the addictions of today

I am a small man with a huge addiction. The addiction is not in thrall to the ways of the flesh: narcotics, alcohol, coital practice, the like, but an altogether graver and more complex addiction with neither precedent nor approved treatment programme. My addiction is to the authorship of extensive, eloquent, verbose letters of complaint to my local municipal offices. The issues to which I take umbrage are perhaps petty, at first – a fact my wife goes to great lengths to express while she threatens to leave me – but I find without exception that after sufficient words have been authored and sufficient time spent doing so, even the pettiest complaint can take on immeasurable significance and easily escalate into gross violations of the fiercest and most depraved type. 

 

The scale of the addiction is great. By night I creep from my mattress in exaggerated gestures that themselves would be comical were it not for motive (being to work on the letters); after eating my meal rapidly I excuse myself from the dinner table under the muttered pretense of washing the pots and the pans and pen hurried notes and primers on the back of the used envelopes I store for the purpose; throughout the course of my working day I check my personal inbox some ten or maybe twenty times for replies or updates or automated responses, or else to fine tune an already lengthy draft, to add footnotes or addenda or to correct anomalous referencing as circumstance dictates. Like the freshly loved I yearn compulsively for the letters when I am unable to work on them and think of little else, a fixation almost certainly, a fact my wife goes to great lengths to express while she threatens to leave me. As I noted astutely some nine months or more into the Watt Correspondence to one A. Watt (a markedly short-lived correspondent – I have noted throughout the development of my addiction that a given respondent will seldom remain as such for more than one or at most two of the letters or electronic correspondences, I presume because of the departmental structuring within the municipal offices, making the establishment of a relationship of even the most meaningless sort an impossibility; somewhat oddly I find this enticing more than frustrating [a sure indicator of addiction, I would suggest, given my research into the area and into standard responses to same], and indeed commonly relish the opportunity to repeat the particulars of a given complaint from the very beginning – often collating an abundance of source material for the purpose – when several months into it (a repetition that would infuriate the clear majority to homicidal reverie), adopting more and more obtuse and sneering tones while referring extensively to reams of references, photocopied supplements and intertexts): “[…] if you ignore enough of the letters of even the most level-headed complainants you can make almost anyone feel like a madman.” 

 

When – as does happen, if infrequently; any responses are rare, adequate ones all the more so – the letters receive what I would by way of verifiable assessment criteria deem “inadequate response”, with no reference made to the flair of their composition or the exquisiteness of their language, my cravings only worsen, and the desire to write further letters as even greater exemplars of these two very traits becomes an obsession. It is fair to say my functioning is moderately impaired or worse. I am nonetheless a fair man, and pride myself on an aggressive politeness that though loathsome in the spoken conversation would surely be deemed “confident” in prose. I adhere to the timeless adage that “please and thank you and all cost all of you fuck all”, as was summarily taught to me by my mother and her mother also (to wit my mother’s mother). They were careful swearers and did so only in the form of ever-more obscene maxims and similar – which I have no doubt made them (both maxim and blood relative) all the more memorable to the lad of some youth and inexperience I then was (in fact to this day I feel great arousal in the presence of a swearing women over 40) – and as a pair were quick to castigate me should I attempt any use of such words outside of the aphoristic context they had made their stock in trade (they despised: the ‘blue’ comedians, modern literature, cinema, essentially all artistic endeavor, and by the time of their deaths, some coincidental week or so apart when I was in my middle teens, conversations with them were almost impossible to either have or understand, as they drifted from one aphorism to another, each unrelated by either meaning, theme or sense, like conversing with fortune cookies of the lowest price point as their lives whimpered before their eyes, small talk in extremis, the comfort of the mutual repetition of their familiar non-sequiturs guiding them gently to the blessed end where silence would come). In the letters I am, so to speak, sociopathically polite, clenchingly empathic, at once sympathetic to the futility of my correspondents, their roles, their tireless efforts against the bureaucracy of a large office complex, their limitations as employees of the municipal offices and humans alike, whilst being at once clear that irrespective of these accumulated nonsenses they have nonetheless failed in the most fundamental ways. Though acutely aware of the struggles of being a functioning and ostensibly decent human I take care to point out precisely what they have done wrong whilst simultaneously congratulating them for doing it wrong with such singular flair, exhibiting a remarkable skill for sublime failure. By way of illustration the following is excerpted from the Watt Correspondence: 

 

“Dear Officers of the Municipal Offices,

 

Thank you for ignoring my recent extensive (copies enclosed) highly literate narrative(s) pertaining to alleged parking offenses for a period of many, many months. This narrative has apparently been forwarded to your office’s “Parking Department” for their singular and I presume professionally trained ignoring. 

 

While I have no – of this I can assure you – doubt, none at all, that the individual officers of the individual offices of the municipal offices must be incomprehensibly busy – for how could they not be, ignoring letters and electronic correspondences indiscriminately with the kind of blanket disdain that entirely transcends individual prejudices – and despite the full-time focus such comprehensive dismissal necessitates, it really does represent quite appalling customer service and a blatant disregard of your own supposed charter and/or policies (please do clarify – your online resource appears to use the term interchangeably, a telling error I would posit). Well done!” 

 

On the rare occasions that reply is made with some feeble justification, assuming that with great relief that will be the end of it, I too reply forthwith with an increasing level of bitterness, like a jilted lover who refuses to relinquish the last word of an SMS dialogue to the firm farewell of his wayward ex, the sheer pointlessness of the task mounting with each new composition, the message diluted with every printed paragraph. 

 

The intense pain of withdrawal instilled by the silence from the municipal offices is matched only by the euphoria I feel during the arrangement of the letters, transcending the tedium of one’s everyday concerns, a fact my wife went to great lengths to express while she left me. I wait hungrily for the post, for the white window envelopes they favour and the revealing franking upon their corners. They fall like precious commodities to the soiled mat. 

 

“Dear complainant,

 

Your complaint has been passed to the relevant department within the municipal offices for investigation. Thank you for taking the time to register your feelings with the municipal offices. Your feelings may be monitored. The municipal offices value your composition.”

 

Considering the time I devote to the letters I find the impersonal address of deep offense, and said as much in my return complaint. The officers are of relative intelligence and attuned to the needs of the human psyche; their responses provide just enough and never more: just enough hope, promise, openness, dialogue, as though they can listen and want to and will. 

 

I entered a long correspondence with one M. Parker, and that I refer to as the Parker Correspondence, pertaining to the state of disrepair within my local municipal park some five minutes walk from my residence, a park in which I have spent many hours during these last five or more years and have witnessed first hand its degradation into a foul grim parody, with each of its focal aspects decimated by neglect, ignorance or public sex acts. The park is fringed by a small wooded pocket that is bordered on three sides by shallow water – the Wensum on the west and the awkward curve of the so-called ornamental waterway on the other two – known locally as “the Islet of Doggers” in perverse homage to the capital’s own bastion of enterprise that was itself until recently a derelict and abandoned wasteland as, some may argue, it remains. This Islet accommodates the lions share of the public coition the park is renowned for and that is advertised within the myriad toilet blocks of the city’s other public spaces (for example: “gay roy. best cock. wensum park sunrise.”), secreting as it does within the depths of its dense foliage a bed of unrolled bright orange plastic safety fence, pegged down at a length of some six feet on a flat stretch of soil about the width of a standard single mattress, an ideal protection mesh for casual fornication. It is encircled by brandless condom wrappers and their well-used former contents and, weirdly, numerous empty milk cartons of various size. By day these woods are a rank but unpopulated place to stroll with a child but under cover of darkness they become a hotbed of perversion. The small red brick toilet block that overlooks the river’s camber, too, houses the men who prowl the gravel paths with their phones clutched to their chest trying to pinpoint homosexual engagement, grunting in the cubicles, rushing back to their families after a quick Saturday morning session, their balls still ripe with spittle. My child and I would see them or worse, hear them during our early visits (we are poor sleepers). It didn’t take long for the letters to follow. I find numerically presented lists to be a useful format to attempt extraction of definite responses to clearly demarcated concerns, and technique I employed immediately within the Parker Correspondence.

 

"1. The so-called “ornamental waterway” – what riveting irony you municipal lads enjoy! – is in fact ankle deep, entirely blanketed in eutrophication, thick with litter and reeking of the foulest sewage. This had once been a pleasant part of the park but it really is now quite grim if not toxic.

 

2. There is a distinct lack of rubbish bins, meaning a huge number of irresponsible park users dump their mess – fast food wrappers, cigarette packets, nappies, tabloids – all over the floor and into the river. Indeed the immediate bridge area of the “ornamental waterway” as discussed in point 1 (above) contains a number of thick plastic sacks of the kind commonly associated with the aquatic disposal of body parts and/or domestic animals that appear to have been both submerged and then held to the riverbed with quite significant weights. Whilst I am, of course, suggesting no connection between the degradation of the waterway and the illicit disposal of human remains, a focused dredging of the “ornamental waterway” and environs would no doubt remedy this and other issues surrounding the same.

 

3. The water feature/fountain is seldom switched on. An off fountain really does represent the very height of futility and is not commensurate with a relaxing visit.

 

4. Myriad willow trees were felled in a tremendous spot by the river for no comprehensible reason aside from the whims of the municipal offices. This localized deforestation has left a patch of miserable wasteland in place of the trees, populated only by thistles, weeds, broken glass and decaying excrement, all of which are entirely unsuitable for children.

 

5. The park is crawling with functioning doggers and cruising homosexuals, which leaves the patch of woods that adorns the riverbank covered in spent condoms and milk cartons, and shifty gents gripping their smartphones as they hover around the toilet block and thumb their way through Tinder.

 

6. I have on multiple occasions encountered needles and drug paraphernalia amongst the playground equipment and in the pavilion, as well as the stench of presumably human urine and excrement in same. My child’s football was soiled by same, and she watched as I burst it whilst shouting. I imagine this one terrible experience has caused irreparable damage, both to our relationship and to her future psychological wellbeing."

 

In fairness to the man Parker I did receive an above-adequate response to my complaint, albeit after a period of some twenty working days and not the fifteen working days stipulated within the various literatures produced by the municipal offices as guidance for the complex complaints procedure. As satisfactory as his responses might have been I remained – indeed, remain – unhappy with park, and pen notes to Parker reflecting the same almost weekly, often just single lines or bulletpoints on scraps of paper, thoughts or responses to a given park-based stimuli that really falls well outside of his purview. There have been scant responses since his first but in the circumstances I care little; the catharsis of the Parker Correspondence is singular and unmatched by my other more aggressive lines of complaint. 

 

Since leaving me – and she too a victim, she purports, of a decidedly modern addiction, collateral damage, as it might be – my wife has found another male and assimilated him comfortably into the occurring of her life, a male in the employ – perfectly! – of the municipal offices, a male who does not – she assures me with crushing brevity via SMS – suffer from an addiction to the authorship of extensive, eloquent, verbose letters of complaint to his local municipal offices (which given his employment status is quite understandable, as without the comfort of geographical dissection such letters would be directly received by his employer and likely cause all manner of complex interpersonal and intradepartmental tensions that would combine to create a working environment of some distress). What he does for either work or leisure without the purpose of the letters is a mystery. I have begun to address my myriad correspondences to him personally by way of the municipal offices, though I have no knowledge of his place within the organizational structure of that immense body or of his ability to address my increasingly pressing concerns with any satisfaction. 

 

“Dear Shitter,

 

You will forgive me, I trust, if I refrain from addressing you by name (within the body of the letter at least; to ensure you received it at all it was essential that I did so on the envelope); I loathe you like an atrocity and can’t bear to see it – which is to say your name – borne. And, the fuck, what – fucking well? – is a name? Well?

 

While it is not within my nature to complain without cause I feel I now must about the loss or, more accurately, persuasive removal of, my wife by you, acting (I assume) on behalf of the municipal offices.”

 

I still wait his response and visualize its certain inadequacy with some relish. It will thank me for my patience, for my time, and for the physical hospitality my wife extends to all employees of the municipal offices. There will be derisive sniggering within its poor punctuation. I will read it many many times until I feel quite nauseous. I will complain about her absence to the very top. This time the municipal offices have destroyed the wrong man. I shed tears as she packed her bags and my child’s little bags, and complained determinedly about fairness, vows, even love. Perfectly, there was no response.

 

I know this is a problem, letters, dependence, a very real one. I only don’t care. Everyone needs something.