Thar be monsters

This is a super-stressful week at work, the sort of week that makes me zone out on videos of kittens and unchallenging American sitcoms just so my brain can untense enough for me to be reasonable with the F-word and then fall asleep. But instead, last night, I watched Coast and then, from the same provider, a BBC documentary about lake monsters.

Coast is a cute show. I don't know if I'll watch the 2 to 4th series, though, as they get rid of the skinny geographer host whose endearing manner reminds me of Geoff the First Time Cottager and put pretty Scottish longhair Neil Oliver on the marqée instead. If I want hot, I'll go ogle the chef at my favourite pizzeria, thank you, when I go to the BBC I want pure fucking geek. Also my part of the coast gets covered in the first series, and now that it's behind me I find myself not caring as much anymore.



We'll see.

The monster one was great. I have a thing for people who spend loads of time and money hunting lake monsters. There's something really sweet about it, almost as sweet as it is silly, but I also find it annoying, as there are so many really phenomonally beautiful and interesting things in the world that actually exist, and why not gawk at those?

But since I started kayaking alone once in awhile, I understand the psychology of sightings a little better. When it's silent and the water is dark, and shapes loom out of it occasionally, and the sounds are odd and once in awhile the way the waves hit your boat sounds like a big solid thing brushing against it, all that shit could be anything. I nearly screamed once on the La Vase when I spotted some bizarre bladdery water weeds because I thought they were a corpse - it took seconds of frantic reasoning with myself to keep looking at them instead of paddling away like a madwoman, and realize they were bladdery water weeds. Also once in Scotland I saw a seal playing on the surface of Loch Lomond, and the way those wee animals swim around, weaving up and down on the surface of the water, looks like all the classic bumpy monster descriptions.

Anyways, here's the documentary, it's good for the evenings your brain hurts and you want to hear the funny way people from Vermont and upstate New York talk.

Lovely as a sleepy lizard

Like everybody, I could complain about my job. Really only about the hours - I'd like to work as hard as a rentboy at a televangelists' convention three days a week and then have four day weekends. I suppose I could also complain about the fact that my office is in Brussels, but that's not my office's fault, and if it was in a better city where apartments aren't so cheap they'd have to pay me more, or else I'd be complaining about my salary. So there you are. And my job has great benefits, like the way I'm being paid to fight with people on the company blog - I gave up looking at comment sections of anything a long time ago because of the contribution it makes to my misanthropy, but hey, if it's my job, cool - and knowing about what's happening in Mozambique and the way I get to go sea kayaking in Marseille in a couple of weeks.

And yesterday my job benefited me by teaching me, in the course of research for one of my articles, that Abu Dhabi has a falcon hospital. And it's one of several in the region. Can you believe it? That little scrap of information took my breath away - slapped me across the face with the fact that not only do people live so differently from me, but people love birds in an absolutely different way from me. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Obviously I shouldn't have had to look all the way to Abu Dhabi to realize that, but you know how things jump out at you from time to time.

Also varied and wonderful is something the F-word got for me, Life in Cold Blood, narrated by the mighty Attenborough. I don't know the last time I've seen something so pretty, though there're so many reptiles and amphibians making it that from time to time I feel like I'm watching porn that's missing my horny mark. It's all the relationships within a species that really gets me though, not just the jissoming relationships, or not just the jissom in the jissoming relationships. Like the je t'aime moi non plus of Australia's sleepy lizards, who spend two months together a year, and then split up, and then get back together, and who mourn their partners if they die. Or the ritual combat of king cobras, who can kill a large animal with a single bite but whose menfolk content themselves with wrestling and pinning each other down to settle territorial disputes. I swear the more we learn about animals, the more mysterious they get.

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.

The devil you know is a twat

America, you should start looking into what sort of bananas will thrive in your varied climates now. There's always the paw-paw, otherwise known as the prairie banana, which makes a fucking fantastic Jamaican hot sauce. Because if she wins, it won't just be the name of the overpriced sweatshop outlet anymore. Pardon my evident bitterness but I abhor that creature. Her husband was a cynical cunt who sold out what was left of Roosevelt's legacy to make nice with the very people he should have opposed, and she herself has made public statements of such staggering irresponsibility for populist purposes that I fear she'd be even worse. Not to mention participating in the murder of thousands in Iraq. Ugh. Gross.

I didn't think I'd fallen for the Obamania that has swept the universe; I've only heard him speaking once, and while it was delightful, so was listening to the creature's husband talk. I loved hearing Bill Clinton talk. He was so good at it. And from what I heard before I tore myself away from the screen, crying 'no! No more letting American politicians play with my heart,' Obama is even better at talking. Anyways. The point is I evidently have fallen for it, or at any rate have become absolutely persuaded that a half-unknown quantity who has at least put his votes where his mouth is over the short space of time he's been voting in his congressional house is a vastly better possibility for the future of our planet than four more fucking years of the Bush/Clinton combine.

Maybe that's not quite mania but it's sincere nonetheless. So this morning I actually switched on the computer in a state of hope that the evil charm has been broken and the Bush/Clinton combine has at last been consigned to the composter of history. Not yet, it seems. It's like Christmas has been postponed. But for how long? It better not be until McCain wins the presidency. He'd blow stuff up and then die and then that personable psychopath Huckabee would try to usher in the End Times. I don't want the End Times. I want to live to experience the adventure and excitement of menopause.

Anyways. My mate Kate has linked to a sometimes-funny blog called Stuff White People Like, which features my water bottle and my own life pattern in response to North American political degradation. I thought I moved to Europe for the extra four weeks of vacation, higher pay in a stronger currency, and richer desserts, but the writer makes a pretty good case. And if that Botoxed bit of criminal-insincerity-in-a-power-suit wins, I predict lots more Americans threatening to move to Canada and lots more Canadians threatening to move to Europe.

And anyways again. I'm going abroad for a conference this aft and won't be back until next week; unless my hotel has wireless (which I hope to fuck it does as I have another huge report due) I won't be posting until then. If you need anything keeping you busy, I suggest you check out the site for Viz magazine; easily the stupidest, grossest, most puerile thing I've ever been ashamed of enjoying. It's like a farting competition in an elevator that goes horribly wrong.