Versive

Goodness gracious me, but wasn't that a debauched weekend. It was - I actually can't say quite how debauched because it was possibly a step too far even for me - I have survived though and feel all the better for it.

Anyway, someone who shall remain nameless seems to think that travel blogging is somehow low-rent or cheap and common or something, and to him I say: `Nameless, play nice now.` Yes, travel blogging is available to all and many, and too many, but really what is the alternative; Proper Journalism (with capitals)? Researching facts and figures, places and people? Well yes, that I could do. But here in Nelson, a quiet and peaceful city in a quiet and deeply non-controversial country, there are no stories I could relay to you that wouldn't get both myself and several other people into trouble. Names are to be changed to protect the guilty even if this happens anyway, naturally. The real stories are so life threateningly interminable (paronomasia-laden double negatives included for effect; words like paronomasia doubly so) that I can consture one right here and now without fear of being contradicted - and not just because none of you lot are going to watch Kiwi news broadcasts:

"John Key (leader of the National Party, won the election in November) has said today that he is willing to go on record in regard to the most pressing issues of today at a unique conference, headed by his representatives through which he will deliver his messages on issues relevant to all the people of this country, which will be decided upon at a series of preliminary meetings to be announced at a later date after consensus actuations are taken and collated by dedicated teams of National Party subsidiary volunteers, at a date yet to be announced." And so on.
Plenty of proper stories also make the news over here, but they are the usual occasionall murders, attacks, crime figures, housing prices, global doom prophesies and the odd story about brain-damaged kids acheiving at high levels in school or various other random feelgood items that occur on at the end of television news and mired deeply within pages of doomsaying in newspapers. I begin to see the appeal of "TV Life!" and "Weekly Gossip!", "Massive TV Woman's Metropolitan Sex Cheating Scoundrel Wow Mega Weekly OK!!!" and all the others.

Anyway none of the things that make it into even this kind of publication interest me, so I can't imagine why anyone else would care. If David Beckham elopes with Owen Wilson while Angelina Jolie smokes crack in Shia LeBoeuf's house, all on live TV, then everyone who ever met them gossips about it in Cosmo, I could frankly give a lot less than even the most miniature conceivable shit.

And if taxes go up by 2% - oh yes, all this is utter bollocks as well, folks - then fuck them and fuck all who set store by them, let them do what the hell they want because two things are certain with regard to all the financial inanity that besets us on all sides like the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men (thanks, QT ), and is presented as being oh-so-god-almightily important: One; there is nothing any of us can do no matter how much hand-wringing takes place, so deal with it or leave whichever country you think is being run so terribly badly (but of course all that free health care and clean running water is okay with you, yeah?), and Two; if you stand to lose so much money when the per cent increase, even when compounded, can be given in single figures then you have enough money to do with already, and I do not care for any arguments to the contrary. Oh, it's hard to pay off £40,000 in taxes every year, but then you are by definition in the richest 5% of people on planet Earth. Put down the designer jacket, the car perpetually at only 25% occupancy, and the £300 mobile phone, and stop bloody whining.

That's my fucking job. Grargh at you all.

I may have a little residual grumpiness from the weekend's excesses.

Now I have settled into a routine of sorts, I'm confronted with scarce little chance for comment. It isn't the most interesting lifestyle to relate, you see, when it's much the same as yours. So I will have to collect titbits and snippets of more interesting existences, such as that of the Boeing 747 airliner, one of the most recognisable and well-known aircraft in the world, which looks the way it does because Boeing actually designed it as a commercial failure.

It came about at a time (1965 to 1970-ish, these things take a while to knock together y'know) when Boeing and most sensible contemporaries believed regular passenger jet aircraft were about to be usurped by supersonic commercial flights, a la Concorde, and thusly thought any new planes travelling at normal old speeds of just five or six hundred miles per hour were never going to cut it carting impatient bloody humans around the planet and so had to be able to take freight to pay their way.
So the most famous passenger plane in the skies today has a damn great lump on its head and a vastly extended upper cabin because the nose was designed, with as little modification as possible, to hinge right off to enable to loading of heavy freight straight into the fuselage. So now you know.

Now I'm not sure whether you know (or care) but there is also the story of that unavoidable and rather overated song from the movie The Bodyguard, which Whitney Houston sang from the number 1 spot for fourteen weeks whether we liked it or not; you know, that three-minute warble that simply says `I will always love you` but required a few million dollars of movie and/or stage baubles to get the sentence across.
The thing is that Whitney, even in the midst of her most creative crack sessions, did not write this song, for it was created by none other than Dolly Parton a good few years before (1974 in fact). But at least I have worked out one thing that is true - none of you actually did care

More poignant and a lot more seriously, I recently read an article by a scholar of sociology and various other humane sciences, that highlighted something purely plausible, highly likely and extremely important for millions, if not indeed the whole world. The thing is that in the United States of America, which is of course the only country of any importance to anyone whatsoever , black people consistently perform very badly in school, college and the world of work, very badly indeed in fact, and you can put your white hood and robes back in the drawer right now because first off, this sociology scholar happens to himself be black, and he's one (one of the dwindling few) of that number with a serious amount of skills and education; and they happen to be exactly in that area under discussion.

The problem with black people underperforming in the United States has a lot to do with hip-hip music, the author asserts, and not in that cliched vein where hip-hop is a violent form of music that causes gang problems, but rather that both the music and the appalingly low levels of performance across US black culture as a whole are in fact symptoms of the same problem: namely, that African Americans are unique among all cultures in developed nations in that they largely take their social cues and structure from street culture rather than from high-acheiving scientific and academic culture, the political sphere, from spiritualistic or moral ideals or any other admirable focus of human acheivement.

Essentially the problem is what has been called `cool-pose culture` where the influence for social behaviour is directly or closely based on street gangs and young and powerful, and usually criminal, black men who go against the grain of society purposefully to establish themsevles as unique, and more often than not uniquely bad. That only a tiny proportion of black Americans come close to that definition, yet millions upon millions are addicted to its imagery and narrow-minded, self-destructive ideals is the most saddening and tragic thing of all.

Just as maddening and unfortunate is that the idea of "keeping it real" and staying close to black American street roots - basically glorifying the poverty of inner city ghettoes and the infamous housing projects - is something noble to uphold. This is most heartbreakingly manifested when intelligent and high acheiving black kids are socially demonised, cast out, even physically attacked for doing well in school, for no other reason than that they are `acting white`.
To be seen to be in any way smart, focused or gifted is, for black kids in millions of streets across the US, something that must be hidden through a very real fear for their safety, and even their lives. I can't think about that without feeling a sense of rage and frustration.

It is such a huge problem that a black kid from anything but the most affluent slice of society in the States, who works hard and wants to have a college degree and a decent career, will more than likely be beaten up by fellow black students because those aggressors feel, fundamentally, that behaving as the white kids do and doing well, in order to acheive good things and attain and happy life, is betraying their underacheiving and downtrodden roots. That this has bizarrely become the thing to model your life upon if you are young, black and American.

Why this should be so when the civil rights movement was led, and rightly so, on the basis that white and black people are capable of equal greatness and all people should strive as hard as they could to acheive the best of all things. Sadly something, somewhere in the works seems to have gone terribly wrong.

And you will have noted, I hope, that no-one ever complains about hip-hop lyrics advising the listener to do badly in school, to perform poorly in the world of work or to have an unsucessful life, and rather that the music has become poster boy for the apparent glory of street culture and has in fact been used by, rather than informing, this senseless and bitterly cruel ideology.

Anyway, that's what I read the other day.

Hello! Thought you'd seent he last of me, didn't you?
I just haven't felt the need to rant incessantly about whatever platitudinal nonsense I've been up to recently because I have real live humans here to bore to death instead.
That was by way of explaining why I haven't been very talkative lately.
Now the next bit is by way of telling you what's been happening anyway, because everyone here has already been bored to tears. And in any case i need to record what's been going on so I can rember it better. After all, it would be a sad state of affairs if I did a load of cool stuff then could never remember any of it when trying to impress people in future.

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Things at the bar have gone well, perhaps a little too well in fact... They want to not only make me a duty manager but also it seems there is a need for a full-time 2IC - that's Corporatese for 2nd in charge - for the whole place and/or the possibility, hopefully, of getting to be full manager of one of the places - and it is a national company, so there really is both hope and scope for that and not just the airborne pastry dreams of a hippy. It's not confirmed whether the higher-ups are definite about needing a 2IC here just yet though, so I am keeping my pies of conjecture safely aloft just in case.

Speaking of dreams I have had many and various involving the bar and the people there and a few more of note, including one I was most impressed by that intentionally confused me into waking up. I think that's quite an acheivement, personally. I'm told that I make cameos in the dreams of some people back home myself, so maybe mystical hokum is afoot -- or perhaps we're all just human, who knows.

Some of these thoughts are from way back. When Rob, a barman originally from Yorkshire and at the time in charge of the back bar, left the company some months back (yes, I have been a lazy boy) we stayed after work and drank, ooh, many many bottles of scotch and several others that `needed finishing up`, and as a christening glory and departing gift a certain manager who shall remain nameless emptied a few kilos of flour over his head - amusing, certainly, but I was holding out for the slops bucket containing the dregs of every horrible drink abandoned throughout the entire day.

And I have now run out of impetus - I don't know what precisely, but something is just missing from life right now that doesn;t in the slightest make me want to write about anything. I think it is because I know that, truthfully, nothing I am doing is much worth reporting and while I do delight in making the inconsequential sound thrilling or at least engagingly debonair, I'm pretty suspicious of my motives. I am just not so sure I need to try and impress people anymore, although I guess this is because I'm doing it for real at work, mostly. Oh well. At least two of the girls at work are making no secret of their intentions either, possible even a third may throw her hand in to confuse matters further, so I may finally be doing something right

In brief, and in barely more elaborate form than my notes, I have in the last month or two been up to the following:

Boozy after work sessions. When the last bar manager was in charge we at the bar were all leaving the place eventually at about 6am every Friday and Saturday night,Saturday and Sunday morning, seeing the break of day from the wrong end and generally making the very most of the fact we worked in a bar. These sessions have now stopped, by and large, although we do occasionally have clandestine reasons and meetings for many an post-labour pint or seven.
New year's day I rolled into the hostel at 7:30am, for example

I have been getting into many fights lately, too. It has been a pretty one-sided affair however, and the only weapon used thus far has been the common or garden house-pillow; my roomates beat me shitless with them for snoring, you see. This often does nothing, of course, and I wake up with a sore throat as they depart with a sore look. Meh, it's a hostel, whaddya gonna do?

NB: In fact since making these notes, I have actually been kicked out of one hostel for snoring and comiing into the room at all hours. Well, honestly. What a bunch of utter fucking fairies, that's all I can say.
I'm back at the YHA and loving the fact I can cook a casserole at 4am without incurring the wrath of the hostelling gestapo and half a dozen over-cautious nancies who don't seem to realise the difference between a hostel and a 4-star hotel. Happy days!

Little mishaps happen as we trundle our lumpen forms blinkingly through life's murky corridors, and little things happen to me often, because I am a drunk and often incapable. I woke one morning last month, padded into the kitchen, up to the sink and proceeded to wash my hands in boling water, an exercise I plan not to repeat.
This was, I must add, not water from the hot tap that was very very hjot, but boiling water, H2O at a temperature of at least 98 degrees C and ready and waiting to strip the skin from foolhardy Englishmen who couldn't quite distinguish the tap in the sink which he uses every day from the tap in the water boiler mounted 12 inches ABOVE the sink which he uses everyday as well.
An easy mistake to make, and a bit of cruel trap if you ask me. By way of explanation; hostels here do not have kettles to boil water in but catering-style independent boilers that provide freshly boiled water 24 hours a day in lavish quantities.
That was an ouch and no mistake.

Later that day I went to the supermarket and the trolley guy, poor sod, took a good twenty or more of his charges and rammed them right into the edge of a large set of automatic sliding doors, misjudging the angle in a very expensive manner as they bounced out of their tracks and went straight up to silicon heaven right there and then. All the little blinky lights went off and they made a noise not unlike a gearbox mincing itself. I wonder if he was English as well.

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I have tried to make this nice, but it bugs the hell out of me still. I have a bit of a gripe to make about cleaners and I am going to be rude, sweepingly offensive and narrowminded, but frankly it appears to me that there is a metality required to be a cleaner and it is not one that might even remotely be called positive.
We shall set aside the fact that the cleaning lady always, always, ALWAYS fucking hoovers wherever I sit within five minutes of my arse touching down. We shall even ignore that the daily cleanup must be timed to coincide with my waking patterns and if I rise at 7am there the cleaning lady is, yet when I rise at 2pm there she is also, hoover in one hand, rubbish bag in the other and the visage of a small-minded satan facing out front and centre, ready yet again to tell me to move my stuff, tidy my food up in the fridge, or clean out half the room I am staying in myself.
I'm sorry, I thought that was your JOB? I wonder how far this attitude would go in any other line of work...

Every fucking day no matter what time, there is a little cleaning person with a little cleaning person's mind willing someone, anyone nearby to do anything that steps within tiny cleaner's mind's circle of authority. They also have an incredible talent for shutting down whatever it is I want to use, especially the kitchen when I have a meal for ten people to prepare - this happened well outside the allocated hours a few weeks back and we were all but ordered to not even enter the kitchen to put food in the fridge. As this would have involved the wastage of $50 worth of cheese, the corruption or $40 in steak and chicken, and the death by strangulation of on obstinate lobster-brained cleaning lady I managed to barter safe passge for our foodstuffs to a waiting refridgerator, all the while wondering just how hotels, bars and hostels (not to mention schools, concert halls, youth centres and any number of semi-public facilities) manage to find the same petty, lazy kind of person all over the world.

cleaning ladies in general are a special breed. Assuming more authority than all else they dictate the rythym of hostels despite being, well, just the bloody cleaners, not to put too fine a point on it, they seem frequently lazy or clinically obstinate, and are generally quite dumb. If that makes me a bastard, then sign me up and give me my badge - the people who clean stuff up after others are mostly thicker than a yard of lard and looks about as healthy. There was a special case at the last hostel, poor thing, obviously a few bricks short of a barbecue, yet still she did, amid the awkward and stilted conversation she insisted on striking up with everyone within 20 yards, manage to do just as good a job in the same time as the other cleaning lady whose barbecue appeared to be fully bricked.
If that doesn't say all that's needed then please take into account that the compos mentis one was the lazy type who shut down the kitchen for an extra hour or more while she slugged through the cleaning routine, and was also the only one of the pair who harassed all guests at all hours.

No matter what you say on the subject of stereotypes there is a special kind of person that becomes a cleaner and never stops, taking it on into middle age or beyond. I have met many people and consider myself a pretty good judge within cultures that I know, and have to say that generally, cleaning ladies are usually either stupid, lazy, or are annoying little jobsworths who wont do any more thah the absolute base minimum of their job and won't ever go over their prescribed boundary to help someone out, and that's a `quality` I really can't abide.

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Less bitching, more relaying. A thing that's impossible to not notice here is the predilection of Kiwis to go about the place barefoot everywhere, in any weather, if necessary. Now it is so sunny here in Nelson I burn within ten minutes of stepping outside, there are absolutely hundreds of men, women and children mooching the streets, parks and shops sans footwear, and it is almost all pakeha (descendents of white Europeans) who do it and not Maori, which I suppose you might have expected, you poor Northern hemsphereans, you Generally it's pakeha anyway, Maori tend to wear rather more clothing in general in fact, and in case you were wondering those grammatical arrangements there are correct. There is no difference in singular or plural in the description of Maori or pakeha from the Maori language's point of view.

One funny thing that keeps happening, and funny because it not only reveals one of the older traveler myths to be hypocritical but also because it makes me a bit of a hypocrit is that I get pissed off, a little tiny bit, with people who come into rooms I am staying in and joking and laughing that I sleep during the day as if I am wasting my traveling expereince. I consider these people to be snobbish and exactly as narrow-minded as they probably think me to be, because frankly, what I do is no concern of theirs but so often they make it so.
A little banter and a chat is all to the good of course, but one too many times I have had groups of people all traveling together come into my room for one or two nights, and pretty soon be laughing and joking that a guy is sleep at midday and hasn't even got ONE mutlicoloured handknit Nepalese-style ear-warming hats; to which I say: everyone who thinks they're some seasoned worldly-wise travel guru has one of those hats, you all look fucking ridiculous anyway, and I was out drinking until 6am this morning so you know just what you can do with that hat, a pencil, and a thimbleful of vinegar you inevitable stumbling cliche of a git.

I really hate those bloody hats though, don't you? I can't see the point at all in looking like a stoned alpaca with multicoloured, badly-knit dangly ear flaps that make the wearer look like Dali sketched out a bloodhound and then vomited between the lines. Just because it's made in a tiny village in the mountains in a foreign country doesn't mean it's any GOOD.

Anyway I'm feeling there's a lot of hate in the room, so I'm gonna calm down now