Postcard from London

"Welcome to London. It's a blustery day here," said the announcement, as the plane touched down at London Heathrow. "It's raining."

It didn't take me long to figure this out for myself.

As I stepped out a paper bag blew up and smacked me in the crotch. A sort of telling off, I imagined, for my month in California.

Even as I write this I can see litter blowing up and smacking people for their sins. I think of how they ignore bins here, as they do social niceties.

A rather rude customer service advisor has just told me that I can't travel on an earlier train to see my mum on Mother's Day.

It smacked with irony then when James Blunt came on the radio.
"My life is brilliant," he mocked.
Whomever smiled at him on a subway, I thought to myself, can't have been riding the Tube.

Postcard from a Convenience Store

Behind the convenience store counter sat, what I've been told is called, an NRI - a non-resident Indian.

The top half of his face hid under the shadow of his baseball cap, which nodded both to the San Francisco Giants and to the tallish NRI standing at the counter, handing over his driving license.

I was buying booze.

As he stood to serve me I noticed that from under his baggy jeans shone the ruby jewels of his fancy slippers.

These were not the shoes of an American football fan. Nor were they the comfortable footwear of a convenience store clerk.

The stones were sewn into white satin and glistened as he walked, with surprising grace, over to the cash register.

These were, I realised, the slippers of a bhangra dancer.

He noticed me smile and turned up the volume on his radio. It was the familiar locomotive beats of bhangra music.

My feet shuffled, we spoke a little Punjabi and the drinks were on the house.

Postcard from a Rollercoaster

There must be some convoluted metaphor I can apply to riding Santa Cruz’s Giant Dipper five times as I did today. Life is a rollercoaster? Pleasure at the fairground? Rollercoaster…of love? I’m beginning to sound like an AOR radio station playlist. (And I’ve always considered myself soul, man.)

With a light breakfast, a wristband, and balls of steel, Pete and I plonked ourselves down on one of the oldest rollercoasters and marked the beginning of my last week here with an ascent, a decent, a twist and a turn.

I guess I could fashion some literary device from that. What do we have? An ascent…? Well, we’ve certainly had our high points. Seeing the sun set over the Pacific, out of the windscreen, setting the sea and St Patrick’s Day on fire, with the Rolling Stones ‘Under My Thumb’ and on the car stereo is a moment in time I will not soon forget. Nor will I the kind people that I’ve met. And it doesn't get much higher than riding, what the Rough Guide calls, two "utterly demented" rides atop Las Vegas's 1149-foot-tall Stratosphere tower.

A decent…? I think I hit some dark depths after a particularly drunken night, when I realised that my blurry outlook had less to do with how much I’d drunk and more to do with the fact that I’d actually lost my glasses. I then had to spend the next few days (before I bought a replacement pair) driving in my prescription sunglasses and explaining to everybody that I did not think I was cool sitting in my shades at the bar. (They didn’t think I was cool anyway.)

As for twists and turns, there’ve been plenty driving on the 1, or the Pacific Coastal Highway. Just last night we saw a deer in our headlights. Literally. It looked like me. I mean, I’ve felt the same way with some of the run-ins I’ve had.

And we can expect more – twists and turns, that is – as we continue our roadtrip north. If, to quote Ronan Keating, of all people, “life is a rollercoaster”, I’ve just got to ride it. Word.

Postcard from Las Vegas

In the carefully constructed casinos of Las Vegas every effort is made to keep the teeming, gambling masses in a constant state of fantasy.

The halls are a Wonderland-like maze of tables and toys, clocks are conspicuously absent, time and space - even the natural light of day - are a reality at odds with this sensuous sin city.

If you ever find an exit sign and venture out into the unknown - a sun-lit Strip in the day - you'll find the curious meeting of fantasy and reality. Neon signs reach into a clear blue sky and the Las Vegas Boulevard stretches between the Sierra Nevada mountains like a stream through the desert.

Though not exactly the same (there are fewer exotic dancers, but no less gambling), Las Vegas and its two worlds is in some way similar to my life. My writing is the Strip that bridges my public and private spheres.

Unlike Vegas however neither present fantasy. Far from it (there'd certainly be more exotic dancers and less gambling if that were the case). Rather, those that known me, that share in my experiences and read my blog are presented with reality from a different perspective.

I write this because I met a girl - a great girl - far from the Las Vegas Strip, in sunny San Diego. And I'm nervous that when she returns home she'll Google me, find my blog and suddenly be presented with reality from a different perspective. Not to mention an archive of my dating disasters.

But I guess that this is what we gamble when we put our cards on the table. It's like opening the door to a sun-lit Las Vegas, my flaws and follies on display.

Sometimes even there are exotic dancers.

Postcard from Big Stupid Sur

Should we have taken the advice of Irish band, The Thrills, we might not have gone "back to Big Sur", and be faced, as we are today, with a court citation.

And though running from the cops was high on our list of things to do, this morning we were faced with a park ranger. And we hardly ran. Instead, we stated our case plainly: We had (honestly) dropped our $20 into the drop box for registration at the camp site. Somehow, perhaps through some administrative error, it had got lost.

"You see sometimes," the old man said. "People say they've paid their registration," then, looking at us from under his baseball cap, added, "when they haven't."
"With all due respect, sir," I began. "We have."
"Is it possible that you forgot to pay and dropped it in this morning?"
"No," Pete snapped. "We paid it. When we arrived."

And so the conversation continued until the man, with the power to tear up our notice and put this misunderstanding, like much of the Pacific Coastal Highway, behind us, simply smirked and walked away.

For a moment in time our destiny, our freedom, sat in the grubby hands of this rude and arrogant park ranger - a stupid white man with the power to decide our fate.

And as we left the park, I thought of other stupid white men in positions of power and wondered how Americans put up with it everyday.

Postcard from a Big Guy in a Small Town

You can take the big guy out of the small town but not the small town out of the big guy.

This is the lesson I learned from my stay in Davis, the sleepy college town where, you might remember, I stayed for a year and, more recently, vowed to never return.

Posterity, a remaining friend and a convenient stop on our road trip led us there. And a girl - isn't there always a girl? - may just bring us back.

I'm vowing to never take more vows. Unless of course it is one of holy matrimony with Sonia, the young lady my friend Amber introduced us to.

And though we'd wished, with the Beach Boys a-blaring on the car stereo that "they all could be/California girls", Sonia hails from Spain. But she'll always hold a place in my beer swilled heart.

I might have been under the influence, but my eyes had ne'er seen a more beautiful site. And bear in mind, we're road tripping down the Pacific Coastal Highway.

Having sobered up and hit the road (in that order), it occurs to me that I've either fallen pretty hard for Sonia or bumped my head. I say this because we've driven some 250 miles but no further from her delightful memory.

The catch - and isn't there always a catch? She has a boyfriend, albeit a pig, who pays her little attention and time.

With three weeks remaining I could give her both those things. Unfortunately, all I leave her with is a stolen kiss and a goodbye.

Postcard from a Piss-Drenched Couch

It's important to make a good first impression. Even more so when travelling, meeting new people and, potentially, sharing their living space.

Unfortunately, I rarely do.

Like this morning at my friend Katya's house in San Francisco. It turned out that, in the night, her cat had peed on the sofa - an occurrence that Katya was recounting to her new housemate, Christina. This coincided with my first meeting with said housemate.

And though it would have been more sensible, certainly more commonplace, to simply extend my hand and say my name, I instead went with a joke. And a crude one at that. You could say that I took a risk.

"So, Christina," Katya said. "The cat peed on the sofa last night."
"Oh no!" Christina exclaimed. "Bad kitty!"
"Well hey," I said, pointing. "I just pissed in the corner."
"What?" Christina said. Clearly preoccupied with the piss-drenched couch she'd not heard my joke.
"I, er...I pissed in the corner."
The moment had passed. And I was just some weird guy, standing in her lounge, pointing at the spot in which I'd just claimed to have pissed.
"Hi," I said, extending my hand. "I'm San."

Postcard from match.com/sanfrancisco

Though many first dates may start with nerves and excitement, few end with projectile vomit.

This was the curious situation I found myself in last night as I kissed my date farewell, stumbled out of her front door and puked on her porch.

It was marginally better than my first match.com date, buoyed by the fact that she actually showed up. And it didn't hurt that we were drinking in arguably California's greatest city, San Francisco.

The amount we drank however may have led to the evening damp and dastardly demise and this morning's hangover from hell.

Should she not remind me of such horrifically drunken times I might see her again. Unfortunately, her memory is now forever associated with that crazy night. And I'm constantly reminded by the little bit of vomit on the tip of my shoe.

Pretentious Poem from North Beach

Allen Ginsberg, what would you say,
Sitting here, smoking North Beach away?
Inhaling the trees
Blowing out the cathederal
Sleeping bags and the homeless
Did you know him?
He's about your age
He's flanked with tourists now
The City Lights Walking Tour
Did you ever take that, Allen Ginsberg?

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