My breast friend

Well, here we go again. I am writing this at 4.30am because my body clock refuses to adapt on command. I landed in San Francisco at around midnight last night after a tidy little 11hr flight and went to bed at 4am, which is actually only 8pm local time. Needless to say I am now wide awake as it is midday, aka 4am. The people in my dorm must think i'm a complete freak. Speaking of the dorm, I wish cameras could take pictures of smells, if it could then I'm pretty sure that it would look something like this.... 

This was in the communal toilet

It is not pleasant being back in a dorm, but hopefully I'll adjust again soon enough. My room is a 2 x 2 bunk bed little number, and the beds are uncomfortably close together. When I was getting stuff out of my backpack at 4am my ass was about 12cm away from the guy on the bunk next to me's face, not a pleasant thing to wake up to. It is also about nine thousand degrees in there, but if you open the window then you may as well be sleeping on a bunk bed on the hard shoulder of the M4. Moan moan moan. 

Anyway, I vowed to a friend that in my first post of this next trip away that I would write up something that I wrote last week, just to remind myself whilst i'm away that if things do get a bit shitty, then they could always be worse - here we go...


I don't want to tell anyone this, so I may as well just tell everyone. It is just six days until I depart for the US and at this point i'm probably supposed to be feeling excited. Well I do not. My house is falling to bits and I have to evict two tenants, another is six weeks behind with their rent; my tax return has not arrived so I have to complete it online in peru, puyfect. I probably could and should have sorted this all months ago, but that would just be taking the easy option. But the best part of it is that i have found a lump on my chest, and following some trusty research on the internet I have discovered to my surprise that male breast cancer does actually exist. Ever the hypochondriac I have self-diagnosed myself with this, although I am still holding out mild hope that I have just battered myself whilst drunk on a night out or something. Either way it is stressing me out to fuck, as I am due to leave in just a few days and if it needs testing then I am not making the flight. 

No one who develops cancer should ever feel humiliated by it, but there is something ever so slightly humiliating about the idea of male breast cancer. Apparently 400 men a year are diagnosed with the condition in the UK, so whilst the chances of me having it are pretty ruddy slim, there is enough of a possibility to cast a shadow of doubt in my mind. So I am going to embrace the humiliation of a hypochondriac turning up at the doctors with a self-diagnosis of male breast cancer, as I would rather this wasn't playing at the back of my mind. Heading out of the UK for nine months I will have something far more valuable than dignity, and that is peace of mind. I hope by the time people read this I will be basking in the Californian sunshine and I can just chalk the experience up to my expanding backlog of faux-infliction's that essentially amount to wasting a GP's time (which thankfully is not a criminal offence, although it probably should be). But seriously, anyone who knows me knows what my family and myself have been through with this terrible disease, and it is an illness that I respect enough to have checked out. Yet still I find myself chugging away happily on another cigarette as I write this in the midst of a cancer scare. A paradox like this truly does define stupidity. 

So I went to the doctors and it turned out to be just a cyst; I feel like I can now fully relax and get on with enjoying myself. The stress involved at that point of the week was pretty high, but it's funny how quickly these things are forgotten (time for another burn). Not much else of note has really happened to report back. The doorbell of this hostel keeps going and as I am the only person up and around I keep letting them in. There have been some of the fruitiest characters that I have ever seen (baring in mind it is 5.21am). I just let in a bloke who was about 5ft tall and was wearing a pair of denim hotpants and a stripy vest. Whilst San Francisco is supposed to be a very liberal place with a big gay population, I'm fairly sure that this bloke had just been out to watch the footy with the lads, followed by a curry and a fight. I guess all of the poppers and bumming probably explains the weird shaped poo's being left in the toilets. Anyway, enough of the toilet talk.Today I am probably going to hire a bike and have a tour round. There are a small amount of hills in San Francisco (43 in a seven square mile I'm reliably informed by the minibus driver yesterday), so it will be nice to get a bit of exercise. Laters gays