Texas Re-Attempted: Delays and Connections

I don't know what it is about Americans - what makes their mentality so different from my own countrymen - what has always been alluring to me. I think it's that they're tough, and not in an arrogant or crude way. When they speak it's like they're here to get the job done. Service staff in England are the eternally bored, stressed and ever-awkward, and they conduct their business with me in a conscious and mutual agreement that we would both rather be somewhere else.

But Americans... when they advise me and when they serve me they do so to get shit done, and always with a stoic competence in their eyes. I feel like I can count on these people - that they would be strong with me if I needed them to be. Perhaps these are "my people". They don't walk on eggshells and they give as much as they get.

They're like Laura.

And they all take that extra step. A stranger stands beside me as I observe an exhibit of Martin Luther King at the Atlanta airport. "Dayum, that dude was short!" he remarks as he nods at a display case containing Doctor King's clothes. We have a whole conversation about it. Then a voice comes on the tannoy. "Hey, if you missed your flight you gotta think positive. Look for other booked flights that have seats available. Don't give up now." There it is again - think positive and get shit done.

After 4 hours sitting in Atlanta Airport, staring at old Americans with their shirts tucked in, I'm on the connecting flight. It's small and cramped and the stewardess has to sit by the emergency exit, next to a horny old guy (not me) who acts like he's brought all the other passengers along to impress her. I eavesdrop on his clumsy flirtations and hope the stewardess's look of stoic disgust is something I will never see on Laura's face.

There's another black passenger in the seat next to me, but he's dressed in a white suit and wears a fedora. We are ice cold, like a cop duo, ready to defend this plane from randy geriatrics and flawed Hollywood scripts. We scowl at the other Americans who seem incapable of taking orders. As the plane takes off the other passengers get out of their seats, fiddle with laptops, open overhead bins and tuck their shirts in as the cabin crew scream at them - a cargo of arrant autistics.

And I find a Suduko. Fuck yeah!

Then we're down.

I'm here. In Houston.

I move slowly through Security and follow the signs to Baggage Reclaim. My heart is thumping, my limbs shaking - but I savour every moment. For these are the throbbing crescendos of a vital life. Coming down the escalator, I see her - the hair and figure distinctive. She cuts a rift through the room, the way only a woman can. I think of jewels in glass vessels, preserved under shifting waters.

Laura's facing away from me. Maybe I can pounce on her, or sneak up and breathe on her neck. I like doing that to unsuspecting women. It's why I'm such a player. But alas... Laura has put her back to the sea of luggage trolleys. I would have to clamber over them in order to get the drop on her, and such behaviour would probably get me shot by the security guards. Already she has thwarted me.

Then she turns.

The awkwardness expires in under 20 seconds. We say hello, softly, then hug, ask a few superficial questions, take a few steps towards the exit. Then I grab her and, with an apology, swoop in for the kiss.

It is, and ever will be, her sharpness that strikes me - how utterly she stands apart from the colours, textures and expectations that surround her. She is not like other women and yet, it were as if something new is manifest in her, or something old of which she is the last. A separate gender, for those who ride a wave apart. She leads me to the car, walking on her tiptoes as she has always done, and soon we are riding through the Houston night.

Texas Re-Attempted: Flying with Apes and Penguins

I've given myself 4 hours, and caught the airport at its least secure. I hope the Americans on the other end will provide a better paranoia service. All I get is the manic depressive son of Michael Stipe, who asks if I have anything which can be construed as a weapon. I glance at my crotch and shake my head. Then another guy who wants to beat REM to the wrist-slit grunts something about metal belts. I say I preferred their first album and hold up my little bag of liquids. I'm through Security in 5 minutes and eating breakfast in a cafe that has knives shaped like scalpels.

"We're at an airport!" yells a child in the corner as he tugs his father's sleeve. I want to share his excitement. Maybe I could scream the same line at the table of Muslims next to me...

No. They might think it's a trap.

With 3 and a half hours to kill I return to the rabbit warren seating area and finish my John Connolly novel. Damn, it's a dark book - the first and darkest of the series. I wonder if he was angrier back then - sicker as he faced the prospect of an unpublished life, not knowing if his debut would sell. He has found more light and more comedy in his later books, but this first one... fuck! I finish the haunting epilogue as the plane begins take-off, hoping that I have likewise flushed my darkness and am now anew.

Take-off is awesome. Awe-fucking-some! There's still so much green in England - a country like wet moss catching gold in sunlight. As we lift higher I see squares of brown amidst the patchwork green, like a jigsaw uncompleted. I can't help but see reflections. The towns are brown and white like exposed bone - all things growing.

Bollox! There's no Sudoku! How the fuck am I gonna survive this flight? Bollox! My headphones don't work!

Then I think up a funny joke, which I'll use later in the blog. At the time I was laughing in my seat and alarming the black lady next to me who was reading a Christian self-help book (Oxymoron? Yes? No?)

Ooh, they're showing Rise of the Planet of the Apes! I order a new set of headphones and settle in for some delicious Simian distraction. Hopefully the lady beside me won't be offended by the talking monkeys and flip her shit all over the plane.

Well, that was a bag of wank. I know it's a film about apes but they could've used more than one napkin when they were writing character concepts. Another film with a bleak antagonist and a pointless love interest. It's a good thing I'm seeing Laura shortly, so I can dispell the Hollywood myth that all women are cookie-cutter accessories to subplot. I mean, seriously, her character notes must've been "smile at ape, fall in love, ask hero a few times if he's sure about what he's doing." For fuck's sake they could've got a...... monkey..... to do... that....

Hmm....

The next film comes on: Jim Carrey being inconvenienced by penguins. What. The. Fuck?

Aaagh! The last line got me! Why does that always happen with these family movies? They're a stream of tired cliches and then, right at the end, one line comes out of nowhere and makes me burst into tears.

"Kids, I have to go away on a long journey. I may be gone some time. So... I'm gonna need you to come with me."

Damn you, Jim.

Shit, man, I'm flying over the Atlantic Ocean to meet a girl! This is crazy! I wonder if anyone else on the plane is possessed of such ridiculous notions. Looking down at the sea, it hits me: this great expanse that took former men weeks to cross, that claimed the lives of countless sailors and explorers, that has yielded more stories and less secrets than outer space itself - I'm crossing it in mere hours. It's like I'm rushing through the halls of my ancestors.

Truly, it is as overwhelming and impossible to honour the landscape I pass over as to explain my decision to reach out for Laura. Such things were not meant to be contained by one pen... by one mind.

Perhaps I do not speak for there is too much to say.

The third film is a Woody Allen drama. Uugh! I take out my headphones and get on with my own pretentious and casual meanderings. Fuck you, Woody.

The fourth film stars Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. It's about an American and a Brit who become embrolied in an adventure of intrigue and seduction. Such wild and implausible ideas these film-makers have.

Although the final reveal renders the entire film non-sensical.

I hope Laura's not related to me.

Ooh, and now we're flying over Louisiana, the place where the John Connolly book was set. I'm coming closer and closer to the extraordinary world of the mythic journey. I wonder what Threshold Guardian I will have to face...

... found him! The customs guy - not a scary customs official, but a "duuuude" customs official. "Alriiiiight!" he says as he takes my passport. He asks me what I'm doing here and I blurt out the entire story. "Nooo waaaaaay!" he exclaims. He seems genuinely shocked, and I wonder if my Messiah complex will be stamped as inadmissible. But luckily, he takes pity on me, and welcomes me to America.

Texas Re-Attempted: Travelbodge

It doesn't feel real yet. All is stress and obligatory nightmare between the rival streams of headlights - red and white cells - as I am pulled by machines through darkness. My car almost runs out of petrol. The Travelodge has been knocked down. I am rebooked to another motel after 4 circuits of the Gatwick monstrosity. The girl at reception asks if I want to complain. I say no, of course, like a good Englishman, and she nods along and says "life's too short".

I order a burger at the motel restaurant and sit with my back to 87 other guests who are transfixed by the football match. They stare, tut, yell and despair in unison. They should be watching my life. They should be the audience to this crazy and lonely adventure I have embarked upon. But like ships in the night...

Texas Re-Attempted: Threshold

All is prepared. Tomorrow I set out on my journey - the long drive to London through the ashes of the crash that claimed 7 lives. Dark shapes have been circling. A co-worker died a few weeks back. Tripped on the stairs and broke her neck. She was the one who trained me on my first day. Then David got cancer. Then the wing mirror got smashed from my car and another co-worker turned all of a sudden to attack me with that brunt of psychological dexterity I have seen in the bullies and alphas of my life. All around me images of cruelty and death have swerved into my path. A dark cloud gathers around England, and I hope my plane will pierce it and rise aloft into the Texan sun.

The long list has been ticked away. All that is left are the words I have stored at work. These are the things that ravage me, and I have saved them in a word document - my secret chamber between calls and conversations. To copy-paste:

They all try to make out that the other is stressed. That is their objective in all they converse.

Jenna has another road rage story and makes barest eye contact between the islands of her monologue. Brent yells across the room "Where's um..." He tries to think of a name - any name. He tries to fill the air with useless words. Asking who's in, as if it matters.

Jenna and Sophia - they say everything in a baby voice. It is all they know now. And behind them Brent repeats the same joke to Sophia, over and over, the same impression of Sophia, over and over... never different. It is now a ritual - a rite they share.

Brent, Louis and Matt fall back into that natural habit of saying non-sensical things to me - even though they had stopped recently when I was more verbal. Something about me has slipped - they see again the breach - the hole that they must fill, for terror I will not fit into their framework. They sing each other's names for no reason - simply trying to get a response - reduced to nonsense-speak by their terror of silence.

Am I any different?

Emily - the painful silences while you think of something worthy for her attention, and feeling idiotic when you make small talk - like youre boring her. I have done the same.

Definite problem. Definite hypocrisy. Neither extreme is acceptable, but how to find balance? How, when everything reduces me to hostile silence. What do I really want? Perhaps an edited life, where everything speaks concisely and powerfully. Perhaps I like my job because it's a language of facts and not the unspoken rules of co-existence that drive the others and reduce them to retards.

And Matt. Poor, sad, competitive, pathetic Matt. The slow and deliberate way he pretends not to hear people and makes them repeat everything and requires everything to be stated directly to him. His is a language of annoying and forcing people to repeat themselves, like a surgeon laying victims out on a slab - defence through attack.

I am angered by my inability to explain these mannerisms to others in the ironic way they are enacted, and my own inability to deal with them by expelling them through sound.

They make casual attempts to distract each other, and it never seems to get old. Like my harassment of Diana, perhaps? How is it that I can speak perfectly well to people on the phone but cannot contend in the small talk between-call snippets, except sometimes with Brent (Why is that? Because I am just as disillusioned as him?). Then again, all I do is agree with him or give monosyllabic exchange.

And yet, if I gave voice to it, I would have to point out every little thing that annoyed me, and it would take forever. How do other people look past this - and is that the right term? Or are they simply focussed so inwardly that they make themselves immune to others? Are they more isolated than I am? More insular than the silent writer who tries and tries again to empathise with strangers?

The sexual way they go after her. Nothing else for Sophia but innuendo and ironic rape. And Kerry... she copies Jenna... because she sees her as the alpha female, always spilling her every mood and anecdote and expecting adoration.

All is boredom, wasted energy - what would become of them if they used every drop? Would they ever reach a state of silence? Is that me? Is that why I get so tired?

There is nothing between me and them, or us and customers - only mechnanized emptiness or unregulated nonsense. Oh, for a common structure, organic and emotive - a story to follow.

I'm turning into a serial killer...

But I do feel slightly better for writing this. I wonder if this is how they feel - little junkies getting their minature fixes while I go cold turkey.

Now all is expelled. I have made my peace with friends and family, work and paperwork. All that remains is Laura.

I saw a sign today. A disused rugby field fenced off from the public. The sign read "Private Property". And there was a sign next to it reading "No Dogs Allowed". Surely they only needed the latter sign. Or were they afraid that members of the public would shove their dogs over the fence and bid them enjoy their freedom? Or, even worse, were they afraid that dogs would take the initiative and desert their forbidden masters, frolicking in the rugby fields of misanthropy?

Maybe I'm back...

Texas Re-Attempted: Perforection

I sit in a hospital waiting room, where old women yell the intimate details of their private lives. Some would find it erotic, but as always I stray from the herd. I am here for my hearing test, and as a burly woman shouts "Mr Core-core-an" across the room, I pass the first challenge with flying colours.

They take me to a soundproofed room where a woman asks me three times if she can add my mobile number to my file. It makes me suspicious. Am I doomed now to receive spam calls from the hospital? "Amputate your foot, Sir? STD loyalty card?" I laugh nervously and tell her it's fine. Then she plonks some headphones on me and tells me to press a button whenever I hear something. I consider informing them of my overactive imagination, just to validate the results, but they are already ignoring me.

My hearing checks out fine and the consultant gives me a look of disgust for wasting her time with my ubermensch audio prowess. So as punishment she gets a med student to look in my ears with a giant needle-like device. "Let me know if it hurts," he remarks as he penetrates me. I assure him that I have a healthy aversion to getting my brain pierced. Luckily he doesn't drill too deep, and I am still able to contemplate the finer points of Locke's philosophy as I leave the chamber.

Then they take me to a very nice man with a moustache who is having an argument with a nurse about how to pronounce my surname. He gets it spot on, and I consider giving the old bastard a kiss... but the moustache scares me. He penetrates me like the med student, but he is a gentle and attendant lover. "You have a perforated eardrum," he says, and books me in for a scan. He offers surgery but warns me I could lose my hearing altogether. "Your surgeons aren't too hot then?" I ask. It's probably hard to tell them when it hurts if you're under general anaesthetic.

I leave the hospital with a certain sense of satisfaction (which has nothing to do with the double penetration). Finally I know why my ears pop and why I enter my own little world at the call centre and why I can't hear people in clubs and why my voice sounds perfectly respectable only within the confines of my clicky little head. Doctor Moustache-face says it must be a childhood infection. I wonder if my artistic leanings started at the same time, as the real world of sound and background chatter distorted. One little perforation - an imperfection, a hole, a flaw in the machinery.

If I rack my brains I think the clicking started on my first flight to the States. Perforation can happen on flights, according to Wikipedia.

Cue the usual rationale.

Maybe the United States has always been there to shape the milestones of my life. I fly to Pennsylvania and the trip makes me an artist. I fly to Arizona and see in my uncle the success I crave. I fly to Florida and feel at my physical peak as I swim in the Gulf. I fly to Washington and feel a connection to history like no other.

And now... I fly again to Texas... on the chance of something amazing.

Maybe the perforation's reached my brain.

Texas Re-Attempted: An Unreal Day

This night I am struck by the unreality of our world.

I lie here, wondering about Laura, trying to imagine what she is doing right now, what she is thinking and what things today will make her smile, or sink or rage. And it strikes me that I will never be able to predict it - not 100%. My imaginings are a fantasy, an unreal narrative of her life that will never come to be.

I wonder how atheists can demand to see God, when they live in a world of so many unseen, non-existent, non-tangible things?

When I was young music was tangible - records and CDs. You had to hold it, to manipulate the matter, solid to solid. Now we download these i-tunes, less than vapour, and stream our films from murky corners of the net. Movies that never happened, stories told by conglomerates. Even books have gone electronic, shooting intangibly and invisibly through the cyber haze.

I sit at my desk at work, phoning strangers to discuss their debts, clicking buttons that move their red numbers to blue numbers, that calculate their interest rates and mortgage figures. My job is to get back the money that they borrowed - the money that was never theirs, which they used to buy homes which they do not own. And even that very money did not exist. The moment it was put in the bank it was spent by the bank managers, who survive only by the promise that they will give that money back should the customer ask for it.

And yet, if everyone in the country went to the bank on the same day and withdrew their savings, the banks would collapse. Because the money just doesn't exist anymore. All that exists is a promise.

And promises are my sole investment. I have bought a plane ticket for a flight that has not happened, booked a room that is not mine and a car that is not paid for, for a trip that will be nothing like I imagined. And till that day I will write my novel - a story that will never happen, and play on Iwaku with avatars that don't exist in the pursuit of story perspectives that are not shared.

We talk in similies and unreal things. "It was like this... and he was like 'Hi,' and I was like 'woah!' and we were like "Awesome!". Blankly lying to each other with facsimilies of events. Nothing happens accurately anymore - just reported equivalents. Our personalities expand into the internet and our facets sparkle on Facebook and Twitter while our real selves dwindle, as relationships break apart because they are not as we fantasized or because we see someone else and imagine them to be better.

And politicians join the fray, erasing the origins of our wealth, the origins of our food. They rub away the third world countries, hide us from the oil wars and the slave labour. We eat our food that comes from nowhere and drive our cars that have no consequence. We read the newspaper stories of potential terrorists and potential paedophiles and look for Youtube clips of cats with humanity they do not have. We play our video games that yield nothing, talking stats and Warcraft gold. Just the sad ones though - the cool kids go to the clubs in search of sex that is not happening or a night they will not recall in the morning. We strive for the forgettable and the null, the space between matter, the narcotic veil and the artistic hypothescape.

For my own part, on these nights, I go to the gym, trapped in there with the other neurotics, who tone their bodies for the chance that they will be desired, that someone will notice them and fall in lust. We pump the iron and pound the treadmills, aspiring for a body image that is not real for a prize that will not be as we imagined. The men with their fantasies of pornographic scenes that will not happen. The women with their thoughts on children who do not exist.

The others my age are planning now, saving their ethereal money for immaterial futures, planning the events that have yet to transpire while checking their Facebook phantoms and quibbling over bonuses that equate with nothing. We create no materials, we produce no matter. We are shifters of unseen things, waving our hands in the air and calling it progress. Like the mad witch-doctors who were too enlightened to bash rocks with the other cavemen.

And all the while I am intimidated by the people around me - by the people who I imagine to be braver and sharper and calmer and cooler than myself. I am hounded by ghosts, by projected creations, and seek salvation in my characters... in the imagined avatars of Iwaku.... and in Laura... that girl who I think is thinking unreal thoughts of me. I watch the third person dopplegangers of myself - the Greg my parents envision, the Greg my colleagues work with, the Asmodeus who grates and jars with the Iwaku Community. And I am enslaved to those personas, using them to streamline my own, material, tangible, actions, of which there are fleeting few.

It is perhaps the most sensible conclusion that the world - the real world - ended a long time ago. And we are now just ascending, moving into the spirit realm where everything is cyberspace and numbers, where everything is promise and projection. A world where we are told that things exist and that Cause X will yield Effect Y.

Perhaps we are with God now, requiring not to see, but only to trust. Were we to hold in our hands the things that make us... it would be a nightmare. For we cannot bear to simply surround ourselves with matter. Our minds cannot process such a world.

So instead the twitching of my fingers sends another post into Unreality, for the delight of an audience who is not as I imagined.

Enjoy, my darling phantoms. And send me back your promises. ;)

Texas Re-Attempted: Life for Brent

The prophecy is complete. When I first came to Cornwall my aunt had a simple solution to my solitude. "Don't worry, Greg," she said between tango steps in the kitchen, "Everyone will find out you have a car and then you'll be that friend who drives people around!"

At the time I thought this desperate - the hysterical promise of a woman with no way out from my self-entrapment. But now, five years on, I have the pleasure of driving the dark mirror of my soul to work this morning.

His name is Brent - our names sound the same when they're yelled across a call centre - and like most "friends" I have received in my life Brent has stumbled on the comedic holy grail of realising he can call me Gregory and tell me that I'm 'quiet' every hour.

I don't get that. Usually quiet people aren't told they're quiet. You only tell someone they're quiet when it's out of the ordinary. But since I am perpetually quiet it must be that ordinarily they feel a different kind of noise from me - the offshoot energy of my psychic exuberance - and cannot marry it with my laconic presentation.

"Don't trust anyone, Greg," he advises me in his wrist-slitting Nothern drawl. "You can't trust anyone in that call centre. You tell them anything and they'll go and tell everyone. You're the only one I trust not to gossip."

I nod and continue taking mental notes for my blog.

He's 41, lives above a cafe, and has just bought a kitten. He prides himself on starting arguments where arguments are needed and cultivating germophobia and paranoia in equal measure. When we get out of the car he walks ahead of me, as quickly as his little legs can carry him, so that no one will think we are friends. His company is half-confession and half-interrogation, a barter trade of leverage and apology. I spend my shifts at the desk beside him, listening to him ramble between calls and spout random comments in a variety of accents - anything to ward off my silence. Perhaps he will soon seek a confrontation with me, so I might become a marker on the navigation of his rutted existence.

Given my condition - my interpretation of the world in archetypes - I am never sure if I freely allow others to dominate me or if I have no choice in the matter. I certainly don't feel put out. I listen to their thrusts and parries and all the strange squeaks that I elicit in those terrified of silence. And all the while I remember that I am better than them.

Perhaps the ultimate superiority complex: one in which I feign ironic docility. At the end of the day I suppose it's better to wear my ignorance and conceit on the inside.

Today I shadowed a pair of girls (they consented - it was a work thing) and they reminded me of how anomalous I am when I engage people proactively. The usual "deer in the headlights" look set in, whereby a pause and a blank stare followed each of my comments. Luckily I talked about clubbing once, so they refrained from reaching for their rape alarms. It reminded me that, at least in the world of call centres, I am best as a limited robot and sounding board. Anything more brings apocalyptic confusion.

I like to think I make sense. Perhaps it's a form of Alzheimers - to think I am perfectly understandable while all others hear stilted gibberish. It seems like every other human being was taken aside at school (probably when I was crying in the toilets over that silly dead brother business) and taught the codes by which to hide behind small talk and vacuous comments. I really should claim Asperger's and get some benefits - there has to be some payoff besides articulate and moving blogs that make me sound like a perfectly well-adjusted misanthrope.

So perhaps I have nothing to fear. I will never become like Brent, convinced that only cats will love me, starving myself before each weighing at the slimming club, and finding my sole pleasure in 'slasher films, Greg, where they get chased and they think they've escaped but then they get caught and killed'.

I'd like to be someone that people can't blog about - whose multifaceted enigma defies archetype.

I am a claustrophobic undertaker. I force all others into my boxes but fear them for myself.

Perhaps they too hide their beauties, and yet an ugly part of me fears they do not.

I never want to be like Brent.

Texas Re-Attempted: The Six Hundred Penny Man

I don't trust my housemates. Istvan says he's a student, but I never see any study books. Krystina says she works in a lab, but she's always in the kitchen when I'm trying to cook. She also says the lab is inside a mine, but I wasn't aware that Hungarian women had penetrated the mining industry yet.

Something does not add up.

What does add up, however, is the £60 I have left to live on this month. I bought my flight tickets to Texas today and promptly got a call from the Barclays Fraud Squad. They asked if I had really just emptied two of my savings accounts. I explained the situation to them. They elevated me to High Risk.

Today was the day of physical correction. I woke up bloodstained and with a rock taped to my back. No, I haven't gone back to Catholicism. What happened was that I caught myself snoring a few nights ago. It's true. I tried to play innocent and explain myself but I was furious and refused to listen. I told myself I was becoming more like my father everyday and promptly stormed off. So now, in an effort to learn how to sleep on my side, I have taken the Internet's advice of taping a tennis ball to my back. Only I can't afford a tennis ball, so I used a rock.

If you seek the symbolism, it will come.

And in the spirit of taking the Internet's advice, I also looked into the dangerous mine-strewn land that is male personal grooming. The websites I visited meandered between calling me a fag for even considering body hair removal and endorsing the halycon wonders of a shaven scrotum. The middle ground, according to the chatrooms, is that it very much depends on the woman.

I settled with trimming my nipples.

Next up was my posture. I've found (don't ask me how) that clenching my buttocks keeps me more upright. So as I walked into town today, slinking like a cat and scratching my nipples, it was with the assurance that I was bettering myself.

First stop was the doctor's surgery, which I had decided to register at after 15 years of tempting fate. The receptionist was a scary woman who wasn't gonna stand for all that personal privacy bollox. She barked questions at me and told me to stop rubbing my nipples and clenching while I spoke to her. Finally I got round to asking about my hearing (my ears have always clicked) and she booked me a telephone appointment with a doctor. The wonders of modern technology. Perhaps the stethoscope will be delivered via webcam.

Then it was on to the gym, where another scary woman barked questions at me whilst complaining about her manager. He had left her alone on reception so in return she was refusing to answer the telephone. I sweet-talked her with tales of my old reception days, and she gave me a corporate discount.

Then I descended into the heart of town, each iron-buttocked step drawing me deeper into the Falmouth melee. God I hate the general public. I used to have valid political and philosophical reasons for doing so, but now it's just one thing... WALKING. Why the fuck can't the general public walk down a street properly? It's either slow fuckers who seem oblivious to the fact that you're trying to get past; or blind fuckers sorting out their shopping and then seeming oh-so-surprised when they almost collide with you; or it's dickheads walking directly out of a shop without even the slightest conception that there may be people in the street.

Twats. If they can't successfully navigate a pavement they should be put in the road along with the cars and all the other things that can't walk.

Dodging them with my slinky nipple shimmy, I dive into the pharmacists and begin the search for men's hair dye. I've gone a little grey on the sideburns, and I'm not sure if I should disguise the fact. Again, the Internet concludes that it very much depends on the woman.

Such power they have over us. They've replaced the Church in making men feel like everything they do is wrong. Fuck you, Dan Brown.

After half an hour rubbing my nipples in the women's shampoo aisle and getting frowned at, I realised my mistake. It seems that products for men are not stocked in the HAIR aisle or the SHAMPOO aisle or the HAIR PRODUCTS aisle. Instead there is a tiny display in the corner where the sign reads, simply, "MENS".

We are now a substrata. A minor category nestling cancer-like in retail's abode.

I looked for Strawberry Blond. They only had light brown. It will have to do.

I return to a quiet house, hoping to see my housemates cutting coke or trafficking sex slaves. But alas, no sense is made of their puzzling solvency. There's £60 left in my bank account and my body is sore.

And all that waits for me is a rock... clinging to my shirt with the promise of a restless night...

Texas Re-Attempted: Cock'O'Sore

Hmm... two and a half years since my last post. My follower must be bulk-buying ronseal and hair dye.

Yep. Biblical joke. Suck it.

"So why the sudden return?" you proclaim. Has he got published? Has he got laid? NO! He's gonna whine about the same shit all over again.

That's right folks: I'm going back to Texas!

But before I explain why, I'll recap the last 30 months...

When last you heard from me, I had lost my job over child abuse allegations and moved in with 3 bisexuals who I had separate histories with. Since then I have sought to improve my moral health by losing a second job after sleeping with my boss and moving in with a stoner who injects himself with hormones released in the brain at the point of death. I also indulged in an angry sadomasochistic relationship with the lovechild of Mr Spock and Satan.

An eventful few years. But things are better now. You find me sitting in bed, the tenant of two tidy Hungarian scientists, with a sore throat that has proved immune to paracetamol, glycerin, salt-water, fruit-smoothy, bacon carbonara, Lockets, Halls Soothers and Halls Originals. This industrial grade super-disease was contracted at the call centre where I work - a company that refuses to believe in human frailty to the point where they would rather risk the mass infection of 200 people than give a cunt a break. Perhaps these brazen cultists will offer me some alchemical elixir on Monday morning when they find me croaking at the customers like Batman in a kebab shop.

Not only are they intent on transcending human mortality, but my employers also follow the proud tradition of fucking up my name. My desk plate reads "COROCAN" and my username reads "COCORONG". I should be happy that the latter one at least sounds Irish, but authenticity is no comfort when your penis is in question.

However, the money at the call centre is good, as it should be for propogating human misery. And it has allowed me to save up for my return to the place of spiritual purgatory known as Texas.

Now, as regular readers of my blog will know if they existed, I have a habit of crowbarring the events of my life into a framework of narrative resonance. I look for meanings and exaggerate coincidences. For example, I currently live at the intersection of Pendarves Road (Pendarves House was the first care home I worked in), Tehidy Road (Tehidy House was where I worked with my boss who I slept with) and Tresillian Road (Tresillian is the abode of Lucispock the Destroyer). Now, some might say that the chances of living near places named "Tehidy", "Pendarves" and "Tresillian" are quite high in Cornwall. But those people are arse-badgers.

With this in mind, let me introduce you to the reason I am going back to Texas:

Her name is Laura. She has short hair and athletic physique, like the heroin of my novel. She is quirky and full of hidden feist, like the heroin of my novel. She caught my attention unexpectedly and defied the majority of my assumptions about her, like the heroin of my novel.

You see the pattern.

Add to this cake the cherries of her living in Texas, being a fan of Brian Froud, appreciating the awesomeness of Children of Men and studying as a creative writing major, and you have the recipe for Greg Cock'O'Sore becoming a deluded fuckhead.

She also works in a chocolate shop. I'll get back to you on that one...

We met online last December, went on our first MSN in January, had unprotected Skype in March and last week I asked her if I could spend all my disposable income on driving a freight-train of self-loathing and neurosis into her city. And after only a minor wobble in which she compared me to a sexual deviant, Laura consented.

Not content with this, I've also inserted a road trip in which we will crash the wedding of some other people who I've met online and probably won't like me.

So right now, the name of the game is preparation. Today I saw a financial advisor at the bank, who after talking to me said she was going to re-evaluate her life. I naturally told her colleagues to hide the razorblades, but it turns out she was genuinely impressed with my gungho attitude. I advised her that there are jobs in Korea and she gave me a credit card. A mutual fuck-over if ever there was one.

Afterwards I went to the opticians to engage in the erotic tradition of the eyesight checkup. Being in a dark room with someone staring into my eyes and giving me orders was just the pick-me-up I needed. Unfortunately, this optician did not want to work in Korea, did not want to give me a credit card, and definitely did not give a fuck about my meta-narrative. I had a one-night stand with an optician once (before Spockistopheles). They are all strange and soulless creatures, devoid of mortal dreams. She told me my eyes were "all lovely at the back" and not to see her again for two years.

I guess it was erotic enough.

So now, like a lazy paedophile, I'm back home sucking on anything I can find and counting the hours between paracetamol doses as I write my blog.

Texas is set for November 13th, four years and seven days since my original voyage.

From sprite-starved scribe to chocolate-coated cockosaur... the metamorphosis continues.

New House Attempted: A Thick Sock Day

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