The Rome plan

People ask me about my upcoming five week trip to Rome. Mostly they ask when it is. Once I hit the four weeks to go mark I have been able to answer that question in great detail and yet still be fairly brief (as I write this I do it in weeks, but as you read this I will be doing it in hours). They ask if I'm learning Italian (in theory, yes, but it's a bad theory). People never ask if I'm looking forward to going to Rome, rather they always tell me about how much I must be looking forward to it (fair enough). They ask if I'm going anywhere else in Italy (I don't understand, why would I go anywhere else other than Rome?). And every once in awhile they ask what I'm going to do about my blog.

This is the blog that they're referring to. Some of the people who asked this don't even read my blog. I hope you are as confused and outraged as I am about how someone would know about this blog and yet not read it. But some of the people who ask about my blogging plans do read my blog and presumably both sets of people are simply curious about my course of action. Up until a few weeks ago my answer was that I was going to post "best of" essays from my vast catalog of previous posts (1300 plus). I hated the thought of breaking my relentless, multi-year streak of new, daily posts, but the thought of writing what would functionally be 40 or more essays to prepare for the trip (while still meeting my daily posts in the time being) did not seem realistically manageable.

And then I had an impossible idea:

What if I got myself some fancy cheeses, prosciutto, lemoncello, melon. And on my day off alone, Thursday, I sat down at my computer for ten hours, getting increasingly drunk, and wrote a fake travelogue that matched my trip day by day in real time. You, reader, would be following along in actual time with an alternate reality version of my projected trip even as I would be on said trip!

Excited?

Well, while I write most of them I'll be drunk. Also I'll only have something like ten minutes to write each piece. So you might want to moderate your expectations. When I really consider the project, actually, I begin to suspect it will all be terrible.

But, on the other hand we're talking about Rome! What's with the doom and gloom? Starting tomorrow, in prose, we are embarking on a five week trip to Rome. This is going to be great. We are going to have such fun! 

Uh oh. Everything is beginning to spin already.