Smokes! Lets go!

Well that was a 2 days of travel I won't soon forget.
I hate packing things up. I particularly hate trying to stevedore an entire life into my huge backpack without its seams bursting.
There were few extra possessions that I needed to lynch into it, a shirt, a book from City Lights, some guide books, and tat (receipts, bart tickets, museum tickets etc.) for memories, but the backpack just seems to be growing every day. I wouldn't mind it's flourishing, but I've killed every pot plant I tried to do the same with. It's a bulbous misshapen ball sack, like a hard syphilitic sailor's cock, and about as intimidating to be alone in a room with.
The impending doom of United Airlines hung over us all morning like a grey-cloud of bitter hangover. It even seemed to be infectious as the cloud spread over San Francisco and piddly drizzle and biting winds started to whip at our ankles as we killed time roaming hill and street until zero hour. It's hard to feel upbeat about two days of travelling, but it’s totally impossible when the travel is courtesy of the worst commercial air carrier I have come across. It suits our budget which is priority one (sickening though it is to admit), but is not designed for any kind of comfort.

We started reasonably well with a late breakfast in a traditionally modern Chinese restaurant just off Chestnut on one of those streets that's too small to make it into the guidebooks.
I had sweet and sour pork with bland bland rice and it was wonderful. It’s the first time I have tasted food that reminded me of home since I got here. It was so nice to taste home. My stomach also thanked me for liberating it from the fried Yankee breakfasts we have existed on since we arrived.

Autumn and early winter were both lapping at the heels of our adventure. The chill in the air and on our backs seemed to signal our departure and I couldn't help but feel distressed to leave.
The people passing by were poorly dressed for the sudden change in temperature.
Unhappy Californians shivered in their shorts and sandals and frowned into their mobiles and Bluetooth headsets saying:
"It's so cold",
and
"It’s, like, so cold."
whilst ignoring each other on the street.


We shivered around the streets, wandering how to pass the time between hotel checkout and airport check-in. After smoking, meandering, bookshop browsing and drinking too much coffee and not enough booze, we gave up and decided to hike it to the airport an hour early.


After being intimidated by the big city, enamoured with it, scared of it, fed up with it, and then round trip back to sweet love for it, we didn't need to squeeze anything else from the rind of our remaining time, so to go to the airport felt like a release. The start of the next episode.


Sarah knew I was being quiet but she didn't question it much.

This, the day of our flight into a new world, was the day that miserly pessimism decided to smash me firmly in the stomach, steal the seeds of hope, and replace them with the cold childlike fear possessed of all over-mammied Irish boys in new situations.

Australia hung over me like a monster in the cupboard, and I had no blanket to hide under.

I think Sarah knew she couldn't do anything about it. I was just working myself up into oblivion. I wound myself up and I was away, she isn't able to stop me. I guess I just ponder the worst too much.
Thank god she is here with me, stemming the wounds of my own inability to maintain forward motion in happy exaltation of new sights and experiences.
I'm frequently lost in the doldrums of self-hatred and she is my one guiding light. Her and this laptop, and the familiar rhythm of typing and deleting that lets me shut out the shadowy oblivion until drink, new sights or excitements steer me back on course to normalcy and the ability to put up with myself.
Again, I just hoped that the worst of my fear-binge wouldn't affect her too much. But it was becoming impossible to hide it from her.
For her I am an open book, even for my most embarrassing moments and lowest points.
She is my greatest friend and counsellor through life, who has helped me with everything from dealing with great sadness to dealing with athlete's foot. All I can think when I stare at her beautiful eyes is thank God for her.
Thank God, for something is spurring me on, and it certainly isn't me.

We went back to the La Luna to collect our bags. That little Motor Inn is framed in my brain forever now, incandescent Americana like the beach boys, chipotle sauce or chronic heart disease.
We definitely lived well in San Fran. I'm proud of how we managed to navigate our way through a strange few days. I feel closer to Sarah than ever now. We are bonded by weirdos and questing. Of course the budget wasn't a major issue, and we couldn't save ourselves from eating out continually, with no cooker or facilities, we were fed from the guts of the
American culinary industry for our entire stay.
I can't remember one bad meal, but my stomach is just aching for familiar fare.
I'm really missing home cooking. I love the messing around with saucepans and meats, going to a local shop, then another, then another to find all the ingredients for any of my ridiculously over-complicated dishes.
I only ever cook for Sarah though.
There never seems much point or reward in cooking for myself. I never smile at my own creations and I love to surprise and please her, even if it is only for something as silly as a warm cooked meal after a hard day's work.

I'm beginning to feel like I can do nothing for her. Laundry and cleaning and cooking are taken out of the equation.
All I ever want to do is make her smile, but I'm not always so good at it.
I think I would make a great housewife.
Sarah is like a rock through my ambling self-indulgence, shoring me up mentally. She is finding the accommodation and coming up with ideas. She is also eternally decent to me and basically carrying me on her back like I were a wounded ranting soldier wheezing morphinated nonsenses in cold fear of failure.
I am not sure how I will fare now that my old friend, self-indulgent depression, is beginning to swell in my stomach again. The bastard.
It's a plight maligned by all who know me, who know of my tendency towards the negative, but it is still a part of me, as plain to my familiars as the nose on my face, though I try to hide it like the sweat stains.
I try to bury it deep inside like we all do with our failures. But I still perma-suffer whilst upsetting most that come into contact with me and my sulks. I'm just grateful that all my great friends stick by me and feel that I'm still worth knowing despite my worn-on-my-shirt flaws.
I know who I am.
I don't know how to build a bridge over the pit of my stomach to make it to happiness from self-constructed despair.
I am definitely beginning to miss home, friends, comforts and the friendly open prison of my life in Limerick. And my little car with its squeaking brakes and baldy tyres.
I miss getting up and making myself a cup of coffee from my own kettle, in my underpants with a fag in my mouth, a quick scratch and a few wheezy coughs. I miss laundry and kitchen cleaning and the minutiae of daily living. It's strange the crap that you miss when you strip most of your life away except for one beanstalk of a backpack.

I miss friends most of all.
I miss my drinking buddies, my sage counsellors, my adopted children, my guiding lights and my confidants and my brother. I miss the group life, the secrets shared on drugs, the heartening steel of friends who stick by no matter what.
I will never miss working, but the rest is a hard knot in my heart, bound to me with chains and love.






In Melbourne, the place we have booked is a lovely central apartment, Carlton, a strong-armed stone's throw to the Central Business District, with its own cooking facilities.
That's heartening me.
Everything else is making me feel like a little boy lost in a supermarket. All the choice in the world, but no currency or intelligence to pick anything.

I really felt like I shouldn't catch that flight to Melbourne.

I feel like I should take the first hop of the flight, to LA, and then just cut and run, enjoy more of tourist's America and then go home to the palms of friends and family, find a job and a car and hop around the places I will always know, beginning something new from the ashes of the old.
I am not sure if travel with my world on my back is a beast I can tame.
I don't know if it's something I want. Maybe feeling like I have conquered this fear, just once, will mean that I can finally put this fear to bed, but maybe again I don't want to.
I hope I can, but it's the ever-doubting hope of a Catholic priest, peddling along in a profession where your boss never thanks you for a job well done. I never pat myself on the back for smoothing through the hard edges life sometimes deals me. I always kick myself worst when I'm down.

Maybe the meat of this story is in my stomach and how I learn to digest change, and all of the exotic foreign strangeness is just an aside to how I feel, right here, in the centre of my chest.
You already know I'm stubborn; I just need that heroic stubborn to push through and fend off the worst of the unknown until I am back on my feet mentally.
Fear of failure is at my back pushing me on. Fear of the unknown lies ahead, pushing me home. I feel like a leaf floating on the trade winds of both, with little say as to who wins. I'm hoping I will learn to sail these seas of meandering dread. I need a tiller to fend off the worst of these storms, a beacon of hope at the shore.
It's really not easy being this precious.





We took a cab to the airport. The of-Russian-origin driver ignored us and played classical music. I saw his hands directing and conducting it as he drove, and realised that he made me do the same. It was something or other by Brahms according to the DJ.
He was the only taxi driver I was in the car with in my whole time in San Francisco who didn't beep his horn in anger once. Most drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the horn. His hands clicked and he let the angry reactions he felt dissolve away into the rhythm of the classical music.

Once we arrived at the airport, weighed down with backpacks, we took the round-robin monorail that circumnavigates SFO to domestic terminal 3. We began our trek to yet another continent with a United Airlines flight to L.A (UA856) on sept. 28th.
It's a short jump, less than two hours of discomfort and ear-popping until LAX and the dreaded.

We flew low around LA for a while, waiting to land in one of the busiest airports on the East Coast.
I was listening to channel 9 on United Airlines in-flight radio, distracted with the business of stopping my brain from going where my body doubtless was.
For some reason, this quirky channel 9 was a direct link to the LAX control tower radio, full of "Ready to push" "219 and holding", fast prompt requests with token politeness underlining commands that needed urgent responses or lives or jobs would be lost.
I heard American, Australian and Japanese accents all asking to land and take-off and calm voices from the ground telling them how and when.
It landed me (but not the plane) again in the familiar tranquil home of a 12 year old boy spending time with his dad.
As long as I can remember, my father has always had a portable multiple band radio, one of those radios with a million short wave frequencies and eternal battery life, possessed of all older generations desirous of a world beyond their own limitations.
These little portable radios (they were constantly upgraded, about one a year) went everywhere with him. In the back of his car, out whilst gardening, to his office in work, and when I was a kid, it seemed to contain entire unknown worlds that could be digested by even my weak stomach from a safe distance. I had grown up with the strange sounds of airports, taxicabs, garbled low frequency messaging and I remember how relaxing and intriguing it is to listen in on conversations whose meaning, other than garbled reading between lines and judgement of tones entirely eludes me, like a Spanish soap opera.
As we hit closer to LA itself, I took to gaping out the window. The expanse of the place was a distractingly hyperbolic sight. It was approximately 8pm and twilight was hitting in, and the lights of a big city stretched further and further to the end of the landscape, time, space and the universe. Under me, and beyond, all I could see from both sides of the plane, an eternity of suburbia and advertising, pushing and hacking away at the desert.
That song, playing over in my head, Sandy Shaw.
"LA is a great big freeway, put a hundred down and buy a car. In a week maybe two they'll make you a star"
My heart soared away with it, a dot on the skyline I was staring at, turning happily into largesse from obscurity, or just learning to live in what must be the largest goldfish bowl in the world.
I might never see LA again, and though I have only ever viewed it from the safety of a plane or a bus, passing through to a friendlier start, I don't think I could breathe there without money.
Lots and lots of money. Any place like that should never have existed in the first place.
I can't help but wonder, also, if Australia is my San Jose.
Is it an idol I have held up, to be toppled by impossible expectation?
A reflection of a memory of a place I have never seen that cannot hope to live up to my dreams for it. I have lived in the wonder and excitement of getting back on the road for so long that it seems impossible that it holds anything for me but disappointment when compared to the picture of it in perfect 20/20 in my mind's eye.

We landed bumpy on the tarmac, and again, sweaty brick wall of fear hits in and Nick goes postal.
I caved and babbled at Sarah over cigarettes outside, everything came out and it felt good to know she knew my heart, even if it's a dank place in my chest that suffers with malignant fear.
I have a feeling that in the next few days, she will see more of my heart and soul than she could ever hope to. I just hope it doesn't send her screaming and she still thinks she can deal with me until after I grapple this monster.

I hate showing that side of me to other people.
I hate how often I cave and people see it anyway.

But she exists forever in my heart, lighting through my darknesses, vices and weaknesses.
It's only fair to show her the rooms I haven't cleaned for her yet. After all she is paying for them.

I really felt like I couldn't get on that flight.

Everything it represented suddenly seemed appalling to me, as I sat supping a double whiskey in LAX waiting out the 4 hours till the dotdotdot.
Even Sandy Shaw's sweet voice, exalting the dream of travelling for the sake of friendship, rebirth, and the power of dreams over the reality of rampant consumerism is mixing bitter with the cold fuel of upset in my brain.
Now the same song, over and over in my head just felt like a bitter rampage against a disgusting world we so easily immerse ourselves in, mulling like bitter wine.
Maybe my travel reflected her anger, and the reality of her dreams probably floated away in a trip from recording studio to concert.

"And all those stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas."


UA839 to Melbourne via Sydney.
An arrow through the commonplace that sustained me.
A bullet through my happiness.

A placebo where a smile should be.

My mind hung on grimly through the white-knuckle boredom of security, check-in and dawdle. Playing over and over in my head and the pit of my perma-weak stomach, the same in-flight movie of terror and the need to run back home.

I gulped it back again and again, deep into my chest, imprisoned in my head so I could learn to tame it, swimming against the tide of my own revolting cowardice.

How silly, I kept on thinking.

How fucking hilariously sick and silly.

And how ashamed I am of where my mind goes, what I put myself through, and how I dawdle along with decisions, shambling and ambling through life on the back of other's dreams like every writer until the reality of reality hits in and I want to run home to mommy like a sobbing schoolchild.

Fear of flying has nothing on fear of landing.

I really want to explore more of this great fear I have for the unknown. I need to quench my thirst for the knowledge of its origin, or how and why it controls and tries to win out over the rational calm side of my brain.
I know the only hope for me to learn to control this abominable ague is to sit through the fierce distemper of the instability and land myself in a world unknown, but I don't know if this will reveal a sour scared tempo to my personality. I want to succeed, for Sarah and for myself. I just would hate to push her away amidst this fierce and personal battle that she cannot hope to understand.

Through my brain, images of this cycle through my life were beginning to play out their late show.
I know it started with pre-school. I didn't like pre-school. I asked my mom if I had to go anymore after three days. I can even remember then, the same fear eating away at my stomach about this strange new world, with its swings and sandpits and strange toys that everyone else seemed to love, and the brisk and even tempered woman who presided, designating lunches, rewards and nap-times with ever-patient kind smiles. I don't think she had a tool in her teacher's handbook for dealing with my monsters though.
I just wanted my own toys.
My own thoughts in my own room with my family where it was all safe and suffocating, and the droning of relentless life could patter about around me in my own little cell of comfort. So I didn't go to pre-school. I started school in Infants with the same fears and let them wash over me with every new change, right through my time in school, right through again to the dawning of adulthood.

You remember when the teacher was ill? And your class got divided up into groups of 4 or 5 and fed out amongst the other teachers, set to do nothing for the day? How wonderful and freeing it was to sit elsewhere and not work and have the day off from the mundanity of school?
I hated it. I hated the change. It upset my stomach. I broke out in sweats. I sat sullen, hoping for time to fly by and take me back to normalcy.

Seeing as how it started so early, how can I hope to remember the trigger that started me off on living with the fear, rather than rising up against it? I want more than anything to battle tooth and nail to the grim and bitter end with all of my forthright stubbornness until I taste sweet victory or bitter defeat in the arms of a foreign world and time where I could finally know myself.
At least to know myself would be victory, even if it meant sidling home in defeat. To know so little of myself that I let this fear win out all the time sickens me almost as much as the alternative.

I was only allowing myself to think that the boredom of flying would mean I would be glad to land anywhere, and that this is how it was meant to be. 16 hours in the sky, over the Pacific to Sydney was the prospect.
The Pacific.
In the words of every sailor, traveller or any who have traversed or dealt with it, what a poorly named ocean. But the great size of it alone made it seem like there was all the time in the world to plan and get over this hurdle.
I boarded the plane and took my seat. I got the middle seat, no comfort of the window, its cold shoulder to sleep against, and no comfort of the aisle, with its quick escape to bathrooms without bothering others.
We seemed to spend forever taxiing around aimlessly. We spent another hour waiting for clearance to take off. (Again, in flight radio was telling me exactly when it was no-going-back-sucka time, through the calm robotic voices of LAX control tower.)
Friday, at about 11:15pm on American time we finally got our clearance to leave, took off, trundling down the runway towards the inescapable reality of something new and scary.
It's done now I thought. Just accept it. Dammit, enjoy it you fucking pussy. You fucking total pussy.

I slept furtively, and watched some of the same movies I had seen on my United flight to San Francisco. Within a few short hours, boredom set in like a drunken bastard at a taxi rank.
My 6 foot 1 frame was not built for air travel. I clashed with my seat, pushing the fucker as far back as the evil capitalists who designed airplane seating arrangements would allow (about 4 inches). This then caused a clash with the person behind me's knees (some poor woman who was clearly distressed by my aggressive seat pushing. What could I do? As I said, 6'1''. Not exactly easy to squeeze that into the smallest seat space per person of any transatlantic carrier.)
The seat in front also took a bashing as I squish squashed left and right to gain some leverage and 15 minutes of comfort before ass-numbness prompted the next round. Sarah on the window seat and a Peruvian to my right who had the misfortune of getting the aisle seat next to mine also took a beating from my constant squirming.
The Peruvian to my right, couldn't have been older than 20, got woken up some 4 times during the night by my incessant need to get out of the tiny little cushioned prison I had paid a fortune to be trapped in so I could go to the bathroom. I went there to not pee despite needing to, splash cold water on my face and quietly fart, navel gaze and stare at my ever more haggard complexion as I exalted in finally being able to stretch to my full frame if even for only a minute.
My breath rapidly deteriorated to paint thinning grade halitosis ad the pit stains slowly grew to meet the chest stain.
I read Tom Robbins and drank white wine. I took prescription medication my dad had bought me to relax, but it didn't work. (How could it, it wasn't a horse tranquilizer.)


Like all things though, time and the worst of the self-imposed torture passed, and quickly became just another jotted individual memory like everything else on this crazy trip.
Sarah and I were already planning how to get back home by taking flights by any other airline, and taking hops of no longer than 6 hours each time.
I will never ever fly with those fuckers again. It’s possible I will never fly again, and just swim home, or hide in a freight ferry with a crate of whiskey and a packet of rice in my pocket.
We tipped down in Sydney at 8am local time. I was wild-eyed from furtive sleep and travel, prescription drugs and booze, and barely able to coherently navigate the airport. Both Sarah and I found it impossible to orienteer our way through the signposts and snapped at each other whilst getting lost for an hour before we found our gate.
We are both intelligent people. We both have good heads on our shoulders, and I have always believed that only morons get lost at airports.
Total morons.
But this was before I took a 16 hour flight. My IQ was less than my age plus my shoe size at that point, all I could do was drool and roar, and fantasise about punching someone, anyone, repeatedly, until their face caved in and they were left with nothing but a jiggly stump of spinal cord waggling cartoonishly where their head used to be.
We took a transfer from Sydney to Melbourne, so we still hadn't arrived at our final destination and when you are transferring from Sydney, they don't let you fucking smoke while you are waiting. Again, the over-regimented anti-smoking laws meant that I couldn't get my much needed fix.
This is after multiple freak outs.
After 16 hours without a smoke.
After the worst airline in the history of the world for that full 16 hours, no decent food and some 45 minutes of sleep.
They gave me jelly beans and a packet of crisps for breakfast.
And the stupid fucking pious holier-than-thou fucks who designed the airport didn't have a door that opened to the outside to just let me have a cigarette between one fucking awful flying experience and another.
All I was thinking throughout my whole time in the airport was "those fucking fucking cocksucking total absolute cunts." and similar colourful descriptions.

Yeah. I'm mellow.

Thank God that our last flight was only another two hour hop down the coast, but by this stage, I was existing entirely on the far edge of the seat.
My head comprised 95% vein throbbing in anger and 5% black rings under my eyes. I ignored the air-hostesses as they smiled and asked me stupid questions, for if I had opened my mouth, I would have bitten one of them, possibly on the throat, and then spent my time roaring and drinking the blood whilst screaming my anti-United anti-Capitalist manifesto until I was subdued by at least two, possibly more of the multiple mullets on the plane.

Finally we landed and got through border security thankfully quickly. We picked up our prodigal bags after waiting an hour at a rotating carousel, bleary eyed and barely able to stand.
Cigarette, smoke, fag, toke, pull, tug, drag, filter, tobacco, smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke.
We then had to get through customs. They scanned our bags with haste, possibly noticing how my throbbing forehead vein was reaching toward them whilst their backs were turned, trying to strangle them. We got through to the arrivals lounge, and sped, no sleep and exhaustion disregarded, we sprinted out to the Melbourne air, fag and lighter already in my hand, for the final smoke I had been looking forward to for what seemed like 20 years.
Fucking total cunting bastard United Airlines and cock-assing Australian government can suck my smoke filled cock for all eternity.
Bastards and scum the whole cocking lot of them.