midnight motorway noises

It is very easy, with all the anti-American (or, more precisely, anti-Bush) rhetoric among friends, on the television and in the newspapers in this country, to believe ourselves right again. Or not as wrong.

I am so often guilty of feeling better-than, and therefore good enough. We become so sidetracked by the ritual mockery of our Atlantic neighbour - stereotyping her citizens and chastising that person's mindboggling apathy and unerring stupidity - that we neglect the self-deprecation that we're supposed to be so good at and get tangled up in betterness rather than betterment.

I watched Taking Liberties on YouTube but I'm sure it could be obtained through more approved channels. It doesn't present much that you wouldn't know already, but it's refreshing and alarming to see it packaged without the obligatory butamerica'sstillworse wrapping.

In the permanence of absence I forgot how unsettling the other could be.

I wind the film back, watching the negative frames disappear until nothing's left but that single image - by the water, late autumn.

I want them back. Desperately I grapple with the coil of stills - nails and teeth hack frantically at the casing but the pictures are blistered and burnt from the heat of that single image and the only copies are held so far away in the distance that I wonder if they even still exist.

Fuck it. I drop the film to the ground and stamp down hard and close my eyes tight as the plastic cracks beneath me.