2019 in Meaningless Pie Charts

As 2018 shuddered to a halt and I struggled to recall what the fuck had happened in 2018 Without Notes - being too lazy to trawl through my diary - I decided that the coming year would be different. I would note down what I'd read, watched, listened to, where I had eaten and so on, and I would do it every single day, and then I would offer a corporate style end of year report on 2019. Unfortunately, as I examined all of my data on the 1st of January, 2020, I realised that I had a much greater quantity than I'd anticipated having to process, so great, in fact, as to potentially suck most of the fun out of the enterprise. Nevertheless, I'm reluctant to waste a good idea, or even a fucking stupid idea, so here it is at long, long last, following a lot more work than it really deserves.

 

WONGA
I spunked away a total of $8,463.09 on groceries and assorted household goods in 2019, household goods here meaning food, cat food, soap, shampoo, beer, hay for the rabbit, cleaning supplies, and occasional stuff for the garden such as a new trowel or a bag of grass seed. Of course, my wife paid half of this sum. Generally speaking, I buy the stuff at our local supermarket on the way back from my daily twenty miles on the bike, then she pays me back half of my total spending at the end of the week. As we see from the graph, the extremes both occurred during the summer, a stratospheric $839.73 in August dramatically falling to just $385.34 for the month of September. This is because I went back to England to see my parents in September and left my wife to cope on her own. The cost of mailing groceries back from the UK would have been prohibitive. I'm not sure how I ended up spending so much during August. Maybe I was stocking up on Top Ramen for the kid, it being one of the three things he eats.

CYCLING
For five days of the week, I try to cycle twenty miles so as to prevent my turning into Stan Ogden. My odometer registered a total of 28,956 miles on Tuesday the 1st of January, 2019, and a total of 33,683 miles prior to my setting out on the morning of Wednesday the 1st of January, 2020. Additionally, the aforementioned odometer failed on a couple of occasions during 2019, usually when I'd accidentally knocked the little magnetic dingus mounted on the wheel out of wack. At the time I estimated that my odometer had therefore failed to account for 8 miles travelled. Amending the total to account for the lost mileage, I therefore deduce that I cycled 4,727 miles during 2019.

 

Inspection of the resulting pie chart reveals that during 2019, I cycled 14% of the total distance I've cycled since I began using an odometer back in October 2009, which is interesting.

BOOKS
I've usually got a book on the go as I read quite a lot, mostly novels but including comic books here and there. I read a total of 93 things during 2019, including 18 comic books, 8 non-fiction, and Papercuts by Bernadette Cremin, which is poetry.

 

As you can see, poetry isn't really my thing, although most years it occupies a mere 0% of the pie chart, so this represents a binge by my standards. I've compiled a top ten of my most read authors of 2019 which, as with all of these things, should be taken as an approximation for several reasons. Firstly, I read four back issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction which I haven't counted just as I haven't counted other multiple author anthologies; and otherwise, I read four novels by D.H. Lawrence, three each by Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke and A.E. van Vogt, and then there are a further seven authors of whom I read two works each; so it doesn't make for a tidily sequential top ten given that chart positions two through to five are interchangeable as are six through to twelve, and I've excised the final two authors - Philip Purser-Hallard and Kurt Vonnegut - simply because they're at the end of the alphabet. So my most read of 2019 are, for the sake of argument, as follows:

1 - D.H. Lawrence.
2 - Charles Bukowski.
3 - William S. Burroughs.
4 - Arthur C. Clarke.
5 - A.E. van Vogt.
6 - Martin Amis.
7 - Daniel Bristow-Bailey.
8 - Fletcher Hanks.
9 - Mark Millar.
10 - New Juche.

I can't really see the point of listing all 93 things I read here, so anyone who cares that much should refer to the appendix of Missing Words which will be published at some point in 2021. On the other hand, here's how much I was reading and when:

 

Here the extremes were February and September. Of the twelve titles read during February, only two were comic books, so I guess the rest must have been slightly breezier than I remember; and as for September, as mentioned earlier, I flew back to England that month so my usual reading habits were slightly disrupted, plus I was proofreading my own Bricklaying the Charleston which I haven't counted because it would be wanky, and I guess Abraham Merritt's The Face in the Abyss wasn't quite the page turner I'd hoped it would be.

As you will see below, I've additionally correlated the information regarding date of publication so as to determine which decade (or century) produced the bestest books and which was the most boringer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of what I read was produced during the twentieth century, with twenty-six titles having been written since 2000, and just five prior to 1900 of which the earliest would be Voltaire's Candide of 1759.

 

Should any four-eyed brainiacs be reading, the four important nineteenth century novels (or at least collections) I read were Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1876), Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat and other Tales of Good and Evil (1842), George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) and the Marquis de Sade's Crimes of Love (1800) which I offset with Bill Strutton's Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965) and a couple of eye-wateringly weird Fletcher Hanks collections so as to keep my feet on the ground and retain some kind of understanding of what's going down with the kids on the street.

MOVIES
2019 was apparently the year during which I began referring to them as movies rather than films due to my ongoing Americanisation (although it should be noted that I still can't bring myself to spell Americanisation with a z). For the sake of argument, I am here referring to anything which doesn't quite seem to count as a TV show, so hour-long comedy specials and certain one-shot documentaries are included. Anyway, I clocked up a total of 57 movies or might as well be movies during 2019 - Stan & Ollie (2019) and Spirits in the Forest (2019) at the cinema (or movie theatre as I have no intention of ever calling it), Won't You Be My Neighbour? (2018) and Straight Outta Compton (2016) on DVD, and the rest on telly. There were a few which I saw while crossing the Atlantic on a plane in September, but I failed to specifically note which ones so I'm afraid we'll just have to soldier on in the absence of that information. Let's have another pie chart.

 

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot to conclude from this beyond that I watched a bunch of films, of which 31.6% were documentaries. I watched ten in September, which was doubtless thanks to being stuck on a plane for roughly twenty hours, and I watched just one in January, but the month by month viewing statistics don't really seem sufficiently fascinating to be worth preserving in the form of a chart, not even to me. My top ten, based purely on which ones I liked more than others, is as follows:

1 - Mean Girls (2004).
2 - Stan & Ollie (2019).
3 - A Christmas Story (1983).
4 - El Camino (2019).
5 - Dolemite is My Name (2019).
6 - I, Tonya (2017).
7 - Dark Star (1974).
8 - The Damned: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead (2015).
9 - The Laundromat (2019).
10 - District 9 (2009).

I can't be bothered to compile a bottom ten, but the worst was probably X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) about which I can't remember a single fucking thing, which is interesting given that I can remember the far superior comic book it was based on in some detail and I'm not actually sure how many decades have passed since I read it.

Turning to the dating of all the movies and might as well be movies I've watched, it's probably no great surprise to see the statistics dominated by the last ten years.

 

This is because I'm fire and proper quality innit and I can't be doing with none of your grandad flicks, yeah? You get me?

TELLY
I am aware of having stated - and with some frequency - that I don't really watch much television, despite which I somehow managed to catch 215 episodes of Wheel of Fortune during 2019, so I suppose what I actually mean is that I try to watch only things which seem worth watching, rather than sitting there with my face glued to the screen like some fat knacker more or less regardless of what's showing. Nevertheless, my viewing habits are apparently such as to result in a corpulent mass of data which I've found more or less completely bewildering, even impenetrable, some nine months after the fact. In an attempt to tackle this data, I'll begin with the simple stuff, specifically my top ten most watched shows of 2019, which are as follows and include shows from both regular TV and streaming services:

1 - Wheel of Fortune (215 views).
2 - Boardwalk Empire (56 views).
3 - Episodes (39 views).
4 - Jersey Shore Family Reunion (26 views).
5 - Kim's Convenience / True Detective (24 views each).
6 - My Name is Earl (23 views).
7 - King of the Hill / Mindhunter (21 views each).
8 - The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (20 views).
9 - Carnivale (19 views).
10 - The Good Place (14 views).

I've neglected to account for episodes of anything where I either gave up half way through, or which was simply on in the background as I did something else, although it should also be noted that this top ten is as much representative of which shows simply had a greater number of episodes than others and therefore only indirectly reflects how much I may or may not have enjoyed them. Also, it's actually a top twelve seeing as I watched as many episodes of Kim's Convenience as I did of True Detective, and the same even tie occurs with King of the Hill and Mindhunter in joint seventh place.

Anyway, during 2019 I watched 887 episodes of 185 shows. Of these, 585 were viewed on streaming services, principally Netflix or Hulu, and 288 on regular cable television because we get tons of HD!*, plus there were 14 DVDs in there somewhere. Admittedly this does look very much like an absolute fuckton of telly, although broken down works out at an average of 2.43 shows a day, which sounds about right.

 

As we can see, an impressive 19.5% of all television I watched during 2019 was actually Wheel of Fortune.

 

Here we see my viewing figures as they fluctuate in terms of the full year, determined by count of episodes rather than shows, with the lower part of the graph referring specifically to episodes of Wheel of Fortune for the sake of comparison. My initial analysis of the data describing my general viewing suggests the August peak may have been caused by the increased Texas heat obliging me to spend more time inside the house at that time of year; followed by a trough in September resulting from my visiting England and being therefore unable to watch the Wheel during that time; presumably leading to a second peak once I returned to the United States in October and caught up on all of the episodes I'd missed. However, the data referring specifically to Wheel of Fortune reflects this pattern only in a vague sense and may be additionally influenced by the network tending to show only reruns of the Wheel during the summer months, therefore rendering it less essential in viewing terms.

FOODS
My wife and I tend to eat out a couple of times a week. According to the statistics we dined out - or at least I dined out - on 192 separate occasions during 2019, meaning we ate out 3.69 times per week for the duration of 2019 - generally Thursday and Saturday evenings because it gives me a break from cooking, then Los Dos Laredos for lunch on Sunday, but sometimes also Saturday.

 

I don't know what happened in April. I don't remember going on a diet. Anyway, my top ten most popular eating places of 2019 were as follows, although it's numerically a top twenty-five given tied positions at seventh, ninth and tenth places.

1 - Good Time Charlie's (31 visits).
2 - Los Dos Laredos (29 visits).
3 - Sabor Cocinabar (16 visits).
4 - Jim's (9 visits).
5 - Tandoor Palace (7 visits).
6 - Hung Fong (6 visits).
7 - The Hungry Farmer / Taqueria Cazadores (5 visits each).
8 - Sea Island (4 visits).
9 - Bandera Jalisco / Cheddar's / Hooters / Longhorn Steakhouse / Tong's Thai (3 visits each).
10 - The Barn Door / Blanco Cafe / Cracker Barrel / El Bosque / 410 Diner / Jacala / Magic Time Machine / Mamacita's / Papagayos / Pho Plus / Taco Tote (2 visits each).

For the sake of full disclosure, the establishments I visited just the once during 2019 were as follows: Al Amir / Babil Cafe / Bamboo Biryani / Bangkok 54 / Bar-B-Cutie / Bill Miller's BBQ / Burger Boy / Burger King / BurgerFi / Café 37 / Café in the Park / Curry Royal Tandoori / Denny's / Earl Abel / El Jarro de Arturo / Ginger & Co. / Guajillo's / Heitmiller Steakhouse / J. Alexander's Restaurant / Kai / LA Crawfish / La Fonda / Las Tapatias de Jalisco / Luby's / Mediterranean Turkish Grill / MezzeMe / Pig Stand / PoPo / Pot Belly / Rehoboth / Rising Café / River Hofbrau / Sapporo / Tarka, TGI Fridays / The City Arms / The Flying Saucer / The Lion and the Rose / Tomatillos / Triple C / Triple T / Wagamama / Whataburger.

A couple of these were in England and MezzeMe was in Austin, but otherwise they're all in San Antonio except for River Hofbrau which was somewhere on the way back from Austin but was sort of crap anyway. Although J. Alexander's, Bar-B-Cutie, and TGI Fridays stand out from this final group as significantly underwhelming, most establishments at the lower end of the list are only rated thus because it's pretty hard to beat Good Time Charlie's or Los Dos Laredos, and certainly the notion that I patronised Denny's, Bill Miller's and Guajillo's in particular just once during the entire year seems peculiar. That said, I seem to remember having the shits after eating at Bar-B-Cutie so it'll be a while before I go back there. They should probably place greater emphasis on food hygiene and less on having a fucking stupid name.

MUSIC
Finally we come to music and the subset of data which proved ultimately so expansive that I almost couldn't initially be arsed to correlate it. As a rule, I listen to two, occasionally three CDs when out on my morning bike ride during the week, sometimes a couple of singles as I'm getting ready to go out on my morning bike ride, then other stuff at home for some of the afternoon, almost always vinyl albums, unless I'm writing and need to concentrate.

Apparently I listened to 1,185 compact discs, records, tapes, and singles during 2019. This breaks down to 511 CDs, 375 vinyl albums,  126 vinyl singles, 103 cassette tapes, 69 downloads - mostly listened to after burning to CDR - and one solitary CDR which wasn't originated from a download. These figures count double disc sets as single albums and additionally describe the number of times I've played albums, rather than describing the number of albums I've played, if you see what I mean. Also, I've ignored albums or CDs where I've listened to less than half of the thing before switching to something else, and tapes while I've been editing them as sound files for public sharing through my Ferric Archaeology blog - which I count as work rather than listening. Anyway, let's take a look at these figures as a pie chart, seeing as we haven't had one since we were discussing Wheel of Fortune.

 

I was fairly sure I listened to more albums on vinyl than on compact disc, so it just goes to show how wrong you can be.

The top ten - but actually sixteen due to a few of them being evenly tied - artists whose work I listened to the most in 2019 are as follows, with total number of discs, tapes or whatever media indicated in brackets. Peter Hope and David Harrow seem to have turned up on a number of shared releases as well as recording under variant names, but it seemed tidier to give each his own listing encompassing all names under which they have recorded.

1 - David Bowie (43).
2 - Peter Hope (37).
3 - David Harrow / 2Pac (29 each).
4 - Residents (24).
5 - Sleaford Mods (19).
6 - Apostles (18).
7 - Ice Cube / Mrs. Dink (17 each).
8 - Cabaret Voltaire / Haystak / Snoop Dogg / WC (15 each).
9 - Lil Nas X / Sex Pistols (14).
10 - Einstürzende Neubauten (13).
 

The top ten albums or equivalent works I played the most in 2019 were as follows, again with full number of plays indicated in brackets. This list is a little more arbitrary than the previous one given that I'm not allowing for tied results, so those albums occupying the sixth to the ninth position, for example, could be in any order, each of them having been played ten times.

1 - Lil Nas X - 7 EP (2019) DL (14).
2 - Haystak - Portrait of a White Boy (2004) CD (14).
3 - Hero Of A Hundred Fights - [Hero Of A Hundred Fights] (1999) CD (12).
4 - David Bowie - Hours (1999) LP (11).
5 - Tangerine Dream - Electronic Meditation (1970) LP (11).
6 - Mrs. Dink - D(EE)P R(IS)K (2019) DL (10).
7 - Peter Hope & David Harrow - Wrong Acid EP (2019) DL (10).
8 - Shangri-Lies - Drain / Greed / Hunger (2019)  DL (10).
9 - Stephen Mallinder - Um Dada (2019) LP (10).
10 - Residents - Mark of the Mole (1981) LP (9).

Finally, for the sake of being thorough, here are my top ten most played singles of 2019, again in a slightly arbitrary order so as to avoid the number three slot being shared by twelve records all of which I listened to twice.

1 - Peter Hope & David Harrow - Feel / Fear & Love (2019) 7" (7).
2 - Mansun - Wide Open Space (1996) 7" (3).
3 - Sleaford Mods - Sleaford Mods (2018) 12" (3).
4 - Caroline K - Don't Believe It's Over (2019) 12" (2).
5 - Grace Jones - Slave to the Rhythm (1985) 12" (2).
6 - Marc Almond - The Boy Who Came Back (1984) 7" (2).
7 - Nocturnal Emissions - Stem Cells (2018) 10" (2).
8 - Peter Hope & TBC - Apple Eye / White Grass No. 2 (2019) 10" (2).
9 - Psychic TV - Unclean (1984) 12" (2).
10 - Sex Pistols - The Biggest Blow (1978) 12" (2).

The factor which I've found most surprising about the above data is that I don't actually listen to music as much as it feels like I listen to music. Asked to guess how many times I've listened to WC's Revenge of the Barracuda in 2019, for one example, I would have said twenty or thereabouts but it was actually just six times. Additionally, I've had the impression that the majority of my listening has been dominated by rap, but let's see what the pie chart says - and keeping in mind that certain slightly arbitrary lines have had to be drawn for the sake of brevity in deciding what constitutes a particular genre.

 

So my impression was more or less correct, naturally prompting the question, what sort of rap?

 

As we see from the chart, I've mainly been keeping it locked to the west coast for the duration of 2019, yeah boy, albeit not exclusively because I'm all about keeping it real. Having moved to America in 2011, I now feel a bit less weird about listening to quite such a high percentage of American rap, although it will be noted that I'm still, strictly speaking, not representin' my hood (in a general sense) in this respect, despite my top two albums of the year both being rap albums from the south, respectively Atlanta and Nashville if anyone cares. Additionally, this pie chart should not be taken as an indication that I ain't be feeling UK rap and or grime or whatever the hell it's called this month, for indeed my general opinion is that the standard of UK lyricism generally exceeds that of these shores by some margin, however 1) I'm a white man in his fifties and am therefore subject to certain limitations when it comes to what's going down on the road with the kids and that, not least due to the aforementioned road now being on a different continent. Word to the motherfucker.

 

Here we see the data approximately correlating the years from which the music I listened to during 2019 was derived. Thankfully, it seems I'm not quite an eighties man in the sense of a number of my contemporaries who subscribe to the belief that it was more fun when we was growing up and with none of that swearing like now and that the first Go West album really does contain some classics if you'd just give it a chance. I find the pathological need to experience new music and to keep a finger on some notional pulse a bit peculiar, by which I mean this kind of thing seen a while back on facebook:

'I'm fifty-one. My favorite bands right now are Otherkin, Bad Sounds, Spring King, Sundara Karma, Inheaven, Kagoule, Vant, and Moaning. I can't see myself ever not listening to new music.' - Mike Tully

I actually looked up a few of those and they were mostly shit, and more than a couple of them sounded like something from 1979 for some weird reason; but, mid-life crises aside, obviously it's nice to hear music I've never heard before from time to time, regardless of vintage. The one hit registered in the graph for 1869 was Wagner's Ring Cycle, in case anyone was wondering, which sort of counts as music I've never heard before (for example) because it was probably the first time I've played it all the way through, despite having found the three disc set left outside on the pavement by someone back in the nineties.

Anyway to further break it down, my top ten favourite years, musically speaking, were apparently as follows (including a couple of score draws):

1 - 1999 (54).
2 - 1979 (36).
3 - 2000 (34).
4 - 1996 (31).
5 - 2001 / 2019 (29 each).
6 - 1980 / 1994 (27 each).
7 - 1990 (26).
8 - 2002 (24).
9 - 2006 (22).
10 - 1977 (21).

Finally, in case anyone cares, my top five most played albums on a month by month basis were approximately as follows, allowing for  anything played with the same frequency as whatever made number five being omitted by virtue of appearing later in the alphabet. In other words, had I listened to any tapes by AA Book of the Road just once in September, Forever: Rich Thugs would have been displaced.

January
1 - Hero Of A Hundred Fights - [Hero Of A Hundred Fights] (1999) CD (12).
2 - Cabaret Voltaire - Groovy, Laidback and Nasty (1990) LP (4).
3 - DDAA - Ronsard (1988) LP (4).
4 - Undertones - Undertones (1979) LP (4).
5 - Young Fathers - Cocoa Sugar (2018) CD (4).

February
1 - Cosey Fanni Tutti - Tutti (2019) LP (7).
2 - Dentists - Heads and How to Read Them (1990) LP (7).
3 - Einstürzende Neubauten - Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen (1987) LP (5).
4 - Haystak - Portrait of a White Boy (2004) CD (5).
5 - Chris Duncan - The Vanishing Mother (1981) C60 (3).

March
1 - Haystak - Portrait of a White Boy (2004) CD (9).
2 - Sleaford Mods - Eton Alive (2019) LP (8).
3 - Salford Electronics - Communique No. 2 (2017) CD (7).
4 - Tangerine Dream - Electronic Meditation (1970) LP (5).
5 - Shangri-Lies - Drain / Greed / Hunger (2019)  DL (4).

April
1 - Residents - Mark of the Mole (1981) LP (9).
2 - Shangri-Lies - Drain / Greed / Hunger (2019) DL (6).
3 - Bollock Brothers - Never Mind the Bollocks 1983 (1983) LP (5).
4 - Infinite Livez vs. Stade - Art Brut fe de Yoot (2007) CD (3).
5 - Apostles - Cartography (1987) C90 (2).

May
1 - Peter Hope & David Harrow - Wrong Acid EP (2019) CDR/DL (10).
2 - David Bowie - Hours (1999) LP (5).
3 - David Bowie - Tonight (1984) LP (4).
4 - RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo (1998) CD (3).
5 - Antonym - Statues in Ice (1992) C50 (2).

June
1 - Mrs. Dink - D(EE)P R(IS)K (2019) DL (10).
2 - Stex - Spiritual Dance (1992) LP (6).
3 - Residents - Tunes of Two Cities (1982) LP (4).
4 - Shellac - Dude Incredible (2014) CD (4).
5 - Residents - The Big Bubble (1985) LP (3).

July
1 - Lil Nas X - 7 EP (2019) DL (13).
2 - Chrome - The Visitation (1976) LP (7).
3 - Imagination - Scandalous (1983) LP (6).
4 - Princess Superstar - Princess Superstar Is (2001) CD (5).
5 - Charlatans - Some Friendly (1990) LP (3).

August
1 - Nicht Gut - Grönland (2019) C30 (7).
2 - C.W. McCall - Black Bear Road (1975) LP (5).
3 - Mex - Dark of the Moon (1981) CD (5).
4 - Laibach - Opus Dei (1987) LP (3).
5 - Wreckless Eric - Construction Time & Demolition (2018) LP (3).

September
1 - Awkward Geisha - 100 Soft Rock Anthems (2019) DL (4).
2 - Wreckless Eric - Transience (2019) LP (4).
3 - Beatles - Please Please Me (1963) LP (3).
4 - various - Real Time 1 (1982) C90 (2).
5 - Above the Law - Forever: Rich Thugs (1999) CD (1).

October
1 - Pixies - Beneath the Eyrie (2019) LP (7).
2 - Bernadette Cremin & Paul Mex - Mutual Territory (2018) CD (5).
3 - Cabaret Voltaire - 1974-76 (2019) 2LP (5).
4 - Dickies - Dawn of the Dickies (1979) LP (5).
5 - Stephen Mallinder - Um Dada (2019) LP (3).

November
1 - Stephen Mallinder - Um Dada (2019) LP (7).
2 - Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention - We're Only in It for the Money (1968) LP (5).
3 - David Bowie - Pin Ups (1973) LP (4).
4 - Ice Cube - Raw Footage (2008) CD (4).
5 - Nocturnal Emissions - Beyond Logic Beyond Belief (1990) LP (4).

December
1 - Mrs. Dink - Diabolique (2019) DL (4).
2 - Headyello - Road to Elsewhere (2019) DL (3).
3 - Love Unlimited Orchestra - Rhapsody in White (1977) LP (3).
4 - 2Pac - R U Still Down? (1997) 2CD (2).
5 - 2Pac - Thug Life (1994) CD (2).

There I think we have it, because that's already more useless statistical information than anyone sane could ever possibly need.

Any data-mining types intending to somehow use the above information to try and brainwash me into purchase of Babylon 5 DVD boxed sets or listening to They Might Be Giants on Spotify, go ahead. Take your best shot.

*: This potentially confusing qualification refers to an unusually annoying Spectrum internet television commercial and as such, is unlikely to make much sense to anyone who hasn't seen the commercial. Additionally, being just a passing reference to something annoying, it probably isn't funny enough to be worth explaining.

Gun Fun

I've never really had a particular problem with guns, having had very little direct experience of them. I grew up on a farm in England, and being a farm there were rifles knocking around. I used to pick up the spent cartridges when I found them, as I did from time to time, and that was so far as it went.

When one of our neighbours was released from prison and took to terrorising the neighbourhood, my wife's ex-husband lent us a twelve-gauge pump action shotgun which we kept in the closet without any real plan of using it. We bought a box of cartridges from Walmart and felt immediately and significantly less concerned with the unpredictable actions of our dumbfuck neighbour without even having loaded the thing. Whatever shit he might pull next, we told ourselves, we have a gun and he doesn't. Being a pump action shotgun, pumping the forestock to make that familiar click-clack sound is cinematic and slightly terrifying, so we figured it would be enough to send our neighbour heading for the hills next time the voices in his head sent him around to pick a fight with our front door. As it turned out, simply yelling get off my fucking lawn was apparently enough to do the trick. We haven't had a peep out of him since, and that was about a month ago.

Texas law reputedly takes a sympathetic view when it comes to shooting intruders who have entered your home, and I had - perhaps optimistically - assumed it would simply be a case of waiting for our neighbour to resume his paranoid schizophrenic war on us, at which juncture we could defend ourselves to the full extent of our capabilities and the problem would be resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned. I suppose I should be glad that it didn't come to that, although I'd nevertheless been considering gun ownership for a while, having ceased to trust America's political system to safeguard my family from spontaneous visits by semi-organised groups of extreme right-wing shitheads who don't trust people who read books or who vote for someone they don't like. I've seen them on the television with their Tiki torches so I know that they already exist, and we spent four years under an administration which couldn't quite bring itself to condemn their general type.

Unfortunately, not everyone seems to see it as I do, and editors in particular seem inclined to point out the error of my ways. I write things which occasionally require the attention of an editor, and the most recent one got quite sniffy when I summarised a couple of points from the previous paragraph on social media. Violence begats violence, he opined, albeit not in those actual words, and only an imbecile would have a gun in their home. I pointed out that, having grown up in England, I was reasonably intimate with the general concept of not having a gun in one's home, and indeed with the desirability of the same on the grounds of a society without gun ownership being one wherein people have difficulty shooting each other. He explained again, simply repeating his argument having apparently assumed that I hadn't understood on the grounds that I hadn't simply replied, yes, you're right. Guns are bad. I know that now.

The previous editor had taken more or less the same position, presuming to understand my situation better than I did and even providing links to various articles published by the Guardian to show me just how wrong I'd been. I wouldn't have minded but I wasn't even particularly defending gun-ownership, rather suggesting that the lazy focus on the same as the cause of everything bad that's ever happened might, in certain instances, contribute to whatever the problem may be by diverting attention away from deeper underlying causes; but whoever you are, wherever you are, there will always be someone who genuinely believes they understand your situation better than you do because they've read a book about it or they went to a better school. That's the class system for you.

It would be nice to live in a world without guns, but unfortunately we don't. Maybe one day we'll get that genii back in its bottle, but for the moment there's not much point getting sniffy about it; and for what it may be worth, the argument about how we need our guns in case the American government ever becomes a dictatorship doesn't cut any ice with me either, given the last four years played out without so much as a fucking custard pie targetted at anyone who might have deserved it.

So when Margot invited my wife and myself out to her farm in Medina County so that we could shoot guns, it struck me as something worth doing. I'd fired an air rifle once or twice, but not an actual firearm and it seemed like a good idea to get in some practice. Medina County is some way from San Antonio so it took the best part of an hour to get there. We'd been there before, one new year's eve, and I recall being astonished at the night sky - possibly more stars than I'd ever seen.

Margot is one of the two women I've met who could probably be described as rootin'-tootin' without it being an insult. She invited us in, introduced us to her kid, her husband, her dogs, and Oreo, her enormous pet bunny who may be coming to live with us at some point because she has trouble coping with all of the critters.

She picked out a couple of guns from the safe, filled a hold-all with boxes of ammunition, and then we drove out in her jeep, heading for where she usually engages in target practice. The farm, to my eyes, was distinguished mainly by longhorn cattle of all shapes and sizes - although mostly huge - lazing around the water hole near the house. Otherwise it was scrubby trees on flat but uneven ground for as far as the eye could see - nothing like Sweet Knowle Farm where I grew up, and not even like anything from the western movies I'd watched as a kid.

We drove slowly, the jeep tipping and bucking, Margot telling us about life on the farm over a soundtrack of the sort of grunting metal I've never quite recognised as music. Eventually we came to a halt.

Margot pinned a paper target to a tree and talked us through the process of loading up a clip with bullets, cocking the firearm, all the safety procedures, and all the stuff we've seen in cop shows. I'd spent most of the previous hours anticipating something which deafened me while knocking me off my feet and leaving a massive bruise on my shoulder, so the reality of actually firing guns turned out to be thankfully - and I suppose worryingly - much easier than I'd anticipated. My earplugs were sufficient to reduce the noise to something innocuous, and Margot showed us how to hold guns in the proper way - us being Bess and myself.

Our first gun was a rifle, possibly a Remington - unless that's just who made the bullets. It was small, fairly light, and felt much like an air rifle in my hands. Bullets were loaded into the firing chamber and spent casings subsequently expelled by pulling back and then up on a lever assemblage just as Clint Eastwood would have done, and which felt hugely satisfying. I could almost sense a droopy mustache forming on my face as I shot the thing. The kickback was significant but nothing like so bad as I'd anticipated, and I seemed to be pretty good at hitting the target for some reason.

Next was the 380 automatic, a small, stubby handgun which looked worryingly insubstantial but proved to be just the right weight to keep it from sitting in one's palm like a water pistol. Everything about it was smooth and well-oiled, and I at last understood what is meant by the term automatic. The rifle had required that I cock the gun each time I was about to fire so as to load a bullet into the chamber; which is only necessary once with an automatic, following which one may shoot off the entire clip of seven bullets. Again, the noise wasn't too bad, and the kickback only seemed like it would be a problem when firing off the entire clip in quick succession. The gun required that I support my gripping hand with another cradled beneath - like you see in the cop shows - so as to improve aim and prevent the firearm flying back and hitting me in the face. Unfortunately though, my aim was shite, meaning I would be wise to get in more practice before attempting to - just randomly and off the top of my head - settle an argument with a disagreeable personage by shooting him in the kneecaps.

Finally, we loaded up the twelve gauge, the one borrowed from Byron. It seemed like it would be effective - in some imaginary worst case scenario - but was frankly a pain in the arse to use with all of the complicated cocking and shucking to be undertaken in a specific order. So that was good to know, I guess.

After about half an hour, Bess and I felt we'd got as much as we were likely to get from the exercise so we packed up and came home. For me, it had been strange shooting at a target with a potentially lethal firearm, but nothing like so strange as I'd expected it to be, and it seemed to come naturally on some level; at least, all those rap records suddenly made a lot more sense. Surprisingly, I didn't feel like a different person. I didn't feel the need to listen to Ted Nugent and my views on gun nuts remains more or less unchanged.

For better or worse, I'm now able to do something I may not have been able to do a month ago, so that's good.

Diarrhoea Day

I had a feeling it was going to be that sort of week given that I was scheduled for a colonoscopy on Thursday afternoon, two days after a presidential election which would almost certainly cement Trump to the throne. I anticipated that by the time I woke, future presidential elections would already have been banned due to the confusion caused by having persons other than Trump on the ballot. Some genius would somehow manage to prove that democracy was a threat to freedom of speech, our right to shoot a gun, and possibly all the little unborn babies. I was assuming Trump would win in hope of avoiding the level of despair I experienced first time around when no-one thought he stood a chance in hell. I was assuming Trump would win because it's 2020. I also assumed my colonoscopy would reveal the presence of cancer, because it's 2020, so why wouldn't it?

Shooty the Drug Dealer was back out of the loony bin. Our neighbour across the way had discovered him in his yard at three in the morning.

'Is there some particular reason why I find you in my yard at three in the morning?' our neighbour asked, not unreasonably.

'I saw a man in your yard and I thought he was going to burgle your house,' Shooty explained helpfully. 'I chased him off for you!'

'If I find you in my yard at three in the morning ever again, I will shoot you with my gun,' our neighbour told him, because it wasn't even the first time Shooty had been discovered in his yard at three in the morning.

Shooty was hurt, explaining that - contrary to all of the evidence - he had our neighbour's back and that he considered our neighbour to be not only his bro but also possibly his dawg, or something. Some of this we heard directly from the neighbour, and some from Shooty's mother who phoned to explain that she didn't know why the aforementioned neighbour was being mean to her boy and threatening to shoot him, and it was worrying because now a couple of Shooty's other dawgs were planning to get the neighbour for being so mean to their trespass prone bro.

'Just another day in paradise,' observed Donna, who lives next door to us. Squidward the fantasist who lives on the other side - the man who knows doctors and dentists and clearly believes the rest of us regard him as something classy to which we might aspire - claims that Shooty left a bag of drugs in his garden. Squidward found the bag of drugs - cocaine and acid, he believes, because those are the sort of drugs that druggers like to take when they want to get high.

Shooty was presumably walking along our street with his bag of drugs, which probably had bag of drugs written on it, when he noticed Squidward's garden.

'Yoink!' I'm sure he exclaimed, one finger aloft so as to illustrate that he'd just had a completely brilliant idea. 'That looks like smashing place for me to take some drugs!'

Unfortunately he took so many drugs in Squidward's garden that he must have got unusually high and forgetfully left his bag of drugs behind when it was time to go home for tea - most likely a mound of mashed potato with sausages sticking out.

Rather than call the cops, as he'd once done when his other neighbour's dog was barking - and for pretty much every other fucking thing ever, come to think of it - Squidward instead popped the bag of drugs into yet another neighbour's wheelie bin, making it difficult for the rest of us to verify his frankly fucking ridiculous story. By the time we checked said wheelie bin, some druggers must have found the bag of drugs and smoked the contents because it was no longer there. It was all very mysterious.

On the Saturday before both the election and my colonoscopy, we can hear Shooty literally howling at the moon in the street outside, just like in the films.

The clocks go back on the Sunday, and I start to get those weird visual migraines, one of them at some point every day when I've only had two or three in my entire life.

I have my colonoscopy on Thursday, but more than anything I'm dreading having to fast the day before, and the stuff they'll expect me to drink. They've said it will be sent to my local pharmacy but with just two days to go, they seem to be leaving it a little late. I give the doctor a call. Someone with an accent I have trouble understanding explains that they've already notified me and that the medication went out a week ago. Some pharmacies only keep prescription medicine for three days if no-one turns up to collect, so mine may already have been returned. I ask by what means I have been notified and he reads out a phone number which isn't mine.

'That's great,' I say. 'I guess I'd better go and see if they still have it. If not, I guess I'll speak to you in a bit when I call to cancel my appointment. Many thanks.'

They have my prescription and there's $85 to pay. If we didn't have medical insurance, it would cost $150, which strikes me as expensive when I'm fairly sure I could get the same job done with milk of magnesia. Still, it's better than putting up with all that horrible socialism, right shitheads?

I have a bowl of French onion soup on Tuesday morning, and nothing after that. I take the bowel preparation drink at four in the afternoon, a 6oz bottle diluted with 10oz of water, then another 32oz of water to wash it down. It's pretty much the most disgusting thing I've ever had in my mouth and it cost $85. It's too sweet, sort of salty, and tastes like it should be purple in colour, except it's clear. More than anything it resembles Dr. Pepper which is the worst flavour in the world, something akin to cheap perfume crossed with dental mouthwash and referring to nothing found in nature; and fucking Trump seems to be doing all right so far. At least it's not the landslide defeat promised by all those Democrat party adverts asking for money on facebook.

I fucking loathe the medical-industrial complex industry, I write in my diary that evening. Felt like killing myself most of today.

The purpose of the $85 bowel preparation drink is to give me such powerful shits as to leave me completely empty by the time they get around to poking their Kodak Instamatic up my arse on a spring. By Thursday, I'm so weak that I have to draw a chair up to the kitchen sink and sit as I wash the dishes.

I examine the packaging of the bowel preparation drink and am able to confirm my worst fear, that the flavour is something added presumably so as to make it more yummy, at least in the imagination of someone who thinks Dr. Pepper counts as a flavour and who almost certainly voted for Trump.

Speaking of which, they still haven't finished counting the votes. Biden seems to be in the lead, but who knows. It's still 2020 after all.

We drive to the Stone Oaks medical centre. I enter an empty waiting room - no receptionist. A post-it note stuck to the window of the reception desk suggests I should ask for such and such an extension number when I call to let them know I've arrived. I don't know why they would assume I know what their fucking phone number is.

I bang on the locked door leading to the surgery and yell, 'shop!'

Eventually someone comes, but only because they expected me to be here at this time, not because I've successfully drawn their attention by pounding on the door and yelling.

I change into a gown and lay on a gurney for about ninety minutes with a saline drip feeding into one arm. I've had a headache all morning but haven't been able to take anything for it because the period of fasting applies to ibuprofen as well as to sausages and pies. I listen to the nurses and orderlies talking about country music.

'I loves me some country,' says one, young with a beard. 'I listen to it all day long but, you know, I never realised she had that many songs. I figured she was mainly just someone from the movies.'

'She had a lot of hit songs for sure.'

'Was that like - when was that?'

'Well, the sixties and the seventies mainly.'

'So was that her main thing, what she was known for?'

'Yeah, that's what she's known for more than her movies.'

'Well, there you go.'

I realise they're talking about Dolly Parton.

Eventually I'm wheeled into surgery. I notice Led Zeppelin on the radio, which strikes me as unusual, and the next thing is I'm back out on the ward, feeling wonderful and aglow with the heroin or whatever it was they used to sedate me. It's all over. The doctor shows me a series of snaps taken inside my own bumhole, which doesn't seem to contain anything I need to be worried about.

Also, my headache has gone.

That evening we eat at Good Time Charlie's, and it's the greatest meal I've ever eaten; Joe Biden seems to be president, so far as anyone is able to tell; and even Maisie, our bunny rabbit seems better, although we didn't even realise there was anything wrong. She had one regular ear, and one which flopped down as with lop-eared rabbits. We assumed this peculiar asymmetry was due to mixed parentage, but today she has both ears held proudly aloft for the first time. It feels as though we've turned a corner.

Rap's Most Pitiful Skits

I've listened to this stuff so that you don't have to, although I should probably state for the record that I own all of the CDs from which this drivel is sourced and love most of them to varying degrees, so my sneering comes from a place which is otherwise mostly respect. The following should therefore not be mistaken for a twatty middle-aged white bloke scoffing at those hippity-hoppers with their rappers' music on the grounds of it failing to sound like Gentle fucking Giant.

Angry jailbird questions Dr. Dre's sexuality, yet again.
This one is more obviously directed at Eminem, but the joke - if we're going to call it a joke for the sake of argument - is so powerfully lame as to be eclipsed by its own insults. I'm referring here to a skit featured on Death Row's Too Gangsta for Radio compilation of 2001, a compilation which could have been great. I remembered it as being mostly great but listened to the thing this morning and noticed that once you're past a few decent contributions from Above the Law, the LOX, Murder Inc. and a couple of others, it's mostly just Death Row's loyal elves saying the same old stuff on behalf of their master, the most eye-rollingly underwhelming of which is probably a Tupac impersonator ironically named Tha Realest - so I guess the practice of keeping it real must extend to sounding like some other guy's Spitting Image puppet. Among Tha Realest's contributions to Too Talented for Radio is F*** Hollywood which posits that specific celebrities are disgusting faggots who will definitely give you AIDS if you're not careful, and who are therefore unsuitable as role models for our kids. In case this sounds a little homophobic, or even fucking moronic, Tha Realest is careful to make it clear that he ain't hatin' but rather is simply telling it like it is - so that's a relief. Anyway, to get to the point, the skit in question purports to be the testimony of a leading Ku Klux Klan personage as he welcomes Eminem into the fold and explains what his mission is to be, namely to infiltrate rap music so as to make more money from the same than any African American rap artist ever did. The subtext of the skit therefore cleverly implies that Eminem is, in fact, a racist. Do you see? The efficacy of this short audio drama is, however, undermined by the aforementioned Grand Dragon proposing that Eminem will undertake this mission by adopting the name Marshall Mathers, suggesting that whoever wrote the script doesn't actually understand how names work. The Grand Dragon additionally proposes that Eminem - presumably cleverly using his own actual name as an alias - infiltrate the rap business by buddying up with Dr. Dre, formerly of NWA; and here comes the ingenious part - the same is identified as Dr. Gay of a group named either NW AIDS, or NWA but with the W standing for with a dick in his mouth*. Behind this Wildean wordplay lays an implication of Dr. Dre being a homosexual who might therefore justifiably be rebranded Dr. Gay - read the sentence again a few times if it went over your head. It's interesting to note that, regardless of anyone else's sexuality, or even the label's failure to release anything which wasn't mostly shit since its best artists either died or jumped ship, the individual behind the beef seems to have spent one hell of a lot of his time in an all-male correctional environment thinking about deeds involving Dr. Dre's knob, just like the great big heterosexual that he definitely is.

C-Murder's inconvenient phone call.
Bringing this one up feels a little like kicking a dog, but it would be wrong to excuse certain artists from the roll call simply on the grounds of the rest of the album being exceptional, and Bossalinie is an otherwise great album; and never mind a dog, this listing additionally amounts, it might be argued, to kicking a man when he's down, which is never a good feeling. C-Murder is presently incarcerated for a crime which it kinda sorta looks a lot like he didn't do, the sum total of evidence apparently amounting to him being a black man who was in the same club and that he calls himself C-Murder; but unfortunately the skit, which is identified on the inlay as Phone Call, may actually be the absolute lamest of its kind. First we hear a phone ring and C-Murder answers, clearly disgruntled with having been called at 5.30AM by a fan who explains how he got the number from a girlfriend. C-Murder tells the caller to fuck off in no uncertain terms and hangs up, following which we hear his pitiful admirer exclaim damn, because he knows he's given offence to a great man. The fragile reality of the skit is diminished by the stilted acting and the fact of both voices being heard clearly, where that of the caller really should have been treated so as to make it sound like an actual phone call. The import is of course that C-Murder is amazing, a man who finds himself having to put up with all manner of nonsense in his line of work, while the fan is a much lesser person and an idiot. The problem is that C-Murder has already spent an entire CD telling us that he's amazing, and Phone Call fails to add anything of value to the hypothesis; but worse, for something which is presumably intended to be bitterly amusing, it contains no actual joke. It might just about have worked with a better actor speaking at the other end of an actual telephone line but still probably wouldn't have been that funny. C-Murder was never the most original rapper, but he makes up for any shortfall with a powerful and chilling delivery and by playing to his strengths, and skits sadly aren't one of them. That said, I still don't think he should be in the stripey hole.

Names mispronounced with hilarious yet revealing consequences.
At the risk of enraging simpletons, I'd say that 2Pac was somewhat overrated, which is doubtless something to do with the James Dean effect in relation to his unfortunate passing. True enough, when he was good, he was amazing, and he recorded a couple of exceptional albums prior to disappearance down the Death Row rabbit hole; but those posthumous double CDs really ain't great. With one or two exceptions, the beats are mostly lackluster, and for the most part those discs seem to be the work of someone who wasn't very well, who was succumbing to toxic levels of paranoia, and who had apparently stopped caring. There might be a single decent album's worth of material among all that posthumous stuff, but the rest is just more of the same bollocks about bitches, money, loyalty, enemies, just how much 2Pac doesn't care about what those enemies be saying, and words prefixed with thug to the point of absurdity - thug passion, thug nature, thug life, thug somnambulism, thug unintentional homoeroticism, thug collectible figurine display case and so on and so forth. The laboriously titled Makaveli the Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory isn't a bad album for all that it's no 2Pacalypse Now, but is nevertheless one of seemingly hundreds which open with a news report live from the launch party for the much anticipated new album from controversial rap artist 2Pac Shakur, and this much anticipated new album is usually the album we're listening to - which makes no fucking sense whatsoever - because some rap dude releasing a new album would obviously make the evening news. Usually the reporter tells us that he or she is trying to see what's going on, and we can hear an excitable crowd in the background, possibly with some guy letting off a few rounds from his AK47 in a generally irrepressible spirit of excitement. The reporter then inevitably goes on to explain how whichever rap rivals 2Pac had fallen out with that week have been reportedly crying and shitting their pants like lil' bitches, terrified of what this new masterpiece from the wise one will reveal about them and how it shalt demonstrate their own inane bleatings to be as unto the folly of simpletons. To this effect, the reporter who calls in Makaveli the Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory specifically identifies Mobb Deep and Notorious BIG as among those now in tears and running for their respective mummies, except he erroneously mispronounces their names as Mobb Sleep and Notorious PIG - which is hilarious, obviously. Biggie was quite a large gentleman so mistakenly referring to him Notorious PIG seems uncannily fitting, and so much so that I half suspect it may even have been deliberate. Jay-Z is also mentioned, although the reporter misses a trick in failing to refer to him as Gay-Z, so I imagine the Death Row brains trust still had that one in development at the time of the release party which didn't actually happen. Possibly, having come up with Dr. Gay as an hilarious yet revealing rebranding of Dr. Dre, they didn't want to confuse the issue. Maybe the whole thing would have worked a little better had 2Pac ever released an album as good as Ready to Die, The Infamous, or Illmatic. What a waste.

Puffy's sexy cultural experience.
The internet reckons a skit is a short comedy sketch or piece of humorous writing, especially a parody, which coincides with my understanding of the word, but not with a great number of the skits found on rap albums, many of which constitute po-faced dramatised affirmations of the artists in question being bigger, harder, better paid, more lyrical, or more violent than the rest of us, and with not much in the way of chuckles. Puff Daddy, or whatever he's calling himself these days, is a man who has never been afraid to take himself far too seriously, and his skits accordingly tend to be merely wry at best, but executed with such ham-fisted determination as to actually make us feel a little bit sorry for him. This one turns up uncredited at the close of Señorita from 1997's No Way Out and constitutes a seemingly candid recording of Puffy fooling around in bed with some Hispanic woman. The listener is invited to assume that they've just finished having it off so we hear various sighs and the occasional slurping sound as Puffy addresses his lady friend. He playfully tells her that he wants to learn Spanish so as to be able to deliver certain romantic exclamations in her own language when shooting his load. The cross-cultural aspect of their union is emphasised by the music we hear in the background, which is clearly in the Latin tradition. In fact, it seems to be emphasised with such force that I'm surprised Puffy doesn't ask her to fix him a nice spicy taco or a half coconut of tequila. As skits go, while this one isn't even remotely funny, neither is it particularly stupid or offensive, but the problem is that it seems to go on forever, at least beyond the point at which the listener begins to feel awkward. We get that he really, really, really fancied Jennifer Lopez, and that she was doubtless amazing in the sack, but this sort of eulogy - along with those fucking tracks on later albums where he was begging her to come back - is simply embarrassing. It's like the teenager who mentions the name of some specific girl every five minutes, regardless of the general thrust of the conversation. You could be talking about Chairman Mao and he'll just happen to mention that he saw Karen going into the Chinese takeaway on the high street on Tuesday night. He's pretty sure she ordered sweet and sour chicken. At least that's what it looked like. No-one needs to hear it, and neither did anyone need to know so much about what it's like inside Puffy's head. Sometimes it's good to keep stuff to yourself.

Ganksta Nip interviews himself.
The chorus of Ganksta Nip's Texas Chain Saw from his 1998 album on the Rap-A-Lot label, Interview With a Killa runs Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blacula, Daytime: walking zombie, nighttime: evil Dracula, which is actually just an arbitrary list of slightly mismatched scary things - first naming two fairly dissimilar horror movies, and then two states of being between which Ganksta Nip purportedly divides his daily existence. Specifically, he spends the day as a walking zombie, so he claims, then each night transforms into an evil Dracula, which is something quite different to those good Draculas you're always hearing about it. This, I would suggest, illustrates the main pitfall of rap careers undertaken by those who watch way too many horror movies, namely how easy one can end up looking like a fucking idiot, as should be pretty obvious from a quick glance at all heavy metal. The key to getting it right seems to be either keeping a sense of humour regarding the absurdity of one's performance while pulling those scary faces, or else walking the walk with such conviction that you come across as certifiable and probably a danger to yourself - which is presumably how Insane Clown Posse, NATAS, and Three-6-Mafia got away with it. Unfortunately, Ganksta Nip goes one further on this album by conducting an interview with himself as both into and outro. I'm sure we've all heard those fake news reports about the impressive notoriety or criminal prowess of such and such a rapper who is also so obviously also playing our on the spot reporter, but Ganksta Nip interviewing himself is worse. It's not so much that he doesn't have a whole lot to say or that what he says isn't anything like so scary as he seems to believe, but the delivery and execution are such as to suggest he must have been about twelve at the time, which he clearly wasn't, otherwise he would have been working on his first album at the age of five. Both interviewer and Ganksta Nip speak slowly during their notional meeting of mind, an affectation which is probably supposed to sound sinister, and Ganksta Nip replies as himself in a laboured scary voice possibly based on that of the Leprechaun from the movies of the same name; but the touch which really reduces this already shaky production to ham-fisted idiocy for me is the peculiar phrasing of the questions, at least two of which are suffixed with the interviewer adding, let me know. I suppose let me know might be a quirk of language, some regional equivalent of asking what's that all about? immediately following did I see you wearing a Wonder Woman costume outside Toys-R-Us earlier today?, for example, but I'm not from Houston so for me it's something you say when communicating with a person to whom you're not actually speaking, when writing a letter, for instance.

Dear Sir, thank you for kindly sending me the 1979 Hornby Railways catalogue. I wish to order the R.629 Level Crossing with Opening Gates but am unable to find the correct price and postage. Might I ask that you provide these in your response, for which I enclose a stamped addressed envelope. Let me know.

Let me know somehow makes the whole thing seem ridiculous, which is a shame because Ganksta Nip is clearly not without talent and is very listenable when he's not doing silly voices or discussing different types of Dracula.

When even the toilet scene has its down side.
It's called I'm a H-O-E and is specifically identified as a skit in brackets on the second Ruff Ryders label compilation, but takes the form of a song rather than the usual minute or so of unconvincing dialogue. I say song because it has a beat and a tune, but really it's more like a horrible nursery rhyme with commentary. What are you, bitch? asks our narrator, to which the response is sung back, I'm a H.O.E. - not an acronym but simply spelling out the short form of whore in a way which conveniently sets up the rhyme scheme for the rest of the number. Are you really? asks our man, and if the young lady's response is indirect, providing no clear statement of either positive or negative confirmation, it is difficult to miss the import of I'll fuck the whole family. The import is that our man is dealing with a sexually promiscuous individual, and so naturally he becomes excited as the young lady sings the rest of the nursery rhyme, in doing so revealing that she is keen to take it up the wrong 'un, facilitate a gang bang, and to have her partner - or possibly partners - urinate and defecate upon her person during their romantic liaison. Our man's reaction to these promises is mostly that he can't wait to tell his boys about this one and that he can't believe his luck - which probably works better, or is at least more amusing, if you're into what I understand is referred to as the toilet scene. I'm not, so I find it bewildering unless it's supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem to work as humour either so far as I'm able to tell. Anyway, the cloud surrounding this silver lining - or golden brown lining, I suppose - that is to say the punchline to I've found a lady who will let me do a sexy poo on her and I can't believe my luck is that the lady in question is unfortunately HIV positive, doubtless as a consequence of her sexual exploits. Ultimately, I found it difficult to keep from feeling sorry for everyone involved in this one minute and twenty seconds of witless drivel.

Swizz Beatz likes to partake, if you know what I mean.
I don't know what went wrong with Swizz Beatz. One moment he was a mysterious background figure crafting genuinely weird minimalist beats, like some some guy trying to pull a track to pieces to see if he could keep all those plinky-plonky Casio presets balanced on the very edge of falling apart, resulting in something like the sonic equivalent of Japanese minimalist horticulture; next, he's this goon jumping up and down pulling faces in the background of a Bontempi organ set to carnival sounds as it pulls on a leather jacket in the hope of seeming at least as hard as Michael Jackson in whatever that video was - you know the one I mean. Here on G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, Swizz Beatz' first approximately solo album - and I dread to think what G.H.E.T.T.O. stands for - he additionally takes up rapping, which is ill-advised given that his raps tend towards the simplistic, frequently rhyming words with themselves, which is actually just repeating rather than rhyming. Probably the most annoyingly stupid example would be Who's Real from Jadakiss' Last Kiss album, upon which Swizz drops the following science:

He's phony, she's fake.
That's the type of people I hate.
If you real and you know it clap your hands.
If you real and you know it clap your hands.
Wait a minute - who's real, who's not?
She's real, but he's not.

One possibly shouldn't over-analyse club bangers - as they're known in the trade - but this one was really giving it away, beginning with a brave denouncement of not only phonies but also fakes, two groups of people generally loved and admired by most of the populace, and yet Swizz Beatz here takes a stand, declaring that actually he doesn't like phonies or fakes very much at all! This is followed by a vocal call to identify real people and to distinguish them from the fake and phony demographic by having them clap their hands, then concluding an intriguing examination of this duality in greater depth wherein the word not is cleverly rhymed with the word not. With this degree of cerebration in evidence, it's probably obvious that Swizz Beatz is not averse to the old space fags, if you know what I mean, and his enthusiasm is communicated at length on G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, most wearyingly in the Alien skit. First we hear Swizz talking to himself as one does when off one's fucking cake. The story seems to run that Swizz has smoked so much dope as to have summoned an actual alien presence, presumably voiced by the man himself using a pitch change effect. The alien has apparently travelled half way across the galaxy principally so as to encourage Swizz Beatz in his dope smoking by exhorting him to smoke that shit, boy, and the like, which would imply that the album Carl Sagan glued to the side of the Voyager space probe was almost certainly wasted on the boring green cunts. Swizz duly smokes that shit and in such quantity as to render himself unconscious. This upsets the alien who first exclaims, oh fuck! Not again! before concluding, my work here is done, presenting the confusing possibility of an unfamiliar extraterrestrial value system riddled with apparent contradiction in which one may be upset and even distressed by that which one successfully achieves, unless it's simply that the skit was written, most likely improvised, by a fucking idiot. This announcement is followed by our extraterrestrial visitor exclaiming, I'm the space alien blunt smoker, either seeking to remind himself of his own identity, or providing gratuitous and perhaps even unnecessary quantification on our behalf. This skit is probably hilarious if you've just smoked one, but then under such conditions it's possible that everything is hilarious, therefore reducing this incoherent bollocks to two minutes of your life you'll never get back.

Crying Thug is surprisingly not so tough as he may seem.
Crying Thug is the name of a contestant on a nonexistent game show which was originally broadcast uncredited at the end of Crush Tonight on Fat Joe's Loyalty album. Considering all that Fat Joe was going through at the time, it's impressive that he even managed to record an album, let alone one as good as Loyalty, but it really could have done without the skits. Admittedly there are only two requiring use of the skip function, but they nevertheless detract from the whole and this one really is utter bollocks. Skits based on game shows seem to be fairly common on rap albums, the punchline usually being that the prize is a gun or a nice car or some hoes, or whatever. Of its kind, The $20 Sack Pyramid on Dr. Dre's Chronic album is probably the only one that's actually funny. Rep Your Set roughly duplicates the formula with theme tune, smooth talking host, and wild audience sounds, requiring that three contestants rep their respective sets in order to either win a gun or, in the case of the losing contestant, avoid being beaten up. By way of example, the second contestant reps his set with the following statement:

Chi-town motherfucking hustler bang a motherfucker cash money murder man Gotti.

In other words, contestants compete by reciting meaningless gang gibberish in a vaguely threatening tone. However, Crying Thug, delivers his address with a distinctly fearful tone, therefore poorly repping his set, following which we hear him receiving an enthusiastic beating. This is hilarious because he's named Crying Thug, and it sounds like he's crying, and because the host calls him a pussy immediately following his characteristically disappointing statement. I'm not sure there's actually anything else to unpack from this one, semiotically speaking. I guess you had to be there.

Ludicrous slurping noise.
I can't even remember which album this turns up on, or even whether it's just one skit as I'm sure I've heard several variations on the scenario. I thought it was either some Dr. Dre or Three-6-Mafia album but have drawn blanks on both counts and can't be bothered with searching further. The skit, as I recall it - albeit with some reluctance, depicts a romantic liaison between a young woman and the man, or possibly men in the plural, who rap on whatever the CD may be. In essence, she's attempting to provide oral stimulation of either his penis or their penises but isn't doing it right, much to the bemusement of whoever is on the receiving end. The unhappy customer or customers then provide instruction on how the young woman might do it better, prompting her to ask you mean like this? in a voice conveying a somehow unpleasant degree of innocence, followed by a ludicrous slurping noise suggestive of a mean spirited child loudly and demonstratively licking an ice lolly so as to antagonise another child who has no lolly. Quite aside from the question of what qualifies the unhappy customer or customers in the dispensation of blow job advice, it simply doesn't sound like that. I appreciate that the artist or artistes responsible were attempting to convey a sexual transaction with no distinctively associative sound, but the result suggests sexual acts as imagined by persons with little or no actual sexual experience, which is marginally more amusing than whatever boorish porno crap they were originally intending to communicate.

Master P raises them right.
I'm convinced I've heard a skit wherein Master P dispenses fatherly advice to his kid, then about five or six-years old, regarding how he's getting on at school. The advice divides into two categories, firstly the regular stuff about working hard and being respectful to your teacher, then the inevitable ghetto gibberish about how you should be true 2 da game, and always look a man in the eye before you kill him - amongst other suggestions which seem to run contrary to those in the first category. I feel as though I've heard this skit a number of times so I'm sure it exists and yet I can't find it on any of my CDs, so it may even be my imagination blending spoken parts of otherwise unrelated songs into a single conversation. Anyway, the next best thing is probably the thematically similar dialogue which opens Goodfellas, the first album by Master P's 504 Boyz. Dad, asks the boy, is Tupac still alive? prompting a request for clarification by his father, not unreasonably given that all rap music had spent the previous five years banging on about the aforementioned Tupac being very much deceased. I heard, the boy explains, that you got a nigga, Krazy, sounds just like 'Pac. Here he's referring to the rapper Krazy, then newly signed to Master P's No Limit stable, whose delivery betrays a pronounced Tupac influence - although it would be unfair to suggest that Krazy sounds exactly like Tupac. Broken down, the question operates by a form of logic which might just as well be extended to presuppose that, for example, David Bowie is still alive because Phil Cornwell was on the telly doing an impersonation of him just now. Master P gives no answer, instead allowing his son to ask another question before launching into an extended account of an argument with another child in the school playground, the usual crap about frontin' and stuntin', keepin' it real, and so on and so forth, all of which suggests that, since the previous skit - assuming I didn't just imagine it - our boy has ignored almost all of the advice belonging to the first of the two categories with regard to his education, the little bollix.

*: Presumably implying the artists in question were actually called NWADIHM.

More Shooty

Our neighbour, Shooty the Drug Dealer has been away. Having been released from prison a couple of months ago, he became angry and confused by the lack of recreational facilities and employment options available to a gentleman such as himself, and so lashed out. This expression of frustration culminated with him stood on our porch as we were about to go to to bed screaming that we had better not be sayin' shit about his son. Being, up until that point, barely aware of even Shooty's existence, let alone that of his kid, we actually hadn't been sayin' shit about his son. It seemed there had been a misunderstanding.

Next day my wife went to the courthouse with Shooty's long-suffering mother and gave evidence resulting in his being sectioned that very same evening.

It's actually his grandmother's house, but Shooty lives there too. He'd been detained at the President's pleasure - or however the hell it works here in America - for assault of a senior, presumably the aforementioned grandmother, and detained for five years which suggests something stronger than an uncouth slap. By the point at which he felt compelled to explain his bewildering reservations in the strongest possible terms on our porch at an ungodly hour, the grandmother had moved out along with the mother and Shooty's son. They couldn't deal with him. Shooty's mother had actually adopted his son as her own kid, making the child both Shooty's son and foster-brother.

So this was why he couldn't find his son that one time, because the child was in the care of someone who actually gives a shit about his well-being.

Anyway, it apparently only takes a week to cure Shooty because suddenly he's back on our street. He's smashing bottles in the road at 2AM, mostly outside our house for some reason.

Logan who lives across the way spots him at 2AM, stood lurking in the gap between Logan and Tony's house, for no obvious reason. 'You have to stop this,' Logan tells him. 'They're not going to let you see your boy if you keep acting crazy.'

Shooty explains that it's okay because he's clean, completely off the drugs now. In fact the only thing he smokes these days is pot, so that's good news.

Tony's truck is broken into at some point during the next evening. A credit card is taken and someone tries to use it to spend $150 at HEB. The cops are called, but it's a mystery who might have been responsible. Maybe it was the creepy disused fairground owner or perhaps even the mayor all along.

Shooty's grandmother runs down the street midday screaming, 'He's trying to kill me!'

Shooty himself storms down the street early morning yelling, 'I hate that bitch!'

It's not looking great.

So as to save myself the bother of writing it all out again, here's what I posted on facebook.

Shooty the Drug Dealer paid us an afternoon visit. Either the meds aren't working or it's all the really awesome ganja he be smokin' like a chilled out playa that's been making him jumpy, because there he was on our lawn at two in the afternoon shouting the usual incoherent gibberish about how we be disrespectin' his son - a child the existence of which I am barely aware. Noticing our front door was unlocked, I went to flip the latch but before I could get there he kicked it open and hard, still yelling. I got the red mist, slammed it shut, then yanked it open and bellowed, get off my fucking lawn, you fucking cunt, as he scarpered back to his house.

The cops arrived two hours later and once again told us that he was a very troubled man with many issues.

'So we should definitely give you a call if he does it again?' I quipped, having already mentioned all the previous incidents. Shooty seen hanging about in Tony's yard at 2AM was probably a massive coincidence, to be fair.

'Yes,' said the cop, failing to spot my sarcasm. I went inside because I knew I wouldn't be able to keep myself from calling them a pair of useless donut-scoffing wankers. My wife kept talking to them. From what I could hear most of the conversation seemed to be the cops making sure we weren't going to do anything to upset Shooty.

I don't know how much Wendy Davis plans to defund the cops by, but whatever the sum, it isn't enough.

That was Sunday. Shooty himself called the cops at 3AM on Monday morning because his house was under siege by an armed gang which only he could see and hear. It took the cops eight minutes to respond - which is good going compared to the two hours it took them to get around to responding to us when an absolutely real and physical nutcase tried to kick in our front door.

By Monday evening he's back inside. This time his mother didn't require additional testimony or evidence, although again, we have no idea how long it will last or how soon he'll be back on our porch yelling at our house for no fucking reason. There doesn't seem to be much point in hoping for some miracle cure by which he'll suddenly start behaving himself.

We can get a restraining order, although the problem there is that it can't be delivered to him while he's in the loony bin because it might make him feel a bit fed up or something. My wife has nailed a no trespassing sign to every vertical surface on the exterior of our house which faces the street, which makes her feel better, but very much resembles a display of fear to me. We've purchased a box of shotgun cartridges from Walmart, which cost a surprisingly budget-friendly five dollars and probably represents the crossing of some line or other for me, but I'm past caring.

If nothing else, I take comfort from how fast that fucker ran when I bellowed, get off my fucking lawn, you fucking cunt. Never in my life have I had that effect on someone at the other end of a disagreement. It doesn't suggest great reserves of idiot courage on his part, and if he really wants to get at us because of something explained to him by the voices in his head, I don't think he has the intelligence for anything devious or sneaky.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

The Who Bloke

 

There were two doors, both number fourteen. One of them was A and the other was B respectively referring to upstairs and ground floor flats, but it was anyone's guess which was which. Both doors had inset panels of frosted glass so if you pressed your nose up close, you could just about see a flight of stairs behind the door on the right; but without any indication or which was A and which was B, it was anyone's guess. I tended to put the mail for flat A in the door on the right, basing this decision on a hierarchy of the uppermost dwelling being the primary one. Occasionally one of them would get something specifically addressed to the basement flat. After a while I began to remember the names, as I did with almost everyone on Glengarry Road after a year or so, and it got to the point where I no longer even needed an accurate house number. If, for example, I had something addressed to someone with the surname of Burnap supposedly living at number 63, it would go to number 36 without my really having to think about it, because that was where Campbell Burnap lived. Somehow I still retain some of this information twenty years later.

I haven't retained the name of the guy who lived at 14A, or possibly 14B but it may have been Adrian, or at least he looked like an Adrian to me. He resembled a more sensitive version of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and was obviously gay. I'd been living and working in East Dulwich for about five years and gay people seemed drawn to the area for no obvious reason beyond that it was quiet and mostly civilised, and so I had somehow developed gaydar without really trying. I don't know how I knew, but I almost always did, although the information was never really much use to me. My sexual liasons have historically tended to favour persons with boobs, and jokes with opening lines such as three poufs walk into a bar aren't entirely my thing so I've never needed to check whether the coast was clear before committing myself to knuckleheaded discourse.

That said, at the time I hadn't had sexual liaisons with anyone in possession of boobs for a number of years and, some might argue as a consequence, I had taken to Doctor Who books. There was a new one  every month, and most of them were better than anything which had been on the telly. Doctor Who had been cancelled in 1989 and was still a decade away from returning as Britain's favourite breakfast cereal, so people tended to look at you funny when you mentioned it. I'd been obsessed with the show as a child and then as a teenager, so this may even have been the early onset of a peculiarly specific form of mid-life crisis.

One item of mail regularly received by Adrian - or whatever his name could have been - was a monthly subscription copy of Doctor Who magazine. I'd looked at the thing in WHSmith a couple of times but it was a bit too intensive even for me. Nevertheless, it meant I was well-disposed towards the Who bloke at 14A, or possibly 14B, even before I met him. On the first few occasions when I actually did meet him, my cheery postal good morning was met with only a silent sullen glance, but I persisted on the assumption that he was probably just having a bad day, plus life is too short to harbour resentment against persons you don't actually know. Eventually I caught him at his front door as I stood there with his latest issue of Doctor Who magazine about to go in the letterbox.

'Yes, I've been meaning to have a word with you,' he began somewhat icily, then went into a lengthy complaint about his mail being delivered to the flat upstairs.

'I understand the problem,' I said, 'but I don't think it's me,' launching into an explanation which probably foreshadowed the first paragraph, adding that his complaint tended to be common when I was on holiday and someone else was covering for me, and that whoever that was stood only a 50% chance of getting it right given the absence of anything to indicate which flat was which.

He seemed to understand, and was even a bit embarrassed, so I changed the subject with, I see you're into Doctor Who, which was probably akin to recognising a fellow Freemason in whichever year it was. He smiled for what seemed to be the first time ever, and we compared notes for a minute before he had to be off, being on his way out somewhere.

The next occasion, I got invited in, which was a bit of a shock after the first couple of frosty years and his failure to reciprocate any of my greetings. He was a little older than me but looked significantly older, so I thought, and his flat was much the same as mine. He mentioned a partner of unspecified gender, possibly feeling awkward about it for some reason, and that the partner had died. Additionally, his mother had died more recently. This seemed to explain my impression of him being a less than happy bunny, and I mentioned the unreciprocated greetings, or at least tactfully referred to them by saying, 'yes, you always struck me as having a lot on your mind.'

'Sorry about that,' he said. 'I think I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown for a while there.'

We talked about Who, albeit at crossed purposes. He hadn't read the books, although he'd heard good things about them; and he was quite into conventions and fan gatherings, which didn't really sound like my sort of thing. He'd met Sophie Aldred a couple of times and told me that her screen persona was pretty much her persona in real life. He showed me a fairly large model TARDIS which occupied his bedside table and had a lamp inside, which I found a bit weird. I might have found it weird that he showed me his bedroom, but his flat seemed to be mainly just a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen - much like my own. We seemed to be fairly similar in many respects.

I imagined that this would be the start of a friendship, if not necessarily a beautiful friendship, but from then on he kept himself pretty much to himself, just as before. Our meetings were chance occurrences, albeit significantly more jovial chance occurrences than they had once been. The very last time I saw him, he'd been having a clear out and getting rid of stuff. I handed him his mail and he gave me a DVD, saying, 'Here, you need to see this if you haven't already.'

It was a DVD of the BBC's Edge of Darkness from 1985. I'd never heard of it.

'Then you really need to watch it,' he said. 'It's very good.'

It seemed to be a crime drama and therefore possibly not my sort of thing, but it seemed like a generous act so I took the DVD home and watched it. I moved away from home in 1984 and didn't have a television again until about 1993, which is why I'd never heard of Edge of Darkness. The irony is that I'd moved away from home to take a fine art degree specialising in time based media, specifically film, video and, I suppose, television.

I thought Edge of Darkness was amazing, and so much so that I insisted my friend Andy come over and watch it too, which he did over a couple of afternoons. He also thought it was wonderful, and particularly enjoyed Joe Don Baker's massively entertaining portrayal of a Texan character named Darius Jedburgh - this in spite of Andy's infrequently stated general dislike of American culture.

'Yes,' he grudgingly conceded after we'd just watched Jedburgh terrorise guests at a conference with lumps of plutonium, 'if one really must be an American, then you should at least have the decency to be from Texas.'

I have no idea what became of Adrian, but Who was back on the box by 2005, and was a huge hit but seemed to have lost whatever it was I'd liked about the thing in the first place. Given that I now live in Texas, the rest may add up to some kind of narrative - if not necessarily one which means anything profound - but you may have to put the pieces together yourself.

Hanuman About the House

At the heart of the city of elephants, Hastinapura, the Lord Hanuman did make his home, but it was not the Celestial Palace we know so well from other tales of the Monkey King. Pawanputra Hanuman was in those days without such means, and was so obliged to seek affordable accommodation, a quest which saw him victorious when he agreed to share with Anjana and Sita, both of whom were considered great beauties in their way.

One day as Anjana gathered messages which had come from the king, she learned that the date of Lord Hanuman's birth was most imminent, having accidentally read notice of an appointment with the apothecary.

'What should we do, Sita?' she asked of her friend and household companion. 'Should we give him one?'

Sita's face grew red with surprise and embarrassment. 'Gosh!,' she exclaimed. 'That's very modern of you!'

'No, silly,' said Anjana. 'My meaning was, should we give to him a birthday present?'

'That is a very good and fine idea,' said Sita, 'although I know it would be unwise to give him a pearl necklace.'

'Crikey!' said Anjana. 'I would also say that it would be impossible because we are both ladies and it is my belief that such transactions are ordinarily conducted in the other direction!'

They stood for a moment or two because there seemed to be laughter all around, and so they were unable to continue their discussion.

'No,' said Sita. 'You misunderstand me. If you will recall, I once tried to present the Lord Hanuman with just such a gift, but he politely refused it, for it did not feature the name of Rama and was in this way unacceptable to him.'

'So he did not like it then?'

'No, and he was not happy about the necklace either!'

Again there seemed to be laughter all around, and just as it receded, Lord Hanuman himself did come into the parlour.

'Hello, you two,' he said. 'What are we discussing today? I thought I heard you mention something about giving me one!' As he made this statement, he did catch Anjana's eye whilst smiling and raising his eyebrow in a meaningful way.

'Men!' said Sita indignantly.

Anjana sighed and shook her head. 'I really wish you would cease with this line of enquiry, my Lord, for as well you know I am cursed by a certain sage so that when I fall in love, my face will come to resemble that of a monkey, an eventuality I wish to avoid.'

'What's wrong with looking like a monkey?' said the Lord Hanuman, a little injured.

'Besides, I am saving myself for Kesari,' Anjana added, 'and I am technically your mother, I rather think you will find.'

'This is all very confusing,' observed Sita. 'I hardly know whether I'm coming or going.'

'Blimey,' said Lord Hanuman. 'Would you like to sit down? Maybe I could fetch you a chair.'


Much later, following a lengthy series of slightly repetitive comic misunderstandings, Anjana and Sita presented a gift to Lord Hanuman. They first draped a muslin cloth over the gift so as to conceal its nature and enhance the sense of surprise. Unfortunately this gave the gift a priapic appearance which put everyone in mind of the male generative member.

'I wonder what it can be,' said the Lord Hanuman dubiously.

'I shall give you a clue,' said Sita. 'You will enjoy it in your mouth.'

'Crikey,' spluttered Lord Hanuman. 'I rather think you girls may have entirely the wrong idea about me!'

Then they revealed that the gift was in fact a banana.

'Because you're a monkey, and monkeys like bananas,' Sita explained happily, which cleared up all further laboured comic misunderstandings.