Connecting Airborne Pig

"Break the window by the town hall. Listen, the siren screams, there in the distance, like a roll call of all the suburban dreams."

It's a rare day you see this boy heading posts with Pet Shop Boys lyrics. But hey, I pick the words that feel right, and those do. Onward, friends, onward...

The recent lack of posting is due to my ducking out of Christmas and heading to N's, where seasonal activities were largely ignored in favour of videogames and the four disc set of old Transformers cartoons I got him.

Sadly, and though memorising an endless stream of Galvatron quotes is more fun than it has any right to be, I returned home this afternoon for belated openage and a big bowl of profiteroles. Nothing remarkable to report. My lack of enthusiasm for Christmas tends to manifest itself in a series of dull and invariably clothing-related presents.

Oh, except I got an iPod! Woohoo! And a Bill Hicks t-shirt from Jennifer! Yay! And a Scrubs DVD from Jammie! Wheeee!

Ahem.

I was glad for these gifts, because they offset the day from hell. Oh sure, Mr. Thameslink, sure the trains are running on time and without incident. Just like always, right? I'll just hop on the 14:45 from Bedford and catch the connecting airborne pig from Luton. Or maybe not, eh? Maybe I'll have to get on a replacement bus service due to - wait for it - 'ice on the track', before making my weary way to platform 2 of Luton station and standing in the midst of what appears to be a refugee camp for ninety minutes. Yeah, that sounds like a fun way to spend my afternoon.

"We're running thirty to fifty minutes late," said the guard.

"Oh, really?" I replied. "Funny, you'd have thought you people would have come to terms with this 'winter' thing by now, what with it happening every fucking year."

Later, I played good samaritan for an old lady in a wheelchair who appeared to be struggling to remove the lid from a bottle of sparkling water. Said beverage promptly exploded all over me.

"You did that on purpose, didn't you?" I said, with such genuine bitterness in my voice that bystanders laughed in disbelief.

Still, I got home eventually, and seeing as we're closing on yet another New Year, expect some 'Best Of...' style posting in the next couple of days.

Cheesy Synthesisers

"You've got the touch! You've got the power! Yeah!"

I'm feeling generous today. So generous, in fact, that I have decided to give you all an early Christmas present.

Enjoy.

In Which Ray Banks Blows Up A Small Town In Hertfordshire

"When I was a man, the wind blew cold, the hills were upside down."

Crossing Ray Banks is a bad idea.

No, seriously.

See, this whole thing started many, many years ago...

(The mists of nostalgia descend...)

(...then ascend again)

Fuck all that mildly competitive history. It's not important right now. All ye need to know is that once upon a time, before either of us was doing much in the way of forging promising careers in the field of scribblage, Ray Banks and I were...friends. Difficult as it may seem to believe in light of recent events, the two of us once lorded it up in the same MSN chatroom. Then we met. Then Mr. Banks scaled the walls of a toilet stall in a positively heroic attempt to rescue a semi-conscious Mr. O'Mahony from...uh...semi-consciousness. Then we met a second time. Then I half-carried the gentleman known in certain revolutionary circles as El Presidente to a waiting cab after he'd had one too many glasses of Scotch.

Then...nothing, for a while. I drifted off into internet obscurity while Raymond married some kick-ass chick from the other side of the pond and published a short, brutal, and annoyingly good novel entitled The Big Blind.

And then...well...then Jennifer Jordan came along and hauled me into some project called Fuck Noir, I took my time coming up with a first draft of my contribution (almost finished, I swear!), and Ray, apparently now hired on as Ms. Jordan's muscle, started leaning on me.

Now, I know some of you have seen the types of films and read the types of books where innocent folk are leaned on by harsh and unforgiving villains, and I know that there's a picture in your head right now of big lads dishing out idle threats and a bit of a slapping in order to make their point. And that's fine. It'll give you a basis of comparison for what happened next.

You see, Ray Banks didn't come round my house with a couple of his boys and give me a bit of a kicking. That would have been much too simple and cliched for the kind of mind I now know this evil bastard possesses. No, Ray Banks needed something bigger than that, something spectacular.

So Ray Banks blew up Hemel Hempstead.

And then, as though igniting sixty million gallons of fuel and getting the attention of the world's media wasn't enough, the fucker somehow arranged it so that my recent transfer left me working in a Home Entertainment store some two miles from the site of the explosion. Every time I get off the train and walk up the hill to work, I have to do it with a scarf over my face, protecting my sensitive lungs from clouds of acrid black smoke.

The story's coming, I swear, just as fast as my sausage fingers can type. Call him off, JJ, call him off!

Zoiks!

"Boom! Shake-shake-shake the room!"


And there I was thinking I'd imagined the loud bang that jolted me out of sleep this morning.

Drunk Driving

"I assure you I'm not, officer. I've only had a few ales."

One of the few truly kick-ass things about working for the Home Entertainment people is that it gives me the chance to a) rent games for free, and b) buy them at a reduced rate if I like them. This has, naturally, led to my game collection (much like my DVD collection) swelling at an exponential rate.

My latest rental (just a day after the almost shockingly disappointing Prince Of Persia: The Two Thrones) is Need For Speed: Most Wanted.

This isn't ordinarily my sort of game at all, but the rather suave combination of ace racing action, unique and interesting presentation, and (gasp) a reasonable and decently-acted story, make for a game that's as addictive as it is enjoyable to play. It's a bit like being in The Fast And The Furious without the handicap of having to be Paul Walker. And, like GTA: San Andreas (The Greatest Game Ever Made™), it's almost better when you're drunk.

So here's to Need For Speed: Most Wanted. B-movie story and acting, gameplay second in the genre only to the mighty Gran Turismo series, and the frankly irresistible opportunity to go up against the rozzers in a souped-up Lexus with half a bottle of Jack in your lap and a lit cigarette dangling from your lips. Damn near essential.

Little Light

"I'll hold your hand if you hold mine. The time that we kill keeps us alive."

What?

Not much I can say, I suppose. Let it simply be known that The Souljacker Diaries were not, in and of themselves, very inspiring to me. I just wasn't interested enough. All the time I was writing there, I was missing this place. It just wasn't the same.

So I'm gonna open a fresh, clean notebook, find myself a nice comfortable seat near what little light filters into this place, and get back to doing that thing I do best.

No, not that thing. You fucking perverts.

Well, maybe. But not just yet, eh?

So...what's been going on since last we talked? Well, I'm still gainfully employed by the Home Entertainment people, but I'm about to take a step down the corporate ladder. It's not really a demotion as such. I'm dropping from manager to assistant manager, but I'm transferring to the company's flagship store. So it'll be harder work, but less responsibility, essentially meaning that my work days will pass more quickly and I'll be able to go home and do something a little more productive (like, say, writing) without constant phonecalls from the store and worries about things that need doing to distract me. I'd like to get a few things done, creatively speaking, before the time comes for me to flee England for good, so this is happy news.

And so to visas. The lack of recent updates at Transatlanticism is due mostly to the fact that not much is going on. Under ordinary circumstances, I'm sure I would have shared some of the strange experiences of recent weeks with the readership, but I've had little time for the kind of lunatic prose that would undoubtedly have been spawned by such adventures as my recent jaunt to Birmingham, where a fat Asian doctor put his hands in my bathing suit area and then stabbed me with a completely unnecessary amount of needles. Fun though such tales might have been, exhaustion has left me without much of an inclination to get into that kind of action.

But we're almost there now. The paperwork is all wrapped up, I have ninety-nine percent of the relevant documentation, and the next communication I have with the US Embassy should be the one where I get an interview date. Fingers crossed, kids. That date is the holy grail of this journey, and once I have it, well, we'll be in fairytale territory, and I'll finally be able to look myself in the eye and say that all this was worth it.

But Christ, I wish they'd get a fucking move on.

Lastly but certainly not leastly, I'm maneouvering myself into a position where I can get some work done on a story for Jenn Jordan's Fuck Noir anthology. Not too much to say about it now, as all I have are the characters and a basic outline, but I think this one's going to be good, and I'll be sure to keep you updated. I've also broken my promise as regards doing any further writing for Clean Sheets, and a short piece of mine entitled Drafts will be going up there in January. The about-face happened when they decided (as a gesture of goodwill, I suppose) to pay me for the publishing of Aria. This marked the first time I'd been paid for anything that wasn't a favour for a friend as far as writing is concerned, and the fact that it was swiftly followed by the frankly bizarre sale of a seven-year-old screenplay to an indie director for £100 plus 4% of any (unlikely) future profits, made it an important milestone. The uncashed Clean Sheets cheque is now framed above my computer, and I like to think that the run of luck it inspired is ongoing. My plan for now is to get the story for Jenn J. done before getting straight back into the novel I'm working on while I'm still enjoying myself. It may not be the way things work out, but like I say, I'm on a roll, so who knows?

Anyway...I'm back where I belong, so keep it here and we'll see if we can't get some regular postage going. I've been drowning in bullshit and missing the outlet this page used to give me, so expect quite a few of the ol' Notes from here on in.

Or not. Shit, you know what I'm like.