A thing what I wrote.

 

The Europa Hotel, Belfast

Fourteen Years Post

 

The night shift would be starting soon. He hadn't slept beforehand even though he was beyond tired. Tired was a distant memory. This was his fourth night shift in a row, if you could even call it a night shift. If you could call it a job. They tell you it's your duty to those left and to those that have fallen. For most people, that's true. For Jack, it was punishment, in more than one way. Most people do it for a year at most and then, if you're still alive, are called up again 2 years later. This was coming up on Jack's third year in a row. He wasn't one for violence, although that changed - had to change - once the sentence had passed, and even after all the things he'd witnessed, after all the death and destruction, some of it caused by…them, some of it caused by himself, he was worth it. Even if the night shift meant he didn't see him nearly enough, he was undeniably worth it.

He hauled himself out of his camp bed, already dressed in his work clothes from the previous night shift that he hadn't bothered changing out of, looked over at the woman sleeping in the cot next to him and thought about waking her up to say goodbye, but then thought better of it. She had likely only fallen asleep a short while ago, and he didn't want to incur her wrath needlessly. He'd hopefully see her for a few minutes once he came back after his shift and before her own started in the basement. He kissed her on the forehead and the little man she held in her arms as well. Undeniably worth it. He tiptoed around the rest of the people that littered the floor, their cots covering almost every inch of floor space, gave his workmate a kick in the ribs to wake him up and walked towards the lift.

His back ached from lying on a camp bed for the past month, but the thought of it being his turn - their turn - on the hotel bed next week kept him from complaining too much. There were six other families in the room with them, and they had devised a rota for sharing the king size bed. Jack felt a little guilty that when it came to his turn he only had to share with his wife and son, while others had to fit six people but those were the rules and they daren't break them. Every room was the same, it had been the only way they were able to fit as many people into the hotel as they could. It was fit to bursting now, but it could be much worse. There were families that they had to turn away, that were forced to live on the streets, out in the open. Jack knew this all too well. Sometimes he was the one who had to turn them away. Sometimes he had to do more than that.

"Morning Gerry," he said to hulking mass standing next to the lift. All he was missing was a green hue, as he was always angry.

Gerry just grunted in his direction, barked a command into his walkie, and starting pulling. As did all the other lift jockeys - sorry, elevation operators - on all the other floors. The lift jockeys hated the night shift workers, although it was hardly their fault they had to work nights. Maybe they were just annoyed that in the new world this was the only use for strong men and that all those years of steroid abuse were for naught. After a few minutes of creaking and groaning, mostly from Gerry, the lift eventually arrived on the twelfth floor. Jack prised apart the doors just as Brian, his workmate, shuffled around the corner, still in the middle of putting his boots on. They stepped into the lift.

"Ground floor please," said Brian, a little too cheerfully for Gerry (and Jack, if he were honest) who, true to form, grunted once more although in a somehow more disgruntled tone. Jack wondered if today might be the day he tells his fellow lift jockeys to just let go of the rope and watch us plummet to the ground. They stopped at the third floor to pick up the third member of tonight's shift, a man neither Jack nor Brian knew and who didn't introduce himself either. He was skinny, with sunken eyes and sallow features. Even his hair looked sad.

Death warmed up basically.

He carried himself with the weight of someone who had given up a long time ago. He also carried the backpack with the backup supplies they might need, but never had thus far, during the night. Brian tried to make some conversation but the man just kept his back to us and said nothing, and began to softly weep. Jack didn't blame him. If he was the one with the supplies it meant he'd been on this shift for at least six months already. This wasn't much of a life.

The lift started moving again.

They hit the ground floor a little harder than they were expecting, with a loud thumpf resonating around what was once the lobby of arguably Belfast's most famous hotel. It was still recognisably up market, albeit covered in dust and grime from the past decade and a half, and perhaps would have been a great place to stay back before they arrived fourteen years ago. Jack had never stayed there before the fall, but then he was 17 when it kicked off and rarely do teenagers stay in a hotel in their home city.

They trudged into the former train station via the link from the underground car park where several shanty town-like developments had been erected by those in charge, filled with people waiting for those ‘lucky' enough to live in the hotel proper to die before they would be able to apply for the vacant spot. They marched past ticket kiosks and vending machines long since looted and empty, past the once automatic doors leading to the bus stops that were now bricked up and relatively undisturbed ever since they were originally built and onto what was formerly the train line between Belfast and the rest of the country. They were on mounted turret duty tonight; twelve hours in a stationary post looking out into the darkness at an enemy that had never once broken through the eight other emplacements and blockades along the tracks before they would even reach them, the ‘last line of defence.' The bridge across the tracks that once held ____________ had been converted into three crow's nests on which the turrets now sat, with several foot soliders armed with automatic rifles standing on the former train platform. Jack climbed the centre ladder up to his own little 4x4 foot coffin for the night and slid his ID card in. Even in the midst of an invasion the bosses still made sure that everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be there. Death, taxes and bureaucracy. This was the first time in about eight months he'd been on the turrets, and he could barely remember how to use it if in the unlikely event that he would have to. But proper refresher training was in short supply. Happily someone had put some handy instructions on this particular turret - POINT AWAY FROM FACE. They'd also spray painted Ol' Painless on the side. The reference made Jack smile, until he remembered that Ol' Painless was pretty useless and he'd probably be better caking himself in mud. Well, that and the fact that this amateur graffiti artist had likely been court-martialled and tossed out on his ear for defacing government property.  

He set up his gear for the night; a two litre bottle of recycled water and a few protein bars that said they were strawberry flavoured (hazy as his memory was he was pretty sure strawberries never tasted of wet cardboard) and a little camping seat, that he could use on the one break that he would get around six hours into the shift. It had become a sad world that sitting in almost total darkness save for a dim red warning light, on an uncomfortable canvas seat that was likely to break under his weight any day now was the thing he was looking forward to. He gripped the handles of the turret, and ran through the routine checks you had to carry out every hour despite the person he relieved just doing them ten minutes ago when their shift ended. He pushed on the handles, where the triggers also were and the mini-gun whirred into motion heating up the barrel so that some red hot lead could (but wouldn't) fire out of it more easily. Bringing the gun to the brink of release and then stopping just shy of it. It was almost cruel to deny it that. He put on his night vision goggles, flicked a few switches on the side then rested them on top of his head rather than actually wear them, and finally shot a look across at Brian who mockingly saluted, and then to the other man who was just peering out into the black before turning around and doing the same.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * 

Hours passed without incident.

The pall cast over the group by the earlier lift encounter had not lifted and even the usually jovial and talkative (God, was he ever talkative?) Brian said nothing. The third man just continued staring. Jack wasn't entirely sure he'd moved these last few hours. He wouldn't have been surprised if someone told him that he hadn't blinked either. Brian was just coming off his fifteen minutes break during which he disappeared below the sides of his box so that you could only see the top of his head. Jack had heard a lot of stories about what some of the men (because only men were chosen for turret duty) did during their downtime, but he tried not to think about it as he was currently standing in such a box. He whistled at Brian to tell him his fifteen minutes were up. Brian popped his head up and nodded. It was Jack's turn for a break next on the rota but in an effort to extend some kindness the strangers' way, he shouted across,

"Hey buddy. I'm alright over here if you want to take your quarter now."

The man managed a half hearted ‘thank you' smile and then he too disappeared behind the sides on his turret casing. Jack splashed his face with some of his recycled water, having long since gotten over what it was recycled from, and chowed down on a protein bar. It wasn't long before Brian piped up, the mere fact that the other man was behind two inches of lead lined armour apparently enough to remove the barrier to conversation thus far.

"Jackie, how's the wee man doing these days then?"

"Aye, alright, I think. For all I see of him. He sleeps well." was the reply. He tried to keep things light, but the truth was he only saw little Logan in those short moments between getting back from the night shift and falling asleep himself. He tried to not let it bother him but in the back of his mind he worried that his son wouldn't be able to pick his own dad out of a line up. He was only two and thanks to the sentencing only saw his father very rarely; the chances were he could think any one of the men they shared the hotel room with was his father.

"He's a good wee lad. Never shuts up, like, but sure you know that yourself."

Jack laughed, but crumpled inside.

He didn't know that himself.

"How's your two?" he asked of Brian, before he starting weeping.

"Doing grand, yeah. Jessica is starting to get to that age' he said, as if Jack knew what he meant, ‘and then Byron is going to be 16 in a couple of weeks.'

He tried to hide the fear in his voice at that, but Jack knew what turning 16 meant. Everyone did. There might be a father and son team up here on the turrets before too long.

"We'll have to have a party. I'm sure Charlotte could whip you up a cake made of protein bars. She's good at those wifely thi…" The words were out of his mouth before he realised who he was talking to. "Sorry, mate. I didn't mean…"

Brian held up his hand. Don't worry about it, is what is signified.  

They returned to silence after that.

A few minutes passed before anyone spoke again.

"Jackie, what time is it?"

"5.51."

"Hey pal, your quarter's up. It was up six minutes ago. Chop chop. It's Jackie's turn."

No reply.

Brian whistled a ‘get the hell up' whistle.

Nothing.

Brian signalled to one of the bodies on the platform below to blow his actual whistle. He did.

"Okay okay" a voice said from inside the man's box.

He rose slowly to his feet. Even in the darkness you could see that he'd been crying, his eyes were red and his shoulders still shaking. He stood up and straightened himself.

Only he didn't stop there. He continued climbing onto the edges of the emplacement, over the huge minigun and within seconds he was on the other side of the metal box. One of the footsoldiers raised his gun and yelled up at him.

"Don't do anything stupid, now. This isn't high enough to kill yourself, and if you only break your legs it'll be even worse. They'll just bandage you up and throw you out for dereliction of duty. Don't do it."

But the solider couldn't see what Jack saw.

The noose around the man's neck.

He crossed himself, and only then did the soldier see.

Brian must have as well because I heard him shout ‘Nooooooo' from behind me as I watched.

The man stepped off the turret.

The rope went tight.

Just another day on the grind.

 

Flowers and ting

Flowers, man.

Don’t get ‘em. Likely never will.

Terrifying.

The other day I was in Tesco buying flowers for my good lady wife who was feeling poorly at the time. I don’t often buy flowers. Mostly because I never know what ‘kind’ to get.* Do you get the one that look like your stereotypical flowers? Do you get the weird looking ones that sort of resemble broccoli? A combination of both? And then after all that you’ve still got the colour to worry about.

It’s a wonder I don’t just collapse into a gibbering heap in front of the people queuing for fegs and lottery tickets.

[* is ‘kind’ even the right way to describe flowers? Should I have used ‘type’ or ‘genus?’ Should I use their correct Latin name?]

And Tesco, or any supermarket, is probably the easiest place to buy them too. If you go into an actual florists, you don’t just pick out whatever flowers you think look nicest, and hope for the best. They ask you what kind of flowers you’d like. At that point I feel like I’m on Who Wants to be a Millionaire staring in befuddlement at the final question, on the verge of tears, while Chris Tarrant chuckles amiably at my ineptitude.

“Uh…can I have the…er, the…um…well, I think she likes…erm”

*collapses in front of people queuing for fegs and lottery tickets, but not before noting it odd that a florist sells such things*

Just out of shot; me, crying on the floor.

In the end I just point to something that looks vaguely flowery and pretty, in much the same way as I do when ordering food abroad, in the hope that the woman behind the counter doesn’t chastise me for picking some hideous flower that’ll upset my wife so much that she’ll leave me and shack up with some flower aficionado, with better hair. Because like the florists, the barbers is another place where I’m generally befuddled as to what to ask for so there’s no doubt many many people out there with better hair than me.

But in general, flowers annoy me. I can appreciate a flower as well as anyone else, and when they’re not caused my hay fever afflicted sinuses to sneeze over everything in sight, I can agree that they’re pretty and are nice to look sitting on the windowsill in my front room. But more often than not it’s assumed that if you, a man, are buying flowers you’ve either done something wrong or looking to get something.

The woman in Tesco when I got to the counter to pay straight up asked me ‘So what did you do then?’ Aside from being utterly presumptuous of her - I hadn’t done anything wrong – it makes it seem that women are such petty creatures that one bunch of flowers is a cure-all method for any indiscretions you, the horrible horrible man, have carried out. Unless of course, it works. Womenfolk, are you so blinded by flowers’ colourful olfactory powers that it supersedes any transgressions the man in your life has committed? I’d like to hope not.  

"They're lovely. I totally forgive you for sleeping with my sister."

And then you have the Valentines Day aspect of it, which in my mind is statistically the least romantic time to give your partner flowers. I would reckon at least 95% of men get their significant other some form of flowers on February 14^th which hardly makes the recipient feel special, does it? ‘Aw, you relented to cultural norms and did the same thing as millions of other men around the world have also done. How romantic and thoughtful of you, and not at all a near mandatory demand forced upon you by years of indoctrination that today is the most romantic day of the year.’ Buy your partner flowers on a Tuesday in October, completely out of the blue. I don’t pretend to know the anything about the workings of the female mind, but I can pretty much guarantee you it’ll be more special to her than buying her flowers on a pre-determined ‘romantic’ day.

If she likes flowers, that is. If she doesn’t then don’t buy her any, you idiot.

The shelf life of flowers bothers me too. If I receive something as a gift, I fully expect it to last for a good while. I have things in my house that I got for my 18^th birthday (I’m 28 now) that I still use and are still in good nick. Flowers, if you’re lucky, last a week. A week! I’ve got milk in my fridge that lasts longer than that! And considering the amount of money that you can spend on a bouquet of flowers, I don’t feel that’s a very solid investment. Some bunches of flowers even have the audacity to state that they ‘Will Last for 4 Days.’ Four days. Four poxy days. Imagine if you were given a DVD or a game and it said ‘Will Only Work for the Next Four Days.’ You’d be livid. If I’m spending that amount of money on something I either better be able to keep it or eat it. Preferably both.

If I had my way, I’d have all men give their partners acorns. It’s kind of a flower. Trees are pretty. And it’ll last for years.

Now that’s a solid investment.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

In conclusion, I think flowers are a pretty stupid gift. But I’m a massive hypocrite because I bought Jenny some the other day, and they made her smile.

So maybe they do have some merit.

But what do I know? 

[EDIT: I haven't sworn in this blog, surprisingly, so here's a picture.]

Men: What the Hell Happened?

Haven’t blogged in a while, (Belfast Times and Following The Nerd have been taking up most of my writing time; in a good way I might add) but recently I’ve noticed something that I wanted, nay NEEDED, to write down my thoughts on. 

Namely men and how we’ve become less manly over the years. Now naturally I’m not talking about myself here. I’m as manly as they come; in my weedy, computer game playing, comic book reading, unable to grow a decent beard kind of way (form an orderly queue, ladies) but rather other men that taking beautifying themselves to an extreme degree. You see recently, I was privy to a conversation involving the best type of eyewear to protect one’s eyes whilst using a sun bed; whether little paper coverings or goggles were the way to go. There are considerable problems with both apparently, but with the paper things coming off best because while they don’t provide adequate protection they also don’t cause unseemly white lines around the eye area that the goggles quite clearly do. Clearly eyesight is an acceptable sacrifice for a perfect tan.

Now this conversation was between two members of my own sex, and while I’m not casting aspersions on the sexuality of either, it does strike me as odd because these two are predominantly, due to other conversations witnessed and partaken in, very much of the alpha male variety (“grrr, birdz, tits and beer”). Yet here they are, one proudly proclaiming that he partakes in a regular tanning session and extolling the virtues of same to the other in a way, that I hope isn’t too presumptuous, more commonly associated with gay men. It got me thinking…is this normal? Is this what men, who I might add are only a few years younger than me, do now? 

I'm not even the dude on the right. And he's the one that probably gets made fun of by the others.

Granted both are, as far as I’m aware, single, and maybe times have moved on since I was a-curtin’ so perhaps this sort of self beautification is common place amongst the 18-24 single male. But God, I hope not. When I was younger, the only regime I had was a morning shower, some hair gel and a shave every so often (to be honest, it’s not much different now at the ripe old age of 28); I didn’t go and get tanned, I didn’t  wax my chest, I didn’t moisturise. To this day my wife has to forcibly pin me down to pluck the hairs from my head when my bushy eyebrows (plural) start threatening to become a full on monobrow (singular), and it usually requires bribery of some sort on her part.

And then there’s the gym of it all. The tanning seems to come as a direct result of going to the gym to get ‘ripped’ or ‘shredded’ and other such awful words for turning yourself into a vein-y, pill popping, shrivelled testicle owning ponce. [Have you ever seen the programme Geordie Shore? Don’t, it’s awful. Unfortunately I have and anyone that aspires to look the same as one of the muscle-bound, borderline retarded twats on that show is a complete bell-end.] And also, don’t tell me about your gym sessions, either directly or when I’m in earshot. You cannot even begin to believe the amount of fucks I don’t give. 

No caption necessary. But here's one anyway.

So does the fact that I do none of these things mean that I wouldn’t get a girlfriend today? I really hope not. I’m not one to pretend to know the female mind in any way, but surely that’s not what women want. Otherwise I’d be fucked, to put it mildly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I just throw any old shite on me. I take a little pride in my appearance but if I’m going for a night out my first thought isn’t ‘Shit, I better get a couple of minutes on the sunbed.’

Ladies, you can fantasise all you want about your Channing Tatum’s and your Ryan Gosling’s (incidentally, two actors I don’t get the attractive appeal of. I mean, they’re no Jeffery Dean Morgan) but don’t expect me to bust my ass to look like that. However the real problem is that I don’t think the ladies are the ones who expect their men to look this way anyway. It’s the men themselves that think that the womenfolk want them to look ‘shredded’ (even typing that word pains me) that are the problem. 

Sexy motherfucker, right there.

But aside from the tanning fiasco the other thing that really prompted me to write this blog was when I was at the barbers this weekend, a mother came in with her son. He can’t have been more than 3 years old. As the little kid sat in the barbers chair next to mine his mum came up beside him and made all sorts of requests to the barber about what she wanted done to the boy’s hair. It seemed awfully complex and sounded like it required a lot of work. She used the word feathered. FEATHERED?!?!?!? Feathered hair. FOR A THREE YEAR OLD!!! I can’t be sure but I’m fairly certain that when my parents took me to get my hair cut when I was three, they sat me down in the chair, pointed at my head and yelled “SHORT. MAKE HAIR SHORTER” at the barber. Ok, this might not actually have happened, but they certainly didn’t request that my hair be layered. You’re three. You’re not going to give two shits what your hair looks like.

So is this obsession with male grooming and beautification happening at a younger and younger age? Am I amongst an ever decreasing amount of men who couldn’t care less about their appearance, at least not to the extent that those not that much younger than me do? Are parents instilling this in their children so that eventually they’ll grow up to be preening pretty boys, with shaved chests and perfect abs and highlights in their hair?

I mean, ‘feathered.’

For fucks sake. 

Real men should even know what 'feathered' means. 

Acting your age

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about getting older.

Not in a depressing way, mind. I have no problem with aging at all, not the way some people do. Women, mostly. A friend of mine turned 30 recently and near had a mental breakdown. Seriously. But my thoughts have recently turned to wondering whether I act my age. I’m 27. Not old by any stretch but I still feel like a teenager most of the time; a teenager with a house, and mortgage but still a teenager. It makes me wonder, do people who meet me or even just pass me in the street think that I’m 27 or do I give off a younger than my years aura? Or even an older than my years vibe? Do people look at me and instantly think I’m nearly 30, or do they see me as I see me; still relatively young looking? Or worse still, do they think I’m a square?

For instance, I walk past the art college in Belfast most days on my lunch hour, and I see the kids (and they are kids) coming out of said college, and they look so fresh faced, and frankly, about 12 years old. I mean, when I look in the mirror I don’t think I’ve changed that much since I was 18 yet looking at these cherub faced university students makes me think that I must look like an old man to them. I mean, I know I haven’t been ravaged by age or anything, but I’m bound to look at least 9 years older than these students even though in my mind I’m still pretty much the same person, looks wise. Literally the only thing that has changed about me in those last 9 years since I joined uni is my waist size.

And I’m definitely not a square.

Sometimes though I think I should act more like a 27 year old. The problem being, I have no idea how a 27 year should act. At present I still play computer games, I’m still actively an immature internet user, and I still get stupidly excited about things that you think I’d of long since grown out of. But is this just indicative of a massive culture shift? Is the immaturity threshold becoming higher? Or am I just a big fucking kid? Well, I reckon it’s all three, because most of my friends are probably the same.

But then sometimes I also think is it such a bad thing? It’s not as if I’m shirking other responsibilities to go and play video games, except for maybe not washing the dishes. But serious responsibilities. I still get on with my adult life, and do important adult things, yet still leave time for the dumb stuff. It’s not as if I’m not going to work so that I can play Guitar Hero. I suppose this has always been the way, and it’s only because I’m currently going through it that I can understand how this aging thing works. I reckon I’m currently in a sort of limbo state at the moment; the time of life when I can have my cake and eat it, before real life kicks in and I have to alter the immature/mature ratio to more acceptable grown up standards. But even then, I doubt I’m going to turn into some stuffy boring so and so. It’s quite interesting when you think about how your life is compartmentalised, between the you in your spare time, the you around certain people and the you that has to deal with important shit. Maybe that is acting my age; being able to switch between the fun parts of your life, and the necessary parts.

This blog ended up in a different place than I had intended, but hopefully it might raise some interesting discussion.

Enjoy!

Gym Wankers

Recently, a certain culture has arisen with a lot of folks, and has become the popular thing to do, or be seen doing. That thing is, going to the gym.

I don’t have a problem with people going to the gym. It’s great. If that’s your thing, go for it. I’m not going to stop you. What I will ask you to stop doing however is telling me that you went to the gym last night, what you did in the gym last night and how good or bad you feel because you went to the gym last night. I just could not give a flying fuck.

I don’t, as you may have guessed, go to the gym. I’ve been maybe a handful of times in my entire life, and astonishingly I’m still pretty fit despite this. You see, I can get exercise in a variety of other ways apart from going to the gym 8 days a week. And better than that, I do it for nothing.

It’s these people that are all ‘oh, it’s a lifestyle choice’ that get on my tits. I’m sure it is, but frankly I’d rather be 30 stone than one of these wankers that goes to the gym every single day and works out exactly how much they need to exercise to work off the food they’ve eaten that day. And I don’t care if you’ve had a great workout, or ‘smashed the gym,’ or done 20 reps or whatever. To me, you’re a gym wanker.

I want to actually enjoy my life, not have it ruled by the fact that I feel I have to go to the gym every day and worry if I don’t because you might put on a tiny bit of weight. People say that being lazy and not being in your peak physical condition shows a lack of self respect; I think it shows a lack of being a boring bastard that you don’t feel the need to work out every day.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with people exercising and keeping fit. I encourage that. I don’t enjoy people telling me that because I don’t spend every non working or sleeping hour in the gym, that I’m somehow a fat lazy bastard. I’m not, so kindly fuck the fuck up.

The worst people for it though are the ones who do go to the gym but still smoke, get bladdered every weekend and munch down on carry outs as well, yet still take the moral high ground because they go to the gym. I don’t smoke, I don’t really drink (I do however eat quite a lot of takeaways) so I tend to throw this back in their stupid gym going faces.

I know for a fact that I could be fitter, stronger and healthier if I did gym it up 8 days a week, but honestly I’m fine as I am right now thanks.

Bye
JC

Facebook Offences

So, recently I had a friend cull.

On facebook. I didn’t kill anyone or anything.


Actually calling it a cull is a bit much; I deleted, like, 7 people. Mainly for offences that are unforgivable. A lot of it is just filling my news feed with random bullshit that I don’t really care about, much less want to read further. And yes, I’m aware of the irony that you probably came to this blog through a facebook link, and that I myself am incredibly guilty of putting up random links to shit you might not care about so this blog might seem a bit rich coming from me. However, at least my shit is easily ignorable, and to be fair I don’t much care if people delete me. Below is a list of the aforementioned offences that cause you to get deleted.

Or un-friended.

1. Horoscopes

Signing up for these daily horoscopes so that you and you alone can see them is fine. Good for you. You can enjoy a daily dose of bullshit about what’s going to happen in your life and see it every day. However, just because you think its great doesn’t mean you should make it public and stick it on my news feed as well. I couldn’t give a monkey’s that you’re a Libra, and that Jupiter’s fourth moon has aligned with Omicron Persei 8 and therefore you’ll have an alright day today. I could have told you that you’ll have an alright day today. Statistically speaking most people have an alright day. Just most people don’t post it on facebook under the guise of cosmic fucking significance.

2. The ‘I’m so hungover’ update, or any other self pitying status

Well done, you went out last night. You got drunk. You’re really hungover this morning. I really don’t care. The next weekend: same status. The weekend after: same again. Repeat ad nauseam.

The same goes for any status looking for pity. If it’s something that worthy of pity you won’t post it on facebook; therefore it’s something that’s not bad enough to keep private but something you feel that just about bad enough that some of your more gullible, brown nosing facebook friends will comment upon making you feel better.

Status: So fed up. I hate my life.
Reply: Aw, what’s wrong, babe?
Me: Fuck off

3. Song lyrics as statuses

You think this makes you sound deep, do you? That you can quote a line of a song as if it sums up EXACTLY how you’re feeling. Well, whoop-de-bloody-do. Some other people go through the same sort of shit, but don’t feel compelled to quote a song lyric that someone else has written to convey their feelings. Instead do something different and channel your anger/sadness/pathetic existence and write something yourself. In fact the only time quoting song lyrics is appropriate is if you being incredibly literal and if you’ve set fire to the roof of the house of the person who has been fooling around with your mother - “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don’t need no water; let the motherfucker burn. Burn motherfucker, burn.”

The same applies for bible verses by the way.

4. Chain statuses

You know the type; repost this if you know someone who has been affected by ________. Why, exactly? Is it going to help somehow? Will it bring the dead back to life? Example - “Little Timmy has got stuck down a well. Repost this if you want to help.” I don’t want to help little Timmy. Mainly because little Timmy doesn’t exist, but if he did he’s got to be pretty fucking stupid if he thinks that a couple of thousand facebook statuses will pull his ass out of a well.

The other one that annoys are the ‘now that you’ve read this you will die, unless you post this on the walls of ten friends.’ If I get one of these from you, you are instantly deleted. Unless of course you’re the person that’s still waiting on your cheque from Bill Gates for that beta test many moons ago? In which case, we were never friends in the first place.

5. Ridiculous amounts of updates.

I post to facebook whenever I have something to share. Something that I think some folks might find funny. I don’t vomit every single thought I ever have onto all my friend news feeds. I have the forethought to think that they might not care that I just wrote on my hand with a black marker (“OMG, LOL I just wrote on my hand! In black permo marker! Wat a dumass!!!!111!) or that I accidentally started singing the song that I was listening to on my iPod a little too loudly for a public workspace. Both of these things did actually happen to me today, but you wouldn’t care about them if I put them on facebook so don’t presume that I’ll want to read your incessant 10 in an hour updates.

The worst, though, is during any kind of sporting event in which some of my (former) friends decided that they wanted to take over the commentary of the event. In text only. Seriously. Offering an opinion on every kick of the ball. I didn’t need to actually watch the game, just read this person’s constant updates over the 90 minutes.

6. Facebook games

Thankfully you don’t see it as much now, but every so often I still get the odd game request – ‘such and such has given you a wrench to use in Mafia Wars, if you give them 3000 Mafia points.’ What? I’ve never played Mafia Wars in my life. Or Farmville. Why do people presume that they can get me to play these things? And besides, as far as I can tell they’re only doing it so I can give them more points (or whatever) to fuel their own addiction to the blasted thing.

So you’ll get unfriended. I’m a facebook friend, not a bloody Farmville pimp.

7. Self congratulatory posts

The type of post that some people make after training or the gym or some other group activity. ‘Great session tonight lads’ - I don’t see the point of this sort of post. You were at the thing with the people you are supposedly typing this status to, so why didn’t you say that to their face at the thing that you were doing together? Unless…you want other people to hear that you had a great training session/gym workout/whatever, so that people know that that’s what you were doing, while the original poster remains vague and aloof enough to make it seem like they weren’t looking for validation in the first place. The same goes for posts that are so obviously designed to elicit a ‘oh, well done you’ response. Unless it’s something of an actual achievement you shall get no such praise from me.



So, in conclusion, I’m a great facebook friend and you should all add me. Just make sure that any random shit you post is funny. And not downright fucking insulting to my intelligence. At least that way it’s forgivable.

Do you want to end up in a future blog? DO YOU?

Cheers
JC

Dicks Looking Back

Have you ever looked back at your younger days and thought “I was a right dick?”

I do. All the time.

I don’t mean a dick as if I was mean to somebody (although there are those), just that there are certain points in my life that when I remember them, I think that I am a right dick.

As I can remember pretty much everything that has happened to me, especially the stuff that causes me to think I’m a dick, this happens quite often. Be it little things like putting the emphasis on the wrong word in a sentence and making it sound far more threatening than was intended (“Oh yeah, I see what YOU mean.”), or big mortifying, life changing things, such as calling your Primary school teacher ‘Mummy.’ I remember them all.

What I’m wondering is, do other people do this with the same frequency as I do? It’s normally when I’m lying in bed, unable to sleep that these things run through my head. One in particular was bouncing around my brain last night. At uni, we went out to Kelly’s a lot, every week without fail. And, every week without fail, the DJ near the end of the night played the song All My Life by the Foo Fighters. I love this song, and throughout it I rocked out quite hard. However, there comes a quieter part in the song that builds and builds up until an unleashing of a lot of rocking rockiness. During this quiet part I would often pretend to play guitar, and then once the crescendo hits, I would leap into the air, landing as soon as the heavy guitars kick back in and continued playing air guitar and headbanging. A lot of the time the people I was with stood by and watched, mostly in admiration (bear in mind though, we were probably quite drunk). Except when I look back at it, I can’t help but think ‘Fucksake, JC. Quit acting like a dick.’

It’s as if I’m hovering over my past self, and watching in horror at what I’m doing. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, only this time I’m being shown my past to make sure I don’t return to my dickish ways, rather than….exactly, that’s exactly like Scrooge.

Another time I’ve often looked back and thought I was a dick was back in the first year of uni. I had recently come out of a relationship that had ended quite badly (well, badly for me), and had started kinda sorta seeing a girl that I had met/got off with at the union. At the time I sort of latched on to her and we were in a sort of pseudo relationship, mostly due to my insistence that it was one. That sounds really sinister; I didn’t tie her up and force her to play happy families or anything. Promise. But whenever she ended whatever it was that was going on, I sulked for ages and was a bit of a dick to her when really she didn’t deserve any of the anger I was projecting. It was more reflected anger that really should have been directed at the previous relationship ender. Fuck, this was meant to be a funny blog, not some sort of confessional.

Right, let’s get this back on track with a slightly embarrassing story. I remember being at a house party back in secondary school days and it was nearing the end and people were filtering out. It was back in the days of CD changers, and once the machine had switched from one CD to the next, a process which took an annoyingly long time as well as causing an unusual amount of crunching and whirring, Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) came on. Now, there’s a point in the video for this song where said White Guy does this dance in a dance-off that fails to impress any ladies, and for whatever reason (maybe I was trying to impress a lady myself) I decided that copying this dance would at least get a few laughs, completely ignoring the fact that the impressee would have to be familiar enough with the video for the song to even know that that’s what the impresser (me) was mimicking. However, even if she was familiar with the video that’s not what she would have seen me do. I had completely forgotten what the actual dance from the video was, so I ended up doing some weird kicking thing, and clapping my hands underneath my legs. I should’ve known that if it didn’t work in a fictional music video, it probably wouldn’t work in real life. Even if I had done the real dance. I did this bizarre almost Cancan-esque routine, like, 8 times before I finally decided that I should probably stop. All the while, future ghost me is hovering above and despairing.

I’m sure there are many more examples that I’ve thought of on manys a sleepless night. But I also got thinking about whether other people regret dickish things they’ve done and are glad that they’re no longer like that anymore. One person stuck in my mind when thinking about this. Back in school, there was this second year kid who got the same bus home to Bangor as I did (I was in third year). He was one of these alpha male type kids, who was essentially the leader of his little group, and as such was the loudest and most obnoxious. For the whole bus journey home, he was singing ‘Get your tits out for the lads.’ Anyone that spoke up to tell him to shut up had this sung back full volume in their faces. This guy had no shame about singing this at the top of his lungs for the half hour journey. Even when the bus driver told him to shut up by telling him ‘the only tits you’ve ever seen are your mum’s’ (which admittedly was pretty funny at the time) he just continued on, except this time turning his ire on the driver. I wonder does that kid ever look back and think ‘what a dick I was?’ I know I would.

What about school bullies? Are they ever kept awake at night, by replaying past horrors they visited upon kids at school and thinking that they were right dicks? Yes, Thomas. I’m talking about you, you little shit. Actually, to be fair he still hasn’t recovered from the time that, after he kicked me in the crotch and spat on me, I turned right around defiantly then went home, cried a bit and got my mum to tell the principal on him. Yeah, take that you dick. In fairness though, he was put in to the special class, so karma got that retard in the end. Retribution, bitch!

Anyway, that’s today’s thought. I’m off to try and not do things I’ll reflect on in the future. Just to get this goddamn future ghost off my ass.

Cheers.