Holi

It's Saturday afternoon and we're heading for something called Holi. This was Bess's idea. Holi is a traditional Hindu festival celebrating the arrival of spring, amongst other things. Bess has a number of co-workers from India and Nepal, and one of them told her about it. Having previously lived in Coventry - which enjoys a substantial Asian presence - I'm a little surprised that I myself have never heard of it.

'They throw paint at each other,' Bess explains.

I called my mother earlier in the day, it being her birthday. I told her we would be going to a Holi celebration.

'That's the one where they throw paint at each other,' she said.

We leave around two, taking the kid along because it sounds messy and therefore the sort of thing he will probably enjoy; plus it will be good to scrape him off the screen for a couple of hours.

Bess follows directions on her smartphone, leading us to what resembles a scout hut lost somewhere in the leisurely tangle of San Antonio's suburbs. There is a stall set up next to the hut, although we can't tell what goods are on offer, and there are just three other people here, one of whom is of either Indian or Latino ancestry. Our source seemed to think it would all be kicking off around two, but this was apparently an optimistic estimate.

We go home, then return around four. This time the roads are crammed, and there's a cop waving vehicles on towards the associated parking lot. We're at a crawl, so Bess drives off elsewhere, two, three streets away until we find a place to park. It's outside someone's home but hopefully they won't mind seeing as all their neighbours also have stranger's cars lined up along their stretch of road. We get out and walk.

Figures approach from the other end of the street. The first is a guy covered from head to foot in bright primary colours. It's a peculiar sight and he smiles because it's funny.

Once, as a student, I was on the way to some house party in a neighbouring village with my friend Carl, who began to describe a scenario in which bewildered figures emerge from the fog ahead of us, blackened faces with their clothes still smoking. This, he explained, would indicate that we were about to attend the greatest house party of all time. I've honestly never been wild about house parties, but the image has stayed with me and I am reminded of it right now. Rainbow coloured survivors stagger towards us and we can hear twangy Indian pop music in the distance. This is not what you expect to see in some average urban street. It's like the polychromatic Bollywood version of that zombie apocalypse you always hear about.

'I guess we missed it,' I say, basing this on our being the only people heading towards the noise. When we get there, it's obvious that I was wrong. Things are just beginning to get going.

There's a field behind the building I assumed to be a scout hut. The building is actually the center for the India Association of San Antonio, and the field is packed with people of all colours. By all colours I mean blue, green, purple, yellow, orange, red and so on, and the air is full of similarly hued dust clouds as everyone pelts each other with handfuls of powdered paint. The field is most likely additionally packed with people of all colours in terms of ethnicity, but it's no longer possible to tell with most of them, excepting a few in traditional Hindu dress.

There were many people of Indian descent around the places where I lived in England, and I found that I missed them when I moved to San Antonio. We have people from India in San Antonio, but they don't seem quite such a visible presence. Bess tells me that their numbers tend to be concentrated around the medical center and University of Texas campus in the north-east part of the city. Amongst her former colleagues was one Dr. Ramamurthy, mother of the actor Sendhil Ramamurthy, best known for his role in the television series Heroes.

There are a couple of decent Indian restaurants, notably the wonderful Tandoor Palace on the Wurzbach Road, but outside of such places, I no longer see Indian people in large groups; which is partially why it's so nice to be here at this festival. I'm not sure I even realised I'd missed this sort of thing, although that is perhaps an inevitable reaction for someone living in a different land to the one in which they were born.

Bess wanders off and finds the stall selling the bags of paint. She returns with four or five and hands a couple to the boy. I decline because I think I would feel weird chucking paint at strangers. Strangers, on the other hand, feel less reticent about chucking paint at me. My assailant grins and springs off to bombard someone else, and I'm trying not to laugh because it's funny and stupid, and there's something cheery about it; and I'm aware that my attempts to clear bright purple powder from my face duplicate those of Oliver Hardy as he blinks haplessly from the screen, his hair white with brick dust.

Another couple of minutes and none of us are the same colour as when we arrived, which is apparently the point. The paint sets everyone on an equal footing, and in the end we are all the same, equally ridiculous.

Junior goes off to buy more paint.

I'm tempted to dance, but I'm still a little fearful it will be the white guy dance, like I'm someone's dad at a wedding. The music is mostly what I think of as bhangra, or at least what I associate with Bollywood - modern beats rooted in Indian tradition. There's a group of young people dancing in a circle, some barefoot, and presumably Indian judging by the sandals, a couple of topknots and the raw energy of their moves. This clearly isn't their first rodeo, as we say around these parts and, reminded of just where I am - it's wonderful to be outside at some large celebration without the barbecue smoke or country & autotune wailing away in our ears.

I watch the dancers, envious.

We spend an hour or more, just soaking it all up, gradually changing colour as wave after wave of paint hits us. If the object of the celebration seems unclear, at least to me, it doesn't seem to matter. Eventually a bonfire is set alight  at the center of the field in reference to the burning of Holika, the sister of the demon king, from which comes the name of this part of the festival. We all watch the flames and savour the smoke, and it feels as though we've all come through something important together.

2000AD After I Stopped Reading

My first issue of 2000AD comic was prog 20, cover dated 9th of July, 1977. I bought it from the other newsagent in Shipston's main square, the darker, slightly weirder place run by the bloke who resembled something from Planet of the Apes. I was immediately hooked, then found out that Peter Empson had been reading it from the beginning and was willing to swap his collection of eighteen back issues (minus the second one, in case anyone is doing the calculations) for a big stack of copies of the Topper.

I stopped reading in October 1980, having become somewhat burned out with the more shitey regular stories - Mean Arena, Meltdown Man, and Judge Dredd treading water with crap such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Aged 13½ Months.

In January 1986, Nick Scullard gave me a massive stack of back issues, actually most of those I'd missed since 1980. He gave them to me because his collection had been transformed into a damp tower of clay following a thorough soaking when the pipes in his house burst during a freeze. He couldn't face dealing with it, so I dried them out on a radiator, one page at a time, managing to salvage nearly all of them and thus bringing me up to date with the galaxy's greatest comic, albeit in slightly wobbly, water-damaged form. It looked as though the comic had picked up somewhat since October 1980, and so I resumed my weekly purchase; which I continued until some point during 1991, at which point I once again lost interest. Contributing factors included: artists who couldn't actually draw; Garth Ennis imaginatively writing a story featuring a violent character called Tarantino who swears a lot; Garth Ennis sending Judge Dredd to Ireland where he meets an Irish Judge who enjoys a lovely pint of Guinness, so he does; Armoured Gideon; Dead Meat featuring Inspector Raam; Jamie fucking Hewlett; Armoured Gideon again; artists writing the names of their fave bands on walls in the background of the strip; Brigand Doom, but mainly because the name was stupid; comic strips which wished they were in Deadline.

While I have a lot of love for the cream of 2000AD, I try not to think about the ropey stuff, which is difficult because there has been one fuck of a lot of it. I've bought the occasional issue since but have seen nothing to entice me back to the fold. Therefore, writing from a position of extensive ignorance, here is my postdiction of stories which will have appeared in the galaxy's greatest since I decided I couldn't read any more back in 1991 or thereabouts. I feel confident that at least three of these, which I've just made up, have actually appeared in the comic.

A postdiction is like a prediction but instead refers to something which has already happened, in case you were wondering.

Comic Rock: Sailing. Nemesis the Warlock, which was wonderful, began life as Comic Rock, an occasional series of one-off strips somehow inspired by something in the hit parade of the day in an endearingly wrong-footed effort to get down with the kids. What this actually meant was that the strips were named after Going Underground by the Jam and an unlistenable television advertised heavy rock compilation whilst making no other concession to the sources of their alleged inspiration; which was probably for the best given that Killer Watt, the unlistenable compilation in question, featured Ted Nugent. The notional third episode of Comic Rock was inspired by the song Sailing as recorded by Rod Stewart, which was a tune that the kids on the streets were digging at the time. The story featured arch villain Torquemada in a boat, beneath which Nemesis the Warlock swims, drilling a hole in the bottom so that it sinks. Credo!

Donna Kebab. This was another Pat Mills' tale of a quick-witted underdog fighting an overpowering authoritarian state whilst striking adjacent blows against sexism, racism, and people who aren't down with the kids or who tell kids what to do but don't know nuffink. Donna Kebab is set in a future society modelled on that of ancient Greece. Mills boldly defies racism by writing for a cast of exclusively Hellenic ethnicity, here defined in terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever bought or ate a doner kebab, ingeniously subverting expectations by mocking those who engage with other cultures only through cheap fast food. Donna sports a large moustache in defiance of sexual stereotyping, and makes frequent comedic expressions of her support for Arsenal football team by exclaiming up the Arse!, just like Harry Enfield from about a million years ago. She also wields a powerful technological sword made from a shish kebab rotisserie, and takes counsel from the spirit of Plato, the ancient philosopher, to whom she irreverently refers as Play-Doh.

Metal Guru. He was a robot and he gave out spiritual advice to those who sought to understand the meaning of existence, but then someone pushed him too far by asking a question so stupid that it blew his ancient wisdom circuits, sending him on a killing spree across New Afghanistan. Once the clever wordplay of the title had been established, the strip was mostly about squads of the Spiritual Guru Containment Unit attempting and failing to take down the Metal Guru as he rampaged through towns and cities, twisting heads off whilst screaming his catchphrase, Enlightenment!

My Groovy Edwardian Hat. This strip, named after Vanilla Traction Engine's 1968 hit single, was written and drawn by Brendan McCarthy and was heavy on its use of disembodied shoes with pairs of eyes seen peering from within. It seemed to be focussed on a character called Twitchy, although Twitchy was actually absent from six of the eight episodes. To date, no-one has been able to explain what happened in My Groovy Edwardian Hat, let alone what the fuck it was supposed to be about.

Slapheads. Future sport was never this tough, possibly excepting previous examples of Roy of the Rovers dressed up as Rollerball; but Slapheads was different in so much as that it was named after an insulting term for bald people, because it just fucking was, okay? The game featured a mix of genetically modified humans and surgically altered convicts whose arms had been replaced by giant flippers, and their objective was to score points by quite literally slapping one another about the head for the edification of a braying audience of bloodthirsty spectators all filming it on their phones. Unsurprisingly, the manager was up to something fishy involving sponsorship money taken from a bald wig manufacturer, and that's mainly what the story was about.

Steam Iron. Introducing the splendiferous escapades of that most delightful mechanical sleuth and adventurer, Professor Pistlethwaite's Patented Detection Engine Model No. 14, additionally known and recognised in the court of Her Royal Highness Queen Victoria by his more colloquial sobriquet, Steam Iron on account of the means by which his mechanism is afforded energy and momentum, the material of his construction, and - by way of a third meaning implicit in the combination of the two words - his pronounced and enthusiastic homosexuality as demonstrated by his adopting many of the delightful mannerisms of Mr. Wilde, the playwright. Most likely written by Dan Abnett, because why wouldn't it be?

Strontium Cat. Behind the ingenious wordplay of the title, Strontium Cat constituted a further expansion of the Strontium Dog mythology, this time fixing upon a time-travelling bounty hunter, stranded in 1930's New York, getting by with just his wits, his catlike mutant senses, and his not inconsiderable chops as a jazz saxophonist. Fate conspires to land him a weekly gig playing with Zoot Jellyroll's quartet at the Blue Tiger down on the lower east side, and then it's a slow decline as the strip's creators gradually exhaust their already slender stock of jazz references.

Sweet & Sour. This was another Pat Mills' tale of quick-witted underdogs fighting an overpowering authoritarian state whilst striking adjacent blows against sexism, racism, and people who aren't down with the kids or who tell kids what to do but don't know nuffink. Sweet & Sour is set in a future society modelled on that of ancient China. Mills boldly defies racism by writing for a cast of exclusively Chinese ethnicity, here defined in terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever bought or ate a Chinese takeaway, ingeniously subverting expectations by mocking those who engage with other cultures only through cheap fast food. Clementine Sweet sports a long moustache whilst Brett Sour wears a traditional lady's cheongsam in defiance of sexual stereotyping, and their victories are celebrated with verses of the Ying Tong Song, just like Spike Milligan from about a million years ago. Sweet also wields a powerful technological sword made from chopsticks, and takes counsel from the spirit of Confucius, the ancient philosopher, to whom she irreverently refers as Mr. Confusing. Come to think of it, this one might have been Mark Millar.

Terrible Planet. After Death Planet, Deadly Planet, Hell Planet and all of the others, what adjectives were left? The futuristic colonists of Terrible Planet have fled an ecologically devastated Earth in search of a new life amongst the stars, hoping to make Agamemnon IV their new home; but there's one problem - Agamemnon IV is, quite frankly, terrible. It rains a lot, and everywhere you go there's a faint smell of sulphur, like someone farted, and it always seems kind of chilly considering how near the planet is to its sun; and there's this island where you can't walk ten paces without falling over, and no-one can work out why. Even Doctor Steiner can't explain it, although to be honest he doesn't seem to know much for a scientist. Only the other day they were talking about music and Steiner was surprised when someone told him that the Sex Pistols - a group from ancient Earth history - hadn't been able to read sheet music. 'But how then were they able to play their instruments?' he had asked, incredulous.

Tough of the Time Track. Puzzling reboot of an old character from Victor, this time snatching Alf Tupper from his traditional twentieth century background and obliging him to compete in the trans-temporal games against runners from ancient Rome, caveman times, outer space, Nazi Germany and elsewhen, most of whom seem to share the same knowing sense of humour as a media studies student living above a barber's shop in Camden Town. This one was drawn by an artist who once produced a fifty page cartoon strip entirely about her own vagina, and Alf is consequently a somewhat changed character. He still fucking loves his chips, but now considers them something of a guilty pleasure. Also, his fave band is Vant.

Mr. Kirby

He was never really our cat, not exactly. We have a female cat called Kirby, soft, grey and stripey, who briefly went missing back in 2013. She eventually turned up, but as we'd been out and around the neighbourhood looking for her, we noticed a similar looking cat with the same sort of markings, same colour, same long tail. We'd approach the cat, notice his massive hairy nuts, and realise he wasn't our Kirby; and so someone, probably the kid, called him Mr. Kirby.

At some point, after feeding the cats in the morning, I took to leaving the bowls out on the back porch. I'd noticed a few strays hanging around, and it seemed like they might appreciate what cat food was left over when our own bunch felt like they'd had enough. Because feral or stray cat populations tend to stabilise under certain conditions, we ended up with a regular gang of four of five visitors stopping by our house for breakfast every morning - the B-Team as I thought of them. Unfortunately, our own cats sometimes scoffed the lot, and so I inevitably began to buy extra tins for the outside guys. I knew it would all be eaten, and I didn't like the thought of anyone going hungry.

Mr. Kirby of course became a regular.

He was a funny looking cat, and I didn't really know what to make of him at first. He wasn't hostile but neither was he overtly friendly, and he always seemed wary, as though deeply suspicious of whatever motives we might have for dishing up all that free grub. He put me in mind of the young William Burroughs being described by someone's father as a boy with the look of a sheep killing dog. He looked shifty, and I entertained the idea that he might even be William Burroughs reincarnated given that the late author would probably have quite liked to come back as a cat.

Mr. Kirby warmed to us as the years went past, and became such a fixture that he no longer quite seemed like a stray, more like some guy who just happened to live in our garden. We fed him and left out clean water every day. I even built a wooden shelter for the cold weather. Mr. Kirby sometimes wandered into our house, but he had a tendency to spray left, right and centre, so I tried to keep him outside when possible.

Eventually he became so accustomed to us that he would wait to be fed, then start up with his peculiar meow - more like the hooting and honking of a small furry goose - and we got to the stage at which I could pet him as he was eating. He was all muscle, very wiry, and he looked like he'd been in the wars. Had he been human he would have had tattoos, an eye-patch, and a Brooklyn accent. Contrary to the image, I never saw him have even a hissing confrontation with another cat, let alone a fight. If there was food in a bowl and several takers, the others would step back and simply wait for Mr. Kirby to finish without so much as a warning glare. I suspect it may have been something to do with his nuts, which were huge and impressive.

Sometimes he'd fail to turn up for breakfast, occasionally for three or four days, and then he'd be back on the fifth day, gaunt and ravenous having presumably spent the time trapped in somebody's garage; or he'd return with some terrifying injury or disability, a terrible limp, a seeping eye, or one side of his face swollen out of all proportion. On one occasion I attempted to catch him, to get him into a cat carrier so that we could take him to the vet, but he was stronger than me. It was like wrestling a fully grown man. Thankfully his injuries always seemed to clear up of their own accord.

More recently, I suppose you could say we became friends. He greeted me with his hooting meow, and would push his forehead into the palm of my hand when I petted him. He stopped marking the furniture when he came into our house, so I let him in from time to time. Now able to make a reasonably close inspection, I finally realised than he had a minor cut - albeit long since healed - at the outside edge of his left upper eyelid, meaning that when he looked at you, one eye seemed to be squinting, making him appear suspicious. Combined with the distinctive meow and his spotty belly, my wife and I guessed he had both Siamese and Bengal cats somewhere in his family tree.

About a month ago, maybe a little longer, he once again fell ill. He had terrible diarrhoea and a variable appetite, along with what looked like scabies, resulting in scabs and cuts on his head. I treated him for fleas, then added a deworming compound to his food, just in case. I changed the dry food left for the outside cats to a grain free variant, having learned that this is often better for cats with digestive problems. I rubbed an ointment onto his head when I could hoping to treat the scabies, which it did to an extent; and all through this he otherwise more or less seemed his normal happy self, except sometimes he seemed to be drinking a hell of a lot, and his appetite went through the roof - anything up to three tins a day which still left him looking somehow gaunt. I could tell something was wrong, but he was obviously an old cat, and it didn't seem like there was a lot else we could do because we simply can't afford the sort of vet's bills he would chalk up.

Then just a couple of days ago he went from bad to worse, not eating, not drinking, just sleeping most of the time. He would perk up intermittently, but it didn't seem to last. Next thing, I come home and he's laying on the porch in such a posture that I find myself checking to see if he's still breathing. He resembles a corpse and flies are buzzing around him. Over the next couple of hours he moves from one part of the porch to another, but always to end up slumped like a pile of bones. Gus II, another one of the strays, cuddles up to him, and it's breaking my fucking heart. I know he's not coming back this time. I guess that Gus II might also know this.

Bess comes home and we take Mr. Kirby in a box to the emergency veterinary clinic on Broadway. I can't stop crying. Mr. Kirby has somehow become a staple of my existence, and life without him hooting away each morning seems unthinkable.

The nurse gives him a sedative so that he won't feel what's coming next, although to be fair, it's difficult to tell whether he's truly been conscious during any of this. She then gives him something which stops his heart. I stroke him and cuddle him. I'm going to miss this cat so fucking much.

It's over. We did the right thing for him, much as it hurts, much as it feels as though we've let him down.

There's nothing much more to say, but no, he wasn't just a cat.

We're going to miss you, Mr. Kirby.

What a shitty day it has been.

Back in the Saddle

'Everybody make some noise!'

Bess and I are back at Mission Marquee Plaza craft fair. Following a couple of fallow months spanning the season during which Texan temperatures dip to not actually very warm at all, this is the first such fair of the year and it's good to be back - particularly after such an uncommon week. This winter has been genuinely cold, wet, grey, and relentless, feeling more like English weather than I am comfortable with; and we were all ill last weekend - Bess, myself and the boy with some chest infection which hit each of us on consecutive days. I'm still recovering. I went out on the bike just one day but had to get off and push whenever I came to a hill.

Then I noticed that all of the boy's anecdotes about occurrences at school hinge upon the phrase he then proceeded to as prefix to the thing which the person did, which is rarely anything of consequence sufficient to justify either the build up or application of such long, long words.

Then a white supremacist murdered fifty Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, prompting our president to quickly delete the tweet he'd allegedly posted thirty minutes earlier linking some Breitbart opinion piece about how all Muslims are bad.

These are the contributing themes from which the general mood of the week has been woven, so it's really nice to be back to something familiar, and no longer coughing or sneezing as we had both feared might be the case. We loaded up the car the night before without even really having to think about it, and here we are, back on our old pitch to the right of the stage area and the drive-in screen. Being the first craft fair of the year, there are a lot of people here, and even some entertainment.

We've set up between a couple of women selling jewellery and a younger woman with bags of fresh herbs, all from her own garden. She also has a little dog, a friendly terrier called Radio, although we never get around to asking why he is so named. The cactus family arrive as I'm attaching my paintings to the display frame. We're usually right next to the cactus family, but never mind.

I pop over to say hello.

'It's good to see you,' he responds.

'Yes,' I say. 'Where's your friend with the truck?'

'My friend with the truck?'

'You remember I did a painting, and his truck was in the way so I painted it as well. He said he was going to buy the painting.'

'He might be along later. I don't know.'

'Well, no problem. If he's changed his mind that's fine too, but I have his painting with me just in case.'

We get ourselves settled. It's still a little cooler than we like, but better than it has been. Bess has already sold a few rocks.

The entertainment is a festival of sorts, something billed as Loopfest 2019. Performers have come from all over the world - Mexico City, California, Costa Rica, Holland and so on - and today they're going to do their thing on stage for us. There are about seven people sat around on the grass up at the front. I assume they are either the audience, or other performers watching the show whilst waiting for their own turn in the spotlight. These people are Loopers, someone explains over the PA.

It's a whole new kind of music.

It's the latest thing.

It's people playing music, sampling themselves, and then using the looped sample as accompaniment. I recall seeing it done in a pub in Coventry back in the eighties, except the guy was mostly applying his sampling technology to covers of House of the Rising Sun and the like. I've even done this sort of thing myself but with tape loops; but some nineteen year-old has a go and it's suddenly a fucking movement because he thought of it and it's like, awesome 'n' shit.

The first guy sounds like Fatboy Slim who some may remember tickling the charts two whole decades ago. Then there's a guy looping the noises he generates with an electric cello - which is actually pretty good; followed by some tool with a keytar looping his own vocal beatboxing - and the rest seem to be variations on country and western which would sound exactly the same played by a full band, perhaps better, and which makes me wonder whether the Musicians Union didn't have a point all those years ago when they tried to ban the synthesiser. If it sounds like Waylon Jennings with full band and yet it's all coming from just you and a pedal, my first thought is that you're performing with samples because you don't have any friends, and my second thought is that there may be legitimate reasons why you don't have any friends. Generally this is the most underwhelming amazing new thing I've encountered in a long time, which I state as someone who still finds vapourwave quite exciting.

'Could you do a rock with the badge of the marines?' asks some guy who stumbles up to our stall. My wife smiles and makes amiable noises, but it's clear that the answer is piss off, and rightly so.

Hi there, I don't like anything you have enough to want to buy it, but if I could persuade you to paint something completely different to any of the stuff you're selling here on your stall, then there's a possibility I might consider making a purchase.

We love these people almost as much as those whose unrequested advice begins with, you know what you ought to do?

I head off to buy tacos just as some hairy dude approaches mumbling something about Salvador Dali. I recognise his type from having spent most of my art college years avoiding him. I just know he's about to dump a load of useless suggestions on my wife, maybe if she could paint mandalas on a bong or a cigarette lighter or a Grateful Dead album…

I buy tacos and by the time I return, the hairy dude is stood alone in the middle of the field watching people sample themselves on stage. He walks backwards and forwards, and after studying him for a couple of minutes, we recognise this as dance. He holds two brightly coloured balls, one in each hand, and he's throwing them into the air then catching them. It isn't quite juggling.

'So what was he saying?'

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me.

We have a sign hung from the awning of our canopy, something along the lines of Bess & Lawrence Burton, Original Artwork in chalk. It seemed necessary to qualify ourselves as having produced original artwork so as to effect some aesthetic distance from persons selling their homegrown paintings of Batman and the Joker.

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me, 'and said something like, well, it's not exactly Salvador Dali, is it?'

'Huh?'

'I know.'

'What a fucking twat. I wish I'd heard him.'

I expect it was something well-intentioned which came out wrong, or was an innocent but fumbled attempt to introduce himself as a bit of a character, or at least as a guy who has heard of Salvador Dali. Arseholes will usually have heard of either Salvador Dali or Pablo Picasso and may even know that Mona Lisa was not the name of the person who painted her picture. When they attempt to engage you in banter on the subject of art, being way out of their depth they will assume that you will be fooled by mention of either Picasso or Dali. A very early issue of 2000AD comic, back when it was actually read by children, featured a letter from a young reader proposing that the art on Judge Dredd was so amazing that not even Picasso could have done a better job. It seems a fairly safe bet that the lad hadn't actually given much thought to how a tale of Mega City One's toughest lawman would have looked had it been drawn by the celebrated misogynist and pioneer of Cubism; and that's the mental age we're dealing with here.

Bess and I eat our tacos and watch a lone buffoon dancing in the middle of a field to country and western played on an effects pedal. Occasionally he raises up his arms to flash peace signs at no-one in particular. As usual, I haven't sold shit, while Bess has been pretty much cleared out.

It's nice to be back.