I know we'll catch that villian

Allow me to treat briefly of Ghost Estates. I gather there's a problem. And what might that problem be? Might it be that there are no shops around? Well, welcome to living in the bog. Might it be that there's no one around to talk to? Sounds fucking delightful to me. Might it be that there are dangerous, unfinished building sites that could be simply accessed by children? Uh huh, those are what we used to refer to as 'playgrounds'. If ghost estates actually housed, or indeed estated ghosts then for sure, we might have some reason to complain. No much of a reason though, what with the fun and frolics than inevitably ensue from a good haunting:

See? Recessions are great.

Now Jimmy chose the Yankee blue

As Common Law, Data and I wandered Rikerless through Trinity College this Sunday, (the older daughter was with her new family, the Alis) my partner in drudgery asked if I would like to go back to college. Proud of my ignorance and pickiness, I immediately pointed out that I had never been to college and therefore could not technically go back. Common Law sighed.

"Would you like to go to college?"

As this question was posed we were passing a politely passed out pupil prone upon the cricket pitch, with a can of my Pims clasped lightly in his fist.

"Yes," I said, "Definitely."

"I don't mean so that you could spend your days drunk and lying in the sun. I mean so that you could study."

"Oh," I said. I needed to think about that one.

Which is all by way of bringing forth my statement of the day. I fucking love iTunesU. Sure, that's a lot of irritating wrong sized letterness, but what it provides! I'm currently attending Yale. Oh yes, I am. Every night as lay down my head after another day of meaningless exertion, I drop in on a lecture. I'm currently learning all about the American Civil War, from the esteemed Professor Blight. That is some fucked up shit, folks. And I haven't even got to the war bit. We're at slavery, me and the prof and fucking hell is pretty much all I have on that. And it happen yesterday, just about. Really, the temerity of Americans with their freedom bullshit, even the right-thinking ones. They have some serious memory loss issues, they really do. It's early days, but I'm pretty sure that Professor Blight's thesis will turn out to be that slavery and the Civil War fucked America and Americans all the way up. And you can see why he might posit the shit out of that too. Think of an American. First one that comes into your head. Fucked up, right? Mental, most likely. I know, mad isn't it? Isn't he, isn't she? That's the Civil War and all the messed up shit that caused it and all the messed up shit that it caused, right there in your mental mentlar picture.

But it gets better. I've just started alternating my Frederick Douglass with a little bit of the old philosophising. I was attracted by the title of the course in question which is, quite simply, Death. Get in! I dig a bit of death, me. And a bit of Death too. I'm only ten minutes into the introductory lecture but what a fucking ten minutes it's been. Shelly (he wants us to call him Shelly) has already put it out there that he has an argument to make, and that it is, in a couple of nutshells, this: Immortality is not desirable, there is no afterlife, suicide is a moral act and death is, in essence, fucking deadly. That's Irish deadly, you poor fucked up Gringos, an Irish deadly meaning fab.

So I'm getting educated. For free. On my telephone. Obviously I won't get a piece of paper, and thus the potential to earn more than the paltry sum that shouting at people brings in, but I'm pretty sure that to earn a bona fide university qualification one has to spreadeagle one's self in a spring-kissed cider stupor and I have neither the time, the money nor the emotional backing to be doing with that. And I'd also be willing to wager that a degree in Civil War, Slavery and Death does not pave the road to much wealth.

But I'll let you know how they turn out. Badly, I'm guessing, on just about all counts.

What did we ever do to these guys that made them so violent?

And still Gettingmyholegate rumbles on. Such would have been your obsessive refreshing and rerefreshing of all the interblogs in question that it seems unlikely that you will have taken on board the big news story of the weekend. Here's a hint, it had an aeroplane in it.

What the fuck is it with aeroplanes? Is it because they're just wrong? Because they are. They're all kinds of fucked up, planes. Look how heavy they are. Much heavier, for example than the plate I just frisbeed across the kitchen. And did that plate make it all the way to New York? Or Smolensk? Or even Inis Mór? It did fucking not. It fell on the ground and broke into a bizillion pieces. And now I have to text Common Law. That's the new rule, you see. I am required to text the lady of the house immediately following the breakage of any item by either the children or myself, including but not limited to, the children or myself. No longer am I allowed to clean up whatever it might be, hide the evidence and hope that my fake wife doesn't notice. Nope, not no more. Common Law is now subscribed to the Smashed Shit Text Alert Service and you can be too. Mail me your number and I'll make it so. Texts cost €1, €5 for optional photo of destruction.

Aaaaaanyway. Airplanes. Heavy, right? And there they are flying around the sky and only occasionally crashing. Wrong, right? And yet there seems to be something about dying in a plane crash that makes it okay to have been a right wing Pope loving gay bashing prick. If Lechy had snuffed it of a heart-attack would Poland be in mourning shock? Would Poland be united in grief if it had just been him and not his wife and a whole load of other big wigs? What's it all about, Alojzy? If Mary Harney and Brian Cowen were to die in a plane crash tomorrow how would that be? Would we shed tears? I know that cunt down the off licence would, but the rest of us right thinking folk, how would we respond? Would we unite in mourning? I would like to think fucking not. Pity for their families, for sure. But joy unconfined on every other level from this honest Greta. We're all going to die and really fucking soon too, so the sooner the hate-filled catholic cunts and the greedy grasping fuck the poor pricks kick the bucket the better, if not for all concerned, then at the very least for me. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to smash some more plates. Riker needs a new pair of shoes.

Born already ruined

We got our brochure for the Grand Canal Theatre in the door today, hidden in among other marginally less offensive junk mail, such as flyers espousing the virtues of low rent golf courses and high rent Fianna Gael councillors. There has been discussion elsewhere as to just how shit the upcoming season in this newly opened thespian safe house is going to be yet still I felt compelled given my theatrical background to leaf through the brochure in question. My eye was caught and about ripped off its stalk by one particular potential musical feast.

The Priests.

This is old hat, one assumes. These guys are multi-million selling stadium outselling superstars so everyone else is going to have heard of them already. Not me. This was fucked up singing priest trio first contact for the Greta. (Did I mention that I've changed my name to Greta? Well, I have. Yours is not to wonder why, folks.) This was a first contact where they probed the fuck out of Greta's brain. How does this shit work? It seems to me that you are either a multimillion selling recording artist or you're a fucking priest. Vows of poverty, chastity and obedience would seem to sit rather uncomfortably with the coke snorting off the tits of groupies life of a Rock or even Shitty Hymns God. But wait! What's this?

"The Priests were adamant to never allow their music commitments to stand in the way of their day jobs and parish obligations, and this is written into their contract."

Call me cynical if you refuse to call me Greta, but if they are touring the States singing their little Jesus loving scrotes out then they're not in Ballymacsac ministering to the dying and recently unmolested, are they? By not being in their parish all the time, their new career is not so much standing in the way of their pastoral duties, as doing that thing where two people meet on the street and look to go around each other and both shift in the same direction and this goes on for a while until one party (me) begins to suspect that the other party (you) is doing it on purpose just to spend more time in the luminous presence of the first party (me). And don't give me that 'representing Jesus on The Jonathan Ross Show'. It's all over for Ross, all over for his audience. They're all filthy homo loving rimmers and are Calvinistically predestined to burn. These fuckers need to be tending to Mrs Ballymacsac and her hairy chin. She's torn between daily mass attendance and just staying home to sniff mephadrone and play Modern Warfare II. She needs you, The Priests.

And they look like paedophiles. I know, cheap shot, right. But I'm not saying they are paedophiles. I'm not even implying it. I'm saying they look like paedophiles. Look at them:

From left to right we have: old but sinewy and strong I'm just going to hold you down and rape you paedophile, then youngish I will try to just be your friend for the longest time and then my pats on the back and friendly punches on the shoulder will slowly become more insistent caresses until eventually I too just hold you down and rape you paedophile, and finally my face is actually a latex mask and after I hold you down and rape you will be unable to identify me in a lineup because I will have removed my rubber face paedophile. Is what they look like. Not what they are. Necessarily.

And where is the money going? I know I may be labouring this point a little but I assume that they're making a whole load of fucking cash from this. And I assume that whatever coin is left over from rent boy rental is going back into the church to help pay the travel expenses of other paedophile priests as they get moved from one fresh meat parish to the next.

Am I harping too heavy on the paedophile rapist thing? Perhaps. And perhaps the priests, if not The Priests, should not have done so much raping, so much covering up, so much enabling. Perhaps the Pope should resign, perhaps the government should force the church to hand over control of our schools and perhaps every deluded innocent and not so innocent who goes to see The Priests in the Grand Canal Theatre on the evening of my birthday should be called to fucking account.

Is all.

I wish I could write you a melody so plain

Twice, fucking twice, in the past three hours people have called to my door, taken one look at me and asked to talk to my mum. I am almost 36. I have a beard. A job. Two school going children.

I should take this as a compliment, I suppose. But really, I don't believe that they're asking to talk to my mother because they think I'm young. I believe they're asking to talk to my mother because they think I'm the retarded grown up son who in the good old days of yore would have been too busy being buggered in a state institution to come and answer the door to gutter peddling fat guys. I have the look of a special child granted too much freedom by our overly permissive society. I am Lenny. I am Boo. I am Forrest. I am Frank Cornish's older brother, all grown up. I am Algernon, but before he got the crayon stuck up his nose. It's the hair, I'd say, or the Easter egg smeared face. Or the vacant, yet haunted, eyes.

Next time this happens I'm going to drop one shoulder, grimace up my face and loudly groan 'Mummy! Mummy! The bad man touching Gimme! The bad man touching!'. That ought to enhance my sullied neighbourhood reputation.

You're far too keen on where and how, but not so hot on why

To pray The Way of the Ridiculous Weather Cycle requires only that you meditate before each station. Before each station you may say: "We adore you, O Gimme, and we bless you, because by your holy bicycle, you have redeemed the world. Kind of."

I. Gimme condemned. To going for a cycle.

II. Gimme gets on His Drek.

III. Gimme goes "Motherfucker!" for the first time.


IV. Gimme meets Mr M.

V. Mr M. says he's just going to go at Gimme's pace. Mr M. always says that.


VI. Nobody wipes the nose of Gimme. He blows a snot rocket then wipes His own nose.



VII. Gimme goes "Motherfucker!" for the second time.

VIII. At the start of the climb, Gimme passes that club jerseyed guy who had the temerity to pass Gimme on the flat. Gimme leaves him for dead. The sky starts to do something beyond merely raining.


IX. Gimme goes "Motherfucker!" for the third time. This time is both the loudest and wheeziest.

X. On Military Road, Gimme is completely soaked to the fucking skin by a sideways driving hail. He cannot see more then five feet through the mist. He tries to hide behind Mr M in a half-assed echelon, but the wind keeps blowing Mr M towards His wheel. He gives up and cries a little bit.


XI. Gimme begins the descent. His face, fingers and toes go completely fucking numb, instantly.

XII. Gimme dies on the bike. Or wishes he was dead. "Give me a couple of nails in my palms and a slow agonising suffocation any day", He thinks.

XIII. Gimme's body is removed from the bike.

XIV. Gimme's body is laid in the gym shower where it very, very slowly defrosts.

XV. Gimme teaches spin.

It may be safely asserted that there is no devotion which enables us more literally to obey His injunction to take up our bicycle and follow Him.



*Iconography by Riker*

This is not a case of lust you see

As soon as I came in the door I knew that something was wrong. Although it was only 8.30, I was well into my day, having risen at 5.30 to leave at 6, to teach at 7, to hammer it home at 8. Common Law was recently up, getting the children fed and ready for the second last day at Easter Camp. But I knew immediately that this was not merely early morning grogginess, nor even the crushing fatigue of a week of 14 hour work days. There was something profoundly amiss, a terrible trauma as yet unspoken.

I waited, we waited, until the girls were picked up and shipped off. I kissed, waved, closed the door and then softly, tentatively enquired:

"How's it going?"

"Okay."

"How was the show?"

"Fine."

"Did you go out?"

"Yeah."

"Have fun?"

"Hmm."

"Did something happen?"

"No."

A single tear rolls down her cheek.

"What's wrong? What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Tell me."

And suddenly the tears come in a flood.

"Oh, Gimme."

"What is it?"

She falls into my arms. I hold her tight. She speaks through sobs.

"They lied to me, Gimme."

"Who? Who lied to you?"

"They said March 31st."

The words are a wail.

"Who did? What's March 31st?"

"I believed them. I really believed it was finally going to happen."

"You don't mean..."

"Yes."

"Oh, baby..."

"Lego Harry Potter...it won't be out till May 28..."

Her body shakes, she can no longer speak.

"It's okay darling, it'll be okay..."


It's going to be a long two months.