Even More Letters Never Sent

To recap, as of 21st August, 2014, I adopted the practice of saying exactly what I felt needed to be said when engaging with others through social media, and then not saying it, deleting the words I'd written in the comment box, the email or whatever, having copied them to a notebook document on my word processor. This, I find, has saved a lot of arguments because it gets it out of my system without my having to point out that the person with whom I am attempting communication is full of shit. It also leaves the other party free to continue subscribing to whatever bollocks inspired my response. I've taken great pleasure in composing some of the responses which follow, and find many of them entertaining in their own right. You may disagree, but then I'm the one sat here in front of my computer and it's been a quiet week what with it being the end of the world and everything.

Ah Trumpanzees - how I miss those pre-internet days when you were all just random backwards farm hands mumbling to yourselves about whatever the latest tabloid tray jigsaw had told you to think this week in the corner of some bar - and yet look at you now, almost forming your own sentences and sharing them all over the internet, or at least repeating something you heard one of the bigger boys say and sharing it all over the internet to a chorus of happy grunting and clapping flippers from your newly emboldened brethren. Woof! Woof!

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I know exactly what you mean. It seems to be how the enemy works these days - by turning everyone into weird little cancer-copies of itself.

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It's possible to elevate oneself without pushing down on someone else, and whilst I'd rather not be one of those people whose only post on someone else's page is disparaging, this is drivel.

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Now you mention it, I spent a couple of years on a forum which got extraordinarily cliquey and where they had this thing called Shaker's Law, named after some forum bloke who came up with it, and amounting to the claim that everyone who gets pissed off and leaves the forum comes crawling back in the end having seen the error of their ways (because the forum was so great and we're all such great pals and we all look out for each other) and so the crowing when anyone left and then came back was unbelievable. Anyway, I'm still quite proud of the fact that once I'd had enough, I left without ceremony and never went back.

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It's only because I don't have time to write the announcements due to being on here posting stuff about how I know who my real friends are.

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Still, better vote Conservative just in case. This is probably the fault of the other lot anyway, and that beardy one wears a jacket with patches on the elbows and obviously hates successful people, which I'm sure you'll agree is jolly unfair - spends all his time with his nose in a book, knows nothing of real life, the big swot. The parents of these urchins might have better jobs if they'd tried harder at school, although it could be that some bottom smuggler has already given their jobs to ILLEGAL MUZZIES. It's the soup of the day.

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Yes. It breaks my heart sometimes just to think that so much of the world seems to be running on vestigial instincts which not only are no longer necessary to keep us all alive but are actively contributing to our destruction.

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You had one job, al Qaeda...

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I respectfully but strongly disagree. Whilst Wells has written a good few yawnfests, War of the Worlds is not among them, and criticising a perceived lack of character development (an overrated quality if ever there was) suggests the novel may simply have not been for you, you fucking moron.

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I know, right? What he needs to do is add a few scenes like with the main character drawing a picture at school and like showing it to his dad but his dad says it's bullshit so he spends the rest of his life with a deep inner sadness at his dad having said his drawing was bullshit, until the Martians invade, then the invasion can be a metaphor for his wrestling with his inner sadness at his dad having said his drawing was bullshit.

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We can only hope he isn't so upset that he ends his own useless life.

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Yes, I hope Boris gets in and reverses all the damage Labour have done over the last nine years of their being in government.

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You're talking about trickle down economics which I don't believe is really any more legitimate than the Wizard of Oz asking us to pay no attention to that little bloke stood behind the curtain, and the current divide between rich and poor would seem to support that it doesn't work, hence the need to blame everyone but those in control of the machine doing the actual damage. Plus I couldn't give a shit about millionaires bleating over having to pay tax, particularly at 45% (not sure where you're getting 80% but I may well be wrong). Final comment about dole scrounging sponge monkeys (etc.) suggests we should probably just agree to disagree.

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I know a few people have been saying that when the tipping point arrives, it's going to be spectacular, but I'll be happier when I can actually see it. I'm getting a bit worn out with things which simply won't ever, ever, ever happen, and then happen.

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Not sure if it's the US or just Texas, but no-one is allowed to sell fireworks within the city limits, so every highway has a massive discount firework sale shed thing about ten feet outside the city limits as you head almost anywhere else. One of them exploded last week due to a stray spark or something, which is funny.

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Yes, in the sense that he's not the comedy bungler he plays on TV.

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We now have an official cat colony license as recognised by the city, which means that next time Orange Squidward decides he wants to involve himself in what goes on in our garden, he'll have to change tack, perhaps calling the cops on us for having the wrong type of lawn or maybe because we haven't cleaned our windows to the sort of standard he expects.

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Not particularly wanting to get involved here, but this person hasn't actually stated a reason as to why he/she/it believes you suck niggers dicks, so the question is meaningless. Don't know if it's worth pointing that out.

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I never take the holiday, preferring instead to praise Satan even harder than usual for the full duration of the day.

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I dunno - always found Griff a bit more dodgy than I like, although thankfully they never seemed to tell him where the studio was.

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I know what you mean, and anything more demonstrative than Harold Pinter generally makes me uncomfortable. At a bit of a tangent, the whole idea of David Bowie as having been on a mission to combine theatre and rock music has always annoyed me a little, because it sounds like drivel; yet just this week I picked up Images, the double of his early Decca stuff. I already had most of the material as it happens, and had always regarded it as a bid for fame by means of Newley-inspired novelty, except I've realised the sheer range doesn't actually fit that theory (Laughing Gnome on one hand, a (hopefully ironic) hymn to eugenics on the other, and of course London Boys). The chatty sixties cover notes suggest this was Bowie's theatricality expressed early on, with songs as plays (etc.) of what is often very different constitution, and possibly for the first time ever I've understood what is meant.

***

I see panic. I see refutation of the statistics purportedly producing that panic along with the suggestion that we shouldn't panic. I see refutation of the suggestion that we shouldn't panic because even though the hospitals aren't going to overflow with bodies, we'd better hope we don't get a nasty cut and have to go to hospital because the hospitals will be overflowing with bodies, so I guess we should panic. I see social media persons getting very self-important and shaking us by the shoulders screaming FOOLS! YOU'LL DESTROY US ALL! My wife worked in epidemiology, had swine flu in 2009, and she regards it as bullshit at least in terms of it being the end of civilisation. I trust her judgement on this. Flu was already a killer. Not much has changed except now we have to wipe our bums on our hands and my friend in England can't buy fucking paracetamol due to loonies stocking up for the flupocalypse. Hocking up a greenie into the yawning mouth of a fellow commuter was never entirely polite, so I don't really need any older boys who went to the proper school telling me to not do it.

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Regarding all of this panic about life without toilet paper, shops running out of everything, unharvested food rotting in the soil etc. I'm fairly sure there are already a shit-ton of people who have been living their entire lives in those conditions, although usually we're told it's their fault. I therefore propose that anyone worried about COVID-19 gets on their bike, pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, and builds themselves a nice big well-staffed hospital with excellent funding.

***

My take on this is that a) it's serious up to a point, but it isn't bubonic plague, and b) thinking aloud here, I wonder if a constant diet of news media induces a sort of pleasurable panic response (adrenaline or summat, no idea) meaning we need a new shitstorm roughly every three or four months (and happily we seemingly have plenty of material at present). I try to call my dad ever month, and sometimes he just can't get those warnings and prophecies of doom out fast enough, and it's clear that this sort of thing has become his reason for being of late, although admittedly it's usually the perils of immigration (despite it having no actual impact upon his daily existence); so, as for whether it tells us anything that's actually of any use, I don't personally believe so.

***

Yes, because I definitely said that me having to deal with a fucking moron was exactly the same thing. I really regret that now. Thanks for setting me straight.

The Fence

When I first moved to America, my biggest moment of culture shock was - possibly oddly - to do with the fencing. In England we have brick walls or hedges around our gardens or yards, or stout wooden fencing of the kind against which a neighbour's child can kick a football for the best part of an afternoon to the rapturous delight of everyone within earshot. In America the default seems to be chain link fencing, which turns everything into a scene from Boyz n the Hood; so that no matter how nice one's garden may be, horticulturally speaking, you're always half expecting to see a ten-year old Ice Cube discovering a dead body in the alley at the back. They don't have chain link fencing in the better neighbourhoods but, on the other hand, the better neighbourhoods are mostly populated by people you wouldn't want as neighbours.

We know this because we have one living right next to us, an individual I'm naming Squidward for the sake of argument, a man who quite clearly wishes he lived in a better neighborhood. Our guess is that he was born into money with certain expectations but fucked up, obliging him to rent a place he can actually afford in these, his later years. He doesn't like cats, which is a shame, because we have fifteen of them along with a cat colony license, as approved by the city, which means we can have as many as we want. When he first kicked off, we very briefly entertained the idea of cat proof fencing which features an overhang at the top and keeps all of your cats in your own yard. We entertained the idea for as long as it took for us to notice how much that stuff would cost.

Then we saw that it was possible to buy the overhanging topper at a fraction of the price and attach it to an existing wooden fence so as to similarly prevent the daily feline exodus into Squidward's yard, there to deposit turd after turd after turd. This seemed a cheaper option but for the fact that we first needed a wooden fence to which the topper could be attached. We obtained quotes, one from Lowes, one from some other guy. The quote from Lowes suggested we would only be able to fence one side of our garden, specifically Squidward's side. The store representative told us that his guys would be able to work around the existing trees while ripping out the chain link and replacing it with wood to a height of six feet. He also warned us against hiring any old Chuck in a truck for the job. The other guy, who may actually have been called Chuck and who turned up in a truck, gave us the same quote for the same work except that he'd have to cut down all of the trees. We went with Lowes.

City and utility people came to check the ground for power lines, and then our garden was transformed into a building site for a couple of days. We hadn't told Squidward what we were doing. The fence was on our side of the property line meaning we were under no legal obligation to tell him anything, and that was part of the fun. The guys spent the first day cutting back tree limbs, pruning, and ripping up the existing fence, finishing up with a series of holes into which fence posts would be cemented. Next day, the fence started to go up.

From time to time we went outside to see how they were getting on, hoping Squidward hadn't been out there giving them any shit. Then we learned to our utter amazement, that his response to the sight of this fence springing up unannounced had been to additionally contract the guys to fence sections of his yard on the other side of his house, or rather the other side of the house he rents. This was sort of a relief, suggesting that Squidward endorsed the fence to some extent. We'd been expecting legal action, despite his having no leg to stand on, purely because he's a complete wanker whose mission in life seems to be a never ending quest for disappointment in the behaviour and actions of those around him. Typically, he was already starting to piss the workmen off, apparently being unable to decide what he actually wanted them to do. We watched them rolling their eyes as they muttered to each other while sawing and hammering.

Ever since Squidward snitched to Animal Control, he's been an elusive presence, and I get the impression that he's scared of us. Where once he seemed to be out in his garden all the fucking time, impossible to avoid and stripped to the waist with his pinched orange face and wrinkly tanning salon physique, suddenly he became scarce. Now, as the day drew near to its close, with the fencing mostly up, he was back in his garden and we could hear him giving instruction to the workmen. He wanted to know why he'd ended up with the ugly side of the fence, as he called it, the side with the horizontal beams to which the vertical slats are secured. He spoke to the workmen as persons of his kind tend to speak to all manual labourers, as people whose work will later be scrutinised so as to ensure they've done the job properly. He called them back to pick up stray bits of wood, to do a better job of trimming certain branches, and then complained about the soil they had moved when sinking the fence posts. We could hear him having a tantrum behind the fence, stomping around and muttering to himself.

Well, I suppose I'll just have to pick this up myself.

Later he was joined by Mrs. Squidward as he inspected the fence at the front. We'd always assumed the ordinarily reclusive Mrs. Squidward to be some silent, long-suffering observer to her partner's one man war of indignation against the rest of the street, but we could hear her questioning as to whether the cats would still be able to jump over this section of fence, suggesting she might not even know what cats are or understand how they work.

At length, it dawned on us. The Squidwards considered themselves the injured party due to their being better bred and therefore in the right. We were only doing our best to appease them, in our own admittedly ham-fisted way, which is why Squidward ended up with the ugly side of the fence, the fence we'd paid for and had built for him.

My wife took the guys some beers once they were done. We all understood each other very well regarding the neighbour. Squidward probably still believes the object of the fence is to keep cats out of his precious yard, or at least out of his landlord's precious yard. While we're keen to reduce the numbers for the obvious reason that we don't want our cats anywhere near the horrible cunt, the main reason for the fence is so we don't have to see his miserable orange ass; and we probably won't be bothering with the cat proofing toppers. There doesn't seem much point when the fence only runs down one side of our garden.

One week passes. I see him obsessively polishing a tiny mark on his beloved automobile, so I step outside, loudly announcing to my wife, 'I'm just going out to look at the grass,' but he scuttles away, and in any case the term grass, meaning informer or copper's narc is not widely understood in America.

Two weeks later as I'm coming back from the store, I hear him call. 'Hey, Lornce,' as he pronounces my name, clearly trying hard to sound casual. I ignore him. He's probably only calling because he sees that our driveway is empty. My wife is not at home and he seems to be terrified of her. He calls again but I have nothing to say to the cunt. I don't even look in his direction as I go around the side of the house and close the gate.

Simon from Discovery Records

Stratford-upon-Avon had four shops selling records by the time I'd reached the age at which music becomes the most important thing in your life. There was WHSmith - obviously, Midland Educational, RVS and - the best of the bunch by some way - Discovery Records which was independent, a chart return shop, and was owned by a hairy man named Bob. The shop was pretty small, almost a kiosk, situated on the left as you made your way to the precinct from its associated multi-storey car park. RVS was generally decent, but Discovery was the place to go if you wanted anything truly off the beaten musical track. Also, the staff were a couple of vaguely punky kids from the local school, two or three years older than myself or my peers, so even if we remained too awestruck to actually converse with them, it was better than having to deal with the squares who worked behind the counter at RVS. There was Ollie and there was Simon Morgan, and probably a few others I've forgotten but those seemed to be the main two. They were talkative and funny and they seemed to enjoy the job, even occasionally taking the piss out of our overly-earnest schoolie purchases, but not in any mean-spirited way. Simon was kind of beefy with spiky blonde hair and a leather jacket and I recall him as the man who facilitated my purchase of at least two Sex Pistols albums, so obviously he became lodged in the mental map of my teenage years early on. The second of the two albums was The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, which counts as an overly-earnest schoolie purchase if anything does, but Simon nevertheless managed to keep from rolling his eyes too much. Being a double album, it cost more than I could afford with a single week's worth of combined pocket money and paper round wages - so probably a tenner, obliging me to buy the thing in instalments; and I can still see either Simon or Ollie taking my two quid and noting it down on a payment slip kept in the till.

We also knew Simon to be in a local punk band called Domestic Bliss, because my friend Graham's older brother had the single they had recorded and released through the shop - Child Battery with Life on the other side. Life featured one of the first bass lines I ever learned to play through copying it from the record. Others were Gotta Getaway by Stiff Little Fingers and Public Image's Theme from the first album.

By 1984, I'd moved to the other end of the country, and Discovery Records had relocated to Leamington Spa. I bought a few things from there, but I'm not sure Simon was involved by that point. He turned up in Runaway Rhinoceros, a local zine, as a member of a group called the Hop (pictured), whom I'm pretty sure I saw at the Royal Spa Centre supporting the Three Johns. Unfortunately I don't recall much about them, although later came to the startling realisation that their drummer had been Simon Gilbert who eventually joined Suede. This section of the anecdote trails off with myself in the rudimentary recording studio of Maidstone College of Art bashing out a cover of Life by Domestic Bliss just to see if I could do it, and because it was a fucking great and criminally neglected song.

Several decades later, I encounter Simon on facebook, and so we have our first conversation which doesn't end with a financial transaction. I tell him that he sold me the first Pistols album. I think he may have apologised, which was funny. We talk a little about mutual friends, and only now in my fifties do I realise there have been so many of them. Had I been aware of this at the time, I might not have been quite so desperate to get myself as far away from Warwickshire as I could manage. I send him my cover of Life, and am amazed that he likes it, even makes noises about putting it on YouTube. I guess it's flattering to have someone cover one of your songs.

Months pass and we communicate from time to time. He posts clips of bands I've never heard of on my facebook wall and tells me, you need to get a copy of this. This is how I first hear the Sleaford Mods, Pessimist, Parquet Courts, Enhet För Fri Musik and others who now sit neatly alphabeticised within my collection. Simon's recommendations are always good, and it's funny that even after all this time he's still influencing my listening habits. I still don't know much about him beyond what I gather must have been a pretty serious battle with booze in the years between Discovery Records and facebook, which led to his involvement with recovery in a more general sense and helping others to get clean, to sort their lives out; but then I don't feel I need to know much more because I already appreciate that he's one of the good guys. He's a constant voice of reason and common sense on facebook, one of the few, always generous and considerate, kind and funny, never acting the asshole. He's one of those people whose existence seems to prove that there is good in the world, a man about whom one can find nothing bad to say; and it's inspiring seeing him doing so well, still cutting through the crap of daily existence. Like myself, he cycles a lot, and I'm hoping one day we might hit the country lanes together when I'm back in England visiting my folks.

Out of the blue, I find a photograph of Simon posted on facebook suffixed with a trail of condolences. It seems difficult to believe. He was only a couple of years older than myself, and there have been too many deaths this year, and this isn't even the first Simon. It was a cycling accident, an encounter with a tractor along a country lane upon which I myself have ridden many times. Death is never fair, but this one seems unusually harsh. In the days which follow, social media fills with glowing tributes in numbers proving that it wasn't just my imagination. Simon was popular because he was one of the good guys, one of the best. Even from halfway around the globe, his sudden absence is shocking.

Cat Homework

We are at the library on San Pedro, right next to the park. The park was famously the site of Yuanaguana, a Payaya village before the Europeans showed up, although being mostly nomadic, the Payaya didn't leave much behind in archaeological terms. This is possibly only the second time I've been to this park because the first visit was a bit weird due to the presence of numerous down-at-heel drag queens and the spectacle of the spring, or the fountain, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be. It's at the centre of the park and resembles a giant version of the candle made from Father Jack's earwax in the Passion of St. Tibulus episode of Father Ted.

We are at the library on San Pedro because we've been obliged to attend a class in much the same way as reformed jailbirds or recovering substance abusers. The comparison isn't entirely arbitrary because this is a class which Bess and myself have been obliged to attend so as to tick all the boxes on our having become a licensed cat colony, as recognised by the city council. Specifically it's a class for the TNR programme, TNR referring to the trap-neuter-return practice by which feral cats are allowed to remain at large without producing a ton of kittens. As joint CEOs of our own officially registered cat colony this sort of thing will soon be our responsibility.

'Let's hope they're not holding a T'n'A class at the same time,' I tell my wife as we enter the building. 'Can you imagine the confusion?'

Gratifyingly, she gets the joke and duly concedes a chortle.

'We're here for the TNR,' she says to the women at the front desk, who point us towards a side room.

We anticipated a class of three or maybe four weird old ladies bringing with them a certain aroma and probably talking to themselves, because the image is difficult to dispel even for crazy cat ladies such as ourselves. However to our surprise, the class is packed, twenty or thirty women and a few guys, mostly younger than us, clean, tidy, and not a tinfoil helmet to be seen. Three women are at the front with a table full of t-shirts and a humane trap. Behind them is a screen on which will be projected whatever is required to illustrate their testimony. Bess and I take seats at the back, there being only a few of the folding chairs still available. Our classroom seems to be the section next to the large print books. I can just see Michelle Obama's autobiography on the shelf to my left.

Our mistress of ceremonies is a regal older lady of distinctly Texan type - which I state as compliment in case there should be any ambiguity here - in so much as that a foreigner like myself is easily able to imagine her wrestling critters and ornery types and taking it all in her stride. Unfortunately this is the noisiest library I've ever been in and I have trouble hearing all that is said. Maybe the cat homework has coincided with an amateur wrestling class held elsewhere in the building.

We're there for about an hour, long enough to contract square-botty from the chairs - as the condition is understood by the medical profession. Mostly we're learning stuff we know, the wisdom of the TNR policy balanced against the usual clueless complaints traditionally made by people who simply don't like cats; but happily there's plenty of new information, not least being the operation of the humane traps which we loan from the city, where we take the cats to be fixed and so on. The hour is genuinely useful and informative, and it feels as though we've joined a secret society, which we sort of have.

The opportunity to ask questions comes at the end, and inevitably there are a few from those who just like to ask questions.

'I'd like to know, on the sheet of paper where you've given the number we need when we want to get in touch with you to ask a question, that number there, is that the one we need when we want to get in touch with you to ask a question?'

No-one actually asks that, but a few of them come close. I raise my hand and ask whether cats taken in to be fixed at the recommended clinics are checked to see whether they have an ID chip. I'm thinking about the wombat, one of our own feral regulars. He's a cat who resembles a wombat, albeit a ginger wombat. He has massive nuts and although we feed him, we otherwise can't get near him. Given his build and general disposition, I have a theory that he may have been an indoor cat who escaped and somehow ended up at our place, so we need to see whether he's been chipped.

I'm told this is a very good question, which is nice.

A bucket is passed around and we all chip in a few dollars towards cat food and similar supplies. Our own cats occasionally benefit from a free bag of the dry stuff which has been sent our way by the Feral Cat Coalition, the voluntary organisation which has arranged this meeting.

We seem to be done so I pop outside for a smoke, seeing as I'm back to smoking at the moment, because the year 2020 has thus far been a bit of a twat, even though it's still only January, and I only smoke in response to stress. Some young black dude approaches me and asks if I have a spare. I roll one for him. He has a strong African accent and seems a bit lost. He's trying to get somewhere, he tells me, but I can't work out why, so I say sorry because I'm not much help. He goes to sit on the bench outside the library to smoke his cigarette.

I look around for my wife but she's nowhere to be seen. I guess she's gone back into the library.

Back inside the library, she's talking to one of the Feral Cat Coalition people. We tell her about our neighbour who hates cats.

'I had one of those,' she tells us, and describes a scenario much worse than our own with a neighbour getting pissy over the slightest feline incursion into his precious yard which, according to our narrator, resembled a tip and was full of all sorts of junk he'd found at the side of the road.

'He was a pyschiatrist,' she tells us, rolling her eyes.

'It's always the way,' I say. 'How many cats do you have?'

'It was fifty at the time.'

I can actually hear Bess thinking holy shit! and that's what I'm thinking too. We don't have anything like as many. Our colony is pretty sane by comparison.

The woman describes how she was fined, and how she had the bad luck to be up before a judge who hates cats.

'You had a cat colony license and you were fined?' I'm trying not to panic. 'How can that happen?'

'It was a couple of hundred dollars, but that was before I had the license.'

Bess and I share a huge sigh of relief.

We go home, and it feels as though we're now part of some mysterious strike force.