Support our troops

The barrage of complaints resulting from last weeks blog was quite hurtful:

I am NOT a kitten abuser

Never have I maltreated kittens. Au contraire, I am quite happy to let small Siamese kittens gambol about on my head. I feed them with small dishes of milk, and when I am informed this gives them diarrhea I provide them with cat food which they munch on causing their bellies to bulge. Mew mew meow they go. They love me! Hat has gone now but I never molested him!

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I shaved the back and sides of my head in the Ocean beach public toilets while eavesdropping on a conference conducted by two men sitting on the floor of a cubicle. I cut behind my ear. In the morning we drove to LA, taking with us two English guys from Dover who we met on the street. They were young pups on their gap year who laughed and smoked cigarettes in the back of the car despite being pressed into a rare form of coal. On the way Ponty died at some traffic lights and wouldn't start up for a couple of minutes. Crawling around under the car surrounded by traffic was slightly humiliating but at least no oil was being spilled.

It's a pleasant life, sleeping on the floor, waking to have Vietnamese food cooked for you and then walking up and down the frisco mission pretending you live there. The sleeping arrangements did get a bit much after four nights of lying coffin-like next to John and having to apologise for interfering with him in the night. We planned a giant road-trip up to Seattle and took our friend Mary with us. Not having enough money for petrol, we bank on taking a rideshare fellow with us from Craigslist.

Craigslist man, John, makes his entrance; black shoes, black trousers, black jacket, hair slightly greying, metal framed rectangular glasses. For conveniences sake I will refer to him as 'Reddy'. He is employed somehow by a perfume company and gives us gifts of little perfume testers. And so we are on our way. Our usual good speed is not achievable - Reddy needs to stop often. Reddy would like to buy a coke. Reddy needs the toilet. Reddy would like to buy some aspirin. Reddy thinks he has left something in the boot. Reddy gets some cheap fruity 11% punch from a petrol station and necks it enthusiastically from a brown paper bag as we speed along, his volume increasing. Hark the 6th flat tire, the most explosive and dramatic yet; the car is filled with a vicious rattling and juddering, John swerves across three lanes, cuts up a lorry and stops on the hard shoulder. I am so used to this process by now it provokes hardly any reaction in me; I feel a grim acceptance that I can sense in John too. We exit the car and Reddy fixes John with earnest drunken intensity, 'John man, jus lemme say thanks for saving our fuckin lives man!' I jack the car up and struggle with the wrench I bought in Mexico - it's slightly too big and is stripping the bolts. I decide to stop but Reddy muscles in and there is a brief power struggle over the wrench which I win. Relinquishing his grip Reddy smiles. 'Two typical guys, hah-HAH!' I end up getting a ride with a guy called Ethan to the next town where I buy a used tire, setting us back by $30 and a couple of hours. We're up and driving again and after half an hour Reddy realises he left his phone on top of the car before we left the lay-by meaning it has most probably been dashed into umpteen pieces on the freeway. He demands we stop and search the boot. Finding nothing he loses his rag: 'Fuck, fuck! I'm a fucking idiot!' Then he sits on a wall and broods over a cigarette. I manage to capture an image of him smoking in the car just as we start off again - he's looking very pissed off. There is an awkward atmosphere to the car.

It's dark now and we stop for food somewhere. I see Reddy eyeing up a mammoth bottle of extra-strong beer. We sit eating in the car and Reddy says he is going for a short walk, after which he returns having obviously drank the beer and the mood cloud from the lost phone evaporates. He forces us into a game of trivial pursuit, meaning he roars a question - all of the questions relate to world war one - and begins shouting immediately over anyone who tries to answer. From the front John adds to the confusion by stiltedly posing a series of inane questions, such as 'what-is-a-good-salad?', which only serves to anger Reddy into bellowing unsophisticated anti-limey insults at us. It is a relief to drop him off. Later on he emails us - he has left his iPod and Jacket in the car. What a prick!

We were adopted in Tacoma by the family of Mary's boyfriend, taken on a memorial day BBQ, and stuffed full of meat. Mary's boyfriend's brother's son, a small Cambodian boy named Desmond, repeatedly chucked a colourful plastic sword in my face. Against all odds this was quite fun. And oh jaysus there's another flat tire but praise the tire lord Jesub there's only a screw in there, only a small screw that must have somehow been standing completely upright on the tarmac like an attentive saboteur.

ANOTHER flat tire (#7) leads me to compile a list of possible explanations for 'puncture curse'

- We ran over a box of screws and each tire has had a different time-delayed reaction to the screws (or something), meaning just as I think the tire situation has become 'A-OK' another screwtip penetrates another gaseous chamber, sending me into another mindstate of 'what the fuck are we going to do now, we've nearly finished the road trip but we've had seven flat tires in the last 3,000 miles and I don't have any money left'.
- The tires, all being crappy Mexican replacements of varying sizes, have different pressures exerted upon them by the weight of the car and therefore explode prematurely *rhubarb rhubarb*.
- John has engaged in a very cruel and long-running prank whereby he scuppers a tire every 500 miles using a pair of nail scissors and then giggles inwardly every time I kneel down and skin my knuckles jacking the car up.
- I have been cursed by the overlord of the TireWorld, Les Schwab, by snubbing him at the beginning of the trip in favour of Firestone, and am now eternally paying the price through rotten luck, as far as steel ribbed partially inverted circular dinguses are concerned anyhoo.

Wave goodbye to Ponty. Sitting for two days outside 7/11 was too much and he got towed. We can't afford to pay the reclaiming fee. Annoyingly I filled him up with $20 of petrol just before I noticed the flat, and I would never drive him again. We prised off the number plates; the front one was a textured collage of flies and mosqouitoes, the back quite clean and respectable. We flirted with the idea of battering him in with golf clubs but refrained. He will get auctioned off and any money raised will go towards paying off the gargantuan fine (add that to the other gargantuan fines I have racked up over the last 3 months). Tomorrow is the last day of the road trip. We just sang kareoke and I am drunk. PeCE.