Weekenders in places with names I can't pronounce

Yesterday I called to book 'our' place in the Ardennes, and it was full . . . as was every other place in the area. And despite the dreadful yet fruitful agony of having obtained my full license, I'm not yet allowed to rent a car here - you need to have had the permit for two years - and the F-word won't, so I spent a panicked hour searching for somewhere else to kayak and get fresh air that we could get to with trains.

Well, thank god for this disorganized industrial shithole of a country being next to the Netherlands. We're going here. Dordrecht. An hour and a half away, I've managed to book some boats that look much nicer than the tubs in the Ardennes, and it's next to this, so it's going to be fucking awesome, I'm pretty sure. Even if it pisses down rain all weekend (and we seem to be in the grip of some sort of wildly geographically misplaced Indian summer here so I don't think it will), I'm pretty sure we'll get a lot out of going to a place with folklore this bizarre.

God, I love the Dutch. Not just for the social liberalism and their stunning good looks. I love their weird, too. I'd love Belgians' wierd as well, but it seems to segue into creep far too often for comfort. I think it will be a good policy to spend the maximum amount of time in the Netherlands before we leave. It's just so much less annoying. Shame about the food but one always manages.

Speaking of food, this site makes me hungry.

I am become She-Bogan, Destroyer of Taste

Yesterday was my first solo drive ever. And it was to the beer store to pick up a plank of 50, in my brother's pickup, wearing a home-made Wonder Woman singlet, Uggs, 30 visible blackfly bites, unwashed hair, and a miniskirt. I considered it a beautiful synthesis of hoser and bogan; indeed, possibly the creation of a new subspecies of easy livers: the Great Northern Ontario She-Bogan.

I'll let you know how my classy new lifestyle goes.

On no longer being in Portugal

Portugal was so great I nearly cried when we got on the plane out of there. And then I cried on the plane when the engine started making funny noises. Panic Attack! I kept it quiet though. Thank god I've finally got my driver's license. My lifestyle will always involve areoplane rides, and probably many more than the vast majority of the world's population, environmental direness notwithstanding, because that's simply the nature of love and of oceans - but I would like them to involve less than they currently do, because flying continues to scare the living shit out of me.

Moving on. Whilst on trains, planes, lying on the beach, et cetera, I read The Mill on the Floss, which put me into quite a poopy mood briefly, though it was very good, and now I can't wait to get to Middlemarch. Floss was rather uncanny in its depiction of a child's mind via Maggie, but even more uncanny in its depiction of the inevitability of destructive sexual love from bored women who don't believe in themselves enough to do anything else with their stagnating brains.

Maggie was suffering through societal constraints the likes of which my generation can't imagine, but we can recognize bits and peices in our own situation - and constraints from the outside aside, during my years of spreading it around it was evident to me even at the time that there were hundreds of better things for me to be doing than nailing a bunch of guys whose names I don't remember anymore. And now, I don't regret the sex, some of which was definitely beyond worthwhile, but I regret the attention I paid to it. Floss reminded me of that regret, and put me in a poopy mood because enduring societal constraints notwithstanding, it looks like there was something wilful about my propensities to orient my life, to a certain degree, around a generalized notion of cock, when the whole world is just bristling with cocks anyways, and with many other things besides.

Also reading more Stephen Jay Gould and adoring it more than before, it that's possible. But more on that later.

In which Rupert mends my annoying morning

Very little to say today too. After my holiday, the maison communale's bridge holiday (because why should civil servants take the one publicly funded holiday everybody else gets when two is so much better), and the acquisition of a new set of passport photographs, which took visits to four booths, two studios closed for the summer break, and one excruciatingly stupid phone call to the booth-company (following their instructions to call a hotline to find out the closest machine when one was busted and instead having a conversation with a nincompoop), I'm actually going to go to the Belgium equivalent of the Ministry of Transort or DMV or whatever and get my actual license, which will involve queueing from 8 am until . . . I don't fucking know.

Except, Belgium being Belgium, I probably won't get a license today, despite a Belgian licence being nothing but a folded piece of printed salmon bristolboard with a photo attached to it, because these people are fucknards. My hope is to get it and an international license sometime within the next month before I go to Canada. You see how effectively I've lowered my expectations . . . it really helps me get through life here.

Let me just leave you with a quick reminder of what celebrity is good for: occasionally one of them will say awesome things. Like this:

"He (Michael Jackson) personified the pain and anxiety of a black man in a slave country. We all watched as he changed from black to white. He was living performance art."

Oh Rupert Everett. Don't ever change, no, don't you ever change, oh promise me you're always going to be as . . .you know . . . as you are.

UPDATE

After a mere two hours of queuing - lengthened by the desk workers 'forgetting' to hit the button inviting all ticket holders after 61 to advance for 15 minutes or so - I got both my Belgian and international license all in one shot. I am now indistinguishable from a grown-up. Yay!

Protestant liesure

It feels as though time is slowing down a bit as I get closer and closer to departing for the Med, where we're having a little writing retreat on the beach for a week. Still some hurdles to overleap at the office before I can leave it behind in good conscience, or else I'll be fucked when I get back. Dear oh dear. I may even have to write a to-do list. Blech.

It's rather provoking because I have to hot-foot it down there to deal with some angry-businessman crap this morning, a stressful enough situation that my eyelid was twitching by the end of the day yesterday, when all I want to do is go to the maison communale, submit my pass sheet and get my really-for-truly driver's licence. I like work - but it is seriously cramping my fucking style, man.

At the same time - beyond personal feelings of loyalty to my immediate management team, who I really like and who I would hate to screw over by being incompetent - I have a certain horror of joining the ranks of the unemployed. A totally irrational horror. I'm nowhere close to being sacked, and if I was, it would be awesome because of the big Belgian payout I would get and the 80%-of-my-wage pogey I'd receive for a two year period, or until we blew this fucking popsical stand of a country. But still that little horror is there, partly because it would definitely mean I couldn't move this job to Asia and then it would all be a big mystery, more exciting than intimidating but I'm a slave to the intimidation . . .

I think I have an uncomfortable combination of Protestant Work Ethic and Mezzogiorno Liesure-is-Success neurosisizing me up. That's right. Blame the parents.

I remember back in the dayz when I used to have to get my stroll on

Guess who passed her driving exam? Mistress La Spliffe, that's who! Oh sweet Jesus, the fucking relief of it all.

And you know what one of the best parts was? Riding to work afterwards in the urine-soaked, stinking, filthy subway with ugly bastards leering at me, and thinking 'from now on when I do this it's because I'm making an environmentally sound lifestyle decision, and not because I'm a fucking loser.' I think it'll help out with walking on rainy days, too.

Riding the moronic road

Practicing waking up early in preparation for my upcoming second-go-round of the driver's exam, which is scheduled early in the morning later this week. I'm nervous, but it's not as bad as last time - different rather - thinking that I'd be a real asshole if I failed twice, rather than thinking it's going to be very hard to pass. I feel a great deal more ready than last time, and honestly think I'm better than most of the other drivers circulating around Belgium, which sadly is saying very little (and is far from a guarantee that I'll pass the exam, as they tightened up their giveaway policies a lot over the last 20 years). For example, I don't box intersections and if there's a t-junction immediately preceding an intersection I brake a little earlier so I don't block that either. As far as I can tell about 1 in 3 Bruxellois drivers are intellectually capable of such a feat. They are real shitheads on the road - oblivious motherfuckers - and haven't really kept up with the changes in their own driving laws.

Pedestrian crossings are the most obvious example to visitors and new arrivals, most visitors and new arrivals being obliged to cross streets quite early on in the process. It's only been within the last ten years that the rules have been changed and that drivers are obliged to stop when people are using them, and of course they don't. Why would they? There are no fucking consequences if they fail to stop. There are no traffic cops hanging around with cameras. They can even buzz a crossing whilst talking on a cellphone and kill a fucking pensioner without any jailtime or even substantial loss-of-license time. And judging from some of the really fuckwitted behaviour I've seen and heard of here, either many drivers are utterly unaware of the change in the law, or else become such self-involved sociopaths when they get behind the wheel that it loses all meaning.

Three examples:

1. Some asshole in an Audi cuts me off on the way to work. In my classy North American way, I flip him a bird. The cunt stops mid-intersection, blocking traffic of course, and starts to get out of his car. I'm far more bark than bite but I'm sick of nearly getting killed by these troglodytes, so I start walking over, determined to get in some beats even if it means getting the shit kicked out of me. Either the asshole in the Audi notices that I'm a girl, or that I'm spoiling for a fight, or that the early morning rush-hour traffic has been blocked by his stopping the middle of a busy intersection and everybody is honking at him; he closes the door and speeds off.

2. Next to the Porte de Hal, which cars go about quite fast despite a liberal sprinkling of pedestrian crossings, we saw some fat old red-faced fuck in an expensive grey convertible - I believe it was also an Audi, they're beautiful cars but they get driven by goddamn incompetents - slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid hitting a skinny little teenage boy who was halfway across the road. Embolism gets out of his paused car, blocking traffic of course, and walks up with his dicky chest out to have it out with the kid, ignoring the horns behind him and shouted abuse from the many pedestrians all around, who'd been freaked out by nearly seeing a minor's guts splattered all over the cobblestones. The big fat cunt takes a swing at the boy for daring to get in his way and lands two or three; as we go over to intervene, the boy cleverly retaliates by repeatedly kicking the front of the Audi. The man realizes he has rather more to lose in this situation, gets back in his car, and speeds off.

3. A friend of ours, another Canadian, who lives here with his family was partway across a crosswalk when another cunt - he doesn't remember if it was in an Audi or not - cuts him off. He's a temperate man but as he was holding his infant daughter in his right arm at the time, he angrily shook his left fist in the air as the car sped away. The goddamn jackass reverses, blocks the intersection (of course - it's just not an incident unless you're getting in everyone's fucking way), gets out of his car despite the imprecations of the woman sitting in the passenger seat, walks over to our friend, and punches him in the face - swinging over the head of the baby girl. Once more - and this was the same in all three examples - he pulls this shit in a very crowded location absolutely stuffed with onlookers, and in this case, according to our friend, about 20 people immediately descended from the nearby cafe and sidewalks, shouting at the asshole and explaining what sort of human being he was for taking a swing at a guy holding a baby over the head of the baby. Punchy mainly looks baffled.

I know that every nationality drives stupidly in its own way, though I don't really know it on a practical, experiential level about any other country like I do about this one. I've heard the French are congenitally incapable of signalling a turn or a lane change, for example, and Italians have the supremest disregard for the lives and limbs of cyclists that I've ever witnessed. But Belgians - honestly, the way they drive makes me hate their fucking guts. It makes me think all of the stupid Belgian jokes I've ever heard are soundly based in fact. I know they don't enjoy their Newfie-of-Europe stereotype, but when they get behind the wheel, they're not fighting it too hard.

The happy side of SAD

A short one today because I had to sleep in this morning because of more driving and properly meeting my upstairs neighbour, a German who's pretty awesome and who, with any luck, I'll be swapping plant attendance duties in the future instead of relying on an increasingly unreliable friend with a chemically dwindling short-term memory who lives nearby.

50-odd hours of driving practice/lesson have had a startling effect, turning me from a non-driver to a novice-driver to a bad driver. I can drive - I know what I have to do - I just do it with a remarkable clumsiness and lack of aplomb. It's at the point where my instructor is laughing instead of hitting me though, and last night when I noticed a woman with enooooormous boobies waiting to cross the streets and said 'gosh, she's hot', he congratulated me for keeping my eyes on the road so well I'd failed to notice she was about 70 and 'completement refaite.'

So many good things have been happening lately that I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wish I didn't do that, it's unhelpful. I did ask myself if it's just that summer is actually here now - that the weather has actually been behaving since the solstice - and I'm on the upswing of SAD. Also Belgians are the SADdest motherfuckers on the planet, to the point of being five or six degrees nicer to you when the weather is good, which of course has an impact on the quality of one's life. Also the men are far hornier when the sun is out, and look at one so much more appreciatively, which is pleasant, as I'm trying to enjoy the last (at a guess, depending on how pregnancy ruins my body) five years in which I'll be sexually attractive to strangers. But no. Some seriously good shit has been happening.Yay for good shit.

Jolly jolly jolliness

What a weekend. I got a sunburn and, I believe, a cure for hay fever (a combination of prayer, probiotics, and stinging nettle supplements). Yesterday we rode our bikes down the Rhine to a set of allotments - and German allotments rock, by the way, they're not just gardens; they have huts and roses and barbecues - they're right Lebensraum. Okay, I've got to stop writing things like that. For this morning at least. Anyways, we rode our bikes along the Rhine, and the trees were fucking like bunnies. There was so much pollen in the air that it looked like a flurry. I'm not exaggerating at all. It looked like a big flurry and it was all actually going up my nose, and I was basically okay. Thank god, because there were lots of lovely things to drink, making antihistamines quite out of the question.

Oh, and yeah. Back to Mistress La Spliffe again. I'm just not a one to not get high. Especially when my reason for not getting high is to punish myself for not joining the epically polluting car-driving class fast enough, on a continent where nobody needs a car unless they have children, and even then it's debatable. I'll push myself, of course, but it was already a moral compromise to start using one of those beastly (if fun) things, and I'm not going to not get high for a moral compromise. Particularly when I really, really want to get high.

Back to the money factory.

Highkus

Clash of the Titans
The first half was so silly-
God, I miss reefer

Pornography stream
Loaded on my sweetheart's Mac-
I will watch it straight

David Attenborough
gurning at a stinkflower
means less to me now

Hyperventilate
twirl until I fall over
and hope I feel high

Dumbfuckery and consequences

How I would love to blame this on someone else. But that shithouse choke yesterday at the exam was 100% Mistress La Spliffe, and now my mighty organs of indignation and anger must be turned against myself. I can't blame the examiner; he was clear, reassuring, and friendly; I can't blame my instructor, who taught me how to drive well enough that I did everything else perfectly - painfully perfectly; I can't blame Belgium, because while it's given me innumerable examples of drivers doing exactly what I did to fuck up the exam yesterday, that has translated into innumerable opportunities for me to curse Belgians for their dangerous stupidity - there was certainly no pressure to emulate it.

It really hurts to have managed the parallel parking, the three point turn, the following the flow of traffic, the signalling, the left turning, the braking smoothly and safely in time to avoid mowing down a family of geese ambling across the road without risking getting rear-ended, and all the other things that had me shitting myself, just to fuck up in this new, dramatic, dangerous, and fucking mentally debile way that I never did during my lessons or practice sessions. But what it is informing me is that despite my finesse behind the wheel and my reasonably good impression of calm, competent driving, if I'm happy to tool out on a roundabout without judging my distances properly at my fucking exam like a fucking retard, I'm not ready to drive on the roads unaccompanied yet, and that's all there is to it.

Well, not quite all. Here's the thing: I know how to drive now, and have even mastered the roundabout - I never would have driven on and cut somebody off on a roundabout if I hadn't been having a massive brainfart; I'm aware of the fucking laws of priority, painfully so, because they're so counter-intuitive from a Canadian perspective, as we don't have roundabouts and every intersection is adequately signposted so we don't have to fart around with the massive trust exercise which is Rightwards Priority. So the worry is that what's making me unfit to drive isn't my driving skills per se, but my inadequate brain, and that's worrying because while one can improve their skills, it's a different proposition altogether to improve one's brain.

So in punishment but also in an effort to help myself, I'm cutting off the reefer. No more reefer for me. Not until I've got that fucking dimestore salmon foldy piece of shit these Belgian stone-age nincompoops call a full fucking B-class license. I've already been cutting down but now I'm cutting out. Even when I go to Amsterdam at the end of the F-word's school term. I will go to Amsterdam and I will not smoke or eat reefer. I will watch David Attenborough ocean documentaries and I will not be high while I do it. I realize that makes my blogonym a little non au courant, so in the meantime you may address me as the Dread Pirate Jessica.

Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up, fuck!

Last night I thought of a really good reason why it would be okay to fail the exam today, but this morning it's just fucking gone. Oh wait, here it is again: part of the pressure I'm feeling to pass is feeling like a fucking gonad because I'm 30, and most people get their permit when they're 18 or something, which makes me a retard in quite a literal sense. But what that means is that even though this is my first time taking a driving exam, I've been 'failing' the exam for the last twelve years by not taking it. And that means that if I fail again today, it's just par for the course. And if I pass it's about fucking time.

It's a little make-believe and double-thinky, but it works for me. I hope.

Earlier I was having a real motivational problem with the whole thing, to be honest with you. I got sick of feeling all this massive pressure to not fuck up, not fuck up, not fuck up, after getting through my adult life to date with zero problems related to my unlicensed ways. Why put myself through this horrible emotional wringer, this long-delayed rite of passage, when everything has just been fucking fine without a fucking car, and I hate fucking cars, and they're fucking up the fucking planet? The obvious answer (that we're moving back to the New World, and the New World has Third World public transportation, so unless I live in the middle of a city like Toronto again I'll feel the lack of a permit badly, and we've got no desire to live in another city of that size ever again; not to mention apparently every employer in Australia insists on their employees having full licenses) was too abstract, too distant in time for comfort or motivation. So I thought about it, and came up with some real motivators:

-I can rent a car right away in Canada because the stupid fucks at the agencies there have age conditions, not length-of-time-holding-a-permit conditions. That means that when I go home for a visit in August and September I can rent a kicky little number and drive to Ottawa to see Melbine and Drools, and then drive to Toronto to see everyone else and watch Lisa get married, and not have to break my fucking balls right off and waste my precious visiting time by taking the long, slow, oft-delayed trains or buses linking my three pertinent cities. I can tool around the country roads. I can stop and catch bullfrogs and hunt for mushrooms. It will be fucking keen

-If someone else at the office who has a company car gets fired, I can use it until the contract runs out, and just pop off to Marseille or somewhere else Mediterranean whenever I want and go sea kayaking instead of waiting in vain for a TGV ticket sale that never comes

- I'm one step closer to fucking my man in the backseat of a car. As far as I remember (and unfortunately, or not, the time of my life I was having the most, shall we say, varied sex, is the time I remember least) I've never had sex in a car. But somehow it seems like a pre-requisite to a responsible family life. I'm pretty sure most of the elder children I know were conceived in the backseat of a car

- I can live in a house, a very big house, in the country. It'll be like an animal farm, lots of rural charm, in the country

Yeah, so now I'm motivated and nervous. It's a big improvement.

***UPDATE***

Everything was perfect until the last five minutes, when I didn't see a car on a roundabout and nearly drove into it. It was so shithouse and dangerous the examiner ended it right there and asked how it felt to break all my dishes at once, or something. What does it feel like? It feels like stupid. Oh well. Second try is in July.

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!

Too busy to blog

And not even with my driving exam yet. Everything else. For a lazy person, I sure am fond of overstretch. Just wanted to write one thing: I fucking knew it.

Acc-en-tuate the positive

This weekend was just the ticket, though not a rest. . . too much to do, like study for my driving theory test (was going to do it this morning but still flunking the practice tests so it will have to be tomorrow), proof another country report, cook, clean, etc. . . but on Saturday the F-word succeeded in kicking my ass sufficiently to get us out to the Ardennes with a group of friends and acquaintances to kayak down the Lesse river.

Very much kayaking à la Belge, which meant the 'rapids' were very slow indeed, there was only a 5% chance of falling out of our big plastic shells, and we followed the direction of the current from point A to point B - when we felt a bit tired all we had to to was steer away from the gravel banks and the flock of incompetents who'd descended on the river. Doesn't matter. There's an incredible fucking charm to tiring yourself out by propelling yourself over the water - even more like flying than cycling - and it was very, very beautiful down there in the Furfooz-y area. No Canadian savagery or even British haunted broodiness, but lots of trees and staggeringly big cliff faces, lots of 'holy fuck would you look at that'. And of course, since this is Belgium and everybody is an organizational idiot, no life jackets or loud warnings or other intrusive safety features - just the sun (thankfully, amazingly) and wind on the skin as we merrily rolled along.

Which is tied to a realization on Saturday morning as we went to meet the group. Yes, I live in Belgium. Yes, these people are incompetent organizational idiots with absolutely no fucking notion of how to do anything in a reliable and systematized manner. And yes, that's going to annoy the fuck out of me time and again and again and again. Yesterday it was Fortis, awhile ago it was Belgacom, before that the maison communale, before that ING, before that Fortis on a different occasion, and tomorrow it's going to be the people I have to deal with to get my driver's license. There'll be no end until I leave, and Belgium being Belgium, I fully expect a year or two of hangover annoyance after I leave . . . they'll find a way, the fucking cunts . . . this place is like a Roald Dahl short story.

And, just like I enjoy Roald Dahl short stories, I have to enjoy Belgium. Part of that enjoyment will have to be negative in its nature, as my boss instructed me when the Fortis fiasco almost had me weeping with rage on Wednesday - I must simply accept the stupid things they do here as the status quo, and then be very happy, even overjoyed, when they manage to pull their thumb out and something goes right.

But another part will have to be, since we plan on moving back to a litigious, Anglo-Saxon, stick-up-its-ass society, that I need to enjoy the irresponsible, unregulated fuckery that Belgium is to the greatest extent possible while I can. And the driver's licence is a case in point; here, it will take a minimum of three months, while in Canada or Australia I'd be looking at a minimum of two fucking years. Unpasteurized dairy is another case in point. If I wanted raw milk in Canada or Australia, I'd have to set up some sort of illicit operation with a farmer; here, I walk to the street market and point. With the corollary that I can buy delicious cheese that smells like Death Herself and tastes like blue heaven at any supermarket, while in Canada or Australia it's all sanitized to the point of tastelessness.

And if I wanted to kayak in Canada or Australia, even in a river that I could wade along for its entire course, I'd have to have a life jacket; here, I can spend the entire day on a river with about 200 people without seeing one. Rock. And. Roll. I think I'll take Friday off and that we'll head back to the area - the park looks incredible, so it'd be good to spend a day there - running up and down the Roman ruins, playing amateur archaelogist, and spelunking in an irresposible, dangerous, and oh-so-Belgian manner. Wheeeeee!

Up at the Vilification

That shit with Fortis is now ongoing as well. Doing anything in this retarded dump of a country is like herding incontinent cats. We'll never do business with those fucknards again and will definitely switch our house insurance to ING next year, as we've already switched our current accounts, also because of sheer blue incompetence at Fortis . . . The F-word is fed up. I am triple dutch fed up, because as the household 'francophone' I get the fun job of having to talk to these damnable bungling cretins, to try to help them sort out their own fucking mistakes. Plus he gets to soothe his flustered soul with two months of vacation, and me . . . but these sorts of comparisons are not healthy for the life of a couple. When we go to Australia he'll have to be the daddy because I won't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing and then I'll be glad of having once been useful. In the meantime we have an in-bank appointment today and I'm already concerned I'm going to get so pissed off I cry.

Moving on. I've decided the driving school is a scam. Since I won't need to purchase car insurance here in Belgium - thank heavens for small mercies! - and since San Francisca has offered to teach me on and let me use her automatic at the exam, and since I already know how to drive automatic from the Liviu lessons in Canada, and since I'm pretty sure I can teach myself the theory here with a book and some concentration, and since the nearby schools, contrary to the one downtown an acquaintance employed by the EU used do not help with the requisite paperwork at the Belgian equivalent of the DMV, fuck that. It would have come to about €1200 if I used one of the nearby schools. I can spend that money relaxing in Australia, learning how to drive stickshift on my own time. Kiss my ass, Belgium. I don't want to give you a cent more of my money. What a pointless mess this shithole nation is. But I will go to school if I keep failing the exams, which luckily have no effort-limit - à la carte and as cheaply as possible.

Not much else fit for print today . . . read another Somerset Maugham book, Up at the Villa. A bit of fluff compared to The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage, and The Moon and Sixpence. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it was refreshing. And it gave evidence that Maugham, for all his difficulties constructing an elegant sentence, at least had the gumption at some point in his life to have a frank talk with a female human about her sexuality - something E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, three 20th century authors I generally like better than Somerset Maugham, all apparently failed to do. Anyways, it was fluffy enough that I wouldn't mind watching the movie. And I'd like to see Sean Penn not suck. I don't know why. I guess it's because he's still managed to hang on to a career as a serious quality actor and yet I just find him so fucking annoying to look at in every movie I've ever seen him in.

The Red Dragon worries about male social health

I've got the same reluctance to commit to movies that most people seem to have to committing to reading a book - I just resent bad movies so much, as such a massive fucking waste of my time, that it takes some doing to make me actually sit through any of them. I was even a little reluctant to sit down to Hot Fuzz, and finally I told myself I owed it to Shaun of the Dead to watch something by some of the same people.

So I saw it last night and it was fuckin' adorable. Can't think of a better adjective for it than that. The absolute cutest movie I've seen since . . . well, since Shaun of the Dead. I would watch more comedies if there were more comedies like that. Though maybe there are and I'm just not watching them. Hard to tell. Timothy Dalton chewing the shit out of the celluloid and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being so funny. There are so few movies where a scene ends and it's only then it sinks in what's happened and the helpless belly laughs start - like the 'fascist'-'hag' scene. Dear oh dear. The constant Point Break references - 'ever fired your gun in the air and yelled, 'Aaaaaaah?' - fucking hell.

And something so very sweet about the friendship of the Pegg and Frost characters. Sometimes I worry about boys, you know. In general. Some of them seem to have so many difficulties with social communication compared even to socially retarded women and sometimes it strikes me that the male gender might be, occasionally, a very lonely gender to be, especially as they age. So there's something extremely sweet in seeing such a touching - seriously! - picture of manfriends.

Speaking of friends, car update - San Francisca has volunteered to teach me herself. And she taught driving to work out some community service back in her, you know, community-service serving days, so she knows what she's doing. Her car is automatic and I'll be taking lesson-lessons on stickshift. Will that confuse me or only make me stronger? We'll see.

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.