Letter to the Sports Editor
“Rain down. On all those tired eyes and tears and frowns”
“Hell I don’t miss those whispers, those soft groans of fear when I enter a civilised room. I know what they’re thinking, and I know exactly why. They are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that I am a teenage girl trapped in the body of a sixty-five year old career criminal who has already died sixteen times. Sixteen, all documented. I have been crushed and beaten, and shocked and drowned and poisoned and stabbed and shot and smothered and set on fire by my own bombs…
All these things have happened, and probably they will happen again. I have learned a few tricks along the way, a few random skills and simple avoidance techniques — but mainly it has been luck, I think, and a keen attention to karma, along with my natural girlish charm”
Hunter S Thompson
“Fear and Loathing at the Taco Stand”
(final chapter of his 2003 book “Kingdom of Fear”)
Hey Jack!
It was around 10am when I finally blinked my way into existence and a new day rather like every other day in this foulest of English summers. Slate grey skies greeted me once more as the pitter patter of rain descended from a sky blanketed by a bleakness normally reserved for 3pm on a dark November afternoon. It’s the height of summer Jack and if you don’t believe me, I’m sure you’ll believe United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and his “era of global boiling” speech. Mr Guterres has clearly not lived in the English midlands and perhaps there’s an argument to be made that he doesn’t live in our reality at all and you’re welcome to make it. I, on the other hand, shall be drinking copious amounts of tea and wondering aloud why it’s always fucking raining.
It’s 2.15pm now and after our traditional morning of hugs and bacon sandwiches my son and I have resumed our places in this damned and doomed world of ours. Whilst I sit cross legged like a demented Buddha at a small coffee table wearing shorts and a Pink Floyd t-shirt my son takes the sofa to my left and plays a Playstation game I first played when his age some 30 years ago. The circle of life or, in the case of “Resident Evil”, a relentless pursuit of death, and why not? I’ve already completed my call of duty as a father today by introducing him to the sonic delights of Deacon Blue for the first time and whilst there’s not a shred of dignity in our rain town, I’m a real gone kid, and forever that teenager falling in love with this Scottish band for the very first time. Now those were summers full of sunshine Jack! Early U2 revisited INXS and Simple Minds and Deacon Blue and sex in the college field on Thursday afternoons, wickets for a team full of Zombies on a Sunday. Part time work. Part time living. College living. Easy living. Living life “like dolphins” as my old friend Hunter so beautifully exclaimed, and so very, very often.
It’s been a wild 48 hours or so within The Matrix. A 20 year old “loner” with 3 names took some pot shots at Donald Trump and no sooner had the ex President in the “Land of the Free” raised a defiant fist skyward for his death defying feats then the gears of conspiracy theorists the world over cranked into action. Yet again a lunatic with more names than media defined characteristics had tried to assassinate a high profile public figure and quite frankly I was shocked and dismayed the media didn’t name him as Lee Harvey Oswald. Or Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Or Mark David Chapman.
Or James Earl Ray.
It’s always a man, he’s always a loner and he always, without fail, has 3 names. Sometimes they leave books at the scene of their unspeakable crimes. Occasionally a flame retardant passport will be found and then quickly disappeared into the memory hole along with the footage of a lady speaking live on television about a building that has recently collapsed behind her only it hadn’t, not yet. That happened 20 minutes later. But you can’t ask questions Jack! Not in our brave new world and anyway, it didn’t happen, it’s been memory holed, and if you say it happened, you my friend will be considered a nuisance and a freak and very bad news indeed. Who needs that kind of hassle? Not me my old friend. I just have an inquisitive mind, a sense for the macabre and a head full of dreams and rhetorical questions. I wonder, on rainy days such as these, what will happen next in our Matrix carnival of the bizarre? After coming an inch or two away from blowing the head of an ex President of the USA clean from his shoulders on live television well fuck, what’s next? Real alien disclosure? Members of the Royal families of the world transforming into 7 foot tall lizards during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games? We can but hope Jack, hope, and fervently pray.
After the prayers of a godless heathen I guess we can segue from games in Paris to a game in Berlin and a football game lost by my home nation England. They played in earnest for 5 minutes either side of their equalising goal and aside from this were their usual dreadfully boring and outclassed selves. Viva España! Spain were the best team of Euro 2024 by a country mile in anyone’s language and so were Argentina in the Copa América they rightfully became champions of once more. Despite my earthly place of birth this gave me two footballing wins out of two on a Sunday night into a Monday morning in The Matrix and after all too familiar scenes of crowd congestion and dangerously desperate people trying to con their way into the futuristic Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. Whether it’s 2 lock down years or 20, 40 or 60 years of sporting failure, there are desperately dangerous people everywhere and a growing number have nothing left to lose anymore. In the hours that preceded the delayed kick off a world away in one branch of the Evil Empire, the other wing of this diseased bird saw drunken football fans throwing plastic garden furniture at strangers because their football team lost, again, and desperately unhappy people make for dangerous opponents on a high street anywhere in Shakepeare’s “Sceptred Isle”.
The bread and circus for a doomed and dumbed down generation of swine.
The sentence above is probably, but nowhere near all of the reasons for my continuing anonymity within The Matrix and it certainly doesn’t help my cause. Ugly truths Jack. Ugly truths. The world is in need of them but not ready for them. It was ever thus. Yesterday I released a triple bill of spoiler free appreciations of films for a rainy afternoon and today, as the rain has finally given way to a bluer sky full of white “The Simpson’s” type clouds, an ugly truth persists that no-one apart from a writer in Canada and a secret agent with a penchant for the films of Wes Anderson will ever read yesterday’s releases.
Now there’s an ugly truth Jack! It matters not a jot whether I celebrate in my political editor’s slow recuperation from a horrific wolverine attack that’s left him full of fear and loathing, images of ducks and swans from a picturesque picture book toy town on the banks of a river, canal boats passing merrily on by me on the canals of a life and past long forgotten, existential screeds on the upside down nature of life within a contorted and bent out of shape Matrix or a triple bill of thoughtful prose on three films from yesteryear, I remain a stranger in a strange land, a man out of time.
A man who may as well have watched the rain tumble down the windowpanes rather than writing this steaming pile of balderdash that no-one will ever read.
But why worry eh?
Who needs book sales when there will be another madman shooting at a public figure soon enough whilst other public figures transform into 7 foot lizards before our eyes and the aliens will finally land, and then the football season will start all over again. It’s the “All Star” break in the baseball season and England will resume their cricketing battle with the West Indies before Sri Lanka come calling to have the piss beaten out of them by which time the football season will have started, the baseball season will be approaching the mythical month of October and American Football will be in full seasonal swing again. Basketball and Ice Hockey will presumably end and begin their respective seasons, there’s another election in the Evil Empire come early November and then we’re on the downhill slope to Christmas and the end of this foulest of all years, 2024.
My politics editor once described me as “irrelevant” and he’s paid a heavy price ever since. Those wolverines sure left their mark on him!
But perhaps he was right after all.
Selah.
"A final word from The Boss" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.