Howdy Smokestacks,
This week, the lum has been in the US of A.
I love America, and Americans funny enough, well the ones that don't appear on the news anyway. American news is the dumbest most inane sensational bunkum, to use an old Jimmy Sandison word. What about this run of headlines I noticed blaring out from the hysterically screaming red ticker one morning.
Japans nuclear melt down disaster, Downed US plane in Libya, Linda Carter digs new Wonder Woman costume, Donald Trump on Qaddafi.
How many political celebrities and veteran world affair commentators have been gone through before you arrive at Donald Trump and who's up next? Banana Splits Drooper, live from Camp David and Steve Austin really likes new prosthetic limbs, "there such good value".
I was staying in Burlington, just North West of Boston. Burlington is a fairly typical US town I think, made up of roads for cars, places to park your car and big warehouse type shops with names like Casual Men XL and Big Bobs Golf Bonanza.
My hotel was the bargain bucket Candlewood Suites. Suites, in the accommodation evolutionary chain, is one step up from trailer. It is the kind of place you will have seen featured in Cheaters, or starring in a grisly murder scene investigation in CSI.
Full of travelling salesman, jobbing tradesman and evicted families. The rooms to be honest were clean and a fair size but were furnished about 25 years ago. It could have been one of those museum exhibits, step back in time in the 80s motel ride. It had a VHS player for a start, and an 18in wide screen microwave plus you don't get the use of a sharps bin often when staying overnight at the Premier Inn. The air-conditioning unit sounded like some mad experiment, deep down in the Dyson labs, where 15 bagless vacums have been strapped together to try and create a dimension splitting cyclone. Still, Americas great.
I had one night in Boston before flying home and landed in a genuine hotel where the rooms had bathrooms with doors and no cooking facilities so the lobbies didn't smell of Quesadillas.
It was right opposite Massachusetts General Hospital. Nice place with a good location in the old part of town but given most people staying there had gravelly ill relatives in the wards across the road, its not exactly party central.
Before my flight home I had time for a wander around down town Boston, I had been before so knew my way around a little but still ended up in Chinatown. Now, when you say Chinatown in San Fran, New York or even London you think colourful restaurants, hanging lanterns and dragon statues, there is not much of that in Boston Chinatown, its mostly homeless Vietnamese scratching a living from fag ends and scraggy looking shops selling all kinds of crap. And a load of crazies.
Nobody does crazies like the States. One guy I passed was just bent over, legs straight, bent right over at the waist staring intently at the floor as if he was waiting for some tiny concrete coloured bug to move so he could squash it before it ran off with all his secrets, or another old guy just randomly stopping in the street and shouting at the top of his voice how it didn't matter and we'll all be OK just as long as we said sorry.
On the flight out of London I got upgraded to Business Class with BA, which was sweet, but without sounding ungrateful, I really could have been doing with it on the night flight back. Instead I was away up the back with a family of overweight middle Americans wedged in the seats behind me which made me feel bad about reclining my seat. The little lady in front of me however had no such qualms and whipped her seat back as far as it would go as soon as we had taken off. This meant I was effectively pinned to my seat but did have the benefit of giving the little 6 inch movie screen a big cinematic wide-screen effect because of the fact it was only about 4 inches from the end of my nose. I was glad to get off that plane, only slightly jealous of the business class passengers who all looked like people you might see standing in a hotel car park at 3 in the morning after the fire alarm has went off. Hair all over the place, baggy eyes and no make up on, quite a sight for my sore bloodshot sleep deprived eyes.
I Saw a busker with a didgeridoo the other day at Stratford station, it struck me as being the single most stupid, inconvenient and joyless choice of busking instrument. It doesn’t make music, it amplifies the raspberry's you blow down it, rearranging them only slightly to give the slightest hint of a rhythm, it was about 10 feet long and looked a heavy thing too, in fact, there was another shifty looking dirty bloke hanging around him, theres no chance he was there to appreciate the bombination, I reckon he was there to help him carry it home. Which means the instrument half as appealing as even a wobble board or the bagpipes to an Englishman has to make double the money to make it worthwhile. Revisit your business plan you didgerydope.
In London you see lots of people that look like they might come from Japan, and these last few weeks with all the trouble at home I've felt incredibly sorry for them. What happened and the images they shared with us were almost unbelievable but what it confirmed for me is, we really are just ants on the surface of this rock, absolutely at the mercy of nature and the physics of universe we are spinning through. No God, no anything else, no aliens, well, there probably is but they will undoubtedly be so far away we will never hear from them, or them from us, and nothing but the planet, mother nature, and the land, sea and sky. Its simple really, I don't know why anyone needs more than that.
Lang may yer lum reek.
No comments:
Post a Comment