Day tripper

Only being back home for week, I've allowed myself to get back into the weekly (ish) trips to Falmouth.

The last few days have been a welcome change of pace. Back for a few minutes and I have something to smoke. A bar which provides ample measures of Sailor Jerry's, lime and lemonade. A nice place to relax.

Unfortunately there was only one guitar at hand. Music took a back seat in the proceedings. Banter and episodes of Screenwipe were aptly at hand.

Right now I'm feeling pretty beat. I'm in a three table tournament on Full Tilt. Should keep me busy before jumping in either the tub or the sack. Need to be feeling up to speed tomorrow as the drinking session with my uni buddies kicks off Duncan's birthday weekend in Woking.

Ah, the life of the social-ist.

Back to the grind

It's quite disheartening that the only thing I have to write about after being home for about a week is my new job. Previously I've been able to report on the crazy life I was living in Warsaw, teaching English and being caught up in crazy situations.

Now I'm glass collecting. Hoo-fucking-ray!

The biggest problem I've found adjusting to normal, home town life, is that everything seems so normal. The minuscule events in the world that pass through my existence seem pretty straight forward. No longer am I brought face to face with strange habits or customs. It's all a bit boring.

I guess I'm using this as a reminder to myself, to not get caught up in the simple life for too long. Too many people I meet talk about how long they've been stuck in this town. You wouldn't say that if it was a good place to dwell.

I might get something like that tattooed on the back of my hand. "Get the fuck out of here!" Although that might get confusing in the future, when hopefully I'll find somewhere I'll want to stay.

Homecoming Part 2

Now that I've had a decent night's sleep, a few more cups of tea and some scraps that I found in my top draw to smoke, I'm definitely feeling in a better state to write about the last few days.

In a last effort ditch to get my hands on as much Polish money as I could before I left, I foolishly organised a conversation on Monday morning. My last day in the country. I arose at 6.45am to head into town when I was met by the clusterfuck that is Warsaw's public transport system. The Metro wasn't running properly between two stations, one alternative to squeezing into a train was to squeeze onto a tram, the other was to wait for non-existent replacement buses. They're not too great at organisation over there. Anyhoo, it fucked up my being able to get to the lesson at all thing. That'll teach me for being a money grabbing capitalist whore.

Approximately 23¾ hours without any sleep later I took off from Warsaw. Somewhere over Europe I got my eyes shut for all of half an hour. The day continued as I landed in Luton and got a bus to London, where my eyes dipped up and down for another 30 minutes. From there, with my eyes looking similar to how they would after an evening smoking with the Wu Tang Clan, I caught the train to Newquay. During this trip I again snuck in a sneaky 30 or 40 minutes shut eye. Not proper sleep, just traveling kip, where the slightest nudge stirs the senses into bewilderment.

The change at Par allowed me to get in a cigarette, to which I received a telling off from a First Great Western employee. On the train I met a chap who was going to Newquay from Falmouth. In a rather non English way, we started up quite a conversation that included loads of things that I actually know about. Teaching English abroad, Falmouth, traveling around Australia, Newquay, blogging. It's quite handy when you have a full round of ammunition for a chat. Not just crap you know, but crap that you're really interested in. Nice one Will. His blog Alternative Current isn't bad either.

At around 5.00 we got into town. Within minutes of arriving I realised not a lot had changed. Abandoned and half completed building sites everywhere, my folks complaining about it and numerous other injustices in the world, my house that is colder in an unseasonably warm March day than my digs in Warsaw on a seasonably cold (-25°c) winter's day. Boy, it's good to be back.

As it was St Patrick's Day, I wasn't going to let 38 hours without sleep stop me from catching up with some friends and having a few pints. The few pints turned into 6 or 7 - my tiredness got in the way of drinking more, but didn't stop me from playing a few tunes at the open mic. Back five minutes and I'm pissed, playing someone else's songs in front of a pub full of people. I've got to work on these bad habits. By that I mean the someone else's songs thing.

Just after 3.00am I finally got myself horizontal and out of the 44¼ hours of consciousness that started two days earlier. For a trip that only took 11 hours of actual traveling, that was a bloody long day.

Homecoming Part 1

The Teenagers sang about fucking some American cunt. I can't say I paid any attention to what Kanye West and Chris Martin were banging on about.

I've been back in my home town for about three hours. Having been up since 6.45am yesterdy morning, not a lot makes sense. The broken phone and laptop aren't helping either. All I know is I need to go for a few pints of the black stuff.

Perhaps tomorrow will hold the answers to the Kanye West-ions I have about the last 38 hours.

Tune in for Homecoming Part 2 tomorrow...

Getting further entangled in the web

Sorry for the pun. I know the term 'web' hasn't been used since about 1997 (or the last mention of some cyber crime in the Daily Mail), but it's late. My concentration is slowly sinking (as is the plan to send me to sleep) but not to such a degree to stop me from joining the latest online trend.

Tonight I got me a Twitter. Fucking hell, a hillbilly with a lisp, I'm really missing writing at three o'clock in the morning aided by a bottle of wine or an eighth of green.

Where was I?

Oh yes, Twitter. I've heard it being mentioned quite a bit recently and what with being a total geek that has a tendency to get into things just as they stop being cool, I thought I'd get on it ahead of the rush. If I'm being honest about the degree of my geek claims, I went on it after reading something that Stephen Fry said on the BBC here.

It's been almost two years since I opened a Facebook account. My thirst for knowledge of my friends' activities and whereabouts vastly outweighs my need to get away from my computer screen and have a chat face to face with them. This seems to be the next big move in permanently gluing our faces to our computer screens or mobile handsets. By getting in now I can offset the (damn I hate to use it again, spiders should have got a copyright on that years ago, alas) web trendsetting against my awfully uncool @hotmail email addresses.

I haven't been on it long enough to tell what it's really like (what with having about nine contacts), but I think the idea is pretty cool. In 160 odd characters, you write what you're up to. It seems to be that simple. It also seems to be vaguely (exactly) similar to Facebook's status updates, which is my favourite bit of it. Meh, photos of your holidays, your favourite commodities, what school you went to, adverts coming at you from all angles... I could live without it. I'm pretty sure, I did for the first 23 years of my life. Obviously the old businesses have got in on the Twitter action (the second of third screen asks you if you would like to add any of these members: Britney Spears - No, Ryan Seacrest - No, Coca-Cola - No... for example), but at least they only have 160 characters to sell you their shit. That is, if you add them.

So I'm going to stare blankly at my screen awaiting news from eight mates, Stephen Fry and The Onion. I don't think I'd get that done in a room full of friends.

Dreams...

According to the 1990's cycloptic pop singer Gabrielle can come true. What the little piratey minx didn't mention was that nine times out of ten they are either: impossible, improbable or so loosely based on reality that it's probably just your brain keeping itself entertained while the rest of the selfish body gets to lie there and do nothing. Another thing old Gabbers forgot to mention was that dreams are a pain the harris to talk about without sounding like a fucking idiot.

I'm probably breaking one of the ten men commandments written somewhere highly witty and so highly macho that only giant men with their strength gained from the gym, where they go to enhance their alpha muscles (as opposed to look at others') so they can lift such intellectual weight off a shelf, a guide to life so overwhelmed by insight that each word has been carefully wanked over for millennia, for each one is worth a thousand mortal breaths: except the title. (Or Im Agazine is waiting in a bin for its revenge.) My real concern was that I've been away from this page for about four days and I felt like writing something this morning.

Ah yes, the dream thing. If I'm going to bear my soul to a dozen people on the internet, I might as well do it properly. Normally my dreams are so inanely boring that for the first few minutes of my day I'm glad to have woken to a world that is not limited to my rather limited imagination. The joy usually wears off when I reach the level of consciousness that reminds me that my life is limited to my imagination as well as my ability to do anything with it. But as the film flickered in my head in the early hours of this morning, I got the idea that for once in my life my head wasn't just showing me pictures that made absolutely no sense. Unlike most of my dreams, this morning there was dialogue. Hopefully this is going to do to my head what talkies did for Hollywood.

There was also a strange amount of product placement.

Have you ever seen the episode of Futurama where people's sleep is invaded by advertising campaigns? I think it's starting to happen. And you know how websites track your previously visited sites and personal data to tailor fit the ads that appear in your browser? (E.g. 20 something male, uses social networking, email, reads the news and watches a bit of porn: TV LICENSING ad.) My brain's adverts had that. I remember looking at a slogan on a billboard which had a misplaced question mark and thinking: why is there a question mark in that brand X advert. (In fact it was one of those double brand ads, like use Friendface on your iWank.) And instinctively, in my sleep, my obsessive nature made me shout at the advertising hoardings like a madman.

Then another advert appeared that made me laugh, because it really seems to have worked in a backward ass kind of way. So I'm walking through the park and then out of nowhere, on the side of a building or floating through the sky like in Blade Runner, another billboard appears: New York City, a place to blog. Sheesh kebab, did that make me laugh. If all NYC has got going for it is ten million morons like my morose self tapping inane thoughts into iBooks at brand coffee houses, America is more fucked than we thought. Hell, we might as well right off the idea of the Western hemisphere already.

But the important thing is that these bizarre images in my stupid head seem to have done the trick. I've woken up an hour earlier than I planned to. Despite not being in the Blogger's City, I've spent the first half an hour of my day writing about the last half an hour of my last day. Things are starting to make sense to me. I've been reading Catcher In The Rye again, which explains the New York setting of this morning's adventure through my skull. I've already finished school so I can't drop out like old Caulfield did. But I can go home and explain to my folks: Mum, Dad, I want to be a famous blogger.

One of those

It seems like I'm following up the last lazy post with another half assed effort. Well, you can't say I'm not consistent.

This evening's entertainment has been brought to you by Zubrówka vodka, a lack of sleep and the letter L.

My time here in Poland is drawing to a close. As of yesterday evening, my time left was reduced by 24 hours. For some retarded reason I got my dates mixed up and thought I was here until a week on Wednesday. It turns out I'm coming back a week on Tuesday. Arse.

My current theme of operation is a bi-polar approach to pretty much anything that I can wrap my head around. The slightest bit of inspiration is marred with an (I'd like to say equally, but I'm not that way inclined) a-pessimism. (That was an attempt to turn pessimism into a Present Perfect verb and to follow on from the 'an': not sure what you call that.) For every idea of something I can do, there's at least two excuses why not.

In the last week I've had the pleasure of finishing my work as a Callan Method English teacher. To re-cap, the Callan Method involves asking (foreign speaking) students quickfire questions (in English). I can't really comment on its standard of teaching English, but I can say it's been the only opportunity to ask Pole's questions like:

If you fell from the top of a building, what would happen?
Have you ever seen a fight in the street? Between two drunks for example...
[And] Why is it some people want to fight the moment they get drunk?

In spite of all the stress of teaching (such as finding and getting to students' classes in the remotest parts of Warsaw, getting them to speak English regardless of their abilities...) I have to say it's more interesting than the usual service industry shit employment that is waiting for me back home. I look forward to my next interview where I can explain that, 'I was paid a reasonable amount of money to talk to people'. Perhaps I should only apply for journalist type jobs when I get back.

During this past week I've been doing conversation classes, which is pretty much what it sounds like. I have a conversation in English, with a Pole. (Yes, I just noticed how amusing it would be if it read: ...with a pole.) I've had the chance to talk to some staff writers of Rzeczpospolita, one of the three national dailies based in Warsaw. Cunningly using my conversation session to do further research on getting into the media, I've reached the familiar conclusion: sell yourself for nothing (or less than you're worth)... maybe you'll get a contract after a few years.

And this is the shit kicker (a poker term, where you're practically unused card is beaten by an opponent's better practically unused card). I'm not 18, 19 or 21. My folks don't own a house in or near the city. My folks don't have any connections of any sort out of the square mile that is Newquay. Journalism seems to be something done by those who can [afford to]. It looks like I'll be serving pints or writing hollow press releases until I can afford a midlife crisis internship.

If the worst comes to the worst I can apply to become an English teacher in England. I used to watch Teachers, it looked pretty cool. I just hope I never come face to face with myself at age thirteen:

Me, 13: 'So this is what you did with your life?'
Me: 'Yeah. You should probably work on your ambitions.'

My fucking short attention span

If I was ten years younger and my parents were lazy, I'm sure I'd be put on a course of Ritalin. My attempts at playing more music have been achieved in many ways. I'm playing my guitar for a matter of minutes, then mucking about on Ableton and just before I came on here to write about it I got bored of my computer's pathetic memory speed and played around with a remix of Black History Month on DSS DJ. I'm playing music, but apart from a crappy drum and piano loop: I haven't come up with much.

And so I'm stood in the kitchen at 2.40am smoking a cigarette and writing.

Now I'm back in bed, slouched in a semi-horizontal position which is probably the cause of my latest back problems. (I'm such an old man. It's embarrassing.)

I want to be able to sit down and produce something vaguely artistically valid. Perhaps that's why I've diverted my attention to the warming text box of Blogger. Blogger doesn't freeze as soon as you enter some text. My computer can cope with Blogger. It doesn't demand too much from my head to try and think outside of the painfully simple (ergo useful) minor pentatonic scale that the neck of my guitar demands. Just tap away and try not to think how late it is and how much all this shit sounds like everybody who has ever been before's shit. Damn, I've fallen into that trap again.

All I wanted to do was change the world, all I managed was to change my underpants.