I had to renew my passport today and the experience left me scarred for what might be left of my life. Firstly, I needed a new photograph and I decided to do what everybody else does and take a photo of myself. We may live in the land of the selfie but it’s not something I’ve ever done, expect maybe the last time I had to take a passport photo I guess. I took maybe ten or twelve and studied them hard looking for the best one, after all, I’m going to have to live with this for the next ten years but alas, I looked old in all of them. I tried another few in better light but it didn’t help. Circles under my eyes, lines where there were none not so long ago, but being as I don’t use mirrors for much anymore, this was news to me. I decided that I should have a decent shave before I tried again in a few days.

But that was nothing compared to the punch in the mouth that was the realisation that this passport would last ten years and when it needed renewing again, I’d be 67. For some reason, that sounds even worse than 70.

Can you imagine being 67 when just a few seconds ago, you were some young gun lurking in a record store. Some of you probably can but this is news to me. I carried this around all day like I was actually 67 but the hours slipped by and I drifted back to the reality in which I am only 57 and decided it really was time I decided what I wanted to do with my life.

I read an interview with Henry Rollins. Yeah, I read a lot of Henry Rollins interviews–I can live without his music, but his writing’s fantastic and he’s smart as hell–in which he was talking about how he moved on from reading Bukowski. In the interview, he’s asked this:

“You’ve often said that certain books are right for a person at a certain age, and then they stop working, and one example you give is Charles Bukowski.”

And Rollins replies (let me cut it down a little):

“Lydia Lunch loaned me my first Bukowski, South of No North. I couldn’t stop reading it. I eventually read a ton of Bukowski, up to Love is a Dog from Hell, the 1984 book that documents the dying of John Fante. Then I read John Fante, his favourite writer: Ask the Dust, one of the most beautiful books ever written. A quick read, but wow, it’s special. It made me stop reading Bukowski. I’d moved on.”

I used to know a girl who wanted to be a museum curator. Her name was Jane and back when I owned a video shop in the early 90s, she worked in a petrol station that also rented videos on the other side of town. We knew each other because we used to scope out each other’s stock and played nice so that we were both winners. She knew that we did horror better than them and I knew that they had way more comedies than I could cope with. Working together, we kept Blockbuster out of town and made the store that was in the middle of us look weak. If there was something we didn’t have, we weren’t averse to calling each other up either, so a valued customer could get what they wanted somewhere else.

I always thought that was the greatest thing ever. Imagine knowing exactly what you wanted to do with your life so much, that you could say it out loud and even though it’s maybe a bit ‘off kilter’, she was 100% all in, so even if you thought it was a dumb idea, you had nowhere to go with your thoughts because she could have cared less.

I hope she made it, I really do because the video rental market is dead and buried my friends and maybe petrol is not so far behind either.

The thing about curators is they care. They look at a selection of items and with their expertise, decide what most people would like to see. Sure, I’m in the minority that would like to rummage through the boxes you stashed in the basement, but for most people, the curated items will do just fine.

We landed in Philadelphia with ten minutes spare to make it from one side of the airport to the other if we were going to stand a chance of catching the connecting flight to Denver. With security being the way it is, that was looking about as likely as getting a smile out of one of the flight attendants we’d been trapped with for the last seven hours. To make it through security, first you need your soul dissecting and you must answer a bewildering array of questions designed to catch you out.

These are either asked by people who could care less one way or the other what business you have in the States and ask stupid questions like “Do you dye your hair” to people who care a little too much and behave like they never got accepted into the military and have a chip on their shoulder to prove it. These people have buzz cuts in order to ask their questions properly — questions like whether you intend to work while you’re in the promised land and that next time you come in, you need a form that says you’re allowed to. Then he’ll tell you the number of that form — and because there was nothing wrong with your entry visa in the first place, he will attempt to sweeten the deal by telling you that he’s “not going to bust your balls this time for it.”

I picked up a book for pennies the other day - a secret Michael Crichton novel called Binary. It’s a secret because he was writing under the name John Lange, but hey, it’s Crichton so you know it’s going to be good. (For those of you who have never heard of him, he wrote Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Congo, created E.R. and a bundle of other great stuff.)

I’ve often wondered how the original publisher thought they could sell it under the name of a nobody. Maybe Crichton didn’t think it was his best work but he was getting paid anyway, so what are you gonna do. Or maybe he was under contract to another publisher and the only way to sneak a book out is in this way. I guess there’s a million reasons you might want to hide yourself away.

Stephen King did the same thing, writing as Richard Bachman and I know they’re not the only ones. Hell, everybody was at it at some point but pickings are slim these days and I don’t think it happens anymore.

I used to think it was the equivalent of doing a poor job on the washing up and blaming your sister for it but that was before I figured out that money was probably involved. Money, my friends, changes everything.

I wasn’t looking to buy a watch. I already have a watch – not that I wear it. I bought it about ten years ago when I had some money; but I’m damned if I can remember the last time I strapped it on my wrist.

I was walking past a store a while back in which they only sell Dead Men’s Junk. Dead men’s shoes, dead men’s hats, dead men’s suits – you get the picture. I don’t even know why I stopped to look because I’ve gone past it a hundred times before without being lured in. I’m usually not even interested in a living man’s stuff, never mind anything he might no longer have a use for.

It’s a curse of the modern age. Not so long ago, a dead man wouldn’t have owned any stuff. The clothes he stood up in? He would also have been wearing them lying down. My grandfather died something like thirty years ago – aside from his clothes, all he had left was a leather belt, a pair of binoculars that never worked properly and a notebook that had some financial stuff in it about how he could buy himself a pig in secret if he hid a little money away from my grandmother each week. I have the belt and the binoculars right here but I don’t know what happened to the notebook. I must ask my mother. The pig thing actually happened – it was bacon, ham and dog snacks a long time ago but it did happen.

I am going to shamelessly lift the following from the annals of time. I'm guessing a piece of writing that's nearly 400 years old is out of copyright by now - if it was ever in it to begin with.

A good five years ago (ish), I came across a work by Minamoto Musashi called Dokkōdō - to give it some context, roughly translated that's something akin to 'The Way of Walking Alone' (and variants thereof). It's nothing more than 21 pieces of 'advice' but it also happens to be 21 lines I took on board at a time when I was really tired of fighting a battle I was never going to win and then forgot about. So yesterday when I found reference to it again online, I raised my eyebrows at exactly how much of this I had taken in - for good or ill.

A lot of this has helped me out more than I ever thought it would, so I'm dropping it in here for prosperity - if you can mine one valuable nugget out of it, it will have served its purpose. To get the most out of it, you'll need to be smart though.

Until a few moments ago, I would have poured scorn upon any grown adult too timid to grab life by the horns and shake it upside down to see what fell out of its pockets, but as I perch here on a ‘seen better days bed' in a Parisian hotel that's barely one step up from somewhere George Orwell might have stayed, spreading cream cheese onto a bread roll using my finger as a knife, maybe I am the one who got it wrong.

I have taken an impromptu road trip to play in the Garden of the Reaper. There's something about the memorials the living set up for their dead that draws a bow across the soul-strings of our own mortality. 

OUR FIRST BIRTHDAY

It wasn’t how I thought my life would turn out, not at the time. I figured I had made some good decisions or at least enough good decisions to put me in a place that was decent enough to jump off from and make my next ‘life move’. That’s not exactly how I was thinking about it at twenty two. No twenty two year old thinks about their life like that but if I think back hard enough, that’s the thought process I can see taking place inside my head.

Perhaps I’m being optimistic about myself otherwise I wouldn’t have been sitting in the drivers seat of a £400 Ford Capri with my worldly belongings scattered on the passenger seat beside me - which is more or less exactly where I had been for at least seven days.

On the one hand, you can’t get much lower in your life than this unless I add the remaining facts into the story, which are that the only thing on the passenger seat next to me is a half smoked packet of cigarettes and the Ford Capri isn’t mine. It’s a new low for me but one that I’m appreciating more as each day goes by. I might be down and out but I still have half a packet of cigarettes to keep me company. I even have a little money in the glove box to buy some more when I run out.

I was in my studio playing a little guitar when, from across the gardens at the back of the house came the smell of a barbecue and the sound of something called ‘we’ve got friends round’.

I pressed on with figuring out Chelsea Hotel #2 until it got harder and harder to concentrate what with the uber volume of football talk/latest fashion talk and the smell of 300 sausages rocking their skins off on a grill.

I sat there for a while with Bess on my lap and tuned her up again while half listening to the conversation.

I guess stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason. A bunch of guys talking about the game and a bunch of girls talking about their dresses. Not the amazon burning down, not Christmas, not what books they were reading or even the weather. Football and dresses.

Maybe that’s why we never have barbecues or friends round - because we don’t have the necessary social skills to pull one off with any grace.

London's St. Pancras train station is not all it should be. 

Outside, there is one of the most majestic buildings in the West End called – I believe – St. Pancras Chambers, which is now an apartment block and damned impressive by any standards.

I sold a pen to a guy who lived there once. He was either a collector or a cheapskate but when I looked at how much it cost to rent an apartment there, it was obvious that he was wealthy enough to have bought several versions of this particular pen from a store across the road.

The pen in question came into my possession when somebody gave it to me as an ‘unwanted gift’ and requested I make good use of it. Truth be told, it was a nice pen too. A Mont Blanc – but it was very obviously a pen designed for either the female of the species or a person with very small hands. Either way, it was no good to me. I’m a one-pen-man and that vacancy is already taken. I put it up for sale on a leading internet auction site at a very reasonable price and it sold immediately. The guy actually wanted me to take it there in person so that he could meet me but the price of postage is very different to putting juice in the car or taking the train itself and the actual amount of time taken is not quantifiable. Which is how it found itself being entrusted to the Queen and her legion of mail delivery people.

I wonder what she does? She doesn't look like she does anything, which means she must be one of that dying but ever so interesting breed known as 'ladies who do lunch'.

She is dressed extremely nicely and is wearing a silk scarf to set her outfit off. She does not appear to be waiting for anybody - in fact she seems to be very content to simply sit and 'be'. I would guess that she is the same age as my mother, but she is not my mother because I hope that she would at least say hello.

She sees me looking at her but looks away quickly when I don't avert my gaze like polite people would. Now I feel bad because I have made her feel uncomfortable, so I look down into my coffee and stir it again because I can't think of anything else to do. Nobody else in the coffee shop is aware of this because they are too busy being important with their phones - even when they are out for coffee with other people. The coffee shop is upstairs in a bookstore. In the far corner there is a man reading a book on a kindle. He knows this is wrong which is why he's sitting in the corner but he cannot hide his shame even from himself.