Huh? What time is it? Holy ****!

Saturday, December 4 12:45 PM

Good God, this has to end soon. It just has to. I live in the land of Eastern Standard Time, but I normally operate somewhere between Pacific and Alaskan Time. During my week in London, I was on Western European Time...and I've been on Martian Time ever since I got back home.

I'm not such a world traveller that I have any sort of Bulletproof Advice on how to beat jet-lag. What seems to work for me is to just regard the entire post-travel day as a writeoff. I dump the bags in the hall, shuck off as much clothing as is practicable, fall down someplace soft, and then I don't wake up until I'm being furiously slapped around by paramedics who are shining a penlight into my pupils and are pointedly ask me who the President is.

Alas, I wasn't able to hew to this sane advice because of the Thanksgiving holiday. I got home the day before and all of my editors, keeping a nervous eye on a four-day weekend, made a series of Extremely Reasonable Requests that, when placed in a big wobbly pile and observed from a safe distance, amounted to an immediate tragedy concerning my plans for immediate unconsciousness. On Thanksgiving, I was due at my sister's house at 1 PM, so that day was out, too.

In fact, I was really very ready for bed at 8 AM on that morning and I very nearly had to invoke the Bob & Doug McKenzie Protocol to keep the appointment. (Bob: "Can you believe we get to work at the brewery?" Doug: "Yeah, but let's not blow it by coming in late for work on our first day, eh?" "So let's stay up all night, then." "Beauty idea!") I instinctively recognized this as A Bad Idea and I managed to get three or four hours of sleep, taking my seat at the table shortly after everyone had said grace and started the platters circling. On top of everything else, I had to bail only an hour or two after the meal, so as to avoid a big tie-up on I-95.

(See, if I'd stayed there until 6 PM, all northbound traffic would have been gridlocked by a multi-car accident caused by an competently-attractive technology pundit falling asleep at the wheel.)

So I missed my chance to slap straight back into my normal, "living on the East Coast but working on Alaskan Time" cycle. This has provided me with a great number of fabulous opportunities to be asleep when I'd much rather be working. I've been dozing off in my chair shortly after dinner, waking up at midnight, working until 7, dozing off again sometime at 11, and waking up God knows when. I have seen more sunlight and less Letterman in the past week or two than at any other time since high school, which was when God granted me the benevolence of morning study halls. It was here when Boy Edison learned a lesson that would serve him well for the remainder of his professional life: the hours of early to mid-morning are best spent in quiet, that is to say snoring, meditation, and shouldn't be wasted on insincere fits of by-the-numbers so-called "productivity."

I'm just beginning to reassume some form of normalcy. I fell asleep at 7 last night. I woke up at midnight, read for two hours, fell back asleep, and have now been up since 6:30. So at least these blobs of rest and wakefulness are slowly starting to ooze together into the more human-like "one sleep period per Earth day" cycle.

I had another absolutely fantastic week in London, and it looks like I'll be making a couple more visits in 2005.

My first trip, back in May, was filled with those plentiful (and highly pleasant) shocks that are part and parcel of your first trip out of your home country. You want to buy a paper and you fish some change out of your back pocket and the sight shocks you for a full twenty seconds: the same person is on every single one of these coins. And it's a broad!

The "Exit" signs say "Way Out." None of the newspapers have comic strips, but that's OK, because many of them feature frontal female nudity as a consolation. I turn on the TV and you see a show about TV and pop music stars...but I don't recognize a single damned one of these people.

It's all a huge breath of fresh air. I think of myself as an intelligent man who enjoys thinking;

Nonetheless, so much of our daily lives are spent on mental autopilot. Every day, I buy this paper and I don't even look at the others. I pay for it with two silvery discs which are so familiar that they don't even register as distinct objects any more. I go to a sub shop and order a roast beef sandwich with swiss cheese and tomatoes without even looking at the menu board.

I go home. I don't watch afternoon TV. What's the point? I already know what I'll find on every channel. Surprise makeover paternity tests. Court shows in which the Defendant has to be convinced that when he was dating the Plaintiff and she let him charge $700 worth of Trans Am repairs on her Mastercard, it was not with the idea that the debt would be repaid in the form of sexual favors. Ads from many lawyers who seem convinced that my two-month unpaid suspension for driving a forklift while drunk can easily be converted into eight months of worker's comp. So instead I read, or I do a little work.

But when I'm in London, I barely get past Step Two on that agenda. Morning paper. Which one? Gosh, I have no idea. I leaf through three or four before choosing the Times. Time to pay for it, so I pick through my assortment of weird-arsed pocket change. I wonder why the one-pound coins are so much thicker and heavier than the rest of them? Is that just the way the pounds have been minted for the past hundred years? It's practically as heavy as the two-pound coin. The two-pounder has a really neat look, too: it's a big silver disc with a thick outer border of brass. Is Britain the only country that uses two-toned coins? Hey, that isn't a simple geometric pattern in the border, either. Looks like some sort of writing. Gaelic, maybe? Now that I think about it, the one-pound coin has writing all along the edge. Oh, cool, I've got a fifty-pence coin...perfect. But isn't it interesting that a country filled with vending machines would produce a coin that isn't round? Particularly in such a popular denomination!

The whole environment forces you to slow down, observe...think. It's not disorienting. It's exhilarating. There's absolutely no dull tedium; it's all opportunity. You really don't realize how much your life is limited by your prejudices until you remove yourself to a place where you haven't had enough experience to develop any.

So. As much for my own future reference as for your amusement, I should make a note to comment about various adventures I had in England. Having a couple of beers with Terry Jones would be at the head of the list, of course, but I should also tell you about Mac Expo, and the daily struggle to survive in a nation where the dollar has about as much buying power as its equivalent weight in loose string. I have much to say about the positives and negatives of taking a long walking tour a foreign land, guided by a book written (a) by a good friend (positive) (b) sixteen years ago (bad) which (c) includes the phrase "Now at this point, you're almost certain to get lost." (double-plus ungood). This trip also saw the opening of the first Apple store in Europe (hella good) and my name entering the record books as the first author to speak at an Apple store anywhere on that continent. A performance by an orchestra of ukulele players was attended. I dropped the F-bomb in front of a long line of middle schoolers, though I stress that this story is unconnected to the Apple Store appearance. I celebrated my birthday twice, and drank more in one five-hour period than at any similar span of time in my life. Hopefully, I'll get to some of that.

It did occur to me that I don't seem to blog about my trips as much as I once did. Ten years ago, I'd write thousands of words a day from the road, composing breathless documentaries about the sights and the sounds.

At first, I chalked this up to the fact that I'm far, far busier these days, plus there's a certain amount of stupid energy that comes with youth. But that's not it at all. I'm a much smarter person here in my Thirties than I was in my Twenties. I had a lot more time to write, sure...because I spent a lot more time in my hotel room. I wasn't exactly a hermit, but sleeping late was a huge attraction and when I returned in the late afternoon, ostensibly just to dump off whatever tonnage of press releases, products, and any other convention-related barnacles I acquired during the day. But a quick trip to the Internet to check my email would result in the delivery of pizza and an evening spent sampling the delights of in-room HBO.

What an idiot. Well, yeah; when I travel, it's more important than ever that I open my virtual office for a couple of hours a day. But I don't work any longer than I absolutely have to. These days, I set the alarm early so I can take a walk before breakfast. I'm getting in touch with local friends to set up lunches and dinners, and if dinner is happening close enough to the hotel that I can walk home without being brought low by either fatigue or modern highwaymen, I'll take the less-efficient route back home, taking pictures and making stops along the way.

And I'm taking hundreds of notes. During my week in London, I filled an eighty page notebook and made a good start on a second one. What I saw, what I thought, what I overheard...it's better than pictures. I'm out there, drinking it all in while I still can, instead of pouring it all out into a BBEdit document.

It's a bad trade for you guys, but a fantastic one for me. But do check out my Flickr photosite — I've got plenty of London pix up there to tide you over until I find time to finally tell the full, fifteen year saga of The Python Codex.

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Now do "Brazil."

Sunday, December 5 11:37 AM

The highlight of my Saturday night was trying to explain the plot mechanism of "Shallow Hal." To. My. Mom.

"Is the really fat girl the other girl's sister?"

"No, Mom...they're both the same person."

"So she can change from being really fat to being really skinny?"

"No, no...the fat version is how she really is. The skinny one is just how she looks to Hal."

"You mean she changes every time he looks at her?"

"Well, sort of. It's all in his head. He's been hypnotized so that every time he looks at any woman, he only sees her 'inner' beauty. She's really, really fat, but she's a kind, warm, giving person, so she looks beautiful to Hal, you see. And the important thing is that Hal doesn't know that he's been hypnotized. So he's baffled about why chairs keep breaking under his 'skinny' girlfriend, and why nobody else seems to think she's a knockout. Because — once again — she's a fat woman but Hal thinks she looks exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow."

"Oh! Then that's not the real Hal, right?"

"I'm sorry...?"

"Hal is really a tall and handsome guy, and he looks that way to us because that's the way he is on the inside?"

"NO!!! (sorry, Mom...I'm sorry). It's only Hal who sees this way, and it only affects the way he sees women."

"So the guy whose legs are all twisted, and who walks around on his hands...?"

"That's really the guy."

"He's really like that?"

"Yes! Yes, praise God! That's right. Because he's a man, isn't he?!?"

"No, what I meant is, the man who plays him...he's handicapped in real life? It isn't just some guy in a costume?"

"Oh. Sorry. Yes. Yes, he is."

Silence.

"But if it only affects the way he sees women, were the really fat Hawaiian guy and the really trim Hawaiian guy one two different guys?"

I was about to sigh the sigh of the ages and patiently re-explain the premise yet again, when I realized that she had, in fact, spotted a logical inconsistency in the film. And I couldn't simply acknowledge that. Successfully planting the "Hal isn't aware that he's been hypnotized, and that every time he looks at a woman, what he sees is merely the illusion of how beautiful she is on the inside" concept was a hard-won battle, and trying to explain that for no apparent reason it also affected his perception of some men would have put us back to square one.

I recognized that deception was sometimes the better part of valor, I confirmed that the men were indeed fraternal twin brothers, and then I grabbed my coat and hat.

I think for Christmas I'm just going to buy my Mom a copy of "Memento." If we're going to keep slicing my tee shots into the woods like this, I'd much rather fail on a PGA Tour course than on Pirate Walt's Mini-Putt.

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Home Depot: Zero. Ihnatko: Point-Thirty-Eight.

Monday, December 13 8:03 PM

Home Depot thwarted me this afternoon. They teased me by taking the key that I needed duplicated and sticking it in one slot of the machine and sticking a blank in the second slot and letting me watch it go rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr for three minutes. Then the machine's operator gently cursed and asked, rhetorically, why the bit was refusing to make a necessary final cut to form the tip of the key.

At which point "Manager to Register 4, please...Manager to Register 4" rang out through the PA, which was a signal to the key guy that the store manager wanted to get my priceless reaction on tape so that everyone could watch and laugh about it during next week's regional Christmas party. He fumbled with the machine for a minute to give Store Security time to find a blank tape and press "Record," and then he went through the pointless exercise of starting the machine up again. Bastards.

But here's why you shouldn't laugh in the face of Karma. Before I left the store, I pulled a Coke out of a refrigerated case and brought it to one of the Home Depot's self-service checkouts. I slid a dollar and a dime into the machine and received a nickel and a penny in change. Only it wasn't a nickel: it was a seven-sided 1983 British twenty-pence piece. The corners had worn off with age, making it a nearly perfect match.

Oh, how I laughed. Revenge was sweet: thanks to the weak dollar, that baby's worth thirty-eight cents, meaning that I was over-changed by more than 650%!

Payback — literally, in this case — is a bitch. And you know what? After my next trip to England, when I've had a chance to change that twenty pence back into US currency, I'm spending every penny of that profit over at Cape Cod Lumber. After I reclaim my original five cents, of course. For that much dough, I bet I can get an adonized nail.

Or possibly a nailgun, if the dollar continues to plunge in value. In the meantime, I'm gonna head to the coin store and buy one of those little windowed holders. I'm keeping this baby in my wallet between now and then. I'll produce it whenever I find myself talking to somebody in Finance, who are certain to react to it with sighs of blissful nostalgia: surely, not since the days of the Marshall Plan has an American gotten such a great exchange rate from dollars to pounds.

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Failure can be quite fascinating.

Thursday, December 16 1:24 PM

I'm reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's a slow, slow read. Here, I'll give you an example...take a moment and rub your eyeballs along the following passage:

The only accession which the Roman empire received during the first century of the Christian Era was the province of Britain. After a war of about forty uears, undertaken by the most stupid, maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke. The various tribes of Britain possessed valor without conduct, and the love of freedom without the spirit of union. They took up arms with savage fierceness; they laid them down, or turned them against each other, with wild inconsistency; and while they fought singly, they were successively subdued. Neither the fortitude of Caractacus, nor the despair of Boadicea, nor the fanaticism of the Druids could avert the slavery of their country, or resist the steady progress of the Imperial generals, who maintained the national glory when the throne was disgraced by the weakest, or the most vicious of mankind.

Such was the state of the Roman frontiers, and such the maxims of Imperial policy, from the death of Augustus to the accession of Trajan.

This isn't text that should be gobbled down like cheese popcorn. It demands to be savored. There's a passage like this on practically every other page. I read it, and re-read it, and then I find myself actually speaking it aloud. There's a real sense of melody to the thing, an aspect that's missing from nearly all writing these days...and even from most good writing. Reading this will piss you off once again about the history classes you took in high school. Teachers PowerPoint the names and the dates instead of trying to tell a story with well-drawn characters and a beginning, a middle and an end (or the ongoing illusion of an end, anyway). How can they? There's a standardized curriculum to get through, and a standardized test to prepare the kids for. Ideally, teachers should be road-trippers, knowing the destination but finding their own route. These days, they seem more like medium-haul truckers, knowing that there's a little black box under their seat that constantly radios their speed and progress to a central office filled with bureaucrats, each one poised to strike whenever a three-minute gap appears in the logbook.

If The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes a profound statement about how History is taught, it makes one about my writing skills that's just as potent: specifically, "You suck." But it's said with love and encouragement, with none of the hostility and resentment that punctuates those two sylabbles when my dog says it.

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Oh, Christmas tree...Uhhh, Christmas tree?

Saturday, December 18 6:50 AM

Back home again, with my hands smelling pleasantly like tree sap and gingerbread. The tree smell is because I went out tonight and bought my Mom and Dad their Christmas tree, which is something I've been doing for several years, now. The gingerbread one is because there was a Dunkin' Donuts next to the tree lot and I spotted a sign that read "Gingerbread Donuts: for a Limited Time Only." I checked my watch: it was about 7:52 PM. How could I be absolutely sure that the offer wasn't scheduled to expire at 8? So I ran straight into the franchise, dragging Mom and Dad's tree behind me, scattering needles and toddlers across the tiled floor as I leapt to the counter and bought out their entire stock. I managed to pull the last of those eleven boxes safely to my side of the counter mere seconds before the clock struck.

This turned out to be a pretty savvy move. After I'd bought up all the gingerbread donuts they had, they didn't have any more. So if I'd waited until after 8, I'd have been completely out of luck.

Normally, I like to get the tree about a week and a half before the holiday. I cut it pretty close this year because I've got a big book deadline coming up and I kept putting it off and putting it off. But I sure didn't want to try and buy a tree on the weekend before Christmas — largely this was an issue of having spent a lot of money on presents; I don't have enough cash on hand to cover the bail on a misdemeanor battery charge — so it had to be done tonight. Thus I pocketed my high-intensity LED flashlight and headed out the door. This little item is one of the best twenty bucks I ever spent: it's barely larger than the 9-volt battery that powers it, and yet it projects a tight, white beam of almost painful brightness that penetrates for yards. An absolutely essential accessory when you're shopping for a tree after dark.

Over the years I've learned that the upper hand in the battle between a man and an undecorated Christmas tree is won or lost at the tree lot. You can prune the tree when you get it home, but the correct shape has to be lurking somewhere in there already. You can adjust the screws on the tree stand or install a few shims to get it to stand straight, but if the trunk has a bend in it or of it forks at some point, rest assured that no matter how carefully you set it up, one of the grandchildren will be wearing that tree at some point during the Christmas Eve party. Boughs must bend and not break; if the tree's truly fresh, then a fresh cutting will be sticky with sap.

Et cetera. Eventually I found what I was looking for and the winning tree took its tearful walk down the runway in its sash and tiara, as flashbulbs popped all around it.

It wasn't until I was in my car driving home that I made a disturbing realization: with the light in my hand, highlighting each tree's physical positives and negatives, the whole scene was reminiscent of a weird Home & Garden Network edition of "Hot or Not." Picture Lorenzo Lamas, slurring in his patented "Me no need brain; me have strong jawline" voice.

"Uhhhh...'kay: you've got these really full branches, which I'm totally into, and you're standing all nice and straight. That's really cool. Trees oughtta stand straight. I dunno know why some don't. It's ugly. But then you got this sort of bare batch right here, and as far as your bottom goes, you got something weird goin' on there and there, but it's nothin' that couldn't be fixed with a little cutting. And I dunno about your top. It's like your trunk splits into, like, three parts right here. What's up with that?"

"And your final judgement, Mr. Lamas?"

"I mean, uhhhh, this tree, it's not...you know, it's not All That or nothin'. But what the hell: I'd trim it anyway."

The key difference is that by driving around a state highway for twenty minutes with the tree riding under the flapping lid my car's trunk, I was treating my winning contestant with far more respect and dignity than any woman who ever put on a bikini and got laser-pointed by the former star of a failed syndicated action series. After all, I read in "Entertainment Weekly" that winners of "Hot or Not" are strapped to the roof of an associate-producer's car next to a former "Survivor" castoff and Bob Denver, and then taken straight to a boat show for a personal appearance.

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