Tendon is the night

So I have wound up in a wrist brace

...forget the cracks about 'wank strain' and similar hilarities I have heard them all in the past 24 hours...

and it is a proper fucking pain. So I have decided to write this blog as it comes - no spell check, no editing at all; all those accidental Caps Locks (which prick put that button next the letter 'a'?), no retracingg to erase typos, just none of that shit at all. Typing is difficult enough with this spazzy thing on - it is one of those beige efforts with the four wrist straps and the single thumb strap, with a stretch abndage beneath and around, if that makes sense. Essentially what I am saying is that the bandage is under and over the spaz support. Claro? Bueno!

I feel like a fucking footballer running out with calipers on; like a racehorse in a friggin' wheelchair. A writer with a fucked up forearm. Apparently it all stems from my shoulder. Oh, point of refertemce, it is my right hand. I am left-handed. No wank strain, unless I have been doing a serious amount of pretending it is someone else or the old double-handed shandy. Whether or not I can or need to do that is none of yours. I have nothing to prove so make up your own mind. If you haven't got one as k someone else to make up theirs and get them to tell you what to think. Don't be ashamed there is a lot of it about.

Enough of this bollocks. The Ibuprofen are not kicking in and I'm getting the pins and needles from elbow to finfertips and the feeling that Butterball is standing on my right forearm trying to prevent me from typing.

Tendonitis - you've gotta love it.

Maybe more tomorrow. I've decided to go Stateside Wedensday not Friday nextr week so I'll be in transit then - FYI.

a BIENTOT X.

Wind up Banged up?

So I am making a quick trip across the Atlantic a week Friday for a long weekend. It is a surprise visit to see Rose; a birthday treat. I am bouncing through Chicago O'Hare and I have eighty-five minutes from touchdown to take off, needing to clear immigration and customs, then hop from Terminal 5 to Terminal 1, check in for the flight to DFW, then board.

So you might imagine that the last thing on my mind would be to wind up a TSA employee. You'd be wrong for two reasons. Last time I went through Chicago, around May '05 I think, there was this TSA guy who was a real hoot, having the craic with everyone in line. That leads me to believe the TSA have a sense of humour, deep deep deep undercover. Secondly I want to get back at those mothertruckers for last time (see the '...Rubber Gloves' blog posting)

Here's the deal; I will be carrying hand luggage only, due to the short turnaround at Chicago and the fact that I will only be staying in TX three nights - even I can travel light for a three night trip, notwithstanding my toiletries and CDs. But I will be bringing back some bits and bobs for Rose, clothes mainly, ahead of her permanent UK return in the summer. So I will be packing this kit bag which, when unfolded, looks like a sleeper carriage for a female gymnast. This thing is fookin' huge as bags go.

So I want to tell the TSA guy (or girl) that the folded up kitbag is to;

facilitate the safe carriage of an emmigrant midget family that has been hiding out in the TX hill country, near the town of Shitkickerville

or to

allow me to transport my celebrity midget from TX to Manchester, UK, for the 14th Annual Pro Celebrity Midget Throwing World Cup, for which I am the defending champion (I am a big, strong guy so this is feasible).

Let me know what you think. Which is your preferred option? Do you have any better (and by that I mean funnier) options? How do you rate my chances of making that connection at O'Hare? How do you shoot a friend accidentally with bird shot? Did Cheney think the poor old bastard was a Dove? Answers to all, some, none, or more of these questions ASAP to the comments page.

As Ben Stiller says in Starsky and Hutch ,

(bad Noo Joyzee Mobster accent).
Do it!
...Do it!

The biorhythm method

Well I never really believed in the whole biorhythm thing; always struck me that it was all part of that stuuf crammed within the dubious city limits of Crapsville, Bunkum County. You know all that shite like horoscopes, reiki, Shakespeare, feng shui, tabloid newspaper headlines, political sincerity. All that stuff that you know is not true, you just know it, but you can't be arsed, or you're not sufficiently driven, to disprove.

Of course I was suspicious, curious, nervous of the Crapsville beliefs when I was a teenager; superstitious. But fuck me I was superstitious about Chee-zus and the whole Ker-rriste-ianity thing, so that is a pretty safe and accurate measure of how far off-beam I was back then.

The reason I mention this is that I am searching the for source of my lethargy which is transparently coupled separately with ennui, self-doubt, mental decrepitude, and physical fatigue.

According to my favourite website a biorythm is, in addition to being a noun;

An innate, cyclical biological process or function.

Then, yes, my innate, cyclical biological process or function is definitely on the wane. Either way I still think this stuff resides permanently in Crapsville. It is ninth generation bullshit as a set of beliefs.

Perhaps I am just grouchy cuz I am on my male period; you know, got the painters in, rag week, surfing the crimson wave, strawberry fields. Any takers? Any further offers? Do let me know.

Nice!

You've had the long so...

...here's the short of it. No! Not a picture of my cock you cheeky, and entirely misdirected, git.

A short entry today (OK, who let the ghost of Sid James into the room?). It has been one of those days wherein the sands of time run firmly against you. You know those days; you feel like twenty minutes have passed but really it is two hours. I relish these days when they come along - they're so infrequent, unless you live in Tellyland where people have jobs and lives that are so rewarding that they are continually looking at thier watches and asking, Is that the time. Gotta dash, as though life is just so crammed fully of specfuckingtacularly interesting things that you are bound to forget the time, probably even the decade: whoop-dee-bastard-doo.

I am laughing of course because I am in that show right here and now; life feels fuckin' great. I have the book finished, Rose is coming home, the new car is about to go on order and I am pretty sure that I have found the ideal place for us to live. Only downsides are that the prospective literary agent still hasn't seen the Tru way, the light, and Rose is 5471 miles away (give or take...) in TX.

...soon Tru, soon...

That's the long and short of it right now.

Catch you in the manana x.

How long is too long?

So I was at this lit party last night in Manchester, a couple of mates run this magazine and they won and award, only they didn't. Anyway that is far from relevant. So I was talking to two girls, Aspic, a mate of mine (yeah she is transparent, and soft when pressed), and a friend of a friend's girlfriend, House (yeah she's massive, fat) and they starting talking about a show that featured the guy who has the longest cock in the world. Well, every guy in earshot catches this, two descend, one of the mag guy mates and some random dork. Of course the guys immediately want to know how long, Down to the knee? How tall is he? and go on to insist that he must be miserable, he must never get it up, ...all that blood in one place? No way! The girls are totally matter of fact in saying that the guy loves his massive appendage, cock-a-hoop you might say, and he boasts that he never has a problem getting a girl. The boys frown, threatened. But the girls are totally adamant that his cock is ...way too much. They even pull faces and screech. Eeeuw!

At this point I drifted off into an interior monologue about how long is too long for my manuscript and associated letter and synopsis to be with the agent guy I sent it to in London? I only posted it last Friday before I set off on the train for Oxford. So less than a week is okay. Two weeks? Reasonable. Three weeks? He should be getting in touch by then, think I'll post him a friendly email, all upbeat, chatty, Trumanesque. Four weeks or longer? Way too much. Eeeuw!

Inner Shitty Limits

Ok, so you know that I am back Britside so I should lay out the situation as it stands, put you in the picture.

I am in Liverpool, England and Rose is still in Denton, Texas winding up the PhD and closing out her job, plus there is the dog to take care of - a lush German Shepherd as it goes. My task is to get a publisher for my book. I have it in the hands of a UK agent right now and I am looking for a US agent of suitable repute, vision and balls.

Meantime I am scoping out accomodation (rental for now) for Rose and me to move into sometime after Easter this year, plus sorting out a new car and clothing the house-in-prospect, all the practical stuff. To this end I spent today trawling around a freezing, misty Liverpool, all pre-colonial big-brick buildings, post-industrial terraces and brown, brooding churches. I kind of forgot what a spiritual city Liverpool is. It has so many churches (to paraphrase the first gig bar scene in Blues Brothers, 'We have both kinds, Catholic and Protestant'), church societies, Salvation Army outlets. The city's communities are punctuated by their churches, demarcated by them. Like with all cleavages of western religion they bring people together as they drive them apart from others. Chee-zus there are left-footer and right-footer pubs in Liverpool. Pubs! A truncation of 'public house'. Ker-riste.

I went to see these great-looking (on the website on which I had found them) townhouses. To say that the area they had been unthinkingly plonked in was a shithole is really disrespectful to all the shitholes of the world. Seriously, this really was the Inner Shitty, all needle-strewn wasteland, derelict rows of stores held together only by their memories and rat shit, metal grill-covered windows on neighbouring houses, and perhaps most appallingly of all palm trees and hollow plaster gargoyles in front gardens. The houses are off the shortening short list.

Such is the clamorous glamour of the life quotidian for the soon-to-be literary hero. As my most recently completed self-help book insists I chant, 'Shit Happens'.

Next?