travelogue 8

February 5, 2006

“hello. is that reception? ah good, you see, I’ve just been out with some lovely work colleagues talking about data architecture models and functional spec politics to a place that does orange beer and things like that which was really near to place that you can play indoor luminous golf in the dark, oh, you know the place, haha, anyway yes, so, I probably had a couple of shandies and got a lift back in Kristen’s seat-warming multi-function space station, at which point I made for the elevator where I pushed all the buttons at once to see what happens and now I think I’m on the 7th floor but I have absolutely no idea where 730 is and I appear to have lost the will and wit to actually find out. could you be a super chappy and send somebody up to help me out? I think I’m near, but everything looks so far. yes, 730. mr caynes. that’s me. ok, I’ll hold…”

in the end I just crawled my way along the hideous 70s carpet like something out of splinter cell until I reached the end of the corridor and as luck would have it, just before I hit the fire escape where I may have taken the splinter cell thing a bit too far by trying to rappel down the wall and hanging in a dark corner of the lobby until a receptionist wandered past and I snapped their neck with my legs, there was 730 with my door key already stuck in the lock and the sound of the tv filtering under the door. I guess I’d already been back to the room at some point and raided the imported fruit and nut supply that I was supposed to give to Julie and my blood suger level shot off some dial somewhere which was why I was jibbering around the corridors like a loon, looking for bottled water that I already have in my room. either that or I just really needed to go to sleep. or I already was asleep. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy…

travelogue 7

February 3, 2006

“you wanna have your 5 year old technology platform and migrate onto our content services architecture and keep all your functionality intact because your director likes the way that he can generate a report that nobody reads? yeah. ok, have a nice day! bye! it ain’t gonna happen” and “it’s about standard practices and technologies and even if we’re not 100% there, we’re 90% there which is what we can deliver now and, oh, by the way you ain’t ever gonna get that 10%, right? oh, you want 50% of that 10%? sorry. have a nice! bye!” and “you’re the business you should be telling us” and so on.

having spent the morning in the hotel room finishing off the 3 slides I spent until 3:04 am trying to finish last night this morning I made the mistake of uploading the finished presentations to the collabspace via the hotel broadband link which has an upstream capability of around 2 bytes an hour or something and so I spent 40 minutes just watching a logo twizzle round on the top corner of a browser until what is left of my hair was scattered liberally around a gideon bible having been dragged from my scalp through the unbearable tension of network stasis and a desperate urge to just jump out the window. but it did upload eventually and I made a tom cruise mission impossible type disconnect/unlink/snapshut laptop move and dashed out the room into the maid who was just putting something unsavoury into a yellow plastic bag that said ‘medical’ on it and down the elevator and slid manaically across the hood of the suzuki gelatin like starskey always used to do at the beginning of starskey and hutch, or was that hutch, no, he did that thing where he jumped off a wall and landed on his arse on the hood of a car. I had planned to meet up casually with some colleagues to break into the 4 days ahead, but now I was going to have to screech around Interlocken Everdecreasing Loop like an idiot, leg it up to the lobby of building 5 at which point I will pass out in a sweaty white heap because I always do at the lobby of building 5 and then I’ll get lost for 20 minutes looking for a meeting room called Yellowfoot Beaver Catastrophy or something which I will eventually find by walking past it 3 times while everybody inside wonders why I’m just walking past 3 times and so I’ll stumble through the door just as somebody is reaching a climax and it’ll take all my powers of being a stupid english person to ingratiate myself with a bunch of folks who have been in this room for an hour already and really would rather be writing taglibs or something.

“think of it as a utility subscription convergence services architecture model. if you can” and “so there are really 3 parts to it. no, 4. yes so there’s the, oh, hang on, 5 parts. 5? what’s the fifth part. I though we weren’t going to, oh, right. anyway, so, there’s 5 parts to the basic…what? right, I see. so, the basic 4 parts…” and “so, back to the presentation here, this is how I see our cascading delivery model for our service orientateted model thing which is what it really is, right?” and “aha, you see, that is correct, but I wish to understand how one should begin to test that which we have no means to determine whether the potential outcomes are dependent on the allocation of and development of and attribution to, per se, those suites to which we do not yet have developement schedules against those to whom the testing will be the test of the testing under which we should be managing the scope of the discussions here pertaining to that which is preventative but untested” etc. after 4 hours of that with the occasional “we’re all shareholders, right?” I was ready to turn my back on another day and discuss things like sausages and hummers over dinner instead and so retreated to the flex space at the end of the universe for a while, plugging and unplugging ethernet cables to nowhere for about 20 minutes until I got one that got me connected and my battery died, laughing.

travelogue 6

February 2, 2006

I’m going to get back to the hotel far too early and I mght have to do more work than is necessary so I get the suzuki granola back on the right side of the road and head back to Broomfield the long way round even though the sun is kind of losing the will and the looming clouds are starting fights over the edge of the hills but I like the look of that little road and its got an old gas station on the corner and it looks like it might lead to an interesting kind of town where I can stop off at a grocery store and get 5 gallons more water because my internal organs are like walnuts by now and there I shall have a pleasant tourist conversation with a local park ranger with squirrels on his back or something like that. despite the rapidly darkening skies the short drive is just as I’d hoped with a beautiful view of rattlesnake gulch and shirttail peak and places with names like that spread out in front of me with suitably placed bumps in the road which are giving the shocks on the suzuki a bit of panning and they’re now crunching around which is a nice compliment to the grinding and grating noise the front nearside wheel has been making every time I put the brakes on since I left the airport and in a short while I’m approaching the outskirts of Eldorado Springs. well, I say outskirts but in fact by the the time I’ve entered, I’ve exited and all I can see now is large signs written in paint with a large brush which say things like DON’T PARK HERE IF YOUR NOT FROM THE COMM-U-NI-TY and NO PARKING HERE and PARK ENTRANCE NOT THIS WAY and I’m beginning to get the feel that there ain’t a friendly grocery store here and actually its a bit like the Witterings in the UK which are deserted in winter and you never see a human but in the summer is full of signs made out of industrial size letraset from B&Q and A4 card which say things like OH NO, YOU CAN’T PARK HERE and PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T PARK ACROSS DRIVEWAY and NO CHANGE FOR PARKING and GOLF SALE and suchlike and for 3 months the only road in and out of the village is nose to tail with vauxhall vectras, golf gtis and renault megane scenics spewing out carbon monoxide, churning up herbacious borders and generally metropolizing an area of outstanding natural beauty although the garage on the edge of town does a good trade in bottles of water and happy shopper sandwiches and ginsters at that time of year probably which I how I imagine Eldorado Springs must be between May and September on its one road in and out of town where enterprising locals set up stalls at the side of the road selling litres of water for 5 bucks and replacing the signs with ones which say PARKING HERE $20 ALL DAY and LAST PARKING BEFORE NATIONAL PARK and things.

that’s not to say it didn’t look like a nice place. it was just kind of closed and I wasn’t going to stay long enough to pay whatever is cost to park in the national park parking area so I swiveled the suzuki geronimo around in the dirt, dropping it onto the deck at least a couple of times when the wheels hit any particularly tasty potholes which resulted in a rather nice banging noise from under the passenger seat every time I turned left from then on, and I headed back towards Broomfield where my other presentation on globalization was on he tadpole mocking me into including a slide about engagement models and business requirements for a next generation ecommerce platform that can pop up storefronts in uzbekistahn at the flick of a switch but probably can’t take any money for some reason and might be in English anyway and so I get back on the 128 and hope that it eventually turns into a road that includes ‘Interlocken’ in its name because then I’ll know I’ll only have a couple of hours drivng insanely round in circles trying to get off any raods with ‘Interlocken’ in their name before I’ll be back at the renaissance and taking pictures out of the 7th floor window thinking that I might one day stick them all together as a panorama of a number of car parks, which will be nice.

approaching Broomfield by the back door it was apparent that the snow was waiting for me over the brow of Interlocken Endless Loop and so I stopped by the side of the road, pointed my camera at the sky, quickly ditching it and pretending to be on my upside-down callphone when the local police slowed down as they passed and then decided to brave the elements in a kind of head-on fashion. I got back to the hotel about 3 hours later, but not because of the snow. while I wasn’t looking, someone put a golf course in the way and I’d got to the 15th green before I realized I’d lost the plot.

travelogue 5

February 1, 2006

“DON’T GO HERE. PEOPLE DIE HERE, LIKE, ALL THE TIME, D00D”. that’s what it says on the tourist board when you cross the highway to take a closer look at Boulder Falls in the snow at least it says something like that which in effect says if you climb up here when there’s a perfectly icy disjointed loose graveled and shiny rock laden path down here then you deserve to plummet 10 metres to your death in the icy flow of the falls you stupid ass why did you come here anyway it’s not that exciting its not like niagara or anything even if you’re from the UK right you’ve got waterfalls don’t you jesus. still, notwithstanding the advice I thought I’d check out the falls again because there were some pretty nice snow covered sections of the river on the way up that caught my eye when I should have been looking at the road and the snow trucks and explorers coming in the opposite direction on the carriageway I’d just crossed over onto which the suzuki didn’t repond to particularly well to as I screeched back across to the right using full lock and whizzing the wheel through my hands like steve mcqueen on lombard street and so I though the falls might yeild some nice winter shots I could tag with ‘winter’ and ‘snow’ and ‘winter snow’ and stuff like that in flickr and join all sorts of new groups called things like ‘snow’ and ‘winter snow’ and ‘joys of winter snow – READ THE BLOODY RULES’ and things like that and post my winter snow shots and see how many people completely ignore them because well they’re just a bit rubbish next to the nikon d70s club who’ve trekked up the himalayas and have stunning sherpa silhouette shots looking down at the cloudbase with the sun overexposing on the virgin snow at the highest peak in burma with a flock of eagles flying past in the background waving free tibet flags in their beaks while an airbus380 leaves a heart-shaped vapour trial in the distance so my grainy closeup of a bit of cold water and half my foot doesn’t really cut it and even though someone who lives in norwich and so is polite enough to leave a comment like ‘er, I like the movement on that, I think’ there’s not really much to stop me just deleting it except I’ve geotagged it now and I can’t be bothered

after a couple of experiments with the self-timer and the edge of a cliff I’m getting pretty cold anyway and I really should be heading back to the hotel now to contemplate the strategy for web globalization over an endlessly distributed and fragmented internal infrastructure soon to be converged around common content services and the extension of the software lifecycle to incorporate the whole research, get, subscribe support process when we’re looking at how to accomodate licence purchases with briefcases full of cash in China and so I head back to the suzuki generous and attempt a complicated reversing manoevre into the path of an oncoming snow truck while in a forward gear and hanging over the edge of the river like something out of the Italian Job. in the end I just kind of screech wildy around while everybody pulls up and watches but I put on my best ‘sickly grin I’m a tourist and even worse I’m british’ look and end up looking a bit like john cleese which mostly always gets me off the hook and I even throw a silly walk in for good measure usually but right now I’m content with just sticking my hand out of the wrong window in a kind of apologetic but thankful gesture which probably ends up looking like I’m giving everyone the finger but now I’m careering down towards the 36 and so I don’t really care anymore until I hit a school bus and bounce into the front yard of a surprized looking family from Wisconsin who’ve only rented the place for the weekend.

I made that last bit up about hitting the school bus by the way, but it happened like that in my mind…

travelogue 4

January 31, 2006

its monday and I’m supposed to be holed up in a hotel room in broomfield putting the finishing touches to a globalization strategy presentation that our director will present back to me and a number of other colleagues who are currently making their way to colorado where the world is congregating this week to talk about really important stuff and then some really unimportant stuff but instead I’m holed up in the Boulder Café on the corner of Pearl and 13th waiting for the waitress twins to appear again as if by magic with some orange beer that’s been brewed by a local hippy in an underground cavern at the foot of the rockies using a pedal bike and some healing crystals and today’s special which happens to be a prawn and chicken satay thing which sounds nice but until they arrive plus the gallon of water I need every 5 minutes in colorado I’m just looking out the window with a blank stare wondering why nobody is coming to Boulder today even though its a bit cold but then its always cold in winter and then I remember why I’m not actually holed up in a conference room instead on a monday lunchtime on january and thats because its Martin Luther King day and nearly everybody round here has taken to the hills to stand on rocks on one leg and cast huge shadows or experience the love of life at 10200 feet up in leadville or is probably just sat at home in a house in the middle of nowhere that probably used to be a forge or steam engine or something and posting clutter on ebay so they can get the car in the garage again and that’s why I’m sat here on my own with 2 waitresses looking after me and one old man at the table next to me who thinks I’m some kind of progressive liberal freak because I’ve got a fleece on with the collar up and I haven’t had a shave and my camera is kind of pointing at him in a way which is making him slightly edgy and so he’s rustling the Daily Camera around like an impatient father-in-law shooting daggers at me

the special is special and the amber is nectar and I decide to forego the cheesecake in case its anything like the cheesecake at the renaissance which arrives in 10 seconds but takes about 10 hours to finish because its the size of a flatiron or something and well, you have to finish it even though its not tasting that great washed down with flat tire and so I try and sneak a couple of shots of the waitresses on the way out but as usual I thought they were being nice to me because I was english and on my own and they kind of liked me but now I’ve paid I’ve suddenly become invisible and they’re clearing the table before I’ve even stood up and so I give up on candid for the time being and just get my dad’s killy coat on that I’ve borrowed for the colorado winter which is the one he got free when he was working on the winter olympics in japan years ago and I ding out the door and decide its probably time I took a quick tour of the deserted pearl street mall and then head back to the suzuki for a quick detour around a couple of landmarks around here while the sun is out but wait it looks like snow best be quick and so I screech out of the deserted parking garage like starsky and hutch with slippers on and head vaguely west, no, east, ah well round in circles for a while before I finally point the suzuki getover up a hill and we’re headed into the clouds which might be an interesting thing and a mildly stupid thing depending on what happens in the next couple of hours but its only 1 o’clock and I can probably do that set of apocalyptic web venue slides in a few hours after a couple of beers later so lets just go for it

travelogue 3

January 27, 2006

wake up. you’re there. humph. shuffle. so I’ll just stand here stooped under this overhead locker while you all dither around detaching your armstraps and dropping your duty frees on the heads of unsuspecting latvians who are wrestling their super-sized carry-on bags out of the seat in front of them as a million blankets cascade from the aisles and an armful of BA headsets careen up the aisle as backpacked 7 year-olds push through to the exits past the world traveller plus and the nice ladies in club world who are picking up 17 discarded newspapers from each reclined seat as my large russian friend is pulling what looks like a sack of potatos from the space over our heads with a look on her face that says she’s not really very pleased with having spent 9 and a half hours squeezed between 2 armrests with buttons on she’s doesn’t know how to use and all this goes on for about 30 minutes because we’ve stopped taxiing about 50 metres short of the terminal building because the plane the should have already been taking off has still got a pipe sticking out of it and hasn’t made room for flight ba219 so we’re just stuck in this neverland trying not to catch each other’s eye while self-consciously fiddling with the loose change in our pockets that we can’t use in this country anyway and we didn’t put it all in one of those charity envelopes so I guess we’ll just set off some kind of security alarm instead when all we really want to do is get through security and use a proper toilet that doesn’t move around when you’re trying to use it

40 minutes later we’re on the avis bus to the rental car pickup where I let them know I’m a preferred customer and so my car will be ready for me and as usual they can’t find caynes timmr on their palmtop until I point out its with a c and not a k and also its a y not and i and an n not an m and its tim, not timmr which is just a concatenation of tim and mr (ahh! I see!) and anyway sir, we don’t seem to have a car ready for you like they never do for some reason and so I check in with the rental station after being hoofed off the bus and actually, they do have a car for me in slot N9 have a nice day. so this looks like me, the one between all the enormous suvs that have been hired out for a colorado weekend and are about 10 feet tall with full beams on in the parking lot just to let you know just how big and impressive they are, the one that says ‘suzuki’ on it and has done about 38000 miles with the pedal to the floor and never got past 50 miles an hour and its a lovely grey with a name like a ‘gerona’ or a ‘genoa’ or something but its got a walnut dash, so it must be good. righto, let’s hit the toll road and we’ll be at the renaissance in about 30 minutes, which we are, because the toll road is alway completely empty save for the poor souls who man the tolls in the middle of winter and have to deal with the english and their $20 bills and fumbling around in their laptop bags and getting receipts and all that but then you still have a nice day so everything’s alright thankyou sir no problem you drive safely etc.

after picking up 17 complimentary breakfast coupons, 500 free marriot points for standing up straight in the restaurant, free internet access because nobody else is using it right now and a letter about how there really won’t be much inconvenience when we start doing building work on the roof tomorrow morning I’m up to the 7th floor and turning the wrong way out of the lift until I get all the way to the end of the wrong wing of the hotel and consider just hitting the fire escace and getting back in the suzuki and straight back to the airport but instead turn back and hike across the wilderness of the horrible patterned carpet until we’re at 730 and the key works and I’m in and they’ve folded the corners down on everything which is nice so lets think about the rest of the day. ooh, I’d like some of that water, I’ve not really had any for a few hours and that looks nice. $4.50? dammit. where’s the vending machine, ah, down the corridor. right. 2 dollar bills? I spent those of the toll road. dammit. right. where’s the bar?

travelogue 2

January 25, 2006

back though the underworld tunnel and out into the swirling mass that’s terminal 4 concourse on a rainy sunday lunchtime where I’m already on the wrong floor so I’m pressing all the buttons on the elevator again to see where I come out which is thankfully right next to WHSmiths where I need to buy 17 litres of spring water just to make sure I don’t get a flaky nose by the time I’ve coated my face with everyone else’s breath passed through a chlorine filter that has probably come from the swimming pool in greenwich and makes me look like pete burns by the time I’ve landed in Denver and all the indians start wailing at me as I pass them over the walkway that connects BA to CO via TSA and FBI.

so I’ve checked in online and I’m 2 hours early which is a contradiction that BA can’t really deal with, so I proceed to the bag drop to be told that I’m checked in alright but I’ll actually have to drop my bag somewhere completely different like off a cliff or something so follow me and I’ll get that taken care of for you except you don’t know where you’re going do you? still, the bag passed onto the conveyor at the back of the check in area and my confidence in ever seeing it again dropped to somewhere below zero which was rather worrying as I’d packed the tadpole and so all the work I needed to do was in there and never mind you’ve had a wasted trip sir – couldn’t you just do your presentations without the pictures you drew in them? without the pictures? are you mad? they are the presentation. you’re not in marketing are you? anyway, if I never see my bag again, I’m remembering your name, er, steve, and I’ll hold you personally responsible for its safe return. ok, calm down and zip up everything that moves to progress through the security screening and then on to wander aimlessly around the rubbish terminal 4 shopping and almost buy a shirt from pinks for no reason probably. I might just get a ridiculous sandwch from starbucks that takes me about 30 mintues to undo the packaging.

wait up. that’s surely not the queue to get through security. I’m surely not going to have to stand next to this annoying wailing family for half an hour listening to that insidious little twerp rattling on about the computers. excuse me! full body scan! me! me! oh, right, they’re doing the full body scan. I expect it will show up that alien growing inside you. shuffle. nice shoes. shuffle. nice hair. shuffle. you don’t really need a carry on bag that size mate. shuffle. ooh, you’re nice, I hope I sit next to you. shuffle. aah. not you. shuffle. etc. in the end its pretty painless and after putting all my clothes back on and applying some of the cream they kindly gave me, I’m sauntering into the safe haven of a stateless environment, only cluttered up by the loons on their way to paris, oman, brussels, new york, wherever.

godammit, get me on that plane. I’ve been to the bathroom and so I’m ready for my window seat. I hope 29H and 29J had some kind of passport problem and won’t be boarding today so that I can have these 3 seats to myself and move my leg at least 15 degrees off-centre to get some movement in them. oh, hang on. hello enormous russian lady who will be sitting next to me for 9 and a half hours. is that your friend? oh, no, just some unrelated wiry looking black jumpered snippy little man who probably will get his laptop out in a minute. right, so everything set now. perfect. let’s get the sony walkman out and start with maximo park to see me through the first tedious stretch…

as we are a few hours into the flight, we go north just far enough to dip out of the daylight and into the twilight to the point were they meet in the middle and everything goes purple. I was expecting this to happen which is why I had planted myself by a window, but I didn’t really know that everything would look quite so other-wordly as we passed over Iceland in a kind of drug-fuelled luminarium, which is how I like to think of the whole Iceland experience anyway so it was appropriate. as my forehead stuck to the window, I just kind of fazed out for a moment – like I do on conference calls about portal architectures and globalization business models requiring platform enhancements that I hadn’t included in the original brd in 2003 – until everything went blank with my camera whirring in the background and mrs seatanahalfakov dribbling over some story about a tractor factory in the newspaper while mr beaky played poker online via satallite with a young woman called brandy from ohio who was really big dave from east ham but it didn’t really matter becasue we were all playing with complimentary lemon fresh tissues

travelogue 1

January 24, 2006

right mate, terminal 4? right, get off this one and get on that one over there. he’s going to terminal 4 but I’m knockin’ off and I can’t be bothered and as you’re the only one then I don’t really care, right? yeah, this your bag? right, there you go mate. <crash> dave’ll sort you out. dave! terminal 4! I ain’t going, can you take this one! he’s only one! alright, I’ll go, here’s my suitcase, careful with that. <crash> anywhere mate, be about 5 minutes. thanks. hang on. this bus has got leather seats. and it’s got a huge telly at the front that shows you where we’re going. and the aircon works. dammit. I get to sit 4 hours on a sharabang from 1989 with flock wallpaper on the seats and the heating up to 11 with sticky patches on the carpet, which are, incidentally, on the back of the seat and footrests that take the skin off your shins, just because I travel from East Anglia? what’s with that then? this is a nice bus. I want to be on this one all the way, not just the last leg after being ejected by a truculent dolt of a provincial driver who wants to get home for sausages and arsenal.

passing south african airways on the right, a 777 passes overhead at about 50 feet before skidding onto runway 2 and I’m wondering whether booking the hotel closest to terminal 4 is the best idea in the world as we pull up at departures and get hoofed on the concourse, our suitcases cascading out the back of the National Express like it’s a waste collection. the hilton heathrow is supposed to be connected to terminal 4 by a covered walkway which sounds like something out of dr. no, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion it might end up being an experience more like dr crippen judging by the way the day has gone so far. through the terminal building I spy a helpful yellow sign that says ‘hotel’ and realize I’m on the wrong floor and in the wrong elevator and so I press all the buttons at once to see what happens and I get ejected onto level 2 where there’s a tatty looking weatherspoons called ‘the departure gate’ or something ridiculous and just to the left there’s a barely noticable black hole in the wall where the journey to narnia begins through the back of a photo booth where you can get your head superimposed onto michael jackson. again. so this must be it. the otherworld that is the heathrow hilton covered walkway. it’s a tin tube with the occasional window and unsettling fire escape and signs which say that you’re ‘5 minutes from the comfort and luxury of the hilton heathrow’ or something like that, which doesn’t give me a great feling for how long it’s actually gonna take to get me to a bed tonight. the walkway is also suspended over the inner roadway for the airport so the odd rumble of delivery lorries underneath and business class overhead make for a sublime underworld experience. with ‘1 minute to go before the plainly further than that away entrance lobby of the luxurious and splendid hilton heathrow’ I’m beginning to lose confidence and the will to live, but as I round the next corner, I see the portal to the otherworld and I pass through into an ecstatic reception from the queen sized gods of bedroomland. well, I get to the car park anyway, and it’s raining, but hey, there’s the lobby, and what a fine lobby it is…

checking in is painless and dutch and I’m soon off to room 217 to unload, unwind and work out where dinner is. get in the room, dump the stuff, take off a couple of layers of day-old clothes and hey, let’s check out the view. hang on. this is looking into the hotel, not out. I can see the restaurant, the bar and the huge atruim in the middle of the huge square hotel. there’s loads of people down there. and they’re all looking up here. at a fat guy with no shirt on picking fluff out of his navel and doing a huge belly-out yawn. this is a mirror right? I mean, a one-way mirror. I can see them, but they can’t see me. I mean, it would be stupid to have hotel rooms on the 2nd floor looking out onto the atrium and everything where everybody out there can see back in while you’re getting undressed and checking out the tv. don’t panic. no sudden movements. just gently sliiide to the back of the room and take a moment. right. so. there’s a cleaner next door, I saw her, so let’s ask her about the windows onto the world

excuse me. sorrie? excuse me. yissss? these windows, they’re just one way, right? I mean, I can see out, but they can’t see in, is that right? I’m sorree, I’mno to understand the windoors? never mind. so I crawl back acorss the floor of my room, peel my shirt of the bed and get dressed again before casually striding up to the window and pulling those curtains across like it’s something I do every day. it turns out, when I’m down in the bar, that you can see directly in to the rooms, which is why the business rooms are on the fifth floor, so you can look down on everybody with just your boxers on and nobody ever needs to know. I spent some time talking to a student on his way back to the Netherlands who wanted to be an IT journalist when he leaves home and travel around the world like I do. except I’m only going to Colorado, I told him and he’d already spent half his life in africa helping staving children with his parent’s charity work, so I wasn’t really much of a role model, but the fact that he was even talking to me was a novelty, so I milked it as much as I could and got him to pay for my drinks with the british airways payout he’d been given for them not having a connecting flight for him. genius.

tomorrow it’s 9 and a half hours to denver, so I’m going to watch match of the day now with the curtains open and write messages on the window backwards with melted chocolate.

a medley of sausage

January 18, 2006

go on, its got a raspberry jus and a sugar snap pretzel heart-shaped toothrot stuck in it. what? what do you mean its too loose? what does that mean? right then, I’m off to play liminous indoor golf on my own in an empty movie theatre while rachel sorts me out with lightly kilned golden and a couple of chap sticks. after that we can pile in the space shuttle and watch the series premiere of Flatiron housewives left on 36 while I get heated from underneath and press all the buttons at the same time so chris gets ejected out the tailgate and into the path of the hummer, which is careening around the cark park, looking for a kerb to mount except all the kerbs here are tiny like those steps they make you climb to get to the lobby which are there just to get me out of breath again.

anyway, after debating lossless compression and dlink cables for about 17 hours we all squeezed into the elevator with a short fat bloke from Texas who smelled of donkeys and had an unnerving spatula protruding from his hipsters until some of us spewed out onto the sticky 4th floor carpet and the rest of us stayed for another jager and had a party on the fire escape with an escaped baboon and a bus load of guides. after that the lid came off and I had to clean the carpet with my toothbrush and it was at that point I realized I’d forgotten to pack the adaptor for my adaptor which means by friday I’ll look like an upsidedown man with the wrong head.

you love it

barking at the flatiron crossing

November 21, 2005

denver was a last minute thing. before that, I’d planned for, ooh, a couple of hours, to go back to the flatiron crossing and visit those nice people in PacSun to see if they’d had a delivery of large tshirts with skatetractors on that I could get my hands on. I figured I could probably get all that stuff with ‘Colorado’ or ‘Boulder’ or ‘Flatiron’ printed on it while I was there as well and so I’d only have to take one evening out of the social calendar to visit the mall, eat alone at the Renaissance and actually get to bed before 2 am. so wednesday evening was dedicated to’ project taxable items’ and if I got away from the globalization meetings we had arranged that afternoon which I’d arranged myself but completely forgotten about and had left my UK/US travel adaptor behind and couldn’t plug in the laptop and had the wrong phone and it felt like the wrong head which I had found under a bucket, then I figured I’d probably have a couple of hours and anyway the flatiron’s pretty small except for the enormous empty department sotres at each end/corner/whatever where dirk and sarah are just kind of unloading ties and arranging them in a spiral on a shiny tabel in menswear, because they’ve run out of shoes to arrange and they haven’t actually sold anything for an hour.

so I extricate myself from broomfield 5, turn the wrong way onto interlocken loop, end up at the airfield where a couple of light aircraft spray the car with nerve gas or something and then I take a left and look back over the crest of the hill where broomfield sprawls out beneath me, and I can see foleys and nordstrum about a mile away and so I set off in a straight line, keeping them in my sights all the time. across parking lots, central reservations, golf courses, 4-ways, 3-ways, and anything else the rental fucos can negotiate and in 5 minutes I’ve slammed through a hedge into the empty parking lot and I’m wondering if the flatiron actually closes at 6pm on wednesdays, until I see a middle aged couple with a foleys bag fall through the doors and I realize that I’ve jumped the first hurdle and at least I’m at the mall and its open. I stick the dead laptop in the boot/trunk lock my wallet in the car and set off on my pathetic little quest.

cookie smell. its there. good. right. being a veteran of the flatiron having been here once before, I know where I’m headed and stride confidently through foleys, which looks like the kind of place I might come back to one day when I’ve passed 60, lost all my money to online poker and have lost all self respect and have the sartorial elegance of a pig farmer on vacation, and then the world opens up and I’m into main street, or the village, or ‘flatiron street’, or whatever they’ve called the main drag in the mall which in the UK would have actually been a regular street for 800 years but now it’s got a marble tiled floor and an atrium roof and smells of cookies, but I suspect over here in Colorado used to be, well, probably nothing at all but a maybe a place where some animals roamed around or something athough I’m sure that’s completely inaccurate and actually it was a street for 300 years, but a street that had animals roaming all over it, and I know that I should take a left out of foleys, but there’s only straight on as an option, so I’m confused already. oh, but wait, I’ve come out 20 yards from PacSun, it’s just over there. bingo. I’ll be out of here in 20 minutes and then I can get a game sausage and pasta entree in flatz and spend 4 hours reading email and watching drew barrymore in some family channel film about bad love and driving cars up mountains blindfold etc.. brilliant.

‘hi there!’ oh dear. looks like I’m this evening’s customer. don’t they know I’m british? surely they can tell I’m not used to being communicated to in stores unless I’m complaining about christmas lights being put up too early or the rudeness of the staff. ‘my name is christy and i’ll be your server today. rashid is with us in mens today so if you have any questions today, then please today let me know and we’ll see how we can help today sir. is there anything I can help you with today?’ dammit. I was hoping to slip in quietly, pick a couple of tshirts that would be perfect for a 16-year old son but that I’m actually buying for my 38-year old self, bag them and slip away before anyone had noticed. they probably remember me from 6 months ago when I did the same thing. they’ve been brainwashed or something and they have some kind of sinister ESP that they use to gang up on shoppers and make them buy stuff they didn’t want. ‘er, no, i’m just, er, looking’. ‘ok sir, well, give me a holler if you’re needing anything, sizes or styles, ok?’. ‘right, sure’. a holler? what’s that? sure, I’ll give you a holler. I’ll find a tshirt that looks about right and I’ll come up to the counter and shout in your face I THINK I’LL TAKE THIS ONE BUT HAVE YOU GOT IT IN A LARGE, CHRISTY? I’m not sure about this at all. and they haven’t got any tshirts I like, even though rashid pulled a couple down from the ceiling with a huge stick, in case I ‘wanted to check the style’ of them. exit strategy. head down. move to the door, stealthy. nearly there. ‘YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY TODAY SIR’. jesus, she doesn’t have to shout at me on the way out the door, I mean, I was the only person in there. ‘YOU’VE A GREAT EVENING SIR YOU SEE US AGAIN SOON’. oh no, rashid has barked out to me as well. I’m nearly out the door. do I acknowledge them or something? I’m too far out to speak normally, and I can’t turn around without that looking just really awkward. maybe I’ll just ignore them. no, can’t ignore them, that’s just rude. dammit!

in the end, I just kind of weakly raised my hand and gave a kind of backwards wave with my knuckles while pulling a half smile that was only seen by a couple of teenage girls pulling gum out in strings who probably immediately classified me as a danger to the public. so that wasn’t quite how I’d seen this evening going. now I’ll have to do the walk along the ground floor and back along the upper floor because I’ve crossed the invisible threshold which means I’m too far in to simply turn around and walk out and I can’t just stop in the middle and decide it’s all over by looking at my watch and pretending I’m late for a meeting or something even though I appear to be the only person in the mall, which of course, is worse, because that means everybody is looking at me wondering what the hell I’m doing gibbering to myself in the doorway of PacSun waving my limp wrist about with a sickly insipid half-grin on my face. oh well. let’s get it over with. I might find something in the ‘mid thirties man trying to be 18 through inappropriate dressing in guess, stussy and levis’ section in nordstrum where I can have chat with dirk about whether I’m here on business and whether he’ll accept maestro cards or if I’ll have to put it on visa and I’ll wonder why he doesn’t take a pin number or a signature and I’ll go home alone as they pack up the rest of the ties until tomorrow when they’ll finish the spirals and start of the glove trees for christmas. except I don’t. I didn’t find anything anywhere. 40 minutes of my life has passed by in this place and I’m no closer to a purchase than I was during my globalization presentation on monday, where at least I got pizza and donuts. I’ve even been into crate and barrel and considered getting a set of kitchen knives for the hell of it, but homeland security or the tsa might have something to say about that. I know. I’ll just leave. go back to hotel without buying anything. perhaps I’ll go to denver on friday or something (which I do). so, where was the fucos? that’s right, back though the power tools in foleys. right, let’s go.

I was almost at the entrance to foleys when I took a quick look to my left for some reason. just baskets and things. but hang on, there’s something moving in that one. what is this place? oh. I see. aaaaaaaaaaaaah. it’s a pet shop. not the kind of pet shop you get in the UK which might have a fish and a couple of tired guinea pigs hiding under a shredded free advertiser. no it’s more like the ones in spain that the kids stick their nose up against. the kind of pet shop that has, well, pets in. I’m talking dogs. and cats. and big spiders and lizards and rats and gerbils and geckos and frogs and things that look like sticks that are probably insects, but actually, are just sticks in a spider case without a spider in it. there must of been about 12 glass-sided cases, each with a couple or three puppies in. and these weren’t just your average mixed up breeds of dogs, they were all those wierd ones you only ever see people walking around with under their arms plus a few which would eventually be about 10 feet tall and need their own house. and they were all barking. yapping, to be more accurate. little whiny puppy yaps that were somewhere in between very cute and instant migrane. in the top-right case, was the most striking dog of the lot. it was a white husky puppy which cost about a million dollars and was just kind of slinking about, outstaring everyone that came into the shop. I gave it a go, but after about 5 minutes I had to rush to the bathroom to pour water into my dried-up eyeballs. that dog had the most evil stare. and I swear it had human eyes. I mean, they didn’t look like dog eyes at all, they were bright green, piercing, human eyes, I’m sure of it. there was something strange going on in the back of the store. nevertheless, I stayed for about 30 minutes just watching puppies roll over on metal grills and biting each other’s ears off and I think every customer in the flatiron passed through in that time and stood there going aaaaaah and stuff, so maybe it was just a really nice shop that happened to have a devil husky in one case by mistake and I was reading too much into the little yelping and squelching noises coming from the backroom.

I went for a grilled beef skewered bar meal in the end and watched the bullets on cable in the bar with a couple of flat tires before retiring to the 6th floor and charging up the laptop before falling asleep in front of the scifi channel which had something on which looked like star wars but wasn’t.

Things what I writ