the perfect line.

Let me tell you about this guy, a Polish guy named Marius. Polish meaning from Poland and not pole-ish as in tall and cylindrical or polish as in shiny. Just to be clear.
He hooked up with my friend Superfast about a year ago and she liked him enough to introduce him to the rest of the zoo. God bless Superfast and her amazing ability to pick the strangest boys as accessories. The last one couldn't really speak english at all, and maybe this was part of the charm because Superfast never shuts the fuck up. And the first one, meaning the guy she was with when I first met her, was a pure dodgy dealer from sunny seaside Bray, a man famous for shitty deals to his friends and for punching holes in the wall during emotional moments. Crazy J's Snakepit (on account of the snakes, and also on account of Crazy J) was where they lived, a pretty nice flat in Rathmines with no lock on the building's front door and the occasional junky infestation in the hall. Classy like.

But that was a long time ago and far, far away. Marius is a different bottle of gin altogether. He's a big calm rugged chiselled dude all full of enthusiasm for everything and an aura of honesty and good will. It's a good thing he's not in the army because he'd almost certainly spend his whole time jumping on grenades and the like in random and unnecessary acts of heroism.
Marius is also a nut, of course, Superfast likes them nutty.

If I have learned one thing in my several years of consciousness, and there's little evidence to show that I have, its that everyone is a few diamonds short of a heist and the entire world is populated by whacky loons. That said, whacky loonery is relative and theres always room for erratics straying from the standard deviation.

On a night full of stories, in a land far from home, the sun came up sometime after 6am and buses arrived to take us back to town. Marius has a great affection for Cherub, as we all do, and none of us really get to see Cherub too often as he lives in the wesht, in one of them sparsely populated counties that never win anything in the GAA. Anyway Marius, in a heightened state of totally fuckedness, managed to engineer the boarding so himself and his good friend Cherub got the two seats up beside the driver, much to the delight of said sober and early-rising driver .
It was so important that we all knew of this marvelous feat. Marius propped himself up with this elbows on the back of his seat and his sunburn and his matching Hawaiian shirt and shorts combo, panama hat and aviator shades, calling out "Hey we got the best seats, me and Cherub, we got the best seats". And we weren't laughing at him exactly, well we were, but in the friendly way you do when your friend is visiting baloobas-town and doesn't seem to know it. He took mild offence anyway, maybe just because we were not as impressed as he thought we would be at his seating genius, and his honest, plaintive polish-accented voice rose up as he placed his palm on his chest and said "I just have to say what is in my heart".
Jaysus, I nearly suffocated with the mirth.
It probably didn't help that I was full of strong drugs, but even now in total sobriety it cracks me up, the earnestness of it, the ridiculousness of the scene, you couldn't invent him.

In spain, under an olive tree.

Them continental types do like their food, and after about twenty courses I had me an auld wander out to stretch the legs and maybe delay the early onset of unconsciousness.

Outside, under an old and twisted olive tree, I found a an old and twisted druid.
Not twisted in any overt way, but one look at his pointy eyeball and I knew he had himself convoluted into a loop of epic proportions.

The woad painted onto his face was beginning to pulsate and shift, a sure sign that he had enough random and conflicting hallucinogens, amphetamines, opioids, bad juju and crazy shit onboard to start altering other peoples perception of reality.
I was in that secure drunk gregarious place, waving a stogie about like I knew what I was doing with it and slopping gin on the paving slabs. I was dressed, snappily, as a Chinese peasant.

The Hairy fella had been on the receiving end of a succession of complementary offerings from the Spaniards, partly due to the mighty impression he made with his wedding ceremony and partly because he just has the head on him that people want to throw drugs into. Maybe they intuitively think he's in need of strong medicine. For his brain.
He has a measure of wisdom that reveals itself in wee slivers of time, between the moments spent assuming random wedding guests are prostitutes and moments spent getting lost in forests while on weekend visits to large cities that don't contain forests.

-KFS me auld scober, I have just the thing for you my friend, have you had one of these yellow pills?
-Not at all now Hairy, I'm in my undeflateable castle of groove due to the many, many gintonicos I've been swimming in, and also sure I've left all that auld craic behind me manys the year ago.
-Ah but KFS you forget I know you all too well, and this is very trippy stuff.

My little ears picked up and I could feel righty actually swivel foward a couple of millimeters.

-Trippy is it you say? stuff is it you say?
-Synthetic mescaline by all accounts my friend, you'll not do yourself a dis-service?
-Jaysus no, that would be criminal.
-Good man.

I was the proud owner of a golden capsule, snug in the centre of my palm, as the light glowing from the building behind me gave my gin a swimming-pool shimmer. The whole scene was permeated with an ethereal sense of adventure, there were rivulets of electricity running on the edges of everything. I was mostly just excited in general and all wound up with the occasion and the sense of marvellous dislocation, and rivers of booze and the miraculous intersecting timelines of all the good people.

And this is before I actually swallowed the magic bean. The night got a whole geansai-load more exciting shortly after.

a slow start

This is about my fourth attempt at starting a blog, and with two magnificent posts in two months its going swimmingly, in a lead fish kinda way.

C'mere and let me recount the history of my attempts.

First off, back in pre web2.0, I had a domain I bought for a cool email address which came with a free bit of hosting so I wrote random rants and stuck them up there and also got people I knew to write me stories of drunkness and cruelty, which I also published. this was all pre-wordpress, in fact the word blog wasn't invented and also I remember dinosaurs pulling cars.

But that petered out fairly quickly, there was no encouragement really, no tracking, no comments, so it felt a bit like talking to the wall, or Biffo. Actually it was exactly like talking to Biffo except the internet didn't then call me a cuntybollix and try to jump the girl I was into.

Then ages after that, only a couple of years ago, I discovered and read a load of blogs around about. And it brought out the frustrated writer in me, so I cast about for something to write about and settled on my great passion (outside of music and drunkenness); hitting people really hard.

I've been studying martial arts, the punchy kicky kind, for donkeys years and I thought I'd do a bit of an auld blog on the mechanics and theory behind hitting people. It was shocking dull stuff, and worse, the more I wrote and thought about it the harder it became to write anything that I could stand over. The subject matter was just way too complex, the human body in motion is pretty much impervious to even the most simple stripped down physics generalisations.

I've just checked and its still there, I thought wordpress would have trashed it ages ago. It has a good start but introduces a faulty concept almost from the very beginning, so its probably a good thing that I didn't spent any more time writing posts that would have to be totally revised.
I might even go back and see if I can bash it into something useful one of the days. Very enthusiastic today for some reason.

My third attempt is still current, if not updated very often. It started as a weird post-modern self-referential recursive thingy - that's about as many redundancies as I can think of, if you have another way of saying self-referential then let me know and I'll edit it into this bad boy. The blog was a blog about using the blog layout for the Joomla CMS and the posts were there to give me something to work with, while also scratching that writery itch.
I experimented a good bit with that blog, at first it was all just technical stuff, but when there was nothing to say I just prattled on and it turned into a personal blog. Then I tried a tiny bit of fucked up dream fiction, which I never finished and its better that way because it freaked me out and I had no idea what I was doing or what I wanted from it.

This blog is for things I can't write on the other blog because the other one is not anonymous, there's probably family and everything throwing the occasional eye to it. Not that the lousy bastards would deign to comment. fuckers.

And memories. I've a head full these snapshots, moments that felt like moments at the time and stuck with stories hanging off them. If I could just drag them out, when they float up from the murky.

The point

It used to drive me nuts when I'd go looking for the butter and Biffo would have stuck it back in the fridge. See we only used the proper stuff, made out of salt and cow juice, and sure if you kept it in the fridge its only valid use would be for home defence or maybe crushing ice for mojitos.

And I'd get right wound up about stuff back in the day, but I didn't like to cause conflict so I'd generally just rant and fume to myself for a bit.

It didn't help that we had this routine breakfast/dinner thing. For about half a year we had a big fry up for brekkie with bacon and hostages and beans and eggs. And then another one for dinner.
And all with the toast, sure what's a fry without toast? a travesty, that's what it is. And where would the butter for the fucking toast be? in the poxy fridge, thats where.

So, on one of the days, while I stood there trying not to grate the toast into bready pulp as I rubbed the frozen block around it in the hope of melting on an ether-thin layer of buttery goodness,
I says: whats the story with putting the butter back in the poxy bastard fridge every time I turn my back, you sneaky weird freakily impractical cuntybollix?

he says: you have to put it back in the fridge, thats the point of hard butter.

What the? who? hard butter? what the fuck?

There's no point sometimes, you're not talking to a person so much as a bundle of weird reactions arising from muddled and hazy and not-really-there-at-all thought processes and memories.

Thats the point of hard butter. seriously, what the fuck?

one thing leads to another.

Mouth paralysis, wurblefurble. I couldn't tell any of the random strangers I stopped what was happening to me, with my freakish mumbly and waving arms I was loosing any concept of communication along with the means.

Also I was lurching. Voluntarily I think - it seemed appropriate to my rapidly deteriorating condition and I'm a heart-on-my-sleeve type of guy.

In the midst of the rising fuzzy panic I was trying to get a grip on the situation. In a shopping centre of some sort, didn't remember why or how I was there but that wasn't too immediately relevant.
I hadn't been hit over the head, a quick head-wound triage ticked that off the list, and there was no pain that might indicate a stroke or a haemorrhage or something terminally medical.
I probably wasn't drunk, there is a drink/time window there that can fool you sometimes but the fact that I was both thinking and standing at the same time meant that even if I had been drinking I was far from that topsy-turvy moment. Besides the angles were all wrong, the passers-by were moving left or right to avoid me, rather than up and down or flying horizontally from floating barstools.
I hadn't been eating anything weird or unusual.
Had I?
Hang on there a minute, that hooked something.
An image floating just off-screen.
Night time, a hand held out palm up with a cigar between the second knuckles and a fat gin and tonic shimmering nearby. In the centre of the palm is a small yellow pill, the capsule type.
Ah, that would be the mescaline.

The gin is a smoking gun; if it wasn't my gin it wouldn't be shimmering.

As the pieces click together, both of them, the dream falls away.
My brain was testing the theory that I had maybe inadvertently broken it, having a bit of a worry in the wee small hours when my self wasn't there to assure and assuage.

Sixteen hundred kilometers away and three days previously I had been at a wedding. That was where the cigar/gin vision was imprinted. That was my hand, and my fistful of dynamite. FSOL's "we have explosive" plays in my head every time I pull that image up towards the light. Sends shivery delight up my spine, like listening to classic techno tracks on the bus and having the hairs rise on the back of my neck as random snaps of old craziness paint a big dopey grin.

I held it together pretty well at the start, I've got more and more into my booze over the years and generally don't feel any need for extra pep in my step. Besides, as the years pile on it gets genuinely inconvenient to be getting too far off your face, there's always some other shit that'll have to be dealt with tomorrow and at least regular hangovers are predictable, mostly.

I flew in on thursday evening, the wedding was on friday and I was flying out again on sunday.
There was plenty of coke around on the first night, and it was easy to turn down. I never really got the stuff to be honest, even before I started to loose interest in powder and pills, or to be more accurate, before I started to realise that I had little interest in them, coke always seemed to a bit of a sham. It cost a fortune, although I hear that has changed now, and does fuck all, relatively speaking.
It's a bit like gravity in physics terms. Gravity is commonly perceived as a powerful force, we are all held down by gravity and it takes mind-numbingly huge rockets to get any size of payload into orbit. But compared to the other forces in nature gravity is weak as fuck, the electromagnetic force that binds matter together just shits all over gravity, and also takes a wee in gravitys gravy.
The humble Liberty Cap mushroom grows wild and untamed every october, it costs nothing but the time it takes to go out and pick a few and the psilocybin payload will blow you clear out of your boots for five hours.

So yeah, I avoided the coke because there's no point to the stuff, and also because I had decided to be a good lad and start behaving like an adult. A messy aggressive drunken abusive incontinent adult. That's where I'm at home, that's my zone.