March 28th

On this day... Ah, friends. It seems like forever ago that I made that last post - so young and full of hope, like a tick among a herd of hemophilic cattle. Well, no more! Europe was, in a word, nightmarish. But somewhere between the food poisoning and the 15-hour Heathrow (herafter called Hellthroe) layover, or maybe between the lost luggage and the being caught in the middle of a rape investigation, things stopped being upsetting and started being funny. Luckily, today's event fits my mood: On this day in the year 37, Caligula became emperor of Rome. He was a sick puppy, even by Imperial Roman standards; however, like my plans for Europe, he started out good. Despite having a traumatic childhood (most of his family was murdered), Cal seemed like a pretty well adjusted young man. In the early years of his reign, he lowered taxes, recalled exiles, and banished sex offenders from the empire. Then, in the middle of his years as leader, he was stricken with a debilitating illness. He survived, but his personality had undergone a complete and irreversible change. He was given to violent fits of cruelty, and at times he seemed to lose all grip on reality: he once made a group of legionaries take a day out of their military campaign to gather seashells, which he said were emblems of his victory over Neptune.
While it's been a long time since I howled with laughter over my last gladiatorial game, I do have just the teensiest bit of sympathy. There are things in childhood that can lie dormant in you for years, just waiting for the right psychological circumstances to rise to the surface like a bubble of swamp gas. Case in point: when I was small, I had a passion for those Halloween sound effects tapes - doors creaking, wolves howling, men with deep voices giving guided tours of graveyards, that kind of thing. I haven't thought about it in ages and ages. Then, in the midst of post European stress disorder, I woke up the other morning with an uncontrollable desire to listen to those tapes again, immediately, or my head would explode. Unfortunately, I had lost track of my old ones. I asked my friends, but they, apparently, don't carry sound effects on their persons. In desperation, I turned to the internet, where I found my fix in all of its synthesizer-ed glory. But what summoned this phantasm from the depths of my subconscious? My vote is with the agony brought up by travel - the need to externalize my fears and return to childhood.
At least I'm not making Romans gather seashells.