Dangerous Shithead 2020

Apparently there's an election coming up here in Americaland. The commercial breaks punctuating Wheel of Fortune are presently stuffed with political campaign advertising, replacing the usual stuff about geriatric drugs which, if they don't kill you by actively inducing the symptoms you were hoping to treat, will enable you, as a senior, to go hang gliding, rock climbing, zip lining, or to enjoy an outdoor jazz performance with a loved one while smiling beatifically. Similarly, our dunderhead local news organ has been spending a lot of time helping us to decide how to vote. The possibility that anyone might require assistance in making a decision at this point is probably why we're already fucked and so fucked that voting won't make the slightest bit of difference.

Nevertheless, these seem to be our options here in San Antonio, Texas - all information deduced from television commercials viewed on occasion of my being too lazy to reach for the remote and hit the mute button. If there seems to be a certain Democrat bias, it's only because I dislike fundamentalist religious cults, conspiracy theorists, toxic capitalism, actual Nazis, and thickies who've somehow concluded that knowing fuck all about any given subject is somehow equivalent and as valid as knowing everything about it. Sorry.

Chip Roy - you know how sometimes you really can tell just from a person's face. Also, his name is Chip. Next.

Tony Gonzalez seems a bit of a wanker. His commercial opens with the usual shots of veterans while our man pulls serious faces and tells us how deeply he cares about those guys, thanks them for their service, and so on and so forth in the apparent understanding that this constitutes a bold stance because most of us hate veterans, or liberals hate veterans, or Gina Ortiz Jones wants to force veterans to undergo gender reassignment surgery, or something. Gina Ortiz Jones seems to be Tony's competition and I don't think he likes her very much. Half way through the advert he points out that she lives in Washington and not here in Texas as though this constitutes evidence of her true loyalties - you know, the Washington lesbian cabal or something.

Steve Allison is a fat old white guy who smiles a lot and is seen amiably reading picture books to small children. I get the impression his advertisement possibly spends some time slagging off the opposition but I can't remember for sure. The angle here seems to be - look, I'm white, for fuck's sake. I mean seriously, we've been doing okay so far, haven't we? Tell me we haven't been doing okay up to now. How bad could it honestly be?

I like to think M.J. Hegar may actually be related to Dik Browne's famed cartoon Viking. She's a veteran, but presumably went about it the wrong way and so failed to inspire Tony Gonzalez to thank her for her service. She rides a massive motorbike in her campaign advert and seems able to string a full sentence together without first having to write it down. The negative campaigning against M.J. Hegar warns about how she wants to impose a carbon tax and DESTROY TEXAS JOBS, which is doubtless terrifying if you don't believe in climate science because you're a fucking simpleton. Sorry if that makes anyone feel a little bit sad. Hegar also apparently said something about how Democrats shouldn't compromise which therefore makes her unreasonable, which is a bit fucking rich coming from that side of the toilet bowl.

Gina Ortiz Jones seems reasonably genuine, from what I can tell, and as with M.J. Hegar, the negative campaigning arguably says more about her opponents than it does about her. You can tell they really, really, really want to jump out of the television screaming, seriously? You're going to vote for a fucking carpet-muncher now? but they can't because that would be illegal (and physically impossible) and so have to content themselves with painting Jones as one of those people, you know, not mentioning any names or nuffink, while showing us a photoshopped image of Jones hanging out with Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just like those three witches in that Shakespeare movie, the one with Orson Welles. One of the more entertaining bits of negative campaigning suggests Jones intends to fund gender reassignment surgery for someone or other using money which would have otherwise definitely gone to our beloved military. I suppose it must be that special military money that you hear about with tanks and planes printed on the notes.

Wendy Davis is the one who talked for a million hours straight during some big political thing and so prevented her opponent passing a law that would define masturbation as Communism and therefore illegal and a violation of religious freedom - something along those lines anyway. So far as I'm able to tell, she's not actually evil which makes her something of a rarity in political terms. Negative campaigning has focused on how Davis once purchased a sandwich at the taxpayers' expense, which is exactly the sort of thing that our president would never, ever do. As you know, most Republicans have jobs in hardware stores or helping out at the local airport, engaging in political activities only as a hobby during their free time. Most of them would rather die than accept any kind of financial recompense for their work. No thank you, I'll quite happily pay for it myself, should be the new Republican campaign slogan.

The only Joe Biden advert I've seen was one made by Donald Trump so it wasn't particularly complimentary, or even coherent for that matter. Crooked Hillary's emails weren't actually mentioned but it was something in that general spirit. Biden was interviewed on 60 Minutes the other night and seemed to come across okay, I thought. That said, he could have been G.G. Allin and still come across as more dignified than the competition.

Thoughtful John Cornyn is, so I gather, being presented as a more thoughtful politician if we don't want to vote for Wendy Davis. The campaign emphasises Cornyn's canny reliance upon his brain when it comes to doing thinking and stuff, and so we have Thoughtful John Cornyn - unless Thoughtful is actually his first name. No-one knows what he stands for aside from the usual deal about how cops and veterans are amazing, but I suppose the ability to form thoughts counts as a mutant superpower in the current political climate. I'm actually surprised his people haven't had him on camera with an index finger set ponderously against his lower lip, one eyebrow raised in quizzical fashion, and a cartoon thought bubble above his head so as to illustrate cognition. They could even have him thinking I am Thoughtful John Cornyn in Comic Sans font just in case any potential voters hadn't quite got it.

Celina Montoya is another one about whom I don't actually know anything much, but judged on the quality of her enemies, she's probably doing something right. Additionally, it's interesting to note that all of the female candidates named above are associated with the Democrats, while all but one of the men are Republicans. I wonder why that should be.

What Happens When Someone You Don't Really Like Snuffs It

 

We used to think she was all right, but eventually we'd had enough. I say we, but my wife had the worst of it. I was mostly just an irritated spectator. She had been part of my wife's rock group, a rock group in this case being women, or mostly women, who get together to paint decorative designs on rocks and stones. The idea is that the stones are left hither and thither to be found by strangers in the hope of brightening someone's day. It's a random act of kindness.

Some of the rock group seemed decent people, but a few were problematic, tending towards gossip and fixating on things which wouldn't matter to anybody sane. I guess that's what happens when you hang out in a group. There's always one, sometimes two or three.

Anyway, we used to think she was all right, like I said. She was small, round, approximately Mexican, and always with a certain twinkle in her eye. She was distraught when her little dog died, and publicly so on facebook. I took pity and did a painting of the former pooch in the hope of providing some solace. She seemed to like that. I also painted a sign for her rock spot - a patch of garden in the grounds of her local library where people could leave rocks they had painted in exchange for any which took their liking. The sign was in acrylic paint on a large breeze block.

The pattern eventually emerged that she liked to get free stuff, which I only noticed as my wife became more and more irritable. The woman's facebook page was mostly sob stories, pleas for this or that, did anybody have such and such a thing she could borrow, or maybe just have? She had plenty of painted rocks from my wife, even a few of the old vinyl records which take my wife hours to decorate with elaborate mandalas. She added googly eyes and pipe cleaner legs to one of them and sent the photo back.

Look! I made a spider! Isn't he the cutest!

Others she embellished with bunny ears, or in one case, circular mouse ears so that he can be Mickey! My wife said nothing but I could tell she was upset, given all the work she'd put in. My own reaction was closer to nausea. I don't want anything to do with adults who are into Disney, particularly not anyone affecting to be on first name terms with the mouse. Life is too short.

My wife specifically became irritable, as I recall, following the death of the dog. It was perfectly natural that the woman should be distraught under the circumstances, but the figurative daily wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media seemed out of all proportion, and it felt as though she might be milking it somewhat. Personally, I tend to experience grief as a private thing. Wheeling it out on social media, day after day, month after month strikes me as odd, and I've never found heart-shaped emoticons much consolation.

Then there were the private messages, gossip about other rock group people, someone had done this or said that, and you know who has some weird, unsavoury kink, and that terrible woman never pays when you take her to lunch. She's so mean and greedy, and that son of hers, the retarded one, well...

This last accusation was what broke the camel's proverbial back. We knew for a fact that the supposedly terrible woman often paid for lunch, and the comments about her son, an entirely likable young man coping with certain learning difficulties, were simply too far over the line. My wife said so, then immediately became the person spreading hurtful lies about the woman who makes things into Mickey. The entire rock group rallied around, posting hilarious passive-aggressive messages on facebook about knowing who their real friends were, the sort of shite which your average fifteen-year old girl would regard as a bit self-involved. My wife no longer qualified as a real friend to women who make things into Mickey.

Then suddenly she had cancer. We felt sort of bad - or at least awkward - until her facebook page filled up with the gnashing and wailing of teeth, further requests for free stuff, and yet more hymns of praise to those real friends, the ones who had stood by her through thick and thin. It's hard to feel too sorry for someone with cancer when they not only continue to act like an asshole, but somehow get worse. Pity me for no longer do I know the joy of eating, the posts screamed in contradiction to pictures of the woman gleefully stuffing her face with the usual junk food. My wife used to work in cancer research. We've known plenty of people who've suffered and died. Somehow this just didn't sit right so we stopped thinking about it.

Then suddenly she's gone.

Both Bess and I are actually surprised, and yet somehow it doesn't change anything. The weekend comes and we meet up with Leslie and Ernest, another couple who fell out of favour with the rock group because of the woman who made things into Mickey.

Leslie makes a tray of cupcakes covered in fondant googly eyes. We're not actually meeting up to celebrate somebody's death, or at least we're trying not to think about the possibility that we may be, but we meet up nevertheless at the Longhorn Steakhouse. I drink beer and we eat Leslie's sarcastic cupcakes while laughing about the worst, most self-involved excesses of the woman who made things into Mickey. It feels a little as though we're skirting around the famed Mexican attitude to death. It's not so much that we're glad someone annoying is dead, but it's nice to move on with a bit of ceremony.

Carnival

Jackie has the week off and Karen is covering her walk, which is the one next to mine. Fay is immediately behind, covering Crystal Palace Road because Richard is also away. I hear someone ask where he is.

Juliet's head pops around the corner of the frame. 'He's probably at home having a smash innit,' she reports with mischievous glee.

'Really Juliet,' I say with mock indignation. 'I'm surprised at you.'

'All right then,' she adds, somehow taking my faux outrage as a request for clarification. 'He's at home having a wank!' She does the hand gesture in illustration of her hypothesis.

'Must run in the family,' says Danny without looking around.

'Fuck off,' suggests Fay, who is Juliet's older sister.

'Are you going to the carnival?' Karen asks.

'You must have nearly all of your tea set now, yeah?' Danny continues. 'Just a few weeks to go. You must be excited.'

'Fuck off.'

'Harsh,' says Andre as he walks past, loaded down with parcels.

'Did she just tell you to fuck off?' asks Joel from the frame on the other side of Danny.

'You can fuck off too,' says Fay, directly addressing Andre for some reason.

'Don't say that, Fay,' Andre smiles.

'Fuck off.'

'Just think, your whole tea set might be finished soon. That should make you happy, yeah?'

I asked about the tea set last week. Danny told me that Fay has a subscription to a weekly magazine, one which comes to the sorting office because she lives in the area. It's something to do with the late Princess of Wales, and each issue of the magazine comes with a souvenir item of fake commemorative crockery building up into a sort of Lady Diana tribute tea set with cups, sugar bowl, fancy spoons and so on and so forth. Our amusement derives from this being the very last thing anyone would ever expect of Fay.

'Lady Di would be very disappointed to hear you talking like that, Fay,' says Danny.

'Fuck off.'

'So ladylike!'

She kisses her teeth. 'You better watch I don't cut you.'

'Don't be like that, darling,' says Andre.

'And after I've cut you, I'm going to kidnap your dad and do him up the arse with a strap on,' Fay adds, almost casually as she continues to sort mail into the frame. 'And I'll make your mum watch innit.'

Andre doesn't have an answer to this one and walks off, silent with laughter.

Everybody pauses in their work to look at Fay, impressed. She smiles to herself and basks in our admiration.

'Are you going to the carnival, Fay?' Karen asks again.

'I'm going to have to see. I don't know what him indoors wants to do, you know.'

'Bring him along. Tell him you'll be doing the bogle innit. That might help him make up his mind.'

'That's that dance, isn't it?' I say, because it's one of those things I've been wondering about. 'The bogle, I mean.'

'What dance?' says Karen.

'You know,' I say, and I put my letters down and step back into the walkway. I put my hands on my knees and stick my arse in the air, moving it up and down whilst impersonating a dancehall rhythm with my mouth. 'That dance.'

'Fay, have you seen this?' says Karen.

Fay looks around and chuckles. 'Oh my days.'

'But is that the bogle?' I get back to my letters. They still haven't answered the question.

'You want to come to the carnival with us, Lawrence?' Karen asks.

'I dunno. Sounds a bit lively for me, Notting Hill and all that.'

'You should come with us. You ain't got nothing on this weekend innit.'

'I don't know. It'll be all that bashment stuff.' It occurs to me that I had another question. 'What is bashment anyway?'

'What's bashment?'

'Yeah - I keep hearing that word on the radio, so what is it? Is it just like dancehall and that?'

'He can't go. His misses won't let him innit.' Juliet has turned up out of nowhere.

'Well, I don't know about that,' I say, although I sort of do. I try to imagine herself at the Notting Hill carnival, doing her best to stick to the white bits with the whole food and hand knitted goods while bending over backwards to identify with black people and getting it all wrong because she doesn't actually know any, apart from Nadia. She has it in her head that I have a thing about Nadia, which I suspect is a misinterpretation of my talking to Nadia like she's a human being rather than my black friend.

'I'm going,' says Juliet, and like everything Juliet says, or at least everything Juliet says to me, there's something in there that I don't quite understand - possibly an invitation, an element of amusement although nothing cruel. She has a fierce little face, like a black Minnie the Minx. She's trouble but in an interesting way.

'You can go with us lot,' says Karen.

I bite my lip and keep on sorting the mail, wishing the world was just a little bit different to how it is.

Farewell to Charlie

Charlie was a rabbit who came into our lives about eighteen months ago. I introduced him here. He became a member of the family and we loved him. He spent mornings outside in his run in the garden, then came in when it got too hot. His hutch was in the front room, but he had free run of the house while we were at home. He got on fine with the cats, and a couple of them seemed to be actively afraid of him so he was never any trouble.

About a week ago, a neighbour called on us, asking us if we could rescue a rabbit which had been hanging around in her yard. It was obviously a domestic bunny which had escaped, but she was moving, and the new people had dogs which didn't bode well for the future of the rabbit. The woman had tried to catch her but had never been able to do it. My wife, having apparently acquired some sort of rabbit mojo, said that the bunny just came hopping right up to her and so suddenly we had a second rabbit. She's small, mostly black, and about eight months old according to the vet. Being female, it occurred to us that we may as well keep her. Charlie would have fought with another male rabbit, but if we had them both fixed, it seemed likely that they would get on okay and we wouldn't end up with a million bunnies. This would also solve the problem of finding a home for her given that the Rabbit Rescue people told us they had no room, just as they had before, which casts some doubt on what the rescue element of their name might refer to.

We named her Maisie - which had been Charlie's name before we'd realised he was a boy - and set her up in the front room next to Charlie's hutch so they could get used to the idea of each other, as they were clearly doing. She was worryingly underweight, but then so was Charlie when he first turned up.

My wife took them both to a veterinary clinic supposedly specialising in rabbits to be fixed on Monday. Before I'd even heard anything, it suddenly occurred to me that Maisie was surely too skinny for such an operation. My wife called and said she had bad news and I feared the worst. They had started to prepare Maisie, then realised that her heartbeat had become alarmingly irregular.

My own heart felt like it skipped a beat.

The bad new was that they hadn't been able to spay her because she was too underweight, but she was otherwise okay and we could try again in another couple of months.

The bunnies came home.

Charlie seemed fine the first day, if understandably subdued. We had pain medication to give him but weren't unduly concerned given that it's a relatively straightforward operation for male rabbits. We would have had it done before but there didn't really seem to be any need, given that it was just him and the cats

I never saw his back end, but Bess had a look and said it was terrifying and that she was sure it shouldn't look as it did, gnarly with huge Frankenstein stitches, swelling and so on; but, as I say, he seemed okay, relatively speaking. By Wednesday he was even more subdued. He was eating, but not much, and he didn't seem to be producing the usual steady stream of cocoa puffs. This had happened once before. He became constipated with complications before we realised that a steady diet of the things everybody assumes rabbits should eat - lettuce, carrots, and so on - was actually too rich for him. It was pretty scary, but we took him to the vet and he came though. Since then we had learned that carrots and the like were okay but only as a weekly thing. This time he was eating mostly just grass and hay, so we assumed it was some sort of reaction to the operation, possibly stress related.

This morning I got out of bed and found both Charlie and my wife missing. I called her phone. She'd got up in the night to check on him, then taken him straight to the emergency vet. He'd had diarrhoea and seemed in a really bad way but was presently being seen. She called back about thirty minutes later. Charlie had died due to complications from blood poisoning contracted from his own droppings infecting where his nuts had once been.

She brought his body home and I buried him in the garden, planting a wild petunia to mark the spot. Wild petunias had been one of his favourite things to eat. He used to tear them from my hand when I brought them in from the yard.

Today has been fucking unspeakable.

It has occurred to me that this surely can't be a routine occurrence following neutering, and my suspicion is aroused by the post-operative state of his back end and that some vet apparently already had Maisie prepared for her operation before noticing that she was underweight. It had seemed that way to me but then I'm not a vet; but none of it is going to bring my rabbit back, so I'm trying not to think about it.

He was mostly white with a few little black spots, and his fur was like cotton, the softest fur I've ever known on an animal. When I picked him up he'd sit in my arms and make a chewing sound, which is apparently the rabbit equivalent of purring; or sometimes he'd scramble up onto my shoulder as though trying to launch himself off into space. Recently, my wife bought a set of brightly coloured plastic cups, eight which nest inside each other like Russian dolls and made for toddlers but we'd heard that bunnies like them. Charlie thought they were great. He'd lift the cups out of each other one by one with his teeth, arrange them around his hutch, or in the water bowl, or line them up on the edge of the hutch and bat them off into space with his nose, then watch them fall with a look of intense concentration - like he was conducting an experiment.

He was the most wonderful rabbit in the world and he brought nothing but joy into our lives. If you were to ask me to list humans whose deaths would affect me less than that of Charlie, I could reel off the names without even pausing to consider.

This has been a generally awful year, and Charlie was one of the few good things about it.

 

 

 

Full of Prostitutes

It's about 7.15AM and I'm wheeling my bike down our driveway, about to go out.

'Yo!' It's Shooty the Drug Dealer walking along our road at this time of morning for some reason. 'Whose car is that?'

I ignore him because he's a knob.

'Yo!' again, 'whose car is that?'

I look at him. He's looking at me, and at the car right behind me. He's looking at the car which is parked in our driveway. He's looking at our car, which is parked in our driveway, and has been parked in our driveway more or less all day, every day for at least the last few years.

'It's our car,' I tell him, seemingly somewhat redundantly.

'What?'

'It's my wife's car.'

'Oh. I thought it was Kimberley's car.'

I have no fucking clue who he's talking about. 'No,' I confirm. 'It's our car.'

He wanders off mumbling about something being full of prostitutes, which is the actual expression he uses, in case anyone thinks I'm making this up. It sounds as though he means that Kimberley's notional car is full of prostitutes.

Who fucking knows?

A week later it's more or less the same encounter, except this time he wants to know have I seen a six-year old boy running around. This would be his son. Apparently he's mislaid the kid. You know how those things just run off and who can tell what the fuck they get up to? The question is put to me at 7AM as I step out of the front door to call the cats in for breakfast. I'm still in my pants. The weird thing is that I get the distinct impression of Shooty having emerged from behind the small lemon tree in our front yard, as though he's been waiting, or was lurking.

'No, I haven't seen a six-year old boy,' I tell him. 'I've only just got up.'

Weeks pass and then he turns up on our porch one evening. He doesn't actually knock at the door, instead being content to shout at it.

'You been calling up my grandmother, bitch?' he enquires. 'You better not be saying shit about my grandma, puta.'

All of this is recorded on our Ring, which is a door bell with a built-in camera activated by movement. Following the recording of Shooty proposing that we refrain from discussing his grandmother in scurrilous terms, we have a video of him sat on our porch for an hour between two and three in the morning.

He's back again the next evening, this time at 8PM as we're awake and still watching telly. His arrival is heralded by a loud bang which we later realise was him kicking over our wheelie bin in protest. He doesn't actually knock or ring, and perhaps doesn't understand the latest doorbell technology, again preferring instead to stand a foot or so away from our door and shout at it. Mostly it's about his missing son, the six-year old, the one presently in the care of Shooty's mother and grandmother. They all moved out about a month ago, unable to deal with him, and are still waiting for him to be carted off before they come back.

I catch Shooty's eye through the window and do the what the fuck, dude? gesture. The thing is, I'm somehow not actually scared of him even though I probably should be. Face to face he seems idiotic, even pathetic, regardless of the reputation.

'Fuck you!' he screams with real feeling and gives me the finger before wandering off. He thinks we've kidnapped his kid, or we've been badmouthing his kid, or we've given his kid to aliens who are probing the child even as we speak. Nobody knows.

We call the cops, because when we called them this morning, they said to call them if it happened again, and it has happened again. They arrive after about fifteen minutes and explain to us how Shooty is not a well man and may be feeling confused and upset right now, and we should definitely call them next time it happens.

Neighbours come out of their houses to share notes with us. Shooty has been dropping in for a loud one-way chat with everyone on the block, so it turns out. Someone actually saw him carrying an axe the previous night.

I've identified our boy as Shooty on the understanding that he shot and killed someone in his house five or six years ago but was never convicted because the cops were somehow unable to prove anything; or maybe they decided that they would definitely act if it happened again. However, it turns out that I am in error and he merely stabbed someone and should therefore probably be identified as Stabby the Drug Dealer, but I'm sticking with Shooty, having thought of him as Shooty for most of his time in the stripey hole.

He was in the stripey hole for abuse of a senior, whatever that means. His rap sheet can be viewed online. No actual murder, and nothing sexual, but otherwise he's pretty much done the lot. Also interesting is that the rap sheet logs calls made every couple of days for the last two months, ever since Shooty came home - mostly nuisance and disturbances, but one of them involving a knife. I guess maybe the cops were waiting for a nice even number, like fifty.

Anyway, he's now binned up, presumably medicated, and his goldfish memory will hopefully have forgotten whatever he imagined we did by the time he comes back, which he hopefully won't.

Perhaps oddly, the detail I've found most depressing is his moronic territorial yapping because I've heard it too many times.

You'd better not be saying shit about this person or that person somehow associated with my good self, because you'll be amazed at the vigour of my righteous fury. You better not be saying shit about my hood. Don't you know I be from the southside?

This is drivel you come out with when you have nothing else going for you, when the sum total of your personality is an address and the fact of your continued existence; and so you have to jab your existence at other people like it's a stick with a cowpat on the end, and keep jabbing until they notice, because when they notice you, you become real.

It's exhausting.