I guess it made sense to move to France, of all the places I could have ended up at least I spoke french.
I had taken french for three years straight at Ross because I was insanely infatuated with my french teacher, and for some strange reason I expected France to feel like her, her warm yet mysterious gaze, her laugh.
But France did not feel anything like Ms. Baudin, instead it felt like the end of the road, like the end of my story.

In the first weeks I was there I traveled around and looked for places to settle down. In the end I hired a realty firm to find me something affordable and quaint but they came back with pretty atrocious results.
The only property I could comfortably afford that wasn't a sterile condo or a sketchy penthouse was this historic chateau in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere located in Limoges, the same place where Renoir was born. It seemed like a fortunate find but they told me the big “catch” was that not only did it not have water or electricity and that all the original pipes and wires needed to be updated and replaced but also that many of the walls and support beams within the walls needed to be replaced as well.
They told me that even with the cost of renovation that it was going to be cheaper than anything else they had.
So I bought the chateau and spent three months in the house before all of the water and electric was totally fixed, and by the time they were finished I had lost my patience with the whole ordeal and decided to go ahead and ignore any further maintenance the house needed.

When I moved in I had no furniture, no possessions, just a laptop, a typewriter and a suitcase full of clothes and records. I spent a lot of time and money ordering furniture and decorating the place but it never really shook that cold, unlived in feeling. it seemed like a construction site more than a home, It had chipped paint and soiled floors, it reminded me of the bus station in Exeter. For the two weeks that they were running all the electric in the house I lived in a hotel in Manchester, it was a nice hotel with a pool and a steam room and a great vegan room service menu. A year into living in Limoges I found myself staying there for no real reason other than to escape how terrifying and sad the chateau was.
I'm pretty sure the hotel staff knew me as the strange guy who made the hallway smell like weed and ate coconut cashew curry by the pool and came stocked up on booze.
The chateau was insanely messy and smelled like trash and mold. I was too depressed to clean, let alone write.
It was so fucking strange going from this hyper clean, sterile environment where I would watch eight dollar porn and order junk food and go swimming in a heated indoor pool and then, just a short ten hour drive away was my massive haunted house nightmare crawling with bugs.

the two worst things about the town were the bugs and the water.

I bought the house because the surrounding town was so cool and small and authentic, I figured I would sell it later anyways, the two worst things about the house were the bugs and then the water.
The bugs were those nasty centipedes, The Satanic Arthropod , they were everywhere, they were in my bed, my clothes, it was a nightmare, and I couldn’t exactly call the exterminator, so I had to deal with it, also the water was jet brown and never stayed warm in the shower,

the house had a basement that was so terrifying I can't describe it,
I always felt cold breeze coming from it and that's where all the arthropods lived. I never had to go down there though because I had nothing to store and the breakers were upstairs thankfully.



The place was always freezing because it didn't have any central heat so I ended up buying ten space heaters for the living room and kitchen and bedroom. I was sleeping on two futon mattresses stacked on top of each other with no sheets or pillows, just a bear skin blanket I bought from the local flea market.

Like six months into living there I got internet, I


I spent one weekend in Amsterdam sitting in coffee shops watching people walk by, I listened to Prokofiev and romaine while drank espresso and smoked joints and tried to make small talk with the cute Brazilian waitress but she was busy. I walked around pairs alone for six hours, got really drunk at an expensive bar downtown and ate raw fish and champagne adjourn. I didn't sleep for two nights, it reminded me of the met days in new york. It was remarkable how different my life seemed, I mean I used to be a fucking suburbanite and here I was stoned in pairs.
I got weed from two teenagers at a bar in Amsterdam, they told me the legal shit in the cafe was bogus, that they had the real chronic, but I think they sold me expensive laced weed, laced with someone I cant identify, whenever I smoked it I felt like I was going to faint for a second and I could see drippy tracers forming but since I had gotten It back to my house in the country I had to smoke it, I couldn’t just throw it away, so I would get fucked up on laced weed and walk around the woods with the dog listening to Alan watts talk about the cycles of life and how all energy moves in waves and we are waves. Then I would take a three minute shower before the water would get cold and blackish and I would sit and write. There was a jacuzzi in the master bathroom, it was old and used and it was really junky and dirty and i never cleaned it and i got a skin infection and i had to take oral medication for mold exposure i went to the nearest shop to buy a flash light or something and all they had was dozens of candles so i used candles to light every room in the house which is a total fire hazard and then i listened to Mozart for three hours, his requiem while smoking cigarettes and drinking from the french press and writing drafts and notes for the Catherine wheel. you can tell i was agitated when i wrote the book because it was cold and wet and i had a gross hot tub fungus rash and i was angry about how maybe the whole move was a mistake and how maybe the whole book was a mistake. the only thing i did for a few months was to walk around my property with the dog and listen to audio tapes, i listened to a lot of Alan watts tapes and they blew my fucking mind, here are three great theories of Alan watts.


I had just turned twenty one and I celebrated by going to the closest pub and having a glass of wine, then driving home and falling asleep at 10 o clock.


I developed this horrid tooth ache in France and I refused to get it pulled because of my fear of removing things from my body. Eventually it became too painful to sleep so I drove to the nearest dentist an hour away and he pulled it for me. At the end of my visit they asked me if I would like to keep the tooth, I didn't even know this was an option, this being my first tooth extraction. So I was like um yeah sure and I took the rotting decayed black tooth and went to the pharmacy down the street to get my painkillers and fresh drinking water. It was a long wait for the pills to be bottled and labeled so I walked around aimlessly thinking of things to buy and I saw this little crepe station with packets of jelly and syrup so I took the tooth out of my pocket and stuck it in the container of jelly packets so that next time someone was blindly digging for jelly they would receive a decomposing human tooth instead.



during my stay in France I didn't have a job, I didn't have any friends and I didn't have any peace of mind. So while I was there I would make weekly trips to the nearest bookstore in chateuroux and I would very carefully select books that pertained to my self study course work. I was out to learn as much as I could while living there, for two reasons, it was a great distraction and I could use the knowledge in my writing. I bought countless books on ancient Egyptian philosophy and drugs, I had books on the cosmos and botany, books on religion and agriculture, architecture and shamanism. I had a whole library in the middle of my house.


The real reason for all this focus on personal growth was to try and make a dent in the overwhelming depression I was experiencing. I still hadn't convinced myself I would be okay, I still felt like I should kill myself, I still felt like I needed Catherine to be happy. So I tried to exercise as much as possible and I started a very ambitious vitamin regimen. In the mornings I would take folic acid with a tablespoon of cold pressed flax-seed oil. I was taking vitamin a, b12, pro-biotics, fish oil, calcium supplements, vitamin d (because there was no sun ever) magnesium, biotin, iron supplements, protein powders, bee pollen supplements and these weird holistic medications I ordered from India. But nothing seemed to really help, it was no match for the horrible weather and constant rain and haunted basement. And for every healthy thing I would try I would supplement it with an equally unhealthy action, like driving around Limoges with the aston martin chain smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey listening to Roy Orbison on cassette.

I never expected the lust for heroin to be so strong, I had been clean for a full year but every day and every night I thought about it at least once, I can compare it to the feeling you have when you stop eating bread and every conceivable part of your anatomy craves it for much longer than is welcomed. One of the best things about leaving new york for such a small town with no contacts is being forced to go totally sober. Had I still lived in new york I knew I would have filled the void with anything, pills, cocaine, anything.



One of the weirdest emotions is when you're flipping through the paper not expecting anything to really jump out, maybe a good day for the stocks, but then you see it. The girl you lost your virginity to, stabbed to death in broad daylight. The boy you took to prom that tried to feel you up in front of your brother, hit by a drunk driver. Not all of us get to experience it, and if we do it's never more than once or twice, which makes it even more insane. The school teacher who was so nice to you and passed you even though you failed, strangled by her ex husband.











ALAN WATTS
the first audio tape I listened to was about drawing a comparison between the divine and the insane. In the middle times, people were burned at the stake for religious her icy and now today we have high ranking bishops that say they don’t believe Mary was a virgin. We can use this example in the sense of modern psychiatry, the true modern her icy is to be clinically insane, that is to say that you experience a different reality than the mainstream of people. That this action is taken very seriously, just as the divine Jesus was in middle times. The reason we can now make light of god and joke about him is because nobody takes religion seriously anymore in America.

It gets interesting when you take for example the village idiot, who in Islamic tradition is regarded with respect, because it's said his soul is not in his body, it is with Allah.
It is said to be a sin to sweep away out of sight or to be cruel to the idiot, that it brings on great shame with Allah.


well thatch not normal, there must be something wrong with you.
We love normal, we are all on the normal team, we feel threatened.


The priest and the doctor, they have the same markings and costumes.
The church and the hospital provide the same dehumanizing character.
The process of catching and questioning and incarcerating someone who has committed no crime only to lock them up and give them no attention at all is the same crazy ritual that makes us animals.

Like I said it was raining for months and months and I started listening to Niccolò Paganini and Prokofiev on a constant basis, I didn't have a washer or dryer in the house so I had to buy a big metal bucket and hand wash my clothes with dish soap and then hang them outside to dry and somehow 5 or 6 bugs would always end up in the pants and shirts and socks.


There was a pig farmer that lived down the street, always smelled like shit, sold me cheap bacon





while i was there i tried to become spiritual which really involved reading t, Reference ale stair Crowley’s book of lies and while burning incense by candle light. i would draw satanic white circles on the hard wood floors and pretend i was going to contact the dead. three times within a month i would wake up and the circles would be magically gone, like they had been cleaned with a mop by someone but nobody there, months later i noticed the dog licking chalk on the floor, it could have been him, but maybe it was ZE GHOST


I ordered everything online so when it came time to buy my first set of light bulbs I ordered all red bulbs and when they arrived it made my house look like a dark room, I still used the candles as well and it gave the chateau a horrible sinister vibe at night. I would be sitting around washing dishes and see the centipedes everywhere. I couldn’t help but think of max, I missed the mental home, I missed America, I missed Catherine and heroin.

it rained for six months in pairs, not even exaggerating, some days it was just drizzle or Grey bleakness with damp air but it rained for months straight and it was so perfect for my mood and life position.

9 months into it i received an email from Catherine

"hi cass"
the message you sent back was “what happens now”
her message reads “What happens when you despise yourself just as much as everyone else does? What happens

when you wouldn’t be your own friend? What happens when everything you hoped would happen in

1. your insignificant life doesn’t happen? IN FRENCH”

it was hard not to buy a car, I lived in such a remote area it was required, but I didn't want a flashy car, I wanted something original and authentic. I ended up buying a 98 Aston Martin DB7.
One night the ghost vibes became a little too unreasonable and things were moving in the basement and I got in the Aston and drove to Manchester to the hotel.







As I was listening to the Alan watts tapes I was finding myself finishing his every thought and tangent.
And it's funny because I really considered Alan a friend at this point, when you live alone in the country for two years with nobody to talk to, suddenly this little voice emanating from your stereo is your only friend, somehow just the talking, even though it's not “real”, becomes a way to lift the scary lonely feelings that come with living in the forest all by yourself. Alan and the dog became my only real companions. The dog even took on a new role, beyond pet, maybe even beyond friend. He was very tuned in to me and my habits, he knew when I was sad or scared. He also seemed very very frightened of that basement, and I remember waking up one night to the sounds of him whimpering downstairs so I went to check it out and he was sitting in front of the basement door crying and pawing at the door.

The whole experience was very much a nightmare, I found a rat in the downstairs toilet, I found lead paint in the bedrooms, I found a creepy chest of drawers with blood on the handles.

Food was tricky, the part of town I lived in didn't have a restaurant, or a grocery store, and really it didn’t have the weather to grow your own stuff, so I would have to drive in the Aston martin all the way to Châteauroux three hours away to pick up grocery's and supplies. I was eating pretty poorly in new york so while I was in France I tried to be healthier. I was eating a lot of Coq au Vin and whole wheat crepes with chicken and kale salads with prunes and beets and almonds.



and while I was in Amsterdam I bought magic truffles from a shoppe in the central square near all the coffee shops. I got enough for three or four trips and at the exact same shoppe they had a tobacco section so I picked up pipe tobacco and cigarettes and they sold the exact brand of vanilla cigarettes that Catherine was always smoking so I got a pack of those as well. I went to an opera while I was there and forgot the truffles in the car so that was kind of a shame. So about two weeks later I took the first container of magic truffles called KAZAM TRUFFLE DELUXE and I walked around my property with a flash light for two hours but the problem of getting lost on truffles landed me in some totally creepy area somewhere behind my house and there was a gravestone with some fucked up shit on it. I was terribly lonely, I missed Catherine and I missed civilization and I wanted to finish the book.