What’s worse is that I got to the stage of knowing I was dreaming, and standing in my bedroom in the dream wondering what might be the best way to break the cycle. And then getting Lynchianly paranoid about whether or not I actually might have already done so, and is my vision hazy because I’m asleep or because I’ve just woken up or, oh, maybe that’s just my very self evaporating before my eyes. I don’t mind telling you that this is some heavy shit to be wrestling with on a Friday morning, especially when the “normal,” properly dreamlike dreams that acted as a prelude to these fiendish recurso-shenanigans involved

1. creating and then being stalked by a psychotic character called “The Painted Man” and
2. walking into my bathroom and immediately having a panic attack because everything was mirrored and there were three times as many doors as there should have been, none of which led back out to the hall.

So. The only sensible conclusion I can draw is that the subtle mind-trauma wrought many years ago by the magnificent House of Leaves is finally catching up with me. Now that the absolute dissolution of my psyche is proceeding at a decent clip, I can move on to phase II: fall in love with a stripper and have the shit kicked out of me by a man from Gdansk. Stay tuned, Bat-fans, for more exciting updates from the mouth of madness!

magazine safety brake system to control the ejection of the front-loading magazine

Not just a stapler, this, but seemingly the most badass stapler in the world. The kind you’d find behind the blast doors of CTU’s supply cupboard. You can hear the chunk of the payload sliding home. You can feel the weight of it. Right now, you want to dive out of your chair and roll into cover behind the nearest filing cabinet.

And yet, and yet, it’s still not enough for me. I’ve written to the manufacturer inquiring about the possibility of throwing some thermal optics on there for late-night operations, and possibly a suppressor for when you’re hiding out in a foreign embassy and need to stick some pages together on the down-low. What pages are you stapling? Top fucking secret pages.

Don’t mistake this for sarcasm. I once closed a staple remover on my fingertip, so I know god damn well how much damage casually wielded Tactical Desktop Instruments can inflict. Safety measures are not to be poo-pooed. I reiterate: poo-poo will not be tolerated.

I.

You end up data-mining conversations, mostly without realising it, so that out of the blue you mention some obscure aspect of someone’s life that you’ve inferred from various off-the-cuff remarks they’ve made over the past however many months, except of course they don’t remember making any of these remarks, nor any conversation where the fully formed detail might have arisen, and all of a sudden you look like some kind of stalker.

II.

The best-case of (I) above is that you get a reputation as someone with impressive recall, which is a fun little detail and maybe decent at a party (if you go to that kind of party, which I don’t think anyone outside of a Woody Allen film actually does), but also be aware that no one in your direct circle is probably out doing brain scans and reviewing the literature and making distinctions between different types of memory, so in the end all you’re left with is folks getting bunched up over stuff like how you forget their birthdays and their names and things they asked you to do two minutes ago.

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.

1. Do people still keep appointment diaries? Or does everyone just use their phones now? I tried that, but I end up never checking it so it’s kind of pointless. Whereas if I see an object lying around that looks like it might be some kind of configuration of words and paper (delightful!) I tend to flick through it out of sheer muscle memory.
2. I put the original outline for this post in my phone, which it turns out is an uncouth bloody yahoo and doesn’t recognise the word “concierge”. However, after foundering a bit it does leave you with “bombieri,” which sounds like a kind of roguish Italian fighter pilot. So that’s all right.

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 Who¹. Bonus points: German tries to correct my spelling, realises I was right in the first place. WhuPOW.)

1. First two questions: “Are they German?” “Can’t remember.” “Do they have a beard?” “Not sure. ” It went uphill after that though, I promise.

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.

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.