Not the Vegas Blog

I know, firstly that I haven’t blogged for too long. Secondly, I know that what I’m supposed to write about, and what I suspect people want to hear about, is what I got up to in Vegas. Why wouldn't they? I got invited to an adult club night for ‘free-thinking couples’ for one thing, and that’s just a small fragment of a really mad four days. I’ll get to it, I promise.

The tenacious puppy

But right now I just want to write a bit about the fact that I’m now home again, and I've been out of Berkeley for almost a month, and thinking about that has put all sorts of things in my head; and for the moment writing about Vegas will only remind me that I’m no longer in Vegas, and no-one needs that.

So, I’m at home. And home for me right now involves a never-ending battle of wills with a ten-week old Portuguese water dog. I just spent ten minutes sitting in the kitchen eyeballing him through the back windows as he stood at the top of the garden steps he is too small to climb down, staunchly refusing to sit and thereby allow himself to be lifted.  

After an eventual capitulation I got him inside, wrote the first three sentences of this blog and then had to get up again and forcibly pry one of my father’s summer clogs from his deceptively tiny jaws.

He’s a tenacious little bear, and is not quite housetrained, which means that most of my time in England so far has involved sitting in the kitchen waiting for him to perform his next bodily function inbetween bouts of harassing our intensely world-weary Labradoodle. He is also agoraphobic, and has firmly decided the best place for him to sleep is in the wedge between the bottom of our oven and the floor, where he can quietly chew the flex cable and eat the paint as it strips away under the pressure. But goddammnit, he is a cutie.

Since coming home I went up to my old university to give a talk about blogging, for which I felt vastly unequipped, but everyone was lovely and generous, and I particularly enjoyed the question from the young man who asked whether blogspot was owned by Google; because if it was there was no way he was setting up an account there. Ain’t no way the USA surveillance was getting to him.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but everyone in California is really friendly.”

Somehow not the answer he was looking for.

I miss the friendliness and the happiness more than I could ever have imagined. Even with this wholly unusual heatwave putting some semblance of a smile on everyone’s face, I have never found the London Underground more isolating. Yes, the BART was expensive and slow, and apparently has been completely dysfunctional since I left, but you could always count on at least two entertaining personas on the ride across the bay. People would at least make eye contact, occasionally, instead of sitting in bubbles of festering resentment against everyone else trying to get to work.

I miss feeling productive, having an agenda. Sure it’s the summer holidays and that’s bound to go tits up, but given that my only employment is Puppywatch, at least until I can move back up to Norwich, I’m not surprised that my brain is going soft.

As someone who is only just getting into the ‘not going back’ mourning period, all I can say is that reverse culture shock just expresses itself in strange ways. I sat up way into the night last night watching promotional videos of the Berkeley campus and crying in a deeply self-indulgent manner; and I creeped out a guy on the train last week because he was wearing a San Francisco Giants cap, so I stared at him, glassy-eyed all the way to London Bridge station. I find it hard to write about America- a first attempt at a piece of dissertation writing last week became inexorably tangled in the Golden Gate Bridge suicides- and I get angry with myself, on a regular basis, for every incidence over the past year when I wished myself home again.

It’ll pass. I had much the same experience when I landed back from Ghana, and got over that without too much grief; so I’m sure that in due time I’ll publish something entertaining about that Vegas sex party invitation and the back-of-the-bus coke dealer who wanted to talk to me about Man United. For now though, I’m just going to rescue that tea towel from the puppy, and watch the Bear Territory video one more time.