Coco Loco

I first saw Coco when she was just a facebook avatar, a weird grin with pigtails and eyes so wide set they seemed to be making separate journeys around to the opposite sides of her head, like characters in a novel by Jules Verne. The photo had been taken during Oktoberfest, hence the pigtails. My wife knew her from work. The woman had picked up the name Coco when a colleague likened her behaviour to that of a guest at a chimpanzees' tea party. She flounced and pouted, complaining loudly that some prohibitive condition or other would not have applied had she been born with a penis, and then once Sherlock Holmes had turned up to apply his characteristic wisdom and insight to the mystery, the problem always turned out to have been her own doing.

She hadn't understood some detail.

She had neglected to include some part of the code, something so simple that even I understood what had gone wrong when my wife described it to me, and I'm not a programmer.

Everyone had reminded her of that one element, that repeat offender blind spot, and she had testily informed them that she knew perfectly well what she was doing, thank you very much; and yet it always turned out that she hadn't known what she was doing.

It wasn't her fault.

It was never her fault.

It was because of sexism, despite her being the highest paid person in the company anywhere below the level of management. It was because of every possible reason other than her having screwed up, and so it was observed that Coco the Chimp is flinging her faeces around - everyone duck.

They would all rally to locate and tackle the problem, to write the code as it should have been, as it would have been had anyone else been on the job.

'I fixed it!' Coco would beam, dancing from one cubicle to another waving metaphorical pompoms, having taken no actual role in correcting her own mistake beyond providing the initial problem.

'I am a good programmer. I am a good programmer,' she would tell herself over and over, sat alone at her cubicle, broadcasting like some horrible motivational radio station; and yet the simple repetition of the words somehow never made it so.

'How are you enjoying your stay in Texas?' she asked me, screeching across the table at Taco Garage with what might be the least sincere smile I've ever witnessed, the smile you keep ready for a foreigner. It was the first time I met her and was able to put a face to the pigtailed avatar. Bess and I had been married a year, but stay seem to redefine this as a temporary arrangement - not how do I like Texas, but how am I enjoying my stay?

How's married life working out for you?

Will it last, do you think?

Owing to the frequency with which she dropped them, I assumed passive-aggressive observations of this kind were learned behaviour, a pre-emptive defence mechanism designed to put the other person off guard before they could properly formulate the realisation of Coco being a bit of an idiot. She had somehow devised a way of kissing your ass whilst flipping you off at the same time. It was confusing, annoying, but also quite impressive.

She'd address my wife Bess as Beth, and with much greater frequency when getting pissy over something, revealing the affectation to be anything but the innocent slip of the tongue she made it out to be. She would claim my wife's programming victories as her doing, having supposedly helped with the parts my wife didn't understand whilst undermining her own story with gibberish about programming in the cloud; and even I know what a cloud is.

She tried to give us her swimming pool, one of the kind which can be set up in the yard and filled with water. It was twenty feet across and free because she was having a proper pool installed in her own garden. I said no, immediately detecting a situation which would become horribly complicated, and because I quite liked our garden as it was without some shitty used pool taking up space; and it would become horribly complicated, because every part of Coco's world was horribly complicated - her two boyfriends for example. She couldn't decide which she liked more, and so she'd been sat between them when we all went out for dinner, not even an example of free-thinking polyamory, just someone who couldn't decide and was taking the general concept of awkward to a whole 'nother level, as they say. Eventually she married the former Scientologist and spent a year planning what she clearly hoped would be the most magical wedding of all time, something to make even the most saccharine coated Disney extravaganza seem like one of Joseph Beuys' more harrowing performances. She spent a year telling everyone about the wedding. It didn't matter who they were or whether they were interested. Sometimes she would be moved to tears in contemplation of how beautiful the wedding was going to be, and the rest of us began to worry about what she was going to do after, with no more magic to look forward to, just her and the former Scientologist sat around their pool and beginning to realise that nothing had changed.

The day of the wedding came and went, and on Sunday the 11th of May 2014, I tried to write about it in an essay provisionally entitled Wedding of the Century.

We were heading for a wedding to be held at the Newhaven River Inn which is near a town called Comfort. It was to be the wedding of the century, at least in the imagination of one of the participants. The rest of us, despite having already had a year to think about it, were yet to be convinced. In fact we anticipated disaster. An event carrying that much expectation seemed destined to failure, not least because of who was involved...

I started on a second paragraph, but had begun to bore even myself. It was just a day out in the country with a ton of people we didn't know, and Coco screeching and getting my wife's name wrong, and cooing like a googley-eyed Care Bear over those members of her family which had turned up because they were actually still talking to her. It was okay, but nothing memorable aside from being a conspicuous display of money which went on too long, and we left with a little bag of small white pebbles with which to commemorate the event. Then many years later I discover them to be sugared almonds and that this is a common marital tradition over here.

My wife is allergic to almonds.

After the wedding, it was the honeymoon and a series of lurid heart-shaped photographs of herself and the Scientologist on the beach; and although we've heard bad things about the Church of Scientology, both my wife and I began to wonder how bad it really could have been. The Scientologist seemed like a genuinely nice guy, so how come he ended up with Coco?

After the honeymoon, it was back to the usual onslaught. How she couldn't stand it in Texas with all these Republicans and rednecks, then right in with the jokes about camels and joining Al-Qaeda when the Moroccan guy takes a couple of weeks holiday. She's from New York, she reminds us on a daily basis, where everyone is wonderful and no-one tolerates racism; and it's true in that she's certainly more liberal than most.

Her daughter has married a man she has known for a matter of months, and they've just had a baby, and now the husband has decided to go for gender reassignment surgery. Coco tells us she is going to be as supportive as fuck, because that's the kind of big-hearted New Yorker she is, leaving the rest of us to wonder why it didn't occur to this guy to mention his gender dysphoria nine months earlier; and if this is genuinely none of our business, then maybe we shouldn't have to hear about it all the fucking time, and particularly not with diagrams of penises bissected and inverted on the office whiteboard whilst we're trying to get some work done.

'They turn it inside out and make it into a vagina, but he'll have to use a dildo so that it doesn't close up. That's what happens.'

Thanks, Coco, but we're trying to eat right now.

Still, it probably isn't any worse than when the dog had cancer, inspiring cross section anatomical diagrams of dogs' arseholes on the whiteboard, because she knew we'd all want to know how the vet was going to proceed.

Still trying to eat, thanks.

Every day she petitions my wife to take lunch with her, sometimes popping the question before Beth has even sat down, because eight hours of Coco the chimp talking about dog's arseholes, her dream wedding, and why she hates the entire state of Texas is just not enough. If they do lunch she gets to keep that monologue going all the way through.

'Do you have any plans for lunch?'

'No, I'm just going to grab a sandwich today. I can't go to lunch with you.'

'Oh - well I guess I'll just have to eat an old shoe then,' because apparently that's what you say. It's supposed to make the other person feel guilty.

I finally get to see the swimming pool with my own eyes when Beth and I are invited over for dinner, one evening - the pool which was going to make Coco's life perfect back in the days before the wedding was going to make her life perfect. It's just a pool in a back garden in a leafy part of San Antonio. Since we've arrived Coco and the Scientologist have spent most of the time telling us what a pain in the arse it is to keep clean. I get the impression that it's less for swimming, more for sitting around whilst drinking Martinis. Then the other previous boyfriend turns up, the one who lost out to the Scientologist. I expect it to be awkward, but oddly it isn't because he seems one hell of a lot happier than the last time we met.

'I always read your blog,' she tells me grinning like she expects a cookie. 'An Englishman in Texas,' she adds, proving to me that she knows what it's called and must therefore be telling the truth; but I hear variations on the theme all the time.

Let me know when your book is coming so I can buy one.

Sure.

We eat something that's been roasted and drink wine, beer, or iced tea. The food is okay.

'Do you make fish and chips for yourself?' she asks with the volume the rest of us keep in reserve for the hard of hearing, and again with that smile, already congratulating herself on all that cultural sensitivity she wields like a master swordsman.

I don't answer because I'm actually in the middle of a conversation with the Scientologist, and the interruption seems unusually rude and stupid. How does he put up with this, I wonder.

Eventually she leaves. They sell the house and vanish from our lives, somewhere cold and liberal, where they just know everything will be amazing and magical, and they'll finally have the perfect life they've always deserved once they're settled and Coco has an obscenely high-paying job based on her countless skills, not least of these being her people skills. People just gravitate to her. She doesn't know how it works. It's just a gift.

I remind myself that I only met her a couple of times, and most of the suffering was experienced by my wife, but often it feels as though I was there too; and that's the magic of Coco.

Ten Things Which America Doesn't Really Get

Bacon. It's all streaky. I once encountered proper bacon in an establishment describing itself as an English style pub, and was so surprised I had to get the waitress to ask the chef where he bought it. Apparently he had it flown in from North Carolina.

On a similarly carnivorous theme, lamb isn't particularly popular over here either, meaning kebab shops are sadly few and far between. There are a couple of Mediterranean places which do a decent doner kebab, but they never quite get the pita bread right, or the chili sauce, or the fat, grumpy bloke who calls you my friend but otherwise refuses to speak English following a long, long evening of being addressed as Stavros by horizontally-inclined beer enthusiasts.

Beer. Sadly no-one in America ever just nipped down the road for a pint, so it has come to be regarded as an exotic practice. Beer tends to come in bottles, either your regular swill or artisan beverages with knowingly stupid names like Burst Radiator or Enraged Skinhead, most of which taste like what you get when touching the two terminals of a standard nine volt battery to your tongue. Bars - which are what we have instead of pubs - tend to serve either Miller Lite or Budweiser, neither of which really count as beer; excepting the fancier places serving Burst Radiator, Enraged Skinhead and others on tap to men who spend the evening talking about different kinds of shit beer. In England I generally encountered unorthodox beers in a pub, usually by means of a decision-making process concluding with the words, fuck it - I may as well have a pint of that, I suppose, whereas here the activity seems spiritually closer to stamp collecting. This is why I stick to Mexican beer, and because it actually is beer.

Civilisation. This entry was going to be Government, but then I'm not sure any country really has the hang of that one, and the broader heading allows for discussion of contributing factors. Colonial America was founded seemingly with the intention of getting around the problems of what happens when you have hereditary leadership, meaning no Kings or Queens and that the job of President should go to whoever the people generally feel is best suited. Unfortunately this now amounts to who can afford the most effective advertising campaign, meaning it's usually the upper classes, in turn meaning that we're slipping back towards a dynastic model of leadership. This is justified by the erroneous notion of how those with the most money must be really amazing to have earned their fortune and are therefore well-suited to telling the rest of us what to do. All sorts of factors have contributed to the evolution of the English upper classes, and not all of them necessarily meaning we get terrible people at the end of the process. Some may be arseholes, but I've met a fair few who aren't, and who are very much aware of the mechanism of their privilege and who tend to have genuinely benefited from an expensive education - as you would hope. Here, on the other hand, being upper class is just a case of having a shitload of money, regardless of how it was obtained, and the American upper classes are pretty much just Terry and June from the English sitcom of the same name but with a mammoth bank balance. I know this, having stood behind them in queues and listened to their gormless conversations about Bon Jovi and alt-country and the Obama dictatorship and a better standard of person in their shitty golfing slacks. This is why socialism has become a bad word amongst those who have no actual experience of it and don't really quite understand what it means, namely because our upper classes are people who genuinely believe that money makes everything right, and that the best deal is the most popular, simplest, and therefore the cheapest - which as anyone who ever shopped at the Dollar Store will tell you is not necessarily the case.

Here's the thing with socialism: if you want to be a part of civilisation, then you are obliged to pay taxes as a contribution to that civilisation, given that the civilisation in question is about more than just you. Taxes pay for roads, emergency services, and general infrastructure, and it really isn't down to you to decide who deserves what, and it is about the whole rather than what's directly in it for any one person. If you don't wish to pay taxes or be part of civilisation, that's fine. You have the option of fucking off to the forest or the mountains or else discovering your own country using a road you've laid yourself rather than one of the ones we paid to have built for you, and you should be ready to generate your own electricity when you get there.

Any civilisation worthy of the term tends to be comprised of people who make things and do stuff rather than spending their time asking what do I get out of this? or whining about how political correctness is destroying their lives.

Law Enforcement. My experience with the police force in England has generally been consistent with the idea that whilst there are doubtless a few bad 'uns, these are persons who have somehow eluded rigorous checks in what is otherwise a fairly extensive training program. I could be wrong about this, but I sometimes get the impression that the training procedure of our police force is a guy who asks would you like a gun? Hopefully I'm very much mistaken.

North-East. England has Newcastle-upon-Tyne, home of the greatest accent known to man, and we get fucking New York. You'll know if you've ever met someone from New York because they will have told you about a million times and will have pronounced it Noo Yawk Cidee in an attempt to be cute. Additionally they will probably have described the place as some sort of free-thinking utopia in a land otherwise dominated by record-burning Ku Klux Klansmen who hate black people, improvised jazz, and anything resembling Communism. The only New Yorkers I like tend to be rap artists, persons such as MOP, current title holders of the world's greatest improvised exhortation to party heard on a rap record, which was bang your head against the wall, come on! during some song on the Warriorz album. Those guys can do no wrong so far as I'm concerned.

Pork Pies. I only get the craving once a year, and I could possibly purchase one from a certain mail order outfit specialising in fancy foreign foods, but the $70 refrigerated shipping cost is prohibitive considering that I'd probably eat half of the thing and then go off the idea, as I have done in the past. My dad always used to have a pork pie for Christmas morning which was apparently part of some tradition, although I don't know if it was just him or whether it's some more widespread observance. Here in San Antonio we traditionally have pork tamales on Christmas morning. A tamale is made from maize flour - and pork in this case - steamed in a corn husk. They're from Mexico and of pre-Colombian origin; and they're okay, but it just isn't the same.

Come to think of it, the cakes are all a bit weird too - kind of dry and far too sweet and always with that cream from a fucking spray can. Greggs should seriously think about opening up over here. They'd make a killing.

Rebellion. This is something with which American teenagers - or sometimes older people - engage between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. The epitomy of American teenage revolution is Michael J. Fox dancing to Depeche Mode on the hood of a car stalled in gridlocked traffic and in doing so teaching the grown-ups a thing or two about what it means to be young. Rebellion generally occurs once you're done with the scouts and before you get a job selling car insurance to those seduced by advertising for Dodge vehicles. Sometimes it's difficult to believe that this is the same country which came up with Elvis, the Ramones, and MOP.

Ska. As Wikipedia is my witness, Ska is a musical genre that originated in Jamaica in the late fifties and was the precursor to rocksteady and reggae, combining elements of Caribbean mento and calypso with American jazz and rhythm and blues. It is characterized by a walking bass line accented with rhythms on the off-beat. It isn't, and nor will it ever be, twelve white dudes from Vermont in pork pie hats playing a song with a chorus sounding more like U2 than Prince Buster. Sorry. I don't make the rules.

Sweets. Candy always sounds like a euphemism for something illegal, and in a few cases it actually is. Our chocolate bars mostly taste like the supermarket's own brand products, and I'm talking Wavy Line or Happy Shopper rather than Waitrose. We have Cadbury's, but mostly sold only in stores frequented by a better standard of person and accessible only by means of vehicular transport.

Vehicular Transport. If you don't drive in America you're pretty much screwed unless you're conveniently married to someone who does, as I am. It's easy enough to walk around the centre of whichever town or city you may be in, but I would guess there are not many people living in the centre of their town or city. Most of us are in the suburbs where there's no nipping down to the shop on the corner for a can of pop and a pork pie, or even a tamale. Given this heavy emphasis on automotive travel, you might think this would be an area in which America excels, but sadly no. The extent and scale of our roads and highways combined with a population density much lower than that of the United Kingdom means that a traffic jam is something to be endured for slow moving minutes rather than stationary hours, but America has chosen to compensate for this relative freedom by having everyone drive trucks the size of your average fishing trawler. The fucking things are enormous, resembling giant Tonka toys, and whilst I can see one might justify such gargantuan vessels on a ranch, or if engaged in a business requiring that one travel with a fleet of lawnmowers in the back, otherwise there's really no excuse. Dental assistants are rarely required to convey injured bison back from the creek so far as I am aware, so they most likely choose enormous trucks as compensation for some deficiency, although obviously I have no idea what that could be.

A recent television commercial for the Dodge motor company shows actors portraying the Dodge brothers - Horace and John - magically transported from 1914, newsboy caps and all, leering with joy at their legacy of giant-sized Hot Wheels cars pulling wheelies and revving engines. Their joy is clear from lurid smiles comparable to those of fetishists who take sexual pleasure from pooing in their own pants and who have presently done just that. The commercial is hard to watch, and it's annoying, and I guess the assumption is that rest of us are expected to want to share in this sort of excitement.

A Glossary of American Television Shows

These are only shows I've seen since moving to San Antonio in 2011, otherwise we'd be here all day. I haven't included anything which I've watched and then found myself unable to remember what it actually was. For example, I've probably watched at least one episode of The Flash, but who fucking knows?

A Charlie Brown Christmas - By the way, I'm also including American shows I saw whilst living in England if I've seen them again since moving here, and my wife watches this religiously every Christmas so it makes the cut. It also makes the cut because it's a classic. Just the scene with Schroeder tickling the ivories whilst a stage full of kids engage in oddly repetitive expressive dance is by itself better than anything else seen on television since about 1995.

Agents of SHIELD - This is some Marvel Comics thing based on a bunch of spies living inside a giant floating helicopter. It had the Man from UNCLE in it, or one of those guys - not David McCallum, the other one - unless it was just somebody who looked like him. I have no memory of what happened in the episode I watched except that it involved a lot of people discussing the importance of teamwork, and some guy in a dark room kept looking at a green glowing thing.

Amazing Race, The - Various unpleasant couples competitively quest forth to different locations in different countries so as to find clues as to the next place to which they will all be required to race amazingly. Some shit found in a windmill in Holland will mean they all get to spend the next episode questing forth to the place in Germany where Hitler gave his famous speech, for example. Most of the couples wear bright lycra jumpsuits and they spend a lot of time either running around, sweating, whining, or giving it 110%. Most of the couples come across as horrible wankers. It should really be called The Unpleasant Race.

American Dad - This is one of those animated shows which appears to be drawn by the Garfield artist - what with the big, heavily-lidded eyes and everything - and it contrasts the cutesy appearance with edgy jokes about date rape, sodomy, farting, coprophilia and so on. Junior loves it, and it's one of those things he'll watch over and over, hopefully missing 99% of the references. American Dad gives the impression of being funny as I pass through the front room while it's on, but once you sit down to view an entire episode, it gets headachey pretty fast - one to file under trying too hard.

Andy Griffith Show, The - This was a show from the fifties or maybe early sixties. It's the black and white adventures of a rural law enforcement officer and the hayseeds under his jurisdiction. Most of the jokes can be discerned as incoming about five minutes before they happen, much like weary travellers seen approaching from afar upon a lonely road, and the episode I saw was based around an hilarious mix up occurring when impounded jars of moonshine were stored in the same room as the lemonade the kids had made for their stand. I can't remember why Andy Griffith had nabbed the lemonade as well, but I guess that's cops for you. I actually found this show pretty funny.

Angel - Angel is a good vampire, and was probably the first of the current glut of good vampires who shun human blood. He solves supernatural crimes in this Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, and although the show suffered from the same problems as the corporate entertainment franchise from which it was spawned, it was generally pretty good, particularly when it wasn't taking itself too seriously; and once they ditched the predictably heart-warming yet tormented Irish-themed character from the first series.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force - Laboured date rape funnies delivered by anthropomorphic fast food items in a production which additionally attempts to distract viewers from the piss poor animation by making jokes about its own general ineptitude. Worthless.

Arrested Development - I have no idea how I missed this one when I was living in England, but presume it must have been on after my bedtime, what with my having to be up at five every morning and everything. Arrested Development is fucking great - apart from the final series which was rubbish - and is not actually particularly far fetched. It could quite easily have been based on half the people who live in Alamo Heights.

Battlestar Galactica - Meaning the recent, heavily revised version, rather than the seventies one which was more or less Starsky & Hutch in a space rocket. This was one of the first things I watched when I got here and discovered that my wife-to-be had Netflix, one episode a day until I'd seen the lot. It was pretty darn great too, aside from the shitty ending with a Jimi Hendrix song as some sort of avatar of cosmic infundibularity, or whatever the hell was supposed to be going on there. Science-fiction television is mostly drivel aimed at selling action figures, but this was decent.

Better Call Saul - This is a Breaking Bad spin-off which is better than Breaking Bad. American television has spewn forth a ton of drama serials about lawyers, solicitors, and chartered accountants over the years, and it's a testament to the creators of this thing that I didn't even notice that this was one of them.

Big Bang Theory, The - This is a comedy show based upon the hilarious premise that nerds collect Batman comics and retain an in-depth encyclopedic knowledge of minor details of Batman continuity. Ha ha. It's also one of those sofa entrance hilarity comedies distinguished by half the cast being sat upon a sofa facing the viewer as another enters the room to a soundtrack of general hooting and hollering so as to suggest that we will soon be laughing our arses off. The new arrival usually makes some amusing observation such as I guess I missed the Nicks game, huh?, and that's when the comedy happens. Oh my aching sides. The Big Bang Theory seems to be very popular amongst people who don't actually understand what humour is or how it works.

Big Brother - American Big Brother is even worse than the English version. Unlike the English version, American housemates are free to discuss who they will vote to have evicted from the house, so that's pretty much all the fuckers ever talk about; and there's no phone-in vote so viewers aren't involved other than as passive observers. Additionally, where English Big Brother excels in filling its house with people more or less guaranteed to want to kill each other, in America it's mostly just whiny annoying wankers, and the obligatory Texan almost always turns out to be a closet white supremacist thus making the rest of us look bad, which is disappointing. The most annoying contestant I've seen thus far was the fedora-hatted Californian skateboard tosspot who asked a housemate from Colorado, so how's life in 'rado?, because man, those first two syllables - ain't nobody got time for that. Thankfully, he proved even more hateable than the rest of them brought together for that particular series and his anus was promptly booted back to 'fornia after the first week.

Black-ish - here's yet another one of those families, but with four kids rather than three, and they're black. As situation comedies of this general type go, it beats the shit out of about a million others, and the jokes are mostly funny, but I don't know. I'll watch it and I may even chuckle, but for some reason it never occurs to me to tune in the following week.

Bob's Burgers - It's a cartoon set in a burger joint featuring one of those cartoon families with three children which manages consistent brilliance without resembling The Simpsons in the slightest.

BoJack Horseman - I've seen the pilot episode twice, and I seem to recall a few chuckles, but for some reason I've never bothered watching the rest.

Breaking Bad - If not the greatest TV series ever made, definitely the greatest TV series about a chemistry teacher cooking crystal meth so as to finance cancer treatment ever made. The only problem with Breaking Bad is that you end up hating everyone in it by the third series, possibly excepting Jesse, and yet feel compelled to watch anyway. Having briefly regarded Breaking Bad as the greatest show ever made, I was surprised to find it such tough going and considerably less enjoyable second time around. In fact we gave up with the final series on second viewing. It was just too horrible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Decent but possibly overrated series about a teenage girl and stuff who kills vampires and stuff and related supernatural horrors and stuff. It somewhat went off the boil and stuff when later episodes and stuff began to take themselves far too seriously and stuff, and the bovine Tara turned up to moo at viewers and make us feel all bad about shy people being shy and stuff; and then with the excessive reliance on mumbling Buffyspeak and stuff began to outstay its welcome and stuff; and it's a damning indictment that by the end the only good thing about the show was an American dude pretending to be Sid Vicious and stuff. Thank fuck and stuff they cancelled it.

Caprica - Incomprehensible but nevertheless enjoyable attempt at making a Battlestar Galactica spin-off. Shame it didn't last.

Catfish - This is another reality show, one in which online sweeties discover that the person to whom they've been emailing their intimate hamburger or hot dog shots is actually a fifty-year old male sex criminal from Missouri and not, as they have been led to believe, a youthful Beyoncé lookalike eager to move in and start a family. It's sort of fascinating to watch, providing you can get past the entirely unnecessary soundtrack of the worst music you've ever heard and the fact that everyone involved refers to each other as bae - because it can sometimes be hard to spell the word baby; but sometimes it gets a bit too depressing given the high quota of tattoos, piercings and ear gauges on display; and as for those text message montages of u mean so much 2 me, I feel like I can tell u anything, and the rest - sweet Jesus.

Chowder - This is a children's cartoon about a little purple guy who looks a bit like a cat, and who seems to live in some sort of pseudo-mediaeval feudal society. All I can really remember of it is that the episode I saw - possibly the pilot episode - featured a joke which made me laugh so much that my sides hurt, so that really happens.

Cleveland Show, The - See American Dad. It has its moments, and I wanted to like it, but...

Dance Moms - Pouting borderline psychopathic mothers encourage pre-teen daughters to compete in competitive dance events whilst pointing out how the offspring of rival matriarchs got to prance about to Like A Virgin last week and so this week it's Shanillia's turn, you fucking cunt. The high levels of passive-aggressive on display in this show are frankly terrifying. It's like a live action re-imagining of hell as envisioned by Hieronymous Bosch but with greater emphasis on little girls in pink tutus dancing to that Cher song which sounds like it was recorded inside a flying saucer.

Deadwood - It's about a load of cowboys in the old west who say fuck a lot, and the worst of the bunch is the bloke who runs the local antiques shop, which is called Ye Olde Bide-a-Fuckin'-Wee Antiques 'n' Shit. I tried one episode but it all looked a bit grim and seemed to feature more murdered prostitutes than I usually require of a television show.

Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 - I saw two or three of these and I think it made me laugh, but I can't remember anything else about it except that the blonde one reminded me of Lamb Chop of Shari Lewis fame. I think there was a scene set in a whole food restaurant because I vaguely remember being annoyed.

Duck Dynasty - Duck Dynasty is a reality show following the fortunes of a family of hillbillies who run a duck call manufacturing operation. For some reason everyone seems to think it's amazing. The five minutes I watched comprised footage of them arguing at the warehouse, with the argument escalating into open hostility disguised as pranks. One guy emptied a sack of some white powder over the other's head. The victim looked pissed off, as was then underlined by footage of him commenting upon the incident, explaining how the guy had emptied a sack of some white powder over his head, but that dang fool had better watch out because payback sure 'nuff do be a bitch. This was followed by footage of the victim emptying a retaliatory sack of some white powder over the first guy's head. I'm not sure what the powder was, although I have a feeling it probably wasn't cocaine. It was like watching an episode of The Three Stooges in slow motion.

Empire - My wife loves this one, and it's basically a Mexican telenovela by virtue of the dramatic faces pulled every thirty seconds; except I suppose, technically speaking, it's actually just Dallas with black people, and instead of oil they're trading in R&B singers.

Family Feud - I think this was remade as Family Fortunes in England. A game show host asks thick family members to name a kind of animal with four arses, and points are then awarded depending on whether their answers correspond with those given by members of the general public who have been asked the same question. Our current version is presented by the comedian Steve Harvey who is otherwise very funny, and makes the best of finding himself obliged to work with idiots, but is still very much polishing a turd where this thing is concerned.

Family Guy - See American Dad. I almost liked this one. As with all the other Garfield spin-off shows from the same stable, it's hilarious until you sit down and watch an episode all the way through.

Futurama - Brilliant, obviously.

Garfield and Friends - See my treatise entitled Garfield = Jeremy Clarkson which is to be found elsewhere on this blog.

Glee - This one started off so well that it fooled even me, then took about a series to reveal itself as the same old aspirational stage school shite about all which can be achieved if you just dare to dream hard enough. I suppose it might be awarded points for smuggling a gay character onto mainstream telly, although all the gay people I know - and for some weird reason I seem to know a ton of the fuckers - hated Kurt's guts, so I'm not even sure if that really constitutes a victory. The best thing about Glee was the psychotic sports coach played by Ayn Rand. She was great.

Goldbergs, The - The Goldbergs is a situation comedy based on someone's actual memoirs of growing up in the eighties in America, and sometimes it makes my wife laugh so much that she falls off the sofa. Having grown up in the eighties in England, I find this one a bit mystifying in places. It's not without chuckles and I can appreciate that it's a quality product, roughly speaking, but more than anything it impresses upon me that America and England are very different countries, despite the superficial resemblance.

Hell's Kitchen - If Gordon Ramsay has any failings it is only that his generosity of spirit leads him to go easy on those who foolishly agree to be fired out of an allegorical cannon on one of his celebrity cheffing shows. Additionally, much of his televisual work wastes precious airtime pissing about with recipes, airtime which might be better spent showing Ramsay kicking some perpetrator of culinary idiocy down a fire escape or battering an uncooperative waiter about the head with a cricket bat through which twenty or thirty six-inch nails have been driven. Never mind. I never really liked this one so much as Kitchen Nightmares because I've never really cared whether Paul Daniels can make a soufflé, or that Noel Gallagher has just turned up, and - blinkey-blonkey-blimey - he's ordered the curry! This is like the English one except I have no idea who the celebrities are, and when Ramsay starts bollocking his team they salute him and bark sir, yes sir like in Full Metal Jacket.

Hey Jessie - Jessie is a Texas teenager who goes to babysit a bunch of wisecracking kids in New York City with presumably hilarious consequences. I've never actually seen the thing, just heard the annoying theme song blasting from the kid's room at Motorhead decibels over and over, one episode after another. Jessie herself is currently starring in a shampoo advert of some description, thus allowing me to report that she resembles a Hispanic Kerry Katona, but is significantly easier on the eye than such a description doubtless implies. Hopefully Jessie, as a Texan, spends most of the show either protecting the second amendment or threatening to secede from the union, but being as it's a Disney production I imagine it's the usual crap about brushing your teeth and not being mean to the weird kid, not even when that screwy-looking son of a bitch is effectively giving it away.

Ice Road Truckers - All I can remember of this one is footage of some guy wrapped up so as to endure subarctic temperatures stood forlornly upon a frozen river pointing at his truck, its front end sunk deep into the ice. 'My truck is in the ice,' he explains to the cameraman, and then we watch various attempts to pull the truck out of the ice. The most interesting thing about this one, at least to me, is that it's edited by an English bloke, and an English bloke I know because I was at college with him. I saw him last year and he explained that he landed the job because apparently Americans don't know how to edit reality television and regard English people as experts in the field. They should probably ask English people what they should make their reality shows about too while they're at it. Had they asked me, I could have told them that this one probably wasn't the greatest idea.

Jessica Jones - This is another Marvel thing. The character is somewhat after my time, although I gather there's a tenuous connection to the Purple Girl who used to be in the Alpha Flight comic book, which I used to quite enjoy. Her powers seem to be mainly to do with smart-arse one-liners and shagging, and apparently Doctor Who shows up in the later episodes. Comics sure have changed since I was a kid.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians - I saw about a minute of this once, and it was the one with the arse whining about something or other. I don't know who these people are or why they exist.

King of the Hill - I always loved this animated show, but I love it even more now that I live in Texas. When people ask me how my life now compares to how it was in England, I tell them that it's a lot like King of the Hill because it genuinely is, and as it happens, yes, I do know someone just like Boomhauer. It is my firm belief that King of the Hill may ultimately prove to be the greatest television show ever made.

Kitchen Nightmares - As with the English version, here Gordon Ramsay descends upon the eating establishments of fools in order to explain why no-one wants to eat their shit food. The high point of the English version was probably the complete knob who fancied himself an award-winning chef despite never having actually trained, and who was serving a hockey puck sized slice of black pudding on square plates drizzled with chocolate sauce as his signature dish. Ramsay naturally had him crying within about three minutes. It was amazing. Unfortunately the American version is less entertaining, because we don't like those sexual swearwords over here, never mind the sight of someone having their head kicked off by an irate Ramsay. Most of the venues upon which the lad descends seem to be either pizza places or burger joints, and whilst he nevertheless scares the living shit out of everyone involved as good as he ever did, I guess the really violent stuff just doesn't get broadcast. It's sort of like giving Pavarotti his own show on the condition that he doesn't sing. Also, there's sometimes a bit in which they all get together and pray out loud, usually something along the lines of dear God, please make it that so our restaurant stops being shit; and Ramsay joins in too, when really he should be stood to one side, mocking them all whilst smoking and drinking a can of Kestrel.

Leave it to Beaver - I'm not sure how I ended up watching an episode of this. It's a black and white thing from the fifties, the slow-moving adventures of a small, well-meaning child who finds himself embroiled in moderate scrapes with vaguely amusing consequences culminating in a heavy-handed message - you have to help your friends, that sort of deal. I'm not opposed to gentle television on principal, but it really makes you wonder how dull the rest of the schedule must have been during the era when this was a hit. Leave it to Beaver resembles early video art more than it resembles comedy.

Lilyhammer - This isn't a Sopranos spin-off although I get the feeling it wants to be, and the Jools Holland of Bruce Springsteen's band is easily as watchable here as he was playing Silvio Dante. The Scandinavian setting comes close to inspired, and the show only really falters when it really does pretend to be an episode of The Sopranos, getting Paulie in to play that priest, implausibly sending half the cast to New York and so on. Stick to the episodes with ice and snow and you won't go far wrong.

Lost - This was amazing for three or maybe four series, and then turned suddenly and dramatically to shit. New mysteries were piled on top of older, still unresolved puzzles, and it began to feel as though they were making it up as they went along for the sake of seeming weird and interesting like some goth drawing spiders on his own face before he goes to sign on. Particularly pointless was the killing off of Charlie the former Hobbit. It didn't quite do it for me as I'd always hated the character and didn't really care that he'd pegged it, so it felt like an ostentatious diversion from everyone having forgotten what the story was supposed to be. Charlie as a supposed Gallagher brother never really worked if, like me, you regard Oasis as the most worthless bands of more or less all time, and yet they still found a way to make him even more annoying with his dreary fixation on Clare and the baby, who became his equivalent of John Steinbeck's Lenny asking George to tell him about the rabbits.

Louie - Louis CK is presently my all-time favourite comedian, roughly speaking, and whilst this not-quite-autobiographical show isn't always what you might conventionally term funny, I think it stands as a testimony to his wit that he can come up with some of the most profoundly depressing material ever broadcast, and yet somehow it still feels like comedy, even when you want to slash your wrists afterwards.

Mad Men - I think I made it to about the sixth episode before I realised that I couldn't give a shit whether any of them lived or died, or what happened next. It probably could have done with a few jokes. Maybe it had a few jokes but I just didn't notice. The thrill of seeing a man smoking a ciggy on telly also wore off after a while.

Making a Murderer - This is a thoroughly depressing ten-part documentary about a supposedly innocent man being locked up in prison for eighteen years of his life, freed when it's finally proven that he didn't do it, then locked up again for a new crime he almost certainly didn't commit just as the state was about to say sorry. I say supposedly innocent for the sake of impartiality, but he looks innocent to me. Some have accused the programme makers of bias, but you might just as well say that all those World War II documentaries made Hitler look bad and there was a lot more going on that we don't know about. On a positive note, Making a Murderer at least shows that people still know how to make documentaries - contrary to what you might believe from a quick glance at the History Channel - but unfortunately this one is, as I say, profoundly depressing because it doesn't say much for the legal system.

Malcolm in the Middle - This was a prequel to Breaking Bad, and is probably the best thing any of these people have ever appeared in.

Maron - See Louie, but with an entirely different comedian, and again one who doesn't really do jokes. The episode with Danny Trejo is pure gold.

Middle, The - I still don't know what it's supposed to be the middle of, but never mind, and Malcolm is nowhere to be seen. Like Malcolm, Bob's Burgers and a thousand other fucking things, this is a comedy about a family with three children, a big one, a medium-sized one, and a little one. Despite the wearying familiarity of the premise, The Middle is sort of watchable because the actors are good and the jokes are funny, or at least superbly crafted - although it never quite loses the feeling of having been designed by committee.

Mighty B, The - My wife likes this one because the main character is called Bess, which is also my wife's name and is what the B stands for. This is another children's cartoon, but one of the good ones. It has a lot of energy. It's sort of like listening to three different Ramones albums all at the same time.

Mike and Molly - This is another sofa entrance hilarity comedy with the unique angle of there only being room for two on this sofa because Mike and Molly are both quite fat, which I suppose means they're jolly. I only saw about ten minutes of this, and most of the jokes seemed to be about cakes and how hard it is to not eat them, but it made me laugh a couple of times.

Modern Family - This is an odd one in that it does all the sort of things I tend to enjoy in a comedy, and doesn't bother with a laugh track, and it has obvious wit, and yet...

Munsters, The - Obviously the greatest situation comedy of all time (please disregard any previous claim I may have made to this effect) and superior to the Addams Family because the Munsters don't realise that they're monsters. They may as well have stopped making television shows after The Munsters. It has pretty much everything.

Must Love Cats - I don't remember much about this one aside from it being a reality show about a guy who visits people who own cats, and who sometimes sings songs about them - the cats I mean, not the owners. He has an acoustic guitar. I seem to recall one episode in which someone with a massive garden had enclosed the entire place in a vast Jurassic Park style cage with overhead walkways, all for their cat. It impressed me anyway.

My Cat from Hell - This is very similar to Must Love Cats, and the guy even carries a guitar case around as he visits cat owners. His name is apparently really Jackson Galaxy, and he used to be in some band or other, but now the guitar case is just full of cat toys. It's often fascinating, and Galaxy somehow manages to be both likeable and aggravating at the same time.

My Name is Earl - Along with The Sopranos, this was the greatest show ever made; and along with King of the Hill it's more or less as close as dammit to a description of how I find life in Texas. I don't yet have my hair cut into a mullet, and I don't drive a Camino, but otherwise it's more or less the same. Of all the cancellations ever to cruelly pluck decent shows from the starry firmament of our viewing, this has surely been the most bewildering and the most criminal.

Nanny 911 - I used to watch Supernanny - roughly speaking the English version of this - and found it sort of enjoyable in so much as any of those bullying shows wherein simpletons are reprimanded for their oafish ways are sort of enjoyable. Weirdly, the American version seems to staff itself from the exact same pool of English televisual nannies - at least one of whom I always found slightly bothersome due to her resemblance to an ex-girlfriend. Weirder still, these nannies seem to represent a Thunderbirds style task force answering the call of distressed parents unable to cope with their generally repellent offspring. They all live in a quaint English cottage - apparently their version of Tracy Island or Avengers Mansion - and each week the Overnanny draws their attention to a new case. The Overnanny is an ancient nannorial matriarch of such wisdom and power that she never actually leaves the cottage. She isn't formally identified as the Overnanny, so I'm just taking a guess with the name. Anyway, each week she bids that her teamsters do gaze forth upon that which is revealed in the mystic mirror of telling - usually footage of screaming toddlers flinging bowls of cereal at clueless parents; the nannies pull faces like unto the duck of disapproval and make tutting noises, and then the Overnanny decrees which of them has powers most suited to the challenge. Many Americans seem to have a weird and possibly unhealthy fixation with all things English. Apparently only we have the power to tell junior to shut the fuck up, clean his room, and stop acting like a cunt.

Nurse Jackie - Following whatever the hell happened at the end of the final series of The Sopranos, Carmela got a job in a hospital, changed her name to Jackie and started banging Father Phil who, by pure coincidence, has also undergone a complete change of identity and profession. She took a load of drugs for a few series, was sacked for taking drugs, then was reinstated, over and over so as to save having to change the name of the programme to either Nurse Zoe or Former Nurse Jackie. It was great while it lasted, but after she'd been sacked and reinstated the seventh or eighth time, the plausibility of the whole situation began to suffer, and it all turned to shit.

Office, The - I've only watched the first episode so far, and whilst it's clearly a quality product, I really can't get past it being a more or less word for word cover version of the English situation comedy starring Ricky Gervais and others. I liked the original a lot, so I find this karaoke act kind of strange, although I guess I'd be interested to see what happens in the later episodes, those made past the point at which they ran out of Gervais to recycle and had to generate their own material.

One Step - I've checked online and this is the name given to an advertising campaign for something called Prevnar 13, specifically to a commercial repeated with such frequency that it has come to seem more like a television show, and it's always a mad scramble to find the remote and hit the mute button when it comes on. American television commercials are weird. You might imagine them to be fairly slick, but the great majority appear home made, like those things you used to see at the cinema in the seventies - fancy a meal after the film? Then why not come to the Jade Pagoda conveniently situated in the high street and so on and so forth. Living in Texas, this means that half of the adverts I see involve a red-faced man shouting about trucks whilst stood in front of his car dealership. Generally more professional are the adverts for products designed to stop you dying of something, generally aimed at seniors and shown in the breaks during Wheel of Fortune; and these seem to go on for minutes and minutes, usually with somebody reading out a long list of legally prudent disclaimers - may cause drowsiness, may cause death, and even may increase severity of asthma symptoms, which turned out to be one possible side effect of a product otherwise promoted as a means of relieving asthma symptoms. Anyway, Prevnar 13 is some kind of jab which inoculates against a whole variety of conditions - so far as I can tell - and so the advertising runs with the gimmick of it being just one thing which is able to address many problems; and so we see footage of perky oldsters doing just one thing in order to illustrate the point - some guy cooks a single sprig of asparagus on his barbecue grill, a slightly aggravating woman purchases a single strawberry from her grocery store, and most annoying of all Dr. Russell from Space 1999 goes to the gym and does her single sit up. It probably isn't Dr. Russell from Space 1999, but the woman looks a bit like her except more smug and a lot older. She's got the leotard, the leg-warmers, all the shit. She unrolls her exercise mat - or whatever you call those things - and then does a single sit-up, her face bowling forward to fill the screen as she does so. She says, 'One,' out loud, counting her single sit-up, and then gets up and goes home. It's the expression on her face as she counts her single-action work out, a sort of half-smile with just a faint hint of superiority which asks and just what are you doing with your life, you fat fuck? It makes me want to kick in the screen, but I never do.

Orange is the New Black - Semi-autobiographical life in a women's prison and amazingly they managed to not screw it up, at least not yet. This one's right up there with The Wire and The Sopranos in my estimation.

Pair of Kings - Pair of Tossers would be more like it. Junior was briefly addicted to this show, and thus did I see a few more episodes than I would have liked, the number of episodes I would have liked to see being none at all. The premise is that a pair of wisecracking kids implausibly end up as rulers of an obscure presumably south-sea island, the kind where cars tend to be made out of bamboo with a couple of logs for wheels, like on the immeasurably superior Flintstones. This thing might have had some charm had it been made by Hal Roach back in the thirties, but it was made by Disney and ran from 2010 to 2013, so just how good do you think it could be?

Parks & Recreation - This one is a work of art - just beautiful. It's only failing is that Ron Swanson isn't a real person.

People's Court, The - The People's Court is a televised court presided over by a Judge who isn't actually a Judge so much as just some woman who makes decisions about what seems right. The cases brought before the court are usually things like when some bloke sells his car, but the car turns out to be shit, or somebody put their penis into an extra-marital vagina, or some guy owes twenty dollars and he doesn't think he should have to pay it. It's mostly minor stuff, and you can usually watch about three of these things before you begin to feel bad about yourself. A recent National Enquirer headline ran with something about People's Court being rigged, which I suppose would mean something to readers under the illusion of it being a real court, just like the one in which Steven Avery was found guilty of a crime he had no reason to commit. Talking of hysteria and the wisdom of the mob, some readers may have encountered facebook idiocy concerning sharia law and how entire cities in Englishland are now under sharia law because of Muslamic immigrants and political correctness innit. Aside from being untrue, I watched a documentary about sharia law as practiced in Islamic countries a while back, and the weird thing was that it actually seemed a lot like People's Court, so I'd say facebookers need to know what the fuck they're talking about before repeating such bollocks.

Phineas and Ferb - I have a feeling this is Disney getting down with the kids. It's animated in that sort of wacky angular post-Ren & Stimpy style favoured by production companies who've realised that three kids and a crime-solving dog will no longer cut it with today's sophisticated under-tens, and it follows the vaguely wacky adventures of a boy-child who invents things; but there's something unpleasantly wholesome about it, and the nagging hag of an older sister as stool pigeon and destroyer of all that is fun strikes even me as a bit sexist - and I couldn't ordinarily give a shit about that kind of thing.

Portlandia - Much that is terrible about the modern world, or at least its media image, apparently comes from Portland - twenty year-old men with full beards, breakfast cereal restaurants, bands called Ha Ha Tonka, multinational conglomerates attempting to pass themselves off as a Women's Institute knitting circle but with hippies, and adverts for the same soundtracked with corporate ukulele; and Portlandia takes the piss out of all that. The only problem is that it somehow seems to resemble the very thing it's taking the piss out of, or at least it does to me. These Americans can be so inscrutable at times.

Raising Hope - I get the impression that this was an attempt to remix My Name is Earl in such a way as to avoid cancellation. It has some of the Earl magic for sure, but steers just a little too close to sentimentality for my liking, although I like the funny-looking woman with the ukulele and a missing tooth. She's cute.

Real O'Neals, The - They're Irish, they have three kids, and one of them is a homosexual. I say they're Irish, but they're actually Irish-American, which isn't the same thing. No it isn't. Drinking Guinness and wearing a green hat with a shamrock printed on it is not the same as being from Ireland. I know actual real Irish people from Ireland, and most of them think you're fucking ridiculous, quite frankly. This show was probably okay, but I couldn't get past my own irritation, even despite the presence of the otherwise wonderful Martha Plimpton. Also, I'm not sure quite how they qualify as real given that this is a sitcom rather than a fly-on-the-wall documentary. I suppose they're real like The Real Ghostbusters were real, so I guess this is a meaning of the word real with which I am unfamiliar, specifically one which translates to not as good as the film. Sure enough, my impression of The Real O'Neals was that it is not as good as Bridget Jones' Diary, which is the worst film I can think of at the moment.

River Monsters - Junior presently spends most of his time attempting to impress people by relaying fascinating facts in a portentous voice resembling that of Doctor Doom as depicted in seventies animated superhero fare, usually the sort of fascinating facts no-one with half a brain would care less about - the life cycle of the world's most dangerous squid, the amazing stuff which you can get from Japanese vending machines and so on. Needless to say, he's a big fan of River Monsters in which some bloke relates folk tales of this week's reputed killer fish, describes just how terrified he is, locates something significantly less deadly which clearly isn't the thing he was looking for, and then concludes that perhaps we shall never know as the music swells to a predictable crescendo. The show would last about three minutes if you edited out all the embellishments, recaps, and associated horseshit.

Roseanne - I watched a few of these in England about a million years ago, and they seemed fairly funny. I saw a repeat more recently whilst living here, and it still seemed fairly funny. I still don't understand how Friends got made. I'm not saying Roseanne was some sort of comedy year zero, but Friends nevertheless seems like a backwards step by comparison.

Salem - I managed about ten minutes, but it was too much like listening to a Fields of the Nephilim album for my liking.

Simpsons, The - It may be well past its golden age, but it still beats most of the competition.

Six Feet Under - It wasn't quite The Sopranos, but Six Feet Under was still pretty darn good. It wasn't quite a comedy, but it had a sense of humour, and as such probably struck just about the right balance for what is essentially a soap opera based around a funeral parlour. I'll add extra points for it keeping up the pace right until the end, rather than tailing off into an implausibly shite treading water phase after the first three or four series as was the case with both Lost and Weeds.

Sons of Anarchy - I assumed this was some sort of post-apocalyptic deal but no, it's just a bunch of bikers, pretty much The Sopranos in piss-stained leathers with a chicken stapled to its jeans. They drink hard, they raise funds by illegal means, they ain't keen on the law, and they communicate exclusively in short gruff sentences excepting the point in each episode during which young Jax Teller reads a little more of his late father's unpublished memoirs and it briefly turns into The Waltons. It's kind of shit, but it's watchable.

Sopranos, The - I probably could have lived without quite so many dream sequences, but otherwise this was more or less the greatest show in television history, which I offer as scientifically verifiable fact rather than mere opinion. If you disagree, or if you're reading this with even so much as a twinge of now just hold on there a moment, stop reading right now and get yourself to the office of your nearest education authority because you need to start all over again at grade school level. People who don't like The Sopranos are just wankers, and useless wankers into the bargain. It's as simple as that.

SpongeBob Squarepants - Words seem inadequate as medium for the summary of just how great this show is. If you've just woken up from a long space voyage spent in suspended animation. SpongeBob is a yellow cuboid denizen of the deep who hangs around with a starfish and works at an undersea fast food outlet, and as such his adventures closely resemble the science-fiction novels of A.E. van Vogt. I'm not even sure I'd call it a children's show. It's kind of a thing in itself.

Super Mario Brothers Super Show, The - See Don't Do the Mario, Please... elsewhere on this blog.

Suspect - See Catfish, except lacking the generally entertaining presence of Max wossisname, and suffering from the problem that it's the exact same thing every week. Some person is worried that their friend or partner is moonlighting as either a prostitute or a stripper, but it turns out that they're just taking an evening class; and it's easier to call in a nosey television show than to simply ask what the fuck is up with you never being around and shit? The show is further hamstrung by the leaden presence of co-presenter iO Tillet Wright - and yes, that's how we spell it with the first letter in lower case - who is named after one of Jupiter's moons and reminds me of more or less everyone I ever crossed the road to avoid back in 1987. She is the human embodiment of the decision to wear a fedora with a leather jacket whilst playing a trumpet in Camden Market. I'm sure she's a delightful person, but she makes me want to buy Whitesnake albums and eat the raw meat of something I've killed with my own bare hands.

Toddlers and Tiaras - This is another reality show in so much as that it comprises footage of stuff which actually happened, but in all other respects it's what Heironymous Bosch would be doing if he was alive now and working for whatever lame channel thought this shit was a good idea. Every week we meet a different group of psychotic morons and watch as they tart up their five year-old like a hooker and have her compete in alarming beauty pageants. I don't know if Gary Glitter is particularly a fan of this show, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that were the case.

Total Drama Island - Junior has watched some seriously headachey shit over the years, but this one makes most of them look like one of Harold Pinter's less eventful plays produced in a Trappist monastery. Total Drama Island is animated in that vague sort of animé Pink Panther style which seems very popular with the younger generation, and purports to be an animated reality show, sidestepping the point that the only saving grace of most reality television is its spontaneity. Total Drama Island works if you regard the word awesome as a viable humourous punchline regardless of the context, or you piss yourself laughing when something is described as swag, or when an observation is prefixed with the word hashtag, as though all human experience is one big Twitter feed. For the rest of us it's just screechy zero-ideas shite which doesn't need to exist, and it was probably written by a computer.

Trailer Park Boys - I saw one of these and can recall having received the impression of it being just the sort of thing I might like, but that was four years ago and I still haven't got around to watching a second episode. I guess that must tell you something.

Ugly Betty - As everybody in the universe knows, Ugly Betty began life as Yo Soy Betty, La Fea, a Colombian telenovela about a right old munter attempting to make it in the fashion biz, and the Salma Hayek version is just one of numerous regional variations. Less well known is that Yo Soy Betty, La Fea wasn't that amazing. At least I didn't think so, and assuming I was watching the Colombian one rather than some regional variation. It just looked like your average telenovela with endless scowling, leering, heavy breathing, heaving bosoms, dramatic exits, and not much in the way of chuckles - not that there's anything wrong with telenovelas, but Ugly Betty is significantly better, just as anyone who ever covered the Velvet Underground will logically improve upon the original.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - I didn't watch enough of this to be absolutely certain of how she qualifies as unbreakable, but I suspect it's probably her relentlessly perky disposition thrown into sharp contrast by life on the mean streets of the big city. It's a comedy written by Tina Fey, which probably tells you all you need to know. If you piss yourself laughing every time Tina Fey wrinkles her nose and pulls that I'm just a little bit quirky face, then this may well be the show for you. Personally I thought it was shite.

Uncle Grandpa - This is another Cartoon Network children's animation which tries far too hard to be weird, hence the name, and probably the fact that I can't remember the first thing about it beyond how entertained I wasn't. SpongeBob has a lot to answer for.

Waltons, The -  I know it's schmaltzy, wholesome enough to have someone's eye out, and features writing so heavy handed as to make your average episode of Scooby Doo resemble the work of Jorge Luis Borges, but Goddammit I loves me some Waltons, and so do you, unless you've got something wrong with you. Even my mother likes The Waltons. Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and accept that nothing good ever came from attempts to reinvent the potato.

Weeds - Weeds was amazing up until they accidentally burnt the entire subdivision to the ground, forcing the cast to relocate to a house near the Mexican border whilst Nancy took a job in a shop which, by pure unlikely coincidence, housed one end of a tunnel leading to the home of some hunky cartel dude. I'm not sure how many series that was, but I think it was about three, and then it all turned to shit. It felt as though they were just throwing any old thing into the mix in the hope of something working - Nancy shags the cartel bloke then everyone else, Kevin Nealon finds a suitcase full of heroin at a circus and has to flog it all before the clown notices that his stash is missing, an alien saucer lands and they come in search of a truly mellow legal high blah blah blah... It just became hard to care after a while.

What Not to Wear - Clothes-horsey woman and a bloke bearing an unsettling resemblance to my wife's boss coax tattooed hoochie-mommas into not dressing like they're still fifteen and auditioning for an Insane Clown Posse video shoot. As makeover shows go, this one seems harmless and fairly watchable, I guess, if you like that sort of thing.

Wheel of Fortune - The host is a million years old and apparently a font of all sorts of horribly Republican opinions - according to the headline of something I didn't bother reading on facebook - but really, who gives a shit? It's a game show and it does it's job without shouting at you, and is as such significantly less headachey than Family Feud. It's also the closest America comes to Countdown, which I sort of miss, so that's nice too. My only real criticisms of Wheel of Fortune are that having the contestants engaged in continuous applause, even apparently applauding their own often unremarkable contributions, makes them seem a bit lobotomised; and secondly, those words and phrases. For those who have never seen it, Wheel asks contestants to pick letters and guess at a phrase or term denoted only by blank spaces on the quiz board with a clue given by categories such as around the house or sayings. The problem is that some of the categories just seem a bit ridiculous - things being one of the less helpful examples. Anxiety disorder, pearls before swine, and stegosaurus cheese alienation could all legitimately be regarded as things. In fact everything in the universe is a thing by some definition, so I don't really know why they bother with that aspect; and then we have clues leading to popular phrases such as people who dwell in glass houses shouldn't hurl stones or a rolling rock doesn't gather moss, or even living creatures like beautiful birds flying south. I know it's a petty grievance, but I really feel that whoever sets the puzzles needs to get their shit sorted out before the show ends up with contestants required to guess random sequences of letters, because that would be pointless.

Wire, The - The Wire was amazing, and it probably says something about me that I prefer television serials which aspire to be books, or rather to work in the same way as a good novel, as was a stated intention of this one. What it says about me is that I am a fully grown man. That's how I see it.

Year Without a Santa Claus, The - This is an animated children's thing from 1974 made by someone called Rankin-Bass. It seems to enjoy nearly legendary status over here, and yet I'd never heard of it. I guess maybe the English TV stations didn't buy everything America had for sale in the seventies after all. Anyway, I'm not actually sure what happens in this as I didn't see it all the way through, but it involves various reindeer and a character called the Heat Miser who has a dualistic counterpart in the form of the Snow Miser. Both of them sing their own big band numbers, which sound like they were written by the Foetus bloke. This was some seriously weird shit.

Durham, NC

'Don't you just love fandom?' the fanzine editor asked me. We'd met for a drink and there had been a peculiar lull in the conversation, at which point he just came right out with it. It was as much a statement as a question, and to my ears it had the cadence of isn't life so much better with the love of our Lord Jesus? The problem was that I didn't love fandom and I didn't know how to answer. I felt bad for the fanzine editor, and then bad for myself because he was the nice guy whilst I was the cynical gremlin of judgement, not even true to myself, choking back my own poison lest it reveal me as such and ruin the mood. I had once enjoyed the thing enough to have bought a ton of tie-in novels and to be able to hold a conversation with the fanzine editor, but my interest had dwindled when the television company resumed making the series; and my interest had further curdled to a faintly carcinogenic slurry as the show began to engender a new, more toxic species of fan, and as their numbers began to multiply.

My problem stems principally from the fan aspect, at least as I understand its contemporary meaning. There are plenty of things which I like but for which I'm reluctant to call myself a fan. There are probably entire episodes of The Sopranos which I can recite line by line from memory, but that's because I like The Sopranos. I have no need to belong to a greater whole of anything, or to define myself as such for the benefit of my peers. I see fandom as being about branding - dedication to a commercial franchise signified by a set group of ideas and images. Whatever may be done or said by those ideas and images is usually of importance secondary to their repetition; and when I say branding I specifically mean brand loyalty of the kind which either excludes everything external to the franchise, or which at the very least favours mainly that which echoes some aspect of the franchise, not least the fact of it being a franchise as distinct from any more organic expression of culture.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties. I no longer really draw comics as I once did, and as for reading the things, I've had an on-off relationship with the medium for the last two decades. There are comics I still enjoy, but nothing I enjoy so much that I need to pay fifty quid or equivalent for the privilege of dressing up as one of the characters whilst hanging out with others similarly costumed as what may as well be corporate mascots. I've never wanted to belong to any club which would have me as a member because if they want my membership then it's unlikely that they really know anything about me, or that they care to know anything about me.

Besides, in my day - seeing as I'm now of an age which allows for use of such a preamble - it was the fancy dress parade. I refuse to acknowledge the term cosplay - a clumsy conflation of costume and play by which participants distance themselves from an activity traditionally associated with very small children. It isn't the activity which particularly bothers me so much as the implicit anticipation of not only my approval, but my hearty endorsement of persons who feel best able to express their inner selves by dressing as Batman, or River Song, or Pinkie Pie. It isn't that I disapprove so much as that if you reduce yourself to a dull, juvenile symbol by your own free will, if you identify so heavily with what is essentially just merchandise, then I simply don't think that you and I will ever have much to say to each other because I suspect that behind the glitter and the cape, you probably won't have much to say about anything; and this makes me feel sorry for you, and disappointed. I don't want you banned, stamped out, or subjected to scorn, but neither do I want to have to think about you for any length of time, and you don't get a cookie just for being you. You shouldn't need my approval.

I hadn't been to a comic book convention since the early nineties, but Charlie said he'd been invited to one in Durham, North Carolina - right here in America. I told him, 'great - maybe me and Bess can fly up there and meet you or something.' This had been suggested in England back in June - one of those commitments you make as a sort of place-holder whilst knowing it will cost and therefore probably won't happen. I mentioned it to my wife as soon as I was home in Texas, and she provided the motive force which would ordinarily have faltered as I faced up to the reality of travel plans and plane tickets and places to stay. I'm glad she did, because Charlie is one of those people I should have seen with a little more frequency over the past couple of decades. We were at art college together, we attended comic book conventions together, and so much as any of us ever had a little gang, we were in the same one. Then our lives flew off in different directions and everything became complicated; but once a couple of decades have passed, life becomes too short to let the complications get in the way.

Charlie draws a hugely successful comic book called The Walking Dead, itself the inspiration for a hugely successful television show, and he is as such probably the closest I come to knowing a celebrity. My comic habit is severely reduced compared to what it was, and I haven't really enjoyed what few episodes of The Walking Dead I've seen. I can see that it's a quality product but it probably just isn't for me, which isn't unusual given there being very little television I like at all these days. Charlie, being both a fully grown man and a nice guy, doesn't seem to mind.

Because I don't just love fandom, I suppose I have a few reservations about the event, but the point is getting to hang out with my old pal, and getting on a plane and having an adventure, and the sort of adventure which Junior might hopefully appreciate despite it occurring in the real world rather than on a screen. It's the sort of thing which we, as a family, probably need to do more often.

We fly on Friday the 13th, changing at Atlanta then arriving at the airport in Durham after dark. We haven't spent long in the air when you add it up, although with all of the waiting around, it feels as though we have. Happily I have not been driven to silently grinding my teeth whilst assembling a series of barbed comments, as occasionally transpires when we spend time as a family. It's not that I don't get on with Junior but that his behaviour can sometimes be quite demanding. On bad days he may come across as rude, needy, and entitled, although in all fairness this could be partially because I have become actively attuned to notice such behaviour - feeding the irritation like you scratch at an itch. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and rests significantly on the fact of his being a twelve-year old boy, and things tend to go better when I'm able to keep this in mind. The prospect of the three of us up in the sky squashed into economy seats for a couple of hours was one I had been trying not to think about, but once it happens it's fine.

We land at Durham and take a taxi to the Marriott Hotel, the one in which the comic book convention is to be held. The trip seems to take some time and I guess that the airport is some way out of town. I find it frustrating that it's already dark because even just the bushes and trees at the side of the highway - what I can see of them in the glare of sodium lamps - are a testament to our being somewhere other than Texas. I've been to North Carolina before but just passing through, changing flights or a night at some anonymous hotel when a flight has been cancelled. I want to get a look at the state to see how well it compares with my mental image, cohered during many hours of listening to David Sedaris describe his formative years growing up in Raleigh. I want to be able to see if the place is anything like I imagined, but it's dark and all I can do is boggle at trees with tall, thin trunks and the unsettling absence of cacti. We come to Durham and I try to recall the name of the flooring company run by Paul Sedaris, younger brother of David, but I know it's unlikely that he would have an office or an outlet in Durham, or that we might just happen to drive right past it, or that it will mean anything if we do.

The hotel is huge and ornate, tall ceilings with gold fittings and many reflective services. We sign in, and the receptionist chuckles as she notes that we are from Texas. 'Like I couldn't tell.'

I'm wearing my Stetson and one of my favourite shirts, one that makes it look as though I'm wearing the state flag, most likely originated with either a garage or some fried chicken concession.

'He's not even American,' my wife chuckles, and we all laugh. The joke should be old by now but it still contains some magic.

We find the room and realise there's been a misunderstanding. We have two single beds. This means the boy will have a bed of his own as requested, but Bess and I will have to sleep whilst balanced side by side on a mattress with the dimensions of a long thin sofa cushion, and neither of us are what you'd call petite. Otherwise, the room seems fine. We return to reception and explain that one bed fails to meet out requirements as Texans. Unsurprisingly there's nothing they can do. Everything is fully booked due to the convention.

There seems to be a dining area, a raised enclosure at the heart of the lobby in which persons dressed as characters from The Legend of Zelda pick at plates of hotel food. We're all hungry, not having eaten fried chicken for a number of hours, and so we pick a table and direct meaningful glances at staff whom we hope are passing waiters but who may simply be porters. We watch entire teams of Avengers and other characters I don't recognise pass by and at least know that we are in the right place.

I've sent Charlie a text message to explain that we are here but I haven't heard back.

'He's probably busy,' Bess suggests.

Having myself been let down by mobile phones failing to work in foreign countries, contrary to the claims of the network provider, I'm not so sure; and I'm almost at the point of scarfing leftover fries from the abandoned plates at the table recently vacated by girls dressed as Japanese cartoon characters. I go for a walk to find a waiter or someone, just so far as the end of the lobby, although it should probably be noted that you could almost certainly park a Boeing 747 in this particularly lobby. I follow Spiderman, Deadpool, and a couple of Klingons past the bar to the glass double doors beyond which are the convention halls. I can see security guards and swarms of people dressed as cartoon characters on the other side of the glass. Stranger still is the promotional poster pasted to a board: NC Comicon and just one name in huge letters, Charlie Adlard.

'Fuck,' I say to myself, quite loudly.

I've understood my friend's fame at least since the days when he briefly considered changing his name to Charlie X-Files Adlard because that was how it was written by everyone else. He's now Charlie Walking Dead Adlard and it has only just sunk in. I have an urge to grab complete strangers by the sleeve and tug and point and yelp, 'that's my mate!'

I return to the wife and kid, and miraculously we attract the attention of a waiter who delivers conflicting statements: the kitchen is now closed but yes, he will be happy to take our order. We've been waiting forty minutes and are grateful just for the attention, even if we can't quite tell whether we've just ordered food or not. It eventually turns out that we have, and that with which we are served probably isn't great but nevertheless tastes amazing to us; and in any case Junior is past caring, being at the point of kid-overload having spotted the millionth person dressed as a ninja from some game or other. I wonder to myself whether he knows these are simply regular people dressed up, or whether he thinks those three stood over by the elevator are actual Mario brothers. It probably doesn't matter.

By the time we've eaten, it's late so we go to bed. Bess and I do our best, balanced on our thin strip of mattress. Junior snuggles under the sheet of his bed to yelp and hoot to himself for another couple of hours whilst playing games on his iPad, at least until I let fly with some of the barbed comments I'd set aside for just such an eventuality as this. Part of the problem is that he requires no more than about ten minutes of sleep a week, and short of gagging and locking him in a trunk, he can on occasion be slow to respond to suggestions such as shut up and go to sleep. I'm not even convinced he quite understands it as an instruction. If he considers his room-mates at all, I expect it's only in terms of what he will tell us about the game over which he's been yelping and hooting next morning, because we'll be dying to know.

Parenting is more difficult than it looks, although not necessarily more difficult than I thought it would be.

We don't sleep well, but we do sleep and are awake at eight. I have a bath and we return to the lobby for breakfast, which is when I notice that I've had a message from Charlie. Still jetlagged, he hadn't received my text until after we were all asleep. So we have breakfast and I give him a call. We arrange to meet at one of the dealers' tables within the convention, a retailer of signed Charlie Adlard originals.

We enter the convention and wander around for a little while. I don't see anything I understand well enough to want to buy, but probably about half of the attendees have come in some sort of costume and it's entertaining by itself just watching them. I stand by everything I said in the first couple of paragraphs, but find there is nevertheless something oddly life-affirming about this peculiar situation. Everyone seems to have made a significantly greater effort than they ever did in my day, and regardless of which corporate mascot is represented, I cannot help but appreciate how much fun they all seem to be having, and the fact that no-one really seems to give a shit what anyone thinks.

Why are they doing this?

For FUN, man! Pure fuckin' FUN!, I think, recalling the line from one of my favourite Baby Sue comic strips. I dislike fandom and cosplay and the obsessing over details which only matter because it's either that or recognise that one's entire life has been a waste of time, and I dislike these things particularly when they are pursued to the exclusion of every other potential cultural experience; but when you glance across a crowded room to see some guy dressed as Groot, the tree person from Guardians of the Galaxy - presumably on stilts inside a papier mache construction resembling a tree trunk, those objections are reduced as unto a fart in a thunderstorm whipped up by Thor himself.

My wife and I are speechless - awestruck, and Junior is close to exploding with kid-excitement.

Somehow even more impressive is a distinctly well fed Ghost Rider - a kind of supernatural biker with a flaming skull for a head, in case you've made better use of your life than I have. Our boy simulates flames with a day-glo orange wig over a rubber skull mask, and if any of his friends have pointed out that he's a little on the chunky side compared to the comic book character, then I guess he must have told them to piss off. I'm so impressed that I take his photograph.

When we encounter Charlie he is with a young woman whom he introduces as his personal assistant. Her name is Nicole, and by absurd coincidence it turns out that she once lived in San Antonio, and she lived in a place just off Eisenhauer, a road I cross on an almost daily basis. I briefly wrestle with the coincidence, and also the realisation that Charlie has a handler these days. He submits a fake growl and paws the air with imagined claws like an enraged bear, and I fail to notice that as we discuss hotels and schedules, Nicola is batting away autograph hunters so we can talk in relative peace. Bess fetches out a stack of issues of The Walking Dead because there are a load of folks back home in San Antonio all lined up for autographed copies. They can scarcely believe I'm friends with a genuine star, and Charlie doesn't seem to mind because he's a nice guy and I guess he's used to it. He whips out a magic marker and scrolls an elegant signature across the covers of copies for the kid, his dad, and Duncan, our boy's best friend at school whose entire family identify as Walking Dead obsessives. Charlie has a mammoth signing session this afternoon but will be free to talk under less hectic circumstances for a while after that, so we arrange to meet again around six.

We look around the dealers' room.

'Nice costume,' some guy tells me, because I still have my Stetson on. I was going to tell anyone who asked that I'd come as Hank from King of the Hill, but I suppose I could just as easily be that Walking Dead guy; you know - the one with the hat.

Image Comics have just published a hardback called The Art of Charlie Adlard, and I leaf through a copy at one of the stalls. It's strange to see some of the older material in this historical context, and I can remember him spreading pages of The Tar Baby across the dining table at my dad's house in Coventry. His figures had an initially exaggerated, cartoony quality, but have since tightened up, and his use of shadow has always been astonishing. It feels amazing to see someone I know personally having done this good, having gone so far in his chosen field without either compromise or turning into a dick. It's the kind of success story which sod's law generally prevents, but just this one time it has all worked out just right. I've known this for a while obviously, but now that I've seen the evidence I feel so proud of my old friend that it's embarrassing.

The guy running the stall comes over and tells me he can probably get hold of a signed copy if I'm interested. I buy Mark Millar's 1985 instead.

We have a look at the Lego exhibition, and then Junior stops at a stall selling wooden props, an actual size recreation of Thor's hammer or a replica of the gun with which Bloodstab shot Facepuncher in that issue of Foe Destroyer. He examines a selection of fake swords, then picks an angular wooden shield with a black squiggle on the front, which is handy because it's the only item airport security are likely to allow on the plane. It's from The Legend of Zelda, Junior explains to us in greater detail than we really need.

'Shield bash!' he keeps exclaiming, pulling a melodramatic expression and thrusting the wooden plaque at an imaginary enemy. 'Shield bash!,' he tells us over and over.

The thing looks kind of underwhelming, pretty much an irregular offcut of wood to which someone has added a fabric handle and varnish; but Junior thinks it's great and that's what matters. Even as I write, six months after the fact, I notice that he still sleeps with the thing in his bed from time to time.

Eventually we get tired and return to our room to rest, passing an impressive Asian incarnation of Patrick Troughton's Doctor Who as we do; and then we share an elevator with an individual who I'm fairly certain is the real Captain America.

I only rest for a little while, and then go out for a walk around Durham just to get the lay of the land. Strangely it feels like England to me, or at least more like England than Texas ever has. The trees are all different but they're more or less the same shape, and whilst curbstones and buildings are definitively American, the air tastes similar, or maybe it's some chemical on the breeze, or just the fact of it being so cold as to warrant layered clothing. I experience no nostalgia because I am reminded of those freezing days when the sun barely rose above the level of the rooftops on the other side of the street, which is something I know I will never miss. I walk so far as something called the Old Five Points. It seems to be a run down neighbourhood suffering the first incursion of gentrification so far as I am able to tell. There's a parking lot full of people with some kind of makeshift stage being set up, and some guy asks if I would like to be included in their prayers.

'I'm good,' I tell him as though I've just been offered a cigarette, smiling like we both know how hard it is to give them up.

After an hour I make my way back to the hotel. My wife is awake and is watching the news which is now full of explosions in Paris but with not very much in the way of actual information. Everyone interviewed says that they think what has happened is terrible, which doesn't really need stating. I guess we must be gearing up for another war.

At 4.30PM we return to the lobby as arranged and meet Charlie for a beer. He's been signing autographs for most of the afternoon, both him and Gerard Way, the former singer of My Chemical Romance. It turns out Gerard Way is here because he's written a comic book called The Umbrella Academy which has proven popular, winning awards and everything. I try to remember what I know of My Chemical Romance, which isn't much but I have an impression of them sounding like the Bay City Rollers with black eyeliner. Charlie doesn't seem to have any strong opinion of the music, but he regards Gerard Way himself as a decent guy. Typically we spend most of the time talking about bands, one of the threads of our shared narrative being the band for which I once played guitar supporting the one for which he once played drums. Charlie has recently been in the studio with the Cosmic Rays for whom he presently plays drums. We talk about the album they've had pressed, and the new guitarist, and the old guitarist, and absent friends, and America. Junior has his picture taken with Charlie, but is otherwise suffering from stage fright. Bess later observes that for her the best part of the entire weekend was seeing the smile on my face as Charlie and I caught up.

He has to return to signing duties around six so the rest of the evening is mostly just bumming around and filling time for Bess and myself. Junior plays games on his iPad. At one point I step outside for a walk and buy an issue of NC Slammer from a gas station.

NC Slammer is a local newspaper comprising the mugshots of everyone arrested in the Wake County area presumably since the previous issue, giving names and reason for arrest - overdue library book to kiddie fiddling to mass murder and all points in between. The paper is divided into sections, grouping certain kinds of perp together. The Love Birds - Jail Birds section, for example, lists married couples who have been arrested together. This pair of doozies, reads one typical and dubiously grammatical entry, was arrested in Auburndale, FL for stalking and harassing their neighbors. And their neighbors' elderly parents. Tearing down their fence, putting up surveillance cameras, hollering out obscene insults, shining high intensity lights through their windows all night long. Threatening to kill their dog! and mug shots of the unhappy couple are inset into a pink love heart. A disclaimer runs along the foot of the page reading all suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty, just in case you had forgotten. I suppose if nothing else it brings comfort to angry shut-ins, at least confirming that the rest of us really are out to get them.

Who's paranoid now?

I take my copy of NC Slammer back to the hotel and show it to Bess.

'This is what your friends and relatives think America is like,' she sighs.

We begin the next morning with another walk. I've spoken to Charlie and it doesn't seem like we're going to get another chance to see him, as we suspected would probably be the case. He's committed to another day of dishing out autographs. He's now at the stage where certain fans even have his autograph tattooed onto their flesh. We step outside the hotel and see a sandwich board pertaining to this morning's signing session. Charlie and the bloke out of My Chemical Romance will be signing your shit at ten in such and such a building, it says. The building in question is across the other side of the square. Fans clutching copies of Walking Dead and Umbrella Academy are already lined up in their Frankenstein boots and black eyeliner. The queue is about three wide and maybe two-hundred feet long, and it is eight in the morning - two hours to go before the doors open.

'I guess Charlie's going to be busy today,' my wife observes.

We have a stroll in the crisp morning air - something we don't really get in Texas - and then we gather up the kid and get a taxi to the airport. The taxi driver is from Somalia and he spends the journey telling us about his country, which I find fascinating because he's giving us a positive spin in telling us about his family and so on, reminding me that the qualities of a person or a place are rarely the same as what we Americans have heard about them on the news - using we Americans here for the sake of argument.

We fly back to San Antonio.

I have seen my old friend, and I have seen how well he's done for himself. I have seen a different state of the country in which I now live. Junior has his shield and is still proclaiming 'shield bash!' every thirty minutes, throwing dramatic shapes for the benefit of an imaginary audience; and he has his signed copies of comics for himself, his dad, and his friend Duncan. In my diary I have noted:

These conventions seem significantly less macho than the ones I used to go to, and there are more little kids so the atmosphere seems less oppressively spotty and teenaged.

I still don't love fandom, and I still think adults who dedicate their entire existence to what is in essence escapist children's entertainment to the exclusion of everything else are fucking idiotic, and I still have nothing to say to the person whom comedian Louis CK described as a non-contributing product-sponge cunt; but the weekend has nevertheless opened my eyes. I shared an elevator with Captain America, and it's an encounter I will never forget.