When I moved here, I sold everything. Right before I left my rent was paid by eBay and a garage sales. I would sell a shelf load of my books to the used book store and it would be enough to feed me for a week. When gainfully employed with a salary, crap seems to accumulate in one's abode like dust. Books, bizarre cooking contraptions, useless electronic gadgets. It was a nice feeling to just clear it out and leave it all behind. The only thing brought over to this isle was my clothes. Since then, I have tried to live a more ascetic life. I hesitate to buy those tempting tidbits. Not out of any deep moral conviction. I'd love to clutter my life with crap once again if only to experience the sensation of getting rid of it once again. No, mainly it is because my remaining here is tenuous. Someone has drawn imaginary lines and since my birth took place outside of those lines I do not have any claim to remain. So, I have avoided major purchases for this reason. Lately, it has been different. I have been buying little comforts. Unconciously nesting in the hope that I can stay. Nothing extravagent, but just little things which seem to be telling myself, "Yeah. let's stay for a bit." fingers crossed.

never talk to (well dressed) strangers

He listened to the soothing tones of the man’s voice. The untucked tails of a foreign accent occasionally peaked out from underneath his perfectly arranged and intonated speech.
He was lulled into a meditative peace despite the menace with which the man’s words were now imbued. Unblinking, He starred at the man’s shoulder. He could see the kinks of stray fibres upon his wool coat. He looked at the thin stubble sprouting from the jaw and neck. The tiny speck of a flea crawled along the line of the jaw. Occasionally, it would disappear from sight with a hop reappearing a moment or two later back upon the jaw. Then. Nothing. A gold and electric green flash. Then black. He could feel his body being roughly shifted and searched. A dull kick which would certainly hurt more when he returned to consciousness by the pokes and prods of two policeman taking him for a drunk.

This is beautiful. I would love to have Amanda's rendition of the kidney framed on my wall. I'm a big fan of Basquiat and Dubuffet but there is always a self-consciousness that can't be avoided. Children never seem to have that problem even when reproducing techincal drawings. love it.

Are there cobblers in America? Along the road I live cobblers are sprinkled liberally about. They usually have a secondary trade such as making keys and/or selling cheap gold watches. I have taken their existence for granted. All cities have little old men in cobbler shops. Do they? That is the question that came to my mind yesterday. I have noticed already I am unable to answer the 'How do they say it in America?' questions, and I say things like 'cheers' and 'wee'. I don't purposefully ape british speech and expression. It is just an unconcious human tendency to assimilate. I was in New York in July and asked a secruity gaurd where the 'lift' was! I could only imagine what his opinion was of the pompous twit asking where the life was in his thick american accent. So, now when someone asks me how I would pronounce something or what is the 'american' word for that. I cannot answer as quickly as I once did. It is the same for America in general. I can't remember the everyday details I once took for granted because I grew up in America or because I now see them everyday on my way to work. It is an odd state of mind that brings up even odder questions such as "Are there cobblers in America?"

"I don't believe in reincarnation," the small girl began the conversation as she sat down with our drinks then continued, "but sometimes I think I was once a fuedal lord. A real fat disgusting lump of a man. My hair is balding at the top but is long and wirey with strands a grey running through it. I imagine myself eating whole legs of game. My fingers and beard are wet with grease fat. I imagine my husband is there too but he's a very plain and mousy wench but he has a fantastic set of tits. I'll order him to bring me a drink and when he draws close I put my hands between his cleavage and slap his breasts around like two dangling wine skins. Sometimes, when we are sitting on the couch watching telly. I'll lean over and slap around his imaginary breasts. He hates that." Most of the time I can contribute to the conversation with an anecdote of my own. This time I was caught short.

Gluwein season is here. Hurrah! I got moderately drunk beneath a cold clear sky this weekend. I was supposed to be working on a presentation for Friday (which is now tomorrow and I am still not done). Instead, I decided to wander. This is how I discovered the gluwein kiosk run by a very Bavarian looking woman with a Yorkshire accent playing Um-pah music. It was part of an international festival which was predominately French baked goods and Dutch tulips. I sat there with a friend for most of the day trading office gossip (Did you hear? S. told D. that she wasn’t going to speak to M. because he is black and voted republican.) Afterwards, we continued at a pub and then back at the flat. Not a bad day of procrastination. Now, I am typing the story to procrastinate further. I have managed to write a pirate joke into the presentation.

Q: What is a pirate’s favourite type of dialogue?
A: Aaarrrgumenation.

Can you see why I am procrastinating?

Enlightenment was a disappointment to Jonathan. It came early one morning upon his awakening. The solutions to all of life’s mysteries lay before his mind’s eye like a child’s drawing. It seemed simple, poorly constructed, and irrelevant to his life as a mortal, although, that morning’s first cup of coffee and every cup since has been an indescribable sensual pleasure.

Apparently, it is pronounced "Albeeno".

Winter has arrived wearing gale winds that pull the breath from you and put an ache in your fingers. This year I am not willing to play along with winter's shenanigans. I am stubbornly refusing to add layers to my wardrobe. Yet, this morning the weather's tactic of attrition is being to show results. Undershirt, long sleeve shirt, and military surplus wool sweater. BUT, I refuse to wear gloves or long johns until November, damnit! Right now it is taunting this declaration by slapping hard against the window and shoving clouds around like billiard balls.

When confronted with the thousand years of western civilisation that is found in continental Europe, a colonial like myself can develop a culture inferiority complex until one hears Euro-pop music which immediately remedies the affliction. This thought popped into my head as I ignored the drunken ramblings of my companion. He is currently performing a litany about the emptiness of American culture. I then muse about his reaction to my lighting a cocktail napkin and throwing it into his lap. I believe this to be the only appropriate response when one is presented with this sort of nonsense.

I am reading "The Secret Life of Dali". It is fantastic. It is a shame that he's become a parody of himself and his art is now nothing more than coffee mug and mouse pad decorations. He writes but describes things in terms of painting. Words are an ungainly medium for communicating anything of worth. To completely capture some filiment of thought with the ackward tool of language is a rare event. That is why when some one has expressed perfectly something I have been trying to formulate it becomes pointless to attempt repetition. In this book Dali has done it twice. Everytime he speaks of his wife he expresses love sublime perfectly. Dali can be forgiven for his sins for the devotion and adoration of the woman, Gala. I have just read the second time, he has expressed a thought that has occured to me but never been able to express.

"Throughout my life it has in fact been very difficult for me to get used to the disconcerting and flabbergasting "normality" of the beings who surround me and who people the world. I always say to myself, "Nothing of what might happen ever happens!"
...
I cannot understand why man should be capable of so little fantasy. I cannot understand why bus drivers should not have a desire once in a while to crash into a five-and-ten-cent store window and catch a few toys on the fly for their wives, and amuse the children who happened to be around."

I am nomadic by nature. Given three years in one location and I get restless. I begin to look at maps and atlases at the breakfast table looking at the dots that represent cities I have never visited. As a consequence there is no dot on any map that I can point to and say, “home”. I am regularly asked, “Where are you from?” To which I reply that is a difficult question to answer and then I list the several places I lived in growing up. I regularly return to the city that I spent most of my memorable childhood. I am never draw back by nostalgia or pining but to visit my mother who still lives there. This city in which I live can almost be considered an exception. I doubt I’ll ever be able to call it home (mainly because I am constantly reminded I belong somewhere else. “Where are you from?”) When I disembark from the plane and I hear that beautiful, sometimes incomprehensible, Scottish accent busy in everyday meaningless chatter, I feel I have returned to something safe and familiar. I could stay another three years easily.

I have just returned from my adventures in Germany. So many things to mention, to describe, and to ponder. In due time I will make these but it is my first day in the office, I am feeling the unusual sensation of initiative and will try to make the most of it. So, just a little post.

Berlin is an incredible city. So much art. Big wide streets. Street art scattered like confetti. So much of recent western civilisation has occured among these blocks. The decimated corpse of an ancient cathedral testifies to the consequences of world war. A strip of pavement demarcates where one ideaology was seperated by another. It used to be a wall. A very famous wall which most germans step over with out a glance or thought. Why should they? They lived here it was just a wall to them, to us tourists it was a far more frightening abstraction. Now, in this city which is familiar with the ways of walls and their purpose of keeping one seperated from another has a new wall. This one is much smaller than the earlier incarnation. This one surrounds a square block of city which contains in the middle an ordinary building which just happens to have a bald eagle emblem and an American flag. When I saw the huge concrete fortifications blocking the road, I first thought it was a recreation of Checkpoint Charlie for the benefit of the tourists. The men and women standing gaurd were not in period uniforms. They were modern day police. You are allowed to approach the building by foot which I did to the consernations of my companion (Germans in uniform still make her nervous). At every street corner there were two police. The building was dwarfed by the security measures. It made me incredibly sad. After visiting sites like the remains of the Berlin wall and a concentration camp to see yet another barrier. Whether made to keep people in or keep them out, there is no denying that walls in Germany mean sadness for me.

Ladies and Gentleman! I have arrived. I am now the number two result for the google search on Rasputin's genitals. I love looking at how people find my blog. Where is google.ca? Canada? It's too early to blame cabin fever for searching rasputin's genitals.

Watched a woman savoring a chocolate muffin. She stood in the street lost to the world with an expression of ecstacy.

Last week I went to see this man. It is a rare occasion that the individual responsible for the music I enjoy is still alive. So, I paid the ridiculous amount for the tickets. I haven’t been to a live show in quite awhile. Years ago, there wasn’t a week I didn’t wake with clothes that smelt of cigarettes and spilt dollar beer, but I have become much more discriminating these days.
The opening bands were hit and miss. I enjoyed the skiffle band from Hull. The toes tapped. The head bounced. Occasionally, I knew the words to some of the old standards and I sang happily sang along. The next band sounded like one of those ‘Celtic waves’ CDs. You know the ones where they show rolling green hills dotted with sheep and convivial pub gatherings and if you buy now they will throw in a ‘kiss me I’m Irish’ button. I used the opportunity to queue up for a drink or two.
Then came Shane. It seems silly to point out that he was extremely inebriated. This is a man whose teeth have all rotted out of his head due to his predilection towards schnapps and Irish Crème (which, by the way, is nothing but sweetened condensed milk and whiskey. Beurk!). He was wobbly on his feet and grinning the mad toothless grin of a professional drunk. He not only sang off key but also sang to a different tempo. He was a mess, but the crowd was just relieved that he showed up. Song number two started with him no less drunk but a switch had been flipped. He was in perfect form. His cracked mumbling voice sang all the sadness and revelry that make me love the music so much. I sang along. Danced. Got tossed around with the aimless shifts of the crowd. One of the moments of perfection occurred, where time ceases, reflective thought ceases to ruin your enjoyment, and a person is completely in the moment. It is rare event but it is sublime. To think it all occurred during a gig of a drunken Irishman singing simple songs while one is being tussled, showered with beer, and abusing one’s hearing.
The bus ride home was fun. The other punters filled the cabin with stamping feet and choruses. Everyone sang along and chattered about the great show. “chust sublime” everyone agreed.

I wake up late today, my radio alarm clock goes off and BBC news whispers into my ear. "Wake up sleepy head, there is death, and sadness, and the world is unfair." I as extremely slow to rise this morning due to wrestling with a bout of pointless insomnia last night. The alram clock recognises this and shoves in my ear a report from Iraq (A place currently rife with death, sadness, and unfairness) which it knew would get me out of bed in a hurry. I listen to the report. What the fuck! A kid is blinded, maimed and his brother dies in the process. Sure that's sad. boohoo. a little tear on your way out. BUT, your concerns of whether your editor recognises all your hard work in the face of danger or whether you make it to the front page. That's the real news. double fuck you lady! You are a tourist.
Maybe, just maybe. It's that sort of self-centered self-righteous mind set that keeps pissing off the rest of the world. The 'West' has been blessed with this unprecinted personal liberty and most of us fritter it away watching Big Brother or following cult-like diet regimes. Crying and moaning about how fucking tough we have it. No wonder fanatics want to toss bombs at our children. We are obviously oblivious to everyone's suffering but our own. Yeah. I'm fucking up now and I switch off the radio alarm.

Exhausted from the constant pleading for attention that is currently rife through this town as the untalented resort to varying degrees of nudity and shades of hair colour to placate their insatiable desire to more unique than the other five thousand people in their underoos and hair dye handing out flyers, I have sought refuge in the gardens below the castle. It was there that I met a true modern day sage. A man whose wisdom is tangled, nay, woven amongst the food particles and plant detritus of his beard. It would have been easy to mistake him for the other homeless person who is constantly spitting at me from his rotten toothless face nutritional advice1, but this gentleman was uniformed as one of her majesty’s grounds keeper. A blue coverall. He sat beside me at a friendly distance. Eventually we started chatting and I’ll try to recreate the most interesting portions of the dialogue.
“Where you from?” he asked. Fair enough. It’s a tourist town and my accent is indeed a muddled and bizarre one these days.
“I live here.”
“What are you doing in this hole then?”
“Hole?”
“Aye. Look at this shit. Green lawns. Green leaves. Fucking flowers.”
I chuckle at his joke. “What’s wrong with the flowers.”
“They’re cunts.” I understand that to many that particular word can be grating and probably exists high on one's naughty word list, but living here one becomes immune to its shock. Now, I can only laugh. In this part of the country, they pronounce this phrase from their bellies. The ‘c’ is thrown out with great force and velocity and the ‘u’ forces their jaws open to allow its bulky mass to pass the lips. I can never help smiling when I hear the phrase but it was particularly humorous given the current context. “I’m not joking. They’re cunts. The lot of them.” Every morning I piss on that bunch of thistles. Those over there. Where the Orientals are taking pictures. Aye. There. And look at them. They’re the biggest of the lot. They do it to spite me. The cunts. As soon as they fade. Chop. Chop.” He smiled and mimed the motion.
“I hate plants.” He concluded in an almost defeated tone.
My first instinct was to politely nod and agree but the urge to say something quickly rose to my throat. “But your job. You’re working…”
“Aye. I know. Everyday I’m surrounded by plants. Fucking Gorse. Fucking Grass. And Faaaaking Thistles. But you know what. It keeps me going. I’m sixty-three and I’m still fit. Because everyday, I come here and keep those bastards in line.” He punctuated the last sentence by slapping at the foliage behind our bench like he was scolding a naughty child.
The conversation only got stranger. The gist of it was that it is exactly because he hated nature that he made a good gardener. Maybe that is what I am missing from my daily life. Good ole’ antagonism. Something to define myself against. Countries do it all the time. Hell. Countries are doing it right now. When the shit hits the national fan. Leaders point to someone else as the monkey who threw the shit. I suppose that is why America is such a popular target for foreign governments to distract their populaces from more domestic issues. Because, ladies and gentleman never in our history has a monkey thrown so much shit.

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1) Dear reader. I shit you not. This guy doesn't take a hint and for some reason, maybe I look malnourished, he is always singling me out to give me recipes and soliciting a place to stay for the evening.

Wow. We've had a thick haar for the past three days. I haven't seen past the first floor windows of any buildings this week. Street noises seem strangely disembodied. You can smell the saltiness and sea air wrapped inside the fibrous fog that has settled into every nook and cranny of the town. I should use this time to explore but I have work that must be ignored and that is best done at my desk.

It is festival time in our fair metropolis. Overall, this is a great time of year. The weather is usually tame and the constant activity tempers any lethargy one may feel. I have been out a few times. The shows are too expensive, but freebees can be found. The other night I went to a pub playing folk music. If you've seen any john wayne irish films you'll know the scene. Drunks around a table all playing instruments while other instrumentless drunks nod and sing along. It is a very pleasant atmosphere, but this is festival time. So, of course, I had a whole family of performers for some show trying to shake me down to buy tickets. At first I was very pleasant. Saying I would not be able to go, but their constant insistance required me to bluntly tell them unless they are passing out free tickets they might as well take their flyer back. Shame too. It looked like an interesting show, but once again too damn expensive. My understanding is that the venues charge so much that the tickets have to be that much. Today I bought some tickets for a band, "Flight of the Conchords". Right now tickets are almost reasonable with a two for one deal. The next few days will be a mad rush to see the shows before they go up to tourist prices. While I was waiting to buy tickets, several people walked by carrying five foot toothbrushes. This is what I really like about festival. I am much happier at a pub and when the booth next to me is occupied by two men in swan costumes talking about scoring with chicks. I am at peace when the world visually confirms to me its absurdity rather than its usual and more subtle manifestations. The festival can also have its drawbacks. I have already mentioned how pushy the show barkers can be. By the end of august, your pockets are filled with flyers. You can't talk to strangers for fear of a thirty minute sales pitch on their play about Rasputin's genitals. This bit troubles me an extra measure. Artists in any medium hold a very high position in my esteem, but during this tradeshow they call the festival I can have no illusion that their business is a business like any other. They have a product to move. It can be disheartening for a layman such as myself that perceive these people as pursuing a trade more noble than mine. My advice to anyone is never meet any of your idols. I have met two of mine and was disappointed on both accounts. A lesser nuisance is the sheer volume of mediocracy. Last night, I was at a show. I walked in and the musician was singing, "Let's invade Latvia". I was instantly excited. Yes. Lets! Everyone knows how smug those latvians are. Alas, I misunderstood the lyrics. He was singing about all night until the morning light or some crap like that. Ah well, Maybe someday someone will put those damn latvians in their place