Therapy 3

I didn’t expect I’d see her again that day, but about fifteen minutes later she came back in and sat down.

“I’m a mystery unto myself,” she said. “I left here full of gloom and feeling this sort of rage towards everyone and everything – towards myself, really, my life, of course – but, you know what I mean, where you look around and think you just can’t stand anyone – and then I saw this woman struggling with some bags trying to make her way to the bus and – of course, I left myself behind, went up and helped her, insisted and made a joke and got her smiling. I do that all the time, and often when I’m feeling terrible. It makes me think I must be a nice person – so why do I feel like I’m not?”

I settled back into my own chair. I ruminated on the idea that, deep down, way down inside, all of us perhaps have that question: am I good? am I bad? And what does that mean? Maybe it means: am I loved? Am I worthy of love? And love from whom? From one’s parents? From those first few moments of life? Or from beyond even that, from past lives, from God?

“I,” she said. “I…”

She tailed off. She began to cry. She said “fuck” and clenched her fists and gritted her teeth.

She tried to speak again. Then stopped. Closed her eyes. Took a big sigh.

“I told a lie,” she said. “Lately. Recently. I told a bad lie; a big lie. It’s so not like me; I believe in honesty so much. But…I couldn’t help myself. I got in too deep. Things escalated and I guess I just went along with it, was sort of on automatic pilot, right until it ended. And then I felt like shit. Felt, even – and I’m no Catholic – like I wanted to go to church, talk to a priest, do the whole, ‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned’ business. I feel really yucky, like I’ve let myself down – and yet…I don’t know what else I could have done. It brought up all that childhood stuff I was talking about before: about getting into trouble and going into this mode where I would do just about anything to get out of it. But I’ve been better lately, for so long now – though I guess I don’t really get into trouble anymore, so perhaps I wouldn’t really know. Little white lies, you know – like when a guy says, when was the last time you slept with someone? and you think, well that’s kind of irrelevant, and saying, ‘four days ago’ isn’t going to go down so well, so I say six months or eight months or whatever they want to hear and we can move on – but…goddamn, I really let myself down. I feel like I polluted my soul.

“And then I got to thinking,” she said, “about Mark, the last guy I was in a relationship with, and how good it was, and how great he was – but how there was this one point where he told me this really stupid lie – stupid as in, he could have totally told me the truth, and I was always bound to find out anyway – and I just lost all trust in him. We broke up. We hung out and hooked up after that, and it was all still mostly really good – but whenever I thought about getting back with him in a real way – and I thought about it often – all I could think about was that damn lie, and I couldn’t get past it.

“You know what I think?” she said. “I think I maybe needed to cut him some slack. Understand that people fumble sometimes. That I fumble, and that I’d like to be cut some slack, and for it to be understood why I did what I did, and not be forever judged on that. But I just couldn’t do that for him – couldn’t do it with Graham either – and I think that makes me wrong, that I couldn’t live with their failings – same as it’s been with everyone. I mean, they’ve been wonderful, good people – but it always comes down to: oh, this one’s too chubby; this one’s not funny enough; this one has a few weird habits; this one talks too much; this one’s not as good looking as the others; this one has an annoying laugh – that sort of thing. And now, here I am: five years single, and pretty much getting past the age of so-and-so, and I guess I feel like I’ve more or less blown my chances.”

“I don’t think you’ve blown your chances. There’s always another chance.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but…I feel like I’m getting worse. Less tolerant, not more. More picky – almost writing them off immediately. One little disagreement and I’m outta there. I just can’t be bothered with it. I guess in a lot of ways I prefer being single – and yet, I can see how I like – and crave – and need – intimate company too. I love love. The physicality of it. The closeness. I just can’t handle the nuts and bolts of it – the boring bits; the friends and family stuff; obligations; and…when personalities arise, that sort of thing. I just wanna be held, and I just want someone to listen to me – which is, of course, massively unfair, when I say how bored I am of listening to other people, of hearing them go on and on.

“How do you tolerate this?” she said, gesturing to indicate the two of us, and looking at me, waiting – meaning it wasn’t just a rhetorical question, wasn’t just some thought out loud.

“I’m less invested,” I said. “It’s only for an hour and I know my place. You’re not really expecting me to speak, you’re expecting me to listen. It’s a different level of engagement. Plus, we don’t have the same emotional entanglement as people who are intimately, physically involved.”

“I feel like a part of me wants you to be invested,” she said, “but I suppose that’s just my ego – and, anyway, I understand what you’re saying, it makes perfect sense. Maybe whatever I might feel around is just another sign of wanting some sort of connection with another. I mean, it was nice that hug and all – but I wouldn’t want it to go further. I know your lifestyle, I know how you live – and I know there’s no real compatibility there, and I think compatible lifestyles are just about the most important thing in a relationship. Good sex, good conversation, fun – those things are possible with lots of people: but someone’s who’s truly on the same page when it comes to the day-to-day stuff…I really think that needs to be there; sheesh, I’m just waffling now.”

“Maybe you can go back to what you were saying before,” I said, “about your feelings about honesty.”

“Yeah, you know,” she said, “I think I feel better now, after letting it out to you. You’re not a priest but…it does feel better – and I was really beating myself up about it these past few days, and during that walk. Who knows? Maybe it’ll come back – but, right now, I feel like I’m somehow taking it easy on myself.

“I do feel bad for Mark, though – there was a guy who I felt was really living my kind of lifestyle, and I can’t say that about many people. I can understand why he did it – he didn’t want to get caught out; he didn’t think he would be; he probably didn’t think it mattered – just the same as me – but…he did get caught, and he made it worse through further denials, and it escalated into something that I just couldn’t tolerate or accept – something that I couldn’t put out of my mind. That’s a shame, that. To look at someone you think you might love – and then to have that niggling thought at the back of your brain. Ah well: what’s a girl to do? Just end up an old cat lady, I suppose. Only forty more years of living and loneliness.”

She laughed and grinned at me. If it had been a text, that last sentence would have ended with a wink.

“And what about the other things you were saying? About failure? About feeling mentally ill?

“Do you know what?” she said. “I feel like I want to dance. I feel like I want to get up from this chair and spin around and do something totally goofy. God knows where that’s come from! But that’s what I feel: I feel happy!”

Some sort of liberation, I thought: good for her. Nothing to do with me, I thought: really good for her.

“So dance, then,” I said. “Feel free. You want some music?”

“Nah,” she said, “feeling’s passed. I just wanna…maybe look out the window for a minute, watch the leaves and branches in the breeze.”

She stood up from her chair. She walked over to the window and pressed her hands against the pane, and leaned her forehead on the glass.

She breathed in deep and loud, and let it out. She sighed. She looked down to the street and watched the people passing by, the cars. Rain spattered the glass. Some of the people raised umbrellas.

“I don’t know what I feel anymore,” she said. “In this moment…everything feels fine. Is that weird? I don’t have a single thought in my goddamn brain.”

Therapy 2

When she came into our next session I thought she looked lighter than before, though still with an air of pensiveness about her. A mind mostly at peace, but with a slight yet constant sense of discontent which flavoured everything else. It was like too much salt had been added to a meal: there was no ignoring its taste.

“How are things?” I said. “How have you been?”

“I’ve been good,” she said, “some things did happen after our last talk. Like, immediately after. I mean I left and, one, I felt better – a little better – and, two, I felt like my thoughts moved on, like all that stuff I said had been circling round in my head, repeating, playing over and over – not like a stuck record, but…like a song I’d got to know, learned the lyrics by heart, but heard enough – and talking it out…I guess it was like I took the record off, changed the tune, and started playing the next one down in the pile.

“Same genre, though,” she said, smiling.

“That’s what I find too,” I said. “As though my brain can only hold so much, go so deep, and I have to let it out before I can reach the next layer, penetrate to what’s beneath. And so on.”

“But when does it end?” she said. “I feel like I’ve been doing this for years. Doesn’t it ever just stop?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe it never did end. I was past caring about that. Used to want it to, but wanting it seemed to make it worse. Now I just tried to enjoy the ride.

“So what happened?” I said. “What’s the ‘new song’?”

“You know,” she started, “first thing I thought when I got to the end of all that splurge was that I probably want to be with someone. I’ve been single more than five years. I think that’s maybe not been good for me. Too much time not being able to share. Too much time not being held and reassured. Too much time spent just thinking in my own head instead of giggling and messing about and making love and having a laugh.

“I feel like, for some silly reason, I’ve spent the last two or three years trying to be a nihilist. It was kind of fun at first – just dismissing everything, saying everything is pointless, embracing that. It was liberating. But, ultimately, it doesn’t seem to work, in the sense that it hasn’t brought me to happiness or peace. It seems to have sucked the joy out of life, much as it makes me giggle, the philosophy and the theorising and that. But – I’m getting sidetracked here: I want to stay on focus. I feel that’s something that happened last time too – that I kind of went down alleys I didn’t want to, that there were other things I would rather have explored.”

“Are you saying the things you expressed weren’t true?” I asked. “I like to think the conversation goes where it will. That everything will out, in its own time.”

“You know what it was?” she said. “I just felt…kind of embarrassed. All that talk about death and dying and maybe wanting it, and maybe even hinting that I could one day make that happen: I felt kind of stupid about that. Yes, embarrassed. How dramatic! How attention grabbing! That’s pretty much the first thing I felt when I left that session: like I wanted to run back in and make you understand that it wasn’t real: scrub the record and erase the whole conversation and pretend it never was. I don’t want that. I could never want that. I just…it was just a thought that I’d picked up one day, chewed over, and liked the taste of, so…I nurtured it – treasured it, even – and pulled it out to show off whenever I…I don’t know. I don’t want to analyse it too much. I think it just became a silly habit. I want to move on from that now – and try and keep my thoughts and talk from going there. Not because it’s bleak or dangerous or whatever, but simply because it isn’t true, at the deepest part of me – it’s just like some goddamn game I was playing with myself, and I didn’t even know.”

“And you’re saying now you do?”

“I think so. Something happened the next day to sort of shove the reality of my feelings in my face. To show me that I do want to stay alive, that I do value life. I think the truth is, I just want to stop feeling the way I feel, and a part of me – call it a lack of imagination – couldn’t figure out any other way to do that. Plus, like I say, the melodrama, the embracing of all those pretentiously ‘deep’, frivolous nihilistic thoughts, the comfort in the justification of it. It gave me something, I guess. But it’s time to move on.

“The other thing that happened,” she said, “is I met a guy – like literally a couple of hours after leaving here. It was fun. It was beautiful. We only spent like twenty-four hours together but…I guess it was confirmation of that feeling that I’m tired of being alone. It was nice to be with someone. I felt like I liked myself more, in that situation, and I liked life more too. You know? It just kind of takes the edge off things, gets me out of my head. He was fun, uncomplicated. Circumstances prevent anything more, but…well, I guess we’ll have to see what follows.”

I smiled inside here. I’m always going out on a limb when I say things like “wait and see what comes, expressing yourself in a deep and real way can actually change reality” – it’s my hope, for them; it’s been my own experience many times in the past – so when it actually comes to fruition, so suddenly…I guess it’s a relief, and an endorsement, and allows me to trust these beliefs more. Every moment is a choice to say or not say the words that appear in my brain. This is one of my own great challenges: to pick the right path through that. And it looks like I may have picked it right this time.

“So a lot happened,” she said. “The moving on, the new layers of thought, the…guy.”

She paused then, looked down at her hands, and a smile spread across her lips, eyes soft in remembrance.

“But, also,” she said, suddenly snapping to, “I feel like there was so much I didn’t say. Like that whole thing about how I started – ‘I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m mentally ill’ – like there was a whole train of thought there that I thought I would talk about, and that I went down some other tangent, and maybe now I want to loop back around and see where that other one would take me. After all, that’s been playing in my head a long time too. I’d love to see if letting that out might have similar results. I just…

“It’s all kind of embarrassing,” she said. “Everything is. I feel like such a…failure.”

The word kind of leapt out of her throat, and tears rolled down her cheeks. She began to softly weep. She looked impossibly sad.

“Oh my,” she said, wiping her face. “I didn’t expect that. I had this whole speech planned: I thought I knew where it was going. And then I said…that.”

She sniffled some more. She was smiling and crying at the same time. I’d learned to dig her ability to do this – that even in expressing her deepest sadnesses, there was always something of joy behind it. She’d explained to me once that she enjoyed crying: that, to her, it was just an expression of emotion, something inside wanting to come out, just the same as a laugh or a smile. Why suppress it? And more: that she’d learned the power in letting her tears flow freely, the way she felt cleansed afterwards, the way stuck emotions seemed to be let go – so that, having deeply experienced the benefits of a good cry, she now welcomed the tears to the extent that, even in the moment of sadness, there was gratitude and happiness, for the now ingrained knowledge of exactly what these tears meant: that something was being touched; that something was being released; that something very real and very beautiful and, indeed, very useful was happening. So why not let it flow?

I’d seen in my own life how people suppressed their tears. How they sought to wipe them away, even before they’d left their eyes. How they were embarrassed, ashamed. I thought this was a great pity – as I thought it was a great pity that I didn’t cry more myself. I would love to experience the release these tears appeared to be doing for this woman, and for others. It looked amazing. They always looked so beautiful afterwards. They were the lucky ones.

“Whenever I say that word,” she said, “I remember being about ten years old and breaking this huge old vase we had in our living room. I was horrified. I tried to hide all the pieces but it was hopeless. How would it go unnoticed that the vase was missing? How could I lie my way out of it? And then my mum walked in in the middle of me stuffing shards of it under the sofa cushions, and she went ballistic. I didn’t know what to do. And I remember I started bawling – like wild, uncontrolled – and she took me on her lap and shushed me, like she always would when I was crying – I loved that; they’re some of my fondest memories – and I actually said to her, out loud, ‘I feel like such a failure’. I was ten years old! There’s got to be something weird in that, right? For a ten-year-old to say something like that? And you know the other weird thing? Even right then, in the moment, I had the sense that all my tears and the expression of those words…I dunno: like there was something phoney about them. Like I was just pretending, so that I didn’t get into trouble. And yet…it must have been real, right? I think, deep down, that thought is always with me, maybe driving me – maybe more of me than I could possibly realise. How could it be phoney? It just can’t be, right?”

I looked at her. I didn’t know what to say. I wished then I knew more about attachment issues and the importance of the formative years of the parent/child relationship. I knew enough about her situation to know it hadn’t been easy – that, in fact, it was downright screwy in places – and I knew there was maybe something important in this, that less of a gap in my knowledge could maybe touch on. I made a mental note to learn more. To do some reading. To come back with something useful.

I said: “maybe both were true. Maybe your expression of emotion and your awareness that there was something…maybe ‘phoney’ isn’t the right word – maybe they were both real. It sounds like you had a knowing that this would get you what you wanted – get you out of trouble – but that doesn’t necessarily mean your emotions weren’t real too.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but I think it was more than that. I think…I think maybe I ‘ramped it up’. Turned up the volume. Made it more than it was. And I definitely remember this other time – probably around the same age – where I totally faked being upset to get out of trouble. I knew what I was doing. I was a good actor. I’ve always been a good actor when it comes to situations like that.

“God,” she said, “this is going all over the place! There are too many things going on. Two minutes ago I wanted to talk about how I just feel like I can’t make it in this world – with people, with jobs, with the way the whole thing is set up – but then I get this blurt out of nowhere – I can’t even say the word right now, it feels so shameful – call it the f-word – ha! – and also this other thread about not being okay with getting into trouble which, yes, totally relates to something which has been going on these past few weeks: something totally big and mind-overwhelming, and really goddamn bothering me.

“I’m a mess,” she said. “Too much. Too many things. Where do I even start?”

“Hey,” I said, “you’re not a mess, you’re just digging into stuff. And it’s not too many things – it’s three things. It feels like a lot, but three’s not that many. Yes, I know there’ll probably be more, but you can handle it. One at a time. But…let’s take five. Have a drink of water and breathe a little. Come back to it. What do you think?”

“I think…” she said. “I think I need a break. Take a walk outside. And then see how I feel. Maybe I need to let these things settle, live with it a while. Maybe I just need to go back out into the world and see what’s what. Or maybe we can get right back into it. One step at a time, you know? See how I feel in a minute.”

Smart cookie, this girl. I dig everything she says.

Crisis situations and death

We were talking about crisis situations, and the unexpected ways we’ve acted when life has thrust something dramatic upon us. Muggings, robberies, car crashes. When thrown into the deep end, some people act, and some people freeze. We’d both had experiences where something unpredictable, powerful, spontaneous had arisen within us. If you’d asked me, for example, to predict how I might have reacted in that Spanish bus station in 2008, I never would have guessed I would do what I did. But it gives a man great confidence, to know that’s within him – that maybe he can trust it to be there when called upon – and it won’t be the curling up into fear, the paralysis, the trauma that he perhaps previously imagined, and which does seem to be the case for others, but something altogether more wonderful and surprising and useful.

Later on, I began to make my way to El Chorro, fannying around in San Jose for a couple of days en route. Then I got the bus out to Santa Anita, but decided to disembark at the airport and see if I could find the phone I inexplicably left there on Sunday. No dice. I left it all behind and tromped through the hot desert, cutting through backstreets and unknown Mexican neighbourhoods till I came back out at a highway Pemex and unsuccessfully thumbed while the cars flew by. I gave it up and started walking up the highway: what the hell; it’s good to walk.

Soon enough, I came to a little sandy bypass around a bridge that must have been damaged in the recent storm. The traffic had to slow right down and a guy let me jump in the back of his pickup. Suddenly, of course, everything is all right with the world: I’m zooming under a hot desert sun sprawled in the bed of a Mexican pickup with the wind in my hair and not a care in the world. Ah, for this, and not having to sit in the front, making idle chatter, with a roof over my head! Ah, for this, rather than pretty much anything else.

I got water in Santa Anita – I was parched – and for the second time that day a guy told me it was too dangerous to hitchhike anymore, too many bad people on the roads. I just nodded and agreed and casually mentioned the thousands of Mexican miles I’d hitched in recent years, and made my way to the road. No other way to get to Santiago anyway. Not unless I wanted to wait two hours for a bus, and still be stuck miles from my destination, in the dark. So to the tope (speedbump) I went, and stuck out my thumb.

I say all this, I guess, because there’s something about the timing here – or the lack of it – that strikes me. The way I detoured at the airport. The way it took me much longer than I’d thought – both in terms of hours that day, and in days themselves – to get to this place, back en route to El Chorro. Plus the walk and subsequent pickup. Plus the water. Not to mention suddenly being all these thousands of miles out of England, when it’s still less than a week since I was sitting in London not knowing what I was going to do next.

The timing, the timing…

I took my spot. I thumbed a little. I turned around and watched as this lolloping silver-grey dog started making a beeline across a side road towards me. It seemed sort of jolly, like it wanted to make a friend, like it figured I had a snack. I did have a snack: I had some tostadas – but I didn’t really want to give them to this dog. To be honest, I wasn’t really in the mood for a dog to come lolloping up to me. I turned back to the road and stuck out my thumb. Behind me, I heard a squeal, like car brakes, and the bump of a car going over a ubiquitous Mexican speedbump. And then I had this flash of a thought of puzzlement: because I didn’t remember there being a speedbump there, in the side road.

I turned around. A white 4x4 was going down the hill. And the dog lay twitching in the road, its tail flopping half-heartedly, back legs occasionally kicking out, and a stream of blood trickling along the tarmac from its lazy, lolling, unmoving head.

I didn’t know what to do. What was I supposed to do? I was the nearest person to it – and, not only that, but I was responsible – after all, if I hadn’t been standing there – if I hadn’t made the decisions I’d made that day, that week, this whole life – the dog wouldn’t have had anybody to gamely gambol over to, tail wagging, tongue flapping, anticipating affection and food.

And now it lay dying in the road, immobile except for spasmodic jerks, a pool of piss now forming around its back end, and that stream of blood insistent and incessant as it flowed on down the road.

A car came on my other side, and I stuck out my thumb again, and it went on by. A Mexican family of mother and three children slowly came walking down their yard to look at the dog. They were in no hurry; it evidently wasn’t theirs. The dog twitched less frequently now, and I felt grateful that at least I wouldn’t have to kill it, or go find somebody, tell them what had happened, and try to make out it wasn’t my fault.

Now here comes a Mexican fella from the direction the previously alive dog had done a minute or so before. He ambles too: he’s in no hurry. He takes one look at it and know it’s a goner. It’s stopped twitching by now, and the piss no longer flows. He picks it up, front paws in one hand, back paws in the other, and holds it out in front of him so as not to get the piss and blood on his jeans and shoes. He carries it over to the back of a blue pickup truck and tosses it in. He says nothing. He does all this so automatically, so smoothly, it’s like he must do it every day – like he’s been preparing – like he was told the whole thing in a dream, and is going through the motions.

I guess the dog wasn’t beloved family pet after all. I guess the dog was just a dog that barked at stuff, got fed, and is a dog no more.

I wonder if anyone will ask me if I saw it, what was the car that did it, did I get a registration, like they would in England – and stand around chatting, and lamenting, and tell me its name, and grieve for the hearts of the children, when they come home from school and find out their Sandy, their Rover is gone – but no one does. The family has moved on. The guy has done his deed and gone back in the house, presumably to wash his hands of the whole mess. And the dog lies dead in the pickup bed, flies no doubt gathering, while the perpetrators are probably miles down the road having instantly figured it’s just one o’ them things, no need to hang around discussing.

Then a car stops and I get in and zoom up the road talking with Manuel in my shoddy Spanish about football and the weather and how long it takes to fly from England – but all the time I’m thinking about the dog, and about my role in her downfall, and about how she wouldn’t now be dead if I hadn’t chosen to stand in the spot I did, at the exact second I did. How children might not now be mourning and crying tears. How that silver-grey hound would still be happily lolloping after snacks and strokes and snapping at flies in the sun and snuffling into her evening meal totally oblivious to how close she came to extinction.

The colour of her fur. Those back legs twitching. The trickle of blood running down the hill in the direction of the car that rolled over her.

There was nothing I could have done, and nothing I could do. But still…

A minute later, we pass a cow lying on its side on the shoulder of the road, legs sticking stiffly and stupidly out, another victim of four wheels. It’s striking because I’ve travelled this road dozens and dozens of times, and seen plenty of cows by the highway, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen dead, right hot on the heels of the now dead dog. And then I remember also, the day before, in my friend’s yard how her own dog had got hold of some bird and messed its wing up, and the poor thing was all crippled and useless, bones showing, just air where its feathers should have been. Its little bony head cawed helplessly. Apart from the wing and trauma, it was mostly okay – but I knew instantly that I was supposed to end its life, find some rock and crush its skull, and put it out of its misery – or, at least, save it from the future misery of the slow, lingering, horrible death. I also knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill the thing. I can’t even kill flies.

All this death, but don’t start to thinking this is a Mexican thing – that life is cheap out here – that dogs and cows and birds are dying all the time, and nobody really cares – because I’ve spent a good deal of time in this country – probably about two years in total by now – and for me to see even one dying thing is pretty unusual, let alone three. It seemed sort of significant. It made me think. And it took me right back to the first time I was in Mexico, and the first time I was in El Chorro, after the Lovely Boys had left, and everything started happening for me – the synchronicities, the weird introduction to some sort of spiritual/mystical reality – and how, one night, I’d sat gazing into my fire and a grasshopper had leapt in, and instantly perished in the hot flames, and how I’d been immediately struck by the unlikelihood of his demise in that way, at the hands of a young Englishman so many thousands of miles from home, who could have been in a million other places – and maybe should have been – but was right there to build that fire, in that exact spot, at that exact time, to end the life of a sentient being who was perhaps fully expecting to land on sand, as he had done every other night of his life.

Gone. Snuffed out. Never to leap again.

I dunno. These things happen all the time. And of course there’s nothing spooky in it, because it’s just the way things are, how they have to be. And yet, this grasshopper moment deeply and sincerely struck me – it was a spontaneous reaction – and it stayed with me, and came back to me now, more than eighteen years later, and I remembered it as we drove on up the road.

Manuel took me all the way to Santiago, and then I walked once more past the Palomar and the avocado farm; turned the corner at the church; turned the other corner, and on past the zoo, and then arrived at my usual hitching place, where I’ve been standing and hitching every since 1999. But, this time, it looked different. The storm had taken out most of the road. Water still flowed, a temporary shallow river, and children played in it. I walked some ways across, carrying my wheely case on my shoulder, and then when it came time to take off shoes and socks, I saw a pickup approaching. Once more, I was invited into the back, and bounced along as far as the first little pueblo. From there, it’s maybe five miles to El Chorro. It was getting dark. I figured I might as well walk. I dragged my case down the road, and when the sand became too deep, I carried it on my shoulder; held it out in front of me; balanced it on my head. The damn thing was too heavy though: it’s all I own in the world, and it’s still too much. I’m going to have to jettison some more.

After some time another pickup came and I hopped on back. A worker on his way home from construction work, by the looks of his jeans and boots, also jumped in, and we two and the little boy who was already in there bounced along to Agua Caliente, which is only a mile or so from my destination. I was going to make it. It was maybe the last truck of the night, but after all that timing, those possibilities and turns, I was going to make it.

I hopped out in twilight. I waded across a river. I dragged my suitcase in the sand. And in the almost dark, somewhere close, I heard that sound which you know even if you haven’t ever heard it is the sound of a rattlesnake.

I stopped. I let go of my case and let it fall to the sand. I shouted ahhh! I didn’t know where the sound was coming from – whether it was right by me, or moving toward me or what – but then I saw it: the snake was just off to my left, heading away from the road, and rattling as it went. It must have been right by my foot when I’d walked on through. It could have been mere inches. They’re good old snakes – they’ve never caused me any harm – but, you know, I guess you just never know, and I guess there has to come a day when one decides it’s not the time for warnings and slitherings off, and they bite.

I didn’t want to get bitten. I didn’t want to die. And I guess this, for me, is the point of the whole thing: for, no matter how frivolously I might talk about death, and accept the fact of it, and sometimes joke how no longer existing might be quite nice – the core of my being, the bit of me that is revealed in those spontaneous, unpredictable moments, doesn’t want it one bit – nor does it think it inconsequential, something unmoving, it thinks it “a hell of a thing.” That dog’s death disturbed me. Even considering ending the life of the bird proved an emotional impossibility. And I didn’t want to get bitten by that snake. If anything, I was afraid: I wondered what the hell I was doing out here, wandering down dark roads with rattlesnakes unseen in the trail. I didn’t want it anymore. I wanted to be somewhere where there weren’t snakes in the grass.

Therapy 1

I was thinking maybe I would transcribe some of my therapy sessions for y’all, given that they’re – what’s that? You didn’t know I was a practising therapist? Well, I am. Not a licensed, qualified one, of course – but I do give sessions, and people seem to find it useful. They come, sit for an hour, tell me what’s on their mind, what’s in their heart, and I listen, ask questions, offer little tidbits, gleaned from my own experience, from reading, from hopefully useful ideas. Mostly it’s about giving people a chance to get things off their chest, to feel heard, to get their thoughts outside their heads. I really believe expression is key: simply putting a voice to our inner-workings can have near magical effects.

Naturally, because I’m not qualified, I can’t take payment – but I’m certainly not averse to the food they leave me, to the tenners dropped ‘accidentally’ by the door.

I feel like it’s a good thing to do. I know how powerful expressing and being listened to have been in my own life and transformations, so I do my best to offer that back. Kind of a shame I don’t really get to do much of it myself anymore. Though that’s not really through choice.

Anyway, I’m thinking of about a month ago and this woman who’s been coming to see me on and off the past fifteen years or so. She’s a pretty bright spark – has her ups and downs – but mostly a positive, persevering sort. She’s a pretty classic example of someone for whom this style of ‘treatment’ works: I don’t generally have to say anything; she just wants to get her head cleared; she figures it all out herself.

She sat down in the chair opposite and looked around the room. She’s a good looking woman, three or four years younger than me, shiny-eyed and quick to smile. But I sensed a certain heaviness about her this day that I wasn’t used to seeing. A weariness of spirit. It took her a little longer than usual to begin.

“I’ve come to a conclusion,” she said, finally. “I’ve come to the conclusion that…I think I’m…mentally ill.”

She stopped then and looked at me. I looked back, slowly, subtly nodding. I scanned my brain to see if it felt like there was something I was supposed to say, but there wasn’t. I just looked at her and felt my breath.

“There’s something wrong with me,” she said. “Something deeply wrong. Something wrong with my brain, something wrong with my BEING. It’s who I am. There’s no getting away from it. I really, truly don’t see this being fixed.”

“You know when they were cracking DNA?” she said. “They worked on fruit flies, and found that by altering little pieces of the code, they could alter the flies’ behaviour. Fiddle with one gene and the flies might become asexual, or only be able to steer in one direction, or be repelled by light. That’s how I feel: I feel like there’s something in my genes that causes me to behave in weird ways, and even though I know they’re weird, and I know what I’m ‘supposed’ to do, there’s nothing I can do about it, and it’s starting to become hell – because at least the flies don’t know there’s anything weird about what they’re doing, they’re just doing it, little automatons. And I guess that’s what I am too – a weird little automaton powered and controlled by and enslaved to my genes – to whatever it is that makes me who I am – except I have this awareness of it, and a desire to be something different, and so there’s this push-pull, this tension between the two. I can barely stand it. It’s getting ridiculous.”

“I’ll be 37 next year,” she said. “I think if I haven’t got this sorted by then, I might just die. I’ve had a good life, done pretty much everything I ever wanted to – grown and experienced and become a better person than I was but…it feels like the fun’s gone out of it. That I’ve taken this thing as far as it can go. That everything else that’s left to do – all my ideas and dreams and desires – are just sort of beyond me – the same way writing a postcard or making a good cup of tea is beyond a fruit fly. They’re not difficult things to do – but only if you’ve got the capability. I think I’ve reached my limit. It’s getting hard to see a reason to go on.”

She paused for a second here and let out a big sigh. I thought about saying something – I guess you’re supposed to say something when people express thoughts like these – but she started up again before I could, and laughed.

“So I was talking to this friend of mine the other day,” she said, “and I was talking about this article I’d been reading about a young guy who had killed himself. I said to her, ‘you know how they always say, we never had any idea, they always seemed happy enough, it was totally out of the blue – would you say that about me if they one day found me dead?’ and she laughed and said, ‘no, you’re always talking about dying, it wouldn’t surprise me at all.’ I got a certain satisfaction in this. I’ve never wanted to be one of those clichés after death: all ‘they were such a good person, they’d do anything for anyone, they lit up every room’. I really hope it’s true, that this friend would tell the reality about me. That they’d laugh and say they’d been expecting it for years, that they were surprised it hadn’t happened sooner.

“Not that I could ever do that,” she continued, “my spiritual beliefs get in the way of that – though I could,” she mused, “maybe engineer it by hanging out in dangerous places, I suppose – but you get the point: there’s a big part of me that’s kind of done with existence. Or done living with the way my head currently is. It’s too frustrating. Too much to deal with. To be handicapped and incapable of doing the things I want to do, and to not be able to think of or tolerate anything else – and yet to have to wake up every day in a world where ‘not doing’ is impossible, strapped to this brain that won’t allow me to let go of all the stupid thoughts and ideas it relentlessly compels me to pursue.”

She sighed and slumped a little in the chair. There was no need for me to ask her what these things she wanted to do were – she painted, and wanted to paint more – to knuckle down and commit to it in a proper way – and probably the majority of our sessions were taken up with discussing this, to the extent where neither of us were sure whether she did really want to paint, or was just deeply attached to talking about it and enjoying the drama of the incapable and unable artist, weighed down by ideas, and haunted by the reality of such little actual output.

“I had this awful thought the other day,” she said, “that I was literally doomed to living out another three or four long decades in this continually frustrated and incapable state, finally dying without accomplishing even a fraction of what I wanted, was supposed to, maybe could have done if one little thing had been just that little bit different. Some gene, some opportunity, some meeting.

“I’m lonesome,” she said. “Maybe that’s all it is. Too much time without a good body to curl up next to. To talk with. To share some giggles and not feel so nuts. But I’ve tried that: it’s hard. It’s never worked. There’s really something wrong with me.”

Again, I thought about saying something – but it seemed she was on a roll now. This stuff had been there a long time, swirling round in the waters of her brain. It was all gushing out like a torrent. There was nothing to do except breathe and be all ears, like the ears of an elephant. Months and months we’d been talking surprisingly superficially, for her. Now I understood why.

“Another thing I’ve been thinking,” she said, “you know how I’ve talked before about just not really liking people, finding them boring, getting annoyed with their overlong tales of nothing, yakking away in my ear, blahing about things that seem sort of pointless? But then I thought, maybe that’s not it: maybe it’s something more than that. Maybe it’s not them that I find frustrating, but rather my inability to connect with them. Maybe I’ve been a little hard on myself. I crave connection – I’ve experienced deep connection with some wonderful people – and maybe it’s not experiencing that that causes the pain. I know how good that can be. I can barely stand not having that. I'd rather be alone than have to live experiencing less.”

She paused. She grew a little quieter, after her enthusiasm for that last thought.

“But other people don’t seem to have a problem with that,” she said, furrowing her brow and seemingly discarding the theory. “No, it’s more than that. I do look at most people and just think, what is the fucking point in you? Why do you even exist?

“But maybe that’s projection. Why do I even exist? What is the point in me? Jeez! Who do I think I am that I have some point and all these other people don’t? You see!” she said. “What the hell is wrong with me?”

She seemed to reach the end of something there. I guess up till that point she’d just been letting out thoughts that she’d been working on for some time, that were more or less complete: and that one about being frustrated at not being able to connect with people had been one that, up until then, had resonated with her – but hearing it, and questioning it, and realising it maybe wasn’t quite as true as she’d hoped seemed to deflate her.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I just look around at other people and I can’t figure out how they go on, how they persevere, how they can tolerate one another. I look at myself and I think, I’m a nice person, I don’t get angry, I’m there for others, I’m smart, I’ve got things to say – and yet…I’m lonesome. I’m lonely. I don’t have many friends. I don’t feel part of any group. Some people are real assholes, and they have all that. Some people are dicks, and they have people who love them. Shit, even Hitler had more friends than me; I just don’t get it.”

I looked at her and thought, despite the gloom and obvious darkness of all this, there seemed to be a smile on her face, a light in her eyes. I didn’t doubt for a moment that it was all genuine, and was genuinely sad for her, and yet…there was also this sense that she could laugh it off at any moment; that she was actively enjoying the expression; that these too were ‘mere thoughts’, and though expressing something of her being, it wasn't expressing the whole truth, the deepest part of it.

I didn’t know what that meant. It was just an inkling, an idea, a possibility. I would have to do some reading.

“Perhaps,” she said, after a lull of maybe thirty seconds, “perhaps I’m just depressed: yes, maybe that’s all it is: people get that, don’t they? Isn’t that what it sounds like to you? All this pointlessness and mortality and blah blah blah? Fuck it: I guess it’ll pass at some point – like that awesome cartoon woman and her bit of sweetcorn under the fridge. Oh, for my bit of sweetcorn!” she laughed.

(That was a reference to some blog that became quite popular a few years ago, with silly simple drawings and amusing insightful words; I forget the name of it.)

“God,” she said, “I actually feel better now, thinking that might be it. I mean, it’s not like I’m gonna go out and pop some pills, but putting a name on it…imagining that what I’m feeling is simply what all those other people always say they’re feeling…I mean, I do have a pretty hard time getting out of bed most days, can’t find much to do except click on things, and make it through till sleep. It’s probably like that time I met all those Alcoholics Anonymous people and, listening to their stories, learning about their program, I realised I’d done pretty much all the exact same things on my own, learning as I went along, not knowing it was all just some standard thing that thousands of people are doing all the time. I really ought to get out more, join more groups, stop all this brooding and go find some actual fellow brooders who have the answers all printed out already in pamphlets, rather than having to discover them for myself, stumbling along, and no doubt taking longer.”

She looked up at me and smiled. “I like talking,” she said, “it makes me feel good. I feel better. I feel…a lightness, a sense of something intangible having left me. I don’t understand but…you know what? Right now, in this moment, I feel good.”

She looked at me again, beaming, and then frowned. “It’s not going to last, is it? It’s all going to come back?”

And, at that, I finally realised it was my turn to say something.

“Wait and see,” I said. “Go outside. Go take a walk. Look at things, grab a bite to eat, and see how you feel then. It’s hard to know right now if getting all this off your chest has done anything – but I guess reality will inform you pretty soon. Who knows who you might meet later today? Who knows what opportunities might arise? What you’ll feel next time you sit down to paint?”

We smiled at one another, eyes meeting, resting in connection.

“We’ve still got twenty minutes,” she said, “can I just stay here and hang out? We don’t have to talk.”

“I really would recommend taking that walk,” I said.

She grinned at me coyly.

“I’d actually quite like a hug,” she said, “just something quiet, someone to hold me.”

I thought: I’d quite like that too; she’s pretty fit, this girl.

Which, along with the lack of patient confidentiality, and not having had to train or needing to follow rules and tow the line, is the other great thing about doing this off me own back.

Nothing happened, of course – there might not be any legal requirement, but there’s still ethics, morality, trying to do the right thing by another – nothing beyond a bit of skin on skin; two hearts beating together; a hand cradling a beautiful head; and the lowering of blood pressure and stress hormones that comes from simple, wonderful, intimate human contact in the quiet of a cosy room, in a comfortable chair, two bodies wrapped silently around one another, eyes closed, and smiles on their contented, at ease faces; that sort of thing.

A development

Oops.
I was feeling frivolous and free
And wondering what to do next
So I tossed a coin
And bought a plane ticket
Departing in 7 hours
To Mexico
For 9 months
Now I'm shaking a little
After initial excitement
No doubt it'll all go well
And, I mean
What's the alternative?
But still...

Freedom and decisions

People who aren’t free think freedom must be great. They’re not wrong, but they’re not seeing the whole picture. When you have total freedom you’re always in a place of decision. You wake up every day thinking about what you’ll do with your time. Where will you go? Who will you talk to? When?

Day after day, week after the week, month after month, that can be exhausting – and the opposite of that – some routine, some knowledge of what the foreseeable future will contain, no longer always having to create and decide – that can come as a blesséd relief. A job, a course of study, some contract – all things that are binding, and yet…counterintuitively, they bring one liberation.

I’m at that point too much. It makes you weird. And I remember only too well the lovely relaxing feeling of being tied in to something, of being committed, and of ‘losing’ my freedom.

I like it – even if I, sooner or later, rail against it and burst once more into the unknown.

Too many times, sometimes, I find myself singing Dusty Springfield’s “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” and that don’t seem healthy.

Too many times I look around, wondering, what with the world as my oyster, what an earth am I supposed to do with it?

“Supposed”: that’s an interesting word to use. As though there’s something I should be doing, some kind of duty or assigned task – someone else running the show, who could tell me what to do.

I guess there is a part of me that feels like that, even though a casual observation of reality would appear to contradict it.

Then again, there are things that feel ‘wrong’ – and, in tandem, things that feel ‘right’. ‘Right’ is not necessarily what one is ‘supposed’ to do – we can do what we like – but, it would seem to me, ‘feeling right’ is probably what a smart person should aspire to – in the right place, with the right people, doing the right thing – and given that not everything can provide that feeling, that experience, it does appear that choices have to be made.

So, what is one to choose? And how can a man decide? That’s the question. Not, “to be or not to be” but – “what to be, or do, and where to be or do it?”

A certainty in life is that one has to be somewhere: there’s no getting away from that. And one thing that my life seems to be telling me is: I feel better in some places than others.

Hell, I feel downright BAD in some places. And really rather GOOD in others.

Today, I’m in England. I was born in England, and to England I always seem to return. I’m not sure why, exactly: probably out of habit and ease and because there are lots of people here I like, and still a couple of family members alive.

Banking and money and familiarity and such.

So not 100% free, given my habitual return to this land.

I came back at the end of May: I’m not really sure why I did that. I didn’t much want to – I rolled around moaning a bunch on the floor the night I bought my ticket, and came within a whisker of cancelling it – but come back I did, and on the whole it’s been nice. Nice times with good people. None of that crazy despair I experienced in 2015/16. Not really minding anything.

I’ve thought many times I should perhaps just stay here. Maybe even live again in London, where most of my favourite people are.

But, of course, the noise of that city made it quickly unbearable, and nowhere else I’ve been has presented itself as somewhere I could make a possible home.

And, moreso…

I have this strange thing, that doesn’t make any rational sense. It started pretty much immediately upon my return to Europe from Mexico in 2015.

My eyes went bad. I went from having great vision to really struggling to read street signs.

I had to get contact lenses. It was freaking me out, because I had laser eye surgery in 2008, and everything had been great since then.

Interestingly, a very nice optician I talked to suggested it might be stress related. I didn’t feel stressed out, but then, I guess there are stresses that we don’t really notice.

Once, when living in London – this was back in 2010 – I started getting this weird swelling in my face. Doctors provided no illumination – but whenever I thought about it, I felt it was related to my job. I even had dreams that seemed to say as much.

Naturally, when I quit the job, the swelling desisted, and hasn’t come back since.

But that was tolerable: playing with one’s eyesight isn’t. And it was with great relief that, not too long after returning to Mexico last year, I watched as my eyesight quickly improved and notices in grocery stores, children sitting at the back of classrooms came back into focus.

It’s very odd, I know. But, it happened.

And, not only did it happen then, it happened again when I came back to England in May. Walking from the plane. Feeling happy and enjoying the pleasant English orderliness after Mexican free-for-all dust and chaos/exuberance/freedom.

My eyes had gone bad. And I told myself, well, I guess we won’t be staying long.

And every time I’ve sat with someone wonderful, or got into something good, in that moment of thinking, why would I want to leave here? I remember: because I can’t stay. Because something’s telling me this isn’t the ‘right’ place for me right now. Because there’s somewhere else I’m ‘supposed’ to be, where my eyes don’t go bad, and where this barely noticeable stress is absent.

But where is that place? That’s really the question for me. Not what to do or who to be – those things take care of themselves – but where, where, where?

That’s the ticket that gets the ball rolling.

And so, I look at flights every day and try to figure out where I should. I think of Mexico, and look at options there. I think of San Miguel Allende, the lovely writerly town north of Mexico City, and I think of Baja – good ol’ Baja – which puzzles me, but…I do keep dreaming about it, and I do always seem to end up back there, sooner or later.

I also think of Asia, and wonder if I shouldn’t try something new – and about six weeks ago I was a click away from buying a ticket to Malaysia, but a coin came down ‘tails’ instead of ‘heads’ and dictated otherwise.

The six weeks since then I’ve been on a conveyor belt. One friend after another has offered invitations, housesitting gigs, little chunks of work that felt like the right thing to accept. It’s been a nice time. I haven’t minded putting my jetting on hold. I thought there might have been some reason for me to have stayed in England during that time, but nothing’s arisen that I can particularly put my finger on.

Now that conveyor belt period seems to have come to an end, and it’s time once more for the unknown future.

The question is: do I click on that plane ticket that my finger’s been hovering over the past few days? Or do I hold on some more, risk losing it, and see what else transpires?

I don’t know – and yet, at some point, I’ll have to. Otherwise it’s just the interminable going round in circles, and going nowhere at all, while the world still spins and time ticks ever onwards, to old age and the grave.

Time is finite these days: there’s no getting away from that.

Landing in Vancouver and farting

I landed in Vancouver around 11 in the morning and made my way to passport control. Waiting in line for immigration is always a nervy affair for me: when you’ve been deported from the US three times, and had one or two run ins with Canada also, it’s bound to be.

Well, I say “deported three times” – it was actually one deportation and two refused entries, but, for sake of simplicity, I usually lump them all together. It amounts to much the same thing.

The first one was in 1998. I was 22 years-old and spending a glorious summer thumbing it around the western US, hiking through deserts, camping in wild Utah canyon country, whooping it up with drunk Indians, the works. A couple of months of that and I was in heaven – so, naturally, I figured a next logical step would be to jump on a freight train and ride it clear across the Rockies from Montana plains to Seattle fog. I’d ridden one before, earlier in the summer, a five hundred-mile journey all through the night winding up and over the Continental Divide near Helena. It was wonderful, seeing that train curve around the mountain switchbacks as it crossed rickety old high wooden bridges hundreds of feet above crystal clear rushing pine tree creeks, me and the train crew the only souls for dozens of miles, the roads nowhere to be seen, and my youthful feet dangling over the edge and loving every lovely second of it, a dream come true.

You can’t blame a boy for wanting more of that. And so I waited three days to catch a ride out of Havre, up there in the plains not so far from the Canadian border, and once on it, so delirious was I at the joy of the whole thing, I danced and sang and waved at the traffic passing by on parallel US-2 – and probably waved at some off-duty cop, some cop on his way to work, some busybody citizen.

They were waiting for me when we slowed down and shuddered through Shelby, barely a hundred miles into the trip.

They hauled me off and charged me with criminal trespass. Called the nearby border agents. And they told me, being as I’d very clearly overstayed my three-month tourist visa – I’d been there almost two and a half years by then – that I would be on my way home and wouldn’t be allowed back for a minimum of five years.

It wasn’t so bad: a free British Airways flight from Seattle, pissed out of my mind on multiple free booze; and, in any case, I was back in the US just a few months later – OJ was right: back then there simply wasn’t much in the way of linked up computers nor record keeping. I’d flown into Vancouver, decided to take a chance at the border, and the nice officer there, after disappearing with my replacement, differently numbered passport for a good fifteen minutes, had returned with a spanking shining new three-month visa and I was back in the US once more.

I stayed another fifteen months, punctuated and re-legitimised by a couple of trips into Mexico.

It was another groovy, good time. Great friends and great travels. All those people and places I hadn’t seen for such a long time – getting on for eighteen years now.

I’d tried, though – hence the twenty-year ban. I’d flown into Boston back in 2000 – and been shipped back the next day, my five-year ban now doubled.

Airports, I figured, must be more on the ball. So the next year, while on a trip to Canada, I headed once more down to that familiar border south of Vancouver where I’d had my earlier success – but had no such luck this time, post-9/11. An eight-hour interrogation by American officials. A whole load of hassle getting back into Canada. And my ban doubled once more.

This was 2001. Now it’s 2017. Not that long to go. But the itch growing too strong to wait. And the urge for adventure, for doing something outrageous, much more appealing than boring old bureaucracy and shelling out money and waiting in lines and doing what I’m told.

Also, a year ago I’d told a bunch of American friends that, in the completely unlikely scenario that mad-headed Donald Trump would be getting into power, I’d definitely 100% do it, just to piss him off, knowing how much he hates illegals and wants to keep those borders tight.

A flip comment. And no way a supposedly developed nation could contain enough dumb bastard people to vote in a lunatic like that. But they did. And not that I was on that plane to fulfil an off-the-cuff promise to do something crazy because of Trump – and yet…my own urges, that Trump idea, and now OJ and all the visions and dreams…it was all adding up to something I could only describe as “meant to be”.

‘Trump’, by the way, means ‘fart’ where I come from. As in: ‘to trump’ (verb) or ‘did you do a trump?’ (noun) or ‘it smelled like someone had trumped’ (past participle) (I think; never was much good at grammar).

That always makes me chuckle, and I think it’s a shame more people aren’t aware of the true meaning of his name – as it’s also a shame that he isn’t called Peter, like the rabbit, rather than Donald, like the duck.

‘Peter’, you see, is the French verb meaning ‘to fart’.

And, as if by magic – or, rather, so I can manufacture something of a segue – right there in that slowly shambling queue of weary travellers full of airplane food and airplane movies (both of which I love) I felt my arse cheeks parting and a steady gasp of air gently making its way into the outside world, innocent and fresh as a new born babe.

I shuffled away from it. I looked around and wrinkled my nose. I did my best impression of a man who had picked up the scent of another man’s fart and was trying to figure out where it had come from, grimacing disapprovingly that someone would have the audacity and lack of shame to release such a stink in such tight and public quarters.

Raisins, it smelled of. Chewed up raisins and curry. Which was about right, I figured, given I’d eaten half a kilo of Sainsbury’s Basics raisins that morning, and enjoyed a lovely piping hot microwaved airplane vegetarian lentil curry on the flight.

I wondered if it would still be there, lingering and waiting for me, when the queue snaked back around.

It was.

Oh, those poor people! Did any of them suspect? Did any of them know it was me?

But, how could they? There were hundreds of us: it could have been anybody’s anus hole that had opened and squeaked its mystery into existence.

“Trump,” it had said – and then moved on, leaving behind its stink, for the rest of the world to inhale.

I approached a lady sitting in her little immigration booth. She was small, but hot: something about all that uniform and padding and weapons that really does it for me.

The hottest women in the world, of course, are Israeli women soldiers: their ill-fitting pea green uniforms still unable to disguise the loveliness of shapely young bodies; groups of them hanging out at bus stations ready for their weekend leave, masses of lovely Jewish hair flowing like the Jordan; a latté in one hand, a mobile in the other – and, strung across their backs, casual as you like, a massive, beefy submachine gun, all black and oiled and dripping with potential. She stands there laughing and chatting with her friends. She seems so beautiful and sweet. But you just know that she could kick your ass any time she felt like it: throw you like a ragdoll to the ground and stamp her heavy Israeli boot across your throat. Then she’d point that gun in your face – shove its nozzle in your mouth, even – and, uttering guttural Hebrew indecipherables that may well be threats, may well be pleasantries – it’s impossible to tell – give you the biggest boner of your life.

Hot, I tells ya. Incomprehensibly lovely.

But that’s Israel, and that’s a whole other story. This is North America, where immigration officials are generally considered the most unpleasant people on earth, and you’d better tread carefully, lest you find yourself deported, as I invariably do.

She takes my passport and places it facedown on her little scanner. I would give anything to know what information is flashing up on her screen, find out what I need to lie about, where I can be truthful.

“Purpose of visit?” she says.

Probably this is one of the places where I need to tell some lies: probably it’s not so smart to tell her I’ve come to Canada so I can break into America and go visit OJ Simpson because he wants me to write a book about how he and George Bush and some space lizards and Martha Stewart masterminded the whole shebang of 9/11.

Or – who knows? – maybe it is one of those places where honesty is the best policy. Maybe it’ll be like one of those moments in the movies where the cornered protagonist is forced to blurt out the truth and the truth is so ridiculous that all the baddies just laugh and send them on their way.

“Yeah, right,” she’ll say, “good one” – and stamp me in. She’ll wipe a tear from her eye and seek to compose her chortles just in time to pretend to be badass for the next person in line, which won’t be quite quickly enough – which will then cause that person to think they can make a joke, mistakenly, and that’ll lead to them getting into a whole host of shit, deported or jailed or maybe even tasered and left writhing on the floor in having multiple heart attacks and then dead, all because an immigration official for one moment failed to suppress her smile.

Such are the fine lines, the seemingly inconsequential moments of decision, between life and death.

I think better of it. I tell her I’m there to visit some friends, see a bit of the country.

“Can I see your return ticket?” she says.

I reach into my back pocket. I’m all prepared. Those twenty-four hours between buying the flight and getting on board have allowed me to get up to all kinds of innocent deviousness: for when you’ve travelled as much as I have, in the way that I have, you’ve learned a few tricks.

Number one, they like you to have a ticket out of their country. Not only do they not want you staying and, I don’t know, picking fruit or something, but they also don’t understand the idea of freewheeling, of making it up as you go. They, like most people, live in a world of concrete plans and dates that are fixed well into the future. They can’t conceive of a man like me, who lives one day at a time, just like their beloved spiritual leaders long ago told them to do.

I’d go into a travel agents – well, back in the day when I used to go into a travel agents, before I forgot that it was possible to buy things from another human being, face-to-face, rather than clickety-click on a machine – and I wouldn’t know what to say when they asked me the question, “and when do you want to come back?”

What I really wanted to say was: “How should I know? I haven’t even gotten there yet. I don’t know if I’ll like it. I don’t know who I’ll meet, what opportunities might arise. What if I meet the woman of my dreams and want to marry her? What if I get offered a job? What if I bump into someone I hit it off with and decide to go with them to a neighbouring country? Or what if I’m impossibly bored and immediately realise that I’d rather be home in my own comfortable English bed watching the cricket and sipping tea with my pinky raised and godblessing the queen?”

Oh, for the day when we live in a world where you can just rock up to an airport – or a train station, even – and buy a one-way ticket to where you want to go, and it isn’t a three times as expensive as buying one a month in advance, and I’d never have to plan ahead ever again.

But, then again, I don’t do so bad, what with miracle tickets like this one: it does seem that, whenever I need to be somewhere, the ticket is there waiting for me.

Plus, there are always ways around it.

I pull out a piece of paper. It’s a real genuine paid-for airplane ticket for an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Mexico City, departing in a month.

It’s got my genuine name on it. There’s nothing bogus about it. It’s not like one of those photoshopped tickets I sometimes knock up for the megabus, when I’ve left it too long to buy one for a reasonable price.

She checks it out. She’s satisfied by it, and so she should be: like I say, it’s absolutely legit.

But, at the same time, there’s no way I’ll be getting on that plane. You see…

Here’s what you do: Canada wants to see a return flight, but you don’t want to buy one. Except there’s a loophole: for, in Canadian law, you can 100% refund any plane ticket within 24 hours of purchase. So, the morning of your flight, you buy your ticket outta there. It doesn’t matter how much it costs, nor where it’s to – hell, buy a first class ticket to Monte Carlo if you want to feel momentarily Rockefeller – ‘cos you’ll be getting all your money back anyway. Then you land. Then you show it to them and they accept it. Then, when you’re through the other side, you cancel it and – voila – you’re in the nation, on a one-way, free from any obligation to be anywhere in particular on any particular date, when you might much rather be some place else. Just as it should be.

Number two, they sometimes want to see how much cash you have – just to ensure that, once again, you won’t be scampering off straight from the airport to a fruit farm somewhere to earn minimal wage putting peaches into barrels and keeping the economy afloat. So, also in my back pocket, I’ve got a nice printout of my very healthy bank statement, which shows that I’m a moderately well-off white guy just here on a trip to visit his friends and no danger to the fruit-picking industry whatsoever.

Only thing is, it’s totally bogus: after buying this plane ticket out here, I’ve only around three hundred dollars (US) in the bank. But I’m good with photoshop. And it’s easy cutting and pasting numbers, moving a few digits here and there, cranking up the balance till it’s enough to satisfy one of them there ‘normal human beings’ who can’t conceive of being in a foreign country and living on less than a hundred bucks a day with all your hotels and excursions lined up, and a big giant safety net woven from money ready to catch you should anything go amiss.

Those things – thanks to my hitch-hiking youth spent sleeping by the side of the road and existing for months purely on faith and trust and the kindness of strangers – aren’t a problem for me. I’m lucky in some ways. And unlucky in others.

But that, like what happened to me in Israel with those gorgeous Israeli women soldiers, is a whole other story.

“Enjoy your stay,” she says, her eyes already moving onto the person behind me.

Is it just my imagination, or is he grimacing, scrunching up his nose, looking for all the world like a man who’s been walking – nay, wading – through a cloud of invisible brown-green gas these past ten minutes?

Have I been silently trumping more, and not noticing, so focused was I on this final barrier into the great, grand nation?

I stop for a moment and take a whiff. Glance at the guy now standing in front of my tiny lovely woman, and at the people standing behind him.

And, judging by the looks on their faces, it seems that I have.