It’s happened once before. Today it happened again.
I’ll set the scene. We like next door to a kindergarten. I am awoken, for the forty-seventh consecutive day, by the yammering nonsense in the playground. I pull on a T-shirt, stagger out of bed, and go downstairs for a drink.
Thanks to these insufferable little bastards - coupled with my complete inability to fall asleep before 3am – I am now teetering on the very brink of hellish, full-blown insomnia. Hence the confusion when I walked back into my bedroom with a glass of water in one hand and a magazine in the other, knowing that one of them was to be thrown onto my bed, and the other placed neatly on my bedside table.
As I write, the duvet is still drying.
I really am blossoming into quite a stupid man, you know. In fact, I’m beginning to think that my degree was actually just a hallucination, induced by the years of institutional buggery and sub-Arctic cross-country runs at the High School (note: only one of these actually happened. As if I’d run anywhere). But there is a definite dulling of the senses. I try to remedy it by drinking coffee, but it just makes me do stupid things faster.

It’s the kids, I tell you. I just don’t understand it. Only children (and conceptual artists) can vomit, steal or cry for public reward, as if having stumbled across some hitherto undiscovered realm of nuclear physics. This is a wonderful house in a wonderful place, but I would staple my balls to a soldering iron before I ever knowingly took up residence next to a kindergarten. They are just… insatiable. Forty fluorescent, amphetamine-charged Energizer Bunnies, hurtling about the yard with massive, irrepressible glee. Were it not for Advil and earplugs, I would have been in the papers by now.

I’m in a bad mood, because I’m still profoundly unemployed, and fast running out of options. It’s been suggested (by a surprisingly large number of people) that I apply for a male escort agency. And whilst this is a very workable idea, and would solve at least two of the ongoing problems in my life, I’d like – for once - to get a job on the merits of something other than my body.
Actually, I did notice the other day that someone was advertising for cowpokes. Surely that’s not as easy as it sounds?

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So, Andrew and I took a trip last Friday to his hometown of Barren. It’s a small town about four hours north, and his reasons for going back were twofold:
- To touch base with his assembled family, whom he misses dearly.
- To get his Kansas album.
Having only discovered on the Thursday that everyone was going away for the weekend, and not exactly relishing the idea of watching Rocky IV for the third time in a week, I accepted his invitation. And all was well, until I woke up on the Friday to the customary shrill of irrepressible youth. I was on my way to undermine their confidence through the fence slats when I saw Andrew, deathly pale and swathed in blankets, slumped in the recliner. Turns out that a troublesome neck injury had blossomed into outright paralysis when, during the previous night’s three hour ping pong marathon, an elaborate passing shot had left him crippled from the neck down. I had a lunch date to be attending, but left him with some pills and the very specific instruction that were he not better on my return, we wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Well, by the time I got back, three hours later, Andrew was - to put it mildly - ‘gangster tripping’. He was sat in the same chair, still huddled in blankets, but surrounded by discarded pill bottles and wearing an unnervingly euphoric grin.
His neck still hurt, he explained, although he was by all accounts feeling “much happier”. He then proceeded to explain to me, calmly and in fleeting detail, how I was going to drive us to Barren.
I should explain something at this point… namely that I can’t drive. The main reason being that the people who encourage me to – my dad, good friends like Steve and Claire – are so massively, psychotically intolerant of other drivers that the very prospect of sharing a road with them (and they are by no means the only examples) lassoes my bowels with a kind of icy, unmanageable dread. My father is a kind, benevolent and charming man. The perfect gentleman. Having said that, anybody who’s had the misfortune of sharing the shortest of car journeys with him will know that a certain transformation takes place when he’s behind the wheel. Have him giving way at a junction, for instance, and anyone unfortunate enough to miss an index finger raised imperceptibly from the steering wheel (in the dark) will be subjected to a squall of vicious, apoplectic abuse. “COME ON THEN, NOBHEAD!!” he’ll scream, hammering on his headlights 37 times per second, as I sink quietly down into the upholstery, the radio drowned out by the sound of his arteries clanging shut.
And the same for Steve, who – to his eternal credit - can turn any leisurely city drive into the Monaco Grand Prix (whilst rummaging under his seat for a tissue to stem his 16 year cold).
So no, roads are not for me. They are a snakepit of passive aggression, one-upsmanship and jabbing fingers, and I am not – by and large - a confrontational person. And I explained politely to Andrew that the chances of me driving unlicensed and without any real understanding for four hours on the interstate, at night, were beyond anorexic.
“I guess I’ll have to drive, then,” he said, turning his entire body to look at me. I was ot confident.
Somehow, we made it. Andrew even found the time to deconstruct the whole theoretical basis of Christianity for me on the way, which took about an hour. Granted, there were a few hairy moments. For one, he couldn’t look over his shoulder. As ‘blind spots’ go, an entire lane is a significant one. And is if this isn’t enough (in America, where driving habits are based loosely on a very casual Rome, and crossing the road is a baffling lottery), he kept my heart in my throat for a good ten minutes, steering with his knees whilst doing air cow-bell to ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’.
I was crawling up the insides of the car by the time we were within thirty minutes of Barren. But he’d saved his best trick for last.
“I hate this bit of road,” he says, as we hurtle through the night.
“Why’s that?”
“Hunting season. The deer get a little spooked. They run out onto the roads.”
I see.
“It’s a pain.”
I would suggest that hitting a 220lb animal at 70mph would qualify as slightly more than ‘a pain’.
“I guess. Y’know, there’s really only one thing worse than hitting a deer.”
“And what’s that?”
“A bear.”
“There are bears out here?”
“Yep.”
“Dangerous bears?”
“No. The other kind. The thoughtful, introspective ones. They write haikus.”
The final leg of the journey we completed in silence, bar the quiet whittling motions of thumb and forefinger across the bridge of my nose.

The next day, after some welcome hospitality from Andrew’s family (very sweet people), we were driving back from a hearty lunch in the adjacent town. Andrew had found his album and was in the middle of trying to explain just why listening to ‘Dust In The Wind’ and driving past endless acres of ruined corn was so inspiring, when he pulled over to the side of the road.
He explained that I would be driving. On the lonely, isolated straights of County Road M, I concurred. What could go wrong? I’d always assumed I’d drive one day, and now that day was here.
After a shaky start, we got going. I doubt anyone in the world has made harder work of driving an automatic. Andrew had fixed the most purposeful smile to his face, and was managing to speak whole sentences without moving his lips. He had the look of a man watching his autistic nephew play with a Ming vase. I, meanwhile, was barreling merrily down an unmarked country road, sitting on the ‘wrong’ side of the car, driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, struggling to understand why holding the wheel straight on a straight road does not make the car go straight. I think we had a shared realization, as he asked me for the fourth time if I wouldn’t very much mind moving his car away from the ditch, that we should maybe have tried the carpark of an Aldi first. Good fun, though.

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Saturday night marks the Halloween celebrations. We are going to a party, and I am beyond thrilled to be resident in a country that actually acknowledges and celebrates this Great Day. I have been mulling my costume, and after much deliberation, and taking into account my predisposition to class, decorum, and historical integrity, I have decided to go as Paul Stanley from Kiss. I applied eye-liner last night for the first time, and can describe it only as a horrific and draining experience. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but something about the whole episode tripped my irrational and longstanding fear of jamming a pencil into my eye.

Hopefully it’ll go better on the night. Failing that, we have liquid eyeliner. Or, as I believe it’s also called, creosote.