Hey Hey! So here’s the big announcement. This makes the Amperduke trailer look like shit; I’m getting a slot in 2000AD called:

The first story should be appearing either this month or next month and it’s a doozey. After that I have 2 more and then we’ll see what happens. I’m absolutely delighted with it. I was a huge 2000AD fan, even had a Judge Dredd T shirt at one stage. One of my first attempts at a comic was a Sam Slade story when I was 11 or 12. I loved it and was obsessed with it for ages.

It’s mad, I was over in the local net cafe and when I read the mail I let out a little squeal of joy like a ponce. Then when I was floating out, all dizzy and excited I saw my nemesis from school. She was always telling me how immature I was and used to tut everyday because I never had a pen . She used to rule her page like her life depended on it with a red pen, a double margin. Everyone said she’s go far, even the teachers.

And here she was all fucked up with kids and miserable looking and I wanted to say to her “Who’s immature now bitch? Fuck you and your double margins”

So give me the love and kudos I deserve. I’ll post a tiny preview of the impending story. It’s a story that I’ve had in me for around 10 years and it’s not bad at all.

I have no shame in admitting that I listen to self help mp3’s. Yeah, all that ‘7 habits of highly successful people’ stuff, I lap it up. 90% of is crap and tragically funny but there are a few good ones. Hey, they all come for free and I get sick of listening to Bette Midler

I also have a sizeable collection of ‘relaxation’ sounds ranging from gentle rainfall to terrifying jungle noises, different strokes for different folks there, I can handle sparrows and woodland birds twittering away but not scary parrots and monkeys making that horrible cackling sound. During my self help download bonanza I got into self hypnosis and guided meditation, some of them are great but most of them are shit with some dude just whispering with a reverb echo effect on. I’d listen to the first 20 seconds before deleting the shit ones. I found one that sounded really relaxing and ran for about 10 mins, just right for a bedtime listening.

I’m always in a bad mood going to bed. By the time I’ve finished dicking around drawing it’s 11pm and I only get an hour of fun before having to go to bed. The thoughts of a guided meditation at bedtime sounded good.

I got comfortable and let it play, struck by the male speaker’s strange comment that ‘he’s never done this before but here we go’. My qualms were soon lost as he described me being in a beautiful meadow. I should really draw a pic of me prancing merrily through flowers but I have no Wacom today. Everything was grand, got around 5 minutes of genuine relaxation and hit that state where you’re still listening but half asleep. He kept describing my surroundings and all but suddenly the speaker is in the meadow with me, I was too snoozy to do anything but accept this and let it flow. He then describes himself putting his arms around the back of me and massaging away my tension. Thought it was a tad fruity but my inner gay told me to go with the flow.

Next thing he’s kissing me and dropping the hand. Wham! I’m awake and panicked.

Raped in the ear in my own bed. I jumped out of bed and was ready to kill somebody at this stage and wished my neighbours were playing music so I could go in and slap one of them silly. I felt violated. Sounds funny now but I was really shook up.

It is funny now. I presume it was just a recording some bloke made for his girlfriend which made it’s way to torrent land. And a valuable lesson about trusting an illegal download, who‘s to stop me from doing the same? Put up a torrent where the first 5 minutes are legit with me guiding you through a serene forest then all of a sudden a hand bursts through the ground, grabs your ankle and its Resident Evil time. It’d be a good sting.

P.s. Not gay. NOT GAY.

I’ve been thinking alot about marbles this week. They are so easily forgotten from my massive list of childhood gems because they never had their own cartoon or song and were ultimately disposable. But unlike Thundercats and He-Man, marbles are the one toy that I played, my Da played and his Da played.

( that’s my Da playing marbles with Christy Brown and Phil Lynnot)

What makes them strange is this; everyone played them but EVERYONE played with them differently. The names given to each variation were never uniformly agreed and they changed from clique to clique. Everyone agreed on catseyes and steelies but after that it was a free for all. I used to get my 7-up’s and green frosties confused and always insisted that green frosties were worth more than 7-up’s, a friend pointed out to me that they were exactly the same.And they were.

This is the crux of the matter, perceived value. We’d only play for keeps and the rapid calculations of how many catseyes equalled a chalkie or whatever were done on the spot and confused the shit out of me. If two lads told me a whitey is only worth two gulliers I’d probably believe them. It was all a dizzying taste of economics and market trading. But there were so many holes. Firstly to enter the market you needed some float, a bag of easily obtainable catseyes would get you in, to move up the ladder and get some good marbles you either had to play constantly with shrewd bartering or do what lazy kids like me could do, buy or steal precious marbles.

And this shows more problems, besides the fact that you could basically accquire a fortune of marbles without ever playing them and just spending pocket money on them, the head of the marble foodchain was the Steelie and the T-rex of Steelies was called the King Steelie. But you couldn’t buy them and the market depended on scavaging and trading to get them. In my particular marble circle we all received pocket money which would replenish the catseyes and allow us to trade/play. There was one poor kid who never had any money and played like a shark, every game counted to him and he built up a fair collection through hard work. This was a grand set up until said poor kid started to produce King Steelies, 2 or 3 a week, the size of golf balls, besides physically smashing our marbles he obliterated our collections in straight trading and became quite the Baron.

His brother was a mechanic or something and that’s where the Steelies came from. I used to think this was unfair but now see it as the perfect balancing mechanism to our market; we could all afford to buy stock and gamble, the poor kid (David Fletcher if you must know) had no money but had the acumen and one the asset that all we needed, King Steelies.

I broke into a neighbours house to steal such treasures. He played alot but was a speculator, I suppose we all were, gleefully showing off a piece that would never be put into the game and kept safe in the collection. He had five of these weird white ones, slightly larger than the average marble with a ghostly blue hue. I wanted them. There was a communion or confirmation going on in our house and him and all his familiy were there. Knowing that his house was unattented and knowing where he kept his stash, I forced the front door and bailed up the stairs and ransacked the fucker’s room, I laughed because his Ma would make him clean up the mess I was making. I grabbed the 5 marbles but decided to take only 4. A small act of mercy and a reminder to him of what he lost. But I could never display them in public and eventually off loaded 3 of them.

But back to the crazy discrepancies, the rules of play were just as fluid as the naming. Until I moved to another part of Tallaght I had never played Shores. Kids would smash open the little shore covers outside every second house, fill them up with grass, define the oche and throw marbles in. The ritual of putting in your stake of an agreed number of marbles into the shore before playing always seemed very manly and exciting. Sore losers and chancers would always hit you with some lingo before starting ‘No rebounds, no tax’ or whatever and these rules could be invoked and made up at any stage.

I was talking to the walking Wikipedia that is my Grandad yesterday and his memories of marbles were strikingly similar, the rules and mode of play would change from street to street. He said ‘marble season’ was just one of the yearly cyclical fads that included conker season, tops season, rounders season etc. Got me wondering, do the current generation of kids play this way? Probably. Surley conker battles have been replaced by Yu Gi Oh duels and the trading of cigarette cards which dominated my Grandad’s youth have found a replacement in Pokemon cards. I saw a dude in his 30’s a few years ago down in Bushy Park excitedly gathering chestnuts while his two kids looked absolutley bored, they probably had their gameboys in their pockets and thought their Da was an idiot but they’re both sides of the same coin.

I’m now looking into doing further research on marbles, besides the funny parts of arbitrary rules I think the whole marbles thing can teach kids alot about supply and demand and all that boring shit called commerce which affects us all.Maybe not, but I learned a whole lot more from bartering some catseyes than pouring salt on snails and humping my pillow

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As above.

I got my haircut by a junkie. I strolled down in the sun to the barbers on Saturday with my hair in much need of a cutting. I’m a scab so I always wash my hair before I go get it cut and by the time I got there it dried into a massive puffy afro.

Got in and the place was packed with the young males who get their cut every week, who are surprisingly not all fags, just like to keep it tidy and styled. I’m the opposite, not the fag bit. I let it go for months and months. After flicking through the tabloids they have on the table I was called. She was the only female in the place, each of the eight chairs was manned by a man except this one. It was early Saturday morning so I was not alotogether shocked to see her in what I’d call pyjamas but still thought it weird. I instantly could tell she was either dying from a hangover or whacked out of it on something. She gets spraying my hair and she done a bad job of it, should have figured that if she couldn’t handle the spraying water part the chances were that this was going to end in tears.

She starts snipping, I make it clear that I’m not talking with my well practiced vacant stare. All of a sudden she freezes as if she’s listening to something important on the telly but it wasn’t the telly, they have it tuned constantly to some shit like ‘Mens and Motors’ the televisular equivalent of the tabloids on the table. Complete pap for complete saps. It continues and she jams a scissor tip into my head and I wince and she tuts to herself. She redeems hereslf with a burst of rapid cutting and it all appeared to be going swimmingly well. But with my fringe clamped between her fingers she sways backwards and I’m thinking she’s going to pass out.

God bless my volumous locks because she manages to keep balance by clinging fast to my fringe.

When she holds up the mirror for me see the back of my head I sigh with relief. The ordeal was over. I paid and left. On the walk home, I’m stopping to look in shop windows trying to suss out if my new do is passable and thinking about what just happened. Can anybody just walk into a hairdressers and rent the chair off the shop and then keep what they earn? Loads of scenarios popped up as to why a drugged person would be allowed to operate, they surely weren’t understaffed that day. I got around to thinking how maybe she owned the place and then I had a flashback to when I was around 14 in the same place and had another crazy experience with a blond hairdresser.

She was cutting away and all of a sudden she turns to her work mate on the the other chair, clutching her jacket thing she sez:

And indeed she did, there was nothing on under her jacket thing and I saw a glimpse of the tit, not the nipple but an apple sized segment. I saw enough to get a few weeks out of it. I heard from a friend how he was once mad about a female hairdresser and went in to get his haircut every few days to see her . I thought it was funny, not because it was endearing in a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan kind of way but because I would have presumed that she thought he must be gay to get his haircut so often thus scuppering all hopes with her.

Was the ‘no bra’ incident a ruse to get a young pervert like myself hooked on the heady mix of Brylcreem and striptease? Give me a glimpse so that i’d come back next week and tell all my pals to go there. I reckon it was the same girl alright, the bra girl and the junkie girl. Maybe she bought the place from all the cash she made from the ruse. Maybe that’s why she was in her pj’s and out of her mallet, her place - her rules.

But back to the no bra thing, I’ve always wondered if I could take a sly one off the wrist when they put the cape over you. I reckon it happens all the time. Ever wonder why sometimes she gives you a tissue when the haircut is over?

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Fuck the world in the ear! Jesus christ just hand the reins over to the Polish as soon as possible, I’m sick of Irish people who are bad at their job. Last week I had to go down to The Square to buy provisions, Hayley was returning to get some stuff and intimated that she didn’t want me to be there while she visited so I decided instead of walking in the rain for an hour listening to The Smiths I’d get the shopping in.

35 minute wait at the terminus for a bus that’s meant to leave every 15 minutes. Getting soaked and brooding over my crummy life. Huge big queue at the ATM’s operated by fucking idiot women who treat each step of the transaction like Who Wants To Be A Millionare. You put the card in and take money out you corny old dopes, it’s a simple as that. These people should need a permit to leave the house.

Got the money and entered pulling off my hat. Noticed that the hat smelled really bad. Soaked in pissy rain, sweat and hate juice. I realised that my matted head must now smell too. Blaring UK Subs so I didn’t have to hear piped cover versions of Slade over the intercom thing I marched like I was holding in a liquid poo and got some stuff in Easons and went to Dunnes because I know Tesco’s don’t sell couscous. Oh they sell it in shitty little packs of individual servings alright but I want the good stuff, the uncut grain. Walked around filling the basket, cans and maltana bread but I couldn’t find the couscous.

No joy. Nowhere to be seen. I see couscous as energon cubes, something perfectly bland but open to wild variety. Bang a load of it into some soup and it turns into the gick that Robocop eats. Ready in minutes, cheap and modest, it has sustained me when times were bad and now that I’m unemployed it has become a near daily meal. It’s food’s best kept secret and I began to suspect that the purchasing managers in Dunnes decided to stop selling it because it took up too much space and the margins were bad compared to the other over priced pasta stuff.

Asked a young lad if they had it and I got the universal indifferent “mwha?”. I have no beef with the shelf stackers, they don’t give a fuck and get paid accordingly. I asked if there was a manager around. This faggy dude around the same age as me appears, wearinf a shirt and tie like he matters and he’s gunning for that promotion and I ask him where’s the couscous and that’s when things go wrong.

I can’t remember what he said or how he looked at me but I just got that red flash when you want to immeadiately kill somebody.

In the fraction of a second I got it, loads of stuff ran through my mind. Me kneeling on his chest smashing his smug face in with the heel of my fist and trying to remember to remember the actual colour of fresh blood so I could use it in a comic , me up in court acting as my own council ” Your Honour, I was just dumped by the woman I love a few weeks before Xmas, I’ve been made jobless and I’m homeless and tightly wound, this cunt was not only mocking me but the working classes, to deprive the people of affordable food, this Esperanto of grain, is a disgrace rivalling having to pay your doctor 50 snots to get a perscription renewed. And he had a ‘faux-hawk’”, me in prison appeasing the would-be bum burgulars with countless drawings of Bob Marley and cannabis leafs.

I just wanted to kill him and I was staring into space with the Saving Private Ryan tinnitus in my ear when I realised he was walking off. I paid for what I had and walked home thinking about it. Well I showed him!! Yeah, by writing about it on a blog that nobody reads. Yeah I’m stressed, things are shit and I’m trying to make sense of what has been the worst month in Bobdom since the Care Bears comic merged with The Getalong Gang back in 1986. I know strangling some idiot won’t change anything. But I’m sure it will help a little.

Death metal, violent porn and Bavaria are the only things that can get me through this. I KNOW I’ll be better in a few months, when I’ve moved out, banged a new girl and the timed explosives in the hall go off but untill then it’s Venice 1926.

Last Saturday, I was on the bus coming through Tallaght, a couple of stops before the Square. Staring vacantly out of moving vehicles has been a favourite of mine for years. I spotted this ‘Hardman’ about the same age as me marauding across a field, grimly clutching two crazy looking dogs.

‘oooooh! You’re so hard’ I thought to myself. What a pathetic and pitiful display of a man’s insecurities. The dogs were very excited. I felt sorry for them, disturbed fully grown dogs are a lost cause and the owner should be held accountable for not training them right. What a wanker. They suddenly stopped moving in the same direction as if to confer with each other. The Hardman faltered as they swarmed under his legs and he kept trying to walk at the same pace, it was great. Inevitably……

Beautiful. Truly beautiful. A full story told and resolved in 4 or 5 seconds. But nobody else was looking. It wouldn’t hurt him unless somebody saw it. I spotted 2 scanger girls in their 20’s directly below me who saw the whole thing and one of them pointed and laughed. The Hardman probably hung himself that night.

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Last Monday I left the house to go to work. I was still reeling from the very recent break up from my girlfriend of nearly 6 fucking years. Jesus even typing it hurts. For the previous 6 Mondays I left the house facing the terrible weather with a smile, knowing that soon I’d be made redundant from my day job and could lie snugly in bed with her listening to the rough wind and rain outside. But now the biting cold and wind was just that. I have to move out, find somewhere to live, somewhere to work and spend Xmas alone. To say I was depressed would be a little bit of an understatement.

I always choose to walk across the field instead of using the footpath. Probably saves me around 2 minutes but I like it. And that day I felt it was fitting to walk alone in a dark field, I lap all that shit up.

The wind pushed me back and I forced through it with same childish thoughts that I’m a German soldier retreating from Russia that I always get. Don’t ask, I just do.

At the bus stop the usual young school kids were there acting the bollix and messing about, they seem like decent kids and I always like to hear what they have to say to each other. One of them took the chance to use his coat as a wind sail and fly a few feet. The wind was that bad. But the kids were still having a laugh compared to me and my fellow grim faced adults. The girl was eating a pack of Meanies. I thought ‘that can’t be a healthy breakfast’ but then I realised I was having a cigarette for mine.

She was laughing and I was miserable, thinking of just going home back to bed when I felt something like a cold kiss on the cheek.

It was a Meanie that had flew out of her hand . It was stuck to my face. Nobody saw it. I opened my mouth and in it flew. And it made me laugh. And I knew that there has to be hope in all this horrible mess.

Boo fucking hizz-oo.
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