Bloody Pagans!

I walk through the St. Giles cemetary every morning, not because I'm like TOTALLY goth right down to the route I take to work, but because it's the most direct shortcut between the bus stop and my desk. In the summertime, all the homeless people set up their tents amongst the tombstones and trees; I don't know if the cops hassle them less or if it's just generally nicer or what, but you walk through there in early-morning July and it's like Glastonbury sometimes. Today I was talking to a guy called Kevin and he told me this:

At the end of one particularly intoxicated evening spent ambushing theater-goers with the standard "can you spare 50p so I can afford a cup of coffee" routine shouted at full auctioneer's tempo so as to get in a heartstring-tugging plea before the subjects managed to hurry out of earshot, Kevin crawled back to his tent in the cemetary to pass out. He had just about managed a full exit when he was suddenly jarred into confused, panicked consciousness by some loud chanting right outside his door... "Bloody Pagans, dancing round a tree and chanting at FOUR IN THE FUCKIN' MORNING!" he told me, completely appalled by utter the lack of decorum. "Well, I come runnin' out with my fist, an' I shouted 'You bloody Pagans! Can't you see that people are TRYING TO SLEEP!!" Despite his initial bravado, however, in the cold, hungover light of the next day, Kevin decided it was best to move on, because "Fuck that spooky shit."

Why can't I own Canadians?

I'm currently watching a thoroughly depressing episode of Dispatches that spotlights the importation of fundamentalist Christianity from the U.S. into the U.K. It seems that a growing number of Brits have got the whole schtick worked out to the letter, right down to the goldmine of fundy wisdom that includes "I have 20 grandchildren. I don't want my grandsons to think it's okay to get shit on their penis." (I'd kill for a Youtube link to insert here, but it's only just now airing. I'm sure it will come in time. For now, as hard as it may seem, you'll just have to take my word for it.) Sigh. For fuck's sake. Why, with a wealth of import-worthy fabulousness including 3 Muskateers bars and washing machine technology, does the U.K. keep scraping my homeland's colon for cultural inspiration? And, I mean, yes, thank you, Dispatches, for giving the whole thing the circus side-show Louis Theroux treatment it so richly deserves, but still, British people? I beseech you. Please. Stop it. Stop it now. And stop it good. And FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SACRED (mit irony), don't elect them to public office. The world has been through enough.


Update:
The shining paradigm of godly virtue can be found at 1:35.

The problems with today, in order of suckiness:

1. Rainiest, coldest, most minging day in recent history

2. Leaving magnificent bag of Manchego cheese, mortadella and fresh Medjool dates--purchased from the swank deli down the street expressly for my gastronomic pleasure since I knew I'd be dining solo tonight--in the fridge at work

3. Gym closed for "renovations" which, most likely, will not include the chiseling of six months' buildup of encrusted body fluids from the surfaces of the equipment

4. Perky, adorable and innovative personal trainer who thinks it would be a GREAT IDEA to do circuit training in the adjoining field in full view of the junior high rugby team (because nobody is more courteous and able to keep their opinions to themselves than thirteen year-old boys)

5. An hour and a half of progressively gustier winds and sandblastier rain whilst jumping through the mud trying to negotiate said circuit

6. The kind offer of the gym-renovation staff to let me use the stankiest toilets in the history of stank toilets to briefly mop my hair and "waterproof" mascara-streaked face with .0005-ply toilet paper before venturing back out into the monsoon to wait a further 30 minutes for the bus.




Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow...cannot possibly suck so much.

Screaming Fans

I've always been a freak magnet. As far back as I can remember, I've sported some kind of irresistible forehead tattoo only visible to the criminally insane, and no matter how I've tried, I can't seem to shake it. The pants-wetters, the booger-eaters, the inappropriately tactile, the uncomfortably direct...I am their queen. Once, as a teenager, I sat on the Spanish Steps in Rome and endured a particularly brutal string of increasingly disturbing propositions from a Dutch junkie who's name, I still remember, was Yoopie. Brimming with seventeen year-old gumption, I said to him, "Yoopie, let me ask you a question. What is it about me that makes you think this is okay?" and, after a few seconds of honest thought, he answered, "I don't know. Perhaps you should just go with it." And honestly, I thought that was fair enough. Sound advice coming from source. I wanted an answer, and I got one. So I've tried. Through the years, I've tried to train myself not to freak out when people lurch toward me reciting street poetry, dribble a-flying. I've made an honest, valiant effort to allow for the off-kilter logic of the reality-challenged. Honestly, I have. But no matter how I try, and no matter how much of a compassionate Zen master I tell myself I truly could be if I only tried HARDER, I can't seem to stop my innards recoiling in horror when the old man on the bus rubs up against me and yells "UNCOMFORTABLE?UNCOMFORTABLE?" In fact, it seems that the more it happens, the less used to it I get.

Today, I stepped out of my office for some...fresh air, and a man lunged up to me and asked if I had an extra cigarette. I said no because I'd only brought the one out with me, and he said thanks anyway and continued up the sidewalk. I knew it was too easy to be over that painlessly and, sure enough, when he got to the other side of the street, he turned around and started screaming "YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL...YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL IT'S TRUUUUE..." all James-Blunt-on-crack-style and would not stop. I couldn't really do anything but stand there awkwardly and feign confusion as passersby gave me WTF-eyes. I finished my cigarette in three long drags and hurried back toward the main gate as he trotted after me on the opposite side of the street, declaring his admiration for my silhouette in supersonic, pornographic detail. As I pawed desperately around my purse for my swipe card, the security guard said, "Looks like you've got a fan!"
And my reign continues.

Ya sure you betcha.

I've been flat on my back all day with a fever, totally entranced by a season 2 marathon of Who Do You Think You Are?. Who Do You Think You Are? is one of those shows that reinforces the BBC's reputation of creating television viewing experiences that are, truly, high-end kickass. Celebrities (most of whom, with the exceptions of Stephen Fry and my "distinguished gray" fantasy-crush Jeremy Paxman, I've never heard of) trace their genealogies back through several generations and find out who sympathized with the Nazi party or worked as a prostitute in Victorian London or what have you. It's absolutely riveting, and it has fed my already healthy genealogy fetish sufficiently enough to justify forking over for a membership on ancestry.com. Bless techology.

Genealogy fetishes run in my family. There is a stunningly extensive photograph collection of stern-faced, pale, Scandinavian people scattered throughout my mother's house, including a beautiful portrait of Great Grandma Hilde as a teenager, before she immigrated to America from Norway. She's swathed in black petticoats, a Mona Lisa grin touching the corners of her mouth, her thin, light hair spilling over her shoulders. People always think that it's a picture of me dressed up for one of those goofy, old-timey joke photos. I've always loved the fact that I look freakishly like her. And I've always wondered if, had she been clairvoyant enough to know that her great-grandkid would come out looking freakishly like her, she would have loved it a little bit also.

On the 1910 federal census, Great Uncle Rolf is listed as being 5 years old and named "Ralph". Maybe he told the census-taker that his cat's breath smells like cat food.

Sam's Creek Blues

I never used to drink beer. I preferred the far more efficient (if less sociable) gin approach. I kept bottles of Fosters in the fridge anyway, though, because my co-workers tended to drop by a lot, and they were beer guys, back-slappin' Southerners in flip flops, and we'd sit out on my balcony in plastic chairs and I'd chain smoke and they'd take long, cold draws and make me laugh about whatever was upsetting me, if there happened to be something upsetting me, which there usually was. I never drank it myself, though. Then, one time, totally out of the blue, and for no reason apart from Jerry Douglas's dobro, the inkling took hold of me and I sat out in the plastic chairs alone, taking long, cold draws and watching the sun go down over the Atlanta Highway.

I remember flying down Vaughn Road with the windows down and Bruno’s bags full of Healthy Choice turkey dinners defrosting in the back seat with this blasting, blasting, blasting so loudly that I could feel it in the backs of my thighs. And it’s acoustic.

Little pockets of happiness filled with fairy dust and zing. Frozen forever in suspended, rose-colored animation, just how I like it.

I can't help missing the days when I didn't really have a mindset.

Now, I’m overtaken with homicidal rage the second I set foot inside a grocery store. Screaming hellions ripping things from the shelves while their corpulent mothers jiggle ineffectually after them. Overpriced slop, rotting vegetables. Mushy, brown apples.

Lettuce used to taste as luxuriously symphonic as raw honeycomb and cream cheese.

This must be one of the crappiest places in the western world.

Ah, songs.

Adventures of an Italanglimerican Asthmatic

I do not, and may never, posses the superb, succinct verbal-dagger artistry of the most recent object of my swooning fandom, but I'll self-consciously throw myself into the murky depths of Michael Moore bandwagonism nonetheless.

It's very difficult to ascertain exactly what the arguments against Moore's new film, Sicko, are. The summation of the preceding "journalistic report" to the instantly classic, 10-minute Moore diatribe on CNN was essentially, "Michael Moore is right. Our health care system sucks. Here is some stuff that may or may not look kind of sort of sketchy if you squint your eyes really hard and spin around three times while holding your nose and downing a fifth of vodka. In sum: he's right." But I think--I think--the vapors that Big Pharmacy are desperately grasping at can be summarized in the jerkoff Hannity & Combs piece that my husband sent to me at work this afternoon:

1. Americans have the shortest waiting periods EVER!
2. Nations with socialized medicine pay so many taxes that working people have live in shacks and eat dirt and sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" while drug addicts and gypsies eat caviar and take money baths!
3. The cases Michael Moore features in his movie are isolated and never actually happen in real life!

A personal-experience rebuttal might not be the most statistically effective, but dammit, I know I'm right, so here it is.

A signifiant chunk of the four and a half years I spent living as an adult in my home country are wacky, free-wheelin', students-with-no-health-insurance anecdotes. It was all very fun and Kerouacian until the end of my first semester at college, when I thought I was going to die because I have asthma and couldn't come up with the $250 I needed for that month's medication. My (goddess of a) doctor managed to amass a grocery bag full of drug company samples--tiny little inhalers worth about ten good squirts each--to hold me over until the next semester's worth of academic scholarship money came through. Had it not been for her generous resourcefulness, I would have been in serious trouble, and what followed were four long years of similarly touch-and-go, cloak-and-dagger rain dancing to keep me from suffocating in my sleep. And trust me--it was very, very far from isolated.

When I arrived in England, ignorant of just about every facet of English life and receiving little help from my similarly befuddled boyfriend (who was still a fairly recent arrival from Italy), I lost many, many hours of sleep panicking about what was going to happen to me when my medication ran out. I'd heard vague rumors about the NHS, but I wasn't married yet, and only in England on a temporary six-month visa that did not, as far as I knew, entitle me to any citizenship rights, whatever they might have been. I wasn't allowed to work. I had virtually nothing. All I knew was that everything seemed to be about a hundred times more expensive and, if that also applied to medication, I was well and truly fucked.

After putting off the inevitable until the last minute, I braced myself and registered at our local National Health Service clinic. Name. Nationality. Contact phone number. Known medical issues. "Asthma", I wrote shakily, feeling like I was filing for bankruptcy.

"Let's set up an assessment," the receptionist chirped. "Say, tomorrow at 11?" (Total waiting time--approximately 21 hours.)

I couldn't bring myself to ask her how much it was going to cost.

The next day, I submitted to the usual peak flow tests and symptom-trigger questions, the cash register in my mind chinging madly with every word that came out of the doctor's mouth. He handed me a prescription containing the Anglicanized versions of all the necessary preventative and rescue meds, and I made my way to reception with my credit card clutched in a sweaty palm, praying that they accepted credit cards that may or may not have been maxed out.

The receptionist looked surprised to see me standing there. "Do you need another appointment?"

"No, I need to...pay," I choked.

She looked utterly confounded. "Pay for what?"

"The doctor?"

"Pardon?"

"What?"

And it went on like that for a couple of passes until she was able to identify my accent.

"Oh, you're American, aren't you?" Bless her. Trying so hard not to laugh.

And, I must say...five years on, and I'm a full-fledged legal immigrant with a big-girl job and an easy familiarity with the NHS system, and I still can't help but feel like a cat burglar every time I skip out of there without greasing any palms.

I learned about prescription costs in a similarly embarrassing fashion. I was moaning to a patron of the pub I worked in, and I said, "I have these prescriptions to get filled, but I'm broke! I'm going to die or something!"

"No, it's not so bad. They'll cost £6."

"What? Why? Do you have asthma too?"

"All prescriptions cost £6, no matter what it's for." Unspoken subtext: "Oh, you're American, aren't you?"

As I struggled maintain nonchalance while the Hallelujah Chorus resounded in my head, I went home and slept the first night of beautiful sleep I'd had in months. And I kissed the sky and did bell kicks all the way there. I mean seriously, you can't imagine. After four years of life/death constantly in the back of my mind,it was better than winning the lottery.

These days, my monthly NHS contribution is automatically deducted from my paycheck. If it was so astronomical that it actually affected me in some way, I'd be able to tell you exactly how much it is, but it doesn't, so I can't. If I'm drowning in taxes, I guess my nice life and I are just too busy enjoying unobstructed breathing to notice.

I'm aware that the system isn't perfect. I'm aware of the issues, and there certainly are issues. But when you're young and sick and frightened--terrified--and you don't know where your next breath is coming from, and then, for the first time in your life, you're told that everything is going to be okay, and then it IS okay, and you weep with relief...your punching fist tends to want to penetrate your computer screen and shove itself down Sean Hannity's knobby little throat.

And, today, an Australian puppy is spared.

Will the cycle be unbroken?

And, what ho! Cycling season is upon me. It is time once again to walk the bike up the road to the Local Villiage Grumpy-Assed Bike Shoppe (Where Your Custom is Our Inconvenience) for a once-over before I jump into another summer of swallowing mosquitoes and getting flipped off by bus drivers. Woo! It doesn’t seem like it could have possibly been a year ago since I last did this, but it has. The first couple of rides of the cycling season are always so exhilarating. Look at me! I'm health conscious! Excercising at 7 in the morning! Whilst saving the environment! I deserve accolades! ACCOLADES! It gets old really quickly, though. Old, hot and uncomfortable. Old, hot, uncomfortable and worrying. I worry about the fact that I’ve had no major spills (excepting the time during my first cycling season when I was menaced by a man with a lawn mower). Everybody who cycles between towns has some kind of horror story about being chased down by crack-smokers or going head-over-handlebars into a pile of rocks or being side-swiped by traffic. I am shadowed, everywhere I huff and puff, by the overwhelming sense that I am due.

There is a gig tonight. It’s at the pub I don’t like, the boring one, but I feel as if I have to go, and it actually will be the first viable opportunity I’ve had to get a full evenings’ use out of the beautiful camera Bubba gave me for my birthday.

I’m all about positive negativity.