Normalcy

Notice anything wrong with these posters for films released in Ireland in the last year?

Stop being thick.

'All Right' and Traveler'. A superfluous L and gap and a missing L. Without wishing to go overboard, this blogger is firmly of the opinion that once we start welcoming weird American spellings into our world we might as well, oh, I don't know, salute the stars and stripes and snort Sunny Delight and suchlike. It's a slide that began when we accepted 'cool' as meaning anything other than 'pleasantly cold', took 'awesome' to mean 'quite agreeable' and used 'totally' to mean 'I fully agree'. It will soon reach its nadir when we begin using 'sick' as a positive adjective.

We can, it's fair to say, blame the youth on such tendencies? But now they're smearing it all over our film posters like H-Block protesters. Mark my words, good people, this may very well be the beginning of the end, if the end didn't already begin on the day my mother deemed it appropriate to use the word 'guesstimate' in my presence.
Of course, one might suggest that I am indulging in such pedantry and curmudgeonliness out of an anxiety caused by my impending unemployment leading me to be slightly more on edge than usual. Well, you can all fuck off back to Texas too. It's ignoring the likes of this that led to the rise of Genghis Khan and Idi Amin and those lads, and I'm registering my displeasure at this growing tendency before Uncle Sam has wiped his "butt" with us entirely.

the fucking view is fucking vile for fucking miles and fucking miles

Having watched the final episodes of The Sopranos over the weekend my next post was set to be all about the majesty of that show, featuring a detailed analysis of crime and society in America and the definitive opinion piece on whether it, or The Wire, is the best TV show ever made, ever.

And then I was told on Monday that I'll be losing my teaching job on Friday week. Spaniards and Brazilians, unfathomably, don't want to be in Dublin during the winter. And immediately I was overcome with that old sensation of no-one gives a fuck what you think about anything, Andrew. It seems to be the hallmark of unemployment, and I remember it well.

My last period of joblessness (Oct. '09 to Feb. '10) was characterised by early depression and onanism, followed by an upswing in mood brought about my reading lots of books and doing volunteer work.

This time around I plan to synthesise these disparate strands by writing a pornographic novel to be sold in aid of grieving kangaroos.

You're toxic, I'm slipping under

"It's not fair!" Words you haven't uttered in years, now directed at two Leinster Hockey Branch referees on the occasion of your team being dumped unceremoniously out of the cup by a team bolstered beyond all recognition by a load of illegally unregistered players from a much higher division. A team whose legitimate side you had strolled to a 6-0 victory over in the league just a couple of weeks earlier. Yet another example of the skulduggery that dogs lower-level hockey to a surprising extent. Not fair at all, but your team are slowly learning how to play that game. Come to think of it, it isn't really fair that you're a hockey player at all, being a refugee in its middle-class bosom for over a decade now. Forced out out of football - a game you're much better at - as a delicate 15 year-old by one too many taunts of "Proddy bastard" from your own team-mates. And they laugh at you, these elder gentlemen, much as you do when teenagers approach you with the same whinge when confronted with a punishment they don't feel they deserve. Life's not fair, lads, I'd kick you up the hole too, if The Man'd let me.
The words come rising to your throat again in an acid bubble tonight, as you sit down with one of your best mates to watch the football over a few pints and he comes clean about who his new employer is. AnglofuckingIrishcuntingBank, of all people. The ones costing the state about 30 billion euro; you may have heard mention of them recently. Good to know they're hiring, innit? Loath to hear too much about the bastards, you fill him in on my recent own employment status. Which is that, after more than four months without a speck of paid work, things have been a bit better recently, a few TEFL hours and a bit of secondary subbing work making things feel a lot better. You don't bother spitting in his pint when he says that he's glad the hourly rate for  subbing has come down a bit, as it was too high. You don't bother pointing out that it would take his new friend Seán FitzPatrick a full 1200 years as a full-time secondary teacher to pay back the debts the government reckon he won't be able to get back to them. You just let him get the next round in and you sit and watch your team take a hiding with an odd mixture of glumness and awe and you think that it's also not fair having to play possibly the best club side in the world with five of your cast-iron starters missing. Trying to counter  Lionel Messi, the best player in the world, with Mickael Silvestre is most likely a contravention of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. .You console yourself with the fact that at least the horrible little banker fuck beside you is a Liverpool fan, so he knows something of pain. And a job's a job and a mate's a mate, right?
Right.

An Béal Bocht

There's this grey coat I have that I bought in Milan about three years ago. I think it cost me about 240 eurolira - not exactly wildly excessive but way more money than I had ever spent on an item of clothing before. I swaggered around Dublin and various insalubrious parts of county Wicklow with it on, always confident that the coat lent me an air of respectability. I looked like the kind of man you'd be happy to have teach, and possibly even date, your children.

I still wear the coat in winter and, dubious strawberry yoghurt stain notwithstanding, it looks pretty good from the outside. Inside, however, the fancy satin lining is perishing to the point of non-existent and strands of it peek out most unwantedly from my cuffs. And lately I've been seen to meander into McDonald's and fumble for an unfeasible length of time in the inner breast pocket in search of Buy One Get One Free vouchers for sausage and egg McMuffins.

Aside from that, I don't think unemployment has made the slightest bit of difference.