Pearsall

The United States Postal Service now, for reasons best known to itself, automatically photographs your mail prior to delivery, allowing my wife to go online and take a quick look at what the mailman will  bring later on. Unfortunately we see that one of our letters will be a citation for something or other from the city and a case number is just visible through the thin paper of the envelope. We were driving to Pearsall today, but now we're waiting in for the mail, trying to work out what our stupid neighbour has found to complain about this time. We guess it must be something to do with our trees, but mainly because we can't think of anything else; unless he's completely lost it and now suspects that we're collaborating with an underground race of mole people and have built a structurally illegal staircase within our own home so as to facilitate their proposed war against the surface dwellers. The mail usually arrives by eleven on Saturday, but there's been nothing. Eventually we leave anyway, assuming it to be one of those occasional Saturdays when the mail doesn't show up until late afternoon; so we drive over to Target and buy ourselves a little American flag for a couple of dollars.

To start at the beginning, I never met my wife's grandfather. He was gone before I could get here, but he's one person I wish I could have met because I think I would have liked him. His name was Harlan and he was nicknamed Fuzz, originally in reference to his copious blonde hair, but retained with an ironic twist once he went bald on top. As soon as my wife told me this I thought of the old boys I knew at work, the generation who lived through the second world war and whose sense of humour was apparently an international phenomenon. Asked about his nationality when crossing back over into the States from Mexico, Fuzz would say Texan with what I imagine to have been a wry but resolute smile. He was quiet and not given to ostentatious displays of emotion, yet when his favourite chicken went missing - whom he'd named Miss Chicken - the depth of his affection was exposed in his smile when she came back, despite previous protestations that she was only a chicken and sometimes they wander off.

He's buried in the cemetery in Pearsall, a small town surrounded by a lot of wide open space some fifty miles south of San Antonio. My wife grew up there, and that's where her family are from. Its main industry seems to have been either oil or peanuts, depending on which bit of the internet you're looking at. There's a monumental peanut on the side of the highway as you leave town bearing the legend, world's largest peanut, 55.000.000 lbs marketed annually; but the peanut has clearly seen better days, and its claim seems to raise more questions than it answers. The town had a population of around ten-thousand last time anyone counted, but I get the feeling the figure may since have reduced somewhat. The house in which so many of my wife's family were born was once in an orchard but is now surrounded by trailer homes. We went to have a look. There was a wild pig kept inside a tiny cage outside one of them so we didn't stick around.

Each Memorial Day, Fuzz used to visit the cemetery to embellish the headstones of his fellow veterans with small flags, just as a gesture of respect and camaraderie. Edi - his daughter and my wife's aunt - had been to Pearsall to visit the family plot and noticed that someone had continued this practice, although the spot where Fuzz's remains are now buried had been missed; so that's why we're driving to Pearsall. I've already pointed out that Edi could surely have popped into the local Walmart, picked up one of those little flags for a dollar or two and addressed the oversight rather than just telling the rest of us about it; but Bess has taken it upon herself to plant a flag on her grandfather's grave simply because it's something she wants to do, because that's what Fuzz did for others.

Besides, it's a day out when we've hardly been anywhere for the last two months due to the lockdown. Our part of Texas hasn't been hit too bad by COVID-19, possibly because everything is kind of spread out and we have a decent mayor who does his job properly and listens to epidemiologists rather than angry fucknuggets who regard being required to wear a face mask and skip church for a week or two as a violation of their civil rights. A few places are starting to open up at reduced capacity, but both Bess and myself are still wearing masks in public, and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future. I still don't understand why anyone would consider it an inconvenience, given the reason for wearing them.

Pearsall is as I remember it from a couple of previous visits, hot, quiet, and spread out with not many people around during the day. There seem to be a lot of high street stores now closed down, even boarded up - sometimes three in a row, one after the other. I have an unfortunate feeling this may simply be a sign of the times for Pearsall rather than anyone's business specifically going under as a result of the lockdown.

We drive to the cemetery, plant our little flag, then stand around and think about the dead for a while. Most of the names in the Arnold plot are familiar to me by now, although there are still a few empty plots where blank stones await carving in honour of those presumably still living. I may even be one of them. I don't know.

Job done, we head back onto the highway, then stop off at Triple C being as it's past lunchtime. Triple C is a diner which you could probably justifiably call a restaurant, a steak place. I never really saw what the fuss was with steak until I ate at Triple C, yet the last time we came it wasn't that great - which was weird and unexpected and hopefully a one-off dip in the graph. The waitress points a gun which reads temperature at my forehead so as to ascertain whether or not I have the coronavirus, and we are shown to a table. We order salad and steak.

The walls are covered in square panels of wood bearing the brands of different ranchers, some of whom have presumably supplied Triple C with its meat. Each brand is embellished with the name of the rancher and the location of the ranch, mostly Texas, but a few further afield, Kentucky and the like. I study the designs and realise that they are burned into the wood, and were therefore most likely made with an actual brand, which is probably about as far as I need to go with that train of thought. Most of them are identifiable as letters, the initials of the rancher - JR, TJ and the like; but some comprise more esoteric symbols, stars, squiggles, heavily stylised versions of the initials and so on. A couple of them remind me of symbols reputedly seen on the side of flying saucers, notably one famously reported by Lonnie Zamora in Socorro, New Mexico, 1964. I'm able to recall the name Lonnie Zamora without having to look it up, and I don't know whether I should be proud of this fact or slightly saddened.

The salad is amazing. The steak is okay, but nothing special compared to what is served at either Charlie's or the Hungry Farmer in San Antonio. Oh well...

We arrive home and the mail has been. The citation turns out to be a routine thing which comes around every year. Our trees and bushes are obstructing the alley at the back, so it's thankfully nothing to do with our stupid neighbour. It will take about an hour to trim it all back, just as it did last time and the time before, and so it's really nothing to worry about.

It's difficult to say quite what connects all of the above beyond belonging to the same day, but I'm sure there's something.

San Antonio's Intergalactic Visitors

Looking at this photograph, it may take a moment for you to notice anything out of the ordinary, but it is there. This is an ordinary photograph taken by myself on Wednesday the 30th of January, 2019 using my trusty Samsung PL65 digital camera. Excepting that the flash hasn't worked for the last couple of years, the camera is in no way faulty, and the above photograph features no model work or related trickery. Nor was Photoshop used to edit the image.

I was on my daily twenty mile bike ride along San Antonio's Tobin Trail. I had just passed beneath the bridges of both the railway line and Wetmore Road, and I was heading up the hill which is a supposedly natural feature of that stretch of the trail when I noticed an object nestled in the grass. The path upon which I rode followed a winding course, and so I stopped at the outermost point of the curve, which was also the point closest to the object. Looking north I saw what appeared to be a construction resembling a pipe projecting upwards from the grass. I have been riding the Tobin Trail for nearly eight years and am therefore familiar with the landscape, and yet this feature was new to me. I estimate that the construction would have been about thirty feet from where I stood. I did not approach the construction, which appeared artificial in nature, for to do so would have meant leaving my bicycle unguarded, but I was able to take a number of photographs. Let's have a closer look.

There is no doubt in my mind that the photograph shows an artificial construction. It is not a tree stump, and as I have already stated, this is a genuine photograph and not something produced through use of Photoshop or similar.

This section of the Tobin Trail comprises a surfaced path leading up to the top of the hill and then down on the other side, forming what would be a horseshoe shape if seen from above. If we were to draw a line between the two tips of the horseshoe, we have a rough dirt path running along the base of the hill, as can be seen in the first photograph. Viewed from above, the area around the mysterious pipe is laid out like so:

 

It has been suggested to me that the construction may simply be a certain type of water bottle, perhaps one left behind by a person - either a walker or a cyclist - who opted to take a short cut to the further part of the trail. While this is a nice idea, not only can neither any cyclist nor any walker be seen in my photograph, but I do not recall having seen any such person taking this proposed short cut in a great many weeks. Of course, whilst the object may well be a water bottle left behind by this hypothetical individual, it may equally well be something which fell out of Doctor Who's TARDIS as he flew over on his way to fight the Daleks, but I would rather avoid such flights of fancy as I attempt to deduce the facts of this mystery.

This is a water bottle of the kind proposed by our sceptical friend, as seen on the Amazon website. Unfortunately, as you can see, it is quite different to the construction shown in the second photograph, so we might do better to concentrate on the main issue rather than waste our time with random speculation.

Working on the assumption of the construction being something akin to a chimney or perhaps an exhaust pipe, it seems likely that it must be the single visible extension of a subterranean complex, perhaps housing spacecraft from another world, providing rest and recreation for the alien pilots after their long voyage from the stars. Many researchers have noticed a correlation between UFO sightings and airports or air bases, and it can surely be no coincidence that the telltale exhaust pipe is situated at less than the distance of one mile from San Antonio airport. Indeed, I distinctly recall having seen signs instructing members of the public that in making use of the Tobin Trail, they are upon land which is the property of the aviation authority.

The location of the exhaust pipe is indicated by the numeral (1) on the first map, and the same is a detail of this second larger map denoted by the square. The airport runway is to be seen on the left-hand side of the map.

Naturally, I would not wish to take the supposed correlation between UFO sightings and airports or air bases for granted just because what seems to be a subterranean UFO base just happens to be situated near an airport; so it was fortuitous indeed that I was able to witness evidence of the same with my own eyes and also to record it on camera. I was stood at the point indicated by the numeral (3) on the first map when I noticed a mysterious object rising up from the direction of the airport. It was twenty-three minutes past one in the afternoon, Friday the 1st of February, 2019. The sky was overcast and the object moved through the air from west to north-east. The electricity pylon seen on the left of this photograph is the one which is visible in the first photograph. As before, I should stress that this is a genuine photograph and has not been subject to manipulation or enhancement using Photoshop.

As can be seen in the blown up image which follows, the object initially appeared as a sort of cone shape, tipped to one side (most likely simply due to how it was flying) and mounted upon a longer, cigar-shaped base. There seems to be something projecting from the left of the cone, perhaps an aerial, or perhaps even one of the extraterrestrial passengers who has decided to take a look out of the window at this mysterious world some of us like to call Earth!

By the time I was able to take a second photograph, the craft was passing much closer to my vantage point, affording me a better shot, but unfortunately by this point it had already taken on a familiar form resembling that of a light aircraft of terrestrial design - as seen in the photograph below. If unusual, this transformation has been noted as a common type of camouflage adopted by our interplanetary visitors in recent years, and for me it was sufficient proof that I was onto something. Could this be a craft which had only recently taken off from the underground saucer base I had discovered? Was this what I had just seen with my own eyes?

It seems incredible that these beings should have allowed me to witness their activity in this way, and to have allowed me to discover the facts of their existence in the first place; but then perhaps my discovery had been an unintentional one.

I have been cycling the Tobin Trail since 2011, and up until a year or so ago, as I reached the point designated by the numeral (2) on the first map, I usually alighted, pausing my journey so that I might urinate. The point indicated is on the top of the hill in such a position as to allow me to see others approaching from a great distance, whilst being hidden from view by motorists on both Wurzbach Parkway and Wetmore Road by the curvature of the hill (as can be seen from the second map). Therefore, feeling myself blessed with sufficient privacy, I habitually urinated at this point on a daily basis; until recently when I learned that technically this constitutes indecent exposure under United States law, and if successfully convicted of that charge, I would find myself obliged by law to inform all my neighbours of my status as a registered sex offender! I therefore now suspect that the subterraneans were attempting to warn me off or to put me out of the picture by somehow inducing my need to urinate at that specific location, hoping I would then be discovered and prosecuted. Indeed, I already mentioned having seen signs instructing members of the public that in making use of the Tobin Trail, they are upon land which is the property of the aviation authority. It is curious that I am no longer able to find any of these signs anywhere along the Tobin Trail, almost as though they have been removed by someone, or perhaps something! Without such warnings, an innocent walker or cyclist might commit trespass and find themselves inconveniently detained by legal authorities; or perhaps I should say conveniently detained for I'm sure it would prove quite convenient for person, persons, or perhaps even beings who would prefer their activities to remain undetected.

Having shed some light on the mysteries of the land on the western side of San Antonio airport, and the mysterious non-human creatures which shelter beneath it in their technological hideout, we are left only with the question of why now? My own hunch is that we find ourselves presently entering a crucial stage of human history, now that we have an innovative president pushing a bold new type of politics which has already given us the promise of our own Star Trek style Space Force, and so it is only natural that beings from other realms, and even other times, should wish to study this episode of human history. With this thought in mind, I direct readers to the point indicated by the numeral (4) on the second map. This pointer indicates the location of an artificial shelter constructed so as to protect those using the Tobin Trail from chips of rock which may be dislodged as trains pass by on the overhead railway line. It can hardly be a coincidence that this same shelter has been decorated with several stickers promoting the president's forthcoming campaign for re-election in the year 2020; although given all which we now know of this mystery, it wouldn't surprise me if these stickers had actually been bought back from the future after he has already won!

Sceptics will doubtless raise the same sort of objections they always raise, namely that I have been mistaken and what I saw was actually the planet Venus, or they will claim that I have invented most of this story, then tried to support my invention using trick photographs cleverly forged by means of Photoshop. Yet I have the proof, for my photographs, those which I have shared here, are quite genuine and have not been artificially made on Photoshop; and if this is all a fantasy, then what induced me to urinate at the top of the hill nearly every day, year after year; and what is the true nature of the mysterious shape-changing craft I saw that day? I would ask these questions of my critics, but I know that they would be greeted only with silence.

What more proof do I need than that the beings themselves have attempted to curtail my investigations. On Friday the 1st of February, 2019, just after my encounter with the alien craft, I was able to take this photograph.

Compare this with the second photograph and you will see that the pipe, the chimney, the exhaust system or whatever it may be, is of articulated construction and has now been laid flat in the grass so as to conceal it from further scrutiny. They knew that I had detected them, and that their secret presence on our world was no longer quite such a secret. Why else would they have gone to such trouble to elude detection?

If you can think of a reason, I'd sure like to hear it.

Bad Day

The bad day began online, as is often the case, specifically with an email notification pertaining to a new post on Next Door - a social networking site designed to fill in for the role of neighbours actually talking to one another as they once did. Most of the time Next Door will be someone looking for a new home for some bit of old furniture, or offering a lawn mowing service, but recent postings have been rendered increasingly exhausting by our local gun nut whining about liberals, or Obama's plan to take away our guns, or the hypothetical presence of ISIS cells in the neighbourhood. So, having signed up I've tended to ignore the actual website, relying on either email notifications or my wife - who is now also a member - to keep me informed in the event of there being anything I really need to know. The email notification which heralded the approach of my bad day pertained to a thread headed Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, and which opened with the suggestion that I probably shouldn't read what followed if easily upset, and so I didn't.

I've been down that road before with the kind of email notifications you receive on a daily basis if you've ever signed an online petition to ban this, stop that, or to bring an end to such and such. This petition called for the prosecution of individuals who had posted a video clip of animal cruelty undertaken for kicks on YouTube. I won't describe what had been filmed, but the email provided a link to the offending YouTube clip, and by association an image and a description of what I would see should I follow the link. The act of cruelty had involved a cat and had been filmed for the purpose of entertaining the sort of cunts who would find such a thing entertaining; and given that the reason such cunts would even bother posting such a thing on YouTube seemed most likely be so as to upset people such as myself, then it bothered me how the petition site had effectively done their job for them, even without my watching the thing. Hence I do my best to avoid anything I'm likely to find upsetting beyond the limits of my distress serving some purpose.

We have a number of cats, and as I work from home I spend more time amongst cats than amongst humans, so it would be fair to say that I have a lot of time for cats. Unfortunately this often seems to place me in opposition to a certain section of the online community, namely those who use facebook principally to mount a protest against people posting pictures of cats on facebook. I can understand up to a point in so much as that I find the children's television show Doctor Who annoying and headachey, and there tends to be a lot of Doctor Who in my daily facebook feed; but being an adult I am able to reason that if something brings happiness to a person without involving others being marched off to the gas chambers, then that has to be a good thing. Generally I would hope others might be able to take the same view of those who, like myself, happen to like cats. Most do, but then there are persons like the facebook connection I made on the grounds of my having enjoyed his novel and that we know a load of the same people. His posts hilariously described facebook as catbook and suggested that the love of cats demonstrated by others was quite literally ruining his life. Our love of cats was making his existence a living hell!

Stuck in Guantanamo Bay, blindfolded and having a lamb korma pumped up your arse, or noticing that a facebook acquaintance has shared a photograph of their cat - same fucking thing, my friend, same fucking thing.

Then, on the day that Kirby - one of our own cats - went missing, an unrelated Google search brought me the appalling news of domestic cats having been found dead following probable torture by a psychopath three or four miles from our house; and this was immediately followed by the important novelist's side-splitting facebook post proposing swimming lessons for cats using the brick and sack method.

Ha ha.

I defriended the shit BBC medical-drama scriptwriting cunt, and have done my best to try to learn something from the experience, which is why I now chose not to read Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace.

The day was okay for the most part. I cycled twenty miles as part of my new daily exercise regime, wrote the usual bollocks, and then mowed some lawn. Our garden at the back is enormous and so I tend to mow it in sections, one quarter of the whole area each day using a reel mower - that is to say one powered by myself - because I knackered the electric one last year. The temperature differential between Texas summer and winter is such as to necessitate two kinds of grass grown on a lawn. Bermuda grass thrives during the hottest time of the year, then dies away around November to be replaced by rye grass, which itself dies away when the Bermuda grass returns in spring. The cycle more or less looks after itself, the only significant problem being just how thick rye grass will grow in a very short space of time, even after what is only a light rain. It was rye grass with which I knackered our electric lawnmower, because when it gets thick, I may as well be trying to mow a lawn of rubber tubing.

My day began to turn bad as I now attempted to mow another quarter of lawn in the back garden. Rain the previous week had set my regular schedule behind by a couple of days in addition to bringing the rye grass up thicker than ever. I pushed the mower into the growth, then brought it back, then forward again, over and over across the same patch. It was like hacking away, like cutting someone's hair with a kitchen knife. The blades clogged with thick green wads, the wheels seized up, and the grass didn't even seem cut so much as crudely levelled; and although I'd opted for the reel mower on the grounds of its use constituting exercise, this was exhausting and far more work than seemed fair. It took me about forty minutes to make a lousy job of what would have taken ten minutes in summer. The work left me pissed off and rudely aware of our garden growing faster than my ability to keep it all in check. I'd finished weeding the cactus patch a week before, and it had returned to its overgrown state even before I could get back to work on borders I hadn't touched in over a year.

I could feel depression settling over me as it does from time to time, without warning, often even without any coherent reason. The term depression may be misleading, but it's the best I have. I've suffered on previous occasions, and have been given a medical diagnosis of my thankfully infrequent darker moods as something other than just feeling a bit pissed off. I once wondered if it might be hereditary given my grandfather's episodes of clinical depression, although being realistic, he was almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress following service in the second world war.

To get things in perspective, my circumstances were once substantially more miserable than they are at present. Specifically there's nothing about my present circumstances which could be described as miserable, or even unfortunate. I have no real cause for complaint, and so I suppose I must have some perverse subconscious need to arrange for my own discomfort from time to time. I find myself pissed off by things which don't matter and which have no long term consequences, unfortunate or otherwise.

I've mowed the lawn and now Bess comes home in something of a state. She too has received the email notification for Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace, but she's read it and is upset. I tell her I don't want to know, and try not to think of what I read when Kirby went missing, what was done to those cats over by Windcrest, or wherever it was.

'The signs are all around on the trees and telephone polls,' Bess tells me.

Cats being mutilated in this area, they read. Beware!

I've already tried to rationalise some of the horrible possibilities. The cat was found on Bradshaw, about a mile away from us, maybe a little more. That places it in the vicinity of Catman's house. Catman is either the local crazy guy, or the local guy who just happens to live on welfare, likes cats and could maybe stand to take more care of his yard, depending on how you look at it. I would guess him to be about late fifties. He's tall and scrawny with straggly hair and a huge white beard. His clothes seem lived in and he pongs a little, but I've spoken to him in the local supermarket from time to time, and he's a nice if slightly intense guy. His yard on the other hand is a mess. It isn't that it's full of rubbish so much as that it is left wild and untended even by the variable standards of our slightly crappy neighbourhood, and there's a six-foot pyramid of discarded cat food tins at the back of the house accounting for why the garden is always full of cats. We don't know if they're his cats or just local strays that he feeds. Each time we pass either Bess or myself will submit an involuntary wave at the place and coo, 'Hey, Catman!' in the vein of Earl Hickey greeting Darnell Turner in an episode of My Name is Earl.

Catman lives one block down from the street on which the mutilated body of a cat was found. I know not everyone likes cats. I can easily imagine that a person who doesn't like cats might be prone to dark thoughts if they lived near Catman, within view of the pyramid. Additionally, it's presently spring break which is historically a time when retarded deeds tend to be done with greater frequency due to those responsible being at liberty rather than at school. Given the presence within our neighbourhood of at least one gun nut who worries he might be sharing his road with an ISIS cell, I can easily imagine someone young and morally stunted electing to take a stand against Catman by hurting one of his cats with the added bonus of terrifying the shit out of the rest of us. This is what I've been telling myself, that it might be a vendetta waged against one particular person rather than cats as a species. I tell Bess, but it doesn't really bring much comfort.

It's six in the evening so I cook the dinner - chicken in walnut sauce. I usually serve it with potatoes done in a certain Mexican style with bacon and coriander, but as we're both trying to cut down on the carbohydrates, I've done cauliflower as well as potatoes; but there's too much material for the one pan, and cauliflower florets fall to the floor as I mix in the seasoning. The pans, of which there are three presently on the cooker, have become too hot to pick up without an oven glove, and somehow I now have too little space in which to put anything down. I'm getting more and more stressed as food I've prepared spills from pans onto the tiled work surface and down into the cracks.

'Fuck!' I pick a stray cauliflower floret from the floor, step outside and hurl it against the frame of the porch to teach it a lesson.

Dinner is eventually served but somehow it doesn't taste so great to me, despite which I eat too much, or at least enough to leave myself in some discomfort. Bess thinks it tastes fine, so I suppose that's something.

After dinner we drive to the Methodist Hospital to visit Myra. She fell at the weekend, fracturing the bone down the left side of her face and jaw. They've operated and she has four metal plates and twenty screws in her skull. She looks a state. We're all relieved, but I can't stop thinking on what a shitty world it is that such a thing as this could have happened to the woman.

We return home, and more and more I feel like buying cigarettes, when I haven't smoked or even felt the urge in a long time. I feel numb. I feel like going to sleep for a year or two. The world seems cold and cruel and joyless. There is no prospect for anything good ever again.

Of course I recognise the feelings for what they are, none of which makes any difference to the fact of my experiencing them.

The signs are still up. Cats being mutilated in this area. Beware!

Bess and I bring all of the cats inside, except we can't find either Snowy or Kirby and have to hope they will remain in some place where a roving nocturnal lunatic is unlikely to find them. Keep your cats in at night, was the thrust of Cat Killed in Wilshire Terrace on Next Door, so we're doing what we can, not least because further dismembered bodies have been found in the same area. A few of our cats tend to remain inside at night anyway, but the others are accustomed to staying outside and are clearly pissed off with this change to the established routine.

Holly is in our bedroom. Ordinarily I would put her out in the hall and wedge the door shut with the doorstop so as to prevent her waking us up in the middle of the night, but tonight I can't be bothered. I'm past caring and I feel protective towards all of them because they're my family.

I just want it to stop.

I pop an Oxycodone I have left over from harrowing dental treatment some years earlier and look forward to the cotton wool effect. It's not something I'm in the habit of doing but tonight feels like dangerous, unexplored territory.

After I turn out the light, Nibbler or one of the others manages to get our bedroom door open because the lock has never worked and the doorstop I purchased from Lowes a couple of years ago - the only one they had in stock - is crap; much like everything. In the darkness I can feel a tidal wave of cats washing into our room and taking their places on the bed with us.

I don't quite sleep, and both Nibbler and Holly wake me from whatever state of slumber I almost attain with kitty headbutts at different intervals. Enoch wanders around the house meowing his arse off like a little velvet fire alarm every thirty minutes or so, just as we knew he would, which is why he otherwise usually goes outside at night. I can't even be mad at them. I love these cats and would do almost anything to keep them safe. I just hope Snowy and Kirby are okay out there.

They are, and are at the door waiting to come in when I get up to feed them all around seven. So far as I can see there are no mutilated feline bodies on the front lawn.

Even before she is out of bed, Bess looks at Next Door on her iPhone. The police report is in, because this kind of animal cruelty is now a felony. The police report is adamant that the Bradshaw cats were killed by a coyote. It's horrible, but it's at least preferable to that which we've been fearing for the previous twelve hours. Coyotes are a rare sight within the city limits, but not unknown. I myself saw one down on Holbrook over a year ago.

The whole day suddenly looks different. In fact the whole world looks different, and somehow we came through. I can live with acts of God or nature or whatever you prefer to call it.

Sedona, AZ

I have a theory that modes of human thought are influenced by  geography to a greater extent than any of us may realise. I say theory, although vague assemblage of ideas might be a more accurate term, a vague assemblage of ideas which came to me as I noticed certain stylistic similarities between the art and architecture of the Classic Maya of Mexico and that produced by their very distant relatives across the other side of the Bering Straits in parts of Asia and northern China. The early twentieth century folklorist Donald A. MacKenzie saw clear parallels between Mayan and Asian cultures of such strength as to indicate pre-Colombian contact for which there is unfortunately no worthwhile evidence, despite the protestations of conspiracy theorists. However, looking at the art of the two unrelated cultures, you can't really blame MacKenzie, such is the apparent synchronicity of vision. My idea was that environment might influence thought in so much as that a society which develops in a river valley will yield persons thinking in subtly different ways - in certain respects - to persons of a society developing high on a mountain plateau; and maybe these divergent modes of thought are passed on by whatever mechanism in such a way as to mean that, for example, two very distant cousins separated by many, many generations, when asked to draw a sailor will both independently produce the image of someone who very much resembles Popeye through the inheritance of a shared visual language; and spoken language and the forms it may take prescribe what can be said and how it is expressed, so perhaps similar laws apply to thought and perception.

With no clue as to whether any of this actually applies to anything in the real world, I intuitively feel that environment really does exert its influence on human thought and ways of seeing. Having visited Mexico on a number of occasions, it has struck me that the pre-Colombian Gods - Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Toci and the rest - make perfect sense in context of the environment from which they were born; or specifically, it's easy to see how someone might subscribe to a belief in that particular pantheon whilst wandering around Tepoztlan or Malinalco or Teotenanco, for these are spectacular environments. At least they were spectacular environments in terms of my experience, and whilst my experience may well be the false impression of a visitor whose eyes have not yet grown accustomed to the surroundings as commonplace, I somehow doubt this on the grounds that I continue to be impressed by mountains in a general sense, no matter how many I see.

Certain landscapes, I would suggest, are resistant to ever becoming so familiar as to reduce to wallpaper, specifically those which we usually describe as epic or panoramic by virtue of features which will remain forever at the periphery of human experience, craggy peaks, desert expanse, or great oceans - places we can visit, but upon which we cannot quite make a home, not without significant difficulty. Mountains and the like therefore remain distant, removed from regular human experience whilst providing an ever-present reminder of forces at work with which we cannot immediately identify, and whether geological or supernatural - it doesn't really make a lot of difference. This is why Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt painted what they painted in preference to parking lots or drinking establishments at chucking out time: landscape as summation of the sacred.

I've vaguely subscribed to most of the above at least since my parents used to take me on holiday to the lumpier end of Wales as a child, even if I didn't quite have it all set down in such terms. I was reminded of it when I visited Mexico, and again more recently when passing through Roswell in New Mexico. The marshy uplands as one leaves the town heading for Ruidoso, passing through fog sporadically illuminated by distant gas flares all equate to a landscape which seems unusually conducive to belief in extraterrestrial visitors crashing their saucers. If it's going to happen, you think to yourself, then it would make sense for it to happen here.

Of course, none of this accounts for that which is understood by both science and psychology regarding Mexican Gods, crashed flying saucers, or the emotional upswell of feeling which some may choose to describe as religious experience, but then I'm not really talking about either science or psychology so much as the human experience of a subjective response to one's environment, because that is the part which most of us understand, and that is the part from which mythology is born, mythology amounting to an intuitive understanding of one's environment for which the issue of rationality may not be directly relevant, at least no more so than it is to a Bierstadt landscape. Mythology represents neither a scientific discipline nor necessarily an objective representation of what we experience, but it can be helpful in describing what we experience given that what we experience is generally experienced as meaning rather than material substance.

To get to the point, I had enjoyed a memorable fortieth birthday in Oaxaca, Mexico with my friend Rob; and a similarly stimulating forty-ninth - the transitional year, I suppose - in Roswell, Ruidoso, and New Mexico with my wife; and now as I was about to hit fifty, it was to be the Grand Canyon. I've lived in America for nearly five years, and it seemed like due time.

We flew to Phoenix, hired a car, and drove the hundred or so miles north following I-17 up to the small town - or possibly city given my not yet quite having grasped the American distinction - of Sedona. The Grand Canyon is another hundred miles north of Sedona, but my wife had stayed in this place some years before and said the experience would be worth the extra distance, and she was right. Leaving Phoenix, the land was much closer to desert than anything to which I'm accustomed, characterised by scrubby plants scattered across the rocks and sand, creosote bushes and forests of saguaro - arguably the most fundamental of all cacti, the kind we all remember from cowboy films we saw as children, the kind we drew at school based on images from Little Plum or Desperate Dan. The terrain changed as we headed north, switching abruptly to a landscape more closely resembling our corner of Texas with familiar salt cedar and nopal cacti replacing saguaro so completely that it seemed as though we had passed some ancient horticultural frontier which no plant had been willing to cross. I suspect it was probably our elevation above sea level, climbing higher as we travelled north, up out of the burning desert to that which, like San Antonio, is merely scorching.

It being our birthday - my wife forty-four and myself fifty on the very same date - we pulled in at a Denny's restaurant, having heard a rumour of there being free food to be had therein on one's birthday; and the rumour was true so we each had a free grand slam - a dish pretty much constituting the last word in breakfast for those of you still to pop your respective Denny's cherries - which probably represented some sort of seminal moment in the history of mooching.

We got back on the road, resuming our northwards trajectory and gradually acclimating to it still being only ten in the morning thanks to Arizona being two hours behind Texas. The distant mountains grew more impressive, more cinematic as we went on, presumably geologically working towards the general thrust of the Grand Canyon, culminating in a spectacular splash of red rocks as we approached Sedona; so spectacular that we stopped the hire car and got out to take photographs and swear in appreciation, little realising that even this scene would come to appear humble in comparison to that which lay ahead.

Sedona itself nestles amongst red rocks, immense outcrops of heavily layered red sandstone, alternately craggy or made smooth by wind and water. It was like no place I had ever been, and those cowboy flicks of my youth - a good few of which had almost certainly been filmed here - hadn't done it justice. It felt like a rehearsal for the Grand Canyon, also like certain places in Mexico in being at similar distance from anything previously experienced; and similarly remote with mile upon mile of mountain or desert scrub upon which no-one had yet attempted to erect a billboard advertising car insurance.

We found our hotel and settled in, then went back out after a short rest. Sedona, so it transpired, is nothing like a town or city by any European sense, but rather comprises dwellings, restaurants and the occasional store - mostly of adobe - hidden away in upland conifer forest and arranged along a spider web of roads and highways following the canyons and rivers. It feels mostly like wilderness, and each turn in the road brings a freshly astonishing panorama into view. We began to recognise certain flourishes of hill or mountain by shape. Bell Rock is easy to spot because it resembles a bell, sort of; and then there's Snoopy Rock which from one angle roughly duplicates the profile of Charlie Brown's cartoon beagle reclining on top of his doghouse. Another angle reveals Snoopy Rock's close set and top-heavy sandstone columns, features which seemed to justify our briefly rebranding it European Dentistry.

As if all this spectacle were not enough by itself, the terrain is of such quality as to appear in constant flux, changing each minute as the sun drags shadows across the mountain landscape, eventually culminating with evenings of splendour equivalent to epic Biblically themed paintings of the nineteenth century - plunging river valleys sinking into sepulchral shade as high peaks shine like gold in the deepening blue expanse of the heavens.

Pardon my adjectives.

Back in the sixteenth century, the Spaniards inhabiting Mexico  encountered rumours of the Seven Cities of Gold reputed to be found in the north, somewhere beyond the Rio Grande, and being big fans of gold they sent expeditions in search of the same. Needless to say, none of the legendary cities were ever located, and one enduring interpretation of the myth suggests it may have been only a rumour springing from numerous hopeful Mexica pointing northwards and saying, sure - go that way. Just keep going until you find those puppies. Another interpretation is that the myth springs from a misunderstanding of an early traveller trying to describe the Grand Canyon, and although Sedona isn't quite so far north, it could equally well have provided inspiration for the story.

In the evening we ate at a passable Mexican place, discovering that Max Ernst had lived in Sedona for a while - which makes a lot of sense when one compares the texture of many of his paintings with that of the landscape; and then we retired, exhausted by a twenty-six hour day of which the latter half had been spent in a state of near continuous awe; and here is why I began with a lengthy preamble concerning the influence of landscape on human psychology. Both my wife and myself found it difficult to believe that anyone could become bored of Sedona, such was our reaction to the place. It doesn't seem like one could cease to appreciate the mountains or the canyons or the spectacle of it all, and so it probably isn't too surprising that the town should have become a Mecca for new age types, simply because this is a landscape which demands consideration of forces larger and less easily quantified than oneself. This thought was underscored when we stepped out from the hotel the next morning and found ourselves immediately awestruck all over again, just like seeing it all for the first time.

The new age presence in Sedona manifests as shops retailing crystals, books, and related paraphernalia, or else offering services which probably must mean something or other to those who hand over money for tarot readings, channelling, rebirthing, having their aura photographed or whatever. Ordinarily I might have found such things quite irritating, but in Sedona they are at least an understandable response to the surroundings. One specifically local response to the surroundings is the phenomena of the vortex, or vortices - supposed natural regions of poorly defined energy one may encounter whilst exploring the wilderness. These regions are apparently highly conducive to meditation, and a guidebook on sale at the Sedona branch of Walgreens promises that deep thinkers will experience greater clarity whilst meditating within a vortex. The book contains a map should you wish to go looking for one.

I am a little irritated by this idea. It suggests persons requiring that their powerful emotional reaction to nature hold some deeper meaning. It's someone stood before a scene of sublime beauty  deciding that it isn't enough, that it needs a bit of that old Harry Potter magic sprinkled on top to make it really interesting; but then again, in Sedona it seems all bets are off, and I find myself thinking well, if it works for you, then whatever... It is difficult to maintain one's customary cynicism in such surroundings.

As with Roswell, I can see why people gravitate towards certain modes of thought in this setting, even that certain modes of thought might be considered appropriate, no more harmful than an emotional mapping of the territory, a means of description beyond the dry statistics of geology.

With my curiosity operating at a reduced level of cynicism I purchased several books written by Tom Dongo, a Sedona author who describes innumerable incidences of mysterious forces and encounters allegedly occurring in the region over the past couple of decades. He writes with a pleasant, conversational style and doesn't really seem to care too much who believes him, and whilst I'm not sure I do, neither do I exactly doubt his testimony, peculiar though it may be, and I nevertheless very much enjoyed his books.

Anyway, on the Friday we went to see the Grand Canyon. Naturally it was spectacular, and so much so that no description can really be adequate. It is something one really needs to see for oneself. That said, the Canyon has about it some disconcertingly underwhelming quality relating to its being somehow too spectacular. The Canyon is a mile deep in places and eighteen miles across at its widest, meaning that standing on one side affords a view of more earth and rock than most people will ever have seen and from an angle which may as well be above, and at a greater distance than is generally facilitated by the natural curvature of the Earth's surface; so the view is probably not unlike what you might see from orbit, the novelty being that it's down here and is thus viewed with the naked eye. The result of this is that you can't quite take in what you're looking at, and it's difficult to tell which distant outcrops or peaks are in front of others.

Bess and myself walked along the edge roughly to the point at which the safety rail ends before being driven back by vertigo. We could see teenagers messing around on nearby outcrops beyond the safety rail, taking their selfies on strips of rock four feet wide with a mile drop either side, and the sight alone made us feel ill. The information sheet we'd been handed back at the entrance reported a statistic of around a hundred deaths a year at the Grand Canyon.

We sat for a while, some way back from the edge, trying to ignore the woman on the next bench singing her whining improvised hymn to Mother Earth - sung out loud because presumably the words would be meaningless without an audience to define her deep, deep spirituality as visionary and against the common grain by regarding it as slightly comical, the unenlightened fools. Then we got back in the car and came home, or came back to Sedona given that it had already begun to feel like home; and we both realised that, regardless of scale, the Grand Canyon had been substantially less breathtaking than the place we were staying. Sedona works on a more human level.

On the Saturday we pottered around a couple of sites south of Sedona, the somewhat misnamed Montezuma's Castle and the hilltop fortification of Tuzigoot, architectural remnants of local Sinagua culture of the fourteenth century, and somewhat refuting the received wisdom of pre-Colombian North America lacking anything resembling civilisation.

Then on Sunday we came home, returning to the established here and now. Obviously there was more to it than only that which is described above, and the details of where we ate and what else we did were set down in my diary, but mainly because I am otherwise unlikely to remember any of it given the contrast of the setting in which it occurred. I've lasted half a century, and I've seen the Grand Canyon, and I've probably been changed in some sense by the landscape of Sedona. I probably could have said this in significantly less than three-thousand words, but sometimes you just have to go the distance with your subject, particularly when there's no map which will ever really do it justice.

Pranky McHoax! fnord 23

I'd had enough of cassettes, fanzines, and all of that shite. It was 1988 and following my exit from Maidstone College with letters after my name, I'd failed to become famous for brooding art of the kind which inspires people who wear black clothes to scowl in nihilistic appreciation. No-one gave a shit about my tapes, including me, and I'd been obliged to take a job with Royal Mail. It paid the rent but left me somewhat knackered and hence lacking the enthusiasm for promoting cassettes which I could no longer be bothered to record. Pranky's letter therefore came out of the blue as a complete surprise. In fact, given the time which had passed since I'd last bothered with cassettes, fanzines, and all of that shite, I couldn't really work out how he'd even got hold of my address.

His name in full was Pranky McHoax! fnord 23.

That was really his name as it appeared on his birth certificate.

Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 was really his name.

It really was his name.

That's what people called him.

It wasn't really his name, but it's what I'm calling him, and for a moment you believed me. I played a prank on you.

Ha ha!

Pranky's letter came out of the blue as a complete surprise, including with it an A5 black and white fanzine folded eight times to the size at which it could have been swallowed by a spy so as to fit the envelope. The fanzine was called Datakill and the print was tiny, each page crammed with information at all angles and in every available space in a typographic style most likely inspired by Skate Muties from the 5th Dimension, an earlier and similarly chaotic fanzine. Each page demanded that I concentrate in order to work out what I was actually looking at, and I eventually discerned fanzine, record and tape reviews - and mostly of the sort of stuff I liked, alongside interviews with the Severed Heads and Datblygu. I hadn't heard anything by the Severed Heads, and I'd never even heard of Datblygu but it all sounded pretty interesting.

I replied to Pranky, thanking him for his fanzine, expressing a regret that I wasn't really sure why he had written to me. I no longer produced anything I could send him in return, and he didn't seem to be looking for contributions even were I to come up with something. He didn't seem to mind, and had written mainly through a love of networking, which reminded me that I had been the same a few years earlier. There were thousands of us, all over the country and even the world, churning out our cranky fanzines and stubbornly esoteric music, all sending each other tapes or photocopied lists of tapes or whatever. Nobody had even considered calling it a scene so far as I was aware, and I was at least glad that it had continued in my absence. Pranky sent me a couple of tapes of Datblygu and some other bands he liked, and I returned the favour, and so we began to write each other long vaguely counter-cultural letters. Pranky wrote in all capitals and often green felt-tip. He used a lot of exclamation marks. He was interested in all sorts of stuff too, obscure music, conspiracy theories, outsider art, and anything generally regarded as weird. He also seemed to be fairly heavily into the writing of Robert Anton Wilson. I hadn't actually heard of the guy, but I recognised certain familiar obsessions in common with William Burroughs, Vague magazine and Psychic TV, not least the supposed ubiquity and possibly mystical significance of the number 23. In fact, thanks to my juvenile overinvestment in the low calorie philosophical musings of Porridge, I had already been bored thoroughly shitless by the supposed ubiquity and possibly mystical significance of the number 23 before I'd even finished school.

Possibly it was the relentless capitalisation, but Pranky's letters always suggested that he was shouting. He seemed loud and enthusiastic, a counter-cultural equivalent of the sports coach in American high school movies taking no crap, pooting no guff, firing off fifteen directives a second, making shit happen whether it wanted to happen or not.

Have you heard this?

Did you read that?

What do you think of this?

Isn't that a pile of shit?

It was exhausting but fun, longer and longer letters zipping back and forth, Jiffy bags bulging with all manner of crap, tapes, fanzines, paperbacks found in second-hand shops spilling out onto the carpet like a mail art version of the scene where they open up the shark and all the money sluices onto the deck, wads of dollar bills still sealed in plastic. I say mail art - which you can look up on Wikipedia if you care that much - although it really wasn't. Pranky seemed to like the term, and I never expressed an objection, but then more or less everything he did was capitalised by his own account, and I mean the subject as well as the letters, and then there were all those exclamation marks seasoning the message whether it needed it or not.

I JUST READ ABOUT SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABS IN RE/SEARCH + NOW I WANNA SEE THEIR VIDEOS!!!!!

You do????? Wow!!!!! That's amazing!!!!!

In November 1991 I caught a coach from London to Newport, having promised Pranky that I would visit him. He lived in Wales. My family went on holiday to Wales more or less yearly when I was a kid, and I hadn't seen the place in years. The coach journey was uneventful but entertaining, shared with four Welsh teenagers on their way back from Amsterdam and patently hungover. The quietest and most severely hungover of their group was named Dai, and he served as comedy scratching post for the other three on the grounds that he was probably still too drunk to fight back. They spent most of the journey spinning horror stories of what would happen to their colleague at the checkpoint on the Welsh border.

'How many dogs' bums have you got in your bag, Dai?'

Even I couldn't help laughing, but it was nervous laughter. There was something a bit weird about my going to meet Pranky McHoax! fnord 23, and I was slightly scared, imagining a sort of Welsh Jim Carrey shoving fanzines in my face and being four-hundred times more interesting than I could ever hope to be.

I alighted from the coach and Pranky was there to meet me, a quiet little googly-eyed bloke with glasses and a head which seemed slightly too big for his body. He'd driven into Newport to pick me up, and now we drove north to the town where he lived in central Wales. We spent the journey in awkward conversation about all sorts of stuff, obscure music, conspiracy theories, outsider art, and anything generally regarded as weird. It was a lot like reading one of his fanzines, just with less obvious enthusiasm. He lived with his dad, and I slept on the sofa for a couple of days, just hanging out, visiting places, talking about all sorts of stuff, obscure music, conspiracy theories, outsider art, and anything generally regarded as weird. Pranky didn't seem exactly lacking in social skills, but what social skills he had were calibrated to a peculiarly narrow focus. He reported or described things, often in great detail, but it was difficult to tell what he really thought of them, or how he felt about anything. My stay was not unpleasant, but I was glad it was to be only a matter of days.

Pranky's dad had recently retired, and I never quite worked out what had happened to his mother and didn't like to ask; and peculiarly I found it significantly easier to get on with the old boy than with the son. It was the same at work. The older generation always seemed to have more going for them than my contemporaries, and certainly more wit.

'I suppose you think we're all red-faced Taffs up here in Wales, don't you?' Pranky senior observed drily as we were introduced, and  he continued to take the piss out of me for the rest of my stay. Next morning, being first to rise, I found myself temporarily flummoxed by their kettle, a design with which I was unfamiliar.

'Here, let me do it,' sighed Pranky senior shuffling into the kitchen in his dressing gown. 'Bloody genius from London,' he muttered.

Pranky and I shopped for records, purchased dubious second-hand flying saucer literature in Hay-on-Wye, and climbed a mountain. I would have been happier climbing more than one, having been obsessed with anything mountainous ever since those Welsh holidays of my youth, but Pranky didn't see the appeal, I suppose finding significantly less novelty in the geology of his surroundings.

It was a pleasant time, but an odd one, and it was a relief to get back to London and the more familiar territory of our respective letter writing personas.

A second issue of Datakill came out, at least as a somewhat disappointing stack of photocopies in an A4 plastic envelope of the kind purchased in packs of twenty from WHSmiths, and I myself re-engaged with the network as I took to self-publishing my own comics, and even releasing a tape of new music. Meanwhile, having had the flames of his existing obsessions stoked by, amongst other things, certain issues of Re/Search, and keen to break away from the admittedly limited field of the music fanzine, Pranky changed direction, channelling his not inconsiderable energies into Hoax!, a fanzine dedicated to pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, networking, and whatever else he felt like writing about. A lot of work went into the thing and it proved quite popular. It shared some territory with Re/Search, some with Vague, but was otherwise more or less it's own thing and even caught the attention of You've Been Framed presenter Jeremy Beadle, then hosting his own radio show on some station or other. You've Been Framed was a laboured early evening entertainment show in which hidden cameras film the horrified faces of unsuspecting members of the general public as they return home to find, for example, that the greenhouse is full of raspberry jam; and Beadle, the supermarket's own brand Noel Edmonds, was a fan of Hoax!

This is a good thing, is it? I asked in so many words, the patronage of Jeremy Beadle not really being much to boast about, I wouldn't have thought; but Pranky believed otherwise. He'd spoken to Jeremy and they were on first name terms. Apparently the presenter wasn't such a square in real life. He had even been in one of the early line ups of Test Department but had ended up having to jack it in, what with the tiny hand and everything.

Not really.

I just made up that last part. It was a hoax!

Ha ha.

Pranky really did seem to be buddying up with Beadle though. I wouldn't joke about that sort of shit. They bonded with particular adhesive strength over cassettes of prank phone calls.

'Hello, could I speak to Mr. Johnson please?'

'Yes. Who is this?'

'William Burroughs.'

'Who?'

'It's me, William Burroughs the writer.'

'Bill Beaumont?'

'No - William Burroughs.'

'I think you've got the wrong number.'

'I'm not really William Burroughs!'

'What?'

'Fooled you! Ha ha!'

Pranky asked me to draw a cover for the second issue of Hoax! I said yes, then immediately regretted it when the letter came with a list of forty or fifty elements to be included in the illustration, every possible detail right down to the drawing pins scattered on the pavement. Given that no actual offer of payment had been made, it felt a little as though I'd asked if anyone wanted anything from the cornershop seeing as I was going that way, and been handed a list of parts required for assembly of a basic jet engine. The cover star was to be Bugs Bunny, which was something to do with Pranky's long-winded theory about the cartoon rabbit being a symbol of anarchy descended directly from the mythological Trickster of the American south-west, and the rest was all tittersome references to the number 23, Situationism, phone pranks, and the usual shite which had been getting boring even when clogging up the pages of Vague back in the eighties. I drew the cover, and gave Bugs Bunny realistic human genitals specifically because they hadn't been requested in the long, long list of stuff I'd apparently agreed to draw. I wanted to see if Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 could take the jocular punches as well as he was keen to see them dished out. It turned out that he couldn't, and the cover star's meat and two veg were tippexed out because he couldn't stand to see Bugs humiliated in such a way, as he wrote by way of explanation. I was bemused, but I was even more bemused a couple of weeks later when I saw the second issue of Hoax! on sale at a stall at a free festival in New Cross, and bemused because it was my cover and I hadn't received a contributor copy at that point.

He asked me to draw a cartoon strip for Hoax! I said okay and he sent me a script for something called The Fabulous Phoney Phreak Brothers riffing on Gilbert Shelton's considerably funnier strip subverted to a chucklesome take on pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, and networking. The script was something like fifty pages in length. I drew two panels and came to my senses. I had better things to do with my time.

Pranky began to visit London, usually to attend small press or fanzine events. Hoax! seemed to be everywhere, and the third issue was a big fat thing with a three colour glossy cover of more than a hundred pages. Personally I was finding it less entertaining than it had been, pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, and networking being limited subjects with nowhere interesting to go once you were done tittering; but it was Pranky's thing and he seemed to get a lot out of it, so whatever. Possibly he would eventually reign it in, maybe even move onto something more interesting. He would get the message, perhaps even realising that the rest of us couldn't give a shit about the number 23.

He didn't get the message, and his correspondence became weirder and weirder, larger and larger Jiffy bags mummified in miles of plastic tape the shape and size of something upon which a tramp could reasonably expect to get a good night's sleep. I would hack the thing open, read the letter, and wonder why I should have been chosen as recipient to the rest of it. The tapes would contain interviews or radio features on Manson, Porridge, Robert Anton Wilson, the usual suspects; samples of Pranky's own music, which was actually decent but for laboured titles parenthesised with pseudo-occultural word salad - John Wayne Sleep Gacy Racey Sale-at-Macy's 23 Remix or similar; and the rest would be Cassandra Complex live tracks, Pigface b-sides, Al Jourgensen side projects and others from the industrial rock bargain bin. There was never a real reason to listen to the tapes, or at least not all of the tapes, and the cassettes were too knackered to be worth recording over, and yet some effort had gone into their compilation at some stage, so it wouldn't have felt quite right to just chuck them in the bin. I could have given them to someone else, but no-one would have wanted them, and that was probably how half of them had ended up inside the parcel in the first place. Pranky may as well have been posting me the contents of his dustbin, and sometimes amongst the stacks of paper were reams and reams of surplus photocopied images of the kind which result when a pre-internet fanzine editor is putting together the latest issue of his masterpiece. It was sent with the subtext, here's a pile of random crap - it won't all be of use or interest, but maybe some of it will, which wasn't actually a hostile act, but would have looked more or less the same had it been. Sometimes it took days to recover, to process all this shite.

Please stop, I asked him.

He didn't, and if anything it got worse. Make some joke about Coronation Street containing secret coded messages originated from Terry Wogan and broadcast for the benefit of an alien civilisation inhabiting a planet in the vicinity of Sirius, and the next twenty pages of green felt-tipped correspondence would contain numerous tittering references to the same alongside pages of photocopied magazine articles, books, cassettes, or videotapes rescued from charity shops, whatever the fuck he could find with even the most tenuous connection to Coronation Street, Terry Wogan, or the astronomy of the region around Sirius - VHS tapes alternating episodes of Blankety Blank with alien abduction documentaries. It got even worse when he discovered the internet, then still very much in its infancy.

I had undertaken to start my own religion based upon worship of Ringo Starr, in turn based upon how much I'd laughed when a friend described Ringo Starr as the luckiest man in the world. The religion was to manifest as a series of tracts, of which only one was ever printed, essentially a parody of Current 93 and Temple of Psychic Youth literature spun around the notion of Ringo Starr as an esoteric messiah in the Aleister Crowley tradition. Thee Church ov RINGO was an exercise in postmodern sarcasm and accumulated about twenty or thirty members with fancy certificates and laminated membership cards. Tract, as the aforementioned tract was called, comprised material sent in by whoever felt like sending anything, a disproportionate quota of which came from Pranky, a stream which became such a deluge as to inspire me to disgust for what was roughly speaking my own creation. The straw that broke the camel's back was an eighty page story of generic sword and sorcery presumably nicked from the internet. Pranky had gone through the entire text replacing the name of the main character with Ringo. Seriously, I wondered, what the fuck did he really think I was going to do with this shit?

Amongst the material to be hoovered up by the indiscriminately tittering blender of Hoax! was a whole lot of Neoism which, if it helps, is described thus by Wikipedia:

Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. It operates with collectively shared pseudonyms and identities, pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.

This explained much of Pranky's creative output, and also why he asked if he could publish his fanzines under the heading of Runciter Corporation, the name of my own imprint and tape label.

I told him certainly not.

My friend Paul and I had elected to go halves on a mailing address, specifically a postbox with British Monomarks. Paul produced a fanzine called Gneurosis and I had various things on the go, and so we could each pay a tenner or so every couple of months for an address which would appear on all of our works, saving the trouble of angry nutters turning up at our homes, or mail sent to addresses reproduced in the pages of older fanzines going astray when one of us moved. Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 liked this idea and asked if he could make use of our postbox address for some one off undertaking requiring a certain degree of anonymity. Neither Paul nor I had any problem with the idea, so we said okay. Pranky sent the Valentine's Day card, that being his primary intention, and then took to giving out the box address as his own, as though he was sharing it with Paul and myself. He even printed it inside one of his fanzines, apparently missing the distinction that Paul and I were paying for the box address, and paying for stuff to be forwarded from the box address to our homes. Now we were getting shit addressed to him in with our mail, and somehow he had figured that neither of us would mind, or maybe he simply hadn't given it any thought at all.

'Hey there,' I said directly to his face one day, 'you know how you've given out our British Monomark box as your mailing address in the latest issue of your thing?'

'Yes.' He looked nervous, but then he always looked nervous.

'Well, don't fucking do it. I don't want to get your post and then have to forward it to you. I wouldn't have minded so much but you didn't even ask.'

This was unusually direct of me, but the situation seemed to be coming to a head. Everyone I knew was exhausted with Pranky McHoax! fnord 23. He had come down to London to stay for a couple of days, visiting some sort of small press event. This was the third or fourth time. The problem was that, as stated, beyond pranks, hoaxes, conspiracies, good old fashioned lies, subversive or otherwise counter-cultural activities, and networking, he had no interests. He was a poor conversationalist, and if he initiated a conversation the first words out of his mouth would usually be did you know that followed by some wearying trivia involving the number 23, or prank phone calls, or an obscure producer of balls-achingly poor industrial music, or Jeremy fucking Beadle. Occasionally he would hint at a supposed prehistory of reckless abandon, booze, sex, and the sort of hard drugs which made Syd Barrett the lobster he is today - or at least was in 1995 - but Pranky's testimony seemed unconvincing. He may as well have been telling us about his misspent youth as a gunslinger in the old west. He didn't smoke; he didn't drink; he'd sip cautiously at a half of shandy in the pub, and there was no point even trying to cook for him because he had his bottle of coke and his little packet of cheese footballs.

'No, I'm fine, thank you very much.'

For someone so relentlessly fixated on subversive mayhem, he presented an oddly joyless character, a little Celtic tickertape machine dispensing an endless stream of factual novelties, and never really engaging with anything outside his chosen field of tittering subversion; and he got away with it because we felt sorry for him; and here he was once again in my flat, and I couldn't work out why we still knew each other.

I'd had an exhausting day at work as usual, a six o'clock start followed by eight hours of hard physical labour. I had rested in the afternoon, but it was never enough, and all I wanted to do was eat my doner kebab and watch fucking Brookside, my favourite television programme in all the world. Nat Simpson seemed to be knobbing his own sister so far as anyone could tell, Mick Johnson was off his box on steroids, and Jimmy Corkhill had, against all odds, transformed into some sort of role model to the unfortunate Tinhead. It was dynamite, and then came the knock at the door just as the show began.

Pranky had been in town all day, dealing with small press things, noting with not inconsiderable amusement the preponderance of the number 23, and that the 23 bus route goes past Liverpool Street station and Liverpool is the birthplace of Ringo and Mark Pawson said this really funny thing blah blah blah Jeremy Beadle blah blah blah illuminati blah blah blah…

'Listen,' I suggested. 'Do you think you could find somewhere else to stay tomorrow evening?'

That threw him a little. 'Okay,' then he continued to talk bollocks throughout the rest of Brookside.

Next morning he was gone, leaving just a pile of about fifty copies of Message from the Sun God, an A4 fanzine he'd had printed comprising a lengthy rant - a good thirty or so pages - lifted wholesale from some nutcase on the internet. There was no reason on earth why anyone would want to read it, aside possibly from members of the psychiatric profession, and Pranky had paid money to have it printed; and there on the inside cover was the British Monomark box address I had asked him to refrain from using as his own. Maybe he thought I was joking, or maybe he didn't believe the fanzine would generate any mail so it didn't matter, or maybe I had been subject to an hilarious prank. For the next year mail continued to turn up addressed to the Sun God. I threw it away, just as I had stuffed all those copies of Message from the Sun God in the recycling bin rather than, as had probably been intended, leave them on buses to mess with people's minds blah blah blah. He called it culture jamming, because whatever the fuck it was he was doing with his life really needed a special name.

Mail turned up from Pranky himself, a battered Jiffy bag the size of a small suitcase doubtless bulging with Scientology pamphlets and Neon Judgement live tapes. I marked it not known at this address and had it returned to sender.

I felt guilty, and continue to feel some small degree of guilt to this day, although I've a hunch it may simply be pity. Pranky was not necessarily a malicious person. He was just a bit of a bore with poor social skills, and he probably knew it to some extent and couldn't help it; and even if he wasn't intentionally taking the piss, it often felt that way. It's a shame, but the world is full of sad, sad stories, and sometimes when someone is a pain in the arse, the kindest thing you can do is tell them to fuck off.

More than a decade later he resurfaces on YouTube as a stand-up comedian. His routine involves creaking puns made in reference to a series of unlikely objects produced from within a suitcase. The camera cuts to the audience, unfortunately exposing the fact of the soundtrack of uproarious hysterics having derived from a source other than those who sit politely chuckling and wondering if this is what this bloke intends to do for the duration of his act. The funniest thing about the clip is its single response in the comments box:

I have worked with the biggest names in world comedy like Jimmy Tarbuck, Bruce Forsyth and Joe Pascquale but I have never witnessed such talent, timing, original material and pizazz in the one package. Were you beamed down in a UFO from Planet Comedy? You seem to have an unearthly quality. I was pissing in my Armani slacks watching this, it's incredible… the hat out of the rabbit - sheer genius. I can try book you into the O2 Arena and we will take it from there. You are a magic comedian.

Even as I read the words, I weigh up the possibility of Pranky McHoax! fnord 23 having submitted the comment himself from a different account, and that he was absolutely sincere, and just for a moment I feel incredibly sad.

The Mission is Terminated

Excerpt from A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to That
William Burrough's House... the autobiography of Porridge:

It was the beginning of the end when Throbbing Gristle did a pop concert in San Francisco and we were singing An Old Man Smiled which is one of the ones what I wrote although Peter come up with some of it too, mainly that sort of twangy bit that sounds like how you used to make a farting noise with a ruler on the edge of the desk at school. We was doing An Old Man Smiled and I could hear Cosey Fanny picking out the notes of Popeye the Sailor Man on her guitar and I looked at her and she pretended not to know why I was looking at her because she is sneaky like that, the cow.

'Very funny,' I said but I was being sarcastic because I didn't think it was funny at all and it was not fair of Cosey to make fun of my sticky out eyes like that because it's my glands and I can't help it and anyway once I saw her put her hand in her drawers and scratch a bit when we was around at Cabaret Voltaire's house because they was borrowing our lawnmower and she took her hand out and sniffed it and then looked around because she thought no-one was looking but I saw it. Anyway she didn't hear me say nothing because we was doing our songs so loud so whatever. I wasn't bothered anyway.

When we had done the concert I was talking to some bloke from Research which is a magazine about murderers and lots of scary things and doing drawings of men's cocks on government buildings and stuff like that. It is a very good magazine but not a lot of people read it because they are scared of the truth about stuff and things. Anyway I was telling this bloke about how I was going to invent acid house but I was going to wait a bit because no-one was ready for it and I had only just invented punk rock a few years before and I wanted to pace myself a bit. That was when I spoke to that Malcolm MacLaren who is the ginger bloke out of the Sex Pistols. He came up to me when we was backstage with the famous Lou Reed.

'What am I going to do, Porridge?' he asked me. 'No one is interested in my band! They are not even as famous as the Rubettes!'

I couldn't think of nothing so I showed him my tattoo of Aleister Crowley sticking up the Vs to the Pope because I had just had it done and that's how he had the idea for Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols because there was a bit of space between Aleister Crowley's fingers and the Pope and I said, 'Oh Mr. Sebastian left that bit vacant,' and it was because I said it that he got the idea for it and that's why they got banned off the telly and became famous and all because I done it!

Anyway I was talking to this bloke from Research and he had said to me where do you get your ideas? so I was telling him and I was also telling him about the new song we were going to do which was about poo and it was a really playful and subversive song.

I see you,
I see you on the loo,
I see you doing a poo,
You are very nice and I am too.

Anyway there was a knock on the door. It was none other than that Ian Curtis from Joy Division. He had been following me around ever since we played in Liverpool where they are from and he came to see us and he came up to me after the gig and said he liked all of the songs what I wrote but the ones that Cosey Fanny did and that other bloke with the train set did weren't much good. His band were called Sad Sector but I had said to him that name is rubbish, Ian - you should change it is what you should do, and I told him Joy Division would be a good name because it was like the opposite of Sad Sector and I had playfully turned it upside down and inside out and stuff so it was subversive because it meant like those prozzies what the Nazis used to go and see behind the back of the van when they was feeling a bit randy and wanted to have it off and that. Ian said it was a dead clever name and he couldn't wait to see the faces of the fans when they heard it, and then they became famous, and that was sort of because of me when you really think about it.

'Come in, Ian Curtis my famous friend,' I told him, and he did and I could see Chris Carter looking over all envious and that because all he had was his blumming train set and I was the one who had all the fans asking me what's this song about, Porridge? and all the lady fans always wanted to have it off and that and no-one even knew about smelly knickers at the back fiddling with his knobs and switches. What a sad case! Ha ha ha! Once he kept pestering me because I had some toffos and I wouldn't give him none and he wanted a toffo and he kept saying pleeeaaase give us a toffo, Porridge and I said UFO to him which is the letters for you you-know-what off but I didn't want to say the middle word out loud because his mum was in the kitchen making us some chips, but I reckon that was how he got the idea for the X-Files and he never said thanks or nothing. Typical.

'What can I do you for?' I asked Ian Curtis.

'I'm fed up of Joy Division,' he said. 'I want to form a band with you, Porridge. I've even done a drawing of what it would look like,' and he showed me a drawing he had done of a gig and all the crowd were cheering and holding me up because I had jumped into the crowd like Iggy Pop or something. It was a really good drawing.

'This could be our album cover, Ian Curtis!' I said, excited.

Just then the one with the glasses out of the Shadows came by and he was looking for his friend Burt Weedon because he wanted to learn a really complicated guitar bit, and he said, 'does anyone know where Burt is?'

I didn't but I'd had another great idea.

What can I do you for, Ian Curtis?
Does anyone know where Burt is?

Tim Westwood was there because him and Chris Farter knew each other from being in the scouts and Chris had forgotten his sandwiches because he was too busy thinking about switches and knobs and the difference between OO gauge model railways and N gauge model railways and so his mum had got Tim to bring them. That's what I called him sometimes by the way - Chris Farter - hur hur hur. Once I even called him Piss Farter, which was dead funny. Everyone said so. Even Peter was laughing and he never laughs at anything because he is always serious. Anyway, Tim said 'Man, you're on fire tonight, Porridge! Lay that science on me one more time,' and he said some of the words in a funny voice like he was having a seizure or something, but anyway I said it all again once I had worked out what he was asking for and I thought up some more and sort of carried it on.

Chris is sitting on the chair.
He is sitting over there.

I just made it up like that, just saying it as soon as I thought of it. I didn't have it written down or nothing. I just made it up and said it. While I was saying it Tim was making funny shapes with his fingers and kept saying things like yeah boy, Porridge is keeping it hot to death for the UK, and he said UK like yooooo kaaay which was a bit weird, but I wasn't really paying him too much attention because of course I had just invented rapper's music.

'That was right good that was,' said the man who had bought Cosey Fanny a basket of complementary muffins from the man who had organised our pop concert.

'Yes,' I said. 'What be your name, my good man?'

'Afrika Bambaataa,' he smiled.

And that was how I done it. Even though Throbbing Gristle was splitting up but I knew I would always be able to think of something new to keep myself busy.