Im gonna try 2 tame a little red love machine

I'm excited about learning how to drive. Pity it hasn't begun yet. I guess everybody of a certain age, having got back from holiday, has the same idea I do and the driving schools are all booked up. Oh well. This is Belgium and I mustn't expect things to be easy. I must be patient, and remember it's not like I have anywhere to go. I live in the centre of a high speed train system that can direct me towards anywhere in this weird and diverse continent; in a couple of weeks I'm taking a direct train to Marseille - it'll take about 5 hours - driving would take twice that, at best. I must remember that getting the license is not in aid of my life here, but of my life when I move to a country with remarkably bad infrastructure, which is unlikely to happen for a couple of years yet.

Most of the phenomena in my life can be at least partly explained by laziness, and my failure to get a driver's license to date is no exception. But another part of the explanation is that I think cars are absolutely fucking retarded. Over the last 12 years of cycling, how many grim-faced traffic jams have I breezed past? Over the past 30 years of being a passenger, how many times have I seen the driver cuss and fret and look desperately around like a turtle trying to decide whether or not to panic, searching desperately for a parking spot? How many times have I cursed the filthiness of the air in Canadian, Belgian, French and Italian cities - especially the Italian cities, where the pollution is visibly chewing its way through the cultural patrimony? How many of my contemporaries finished university in my mercifully debt-free position, and then proceeded to run debt up on a lease or the other expenses - insurance, parking, and all that motherfucking gas - that I've never had to think about?

My 'cars are bad' notion owes a lot to their contribution to overall pollution, both in tree-hugging terms and in human health terms. But it also owes a lot to the fact that, out of all the people in my life I can think of who were very taken before their three score and ten, one bought it from suicide, two bought it from cancer and a dozen bought it in car accidents. In blunt statistical terms that means I should hate cars 6 times as much as I hate cancer, and as for suicide, well . . .

So it's not just the gas-guzzling and the pollution that makes me think cars are stupid. I don't think they're simply a technology that can be improved by changing the power source to something 'cleaner', and I don't know that batteries are all that much 'cleaner' anyways; they have all their own attendant disposal problems and you know everyone except the Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians, alternate South American and Spanish governments, and the Japanese is going to fuck that up. I just think they're a really stupid way to get from point A to point B. Inconvenient, dirty, dangerous, farting, annoying, frustrating, expensive things, that people carjack no less. And I think it's the goddamn height of the problem with modern society that the governments we've chosen have been so lazy, so pandering to corporate or industrial interests, as to allow urban and national planning that makes something so inconvenient, dirty, dangerous, farting, annoying, frustrating, and expensive the centrepiece of how we all get around. We suck. Except the Dutch.

That having been written, I am quite excited about learning how to drive. Though I think cars are absolutely fucking retarded as a cornerstone of the transportation system, and though I think future generations, if they exist, will look as askance at our dependence on cars as we look askance on the Roman's dependence on lead piping for their water systems in rich neighborhoods - stupid fucking Romans - it looks like it will be jolly fun to drive one. Cars shouldn't be for getting us around, they should be for fun. For Nascar and racing and amusing television programmes like Top Gear and Magnum PI and The Dukes of Hazzard and the one where the car talks to David Hasselhoff. For Prince songs, and Beach Boys songs, and chases in Bond movies, and to show off at masturbatory shows, like purebred dogs.

Or, indeed, like ducks dressed as geishas. Give a listen to the mp3, it's the cutest thing in the world. Especially the part about how going to Hong Kong will be such a big change. I wish Brian Harrington was my uncle. The only thing I've seen this week that even rivals that story for cuteness is the obituary of Jack Weil in this week's Economist, the 107-year-old who invented cowboy chic.

I can see all the incredibly stupid obstacles in my way

Maybe it's because yesterday was a remarkably good day; maybe it's because my boss's advice about how to live in Belgium (be wildly happy when anything goes right and accept things going wrong as the status quo) has finally sank in. But I feel like I'm making some progress in terms of not trying to think of a way to make this shithole sink into the sea.

The driving theory test: 44/50. First go, in French. Rock! I'd forgotten how much I love acing tests, which I'm starting to think is my real motive for having got so much education. Rampant, insecure self-regard. I love when strangers tell me I did good. Makes me blush all over, like when you give an attractive man a hard-on. And then I hoped I could get my provisional license right away but I could not - have to do 20 hours of lessons at a car school first. And then I hoped I could do those 20 hours in the next month, but I could not - all the schoolkids back from holiday had the same idea, I suppose, and my lessons will stretch into early November. Once they're finished, it is a further three months until I can take my final exam and get the full license.

Good thing I revised my goal to getting the permit before I turn 31. Neither wrench in the works killed my mood. It's not like I have anywhere to drive at the moment so six months is about as good as three months. And six months, though twice three months, is a mere fourth of how long this process would take in Canada or Australia. And here I'll be learning on stickshift, and in, if not an urban jungle, and urban dodg'em course; that means I'll be able to drive anywhere. See? Two stings-in-the-tail and not wishing Belgium would sink into the sea at all.

Work: Also got a full body blush from being recognized for a job well done. Got an email from my big big boss, which was a forward from my big big big boss, who had written it to both my big big boss and my big big big big boss about how he thought my first editorial, published a couple of weeks ago, was remarkably good. Now all three of these men are bosses so big I have no idea who the hell they are, though I'm meeting the big big boss next week when he comes to Brussels and we have a series of meetings with him and my boss and my big boss, and somehow that just makes the positive feedback nicer. It's not the Pulitzer but hopefully it will make up for the way I never brush my hair at my performance review.

Okay.

For serious this time, I'm doing the fucking driving theory test this morning. And hence not blogging. What a pain in my ass it all is. Last night, after trying to wedge the umpteen useless fact into my brain, I could only make myself feel better by shopping online for kayaks, with that false but widely-spread feeling that oils the smoking axles on our steeply descending consumer society: 'I deserve it'.

UPDATE

Yeah dude I rock!

Why the birds are singing

Feeling gloriously pummelled by our two day escape to the sticks of Dinant. Same area as the weekend before, but this time we brought our bikes and went a little further afield. On Sunday we arrived in Dinant, and then rode the 15 minutes or so to Anseremme, where we got a super cheap hotel room at Ansiaux; that was the same place we rented kayaks from the next day. After buying a picnic at the Spar underneath the giant motorway bridge, we rode our bikes to Furfooz:


View Larger Map

The bit where it goes down from Anseremme along the river was nice and quite flat, but the bit where it goes back up again into the little peak was uphill, and there were several times I caught myself panting for air like an overexcited Jack Russell. But I enjoyed panting for air there. It was clean and pure and didn't smell like anything except trees and/or cowshit. And it was a series of beautiful views and vistas, what's more - forests, one castle, and those fantastic limestone cliffs that water and time have sculpted in the most 'whaaaaaaa?' ways.

Speaking of, a bit attraction of Furfooz Park are its strange caves. Strange stories attached to them - of a golden fleece, of a race of mortal but magical dwarves called the Nutons who would do work for the villagers in exchange for sweets - and a long history. The park had been continuously occupied over several thousand years and had some Neolithic burial grounds in it. A creepy, beautiful place, to which we didn't bring cameras, because of what we got up to the next day - more kayaking - and this time, rather wetter.

We took the five hour trip (from Houyet to Anseremme) instead of the three hour one (from Gendron), and I believe we stretched it out to six or seven. Fewer people on the river this time and we each got a monoplace kayak, so we could arse around a bit until we started feeling like we knew what we were doing. I was continuously challenged by my disabilities in discerning right from left, as I will be when I hit the road with a driving instructor - oh boy - but very quickly it started feeling like second nature. So manoeuvrable, so comfortable, so soothing. I think when we move back to a country with space we'll buy a couple of real kayaks and be serious about it.

But in the meantime, in this country without space, it was very beautiful. Most of the route was clearly inhabited, with chip stands and caravans and little dogs barking, but in the first two hours especially, from Houyet to Gendron, we often had the feeling of paddling our way through a wet, primeval forest, much like our predecessors might have.

In Canada as well, during any sort of nature adventure, that is a feeling that stays with me and makes the experience charming - going across the lake on a canoe, hiking through a forest, sitting next to a fire - thinking 'this is much like our predecessors might have done.' It's as much a part of the experience for me as the beauty of the nature itself, because as I look there's the knowledge that I'm seeing it from the physical perspective that people have been seeing it from for thousands and thousands of years. And it casts me onto wondering about how perceptions of beauty may have changed, or, before that, if they came into existence. It's hard to believe that they didn't always exist.

Part of thinking about that was looking at the beautiful birds on the way, including two I hadn't seen before, the European kingfisher and the little egret - both very beautiful, and I don't know if there's a more dramatically coloured bird in northern Europe than the kingfisher. At first I only noticed them as electric blue flashes darting over the river, like massive dragonflies, but as I learnt how to stop being so damn splashy with the oar I saw them roosting or waiting to kill fish - saw their bright gold bib as well as their insane blueness. And the whole way, without all the screaming Wallonians of last weekend, was filled with birdsong.

And it made me ask myself: when we think of male-to-female display in the the natural world, and most dramatically in the bird world, doesn't it make rather more sense to assume the lady birds have some abstract notion of 'ooo, that's a lovely one' than some concrete notion of 'ooo, that plumage/trilling indicates that the male bird is in a fine state of health, which means if I let him fuck me our offspring will be in a good competitive position in regards to the offspring of less well-plumaged/trilling male birds'? Doesn't it make rather more sense to assume, that is, that a well-developed aesthetic sense is probably innate in many, many species?

If you consider people, for example; men have cocks that hang outside their bodies even when they're not using them, although all our closest relatives do not - chimpanzees keep them nicely tucked in, as do gorillas (who are hung like crickets, by the way). I believe the consensus is that this is because cocks are instruments of male-to-female display in our species, wherein men and women are rather closer to the same size than they are in our relative's races, making straightforward rape an untenable reproductive strategy more than some of the time.

And considering the scientific idea of natural selection is only a century and a half old, and that the similar idea of animal husbandry is probably only about 17,000 years old, but that cocks have been awesome for at least 200,000 years (I expect that the ancestors of homo sapiens also had awesome cocks, but for some reason this is never mentioned in the speculative scientific literature *cough written by male scientists cough* that I've read on the subject), I think the assumption that women, at least, have had a well-developed abstract aesthetic sense ('ooo, that's a lovely one') since the dawn of our species can be taken as true.

And I think a corollary of that is that you can expect a sense of beauty in any species where the sexual dimorphism is slight enough to make reproduction about the female response to beauty, rather then big males competing with each other for the privilege of mounting their little sisters. I wonder what sort of poem a bird would write if it could. And I wonder if we would be so casual about killing them and taking their stuff if we believed that they would write it if they could.