Uh oh! Rubber gloves

I have been remiss in not informing you of what was, and remains, far and away the most engaging and scandalous episode of my most recent transatlantic jaunt. It happened upon landing at DFW airport, or rather soon thereafter, at Immigration.

This was like my sixth trip in twelve months - on average I spend one out of three days a year Sateside and two out three mathematically necessary days a year Britside - so the fuckers in the perspex booths should know me by now, those fingerpriting, phot-taking bastards all bulging, sagging, folding black-uniformed officiousness with their guns and badges (giving high school mediocrities the right to humiliate, bully, harangue people - their self-righteous, erroneous jermemiads, all paranoia and disinformation). Let us not forget these quarter wits can shoot people - it happens.

So I am at the booth after the flight lands late; the queue is uncharacteristically slow moving - by now I have been on the go for eighteen hours. The last thing I need at this stage is some atrociously made-up Hispanic woman with a bad attitude; Chica the Clown with a custard pie frown. She is aggressive and suspicious from the outset, making the familiar questions feel like an interrogation. So when she asks my girlfriend's name and whether we are planning to get married I refuse to tell her and suggest that her questions are not pertinent. After an aeon of vocabularian confusion she states that if she asks a question then it needs asking in the interests of nashernull scuriddy, whatever the fuck that means.

Next thing I know I am sharing a side office with a geriatric wheelchair-bound Mexican nonagenarian guy in a full-length fur coat and a Gen X Arabian prince-type, all easy affluence and triple chin. Chica tosses my papers to a colleague through a hole in her glass cage. Some time passes and a guy comes to 'interview' me. This consists of the same questions with one subtle difference, asking if I am planning to get married on this trip. Oh, yeah, US Immigration flatters itself that EVERYONE in the world wants to live in America. This is the kind of displaced logic that led to 9/11 - the notion that America is so great everyone wants a piece of the pie. Get real. That just pisses off everyone else.

I get all the right answers and I am free to collect my prize, a beaming, hot and horny Rose the other side of the sliding doors, right? Of course. I step up to the podium and the Customs guy smiles and informs me that I will be leaving through Door Two today. Cool, a change is as good as a...Only Door Two leads me into a huge hall full of desks and conveyor belts. Only one desk is populated, by the Immigration versions of the bastard sons of Cheech and Chong and Starsky and Hutch. I enquire as to the way out, only to be asked to step forward by Cheesky as Chotch ceremoniously pings on some rubber gloves. Ay carumba! Donde esta mi salida?

I step forward to further accusatory questions, bam! bam! bam! Muy rapido. What am I doing here? Why was I sent to them? When am I going home? How can I afford so many trips to the US? What is Rose's cell phone number? Chotch is playing Good Cop; Bad Cop Cheesky goes in back. My hand luggage is unpacked, my case unpicked - there goes the careful packing method - Chotch forgets which role he is playing and gets all smartmouthed asking if he is going to find needles in my shoes? When did I last go to Mexico? Do drugs? Can I speak Spanish? Which dialect? Cheesky is back and he thinks he is Good Cop. This getting fucking comical! Chotch tells me how it is as he defiles my wallet (he cannot work out why a florist's card would be signed R xxx. or R xoxo. - surely this is some evil code?). Apparently I am working illegally in the States, staying for as long as possible (90 days on a visitor's visa), fiddling money that is due to hard-working, tax-paying Good Americans (lordy, surely there is no other kind of American?), then fucking off back to England to splash out on well-priced British fare like the most expensive cars in the western world, overpriced clothing and drugs that never threaten to be associated with the phrase 'keenly priced'. Obviously he is unaware that I do not need the money nor that every US Dollar is worth only approximately 55 English pence. Wrong, mi amigo nuevo. Bad Chotch does not enjoy being contradicted but we all three know he has fuck all to go on, as there is nothing to go on. He has shot his bolt, like a celebrant Mexican who forgot to go to Walmart to buy extra bullets on NYE.

I am free to go, with a warning that I should be more cooperative next time. I left, smiling at the whole thing. That was until Rose filled me in with further details. Cheesky had called her, refusing to inform why I was being held, stating only that I was being uncooperative, then going on to try to trick her into contradicting my story. Cunt!

My only crime? Having the financial, physical and emotional wherewithal to make multiple transatlantic trips without the visible means of support of a business suit or briefcase.

Land of the Free...

Arctic Heat

No wonder the polar icecaps are melting faster than Joan Rivers' face in front of a log fire.

Well nothing is sacred it would appear. I buggered off to TX on the safe side of Christmas and in doing so attempted to buy the Arctic Monkeys' album on the way out of Gatwick, only to discover its UK launch was set for late January. Tree-fookin-mendous, I'd be back in Blighty in good time. Cool as anything, me. Lo and behold in my absence the whole bastard country cottoned on to the cheeky, pre-pubescent, council estate flouting rapscallions with their Sheffieldisms and occasionally clever but never dumb lyrics. They have outsold the rest of the Top 20 in the UK album charts PUT TOGETHER this past week.

Maybe I am getting old because time was that I could spot something cool and a few other people would latch onto it. Because that is the key; the less people that like something the cooler it is - within reason. There is absolutely nothing cool about German Industrial music even though it is adored by only eleven fat, saggy, bad coat wearing, twelve inch thick soled shoe tottering, quarter-wits (mainly from the three corners of Yorkshire). That constitutes a cult of cunts. When we are talking lack of weight of numbers we are talking The Smiths before and right up to the release of The Queen Is Dead; or Richard Pryor prior to Stir Crazy. Simple.

It seems that now when I spot something cool every other fucker latches onto it a few weeks later. The same thing happened in mid-'05 Stateside, with My Chemical Romance. There I am getting in touch with my eye make-up side when the bastards appear on MTV emmeshed in a pustulating throng of high schoolers. ARSE!!

You lazy fucker

Cheezus Ker-riste on a bike (with or without chives, your choice), what a lazy fucker I have been. Or not, as the case actually is.

In the eons since my last post life has been a blur of activity, a whirling dervish of Transatlanticism, an orgasm or five of explosive developments. All you need to know is that in the past three months I have been between Texas and Manchester a couple of times - spending six weeks TX-side and six weeks Manc-side, notwithstanding the traveling around UK during Ker-ristemas/the holiday season visiting piss-soaked relatives and avoiding pissed up Brits subsumed in and by the annual ritual humiliation of the office party, all confused sexual tension, thrown together master-servant cleavages and bad turkey dinners; tandoori, roasted, provencal, greco-roman, cumberland and WWE...or somesuch never nonesuch.

The book is fully edited, the Masters degree is complete, agents you are on notice. Get your shit together, in between post-festive guilt and redemption. The Ker-ristian world was on downtime-shutdown-uptime for six weeks and now you have disintered yourself and have work to do.

Get it done.

Half Lived.

You know you want to.

I am well: Rose is better. Same-same.

Till tomorrow and next time.

Tru'.