Ouch

Day two in the gym and everywhere hurts.

I touch my arm…. Ouch… My legs… ouch…

Even my shoulders and back and stomach… ouch ouch ouch.

Turns out I bruised my finger.

One Month Today

One month ago today I smoked the last cigarette I had. One month today. On Saturday I started developing a cough. I thought I was getting a cold. Nope.

For the last two days I’ve been hacking up tar. No joking. Its disgusting and tastes like what you’d imagine tar being hacked up out of your lungs would taste like. That’s the best way I can put it. Still though, I’m rather proud. I’ve been a smoker for nigh on seventeen years and now I’ve made the first real stab at kicking them to the kerb so I’m happy about that despite the hacking and the choking, and to celebrate I’ve decided to go back to the gym tomorrow. I’ve made an appointment for tomorrow afternoon to talk to one of the trainers about getting a moobasectomy and a beerbellyoffame.

I’ll report back if I come out the other side. Although, when I’m beautiful I may not have to write here because real people will like me, so be nice to me now, before I have you forgotten.

Down? How About a Kick in the Nads!

As if we didn’t have enough problems. Scumbags running the day to day affairs of our towns a cities, scumbags in suits taking money from our wages to keep them rich, inept and corrupt officials using Joe Public as a piggy bank, more people loosing their jobs than you can shake a stick at, people coming out of hospitals sicker than when they went in with hunger and poverty being all the rage these days.

Now to top it all off we have an impending global flu pandemic.

Brilliant.

Like we really need another way in which the government can be useless. Mary Harney has been doing her best to dismantle the health service for the last few years, preferring to spend money on shafting BUPA so Sean Quinn (who incidentally doesn’t seem to be subject to “Risk Equalisation”) could diversify out of Anglo.

A few years back they issued us all with iodine pills in case of a nuclear attack. Remember that? Just vaporised by a lunatic Muslim? No bother! Here’s an iodine pill for you. That’ll sort you right out. Now I can see them cancelling mass or something equally vapid and useless for the sake of being seen to be doing something without actually having done anything at all to save lives that might in any way cost them any money, the bastards.

I’m actually half looking forward to seeing how much of a balls they make out of handling this, should it reach here. This country has become a parody of itself. Thick Mick just blew his first pay cheque and now he cant afford to go to the doctor. You know, it would probably be hilarious if it wasn’t so fucking infuriating.

Why Mr Quinn, I had No Idea!

As seen in Superquinn this afternoon.

30 swinging meters for when your most fabulous shirts simply MUST be dried in time for the Celine Dion concert.

Next weeks special; hot meat in a bun.

Woe betide thyne Scumbags

Having nothing better to do these days due to the failing economy, I visited my good old parents for a cup of tea this morning. My mother is a very unique woman. Advancing in years, yet very healthy and by looking at her you can tell she makes an effort to keep herself well.  She eats well, gets out as much as she can, doing this and that as they do and regales me with all the inside stories on whats going on around the place. My father reads the paper and grunts at me. The silver-back of the family, so to speak.

Near where they live there are flats recently vacated under the buy fancy jeeps and paint regeneration on them scheme. Since they have been vacated they have become the usual target for all the usual sorts of shite that scumbags do to amuse themselves.  Last night, they went up on fire. (The flats, not the scumbags, unfortunately). A few weeks ago they were vandalised so the local council who claim to not have the money to demolish them put big railings around them. So, the scangers across the way stole a JCB, used it to tear down the railings and burnt the JCB before coming back to light up the flats when the fire brigade didn’t show to quench the machinery. They lit up the flats so they could molest the fire crew that arrived to put them out.  As soon as the engines came around the corner stones and bottles went flying at them. When they got out of the engines they found that the water main had been deliberately tampered with so they had to sit and wait and watch the flats burn while dodging missiles to wait for a tanker full of water to arrive.

Six engines (one draughted in from Ennis) and a water tanker. A massive yoke, so it was.

It would have cost less to knock the flats than to answer that emergency call. I’m sure of it.

These were not kids. These were pricks in their twenties with nothing better to do than harass a bunch of brave and hard working fire fighters out trying to make the scumbags in question shitty little lives safer. It galls me to think that, should any of these wankers become trapped or the victim of their own misadventures, they would fully expect these same men to come to their rescue, and come they would regardless.

A better man than me once suggested a pretty sure fire way to sort out a lot of these problems, and he in now way suggested the punishment of stupidity, rather, lets take the warning labels off of everything. Let the problem sort itself out. If they are out breeding us then surely we can educate our children to realise themselves that they shouldn’t use hairdryers in the bath, or whatever.

Just a suggestion.

Chew on it for a while and let me know what you think.

Limerick is now over run by scum, and there is nothing we can do about it. For my own part, I’ve given up despairing. I’m actually intrigued at this point and I’ll tell you why. The time is fast approaching when the government are going to run out of dole money. At the very least they will have to cut it significantly. Its only a mater of time before the whole scumbag culture implodes in on itself under the weight of a billion hoop earrings and dirty Nike Air Max.

I’m popping my corn and pulling up a ringside seat for these end times, or the Rapidture, as I’m going to call it. The four piebald horsemen of the Epoxy-clips will be bombed out of their heads on resin, and wont know whats going on. Then some lad with long hair will appear asking about Mount Olive and get the head digged off him by Olive’s brother and because he looks like a Muppet. Then there shall be a great tribulation, and Declin shall have lost sight of the bag of yokes he placed under the wheely bin only the night before, and verily, Tony shall smite his brethren who spake unto the social welfare of his cohabitation in his concubine’s council house.

A fitting end to a dramatic chapter, I feel.

The Joys of Parenthood, Vol 1

This used to be the subwoofer from my home cinema system.

Now its a handy storage box for megablocks and the likes.

At least its not going to waste I suppose.

End Game

I remember sitting home last year watching a rugby international and trying to get The Bean interested in it. Ireland were playing Canada in Thomond Park. Keith Earls scored a fine try the first time he got his hands on the ball in his first international. Outstanding stuff. Ireland trounced them in effective, if not rather an ugly fashion. Of course, The Bean was coming up on eighteen months old. Try as I might there were mega-blocks to be chewed, walls to be crayoned and many, many things to be thrown into the toilet. There just wasn’t the time for rugby in his busy evening which came to an end shortly after with bath, a visit to the tooth brush and an attentive tucking in.

In his cosy world he has no concept of the other thing that happened that night. Later, as he slept safe and sound in his warm bed.

A man. A short chase. A gunshot. Darkness.

We all awoke to the news. We were horrified. Somewhere inside of us we probably knew that this was going to happen eventually. It was only a matter of time before someone got caught in the crossfire. As terrible as the thought may have been, we got on with our lives regardless all the same, on many levels not really giving a shit because all this was happening in another world we never ventured into. Well now this world had ventured into ours. As unwelcome as it was uninvited. Like it or not we had death and violence thrust onto our doorsteps by people who were now testing new boundaries. Like a child will see how close he can get to the fire before he is told definitively to stay away, or gets burned, Limerick’s underclass were now in new territory. Right on the hearth, waiting to see where the heat was going to come from.

I’ve said many times before that criminals, like politicians, like bankers and builders, will operate within the parameters they are allowed to by wider society. Bear this in mind as you read on.

Maybe I was being overly optimistic at the time, but it seemed like the national outrage at the time might have started ringing bells in higher up places. In places with the tools to take action and try to close these people down. But, as it turns out all we had was the same hot air from the same people meaning the same thing.

Nothing.

In proof of this point, yesterday I drove past the funeral of a man who was shot in the back because his brother testified against one of the people involved in Limerick’s drug wars. After Shane was murdered we were promised action. All we got was a slap in the face from the criminals to remind of our place and the fact that there will always be ways for them to get to us should we be brave enough to take a stand. Shane died in a case of mistaken identity. They thought he was one of them. Last week Roy Collins was deliberately targeted as an outsider. As an innocent man. He was deliberately killed so that you, me and all our kind will know not to get in the way of the drug dealing scumbags who have now shown in no uncertain terms that THEY run this city, and they, and only they will be the arbiters of who deserves to live and die on their streets.

We heard the usual shit from the usual people but I have no faith in them anymore. I ‘m sure they’ll do nothing just as they have done nothing to save us from economic collapse, job loses and failing health and education services. As we have been told to tighted our belts to save ourselves from bankruptcy and reposession we will be told to bolt our windows and doors to protect ourselves from the scum that they allow to run our streets.

I’ve gone beyond being angry about it, and I think that’s the wider problem. We have accepted it. This is now normal behaviour from the criminal fraternity. Innocent people who want to protect their families, neighbourhoods and business interests are now legitimate targets. The boundaries have been extended and now society’s delinquents have a new field to play in which we, the wider society, have opened up to them through collective inaction.

Shame on us all.

The Red Machine Marches On

I got a phone call at nine in the morning. It was the hairdresser. Luckily I had been up since six anyway so the need to bate the head off him didn’t arise.

Well Doc. I have news.

Oh yeah? Whats that now?

Its my buddy’s birthday do today and he’s kinda after guilting me into watching the match with him in the pub, so I figured you might be the very man to take my ticket off me.

You came to the right person, says I.

So in I went to break the news to Mrs Orgasm. Sorry love, but you’ll have to do without my mug moping around the place today, following you around shopping centers and getting annoyed in lingerie departments. Unfortunately, you’ll have to spend this Easter Sunday completely without me trying to hurry you on and take the laser card off you.

Bollox. Says she.

So now we have one of those Guy Ritchie style cut scenes, like in Snatch, after cousin Vinnie says “Weah goin da Engalund” only you have brief cuts of me pulling on my jersey, turning the car key, locking the car up in town, a high speed clip of a pint being filled, me knocking it back, swirling crowds on Thomondgate and the scene ending with a BOOM and my arse landing in my newly acquired seat in the West Stand in Thomond Park.

Its not the worst seat in the house. The fact that its all the way down on the try line on the Ballynanty end is negated by the fact that its pretty high up which offers a good view of anything happening everywhere in the park.

Its 12.45. The teams are warming up, Munster right on front of me. They finish their warm up and the crowd roars as they head for the dressing room. However, O’Gara Breaks away from the team and canters towards the Ospreys, who are in a huddle under the posts on front of the south terrace. Ten meters inside the half way line. He stops. He waits.

The Ospreys break their huddle.

As they turn to jog to the tunnel their heads come up and at once they see O’Gara standing there, and as they see him he launches a drop goal over their heads, dissecting the posts perfectly.

He turns.

He nonchalantly jogs back to the tunnel.

He has thrown down the gauntlet.

What follows is eighty minutes of clinical vivisection of a visiting team. I cant remember seeing anything like it in recent times. Munster and Ireland used to have a habit of being flaky as favourites and coughing up dopey errors allowing teams to go 6 or 9 ahead in the opening minutes, forcing us to chase the game. On the bottom. Plucky underdogs. Where we liked to fight from.

Those days are gone now. Put to bed in Cardiff against Wales and tucked in this Easter Sunday in Thomond Park against a group of men who see themselves as the Giants of Welsh Rugby. I most definitely don’t want to get ahead of myself, but the Munster team I saw yesterday will take some beating by anyone. So bring on The Ladies I say. Croke Park here we come.

Your grandfather knew better

In other news, the recession can go fuck itself.

I’m sick of hearing about it. Every morning I turn on the radio in the car. Doom this. Gloom that. Woe betide us all for the taxman cometh and he taketh thine kidneys and deposit thee in a bath full of ice with a brief note outlining why you are there and a mobile for you to call an ambulance.

But wait a minute, I’m fucking poor anyway, and the more I think about it, the more I realise I’ll be devastated about having to miss all those nights out I never had in the first place. Not to mention all the holidays I didn’t go on and the swanky car, hefty mortgage and the coke habit I could never afford to begin with. I’ll sure be missing all those high class society parties I was never invited to and as for the fur coat collection I don’t have, like the peacocks that don’t live in the grounds that don’t surround the stately home I don’t live in, I guess not having it will mean I wont have to be gutted about the lot of it getting taken off me because of the recession. Me, you and most of the rest of us will have to make a few minor adjustments to settle back into a life less complicated by multiple credit cards, over draughts, whopping great mortgages on overpriced shoe boxes next door to someone the health board gave the house to for free and this insane competition to out bling our equally vapid and nouveaux pretentious neighbours.

I think the biggest problem we have to face is the fear we don’t know why we are feeling. Stop for a second. Take a deep breath, breath in some perspective. We are all borne from a very, very long line of very successful ancestors who we know all lived long enough to rear our more recent ancestors and that every one of them got the ride at least once in their lives, no doubt an epic success in itself in a time before dentists.

Now think about it.

You, your parents, your grand parents, their grand parents, their great great great grand parents before them. Your relatives who stayed put and had the wherewithal to get themselves through the famine, by hook or by crook. Your late relations who, generation after generation outsmarted the foreign armies and plagues that came to take those who would have no descendants. The people who bore your genes about the time Brian Boru was giving the vikings the jabs. The people who bore my genes about the time the pyramids were being built and before, and further back, a hundred thousand millenia ago there were creatures alive that went about their daily grind carrying the genes that their descendants would one day use to produce you and me, here today, geared up with all the smarts that got them all to where you are now.

And now the newspapers would have you believe that all that is going to fall apart because a few crooks raided the treasury.

OH NOES!!!

Come hell or high water we will survive by calling on the rights we have all inherited through the toll of the billion deaths that our lineage outsmarted. The radio and the papers can have their recession. They can keep their gloom.

I’m off down to the shop to buy an icepop.

Who wants one?

Good Vibes go Here

Its official, Paul Warwick will be staying on at Munster for another two years at least.

I’m absolutely delighted about this. Paul has been an instrumental part of the set up since arriving, and although it might seem he has the soul of a fly half, his strength, speed, tactical kicking, general cajones under pressure and his all too natural ability to slot over a sneaky drop goal from the pocket  has seen him excel at full back on the first XV.

I’m not too sure where the confusion came from, I’ve heard multiple rumors from multiple sources but none of them hold the kind of clout that would see me speculate on it. Regardless, this is definitely good news. However, I’m kinda hoping this isn’t an April fools day stunt on behalf of that most esteemed of sources, the Limerick Leader. They’d never, would they?