I'm Climbing Up Those Walls Again

Tomorrow I am off to Oxford, the city where I was brought into this world.

On Monday I will be tackling the Economics department and the Queen Elizabeth House @ Oxford University, forcing them to remember who I am and to tell me abou their program. Afterwards I'll come back for a couple days, then head down to London. Sometime after that I'll tackle Cambridge.

Posts will drop down during this period, as will comments (although I haven't been a very good commenter recently, that'll pick up when I'm back in Beverley for good).

Talk to you all soon.

Last night I saw the 2001 French film Sur mes levres or Read My Lips.

It was brilliant. I'm loving it over here, as the local video rental store has all of the great foreign and independent films that I missed in Clemson this year.

Read My Lips follows the dull, mid-thirties life of Carla, a secretary that is mostly deaf, and uses a hearing aid. Due to the fact that she used to be completely deaf, she knows sign language and how to read lips. She has almost no social life, until one day her boss asks her to find an assistant for herself. She finds Paul, a younger man, just out of jail, with no experience. Soon she begins to use Paul to help her career, and Paul, not completely detatched from his life in crime, thinks of a use for her lip reading...

I suggest you check it out.

Is a major attempt to get you attention.

They are attempting to start up THE DRAFT in this country again. We're talking 2 years of mandatory military service for men and women aged 18-25. Don't believe me? Here is the bill in the house, and here is the bill in the senate.

A quote from the bill:

A bill to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.

I've been reading a lot about it in the British press (since apparently you have to go to a different country to get any good US news). The Selective Service System is getting about 25 million more in funding this year. They are starting to fill the 11,000 or so draft board positions in this country. It is all being aimed for a potential start of the draft in early 2005, after the election.

I ask each and every one of you to take this issue very very very very very fucking seriously. Tell everyone you know about it. Both our government, and apparently our media, are staying quiet about it. THIS NEEDS TO BE OUT IN THE OPEN

Good lord this was a good film. I'm talking about The Seventh Seal, directed by Ingmar Bergman in 1958.

It follows the journey of a knight and his squire returning from the crusades. One day, on a beach, the knight is approached by Death. In order to try and save his life, he challenges Death to a game of chess. If he wins, Death leaves, but if Death leaves, he can claim the knight. The movie follows the knight's path through the plague infested countryside as he plays a few moves with Death every day. The stark b&w cinematography of this movie is just amazing. The movie is definitely a "stunning allegory of man's apocalyptic search for meaning".

It comes highly recommended. *****

..the dead will walk the earth.



Jesus H Christ, I just woke up from a pretty scary nightmare with a huge budget. I remember most of it, but may have to fill in some of the minor details to make the story continuous:

I was driving for some reason, and I arrived in a big parking lot area (like the kind you find with stores all along the periphery of the parking lot. I got out of the car and started wandering over to a big crowd that seemed to be hanging out by a store. Some people began to break from the crowd, and ran past me screaming their heads off. I then noticed that some of the people didn’t look right, and that they began walking towards me. It didn’t take me very long to notice they were zombies, so I turned to run back to my car, only to discover that it had also been overrun by people trying to escape and then zombie on top of them. I looked about frantically, and finally saw a small car garage not far off. As I ran towards it I met up with a girl (my age) who was also making for it. We got in without any zombies really noticing us, so we slammed the outer door shut.

We talked for a while, mostly about what our next move was and what car we were going to take. In the end, we found a Camaro-like car with the keys on the seat. It was small and maneuverable (less likely to get stuck on something). I remembered this was a good choice from my Zombie Survival Guide. We hopped in, and to my delight I discovered a couple of pistols, a semiautomatic long rifle, then a sniper rifle and maybe a shotgun (hazy around that bit). Unfortunately reality doesn’t allow for us to actually manage to carry and fight with all these guns. So, in an attempt to make our way to the highway, we took off down the road into what was the city center, where it turned out the main battle was now taking place.

A word on the actual zombies, who were fairly traditional: you have to destroy the brain to kill them, can’t run. The difference from a traditional Romero zombie is that these could walk pretty damn fast. Imagine someone striding towards you as fast as they can.

In zombie movies that take place on a scale of national or global destruction, you always see the beginning, the aftermath, or some small corner of the battle. You are never placed in the middle of a city right as the outbreak hits. It turns out that it isn’t a very fun place to be. As the girl and I (who I will name Lisa for storytelling purposes) reached the streets, we immediately were plunged into chaos. There was a huge all-out battle going on in the streets. Crowds of humans were trying to push back or run from huge crowds of zombies. Lisa and I had to start shooting pretty quickly, as the car got stuck after only a minute down the street. The sky was red, and the moaning and snarling of the undead was all anyone could hear. Lisa was brandishing a pistol and I was firing the semiautomatic rifle, while having a hard time hanging on to the rest of the guns.

We weren’t holding up too well, but suddenly a huge semi truck came barreling through the nearest crowd, but then slowed down a few seconds. Lisa and I took the opportunity to jump on to it and climb in next to the driver. He barely noticed us, as he was more concerned with getting down the road. We sat on the edge, fighting off zombie that tried to grab onto the side of the truck, and picking off others. From this position I could see that the entire city was going down, with smoke and screams filling the sky around us. It wasn’t long before the semi got stuck and we had to abandon it. At this point, it seemed like the battle was over, and that the humans were just running away as fast as possible with zombies right behind them. It made for really claustrophobic and difficult fighting, as I’d have to constantly turn back and fire at any zombies that came from the back or the sides.

Just when we thought we couldn’t hold up any more, we reached two defense lines of humans: one ahead in the main street, and one that went down a side street. Lisa got swept by the crowd down the main, but I got pushed into the side street. After I got through the line of humans defending the street, everything calmed down for a moment. I talked a bit with some others, who were convinced that this line would hold out. I wasn’t, so I made my way into the nearest building in the protected area, to look for Lisa.

Now dreams have a way of jumping around, so I’m not sure if I walked right into a movie theater or just appeared there later. Anyway, I walked right into a movie theater, with a bunch of fairly nervous, gun-toting people watching a movie. I scanned the place for zombies, as they have a habit of appearing when you least expect it. I met Lisa there, and discovered she had found her boyfriend (go figure). I suggested we get out of the movie theater, and as we were leaving I spotted a man who wasn’t moving in a normal fashion. He was reaching for Lisa. I stepped in quickly, kicking the man down, and then smashing his head in with the butt of my rifle. Either I was used to it at this point, or it was just the dream turning me quickly into a cold-blooded zombie-killer.

At one point someone gave me a huge crossbow. It was either Lisa and her boyfriend or someone else, to thank me for the help I had given so far. Then I was in a Wal-Mart. Apparently we had all been evacuated and dumped out there. I began to open up my crossbow (it was really big, so much that I’d have to hang it on my back when I wasn’t using it). It was in one of those annoying plastic packages, much like the kind calculators come in.

The Wal-Mart was secure for a while, but I knew it wouldn’t hold out. They were bussing in people and leaving them there. I knew that were there were people, there would soon be zombies. My crossbow package didn’t come with any ammo, so I’d have to go to the sporting department to pick some up. After that I planned to head out on foot. The road was probably too congested at this point for cars, and busses are too hard to control and make too much noise. I would have liked to have a few people with me, so maybe some worthy companions would be dropped off soon. Then I’d head off, with the countryside being my destination. This city was lost.

Then I woke myself by mistake, kind of angry that I didn’t see how it all ended.

I now have a cell phone which I'll use whenever I'm over here in the UK.

If you are calling from the US dial:
011-44-7789-342-291

If you are calling from within the UK dial:
07789-342-291

Yesterday I was thinking over some of the differences between the US and the UK during the Coheed and Cambria Concert. At all the US concerts I've been to, they've had a slew of security guys who stand between the crowd and the band, all big and beefy, ready to pull people out.

In the UK, they had one guy, who wasn't really buff at all. However, he had a long scraggly pony tail and some hair on the top of his head, but the sides were shaved (probably so you could see the tattoo on his fucking temple. He had a beard and more tattoos up and down his arms as well, and that wild look in his eye. No one wanted to mess with this guy. He'd tear you freakin head off.

I'm off again to go read about infant mortality and plan some more. Cheerio.

I've been away from the net for a while. Sunday the library was closed and on Monday it was Bank Holiday over here, which also meant the library was closed.

My last post is a bit longer and more stream of consciousness than usual. Most of my posts will be typed up on my laptop now, and then posted later, so expect to see several posts at once.

Not much going on in Beverley, just watching every single foreign film I missed this year (the local movie rental place has them all, side by side). So far I've seen Goodbye Lenin! which was wonderful and Gerry (a Gus Van Sant film, the guy who directed Elephant and Good Will Hunting) which should have been good, but was way too minimalist for its own good. On TV I caught "Escape from Alcatraz" with Clint Eastwood, which was pretty good, and some Israeli movie about militant settlers planning to blow up the Mosque at the Rock.

The news is much more in-depth over here. I read an article which noted that THE DRAFT is being proposed in two separate bills that are currently being reviewed by committees in the House (we're talking the US folks). I never thought they were that crazy, but it seems that this generation of draft-dodging politicians is actually thinking about doing it again. It looks like we still have this problem with not being able to admit we made a mistake in starting a war, and so need to compensate by sending more of our youth to die in it.

Speaking of Iraq, I noticed that we appointed a Prime Minister in the transitional government instead of letting the UN do it as we had planned. This sort of unilateralism is dangerous, as we are doing more and more to tell the world we'd rather do this alone.

Hope everyone is doing well. I'm reading other people's posts but don't really have the time to reply, as the library likes to get you in and out of here pretty quickly.

Crinkles in the wood tell me
all I need to know
about the previous epiphany

Natural light will illuminate
the wonders that anxiety
brings as sleep abates.

This place is still foreign to me. Long ago I consented to embrace both sides of the Atlantic, becoming this Anglo-American hybrid that is utterly bewildered by both of his cultures. There is a certain side of me that is content, as I sit at the small wooden table by my “Gothic” style iron bed, which just may the most comfortable thing I’ve had to pleasure of sleeping on since last year. I cannot deny the fact that I am supremely comfortable here, but at the same time I feel like I lost something during the turbulence over the Atlantic. Maybe it was my drive that disappeared, breaking off of the chassis and plummeting to the streets of Dublin as my Delta flight passed overhead.

At the time I was sitting there, pondering whether or not the turbulence would let me sleep, when I began to think about the man who sat next to me. I never did catch his name; you tend to leave names out of your conversations on flights. It would be dangerous to get to know someone well enough to ask his name, just so you could add it to a long list of people you will never ever see again. Mr. Nameless Pakistani was a cheerful fellow, especially since I was not originally fated to be next to him. While illegal in some countries, airlines in the US will overbook a flight on the hopes that enough people will drop out at the last moment. This failed to happen on flight 064, and so anyone who got on the airplane as a group ended up getting separated, prompting millions of in-flight seat exchanges. The first time I had been the sole person separating a boy from his sister. The second time I gave up my seat so a pretty English/Indian woman could sit with her two toddler children, and so I ended up next to the Pakistani.

His life story is irrelevant, as he was an American now. The slate is wiped clean when you move to Silicon Valley and stick your kid in university. Nether less his past had come back to him in the form of an ill father, and so he was destined to spend 24 hours traveling from McDonald’s and Christianity to McDonald’s and Islam. I envied him, not because the color of his skin allowed him to wander streets I wouldn’t be able to risk for many years, but because he had a past to return to; a mission to fulfill.

I would like to think I have a past here, but little green forms being handed out at the International Office of Manchester University say that I’ve been gone too long to be considered normal. It is then with the British government’s greatest sympathies that I, a citizen of her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, must pay as much as three times the standard amount to go to university here. I open and examine the two little booklets which are my identity:

PASSPORT: United States of America
The front cover is imprinted with the famous image of the American eagle: clasping a branch in one claw, and a bundle of arrows in the other. In its beak is a piece of parchment that says: E Pluribus Unum. Inside the passport states:

The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance nd in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.

PASSPORT: European Union, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
The front cover in imprinted with the UK symbol of the lion and the unicorn surrounding the crown, with a hard to read phrase. An easier phrase is on the bottom: Dieu et Mon Droit. The notice on the inside concerning helping me is the same as the US notice, except that Secretary of State is replaced by "her Majesty" or something along those lines.


The US passport is full of records of my travels, the European Union one is empty. Shall I embrace a future without a past, or shall I continue to remember?


Listening to: Alkaline Trio - Queen of Pain