Life and Death

On Monday I encounter baby armadillos, which is a first. They're at the side of the trail, snuffling around in the undergrowth with manic energy, three of them. I've seen armadillos in the wild before, but not often. They're usually adults, and a single hasty move is all it has taken to send them scurrying away. Added up, and excluding those I see squished on the highway with depressing frequency, I've seen a total of three armadillos in the wild, and that figure has just doubled. They are each about the size of a large, well-fed guinea-pig. I walk up to them slowly and carefully, and either they don't see me or they're not bothered. I get within about three feet and stand there for the next ten minutes just watching them.

That evening, we're driving past Catman's house on Sumner. Catman is the local crazy guy who feeds feral cats. We've stopped off at his house before, and he's okay, a nice guy with not an ounce of malice or aggression anywhere in his personality; and most of what he says is lucid, even interesting, but then you get digressions into how he foresaw both the collapse of the twin towers and the death of Lady Diana Spencer - also that he died and encountered angels before being brought back to life on more than one occasion. His testimony can be exhausting, but he has kittens scampering around in his yard.

'Kittens!' I squeal.

Bess steps on the brake and backs up at speed.

We get out and go to see the kittens.

Catman remembers us but not our names. He looks and smells better than he did last time. He had painful scrapes and bruises on his arms and legs, and his hair had been cut by someone who apparently thought they were shearing a sheep. Today he's more like a skinny version of Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural. He tells us about the kittens, and it becomes obvious that the way to talk to him is to keep him on the subject of cats, because that way he makes sense and will even listen. The mother of the kittens was killed by some dog, he tells us.

There are six kittens, same litter but different fathers, black, tabby, and four Siamese - six little scampering fluffballs looking up at us with buggy blue eyes. They climb all over as, mewing away. We watch them clean themselves, even having a pee and covering it over with soil. They're tiny, but apparently just old enough for their mother to have taught them all the important stuff. They'll probably be okay. That all six of them have survived this long in some guy's garden suggests that they're tough and healthy.

Tuesday is similarly grey. The skies have been heavy and overcast of late and I find it oppressive. Coming home from HEB, I see an opossum dead at the side of the road, most likely hit by a car. Worse still, I can see movement. There are babies spilling from her cooling pouch, alive but blind and hairless with ants swarming all around. They're doomed. They won't survive outside their mother or without her warmth. They're too small. It feels like the most horrible fucking thing I think I've seen. I could take them home and they will die. I leave them and they will die. I'm paralysed. Nature can be a  cunt at times, although I suppose on this occasion she was acting through some yahoo-fucknugget in a truck. I tell myself that critters die in the wild all the time and that this is no different.

I phone my wife and she tells me we have an animal rescue organisation in the city, and that it's worth giving them a call because they'll even come out for an injured sparrow. I give her the address of where I saw the opossum and she calls them.

In the evening we go back to see Catman and the kittens. We take a bag of kitten chow and some milk, because it's clear that they can use all the help they can get. Catman's care, through no fault of his own, seems a bit erratic. One of the kittens has gone missing. They're at the age where they want only to be friends with anything that moves, and Catman thinks the missing kitten probably followed the mail guy down the street and got lost. I'm telling myself that anyone decent finding the lost kitten will be unable to resist her fuzzy charm and will either give her a good home, or make the effort to find one for her; because that's what I would do. I don't want to have to think about other possibilities.

We feed the kittens in so much as that Catman sweeps a section of his path and tips out some of the dried chow. He takes an empty tin which once contained cat food from amongst the detritus scattered across his lawn, inspects the inside for crap, then pours out some kitten milk. Flies swarm around as the kittens stuff their faces.

Wednesday begins with the same grey sky, and Bess finds Gary dead in the road outside. Bess and I are devastated. I spend most of the day in either a daze or tears, and then I write this on facebook:

Gary wasn't really our cat, but he ended up living in our yard on a more or less permanent basis because his owner was an arsehole who probably didn't feed him properly, and never really seemed to give a shit about the endless succession of critters she has running around her yard for a couple of months before slouching off to die in traffic. Her name for him was Fat Cat, which probably tells you all you need to know. I renamed him Gary because Fat Cat seemed cruel, and because he reminded me of Gary, my neighbour in London - big, pushy, not very bright, always there hanging around when you open the back door, but essentially lovable. I fed him every day, left dry food out for him and the others, and yet he'd still run into the house at every opportunity, meowing his head off and burying his face in the food bowl. We usually let him eat for a few minutes, then would pick him up to take him back out. He purred like a motorbike as soon as he was picked up. He just liked the attention. The other cats eventually got used to him. He chased a few of them off every once in a while, but fights were few and far between. Once we took him for a day out, to spend time with Bess's grandmother, reasoning that it would do them both good and that he was uncomplicated and outgoing (and that she might even want to keep him), but he spent the entire time under the bed, just waiting for whatever it was to be over. This also put the dampers on a very vague plan we had of driving him up to Tennessee and giving him to my friend Sarah who was at the time looking for a large hairy cat. Anyway, today Bess found him in the road outside, presumably hit by a car. I didn't realise I would be quite so upset, but I guess he lived to a good age and at least his last few years were happy.

I dig a hole at the end of the garden. Bess comes home around lunchtime and we bury Gary. My heart is breaking.

That evening she comes home with Catman's kittens, all five of them bundled up and blinking in her arms as she gets from the car. 'I couldn't stand to think of anything else happening to them.'

'I know,' I say.

'After the one went missing and then Gary, and the opossum you saw - I can't take any more dead critters this week.'

'Me neither. I went past and the opossum was still there. I guess those rescue people didn't think it was worth their effort.'

Bess sighs. 'I had my doubts. I called them a few years ago, that time we had a ringtail in the yard. It took them two hours to turn up.'

The kittens spend most of the day asleep in a little fluffy huddle in an old crib we have under the bed, with occasional bursts of activity and following anything that moves, including the other cats. We already have eight, so we won't be able to keep them, but we can at least give them a decent start in life.

It feels like the storm has broken.

Powwow

It's April so the Powwow season is upon us once again - same place as last time, although when I check I realise that last time was actually 2015. Now that I'm in my fifties, now that I've finally got all my thoughts working in a straight line, the time just rockets past.

It's Saturday morning, which began with a craft fair drive-by in the name of research for when Bess and myself start selling our stuff. This one was open air, on the land just behind the drive-in cinema on the southside. It's held twice a month and pitches are free, which possibly correlates with what we saw as we went by - a row of ten stalls and seemingly no actual punters, although I suppose it was early and the skies were a little grey.

We picked a Mexican diner for lunch, or possibly late breakfast. It's difficult to pick a bad Mexican diner in San Antonio, but not impossible. You can usually tell a good one by the hand painted signage on walls and even windows in emulsions so bright that it hurts to look at them, and also by how many white people can be found amongst your fellow diners. The fewer there are, the better the food will usually be. It's depressing but that's how it works.

I have huevos rancheros and Bess has taquitos and we're set for the rest of the day, so we drive along to Woodlawn Lake. We can already hear the drumming before we've parked, the familiar monotonous beat in 1/1 time - Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…
 

We talk about Tiana who lives up North somewhere, who came down to meet us in Austin last year. She's mostly Native and a regular face at the Shinnecock Powwows - at least I think they're Shinnecock, one of the tribes I hadn't heard of. Bess has been to Powwows in New Mexico and Arizona, and they're not all the same thing, not by a long way. She tells me she has felt like an intruder at a few of them. Not all are so open or welcoming as the one we're going to, which is possibly something to do with it being part of Fiesta, the local annual holiday which takes over a week or two of April.

As usual we're in a repurposed basketball court, and as we find seats, there's a ceremony already underway, but it's as much to do with Fiesta as anything - the shaking of hands, swapping medals, men in full tribal dress sharing jokes with those declared royal for the duration of Fiesta, some distinguished by the sky blue uniforms of the Order of the Alamo. Eyes cast around the room find no clear line demarcating where Natives begin and the rest of us end, which I guess is similarly true of the local gene pool. I suppose we have extremes represented by the obviously Indian in regalia of feathers and animal bones contrasted with a few of the Alamo Heights set, usually most easily identified by face lifts and the look of having recently starred in an episode of Dynasty; but inclusivity is at least some of the point of this thing. On some level this might be considered an Indian Show, but then we're all having fun, which is probably better than invisibility.

There's a circle of guys at the centre of the hall, gathered around their drums and all in black shirts and Stetsons. The master of ceremonies speaks through a tannoy too distorted for me to really follow what he says, but it seems there will now be a dance. A larger circle forms around the drummers, all facing inwards.

Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…

So many people are milling around that it's difficult to see who is actually dancing, but the rhythm is accompanied by a traditional chant, albeit with modern words, a chant probably very much like the thing you're imagining, having just read that sentence. It's familiar and yet experienced in the raw it sounds new and more powerful than one might have anticipated. The rhythm may seem rudimentary but the drums are huge and the skins resonate with a power felt in the gut, a deep bass that somehow makes me think of rave music and techno.

'There will be a cakewalk,' the announcer tells us, and that's all I understand, except that we are invited to participate. We are given paper plates with numbers written on the back. We form in a circle, again facing inwards, and place our plates on the ground before us. I'm still not actually sure what I've agreed to do.

Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…

We dance. It's a shuffling motion whereby we all move sideways, clockwise around the ring of participants.

Fuck it, I say to myself. I'm going for it.

I dance next to a younger representative of the tribe in full dress, huge fans of eagle feathers running down his sleeves and back. I copy his moves and then improvise, hopping from foot to foot, putting a bit of elbow grease into it because it's actually fun - all very immersive. Another minute passes and we stop with the music, all picking paper plates up from the floor in front of us.

The master of ceremonies reads out a succession of numbers, and those with plates bearing the numbers run to the podium to received baked goods, pies, even a box of Little Debbie snack cakes. I suspect this tradition has been a more recent development, say the last couple of years rather than anything handed down from one generation to another. We've combined musical chairs with the tombola and the Mario, a dance famously described in the closing theme to the Super Mario Bros. Super Show.

Do the Mario!
Swing your arms from side to side
Come on, it's time to go!
Do the Mario!
Take one step, and then again,
Let's do the Mario, all together now!
You got it!
It's the Mario!
Do the Mario!

One YouTube commentator pointed out that the Mario is a lot like walking, and so is the cakewalk.

'He's from England,' I can hear Bess explain to some other dancer, but I missed whatever point she was trying to qualify, and I don't really care because we're off again.

Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom…

We keep going until they've shifted all the cakes. Neither Bess nor myself won any of the cakes or pies, but then we're still full of huevos rancheros and taquitos so we're not too bothered.

Starving Artists

We're on a fact finding expedition to something called the Starving Artists Show. Bess and myself have been gearing up to hitting the craft fairs in the hope of selling our respective works and generating a bit of wonga, and this constitutes research. I've been painting on canvas, and I need to know what to expect - what the standard is at this kind of event, how much people generally charge and for what? This will be new ground for me because I've previously only sold my paintings intermittently and have always worked in acrylics. Now I'm trying my hand at oils, meaning I'm effectively having to learn all over again.

The Starving Artists Show takes place in la Villita, roughly speaking a nineteenth century village of small limestone buildings at the heart of San Antonio, and which arguably was San Antonio back in the good old days of rickets and slavery. Today it's an artists' community just south of the city centre, meaning it's mostly galleries, stores selling hand crafted nick-nacks - some quite nice, some fucking awful - a couple of eating places, and general artisanal shite. I mostly think of the pieces sold in la Villita as art for people who don't really like art, but who otherwise pride themselves on knowing what they like. If you're after something with the intensity of a Billy Childish woodcut, then la Villita probably isn't where you're going to find it. On the other hand, it's not a bad place to pick up handmade Mexican folk art.

We begin with a visit to one of the stores because Bess is friends with the woman who works there. They talk and I wander around the shop, picking up clay figurines and inspecting them. The world of mass-produced injection-molded souvenir tat in which I grew up is long gone, but I still can't work out how I feel about its replacement. I like that the precious things of the shop were made by a human being, and I suppose they're nice enough in their own way; but they operate within a system of values which I don't understand. There's nothing here I really need to own, and I can't see the point of having anything you can't claim to need by some definition.

We move on, having had the obligatory discussion about our respective cats. The narrow streets of la Villita are lined with temporary tents and awnings, and each is hung with art of one kind or another, and all of it for sale. The standard is better than I'd anticipated. I'd expected lurid Disney characters scrawled by persons with more enthusiasm than talent, and although that stuff is here, it's thankfully in the minority. On the other hand, I'm surprised to realise that my own fledgling works in oil - of which I'm happy with less than half of those painted so far - are probably above average compared to most of these efforts. There isn't actually much I'd be happy to see hung in a gallery, the one exception being the work of an old guy specialising in Western themes, with desert landscapes painted at least to the standard of Frederic Remington. His canvases are large and he's asking hundreds of dollars for them. I too would be asking for hundreds of dollars had I painted them.

Moving on, the best work seems to be mostly what you could just about call Post-Impressionist, tending towards the representational, and competently so, but with a slightly wild approach to colour. There are plenty of abstract works, if we're going to call them works, but patently produced in the belief of splashes of colour being sufficient in and of themselves. The best abstract painters, in my view, tend to be those who learned to paint like Titian before moving on to non-representational realms of expression. You make a better job of breaking rules when you're at least a little familiar with what they are. I don't think those selling their work today have arrived at the abstract by quite the same route.

I look at the prices. There isn't much under one-hundred dollars, and those which are tend to be tiny nick-nacky canvas squares with a single twee image - a heart or a peace symbol which can't have taken more than a half minute of fingerpainting. I've been thinking of selling my canvases for around sixty dollars, at least those I like, so I guess I won't have to feel guilty about the possibility that I might be overcharging.

We turn the corner into the next street and it seems to be getting worse. More and more I'm seeing Frida fucking Kahlo. I don't have anything specific against Frida Kahlo, beyond that she tended to paint the same tea-towel self-portrait over and over again, but she was never the saviour of modernism - if anyone still remembers what that was.

We reach the lowest circle at the end of this second street - Mexican folk art and Día de los Muertos skulls embellished with the catchphrase Go Spurs Go. The San Antonio Spurs are the local basketball team, none of whom are actually from San Antonio because their success is such as to be able to afford players of ability greater than any of the local hoop-shooting fucknuggets can apparently muster. The Spurs are a big deal if you don't have much else going on. When you see them, you call out Go Spurs Go to show your support and to affirm membership of the tribe. Personally I couldn't give a shit about the Spurs, and Go Spurs Go painted on a flowery skull is possibly the dumbest thing I've seen in my entire life.

Bess and I stand and stare for at least a couple of minutes, trying to imagine what it would be like to be so stupid as to get excited by Go Spurs Go painted on a flowery skull.

We beat a retreat, across South Alamo Street to the Hemisfair Park, which is where they held the World Fair back in 1968. I would have been three, and Bess would not yet have been born. It's been fifty years since the World Fair, so in addition to the Starving Artist Show, we have some manner of celebration marking the anniversary.

We watch Native Americans dancing on a stage for fifteen minutes, chants and drumming amplified through a PA. The theme of the 1968 World Fair was the coming together of cultures. Much like the crafty things of the shop, I'm not sure how I feel about this, about Native Americans reduced to a dab of ethnic colour in the sideshow, but then again, maybe that's preferable to their being rendered invisible. Maybe there isn't a single right answer to the question.

We eat Mediterranean food from a truck - probably khlea - and watch a German choir, many in lederhosen, choiring along to a CD of oompah band music. Then we ogle vintage cars with massive tailfins, vehicles resembling spacecraft of the fifties; then flamenco dancing performed by a troupe with a generation gap seemingly excluding anyone between the ages of about eight and sixty, so it's mostly old women and toddlers. I seem to be the only one confused by this.

Finally we head back to the car. We have the knowledge we need for the craft fair at which we'll be setting up shop in May, and if it all goes tits up, then I can always fall back on Frida Kahlo…

Frida Kahlo as Ariel from Disney's Little Mermaid, and big swirly letters running along the foot of the canvas: Go Spurs Go...

Jersey Shore and the Labyrinth of Fear

Seven or eight young Italian-Americans come into town, and everything changes. By this standard, every story is a Jersey Shore story, as every Jersey Shore story is exactly that - seven or eight young Italian-Americans come into town looking to party, and everything changes.

And so as long as there are stories, there are Jersey Shore stories. When the stars go out and the universe freezes, around the last fire on the last world, there will still be Jersey Shore stories to tell. And when we are done telling them, at long and final last, in the distance will be a strange wheezing, groaning sound as Mike gets out of bed, rubs the sleep from his eyes and thinks about maybe grabbing some breakfast. And out he will presently step into the day - gym, tanning parlour, then laundry...

I believe this. I believe this because to disbelieve this is to disbelieve that stories have power.

To set Jersey Shore and the Labyrinth of Fear before our psychochonographical eye, we might discuss the day when Shakin' Stevens rode high in the Englishland charts with his cover of Green Door, a day upon which President Carter began talks with Giscard d'Estaing over what was to be done regarding the Lithuanian hostages, and when Marvel Comics carried the first advertisement for Hostess Twinkies to be counted as official Marvel Universe canon. We might discuss these things, but we're actually referring to Curtis Phallocrat's amazing novelisation which came out a little later; besides which, Shakin' Stevens is like this totally iconic Englishland singer and you probably haven't heard of him, but I have; and I wouldn't want you to be confused.

So, let us instead cast our thoughts back to that fateful day upon which Jersey Shore and the Labyrinth of Fear first appeared in the hallowed halls of WHSmiths. WHSmiths is like this totally iconic book store in Englishland and everybody goes there. It's really amazing. You probably won't have heard of it, but I have.

The Cartoons were riding high in the charts with their cover of David Seville's 1958 novelty hit, Witch Doctor; Freddy Got Fingered entered its third record-breaking week at the box office, cementing its reputation as the best-selling film of all time; and meanwhile Maurice Augières had just broken the land speed record in Dourdan, France. These may seem like unrelated facts, but only to those who understandeth not the magic of psychochronography, which is a means of examining important cultural events in terms of their impact by means of mentioning other stuff which happened at the same time; so if it seems like it's just a review, then you are to be pitied, my unsophisticated friend. We travel in spaces much deeper.

Dourdan is like this totally iconic place in France. You probably haven't heard of it, but I have.

Let's take a look at the novel.

'What is it?' asked the Situation uncertainly.

'Ronnie lost it again,' admitted Snookie sadly, and they both gazed across the dance floor to where Ronnie could be seen yelling red-faced at the unfortunate Sammi. Thankfully the music was loud, so no-one could hear what Ronnie was shouting, but the shape of his lips seemed to be forming rude, insulting words. He looked very angry.

'What's going on?' asked Jwoww as she came back from the bar with her tequila.

Situation pulled a face and pointed to their quarrelling housemates.

'Oh man,' Jwoww exclaimed. 'Again?'

This is a clear homage to the fight scene in Bleak House by Charles Dickens, because the magic of Jersey Shore is that it can be used to tell any kind of story, and here it has been used to tell a story which harks back to the fight scene in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, as originally serialised in Sounds music paper by none other than Alan Moore. Sounds was published by the British Natural Party which is a racist organisation because Nicky Crane was on the cover of the second Oi! album and he was a famous racist. Alan Moore has since refused to comment upon the time when he was drawing cartoons of Buster Bloodvessel for a Nazi skinhead magazine.

Charles Dickens is like this totally iconic author in Englishland, and we'll just pretend he didn't get his best ideas from watching Jersey Shore for the sake of argument. They all read his books over there in Englishland. They probably haven't heard of Jersey Shore, but we have, which is probably why they don't realise where Charles Dickens has been getting all of his best ideas. You probably won't have heard of Charles Dickens, but I have.

Shame on you, Alan Moore.

Writing on the Wall

We've driven to Austin on the spur of the moment. Bess took the day off for a doctor's appointment and something at the bank additionally requiring my signature, and suddenly we had the whole day free to do with as we chose. So here we are at Austin Graffiti Park because Bess wanted to take a look at the place before they dig it up and move it to some other site out near the airport. It's officially known as the HOPE Outdoor Gallery, with the acronym standing for Helping Other People Everywhere. It was a housing project on the side of a hill, abandoned and ruined leaving only the walls, adopted by local graffiti artists, then made official during some SXSW event or other.

I quite like some graffiti art, although I don't really care whether you call it art or not. I particularly like the stuff I've seen sprayed on the side of Union Pacific railroad carriages which I encounter on an at least weekly basis as I follow the Tobin Trail beneath the bridge at Wetmore. I like what I see sprayed all across the southside of the city, which owes at least as much to the tradition of Mexican muralists as to anything else; and back in 1999 when I first visited Mexico City, I walked into the hotel bar on my very first night and met a couple of guys from the New York based Tats Cru - south of the border for some family wedding - which is probably equivalent to meeting royalty in graffiti terms.

Here in Austin, it's overcast and my enthusiasm probably isn't what it could be. We drove past a guy with a tail and I am now primed to expect idiocy. He looked to be in his late thirties and additionally wore a fedora, which is always a bad sign. His tail was long and bushy, yellow with black stripes, extending down from the seat of his pants almost to the ground. I realise how irrational it may seem to take such a profound dislike to a stranger based solely on their unorthodox appearance, but I'd probably go so far as to say that I actively hate the guy.

We find a place to park, then follow the street back along to the HOPE Outdoor Gallery. It's just a ruined pile of concrete junk set into the hillside, but with every surface a chaotic riot of colour. Empty spray cans and trash are strewn all around, and the place swarms with visitors climbing up and down worn slopes to the higher levels. It resembles the sets you always see in post-apocalyptic wasteland films, and I'm feeling a little underwhelmed. Worse still, the guy with the tail was apparently on his way here. He's set up shop with a marginally less irritating friend. They occupy the small central plaza of the site. They seem to be practicing circus skills with musical accompaniment from a smart phone hooked up to a battery-driven amplifier. I assume it's battery-driven, but maybe someone found a way to generate electricity by harnessing the annoyingness particles given off by useless wankers.

'Shouldn't you be working in a fucking bank or something?' I mutter as I watch the man with the tail juggling some kind of semi-circular dingus. He has the tip of his tail held between his teeth so that it doesn't get tangled up in whatever the fuck he's now started doing with a hula hoop, because having a tail can be such a pain  - always getting caught up in things. I can feel my inner Hank Hill beginning to bristle as I prepare a speech about growing up, responsibility and so on.

'This is why people voted for Trump,' I tell Bess.

'I know,' she sighs.

We climb up one of the banks past giant nopal cacti sprayed lurid dayglo shades which nature never managed. This too annoys me, at least a little. It suggests a lack of respect for the natural world, as does the scree of plastic spray can detritus; but, you know, just so long as cunts get to express their precious creativity...

We pass a couple of young women on their way up the slope. One has short blonde hair, ostentatiously large spectacles, and a wide, unpleasant mouth.

'She's an artist and activist,' I growl quietly, in obscure reference to iO, occasional co-host of MTV's Catfish whose name is differently capitalised so as to challenge the phallocratic orthodoxy of having a normal fucking name like everyone else.

The corner of one wall is sprayed with the words TRUMP 4 LYFE in silver.

'See,' I say. 'I told you!'

We climb back down, then along, and then up the other side. Here and there we can see the remains of some lovingly rendered image sinking beneath a sea of hastily sprayed tags and markers.

'Why would you spray your stupid fucking name over that? How does that add to anything?'

'I know. It's dumb.'

Kids pick spray cans from the ground, shaking them to see if there's any paint left, occasionally adding a name to the chaos, or the Beautiful Chaos as one piece would have it; except it's no longer beautiful. It's just chaos.

Later I will learn that permits were once required, ensuring that only persons with either talent or something worth saying could add to the graffiti park, so what I'm presently seeing is what has happened since whoever looks after the place stopped caring.

It will be demolished anyway, so what does it matter?

Find a spray can and express yourself.

Most have expressed themselves as names. There's a shittily drawn eye in a pyramid submitted by someone who probably believes themself to be a bit of a deep thinker, and most depressing of all are the wonky school logos, Central Catholic and the like. I've never really understood people who enjoyed school but I can accept that they exist and probably had their reasons, but proudly spraying the name of your school on a wall seems like the most retarded thing I've ever heard of. Proud to be a drone, it seems to say, proud to be a component! Check out this awesome barcode I just had tattooed on my forehead.

What else can I tell you? I'm a good company man through and through. Ha ha! Guilty as charged.

I'm a tool. Hear me roar in accordance with accepted community standards. Here's my roaring permit if you need to see it.

'So,' I say to Bess, 'they're going to move all of this to some other place?'

'That's what I was told.'

'I can't see the point. Can you?'

'No.'

'It's not like there's anything special here.'

Later I read that they're moving a token lump of wall for the sake of physical continuity, but this crap will otherwise be bulldozed to make way for some new development.

Yet, the longer we hang around, the more we begin to see the place as it was. Here and there, an image emerges from the Jackson Pollock scrawl. There are lost wildstyle tags in jagged letters six foot high, pink, blue and other strange contrasts of colour, names you have to know to be able to read. There are faces and heads, Snoopy and el Chavo - a child played by an old man in a slightly disturbing Mexican kid's show. There are traces of what you could even call art, now drowning in the free expression of JOSH and Central Catholic and some witless Biblical reference needlessly sprayed across the once relatively proud visage of something that was either an armadillo or a futuristic robot. This is what happens when you give people free reign. Despite the best of intentions, they never have anything to say that's worth saying, and next thing you know - oh dang, look who we just voted for!

We pass a young couple. The boy is long-haired, skinny as a rake, over six foot, and he looks about seventeen at most. He wears a psychedelic top and circular rose-tinted Lennon specs. He's either got himself lost on the way to a costume parade or undercover cops are getting younger and younger. There's a third possibility - that he's just some hopeless twat trying too fucking hard like everyone else here - but I'm not thinking about it because I know that if I do it will annoy me.

Eyewitness News

Our local news programme is broadcast by KENS5 and is called Eyewitness News, or at least I think that's how it works in so much as that I assume KENS5 is the name of the station. It seems to alternate with CBS. We get the CBS national news before six, and then the local stuff afterwards on the same channel, up until half past - at which point the immeasurably more informative Wheel of Fortune comes on. Our anchorman is usually Jeff Brady, distinguished by his eyebrows being a different colour to the rest of his hair, like Max Clifford; and like Max Clifford, he's a white guy. All of the news team are white, apart from a few unusually pallid Latinos. It still strikes me as odd that here in San Antonio, a city wherein a mere 40% of the populace are anything other than Hispanic, a city wherein most kitchen sinks have three taps - or faucets if you really must - hot, cold, and Cholula sauce - and yet our news is brought to us by the whitest people you've ever seen. Last week we had a light brown guy vaguely resembling Barack Obama sitting in for Jeff, who was presumably otherwise indisposed, but today we're back with Jeff.

Except I'm not because I've missed the first minute, so I turn on in the middle of a news report brought to us by Henry Ramos. Some kid has been shot. We focus on the boy's father for a little longer than seems comfortable. He is distraught, in tears and rocking back and forth saying that his boy was amazing, over and over.

'He was amazing,' he says. 'He was amazing. He was amazing.'

The police are claiming that there is some discrepancy between the evidence and the father's statement. In the house they have found three handguns, an AR15 - which by the way stands for army rifle - a shotgun, and more than fifty live rounds of ammunition. Maybe the guy was protecting this innocent weaponry from liberals and other people who hate America.

The next minute, we're into the weather. Bill Taylor seems to be on the television all the time. He may even be his own channel by this point. He's one of those big grinning wardrobe shaped men who walks like a crab and seems to have been modelled on John Wayne. His grin reveals a large gap dividing his two front teeth, and his speech is often peppered with cornball jokes of the kind you see in old shows such as Leave it to Beaver. The weather has been record breaking, although which record it has broken this time is left unstated so maybe it's a figure of speech. Anyway, there was a storm last night and it's been raining a lot. Bill warns us that the water level of the San Antonio river is rising, which is what tends to happen when it rains around here. Bill shows us footage of rainfall and pictures of water. He grins and flaps his arms and cracks jokes, but he really could have just left it at it's been raining a lot.

We return to the main desk. Jeff talks about his experience of it having rained a lot, and then we go to Sharon Ko for a traffic report. It's been raining a lot so there's a lot of water on the roads and highways, and Sharon shows us footage of what that looks like in the hope that it will inspire us to take care when driving. It doesn't rain much in our part of Texas, but when it rains, it rains a lot and so the rivers fill up and there is water on the roads and we all have to drive carefully. That's how it works.

Three minutes in and we inevitably go to the subject of the Final Four, with the guy who resembles Barack Obama now relegated to reporting from somewhere downtown. The Final Four is some kind of major basketball event which has taken over the city. Everyone is coming to San Antonio to see it, and everyone is excited apart from me. There will be live bands and everything. The Obama guy asks Dan Gavitt what makes San Antonio such a great city in which to host the Final Four. I don't actually know who Dan Gavitt is, but here's his answer:

'Some of it is the history of the tournament here. Some of it is the culture of this great place. I mean certainly, you know, the river walk, proximity to the Alamo Dome, hotels… It's such a convenient place for everyone to attend the Final Four. It's special.'

So there you have it. While Dan explains, text runs along the bottom edge of the television screen, briefly referring to news items either less important or less local: President Trump has done something or other, there have been shootings, something about a mosque in Canada, then cures for cancer, and a claim made that social media is making America look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Regardless, we're still concerned with sport sport sport sport sport, and now specifically the news that Trevone Boykin has been arrested, and that's really his name. He's some big cheese football player and he was born in Mesquite, Texas. To further establish the theme of local boy made good then more recently less good, we are told that he was arrested right here in San Antonio back in 2015 for assaulting one of our very own cops. This time he has tried to choke his girlfriend and has broken her jaw, which we can see from the footage of her trying to speak through a swollen face.

Go Seahawks!

At six minutes past, we return to the traffic. A woman stands blue-screened over footage of traffic crawling along our major highways, one scene of the same thing after another. We can see an ambulance on the hard shoulder in the final scene, lights flashing.

'There's been another accident on I-35,' our woman tells us, presumably having just noticed it on the monitor, off camera.

So that's what those flashing light van things are for.

Jeff promises that we'll be curing diabetes right after these messages. The screen is a montage of burgers, fries, tacos, and all manner of greasy food. My guess is that someone will be telling us how this sort of food is bad for us, particularly if we don't want to catch diabetes.

The messages are a trailer for Wheel of Fortune, then one for Neighborhood Eats, a morning show in which some guy checks out different diners and eating places right here in San Antonio. All the trailers I've seen for the show seem to feature him eating burgers.

There's a facebook group dedicated to this same thing called Eat in SA, but I got tired of the discussion about burgers.

Hey! I had a really great burger at this place the other night.

San Antonio has many great restaurants and eating places with cuisine from all over the world, and as you might expect given the cultural composition of the general populace, some of the Mexican places are so good that I'd happily bear arms for them should it ever be required; and yet there's somehow still people seeking that elusive perfect lump of ground beef in a fucking bun. My position on this is that whilst a decent burger can be nice every once in a while, it's basically children's food and is as such fairly limited. In a city where you could be eating the mole poblano served at Guajillos on the corner of 410 and Blanco, if you're still looking for the perfect burger, then frankly you're a fucking idiot, to my way of thinking.

The Neighborhood Eats trailer is followed by commercials for Champion AC, World Car Nissan, Conn's Home Plus, and Chevrolet. We're nine minutes in.

Next up is Real Men Wear Gowns, a regular feature of Eyewitness News dedicated to men's health, although usually covering health issues which apply to more or less everyone. Tonight we're looking at men's diabetes, or diabetes as it is also known.

'We know there is no cure for diabetes,' Jeff tells us, 'but researchers right here in San Antonio are working to change that,' and so follows the report from Jeremy Baker, who reminds me a lot of Kenny, Earl's gay friend in My Name is Earl. Kenny - or rather Jeremy - introduces footage of Mr. Rodriguez who presently suffers from men's diabetes. We learn that it's good to eat fresh vegetables and to engage in regular exercise, but it's bad to sit on your arse stuffing your face with the sort of crap beloved of the guy on Neighborhood Eats; so that's another one of life's eternal mysteries well and truly cleared up. Mr. Rodriguez says that he is going to try to get more exercise in future, and the rest of Real Men Wear Gowns looks suspiciously like an advertisement for Forxiga, a pharmaceutical product which already has its own advert and which some medical dude just happens to be studying.

At eleven minutes past the hour we go back to more commercials, beginning with a particularly weird one for Aramendia Plumbing, a local company working to a presumably tight budget. The adverts feature horrific CGI gremlins knackering someone's bathroom, as discovered by horrified overacting children. It's followed by a commercial for Rooms to Go, then a trailer for yet more of Bill Taylor's weather - coming up later on Eyewitness News - then Popeye's fried chicken with that irritating bloody woman, Ram trucks, then Chevrolet, yet again.

At fourteen minutes past, we learn of a question which will be included in the 2020 census. The question is are you a US citizen? The State Representative for El Paso has been campaigning against the inclusion of this question in the census, rightly suggesting that it will skew the results by leaving those who aren't citizens reluctant to fill in the census for fear of being rumbled, then personally loaded into a cannon by the president and fired back over that wall he keeps saying he's definitely going to start building any day now. The question seems to have been included because Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, asked for it to be included. Ted Cruz, for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with this wonderful man, is essentially an unfriendly version of Grandpa Munster.

Sixteen minutes in and Jeff tells us about how recent weather conditions may have impacted upon local agriculture, specifically those with strawberry farms whose livelihoods may be left in tatters by the winter we've just had, which has been a really weird and screwy one by Texas standards, but that's just one of those things rather than anything to do with climate change because climate change was invented by lefties who never learned to drive and are jealous of the rest of us with our cool sports cars.

Anyway, the point is that certain farmers are probably fucked.

'The weather we've had could be berry bad for business,' Jeff quips.

'Oh no you didn't,' we hear Bill Taylor chortle in response.

Hilarious.

Enjoy your new jobs at McDonalds, farmers! Ha ha!

At seventeen minutes past we join Bill Taylor for the weather yet again. I've lost count of how many times we've had the weather so far, but it feels like this is the third or fourth instalment.

It's been raining a lot.

This is the section of the news which feels like some sort of CGI showreel. Bill talks and grins us through seven or eight variations on the same basic bit of information, utilising a bewildering series of maps, graphs and imagineered forecasts. It takes a full three minutes to get through the lot, during which the text running along the foot of the screen announces the advent of a pinball machine themed to the songs of hard rock group, Iron Maiden. The pinball machine will be called The Legacy of the Beast, and definitely no more storms tonight, even though it has been raining a lot.

Now we see Bill wander across the studio to meet with Joe Reinagel, the sports guy and another one of those big grinning wardrobe shaped men who walks like a crab and seems to have been modelled on John Wayne.

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got a new kitten. She just turned up on our doorstep so we took her in. She seems to have bonded with Jello, a slightly older cat who now seems to regard her as his kitten and occasionally grooms and bathes her with his tongue. Daisy, which is what we've called her, is not yet allowed outside. When Jello comes in, she always perks up, running to meet him, tail aloft and meowing happily.

This is kind of what happens when Bill and Joe meet, and I think we're supposed to find it cute by some definition. They joke, but their humour is tedious, mostly upper arm punches and how 'bout those Cowboys! Tonight they're talking about the Final Four. We see footage of sports dudes arriving by coach from Chicago right here in our city! Then we see footage of a plane landing.

'It's an exciting time for all of us,' some guy declares. As a news item, this amounts to the event which is going to happen soon is still going to happen soon.

Next we learn that the San Antonio Spurs lost, or they won but in a bad way, or something happened, or maybe it was a draw. Joe describes some aspect of this as crucial, and we go to footage of Gregg Popovich, the Spurs head coach, mumbling something in relation to whatever Joe just told us.

'It doesn't mean crap. None of that stuff matters. It's kind of cool and we did that for a long time; and other than that, it's worth a cup of coffee or something.'

That's what he actually says, so I have no idea what any of this could be about beyond that it seems to devalue Joe Reinagel's assignation of anything being crucial. More interesting to me is that the coach's name is Gregg, spelt the same way as that of the bakery.

Anyway, we're onto the subject of whether or not there will be a ban regarding sports persons kneeling for the national anthem, or possibly failing to kneel for the national anthem, whichever is worse. This doesn't actually seem to be a news item so much as a rhetorical question.

The final commercial break advertises the upcoming Selena festival celebrating the life and music of Selena, who was a big deal here in San Antonio. This is followed by something about wheelie bins, then Alamo Toyota, and finally the Texas State Aquarium.

We're back to Eyewitness News for the Final Play, as Joe calls the feature, usually with a grin or a wink to signal that we're in for a real treat right after these messages.

Better hold onto your hats, kids. This one's a real doozy, yes sir.

This time he's dispensed with the usual chortling preface to what is almost always YouTube footage of some sports person falling over or failing to catch a ball. Instead we see a baseball player at the edge of the field exchanging his bat for a hot dog with some supporter. This occurred during a game.

Ordinarily we would pan across to Jeff, Joe, Bill and whatever the lady newsreader is called all chuckling away.

Have you ever in your life seen anything like that!?

We pan across tonight, but just for a few seconds. Usually we get half a minute of banter as they describe people falling over or recall previous side-splitting instances of sports persons failing to catch balls.

We must have run out of time.

It's over.

I can't remember much beyond more weather than we could possibly need and sport sport sport sport sport…

Six hours later, thunder splits the heavens and I am woken by brilliant flashes of lightning.

Home School

There have been a couple of bombings in Austin, anonymous packages left on porches and one of them set off by a tripwire. No-one knows what is going on, but people have been killed and Austin is just down the road, relatively speaking. Now one of the bombs has gone off in a FedEx depot on the outskirts of San Antonio. Someone on facebook suggests that it seems like the sort of thing Atomwaffen Division have been known to get up to. I've never heard of them, so I have a look on Wikipedia and discover them to be a neo-Nazi organisation who, aside from anything else, somehow have a presence in San Antonio. I find this last detail particularly bewildering because I would have thought that, had I grown up preferring the company of white people to such an extent, San Antonio would be the last place I'd want to live; but then maybe my expectations of logic and consistency are outmoded, given events of the last year or so. Atomwaffen Division might have cells in Kenya or Bombay for all I know.

This is on my mind as I cycle to McAllister Park, as I do each morning. I imagine tripwires strung across the trail waiting to blow me to bits, but it's just one of those thoughts you have and about which you can do nothing. What will be, will be.

I cycle to McAllister Park every day, a round trip of twenty miles which keeps me fit, roughly speaking. Now that I work from home, my daily commute has become a separate oxbow of my time, its own phenomena divorced from the need to actually get anywhere in a geographical sense. About nineteen miles of the journey follow a greenway called the Tobin Trail through countryside and undeveloped land, away from the traffic. It's mostly cyclists, runners, people out walking their dogs and so on.

The point at which I turn around and come home is a covered pavilion at McAllister Park, near some bogs. I usually stop off and take five minutes rest while drinking my flask of iced tea. Usually I'm alone, but today there are others, women with small children. I listen to them as I drink my tea and realise that these are home schooling parents who have, for whatever reason, chosen not to send their kids to a regular school containing teachers. I am told that if you are able to demonstrate that you can teach your kids at home to a reasonable standard, then the American educational system is okay with that. It sounds dubious to me, and the term home school seems suggestive of parents who don't want their offspring learning about no darn evolution or any of that fruity stuff, but then what do I know? My wife's cousin Jenni was home schooled, and Jenni is wonderful, so either I have it completely wrong or there are exceptions.

I sit drinking my tea listening to the screech of free range children. I listen to their parents. They sound normal enough, although it turns out that two of the kids - brother and sister, both very young - are named Samson and Delilah. I don't know what to conclude from this realisation.

Cycling back, I pass a discarded plastic water bottle at the side of the road which runs through McAllister Park. I pass discarded plastic water bottles all the time, but every once in a while it annoys me enough to impede my progress. I get off and pick up the water bottle with the intention of popping it in the blue recycling bin which I will pass as I exit the park. I pick up the bottle and notice another about five feet away, then a plastic carrier bag swaying in the breeze, caught in the thorns of a bush. I might as well finish the job, I tell myself, as usual.

Litter annoys me, but this type of litter particularly annoys me because it's almost certainly runners or cyclists, the sort of self-absorbed wankers who habitually purchase bottled water. They're happy to improve themselves, but not the planet. That's asking too much, so they presumably just drain the bottle and off it goes into the grass to spend the next five hundred years half-lifing into the soil. I see them every day, self-important old codgers in bright green lycra on the weirdest, most expensive bikes money can buy. They don't believe anything is legitimate unless they've spunked away a ton of money on it, so you'll see them in their artisan cycling socks, glowing in the dark on streamlined Branestawm contraptions with an unorthodox quota of wheels and the seat mounted in the last place you would expect to find it.

Having been raised right, I can't even imagine what it must be like to drink a bottle of water then just lob the bottle into the hedge. I didn't even do it as a kid, and I wasn't even a particularly enlightened child. Were I running the show, littering would carry a mandatory ten-year jail sentence, but then a lot would be different were I running the show.

I'm now standing in the grass with two plastic bottles in a carrier bag pulled from a bush. I can see a flattened beer can about ten feet away. I sigh and pause the music on my Discman so as to be able to hear the warning rattle of any rattlesnake which may be in the area. Poor People's Day is a great album, but I don't want to die. I gather up the beer can, then another bottle, then notice a second plastic carrier bag down near the pipe which allows water to pass beneath the road in the event of flooding. There is something in the carrier bag. It seems to be a turd, specifically a human turd. I suppose someone was caught short, maybe a little kid, and so we end up with a shit in a bag tossed from a car window.

The toilets are situated about one hundred yards down the road.

Poo under other circumstances constitutes a fertiliser, but this one is in a fucking carrier bag.

Where do you even start?

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Thankfully the smell isn't that bad, and I've been able to pick the thing up without coming into contact with its precious cargo. I empty the first carrier bag, spilling plastic bottles and a beer can out on the road, put the bag of poo inside that, then tie it at the top. I manage to squash all of the bottles with the can into the other hand, get back on my bike, and ride off towards the bins.

As I arrive home, I hear from my wife.

'They've caught the bomb guy,' she tells me, then adding, 'he was home schooled. He blew himself up before they could catch him.'

His name was Mark Conditt. He was 23, white, and was described in the New York Times as follows:

Mr. Conditt grew up as the quiet, socially awkward oldest child of a devout Christian family that held Bible study groups in their white clapboard house, where an American flag hangs from the front porch.

Mark Conditt didn't approve of same-sex marriage, described himself as a conservative, and wished to see an end to the sex offenders register; and, as I said, he was home schooled; so this is, by pure coincidence, the second time today I have found myself thinking about home schooling.

I feel there's a pattern in all of this, but maybe it's just me.