Finding out-of-the-way public places to read. Listening to music for hours on end when nobody else is even awake and work is starting in a few hours.foreign travel. running (I know, but really!). Big watches.
I learned Spanish to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the original. This involved immersion in Cuernavaca and rooming with Dan Grayson. Marquez ended up way over my head and I've since forgotten all my Spanish. Now all I have left is Dan.Currently I'm trying to learn Farsi so I can speak harshly about people, directly in front of them and without their understanding, to Roza. Turns out travel to Iran is prohibitively difficult right now so I'll have to pick up this language without the benefit of immersion. Fair enough. As Proust said, "The real voyage is not to travel to new landscapes, but to see with new eyes."And, of course, there are other people I'd like to meet. Again, not for the first time. But the point is moot and those bridges have burned.
I veer off in other directions, but it always comes back to dirty country. Whether it's Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings or Hank Williams. Maybe I was switched at birth and have white-trash roots. Anyway, I veer, and when I do:Billy Bragg, RANCID!, 10cc, DJ Shadow, N.E.R.D., Josh Ritter, Gorillaz.
Running with Scissors. Fight Club. And any other movie that either attacks our post-modern complacencies or stars Brad Pitt. (He really is a good actor! Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Seven, The Mexican!). Rocky Balboa.
If it's between SHIELD seasons then I've given up on TV.
"Fiasco" by Ricks. (The Single Best Macro Book on Iraq) "Out of Control" by David Kelly (the ideas in this book will never leave you). "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" By Hunter S. Thompson. "Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis (the only book I've come across to make sense of the Holocaust). "Blood and Guts in High School" by Kathy Acker. (But I'm not pushing it on anyone.) Tsuenetomo's "Hagakure." "Journey into Power" by Baptiste. "The Economics of Innocent Fraud" by John Kenneth Galbraith. "Beyond Fear" by Schneier. "Brief Autobiography of the Dead" by Brockmeier (Katie has it!). "One Bullet Away" by Nathaniel Fick. "100 Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the reason I took Spanish for 3 years in college).
Rory Stewart and Natascha Kampusch