Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot

Travelling with work has to be the best way to go abroad - it immediately removes two of the biggest bummers:

1. Having to pay for it, and
2. Being expected to enjoy yourself

Once these two factors are irradicated you are immediately free to have the time of your life. Particularly, being expected to enjoy yourself - there is nothing worse than paying for a holiday and then feeling obligated to enjoy it because "wa-hay, you're on holiday - you have to have a good time", usually by spending more money and hence being more miserable when you return. Being not expected to enjoy yourself has the opposite effect, like when you were in class and ordered to work in silence - it was an immediate cue to start a sniggering fit with your friend.

So I've spent the last week in Boston, which I always thought was a suburb of New York, but it seems it's some two hundred miles North of the Big Apple. It boasts the claim that it was where the spark that ignited the American War of Independence occurred, apparently over a shipment of tea?? And it’s where the ridiculously over-popular Cheers was set. Now I'm not usually one for getting all giddy about tv shows and their locations but I have to say, when you come across a place that is apparently so familiar, you kinda get excited - it's almost like seeing your old house or school - shows you how much these things implant themselves in your psyche. There I was standing by the Cheers sign grinning like a fool, having my photo taken and pretending I was Norm at the bar.

For all its faults, there really isn't a better place to come than the US if you're on expenses - money is king, and they have an infinite number of ways of extracting it from you. Saying that, the quality they offer is so much better than what you're used to, it easily loosens up the purse strings and coupled with the freedom of an expense budget, the greenbacks soon start flying. You start to gain a perspective on why the Americans think so much of themselves - walking about among these awesome skyscrapers cannot fail to impress, whereas munching your way thru a five course meal at the top the tallest in the city, is a pretty God-like experience.

I think it is this kind of inward-looking, self-congratulatory attitude that makes most Americans so deplorable to the rest of the world, but while you are within their bubble, you can see why they think they've carved themselves their own sweet materialistic piece of paradise.

With our species on the edge of extermination

I really enjoy yoga – it’s not something I have generally admitted to people until now, but over the last 6 months or so I’ve really been getting into it. I was kind of embarrassed to admit I did it - there isn't that manly ring to it, like heaving and sweating in the gym or playing competitive sports, but just recently I’ve become more ashamed of the fact that the principle of yoga (seeking a path to enlightenment) has been around for six to seven thousand years and its only recently (strangely enough around two thousand years ago) that it lost its appeal as a worthwhile pursuit in the west.

I find myself imagining those changing times, with whole swathes of people sitting, enjoying life in the moment, grooving with the eternal now. Perhaps, with a respected elder, who could drift into a meditative trance for days at a time and return with visions and philosophies his people could learn from and be inspired by. Then one day this thug, bully-type character comes along calling himself Alexander the Great or Atilla the Hun or something ridiculous and hearing of this great guru who tells everyone the light of eternal happiness and joy shines from within, promptly lops his head off with a dirty great sword exclaiming, “Now that’s what I call enlightenment!” or words to that effect.

Now, his people do not mourn him - they know he has experienced an infinity of eternal nows and life is but a dream etc - but they are concerned at this lumbering idiot stomping about the place demanding people serve him or he’ll get a bit spicy. So, they play along with the oafish moron, with the hope that they’ll be able to educate him in the true joy in life and perhaps he’ll become a more compassionate, chilled-out kinda guy. They teach him about how he can achieve God-realisation within himself, but this backfires and he believes he is God and becomes enraged when they try to tell him everyone can achieve enlightenment and sets about more of them with his mighty sword of truth and justice. They soon realise this guy is a bit of a lost case, but unfortunately (perhaps they are a little too enlightened) they don’t try to kill this bumbling buffoon, they just let him get on with ordering them about and use their yoga training to transcend the hardship he is inflicting and keep their yoga practices to themselves, but always with the vain hope he would grow up a bit a take heed of their teachings.

They’d continue to serve him and try to satisfy his petty demands, like building him a palace and bringing him fine foods and fabrics, but because of his amoebic worldview he would quickly become bored of this situation and would demand yet more stimulation “Why isn’t my palace built? I want a blue orange?” and he would start to pry more and more into their lives and see they were still wasting time with this enlightenment guff and realising all this grooving with the eternal now wasn’t getting his palace built, he would crack yet more skulls, thus pushing the old teachings further underground. Teaching the old wisdom to the young would become near impossible. The elders would try to communicate the old ways to the fresh young minds, but they would have to use metaphors and allegories so that the doofus wouldn’t catch on. The upshot of this though, was that the young were not too bright and hence took these metaphors literally - hence a Judeo-Christian theology was born.

The only positive to all this was that before the imbecile, who started us all on this ridiculous materialistic spiral, died (probably at the hand of one of his own pitiful brood), thanks to the teachings he’d ignored his whole life, he probably realised the true meaning of enlightenment in his last few seconds of brain consciousness and that he’d been an absolute c*nt.

With no prospect, but a horrible death

I've always been fascinated by the notion of idiocy - is there an absolute scale, he's thick and she's enlightened or is it like everything in this crazy old world, it's all relative. I was standing behind some woman and her man at a sandwich bar as she was mole-faced, interrogating the sandwich selection. The fact they were blocking my access to the sandwich I wanted, didn't bother me as I wasn't in a rush and quite happy to allow her time to reach her decision, but she kept picking them up and putting them down again perhaps to check they were real, moving from one to the next as if the packaging information wouldn't compute without the affirmation of touch. The Chicken Jafrezi seemed to be warranting several repeats of this curious inspection procedure. I could see she was processing the fact that she liked chicken, but was unsure about the other bit. She then turned to her mate and, still mole-faced and confused, asked "I'll try this, but wot's jalfreezie?" to which her companion shrugged and just as I was about to burst out with, "it's Jalfrezi, you stupid woman, it's a curry - you'd probably know it as a chicken tikka but more tomatoey!" When he responds with "P'rhaps its frozen chicken" and proceeds to laugh heartily.

This confused me as either he knew what it was, but was just playing along with her ignorance by making fun of her, or he was as ignorant as she was and was amusing himself with the idea that it didn't really matter whether he knew what it was or not. My immediate rage at their stupidity subsided at this, as I thought how little it did matter whether this woman knew the difference between a Jalfrezi and a Biriani. People seem obsessed with cramming their head with essentially meaningless facts and being outraged if others haven't taken the time or had the inclination to learn them too.

I speak to academics quite frequently - now these are people who have devoted large portion of their lives to gaining an in-depth knowledge of very narrow area and if you engage them on their chosen subject you can quite quickly feel like the woman at the sandwich counter and they probably view me in the same dim light, but when it comes down to it, it doesn't mean he/she is going to enjoy their life any more or less than I might, living in ignorance of their Jalfrezi knowledge as long as I'm willing, like that woman, to experience the unfamiliar.

Looking back, this has ended up almost being one of those horrible radio 4 Thought for the Day programmes - oh well, it's too late to change it now.

We actually played games

I used to be rather ashamed of the fact when someone asked me what music I was into, I'd reply "bit of everything really". I hated this woolly non-committal answer and tried to develop an overbearing passion for a particular genre, which I did for dance music for a while. But then you'd talk to someone who was also into dance and they'd start compartmentalising it further - house, trance, hard-house, garage, old skool, the list was endless. And you'd get people, who would despise one form of repetitive beats over another - ridiculous, what's wrong with you people, they're all just there so you can take drugs and dance about like a loony, why do you have to keep separating yourself from others?

So now, rather pretentiously you might say, I say I'm into passion music - music created, performed and recorded with a passion: country and western, jazz, techno, classical, pop, hip-hop, it doesn't matter, if I turn it on and think to myself in a geography teacher style, "that's got a good beat" then I'm sold. I was openly mocked for my appreciation of the Streets' first two albums, but it couldn't be denied that the guy had a passion and told us a story any working class lad could relate to - shame he's let the fame and fortune go to his head and his third album is pants, but such is life.

My latest rediscovery is Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds* - I first heard it back in the late 80s when my bro brought home a heavily re-recorded cassette tape copy, but thanks to modern means a digital version came my way round about the same time old Nicolarse went to see a live performance of it - and it is truely one of the most electrifying pieces of modern composition I have heard. We've been obsessed with it since - putting it on full volume in the car is f*cking amazing. It really does skate that far edge of awe-inspiring magesty and huge self-indulgent, cheese-fest, but I just love it all, even the fact that it was blatantly done with american actors putting on a Dick Van Dyke style english accents. A true work of genius that restores your faith in the spirit of man.

*The website's pretty good gives you the story of how the album came about - I wouldn't listen to the mp3 snippets too long though - it keeps cutting off when it gets to the good bits and there's no "oooooh-laaaahh"s.