One Thing Becomes Another

‘Your problem,’ I said to my friend, ‘is that you live in a state of constant emergency.’

I said that to and about him a few months ago, a smart-arsed observation about his endless battles with unpaid bills, unauthorised overdrafts and problems at work, but it could apply to any victim of the information age. Everyone I know is acutely distracted.

I was lying in bed reading a book about someone trying to write a book about DH Lawrence when my mobile phone beeped. A text message! Conscious of the irony of being distracted from a book about endless distraction, I resolved to finish the page I was on before picking up my phone, but when I got to the end of the page I realised I hadn’t absorbed a word.

With a gun to my head, I couldn’t have told you what I had just read. What I had really been doing, of course, was thinking about the text message – who it was from, what the person wanted… all that. I knew it was unlikely to be a message announcing the return of the messiah, but the fact that it was unassimilated information, un-consumed media, was enough to dislodge my serenity.

My conscious effort to continue reading was over-ruled; my subconscious had declared a state of emergency. It speculated that the message was most likely to be from my sister, confirming our arrangements for tomorrow night, or my girlfriend telling me she was nearly home and could I put the kettle on? I hoped it wasn’t an automated message from O2.

There was nothing for it but to check the message. It wasn’t from O2. I thumbed a suitable response. I was free to return to my book with a sense of anti-climax. But now that I was upright, instead of returning to my book I felt compelled to wake my sleeping computer and click on the Mail icon.

The mail software showed me the usual unsolicited offerings of pharmaceutical products to help me sustain an erection, along with a few Facebook notifications, a personal email which demanded logistical considerations, and three job possibilities. While I clicked through these e-mails, I had iTunes shuffle dutifully through a playlist.

I was unsettled. Should I respond to these e-mails straight away, or flag them for future consideration? Obviously the latter; it was Sunday evening. I don’t like to consider complicated logistics or apply for jobs on Sunday evenings. On Sunday evenings I like to watch TV.

That reminded me – Top Gear was on. I went straight to it. Jeremy Clarkson made several references to Lady Chatterley’s Lover throughout the episode, making a lot out of the fact that ‘crisis’ was used in the book as a euphemism for orgasm.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was, of course, written by the same DH Lawrence that inspired the book I was distracted from reading by the phone, then the computer, then the TV, so the circle of distraction was complete.

———-

Get this: I happened to look up ‘Messiah’ in my computer’s dictionary. Look at the example in the second definition.

Jesus Christ!

Considering the Messiah is the promised deliverer of the Jewish nation, I cannot think of a more tasteless example of a less literal use of the word. Hats off to Apple’s Dictionary Corner.

A Gushing Tribute to Lise Myhre

I’m not Comic Book Guy. I don’t generally find myself drawn to comics, but there is one I simply love: Nemi. You can find her every day in the Metro, the free version of the Daily Mail that is given away in tube stations to London wage slaves.

The Metro is a strange home for Nemi. Metro headlines are easily confused with satire. Front pages are dominated by house prices, and their ever-changing correlation with drunken ladettes and the Brussels bureaucrats who want us to suck their regulated bananas. It’s shit, basically. It’s where the standard of journalism is so poor that Georgina Littlejohn (daughter of Richard) is a star attraction.

So what on earth is a clever subversive anti-establishment comic strip featuring a promiscuous, nihilistic Norwegian goth doing on the back pages? It’s a mystery I can’t solve, but I’m glad it happened. Life is considerably better with Nemi in it. I just took delivery of the second collection from Amazon… there’s a third one due. Here’s a couple of my favourites. If you like them, buy the new book.

Click on them to make them bigger, obviously.

And Finally

This just happened: It’s a warm and sunny morning in London, and I just spent an hour walking the dog in Primrose Hill. We threw and chased the ball, we lay around and stared at the sky, we played with a greyhound and one of us sniffed his butt. The breeze carried the delicious smell of cut grass, blossom and creosote. Everything was wonderful.

As we neared home, I overheard a couple of seconds of TV News through an open window. The exact words were, ‘And finally – preparing for a nuclear apocalypse.’

ANOTHER Hot Air Balloon?

So, I‘m 30 and 1/52nd. Nothing profound has happened. I have watched a lot of cricket, drunk a lot of tea and procrastinated whenever the opportunity to apply for a job has presented itself.

I have two worries. One, that I won’t get a job. Two, that I will get a job. Wimbledon is coming up, followed by the Ashes. It is possible that I will spend the whole summer watching other people exert themselves on my behalf.

Television. I’ve watched more in the last two weeks than in the previous two years, and I hereby state my hypothesis that at any given moment, something featuring Stephen Fry is being broadcast. Now, don’t get me wrong – I love Stephen Fry. I hate to think how impoverished I would be had I not saturated my brain with Blackadder, Jeeves & Wooster and A Bit of Fry & Laurie as a child. Yet, the sheer depth and breadth of Fry is astounding: Today, in two seperate programmes (one the passable comedy/drama Kingdom, the other a documentary of his journey across the United States) he was filmed in a hot air balloon. This almost seems allegorical, bless him.

Anyway. I’d almost always prefer hearing Fry Twitter on than reflect too deeply on the progress of the British National Party. I can only think this: If the BNP achieved their objectives, I would be very lonely.

Luckily for me, you’re never alone with computer games. Nas was kind enough to get me GTA: Chinatown Wars for my birthday, and I’ve found playing it very cathartic. I was on a train from Devon to London the other day, instead of allowing the dickishness of some of my fellow passengers to raise my blood pressure and ruin my journey, I flicked on the DS, committed a few carjackings, ran amok in a hospital and used a shoulder-to-air missile to efficiently remove a police helicopter from the sky. And the Daily Mail wants the game banned! Think how many real lives have been saved by the technology that allows us to indiscriminately slaughter digital people.

It does desensitize you to horrific violence, though. My answer to the question, ‘Would you like a cup of tea’ is often a variation of, ‘Yeah, wait a sec. I’ve just kidnapped some triads and locked them in the boot of the car I just stole from a hospital car park. Let me just dump them in the river and fire-bomb their parents’ mini-mart, then I’ll make a pot…’

Gotta go – QI’s just started.

Chai, Shankar, Covering Letter #1

Free will is bollocks. As a veteran of Asian travel, I am compelled to wander around the house in loose-fitting clothes listening to Ravi Shankar and drinking Indian-style Chai. This is sweet, milky tea with added spices such as cinnamon, ginger, peppercorn and cloves. This brew has been piquing my post-travel nostalgia almost as much as Geoff Dyer’s latest novel, ‘…Death in Varanasi’.

People keep asking me where my favourite place was, and I can only answer Varanasi – also known as Benares – the ancient Indian holy city on the Ganges. I wrote about it here, but my prose does not compare with Dyer’s. It’s a great book, all the sweeter for me having been to Varanasi, frustrated at being unable to describe it adequately.

Along with a refreshed reading list, my return to England is enhanced by all the new music I have to listen to. NOFX have a new album – Coaster – heavy on the comedy now that Dubya has been vanquished. Favourite line: ‘I wanna wake up without feeling sick, but I can’t cuz I’m a drug-abusin’ alcoholic.’

Therapy? have also returned with their 12th album. 12 albums! I’m so old, I disapprove of my own tattoos. They’ve been a bit hit-and-miss for a long time now, but this latest album, Crooked Timber, is a fine piece of work. The title is Kant: From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

Speaking of cynicism, I’ve been enjoying the political pantomime very much. All the moat-cleaning, duck island expenses are brilliant as entertainment, and also present the outside possibility that politics might clean itself up for a few years. We might also get electoral reform so that people’s votes might actually make a difference. I said ‘might’!

I wrote my CV. I kept it to one page, and I think it sells me well. It’s hard to tell empirically though, as I’ve only applied for one job, and they haven’t called me back yet. I feel like a jilted lover staring at an unringing phone. But we’re meant to be together!

Unemployment angst is greatly alleviated by the joy of catching up with friends. This is me and Alison doing the classic forearm skin colour test. She swears this is straight from the camera, no processing.

I gave up smoking nearly three weeks ago. It’s thumb-sucking for adults. I started smoking because a) Slash from Guns n’ Roses smoked, and b) It made me 40% more popular at school. Slash now has a pacemaker, and school is a distant memory, so smoking no longer serves any purpose. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going evangelical. I’ll always be there to help you roll. I had intended to stop smoking at the beginning of my trip to India, but failed five minutes into a journey on an Indian motorway.

Kids Can Be So Cruel!

“We Can? Thanks, Mom!”

I wish I could have seen myself emerge from St John’s Wood tube station the other morning, fresh off a plane from the tropics. It was raining. Grey skied. I was wearing linen trousers and a thin cotton shirt. And flip-flops. The cold air made me cough. People were openly laughing.

I did a good job of staying awake that first day until about 9pm. I watched ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ for the first time in my life. ‘Britain’s Got Problems’, my sister says. It’s organised cruelty towards psychiatrically unstable people. The best kind of modern entertainment! Hell, I even encouraged my sister-in-law to phote for the father/son Greek dancing outfit that I am pretending not to know the name of.

I do worry about the kids on that show. When I was eleven, one of my school-friends made an appearance on ‘Run the Risk’. Remember ‘Run the Risk’? It was one of those shows where kids ran around brightly-coloured obstacle courses – wearing helmets and elbow pads – which invariably ended with someone getting gunked. What constituted the gunk was never revealed, but to child’s eyes it looked like alien blood blended with whale blubber and mucus.

Anyway. When the contestants introduced themselves at the beginning of the broadcast, they had to yell into the camera their name, age, something they liked and something they didn’t like. My hapless friend managed to blurt out ‘I don’t like canoeing and I like Take That’. Subsequent school-life became rather difficult for him. At my school, people who learned the violin were held upside-down over the cesspit (actually the steps to the basement beneath one of the sports centres) and shaken until their pockets were empty.

Sticking your neck out is not advised until you reach the age of nineteen, in my opinion. I feel a cold sweat break out at the base of my spine when I imagine what might become of a kid who has appeared on prime-time television dancing topless with his dad.

It breaks my heart to say it, but had that kid from ‘Good Evans’ been at my school, he would have been systematically humiliated in front of the best-looking girls by the meanest boys in the playground morning and afternoon for at least two terms. We don’t like people who are good at stuff in England – we like them to be reassuringly shit at everything.

There should be private schools that BGT alumni can safely attend, funded by ITV, otherwise they will all be twitchy heroin addicts by the age of sixteen, their former talents beaten and humiliated out of them and their faith in humans annihilated.

Anyway. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been enjoying London as if seeing it for the first time. It’s sure is a great city. I’ve never fallen out of love with it, but I had certainly started to take it for granted. Damn, it is expensive, though. I need to start thinking about starting to think about looking for a job. But I have a barbecue to go to first.

And Then This Happened…

I got back from six months traveling in Asia and posted this picture on flickr yesterday. Mieke went to the conservatory of flowers in San Francisco and posted this picture on flickr yesterday. Freaky.

Singapore Slung

Question: Who wouldn’t love Singapore?
Answer: Gay drug-traffickers who like crossing roads at times of their own choosing.

Singapore is jokingly known as a ‘fine city’. This is because of the number of essentially harmless activities which lead to exorbitant fines. For instance, chewing gum is contraband. Drinking water on a train or crossing the road when the green man isn’t flashing will cost you heavily. Also, homosexuality is illegal. This troubled me until I saw a few hundred men congregated in a park, mincing around with pink balloons, megaphones and banners, without encountering police harassment. In practice it seems homosexuality is illegal in Singapore in the same way that marijuana is illegal in the UK.

I love Singapore. If Singapore was a public school and had a Latin motto, it would surely be Cleanius, Modernius, Efficius. There is no litter in Singapore. There is no antisocial behaviour. Everything runs like clockwork for the benefit of the average citizen. Most people seem to view the successive Governments as paternalistic rather than authoritarian, and are happy to concede a certain amount of personal liberty in return for a very high standard of living.

Food is the national obsession. Singapore has dozens of food courts, which are like shiny, gleaming shopping malls, but instead of GAP and Topshop, it’s Sushi stalls, noodle stalls, gourmet sausage stands, etc. You grab a table, and shovel down platters of mixed origin until you are fit to burst. It’s all so good that you can pretty much choose at random. We have been stuffing our faces, I tell ya. Meal-times don’t exist in Singapore. People who eat only three meals a day are considered unwell. A fat man is desperate to burst out of my skinny-as-a-rake figure.

It’s great to wash everything down with Singapore’s award-winning Tiger Beer after a couple of weeks in Malaysia, where alcohol is sometimes hard to come by. Speaking of alcohol, the ‘Singapore Sling’ was invented by a barman at the Raffles Hotel nearly a hundred years ago. We went there to drink an original. They cost 27 dollars each. I am too ashamed to tell you the price in sterling, but you can look it up on xe.com if you’re curious. We sipped slowly.

I also visited the largest book-shop in Asia. It sure wasn’t small. It could probably serve as an aircraft hangar should the need arise. I know I am prone to droning on about Vonnegut, and I’m sorry if my mentioning him yet again is tedious, but I have to mention – they had in stock multiple copies and different prints of every single Vonnegut title – all 25 of them. I picked up one of his later collections of essays and opened it at random. The first paragraph that caught my eye made me laugh so hard that adjacent customers began to regard me with alarm. It read:

I laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy, but there is something tragic in them somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world, and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed.
 
We went to the cinema to watch the Star Trek movie last night. I am neither a movie fan generally, nor a sci-fi fan specifically, but I really enjoyed it in spite of the inevitable presence of a hacking cougher behind me.

Yiddish humour insists that there are two types of schmuck, a schlemiel and a schlimazel. A schlemiel always spills his soup, while a schlimazel has soup spilled upon him. I am the latter schmuck. A hacking cougher is slightly preferable to a seat-kicker, but I’m always in front of one of the two. I do wonder about the so-called Law of Attraction, you know…

Anyway, good as the film was, it occurred to me later that although it felt like it had a happy ending, a happy ending was barely possible after the swift and successful holocaust of 8 BILLION intelligent, peaceful Vulcans. Still, at least Leonard Nimroy was ok. Sequel when?

Anyway. We’re popping – yes, popping – to Indonesia for three days, then back to Singapore for more mountains of food and pitchers of Tiger beer before flying back to London four days later. I’m looking forward to drinking some wine. I’ve had two glasses in six months, which is rather less than my usual two bottles per six days. I also can’t wait for reunions with beloved friends, family members, canines, decent clothes, guitars and Macbooks.

When I’m back I’ll do one post with the best photographs I took along with some commentary, link you to a comprehensive Flickr collection, write some general Asian travel tips for the numerous people who arrive here after typing travel-related search terns into Google and then draw a line under this whole Gogarty-esque debacle.

London friends, please keep the evening of the 6th of June free if you can – I’m turning 30 and will need assistance with the sorrow-drowning celebrating. There’s a Facebook Event coming up, assuming I can secure the services of a dog-sitter.

Selemat

I dreamt that I was giving Wayne Rooney guitar lessons. He wanted to learn Greensleeves, and I was taking him through it phrase by phrase. I remarked that some historians thought Henry VIII had written Greensleeves. He said that in Liverpool, to ‘Henry the 8th’ meant to put all of your weed into one bong.

Yeah, I’m blogging my dreams now. Blog paralysis. We spent a week and a half on Koh Lanta, where I had a great time with Islamic sea gypsies until our Thai visas ran out. I will write a lot about it, but not yet, and not here.

We fly back to London in three short weeks. We’re in Malaysia for the next two weeks. I’m a little underwhelmed by Malaysia, although I think this is mostly because it isn’t Thailand. I think I might have mentioned – I love Thailand.

Kuala Lumpur is a hectic city, and very hot. It’s never less than thirty degrees, which is great if you’re by the sea-side, not so great if you’re elbowing your way through Chinatown with heavy bags, tiredness and hunger.

I have to say that KL (as it is referred to by KL’ers) does a very good job of relieving the symptoms of tiredness and hunger. Our hotel was cheap and comfortable, and the choices of food on offer were astonishing as much for their tastiness as their prices. Satay is the Malay staple – sticks of barbecued meat marinated in sugary peanut sauce. The most I’ve eaten in one sitting was ten. Chinese food is everywhere – the only thing to get used to is that Chinese and Malay cuisine uses all parts of an animal, from lips to butt-cheeks. I must have held up my chopsticks and asked, ‘what the hell is THIS?’ a dozen times, never to receive a satisfactory answer. It’s usually tasty though.

Malay is a strange language. It uses the Roman alphabet, and is a bit like English gone wrong. Ticket counter? Tiket kaunter. Yes? Ya. My name is? Nama saya. You get the idea.

We’re in the charming old colonial town of Melaka now. We’re here for another night, then we head out to the Tioman islands to squeeze in a final few days of diving and snorkeling. Then we head home via Singapore, a few days after which I will be thirty, unemployed and living with my girlfriend’s parents.

Songkram

You may have seen the news – it’s really tense here in Thailand at the moment. The situation threatens to spiral out of control at the slightest provocation. People are lurking on every street corner with whatever weapons they can get their hands on. It saddens me to say this of my beloved Thailand, but even children – yes, children – are shooting each other indiscriminately. The Home Office has issued a warning to British people that they shouldn’t travel to Thailand unless armed with water pistols.

Yes, the Thai ‘Songkram’ festival began today, and it is typically celebrated with the reckless dissemination of water. Koh Phi Phi has turned into Water Fight Island. A water pistol is a must if you want to stand a chance of defending yourself against unprovoked attacks from slap-happy Thais. Loose affiliations are formed and broken; farang and Thais were united by a common purpose as we helped defend our guest-house from ice-bucket attacks.

—–

One of the biggest bummers about being human is that we’re never satisfied. A cup of tea is always better with a slice of toast. A slice of toast is always improved by melting some cheese on it. Melted cheddar is improved with a splash of Worcester sauce. I can’t think of a single activity, emotion or product that couldn’t be made better or worse with the addition or subtraction of something else. For example, while typing this sentence I am also listening to an iPod and half-watching a frankly bizarre Japanese cartoon on Thai TV.

What I mean to say is, it is very difficult to appreciate the present moment just as it is. Many of what should have been peak experiences in my life were completely lost on me at the time. Case in point: playing a gig to just shy of ten thousand people, supporting the Pogues in Dublin. I spent most of the gig trying to decide if the tastelessness of buying wine in a cardboard box can be forgiven if it is purchased to consume with your family over the Christmas period, when excessive consumption causes everything to taste of everything else anyway. It works the other way around, too – you often don’t realise how shitty a particular period was for you until it’s over. In my case, 2005. That year can fuck right off. Anyway.

I managed to appreciate a present moment earlier today. I was walking barefoot down a white sand beach into warm turquoise water under blue skies with the hot sun on my back, about to swim out to a coral reef, snorkel in hand, ready to harass some tropical fish. It suddenly struck me: Things could not be better. I actually said to myself, ‘This is a perfect moment – appreciate it!’

I trod on a sharp stone exactly a quarter of a second later and hurt my foot. There is nothing to learn from this.

—–

Blogging is difficult when you’re living a lifestyle of tropical minimalism. I eat, I sleep, I read, I swim. I’m in good shape; swimming and snorkelling every day does that. I can hold my breath for two minutes and do 50 press-ups, although probably not at the same time. I hope I won’t return to being a hopelessly lazy slob when I get back to England.

The only slightly unusual thing I did recently was to narrowly avoid contributing to a man’s death while getting a haircut. Maybe you’ve heard of Libet’s Half-Second Delay. I have a book on the subject, but it’s a couple of thousand miles away at the bottom of one of many cardboard boxes which my worldly possessions call home. From memory – and I hope I don’t misrepresent it – a scientist named Libet conducted a series of experiments in which he wired up a subject’s brain in such a way as to monitor its electrical activity. Having done this, he asked them to say ‘now’ and to raise their hand at a moment decided by them. The burst of electrical activity in the brain at the moment of saying ‘now’ is clear to see.

What was curious was, when the person said ‘now’ – the moment they articulated their conscious decision – the activity of the brain seemed to suggest it had already prepared the signals to the nerve endings in the subject’s hand about half a second before.

‘Well, it would’, was my first instinct when I first read of Libet’s Half-Second Delay. But half a second is a long time, longer than most people seemed to expect. This is a crude explanation of the experiment, and if you’ve read this far, you might like to look up a scientifically-worded account of the phenomenon. Not on Wikipedia!

I don’t think Libet himself ascribed any philosophical consequences for his experiment, but since then dozens of high-minded articles, academic papers and stoned conversations have been inspired by its apparently calamitous impact on the proponents of free will. Opponents to this idea point to the fact that Libet’s experiments also showed that a subject could over-rule their own decisions at the last moment. This is crucial to consider!

This experiment popped into my head not because I was sitting at the top of a mountain smoking Thailand’s finest and chanting ‘Om’, but because I was sitting idly in a barbershop waiting to get my hair cut. There was a Thai guy already in the chair, so I had to wait a long time. Thais are generally very careful about their appearance, and the hairdresser was scraping delicately around his ears, neck and eyes with a cut-throat razor.

My mind was blank. My eyes fell on a mosquito. It seemed to be taunting me, the little bastard. It paused in front of my nose, did a little figure-of-eight, used its wings to flap out ‘ner-ner ne ner-ner’ and came in for the sting. I rolled my neck, squinted, and raised my hands to take my vengeance on my insect tormentor with a resounding clap.

As my hands were hurtling towards each other and the mosquito, I had a sudden and vivid understanding of the consequences of a loud and sudden release of energy for my fellow customer. Namely, blood spurting from one or both of his carotid arteries, the shrieks of a hairdresser holding a bloodied razor blade providing a soundtrack. My brain sent my nerve endings a message meaning nothing other than ‘Abort! Abort!’, and my hands met silently. Manslaughter averted! The mosquito bit the palm of my hand and flew out the door.

—–

I wish my sub-conscious had made such an intervention when we walked into a travel agent’s shop on Koh Tao about a week ago and asked for tickets to Phuket. We took an overnight boat out of Koh Tao. We were loosely assigned berths on the starboard of the poop deck. I slept for about five minutes. When we reached dry land, we took a coach to Phuket. I slept for about five minutes. Then it took us two hours to find our hotel. It was a good hotel for many reasons, and worth the effort of finding, but is also the only positive thing I can find to say about Phuket. It’s full of fat old cunts buying themselves as much focky-focky as their grossly obese bodies can cope with. Every bar is dedicated to this commerce; every bar looks exactly the same: The Sweethearts Bar, The Love Bar, The Good Time Love You Longtime Bar, etc. We’d foolishly paid for three nights in advance. Not much else to say.

We’re currently on Koh Phi-Phi, which is lovely. We went to the beach where they filmed The Beach. If the beach could speak, it would say ‘leave me alone’. We should have done. Nas is doing some scuba diving. I’m not an enthusiast; I find all the equipment claustrophobic. I’m going rock-climbing instead. We’re going to Koh Lanta in a few days before heading to Malaysia.