An Ode To Sane Capitalist & His Contempt of Socialism

I awoke as I make love – quietly… from above - to see that all hallmarks of me as I’d been were lodged tentatively there in my spleen and were not at that moment being directed into the hands of someone unexpected or laundered by someone so reproduced copies can make millionaires just by dealing in poppies. What had turned a desultory toast to a meal so divine it spoke sound of our host into an evening of wine and rambunction, hangover heads and hepatic destruction?

I looked around for evidence and it was there, bottles of wine and bile everywhere. Something was tying knots in my meninges and tugging so hard on those fibrous fringes. I surveyed the room to distract me from thinking of working and sleeping and spewing and drinking. And there was diversion asleep on the floor, a folded up Metro from the morning before.

I barely perused the small ads and the sport and I paid little heed to the gardening report for I knew in my mind what deserved rumination and soon I arrived at my favourite location. The Your Letters page where treasures abound and where reasoned opinion can never be found. And there as if cued was a pearl of opinion presented herein without power of dominion…

“I see that another man has gone on the rampage in China, killing 11 people with his tractor. I can only imagine that years of oppressive socialism has worn his mind down until he eventually flipped. It’s obvious that socialism makes people neglect their responsibilities to others. That’s probably why we’re seeing such strange behaviour coming out of the People’s Republic of China”

Sane Capitalist, Glasgow

There was something amiss or something not right, I checked it again it was there black and white. Socialists neglect their duty to others so roam in their tractors and butcher their brothers? Surely the very definition of the word would render a viewpoint like this as absurd. But there in the print of the Metro it read, Sane Capitalist’s account for eleven all dead.

I travelled by train at a modest expense to the city of Glasgow in light of events. I wanted to source the source of this quote and understand why he’d plain missed the boat. Such sweeping rhetoric and such bold assumption led me to the equally flippant presumption that I must be dealing with some millionare or a cad of convenience too wealthy to care.

My initial inquiry presented two leads which I roundly dismissed as insane by degrees but as time whittled down and nothing presented I thought of these targets and quickly relented…

The first was a man who was one foot and four at least when I measured him drunk on the floor. He stirred as I knelt to the smell of the gin that I placed as an incentive under his chin. ‘I ain’t heard of this man’ he said with a start then laughed at graffiti mistaken as art. Apparently, he endeavoured to sleep at the GOMA but struggled to find it in drunken scotoma. I tossed him a fiver to soften his din and he paid me it back in pursuit of the gin.

The second a woman proclaimed only this, “The chap you pursue is as mad as cats piss”. I took it as read I should still check it out and that’s pretty much what I then set about. I waited and waited as she tried to recall where it was that she had seen him at all. And then in a flash she bore forth her knowledge and said she had slept with him once while at college. From a pram by her side she presented a child with hair like Karl Marx that was dressed like Kim Wilde. ‘This little girl is my wee Billie-Jayne and my only real tie to the one you call Sane’.

She made me a note of his last known address and I gave her a fiver that smelled of drunks piss. The fiver was tucked in her smoke damaged bra and she said in broad Scots ‘Da gijn near ‘im ava’. For those unrehearsed in this Doric and drawl that roughly means ‘Don’t go near him at all’.

But travel I did to the stated abode which carried a sign stating ‘Mortgage Foreclosed’. The neighbour came out, a nosy old bitch who was near apoplectically desperate to snitch. She called me inside where she poured up some tea and suddenly turned all Miss Marple on me…

“If you’re looking for John then you don’t yet know he hides in a cellar and edits the Metro. It started off really as a minor league joke but he got a real kick out of riling the folk so he submitted five made up letters a day each one being insane in a different way. Word on the street is that people felt grief at reading his letters that beggared belief. And so when they found out that house was his home they drove him away to his bunker alone. He told me he felt at times like he was Hitler but I’m not so sure as his dog is much littler”.

I decided from then on to take to my boots and leave Sane Capitalist to his nonsense pursuit. But now if you’re reading that old letters page try not to burden yourself with a rage. If something seems stupid or racist or lame then I know the face of the man and the name. Next time the letterhead cries in large font ‘Socialists to Blame for the Pope Looking Gaunt’, stay nice and calm and don’t lose lucidity think of Sane in his bunker and toast his stupidity!