Bang Bang

Dear Octopus,

Sorry for the delay in writing to you (again). Things have changed from my last letter (also again). But in a way this presents an interesting continuation of my point. If you remember my last letter saw me meandering senselessly around a Chinese supermarket in Hampstead, with the lovely Tango trying patiently to teach me the value of spontaneity, and how enriching it can be to make decisions on impulse. It turns out that I was a poor student. So poor in fact that I failed to see what was, I suppose, inevitably coming: the Tango's spontaneous impulse decision to live what will probably be an inestimably more enriching (but Squid-less) life. 

Maybe she just stopped caring. You'd have to ask her.

But here we reach an interesting juncture. The Tango's legacy, the lessons I choose to learn from her, and indeed the entire way in which she continues to live on in my memory, could just be the usual prosaic, quotidian shit that always fades with time. The detail - that little and lovely sea of personal imprints and imperfections that someone leaves on your life - aren't nearly as special as they or even you would have yourself believe. Her laugh can be thrown away just as easily as her toothbrush. 

But even so, I got the feeling that the lesson she wanted me to learn was more valuable. So fuck it. I went back to Devon. And when it became clear that the usually impish Inky Squid was sorely in need of a good time too, I saw an opportunity to put her curriculum into practice. 

I'll detail what happened in the style of the police alibi statement that I'm lucky I didn't have to produce. No frills. Just facts.

The long and the short of it, your honour, is that we crashed an eighteenth birthday party. Actually that's not the long or the short of it. So.....all of the kids were arriving and then leaving their alcohol behind a makeshift (make-SHIT) bar. Essentially I installed myself behind the makeshift bar, using the Inky Squid as my enforcer (known on the night-club / discotheque scene as a 'bouncer'), and proceeded to refuse the kids access to their own alcohol unless they produced sufficient identification. We then siphoned off elements of their alcohol (not stealing, I was very specific about it not constituting stealing) and produced a punch so potent in its destructive force that it could easily have palsied the liver of a sixty-five year old darts captain. We then introduced the kids to hard drinking games. That they played by buying punch. Buying punch made from ingredients they'd brought to the party with them. 

But we did stop the fight. So that can't be irresponsible.

I remember saying to the Inky Squid at the time, slurring nastily and highly inebriated of course, 'you never know where life is going to take you, right? Last weekend I was living a different life. Now I'm here, giving little Jeremy here his fourth tequila slammer in a row and dancing to Rihanna in the kitchenette of what is technically a government building. Fuck it. This is what life is all about, right? Things happen, you get shot down, you fucking move on, right? Who knows where life is going to take you next? It's exciting. Right??'

I should add that the repeated asking of the at-best-rhetorical-and-at-worst-absolutely-meaningless question 'right?' was only inserted here because I'm recording this statement verbatim, and I do sometimes need affirmation. The point is that it's only when you see a seventeen year old girl with A-level coursework to write the next day vomiting into a gutter that you realise everything with you really isn't that bad. And taking a journey is often a lot more fun when you've no fucking idea where you're going.

In that respect I suppose, the Tango leaves a good lesson. I doubt she's even thought if the decision she made was the right one. I hope for her sake that it was. It's good karma, for one thing.

Your loving friend,

Action Squid

The Mysterious Bream Of The Industrial Chinese Mega-Mart

Dear Octopus,


Two months, since I last wrote to you. Two months. The profuseness and profundity of my apology need not be extolled - knowing me as well as you do - but please don't think my holiday from these pages in any way related to a diminished regard for your welfare. I worry about you as always; in all the incidental nooks and crannies of solitude (late-night tube carriages, supermarket queues, the long drunken stumble down Penwith Road of a now-warm Thursday evening). I suppose I've just been thinking of the right thing to say.


Sunday saw some chink of inspiration, if not actual enlightenment, so seems as good a place as any to snatch up the meandering thread of my existence.


I was wandering the aisles of a Chinese supermarket in the Hampstead-area, in the company of the Regal Tang (or 'Tango', for short) whose hankering for a steamed pork char siu bao bun was so great that she couldn't be dissuaded by the fact that all of the buns' packaging was in Chinese, rendering it impossible for us to decipher what was pork or otherwise. Muddling along as were, we didn't know our gyoza from our cheung fun, so just selected items seemingly on Tango's loose aesthetic whim. And this bothered me. We could have been picking anything. In fact rather than revelling in the rich culinary opportunism that the situation presented, the whole process was - I'm now happy to admit - deeply disconcerting. What if the buns we were picking contained cyanide, oestrogen, or crushed up brick mortar? What if Tango ended up choking violently to death on the spinal vertebrae of an actual Regal Tang, because I hadn't adequately protected her through being able to read Mandarin Chinese?


It was then that I realised an inviolable truth. I am incapable of being impulsive.


To be fair, I sort of knew already. My mother, the sage and omniscient Vino Squid, pointed this out to me only recently in fact. Even as a child (apparently), I was annoyed when plans would change at the last minute, and would ask what we were going to be doing after making the papier mache Tracy Island before Vino had even opened the first tub of glue and laid down the newspaper. And since developing into what I suppose is technically an adult, things have only got worse. A dull obsession with having a 'plan' pervades every part of my day. I've even written about my enslavement by the Evil Dowager Countess of Routine to you previously, now that I think about it. Even that is becoming habitual. 


So that's that. Clearly I am the spontaneity black hole, the impulse vacuum. A grim and inflexible gargoyle attached to the lively church of life's wondrous diversity. So how to break the mould, and escape? Start taking ketamine on the District Line? Grow out my hair, learn to play guitar and starting trawling the youth hostels of Western Australia with a bumbag full of tedious, life-affirming anecdotes? Join a cult? Start a cult (even)? 


Even those things seem quite conformist now.


I will mediate on this conundrum this evening, and report back. Rest assured that I won't make any major 'life decisions' without consulting you first. Maybe I just need to become better at rolling with the punches, to changes and amends as things come up. Be better at living life on the so-called 'fly'. 


After all, a little bit of spontaneity is definitely a good thing. Our illegible dinner, for example, was not only wonderful to eat but all the more interesting for being an adventure.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid

Resolution #8,956

Dear  Octopus,


New Year's resolutions are practically an invitation for failure. I set a mere and trifling thirty of them last year, relishing the fearsome gusto with which I would tick them sequentially from the list as though they were items on a shopping list. How arrogant. How lacking in knowledge of myself. My performance in fact has been so miserable, so abject, that I have utterly failed to even remotely achieve one of them. Not. A. Single. One. 


I regret that, and have thought about it since the chimes of midnight (and cheery tunes of the vaudevillian accordion belonging to the band of gypsies frequenting the freezing beer garden of my parents' local pub, where I saw in 2012). It got me thinking about something someone said to me that night. Taking a break from teaching the local teenagers the value of premium German spirits, I took a quick visit to the rat-infested lavatory laughably supposed to be a den of solace for the town's more miserly alcoholics and predatory homosexuals. A man next to me at the urinals quite freely and extensively urinated on his own shoe, then shrugged. 'That was unlucky,' I tried to venture, as if to reassure him that this wasn't the Absolutely Unmitigated Disaster that it surely would have been for me. 'No regrets,'  he replied.


That phrase really, really bothers me. To have regrets, after all, is to care. To find oneself culpable for the mistakes you've made. People who say 'no regrets' seem to merely be saying that they find themselves incapable of wrongdoing. And that is arrogant, which is the worst of all human failings second only to unkindness.


The real reason it bothers me though, I suppose, is that I have a lot of them. A man urinates on and potentially ruins his own shoe (which admittedly appeared to be patent leather of the lowest quality) and doesn't regret it.....yet I regret the way in which I said 'after you' whilst holding the door open for him five minutes ago. I regret what I had for breakfast this morning. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I probably regret about 80% of all the decisions I've ever made in my life, at least a little bit. That's not to sound unnecessarily maudlin or melancholic just for the sake of a letter. The same is true (or should be true) for everyone really, to lesser or greater extents. I've met so may nice people, made so many interesting friends, and let them just slip away. I've been cruel and dismissive when I should have been fair, lied when I should have told the truth. Even in the last year, since the fabric of those flimsy resolutions was spun. There are so many things I should have done, but chose not because they were too hard, would have taken too long, or because I was too afraid.


This year then, it's just one resolution from me, with no frills or fancy. This year I will try to be a good person, and live without shame.


Easier said than done, I know. Give me strength.


Your loving friend,


Action Squid