Manchester Airport, en route to Belfast.
9/23/2003
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I lostthekittyhoody.
I.
Lost.
The.
Kitty.
Hoody.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
I would love to blame someone else, so I'll blame the people who had me living on Jamaican time today ("Jamaican time" is an actual term in England. It may sound racist in intent, but I don't mean it that way-I think it's more just about cultural differences) and made me sweat about getting to the airport on time and I had to lie to them and say my flight was two hours earlier than it was, so they got me to the airport at a time that would have been. Then my plane is leaving late, so I'm on too little sleep and fuck fuck fuck fuck. I dropped my favorite article of clothing in the world. It's my hoody with the kitty face on it. Totally comfortable. I've lived in it for 18 months. I got Tiffany to fix the broken zipper for me. I've lived, loved and slept in it. I've molded into this thing. And I had already gone through outgoing customs when I noticed it gone. So I had to get an escort to take me back through incoming customs, (waiting in line while the skinhead fucking customs agent razzed some Asian boy who was returning to go to his second year of college. He didn't get in. It was fucked. Basically the customs guy kept saying, "I don't care if you are showing me papers that the school has accepted you. They have accepted you, but we don't. We need proof, like a bank statement that says you have enough money to get through the whole school year without being a burden to us" (I'll bet most white British college kids could not produce such a document). Anyway, I ran like hell to get around to find the kitty hoody and didn't find it. It's gone. I'll never be back here, they won't return it, so there's no point in asking.
I FUCKING HATE BEING HURRIED TO AVOID BEING LATE. Planes do not leave on Jamaican time (OK, so today mine is, but that's not how I operate). Fuck fuck fuck.
The only good is that the kitty hoody was the last thing I owned that was given to me by the fucking horrible woman in San Francisco who has been stalking me since I broke up with her May 10, 2002. She's STILL fucking stalking me. (Get a life, bitch!) Maybe somehow now she'll go away. Like a magic trick.
Good thing that Dean Superjoy and Georgia gave me a pullover (sweater). Now I won't freeze to death.
My buddy Mike Kelley told me to not get too hung up on crap like that and to just enjoy myself on this trip. To look at myself as more of a journalist and less of a guy at work with hard fast goals.
I guess that way if, I miss a plane, it's something to write about.
I just want to make enough money at some point (and this isn't a lot of money. It's even less than your average businessman who does nothing artistic earns/has/spends) to take a taxi to the airport and not rely on people with a third-world sense of time. I'm too old to be traveling like a punk rocker. Well, not when it works out OK, which it usually does, but when it fucks up, I wish I were operating one notch higher on the food chain of business. Fuck!
They don't make that kitty hoody any more either. It's out of production.
Ok. Now I'm on the plane (the airline is called "BMI Baby". How can that be the name of a company? More like "Drunken Mick Airlines". They're leaving an hour late, of course.
Dublin
I wonder about an airline whose uniform is just t-shirts. The flight attendants are wearing BMI Baby t-shirts and whatever pants they want. Odd. I'll bet the pilots are naked. Instills a lot of confidence in me as they fly us over the ocean.
(Man, did I wake up on the wrong side of the council tenancy today, or what?)
council tenancy where i stayed in Manchester
Ireland
OK, I haven't even set foot in Northern Ireland yet, let alone gotten to Southern Ireland and I already can't understand most of what these people are saying.
These people….MY people. I have been surrounded for a week now by the
descendents of my ancestors. I don't really feel akin to them. It's just more
people, more humans, and I am taking them all on a person-by-person basis. I
wish more people did that. I really fucking don't get nationalism. And I am
headed to an island split by it. 
Tony in Manchester
So, here's an observation on prejudice: People like to diminish things they don't like, simplify a complicated equation down to nothing-reduce it down to a caricature: the drunken bomb-throwing Mick who stops you on the street and shoots you if you can't recite the Hail Mary. The stoned, time-challenged Jamaican. The greedy Jew. The unemployed, violent, daughter-raping redneck. Even fat rich stupid white men who run the world. All that shit is much more easily digestible than checking people out yourself if you're lazy. I do it. Everyone does it. I'm gonna try not to do it so much. People are people everywhere and I am trying to deal with them on an individual case-by-case basis.
I think if there's any true "us against them", it's all us poor people of all colors and strips vs. the bad rich people of any color. Not all rich people, but many of them. Basically the enemy is anyone who puts profits before people. Period.
(Again, I highly recommend everyone read Jim Goad's "The Redneck Manifesto".)
An old friend sent me an e-mail today suggesting that I don't try as obnoxiously to fuck everything that moves while I'm here as I did last time I was in Europe. (Ok, it was Tony from Bomb. He knows what I am/was like better than most know me). The truth is though, while I am leaving my options open, I have been here ten days, have hung out with a lot of women and haven't tried, even subtly, to fuck a one. It's not that my libido has waned, far from it, I can still fuck five or ten times a day if it's someone I like. I just don't want to go through the game and try to go to bed with people I wouldn't go to lunch with any more. Even with cool chix, unless they basically fall into my lap and they're hella cool, I'd rather work on my next book or talk to people I meet or walk around taking photos and being a tourist than doing that silly old luv dance. And I'm having a better time for it.
The airplane is beginning descent now. Just flew over the Isle of Man. The flight from Manchester to Belfast is 48 minutes. The seatbelt sign was off for only five minutes before it came back on. Gotta turn this 'pooter off now. I'll try to sneak a photo of Ireland from the air.
Isle of Man from the air
.
Garage rapper kids at Mumbo in Manchester
Garage rapper kid at Mumbo in Manchester
Tony who runs the Mumbo in Manchester
Tony who runs the Mumbo in Manchester
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