Private World

I have been in existence for fifty-five years. By the time anyone reads this it will be fifty-six, all being well. The title would have been Solipsism but I'm trying hard to avoid disappearing up my own back passage, and Private World amounts to more or less the same thing whilst also being one of my favourite songs by the New York Dolls.

For some reason, I've always been driven to order things in sets or to alphabeticise them - books, records, art, or whatever - essentially to create frames. The books I accumulated as a child, only some of which I actually read, were ordered to my way of thinking into three main groups - excepting outliers such as Winnie the Pooh or anything containing pictures of dinosaurs. These three main groups were Doctor Who novelisations, cranky flying saucer literature, and humour. The last of these, humour, encompassed incomplete collections of Tintin and Asterix, then Mad magazine paperbacks, TV tie-in material such as were spun off from the Goodies or Monty Python, and more or less anything by Spike Milligan. I was a sporadic reader, but I liked anything with pictures that was funny. While the Who novels and the saucer books tended towards a certain stylistic uniformity, as did the Asterix and Tintin titles, the funny books were of all different shapes, sizes, and composition, which apparently bothered me. I therefore attempted to redefine them as a coherent group by writing The Loony Library - blue or black felt tip, all capitals and underlined - in the upper left corner on the inside cover of each book, as though they might constitute a body of thematically associated research material. All I knew was that I liked things to be in sets.

Much later, at the age of fourteen or so, I got my first mono portable tape recorder and took to borrowing novelty records from my friends, making up two C90 compilations for which I laboriously drew covers in felt tip; and, still very much in the thrall of Milligan, I named them Songs for the Hard of Thinking volumes one and two. Somehow it wasn't enough to simply have a couple of cassettes featuring Funky Gibbon, Friggin' in the Riggin' and selections from the K-Tel Looney Tunes album, so I framed the tapes on my own terms - packaged them even.

A year or so later, the enterprise had come to seem a little juvenile even to me so I peeled off the labels I'd glued onto the cassettes and taped over both volumes with pop songs from the radio - Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex, the first Public Image Limited single, Instant Replay by Dan Hartman and others. I was trying to grow up, but I wasn't picky.

However, this arbitrary assembly bothered me somehow, being nothing like so tidy as the few record albums I'd bought, all with nice covers and each one recorded by a specific artist or band. It was a good few years before I bought an actual vinyl compilation album because the basic concept had struck me as untidy. I found peace, at least with taping stuff off the radio, by instigating another set or series or whatever you want to call it on Saturday the 19th of July, 1980. The series was named The Illegal Tapes as a rebelliously sardonic nod to the notion of home taping killing music, and I remember the date because it's written inside my hand drawn cover for the first volume in reference to a Simple Minds performance broadcast during Radio One's In Concert slot. I filled the numerous volumes of The Illegal Tapes with stuff from the radio and singles borrowed from friends, diligently noting down the details of each on the cover, just like on an official release - credits, time, record label, owner of record and so on; and I listened to these tapes at least as often as I listened to my albums despite the shitty quality.

After thirty or so volumes, I began to recognise the faithful indexing of all that small print as essentially ludicrous, but I continued to make covers for the things and somehow kept the series going for one-hundred and twenty-two volumes, finally breaking the habit at some point in the nineties; and naturally I still have all of them because that's how my brain works. I frame things with which I furnish my own private world, possibly as a ritual affirmation of my being in control. I create a framework within which I feel better able to operate, by some definition.

In recent years I've grown increasingly conscious of the fact that I will, at some point, look back on this piece of writing and think, fifty-fucking-five, possibly also lamenting the passing of the ease with which I am able to function, both physically and mentally. I'm also aware that it may feel as though very little time has passed because it will have appeared to race more and more with each year. Childhood seemed to last forever, with eternities such as the length of time some friend was borrowing Spike Milligan's Little Pot Boiler measured in weeks. These days I can read a book I regard as a recent purchase and discover that I bought the thing five years ago.

At the age of ten, five years counted as 50% of the full span of my time on Earth. Five years is now 9.09% of my existence, and my existence is, I suppose, the sum of memories I've accumulated thus far; hence the sensation of my having stepped on the figurative gas in recent years. Elvis Presley released Heartbreak Hotel in 1956, which seemed like prehistory when I was a teenager in 1980, something belonging to the milieu of the second world war and Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston; yet Heartbreak Hotel was just twenty-four years old as of 1980, which is now forty-one years ago.

Twenty-four years back from 2021 brings us to 1997. Oasis were bothering the charts on a regular basis, but I'd given up on rock music and was listening mostly to rap and churning out a series of paintings based on various supernatural figures from Mexican mythology. It doesn't quite seem like yesterday, but maybe the day before yesterday. There were things I began in 1997 which I still vaguely regard as work in progress, while avoiding thoughts of whether or not I'm ever actually likely to get them finished.

I scribbled a hasty, non-committal cover for my final volume of The Illegal Tapes at the age of thirty-five. I had interests, creative pursuits, and habits but it didn't feel quite as though I'd ever fully engaged with anything. There wasn't anything I did which felt vital in the sense of being more than just a means of passing time, at least not with hindsight. I loved making art, recording my own music and writing, but everything I produced began to feel half-arsed once the initial fervour of creating yet another set or series had passed. All I could see were the flaws. I'd begun to suspect that I might be prone to fads or faddish behaviour, because I hadn't consistently stuck at any one thing for more than a couple of years, excepting working as a postman for Royal Mail which I didn't really like to think of as a calling. When I noticed pre-Hispanic Mexico and found myself becoming rapidly obsessed, I told myself that this time I was going to go all the way with it, whatever that meant, and so I did. I'd only ever been a sporadic reader, but now I really threw myself into it. When I ran out of library books, I made trips to Foyles and worked my way through their shelves, beginning with fairly general reading, ultimately graduating to specialised academic texts, translations of Codex Chimalpahin and so on. Eventually all that was left was to go to Mexico and have a look around, so that's what I did. Above all, I loved the discovery that the more I read, the more I understood, and the more I felt as though I had a grasp on the subject beyond my usual waving a hand in the air and explaining well, it's like, you know, it's like, stuff, and that's really interesting, and you know…

The more I used my brain, the better it seemed to work.

I began something called Hueyteteotecuhtin mainly for the sake of having a focus and making use of all that I was learning. Hueyteteotecuhtin would have been a book collecting my series of mythological paintings together with essays explaining the same.

The more I understood, the more I enjoyed the understanding, and the more I realised how little I had actually understood anything up until that point. I took copious notes of everything I read or saw, filling ring binders with scrawling essays and observations which informed the paintings; then eventually realised that Hueyteteotecuhtin, my proposed visual encyclopedia of Mexican Gods would be, with the best will in the world, a potentially cranky undertaking due to the uneasy combination of pseudo-surrealist art and notionally scholarly essays in the tone of an autodidact. I dislike leaving anything unfinished but have come to accept that Hueyteteotecuhtin was probably one of those undertakings where the journey was ultimately more important than the destination.

While pondering what form Hueyteteotecuhtin might eventually take, I wrote a novel, Smoking Mirror, and then another novel, The Other Side of the World when Smoking Mirror failed to find a publisher. The Other Side of the World was eventually published by Obverse Books as Against Nature following such extensive revisions as to turn it into a different book. My attempts to write fiction began as a sort of appendix to Hueyteteotecuhtin, an undertaking I tried on the side for the sake of light relief as much as anything; but also for the sake of making use of all that research and those five trips to Mexico City, at least ensuring that it had all amounted to something and wasn't just another dead end.

By 2008, fiction had become my main thing and writing was becoming something like an end in itself. It was never anything I did in pursuit of fame or money, although I don't think I would have had a problem with either. It was simply what I did, and as such I struggled for proficiency, to be able to pull together a sentence with the sort of aptitude and skill I'd never really achieved with a guitar; and at some point, I think I got there.

I'd agonised over Smoking Mirror, crawling forward one sentence at a time, usually finding it to be drivel and requiring extensive revision next day. The Other Side of the World came a little easier, following which I took to short stories, writing and rewriting almost every day in an effort to get to grips with it.

As I took to writing science-fiction, it occurred to me that I hadn't actually read much aside from about half of Philip K. Dick's body of work and a stack of Doctor Who novelisations; but I'd read enough to be able to tell when an author's main influences were films or television serials because their novels read as though they would rather have been something else, and I didn't want to be one of those people. If you're writing a novel in hope of it becoming a series on Netflix, I probably won't want to read it.

The discovery of self-publishing came as a revelation to me, a means of framing my writing like I'd framed stuff taped from the radio as The Illegal Tapes. It meant that I could produce decent looking paperbacks of both Smoking Mirror and The Other Side of the World, legitimising them as finished pieces which I could then sell to anyone who might be interested. Self-publishing served to frame all that work as something beyond just a stack of printouts in a ringbinder or files sat on my computer and, to be frank, the sequence of my own Lulu publications occupying the book shelf between William Burroughs' Blade Runner treatment and Octavia Butler's Mind of My Mind means more to me than whether anyone is buying.

As it happens, I do seem to have generated a few sales on Lulu, although I have no idea who these people are beyond that they must almost certainly have read Against Nature and then gone looking for further material. I've been told by a good friend whose novels sell by the truckload in actual book stores that if you don't want your work to be read by as many people as possible then you can't call yourself a writer. I file this maxim away with others which may work for  people who aren't me, aside from which I don't call myself a writer. Writing is something I do, and try to do to the best of my abilities. That which readers have thus far taken from my writing has often seemed slightly different to that which I've tried to put in, so I find the feedback and even the praise to be confusing. I can't always square it with what I've done, or thought I was doing. It seems like a distraction and I have no real interest in writing for a specific audience.

In addition to the novels, I've spent much of the last decade chronicling my own existence. I've maintained online blogs of semi-autobiographical material as well as reviews of books I've read and music I've enjoyed. The first of these blogs was Pamphlets of Destiny, although it spent the first two years of its life on a couple of internet bulletin boards. Back in 2007 when I realised I should perhaps make an effort to read more of the genre within which I was trying to write, I took to writing short reviews of everything I read, principally as a means of analysing and understanding the genre, what worked, and what didn't work. This additionally resulted in my feeling better able to tackle books I might once have left on the shelf as either too demanding or at least nowhere near so much fun as reading an X-Men comic book. It additionally meant that, then in my forties, I began to catch up with all the authors I probably should have read during my teenage years - Asimov, Simak, Dostoyevsky, D.H. Lawrence and others. The more I read, and the more I wrote about what I'd been reading, the more fluid I found the process of writing. My vocabulary began to expand, reducing the need to revise each paragraph a million times over before it began to flow as it should; and the more I wrote, the more capable I was at expressing myself, at matching the thought process to words by means which yielded something a bit more coherent than well, it's like, you know, it's like, stuff, and that's really interesting, and you know...

This chronicling of my own existence has taken the form of self-published collections of my reviews, vaguely autobiographical blog posts, diaries kept whilst travelling around in Mexico, and even material written for fanzines or just for the sake of writing. It's self-indulgent, I suppose, but I am my own audience; and I exclude from this undertaking anything which I wouldn't have bothered reading had it been written by someone else. What this means is that I work on this material at great length, getting it into as respectable a shape as I can so as to avoid having to look back on it and wishing I hadn't bothered. Self-publishing has an arguably poor reputation as the home of people who can't fucking write and who tend to think that'll do before hitting the publish my gibberish button on Lulu, and I don't want to be one of those people either.

The purpose of this chronicling and framing, of all the work I've put into self-publishing paperbacks which may only ever exist as a single physical copy on my own book shelf, is mapping where I've been, where I am right now, and how I got here. It's an extension of what I've been doing for most of my life, the ongoing task of elevating myself, or at least trying to live a better life than I was living, by some definition. The legitimacy of this undertaking seems supported by present circumstances under which I'm probably happier than I've ever been. I'm happily married and settled in Texas, and have been for the past decade, and I enjoy what I do. I no longer feel like I have to create an impression or appease anyone outside of the usual civic forces. This was never the future I envisioned for much of my first forty or so years, and it doesn't feel like something I simply stumbled upon through pure luck.

It has been observed by former acquaintances that my obsession with Mexico and all that came in its wake might constitute a magical or shamanic journey, and I recognise the notion that the successful practice of magic - or probably magick - improves the quality of ones life and can be identified as such by the opportunities and coincidences which begin to present themselves with astonishing frequency when you're doing it right. Personally I see it more as a case of simply getting ones shit together, and the esoteric terms arise only by way of contrast with how few people actually do ever get their shit together, for whatever reason. Calling it magic is just another dead end, a flamboyant means of identifying the individual within their peer group, and further validating whatever showy crap someone has adopted as their reason for being.

This chronicling - itself an extension of my framing - is presently what I'm doing instead of having the traditional mid-life crisis, now that I've reached the age at which my childhood may as well have happened to someone else in terms of memory. I create markers by which I can observe the process of how I got here, to return to that particular theme. Much of the autobiographical material from An Englishman in Texas records details I'm beginning to forget whilst attempting to answer the question of what the fuck that was all about. Even the book and music reviews serve a similar purpose, at least from my own perspective, charting attitudes and preferences which have changed over time, including even how well I've applied myself to the creative process.

I've recently spent about two thirds of a year revising all of my own earlier self-published work, having discovered that my proofreading regime up until about 2016 still left significant room for error. Mostly the revisions have been limited to an excessive use of commas and the occasionally errant spelling or typo, but I found this in Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers - the first collection of science-fiction book reviews:

I have an old tape interview where he describes starting work as a teenager at some radio repair place, having an argument with the guy over whether what comes out of a speaker is music or merely a simulation of music produced by minute fluctuations in air pressure.

I don't know how obvious the problem will be to whoever reads this, but to me it suggest that the young Philip K. Dick was once employed to have acne, spend too long on the phone, and to yell, I hate you, it's so unfair! at his mother. The first half of Crappy 1970s Paperbacks, even after all of the revision and polishing, still reads like fanzine level writing to me, but - with reviews printed in order of having been written - seems to pick up around the summer of 2010, the point at which I'd been away from Royal Mail for eight months and had begun sorting everything out in readiness for my relocation to Texas. I don't know if the circumstances were a factor, or whether my thought engine was simply running better, but it feels as though something had changed.

As any legitimate scientist will tell you, the uncomfortable fact of engaging in any field of scientific research is the realisation that what you come to know additionally reveals the sheer scale of what you don't know and may never know; and I would say this applies as well to any course of applied thought. This, I suspect, is why people adhere with such tenacity to blind alleys of pop culture, because it's not that hard to learn everything there is to learn about the Marvel universe or Doctor Who or whatever else is clogging up the internet this week; and achieving a comprehensive understanding of something which doesn't really matter is a nevertheless comprehensive understanding which brings with it an illusory but satisfying sense of achievement, and I should know because that's where I started.

This is also, I would suggest, why unintelligent people often tend to be so terrifyingly resolute in their convictions. They believe in knowledge as something small and finite, something which can be complete once you have all of the facts, or all of what you're prepared to accept as the facts; and whatever insecurities may be in operation serve to preserve and fortify their convictions as something which no-one is taking from them, because those convictions may be all they have.

In summary, if any of above makes any sense whatsoever, then my assessment of my own progress is possibly accurate, or at least refers to real world occurrences rather than just whatever has been happening inside my head. On the other hand, it may read like the ramblings of some cunt talking to himself because that's actually what it is.

Back in 1997, I was single bordering on incel status, loosely financed by a back breaking job, and unable to imagine a future which was likely to represent an improvement on the present. In 2021, barring minor inconveniences, I'm happier than I've probably ever been for any length of time and I'm able to look back on that which I've left behind in my wake and think, yeah, that was okay. I put this down to hard work and learning to think in a straight line, and occasionally having to face the fact that nothing is ever automatically a masterpiece just because you did it and you were expressing yourself.

In ten years time, I will be sixty-six, and I may read this back and think, what a load of old bollocks, which will hopefully mean that I'm right, because the journey will always be more crucial than the destination.

Gus II

We've been having quite a lot of rain and my shoes - sneakers, pumps, tennis shoes, whatever the hell you call those things - are getting soaked on a regular basis. An hour or so in the dryer, which is in the garage next to the washing machine, usually does the trick; but unfortunately the soakings have become such a regular occurrence that they're starting to pong, necessitating the additional application of baking soda. This time though, the smell lingers in the garage, which is worrying. It gets worse over the next couple of days and it dawns on me that something may have crawled into our garage and died. Its happened before and it's usually a possum.

Monday comes and I move a toolbox and discover a dead cat. They look different when the life has gone out of them and it takes me a moment before I realise that it's Gus II. It feels like I've been punched in the stomach. I'm fairly sure I saw her as recent as Saturday when I gave her the usual bowl of Nine Lives.

When I first met my wife, she had a female cat called Gus, short for Asparagus after some character in a headachey musical. Gus was grey and stripey, a pleasantly plump American shorthair of oddly Victorian appearance in that she tended to look as though she didn't approve. Gus was a wonderful cat.

At some point during the expansion of our cat colony, I took to leaving uneaten bowls of food outside for a couple of strays I'd noticed hanging around our garden because I didn't want it to go to waste. Among these cats were a pair of similar type to Gus, and as they were female and seemed to be related, I began to think of them as the Gus sisters, specifically Gus II and Gus III. They were both feral, accepting food but running off if I came too close, and looked similar, excepting Gus III being much larger. They groomed each other and often ate from the same food bowl with their tails intertwined, hence my presuming them to be closely related. I've no clear idea of when they first turned up but assume it to have been at least five years ago.

Our feral cat colony - the guys who don't get to come in the house - comprised about five or six cats at one time, but has been just two or three for most of its history, with members drifting off, presumably having discovered a better deal elsewhere, or turning up to fill a vacancy. At some point a few years back, Gus III became a no show for whatever reason, leaving us with just Mr. Kirby, the Wombat, and Gus II. Then we lost Mr. Kirby - which was fucking horrible - leaving just two, both of whom seemed to have integrated fairly well with our official cats.

The Wombat is a huge ginger male who walks like a wombat, hence the name, and always looks pissed off about something. I've never been able to get close to him, but in recent years he became good friends with Gus II and I often found them curled up together in a corner of the garden, apparently united by their refugee status.

More recently still, Gus II apparently decided I was okay, despite being a human. She'd dance around my feet when I took the food bowls out in the morning, even submitting the occasional meow and allowing me to pet her without flinching. It had taken years but it seemed worth it, and now able to get close I began to realise just how tiny she was - even smaller than our own Daisy, who has remained at what pretty much amounts to grown kitten dimensions.

I'd seen Gus II on Saturday, and now she was dead, leaving the Wombat looking distinctly forlorn. I buried her at the end of the garden marking the grave with rocks, as usual.

It's never easy when they die, and I suppose she wasn't even our cat, technically speaking, but in a world of increasingly vocal flat-earthers and persons who make it their business to make life as unpleasant and pointless as possible for the rest of us, Gus II was a tiny, brown stripey thing which used to dance around my feet and always seemed happy to see me. There was nothing negative about her having existed, only good from what I could see.

Life goes on, I suppose.

 

 

Our Aluminum Wedding Anniversary

Twenty-five years of marriage is considered a silver wedding anniversary, fifty is gold, and being just ten, our own is supposedly aluminum. My source for this information additionally reveals that three years is a leather wedding anniversary, five is wood, and seventeen is furniture - apparently pertaining to the sort of gifts one might expected to receive on such occasions. I have no idea which theological system the list is derived from and I'm pretty sure it's not in the Bible. Aluminum is a silvery non-ferrous metal which I referred to as aluminium during those admittedly rare childhood conversations about silvery non-ferrous metals. Aside from my having given up on attempts to check my own slow sideways drift into transatlantic English, it seems that aluminum was the original spelling and pronunciation, give or take some small change.

The important thing is that Bess and I have been married ten years, and today is our anniversary. We've both been on diets of late, Bess with the keto, and myself with the keto except where potatoes are available; but otherwise eating nothing all day, fasting until the evening meal. For me, this is only a variation of how I lived during most of those twenty years as a postman so it's not really a major deal and I've shed a couple of stone as a result, leaving me better qualified to tell my doctor to stick it up his arse next time he sends me a whiny message about cholesterol levels. However, because it's our anniversary, we've agreed to ignore our ordinary self-imposed daily regime and start by stuffing our faces at Sonia's on the Nacogdoches Road. We once ate at Sonia's every Saturday lunchtime, which is probably why we both needed to go on diets in the first place, but it's been a while. I order the migas plate, just like in the good old days, and it seems like the greatest migas plate I've ever had.

Actually, we start the day by waking up. I give Bess a couple of anniversary presents - a book called Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby and a mug featuring Freddie Mercury looking histrionic against a backdrop of the union jack. She likes Queen, and she likes English stuff - which has worked out well for me, obviously. The book had a bunny on the cover and seemed pretty funny from a quick glance in the store - Jenny Lawson's Nowhere Books on Broadway - so that was that. I'd considered buying jewellery but the antique place, also on Broadway, seemed prohibitively expensive, particularly given that their definition of antique extended to late eighties issues of Marvel's Black Panther comic book, ninety dollars each at the store, but a mere three if you have a look for them online.

Bess's present to me was tickets for the No Limit Records reunion show at Cedar Park, which has been cancelled due to the resurgence of coronavirus, so I guess we'll be doing that next year some time.

Meanwhile back at the anniversary, having stuffed our faces at Sonia's, we hit the road because even though it's fucking hot, it would be too weird to stay inside on this particular day despite the appeal of air conditioning. We drive to Victoria, nearly two hours to the south-east in the general direction of the coast, because we went there before and saw bunnies at the zoo. This time, the bunnies are fewer in number which would seem to contradict my understanding of how rabbits work, but we realise that the rabbits we're looking at are a quarantined group. There's just five or six of them, at least two of which clearly have the snuffles - here referring specifically to pasteurella which can be occasionally fatal, or which some rabbits can live with but which never fully clears up if they have it. Hopefully the other rabbits are elsewhere.

The other rabbits are indeed elsewhere, but it's fucking hot so they're all inside their apartment sized hutch. However, the lemurs have had babies and we spend at least half an hour watching them. Victoria zoo generally specialises in indigenous wildlife - coyotes, raccoons and so on - but we don't mind. One of the keepers attending the lemurs has a conspicuously non-American accent. It's difficult to place and sounds like Northern Ireland to me, but is later revealed as Glaswegian when I ask. As usual, there isn't actually much to be said beyond the revelation that neither of us are from around these parts.

I've never been to Scotland. I begin to tell her that I once had a friend called Gibby who was from Glasgow, but being as the conclusion of the anecdote is that I couldn't understand a fucking word he said either and that we eventually fell out due to his being a gigantic arsehole, my testimony reduces to awkward mumbling before I get to the potentially offending section.

We drive back via Goliad, then head to Guajillos for dinner. Having grown accustomed to one meal a day, neither of us are massively hungry but it's our anniversary. The meal is oddly underwhelming. I usually order mole poblano but my lack of appetite has resulted in curiosity regarding other parts of the menu, specifically to the Mexican version of schnitzel. It's actually good but is kind of dry and surely should have come with some kind of sauce to set everything off. A young man with a beard and ginger hair sits alone at the table next to ours picking at his tacos and watching something on a tablet, so I decide it's his fault. On a positive note, our waitress seems to have calmed down since we were here last - which was presumably her first day.

As we return home, almost back at our own street, a tiny black kitten darts across the road in front of the car. We stop and get out, because he seems a little small to be running loose. We follow him behind bushes and through front yards as evening falls, hoping we don't look too much like potential burglers. Someone comes out to see what we're doing, then points to the house across the street.

'I think she has kittens over there.'

I go and ring the doorbell, then end up having an awkward conversation through a speaker system because the woman isn't opening her door just yet. She doesn't have a cat. She does, however, occasionally feed a feral cat which hangs around in her yard, and the cat has had kittens.

I rejoin my wife. She has caught the kitten and is holding him as she talks to the other neighbour. It turns out that Bess has known the other neighbour at least since when, as a teenager, she used to babysit her son. The son recalled my wife as having been his favourite babysitter. I remember the story from some previous telling, back before we realised these people lived just around the corner from us.

The woman who feeds the feral cat finally emerges from her home so we compare notes, and I find myself thoroughly confused; but the important detail is that we're going to take the kitten home, seeing as he's feral and tiny. We tell ourselves we're going to get him fixed and maybe find him a home, but we both know we'll be keeping him. One more isn't going to make much difference, we tell ourselves, and it doesn't. He seems happy and gets on fine with the other cats, and as kittens go, he's relatively trouble free. We try to think of a name relating to having found him on our tenth wedding anniversary, but nothing suggests itself. Bess proposes Goliad as an elaborate semiotic pun on historical events in the town we passed through coming back from Victoria, combined with our previous black cat being named Bean, all of which would take too long to explain; I suggest Vic as short for Victor, which is the masculine of Victoria; but the kid wins with Oliver, which I like because it can be shortened to Ollie, which additionally makes me think of Oliver Hardy.

So that was our tenth wedding anniversary. It wasn't anything spectacular, but then it didn't need to be because the last ten years have been very much their own reward, as such requiring no additional sprinkling of glitter.

We ate.

We saw bunnies.

We have a kitten.

We've been married for ten years, which have undoubtedly been the best of my life. I couldn't ask for more.

Unvaccinated Man

I cycle the Tobin Trail five days a week in the name of exercise, but Morningstar Boardwalk is closed. Morningstar Boardwalk is a raised walkway which follows about a mile of creek bed along Salado Creek. A section amounting to eight foot of siding and two lengths of decking are damaged. The worst of the damage is where the edge of a decking plank projects about an inch up from the surface of the boardwalk on one side, meaning that if you cycle across it too fast you might experience a small bump. It's been like this since November and hasn't made much difference to anyone, and yet the city have now closed it off for repairs which never happen. Presumably they're worried someone might trip on the miscreant plank and then take legal advice. My admittedly uninformed estimate - based on my own work with hammers, nails, and the like - is that the repairs would take about half an hour, two at most, and yet nothing is done.

This is what happens from time to time. The boardwalk requires repairs and is fenced off for a couple of weeks. Last time I took to walking my bike along the creek bed parallel to the boardwalk, seeing as it was dry. This meant that I was able to inspect the damage to the boardwalk which, on this occasion, was more pronounced - a day's work at least. The persons effecting the repairs were sat around in their trucks playing with their phones - ten or twelve of them, six trucks, and not one of them even looked up as I wheeled my bike along the track of dried mud left by their tires. Eventually the repairs were made and the boardwalk was opened up once more, having been closed off for two weeks.

This time, temporary fencing has been erected at each end of the boardwalk, but it's easy enough to walk around it and carry on as normal, particularly given that the boardwalk itself is no more damaged than it was for a full six months prior to being fenced off. Then someone from the city strikes back, securing the fencing at the northern end to metal stakes driven directly into the creek, leaving no gap around which one might furtively sidle; but as said fencing is secured by means of plastic ties - the kind you might use to anchor climbing plants in the garden, some enterprising civilian with a pair of scissors takes the law into his or her own hands, and once again we are all able to make use of the forbidden boardwalk.

We're probably breaking the law, but this is Texas; plus trying to make up my daily twenty miles by doubling back over the first half of my usual route gets fucking boring after a couple of days; and the fucker has now been closed for a month with still neither a hard hat nor a clipboard to be seen, much less a bloke with a hammer and a bag of nails.

Much of the above is reiterated during my first conversation with Carmen, a fellow cyclist accustomed to daily use of Morningstar Boardwalk, a conversation initiated with one of us observing, it's still fucking closed? Seriously? or words to that effect.

I've been nodding howdy to Carmen for most of the last year without us ever stopping to talk as we pass, but I'm glad that we've broken the ice because she's a hoot and she doesn't like Donald Trump very much. She's originally from New Orleans, has a ton of cats, and seems to have led a varied and interesting life. Today I spot her from a distance. She's about five-hundred yards away on the stretch of trail running off from the north end of Morningstar Boardwalk; except all I can see is a flash of hi-viz material, the same yellow as is worn by the trail stewards. I'm trying to avoid the trail stewards, because I'm trying to avoid having that conversation about how I should take heed of the warning signs at either end of the fenced off boardwalk because I might have a terrible accident where that bit of wood sticks up about an inch.

I proceed with caution and as I come close I realise it's actually Carmen, bright yellow today, and stationary because she's tapping something out on her phone.

'Howdy,' I say.

'Howdy!' She tells me she's been trying to post something on a webpage about wildflowers of Texas. 'My friend Cary is a gardener,' she says, 'and he scattered some zinnia seeds over that ways. They're bright red and they came up - pretty too.'

I realise I know the flowers to which she's referring. I've been passing them every day - although I'd say they're more purple than red. Anyway, they seemed incongruous where they were growing and made an impression.

'So some guy planted them?'

As occasionally happens, we seem to be talking at cross-purposes.

'They wouldn't accept it because zinnias aren't native to Texas, so they didn't take my photo. Yeah, Cary just threw the seeds there and they grew.'

'I saw the flowers. I was wondering about them.'

'Here he comes now.'

Some guy on a bike is approaching, no shirt and he's tanned Texas brown with the usual Sam Elliott moustache.

'Is that Stephen?' I ask. Stephen is Carmen's husband. I met him once and they sometimes cycle together. He looks a bit like this guy from what I can remember.

'No - it's Cary,' she tells me.

'Hey,' says Cary jovially. We almost shake hands, but he changes it to a cautious fist bump. 'I turned back. That hill was too much.'

'The other side of the railway, you mean?' I ask.

He nods. 'I won't come too close. I know how the vaccinated don't like it so much.'

I'm sort of shocked as he says it with a chuckle, and these may not have been his exact words; but whatever he said is said in the assumption that none of us have been vaccinated against coronavirus because we're just not that gullible.

'You haven't been vaccinated?' says Carmen.

'It's all made up,' he smiles, apparently amused at his own misunderstanding. 'You took the vaccine?'

'Of course,' she says.

'Me too,' I add.

'I always been healthy,' he says. 'I didn't see the need. Anyway you ain't got to worry because I never see anyone.'

He's wheeling away now, talking back over his shoulder. The tone is jovial but it sounds as though he's ready for a fight. 'I eat an apple every day. I always have a bowl of Special K. The doctor says there's nothing wrong with me. Don't you worry - I won't breathe on you!'

He coughs in illustrative fashion, making a point of some description as he cycles away towards the fenced off boardwalk.

'Nice meeting you,' I say, although I'm not sure that it was. I think about the fist bump and wonder.

'They're always so angry,' I say to Carmen. 'What is that? It's like it's personal somehow.'

She shakes her head because neither of us can imagine how it must feel to be so certain of anything so vague.

When There's Nothing to Say

Occasionally a complete stranger will talk to me, or make some observation apparently for my benefit. In England this would almost always have been about the weather. Here in Texas, the weather occasionally crops up as a subject with which to engage strangers in conversation, but not with the same frequency because there's not much to discuss once both parties have agreed that it's too fucking hot and a bit of rain would be nice seeing as how we haven't had any since 1974. Without the staple of meteorology, casual Texan conversation has a greater potential for going somewhere weird and pointless, and here's a top ten of my favourite misjudged and bewildering attempts at conversation.

1. 'So that's how you like it, huh?'
I was outside Lowes hardware store locking up my bike when I heard this observation. The speaker was a man in his late sixties, by my estimate, and he made the observation with a gentle smile as though amused to find himself saying such a thing. I was initially bewildered, but soon deduced from his subsequent commentary that how I like it was my bicycle still being there upon my return from the store. The man seemed to be unfamiliar with the notion that one might secure a bicycle so as to prevent it being nicked, and thus was he duly and quite profoundly entertained by this bold new idea. Had I been participating in an orgy, and had I just discovered some new and unusual perversion to be more pleasurable than anticipated, some third party observing, so that's how you like it, huh? would have made more sense given the jovial tone of its delivery.

2. 'That's what you gotta do - you gotta zap cancer.'
This may even have been the same guy who commented upon how I like it, and certainly the amiable cadence with a faint whiff of senility was the same. The location however was a sandwich joint, specifically with myself stood at the coffee machine filling my cup. I was wearing a t-shirt on the back of which was a cartoon lightning bolt underscoring the instruction to zap cancer, so in essence the man was simply agreeing with my t-shirt. The t-shirt had been produced as some sort of awareness raising deal relating to the late Skip Brooks, then undergoing treatment for cancer. Members of his family were staging numerous events and happenings so as to raise funds for his treatment, and the t-shirt was part of that.

'Yes,' I said to the man who had agreed with my t-shirt, because I didn't know what else I could say. I suppose congratulating him on his ability to read would have been poor form.

3. 'I like your bag.'
This one patently comes under the heading of polite attempts at conversation, but makes the list by virtue of repetition, it being an observation which has been made so many times by the staff of my local supermarket as to have become just plain weird. So as to avoid constipating certain cupboards in our kitchen with a surfeit of disposable carrier bags, I now take a reusable PVC thing to the supermarket - which I visit daily so as to avoid having to make a single massive expedition at the end of the week. Sometimes the woman at the entrance greets me with, 'I like your bag,' or sometimes it's the cashier as I'm flapping it about in preparation to load it up with tins of cat food; and they all like my bag.

Yet it's just a bag, average looking PVC, or something of the sort, a bland animal print pattern purchased from the very same supermarket a few years earlier. If they all like my bag so much, I'm surprised nobody bought one for themselves when they were on the shelves. It's not a particularly annoying or offensive observation, but it does seem odd. I suppose that of all the things of mine for which any of these people could express admiration, my bag is the least likely to get anyone into trouble. 'I like the way you move' would seem overly familiar, for one example.

4. 'I guess you like to mow your lawn.'
The lawn mower was seemingly fucked. I'd found a small engine repair specialist, and luckily it was situated on the Austin Highway, less than a mile from our home therefore sparing us the headache of trying to fit the mower in the car. I was pushing the mower along Northeast Parkway towards the Austin Highway when I spotted him up ahead. The area is mostly industrial units, not all of which are occupied, and common land, so of the few people you see on foot about half of them are either already drunk at ten in the morning, or don't seem like they would have any objection to being drunk at ten in the morning. This guy was maybe twenty, a muscular skinhead covered in tattoos, and apparently wearing just dungarees with only one shoulder strap in place. He was watching my approach and I could tell he was going to say something, maybe try to sell me meth. I maintained a steady pace, resisting the urge to cross the road and thus reveal my fear. I set my head down, looking straight ahead as I pushed the mower.

'Hey, buddy,' he said in greeting, sounding unexpectedly jovial.

'Hello,' I replied, sparing him just enough of a glance to show that I was neither fearful nor in any way alarmed by his appearance. He was just some dude greeting me in the street and here I was reciprocating. It wasn't a big deal, at least not for me.

'I guess you like to mow your lawn,' he observed happily.

'Yes,' I confirmed.

I guess that was the only thing he could come up with.

5. 'I don't cook!'
I stood in line in HEB, waiting for the guy ahead of me to pay the cashier. My purchase of cat food was on the belt and from the corner of my eye I could see the customer who had just arrived behind me. She had a trolley and was lifting something out of it, and I had the feeling she was waiting for me to look around to see what it was; so I looked around in spite of my better judgement. The woman was small and old. 'I don't cook!' she exclaimed happily, apparently in the belief that I'd been wondering. A set of three cast iron skillets, small, medium, and large, sat on the conveyor belt where she'd placed them with a theatrical display of effort. I assumed that the full length version of the joke would be something along the lines of here I am buying a set of three cast iron skillets even though I don't cook, which itself raises the inevitable question of why she had bought them; but I wasn't really interested so I didn't ask. I'm sure she had her reasons.

6. 'Get your exercise!'
I'm not entirely sure this counts by quite the same terms as the others, having been shouted by Stacy who is, I suppose, a neighbourhood character, someone I see out and about walking her dog with some frequency and who routinely barks some sort of greeting in my general direction. She is of a grizzled, sun-dried appearance and has that rootin' tootin' quality common to some Texan women of a certain age group. Previous utterances have included the traditional greetings of good morning or even howdy, but also random observations that her dog is ninety-three in human years. On this occasion, she yelped get your exercise, entirely without the preamble of a greeting, as a friendly, if startling, observation offered in what I took to be a spirit of encouragement. I was riding a bike at the time and was thus indeed getting my exercise. I still say a simple howdy would have been significantly less weird.

7. 'Would you mind if I took a photograph of those eggs?'
The enquiry in full was, 'Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I took a photograph of those eggs you have there in your basket?' and was delivered in a possibly rural Texas accent by a balding, red-faced man, dressed casually and stood behind me in the supermarket. On top of all that which I had in my basket sat a box of a dozen eggs, the Central Market brand, costing more than the others on the promise of the eggs having been laid by happy chickens rather than chickens in cages and pumped full of drugs. I was so flummoxed by the enquiry that I could hardly refuse. The man fiddled with his phone, chuckling, 'My dad's gonna be real tickled when he sees this.' I didn't like to ask why, because there seemed to be a good chance I'd regret asking. Having paid up, I made my way home wondering if the photo of my box of eggs was about to turn up on one of those what will those crazy liberals think of next? websites. Later I considered the possibility that maybe the guy's father supplied eggs to Central Market, but that theory didn't fully make sense either. Maybe, much like Edith Massey's character in Pink Flamingos, he just liked eggs.

8. References to cowboys.
These occur with surprising frequency and have thus far always taken the form of either a greeting, or a response to my own initial greeting, variations including well howdy, cowboy or even ride 'em, cowboy because I was on my bike at the time, delivered in either an exaggerated Texan accent or what may well unfortunately be how the person actually speaks. The reason for the greeting is doubtless the fact of my wearing a Stetson hat, giving me the appearance of a cowboy if you're about five or if you don't live in Texas. I wear a Stetson because the sun is strong in Texas, I burn easily and dislike sunscreen or unguents on my face, and because it additionally provides protection in the event of rain - at least as much as an umbrella. I even wear my Stetson when travelling beyond Texas because, aside from the above considerations, it makes for a convenient receptacle to which the contents of one's pockets may be transferred when going through airport security; and because it rains in England. Cowboy jokes cracked by young men in elegant tracksuits are at least understandable in England where a Stetson is a rare sight; but actual cowboys are common in Texas, and about a third of the population of San Antonio wears either a Stetson or something which could be mistaken for one, so observations concerning the same only seem weirdly redundant, equivalent to I see you got yourself a fine pair of shoes there, shoe-boy!

9. 'That's the wrong bike!'
This was a heckle from a middle-aged woman sat upon a second floor balcony as I road past the apartment block on the way back from the supermarket. I was riding my mountain bike up a slight incline towards Harry Wurzbach Parkway. The woman seemed to be grinning in a jocular fashion so I assume the comment was part of some joke I didn't understand and was therefore yelled in genial spirit. It was followed closely by some other presumably related observation which I didn't catch and which may have shed light on the first part of her address. Clearly the bike wasn't the wrong bike in so much as that I was the owner, but perhaps the woman thought some other model might have been better suited to movement up a slight incline. Who fucking knows?

10. 'Now reward yourself with some water.'
I was cycling on the Tobin Trail. It was noon and pretty hot, probably somewhere in the region of 90° Fahrenheit, and a guy in yellow lycra yelled something as he rode past on his mountain bike. It was the second time I'd passed him that day, and he'd yelled something during our previous encounter too - about an hour earlier - which had sounded like coming up on the morning. It had sounded like half a sentence and therefore didn't make any sense to me, so I'd bobbed my head in acknowledgement of his expectoration and thought no more of it. This time, I was listening to Jay-Z's Blueprint III album on my Discman, which I was loathe to interrupt, but I really wanted to know what it was that he'd said, so I stopped, pulled a bud from my ear, and asked. 'Now reward yourself with some water,' he repeated loudly, apparently having assumed that we were both part of a team dedicated to exercisational empowerment and motivated by healthy sports hydration as reward for our being the best we can be. I'd already drunk my customary bottle of iced tea back at McAllister Park just as I do every day, and therefore had no need of this advice, aside from which, water is boring. I suppose the instruction wasn't anything more than the vaguely neighbourly verbal equivalent of a high five and should therefore be regarded as harmless, if a little over familiar, but its instructional thrust seemed like the thin end of a wedge at the other end of which one might reasonably expect to find you need to go a bit faster to get the full cardio-vascular benefit, or maybe you shouldn't eat so many pies, you fat fucker.

Oddly, I was similarly heckled by a random stranger about an hour later in the parking lot of HEB, but it was in Spanish so I didn't understand it. He seemed to be smiling amiably so I assumed it wasn't anything I need worry about, and suspect it probably would have been a bit more interesting than the thing about rewarding myself with water had I requested a translation.