US: The Trip

I started writing this thing at 30 thousand feet in the air, in a metal tube filled with coughing Frenchmen and air stewardesses who look like they’ve been on the receiving end of one too many self induced abortions in the toilet of a backstreet nightclub. The plane was farting its way across the Pacific to the US, where I was to pretend that I knew what I was doing on behalf of the company that employs me. I thought originally that this was a bullshit trip that was getting me out of the stale confines of my office, a break from staring at the same spreadsheets and awaiting the steady approach of death or retirement, whichever sweet release came first. On reflection, and after the meetings, I realise that no non lethal dose of amphetamines would have kept a person awake over the phone as we discussed the intimate details of the IT system we were developing. In short, the Charlie Sheen of a weekend in New York and subsequent nights in hotel bars and lavish restaurants have proven fruitful.

I shouldn’t have been here originally. It was a random, entirely arbitrary dissolution of responsibility that was thrown to me like a zoo keeper chucking peanut shavings at a chimp that gave me control of the system we are developing in the first place. This stroke of luck meant that given a little mild sycophancy, I was able to convince those holding the purse strings that a trip to North Carolina, via a weekend in New York was the only course of action which could be followed.

I would, given the choice, see minor testicular surgery as a better alternative than yet another week of my life spent in my office, so this was well received news. And this was before I heard that the equivalent of a naked Kelly Brook had fallen mouth first onto my erect penis in the form of a surprise upgrade to business class. My excitement was tangible when I checked in online at home and saw the airline had bestowed this luxury upon me. Tangible in a form which has no doubt become all too familiar to my computer, and the sponge which collects the protein filled damage.

I’m normally not a good traveller, especially when heading somewhere I want to be. It’s a hollow, wasted experience that must be endured to receive the prize at the end. The discomfort is agony, the endless monotony maddening, but above all I am invariably twitching and restless, like a crack addict awaiting a soothing hit of the pipe, desperate to start having fun.

This flight though, felt like a soothing cuddle, entombed in a giant, soft cleavage. The stewardesses, an affront as they are to the porn star looks you’d have thought would be required, did not look like were going to stop bringing me luxury food, and I as sure of shit was not going to give them any reason to stop, even if I had to throw up to get more in. And the wine. I tried each of the 6 on the menu and not being a wine snob by any stretch of the imagination, still felt the Bordeux made me believe in God.

To say the subsequent weekend in New York was surreal to my European normality is not doing it justice. My dog finds it surreally exciting when he’s accidentally fed by two people in the morning because the first wasn’t informed. This was like someone had handed me the keys to an unguarded Police lock up and told me the cameras were off.

Within a matter of hours, already in a dream like state induced by jet lag, wine and excitement, I was sitting in a studio dedicated to the filming of S&M porn. Each wall had a array of chains, the floor was coated in filth, scattered in abandon was a collection of butt plugs, impossibly busty mannequins, whips, metalled boots and, less sexy, cats that looked liked they had been living in a small cellar without cleaning facilities for the last decade. After enhancing our evening suitably in this weird, weird place we moved on to a relatively normal bar where drinks were being hurled with a fury and gusto that I think us in Europe believe we have a monopoly on.

The next day I peeled the crust off my eyes so that I could take in the area around me and try and determine where the fuck I was. After a good ten minutes of panic, I remembered I had flown to the US. Within minutes of this, I was scrapping off my equally crusted clothes and preparing to head back out to a party to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, weeks before the official date was due.

We arrived in Haboken, an area where college students go when being a college student is no longer feasible, but the life style is not something they are prepared to give up. Clapham in New Jersey essentially. We got there are midday and the casualties littered the streets like the Somme. Everywhere you looked there were moaning, barely functioning corpses, holding their wounded stomachs and revealing their pizza laden innards on the pavements. These bastards take this holiday fucking seriously I thought to myself.

And so it did transpire. We arrived at a house party, on the top floor of an apartment block, the entire residents of which were playing some sort of drinking game involving a ping pong ball, cups, but curiously, no Thai ladies. We were, at midday, considered and definitely appeared through straight walk, late arrivals. I was presented with a beer can penetrated with a key, and told to consume the whole thing immediately by holding my mouth to the hole, shaking the can and opening the can peel. This had the affect of presenting a group of lions with a fresh piece of Zebra. Walking out of the toilet at some point in this madness, holding my nostril in marked celebration, I was met with the sight of 15 policemen storming into the party in full uniform. It is with some relief that I am able to say I held my initial panic, and did not immediately chuck myself from the window. As it turned out, these cops, carrying musical instruments and doing random party performances, were part of what most Europeans would consider a desperate US celebration of Irish heritage, although probably a more accurate description would be, like in the UK, any excuse for having a beer at 9am. We are lucky to have a close identity with our own heritage, and should look as closely at our frowning on others lack of historical time as we do our own lack of ability to celebrate our own wealth of it.

The last memory I have is of stumbling into the fresh air outside a bar for a cigarette and immediately forgetting where I was. I tried desperately for the next few hours, I assume, to find where I had come out of, before coming to hours later back on the sofa that had supported me for the weekend and with the car that was to take me to work in imminent arrival.

Vince Cable spankathon

The prominent news story regarding Vince Cable’s admission to two young women journalists posing as constituents, that he is declaring jihad on the dark overlord of all that is unholy, Rupert Murdoch, has had me weeping uncontrollably into my cereal even more than one might reasonable expect of someone who voted Lib Dem in the last election.

That’s not to say I’m holding it particularly against him. He reminds me far too much of the kind of cuddly grandfather figure you’d find in bad 80’s sitcoms for me to be able to muster any kind of vitriol towards him. And let’s not forget, whilst the previous Labour government were feasting on the gushing jugular of cash being created from thin air by the banks during the pre crisis days, this was a man who was predicting exactly what was going to happen. He called it, and that, in my opinion at least, gives him the fully earned right to strut into the middle of the house of commons and expose himself to each of the benches in turn, so a moment of indiscretion should be taken lightly.

Yes, the boasts about being able to bring down the government are cringeful and if he genuinely believes that then he needs to be institutionalised immediately. But this was a guy talking to two, supposedly admiring young women. If in that position there’s not a man on the planet who would be able to resist embellishing and flourishing the details of his power and influence. Put in the same situation I would probably have revealed myself to be single handedly bringing Africa off it knees whilst rescuing frightened puppies in my spare time. I’d have almost certainly gone on to nod in the direction of my crotch before stretching my arms apart in the manner of an exaggerating fisherman.

So it’s not the man himself that has me longing for a bottle of whisky, locked room and a shotgun. Nor is it the substance of what he said. A war against Rupert Murdoch and fierce, unending and if necessary self-sacrificing opposition to his unchecked poisoning of the world, like a syphilitic ape pissing in the village well, is exactly what is needed. In a time when the newspapers are essentially vehicles of expression for those with quantities of money so staggering that it’s frankly impolite, the plurality of the media and the opinions expressed within it needs to be protected as staunchly as possible. And to me this applies especially when the opinions splattered onto the world like a wet fart are as knuckle draggingly ignorant and physically nauseating as those espoused by the nasty, racist and hate filled organs of Rupert Murdoch (and naturally, The Daily Mail).

It is the fact that the sting operation against Cable, which appears to have so spectacularly backfired on the Telegraph, has led to the final say in the Ofcom investigation being handed to the grasping, sweaty hands of Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt (of hilariously mispronounced surname fame). C/Hunt’s links to BSkyB, his un-minuted meetings with them and expensive dinners are all documented in an article on the link below, and it will come as no surprise when the decision is called in favour Murdoch’s empire. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/22/conservative-links-murdoch-private-meeting?INTCMP=SRCH

This will be far from a death blow to British media, who should be proud of the independence and fair minded approach of institutions like the BBC (doubly so because they piss off The Daily Mail). But it will certainly be a step in the wrong direction whilst aiding an organisation that uses it’s might to push an intolerant and ignorant agenda.

Swiss robbery

Forget the theft of gold or precious artwork from Holocaust victims, the biggest crime Switzerland has ever committed is the robbery, with malice aforethought, of my public holidays.

This country, this allegedly advanced and developed nation, deems it a perfectly ok notion to prise from your grasping, desperate hands any public holiday that happens, through absolutely no fault of your own, to fall on a Saturday or Sunday. Makes the bile rise in the back of your throat doesn’t it?

So this Christmas for instance, has suddenly become a mundane normality, falling as it does, exactly slap bang over a weekend, something normally considered a right you’d think of as natural as oxygen. The only difference will be a slightly worse residual Monday hangover. And probably an even greater sense of weighty, crushing depression than is usual for a Monday morning, as you realise that yet another year of wishing whole weeks of your life away in desperate search of the next nourishing, healing weekend looms ahead of you. Merry Christmas!

In light of this, the next few days of holiday seem more valuable than the last nugget of crack to the crackiest of prostitutes. The fact it’s for a wedding is an even greater incentive. I’ve only been to one wedding of friends, and although a brutal reminder of how we are all doing adult things these days, along with buying houses, having babies or ‘not making jokes about paedophiles’, they seem to be great fun.

Wasting time in boobless hypnotherapy

Anyone with the slightest glimmer of a brain cell, literally only the faintest twitch of a barely functioning intellect can see through pseudo scientific fuckery like astrology without having to think much beyond the startlingly obvious fact that people clearly can’t be boxed solidly into 12 neat categories that determines to a very specific level their personalities. It is just one more checked box in a long, long list that in its entirety reduces my opinion of humankind to somewhere between that you’d have of a paedophilic rapist knowingly carrying AIDS and a fleck of feces caught under the foreskin of a war criminal.

How in 2010 can this be a functioning, profitable and popular enough industry to be represented daily in the many national newspapers? I’m sure that in most cases it’s not the case that the people keeping this going are unaware of the fact that people conceived on the same day don’t all share the exact same destiny from the moment they are born, an apparently obvious fact that should, if the general public weren’t for the most part a retarded tribe of rampaging chimps, bring the whole charade crashing spectacularly into oblivion. But it doesn’t. Because they are. I think instead that the majority of those profiting, directly or indirectly, are well aware of the fact it’s about as credible as a politician a week before a general election telling you that he will make your girlfriend’s tits bigger if he gets your vote.

Astrology you could argue is a relatively harmless past time compared with say, people who take money off the recently bereaved by claiming to be able to communicate with their dead loved one. Which is basically, in a roundabout way, like saying that breaking into someone's house and taking their money from their wallet is ok, because you could have done it after slicing their throats and raping their spouse in front of them as they bled to death. In my eyes, it’s basically still theft by fraud.

I’m writing this not just because I’m a deeply bitter and angry person who needs to vent on a blog like a socially inept teenager with a barely concealed psychological disorder, but because recently I went to have hypnotherapy. This, I hasten to add, was done to aid my second serious attempt to quit smoking, as opposed to help with something weird, like repressed memories of a violent sexual assault by my scout master when I was 15. For instance.

As well as thinking that it might help, and I was willing to try pretty much anything after the full brutality and suddenness of finally understanding that my will power is not so much a power as a feeble, fleeting thought process that is immediately and overwhelming crushed by my desire for instant gratification, I was also curious about the whole hypnotherapy gig. I thought it might be interesting.

It was not. It was intensely and utterly boring. I would have rather been watching an England friendly, it was that bad.

My immediate feelings weren’t actively discouraged by the fact that the hypnotherapist was a not unattractive woman. In the long run I’m not sure if this actively went some way to preventing my fully immersing myself in the experience, things were onto a downer as soon as I realised I would not be asked to slip into a deep hypnotic slumber by staring at the rhythmic jiggling of her massive sweater puppies. Instead I was expected to listen to her talk, slowly, in a thick German accent trying to tell me I was feeling sleepy and my eyes were feeling heavy. I wasn’t, and they weren’t, but I closed my eyes out of politeness. I literally conned her into thinking that my hundred pounds for her work wasn’t being wasted. Idiot.

Things continued like this for a while. I lay there and she told me to believe I was on a field. What sort of field I thought? Immediately I thought of a park where we used to play football when we were young. Our generation, along with those before and after us in the area have consistently referred to this place as ‘Dog Shit Park’ and a less relaxing environment you could not imagine. Be it the massive motorway running alongside it, the psychotic local hooligans that frequented its benches to smoke and drink cheap cider, or the frankly illogical amounts of excreted dog food that blended seamlessly into the mud and bare patches of brown grass, it is not the place that one would wish to lie in and slip into a state of sleep. You’d be mugged in a second.

At first I blamed myself for my inability to be succumbed by the power of her suggestion. God that sounds dirty doesn’t it? I thought I was doing it wrong, or that I was over analysing things in my head. It was only afterwards that I thought to read up a bit about the subject. Which, on reflection, is a bit like a man who’s never seen a bicycle, reading up about them after spending a lot of money on two tennis balls connected by a lollipop stick.

As it turns out, there is absolutely fuck all evidence that hypnotherapy actually works, and by evidence, I mean real evidence, as opposed to the kind of evidence that religious people use to convince themselves that a virgin woman gave birth after being convinced to eat a piece of fruit from a magical tree by a talking snake. It seems that what is going on, as far as can be determined, is a mixture of exactly what I was feeling, namely an unwillingness to offend the hypnotist by standing up and telling them that jack shit is happening and that clearly they are either abject failures at their professions or the industry they have dedicated their lives to is as valuable to society as a sugar pill, and what is called ‘the dodo effect’. This refers to the placebo element of someone believing in the power of the ‘treatment’ they are receiving along with the person delivering the ‘treatment’. Under these conditions you could, in all seriousness, have someone spanked with the corpse of a heron while reciting the script of the second series of Cheers and they would be more likely to recover from whatever mental illness was being worked on, than if they did nothing.

In short, how fucking weird are we?

Bestival 2010

Shitty weather, astronomically priced cider and fifty thousand people so fucked they can no longer think, this is what British festivals are all about. And so it was this year at the smugly named Bestival on the Isle of Wight. Presumably the locals are used to the annual invasion by now, but it must still come as something of a shock to the elderly residents, who’s quiet, quaint little island is brutalised like in the time of the Vikings.

The attendance this year was increased to fifty thousand from thirty five, which resulted in the camp site looking and feeling more like a refugee crisis zone than somewhere people have paid to stay. Space between tents was non existent so laying awake at night you would become intimately involved in the sketchy, bullshit conversations going on next door. It also meant that navigating your way through the mire of pegs and ropes was like a pissed version of the crystal maze. That I didn’t fall through one of the things onto someone and get accused of attempted rape was itself a miracle.

The music was great, but was probably secondary to the fact that we could legitimately wake up and immediately start getting hammered. The frantic intoxication added to the surreal nature of the whole event, with bikini wearing girls on stilts, giant robotic spiders spouting fire and thousands of strange costumes not helping. On the first morning on the way to the already hellish toilets I saw a midget in a clown costume vomiting onto a fence. I had to stop and think long and hard about what I was seeing.

The first day went as expected, with everyone getting too excited and over exerting ourselves a tad. By which I mean I entirely lost my grip on reality and failed to sleep. Returning to the tent in the early hours I attempted to join a circle of neighbours, but ended up staring at them in silence, occasionally blurting out something that had absolutely no relevance to the conversation. The next day, running on fumes, I had to take it fairly easy so stopped partying around 2am after a quiet day of comparatively minimal, but varied, narcotic abuse.

Best act of the festival, up against contenders like Dizzy Rascal, Hot Chip, The Prodigy, and Rolf Harris, were four blokes wearing cricket outfits doing covers with ukuleles.

After four days I was ready to go, having had about as much fun as is physically and chemically possible. With washing having consisted of a wet wipe, and having collecting grime, sweat and blood in serious quantities, the bath I took once home looked like the BP oil spill, but was a screaming relief after dancing in mud like a tit non stop for the majority of the time. It did take some time to adjust to using a proper toilet again though, instead of just pissing where ever I stood.

London, SW4

Once again the bank holiday weekend has chewed me up and spat me into an oblivion of regret. Landing back in London on the Friday, already carrying a hangover like a soldier carrying the bloody corpse of a best friend, I was immediately sucked into a lifestyle that whilst I miss with every fibre of my being, would have left me either dead or a pair of sunken eyeballs sitting defeatedly in amongst a vaguely human shaped mess of rotting, yellowing flesh years ago.

Comparing the drinking cultures of Londoners and the Swiss is like comparing a tennis shoe to an exclamation mark. If you put the two next to each other it wouldn’t be so much a case of unrecognition as it would be an inability to register each other, like alien worlds that develop a certain form of perception, they just wouldn’t even know the other was even there.

Working in London city, alcohol is treated with roughly the same importance as oxygen. There was a bar in the office and the beer was free. Thursdays are the office drinking days, regardless of family and other such irrelevances. On my first day in the office in Switzerland, in a local restaurant, I asked for a small glass of wine at my welcome lunch. I may as well have grabbed the waitress and raped her on the table, slapping her arse whilst screaming the national anthem for the reaction the request got.

South West Four festival was on Clapham Common over the weekend, and it reveals the drug culture of the place like a flare gun in a bat cave. Clapham is basically a place where university students go to die in their current form and grow up into the surface level, tenuously respectable grown ups we all fear we’ll become when in our teens. Suddenly though, at this time of the year, at around 11am every single late twenty something stumbles into local bars and inhales cocaine, booze and ecstasy with a ferocious enthusiasm. Every trip to the bar for another round of drinks means another two or three best friends, as people turn and ask if you are off to the festival, which your planet sized pupils and twitching, eager smile would have already revealed to every sober person on the planet. And then you fall into a conversation which concurrently covers both your upbringings and the last 5 years of life, before, a minute and a half later, the drinks arrive and you leave your new soul mate to return to the group, who will now be in a conversation a world away from the one that was being shoveled out when you volunteered the round.

The festival itself is an awesomely confusing mess of mud, filthy techno, fairground rides and non sensical chat. The hours go by as seconds, and before you know it it’s all over; and you are sitting in a near by pub talking with passion about the importance of chair legs.

School boy humour

Shut down the humour workshops, close the satire magazines and fire all the stand ups. The absolute pinnacle and utter zenith of all comedy has been reached and it happened last night when the global spotlight fell on a football team called Young Boys who play at a stadium called the Wankdorf.

The world will now surely be darker place from here on in. Sure, we'll still be able to see guys getting hit in the balls by their children on You've Been Framed, and we may even manage to raise the odd smirk at the sight of a monkey masturbating on an internet link your colleague has sent you, but at the back of all our minds we'll have the heavy resignation that sexual innuendo about pre-pubescent boys thrown into football commentary has now been done and will never be bettered.

I was lucky enough to attend the game, taking place near the Swiss capital of Berne, in a little place called Wankdorf, in the Wankdorf stadium. I knew Wankdorf existed of course, but have, for a reason that I cannot begin to understand, never actually visited Wankdorf. If you'd have told me I would one day live within two hours train journey of a place called Wankdorf, I would reply that surely if that were to be the case then I would have no choice but to actually move into Wankdorf itself. I would take fresh pictures of the train station sign everyday, and begin to send postal letters regularly just so I could sign each letter 'in case of non delivery, please return to Wankdorf'.

The game itself was a blur of talk about being tight at the back, playing with spunk and keeping clean sheets. Afterwards I collapsed, a deflated and exhausted wreck. I think the football was supposed to have been pretty decent too.

The point I think I'm making here, as the lithium starts to kick in, is that to laugh at such things is not necessarily an indication that you have a ready built Friztel cellar in which you keep a selection of boy scouts for each occasion. The British press, reporting on the game, were the worst of all offenders, with a lot of the headlines feasting on the opportunity like a bulimic after a particularly cutting insult. But perhaps most of all, it's comforting to know that so many others sense of humour has evidently also stopped developing around the same time they starting crapping in a toilet.

Apparently in some cases, now that I am growing old and embittered, such jokes are 'inappropriate'. I strongly suspect that I'm not the only person who sometimes feels like the have woken up a decade or so after school, in an adult world in which they don't truly belong. I can do my job ok, even occasionally without the sort of incompetence that could bring the company crashing into oblivion in a heartbeat, but I am sometimes struck by a belief that at any moment someone will come around the corner, drag me out of my office and tell me that the game is up, this job isn't for someone who still secretly laughs at his own farts.

It was a relief therefore to see that this game with the unfortunately named Swiss team, seemed to reveal a similar outlook in humour from most people. And if you don't agree? Well you can address your letter of complaint to Mr A. Hole, Around the Corner and Up my Bum Street.