SOMEWHERE, OVER THE BALLYHOOLEY ROAD...

Work-dos are strange things. Seeing persons out of their natural habitat, behaving like human beings instead of the mindless drones that the Anonymous Multinational has cultivated utterly resores your faith in humanity. It's a bit like seeing your teacher out and about around the town and not stowed away in the classroom cupboard as expected.
Anyway, it was clear that everyone needed to get out of their cupboards and relieve executive stress in their own unique way - and as public masturbation is still a taboo, it mostly manifested itself in excessive alcohol intake. In fact, it came close to public masturbation when Barry whipped out his baby Barry to exhibit his new piercings. I hesitate to immortalise that event on The Flog as my therapist advised me that "I need to forget". Still, the nightmares are becoming less frequent.

So we rolled from the house party to the Franciscan Well, and from there to the Brog (as usual). Several things of great interest happened I'm sure, but my toxicant-affected brain now confuses them with old episodes of Rainbow. Imagine my surprise to turn around to see George snogging Zippy, and Bungle telling Jeffrey that he hated his "f*ck*n guts" and that he "dressed like a homo."

At 3:00 AM I left the festivities and began the trek up to Ballyhooley Road. I decided to an alternate route, you know just to mix it up a bit. I then decided to try a short cut, so I veered off Wellington Road (I think) and tryied to see if I could find some sexy route down towards St.Lukes Cross. What I in fact did do was end up in some guy's back garden, just as he swung around the house on his way home from the club.
Startled, he looked at me.
"Er sorry mate, just looking for a short cut."
To my relief, he broke out in a braod smile and said, "no shortcut there boy, just a cliff!"
I realised I was wavering drunkenly by a sheer drop, and I could see my house in the distance, tiny and unattainable. Two or three more steps and I would've been halfway home, probably minus my life. I was looking for a short cut but that would've been takin the piss.
So there I was, to quote the Rainbow themesong: "Up above the steets and houses." I rolled home again eventually, and after survivng a indiana-jones-esque death-defying moment, I fell over a pair of boots in the hallway with an echoing, house-shaking thud. I hurried back back to my cupboard where I belong, putting a sign outside stating that I was not to allowed out under any circumstances without adult supervision.

FLOGOFAILING

In the Anonymous Multinational and moments ago Mary, a disgruntled Flogophile, referred to me as a "disgrace" for not not updating the old Flog. She threw her nose up at me in contempt, and with a single venomous look in her eye she spat on my resolve and my boring un-relate-worthy life. I laughed it off, but inwardly I cried.
Flogging has been difficult this week, it's been busy and I've hardly had time for a fart or a heartbeat. I'm trying to do several things at once right now, (1) writing a bit of this medieval whip-cracking thesis, (2) eating a sandwich, (3) logging a call from a woman who thought she'd have her computer before the weekend and oh my God how is she going to do her work now that she's leaving and can't take her laptop with her and I hope that I realise how I've ruined her day but like oh my God what a sexy accent I have anyway. (4) Writing this bollocks, (5) continue an inner daydream where there is no such thing as computers, Federal Express and Americans (irrate ones). Crapman, the bollocks, has just sent me this cartoon:

I feel like i might cry again.

THE CHRONICLES OF HERNIA

I put my stab-proof vest on last weekend, Crapman was in trouble in Limerick, and only his faithful sidekick could help. I arrived half-expecting to find him hovering above an easily-escapable death trap, possibly a vat of rats with pre-poisoned teeth or something less expensive, with a candle slowly burning through a rope. But no, it was worse than that. Crapman, and the Crapwife (Awn-Ya) was in the middle of a furniture-removal nightmare.

And so the tetris began; Crapman slotted furniture in the back of the van so tightly I was sure that some rows of furniture were sure to disappear. Sadly though, 1970's computer games have little basis in reality. Wouldn't it be great if you were being chased by some stab-happy Limrecians and all you'd have to do is eat some fruit and then you can chase after them and chomp them pac-man style? Or if you could single-handedly deflect an alien invasion, as they descended twards the earth in nice, orderly and predictable fashion? Or if you died you could get a continue as long as you had sufficient change in your pocket? imagining that last one, I see myself at the pearly gates, St. Peter looking disappovingly at my tissue, lint, and cents that I fished out of my pocket and plonked in his hand. "Quickly!" I say, "Give that to God, before the countdown runs out!"

Unfortunately though, life 'aint a video game, and no matter how tightly Crapman packed, nothing disappeared. Yet he still managed to get it all in. Tight and firm.
Man, I bet he's good in bed.
Well, maybe not that good: As myself and Awn-Ya made our way back to Dublin with a fish-tank on our laps. Minus the fish of course, we had carefully packed them in freezer bags, which must've scared the shit out of the fish as alongside the icons for meat and poultry, there was a little fish icon. The poor little guys probably thought they were destined to be breadcrumbed and grilled like so many of their mates. So, when we swung by a hole of a McDonalds in Roscrea, Fish somehow didn't seem the most savory item on the menu. And in the unsavoury little hole of a McDonalds in Roscrea, that was quite an achievement.

Four dead legs later, we arrived in Finglas, where Crapman heroically deconstructed our Tetrised load. Here Crapman was low-tech, as he had switched from Tetris to Jenga, loading up the storage facility to dangerous heights. It was only when we got back to the Nock did the real physical challenge begin. Awn-Ya had bought a whopping great big yoke that was supposed to be table. It was basically a big tree that was fashioned everso slightly to look like a little less like a tree. As beautiful as it was, this item of furniture had as much weight as it had beauty, and pulling it into the temporary crap-cave wasn't too fluid let's just say. Hernia time.
No problem for two super-hero types like us, however, and in fact we were in more mortal danger tucking into our celeboratory Abrakebabra's afterwards. So now, along with my biceps and my triceps, my stomach lining no longer liked me. I felt like I might be going to those pearly gates sooner than I thought.
Game over.
No continues.
(And no, I didn't go for the fish.)


Tetris: A bit like masturbating with sandpaper

IN KILKENNY WITH KIM PENNY

(and Donna Wescott, but she doesn't rhyme)

Our planned trip to Kilkenny finally blossomed, after much stopping and starting, which was incidently a bit like the bus journey there. Donna, with a sudden hankering for peanuts, had a fumble in the overhead luggage compartment as the bus lurched around a particularly vicious corner, and nearly did a graceful twirl down the stairs and through the emergency exit, out into a pot-hole-frenzied boreen, rolling into a nearby field with some nonchalant cows who looked in desperate need for exactly that sort of excitement.
Luckily though me in my heroic manliness saved her from such a fate. And by heroic manliness I mean I got in the way.

They call Kilkenny the Marble City, which is ironic in a way as everyone in the town seems to have lost 'em. There was so many stag and hen parties out that night running amok that I felt like I was on Animal Farm, there were horny hens clucking in one corner and stags clashing antlers in the other. And there was me, Kim, Donz and Scary Mary and her extended family in the middle of the sweaty animal melange of Matt The Miller's. One bestial stag grabbed Donna's hair in a frenzy of give-us-a-kiss schoolboyishness, but all he got was a kick-in-the-balls. I was, for a brief time, caught in the middle of a hen party at the precise moment a male stripper started doing his thing, but I assure you it was just a unhappy coincidence. Ahem.

Kim, the birthday girl, left us a wee bit early, caught up being bauld in a herd of stags, which left me an Donz walk home together to the hostel. It was a pleasant night, not too cold, the air filled with kebab-tinted wafts the sound of football-chant melodies. Donz, a devout veggie was struck by the drunken munchies so bad, that she even considered crossing the threshold of Abrakebabra (Or Ab k ba ra, judging by the sign outside), and only turned back when she saw that queue: "Nah" she said, trying a Pizzeria: "Nah" she said when she saw the queue there. We settled for eating more peanuts, scoffing a packet on the stairs of our hostel, regardlessly scooping stray ones off the wholey unwholesome carpet. Here there was no bus jerking around corners, but our balance on those steps were less than steady. A bus-swerve moment seemed imminent, but heroically we survived, and the only thing we rolled into was our beds.
I awoke to find some girl bending right over me, hovering seductively above my pelvic region, fumbling at something. My early morning brain tried to process the scene in front of me, and I remembered my last act was polishing off those peanuts. Was she trying to steal our packet?
"Are you looking for my nuts?" I thought I heard myself say.

MY SILKY MILKY IN CLONAKILTY

I awoke on Saturday morning and there was a stranger in my bedroom.
It was peering at me through a crack in the curtains, prodding me awake with piercing unfamiliar eyes. My bleary friday night consciousness tried to distinguish between my dreamworld and the environs of my bedroom, and as my wakeful focus kicked in I tried to put a name to my unexpected guest.
It was sunshine.
It's vague familiarity was clearer to me now, I remembered seeing it as a child, and I thought I had seen it between blinks last summer. I flicked up my blinds and welcomed it in; I would say it was an old friend but we never really understood each other. I don't know it well enough to care, and it gives me a ruddy scarlet rash.

It was the perfect day for a visit to Clonakilty though; The crazy inhabitants of 53 Ballyhooley road and I had this mad idea about getting out of the city for a while. As if the gargantuan skyscrapers of Cork were hemming us in, giving us concrete clautrophobia and we were being choked with the smoke of this sprawling metropolis. So we walked to Inchadoney from Clonakilty town to spend the day at the beach, little aware that it was a two hour round-trip on foot. Which was scarcely enough time for a paddle, a game of frisbee and a mini-picnic and a fart, but somehow Donna managed to fit the last one in. Or out, whichever way you look at it.

It meant that a visit to Hayman was right out; and I had to text him with the words "I'm stuck in Cork", words that could only be worsened by replacing the word "Cork" with "Beirut". I Jest though, I love this town, even if the word "cork" seems to be endowed with a certain phonetic harshness, a raspy spit of a placename that has probably filtered through to the fierce effrontery of Cork city culture.

When we returned to Ballyhooley though, I was in for a shock. My milky, silky Irish skin had been attacked. That morning visitor had pinched my nose, cheek and forehead with a rosy glow, not enough to be painful, but enough to be a source of wonderment as to how someone can get sunburnt in early April. And certainly enough to be embarrassing to the bejaysus.
Sunshine. What a prick. Next time he tries to get into my room I'm going to kick the shite out of him.