The next person, I mean the very next person, gout-hobbled granny or lollypop wielding betty-boo eyed three year old, to say Things happen for a Reason, well I'm going to stomp that person's face with my mighty boot.
The hilariously tragic irony is, of course, that this shocking violence will indeed have happened for a reason.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Monday, July 16, 2012
quick, before apathy awakes...
I wish I knew this years ago, like when I was 8 or that. I figured it out all on my own eventually, but about twenty years later than would have been ideal.
The sudden inspiration to action, the flash of "yeah man, I'mma gonna build my own bed / brew my own beer / become an artist ", that can feel like half the battle; after wallowing in apathy for endless time, simply knowing what you want to do is a huge part of getting it done.
But it is not. That's how it feels alright, but knowing what you want is just knowing there is a battle, it does fuck all about getting your fat ass into the scrap.
You can talk about the battle for years, it gets so that maybe you begin to think you fought that fight, that you tried your hand and it didn't work out.
Closely related to this is Yoda's philosophy: "do or do not; there is no try" - do something, really give it everything, and if it comes to nothing you can look back and see that you tried. But set out to try and you are not really trying at all.
Knowing that there is a battle dies not get you into it. Getting into the battle gets you into the battle.
Less talk, more action.
This post retreads a path so heavily travelled by bar stool philosophers and rancid self-helpers that any simple wisdom is indistinguishable from impacted shite. But I am writing it anyway, because action is victory.
I'll groove this habit if it fucking kills me. Onwards!
Saturday, July 30, 2011
In me jocks
Doing 125 on the motorway because I'm a fucking rebel, blasting my way back to Dublin town for a week of manly freedom, of beer and loud tv and waking up on the couch in the early hours. Building furniture in the yard and painting anything that's not quick fleet on its feet. That wednesday sun blistering, and I'm a big grinning shirtless techno fireball in aviators, sweating madly into the seat, all the way home.
Hardly in the door with the first one cracked, a textie blips into my buzz: "Twas sad when you left us, Rosie kept saying Dad? Dad? Dad?". Ah me poor beleaguered heart, is there no end to it? I'm too old now to be suffering new emotions. I see wee Ro now standing in her cot, bawling her little eyes out and it's fucking hilarious. It's so positive and dramatic and goddamn funny that I'm in serious danger of hugging the cat. Poor fucking cat gets it from all sides.
A small army of silent beer bottles stand watch in the quiet house, I watch kung-fu zombie movies in me jocks.
Hardly in the door with the first one cracked, a textie blips into my buzz: "Twas sad when you left us, Rosie kept saying Dad? Dad? Dad?". Ah me poor beleaguered heart, is there no end to it? I'm too old now to be suffering new emotions. I see wee Ro now standing in her cot, bawling her little eyes out and it's fucking hilarious. It's so positive and dramatic and goddamn funny that I'm in serious danger of hugging the cat. Poor fucking cat gets it from all sides.
A small army of silent beer bottles stand watch in the quiet house, I watch kung-fu zombie movies in me jocks.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
for you;
loud laughter sliding in slabs behind me as I part ways with Mark on Ballybough road. laughing at love, laughing at the empty boarded up houses on the main drag, the bright grey early morning. Careful here now, watch yourself here now, bad auld area this. Me hole. A good friday skinful and a few twists and turns into a beautiful world made new, warts and all. We're such terrible spas, the lot of us. You too.
Its so clear now but sure it'll be all gone in the real morning, the one that's coming around 2pm or so. Until then, rest peacefully in the certain knowledge that I love you, yes you, and my friend Mark and Maeve that we left asleep in a sheltered armchair, and Mags who thought to get up and see us out and James that didn't bother his arse and wee Aoife that thought a whole new day had begun when in truth the old one was simply slow in closing.
I am so old, and so young and I am bursting with something but I don't know what the word is for it.
Its so clear now but sure it'll be all gone in the real morning, the one that's coming around 2pm or so. Until then, rest peacefully in the certain knowledge that I love you, yes you, and my friend Mark and Maeve that we left asleep in a sheltered armchair, and Mags who thought to get up and see us out and James that didn't bother his arse and wee Aoife that thought a whole new day had begun when in truth the old one was simply slow in closing.
I am so old, and so young and I am bursting with something but I don't know what the word is for it.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Stick yer title up yer hole.
Je-yasus kid, I am fuckered. I haven't blogged in a bit for mostly two reasons and for lessly many more smaller reasonettes.
My Reason #1 is that, due to the cathartic power of writing shit down, the saga of Spinky has lost its urgency. Also that damn story has so many hooks and barbs catching other threads I can't streamline the bastard into a proper Thing.
In real life I am pushing the intensity up a bit, working all day and night and not getting enough sleep. Right now is the prime example; yesterday I got up at 8am and drove home, a home that I have torn to bits in the name of renovation and is not currently habitable, even for the cat. I spent the day smashing tiles off the bathroom floor and wrestling the toilet off the wall in between bouts of breaking other stuff up with my trusty red crow-bar. Construction, they call it. Then I drove across town to teach people how to beat each other up from 5.30pm to 8.30pm. Which left an hour and a half to get some dinner and a pint in, before doing a five hour stint in this nightclub (I write most of this crap while in a nightclub, tis very distracting.).
Finished up at 3am,drove to the house I'm staying in, got to bed by 4.30, up again by 8.15, and did the whole bastard thing again. Right now I'd give my left testie (the less handsome of the pair) for a twenty minute power nap.
And while I'm whinging here I might as well add that even under normal conditions I sometimes have trouble staying awake while driving. Back when I used to do hard physical work it wasn't too unusual for my passenger to wake me up when the lights turned green, though in fairness that was in heavy traffic where we might not move for five minutes at a time. The hour drive to bed tonight might have to be done in stages.
Some deep down weird part of me actually likes pushing this hard, I wear the sleep-deprivation delirium like a badge of honour, which is probably a symptom of delirium induced by lack of sleep.
My eyeballs hurt. This makes me swell with pride.
My Reason #1 is that, due to the cathartic power of writing shit down, the saga of Spinky has lost its urgency. Also that damn story has so many hooks and barbs catching other threads I can't streamline the bastard into a proper Thing.
In real life I am pushing the intensity up a bit, working all day and night and not getting enough sleep. Right now is the prime example; yesterday I got up at 8am and drove home, a home that I have torn to bits in the name of renovation and is not currently habitable, even for the cat. I spent the day smashing tiles off the bathroom floor and wrestling the toilet off the wall in between bouts of breaking other stuff up with my trusty red crow-bar. Construction, they call it. Then I drove across town to teach people how to beat each other up from 5.30pm to 8.30pm. Which left an hour and a half to get some dinner and a pint in, before doing a five hour stint in this nightclub (I write most of this crap while in a nightclub, tis very distracting.).
Finished up at 3am,drove to the house I'm staying in, got to bed by 4.30, up again by 8.15, and did the whole bastard thing again. Right now I'd give my left testie (the less handsome of the pair) for a twenty minute power nap.
And while I'm whinging here I might as well add that even under normal conditions I sometimes have trouble staying awake while driving. Back when I used to do hard physical work it wasn't too unusual for my passenger to wake me up when the lights turned green, though in fairness that was in heavy traffic where we might not move for five minutes at a time. The hour drive to bed tonight might have to be done in stages.
Some deep down weird part of me actually likes pushing this hard, I wear the sleep-deprivation delirium like a badge of honour, which is probably a symptom of delirium induced by lack of sleep.
My eyeballs hurt. This makes me swell with pride.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Verse Chorus Chorus Chorus; the recursive man.
Ponys Gaff was great, a home from home. This was true to the most exaggerated sense for Spinky, a man who was to prove, over the course of several years, to be one of the worlds great moochers.
Spinky doesn't visit, he auto-installs when you open the door.
Memory is my heroin. Frozen moments of time, self contained chunks that exist untethered from the infinity, I have a whole half-assed philosophy based around memory and the illusion of now. Mostly half-inched from Watchmen.
Even as I write this, I can feel myself sinking into the couch in Ponys living room, I can smell the old sweat and the hash smoke that permeated everything. I love how this all becomes timeless and how I can be there again anytime I think about it. I don't remember the actual conversations but there were recurring themes and plans hatched that float up sometimes.
There was a plan once, in anticipation of the coming millennium and the possible end of human history, for cigars. There was a connection, someone knew a man that might be able to get cannabis oil, and if we could get enough, and also source several ounces of high grade grass, then we could create monstrous cigars of a reality warping nature. The price per cigar would have been about £150 had we ever got that elusive oil. Everything else was ready to go and cigar making documents were procured, but it was not to be. Oh but the dream lives on. Someday, when I'm auld and have resumed the drinking habits of my youth, I'm going to start making enquires and rounding up certain senile people with a view to inducing group incontinence.
Which neatly brings me back to the Ballad of Spinky, or Verse Chorus Chorus Chorus.
Pony is a man of passions, when something hooks him he gets drawn in further than a reasonable man could, his imagination runs wild and boundaries get battered, bent, ruptured and sapped. Arty like.
Ponys future at the time was to be the Bong business, and his research was conducted in his living room with industrial bits of pipe and endless enthusiasm.
Little handy bongs and big bongs, with interchangeable parts and cutting edge bong-tech. There was the six-shooter, six pipe bowls on a rotating thingy so you could fill the six bowls at once and then smoke them sequentially, a real time saver for people who almost by definition are not actually in a hurry.
Pony also adapted the top of a HazMat suit for his bongs, it was a big yellow one with a rectangular plastic front window and gas mask that you had to strap on. Instead of a filter the mask attached to a big tubular bong and you sat there on the sofa looking at your friends through that scratchy plastic window while you smoked the bong without moving because the valves rendered movement unnecessary. It was weird and claustrophobic but sure it passed the time.
Spinky was always there, always. I mean I called over regularly but I went home too. And also spent some time upkeeping connections with other separate groups. But not the Spinkmeister, it must have driven Ponys girlfriend nuts, but the man was an institution, in the architectural sense of the word.
Anyhoo,myself and Spinky became great ol buddies, we both loved drinking to excess, james bond movies, pretty girls and being suave. We went on to have many adventures and Spinky introduced me to many people that went on to become good friends of mine. He introduced me to Crazy J in Crazys J's Snakepit, a small-time dealers gaff where Spinky had insinuated himself, as usual, and as usual had invoked the ire of the woman of the house, in this case it was the younger version of my friend Superfast.
Inevitably he ended up on my couch, it was only a matter of time. This caused some low level strife with Biffo, who technically owned half the couch and took an almost instant dislike to Spinky. I say almost-instant because it was more likely due to a fast and accurate evaluation of Spinkys character than anything instinctive. That sounds harsh, but the truth is I don't demand very high moral character from my friends, just that they understand why James Bond is the ultimate role model and appreciate the importance of getting mangled.
Nonetheless, the tenacious mooch managed to move house with us, which is a three-pronged tribute to Biffo's tolerance, Spinky's thick skin and my own responsibility-shirking prowess.
I never thought of Biffo as the woman of the house before, but it fits the pattern nicely as it was Biffo that finaly gave Spinky his marching orders.
One new years eve night we somehow managed to pull a pair of stone-cold foxes. Spinky realised he was onto a good thing and kept his girl for an epic four years or so, moving in together so he could mooch more efficiently. Things didn't work out with my girl, partially because she was not actually single during the period we were dating, and also because I was a mess. Interesting side-note here: the girls referred to us as "pretty boys", to this day I am very confused as to whether this constitutes a back-handed compliment or the regular kind.
The beginning of the end was the night that Spinky introduced me to his girlfriend's cousin. It was Mrs Spinkys birthday in Handels on Fishamble Street, loud as fuck with the worst bar service imaginable. Whats a man to do when he gets introduced to a beautiful girl in a loud bar? he sticks the head on her, of course. That worked out surprisingly well, and I married the beautiful girl a few years later. But the night ended badly for Spinky, walking home down Harcourt street he was ambushed by scumbags and took a kicking before they took his wallet. As an afterthought one of them stabbed him with a needle.
Spinky doesn't visit, he auto-installs when you open the door.
Memory is my heroin. Frozen moments of time, self contained chunks that exist untethered from the infinity, I have a whole half-assed philosophy based around memory and the illusion of now. Mostly half-inched from Watchmen.
Even as I write this, I can feel myself sinking into the couch in Ponys living room, I can smell the old sweat and the hash smoke that permeated everything. I love how this all becomes timeless and how I can be there again anytime I think about it. I don't remember the actual conversations but there were recurring themes and plans hatched that float up sometimes.
There was a plan once, in anticipation of the coming millennium and the possible end of human history, for cigars. There was a connection, someone knew a man that might be able to get cannabis oil, and if we could get enough, and also source several ounces of high grade grass, then we could create monstrous cigars of a reality warping nature. The price per cigar would have been about £150 had we ever got that elusive oil. Everything else was ready to go and cigar making documents were procured, but it was not to be. Oh but the dream lives on. Someday, when I'm auld and have resumed the drinking habits of my youth, I'm going to start making enquires and rounding up certain senile people with a view to inducing group incontinence.
Which neatly brings me back to the Ballad of Spinky, or Verse Chorus Chorus Chorus.
Pony is a man of passions, when something hooks him he gets drawn in further than a reasonable man could, his imagination runs wild and boundaries get battered, bent, ruptured and sapped. Arty like.
Ponys future at the time was to be the Bong business, and his research was conducted in his living room with industrial bits of pipe and endless enthusiasm.
Little handy bongs and big bongs, with interchangeable parts and cutting edge bong-tech. There was the six-shooter, six pipe bowls on a rotating thingy so you could fill the six bowls at once and then smoke them sequentially, a real time saver for people who almost by definition are not actually in a hurry.
Pony also adapted the top of a HazMat suit for his bongs, it was a big yellow one with a rectangular plastic front window and gas mask that you had to strap on. Instead of a filter the mask attached to a big tubular bong and you sat there on the sofa looking at your friends through that scratchy plastic window while you smoked the bong without moving because the valves rendered movement unnecessary. It was weird and claustrophobic but sure it passed the time.
Spinky was always there, always. I mean I called over regularly but I went home too. And also spent some time upkeeping connections with other separate groups. But not the Spinkmeister, it must have driven Ponys girlfriend nuts, but the man was an institution, in the architectural sense of the word.
Anyhoo,myself and Spinky became great ol buddies, we both loved drinking to excess, james bond movies, pretty girls and being suave. We went on to have many adventures and Spinky introduced me to many people that went on to become good friends of mine. He introduced me to Crazy J in Crazys J's Snakepit, a small-time dealers gaff where Spinky had insinuated himself, as usual, and as usual had invoked the ire of the woman of the house, in this case it was the younger version of my friend Superfast.
Inevitably he ended up on my couch, it was only a matter of time. This caused some low level strife with Biffo, who technically owned half the couch and took an almost instant dislike to Spinky. I say almost-instant because it was more likely due to a fast and accurate evaluation of Spinkys character than anything instinctive. That sounds harsh, but the truth is I don't demand very high moral character from my friends, just that they understand why James Bond is the ultimate role model and appreciate the importance of getting mangled.
Nonetheless, the tenacious mooch managed to move house with us, which is a three-pronged tribute to Biffo's tolerance, Spinky's thick skin and my own responsibility-shirking prowess.
I never thought of Biffo as the woman of the house before, but it fits the pattern nicely as it was Biffo that finaly gave Spinky his marching orders.
One new years eve night we somehow managed to pull a pair of stone-cold foxes. Spinky realised he was onto a good thing and kept his girl for an epic four years or so, moving in together so he could mooch more efficiently. Things didn't work out with my girl, partially because she was not actually single during the period we were dating, and also because I was a mess. Interesting side-note here: the girls referred to us as "pretty boys", to this day I am very confused as to whether this constitutes a back-handed compliment or the regular kind.
The beginning of the end was the night that Spinky introduced me to his girlfriend's cousin. It was Mrs Spinkys birthday in Handels on Fishamble Street, loud as fuck with the worst bar service imaginable. Whats a man to do when he gets introduced to a beautiful girl in a loud bar? he sticks the head on her, of course. That worked out surprisingly well, and I married the beautiful girl a few years later. But the night ended badly for Spinky, walking home down Harcourt street he was ambushed by scumbags and took a kicking before they took his wallet. As an afterthought one of them stabbed him with a needle.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Shopping
I went shopping with Biffo the Sunday before the Sunday before Christmas. The squirtels were tucked snug away in hollow trees in fairview park, the whooping swans were cheering themselves on across our pale skies and all across the land heterosexual men were teaming up to go shopping.
I am from the ninja school of buying-shit, I operate alone and I'm in and out like a shadows ghost. Things vanish from shelves, money appears in tills, salespeople are disturbed by peripheral flickers and the lingering waft of Boots Original 24hr anti-perspirant. Standard kit for ninjas. Fact.
But thats when I'm buying shit for me. I don't need emotional support or deadlines or a play-date to force my hand when I'm shopping for me. Christmas shopping requires backup.
Shopping in a team, or more accurately; a squad (a squad of two) is Combat Mission style shopping; shopping like big gruff manly men with objectives, strategies, operation critical time-windows, danger and alcohol. Lots of alcohol.
The Foggy Dew, 1630 hours, mission debriefing, I arrived an hour late and for the first time ever Biffo was there first, waiting for me. This was a very emotional moment for me, he was half way through his first pint which meant he had been there at least ten minutes, ten minutes sitting there wondering what had happened, why was he the silly twat drinking on his own waiting for some tardy fucker to show up ? Had the whole world gone topsy turvy? Yes you sonofabitch, you are that twat. It only took me fifteen years or so, but I've fucking got your number, you fucking chronographically challenged weirdo. I then ordered a brace of pints before realising I had no cash money on me and demanded that Biffo cough up, thereby losing the moral victory I had fought so hard to achieve.
Any mission worth executing starts with pints, which are immediately followed by a ham and cheese sandwich, naturally. A tactical fork was called for; me to the ATM, Biffo to the Mercantile for sammiges. I found him nursing another pint, the Mercantile doesn't do sammiges. What's this town comming to? Another one down and we broke cover for Grogans and the guarantee of lovely home-made cheese and ham delectables.
Grogans never flags, never waivers, the best pub in the world, marvellous pintage and vittles. I discovered that a ham cheese tomato and onion sammige is called a 'toasted special', I was dumbfounded. For about ten years I have been calling for "a toasted ham cheese tomato and onion thanks very much", the time wasted, the chagrin, the unnoticed funny looks, now imagined, that will haunt me in the quiet hours.
Finally we were prepped for the task at hand. Out the door with us says Biffo, time is short.
To thebatcave record shop. Theres a tradition in Biffos' family, going back about two years, whereby every Christmas I am conscripted to buy techno for Biffo's brother, which is then kris-kringled to him by the appropiate family member. This makes Daddybear the easiest person in the world to buy presents for at Christmas as all a person has to do is phone me and grunt "Daddybear, techno, thanks". Really they're taking advantage of my addiction to buying techno, but I don't mind as I am addicted to buying techno.This year it is Biffos turn to ask me to buy techno, so a trip to the record shop is pretty high on our agenda.
But I'm in a forced recovery with this itch, financial ruination has kept me out of the record shop (singular - I don't cheat on my record shop or comic shop, unlike some slutywhores out there), and my few relapses this year have been online purchases that weren't distributed to the retailers. So I was pretty shocked when I found the entire techno section completely missing. Apparently the guy that took care of that stuff went to work somewhere else and his knowledge went with him. It was a bit of a relief in a way, now I no longer owe loyalty to a record shop I can buy everything I want online with minimal fuss, which was what I decided to do, so we were able to mark that mission objective as an unqualified success.
The walk from Grogans to the record shop, all thirty meters of it, had left Biffo hungry again. Yamamori ? Yeah sure I said, because I'm always hungry, even when I'm full. It makes no sense as I'm only small, but I am also a man of mystery so there you go.
We had lovely Yamamori food and a bottle of wine and were very loud because of drunkness and high spirits.
At this stage a plan had to be drawn up as it was getting seriously late and televisions aren't sold in every tobacconist or brothel like in the good old days. Thats what we were after, by the way, a TV for Daddy and Mammy Biffo. The Emergency plan was this: we both could remember there being a Philips place at the junction of Georges st. and Dame St. We were well aware that it might not exist or possibly might be closed so the back up plan was to hit Dixons in the Jervis centre.
Sure enough the Philips place was closed, but at least it exists so we both felt vindicated on some level. Biffo hailed a taxi, despite the Jervis being a five minute walk away. I expected this, Biffo never walks, when he comes out of the pub around the corner from his house he'll jump into a taxi, avoids giving a destination by saying something like "we'll start by taking this next left" and then calls a halt to proceedings outside his gaff, pays the minimum fare and hops out.
Anyways, Dixons.
Jervis st. was still open , praise be to Cheebus and his mighty flowing robes of woven justice, and once inside the telly shop Biffo decided that now was a good time to find out the size of the cabinet back home that the telly would have to fit into. Je-aysus.
One shouty-in-an-electronics-shop phone call later and we had the width of the cabinet. TV dimensions are given diagonally from top corner to opposite bottom corner, a fact Biffo was blissfully unaware of, so unless we bought a really small tv we had a really good chance of fucking this up. That is unless one of us suavely carries a tape measure in his handsome pocket on a regular basis. Damn straight. In a Bond moment that would bring a tear to Roger Moore's eye and make Pierce Brosnan literally shit himself, I kung fu measured every hench-tv in a five mile radius, wielding that baby like some sort of infant.
I have a habit of not insulting people from a racial minority on first meeting them, for fear of the insult being wrongly taken as some form of racism. It is a subtle form of racism in itself, in that I am treating them differently based on their ethnicity, but in a country where d'ignorance is a virtue I can be fairly confident that I am helping push the balance back towards neutral. Biffo has no such pretensions, so when a small beardy easterner sales assistant bravely stepped up to assist, Biffo asked him if he was a sheep shagger.
This is exactly the sort of comment I avoid, in this case doubly so because he looked exactly like one of those shepherd types from the mountainy bits of Pakistan that you see in movies. Or that I saw in one movie once, to be precise.
The beardy fella took it in good humor, fair play to him, we must have had the advantage of novelty as you don't get many half-cut goofballs in electronics shops. Turns out he didn't have our chosen telly in stock anyway, so we nipped over to Argos and got one there instead. There were no further adventures in Argos as they are well accustomed to half-cut goofballs, twits and sociopaths and have taken steps at a design level to effectively neutralise and contain buffoonery is all its myriad forms.
We took the telly across to T.P. Smiths to wet the babys head, as the saying goes. Tis tradition so it is.
I made it home eventually, a successful shopping mission in the bag, though I had no actual purchases to prove it. Back when I lived with Biffo this was pretty normal everyday stuff, and I do miss it at times. What I don't miss is the next mornings, and lack of practice is making them worse. Also not being able to drink away the monday morning blues is just unfair.
I am from the ninja school of buying-shit, I operate alone and I'm in and out like a shadows ghost. Things vanish from shelves, money appears in tills, salespeople are disturbed by peripheral flickers and the lingering waft of Boots Original 24hr anti-perspirant. Standard kit for ninjas. Fact.
But thats when I'm buying shit for me. I don't need emotional support or deadlines or a play-date to force my hand when I'm shopping for me. Christmas shopping requires backup.
Shopping in a team, or more accurately; a squad (a squad of two) is Combat Mission style shopping; shopping like big gruff manly men with objectives, strategies, operation critical time-windows, danger and alcohol. Lots of alcohol.
The Foggy Dew, 1630 hours, mission debriefing, I arrived an hour late and for the first time ever Biffo was there first, waiting for me. This was a very emotional moment for me, he was half way through his first pint which meant he had been there at least ten minutes, ten minutes sitting there wondering what had happened, why was he the silly twat drinking on his own waiting for some tardy fucker to show up ? Had the whole world gone topsy turvy? Yes you sonofabitch, you are that twat. It only took me fifteen years or so, but I've fucking got your number, you fucking chronographically challenged weirdo. I then ordered a brace of pints before realising I had no cash money on me and demanded that Biffo cough up, thereby losing the moral victory I had fought so hard to achieve.
Any mission worth executing starts with pints, which are immediately followed by a ham and cheese sandwich, naturally. A tactical fork was called for; me to the ATM, Biffo to the Mercantile for sammiges. I found him nursing another pint, the Mercantile doesn't do sammiges. What's this town comming to? Another one down and we broke cover for Grogans and the guarantee of lovely home-made cheese and ham delectables.
Grogans never flags, never waivers, the best pub in the world, marvellous pintage and vittles. I discovered that a ham cheese tomato and onion sammige is called a 'toasted special', I was dumbfounded. For about ten years I have been calling for "a toasted ham cheese tomato and onion thanks very much", the time wasted, the chagrin, the unnoticed funny looks, now imagined, that will haunt me in the quiet hours.
Finally we were prepped for the task at hand. Out the door with us says Biffo, time is short.
To the
But I'm in a forced recovery with this itch, financial ruination has kept me out of the record shop (singular - I don't cheat on my record shop or comic shop, unlike some slutywhores out there), and my few relapses this year have been online purchases that weren't distributed to the retailers. So I was pretty shocked when I found the entire techno section completely missing. Apparently the guy that took care of that stuff went to work somewhere else and his knowledge went with him. It was a bit of a relief in a way, now I no longer owe loyalty to a record shop I can buy everything I want online with minimal fuss, which was what I decided to do, so we were able to mark that mission objective as an unqualified success.
The walk from Grogans to the record shop, all thirty meters of it, had left Biffo hungry again. Yamamori ? Yeah sure I said, because I'm always hungry, even when I'm full. It makes no sense as I'm only small, but I am also a man of mystery so there you go.
We had lovely Yamamori food and a bottle of wine and were very loud because of drunkness and high spirits.
At this stage a plan had to be drawn up as it was getting seriously late and televisions aren't sold in every tobacconist or brothel like in the good old days. Thats what we were after, by the way, a TV for Daddy and Mammy Biffo. The Emergency plan was this: we both could remember there being a Philips place at the junction of Georges st. and Dame St. We were well aware that it might not exist or possibly might be closed so the back up plan was to hit Dixons in the Jervis centre.
Sure enough the Philips place was closed, but at least it exists so we both felt vindicated on some level. Biffo hailed a taxi, despite the Jervis being a five minute walk away. I expected this, Biffo never walks, when he comes out of the pub around the corner from his house he'll jump into a taxi, avoids giving a destination by saying something like "we'll start by taking this next left" and then calls a halt to proceedings outside his gaff, pays the minimum fare and hops out.
Anyways, Dixons.
Jervis st. was still open , praise be to Cheebus and his mighty flowing robes of woven justice, and once inside the telly shop Biffo decided that now was a good time to find out the size of the cabinet back home that the telly would have to fit into. Je-aysus.
One shouty-in-an-electronics-shop phone call later and we had the width of the cabinet. TV dimensions are given diagonally from top corner to opposite bottom corner, a fact Biffo was blissfully unaware of, so unless we bought a really small tv we had a really good chance of fucking this up. That is unless one of us suavely carries a tape measure in his handsome pocket on a regular basis. Damn straight. In a Bond moment that would bring a tear to Roger Moore's eye and make Pierce Brosnan literally shit himself, I kung fu measured every hench-tv in a five mile radius, wielding that baby like some sort of infant.
I have a habit of not insulting people from a racial minority on first meeting them, for fear of the insult being wrongly taken as some form of racism. It is a subtle form of racism in itself, in that I am treating them differently based on their ethnicity, but in a country where d'ignorance is a virtue I can be fairly confident that I am helping push the balance back towards neutral. Biffo has no such pretensions, so when a small beardy easterner sales assistant bravely stepped up to assist, Biffo asked him if he was a sheep shagger.
This is exactly the sort of comment I avoid, in this case doubly so because he looked exactly like one of those shepherd types from the mountainy bits of Pakistan that you see in movies. Or that I saw in one movie once, to be precise.
The beardy fella took it in good humor, fair play to him, we must have had the advantage of novelty as you don't get many half-cut goofballs in electronics shops. Turns out he didn't have our chosen telly in stock anyway, so we nipped over to Argos and got one there instead. There were no further adventures in Argos as they are well accustomed to half-cut goofballs, twits and sociopaths and have taken steps at a design level to effectively neutralise and contain buffoonery is all its myriad forms.
We took the telly across to T.P. Smiths to wet the babys head, as the saying goes. Tis tradition so it is.
I made it home eventually, a successful shopping mission in the bag, though I had no actual purchases to prove it. Back when I lived with Biffo this was pretty normal everyday stuff, and I do miss it at times. What I don't miss is the next mornings, and lack of practice is making them worse. Also not being able to drink away the monday morning blues is just unfair.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
The ballad of Spinky, aka Verse Chorus Chorus Chorus, part one.
For a long time I had a best friend by the name of Spinky, a real person of the punk persuasion and not the small spoty dog his name might lead you to imagine. The story of Spinky is long and convoluted, but I lack the patience to give the convolutions the time they merit so I'll just tear through it as usual and regret the omissions later.
I went through a transition when I was about twenty two, I had lost all meaningful contact with my friends from school and had shed most of my friends from college somehow. I had also just broken up with my long-term girlfriend and although our friends were still my friends I felt the need to move on. I didn't know it then, but even though I had all the time in the world for them, the scene that those friends created was not my natural habitat, I was just such a good chameleon that I didn't realise it.
All this is retrospective of course, at the time I was just mad for the craic and other people and the way you might force your way into their social circles. I wouldn't have the balls to do it now, but then I'm sober most of the time now so that might have some bearing on it.
The Hairy Fella is the most constant friend I've had since I started college at seventeen, and when I hit this transitiony time I made an effort to catch up with him more often because Hairy knows everybody, even you. Seriously, if I used his real name here you would either know him or one of your friends would know him. Unlike the connections between all other sentient beings there are only two degrees of separation from Hairy; either you have met him, somebody you know has met him or you have never met anybody and exist as a free-floating consciousness spontaneously arisen from a coincidence of electrical charge gradients across the wet leaves of a forest after a storm.
I called into Hairy one halloween friday, just for the chat and maybe to attempt putting the submission on his fully-automated self-twisting rubber arm for pints. But a plan was afoot, and it already involved the pub, which saved me the very inconsiderable effort of engaging the self-twisting arm. First we headed to a gaff on Caple St. where we were to meet people and eat the mushies they were rumored to posses, there was also rumors of fly agaric, reputedly the strongest of strong juju. There wasn't any fly agaric (for sharing), as it turns out, but waving possibilities like that around adds an atmosphere of high adventure to a half-cut stroll across town.
The folk resident in this house on Capel street were proper tokers, so there was nothing brief about the visit as it takes tokers bleedin ages to do anything at all, especially if it involves leaving the house. They were, and still are, real good people, hippie grunge types in the main. I took to them immediately as I was also a hippie grunge type and because they appeared to find it funny when I got loud and offensive, I love it when people react like that because then I don't have to feel terrible when I wake up the next morning with fuzzy memories, the Fear and card-sharp shuffled 12 second snapshots of crying and shouting, the bad kind of shouting.
We headed out to a comedy improv in the Hapenny Bridge Inn where I remember some good natured heckling and some pretty ropey comedy, which is only to be expected as most comics are shite even when they have a script. The details are irrelevant really, I went out with a gang of strangers and had me a good ol time. It's the follow up that is interesting; a week or so later I rock up to that same house on Capel street all on my lonesome, insinuate myself onto the sofa and pretty much declare that "youse people are now my circle of fwends, get used to it hippies". I think I may have used those exact words. The fucking cheek of me. And you wouldn't think it if you met me in real life, as mild mannered as Clark Kent with a migrane.
It worked a treat though, the poor auld soft-touches proved suitably compliant and I've held onto them as my main crew* for something scarily close to thirteen years.
One of these good gentle folk that I met was Pony, and it was in his house that I first met / found Spinky, installed on Ponys sofa, smoking big bongs and talking shite.
*I'm pretty sure they don't see themselves as my crew at all, but thats just another aspect of our relationship that they are not consciously aware of. Goddamn preposition.
I went through a transition when I was about twenty two, I had lost all meaningful contact with my friends from school and had shed most of my friends from college somehow. I had also just broken up with my long-term girlfriend and although our friends were still my friends I felt the need to move on. I didn't know it then, but even though I had all the time in the world for them, the scene that those friends created was not my natural habitat, I was just such a good chameleon that I didn't realise it.
All this is retrospective of course, at the time I was just mad for the craic and other people and the way you might force your way into their social circles. I wouldn't have the balls to do it now, but then I'm sober most of the time now so that might have some bearing on it.
The Hairy Fella is the most constant friend I've had since I started college at seventeen, and when I hit this transitiony time I made an effort to catch up with him more often because Hairy knows everybody, even you. Seriously, if I used his real name here you would either know him or one of your friends would know him. Unlike the connections between all other sentient beings there are only two degrees of separation from Hairy; either you have met him, somebody you know has met him or you have never met anybody and exist as a free-floating consciousness spontaneously arisen from a coincidence of electrical charge gradients across the wet leaves of a forest after a storm.
I called into Hairy one halloween friday, just for the chat and maybe to attempt putting the submission on his fully-automated self-twisting rubber arm for pints. But a plan was afoot, and it already involved the pub, which saved me the very inconsiderable effort of engaging the self-twisting arm. First we headed to a gaff on Caple St. where we were to meet people and eat the mushies they were rumored to posses, there was also rumors of fly agaric, reputedly the strongest of strong juju. There wasn't any fly agaric (for sharing), as it turns out, but waving possibilities like that around adds an atmosphere of high adventure to a half-cut stroll across town.
The folk resident in this house on Capel street were proper tokers, so there was nothing brief about the visit as it takes tokers bleedin ages to do anything at all, especially if it involves leaving the house. They were, and still are, real good people, hippie grunge types in the main. I took to them immediately as I was also a hippie grunge type and because they appeared to find it funny when I got loud and offensive, I love it when people react like that because then I don't have to feel terrible when I wake up the next morning with fuzzy memories, the Fear and card-sharp shuffled 12 second snapshots of crying and shouting, the bad kind of shouting.
We headed out to a comedy improv in the Hapenny Bridge Inn where I remember some good natured heckling and some pretty ropey comedy, which is only to be expected as most comics are shite even when they have a script. The details are irrelevant really, I went out with a gang of strangers and had me a good ol time. It's the follow up that is interesting; a week or so later I rock up to that same house on Capel street all on my lonesome, insinuate myself onto the sofa and pretty much declare that "youse people are now my circle of fwends, get used to it hippies". I think I may have used those exact words. The fucking cheek of me. And you wouldn't think it if you met me in real life, as mild mannered as Clark Kent with a migrane.
It worked a treat though, the poor auld soft-touches proved suitably compliant and I've held onto them as my main crew* for something scarily close to thirteen years.
One of these good gentle folk that I met was Pony, and it was in his house that I first met / found Spinky, installed on Ponys sofa, smoking big bongs and talking shite.
*I'm pretty sure they don't see themselves as my crew at all, but thats just another aspect of our relationship that they are not consciously aware of. Goddamn preposition.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Parallels and also divergent quests for truth, and shit like that.
I have been reading a few atheist blogs recently, as evidenced by the blogroll to the right there. I have always been a big fan of reason and the pursuit of truth, and as I lack the patience to think anything through to it's logical conclusion myself it is great to find that other people have done it all for me and presented their findings in a concise, readable and even entertaining fashion.
It is not solely the conclusions themselves or even the structured rationale that leads to them that interest me, as a child I presumed that nobody else believed any of this god'n'cheebus carry on either and that there must be some other reason why we all went to mass, so the arguments in favour of what I always found to be self evident (or more accurately self not-evident) are necessarily a bit predictable.
No, its the arguments from the theist apologists, and the dismantling of these arguments by science and logic, that interest me most. And not for the obvious us-versus-them cheerleading tribalism either, although I can knock a bit of craic out of that too for a while before it gets old.
To be a good thesist apologist requires an ability to understand and use rational thought and also the ability to willingly and consciously abandon it when it leads in the "wrong" direction, replacing it with emotionally derived and fanciful anti-rational thought. In short, a good theist apologist practices a very obvious form of self-deception. And self deception is my new hobby subject, not least because I have certainly been guilty of it in the past and possibly in the present. Which brings me to another field which can parallel this one in almost disturbing fashion; the martial arts.
Where the theological discussions dance around "Is there a God?" and one side bases much of it's argument about an ancient book that states that there is a God and also backs up this statement by claiming that the book is in fact the word of God and so cannot be wrong, the martial arts dance around various themes of "does this technique or training system work?" and some of the many sides base much of their training about ancient traditions of movement that have little obvious relevance to defending oneself or fighting in general, and then try to rationalise how these movements are useful.
While I sit smugly on the side of the rational in the former discussion, I flounder on the side of the traditional apologist in the latter. The similarity between the theist apologist and the traditional martial art apologist is that we are both using rational argument to justify positions that we did not arrive at through reason. If you assume the answer and then proceed to steer the question so that it leads to that answer then the whole exercise spontaneously morphs into a stinking pile of dishonest horseshit.
I now need to dig myself out of this position, because if I am going to deceive myself about something, I'd prefer not to know about it.
There is light at the end of the sewer however, the traditional arts may yet prove to be valid and useful training tools.
The most obvious honest direction for martial arts is very close to the MMA approach; take all your techniques from proven combat sports like boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling, and dump everything else. The reality-based approach is another honest martial route, this is the direction taken by Krav Maga and numerous other "street" martial arts and consists of a very reductionist philosophy, essentially trying to keep to a minimal set of simple techniques that can be adapted to many situations, the simple approach ensures that a technique is easy to learn, execute and, theoretically, its effectiveness is more predictable.
But to outright abandon the traditional arts raises the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Somewhere back in time what are now the mysterious dance-like moves of the traditional arts were almost certainly a form of shadow boxing or shadow wrestling. That is, the person throwing the moves knew exactly what they were and had learned the techniques by doing them on another person, the shadow stuff was just solo practice. That we no longer know what the original intention for most of those moves shouldn't stop us from trying to either reverse engineer them or experiment with the application of traditional moves in a realistic setting to see what might be learned. This is the direction I am now pursuing and it is proving to be full of surprises, not least of all that it seems to be leading to a style of self defense that may well be more practical than the reality-based systems, particularly when combined with those systems.
One of the best sources of inspiration in this regard that I have found is Dan Djurdjevic over on The Way of Least Resistance. Dan's blog has had a big influence on the direction I am taking my own training in, and in general he is very rational and healthily skeptical in his approach to martial arts. One exception sticks out however, he refers to hydrostatic shock in a couple of places in relation to empty handed combat. Hydrostatic shock is a phenomenon related to high velocity bullet impacts, and not to relatively low velocity punches. This is more a misapplication of scientific theory than flat out pseudo-science, but it trips along the ledge (where can be seen the worth of poorly supported conjecture, or something), and that gives me comfort in an odd way, like the inverse of Morriseys "we hate it when our friends become successful", it's good to know that none of us are unique in our internal quests for truth.
It is not solely the conclusions themselves or even the structured rationale that leads to them that interest me, as a child I presumed that nobody else believed any of this god'n'cheebus carry on either and that there must be some other reason why we all went to mass, so the arguments in favour of what I always found to be self evident (or more accurately self not-evident) are necessarily a bit predictable.
No, its the arguments from the theist apologists, and the dismantling of these arguments by science and logic, that interest me most. And not for the obvious us-versus-them cheerleading tribalism either, although I can knock a bit of craic out of that too for a while before it gets old.
To be a good thesist apologist requires an ability to understand and use rational thought and also the ability to willingly and consciously abandon it when it leads in the "wrong" direction, replacing it with emotionally derived and fanciful anti-rational thought. In short, a good theist apologist practices a very obvious form of self-deception. And self deception is my new hobby subject, not least because I have certainly been guilty of it in the past and possibly in the present. Which brings me to another field which can parallel this one in almost disturbing fashion; the martial arts.
Where the theological discussions dance around "Is there a God?" and one side bases much of it's argument about an ancient book that states that there is a God and also backs up this statement by claiming that the book is in fact the word of God and so cannot be wrong, the martial arts dance around various themes of "does this technique or training system work?" and some of the many sides base much of their training about ancient traditions of movement that have little obvious relevance to defending oneself or fighting in general, and then try to rationalise how these movements are useful.
While I sit smugly on the side of the rational in the former discussion, I flounder on the side of the traditional apologist in the latter. The similarity between the theist apologist and the traditional martial art apologist is that we are both using rational argument to justify positions that we did not arrive at through reason. If you assume the answer and then proceed to steer the question so that it leads to that answer then the whole exercise spontaneously morphs into a stinking pile of dishonest horseshit.
I now need to dig myself out of this position, because if I am going to deceive myself about something, I'd prefer not to know about it.
There is light at the end of the sewer however, the traditional arts may yet prove to be valid and useful training tools.
The most obvious honest direction for martial arts is very close to the MMA approach; take all your techniques from proven combat sports like boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling, and dump everything else. The reality-based approach is another honest martial route, this is the direction taken by Krav Maga and numerous other "street" martial arts and consists of a very reductionist philosophy, essentially trying to keep to a minimal set of simple techniques that can be adapted to many situations, the simple approach ensures that a technique is easy to learn, execute and, theoretically, its effectiveness is more predictable.
But to outright abandon the traditional arts raises the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Somewhere back in time what are now the mysterious dance-like moves of the traditional arts were almost certainly a form of shadow boxing or shadow wrestling. That is, the person throwing the moves knew exactly what they were and had learned the techniques by doing them on another person, the shadow stuff was just solo practice. That we no longer know what the original intention for most of those moves shouldn't stop us from trying to either reverse engineer them or experiment with the application of traditional moves in a realistic setting to see what might be learned. This is the direction I am now pursuing and it is proving to be full of surprises, not least of all that it seems to be leading to a style of self defense that may well be more practical than the reality-based systems, particularly when combined with those systems.
One of the best sources of inspiration in this regard that I have found is Dan Djurdjevic over on The Way of Least Resistance. Dan's blog has had a big influence on the direction I am taking my own training in, and in general he is very rational and healthily skeptical in his approach to martial arts. One exception sticks out however, he refers to hydrostatic shock in a couple of places in relation to empty handed combat. Hydrostatic shock is a phenomenon related to high velocity bullet impacts, and not to relatively low velocity punches. This is more a misapplication of scientific theory than flat out pseudo-science, but it trips along the ledge (where can be seen the worth of poorly supported conjecture, or something), and that gives me comfort in an odd way, like the inverse of Morriseys "we hate it when our friends become successful", it's good to know that none of us are unique in our internal quests for truth.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
An apparent contradiction.
Hundreds of great bands have appeared since the evolution of rock and roll, and out of those great bands a few shining stars have blazed much brighter than the rest. Led Zep, Nirvana, The Beatles, Echo and The Bunnymen (yes, really, go listen to Ocean Rain you fucking Philistine).
So how come none of them are fit to kiss the arse of The Jesus and Mary Chain, a band that shouldn't be considered all that special by any sensible measure ?
Must be the morning thats in it.
So how come none of them are fit to kiss the arse of The Jesus and Mary Chain, a band that shouldn't be considered all that special by any sensible measure ?
Must be the morning thats in it.
Friday, October 29, 2010
the bare-faced cheek.
Example one, of the Hairy fellas nefarious carry-on:
It started with a girl. No, that's not accurate, it started with a urinary tract infection.
Hairy was pissing blood, or bloody wee, for all the difference that makes. It was an ongoing issue over a couple of weeks, we were all kept up to date with the pinkening of the stream on a day to day basis, and I for one felt deeply indebted to Hairy for this touching and utterly needless window onto his inner-life. If the accompanying pantomime seemed extravagant (did I really need to watch a man act out the imagined actions of his own abused kidney?), well fuck it, what else would we listening to of a thursday evening drowning in Dutch Gold?
Hairy lived in digs at the time, I think, or maybe he was sharing a room with somebody, either way he couldn't bring a girl home for the dirty deed.
And there was a girl, more than that, a woman, a married woman. That was pretty exotic in our circles, the only married woman most of us knew were our mothers. I was living an early twenty-something life in Dublin, which consists of interacting almost entirely with other people in the exact same age group and social situation, which is great fun and very liberating, but comes with the cost of a total erosion of the ability to communicate with proper adults (people with responsibilities). Hairy never suffered from this social retardation, and as a result of his ability to talk frankly and openly to anybody at all he frequently made friends and picked up chicks from outside our socio-economic-whatever stratum.
This is not always a good thing, Hairy is the only man I have ever known to actually sleep with his friends mother, a woman that Hairy himself described as looking a lot like Bob Dylan.
So Hairy had a meeting set with this lady, and no place to entertain her.I was working that night, can't remember where, but I was coming home later for some boozing, Hairy only needed the room for a couple of hours anyway, so that was that, all panned out and militarty like. We had a few beers before I left for work, and I distinctly remember haveing one of my rare gemlike comic flashes: " ...And here listen Hairy, don't be leaving any strawberry milkshake on my bed ye durty fecker", laughs all round, hero exits.
Hero re-enters some 8 hours later, much drinking and ribaldry follows.
A couple of days later I met the Hairy Fella in his natural habitat, the Dodgy Few or maybe WheelieBins , and delighted with himself he launches into a story vaguely resembling the set-up I described here, only with a twist ending,.In this new ending I walk into the living room the next morning with a gooey glob of pink stuff hanging from my cheek unbeknownst to myself, and the Hairy fella says "ahar har Kfs, I left ya a wee strawberry milkshake on yer pillow last night." Laughs all round, Hero stands flabbergasted.
Its not the fabrication of filthy lies in pursuit of a good story that gets me, although I was there man, that didn't even happen a little bit you fucking nut.
No, its my line, he stole my fucking line and put it into his own poxy gob, the durty thief.
It started with a girl. No, that's not accurate, it started with a urinary tract infection.
Hairy was pissing blood, or bloody wee, for all the difference that makes. It was an ongoing issue over a couple of weeks, we were all kept up to date with the pinkening of the stream on a day to day basis, and I for one felt deeply indebted to Hairy for this touching and utterly needless window onto his inner-life. If the accompanying pantomime seemed extravagant (did I really need to watch a man act out the imagined actions of his own abused kidney?), well fuck it, what else would we listening to of a thursday evening drowning in Dutch Gold?
Hairy lived in digs at the time, I think, or maybe he was sharing a room with somebody, either way he couldn't bring a girl home for the dirty deed.
And there was a girl, more than that, a woman, a married woman. That was pretty exotic in our circles, the only married woman most of us knew were our mothers. I was living an early twenty-something life in Dublin, which consists of interacting almost entirely with other people in the exact same age group and social situation, which is great fun and very liberating, but comes with the cost of a total erosion of the ability to communicate with proper adults (people with responsibilities). Hairy never suffered from this social retardation, and as a result of his ability to talk frankly and openly to anybody at all he frequently made friends and picked up chicks from outside our socio-economic-whatever stratum.
This is not always a good thing, Hairy is the only man I have ever known to actually sleep with his friends mother, a woman that Hairy himself described as looking a lot like Bob Dylan.
So Hairy had a meeting set with this lady, and no place to entertain her.I was working that night, can't remember where, but I was coming home later for some boozing, Hairy only needed the room for a couple of hours anyway, so that was that, all panned out and militarty like. We had a few beers before I left for work, and I distinctly remember haveing one of my rare gemlike comic flashes: " ...And here listen Hairy, don't be leaving any strawberry milkshake on my bed ye durty fecker", laughs all round, hero exits.
Hero re-enters some 8 hours later, much drinking and ribaldry follows.
A couple of days later I met the Hairy Fella in his natural habitat, the Dodgy Few or maybe WheelieBins , and delighted with himself he launches into a story vaguely resembling the set-up I described here, only with a twist ending,.In this new ending I walk into the living room the next morning with a gooey glob of pink stuff hanging from my cheek unbeknownst to myself, and the Hairy fella says "ahar har Kfs, I left ya a wee strawberry milkshake on yer pillow last night." Laughs all round, Hero stands flabbergasted.
Its not the fabrication of filthy lies in pursuit of a good story that gets me, although I was there man, that didn't even happen a little bit you fucking nut.
No, its my line, he stole my fucking line and put it into his own poxy gob, the durty thief.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
thieves and digressions
And the Hariry Fella, come to think of it, is not just an epic liar but a stinking thief too.
Picture this;
Myself and Biffo lived in a weird damp one bedroom basement grotbox, blessed with internationally famous bent railings in the front yard. Internationally famous because they were bent, and the concrete plinth they sprouted from was cracked, split and shifted, by The General's car as he failed spectacularly to turn either left or right at a t-junction. Not bad driving though when you consider that he was in fact dead at the time, having been shot multiple times through the front windscreen with a .357 magnum revolver. Kevin Spacy went on to make a cheeky-chappie movie based on the hilarious adventures of Martin The General Cahill. Mischevous pranks such as car-bombing and murder were toned down in the movie, replaced with the shatteringly effective symbolism of Mr.Spacy stealing cigarettes from a newsagents in Wicklow.
Previous to living there I lived in a bedsit in the middle of Ranelagh village. Now that was a reall shithole, all my neighbours were eastern health board lunatics, constantly trying to invite themselves into my place, probably out of loneliness but I couldn't give a flying fuck as they were all creepy and strange. Starey Eyed Ann managed to talk her way in once, she was this pretty nutjob that hung about Rathmines and Ranelagh. I knew she was nuts because I used to work in a chipper in Rathmines and we had a coffee incident once that involved some very rain man-like rapid repetition of short sentences, the meaning of words slipping further from her with every iteration. And that was before I moved into the bedsit and realised I had just gained her as a neighbour. Anyway once she was in and tea-ed (if someone enters my house they must have tea, its the rule) there was no getting shut of her, as you would expect, I finally had to do the Well I'm heading out now, so... routine. And then of course I actually had to fucking go out and not comeback for ages, just in case.
Also there was only one toilet in the building, and that was on the third floor, I used to load up a spray bottle with bleach and water occasionally and do a drive by bleaching of the carpet and facilities. Pissing into the wind, the irony.
The one great feature that made this bedsit nearly almost habitable, though not for humans, obviously, was the window. A big Georgian front room window, from knee height to about eight foot off the floor. The house was set back from the road because these big old houses have proper front gardens, and the Georgian split level style meant that even though I was technically on the first/ground floor I was about two meters above ground level, affording me a kings view of all that passed on my hundred meter stretch of Ranelagh.A kings view is right. I had two armchairs pulled up to the window and myself and either Spinky or Evileye would spend the night drinking cheap beer and smoking big spliffs and watching the professional lady come and go from the little discrete lane across the road. Not that she operated in the lane itself, there were more old houses snuged away behind the banks and shops of the main street.
Evileye taught me all his techniques for rolling masterful spliffs while we grew into them armchairs, it's a fond memory and it's a shame that I lost the love of smoking because if I hadn't then I could have a little memory to myself with every skin-up.
But despite the window I was pretty desperate to get out of there after a bit. And I was shocking quick to take my chance when it rolled by.
I was walking home drunk, the best way to walk home, when I met Clougherhead on the road. Now I didn't really know Clougherhead that well, but he worked in the local spar with my mate Sly and we'd been introduced a few times and he seemed like a good guy. So I dragged him back to my place for tea, because tea and a chat and drunkenness go well together. It happened that he had a mate living around the corner that needed a new guy to move in, or something, the details were unclear, but what was clear was the possibility of an escape from dumpsville.
We rocked around the corner to the lads house to see what way the habitation situation was evolving.
The situation was this: One of the two lads, who were brothers, was moving elsewhere, and needed to be replaced for a short time before the other brother also moved on. At the same time there was another, better, flat in the house next door, both houses being conveniently owned by the same landlord, where more of the same gang lived. One of the residents of this second flat were also moving on, though not immediately.
The plan: myself and the remaining brother, Biffo, would move into the good flat. Myself and one of the other lads, the Saint, would pay rent, Biffo and Kev would sleep on the floor for a while before going wherever they were going.
This was all settled on within a half hour visit to the two brothers, I don't think Kev and the Saint were consulted until after the decisions were made. The meeting was cut short because the boys were on the way to a party and I shuffled off home, all Hanibal headed and loving plans and they way they might come together.
The very next evening I rolled up to the new gaff with a shopping trolley full of my stuff, and met my new flatmates, two of whom I had never met and Biffo, who I didn't have a chance of recognising since I was pretty drunk the night before.
Biffo was wearing a pretty hungover head, a bit squinty like, but fair play to the man he pulled it together pretty quick, remembering bits of details and the grand plan eventually too. It took us about another four or five trolley trips to get the rest of my house moved, I don't have a clue where I found the trolley, but I know it wasn't from fucking spar, as two morons came out from the shop to tell us that it belonged to them . Really? then why does it say Dunnes Stores all over the handle?
If you are going to accuse two people of grand-theft-manual when you find them pushing a trolley full of lamps and books up Ranelagh main street at midnight then you should probably check and see if it is in fact your trolley. You twits.
Two beds in the gaff, and two people paying rent, so you'd think there would be no arguing over who actually gets to sleep in the beds, if you were sane, decent and not from Offaly that is. I got my bed but Biffo somehow convinced the Saint, with an amazing mix of faulty logic and irrelevant red-herring throwing,
that he (the Saint) owed Biffo from some previous couch crashing, so the Saint got the floor between the two beds. Indefinitely. And paid rent for the privilege, while the freeloader snored away in the smug duvet.
Biffo - and enduring monument to the power of ignorance and manipulation.
I knew this post would decay into a mess of digressions, I'll get on to the hairy fella and why he's a thief and a liar in the next one. Now that the stage is set.
Picture this;
Myself and Biffo lived in a weird damp one bedroom basement grotbox, blessed with internationally famous bent railings in the front yard. Internationally famous because they were bent, and the concrete plinth they sprouted from was cracked, split and shifted, by The General's car as he failed spectacularly to turn either left or right at a t-junction. Not bad driving though when you consider that he was in fact dead at the time, having been shot multiple times through the front windscreen with a .357 magnum revolver. Kevin Spacy went on to make a cheeky-chappie movie based on the hilarious adventures of Martin The General Cahill. Mischevous pranks such as car-bombing and murder were toned down in the movie, replaced with the shatteringly effective symbolism of Mr.Spacy stealing cigarettes from a newsagents in Wicklow.
Previous to living there I lived in a bedsit in the middle of Ranelagh village. Now that was a reall shithole, all my neighbours were eastern health board lunatics, constantly trying to invite themselves into my place, probably out of loneliness but I couldn't give a flying fuck as they were all creepy and strange. Starey Eyed Ann managed to talk her way in once, she was this pretty nutjob that hung about Rathmines and Ranelagh. I knew she was nuts because I used to work in a chipper in Rathmines and we had a coffee incident once that involved some very rain man-like rapid repetition of short sentences, the meaning of words slipping further from her with every iteration. And that was before I moved into the bedsit and realised I had just gained her as a neighbour. Anyway once she was in and tea-ed (if someone enters my house they must have tea, its the rule) there was no getting shut of her, as you would expect, I finally had to do the Well I'm heading out now, so... routine. And then of course I actually had to fucking go out and not comeback for ages, just in case.
Also there was only one toilet in the building, and that was on the third floor, I used to load up a spray bottle with bleach and water occasionally and do a drive by bleaching of the carpet and facilities. Pissing into the wind, the irony.
The one great feature that made this bedsit nearly almost habitable, though not for humans, obviously, was the window. A big Georgian front room window, from knee height to about eight foot off the floor. The house was set back from the road because these big old houses have proper front gardens, and the Georgian split level style meant that even though I was technically on the first/ground floor I was about two meters above ground level, affording me a kings view of all that passed on my hundred meter stretch of Ranelagh.A kings view is right. I had two armchairs pulled up to the window and myself and either Spinky or Evileye would spend the night drinking cheap beer and smoking big spliffs and watching the professional lady come and go from the little discrete lane across the road. Not that she operated in the lane itself, there were more old houses snuged away behind the banks and shops of the main street.
Evileye taught me all his techniques for rolling masterful spliffs while we grew into them armchairs, it's a fond memory and it's a shame that I lost the love of smoking because if I hadn't then I could have a little memory to myself with every skin-up.
But despite the window I was pretty desperate to get out of there after a bit. And I was shocking quick to take my chance when it rolled by.
I was walking home drunk, the best way to walk home, when I met Clougherhead on the road. Now I didn't really know Clougherhead that well, but he worked in the local spar with my mate Sly and we'd been introduced a few times and he seemed like a good guy. So I dragged him back to my place for tea, because tea and a chat and drunkenness go well together. It happened that he had a mate living around the corner that needed a new guy to move in, or something, the details were unclear, but what was clear was the possibility of an escape from dumpsville.
We rocked around the corner to the lads house to see what way the habitation situation was evolving.
The situation was this: One of the two lads, who were brothers, was moving elsewhere, and needed to be replaced for a short time before the other brother also moved on. At the same time there was another, better, flat in the house next door, both houses being conveniently owned by the same landlord, where more of the same gang lived. One of the residents of this second flat were also moving on, though not immediately.
The plan: myself and the remaining brother, Biffo, would move into the good flat. Myself and one of the other lads, the Saint, would pay rent, Biffo and Kev would sleep on the floor for a while before going wherever they were going.
This was all settled on within a half hour visit to the two brothers, I don't think Kev and the Saint were consulted until after the decisions were made. The meeting was cut short because the boys were on the way to a party and I shuffled off home, all Hanibal headed and loving plans and they way they might come together.
The very next evening I rolled up to the new gaff with a shopping trolley full of my stuff, and met my new flatmates, two of whom I had never met and Biffo, who I didn't have a chance of recognising since I was pretty drunk the night before.
Biffo was wearing a pretty hungover head, a bit squinty like, but fair play to the man he pulled it together pretty quick, remembering bits of details and the grand plan eventually too. It took us about another four or five trolley trips to get the rest of my house moved, I don't have a clue where I found the trolley, but I know it wasn't from fucking spar, as two morons came out from the shop to tell us that it belonged to them . Really? then why does it say Dunnes Stores all over the handle?
If you are going to accuse two people of grand-theft-manual when you find them pushing a trolley full of lamps and books up Ranelagh main street at midnight then you should probably check and see if it is in fact your trolley. You twits.
Two beds in the gaff, and two people paying rent, so you'd think there would be no arguing over who actually gets to sleep in the beds, if you were sane, decent and not from Offaly that is. I got my bed but Biffo somehow convinced the Saint, with an amazing mix of faulty logic and irrelevant red-herring throwing,
that he (the Saint) owed Biffo from some previous couch crashing, so the Saint got the floor between the two beds. Indefinitely. And paid rent for the privilege, while the freeloader snored away in the smug duvet.
Biffo - and enduring monument to the power of ignorance and manipulation.
I knew this post would decay into a mess of digressions, I'll get on to the hairy fella and why he's a thief and a liar in the next one. Now that the stage is set.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Liars
I have always had liars for friends, more so when we were all a little younger, but it's not like I jettisoned the distrustful bastards when I passed thirty, so most of them are still hanging about there somewhere. I don't understand it, I can't lie myself and certainly never to my friends, that's the point of having friends, no?
My best friend when I was in the final years of secondary school was a liar through and through, he'd lie about anything, I'd meet him in the one nightclub we could get into and Mod would tell me he was off his face on mushrooms or acid or booze when he was clearly sober as a judge. He told lies about the bands he had gone to see or if he couldn't make it out for something he'd tell fibs about meeting some chick. To this day he'll make shit excuses if he doesn't want to meet up for whatever reason, although I only see him about once every two years so it's not really an issue, but fucks sake all the same.
The truth of it is that the lies were totally unnecessary, Mod was by far the coolest guy in the school, for all his horseshit he really did go to Manchester and see bands, he really did have girlfriends from outside the school, from ouotside the town even. His sense of cool was unmatched, I owe him massively for saving me from my own dorkishness.
Mod took a shine to me for some reason and took me under his wing. I remember in fifth year of school, this was pre-transition year so I must have been about 15, our year did this lame 24hour wakeathon thing in the local community hall to raise money for a charity. Yes, that's right, one hundred odd fifteen year olds stayed awake all night for charity. And not for social dramatics and trouser riding at all.
Anyway, my previous social interaction with Mod consisted of the odd howya and him kneeing me in the nuts for a laugh once while standing outside a classroom waiting to get in. I didn't hold this against him though because I was a pussy and also because even after three years in school I still didn't know exactly who was who in my year and was never sure exactly who it was that had lifted me with that almighty knee of injustice. This inability to remember names or faces or events still troubles me but I have learned to let other people repeatedly fill me in on the finer details like their names and where I met them before. Also I have learned to knock the bollicks out of anyone that attempts violence on my person immediately so as to avoid confusion in the longer run.
I remember meeting Mod in a corridor that night and having an auld chat about bands and stuff. Grunge was just happening and we were both really digging it, and the shoegazing scene and the Madchester thing also. Mod told me not to be wearing my shirt cuffs all buttoned up, they should be open and sloppy. He was dead right, and we were hanging out pretty solidly from then on.
Mod got me into bands that nobody our age had even the remotest clue about, like the Jam and Tom Jones. We were rockin out to Tom when he was pretty much the uncoolest person on the planet, Mod just had that ear for quality, he didn't have to wait for anybody's fucking period revival or semi-ironic comeback.
We were in a punk band too, Mod being the front man obviously. Looking back now I can't believe I squandered the chance we had to be really good, a front man like Mod was is one in several thousand at best, he could actually sing on top of the swagger, he sang for his leaving cert in music and nobody gave him shit for it because he was somehow above slagging.. But I fucked off to college thinking that nothing would change, because people are amazingly stupid when young.
He's a house DJ now, which makes little sense to me, I mean the stuff he plays is alright but lacks the solid balls and innovation of techno, and I never could get past the innate cheese of house, but sure there you go.
I think I finally tired of not believing anything he said and that probably had a big influence on why we drifted apart, I regret that because I went on to have quite a few liars for mates and learned to not give a shit about insignificant truths and untruths. As the Hairy Fella, a notorious and celebrated liar, has repeatedly declared "Jaysus lad, I wouldn't be the type of man to let the truth get in the way of a good story".
And I do love a good story.
My best friend when I was in the final years of secondary school was a liar through and through, he'd lie about anything, I'd meet him in the one nightclub we could get into and Mod would tell me he was off his face on mushrooms or acid or booze when he was clearly sober as a judge. He told lies about the bands he had gone to see or if he couldn't make it out for something he'd tell fibs about meeting some chick. To this day he'll make shit excuses if he doesn't want to meet up for whatever reason, although I only see him about once every two years so it's not really an issue, but fucks sake all the same.
The truth of it is that the lies were totally unnecessary, Mod was by far the coolest guy in the school, for all his horseshit he really did go to Manchester and see bands, he really did have girlfriends from outside the school, from ouotside the town even. His sense of cool was unmatched, I owe him massively for saving me from my own dorkishness.
Mod took a shine to me for some reason and took me under his wing. I remember in fifth year of school, this was pre-transition year so I must have been about 15, our year did this lame 24hour wakeathon thing in the local community hall to raise money for a charity. Yes, that's right, one hundred odd fifteen year olds stayed awake all night for charity. And not for social dramatics and trouser riding at all.
Anyway, my previous social interaction with Mod consisted of the odd howya and him kneeing me in the nuts for a laugh once while standing outside a classroom waiting to get in. I didn't hold this against him though because I was a pussy and also because even after three years in school I still didn't know exactly who was who in my year and was never sure exactly who it was that had lifted me with that almighty knee of injustice. This inability to remember names or faces or events still troubles me but I have learned to let other people repeatedly fill me in on the finer details like their names and where I met them before. Also I have learned to knock the bollicks out of anyone that attempts violence on my person immediately so as to avoid confusion in the longer run.
I remember meeting Mod in a corridor that night and having an auld chat about bands and stuff. Grunge was just happening and we were both really digging it, and the shoegazing scene and the Madchester thing also. Mod told me not to be wearing my shirt cuffs all buttoned up, they should be open and sloppy. He was dead right, and we were hanging out pretty solidly from then on.
Mod got me into bands that nobody our age had even the remotest clue about, like the Jam and Tom Jones. We were rockin out to Tom when he was pretty much the uncoolest person on the planet, Mod just had that ear for quality, he didn't have to wait for anybody's fucking period revival or semi-ironic comeback.
We were in a punk band too, Mod being the front man obviously. Looking back now I can't believe I squandered the chance we had to be really good, a front man like Mod was is one in several thousand at best, he could actually sing on top of the swagger, he sang for his leaving cert in music and nobody gave him shit for it because he was somehow above slagging.. But I fucked off to college thinking that nothing would change, because people are amazingly stupid when young.
He's a house DJ now, which makes little sense to me, I mean the stuff he plays is alright but lacks the solid balls and innovation of techno, and I never could get past the innate cheese of house, but sure there you go.
I think I finally tired of not believing anything he said and that probably had a big influence on why we drifted apart, I regret that because I went on to have quite a few liars for mates and learned to not give a shit about insignificant truths and untruths. As the Hairy Fella, a notorious and celebrated liar, has repeatedly declared "Jaysus lad, I wouldn't be the type of man to let the truth get in the way of a good story".
And I do love a good story.
Friday, September 24, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, September 3, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
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?
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?
Friday, June 25, 2010
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.
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.
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