From Sub Pop to Geffen

The Frank-drenched essence of my luck with flying could only end with Tom Hanks. Fortunately my recent clash with the dizzying heights of aerophobia did not finish with a slip out of a Quantas-sized hole to meet my end in barbate solitude. While the past few days have only reinforced my terminally challenged tendencies, flying standby has wrought a new twist in this psychological skein. On the bright side, at least the airline industry's rapine policy of overbooking has delayed the inevitable leaky bowels brought on by my recurring dreams of dismemberment. Though when I first imagined the interminable distance between London and Atlanta, it did not include a ten-plus hour journey to and from the first great outpost of English and Scottish assimilation, Edinburgh. Add to that the hundreds of pounds spent travelling around the country in order to return to the wintry English summer a slightly broken man when I should have been drowning in the Georgian humidity, devouring hot wings and suffocating on the spectacle of American democracy in that all too progressive town of Bethlehem, Georgia, then you do indeed have a man born on bitter alienation.

Desert island.

Airport terminal.

It really doesn’t make much difference Mr. Hanks – save for the incessant banter of a few lowland Scots lamenting the downfall of Hibernian Football Club; the red-faced defeat worn on the face of a week long strandee, a beautiful Geordie girl with a tooth wrought of gold, and a dissertation critically engaging the lack of a levelling spirit in the Harry Potter series. For now all I can hope for is a respite from the nine month bout of pneumonia presently dormant in my tattered lungs. I guess I’ll be watching The Future is Unwritten on repeat this week, living vicariously through Joe Strummer's humanism, trying to convince myself that the Absolute has not inscribed my fate on the license plate of the Stunticon, Dead End. Otherwise I might succumb to this utter alienation and resign myself to the certitude of calamity.