REALM BEYOND REASON

Stars are ghosts of long dead suns haunting the night above us. They are the echoes of things that once existed and witnessed events beyond the realm of our reason. We don't wonder though, we just proceed. I'm taking the dog out for his evening shite or I'm putting out the bins. It's cold. It's dark. It's dead silent but for distant traffic sighing and the wind quietly sneaking through branches. I'm on the surface of this still planet and I might look up. I might notice these shining spirits in the sky. I may momentarily feel comforted or threatened or ambivalent. Then I will look away and I will do what I need to do or watch the dog do what must be done. Then I will go back inside. I will watch my television and it will erase my mind of wonder and blind me to the infinite. A quiz is on. A woman with nice legs is giving away a big cash prize. I won't bother entering the competition even though I know the answers to all the questions. It's trivia from the small portion of the Universe we continually stare at and think about and measure ourselves by, a small portion of the Universe that concerns itself with fame and fortune. The stars in the sky are eclipsed by the stars on the screen. Marvels roll and burst, are born and die, above us and all around us – further than our eyes can see and our minds can reach - but I'm reaching for the remote control. I'm turning up the volume. Fuck the ineffability of the ineffable ineffableness. I'm going to see if I can win this quiz, this quiz that I couldn't be arsed entering. I'm paying close attention and shouting out the answers in a realm beyond reason.

WORTHLESS

Looking back over my life one day, I realised I’d made a muck of it. An unmerciful shit of it no less. All the retrospection left me with a profound feeling of worthlessness. ‘Worthless!’ I roared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I decided that there was nothing else to do but go outside and throw myself in the bin.

Being a worthless git, I went and jumped in the bin that had all the stinking food scraps in it. ‘Good enough for me’, I said to myself, ‘sure, if I’m any type of rubbish, I’m this type of rubbish’. The food scraps came in handy actually as I found myself feeding on old banana skins and sucking the marrow from cold chop bones in the days I had to wait until my collection.

Eventually the bin men came. I heard their lorry and then I felt myself being lifted up. ‘This one’s heavy, there must be some sack of crap in it’, I heard a bin man say. ‘You’re not wrong’, I replied and then suddenly I felt myself being dropped to the ground. I tumbled out of the bin and looked up. I saw two astonished bin men and then crawled back in the bin and called out to them to carry on but they wouldn’t. They refused to throw me in the back of the lorry with the rest of the rubbish. I even offered them money but they refused and drove off without me. So, there I was, not even good enough to be rubbish. Below rubbish. Sub-rubbish. What do you do with that? What’s more worthless than rubbish? Then it struck me. The only thing more worthless than rubbish is shite and you flush shite down the toilet. So, delighted with my realisation, I went indoors, stuck my head in the bowl and flushed. It didn’t work. I tried again. It didn’t work again. I tried loads more times but it was no use, the toilet wanted no part of me. I was too big. I wasn’t even good enough for the jax. Jesus, there was no end to the rejection. Seriously, what was I supposed to do with myself if I wasn’t even good enough for flushing down the jax? I mean, the jax takes shite. I was even more worthless than shite. What, on God’s earth, is more worthless than shite?

And then it struck me. There is something more worthless than shite and it is with this sub-shite that I realised I must dwell.

It wasn’t easy getting myself elected to the Dail but elected I eventually was and now I sit here in constituency surgeries telling people I can’t help them and that my hands are tied and asking them how their Aunty Mary is doing and if they saw the match and taking the odd back-hander and so on and so on until eventually I’ll draw a big fat pension. A big fat juicy pension. Oh yeah. Turns out being completely worthless isn’t that bad after all.