Death and Brexit

        A couple of days ago my Mum tagged me in a post on Facebook, she'd found something about an Instagram account called @TravellingCars, made by a girl called Kim Leuenberger, who has been travelling around the world for the last five years taking pictures of toy cars in amazing places and situations. This Leuenberger girl has almost 50,000 followers, and has been featured on the official Instagram page – my Mum tagged me because she knows I've been doing a similar thing with The Rocker. What she didn't know was that I'd already heard of Kim's page, contacted her, and met up with her in London for a few drinks and lunch one afternoon a few weeks earlier.
        YOU LOSE MUM! TOO SLOW!!!
        Dickhead.

        I am under absolutely no illusions that what I've been doing with The Rocker is anything other than pointless and stupid. Aside from the fact that the stupidity is the reason I love it so much, I've also always thought that it's not really the particular THING that I, or any person, decides to dedicate their time to that is necessarily important. I could be spending my time taking pictures of birds, or trees, or earlobes, or collecting underwear, or doing something really indefensible like HAIRDRESSING for fuck's sake – the activity itself isn't important.
        What's important is that, as a person, I'm putting effort into something. Anything. We are all full of an infinite well of passion, but for that passion to be visible we need to pour it into something: a cup, a shoe, a dustbin, ANYTHING! Just to remind us that it's still there.

        These are my convictions, and I was hoping they were shared by the rest of the world, or at least by one Kim Leuenberger, when I emailed her on the 15th of June after a friend from Liverpool (IMAGINE!!) linked me to her Instagram. I emailed asking for help. Help with what? Who fucking knows man. My problem went something like this:
        I found this toy car on a playground in May, and planned on writing about it as a way of distracting myself from my imminent departure from London. The idea driving (teehee) the whole thing was supposed to be that you can tell who someone is based on the people they choose to surround themselves with, so rather than write about myself directly, I'd take a literary snapshot of my life in London by writing about the people I care about in this city who make up my life right now. I got a few posts in and realised that had absolutely nothing to do with Toy Cars, and the dawning of that lost, “what am I even talking about?” feeling was swift, and brutal, like when you realize you've paid for an awful haircut, from a stupid hairdresser, and now you're STUCK!

        So I asked Kim if she wanted to meet up because “HEY look at this we both enjoy taking pictures of our Toy Cars isn't that fun! We should do that together sometime, or at least meet up and exchange notes PLEASE HELP ME MY IDEA IS FADING I'M LOST AND ALONE there is no one here who understands me.” – if you really want to have a bit of fun with this blog, imagine me whispering that last part after the caps, maybe behind some sort of Door, like a Leader of The Resistance. Yeah!
        I was hoping that the sheer gushing intensity of the email I sent Kim – complete with Rogue Capitalization and plenty of rambling asides – would convince her that I was an individual worth meeting in person. We chatted for a few days in long, impassioned emails, and after I was finished imaging our wedding and future life together, we agreed to meet up for lunch, which passed without incident, before we hugged an amicable farewell and went our separate ways.

        There is something unmatchably exciting about meeting a new person, and talking to them for a good amount of time. A few hours is really all you need, there's enough time in there for both of you to judge whether the two of you are working on similar wavelengths. Even a series of emails will do. Any type of free, open conversation with no agenda and no ulterior motives. Those conversations are some of the most invigorating and enjoyable moments in life, and they happen all too rarely, because as much as we all love them, no one has any idea where they come from.
        The trick is finding a good excuse: a good friend of mine from Paris told me he used to always carry a corkscrew so that on long afternoons spent drinking by The Seine, he had reason to spark conversations with people around him. That's kind of half the reason I still smoke occasionally, it's the reason I love working in the coffee industry and searching out new coffee shops to find those virgin conversations. It's the purpose of cocktail bars, and book clubs, and football, and pretty much incidental activity you can think of where people go out, try half-heartedly to do a thing, and sit around afterwards swapping details.
        People want to talk to each other.

        So here's my idea: I'm giving The Rocker away.
        I'm going to give it to Brenda – of course – and ask that she give it to someone else, and they'll give it to someone else and etc... I've done as much as I can do with this thing. I've taken as many stupid photos as I have in me, and written a few decent stories, and now it's time to push my car out into the world, and see if anything comes back.
        What I would love, more than anything, would be if whoever Brenda gives the car to reads the few stories I've written on this blog, and then emails me for a chat. Wouldn't that be the coolest thing? Sending out a little message into the world in the form of a Toy Car I found in a playground one midnight two months ago.
        I would love if they contacted me, but even if they don't, it doesn't matter. I'm sending The Rocker out into the world to be Passed between People, and hopefully if this initial Push is strong enough, that journey will last well the glorious European Summer I'm writing from right now. The fulfilment of a Promise that two months ago was only taken on faith. I've brought this idea to a conclusion.
        And I got to shit pointlessly on hairdressers twice in the process hahaha...
        I mean come on, seriously, they're idiots. What a useless non-profession, I've cut friends' hair – AND MY OWN HAIR – more times than I can count, and I've done it drunk, and high, and never had to use some special basin with a hole for your head in it or some lame elastic neck-cloth or two-hundred dollar scissors. NONE of that dumb shit garbage. I haven't seen the movie, but I can see why the Demon Barber of Fleet Street started killing people, what a pitiful existence – a hairdresser is just a shit therapist with scissors.

        Hahahahahah. Three times.

Peace, Taco.