‘Febrile trippage’ or ‘Where’s my sandwiches?’
I don’t know what it feels like to drop acid. Do I miss not experiencing it though? I don’t think so. I’ve heard about people having mad conversations with cows in fields, running terrified from evil statues. It doesn’t sound like a great buzz to me, nor do the flashbacks, should they happen to weirdly re-appear when conversing with teacher-type persons whose blouses confuse me.
Besides, I think I’ve rough idea already of how an acid trip might feel, because I vividly remember tripping as a kid, madly enough. I remember waking up from fevered dreams rooting frantically among the bedcovers searching for my sandwiches or trying to pass the ball and snapping-to in darkness oblivion, confused, spaced.
I thought I was the only one, too, until I recalled the experience to others who recalled the same thing back to me in turn. This made me wonder if EVERYBODY experienced it as a child. Then I wondered why we don’t experience it as adults! How unfair is that, that nature deprives us of the free buzz when we seem to need it most!
I’m talking about those midnight fevers. You know the ones… you’re dreaming about vast black infinite space in which large spools are spinning… some so incredulously fast that they can twist reality into a cruel joke, some crawl so slow so as to instill an ominous fear in you like you know that eventually it’ll hit you and squish you flat. Sometimes you might be standing on the edge of one of those shapes and you feel like you could easily topple into a mysterious void never to be found again and you open your eyes and watch in delerium as the rectangular halo around your bedroom door creeps closer and closer and tells you it’s going to eat you…
…or am I just imagining the whole thing?
To tax, or not to tax. That is the question.
So this first-born of mine… Laughingboy, you all know him by now maybe, but if you don’t, let me fill you in.
He was diagnosed with Otahara Syndrome at the tender age of three months. It’s a seizure condition that affects wee small babies but given that he’s now ten years old, his diagnosis has morphed into a very vague ‘Controlled Seizure Disorder with Global Developmental Delay’. We’re entirely lucky to still have him. He lights us up. He’s my dude, and my God.
He can’t do stuff for himself. He needs a wheelchair. He can’t sit on the couch with us and watch The Simpsons because he has no head-support and would fall over. He’s a whopping 33.5kg child who hasn’t progressed beyond the development of a three-month-old baby, but he is his own person who loves Drum and Bass and who is slowly appreciating a love for R&B against all my wishes.
So he needs a mode of transport, right?
We had one, but he grew out of it. We bought it for €13,000. We had means, at the time.
Our panic to find a new vehicle was sincere more recently, being a family of now fewer means. I earn Carer’s Allowance which isn’t much considering I’m doing the Government a huge favour by personally looking after a disabled kid (It feels weird saying that, seeing as not a hundred years ago, said kid would’ve been hidden away or smothered with a pillow for fear of being a burden on society. Is a disabled kid worthy of society? That’s a can of worms and a half). My husband has a severely debilitating condition too… he has Degenerative Disk Disorder, a condition that means that he is on constant opiates, is in constant pain, and most definitely cannot work. That too, is a can of worms and a half.
My point is, is that we have a minimal amount of incoming money.
This is why it seemed like a blessing when a friend of means of ours chose to sell/lease us a vehicle, a beautiful vehicle at that; one that could not only carry Laughingboy, but any one of his other wheelchair-bound friends at a time. It has six gears. It guzzles the diesel, but it’s worth it. And it’s almost paid-off.
But guess what! Because we didn’t buy the vehicle from an ‘approved dealer’, it means we don’t get to avail of the wonderful Tax-Free Grant that usual vehicles of disablement would ordinarily possess. To avail of free annual motor tax, we must buy a new vehicle at a cost of €23,000 or more, but hey, at least we’d get the VRT back, worth €3,000 or so, in said case. Ooooo. ‘Yay’. I would be less sarcastic, if I had that much money just lying around.
It means that we now have to pay a vehicle tax on our vehicle of comparatively ill-gotten means by roughly €1,100 a year. That much money would heat our house for well over a year and a half, plus change.
So, it seems we should sell our vehicle to a registered dealer, then buy it right back off them again, just to avail of free vehicle tax that should normally be entitled to us.
Does that not seem like fraud to you?
Or should we just sell said vehicle to pay for said house-heating and limit Laughingboy’s travel to public services… an hourly shuttle-bus that doesn’t facilitate wheelchairs?
What the fuck is going on with this system???
Craven
I’m at a turning point in my life, I think. Not in a Robert Frost sort of way, but imagine his yellow wood had been bulldozed one morning and replaced with a four-lane motorway full of spaghetti junctions… that sort of way.
I was getting so good at hiding from things on my comfy couch surrounded by my lovely little K8lings and thoroughly enjoyed my last three years of shitehawkism beneath the radar, but it seems I’ve been found out by some Greater Power who is suddenly gunning for my blood.
They saw me coming. I’m a big fan of Puppychild’s school you see, it’s an ancient old thing in the middle of nowhere filled with nobles and countryfolk and eccentrics so I used to attend the parent meetings out of curiosity. Then I began to attend them purely because nobody else seemed to want to go so it was sort of obvious when I didn’t. Now I have to go because I got spuriously voted into the position of Chairperson of the Parents Association.
“Sorry? I’m a what now?” I says. They just smiled and handed me their coffee bill.
We have the menial task of raising between ten and twelve thousand quid to cover the money flop this year it seems. One does not just pull a handy grand out of one’s bum, you know. This requires work! A LOT of work. We threw a film night at the school and raked in €400 straight away, it was a great buzz. The flyer for this Friday’s gig looks like this:
Aww, Chwismassy!
My family, however, also demands that I get up off my arse and try some hard graft but I’ve no clue as to how to work that one into an already jammers schedule. Need creativity. And a time machine.
And! Worst of all! Potty training has begun.
Save me.
Snacking between meals
A public health nurse dropped by recently, it wasn’t an official appointment, just an old friend. Just as well, in hindsight. She admired Sir Fartsalot’s struts as he toddled with his funky nappy walk (you know the way they do) around the porch as we chatted on the doorstep, and commented that he had something in his mouth. I leaned down to him, gave the innards of his little mouth a sweep with my pinky finger and evicted a well chewed cigarette butt. Impressed with my mothering skills I think this lady was not, but she didn’t show it. She laughed it off, fair play to her.
He’s down to seven butts a day now, thank God.
Half a job
Story of my life, innit? This blog’s looking like my teenage diary, large gaps filled with absent memories, a half-assed diary of mystery. Still, I’m glad I still have them both, as haphazard as they are.
I’ve learned exactly half of Xtreme’s song ‘More Than Words’ on the guitar. I spent half the time in college that I was supposed to. My house is semi-clean, semi-cluttered. I’m a half a job, a quitter, a loser even.
But that’s good, right? If there were no losers, there’d be no winners. You can’t have night without day, hey.
If I’d been more commited, I would’ve told you about Laughingboy’s brush with botox last month. Not just for those with more money than sense, the stuff happens to be quite useful it seems. I was only too happy to have them inject poison into my kid, in fact.
He mutated earlier this year, you see, from a little boy into a strapping young man. His schoolteachers panicked and swiftly ordered larger equipment to handle him, I rushed out to buy big-boy clothes and meanwhile Laughingboy suffered. Nature would have it that a child’s bones grow first, but their surrounding supportive tendons can take up to a year to catch up. Cruel, isn’t it? Seems Mother Nature’s a bit of a half-a-job, too.
That’s what the botox was for, to relax those muscles, to make them sleep and stop hurting while his cells multiply. You should see the difference it’s made! No longer frog-legged, no longer squirming in his wheelchair, he’s his old Laughingboy self again, but taller.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… I’m so glad he lives in the 21st century.
Why you need to sleep with a teddybear
Created by deviant artist Begemott.
Why nobody had a sense of humour before 1960
Rain has been pelting on damp soil, the fire has wanted to be lit, a dreary week in July such as this would have been very boring if it hadn’t been so much fun.
It started last week on the bus to Galway with friends and a hip-flask and several spurious games of dirty 20-questions. It travelled through a night of drinking and dancing and marshmallow fighting and on into the next evening for several sober games of cards and deep thought and soulful talking… old wounds were unexpectedly torn apart and spilled upon the kitchen table, our agonies seemed less agonizing once their funny sides were pointed out. It was like drinking champagne after a long walk through a desert, only it wasn’t champagne, it was peppermint tea.
The following night, I returned home and received the welcome of a queen. I was quite pleased to see that my pretty flower hadn’t been eaten by slugs too.
Say hello to my pretty flower!
Of course, a dampner can be placed on such an idyllic weekend upon close examination of snapshots stolen by an inebriated trigger finger… embarrassment is bound to ooze at the state of one, and the drunken poses one can pull when suitably excited. It made me think of old photographs, and the restriction that was imposed on their subjects.
“Stay fucking still, you little shit.”
Before daguerrotype photographs were replaced by better photographic equipment in the ’60′s, there was no barstool posing, no sneaky bathroom shots or arms-length group photography. They had to sit with as fixed an expression as possible, and a serious face is the easiest to hold for the hundred seconds it took to expose their images. It’s a sad thing missed, all those instances of happiness that happened back then, it’s as though they never happened.
It’s only eighty years later, and my one-year-old is taking his own photographs, albeit very spurious ones. How times have changed.
Eating – ur doin it wrong.
I was at a wedding dinner last month in the company of other carrot slurpers and talking about the awful state of the weather when I suddenly got a terrible shock. As I looked around, I discovered that everybody… absolutely everybody was eating with their knives and forks in the wrong hands.
I do know how to set a table; the knives go on the right of the plate, the forks on the left. Whenever I pick them up to eat, however, I always switch hands. It just makes more sense to shovel with the right, or use a right-handed anchor to hold the meat down while I saw through its sinews with a left-cutting knife. I’m right handed, ergo my right hand has more control, Shirley? Until that day, I had presumed that everybody ate this way.
It was a very shameful moment, but nothing champagne couldn’t fix.
Almost as stupid as this, I felt. Almost.
I did try switching last week, I shouldn’t have worn that new blouse… shouldn’t have trusted my left hand to take control out of the blue like that, I should have eased it into the idea gently, dammit! Poor lefty bottled it halfway on the journey from plate to mouth and had an awful case of the shakes, discombobulating all over the boobal area of said blouse. Disaster.
But what have I done to my brain?! This lack of control practice for poor lefty has probably damaged it beyond repair, synapses’ bags packed, they’ve gone in search of sunnier climes probably. In fact, I’ve most likely passed the tendancy to eat incorrectly to my growing foeti… if their left hands drop off in their mid-50′s, it’ll be MY fault.
I’m a freak and I’m screwing up the evolutionary chain, the smell of antiestablishmentarianism is rank. I flatly refuse to conform to being a left handed forker though, it’s everyone else that’s wrong, not me!!!
Buried Treasure
I was clearing out my bookmarks this evening and looked what spilled out!!
-Floaty-mouse images of Dublin City in June 1961 and June 2011, a then-and-now sort of collection. Look at all the dinky cars! (Stolen from Jo :)
This is what real love looks like.
-US Actress Tina Fey’s ‘A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child’; it’s as though she’s inside my head.
-10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling Read these, and write them out twenty times, you naughty children!
-How to make a gift box out of a bank note. For when you couldn’t be arsed buying that voucher.
-Arty Bollocks Generator because everybody needs an artist statement!
Oh, and a creepy picture by Lori Nix. Click the image to magnifify it.
Current Affairs
By the time we’d hit the vegetable isle, I decided I’d had enough. Sir Fartsalot was perched in the in-built trolley seat and was also looking pretty pissed off, and not knowing the laws of physics, he seemed pretty confused, too.
Every time I touched him… ZAP. Every time I touched the trolley chassis… POP. Static electriciteh on mah trolleh. Pain in the arse.
I could either:
a) Ditch the trolley and just stuff the groceries into various crevices and pockets I had hanging around, but I’dve gotten into trouble doing that.
b) Take off my shoes and socks and declare myself strange.
c) Earth the trolley somehow, some other way.
So that’s what I did. I wedged my keyring into the metal arch of the trolley wheel and arranged everything so that the keys dragged on the ground, then tested my idea by hyper-accelerating to the butcher’s department. Dubiously I touched the baby’s nose and…
…nothing. Score!
I got strange looks. Very strange looks.
“Your keys are on the ground, love” – I got. Or…
“Don’t leave them behind ya! Haha!”
I nodded, and thanked, and I felt like the biggest weirdo on the planet, but at least the electroshock therapy wasn’t getting in the way of the retail therapy any more.
Why don’t supermarket trolleys have earthing-strips?
(I realise this is an increadibly boring conversational topic, but I don’t care. I’m bored.)
