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.
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
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:
