ah bollox…

I just realised that one of the essays I have due is going to draw me into a place I don’t want to go. Its about identity and I was hoping to do masculinity but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that I’m gonna end up writing about the 6. I know I said it was better to look at these things but that doesn’t make it fun

if theres one thing I like to hear….

its this message I just recieved:

“yo yo yo…”-respect to early ’90s vocab, good start

“…don’t pay the deposit on the SanFran house till the end of the week…”-I’m broke, this is fantastic

“….I’m talking to people about a house thats closer to town and cheaper…”-wooh! I might not have to live in the American version of where I live now afterall(Dún Laoghaire(thats suburban,  post-dockland, faux-rural,   pre-ghetto satelite 4 for anyone whos not in the know))

Dun Laoghaire is the only place I know with an equal number of D4 heads as Heroin Addicts, poetry readings as stabbings, hippies as scumbags-truly, it is a bizzarre place to live.  Its tiny but still manages to pack in a premier festival of culture, a noted poetry festival and at(the very) least 3 Aslan gigs a year-makes no sense.

incidentally, I’d love to see a pie chart of the Yacht Club to dealer ratio, it’d be pretty unique-much less one sided than one for Fingal

A brief defence of procrastrination

I have two essays, two exams and two scripts due within the next few weeks and I’m killing time in  the library(of all places). And no, I don’t feel guilty for the extra cubic pounds of stress I’m forcing upon my future self. Heres why:

For a start, my future self is an asshole and probably deserves it. My logic on this being that I’m an asshole now and have no intention of changing my ways so even if my future self isn’t an asshole he’ll still have to pay for the crimes of his past(my present). I mean, if I’m prepared to dick myself over like this imagine what I’d do to another person-my future self is gonna have a lot to answer for

Its sunny outside. If I can’t be outside enjoying it right now you can be damn sure I’m not gonna let that motherfucker enjoy it either. In fact, I’m going to do my dambdest to ensure that asshole is stuck in an exam hall doing repeats in early September knowing full well that its because I wanted to have a slightly more enjoyable time right now.

I’m lazy. Being lazy requires a certain lack of ambition, I have that in abundance. I justify my motivational ineptitiude by sighting famous lazy people of the past. Issac Newton was relaxing under a tree when he made his famous discovery that apples hurt. Moses led the jews out of Egypt not with the promise of s homeland free of oppression and tyranny but with these words(and I quote) “bollox to this(slavery), I’m off-anyone coming?”. He didn’t even bother with a decent excuse “arigh’Pharoh, me’n'de boys are headin’off to the shop to get some unlevened bread. Do ya want anything? Sound” Ghandi did the same with his revolutionary peacful protestation “jaysus Apu, its far too hot to fight the British today, lets just have a sit down instead-whataya say?”. Pearse; “ah feckit lads, it’ll take all bleedin’day to turn this one around-do ya wanna just be martyrs instead?”. This list could go on forever but I’m just not bothered.

Joint logic: “if you study for your exams this year your just gonna have to do harder ones next year, and then, the system, like, ownes you forever…man”

Guilt, like ‘comapssion’, ‘thoughts’ and ‘good honest work’, is for pussies!!

I don’t know about you Batman but my head feels like…

…a box of chocolates that have been left in the sun

…a melon in a vice

….my brain has been grated

…someone threw a cat at me

…I got hit by a falling A-bomb that failed to explode

….its just been introduced to a baseball bat

……its just been introduced to Rickie Hatton(or that Mongolian dude everyone is scared to fight)

…..its been surgically detached from my head and dragged through the Sahara for 40days before being stitched back on using a staple gun, a hammer and a complete lack of sympathy

I’m pretty sure my IQ has dropped a few points after last night. When I woke up this morning I thought I was dying, you can imagine how dissapointed I was to find out that I’d have to go through with the rest of the day. Oh and for the record: Guinness, Miller and Dutch Gold don’t like each other, I know because I can still feel them fighting in my stomach. I wanna puke

Fight or flight? figet!

So there I was comfortably warming my buns on the lap of a fair young maid, craic was being had and shared by all. Then I heard the radiator I was sitting on say(jokingly, we hope) “me and Rua are getting married”-nobody laughes-she says it again…

eyes widen ears prick up, I stayed but I was ready to bolt at any second

I also bumped into the mad one from the before time(’Night of the Numbers’ and ‘Wax on Wax off’). She left the pub without really saying much but sent me a text within twenty minutes

“nxt time lets try talkin itl b crazy! gud ta c ya though ben a while!”

I waited 2 hours and developed a twitch before I wrote back, I wish I hadn’t written back. This is gonna happen with that girl every 6 months for the rest of my life(5 years and ticking)-Run in, run away, run in, run away, run in, run away, Run in, Rua found dead in the  woods having been strangled with his own cock!

 Well, I’m not gonna get sucked in this time……probably

In other news my cousin got his girlfriend pregnant. Papa Rua dealt with this in characteristic “I really don’t want to talk about this” fashion with 4 sentences

1.X got his girlfriend pregnant. 

2. I don’t want to be a grandparent until you can take care of a family.

3. The ‘technology’(WTF?) doesn’t always work.

4. I’m going to bed

Not a word wasted

Some things just have to be said

I just read over the two dittys I threw up this afternoon. One is punctuated by profanity and the other isn’t punctuated at all, to that end I’ve decided to write something worth reading. It’ll be short, like a 50 year old ferarri owners knob(or a 20 year old ferarri owners knob for that matter).

You see, over the last month or so I’ve felt myself get angrier. Exceedingly angry for that matter and, for the life of me, I haven’t been able to work out why-until now. A combination of factors were pulling me towards the type of republican mindset that I’ve spent the entirety of my ‘conscious’* life trying to avoid. Most of the debate has been sub-conscious and I didn’t fully realise what was bothering me until just now when I saw Rosies book list(see Spanish… on my blogroll). I want to start by apologising to all the people who were on the recieving end of ‘angry Rua’** and hadn’t a clue why-because I didn’t either.

It started off when I met that guy from Free Derry(see night of the numbers) and got chatting about the North. We both agreed that peace was the only option, 32 would be great but not worth paying for in blood or treating unionists the way we were treated-simple as, end of story. Both of us had experienced systematic discrimination(which lasted right up to the early ’90s)  as children and grown up knowing that there were parts of this island where our ‘kind’ were neither safe nor welcome. We also had the collective memory of the communities from which our families came; memories of people being shot for the way they spelt their name, being exiled for carrying the wrong hymm sheet or worst-just dissapearing. The only thing we disagreed on was how to deal with it.

I grew up in the south. Nobody I knew in Dublin had any experience of that kind of thing-so I didn’t talk about it. I couldn’t talk about it to momma Rua because she had been through the worst of it in the ’70s and, to be frank, she never quite lost that sense of paranoia/fear. Shes still distrustful of people who talk politics to strangers(she hates the blog). Papa Rua didn’t understand because he was from one of the three counties in Ulster that became part of the free state and conciously ignored the problem(admitadly, he’d prefer to ignore the problem from the relative safety of nationalist areas). My method was not to repress memories asuch but to try and forget, afterall, I was only 3 or 4 the last time I saw a gun pointed in the car window. Kids memories exaggerate things right?

Anyways, this system was working fine. I was a ripe 20 years old and not sectarian, biggotted or militant in any way. That is, it was working fine until my Nordi friend(who objects to the term Nordi because he thinks it refers to scandanavian people-wtf?) blew it all to shit. He was adamant that these things had to be remembered and confronted in order to A)prevent them from happening again and B)because reconcilliation cannot occur until both sides acknowledge their sins. I was pissed at the time so I didn’t consciously register what he was saying. Sub-conciously though, I was on overdrive.
I started remembering things, images, conversations overheard from the adults etc. just little things. I remembered helicopters, soldiers and checkpoints being everywhere. I remember the little outposts that capped every hill around my grannys place. I remember my brother and I not being allowed up the road to the shops until the patrol passed ‘in case they hear yer accents’. We were just kids, the shop was 4 doors down the road. Thats the thing I remember most-being afraid, knowing that you’re hated.
I remember less than five years ago when we got stopped in stanstead going both ways on a Ryanair flight. When my mam protested the security woman didn’t bother answering, she just turned her head and mumbled ‘typical fucking Irish’ loud enogh for us to hear hoping someone would say something and she’d get an excuse-that type of bullshit.
This reached a bizzarre climax on the morning of Paddys day when I stood in the bathroom repeating outloud ‘they hated us, they hated us’. I just couldn’t understand it, I still don’t and it still makes me swing from blind rage to tears to reason to rage again. I felt weird all day that day, just couldn’t wait to drink myself into oblivian and forget about it(which I did, it worked and it was fun). Incidentally, you may have noticed that I stopped writing in Irish after ‘the night of the numbers’-it felt wrong somehow.
It even filtered into what I read. I ended up reading two books ‘Cosa Nostra’ and ‘The Boy’, both of which had striking parrallels in Irish history. Cosa Nostra, as you might’ve guessed, is about the Sicillian mafia-an organisation which mirrors the IRA in structure, image(amongst the community) and activity. Both operate primarily in small local cells but do take orders from a higher ‘authority’, both are secret organisations, both began life as seperatist groups before moving into criminality, both were formed as a result of state corruption and oppression, both have bombed civillian/neutral targets, both have commited atrocities and both maintain that they are the gaurdians of their community. ‘The Boy’ is about apartheid, Baden-Powell and the siege of Mafeking. The two who wrote were massively biased against the British and Boers-which was fair enough because they were being pricks. It really got under my skin, especially the frightening similarity between Sol Plaatje and people like Daniel O’Connell.
I suppose what I’m saying is that all these things came at me at once. All of a sudden I remembered what its like to be genuinely hated and I started to feel it well up within me. I started looking at friends of mine, English friends, differently. I’ve had to confront these feelings properly for maybe the first time ever, and, I think its working. Love dissapears when you neglect it, hate festers. There will not be peace in Northern Ireland until both sides come out and admit that their actions were wrong, or at least apologise. Public debate is the only solution. Cross-community interaction, we have to rehumanise each other.
There was a BBC documentary on tonight showing that Catholic families are still being forced out of Protestant towns and Orange Lodges are being firebombed for the first time ever(or at least at a previously unheard of rate). The peace process is successfully dismantling the military apparatus of violence in the North, the problem is that there are still an aweful lot of angry young men about, only now they don’t take orders from anyone. They operate in disorganised militias attacking indiscriminately. The violence is shifting from political(with a hint of sectarianism) to sectarian straight. You won’t get a ceasefire from a mob, this issue must be addressed and soon
I feel better now that I’ve written that, its out there. Happy now that I understand it. This post was purely to sort out my own head by the way

*I’m sure someone has a better word for it but before a certain age children have no control over such thoughts

**even though none of you probably read this

How much wood would a wood chuck chuckle?

I’m having a terrible day. I’m broke, I can’t afford to pick up the photos I dropped in this morning and I need for Friday, I’ve got a tonne of work to do and I can’t get a decent computer to do it on and I’m knackered and its sunny outside and my legs hurt and I wanna play football and it just not fair!!

 but some things still make me laugh. Someone googled the following 3 words and ended up here:

“Mary Hannafin Sexy”

What in the name of perversion possesed anyone to type that in? Not that I’m taking anything away from ‘minister for deadly Mary’. She helped my mate out with a college project today, very nice of her it was-I wouldn’t have helped

incidentally, has anyone ever googled google? wonder what happens

Cuntin’fuckin’Banks!!

I was broke for the whole of last week and the bitch ass cuntin bank wouldn’t give me a fuckin’overdraft. I put a cheque in on Tuesday and the fuckwad pricks didn’t see fit to put it through even by Friday while I went without lunch 3 days in a row and had to stay in all weekend because its money on the door and a fiver for the Nightlink just to look at town on the weekend!!!

Then I go to to get money out today-Monday-a full six days after I lodged the cheque in the ‘rapid* deposit box’. Lo and Behold, it seems to have gone through and joy of joys they’ve once again seen fit to give me an overdraft……wait a second-I’ve been ripped off again!!! Some Cunt has scammed my Pass card and stolen all my fucking money, not only that but the prickwads down at the bank who wouldn’t give me an overdraft were more than happy to give him one-WHAT THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING STORY WITH YOU ASSHOLES GETTING PAID SO MUCH TO BE SUCH INCOMPETANT PRICKS!!!

This is bollox, utter bollox

 

*named with the same cruel irony as ‘the alliance party’-the ONLY political party in the North to whome no one is alligned

7 things I like about Sunderland

1.CEO(or something like that): Lanky Niall ‘The Business’ Quinn
2. Manager: Roy ‘Roy Keane’ Keane(who you’ll find pictures of on Supermans PJs)
3. Pandy ‘bakesale’ Reid-thats ma motherfucka!
4. Paul McShane-so much heart that the biddings already started for the rights to his donar card
5. The fact that the club have commited to bring through young Irish players and blooding them at premiership level so that they at least stand a chance of making it good at international level
6. 2 games in a row for the first time in in 4 years and (fingers crossed) maybe 3 in a row for the first time since 2001.
7. The fact that Niall Quinns experiment has done more for Irish football in under three years than the FAI have done in 14(yes its 14 years since USA ‘94)*.

8. This list of Irish players in the premiership basically sums up why Sunderland** are great. The following play for:
Kevin Kilbane (Wigan)

Kevin Doyle (Reading)
Stephen Hunt (Reading)
Shane Long (Reading)

Shay Given (Newcastle)
Damien Duff (Newcastle)
Stephen Carr (Newcastle)

Daryll Murphy (Sunderland)
Anthony Stokes (Sunderland)
Liam Miller (Sunderland)
Paul McShane (Sunderland)
Roy O D (Sunderland)
David Connoly (Sunderland)
Ian Harte (Sunderland)
Graham Kavanagh (Sunderland)
Andy Reid (Sunderland)

Stephen Kelly (Birmingham)

Joey O Brien (Bolton)
Andy O Brien (Bolton)

*Korea and Japan was good but that had nothing to do with the FAI. The miracle of Saipan was down to the players and coaching staff pulling together and making the best of an impossible situation-by themselves. If anything the FAIs amateur bullshit made circumstances worse. Also, there was a Quinny in the back room!

**much respect is also due for Reading because all three of those lads needed someone to invest in them

Erasmus anyone?

I just found out(well, we were told a few months ago but I wasn’t listening) that I can get an erasmus to Chicago next year!! Best thing about it of course being that I can get a full semester of really high end photography learning done……….or get pissed and stoned and laid all day every day-to be honest I’d be happy either way.

Only problem is that it would cost around seven grand which is an awful lot more than the nothing I’m paying to go to DIT. This is made a little worse by the fact that you can’t work if you’ve got a student visa so its even harder to minimise the damage. Of course, I could always play the Irish card and work under the table-which would be even easier if it were still the ’80s, goddamn Celtic Tiger limit my emmigration(rua mumbles bitterly to himself)…….

 Also, being away would mean that I’d have a tonne of work to catch up on for 4th year which would be a massive pain in the tits

But pissed and stoned and laid………

I suppose it’d be great if I could make some decent contacts accross the pond, plus, it’d be time out of Dublin……

hmmm, I think I’ll do what I did for the leaving cert when I couldn’t make up mind. Put your name down and if you get it, accept it. When I filled out my CAO there was a twenty point box that I had to hit to go to DIT(Trinity above and Galway below) and thats exactly where I landed and its worked out perfectly. I don’t believe in fate but I firmly believe that good luck is something you should run with. You mightn’t believe it but I’m one of the luckiest cunts I know so I never stop running, anytime I’ve tried I’ve ended up deppressed and miserable. I haven’t rolled the dice since I first got sick and I’ve been fucking miserable so fuck it lets fucking do it.

Can’t wait to call the Credit Union-they’ll love this one