Short term memory fucked

by Twenty Major on April 30th, 2008

Seriously, I keep forgetting stuff seconds after it pops into my head. I’m reading a website and I think ‘Oh, I’ll go to that website’ then by the time I’ve moved my mouse I’ve forgotten what website it was.

Or if it was even a website at all. Maybe I wanted to make a cheese sandwich.

Stupid brain. Is it the left side or the right side that controls memory? Just so I know which side of my head to slap like an old TV that’s lost its picture.

There are none so…

by Twenty Major on April 30th, 2008

“Dave, what the fuck is that on your head?”, I asked as he came stumbling in through the door of Ron’s.

“Quite obviously it’s a mask, Twenty”.

“I can see that but if you’re trying to be all Zorro on us here there’s a small flaw in your plan.”

“What’s that then?”

“Well, Zorro’s mask had holes for eyes so he could actually see out. Yours does not.”

“Good spot, Twenty. I bought this in the airport the last time I went jet-setting around the globe. It’s a sleep mask and it blocks out everything so you can sleep while people change their screaming babies and the plane flies through the sunshine because, as you know, once you go above the clouds there is only daytime.”

“Jesus. Ok, so why are you wearing it now?”

“I’m seeing what it’s like to be blind.”

“Blind?”

“Yeah. I was watching that Al Pacino film the other day, what’s it called?”

“Serpico?”

“No. The one where he’s blind and he’s got a really good nose …erm… The Smell of Minge!”

“You mean ‘Scent of a woman’?”

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, he’s all blind and he goes around sniffing stuff and dancing and everyone loves him so I thought I’d give it a try and see what I could get away with.”

“So did you scent any women yet?”

“Sadly not. I thought I was following a most fragrant lady but it turned out to be some gay fella who used lots of ladies creams and rose water or whatever. Then I nearly got hit by a 65A on George’s Street.”

“How do you know it was a 65A?”

“Because when the person on the pavement said ‘You nearly got hit by a bus’ I asked him what number it was. Duh.”

“So you came all the way from town to here without looking and with no white stick to tap your way along?”

“I did have a white stick except it wasn’t white or a stick. It was a broom handle. Did the job though.”

“What happened to it?”

“I lost it in a Chinese casino on Camden Street.”

“You went gambling while blind? What game did you play?”

“Blackjack?”

“And did they have braille cards?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Then how do you know what you were being dealt?”

“Old Ming the Dealer told me.”

“And you trusted him?”

“Of course. Nobody would cheat a blind man.”

“Oh man”.

“Anyway, I must get a drink. Ron, pint please. Twenty, here’s my wallet, pay Ron please”.

“No problem.”

“So anyway, another thing that happened was I went for a kebab on Clanbrassil Street and you know when you’ve lost the gift of sight your other senses really do kick in. I could taste the ground up alley-cat in the meat and everything. The lettuce and delicious kebab sauce was just mouth wateringly good. And the bread, the usually flat, stale, tasteless bread was anything but. Have you paid him yet? Twenty? Twenty?….”

If you had to…

by Twenty Major on April 29th, 2008

…to save your own life, would you drink a cup of someone’s spit, a cup of their blood or a cup of their piss?

I’d rather not

by Twenty Major on April 29th, 2008

And he walked to the large pond where the young lady sat waiting. He watched her for a while, her golden hair glistening like a snail’s trail on a damp pavement.

Plucking up the courage to speak, for what he had to say was difficult and required great thought, he thought back to the times it had gone wrong. When his words, his utterances, had turned a potentially great situation into something terrible and irreparable.

She was aware of his presence, he knew that. His pig like snorting as he breathed always gave him away. Yet she did not turn around, content to stare at the insects hovering over the water and the occasional fish’s nose breaking the surface.

The clouds moved slowly, briefly covering the sun and casting a shadow across the earth like a cumulo-nimbus shaped moth fluttering around a bedside lamp, but with less fur. And he stood there, still trying to find the words, and she sat there waiting for him to say them.

Time went by. The sun reappeared, the clouds swatted away by the rolled up newspaper of the wind. He coughed, hoping she would turn around but knowing she would not. She was no kind of owl or meercat. He licked his lips, dry as they were, coughed again and began.

“I ..erm … uhm … that is to say …”

“Yes?”, she prompted after his silence had become as awkward as meeting someone who you know can’t stand you but who pretends to be social because the situation demands it.

“Would you … I mean … what it is, is that … erm…”

He stopped. He knew he could never say it. That however carefully he worded it his simple manner, his ability to put his foot in his mouth (literally as well as figuratively) would spoil it and he decided. He preferred to live with the possibility than deal with the reality.

He turned and walked away.

She sighed with relief, put her dwarf on its lead and slowly strolled home.

Board games

by Twenty Major on April 28th, 2008

I went for a burger yesterday in Rathmines and noticed that a couple sitting behind me were scoffing their food and playing Connect 4. How achingly retro it was.

On the shelves they had other games like Battleship and possibly Cluedo and some others.

I was never a huge fan of board games, preferring instead to kick a football outside, but on rainy days a round or twelve of Battleship was always good, some Operation certainly passed the time and, if you could find all the pieces, Mousetrap was entertaining.

But do kids these days play board games any more? Apart from the standards like Monopoly and stuff, do they still make them?

D7?

Miss!

Stop killing kids

by Twenty Major on April 28th, 2008

Perhaps we don’t have the full details of what happened in Wexford at the weekend when a man killed his wife then set his house on fire, killing his two children as well.

The post-mortems are set to continue today and we’ll probably know more then. What we can take from what we know at the moment is that Diarmuid Flood, no matter how troubled, no matter how upset or how angry, was an absolute cunt.

I just cannot understand anyone who would do that to their children. Without trying to condone it in any way, shape or form it is much easier to get your head around a man killing his wife. Or indeed a wife killing her husband. There are many reasons why a relationship between two adults can end so terribly, why somebody feels driven to commit murder. It’s awful and it’s wrong but to some extent you can understand it.

It’s simply beyond comprehension that a person could deliberately take the lives of their own children. And tiny children at that. Six and five, for fucks sake. If you’ve caught your wife cheating, or if something has happened that in your mind justifies the murder of another person, then by all means do what you think you have to do, stupid as it might be.

But babies, Jesus. There was the previous case in Wexford where the children were smothered to death. How is that possible? How could you hold a pillow or a cushion over a child’s mouth as it struggled in terror as one of the people they trust implicity, unquestionably, is killing them? We don’t know yet whether the kids this weekend were dead before the fire started. I suppose the best we can hope for is that the smoke overcame them as they slept but the idea of two kids of five and six being aware of what was happening is just sickening.

I don’t care a jot about what troubles Diarmuid Flood might have had, there is simply no justification for what he did. It was despicable and cowardly. Maybe he thought if he couldn’t have the kids then nobody should. What a God complex. Maybe he thought the kids wouldn’t be able to survive without their parents. What ego - kids can survive the worst things you can think of.

Five and six. Fucking hell.

HURRAH!

by Twenty Major on April 26th, 2008

I know what I said about religion yesterday but thank you Jesus, thank you Allah, thank you Buddah, thank you Sammy Davis Jr, thank you Buddha, thank you Ganesha, thank you L Ron Hubbard, thank you Krishna, thank you, thank you, thank you…

…for this.

Why…

by Twenty Major on April 25th, 2008

…do people called ‘Cockburn’ insist on pronoucning their name ‘Coburn’ yet leave the hilarious spelling as it is?

Fuing Pris.

Jehova’s witnesses and mad Catholics

by Twenty Major on April 25th, 2008

You know what? Jehova’s witnesses, let the fuckers die, that’s what I say. It’s tragic that the two babies are sick and may die but nits make lice, don’t they? They’ll grow up as Jehovas and possibly inflict the same kind of crap on their own children.

If you just leave the cunts be then there’s less of them. Any person that would refuse their child treatment that would save its life is a piece of shit as far as I’m concerned. Any group that seriously believes that blood tranfusions are evil in this day and age are clearly retarded in their thinking. Fuck them.

Then you have the body of Padre Pio exhumed and on display. How respectful, digging up a man who has been dead for 40 years and lashing his corpse out in public. Naturally there’s a bit of decomposition after 40 years but not to worry, we’ll just get some special effects people to make a mask, stick it what’s left of his skull and make sure there are plenty of collection boxes around as the desperate, the sick, the infirm and the terminally ill flock to visit and pay and pay and pay tribute to Johnny Stigmata.

Honestly, the older I get the less I understand religion and religious people. If I were to become supreme ruler of Ireland religion would be outlawed and if you didn’t like it you’d have two choices:

1 - Fuck off somewhere else to live.

2 - Be exterminated by my dalek stormtroopers.

Fucking lunatics, all of them.

How it all changed

by Twenty Major on April 24th, 2008

Old Paddy at the bar was talking last night:

Oh lordy, I remember the good old days. Yes sir. Times were better then. No doubt about it.

What a country we had. Full of poets, writers, artists, wits and wags. And I don’t mean peroxide slappers that go out with footballers. Everywhere you went there was somebody with a great story, a fantastic fable, a splendid song.

And everybody was your friend. You could leave your door unlocked and people would just pop in, have a cup of tea, a piece of the freshly baked brack every household had made of a morning and you’d just talk. About life, politics, sport, your cousin who went to school with a fella who knew one of your cousins. It was a simple life, a creative life, a life so idyllic and tranquil that Ireland was perhaps the best country on earth to live in.

That all changed though. Oh God how it changed. People will never forget the date. April 24th 1999, the year that alcohol came to Ireland. At first we didn’t quite know what to make of it, we’d never seen anything like it before. A drink that made your head all woozy. We thought it was great stuff to begin with. The poems became more raucous, the songs more thigh slapping, the stories and fables more incredible and hilarious but soon it became obvious there was a real problem. It was shocking and something we didn’t know how to cope with, you couldn’t imagine great men like Brendan Behan getting drunk so this new development had a huge impact on society.

Youngsters would get their hands on this alcohol and I’ll tell you this and tell you no more, they went mad for the booze, so they did. Teenagers would get flaggins of cider and sit in fields and drink and then stagger to the chipper, once a meeting place for great minds, get a battered sausage and large single of chips, eat it up, vomit it up and sometimes get into fights.

Then they started with the breaking of stuff. Randomly smashing bus shelters or shop windows or the wing mirrors off cars. The worst was the traffic cone absuse. Previously the traffic cone was a well respected part of society, it served a great purpose, a cordoning off of a particular area but with the advent of hooch these fine, upstanding cones were taken and moved and worn as hats and then nobody knew where was to be cordoned off at all. It was chaos, I tell you.

You knew society was gone to the dogs when things like that started happening. I can’t even begin to mention the other terrible effects it had, like singing and dancing. We’d never had that before and to see once great minds lepping about the place like electrocuted retards was hard to take. Public urination, something so abhorrent to us in the past was common place and while it’s true that everybody was friendly now people were picking favourites. ‘Yer me besht friend, so y’are’, you’d hear people slur and all the other friends would feel rejected and then pick a best friend themselves and so it was that lines were drawn and divisions were made. Is it any wonder things are so violent now? That’s how gangs started, you know.

When I think back on it now I can feel a tear come to my eye. Such a great nation, a wonderful land, spoiled by the introduction of alcohol less than 10 years ago. I shudder to think where we’ll be in another 10. Me, I won’t be around to see it but you lot will.

Now, give the lads a drink on me, Ron. Pints of Jaegerbombers all round.