“Son, when you’re working in people’s houses. DON’T steal money or jewelry. Steal the cd’s, the first thing you go for is the cd’s”

I never stole anything from the houses I worked in. The only time I was ever tempted was when I was installing a fish tank in ‘Celebrity Chef’ Conrad Gallagher’s house. I was all psyched up to go on a bonanza but he was cool. No attitude at all. I got more static from middle class women who wouldn’t even give you a drink of water.

So my big, fat, stinking, sweating delivery man’s glass of water…

I looked at him dead in the eye and said no. What a dick!

“No you can’t have a glass of water because I’m a paranoid maniac” was the message.

But in reality I just worked my reverse Manuel on him “I no speaka Spanish! Me know nothing”. Man it’s great to keep that up your sleeve, to suddenly just pretend you don’t understand what’s being said or going on. I reckon I can get one more year out of it.

So he left. And instead of opening the iMac I dug out my extendable baton and put it on top of my bedside locker. I’m armed to the teeth generally. I’m from Tallaght.

To be continued in Part 4 of Switching to Mac from Pc

So when the delivery man asked could he use my toilet I immediately thought;

“Oh no, I have to get in the lift with him…”.

We both squeezed in. Well there were four of us really, me, him, the iMac and his big belly. Which flopped out of his rancid t-shirt and touched the box.

He seemed to forget about the piss he wanted to take and became more interested in the box. I didn’t sign for it on an iPad as I hoped. He fished out a heavily folded piece of paper that was slightly damp from being in his sweaty pocket.

“So it’s from Apple..? Is it a computer?” he blurted.
“Yeah, an iMac…all in one type of thing” I said.
“Where’s your studio? Up there? Will I bring it up?”.

When I opened the door to him downstairs he was angry with me for having a strange name so his sudden friendly tone made my Tallaght instinct tingle. He was casing me. He was sizing my place up.

And so followed a rapid battle of wits. Him sussing me out and me shutting him down

Then he stuffed his docket back in his pocket and made a motion to turn around and leave before doing a Columbo on me.

“Just one more thing…can I get a drink of water?”

So what’s it going to be? Get him a glass of water and leave him alone in the hall with the iMac and with a chance to gauge what locks I had on my front door?

To be continued in part 3 Switching to Mac from Pc

As described in my comic entitled Breakdown, I have had serious problems over the summer with both by laptop and pc.

Everything seemed to bomb at the same time, and besides Blue Screens of Death and drivers going nutty, even the physical things are annoying me; my speakers are crap and my mouse is getting cranky. I work about 12 hours a day so I decided I deserve a decent set up.

I went nuts, I bought a 27″ iMac souped up to the gills. I never used a Mac before except for one awful, traumatic incident when I was 18 which will get the comic treatment soon. I also used one just for opening files and saving them for PC in a place I used to work. The death of Quark Express and my daily use of iPhone  and iPad really broke down the wall for me.

I just want something that works.

So after being seduced by the iMac in an Apple Store, I bought it online and paced the house until it arrived. Their website is so slick and friendly, the physical store is so slick and friendly, the packaging is so slick and friendly…

I dreamed of a pristine white van sliding up to my house. Like an ice cream truck from the 50′s. An impeccably dressed delivery man would carry the box on a clean, titanium trolley into my studio and I would sign for it on an iPad.

WRONG! And this is the weak link in the Apple experience. After all the beautiful work they put into their website etc, Apple don’t actually deliver the final product. Of course they can’t actually deliver it to your house but if you saw the fellow who delivered my iMac you would not feel too eager to switch from pc to Mac. What a wreck of a human. He smelled like a car my friend used to have. The ‘Party Car’.

Besides his slovenly appearance and dropping my machine on the ground. I think he was also casing my house for a break in.

To be continued in part 2 of Switching to Mac

The worst part was reading about them online. Half of the population have them by age 50. That shook me. Then you start seeing phrases like ‘strangulated haemorrhoids’ and ‘Rubber band ligation’. And trust me when I say don’t click that images button on google.

The other worst part was that in the list of things to do to prevent them, I do most of them everyday. I probably eat more fibre than a beaver. TWO bowls of muesli with yoghurt every day. Pumped up my arse. No I eat two bowls of muesli with black coffee and orange juice before exercising on my gay little stair machine with my bum poised like a presenting poodle. I never over wipe either.

But after a forensic examination I figured out what caused it. During the World Cup final there were two grills set up as we watched it outdoors. I happened to sit right beside one and the chef cooked about 5 big heaps of these wafer thin steaks and nobody was eating it except me. I could see his feelings were being hurt because everybody ignored him so I ate way too much. The next day I broke the first rule of Haemorrhoid Club: I strained while passing a bowel movement. That gave me a slight pain the day after but didn’t cause the blow out.

Then I thought it must have been from exercising, there is a wealth of scaremongering online about weight lifting and haemorrhoids but I only use two little piddley ones for my back. Then I copped it was. I forced a fart out into a kid’s face as punishment for talking in the cinema and breaking one of my favourite toys and it made an odd high pitched squeal instead of a fart noise. That caused it.

If you find yourself with a haemorrhoid and statistically you probably will here are some tips:
-Avoid toilet paper. I finally found a use for my bidet. You knackers would probably have to jump in the shower.
-Don’t bring reading material into the loo because you’ll strain that bum hole
-Witch hazel. I read on some natural remedy site that it works and it does, I made a little manpon with that goo on it and it disappeared the same day

Thank God it’s gone. I wear a big brace on my right hand becasue of my wrist and I certainly didn’t want to add one of those rubber rings to my daily materials. I’m eating mad healthy these days so I’m amazed I never got one when I used to eat a ropey breakfast roll every day, sometimes two.

I know it’s all part of getting older. I can see in some of my friends that the years haven’t been kind to them, thats the best thing about facebook, seeing how fat people get. It should be called fat face book.

I was gazing absently at the floor when I saw a tiny spec crawling along. I then noticed another and another. But they’re so small that you have to look for them. On each large floor tile there is an average of two. I’m sort of into it. I love insects,especially ants.

A panel from one of my 2000AD stories

It reminds me of the time I had headlice. The initial revulsion turned into curiosity about the little colony of creatures living on my head. I was 20 or 21 and working nights in a bakery, at the end of the 12 hour shifts I’d pull off my hair net and overalls and walk home dreaming about a shower. I worked between the extremes of the ovens and the freezer-house so you were caked in grime and grease by the end. One night I yanked off the hair net and I noticed the black dots clinging to it here and there.

I was freaked out. I couldn’t sleep because I could feel them crawling all over me.

After nearly a week of scalding my head with water I had to go the chemist and I was more embarrassed than buying condoms, tampons and small dick cream combined. In fact I chickened out at the first one because the girl was too good looking. The Lyclear cleared them up straight away.

Then they came back. I got rid of them. Then for a third time they came back. A notice appeared in the locker room and I realised it was from wearing the freezer suits which were shared. I had been eliminating them but some scruffy dope let them fester for over 2 months. Plus I was running out of chemists in Tallaght to nonchalantly score my goo.

The outbreak was quelled eventually. Then around a month later I’m mooching around the kitchen at home and I see three different sprays and creams for headlice in a press. So somebody else in the house was infected before me and maybe I brought them to the bakery. I lived with 3 girls and one of them was a proper slut, unbelievably so. I asked a house mate who I got on really well with if she ever head lice and she says no, but Mrs X (the hooer) keeps getting them, ostensibly from all the men she brings home.

So that was the first and hopefully only sexually transmitted bug I got. I think about this now and then. Was I ‘patient zero’ in the bakery? Did somebody from the bakery bang Mrs. X? Was it two independent colonies? It’s interesting once you get past the creepiness of the whole thing, how these tiny blood sucking creatures flourish in this sterile modern world, despite ipods and hover-boards we are still hairy apes, transmitting parasites through contact.

To quote the poet:
“He fucked the fleas off a bitch
He shaked the ticks off his dick
And in the booty, he buries his motherfuckin bone
And if there’s any left over
He’ll roll over and take a doggy bag home”

Amen to that.

They kept landing on my screen and nose and it’s impossible to concentrate. And worst of all was my daily visit by El Gordo, this massive humming bird/hornet nearly two inches long that would swoop in with a dentist drill like shrill and I swear to God more often than not I’d let out a scream.

Even by Spanish standards it has been a bad year for flies. The tiny increase in global temperature has made insects larger and live longer. They’re loving it.

But like Jennifer Lopez in Enough, I had had…enough. And I took the war down to my level. First weapon was the good old fashioned flame thrower. I had promised myself I would never use it again after nearly blinding my ex girlfriend but I need it. I waited in the centre of the room, poised to strike and as they swooped down…

I feel guilty for enjoying it but I do. I torched around twenty one week, some while sitting down from 4 feet away. Next was the sonic boom. I saw her nephew catching them with his hands and I was just too slow to use that method, even when I calculated how far ahead to strike, half of the time I’d miss. Then I realised that if you clap your hands together really hard on front of them it creates a little shockwave that stuns them enough to try again. WHAMMMO! WHAMMO! SQUISH!!

One day I boomed one so hard that it’s wings fell off, turning it into a ‘walk’ rather than a fly. I probably skewered him on a toothpick to finish him. Little bastards. She hates fly paper so I can’t use that but we bought these little pink granules that you leave out in a tray for them and they eat it. It drives them mental, they just start spinning on they’re back at such a speed all you can see is a fuzzy grey globe.
I stand on them. And I start spinning around too. No, they squish.

So after a year of living here I have earned my stripes. Never again will I be held hostage by these flies. But I have a bad feeling the ants that I drove out a few months ago are regrouping and next month will be Armageddon.

I was a late comer, all my friends raged about it and I gave it a try but had to give up after 4 episodes until 2 years later when later I tried it again.

I’m not talking about the slightly annoying things such as Rhonda Pearlman morphing from a slob to bangable back to a slob again all within one scene or how horrible the song ‘When you walk in the garden’ is and trying to fast forward it just exactly right always ends up costing you more time, I’m talking about the handful of things that I genuinely hate about The Wire:

Number 1: Johnny the white boy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah I know he was based on a real person that was schooled by the real Bubbles but this character turned me off watching it the first time I tried to get into it. And yes I know his arc and demise is a counter point to Bubble’s growth etc but come on. The casting in The Wire is otherwise impeccable but him and probably the Iraq vet in season five (another white boy) are just dopey.

Number 2: The lesbian sex scene.

I never thought I’d be complaining about a lesbian scene and I know they probably just put it in for a bit of HBO titty to grab attention but the way Kima’s (and probably Omar too) sexuality is crowbarred in was another reason I gave up on it first time around. It’s pushy character development in a series full of ambiguity and subtitle details.

Number 3: Prez and the dice.

White teacher trying to connect with a classroom of disinterested urban (that means black) kids. It was either going to be a rap or shooting dice. You could see that coming a mile away and I thought the show to be above ‘Hanging with Mr Hooper/Dangerous Minds’ territory. That whole scene was as predictable as the theme for Eminem’s next album.

Number 4: Mobiles

For all it’s gritty realism and the amazing lengths it goes to show us the painstaking work that goes into mobile phone surveillance, it annoyed me that none of the police seem to carry mobile phones. I know in season 4 or 5 Mc Nulty has one but before that it was just pagers and people passing messages. Or am I completely wrong and they all had mobiles?

Number 5: The pub scenes

Okay so the last one was weak but THIS one you have to agree on. I hate when all the police sing The Pogues in the pub. It’s like American Tale or that scene in Titanic where all the loveable Irish rogues are partying to fiddle music. It’s so corny. We get it. ‘Freeborn men of the USA’. Probably partially forgiveable if you consider how many Americans consider themselves Irish and that they think singing The Pogues is what we do.

It makes me cringe. I love The Wire’s smart use of background music so when everybody suddenly starts singing together it’s horrible. HORRIBLE.

I also hated the much vaunted ‘fuck’ scene where Bunk and McNulty just say ‘fuck’ as they inspect a crime scene. The actors pulled it off as best as they could but it’s just too conceited and self aware for me. It’s feel is more fitting of a ‘normal’ cop show or buddy movie and just sits wrong in The Wire.

So that’s what I hate about The Wire.

Well to be honest what I really hate about it is that it’s too good and deserving of all the hype and praise. If you haven’t seen it you’re in for a treat. If you love CSI go dress as a baby and repeatedly punch yourself in the face until your parents have to spoon feed you again because that’s what you like.

I’ve analysed it a lot. The ‘no-go’ areas in Murcia are sort of pleasant compared to any block of flats in Dublin, I’ve yet to feel intimidated or scared at any time over here. Mostly because I think Spanish men can’t fight. I’m not exactly Superfly Jimmy Snuka but I think I could beat up just about every bloke I’ve met, they just don’t seem to have that edge that you need in Dublin at night.

This isn’t a dissertation on the social breeding aspect of Spanish knackers but just a quick pass at the subject. Our apartment looks towards the mountains, it’s beautiful and calm. But last summer I had to change bedrooms becasue a bunch of knackers (or garrulos in Spanish) were sitting out on the street drinking all night and fighting over their prowess in some car racing game on the PS3. A few of them live in our building and seem friendly enough when I give them the nod. I always say ‘Alright?’ or ‘ Story?’ to them just like an Irish scanger would and they respond.  This is what your bottom wrung knacker looks like:

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago an ambulance was called and as I was taking out the bin I could hear the paramedic talking to one of them about somebody overdosing and the two lads spoke back in the unmistakable croaky tone of a Dublin gear head. Last year they were just into beer and weed and whooped it up all night but now they’re all into smack. And you know what? I’m delighted. They’re still there every night but not a peep out of them now. The occasional desperate laugh now and then but other than that not a word out of them.

My little knackers have graduated.

This is a story that has hounded me and when I tell it it gets a laugh but I’m serious when I say it has plagued me. I have woken up at 4am and replayed it over and over again wondering just what happened.

As a kid, around 7 or 8 we went to Butlins. Somewhere in the UK. I have no idea where because as a kid you’re not going to England; you’re going to Butlins. Same way as a child when an adult would ask me where I’m from I’d say ‘Ireland’ when the answer they wanted was Tallaght or Dublin. You have no idea about the scope of geography.

For those who don’t know, Butlins is/was a holiday camp for middle to working class families where the parents could sit themselves down in the huge drinking hall and be free from the kids except for the regular returning to get another pound coin for the arcade. I loved it. That summer I discovered Pac Land . Having played Pacman for years I just couldn’t believe how wonderful this new game was. They also had a huge swimming pool with windows in the sides, facing the drinking hall so if the parents bothered to turn their heads they’d see their blue faced kids pounding on the glass trying to get a wave.

There were loads of activities all overseen by The Kids club. Which thinking about it now had to be ran by teenagers. ‘Bubbly and outgoing guys and girls needed for child friendly holiday resort’. They laid on lots of things to do, arts and crafts, races and the like. It was fun but I’ll always remember the complete downer of being told sit down at a desk in what looked like a classroom on my summer holidays. ‘This isn’t a shower….it’s a fucking gas chamber!’

They paired you up with other kids. I went on my own one day and got matched up with some English kid. We talked the way kids do in awkward spurts and disjointed ramblings about He-Man and football stickers. I remember thinking he was a square because he never saw an ice pop stick sharpened down to a point by rubbing it on a kerb. I always had one tucked in my sock in case things got messy.

So this days activity was a ‘treasure hunt’. You were given a photocopied sheet, no it was actually spirit print, those cheap but fun purple copies. I remember my school start using them and we all knew it was a cost saving measure. The items we had to find were….

I knew I was going to win. I can’t remember the prize, I think it was a pencil and a can of Coke but I wanted to win. A treasure hunt. I’d be the number one treasure finder. As we filed out calmly I noticed there were kids who were much older and taller than me, they must have been at the age between being a kid and a teenager and weren’t having fun or not admitting to it. I remember the last family holiday I went on when I was 15 and we all realised it was over. I couldn’t sit and drink Fanta. That was the time I shot my goo into my eye in the shower down in Tramore.

So we’re filing out calmly, me feigning disinterest and then darting off in the opposite direction from where around 12 kids where being led by the Leaders on a group treasure hunt the fucking losers. How could they win if they’re searching in a group? My ‘friend’ said we should go with the group and I told him we’d have better luck going the complete opposite direction and he still hesitated. He must have remembered the shiv in my sock because soon he was foraging with me.

We found three of the items immediately, a match, a pebble and a cigarette butt. We still needed a flower and a bottle top. We searched all over the place, grabbed a doozy of a flower from some display but couldn’t find a bottle top. I was getting agitated. What was the time limit? How long had we been gone for? I searched like a lunatic in a bin as he looked on worried. And then it hit me. I had to play dirty.

I had money and there was a Supermarket within the resort so I’d just buy a bottle, drink it and then present our haul and bag the prize. I remember the two us looking very guilty and nervous as we approached the checkout thinking that the Kids Club had issued an APB banning all kid from buying drinks in case of cheating. I’d go on to feel that exact same terror countless times in my teens as I tried to buy alcohol in Super Valu. It went smoothly and we left with a gaudy two litre of some cheapo Orange drink like Fanta. It had two colour printing on the label. It was cheap. I started chugging it. Frantically.

I passed it to him and he took a timid sip, I could tell he felt like he was breaking 100 laws that day. He passed it back and I lashed into it again but it hardly made a dent in the thing. I don’t remember if I demanded he drink it or if he was trying to end this sordid affair as quickly as possible but suddenly he was gulping it down like it was the antidote.

And this image is ingrained in my head. His face red and his eyes watering, either from the cheap fizz or the awfulness of the situation.

We ended up pouring it down a shore. We ran back to the clubhouse at full speed. I siezed him just before we crested the corner. “WAIT!!” I yelped. And I dropped the bottle top on the ground and stomped on it. “It looked too new”. He wasn’t impressed and I was digusted. I could imagine his dopey life, his scalextric packed neatly under his bed, his undoodled copy books and when he was a teenager his Ma wouldn’t let him put posters on his wall and he’d grow up to play pitch and putt. I hated him the little sap.

The clubhouse was closed. We waited a while in silence. He wanted to go. I told him to wait. We waited. But then he left. Fine, I thought. Fuck him. I’d get all the glory. The lone crusader.

But nobody came. It felt like an eternity. It was.

Was I far too early or far too late? Had we collected the items in record time or spent far too long on the bottle top? I looked at the grubby treasures in one hand and the 50p in the other and decided to leave for a game of Pac Land.

It bugged me for the rest of the holiday. Was I too early or was I too late? Had my dishonesty made me win or lose spectacularly? And it bugged me for the rest of the Summer. Then the rest of the year. Then the year after that. Was I too early or was I too late?

And for the rest of my life. I lie awake and mull over the things in my life and the kinks in my past and it’s usually the first thing that comes to mind. Again and again. You can laugh but these are the words of a tortured soul.