BLOOD IN THE WORDS

I've nothing to say today. This has happened before hasn't it? Nothing to say but still feeling compelled to say something. A bit like a journalist. Have you ever asked a journalist why they became a journalist? It's quite funny. You can see faint wafts of smoke coming out of their ears. It's one of the few questions they don't have an answer to. They have answers to lots of other questions of course but even then they are the wrong answers, which is fine because there are no right answers – not that a journalist would know that. I always wanted to be a journalist myself. 'Why did you want to be a journalist Mr. Fugger?' I hear you fart out your mouth. I'll tell you why. I always wanted to be a journalist so I could cut and paste press releases from PR companies and then spend about ten minutes paraphrasing them and then get paid for it. Why the fuck else would I want to be a journalist? It's hard to become a journalist though. You can't just wander into the profession. You have to have certain qualities. You have to be either thick or dishonest. These aren't qualities you can pick up. You have to be born with them. A big ego helps too. Dumb but confident, that's the trick really – like a politician. Oh, and you have to be kind of half able to write ...a bit. Only then can you be part of the vanguard of chatter that is officially deemed to be of interest. You go on about stuff like you care about stuff and then you forget about stuff because there is some new stuff to go on about. Then at the end of the year you compile all the stuff in a list. Then, maybe, you can get a book out of all the stuff you went on about. And then, if you play your cards right and don't have a mumbly voice, you can get on a radio panel or TV show and talk about stuff. Paraphrased PR company press releases will float from your gob and flow into the ears of the nation, psychically cementing a great big narrative that will harden and become fact. Fact, resolute, grey, bang your head against it, FACT!

You can also mention your favourite bands a bit.

After about thirty years of journalism your liver will pack in and you will die. Other journalists will write about what a character you were and no one will mention the article you wrote about sterilising the longterm unemployed. You'll be buried in some graveyard and a nearby yew tree will suck up your blood and bleed it out every time its bark is cut. That's kind of romantic isn't it? A fitting tribute. It'll be the first time you put your blood into anything.  

THE SUPPLEMENT

The weekend supplement, it's just copy really. You just type stuff for people to read over a coffee. It doesn't have to be that interesting. It can be a bit interesting if you like but that might take a while to get together and you've other stuff to be doing like going out to dinner or maybe staying in and having a bottle of wine. Maybe you could write an amusing piece about staying in and having a bottle of wine. Amusing, not funny. Staying in for dinner and having a bottle of wine is the new going out for dinner and having a bottle of wine. Yeah. Or maybe some pop cultural nostalgia. List the ten best Irish bands of the eighties or movie sequels that were better than the first film. Or you might review something everyone else is reviewing. I also hear there's a new organic food market on the open top of a double decker that travels South County Dublin. Email the guy that set it up and get a few quotes. Or maybe just rehash a few received urbane wisdoms, the consensus of the cognoscenti. What Richard Did is the best Irish film of all time. Hmm, top ten moments in What Richard Did. Or maybe something about somebody who happens to be a kind of 'somebody'. What next for Kathryn Thomas? Or you might fancy providing a chuckle, not a laugh - too boisterous, just a chuckle. How about a bit on funny ads from the eighties? Or how about just words, any words that come to mind. Any old words in any kind of order. Does it even matter what order? Does it even matter if the words are in order? Does it? Does even it order matter the if words in are? Just type and cut and paste words and reach the word count. Clogs are popular again. There's a French Film Festival on or maybe something about speed dating or something or something else or something. Hmmm. Have we done speed dating this quarter? Let's do speed dating then. Go to an event or pretend you did. Rosanna Davison attended an Osteoporosis fund raiser. Almost reaching requested word count now. Hmm, ...ideas - puff pieces and light pieces - Ryan Tubridy's quirky/ironic garden gnome collection. Weightier piece - 'What's Troubling Joe?' about Joseph O'Conner. Get a picture of Joseph O'Conner staring moodily into middle distance on Dunlaoghaire seafront. That might work. Or what's Mahdi al-Harati up to these days? What does a brave rebel do on a Sunday afternoon? Maybe a piece called 'At Home with Al-Harati'. Does he still live in Firhouse? Check it out. Lots of ideas there. Nothing too, y'know, engaging in that demanding way. Just stuff to set the brain in neutral and coast. The advocacy of complacency. We all deserve it. We work hard. Our brains get tired. We spend enough time thinking. Thinking is something you should only do to make money. There's no other reason to be bothered with thinking. That's what I think. But enough thinking. There's copy to be produced. The meat of culture must be mechanically separated and made digestible. It isn't that hard a task.

The main thing to remember is not to spill wine on your laptop.

ARMS TRADING

(pictured above: Fugger Lump Hammers celebrity endorsement, 'If A Job’s Worth Doing. . .')

I’ve recently gotten involved in the arms trade. Let’s face it, people are always going to fight and if I don’t sell them weapons someone else will so it may as well be me. Now I realise I can’t compete with the like of BAE Systems or anything so I’m not exactly selling self-propelled artillery to developing nations or any of that. No. I’m much more small scale. I sell things like knuckle dusters and slash hooks to warring Traveller clans.

I don’t feel bad about it. If the warring parties didn’t use my weapons they’d just be bashing each other’s heads in with rocks or something. At least this way someone (i.e. me) gets to profit and jobs are created and, in these difficult times, that’s good for the economy as a whole.

There were journos complaining about me in the local papers though. They were going on about some kid who got shot full of pellets as she crossed a halting site and lost an eye and blah blah blah. They traced the pellets back to my company and started filling their pages with fuzzy pictures of me looking sinister, getting in and out of cars and going to the shops with my hood up.

I realised I had to put a stop to all this bad press so a subsidiary company I own (one that sells lump hammers) bought a significant amount of advertising space in their rags. They don’t like to bite the hand that feeds, the old hacks. Then I sent out a press release saying I’d donated some money to a traveller resource centre. In truth, none of the resource centres would take my money so I had to set up my own. No one used my resource centre and it didn’t even strictly exist but it’s the thought that counts. Anyway, next thing I knew, the papers were portraying me as a ‘philanthropic lump hammer entrepreneur’ and said my resource centre would ‘herald a new spring for the Traveller community’. They didn’t even mention the weapons side of the business. Nice one.

The Internet is a bit harder to control though. Bloody activists were all over it calling me a hypocrite because I make donations with one hand whilst profiting from misery with the other. Well, I hired a PR company to flood the forums with the following counter-argument: These people are going to kill each other anyway and at least some of the profits made from arming them goes toward their resource centre. When people argued back, the PR people pulled a masterstroke. They started referring to those who opposed the arms sales as ‘anti-resource centre’. I thought that was bloody genius. That PR company was money well spent.

Do you need anything yourself? How about a lump hammer? They get the job done. They’re duel purpose actually.

Paul Williams

I’m a great admirer of Paul Williams. I wish I was more like him. A stand up guy. Dublin’s Gary Cooper. Wears a suit to work. Trainers and jeans at home. Listens to Dido in the car. Hates scumbags. SCUMBAGS! I really enjoyed his film about the Shell to Sea crowd. It was called Satan Walks Amongst Us. Great stuff. Those campaigners are total eccentrics and, as Paul points out, the letter ‘e’ is in the word ‘eccentrics’ and the letter ‘e’ is also in the word ‘evil’. Paul rests his case. SCUMBAGS! It is also no coincidence that the letters ‘I’, ‘R’ and ‘A’ all appear in the name Ken Saro Wiwa. Or maybe it is a coincidence but even if it is a coincidence it’s probably not. Paul rests his case. SCUMBAGS! Paul needs a stiff drink after work. He gets maudlin thinking about all the scumbags he has to put up with. SCUMBAGS! He listens to the song Why by Annie Lennox. Annie Lennox is almost as good as Dido. He listens to Dido in the car. SCUMBAGS! I have all Paul’s books. They are a great read. I have Limerick: Scumbag Town, I have Paul Versus the Scumbags, I have Paul’s Scumbag Adventure, I have Valley of the Scumbags, I have The Scumbags that Time Forgot, I have Dracula: Lord of the Scumbags and I have Destroy All Scumbags. SCUMBAGS! He listens to Dido in the car. Paul likes the taste of Chili Con Carne. He drinks four cups of coffee a day and when he was a child his favourite TV show was The High Chaparral. He once saw Dire Straits playing in the RDS. Great gig. He’s never seen Dido though. He listens to Dido in the car. SCUMBAGS!

Iraq

I've been reading a moving first hand account of Iraq by one of those award winning journalists. It's called I Am Iraq and has just been published. It's got loads and loads of pages so I know it's good. Here is one of the most powerful passages:

'Day 17: Another forty dead and it's only 3 pm. Debris everywhere. People are weeping and imploring the heavens. Did this have to happen? Is God really so callous? I feel a wave of nausea crash against my heart and guts. I cover my eyes. I groan. My wife has had enough of seeing me suffer. She reaches for the remote. She turns off the television. She places a hand on my shoulder and smiles gently. Oh Mags, without you I'd never get through this. I walk to the computer. I switch it on. I've got a couple of hours to get my copy in so I better start typing. Emotionally drained, I email the piece straight to the office. Thank God for email. I don't think I could hop in the car and drive to work in this state. Besides, if I had to go all the way to the city centre now I'm not sure I'd make it back by 8pm and we have tickets for the new one by Eve Ensler. Needless to say, I'm not really in the mood for Ensler's strident populist shtick but I promised Mags. It's the least I can do. After all, without her Iraq would've destroyed me days ago.'

Hats off to the lad, it's a tough gig.