The Red Dragon will ride the wicked road

I've got many ambitions, which you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at me. Looking at me, you would figure I've got one ambition (a nice nap) and lack another that I should have (a comb). But in fact appearances are deceiving and I'm an ambitious, ambitious piece of work. My new ambition: to get my full driving license before I turn thirty on November 25. Failing that, before my 31st birthday on November 25, 2009.

I already know how to drive, you know. I learnt, more or less, when I was an undergrad, from a lovely Romanian bear called Liviu who would greet me each lesson with 'Hello, Menace to Society!' but I kept leaving the country or going through very druggy phases, and then finally I decided I'd wait to get my license until I moved to a country that didn't have a graduated licensing system so it wouldn't take me two fucking years.

So in a very real way, I'm in the right country for it now because judging by the quality of the driving a chimpanzee can get a permit here if they shave before the test. In another way, I'm scared shitless. Like most North Americans I learnt how to drive automatic and here, like any normal European resident, I'll learn how to drive stickshift. And I'm doing that in Brussels – the city where people drive with their ids. Honestly, I don't even think the problem is these fucks wanting to get where they're going in a hurry; they just want to make up for how little their mother let them suck her tit by being a massive goddamn Freudian slip to everyone else on the road. But the benefit of learning here, of course, is twofold; first that it will be fast-ish in terms of getting a full license – four months or so – we'll see how quickly the gears of Belgian bureaucracy grind for me and how often I choke at the tests. And second, once I can drive here, I can fucking well drive anywhere. Like, Italy-anywhere.

The lessons will be pricey but I must think of it as an investment. Because if I waited until we went to Australia, that would be another two years of graduated licensing, but this time in a small rainforest backwater where employers insist on licensed employees, and where I want to hatch my young, who will be heavy. So now, now is the time to carpe diem, grasp the nettle, take my medicine and like it, daddy, like it. I'll let you know how it goes.