I was living on a farm on the outskirts of the village of Kilmuckridge, known for being near the beach to the hundreds of tourists that pass through it each year. Nowadays that’s not much of a distance for me to get there from home, but when I was young, it might as well have been deep space. It was the late 80s, and both Mam and Dad were working and looking after me and baby Cathal. Micheàl was in primary school, so he got to see kids his own age during the day, whereas I spent most of the time on my own. The economy being what it was back then (which is to say, “fucked”) there was no way we had money for playschool or anything like that, if it even existed at the time. So for a lot of the time, it was me and one or other of my parents, my grandmother, Gretta (henceforth to be called Granny K.) or our neighbour Iris, who babysat from time to time. As you can imagine, there’s not going to be much conversation beyond what few games a grown-up can play with a three-or-four-year-old, and there was housework to do, so a lot of times I was left to my own devices.

This is not to say I was ignored. I can remember lots of instances of Dad drawing me hilarious pictures of rabbits and foxes, and me trying to copy them, or Mam bringing me a plate of Philadelphia sandwiches, which were my favourite until I got sick of them. I haven’t eaten Philadelphia since 1992.

No, I was just…bound to where I was by distance, money, and the fact that the only kind of car I could drive was the kind you had to run along the ground with your hand to get going. And even then it always kept turning over. So I turned to my imagination to fill the time before Micheàl came home from school, and it was helped greatly by books, music and television. I know it’s clichè, not to mention a supposedly bad thing, to expose a child to too much television, but during those years TV was like having another child in the house, one who knew all the things I liked. I’m told I used to go crazy for kids’ shows (don’t ask me what they were, all I remember are colours), and would always sit and watch “Murder, She Wrote” with my mam. Only years later would I realise that that show was in fact about the world’s most effective and efficient serial killer, but more on that stuff later.

Music was a totally different trip for me. To say it lit my brain on fire is both horribly cheesy and totally accurate. I wore my mam’s old cassettes of Elvis and Johnny Cash out listening to them, crooning “Suspicious Minds” in the worst Elvis impression you ever heard, on account of my balls hadn’t dropped and I still sounded like a girl.

Between this, and the Roald Dahl stories my parents read me, I became something of a dreamer, and would spend days roaming around the house with my curly hair and dungarees, looking like a Goodies action figure come to life, rooting in the various cupboards and corners for anything of interest, curious like most kids, but rather than just wanting to satisfy my curiosity, I always felt like if I found something interesting, I’d have to figure out what I was going to make it do.

Even after I started school and got to interact with other children and the fearsome Ms. Kennelly, who’s modus operandi for disciplining her class was to take a kid who’d been naughty up from his seat and shove her wedding ring finger up under his neck, then basically neck-poke him across the room to the wall, where she’d press nail and ring into the poor kid’s gullet while she scolded them, I kept up the habit of looking around for weird things to do things with. Speaking of Ms. Kennelly, I remember being at my graduation from secondary school and hearing a couple of my classmates drunkenly describing what they’d like to do to her as revenge for her punishment technique. Some got it more than others.

It was in this spirit of rooting for imaginary treasures, being around six or so at the time, that I came across a couple of books in the bottom of the airing cupboard. Most of them looked old, but the one on the top looked new: The title of the book was “Everywoman” and it was, for want of a better word, a sex manual.

I know what you’re thinking; My dad had stashed a little visual aid in the airing cupboard, right? You’d be wrong. Mam is a nurse, and this book was basically a medical manual on the mechanics of intercourse(there’s a much better way of putting it than “sex manual”) left over from her days working the maternity wards. Not registering the pictures all that much, and having discovered the joy of reading at school, I decided that I HAD to read that book, and proceeded to do so. I’d barely gotten to the second page when I happened on a word that stumped me. Since it was my mam’s book, I decided to ask her what it was. So I got up from the floor where I was reading, walked out into the back kitchen, where Mam, Dad and Granny K were eating dinner, took a breath and asked, “What’s a va-geen-a?”

Cue horrified look from Granny K.

Cue Mam dashing from the table to the airing cupboard to grab the offending book.

Cue Dad laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

Mam did explain what it was. I’d seen the picture and read the words, so there wasn’t much choice, really. But she forbade me to read that book from that point on, and to only come to her if I had any questions about boys and girls. So the book, unfinished, was moved from the airing cupboard to a secret location. The top shelf of the bookcase.

I want to go on record right now and say that that book caused me more trouble before the age of ten than “Ulysses” has caused since its publication. First, I got a whack on the arse (which sounded worse than it stung, but left the desired impression) for reading out loud to a neighbour’s child the paragraphs on “Fell-attio” and “Cunnilingus” which I had no problem pronouncing…Insert your own tongue joke here… Then I got a scolding for asking what the baby in the picture was doing hanging from his mother’s va-geen-a. Finally, and most bizarrely considering the content of the book, I got the biggest bollocking for ripping the cover off when trying to take it down from the shelf!

It wasn’t that my parents were trying to shield me from sex; it was more that, with the kind of imagination I had, and the fact that I was a tubby little loudmouth (Goodies action figure with talking function!), they were trying to shield visitors, and especially Granny K, from the anatomical tirade that I would surely unleash after reading that book. Which, in retrospect, was fair enough.

But they had no problem with answering any of my questions about it. In fact, I distinctly recall sitting on Dad’s knee as he and Mam watched a sex education video, complete with the sex act filmed from inside the woman’s vagina. I saw my first cum-shot on that video, as part of an illustration of the creation of life. And to be honest, despite their frank and simple explanations, I hadn’t a fucking clue what was going on.

I was 22. No, seriously, I was only seven or so.

That’s how my parents were, and are. They gave us plenty of room to express ourselves and think for ourselves, so long as we didn’t break house rules. If you did, you got a warning. If you repeat offended, you got a warning. But if you kept it up and didn’t listen, you got a noisy slap on the behind for yourself (House Rule #29 – Thou shalt not describe oral sex to neighbours). A lot of people would consider those slaps on the backside to be abuse nowadays, but they weren’t done in violence. It was just a reminder that if you didn’t do the right thing, then bad things would happen. In fact most of the time just the threat of the noisy slap was enough. One time, Micheàl got his last warning and Mam got so mad she whacked the wooden spoon off the table to bring home her point. The spoon hit the table and broke in half! Micheàl ran, crying. Mam’s point was made.

But back to being a kid in the country.

Even though I’d spent a while on my own, and was alone in my own little world with its dream machines and proto-porn uncovering exploits, there was never any boredom or feeling of loneliness at home, for me or my brothers. We had fields to run around in summer, going on nature walks, picking fruit off the trees, all that good postcard stuff. There were cows to look at and the dogs to play around with, all that good bread advert stuff.

Then there was the pond.

The pond was at the bottom of one of our fields, and it was a little slice of heaven during the summer. All of us would head down there and paddle around for a few hours, taking to it like ducks to l’orange, splashing in that excited way that kids do…No, don’t go away! I swear, this is the last “Prince Of Tides” type moment, it gets good again in a sec, hold on…

One day at the pond, we were doing the usual messing and splashing, when I waded over to something on the far bank that had caught my eye. It was lying on the water’s edge, not moving. It was brown, and its skin was covered with what looked to me like wet feathers. Once again having uncovered a treasure, I picked up the dead bird with its odd lank tail and shouted over at Dad on the far bank “Daddy! Look! I found a dead bird!”.

Dad: “That’s not a bird. That’s a rat”.

Terror struck me like a reverse-angle kick in the nuts, and I looked at my “dead bird” again, my wistful imaginings of nursing it back to health gone in a flash. I was, in fact, holding the decapitated corpse of a rat. That’s right. The rat had NO HEAD. I know what you’re wondering; a) How did I mistake it for a bird? and b) How in the name of Charles Darwin was I going to nurse it back to health?

None of these things crossed my young mind. All that crossed it in that instant was “AARRRRRGGGHH!!!” I flung the headless rat into the brush by the pond, rinsed my hand like a crazed maniac and sprinted back across the pond in a revulsed, gambolling sprint. The pond dried up a few years later, but never once in a subsequent visit did the rat’s head ever appear. Thank fuck.

It was shortly after the incident at the pond that our cousins from that far off land of OVER THE ROAD began showing up at our house with increased regularity. Siobhàn, the youngest, was/is a red-haired scamp who could be fun and angry in one go and was always good for a laugh. Nuala was slightly older, blonde, but much the same as Siobhàn. Raymond was the oldest and the only boy, and to be honest I don’t remember playing with him all that much. But I do know that with Cathal able to move a bit now and with Micheàl bringing over new playmates, things were way more interesting to me than anything that had been printed in “Everywoman”.

Almost everyday after school, Dad would steer the K-Mobile – the car-tractor hybrid that he built himself from old parts in his spare time, and which still turns heads to this day – loaded with myself, Micheàl and the cousins into the yard, where we would spend the rest of the day playing in the sandpile outside the house (we didn’t need a sandbox. Dad, as ever, thought outside of it). I have a memory of wishing aloud to Dad and the others that I was allowed to marry either Nuala or Siobhàn, such was my happiness at having all these cool people hanging around all the time. My defence for that statement is two-fold: I was a little kid who didn’t know any better, and I live in hillbilly country.

As I found out when I was older, the reason our cousins were coming over so often was because their parents were splitting up, and they needed looking after while everything was being sorted out. I never knew at the time. I was having too much fun.

Before I finish up, I want to tell a story that came from this period, one that my aunt Peg loves to tell:

Micheàl and Siobhàn were out in the sandpile one day, while Peg watched from the kitchen window. Micheàl wasn’t long in school, and was apparently worried about what to do if any older boys gave him a bit of hassle. Siobhàn, without hesitation, put her hands on her hips, leaned over to Micheàl from her spot on the sandpile and gave him advice Yoda would envy. “You know what to do if anyone tries to bully you, Micheàl” she said, “give him a KNEE, straight in the MICKEY!”.

Wise, wise words.

My first real memory is of being left at the side of the road by my mother (Great start, right?). I was stood on a ditch on the corner of some backroad in a place I didn’t know, with no sign of life anywhere nearby, and I was crying my eyes out. I was about three or four years old, and full sure that I’d done something so horrifically bad that she’d decided she didn’t want me anymore, and that I was going to have to live in the ditch, eating berries or foxes or whatever it was that was whirling around my panic-stricken child’s brain. I don’t think I’d ever felt as cosmically lonely in my short life to that point, and it still ranks as one of the most desolate moments I’ve ever known.

What had happened was this: My mother, Eileen (but she’ll be Mam from now on), my two brothers and I were on the way to Mam’s relations in Tipperary. We were travelling in the summer heat in my Dad’s old Escort, which was bottle green (until we painted it Green, White and Gold for the World Cup in 1990), and I was being a cast-iron little PRICK.

I’ve been told that as a baby, I was the only one who was quiet. My older brother, Micheàl, would yell and scream and cry and drive my parents nuts all through his first few years, until Mam would have to get into his face and really give him a talking to to shut him up. Ditto my younger sibling, Cathal. But my Dad’s said on more than one occasion that, when I slept, he had to “poke you to make sure you were still alive”.

Well by the day I was left standing on that ditch out there on the back roads (actually I think it might have been Dublin we were going to, and I was on the outskirts of Moone. That detail is best left to Mam, who remembers this better), all that had changed. I had been gifted with my parents’ imagination, and had conjured up an imaginary friend, that I wouldn’t shut up about. And not just an imaginary friend, but an imaginary SISTER, who I called Deirdre.

I don’t remember what Mam did to set me off, but throughout the whole trip I kept telling her that “Deirdre” was going to take me away where I would be happy, and she’d give me sweets and ice-cream and Cadet Cola and she wouldn’t be mad at me like Mam was. I kept repeating “Deirdre will come and get me and take me away” over and over, while Mam asked, then told me to stop it. But I didn’t. I was so mad, and probably so ungrateful at my young, innocent age, that for the dozens of miles on the trip – this was way before the motorways – I just continued my guilt-tripping barrage, like a just-out-of-nappies tank-gunner, lobbing volleys of petulance at my mother as she tried to keep both the car and her sanity on track. As the miles wore on, my mam lost hold of herself and began to threaten that, if “Deirdre” was going to take me away, then she could come get me on the side of th road and I’d never see them again. When she said that, I remember barely noticing and just reiterating that “Deirdre will come and take me away”.  She repeated that she was going to leave me on the road for Deirdre. I went through my speil about sweets and Cadet again.

Suddenly, my mam pulled over, got out of the car, and dared me to get out and wait. Unperturbed, I got out, sure in my innocent defiance that either Deirdre would come or Mam would cave and we could go on, having easily won the argument. Like I said, cast-iron prick.

But no sooner was I out the door than my mam picked me up, placed me on that oh-so-lonesome ditch, and told me that if Deirdre wanted me, she could come get me. With that, she got in the car and drove off!

Little did I know, she was teaching me one of the first life lessons I’d ever need: don’t piss off your mother by talking and berating her non-stop on long trips. You see, while I was stood on that ditch, crushed by the fact that my family had left me and that I’d have to fend for myself like a white Mowgli and blah blah blah, my mother had driven the short distance around the corner of the road and pulled in, waiting for me to get the drift that she was right and I was being a teeny little douchebag in dungarees. Cathal and Micheàl were both clamouring for Mam to go back and get me because I’d starve or die of thirst or meet my end in some other tragic way. But she waited, sure that I’d pick it up (I mean I’d learned to be an asshole in only three years, so this wouldn’t have been difficult to get the gist of!) for what amounted to about fifteen minutes, but to my whinging, sorry ass felt like the entire Jurassic Period.

At the point where my tears were at fever pitch, and I felt like I’d just curl up and die screaming for Mam to come back, I was greeted with the sun-dappled mirage of that Green Escort coming back round the corner. And could that REALLY be Mam at the wheel? It was! My tears dried in an instant as she got out of the car and picked me up by the armpits to put me back in the car with my real family. But instead of a hug and an apology, which I stupidly thought I deserved, she gave me what looked like the world’s biggest scolding look and said “I don’t want to ever hear about Deirdre again, right?!”

Needless to say, I shut my mouth for the rest of the trip.

Well, it’s time to leave for work, so I’ll have to go soon, but just one final thing about this story. Mam, many years later, would tell this tale and point out that, in her annoyance, she never thought of the possibility that someone could have come along and taken me while I was on that ditch crying, either out of sympathy for a lost child or some darker motivation, and that she was lucky it had been at a time when there wasn’t as much traffic on the roads as now, and that it had been a back road and not the main drag that she had finally lost her rag with my annoying shenanigans. She was right, but that still doesn’t stop her laughing every time she tells it. I think it’s one of her favourite stories.

Oh, and for the sake of closure, I never imagined Deirdre again. There would be another Deirdre in the near future, but that’s for the next part of this chapter.

I’ll Leave It There.

I’m not famous. Neither movie star, nor musician. Not much of an athlete. I was never addicted to drugs, involved in organised crime, or any of the other things that generally make for the subject of an autobiography. I haven’t killed anyone (I once accidentally beat up a person, but we’ll get to that later) or even truly loved anyone, that I know of. I’m not even spectacularly well-travelled – soon, France, soon. No, I’m a farmer’s son who lives on the outskirts of Wexford, a county that, if you look at the shape of Ireland on the map the right way, is literally the arse-end of the country. I live out in the countryside, what some would call the sticks or the boonies or the sticks, but to me is just home. Or, jokingly “Texas Chainsaw Massacre Country”.  I’m pushing 30, and I haven’t even had what most people call a full life yet. Aside from being slightly taller than most and having a modicum of writing ability, there is very little that is spectacular about me.

So why should you listen to the story of my life?

There are three reasons that I’m going to give you, and you will have to decide if they’re good enough to read on or not. The first is that, to my knowledge, there are very few biographies out there of normal people. People who aren’t in any kind of separate class to the reader, through their adventures, mishaps, doings and whatnot. This is mostly because normal is boring. But, luckily for me, I’ve lived in a place that is by turns interesting, disturbing and boring all at once. I’ve met and interacted – and still interact – with some colourful characters from all walks of life, and had some experiences that will, for some at least, be patently abnormal. The contents of this tome (fancy name for a blog, right?) will be those stories I’ve told, that when people hear them, they laugh and go “What?! That didn’t happen!”. I’ll also be revealing a few tales I’ve kept to myself, for whatever reason. With any luck, you, the reader will find them as interesting as I and the few I’ve told them to do.

Reason number two is that this autobiography hasn’t been ghost written. This is not me writing “with” anyone, either for research purposes, or for the purposes of making it sound more writerly by making it more lurid and sexy. Very few people have ever found me sexy, and I just plain don’t have the money to retain the services of someone who can. Such is life. But the important thing is that the stories I’ve heard, seen and been involved in will be told as I saw them, with my feelings and opinions, and not a collaboration with a hired hand to produce the best results. This is the most “auto” autobiography you’re ever going to see. There’ll be as little lying as possible, and I won’t try and make myself look good. I like to think I’m a deft combination of imperfect and lazy. There’s also no guarantee that you’ll care, so if you’re into suspense, you ought to be on the edge of your seat as you wait to see if the story gets really good or if it descends into shit.

Third and final reason to read, then. This better be a good one…Oh yeah, it’s going to be free.

Now, before I embark on chapter 1, some short warnings: This is not a tell-all, so if you know me and are expecting embarrassing secrets about anyone but me, you won’t find them. Like I said, I can ill afford legal representation. Plus most close friends of mine will have heard most of these anyway. If you’re looking for a glamour-girl-meets-simple-farmer tale of sex, drugs, and other peoples’ dirty laundry, you’ll be half disappointed.

Next, this is not researched in any way, aside from a few dates pulled off Wikipedia (and some juicy info off WikiLeaks that I’ll claim as my own!) because, as previously stated, this is a true autobiography, pulled from memory, and as such timelines may become skewed, though events, to the best of my knowledge, will not. As a good friend of mine once said when we were heading down an anonymous backroad somewhere between Kilkenny and Galway “it’s all part of the adventure”

Is there anything else to say before this intro is done and I can get on with reminiscing like it was 1999 (Prince jokes, no good bio should be without them)?

Oh yeah, the reason it’s called “Leave It There”. No, it isn’t a riff on the Beatles’ “Let It Be” – we’ll get to my problems with them in an upcoming chapter – but because I intend to write it in the few free hours I get a day when not working at my day job or pursuing my career as, funnily enough, a writer. So during a chapter, I may just have to “Leave It There” because it’s time to work. It’s not a clever gimmick to create cliff-hanger endings to chapters, or an excuse to procrastinate if I have an off-day. It’s not designed, it’s not even been that well thought-out.

This is just the life of a nobody.

Which brings me to my first topic. Fuck MOAR, fuck PWNED, fuck LIEK. I don’t care if they’ve turned into the social online meme popularity equivalent of Andre The Giant vs Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania III or Richard Branson’s left testicle, the fact remains that purposely spelling something wrong is just FUCKING ANNOYING. It’ll get worse, soon they’ll stop using the letter A to describe things and replace it with S because it’s next to it on the keyboard and someone in a forum somewhere said that HuskyBox134 was “s FAGG!!!!11111!!!”. As far as this wirter if cnternd, day cn al sck S DIICKL111!!!”!”!! It’s very saddening that I won’t need to translate the meaning of that last satirical sentence…

I’m declaring a boycott on Iceland. The store, not the country. Couldn’t boycott it if you tried. It’d be like trying to boycott a huge mass of land in the northern hemisphere of the planet. But the store…oooh the STORE! Watching one of their adverts is like trying to pull a stump out of the frozen ground with nothing but barbed wire and your penis (women, substitute penis for labia. Not literally, angry female readers with access to surgical tools). And the barbed wire is covered in acid. And somehow Nick Griffin of the BNP is turning this stump-pulling into a metaphor for why foreigners should be shipped out of Britain.

The ads go beyond the usual level of TV advert suckage. I won’t go into the details. I don’t want to hurt you that much. But the fact that they’re on EVERY 3 FUCKING SECONDS, often CONSECUTIVELY, makes me want to hurt the people involved to an extent that might actually go beyond criminal and be an actual affront to nature. I don’t even care that they’ve taken “20th Century Boy”, T-Rex’s best song, and taken a big steak-and-onions shit all over it, but I’m sitting there, trying to watch Star Trek and instead I’m treated to a Ludovico-esque litany of Jason Donovan being a cunt with a bunch of female middle-aged cunts. And it’s got a fucking generic lame-duck bastard of a slogan as well. I feel like going to Marc Bolan’s grave, digging it up and turning him over in it just to vindicate my opinion of this tainted anus of an advert.

Oh wait, can I say anus? Because nowadays it could be one of these ridiculous combo names that tabloids (specifically The Sun, that paragon of quasi-racism and even quasier-raciness) use to describe unattractive middle-aged female singers on reality talent shows that seem as inescapable as the process of aging. There’s a SuBo and a MaBy, so if for instance the person was called Ann McManus, she could easily become AnUs and no-one would bat an eyelid. In fact, they’d probably give her a makeover, put out a CD of covers and turn her into an overnight success like those two reanimated Cabbage Patch Kid clones of Kenneth Williams that came out recently. But enough about them. No seriously, ENOUGH. Get rid of them. Here’s a few combo names for you, that I think describe the people who came up with these fucking….THINGS pretty accurately: Dickwad. Wankbag. Ballsface. Shithead. Cunthole and GO AWAY. That’s not a combo word, fuck it they can take a bit out of my BuLe (that’s combo for butthole).

Well the computer crashed six times in the space of typing this blog, so I’m not bothered to spellcheck it. Complaints in the comments section below, it’ll take me a year to get around to reading them, so Happy Xmas and stay away from Iceland. Chicken Goujons aren’t worth it.

That’s it.

Am I the only one who fucking hates the imaginary smug bloody guts of Joe Bloggs? Can I be the only one who hates a fake person, religious wars and the ongoing debate about our existence notwithstanding? If so, then I can only conclude that I’m far better adjusted than I ever believed. Because Joe Bloggs is the smuggest, most self-important, laziest, condescending character in literature in the universe. Worse than Harry Potter.  So is A.N. Other. John Smith, less so because it’s a real name, but still annoying to read as the example name you’re supposed to replace with your own. Apologies to John Smith. I hear your bitter is rather tasty.

Why hate Joe Bloggs? Because, at some point,  someone was compiling a document for public consumption, couldn’t think of a decent way of instructing someone to fill in a form, or probably didn’t want to think of one, and just stuck down Joe Bloggs because they weren’t arsed, brained or fucking pancreased to put some work into making the thing and making it easier to understand. And, like all good annoying trivialities, it grew and blossomed until it was the universally accepted shitty fake name for the entire fucking form-writing sector. A sort of literary virus. Oh no, wait better metaphor – it’s like a pipeline in toilet getting blocked with shit that bursts and spreads all over the house while you’re away. By the time you get back, the shit is EVERYWHERE.

So what’s the problem with this feces arboretum of a name, Dearest Reader (and I mean reader in the singular. I know there’s only one of you)? Number one, it makes the assumption that the entire public is too stupid to understand the instruction “Write Your Name Here” without resorting to some sort of Jackass-style caper where everyone entering a Tax Credit form or something is suddenly called Your Name and then the whole world goes to hell in a handbasket and we have the Horsemen and the End Of Days and the Plauges and everything. But let’s be honest, if a person filling out a Tax form can’t follow the instruction to put their name in the box marked “Name”, then they should probably not be filling those forms out in the first place. It’s the print equivalent of getting a good-boy-here’s-a-treat-doggy pat on the head for pulling up your pants after taking a dump. When you’ve just turned 28.

Then, there’s the upper-middle class, business-suit-and-sushi-in-my-Range-Rover aura around Mr. Bloggs, his wife Jane, their neighbours A.N. Other, John Smith, and their two kids Joe and Jane Jr. And their dog, Dog Bloggs. It’s exactly the kind of bland, unimaginative office drivel that produces stupid ad slogans that make no sense, corporate images of elderly men kissing babies, and public service announcements that look like they’ve been shot by me after a night drinking strychnine. With a shoebox camera, drenched in urine and filled with rancid doughnuts.

I could go into an entirely separate rant about the new “Honey Waffles” ad, but it makes for a nice shiny new example of the disconnected, American Psycho-style of fake hipster business lingo I’m talking about. The Honey Monster says “Don’t Tell Them About The Honey, Mummy” to a 12-year-old boy. It was created by committees with flipcharts, approved by focus groups, market-researched to the back teeth of the anus and up again, and it sounds like something you might say if you were tripping off your face on acid and were, by some ludicrous coincidence, the world’s most boring person. It’s fake, it’s lazy, and it’s dispassionate. I’d bet a large sum of someone else’s money that, during the presentation for that ad, the exec in charge opened with the line “Our audience is a boy, let’s call him Joe Bloggs…”

Thirdly, Joe Bloggs is a meaningless name. Sure, it’s a tool, but even a craftsman has a favourite hammer, because it’s the only one he can use correctly. That’s probably libelous to craftsmen, but fuck it, I’m having a “Joe Bloggs” moment and dropping the same archaic stereotype on all of them. See how fun it is?

Joe Bloggs, however doesn’t need to exist except that it means the form-writers of the world want to get an extra 3 seconds on their lunchbreak to talk about whatever it is form-writers talk about. What happened on the latest episode of “Gavin & Stacey” perhaps, or how many lines to put in the “Other Information” box. The point being that you choose just about any pedestrian name in the world and it would do, but that they went so far as to create a fake pedestrian name that doesn’t even have history behind it to bear out it’s own fucking pedestrian status. That’s both crushingly lazy and severely fucking annoying. And what makes it worse is that it’s symptomatic of this kind of thing becoming a global, nay BIOLOGICAL fucking problem.

There’s nary a politician alive who hasn’t used the term “John Q. Public” or “Mr. & Mrs. Taxpayer”. What about “John Q. Suck My Balls”? Fucking John McCain’s campaign guys took it a dangerous step further, when “Joe The Plumber” became more than just a platitudinal fake name to illustrate to the voters that they are people, and was brought up as an actual real person. So now, the public are BECOMING lazy imaginary names and titles? Are all plumbers, fat checked shirt wearing republican tradesmen? It just shows that politicians couldn’t be bothered to think up of a name to make their campaign more user-friendly, and so someone just came up with some random, lazy, pleading braindrill of a stupid moniker to tar everyone with the same brush in the vain hope it makes the politician look “down” with the public, when in reality it makes them look like a lazy suit who is more bothered with bothering the secretary in the panties area than doing a job correctly. Oh…wait, bad example…

My basic point is, though, that this thing just lacks creativity. I know it’s not supposed to be interesting, but it doesn’t have to be so boring you want to fill your teeth with scarab beetles, either. Why that name? If you’re going to pick a name to put on your form instructions or in your speech, why not pick something more realistic? Or go the other way, and pick something totally random that at least has some thought in it. What about “Dan Bastard”? “Regina Fusilipasta”? “Ed Book”? “Mr. & Mrs. Philmore Hesselthine”? “Hans O’ Low”? Or anything. ANYTHING other than Joe “I’m Not Bothered Because I’m Getting Paid And You’re The Stupid Taxpayer Who Has To Fill In Forms You Dumb Proletariat Stump” Fucking Bloggs.

“Rick Bockwinkle” for example. That is all.

One minute, you can be riding high in April, the next minute, you could be shot down in May (if you haven’t guessed, the reason this is is because you probably suffer from a degenerative brain disease and have lost the best part of a month) and before you know it, you’re wallowing like a swallow in Wallowing Swallows’ Hollow in a mire, a pit, indeed a chasm of self-pity, self-loathing, depression, and just about any other thing that isn’t the feeling of happiness. If the preceding sentence implies that you could be unhappy because you are wallowing in a chasm of pasta, and if you think that’s a stupid idea, I urge you to catch the repeat of “Half Ton Dad” on More4. If you watch it and decide to do anything other than get off the couch and perform two hundred jumping jacks purely out of fear, I will be very surprised.

But on top of this, happiness is fleeting for different reasons; For some, it’s the pursuit of the elusive emotion itself – kind of like trying to win the stuffed Count Duckula in a claw machine at an arcade, only less costly and more potentially insanity-inducing. Though not by much, once you’ve seen the little plush toy lift about a quarter of an inch into the air only to be dropped down next to a shitty Beanie Baby for the millionth time .

For others, it’s the fact that what they define as happiness changes endlessly, leaving them wondering just how happy they are supposed to be when they don’t know what will make them happy. For still more, happiness is fleeting because the sum total of horrible, depressing, mind-numbingly awful events taking place in the world crush that happiness to a thin veneer of solace. A cynic might say that the only truly happy people in the world are the ones actually committing all these horrific atrocities and generally terrible things we hear about, since those people are doing what they want.

None of these things are objectively correct, if you ask me. Different things make different people happy. That some of these things should be punished, either by imprisonment, violence, or taking the “Half Ton Dad” diet (they covered his groin with a pink V-neck shirt, despite the fact he had about sixteen Free Willy-metres of fat on each thigh doing the job for him. Pointlessly hilarious) is, however, objective, and should be enforced as such.

But that’s not my point. My point is discussing the thing that makes me happy. Not in a Dublin-Spire-in-my-underwear way as such (not a metaphor, girls, wink-wink), but in the same way some people get when they say nice things to their loved ones, or write out humourous signs for their shop windows, or use charming abbreviations of things that don’t need abbreviating on social networking sites, or write acoustic pop songs, or electronic pop songs that sound the same and have no sentiment or even any passion and wear deely-boppers because it says how eighties-retr0-hip you are fawning over a tiramisu sandwich with watercress or…

Fuck off. Every one of them fuck off. As a matter of fact, don’t bother fucking off. I’ll just fuck off. It won’t take as long and it’ll be better for both of us, because none of these things are going to fuck off. In fact none of the irritating, trivial and mawkishly howlingly bullshittingly feces-cringe-ingly annoying little niggles of the world are going to do anything other than just continue to annoy me for no good reason other than that’s what they do. Yes, that’s a long-winded way of saying annoying things are annoying. That’s what I do when I’m annoyed. It’s annoying.

I won’t address them all, because I don’t want to die typing a rant in my own waste with the leg of the chair, but…just…well… FFFFFFFUUUUUUUCCKKK OOOOOFFFFFFF!!!!!

For instance, apostrophes. I get that they are a difficult thing to place in a word, and they can get mixed up. I also get that it’s now some sort of cultural signifier to put them in words THAT DON’T FUCKING NEED THEM! But what I don’t get, what I find so impenetrable that if I were Superman, I wouldn’t bother trying to see through it but would just punch it till it died then take a space-leak on it, is how you can get it wrong four times out of five and then NOT GET IT WRONG ONCE in the SAME SENTENCE!

What kind of shitty fucking rule is that? I saw a sign the other day for HMV’s sale. In it “CD’s” were on sale as were “DVD’s” and “Blu Ray’s”. Then down the bottom of the sign I also saw that there were “Games” on sale. Excuse me? They get them ALL WRONG except one. It’s one thing to make a mistake, it’s even another to make a consistent mistake. But where is the logic in this fuck-wittery? How do you get something so wrong and then just…not? The mistake has become the rule. The thing that’s right now looks wrong because people can’t even make their mistakes correctly. Did I just enter the Upside-Fucking-Down Idiot Dimension or something?

And saying nice things to loved ones. Why? Is it not enough to love your loved ones, you now have to say it all the time? And it’s the “all the time” bit that bugs me most. I mean…CUNT.

I love, platonically or otherwise, very few people. Whether this is the norm or not, I know not. What I do know is that I don’t feel the need to obsessively tell people that I love them at every opportunity like some kind of fairway attraction robot, only instead of saying “roll-up roll-up, come see The Naked Bearded Lady With Two Legs For Arms, Feet For Hands And A Perfectly Normal Head For A Vagina, HANDSTANDREA!!!” it says something sentimental, contrite, clichè and boring. Something now so limp and useless you could call it a politician. Doesn’t matter what it is, what platitude, or even how meant it is. Phrases of love have been so abused and bludgeoned and robbed of anything but the most superficial power they just plain don’t work anymore, and the people who so repeatedly use them sound desperate, fake and monotonous until…well, CUNT.

You want to show someone you love them? Buy them something for no reason. Fuck the social contract bullshit and just get them something they’d like. Be nice to them. But don’t extol their emotional virtues in the middle of a dinner party just because it’s demanded of you. It’s cheap. And coming from a man who has rubber pockets in his trousers for stealing soup, if I say it’s cheap it must be really fucking cheap. Believe it or not, showing someone you care does actually mean buying them shit. That might be just my personal opinion, but the alternative is CUNT, so…

Movie posters. Remember when posters used to mean art? When you could look at something, gauge the story and tone of the film from it? Remember when there was detail and in-jokes and stark imagery in equal measure? Now we get endlessly Photoshopped (and I mean endlessly; I swear I saw a dude outside my local cinema using the Magic Wand Tool on the poster for Banal Will Ferrell Mugging Stupidly And Talking Loudly Film after it was already on the wall) conglomerations of computer images, and wide-angle compositions of actors so tinted that they look like they’ve got some kind of incipient rainbow jaundice or some bloody thing. If real people looked like actors on movie posters…well they wouldn’t. Now I love Photoshop or whatever program they use, but someone seriously needs to take the Bollocks Movie Poster Filter off and just take some fucking good pictures. Or draw them. Or ANYTHING.

I could write, and have written, entire blogs full of useless rants at the ever on-rushing THING that is life and it’s effect on the progress of the known universe. The inevitable slide from one hideous form of bum-wankery to another. And I’ll continue to write them. I’ll rant in print about how the Internet has gone from people physically degrading themselves to just socially degrading themselves in the bitter hope that a webcam and  a YouTube account will show people the kind of deities they are. In tandem, I’ll rant about the heartless trolls who feed these peoples’ fragile, underdeveloped egos until they become a kind of fucked up parody of peoples’ desire for celebrity and acceptance, and how, in a small way, I am one of these heartless trolls.

I’ll witter on about the placement of full stops, the continuing spiral into one-letter communication that is netspeak – how long till all conversation worldwide will be done by using the letter A and an end-bracket? – and the dumbing down of television until the hit reality TV shows are “Celebrity Fox-Fisting” and “Live Custody Proceedings and Civil Arbitration Brother” and the most popular sitcom programme is “Couples Say Awkward Things Then Make Innuendous Jokes And Probably Someone Does Heroin Because It’s Edgy And Documentary Style, Innit?” ( or “CSATTMIJAPSDHBIEADS,I?” for what passes for short nowadays). I’ll continue to put serious horrific issues next to dick jokes and moral conundrums with….more dick jokes.

Because the world annoys me. And it makes me happy to be annoyed with an annoying world. Try group hug me and I swear to fuck I’ll stab someone emotionally close to you.

That’s the end.

WHAT DID THEY DO TO CINEMA?!!! How was this…this TURD SANDWICH allowed to be farted onto film?!! I’ll give a lot of leeway to bad films, and even unintelligible gibberish I’ll give a fair whack. It’s the cinema, not a Nazi death camp. But this thing was so brain-deafeningly, so teeth-grindingly confusing and irritating that it wasn’t so much bad as it was reminiscent of getting a tooth pulled. By a monkey. With a pipe wrench.

Now, I know I’m not the target audience, but I’m pretty sure the average human being, even the 13-year-old girls this is supposedly for, weren’t scrabbling to have this level of disjointed, shoddy smug sweat-drivel reefed down their throats like so many unwanted carrots, were they? I mean, anyone with an ounce of brain cells, an ounce of cinematic nous, or even a decent handle on primary colours can surely see that the kind of bilge on display doesn’t even qualify as a film in any conventional sense, and that a new word should be made up to describe it. Like “Smugsical” or “Fashion-Snot”. Or how about just dumb-dumbery?

While we’re at it, let’s stop calling them vampires shall we? Because they’re not. Something like “Sparkle-Git” is probably more accurate. They don’t so much re-work the vampire myth here as castrate it, throw it’s bits on the fire and then dress the burnt remains up in the Chemical Afflictions Complete Idiot Clothing Line. The sparkling wasn’t even the worst part – it was the fact that the supposed blood-sucking predators were so inert they had to throw in an attempted (and INSANELY CONVOLUTED) gang rape to generate any kind of threat. A threat that’s ended when the main Sparkle-Git shows up and STARES THEM AWAY. A 17-year-old STARES DOWN SIX CRIMINALS. Excuse me? WHAT?!!! They didn’t know he’s a murderous vampire. Why did they run? He doesn’t even have FANGS he…

…I could write a book on everything that’s wrong with the Sparkle-Git element of this film, but that’s not the centre of my dislike for this so-called picture. It’s everything else.

I’ll make a confession – I was unable to watch the film all the way to the end. I’ve never walked out of a movie, but right around the Sparkle-Git baseball scene (which ends with MORE STARING!) I wanted to walk out of my own home, run into a field and flog a rabbit to death just so I could do something that made some kind of logical sense. I tried to be objective. I did. I gave it the fairest chance I could. But this crap-fest just beats the objectivity out of you with a saccharine hammer, kicks you in the face and takes a dump on your chest. A big, smug sparkly one.

Everything is just so impressed with itself in this “film”: The lead girl, the one the 13 year olds are supposed to want to be, is so lauded and hankered after and accepted right away by the teen model population of the town that even the waitress seems to want to make love to her. This being despite the fact that she was so unappealing that I felt she had wronged me personally in some way. She just sits there, vagueing her way through being instantly loved by everyone, becoming Sparkle-Git heroin, despite the fact she’s about as dense as a lead ocean. I mean, she somehow doesn’t cotton onto the fact that her love interest is, in essence, a centuries-old pathological killer without the help of Google, an Indian book and the wolfy-looking Native American Basil Exposition with the bad hairpiece to shove her, and the audience rudely down the plot with all the grace of an epileptic sperm whale.

Not that the plot will be making much sense anyway, since the voiceover seems to be the movie equivalent of the Marks & Spencer’s ad voiceover as dubbed onto footage of kittens being stabbed, the “film” appears to be edited by an ADD-afflicted hummingbird, making it so bad that it actually borders on being modern art, and the makers catastrophically delusional belief that close-up shots of Robert Pattinson’s eyebrows and some gloomy string backing will cover up the gaping plot chasms that litter this cinematic colostomy bag like a bunch of…well, chasms. They make Compost Tea in the film. Does that even exist? Or did they just make that up to annoy people too?

The dialogue is so poor it’s offensive. For the first ten minutes they describe pretty much everything but the weather and the little pots of pudding that they get with their lunches. And it all seems to be awesome, weirdly attractive, and so very, very pale. And then the two leads actually DO describe the weather! Yes, THE WEATHER! Then that suddenly becomes a metaphor for restrained sexual desire, then jumps to something about eyes and then something else that makes about as much sense as a paper crash helmet. Cackling gibbering smugness runs through the thing like a bad blurry CG Sparkle-Git jumping onto some stock footage, which is what seems to equate to action in the world of this “film”.

And EVERYTHING…is DELIVERED…in MONOTONE. The cast all sound like they’re reciting shopping lists ad infinitum. Really long shopping lists that consist of nothing but white bread rolls. The thing lacks emotion to the point that, if the CG hadn’t been 60s Batman back-projection bad, I would’ve thought they just got the actors to deliver their lines to a tennis ball on a pole and overlaid the other actors in during post-production. Everyone seems to be made of Formica. There was a scene in a kitchen where I didn’t know what was cupboards and what was bad acting. Or wouldn’t have without the lead girl’s simpering to use as a guide. A sort of lighthouse of simper.

Why? Why is this girl’s sexual awakening with what is basically an ancient peadophile supposed to be so interesting? Carry On films are subtler about sex. This film doesn’t so much have subtext as it does a town crier bellowing “SEX! They want SEX! The skinny one and the other skinny one want SEX!” at you over and over until you want to commit hara-kiri with a bell or something. Where was all the sexual tension that was supposed to be in it? I was 13 once: not a girl, but still vulnerable to the raging swirl of hormones inside me, and, like most teens, could generate sexual tension just by looking at a blurry photo of a woman’s eye as I passed it on a speeding train because I was changing chemically. But here, all the closely pressed bodies and pouting in the universe results in what can only be described as confusingly frustratingly boring abstinence.

Everything is pointless. There doesn’t seem to be any concept of time. One minute it’s a Stepford pre-teen Spiderman, then it’s Lady and the Tramp, then it’s porn for Mormons. Mostly, it’s porn for Mormons.

It’s terrible. It’s a crap-fest. It’s the Godzilla of all crap-fests. There is nothing likeable about this film. End of. Drive a pun about vampires through it’s sparkly, confusing, sugary, lifeless, trendy heart and put us all out of our misery. Please.

Oh, and Robert Pattinson looks like somebody bummed a mime.

What is it? What exactly the slithering fuck IS IT? Is it a misspelling of ‘loll’, as in “to loll around on one’s sofa”? No. Is it the hideously simplistic yet basely terrifying name of an alien demi-god in a HP Lovecraft story? No. Is it the cutesy-wutesy come-give-me-your-money-little-kiddies merchandise-friendly brandname of a Steven Spielberg Funny Little Alien(TM)? No.

I’ll tell you what it is, it’s a fucking travesty. Now, I’m not going to bang on about text speak being bad. It’s not, if you use it when texting. But for fuck’s sake, when you’re not trying to deal with the repetitive tapping of buttons just about big enough for a fraction of the edge of your thumb to press without mashing out something idiotic like ahoghioaghwefjkashagoisheheoiwhog2 do you REALLY have to forego ALL the useable grammar that we’ve spent CENTURIES compiling?

Is it so hard to type “that was funny”? No. It took me two fucking seconds just then. Or, if you prefer, why not a phonetic description, like “ha ha” or “tee-hee!”? That’s not difficult, is it? It describes the sound you’ll be making if you actually were laughing, wouldn’t it? Of course it would.

But NO! Instead, the majority of net users feel the need to make things needlessly fucking complicated by typing out what is essentially(actually this is exactly what it is) a descriptive abbreviation of a phrase describing an auditory event.

My problem with ‘lol’ is the smugness of it. A smugness laced with so much navel-gazing idiocy it might choke on its own bellybutton fluff and self-importance. The use of ‘lol’ is the same as using a complex flowchart to show a baby an elephant – totally pointless and overreaching, and about as effective as a gasmask made of Swiss cheese. If you want to show a baby an elephant, show it a fucking elephant! Don’t give it a visual representation of the workings of the action you’re supposed to be performing. If something is funny, say it’s funny. It’s universal. It’s bloody USEFUL. It’s what humankind have been instinctively doing since they invented the word “funny”.

What this…thing represents to me(and by association all people, because I’m the centre of cool, like) is as being another tool to bash non-computer oriented people over the head with. It’s a status symbol that says “I am more intelligent than you, commoner. I can ‘lol’ with letters whilst you hee-haw around like the scummy little donkey you are”. Now bash non-computer oriented people over the head all you want, but for fuck’s sake don’t do it by being smug about something that sounds like a German kitchen cleanser (“Got Stains? Get LOL!!!!!”). If you wish to prove you are more intelligent, why not use INTELLIGENCE?! instead of nonsense. Write a blog from a curmudgeonly, decidedly untrendy point of view, or bitch about the internet whilst ON IT. IRONIC!

My final problem with this phrase(cause my chicken and rice is going cold) is that now people are SAYING ‘lol’ instead of LAUGHING! That’s like trying to walk with your own feces – completely the opposite of how the world actually works. It just irks me. Irks.

*And no, irks is not an abbreviation of anything, and yes I understand the irony about using the term ‘lol’ a bunch of times in a blog about hating it. But that’s you how you descrbe your dislike for something. You DESCRIBE IT! You don’t abbreviate it till it’s about as meaningful as sloshbumpiequid.

I gotta GTFO LOLLOLOLOLOLOLOL!
]]> http://rickbockwinkle.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/i-h8-lol-thats-i-hate-laughing-out-loud-to-those-of-us-who-h8-lol/feed/ 0 rickbockwinkle http://rickbockwinkle.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/love-this/ http://rickbockwinkle.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/love-this/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:12:52 +0000 rickbockwinkle http://rickbockwinkle.wordpress.com/?p=39 ]]> So Valentine’s Day will be here in a few short days. And in the brief break I took between my last blog and this, I came to the conclusion that, like Christmas, Valentine’s Day seems to give the right to normally well-adjusted, or at least incospicuous, people to go completely and utterly insane. And not the brief kind of insanity that results from a night out or drugs, but really actually mentally ill. Rather than rant for a long time about the holiday itself, I will illustrate my point with a simple example – In Tesco in Waterford, their Valentine’s display places sexy adult lingerie, whips and handcuffs right next to the kids’ teddy bear chocolates and party accessories. I can’t imagine who they are trying to attract with that display (that isn’t either stultifyingly annoying or scarily illegal) and can only conclude that they are as crazy as a homeless man screwing a cat on a bike.

And it is precisely because of this, and all the quote-en-quote love that’s about to be ejaculated into society by the myriad people driven by various emotional neuroses and corporate steam-rolling, that I am now going to avoid burbling aimlessly about what I shall call VD from now on (JOKE! see that it was a JOKE! about DISEASE! God I hate this fucking holiday.) and proceed to concern myself with what I most know about, which is blindly aiming irrational hatred at the minutiae of the media that a small house in Ireland receives.

Nits, prepare to be picked!

Recognisable Actors ARE NOT NORMAL FOLK!!!

This is the most worryingly irritatingly ludicrous trend on television right now – getting jobbing, know-the-face-not-the-name actors of the type that regularly pop up in low-budget movies and murder mystery TV shows where they play ordinary people that the audience can relate to, then casting them in adverts where they are supposed to BE normal people who the customer can relate to. And advertisers think this is OK? Are you BLIND??!! I know they think we’re all dumb, cud-chewing money-cattle to be slaughtered at their convenience and that we wouldn’t know our collective arse from a Cartier watch with the words “Not Your Arse” written on it, but if they really believe we’re so stupid that we think we’re all support characters from an episode of “Murder Investigation Team”(an actual show, fact fans) then they must be sitting in their offices, gurgling, dribbling and wondering why they can’t get the right time off the little brown hole in the middle of their buttocks!

Firstly, they put them in ads for shopping chains, trying to give us a “we’re just like you” feeling that will make us want to go out and purchase own brand products, which is smug, but not unheard of in ads. But when you know that the two “everypeople” in the ad are pretending to worry about the recession then suddenly jetting off to a fancy cinema for nothing, while being paid to basically take the piss out of poor people, then it’s not so much “we’re just like you” as it is “cower, lowly serfs, beneath the hauling might of our wallets. Go eat shit with the crows and copulate in the muck until you die, you foul unwashed cretins”. Which, if you’re trying to sell milk and the like, isn’t a crowd-pleaser.

Worse still is when they use these actors in ads trying to send a serious message. It’s bizarre enough that you have to watch stylish footage of a car accident and the accompanying overplayed sentimentality and acousticky background music in a road safety ad that appears to be directed by Michael Bay and written by a crazed televangelist obsessed with doomy symbolism without being subjected to a middle-aged parent type sobbing over their dead child in a morgue as played by the guy from “Intermission” who did the bit about taking a shit on O’ Connell Street. I truly would like to meet the casting director who made that decision and ask if they really thought that road traffic tragedies needed a bit of comic relief. Although, in fairness, the ad does stick in my memory. Although now it’s because I have visions of the guy suddenly jumping up on the morgue slab, dropping trou and…ahem! Let’s move on, shall we?

Bums Tums Abs Pecs and Weird Scary Faces Workout.

“The Perfect Beach Body”; “Bums and Tums”; “Get In Shape With Timmy Mallet”; “Perfect Abs In 20 Seconds Or You Will Be Shot”. Workout videos get more and more ridiculous with each passing nanosecond. It seems we’re all destined to have to watch some be-boob-tubed health Nazi tit around a bad studio doing what looks like the semafore of an epileptic traffic warden, then repeat those moves exactly if we ever want to stop looking like a bunch of fat wastes of grease.

Can there really be that many minute muscles to mindlessly relax and contract in the pursuit of beauty? There’s military workouts for your shoulders, countless dance-ercise videos for your buttocks legs and back, special ones for your pelvis if you’re pregnant (or just have a saggy vagina, apparently.),  the list goes on and on. At this rate we can look forward to titles like “Get Your Summer Eyelids”  “30-Minute Nostril”, or for the fashionable man of the 21st Century, “The Skinny Jeans Workout: Back, Sack, Crack And Shaft Shrinking Exercises”

Worse still are the “Celebrity” workout videos, where someone off something who you probably last saw in a road safety ad shows off how they went from the tabloid version of a manatee with a glandular problem to being a svelte demigod/goddess capable of making lesser people bleed out their ears at the sight of their perfectly sculpted super-anatomy, and they can show you just the horrible, straining repetitions they used to go from FAT AS SHIT to just THE SHIT, so you can SHIT YOURSELF with effort.

But the weird thing about the celeb exercisers is that their face never changes. NEVER CHANGES. They’re walking around with stick-thin perma-tan god-bods, but they still have the same vaguely piggish head they had when they were chubsters, wavering about on top of their necks like an orange on a toothpick crossed with the surreal killer in a Takeshi Miike film, mugging for the cover photo like their new skinny muscles can barely hold the weight of the scariness of their faces. If Satan had nodding dogs, that’s what they’d look like.

Feel the burn, indeed.

Vibrato.

Just Fuck OOOOOOOOooooooaaaaaAAAAAAahhhhhooooooOOOOOOOAAAAAWWWWWEEEEEEEOUUUUUUUUAAAAHHHHH-off, will you, you soppy overperforming soulless fucking SHOW-OFFS?!

Anyway, I was totally sold on this idea as being completely original and absolutely brilliant. But then, just as I was about to add it to the list of other fantastic inventions I’d thought up while bored – the sperm bank ATM machine, the collapsable crash helmet – I got a text message that said something like this:

“Your true love is waiting for you. She has brown hair, brown eyes and beautiful lips. She will marry you and you’ll have two lovely children. Send to 20 friends or your love will never come true”

At first I was confused. What the hell was this weird cryptic message? I know the sender’s number, but they’ve never been this unintelligible before. Not even that time we did cognac shots mixed with spiced rum till we couldn’t speak for an hour. This was weird. And then I realised that I was gripping the phone so tight my knuckles were turning white, my mouth was twisted into something resembling a surgical scar, and my muscles were so tense that I was going to either smash the phone against the wall or somehow ingest my own head. By the end of that message I was so filled with hatred I wanted to find the nearest soft object, tear it apart, burn it, then crush it with my boot, cackling and screaming like an overacting supporting character in a bad horror movie (let’s say, Matthew Lillard in “Scream”). So much for the Hate Pill, we have the motherfucking chain message.

Chain messages are evil. Uniformly, unequivocally EVIL. Or at the very least, spectacularly annoying. Why? Because they combine some of the most bilge-worthy elements of irritating fads, spit-souring bullshit and the kind of superstition you get from kink-haired, ponchoed New Age types, vagueing their granola stupidity at you in a fog of crystals, sugar pills and energy lines (read: NOTHING AT ALL!). A real triumvirate of bastardry.

These buggeredly things usually consist of three main parts – first comes the bunkum, the bit where you’re told you have something stupid, or will have something idiotic, or are allowed to do something you don’t want to do, care about doing, or even considered until this thing intruded onto your day like the paunch of a deluded obese person in a sequined crop top. On a crowded train. It could be your true love, it could be some financial thing or other, or it could be the fulfilment of some trendy organic pipe dream, but it’s usually vaguely mystical, ridiculously patronising and utterly pointless.

 Part two is this sort of thinly-veiled threat cum order that invariably ends the message. It’s usually written in an extreme quasi-parental admonition – “Send this to 50 of your closest friends or you’ll be CONVICTED OF RAPE!!!!” that kind of thing – that evokes a sort of childlike, guilty mental rebellion combined with simmering anger, which usually results in this thought process: “Why SHOULD I send this to 50 people!? You can’t make me!!! Wait…what’s that you say? If I don’t send it I’ll never find true love and make money and become the sexiest thing since Cleopatra did the Atkins diet on her Wii Fit? Well then I’d better take part in annoying the heart soul and sack out of 50 former close friends of mine immediately, because I’m defined by my possessions. Now where’s the oscillator on this mobile phone message thingy?”

 It’s thought control, plain and simple. Yes it can be resisted, but you shouldn’t have to be forced to resist the instruction to spread some fake bad luck knob cheese trend that you didn’t want any part of in the first place. Especially since the only reason you’re being forced to do so is because someone else forced 50 other people to force themselves to do it first. Which brings us to the final part of the triumvirate – Distribution.

 This is the reason you can’t get rid of chain messages, no matter how many times you delete them, forget them or kill off the bloody things in a fit of super-rage. They always come from someone who got them from someone else who got them from who knows where, blanketing your day like a crop-dusting plane piloted by the biggest complete arse-a-ma-cock in the universe. There’s no Sender Zero. No source that can be found and eliminated like the end boss of an RPG, thus leading to the lengthy animated cutscene where you get the girl and etc. Which means, basically, that there is no fear of reprisal for the creator of these fucking things.

I mean, who do you take your rage out on? The things really are like concentrated little packets of hatred that you can’t do anything about. Because you CAN’T. Unless you take a stand. If you know the number of the person who sent you the message, just go round their house and punch ‘em in the fucking neck. You do that every time they send you one, I guarantee the flow to you will stop. Actually, if the 50 people went to the person who sent them the message and beat them up a bit, then instructed them to go find the 50 people it was sent to BEFORE them and beat THEM up a bit, and so on backwards, it could cause a ripple effect that leads us back to the source, so we can wipe it out. Just imagine; an iPhone-wielding army of millions of people marching on some flat or suburban domicile, ready to beat the piss out of some perfectly innocent bored teenager on his way back from doing the weekly big shop with his mother and then telling him to stop sending chain messages to people or he’ll never piss straight again.

Hey, wait! That’s, like, using the same method to stop sending messages as what was being used to send them in the first place, innit? Wouldn’t that make you just as evil and prickish as the person who started it? Yes. Yes it would. I’m a hypocrite.

 Send any complaints you may have to 20 other people or you’ll never find true love, money and…something else stupid. Or just go take a Hate Pill and forget I said anything.