Bum Fights, Street Brawls and Mobile Phones 

There was one summer where the heat was so cruel it caused some to freak out and lose their minds. 

Look what happened to Adrian; he was just sitting on his front porch, swigging a sweaty beer, eyeing girls in their Lycra spandex and ankle bracelets. He soon found himself knocked sparko for fifteen minutes after a solid right uppercut from a jealous boyfriend. Adrian would never fully recover from the internal bleeding.

Now everything is filmed and fights go viral, some bozos look to get as famous as possible in the foulest of ways. 

There was this one guy named Troy who ate spaghetti every day, but that summer he ate earlobes, jugular veins and lower lips too—real vampire stuff. He got over 3 million hits and then started selling T-shirts from the back of his car and made a fortune. Grade A cunt.

On skid row the bums were raging as the sun poured scorn on their tormented souls and all they wanted to do was slash each other up then sit on a bench and wait for loose change to fall into their cups.

There was Ralph who gouged someone’s eyes out with a dirty smack spoon and hurled the eyes in the river. Someone killed Ralph soon after with a shiv, but for entirely unrelated reasons. Ralph had been on crutches since the nineties and led a pitiful life, but I guess he had it coming.

There was another bum named Mouse who scrapped for weed and cheeseburgers while kids from the estate filmed him. He fought anyone and everyone and remained unbeaten, despite being flabby and dim-witted. But in one fight with a lanky kid known as Fixer Fred, the sun, or maybe his clogged arteries, got the better of Mouse and he collapsed and died of a heart attack. Everyone cheered when he passed out, then ran when they heard the blare of the ambulance approaching. Mouse’s death almost broke the internet.

At the height of the summer something truly shocking happened. First, missing cat posters started popping up on lampposts around the city—tons of them. Then the cats started showing up dead in all kinds of awful states. There were guts smeared on the pavement, tails found in recycling bins, and the smell, my god the smell.

Finally, a video of the cat killer was released online and the woman was caught. She was burned alive by a mafia don whose Siamese cat had been found outside the local mosque with its legs chopped off. 

When autumn approached and the heat began to ease, tensions settled too. Yes, heads were still kicked in— for money, or just for fun— but the worst was over. And yet the smell of cat brains lingered around side streets and wafted through gutters reminding the public just how low things had got. Yes, there are always hard times on planet earth, and yes, life is shit, but, damn, that summer was something else.