The Life And Times Of A Serial Hat Wearer

Happy New Year

2011-01-23T02:29:00.002+09:00

Well jerks, lovers and ice-cream fanatics, hope you are enjoying 2011.

A note to say I'm still alive, but living on my very own website now. Here's a link.

Godspeed and good luck.

aidenwylie.co.uk is a fabulous website.

Moving

2010-08-30T21:17:00.000+09:00

Just to say, I'll be posting more stuff more frequently over at my website, so updates will be less frequent.

www.aidenwylie.co.uk

Hope you can follow me.

The 5.32 to Glasgow

2010-08-20T05:41:00.000+09:00

When I was young I used to travel down to Glasgow to stay at my grandmother’s flat in the West End. This was when I was about ten. It was always exciting. We used to get the national express coach down. As an adult, it’s an insufferable four hour journey, taking you through some of the bleakest and dullest stretches of the country. The road is frequently dangerous, and at the Drumochter Pass, very often closed due to drifting snow. The further south you go, the more congested and the traffic becomes.   There’s a part of the route beautifully named Rest-and-be-Thankful. It isn’t named that without reason.   As a kid, though, it was a big trip to the city.

It would start on Friday afternoon, after school, or, if everything fell into place, the start of a long weekend. We would store up for the trip down. Multipacks of crisps, half kilo bars of chocolate, two litre bottles of Irn Bru.    Seats up the back of the bus. The more litter we could cause the better. A competition. As the bus journey progressed, other passengers would slowly move further towards the front. Not because of any cheek we were giving them, more because of our vile language and constant disparagement of local buildings, people and places. I can’t remember what we talked about, really. Wasn’t the landscape. Wasn’t the stags that you can spot on the mountain tops as you drive through the Cairngorms. I can’t really remember what we did other than pile junk on the floor. But it seemed exciting.   Exciting in a way that the words “departure lounge” are nowadays.

As we got older, we would start pushing our luck. At thirteen and fourteen we would regularly be served in bars. But that was yet to come. When we younger, we used to ask my grandmother, then in her seventies now full of these same memories, would buy us cider. Not the inedible white stuff favoured by today’s street urchins, but the slightly classier Strongbow, a decidedly orange coloured drink of no little deliciousness to a ten year old. We would spend the evening getting what in retrospect was mildly tipsy, staying up to three in the morning watching trash television and - continuing our infatuation with creating garbage - turning my grandmother’s living-room into what we called a “council house table”.   Piling up as many empty cans, bottles and packets as we could. When we, little lads that we were, were all pooped out, we would go to sleep in our sleeping bags, awaking in the morning to a clutter which was the source of quite significant pride.

And then it would be Gran-made lorne sausages and tattie scones, washed down with tea and coke. None of us really liked tea, we were just taking our first footsteps in the world of sophistication.   We’d take pride in doing the washing up. We’d ask my grandmother about her soaps, the local crimes and the Glasgow underworld, of which she seemed, at least to us, incredibly wise. Then we’d hop on the underground into the city centre. We’d wander around, doing nothing of a morning, before taking in a football match at whichever of the Glasgow teams we had chosen to watch. After the game, home to fish suppers from the local chippy. And repeat the previous evening’s exploits, before heading back up to Inverness on the Sunday, our teeth much the worse for wear and our clothes stinking of junk food and vinegar, in no fit state for school the next day but all the more refreshed nonetheless.

An Update To Promote Myself And Others

2010-07-23T03:47:00.001+09:00

At the risk of reading a little like a spam advert, I would like to recommend to those who indulge in writing to any degree of seriousness the website authonomy.com

There you can submit any piece (over 10,000 words) to the review and will of the general public. There are some genuinely decent people there. Here is a link to my short story, carefully crafted (!) out of some of the pieces I have written here over the years. The End Of Longing

While I'm at it, I thoroughly recommend the twitter page of Jason Grilli, a creative and thoughtful baseball player. He's currently undergoing a year's rehabilitation and I've come to root for him every step of the way. Jason Grilli's Twitter

I'll post something creative here soon.

Blog Updates?

2010-05-16T18:34:00.000+09:00

Just to note, I have been told to censor my blog whilst I am still in Libya. Hence the lack of updates and disappearing entries. My apologies, but I need to keep my job!

Ross County 2 Celtic 0

2010-04-12T05:17:00.000+09:00

I have nothing to say today, other than my deepest felt congratulations to all the players and staff at Ross County Football club, who yesterday defeated Celtic - yes, Glasgow Celtic - 2 -0 in the semi final of the Scottish Cup. I am a life long supporter of the club, and this victory is by far the proudest moment of my football supporting life. To Derek Adams and his team, thank you, congratulations and good luck. I will, if all goes according to plan, attend the final (and how strange that feels!) work commitments permitting.

After Nightfall On The River Nile

2010-03-23T04:34:00.000+09:00

Good god almighty, what kind of craziness is this? This trip has gone badly weird.

“Waiter, bring me six beers.... and...a quart of rum.”

There is something to be said for getting absolutely shitfaced in a muslim country. Christ, after a month of listening to Roy Orbison records on loop on the edge of the Saharan desert, a man can be forgiven almost any sin in his quest for the amber nectar. Yes, the night may do strange things inside a man, but that hardly compares to month upon month of unintentional abstinence.

Maybe I should go speak with those Japanese tourists. This probably makes a great deal of sense to them, I thought to myself.   But then I decided this mess was of my own making, having started earlier at the hotel bar on the strong stuff, Bloody Mary with tequila chasers, whilst watching Wolf Blitzer interview Larry King on CNN. I was reaping now what I had sewed.

“Get off me, you little freak!” I said to the man in the penguin suit tapping me on the elbow asking for tips. “I just want to enjoy this quiet night of heavy drinking on the banks of ancient Babylon in peace. And besides, you haven’t actually done anything.”

“Sweet Jesus!”   I exclaimed, probably loudly, to nobody in particular. “What do they put in the beer around here?”

Without me noticing, the Egyptian version of a mobile DJ had turned up, and there was some kind of Egyptian ballerina wearing what appeared to an ferris wheel around him, and twirling in circles like a demented ferret to Russian music at breakneck speed, with the ship’s internal lighting system turned off completely. When did they invent this? Twenty first dynasty?   Before or after Ramases II?

It wasn’t long before the effects of the beer began to take hold.   Even still, unsteady on my feet as I was, the cameras from the Japanese tour party was combining with the spinning neon dress to hurt my head and my eyes and generally otherwise offend my senses. I knew I had to get out of there, quick, and I wasn’t planning on diving overboard.   Not yet. But if I stood up, I knew I risked the chance of decapitation from the flying jester’s revolving skirt.   With a full pint of beer in each hand I had to be very careful.   So I took the only natural course of action, and I grabbed the drinks trolley and pushed it towards the spinning dancer.   At the speed he was going, I only had to push gently on the trolley to send it vaguely into his path. The collision was nasty, I believe, with gin and wine bottles scattered all over the lounge deck.   The band was still playing some kind of music as the waiting staff came rushing to their colleague’s assistance.

I took this opportunity to sneak out the side door onto the outside deck, where the belly dancer was preparing her entrance, blissfully unaware of the carnage I had caused. Pausing only to appreciate her cleavage, I hurried on up the stairs to the second deck.   “Watch out,” I yelled back at her, “There’s a bunch of atavistic occidental savages in there, and they’ll eat you alive!   Run for it while you still have the chance!” I never got to see her reaction, as I ducked in to the ballroom at the top of the boat, sweating profusely and carrying the beer and a bottle of gin I had managed to escape with...

...Only to find myself caught up in another dance troop performance.   Only this time it was for a private wedding.   I was tempted to tell the happy couple that they were unquestionably the Egyptian equivalent of those folks who travel from Brighton to Las Vegas to be married by Elvis and that their marriage would be over in a fortnight, but they were enjoying themselves, and besides they probably knew that anyway, so I let them be. Then I looked around, expecting the poor bastard conducting this sham of a wedding to be dressed as a mummy.

I didn’t have much time to comprehend the grotesqueness of it all before yet another dance started performing to the sounds of a bontempi organ, this time a bunch of guys carrying kendo sticks and wearing Ali Baba costumes encircled me. Before I had time to protest I was surrounded by half a dozen dancing Egyptian boys looking like a cross between pantomime villains and small kids in pyjamas.   I was ducking with surprising agility, trying to drink the beer I was holding whilst at the same time avoid the flying batons which were coming right for my face.    I was sweating profusely this time, and the beer was flying all over me and onto the backs of the dancers. I felt close to death.   After what seemed like an age, the rumba beat stopped and I managed to make my way back out onto the poop deck, where the wind blew the flag on the stern of the ship, and the neon lights of the Four Seasons beamed their decadence across the banks of the River Nile, and upwards towards the mouth of the Red Sea. I stumbled around for a place to sit, and found one tucked underneath the upper deck windows.   I grabbed for the bottle, and rested myself against the wall, my legs dangling over the barrier.   I knew, somehow, I would find my way back to the hotel before sunrise, inshala.

Take This Everlasting

2010-02-06T01:05:00.004+09:00

“As everything closed in around the three of us
Things you never saw, talking of the power and rescue

That were rushing through our body

And it's good...

...They’re going to hurt you...

... And they always will.”   (Tindersticks)

********************************************************************************

Then must you speak
Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well (Othello, Act 5 Scene 2)

What was it that made me do it?   One final attempt at heroism by my poor neglected soul? Did the demons in my mind gain such a salient victory? Did I become all I hate and fear, or, as they lead me away to the gallows, will it be looked upon as the actions of a lover, a sage and a seer?

For oh, how I loved her so. From a thousand leagues I watched her. In silence I sang her songs of silver silk, and alone I read her poems made of glass.    Without speaking, I was was the one, all the time, calling her name from my sheltered cove, some place far beyond the sun.   And in the night, racked by magnolia lined dreams of Mariah in the kingdom of cruelty, it was her figure to which I turned. When I talked to you of hopes and dreams and the sound of the waves, it was but her spirit guiding me into your heart.

For I walked for her in Winter, and I swam for her in June. I searched for her in hiding, and brought her wisdom to your room.   I made bread for her in morning, and told lies with her at night. It was our land to conquer, and all the land was ours.

In the morning, I awoke. Life! Yes! The lifeblood of morningtime and the melody of light.   As the dawn broke over the green soaked valley, a swallow, nesting from the southern seas carried my thoughts of her to an unsuspecting ocean and opened the eyes of a long blinded world. And then I stepped barefoot through the dew grass.   Stopping beneath the gentle shade of an olive tree, I raised my head to the Catalonian skies and let out a cry of such wildness and crazed exaltation that for that simple minute I sat at God’s right hand on a throne of gold. And as I sat I gazed upon the foothills, and watched the melancholy ghosts of summer winds go slowly on their trails to the sea.

She had got out just in time. Small town life just didn’t fit. You can’t help where you were born and brought up. It was the tenement blocks, grey, prefabricated and soulless. It was the lack of a decent graveyard. The museum on the high street rejected her work. The only magazines you could buy in the newsagents were gossip and glamour. It was the pub. Melancholy, dreary, bleak.   Trips to the same Chinese restaurant where she got bullied on her way by the same gang of neds on the same corner. So one day she walked down to the harbour and sat on a bench on the edge. She picked up a stone, and carved her name into the bench next to where she sat. Then she arose herself and ran. Ran as fast and far as she could. She got out just in time. She was beginning to go insane. The girls she went to school with, pregnant and married to men twice their age at seventeen. Awaken, awaken, awaken, awaken. All this could be you.

So she ran off to the city - the bright lights and the gloss. The neon in the nighttime and the stage-plays in the day. She had to have the costumes, she had to have the gold. No. That is wrong. It was not the reward, just the need to escape to bigger things.   The chorus of the jewellery was singing out her name, and the visions and sounds of the street swirled around her head like a haze.   She was never a part of that. She didn’t need the shows on Broadway. Maybe she’d get a job there, she thought, but she was never one of them, never part of the set.   Maybe that was what drove her there - the need to prove that things didn’t have to be done that way.

She left me behind, like the last remaining carcass of carrion.   She did what she had to do.   So then, I thought, must I. Not straight away, I knew, for it was only right that she be given at least some time to live the New York City way of life.

So I waited till the Springtime, then I caught her in the fall. I took her from the needle, and the bible, and the gun. I took her last breath, her final word was mine, and though I look back fondly, that then was my demise.

And as I walked that grey industrial town, visions of her soul clouded my mind and I did not dare to think.   In December, when I walked past the foundry in the sleet and the slush, black smoke rose from the cars in a swirl of complex beauty. Sirens cried like dying angels, and in the destructive solitude of this one house town, that could only mean one thing.   The road I tracked was long and cold.    What is it I must do to repay for my choices? I asked myself. I did not believe in God, and I renounced the notion of redemption. I was the carrier of her blood.   Her blood, thick with love and hope and ambition, mine thin and weak and stale.   In this phial there is belonging, a future, the sun and mars. In this phial of her blood, which I took as she slept, exists my weakness and meaning, my curse and my sustenance.

I have not slept for days. When they came and took me, I was a man bereft of breathing, and I was a lost and haunted soul. I was lying on the floor, relaxed and calm. I did not fight, I did not argue, for I know of that shall pass. And here, in my prison cell, as well I lie.   My mind is restless, grasping for an end. Haunted by a past. Haunted by a future the city took from my grasp.   My hair is greasy and dank, my beard knotted and grey. I fear myself like a vulture. The prison walls look mellow, the steel of the cell door radiating some kind of warmth that evaporates into the lime yellow of the lights they keep on all night.   It is not the screaming. It is not the coldness of the spring-mat bed.   It is not the guilt, though I know each of these things be true. No, it is not these things that keep me awake at night.   For the still and the rest I sought have vanished into the lonesome broken night. I cannot rest in peace, and I cannot sleep for this cursed silence. In the silence I see her eyes. Eyes of such depth and beauty. Eyes of love and loving. Eyes of knowledge and tenderness and knowing. Her sweet brown eyes shining like stars in my ocean of longing.   They always did; God knows they always will.

Man-Children With Motorcycles Aren't My Cup Of Tea

2010-01-30T00:28:00.001+09:00

Sometimes when you search for things, you find out that they are messy and horrible. And then you realise that's how people seem to want things. So you end up with a weird kind of nervousness that only serves to teach you that some people you just can't reach and just should not even bother trying. And some things are just plain wrong. 18 years? And he's the jealous one? I'm done, my darling, you are on your own.

In other news JD Salinger, author of the masterpiece The Catcher In The Rye, has left this mortal coil.

Farewell then, JD Salinger.
You were a literary equivalent of a one hit wonder,
The Ultravox of the written word.
The prose you wrote,
The character you created in The Catcher In The Rye
Served as a guide for me and for millions.

And the rest you wrote, were never as good.

Holden Caulfield, that prototype of teenage angst and
Unrecognised wisdom.
Me, relating, thoughtlessly perhaps,
Wanted to be him.
The girls I knew wanted to cure him.
But when addressed with the face to face version
Ran away and hid.

It was pretence.
A romantic notion of freedom.
Perhaps too, it was the split hair
Between Isolation
And Solitude.

You inspired talentless hacks and screenwriters
To supplant the words of adults
From the mouths of bairns.
If that is your legacy
Then, really,
Despite that great book,
You mean nothing to me, Vienna.

Letter From Dienbienphu

2010-01-15T03:57:00.001+09:00

Author’s note. This was written in detox mansion during a power cut. For once, I wrote it on paper, redrafted it and put it on the computer. It was inspired by, well who knows what and it matters not a jot, but it represents how sometimes when I begin thinking of something I write it and it becomes something else entirely.   Initially, I was attempting to write a love letter from a soldier in Vietnam, just before things all kicked off, round about 1954, when the French army was essentially massacred in a battle in a small mountain village called Dienbienphu, an incident which ultimately gave the US an excuse to get involved without appearing colonial. The protagonist wasn’t overly communicative or eloquent, but I think I did him a disservice.   He became, I hope you find, a wiser, more scholarly narrator. Perhaps this was an erroneous value judgement on my part. The letter transmogrified into something altogether different, and it soon became clear that whoever it was he was writing to changed too. I don’t know who this letter was written to, but I’m sure it means something to one, some or all of you.

Letter From Dienbienphu

April 10, 1954

Darling,

I write you from our camp. They won’t let me say precisely where, but it‘s in the hills some place. I been here so long, I don’t rightly know where I am myself anymore! The lights have gone again - the fourth time today - and we are running out of candles. I hate this waiting. Waiting to see you, waiting to go home, waiting for the goddamn French to make their move. It’s quiet now. I like thinking of you. It helps me to relax in the silence. Have you heard of this new Elvis Pressley? One of the boys has a poster. Good looking kid. I don’t want you staring at him too long, you hear me? Might give you bad ideas, and I don’t ever want to go back to Manhattan if you ain’t there.

It’s raining, so I’m sorry if the paper gets all soaked through. I hope you can still read it.    When the lights go off, we put on the battery powered transistor radio, listen to those negro boys. They sure can sing pretty. We boys sure can talk too, though, don’t you mind us. We talk about home, the news, those politician men, everything. The sergeants are real keen to meet you after I showed them your photo!

The rain makes the strangest noise as it falls on the bamboo all around us, sweetness. Like Fred Astair in those movies, tip-tap-tapping. There are birds in them bamboo plants. Pelicans and some great creatures with yellow eyes, they make quite a raucous. Nights in the Vietnamese jungle sure are mighty peculiar. I know you never wanted me to come, but like I told mamma, it was something I just had to do. If we let these Communists here run amok, why, they’ll take away Grampa Granola.

Funny thing is, I ain’t scared one bit. I just know for sure I’ll be seeing you after the summer. Cousin Jimmy’s coming up from Missouri to New York City to open one of those fancy fashion boutiques. Before you ask, when my war veterans’ allowance comes through, I’m gonna buy you the prettiest dress you ever did see. Just you wait.

Oh darling, I’ll be home before the snow falls, and we can go ice skating in Central Park. How does that sound? Your folks don’t need to know, it’ll be our little secret. We’ll go skating, then we’ll take in a picture show, you can choose. We’ll go to Joe’s Diner on 9th and Hennepin and then stay out all night jitterbugging on Times Square. And it’ll be like we never were apart. When the French make their move, and the NVA fall, they’ll put me on the first plane home.

Sometimes, my sweet, it rains and it rains and it seems like it will never stop. How is it in Brooklyn?   How do people cope since the Dodgers left for California? And your jealous brother, how is he? Though you know I would never wish him any harm, must we forever keep our love in secret? What more can I do?    I can’t believe you don’t say anything. You know my concerns. For as long as this petty feud continues, we can never really be together. And then how’ll we celebrate halloween then? That’s no night to be alone.

You know, I kind of feel for these yellow people here. They never did nothing to me, and we’re just hanging around to bail the French out of another mess. We all know it. It’s been this way since ‘48.   It’s been goddamn raining since ‘48 too. How do these poor people cope, living in huts that the French blow to kingdom come?   They haven’t ever really done anything to us. But now it seems even they don’t want us here. I can’t walk anywhere without some Gook telling me to “Go home, Yankee”. Why don’t they want us here?

So my angel, here I sit, trapped between a world of futile love and practical hate. The more I write, the more I find I have had too much to think. When the thunder rolls and the night-time brings the bombing I wonder where you are, and I wonder what you are doing. Who are you speaking to? Is it jealousy? Is it love? Is it something bigger than either of us?   When I write to you my thoughts open up and the words spill out like a fountain. I get deeper and deeper, and perhaps really I ought to stop. I ought to have stopped a long time ago, but I need to hear your voice, sweet angel, and I need you to read my innermost thoughts. This war I’m fighting, in the rolling hills a million miles away from you, I do it out of some kind of belief in what is right and what is worth keeping. I do it for you and for some kind decency. Is any different for you? Things that you do, things that you allow yourself to do and be done to you...

I ain’t scared, baby doll, not one bit , because I know one day I’ll see your sweet face again.   But if I don’t make it out of this war I’m in, well I’m sure you’ll do what’s right, stand up for the oppressed, against aggression. Sounds strange that, given my job, but I believe in your fundamental sense of decency. Don’t ever let someone, whoever that may be, suppress you, put you down, block your self expression.   Don’t let them tell you the things you enjoy are somehow wrong, somehow vulgar, something to put an end to. If it makes you happy, don’t you dare let anyone stop you doing it. And you know, darling dear, you do it to yourself. That’s the worst crime, those times when you let others convince you that you are doing something wrong. Maybe I’m just a fool, or maybe a sociopath, but I always thought love was just about all that is necessary. Necessary for good things to happen, for people to understand, for empathy to exist. But people are greedy, selfish and possessive. They want to control, they want to keep and maintain and stunt.   Don’t let that happen to you, with or without me, don’t let that happen to you.

I can hear guns in the distance, but please stay in my mind so I can write some more. My mind isn’t on fighting right now. But when this war is over, I’ll be a different man. I’ll have different fears and I’ll have seen different things. I won’t change the way I think of you, but you too, you’ll have moved on. These battles do funny things inside a man. He sees things nobody should ever see. He wakes in the night with feelings that no good person should ever have to fear.   When the sun rises he awakes to the beat of a different drum, and the shining don’t mean nothing to him no more. He feels the warmth, but at the end of every vista he only ever sees the gallows.   And when I meet you, be it on the boulevards of Manhattan or on a dust track somewhere behind the sun, I look into your eyes and for that fleeting instant - that brief moment in time when the guns and the gallows and the shooting goes away - well then, darling, sweet angel, you sooth my soul. That is your gift. Your burden is to never hide, never close yourself off to another, never let four walls keep your magic from the world. With or without me, girl, with or without me.

In The Mirror

2010-01-14T23:40:00.001+09:00

A rather linear poem this week. If you hate it, tell me, and I'll never do it again.

Between the Dragon and The Sun, From the Soil To The Air

The Blue Rose

It is a fine and noble thing to dream impossible dreams.

The Swallow

And my dreams one day will come true, and they will be delivered over the seas and the mountains to your heart by a fine feathered bird of strength, positivity and courage.

The Dragon

For my heart is like The Dragon, it flies on wings of desire, and it breathes a tender heat.

The Eagle

So when I leave this mortal coil, my love for you will soar on its own pinion, and it shall rest in perpetual tranquility and wisdom in some place behind the sun. And it will place blessings on you, and it will guide and inspire you.

The Scroll

And in death my love will return to the ground from whence it came, and it will never fade, for mine is a light that never goes out and yours is heartbeat that wills me onwards.

Clink

2010-01-04T00:54:00.000+09:00

It was probably calling the police “pricks” that did it. That, and four hours on the bus from Glasgow to Inverness, a job interview straight off the coach, five hours drinking, three lines of coke and a night of vodka and Red Bulls in a cheap, two bit nightclub in the centre of town. I was, apparently, thrown out of the establishment for falling asleep. I had also climbed up a dancer’s pole, shrieking something unhinged about just wanting to enjoy a quiet night of heavy drinking. Even to this day I don’t think, inside the club, I was doing anything out of order. Jesus, this was Inverness we were talking about. That was positively hospital behaviour. Two police officers, too much time too little to do, arrest figures to maintain, monthly bonuses to meet... the implications are nasty, even now in the cold light of day. Las Vegas, where everyone loves a drunk, this is not.

Outside the discotheque, infinity went up on trial. Or, more precisely, so did I. The brother of a friend came to calm me down. I swung for him - the cocktail of cocaine and vodka does, like the night, do funny things inside a man. The idea was for me to sleep of the violence inside a car, locked away for the night out of harm’s way. As it was, I was locked up inside the drunk tank to think about what I had done.

In the cells, they keep the light on all night. A strange, artificial glow a bit like the greenish glow of hospital lights. The bed, single, made of springs, would have provided hours of entertainment for a child of six, or even a semi-sober adult. They are not, when combined with moth eaten blankets seemingly made of yellow wall insulation material, conducive to a good night’s sleep. Which is probably the whole point.

In the morning, they offer you a choice between one slice of toast or a cup of coffee. Not both. I chose neither, and it was the cause of some consternation that I had put this spanner in the works. Next, washing with a soap - somehow changed to the sink, and one toothbrush, chained to the wall. I passed. The intention of this, presumably, is to smarten yourself up for the photograph. “Smile son, it’ll be for the record.”

Then back to the cell, leaving you an unspecified amount of time to wait, your conscience, supposedly dancing a jig on your shoulders. Of course, you either aren’t remotely concerned or you are too hungover to remember. There is, surprisingly, no place for the fear in the drunk tank. Or perhaps there is, I was just too concerned with other matters to focus on that dark, venal ponderable thing which creeps up on you, step by step, half-memory by half-memory until you realise, usually about six in the afternoon, that what you most feared you had done is exactly what you did.

Then, once you have psychologically blanked out any half memory of the entire incident, through in the post comes a letter from the Procurator Fiscal. It’s a game of chance, of lucky dip. You open it like you are expecting a response from a competition entry, or from a failed job interview. You leave it for a while and then force yourself, you might as well get it over and done with. Ta-da! Congratulations, you have won a ten pound/hundred pound fine... you are arraigned to appear in local sheriff’s court on the date of .... no further action will be taken and no record will be kept.

The Walls Of Tripoli

2010-01-01T03:42:00.000+09:00

On the corner of the street, opposite the shack selling second hand washing machines, a group of adults, posturing aggressively, had surrounded a boy of perhaps twelve, pushing him and yelling in his face. Like a hoard of villagers baying for the blood of the castle owner, they had found this child and accused him of stealing from a convenience store. His older brother, torn between protecting his sibling and holding face with the adults, gave him a slap in the face. Another man grabbed the boy, pulling him with some force away from the group. Eventually, after some minutes in which our driver, fearing like us vicious consequences attempted to ease a few frayed tempers, a police officer walked over to speak to the boy. The officer walked the child a few yards down the road, and stepped between him and one heavy set man, who looked like he wanted to pick a fight with the boy. After a few minutes discussion, the boy and his brother, having convinced the policeman of their innocence, presumably, ran off in one direction, and the adults, far from placated, hung around to argue their case with the increasingly rattled officer in the green attire.

Jesus, what kind of savages are these people? It had only been a few hours that I had walked past one of the villas on the compounds. Six or seven cars, circled like wagons on the sand road. A man, staggering, disorientated leaned on the shoulder of his companion. The men, some dressed in traditional prayer clothes, differing between the tribes, argued, making that peculiarly Arabian gesture with the open-faced palm, slanted at an angle, pointing without pointing. The implications again were messy. Stoning. Insane religious vigilantes with slingshots. This was no time for anyone who could possibly be confused with an American to be hanging around. Not unless you wanted to draw the heat.

I was used to the slightly sinister nature of the Libyan. Christ, compared with the American fucktards who called themselves playwrights I had spent the previous Autumn in New England with, the odd epithet in praise of the extermination of the Jews represented a charming positivism of thought. “It isn’t advisable to trust these people,” I was told on arrival. “They’ll be as friendly as pie to you, until you piss ‘em off, after which they’ll still be as friendly as pie but they’ll hold a grudge against you for as long as you live.”

I went into the local shop, and by the time I came back out, the party had broken up.

Angry Libyans with half-arsed enmity. Call it an occupational hazard. Twisted, caustic cops with monthly arrest bonuses to meet - well, that’s something different altogether. I had heard apocryphal scare stories about the goings on in the police stations. Vast underground bunkers, or, even worse, estates of single room outhouses. In there, nobody can hear you scream. Better off pleading guilty and as quickly as you. The punishment would be just as severe, but at least you saved yourself the interrogation. Same logic as the Spanish Inquisition.

Which was fine, so far as it went. Keep yourself to your compounds, or out on the farms. The police didn’t wander so far out that way, or if they did, it was only to imbibe. Their intention, other than gross hypocrisy, was to monitor the Westerners... but they were fine, so long as as you knew your limits. Stay away from the streets, though. Leave the compound and you were free meat.

Moonshine was freely available from a number of sources. It was mainly sold in bags, prices ranging anywhere from ten to twenty five dinar per half litre. Looked and tasted pretty much like vodka. Mix it with pineapple juice and a bit of sugar and you got yourself a nice little fruit punch. Probably it would be horrendous now, but looking back at those desperate days, it was more than enough to remove the boredom. Evenings of quiet contemplation blown apart by a dozen bags of hooch. Turned your insides into a nervous, disconnected mess. Your heart rate increases way too fast, so you smoke a little skunk and stare at the stars for a bit. Times like that you think back to those days, so many years ago, when you were genuinely happy, before your behaviour became a problem - for you and those around you, and long before you became a stranger. On nights like those, you could sit on the balcony and watch the storms coming in from the Northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, oblivious to the stones being thrown against the compound gates by kids with no knowledge of who you were or what you were doing there, only that it was kind of a blast to wake everyone up at three in the morning throwing breeze blocks at iron gates. So you’d throw back an apple and they’d pick up a stick and you’d start an impromptu game of baseball, eighteen strikes yer out, before, with a laugh and a skip and a bravely yelled swear word, the kids would run off to do their homework or go to the mosque. Shit, I’m sure if I was eight and some bunch of African guys moved into the biggest and brightest house in town with ten foot high fences, I’d pretty much have done the same.

On those warm, covetous Saharan nights, overcome with end of the land isolation, longing for a past both unattainable and unending, it was possible to remove yourself from the prison walls, and in the right frame of mind and the correct dreamscapes, you could make out patterns in the forks of electricity in the sky. Closing your eyes you could think back to the names and the voices and the eyes of the dancers you met all those years ago. In the crashes of the tides of the sea you could bring to mind the spontaneity and adventures and lessons from those sun baked, heart felt days. And in your mind you saw her eyes as the electricity rolled and you convinced yourself that those times, those laughters, never really went away in the man made construct of time.

A Heart In A Million Pieces

2009-12-23T19:45:00.003+09:00

In an apartment overlooking Central Park, the man looked out over the autumnal malaise of brown and orange and green. It was like his eyes were operating through a filter. In a month, they would change to black and white. It was mid afternoon, but the man played In The Still Of The Night on his stereo. Small moments like this, he thought. Isolate, short, the tiniest of incidents of flat out love. His life was like that; a never-ending series of glimpses of unrequited love.

The man closed his eyes, moving in a slow dance with his silhouette. A bottle of whisky lay, half drunk, on the windowsill. He would pour another one, just when this song was over. Doo wop. Cerebral, harmonious, loving; decidedly unfashionable. He set his mind to wander. Across the rain soaked park, past the duck pond, through the pines, into Manhattan. Leaving behind the commuter trains, the rush and the car horns. In his mind he was walking somewhere behind the sun, with his belongings tied up in a spotted handkerchief.

In the medina, the old part of town, he sat down and bought a coffee. The coffee there was thick, almost viscous, enough to send a less hardened caffeine drinking into an insane blabbering wreck. A plastic chair, a red checkered table cloth and prime location for watching the wandering tourists and the hourly rush towards the mosques when the call for prayer came. At twilight the prayer song floated through the old streets. The old men in the cafes continued smoking their hookahs, the young people ignoring the call whatsoever. There was a new car in the gallery that demanded their attention. And besides, these prayers, these mosques were of the old times and merely an inconvenient burden. In the shops men with bad teeth and surprisingly fluent English sold camel hair rugs of remarkable beauty. Women dressed in headscarves - some without - wandered among the alleyways, window shopping for gold.

Tokyo, Yoyogi Park, Sunday morning. Walking over the bridge, shyly asking taking photos of the cosplay girls to make an album to send to his friend, a million miles away. Writing his words on a cartoon notepad, thinking of all the words he would say if only he could see her. What would he say? What would they dance? Would he still recognise her eyes, could he still answer the questions that she asked him when they met, four years ago, that reached the innermost parts of his soul? Did she still have the red star piercing on the place that was only for her? He switched on his ipod, turned the volume up loud, and dreamt he was in a film.

Your Relationship Is Doomed And Your Partner Is A Liar.

2009-11-27T00:20:00.004+09:00

If this post seems unnecessarily petty, bitter or vicious, so be it. It's the "Wee Free" Calvinist in me.

I do not believe in absolutist terms like good, evil, hero or sin, but if there were such a thing as a sin, utmost among sins - beyond theft, violence, or murder would be lying. There is, of course, to only but the most idiotic and dense of superficial thinkers, a difference between misinformation (that is to say, telling somebody today's date is the 27th instead of the 26th) and disinformation (the willful planting of deliberately misleading facts). The first is not a lie, the second is. This much is obvious, and has been discussed in works by Camus and Fitzgerald far more eloquently, and to the point, than I could ever hope to do. So I won't, save to say that Meursault, the hero/antihero of Camus' masterpiece The Outsider, is the one person aside from me who really seems to get where its at.

Second on my list of sins though would be sloth. Idleness, laziness, gratuitous time wasting - call it what you like, it seems to me that people who do not evolve, change and move merely regress. It is one of my major problems with marriage. Eventually, in order for marriage to work, divorce is necessary. It is impossible to grow as a human with the abhorrent confines of a relationship without ending and moving on.

I have, at one time in my life, lived in Tokyo, the single most expensive city in the world. I was making minimum wage there - which is no problem as far as it goes, when the retarded Japanese banking system places zero percent inflation above all other fiscal aims. But living in a twenty foot box, with or without another Gaijin is a tragic situation for any soul. TEFL - Teaching English as a Foreign Language - attracts the most odious, superficial, insensitive idiots this side of acting. But it also attracts writers, poets, linguists. It attracts people who care about language (not, I might add, in that peculiarly protective sense that many English people seem to have; "Football not soccer, couldn't care less not could care less") and it attracts genuinely proactive and talented people. I am still in contact with many of the latter, and hounded by the former.

Living in a foreign city for five years does not equate to immersing oneself in culture. Rather it equates to surrounding oneself, hemming in and bunkering down. None of which helps anyone. Only in this situation can exist the singularly most superficial of relations, a retardation of one's personal creativity and emotional suffocation, not to mention economic idiocy.

I was overjoyed to hear that one of my closer friends from my Tokyo period - much as with painters, writers too change their creations according to their locale - has decided to leave Japan. He was there for several years longer than I was and I saw him become jaded, slightly melancholy and, in the best possible sense, a good drinker. I note with some sadness that some of my other, closest friends, choose to confine themselves to a shoe box in the dreg ends of the city, complaining about the transport, and pretending to be healthy.

On the event of my thirtieth birthday, on which the melancholy was merely passing, I took time out to assess my situation. I have never been one to harvest finance, never a person prone to possessions or superficial image, but I do believe it is impossible to find happiness whilst making minimum wage, whilst living with one person or whilst living in one country. Fulfillment of ambition, once a source of middle class angst, seems to me to be a far more worthy pursuit than "settling down" or "planting roots" or any other of those ghastly euphemisms which essentially mean "watching endless episodes of Lost and complaining about the weather".

People, when put in this position, become weird in the worst sense. Not weird as in social outcasts, nomadic or anti-conventional, but weird as in unsociable to the point of sociopathic, arrogant and aloof. As Bob Dylan once said, "things just happen". This much is true. But what Bob Dylan should also have said was "you need to put yourself in a position to allow things to just happen". The fear of the unknown is a beastly thing. It breeds malcontents, racists, idiots and haters. But what is even worse is the refusal to destroy comfort. It is lazy. It is wasteful. It is, as glib as it may seem, a waste of oxygen.

Questions In A World Of Blue

2009-11-07T16:36:00.001+09:00

There are two “fictional” characters with whom I identify with more than any person living or dead. Those two people are Agent Dale Cooper and Robert Ford, as portrayed by that fine actor Casey Affleck.

Firstly Dale Cooper. A man who believes in nothing other than good. He believes in love and truth and other than love and truth nothing much matters. His sole motivation for everything he does comes from the hurt and pain he has caused to others, and his need to prevent that hurt from being perpetrated against anyone else. He takes pleasure in the size of the trees. Nothing gives him more joy than a fresh cup of Joe, and nothing more fascinating and puzzling than the recipe for a good slice of cherry pie. This is not simple, brainless innocence. It’s a beauty, a deep and philosophical understanding of the world at hand and a wisdom of the world undiscovered.

Cooper places his faith in the hands of science and justice. The law will last the test of time, for him. He believes in justice, he believes in karma. He believes that one good deed begets another. But he also believes in sacrifice. When at the end of series two, after a wild nightmarish battle with his own ego and soul inside the monstrous Black Lodge, Cooper knowingly accepts the evil possessor known as Bob to capture and control his very soul, he does so because, in a decidedly religious gesture, he relinquishes a beautiful future for himself for a contented present for the ones he loves, knowing full well that in future times he would not be able to bring support or happiness through his presence. By then, maybe another would arrive to take his place. Perhaps not. This is a one time offer and it makes no promises for times to come. It is a gamble and a short term gain and it is a trade I would make instantly and without question.

Robert Ford is a man with very few earthly desires. A much misunderstood man, generously, sympathetically and masterfully portrayed by Affleck, Robert Ford was everything that Jesse James was not. Jesse was a strong, wilful and popular man. The women wanted to be with Jesse, they never looked twice at Ford. At one point in the film, Jesse says to Robert, “I don’t know whether you want to be like me, or if you want to be me.” The truth was neither, all Robert Ford wanted to do was help his friend achieve his dreams, as wicked and spiteful as those dreams were.

Robert Ford didn’t know how to help people proactively. He just followed them around and waited to be asked. When they didn’t, it hurt him. He didn’t let it show. But it hurt him. He smiled outwardly, never letting the brains he had escape the dark, impenetrable mask he created in an attempt to impress. He wanted to help Jesse. He wanted him to help Jesse steal money and he enjoyed seeing Jesse’s adulation. Robert Ford never wanted that promotion. He just wanted to help. When he saw Jesse tormented by depression and guilt, he wanted to relieve the burden. When he saw Jesse’s self-destructive tendencies take over, Robert Ford thought he knew how to help. He could put an end to Jesse’s torment and bring some kind of retribution to the families of those Jesse (and by association Ford) had hurt.
 On the day Ford killed James, it was also the end of Robert Ford. He thought he would be liked by so many people. In his childlike naiveté, he assumed that by killing a killer he would make other people happy. Instead, he was reviled, mocked, and eventually driven out of town.

Robert Ford was a man confused. He was often told what he didn’t have. His selflessness was used against him. By being generous, he ended up being detested. Robert Ford was a kind man, an innocent man and a brave man. He was also a foolish man, a gullible man and a man destined to be destroyed by society. The people he wanted to help took all he could give, and without speaking a word or allowing him a final curtain, those people cut him down.

By that time, of course, Robert Ford knew precisely the score. He understood it not one jot, but he felt the full force. Robert Ford did understand something though. He understood that acts of selflessness are not rewarded likewise. Life is not six of one and half a dozen of the other, and things do not balance each other out. It is a fundamental truth that those who find contentment in life do so not with the help of society but at the expense of others. It is the duty of the kind, the noble and the sincere to suffer.

Like Vincent Van Gogh and like Gram Parsons, the good will not be really remembered, not honestly appreciated. Never in this life at any rate. Forget the tortured soul of the artist. Frauds like Sylvia Plath, egotists like Kurt Cobain. That is not the issue at hand. Self hatred is indeed a form of wisdom, the sign of open eyes and a welcoming mind, but it doesn’t equate to human kindness. No art, no genius has ever been created by happy people. Loneliness, isolation and despondency are signs of suffering not universal, but unique to those with spirit, beauty and soul. Roy Orbison singing for the lonely. Meursault sitting in his prison cell. Dale Cooper in the Great Northern and Robert Ford lying on the floor of his bar in Boston. These men shall never inherit the earth. They shall not sit upon pillars of gold. They will not end up at God’s right hand. They will, however, write the stories. They will, ultimately, sing the songs and truly taste the wine. They own art. Poetry can only be understood by the broken, selfless, noble and rejected. It is a truth and a knowledge they can use to keep warm, through the decadent, depraved and vulgar night until the dawn breaks.

Interview With The Author (reprise)

2009-10-10T07:06:00.004+09:00

Goddamn it, Wylie boy, what the heck are you doing?

Hi, good to be here, thanks for inviting me. Most of the time I spend walking around listening to sad songs and pretending I'm in a movie. Actually, I am in a movie. It just hasn't been filmed yet. I live in Libya, and I want to be adored as a writer. That's the idea of this site. I hope to be picked up by a talent scout and whisked away to superstardom and conspicuous self-destruction.

Hmm, I see. So what do you write about?

Oh, the usual. Marzipan, suicidal songbirds, postmodern shit. Derivative, but entertaining. Conceptually, it's a nightmare. Imagine if you will a computer generated devil trying to contract manic depression. And that's me. Each unrelated blog entry should be read as a compendium of collected works. Which is clearly superfluous to both your life and her's, but nonetheless essential reading for divorced couples everywhere.

So is it fact or fiction?

A mixture of both. Even my answers here aren't necessarily true. This is prose. Sometimes I can't tell the difference between my writing and my real life. It's not an easy situation to be in.

Do you have manic depression?

This is a work of fiction.

That didn't answer the question.

Well, put it this way, I drink far too heavily and I am seriously beginning to fear for my health.

That's so cool. Are you angry?

Nice segue into a rant. I have a lot of hate, from things such as cruelty to animals, twenty something couples, good looking woman/fat ugly man relationships, backwards baseball caps, men with earrings, and so on and so forth. I'm not really terribly angry, I've just settled for a life of instability. Also, perhaps I care too much about other people who don't want to be cared about, or more particularly, don't want me to care about them. That's becoming something of a problem, actually. I am the shortest of all the giants.

Ahem.. where oh where could my young lover be?

I don't understand your question properly, but I think my answer to that would be a seven foot dwarf with a tweed jacket walking up the Kings Road (where does the apostrophe go in that?) selling tickets to the gangland shooting of a white overweight hip hop artist. Nobody much cares, but anyone who happens to pass by is in for the time of their lives, whether they want to be or not.

Gotcha. Ta for your honesty. Where do you see yourself going in life?

I hope to contract manic depression, rediscover the beauty of isolation, and remove myself from the restrictive covenants that bind us emotionally, spiritually and biologically to people we care neither for nor about. If I can achieve that in the progress of my website initially - later on my publications - then my soul will be a little less restless. J'ai une aime solitaire. I don't think I will see 35, but you never can tell. Daniel Johnston sings that true love will find you in the end, but only if you are looking, and I disagree with that entirely. It is neither looking nor findable, in the sense that it doesn't exist.

Is that a constant thread in your work?

Yeah, it is. Absolutely. I don't believe for one little second that any of my coupled friends are actually "in love" - in fact I know they aren't. I want to remove them from that blind by opening new channels of delusion. Less smug, more genuine delusion. And I plan to create those channels in roughly the same time as it takes to manufacture a railway line from Dover to Calais. With words. And this weird green sauce I drink in spoonfuls. Makes me a little wired. Actually, this singular narritive was dreamt up in a two hour session lying in the rain in Shinrinkoen park. I drank a bottle and a half. Wired to fuck, mate.

Do drugs and alcohol inspire or desecrate your work?

Neither. But I am drugs and alcohol. I would say most of my work is inspired by lego. And possibly a lingering hatred of Kellogg's All Bran. For which I blame my parents entirely. I remind you of this fact; look through history - no good art was created by happy people. Art is the soul preserve of those, as I like to say, who live under the mantra j'ai une aime solitaire.

How would you like to die?

That's a very maudlin question.

You are a very maudlin man.

True, but this is an act of fiction.

Don't play semantics with me, sonny Jim.

That was a Kirsty McColl song wasn't it?

Good point. What becomes of the broken hearted?

They linger in quiet solitude. Alone with their foolhardiness and delusions of grandeur. I write prose not for the broken hearted, but for those without a heart to break, but a soul so vast it destroys the love of the promiscuous, self-important, smug and self-satisfied generation of our peers, who seek nothing other than instant gratification, and disgusting contentment. I write for the alcoholics, the homeless, and those other brave individuals who shun the ego, shun conspicuous consumption, and shun the colour pink. My favourite colour is brown, by the way. I also write for the very wordy and those who support French Post-Structualism even in the fire of the Daily Mail. I think contented people ought to feel very guilty of their contentment. They need to realise that their boyfriends are cheating on them every time their back is turned. They need to realise that the weirdos and the freaks and the men who say and do things which don't fit in to their time schedules and spaces are actually the people who teach them the most. No teacher can learn from another teacher any more than an actor can learn from another actor. This is the reason that all inter-professional relationships fail.

Aiden, I have to say you are a very troubled old man.

Undoubtedly so, but this is entirely a work of fiction.

Letter From A Madman Adventurer To His Muse, 1834

2009-10-03T06:33:00.001+09:00

It’s been a while I wrote to you, my love. It has been amiss of me, but you must realise that work has been stacking up for over a month now, and I feel the weight of pressure bearing down on me like some crazy, fucked up kind of divinity.
 So I write to you now, watching the winds of the Northern sea bringing electrical storms from Malta to where I am. The wind is building up and the birds have long since flown from where they usually reside, near to where the wild rosemary blows. The darkening skies are a vivid pink and the rain rattles against my window. I’m waiting for the dinner bell, and thinking of you.

Where are you now? Last I heard you were working in the city. Are things still going well? Do you think of me, ever? I’ve been clean for more than two months now, and I feel good. I have been behaving myself, and staying out of trouble. I sometimes fail to find the words to create my art, but what price is this for a heathen scoundrel who destroys every soulful thing he dares to touch?

My arms are covered now. I scratched your arm with a song in your memory. You can only take my leg now. Kirstin Hersh sings her nursery rhymes to maudlin tuneless noise. She lacks your soul, my sweet, god only knows she lacks mine. I allow my mind to wander, in the direction of the sun, setting somewhere behind the Golden Gate, where we promised we would meet. Oh such a loss! Will it ever happen? Have I lost my way so badly that you don’t even want to deal with me ‘neath the California stars? Or is it too far away from the city’s neon, dying haze of orange? Have you sold your soul to the merchants and the frauds and the poseurs and the playwrights and their money there?

It is good to be alone for a long time, my angel. I think you need a healthy dose of isolation, my sweet. You would have to think of me then. I think you still do.

I walked out in the mid-day sun, where the Greeks and Romans built. I sit in theatres of two thousand years in age. The heat kept even the flies away, and the tourists. And I sat inside those columns of ancient marble, and I walked the hardwood floors. I looked through the pillars to the dry and dusty sea, and I felt your breath upon my chest, like the night when first we met.

Police Baby Blue

2009-09-15T03:35:00.002+09:00

“What football team do you support?” the Chief of Police asked me in Arabic.

I was a little taken aback. “Celtic”, I lied.

“Not Rangers?” He seemed to know a little about Scottish football. I still didn’t feel at home - usually when somebody if you like “Celtic or Rangers, pal?” you choose your answer only after a careful study of the questioner.

“Yeah, them too...” I kind of stuttered.

The police officer frowned at me.

“Relax,” he said in English.

The police station was not exactly salubrious. To say it was furnished would be an over-statement. The plaster was crumbling off the baby blue walls. In one corner was a dented and rust filing cabinet. Presumably that contained the names and details of all the criminals and crimes they hadn’t bothered to investigate.

There were two desks. Behind one, a rather flimsy looking stool. Behind the other, a leather swivel chair. The Chief of Police was dressed in his civvies, that peculiar retro-military look, with the thick collars and the beige short sleeve shirts and square pockets. His deputy, on the stool, was dressed in the dark blue regulation uniform.

I was in the station to report the theft of my passport. Or, as my contact had told me to say, “my passport is no longer in my bag”. Visa problems. I would have to leave the country, I was told. Perhaps Malta, probably Tunisia, possibly Cairo. I had a contact in Cairo. A contact who could get me on board one of the private liners which run the length of the Nile. I was in that sort of frame of mind. Too long on your own makes your mind kind insatiable. I have long suffered from a weird kind of intellectual and spiritual wanderlust.

I was attracted by the romance of having to be smuggled out of the country on a false passport by the large bloke who counts as a Public Relations operative in this town. The Embassy had my new documents - biometrics and all - somewhere.

In order to claim it, I had to file a report with the police. It was not an experience I relished. Jesus, I thought, standing in the office. I’m pretty certain that’s screaming I heard from one of the cells. I pretended it wasn’t happening. Gave my answers and got the hell out. After a paper chase around deepest, darkest, dampest Tripoli, I wasn’t going on any humanitarian kick.

Sandstorm Dream #35

2009-09-02T02:52:00.002+09:00

"I wanna live all alone in the desert, I wanna live like Georgia O'Keefe"
(Warren Zevon - Splendid Isolation)

The sun is blazing again. Another forty degree day. You stay inside, out of the desert heat. Days like this, much as it pains you, you just have to bite the bullet and take care of your skin. Cancer is not a cure for loneliness, you tell yourself. So you sit inside the Villa and turn your hand to anything you can find to do. Cook for one, and throw the rest away. Watch the hyperbolic American news channels. Is this really their view of the world? Yeah, probably it is. So you turn it off. Makes you sick. There’s one music shop in the city, selling cheap Fender imitations. You think back to the days you spent in London, trying out two bit minor chords on £3000 Gibson customs. You could pay the five Dinar and take a lunatic taxi to the old Turkish bookshop on September the First Street, where you can pay double the odds for books you have long since read and torn out the epilogues. It’s Ramadan, so there’s no food to be found, not even for the skeletal feral kitten who runs through the sprinklers in the garden to cool down. You try to save it scraps from lunch whenever you can, try to turn it into a pet. On days like this, it has to find a shady lane in between the construction site buildings, just to lay down and sleep. You stay inside, put on some music, but dancing is no good, and the lyrics just make you introspective. You write some words on your computer than nobody reads, show off your tattoos on a white mirror. You ask yourself, how did it come to this? You make your living in a haunted mansion on the edge of town, in a strange and distant country. This is the only place they pay you what you are worth. Don’t fool yourself, kid, wages are not symbolic of the importance of your job. Think of the dickheads you have met who get ten times what you do for writing plays. The asshole on the train to New England, with his long list of published plays for you to buy on the internet, with his two New Jersey houses and self written publicity notes. Christ boy, this is making you resentful. Remember Bob, he said, no fear, no jealousy, no meanness. Yeah right. This is how you combat loneliness.

This is how you combat loneliness. This is your cure for splendid isolation. Maybe at Christmas you’ll go back to London Town, where the rain and sleet and snow and Oxford Circus circus tricks will get you a shiny new contraption to make you happy. You’ll think about gifts for people who don’t want to know. You’ll drink a beer in a smoke free pub and you’ll think that one of these days you are going to get lucky. But then it’s time to go back to the sandstorm. Back into the fire. Yeah, boy, you sure slept with one hell of a dream again tonight. That’s how you combat loneliness.

Don’t think about the future, boy, it ain’t there to be contemplated. There isn’t a script for things that may come. They say to you that only you control your own destiny. Yeah well, that’s nobody’s business but the man’s. They are blaming you, boy. You are the one to blame. So damn easy that way, eh? You live like a recluse and you get the driver to take you to work. You get the chef to cook your meals and you go back to your room, trying to avoid the black parts of the marble staircase. That is how you combat loneliness.

Don’t blame your past, boy. You make your own choices in this life. You fucked ‘em all up and here you are. You can’t live in April 2004 forever boy. She doesn’t like you anymore boy, you went too weird and said all those intense things. You laid your life on the line for someone who didn’t want to know. Don’t trust anyone, boy. Especially anyone you love. Hide it all inside and head out to the desert and camp beneath the stars. That is how you combat loneliness.

It’s big old world, boy, and it just gets bigger. There are better places to hide, and wider gaps between the people and the good times. Check out your surroundings, kid. Isn’t this what you asked for? When you were six, did you not swear to avoid the girls forever and live upon an island and grow your own food? That’s good advice, boy, best keep it mind. Here you are, all your promises came true, there’s no turning back now. Ha! Listen to yourself, boy. All this goddamn sand is turning you crazy, boy. Your mind has come alive to the words of all the songs, and there ain’t not beer with which to soften the pain. The sunlight awakens them ol’ demons, boy, and you’d better be in good shape for the fight. It’s going to be a long one boy, and you aren’t going to win, not in a place like this.

Your head is spinning with a million thoughts at once. The demons in your mind are coming out again. You close your eyes and you dream and you think and you write. You pray, to whatever it is you believe in. You pray for an answer. You pray for redemption and salvation and an unexpected letter from that girl you met underneath the California stars. That. boy, is how you combat loneliness.

All Is Violent, All Is Bright

2009-09-01T18:24:00.002+09:00

The first of September, 2009 marks the fortieth anniversary of Libya’s most recent revolution. On the thirtieth of September, the grand council - or at least one of them - announced (independently of course) a two day public holiday in honour of the Dear Leader. Across the city, the event is heralded by reconstruction work. Buildings and trees painted white. Walls and lampposts revolutionary green. In the main public park, a giant stage has been erected. Tonight, American rap star 50 Cent (one of the most popular Western artists in Northern Africa) earned a great deal more than that for performing for the Leader, his family and cohorts, and selected African dignitaries - including a number from Darfur, whose decadent behaviour at the Al-Kabir hotel I have previously written about. That is besides the point though. What is important to note is that the concert - also featuring marching bands from Wales - was advertised as being free to the people of Tripoli.

And so, on a balmy evening, with the soft wind drifting in from the coast to gently mark the coming of the darkness and the end of another day’s Ramadan fasting, what seemed like the entire population of young people arrived in Tripoli’s centre. A centre of some little aesthetic beauty, a coast lined by renovation work and five star hotels. These young people, boys and girls, young men and women came to get a rare glimpse of their favourite performer. Even if they didn’t like 50 Cent, why pass on the chance to see this hip hop superstar? No big names performs round here, not least since Clinton and Obama came to power with muddled promises of retribution and sensitivity, increased Scottish sentencing and economic integration.

The problem was, police and army also turned up. Not to act as bouncers but to prevent these kids getting in to what was expected to be a free gig. As helicopters circled overhead, kids and adults argued with police in white naval uniforms and soldiers in blue camouflage. People wandered, circling like the helicopters, trying to find a way in. There was none. 50 Cent and the Coalminers’ Fucking Marching Band Of North Fucking Wales had sold their fucking souls to perform in front of a bunch of African millionaires, oil contractors and leaders of despotic regimes.

This decision was not met with apathy. These young kids, men and women, each and everyone of whom is worth a million of the men and women you share your beds with, congregated on the main streets. They chanted, singing along to the music. Then something clicked. Intentions changed. They charged at the police, who had long since drawn their batons. The soldiers and police looked scared. They were not much older than the people they somehow had to move away from the gateway entrances to the park. Forward ran the music fans, back stampeded the police. No riot gear, not tonight, not yet at any rate, but any club would do. People knew they wouldn’t get to see 50 Cent. This was not about seeing the concert now. This was about taunting the police. Forwards again came these noble children. They were laughing. They were making their point. Despots are still despots no matter how many propaganda posters line the roads.

Colonel al-Qadaffi has been in power for forty years. Almost as long as the Queen of England, and with precisely the same number of votes. He will not see forty more. He may not even see ten. I hope he will not see four more. I witnessed tonight revolution on the streets of Tripoli. Young people not afraid to voice dissatisfaction. Perhaps, as in American in the sixties, these are only small steps in a massive and never ending battle. These steps, here, taken by Libyans young, tall and proud, will not be reported on Fox or BBC or CNN or PBS or CBC or whoever. The revolution will not be televised. I suddenly realise the depth and beauty and humanity in that line. I am about to go to sleep, shamefully. Before I do, I’ll put on God Is An Astronaut. It seems the right thing to do. I hope, tonight, these loving and brave music fans continue to press the point. I hope they push the police to breaking point and then step back. They’ll have made their point. I’ve noticed what’s going on here in Tripoli. These are wild and crazy times to be dislocated and alone in North Africa. My job here, ostensibly to teach English, has taken on a whole new meaning and significance. My politics may have changed too. Al-Megrahi, the so-called Lockerbie Bomber, spent four years in a Scottish prison for a crime he did not commit before returning to his beautiful home on compassionate grounds due to his failing health. I know exactly from where he got his strength. The day will come, inshallah., the day will come.

Sandstorm Dream #1 and 65

2009-08-28T15:51:00.004+09:00

So it’s 7.15am and I’m about to leave the house for a swim in the Mediterranean. I guess it’s one of the pains I must suffer for forcing myself to live a Georgia O’Keefe (a rather one dimensional artist, I always thought) style existence as a recluse living on the edge of the desert. I think the inordinate number of fruit flies have given me some kind of fever, because I remember fully a dream I had last night. The only two other dreams I recall in full are ones which were inspired by contracting norovirus; and I’d gladly die that you never have to endure that, (a weird dream about maths and colours a bit like a screen saver) or after absinthe (you really don’t want to know what that one was about).
 So anyway last night I dreamt that I came to visit you. I got the train at first, because the driver told me one went right to your house. But then Michael J Fox kindly told me that it didn’t, and the driver paid for me to go back to the station to get a taxi. Did you know that New Jersey is just a big outdoor market consisting of a series of red and white striped tents? The taxi driver took me there, on the way stopping to buy chips and fried eggs mashed together. I tried calling you eight times, and on the final time you answered and shouted at me. I now realise that somehow I have become scared of you.
 So, after you stopped shouting you remembered my dislike for the Greater New York area, and said we could go to Boston. Boston is in Austria now. I walked there with a colleague who wanted to meet you for some reason, and when we got there it turned out that Boston is in fact the Great Northern motel in Twin Peaks. All the staff there are eight feet tall and wear uniforms with kilts and waistcoats and tiny name badges on their lapels written in gold sparkly italics. For some reason, I was drinking nothing but tea which I don’t like. It took you three days to get there, but when you did you arrived in a bright silver Ford pick up van. You were wearing a checked lumberjack’s shirt like Neil Young. I knew it was you because it looked precisely like you, but when I woke up this morning I realised I am relying on five year old memories to put a face to your name. Except for your eyes, but we’ve had this conversation.

You were hungry, and you told me that you only ate blue cheese and nothing else. I pretended to like blue cheese so you’d like me more, which sounds like precisely the thing I’d do except I like blue cheese. We ordered plates and plates of the stuff. You were drinking Irish coffee, then some blue stuff, and then six cans of lager. You said that the reason you were late was because you had to do your homework, which was to “fix my soul with crayons on this graph and pie chart”. You had been doing it behind the wheel, but it was too difficult for you and you had got stuck, and you asked me and my colleague to help, which we did because that was our job, and while you went off to fax your homework someplace, I went swimming in Boston’s only fjord. It was an alarming sight, a bit like a killer whale with tattoos chasing a salmon. Eventually the manager came and told me you wanted to see me, but the truth was I was scaring the canoeists.

By this time my co-worker had completely disappeared from the equation and was helping the hotel manager build a water mill. You were being very nice now, and back at the hotel we spent a long time talking with great tenderness and emotional honesty about your business plan. It was something to do with wholesaling tomatoes and almonds, but it was never made quite clear. You held my hand as you told me of your profit and loss book-keeping. You had worked out it would return one million euros a day, which is quite good. It was nice, but you might want to clear up your project before taking it to the loan people. You wanted me to invest but when I tried to give you twenty dollars (I had hoped I would have been slightly more generous than that) you shouted at me saying it wasn’t financial investment that you wanted. I was very confused, and scared of you, which will probably cause real problems should we ever meet again. But then you turned nice for the final scene, and we skipped through the hotel, where for some reason you had parked your pickup in the lobby. You had engine trouble though, and I had to phone your dad and tell him you wouldn’t be home for one hour.

Napoleon In Rags

2009-08-13T01:45:00.001+09:00

I am in Africa. This much is true. The hotel I have been staying at has been taken over by a delegation from some nearby country. It’s a four star hotel, supposedly, and that means it’s probably one of the poorer neighbours. Chad, possibly. Sudan, maybe. The main doors have been closed to the general public and red carpets placed on the floor of the lobby and the lift. Outside, a black bullet proof Mercedes with no number plates lies waiting, and half a dozen police offers sleep in their cars. It’s mid afternoon now, and sitting in a car in the forty degree heat is not a job I would volunteer for.

So I return to my room. I open the doors onto the balcony and phone room service to order three or four grapefruits. I am in the mood for gin, or perhaps mint juleps. But that isn’t coming. Not for a long time yet, and at the moment getting my hands cut off for drinking alcohol is not something I am ready to contemplate. If they keep closing the pool, I may have to reconsider.

I play Bob Dylan a lot. Loud. One Too Many Mornings and One More Night especially long and hard. Wish I had my guitar. Haven’t yet seen a music shop in Tripoli, but hey, I’ve always believed more in my skills as a written wordsmith than orally. Isolation and solitude makes me particularly sensitive to the rhythms of the written word. I read all of the Great Gatsby last nigh in bed as I attempted to overcome a touch of food poisoning. Tonight I will probably get a copy of Time magazine from the hotel lobby in which all but the positive African special interest stories are cut out. This is still a despotic regime, albeit a relatively open one.

So tonight I will go out, probably into the Madina, the old part of town. If you can imagine one of the markets from the first Indiana Jones movie, it looks just like that.

Turns out it’s the Darfur Regional President who is staying at my hotel, I have no idea about the morality of the whole Sudanese conflict, but it seems a little suspect that the leader of a persecuted minority spends his time shacked up in a plush hotel at the expense of Colonel al-Gadaffi. The hypocrisy of practical socialism is here in full force, one suspects. And in truth, I do feel like I am in danger of becoming all that I resent. I came here chasing the money, so I can’t complain about the decadence. I am generally regarded as a bit of a weirdo so I can’t really complain about the loneliness....

Which is all really besides the point. The point is, I think, that when the melancholy call to prayer moans under the cruel African sun, I sit in my room, and realise precisely where I am. What I want from life, I do not know. It does not exist in the UK, nor Spain, nor Japan. Nor does it exist in Libya. But something does. Something different and alive and weird. And I’m going to stay here until I find out just what it is, and then, with my eyes never parting from the stars, I’ll wander on to the next harbour and take the first ship to the furthest port of call. To love and be loved indeed.

The Al Kabir Hotel Is Decadent And Depraved

2009-08-10T21:15:00.004+09:00

My disposable income has very quickly taken a turn for the better. I am sitting in the outdoor cafe at the Al Kabir Hotel in downtown Tripoli, drinking the local mint tea (all mint, no tea). It’s pretty good stuff. I am contemplating buying a dodgy, rip off, well made fake iPhone, to go with the dodgy, rip off, well made fake Nike swimming shorts I bought earlier in the storeroom of one of the many sports shops in the city.

In one particular street, possibly one out of every three shops is selling counterfeit football shirts. There are no chain stores, from what I can see. There is a Marks & Spencers someplace in the city. Given the locals’ vociferous dislike of the Zionist movement, its existence was a little controversial. The decision to take away the advertising hoarding seemed to do the trick and now westerners and wealthy Libyans can shop for tasty asparagus based dishes to their heart’s content.

For whatever reason, I arrived two weeks before Ramadan. Work consists entirely of “testing”. In other words, and in less technical jargon, I sit around the teacher’s room for six hours a day hoping that maybe someone will come in for a level check. Some other guy, a Canadian named Richard, has been on testing duty for three weeks. Not once has he moved to communicate with a student.

And so I find myself escaping the forty degree heat by returning to the compound of the Al Kabir hotel in central Tripoli. With a marble facade and enormous chandelier straight out of the 1940s, a faint whiff of her former decadence remains despite the fading of her rooms. The bellboys, concierge and luscious red carpeting hint only at her former glory.

How run amok in a grand hotel with nothing to arm but several cans of non-alcoholic Becks and some stuffed peppers? I entertain myself by indiscriminately ordering from the salubrious restaurant (we are given buffet meals for free, and have to sign - on the company’s account - for freshly cooked garlic king prawns and so forth). I have also developed a healthy liking for the local tea, a thick sweet nectar crammed full with mint. It is indicative of my current frame of mind that I take great enjoyment from ordering dozens of these drinks at a single sitting.

All of which reminds me of our great leader, Colonel al-Gaddafi, whose assuredly self-aware portrait adorns billboards across the city and hangs in every office, restaurant, bank and barber shop. One of the most collected souvenirs of Libya is an al-Gaddafi watch. Personally, I like the ones in which he wears his retro-chic blue aviator shades. When I say retro-chic, I really mean the Frank Butcher/used car salesman look. As a self-confessed fashionista, I must say it’s not a great example of haute couture, but nobody really questions these things, at least not in public. You can generally recognise a more dedicated follower of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Republic’s more nationalistic Arabic ideals if they sport a dyed black mullet.

The Libyan way is most assuredly not the Germanic way. It’s not even the Catalan way. Today, alongside the street talk that Gaddafi is poised to declare Libya a Kingdom and anoint himself as King, was the not-entirely-unexpected announcement that the annual 1st Of September National Day celebration, which had been moved forward to the fifteenth of August to avoid clashing with Ramadan, has now been postponed until October. Largely this is on the basis that precisely none of the roads, buildings or figurative statues of the Dear Leader have been completed. Or, in many cases, started.

In the hotel toilet yesterday, a Libyan man of a bout twenty years of age struggled to get the hand dryer to work. I fussed over getting any water out of the taps. Eventually, by a fine effort of team work and perseverance, we decided that the tap would work with one of us holding it while the other washed his hands. “You have to remember,” the man said with a grin the size of a Cheshire cat, “you are in Libya now. Things do not always work”.

Anyone who wants a dirt cheap football shirt of your choice, let me know.

Dateline Tripoli; An Editorial

2009-08-08T21:44:00.000+09:00

There is something about Tripoli that makes me feel like Your Man In Havana. It may be the decadent hotels on the beach front promenade. It could be the back firing of sixties cars. Or it could be the aromas of cigar smoke and chicken from street side vendors. It was thirty four degrees today and the locals said - with a mixture of wry humour and celebration - it was unseasonably cool.

Tripoli is, on the face of it, a very cosmopolitan city. In the hotel coffee shop, men dress in all sorts of African clothing. The dark skinned Nigerians, the paler North Africans with their mix of western suits and traditional cloaks. Women, unlike in Benghazi, show their faces and, shockingly, their hair. The many restaurants sell Barcelona, Celtic and Chelsea football shirts and the hotel staff speak a mixture of English, Italian and French to various levels of communication. Nothing ever happens that can’t either wait until tomorrow - the Catalans call it manyana - or passed off as a nothing can be done about it. The Japanese have a similar attitude, “shogun-nai” especially when talking about politics. It can’t be helped. Frustrating, but an abject lesson in patience.

“And you must speak of one who loved not wisely, but too well” (Othello)

I have always regarded Wolf Blitzer as being closer to Dan Rather (or Dan Rather Not as Sesame Street coined it) than the late Walter Cronkite. At the very best, he’s a Larry King without the penchant for singing Take Me Out To The Ballgame. I was however struck by his editorialising of a story this week on CNN about a 35 year old man who had murdered a young woman in one of the more (and there are many) lawless states in the US.

“Very sad,” he called it. It was as close to empathy as you will find in these circumstances. Earlier in the year the perpetrator had began filming himself on social networking site Youtube. A melancholy tale, his story began in earnest and hope, descended into serious self-doubt, and ended in murder suicide. At first, he spoke of ambition. Telling the world of how he would turn a 35 year old loner into a success with a younger date. He filmed his house, an increasingly cluttered bedsit. On the living table he showed with pride a self help book, all about the secrets of finding a younger (read prettier) bride. It was, to anyone with a passing sense of realism, bound to end in failure. That nobody noticed was a damning indictment of America’s self-satisfied couples.

It never ceases to disappoint me how many younger women want an older partner. They’ll tell you it has to do with confidence and maturity. Bull crap. It has to do with money. Property and income. The Hollywood cliché becomes accepted practise. Such is life, perhaps, but an age gap of more than four years is odd. More than six, untenable, and more than ten just plain fucked up. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, the superficiality of the stronger sex that lead to the demise of this fine, soulful, loving man.

It would perhaps, I think, be unfair to say the woman had it coming. Nobody has that, and nobody, apart from her killer would argue otherwise. But it shouldn’t be such a stretch of the imagination to empathise with this man. He was not an ugly man, he was just financially unstable, and as a result, sexually repulsive. There is no more ghastly sight than grown adults holding hands. It is an act of the utmost self-absorption. A embarrassing vision of society’s banal values. That news reporters continually express sympathy for the tragedy of the victim is fundamentally a lie. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Like Marx said of the free market, inherent within the structures of sexual desire are the seeds of its own demise. All my female friends will end up separated, divorced, or worse. Many of my finest male friends will spend their lives in perpetual loneliness. Which, if you ask me, is a far greater tragedy than the death of one pretty and vainglorious girl.

I have been informed that I shall be staying in this antiquated hotel for three weeks, possibly four. A man came to fix my toilet, which refused to flush. He fiddled around for twenty minutes, sighed, took it apart and got it working. He left, saying thank you instead of goodbye. I asked for a room with a view of the sea.

Home To Where The Hills Roll

2009-08-02T06:57:00.005+09:00

The Highlands of Scotland are a peaceful place. Stretching from Perth in the south, through the Grampian mountains, past the farm land of Inverness, and northwards to John O'Groats. Stretching west to the Hebrides, the Highlands mixed tourist attractions and bustling metropolises with savagely desolate countryside. The mare’s nest of locales manifested itself in the contradictory nature of her people, who, whilst often gregarious and welcoming, can often be cold and reticent to open up.

In the summer, the fresh water lakes are inundated with tourist buses. There are no motorways up there, and at the peak of July, nobody can ride a bike, other than late at night. The summers, under-rated by self-deprecating Scots, run from late June to early July, and some years, even longer. The end of the Summer months bring the midges from the west, biting and nipping and general contributing nothing but bother to those unsuspecting. Fuck off you bastards, they seem to be saying. Nature’s own self defence mechanism against the influx of campers.

Next comes the rain. The caravans return south to the cities and the English home counties. The campsites return to farms. The grass grows greener and higher and the dairy animals come down to graze. The farmers return to their proper jobs, and shop windows replace the picture postcards with home utensils and fleece clothing. The winds start to pick up. The tides start to churn and turn from azure to haunting grey. The oil rigs start to appear desolate. The citrus yellow rescue helicopter is seen more and more often.

Soon the nights begin to draw in. The open hearths are lit. Curtains close. The pubs all the more welcoming. Bread is replaced by soup, water by whisky. By mid November the snows begin to fall, melting at first. but soon surrounding the rolling hills in a silent shroud of snow. Only the sheep stay outside for any length of time.

Early in the new year the white snow is punctured by the yellow tips of daffodils. Potatoes replaced by fish. Volvos become dirty as slowly they return off-road. The sun shines higher in the sky, kids walk home from school, suddenly unable to see their breath in front of them.

This is where I came from. I left, long ago, to seek my future in the workplace. I sit here now, growing lonely, unhealthy and bald. I think about going back, but just for a while, and then I get out of bed, pour myself a beer, and write down these words.

Bay Of Pigs Baby

2009-06-21T04:42:00.006+09:00

If at last she breaks her silence, warm broken words of sincerity and joy, then and only then can I remove this feeling of guilt.
Guilt, longing, call it what you want. The power of a good woman is a strange and confusing thing. Makes a man believe all sorts of things, including that he must have done wrong.

She walked away on the first day of May. I had been preparing for a job to Biafra, as it was then. I was, along with my producer and translator, intending to interview Henry Kissinger, who was in the region promoting economic reform. We had, whilst waiting for visas to be sent from the British consulate in Paris, decided to nip over to Amsterdam in order to avoid all the Moroccan separatists who had taken to setting off bombs at various locations along the Champs-Elysees. I had been warned about this by reading Albert Camus whilst still in London and had no intention of getting my arm blown off on the account of some war mongering son of a bitch in the Nixon administration, no matter how good the wine was on the left bank.

So we hopped on the train, over the border, leaving contact details with the front office at the Ambassador Hotel, so Sarah knew where she could reach me.

Sarah was never fussy. She had, after knowing me for several years, got used to my whims and fancies. Chiefly among which, and in no particular order are fine single malt, impressionist art, and truffles. We had met in Havana, drinking rum in a bar near the beach, eating mussels and what have you. Nobody worried then about Russia or Berlin. The Bay Of Pigs wasn't even known. We didn't know, or at least, I didn't have to tell anyone I knew about the potential shit that was about to come down. I'd been based in Moscow and had heard whispers about Kruschev going insane and trying to start another war with Playboy Kennedy, but nobody really took him seriously.

And so I lived my life without too much burden and smoked cigars knowing I wouldn't have them thrown away at Dulles airport.

Sarah was a big part of that scene, of those heady yet resourceful, carefree and soulful days, and when I moved back to Europe she came along. Got a photography gig. Kissenger once told me he thought she was cute, so I figured bringing her along would do some kind of good.

Anyway, she never did get back to me in Amsterdam. Nor even when I got back to Paris. And hell, I guess I just got left out to dry. So we headed off to Biafra, sans photographer. We could just get one from the p.a who would be out there anyway. Sub-editors could deal with that.

As it happened, Henry was in good form. Lots of good copy, even threatening war at one stage. Henry has always claimed to be a Democrat, and just got labeled a Nazi by association. Damn your principles, stick to your job.

Jackson Browne Is Rubbish

2009-06-06T04:18:00.006+09:00

Don't know if there's a connection, but watching the hyperbolic Adam Boulten on the wannabe Yankee Sky News, I was interrupted by someone playing Jackson Browne at loud volume. That person is currently causing me as much consternation as any corrupt (by the gentrified British standards - you should see what Washington's standard bearers, including Mr Obama, can get away with) politician. Let me state for the record, like the Dude (in the decidedly over-rated Big Lebowski), I hate the fucking Eagles. I hate every last member, alive or preferably dead, and I hate all their egotistical and vacuous solo work. I HATE THE EAGLES. Very much so. However, my deep-seated distaste for mediocre Californian singer songwriters is of no real interest or importance, or at least not here and now.

So our political leaders are making hay under the sun whilst the taxpayer gets the bill. Well, change le disc. The phrase that immediately springs to mind is "change le disc". Is anyone actually surprised?

The whole point of the expenses system - and indeed full time politicians - was to allow a wider social grouping to become MPs rather than just the wealthy. It is a necessary evil, otherwise you end up with a system like America, where only the extremely rich have any sway in politics, or Japan, where questions are asked of a politician if he isn't either corrupt or racist. Jesus fucking mother of satan, the ridiculous oven I have here burnt the crap out of my lunch while I was writing this.... the patience of angels is tried by the actions of God. Unlike the fickle folks of the USA, or South Africa, the British electorate is relatively educated in the concept of tactical voting, In other words, voting for a party other than your own in order to prevent or assist another winning. This is what you get when you have a three party state. In Scotland you could genuinely make a case that we have a four party state, and combining that with the reasonable concept of proportional representation, well, at least you have fertility (always thought that a negative thing in other walks of life) in your political system.

The trouble with that though is democracy necessarily results in an outcome half or a third or a quarter of the population don't like. Given the inexcusable absence of a "none of the above" option on a UK ballot form, discontent breeds apathy. Or at least that's what careerists like Hazel Blears would have you think. As REM sang however, with reference to the criminally untalented director of Waking Life, withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy. That the rotten, racist, abhorrent British National Party will all but likely take an improved share of the vote in this week's European and Local elections is not the fault of "stay at home voters". Far from it, they have made the ultimate step in sacrificing their vote to highlight the unrepresentative nature of the ballot box. It is the fault of the other parties, the ones who are losing votes, to present the dangers of the BNP to their potential swing voters. If the BNP vote share rises, it is not, despite what they would claim, an endorsement of their racist and nonsensical ravings, it is evidence of the failings of the mainstream.

Who do you love, indeed? I hope it's me. Where is the British James Carville? Is it me once again? Probably. See you on the Daily Politics telling Brillo Pad where to shove his Scotsman.

Drinking On Empty

2009-05-31T05:14:00.006+09:00

Evening came slowly from a place unmapped to gently push away the azure skies. The tattooed man sat at the table in garden, eating frozen carrots to cool himself down. At the bottom of the hill, the sound of fire crackers set off the dogs barking, and the backfiring of a scooter rang like a bullet. The sun was in the tattooed man's face now, and he half closed his eyes. Though failing gradually to blindness, his eyes had always been sensitive. A sensitive soul, they used to say. Even as a child he had never quite known whether this was a euphemistic insult or a complement. Now, as a supposedly fully functioning adult, he still wasn't sure. Nobody had ever pointed out to him the difference between a poet and a weirdo, although somewhere along the line, he believed, everyone makes the value judgement.

The tattooed man had a song in his head, and it looped and circled in his mind as he tried to contemplate the trip he was planning. It had been inspired by an old blues lyric...

"And I'm going down to Louisiana baby, somewhere behind the sun".

Yeah, thought the tattooed man, that sounds sweet, when he first heard it. He had never been to Louisiana, or even Missouri, but even the guilt he felt somewhere couldn't dissuade him from the romanticism of the black man's plight. The tattooed man listened entirely to black man music and read the black man books of James Baldwin. He had black man prison tattoos and the ghosts of black men were carved into his skin.

And so the tattooed man had come to the USA to ride the rails, run up gambling debts, and think his own melancholy thoughts out on his guitar. Riding the rails is not an easy thing to do anymore, at least not in the commuter lines, but the tattooed man explained to himself that once the trains left the East Coast cities, he could stop off at the wood mills in New England and Chicago and Buffalo, then hop on to the transport lines. There he would have to think of the past and the pending, but largely the past. Lost names, places, voices. He had never forgotten the eyes, but the accents were fading like a an overplayed record.

Love is always fleeting, said the tattooed man, as he poured another drink and prepared himself for the onset of night.

Fear And Loathing On La Ramblas

2009-05-29T06:09:00.002+09:00

Sat out last night on the main street watching the after-show party following on from Barcelona's win over Manchester United in the Champions League Final. In any other setting, the raucous crowd and the devilish red glare from the smoke flares could have been seen as a sign of impending violence. Here, in balmy Catalonia, the only feeling was joyous celebration, as the club, which represents so much more than just football, took her rightful place upon the pantheon of footballing greats.

The Mac is back from the repairers, gotta go write me some lines.

Adverts Updated

2009-04-12T21:36:00.006+09:00

Just been clicking on one or two of the adverts at the side there (cheers for clicking, I've earned $0.48 so far!) and results are somewhat unimpressive.

Anyhow, I think I might have to change my key words. My advertisers seem to consist entirely of insane cultists. The one entitled "UFOs in the Bible" is particularly well worth reviewing. The world is full of fools far more whacked out than I.

So, for the little google bot that scans my art and brings us adverts it thinks we would like, whisky, beer, cameras, food, Ross County football club, baseball, gonzo journalism, cheeses from around the world, travel, sun, irony, postmodernity, BBQs, caravans, picnics, cartoons, Japan, Jim Jarmusch, gin and tonics, pub grub, tasty snacks, fun times, crazy times, chips and cheese, visit Glasgow and Edinburgh, kilt hire, Willie Nelson is overrated, humanism, adults, old people, death defying stunts, learn to hula dance in twelve easy steps, personalised cat grooming services, take up boxings, bake a smurf cake, dinosaurs on the rampage, Chesney Hawkes, lovely ladies, Apple Mac and related products, cheap golf shoes, goalkeeper gloves at low low prices.

For I Am Your Saviour

2009-04-12T06:25:00.001+09:00

Sitting in the apartment, and responding to several responses to my blog, I guess I need to set out my goals and aims for all this. Firstly, none of it comes directly from me. Not that I don’t mean it, but the narrator is never me, even when it is written in a first person narrative. So what I’m about to write is not directly from me, but certainly drives at the heart of everything I write. In essence, you are witness to the central narrator of everything that appears in this blog (and, God willing, book), his life, his fears - and ultimately his self-destruction.

I am here for those who offer nothing but love. Pure, flat out, unconditional love. Love, and only love. Good people receive nothing in return for their love. It is impossible to be wise and content at the same time. It is impossible to offer unconditional love and receive it. Our passion and our tenderness is unrequited. Always. It is part of the deal. Only frauds love and are loved back. It is a contradiction. Liars and evil doers try to trick us. They try to pass off as one of us. They seem to offer tenderness and wisdom, when all that motivates them is to receive and not to give. In their smugness and self-satisfaction they dwell. They sleep in their double beds with shallow soulmates and corrupt confidants.

I do not write for them. They cannot possibly comprehend my art. We are the ones in whose souls art and beauty live. This is no false modesty, friends! We do not hide our scars, and we do not turn away from the scars of others. This is our unique characteristic, and it does not occur regularly. It requires a strength of character unknown to others.

I write for the lonely. I write for those who find company and self respect at the bottle of a whisky bottle. I write for those whose demons regularly threaten to take over. Fear not, friends. I understand your battle. I fight those wars too. I know too how it is to suffer. But so long as we suffer together, we no longer have to suppress or bottle up. I write for the self-destructive. I write and I live for people who live on edge of too far gone. Only those who have gone beyond the edge of too far gone know where it exists. It is our secret, and we live there. Not even death can bring that knowledge to those outsiders.  
They will alienate us, friends. They will categorise us and condemn us. They will ignore us and force us out of the daylight. They will return to their hideous notions of comfort, and respect, and understanding. They will fight and make up, they will fuck and they will kiss with tongues. They will hold hands as grown adults when walking to the supermarket.

Do not fool yourself friends! Do not let yourselves become deceived or distracted by their seeming confidence. Life does not travel with them! Fools that they are, they shun life! If they knew what we know, if they fought our demons, our indefatigable urges, they would forego all that they have and take that which is ours. So they can never understand. We cannot allow it. It cannot come to pass that the lovers make their fraudulent love then walk to the battlefield. This is unacceptable, and I will fight to ensure it never happens.

Follow me, friends. We will form an army of the melancholy. We will defend what is ours by right and by knowledge. Our truths shall never be theirs. Follow me, friends. I am your willing spokesman, sage and guide. Do as I do, and do as I say. People will call us insane. People will refuse our offers and our gifts. This is because they do not understand. They will not respond to our calls. They will not understand our language. They will mock. They will resort to cruelty and distortion. But do not fall for their lies!

In our circus, the light shines brighter than their sun. In our river, the water runs cooler than any oasis they think they seen in their deserts of love and companionship. Our air is purer. Our grass is greener. Our mountains are higher and our hell is more fearsome.

Follow my actions, friends. Walk with me. No action is too far. We alone set the boundaries. One of our lives is worth a thousand of theirs. Their blood gives us life. We can feed off their deaths. We can laugh. Arm yourselves. I shall take the lead. I shall kill in the name of our unrequited love. They shall be taught the lesson to end all lesson. We shall bring the book of Revelation to pass. Join me in the revolution. We shall set our demons free, and the havoc of our souls will rejoice in the playtime of the autumn of death.

You have my love, my empathy and my life. They shall only glimpse the pain we suffer. Then they shall draw their final breaths, and we shall shall inherit the earth.

I Am The Light That Never Goes Out

2009-04-09T03:06:00.004+09:00

The city holds religion as the captor causes fears. The cathedrals make a statement; daring, vocal, coloured, celebratory. Not austere and grey like the North. This is no Calvinist country - leave that for the colder, harsher, more industrial places. Gothic is for the kids, baroque is king here. No alienation, no vengeance, no paucity of spending. The churches and cathedrals are the gifts to the people. Take them in lieu of comfort in the home. Enjoy your prayers, and pray for relaxation. Pray for the homeless, and ask not what more you can do. No visionaries here, speak only of what we can see before us. The wonder of the afterlife is revealed to us through our art. Art is a function of religion, the artist inspired by God. His art is not of his own making. It is a blessing. The most blessed shall built our houses of worship.

Above us the moon and stars. You choose to put your faith in these ancient deities. Open beyond comprehension, size infinite. Travellers, sailors, wanderers. We are but nomads, beating our ceaseless path into the past. The moon, weary, stained, splendour magnified. Legends of lost souls stem from her cracked teardrop. The melancholy of the moon, guardian of the lonesome, the broken hearted and the drunk. The stars are home to the angels. Hope shines down. Our futures, collective, solitary, our destiny charted above in the skies. We follow a path older than the earth. The vast emptiness contains our births, our lives, our futures, our death. Man dies alone, we live alone also.

Let not us fool ourselves! Delusions that some other holds our soul inside them. In their eyes only lies. In the hearts, deceit masquerading as love. Women sell their bodies to men who make promises of money. Whores! One and all! Do not deny it, for he knows as well as you or I. Male manipulation creates avarice. Avarice rewarded by perversion. Un-natural libidos constructed in the banking industry. And still you call this love! Ha!

Man dies alone, we live alone also. Love exists unspoken. There is no harbinger to trumpet its arrival. You confuse and lie to none moreso than yourself. I pity you and your delusion. Death is your only salvation. The heartbreak and sorrow of the livers, imitated by the lovers. Ha! I mock you and your false comforts. I am the profit and I am the light. Read my real love carved into my arms and realise my truth. Follow in my footsteps, for mine is the promised land. Mine is the wisdom. Ours is love.

Adverts

2009-04-08T02:13:00.002+09:00

You may have noticed the ads that have started appearing on my blog. Please click on them if you get the chance, as they will pay me if enough people click. I think they are fairly unobtrusive, but if you find them annoying let me know, and I'll get rid of them. Think of it as the first step to me going professional.

Verses on Versus

2009-04-07T17:37:00.003+09:00

Remember I found you that ring in the stream on the mountainside? Do you still have it?

It is possible, try hard, that if you choose to spend enough money, you can avoid any day you want. That could be New Year's Day, Christmas Day, or my personal choice Valentine's Day. It requires a careful study of international date lines, a little maths, and the desire to visit the ends of the earth, but it can be done. Presumably, given an infinite amount of money, one could avoid ever getting older, and die the same age you are now, just by spending the rest of your life flying long haul. It would certainly cut out most of the bullshit.

Some of us revel in that bullshit. Some of us are good in that situation. Some of as are perpetrators-in-chief. Some of us just can't cope with it at all, and their failings in life, like Meursault, should you choose to interpret it as a failing, are directly caused by a complete unwillingness to lie, deceive or invent merely to make things easier. Guess what I'm trying to say is, if ever you are lucky enough to meet someone who pointedly refuses to play their game, keep them in your heart as long as you can. They are a dying breed and need protection, and they sure ain't to be found living in eight bedroom houses on the upside of town, surrounded by friends and admirers and smug middle class cooking facilities. You'll have to search them out in the back alleys, in the bars, or wandering alone after all the coffee houses are closed. They are the ones kept out of the limelight by their own choice, the ones for who praise is earned but never delivered. The good ones are the loners, the weirdoes and the savages. They are the ones who know and speak the truth, who walk with hearts of love and truth, unspoken of envy or pride. Look for the scars on their skin, memories and experiences of the soul, worn on the outside, two fingers raised to the boundaries of lamentable conventions of beauty, but lived in daily deep, deep inside in a place where the comfortable have never been and no right to visit.

To paraphrase Bright Eyes, never are these people burdened by their troubles with living. We are the ones in whose crazed eyes and lust for experience deeper than sex or marriage or any of those tiresome cliches. We are the ones with the sorest throats, and we the ones who have done all the singing.

Such Is Life, My Good Man, Such Is Life

2009-04-06T05:33:00.003+09:00

So, just moved to Catalonia, right? The land of Messi and Barcelona and an independence movement as strong as anything the SNP has to offer. Went out tonight, had a few beers - five at 7 euros 25. Much cheaper than back home. Keep speaking Japanese. L2 interference they call it in the trade. My Japanese was much better than I though. Had two plates of peanuts for dinner tonight, my Spanish is much worse than I thought.

I have a big flat here. Please come and visit.

The Green Dress Thing You Tied Around Your Waist? Yeah, I liked it.

2009-04-05T18:46:00.006+09:00

Sunday morning. Still feel like writing. Watching the Grand Prix in Spanish, which has been dull for the least ten years and hasn't improved from what I can see. Overpaid men really are an odious bunch. It's why so many American men are universally unpopular to all but American women. It's about to piss down with thunder and lightening according to my piss poor Spanish. That's usually fun.

In fact, I'd like to improve Formula 1. I'd like to see races cancelled for good weather. They should take place only when it is raining. I'd also do away with seatbelts. They seem to serve no purpose anymore. I'd also make it compulsory for drivers to listen to maudlin 80s MOR like Til Tuesday or Chicago whilst driving their cars.

Betting should be actively encouraged. Basketball betting - in game - is one of the single most tiring exercises one can ever participate in. It's probably more energy consuming and concentration demanding that the sport itself. Money should be placed on deaths, spin offs and general destruction caused. Bonus points would go to drivers who manage to injure people in the stands. Combining F1 with the Demolition Derby is a fantastic plan which can hardly fail to increase audience numbers. F1 like to pretend it is the sophisticated European cousin of Nascar, much as I am the sophisticated European superior of the playwright I met cheating on his girlfriend in New Jersey. And, if I may, all sex is immoral anyway.

The safety car is out. Why not introduce points for taking out the safety car? Or make drivers only able to drive in reverse whilst the safety car is out... and let's have no more of the red flag nonsense eh? A bunch of whiney, overpaid bitches crying because there's a little water on the track. Bollocks to that, you get paid more money than I'll ever know. Go out and entertain.

I like your eyes better than your dress. Get in touch please.

Stop Running, Kid.

2009-04-05T07:28:00.004+09:00

I'm in the mood for writing tonight. The zeitgeist is here in Catalonia with me. The piano's playing a waltz, I think, and she's inviting me to dance...

From my balcony, the Spanish sun sets over the old castle which serves as the town chambers. Fire it up. I go inside and reach under the sofa for a block of fine Afghani hashish. I sit in my kitchen and roll another number for the evening time. My back is hurting, connected to an muscular injury in my leg. If I sit down and stand up I have to walk doubled over for about three steps. Guess it has to do with my terrible posture. Either way, I need a little soothing. A glass of wine in one hand, I lean over the wall of my house. As always, I try to work out the height, and the damage caused if I were to jump. It's something I have always done since I was a kid. The other think I always try to once a day is to put my arms in such a position that nobody else in this great wide world would be doing it. That's surely an ego thing. Maybe not, maybe I'm actually hoping that somewhere someone is doing the exact same thing, and if I keep walking down this road I'm on then I'll run into her. Maybe I already have, and I was too busy for her to tell me. Well, with Neil Young on the tube and my cigarette and my wine and my poetry in my house, here I am, darling. I ain't going nowhere.

I close my eyes. I take the leash from my consciousness, and allow my mind to wander through the back streets and down the B Roads. From the Palestine to Tokyo, across to London, right through New York, Delaware, Boston, Montreal, San Francisco and wherever the hell it is you are tonight. My demons are at rest tonight, the beast in me is caged and I feel no pain. I drift into a distant past. I can recall clearly sitting on a wall, an arm around your soul, protecting you from the cold of the mountain. Closing my eyes further, darker, and deeper, a waltz plays and a small child sits on a merry-go-round. The fair is deserted, save for one girl on a dapple grey horse. She's saying something, but her voice is too soft for me to hear. In my strain to hear the voices, my attention is caught by the crashing of the waves against the shoreline. A full moon is out tonight. I've been drinking, but the tattoos on my arm remind me of the light that never goes out. Under the shimmering moonlight a dolphin makes its way behind a yacht. Across the water the lights from the houses on the shore blink red, then green, then yellow. I can see cars pulling up. They must be having a party. For a second I consider swimming across, but I turn my back instead. No, that's not for me. I sit down on the beach, and lie back, looking at the coffee stain coloured moon. The moon is yellow, but her light is blue. For a moment, all is still. I am me. I am alone.

I am sleeping now. On the beach the sea grumbles, and the wind picks up. I hear the engine of a car. It stops, and the driver gets out and walks over to me. She kisses me on the forehead, and runs her hand through my hair. Then, with all the care in the world, she takes her car keys and throws them into the sea. Then she takes the cork from my wine, takes a gentle swig. There's wine running down her cheek from the corner of her mouth. She wipes it away with her cuff, then she lies down, puts her head on my chest, and tells me of all her sins.

I love you.

Don't Let My Nature Take You For A Fool

2009-04-05T06:42:00.004+09:00

Is it a universal thing to get nervous in the presence of beauty? I always thought it was the necessity of a man to see beauty in everyone in everything. And there is... right? Is it just me who responds like this? Utterly incapable of dealing to beauty, I seem to respond to it with thoughtlessness. Not in a self-centred way, but a reactionary response, an urge to let spew all my feelings, trust, and - hand in hand with trust - insecurities.

Do people create beautiful things in order to be told that their creations are beautiful? Is that what I'm doing here? Hunter was beautiful, so was Scott, and Ernest, and Janis. As night falls on sleepy Barcelona, my beer bottles pile up and my computer gets the aftertaste.

If you love something, give it away. There has to be limits to that, surely? Or must men (and frankly I have too few female friends to voice this in a feminine narrative), good men at any rate, live as a hunter gatherer only to give away their treasures? Imagine a life constantly collecting and making diamonds from coal (unless you prefer coal, in which case I'll save you that coal) then smashing it into sand because you don't have any offspring to pass them on to? Like a boxer with a glass jaw, the soul broken (come as princess, come as a whore, come as a jock, come as a bore) poet walks a path of lamentable self-destruction, all in the name of muse, art, respect, money. If you love something give it away. Is love a ranking system like college Basketball? Do Boise State and Marquette get to keep the trophy but Delaware must melt it down for pennies for the homeless? Why am I filling this universal blog with obscure references to a meaningless basketball tournament? It's an awful metaphor, and one I ought to delete. But it's written, and I feel like being unscripted tonight. I'm listening to the album The Moon And Antarctica by Modest Mouse, my favourite band. It direct alters my mood. That, my friends, is art. Nothing to do with clever words or sentence structure. Know your stuff, write it down, and somewhere someone or something will prick their ears and smile. Or cry. Tell them a lie, and they'll weep for you, and tell them of foolishness and depravity and they'll grin. Grin, with teeth shining bright, and a twinkle like the stud in Lucifer's ear.

This is a rather humourless entry. What you are seeing here is the kind of response I make, sober, on the wagon, wrecked or loaded, to pure flat out fucking beauty which constantly gets me in trouble and constantly causes no end of pain, suffering and unnecessary isolation. The beauty comes from someone I love with more heart and soul and empathy than I have any right to, but it ain't gonna change any time soon. It's a personal story, and none of it is going down on these electronic pages in any form other than irrelevant abstraction. Read her blog though, it absolutely blows my mind to smithereens and kicks the crap out of any pretensions I have of talent. But that's a good thing. It's one of the blogs I have linked to on the side of this. She says she has a mind which lives inside tomorrow and time can only heal its scars. (A constant moon and a constant arrow. A constant war where my path gets narrow. On the bridge and on the cliff-face, a fool, a spy, and a tear of lace.) After five years, I believe that it's true. Yes, I do. I do believe it's true.

While you are at it, take the time to read through the other blogs I have linked to. There's a great deal of wisdom to be found in this world. Even when talking in monosyllables and thinking in binary. The beauty of maths is in its function, they say, and its consistency. Well, yes, but if you search at the bottom of a broken glass, you can still find a drop of whisky, even if the shards cut your mouth.

Hellcats And Hemingway

2009-04-04T04:26:00.007+09:00

Well, it's just after nine thirty in on a mild Catalonian evening. The neighbours in my apartment block are having their little community confab, my Spanish is too crude and my experience too short to participate, although they asked me too. It's a very odd difference from Japan, where westerners, despite marriages or years of living in Japan aren't generally welcomed into Japanese communal events. For the socialist minded, it's a discouraging fact of life that you will always be a gaijin irrespective of your own ability to ingratiate yourself into your surroundings. So life for a non-native in Japan can be very, very cliquey. Too many of the foreigners, talented or otherwise, contributors or takers, whom I worked and lived and drank with don't notice, or seem to mind. But the Japanese realise this situation, and some of them feel badly about it.

In one of the most enjoyable, and regrettable in it's lateness, I found myself increasingly involved in the extra-curricular activities of a fine bunch of healthy and eloquent Japanese football players, by the name of The Hellcats. The name is neither here nor there, but the point is after four years as an outsider I had only just made any kind of a breakthrough, and by that time my patience had passed breaking point and I had arranged my departure. The Hellcats and I met originally as part of the company football team, for whom they played intermittently as ringers. Through that team bonding, I eventually went on a savage and at times depraved journey through the Tokyo ex-pat community into the Wabi Sabi - beauty of imperfection - of the Japanese underground. I attended Satoshi-san's birthday party in a sushi bar in Chiba, got very drunk with Ichiro-san at our player of the year dinner (the winner being Kura, a classy, classy centre half and top bloke) and joined a mass huddle chanting Italia, Italia for some unknown reason. I miss the Hellcats, those Japanese renegades, far more than any climb to the top of Mt Fuji, or ferry trip to Miyajima island, or crazed museum featuring Ghibli characters.

In Spain, in industrial small town Igualada, there is no subtlety, no Wabi Sabi, no distance. Folks tell you what they mean and mean what they tell you, however mean that may be. But they tend to leave well alone, until the time comes to complain. Argument and aggression is never far away, despite the fundamental decency of the Spanish character. If I am here for four years, I will have settled and married and entered a new, and frankly at this distance worryingly conservative period of my life. For now though, I have Easter coming up, and will be taking a trip to Barcelona.

My somewhat disturbing level of self awareness is motivated, I think, on at least some level by the necessary gaze of an outsider in a foreign country. I am often sceptical of the tourists who tell me how much they enjoyed Scotland, part of me wants them to see the venal underbelly I know to my own harm. But equally, the opinions of an outsider often are more telling, more insightful and more telling. Jack Kerouac, of French-Canadian decent, wrote novels which underlined the venal (to use that word again) poverty of the USA. He also pinpointed the free swing of be-bop, the infusion of black music which made the post war American life swing to the beat of a uniquely American drum. And he did all this to a level unequalled by almost any American writer, with the possible exceptions of Twain and Fitzgerald. It is a remarkable feat, on a par with the music of The Band (also Canadians), whose chronicles of American beauty, immigration, decadence and fear blow any American but Dylan out of the water. Who amongst his many fans cannot recognise the depth and accuracy of Wim Wenders studies in Americanism?

So this raises a question, one which I have no answer to. Who is it that will connect with Japan as an outsider? And can Hemmingway's patchily majestic reportage on Spain ever be surpassed or even matched?

Much weirdness
L'Estranger

When It Rains You Can Really Sing

2009-03-29T11:10:00.005+09:00

It is four in the morning and Barcelona's streets are awash with a day's worth of rain. The World Motorcross biking is in town. I've been smoking a little pot, just for the weekend, with a glass of red wine and a lot of Tom Waits. Walking home from talking to a man about a dog, I meandered home through the teardrop rain, feeling inside me that beautiful sensation known only to junkies and deadbeats when your eyes don't work quite properly and the only sign of life comes from the early rising bin men, or, less frequently, the late departing drunks. The street lights served to illuminate the tunnel in front of me and not a lot else. I thought about loneliness, the CIA, the names burned forever into my arm, and the crazy beauty of those I love. I thought of rolling hills and weeping violins from the deep South. As I walked, I imagined I saw the sun rising over the walls of Palestine, and standing there an angel, dressed in black, like a hobo on the Bowrey. My brain raced at a thousand miles per hour through the faces of people long left behind physically, and names brought suddenly, for no seeming reason back to mind. I suspect I was smiling, but just a little bit, as I unlocked the front door to my apartment, to pour a glass of cheap Spanish wine. Maybe it was something else I felt, something deeper, stronger, more abstract. Or maybe I was just stoned. The choice is yours.

I think what I am trying to say is never listen to Mogwai in the melancholy rain whilst the heart of Saturday night beats proud and strong and pure, in touching distance, and a million miles behind.

The Tour

2009-03-28T05:03:00.003+09:00

The last few days, after calming myself down from recalling my conversations with a miscreant playwright in New England, I turned my pen, or in this case MacBook (from time to time I draft my entries, believe or not, sometimes I just wing it. This is an example of the latter...) to writing dialogue. It suffers dreadfully from a lack of direction, and indeed a lack of pretension to a degree, so be kind to it.

The blue jay perched itself on a rock of granite by the side of the waterfall. Mistake! Closing one eye, the child from the bus tour pulled back his slingshot, loaded it with a stone of optimum velocity, and let go, hitting the hapless - if admittedly vividly coloured - creature square on the cranium and tumbling backwards into the water. “Take that you fucker.”

“Jesus Christ, what did you do that for?” I screamed. “The goddamn Forestry Commission will have you up in court. Those bastards are vicious. They’ll probably castrate you. Jesus, man, what the hell are you thinking?”

Dale, who was working for the BBC at the time, was used to living in something of a comfort zone and didn’t seem to share my fear.

“Calm down, calm down. What’s the worst they could do? Remove us from the park? Besides, I’ve always hated the Byrds”

“You crazy fool! Have you ever looked inside those big green SUV buggers they drive? Well I have, and let me tell you, it isn’t pretty. Take the boot. Every one of those great beasts comes with a selection of small bore rifles, and three thousand rounds of bullets. In the glove box are seven different gauges of knife, plus Commissioner's Handbook, which gives the order to shoot people like us on site! Jesus... they don’t hold back either. Six months of kick boxing training in Bhutan to all new recruits. We’re dealing with a bunch of savages here, and you’ve put us right up top of their wanted list. You sick bastard!”

“The blue jay was asking for it.”

“Dale, how the hell can a blue jay be asking for a rock in the head from a high velocity slingshot?”

“It was laughing at me.”

“Everyone is laughing at you. Constantly. Every time you turn your back. Sweet Mary on a bicycle... There’s no doubt about it, we’re going to have to lay low for a while. Goddamn it! I should ditch you right here and now. You are an imbecile, Dale.”

“Sorry...” Dale tried to interject.

“Oh, well, too late now. There a small cabin up on the ridge. We’ll have to ditch the tour here. We’ll go via the visitor centre and get some provisions.”

Three quarters of an hour later we were struggling up a steep incline with four shopping bags. We had, through a combination of petty theft and honest payment (mainly the former) managed to acquire six quarts of rum, three two-litre bottles of coke, six pints of milk, four boxes of breakfast cereal, twenty three limes, eight carrots, and two bottles of Bushmills. Prior negotiations with a cavalier with regards a canine beast had provided us with a pint of ether and three dozen sleeping tablets. And a couple of bottles of plonk. We wouldn’t need it all, if everything went to plan, but these Forestry agents can be perniciously keen if they get a sent of blood, and it was best that we be prepared for a serious stake out.

“Jesus, this looks like something out of Northern Exposure,” Dale said as we arrived.

“Never mind that, check for bugs. You never know how quickly these bastards can work. You check behind the stag’s head above the fire place and I’ll look inside the coal scuttle. We have to make sure they aren’t bugging us, God knows what they’d do if they knew we were here. Tear gas is a certainty - you should have see them in Wako. That was forestry guys, mainly. We’d be as well jumping off this damn mountain.”

We spent an hour rummaging through the semi-dilapidated shack, before deciding to settle down to a pint or eight of rum punch.

Later on, Dale decided it would be wise to soak one of the tour guide t-shirts in ether. Neither of us felt particularly delighted by the prospect of hiding out, but Dale had put us in this position and there was, for the moment, no escaping it. My lawyer was otherwise engaged in a case involving a friend of mine who had deliberately poured a bottle of coke through a police car window. In a fit of pique he decided to contest it and one of our potential outlets was shot. Not that I would be in any mind to pay the sorry charlatan anyway... he overcharges and I have serious doubts he actually passed his bar examinations, but still, a friend is a friend and he’s bailed me out on more occasions than I care to remember.

Dale on the other hand, had never been one for paying legal fees, even in situations as perverse as this. Many nasty and brutish things have be said about Dale, most of them true. But he’s not without principle, however inhuman and depraved those principles may seem - at least he has some. Which is more than can be said of a lot of people, including me, but only so much use in situations like this. So in lieu of any alternative options we turned our hands to the finest chemicals known to humanity.

Every language has a rhyme to do with alcohol. In English, it goes beer on whiskey is mighty risky, whisky on beer then have no fear. In every case, it’s an urban myth. Like putting a dozen dissolvable aspirin in a glass bottle of coke, which is palpably nonsensical but the sworn cocktail of university students and independent movie makes the world over. The myth, in most cases, has some basis in reality. Vodka and good quality cocaine is a bad mix. Vodka and bad quality cocaine is pure hell, turning even the most passive of people into raging beasts of rage and violence. Which is fine, so far as it goes, and incredibly entertaining to watch when you know what is coming, but something of a shock to those not used to these things as their friends turn into brutes in front of their very eyes.

Dale and I had been drinking for about eight hours before the ether began to kick in. A man high on ether is a nobel and savage beast, and not one to be trusted. But at least he is consistent in his inconsistency, and appears so depraved that anyone with any sense gives him a wide berth. Which was precisely what we wanted. It also made it slightly less unpredictable when Dale picked up the emergency telephone and began hurling it around the room.

“Holy Mary, there’s a kelpie! Goddamn thing wants to drown us in the snow!”

“Oh crap,” I thought. It’s finally happened. He’s only gone and cracked. I knew the situation wasn’t good. Here I was, stuck in a single room mountain shack with a crazed, doped up lunatic who was screaming about invisible Celtic doom-sayers. To make matters worse, he was armed with some of the finest mood altering substance in the country.

“Come here, you sneaky wee fuck!” Dale was now babbling incoherently, and had managed by some method or other to acquire a knife. This was not going to be easy. Fortunately I had foreseen some of this madness and had hidden the spirits in my bag. I opened one of the bottles, but Dale was in no fit state to notice.

I sat down with the bottle and prepared for an evening’s light entertainment laughing at the deranged freak in the corner of the room. Which was all very well until somebody knocked on the door.

The knocking had the peculiar result of seemingly calming Dale down, and his affectation of tranquility was certainly opportune. The knocking continued.

“I’ll deal with this one, Dale.” I said. “There’s no escaping this one. Make sure you stay calm, Dale, I’ve seen these guys and I know how they operate.”

I opened the door, and of course I was confronted by one of those ranger types who used to look after the animals in Gentle Ben or Flipper. I read him straight off the bat, one we would have to keep a careful eye on. Not one for irony. I was way ahead.

“Good evening sir, may I come in?”

Being a betting man, I put on my best poker face and let him in. I tried to cut down the chatter, there was a thin line between amiable and bungling buffoon and I was not going to risk crossing the boundary.

“Good evening gentlemen, sorry to trouble you this fine afternoon, but we have had reports of somebody stoning protected birds to death....”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Indeed, stoning blue jays, with pieces of brick. It’s not something we look too kindly on at... what the hell?....” The ranger turned around to where the sound of broken glass came from. His severe look turned to one of bewilderment and then to one of savage atavism.

Oh God I thought, as I realised what was happening. Dale had smashed one of the bottles and was charging at the ranger, who was going for the gun in his holster. There would be only one winner between a vodka bottle and a bullet, so I tripped the ranger up and pushed his face on the floor. I took his belt and tied his hands behind his back.

“Jesus, what did you do that for, Dale? I’ve already told you how savage these bastards can be. For christ sakes, when he doesn’t call his boss in forty five minutes, they’ll send a small ground force out here, and when they do they’ll spare no mercy - hand guns, tear gas, the lot - Chicago in ’68 has nothing on these guys.”

“I’ve seen him before, Aiden. He’s with the agency. This bastard is on to us, and he was going to take us out. I had to do it.”

“Fuck, are you sure? The C.I.A? How long have they been on to us?”

At this point, I had a thought. There was only one way the C.I.A could have cottoned on to us this quickly. They had to have a mole. And seeing how I jolly well wouldn’t report on myself, Dale must have to been reporting back all the time.

“Dale, you bastard, you treacherous wretch, you double-crossing son of a bitch! How long have you been in on it? I should kill you right here and now....”

“Take it easy, Aiden. I couldn’t help it. I had to do it. I’m up to my neck in debt. They have me under their thumb. And besides, I stopped him from taking you out. They want you gone, man, and this is only the start of things to come. You’re in the shit, mate, but I’m going to make it up to you.”

I wasn’t sure whether to believe him, but I was in no position to argue. They were on to me. I couldn’t be sure whether or not I was in the clear yet, so I had to take Dale’s word for it. We had to take things one step at a time, and the first necessity was to take care of our captive, and I sure as hell didn’t need this turning into some kind of Grand Guignol, which we were in serious risk of doing, as Dale by this time had the helpless ranger pinned against the wall and was threatening him with a particularly brutish anal probing....

A Song For The Missing

2009-03-24T08:18:00.005+09:00

My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true like ice, like fire

(Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero/No Limit)

It has just gone midnight here in Sleepy, Chilly Barcelona. The day brought fresh spring sunlight and clear azure skies over the town of Iqualada, some twenty miles outside the bustling city of artists and artisans, of Gaudi and Messi. For some reason I am feeling that odd sense of loss and guilt without knowing why. Not in any kind of alcoholic sense, but that feeling of loss when something has died, that universal gut instinct which tells you something has been lost, or left, or gone.

It's that unreconcilable absence, or more correctly pang of fallibility which has me listening to the song I have quote from above. It's unquestionably metaphysical - the singer's love, much like like Dante's Beatrice (although to a greater or lesser degree, all decent women are some broken man's muse) does not exist in physical form. It is also unquestionably poetical, and it's that, as GK Chesterton wrote, not in a man being sick, wherein lays the deepest cornerstone of art.

I am reminded of a conversation I had in a train someplace in New Jersey, with a man who called himself a playwright. I say called himself, as he literally had a a printout of all his "published" plays. It was, he said, something he used to impress his much younger girlfriend, a woman he admitted was both beyond his intellectual capacity, and outside his physical attraction. He was going up to New Haven, I think, to meet up with an ex and ongoing flame. Unfortunately for him, his freelance other half was also temporarily placed in Connecticut (the hardest state to spell). I was struck by the inanity of his situation, a raging cliche from start to finish, as he boasted of his two family house in Jersey City and the royalties he used to pay his mortgage. I was also struck by his inability to converse in anything other than superficial bases. His plays had names like Fallen American Soldier, or Tooth Angel, with no evidence whatsoever of abstract or even artistic merit.

This man, wearing Hawaiian shorts and a red baseball cap, boasted that he made his career by winning competitions. By filming short movies in student halls of residence back in Boise, Indiana. Indiana did not want him, Mr. R. Dean Taylor! - Boise State being a basketball college. He boasted of stealing the girlfriend of one of the team's point guards. I do not believe him. I didn't believe him then, either. I hope his girlfriend finds out, she deserves a better, more talented man, a million of whom will be drinking themselves into an alcoholic stupor chasing the muse who never comes.

John Martyn

2009-03-21T07:22:00.000+09:00

Well, toodlepip from me. Up early in the morning for my flight to Barcelona. I'll leave you with a video clip. I'm going to be loading my iPod up with this kind of stuff before I go. Click on John Martyn and enjoy. I can't play it, but if I could I would and I would think of you.

Love and peace.

The tattoo guy

Barcelona Bound

2009-03-20T08:37:00.005+09:00

Think I'll go out to Alberta
Weather's good there in the fall
I got some friends that I could go to working for.
Still I wish you'd change your mind
If I ask you one more time
But we've been through this a hundred times or more.

Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All those things that don't change come what may.
If all the good times are all gone
Then I'm bound for movin' on
I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way. (Four Strong Winds By Ian Tyson)

Wish I wrote that. Don't have the skill. And indeed, have no plans to go out to Alberta, despite the weather in the Autumn.

But I am bound for movin' on, and I will send you the fare if it meant a visit (that's a reference to the second verse but I'm not partial to cutting and/or pasting too much). London has been interesting, a period of my life, following as it did an immensely disappointing and exciting ride on the rails up the East coast of America. For a period there I was out of work and effectively homeless, which wasn't nice, but I did get to go into a real life pawn shop. It was disappointingly sterile. To that end, the opposite of a tattoo studio. Tattoo studios are places I frequent a lot, with both arms now fairly heavily covered, but hey that's my business and I'll show you some time if you ask really politely. Or sing to me. If you are female and you sing to me, well, you pretty much got me for life. You have been warned.

And enough of such ramblings, there was a point to all of this. On Saturday, I am flying out to Barcelona, that gargantuan city of history and azure and architecture. I'm going to live there for a while, try to kick these cravings I have, and at least try to get in some kind of health. The baldness means I'll either have to buy a hat or keep out of the sun. The title of this blog, and that microscopic vein of decency that runs beneath my seemingly impenetrable venal spirit, should give you a hint. Incidentally, if you know how find that beacon, feint as it may be, let me know.

I guess I should regard going to Spain to live as similar to Japan. But I went to Japan to find something, whether that be Wabi Sabi or Gibli or the Helllcats doesn't really matter, but I was young and foolish and in my naivete I thought there would be something there for me. And there was, in all of the above, and more.

But, frankly, I've been to Spain before. I've walked Las Ramblas, and I have no problem with shooting either rabbits or fascists. Perhaps part of me wants to retire in the sun, like those ghastly inhabitants of Gibraltar. That would suggest that at the age of 29 I am preparing for my final five years of life. That's not a great thought, but I always suspected my time was short and que sera, sera anyway. Thinking aloud, as I don't often do, this is more carpe diem than anything else. I'm not pretending I'm going to be nicer or happier person, but I suspect this mortal coil will have a different landscape, which is a fucking awful mix of metaphors, but hey, this is an undrafted entry.

It has been brought to my attention by some of the folk who read this blog - and there are one or two - that I should probably put paid to my attempts at poetry. This advice has been taken on board, even though I thought the last one was all right. So less poetry, more prose. Fair enough, but you have to come and visit to make it a fair deal.

Love and peace,
General Franco

An explanatory verse

2009-03-06T22:44:00.003+09:00

Got a new tattoo - number seven in all - and in preparation for the question, oft-asked, "what does it all mean", I wrote this.

On a mountain dream Spring evening
We drove up the coast
North from San Francisco
And the golden haze of the Sun

In your car was bible, and a knife and a pen
And we tore out the pages
From the beginning to the end
And re-wrote the lines to how it ought to be

Through the streets of Oakland
We slowed right down
Tossing out the writing
For the homeless folks to read

Then we rolled up the window
And played those songs out loud
In the car right then was captured
A moment for me to carve into my mind, my arm, and soul

So tonight I will be drinking
In a bar-room full of loneliness and soul
And thinking of that night in Oregon
And the sea that sings for you.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

2009-02-21T09:10:00.002+09:00

Four years ago my hero took a gun and, apparently in mid sentence in a conversation on the telephone with his wife, blew his head off. It was quite a statement, and one befitting the life lived by Hunter S. Thomson. As much as he became something of a parody of himself in his later years, and as much as the quality of his writing dropped off towards the end, he still had faith in his mind, and was one of the few American writers whose views on politics were actually worth a damn. He still knew how to throw a hand grenade or two when public debate needed it. In his sweet Kentucky drawl, which became pretty tough to understand at times due to his legendary intake of the finest drugs known to mankind, Hunter had soul, wisdom, and wit. As hard as the ever entertaining and eloquent James Carville tried, I couldn't help but feel that the coverage of this past US election lacked insight, clarity and downright balls. Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon speechwriter and friend of Thompson, had a free pass without the Doc there to argue the toss and cut around the bullshit.

But as much as Thompson had carved out a niche as a political commentator, he was, after all, a humorous and savagely brutal writer. Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, his most famous novel, was made into an interesting movie. "I liked it, but I wouldn't recommend it every night", said Thompson of the movie in which his character Raoul Duke, was so expertly portrayed by Johnny Depp. Depp helped fund Hunter's funeral, in which his ashes were fired from two cannons in the foothills of Colorado.

The Rum Diary, the Doc's lost masterpiece, is finally being made into a movie too. No doubt Johnny Depp will be involved somewhere along the line. Where The Buffalo Roam, a confused and often badly written (!) portrayal of a caricature of Thompson, starred Bill Murray in perhaps his most off the wall performance, is best remembered for the Neil Young soundtrack. A recent documentary, titled Gonzo, is a particularly amusing and insightful study of the man Jimmy Carter regarded not only as a friend and confidant, but as an unofficial adviser. It must have been something in the peanut farming, but history will judge Carter well for that alone. Sources for Hunter's work are easily accessible on youtube - see the line above - so I'll leave you all to find your own. I also recommend his widow Anita's owl farm blog. Hers is a far more eloquently worded tribute than mine could ever be, she seems to have something of a gift for words, so I will end this personal tribute to a hero by suggesting that, for the full Hunter S. Thompson experience, the discerning reader should pour themselves a very large whisky and settle down to a chapter or eight of one of the finest minds of his generation, a man full of soul and creativity and heart and talent who is still much missed four years on, even in this new world of extended optimism.

God speed, Hunter. Make mine a quadruple.

In Memoriam: John Martyn and Bill Frindall

2009-02-07T09:12:00.002+09:00

The deep south of Englandshire has been brought nearly to a standstill by six inches of snow. A final flourish of winter has greeted the new year, and left the city in a state of near chaos. On the radio, a welcome return to my ears at any rate for Test Match Special, and news from Jamaica of England’s tour of the West Indies. It is noticeable, even from the dulcet tones of Viv Richards, how enjoyable cricket can be when the whiney redneck Australian team has absolutely nothing to do with it. They seem to be heading for a whitewash at the hands of New Zealand, which is pretty hilarious if you ask me.

Iris Dement has a horrible singing voice, I am reminded, when compared with Emmylou Harris and Rufus Wainright - looking more and more like the long lost father of Nick Cave with each passing day. The melancholic Scots songs playing on the television, coupled with the winter fall serves to enhance my appetite for whisky, which in turn reminds me of the passing late last month of a genuine maverick.

John Martyn - Johnny Too Bad as he deprecatingly monikered himself - was, as Hunter Thompson wrote (though he could have been writing about himself) one of ‘God’s own prototypes, too weird to live and too rare to die’. John Martyn was, by all accounts, a bit of a dick. An alcoholic to the extent that he lost a leg, he wallowed in self-indulgence and drug taking, and chased the muse in any direction it happened to take. He claimed, up until the day that he died, that his talent was dependent on his ruthless consumption of substances, and his much reported violence merely a by-product. Notwithstanding that he hadn’t released a decent record in twenty odd years, he was probably right.

John Martyn recorded music that was good for fucking and drinking. Solid Air, one of the most critically acclaimed pieces of popular blues, serves best at about three in the morning. Despite the pretty melody of relatively radio friendly tracks like May You Never, it really is a lament to the state of mind of close friend Nick Drake. Ironically, as self destructive as Drake was, and as genuine Martyn’s attempts to care for his friend were, John Martyn seemed hellbent to avoid the rat-trap of commercial success by following Nick Drake into that place where only the genuinely tortured soul could follow.

And well he knew it. People would get hurt trying to stop him; he could be genuinely vulgar and abusive, but he certainly managed to follow that horrible musical cliche, he did it his way. His way mainly involved four bottles of whisky a night, but so be it, and Scotland has lost one of its most idiosyncratic sons. It would be amiss not to mention, though, that he was a ridiculously good guitarist, as any of his many Old Grey Whistle Test appearances will testify. He was a pioneer of acoustic blues guitar, and history will no doubt judge him as important as John Lee Hooker, but his masochism prevented him reaching real world wide success. Which probably was the way he wanted.

Also in passing, a farewell to Bill Frindall, the somewhat curmudgeonly scorer for Test Match Special. The players were wearing black arm bands in the first test versus the West Indies in memory of an excellent scorer, and, increasingly, a humorous and principled analyst.

With Apologies To The Master Of Gothic Horror

2009-01-17T07:42:00.005+09:00

Hello people, and happy new year to you, if you will. Apologies for the delay in updating, but the festive period has meant lots of booze and introspection which don't really translate to good writing. I'm currently undergoing something of an infatuation with Edgar Allan Poe. Something I noticed in Baltimore was that he had been adopted as a local son. I also note the fact that in the Oxford American Dictionary, he is listed as an American author. I sent off an email to the editors, but they didn't get back to me. Poe of course being Irish and not in the slightest bit American. Same with David Byrne of talking heads, the Americans pinched him, although I suspect Poe didn't take to changing his accent depending on which side of the pond he was visiting. Anyway here an untitled piece I have written, attempting to honour Poe. I realise it lacks a finality and the melancholy which Poe was a master of, and it isn't finished, but any thoughts you have would be appreciate. Any comments at all would be good, I keep finding out I have readers, but I had no idea until they told me. Incidentally, clicking on the title will take you to a wonderful French, silent version of The Fall Of The House Of Usher from 1926 in its entirety.

As, finally, I approached my destination, I looked behind me along the path that wound down through the pines and oaks three days into the valley. A light rain fell while I drank the last drops of the water in the leather flask that hung from my belt. My journey, such as it was, was nearly over and wearily I turned my attention to the gargantuan citadel before me, which I would call home for the next week.

I continued my climb along the narrow path up the foothills towards the granite castle. The towering drawbridge, made seemingly centuries before from the same trees as I had passed through on my travels, lowered itself as I approached.

The entrance hall was almost phantasmagoric in its splendor. From the threshold, a magnificent blood red carpet of fine Indian silk ran on the floor leading some distance into a darkness barely lit by the multitude of candles lining the hallway. Immediately to my left, some twenty feet above me, was hung a portrait of a man. The man, of a pale complexion, had a long mane, dark and thick, hanging over his shoulders. His thin face was long and narrow, his cheeks sunken and sullen, and his eyes dark and melancholic. The man, with nothing from which to note his name, was dressed in a gown of purple. On his his hands ostentatious jewelry made of ruby and emerald. From his neck hung an opal medallion, a monstrous gem surrounded by a golden crescent. From this brilliant gemstone I could not avert my gaze, and, hypnotised by its beauty, I stared until my focus was broken by a voice of such depth it sounded a thousand years old.

“That, my friend, is my Grandfather, Lord Undermere. He was the first beholden proprieter of this place.”

Such a voice chilled me to the bone. I looked up and saw what I thought was a ghost. For it was the very same face which met me from the portrait on the wall! The same deathly eyes, the same hollow cheekbones, the same silken garments, and oh, the same entrancing medallion. Even now I shudder to contemplate that ghostly figure of my host. But upon that very day I put my fears aside, and blamed them on my travel weariness.

“Yes, good man,” said I, as I came to my senses. “For sooth, I am so weary. May I request you take me forthwith to my chamber room?”

Graciously my host, without a quiver, took me promptly to the chamber door.  
The bedchamber was as splendent and salubrious as the main hall. A four-poster bed, bedecked in red and amber, took its place in the centre of the room. On the north wall was an expansive of leather tomes ranged from left to right. On the southernmost side of the room a glass mirror towered over an ancient and noble writing desk. Oh, such decadence! And thus, having examined thoroughly my surroundings, I took to slumbering.

I know not how many hours passed, but my sleep was deep and unabated. In the depths of sleep I dreamt in vivid technicolour of the pendant I had twice seen earlier. Why should this harmless amulet consume my imagination so? Again, I explained such thoughts to the delirium of the deprived mind, and I paid it no further consideration upon awakening. Now alert and awake, I rose to gather my bearings, but, to my horror, looking back to whence I had slept, I noticed something which I could have sworn was not there before. On the mantelpiece beside the door, the size of a human hand, stood a solid gold picture frame. Within the frame was the self same figure my eyes had twice studied.

I know not how long the painting held my regard, yet my attention was broken by the ringing of the man servant’s bell calling me to the dining hall. My host was awaiting my presence at one end of an enormous oak table, some twenty yards in length. Three places were laid out, and a large tankard of wine in front of each.

“I trust you are well rested?” My host enquired of me. I replied that I was, and I sensed this pleased him. I then resolved to solicit from him the nature of the portraits of the figure that was haunting me so.

“Whom will be accompanying us this evening?” Asked I, though more in politeness than general interest, for as I have already stated, my mind was on other matters of less immediacy.

“It is my brother,” said he. “You may recall his name, or more particularly his face, for he tells me you have met before. To wit, it is, in fact, on my brother’s business that I ask you here. You may recall, that our communique referred to the purchase of a large quantity of East Indian spice. This is, not, it must be said, my particular fancy, but my brother involves himself in the propriety of delicacies to the royal household, and to that end, requires your services. Unfortunately, he is currently dealing with a small matter involving insubordination in the royal kitchens. He will be with us shortly, and, on his behest, I beg your pardon. And now, let us eat.”

At this moment, my host reached to his left and rang a magnificently embelished bell, emblazoned upon it the same crescent I had earlier seen in the painting. Within seconds, the man servant entered the dining hall, dressed from head to foot in a deep, vivid burgundy, Thereupon he placed in front of me a meal of such decadence that I can barely describe it in these notes. Naturally, I dined heartily, and as I did so, I conversed at length about my host.

His family was originally from the Dutch Antilles; his grandfather a merchant banker of some little repute. Having collected something approaching a large fortune, he felt it would be wiser and more expedient all round if he moved his family and his savings to Europe. Thereupon his son - my host’s father - sent his youngest son to London Town for schooling. My host would be living in the sandstone mansions of Cambridge Town when he heard of the death of his grandfather. He arranged travel back to the foothills where he planned to meet with his father to attend to the funeral arrangements. Without explanation, and to quite some discomfort, his father never arrived, leaving the nineteen year old as sole owner of a thirty four chamber-room property. It was his mind to market the property, yet a decade later, my host remained as official owner and tenant in perpetuity.

During the banquet, which even now I must admit was of such delectability and near phantasmagory that my mouth waters just to consider it, my questioning turned to the host, and despite his amiable nature, I was determined to clear my mind of the doubts which had surrounded me thus far.

“Tell me, sir - and please excuse my impertinence in advance if such a matter occurs - tell me of this pendant which rests upon your attire.”

“This is the family gemstone. The Undermere Crescent. It dates from the 15th century. It has been in my father’s lineage since then. I took sole ownership of it upon the date of his death. Sir, whist in my homestead, I must ask you never to touch this stone. For it has has powers beyond your ken. And with that, my friend, I must bid you goodnight.”

With this, quite abruptly, my host rose, leaving his half eaten meal upon his plate. Instantly, or so it seemed to me, the man servant came and cleared the food from whence my host had sat. I called to him, hoping to ask his name, but he turned too swiftly and exited through the wide, sculpted double doors which led to the pantry. I too rose, having lost my appetite, and attempted to trace his footsteps. I walked, nay ran, for whatever fit of fear or excitement held me in its grip. Through the mahogany entrance I burst, but as I did so I once again glimpsed the strange emblem carved this time upon the door. Once, twice, thrice, four times now! Why could I not remove this thing from my brain? What hellish power did my host talk of?

These thoughts occupied my mind for merely a second as, to my astonishment, I entered not the pantry as I expected, but a completely barren room. Only three candles were alit, yet I could easily see the contents of the chamber before me. For, where I should have seen the servants and kitchens, I saw precisely nothing. Where previously the floor had been bedecked in velvet, now the floorboards gathered dirt. Where the walls were decorated with splendid paintings, now moss grew on the unwashed walls. Where once there was splendour and magnificence, now there was only melancholy. There, was, to be sure, no sign of this room ever having been occupied.

My intrigue now metamorphosed into fear and I ran headlong back into the dining chamber, where I attempted to collect my frantic thoughts. I must admit that it was at this stage I first had visions of my escape. I contemplated leaving this blanched castle behind me. But then I was overcome by a new feeling, a sense of calm. I walked along the carpet back towards the Brobdingnagian table. I found upon there sitting a man I took to be my host, but as I walked closer, I realised must have been his brother whom he had talked of over dinner.

I am the resurrection

2008-11-25T06:55:00.004+09:00

Waltzes play in the air, coming from a place nobody can put a name to. Reflections of false promises shine from the windows of nearby shop fronts. The neon lights of crematorium companies buzz, flicker and fade to grey. Smoke rises from the drain systems. The cowboy in the ten gallon hat leans against a railing, against a world he doesn’t like nor understand, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and he bows his head to the ground, sadly searching his mind for a memory he just can’t reach. From across the river bend, fireworks rumble like military practice. Somewhere across town, I reach into the inside pocket of my gabardine raincoat and take out a fresh handkerchief. I wipe the blood off my knife and, taking a cigarette lighter, I set fire to the handkerchief. I stand and I watch and I laugh like some kind of insane freak as it burns to cinders on the cold, cobblestone pavement. Eventually I stamp the dying amber out and head off to get drunk on cheap bourbon.

There’s something you will never know and I can never explain about the kick I get from alcohol. It fixes my soul. Sam Cooke be praised! I come here and I feel indestructible. All my faults which I confess for you tonight in the absinthe of my soul count for nothing, wrapped up in my memories of you. Whisky, the damp Kentucky bluegrass, blood, the ocean and the times of the dragon. I am with the devil in the daytime and with the angels in the night. The mirror reflects bottles of green and ruby and soft, golden brown. On the walls, copies of William Blake illustrations.

“Every night and every morn, some to misery are born.”

The windows stained glass. This is the only bar I know which shuns juke box music in favour of AM music. The low hiss and crackle and intermittent strumming of acoustic guitar occasionally interrupted by news reports from the mercantile exchange, and reports of the build up of Russian forces in South East Georgia.

It suits me better here. I feel more comfortable. Less contrite. Bars are full of things which do you no good in the long term, but for the moment there is nothing better. I talk to myself. I whisper, inaudible, but it is still noticeable. Keeps away the rose sellers. Saves me another night in the cells. There’s only so many of those I can take. In the drunk tank they keep the lights on all night. Some waster wakes to the bit-part memories of small humiliations which will haunt them for weeks to come. A seventeen year old student cries. He’ll be okay in a couple of days. In a week the fear will subside and the realisation of prosecution will smack him like a cold shower to an acid head. Then, like another hit of LSD, they receive a letter asking for a small fee for “incidental expenses” and immunity from prosecution. Which is convenient for all concerned, as the local courts would become clogged up with naive students getting criminal records for getting drunk. There isn’t any money to be made from that, ostensibly because the wages of the judge and courtroom staff outweigh any revenue the state might derive from the fine. And of course he learns his lesson - to just not get caught - and alcohol abuse becomes a domestic problem. And so much for all that, thank christ, save to say I know because I’ve been there and it took me all of a week to relish the experience. There’s no real way to describe getting a tattoo without getting a tattoo. Tell that to the movie industry. So I say to myself as I down a fifth bloody mary and light another cigarette.

I need the alcohol to keep my mind afloat and heading for the rocks where I like to be. Hold the course and steady as she goes, Cap’n. Violins and cellos soar in my mind every time I think of you. Flights of fancy, flee the fight. The tobacco stained moon is out in full tonight. Up there, where noise does not exist, only the sound of hearts beating, reminding me of the day we danced on the rain soaked streets of San Francisco, speaking not a word lest we get interrupted.

I awake to a spinning world. My heard hurts and I have lost my necktie. I fall down the stairs and throw up into the kitchen sink. I take a shower, brush my teeth, shave, and pour a pint of vodka. There is a cockroach on the kitchen floor -this goddamn humidity makes it a haven for the little bastards. I spend ten minutes running about like an imbecile. I run out of spray and resort to throwing the aerosol can at the fucker. Eventually I run out of breath and hang fire with a shotgun, with which I blow the thing’s head off. I hoover up the cracked shell and dislocated legs. Which reminds of what I did last night. Fuck, where’s the knife? Fortunately I find it. It has fallen from my coat when I threw up. I’m always losing things, a particularly nasty habit which but for the grace of god or whoever the fuck would get me in a lot more trouble than I have been. Karma is a load of bullshit. I get away with so much, and it would be interesting if any of my friends knew exactly what kind of a dick-head I really am.

Yesterday the wind was blowing so I killed her. For love, for passion, for money, for jewels, for the fuck of it. Because she deserved to die. Because she asked me to. Because it was too stupid an offer to refuse. Like a cat with a field mouse, I killed her because I love you. I slit her throat with my knife and I held her mouth like a lover as she struggled for air. Then, as the wind became a storm, I put her body in a hessian sack, tied it down with dumbbells, and threw her into the sea. And then the thunder rolled, a flash of lightning in the sky to the east, and the dance went on.

I was born in a small village in the highlands of Scotland. Five sheep to every man. Four and a half farms to every village. There are golden eagles in the sky and dolphins in the sea. The pubs are filled with the remains of those who didn’t manage to move away. In other words, the idiots, the farmers and the retirees. The biggest city has a population of sixty thousand in the winter and about two hundred thousand during the tourist season, no university, precisely one Chinese restaurant, eight chippies, and four hundred and seventy six hairdressers. The highlight of the social calendar is the regional game fair, to which Volvo estate drivers from around the region come to admire the latest tractors, watch the falcon show and get drink drunk and abusive on the local cream liqueur. Smoked salmon at market value with discounts for bulk purchase! Try the latest Smith & Wesson field rifles - never miss those damned deer again! Hire one of our veteran gamekeepers. One hundred years in the business and no fox ever beat us yet!

School sucked. It was one of those singularly inane moments where there can be no doubt that you are living on an entirely different planet from the rest of the world. Cliques within cliques. Those who got picked for country dancing and those who didn’t. Those who would want to go to the ten year reunion and those who send abusive rejection emails back to the two-faced fucks who all of a sudden want you to be their friend. Actually what they want is to see who makes the most money. If I weren’t otherwise engaged killing people, I’d love to turn up in a helicopter to one of these hell holes, sulk around for awhile, tell everyone precisely what I thought of them... or perhaps just get abusive. Then I‘d light a cigar Guess it was like that for everyone, or at least fifty percent of us, so I don’t have that to blame. Or she doesn’t. Or her family doesn’t at any rate.

What can I say to make it all alright? Nothing, so I won’t try. I can’t change what I did, and to tell you the truth I wouldn’t want to either. I regard my actions as a demonstration of love. Pure, unadulterated love. Thirty years of solitude, of longing, of flat out pure fucking love. If I was an artist, with an exhibition in a gallery, I could do whatever the hell I want. Pretentiousness. That’s what really kills me.

When I went to University, nothing much changed. I took far too much cocaine and marijuana and all my hair fell out. At some stage along the line I decided that I would stop listening to my conscience, and carry out all the thoughts than run through my head. A bit like that Dice Man, except compared to me, his trip was like a Gilbert and Sullivan song.

Take, for example, a restaurant. You get bad food, so you either complain or, more likely, you grumble under your breath and pretend when asked that everything is tickety boo. A strong willed character will probably complain, but begrudgingly. I, on the other hand, called out the chef, picked up a fish knife and stabbed her in the eye. A student couple asked me to move on the National Express, so I did, waited until they got off, then I cut his head off, raped her and killed her and buried the pair of them three hundred miles apart. On Valentines Day I lit a fire to a student halls and relieved this world of eleven of the odious little bastards.

ウリトラマン

2008-11-22T07:26:00.000+09:00

The crack of bullet shot splices the frozen air.
I walk across snow covered fields
And contemplate
The slow, sad demise
Of trust.

White breath rises from from frosted farmland.
Church steeples and the call of blackbirds
Serve only to distract
On this long and lonesome road.

Upon the ice reflections fall.
Isolated islands of brown and black
Amongst a sea of silent sorrow
Somewhere behind she sits.
And I do not turn my back.

ウリトラマン

Premium Economy Upgrades Are Worth The Price

2008-11-22T07:25:00.000+09:00

In the airport lounge at Dulles. Couple of hours free. Came for a beer, narrowly got out of a conversation about NASCAR. Stock cars going round in circles for three hours driven by semi-bright rednecks is, bar the inevitable beer, not my idea of fun. Not by a long way. So now the Eagles Bengals game is on. I haven’t been to Cincinnati, so I’m rooting for Philly. Philadelphia, home of the cheesesteak, a mediocre meal involving thin beef, melted cheese, onions and all served on a roughly foot long roll. They say one of those bastards has 1600 calories in it, and certainly the test of a good one is the amount of grease dripping from it. Like a good pie or the stock market the risk is all in the bottom dropping out.

Some pretty insipid quarterbacking by Fitzpatrick of the Bengals has even me bored, far too bored for any of this rubbish anyway. I’m in the mood now for a line or two of the finest quality cocaine, or perhaps a little speed. Pick up the ante a little, at least for a while.

Alas, I must make do with some uninspiring tequila to go with a huge plate a nachos. I talk for a while with an alcohol merchant out of San Francisco, and a police officer from Dublin. We are all, in that peculiarly melancholic way that airports bring, in transit, to disparate destinations.

Airports. Those funny little microcosms of life. Designed to dull the emotions. Bland decor, white and grey and black. No other colours are permissible. Passengers must be sedated. There will be no excitement on this trip. Everything is fine. Carry on. Nothing to see here. Any excitement I feel whilst sitting in the departure lounge quickly evaporates, largely on account of my surroundings. So, as I prepare to return to a place, a country, a state of mind in which I don’t want to be, I tend to turn to that every reliable old friend alcohol, or some kind of amphetamine.
 It would be great to turn airports into playgrounds. Speed those walkways up a little by hooking them up to a V8 engine. Instead of banal muzak, play White Rabbit. In truth, this sounds all very much like a stopover at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport, a gargantuan maze of endless white to anyone who has imbibed a little local produce. It’s an experience I thoroughly recommend, especially given the number of people who have a pathological fear of flying.

Quite, and with my pathological fear of living, I ought to know.

Say It Ain't So, Joe?

2008-11-13T10:25:00.002+09:00

“Mother don’t worrry, I’ve got a coat and some friends on the corner.”

That’s a line from a song called Upward Over The Mountain by a very sincere artist who performs under the name Iron and Wine. Another line reads;

“Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you.”

It’s not, it must be said, a terribly happy song. Not much of the music I listen to ever is. But it is certainly a song I can’t get out of my head since somebody played it to me in Boston, I think.

Sitting here now, a million miles away, in the Bronx, it seems that the two lines sum up a feeling I’ve had here in the New York, in a more subtle variant of Sting’s Englishman In New York. New York is a huge, vast city on so many levels. It has a beautiful and troubled past. It is though, possibly the coldest city spiritually that I have ever been to. I tend to be a little skeptical of people who rail incessantly against the evils of possessions, although I do have a serious problem with large real estate, oddly enough. But New York is a city without a soul; disconnected, harsh, rude and vulgar. Poets write and nobody gives a fuck. A man takes his clothes off on Times Square and plays his guitar badly and tells everyone to vote and he gets international publicity. A bunch of nutjobs fly a plane into an eighty storey building, people sit and wallow in collective self pity before deciding to build a hundred storey tower to replace it. In New York its all for one and none for all. In New York a coat and some friends on the corner count as a radically alternative lifestyle. Here, a city of Jezebels and Goliaths, anyone with a slingshot is automatically regarded as an outsider, an alien, and a danger. There's a real danger that anyone who dares suggest that 9/11 was a case of the chickens coming home to roost will cause genuine pain and anger. It’s so fucked up, so rotten, so ghettoized and disparate. It ignores its history and sells its soul to big business. Times Square must be one of the few sponsored landmarks anywhere in the free world.

In Baltimore, a stranger took me in his own car to one of the more aesthetically pleasing parts of the town, where the sun shone and we ate crab soup in a bar owned by an Irishman. We talked hard politics and drank hard liquor. We shook hands on Veterans’ Day, and left talking of a new feeling of enfranchisement for the millions of Americans who don’t have a seven bedroom property and who don’t own shares in Bank One. Two days later, in drizzly New York, I sit with fear and despondency. I worry that, now the baton has passed hands, people throughout this country will join together to improve the lot of the folk who most need it, and that process, which will not be a four or eight or even twelve year project, will rise into a crescendo. In central park, people will draw the blinds, and close the window to block out the sound of people laughing.

“So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten.” (Iron and Wine; Upward Over The Mountain)

For Stephanie, Where-ever It May Find Her

2008-11-13T06:39:00.000+09:00

Traveling up through the same trees which ten days ago were yellow and now are turning reddish brown. Spent last night in a variety of bars, starting off with crab soup in an Irish bar near the harbour, then monster bavarian beers in the ESPN Zone bar watching Tim Lincecum’s Cy Young press conference and then finally some kind of crappy conversation in a random place with people who probably found me a bit of a drag. Baltimore is the queerest place. Lacking anything remotely resembling physical beauty, it isn’t really high on the tourist trail. Which perhaps adds a certain authenticity to anyone happening to visit. Physically as repulsive as any city, unlike latin Europe, the heart of the city is inside the bars and museums, where infinity doesn’t so much go up on trial as perform to an expectant hoard.

On a whim, I wandered through the barely occupied streets of Baltimore (not, as the song goes, the prettiest thing at night or day) aiming for the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, that Irish immigrant adopted, or stolen, by the people of Baltimore, and indeed the writer is listed as a “U.S short-story writer, poet and critic” in the New Oxford American Dictionary. Poe died an insane, tortured alcoholic and its a fate I often suspect of myself. There is a buddhist saying, one to which Kerouac was prone, that goes along the lines of creation holding inherently within it the seeds of its own demise. A bit like the stock market. Poe’s work is a wondrous voyage through the surreal. The abstract, sombre phantasmagoria of his finest gothic horror comes, no doubt, from his alcohol inspired mind more than the city in which he lived much of his life, and Baltimore’s only real horror is the grotesque heroin industry and inordinate crime rate. There is though a fundamental truth that the cream of human creativity comes from the bleakest conditions. Being an alcoholic, however brilliant, in Baltimore is probably the only way one could conceivably cope with life there. Human decency, so lacking in New York, streams out of Baltimore like blood from a gunshot wound.

Inspired By Iron And Wine (a good one)

2008-11-11T08:48:00.003+09:00

So farewell then, to that peaceful old Irish town in Massachusetts where the sun shone and the beer flowed smoothly. What hell may come, and I am now on my way to Baltimore, that wild and dangerous city on the outskirts of Washington. Why? Well, why not? Like any trip to San Francisco requires an excursion over the the Bay Bridge to Oakland, it would be amiss not to take in the less salubrious parts of the North East corridor.

The train is passing through open fields and along the Massachusetts coastline. The sun is trying to break from behind the melancholy clouds over small town America. A song by Iron and Wine comes on my iPod and I disappear into the great mythical expanse and pretend I’m the Steve Buscemi ‘thinking one’ in a Roger Deakins movie.

Later, by mid-afternoon a bright sunlight will be falling behind the New York skyline. The song has been on virtually endless repeat for the last four hours, and lacking sufficient whisky to drink myself to oblivion, I run a serious risk and write down whatever comes directly into my head. For Stephanie, where ever the sun may find her.

“Mother don’t worry, I’ve got a coat and some friends on the corner.”

130 years ago to this very day and I wore a bowler hat and I never shaved. Too thin from drinking and polio, I reached over and I spat chewing tobacco on the floor. My shirt was ripped and my lip was bleeding and my jaw ached. I was in a rush to get out of town and my drinking and my gambling debts were catching up to me, making living in Boston a less than healthy life pursuit. The cold autumn wind ripped through the holes in the walls of the train, and I flinched as one of the nuns sitting opposite me dabbed alcohol on my cuts. My teeth were stained and dying, and besides it hurt too much to smile or talk. I didn’t feel much like doing either talking nor smiling, neither of which were characteristics particular to a man of my persuasion and upbringing. I let my mind drift forwards to after christmas. If I made it that long I’d perhaps take a horse back to Kansas to my cousin’s farm. There was always bread and a clean bed there. No tomfoolery, mind, ain’t be doing with that round cousin Selma. They even had a stable for the horses, in case they got cold in the winter and that. Cousin Selma said horses had a feel for humans, and they knew when a man wasn’t to be trusted. I never did trust no one anyhow, but them horses always did seem alright to me. So after the snow felled I would ride out to Kansas and maybe take a job in the saw mill. Hang around for a while, once Allan Pinkerton and his agents blew cold. And maybe then in the autumn me and the boys could help take in the harvest. That ain’t no job for a good lady. Lord knows how tough farm life can be, especially with Cousin Selma bringing up two little ones. That was because some southern redneck bastard killed my brother thinking he was me. Now don’t gets me wrong, I hate the Yankee nation just like any right thinking man, but that don’t mean I’m going to orphan some helpless fucking kids in the name of what is right and just. I’d have taken care of them myself, you see, but on account of my polio and my diet I ain’t really a great looking guy, and ain’t no lady on the good lord’s great earth except for some two-bit whore maybe, going to take in a man who is feart to kill and cant lift them heavy weights, you see. And it simply ain’t right to raise a kid with no mama. Sometimes it seems I can’t do right for doing wrongly, sir, and try as I might my health ain’t getting no better so I stick to myself, mostly. I like to drink rye and listen to the kids play them bible songs on the fiddle. Sometimes I play a game of chess with the old timers in the saloon, but it’s usually me, myself and I.

“Mother don’t worry, I have got some money I saved for the weekend.”

So I decided there and then to stick in for the winter, take a job with the negro boys in New London packing for the freight ships at the harbour. It’s hard work and times my hands and fingers bleed but it beats standing out in the cold all day and you get much better pay.

But a man keeps gambling and a man keeps losing, and a man keeps getting deeper in debt, and I couldn’t very well keep borrowing from friends because friends tend not to forget these things, and don’t remain friends for very long. So I did the only thing I could, lacking sufficient skill or expertise at any other legal pursuit, I turned my hand to thieving.

“So may the sun rise bringing hope where it once was forgotten.”

Let me tell you about this sweet little thing I once knowed in Kentucky, I think it was. She had the loveliest brown eyes, like some kind of Roman goddess, and her hair was as straight and long as you ever did see. I got this here tattoo on my arm of an angel to remind me of her. You see, I never did see her twice. Once, into my life, then boom! Out, never to be heard of again. I swear on the good book she was not of this earth. I told you before I’m not a handsome man, and women don’t even look one at me, but she was as kind as kind can be. She held my hand and told me of how good the future was gonna be. And let me tell you, there ain’t no-one who ever said anything as kinds as that. Not to me, not to any man.

We even did a crazy little waltz right there on the street! Can you imagine it? No music or anything, just these two people dancing there and then on the street corner! Such fanciful behaviour! And, oh, all those times we spent together, sometimes you never want that moment to end. I ain’t much of a talker, but I’m a darn good listener if you ever get the chance, and every word she spoke took a year, and every line was like Saint Peter laying out your entire life in front of your very eyes. And she talked with this voice which was so sweet and so pure, and it soothed every inch of my fucked up, god forsaken soul. And every time she looked at me or asked me a question it was like taking one of the demons that swirls inside and eventually comes close to breaking me, and taking that demon and not just banquishing it but killing it. So even though I’ll never see her face again, she can be in my dreams whenever I want, and that’s the greatest gift anyone ever gave me.

“Mother forgive me, I sold your car for the shoes that I gave you”

I’ve always been a peaceful man, done all the things I did with no real motivation other than pure love and friendship. I ain’t never killed no-one. I only steal the drugs I need to keep me going crazy. I stay away from the kids like the minister told me, and the only time I shot anyone it was to prevent them Pinkerton fuckers from burning down Mrs Jacoby’s farmhouse. But sometimes when I’m drinking myself to sleep for the fourth night running and music plays from across the way and the money I lost is being spent turning a trick on the street corner, I half pray to the sweet lord that I don’t wake up in the morning. As yet, my prayers haven’t been answered. So I keep doing the best I can, hoping the gaps between the good times don’t get too long. I ain’t no poet, and I’m sure many an educated man could put these thoughts that go spinning through my head at a thousand miles a minute down on paper much better than me. Sometimes I just can’t figure out where this goddamn life, excuse my French, is taking me. There must be more to life than riding the rails from Long Island Sound and drinking so hard and so long that my only escape is dreaming of a pretty little Jezebel who’ll come around to make me feel good late at night.

It's a long walk from New York to Boston

2008-11-08T08:38:00.000+09:00

Friday 7th November;

Sitting on the train again, and the trees are a slightly yellower colour than those in Washington. As the film title didn’t go, I am now Leaving New York, and that goodness for that. As the train passes through small town America, I am want to think of the harsh, cruelness of life in New York. There are plenty of things to do there, almost enough to make me go back, but with one exception, the guy who sold me an ice hockey ticket and gave me one of the best seats in the house, everyone I met in New York treated me with staggering rudeness, coldness and downright distain. Which would be fine, so far as it goes, but they treat every body like that. New York is a shockingly cold, cold part of the world, and one, which, as Modest Mouse did sing, I happy to say goodbye to.

Modest Mouse were, indeed, one of the generally terrific selection of bands played over the PA system at Madison Square Garden last night, for the hockey game between New York and Tampa Bay. Ice Hockey is, quite frankly, the poor, slightly retarded throwback baby of North American sports, if the NFL is the grandaddy. The Madison Square Garden, which proclaims itself the most famous sports arena in the world (without question true) will host the Roy Jones Jr vs Joe Calzaghe fight tonight, was three quarters full for a fairly meaningless regular season game.

On My 9 tonight; All New Series of Magic’s Greatest Secrets Finally Revealed! Sounds good, must see American TV. Fortunately, since the marathon viewing on election night, I haven’t had to torture myself by watching much of the laborious drivel which passes as even the best of HBO’s output.

I’m now in Connecticut it would appear. New Haven. Go New Haven! I wonder if there’s anything good to do in New Haven? Hey, you remember that old Bee Gees song about all the lights going down in Massachusetts? I always thought the song was about how people shouldn’t reject the beauty of the East Coast for the conspicuous consumption of California. A pro-Beat, anti-Hippy anthem for the New York Times readership. Well I’m way up here in Bee Gees country. Acres of autumnal trees along the little fresh water I’ve seen in the USA. Those oddball wooden houses with gable ends, and yellow lego block school buses, mist in the air along the rail track. I think of Salem and the Witch hunts, and how I was always disappointed when it wasn’t really witches but communists they were hunting. Reeds, ducks, hunting, Kennedy, rotten golf courses. Two hours out of New York and we’re in the middle of some fucked up kind of retro land where the coast merges into the sky and the white beaches hold some sort of melancholic emptiness. The further North we go the more I think of the scene in Fargo when they put Steve Buscemi (“oh look, there’s Steve Buscemi) in the wood-chipper. I think of Nick Carraway looking across the shore to the lights of Nick Carraway’s party and the resonance of that most wondrous of novels suddenly blossoms into full bloom. As the train passes a Nuclear (“New - Kew - lar”) power plant the trees become more barren and the houses smaller. I’m reminded, for some messed up reason which I have no fucking intention of exploring here or anywhere else, I’m reminded of how just about every weekend there’d be a chimney fire or a flood or a high tide and the fire brigade would turn up. I’d sit and watch them and wonder why nobody ever threw stones at them, as they so surely deserved. Like messing about with camera men, walking past in different clothes, nudging him as you walk past, just plain pissing him off.

Fishers Island Ferry ought really to have “disaster” written after it. I want to go to the General Dynamics factory over on the banks of the marina to my left. It would be, most surely, and explosive place to work.

A man called Sam Adams has joined me for the ride up the coast and reminds me I need to see a fat man about a sleepy dog. States I have been to so far; Virginia, Delaware, New York, Washington D.C, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Live updates from the battle front

2008-11-05T09:44:00.008+09:00

I'm typing this from a hotel in Virginia, one of the key "swing states". Two results are in - McCain takes Kentucky and Obama takes Vermont. Same old, same old. No shocks. CNN's number machine is producing some odd numbers, and Anderson Cooper, the excellent if somewhat smarmy reporter, told viewers to ignore the station's own predictions.

I'm flicking between the ever cautious CNN and the three sheets to wind ABC. James Carver, a friend of the late Hunter S Thompson is terrific entertainment on CNN, placing spread bets with Anderson Cooper and making his own calls. It may be the Bushmills, but I'm getting really excited about what is about to rain down.

CNN has just called Ohio, the key swing state, as Obama's. Virginia, Texas and North Carolina all too close to call.

9.55pm Have been chatting online with a few football guys. This is getting tiring, apologies for the lack of updates. CNN now referring to McCain's campaign in the past tense. My favourite line of the night so far; Anderson Cooper; "Be quite James Carver, we still have six hours left to fill." I rather suspect I bought too many biscuits and too much whisky, but I'll give it a shot.

I am now writing in floods of tears. I'm so fucking proud of my American friends. So fucking honoured. It's one of the great moments of my life time, and I shall celebrate by getting hammered here and in New York tomorrow. A firework went off just at the exact moment CNN announced the confirmation.

Edited because I was cliched due to booze.

Washington DC Day One

2008-11-04T07:45:00.001+09:00

2.11.08 2.30 UK Time/ 9.30am EPT

According to the screen on the chair in front of me, we are flying somewhere over the mid Atlantic and should continue for the next three hours before crossing the southern part of Canada, down over Nova Scotia down over the New England. Maybe we could crash land in Martha’s Vineyard and James Taylor could invite all the survivors up to the summerhouse. It’s been at least two hours since I had a beer, and although the seat next to me is free, I feel I really ought to be gassed right about now. We’ve been flying for about three hours, I would estimate, and my stomach is rather beginning to regret the underwhelming pasta with pasta I had for lunch. The plane is a rather old one - you can usually tell because the films are on loop, whereas the newer models have ones you can stop and start at want. So I have David Byrne’s mediocre album on my ipod, and I’m trying to write something of interest. There’s a copy of Dante’s Inferno on the table next to this computer. For poetry, it’s got a hell of a story and not much by way of poetry. Perhaps this comes from the translator’s decision to make each line rhyme - presumably in keeping with the original - but it’s quite a trip.

It’s all I can do, short of going to the bathroom and cutting up a line of the finest cocaine I accidentally packed in my laptop. It’ll have to be used up before I go through immigration. I’m not much of a smuggler, truth be told, it tends to play havoc on my nerves. Part of the fun of flying is the ease in which you can indeed, cry havoc and really throw everyone out of kilter. The whole experience is so damned tranquilised that it’s quite possible to forget the fact that you are flying through the air at 500 mph and 35,000 feet in a metallic tube in which literally tens of thousands of potentially fatal things can go wrong. Which is, I suppose, the point. But I’m all in favour of adding to the drama of things. Make the floor transparent. Allow free range animals. Have foot races between stewardesses. Get the pilot to sit up the back. Actually, I’m told, for all the front windows do (i.e prevent us flying into the side of mountains or 80 storey trade buildings) that the pilot would just be as well facing backwards.

Bored of Canada. There’s caribou down below us, apparently, although from 35,000 feet there’s not much chance of seeing them - and there’s nothing much else. Two hours of flying and I don’t think I’ve seen a single hamlet. Just past Goose Bay, over the border, by St. John and down, at a steady 539 mph down to Boston and and New Hampshire. Two hours and one shitty meal away from touching down in Washington Dulles. It’s funny. Flying is a bit like going to a free banquet, you stuff yourself silly irrespective of the quality of produce From the airport I’ll get the shuttle to the hotel, and then, after a stop off for provisions, down to my first dose of some serious, front line politics. Which reminds me, in 1188 km’s time, I’ll also need to get myself a healthy portion of the water of life to see me through the next couple of days.

Listening currently - Presque Isle is what we should be looking out for now, no caribou here, probably all shot by Sarah Palin I guess - to a Sixty Minutes interview with Texan billionaire T. Boone Pickens. Sounds wonderfully like a country artist with a heroin problem, but actually he’s promoting, just before the election, an odd and slightly scatterbrained push for solar and wind energy. He claims to be non-partisan, but he funded the anti-Kerry Boat Vet campaign in 2004. Now he’s appearing at the Democrat National Convention.

The whole idea of the PSA (Public Service Announcement) is anathema to everything British public opinion holds as true, certainly as regards political bias. Essentially, if you feel like it. and can afford it, you can make your own advert promoting, or more usually attacking one of the candidates. The Boat Vets Against Kerry is one of the more controversial ones, as is Moveon.org. Some genuine dunderheids have managed to finance an advert accusing Obama of being a Muslim. He isn’t, but if you can fund it, all is fair in the world of PSA.

And indeed, it would seem, Fox Sports. It’s now ten to six and I’m in a hotel on the outskirts of Washington DC. If someone would pay me for this shit, then I’d be able to claim it on expenses. But alas, I am paying to making this suite my base for the election. There’s a hearth in the lounge downstairs with a big screen which I’ll use to fire ideas off. For now, I’m watching the Giants and the imploding Cowboys on Fox. I’m keeping the count on the the McCain and Obama spots. Now, given there is also a local election on the 4th of December, there are also adverts for representatives. Some guy called Frank Wolf seems to be going into overdrive in the DC area. Take the example here... subway, dodge, and lowes. Let’s try the next break to see if we can come to some sort of theory.

7.20pm McCain; “Obama’s not ready... yet. (emphasis on the yet), followed by the Wolf plug.

7.45pm How come Chevy Chase looks exactly the same as he did twenty years ago?

In The Departure Lounge

2008-10-29T21:54:00.002+09:00

Departure and lounge combine to make my favourite compound noun in the English language. As I prepare for my trip to the North East corridor - fromm Boston to Washington DC - I've been thinking about my own personal journey, and examining the media coverage of the forthcoming election. I must state, and anyone who knows me will tell you, that my cards are fully on the Obama table.

I fully expect New York to be a shit hole. I’m counting “blue collar” Noo Joyzee and even Delaware (“Hi... We’re in Delaware...”) in that. Frankly I have very low expectations of the North East of the USA. I spend most of my time in the USA (a country I both love and hate for myriad reasons) in Northern California, a peaceable and infectiously easy-going part of the world. In San Francisco you still get left-handed bookshops. In that windy, inclining city, where the street car rides seem like a roller-coaster, bar-tenders retain an amiable personality to strangers and the hostels in the Tenderloin retain the beer-soaked skid rows persona. In San Francisco you can take the walk from clattering downtown to the palm-fringed baseball stadium to the sun-baked North Beach in an hour. You can drink a few beers, one or two more on the house, and take the tram car up over Telegraph Hill back home to a whisky and the Chronicle. There is a sun-kissed cliche of California, the roller blades, the palm trees, the “have a nice day” culture. And it is a cliche, take my word for that. But equally, it reflects to my mind a genuinely pacific nature to the life there. The pacific coast, Big Sur, Route 1, the redwood forests, the Muir woodlands named after the founding father of the Sierra Club; the Central West coast of the United States is not called Golden State for nothing. (bit clumsy)

The Big Apple is not quite so romantic. It was birthplace of the Beats - who promptly left to San Francisco, to London and to Tokyo. It was the death-place, supposedly, of Jimmy Hoffa. It had the Yankees of Di Maggio. It had the glorious, frightening, astonishing outbreak of be-bop, of Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker. It had Bob Dylan’s rise, and miserable, talentless frauds like Andy Warhol. There is no doubting her illustrious past. But Kerouac has been replaced by unflattering mimicry. The unions dictate nothing so much as how much the people who write David Letterman’s turgid scripts get overpaid by. The national sport has become a multi-billion dollar wank-fest, steroid junkies, and the Blue Note sells out to business suits for $75 per person per night. Autumn in New York? The falling leaves in Central Park mean nothing to me.

Ah yes, but such despondency so early!

There is, in the meantime, the small matter of the National Election for the Office of the President of the United States. The three, televised debates between the contenders, Barack Obama for the Democrats, and GOP candidate John McCain have come and gone, with no real winner, and - which is perhaps more the point - no clear loser. It is generally recognised that 90-odd percent of the electorate have already made up their mind. The future of the civilised world - read NATO nations - rests in the hands of swing voters in Idaho and North Dakota. Holy shit-storm!

28.10.08 How Do You Like Them Apples?

It is time for the Fall Classic. An NFL game was played in London last week - a sell-out crowd in both senses of the word attended a game between the Chargers and the Saints, in a game heralded by the omnipotent commissioner Roger Goodell as the first step in gridiron’s hegemony of the UK public. The NFL is, by all accounts, by far the best run of all the American sports, and this international road trip resulted in massive and entirely positive publicity for the sport. Three days later, game six of the World Series between the Phillies and the Rays in Philadelphia was officially suspended due to rain amidst much bumbling from Bud Selig, who, once he guessed which law of the sport best suited - or could be most easily abrogated - and once the Rays had tied the score at two in the middle of the sixth - decided that the tarps should be brought on and we’ll all come back the next day for the final two and a half innings. Essentially, Selig ruled that MLB couldn’t allow the final game to be decided by the weather (the Phillies lead 3-1) and so overturned conventional baseball tradition (the game could just as easily have been awarded to the Phillies). There are, outside Philadelphia, very few people who would be willing to publicly argue against it. Not least those who had money riding on Tampa Bay. But the utterly befuddled, hastily arranged conference, in which the less than extroverted Commissioner announced his decision, was in stark contrast to the flowing professionalism of the new national past-time, and now leaves the potential final innings of the 2008 season overlapping with the opening game of the basketball season - and two rapidly diminishing sports competing to finish second or third, above ice hockey, which judging by the contents of Sports Illustrated, is a minor sport played and watched by overweight hoodlums.

Speaking of which, eight of whom have recently been photographed following John McCain around the blue collar state of West Virginia. Secret service operatives, no doubt. There’s one guy I keep seeing, a 250lb, seven foot Chicano behemoth, with a handlebar mustache and and a ten-gallon hat. Inconspicuousness is clearly not the name of the game with these fellows.

The question of security hasn’t really been brought up in any of the coverage of the election so far. It would, of course, paint the entire country in a grotesquely bad light. Unspoken is the implication that some partly educated, out of work redneck with a grudge will take out Obama with a sawn off shotgun from the boot of a hollowed out station wagon. Two men were in court this week charged by the FBI with making threats to the life of the Democrat candidate. The chief prosecutor put the blame on micro-dot acid, saying the two were, effectively, off their chops and blabbering away like schoolboys.

And so much for all that. But the truth is, the last man who represented anything so much as a conduit of change to the established order was a bumbling southern peanut farmer. Before that, George McGovern was summarily thrashed by that nice Mr Nixon. And before that, Robert Francis Kennedy was dismissed in a hotel in Los Angeles sometime around 1968 by two bullets fired from point blank range.

A lack of genuine commentary on this most dreadful of propositions could be seen as a good sign. It isn’t being discussed because America has grown out of all that. The sophisticated redneck now only looks like a savage, only appears to be genuinely insane enough to try to assassinate the democratic nominee to the office of the president of the United States. And, looking back six months after the election, everything written here could look even more retarded than usual. Yet, yet, yet... the general levels of ignorance displayed by presumably enfranchised Americans is simply staggering.

During a recent tour of some southern state or another, Senator McCain was told - as opposed to asked - by a middle aged voter - that she didn’t trust Obama because he was an Arab. Now admittedly there is a big difference between not knowing the difference between a black guy from Hawaii and a funny little yellow guy with a towel on his head and assassinating the first African-American candidate, but there isn’t such a jump in intellectual retardation. Or maybe there is something to Oliver Stone’s idea that assassinations aren’t carried out by lone nuts but rather by organised conspiratorial collusion between the finest minds in America. If that is the case, given the American establishment’s collective inability to organise an orgy in a brothel, Mr Obama should sleep soundly for the entire month of November, and not with the fishes either.

ミスタ　スプコレ　　

The Adventures of Colin the Dormouse

2008-10-15T22:29:00.002+09:00

Colin was a doormouse. He lived in a brightly coloured wendy house on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. He liked to wear novelty over-sized spectacles, a pink blouse, brown cords and galoshes. Colin drove his Fiat Panda to the shops every Tuesday to pick up his messages, then down to the chemists to pick up his anti-depressants. Colin liked to have smoked salmon sandwiches every Sunday morning whilst listening to the Archers omnibus edition on Radio 4. He’d invite his friends Terry the Olympic tiger and Graham the Jewish tadpole round for a cup of tea and some savoury snacks whilst catching up on the week’s events from the fictional farming community.

One day Colin and his chums decided to hit the MDMA early and went off to large it in a nightclub in Milton Keynes town centre. It was a very rough club and the three pals got in a violent fight with a couple of young ruffian selection boxes, and got taken to the jail cells to sleep off the booze and drugs and think about what they had done. They felt awful.

The next day they were taken up to the local court and charged with breach of the peace. They pled guilty and got fines of sixty euros each.

Deciding to ease off the eccy for a while, the three pals went off on a barge to Yorkshire, where they enrolled in a two day course in cheese making in Leeds. They had a whale of a time. Oh how they laughed as they learnt the finer points of Wendsleydale. Terry the Olympic tiger was the best.
 When they got home, they decided to open a cheese shop, supplying a selection of home made and imported goods to the acting community. It was a tremendous success, and soon the three guys got their faces on the cover of Time magazine. Soon after they got a show on BBC 2. It was critically acclaimed and quickly got moved to BBC 1 just after Panorama. The guys were so happy. Graham the Jewish tadpole got a super-model girlfriend and Colin had a witty column in the Radio Times.

But the fame went to their heads, especially Graham, who was easily led astray by his coke-head beau. The paparazzi had a field day as Graham lurched into anorexia and drug dependency, and eventually he checked himself into the Priory clinic. Their cookery show was not commissioned for a third series, and Colin’s column was controversially dropped from the Radio Times, to be replaced by a kids’ crossword and some jokes.

The money dried up. Times were hard. Tony the Olympic tiger was forced into the male prostitution business, and got himself addicted to crack. Once upon a time he had been a team captain on A Question Of Sport alongside Sue Barker and Ally McCoist. The TV critics had been kind, praising Tony for his cheeky charm and quick hand in one-liners. But now all looked lost, and rumours of Tony’s mishaps resulted in The Daily Star putting a reporter outside his council house twenty four hours a day.

Colin the doormouse fought hard to remain on the straight and narrow. He took up yoga, and turned his hand to volunteering at the local soup kitchen. It was great for his sense of self-worth, he told himself. But his job at the soup kitchen hid a darker secret. For years Colin had working undercover for the Russians, who were planning to invade the UK. The first stage of the invasion was to kill off all the homeless and replace them with Russian trained stick insects wearing trilbies and false beards. The stick insects would leave bombs hidden in their shit around the buildings of major importance, such as the Houses of Parliament and Oddbins.

So Colin took as job in the soup kitchen, where, using a secret stash of arsenic he had acquired from Darren, the pool playing chemist carp at a very reasonable price, he was able to contaminate the pea and ham hot liquid meal being consumed by the city of London’s homeless night after night. They ate and munched and slurped the tasty, tasty green goodness, blissfully unaware of the kind of shit-storm that was about to rain down upon the streets of London town.

London Town is a huge village in the North West of England-shire. It is mainly populated by amphibians and kestrels. The main diet there is Pick and Mix and cheese. Giant chunks of sloppy French cheese. France is near Brazil. The weather is sultry and the nightlife is gargantuan. London was the birthplace of Kurt Cobain, and he worked as a teaspoon there until he was twelve years of age. It is probably best known as home of Cher, the well-known singer and cocker spaniel.

to be continued

Andy Warhol Was A Talentless Fraud

2008-10-03T04:38:00.001+09:00

The Premise; trying to write a surrealist comedy set in Auschwitz. Or perhaps a Quantum Leap style episode in which our heroes are transported through time and space into one of Hitler’s most grotesque and inhuman prison camps. Hilarious consequences ensue.

The Characters; Norman, a portly, middle aged who financial accountant, twice divorced, lives in a converted swimming pool. Conservative, pompous, generally quite unlikable . Likes cycling, discussing the latest trends in livestock, and flumps. In fact, he only eats flumps. Maybe he could be nice. A checkered work history. Probably got sacked from someplace which is continuously hinted at but never explain.

Wayne - his 34 year old trainee. Ugly, lonely and smelly. Unable to fully participate in society, his phobias include dolphins, hotdogs, odd numbers and dinosaurs. Only eats flumps. Is borderline psychopathic, and has to take lots of medicine to calm him down.
Wants to join Al-Qaeda. Wears geeky specs, and with side-parting. Looks like Hitler, but everyone thinks he looks like Ray Charles. I guess he’s the lovable simpleton/idiot savant.

Dave Superdude - the imbecilic Nazi neighbour. Once got himself arrested for throwing bowling balls into the sea because he thought they were “Nigger eggs”. (This is based on an actual news story from the 70s). Lots of bulldog tattoos, wears a mullet and shell-suit. Deluded. Believes he is descended from Patrick Stewart and that one day Patrick Stewart will come to Earth and inherit the meek, or somesuch. I envisage this guy being an awful lot like the awful Jason Statham, except with a wider knowledge of cheese.

Leroy, the intellectual body builder. Discusses philosophy whilst “pumping iron” and looking in the mirror. Is obsessed by the songs of Cliff Richard.

There should probably be a female character somewhere, but as I don’t really know any women, it would be quite difficult to write.

At the moment I am figuring this to be a mix between Schindler’s List and The Young Ones. You could probably envision a whole load of A-Team repairs going on too. It’s probably not a BBC thing, or indeed a Daily Mail thing. Which by my standards is good.

Probably the next stage will be to do a couple of comics, but I can’t really draw. If anyone would be willing to attempt to do this, then I’d be prepared to stretch to the price of a pint.

I tend to think any moron with a quill could come up with a lengthy selection of hilarious consequences, but it’s just the parts in between. Dialogue is what it’s called. I used to be good at this, once upon a time. An ideas man, they said. There are obvious accusations of poor taste, and I would plead guilty to that, but fuck ‘em. Paedogeddon got complaints. The more I think of this, for that matter, perhaps it would be better to make it a one off episode, and send these guys off to god knows where. Which makes it a kind of Quantum Leap for the jilted generation. Which I like, in theory, but which probably lend itself to spurious allegations of plagiarism. I’ll get the Lawyers on it. Don’t know why I typed lawyers with a capital L. Germanic thoughts I guess.

Anyway, there’s lots of room for expansion here, chiefly amongst the characters, if anyone has any thoughts on the subject, please feel free to let me know. If anyone wants in on the action, I’m quite prepared to relinquish a little creative control in exchange for a full “Devised and Created by” credit.

Hey shorty, can you spare a dime?

2008-08-22T21:13:00.003+09:00

Dateline Tokyo.

It's T minus 10 and I've come to a bar I know in the backstreets of Tokyo's Ikebukuro district. The music's banal but the beer's good, and when you have a mind like mine it isn't much of a fight. On the TV they are replaying messrs Bolt and Phelps drug enabled world records. I was surprised by the words of a friend who was bewildered by my supposition that Phelps is not operating on a level playing field or swimming pool as it were. Yet mention of the name Barry Bonds - and he was "at it all the time". Well, yes, that may be so, but it seems to me that Phelps and Lance Armstrong - two men who have failed as many or more tests than Bonds ever did get away scot free from supposition. Can you feel the love tonight indeed. I tend to think that people should be allowed to take whatever they want and have done with it. I want records broken, goddamnit, not brave Paula Radcliffe stories. I'm most amused by the argument that athletes will die in the pursuit of gold. So what? The weakest of all arguments for ending the Iraq invasion is that thousands of young American men are being killed. If there's anything that the world needs less of it is young American men, especially those with a penchant for killing funny little yellow towel heads. Them and art school graduate movie directors.

Give me another beer. I can't stand the egotism. It'll be Oscar night before we know it. Jesus, what a mess.

Oh, and speaking of which, I'll be shortly embarking on a whistlestop tour of the UK, Canada and The US. If you are in any of those places, and I can put down this Tom Waits album I'm playing full volume at home, then I'll probably look you up.

Yours, David Eckstein, or some five foot five white skinned miniman who you can root for knowing he hasn't taken steroids. Or at least, only his sperm count will suffer from it.

2008-08-15T14:11:00.002+09:00

It's all over now. Three weeks and I shall be breaking a habit of a lifetime by flying British Air back to the UK. My thinking is this, that Japan is not a particularly beautiful, deep or enjoyable place to live. Most of my colleagues are wasters. There is no good cocaine to be found anywhere. The duplicity of the Japanese psyche, much discussed in third rate travel books, really is beginning to bug me. And so, as the song goes, the good times are all gone and I'm bound for moving on. In truth, all I shall really miss is the football life. The team, the teammates, and the social events. I'll miss the safety and the lack of litter. I'll miss the well behaved kids and the little monkeys in green waistcoats they have outside the buddhist temples.

I won't miss the weather at all, nor the architecture, nor the countryside. I will not remember the intolerable cruelty to pets and animals. I will not remember the pudding bowl haired English teachers who spend a year singing Oasis songs and drinking whilst pointedly refusing to work. They all live in Omiya and Urawa and I can provide a list of names if you wish.

In November, I shall be traveling to Washington DC for the election of a senile old buffoon or a religious nut who thinks he's Jesus. Selah, as a wise man often said.

Yours, Duke.

It started in the spring time, not long after I arrived here. We flew in on the same plane. Dressed in burgundy, the soft southern rain fell in her eyes and her smile was the mirror reflecting a halcyon time before I was ever born. Her heart, little did I know, was a dark, venal chasm, broken only by blinding love and pain.

Far into the night I drift, the television on loud.

We started fast. We started like a a streak of silver thrown through the sky on a cloudless night. Dreams of honeysuckle, talk of Ireland, of the West, and the unknown east. We explored the city by day and each other by night. We kissed lying on the living room floor, the light in the alleyway flickering as if we were conducting all the electricity through our souls.

We sang the body electric, and we cut out our own hearts.

By the winter, by the equinox, with the hiding of the moon, the evil came. The fire and the venom and the poison thrown in all directions, with no protection and no place to hide. I reacted badly, and I am to blame for all I had and still am. Like a child I ran, ran, ran far into the open fields. But I was not looking for the spaces, I was running trying to find the safest hole to dig.

It's raining. Man, hallelujah for canned coffee.

2008-06-08T17:17:00.003+09:00

The sun is shining over Tokyo and the rainy season is on its way. You can always tell that the rainy season is coming because women carry umbrellas which you can never tell if they are for the sun or the rain. It isn't that rainy season is hot, it's actually a fairly pleasant 25 degrees (I can't find the degrees symbol on my Japanese keyboard). It is more the stifling humidity. 80% and you are lucky. Rainy season is great so long as a) you aren't working and b) you don't have to walk more than 25 yards, and c) are unrequiring of sleep. So it goes.

Euro 08 is on at the moment, which takes care of c) as games kick off at 1am and 3.45am. Which is fine, as I can't sleep anyway and I don't pay the TV license because, well, you don't have to. I have long since stopped paying my internet bills, and the gas got shut off today. Cold showers are good for you, right? I figure I could do with saving a few yen, and it's unlikely I'm going to be entertaining anyone any time soon; skinhead and tattoos are not popular unless you play quarter back for the New York Giants or close out major league baseball games. Especially in Japan, where tattoos have some kind of strange connotation with yakuza gangsters - who, for the most part, are meek, gentle and mild. I have had the honour of teaching a yakuza family, complete with horrendously yet endearingly incomprehensible "Engrish" tattoos. Me; What is your job? Her; "I go on holidays."

I have, also, had the honour of being thrown out an onsen (hot spring) for daring to show off my body art. For those of you who don't me, and apparently there are 78 readers of this blog, and I don't think I know 78 people, I have a number of decorative artworks carved into various parts of my arms. It's a filthy habit, and one I am especially proud of. And so it goes.

People high on my radar this month; some kid called Buster Posey, another called Dyron Dall, and the Hellcats, a Japanese football team who, in my final few months of living in Asia, I have befriended and ingratiated myself into their inner sanctum, trips to karaoke booths, soapland studios, and sake-filled depravity notwithstanding.

Yours,

Gatsby

London Calling... Come In London.

2008-05-15T23:42:00.002+09:00

There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

I am sitting in my loft typing this, listening to Test Match Special. The two bars of unpaid internet connection which I have siphoned off from a neighbour for months give it a Long Wave feel. I've always loved AM music, and LW conversation.

Ah, cricket. Like baseball without the steroids, and in England, Australia and New Zealand, the blacks. Stops for lunch, and tea, not HGH. Harry Caray, the renowned drunk, often talked politics and current affairs in his telecasts. In cricket, a commentator is labeled an eccentric if he actually mentions cricket more than twenty seconds of a minute. In cricket, the players with tattoos are deemed rebels, malcontents and enigmas, a modern trend to be lamented. In baseball, a player without tattoos is probably gay.

The fans are pretty much the same, wantonly distracted, often drunk. Divided between the traditionalists - the scorers, and the ordinary people. The first group ask for silence during play, the latter for cheaper beer. Johnny-come-lately is shunned by both.

The rules are neither here nor there, safe to say I am glad it is back. Cricket and baseball season started recently both sides of the Atlantic, and the tinny free TMS commentary (I would have to pay for baseball commentary) brings a nostalgia of youth and manliness only felt in men. Like in Stand By Me, it's a male world, unashamedly so, and in spite of myself I don't feel guilty for saying I like it.

I am not a poet...

2008-05-08T22:40:00.001+09:00

I remember driving through Modesto in the late spring. Surrounded by opinions and bad music. The minibus was claustrophobic for me and I felt myself filling with hate and range. But you were there to calm me down. You were always there to calm me down. For one weekend, my fresh-to-California naiveté found a mate. In your home made clothes and your free speaking craziness. We played football with a stone on the deserted street - under the full moon - between Telegraph Hill and the Golden Gate Bridge. Jazz music came from some ghastly 24-hour family restaurant, It felt like the longest dance.

But three years have passed - nearly four. You have moved to New York. Maybe New Jersey. I wonder if the winter is as cold as they say. Is it as cold as Tokyo? Is it as cruel and bleak as London? Have you found the freedom you have always strived for?

I wonder if we were to meet again on the midnight streets, would you still drink White Russians? Would we still talk, talk, talk for hours on end about the dreams we have yet to dream?

Your voice was a serenade to sooth a savage soul. I miss you.

Cold, Cold Heart; a love story

2008-05-07T23:46:00.002+09:00

So it’s spring now, soon be summer, and the cherry blossom has been and gone. I am sitting in a coffee shop, listening to fall-asleep mellow jazz, drinking a damn good cup of joe. Waiting for the picture frame lady to finish putting a photograph for the football team. 6.30pm, time for the breakfast of kings. I’ve been slack in my writing of late. Laziness. Laziness brings boredom, which brings a stagnant mind. About the most interesting thing that happened over hibernation was the failure of my expensive headphones. Dead to the world. Good for nothing piece of crap. Except that it wasn’t. They were mighty expensive crap. But so much for all that.

She is trying to be the living embodiment of a black mariah. Poisoned ivy, guess you’d call her. Makes a living off her mouth, makes a fashion statement out of her cleavage. Quite a doll. Dresses head to toe in black in the winter months. Head to toe in pink in the summer.

Winter, like the mourning widow. Summer, like one of Jack Kennedy’s White House girls.

With nothing, or pretty much nothing at any rate, to say, she says it all by dressing to style. I can still smell the odd scent of her perfume, still picture her cheap shoes. Make any five foot zip woman tower over the air stewardesses and the short men. Guess it is good for the ego. She has a definite violent side, but it seems forced, almost like she’s gentle and tender as a lamb, but doesn’t want to admit it. Guess she doesn’t place gentility or tenderness very high on her list of priority. She’ll marry a bastard, that girl, and it’s every bit the future she deserves. Doesn’t mean I’m not sad to see her go.

The last time I was in here was just after Christmas. I had just gotten over some kind of fever, and I still had the remains of the delirium. I can still feel it, and it makes me slightly queasy to be here again. The snow was making strange sounds at me, almost as if it was going to leap up and bite. The neon shop lights fizzed and the pinkish grey snow clouds drew in over the city. My hat and scarf... well, I had thrown those away because at one stage I was convinced they were the cause of my stomach pains. The wind made my eyes water, but maybe that was just her memory.

She had been nice to me for a while, but any extended period of good terms has always been immediately followed with borderline psychosis and cruelty. There really isn’t any way of figuring even the best woman, but the nasty ones... well, life’s a bitch and so is she.

The rain fell in torrents. The taxis, passenger lights off, made no attempts to avoid the rapidly swelling puddles on the road, and sullied the clothes of passing pedestrians, rushing their way between the rain drops, to the up-market apartments and artist studio that surrounded the sordid variety of neon shop lights. Too late, or too lazy for cooking, the overpriced take-away Italian joints always had queues. The joys of cooking have no place in this nine-to-eleven world, where bar talk consists of ironic reviews of old re-runs of the Joys Of Sex.

He had cut out the lining of his rain coat so that it slung over his shoulders better. What is left of fashion after the January sales is not worth bothering about, he felt. Thrift stores had long since become the most expensive places to suit up - this area once was home to students and hippies and beat generation left-overs, but the market soon realised that those particular demographics had a great deal of expandable income, so in came the Starbucks and the Burger Kings and the Niketown stores. And then up went the property prices, and the hippies sold their single room flats for prices that once got you a five bedroom condo overlooking the river. And in came the corporate suits, and even worse, the corporate suits who like to play pretend that they were in fact renegade indie kids, on the basis that they once went to middle sized liberal art schools on the East coast and now they owned top of the range Panasonic video cameras with which they made seven minute movies about relationship angst which they entered into competitions to be judged by people just like them, and who told them how right on and insightful and not-at-all-pretentious their movies were.

His coat had long lost its lacquer and his felt slouch hat was soaked to the bone. He took one of the many side streets, off the neon illuminations of the main road, and down between the thirty storey buildings. Despite living ninety percent of his life totally alone, wrapped inside the straightjacket of his mind, he was a gregarious sort, and he enjoyed the companionship of the bottles of the less salubrious drinking establishments which you could stumble across on rainy nights such as these.

This was the sort of place that still had coat hangers and hat wracks which were still used for their intended purpose. There were no barrels on the walls or chrome lined upholstery. No juke box - the music was the sole preserve of whoever happened to be working being the bar, no pool table, no condom machine. There was a small television in the corner, that was true, but it only ever showed baseball or the news. No movies, no football, no TV dramas, and most definitely no family based quiz shows. No independent cinema, either. There was no kitchen, no snacks and no chocolate sellers. No smoking either, but not through choice, just by law.

The marble bar was twelve chairs long. Those twelve chairs was generally reserved for the twelve regulars, who indeed were, on most nights, the only twelve customers. The windows, which looked on to the corner of the street. The large double door, which became something of a nuisance in the colder months, alleviated the feeling of claustrophobia in Summer. On a rainy evening, such a this, it was neither help nor hinderance to the enjoyment of hard spirits. The smell of lime, which could have been overpowering to a first time visitor, served as a stimulant, like Pavlov’s bell to his dogs, the smell of freshly cut lime reminds the drinker that he is home, and he can behave as he wants.

On the television was a news profile of Richard Milhous Nixon. There he was, just after declaring “I am not a crook” to the news pack, lead by field marshals Woodward and Bernstein, who were doing talking heads pieces. Tributes would not be the right word, Hunter S Thompson savaged the guy, condemning him to hell. The helicopter lay in wait on the White House lawn, a president too scared to leave by the front door. How did it ever come to this, a hundred million Americans asked themselves, audibly.

The bar was empty tonight, he was alone and the barman - a man called Mike who might best be described as gregarious to friends and borderline violent to fools - was busy with the routines of the trade. Lilac Wine was playing over the closing credits to the Nixon programme. It had always been a favourite song of the bar worker and patron both - and it was a good, melancholic version which was new to the drinker. And it was a time for getting drunk. For blacking out and waking to the sounds of a new day on an unfamiliar bench. Lilac wine, I feel unsteady...

Golden Week

2008-04-18T00:34:00.003+09:00

1 am. Tokyo sleeps its mandatory three point four hours of night rest. The salarymen for Honda and Nissan and Sony will, fresh off the last train home, stinking of sake, soon be getting up for the morning's first commuter express. The monochrome - far too beautiful a word for its meaning, I think - grey suits crushed together, attempting to stay awake and read the sports section of the Asahi Shinbum and hold on to the hand rail all at once. The Dawn Train, the Downbound Train as Tom Waits or Bruce Springsteen would call it, lacks all the sleaze and/or romance (depending on how good looking you are) of the New Jersey rail system.

The rain is falling again, as Japan takes its break for Golden Week. Ho ho. The Sakura has been blown to the ground by the late spring rain. We are playing football tomorrow, the rain will fall tomorrow too. By the middle of the week the sun will be shining, and the parks will be full. Lungs of the city, said William Pitt the Younger. He obviously had never been to Japan. The parks are the camping grounds of tramps, homeless and chain smokers. Twice a year, in late spring and mid summer, the put upon youth of Tokyo conjugates in Yoyogi or Ueno, drinking from dawn to dusk and letting off steam in their one week off a year. It starts off with the keener folk, with their plastic blankets vying for prime position - not too far from the toilets, the beer vending machines or the fountains. This is about ten am. As the afternoon sun comes out, out too come the guitars, the frisbees and the beer. As dusk falls, out comes the music, the lights and the dancing.

The Judge Said I Can't Go Near You Anymore.

2008-02-24T18:51:00.004+09:00

In the words of Eels, I have a dose of the Restraining Order Blues.

I'm sitting on a lazy sunday, watching series two of The Shield. Apart from the sage advice of never trusting hispanics, I'm reminded of the fact that people sometimes fuck up, for no apparent reason. There is no motivation, no reason. They just do daft things. I do it often enough myself. I'm sorry. Never meant to hurt, never meant to discard, never wanted to ruin a friendship. Everyone knows I'm not a violent man, I'm just a man who is in love. Or perhaps not. These issues are murky.

Anyhow, ambiguous personal messages aside, the moral of the last few weeks is change. Not to sound like Barack Obama, who strikes me as a decent orator amongst a sea of mediocrity, but in my mind I need a new scene. Some kind of freshness. It may be related to an epiphany I had recently whilst drinking moonshine on the 4am train. It pertained to the notion that David Bowie is some kind of god. Up until now, I have never quite got, or really dug, Bowie. Very quickly my entire view has become polarised. It was a refreshing change, peculiarly narrow yet oddly widespread. A bit like hearing a Bob Dylan record for the first time. It kind of cuts you in half, mixes your thinking around a bit. I like the feeling. I like not being able to control my thoughts. I drink to get drunk and I get drunk to get lost in some kind of madness. If I was a rich man, I'd be a grade A lunatic.

I think my time here in Tokyo is coming to an end. On a personal level, I work in a place in which I do not, or at least do not wish to trust my colleagues. I no longer feel comfortable in this city. I no longer feel comfortable with the Japanese character. Have I lost the ability to adapt? Am I stuck in this job for the rest of my life?

It's one thirty am, and I have the itunes on shuffle. The beer is flowing nicely. I am a lone wolf. Makes moving, changing, lying and deceiving not only easy but par for the course. There is hate and rage flowing inside of me, and I drink to keep it subdued. Sedation. Some people live more exciting lives than others, but mostly people just pretend. I've become so goddamn lazy it hurts. So I throw things up in the air, into the wind, to see where they land. You have to shake things up every so often. Marriage will never be my scene, much as I like to pretend otherwise. I have written in the past - often - about the falsity of relationships so I won't waste my time here on that particular subject, but there's a movie called Into The Wild - somewhat earnest but ultimately warm hearted - and it's about this student who sells all his shit and goes off to live in the Yukon. He dies from eating poisoned berries, but the point is that at one stage he says to a hippy "if you believe that the best things and the enjoyment in living comes from interaction with other people, you are a fool." I paraphrase, but I wholeheartedly support that sentiment.

Ho ho, and so much for all that. But this blog represents an attempt not at apology but explanation for my recent behaviour. I know that there is no excuse for the things I have done in the last week, but it has taken up my time and kept me entertained, if only for a while.

There's a spider making a cobweb in the corner of my room.

The early morning sunshine highlights it as the light breaks through my rag torn curtains.

I like to watch it grow. Over the last week it has become a little decrepit, and I'll soon have to take the hoover to it. The spider has long since climbed out the window, but it adds to the decor so I'll keep it a little yet.

There's a river near my house. I dream of following it to the ocean. But the winter is cold now, and the blue skies belie a bitter wind. The river is dirty, and most often dry. The banks are home to herons and storks and apparently hummingbirds but I have never seen one. There's a fire in my heart that is flickering and dying and I need to pack my bags and go away.

Tomorrow I am going to ride the morning time train to odaiba, the monorail which passes under the rainbow bridge to the reclaimed land on the Tokyo shoreline. From there, on a sunny day, I can look across the water to Mount Fuji, and in my hip-flask will be a fine single malt. And I'll get drink drunk and watch the sunrise and sunset, and I'll think of all those people I have lost touch with for no reason other than my own desire to live.

My love,

Aiden

The Year Of The Inane

2008-01-24T23:28:00.000+09:00

I have a lot of time for the folk across the pacific as I guess I have to refer to it. The Yanks have always been good to me on my sojourns. But it is this time of year that they do ever so slightly begin to piss me off. Particularly this year, it must be said.

In case you hadn't noticed, that peculiarly atavistic form of entertainment know as the US Presidential "Race for the White House" has begun in earnest, and it fills me with dread. Consider this. The leading contenders are at the moment Hillary Clinton - a beastly woman with little or no shame and all the personality of a television remote control, and on the Republic side a septuagenarian baboon called John McCain, who supports a ban on boxing and most likely a return to the Gold Standard. We - or they- may well have a choice between a corporate robot or a slightly senile old pedophile. Leaving alone the cheap insults, however, there is a serious point to be made. Republicans, to be fair, have never given much of a flying fig about their international impression. Far from it, they have always been open in their distain for the court of world public opinion. So it really doesn't surprise me that they intend to nominate (a fascinating and utterly brutal process, incidentally) a half-bright old codger with utterly no relevance or insight into anything other than the Hanoi Hilton.

But the Democrats seem to have taken to the same route. Christ, if Barack Obama were running for Prime Minister of the UK or Japan or even France or Sweden, he'd win by a landslide. Amongst confidants and associates, he is overwhelmingly the candidate of choice for the disenfranchised outsider. Not only is he a fine senator, he is also a fine speaker and an eloquent and concise writer. I wish him, and America, luck, as it seems the Dems are hell bent on nominating the second coming of Randy Bill - a corporate suit and party yes girl, with hardly a redeeming feature to mention.

And it is also Oscar nominations time. The powers of limewire have allowed me to view most of all the nominated movies. But for my reckoning, the sham of the pro-zionist hollywood wank-fest has never been more clearly demonstrated than this year, where the inane, banal and pretentious No Country For Old Men, by the one-hit wonder Coen brothers (hmm...) has swept the board with eight nominations and precious few qualities of note. Whereas the clearly superior, stunningly original, and highly countrified The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is granted a mere two. One of those being the undeniable Best Supporting Actor for the supremely talented Casey Affleck - he will be a superstar and make a gazillion bazillion dollars. Brad Pitt - excellent as always - takes a back seat to a tender and genuine portrayal of a man hell bent on fame and envy. This can be viewed as a character study, an analysis of the obsession of fame, or as a non-elegiac existential Western in the modernist tradtion. It's a thunderous, rolling masterpiece, achingly shot and tenderly scored and acted, and its failure to be nominated for Best Picture is an eternal damnation on the self-indulgent, tweedy and ultimately corrupt Oscar system.

In other news, it is Valentine's Day soon, when idiot men cook for the one time in their lives, and buy over-priced flowers in a cringe-worthy demonstration of a mass lack of critical thought. Go fuck yourselves in the faces, dicks.

Written In A Christmas Cafe; chapter 1

2008-01-06T15:45:00.000+09:00

Goddamn, what the hell, this is a bold typeface...

Ah, what the hell. I’m sitting with my back to the window - dusk is approaching on a mild winter’s afternoon in central Tokyo. There’s a black coffee next to the computer which I am trying very had not to spill - christ knows what insurance forms must be like here - triplicate copies signed with black ink only and then processed at the Immigration Bureau in downtown Saitama. Like getting your visa renewed - which is a process I won’t have to undergo for at least another three years and only then if I have any reason to stay here, which I won’t. Mind you, I won’t have much reason to stay, either. Which is a matter that can wait for now...

I only appear to have 93% of my computer battery left, so there’s not much point in going off on a tangent about the tedium involved in almost any matter of formality in this country. Merely enough time to point out that the only countries in which people actually obey the little green man signal are former bastions of fascism. Which reminds me that I really must visit Peru fairly soon. And so much for all that. The music has changed from Frank Sinatra to Sonny Rollins, and the atmosphere in this cafe has turned an altogether more contemplative shade of blue.

As the snow falls over the city, I sit at my desk, listening to the beat guys mouthing off about the weather. Strangers only talk about the weather, it’s true, but at Christmas everyone talks about the weather.

My desk is a - take a break to see what the fuck the “inspector” icon is meant to do - write-off of the worst kind. I can’t be sure who said it, George Orwell possibly, but there is a line that goes something like, “Show me a man with a tidy kitchen and I’ll show you a man with no morals”. Which is a fair reflection of absolutely everyone in my line of work. But show me a man with a messy kitchen and I’ll show you a good for nothing son of a bitch with very little sense of self-worth. Ah, subtle self-deprecation. In my experience good for nothing except getting yourself misunderstood for some kind of bipolar freak. 87% battery life left. The last two hundred words cost me 6%. Seems like a fair trade.

My desk is a cheap, faux-mahogany piece of lumber. Sturdy and solid, the felt top is stained with coffee and wine and tobacco and worse, and there is a three-inch long tear in the leather padding. The top drawer contains my gun, a diary, forty seven pens with no lids, half an eraser and a packet of post-it notes which have long since lost their adhesiveness. More coffee... The second drawer of the three, the middle drawer, has opened for about three months since I accidentally ripped the handle off trying to open a beer bottle. The bottom drawer contains a copy of The Outsider, any given day’s Washington Post, New York Times or Guardian, a bottle of Myer’s rum and Big Baps Monthly, a publication which I find contains the most erudite and well-reasoned Letters to the Editor page of the lot.

On the smoke stained walls behind me, there is a framed photo - not autographed - of the Queen of England and beside that - besides that versus beside that, the s makes a hell of a big difference - a newspaper headline from 1947 that reads “Jersey Cops Capture New Orleans King Pin”. The music coming from the McIntosh stacked speakers is some kind of muzak version of “The Theme From M*A*S*H”. Suicide is painless, indeed. I nod at the passing copy girl, and throw a piss poor attempt at a lead paragraph for some story or other in the bin. One thing I am notice about this Pages programme - I made the switch from PC to Mac about three months ago - is that it doesn’t attempt to correct my grammar like that stupid talking paperclip does on Word. If nothing else, this new laptop is good for my blood pressure. Which is something of a tangent and one well worth ignoring.

So anyway, I sit and listen to the beat reporters, whose names I haven’t yet had time to learn whine on about the weather and the christmas shoppers and the mutilated horse found on top of a streetcar in San Francisco. Apparently the cable car was running for three days with a horse’s head on the roof. Which raises a lot of questions about the quality of the cleaning staff which no doubt Rush Limbaugh will blame on illegal immigrants. I met Rush Limbaugh one time. He had come to Tokyo to speak to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club - a ragged band of imbeciles and fascists, for the most part - about the Republican Party and Japanese Relations. We met in the toilet - totally unplanned - and he was leaving the urinal when he suddenly stop and took a bullfrog from his blazer pocket and exclaimed “I saved this guy from the Libs”... I wrote it off as Percodan at the time, although it has since occured to me that Rush is less of an evil fucker than I thought, and he might just have had a thing for wildlife - but there we go again on some strange tangent which bores me and has no point for the reader.

One of the stories I hear from the news guys is about a wombat which had been found in the central offices of the International Herald Tribune. The bastards had shot it with a air pistol, which apparently is illegal here and the guy who did has been deported back to Canada. Another story is about a busker in Yokohama who apparently has invented a new type of harmonica which can be played by bats, or something. It’s too cold to go out and follow up on this type of story, which is commonplace in this job. Occasionally you follow up on these and it turns out to be even better than you had imagined. One time, when I was a junior reporter, I was sent to report on a run of the mill story about a traffic cop arresting a guy for a speeding offence, and when it came to booking him, it turned out his name was the same as a well known football player. That would ordinarily be a soul crushing story at the best of times, but when I turned up to speak to the guy, I found him fucking a snake and muttering darkly about the “stolen jewels”. Thinking the guy to be a bona fide nutjob, I didn’t pay much attention to him until I saw a solid gold tiara on the snake’s head. The story only got curiouser and curiouser, as they say, from there on in, but the moral of the story is that most of the time shit stories are shit stories no matter where they come from, but once in a while they turn up something completely unexpected.

On another, particularly off-the-wall occasion, whilst working in San Francisco, I had been writing a story about suicidal hang-gliders intentionally flying into the side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was interviewing one guy - a survivor, presumably - who had been fortunate enough to outlive his self-destructive tendencies. He was a banker in the financial district, two cars, three kids and at least one mistress on the go, living in Marin County. He had been charged by the police with reckless endangerment and as part of the judge’s sentencing had been placed on the FBI’s list of potential terrorists - which also included Charlie Chaplin (dead for half a century) and the head of the International Carrot Growers’ Co-Operative, some guy called Buckweed who lived in Long Island. Which created a bit of amusement amongst the political types, but in the end I think my story was relegated to page 22, in the sidebar next to the funnies.

And so much for all that, the point being most of the gossip you hear from junior reporters can be summarily dismissed as either self-publicising garbage, or mescaline inspired genius, and it’s up to you which one you go for, but the odds are either way you’ll be wrong.

So I leave the office and head down to Lee’s Bar, a small cubby whole of a whiskey bar, where the odd ex-pat mingles in pigeon japanese with half drunk PE teachers and loud and obnoxious salarymen. On the walls are posters of soccer players and signed letters from minor singing sensations. The chairs are welded together and the tables made of drain pipes. The blue neon sign is buzzing and broken, and I half expect to see a cowboy with a ten gallon hat tipped to one side smoking roll-up cigarettes on the street below. The toilet is a hole in the ground, the beer is lousy and the food on offer consists of either nachos from a packet bought from the seven eleven heated up with cheese and sold on at a three thousand percent mark-up, or raw eel in a bowl.

Holy Jesus! What the hell is that? Why is the date copying itself onto every page of my notes? And why is December spelt with four e’s? Christ knows, and at this time in the afternoon my mind is half-fried with rum and grapefruit juice.

Which is what I drink these days, for reasons which are too long and tedious to go into here, but anyway the conversation goes a little like this.

“And if ever such a thing as this should happen, why the hell did it happen in Hiroshima? That’s some kind of deep-rooted irony, and...” (I walk in the door and Naka the barman stops talking).

“Evening Naka”, I say, half-heartedly attempting to be at least semi-polite. It’s a dive, but at least I can still get served. The last place I used to drink barred me after a rather odd incident involving a small plastic robot and a bowl of soup. I deserved it.

“Evening, gin and grapefruit or bloody mary?”

“Gin.”

“You might want to speak to that guy” Naka says, pointing to what appears to be a leprechaun sitting in the corner, reading Playboy and chuckling, but which on closer inspection is an eleven year old boy reading Captain Fantastic and weeping openly.

“I have something interesting to tell you”, the kid says. “You have been presented with an opportunity, but I do not think you recognise the importance or, for that matter, the seriousness of the situation.”

“Get to the point, kid. I’m not the kind of guy who you want to keep from drinking for very long. In fact, I am tempted to throw you through the window now, just to keep from going utterly mad with boredom.” I take a drop of acid from the drawer behind the counter and give it to the child.

“You treacherous, deceitful bastard!” yells the kid. “Fuck you in the face, dick! Why I ought to punch your lights out here and now!”

“Okay,” I say. “You win. What do you want”.

“Yesterday evening, there was an incident in Shibuya. A dolphin was caught shoplifting.”

“That happens all the time. Why the fuck should I care about that? Those ungrateful bastards. They’d steal anything they could get their hands on. And besides, I can’t stand Shibuya”.

“Yeah, I agree with you on that, but there’s more. This dolphin wasn’t any ordinary dolphin. He was disguised as Richard Nixon. He was wearing a Richard Nixon mask. He had a three piece suit and was talking through the side of his mouth. He even had the walk perfected. What’s more, when they arrested him, he had the telephone number of Greenpeace, the Anti-Defamation League, and a known CIA operative in his wallet.”

“That seems a little convenient. Almost too convenient.”

“Yes, you could put it like that,” replies the tangerine haired child. “See, what I’m thinking was that this dolphin wanted to be caught. There’s too much information to be caught carrying around in clandestine manner. This dolphin was pretty blase about the whole thing.”

“Why would a dolphin give up the names of his associates? Why would he take them to the scene of the crime unless he knew they would be found? In which case, why does he want the names found?” I’m pretty startled by this. My head is spinning. I know there’s the whole underground aquatic mammal scene, but it’s not something I concern myself too much with.

I go to the bar, pick up my drink, and come back, expecting to continue the discussion. But the flame-haired kid in the green suit and top hat has gone. Who didn’t see that coming? He has left his magazine, but it’s a little childish for me and so I don’t read it. I finish my drink and go back to the office.

More often than not, the newspaper’s in house library is open all night. Barney, the caretaker-cum-librarian, never sleeps - ever - and spends his nights reading up about all manner of subjects from Ernest Hemmingway’s favourite musical to the collective uses of parsley from 1888 to 1904. Tonight is the same, and I find him in the library. I ask him for the pass card for the microfiche machine, and I look up everything I can find about the dolphin movement. What follows is a basic timeline based on the archives from the Daily Yomiuiri newspaper.

1832 - the first officially recorded occurrence of government sanctioned military action by the Japanese on dolphins and porpoises off the coast of the main Okinawa island. Military press releases indicate several divisions of light infantry storming a series of caves at the first break of light on the morning of July the seventh. Reports of the following attacks are hazy, to say the least, but it appears at least four hundred aquatic mammals were slaughtered, with Japanese casualties said to number between 80 and 144 soldiers.

1833 - a retaliation from the dolphins. An aquarium near Yokohama is stoned. The government places the blame on Extremist Radical children, but newspaper editorials from the time indicate otherwise. The Daily Express in England leads with an interesting story about the impending death of Princess Diana.

1844 - peace talks begin. The Chancellor dolphin, Colonel Fishy Mustard, is invited to talks with the Emperor in Tokyo, but can’t attend due to a lack of oxygen. The meeting instead is held in the neutral island of Mauritius, with the Japanese delegation arriving by submarine and communicating through a megaphone borrowed from James Dean. The following day - April 9th - the newspapers report an impasse, and that war may be soon at hand.

1857 - a terrible day for humanity, reports the Daily Mail of England. Their on-the-scene International Affairs correspondent Grey Greenday reports a sighting of a land-walking dolphin living in the woods near Matsuyama. Apparently the dolphin was “walking his dog, wearing cheap aftershave and whistling a merry tune whilst demonstrating all the character traits of a communist agitator.”

1904 - Official declaration of war between Japan and the sea creatures. Dolphin and whale harpooning launched, and official sanctions introduced, This is followed in late November by the first pro-porpoise, all-purpose advertising campaign.

And since then, there has been a war of attrition between the Japanese government and the sea-living, plankton-loving animals of the world. At it’s most blatant, the battleground exists off the course of Norway, and in the name of Scientific Research, meaning it perfectly possible to go into any Fugu restaurant in Tokyo and order a nice porpoise on toast. There is some mumbling of discontent - generally regarded as an underhand facade for the pro-porpoise movement - which has, on occasion, made the international news, but as a general rule we don’t bother with these kinds of stories.

The snow has finally arrived over the flatlands of the Kanto plain. After about a month of the weather teetering on or around freezing, two days ago the snow came, bring a soft layer of snow over the grey concrete and dirty streets. The trains are running as usual - a generally accepted rule of Japanese society is that the only thing which stops the trains from running is suicide jumpers. There is a story, almost certainly apocryphal, that the various Japanese Railway lines decide, independently of one another, how much to charge the families of suicide jumpers for delays and damage caused as a result of their leaps to glory. The result of this is that certain lines have, along with the decades old rumour of sexual assault, reputations for being suicide cheap options. I don’t know how true this is. Japan is full of such stories. Like the one about Christmas decorations on sale in Ginza which are finely chiseled images of Santa nailed to a cross.

The snow clouds seem to keep the temperatures up, and the lack of wind mean for a pleasant walk home, even at four in the morning. The light is rising now, and at dawn the air is fresher in Tokyo than usual. There is no need for dental hygiene face masks at this time of the day. From the very few overhanging trees left in the city, the birds - sparrows, finches, and other dull coloured birds I never learned the names for - awaken in the trees I never knew the names of. The drunkards stumble out of the nightclubs and into MacDonald’s restaurants for an early morning pick me up/hang over cure. I’ve been there myself, many a time, mainly in my younger days, when I still had the energy to do such a thing, when I still had the naivety of youth and peculiarly based faith in the love of a good woman existing round the corner next to the beer vending machines. I was definitely naive back then, I still believed that babies were made through IVF and artificial insemination. I’m tired now, either from the research or from the cold, and I try to walk as quickly as possible down past the railway tracks, through the monosyllabic architecture and prefabricated huts from the late 70s which makes up the vast majority of Japanese housing. Cheap and cheerful, only sans cheerfulness. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, quite some achievement by the builders. Japanese architects must surely shoulder most of the responsibility for chronic number of people who suffer from cold and flu symptoms during late Autumn. My apartment is precisely the same as everyone else’s, and yet I have not once attempted to enter the wrong one, not even when I am drunk beyond coherence, which is quite often.

I stumble in through the door, leaving my shoes on. Everyone seems to disappear out of the city at Christmas and new year, so I don’t have to worry too much about the neighbours. My neighbour is a stoutly built guy called Masahiro. Masahiro is in his mid twenties, I guess, and has a penchant for playing computer games and singing out loud to the best of The Carpenters. In Japan, The Carpenters are bigger than Buddha. Like most young Japanese, he has probably taken the train back to his family home in the prefectures to spend his time eating special year end food and praying to one of the several dozen gods he doesn’t believe in. And so I climb the ladder and fall into bed. Tomorrow I will be busy doing the same shit as today, just in a different pair of shoes.

I make the mistake of leaving my phone on. It doubles as an alarm clock, but my boss - a gregarious veteran named R. Schofield Croft - takes some kind of deprived atavistic pleasure in rallying his troops into work at 5.30am, just for the sheer hell of it.

“What is it, Schofield?”

“It’s about the Shibuya story... I think you ought to come down to the offices, Parker.”

“Jesus... I only got to bed two hours ago.”

“Ah, two hours is plenty. Thatcher got by on four, and she had to run England. Besides there is someone here who wants to meet you.”

Tokyo Is Cold, So I Dream Of Laurel Canyon

2008-01-06T00:36:00.001+09:00

A little about myself. I live in Tokyo. My hair fell out when I was roughly 21 years old. This may or may not have coincided with my university lifestyle. I mention it only as a reference to the title - my head is cold in Tokyo.

I live in a small apartment not thirty minutes from the centre of the city. I have little by way of furniture, save for this here MacBook laptop which I bought on the cheap in Akihabara, and my Yamaha guitar, on which I attempt to play James Taylor songs. Not, and I repeat not, the Eagles.

In the day time I perform as a clapping seal teaching English and making folk laugh, but in my spare time I am beginning a biography of the Scottish baseball player Bobby Thomson. I write and perform prose and poetry, but I prefer writing in my own spare time, but have been known to read in front of a live studio audience, as they said in Happy Days. I also play as a goalkeeper - following in the footsteps of the previous Pope, David Icke, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

This blog will be a chance to keep in touch with my experiences in writing the book, and also general bits and bobs about my life in Japan. I'm honestly not that egotistical, but it's good practice.