The Style Merchants of Kiev

The first thing you notice when you get to Kiev, after you've crossed the bridge into town across the river, with the beautiful golden spires of the city in the distance, and after you notice how the women are certainly the worlds most beautiful.....The first thing you notice is that all the men seem to have bought all their clothes from the charity shops of Dortmund and Sardinia.

Last night, i wasn't allowed into the club, because my shoes weren't right. So we took some photos of the shoes that 'were' right....

My not acceptable shoes on the left, with a selection of Kievs finest

So today i have a task to find a nice pair of blue suede slip ons or white crocodile skin pointy toed numbers. Then i'll get in....

DAY 2

Trying to find the cheapest and nastiest footwear in the whole country

It was a tough struggle but i managed to buy a rather offensive pair of white pointed leather slip-on shoes. They were like 1970's golf shoes gone mad.  Needless to say, after that i swanned into any bar or club i wanted to, with local ladies swooning at my (white and pointy) heels.

What really gets my goat is - why don't any of the guides tell you about the 'awful shoes' rule in Kiev? Guys, don't even think about turning up here with Timberlands or normal shoes, it's just not going to cut it. If you want to really get into the vibe, a cream suit and a manbag also helps.

I'm glad this blog at least is doing some service by warning people about this local cultural nuance.

Brothers in Arms - me with my new 'Ukraine style' beside some random Ukranian who takes this type of footwear seriously.

Ok, so as for the feel of the city, its changed a lot over the past 5 years, for the better or worse. Back then, the only guys who spoke English were the Mafia and the Hookers, and a Manbag held your gun. but now the city's cleaned its act up and has, like Tallinn back in 2004, become a haven it seems for 2nd rate western men looking to score the woman of their dreams. Amusingly, this was exactly what was happening last night in Vodka Bar (if you don't believe me about the people check this )  where some black DJ guy was up on the stage, acting like a superstar, and telling all the girls he was from .....York. No, not New York, (which would have impressed drunk 18 year olds i'm sure) but. York. In Yorkshire. Fortunately for him, I think the locals considered the two to be similar.

Ok...i'll do a proper report on Kiev after the holiday, now its time to shoot AK47's, go to Chernobil and play Poker with the local Mafiosi (oh, and visit lots of medeival churches of course)

Ayahuasca comes to Estonia

Is it just me, or has 'spiritualism' swept the western world ?

Some people might argue that it's just preparation for Dec 2012 when the world ends as we know it, but others, including me would say something like

'thats a lot of crap, made up by people playing flutes and wearing aqua, or with silly names like 'Storm' (like this girl) '  

Well, i haven't seen any actual Mayan experts saying anything bad about it, just a lot of ponytailed twats pontificating on youtube (like here )

Talking of which, Ayahuasca is again coming to Estonia this summer. Despite having no knowledge of the Equadorian Shaman, or indeed if it's a new age scam (it seems a bit dodgy to me) i think i'll do a 'top up' for one night, just to see how different it is to do it in Estonia, and not in a normal shamanic setting.

Probably this is similar to taking crack cocaine at a techno rave but hey..what the hell, it can only kill me...

I just watched an interesting film on the subject tonight, ( here ) which reminded me a lot about how lucky i was to do it with a decent bunch of shamans (blue morpho) who helped me birth my demons naturally, instead of using a backstreet abortionist like this guy seemed to.

Anyway, more on this later...its not until July the 1st, so i have a couple of weeks to continue enjoying the usual shallow pleasures,  before joining the real and nightmare world that exists inside all of us.

You are not You - Zombie Nations

(I feel i must write something down here before  i go crazy. Feel free not to read on, it's just the ramblings of a madman....)

So i had a thought, on the other days 'wake up its above zero degrees and not raining' run, here in Glasgow Scotland, about where actually do our personalities come from? i.e. what makes you, you?

 I'd been thinking about this ever since i lost my personality in an Ayahuasca session (see here )  albeit temporarily. I still was around, i just wasn't me any more. My ego, my self had gone awol.

So when someone comes to you and says 'well you can't say that because no-one says that anymore' or 'you can't call him that anymore, its not cool'   Then, dear friend feel free to smile, as that person is no more than an empty husk, mimicking an opinion that his environment made him think is correct. He or she doesn't know what they are saying is correct any more than a dog knows to sit when he's told.

Back in the old days, when people hunted in tribes and there was no TV, no schools, mass media, or internet blogs to mould and programme peoples personalities, people did things differently. Your average tribe had a belief system that they were born into, and you didn't really need to be witty and charming to woo the love of your life into bed, you just did it. You didn't have a personality. Simple.

Skip on a few generations, and you have the all encompassing power of mass religion. Think about how people exposed to hardcore Judaism, Islam or Christianity differ in personality from you, simply because thats what they have been exposed to, thats what they reflect.

But now, in the post monothist west, from the very day you are born, there are competing value systems attacking you and attempting to get you to 'join their tribe' - and most of them not very good for you. This means that nowadays, everyone has an Ego. A 'personality'. Or do you?

Lets look at a few things that mould a personality -

1. The majority of the population in some countries still have an idea that 'well i'm American/Scottish/Canadian/Japanese/English so i should act decently (throwback from organised religion?) but what of Latvians? Estonians? Moldovans? Russians? Chinese? do you guys think you should act a certain way because of where you are from? (can you imagine it.....i'm Nigerian so i feel i should scam you somehow)

2. One other main influence on people is still the family, and the upringing. 'i cant do it because its the way i was brought up' is a common excuse i've had from nice girls who i've tried to kiss, since time immemorial.

3. Religion. This doesn't apply to most people in the west - since there is a moral vacuum, which is either taken up by fake 'consumer religions' like Satanism or Scientology or Wiccan and whatever the bad guys will make up soon with media backing to brainwash the masses into Armageddon (did you ever read 'ape and essence' by Aldius Huxley? the world gets nuked and the survivors end up worshipping the devil)   Anyway, as followers of  Reverend Jim Johnson will tell you (he led the infamous 'cult of the damned' where they drank arsenic laced 'kool aid' in Guyana and they all died)  It can be an all powerful influence on people's personality, far stronger than 1 and 2, and as your average suicide bomber will tell you, far more dangerous. Basically when it gets like that, it's just simple hypnotism.

4. Mass Media and the resultant peer pressure. The lack of religion in the west, and the lack of influence of 1,2 and 3 has led to a generation of 'lost children' looking for something to believe in, looking for something to do.

Total cannon fodder for the mass media.

This is the new religion, and its agenda serves as direction for millions. This is where your goatee bearded clown at a dinner party will pretend to defend the right of women to go to work naked if they so wish. Not because he's thought it through, because he was hypnotised by a documentary on it, and it was presented by a 'guy like him'

Children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable, since often their idiot parents are either divorced, never married, or don't care enough, so they get the hardest sell into the system. Peer pressure to conform with that ensures a vast unpaid police force to keep the fashion/message like this or like that.

If you aren't 'on message' you are nobody. Just look at smoking and drinking and as a teenager. Pressure is enormous to do it, but why you are doing it, nobody actually knows.

So if we have a generation of adults weaned on TV rather than values, then what? their 'personalities' are simply reflections of what marketing hypnotists want them to be. Easily malleable Zombies - a marketing mans dream. If you don't believe me, go and ask the opinion of anyone in the rat race - middle managers, council workers, office receptionists, shopkeepers....

Sadly, and frustratingly, you'll soon be able to pidgeonhole them to the point of predicting how the rest of their lives will go, because their whole pointless lives are merely a reflection of what is around them - i.e. mass media and what their peers think of them (with, if they are lucky, the dwindling semblance of an upbringing)

So, unlike 100 years ago - who controls the mass media controls the world.

So what if the agenda of the (very few) owners of the mass media was malign?

Right now we see the US mass media brainwashing a whole country to forget about them stealing all their money. And that Libya is a bad dictatorship all of sudden (since they're pulling out of Iraq and Afghanstan, a new bogeyman is needed to distract the populace from their current bankruptcy. )

And who loses here - the poor average Libyan in the street, who's economy is being ravaged because of NATO intervention, thats who.

So you ask an average Joe american his opinion (i have done so, with everyone i met at the casinos there) and it seems his 'personality' is so non-existant that he's quite ok to turn up at 'ground zero' , and chant 'USA' like a zombie, when the news tells him that the culprit is dead.

In other words - he is so dead inside that he will act on something that the media tells him to act on, not on something he has experienced or has any knowledge about.

And if the media chose not to report about something (for example the total media blackout of Ron Paul's Presidential Campaign) then he remains blissfully ignorant in his world of hamburgers, baseball and Oprah Winfrey.

So there you have it. The fact that you follow Rangers or Manchester City, like healthy eating, and enjoy Yoga, and the odd glass of white wine, is not your opinion, or your personality, it's a product of your influences and the environment around you. Your choice of friends is relative to mutual media exposure (i.e. you'll be drawn to people who reaffirm your belief system) , of partner, of love, is merely a chemical reaction combined with environmental factors, as it the number of children you have. So, for most of us, our ability to make decisions of our own are limited to nothing more important than the menu in Starbucks.

But this leads to a deeper thought - who controls that environment ultimately? Are we, the sheeple, being sheparded into a new age, that we don't have control over? Has this happened before, i.e did we have an 'advanced civilisation' , some atlantis, before, and a 'fall of man' into barbarism resulting from a few people enslaving the population and ultimately destroying it and themselves? will it be different this time? The Hindu Vedas, the story of Gilgamesh, from thousands of years ago, are all about nuclear war in the dim and distant past.

The only conclusion I can come to on this quite spurious philosophical argument is that perhaps there is somewhere in every human a seed of genetic memory from all history, hidden away in the DNA (where we, in theory hold a vast shared memory of our history since we were apes and before) and so such a vast range of perspectives can come out, that now and again throws up genius, and truly inspirational people who can direct us in a way that is positive for the human race and doesn't involve destabilising and then economically enslaving innocent 3rd world countries. Maybe thats our only hope.

Anyway, any contrary opinions welcome.

On that note i'm off outside, its a beautiful day, for a change...

Niagara Falls, Fair City of Fat People and Sex Offenders (and an Angry Waterfall)

The Niagara is kinda cute when its angry

So this time I spent my Buffalo visit staying a rather pleasant and inexpensive guesthouse called wanderfalls  in Niagara Falls, USA, which does private rooms and small dorms (with about 6 people max) for about $25 a night, including pancakes and coffee.  I don't know about you, but I much prefer staying in hostels or some kind of similar thing than soulless chain hotels, so i met some great guys to have a beer with, run, and explore the wonderful City of Niagara Falls.

Niagara Falls is of course famous for having the famous waterfall on its doorstep. It's also a working class suburb of Buffalo, which is a surprisingly good looking city (despite an Estonian style climate) If you are visiting Niagara Falls, most people go to the Canadian side, which is much more prosperous and geared up for tourism, with casinos, hotels, big viewing platforms, a much nicer view (of Horseshoe Falls, the bigger falls) and all the cheesy tourist things (you know the 'Ripley believe it or not, the 4d cinema, all that jazz which i've never seen anything interesting about personally)

Another 'what am i doing here' moment

The US side is mostly an industrial town of about 90,000 people, which grew up on the river business, with aluminium works etc. as the main employer. Now a lot of thats gone, the town is based round one large casino hotel, the Seneca, which is actually quite nice, but has sucked the life out of the town itself.

If you're looking for the real 'Niagara' experience, then the main 'life' is on 3rd Street, just off main street between Main Street and the Casino Hotel. Im afraid it's seen better days, but there is a good wine bar restaurant imaginatively named 'Wine on 3rd' some 'fish fry' and pizza places, and a few bars/clubs dotted throughout the street. I'd suggest not walking too far off this street up the street numbers, it's a bit dodgy at night sometimes. This Niagara link tells you more about local eating/drinking options.

So me and one South African guy, no stranger to urban violence, had a few beers in the awful 'Hard Rock Cafe' (there is one of these and also a 'Starbucks' downtown where all the hotels are. Thats about it.)  and decided to hit a club  ('Ultra Lounge' on 3rd Street) for a taste of life in Niagara Falls. There certainly was a selection of ladies, eager to speak to the 'new kids in town' but hell...talk about wide loads! It's a real shame because some of the girls were very pretty, just when it gets below the waist and....woooop it's like a 35 yr old Spanish woman after 5 kids. I don't know what these girls are eating but it looks like its supersize....

I love the water this colour, was tempting to jump in

Anyway, the bars, I can safely say won't appeal to most except those with a taste for redneck men, or the larger ladies, so my clear recommendation is to walk across the Rainbow Bridge to Canada and there are loads of bars and clubs, it's more like a mini las vegas but at least there are a lot of choices. Otherwise head down to Buffalo and either go to 'Bar Street'  (Chippewas St in the downtown) for rednecks, dance clubs, frat girls, under-agers, or the western half of Allen Street, if you crave a more Bohemian/Live music vibe.

About the sex offenders, the owner of the Wanderfalls was nice enough to tell us that Niagara Falls houses the largest number of sex offenders in the region. So maybe not a great place to set up with your young family ;o)

One great saving grace about Niagara is the River. You can run all the way from the falls, along the path, down a few miles to the whirlpool park at the other end of town. The river is majestic. I ran along the path there just after some heavy rain and the anger and danger of the place was tangible.

€25,000 actually gets you a not bad house here (free plug for www.abbotsinchcapital.com )

Mid- Life Crisis ahoy !

On another note, the good news was though that i seem to be fully recovered and fit as a fiddle.

With 8 months until my 40th birthday, i expect my mid-life crisis will kick in and a rapid move back to dating girls too young by far, a motorbike, followed by redemption in the form of a swift marriage with children soon after....

The bad news is that 've now been told i'm not allowed to do the 1000 mile run in Alaska until i've done the 340mile one, so i'm 'downgrading' to that one this year. To date no Scotsman has finished the 1000 miler on foot i'm told,   but one Scot is doing it this year - i guess if he finishes at least i'll have a time to beat the next year.

Roddinghead (Road) Revisted

It was one of those lovely May days in Glasgow where it swiftly gyrates between warm rain and sunshine and the clouds move fast like you see in some of these arthouse movies when its a dream sequence.

So i decided to test how fit i still am and took a long run up through my old haunts in the suburbs near my parents house.

What was interesting (at least for me) was the story that some streets tell - I was thinking this as i ran along Roddinghead Road. Roddinghead Road is one of those new money streets peopled by an assortment of families who are rich as hell but immensely vulgar (usually indians, greeks, italians, arabs, the less classy Jews, and of course proletariat who've done well - basically the type of people who don't get into the Golf Club up here)

 The typical 'thing to do' if you make a lot of money quickly and are ill-bred, is to buy an old pile on this street, demolish it (or if you feel particularly rich and vulgar you buy the house next door too and demolish that to make an even bigger plot) then you build an extremely ugly but enormous house, with the aim of showing off to the people next door how stupidly rich you are. Sadly the formerly lovely avenue of Roddinghead Road is full of these nasty 'Pondarosa' style carbunkles.

You can really read the story of the current times here -  On a road of say 40 houses, while of course most are still solid looking and deuce despite the numerous interlopers, there were McMansions for sale (foreclosed?), empty McMansions with long grass (abandoned?), and at the end a large empty space where some chancer had demolished the house, with the intention I suppose of showing off his timeshare/drugs/real estate/football player money by building some monster sized monument to his working class roots. But since the grass was already grown long there, perhaps after knocking the house down, he lost his money as quick as you could say 'negative equity'.

 Fortunately, for Roddinghead Road, the times of fast easy money are gone, and who knows, in time these streets will recover from is rash of vulgar palaces built in the last 20 years. But for now, despite there being no apparent recession in the rest of Glasgow, this tells me what i already suspected - the easy buck has gone now, and won't be back for a long time.

But with easy loans gone, where will the new businesses be? where will that brace of chancers and barrow boys who always seem to manage to make it ? Guys like Alan Sugar or Richard Branson? I'm sure the younger generation of confident and energetic are a lot better than on the 'apprentice' show in real life. However - we're only now just at the beginning of the great unwinding of the credit bubble so with no money available, only the real deals will pull through, and these guys (I hope) wont be building crappy but enormous homes on Roddinghead Road. Maybe they'll even demolish a couple and build decent homes.

I'll drop up there in 5 years time and report...

Post MDS depression and the Idatarod Invitational 1000miler

Now i think i see what happens to guys who've been fighting in the front line and then get back to normality. When you push your adrenilin button to a certain level, then your life is never and can never be the same, making it impossible to adjust back to the banality of the real world. The unimportant cares and worries of normal people mean nothing and people and life becomes depressingly tedious. Thats why they do daft things like blow up government buildings.

So how to cure it?

Ok i have an idea, but it probably wont work. I've been experimenting this last year with making my life around me as unstable as possible, in order to test my inner stability, i.e. my ability to lead a relatively sane business and normal life while at the same time not having a home, or any money, for example. So the next level here must be to totally cut off from the world for 25 days and see if my sanity survives.

Rather than settling down and getting a volvo and a house in the country, i've agreed to walk the 1000mile  (1600km) long 'Idatarod Invitational'.

It's set in Alaska in February. Some people cycle it but i think walkng will be harder. It gets to minus 50. You sleep rough and you carry a sled with your supplies and survival gear.There are no rescue helicopters or support. Or signposts.Just me and the harshest environment in the world. I will however be joined by two worryingly insane scandinavians though, and we hope to add to the 9 people who have so far completed walking this race in its entire history, ideally without losing my nose to frostbite.

 The real test will be to not go insane. My fellow adventure Jarmo (who finished the Marathon Des Sable on crutches) brought up the subject - 'As you might know the mental trauma is the ultimate fun/pain in the event. Regarding the fun the previous consecutive winner when seeing the finishing line after nearly running this 35 marathons had felt that he can´t finish yet and started backfiring as turned around and started going back to the direction he was coming from. He was hospitalized from the mt. '    I dont know....maybe hes still in a hospital..

A random guy who got lost for 4 days during the race

i think ill share with you a part of the application form for the race....

I fully realize the dangers of participating in a winter ultra-race held in the Alaskan wilderness during winter conditions, and fully assume the risk associated with such participation, including but not limited to the following dangers: Hypothermia, frostbite, wildlife encounters such as moose, wolves or dogs, equipment failure, inadequate safety equipment, weather conditions ,freezing temperatures and extreme cold and the possibility of serious physical and /or mental trauma and injury, including death, associated with winter athletic competition. I also acknowledge and assume the risk that I may become injured or incapacitated in a location where it is difficult or impossible for me to receive medical aid in time to avoid physical injury or even death.'

Now THATS what im talking about !!! I know from the experience of the MDS that its easy to laugh at these things from the comfort of your sofa, while you actually find yourself crying in the race when you think about how stupid you were to think it would be a doddle. But us humans, were pretty tough creatures you know, we can put up with a lot more than reality tv and soap operas.

there is a shorter 340mile race but id say thats for pansies. But heres a funny link about a guy who gets lost on it. Now how the hell do you train for a 1000mile race in the cold, just as its getting to summer? Well im going to walk to Vapiano and get a pizza, thats for starters...