Tinfoil on the Windows

OK, emailed a nice letter to the lady in charge of Epicure (I think). Fingers crossed they go for the Tallinn thing. Daddy needs new shoes. Or the equivalent thereof. (ie. to not work a straight job.)

In a bar in the city, doing what I can to find markets for what I've written while away. I figure anything that saws the legs off however much time I need to put in pretending to be some guy in a suit the better for all concerned.

My roots are showing. The last time I dyed my hair I was sitting on the lip of a bathtub in a motel in Oxford, Mississippi, and April was the one doing it. We got it from a Walgreens. The same place that wouldn't sell us liquor on a Sunday.

Every day in this town hinges on booting myself out the door before gloom-of-stasis kicks in. I think Fateless and everything it steeped in did this. Years of sitting on my arse, trusting everything would work out, sucking it up, while the world passed me by. When all I'd ever really wanted to do was delete 9/10ths of my crap and hit the road. Or, at the very least, have a life that wasn't being undermined.

For now I'm equal parts joy and rage, the blending of which becomes sorrow if it settles. What I can't work out is if this is who I am now, or have always been.

One thing I like about travellers: you meet up, and straight off there's a sense of belonging. Everyone's got stories, advice, recommendations, warnings, tips, jokes. It's the great opener. There's a Couchsurfing meet that happens once a month at a pub on Brunswick Street. I need to get myself there.

Caught up with Alex. Some of the best conversation I've had in ages. Film, art, the way the structure of good art makes for a good life (economy of means, The Five Obstructions, the way restrictions serve as a funnel for all that's good in life.) Got to talking about Rolling Stone embedding a journalist with a recon team in Iraq, which led to the articles that led to Generation Kill. It was the first time, really, I came out and voiced a plan to eventually get myself into the same position. I don't know if that will, eventually, happen... but I like the idea. I liked the idea when I was ten. It was the second job I ever really wanted with my whole heart: war reporter. I'm not sure why, but I do know a lot of it has to do with that satisfying sense of 'fuck you' that drove me to performance and stand-up.

It does make sense.

This trip was me working out what was real: how I work, the mechanics of travel, of other cultures, my strengths and weaknesses. The basics, really. Next step is to graduate to Asia, then the Middle East. If I can do those two areas rough, then I'll think about the possibility of someplace like Afghanistan. The US military involvement in Iraq is done with, but contractors (actual buildiers, not Blackwater) are still there trying to improve things. There's a story there, definitely. Unfortunately it's a story right now, it won't be by the time I'm ready. If I'm ever ready. But I'd love to be there to see, understand and transmit the new skein of the place. Subtract the US military from that fabric and what does life become, both for locals and for the westerners hanging around trying to repair all that damage? Are they targets? Are they shunned? Are they welcomed?

Every person is a lode of stories - good ones - and they crack open if tapped at the right angle. I want to do that. I want to sit in the dust, inside a canvas tent, trying to strip and clean a camera, while a plumber tells me about his favourite donkey. Or a soldier telling me the way he bonded with his bomb disposal robot, and the day it was destroyed was the most devastating day of his life... that when command issued him a new one he didn't want it.

blithespirit pointed out that more reporters were killed in Iraq than in the whole history of embedded reporting. My response is that Iraq's over, and it's entirely possible that by the time I'm a competent and savvy enough traveller I'll either feel differently or some key factor will have changed. But I want to get in trouble. More trouble. I want to get scammed, get hurt, make a fool of myself, come out on top, have no idea where I am, adapt to the unexpected, be swept along by circumstance, make friends, have my heart broken, whatever you've got I'm buying. But I'd also like to get married someday.

Restrictions serve as a funnel for all that's good in life. The thing on my arm is my headband, my pillow, my dustmask, my scarf, my camera bag, my glass cloth. My keyring is my diary, my keepsake, my passport, my documents. My boots get my across glaciers and into restaurants. I'm most at home without one. I want to live 'til my skull is backlit with the flame of my vanishing life. I want to shout loud enough to be heard by the Gods and thereby live forever. I want to suck up the fact that no matter what I do that'll never happen, and do it anyway.

In short: fuck you.

Will it happen? I don't know. But right now there's a clear path toward it. Things could change that. A stable relationship might not survive a life like that. You've only got to see interviews with the people who live that sort of life. Half of them aren't even in the room when they speak. And then there's Margaret Moth. Holy crap, man... Margaret Moth. Strong, poetic, beautiful and - I've no doubt - damaged. Worked for decades, up before the guys, had her eyeliner on, her hair dyed, her camera good to go. She wound up getting shot in the mouth by a sniper. Didn't blame him. She knew she was in the wrong place. The first thing she asked her friend when she woke up in bandages was "Am I still beautiful?" I guess that's what I think of.

blithespirit said it sounded like a death-wish. It's not. It's not being invested in an outcome. Once you realise that it doesn't get much worse than what you've already dealt with, all you can do is shrug. Same when you've broken life down to its key elements and done your best to free yourself from insecurity and allthe knee-jerk hindbrain crap that runs pretty much everyone. Somebody once said "Don't sweat the small stuff, and once you've been shot at it's all small stuff." What worries me isn't being stuck somewhere without a ticket home, it's not whether or not I can speak the local language, it's not wondering if I'll be attacked... it's realising that not being able to pay a phone bill is stressing me out. That's what really gets me. Or the fear I'll get comfortable in a beige job that makes me hate myself. That every day I'll have to loop a tie around my neck.

What I like about Manhattan is that it's an island full of people turning what few things they're good at toward a variety of ends. Use what you have, play the hand you're dealt.

Maybe this'll happen, maybe it won't. Between now and then anything could redirect the flow, but it's a plan and I like plans. I like being at a point where it could happen, and I'm trying to make it happen. In the end all you have is the experience of a thing, and being here right now, in this moment, like this, is an experience in itself.

RE DW & LJ FYI...

Once a month something happened while I was away that made me realise how small the world was.

The last time was meeting someone in Edin who turned out to be from my neighbourhood.

Then, when I got back, I was walking down Brunswick Street and a woman waves at me. She says "Hello, I know you from the plane." Her names Sabina. I helped her adjust her seat on the flight from Doha.

And the night before last I was talking about going to a Couchsurfing meet in Berlin, and it turns out Nikaya knows the crowd. "Is that Irish guy still there?" Oddly, I knew exactly who she was talking about.

And then there was the unlikely connection in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Or having someone walk into a pub in London. And there was one other thing, I'm sure... can't recall what that was. Oh yeah, Jenny happening to run into a friend of hers, and that friend also knew Nikaya.

Very small world. I wish I could hold it all in my head. Very grateful for having written as much down as I could. I wouldn't recall half of it.

I've got this hare-brained idea about taking this travel thing in a certain direction. Still mulling it over. Ideally I want to stress-test myself in a few unlikely locales before really gearing toward it. Christ, I'm gonna need to hold down another shitkicking job to fund it as well, probably. God I hate that bit.

Tonight I do the last of the packing. Tomorrow I disassemble the big stuff, then head off to a Spanish feast with R... for breakfast. Probably spend the afternoon torpid. Wednesday is the move. Thurs or Fri catch up with people. And in between all that write as much as I can.

Fascinating! OK, back to work.

Test

I've got this thing I wear around my left wrist. It's basically a long tube of material. It keeps my hair back, or my head warm, or it's a dust mask, or a camera bag, or a pillow. It's the thing that keeps me smiling between now and the next ticket. One of the things, anyway.

Also, FYI, if you ever do visit Iceland and fly in from Europe (that is, head east-west), get a window seat, starboard side, not on a wing. Might mean you forego the extra leg room of an emergency exit seat, but it'll be worth it. Keep a camera handy, and get an eyeful of one of the most amazing arrays of landscape you're ever likely to see. You'll kick yourself if you don't. Same advice might hold if you fly south-north from the UK. This has been a public service announcement.

Submitting some work to the London people, for interim pay. Hoping to ingratiate myself a little and get paid for it to boot.

Spent last night walking around Southbank and the city in the rain. Melbourne's such an amazing city. It's the coldest, rainiest, most Bladerunner-ish city I've been in. And it looks amazing.

We went someplace for a drink, then walked up and down the river, past all the art installations. Got given a tour of the city's architecture. It was amazing.

And, naturally, I forgot the camera.

Then we went to 1806 and got goodly drunk on expertly mixed booze.

If it rains any other night I'm a-headin' back. I will anyway, but rain makes it better.

Cath Isakson interview sent off. Sitting in Sugardough listening to Otis Taylor sing about life in a fallout shelter. Working on the thing.

Sometimes I forget how much I love these people, but Jesus.

Meeting _nightflower_ this afternoon to catch up and hand over a shipment of Finnish booze. The sweet and pleasant stuff, not the black, salty, liquorice vodka derivative they seem so cacklingly proud of.

Actually I got three bottles of that for myself.

The American girl here remembered what I usually drink. Gonna miss Sugardough. New place close to the joys of Yarraville, though. And DK, and _nightflower_, which is a plus.

I'm so procrastinating right now it's kind-of ridiculous.

I don't know what it is about Melbourne, but I'm back for a week and my body starts morphing. DK says both he and people he know have the same thing happen to them. It's fucking weird. Beginning to think I should just start lugging 35-40kgs of distributed backpackage everywhere I go to counteract it. I was looking good after a month overseas.

Found an A4 poster for the Peter Murphy gig slipped into the Fateless manuscript. Nice surprise. Phone still has notes in it for London and Edin: door codes, A-Z coordinates, times, dates... wah.

Those fuckin' fuckers better make with the jobbage or so help me God I'll blog about my pain.

Eurgh, fine, back to it.

fluffworld's interview with me is online at A Life In Words, on the Boomerang Books site.

We  both live in Australia but I end up interviewing Australian author Cameron Rogers half a world away from where we both live. We’re in Central Park, New York, where he is taking a break from working on his upcoming novel, Fateless.

He wrote the bulk of it in Melbourne where he lived for the last decade, but he’s doing the final edits while travelling around the world. He’s worked on the manuscript – which he calls, not entirely affectionately, “the brick” – in the States, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, near an Icelandic glacier, in England, Germany and Graceland, all over Paris, while camping in the Dandenongs and in between checking out Muddy Waters’ shack and the Reichstag.

Sounds fun. So is writing all bumming around the world, scribbling a few words in exotic climes?