Mein Gott

Nearing the end of a class on Tuesday, I used my standard technique for filling in the last few minutes of the final class I am going to have with a particular group: I ask them what they're looking forward to doing when they get home.

"Anna, what are you going to do when you get back to Vienna?"
"I will go to the toilet."
She said this without even the hint of a smile on her face.
"You'll go to the toilet? Does the family you're staying with not have a toilet?"
"Yes, but I can't go in another country. My mother has the same problem."

Some quick quizzing from her fellow Austrians confirmed that yes, for the entire week she was here she was happy enough to piss but was entirely unable to take ein scheise. My gut suddenly ached in sympathy and I dismissed the class, horrified.

In what furnace was thy brain?

 

This perfectly composed shot is to serve as a memento for me of my final day as a 27 year-old. Because I don't think you're allowed to wear jumpers with pictures of gay tigers on them once you're 28. That would just be really sad.
I took this not long after having a shower, which is why my hair is wet. I've tended to make a point of having a shower the day before my birthday, it feels like a symbolic gesture - a washing-off of the year left behind. Most people might have these washings-off pretty much every day, but I've never been a believer in such things. I started this ritual the day before my 15th birthday. 14 had been a difficult age, bringing a certain amount of bother with it. A week later I got suspended from school.
It's just as well I don't shower too regularly.

Seasonally disaffected

I've always found bin day slightly depressing. There's something about sad little black sacks of rubbish sitting on the street waiting to be picked up that gets to me. And it's on Tuesday around here, and Tuesdays are notoriously crap anyway. Bin day on a pissing wet Tuesday is even worse, my heart sinks for the binmen who have to pick up these sodden sacks, rendered several litres heavier by those who don't tie up the sack properly.
And there was something very, very shitty about driving the girlfirend's car back from the car dentist (where it must presumably have received a crown, two fillings and a nice little handjob, if the price is right) and seeing the contents of a ripped bag strewn all over Mountpleasant Avenue. Human detritus all over the place, wet.

Gonna help him put asunder bad guys who like to loot and plunder

I wonder if in years to come we will look back on this point in history as the moment when Irish politics finally descended irretrievably into infantilism and lowest common denominator bullshit.

Ireland goes to the polls on Friday charged with making a decision that absolutely no-one seems to understand the ramifications of. It's very hard to when the people who are paid good money to do so seem incapable of anything other than lies and mud-slinging. Posters everywhere scream that the minimum wage could be cut to €1.84 if this treaty is allowed to pass. This always seemed unlikely and is, apparently, completely untrue. So why has it been allowed to stay on virtually every lamp-post in the country? Imagine I put up posters all over the country with a supposed fact like, say:

'IT IS WELL-KNOWN THAT BERTIE AHERN IS AN ENTHUSIASTIC PARTICIPANT IN DOMESTIC ABUSE. MANY PEOPLE WILL ATTEST TO HAVING SEEN CELIA LARKIN IN HOSPITAL AFTER HE BATTERED HER.'

My posters would be taken down pretty quickly, I'd imagine, and if anyone knew it was me who did them then I'd find myself in a bit of bother. This despite my fact being true, as far as I know. Yet a massive amount of misinformation is plastered absolutely everywhere right now. 'YES FOR JOBS', sounds massively disingenuous on Fianna Fáil's part, as there is really nothing there to suggest that more jobs would be created if we pass the treaty. 'We can't save the environment alone,' urge the Green Party, who apparently believe that passing the treaty is akin to shouting "Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Heart!" and summoning Captain Planet. But even He couldn't take pollution down to zero at this stage.

Then there's Jim Corr. I think we all knew, deep down, that touring the world with three ridiculously good-looking girls, all of whom are your sisters, would be enough to send a man crazy. But it hasn't manifested itself in old Jimbo getting whacked off his tits on mushrooms and attempting to snog Ryan Tubridy live on TV, as we'd all hoped. Nope, Jim has gradually turned into a full-blown conspiracy theorist with a fine line in paranoia that'd make even David Icke blush:

You will meet people as I do occasionaly (sic.) who are unable to grasp the reality of what's going on. You may even meet them amongst family and friends but don't get frustrated, It is understandably inconceivable for some people to contemplate that some governments at the behest of their globalist puppeteers could be staging terrorist attacks against their own populations, particularly for people whose reality doesn't extend beyond the television set, which is being used highly effectively sometimes as a Weapon of Mass Deception. 

Jim has been "studying the New World Order", apparently, and is now running a website that can liberate us all. Step One is voting No to Lisbon, don't you know. I think I prefer it when has-been popstars try to make it as reality TV show judges.

I voted no last time round, simply because I wasn't happy with the way the treaty had been explained to the public. The wording on the ballot paper asks if you agree with the proposal to alter our constitution in order to ratify the treaty. I was undecided until the very last minute, when I realised that I couldn't possibly agree with the proposal, because I couldn't for the life of me understand what the treaty meant in real terms, and therefore couldn't  honestly agree to accept it. So although I wasn't necessarily dead against the Lisbon Treaty, I felt perfectly comfortable saying I disagreed with a proposal to accept it at that particular juncture.

But I helped to spawn a monster. The rest of my family had all voted Yes, and gave me constant earfuls (mostly playful, though not all) about my unwavering support for Declan Ganley and Mary-Lou McDonald. Sadly, these two festering pustules both treated the success of the No campaign as a personal victory. Both were, mercifully, soundly told to fuck off by most of the population when they tried to get elected to the European Parliament earlier this year. But they're back again, duplicitous and obnoxious as ever, still making it all about them. This time round they may just turn out to be the Yes campaign's deadliest weapon, as there can't be many people left who have any sort of stomach for them.

It gets complicated, though. One argument for voting Yes that is often put forward is that "all the major parties are for it, so it must be fine." I remain unconvinced by this, as it only means that one or two heads in each party have decided on their policy, and that all the other plods have to toe the line if they know which side their bread is buttered on. Many of our public representatives, I think it has been proven lately, are a corrupt and venal bunch, who know exactly how to get what they want. I hope I don't sound as though I'm sneaking into Jim Corr territory if I say that I honestly don't trust any of them, and find any claims they make to be looking out for the public's best interests to be suspect at best.

So how will I vote (or will I vote?) on Friday? Fuck knows.

 

Would I blow everyone's mind if I ate dessert first?

It's been giddy nuns, frank and sensible Germans and smiling Swiss. This is TEFL, and I love it. No two days are photocopies.

"So you definitely don't need me to work tomorrow?"

"No, we don't need you tomorrow. See you on Friday, Andrew."

This is how the wind blows, and it's OK. It's helping me steer clear of the inevitable maiden voyage to the dole office.

I wander down George's Street. Radiohead's In Rainbows is on my ipod. It must be my favourite walking album by an urban mile.

No matter how it ends, no matter how it starts

I'm hungry. But I have a Mars bar in my coat pocket and the components of a killer toasted ham and cheese sandwich at home, only 15 minutes away. I might even go fucking mental altogether and put salami in it too.

Past all the new students on Aungier and Kevin Street. Each and every one of them thinks they are the most unique and special human being on earth. If zany t-shirts and lunchtime pints don't say that, then nothing will. This feeling is likely only to swell for them as they go through the next few years. It will swell, and it will pop.

The infrastructure will collapse

Posters everywhere fight to appeal to my basest natures. Vote No. Vote Yes. Vota Idiota. Fucked if you do and fucked if you don't, from what I can see. Hard not to feel impotent at such times.

I'll be on my own this evening, as she's off to a meeting like a grown-up. A fleeting moment of panic grips me where I wonder what I'll do without her for the evening. Then I laugh at it, glad there's someone whose company feels like a treat every single night. It's dazzlingly sunny for a moment, and I realise I've been walking for the last few seconds with my eyes closed. I've become that guy.

What's the point of instruments? Words are a sawn-off shotgun

And I near home, and I think about how I might try and put how I feel on this brisk walk home into a post. Because I do that from time to time. And I think about how I will fail, because words can't really do that. There might be no way to adequately tell people how you feel. But if I could tell you I would let you know.

You've got a light, you can feel it on your back
A light, you can feel it on your back

Upon this tidal wave of young mud*

I may very well be the king of posts-I-really-felt-I had-to-write-and then-never-did.

Tonight I had intended to write about football from a certain slant. But it's late and I'm still annoyed by the issue in question and there are plenty who can do that stuff better than I so I'll leave it, at least for now.

I had intended all week to write a little bit about last weekend at the Electric Picnic. But it's now one week on and I doubt anyone cares terribly about what acts I saw and why I went home a bit early, in a huff only with the muck and myself for wanting to see the hype act that everyone else wanted to see. So I'll relate to you instead only a quick anecdote from the Friday at said festival.

Being unfond of getting up and getting my hole into gear in the morning, the missus and I leave it rather late to make our way to Stradbally and don't get there till mid-afternoon. Somehow in our sluggish morning preparations we forgot that we needed to replenish our supply of tent-pegs, as we are about ten short of a well pinned-down tent.

We remember this while pitching the tent. I go off to seek extras from any shop I can find. The man at the camping supplies shop says "No, mate, we sold out hours ago." He is clearly of the belief that if one must be unprepared, one should at least be early to do so.

So I try the Gala mini-supermarket.

"Do you have any tent-pegs? I ask the girl behind the counter.
"Yes we do" she replies, with a certainty that suggests they must have plenty of them. In your fucking face, camping supplies man!
"Brilliant, you're saving my life here. Can't believe I came down without enough of them."
She smiles sympathetically, scans the item, and hands me a box of...Tampax.

*Hundreds of bands playing at the Picnic and I have to go and make my title a pun on a song by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a band who were not there.

The Second Sole

"Is it ready yet?" you bark at the chap behind the counter, "I've been waiting twenty fucking minutes."
 This is a lie. I think you had placed your order just before me, and I was only gone two minutes, fetching milk in the Late Nite shop across the road.
"Nearly," says the chipper man, as he stares intently at the pan, willing the fish to cook faster. I sense you were chatty while I wasn't there, too.

You wear a navy suit, not shabby but not half as suave as you might have hoped. It looks massively incongruous in such surroundings on a Sunday night. You are upper middle-aged and middle middle-class. You are old enough and educated enough to know better than to be an asshole to nice fellows working in chip-shops. Your belligerent demeanour makes me assume drink was playing its part, though you were odourless from where I stood.

And, for a moment, I want to smash your fucking face in.  To decorate the pristine white tiles on the wall with a smattering of your blood. If only to put manners on you.

It passes.

Your order arrrives: two fresh sole and two chips, and you pay with a twenty. "I want all my fucking change, now," you growl, your prey fumbling at the till. You get your fucking change, and an astonishingly genuine sounding thank-you.

You turn to leave, and see me for the first time. I must look strange, freshly returned from a festival, spattered with mud and smelling faintly of rum. But your face speaks of only of contempt, not of bemusement. I resist the instinct to move out of your path and  I make you walk around me instead. You meet my eyes in a way that makes my blood run cold. And you leave.

My food is ready instantly. As I suspected, it was ready before yours but they dared not give it to me first. I leave a twenty cent tip by way of a sympathy gesture and leave. Looking up the road I see you clunking your way along the pavement towards Camden Street.

And I can't help but wonder as to who's at home, awaiting you and the second sole.