One has returned from the Paradise Show in the good ole' US of A. I am officially seven different kinds of messed up having spent more time in the air than I actually did on the ground. I did so much writing while I was away, I have something that looks a lot like a big enough collection of essays and stories that won't need an awful lot of additional work to put out a book. So I came back with a bee up my ass about getting that done sooner rather than later. The Family of Noise didn't quite get finished as planned but it got awfully close - work continues like a train running late on that.
If I could shake off this dizziness and see straight again, I'm sure I would get there a lot faster. I also forgot we were supposed to move house this weekend as well but Eleanor is still in Dubai, so I guess we'll get around to that soon enough - she's back tomorrow, so we can wander around like the living dead together. How constructive of us...
Having written a fair amount on the trip that turned out to be worthwhile, as much as I'd like to, I'd best not drop it all on here - instead, here's some snaps of what the upper echelons of Colorado is like and may go some way to explaining why I think it's a great place to finish a book (and kick start some new ideas too):
This used to be a moose. I knew moose were big but I didn't quite figure on this big - and can't quite get it straight in my head how big it would be with the rest of its body still attached:
..and here's what it looks like outside where many words were laid on the page:
As I closed my notebook for the last time and sat right about here (above) at seven in the morning thinking about how fantastic it was, I realised that, high in the mountains of Colorado was not actually that much different from North Wales - it was just a lot further away and magnified in scale. I guess you don't appreciate what's relatively on the doorstep until all the pennies fall out of your pocket at the same time. So at some near point in the future, when I need to wrap something up again, I might simply decamp to the old birth-place and soak up what I should have all along.
To prove a point - even if to nobody other than myself - this is what I call home:
Not really a whole bunch of difference is there? I adore Colorado but I think I may have been somewhat foolish in taking for granted what's practically around the corner. Sometimes, you have to travel many miles to find what you where looking for. Ain't that the damn truth with everything?
Anyway, the most energy I can muscle up right now is to press some buttons on the remote control and watch Whitechapel.
Busy days - off to Colorado tomorrow and very much looking forward to it. Meanwhile, the morning after I leave, Eleanor is off to Dubai. I've never experienced anything like this before. It's a bit hectic but mostly because we're trying to move house at the same time. We've kind of half moved out, so there's no stuff here that we want but likewise, the other house doesn't have all the things in it that we need. It's a bit weird but I guess in 10 days time, it will all be over. All of it.
I also have a book to finish. Finish or do not finish. There is no try...
Anyway - the Dog Day Afternoon is looming. As soon as everything up there is figured out, time to put the dog back on the radar. If you've been keeping up over the last few months, there was a dog called Kevin (we didn't move house fast enough to get him) and he's back on skid row for bad behaviour. There was also Badger, who has apparently got even worse issues. God only knows what people do to their animals to make them like that, but - in all honesty - I haven't got the heart to take on another human's issues in the shape of a dog. Time for a change of plan and look at some puppies.
This chap - Hector - turned up the other day:
He's an Old English Sheepdog crossed with something else, though without seeing him in the flesh yet, I can't tell what the cross is. Still, he looks like he knows a good time when he sees it. Even more likely though, I found out yesterday that the kennels up the road have some white German Shepherd pups that will be ready around the end of September - which is perfect timing... stay tuned.
White German Shepherd? How very Neil Gaiman of me. I can live with that. In other dog news, we've decided to get two - a dog each. Eleanor is veering towards a Husky right now but I think the short-list only something like 243 dogs on it...
Talking of Neil Gaiman, take a look at this. This is wonderful:
That's one fine. fine piece of art from J H Williams. Roll on the full experience - and if you're struggling to find something good to read in the meantime, I can recommend this with all of my heart:
I'll try and post while I'm away but mostly, I am looking forward to the solitude. 11,640 feet above sea level and a population of something like 17 people? All books should be finished like this - and maybe they will be.
Where was I? Oh yeah, thousands of miles away from home. The show itself was top shelf as expected. Good to catch up with some people I've not seen for a while. Always a pleasure to hang out with Jesse Smith that's for sure but made some new friends too - notably Frank La Natra and Gene Coffey. If you want to know more about the show, you're gonna have to pick up a magazine. Not this one - maybe the next, there's still a lot of material to come in.
Anyway, America. We took a weird route to get there and stopped at Philadelphia on the way. Through the window of the plane, it looks like a interesting, sprawling place to visit. We did go outside for ten minutes to see what it was like and - as in any city - if you want to know what's going, a cab driver is a good place to start. Can you believe that he didn't know where the Rocky statue was. The next two said the same thing as well. It was only though persistence that we found somebody who did know it was about twenty minutes from the airport. How do people live places where they don't know what's going on?
But it shouldn't have been a surprise. Going through customs and security I was repeatedly asked where I was staying and got the "liar" look for my trouble when I told them Keystone in Colorado. "I don't know where that is" she says to me. Well lady, you'll probably find that's the case with 99% of all place names if you don't look any further than the car park and the cake shop. Is it a standard response to see how you react? A trick question? Security in the U.S. is still very paranoid - which is fair enough I guess but it doesn't make for the most pleasant of arrivals in the Holy Land. All it takes is one man to try and bury a bomb in his shoe and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet have to take their shoes off for the rest of their lives. When I hit New York for the first time back in '94, the guy didn't even look up from the comic he was reading when he stamped me in.
I think somewhere in the middle might be a good idea.
Talking of airports, once you've gone through all of the official nonsense, they're actually a pretty good place to pick up stuff you don't get to see very often. On the way home, I found this:
Sounded good, nice cover... never heard of it before and it's totally excellent. You can find Mike's site here but just go read the book because it's a firecracker. Talking of which, people don't usually give me good book recommendations that I pay attention to but yesterday, my writer buddy Barbara shoved this in front of my face:
I don't think that's the official cover that they ran with when it came out but it's the one I like the best (natch) - you can grab it at amazon here - I shall be starting in on it this very evening - just as soon as I'm done with Up Jumps The Devil. I'll let you know. There's also a pretty cool website to go along with it here.
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(A note on the above clip - was that for real? I guess it was. The dark ages were not so far away huh?)
My tickets for Alice Cooper turned up this morning. I'd actually forgotten that I'd bought them - those guys at TicketMaster, ClearChannel and Live Nation sure know how to take the fun out of everything. Buy the tickets months in advance and forget, then send them out far enough in advance for you to forget about it again. And you know what else - back when I was a kid, concert tickets used to be worth keeping - not much, but enough. I still have my Alice Cooper ticket from the Constrictor tour somewhere.
Here's the graphic they designed for the tour:
and here's the tickets for the event:
Would it have be so hard to make something that looked like an effort? It will get me in - as it should because I paid for it but is that it? Is that really good enough for you? You know what - I think it is. Give it a couple of years and you'll probably be able to collect ClubCard or Nectar points when you make a vague attempt at going to a rock n roll show. Then you'll be able to drop by the supermarket on the way home and pick up that "Dad Rock" CD they put out every year at a slightly discounted price for your trouble.
I can hear Jim rolling in his grave from here. Sigh...
I have returned. Where have you been, I hear you ask - and that's a very good question. One has been across the big sea to the land of opportunity and carbohydrates. The holy land known in some quarters as The U.S. of A, but around here, known simply as America. Colorado to be exact. Wait. You can’t call 104,000 square miles exact, so let me tighten that up a little for you: I have been in Keystone, Colorado (population 825 and I think I met all of them) which is - and I know this because somebody with more apps on their phone than me worked it out - 12,408 feet up a mountain. The upshot of this is that at that sort of altitude there happens to be very little oxygen around and it’s like living with another person sitting on your chest and sharing your life force. There were also rumours that every beer you drank counted as three but I felt like such a bag of spanners after the flight that I didn’t attempt to drink for the best part of the week that we were there.
Purpose of journey? The Paradise Gathering - probably the greatest stitching together of artists on the face of the planet. Tattoo artists, yes - but also artists in their own right and I’ll come to that in part two or three because there’s a lot to get through.
From the minute I stepped into Heathrow to millions of minutes later when I stepped off a different plane in Denver, governmental forces appear to have taken control of the distribution of fruit and vegetables. From one side of the world to the other, it appears that carbohydrates are your only option. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now I like carbs as much as the next guy (maybe more) but after a couple of days of watching my lips turn into a couple of slugs wearing salt jackets, I was beginning to get pretty desperate for something that got picked off a tree. So much so that I would even have picked a pawpaw or prickly pear by using the claw (not the paw) but I didn't see either of those things up there. Only Aspen's. Everywhere. All of this was offset by my possibly over zealous excitement of seeing a tin sign above some bins telling us that bears were active in the area.
Like, how neat is that. My first bear sign! Anyway, when we got to our hotel, we found we were the only people staying there. Seriously - when we got up in the morning, the old Polish guy behind the counter was as surprised as we were. In hindsight, I wondered who the hell had left the keys on the counter for us, but some things in life you just have to let go of. We came up the mountain in the middle of the night so it was black as er... night when we got there. I wasn't really sure what to expect come the morning - I certainly wasn't prepared for this:
and this:
Why I chose to make somewhere so beautiful look like the movie set from a seventies porno film with some serious iPhone trickery I don't know but you get the picture. I'm not a super religious man, but shit like this makes you wonder. iPhones have no place in a joint like this but after much debate with myself over what to take to get some work done - MacBook, iPad or iPhone - the phone won based on size and portability and - put through its paces, it far exceeded expectation. Also performing above and beyond was the wi-fi they have everywhere. Why somewhere with less than a thousand people should have better high speed wi-fi - for free - than I have in my own house is a mystery to me, but that's America for you. Maybe they were forced to choose between fruit and wi-fi, in which case, I think they chose very wisely indeed.
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The kids are now firmly back at school. As expected, shit happened while I was away, which was just about the worst thing that could happen. It wasn't uber-serious but the school bus being late in the morning is always a pain in the ass. To ice that cake properly, the driver seems either a) incapable of controlling anything or b) never gave a damn in the first place because I got reports of the kids at the back smoking weed and setting fire to aerosol cans. Yep - that's just the education I had planned for my kids.
Our bus journey to school was pretty dull - or at least it was until this new kid arrived called Baines. I think that was his name. He was Irish and in our very small town mentality, being Irish meant one thing. Bombs. That was about all anybody knew about Ireland at the back end of the seventies in our school - it wasn't until U2 turned up a few years later that there became two things to talk about on that subject. A bunch of kids poked him with the proverbial stick for weeks on end to make a bomb and set it off in the car park of the pub next-door. He eventually came up with the goods and we all crowded around after school to watch him set it off - which if I recall correctly, consisted of a newspaper package that looked like a fish supper - back then you were still allowed to do that sort of thing and by that I mean wrap chips in newspapers, not make bombs. I think that's always been illegal. Anyway, the fish supper bomb was set alight and well... it was like burning a lot of rolled up newspaper in a pub car park. Disappointing but perhaps just as well given how close we all gathered round to see it go up. I wonder whatever happened to him. Maybe it's better not to know.
I've heard no more about it since then so either it's stopped or it happens every day and has become normal - I'm talking about the bus ride now, not bombs. Keep up.
Finally for today, while I was 'over there', I woke up in the middle of the night with a Eureka moment sitting on the tip of my tongue. I was in America! I could buy the Sixx A.M. album "7" from iTunes that's not available here in the UK. I looked, I found, I coughed up some cash and it made me very happy. Which is as good a place as any to end part one:
