No, I was never "one myself"

I’m in the 1st class “quiet carriage” on the return leg of a trip to Devon; naturally it is filled with screaming children and thuggish louts using their mobiles on speaker phone. I have my earplugs in but they are no match for the hue and cry.

I don’t care for children in the least. I don’t think they are cute or funny or in any way charming or amusing. They are like little drunks: boorish and lacking a volume control. I am utterly devoid of the breeder gene and consider those who feel a need to make imperfect copies of themselves extraordinarily selfish.

I am proof that Darwin was right. I despise children and would rather be pickled alive by aliens than have any so therefore my “defective” DNA will not be passed down to future generations. If for some strange reason mine were the only sperm left capable of propagating the species and the little wigglers were harvested from me during the night and used to inseminate armies of willing females, the entire human race would die out within a generation because none of my offspring would posses the biological imperative needed for procreation.

I am the first to admit that I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why anyone would want to subject themselves to years and years of the kind of pain and suffering that having children brings. I am of that age where everyone in my peer group has kids and all of them, to the last, moan incessantly about their precious little snowflakes. They complain that the kids don’t listen, are too loud, won’t sleep, sleep the wrong hours, won’t do what they are told, say “no” to everything, won’t settle down, are sick all the time, cry when you pick them up, cry when you put them down, cry when you leave them alone, cry when you put them in the car, cost them thousands of pounds for clothes, shoes, dental care, doctor’s bills, repair bills, childcare, day care, private school, piano lessons, ballet lessons, karate lessons, tutoring, the list, and the parent’s ability to drone on about it, is endless.

Judging by what I hear I would rank the parenting experience as somewhat less pleasant than being gang-raped in a Turkish jail. At least there you know the sodomizing would eventually stop; with children the fun just keeps on going.

A colleague recently said that she took her offspring on a two-hour drive to see their grandmother. She summed up the experience thus, “It was like having an angle grinder in the back seat for the whole way.” Wow, I really don't know what I'm missing.

Naturally since I hate children, they love me. I am a child magnet. Each and every time I board a train to anywhere, a mother and her 27 germ-infested toddlers will sit next to me. I can’t count the number of tube trips I’ve taken when I will be in an empty carriage and suddenly hundreds of school children swarm in: invariably being herded off to a museum or other cultural activity which will be lost on them because, really, they all would rather be playing Xbox or, if they are English, getting drunk.

Children find me at parties, in cinemas, on the beach, on the bus, anywhere were I simply want a bit of quiet. If there is a charter flight to a Babies with Colic Convention, I will be on it. At this very moment I am 37,000 feet above Eastern Europe on a run to Istanbul. The plane is packed, standing room only, I'm in Business; next to me and behind me are the only children in this part of the plane. For me this is perfectly normal and I have come to, if not accept it, at least expect it.

To be fair, although that is nor really my style, the kid next to me is pretty OK. He's fidgety but so am I and he gets up a lot to see his mum; I get up a lot to go to the loo. We've established a pattern that seems to work. He is also exceptionally polite and as such reminds me of me when I was whatever age he is (about 10 I would guess). He has some pretty cool games too and is exceptionally curious which is a good thing at any age. His mum seems bright and his dad came by to give him a sports magazine but he appears to be more interested in a book of Sudoku puzzles. I wonder if I should offer him my Herald Tribune?

Right. Back to reality. The two girls behind me are using the back of my seat as a kick-boxing pad.

I've dated more than my share of single mums over the years and the experiences were always fraught with anxiety. I was never good step-father material and always wanted more horizontal time than they could fit into their child-centric schedules. A couple of times, I must admit, I did manage to bond with the kids: baseball games, Frisbee playing, photography, computers, that sort of stuff. Mostly though it was a series of uncomfortable dinners followed by even more uncomfortable breakfasts.

The standard line I get from my child-enriched friends is, “You might think you hate kids but just wait until you have your own, it will be different then.” Somehow I doubt that and anyway, why would I want to take that chance? The world does not need another unloved child- we seem to have them in plentiful supply.

Twice and only twice have I ever experienced a loss of self-control so catastrophic that I thought seriously about the possibility of spawning with someone.

Woman number one was a brilliant and beautiful English professor from Chicago who already had an equally brilliant and beautiful daughter. I ended up cheating on her (the mum, not the daughter) with a girl from my photography class who showed up at my door one night with massage oil and candles. That action alone should cast serious doubts on my suitability to be anyone's father.

Woman number two dumped a truckload of ice on my child rearing plans when, after a week of panic and pregnancy tests (negative) she declared, in bed, after sex, that she wasn't afraid of being pregnant, she was afraid it would be mine. Ouch.

After that it was pretty much game over for me as far as breeding was concerned. One by one friends transitioned into ex-friends because they started popping out their young. It became increasingly difficult to steer conversations away from poo, tiny clothes and the cost of daycare. Inside the shells of shallow, self-absorbed parental units I knew there were still bright, entertaining, politically active people but there was no way to reach them over mountains of nappies and Motherhood Today magazines.

I have a dear friend who, at 37, has one and only one ambition in life: to have as many babies as there are eggs left in her body. She is, without a doubt, one of the brightest people I know: well educated, a good job; she is actually making a positive contribution to the world. Men flock to her but she brushes them away, judging them on one criteria alone: would they make a good sperm donor? She's looking for the antonym of “sponge worthy” she wants Ovary Worthy. Believe me, the standards are much, much, higher.

Returning from Istanbul now. Lots of room on this flight and I even have an empty seat next to me. This ever so slightly makes up for the asshole in front of me who fully reclined into my knees. Here's a tip: if you're flying BA within Europe the only difference between Business and Economy class is the food. The seat pitch is identical, i.e., crushingly narrow and anyone over 3.5' tall will need a well oiled shoehorn to fit in.

There are no children in sight or hearing range. This is a good thing as I got exactly zero sleep last night and I'm in no mood to mollycoddle the screaming fruit of someone's loins. Instead I am surrounded by suits and well trimmed greying hair. These blokes can't be much older than me and yet they all seem so grown up. I imagine they all have dull but well paying jobs like Director Of Product Enhancement (read it again, it will come to you) and their Rolexes where gifts from loving but oft ignored wives who are, at this very moment, getting boned by their Life Coaches.

I get up to go to the loo and sure enough, staring back at me in the mirror, is a balding, middle-aged, middle-manager with a Rolex. Holy shit! How did that happen?! Six years ago I had hair down to my waist, $60,000 in debt and a well cultivated reputation for womanizing. I let a woman cut my hair and look what happened: nice clothes, money in the bank, a garden and a lot of female friends who consider me “safe.” The shame.

Maybe the reason that I don't want to have kids stems from the fact that I consider myself an emotionally immature adult. I don't want to stop someone else from being irresponsible when I'm too busy being so myself. I'm not talking about participating in games of Russian Roulette in a Cambodian cock fighting ring but I don't even want the burden of having to wait for the green man in order to cross the street so that I don't unwittingly poorly influence an impressionable child's behaviour.

No. I'll leave the survival of the species to those who seem most eager to procreate: Chavs. When, in your old age, you are being cared for by someone who looks and acts like Amy Winehouse after a hard night on the town and the only shows on the telly are 357 channels of Big Brother don't come crying to me. I was the one wearing a condom.

It's Not Like We're Saving Lives

Eating out in London is a somewhat rare occurrence for me. Most of the menus I order from are written in languages I don't understand and I invariably end up pointing at something and hoping for the best. The fact that I am, mostly, a vegetarian makes this a somewhat risky procedure and I have on more than one occasion been presented with dishes piled high with seared flesh and smothered in what looks like, on close inspection, boiled entrails.

Thus the modifier “mostly” prefixing my vegetarianism; as there have been a few occasions where my options were reduced to 1) eat some kind of meat or 2) go hungry and I'm afraid my moral fibers are not wound tight enough for the latter.

Fortunately for me, experiences like the above are rare. I usually dine out with a local who can either translate or explain to the waiter, indignantly, that I am one of those animal rights freaks who is a bit unstable and unhealthy so could the chef please boil an old dishcloth for me. There are a few countries, France, Spain and Italy, where I can usually fumble my way to the one non-meat item on the menu. This, for some reason I have yet to fathom, is almost always a plate of grilled mixed vegetables served limp and tepid.

I was in Copenhagen a month or so back and ordered a “veggie burger” from room service. The girl on the phone who took my order said, “It's not what you think” but didn't elaborate. After I took the metal cover off the plate I found out she was right: between two buns was a pile of, wait for it...grilled mixed vegetables.

Back to that dinner in London. I was out with a rather well put together friend of mine who, for the past five years, I have had a particularly large crush on. She knows this; the feeling, if her actions once she has had one or two rounds of drinks are any indication, seems to be mutual. It's all in good fun, reasonably harmless in a tipsy office Christmas party sort of way and it gives us both the opportunity to play delicious games of flirtation, mingled with meaningful glances over the tops of wine glasses and coffee cups.

On this particular evening we were discussing the seriousness with which a number of our colleagues took their jobs and our industry (advertising, marketing, PR). This stuck us as both quite odd and quite amusing because my friend and I are under the right-thinking, clear-headed, opinion that the social contribution of our entire enterprise ranks somewhere above termites but below woodlice. Note to self: must find out if woodlice pupate into termites.

We see it every day. Otherwise seemingly sane people taking immense pride in developing, producing and giving birth to wall-size adverts for deodorant, ready meals and hair-care products.

“These people need to lighten up.” Said my friend, “It’s not like we’re saving lives.”

Abso-fucking-lutely. We’re not building homes for poor people, we’re not helping disaster victims, we’re not handing out food to the starving- we are selling crap that people don’t need at prices they can’t afford. Not only are we not saving lives, we’re making the world a slightly worse place just by going into work in the morning.

A few weeks ago I found myself at our Hamburg office waiting to be collected from reception. Outside in the car park was nice shiny new Triumph Bonneville and when my colleague arrived he informed me that their office had just won the Triumph account. The sweet irony of a stalwart English brand like Triumph handing their advertising business over to a German agency; not to mention the fact that Triumphs are insufferably cool, made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

“Oh yes,” said my colleague proudly, “we have won several new accounts this year!”

“That's great, what else did you win?”

“Camel cigarettes!” he exclaimed.

Lovely.

It’s difficult for me to recall if I have at any point worked for an ethical industry.

Photojournalism: nope
Gas station attendant for Unocal: nope
Janitor at a Masonic lodge: nope (no minorities allowed)
Used camera buyer: nope
IT Manager for ad agency specializing in pharmaceutical ads: nope
IT Manager for giant advertising and PR company: nope (Bush hired us to “sell the US brand” to Arab countries)

The closet I have come to having an ethically positive job was when I was the equipment tech and assistant manager in the Photo Department of an art college in San Francisco. At least there I did no active harm and actually felt like I was making a positive contribution to the art world.

Today I find myself on a Eurostar to Paris, surrounded by men and women in suits; everyone is busily tapping away on their laptops- working on little charts and graphs or reports which, in the grand scheme of things, contribute nothing at all to the betterment of the planet.

Even those who are trying to lend a hand often get things totally wrong. A perfect example is the $100 laptop project. Let me give you people a clue: if kids are starving, have no access to clean water or sanitation and have lost one or both parents to AIDS, the very last thing they need is a fucking laptop computer. Do you idiots know how much HIV medication $100 will buy you in Africa? How many antibiotics? How much a $100 donation to Doctors Without Boarders can mean to the life someone who will die without proper medical care?

“Good morning, I see that you are dying of dysentery, well today is your lucky day!”

“You brought medicine?”

“Better than that, I have your new laptop!”

It is a mindbogglingly moronic assumption to think that simply making technology available will somehow lift people out of poverty. The affluence of the West is not a result of everyone having a computer at home- having a computer at home is a result of the affluence.

Put the infrastructure in place before you provide the toys. Build homes, schools, water and sewage treatment plants, teach people to read, help them make their crops grow, eliminate governmental corruption, guarantee universal suffrage, provide medical care, give them the hope that they and their children will live past 30. Come back when all that’s done and then I’ll be happy to start handing out the laptops.

My evil ex-girlfriend suffers from this ass-backwards approach to relief work. She and her friend are trying to raise money for a floating library for the kids in Laos. She wants to make books available to even the remotest villages along the Laotian river system. Can’t argue with that can you? Oh, yes, I’m afraid I can.

Just like the $100 laptop people, she is solving the wrong problem. Making books available to people who a) can’t read and b) are dead, isn’t really helping. Build the schools, build the health clinics and then build the libraries.

Still, I guess doing something is better than what I am doing: nothing. It’s all well and good to armchair quarterback from the first-class carriage but I’m not exactly out there hammering nails with Jimmy Carter. In fact, in any society which is off the grid, I have no useful skills what-so-ever. Hell, I'd be hard pressed to make a sundial out of a pencil and a doughnut let alone know how to irrigate crops, milk a cow or design a primitive battery out of lemons and coper wire. Well, OK, I could do that last thing but what would I plug it into, a pig?

If “actively saving lives” is the gold standard then I’ve built up some nasty karma; next life I’ll be lucky to come back as pond scum. The difficult bit, especially at this stage of the game, is untangling myself from the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.

Since I seem incapable of deciding what the next chapter in my life should be about, I'm opening it up to suggestions. Keep in mind that I'd like to leverage my mediocre photography skills with my lazy writing style, I know a bit about IT and I travel well. I'm not sure how any of that can morph into something worthwhile but I do know that I am searching for a vocation that is an avocation. Unfortunately my addled, sleep deprived brain is simply unable to come up with any ideas beyond “Dude, you should really, like, find something else to do. Now grab the remote, Scrubs is on” Stupid brain.

Oh, Lucky Man

Le Meridian Hamburg; having peanuts for dinner because I can’t be bothered to wrap one of their bathrobes around my pasty white body long enough to answer the door for room service. Truth be told, it’s not the peanuts that I’m after; it’s the salt. The peanuts are simply bite-sized delivery vehicles with good mouth feel. In an ideal world I’d suck the salt off those babies and spit them out again but the concept sounds a little to risqué for my Victorian sensibilities.

In the past two weeks I have slept in my own bed for a grand total of six fitful hours. This stopover at home was due to the baffling and impenetrable mechanics of airline pricing which dictated that it was more cost effective to fly me from Copenhagen to London before sending me to Hamburg. Thus I ended up backtracking 550 miles instead of advancing 300 but I did get to play luggage roulette at Heathrow a couple more times.

I’ve been instructed by a friend of mine to a) write more and b) be more funny. It seems that my last instalment had her competing for jumping space on a nearby bridge and she felt that, given her current situation of inadvertent celibacy, stories of unrequited love might just cause her to lose her grip.

Truth be told, “inadvertent celibacy” should be changed to “self imposed celibacy” because she has no lack of opportunities. Her complaint is that the bevies of men queuing to buy her dinner are too young to bother with.

“They’re just little boys! Why would I want to go out with a 28 year old?”

“Uh, the sex?” I said.

“I don’t want sex, I want a grownup man and a relationship.”

“Wait, let’s get back to the sex. I’m a 42-year-old guy and if some twenty-something hottie asked me out I would hesitate only long enough to check the expiration date on the packet of condoms that are slowly crumbling to dust in my night table.”

“You don’t understand”

No, I don’t. I really, truly, honestly, sincerely, don’t.

I’m not exactly the kind of guy who women, even those of questionable sobriety, make a pass or even cast a passing glance at so the mere thought of someone actually fancying me enough to ask me out to dinner is enough to make my palms sweat.

My friend does not suffer from this malady. Indeed, she is as brilliant as she is lovely which is to say, amazingly so; with a dry wit delivered faster and more accurately than one of those smart bombs which cause guys in the Pentagon to get stiffies over. She has a semi-respectable career, owns her own flat and is someone you could bring home to meet the folks without having to explain away any embarrassing twitches or forehead tattoos.

Why she is still on the prowl is a mystery to me and indeed most of the above ground inhabitants of at least four of the major landmasses on this planet. It’s not that she doesn’t want some willing bloke to take a swim around in her gene pool, it’s just that she is holding out for George Clooney and at last report he only goes for blondes.

My friend from the Midlands isn’t the only attractive woman of my acquaintance who bemoans her solitary life. I have the occasional dinner with a woman who, it must be said, was designed by God on one of His better days. After a drink or two she will invariably launch into a soulful lament about the lack of available men out there. This after flirting shamelessly with the waiter, guys at the next table, the bouncer and practically every male we encounter over the course of the evening- with the exception, of course, of me.

Does she not realize that she could have her pick of any man within a 150-mile radius of her blast zone? Married, engaged, long term committed relationship; at the “I” bit in “I do” it doesn’t matter. Any man not being wheeled along with a sheet pulled over his head would abandon his wife, sell his children into slavery, torch his home and torpedo his career if she said that’s what it took to be with her. Not simply because she is heart-stoppingly beautiful (she is) or rocket-scientist smart (she is) or that men are fickle, amoral, weasels (we are) but because taken as a whole, women like her are thin on the ground. Even setting aside the fact that any man alive, straight or gay, would fuck her, we (speaking as the entire male species), in the long run, really do want the whole package. So yes, it is the sex but it’s not just the sex. Sometimes.

So why is this particular friend of mine not coupled up? I personally think that she is spoiled for choice and has lost interest in the game. Whereas people like me, average looks, poor math skills, have to settle for whoever will settle for us (and oft times fight for the privilege), my lovely friend has had so many offers that she has simply withdrawn into a shell of indifference. Her knee-jerk reaction to any guy who shows an interest is to tease a bit and then shut him down. On the rare occasion she hooks up with a bloke, he’ll be just as gorgeous as her and just as emotionally withdrawn.

Not that I’ll be losing any more hair worrying about how empty it can be for beautiful people to fuck other beautiful people but it does illustrate the theory that no matter what we have, we always want something else. Even if we are constantly told that what we have is the best thing going.

Why is this relevant to me? Because my friend from the Midlands, the one who thinks 28 is below the legal age of majority, tells me all the time how lucky I am to be with the woman currently sharing my airspace: to have a relationship which is easy and stable and, even though it’s not the most passionate, still possesses tenderness and a large laughter factor.

She tells me these things and I am caught up short. Lucky? Really? But what about all those times I’m bored out of my little skull and wish that the person lying next to me were reading Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Ethics rather than Good Housekeeping? And you know, a bit more liveliness during sex wouldn’t go amiss either. And don’t get me started about how she can’t put anything back into the same place twice and…

But when the lights go out, the night is quiet and I’m in our bed, together again after days of being apart, when her breathing is all I can hear and she is warm and soft and pressed against me- it’s then and, truth be told, a few thousand other times during the course of every single day, when I realize that my friend is right, through no fault of my own and certainly undeservingly so, I am a lucky man.

Wanting vs. Having

Picture if you will, a small, hip, veggie café in California, the exact location must remain a closely guarded secret so as to protect the identity of one of the participants in the upcoming saga. It’s just after sunset; the air is warm and people with tans are mulling around trying to look rich. It was a good thing that I got there early because the place was heaving. Packed full of, well, people just like me: reasonably affluent educated liberals with meat aversions. I put my name on the list and wandered back outside to wait.

I’m a pretty patient guy. I don’t mind queues at grocery stores or movie theatres and, if I set my mind to it, I can do some pretty serious daydreaming. The one thing I am absolutely no good at is nervous anticipation.

I had my trusty Yashica T4 with me so I snapped a few photos even though I knew the light was bad. I watched a guy use his dog as bait to catch attractive strangers and finally I sat down at an iron table and pretended to read e-mails I had already read on my Blackberry. How did we ever look busy in public before Blackberries?

She saw me first and stood slightly outside my peripheral vision. It took me a moment to realize she was there and a moment longer to compose myself enough to say anything at all. I believe my first words were, “Ohmyfuckinggodit’syou!”

She sat down across from me. We looked at each other for a moment and I was relived to see that her smile was as large and goofy looking as mine.

“Well…” I said.
“Yep…” she said.

She stood up. “Come here!” she demanded, spreading her arms wide.

I threw myself at her with such force that she had to take a step back to keep from crashing down onto the sidewalk. I held her so hard I thought I could feel her ribs buckling. I picked her up, she was light as a butterfly wing; her legs curled up behind her. We were laughing with a pure, hysterical, manic laughter that almost but not quite descended to tears. All the while we were both saying, over and over again, “I can’t believe it’s you!”

We were still giggling after we had untangled ourselves and sat down. We each took a deep breath and then, apropos of nothing, she said, “You always show up at just the right time, I’m getting a divorce.”

I don’t know what I was expecting her to say but it sure wasn’t that. If it had been anyone else I might have thought she was simply yanking my chain, testing to see what kind of reaction this news would evoke. But not her, she was serious as a heart attack. What I said next was vastly different than what I was thinking.

I said, “Oh no! That’s awful! What happened? I thought you guys were great for each other?”

I was thinking: “Holly fucking shit, that is the best news anyone could have told me in this or any other lifetime, let’s find a hotel so we can fuck like weasels!”

Let me tell you a little bit about the person sitting there at the table with me. We’ll call her Emily because I like the name and it in some ways seems to suit her.

“Emily” and I have known each other for the better part of fifteen years. I was working at a mail-order camera store when she was hired to be our receptionist. When I walked in and saw her standing there (isn’t that a Beatles song?) I suddenly understood all those tired clichés about love at first sight.

She was, at the time, newly married and newly pregnant, oddly enough, in that order. I was married too: three years into what would turn out to be a six-year saga of fucking, fighting and insanity.

It took us about ten seconds after we first made eye contact to realize that both our marriages and indeed every other relationship up to that point had been, for each of us, a grand waste of time and that, standing before us now was the person we were to destined to be with.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. We both, temporarily, stayed married, she had a daughter and then another. After my divorce I bounced from one woman to another until I finally landed in England and, well, you know the rest.

Emily and I drifted apart and lost touch. It wasn’t until I was planning one of my excursions to California that I decided to track her down. It took a fair bit of detective work but I finally found a cousin on her husband’s side who forwarded her a message from me. Three months and about a thousand e-mails later I was having dinner with her in what, it turned out, was her favourite restaurant as well as mine.

I hadn’t seen Emily in ten years but we talked as if there had been no pause in the conversation. We completed each other’s sentences, we spontaneously burst into song, we laughed way too loud and when we paused to catch our breath, we stared at each other in slack jawed amazement.

I held her hand. Her fingers were thin and delicate and she kept her nails clipped short. She still wore her wedding ring and it gave me a slight twinge when I felt it. I closed my fingers around hers and allowed my thoughts to drift a bit:

She was sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea; holding a cup of coffee and smiling into the sun. Cats, dogs and kids running inside and out; I’m cooking breakfast because that is the one meal I can do without causing too much damage to our health or the global environment.

I can see her there, in profile, the outline of her face silhouetted against blue sky, red hair soft as spun silk turning to fleece in the light of a new day.

“Uh, hello?” she said, jolting me back to the moment.

“Sorry, I was just fast forwarding.”

I kissed her hand.

“Very British.” She said.

“No, very French.”

She recited the French Taunter skit from Holly Grail word for word.

This caused me to double over in laughter and when I straightened up she was looking at me in a way that made me think that she was about to make a weighty proclamation, which, as it turns out she was.

“You know,” she began “I really love you.”

Every once and a while you get to have a Han Solo moment and this was mine.

“I know,” I said.

We left the restaurant and headed up the street to Boarders Books. After taking a step or two she slid her arm around my waist and I put mine around her shoulder. That just didn’t seem right for some reason so after a moment, my left arm was around her hips and I was blind drunk with joy.

We walked that way for two blocks, chatting about things I can’t remember. I think I said something about the stars.

As we were crossing the street, arms now wrapped around each other (holding hands didn’t provide the full body contact we required) a mini van pulled up and asked for directions to the freeway. After we told them the best route the guy in the passenger seat gave us a knowing smile and said, “Enjoy the rest of your walk.” I assured him we would.

We stayed in Boarders until they kicked us out and left with two armloads of books. We’d spent the evening discovering, not to our surprise, that our taste in everything from evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics to pulp sci-fi and art magazines was, without a single exception, identical.

It was a slow and silent walk to her car.

We stood next to her battered black Saab, bathed in the amber glow of a streetlight and held each other for a long time. We knew it ended there. She would open her car door and return to her kids, dog and the horror of a soon to be ex-husband who had yet to move out. In one week’s time I would board a plane for England, a girlfriend and a job that paid me too much to leave.

“Our timing, as always, sucks.” She said,

“Maybe in another lifetime I’ll get to be Arthur to your Fenchurch?”

“I’d like that.” She said and kissed me very softly.

Another long hug.

She threw her bag of books into the back seat; much to my disappointment, her car started. Many things failed to happen at that point: I failed to stop her from driving off, I failed to decide that, sod it all, I was going to be with this woman no matter what and both of us failed utterly and completely to follow through on anything that happened that night.

I went back to England.

She got a divorce.

She found another man.

And the e-mails stopped.

Love Letters

Inside my head there is a letter waiting to be sent to you
Droll
Witty
Urbane
Slightly flirtatious
But it is trapped inside a body that has had precious little rest since, since, well, since as long as I can remember and in my present state, I can’t remember much.

I do remember something
Sitting on the floor with you inventorying kit; making up ridiculous acronyms for the model numbers:
“AIS”
“Always Isolate Seahorses”
“AF”
“Androgynous Flyboys”
Giggling wickedly.

You did see me in San Francisco
You brought your boyfriend
Didn’t you meet him at AA?
I was working at a college and was dead broke
We all had coffee on Union St.
You and I held hands behind his back
And hugged for a bit too long when we said goodbye
So you see, San Francisco reminds me of you too

Midnight in London and the wind is rattling naked branches
I am trying to type one more coherent line, one more word, a letter even
Something
Anything
But the toothpicks that are propping my eyelids open are bending a bit too much for safety
And I keep hitting the wrong keys
But if staying awake is awfully hard
Not writing to you is harder

Love Letters

(In response to "tell me a secret")

In the days of my youth I frolicked in the valleys behind Santa Barbara. My folks had a spread with a couple acres of orange trees interspersed with avocados and even a walnut or two. This was a time without fences or close neighbours and past the borders of our property lay an untamed wilderness simply begging to be explored by a boy and his dog.

At the end of one of the orchards a creek ran up into the hills. On summer days, cloudless, hot days that stretched far into the evening, I would pack a rucksack full of previsions and Rocky (the World's Best Dog) and I would set off to find the mouth of the river. We never took along any water because what was that stuff running over the rocks? If it was good enough for Rocky to drink, it was good enough for me. In retrospect I undoubtedly escaped injury or death at the hands of dysentery microbes only because they were too shocked by my stupidity to actually destroy my bowels.

150 yards upstream (which seems like 150 miles when you are 10 and slogging your way through dense underbrush) there was a small clearing that looked out over our valley. Someone had the good sense to plant a large, flat topped rock square in the middle of the clearing; it was on this rock that my best friend and I would take our midday meal. Half a dozen oranges for me and a goodly handful of dog biscuits for him. We always shared.

I don’t know if you have ever eaten six oranges in a single sitting but by the fourth one your lips feel like they are covered with stinging red fire ants. The trouble is they are so sweet, and so juicy and after hiking up the childhood equivalent of the Amazon you are so hungry that you don’t notice the belt sander being applied to your mouth. That is, until half an hour later when you are face down in muddy creek water trying desperately to wash the burn off only to discover that it won’t come off no matter how hard you scrub with sand.

I remembered all this in my kitchen tonight. Standing there, hot and sticky from my ride home, eating an orange over the sink and having my lips tingle with the memory of so very long ago…

There’s a secret for you.

I have to go now…

Budapest

The road in from the airport is narrow and lined with billboards emphasizing happy, smiling people using products that most of the residents here can’t possibly afford. In the space between the advertisements I can see a blighted landscape: industrial strength tower blocks sporting a thick skirting of graffiti, Eastern European cars, covered in soot and with unpronounceable names, parked haphazardly on sidewalks.

Hungary is one of the latest members of the bureaucracy-laden megalith that is the European Union but because of their newcomer status, the Hungarians have not converted their local currency, the Flourit, to Euros. This means that travellers are confronted with an intimidating array of zeros on the banknotes and a hamburger and fries could cost you millions.

My hotel of choice, the Le Meridian, is full this weekend so I’m forced to take up lodgings at the InterContinental- a last minute change made under duress.

There was a time, back before I started living out of hotel rooms, when I associated chains like Hilton and InterContinental with, if not luxury, then at least reasonably high standards. Now when I see one of them (or any of their associated partners) on my itinerary I find myself wondering if there might be any park benches available instead.

The InterContinental Budapest didn’t let me down. Walking into the lobby I was confronted by a sea of conventioneers dressed in green plastic capes and matching crowns. A small woman with the look of a frightened zoo animal was holding one of those ridiculously large checks they hand out to lottery winners. I couldn’t make out who the check was made out to but whoever the lucky recipient turned out to be was going to walk away with €26,000. That kind of money should have bought them a better hotel.

Check-in was pleasant but I should have sensed trouble when only one out of the five lifts was operational. My room was a carbon copy of all other InterContinental rooms I have ever stayed in. These guys learned branding from McDonald’s: each bit of furniture, every picture, every shampoo bottle, are clones of ones found in InterContinentals all over the globe. No deviations allowed. Resistance if futile. You will be assimilated.

The location of this hotel, on the shores of the Danube, couldn’t be better but my room overlooked a construction site. Turning on the heater produced, nothing. I found that no heat came as a set with no Internet. Three trips to reception finally secured me a room with heat, Internet, lights, hot water and a decent bed. As an added bonus they threw in drunken obnoxious neighbours with shrill voices, a feature which seems to be complementary at all InterContinentals.

Not that I ended up spending much time there.

I knew the weekend was going to be a miserable. Our task was to migrate a container ship load of media and accounting applications from one system to another all the while placating an IT manager who resented our very presence and who had convinced his finance director that the whole project was little more than a slice of pure evil. Yep, that should end well.

In the end we got the job done because, well, because we had to. It might be dedication or fear but whatever the motivating factor was, by Monday morning all systems were operational and I even managed to make my flight back to London.

It’s a week later now. I’m sitting in my bed typing this while a kid from Poland tears out a wall in the living room. We have rising damp, which sounds a bit rude but is a fairly common ailment of flats of a certain age- over a hundred years in our case. Groundwater seeps up into the brickwork and through the plasterboard leaving ugly brown and yellow streaks along the walls. The only way to eliminate it is to rip out the drywall and scrape your way back to the masonry. Once this is done they inject some environmentally unfriendly stuff into the wall and seal it all back up with concrete. The process takes two days and leaves the entire flat covered in a thin coating of gritty plaster dust which, I have no doubt, turns to a solid mass in the lungs.

Truth be told I really should be in Budapest again this weekend but the project was running over budget and I figured we could save a few quid by not sending me out. Mistake. I’ve had a phone attached to my ear for the past 48 hours trying to sort things out between UK and Hungarian teams and make sure we don’t miss something vita which will prevent the users from working on Monday thus causing the local management to chase us with flaming torches.

I’m feeling massively guilty about being here while my colleagues toil away in the field- they haven’t left the office before three in the morning for days on end and not only is there no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn’t any tunnel or, for that matter, lights as 60mph winds knocked the entire city off-line. In my mind I’ve just run away from a fight and in punishment, the very second I cancelled my flight and hotel I came over ill and, at this very moment, feel like someone is running a belt-sander over my throat: a physical manifestation of emotional trauma.

The dust has settled in the living room and I haven’t had a call from Budapest in about 20 minutes. The e-mails keep coming in but they are easier to ignore. I think perhaps it’s time for tea and toast. What can I get you?

A Day at the Beach

As I pointed out in a past entry, I am the World’s Worst E-Mail Responder. The reason for this is simple; I always want to write a novel when a line or two will do. I am verbose but I am also lazy and seemingly always pressed for time; thus I have a backlog of messages all crying out for responses but I am seemingly incapable of typing even the most meagre of replies.

The same could be said for these entries. A strict reading of which would indicate that I lead a life of dreary monotony with the occasional spike of frantic tension and bad craziness. While there is a certain truth to this view, the reality (or at least, my reality) is that events in my life maintain a constant roar that, only on rare occasion diminishes slightly: as if the voltage were turned down to 120 from 240

Since, try as I might, I am unable to crawl inside anyone’s head, I’m assuming that the background radiation of my life is pretty much normal. With the exception of my partner, I have encountered very few people who are able to really relax without powerful drugs. I’m not sure what her secret is but on beach holidays, while I cover myself with sun block, huddle beneath any available shade and pray desperately for an unexpected cloudburst, she reads, bakes in the heat and glows.

This can go on for days and soon falls into a basic, almost primitive routine of waking, eating, sunning, swimming, eating, drinking sleeping. It should come as a surprise to no one that after the first thirty seconds of this ritual, I am bored enough to gnaw my fists off.

When I’m on holiday I want to do something: explore, climb, tumble, take pictures, go on a road trip, investigate every cheese shop in Paris, watch couples publicly grope in the streets of Rome, or try and find an open restaurant in Munich on a Sunday (and other recreational impossibilities). I don’t know how to do nothing and never thought that was the point anyway.

To be fair, my partner is game-on to do all of the above-mentioned activities; it’s just that she has an OFF switch installed that was not a factory option on my model. At night, she is pleasantly gurgling in her sleep ten minutes after her bedside light goes off. I, on the other hand, have to read myself into unconsciousness or I will spend hours staring into the darkness, mind racing, cursing whatever faulty gene I have that prevents me from simply settling into the pillow and drifting off. As for my sleeping on planes, trains and automobiles, I’d have better luck knocking a six-inch nail through a two-by-four with my penis (thank you, Real Genius).

Hotel rooms are another challenge. It doesn’t matter what super soundproofed suite I’ve managed to get myself booked into, there is always some purring air conditioner, buzzing refrigerator or busy street outside my window which prevents me, no matter that I stuff my ears with plugs and pile pillows over my head, from sleeping through the night.

At this very moment I am in the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna listening to a woman scream, shriek and bray in Italian to some luckless bastard on the other end of her phone. This has been going on for over four hours now and there would appear to be no end in sight. I escaped to the gym for an hour but when I returned it was as if she hadn’t even paused for breath. I’m hoping that eventually she will simply starve to death: unable to get food in past the bile that keeps spewing out.

I’ve been this way as far back as I can remember. Any noise when I am trying to sleep, write, study or read instantly prevents me from doing any of the above. If it weren’t for earplugs I would never have graduated from college, read anything more involved than a baseball box score or slept longer than a few seconds at a stretch. I kid you not: I wear earplugs in the library; I keep boxes of them hidden in my luggage and clothes. I once was forced to leave a three-day hippie-dippy camp-out, music, drugs, fuck-fest because I had forgotten my earplugs and the incessant sound of the drum circle was driving me psychotic.

Oh dear God! There seems to be whale sounds emanating from the room next door. I wonder if I give her a few tons of baleen she will go away?

Right. All that was a bit of a diversion considering I began this entry with the idea to keep it short and, for once, on-topic. I still have a good lorry-load of recent events to write about including: my month-long holiday in California, the funding for my project being pulled which greatly increases the possibility that I’ll be camped out on a street-corner near you with a sign that says, “Will network your office for food” and the recent news that my mum is responding very well to chemo.

I have no idea what made me think of this but for the last seven years I have not had a cat, a landline telephone or a microwave oven. The only thing I miss is the cat.

It Does Start to Blur After a While

Climbing back up to that 35,000 foot motorway above the clouds. The moon, seriously full on the trip out, has waned only slightly in the intervening days. On night flights they dim the cabin lights during takeoff and landing. For my money (or in this case, the company’s money), on nights like this they could keep the interior lights off for the entire journey. There are mountains up here, vaporous though they may be, which assume an entirely new vision of loveliness under a stark white moon. This panorama is obliterated completely by the pizza-parlour lighting from the inside of an Airbus.

My band of merry men and I have been spending quite a bit of time in Germany as of late. Outside the UK, Germany is our company’s largest European market. Lots of good consumers in Deutschland, despite their anachronistic policy of closing all shops on Sundays. If you find yourself famished in Hamburg on Sunday and your fridge contains two packets of mustard and a jar of expired mayonnaise, you’re pretty much fucked. You might find a few petrol stations open but those hotdogs have been twirling on their little circular runs since at least last Spring so the smart money would be on giving them a miss.

In past posts I have raged against stereotyping entire cultures based on individual behaviour or idiosyncrasies. The US is not filled to the brim with gun-toting, slack-jawed, rednecks named Bubba-Billy-Bob (a full 49% do not fall into that category) and although popular reality TV shows might lead viewers to believe otherwise, not all the English are Chaves. Likewise I am not going to pigeon-hole all of Germany based on my experiences with a handful of IT geeks- I’ll leave that up to you.

I’m one of those cowboy-type IT guys who pretty much makes it up as I go along. Sure, I’ve done a lot of project management stuff with wall-sized charts, graphs and Post-it notes but at the end of the day I’m the guy they pay to make it work- no matter what -and I better not think about getting on the plane back to London unless the Finance Director from whatever remote outpost I’ve been working in is so happy he shits rose pedals.

Working alongside my German colleagues has been, continues to be, an enlightening experience. They take nothing for granted, trust no procedure unless it has been demonstrated to them and consider anything less than complete success a dismal failure. They like plans and structure and are uncomfortable when things deviate from what’s on their worksheets.

Since I’ve been doing these rollouts for over two years I have become a bit, shall we say, complacent about the process. One site visit, a couple of days of prep work and one weekend to migrate usually does the trick. When things go wrong, and they always do, we’re there to make it all better. We get the place running and hand off to Core Services for on-going support. We don’t have the time to baby-sit because come Monday night, we’re off to our next job. My boys and I are fixers and like smoke-jumpers everywhere we take huge, chest-expanding pride in the job we do.

Looking at these two very divergent attitudes, one might think that there would arise a good deal of friction between the teams. In reality, we complement each other fairly well. They force us to be more precise and process driven and for our part we bring to the party an aptitude for adaptation and think-on-your-feet cleverness. It’s up to me to make sure everyone plays nice, catch the flack and push things along. It is almost, but not completely, like herding cats.

Fast forward.

It’s been months since I have been to Paris and I can’t say I have really missed it. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Paris as a place to holiday: the food is great, the shops are lovely and there are no end of little streets to explore. Unfortunately I have spent far too much time working in the suburbs of Paris in offices that have Neanderthal IT infrastructures and appallingly rude employees who smoke at their desks and throw their laptops if they don’t get their way. Experiences such as these knocked the stuffing out of the joy I once felt whenever I arrived at The City of Lights.

Added to my justifiable trepidation is the fact that I have just had the extremely unfortunate experience of catching the Eurostar from its new domicile at St. Pancras. On November 14th the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo was closed and moved to the refurbished St. Pancras station. The retrofit cost more than the GDP of Africa and provides a direct high-speed link to Paris. Trains from Waterloo travelled on the conventional, slower, tracks on the English side before speeding up once they got into France. It took the British 11 years to install their high-speed line while the French had their tracks ready nearly as soon as the last scoop of earth was removed from the Chunnel.

The upshot of all this upheaval has been to transform a dingy 19th station into a soulless 21st century station- and save 20 min on the journey time to Paris and Brussels. Ken Livingstone, the Lord Mayor of London, recently asked “why would anyone fly to Paris anymore?” Allow me to tell you: St. Pancras is a bloody nightmare. Let’s hope it’s still a work in progress because if this is a finished product Eurostar is doomed.

There is no doubt they increased the space available but whomever they got to allocate that space must be one for hard nights on the town. They created a huge ticket counter but reduced the number of automatic ticket machines. They spaced out security and passport control but since there seems to be less staff available it takes longer to get through. The lounge hasn’t been built yet so they put up a curtain around a bunch of garden chairs and shoved us all in there. Outside in cattle class they also have fewer seats with backs and have littered the area with a bunch of padded benches. They changed our gate assignment three times and the rush to the trains was only slightly less frantic than a rugby scrum. The signage is minimal and placed exactly where it is least visible. In short, in every conceivable way they have managed to transform the reasonably pleasant and hassle-free experience of boarding a train at Waterloo into a painful, dehumanizing and loathsome enterprise. Well done!

Even 1st class can’t save this trip. They didn’t put on enough food, the train is standing-room-only and as usual the loos have gone beyond filthy into a realm of wretchedness only approached by open sewers or Edgware Road kebab shops.

We’re coming up to Paris now and the world outside my window has descended into darkness. The transport strike is over now but several of the more disenfranchised suburbs are burning. For the French, this is the sort of equilibrium that allows them to simultaneously feel good and miserable and makes for good conversations over wine.

Four days later and I’m outbound from Paris. The train is much less crowded and they actually put on enough food for everyone. A pod of art dealers is sitting across from me; we’ve been chatting about their most recent acquisition- a small rectangular cast of St. Sebastian having his wounds attended by women. It’s a bit of an odd piece of a type generally created for nunneries. As an 18th century work it’s a bit past my normal area of expertise and taste but it does have a delicate charm. They sank into a heated debate about the volatility of the contemporary art market so I bowed out to try and put a ribbon around this entry.

Between now and the end of the year we have to finish up three more German sites, attend a staggering array of office parties and beg The Powers That Be for the money to keep my boys and I in nice hotels for a few months longer. We all know that sooner or later the golden tap of funding is going to be turned off and eventually we will have to return to more conventional jobs or unemployment. After two and a half years of this gig, the thought of riding a desk again makes the bile rise into my mouth.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. At the agency I used to work at they lost one of their only clients and offered voluntary redundancy to the entire staff. 43 took them up on it even though they only really needed 20 to fall on their swords. 43 out of 180 people decided that a payoff and the dole queue was preferable to sitting in a glass box staring at glowing monitors all day while their souls were slowly sucked from their bodies through their asses.

This gives me hope. No one who works in advertising, media, PR or any similar occupation should ever take their jobs seriously. Trust me on this, if the entire industry were to vanish tomorrow the only thing the huddled masses would notice, apart from a gigantic sucking sound, would be that they can now watch their favourite TV shows without being interrupted by people with perfect teeth making them feel inadequate about their choices in underarm deodorant.

We just cleared the channel tunnel. From this point it used to take about an hour to reach central London- they’ve cut that time in half, which is a nice trick even if we do have to go to the wretched St. Pancras. I’ll spare you a repeat of my tirade against Eurostar’s new London home and instead pass along a snippet of conversation I overheard at a dinner party: “St. Pancras might be pretty but I liked making the French arrive at Waterloo.” Some things never change.

My Home Town v. 1.0

I spent the majority of my life in the small seaside sanctuary of Santa Barbara California. My mum and I moved there from Long Beach (“inflamed boil on the buttocks of the world”) when I was three. She had just remarried, less out of love than to provide a decent life for me. She succeeded in that respect but paid an emotional toll that I only later came to appreciate.

We settled into a house on a couple of acres of land in a wooded enclave called Mission Canyon. Back in the day there were no fences dividing one property from another- trees and undergrowth stretched out in all directions, broken only occasionally by a road or driveway; there were even a couple of creeks which to me were as mysterious as the Amazon. For a boy and his dog it was an untamed and unclaimed frontier waiting to be explored.

And explore we did. Apart from the unwanted interruption of school, I spent nearly every daylight (and many night time) hour of my youth climbing trees, making forts, trekking up streams, swimming, building tree houses, shooting pellet guns, catching lizards, snakes, assorted bugs and in general loving the hell out of living in such an unbelievably cool place. The only problem, although it didn’t seem so at the time, was that I did it all alone.

Those canyons behind Santa Barbara do not lend themselves to neighbourhood block parties. There are no “blocks” or indeed sidewalks and the houses tend to be spread out at random and isolated from one another by the aforementioned trees and brush. It was 15 years before I met my first neighbour.

So there I am, an adopted, only child growing up in the woods with just my dog and parents for company. Socially school was a challenge. It wasn’t that I was shy, quite the opposite, I was an attention-starved extrovert who later mutated into the class clown who had a problem with authority. My particular handicap was that I didn’t understand group activities; I wanted to simply expand my solitary pursuits to include others. I would ask kids if they wanted to come back to my place and read.

I know this has “deranged psychopath” written all over it but for some reason, as tempting as it sometimes seemed, I never went down that path. I managed to acquire a reputation for being smart, cynical and academically lazy; that, coupled with good verbal and written skills, made me just interesting enough to my peers to keep me from becoming the type of dejected loaner you see the neighbours describing on the evening news, “Mark was always such a quiet boy…”

I stuck around Santa Barbara until I was 19- living with my pot-smoking girlfriend until she dumped me and went back to Mississippi to get knocked up. I spent the next year and a half in Long Beach, staying with my second set of parents, going to college, working as a photographer on the student paper, drinking a lot and fucking my philosophy professor’s daughter.

Somehow I managed to get accepted to Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, so back I went. Eight years, a wife, a divorce and countless weirdness later I fled to San Francisco where I was pretty content until I moved to London and entered a previously unknown circle of hell. OK, so that’s a bit of an oversimplification but I need to keep the narrative rolling along.

Today I find myself in Santa Barbara again. Not to live, no indeed, considering that the average home price in this place is now over a million bucks and that most of the jobs are in the service industry, I don’t think I’ll be making the move back anytime soon. No, I am here because my mother has cancer.

Two weeks ago she sent me an e-mail asking how I was, if my knee still hurt, what the weather was like in whatever city I was in and oh, by the way, I’m going in for Chemo tomorrow.

No phone call, no warning, nothing, just “I’m going in for Chemo.” I sat, open mouthed, staring at the screen until I realized that her “tomorrow” was my “today” and I had no idea which hospital she was in or how to get in touch with her- it was 2:00 in the morning her time anyway. By the time California woke up I was supposed to be on a plane for Spain.

In my hotel room later in the evening I managed to get in touch with my dad and he gave me the run down. Mum had a 2.5-pound tumour in her abdomen; it was isolated, lymphatic and treatable. She was on day one of a three-day course of Chemotherapy and she would be back home after that. She was looking at six more monthly sessions, with all the horrors that entails but at this point the Oncologist was cautiously optimistic. I was so completely unprepared for even semi-good news that I simply had no idea how to handle it; I just sat down and cried.

I spend my professional life addressing and mitigating Worst Case Scenario situations. My own personal mantra is “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” I never, under any circumstances, tempt “worst.” It can always get worse; it’s my job to make sure that when it does my team and I have the tools and skills to avoid a complete meltdown. I’m so blinded by this mentality that on those rare occasions when something doesn’t go supernova the wheels come off my bus. Good news, it would seem, disrupts my fragile mental state.

Much to my surprise, I didn’t catch the next flight to California; nor the flight after that. After being assured that mum’s condition didn’t warrant frantic action, I finished up the project in Spain, few to New York and then on to LA; arriving in Santa Barbara a few days after she was released from the hospital.

I’m still here. My mum is fragile but progressing, her tests are looking good and we just hired a care assistant to give her and my dad a hand with the cooking and cleaning. I’ve managed to escape for a few hours to sink into the shadows and soft chairs of a funky café by the beach. There is a giant paper mache sunflower on the ceiling, a cloth covered elephant in the corner and a weird mix of folk rock and inde world music on the stereo. Sitting directly to my left, in a velvet-upholstered throne complete with carved lion head armrests, is a woman who I would happily spend the rest of my life with. Best that she doesn’t know- I’ve had enough humiliating rejections for several lifetimes. She’s packing up her laptop now. Another small heartbreak in an ocean of missed opportunities.

I didn’t begin this to bemoan my romantic insecurities or go into agonizing detail about my mum’s current condition. I wanted to talk about being back in the place I first called home and how utterly disorientating it feels to be a visitor on my own turf.

Adding to my lost at sea feeling is the fact that I have not one single friend remaining in Santa Barbara. This could be partly my fault. I pretty much loathed everyone I went to school with and in my later life here my friends were probably best described as volleyball and beer buddies. Although my wife and I spent our entire married life in Santa Barbara, we were too busy fighting, fucking and moving house twice a year to establish any reliable support base.

I do remember hanging out with one couple: she was a therapist of some kind and he worked at the Post Office where, if memory serves, he used to pour honey into the sorting machines.

Returning this time under, as it were, duress, I decided to take the bold step of writing up a personal add and posting it on Craigslist under the heading Strictly Platonic. I wasn’t looking for a relationship or a quick fuck. I just wanted someone, preferably someone with a wicked sense of humour and breasts, to hang out with in the evenings.

The responses were underwhelming but as it turns out, that wasn’t a bad thing. I have ended up spending a lot more time in caretaker mode than I anticipated. I would have probably felt immensely guilty passing my evenings enjoying myself.

I’m reprinting the add here because I kind of like it and who knows, someone might know someone who knows someone who, in a couple of months, wouldn’t mind spending an evening or two sitting under a giant paper mache sunflower with a guy trying to find home.

Billy No Mates

I can’t help but thinking it’s a bit odd that after living in Santa Barbara for 26 years, when I make return visits the only friends I have in town are imaginary.

Sure, it would be easy to blame myself. I move around a lot and since my tracking bracelet was removed I can be pretty difficult to pin down. Still, you’d think that someone, a classmate, an ex-girlfriend, that guy named Jack I used to work with at a gas station who would stick radiator hoses down the front of his pants before he went out to fill up cars, would take the time to search through my Interpol files for my last known location and send me a birthday card. No such luck.

It’s exceptionally disorientating to be a tourist in what was, for so long, my hometown. I’ve become one of those annoying people who drive around, point at a new office building or bank and say things like, “Hey, that used to be Sparks skateboard park! Wow, that takes me back, I remember when JP and I would get tanked up on Dr. Pepper and ride our bikes all the way to IV, just to watch whatever dude was shredding the half-pipe. Of course we never had the money to get in so we’d try and sneak over the fence until one day…” and on and on until my passenger begins to moan and claw helplessly at the window until their fingernails bleed.

I traded in Santa Barbara for San Francisco and then, in a very hostile takeover, I swapped the perpetual fog of My City By The Bay for the omnipresent overcast and dull grey skies of London- where I remain. 5800 miles NE of the closest decent burrito and surrounded by people who think that a bunch of grown men kicking a ball around in a field is the pinnacle of all human endeavours. I’ve been seven years amongst the savages and it’s only constant denial and nightly uncontrollable weeping which keeps me from plunging into the Thames with stones in my pockets.

But I digress.

I swing through Santa Barbara a few times a year to see my Parental Units and wander aimlessly along East Beach hitting myself on the head with a plank and shouting, “why did I ever leave?!” Just before I lose consciousness a little voice from my past whispers, “because you never made more than $12 an hour, paid $1500 a month for a stucco broom closet under the freeway and were sinking into the lifestyle of a perpetually poverty stricken student.”

Now I find myself making another pilgrimage to my hometown and I will be damned if I’m not going to at least make an attempt to connect with someone, anyone (nearly), in Santa Barbara who can come reasonably close to catching my drift.

I feel it only fair to warn you that I’m not looking for a one, or even two, night stand, my soul-mate, a romantic trysts, marriage, children, or a house with a two-car garage and a white picket fence in suburbia. I live in LONDON for God’s sake! If I want to fish, I’ll do it in a local pond. I simply want someone to meet me at Sojourners so that we can have a latte and complain that they put too many sprouts on their sandwiches.

In the spirit of full disclosure I best you give you a bit of a run-down on who you might see over the rim of your coffee cup: I’m pretty much a run-of-the-mill 41 year-old near-sighted, tall, thin, balding, geek. I don't drink which makes me a pariah on both sides of the Atlantic and the things I do for fun revolve around paintings, photographs, bookstores and spouting witty cynical barbs when disguising politics over dinner.

My baggage contains a marriage (no kids), a divorce, my fair share of broken hearts, a massive amount of European travelling, left-wing rabble rousing for doomed causes, too much time spent in university, a long run of being a photojournalist and various weird, terrifying, utterly humorous, tedious and thrilling bits that make up a normal real life. (Please note that none of those bits contain piercings, tattoos, prison or strange associations with men in overcoats who answer to the name of "Guido.")

Since we’re attempting to manage expectations it would be good if you are within spitting distance of my age and have about as much blood under the bridge. You best be able to write since this will, for the most part, be a very long distance friendship. Holding your own in a rapidly changing conversational environment will be a necessity and knowing the difference between Monet and Manet (but finding Impressionism itself a pedestrian movement which served as little more than a transitional phase and whose seminal works are best suited for adorning sitting room walls) will keep you off my internal “do not call” list.

Right. That about covers it. I’m LA at the moment but I will be in SB between ---- and --- I have a good deal of family stuff to take care of (mum’s been in the hospital- thus the reason for this trip) but I figure I’ll have some evenings free to do whatever passes for fun in Santa Barbara these days.

I’ve attached a couple of photos so you will be able to recognize me across a crowded, restaurant, dance floor or Politics and Aesthetics in 20th Century Modernist Art lecture- you should probably do the same.

OK,
-Billy-

I Did This to Myself

Brussels. I shouldn’t be in Brussels, I should be in London. I’m in Brussels because a massive power failure rendered all international rail transport out of Amsterdam useless. I have been lied to in four different languages and squashed nose to armpit on a train that, it turns out, I didn’t need to get on.

The blame for my current mess rests fully on my slumping shoulders. I deliberately chose to take the train to Amsterdam instead of flying. Counting the time it takes to get to Heathrow, wait in The World’s Longest Queues, clear security, eat stale sandwiches in the BA Lounge, sit on the tarmac, fly, clear customs, play luggage roulette, train from the airport and taxi to the hotel, travelling by rail is normally only about 45 minutes longer and unimaginably more comfortable.

This time, not so much.

20 minutes out of Waterloo on the outbound leg the Eurostar ground to a halt because of signal failures. This put us just enough behind scheduled that I missed my connection in Brussels and had to take the all-stopping-all-the-time Inter City train to Amsterdam.

The return journey, as outlined above, was a comic adventure of cancellations and misinformation. Still, worse things happen at sea and all in all, if I have to be stuck somewhere, it might as well be the Sheraton Brussels Towers, one of my favourite hotels. Thank GOD for business travel services: one call and they got me a room with a view.

Ten years ago when I still had hair and massive credit card debt, missing a train in Europe meant sleeping in a hostel or more likely a railway platform. No connections, no cash and no clue add up to adventures that I’m more than happy are behind me.

Sometimes, like now, I take a step back and look at my life and am honestly puzzled: Is this what it means to be a grown up? Do other people have lives like this (relentless travel, fucking hard work, relentless travel)? Apart from the boys on my team, I don’t know anyone who lives like this. OK, that’s not exactly true, I have several friends who live on the road. But they are mostly burned out hippies who peddle home-made herbal remedies at psychic fairs or trade hash-brownies for gas.

I work with a guy, I’ll call him Rich because that’s his name, who did my kind of gig for six years. He worked for BP (British Petroleum) and installed computer systems on tanker ships in Asia. He had, it must be said, a blast. He built up about a million air-miles going between London and Singapore, travelled all over Asia, slept with beautiful women and generally had the kind of life most 25 year old males would sacrifice private pieces of their anatomy for.

At 33 he called it quits, flew back to London, married his childhood sweetheart, had a couple of kids and seems to be living happily ever after. I’ve been doing this for two years and am honestly terrified of the thought of going back to riding a desk let alone staying in a city for more than four days in a row. What happens to guys like me? What woman would want us? We’re not exactly the safest bet for a long term stable relationship.

When I was six and I made the decision I wanted to be a photojournalist, more specifically, a war correspondent, I figured I would live on airplanes, be a cynical loaner and eventually retreat to a cabin in Big Sur where I could edit my retrospective show for MOMA.

I’m now 41, live on airplanes, am not quite as cynical or as much of a loaner as I used to be; that cabin in Big Sur costs $2.4 million and a MOMA show of my greatest hits would leave a good deal of white space on the gallery walls.

I take a bit of solace in the fact that I haven’t strayed completely from my childhood ambitions but I am constantly haunted by a feeling that the further I go into the mainstream of the business world the more the six year-old in me becomes horribly disappointed. I rationalize that this is just a phase and because I still take the occasional photograph and write throw-away pulp entries for a blog no one reads that I can still call myself an artist.

Bullshit. I sold out the moment I hung up my cameras and started working behind a keyboard for cash. No amount of rationalizing will change that and for all my agonizing the truth is that I didn’t just skid uncontrollably into my current life, I made an eyes-wide-open decision to abandon my old one; now I have to deal with it.

Walking down a sunny street in Oslo this morning I tried to simply be content with where I was and what I was doing. I wanted to expunge my normal feeling that I should be someplace else whenever I’m not in California. I utterly and totally failed to do this. I in fact failed so badly that I had to sit for a few moments on a park bench and try to regroup. I found myself asking the big question: “will I ever be satisfied anywhere or with anyone?”

Probably not.

I wonder if there is a support group for people like me? Something tailored for folks whose entire life is one giant Attention Deficit Disorder.

“Hi, my name is Mark and since I was 17 I have never lived in any one place for longer than a year. I refuse to buy anything that will not fit in a single suitcase. I don’t want to make any attachment that I am not prepared to break within five minutes and I always carry my passport.”

I’m not sure what “normal” is, but I’m pretty damn sure that how I am is not it.

It is Cricket After All

Regular readers of this column, of which there are none, may have noticed a subtle shift in tone, a slight mellowing of my rancour towards England and the English. This attitudinal adjustment has not come about without a price and I feel that I have not so much learned to appreciate the subtle niceties of my adopted land but experienced a gradual decay of my resistance.

After seven years of close, in some cases intimate, observation of the common and not so common inhabitants of this island I really am in no better position to comment on what exactly encompasses the essence of Englishness than I was when I first stepped off the plane from San Francisco all those years ago. The problem arises, indeed is inherent within any attempt to snap-shot a culture, that there really is no way to define The English any more than you can pinpoint The French, The Germans, or the Norwegians. Generalizations about a people tend to be written by guide-book authors or foreigners with an axe to grind. When you grow up somewhere there is little need to define what it means to live there- you just do and that’s the end of it.

Let us not forget for a moment that any white-wash generalization of a people or a county is, by it’s very nature, stereotyping and while sometimes, in the hands of a gifted writer it can be humorous, it can also lead to the most grievous of racial diatribes.

I have lost count of how many evenings I have spent in restaurants all over Europe listing to half-drunk ravings about how America was created by Satan to perpetuate subjugation and destruction, only to be told, after the rant has finished, that “you’re OK, you’re not like that.” I’m not too bothered by this, it shows that there is a separation between the actions of a government and the feelings and desires of individuals. Just today, in an Amsterdam taxi, the driver reinforced this view:

“I love Americans.” He said, “I just hate your government.”

His sentiment is one I can wholeheartedly relate to. The danger lies when the overriding distrust of a country trumps the intellectual understanding that people who live in that country do not necessarily ascribe to the views of the ruling party which means that sometimes it is easier to simply hate all Americans (or French or Russians or Germans or…) than to consider the lives and views of individuals.

The fact that I travel constantly throughout Europe has given me an insight and appreciation not only of the cities that I visit but also of the country I return to. Looking out the small, scratched, Plexiglas window as we line up for our approach to Heathrow I see a patchwork quilt of hedgerows, green pastures and villages and this somehow makes me feel that everything is right in the world.

I fully appreciate why I think this: I’m returning to London after days or weeks away, I know that when we touch down I will be able to read the street signs and I still carry with me a touch of romanticism that all Americans feel toward Mother England. However, for me that warm fuzzy feeling started to evaporate after my first visit to London when I was 13 and encountered thuggish commuters, inedible food and wax paper toilet tissue.

Home is the familiar be it a cave, a cottage or a castle. The tiny refrigerators, washing machines and streets of London which once seemed so foreign now seem more “normal” than their gigantic counterparts in the US. Yet England will never, ever, be my home with a capital “H.” I work with a dozen ex-pats and none of them, myself included, would ever think the phrase, “being home for the holidays” meant staying in the UK.

Great Britain is a small island, about the size of the state of Oregon. It’s 60 million inhabitants jostle about for elbow room on land that has been walked over, ploughed, planted, paved, deforested, mined, fought over, bombed and generally abused for a few thousand years. In the US it is quite easy to wander into the wilderness and find oneself hours, if not days, from anything resembling human habitation whereas in Britain it’s difficult to find a spot without mobile phone coverage.

This small scale and isolation has shaped the character of the English and led to a xenophobia so chronic that, if certain papers with large type and small pages are to believed, the sole unifying belief of the inhabitants is a desire to keep everyone else out.

A favoured topic at pubs throughout the country is the necessity for the government to “do something about” the wave of immigrants flooding the shores of a nation which is bursting at the seams. I have been party to numerous discussion with normally liberal-minded people who will rabbit on about the dangers of letting in more of the teaming foreign masses without once seeing the irony of having the discussion with me.

I have taken one of their jobs, fucked their women, sent thousands of pounds to foreign banks, used their health services, insulted their citizens, government and way of life and never once has my right to live in the UK been questioned; not once have I been told “go back where you came from!” Why is that? The cynical among you might say it’s because I am a white male and you would be right.

My dearest friend in the UK, a lawyer who works in Leeds (the binge drinking capital of the UK- which is saying something), raised in Britain, with an accent so posh you could cut glass with it, happened to have the bad luck of being born in Pakistan and has thus endured a life of taunts, insults and threats from people who claim superiority to her because their parents got drunk and conceived them on a council estate in Hull.

The English of course do not have a monopoly on racism and some, including me, would argue that apart from a few notable headline gabbing riots, Britain tolerates and accepts immigrants from her former colonies (read: everyone) fairly well. Just don’t peak behind the curtain and ask what John Bull feels about all those Polish Plumbers.

I should point out that even though I am British, I am not now, nor will I ever be, English and if you think there isn’t a difference, ask a Scot. “English” is an exclusive club which I, because of birthplace and accent, will always be denied membership.

I didn’t begin this entry with the intent of digressing into the subject of race relations in the UK. My premise was simply that Englishness is indefinable and any attempt at doing so will yield a shed-load of general or exaggerated traits which apply to no one. To a reader of This England (an amusingly stuffy publication which prides itself on looking backward at, rather than forward to, a more civilized Britain) those things which most define an Englishman might be summed up as follows: a quiet reserve, perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds (aka: The Battle of Britain or Agincourt), a love of county Cricket, Sunday roasts, reverence for the Queen and gardening. While I do know one or two people who fit this description perfectly, observational evidence would seem to indicate that although these traits might at one time been an apt portrait of the idealized Englishman (Englishwomen shared nearly the same traits but substituted stern common sense for Cricket) they are far from the norm at present.

Now that I once again find myself 31,000 feet over the North Sea enjoying the crisply polite service offered by British Airways (that is not sarcasm by the way- I really do think their flight and cabin crews are tops) and wishing that children had both a volume control and an off switch; I’m trying to remember when the unfamiliar became the familiar. At what point did the strangeness of Europe, specifically Britain, give way to the sensation of familiarity which allows it to feel, if not exactly like home, then at least something that will do for a time.

The answer, for me at least, is that this change is still a work in progress and something I struggle very hard against. I don’t actually want London to be Home so any advances along these lines have been happening behind the scenes of my consciousness. Stupid brain trying to make me adapt, get back to thinking about sex every 6.2 seconds.

Amsterdam. Very, very nice bar attached to a swish hotel. I am definitely not a bar person but this place is pretty chill: no loud music, no one smoking (anything) and the seats are plush leather. Sorry, slight diversion, where was I?

The English are no different than anyone else: in their most sentimental or stressed moments, what they think of as the Utopia of Home is really an idealized conglomeration of gauzy fantasizes. What’s the harm of it? When reality is hordes of concrete car parks and city centres exploding with pups the size of Zeppelin hangers, who wouldn’t want to escape to thatched roof cottages and afternoon tea?

I make mock of London and the English, for all sorts of good reasons, however I have also spent the last five Christmases in one of those thatched roof cottages surrounded by my extended English family. They have taught me to love Cricket and country walks and days out on the river Dart. As difficult as it is for me to admit, no matter how progressive, how liberal, how anti-monarchy I think I am, years of exposure to a rural and genteel England makes me want to trade in my biker jacket and Ramones t-shirt for a tweed suit and a pair of Wellies.

Almost.

50/50

I am not a grouper or a joiner or a follower which takes me out of the target demographics of most of the social networking sites on the Net. I did, however get firmly addicted to The Show With Ze Frank and as an offshoot of that have become a sporadically active participant in the little pond known as The ORG (www.zefrank.org). It’s fun, friendly and gives us creative/crazy types a nice outlet for whatever we call our art.

As with any arts collective or commune everyone is equal but a few people are a little more equal than others (I have always wanted to use that line) and in the case of The ORG, above the maddening crowd of watchers and lurkers, a few truly inspired souls stand out. In this particular instance I am referring to Bliss and Leary who, out of curiosity, hopefulness or desperation, are embarking on an endeavor appropriately called 50 Dates in 50 States where they are, you guessed it, trying to hook-up with blokes in every state of the Union.

(Author’s note: It has come to my attention that the term “hooking up” is a synonym for “having sex with” a connotation which I, in my naive way, have not intended. I also remember when “Dick” was a perfectly nice man’s name so that pretty much dates me.)

In case you can’t do the math, they need to find 100 guys who can pass their rigorous screening process and escort them to whatever bar, restaurant, mountain overlook, drive-in movie, beach walk, country drive, paint-ball arena, sporting event, beer drinking contest, turtle wrestling rodeo, body art boutique, lobster fishing excursion, dance marathon, or bagpipe killing contest that passes for a first date in your zip code.

If you want further details or to throw your hat in the ring go here: http://www.50dates.tv/blog/ Reproduced here without permission are their essay questions:

Who do you want the date with and why how do you feel about math describe your perfect wednesday what type of girls do you typically date congratulations, all of your hard work has finally paid off, but...ummm...what have you been working on again how do you escape describe your first crush what's in your burrito did seven really eat nine tell me something that will make me smile who's invited to your tea party will our parents like you you have a roll of duct tape, paper bag, and shoe lace...go what is YOUR idea of a perfect date ?

Since I spend a lot of time in departure lounges I figured it would be better to spend my free moments answering their questions than eating stale peanuts and watching businessmen drink cheap booze. Thus:

I’m out of the running for this whole damn fool 50/50 date crusade because the only state I live in now is perpetual denial and besides, if you did decide you wanted to drive here to meet me I’d bet you’d have a hell of a hard time holding your breath for those last few miles. This of course doesn’t in the least dissuade me from writing a rambling response to your application questionnaire because it happens to be well after midnight, I’m tired, bored and in yet another of a succession of hotel rooms in a city where I’m pretty sure they flog people for speaking English.

Forgive me if I diverge from my planned remarks to share a small factoid about my youth: when I was five or six years old my grandmother used to give me about half and inch of PBR in a glass and we’d sit and watch roller derby together. She’d also take me to the track and place $2 bets for me. I’m sure these activities laid a solid foundation for my later years.

Like now for instance. I’m sitting in an airport lounge in Vienna watching the heavens open up and the delays on the departure board roll up like digits on a pinball machine. The liquor if free here and so are the little sandwiches; I’m surrounded by guys in ties with mobile phones stitched to their ears. I, on the other hand, am somewhat more comfortably attired in summer hiking boots and a linen shirt that has never known the love of a good iron. A man the size of Orson Wells in a fat suit just lashed out at the woman cleaning up the dishes saying, “This is appalling! You should see the Qantas lounge!” She laughed uncomfortably and scurried to an Employees Only door; he lumbered off to squeeze into an overstuffed chair.

You asked some very amusing, random, pointed and leading questions, most of which I feel duty bound to ignore completely because I’m they type who can’t do what he’s told, never looks at instructions, reads his own maps (but I will always ask for directions when lost) has a problem with authority and, when forced to work, wants to be in charge or left the hell alone. It should be noted that even though I am Not a Team Player in the corporate mind-control sense, I am the kind guy that parents love. I was raised well, brush up nicely, own a tux, say “please” and “thank you” at the appropriate times, can cook a turkey or a turkey shaped lentil loaf and know enough jokes to entertain the relatives at Thanksgiving dinner.

Be warned- if you do ever voyage to London there is no Mexican food worthy of the name. You know that pack of horrid frozen enchiladas cemented in ice to the back of your freezer? Eating them unthawed and covered in Drain-O would be nearly fifty times more appetizing than anything you would have served to you in London. Except at my place. I have a magic cupboard filled with items smuggled back in my luggage from The Mission District. Illicit dishes with spices and sauces unknown to this barren rock served once a fortnight with all the ambiance of a South-Central tamale parlour.

34,000 feet. Off to my right great mountains of foam reach up to the heavens. Sunset at this altitude has its own special colour and grandeur. Indescribable hues of blood orange and cotton candy pink fold around puffs of spun silk.

We have just been put into a holding pattering in the middle of a mass of storm clouds- thank you very much Heathrow Air Traffic Control. It’s getting harder to type because the plane is bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in a clothes dryer.

Days later now and since you have already left on your odyssey this is even more pointless now than when I started it. I should have finished this a week ago but along with my other more obvious failings I have an almost inhuman inability to write short, pithy, witty prose and must instead drone on and on. No one will ever put a quote of mine on a bumper sticker because I can write nothing of value in under 10 pages. If you hadn’t already noticed I have this nasty habit of being far too verbose for my own good. In grad school, hell, who am I kidding, in every school I ever attended I couldn’t possibly produce work in any mode other than Last Minute Panic. Other people get high to be creative, I stay up for days on end until my adrenaline reserves are all but depleted and then churn out steaming piles of disjointed gibberish. I can only guess that God Him/Her self personally intervened and translated my incoherent ramblings into something with literary merit before my instructors saw them because I always seemed to pull a 4.0. The Universe protects fools, drunks and art history students.

If you like duct tape, you should try gaffers tape! It has all the innate coolness and sturdy sensibility of duct tape but it also PEALS OFF. It’s like the post-it note of the tape world.

I’ve already had my perfect date thanks and I hope you two will experience yours. Mine involved a blue and white sweater, an aging pickup truck named “Ranger,” a side of a mountain overlooking the San Francisco bay and a woman who would later crush my heart with a nutcracker. Of course I didn’t know this at the time and even if I did, I wouldn’t have missed it. It’s beyond my power to convey the feeling of the moment so I’ll let Joan Baez say it for me:

Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling around and snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds, mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Jesus, this entry has gone on long enough, you two are probably half-way to North Dakota by now. The irony of it all is that I spent 26 long years in Santa Barbara hoping to meet up with anyone half as interesting, maniacal, pants-wettingly funny, creative or bizarre as either of you and as soon as I leave (well OK, several years after I leave but still…) Bliss shows up packing enough attitude and industrial strength insanity to blanket all of East Beach. The fact that she has joined forces with the scourge of the Eastern Seaboard, Leary, on this marathon adventure ensures that each and every state will be slightly more amusing and demented than it was prior to their arrival.

I hear there are still a few places on their dance cards yet to be filled so guys, don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to have a date with these two before they are truly famous. I’m afraid that this time I’ll have to watch and wonder from afar.