coffee time... um... coffee time...um...

Yesterday at a local coffee house I saw a donation cup for the local cell of the Alzheimer's society. I began to imagine the Alzheimer's society as a terrorist network relying on the good will and loose change of coffee drinkers to advance their nefarious (but likely outdated) agenda. I figure that if you staff your cells with Alzheimer's patients, they'll never reveal any information when CSIS rounds them up and wheels them away. Better yet, they'll refer to their interrogators as "Uncle Pete" or "Father St. George". Whatever their agenda is (Free the Falangists!) I intend to fight it with meaningless italicization.

Like so:

Attention, Alzheimer terrorists attempting to conquer Prussia, Rhodesia and the Ottoman Empire! Stop what you're doing immediately and sit with your hands folded on the front steps of the burlesque house until the Doukhobors have passed safely through town. Then approach the constabulary and offer a full accounting of your childhoods! That is all.

mysterious fragment found scribbled in a back flyleaf

“... therefore we spent our afternoons exploring the gardens in Palinode’s palace, wandering among the overgrown topiary, chasing spiders along their webs with the tip of a twig, studying the map at the entrance of the hedge maze - now abandoned so long that the hedges had choked off some paths and opened new ones. To enter that maze was to lose your way instantly and turn an afternoon’s diversion into a dark, confusing adventure".
A.G. Morgan, A Summer in Palinode’s Palace (1929) (?)

I found this in a hardbound copy of Dombey & Son when I was nine years old or so. The book rested on the top shelf of my father's bookcase, part of a complete set of Dickens published in 1875 or thereabouts. My father had inherited the set upon graduating from Royal Military College, and though he went to great pains to encourage me to read Dickens, it was clear that these editions were not to be opened or touched. Therefore it was always in secret, at stolen moments on weekend afternoons or even in the predawn hours that I would hoist a chair up in the kitchen and walk it aloft into the living room, my skinny nine year old muscles trembling, and pull down a volume from the shelf. Generally I didn't read any of the text - they were all available in paperback on the lower shelves - but I loved to look at the frontispiece, with its fine crosshatching and expressive faces. I even loved the verso, with its information finely engraved at the foot of the page. Chapman & Hall Publishers. 193 Picadilly. The brief fragment, handwritten in violet fountain pen, first scared me - handwriting in my dad's volumes! - but soon after began to intrigue and then pester me. When I grew a little older I began to look for A Summer in Palinode's Palace in various libraries and used book stores, but without success.

More later.

the perils of speaking out loud II, or the perils of even listening

After a conversation I overheard in a coffee shop today, I'm pretty sure that the aliens have landed and now walk among us, attempting to learn our ways in order to conquer us. Or in order to order a cup of coffee.

Server (Earthling): What would you like?
Customer (clearly a green tentacled alien stuffed into a human suit): Uh yeah. I'll uh... Americanus doublo... Americano?
Server: You'd like an Americano?
Customer: Yeah, what's that?
Server: It's a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso in it.
Customer: (extending tentacle sensor, hurriedly retracting it): Yeah, okay. What's the double?
Server: That's two shots of espresso.
Customer: Oh, I see.
Server: So, a double Americano?
Customer: Well, I'd like the espresso, but I don't think I have time for the coffee... (N.B. - none of this dialogue is made up) so I guess I'll have one to go.
Server: A double Americano to go?
Customer: Do you think I have time to drink it inside?
Server: (somehow intuiting actual meaning behind near-phatic question, holding up mug) We serve it in a cup this size, so if you're in a hurry you'll want to get it in a to-go cup.
Customer: (mulls it over, establishes neural link with mothership, reaches decision) Oh, I don't have time for that. Maybe I'll get a double espresso for inside.

Perhaps this conversation isn't as strange as I'm making it to be. It certainly seems like a long way round to get a double espresso. Perhaps he was not an alien but some kind of Caffeine Hunter attempting to outsmart his drink.

Outside I heard this conversation:

Dude A: Dude [B], look at this motherfucker. Take a look at this fucking motherfucker!
Dude B [to Dude C, the fucking motherfucker]: Fuck, motherfucker. Fuck. What the fuck's happening?
Dude C, "the fucking motherfucker": Fuck, dude, I don't fucking know. Fuck's happening with you, motherfucker?

I don't know those guys get organized. They all seem to have the same name.

the perils of speaking out loud I

When we extended a post-election invite to Americans who wanted to flee to Canada, this really wasn't what we meant.

Sheesh.

clearing up a misconception

As many of you know, newspapers all over the world have reported that Condoleeza Rice has been tapped to fill Colin Powell's position. If you visit the official White House site, though, you'll see that it's the oil tanker Condoleeza Rice who will be Bush's Secretary of State for his second term in the Oval Office:

Washington (AP) -- The giant Chevron tanker, renamed the Altair Voyager not long before Rice left Chevron to become Bush's National Security Adviser, expressed its excitement at the appointment in a special news conference.

"As the first double-hulled tanker to be appointed Secretary of State, I promise fewer spills, an unblemished safety record and prompt delivery of unrefined policy to all corners of the United States".

"Even though I am only nine years old and officially registered in the Bahamas, I assure you that neither my youth nor my deceptive transnational identity will impede my performance".

The Rice then spewed oil over the assembled reporters. "That's my precious lifeblood and cool drink of water all rolled up in one!" exclaimed the "Suezmax" ship, so termed because its girth is the maximum allowable for passage through the Suez canal.

When asked about its name change in 1999 to the Altair Voyager, it said: "Chevron officials, including my namesake, felt that it was inappropriate to associate a senior Bush cabinet official with the myriad oil spills, human-rights violations and general rapine qualities of the oil industry. It would have been tacky to remind everybody that the Bush administration has forgotten the distinction between those who govern in the people's name and those who kick the Earth's ass to make a buck". The ship continued, "So yeah. They changed my name".

The Rice then spewed more crude on the crowd. "Sorry about that," it remarked. "A reef breached my hull a few days ago".

After repairs, the new Secretary of State plans to make a diplomatic visit to the nations of Nigeria and Angola.

from the department of dread prescience

Not two weeks ago I was grousing on this very site about the persistence of Band Aid on the radio. I concurred with Neal Ascheron of the New York Review of Books that Africa functions as some inexhaustible vein of misery from which Westerners feed. And now, twenty years later, a group of pampered Brit-poppers are banding together once more to sing that "Do They Know It's Christmastime" song again. Again. I tell you, we need the Middle East for its oil, China for its Wal-Mart-supply sweatshops, and Africa for its burden of suffering. From various parts of the globe we procure the goods and the energy sources that make our lives easy, and from various bits of Africa we procure the empathy and compassion that allows us to feel at ease with the cheap goods and cheap energy. Everybody rallied behind the "Feed the World" mantra of Band Aid and Live Aid and whatever else, because "the world" in that case simply meant "Ethiopia," and back in 1984 we had the luxury of pretending that Ethiopia's famine came about by a regrettable but natural drought. Never mind a war with Eritrea that had been hacking up the countryside for the last ten years. I wonder whether a new but still Bono'd Band Aid can persuade the pampered millions to part with the 14.99 or whatever it'll cost. THEY'LL JUST DOWNLOAD IT OFF KAZ@A, YOU FOOLS! THE MILLIONS WILL STEAL FOOD RIGHT OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF STARVING... OH... RWANDANS OR LES COTE D'IVORIENS OR WHOMEVER. THOSE WITH ARMS LEFT WILL THROW THEM IN THE AIR AND SCREAM OUT "WHY, CONSUMERS OF INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS? WHY?" And so forth.

ignition loaf

Bread generates its own heat. You ever noticed that? Leave a loaf of crappy store-bought sugar 'n' horsehooves bread in its bag out on the counter for an afternoon, then reach in. You're sticking your hand into a puffed latticework of carbohydrate fire. I wonder if the right circumstances ever get together and nudge a loaf of Wonda into full combustion. Strange conflagrations blamed on babysitters, errant Christmas fires that have the forensic teams sniffing at sockets: I bet it's the bread left out on the counter.

bored blurry blogger spots a mirror

In the Achat Hotel, Karlsruhe. The Lotus says that the picture is interesting because it makes my head look deformed.

leisured indigent in Karlsruhe

This appeared to be two homeless guys and two fixed-address types on the left. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you'll notice that the man on the far left is giving me an irritable glare.

streetcorner in downtown Karlsruhe

a favourably inclined bicycle by the Karlsruhe Waschhaus

in europe they park all perpendicular like

We need more of these Smart Cars in North America. They run on pure Fahrvergnugen.

Karlsruhe girl

This is one of those photos that you wait for, assuming a statue-like pose until the correct moment suddenly turns its face towards you. I stood in a plaza in Karlsruhe just two blocks down from the shop where I bought my camera, waiting for this little girl to look in my direction.

in belgium: the man with a bag of lead

This is Philippe van D_______, a crazy Wallonian who brought a bag of lead to an interview. Don't ask.

nanowrimotosis

Oy. My novel is getting away from me, only two days after its launch. Instead of meandering along with the story of a guy bleeding on the floor of a jeepney crawling through rush-hour traffic in downtown Manila, I let my brain devise an impossible task. I gave my brain a path and it duly planted a few hedges and transformed it into a labyrinth of ridiculous ambition. I’ll spare you the pain of reading a novel that requires of me hours of research and a cursory knowledge of eighteenth century Spanish, but here’s a vague outline so far:

In our first installment we watched a man stealing a pair of polka-dot boxers from a clothesline strung across a Manila alleyway. For reasons unknown, he’s being pursued through the city by unknown pursuers (this unknown quarry). For further unknown reasons, he’s broke and filthy. He jumps onto a jeepney cab, where the pursuers catch up to him, beat him up and take the boxer shorts back. I have decided to retract that last plot point, since it’s more interesting to keep up a chase scene and anyway, a man in bad straits needs a change of underwear. Who is this guy? Why is he being pursued? What’s the deal here anyway?

He calls himself CW, which is short for Cardoza-White. His first name is Frederick. He has come to Manila from the US to locate distant relatives named in his mother’s will. Or you may say that he has come to spend an enviable inheritance in a foreign country before other family members think to contest the will. He locates a far-removed cousin named Apolinair Cardoso di Ocampo, who claims to be the only living family member left in the Philippines. Apolinair talks a mile a minute, owns a house full of animals and children, and is accompanied wherever he goes by a forty year old “boy” named Ferdinand. He seems to make his living by hosting beauty pageants and organizing eco-tours for German tourists. Apolinair calls him “Mr. Fred” at some moments and “my American cousin” at others. He promises to tell CW the story of their shared family, but confusingly, he tells him two distinct stories: the one of a family of Portuguese aristocrats who died in a volcanic eruption that sank the cities of the Provincia Taal into the sea in 1754; the other of a U.S. soldier stationed in the Philippines around 1900 who fathered several legitimate children and a number of illegitimate ones. It turns out that he also participated in the Balangiga Massacre of 1901 as well, the sort of brutal killing spree that occupiers occasionally carry out against the occupied.

It gradually dawns on CW that both his father's and his mother’s family have come to the Philippines in centuries past, and that the separate branches there have eventually intertwined, just as they have in North America. Or at least, this is what Apolinair tells him. But how did the White family cross lines with the Cardosos? And what were a family of Portuguese aristocrats doing in a country so thoroughly colonized by the Spanish? Just how much of what his cousin tells him is trustworthy? Whatever the answers are, we know that CW ends up running like hell through the city streets, filthy and broke and bleeding. With stolen boxers.

You see? I need to shave this thing down a little, or at least read a few books on Filipino history. Maybe I should get back to that post-apocalyptic story about the rich Australian teenager who ends up living in an underground shelter with a bunch of military freaks and rich white guys.

this one sucks so I'll put up some photos next

I came late as usual, but I’m here and now you’re stuck with me. National Novel Writing Month started ten days ago, but I’m going to give it a go nonetheless. I’ll even try it natheless. Can you believe it? Natheless and wearing my polka-dot boxers, I’ll churn out as much prose as possible between now and the 29th of November, when I’m scheduled for my next trip into the world of equipment hauling and the coaxing of dimly-remembered stories of misery from elderly people (necessarily of limited success, since most of the elderly people I speak to are experiencing plenty misery in the present. They’re more interested in talking about the children that ignore them and the body that is shutting itself down, organ by organ, sense by sense. But they talk anyway, you know. Natheless.). For those of you who don’t know, National Novel Writing Month demands 50 000 words from its participants but places no constraints on content. You can write about nostril hairs, international intrigue, shameful masturbatory fantasies, whatever you like. You don’t need characters, plot, theme, setting, or mood. You don’t even need to determine if the main conflict will be man vs man, man vs self, or man vs nature. You don’t need paragraph breaks. All you need are sentences, really, and they don’t require subordinate clauses. No ordinances necessary.

You can even, if you wish, write about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you must have fiction, then you can pretend to be someone else writing about Nanowrimo. You can pretend to be wearing someone else’s polka-dot boxers, a pair you grabbed off a laundry line while running at breakneck speed through the backyards of a South End neighbourhood. Maybe you found the clothesline anomalous in these days of automatic dryers, and so you leapt up in mid-run, clutching at a pair of bright red boxers with orange and white polka-dots, your hand closing around the fabric and the clothes pins popping free off the line. Maybe you were surprised (as surprised as your pursuers?) as your body carried you past the line, the boxers bunched in your hand, your foot hitting the ground and you with a new pair of underwear. Suddenly you’re a thief on top of a trespasser, never mind whatever it was you did in the first place to be going at breakneck speed through somebody’s backyard in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Maybe the neighbourhood’s not even nearby. It could be that you’re tearing through an alleyway in Manila, a side lane thick with clotheslines, white sheets and football jerseys, all colours pale except for those boxers. You spot them and leap up, knowing that you’re far enough ahead of your pursuers that this one suspended moment won’t matter that much, knowing that you can cut through this street and emerge onto Edsas Boulevard, where a jitney can take you straightaway to Makati. There are so many Westerners in Makati, shopping at the Gap and pulling down their face masks to sip Starbucks, that you can blend in. But the men after you will stick out there. You bet that there are at least a few stores in the Makati malls where you can casually enter and browse while a polite store guard armed with a shotgun escorts your pursuers beyond the gates. Even in the stained jeans and the filthy brown barong, you’re still Western, still the receiver of unearned privilege. And you’ve still got that sharp suit jacket to cover the worst of the stains and the fact that you have no wallet – that you are, in fact, flat broke and cut off from the only people in the country who could help you. At least you’ve got a pair of polka-dot boxers.

Nanowrimo does want 50 000 words of you, but there’s no need to stick to those kinds of standards. Especially since that’s the only standard they’ve got. I think that expectations should have a critical mass; if they’re sufficiently low, you can ignore even those. Maybe I’ll put a slogan on a T-shirt: Give Me Nearly Nothing To Fight For And I Will Surrender. Anyway. I’d edit this stuff out, but hey - this in Nanowrimo, the anything goes attempt to get fingers dancing on keyboards. I think that if I can produce two pages a day for the next two and a half weeks, you will all be tremendously bored with my weblog. Natheless I prevail.

Some people don’t need this brand of encouragement. Mimi Smartypants, that Polaris in the weblog firmament, actually restricts her output to 2000 words per entry. How she manages that much in the first place is a mystery to me. I get filled with self-digust over my prose after five hundred words - not for its clumsiness, or pretentiousness, or artful disguise of personality, but for its ease. I feel like a homeless person with the world’s best crescent wrench. No plumbing in my cardboard box. Nor am I looking for sinks and toilets to fix right now, so what am I doing with this weblog, aside from offering some entertainment to friends? Here’s where the plumbing metaphors threaten to clog up. Which is apt for a novel that opens in the Phillipines, where most everything smells a little bit like sewage and grey water. After a few days you get used to it, that faint stench that only strong air conditioning keeps at bay. But who’s thinking of that, when you’re running through the alleyway, hoping for a jeepney that will get you the hell away from those guys? You duck around the sheets and run out onto Edsa Boulevard. A bright green jitney cab with the name Peireira blazoned across the open door in back passes by, so on you jump. Scraps of English, Tagalog jokes, a magandan hapon or two. You squeeze in between two civil servants and stuff the boxers inside a jacket pocket.

Okay, now the guy’s on his way to Makati in a jeepney. This is, in fact, a stupid decision, because it’s a Friday afternoon and the streets are packed with cabs, trucks, compact Japanese cars, slum dwellers hawking cheap Chinese goods between the lanes (not there are any lanes to speak of). Traffic cops lean on their vans by the most crowded intersections, looking not to direct traffic but to pick up a few pesos or US dollars from anyone who looks like they can pay. At the second light the pursuers jump on the jeepney, kick him around, take the boxers. I had to find a way to get rid of the underwear. Exit pursued by a natheless.

CHAPTER 2

As he lay on the floor of the vehicle, his suit jacket imprinted with a dusty Nike footprint, he found himself thinking, highly incongruously, about Tori Spelling’s career. What was she working on now that Beverly Hills was over? A series of Movies of the Week, a couple of direct-to-video erotic thrillers? Was she hosting a series of specials? Two weeks ago, flipping through the Mexican soap operas dubbed into Tagalog and the ubiquitous CNN broadcasts, he’d caught a few minutes of a crime drama starring Spelling and some guy from L.A. Law. What did other actors think, standing there on a set, trading scripted lines back and forth with Tori Spelling? It must be strange, because no matter what emotions you’re expected to call on, no matter what lines you mouth in the service of your character, you have to ignore how ugly she is. Every self-aware actor working with her must be thinking: “This is Aaron Spelling’s daughter. Therefore I must never betray my incredulity, not by casually dropped offstage line or by involuntary twitch, that her face appears to be staring at me through a fisheye lens”. Why not, thought the man on the jeepney floor with the footprint on his jacket and the sympathy of two civil servants, turn Tori Spelling into a figurehead ruler, a transnational monarch, a poster girl the modern world? The paragon of power triumphant over all other considerations. Plus, she appears to be capable of staring in two directions at once, so the “Tori is watching You” posters and pamphlets will pack additional punch. He began to make elaborate plans in his head until he noticed that he was bleeding.

CHAPTER 3

Some days are better than others, he thought.

a nupdate

Regarding Perdido Street Station, which I predicted would spawn a sequel real soon: there's is a sequel, another 800-page fatty that I will probably read. But for Christ's sake, Meaville: I want to write a novel as well, buddy, and if you keep dumping out these hay bales, where am I going to find the time?

Regarding The Lotus' entries on my kissing style or the high regard in which she holds me: Really, she is too kind. I am an ugly man, fish-belly white and surrounded by a pillow of my own grotesque flab. One of my legs is a sort of stump with an articulated flipper at the end, good only for stirring up bathwater. I live in a jar and travel around the world in the cargo hold of FedEx planes. But I have the nicest eyes.

Regarding the States: go visit Seastreet for a sober take on that brutal mess of an election. As a nation fulminates on voter rolls and Diebold and GOP dirty tricks, Seastreet swivels around and looks at the Democratic campaign. Yes, I'm sure that Democrat voters in their thousands were turned away or intimidated or had their votes meddled with by the magic touch-screen machines of Diebold - but come on, people. A close race? A mannequin like Bush shouldn't get more than five hundred votes in the first place. The booths should have been swamped, drowned, utterly saturated with pissed-off citizens working together to get rid of that pisshead and his syndicate. But clearly enough people felt that the alternative simply wasn't good enough. And that's all the Republicans needed - just enough people. Ah well. I'm betting that 2006 will see a backlash against the GOP. Anyone for backlash in '06?

six weeks of looking at pieces of paper

I’ve been reading: Some Books. I’ve been reading Some Books because the movies and televisions insist on speaking foreign languages. They speak French, German, Spanish. The people go around speaking Allegmanisch, Wallonian, Flemish, Provencal, but the TVs keep the mainstream languages flowing nicely. Behind the walls of Europe people murmur their dialects as the electronics squawk in tongues. So yeah. I didn’t get to watch much TV in Europe. But I read Some Books. And here they are.

The day before I left I walked into Buzzword Books and asked Gord to recommend something. He handed me William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, which has a lousy cover but turned out be one of those books that you read feverishly, one of those books that you spend the entire day thinking about, one that you are so impatient to return to that meals and work and conversation becomes an irritant, pointless filler. Why, I kept thinking, am I sitting here talking to this [European citizen] when I could be sitting at a café or in my hotel room reading my book? Even basic hygiene began to tax my patience. You can’t read a book in the shower. You can’t read a book and shave at the same time (without severe injury). I experimented with simultaneous reading and toothbrushing, with limited success. If Boyd’s novel had been another few hundred pages I would have given up on ablutions altogether and given over my body to its basic tendency to make men smell like goats. I would have been the Shaggy Canadian frightening the children of Europe. They would have cowered in their highchairs in all the Autogrills of France, all the Little Chefs of Britain, all the Valks of Holland. The fever and concentration with which I approached Any Human Heart reminded me of my reading habits of childhood, when I would sit in the doorway of my bedroom after my parents had turned off my light, and read by the light of the hallway. When my parents’ footsteps sounded too close to the base of the stairs I would leap up with my book, run across the room to my bed and pretend to sleep. Hmmm. I’m sure they couldn’t have heard the sudden thumps from upstairs and the squeak of bedsprings. Later I discovered that a small flashlights would allow me to read under the covers, but nothing felt quite as comfortable as my old habit of reading in the doorway, positioning my body between the uprights, one foot for a brace and the book tilted to catch the light properly.

If anyone’s curious about Any Human Heart– because I haven’t mentioned one word about its content – I will gladly lend it to you. Serious callers only. Limited time offer. No reasonable request refused. Void where prohibited.* In accordance with federal, provincial and municipal laws. Held over three big weeks!**

*By which I mean to say: Defecate in Public Places.
** Remember when movies were held over in theatres? E.T. hung around for months in 1982, just sucking people into theatres like they were strands of spaghetti. In the papers the ads would proclaim, “Held over two more weeks!” as if they were live productions. Now movies just persist or vanish.

Instead of flying direct to Amsterdam from Toronto, we stopped briefly in Heathrow to switch from Air Canada to British Midlands. As far as I can tell, the hour flight to Amsterdam on BMI is a kind of reward for the gruelling ten hours on Air Canada. If you ever fly international on Air Canada, do not opt for the vegetarian meal. You will get your food served twenty minutes before the carts come creaking down the aisle, but the food tastes like piping hot moist cardboard. Or freezing cold but somehow damp cardboard. You can’t outsmart Air Canada into satisfying your needs or giving you a pleasant experience. They’ve been around way too long for that. Anyway. At Heathrow I bought three books: Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog, China Meaville’s Perdido Street Station and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.

First on my reading list – after Any Human Heart betrayed me by ending – was Meaville’s big fatty of a novel. I tell you, Meaville can not turn down an adjective. Or an opportunity to use words like “beguile” and “judder”. He’s like the guy down the street who ends up with an empty garage because he can’t say no to the neighbours who come over to borrow his tools. Run from Perdido Street Station before the adjectives catch on and come after you. The most frustrating thing about the book is its reliance on plot, such that you can’t put the book down because you need to know what happens next. So you slog through the swamp of adjectives, ford the waist-deep river of archaic verbs, just to see what comes after. What comes after is an inconclusive ending that will almost certainly get its sequel. Which I will read with gritted teeth and a cup of coffee. Mmmm, gritted teeth. It’s like cream of wheat with more calcium.

After eight hundred pages of Meaville’s bring-this-man-an-editor prose, I was grateful that Martin Amis was next on my list. And this was not just any Amis – this was Yellow Dog, the novel that had Tibor Fischer howling with derision, the one that just about everyone agrees hits the depths of depravity. The nadir of Amis’ talent and the squandering of his gifts. The novel that draws on an empty well of the spirit and comes up with a bucket of muck and worms. Yeah, well, I liked it, even though the complaints are justified. Yellow Dog doesn’t really feel like a novel so much as a bunch of collated notes for a longer, more substantial book. Or maybe several books. There’s a story about a successful modern middle-class man whose violent past hits him on the head and transforms him, by dint of a brain injury, into a yob with a conscience, a primitive fighting a rearguard action against his atavistic instincts. Which may be a good way to describe the novel: a text that takes a prurient interest in pornography and incest but keeps stepping back to examine itself instead of diving in wholeheartedly. Instead of gratifying desire, Amis seems to enjoy wallowing in desire’s repulsiveness. The result is all titillation, a striptease of a book, a porn movie in which everybody sits down to dinner instead of having sex.

Interleaved with the A-plot is the risible tale of the Englands, a fictitious Royal Family who end up embroiled in a sex-tape scandal. Perhaps this bit was allegorical, perhaps it was supposed to suspenseful or maybe even funny, but I didn’t waste time on piercing its veil. Complications ensue, other characters do other things, an airplane full of smokers comes screaming across the sky, eventually the whole thing ends. I left the novel in a hotel in southern France for the next off-season guest.

Enough for today? I think so. Next up on the Palinode Review Revue: Middlesex; Oryx & Crake; Snow Crash; The DaVinci Code.

You go, dentures!

Some guy on the radio is telling me that he and some unspecified others are not going to sit in silence, they're not going to live in fear. How long is that song going to infest the airwaves? I find it unsettling when the bagpipes kick in and it becomes clear that this is some Anglo-Saxon call to battle, but to battle what? Silence and fear? What does it mean to battle silence and fear? Where? To what end? To whose benefit, aside from filling the trenchcoat pockets of that singer? Do I battle silence whenever I order a beer or phone out for Thai food? Do I battle fear when I steal someone's place in a queue? If that guy's not going to make it clear, I'm just going to fight my battles wherever I can.

I can't even remember when that song came out. It must have appeared somewhere around '89-'91, when pop music really became infected by that messianic strain of power ballad, with Elton John professing his Belief In Love and Michael Jackson using a lot of dry ice to perform his Earth Song. Remember when protest songs protested something specific? When singers took a few syllables out of their verses to drop some choice names or places? I wonder if it's possible to trace the mutation of the pop protest song into the Affirmation Song? If I had to pick a watershed ("Oooh, I think I'll take that nice watershed with the recling chairs and the rotating jets") for the shift from genuine protest to airy encouragement, I'd vote for Band Aid. You know something's wrong when the short answer to "Do They Know It's Christmas" is "Yes, Mr. Geldof und Freunden, European colonial powers not only fractured a number of self-organized African societies into unstable but politically malleably nation-states, they also introduced traditional Christian holidays, so yeah, they know it's Christmas, you condescending gang of fucks". Neal Ascheron mentions in a recent article in the New York Review of Books that we seem to need the horror and degradation of Africa to fuel our ever-diminishing stores of shock and compassion. We don't need to take action; we just need its resonant call. As for the American version of Band Aid, "We Are The World" was probably guilty of pushing Michael Jackson over into the abyss of insanity.

Now Lisa Stansfield is telling me that she's been around the world and she, she, she can't find her baby. Worse, it's a live performance and people are applauding. Who applauds that kind of crap? Why not go out and applaud road pylons or sun-faded For Sale notices on hardware store windows? Why not applaud a snappy tweed skirt and matching blouse? Why not go wild with hooting and cheering for a set of dentures in a ditch?

Right then. I'm off to find some false teeth I can really put my faith in.

when it matters

Last night I discovered what British people do when they want leisurely passage to their European vacations. They take a ferry, land in Belgium/France/Holland, and proceed to buy up all the booze that Europe can produce. How is it that continental Europe has any alcohol to spare for its own cafes and bars? Why aren't the brasseries and Gasthauser deserted and dry? At the Zeebrugge docks I watched Brit car after Brit car open its trunk to reveal the cases of Stella or hard spirits. And once onboard they didn't stop, buying massive amounts on the Pride of Bruges. Britain: drinking Europe dry.

from the heart of the Meuse Valley come exhausted Canadians

It's nice to be sitting around in the old section of Brussels, because we just spent several days in what has to be the ugliest shit that Western Europe has to offer. Certainly, there are parts of Eastern Europe that look like huge industrial middens with cities plopped on top of them, but the Meuse Valley offers some serious competition. It's a thirty kilometre-long fart, the rancid body gasses of capitalism exhaling all the way to Huy from the back end of Liege. I can't recall, offhand, ever seeing so many nuclear reactors jockeying for space with chemical dye factories and whatnot. I'll tell you all about it when I get home in five days. Five days! Five days. A quick trip through England and then it's home for me. And you will all get to look at my photographs, the online version of the family vacation slide show.

Until then, content yourself with the fact that western Austrians translate 'backyard' as 'backside,' so if you're quick you can get there soon and have a glass of fresh apple juice from someone's backside. I sure did.

austria, I rename thee

Austria, let me dip into your history and rename you Curse of Austria. I spent a week in your Alps, respecting your strange high-altitude customs and walking-stick ways, and nothing went right. Every morning came with a dismaying message, a customs issue, a sick/lazyass interpreter, an inacessible laundromat three towns away, a dialect of German so frightening that the rest of the continent dropped it circa 1500, an expert who consulted brochures during his interview, a heavy fog that descended from the clouds just as we reached the helicopter - and worst of all, utterly bloodless interviewees, survivors of an avalanche that took away their homes and families, from whose voices and eyes no emotion ever slipped. How did I emerge alive? Why am I not dead right now, a crushed mush of pulp under a downed helicopter (we went up a couple of days later), a bit of goo in a crinkled Saab, a weeping wounded mess in a Rankweil gasthaus downing Mohren Brau and pissing off the locals (not dead but good as)? How did I survive and escape to sweet civilized smokestacked Stuttgart? Oh full-day rush hour, oh jammed autobahnkreutz, oh Japanese businessmen and efficient business Englishspeak, I missed you, even you I missed, oh yes.

a rundown

Highly idiosyncratic summary of where I've been and what I've seen:

Long-legged flies tasting tablecloths in Triberg, Germany. The houseflies here have longer legs and it unnerves me.

A run of Playmobil-looking sculptures along the highways between Lyon and Marseilles. Bright elves engaged in acrobatics for our amusement. What for?

Graded clouds sloping into valleys in Vorarlberg. They look like gigantic arrows pointing at hotels and bars.

Citroens and Mercedes trucks plugging along mountain roads.

A roomful of helicopter pilots in heavy red coveralls drinking espressos at a helicopter hangar high up in the Alps.

My time's up.

wenn ich 'Kultur' höre

TALKING WITH THE TEUTONS

Here's a conversation I had with a Swiss border guard yesterday:

Guard: "Guten Tag. Longgermanword, bitte schön".
Palinode: "Bitte nochmal?"
Guard: "Longgermanword and Evenlongerone, bitte".
Palinode: "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"
Guard: (without missing a beat)"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

(A pause in which you can feel the international tensions build. A long line of cars stretches out behind our rented Saab into the Schwarzwald mist. Ahead, the steel and concrete public works of Switzerland wait patiently for my long-dead bureaucratic German to sit up at its desk and produce the correct terms.)

Palinode: "Paßkarte?"
Guard: "Bitte schön".

(Then my German sits up straight and starts pulling the right files. I explain who we are, where we're going and why, discovering in the process that the phrase 'Direkttransit' transcends languages and produces the desired 'please proceed' gesture, that lazy twirling finger indicating the Autobahn and the whole of Austria. We drive off, having satisfied the Swiss customs people that we can be trusted to drive through their country and into Austria without causing any trouble or poisoning the Bodensee or anything like that. On our way through St. Gallen we stop briefly to poison the Bodensee.)

ON BEING FOREIGN

Since I began travelling for a living I've been to a number of places around the world, but Germany and Austria are the only places in which I've felt like a foreigner. People stare at us with curiosity and sometimes hostility, dogs single us out for barking, shopkeepers refuse to understand my German. At first I thought that my Deutsch was far worse than I'd imagined, but after a few halting and friendly conversations with various folks, I realized that some people here aren't interested in understanding me. It's as simple as that. They hear the foreign tones in my voice (or the Turkish cast of my skin?) and their faces shut down.

Worse than that is the low-grade paranoia that these places engender. In Holland we were treated with courtesy, in France with apathy, but in Germany we were watched. No kidding. One Sunday morning we went out filming in a neighbourhood of Ludwigshafen (right across the Rhein from Mannheim) and a middle-aged man in a leather jacket kept an eye on us, affecting a casual air that failed to convince after ninety minutes. Yes, for an entire Sunday morning this anonymous German citizen had nothing better to do than stand on street corners and pretend that he wasn't following us around. There must be a German word for this. "The pleasure derived from pretending to be a secret policeman around foreign film crews". Stupid self-appointed self-policing freaks. I took pictures of him whenever he glanced at us.

Maybe he was a secret policeman. On sleepy Sunday duty.

for some

For some, love comes suddenly and dies instantly. For others, internet access behaves like that.

things to see in europe if you're me

Chickens furtively crossing the road in the tiny 900 year old town of Ouiwekirk. They peek out from behind shrubs and take off over the brick-paved streets. Once they're safely on the other side they look disappointed.

Windmills. Endless freaking fields of windmills.

Naked (topless) ladies on the beaches of southern France. I didn't stop to investigate, but you know, I saw naked ladies.

A Turkish man in a city in Northern France, shouting insults at me and Greg because he thought we were Dutch. He shook his finger at us as we drove by while his friends pointed at our Netherlands license plate.

Frejus, southern France: Set behind a modern metal bookshelf in a town hall office, an old wooden door inlaid with iron. We open the door and find ourselves in an annex built in the thirteenth century, with a spiral staircase leading to the roof.

A blackberry bush growing by Roman ruins. We pick a few. I learn and instantly forget the French word for blackberry.

The remains of a gigantic concrete dam set in the mountains of Provence. Chunks of pink concrete the size of station wagons are scattered for miles along the dry riverbed. Pieces of iron rebar half an inch thick bend out in spaghetti-like curves from the concrete chunks. A huge rusted bolt sticks out from the ground as if it's got some purpose in being there.

A crowd, a swarm of people massing in front of a pizzeria in Cannes, waiting for the glassy-eyed doorman to snap into life and usher people inside. TV industry execs, lost documentarians, brittle-boned models with eggshell faces, shift their weight back and forth. According to those who know, this is the best pizza to be had in southern France. Amazingly, we get a seat on the patio in ten minutes. Every twenty minutes someone gets hit by a motorcycle, screams obscenities in any one of a dozen languages, then keeps on walking. The pizza's nothing special.

That's all I've seen over the last couple of weeks. The rest of the time I've kept my eyes clamped shut for fear of meeting the eyes of Europeans, whose basilisk gaze will turn your heart to brittle glass. No, really, it's true.

it's true

when they say that French waiters are rude. Tonight I had a guy who decided not to understand my serviceable French, not to understand my mush-mouthed and idiosyncratic English, and instead chose to hector us over our choice of bun and switch our salads back and forth until not even we could decide if the 'Salade Marina' had the shrimp. Whatever salad I ordered turned out to be draped in bacon and cream cheese.

The good thing about dealing with crap waiters and foodstuffs that always, always contain internal organs is that I'm doing it in the south of France. And damn, is it ever nice here. It's disorienting to go in less than 48 hours from the near-frigid winds blowing off the Oosterschelde to an off-season resort with a seaside view, but it's, you know, the good kind of disorientation. I'm not going to tell you about the first hotel we checked into, with its standard of service that would make a barracks inviting, but I will tell you that I found an old contact lens in the BUNK bed in which I spent one comatose night by the A8 motorway between Fréjus and Cannes.

hit the new post link and now i'm staring

at the screen, not panicked or disturbed but mystified. What was it that I wanted to say to a mixed bag of cyberean readers? Oh hey... why not talk about today's shoot in downtown Amsterdam? The show's producer reads my site, and I will warn her now that what I'm about to say will make her cry, smack her head on her monitor and cry out "Why me, Oh Yahweh, Oh Wolfen, why?" and so forth. Okay then.

At twelve sharp we leave an interview with a meteorologist at his office just outside Utrecht and head into Amsterdam. By the time we veer off the A1 into the drempelled heart of the city I realize that I've left my city map in my hotel room. Whatever, I say, and instruct my camera guy to turn left, right, wherever, until something familiar appears. This sounds horribly haphazard, but I've been doing this job for a few years now and have found that it's actually a really effective way to hack into the middle of an unknown, crowded, dog-shit strewn city. By one o'clock we're at the Central Station, mere blocks away from the address and with half an hour to spare. A five minute walk. I've even got a map for the city centre and can use it to navigate reliably.

We get horribly, horribly lost. Like all major cities, Amsterdam is full of snaky one-ways and deadends and promising streets that end in a harbour all of a sudden. We circle around the street we want until 1:20, when suddenly Sint Blahblahstraat pops up on our right. We turn down the road, nearly squashing a dozen tatooed bicyclists in the process, and find it easily: the Klompenboer, the only maker of wooden shoes by hand in the city. But parking is another story. If you've ever tried parking in downtown Amsterdam, you'll get a sense of our pain, but if you try it on the only day of a public transit strike you will double up and wail in agony.

Repeatedly we make the wide circle - Klompenboer; stadium; bridge; Nieuwmarkt; Klompenboer - without success. Eventually we find a loading zone and I run to the address. But on first look, it doesn't seem to be a shoe factory. It's a crowded toy store full of stuffed animals. Whatever, I'll go in and ask for the guy. I walk in and see that one wall of the store is actually a wide set of stairs and a blocked-off escalator leading into a bunker-like basement. I can see at the bottom of the stairs a lone guy chopping at a block of wood with a curious-looking hatchet. Around him in the fluorescent lights lie piles of wood shavings and wooden shoes. The shoe 'factory' is actually an abandoned part of the subway once intended to shelter people from nuclear assault. It's one of those spectacular tricks of architectural layering that you find in cities like Amsterdam, London or Sydney. It's really cool, kind of desolate, even cinematic - but it ain't kids' show material. The salesgirl calls the shoemaker up. He turns out to be a very friendly guy, shaven-headed and wiry, with a pair of wooden shoes painted to imitate blue-on-white Delft ceramic. He even helps us find a parking spot.

Unfortunately, he's not quite as helpful when it comes to the shoot itself. His English is not as good as I had hoped, and his answers tend to be brief and dismissive of detail. Did he make all the shoes on the wall behind him? No - those are from a factory. Do you use all those great machines? No. Do you paint the shoes as well as make them? No - his mother does the painting. Will his mother be in today? No - she never comes in on Monday. Can we get some kids down here to watch you make shoes? No - he has to organize a group. There's a group coming in tomorrow, as a matter of fact. But not today. This is turning out to be the kind of shoot that we joke about but cannot imagine really happening. Between shots he drinks beer and smokes American Spirits.

On to the demonstration of his work. He hacks a block of wood into the shape of a shoe with unbelievable speed and skill. Then he places the shoe on a workhorse and starts shaving it down with a razor-sharp foot-long blade hooked into the horse on one end. After that he clamps it and gouges out the interior. Great, we say - what next? Now we dry it. How long does that take? A week. Well, what do you do to it after that? I sand it. Can you sand this? No, it's not dry. Can you fake it? No, there's no point. Can you do it for the show? No, there's no need for that.

After a bit of this he says that he rides a unicycle, so we film him outside riding his unicycle around. The few people we approach on the street to interview about wooden shoes wisely decided that they can't speak English. We jump back into our car and head into a rush-hour traffic jam. To ease our pain we drive past Utrecht, past our hotel, onward into a weird little city called Soest, one of those ass-end cities of Europe that no tourist ever visits. We find a restaurant called Der Droom Grill Room, which looks shabby and slightly frightening, but it turns out to be the most incredible Turkish food I've ever had. Viva la Soest.

an offer

Hello. Would you care for a dike? I've been travelling through the Netherlands, polder by polder, discreetly squirreling away dikes in my jacket. I've sewn some sizeable pockets inside my jacket to house my new possessions. Serviceable used dikes, reasonable rates. Kilometres of protection. Grassy. Sheep here and there. Tomorrow I'm driving out to the Delta Project gates at the mouth of the Oosterschelde, so if anyone wants some giant hydraulic pistons or hearty beachgoing Germans,* please let me know and I'll take a deceptively small-looking briefcase along.

*I've now been in the Netherlands long enough to begin to distinguish Dutch citizens from German tourists. It's frightfully easy; simply look for the jovial guy tromping along a beach in a Speedo and fleece top. Sure, it's 4 degrees Centigrade. Of course he knows that the wind's propelling needles of rain into his exposed flesh. That don't stop him. As a matter of fact, he's about to break into a jog. The Frischairfienden prowl the streets of Vlissingen and take in the delightgul sea breezes miserable cold drizzle. They flop along atop the dikes of Duiveland in diving suits and flippers. Windmills churn the driving air, seawater leaks from gates into the Nordsee, German tourists in space-age parkas scour the beach for Freshness and Health. One day they will find it buried beneath the sands.

dutch dictionary

I've picked up quite a few little-known Dutch words over my week here in Holland. Here are a couple:

Drempels, n. A drempel is a kind of Dutch pastry about six feet in length and weighing seven hundred pounds. Villages in Tholen and Duiveland gather in the town square every full moon to mix a dough made of wheat flour and sawdust and lumber from downed windmills. They lay out the dough on a flat sheet and heap up a pile of unfinished croquettes, squares of mature cheese and probably a few pickled onions. The pastry is then rolled up, boiled in an iron cauldron overnight and then baked in a giant wicker man that towers over the medieval churches and gives burghomasters unquiet dreams. After three days the villagers remove the pastry from its grisly oven and, because of its density and inedibility, lay it across a highway to serve as a speed bump. Eventually it is paved or bricked over.

Overflakken, v. Whether you grow up in Ouwekerk or Utrecht, if you're a Dutch teenager you eventually participate in this kooky adolescent ritual. For one year you must pocket a single square of mature cheese from each meal. At the end of the year, on a moonless October night, in the shelter of a polder, you meet up with your friends. From the year's worth of mature cheese you build a gigantic cheese man that towers over the medieval churches and gives the klompen makers restless fantasies of wealth and power. You must spend the night under the mature cheese giant. If in the morning your cheese man is host to murders of cawing crows, you and your friends may steal a car and get stoned in an Amsterdam coffee shop.

te koop, coll. In order "te koop" with the immense pressure of pronouncing the Dutch language properly, many citizens will abandon their homes in the dark of night and disappear forever, leaving behind a sign in the window that states "te koop". People will pay large sums of money to move into these abandoned homes.

Those definitions are only really funny if you know Dutch, and probably not even then.

fuuuuck

I just spent a costly hour in a hotel in Vlissingen writing a carefully edited post on whiteness and privilege and my complicated feelings about being a white guy who doesn't quite look white. But this goddamn computer took it away from me, and now I am owed ten Euros and one pretty fine piece of writing. I'm dispirited and disgusted. No, I'm just fucking angry. Everything on the road when you're travelling outside North America or inside South Dakota is pure hassle and nickle-and-dimery, an endless string of gas station attendants, phone operators and concierges smiling helplessly and saying Sorry in any one of six different languages. Arggggh.

it's hard to blog an entry

when your entry blog is fogged
and your soggy noggin's putty
and your blogging throat's got frogs: yes:

it's hard to blog an entry
when the entryway's all fogged
from a fifteen hour plane flight
through ten thousand klicks of fog

and the signs in Dutch are nutty
and the roads are black as night
from all the rain that bogs the traffic
down

and it's really congested on the A10 at rush hour. the end of that.

glamour and goodbye

In a few hours I'm off for six weeks to Europe, poking around the various corners of the Union for old disasters. Maybe I'll be partying with Eurotrash. Maybe I'll be scanning the roadside for the next exit out of Utrecht. Who knows? Here's something suitable for The Lotus to remember me by between today and Halloween:

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls, to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No:"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refin'd,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.

As I'm no poet, I had to ask John Donne to supply appropriate verse for my sentiments. Really. I had to travel backward in time to find him, accost him on his way to the pulpit, and persuade him to throw this poem together. When I got back to 2004 I found out that the poem had become a classic! Mind you, I must have done something wrong, because on my return I also found out that the present had gone from the Art Deco paradise I left to a totalitarian bloodbath, with colonial wars and genocide marking off the first half of the twentieth century, and the degradation of the entire world via the military-industrial complex that arose from a confluence of WWII-era interests shaping the second half. It appears that we now live on a kind of prison planet packed with the wretched, led by deluded tyrants who send people off to die in Mesopotamia in the hopes of pleasing invisible supermen in the sky. I must have altered the course of my lineage as well; it appears I'm now partly Irish and largely bald. Freaky stuff, that time travel. From now on I'm not going to go back in time to pester any more famous authors.

downhome badness: revelation

I've been lax lately. Remiss. Unupdatery. That last word may be more noun than adjective, but you get the picture. I haven't updated or written anything of length over the last few days.

I thought I was depressed. That I was experiencing a crisis. That my brief period at home between trips was impelling an emotional withdrawal and an episode of introversion. Why, given the minute amount of time I've been given for myself and The Lotus, should I spend energy on unseen readers? I thought I was weathering blogger block, or worse, full-on blog burnout.

It turns out that none of those things were the case. My problems amounted to a sentence that wouldn't leave my head, no matter how hard I tried to dislodge it. I realized that until I committed to the sentence, released it from my mind and let it tumble on down the internet, none of the other sentences that had been building up behind it over the last week would ever get written down. This is the offending sentence:

My favourite moment in the first Resident Evil movie occurs when Milla Jovovich kicks a dog in the head.

So you can see why I didn't want to commit that sentence to posterity. Nonetheless, it's all true. I saw the movie a few years ago, in a moment of Tuesday evening indecision. I didn't have great hopes for the hour and a half that I was going to spend in the theatre, but some small voice in my ear always insists that I watch zombie films, no matter how certain I am that the film will be a piece of shit.

And Resident Evil was no exception to the shitty-zombie movie rule. Like the rest of Paul Anderson's output, the film threw glossy sci-fi horror and old skool gore together and let the sharp shiny surfaces duke it out with the messy insides. The result was a stupid unexplained mess with all the coherence of a five year old's nightmare, but one shining moment remained: when Milla Jovovich leaps into the air, pivots off a wall, and in rapturous slo-mo, boots a leaping zombie dog right in the head. In mid-air. Wow. It was such a sublimely stupid moment that I wanted to applaud. It was like the kid who brings in a dead squirrel for show and tell; how can you not appreciate the spirit of clueless generosity behind the impulse to show us something so inappropriate? Surely any film that spent so much care and money on a scene so stupid would produce similar moments in its sequel.

Nope.

Not one scene, line or moment in Resident Evil 2 is entertaining or executed with any competence. Actors stumble over monosyllabic lines, props appear and disappear from characters' hands without explanation, expensive scenes with helicopters and spotlights pop up and vanish without adding anything to the movie beyond helicopters and spotlights. And despite the apearance of zombie dogs in a zombie-haunted elementary school, nobody kicks them in the head. Instead, they introduce a gas range to a cigarette and blow the dogs to bits. Who cares about incinerated zombie dogs? If you're not going to kick them in the head, don't bring them to the set.

In a review that must have produced a sticky damp-armpit feeling of shame, Dave Kehr of The New York Times seems to believe the following about the movie:

Mr. Anderson's screenplay provides a steady series of inventive action situations, and the director, Alexander Witt, makes the most of them. A longtime second-unit director, Mr. Witt ... proves himself more than equal to the task of guiding an entire production. His work is fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact.

It is, of course, all in the timing, and Mr. Witt's is extremely good. He knows just when to lay in a lull and just when to puncture it with a shock effect, when to move in on character drama and when to step back for large-scale mayhem. His is the kind of first-class craftsmanly work that never wins awards or even much attention, but has long been the lifeblood of the movies.

Forget Jayson Blair or Judith Miller's fabulations on weapons of mass destruction: the real bullshit at the New York Times is being ladled out in the movie reviews. Here's Alexander Witt's idea of a well-executed action scene:

Night. Everything is blue. The main characters walk around in an open space where no zombies roam. When lame dialogue stretches actors' limited range, magically insert zombie next to them. Then, on the principle that allows multiple clowns to emerge from tiny cars, insert a hoard of zombies. Where did they come from? Who cares? They're zombies! Then, because the choreographer walked off the set a week ago, film the ensuing fight in a herky-jerky nine frames per second. A 9 fps fight scene wears the triple crown: it makes everything look really "fast" and "tense"; it saves on film stock; and best of all, the director doesn't have to put in the hard work of actually staging a decent action sequence. Just in case, though, make sure no cuts last longer than three quarters of a second. And if all that fails, put Milla Jovovich on a motorcycle and have her drive through a stained-glass window for no reason whatsoever. Nobody will notice that we've squeezed millions of dollars into a second-rate B-movie, where everything is dim and backlit, where actors wear the glazed look of children reciting lines at a school Christmas play, and the whole thing takes place in a city with only one bridge out of town.

I'm glad that I got that sentence out. I feel much better now.

business centre

Today I'm in a business centre, where everybody does their business, leaving all their business all over the room in loose files. Outside the business centre all the businessmen and women gather and stand in loose lines and rub their shoulders. The old-school types smoke cigarettes and crane their necks for ashtray stands. Where did all the ashtrays go? Some stamp their feet impatiently because they have business to do, and god knows they're not getting paid to stand around in lines like this, getting tired, getting cramped, losing valuable minutes while the ever-accelerating business world pulses outside the hotel, like an invisible network of freeways cast across the planet. No way. Gotta keep their edge, gotta keep their bellies fed and their coats groomed, gotta trim the unnecessary body hairs before the conference. Gotta visit the fitness centre. Gotta get a good night's sleep. Gotta straighten the files because they're full of business.

the end of glamour

Once I travelled across the world to talk with experts and survivors of ancient disasters. Now, today, I'm driving to Swift Current to interview an equine therapist, which is, unless I'm mistaken, a horse masseuse. The next day we keep going to Medicine Hat, where I interview an eccentric millionaire about a giant tipi.

Maybe I should do the entire trip wearing a tuxedo. That'll lend a frisson of jet-set classiness to the whole affair.

encore

Once more I can post on my weblog! I promised in my last entry to retract all the nasty things I said about Reagan's death and the free market. Well, forget it. I retract my retraction in a spirited counterpalinode. The only downside to Reagan's death was that the pomp and timing only bolstered the Republican cause. That's Ronald Reagan for you: a withered old cabbage patch doll of such insurmountable bastardry that even by his death he damages the discourse. May Satan's urine trickle down for all eternity on his Brylcreem'd helmet of hair.

Okay, I feel much better now. May I add that I also do not regret putting up a picture featuring my wife's face, despite the risk of stalkers, home invaders, telemarketers, etc.

While Blogger was being crotchety I wrote an account of the death of my pet rabbit Gordon on my dormant Diaryland site. You can find it here. My wife wrote about Gordon as well here. Feel free to give them a read. Have a piece of memory of our pet.

florette

Can I post now? Can I, sweet Blogger, after all these days of facing connection time-outs and bland "There were errors" messages every time I tried to post, post now? Give me a clear sign. Like letting me post this request, if nothing else. I'm sorry for the glee I took in Reagan's death, and putting my wife's face on the internet, and bashing the free market. In the spirit of my name, I take it all back. I retract it all. Just let me post.

palinode plus lotus equals good

Click on the picture and it will grow. See The Lotus' eyelids! Check out my Adam's apple! Do it now.

clearing up some rumours

Lately I've been hearing a number of rumours that have been making the rounds (since that's what rumours do), and I'm certain that 90% of all these rumours are false. Palpably, demonstrably false. I won't name names as you know who you are, and if you don't know who you are please ask me and I'll tell you. Anyway the source of these rumours should be very clear to those who have heard them because they all concern scrap metal dealers. Really now. For shame. Let me tell you, contrary to what some have been bruiting about, the truth about scrap metal dealers. Scrap metal dealers do not bedizen darkest Africa with priz'd ornament. They do not emerge at dusk on rooftops, there to glide on canvas wings over the twilit city in search of fireflies. They do not drink in the cool breezes of the gloaming. Theirs it is not to do such things. No, that is not theirs. Nor, having snagged a whole rutch of lightnin bugs, do scrap metal dealers retreat to lairs in ocean caves to scribble in margins of codices, lit by aforementioned bright captured bugs. Why would they do such a thing? Nor did the one who moved into the bungalow down the street have sex with Brian's wife Janice. He's gay. Janice is just trying to get back at Brian for refusing to build a new shed in the backyard, so she's come up with this ridiculous story about an affair between herself and the gay scrap metal dealer, and it's so pathetic. If you ask me Brian pretty much left the marriage behind years ago, and Janice just needs to drop a few pounds and stop being such a pushy bitch. So I just hope everything's clear now.

q and a

I've been working out some answers to questions that people pepper me with on the job. For some reason, people seem to think that it's okay to approach a complete stranger and jack information from me about my life, the contents of my luggage, the weight and cost of our equipment, what have you. I realize that what I do is perceived as part of the Fame Machine, and therefore I have no more expectation of privacy than a hapless celebrity wandering down a Main Street in some Midwestern town, but it's still odd and sometimes incredibly irritating to deal with a passerby calling out: Hey, what's in your suitcase? It's a bit like walking into an office and saying So... what you got in your desk? How much does that file cabinet cost? And so on. Here are some responses I give out to the most commonly offered questions and conversational gambits.

• Q: Hey, what's in your suitcase?

A: Some guy who owes me money.
This is a great all-purpose response in most parts of the world, usually eliciting a laugh from the curious. In the Florida Keys, though, people will take you seriously.


• Q: What are you filming?

A: Well, this is kind of embarassing, really, because we've been making a documentary on you for the last ten years, and you've finally noticed us.


• Q: What kind of film stock do you use for that camera?

A: The fuck you care, buddy?
That's not the answer I give, but man, do I ever get tired of people staring like mules at a Betacam and asking about film stock.


• Q: How much does that camera cost?

A: Around forty thousand dollars.
Even though it's not wise to announce to strangers that you're carrying the price of a sports car on your shoulder, it's too much fun to see their eyes defocus and their mouths try to chew out a response to that.


• Q: Are you news reporters?

A: Yes, the event we're covering happened fifty years ago and we just heard about it in Canada. We're hot on its trail.


• Q: Are you making a student film?

A: Yes, we're making a student documentary about student disasters for student networks all over the student world. The students hired us because they're so busy studying.


• Q: You must have enough Air Miles to go anywhere in the world, hey?

A: We fly on a special magic rock. Sometimes crew members fall off and the company pretends that they've quit and gone partying in Thailand.


• Q: You must find your work very interesting.

A: Could you phrase that as a question? I'm trying to maintain a format.


• Q: Don't you find your work interesting?

A: Oh yes, very interesting, thank you, thank you, it's fascinating, and rewarding too, you wouldn't believe the rewards, and all the people I meet, yes I meet all kinds of interesting people, and oh the things I see and the places I go, feel free to live vicariously through me for thirty seconds, and yes it's hard because I miss my wife, and no we don't have any children, but yes there'll be quite a homecoming ha ha, she'll be so sore when I get through with her, oh yes, oh I can see I got a bit carried away there and you're not smiling anymore and we're still setting up, oh damn.

There's another Georgie deep inside

I've been experiencing Jimi Hendrix issues lately with doppelgangers. I haven't seen any, but they're constantly being intimated to me. Why? Maybe I invite the strange intimacy that allows my shadowed Other to glide close to my life. To tell you the truth, I'm growing my very own doppelganger out of handy household materials. An empty can of turpentine, some rags, a pelt (important), spare bicycle parts (except for brakes, because I'm a no-brakes kind of guy). The empty can functions as my head, the rags and pelt as my torso, and various bits of bike as my lower body. Communication will be limited to whatever is printed on the can, so expect lots of talk about proper ventilation and new standards of professionalism in turpentine manufacture. Conversation available in French and English. The use of wheels instead of feet and the lack of brakes will make my doppelganger dangerously fast on downward slopes, so exercise due caution on walks. The rags and pelt will suffice. Sadly my doppelganger has no arms. When you're living under my roof you've got to earn your arms.

Right, that bit was a lie to entertain you for a brief moment while I puzzled out a way to talk about doppelgangers - not actual physical doubles, but the doubling of one's life that occurs with a road job. Papers report with the glee the scandal of the travelling businessman who leads two sealed-off lives, with separate families and houses and even names. People read the stories with a sense of wonder or perhaps envy; how can a man split his identity into various characters and then keep them contained? But the trick is not to create and maintain different identities when you're on the road; the trick is to keep your identity stable. As soon as the plane begins to taxi down the runway I forget the intervening weeks at home. I feel as if my home were another stop, a layover on the way to the next interview. Likewise, as soon as I walk into my apartment I forget that I've been away. My work is so strange and disjointed, so full of abrupt relationships and switches in scenery, that it resembles a powerful dream, so consuming that I forget my life and so vivid that I remember the dream in its entirety when I wake up next to The Lotus in our bed.

Consequently there are two of me: one who phones from overseas, the other who sits in the living room. I can't shake the creepy feeling that I'm going to pick up the phone one day and hear myself on the other end. Or maybe I'll be scanning the heiroglyphs at an airport terminal and I'll spot myself at the Customs booth. If that ever happens, I'll go grab myself and we'll spend the day playing practical jokes on airport security. Those security people, they're all about the laughter.

I have five minutes left on this airport internet terminal

Would it be more appropriate to refer to the two Kill Bill movies collectively as Kill Bills or Kills Bill?

Because I've got twelve Australian dollars, two thousand Philippine pesos, and ten Singapore dollars riding on it.

yarra valley blues

I've spent a week in some of the most scenic parts that the world comes with, and if I have to see anything else scenic for the next three weeks, I'm going to burn it down. We drive along a winding highway, pick a road, see where it goes, follow the path we've guessed at, keeping one eye on the mileage and another on the view. We look for ferntrees and eucalyptus, heights of land, strange wildlife and bright colours. Eventually, when we've driven too far and seen so much that nothing is left to impress us, we stop at the first spot and point the camera at the best thing available. Then we wait for the clouds to break and the sun to light the place up, which in mid-winter southeastern Australia is like hoping for dry water (mmmm, a nice wafer of freeze-dried water with a bit of salt, it's like taking a bite out of the ocean). And when that's done we head back to the hotel and watch Australians win gold medals. Then we watch the news, which is all about Australians winning gold medals. Then we go to any one of the thousand Italian/Greek restaurants that saturate the Melbourne suburbs. At supper the waitress asks us if we've seen the Australians winnning gold medals, and we ask her if she's seen Steve Irwin in the wild. Then we spend the whole night in the restaurant because the meals here take eight hours to digest properly, and it's imperative that you remain as still as possible while the cheese and beef pass through your intestines.

Today I witnessed a product called the Kiddie Kutter, a brutal 5" knife with a se blade and a bright plastic handle "designed for children's hands". The knife is intended to help instruct children in the art of preparing food. The package says: "Spend more time eating and less time cutting!" I can sympathise; sometimes I spend so much of a meal cutting and so little time eating that by the time it's through I haven't eaten anything at all.

I'm impatient to get home and post at my leisure. Chancing on terminals that set their meters on you is no way to enjoy blog-style writing. I'm not really a spewer; I need some time to stare at the screen and drink five cups of coffee and idly surf around in order to put together a satisfactory post. Forty-eight hours from now and I'll be back home, ready to blab away in the privacy of my own bathrobe. Five dollars will get you in the door. Ten for a ringside seat.

overseas still

On the 500 Philippine peso note it says "The Filipino is worth dying for". Do they mean any Filipino? Because there's 87 million of them in the Philippines alone. I simply can't live with that much responsibility*. Which may be the idea. Or maybe, since there's so many of them, you'd die long before you could even choose which one you'd die for, which one would be your special Filipino. At the airport in Manila there's a footwear disinfecting station (a germicidal mat of some sort) and a SARS testing station (they take your temperature). Maybe they should have a Choose Your Special Filipino station. It would be heaped with corpses.

*Do you ever lose your way in the midst of typing out words like 'responsibility'? Do you ever stop and physically have to count the i's and l's and check where in the daisy chain you've stuck your 'ty'?

This morning I took a helicopter ride. Maybe my readers regularly arrange helicopter rides in the developing world, so you will all know what a surreal experience it is. Thirty minutes beforehand a woman knocks on your hotel door and collects the brick of 65 000 pesos that you've painstakingly banded up with elastics. Fifteen minutes later the hotel duty manager and a guy in a snappy barong knock on the door to escort you to the helipad on the hotel roof. Once at the roof, surrounded by security men, the duty manager, assistants, and a nurse with a first-aid kit at the ready, all your camera equipment is immediately permeated with moisture. Then the helicopter arrives, a cream-pale insect with a jade eye settling down with a blast of wind. Inside are the pilot and another guy who doesn't speak when you say "Magandang umaga!" or smile back when you nod and grin. Instead he takes your bag and puts it under the seat. Suddenly you realize that everybody looks a bit grim, as if they're thinking Oh boy, another couple of North American journalists about to die in some power lines or get shot down by the MNLF, and you wonder what it is you're doing. The unsmiling man buckles you in and shuts the door, and after a moment of adjustment the helicopter is suddenly rocking unsteadily, just a few inches off the ground. A sudden tilt and you're over the city, heading south to circle an active volcano.

Anyway. We'd taken a boat to the volcano a few days before (where I'd thrown up in the middle of a Foreign-Legionesque guided tour) but it was entirely different from the air. The Taal Volcano crater is actually a lake of dilute sulphuric acid, surrounded by high cliffs on Volcano Island, which is on Lake Taal. So it's a lake on an island in a lake on a bigger island. In order to get some decent aerial footage we needed to remove the doors, so the pilot touched down right on the shore of the crater lake. We got off and shot some footage while the unsmiling man removed the doors. Then we were strapped back in and the pilot began to show off, banking and swooping over the cliffs, widening his circle to take in the dry volcano crater from a previous eruption. We saw a trail of people on horses riding up and down a ridge, which overlooks the crater lake by a couple hundred metres. Tin shacks and stables lined the ridge. During a smoke break (for the pilot) by the lake I found out that the pilot was emigrating to Calgary in a year or two.

Everybody here thinks we're from National Geographic and they call us Joe.

hey, is that filipino food?

How long have I been here? A week? A month? Three and a half hours? I honestly don't know. If I were to approach someone and ask Where is this place? they would fix me with a pedagogical look and say More important than where is when. Then they'd tell me that I'd been living in a dreamworld, a fantasy of wealth and luxury, and this crowded, stinking place packed to the rafters with human beings all jostling, calling, selling, buying and begging, is the real world. Which of course it is, if you're going by the weight of numbers. The strangest thing about being in Manila or in the nearby provinces is that I'm witnessing what the bulk of the world looks like. Industry and poverty sandwiched next to other, mansions and embassy abutting shanty towns of corrugated steel and yards of mud and shit. Young boys giving haircuts by the side of the road, people gliding between lanes of traffic with cut-rate plastic goods for sale. And everywhere you go, another McDonald's, a Jollibee's, an Ulo Ulo barbecue shack. Exhaust fumes both slate-blue and soot-black, smoke from a wok in a satay kiosk, an old man brushing branches and dust from his storefront. Then a sudden rain hits and the whole place smells of mud and rot and hog shit. There is no end to the movement here, no break in the lines of traffic on Roxas Boulevard or the lines of ants crawling up the wall. You go for a walk and listen to the cries of "Hey Joe!" from children and vendors and think Christ, isn't that from the second world war? And everywhere in Manila men with guns slung over the shoulder stand around on corners, lounge by the casino entrance and hold open the restaurant door as you enter. You lose your bearings quickly if you're not used to it.

I'm running out of time on the computer here. Remind me to tell you about my hike on the Taal Volcano Island, where my cameraman got sunstroke and four Filipino guys looked on in sympathy as I threw up in some bushes on a field of smoking lava vents. The torrential downpour afterwards really made it fun.

a fine-tuned PSA

I have no time to tell anyone about my adventures in the Philippines right now, but I'd like to inform The Lotus that her tunicky garment was on the futon in the living room when I left the house for the airport.

That is all.

up with Perseids

According to National Geographic, Thursday night witnesses a bright show from the Perseid meteor shower. A cloud of dust from the Swift-Tuttle comet will be flashing through the atmosphere and visible mostly over Europe and Asia. Around that time I will 40,000 feet above the Pacific speeding westward. I'll be spending the whole evening with my face stuck to a window to see what a meteor shower looks like at that altitude.

I'm a little worried about all the triffids booked on the flight, but I figure that as long as I keep one eye on them I'll be okay.

a good day for neologism (a bad day for neologists)

Without disclosing full details of its genesis, I will inform you that I've created a new word from handy preexisting ones, the better for semantic range and flexibility: sockbison, s. from OE socc "light slipper" & L. bison "wild ox": 1. rar. much as you would imagine, a species of pygmy American bison (tax. bison bisonum) accustomed to living in people's socks, where it is said to favour a warm moist environment - 1932 "It is imperative in the tropics to check one's shoes every morning for nesting sockbisons, as their hooves can deliver a crippling blow to the toes and ankles, to say nothing of their vigorous headbutt"; 2. obs. a sort of crude ordnance, reputedly derived from a Frankish sling-style weapon, employed in the War of the Roses - c1450 "A traitor shotte a Gonne, and this soccebison smot the good Earl of Salisbury"; 3. coll. male genitals - 2004 "My sockbison hurts from when you kicked it after I made up the word 'sockbison'".

I'm off to go hang around an active volcano in the Philippines for a week. The next thing you hear from me will be a tired grumbling from a hotel somewhere near LAX.

television criticism

Last week I succumbed to foul temptation and downloaded every extant episode of The Grid, TV's latest valiant attempt to explain geopolitics and terrorism to the masses. It's got just about everything a guy could want out of an hour of television: nice moody lighting, guns, nerve gas, the anaphylactic face of Julianna Margulies. A scene featuring a group of dead university students in London, with Ugg Boots and matching scarf-toque sets everywhere. And a bunch of bearded guys in the desert appearing as the senior council of Al-Qaeda! Let's hear it for the actors who agreed to play the leaders of the single best-known terrorist group in the world today. After that, I imagine they can look forward to a bit of typecasting.

I was hoping, as the luminescent and twitchy credits popped up, that The Grid would not be a combination of tinny exposition on global politics and sentimental harping on how America felt on 9-11. If God heard my wishes, he clearly answered them in the negative. Not a single scene goes by without a brief lesson on Islam, oil politics, Chechnyan independence, general Saudi cravenness, what have you. Unless the lesson is just how bad Americans felt when the planes hit the towers. Dylan McDermott (whose jawline continues to weird me out) incarnates the emotional shock of 9-11 as FBI agent Max Canary (get it? huh?). He wanders around the show in a daze of permanent mourning for his buddy Tim or Tom, having gone so far as marrying his widow and adopting their emotionally damaged son. In what is positively the worst scene of post 9-11 entertainment he grunts out the story of his friend's death in an interagency board meeting:

Canary: My friend died when the planes hit the towers. (Pauses)

Me: Oh, that's why his jaw is clenched like that.

Canary: He was just a guy in his way to work. (Pauses)

Me: Never mind, his jaw always looks like that.

Canary: He went up in the elevator... (Pauses)

Me: Please don't say that he didn't come back down.

Canary: ... He never came back down.

Me: Fuck.

Canary: They found his leg.

Me: His... what?

Canary: That's all that was left of him.

Me: No more, please.

Canary: They buried his leg.

Me: I wonder if they dressed it in a pantleg?

I'm parahprasing, but that's roughly how it went.

questions, answers, veracity

People who read my blog have been asking me questions lately, so it's only fair that people who write my blog (me) answer them. You're with me on that? Okay, let's proceed.

Palinode, did you really find a manuscript in the alley behind your building?

Why yes I did. I went out the next day to grab page 29, which has an excellent description of a gang of sunburnt bikers walking down a dusty street - surely to terrorize the inhabitants! - about to confront our hero. Does our hero, with ole' Broke Bike and Big Gun/Huge Revolver, know who these bikers are, with their dusty jeans and sunburnt noses? Will justice prevail, a twisted justice that makes a mockery of mercy? I dunno. I couldn't find page thirty. The entire alleyway had been cleaned up, the junk swept up, the stinking dumpsters emptied out, and the manuscript a dream.

Palinode, are there really women in your palace, as you claim, and do they truly bestow class?

Yes. You can see them here, diligently plotting out ways to make my palace even classier. Oh man, you should see my digs. So much class. Mahogany accents, indoor swimming pool, wet bar, you name it.

When's your next trip and where are you going?

On Tuesday I go to the Philippines for a week or so, then I'm going back to Australia for another week. I'll be back on the 31st of August, jet-lagged and freaked and exhausted, limp and translucent as a jellyfish. When I'm in the Philippines I'll mostly be in rural areas, so you won't be hearing much from me. Melbourne, though, is full of IBM-compatible personal computers, and no doubt some of them employ TCP/IP to transmit information all over the world.

stupid dirty monkey

Today was a complicated mixture of physical heights, scared children and the vague airy sense of leaking dignity. The truth is that I scare children between the ages of two and ten, and I have yet to figure out why. Infants and toddlers stare at me unceasingly and laugh when I wave or make faces back; I think it's because, with my shaved head, I look more like a gigantic infant than a proper adult. They see me and think: A-ha, he's one of us in disguise. He has access to all the cookies, he can reach all the doorknobs, he uses the regular drinking glass. Once they pass that stage, the amusement in their eyes turns to wariness. It occurs to them that maybe I've made a pact with unwholesome powers to walk among adults. Or perhaps the way I talk to children - that is, with the expectation that they're intelligent young minds who'll respond well to being addressed with respect - is fundamentally off, an aberrant expectation stemming from my lucky childhood. Whatever. Little kids get creeped out when I talk to them.

It's probably because these days I attach a microphone to their shirts first. Maybe that's got something to do with it. I want to go back to the States, where even the most slack-jawed homunculus knows what a camera is and how to respond to it. I swear, they imbibe so much television that apeing the language becomes a reflex for them. Cameras and mics function as eidetic triggers for streams of sentimental longings or paramilltary posturing. They like it when the sport's extreme and the paths of romance are lined with rose petals. Those kids live by a script and they have the decency to recite from it unashamed. When I talk to them I wonder where all the shame went. These kids, they really are free to be you and me.

Today's kids at the exhibition either didn't know the script or didn't want to play along. Instead they averted their eyes, responded in one-word bursts ("Monkey!" "Diving!"), nodded dumbly and pulled at the microphone. I felt defeated. So I harnessed myself to a high=dive tower sixty feet in the air and filmed a group of divers who dress up as five pirates and a monkey. They made the monkey walk the plank.

found: Arrival

This afternoon I found someone's manuscript scattered along the alley behind my apartment building. A few dozen pages lay on the ground, having peeled off from a ream of paper sticking out of a dumpster. The first one I noticed also happened to be the first page of the first chapter, engagingly titled "Arrival". After scanning the text I decided against collecting the rest of the manuscript, but I did pick up the first page and bring it home. Here it is.

Our hero came from over a hill in the east, just a small shadow rimmed in golden sunlight. The wind howled in his face and dust devils danced to and fro, blowing gritty, orange sand all about and whipping countless tumbleweeds across the vast desert floor. The old motorbike he pushed looked beaten and broken, the tires worn almost flat to the rims and the paint all but faded to a sickly rust-color. On the side of the tank the weathered imprint of an old insignia could be seen; beside it, a faded eagle-motif. The eagle was screaming, it's talons stretched out in front as if it were about to slice into the side of it's prey (sics on all the "it's").

Okay, that's our first paragraph. What have we gathered so far? The author certainly hasn't wasted time identifying the protagonist: some heroic biker with a (presumably) broken bike. Given the amount of space the author's devoting to the bike, I'm wondering if the damn thing isn't more important than the hero. Let's see: one sentence there with the hero as the subject, three sentences with multiple clauses fixated on the bike. We also know that the eagle depicted on the tank is highly unusual, in that it doesn't grab its prey with its talons so much as come in from the side and give the unsuspecting prey (gopher, rabbit, &c.) a good gash to the flank. Plus it screams on approach, which is counterproductive. When you consider that this hero is pushing a broken-looking bike through a windy desert with an endless supply of tumbleweeds and he doesn't even get more than one sentence, it's not surprising that he be represented by a screaming ill-angled eagle. Oh, we also find out that he's from the east, which always spells Christ-figure in big buzzing neon to me. Onward:

The machine matched his sandy brown leather jacket, it's left pocket bulging conspicuously where that huge revolver was holstered. How many long, lonely miles had the bike carried the man, and how many lives had the big gun ended so violently? He'd lost the answers to both questions many miles ago.

We know from the first paragraph that the bike figures prominently in the story, but it appears that the bike also has a left pocket with a "huge revolver/big gun" in it. I'd keep it in a holster on my body and not in a pocket on my motorcycle, but I'm not a hero with a jacket so cool it deserves three adjectives. The more I read this story, the more I'm thinking that it's a Western-biker Nutcracker Suite or Velveteen Rabbit, with bikes and jackets and huge revolvers/big guns as characters. Maybe the bike wants to be a real horse. Maybe the jacket wants some mink oil. Maybe the huge revolver/big gun wants to get holstered in a holster instead of a pocket. Let's see if the next paragraph tells us.

He doggedly rolled it across the desert clinging to a vague thread of hope that he would soon meet someone with the knowledge and parts to make it run again. But he hadn't seen a soul in almost three months.

What? Three months? No wonder the author's taken so long to focus on the main character. It's embarrassing, holding up some three-month's-lost loser as the hero of your piece. On the other hand, I have to hand it to the guy for his tenacity. And his jacket, which was probably stitched with threads that were not vague at all, but very specific.

He stopped on the hard shoulder and pegged up the bike. He untied the old drawstring satchel from the front. From that he pulled a silver thermos with a screw top. Inside were the few remaining drops of water he had so carefully rationed; they were minimal and unquenching, but they'd last him another day or so. The man tipped up his hat and let the few measly, unsatisfying beads land on his tongue. It would have to do.

If there were one lesson to be drawn from this paragraph, it's that water sucks. Minimal, unquenching, measly, unsatisying beads that will just have to do, that's what water is. We also learn that the hero has been pushing the bike along a road, and that he enjoys pegging his bike. Pegging is defined as the act of sodomy with a strap-on dildo. So even if the bike wanted to become a real horse it wouldn't make much difference. Also of interest: silver thermoses with screw tops may, under the correct circumstances, turn into hats.

His dark, upturned face baked in the ever-smiling sunlight. His dry, cracking leathery skin still ached from the wind storm the night before. He just shuddered to think about it Thinking about it made him shudder. The Great Desert was famous for it's horrendous tornados of dust and suffocating heat, and he'd narrowly escaped with his life,

Page two was not readily available. But how do you think that interrupted sentence ends? My best guesses:

futilely shooting his big gun at a furious tornado and wasting his precious deadly bullets.

desperately pegging his battered, weathered bike in a fond final farewell to the cruel world, only to find that the vicious killer storm had luckily passed him by.

doing everything possible except turning around and not bothering to cross the Great Desert in the first place, because with a name like that you pretty much know what to expect.

building himself a shelter out of adjectives and taking shelter inside from the whirling, screaming, suffocating, choking, inconsiderate tornado outside that almost seemed to wait for him personally for three harrowing scary days.

Tomorrow I'm going to see if the second page is hanging around somewhere. In the meantime I invite your best guesses on the ending of the last sentence.

the complex world of T-shirts

One of the last times I went shopping for clothes I ended up at the Tip Top in the benighted Cornwall Centre. The salesman was a tall guy with dark greasy hair and a stiff suit. After I tried on a couple of shirts and decided that both were just fine, he leaned forward (which, given our difference in height, meant that he actually leaned over me) and said, "How's your T-shirt situation?"

I was floored. I didn't know T-shirts got involved in situations. I didn't know the lives of T-shirts could ever be so rich as to warrant situations. I wanted to say: Buddy, my T-shirt situation is a disaster. The Stanfield V-Neck won't talk to the Gap XS Crew Neck, the old Motorhead shirt snuck into the underwear drawer, and my Zig-Zag T-shirt got arrested for smoking up in the park. I am a broken man on account of my willful polycotton blenders.

Instead I said: "My T-shirt situation?"

"Of course," he nodded. "For layering".

Oh right. Layering. Otherwise I'm a laughingstock, a fashion victim who couldn't even get it right at Tip Top. I bought two, both size small - after all, even if they're tight, I'm layering here - in reliable black and daring aquamarine. I hope the aquamarine gets along with the Motorhead.

the graduands

(click for full-size image)

the graduands IV

the graduands III

the graduands II

the graduands I

horrible backyard brutality

Here you may witness The Lotus, aka Schmutzie, about to maul with brutal force this helpless little cat. The cat's name is Jasper.