Monsters, no. Ghosts, yes.

Yesterday I took a ferry boat across the Baltic Sea from Germany to Denmark on my way to Kobenhavn. The train rides straight into the boat, everyone gets off and goes upstairs and the boat carries the train across the sea. It is already cold in Scandinavia, it snowed yesterday in Helsinki, and standing on a deck of a ship feeling the Artic wind blow down on you from its very home you are suddenly aware of your fingers and toes. I wrote this after I had gotten back on the train.

10/7

I can tell you how to see a ghost. You have to be standing on a ship, and from the East the sun is ascending and unimpeded by anything to cross its brilliance, and from the west a constant chilling wind blows violently. You will need a source of music and you must specifically play "New Slang" by the Shinns on repeat. Then you stare north at the horizon where the rich blue of the sea meets the gray watercolor blue of the sky. You must stand that way for thirty minutes, until you are good and freezing, and you are ready to go inside. Your mind will have wandered far away from you, and your lungs will wonder how you found air that was so clean. When you can barely stand it any longer, look down over the side of the boat, just away from where the wake of your vessel has churned the water into foam. You will be squinting from the sun in your left eye, and from the wind in your right. If you did it correctly the water will be a smooth and intensely dark green color, and you will see shapes flickering just under the surface. You will swear you saw your entire past and future play out simultaneously over top eachother in a fathomless chaotic dance. You'll see the stream of your time racing from points unknown, and well trodden, and you will see where they raced into eachother at top speed and crashed. You'll realize you are standing on the place where they crashed and you always have been. That you have never not been. All the ghosts you see, ghosts in the water, they are your ghosts, and you will suddenly be aware of the fantastic and impossible odds you overcame to be standing where you are, when you are, as who you are. There was no reason that any of this should have ever happened. Only it did happen. It's happening right now. You might find that your life has always been happening and you didn't think of it that way until just now.

It isn't easy, but if you do it right, and your eyes are true, you will witness tiny miracles over and over. You will know gratitude, and you will forget to be cold.

When I was a child I was watching a television show I can't recall. On the show was a monster of some sort, he had bruised skin and a puckish aspect to his face, maybe he had tiny devil horns on his head. He grinned a lot, and bantered with the hero. I was transfixed by him, and I turned and asked my Stepfather Byron where he came from. Byron said to me "Denmark. He came from Denmark."

So, what I'm saying is, I used to think monsters came from Denmark. When I didn't believe in monsters anymore, I didn't think there really was a Denmark. Until I stumbled onto it playing a the globe in my Elemtary school library in the third grade. We used to look at names of countries, I always marvelled that Niger was just one letter away from a awful word to call black people, and it was in Africa. I thought that was some kind of cruel joke. It couldn't really be called Niger could it? How did they get away with that? Who was reponsible? When I saw Denmark on the globe I recall suddenly having a twisting stomach. It simply didn't occur to me that Denmark could exist without charismatically terrifying blue skinned devils, the world was still bigger than could be considered back then. I don't know when I let it go, I never thought about it again until just now when I was, afterall, sitting in Denmark and thinking of something to write down. I can report that I have seen no monster activity, just a lot of blonde people who are tall. Modern day Vikings riding bikes. Lots of bikes to go with the wind turbines. I suppose it is no coincidence that the air here seems like it was just opened from the package or freshly picked.

The Hostel here is called Sleep in Green. It is down a small side street near a movie theater. The inside is painted in a constant album cover like mural of graffiti. I like it here. It's like a hippie commune, the workers are all hanging out with their friends, the internet is good, its clean and charming and hip.

They had a shockingly good Art museum complete with three Van Goh paintings, and an impressive collection of Egyptian and Classical artifacts. How they ended up in Denmark...who knows? Does anyone know, officially, how long a time has to pass before grave robbing turns into science?

Nothing especially crazy today, or thoughful. Copenhagen has surprised me by being kind of awesome and I will be staying an extra night so that I can see the Trivoli Gardens, which is an in city amusement park/botanical garden done up for Halloween. Then the plan is to go to Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Brussels, Bruges, Luxemborg, Vienna, Salzburg, Budapest, Bucharest, Bran... to be at Dracula's Catsle on Halloween. That's just the rest of the month, I got tired writing that. It's hard to believe I have only been here two weeks. I suppose it has been rather eventful, but it seems like forever ago I lost my railpass in Nice.

Its naptime. I was prancing 'round Copenhagen for 9 hours on my feet today. I am writing this from six hours in he future, don't worry, everything is fine.