I hadn’t expected Kerouac Alley and the bookshop to move me so much; the emotion of it all took me by surprise. Truth be told, I don’t often think about Kerouac these days. I read other authors, other genres, and when I write I don’t try to sound like him anymore; I feel I’ve found my own style, more or less. I had my phase and I moved on – left it behind, along with all the other stuff I left in my twenties, voluntary or otherwise. But despite all that, being there did something to me – something visceral. It felt exactly how watching the Lion King on TV feels, even after all these years: it felt like nostalgia, it felt like loss, it felt warm, it felt like a hug.
Continue readingusa
California Pt 6 | City Lights
I’d written off the 25th of November long before I ever got the plane to California. The day after Annie’s birthday party, I’d imagined, would be an empty one: spinning heads and groaning and human duvet-mounds shuffling back and forth between sofa, bathroom and fridge.
Continue readingCalifornia Pt 5 | Stork
Because of my tendency to roam around, I have only celebrated one of Annie’s birthdays with her since we met: her 23rd. That birthday party – which involved acid tabs, public nudity, rooftop falls, a dildo covered in glitter, leather harnesses and quite a lot of blood – was, it’s safe to say, the reason for my anxiety on the morning of her 30th birthday party in Oakland.
Continue readingCalifornia Pt 4 | Collegiate
The USA is unlike France in every way but one: when you’re there, you can’t help but keep thinking about the fact that you’re there. You’re not just drinking a coffee – you’re drinking a coffee in Paris. You’re not just eating a burger – you’re eating a burger in America. This knowledge alone, with all its fabulous, glamorous connotations – those accumulated over a lifetime of books and stories and songs and late-night Wikipedia trawls – shunts the mundane towards the mythical. I’m blowing my nose – in America!
Continue readingCalifornia Pt 3 | In ‘n’ Out
The ‘bomb cyclone’ beating up the west coast intensified on the second day of my visit: silver sheets of rain coming down, pooling on street corners and running rivers around the wheels of parked cars – leaves and newspapers and single flip-flops floating by forlornly, coming to standstills halfway up driveways or plastered across kerbs. The greens and reds of traffic lights and headlights blurred over sodden asphalt, drawing down buildings and billboards into long strange reflections.
Continue readingCalifornia Pt 2 | Artificial Impertinence
I’m always sheepish when I see friends for the first time in a while – and it wasn’t even that long of a while! But I don’t know; I’m not very good at hellos, and I’m atrocious at goodbyes. I think as I get older I’m increasingly wary of sentimentality. A cautious counter, I think, to the oversentimentality of years gone by – of alienating people, weirding people out with my emotional intensity. I’ve learned, quite subconsciously it seems, to say less. Maybe that’s what happens to a lot of boys when they’re little – maybe that’s why so many men are so stoic and silent and struggle to know what’s going on in their own heads. For some reason it happened to me much later on. I never know how much emotion is appropriate, so it’s safer to just be pragmatic.
Continue readingCalifornia Pt 1 | Scaredy Cat
Before I went to California there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over whether it was a good idea. There were a few factors: after Colombia I seem to have developed some sort of post-shitshow travel anxiety, plus at 31 I was unsure whether I’d be able to keep up with the debauchery I felt sure Annie would have planned for her birthday.
Continue readingToday I Am Angry About: Guns in the USA
Do you ever gaze around you and feel disgusted with the world at large yet agonisingly powerless to do a damn thing about it? Yeah, same (and if you don’t – pull your face out of your gooch, man. Political apathy is for fucking dweebs and I’ve got no time for that shit).
There are a million topics ricocheting around my cranium right now, and for the sake of my own sanity I’m going to articulate one of them below, with nice little subheadings to save you the sheer exhaustion of proper reading.
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I once fired a machine gun in Las Vegas when I was 21 years old, because I was young and I thought it’d be cool, because Hollywood. It wasn’t cool, it was boring and terrifying, somehow simultaneously. I pulled the trigger, it made a loud bang, and suddenly there was a hole in the face of a human-shaped target. Truly, a thrilling experience well worth the violent deaths of thousands of schoolchildren. More than anything, I was just very aware that I was holding a heavy metal tool that was created solely, solely, to kill. If I aimed it the wrong way I would kill someone, or myself. Continue reading
Kerouac
I’ve not written anything for a couple of weeks; I’ve been travelling around Europe, looking at things. I’m still polishing everything I wrote, but I can’t stand to see my beloved website sitting empty. So, while I write up all my travels, here’s a video of one of my favourite writers, Jack Kerouac. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, every single time. This man inspires me to see the beauty in every day, to throw myself at life for all I’m worth, and to never stop dreaming. His writing is as wonderful as it is tragic, and the fluctuations he experiences between cascading joy and absolute misery have touched my soul like nothing else I’ve read. I’m far from the first to say this, but by the time you’ve read a couple of his books, you’ll feel like his friend. He was deeply flawed, but he was honest, vulnerable, and his appreciation of beauty was unbridled. We never met, but I miss you, Jack.
On The Protests in the UK and the Muslim Ban
Yeah, this one’s about politics and the Muslim ban, not travelling. Whatever.
I’ve tried to write a political article about 5 times in the past 48 hours, and every time I’ve given up and scrapped it. My thoughts are too disjointed and frantic and plain fucking furious to put into any comprehensible order. Instead, I’ve decided to simply write a list, wherein I will answer the myriad complaints I have seen about the Muslim ban protests that took place across my homeland yesterday. You might have thought that people could not find much fault with peaceful protests for the sake of the rights of fellow human beings, protests designed to show support and camaraderie with a people that is being increasingly maligned. However, you would be wrong, for this is 2017. The Second World War is slowly passing out of living memory, and humanity, with eye-rolling predictability, seems to be toying with the idea of destroying each other once again. So let’s get into it. Continue reading