You can forgive everything for closing at 5:50 in the evening, because what’s that extra ten minutes going to matter? Everyone in town walks around like they got laid off last week, the head-scratching combination of disappointment and distrust-of-outsiders that you usually see from Ron Paul supporters these days. The food’s terrible, but that’s a point of pride, and at least half of the shops are dedicated to selling things that somebody else used to own. Manchester- it’s England’s own private St. Louis.

But at least St. Louis has ribs, right? I’d forgotten what it’d been like to be terribly judgmental of a city and its people after a single night there, and I’m pleased to report that such unfair snap judgments are as rewarding as ever. Manchester- like a gloomier Buffalo.

Oh, that’s unfair. You can’t compare the city to St. Louis first, then rank it unfavorably compared to Buffalo. That’s a good couple dozen notches down the ladder, and for what? Just so I can be a jerk, and for no good reason except that insulting the Mancunians isn’t enough, and I had to take my shots at the St. Louis- um, St. Louisans? St. Lunatics? Somebody help me out here…

Walking around Manchester at night, Joy Division suddenly makes sense. The Smiths, too- spend your formative years in shitty pissing rain amid sad-faced unemployed steelworkers and that’s what you get.

And it’s entirely possible I didn’t see the city’s best light last night, but what the hell? This is, after all, a rush to judgment, and mine is harsh.

So my friend Cindy is visiting from Chicago, and we went up to Manchester yesterday because her friend Ikey, who plays in a band called the Mars Volta, is on tour in the UK. We took the train up there yesterday, hung out in the city some in the evening, and then went to the gig.

I like the Mars Volta, on balance- I’ve seen them at least three times previously, usually with her, and they’re good and rock-y and stuff, lots of noodling, but it’s cool, we can noodle. Last night, tho- I’ve seen some boring shows before, but I’ve never seen a good band sleepwalk through a set like that. It may have been the worst show I’ve ever been to. Everything a band like that gets accused of- wanky pretentious jamming in lieu of songs- was in full effect, utterly devoid of passion and energy. The faces in the crowd struggled to feel like they were getting their £17.50 worth, but by the time I left (which was early, I admit- I was okay for the first half hour, and stuck around for another hour after that in the hope that it would maybe get good, but then I left before the second half of the set), they all looked like a bunch of teenage boys who had been looking forward to the Friday night D&D campaign all week, only to get there and find out that the DM had a date with his cousin’s friend who was visiting from Canada, and his twelve year old brother would be taking his place.

So Cindy and I hung out in the pub behind the venue until it was over, and then she caught up with her friend and I decided to walk back to the hotel, about a twenty minute walk through the deserted Manchester streets.

It’s any other industrial city, from that view. It feels like walking through the shitty purple properties in monopoly, safe and harmless and boring. I stopped at a kebab shop in the City Centre around midnight to get something to eat and waited behind three drunk Mancunians in suits with cokehead noses, grousing about work and the fact that none of them were getting laid that night.

And that was that, really. We had an early bus ride on the Megabus back to London, and it’s all in the past now. I’m skipping the Mars Volta show at the Brixton Academy and leaving Cindy to fend for herself, after last night’s disappointment. I expect I’ll keep up with writing here more regularly when Cindy’s back in America, and I expect the post-partum depression of having the novel finished will pass at some point, too. In the meantime, expect cranky, sporadic writing from me, and feel free to skip it entirely.