Rum, Curmudgeonly and the Lash

I've never been to an island island before; well, at least not the excessively sandy, palm-tree'd kind where somnambulant locals slurp rum and listen to steel drums while filing great slabs of toenail with chunks of white coral. As a defiantly pale, vaguely Northern European person such environments make me feel rather like a frozen chicken trapped inside a red-hot rotisserie. I'm a winter person, infinitely preferring snow country to sun-soaked paradise, wearing duffle coats to swimming trunks and traveling via dog-sled rather than on a surf board. Nevertheless, we went to Bermuda for a week because my wife enjoys the beach and Jet Blue was offering deals. 
"The isle is full of noises" exclaims Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, a play many scholars believe to be partly inspired by contemporary descriptions of Bermuda, and popular sections are still somewhat rackety at times; although the cries of shipwrecked sailors have been replaced by the tinny whine of tourist mopeds and the obnoxious bellowing of cruise ship klaxons. I was surprised by a sort of high-pitched hiccuping noise emanating from the abundant greenery each evening. At first I thought it might be a motorcade of malfunctioning car alarms, but it merely turned out to be the island's infamous whistling frogs. 
Fortunately, as with most prominent vacation destinations, traveling slightly off-season in early September will ensure that the clamoring crowds are sparse while the weather and the water are still warm. Indeed, it's quite possible that you can take possession of your own picturesque cove and wade into the breathtakingly turquoise sea, only to be suddenly submerged by a deceptively powerful wave like I was. That'll teach me to scorn the beauty of island islands.

St George and the Airport Shuttle

Despite the relentless sun with its blazing heat still beating down upon my head, I'm already in an autumnal frame of mind. There ought to be apple cider instead of lemonade, I feel, and brown leaves rather than green and thunder showers should be replaced by driving rain ... which is a bit of a problem since I'm leaving for the pink beaches of Bermuda on Thursday morning and probably won't enjoy myself now. I've briefly considered changing the booking to Malmo or Bucharest at the last minute, but alas my wife does not approve, so tropical island vacation here I come.
According to our hotel's website, they provide a complimentary shuttle from the airport that merely requires booking with the concierge a day before your arrival. But, as I discovered, information about this service should also be included in the phantom stagecoach section of "Myths and Legends of Old Bermuda."
The concierge was very vague when I spoke to him over the phone. Yes, he had once heard tell of such a thing when sitting around a camp fire late at night, but nobody had actually ever seen the shuttle service.
But it has its own pop-up window on your website's homepage, I explained.
Some guests have regaled TripAdvisor with weird tales of a minibus and strange comings and goings, he replied dismissively, but it's best to ignore the ravings of jet-lagged lunatics. These crazy tourists also claim to have witnessed instant room upgrades and free WiFi, he added, but no-one in their right mind believes such superstitious nonsense.
So apparently the Bermuda Triangle has moved inland and our hotel's complimentary shuttle service from the airport is lost within its misty, isoscelesian confines. I imagine that the concierge is just afraid to admit this disturbing fact to his guests, since such paranormal activity might scare the golfers and honeymooners off. But I don't mind. The mistier and creepier the better as far as I'm concerned. Bring on the fog. It will suit my browning mood much better than cyan skies, blue seas and and pink sand.

Scene Changes

Sometimes, in the early morning, I walk through the grubby backstreets around Central Square, observing the human debris sprawled across long-suffering benches and huddled in urine-dampened concrete alcoves: the indifferent rubble that remains after social conventions are abandoned; apathetic refugees living in the ruins of themselves, once more preparing to sacrifice their day to some sort of grimy Chthonic sewer deity. But I don't observe for very long. These demolished lives are a too visceral reminder of how fragile and precarious standards of living can be. And besides, the smell is appalling. This must be how fresh air feels when brushing against a sweating, fetid armpit: "Get me me out of here!" It's all rather depressing, to be honest. So quickening my pace, past the empty banks and crowded Starbucks, I walk onwards in the direction of leafy Cambridgeport.
Suddenly, a fellow pedestrian and myself are knocked sideways by a wild-eyed jogger wearing Vibram foot gloves and a CoolMax bodysuit. He leaps out from between two parked cars like Spiderman, slams into us, vaults a trashcan and sprints up the street without apologizing, propelled by the obliviously unstoppable force of his own insatiable arrogance. I silently hope that he might trip over the slumbering vagrants and break his neck when he reaches them, but he is unfortunately far too agile to be toppled by such insignificant obstructions. In fact, I suppose he will merely employ their prostate torsos as a series of springboards for extra velocity when running through the thick wall of atmospheric stink.Now I'm passing the neo-Byzantine stronghold that is the Church of Constantine and Helena, named after the Roman Emperor who relocated the center of civilisation from West to East - always a bad move - and his sainted mother. There is much inconvenient rubble here, too, mostly around the foundations and spilling out onto the sidewalk, although comprised of cascading masonry rather than flesh and blood, and contained by orange colored plastic netting. "Please pardon our appearance during renovations" an adjacent placard pleads. At least there are some indications of polite society this morning.

As you can see, I am making vain attempts to add illustrations to my blog. I would have taken pictures of the vagrants and the jogger, also, but I was afraid of the vagrants and the jogger was too fast. Consequently there is only this rather innocuous photograph of the Greek church. I'm not really sure what purpose it serves, but at least it's something.

Things That Go Beep in the Night

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) is the name given to recordings of anomalous sounds that credulous ghost-hunters often interpret as paranormal speech; the vocal imprints of departed souls whose otherworldly communications require a little more nuance than just clanking chains and moaning in drafty corridors. Exactly how the disembodied spirit of a seventeenth century monk could manipulate magnetic tape or digital files is unknown, yet belief in EVP has been prevalent for many years. Even I, when an impressionable teenager, convinced that the family home was haunted by the restless spirit of a domestic maid, once attempted to capture an EVP with my tape recorder. 
Relaxing in my bedroom, perusing a dog-eared copy of Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, I would often hear the wretched woman's shade floating through the walls from room to room, wailing that her chores were never done. I tried to catch a glimpse of her on several occasions, but she had already vanished by the time I got to whichever room her voice seemed to emanate from, and only my mother would be standing there.
"Did you see the ghost?" I would demand breathlessly, but mother would simply reply with a pained expression. Apparently only I was the only family member gifted with the aural equivalent of second sight. Consequently I decided to try the EVP approach to prove that I wasn't crazy. 
In the event, my EVP session turned out to be an disappointing experiment, only producing a sort of muffled drone bearing an uncanny resemblance to the sound of my father suggesting that I should mow the lawn. Very eerie and disturbing, but since it was obviously nothing I just ignored it. 
Most examples of purported EVP are, of course, merely errant radio transmissions or tricks of the ear, so-called "auditory pareidolia," a fancy term for hearing something that isn't really there; and all those futile paranormal-investigator TV shows have finally established beyond all doubt that ghosts absolutely do not exist, never mind borrow someone's microphone when in the mood talk. Yet recently my teenage interest in EVP has came back to, well, it has come back to haunt me.
Settling in my office each workday morning, I began discovering that my telephone was recording messages left late the previous evening, even over the weekend and on public holidays. These were inappropriate calling times when any normal person would not be at work to pick up the phone. At first, having dismissed the appealing notion that they might actually be warnings from the spirit world, urging me to quit my obsolete and unprofitable occupation and turn my undervalued talents to the more lucrative and sustainable enterprise of chimney-sweeping instead, I naturally concluded that the messages must be from either robot-spammers or wrong-numbers (they couldn't possibly come from clients or vendors, so what else could they be?). And so I simply deleted them immediately without listening to the contents. After all, nobody wants to start their day listening to a tedious string of hang-ups, dial-tones and synthetic "Hellos!" But several consecutive mornings of being greeted by a persistently blinking phone eventually peaked my curiosity and on Thursday I decided to let the recordings play.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard the voice of a real, live person; albeit the voice of a real, live person who sounded either half asleep or drugged: "Er, yeah, do you have any jobs available there?" this drowsy voice enquired. "And who do I send my resume to?" 
In fact, I was so surprised at hearing a real, live voice (even one that was so obviously exhibiting signs of diminished responsibility) that it took me ten or fifteen minutes to remember to press delete and move on. But the next message was only the same voice sullenly demanding the same information; and so was the next one; and the one after that; until by the fourth message the voice had woken up slightly and seemed quite resentful, accusing me of being unprofessional for not returning its calls. 
Although this voice wasn't ghostly per se, I decided it was a bona-fide example of Electronic Voice Phenomena since it and I obviously existed in separate realms of reality. I inhabit a reasonable approximation of the normal everyday world, whereas the source of the EVP apparently dwells in the twilight lands of the Forever Smoking Purple Bong. Yet some sort of cosmic crosstalk had enabled the voice to depart its own half-baked dimension and manifest itself in mine. 
Of course, the advantage of only experiencing audible phenomena is being spared any accompanying ocular terror. A fully visible, slouching, sullen materialization of the voice's spine-chilling owner in his grease-stained hoodie, skinny jeans and grubby flip-flops would probably send any witness into fits of uncontrollable shaking and frothing at the mouth. And so my hope is that, having expended whatever feeble reserves of energy it possesses on leaving telephonic EVPs, the voice can never now summon the strength to appear in person. I hate dealing with the general public, especially the general public who harbor the weird delusion that jobs exist for the asking.

My Bucket List

Compiling a bucket list, that morbid agenda of stuff to do before you die, is, like death itself, a rather self-defeating experience. Whatever the desired activity listed, whether it be a travel destination or an extreme sporting pursuit, chances are that you will modify its details over time as new horizons and the desirable objects they reveal are encountered. For instance, when I was in my profoundly pretentious twenties, at the very top of my bucket list was the cherished dream of making a pilgrimage to the annual Noizestadt Festival, to hear cult composer Ludwig Maniak's Schitzmuzik performed in its natural habitat, an über-intellectual event I'd read much about in various artsy magazines. Then I actually heard several minutes of Schitzmuzik and traveling to Noizestadt was suddenly toppled from its lofty perch by a profound wish to avoid Noizenstadt and its atonal festival at all costs (an ambition so far fulfilled, except for a brief scare when I got lost in the Austrian Alps six years ago).


Since those days of misguided youth, I have attempted to keep the contents of my bucket list less defined and more symbolic; so symbolic, in fact, that my bucket list these days is actually just a list of different buckets with symbolic value; buckets that I consider to be somewhat emblematic of the riches life has to offer. There is the champagne bucket, naturally, because we should always be celebrating something. The small domestic tub for turning upside-down and wearing on our heads for playing Game of Thrones with a toilet brush as a sword when we should really be doing the household chores. The red fire bucket for running around with while screaming "Fire!" just because we're bored at work. The elegant clay urn that adds a romantic, classical Italianate touch to otherwise neglected gardens. The antique silver pail for attending Halloween parties or Zodiac theme evenings dressed as Aquarius the water-bearer. The mysterious copper cauldron that we only use to brew outlandish and experimental soups and broths from weird, witchy recipes. And finally the seaside-souvenir sandcastle bucket, obviously, for erecting a temporary perimeter of coastal defenses around the area of the beach we're sitting on.


Although the order of precedence might change from season to season, this bucket list of must-have buckets can surely be carved in stone. So far I have succeeded in only obtaining six of them. One still eludes me. Can you guess which one it is? ... Yes, that's right. It's the small domestic tub. I'm damned if I'm going spend $4.98 retail on something that costs less than fifty cents to manufacture, even if it is made of stain-resistant durable rubber and features an easy-grip molded handle. But anyway, I don't believe I will yearn for any other types of buckets until the day I finally kick the big metaphorical bucket: a day I hope is far off in the very distant future.

Huis Clos

I'm in the IKEA mega store, pushing a laden shopping cart through a maze of shelving stacked high with must-have-but-don't-really-need products, desperately seeking the checkout area. It's such a labyrinth in here. Any minute now an assistant Minotaur in a yellow staff shirt might emerge from behind a rack of modular bookcases to demand if he can help me find anything.
"I've been lost for hours." I'd say. "Please can you point me towards the exit?"
The Minotaur would throw his bull's head back and roar with laughter. "There is no exit," he'd reply. "That's just some ancient myth. Nobody believes in the exits anymore." Then he'd direct me to a display of Scandinavian couches with washable cushions.
Perhaps I should have left a trail of little wooden pegs behind me, so I could have retraced my steps back to the entrance. I'm sure I've already been past these Vuillard Parisian theme toilet seat covers at least three times in the last hour. They're unsurprisingly on sale. Maybe someone in the Food Court might know where the checkout is? I can ask at the meatball counter ...

"Next ... sauce or no sauce?"
"I don't want anything. I'm just looking for the checkout?"
"Cashiers are where the soda cooler is at."
"But I'm not buying any food. I just want to pay for this stuff I got from the actual store. Can you tell me where the regular checkout is?"
"It's downstairs somewhere, near the parking lot where you came in."
"Yeah I know, but I can't actually seem to find my way back there."
"Well you can go to the elevators by the bathrooms which are where the closet organizing section is and you can ask somebody there which floor the checkout is at. Okay... Next ... sauce or no sauce?"

I trudge off in search of the elevators, slaloming my way through a thicket of shoe racks and hanging sweater boxes, eventually finding them at the end of a corridor where exhausted families slump against the wall like refugees from Plywoodland. These are my people. Soon transportation will arrive and we can begin the next stage of our migration to the Exits.

Bing! "Register number 338 is now available. Please proceed to register number 338. This register is located on Level 9 and can be accessed via the Red Zone walkway followed by the Green Zone escalators. A customer care professional will greet you on Level 9 and escort you through the checkout tunnel to register number 338. All coupons and rebates must be handed in to the appropriate service concierge at this time. If you have coupons and rebates please proceed to the service concierge desk at the Red Zone walkway embarkation point before proceeding to register number 338. Register number 338 is now available. Please proceed to ...." Bing! "Register number 476 is now available. Please proceed to register number 476. This register is located on Level 12b via the shuttle buses leaving from the Blue Zone mezzanine. A customer care professional will greet you at the transfer portal and conduct you to the Orange Zone zip-line. You're on your own after that I'm afraid. Register number 476 is now available. Please proceed to register number 476. All other registers are currently occupied serving other customers. Please stand by for the next available register."

And that's just the 10 items or less line. When I make it to the front I'm assigned Register number 893, housed in the Purple Annex, apparently just a short monorail trip from the main building. This is it, I tell myself as the train pulls out, the final chapter of my IKEA odyssey. At last the long search for a checkout counter is over and I should be home with just enough time to self-assemble my stuff before bed.

"Did you find everything you were looking for today?" cashier number 893 asks when I arrive.
"Well, the stuff I wanted was no problem," I reply with as much arch-eyebrow as I can muster. "But I had a little trouble finding you."
He looks at me blankly, his barcode scanner bleeping expectantly. "And what is the stuff you want to buy today?"
At which point I realize that I've left my shopping basket at the meatball counter when I asked for directions.

In Dreams Begin Irresponsibilities

Perhaps it's the lack of rich food eaten before retiring to bed, but I no longer appear in my own dreams. Apparently I have been left on sleep's cutting-room floor, so to speak. Consequently there are no sudden materializations of my dream self at high school in the middle of a trigonometry exam that I know nothing about; no nudist wanderings in and out of the office cubicles of contemporary colleagues; no recurring sensations of endlessly falling into a bottomless black void; not even the next morning's vague recollections of my teeth dropping out one by one while misspelling the word "Kafkaesque" at a subterranean, Grand Guignol spelling bee.
Alas, my dreams are mostly confined to weary appraisals of curious images by a sort of disassociated, long-suffering universal eye. It's certainly not my eye. It doesn't get distracted enough to be my eye. Subjects under scrutiny can include anything from an overstuffed armchair to an erupting volcano, and are usually influenced by minutiae encountered during the day. One wonders why my mind requires subconscious REM processing of such dull vignettes? Obviously it views me as an observer of inessential details rather than the romantic protagonist of an action-packed nightmare. Which is fine by me since I have no desire to wake up in a cold sweat each morning, gripping the sides of the mattress and fighting my bedsheets with my feet.
In fact, I fail to see how any sane person can be interested in these disjointed, nonsensical narratives dredged up from the deepest recesses of dormant minds. The ridiculous "work" of Sigmund Freud and his rabid acolytes proves my point beyond dispute. Freud believed that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment. This theory is clearly absurd, since I never dream that all his tedious books are mercifully transformed back into the trees from which their pages were wrought; a transformation I devoutly wish to be fulfilled. So, auf wiedersehen Sigmund. Don't let the symbolic door hit your Id, Ego and Super-ego on the way out.
According to the dream dictionary I consulted, to dream of saltpeter indicates sorrow and heartache. But how many meaning-seeking dreamers can distinguish saltpeter from regular salt? It's an important distinction because, according to the same book, to dream of regular salt suggests abundance and excitability, which is a rather different takeaway in the morning if you'd been actively amorous before falling asleep.
If you ask me, dreams mean nothing beyond the crude interpretations that curious and often prurient imaginations can associate with whatever objects feature prominently in them. So it seems fair to say that, in common with all forms of critique, dreams reveal more about the interpreter than the actual dreamer. I dream about static images of overstuffed armchairs and erupting volcanoes ... the ball is in your court.