Category: old blog 2005-2008

Posts from my old blog, which I have moved over here. April 2005-April 2008

Week Thirty-Three: If You Can’t Take the Heat

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Yesterday, someone said something that gave me the impression that they thought it was still Spring. I told them, look, if it’s nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside, that means it is Summer. I was assured that this is indeed still Spring, and that I will be looking back on the days when it was only in the 90s like some bygone cold spell. In Davis – in the Central Valley generally – it gets hot, and I mean HOT.

Not that I can go outside, of course. The hay fever is especially bad right now, and I’m tired of everyone asking me what I’m taking for it. Nothing works for me, and anything medicated makes me ridiculously drowsy. I’ve realised that the best thing for me is to just stay inside, in the safe insulated bubble of my office. I don’t have a window, so I don’t see how sunny it is, but my spies tell me it’s glorious right now.

I read somewhere that California got it’s name from the Spanish words ‘cali’, meaning ‘hot’, and ‘fornia’, meaning ‘oven’. Hot Oven. I don’t know about that folk etymology, but it’s a pretty good description. The hottest place in the world is in California, down in Death Valley. It is, of course, a ‘dry heat’, which means that you won’t sweat to death in desperate humidity as you might in the South. It also means that air-conditioning is essential, or plenty of fans at least. In our apartment, for example, we have more fans than Milton Keynes Dons.

And so all that was recently green is already golden brown, and the flooded plains that stretch from Davis to Sacramento have already all but dried up. The snowmelt from the Sierras is causing some Foothills rivers to rage violently, with frequent warnings about going anywhere near the icy cold torrents. Over on the East Coast, however, they are having some terrible rainstorms. By all accounts we in Davis have had our rain now, that’s it, that’s all we get until the winter. Not for Pete though – I’ll be back in London in just under a fortnight. Better bring me brolly.

Week Thirty-Two: On the Road

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Going from northern to southern California usually requires a motorcycle, a head full of poetry and the famous Big Sur coastline. You leave the foggy Bay Area behind, and head for the palm trees and suntans of the Los Angeles beaches. For us, however, the north-south jaunt took us down Interstate-5 from the rising heat of Davis down the agricultural furnace called the Central Valley, over the Grapevine mountains (turn off the a/c, folks), and into the traffic and cooling smog of LA and Orange County, the ‘OC’. We were going there for the wedding of a friend who, a century ago in Aix-en-Provence, introduced me to my wife; ultimately, you could say, it is because of said friend that I now live in the US. We stocked up the ice-chest with Sobes and sandwiches, filled up the iPod shuffle with Jack, Art and Joni, and head off down the highway.

America is all about its roads, and some of the most memorable Americana springs from that. I’ve never read Kerouac, and despite many visits to the City Lights store in SF, I probably never will; I have seen Convoy, though, which is why every time I see a helicopter or police light aircraft while out on the sun-washed freeway I announce that there’s a ‘bear in the air’. As we speed past a backdrop of already browning hills, I get a sense of just how massive America really is; though it is not one country, but many. You have to travel among them to tell the difference, a lot of the time. Even the States, who make their presence felt in the license plate game (when I wonder to myself what story brought that SUV down from the distant grey shores of New Jersey), are not particularly real entities, and passing over the mountains into the land of LA, I get the feeling that, yes we’re in California, but this is a different country, and the road has brought us here.

Yes, the sun is clearly getting to me, so I splash a bit more sunscreen onto my arms. We eventually roll into the rich country of the OC, strolling by the Balboa Island waterfront, shopping and eating in Newport Beach. The wedding was beautiful, a mixture of Irish America and colourful Persia, in the spectacularly Mediterranean Laguna Beach. It wasn’t the only wedding in town, though; down on the shores of the Pacific, other Happy Couples were snapping photos with long sunset shadows and shimmering waves. We wandered among the palm trees and tuxedoes for a bit, before retiring to the hotel, to finish off the previous night’s cheesecake.

And then back on the road, the very next day. Back over the mountains, back into the Valley, watching the thermometer rise from the early 70s to the late 80s (completely bypassing both punk and new romantic). I noticed that in the supposedly smoggy OC/LA area, my hay fever and related allergies actually cleared up. No sniffling and sneezing for me (I was all ready to put it down to tears at the wedding, too). It took less time to get back to our part of the world than it had taken to go south – or at least it did, until just as we were getting into Sacramento, our car threw a flat tyre, forcing us onto the side of the freeway. We had to wait to be rescued, while juggernauts and Sunday drivers whizzed by at speeds that made the ground shake. An ironically fitting end to a road trip – stuck on the side of the road. At least we weren’t far from home.

Week Thirty-one: Don’t Give Me Your Huddled Masses

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The key issue here this week is immigration. Actually, it’s not, it’s the criminal President and his criminal war, but the news channels don’t want to tell us about that any more. On Monday there was a national protest known as “the day without immigrants”, when immigrants both legal and illegal showed solidarity for one another and took the day off work, just to show everybody how much America depends on them. This is a country founded by immigrants, they cry, and they have a damn valid point. As a recent immigrant myself I’m with them all the way.

But the immigration debate is a minefield. In Britain, tabloid headlines rarely distinguish between “asylum seekers”, “economic migrants” and “illegal immigrants”. The consequence is that the public lumps them all in together, and treats them just the same. The same arguments people use in the UK are being used by people here, namely “they are coming over here and taking our jobs” and complaining that with them here, wages will be forced down because they will work for much less than a local. And so they become victimised, and scapegoats.

Hang on a minute, though – where are all the jobs really going? Big corporations are outsourcing their industries abroad, to Asia and elsewhere, because they can pay lower wages there. Are we then to blame the Chinese and the Indians for that? Why don’t we blame the corporations? We seem to be quick to pick on the worker, to pick on the poor sods who bust their bottoms all day and night for a pittance, just because it is a better life than what they left behind. Why are people so quick to attack them? They come to America because they have to – it’s supposed to be the richest country, and everyone wants to take part in the American Dream. Oh yeah, remember that?

And then there is the whole language debate. “They come over here from Mexico, they don’t even want to learn English!” People talk of forcing everyone to learn English, as if in a society dominated by English-language media they wouldn’t anyway. And was Spanish not spoken in California way before English? and the Native American languages before that? It is quite ridiculous that California can support the “English First” policy (whereby they make English the sole official language, thus ‘protecting’ it), when almost all its major cities have Spanish names (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego – hardly Anglo-Saxon). I’d say that, truthfully, the English-speakers were the immigrants, wouldn’t you?

I didn’t take the day off, though (it being my first day on the new job proper), though I did stay away from the shops. The immigration debate is big and sticky, and all sides have real concerns (even the language concerns have some validity). But I think it must be remembered that people come here because there are opportunities denied to them at home, it’s that simple.

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…

Week Twenty-Six: Snow Business

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So I’ve been here six months. Six months since I last saw my family, six months since I rode the Tube, six months since I watched Match of the Day, six months since I heard the terms ‘Asbo’, ‘Happy Slapping’ and ‘Crazy Frog’ (now there’s something I don’t miss). Now it’s all ‘Roseville Auto-Mall’, ‘Ask your Doctor’ and ‘Triple Doppler Radar’. And despite the recent rainstorms and floods (and, um, tornadoes), the weather is still much better than in Britain, though there is one thing I will always miss – snow. Yes it’s freezing cold and causes pipes to burst and cars to slide all over the place, but there’s something magical about a blanket of snow. So on Sunday we decided to drive a couple of hours east of snow-free Davis into the Sierra Nevada mountains to see some of the white stuff close up – and we were not disappointed.

I have never seen so much snow in my life!! The sky was blue, and it wasn’t particularly cold, but I can’t imagine the blizzards that must have raged through those valleys. We stopped at a gas station on the way, and the snow was so deep that we could not read the road signs. Snow over a metre thick was piled up on the roof, bringing to mind ominous echoes of Bad Reichenhall, while small white hillocks were only revealed to be buried vehicles when their aerials poked out of the frozen mush like pathetic grave-markers. Yet with a blue sky and a well-ploughed freeway gliding through the chocolate box landscape, it’s easy to forget the lethal side of snow.

We passed by Donner Lake, a place synonymous with icy death. It was there that the Donner Party, a group of California-bound settlers, met their fate during a ferocious winter storm in the 1840s, resorting to cannibalism. With that in mind, when we reached the town of Truckee for lunch, we both ordered vegetarian dishes. Truckee is a nice little place, whose history lies in the westward expansion of the railroads that united the nineteenth century States. It kind of reminded us of one of those model towns that accessorise Hornby model railway kits.

From Truckee we drove to Squaw Valley, the small but world-renowned ski resort that audaciously staged the 1960 Winter Olympics, fending off Alpine bids from Innsbruck, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and St. Moritz. Nestled comfortably in a valley around a frozen lake, the only thing missing was the White Witch’s castle. Skiers big and small were pouring down the mountains like tiny black raindrops on a window. I have never wanted to ski, ever – lots of danger of injury, freezing cold weather and ridiculous outfits – if I’d wanted that I would have been an X-Man (actually, that would be cool). But after actually visiting a ski resort, even after getting ripped off with an over-priced and under-sized beer, I’m starting to see the attraction of skiing. At least there are no spiders up there.

So after six months I have finally seen a new side to California, the snowy side. We are just as far from the beach here as the breathtaking mountains, and whatever else London might have to offer such as newsagents, Match of the Day and decent news channels, it doesn’t have that. Score one for Arnie’s state.

Week Twenty-Five: It’s a Funny Old Game

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Boy, do I have a red face. Well, half a red face. We went to a college softball match on Sunday, and the midday sun beating down on my left side left me looking like a Feyenoord shirt. To top it off, my Harry Potter-esque scar now glows an ominous purple. After a week of rain, the clouds have finally parted, and it took me by surprise. Either that or Lord Voldemort has moved to Sacramento.

The softball was fun; it was women’s college softball, Princeton vs Nevada. It’s a bit like baseball, except the ball is different (and it ain’t soft, as anyone who ever encountered one at school has ever found out). We sat right behind the batting area, behind the high fence where I thought we would be safe from errant balls. I thought wrong; never mind a sun-hat, I could have done with a helmet, the amount of slices that came our way. All in all though, it was good, wholesome American fun. Princeton absolutely trashed Nevada, despite Nevada’s best efforts to put them off with some bizarre, possibly sectarian team chanting. I half expected them to be standing around a cauldron.

Speaking of sport, local NBA team Sacramento Kings are having an exciting run of form. I managed to watch their televised game against the LA Lakers last week, which despite the clash of purple polyester was a pretty great showdown. The Kings eventually won fairly comfortably, with Ron Artest winning a battle of wits against Kobe Bryant, and Mike Bibby scoring some cheeky three-pointers. Are you impressed I remember all the names? Well, I had to look them up.

And I have decided that I will watch as much of this summer’s World Cup Deutschland 2006 on Mexican TV. I caught a match on Saturday between, um, two Mexican teams (one of them was called ‘Tigres’, I caught that) and I was reminded of how much more fun it is listening to Latin American commentators when somebody scores. Motson, Pearce, Gubba, Davies… you guys just cannot pull off the famous cry of…

GOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Week Twenty-Four: Eight Legs, Two Fangs and a Change of Underwear

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My name is Pete Scully, and I am an Arachnophobe. Snakes, rats, ghosts – none of them scare me, but spiders… they are my great weakness. I knew when I came out to California that this was Black Widow country, and I have feared the Widow since I was very small, but now I have a new venomous arachnid to fear – the Brown Recluse. So far, I have encountered neither. Thankfully. I am always on the lokout, and the other night I got a fright – I was on my way to bed, I didn’t have my glasses on, I lifted up the pillow, and this little brown spider ran around in circles before vanishing behind the bed. I tell you, trying to go to sleep that night, trying to ignore the possibility of a little eight-legged freak crawling across my face, that was a task little short of Herculean. In fact it was Poirotian.

I am fascinated by spiders. When I was a schoolboy, other children would pretend they had spiders in their hands just to see my reaction. Just seeing a photograph of one makes my spine feel like Tornado Alley. California’s Central Valley has just those two dangerous spiders, I’m told, but in some abundance. It is because it gets so darned hot here. I’ve done a little research on my enemies lately, and wow that Brown Recluse does not sound like a friendly old eater of flies. When it bites, it does not poison you in the same way that the Widow does, but leaves behind a flesh-eating bacteria that slowly deteriorates whatever it has bitten. Check out this nasty set of images. Can you believe a spider can do that?

And how big is this thing, this Brown Recluse? It’s TINY!! Less than half an inch long! How are you supposed to know if one is lying in your clothes (as they do), or among your books (as they do), or in your bed (as they do)???  Even as I write I am in a panic – I’m from Britain, for heaven’s sake! We don’t have anything that can do you any serious harm there! Our only poisonous snake is the adder, whose bite is more full of sarcasm than venom. So what is my solution, how am I going to learn to live alongside these fanged menaces?

A big hammer. It’s the best I have come up with. When I finally see one, I want to be ready.