The Town on the Border

It's Saturday and we've found ourselves at a loose end, so we drive to Laredo on a whim and because we haven't been there in a while. Laredo is on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, and Nuevo Laredo - which is actually in Mexico - is on the other side. We leave before noon, drive for an hour but not quite two and park in the usual parking lot on the bank of the river. We can see a Mexican family on the other side, spilling from their car for a picnic and a couple of the kids with fishing rods. The hysteria attendant to the thought of people on the other side of the border and what they might do seems even more strange and stupid when you can actually see them with your own eyes. The river isn't even so wide as the Thames as it passes through London and the water is warmer which probably explains a couple of border patrol vehicles parked nearby - just in case.

We stroll a few hundred yards along to the bridge where both vehicles and pedestrians cross to and from Mexico, passing through an enormous Border Control center on the opposite bank. There's a guy fishing beneath the bridge, stood in front of a squall of graffiti which is too far away to be legible. I take a photograph on my digital camera and zoom in to read Tepito existe porque resisto, which amounts to Tepito exists because it resists, or similar, although I have no idea what it means. Tepito is one of the reputedly more fearsome neighbourhoods of Mexico City, which is nevertheless seven hundred miles to the south. Maybe there's also a Tepito in Nuevo Laredo, or maybe the name has accumulated some other meaning. In any case, the slogan is surrounded by graffiti footnotes suggesting that the artist really, really likes someone called Rachel, so we probably have a mixed message even before we get to the language barrier.

Laredo itself seems unusually empty given that it's Saturday afternoon. The stores are open but there's hardly anyone around, and I wonder if the traditional Mexican siesta has finally crossed the border. It really does feel like I'm back in Mexico again. The stores are distinctly Mexican - notably all the perfume outlets and a branch of Liverpool, the department store - although I realise they may simply be trading on the name rather than actually related. We pass a branch of Church's, the fried chicken franchise, and because this is Laredo the usual corporate hoardings and illuminated menus are hand painted on a piece of hardboard. The town even smells like Mexico City, which is uncanny - which I qualify by stating that Mexico City smells simply distinctive rather than actively unpleasant, unless it's very early morning for some reason.

Passing a clothing store, I see that the floor is divided into sections for women, ladies, and accessories - marker pen on squares of cardboard. The distinction, so my wife informs me, is that clothes for ladies tend to be regular sizes, whereas those for women apparently presume that the customer could stand to lose a few pounds - which seems somewhat judgey.

We enter what resembles a thrift store because I decide I need to buy a belt. I've been trying to lose weight and have succeeded in so much as that my trousers now fall down with some frequency due to my having reached the final hole on my normal belt. Their belts are a dollar each, which seems just a little too cheap to be trusted. There's a stack of comic books at one side of the store, which is organised according to some free-range logic, and uppermost is a reprint of a specific issue of the Incredible Hulk that I've been after for two years. I haven't bought a copy because the cheapest I can find presently costs several hundred dollars, even in terrible condition, and online searches have yielded no reference to any cheaper reprint leaving me to assume that there was no such thing. Yet here it is for something like fifty cents; except, having been looking for the thing since about 2018 or thereabouts, just this week I paid twenty bucks for a paperback collection including this specific issue - amongst others which I had no particular interest in reading - and which arrived in the mail just yesterday morning.

We keep walking and begin to notice how many stores have been boarded up - pretty much all of them. The heart of Laredo has become a ghost town with just two or three functioning streets at the center. The rest has been abandoned, and even the occasional spray of broken glass seems to have been left untouched as it would be were it a crime scene, which somehow it isn't. There's no telling whether this is a direct result of the pandemic, or whether old Laredo was always on the economic edge. The outlet malls which line the highway on the way in and out of town seem to be doing business as usual, so it's anyone's guess.

We return to the car and head home, hoping the place will have been restored to life next time we visit.

City resources have apparently been stretched by an influx of refugees from Haiti, and there's the recent discovery of a huge mass grave just across the river, but I have no idea whether either of these are really a factor in whatever has happened to Laredo. It's a great shame because it's a lovely town, one where it's still possible to walk down a street without feeling like there's a massive invisible hand squeezing every last droplet of money out of you, without feeling like you're just part of a financial equation; or that's how it was. I fear for whatever the future may hold.

Fare Thee Well, Pentagon Center

My first true mall was the Stoneborough Center in Maidstone, Kent, prior to which I knew the mall only as a place where American teenagers would hang out in movies starring Michael J. Fox. I grew up in the era of the shopping precinct. By the time I went to art college, the era of the mall had arrived. The Stoneborough center had a great record shop called Challenger & Hicks from which I purchased debut albums by the Dentists and the Apostles, amongst others; and Hayley worked at Miss Selfridge on the lower floor. I had entered Hayley one evening, a transaction facilitated by booze and Hayley's desire to annoy Pete, her boyfriend, but it ended badly. This left me mooning around outside Miss Selfridge trying to make it seem as though I just happened to be passing, until she emerged, took me to McDonalds, and explained the general concept of dumpsville - which was probably fair enough with hindsight.

That's all I can remember of the Stoneborough Center.

My second mall was the Pentagon Center in Chatham, Kent. I moved to Chatham in September, 1987 and lived there for the next two years. The Pentagon Center was bigger and Chatham had better pubs and I knew more people. My memories of the Pentagon Center are as follows:

• Andy Bibby shoplifting my Christmas present from WHSmith, the Monkees greatest hits on cassette. He presented me with this gift directly outside the Pentagon Center on the pedestrian walkway. I wasn't actually expecting a Christmas present from him because I didn't like him very much, and was never particularly struck on the Monkees either for that matter.
• Buying cheap records from a store on the ground floor. The shop seemed to be one big bargain bin of ex-chart releases and things which hadn't sold in the first place. Being on the dole and hence skint at the time, I picked up quite a lot there and even got into the habit of buying 7" singles seeing as they were something like twenty-five pence each. I'd only really bothered with albums and 12" singles up until that point for slightly cranky, pedantic reasons; but at twenty-five pence a throw, I felt adventurous and took chances on things I'd never heard if they seemed interesting. Inevitably I picked up a few duds, but also some pretty good stuff - Eric B & Rakim, early techno singles by Todd Terry and the like.
• Buying normally priced records from K2, the other record store, which I think was on the second floor. They had a couple of things on the Illuminated label, which was nice, and the first Lack of Knowledge album. I also encountered my first Metallica album in their racks. I hadn't heard of them before, and thirty years later I'm still astonished at what a pitiful name they chose - Metallica because they play metal, and so it presumably suggests things which pertain to the same. It struck me as being like a punk band calling themselves the Gobbing Pogoers or Punkerrific!
• Running into the French chef from the Blue Lagoon just outside one afternoon and him getting very excited and waving a newspaper at me, folded to the classified section at the back. The prison service was recruiting. He knew I was on the dole and somehow thought I'd make a great prison warden. He might have been Spanish, come to think of it.
• The Blue Grotto, which was a depressing pub on the lower floor as you made your way out to where the National Express coaches were parked, and tellingly possibly the nearest pub to the dole office as the crow flies - although it might have been Churchill's, I suppose. It felt like one of those modern pubs on a fifties estate, all stains, man-made fibre and broken dreams. I'm not sure I ever went in there, or if I did, I didn't stay very long. Its claim to fame seems to have been as venue for the Dentists' first gig.
• Ludicrously animatronic festive displays around Christmas near the escalators, although this is one of those memories where I can no longer quite remember if it was from life or something on TV.
• Pilgrimage to the associated coach station every other Friday afternoon - either every two weeks or possibly monthly - for transport up to London so as to stock up on X-Men comics and visit my friend Carl in Rotherhithe. This coach journey is probably what imprinted me with the idea of living in Lewisham, which I eventually did. The most memorable part of the route was through Lewisham, you see.

That's more or less the sum of my memories of the Pentagon Centre, although there's also the possibility that I may have bought a Talking Heads album from WHSmith, probably Speaking in Tongues. They're not great memories, and you'd be hard pressed to get a three hour feature film out of them, but they're my memories.

Recently I've learned that the Pentagon Center is to be redeveloped. Online articles seem keen to stress that it's a redevelopment rather than demolition, but the first image that comes up shows a JCB, rubble, and hoarding promising 1 & 2 bedroom apartments from ₤185,000. I'm not sure I've set foot in the place this century, never mind recently, and I don't doubt the truth of online articles bemoaning it having turned into a piss-stained urban purgatory of pound shops and loan sharks; but then it was always kind of crappy, even in my day, and it felt like our crappy. I don't have any real investment in the place, not after all this time, and arguably even less right to object to the coffee crash pads and mindfulness hubs which I'm sure will soon be setting up shop in whatever's left once they've housed all those web developers from Leicester who've heard something or other about at least one of the local schools; but I thought I should at least acknowledge the passing of whatever it is that's passing.

Some things were better when they were crap.

Warehouse

San Antonio has a problem with homeless people. I don't know how many homeless people we have relative to other cities, but we have them and they're fairly visible. There was some law passed a couple of years ago whereby one could be fined or otherwise made subject to legal action should you be seen aiding a homeless, even just giving one a sandwich or a can of pop. I don't know if this law is still in place because I don't actively seek out information which might facilitate my expressing indignation on social media, but I haven't heard about it having been dropped; and I have heard about House Bill 1925 which criminalises homeless encampments and which was winging its way to the desk of Russ Abbott, our state governor, just a few months ago. Given Russ Abbott's previous Trumpesque form whereby the value of a decision is quantified by how much it will annoy liberals, I'm sure he'll think it's a wonderful idea.

The notion of discouraging homeless persons by fining those who provide food seemed calculated to diminish vagrancy around the more picturesque parts of the city centre where tourists with big wallets might happen to pass by. I seem to recall that, in official terms, the law was intended to concentrate all those bums and park tramps in the general vicinity of recognised homeless shelters and soup kitchens - mostly at some distance from the Alamo by happy coincidence. I have become unfortunately accustomed to persons who think in this way, persons such as the genius who posted on Next Door to announce that he would be standing for election and would appreciate our support. He'd noticed a lot of homelesses along Austin Highway and was going to solve the problem by taxing them. I guess if those lazy homelesses suddenly found a chunk of their wages being siphoned off by the city treasury, they might buck up their ideas and start living in houses. I don't really see the logic in this proposal but then I've never read Ayn Rand.

In related news, my stepson occasionally engages in volunteer work for a homeless charity. This is something to do with his school which expects so many hours of volunteer work from him each year, and which somehow counts towards his 'O' levels or whatever the hell it is happens at the end. He's volunteered at the local zoo, which I understand mostly involves him standing around and lecturing complete strangers on animal facts and statistics regardless of whether or not they asked. This seems to relate to the sort of thing he wants to do when he leaves school, and is more or less what he does anyway, so that's handy. He also spent some time volunteering at a retirement community, either calling out bingo numbers or providing hand massages with moisturiser, but he wasn't quite so keen on that one for some reason. The work for the homeless charity is usually either parcelling up boxes of food and the like, or else working in one of the kitchens at which the homeless get to eat without anyone being fined.

It probably comes as no surprise that his various volunteer jobs have been somewhat thin on the ground during the pandemic, but things seemed to be starting up again, and so my wife put him down for packing boxes as soon as it became an option. She also put herself down for a shift, and me too. I don't remember exactly why, but it seemed like something to do.

We were given a time and place at which we showed up along with about a hundred others, possibly more, and were all herded into a warehouse of the kind with which I am quite familiar, having worked in many similar places over the years. The biggest difference was not so much that the boxes we'd all be slugging around contained food as that those present actively wanted to be there, presumably having lived lives which had spared them from working a conveyor belt. We were mostly teenagers or suburban housewives with big smiles, clean clothes, and a can do attitude; as distinct from employees of Parcel Force, few of whom had any better options.

The deal was that we'd each pick a place along the conveyor belt. One group of people were given the task of assembling cardboard boxes and setting them on the belt. The rest of us worked in teams, opening up packages of bottled fruit juice, breakfast cereal, tinned food - whatever had been donated or otherwise procured - and filling the boxes. Bess, myself and the boy took up position right at the start of the belt. My job was to collect newly assembled boxes from the people behind me and set them on the belt. Junior opened up packages of apple juice and set each bottle on a trestle table, and Bess transferred a single bottle to each box before shoving it along so that the next people in line could add a carton of breakfast cereal, and so on and so on until the box was full by the time it reached the other end. It was boring and repetitive but it was good exercise - the sort of task which becomes automatic after the first few minutes. There were seven or eight people working behind me, all pulling flat boxes from a pack, pushing them out, taping up the bottom, and stacking them ready.

I did this for about an hour and came to the peculiar realisation that I kind of miss this sort of manual labour. There's something satisfying about its sheer relentless physicality, although it doubtless helped that no-one was going for maximum productivity by overloading the workforce to its absolute limit as they did at Parcel Force - a job which involved more yelling than any I've done before or since.

We had a ten minute break after about an hour, then got back to it for the second half. Junior began to struggle, having apparently been thrown by the arrival of a different brand of apple juice, the bottles of which could not be lifted from the packaging with quite the same fluid motion as before. I told him to take over what I'd been doing on the grounds that I have more experience as a mindlessly labouring cog in a machine so it didn't make much difference to me. The new bottles were indeed a pain in the arse compared to the previous type, but it was otherwise fine, and so we all chugged away for another hour. Metal things cracked and banged and echoed around the vast, cavernous space, and the radio cranked out distorted hits of the seventies and eighties. It was all strangely familiar, but less depressing for being a one off deal.

Neither Bess nor myself recall how many boxes we made up at the end of the two hours, but it seemed like a lot, and it felt as though we'd done something good. I have no idea how much difference any of it will have made to those who'll receive one of our boxes, but hopefully it will be a help on some level; and it at least seemed more productive than any of the endless whining about people who live out of borrowed shopping carts making the place look untidy.

Hello, My Name is Max Cady

I'm cooking dinner when my wife calls me into the front room. 'Can you believe this?'

I turn to the TV. We're tuned to the evening news, presently taken up by footage from someone's cellphone. Some woman has encountered Judge Nelson Wolff in a local supermarket and is giving him a piece of her mind, such as it is, whilst filming it all on her phone. Wolff walks to his car, refusing to acknowledge the woman as she calls him a communist and a traitor, adding that making a kid wear a mask is a form of child abuse. This is a woman who likes to stand up for what she believes in. She's shared this video clip on social media and now it's on the news.

Nelson Wolff is among those supporting Mayor Ron Nirenberg's opposition to our state governor's most recent decree, the one banning mask mandates. Our state governor believes that ordering people to wear masks during a pandemic - and presumably he understands that we're in the middle of a pandemic on some fucking level - is a violation of human rights or something. Our city council appears to believe that our state governor is a shithead and I can sort of see their point, if that's actually what they believe.

'Who the fuck does she think she is?' I ask.

'She's a hairdresser,' Bess tells me.

'Wow.'

We rewind the clip and watch it again, then I go back to the kitchen and Bess gets to work on her phone. Within minutes she's found the woman's home address, the hair salon, and everything else you would probably rather not know.

The woman's surname is obviously something she came up with herself. I won't repeat it here, but let's just say that as names go, she may as well have named herself Ashley Awesome or something similarly imaginative. It's the equivalent of a personalised license plate on your vehicle, letters and numbers somehow tailored so as to imply that you're a hit in the sack or whatever. If there's one surefire indication of life's success stories, it's that which is written on a personalised license plate because it's always the truth.

Ashley Awesome's facebook page is batshit - exactly the sort of thing you would expect of someone who calls an elected official - here in Texas in the year of Our Lord 2021 - a communist: Trump was clearing out the swamp, the pandemic has been orchestrated and anyway it's not that serious, blah blah blah freedom blah blah blah the constitution blah blah blah…

A couple of days later we happen to be out and about on a drive, and we just happen to drive past the woman's home. We want to see what it looks like. We want to be Robert deNiro taking his seat in front of Nick Nolte and lighting up the world's smelliest cigar. The house is in one of those bland personality free subdivisions which make English council estates seem wildly Bohemian. Every house is the same, few trees, no shops, no stores, nothing communal and everything just a little too clean; and these houses cost a shitload too, much more than our own rundown corner of the 'hood. This is where all those success stories end up. There's a dirt bike in the woman's drive, and the flag of the black and white stars and stripes bisected by a blue line. Ashley supports our brave boys in blue, which isn't a massive surprise. There's also a vertical banner which reads AMERICA just in case anyone was so terminally fucking stupid as to have forgotten where we are.

We drive slowly past the woman's house, which brings us both a great feeling of satisfaction for reasons which are quite difficult to describe. There is about as little substance to this person as we had guessed, and that's always good to know. She's an assemblage of signifiers calculated to annoy liberals. It doesn't really matter what she supports or claims to support because the most important detail will always be who it annoys. None of this shit is even consistent. It's just a symphony of differently hued raspberries blown at anyone who ever read a book, or tied their own shoelaces, or who once called you something hurtful, perhaps implying you were a bit of a fuckwit in some respect.

When was the last time you heard anyone banging on about freedom or the Constitution in service of a cause which wasn't about them getting to dictate what happens with everyone else, and which wasn't in response to something which has no impact on their own continued existence whatsoever?

It really feels like it's been a while.

Meanwhile, the Yelp page for the woman's hair salon has all but vanished beneath a deluge of negative reviews. She's replied to a few of them, a form response explaining how she knows the reviewer has never even visited her salon and can therefore expect to hear from a cyberdetective she has hired to tackle such fraudulent submissions.

That's how it works, see!

Scary.

Private World

I have been in existence for fifty-five years. By the time anyone reads this it will be fifty-six, all being well. The title would have been Solipsism but I'm trying hard to avoid disappearing up my own back passage, and Private World amounts to more or less the same thing whilst also being one of my favourite songs by the New York Dolls.

For some reason, I've always been driven to order things in sets or to alphabeticise them - books, records, art, or whatever - essentially to create frames. The books I accumulated as a child, only some of which I actually read, were ordered to my way of thinking into three main groups - excepting outliers such as Winnie the Pooh or anything containing pictures of dinosaurs. These three main groups were Doctor Who novelisations, cranky flying saucer literature, and humour. The last of these, humour, encompassed incomplete collections of Tintin and Asterix, then Mad magazine paperbacks, TV tie-in material such as were spun off from the Goodies or Monty Python, and more or less anything by Spike Milligan. I was a sporadic reader, but I liked anything with pictures that was funny. While the Who novels and the saucer books tended towards a certain stylistic uniformity, as did the Asterix and Tintin titles, the funny books were of all different shapes, sizes, and composition, which apparently bothered me. I therefore attempted to redefine them as a coherent group by writing The Loony Library - blue or black felt tip, all capitals and underlined - in the upper left corner on the inside cover of each book, as though they might constitute a body of thematically associated research material. All I knew was that I liked things to be in sets.

Much later, at the age of fourteen or so, I got my first mono portable tape recorder and took to borrowing novelty records from my friends, making up two C90 compilations for which I laboriously drew covers in felt tip; and, still very much in the thrall of Milligan, I named them Songs for the Hard of Thinking volumes one and two. Somehow it wasn't enough to simply have a couple of cassettes featuring Funky Gibbon, Friggin' in the Riggin' and selections from the K-Tel Looney Tunes album, so I framed the tapes on my own terms - packaged them even.

A year or so later, the enterprise had come to seem a little juvenile even to me so I peeled off the labels I'd glued onto the cassettes and taped over both volumes with pop songs from the radio - Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex, the first Public Image Limited single, Instant Replay by Dan Hartman and others. I was trying to grow up, but I wasn't picky.

However, this arbitrary assembly bothered me somehow, being nothing like so tidy as the few record albums I'd bought, all with nice covers and each one recorded by a specific artist or band. It was a good few years before I bought an actual vinyl compilation album because the basic concept had struck me as untidy. I found peace, at least with taping stuff off the radio, by instigating another set or series or whatever you want to call it on Saturday the 19th of July, 1980. The series was named The Illegal Tapes as a rebelliously sardonic nod to the notion of home taping killing music, and I remember the date because it's written inside my hand drawn cover for the first volume in reference to a Simple Minds performance broadcast during Radio One's In Concert slot. I filled the numerous volumes of The Illegal Tapes with stuff from the radio and singles borrowed from friends, diligently noting down the details of each on the cover, just like on an official release - credits, time, record label, owner of record and so on; and I listened to these tapes at least as often as I listened to my albums despite the shitty quality.

After thirty or so volumes, I began to recognise the faithful indexing of all that small print as essentially ludicrous, but I continued to make covers for the things and somehow kept the series going for one-hundred and twenty-two volumes, finally breaking the habit at some point in the nineties; and naturally I still have all of them because that's how my brain works. I frame things with which I furnish my own private world, possibly as a ritual affirmation of my being in control. I create a framework within which I feel better able to operate, by some definition.

In recent years I've grown increasingly conscious of the fact that I will, at some point, look back on this piece of writing and think, fifty-fucking-five, possibly also lamenting the passing of the ease with which I am able to function, both physically and mentally. I'm also aware that it may feel as though very little time has passed because it will have appeared to race more and more with each year. Childhood seemed to last forever, with eternities such as the length of time some friend was borrowing Spike Milligan's Little Pot Boiler measured in weeks. These days I can read a book I regard as a recent purchase and discover that I bought the thing five years ago.

At the age of ten, five years counted as 50% of the full span of my time on Earth. Five years is now 9.09% of my existence, and my existence is, I suppose, the sum of memories I've accumulated thus far; hence the sensation of my having stepped on the figurative gas in recent years. Elvis Presley released Heartbreak Hotel in 1956, which seemed like prehistory when I was a teenager in 1980, something belonging to the milieu of the second world war and Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston; yet Heartbreak Hotel was just twenty-four years old as of 1980, which is now forty-one years ago.

Twenty-four years back from 2021 brings us to 1997. Oasis were bothering the charts on a regular basis, but I'd given up on rock music and was listening mostly to rap and churning out a series of paintings based on various supernatural figures from Mexican mythology. It doesn't quite seem like yesterday, but maybe the day before yesterday. There were things I began in 1997 which I still vaguely regard as work in progress, while avoiding thoughts of whether or not I'm ever actually likely to get them finished.

I scribbled a hasty, non-committal cover for my final volume of The Illegal Tapes at the age of thirty-five. I had interests, creative pursuits, and habits but it didn't feel quite as though I'd ever fully engaged with anything. There wasn't anything I did which felt vital in the sense of being more than just a means of passing time, at least not with hindsight. I loved making art, recording my own music and writing, but everything I produced began to feel half-arsed once the initial fervour of creating yet another set or series had passed. All I could see were the flaws. I'd begun to suspect that I might be prone to fads or faddish behaviour, because I hadn't consistently stuck at any one thing for more than a couple of years, excepting working as a postman for Royal Mail which I didn't really like to think of as a calling. When I noticed pre-Hispanic Mexico and found myself becoming rapidly obsessed, I told myself that this time I was going to go all the way with it, whatever that meant, and so I did. I'd only ever been a sporadic reader, but now I really threw myself into it. When I ran out of library books, I made trips to Foyles and worked my way through their shelves, beginning with fairly general reading, ultimately graduating to specialised academic texts, translations of Codex Chimalpahin and so on. Eventually all that was left was to go to Mexico and have a look around, so that's what I did. Above all, I loved the discovery that the more I read, the more I understood, and the more I felt as though I had a grasp on the subject beyond my usual waving a hand in the air and explaining well, it's like, you know, it's like, stuff, and that's really interesting, and you know…

The more I used my brain, the better it seemed to work.

I began something called Hueyteteotecuhtin mainly for the sake of having a focus and making use of all that I was learning. Hueyteteotecuhtin would have been a book collecting my series of mythological paintings together with essays explaining the same.

The more I understood, the more I enjoyed the understanding, and the more I realised how little I had actually understood anything up until that point. I took copious notes of everything I read or saw, filling ring binders with scrawling essays and observations which informed the paintings; then eventually realised that Hueyteteotecuhtin, my proposed visual encyclopedia of Mexican Gods would be, with the best will in the world, a potentially cranky undertaking due to the uneasy combination of pseudo-surrealist art and notionally scholarly essays in the tone of an autodidact. I dislike leaving anything unfinished but have come to accept that Hueyteteotecuhtin was probably one of those undertakings where the journey was ultimately more important than the destination.

While pondering what form Hueyteteotecuhtin might eventually take, I wrote a novel, Smoking Mirror, and then another novel, The Other Side of the World when Smoking Mirror failed to find a publisher. The Other Side of the World was eventually published by Obverse Books as Against Nature following such extensive revisions as to turn it into a different book. My attempts to write fiction began as a sort of appendix to Hueyteteotecuhtin, an undertaking I tried on the side for the sake of light relief as much as anything; but also for the sake of making use of all that research and those five trips to Mexico City, at least ensuring that it had all amounted to something and wasn't just another dead end.

By 2008, fiction had become my main thing and writing was becoming something like an end in itself. It was never anything I did in pursuit of fame or money, although I don't think I would have had a problem with either. It was simply what I did, and as such I struggled for proficiency, to be able to pull together a sentence with the sort of aptitude and skill I'd never really achieved with a guitar; and at some point, I think I got there.

I'd agonised over Smoking Mirror, crawling forward one sentence at a time, usually finding it to be drivel and requiring extensive revision next day. The Other Side of the World came a little easier, following which I took to short stories, writing and rewriting almost every day in an effort to get to grips with it.

As I took to writing science-fiction, it occurred to me that I hadn't actually read much aside from about half of Philip K. Dick's body of work and a stack of Doctor Who novelisations; but I'd read enough to be able to tell when an author's main influences were films or television serials because their novels read as though they would rather have been something else, and I didn't want to be one of those people. If you're writing a novel in hope of it becoming a series on Netflix, I probably won't want to read it.

The discovery of self-publishing came as a revelation to me, a means of framing my writing like I'd framed stuff taped from the radio as The Illegal Tapes. It meant that I could produce decent looking paperbacks of both Smoking Mirror and The Other Side of the World, legitimising them as finished pieces which I could then sell to anyone who might be interested. Self-publishing served to frame all that work as something beyond just a stack of printouts in a ringbinder or files sat on my computer and, to be frank, the sequence of my own Lulu publications occupying the book shelf between William Burroughs' Blade Runner treatment and Octavia Butler's Mind of My Mind means more to me than whether anyone is buying.

As it happens, I do seem to have generated a few sales on Lulu, although I have no idea who these people are beyond that they must almost certainly have read Against Nature and then gone looking for further material. I've been told by a good friend whose novels sell by the truckload in actual book stores that if you don't want your work to be read by as many people as possible then you can't call yourself a writer. I file this maxim away with others which may work for  people who aren't me, aside from which I don't call myself a writer. Writing is something I do, and try to do to the best of my abilities. That which readers have thus far taken from my writing has often seemed slightly different to that which I've tried to put in, so I find the feedback and even the praise to be confusing. I can't always square it with what I've done, or thought I was doing. It seems like a distraction and I have no real interest in writing for a specific audience.

In addition to the novels, I've spent much of the last decade chronicling my own existence. I've maintained online blogs of semi-autobiographical material as well as reviews of books I've read and music I've enjoyed. The first of these blogs was Pamphlets of Destiny, although it spent the first two years of its life on a couple of internet bulletin boards. Back in 2007 when I realised I should perhaps make an effort to read more of the genre within which I was trying to write, I took to writing short reviews of everything I read, principally as a means of analysing and understanding the genre, what worked, and what didn't work. This additionally resulted in my feeling better able to tackle books I might once have left on the shelf as either too demanding or at least nowhere near so much fun as reading an X-Men comic book. It additionally meant that, then in my forties, I began to catch up with all the authors I probably should have read during my teenage years - Asimov, Simak, Dostoyevsky, D.H. Lawrence and others. The more I read, and the more I wrote about what I'd been reading, the more fluid I found the process of writing. My vocabulary began to expand, reducing the need to revise each paragraph a million times over before it began to flow as it should; and the more I wrote, the more capable I was at expressing myself, at matching the thought process to words by means which yielded something a bit more coherent than well, it's like, you know, it's like, stuff, and that's really interesting, and you know...

This chronicling of my own existence has taken the form of self-published collections of my reviews, vaguely autobiographical blog posts, diaries kept whilst travelling around in Mexico, and even material written for fanzines or just for the sake of writing. It's self-indulgent, I suppose, but I am my own audience; and I exclude from this undertaking anything which I wouldn't have bothered reading had it been written by someone else. What this means is that I work on this material at great length, getting it into as respectable a shape as I can so as to avoid having to look back on it and wishing I hadn't bothered. Self-publishing has an arguably poor reputation as the home of people who can't fucking write and who tend to think that'll do before hitting the publish my gibberish button on Lulu, and I don't want to be one of those people either.

The purpose of this chronicling and framing, of all the work I've put into self-publishing paperbacks which may only ever exist as a single physical copy on my own book shelf, is mapping where I've been, where I am right now, and how I got here. It's an extension of what I've been doing for most of my life, the ongoing task of elevating myself, or at least trying to live a better life than I was living, by some definition. The legitimacy of this undertaking seems supported by present circumstances under which I'm probably happier than I've ever been. I'm happily married and settled in Texas, and have been for the past decade, and I enjoy what I do. I no longer feel like I have to create an impression or appease anyone outside of the usual civic forces. This was never the future I envisioned for much of my first forty or so years, and it doesn't feel like something I simply stumbled upon through pure luck.

It has been observed by former acquaintances that my obsession with Mexico and all that came in its wake might constitute a magical or shamanic journey, and I recognise the notion that the successful practice of magic - or probably magick - improves the quality of ones life and can be identified as such by the opportunities and coincidences which begin to present themselves with astonishing frequency when you're doing it right. Personally I see it more as a case of simply getting ones shit together, and the esoteric terms arise only by way of contrast with how few people actually do ever get their shit together, for whatever reason. Calling it magic is just another dead end, a flamboyant means of identifying the individual within their peer group, and further validating whatever showy crap someone has adopted as their reason for being.

This chronicling - itself an extension of my framing - is presently what I'm doing instead of having the traditional mid-life crisis, now that I've reached the age at which my childhood may as well have happened to someone else in terms of memory. I create markers by which I can observe the process of how I got here, to return to that particular theme. Much of the autobiographical material from An Englishman in Texas records details I'm beginning to forget whilst attempting to answer the question of what the fuck that was all about. Even the book and music reviews serve a similar purpose, at least from my own perspective, charting attitudes and preferences which have changed over time, including even how well I've applied myself to the creative process.

I've recently spent about two thirds of a year revising all of my own earlier self-published work, having discovered that my proofreading regime up until about 2016 still left significant room for error. Mostly the revisions have been limited to an excessive use of commas and the occasionally errant spelling or typo, but I found this in Crappy 1970s Paperbacks with Airbrushed Spacecraft on the Covers - the first collection of science-fiction book reviews:

I have an old tape interview where he describes starting work as a teenager at some radio repair place, having an argument with the guy over whether what comes out of a speaker is music or merely a simulation of music produced by minute fluctuations in air pressure.

I don't know how obvious the problem will be to whoever reads this, but to me it suggest that the young Philip K. Dick was once employed to have acne, spend too long on the phone, and to yell, I hate you, it's so unfair! at his mother. The first half of Crappy 1970s Paperbacks, even after all of the revision and polishing, still reads like fanzine level writing to me, but - with reviews printed in order of having been written - seems to pick up around the summer of 2010, the point at which I'd been away from Royal Mail for eight months and had begun sorting everything out in readiness for my relocation to Texas. I don't know if the circumstances were a factor, or whether my thought engine was simply running better, but it feels as though something had changed.

As any legitimate scientist will tell you, the uncomfortable fact of engaging in any field of scientific research is the realisation that what you come to know additionally reveals the sheer scale of what you don't know and may never know; and I would say this applies as well to any course of applied thought. This, I suspect, is why people adhere with such tenacity to blind alleys of pop culture, because it's not that hard to learn everything there is to learn about the Marvel universe or Doctor Who or whatever else is clogging up the internet this week; and achieving a comprehensive understanding of something which doesn't really matter is a nevertheless comprehensive understanding which brings with it an illusory but satisfying sense of achievement, and I should know because that's where I started.

This is also, I would suggest, why unintelligent people often tend to be so terrifyingly resolute in their convictions. They believe in knowledge as something small and finite, something which can be complete once you have all of the facts, or all of what you're prepared to accept as the facts; and whatever insecurities may be in operation serve to preserve and fortify their convictions as something which no-one is taking from them, because those convictions may be all they have.

In summary, if any of above makes any sense whatsoever, then my assessment of my own progress is possibly accurate, or at least refers to real world occurrences rather than just whatever has been happening inside my head. On the other hand, it may read like the ramblings of some cunt talking to himself because that's actually what it is.

Back in 1997, I was single bordering on incel status, loosely financed by a back breaking job, and unable to imagine a future which was likely to represent an improvement on the present. In 2021, barring minor inconveniences, I'm happier than I've probably ever been for any length of time and I'm able to look back on that which I've left behind in my wake and think, yeah, that was okay. I put this down to hard work and learning to think in a straight line, and occasionally having to face the fact that nothing is ever automatically a masterpiece just because you did it and you were expressing yourself.

In ten years time, I will be sixty-six, and I may read this back and think, what a load of old bollocks, which will hopefully mean that I'm right, because the journey will always be more crucial than the destination.

Gus II

We've been having quite a lot of rain and my shoes - sneakers, pumps, tennis shoes, whatever the hell you call those things - are getting soaked on a regular basis. An hour or so in the dryer, which is in the garage next to the washing machine, usually does the trick; but unfortunately the soakings have become such a regular occurrence that they're starting to pong, necessitating the additional application of baking soda. This time though, the smell lingers in the garage, which is worrying. It gets worse over the next couple of days and it dawns on me that something may have crawled into our garage and died. Its happened before and it's usually a possum.

Monday comes and I move a toolbox and discover a dead cat. They look different when the life has gone out of them and it takes me a moment before I realise that it's Gus II. It feels like I've been punched in the stomach. I'm fairly sure I saw her as recent as Saturday when I gave her the usual bowl of Nine Lives.

When I first met my wife, she had a female cat called Gus, short for Asparagus after some character in a headachey musical. Gus was grey and stripey, a pleasantly plump American shorthair of oddly Victorian appearance in that she tended to look as though she didn't approve. Gus was a wonderful cat.

At some point during the expansion of our cat colony, I took to leaving uneaten bowls of food outside for a couple of strays I'd noticed hanging around our garden because I didn't want it to go to waste. Among these cats were a pair of similar type to Gus, and as they were female and seemed to be related, I began to think of them as the Gus sisters, specifically Gus II and Gus III. They were both feral, accepting food but running off if I came too close, and looked similar, excepting Gus III being much larger. They groomed each other and often ate from the same food bowl with their tails intertwined, hence my presuming them to be closely related. I've no clear idea of when they first turned up but assume it to have been at least five years ago.

Our feral cat colony - the guys who don't get to come in the house - comprised about five or six cats at one time, but has been just two or three for most of its history, with members drifting off, presumably having discovered a better deal elsewhere, or turning up to fill a vacancy. At some point a few years back, Gus III became a no show for whatever reason, leaving us with just Mr. Kirby, the Wombat, and Gus II. Then we lost Mr. Kirby - which was fucking horrible - leaving just two, both of whom seemed to have integrated fairly well with our official cats.

The Wombat is a huge ginger male who walks like a wombat, hence the name, and always looks pissed off about something. I've never been able to get close to him, but in recent years he became good friends with Gus II and I often found them curled up together in a corner of the garden, apparently united by their refugee status.

More recently still, Gus II apparently decided I was okay, despite being a human. She'd dance around my feet when I took the food bowls out in the morning, even submitting the occasional meow and allowing me to pet her without flinching. It had taken years but it seemed worth it, and now able to get close I began to realise just how tiny she was - even smaller than our own Daisy, who has remained at what pretty much amounts to grown kitten dimensions.

I'd seen Gus II on Saturday, and now she was dead, leaving the Wombat looking distinctly forlorn. I buried her at the end of the garden marking the grave with rocks, as usual.

It's never easy when they die, and I suppose she wasn't even our cat, technically speaking, but in a world of increasingly vocal flat-earthers and persons who make it their business to make life as unpleasant and pointless as possible for the rest of us, Gus II was a tiny, brown stripey thing which used to dance around my feet and always seemed happy to see me. There was nothing negative about her having existed, only good from what I could see.

Life goes on, I suppose.

 

 

Our Aluminum Wedding Anniversary

Twenty-five years of marriage is considered a silver wedding anniversary, fifty is gold, and being just ten, our own is supposedly aluminum. My source for this information additionally reveals that three years is a leather wedding anniversary, five is wood, and seventeen is furniture - apparently pertaining to the sort of gifts one might expected to receive on such occasions. I have no idea which theological system the list is derived from and I'm pretty sure it's not in the Bible. Aluminum is a silvery non-ferrous metal which I referred to as aluminium during those admittedly rare childhood conversations about silvery non-ferrous metals. Aside from my having given up on attempts to check my own slow sideways drift into transatlantic English, it seems that aluminum was the original spelling and pronunciation, give or take some small change.

The important thing is that Bess and I have been married ten years, and today is our anniversary. We've both been on diets of late, Bess with the keto, and myself with the keto except where potatoes are available; but otherwise eating nothing all day, fasting until the evening meal. For me, this is only a variation of how I lived during most of those twenty years as a postman so it's not really a major deal and I've shed a couple of stone as a result, leaving me better qualified to tell my doctor to stick it up his arse next time he sends me a whiny message about cholesterol levels. However, because it's our anniversary, we've agreed to ignore our ordinary self-imposed daily regime and start by stuffing our faces at Sonia's on the Nacogdoches Road. We once ate at Sonia's every Saturday lunchtime, which is probably why we both needed to go on diets in the first place, but it's been a while. I order the migas plate, just like in the good old days, and it seems like the greatest migas plate I've ever had.

Actually, we start the day by waking up. I give Bess a couple of anniversary presents - a book called Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby and a mug featuring Freddie Mercury looking histrionic against a backdrop of the union jack. She likes Queen, and she likes English stuff - which has worked out well for me, obviously. The book had a bunny on the cover and seemed pretty funny from a quick glance in the store - Jenny Lawson's Nowhere Books on Broadway - so that was that. I'd considered buying jewellery but the antique place, also on Broadway, seemed prohibitively expensive, particularly given that their definition of antique extended to late eighties issues of Marvel's Black Panther comic book, ninety dollars each at the store, but a mere three if you have a look for them online.

Bess's present to me was tickets for the No Limit Records reunion show at Cedar Park, which has been cancelled due to the resurgence of coronavirus, so I guess we'll be doing that next year some time.

Meanwhile back at the anniversary, having stuffed our faces at Sonia's, we hit the road because even though it's fucking hot, it would be too weird to stay inside on this particular day despite the appeal of air conditioning. We drive to Victoria, nearly two hours to the south-east in the general direction of the coast, because we went there before and saw bunnies at the zoo. This time, the bunnies are fewer in number which would seem to contradict my understanding of how rabbits work, but we realise that the rabbits we're looking at are a quarantined group. There's just five or six of them, at least two of which clearly have the snuffles - here referring specifically to pasteurella which can be occasionally fatal, or which some rabbits can live with but which never fully clears up if they have it. Hopefully the other rabbits are elsewhere.

The other rabbits are indeed elsewhere, but it's fucking hot so they're all inside their apartment sized hutch. However, the lemurs have had babies and we spend at least half an hour watching them. Victoria zoo generally specialises in indigenous wildlife - coyotes, raccoons and so on - but we don't mind. One of the keepers attending the lemurs has a conspicuously non-American accent. It's difficult to place and sounds like Northern Ireland to me, but is later revealed as Glaswegian when I ask. As usual, there isn't actually much to be said beyond the revelation that neither of us are from around these parts.

I've never been to Scotland. I begin to tell her that I once had a friend called Gibby who was from Glasgow, but being as the conclusion of the anecdote is that I couldn't understand a fucking word he said either and that we eventually fell out due to his being a gigantic arsehole, my testimony reduces to awkward mumbling before I get to the potentially offending section.

We drive back via Goliad, then head to Guajillos for dinner. Having grown accustomed to one meal a day, neither of us are massively hungry but it's our anniversary. The meal is oddly underwhelming. I usually order mole poblano but my lack of appetite has resulted in curiosity regarding other parts of the menu, specifically to the Mexican version of schnitzel. It's actually good but is kind of dry and surely should have come with some kind of sauce to set everything off. A young man with a beard and ginger hair sits alone at the table next to ours picking at his tacos and watching something on a tablet, so I decide it's his fault. On a positive note, our waitress seems to have calmed down since we were here last - which was presumably her first day.

As we return home, almost back at our own street, a tiny black kitten darts across the road in front of the car. We stop and get out, because he seems a little small to be running loose. We follow him behind bushes and through front yards as evening falls, hoping we don't look too much like potential burglers. Someone comes out to see what we're doing, then points to the house across the street.

'I think she has kittens over there.'

I go and ring the doorbell, then end up having an awkward conversation through a speaker system because the woman isn't opening her door just yet. She doesn't have a cat. She does, however, occasionally feed a feral cat which hangs around in her yard, and the cat has had kittens.

I rejoin my wife. She has caught the kitten and is holding him as she talks to the other neighbour. It turns out that Bess has known the other neighbour at least since when, as a teenager, she used to babysit her son. The son recalled my wife as having been his favourite babysitter. I remember the story from some previous telling, back before we realised these people lived just around the corner from us.

The woman who feeds the feral cat finally emerges from her home so we compare notes, and I find myself thoroughly confused; but the important detail is that we're going to take the kitten home, seeing as he's feral and tiny. We tell ourselves we're going to get him fixed and maybe find him a home, but we both know we'll be keeping him. One more isn't going to make much difference, we tell ourselves, and it doesn't. He seems happy and gets on fine with the other cats, and as kittens go, he's relatively trouble free. We try to think of a name relating to having found him on our tenth wedding anniversary, but nothing suggests itself. Bess proposes Goliad as an elaborate semiotic pun on historical events in the town we passed through coming back from Victoria, combined with our previous black cat being named Bean, all of which would take too long to explain; I suggest Vic as short for Victor, which is the masculine of Victoria; but the kid wins with Oliver, which I like because it can be shortened to Ollie, which additionally makes me think of Oliver Hardy.

So that was our tenth wedding anniversary. It wasn't anything spectacular, but then it didn't need to be because the last ten years have been very much their own reward, as such requiring no additional sprinkling of glitter.

We ate.

We saw bunnies.

We have a kitten.

We've been married for ten years, which have undoubtedly been the best of my life. I couldn't ask for more.