Mullocker's Travels #9

There was a girl, in Portland. I arrived there on the slow boat from Vancouver, my eyes still stinging, hands blistered, clothes threadworn and lifeless. I was close to the bottom, emotionally. And then I saw her, sunbathing outside a 7-11, flip-flops flipping and flopping girlishly as she waved her toes at passing cars.

She looked beautiful, ineffably so, like a really hot chick in a nightdress. She believed in me. Her eyes were deep as a distant galaxy. And when it rained, she wore a woolly hat against the cold.

We were inseparable until she found the key to the handcuffs. And then I had to leave, because as much as we love each other, Portland doesn't have a baseball team, and I have to follow my heart. And my heart belongs to baseball, specifically to the Aguascalientes Railroadmen of the Mexican Summer League. Luckily, they play right next to a train station.

I have to change in Albuquerque.

Mullocker's Travels #5

I reached Shangri-La just at the point where the singer from Led Zep, John Something, sings "My Shangri-La beneath the Summer Moon". To achieve this, we had to wait just outside for twenty-three minutes, because our fingers were too numb from exposure to operate the fast-forward button on the fiddlePod. And by 'we', of course, I mean myself - the Bould Mullocker - and my companions Shaman John (Grand High Priest of the Church of Lepton) and Sherpa John (The Mizo Elvis).

Shangri-La is nice, but the food is a bit shite and you're not allowed chew gum. The day after our arrival, the summer solstice fell, fell hard, taking out the world's last mating pair of tail-backed pterosaurs, and John said: "Hey! Today is the longest day of the year!" John responded: "Let's drink all day!" but they had run out of beer two days earlier, celebrating the opening of the storied Utopia's first drive-thru Burger King. We loaded the gear back into the Corvette and headed North, hoping to reach Astana by morning.

Mullocker's Travels #2

I returned to the airport. The fetid mass of people, their glazed expressions and unrefined trolley-pushing a vision of supermarket purgatory, assailed my sensitive disposition and almost made me turn back. Valuable insight gleaned: transport hubs are often crowded with people, some of whom are smelly. I wrote this insight on the back of a map of South America, somewhere near where Japan would be if the map were a globe. I used a blunt B4 pencil just in case the map really was a globe and my depth perception had been affected by my sock-hat.

I was wearing a sock-hat because I had no more room in my satchel. The sock hat consisted of 14 pairs of socks, the ankle ends all tied together in a bun with masking tape and elastic bands, the toe ends splayed out in each direction like the tentacles of a 28-legged cotton octopus. This was variously described as "weird" (little girl), "stu-pah" (local street urchin), "can we take picture" (recently arrived Japanese tourists) and "a blatant contravention of the spirit of the 'one item of carry-on luggage per person' rule" (man in sweet shop).

I decided to get on the next plane to anywhere beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet. I devised a scheme to give each letter an equal chance of being chosen, with a knock-out tournament of rock-paper-scissors, beginning with matchups of pairs of consecutive letters, until one was left. However, it became apparent towards the end of round 2 that 26 is not an appropriate number for this system, so a decision was made to make the twelve least frequently used letters engage in a series of preliminary rounds, competing for two available places in the last 16. My mission to discover the twelve least frequently used letters of the alphabet will begin shortly in the airport bookshop, to which I am presently headed.

Mullocker's Travels #1

My life thus far has been insufficiently Zappa. I have therefore decided to embark upon an outrageous road trip the like of which has heretofore existed only in the youthful dreams of great men. An account of this adventure will be edited for brevity, decency and dramatic effect, proofread thoroughly, and presented here for posterity's benefit and the reader's acclaim.

I come to the realisation that my life has been insufficiently Zappa through a brief but productive exposure to his musical legacy on Compact Disk, and, chiefly, through a brief but glorious multi-sensory experience of his music played in the flesh by an ensemble including his son Dweezil (who has curly hair), Napoleon Murphy Brown, and Julie Gonzales.

I began my trip by getting the bus to the airport. The bus was more of a coach really, and coloured blue. My post-concert trip to the airport resulted in the accrual of the following insight: many airports are closed at 2am. I went home and resolved to return the following morning.