They stab it with their steely knives

The fuck have I been? I've been lying in the lap of alleged luxury is what I've been doing. If your memory by some wild and unlikely chance stretches back to the Stranded of last September you'll recall that I won a prize. That was it for my winning it seems. Just the losing from here on in for Gimme.

The chassis search had me stumble across the token in question. It was valid until the month of March. Desperate phone calls were thusly made to The Clarence. Friday was the only option. And so I booked the room, booked the dinner, booked the shift-work carers. And in an unprecedented burst of generosity I called Common Law up and told her that she could come along.

You'll be wanting me to skip the review and get straight to the conclusion. And I shall make it so.

Rich people are wasting their fucking money. Yeah, yeah, I know that's what they do, that's their gig and all, but €410 for a room with a nice carpet? And a reasonably comfy bed? And a free newspaper? What a pack of stupids the rich are. How the fuck did they get so rich throwing cash around like that?

Dinner was fine. I've had better. I've cooked better. The Mistress Dee was snottier than she really needed to be. And there was no tea on the drinks menu which was a little fucking Alanis given the name of the restaurant. But we still left an outrageous tip, because well, one really better had if one is going to get a free meal, right?

Bitch, bitch, bitch. It was fun. It was a break. And most of all it was not sitting at home trying to think up lies to tell you fuckers.

I told that girl that my prospects were good

I want my 'I have a flat tire and a squeaky noise in my derailleur' days back.

Fucking cars and car ownership. Not fucking cars, of course, just the one fucking car. The Purple Danger honeymoon period appears to be well and truly over. We flew in from our waterbedded, polar bear-rugged Niagara Falls suite last night and it's been nothing but bitching and moaning, surly sniping and paranoid delusion from the moment we touched ground.

Her motor tax is up for one thing. I got no reminder. I got no reminder that would potentially have included a pin that would make renewing said tax a simple on-line matter.

'Oh yeah, there's a problem with some of those,' I am informed by a disinterested drone after an eighteen minute hold. 'All you have to do is get a Pn539569867986748674866707645906754097409783409578 form from the Garda station and send it in to us. We'll look after you.'

He said that. He said that they'd look after me. He didn't make it sound like they would be giving me a blow job, a foot rub and a Long Island Iced Tea. He made it sound like they were going to shoot me in the fucking face.

'I'm sorry, would you mind calling out the name of that form again?'

'Sure. It's Pn833657856541876418957109765-0785y46787645867876.'

'Ok, thanks.'

Bureaucracy. Worth waiting for.

I found the form on their website. I got Common Law to print it off for me. We don't have a functioning printer since Riker dropped the Playstation on it, totalling both, a couple of weeks back. It was my fault, that. I'm not exactly sure how, but it was my fault.

And this morning I filled in the form. My chassis number? The fuck is my chassis number? What's a chassis? Why must it have a number? I have an idea that it has something to do with the underside of the car. Do I need to crawl under there? But I don't have one of those slidey things like in the movies. I don't have overalls. I am completely out of my fucking depth.

The fucked up thing is that I want to give them money. A whole fuckload of it too. I want to do this. Here, take my fucking money. But no. The cunts have to make it the most arduous process in the whole fucking world.

What else signals the end of the romance and any hope of non-baby making car sex? One of Purple's seatbelts has, appropriately enough, gone all limp and slack. I'm sure this is easily remedied but I'm fucked if I know how to do it. What kind of porn is going to excite a seatbelt? Where to insert the automotive blue pill? So the Bridge Crew have to sit beside each other. And this is a little like telling the Dutch that they all have to move to Hamburg. Well it is not going down.

The final nail in the coffin of my P.D. love is the imminence of my driving test. I drive perfectly now, in fact I am probably the greatest driver in the history of the world. And yet I have no idea if it's mirror, mirror, signal, turn or turn, mirror, mirror, signal. I have been too busy with almost killing motorcycle police to be bothering with these minor details, these minutiae of motoring. And I have yet to even attempt reversing around a corner because, why the fuck would I? Who the fuck reverses around a corner? Argh.

Stupid chassis. Stupid seatbelts. Stupid driving test.

And stupid, stupid heroin-like dependency on my precious purple plaything.

As my bones grew they did hurt

I wish to muse on what it is that is important to me, and why it is that this what, this that, is a moveable, and constantly moving, feast.

But I don't wish hard enough to do it, to get the musing done. It'd be a whole load of fucking effort and I might learn something about myself.

And I know enough.

If Jesus saw Pat Robertson what do you think he'd say?

Down with Jesus! That's what Common Law says. She believes that Jesus died for her sins, but is unimpressed with it as a gesture. There are many, many good people, she reasons, who would be willing to die so save humanity. Particularly if they were to going to come back to life three days later.

CEO of the World: Jesus, hi! Good to see you!

Jesus: Hello, Mr. Johnson.

CEO: Jesus, Jesus! Call me God! Or Dad, I suppose. You can call me Dad.

Jesus: Ok. Dad.

CEO: You know what? Don't call me Dad.

Jesus: Yes, Mr Johnson. Sorry, Mr. Johnson

CEO: Oh, that's fine! (coughs) Take a seat!

Jesus: Thank you.

(They sit)

CEO: So, Jesus. You might have heard rumours of this saving mankind thing we've been working on.

Jesus: Yes. I mean, I've heard some things.

CEO: Oh? What have you heard?

Jesus: Nothing, really. Well, actually... You won't believe this probably, but someone told me that the plan involved my going downstairs and getting brutally murdered.

CEO: (laughing) Oh, that's good! Who told you that? That's wonderful!

Jesus: Well, I should probably...

CEO: Tell me who told you this, Jesus.

Jesus: It was Jacob.

CEO: Really.

Jesus: Yes.

CEO: I see.

Jesus: But I'm sure he...

CEO: The thing is Jesus, that there's an element of accuracy in what you've heard.

Jesus: An element?

CEO: A little more than an element.

Jesus: I have to go downstairs.

CEO: Yes.

Jesus: And be brutally murdered?

CEO: Weeelll.... You will have to die.

Jesus: Oh.

CEO: But you won't really die because you'll be alive again in three days! You can hardly call that dying, right? But yes, you will cease breathing and the like. And it may hurt somewhat. In fact there's little doubt that it'll be dead sore for a little while. Ha! Dead sore! But you know most people last days and days on these things. We'll have you die pretty quickly. Three hours, absolute tops. Most labours are longer than that! The lashes really shorten the time.

Jesus: Lashes?

CEO: Yes, well, you needn't worry about that now. The HR department will go through all the little details. Expenses, etcetera...

Jesus: Right.

CEO: This is voluntary, of course.

Jesus: Of course.

CEO: I can always magic up another son and have them do it, you know. It is an important job, Jesus. Most people would jump at the chance.

Jesus: Yes, of course. Of course, I'll do it, I mean.

CEO: You will be saving all of humankind.

Jesus: No, no, of course I'll do it. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I didn't mean to seem hesitant.

CEO: Ok, good. Great! Well, that's us.

Jesus: OK, thanks sir.

(Jesus rises, moves to the door)

CEO: And Jesus?

Jesus: Yes, sir?

CEO: There'll be no repetition of your previous...issues, will there?

Jesus: Sorry, sir?

CEO: Just stay away from the hookers, Jesus, ok?

Jesus: Oh. Yes. Yes, sir. Yes of course, Mr. Johnson.

(Jesus exits, quickly)


I don't know, I reckon I would have said no. But I am super selfish like that.

It balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine

Making children do stuff that you want them to do without them knowing you want them to do it and by essentially making them think that they want to do it or even making them think that you don't want them to do it is a precious pistol in the parental cannon. Yes, a fucking pistol in a cannon. Why the fuck not? A cannon that fires pistols. That then fire bullets after they're fired from the cannon. Sounds fine to me.

Sorry.

Being able to trick children into doing stuff is important, that's all I'm saying. And I'm pretty good at it for the most part. But tricking them into liking stuff appears to be a lot more, well, tricky. The sickening revelation that a person of good taste and humour could remained unmoved by The Thin White Duke led me to call Riker to me on Friday afternoon as I engaged Limewire and stole me a copy of Space Oddity to go with the ones I've shelled out for many times on both cassette and cd.

'Listen,' I said, 'listen and love.'

Major Tom was my first taste of Bowie, back when I was in or around the first-born's age, and I distinctly remember being instantly smitten.

She listened all right, but not for long. 'I don't like it, it's weird,' was her Parthian shot.

'For fuck's sake!' I screamed after her, internally. 'How can you not like it? What's not to fucking like? And of course it's fucking weird! It's Space Oddity! It's not Space fucking Normality! It's Bowie! It's a little gem of gemosity! Sigh, Riker! I sigh at you!'

What breaks my heart is that if she came across it herself, rooting through her uncle's record collection on the floor of her grandparents sitting room, she too would be smitten, of course she would, because she is a girl of taste, intelligence and sophistication. But because her grumpy old big-haired dad preaches it, she has has no choice, even at the tender age of nine, but to dismiss it out of hand. Which seems to me to be a real fucking tragedy. If she's going to despise everything that I adore then she's going to be despising a whole lot of seriously good shit.

Sigh. Always with the sigh.

But there is good news. To console myself, I closed the door and stuck on Disc two of Bootleg Series Volume 4. Data wandered in as Track 5 began. And proceeded to stand directly in front of the speakers and do what I can only describe as a full-on, barnstorming wig out, for the entire 4'50 of Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat. She stomped her feet, she banged her little head, she was transported.

If I had a will I would have changed it right there and then.

Ali was the second son of a second son

So Iraq, huh? The 'surge' is working, right? Surge. I love that word. I use it all the time in my classes now. Although I have yet to pose the question 'Do you feel the urge to surge?' I am seriously concerned that it's in the fucking post.

Yes, lily-livered liberals, I know the surge working thing is just a temporary lull, blah di blah we're all going die nyah, nyah, na na nyah but there was an interesting piece in yesterday's Times (lifted, I'm pretty sure, from The Washington Post) which was very anti-occupation and yet contained the following:

I don't have the quote. Common Law threw out the paper. I could now put on shoes, walk down to the back of the garden and root through the green bin so that you good mooks know that I'm not making it up but I so could not be arsed that it's almost untrue.

They have stuff in Baghdad now, was the basic point. Pirate dvds, satelite dishes and (for this part I do not need the paper for it is burned in my fucking brain), 'the latest version of Grand Theft Auto'.

I'm preaching Christ crucified here, Christian and non-Christians, by which I mean that I want to play the new version of Grand Theft Auto about enough to move to Baghdad. Bring on the wandering through the streets of The Given Garden of Iraq in constant fucking peril, expecting at any moment to be shot at, kidnapped, or blown to a million pieces by a living , breathing weapon of some evil twisted fuck. And hey, bring it on again in Liberty City. In LC, of course, I will be armed with a machete, a pump action shotgun and a light, understated rocket-launcher.

American tank? See you later alligator.

Brainwashed fundamentalist? In a fucking while, crocodile.

Gimme does not discriminate.

Really, what's the point of being free, (I'm not fucking free), safe, (I'm not fucking safe), and unoccupied (I am more occupied that you would fucking believe) if I don't get to play GTA IV?

No point, no fucking point at all.

If ITV make a new series, they ought to come take a look at my girl

So I better come up with some cheerful shit now, huh? You grabby grasping gargoyles will be wanting some contrast here in the House of Gimme. Enough with the downer posts, dolt, let's go with the happy fucking clappy. Or just the happy clappy. Because if it's fucking clappy then it's probably pretty unhappy, right? Not that I'd know, I never got the whole promiscuity thing together and have therefore remained boringly venereal disease free, even during those six weeks when I was single back in '95. Yeah, I'm a serial monogamist. You didn't know that about me? I cannot fucking bear to be alone.

I have strayed from my intended point which was: fuck off. I'll be happy when I want to be, you joyful jackals, and today I want to go with a death. I just love to speak ill of the dead, because there's no way that they can come and get me.

The last of the Big Three took out his diaphragm yesterday and just like with The Beatles, those guys popped off in order of greatness. (You know Ringo's gonna go first, right? That fucking cheerful chump McCartney will fucking outlive me, the frog chorusing cunt.)

Clarke was a visionary, no doubt, and I will be forever grateful to him for his contribution to one of the greatest movies of all time, but feel me folks, this guy could not write for shit. Seriously. His ideas were stunning, occasionally beautifully in their complexity and insight but his prose was that of your most boring drunken uncle at the funeral of his own pet hamster. The dialogue, oh good fuck but it was some of the most embarrassing shit I have ever read. Heinlein and Asimov were no fucking Amises, or indeed Gimmes, but I don't believe that even the offer of a fully-functioning, three laws of robotics obeying, blowjob performing android would have been enough to entice either of these lads to write anything remotely as turgid as any random paragraph in a Arthur C. novel. 2001? Fucking fantastic film, particularly off your box in the front row of the IFC, but no amount of Morocco's finest would make the novel anything but a heartbreakingly tedious slog.

Yes, a visionary, uh-huh, fo sho. But just like I don't really care that Dylan is a bit of cunt or that Kubrick was a crazy, Clarke's being a visionary matters not a jot to me. If the fucker couldn't write then he shouldn't have been a fucking novelist.

There's more to this story, peeps, this post has a real point outside of the besmirching of a great man by a tedious tosspot. This point pertains to the evil of the media and my pathetic intellectual laziness. I was convinced up until yesterday that our Mr C. Clarke was a kiddie fiddler. I feel like a tit. Because I once heard a rumour related to a red top rag story, and took it as gospel and carried it round in my head for years and years. What a fucking tit I am.

Apologies, Arthur, for the fuck all that it's worth. You crap writing seer, you.

I turned to look at you, to read my thoughts upon your face

This is just a big long fucking moan devoid of humour or insight, so you might as well move on and come back when I'm feeling a little less sorry for myself.

I'm in a big fat fucking slump here. Maybe it's lunar, maybe it's Lenten, maybe it's just my being a lazy cunt, but I'm finding it extremely difficult to find the motivation to do right by myself. The fuck am I talking about? I'm talking about the exercising, the eating right, the filthy failing that shall not be mentioned. Oh yes, that filthy failing. That one. Fucking sigh is all I can do about that. Sigh and wait until I get home from work and the children are in bed and I might ease the pain with more pain. And rejoice that I'm brushing my teeth about 200 times a day. Everything has its upside.

This slump, and it is big and fat and it will make me bigger and fatter, is manifesting itself in many ways. Here's one: I haven't cycled to work this week. Normally I would have no fucking option in the mornings but the whole Peppermint Patty party, Crucified Christ carnival get together means that there's very little traffic on the roads and I can make it to work on time if I drive. So I'm driving. I miss cycling and yet still I drive. Because it's easier, it's warmer, and I can truthfully tell myself that I need the practise, because, here's a little nugget for you, I have a date for my driving test and that date is soon. But it's all so much bullshit to cover the complete lack of arsedness than I own.

Here's another: I'm working my way through the leftover Christmas booze. Common Law likes a drink herself but if the house is beer and wineless (this house is never whineless though, not with me and Data living here) she'll not be mixing Jameson with orange juice in her desperation to get some kind of alcohol into her system. I, on the other hand...

One more: I'm tired. When I'm busting a gut, training like a crazy person, going above and beyond the standard seven spin a week, I'm tired too, of course. But achy tired, nicely sleepy by the end of another tough and occasionally satisfying day tired. Now I'm just flat out exhausted all fucking day long. I'm finding it hard to get out of bed. I resent that I'm always the one who gets up with the children where I normally accept my lot like the good house husband that I occasionally am. And then I'm not sleeping at night, constantly on edge, waiting for the newly bedtime nappy free Data to start shrieking that she's wet the bed, despite the fact that she has yet to do this.

Did I say one more? I meant two more. Food. I'm eating all the fucking time, every fucking thing I can get my grubby grasping hands on. But mostly the three Cs of the big binger. Crisps, cheese and chocolate. In that order or any other. Or all at the same fucking time. Why the fuck not?

There appears to be no middle ground with me. I'm either prone on the couch stuffing Snickereses into my mouth as I gulp down vodka and gasp a hit on my crack pipe or I'm ingesting nothing but complex carbohydrates and perfect protein sources while I burn 4000 calories a day. So all I need now is a time target by which to switch back over to my monastic lifestyle. How about tomorrow? Ha! I'm fucked if I'm missing out on all those Easter eggs that I intend buying for myself once the prices drop on Easter Monday.

So how about Monday week? Monday week makes sense. I'll do that. Really, how much damage can I do to myself and those around me in just a week and a half?

Targets are great, huh? Particularly when they're fucking miles away.

Maybe I just need a little nudge

It's the suicide serial part one, people, it's car crash carping.

You know the way I am a useless selfish cunt these days? Sure you do. If you read this shit, you know that shit. It's there between the lines, in the lines, to the right and left of the lines. The centre of my own attention is what I am, and rightly so. I'm fucking wonderful and deserving of every minute of thoughtful consideration that I bestow on my person. But be aware that this is nothing to how I used to be. And this is nothing less than a widely held opinion.

About eighteen months ago , I went to a gig in Vicar Street to see some singer songwriter whose name escapes me. He had a song that I quite liked. 'Something, something love', went the chorus over jangly and appealing guitars. I went with an almost friend.

And there I met a guy, a balding guy, a balding obsetrician guy with whom I went to school. With whom, if truth be told, I was pretty good mates. I always found him as irritating as fuck but then I was a serious loser in school and didn't have a large pool from which to pick friends. We saw little of each other after school, this Balding Obstetrician and I, but in the course of one of our infrequent meetings during my early twenties he tried to snog Common Law while I was taking a piss in the toilet of our tiny Rathmines bedsit. That was pretty much it for the occasional get togethers.

We may now flash forward, but not too far forward, to Vicar St and jangly guitar boy. My face, upon clocking the approach of this Balding Obstetrician could not have been doing anything but falling like a man from a Twin Tower but, unperturbed by this plummeting, B.O. launches into the catch-up chat up.

'You have kids now, right?'

'Two girls.'

'Wow, that must have changed you.'

'Hmmph.'

'Because you used to be really, really selfish, didn't you?'

'Sorry?'

'Ah, c'mon, Gimme, you were. You were really, really selfish.'

Thankfully, the music began. Ungratefully, I was forced to spend the next 90 minutes listening to The Balding Obstetrician singing the lyrics of every single fucking song directly into my ear. That's the kind of cunt he is, you see. The kind of cunt who believes it is incredibly important that you know that he knows every single lyric of every single song of some reasonably obscure singer songwriter.

Obnoxious and rude as 'you used to be really, really selfish' is as an opening conversational salvo, it was also extremely accurate. As a teenager I was without doubt the most selfish cunt I knew. And I knew a whole fuck load of them. Oooh, the competition was out there, indeed it was. Spoilt, privileged, what the Yanks would call trust-fund kids abounded. I knew charity box thieves, I knew boy rapists, fuck I even knew rugby players. And I believe that I found myself challenged, subconsciously at least, to be the most selfish cunt of them all. The Supremo of Selfishness, The King of the Cunts were the titles that I wanted for my own.

And so.

And so I took a bath.

Cuaichín Ghleann Néifinn

Whaddya fancy folks? Suicide attempt or a soap-opera sophistry? Bubbling bath or bubble bath? They're both in the pipeline but one has to come first...

I'll go easy on you, I guess. I'm nice like that. Hate to be too hatefully challenging of a Tuesday morning. Particularly that kind of Tuesday morning where you're all hungover to fuck and yet you still have to work. Suicide bid it is.

I'm only kidding, I'll do the soap-opera.

This all came from that curse of the internet idiot, the addiction that is clicking through. I'm a regular reader of Skin Flicks, because that JC guy, he enrages and informs me in almost equal measure. And you can bet your fucking house on his being just over the moon that the big knowledge I gained from him this week was not how fucked up that whole Tibet/China/Olympics gig is nor even what whiskey with an 'e' to drink (or was that which whiskey to drink with 'E'? I don't know, I was doing E and drinking whiskey when I read that post so it's all a little hazy). No, what I learned from those flicks of JC's skin was how many people would like to see the return of the spectacular weekly Irish rural drama that was 'Glenroe'.

I read that, you see, I clicked through to this, and then I ended up there. Don't click that link! Don't do it, folks! No clicky! I want you to guess first. How many people do you think might have signed a petition demanding the return of this terrific televisual treat? In a country of four million people up to one million of whom used to regularly tune into the doings of Biddy, Miley and the gang at the Molly Malone, how many do you reckon want to see it back on our screens?

Keeping in mind that perhaps knowledge of the petition is not as widespread as it could be, what do you think?

Wrong.

The answer: forty-five. Not forty-five thousand, as Common Law assumed I meant when I shared this nugget of trivia with her, but forty-five.

45.

Yup.

The big four five.

That's gotta give the big boys of Radio Telifis Eireann the root up the artistic arse that they have so sorely needed since that crazed decision to put the whingeing, whining, myxomatosis infested rabbit of a drama series out of its misery back in the day. A nice, round, 45 nostaligic muckers say that it's time to get all Pet Semetary on Glenroe. So you'd better fucking do it, lads. Think of the viewing figures! Think of the advertising revenue! Think of..yeah, ok, maybe not.

I won't be putting the Bridge Crew into full time daycare any time soon.

You pretend you're high, you pretend you're bored

The Health Service Executive. Tibet. Woman self-embedded on a toilet seat. These are the topics that the smart folks, the glitteratti of the bleughs have been and will be addressing. Me, I'm still stuck on the fucking bins.

I have this thing for waste. Nothing gets me going like garbage. Rubbish rubs me up the right way. It's not that I want to roll around in it, or fuck it, or even fuck on it. I'm not saying waste makes Little Gimme stand to attention. But it surely arouses my passions in precisely the manner that injustice and corruption once did and now fail to do. My rage has grown tired of injustice and corruption and their brutally stolid consistency. My rage wants to run with the refuse.

So here's the thing. An extensive billboard campaign, a joint venture no less, between the four local authorities in the Dublin region. And it's all about how fucking great they are. 'We do more than just empty your bins' is the tag-line. Let me be super transparent here, joint venture boys, let there be no doubt about the feelings that I feel.

I do not give a fuck.

And I seriously fucking resent your spending my cash on spreading knowledge that everyone knows or if they don't know they don't need to know, and if they did need to know you'd be fucking letting them know by Morissetingly sending them pieces of paper that they would then knowledgeably fuck in the bin.

Remember the way I asked nicely for them to take away our brown bin? So, they eventually emailed me back and said 'yeah, no problemo Gimme dude, leave that bad boy outside and we'll take it away.'

I left it outside. They did not take it away. And while I was in Spain they sent me a threatening letter saying that not only are they not going to take it away but they are also going to be rummaging through my normal bin and if they happen to find any organic materials whatsoever, they are going to have my children taken away from me and put to them work on a Nepalese farm. Or words to that effect.

Fine, whatever, you two faced-fucks, threaten away, root through my rubbish all you fucking like, but stop spending money trying to convince people that you're doing a good job when you could just be spending the money on guess fucking what? That's it, bin bastards, doing a good fucking job.

As I believe I have said about a bizillion times before, I'm pretty sure it's all just going in the landfill so I wish that we could go back to the good old single bin days. But even more than this, I wish that I could care about something that mattered.

Angel left wing right wing broken wing

My Salamancan trip has left us with a serious skinny milk surplus. There are currently nine litres taking up the top shelf of the fridge. And as it is Friday, and as I now drink beer again, this situation is seriously fucking me off.

I've had two and a half litres since returning from the school pick up about 90 minutes ago and I'm beginning to feel a little bloated.

My question is this: How much fat free milk do we believe that I can drink before vomiting or inducing lactosical toxic shock? Yes, it fucking exists. Because I say it exists, it exists.

It's complicated but so sincere

Riker had finger herpes, so we went to the doctor. As one does. There was a serious fucking shower going on as we walked out the door. Back during what now seems like the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, in the real B.C., this would have been, if not a major problem, then a serious pain in the tits.

The real B.C. is Before Car. Did you get that? You probably got that. The dimwitted readers don't hang about.

Oh, Purple Danger! How we adore your magnificent purpleness, your stalwart imperviousness to just about anything that Irish weather cares to hurl at you. Oh, and thanks for turning me into a fat lazy cunt. Fat lazy cunt is my destiny and you have helped me to embrace it.

So finger herpes it was, according to Common Law, Mother-in-Common-Law and my own attended medical school back in the day Ma. The internet too was quick with its finger herpes diagnoses.

And so we sat dry and snug, having driven the thirty seconds through the downpour, in the waiting room of our local GP, armed with our novels. Riker read Enid Blyton (how I wish she would stop reading that shit), and I read Dreiser (how I wish I could read that shit forever).

Enter a saturated woman.

From here on in this post is falsehood free. Any figures that I may give out will be entirely accurate.

This woman, this saturated woman, proceeded to use the word 'saturated' 37 times over the next 17 minutes. And always loudly. And always with emphasis. She was like a four year old who, having just learned a word, proceeds to repeat it over and over again, confident in the knowledge that every time they use it they become cleverer in the eyes of their audience.

She was barely in the door when the first saturated shriek occurred. 'I'm saturated!' she screamed at the room. And she got two more in before she even sat down. The next one, while uttered like a mutter, was still really, seriously, fucking loud. It was then that I began to count.

She was with her teenage daughter, who lurked outside for as long as she could before being sucked in by her mother's attempts to explain her level of saturation through the door. Having used up her offspring and the two other people in the room, (she was getting nothing from Riker and Gimme, both of whom are familiar with the age old axiom 'when you don't know where to look, look at your book'), she proceeded to make three phone calls. Each of these three people were informed of her saturation. Repeatedly. Loudly.

'Seriously love, do you really need the phone? If they're not outside the Pale they can probably fucking hear you.' Is what we were all thinking. Apart from Riker, who was thinking that, but without the bad word.

Fucking people. Why are they so stupid? So stupid, so vain, so assured of their own brilliance? And why am I all of these things too? Because that is exactly what I am. A big fucking loud braggart, shouting my cleverness in a small room full of embarrassed people. 'How clever I am!' I shriek, when I am patently anything fucking but.

And it wasn't finger herpes after all.

They took the credit for your second symphony

Fucking funny cunts. Clever, witty, side-splittingly funny cunts. They piss me off today, so they do. Why can't they just be funny in one place? Do they really have to be funny all over the fucking shop?

I'm downloading and listening to old episodes of a podcast which takes as its topic a subject in which I have about as much interest as I have in line-dancing. To be completely Krystle folks, that's not a whole lot of fucking interest. But it's funny, oh so fucking funny.

And for various reasons, that is all that I feel I can say on the matter. In fact, it's just one reason, but I'm going for maximum crypt here so I'm sticking with the various version.

So in lieu of discussing that which I wish to discuss, here is a gut-wrenchingly boring list of the podcasts to which I subscribe and may freely describe:

The Fredcast:

Republican rich bloke talks about cycling. I'm guessing the majority of my readers would rather frenchie their grannies than listen to this, but if you like cycling it's well worth a listen. And he's cute too, is Dave the Fred. Cute in a 'I'm too repressed to talk about the colour of my urine being a good indication of my level of hydration' kind of way. Not in a 'I want to frenchie him like he wasn't my granny' kind of way.

Mark Kermode's film reviews:

This is another of those cultural phenomena that Common Law has discovered through me and appropriated as her own. Now she has the hots for this hyper-groomed witbag, adding to the already extensive list of people who she fancies more than the father of her children. And I don't fucking blame her.

When one's chances of getting to see a movie that doesn't involve animated animals or some little spotty cunt of a wizard are slim to fucking none, then Kermode is your man. The reviews are, I suspect, considerably more entertaining than the majority of the films themselves. I suspect. Don't you be contradicting me now, you'll only make me sad.

Fighting Talk:

More funniness, more sport. Often breathtakingly sexist too, if that's your bag. Bob Mills is a regular. Why the fuck isn't he the new Noel Edmunds? 'In Bed With Me Dinner', was briefly the greatest tv show in the history of the world. And then, of course, 'Strictly Come Dancing' came along.

Thinking Allowed:

Cultural and sociological miscellanea. Better than it sounds. Always short too, which is nice.

Stephen Fry's Podgrams:

There have only been two of these, but they're both fab. I have a big man-crush on that big fat Fry fucker. I love his voice, I love his wit, I love his big long words. And I relate to his self-loathing. Nothing gets Gimme going like self-loathing.

Infinite State Machine Radio:

And there's only been one of these. But as it's a couple of stoners sitting around listening to kick-ass tunes it seems unlikely that any future episodes that they manage to get together will be anything other than as glorious as the first.

There's a few more, but I'm bored. A word of advice: never start a post at 10.30pm when you're looking down the barrel of a 7am spin. You'll only end up finishing it in some half-arsed manner.

Ugh.

Update:

That 7am badboy is in the bag, and my head is somewhat clearer. I just thought of an infinitely more appropriate, not to mention hella cryptic, closing line:

'You go now'.

That's it.

You go now.

Pity please the ones who serve

What I tell you now is completely true. Since I returned from Spain I have cycled either to or from work on six occasions. Just those 60k, just the three hours.

Say, chip in here, folks of Dublin, interject your asses off. How's the weather been since Sunday? Pretty crappy, right? Reasonably miserable. It's been raining a good bit, there's been plenty of wind. Temperature though, not too bad, even for us Irish pussies. And there have been plenty of dry spells. It would be plainly false to say that it has been non-stop rain since Saturday evening.

And yet, and yet...every single fucking time in the past three days that I have swung my leg over Hardcore Motherfucker's crossbar, the fucking heavens have opened. Want to know when there will be a downpour in the leafiest suburb that the Northside has to offer? Tomorrow from 9am to 9.30. It'll drift with me across town. I'm not saying that it won't rain at other times, but I can guarantee you lashings of the stuff right then.

And also between 1 and 1.30.
And six and half-six in the evening.
9 and 9.30.

You guys should take the money you were going to waste on the Cheltenham nags and see if there's a bookie out there that'll give you odds on that shit.

Folks, I am a staunch atheist but this week I feel that I could be easily turned to a belief in both a higher being and his being entirely focused on my misery.

But Gimme! It's weather! It's a coincidence! It's not personal! It's happening to all of us! This isn't a self-absorption competition!

Ha! Yes it fucking is.

Curves the words, spins the verbs

Yeah, sure, my legs hurt. Of course they do. Despite confidently carting my shiny Asics and a ridiculous number of technical tops to Spain, I completely failed to do any exercise outside of the seemingly endless traipsing from bar to bar. My lower back aches too, got to expect that. And my ass. 'Saddle sore' is a nice way of putting it, I guess, but 'ass agony' would be a whole lot more fucking accurate.

But it's my throat that's the most fucked up. It feels as if I dispensed with the post-workout protein shake and went with vitamin razor blade instead. Why? Because I screamed tonight. Oh how I screamed. Screamed at the make believe, to get all Smithsonian on your not so achy asses, the make believe that these lazy fuckers were trying to sell me.

'We're working hard, Gimme, really we are.'

No. You're fucking not. You know how I know? Because I've been away for a week and nobody works you harder than me. Because you don't look like you're going to cry. You don't look like you're going to puke. You don't look like you're going to cry, then puke, then cry in your puke puddle. You don't look like one more turn of the resistance at this cadence may well cause you to completely fucking die. Oh, I know that you're trying to make it look as if all these indicators apply, but you lie. And for the sake of whoever it is you're going home to tonight I hope that your fake orgasms are a whole lot more convincing. So ditch the fucking falsehoods, back away from the bullshit and get to fucking work, you lazy, good for nothing cunts.

Also I have a headache, from all that screaming. Because a surprisingly large proportion of these screams happen in my mind.

You are surprised about that, right?

Grab your backpack! Let's go!

Ten Five things I learned on my holiday in Spain:

A healthy Spanish obsession with doped up, duped up Pro Tour cycling notwithstanding, bicycles are not the business in Spain. We think we're bad with our SUVs and our comedy death trap bike lanes but I saw a grand total of two cyclist on the roads of Madrid and they both looked justifiably fucking terrified.

Verve boy has it all wrong, the drugs do work, but now they only make me feel different, not any better or worse. So why do I fucking bother?

In Spain there is counter-intuitive pedestrian crossing system for midgets, dwarves and small children. If the traffic signals are to be believed then these subsets of humanity must cross against the flow of traffic. Keeps them lively I suppose. No one wants to be around a grumpy dwarf. That's why they killed him at the end of that movie.

'Swiper, no swiping', despite being a Dora catchphrase, is not in fact a friendly Spanish greeting.

The world retains its power to shock me. Or bemuse me at the very least. I thought my bemusement was all used up but rounding a corner onto a busy street in Salamanca one evening to discover one man being orally pleasured by another man, who may or may not have been concious, bemused the holy fuck out of me. Oh the thrusting that was there. Oh the happy smile as my eyes met those of the pleasured.

Yeah, that's fucking it. I didn't go to learn. I went to not fold clothes.

Long way going to get my medicine

The door does not go swish, swish, swish as we enter because it's not that kind of door. But it wants to. So it thinks swish, swish, swish as the inevitable eerie silence falls.

This is a room into which we have walked, and little more. Most Dublin bar toilets are considerably larger and the addition of myself and V to the crowd has made this harshly lit, tiny little jacks become fucking jammers. A small card table in one corner, with play suspended to take in our entrance. An old man sitting beneath the bar, unmoving and gummy. The eyes of the total of six people in this tiny room are all now upon us and our glittering whiteness.

V has been here before and so takes the single step required to reach the bar and order drinks. He's here on business, he's got an very un-V business-like head on him. My head is not business-like. My head is all messed up. To produce an exhaustive list of the chemicals under whose influence my poor little noggin now finds itself would be, well, exhausting. But there's a lot going on up there, oh yes, all kinds of different parties struggling for influence in the Cortes that is my mind.

They form a short-lived coalition and allow me to take my single step without falling over. We have a beer.

The walk from V's apartment to town is uphill but brief. One winds one's way through narrow streets, one takes in the opulence of Franco's civil war headquarters, one rounds a corner. And as one does one's head is fucking blown off by what one sees.

It is merely one of the shorter sides of the cathedral but it is stunning. I know fuck all about architecture so I won't bother trying to get across its smoothly jaggedy beauty but I can tell you that every single time I come around that corner, even when I know it's coming, I am still blown away. Every single time I say 'Fuck,' in an awed voice, because I'm dead articulate like that.

And I am as awed, as blown a-fucking-way by the incredible grottiness of the bar in which we now stand. It is the front room of a gaff that is screaming for a fucking makeover. The swarthily scarred man behind the counter wants to get Grand Designs in right this fucking minute. But because I only have to stand here for fifteen minutes, I'm glad that this transformation will never happen.

I am charmed by this room. By its nicotine colour scheme, its cafeteria chairs, its antique television. Ooh, but the telly is a winner. Without doubt, one of the earliest models to have been sold with a remote control, but still from a time when appliances didn't include a built-in self-destruct countdown chip. The channel changer sits on the bar, solid in its clunky glory, about the size of a paperback Don Quixote. Oh, such charm.

It's a filthy shithole, but I don't have to come here every night. V conducts his business, and then abandons me briefly so that I might spend ten minutes drowning in a vat of paranoia and self-conciousness. He returns, and we leave.

A town of beauty and contrast is what this place is, and I believe that once the children grow up and get high-paying jobs and start reversing the flow of cash, I'm going to get me a Berlitz tape and move on down here to Salamanca.

All dead, yet still alive

Do you even want to know? Don't answer that.

It's a brief synopsis of the holiday so far:

It opens with me sitting in a too crowded airport bar watching footage of a plane getting blown to fuck by crosswinds as it came in to land. Inauspicious? I'm not entirely sure of the precise meaning of that word so I can't say conclusively but I'm reasonably sure that it lacked auspiciousness. But too crowded it most certainly was. Waiting for the plane was like being on a plane. How do people do this all the time? Do they not go fucking crazy, crazier?

And then there were the Celtic cunts on the flight, off to the Barcelona game. How they offend me with their fatness and their loudness and their being from fucking Newry not Glasgow or any fucking where in Scotland. Don't Newry have a football team? Maybe they even play in a league with more than two teams. Fuck off, nordy Celtic supporters, fuck off and shut the fuck up.

The trancs don't seem to be working.

And then Madrid airport and the inevitable lateness of V. Luckily I've taken up smoking for the week so I have plenty to do. How the fuck do people who don't smoke wait? How do they do it? And giving up when I get back is going to be dead simple, right?

So first time in Madrid, all checked in and showered and good to go for the night. V and his mate, ooh let's call him Alan, hang on as I lean out the window for a quick toke. There's a knock on my mental door, and a simultaneous ringing of my physical bell. Guess who's calling? It's Mr Fucking Whitey.

I could offer the mitigating factor of my having had no more than three hours sleep for the previous four nights, but nothing really excuses what happens next. I send them on their way and sleep for twelve hours.

I wake to a grumpy V, reefing me out of bed, hurling me down the stairs, and booting my sorry ass across the road to the Prado. No, it's not the male version of the handbag company it's fucking art. Jesus, V, art? His way of preparing me for this is to have me breakfast on churros. which essentially involves my sucking chocolate off a stick of butter. Mmmm, chocolate off a stick of butter...

Oh so little time, so much fucking art. I need to come and look in detail at why it is that I am such a loser philistine and remain unmoved by just about everything I have ever seen hanging up in a gallery but for the moment it's enough for you to know that I am now one cultured motherfucker having seen real live Raphaels, Rubens, El Grecos and Velasqueseseses. And they looked dead different to pictures I've seen of them in books. Oh so very, very different. Yup, really different. Uh huh. Different.

And to go into some seriously boring fucking detail, V then went and got his haircut in the most expensive barbers in Madrid. He knew it would be the most expensive barber in Madrid because it said so in his Time Out guide. He just barged right in there and said that he wanted to look like Eduardo Noriega. It cost €20, this most expensive haircut in Madrid and appears to have been worth every cent as V now looks almost exactly like Edward Scissorhands. Close enough.

They we got the train to Salamanca and went the fuck out.

Not so brief, huh? More to come for your snoozing pleasure.

At dead of night the whistle blows

Four days of late night barring and early morning parenting have me in a fucking heap. I leave for Spain in a couple of hours to do the drinking but not the breakfast making or the absolutely having to be upping. Even if V has forgotten that I'm due over this week and I spend the six days wandering Spanishless through the streets of Madrid and the nights face down in an Hispanic ditch at least I won't be making sandwiches or folding yet another mountain of fucking chldren's clothes.

How were the Blog Awards? Load of shite.

Really. You'll read a lot of diarrhoea on other bleughs about how lovely and talented and pretty and fucking nice every cunt was, but it's all bollox. As in my really life, there were a handful of people with whom I could just about bear to hold a conversation without weeping with boredom, or vomiting with vacuousness.

And again, as in really life, there were a fuckload of rude, boorish, irritiating, self-important, fake and downright ugly cunts. Plenty of ugly, both outer and inner, at the Alexander this Saturday.

And the awards, with the satisfying exception of the big three, all went to the wrong people. Maybe all those winners are fucking wonderful, I wouldn't know. I don't have time to be reading anything but the best. I tell you this much though: Medbh should have won, Manuel should have won and despite not being short-listed I should have fucking won. I'm not going next year unless they guarantee me a chipped glass standy uppy plate. Give me my fucking plate, you bastards.

I have to go and get this plane now. I leave you with a final piece of learning garnered from my rewarding awarding time: I saw Roisin Ingle in the flesh for the first time, and I now know where Willy went after he jumped over the big barrier. Fuck me, but that woman is as big as she is shit at her job.

Hasta luego, pueblo.

Sometimes there's no time to run away

Two nights of the consistently disconcerting, occasionally jarring juxtaposing of faces and words down, just the big bad one to go. My brain aches from the booze and this new knowledge that I knew, but did not know that I knew. Oh all the things that I now know that I know. Sleep is what I need to process this knowing but sleep I shall not get.

Meetings now, and child jugglings and taxicabs and ice cream and buyings and I suspect sighings too and then to these awards and more booze and smoke and talk.

Apologies in advance for falling asleep on your shoulder when you're trying to hold a conversation with that fascinating guy from Limerick. It had to be someone and you just happened to be there. Don't take it so fucking personally.