I'd like to address an item from yesterday's blog.
1. To my European readers, take no offense by my reference to European hell holes. First off, every place that my ancestors could afford to live in the old country WAS a bona fide, dirt bag, ghetto, hardscrabble farm-- most likely all of the above, hell hole. The folks that got out-- ipso facto, moved up in the world, when they were let a one room cold water flat in a random cold gray American hell hole ala Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and/or Detroit.
2. Lots of places in Europe are very, very cool. Places that Babs has visited that she adored: St. Tropez, Paris, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Scandinavia, & St. Petersburg, Russia (didn't like Rome, maybe it's because they kicked me out of the Vatican). Did I mention Amsterdam?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQAxxaGDJ6s&feature=related
3. However, there is one island in particular that I really don't like. I adore their literature, and their TV shows, and their dictionary. I dig their royal family
http://madhattery.royalroundup.com/, and next to Americans-- this race can rock. But people, to be frank, if I never tread the shores of Albion again it will be too soon.
4. There are reasons too numerous, but I'd like to share with you the story of a traumatic Fourth of July when Babs was held hostage in the town of Doorknob, Scotland in the UK (it's right next to the Arctic Circle). There are no sparklers, or fireworks, or barbecues, or corn on the cob, or baseball, or sun. It's just gray, cold rain, and people speaking this incomprehensible language, eating pigeon and fat drippings-- and to add insult to injury, at that latitude daylight lingers for 22 fricking hours.
It's as if the biggest party in the world is happening in the mansion of fun in America, and you haven't been invited cuz you're not cool enough, and you're at the window looking in watching all the hipsters having fun at this party.
My jailer, fellow "American" Fang, was such a Scottish poseur & wannabe that he wouldn't even indulge Babs a little. Looming large were 30 more days hard time in the hole, before I could get back to the party-- the big box, the sun, the music, that trailer park in the sky, i.e. America.
The outlook was bleak. I weighed my options for escape-- taxi, plane, train, bus, auto, goat cart, row a boat across the Atlantic? Gnaw off my arm? All non starters.
My only viable option was to draw on my vast reservoir of American cockeyed optimism. That, combined with making Fang's life a living hell... and a bottle of single malt got me through.
I dedicate the following video, from a fabulous woman, who just happens to be named Babs (aren't her nails, and highlights like butter?), to all you cockeyed optimists out there...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzl01bBl74
