TRAYS OF SANDWICHES

Trays of sandwiches, quartered diagonally. Wretched pyramids. Triangles of misery. That’s the cheese. That’s the chicken. That’s the ham. That’s the egg. That’s the ham and egg. Trays of sandwiches herald awkward formality. A gathering of unlikeminded souls. Trays of sandwiches are accompanied by strained conversation:

‘What route did you take here?’ Oh, was it busy? I saw a dog looking out a passenger seat window on that route once.’

(Silence)

‘Were there any dogs looking out passenger seat windows on your way here? Yes, well you sometimes see them. I could’ve sworn the one I saw was wearing sunglasses and had a cigarette dangling from its mouth. That may have been my mind playing tricks on me though. Does your mind play tricks on you at all? You really can’t be sure of anything can you? I mean, you just have to take things at face value but anything could be happening, you know, on a quantum level.’

(Profound silence)

‘. . .anyway, try the ham and egg, they’re nice.’

Trays of sandwiches are a bad omen. They mean bad things. They are produced at times of trauma. Someone gets very sick or badly injured and worried relatives gather around trays of sandwiches. You can tell who’s least worried because they are really tucking in. Or maybe they are the most worried. Trays of sandwiches accompany us throughout our lives. They are there at all the major junctures. Someone is born: tray of sandwiches. A couple get married: tray of sandwiches. Someone dies: tray of sandwiches. Vietnam: tray of sandwiches.

Trays of sandwiches remind us of the last time we saw a tray of sandwiches and if the last time we saw a tray of sandwiches was a bad time (and if a tray of sandwiches was involved it probably was) then our reaction to the tray of sandwiches can be dramatic. The sight of a tray of sandwiches often activates PTSD. When trays of sandwiches are produced, some of us transform into blubbering John Rambos recalling our own shoeshine box incidents:

‘I wanna go home! I wanna go home! He keeps calling my name! I wanna go home, Johnny! I wanna drive my Chevy! I said, with what? I can't find your fuckin' legs! I can't find your legs!’

Quite the faux pas.

I think gangsters shouldn’t leave horse heads in beds as a warning. Instead, I think they should bring a tray of sandwiches to their intended victim. That would be much scarier. Imagine, you’re sitting some place and all of a sudden some shady character comes over and sets down a tray of sandwiches in front of you. Jesus, the hair is standing up on the back of my neck just thinking about it.

If aliens ever come to Earth and we are preparing to greet them, I don’t think we should have trays of sandwiches involved. The aliens might react badly. They might have trays of sandwiches on their own planet and the negative feelings they associate with trays of sandwiches might make them aggressive. They might open fire with some awful weapon and the world will be destroyed. We’ll be left in an arid wasteland, gathered in the charred remnant of a dining room, comforting ourselves with trays of sandwiches. Making small talk over slices of stale fungal bread. Stiff, with rat meat in the middle.

Trays of sandwiches, quartered diagonally. Desolate Alps. Equilaterals of anguish. Try the ham and egg, they’re nice.

OLYMPICS 2012

‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises’

It's time for the Olympics again! And you will enjoy it! All this is for you! It’s all for you! And the mighty bell will sound and resound and men and women will run and jump and people will cheer and roar and there will be money, so much money, and security and checkpoints and scans and searches and no liquid containers exceeding 100mL and electric fences that go on for miles and miles and miles and high jumps and cycling and roids and copyright protection and traffic redirection and fwooosh, there goes a jet, and missile launchers and weight lifters and javelin throwers and boxers and gymnasts and snipers and Cameron and prepare them for the sacrificial alter and God bless her majesty and my child can't breath, my child can't breath, let me out of here, my child can't breath, and the flinging of the discus and the hovering of the drones and attack dog eyeballs twisting back and rolling frenzied in the head and blood red gums and huge yellow fangs and saliva spitballs and unattended baggage and the spirit of 1936 and checkpoints and CCTV and who's in charge here and is anyone in charge here and how the hell do we get out of here and it's all for you and it's all for you and it's all for you Damien!

Enjoy!

50 SHADES OF FUGGER

As regular visitors to this blog know, Fugger is just an everyday girl that likes to do typical girl stuff. For example, these days I can be found reading the popular erotic novel for children 50 Shades of Grey in front of everybody on the bus. All the girls are reading 50 Shades of Grey on the bus. I haven't seen them do it but I know they are because I read they are in a newspaper that I found on the bus.

Anyhoo, it's a great book about a powerful yet vulnerable man and the ass he loves to spank. It's such a good read it has inspired me to write my own erotic novel for children. I don't want my novel to be a rip-off though so I'm adding an Irish flavour to the spanking. My novel is called The Bata and it is about a powerful yet vulnerable schoolteacher and the ass he loves to spank. Would you like to read an extract? I bet you would. Ask me if you can. Go on, ask. Sound like you mean it. Make it sound like you mean it. I want to hear the words come out of your filthy mouth. OK, I'm convinced. You can stop asking. That'll do. It's getting weird now. Seriously, cut it out. Stopped? Good. Right, here, for your pleasure, is an extract from The Bata:

I had been fierce bold and knew Mr. Muldoon would give me a fair few licks of the bata. Oh how I feared yet longed for the bata. 'Hitch up that skirt there now you and we'll see what happens to girls who don't study their catechism', said Mr. Muldoon as he studied my hole with hugry angry eyes. I could tell that there was a frightened child behind those eyes, a child who had taken a few licks of the bata himself in his time. I was looking over my shoulder at him and before biting my lower lip in anxious delight I said, 'I'm a dirty little shite of a girl all the same amn't I Mr. Muldoon?' Oh he went mad at that. The foul language out of me would earn me another six strokes at least. I readied myself but didn't the bells for The Angelus go off and we had to call a halt to everything until we'd recited our devotions. Some might say I was saved by the bell but I wouldn't be amongst them. I relished the knowledge that the bata would be alighting my arse as soon as we'd said a few more Hail Marys and from the lump in Mr. Muldoon's trousers I could tell he felt the same way. Unless that was just the blackboard duster he often kept in his pocket.

Well, what do you think. Did you like it? Did you start pleasuring yourself as you read it? I bet you did. There's no shame in it. I was pleasuring myself as I wrote it. Just remember not to go pleasuring yourself as you read it on the bus. I did that with 50 Shades of Grey and ended up in court having to put €300 in the poor box. Now I'm 50 Shades of broke.

I AM PLANKTON

I'm just not driven when it comes to anything. Anything at all, I'm just not driven. I must be lacking something, maybe it's drive. I sometimes worry about my lack of drive. I think of all the things I could achieve if I was driven and I worry. I don't worry enough though because if I did I might be driven to do something about my lack of drive and I'm just not driven enough for that. Put simply, I don't have the drive to do something about my lack of drive.

I'm content enough just bobbing about in an undriven fashion. I am human plankton really. Maybe my lack of drive is a superpower. Maybe I was bitten by radioactive plankton. That's silly though, plankton doesn't bite. It couldn't be bothered. It lacked the drive to evolve teeth for a start. It wasn't even driven to evolve a mouth.

So, that's me. I am what I am and what I am is nothing much. I lacked the drive to amount to anything and I've gone without but who cares? Not me, apparently. In fact, I sometimes romanticise my lack of drive. I imagine that it makes me innately subversive. I am the unmotivatable spanner in the works. Capitalists, Communists, Theocrats, Democrats; none have any use for me. Even God himself/herself/itself/nothingself is nonplussed. I am an existential maverick of inactivity. I am an existential/societal/cultural rebel and my act of rebellion is refusing to do anything. I even refuse to rebel. I even refuse to refuse. Yes, I refuse to refuse. There's a simple knack to refusing even to refuse. To refuse to refuse you simply don't refuse and then you just don't do what you didn't refuse to do. It drives people mad. Poor souls, their drive driving them mad.

I sometimes wonder about the rest of you. I wonder about your drives. What drives you on? What is the source of the drives by which you are driven? I suppose there is desire, that's obvious. But I suspect that there is also fear. You are driven to accomplish something because you fear what will happen if you don't. What will be the consequences? Will you be fired? Will you become homeless? Will you starve? What will people think? What will the neighbours say about you? These fears don't drive me at all. I am not driven by fear because I am fearless. Yeah, I like the sound of that, I'm fearless. That's just occurred to me now. I suppose I do fear one thing though. I suppose I must fear drive because with drive comes fear.

If more people were like me then there would be less harm done in the world. People wouldn't be driven to harm. Of course, people would be less driven to help also but that wouldn't matter because people would lack the drive to care either way.

Perhaps I am just rationalising after the fact. Maybe I'm just making excuses and what I actually need is to be put on a course of drugs that will imbue me with drive. Just imagine me then, doing more than the bare minimum and sometimes even more than that. I wonder what that would be like. I'd imagine I'd be a lot more frustrated but I'd also find life more rewarding. As it stands, I don't find life rewarding or frustrating, I just find it and I can take it or leave it. I just let you lot get on with it. Do whatever you like. I am plankton. Leave me be.

WORMHOLE

(pictured above: a pretentious wormhole speaking French)

I made a wormhole in time. If you jump through it you go back in time and arrive at the moment it was created, that's how wormholes work. For example, if you made one now and left it for a week and then went through it, you would arrive at the point of its creation the week before. You could go down the bookies and put some money on horses you've already seen winning. Of course, if that happened you'd already have the winnings before you jumped through because that would have already happened. It's all paradoxical this time travel. Things can get tricky. 'Fuck it', I said to myself, 'let's just see how it pans out' and I jumped straight through.

I jumped through the wormhole and arrived when it was made, which was just a second before so I only arrived to see myself jumping through. So, I left it a day. Then I went through the wormhole again and met myself watching myself jumping through. Then I turned to myself and asked myself what's going to happen tomorrow and I said 'not much' and another me was there too, having come through the wormhole at the same time as me. The third me was old and had a big grey beard and a walking stick. He looked at the other two mes (including me) and said 'the next few decades are going to be a bit shite though'. Then a heap of other mes of all different ages and stages of decrepitude popped up and they said 'he's not wrong lads'.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure which me is writing this blog post. We're all here now. All from the future, living in the present, and blogging about the past. The only chronological direction open to us is forward, unless we jump through the wormhole again and that wouldn't be a good idea because this room is full enough as it is and I'm getting sick of my own company. Is this what my friends and family have had to put with all this time? Jesus. I mean, I'm beginning to bug myself so much I'm thinking of requesting a restraining order against myself to get me off my own back. Although, there were times I was considering doing that before I even made the wormhole.

Could be worse though. Imagine it was Ryan Tubridy went jumping through the wormhole over and over and over. The room would be full of Tubridys babbling away, interviewing himself and getting nervous and fidgeting with the cue cards. Fidgeting, fidgeting, fidgeting. What pocket of Hell would that be to come across?

ARSES

Who are you? How do you define yourself? If something, anything, happens do you respond to it based on the values and social norms that were downloaded onto your cranial hard drive as you were reared and socialised by family, school, religion, media, and all the rest? Is that really your response or just an instruction? Is your sense of 'self' merely a construct formed by external cultural and societal forces? What are you other than a range of predictable responses and a few personal memories and traumas that you have placed into a formalised context that depends on the aforementioned external influences? Is there a self there at all? Are you there at all? How free a thinker are you? Do you even really think and, if you do, do you ever find yourself thinking something and then stopping yourself thinking it because it seems disconcertingly transgressive or embarrassingly absurd?

Do you think you're a rebel because you dress like a rebel or are you actually a rebel? What is a rebel? What are you rebelling against? How are you rebelling? Is that really the best you can do? Is that actually rebelling? Are you just playing the part of the rebel in an agreed upon cultural game?

I went to art college. They asked me to make something and to give of myself so I shat on the floor. I was following instructions but interrogating those instructions and showing them up for what they were by carrying them out. Why? Because we must be constantly awake and make no lazy assumptions. Every moment of every day our true selves are smothered by the externally constructed selves imposed upon us by whatever culture presides at the time. We must remove the blinkers. We must reject and then we must reject rejection and learn to accept nothing. Does that make sense? Why not? What is sense? Ceci n'est pas une pipe!

Language too is blinkers. What is language but a way of placing boundaries on thought and expression? If we could ditch language and communicate telepathically we could say so much more. Dogs are more genuine when they snarl and whine and sniff each others' arses. We are just trading agreed assumptions and myths. Even when we're telling the truth we are lying.

Last week I held a protest against protesting. It turned into a riot against rioting so I threw a molotov cocktail at a molotov cocktail. Then I told a woman that I loved her but that I didn't know who she was or what love was and neither did she and she said that love was a feeling and I said that I didn't know what a feeling was and she said it was just a feeling and I said that I had a feeling she was just told that by someone who heard it from someone else. Later we got married and divorced at the same time and then I sniffed her arse and whined and then I snarled.

I am most awake when I am asleep. I will not sleep in a building. I will not live in a house. A house is a contract and a house is a series of assumptions. When I lived in a house I slept in the bath, I shat in the kitchen sink, and I ate my dinner from the toilet bowl. When it got dark I hung my pyjamas over the windows and I dressed in curtains. Then I sat in the fireplace and set fire to the rest of the place. I will not live in a house or an apartment. Apartment. Apart-meant. Where we are 'meant' to live 'apart'. Apart from others and ourselves. What is a roof but a blindfold?

I live in a forest. I eat nuts and berries and when I eat the wrong berries I get a sore tummy. I shout and roar as I endure the cramps but I do not call a doctor because a doctor will just say this is a stomach, this is poison, this is illness, and then it will be decided that my stomach is ill because I ate the wrong berries and that I ate the wrong berries because my head is ill and I am not adhering to the all powerful Adherable and I should be locked away. I only trust one type of doctor. I only trust the proctologist. The proctologist sniffs people's arses and so knows more than any other because up our arses is where our heads can be found.

We only think we are people in the same way that we think that there is a world and there is a universe. That is all just an idea. It's not even our idea, we were just told the idea. The truth is that there is nothing. The Big Bang was just an idea that got out of hand and spread out into the void. If we think about something else maybe it will all just go away. What will we think about? We will think about nothing. Nothing at all. We will think about nothing and it will be easy because even when we think that we are thinking about something we are thinking about nothing.

And now I must go. Using language has made me feel cheap and dishonest and besides, I've still got a pain in my stomach and it's really getting bad but maybe that too is all in my head and my head is up my arse and everything is a load of arse. Someone call a proctologist!

THE MAN ON THE STREET

When asked if he wrote his songs for the man on the street, Sid Vicious said: 'No, I've met the man on the street and he's a cunt.'

ALSO. . .there's another right c word of a fella over on the RABID DOG CHRIST blog. Click the link and check it out.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

What use is food for thought eh? I mean, you can't eat it. What use is food you can't eat? If someone gave you food for thought you'd get hungry and all you'd be thinking about is how hungry you are and you'd have no time to think about the food they gave you for thought. Food for thought my arse! How's that for food for thought?

And here's more food for thought for you, why does everyone say earthquakes are San Andrea's fault? What did San Andrea ever do? Unfair!

And a final bit of brain dinner for you, physicists keep talking about neutrinos but what about old-trinos, eh? What about them? Quantum physics is a bit ageist isn't it? Have a mind chew on that food for thought!

That is all!

. . .jeepers, I'm beginning to sound like The LOL Generator or, worse still, Jimmy Carr. This blog really is dying on its arse. It used to be good though. Do you remember the one about the blacks? That was a bit of a laugh. Some of The Mother stuff was good too wasn't it? And there used even be some kind of food for thought stuff but sure what use is that? Ah well, if it keeps up at this rate I can always get a job writing the opening gags on The Craig Doyle Show.

REVENUE ZOO

To generate more revenue, the zoo have renamed the animals after sponsors. It's working out grand. I was there yesterday. I arrived in time to see the Avivas getting fed and I got a look at the new baby Coca Koala bear (very cute). The Fyffes are still their old selves, jumping about the place and screeching and picking nits out of each other. The Goldman Sachs are very fierce though. I hope they never escape their enclosure. They'd run riot and wreck the place.

My favourite has to be the Tayto, with its big ears and long trunk. Funny, I remember the Tayto the zoo used have in the eighties. Ironically, it died because people kept throwing it Taytos and its stomach went all banjaxed.

Anyway, the zoo is a great day out. Very educational for children too, teaching them all about animals and fiscal responsibility going forward.