Month: April 2006

Week Thirty: Vegas in the Springtime

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I’ve been to Las Vegas three times now. The first time, A and I were on the way from Disneyland to the Grand Canyon; the second time, we invited the families, and got married by an Elvis. We love Vegas, crazy Vegas with its dry heat, its non-stop neon lights, and its trance-inducing slot machine noise. I went there for the third time this week, this time not with my wife, but with Tel, my oldest mate from Burnt Oak, who was in America on a visit.

We stayed at the Super 8 Motel on Koval, not far from Paris and Bally’s – not a first choice, of course, but there was a convention or two in town, so it was the best we could afford. It wasn’t bad, a good location, decent rooms, an okay pool – and the sort of place where, over breakfast, you could see a decent fight between a tall black hooker, a small Hispanic pimp and two rejected guests from Jerry Springer. Well, you’d see it if you weren’t in bed with a terrible hangover from a crazy karaoke night at the Ellis Island casino pub right next door, like I was.

The funny thing about going out in Vegas is that drinks can vary wildly in prices. In the casino, of course, they are free, as long as you are filling the slots, and give the waitress a good tip (such as, “put some clothes on, you’ll freeze to death in that”). In lounges and clubs, though, expect to feel like a pushover parent in a toyshop. In those bars which purport to be brewpubs, however, you can have many a beer at roughly a couple of dollars each. We went to a few of them. People even bought us drinks, even after I’d done a nasal cockney spoken-word version of Lola to an audience of local rednecks in cowboy hats.

We went Downtown, to Old Vegas, where we had an average buffet, met a fat old Elvis, watched the Fremont Street Experience and saw the casino used in Back to the Future 2 as ‘Biff’s’ (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way – thud! – the easy way…”). It’s a lot more red and gold carpeting downtown, a lot more CSI and Fredo Corleone. The cool swinging hipsters that we are, we took the bus there and back, meeting Texans and Iowans and other merrymaking mid-Staters on the way. I sensibly kept my Bush-whacking comments to myself. That’s Vegas for you, it has many faces, many accents, many opinions. And so we flew back from the dusty Nevada desert to the wetlands of Sacramento, with Tel deciding that though he kinda liked it, he preferred little Davis better. Me, I still love Vegas, and next time, I’m going back with my wife, my good luck charm (as Elvis would say). Without her, the third time wasn’t lucky, but may the fourth be with us!

Week Twenty-Nine: Eggciting Times

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The Sun has come out, after record Californian rainfall, and Spring is well and truly in the air. The once sun-crisp brown hills and fields of northern California are now alive and green, while the mountains are still thick with snow, and the rivers full to overflowing. Pete has begun murdering all spiders that look even remotely like a widow or a recluse (“execute Order 66”), and the Easter Bunny has been defying his asbo and bringing baskets of colourful eggs to all. The White House has been holding its annual Easter Egg Hunt, though despite the President’s insistence that there were mobile chicken pens and painting equipment on the White House lawn, the UN teams of specialist toddlers have yet to find any evidence of coloured eggs.

Easter is slightly different here than in Britain. For one thing, they don’t get Good Friday off work, nor Easter Monday. Secondly, they don’t have the big hollow chocolate Easter Eggs so common in the UK. Thirdly – and this one I really missed – they don’t have Hot Cross Buns. Here in the US it is the custom to give big Easter Baskets, stuffed with colourful candies, little chocolate eggs and other sweet goodies; moreover, the art of painting eggs is more popular here than in Britain (I just draw eyes on them). There has been a recent trend, however, to rebrand Easter as the sterile “Spring Holiday”, with terms such as “Good Friday” being seen as too offensively unsecular. Personally I like the name my brother-in-law Kris gives Easter, “Zombie Jesus Day”. Now, where shall I draw the parallel with the Zombie Jesus and the Church’s long history of eating people’s brains..?

Every holiday here has its associated colours. Christmas has red and green, Thanksgiving has brown and orange, 4th of July has red, white and blue; Easter has, well, pastel colours. Yellows, light greens, a bit of soft pink, maybe a touch of pale blue. It’s a very wimpy holiday, colour-wise, as if it can’t really make its mind up. Cards show baby rabbits and newly hatched chicks, rather than bloody nails and splintered wood, surely the true spirit of Easter. What would Jesus do? I don’t know, but I know if he were alive in today’s America, he would probably be deported because of his Mexican-sounding name. And so, to close this week’s entry, I’d just like to point out (in my best Cockney rhyming slang) that as long as Bush is in office, there will always be a bunch of easter egg hunts at the White House. Happy Vernal Equinox!

Week Twenty-Eight: Prints Charming

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The office is a strange place. Office society is like medieval Germany, full of tiny little independent principalities that must not be encroached. Medieval Germany, however, did not have photocopiers (though I imagine that when Gutenberg put his original printing press together he spent the first week calling in overweight technicians and trying to un-jam paper). I am struggling to understand our new giant photocopier, trying to work out why it prints twenty copies when I indicated I just wanted one, and why it prints ‘recto-verso’ when I don’t want it but won’t tell me how to do it when I do.

I am not very good friends with technology. Sure, we keep in contact, but it’s not in my speed-dial or anything. Sometimes I will walk past this photocopier and it will growl at me. I try not to look it in the eye if I can avoid it. I have given up wondering why, when there are five trays filled with paper, it insists on using the tray which is not only empty but impossible to open without a crowbar. I have not even begun to tackle the many options on the control panel; I’m sure that if I really wanted to I could get it to wallpaper the living room, but it’s just best if I stay away.

The little printer we have at home is even more scullyphobic. It seems to be pretty straightforward: you load the paper, you press ‘print’, it prints – couldn’t be simpler. Tell that to the bloody printer! What really happens is that you press print, and the printer says ‘no’, stating its reason as ‘out of paper’. “No,” I tell it, “the paper is THERE, right there in front of you.” “Where?” it replies childishly. “THERE!” I moan. I hold its hand, feed it the paper like a baby in a high-chair, and then, halfway through the first bite, it chokes up, flashing “Paper Jam! Paper Jam!” on its little LED screen.

So I take the paper out. And press ‘Continue printing’. And, like a schoolkid trying to wind up the teacher, it continues wailing about there being a Paper Jam, despite all the paper being removed from its guts and several threats of hammer-induced destruction are thrown its way. Oh, I really hate printers, why can’t they just grow up? And the worst thing is, you know that when that printer does grow up, it will be a smug, self-important photocopier. It’s nature’s way.

Week Twenty-Seven: Let The Wookiee Win

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Sometimes, when the absence of thought and the distraction of mind take us to places where we find it impossible to sit and think of anything beyond ‘it is still raining’ and ‘I hate the newsreaders’ (well, I do), it is necessary to simply reflect, allow the stream of consciousness to take you away (although whenever I think of stream, I think of the one in Watling Park, whose stickleback and piss infested waters take you on a twisty-turny journey through the sewage system of Burnt Oak, bringing you out somewhere beneath the old Scout Hall behind the shops). You see where this week’s entry is going.

I have been job-interviewed a couple of times lately, with one on the way. It never rains, but it pours, and the rain is pouring right now, thundering against the skylight. I will be seriously wet when I reach the bookshop later. I’m enjoying it there, entering invoices, making origami muppets, wowing people with my ‘intelligent-sounding’ British accent. Davis is a Republic, you know, or so they say – it’s full of Democrats, but I know a few prominent Republicans too, and I don’t hold it against them (though I’m more Moses minded, I’d like to see Bush burning – but not dying, of course, I’m anti-capitalist punishment).

I’ve ventured into space, also, but not on a rocket: I have a myspace now, like many social-minded Americans (though I am not particularly social-minded). It’s ‘all the rage’. I have taken workside doodling to new extremes – I am still trying to perfect messers Bush, Cheney and Blair, as well as a million different faces for a shady literary character I am calling The Prince. He is half Fomorian, and has one eye slightly bigger than the other. And I am planning not only a trip back to London, but also to Las Vegas – Mr Potticary is coming out for a visit in a little short while.

Mrs Pete is busy with her studies and her job; Mr Pete is reading Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’. I’m about a third into it, and it is pretty good, some interesting ideas about the old folk gods and sods of the various immigrants, pitted against the new American gods, which I think include TV, shopping malls, the internet. Maybe the gods are all out there on myspace? Maybe there should be a site for all the old gods, such as ‘deities reunited’, or ‘myheaven’. There’s a lot of stars in space, but a lot of wannabes as well. And thus concludes this stream of barely consciousness.

Until next time, y’all come back now, y’hear…