2000AD After I Stopped Reading

My first issue of 2000AD comic was prog 20, cover dated 9th of July, 1977. I bought it from the other newsagent in Shipston's main square, the darker, slightly weirder place run by the bloke who resembled something from Planet of the Apes. I was immediately hooked, then found out that Peter Empson had been reading it from the beginning and was willing to swap his collection of eighteen back issues (minus the second one, in case anyone is doing the calculations) for a big stack of copies of the Topper.

I stopped reading in October 1980, having become somewhat burned out with the more shitey regular stories - Mean Arena, Meltdown Man, and Judge Dredd treading water with crap such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Aged 13½ Months.

In January 1986, Nick Scullard gave me a massive stack of back issues, actually most of those I'd missed since 1980. He gave them to me because his collection had been transformed into a damp tower of clay following a thorough soaking when the pipes in his house burst during a freeze. He couldn't face dealing with it, so I dried them out on a radiator, one page at a time, managing to salvage nearly all of them and thus bringing me up to date with the galaxy's greatest comic, albeit in slightly wobbly, water-damaged form. It looked as though the comic had picked up somewhat since October 1980, and so I resumed my weekly purchase; which I continued until some point during 1991, at which point I once again lost interest. Contributing factors included: artists who couldn't actually draw; Garth Ennis imaginatively writing a story featuring a violent character called Tarantino who swears a lot; Garth Ennis sending Judge Dredd to Ireland where he meets an Irish Judge who enjoys a lovely pint of Guinness, so he does; Armoured Gideon; Dead Meat featuring Inspector Raam; Jamie fucking Hewlett; Armoured Gideon again; artists writing the names of their fave bands on walls in the background of the strip; Brigand Doom, but mainly because the name was stupid; comic strips which wished they were in Deadline.

While I have a lot of love for the cream of 2000AD, I try not to think about the ropey stuff, which is difficult because there has been one fuck of a lot of it. I've bought the occasional issue since but have seen nothing to entice me back to the fold. Therefore, writing from a position of extensive ignorance, here is my postdiction of stories which will have appeared in the galaxy's greatest since I decided I couldn't read any more back in 1991 or thereabouts. I feel confident that at least three of these, which I've just made up, have actually appeared in the comic.

A postdiction is like a prediction but instead refers to something which has already happened, in case you were wondering.

Comic Rock: Sailing. Nemesis the Warlock, which was wonderful, began life as Comic Rock, an occasional series of one-off strips somehow inspired by something in the hit parade of the day in an endearingly wrong-footed effort to get down with the kids. What this actually meant was that the strips were named after Going Underground by the Jam and an unlistenable television advertised heavy rock compilation whilst making no other concession to the sources of their alleged inspiration; which was probably for the best given that Killer Watt, the unlistenable compilation in question, featured Ted Nugent. The notional third episode of Comic Rock was inspired by the song Sailing as recorded by Rod Stewart, which was a tune that the kids on the streets were digging at the time. The story featured arch villain Torquemada in a boat, beneath which Nemesis the Warlock swims, drilling a hole in the bottom so that it sinks. Credo!

Donna Kebab. This was another Pat Mills' tale of a quick-witted underdog fighting an overpowering authoritarian state whilst striking adjacent blows against sexism, racism, and people who aren't down with the kids or who tell kids what to do but don't know nuffink. Donna Kebab is set in a future society modelled on that of ancient Greece. Mills boldly defies racism by writing for a cast of exclusively Hellenic ethnicity, here defined in terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever bought or ate a doner kebab, ingeniously subverting expectations by mocking those who engage with other cultures only through cheap fast food. Donna sports a large moustache in defiance of sexual stereotyping, and makes frequent comedic expressions of her support for Arsenal football team by exclaiming up the Arse!, just like Harry Enfield from about a million years ago. She also wields a powerful technological sword made from a shish kebab rotisserie, and takes counsel from the spirit of Plato, the ancient philosopher, to whom she irreverently refers as Play-Doh.

Metal Guru. He was a robot and he gave out spiritual advice to those who sought to understand the meaning of existence, but then someone pushed him too far by asking a question so stupid that it blew his ancient wisdom circuits, sending him on a killing spree across New Afghanistan. Once the clever wordplay of the title had been established, the strip was mostly about squads of the Spiritual Guru Containment Unit attempting and failing to take down the Metal Guru as he rampaged through towns and cities, twisting heads off whilst screaming his catchphrase, Enlightenment!

My Groovy Edwardian Hat. This strip, named after Vanilla Traction Engine's 1968 hit single, was written and drawn by Brendan McCarthy and was heavy on its use of disembodied shoes with pairs of eyes seen peering from within. It seemed to be focussed on a character called Twitchy, although Twitchy was actually absent from six of the eight episodes. To date, no-one has been able to explain what happened in My Groovy Edwardian Hat, let alone what the fuck it was supposed to be about.

Slapheads. Future sport was never this tough, possibly excepting previous examples of Roy of the Rovers dressed up as Rollerball; but Slapheads was different in so much as that it was named after an insulting term for bald people, because it just fucking was, okay? The game featured a mix of genetically modified humans and surgically altered convicts whose arms had been replaced by giant flippers, and their objective was to score points by quite literally slapping one another about the head for the edification of a braying audience of bloodthirsty spectators all filming it on their phones. Unsurprisingly, the manager was up to something fishy involving sponsorship money taken from a bald wig manufacturer, and that's mainly what the story was about.

Steam Iron. Introducing the splendiferous escapades of that most delightful mechanical sleuth and adventurer, Professor Pistlethwaite's Patented Detection Engine Model No. 14, additionally known and recognised in the court of Her Royal Highness Queen Victoria by his more colloquial sobriquet, Steam Iron on account of the means by which his mechanism is afforded energy and momentum, the material of his construction, and - by way of a third meaning implicit in the combination of the two words - his pronounced and enthusiastic homosexuality as demonstrated by his adopting many of the delightful mannerisms of Mr. Wilde, the playwright. Most likely written by Dan Abnett, because why wouldn't it be?

Strontium Cat. Behind the ingenious wordplay of the title, Strontium Cat constituted a further expansion of the Strontium Dog mythology, this time fixing upon a time-travelling bounty hunter, stranded in 1930's New York, getting by with just his wits, his catlike mutant senses, and his not inconsiderable chops as a jazz saxophonist. Fate conspires to land him a weekly gig playing with Zoot Jellyroll's quartet at the Blue Tiger down on the lower east side, and then it's a slow decline as the strip's creators gradually exhaust their already slender stock of jazz references.

Sweet & Sour. This was another Pat Mills' tale of quick-witted underdogs fighting an overpowering authoritarian state whilst striking adjacent blows against sexism, racism, and people who aren't down with the kids or who tell kids what to do but don't know nuffink. Sweet & Sour is set in a future society modelled on that of ancient China. Mills boldly defies racism by writing for a cast of exclusively Chinese ethnicity, here defined in terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever bought or ate a Chinese takeaway, ingeniously subverting expectations by mocking those who engage with other cultures only through cheap fast food. Clementine Sweet sports a long moustache whilst Brett Sour wears a traditional lady's cheongsam in defiance of sexual stereotyping, and their victories are celebrated with verses of the Ying Tong Song, just like Spike Milligan from about a million years ago. Sweet also wields a powerful technological sword made from chopsticks, and takes counsel from the spirit of Confucius, the ancient philosopher, to whom she irreverently refers as Mr. Confusing. Come to think of it, this one might have been Mark Millar.

Terrible Planet. After Death Planet, Deadly Planet, Hell Planet and all of the others, what adjectives were left? The futuristic colonists of Terrible Planet have fled an ecologically devastated Earth in search of a new life amongst the stars, hoping to make Agamemnon IV their new home; but there's one problem - Agamemnon IV is, quite frankly, terrible. It rains a lot, and everywhere you go there's a faint smell of sulphur, like someone farted, and it always seems kind of chilly considering how near the planet is to its sun; and there's this island where you can't walk ten paces without falling over, and no-one can work out why. Even Doctor Steiner can't explain it, although to be honest he doesn't seem to know much for a scientist. Only the other day they were talking about music and Steiner was surprised when someone told him that the Sex Pistols - a group from ancient Earth history - hadn't been able to read sheet music. 'But how then were they able to play their instruments?' he had asked, incredulous.

Tough of the Time Track. Puzzling reboot of an old character from Victor, this time snatching Alf Tupper from his traditional twentieth century background and obliging him to compete in the trans-temporal games against runners from ancient Rome, caveman times, outer space, Nazi Germany and elsewhen, most of whom seem to share the same knowing sense of humour as a media studies student living above a barber's shop in Camden Town. This one was drawn by an artist who once produced a fifty page cartoon strip entirely about her own vagina, and Alf is consequently a somewhat changed character. He still fucking loves his chips, but now considers them something of a guilty pleasure. Also, his fave band is Vant.

Mr. Kirby

He was never really our cat, not exactly. We have a female cat called Kirby, soft, grey and stripey, who briefly went missing back in 2013. She eventually turned up, but as we'd been out and around the neighbourhood looking for her, we noticed a similar looking cat with the same sort of markings, same colour, same long tail. We'd approach the cat, notice his massive hairy nuts, and realise he wasn't our Kirby; and so someone, probably the kid, called him Mr. Kirby.

At some point, after feeding the cats in the morning, I took to leaving the bowls out on the back porch. I'd noticed a few strays hanging around, and it seemed like they might appreciate what cat food was left over when our own bunch felt like they'd had enough. Because feral or stray cat populations tend to stabilise under certain conditions, we ended up with a regular gang of four of five visitors stopping by our house for breakfast every morning - the B-Team as I thought of them. Unfortunately, our own cats sometimes scoffed the lot, and so I inevitably began to buy extra tins for the outside guys. I knew it would all be eaten, and I didn't like the thought of anyone going hungry.

Mr. Kirby of course became a regular.

He was a funny looking cat, and I didn't really know what to make of him at first. He wasn't hostile but neither was he overtly friendly, and he always seemed wary, as though deeply suspicious of whatever motives we might have for dishing up all that free grub. He put me in mind of the young William Burroughs being described by someone's father as a boy with the look of a sheep killing dog. He looked shifty, and I entertained the idea that he might even be William Burroughs reincarnated given that the late author would probably have quite liked to come back as a cat.

Mr. Kirby warmed to us as the years went past, and became such a fixture that he no longer quite seemed like a stray, more like some guy who just happened to live in our garden. We fed him and left out clean water every day. I even built a wooden shelter for the cold weather. Mr. Kirby sometimes wandered into our house, but he had a tendency to spray left, right and centre, so I tried to keep him outside when possible.

Eventually he became so accustomed to us that he would wait to be fed, then start up with his peculiar meow - more like the hooting and honking of a small furry goose - and we got to the stage at which I could pet him as he was eating. He was all muscle, very wiry, and he looked like he'd been in the wars. Had he been human he would have had tattoos, an eye-patch, and a Brooklyn accent. Contrary to the image, I never saw him have even a hissing confrontation with another cat, let alone a fight. If there was food in a bowl and several takers, the others would step back and simply wait for Mr. Kirby to finish without so much as a warning glare. I suspect it may have been something to do with his nuts, which were huge and impressive.

Sometimes he'd fail to turn up for breakfast, occasionally for three or four days, and then he'd be back on the fifth day, gaunt and ravenous having presumably spent the time trapped in somebody's garage; or he'd return with some terrifying injury or disability, a terrible limp, a seeping eye, or one side of his face swollen out of all proportion. On one occasion I attempted to catch him, to get him into a cat carrier so that we could take him to the vet, but he was stronger than me. It was like wrestling a fully grown man. Thankfully his injuries always seemed to clear up of their own accord.

More recently, I suppose you could say we became friends. He greeted me with his hooting meow, and would push his forehead into the palm of my hand when I petted him. He stopped marking the furniture when he came into our house, so I let him in from time to time. Now able to make a reasonably close inspection, I finally realised than he had a minor cut - albeit long since healed - at the outside edge of his left upper eyelid, meaning that when he looked at you, one eye seemed to be squinting, making him appear suspicious. Combined with the distinctive meow and his spotty belly, my wife and I guessed he had both Siamese and Bengal cats somewhere in his family tree.

About a month ago, maybe a little longer, he once again fell ill. He had terrible diarrhoea and a variable appetite, along with what looked like scabies, resulting in scabs and cuts on his head. I treated him for fleas, then added a deworming compound to his food, just in case. I changed the dry food left for the outside cats to a grain free variant, having learned that this is often better for cats with digestive problems. I rubbed an ointment onto his head when I could hoping to treat the scabies, which it did to an extent; and all through this he otherwise more or less seemed his normal happy self, except sometimes he seemed to be drinking a hell of a lot, and his appetite went through the roof - anything up to three tins a day which still left him looking somehow gaunt. I could tell something was wrong, but he was obviously an old cat, and it didn't seem like there was a lot else we could do because we simply can't afford the sort of vet's bills he would chalk up.

Then just a couple of days ago he went from bad to worse, not eating, not drinking, just sleeping most of the time. He would perk up intermittently, but it didn't seem to last. Next thing, I come home and he's laying on the porch in such a posture that I find myself checking to see if he's still breathing. He resembles a corpse and flies are buzzing around him. Over the next couple of hours he moves from one part of the porch to another, but always to end up slumped like a pile of bones. Gus II, another one of the strays, cuddles up to him, and it's breaking my fucking heart. I know he's not coming back this time. I guess that Gus II might also know this.

Bess comes home and we take Mr. Kirby in a box to the emergency veterinary clinic on Broadway. I can't stop crying. Mr. Kirby has somehow become a staple of my existence, and life without him hooting away each morning seems unthinkable.

The nurse gives him a sedative so that he won't feel what's coming next, although to be fair, it's difficult to tell whether he's truly been conscious during any of this. She then gives him something which stops his heart. I stroke him and cuddle him. I'm going to miss this cat so fucking much.

It's over. We did the right thing for him, much as it hurts, much as it feels as though we've let him down.

There's nothing much more to say, but no, he wasn't just a cat.

We're going to miss you, Mr. Kirby.

What a shitty day it has been.

Back in the Saddle

'Everybody make some noise!'

Bess and I are back at Mission Marquee Plaza craft fair. Following a couple of fallow months spanning the season during which Texan temperatures dip to not actually very warm at all, this is the first such fair of the year and it's good to be back - particularly after such an uncommon week. This winter has been genuinely cold, wet, grey, and relentless, feeling more like English weather than I am comfortable with; and we were all ill last weekend - Bess, myself and the boy with some chest infection which hit each of us on consecutive days. I'm still recovering. I went out on the bike just one day but had to get off and push whenever I came to a hill.

Then I noticed that all of the boy's anecdotes about occurrences at school hinge upon the phrase he then proceeded to as prefix to the thing which the person did, which is rarely anything of consequence sufficient to justify either the build up or application of such long, long words.

Then a white supremacist murdered fifty Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, prompting our president to quickly delete the tweet he'd allegedly posted thirty minutes earlier linking some Breitbart opinion piece about how all Muslims are bad.

These are the contributing themes from which the general mood of the week has been woven, so it's really nice to be back to something familiar, and no longer coughing or sneezing as we had both feared might be the case. We loaded up the car the night before without even really having to think about it, and here we are, back on our old pitch to the right of the stage area and the drive-in screen. Being the first craft fair of the year, there are a lot of people here, and even some entertainment.

We've set up between a couple of women selling jewellery and a younger woman with bags of fresh herbs, all from her own garden. She also has a little dog, a friendly terrier called Radio, although we never get around to asking why he is so named. The cactus family arrive as I'm attaching my paintings to the display frame. We're usually right next to the cactus family, but never mind.

I pop over to say hello.

'It's good to see you,' he responds.

'Yes,' I say. 'Where's your friend with the truck?'

'My friend with the truck?'

'You remember I did a painting, and his truck was in the way so I painted it as well. He said he was going to buy the painting.'

'He might be along later. I don't know.'

'Well, no problem. If he's changed his mind that's fine too, but I have his painting with me just in case.'

We get ourselves settled. It's still a little cooler than we like, but better than it has been. Bess has already sold a few rocks.

The entertainment is a festival of sorts, something billed as Loopfest 2019. Performers have come from all over the world - Mexico City, California, Costa Rica, Holland and so on - and today they're going to do their thing on stage for us. There are about seven people sat around on the grass up at the front. I assume they are either the audience, or other performers watching the show whilst waiting for their own turn in the spotlight. These people are Loopers, someone explains over the PA.

It's a whole new kind of music.

It's the latest thing.

It's people playing music, sampling themselves, and then using the looped sample as accompaniment. I recall seeing it done in a pub in Coventry back in the eighties, except the guy was mostly applying his sampling technology to covers of House of the Rising Sun and the like. I've even done this sort of thing myself but with tape loops; but some nineteen year-old has a go and it's suddenly a fucking movement because he thought of it and it's like, awesome 'n' shit.

The first guy sounds like Fatboy Slim who some may remember tickling the charts two whole decades ago. Then there's a guy looping the noises he generates with an electric cello - which is actually pretty good; followed by some tool with a keytar looping his own vocal beatboxing - and the rest seem to be variations on country and western which would sound exactly the same played by a full band, perhaps better, and which makes me wonder whether the Musicians Union didn't have a point all those years ago when they tried to ban the synthesiser. If it sounds like Waylon Jennings with full band and yet it's all coming from just you and a pedal, my first thought is that you're performing with samples because you don't have any friends, and my second thought is that there may be legitimate reasons why you don't have any friends. Generally this is the most underwhelming amazing new thing I've encountered in a long time, which I state as someone who still finds vapourwave quite exciting.

'Could you do a rock with the badge of the marines?' asks some guy who stumbles up to our stall. My wife smiles and makes amiable noises, but it's clear that the answer is piss off, and rightly so.

Hi there, I don't like anything you have enough to want to buy it, but if I could persuade you to paint something completely different to any of the stuff you're selling here on your stall, then there's a possibility I might consider making a purchase.

We love these people almost as much as those whose unrequested advice begins with, you know what you ought to do?

I head off to buy tacos just as some hairy dude approaches mumbling something about Salvador Dali. I recognise his type from having spent most of my art college years avoiding him. I just know he's about to dump a load of useless suggestions on my wife, maybe if she could paint mandalas on a bong or a cigarette lighter or a Grateful Dead album…

I buy tacos and by the time I return, the hairy dude is stood alone in the middle of the field watching people sample themselves on stage. He walks backwards and forwards, and after studying him for a couple of minutes, we recognise this as dance. He holds two brightly coloured balls, one in each hand, and he's throwing them into the air then catching them. It isn't quite juggling.

'So what was he saying?'

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me.

We have a sign hung from the awning of our canopy, something along the lines of Bess & Lawrence Burton, Original Artwork in chalk. It seemed necessary to qualify ourselves as having produced original artwork so as to effect some aesthetic distance from persons selling their homegrown paintings of Batman and the Joker.

'He read the sign,' Bess tells me, 'and said something like, well, it's not exactly Salvador Dali, is it?'

'Huh?'

'I know.'

'What a fucking twat. I wish I'd heard him.'

I expect it was something well-intentioned which came out wrong, or was an innocent but fumbled attempt to introduce himself as a bit of a character, or at least as a guy who has heard of Salvador Dali. Arseholes will usually have heard of either Salvador Dali or Pablo Picasso and may even know that Mona Lisa was not the name of the person who painted her picture. When they attempt to engage you in banter on the subject of art, being way out of their depth they will assume that you will be fooled by mention of either Picasso or Dali. A very early issue of 2000AD comic, back when it was actually read by children, featured a letter from a young reader proposing that the art on Judge Dredd was so amazing that not even Picasso could have done a better job. It seems a fairly safe bet that the lad hadn't actually given much thought to how a tale of Mega City One's toughest lawman would have looked had it been drawn by the celebrated misogynist and pioneer of Cubism; and that's the mental age we're dealing with here.

Bess and I eat our tacos and watch a lone buffoon dancing in the middle of a field to country and western played on an effects pedal. Occasionally he raises up his arms to flash peace signs at no-one in particular. As usual, I haven't sold shit, while Bess has been pretty much cleared out.

It's nice to be back.

Rap Autopsy in a Diner

I've come to regard the last five years of the twentieth century as my transitional years, for one reason and another. A lot of stuff changed during those five years, or ceased to remain the same, and my listening habits were among those changes. Rock music was no longer doing it where I was concerned, and neither Morrissey nor his legacy said anything to me about my life. I think I may even have had an entire year without music somewhere in there.

I effected a return to the form with classical works, just the odd piece of Beethoven or Strauss here and there, mainly out of curiosity and because I trusted that it wouldn't suddenly adopt a Manchester accent and start walking like a monkey. Somehow this led to R&B, another magisterium comprising the sort of thing I wouldn't ordinarily have enjoyed, or at least understood; and the R&B led directly to rap.

I had a few rap records, but mostly the obvious stuff you would expect a white bloke to own. I'd never fully engaged with rap because it seemed too vast a realm with its own distinct parameters, and my enthusiasm would only ever be a token indulgence - like all those worthy white dudes still insisting that, in their inevitably humble opinion, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is the greatest rap album - because they read it somewhere and it's the only one the fuckers have actually heard all the way through.

In 1995 I suddenly felt I understood rap, really and truly for the first time. I could no longer stand to listen to rock because it sounded like entertainment, and only entertainment, and with anything weirder or more experimental beginning to seem like so much pointless art gallery wank. Everyone I knew at work listened to rap and I acquired a taste for it by a process resembling osmosis, and because it was the only thing which sounded angry enough to get me through a miserable, back-breaking day. Disgruntled black men kept me sane because they understood the shitty end of the stick better than anyone.

It was always exciting when I spotted a new issue of The Source on the racks of the newsagent in East Dulwich Grove. The Source is an American magazine covering rap music, hip-hop, and black culture. I also bought XXL, Rap Pages, Vibe, and Hip Hop Connection. The latter was an English magazine and was, as such, more intelligent, better written, and funnier than its transatlantic equivalents. There was also Murder Dog, the best American magazine by some margin, but it wasn't easy to find and was usually only on sale at Tower Records in central London. The rest ranged from well-meaning but stupid to just plain stupid depending on the issue, but they nevertheless kept me informed and fascinated.

So a new issue of The Source would turn up on the racks of the newsagent in East Dulwich Grove. I'd buy a copy in the morning and save it for after work, heading to Ken's caff up Crystal Palace Road to read about Timbaland, Master P, or the LOX over egg, chips, beans, two sausages and a cup of tea. This was my ritual, a little splash of sunlight in what was usually a shitty, overcast day of hard labour spent hammering square pegs into round holes.

'Usual, sir?' Ken calls as I enter, because I always order the same thing. I nod, grunt, sit, and start on my reading - new albums and usually two or three I'm after, who has done what, names I've been wondering about, always something which seems worth knowing. It's another world, one to which I feel dimly connected by virtue of my less than sunny disposition.

We need such rituals to keep us pinned to the planet.

The Source had its moments, but was never so great as it clearly believed itself to be - a position apparently based on the idea that the magazine was somehow woven into the fabric of the culture it described, that a review awarding the full five mics to a new album in The Source really meant something in the great scheme of things, and that The Source had been down from day one, as we say. The magazine had its place, and there are a lot of albums I picked up specifically because I'd read about them in The Source, including albums which may or may not have kept me approximately sane at one point or another; but, as with the lyrical content of the music upon which it reported, The Source often had a tendency to overplay its own significance. While an artist such as Louisiana's Fiend might justifiably claim to be the baddest motherfucker alive, he does so in the context of his music as a form of expression, and if you listen to enough of his music you'll most likely reach the same conclusion as he did. On the other hand, a magazine adopting this same position as its editorial policy is fucking ridiculous because it's a magazine, exclusively serving to report on the activities of others. The range of its potential for original artistic expression is limited, unless it's actually a fucking novel and not a magazine at all. The Source never quite seemed to grasp this distinction, and has historically regarded its own commentary as an integral strand of the culture it attempts to describe.

Nevertheless, a new issue was always exciting as I scoffed my two sausages, egg, chips and beans, shucking off eight or more hours of mindless, grey slog. I'd finish eating, pay up, then head home with a little more of a swagger in my step than would otherwise have been the case, freshly aligned with something which made all of this bearable.

Twenty-four years later, I'm living in Texas and I spot a copy of The Source on the rack at my local supermarket. I buy it out of a sense of nostalgia and head for Papagayos, my nearest Mexican diner. The sky is uncharacteristically grey and I'm going to read the magazine over breakfast seeing as it's still going. Were I to describe this in a novel, it would be a motif, a pattern which repeats whilst serving as a measure of how much else has changed; and that's what is happening here because life is often very much like a novel.

I no longer carry the weight of a disappointing world on my shoulders, and life has generally turned out pretty decent. This allows me the luxury of looking back, not so much out of nostalgia as curiosity, attempting to reach an understanding of the past. I still listen to rap because much of it communicates certain truisms which apply regardless of the quality of one's life, simply because it's about the quality of society in general; but I no longer read the magazines because most of them have ceased publication, and because in any case I grew bored of them many years ago.

The Source in particular shot itself in the foot when taking the editorial position that a specific white rapper was destroying hip hop. Whilst there may be many good reasons to criticise Eminem, his having committed a casual act of racism on tape back when no-one had heard of the fucker would seem to be reaching somewhat, particularly considering acts which those who live in glass houses should probably try to avoid. The demonisation of Eminem seemed a cynically obvious attempt to generate controversy and, by association, sales, whilst elevating the career of Benzino, a less economically successful rapper with shares in the magazine, or some editorial position, or something of the sort.

I've purchased what is apparently issue 274 of The Source, probably the first since I moved here, and I'm going to read it in the caff just like in the old days. It was there on the magazine rack in the supermarket and I thought, what the fuck, so I sit in Papagayos and wait for my migas plate. Migas is my American equivalent of two sausage, egg, chips, and beans. It's an omelette of chillis, peppers, corn chips and cheese served with refried beans and fried potatoes.

Issue 274 is the Annual Power 30 Issue of The Source, a yearly special which prints a list of who makes the most money in the rap industry. It's a feature I never cared for, and never understood why anyone would. In at number six is the guy who started Spotify, a streaming service. The entire magazine now comprises industry horseshit. Reading it is like being stuck in a room full of suits as they discuss their annual salaries. Imagine an arts publication which examines Picasso purely in terms of how much his paintings fetched at auction.

Interviews with artists I've never heard of explain how much they were signed for, how much money they make, how much their hit song sold, how many downloaded it from bandcamp, and then - every single fucking time - all about how Lil Yachty be keeping it real. Everybody be keeping it real. All they've ever done is keep it real. I don't remember the last time I heard of a rap artist who ain't be keeping it real; and you can tell they be keeping it real because they take the trouble to write it out using the syntax of a person who ain't be too good at the grammar 'n' shit; like diligently replacin' the g with an apostrophe so as to render phrases such as keepin' it real closer to how they might be spoken by some guy from the street, because you ain't want anyone to be thinkin' your ass be all fancy 'n' shit or that you ain't be keepin' it real. I sold my back issues of The Source to a bloke in Croatia through eBay, so I don't know whether the magazine was always this way, or whether it's simply that I'm happier and less fucking stupid than I used to be.

One issue of a magazine which probably wasn't The Source but may as well have been had an interview with Eve, the Ruff Ryders recording artist. The article emphasised her keepin' it real and repeatedly compared her to a pitbull in a skirt. Some journalist had presumably come up with the analogy, and they were going to get their money's worth. The next issue ran a letter praising both Eve and the article. She keepin' it real and she real fly, the reader enthused, adding, she like a pitbull in a skirt, cleverly restating the analogy with the words in the exact same order and everything. It was hard to see why anyone would have bothered writing such a letter, and I personally thought it reflected poorly on both the readership and the editorial standards of the magazine.

So I do my best to find something worth reading in the Annual Power 30 Issue of The Source, but it's like reading a fucking bank statement or something given to you by an insurance salesman. Er'body be keepin' it real and er'body be makin' hella money, and that's all it has to say for itself. The legacy of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, Olaudah Equiano and anyone else who ever had their ass kicked for pointing out that society is rife with certain inequalities is apparently we be getting' paid. In a society of do rights and apple polishers, where individual freedoms are becoming less important than just how hard you saluted, how hard you cheered, the voice of the resistance has become an investment portfolio, and if you play your cards right, you too might one day get a key to the executive washroom, or at least get to eat the slop they feed you in the big house.

I eat my migas, which are delicious, but which have taken a long time coming; and whilst Papagayos used to be a great place to eat, they seem to have fallen behind. I get the impression they're short staffed, and the food is good, but not quite to the standards of Los Dos Laredos or Bandera Jalisco. I skim the magazine, but there's no name with which I am familiar, and nothing I recognise. Subsequent research conducted via the internet yields video clips of rainbow-haired teenagers reading out their bank statements and pulling faces over a pinging noise. Briefly I pause to read about the Yung Miami and JT, collectively known as the City Girls.

Unfortunately, JT has been robbed of all the joy of the #In MyFeelingsChallege due to her incarceration on credit card fraud. She reported to jail on a two-year prison sentence in July, and is scheduled to be released in March 21, 2020.

Miami has been carrying the flame solo and she has been doing a good job keeping their name alive. She launched the #CityGirlsTwerkChallenge where contestants uploaded their best video twerking and the grand prize was $25,000 and a chance to get 'flewed' out to be in the music video with herself and Cardi B. Twerk was the twosome's first entry in the Billboard Hot 100 charts, coming in at 92.

I know they can't all be Angela Davis, but Jesus…

Maybe it was always this way and I simply didn't notice. I suppose the realisation at least means that I'm older, hopefully a little a wiser.

Visions of the End

A sense of the apocalypse has briefly visited itself upon south Texas, specifically a freezing cold apocalypse. It's March and we should be outside in t-shirts, already gearing up to complain about the heat; and yet we've had weeks of dull grey skies just like you get in England with overnight temperatures dipping to freezing, necessitating my covering the pumpkin and sunflower plants with garden blankets each night. All sorts of things which would ordinarily be gearing up for summer - presumably including pollinating insects - are struggling to make it to Spring. Apparently this is a phenomenon known as an arctic blast which occurs because our planet no longer has ice caps, possibly. It's something along those lines. Thankfully I know it can't be climate change because our president has assured us their's no such thing and he should no because he's the president. If their where anything too worry about he would of told us.

Therefore phew.

It's too fucking cold and yet I force myself out the door to ride twenty miles each day in the name of staying healthy, five days a week without fail. Nevertheless the report from a medical check-up I took about a month ago comes back with sirens awail.

'My blood pressure might be a little high right now,' I told the nurse, 'because I've just cycled twenty miles. It's usually fine when I have it taken at the dentist.'

'How much do you weigh?' she asked, beckoning me onto the scales.

'I was 194lbs yesterday,' I told her.

'Well, you're 201lbs today,' she said.

'Maybe that's because I'm still wearing three layers of clothing and heavy boots,' I offered, but she didn't appear to care. The check-up didn't seem particularly focussed on what it was actually supposed to do, so now I have this letter in the mail telling me that I will probably explode before the year is up, but as the unhealthiest person in the world I may qualify for some kind of award. I'd go to collect the thing but I expect my mobility scooter will run out of juice before I get there owing to my having to make excursions to McDonalds and lard retailers on the way.

Also, the kitchen drawer caused me to have a meltdown. I attempted to open it whilst aggravated, but was prevented from doing so by a family size box of matches stuck at the back, because in the year 2019 we somehow still have a family size box of matches. The drawer has annoyed me ever since it became a sea of loose thumbtacks.

'Do we have thumbtacks?' the boy asked.

'They're in the kitchen drawer,' I said, recalling a mental image of all the thumbtacks in their tidy little plastic box.

The kitchen drawer is adjacent to the sink, of which the tap - or faucet if you prefer - has developed a sudden and unexpected drip. We had the entire assembly replaced a couple of years ago, so it's all pretty new, which is why there was no drip; and then suddenly there was, and enough of one to fill an unwashed mug to the brim in about thirty minutes. I examined the nut around the base of the pipe and wondered if it needed tightening. I opened the kitchen drawer, recalling having seen a wrench in there, but it opened only so far due to the family size box of matches, just enough to reveal thumbtacks everywhere.

I tugged.

I tugged harder.

I slipped in my hand, probing for whatever was stuck - some kind of box which I accordingly pushed down.

I tugged but still nothing.

I tugged with brute force, hoping to break the thing and teach it a lesson. 'Cunt,' I screamed at the drawer, so loud that my throat hurt. As I say, it turned out to be a family size box of matches. I still don't even know why we have a family size box of matches.

A flash of white caught my attention, something in the garden.

I went to see. There were two white doggies running around in our garden, two wuvable white puppy dogs which I'll call Barky and Fido, most likely owned by Shooty the drug dealer who just never quite seems to find the time to secure his fucking fence. I'm not sure what breed Barky and Fido are, but they're of that pedigree generally preferred by those in the narcotics retail trade, the kind you often see in the newspaper when they've broken free and killed an infant. Because we have cats, I am displeased to see Barky and Fido having a woofy, waggy-tailed time of it in my garden, and I'm reluctant to pop down the road and ask whether Shooty might see his way to securing his fucking fence in case he decides it would be simpler to pop a cap in my ass.

Anyway, this evening we are dining out, even though we usually stay in on Tuesday, and would prefer to do so this evening because it's freezing out there, despite being March in Texas. The boy's school has done some deal with an eating establishment called Willie's Grill & Icehouse. The deal is that if we eat there on this particular Tuesday evening then present the school with the receipt, this will somehow count as good work and go towards Junior's final grade in his Latin class. It's some sort of sponsorship deal, something to do with  Willie's Grill & Icehouse donating money allowing Junior's Latin class to take part in state competitions, but it sounds like a bribe from where I'm sat - greasing the wheel, stacking the deck, payola, whatever else you want to call it. Still, although the boy gets by in Latin, his grades suggest a scholastic strategy similar to that which he applies to the task of procuring thumbtacks from a drawer. We are therefore on the road, heading for Willie's Grill & Icehouse, because that's how much we care.

Willie's Grill & Icehouse is unfortunately packed this evening, mostly with other parents attempting to influence what grades their own kids get in Latin this coming semester - whatever the hell a semester is. The queue reaches out the door, out into the freezing hell of the strip mall. It's wall to wall squares, eager beavers, apple polishers, good company men, loyal snitches, do rights, clean cut kids who unfailingly call you sir, sportswear - Go Spurs Go, and not one funny haircut amongst the lot of them. Once inside we are blasted with country and autotune music. Everywhere I look, there is a Bud Lite logo.

We last ten minutes in the queue which hasn't moved in all of that time. Fuck this, we declare, and leave. We'll go to eat elsewhere, then come back later and pick up a burger on the way home once the crowds have diminished. So long as we get a receipt from the place, it will still count.

We eat at the Longhorn Steakhouse because it's near. Also, there are places to sit and their country and western is at least the genuine article. The food, when it comes, is delicious.

It's approaching eight in the evening as we return to Willie's Grill & Icehouse. Bess goes in to procure a burger which we can take home to the kid. I briefly nod off in the car, cold and tired, then after an indeterminate length of time, go into the restaurant to find my wife. The queues have vanished, but the place is still busy. Bess waits for her order to be processed. We talk to other parents who had the same idea as us. One of them has a boy called Aniston in our kid's Latin group. I don't ask. Maybe she was a big fan of Friends.

Servers scurry back and forth from the hatch running along the front of the kitchen, all young, all wearing Willie's Grill & Icehouse t-shirts bearing the slogan, more food, more fun. I can feel my soul beginning to die around the edges. Food, if it's any good, no more needs to be fun than architecture needs to be educational, and - excepting the mighty Cocina Jibarazo - anyone who serves their food on anything other than a plate is a scoundrel, and so as to be clear on this, no - paper plates don't count either. If I'm sitting down to dine, I do not wish to eat from a punnet, a bag, a bit of cardboard, a piece of slate, a plank, or a bright red plastic basket with the food contained within a nest of greasy paper.

All around us are tables of teenagers and eager beavers and squares, all peeling shrimp and dumping the shells into blue buckets with Bud Lite printed on the side. These are actual diners rather than the kitchen staff which their labours imply, so I suppose peeling your own shrimp constitutes the fun promised by the t-shirt. I can tell I haven't strayed into the picture space of anything painted by Heironymous Bosch because I don't recall his art featuring a million flat screens tuned to knucklehead sports channels.

Eventually we have waited forty-five minutes, and still no sign of our order. 'Can I at least pay?' Bess asks, having finally caught someone's attention.

We pay and leave, because the receipt is all we really came for. We drive around the block, then return to pick up the burger, feeling awkward about just leaving something for which we paid. We drive home, feed the burger to the kid, watch Wheel of Fortune, then go to bed.

Next day is sunny and bright, even a little warm. I take in all of the blankets from where they've been draped to protect plants from the frost. I wedge canes into the earth at the points where Barky and Fido have been getting in under the fence. I take the kitchen drawer to pieces, pull out the old nails, then glue it all back together. Finally I get on my bike and ride, knowing it will be a better day.

Mr. Avery

Mr. Avery just turned up one morning. In addition to our own gang, I also serve breakfast to three or four feral cats who've taken to hanging around in our back garden. Curiously, the feral cat population tends to remain stable, with the number remaining at three or four. Gary from down the road had recently departed to the great alley in the sky, which I imagine resembling the one in the Top Cat cartoons, and it seemed that pussycat central control had sent Mr. Avery as his replacement.

He was huge and a buff ginger colour, with a tiny little face set at the centre of a big round head giving him the appearance of a feline Oliver Hardy. At the time, Bess and I had been watching the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer which details the plight of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man currently serving life for crimes he almost certainly didn't commit; and because Steven Avery might also be described as rounded and ginger, we named the new cat after him.

Mr. Avery looked as though he'd been inflated with a bicycle pump, a series of sullen orange balloons forever sat waiting to be fed outside our back door. He seemed too groomed and well fed to have grown up feral and so we assumed he was probably lost. He wasn't particularly friendly, always keeping a distance whilst being too big to be truly intimidated by any of the other cats. He had the demeanour of a cat who had probably lived inside for most of his life and was accustomed to luxury.

Assuming Mr. Avery had probably been someone's cat, I posted on Nextdoor, our online neighbourhood forum, in the hope of tracking down his owner. I received two replies. One described a missing cat named Sunny, who couldn't have been our boy unless his nuts had grown back in accordance with the laws of only Mexican biology. The other was from a woman called Millicent who explained that her neighbour was missing a ginger cat, and specifically one with a bit of a red nose due to allergies.

I went outside, found Mr. Avery, and inspected his nose. Sure enough, it seemed kind of red.

I sent Millicent a photograph of Mr. Avery along with my phone number. She said she would show the photograph to her neighbour.

Two days later there was still no reply. I sent a second message asking if she had yet shown the photograph to her neighbour.

I have not seen her, she explained. Let me go knock.

Three days passed without further response, so I asked again.

No, she said, she still hadn't had a chance to talk to her neighbour, but it was probably a different cat - even though Millicent herself somehow had no idea what the missing cat looked like, and anyway, she was in Alamo Heights, some two miles from us, so - you know - it seemed a bit unlikely. Maybe I should pop along to my local vet and ask if anyone had reported a missing cat.

I told Bess, who pointed out that no-one born since 1910 has been named Millicent, and that this in combination with the Alamo Heights location suggested I'd been dealing with a woman who had probably never been in the position of having to wipe her own bottom, and who might therefore be characterised as inherently flaky.

All the same, Millicent had given me her own address, so it seemed like we might as well go over and call at a few of the adjacent dwellings. One of them would be the former residence of Mr. Avery, we reasoned. I would have asked for the specific details, but I found myself unable to phrase the question in a way which didn't approximate to we'll make our own enquiries if you'd be so kind as to forward the address of this person who is missing their cat, seeing as it's apparently too much trouble for you…

We drove over to Alamo Heights - two miles, but not actually that far in terms of the distance cats have been known to venture. I was going to wear my hi-viz jacket so as to effect an illusion of officialdom, the sort of stranger to whom one might safely open the door knowing it would be about the local water supply or something; but Bess pointed out that some guy in a hi-viz jacket asking about a missing cat was arguably weirder than the same thing in regular clothes, so the hi-viz stayed in the car.

The anticipated gun-toting Republicrats foaming at the mouth and bellowing git off mah probertee, bwaaah thankfully failed to materialise. Same with the cat-hating nutters who would be glad to learn of one having gone missing, hope it stayed that way, then ask how come it's okay for cats to roam all over but you see one stray dog and everyone loses their shit? These were the people we expected to meet, having read their incoherent rants on the aforementioned Nextdoor, but thankfully it turns out that the internet can sometimes present an unbalanced, unrepresentative picture of humanity.

Everybody liked cats, everybody had their own stories about a missing cat, but nobody had actually lost one; until we came to a house from which a ginger cat named Cheeto had absconded a few months earlier. This was clearly the cat to whom Millicent had alluded, but Cheeto had been back a while and was presently rubbing his face against my leg whilst purring like a motorboat.

So we went home to Mr. Avery and the others, at least knowing we had tried; which isn't the end of the story, but is probably the end of this episode.

San Antonio's Intergalactic Visitors

Looking at this photograph, it may take a moment for you to notice anything out of the ordinary, but it is there. This is an ordinary photograph taken by myself on Wednesday the 30th of January, 2019 using my trusty Samsung PL65 digital camera. Excepting that the flash hasn't worked for the last couple of years, the camera is in no way faulty, and the above photograph features no model work or related trickery. Nor was Photoshop used to edit the image.

I was on my daily twenty mile bike ride along San Antonio's Tobin Trail. I had just passed beneath the bridges of both the railway line and Wetmore Road, and I was heading up the hill which is a supposedly natural feature of that stretch of the trail when I noticed an object nestled in the grass. The path upon which I rode followed a winding course, and so I stopped at the outermost point of the curve, which was also the point closest to the object. Looking north I saw what appeared to be a construction resembling a pipe projecting upwards from the grass. I have been riding the Tobin Trail for nearly eight years and am therefore familiar with the landscape, and yet this feature was new to me. I estimate that the construction would have been about thirty feet from where I stood. I did not approach the construction, which appeared artificial in nature, for to do so would have meant leaving my bicycle unguarded, but I was able to take a number of photographs. Let's have a closer look.

There is no doubt in my mind that the photograph shows an artificial construction. It is not a tree stump, and as I have already stated, this is a genuine photograph and not something produced through use of Photoshop or similar.

This section of the Tobin Trail comprises a surfaced path leading up to the top of the hill and then down on the other side, forming what would be a horseshoe shape if seen from above. If we were to draw a line between the two tips of the horseshoe, we have a rough dirt path running along the base of the hill, as can be seen in the first photograph. Viewed from above, the area around the mysterious pipe is laid out like so:

 

It has been suggested to me that the construction may simply be a certain type of water bottle, perhaps one left behind by a person - either a walker or a cyclist - who opted to take a short cut to the further part of the trail. While this is a nice idea, not only can neither any cyclist nor any walker be seen in my photograph, but I do not recall having seen any such person taking this proposed short cut in a great many weeks. Of course, whilst the object may well be a water bottle left behind by this hypothetical individual, it may equally well be something which fell out of Doctor Who's TARDIS as he flew over on his way to fight the Daleks, but I would rather avoid such flights of fancy as I attempt to deduce the facts of this mystery.

This is a water bottle of the kind proposed by our sceptical friend, as seen on the Amazon website. Unfortunately, as you can see, it is quite different to the construction shown in the second photograph, so we might do better to concentrate on the main issue rather than waste our time with random speculation.

Working on the assumption of the construction being something akin to a chimney or perhaps an exhaust pipe, it seems likely that it must be the single visible extension of a subterranean complex, perhaps housing spacecraft from another world, providing rest and recreation for the alien pilots after their long voyage from the stars. Many researchers have noticed a correlation between UFO sightings and airports or air bases, and it can surely be no coincidence that the telltale exhaust pipe is situated at less than the distance of one mile from San Antonio airport. Indeed, I distinctly recall having seen signs instructing members of the public that in making use of the Tobin Trail, they are upon land which is the property of the aviation authority.

The location of the exhaust pipe is indicated by the numeral (1) on the first map, and the same is a detail of this second larger map denoted by the square. The airport runway is to be seen on the left-hand side of the map.

Naturally, I would not wish to take the supposed correlation between UFO sightings and airports or air bases for granted just because what seems to be a subterranean UFO base just happens to be situated near an airport; so it was fortuitous indeed that I was able to witness evidence of the same with my own eyes and also to record it on camera. I was stood at the point indicated by the numeral (3) on the first map when I noticed a mysterious object rising up from the direction of the airport. It was twenty-three minutes past one in the afternoon, Friday the 1st of February, 2019. The sky was overcast and the object moved through the air from west to north-east. The electricity pylon seen on the left of this photograph is the one which is visible in the first photograph. As before, I should stress that this is a genuine photograph and has not been subject to manipulation or enhancement using Photoshop.

As can be seen in the blown up image which follows, the object initially appeared as a sort of cone shape, tipped to one side (most likely simply due to how it was flying) and mounted upon a longer, cigar-shaped base. There seems to be something projecting from the left of the cone, perhaps an aerial, or perhaps even one of the extraterrestrial passengers who has decided to take a look out of the window at this mysterious world some of us like to call Earth!

By the time I was able to take a second photograph, the craft was passing much closer to my vantage point, affording me a better shot, but unfortunately by this point it had already taken on a familiar form resembling that of a light aircraft of terrestrial design - as seen in the photograph below. If unusual, this transformation has been noted as a common type of camouflage adopted by our interplanetary visitors in recent years, and for me it was sufficient proof that I was onto something. Could this be a craft which had only recently taken off from the underground saucer base I had discovered? Was this what I had just seen with my own eyes?

It seems incredible that these beings should have allowed me to witness their activity in this way, and to have allowed me to discover the facts of their existence in the first place; but then perhaps my discovery had been an unintentional one.

I have been cycling the Tobin Trail since 2011, and up until a year or so ago, as I reached the point designated by the numeral (2) on the first map, I usually alighted, pausing my journey so that I might urinate. The point indicated is on the top of the hill in such a position as to allow me to see others approaching from a great distance, whilst being hidden from view by motorists on both Wurzbach Parkway and Wetmore Road by the curvature of the hill (as can be seen from the second map). Therefore, feeling myself blessed with sufficient privacy, I habitually urinated at this point on a daily basis; until recently when I learned that technically this constitutes indecent exposure under United States law, and if successfully convicted of that charge, I would find myself obliged by law to inform all my neighbours of my status as a registered sex offender! I therefore now suspect that the subterraneans were attempting to warn me off or to put me out of the picture by somehow inducing my need to urinate at that specific location, hoping I would then be discovered and prosecuted. Indeed, I already mentioned having seen signs instructing members of the public that in making use of the Tobin Trail, they are upon land which is the property of the aviation authority. It is curious that I am no longer able to find any of these signs anywhere along the Tobin Trail, almost as though they have been removed by someone, or perhaps something! Without such warnings, an innocent walker or cyclist might commit trespass and find themselves inconveniently detained by legal authorities; or perhaps I should say conveniently detained for I'm sure it would prove quite convenient for person, persons, or perhaps even beings who would prefer their activities to remain undetected.

Having shed some light on the mysteries of the land on the western side of San Antonio airport, and the mysterious non-human creatures which shelter beneath it in their technological hideout, we are left only with the question of why now? My own hunch is that we find ourselves presently entering a crucial stage of human history, now that we have an innovative president pushing a bold new type of politics which has already given us the promise of our own Star Trek style Space Force, and so it is only natural that beings from other realms, and even other times, should wish to study this episode of human history. With this thought in mind, I direct readers to the point indicated by the numeral (4) on the second map. This pointer indicates the location of an artificial shelter constructed so as to protect those using the Tobin Trail from chips of rock which may be dislodged as trains pass by on the overhead railway line. It can hardly be a coincidence that this same shelter has been decorated with several stickers promoting the president's forthcoming campaign for re-election in the year 2020; although given all which we now know of this mystery, it wouldn't surprise me if these stickers had actually been bought back from the future after he has already won!

Sceptics will doubtless raise the same sort of objections they always raise, namely that I have been mistaken and what I saw was actually the planet Venus, or they will claim that I have invented most of this story, then tried to support my invention using trick photographs cleverly forged by means of Photoshop. Yet I have the proof, for my photographs, those which I have shared here, are quite genuine and have not been artificially made on Photoshop; and if this is all a fantasy, then what induced me to urinate at the top of the hill nearly every day, year after year; and what is the true nature of the mysterious shape-changing craft I saw that day? I would ask these questions of my critics, but I know that they would be greeted only with silence.

What more proof do I need than that the beings themselves have attempted to curtail my investigations. On Friday the 1st of February, 2019, just after my encounter with the alien craft, I was able to take this photograph.

Compare this with the second photograph and you will see that the pipe, the chimney, the exhaust system or whatever it may be, is of articulated construction and has now been laid flat in the grass so as to conceal it from further scrutiny. They knew that I had detected them, and that their secret presence on our world was no longer quite such a secret. Why else would they have gone to such trouble to elude detection?

If you can think of a reason, I'd sure like to hear it.