.

At about three in the morning, I was woken up by some weird interference noise and it turned out that The Patient Mrs. had called in on Skype and that was running the same time as the Yankees stream. I don’t know how it had answered, but I woke up for a couple minutes and spoke to her, which was good. This has already been a long trip, and it’s a long way from here to Monday afternoon when I catch my flight out.

Most of the night, I tossed and turned in various stages of discomfort, but I slept and that’s the important thing. Still, this morning it took me a solid half-hour to get out of bed and get myself together. When I finally did and finally figured out how to work the shower, I decided to head out and get some caffeine in me to get right. Could probably use another cup or two (or 10), but the muffin helped as well and I proceeded on to see if I could hit up the Music and Video Exchange, which I’ve visited a few times in years prior. Closed. What a shitter. Because just what this market stretch of tourist-hell Camden needs is another t-shirt shop. Bleh.

Resurrection Records, which wasn’t nearly as cool but which I’ve also been to, also seemed to be gone in favor of  a shop selling shirts with pot leaves on them. So it goes.

Back to the hotel, then. I could’ve walked around some more, but honestly felt like I was about to keel over, and so I’ve been sitting in the air conditioning in this room trying to continue to regroup the best I can before the Desertfest pre-show tonight with 1000mods from Greece and Enos and Blasted. Would be nice to stay conscious through the whole thing, since it’s the start of the Desertfest coverage that’ll play out over the next three days as well.

A lot of really great stuff coming up. Time to get my head into it.

Tags: Camden, Euroventure 2013, London, UK

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 25th, 2013 at 8:49 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.