Pass the Bread Soda
That’s the thing about eight-seater taxis… you’re so muffled up the front in the driver’s seat that you can’t hear the bloke behind you spewing his Bacardi all over the kip so by the time you find out about it, it’s too late.
There’s an Aviation Day in Newcastle happening right about now, I had meself all geared up to bring the kids for a bit of face-painting, flight simulating and skydiver admireage, but it just wasn’t meant to happen I reckon.
Nope, it just so happens that our eight-seater taxi is also Laughingboy’s only mode of transport so one whiff of the pen in that taxi when I opened her up was enough to convinve me to make other plans. The heat of the sun had warmed her insides up a little, see, so the vomitus belch of stench that erupted was so strong it just wasn’t worth tolerating for the sake of an interview with the Irish Air Corps.
Fuuuck.
AND I’ve lost my rubber gloves.
Winter Year Weirdness
When I pull into a parking space I like to glance quickly into the car parked beside me, this tells me if I can get away with slamming my door against their enamel, as you do.
Today I did just that. Pulling into a space in a crammed carkpark underneath a large shopping complex, I scoped out the black 4×4 with its chaste paintwork beside me and was dismayed to see a little head floating in the back seat of the vehicle. She had big sad eyes and a head on her like a dandelion clock. Someone’s Granny. Awww.
They could’ve left her with an aul’ Woman’s Own or a lollipop or a crochet hook or even a Nintendo, but they didn’t. Not even so much as a crack in the window. She gave me the BDI as I assembled my array and made me feel guilty.
It made me wonder what sort of parent I’d be to my aul’ pair someday, should I be lucky enough. Would I let my mother run naked on the beach in just her nappy? Would I bring them to Lidl high on coke and let them run riot in the aisles and would my dad tug on my hem in Tesco, wheedling for Viagra (not ’till after dinner I said!)?
Then I wondered what sort of child I might make to my kids… would Puppychild read Tolkien to me as she tucks me in in my nineties and let me eat custard lollipops on Sundays? I must be more mindful of this in the future in preparation for Plan B, should my plans to bugger off to Africa eventually fall through. Plan C might be driving into the Grand Canyon high on my first ever shot of heroin… I haven’t really thought that one through yet.
Maybe the Eskimos have it right, but shuffling off in the direction of Wexford waiting for the elements to get me seems a bit rough. I might wander up the Dublin direction and do a Mad Mary on it and dance and sing in my finery or something else entirely.
Haunting a 4×4 in a carpark, though… that plan’s way down the list I tell yeh.
(image from http://deadpandas.blogspot.com/)
Jehovah’s Witnesses – My Dirty Little Secret
There are many places in this house that escape my cleaning routine. I may visit them twice a year, maybe not at all; the greasy crevice between the oven and the cabinets being one such place for instance. Euughh.
Another would be the place behind the giant shoe-box underneath our bed, apparently.
I spotted the glossy magazines while searching for spare change this morning, they grabbed my interest as a very strange place to keep magazines, so I pulled them out to have a better look. I turned page after page in total shock at both the images, and the fact that each page was so well-worn and crumpled by such apparently sweaty eager hands. I felt so confused and dirty at having found TAT’s little secret, and wondered what I should do with it.
See, I understand that a lot of men hide porn from their wives and I would be delighted if these magazines indeed were porn, but they weren’t porn at all, they were five different issues of WATCHTOWER, a Jehovah’s Witness rag that usually finds its way into the recycle bin around here (away with your claims of oozing purity! I reserve the right to be a total fuck-up, thank you very much!).
So what am I to do? Am I to throw the magazines on the coffee table in fury during a dramatic confrontation with TAT over a dirty-great-big fry-up one morning?
“WHAT’S THIS?!?” I might scream… “IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO TELL ME ABOUT? AM I NOT MEETING YOUR NEEDS HERE OR WHAT?? ARE YOU TALKING TO STRANGE MEN AT THE DOOR BEHIND MY BACK NOW, IS THAT IT??”
…and so on and so forth.
No, that seems too much like hard work. Instead I shall tell all his friends so that they may look upon him with great awe and ridicule, for that is what it is all about, for God is a woman and likes wine and has a sense of humour about these things.
(I hope!)
See you in Hell.
xx
me
Is there such a thing as cranial Viagra?
I feel I should apologise to those of you who still read this blog. The fact that you patiently wait for content that is sporadic at best, and you leave comments even if I don’t always have time to return them, this amazes me and I’m so unbelievably thankful to you for that loyalty. I feel like I’m behaving a bit like a spoiled brat sometimes.
It’s not so much that my family takes up most of my time, it does, but there should always time for a quick update… I just can’t figure out what the hell I’m supposed to write about, without the end result seeming so much like a bag of shite. There’s a constant scanning mechanism in my brain beeping away, searching for something interesting or funny to say, but my sense of humour seems to be wedged in that dark spot under the bed that is impossible to reach, even with a broken coat-hanger. It just sits there by itself, grumbling and gathering fluff and won’t come back out of its own accord no matter how much coaxing I do.
Blogging is just so difficult all of a sudden! Content must be original, interesting, heartfelt without being maudlin. It must be brief and memorable, and true. It can’t be re-gurgitated, can’t be contrite or honest in a negative way unless a healthy dose of vitriol is involved (vitriol to me might as well be a brand of cough-medicine though, it just doesn’t appeal to me at all at all), and it can’t be so sweet it makes your teeth ache. I have worry. I have stress and boredom and niggling doubt all rolled up in a gooey ball. I have negative thoughts that don’t go down too well in blogs, and gripes about people and things that should not be written about. Apart from that, there are dodgy YouTube clips and stupid Facebook applications filling the rest of the fug.
I think The Secret Fire killed it for me. The pressure to create something as good as, or better than that post is almost impossible, a fact that one or two people have pointed out to me before. This truth feeds my insecurities and I agree with them, and feel like giving up because it’s so unlikely that the planets will align themselves again so perfectly. But I don’t give up, even if I probably should. Maybe some day the Mojo will come back, maybe it won’t.
So I suppose the rest is in the hands of Saint Jude, and in the meantime, thank you so much for hanging in there!
The Interceptor
Rain pelted the windscreen in gusts as the car’s velocity hiccuped in turn, driving at a steady 90kmph, Chris peered through the bedlam of swishing wipers and racing raindrops on the highway of his melancholy. Maybe it was a bad idea to cure 3am insomnia with a random drive to nowhere in particular that night.
Damn cow took his parrot, the African Grey he’d personally taught to answer the doorbell with a perfect “Piss off!” whenever it chimed. He hoped she rotted in hell, her indignance and arrogance kept him from functioning at anything but a basic level since she’d fucked off two weeks ago out of the blue. Driving helped him to think.
Chris pulled his car over at a truck-stop in a sudden dire need for a nicotine fix as he realised his pack of smokes was still in his jacket in the boot. A shock of rain slapped his senses as the door popped open and he shuddered as a trickle of icy water meandered down the back of his neck which he braved with a grimace as he fumbled through the leathery folds of his coat and found his cigarettes. As he slammed the boot-door closed, her sudden there-ness shocked him to the core.
“What the fuck. Where did you come from?” his fright was immediately dampened by the softness of her face, and the cruel way the rain whipped her fringe into her eyes. She seemed too pure for this sort of weather.
“Sorry,” she laughed with a gaiety that would ordinarily be forbidden on a night like this, “Can I’ve a lift? My boyfriend left me stranded a mile down the road and my phone’s all wet, it’s fucked! I can’t make any calls on it.”
“Get in.” Chris fought the urge to victory-punch the air as she ducked into the passenger-seat.
As he shunted into gear and pulled back onto the motorway, he let his eyes roam over her striped knee-length socks and savoured the sweetness of the sickly perfume the rain couldn’t quite seem to wash away. He was bewitched, he wanted to know everything about her. She to him was like wet cement to a ten-year old, he felt a strong urge to make his mark on her somehow.
“So what’s your line of work?” he asked in his favourite mock-sensual voice.
She turned her head to meet his gaze directly, he found it hard to break away to watch the treacherous road ahead. She smiled an odd smile.
“I guess I’m here now, I might as well tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“I’m an Interceptor.”
“What… like… as in the ally of the Deceptacons? Do you… like put WD40 on their transformer joints or something?” he snorted slightly as he laughed and instantly hated himself for it.
“No, my job is to be placed at a certain time in history to prevent certain things.”
Chris narrowed his eyes and shot her a glance. The stuff that was coming out of this girl’s mouth was all too contradictory to her hooped earrings.
“Like what?” Chris toyed with the idea of dumping the girl and her little pool of insanity back to the kerb of the miserable night. He had enough insanity in his life already.
“Like yesterday. It was my job to let the bus out in front of my car into the path of a long line of traffic I’d already made sure to slow down on the path to the Red Cow Roundabout. They were furious with me, you should’a heard the beeping I got! The bus driver was happy enough with me though. Thing is, they should all have been happy with me, but they didn’t know it.”
“Why?”
“Because if I hadn’t been there to slow down the traffic enough to let that bus out in front of me, the collision would have happened that killed fifteen people, ten minutes later.”
“What?!”
“That bus would’ve side-swiped a blue Audi which would’ve caused it to jack-knife on the slip-road, see? It was my job to delay the bus, to let the angry Audi go on about it’s business.” The girl pulled the sun-visor down in front of her eyes and began to stroke her eyelashes and check the status of her running mascara. “Like you. You’re a school teacher, right?”
“Jesus Fucking Christ” Chris spat as he momentarily lost his grip on the steering-wheel and struggled to re-gain control of the car. “How did you know that?”
“You’re a school teacher. Sure, the kids like you, but you’re a pretty stupid school teacher, because you’re letting that errant girlfriend of yours rule your life… I mean seriously, you were only with her for five years, that’s hardly an eternity, is it? Is she really worth the distraction? That bimbo would’ve caused the demise of seventy-two people, like, half the school, if it wasn’t for me.”
The girl pulled out a razor-blade and pulled the corner of her eye towards her ear, gazing at herself intently at the tiny mirror stuck to the inside of the visor in front of her as she did so. The razor introduced itself to the soft whiteness of her eye in a flash and blood trickled over her knuckle as she pressed hard.
“It’s my job…” she blinked a blood-shot eye at the driver beside her and smiled her quirkiest smile “… to shock you into crashing your car and killing yourself so that the explosion you cause through your stupid neglect two weeks from now, doesn’t happen.”
By the time his car had hit the supporting column of the bridge, she had gone.
He wondered in the brief moment before his skull shattered on the steering-column, if she had ever existed at all.
