Stray Mailer 23.1.03

I love going to the dentist. The heady thrill of having to get up early, motorized chairs meaning not having to move to have a wee lie down when the needle puts me into shock, having a full inch of surgical steel tooth scraper plunged into my gum and then being told off for having bleeding gums, having to quickly learn the art of swallowing with my mouth open when I can’t breath, and then playing the stroke victim for the rest of the day with a half paralyzed face. And knowing that it's all my own fault for really not taking enough care of my teeth.

But I have to say, good dentists don’t hurt. If yours does, get a new one. My last two dentists have been excellent, not like Dr Payne, the guy who had to give me three needles because he kept missing, none of which took fully and then gave up and drilled away anyway.

And what the hell kind of name is that for a dentist?

Speaking of complete lack of surgical precision, the Australian army is right now being shipped out by John Howard, the ozzie pm, the one who constantly looks like he’s being broken up with (bunched sorrowful eyebrows, puckered quivering chin) clamoring to side with the U.S. (as opposed to the T.H.E.M.; Terrorist Harboring Enemy Motherfuckers) and their war on hypocrisy.

Australia was requested recently to send troops to defend the newly independent East Timor against attacks by Indonesian backed guerillas, but were refused. Australia said it couldn’t act without UN permission.

You might have heard of this Iraq thing, it made all the papers.

According to my sister when I phoned her in New Zealand recently it's not such a big deal over there. Nothing’s ever a big deal in New Zealand, but the rest of the world is going completely spastic. I’m not sure if that’s in nz’s favor or against.

It makes me happy that hundreds of thousands of people around the world turned out to protest last week, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s not going to make the slightest difference.

There was an antiwar march (saunter) in Galway, one of the three protests I stumbled into during the year. One anti MacDonald's, during which I tried to get into the restaurant and upstairs to film the kids throwing things at the protesters on the street below, but was turned away at the door. "But I'm not a protester." "I don't care, get out." I'd probably get bounced from a fast food restaurant whether there was a protest going on or not. The third action was in Madrid. I think it was something to do with students, but it was all in Spanish so I really have no idea.

They were all pretty pathetic. Bless them, it was a good effort, but it was sad. I doubt anyone even new it happened, let alone cared. Our parents did all this in the sixties and all we got out of that was the seventies. Britain had it's largest ever demonstration recently, hundreds of thousands stormed London to protest _against_ stopping fox hunting. I think they banned it anyway.

I’ve got a new image as the windows backdrop on my laptop; it's a photo of one little Chinese man stopping four tanks in Tiananmen Square just by standing in their way. It makes me cry.

My cousin was very nearly killed in Bali. He and friends were in the Sari club on the night the bomb went off, but decided to have an early night for sight seeing the next day. Stepping out of the club they took a horse and carriage ride down the street and were walking to their hotel, back past the club, when it exploded. They were three hundred meters away. They’re all ok.

Maybe it was discussed when it happened, but currently no one here is asking why Australia was targeted by terrorists. Maybe it's too obvious to require actual debate.

Howard seems to be the only Australian in favor of getting in with the U.S. and U.K. to form the allies of evil. Someone finally bothered to do a public opinion poll and found only thirty percent of Australians would support a U.S. led attack.

Ninety percent of the British are against war, most yanks are for it, but the amount against is pretty considerable.

This is the first war in Australian history that wasn’t supported publicly before it even began.

Australia burnt down. As I mentioned the whole country is mid massive drought and freakishly windy, so it all just decided to explode into flame. Four people were killed in Canberra, the capital, with over four hundred houses destroyed and it's still burning.

There’s been study’s showing the drought is largely due to global warming, but the government is definitely not going to talk about the Kyoto accord.

There’s two TV networks here, SBS and ABC, which are right now taking enormous pleasure in airing any documentary they can get that makes America look bad. It's got way past the point where I want to know any more. I don’t want to actually hate America, but it feels like the universe has taken exception to my thinking of all things as relative, that there’s no such thing as evil, and the more I resist demonizing the States, the more it ups the stakes.

The American navy’s new sonar system kills whales and dolphins, which they acknowledge but don’t consider to be a problem.

There were plans to assassinate Bob Marley.

Federal legislation passed in 1996 makes it mandatory to incarcerate and deport any non citizen, ie permanent legal residents, who has _ever_ been convicted of a felony. There was a woman deported to Germany, where she has no family and hasn’t seen since she was two, leaving her kids with no means of support, because she received a suspended sentence eight years ago for pulling someone’s hair. A lot are kept in custody for three or four years waiting for mandatory deportation, which is very profitable for the prison system.

The Drug Enforcement Agency is randomly strafing South American rainforest with banned herbicides on the off chance of hitting a coca plantation to make it look like the CIA wasn’t importing cocaine for decades to support puppet regimes and wipe out black people.

Ok, actually that last one may not be entirely factual, but as far as I know it is, and it definitely _could_ be true.

I made a deliberate effort to make harmless small talk with any Americans I met in Europe. Poor bastards. Everyone they meet immediately starts giving them grief for being American. I urged most of them to start wearing Canadian flags.

A Texan I met thought Europe should publicly state it would give asylum to North American political refugees.

GAAAHH!!

I’m sick of talking about America.

My father is going to want to reply to this saying HA, that’s nothing, the rEAlly bad stuff is… But DON’T. I’m sick of it. I tried reading some Noam Chomsky, got one page in and had to stop. I know bad things happen, I accept this.

Let’s move on.

This whole email has been a direct result of watching too much tv.

Of all the things in the world to take seriously, politics rates down there with gambling, magazine horoscopes and olympic beach volleyball.

Tomorrow I am KAPWIIIINNNNG! out of here. Singapore two days, Frankfurt thirteen hours and I’m back in Ireland for god knows how long.

This much I can say for sure because it's all paid for. Thanks mum and grandma. Thanks for the thousands and thousands of dollars you’ve been siphoning into my offshore accounts that’s kept my itinerancy viable for so many years. Thanks to the New Zealand tax payers for much the same reason.

Got to get a job. I’ll be working illegally and not paying tax, but that’s not really my fault, and anyway it's a start.

My job prospects are pretty good this year. Ski field grunt work for the winter; bad pay but free food, accommodation, gear hire and most importantly, snow.

Come summer I’d like to hook up with a fire troop and spend the festival season being shipped around to them all, bad pay but free events, all for spraying globs of burning kerosene at people just too druggone to deal with it.

Then with the autumn head for Rome, or maybe Paris, and start finagling my way into the film industry.

But this is of course way in the future, so who knows.

I’m looking forward to this year. Gonna be big.

Daniel.

Stray January 04, 2003

So.

There and back.

A full circle in Michael Palin terms, but it'd be more like scribbling on a globe with a crayon if you stopped to map out where I actually went. Far but not wide.

I think the biggest mistake was the occasional footnote to these mails mentioning off hand plans for the next leg, and telling those of geographical convenience that yeah sure I'll drop by when I get there. And for the next step after the email that was fine, I usually kept to that part of the plan, but after that things would invariably change. Some better option would always come along. I like making plans much more than sticking to them. Why stick? Why plan? You think you know what's going to happen tomorrow? I met a lot of people who suffered for booking ahead, staying longer than they wanted because they had already payed, leaving sooner since they _had_ to be somewhere sometime.

Though I have to say, it happened so often that I'd arrive in a city and be told there was one bed left in one hostel that I just assumed it was a sales tactic to make me take it. But no one else seems to be told that. And I did have to walk around Barcelona for three hours trying to find a bed because I had assumed I'd just wander into something. Which I did, but it took long enough.