So anyway you come out of work and you’re walking down the street and you think Fuck it, I’m gonna grab a cheeky bag of crisps, and you go into the shop and pick up a packet of smoky bacon because it’s been a while and to be honest you’re not up for the whole King-Tayto-King-Tayto dance you have to do every single time you go for cheese and onion, and so you pay up and you leave and you’re walking along and yeah, you made the right choice, these are reet tasty. Skip ahead a couple of minutes and you’re nearly finished and there’s a bin just up there, how handy… only you’ve misjudged how close to the bottom you were, so you end up standing beside the bin munching away like a div, and after a while the people who saw you leave the shop have passed by and now for all anyone knows you’ve been there the whole time, and you’re stuffing the last bits into your gob and getting more and more hassled and you want to shout at everyone how of COURSE you didn’t just WALK UP TO A BIN and fish around for a bag of CRISPS, you’re wearing a SUIT for god’s sake.
So here you are… approaching your 26th birthday, standing beside a bin, tie askew, jacket missing, wild-eyed, spraying wet specks of salty potato at passers-by. Pay close attention, children: dreams do come true.
I have a habit when taking quick notes of writing in all caps. This is partially because such notes are often for the benefit of others, and no one likes wrestling with handwriting, and partially because I’ve somehow convinced myself it’s faster. So but anyway, I got into the habit of doing this with my diary, and even now that I’ve realised it’s kind of weird I can’t quite convince myself to stop – it’ll ruin the consistency, you can’t run counter to house style, and plus if for some reason anyone else happens to look through it it’ll look like I’m admitting I was wrong. So caps it is. But ok, that’s all very well when it’s something sedate and sensible like OXEGEN or ANNIE’S LAUNCH or whatever, but then you get stuff like HONKIVERSARY or SOME CLASS OF YOKE IN LAN and soon you’re looking like some deranged concierge who doesn’t know how to quit, stringing syllables together and shouting them at the sky, hoping it sounds like enough like a real itinerary to fool the manager into leaving you be. So on balance, I should probably look into the lowercase, is I guess my point here.
Woke up. Fooled around on the internet. Cattle-penned into town on the Luas, watched Bad Lieutenant. Laughed my ass off. Got caffeined up, finished Cloud Atlas. Pinballed around Dublin in the rain, raided at least four bookshops. Watched with interest as my head and chest cavity filled with fireworks. Drank a can of Relentless on the way home. Texted my mother/sister/aunts about the mini-marathon – they did it in an hour and a half. Am impressed: it takes me that long to get up the morning. Current status: drinking cheap coffee out of a broken Elbow mug, writing formally adventurous fiction. Having slight trouble breathing, in the best possible way. Don’t know why days like this happen, can’t predict them, don’t really know how to bring them about; feel slightly gimpy drawing attention to it. But there you go.
Seems drawing badass celestial bodies is a thing I do when I’m drinking. I see two problems here: one, my knowledge of astronomy is fairly limited and thus already running almost dry; two, I can’t guarantee Drunk Colm won’t eventually think rubbish puns about white dwarves are the way forward. So over to you: suggest something else I can doodle. Something that gets a bad press and needs an image overhaul. Something that will benefit from a good ol’ bitta tipsy PR. And please note that you will be paying for the necessary Art Juice. I’ll be right over here.
(Context for the upper half: a bar in Berlin, an ill-thought-out game of Guess Who. Bonus points: German tries to correct my spelling, realises I was right in the first place. WhuPOW.)
Sometimes you have to ask yourself: how committed am I to the buckle doctrine? “Sometimes,” in this particular case, meaning one hour and three shops in. But cowboy up son, because that’s weakness talking. The buckle doctrine exists for your own good and you know it. It exists because, what, you’re gonna walk around in plain black loafers like some schmuck? You’re gonna settle for laces? Get the fuck outta here.
Wildly veering linguistic register aside, you do need some kind of trademark. Stick with your bog-standard thirty-quid Dunnes effort time after time and it starts to seep into your brain way worse than any tie or shirtsleeve; you’ll be walking The Man’s walk in no time. Did they put up with that shit in the eighteenth century? No sir, they did not. A man’s gait was his own. And do you know why? Buckles, my friend. Buckles.
The only problem is the price. The b-s D-e, as alluded to above, is cheap. Character is not. Especially for a man such as myself, who hesitates to exceed an annual outlay of fifty of your earth Euro in sheathing any given body part. I exceeded it most grievously this time – presumably due to inflation, since what I ended up getting is an ever-so-slightly-updated version of the shoes I’ve been wearing since Maastricht. But these are the shakes, and there’s no point complaining. All you can do is find a way to balance the scales, whether by cheaping out on runners or persisting in wearing jeans made out of holes. No matter how much your mother gets onto you about it. That’s right, wussbuckets: I am exactly as cool as you think I am.
Today I saw a dude trying to feed some ducks. Trying, because seagulls are like ninjas. There were two ducks sitting right in the middle of the canal, no other birds in sight, and the instant the first bit of bread hit the water it was grabbed by a seagull who’d swooped in out of nowhere. I reckon ducks are used to this, because they didn’t put up much of a fight, and within minutes they’d been shunted over to the banks. At first, to his credit, Dude tried to manoeuvre a few scraps through the storm, but eventually he gave up in favour of tricking the gulls into some slick-ass aeronautics. I’m pretty sure they were doing barrel-rolls at one point.
What was interesting was how the system evolved. Dumping bread in the water is well and fine for your laid-back duck-type scenario, but it’s way less than efficient when what you’re feeding is essentially a scale model of a Mongolian horde. As time went on the gulls formed into a basic rubgy line-out configuration while Dude fired the bread directly at them in mid-air. I don’t know if you know how ludicrous it looks when twenty-odd birds are doing a kind of asynchronous low-gravity pogo-hop off the surface of a canal, but I’ll clue you in: pretty damn ludicrous.
There was one sorry bastard in the middle of all this, jumping at all the wrong times and giving off an adorable impression of birdy panic. As I stood up to leave, he finally pulled together enough sense to huff his way out of the crowd, and our hero tossed a scrap his way. And then, with the most beautiful comic timing I’ve ever seen in the animal kingdom… a duck got it.
Hair: I have a lot of it. I mean, just a ludicrous amount. I remember going for a trim as a child and coming out an hour later, the hairdresser sweating buckets, muttering to herself about rainforests and staring into the middle distance.
I leave a trail of loose hair wherever I go. I don’t need to buy blankets, because it only takes ten minutes lying down to achieve full three-inch coverage. Cleaning up after a shower is a nightmare – tiled floors like, whose idea was that? My first house is going to have a black shag carpet in the bathroom. And I am never, ever going to look at it.
(Do you know, incidentally, how awkward it is picking up strands of hair off a men’s room floor? Because you know that when people see them they’ll know straight away whose head it came off, and they’ll be all “Ugh, that guy has a body, with things on it”. I personally have no idea how awkward that would be, but I imagine fairly. It’s probably almost as awkward as having someone come into a men’s room while you’re standing there in the middle of the floor, whistling, with your hands in your pockets and a bunch of god damn hair all around your feet.)
I would worry that I’m going bald, but this has been happening since I was 13 with no sign of any thinning. I tell you what, I’m not even sure I have a scalp under there. There’s an expedition going in this Saturday to see what they can dig up. Pray for them, internet. Pray for them.
Got a text message from NTL there. Oh hey NTL, haven’t heard from you in a while! What’s happenin’, bro?
In Regards to a recent Termination – Cancellation on your Chorus/NTL account please be advised that despite numinous attempts we have been unable to contact you to collect our equipment.
Man, whatever. I mean, let’s not get into who tried to contact who, and who got through first time and arranged to pick up the equipment, and who nevertheless didn’t bother to turn up. Let’s not get into how maybe you’re coming off a little pissy right now, NTL. No. There are much more interesting things we could talk about.
When I first glanced over the message I read it as “despite numerous attempts”. But that ain’t what it says.
From Wikipedia: “Numinous (from the Classical Latin numen) is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity.” Dear Mary. So that itch I’ve been getting on and off just behind my ear, is that them deploying their mighty powers to try to communicate with me? Perhaps my rock-solid rationalism has prevented them getting a clear signal. I shall clear my mind and meditate, and we shall see if we can sort this matter out once and for all.
… nope, still just trying to flog me a landline. Dammit NTL. Such a waste.
While in the bookshop yesterday I happened across a book, the name of which eludes me, which nevertheless stuck in my mind because the front cover loudly hailed it as THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK ABOUT EVOLUTION SINCE DAWKINS’ SELFISH GENE. You’ll note there’s no attribution or quotation marks there. It’s just something they slapped on. I didn’t know you were allowed do that.
Naturally, I got in touch with my publisher tout de suite.
Axel, baby,
Has The Tau-Upsilon Procedure gone to print yet? Don’t answer that, there’s no time. Pulp them if necessary. We have a new cover. Print the following, 18pt:
A MOST EXCELLENT NOVEL. SO EXCITING MY EYES HAVE MELTED. FIVE STARS. NO: ELEVEN STARS!
Is that cocky? Print FIVE STARS in Comic Sans so as to create ambiguity. Title and my name can go on the spine. Omit title if necessary.
Won’t keep you any longer. Get to it.
yrs in sport,
E.
PS: I think the boy has been drinking my sherry. Have him fired.
PPS: Working on a new series, The Continuing Escapades of Selfish Gene. Send advance pls. Will forward manuscript on my return from Ecuador.
PPPS: Will be in Ecuador for the foreseeable. Have the boy take care of my post.
Those of you who checked back here over the past while (cheers, incidentally) will have noticed there was some villainy afoot. Firstly, to get the ringing-my-exes bit out of the way: scary warning notwithstanding, the site has been clean since 31 July, but if you accessed it in, say, the week before that, you might want to download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and give yourself an old scanaroonie. To be fair, you were probably already riddled anyway, so this is long overdue.
Secondly, thanks to the hosting ninjas at Blacknight for helping me sort this out. Hey, looking for a hosting plan? Try Blacknight! They’re ninjas.
Finally, I actually had stuff I wanted to post in that time. I know! So keep an eye out for that.
Recent Comments