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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then suddenly she's gone.

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

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

Alamo Heights Bike Tosser

No idea, but I guess this is what someone else's lousy day looked like.

It's already a lousy day, not least because we're in the middle of a global pandemic. Happily the pandemic hasn't made a great deal of difference to me, thus facilitating my irritation by inconveniences of lesser consequence.

The Lulu website through which I self-publish all sorts of things has had an upgrade, meaning that it no longer works and keeps forgetting my password. All morning I listen to my wife verbally wrestling with fellow programmers over an internet connection, now that she works from home, at least a couple of whom seem to know less about coding a webpage than I do. One of them routinely sets aside his designated tasks so as to concentrate on removing accidentally placed double spaces from lines of programming code, despite that a double space makes no difference to what the likes of you or I will eventually see on our screens. On other days he dedicates himself to highlighting different parts of code in different colours, supposedly for future reference by somebody or other, and my wife ends up having to finish off the work he was actually supposed to be doing. I've a feeling that the Lulu upgrade may have been coded by persons such as this. It doesn't work and half of the regular features are missing, but it looks like the British Airways site, and apparently that's what we really wanted all along.

Additionally, it's hot and windy out, which is a weird combination, and my ingrowing toenail - which has been fine since I was about sixteen - is playing up.

Anyway, I head out on my bike. Today I'm going to cycle to Bike World over on Broadway before I hit the trail. I've had the same tyres for a year, and the back one is bald, having covered something like five-thousand miles. I've already tried to purchase replacement tyres from Bike World, but they only had an ostentatious racing tyre in my size; so I'm trying again, and this time I'll simply ask them to order the fuckers if they don't have anything in stock. I'm trying to avoid using Amazon. I'm trying to support local business.

It's half past eleven in the morning and Bike World doesn't open until twelve, at which point they will allow just four people in the store at any one time. I lock up my bike and cross the road to Bird's Bakery, looking to get something to eat and to use up some time.

I examine the menu on the table set up outside. A woman comes out to take my order.

'I'll take a chicken sandwich,' I tell her.

She takes my card and goes back inside, then returns a couple of minutes later. 'I just figured I should let you know before I swipe your card, it will take about a quarter of an hour.'

'Fifteen minutes?'

'Yes.'

I look at my watch. I look at Bike World across the road, still shut. By the time the sandwich is ready, the store will be open, thus negating the entire fucking point of my buying the sandwich.

'Okay,' I sigh. 'Never mind.'

I wander up the road to the meat market but it doesn't seem like the sort of place which is likely to sell anything snacky.

I return to Bike World, and to three others who have arrived to wait in my absence, a young couple and an Alamo Heights Bike Tosser, a middle aged man who looks as though he's no stranger to the golf course and who regards himself as a better standard of person. He stands there with his mountain bike. I walk in front of him, pointedly unlock my own bike, then wheel it around so that I am now stood behind him.

'Sir,' says the younger guy who is here with his girlfriend, 'you were before us.' He gestures for me to come to the front of the queue.

'It's okay,' I say. 'There are four of us, and I don't mind so long as I don't end up waiting outside once they open.'

We all stand there for another few minutes.

The door opens and a bike dude emerges. He sees myself and  Alamo Heights Bike Tosser stood with our bikes. 'If you guys need repairs, you'll have to go to the double doors around the back.'

'I just need tyres,' I say.

Alamo Heights Bike Tosser says something which suggests that he has indeed brought his bike in for repair.

We wheel our bikes around to the back of the building, to the double doors as instructed. Because I was at the end of the queue, I am now first to get to the double doors, so I knock.

After another moment, the door opens and another bike dude pops his head out. He looks at me. 'Okay, how can we help?'

I look to Alamo Heights Bike Tosser. 'Didn't you need your bike taken in to the shop? Maybe if you're just getting it taken in…'

This is me being polite, having - so it turns out - misread the guy's needs. It's already been established that I was here first, so I hardly need to rub it in his face.

'Yeah,' he says to the Bike World guy, 'I'm going to need tubes and tyres, plus a rack too,' and off he goes with a list of all the stuff he intends to purchase. It seems that he's replacing everything on his bike except the frame.

The double doors close as the Bike World guy goes inside with Alamo Heights Bike Tosser's bike and long, long list of requirements.

We stand there in silence for a minute or two.

'Hell of a way to run a business,' says Alamo Heights Bike Tosser as though we're all in this together.

I wait another minute.

'Fuck it,' I say, walking off with my bike. 'I'll come back some other time, maybe when there are a few less cunts who want to go in front of me because they're more fucking important than I am.'

I say it loud so as to ensure that he will hear, and I take pleasure in doing so. My objection is poorly constructed, I know, but hopefully conveys just how much I dislike the man.

I cycle home. I was going to head out onto the trail but it's too hot and I'm too pissed off.

The Fence

When I first moved to America, my biggest moment of culture shock was - possibly oddly - to do with the fencing. In England we have brick walls or hedges around our gardens or yards, or stout wooden fencing of the kind against which a neighbour's child can kick a football for the best part of an afternoon to the rapturous delight of everyone within earshot. In America the default seems to be chain link fencing, which turns everything into a scene from Boyz n the Hood; so that no matter how nice one's garden may be, horticulturally speaking, you're always half expecting to see a ten-year old Ice Cube discovering a dead body in the alley at the back. They don't have chain link fencing in the better neighbourhoods but, on the other hand, the better neighbourhoods are mostly populated by people you wouldn't want as neighbours.

We know this because we have one living right next to us, an individual I'm naming Squidward for the sake of argument, a man who quite clearly wishes he lived in a better neighborhood. Our guess is that he was born into money with certain expectations but fucked up, obliging him to rent a place he can actually afford in these, his later years. He doesn't like cats, which is a shame, because we have fifteen of them along with a cat colony license, as approved by the city, which means we can have as many as we want. When he first kicked off, we very briefly entertained the idea of cat proof fencing which features an overhang at the top and keeps all of your cats in your own yard. We entertained the idea for as long as it took for us to notice how much that stuff would cost.

Then we saw that it was possible to buy the overhanging topper at a fraction of the price and attach it to an existing wooden fence so as to similarly prevent the daily feline exodus into Squidward's yard, there to deposit turd after turd after turd. This seemed a cheaper option but for the fact that we first needed a wooden fence to which the topper could be attached. We obtained quotes, one from Lowes, one from some other guy. The quote from Lowes suggested we would only be able to fence one side of our garden, specifically Squidward's side. The store representative told us that his guys would be able to work around the existing trees while ripping out the chain link and replacing it with wood to a height of six feet. He also warned us against hiring any old Chuck in a truck for the job. The other guy, who may actually have been called Chuck and who turned up in a truck, gave us the same quote for the same work except that he'd have to cut down all of the trees. We went with Lowes.

City and utility people came to check the ground for power lines, and then our garden was transformed into a building site for a couple of days. We hadn't told Squidward what we were doing. The fence was on our side of the property line meaning we were under no legal obligation to tell him anything, and that was part of the fun. The guys spent the first day cutting back tree limbs, pruning, and ripping up the existing fence, finishing up with a series of holes into which fence posts would be cemented. Next day, the fence started to go up.

From time to time we went outside to see how they were getting on, hoping Squidward hadn't been out there giving them any shit. Then we learned to our utter amazement, that his response to the sight of this fence springing up unannounced had been to additionally contract the guys to fence sections of his yard on the other side of his house, or rather the other side of the house he rents. This was sort of a relief, suggesting that Squidward endorsed the fence to some extent. We'd been expecting legal action, despite his having no leg to stand on, purely because he's a complete wanker whose mission in life seems to be a never ending quest for disappointment in the behaviour and actions of those around him. Typically, he was already starting to piss the workmen off, apparently being unable to decide what he actually wanted them to do. We watched them rolling their eyes as they muttered to each other while sawing and hammering.

Ever since Squidward snitched to Animal Control, he's been an elusive presence, and I get the impression that he's scared of us. Where once he seemed to be out in his garden all the fucking time, impossible to avoid and stripped to the waist with his pinched orange face and wrinkly tanning salon physique, suddenly he became scarce. Now, as the day drew near to its close, with the fencing mostly up, he was back in his garden and we could hear him giving instruction to the workmen. He wanted to know why he'd ended up with the ugly side of the fence, as he called it, the side with the horizontal beams to which the vertical slats are secured. He spoke to the workmen as persons of his kind tend to speak to all manual labourers, as people whose work will later be scrutinised so as to ensure they've done the job properly. He called them back to pick up stray bits of wood, to do a better job of trimming certain branches, and then complained about the soil they had moved when sinking the fence posts. We could hear him having a tantrum behind the fence, stomping around and muttering to himself.

Well, I suppose I'll just have to pick this up myself.

Later he was joined by Mrs. Squidward as he inspected the fence at the front. We'd always assumed the ordinarily reclusive Mrs. Squidward to be some silent, long-suffering observer to her partner's one man war of indignation against the rest of the street, but we could hear her questioning as to whether the cats would still be able to jump over this section of fence, suggesting she might not even know what cats are or understand how they work.

At length, it dawned on us. The Squidwards considered themselves the injured party due to their being better bred and therefore in the right. We were only doing our best to appease them, in our own admittedly ham-fisted way, which is why Squidward ended up with the ugly side of the fence, the fence we'd paid for and had built for him.

My wife took the guys some beers once they were done. We all understood each other very well regarding the neighbour. Squidward probably still believes the object of the fence is to keep cats out of his precious yard, or at least out of his landlord's precious yard. While we're keen to reduce the numbers for the obvious reason that we don't want our cats anywhere near the horrible cunt, the main reason for the fence is so we don't have to see his miserable orange ass; and we probably won't be bothering with the cat proofing toppers. There doesn't seem much point when the fence only runs down one side of our garden.

One week passes. I see him obsessively polishing a tiny mark on his beloved automobile, so I step outside, loudly announcing to my wife, 'I'm just going out to look at the grass,' but he scuttles away, and in any case the term grass, meaning informer or copper's narc is not widely understood in America.

Two weeks later as I'm coming back from the store, I hear him call. 'Hey, Lornce,' as he pronounces my name, clearly trying hard to sound casual. I ignore him. He's probably only calling because he sees that our driveway is empty. My wife is not at home and he seems to be terrified of her. He calls again but I have nothing to say to the cunt. I don't even look in his direction as I go around the side of the house and close the gate.

Golf

We're at La Gloria, down by the river. It's approximately Mexican, but due to the location caters mainly to braying pricks with too much money; so we have bits of farm machinery nailed to the walls for the sake of ambience, bottled beer or five billion varieties of marguerita, and the sort of fare which inevitably draws screeching twats who just love love love that num nummy numptious Mexican street food. Everything above head height is a television screen blasting out the game, the Dallas Cowboys legendary play off against the Dallas Cowboys or something of that general nature. Men in helmets and padding have grunting fights which last two seconds before we cut to five minutes of grinning salesmen discussing what just happened as though it matters.

I am here because my wife is here, and because Zara has just chucked in her job and is moving to Austin. There are a load of folks from the office so why not, I figured. I know some of them. We enter the bar and familiar faces mouth greetings which I don't hear due to the noise of the Dallas Cowboys legendary play off against the Dallas Cowboys, except for Hunter. I hear him fine. I had my fingers crossed in hope of his having stayed home, but no luck.

'Hey buddy!' he bellows like I'm some long lost pal, eyes big and deep like those of a needy hound, the kind which eventually tries to hump your leg. 'It's been a long time!'

That's because we don't actually know each other, which is in turn because we aren't friends due to having nothing in common besides very vaguely mutual friends, but I say, 'Sure.'

He's clearly been hoping I would show, and I don't like to think why. I'm trying to say hello to a few of the others, people I actually sort of know. 'So when we gonna party?'

'Huh?' I'm caught out. It's a truly weird question.

'You and me, we're gonna party!' There's something seriously creepy about the smile on his face. I'm trying not to think about what it could mean.

'No,' I state firmly. 'We're not. You don't know me. I don't party. That's all there is to it.'

'We're gonna party, buddy!'

'No, we aren't. You are mistaken.'

'We're gonna party.'

Maybe it's meth. Maybe it's booze. Maybe it's just Hunter.

Bess pulls me to a seat at the opposite end of the table, which is thankfully fourteen or fifteen feet in length with others from the office all packed around the circumference. We squeeze in between Bob and Santina. I wave distantly at Rowena.

Rowena arranged our wedding. Bess and I were married within a month of my arriving in America, although obviously we had known each other longer. It was just going to be a registry office, but Rowena said oh hell no, possibly whilst doing that cobra head wiggle made popular by disgruntled female guests on talk shows.

Oh no you di'nt, girlfriend.

So Rowena arranged it all, or most of it, or some of it. They all showed up at our house. Edi ordered cupcakes. Rowena made enchiladas, and the preacher was a friend of her husband - and her husband was Hunter; so that's how I know him.

Hunter and I stood out in the garden smoking. I was in a state akin to shellshock. I dislike crowds and it was my wedding day, or at least the day of the ceremony, the stuff you tend to remember. Hunter was simply entertained to meet an English dude.

Tonight it seems that he's back with Rowena, which is why he's here at La Gloria guzzling bottled beer. It's hard to keep track. She sticks with him because he's good with the kids and takes care of them while she's at work, and because he's so handsome.

Some weekends he disappears, just vanishes without a word and doesn't answer his phone. It's meth and hookers, and specifically pre-operative male to female transexual hookers, although apparently his thing is enemas, so maybe it doesn't quite count as sex, or at least not intercourse. You would probably have to ask Bill Clinton about that.

He usually resurfaces, regretting everything or regretting some of it. Someone told me that the deal with transexual hookers is a surprisingly common pendant to meth abuse, although I don't know if that's true. It's just a thing for Hunter, but everybody is a little bit curious, right? I mean, we all love to see that shit, don't we? This is usually the case for his defence as he swears never to succumb to temptation ever again, or at least not for another couple of weeks as it usually turns out. Once he came back claiming to have found God, and even made plans to train as a preacher.

We always wondered who Rowena's facebook posts were for, each time the fucker crawled back, and there he was doing a little dance while firing up the barbecue because baby, you so crazy, filmed on a phone with a string of hearts and hashtags, that man of mine. I guess the posts were for Rowena herself. One of these days she'll change the locks. One of these days she'll come to her senses.

Hunter grins at me from the far end of the table, mouthing something about a party which isn't going to happen because I don't really do parties and no-one is sticking a rubber tube up my bum, no matter how nicely they ask.

The football has changed to golf across the upper half of the room, and somehow it's still deafening.

'Really?' I mutter to Bess. 'Does anyone who isn't a complete wanker really give a shit about golf?'

Bob, who clearly gives a number of shits about golf picks up on the one word, my identification of his favourite sporting pastime. He leans over and begins to tell us about golf, and about playing on courses in Scotland, which is of obvious interest to me because I was born somewhere near there; but it's still a better proposition than the one with the meth and a length of rubber tubing.

Desesperación

Once again it's market day. We loaded up the car last night and we're heading out to a spot where we'll set up our canopy, table and a couple of chairs. We will be attempting to sell our stuff to complete strangers - Bess's painted rocks and my canvases. Usually that means it's Saturday and we're heading for Mission Plaza, but today is Friday and we have a pitch at the Desesperación Community Centre*. It's their annual peace market, as it's called, a three day event, Friday to Sunday with a 9AM start; and it's a benefit for the LGBT community. We haven't even got started and somehow it already feels like work, but we're telling ourselves this is simply because it's something different and we've grown so used to the set up at Mission Plaza.

Some people make thousands of dollars over the three days of the festival, we've been told. We usually pull in about forty at the Mission, and that's entirely my wife because no-one can afford my paintings, relatively cheap though they may be. Mission Plaza is on the south side, which isn't really where the money is, but I'm personally not too bothered. People seem happy just to see my paintings and that works for me; but it bothers Bess, which is why we're here at Desesperación, which is fancier and is therefore patronised by overmoneyed Alamo Heights types looking to offset their economic footprint with something cute, ethnic, and preferably hand crafted.

The street is closed off for the market. We park at the Bill Miller barbecue place, which is opposite the Community Center. It's still early and there are only a couple of other vehicles in the parking lot. They surely won't mind and we can move the car elsewhere once we're unloaded. Between us, it takes two trips, fifty yards between the car and the spot which has been reserved in our name, Bess and Lawerence scribbled on the curbstones in chalk, my name spelled with a vestigial e. The first trip is punctuated by some Desesperación official letting us know we'll have to move the car once we've unloaded because Bill Miller is likely to get pissy.

Yes, we know.

The second trip is more complicated. I'm carrying an easel and a case full of paints whilst pulling a wheeled carrier containing Bess's rocks, one of those things with an extending handle. I have eight house bricks piled precariously on top of the wheeled carrier and I'm pulling it along with great care over the uneven pavement so as not to dislodge them. We're on grass at Mission Plaza where everything can be pinned down with stakes so as to prevent it blowing away, but here we're on asphalt so we've picked up a stack of bricks from Lowes with which to weigh everything down.

I'm pulling the wheeled carrier along the pavement at the back of stalls which have already set up and I come to a power line, a thick length of cable duct-taped to the ground. I'm having trouble getting the tiny plastic wheels over the thing. Someone more important than myself, whose time is more precious, dances around me so as to get past, obliging me to manoeuvrer, spilling my house bricks across the pavement. There are eight bricks in total and three of them smash in half.

'Thanks a lot,' I call out to the important person. 'That's great!'

I lift the wheeled carrier over the power line, gather up the bricks and the pieces of bricks, and eventually get to where Bess has already got our canopy set up.

She heads off to move the car.

I bolt things together and unpack more stuff.

We're next to a guy selling bead jewellery similar to the Huichol crafts you see in Mexico. The guy opposite has silver jewellery. To our left is the end of the street where they're setting up a stage and a PA. Ours is the stall nearest to the stage. Somehow I'm having a tough time feeling positive about any of this.

Behind us is the building of the Desesperación Community Centre, some sort of converted warehouse. There are two floors and a number of rooms within, presently all occupied by other traders. Some of them have come from Mexico, places such as Malinalco and Oaxaca, and these are the people who reputedly pull in thousands of dollars over the weekend selling art, crafts, clothing, jewellery, and delivering what they refer to as Aztec Horoscopes - which I'm not touching with a fucking bargepole. I've spent a lot of time up to the eyeballs in the Mexican Tonalpohualli calendar over the years, and I don't like to see it repackaged as a money spinning one size fits all new age nick-nack.

As with Mission Plaza, we don't have to pay for our pitch, but unlike Mission Plaza, Desesperación wants a cut of whatever we make. Bess and myself had our name down for a ten foot street pitch, which means they'll want 35% of our takings at the end of the day, assuming we sell anything. Smaller pitches were available for a lesser percentage, but we needed ten feet for the canopy because we don't want to take chances with the weather. Indoor pitches will be obliged to cough up 40% of their takings.

This was explained to us during the induction which we attended on Tuesday evening. First we had to apply, showing examples of our work because they don't want anything too shit lowering the tone. Having been accepted, we came to the induction hosted by four of the organisers, three young women and an older one, a Matriarch in traditional Oaxacan dress. The young women were like of the kind who, you know, when they talk they're all like ermahgerd this and, you know, ermahgerd that, and they're all like giggling and stuff and like they don't know words and everything they say sounds like a question, which didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence. The Matriarch - whom I shall call Ermintrude for the sake of both convenience and insult - had horrible hair and nasty shoes, although it was Bess who noticed this second detail. She seemed officious and humourless, like an unforgiving school teacher. I hated her upon sight and immediately understood that this was all a terrible idea. She put me in mind of the definition of a false wise man recorded by Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún in the late sixteenth century.

The false wise man, like an ignorant physician, a man without understanding, claims to know about God. He has his own traditions and keeps them secretly. He is a boaster, vanity is his. He makes things complicated; he brags and exaggerates. He is a river, a rocky hill.

Ermintrude immediately struck me as a woman who makes things complicated. The induction rambled on for far longer than seemed necessary on the topic of how it was going to be. Here's what we were going to do. Thanksgiving was coming up so there would be all that leftover food, and maybe we could bring it along to help feed the volunteers. In fact, maybe we could just take a day out to fix tacos for them, and don't worry about making too many, and we should advertise the market on all of our social media platforms. Everything was about what we could do for Desesperación, rules we should observe so as to keep ourselves from getting in the way or becoming a nuisance, how we were to pay the money we owed at the end of each day, how to sign our contracts…

Never trust a hippy, I thought darkly to myself. Anyone who projects their inner serenity with that much emphasis is invariably overcompensating for something, usually their inner Heinrich Himmler.

Yet here we are, because they had us sign a contract, and there has to be an upside to anything with that much small print. Maybe I'll sell a ton of paintings.

I wander around before the crowds start to thicken, checking out the other stalls. It's mostly clothing and jewellery, some animalitos,  muertitos and the like. The art is mostly decent, but nothing I'd want to buy, nor anything which makes me feel uncomfortable about my asking for eighty dollars a canvas - price adjusted so as to account for Desesperación wetting its beak every time we make a sale. One stall has a typically inept painting of the Joker and his girlfriend, Harley Quinn on sale. So much for filtering out those who might lower the tone.

It's ten, and the crowds begin to arrive. A group from the Centro Cultural Aztlan are engaged in a ceremony at the end of the street, four of them in approximately traditional Mexican dress chanting, saluting the four cardinal points, greeting the sun, and asking Ipalnemoani to bless the craft market. They also mention Huitzilopochtli a couple of times, which seems a little incongruous given his famed penchant for human sacrifice on a massive scale. The incense burning in their censer is cedar rather than copal, as it probably should be, and it feels hokey. Next, a Tejano band start up on the stage, effectively drowning out any attempts at conversation we might make. Tejano is a traditional fusion of country, Mexican music, and Bavarian oompah bands with particular emphasis on accordion. In between songs, our accordion player introduces himself as being in some way related to Flaco Jiménez, a local Tejano boy made good who was won awards for his accordion playing in some peculiarly specific capacity like fastest, loudest, or most annoying. I have nothing against Tejano music, but I prefer narcocorrido - a variant which celebrates the deeds of various drug lords - and I'm not crazy about the volume. The band play about a million songs, all of which sound more or less the same to me, and then on comes our compère. She resembles a hybrid of Yoko Ono and a Hispanic version of Toni Arthur who used to present Play School back in the old country. She smiles like it hurts, and it seems as though she's addressing an audience of small children. She screeches and her speech is seasoned with ill-fitting phrases borrowed from rap. She introduces people as being in the house, asks that we give it up for them, and so on. She is exhausting to watch.

Now it seems that Ermintrude is in the house, so we give it up for her. Ermintrude repeats some of what she told us at the induction. The thrust of her speech is that as we approach Christmas, maybe we shouldn't be giving our money to the multinationals who are destroying the Earth, but instead opt to ethically spunk away all that lovely lolly on independent traders, such as those gathered here today. Desesperación raised a million dollars last year, and the city matched that sum with a further million, and now - maybe if we really make an effort - we can raise another million for Desesperación over the coming days. Ermintrude is kind of vague on what this money is for.

'We save buildings,' she explains. 'We campaign for preservation orders. You know, we have many beautiful historic buildings in San Antonio, and that's partially thanks to our campaigning work. Also, last year we fought the city when they wanted to raise taxes to pay for a new pipeline for the water system, although we lost that one.'

Given that San Antonio's water and sewage system is in famously poor shape, I'm not sure how I feel about Ermintrude's apparent attempt to preserve its state of historic disrepair; and a few more taxes to keep us from turning into Flint, Michigan doesn't seem an unreasonable proposition. Furthermore, I realise that in all this time I haven't heard a single fucking word about the LGBT community for whom we are supposedly raising funds. Mostly it's been about our money and how we can help out. At one point I go to take a piss, and pinned to the walls of the rest room are flyers with DONATE in bold letters.

Never trust a hippy.

The Tejano group is followed by a mariachi performance, a band backing an elderly female singer in flamboyant dress who prowls the makeshift stage as though about to drag one of those nice young men off into the bushes. Her voice is unfortunately a shrill screech and far from seductive.

Then there's another elderly woman wearing an unusual amount of makeup and lamenting mislaid love, after which it all blends into an endless conversation stopping racket which has made its home at the end of the street, punctuated only by further announcements of who is now in the house along with requests that we either make some noise or give it up for them.

I've bought my easel, oil paints and a freshly prepared canvas, because I had a feeling this was going to be one fuck of a long day, and it's not even eleven. Seven hours to go. I set to painting the tree on the opposite side of the street, incorporating elements of the revolving sign of the Bill Miller restaurant. Within minutes my view is blocked by people watching the band, but never mind. I do what I can, pushing paint around the canvas until it looks like it's in more or less the right place.

The mariachi performance is followed by Yoko Arthur screeching and telling us who else is in the house, then drawing a few raffle tickets. Each trader was asked to provide an example of their best work to be given away as prizes in the raffle. Bess gave them one of her painted rocks. I didn't give them anything.

The Centro Cultural Aztlan people are back, reborn as a rap group. This time there are two of them along with a woman playing a flute, rapping to a backing track of hip-hop beats. It sounds okay, and they're lyrically pretty tight; but as with the ceremony, it feels too much like an impersonation and not enough like that which it aspires to impersonate. Generic ad libs asking where my people be at? and the like don't really help.

We're right here, I suppose.

Next is a woman named Azul. She sings and plays vihuela, and is backed by an approximation of a mariachi group. She tells us her music draws from the traditions of Veracruz on the Mexican gulf coast. It reminds me of Tarascan music and is happily lacking the oompah of Tejano. It's the best thing we've heard so far by some margin. Of course, I still find something to annoy me - there's a woman sat at the front in a turquoise shirt, late fifties, bit of a spare tire with the face of a librarian. She is lost in music. Her arms sway slowly in the air as she snaps her fingers. Her head is back and her eyes are closed in rapture. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone look quite so smug. She is every social worker I've ever met, and only now do I realise she's been doing the chair dance all fucking morning, just sat there being a spirit demonstrably more free than the rest of us. I never realised there was a female equivalent to the dance famously done by dads at weddings, but now I've seen it with my own eyes.

I paint the tree and Bess sells rocks.

Yoko Arthur returns, now treating us to a full screeching half hour of what seems to be either a one-woman play or performance poetry which outstays its welcome. Her voice swoops up and down as she describes the trauma of childhood jealousy. She wanted the Commodore 64, but they gave her a ballerina doll seeing as how she was a girl and all. Gender stereotyping is a bad scene. Her brother got the computer, but she isn't bitter because she saw the alien. It was in her room one night, like the aliens you always hear about with the bald heads and big eyes and everything. It blinked at her and was definitely real, and that was better than having a Commodore 64.

'Who the fuck is this for?' I ask Bess.

She shrugs and sells another rock to someone.

Yoko Arthur concludes her performance and we give it up for her, and then for another poet who is now in the house. This one seems a little nervous as she takes the microphone and informs us that this is a poem about when she had uterine cancer.

Death sits at a desk and in my uterus, she explains, and I'm so astonished that I jot the phrase down in my notebook. It was actually the doctor who diagnosed her cancer sat at the desk, but that's poetry for you. This poem just keeps on going like a more depressing Energizer Bunny™, becoming bleaker and ever more bereft of light by the minute. It's all we can do to not laugh.

I purchase beer and tacos from upstairs, and the music resumes, more Tejano, more horseshit, and then the world's most efficiently workmanlike blues band. The bass player used to be in Question Mark and the Mysterians who had a massive hit with 96 Tears. This doesn't mean a lot to me because I preferred the Eddie & the Hot Rods version.

I paint.

Bess sells rocks.

The woman in turquoise is still doing her dance, such as it is, arms in the air, fingers snapping, moves requiring nothing which formally acknowledges rhythm.

'Now she is why people voted for Trump,' I tell my wife.

I come back to the painting from time to time. I can't tell if it's any good. Bess swears that it is, but then she usually does. It feels like we've been here for at least a week.

Yoko Arthur introduces yet more people as being in the house.

I paint.

A little girl goes crazy over a small canvas my wife has decorated with a mandala, first asking that my wife sign it, then to have her picture taken with the artist.

'Now that has made it all worth while,' Bess explains happily.

Hours drag past.

My painting begins to look kind of okay.

It gets dark and I still haven't sold a single canvas, not that I'm hugely bothered. I pack up my paints.

'I'm going to take this stuff to the car, okay?'

The car is in the parking lot of San Antonio College, not actually a whole lot further than Bill Miller.

I return and it's twenty to six. Bess starts to pack away her rocks.

'You can't pack away yet.' Ermintrude appears from nowhere to deliver the warning like we're naughty children. 'You have to wait until six.'

'Sure. Whatever.'

We wait until six, and I tell Bess to leave the packing up to me. She has to take our receipts to the office so they can work out how much we owe them, and the queue is already long.

I pack things away. Bess returns after about forty-five minutes. She is strangely quiet as we carry our stuff back to the car.

'Are you okay?' I ask.

'Fine,' she grunts. 'Tired.'

We no longer even need to have the conversation about whether we're coming back tomorrow. We signed contracts stating that we would, but the penalty of breaking the contract is that we won't get invited back next year. Boo hoo.

We drive to a branch of Jim's. We're tired and hungry.

Bess tells me that we took $130 - which was all her rocks. The Desesperación people looked at our receipts and reckoned it was $133, by which point Bess no longer cared enough to argue. They said that we owed them 25% of our takings because we had actually been given an eight foot rather than the full ten foot pitch. Bess said she wasn't bothered and that we'd signed a contract to pay 35%, and in any case she'd already written out a check for $53.20, that being 35% of $133. They said we owed $54 because they had rounded it up. Having stood in a queue for three quarters of an hour, Bess threw a dollar bill at the woman and told her to keep the change.

We eat and we leave a tip.

The knowledge that we won't be returning tomorrow, that we've managed to reclaim our weekend from Ermintrude and the forces of evil is a feeling so wonderful that it has left us almost lost for words.

Never again.

*: Names changed because I've no doubt they have some really mellow and tuned-in lawyer ready to destroy the lives and empty the bank accounts of anyone who might be legally proven responsible for a bad vibe.

Pest

According to my diary, it was Sunday the 15th of February, 1998. I took my four channel Tandy mixer around to Ed's house, along with a couple of effects boxes - graphic equaliser, compressor, that sort of thing. It was a pretty basic set up, but I expected it would do the job, even though the actual details of what the job would entail were unclear. Ed was in a group called Attack Wave Pestrepeller, an improvised noise thing, and on this particular Sunday they were going to improvise noise in Ed's kitchen accompanied by a group of madrigal singers. No-one quite knew how it was going to work, or if it was going to work; but the singers seemed keen on the idea, and if anyone had grounds for reservations it would have been them, given that Pestrepeller probably weren't going anywhere near the Figgy Pudding song.

I knew Ed because we'd both been involved with small press comics publishing, and then discovered further common ground in weirdy music of the kind which often prompts witless twats to opine I wondered when they was gunna finish tuning up. Ed's enthusiasm extended to his publishing a magazine called The Sound Projector, and he roped me in to write for it, although most of what I came up with now makes me wince. Ed and I had recorded together, and I gather he had formed the impression of my knowing my way around a mixing console, which I do; and additionally he had this band with Harley, another cartoonist, and Savage Pencil.

My introduction to music beyond the Beatles and whatever shit Dave Lee Travis was playing that week had been facilitated back in February 1980 when I started buying Sounds music paper on a weekly basis. By far my favourite regular features of the paper were the tangential cartoon strips drawn by lil' Alan Moore under an assumed name, and Savage Pencil's superb Rock 'n' Roll Zoo, which probably changed the entire course of my life. Rock 'n' Roll Zoo was hilarious, vicious, amazing, fucking stupid, resembled a drug-addled scrawl, and couldn't be arsed to come up with a punchline half of the time; and I would probably still be hailing Savage Pencil as the greatest cartoonist of his generation had I never had the misfortune to meet the miserable fucker. As of Sunday the 15th of February, 1998, I was yet to meet the miserable fucker, and was therefore understandably excited to find myself in the immediate orbit of someone whose work I'd admired to the point of adoration.

Despite being mildly starstruck, I managed to contain my enthusiasm when introduced to Mr. Pencil who, after all, was really just some bloke Ed knew. I refrained from explaining how oh darn - my tail's fallen off again had probably been the greatest punchline in the history of graphic arts, or how he was probably directly responsible for my ever bothering to draw comics in the first place, because it would have been undignified and I didn't want to embarrass the guy. On the other hand, maybe that's what he actually wanted. It was difficult to tell. He was this little bloke, kind of rounded with a massive, grey beard and eyes suggesting sleepless nights - the self-made grumpy hamster of outsider art. He didn't look particularly happy and he didn't say much, at least not to me.

He had a Moog synth so I plumbed that into my mixer, then added Ed's Hammond organ - or whatever it was - and then Harley's guitar, assuming I correctly recall that he was playing a guitar; and there was a single microphone for the madrigal group at the other end of the kitchen. It was going to be chaotic, and my job was to attempt to maintain some sort of balance. The internet describes it thus:

Savage Pencil conceived the idea of combining the fearsome noise of Attack Wave Pestrepeller with the voices of madrigal singers. The idea was to combine two different sounds, but also two different approaches to making music; the singers, who could sight-read music, would be forced to improvise and sing without sheet music to guide them. The idea was tested in Ed's London kitchen, causing maximum distress to the neighbours for long, painful hours. The five singers struggled to be heard over a cacophony of feedback, organ drones and bitter grunts from Sav's Rogue Moog synth, although the handheld tape recordings of the sessions magically extracted the true essence of the event.

I'm thanked on The Cruel Sea, the CDR they released of the recording, although not thanked in the specific sense of having been involved. The magic which somehow just came about, perhaps as a sort of interference pattern resulting from the proximity of such fucking massive talents all in the same place, was, I might argue, essentially down to me keeping Savage Pencil's synth at the same volume, despite his turning the fucking thing up a notch every time I brought him down, so as to allow whatever the others were doing to be heard. Bizarrely, the Pencil seemed to appreciate this.

'He's very good, isn't he?' I heard him mutter to one of the others, marking my apparent graduation from just some cunt Ed knew to a person who is able to do things. It would have been nice for this to have been acknowledged in the above account. I feel somewhat sidelined by the suggestion that what you hear on The Cruel Sea occurred just by agency of some crazy magic, but never mind.

Anyway, we all went to the pub, because that was what we did in those days. The neutral environment seemed like it might be more conducive to conversation with my sullen hero, but it wasn't to be. I spoke to his wife, who was lovely and possibly long suffering. I spoke to himself and he ignored me. Being two decades past, I can no longer recall what I said, but it was almost certainly something safe, possibly something about the synth he had brought along, but he nevertheless ignored me. I made two or three direct addresses, at least one of which was tagged onto some utterance from elsewhere across the table. In each instance he looked directly at me for just a moment, then spoke to someone else, mostly prolonged name dropping from what I could hear. His voice took on the world weary drawl of a retired colonel or some jazz wanker. 'Yes… that was when I went to Los Angeles to interview the Grateful Dead...'

Realisation dawned upon me that for all his talent, the cunt wasn't actually worth talking to, and that contrary to assumptions, I wasn't amongst friends.

This is why you should never meet your heroes, I told myself.

They always turn out to be arseholes.

Every fucking time.

Then I count all of the heroes of mine whom I've met, some of whom I now count as friends, or at least chummy acquaintances, and I realise they don't always turn out to be arseholes.

It was just him.

Generic Internet Argument

Maybe they do, or maybe they don't, so I respectfully suggest it probably depends on which bears you're talking about. Wikipedia defines woodland as low-density forest forming open habitats with plenty of sunlight and limited shade. Taking the trouble to look on Googlemaps, even a five-year old will be able to see that the nearest ecosystems conforming to Wikipedia's definition of woodland from the Chicago Bears Soldier Field football stadium are either Grant Park to the north, or the southern limits of Ping Tom Memorial Park. Both are about a mile from the stadium, so you're telling me that Jay Cutler - who is currently worth forty-million dollars - is expected to travel up to a mile from the stadium during practice or even a game in order to take a shit, because as you quite clearly imply with your rhetorical question, Jay Cutler, quarterback for the Chicago Bears defecates exclusively in woodland. Your proposition makes no provision for his bowels to be emptied in any place besides woodland, and whilst you may well find the argument upsetting or possibly trivial, I am simply restating what you have written. If you don't like that, it isn't really my problem. Maybe you should think about what you're saying before you hit submit.

An article posted on the CBS Chicago website dated December 30th, 2012 states:

After the renovation in 2003, Soldier Field definitely isn’t lacking when it comes to facilities. It has doubled the number of restrooms and ensured that each facility is compliant to ADA standards by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Every single restroom is fully equipped with baby changing stations and there are fourteen family restrooms throughout the stadium. Solder Field prides itself on being a green facility complete with recycling and energy-conservative initiatives. Restrooms at Soldier Field are equipped with state-of-the-art Dyson Airblade hand dryers which replaced the paper towel system. The result is an abundance of family-friendly restrooms that are clean and efficient for the 63,000 people who visit the stadium for a Chicago home game.

Nevertheless, when Jay Cutler needs to pinch off a loaf, rather than avail himself of any of the available restroom facilities of the stadium which - as I have demonstrated - are extensive, he simply has no option but to travel a distance of just under a mile along South Lake Shore Drive to Grant Park where he takes to the trees, drops his pants, and then produces a stool presumably in full view of anyone else who happens to be making use of the park's facilities at that time? Chicago law has this to say on the subject:

No person shall urinate or defecate on the public way, or on any outdoor public property, or on any outdoor private property.  Except as otherwise provided in subsection (b), any person who violates this section shall be fined not less than $100.00 nor more than $500.00, or shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than five days nor more than ten days or by both such fine and imprisonment.

(b) Any person who violates this section while within 800 feet of a parade route which is not open to traffic shall be fined not less than $500.00 nor more than $1,000.00 or shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than five days nor more than ten days or by both such fine and imprisonment. For purposes of this section, the term “parade” has the meaning ascribed to the term in Section 10-8-330 of this Code.

I've looked for a clause excepting Chicago Bears players but I can't seem to find one. Funny that, because you have quite clearly described their toiletry preferences to me, and those preferences are exclusively limited to outdoor facilities of low-density forest forming open habitats with plenty of sunlight and limited shade.

That's what you're saying? That's what you're telling me?

I'm writing this whilst sat at the computer with a window to my left, and through that window I have a good view of the eastern edge of Gilcrest Park which covers approximately thirty-two acres and is heavily wooded on our side. I have lived in this house and made use of the computer in this room since September, 2002, and do you know how often I've seen Jay Cutler parking up on Lafayette Highway and then vanish into the trees in order to take a shit? I have not seen that happen once, and nor have I seen any other persons playing for or otherwise representing the Chicago Bears engage in this deed which you seem to insist occurs with such frequency. Perhaps it was simply that I was looking away at the time of the defecatory action in question. I mean there are twenty-four hours in a day, and I sleep for at least six or seven, then I am at the computer for no more than ten leaving a massive eight hour window during which Jay Cutler can pop along and just curl one off as he pleases without my noticing, so obviously that must be what's happening because you say it is, and you obviously know everything.

As for the Pope's alleged Catholicism - nice straw man, but I'm not even going to touch that one.

The Award-Winning Author

I knew the award-winning author long before he was an award-winning author. We were at college together and were briefly friends. He bequeathed me a stack of issues of Doctor Who magazine and then moved away. We wrote to each other, but our correspondence was difficult to maintain for some reason.

Three decades later I encounter his first novel in a book shop. 'Fuck,' I exclaim to myself. 'I know that guy!'

We re-establish communications through social media. I've already read his novel, because it would have been rude to get back in touch without having done so. Also, I was initially worried I might not like the book, so I wanted to get that out of the way in the event of my needing to come up with elaborately diplomatic reasons to avoid direct discussion of his having become an award-winning author.

The problem is that I dislike steampunk. At my most unforgiving I would characterise steampunk literature as a conservative genre tailored to those who don't actually enjoy reading books, but who like the idea of themselves as people who read books, and who see the measure of a good book as whether it gets made into a television series or a film, or at the very least whether it can be pictured as such in one's mental cinema screen whilst reading. They are people who like to read about familiar characters having adventures, just like that Sherlock Holmes on the telly; and so steampunk literature strikes me as prioritising style over content - in my possibly limited experience. Like anything which needs to quantify the limitless expanse of its imagination, which promises anything can happen with wide sparkly eyes and the smile of Johnny Depp in yet another shitty Tim Burton film, it is repetitive and characteristically lacks range or variation from a central theme.

The above paragraph represents a view pushed to an extreme, and there are always exceptions to the rule, but my general opinion is to be found somewhere therein; excepting novels by Michael Moorcock - which are generally wonderful - and maybe a few other things, Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright and the like. For me, the term steampunk conjures a million self-published eBooks, generic thrills and laboured titles delineating the most fantastical and diverting escapades of two names; because it's always a hero and his sidekick, just like on the telly - Holmes & Watson, Burton & Swinburne, Newbury & Hobbes, Grace & Witherbloom, Arseworth & Tabernacle*: ripping yarns all. C'mon chaps, let's all pull on our jolly old plus-fours and fire up the difference engine, what? The stuff practically writes itself.

Words therefore seem inadequate to express the sense of relief I experience when the award-winning author's effort turns out to be decent and entirely free of the worst clichés of the genre, thus sparing me the ignominy of having to say well, it's not really my sort of thing but I can see that you put in a lot of hard work. Were more steampunk novels of such quality, I might never have formed quite such caustic opinions as those expressed above; and I decide it's not difficult to see why the award-winning author won the award which qualifies him as an award-winning author.

I've written a short series of eBooks, the award-winning author tells me, just something I can stick on Amazon to bring in a bit of money on the side, and I need you to draw the covers. How much do you generally charge?

Fifty quid, I tell him, because that's how much I generally charge. In all honesty, I don't particularly enjoy painting book covers unless I'm fairly directly invested in the novel. Most of my energy goes into writing these days, and my eyes are failing so the production of cover artwork is no longer quite such a pleasant undertaking as was once the case. Fifty quid is, by the way, one sixth of the standard charge for the sort of cover artwork I do.

The award-winning author seems disgruntled, reminding me that he is an award-winning author and that this will be good exposure for my artwork. He requires cover illustrations in the general spirit of a Victorian periodical. I supply preliminary sketches of the two characters - the hero and his sidekick who are to have adventures in this proposed series of eBooks - but the award-winning author doesn't like what I have done. After a few revisions, I give up and go back to working on some novel or other. It doesn't seem worth the trouble and I don't want us to fall out.

In any case, the award-winning author has other fish to fry, notably his website. He's having trouble with how it displays on different devices. My wife offers to help out, it being her field, but leaves him to it after a day or so. He seems to want his website to be able to perform actions which simply don't work in certain browsers, and my wife has the impression he's been getting pissy with her.

Never mind.

She doesn't want to fall out with my friend, the award-winning author either. He posts pictures of his children on facebook and they're cute.

I finish my novel, Against Nature, and it's published by Obverse Books. I send a copy of the eBook version to the award-winning author seeing as how we're both authors - even though only one of us has won awards - and we're both writing variations on science-fiction, and we're buddies from way back.

How critical do you want me to be? he asks.

I'm a little bothered by this. Some sort of feedback would be nice, but I'm not seeking career advice, even though he's an award-winning author. This is 2013, and I presume he never reads it because my novel is never mentioned again.

The award-winning author is writing something new, something which isn't steampunk, because he doesn't wish to be seen as a one-trick pony. He sends me twenty or thirty chapters of the unfinished work and asks that I criticise it as thoroughly and brutally as possible. This is difficult because there's not much wrong with it, and it is by far the best thing he has ever written. During our exchanges he tells me that anyone who does not want their work to be read by as wide an audience as possible cannot call themselves a writer. This is bullshit, so much so that it almost makes me laugh. I'm beginning to realise why we lost touch three decades before.

The greatest writer I know in person is Ted Curtis. His writing shits over the work of most authors I've read, including the award-winning ones, and his novel The Darkening Light is available through Lulu, the print-on-demand publisher by which I publish some of my own stuff. I don't know how many people have read The Darkening Light. It could be hundreds, but it could be about ten, and I don't know how much Ted really cares. Bulletpoint lists defining who is allowed to call themselves a writer therefore mean nothing to me.

In April 2016 my wife and I attend a Night in Old San Antonio, part of our city's annual Fiesta celebrations, an event in which attendees are invited to drink until they can't stand whilst stuffing their faces. I stuff my face with a particularly messy taco and my wife takes a photograph of me as I tilt my head back and feed strips of beef and chilli into my face. She posts it on facebook for a joke, because I look ridiculous and amusingly bereft of dignity. The award-winning author makes a copy of the photograph for a joke and crops it so as to focus upon my fat face tilted back to receive beef, for a joke. He is digging me in the ribs and grinning, figuratively speaking, for a joke.

Okay, I think to myself, not quite sure how I feel about this or the amount of pleasure everyone seems to derive from just how ridiculous I look. Three decades ago I recall the award-winning author as having a particularly cutting sense of humour even before he was an award-winning author. He broke the ice by taking the piss out of me, for a joke, and it was so funny that I couldn't help but appreciate the craft involved, and it seems that he has not changed in this respect.

Human dustbin, exclaims a relative I have met just once, I love it! It's a jocular punch on the arm at the end of a drunken evening, well-intentioned but somehow misjudged coming from someone I don't actually know that well; and I really dislike being referred to as a human dustbin.

The award-winning author sends messages to make sure I realise that any acerbic comments on his part conceal no malice, and that the fact of our being back in touch represents one of the great wonders of the internet. He is really glad to know me and regrets his behaviour at college. I don't actually remember his behaviour at college, whatever it was.

My wife compliments the award-winning author's children again because she responds to anything which is cute. You must bring them to the States, she suggests, so I can mollycoddle them.

My children will never set foot in the United States, the award-winning author informs her as preamble to comments on US gun laws which are why his children will never set foot in the United States.

'I was complimenting his kids,' she later tells me, upset and bewildered. 'What did I do to deserve a lecture on gun laws?'

She unfollows the award-winning author on facebook, meaning that his status messages will no longer appear in her feed.

Finally, I post a photograph of a stray kitten found in our garden. I post the photograph because the kitten is cute. The photograph shows myself holding the kitten, my face down-turned as I look at the tiny creature. It's not a great photograph of me, and I don't consider myself particularly photogenic.

The award-winning author shares this view. I so need to photoshop the cat out of the pics and a caption: The bells! The bells!, he writes, the implication being that I resemble the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I chuckle and roll my eyes because it's true. It's not a great picture of me. I know it.

Unsure as to whether I've quite grasped the full import of his joke, the award-winning author makes a copy of the photograph, for a joke, and alters it using photoshop so that I appear to be cradling a human brain rather than a kitten, for a joke. He tags me so that when posted, the photograph appears on my facebook page with the caption Master, I have the brain!, now implying that I resemble Ygor, the lumpy servant of Victor Frankenstein in the Universal horror movies, for a joke, I suppose just in case I hadn't quite understood the initial Hunchback of Notre Dame reference, for a joke. It pisses me off a little, which is I suppose part of the joke.

The relative who described me as a human dustbin, for a joke chips in with oohh my brain hurts!!, for a joke, and I can't help notice that despite all we might hypothetically seem to have in common and all which we might discuss, he mostly responds to photographs in which I look ridiculous, for a joke.

Let he who remains photogenic past the age of fifty cast the first photoshopped stone, I comment, hoping to communicate that I don't really enjoy having comedy antlers stuck to my head whilst being set to dance upon a heated metal plate. The award-winning author points out that some of us haven't been photogenic since the age of five, which makes it okay because I'm just some grumpy cunt with no sense of humour.

Then people I've never even met, friends of the award-winning author, take to chipping in with contributions of their own. Well done, Ygor, one of them remarks, for a joke, showing us that he gets the reference by more or less just repeating the initial joke, for a joke.

I don't really enjoy people I don't know having a laugh at my expense in this way, and I am so upset that I am unable to sleep at night. It throws me out for the rest of the week.

I unfollow the award-winning author on facebook. I no longer want to think about him or his award-winning novels.

That same week I find one of them in a branch of Half-Price. It's one I haven't read, and I guess one I will probably never read. I've now read four of his, and he never even mentioned the eBook version of Against Nature I sent him back in 2013.

Fuck him.

*: Excepting Sherlock, these are mostly pairings plucked from the internet as representative of a general trend, and their being referenced in this rant should not necessarily be considered reflective of the literary merits of the works in which they feature which, for all I know, may well be fucking amazing.

Atheist Heaven

Atheist Heaven was what I should have renamed the internet bulletin board for which I served as administrator a few years ago. It was Carl's suggestion. We were speaking on the telephone and I could hear him struggling to breath as he rocked with silent laughter at the notion of Atheist Heaven. I liked it because it was funny and I knew it would annoy the more humourless members of the board. In the end they went for Thinking Universe, adopting a banner which showed an image of a spiral galaxy embellished with a thought bubble like you might see in a Popeye cartoon. It wasn't the worst name they could have come up with, but I thought the banner revealed a certain lack of imagination. Look, the universe is having a think!, which caused me to have a think about 1970s pub rock bands releasing albums with hopelessly literal artwork - the cover of Rockin' in the Jungle inevitably depicting band members going at their instruments in safari suits or else dressed as gorillas against a backdrop of plastic palm trees.

I'd resisted the internet for many years, but took the plunge around the beginning of 2006 after protracted nagging from my girlfriend. She didn't have internet access but wanted a relationship with someone who did - she explained testily - so as to save her the trouble of using the computers up at the library. She promised that my proposed internet access would give her a reason to visit me, which was of course very flattering.

At the time my principle interests were Mesoamerica and, to a lesser extent, science, so that's what I looked for when I first got myself plumbed into the world wide web. I discovered bulletin boards and found they served in part as a reasonable substitute for the social life I didn't quite have. There was Archaeologica, which touched upon several of my areas of interest. It was okay, but began to feel a little slow and dry after a while, and I found myself increasingly irritated by the received wisdom of mainstream archaeology as a secretive club which strives to keep the truth from the rest of us so as to save money on having to get all those archaeology textbooks rewritten and reprinted.

The Richard Dawkins board wasn't actually much better, but it was busier and they had an off-topic section where the more scatologically inclined users could discuss whatever they felt like discussing. Usually this was inconsequential shite of a puerile nature - what you had for breakfast, how much you hate Noel Edmonds, worse job you ever had, biggest poo you ever done did and so on. As with most inconsequential shite of a puerile nature, you probably had to be there. Richard Dawkins himself tended not to be there very much, apparently having assumed that most of those signed up to his bulletin board would spend their time politely discussing protons or how God is just like Father Christmas. Unfortunately, the one day upon which Richard Dawkins had some time off from splicing genomes, the one day when he happened to be there, was also the day when someone started a thread entitled Ass to Mouth or similar for discussion of a sexual act which seems more tailored to the composition of appalling jokes than to actual intimate pleasure as I would recognise it.

Richard Dawkins read Ass to Mouth, wisps of smoke trailing furiously from his ears, then deleted a whole load of similarly scatological threads and banned those responsible, not wanting his name in any way associated with the discussion of bums in a supposedly recreational capacity. I can't say this ever struck me as either surprising or even particularly unreasonable, but others using the bulletin board had much stronger feelings, having put a lot of work into Ass to Mouth and now suspecting that this virtual pogrom represented a violation of their freedom of speech, possibly even their basic human rights. About three-hundred members of the Richard Dawkins board therefore took their custom elsewhere, specifically to the Thinking Aloud forum as set up by Sid's Snake. The three-hundred included those who had been banned from Richard Dawkins' board; those who had left as a show of solidarity with those banned and who now didst go forth unto the wilderness seeking a bulletin board which wasn't quite so much like NAZI GERMANY; and persons such as myself who went along following the trail of chuckles, and who had never really been so fascinated by protons that we felt the need to argue about them with complete strangers.

Sid's Snake turned out to be some hairy metal guy from northern California, a couple of years younger than myself and who took photographs of the rock group Kiss for a living - or something like that. He was, in addition, a proclaimed atheist with an interest in science and all that good stuff, and he'd set up Thinking Aloud in anticipation of Richard Dawkins losing his rag and suddenly expelling a whole load of potty-mouthed angels from his virtual creation. In case it isn't obvious, I've substituted the names of those involved with those of characters from Whizzer & Chips comic because it's amusing to me, and I don't really feel like identifying any of the fuckers, having no desire to resume communications with them; so let us, for the sake of argument, work with the notion that Thinking Aloud was set up by Sid's Snake.

Thinking Aloud was fun for a while, if possibly somewhat impenetrable to outsiders due to the rise of small cliques of users with their own inscrutable sets of in-jokes, which seemed to be reflected in favouritism on the part of the moderators - those granted administrative powers to police the forum so as to prevent anyone engaging in cunty behaviour. Inevitably, as with any environment in which a certain percentage of the population take themselves far too seriously, after about six months there was a schism. Odd Ball had been banned for being a bit of an argumentative tosspot. Protests were made suggesting that with the expulsion of Odd Ball, the forum had become too much like NAZI GERMANY and Sid's Snake was actually a lot like Adolf Hitler when you thought about it, so Sid's Snake banned those involved. This was apparently exactly what Hitler would have done. Luckily Sweet Tooth had anticipated Sid's Snake losing the plot and had spent the previous months setting up yet another forum called Rationalia, so everyone went there instead.

I posted on Rationalia for a little while, but never really took to the place. The repeated schisms seemed to have generated a more concentrated strain of self-important atheist - unless they had always been that way and I'd simply never noticed. The atmosphere of the forum was jovial but often with a suggestion of the passive-aggressive, a nastily Darwinian undercurrent, like hanging out with a hyaena-pack of public schoolboys all waiting for you to say something stupid or to reveal some hitherto unsuspected weakness, but for now biding their time with knob gags or by quoting Monty Python and Douglas fucking Adams zingers at one another. Minnie's Mixer quipped that Rationalia was like a cross between 4Chan and the Richard Dawkins forum, which was I suppose her version of you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!, missing the point that 4Chan - a famously unmoderated image board - was at least occasionally funny, and Rationalia was mostly droning middle-class liberals with a pathological need to be right about something or other sat around agreeing what fine sport it was to scoff at Christians, to engage them in debate and make them cry. This was the point at which I no longer had any desire to call myself an atheist, specifically when it was asked how more chew toys might be drawn to the forum, chew toys being religious persons who might be induced to sign up and then bullied into either renouncing their faith or giving up and slinking off to general cries of victory, gloating, and congratulating ourselves on our magnificent rationality.

Additionally, possibly because God is dead with morality and even personal responsibility an illusion, the forum developed an unpleasantly sexualised undercurrent, allegedly expressed in an inner sanctum apparently modelled on back issues of Reader's Wives, driving at least some of the membership away. It was all very 1960s. Newly signed up and hypothetically female users - so far as it was possible to tell on the internet - were invited to post photos of their tits on at least a couple of occasions; but apparently that was just high spirits and anyway the hypothetical women hadn't minded so it was all okay. If anything, they had probably enjoyed the lively jocularity of the exchange. The suggestion that the forum had turned into a virtual knocking shop was deftly countered with arguments amounting to if you think the board has developed an overtly sexual tone then you're very wrong because the board hasn't developed an overtly sexual tone.

Brilliant.

I drifted back to Thinking Aloud which by this point was down to a regular membership of around three, excepting Rationalians nipping back to save HTML copies of ye olde precious threads which had been crafted by their own fair hands, the virtual artifacts which must be saved that future generations might benefit from the wisdom of Sexy or Salad Dodger? and its like. I had initially mistaken casual speculation about how one day someone might make a film about our little corner of the internet for sarcasm, but no, some of these people genuinely seemed to believe we were kind of important in the great scheme of things, if not the three-hundred, then we Atheists; or we friendly rabid atheists, as the Rationalia strapline had it.

Ha ha.

You don't have to be mad to work here... but it helps!

Back at Thinking Aloud, Sid's Snake had recruited a couple of his real life stoner buddies to make the place look busy, but you could tell they didn't really give a shit about atheism, science, the internet, or saying anything funny. Still, Sid's Snake had an idea. He was going to buy an existing atheist bulletin board and merge it with Thinking Aloud. I suppose having put some amount of work into the forum, he just couldn't let it go. He seemed to have a vision where the place was concerned. It sounded like a reasonable idea at the time. For all of its faults, I'd still enjoyed Thinking Aloud significantly more than any other internet forum of which I'd been a member, and I hadn't yet quite seen the appeal of facebook, so that was my virtual social life, or as good as. We had a look at a few other thematically-similar boards, mostly populated with humourless bores and thus entirely unsuitable for assimilation. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own, we suggested helpfully. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile, but they weren't having it, so the search continued, at least until we discovered Atheist Nation.

Atheist Nation had been set up by some guy called Robert a few years before, but Robert had become a born again Christian and had understandably lost interest in the board, which would therefore cease to exist when his last payment to the host or the server or however it worked ran out. Sid's Snake made him an offer, and Robert said yes.

Where the three-hundred seemed predominantly English Grauniad reading middle-class with just a soupçon of debate conducted by means of hilarious references to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - as an admittedly broad generalisation - Atheist Nation was comprised of generally younger members, mostly American and working class or at least blue collar, many of whom significantly regarded Richard Dawkins as a bit of a dick. If the Rationalia branch of atheism was a chance for a jolly interesting debate with the pleasure of getting to be right about something, over and over, for Atheist Nation it seemed more like a means of staying sane, particularly for those poor fuckers representing the lone voice not asking Jesus for a new car, job, or pair of tits in some terrifying Baptist backwater. Additionally, Atheist Nation had a few severely ornery types - as we say in Texas - as part of the equation, persons virtually incapable of turning on the computer without upsetting somebody, but it made for a less predictable and slightly more dynamic virtual environment than Rationalia's evolving festival of self-congratulation and cosily, familiar jokes.

The merging of one temporarily vacant bulletin board with the populace of another was a success in some respects, although not everyone was happy about it, this being the internet. Fuss Pot, possibly one of the most boring women ever to set people straight on social media, had been a moderator at Atheist Nation when it first started and had since found herself amongst the three-hundred. Now she returned to Thinking Aloud to protest the violation of basic human rights of Atheist Nation members. Wait until Robert hears about this, she raged righteously, unaware of Robert having found Jesus due to the fact of her not having given two shits about Atheist Nation for the previous five years. Sid's Snake was exactly like Adolf Hitler, she bravely protested in the spirit of Che Guevara, John Lennon, and one of those monks who sets himself on fire.

I could really do without this, I suggested to her, pointing out that Atheist Nation had been a sinking ship at the time of its assimilation, and that she was talking bollocks as usual.

If you don't like the drama, you should have thought about that before you became an admin, she typed righteously, ignoring my actual point, possibly simultaneously shouting at the computer screen; so that was me told.

The new improved Thinking Aloud began to settle. Those for whom the merge had been a step in the wrong direction drifted away, and a core group of regular posters established itself, remaining  stable for a year or two in so much as any form of social media ever remains stable. We had about five or six moderators, and the key to the board's success, if any of it can be termed successful, seems to have been that Sid's Snake had apparently learned his lesson and had taken a back seat in terms of running the place. He posted from time to time and he made suggestions, but he spent most of his day concentrating on some other related project, something he wasn't telling us about.

Months passed and it dawned on me that I'd never really wanted to serve as admin on an atheist bulletin board, having originally stepped in on the understanding of it being a temporary thing; and part of the problem was that I don't like atheists, or at least I tend to dislike people with a strong need to identify as atheist.

It comes down to basic manners. I myself have never had any strongly religious belief and could therefore most likely be considered atheist by some definition, but I don't see an absence of belief in something as a defining, interesting, or even useful characteristic any more than I would my promote my lifelong hatred of kedgeree as indicative of culinary credentials. That which drew me to atheist bulletin boards in the first place was mostly science and knob gags rather than a desire to discuss my not believing in something; and this has been particularly so since Atheism has become a cause in its own right and, in terms of social media, a stick with which to beat others over the head.

I understand why, as a rallying cry to those disaffected, declared atheism might seem a necessary means of combating the rise of extremist and fundamentalist religions, but is it really? When was the last time hitting anyone over the head with an essay and calling them a fucking idiot made any difference other than cementing them more firmly to whatever screwy convictions you were hoping to dissolve? So if it's all just pissing into the wind, what are we left with if not net-dwelling antisocials who are only able to elevate themselves by pushing down on someone else? It's not so much that atheists are inherently dull as that there's not much joy to be had from anyone who is able to discuss only one thing, particularly when that one thing is how they don't believe in something with such vigour that they're prepared to regard even the slightest variance of opinion as essentially cunty. Additionally, as Lewis Black has pointed out, you can usually tell a fanatic by their lack of a sense of humour, a definition I would expand to encompass the same old show us your tits jokes and Python quotes year after year after year on the grounds that simple repetition should never be confused with actual wit.

So specifically Atheist opinion expressed on social media has, in my experience, tended to fall into one of a fairly limited number of categories. Whilst whistles blown upon religious idiocy such as - for one example - Charles Darwin nudged out of the biology textbooks by educational systems which feel somehow bound to respect the views of drooling morons, are certainly to be commended, I've never felt it useful to start screaming about irrationality when dealing with inherently irrational people; and the problem is surely not so much their idiocy as the existence of a system in which their idiocy is granted currency. So most campaigning against religiously-inspired tomfoolery tends to take the form of don't you think this is terrible?! and serves mainly to consolidate a consensus view of yes, this is terrible without making the slightest difference to anyone but those nodding their heads and patting each other on the back over how much more enlightened they are than hilarious yokels from rural Arkansas or wherever. Nothing progressive is achieved, least of all communication, and most likely because it can be quite difficult to communicate with a person once you've likened them to a drooling thirteenth-century serf whilst channelling Terry Thomas.

Come to think of it, most specifically Atheist opinion that I've seen expressed on social media has amounted to don't you think this is terrible?! The aforementioned Fuss Pot had very little else to say, whether it was her suspiciously anti-Semitic campaign to have some hundred year-old carved image of a menora removed from a public building - because yeah, that one was a real violation of human rights - or her bravely facebooking of statistics demonstrating that gun ownership is most prevalent in areas of the United States with a high incidence of religious fundamentalism, because wow - who would have fucking thunk it, eh?

A survey conducted by somebody or other inspired a thread on Thinking Aloud seriously suggesting that Atheists are now the most persecuted minority in the United States. Whether true or not, the survey struck me as more to do with the adopted victim mentality of persons such as Fuss Pot who, like all good vessels of middle class guilt, tend to need to distract from their own privilege by expressing either solidarity with, or suffering parallel to that of those actually getting their front doors kicked in at two in the morning by angry retards. I tried to point this out on the forum, but the response was something along the lines of oh - so you think it's a good thing that children as young as six months are being raped by priests? You think that's a good thing, do you? You think that's fine?

This is about as much sense as I've ever had from persons who feel the need to introduce themselves as Atheist, those for whom not doing something is a defining quality. Of course, I can understand it up to a point, and I agree with a fair amount of what is written in Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, and I'm keen on the separation of church and state guaranteed by the constitution of my recently adopted homeland; but I don't believe anything reduced to black and white arguments of good and evil is ever helpful; and I don't believe that calling people delusional is ever conducive to meaningful dialogue, no matter how crazy they may be; because, in case no-one noticed, that's what the other lot have been doing all along and that's why we don't really like them. There are plenty of problems in the world without inventing new ones such as Atheists as a persecuted minority, and none of those problems will be addressed by don't you think this is terrible?!, or by further disenfranchising the opposition with divisions bearing a suspicious resemblance to lines once defined by class; and on a more personal note - or at least one more directly pertinent to my own private obsessions - there's probably not much point taking any kind of interest in human history, art, or even science if you're driven by some pathological need to divide everything up into rational and irrational whilst presuming the latter to comprise essentially useless information. If, for example, your understanding of mythology can be reduced to it's all superstitious innit, then what you have isn't really an understanding.

Thinking Aloud seemed to work better in its Atheist Nation phase, at least from where I was stood, and specifically because there was no unifying cause behind which we were all expected to rally, and no-one who gave a shit about Douglas fucking Adams. Occasionally a new member would sign up and make the increasingly familiar introductory post about Jesus being non-rational nonsense that is not rational and has no reason and is nonsense and is logically irrational, apparently expecting a virtual round of applause; or a patently crazy individual identified as Dennis Markuze would post bizarre and lengthy attacks promising all you little atheists are gonna get your heads cut off which we immediately deleted; but mostly the board ambled along and looked after itself.

Unfortunately this wasn't quite enough for Sid's Snake. He had a vision of something bigger, and he was never entirely happy about the way things were, the posting habits of the forum membership or our general lack of manners - which admittedly also pissed me off from time to time. Sid's Snake had vowed to maintain a strictly advisory role, suggesting rather than intervening because he'd learned his lesson and you guys are doing an amazing job without me. This didn't quite work as promised because every time he advisoried something which the rest of us failed to implement on the grounds of it being a terrible idea, he just went ahead and did it anyway.

He seemed to be getting more and more involved, despite promises to the contrary, because it turned out he had been working on a much larger project, a social media site called Evolving Hub, or at least that was one of a number of fairly uninspiring names. The most ludicrous was probably Symbiant Minds, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. It was going to be bigger than facebook, and Thinking Aloud would be just one small part of it; and I presume this must have been back before the advent of some new piece of shit social media crap which will be bigger than facebook was a more or less daily occurrence. Evolving Hub would be for like-minded people who don't like Jesus, and possibly even for some who don't mind him that much. We could blog on Evolving Hub, post pictures, have a network of friends, and keep all of our different bulletin boards open in different windows, and there would be something called the Pink Pages if we wanted to organise orgies of like-minded consenting rationalists, and Thinking Aloud would be somewhere in there too but Jesus, you guys really need to get the place under control. The problem was that Sid's Snake saw himself as some kind of benevolent social media Buddha smiling benignly down upon his grateful minions as we sat around politely discussing rational shit or arguing over which Judas Priest album was the most awesome, but it was never going to happen because Sid's Snake didn't actually seem to like people, and he never understood when they failed to behave according to his vision.

Becoming increasingly frustrated with us, and with threads which failed to resemble transcripts of discussion at the Oxford University Debating Society, Sid's Snake started up a new forum and began to invite us over to take a look around. There were a lot more rules and it mostly seemed to comprise sections he'd proposed for Thinking Aloud which we'd either rejected as too lame or had tried and then rejected when no-one took the slightest bit of interest. It began to feel as though we were dealing with a stoner version of Captain Mainwaring.

I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times, transatlantic calls made at his request so we could discuss the future of the place. There was a lot of hey in there, also man and dude and the rest, and I suspect there were a couple of times when he was actually calling from inside a bong; but he never really made much sense, and I could never tell what the point of the call had been.

He paid me a few hundred dollars to revise and rewrite the text of facebook's terms of use so as to avoid copyright problems when he added it to the Evolving Hub small print, this sort of shite:

Like most websites, we maintain an access log which includes IP address information. This is done for our security and yours. These logs are deleted from the server periodically, but we make no specific guarantees about their longevity. We reserve the right to log IPs at any time. To prevent your IP address from being logged you must access the site through a proxy server. The site's functionality may be impaired when using a proxy.

I came close to slipping into a coma on a couple of occasions whilst undertaking this task. There seemed to be pages and pages of it, and he was paying me because hey, you're the writer guy - you have the way with words and shit. Evolving Hub was going to make all of us rich, so what the hell, I thought, why not? That said, I had a hunch that Evolving Hub probably wasn't going to make all of us rich, and probably wasn't even going to happen given Sid's Snake's track record of periodically pissing off everyone around him, but it wasn't like I had anything better to do.

The sadly inevitable end came when Tiny Tycoon was banned. One evening he'd been there, posting away on Thinking Aloud as usual and the next morning he was gone, and Sid's Snake had filled up my private messages inbox with requests stating that I needed to get in touch and to back him up on this one. We had to present a united front.

First it was claimed that Tiny Tycoon had been redecorating our precious forum with the kind of pornography which Gary Glitter had on his computer. Then he'd actually just been providing links to a popular kiddy-fiddling site on our precious forum. Then he'd been providing links to 4Chan on our precious forum, which Sid's Snake insisted was a popular kiddy-fiddling site. When after half a morning of this I finally got to the truth, and it turned out that Tiny Tycoon had simply mentioned 4Chan in some thread or other, and had mentioned it because he'd recently looked at the place, decided it was horrible, and was telling the rest of us to avoid it like the plague. He hadn't provided a link and it wasn't the sort of site Sid's Snake had claimed it to be through a haze of weed smoke.

I gave Sid's Snake a call. He was raving. He sounded as though he was channelling William Shatner's acting. I explained that I had lifted the ban on Tiny Tycoon because the guy hadn't done anything wrong, and he certainly hadn't been attempting to promote  pornography of any description, and we probably owed him an apology. Sid's Snake went into a rant predicated on the understanding that I'd never heard of 4Chan, had no idea what it was, and hadn't actually said any of the things I had just said to him.

I set him straight. 'Yes, I've seen 4Chan, thank you. It's an image board without much in the way of moderation, and I'm not a big fan of the place either. Sometimes that sort of thing gets posted there and it might be up for ten minutes or so before somebody removes it and the person responsible is blocked, so what you're worried about is down to members rather than the site itself. It's no more pornographic than Thinking Aloud or any other forum. Somebody could post that stuff at our place, and we'd remove it and ban them. That doesn't make us Gary Glitter. Do you see what I'm saying here?'

He didn't. 'I've seen a picture on 4Chan where a fifty year-old dude has his [description of something you don't really need to think about], so do you think that's okay? Is that the sort of thing you think we should be linking on Thinking Aloud? Do you think that's cool? Would you like to see that on our forum? Would you? Would you? Would you like to see that? That stuff is okay by you, is it?'

I pointed out that no-one had provided links to anything of the sort, but I was wasting my time. I listened to another ten minutes of the same shit over and over and then put the phone down on him. Never trust a hippie, I reminded myself. I should never have let myself forget that one.

Sid's Snake engaged us in the staff room - a private area of the forum visible only to moderators - us being myself and the seven or eight other members of Thinking Aloud staff at the time. He stuck to his story regardless of the suspicious deletion of the supposedly offending material, the terrible thread in which Tiny Tycoon had posted the kind of pornography which Gary Glitter had on his computer, or provided a link to a source of the same, or not actually done any of these things. No agreement was reached, no admission of error or possible misinterpretation on the part of Sid's Snake, not even an acknowledgment of how many times he'd changed his story;  and at last I understood why most of the three-hundred had ended up hating the cunt.

He vanished from the forum and from our lives. Thinking Aloud continued with a few murmurs about buying the place from our drug-addled mentor, but it never came to anything and then without a word he pulled the plugs. A few of the others got to work on what became known as Thinking Universe, yet another breakaway bulletin board, and the Evolving Hub empire never happened; and I came to realise that on reflection I don't really like bulletin boards, or the sort of people who habitually hang around on them, or people who need to be right, or who need to belong to an exclusive club or a cult of any kind. It turned out that I already had friends, at least as many as I could possibly need, people who had been there all along even if it wasn't always obvious. Some of them even have views on religious or other matters which differ quite significantly from my own, because that's how the world works, despite the opinions of anyone who might wish it were otherwise.