Earth and moon as seen from 114 million miles

It seemed like my eyes had been closed forever. I opened them and found myself in space. I was enveloped by total blackness, pierced with undiluted specks of perfect light from galaxies and solar systems never before observed with the naked eye. For the first time in my life, I was absolutely still. No forces were acting upon my body and I was floating in perfect nothingness. I wasn’t bound by gravity, compelled by any action or indeed limited by resistance. Absolute and total silence is the hardest sound to contemplate, space makes the most peaceful of country meadows seem like a riot of noise and alarm.

Far off galaxies revealed themselves to me in discs and spirals, dancing to a rhythm so precise as to predict and pre-empt every event that has ever taken place or will ever take place so as to make control, power and choice as meaningless as the lines in the sand left after the tide, yet at the same time the vastness of it all made the concept of fate and pre-ordination as unimportant as the path of the swirls in a milky cup of tea. Distance and perspective lost all meaning and I was at once everywhere and nowhere, time was nothing but a mere man-made concept, I was at once now and eternity, yesterday and tomorrow, never and always, I had lived for a billion years and had yet to be conceived. Answers to every question ever posed and every thought that will ever be imagined were presented to me and explained as easily as the simple truth of the difference between zero and one. And then…

“Hey, wake up” a voice interrupted me.

I opened my eyes, “Are you God?” I asked softly.

“Wha? Listen, ya can’t sleep here, we’re closin’ for lunch. Come back after.”

It slowly dawned on me that I was in the dole office, absolutely tripping off my balls on magic mushrooms. I felt as if my teeth were melting and my jaw was about to fall off, I held my hand over my mouth and said “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

I went home as quickly as possible, without making eye contact with anyone, they knew, they all knew, the dog on the corner of my street said hello to me and I sped up until I reached my door and fell into bed fully clothed, I slept a dreamless sleep for over twenty hours. I was awoken by a text message: HI HUN IL B L8 SEE U @ 10

Are we still doing this, the block capitals? The text speak? It’s just as easier to write a proper message you know. I didn’t say that though as I imagined myself as a German WW1 officer, I just said: Sure, see you in the back of the smoking area.

I had met her a month before, standing in line at the chippers at three a.m, she was gorgeous, her handbag was worth more than anything I have ever owned. She said she was a model of some sort and that the only reason she likes getting drunk is so she can binge on junk food, I convinced her to try the battered sausage, she gave me her number. I didn’t text her, I don’t go in for that sort of thing; going for coffee, calling the next day, arranging another date, goodnight kisses, sleeping with each other on the third date, meeting her friends, Christmas at her parents’, going on holiday together where I ask her to marry me, conceiving on the honeymoon, taking a management job at an insurance firm to pay for private school, winter ski holidays, waking up in the middle of the night at fifty three and realising I was never happy with her and now it’s too late to find someone else because I’m bald and impotent. It was all perfectly clear that’s how it would play out when I met her, better to stop before it even started. A week later, a friend of mine was playing a DJ set in a popular nightclub in town and I went along to show my support by taking a pill and chewing on my own lip in the corner of the room for three hours, it really wasn’t my scene; the smell of fake tan in the air, sugary alcopops, the same songs every night, how could anyone enjoy this? And there she was, it made perfect sense, this was her comfort zone, she fit in perfectly. She saw me across the room and came over, demanding why I hadn’t texted her, the confidence of vodka on her breath. In that moment I relented, she looked amazing in the lights of the dancefloor, through the MDMA haze. We arranged a date the next night and now here we are, about to go on date number three. The previous two dates went well, exactly as predicted, some dancing, the usual chit chat, I paid for her Chardonnay, walked her home to her place with her arm in mine, a goodnight kiss and then home by 2a.m. I really don’t know what’s going on, there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s perfectly pleasant and intelligent as well as being gorgeous, we’re the same age and have lots in common, and yet, I can’t wait to be rid of her, she doesn’t get me, she’d never in a million years take mushrooms, or stay up all night dancing naked on a beach around a fire. But I’m far too much of a coward to actually come out and say that, to be honest with her, to see that look on her face as I say “We need to talk…”. I’ll do what I always do, wait it out until an opportunity comes to sabotage the relationship, a war of attrition until she relents and moves on, another name added to my list of people to avoid in the street.

Our third date went fine, a few pints in a ‘trendy old man pub’, an oxymoron if ever there was one. I walked her to my place, invited her in. She said she’d wait inside for her taxi, I shrugged. We began to kiss on the couch and I asked her to stay. “It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that it’s too early, I like to play by the rules.”

I nodded, pretending to understand. If you want to do something you do it, there are no rules for dating, you’re not baking a cake, people have been fucking and pairing off for millions of years, it baffles me that we could be so arrogant as to think we could improve it by putting restraints on it. Her taxi came and she left.

I put on some Dylan, sat down in my smoke filled room and opened a blank page. An hour later and I was still trying to remember what came to me in the dole office while I was tripping off my tits. “It had something to do with space.” I said to the empty room. My train of thought was interrupted my a phone call. “Come over if you’re up.” the voice on the other end said. It was an ex of mine, we’d been having some sort of thing whereby she calls me up when she comes in drunk and lonely, we never speak to each other apart from that. It’s working out quite well for both of us.

A couple of hours later and we’re lying together naked in the dim candlelight. “I’ve never been anyone’s mistress before.” was what she said after I told her about the model, “I think I’ll like it.”

“I’m breaking up with her” I said, flatly “it wouldn’t be fair. It’s like Updike said, the wife can never know more about the man than the mistress. She only suspects the man may be a liar, the mistress knows for certain.” But she was already asleep, and I was left alone in the perfect stillness of space.

“Do you want to come smoke dope in my brothel?” I asked her as last orders were called. She raised an eyebrow, unsure what to say. After all, you can’t just say no to a question like that, there has to be a follow-up, and then you’re in, fun will be had.

The Brothel, as we lovingly call it, was a real whorehouse before it was shut down, disguised in the thinly veiled cloak of a ‘Massage Parlour’. It has a waiting room that we use as a dancefloor. All the doors are marked with brass plates that proclaim ‘Reception’ or ‘Private’ or ‘VIP’. We found a secret room on the third floor that the landlord didn’t know about, some sort of pimp’s lair, with nothing in it but a dusty mattress on the floor and a huge safe built into the wall that we can’t open.

The house is always filled with music. I live with two musicians and a writer, three guys I’ve known since I was twelve years old. There’s always the sound of singing from the kitchen or something blaring out of a stereo somewhere, or a keyboard in the bathroom (the acoustics are better), drums in the sitting room, the gentle strumming of a mandolin from the attic, a glockenspiel for an alarm clock. I’ve grown used to it, and find it comforting; stepping over wires, sitting on bass amps while watching DIG! for the thirtieth time.

This is where we celebrate our unemployment. We are a republic unto ourselves, a country within a country, like Monaco or The Vatican. We are the flagship for all that is good and exciting about youth; indecision, indiscretion, exploration, experimentation, fantasy, creation, destruction, delusion and newness, all that is new in ourselves and new in this unknown world around us of fear and poverty and above all, freedom.

The Man doesn’t know we’re here, the For Sale sign hangs outside like the flag of our recession republic, shielding us from the world of responsibility. We don’t have any neighbours, no tv licence people come calling, the bills pile up on the hall carpet until they are thrown on the fireplace unread.

There are downsides of course, the kitchen isn’t even fit to boil a kettle, the oven door has to be held in place with a weighted chair when it’s turned on, the grill starts fires, there is a perfectly circular hole in the wall where an extraction fan used to be, we simply use it as a bin, nobody knows where it leads. There is no heating to speak of, jackets must be worn inside and on the rare occasion I go to bed sober, I fill five jam jars with boiling water and place them under my covers an hour before I go to bed, sort of a middle ages style hot water bottle.

Empty and half empty (half full?) beer cans are simply left, sometimes for months at a time, hundreds and hundreds of them all over the house . The empty ones are used as ashtrays, the first time you accidentally tip your ash into someone’s beer thinking it’s empty, it’s funny, after that, it’s just bad economics. As part of our detachment from the real world (and poverty), our bins aren’t collected. We simply allow black bags to pile up in the hall until the flies become a problem (glass bottles were quickly banned except for spirits due to weight) once every couple of months we slip out under darkness to find an unattended skip.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent an hour rolling my day’s supply of joints on the coffee table, perfecting the art of Fordism, rolling them in stages, fourteen at a time, starting with fashioning fourteen roaches, then tearing fourteen rolling papers, separating out fourteen portions of tobacco etc, until there were fourteen half-rolled joints laid out in front of me, ready to be licked and sealed (yes, 14 a day is probably a lot, everyone needs a hobby). In the time it took me to do this, sitting under the portrait of Eric Cantona that hangs in our sitting room, I watched one of my housemates stalk around the room catching flies. There must have been about twenty bluebottles in the room at the time, and he caught them all, sealing them inside a plastic Fanta bottle for some reason that has since escaped me. He has made this one of his main pass-times. His primary method lacks panache, but is certainly effective. He stands on a stool in the middle of the room, staying perfectly still, and waits for one to come within range, then he simply swings at it with a clenched fist, knocking it dead before it hits the ground, when there are more flies than he can handle, we take out the rubbish.

Still, I would put up with all of this filth and madness and much worse in order to avoid the recessionary alternative: moving back home. When I visit home, I feel like I’m the ambassador of an ancient court to a foreign land with strange customs and people. My mother’s cure for empty nest syndrome seems to primarily involve cleaning. I don’t feel comfortable sitting down anywhere, the CDs on the bookshelves and the newspapers on the tables are too straight, as if they’re not for reading at all, merely props in a suburban dinner theatre that’s been lasting over twenty years. There’s no smell of smoke in the house, no smell of anything actually, the furniture is stiff and the carpets are clean. This is not a place for living, this is a place for dying.

My sister seems to fit in perfectly, she lives in this moonscape of doilies and saucers, spending her days watching re-runs of Two and a half men, not laughing at it…simply watching it, as if observing the movements of the characters, studying their habits to relay to her alien overlords how the human race interacts with each other.

At dinner, my mother will fish for details on a possible girlfriend in my life “or boyfriend…ha….ha” my father will add, not really joking, because right there and then he might make me crack and admit what he feared all along; that I must be gay, because only queers like books and old movies and don’t like hurling, it’s not because I’m terrified of exposing any girl to the torture that is my family. I’ll turn on the radio to fill the silence and the news will tell us that the polls predict a landslide in some third world election. “I wonder why journalists always trust the predictions of Polish people.” I’ll say, laughing at my own pun.

“What?” they’ll say.

I’ll grumble that it was just a joke and disappear to search the medicine cabinet for some old prescription pills that won’t be missed, twenty years’ worth of family ailments and maladies staring at me from a bathroom cabinet. I’ll take down the names of anything I don’t recognise and google them later in the hope they’re something worth trying or selling.

Then I’ll escape, relishing the walk from suburbia, where tall bushes hide small minds and secret loathing, where people go out on the balconies of their one-bedroom apartments to smoke cigarettes and watch the television through a screen door. Back to the city, back to The Brothel, where there is coffee and music, and filth and tears and life and ideas and flies and secret rooms and laughter and friends…friends, these are my real family.

“So” I asked her again, “do you want to come smoke dope in my brothel?”

No more 9a.m lectures for me, no more assignment deadlines or cramming for exams, for the first time since I was five years old, my life no longer revolves around the timetable and my fate is in nobody’s hands but my own, my future will no longer be determined by the arbitrary whims of a man at a desk. I am finally the master of my own universe, a king among men. I answer to no-one but myself and give way to nothing except my own desires. I am bound by neither place nor time and am free to roam the earth as I please.

I now have an Arts degree.

This is how I come to find myself sitting in my underpants at three in the afternoon, eating Cheerios straight from the box and drinking white wine from a mug with a picture of a cat on it that was here when I moved in. The mug was already here, not the wine. I’m sitting on the floor behind the television, facing the corner. This is the only spot in the apartment where it is possible to steal wireless internet from the neighbours.

I am listening to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, watching Trailerpark Boys on youtube and having a very involved discussion on a message board about the pros and cons of a movie of the anime cartoon series Cowboy Bebop. I’m actually taking a break from what I’m supposed to be doing, I’m at the tail end of a 30 episode marathon of the West Wing. I estimate it’ll be another four days before I finish all 155 episodes. After that’s over with, I will posses all knowledge about the intricacies of US politics, so far, it seems to involve a lot of talking quickly while walking down long hallways.

When I finished college and my parents sat me down and said, “OK, you’ve got your degree, now what?”, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said, “I just want to take a break for a while.”

I’ll have you know, good reader, that this isn’t all I’ve been doing since you last heard from me. Like the good citizen that I am, I got a job straight out of college. Probably the greatest job I have ever had or will ever have again, even if I one day become the CEO of a multinational porn and beer consortium, that job will still be the best. It was probably the greatest embodiment of the idea of ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ even in the eyes of the most ardent socialist while perfectly balanced with the capitalist ethos of the faceless minimum wage cog in a huge machine.

I was in charge of the shopping trolleys at a large, suburban supermarket. I say ‘in charge’, I was actually the only person working the trolleys, but that gave me a leg up over the other supermarket drones who spent their days inside, stacking shelves and manning the checkouts. But then again, that’s like saying I was the best looking girl in Coyotes, or that I won a Special Olympics medal, or that I was the best journalist working for The Sun, it’s still not as good as the real thing. My duties were simple: sit inside a corrugated metal shed all day in the carpark, when someone wants a trolley, give them a ticket, take a euro off them and give them a trolley, when they return the trolley and the ticket, give them their euro back.

Sometimes, very rarely, I would need to help an old woman with her groceries or assist in removing a very, very fat child from a child seat. Aside from that, it was bliss. For ten hours a day, I sat in a comfortable chair, sheltered from the elements, but very much ‘outside’ in the fresh air and read a book, magazine or newspaper. I met some interesting people, mainly old people who hang out in supermarkets all day because they’ve nowhere else to go, they just walk around until they keel over, safe in the knowledge that they didn’t die at home, alone. This happened surprisingly regularly, so much so that it stops becoming depressing and starts to seem like one of those things in society that seem horrific when viewed subjectively but are such a big part of our lives that the world would stop functioning in the same way if it ceased, like third-world poverty or teenage binge drinking.

Everything was going great, I felt I was mastering a craft, getting to know the art of trolley maintenance, fixing errant wheels that would lead trolleys astray, oiling the hinges on child seats, contemplating the intricate physics of the ‘trolley snake’, the form trolleys take when they’re slotted perfectly into each other like a beautiful a-sexual orgy or a single amorphic beast that can’t be tamed, even by the most skilled of handlers when being transported across a rain slicked carpark in one long, beautiful convoy.

Then, disaster struck. Like the cooper put out of business by the cheap steel silo, or the lumberjack’s dulled axe or the cavalry horse knackered by the jeep, I was replaced by a machine. I came to work one day to find my shed no longer there, the trolleys I knew so well were replaced by shinier, newer models that were coin operated with a chain link.

Being hungover in the dole office seems like a right of passage for young people in Ireland these days. The first time I went in, the day after I left the trolley industry, it felt like a cattle mart, they’re so used to unskilled college graduates at this stage that they hardly give you a second look, they mumble something about a FÁS course and stamp your form.

“Two thousand and eight euro and thrity-two cent”, the nice woman at the post office said as she counted out a batch of twenty crisp €100 notes when I first collected my ‘payment’. I was unsure what to do. They don’t teach the accepted dole etiquette in Arts, but they really should start. “Backpay payment,” she said, “you’ll be on 196 every week from now on, and 50 for rent.”

That was only slightly less than what I was getting in the supermarket. I had great plans for that two grand. I was going to backpack around Europe, finding underground music scenes that are unknown outside Budapest or Prague, I’d buy a cheap motorcycle, explore the entire west coast of Ireland, I’d buy a kilo of the finest hash imaginable, sell it in ten spots and live like a sultan.

On the dole in Galway, one imagines there’s no other place like it, it’s the perfect marriage, the greatest city in the world to be on the dole, as Joyce said, it’s the “graveyard of ambition”, surely the perfect place for someone with no ambition.

I never went to Prague, I never even looked for a motorcycle and I didn’t take the Galway ten-spot scene by storm. The two grand drifted through my fingers like a handful of sand. Now, here I am, on the dole in the greatest dole city in the world, hiding out in my recession bunker, stocking up on cheap beer and dried pasta, waiting out The Man and his economy. I’m the king of my own universe, the prince of paupers, bound by nothing except my own ambition, or lack thereof.

Congratulations.

Seriously, stand up and give yourself a pat on the back and await rapturous uproar and applause from the awaiting subservient throngs.

[Applause]

You are it.

You are the best we can do.

You are living on the edge, at the tipping point of civilisation. Since humanity came down from the trees, built the pyramids, unlocked the atom, travelled to the moon and touched the face of God, having uncovered the mystery of time and the fourth dimension and beaten itself at chess with a computer and scratched the surface of the human mind, you are our greatest achievement. Every possible option is open to you, a child of the first world, living in the golden age of €1 international flights and €2 mint Cornetto McFlurries. Congratulations on getting here, through the trials of mating and natural selection, every one of your ancestors throughout the past thirty thousand years of recorded human existence has lived long enough to find a mate, survived through plague, war and recession. They were attractive enough to pair off, healthy enough to bear a child and responsible enough to rear it properly. Not only that, but you were lucky enough to grow up in a liberal, western, English speaking, advanced, rich and fruitful society where you have had to do comparatively little work to get to your current position, an information sponge with the works of Beckett, Botticelli, Brahms and the Beatles open to you without strolling away from the B section of Wikipedia. You are probably healthy and reasonably attractive, fit enough to walk a half-marathon. Seriously, well done, a fluke of genetic and geographic circumstance have led you to this point in space and time; a free agent in a world of limitless opportunity. If you wanted, if you put in a little effort, you could scale the heights of political spheres and become president or walk on the international space station.

However, instead of becoming a leader of nations or going to space, you will instead watch television. That’s it, nothing more, nothing less. You will watch lots and lots of television. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll go for a walk to the shop to get more Pringles…on a Sunday…if the weather is fine…during an ad break…if there isn’t an ad you haven’t seen before. That’s fine though, nobody expects you to do anything else, and to do anything else would upset the very carefully and well thought out plan that nature has for you. You are meant to retreat into a world of Celebrity Big Brother and Heat magazine. The fact that Kerry Cole or whoever is famous this week is pregnant while high on crack and lost four stone while having cancer should interest you, if anything; you need to work overtime to afford more Heat magazines. It’s fine, the mere fact that you ever existed deserves a round of applause.

[Stand for another ovation, wait for noise to die down and continue].

About thirteen years ago, the worlds biggest and brightest minds attended a scientific symposium in New York, the biggest names in physics, chemistry, biology, economics, engineering, mathematics and philosophy were all packed into a hotel ballroom for three days of talks, a massive ‘think-in’ aimed at thinking outside the box in order to come up with answers to the environmental and over-consumption problems facing mankind. It took them two days to agree that all these problems were caused by overpopulation. Darwin had been proved right many times over, the problem is that it wasn’t only the fittest who were surviving, the others were too (you and I).

At the end of the conference, not wanting to suggest a purging of the lower classes, a genetic selection process by fights to the death or a lottery process by which we decide who gets a handgun and the right to kill ten people they don’t like, as those ideas seemed far too radical (and expensive by the sounds of it, if not damned entertaining)…they simply suggested we do nothing. Keep reproducing and consuming, because, this will lead to the birth of another Newton, another Da Vinci, another once in a generation genius who will figure out the problem for us, or failing that, technology will advance far enough to build a computer powerful enough to figure out the problem for us.

Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, in fact, if I were you, I’d take tomorrow off college and go on the internet, looking up all the members of the opposite sex you know on Myface or Spacebook, grading each one’s genetic traits against yours and find a mate. Failing that, you should go to the nearest nightclub, get absolutely shitarsed drunk and try and touch genitals with a mildly attractive stranger….. What’s that you’re mumbling? You already do that?

Well done. Job well done I say.

[Spontaneous applause followed by a shower of rose petals, shield your eyes from the spotlight, wave to the adoring masses, regain composure, muddle through a hastily prepared speech and retake your seat, The X Factor is about to start.]

It’s 4:32 am. “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone”, the Bill Withers song has been on repeat for the past six hours in our neighbours’ flat at number 23. I don’t really mind, it’s a good song and I’m up anyhow writing this diary entry and playing Fifa 99, and they don’t even have it on that loudly, it’s just that our apartments are so shittily built that you can hear someone sneeze two doors away. These are your standard boxes upon boxes built at the height of the Celtic tiger, the walls are probably made with Chinese newspaper and egg whites.

The fact that the neighbours chose this song isn’t really that surprising, two middle aged men live together at no. 23, I’ve seen them stumbling home from the pub at midnight, or skulking out to the shop to buy the Irish Indo and shoe polish or whatever it is middle aged men buy.

I can imagine them now, huddled together in the middle of the sitting room consoling each other, sobbing gently over the memories of their lost loves as Bill Withers comforts them; “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know…this house ain’t no home any time she goes awaaaaay…ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.”

I should put a bottle of whiskey and two razor blades through their letterbox; let them put themselves out of their misery. Although, that’s taking a bit of a risk, you never know who’d move in instead of them, they could be like the assholes who live below us at number 26; an amateur DJ and his bimbo girlfriend who alternate between Enya or the Titanic soundtrack on a Sunday morning and Tiesto or Scooter on a Saturday night.

Then I’m struck by a terrible thought; perhaps the guys at number 23 have already taken care of themselves, sticking both their heads in the gas oven, or taking a bath together with a toaster or scoffed a fistful of pills while Bill Withers sends them to sleep…it is a good song to go out on (Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ would be my first choice). I’m going to have to make some sort of statement to the police when they find the bodies, the first paragraphs of this diary could be used as evidence of intent…

Before i can finish that train of thought, Bill Withers has suddenly stopped singing next door. The lads are probably fine; they wouldn’t stop the music before they killed themselves. It could be on a timer though. No, I’m sure their fine. It’d make a good entry for the next issue though if they did do something drastic. (Wikipedia search: Seppuku)

I might as well take this brief interlude to tell you about my latest brief foray into the dating world, since it’s related to all this. You see, I’m not much of a ‘dater’ in the traditional ‘Ross and Rachel from Friends’ sense of the word. Sure, I have been on dates, with girlfriends, girls whom I’ve already established a relationship with, friends who’ve become lovers, thus avoiding the awkward first date chit-chat while we size each other up to make sure the other person doesn’t have any STDs or a basement full of crack-addicted child prostitutes covered in goats’ blood (you’d be surprised what you can learn about a person by the way they drink their coffee).

So anyhow, enough of that filler, down to business: A week or two ago, I was on a night out. Where I was, what I was drinking and with whom is unimportant, all that matters is that she was there. The girl from number 32; tall, dark, second generation Italian with perfect skin, sensuous lips and mischievous eyes. I spotted her on her own at the end of the bar, drinking red wine and looking uninterested in everything except her nails, waiting to be spoken to. Unfortunately, I was beaten to it by some scumbag in a chequered shirt who was too drunk to get into any of the nightclubs. She smiled at him politely, straining to comprehend his slurred tones, when he lunged at her, grabbing her breast. She screamed, spilling her red wine across the bar. I rushed over, separating her from the brute and escorted her out the door. She took a moment to catch her breath and regain her composure before she even looked at me. When she did finally notice me, she recognised me as her neighbour, just as I had done. She smiled and we began to laugh; “Thanks” she said, “I owe you one.” She began to walk away as I suggested we catch a cab home together (with perfectly innocent motives, I assure you)…however, she thought the same as you do of me and refused on the grounds of us being near perfect strangers and not wanting to damage her reputation as a lady (I’m paraphrasing).

“You are sweet though, let’s have coffee together tomorrow, I get my lunch break around one o’clock.”

So we did, we had coffee, I pretended it wasn’t a date while we had first date chit–chat. She ticked all the boxes. She’s a lawyer, likes classical jazz, plays piano, enjoys dancing, is well read, well travelled, open minded…it all went very well and we decided to go for cocktails that evening. Fast forward to eight hours later and after cocktail upon cocktail upon cocktail (Woo-Woos I believe they were called, for the aficionados amongst you), we were in search of a nightclub to dance the night away.

So there we were, in my natural environment; a darkened room with loud music, I was busy pretending it wasn’t a second date and it was all going very well and good when suddenly she burst into tears. Right there, in the middle of the dancefloor, surrounded by hundreds of people. I tried to console her, not having a bull’s notion what the fuck had just happened when she turned to me, her eyes full of tears and screamed “Why did he leave me?!? Why?!” before she buried her head in her hands and continued bawling.

Now, my instant and immediate thought was to get the fuck out of there as quickly as my underused legs would carry me, but that would have been impolite, and besides, she had my coat-check ticket.

Then she asked the question again, “Why did he leave me?!?” The answer to this question was becoming increasingly obvious to me, as I’m sure it is to you: “Because you’re an absolute psycho!” But I didn’t say that, I simply hugged her and said the words that every girl wants to hear about their ex; “Because he’s an asshole?”

“Yeah, he is an asshole, you’re right. You’ll never leave me Paddy, will you? You’ll stay with me.”

The temptation to flee was growing stronger and stronger by the minute, my coat be damned, I could pick it up tomorrow. But I stuck it out, she kept buying drinks (Her = Lawyer, Me = Student, I should look into getting this column sponsored), and when she wasn’t in floods of tears we danced and drank some more. We did get a taxi home together this time, but we went our separate ways. I haven’t talked to her since.

She texted me every day for the next week without any encouragement, which made me look like the asshole, but it’d be worse to lead on an emotionally unstable psychopath.

Now I’ll obviously have to move out, with Bill Withers one side, Enya underneath me and a lunatic who’s convinced we’re going out living at number 32.

The nightclub toilet is where a lot of mistakes are made. Lines of cocaine are taken for the first time, unprotected sex is had, naggins of spirits are poured into pint glasses and hurriedly drank, and people pass out in pools of their vomit…or other peoples’ vomit. But the biggest mistake anyone can make in the toilet of a nightclub, and it could happen to anyone…is drunk texting. You’ve had a few light ales, or a snifter or two of port, and retire to the powder room to relieve yourself when you get an overwhelming desire to see how your ex-girlfriend is doing, or to tell your boss you may not be feeling the best tomorrow morning and won’t be in, it may all start off with the best intentions, but it usually goes awry. You’ll tell your girlfriend that you love her and your boss that he can go fuck himself, or the other way around, or both, and you won’t remember until you look through your ‘sentbox’ the next morning.

The texts don’t have to say anything obvious or naughty; sometimes it’s what they don’t say that means the most. The very fact that you’re on a night out with your friends, heavily intoxicated and you decide, out of the blue, to text a girl you fell madly in love with years previously, but it never worked out and you haven’t seen them in months, simply to say ‘Hi, how’re you?’ or ‘Hour U?’ or ‘LQfoj’, depending on how many light ales you’ve had, says far more than you think. They know what you’re really saying, but luckily there’s no damage done. The real problem occurs if they’re also drunk, in a nightclub toilet texting you back, that’s when you agree to run away together to Mexico, or decide what you’re going to call your children.

The phone is an amazing invention; nearly everyone in the western world is contactable at any moment at any location. A camel dealer in Casablanca could ring a barman in Castlebar and nobody would think twice about how amazing a feat of engineering that is. What’s really amazing is that you could ring Brad Pitt right now. Somewhere in the world, Brad Pitt is walking around with his phone in his pocket (or at the very least the phone is in the pocket of his trousers in the next room because he’s having a shower or something) and you could ring him and have a chat if you guessed the right number. The chat probably wouldn’t last very long, and would surely involve the line “How did you get this number?” or “I’m not actually wearing anything, I was having a shower.”, but you could ring him nonetheless.

The reason I’m talking to you about phones is because I’m actually avoiding what I really want to talk to you about, I thought I could get away with eight hundred words about drunk texting but I seriously ran out of steam after Brad Pitt.

It all happened on Halloween. I don’t rate Halloween as a holiday at all, actually I really actively dislike the whole idea, but I still go out, because town turns into a messy concoction of short skirts, bad make-up, vodka, fireworks, chocolate, ambulances, violence and Amy Winehouses. It’s the only time of year when you can witness a man dressed as Jesus or Ali G or something being piled into the back of a paddy wagon, swearing and shouting at the cops that he’s going to murder them once the cuffs are off and it’s not in the paper the next day because there is nothing out of the ordinary about that situation on Halloween. I go to Eyre Square every Halloween and drink it all in, I revel in the mess, the vomit, the devil horns, the shocked faces of the tourists, the entire surreal situation. This Halloween however, I overdid it a tad. I went to a fancy dress party at a nightclub and took every advantage of the drinks promotions on offer, Double Vodka and Red Bull, Fat Frog, Coronas, Jaeger Bombs whatever suggary shite was on offer, mixed with several other types of stimulants, most notably a bag of MDMA and crushed Ecstasy (the difference between the two is lost on me). Very little memories remain of the rest of that night after the club, that rarely happens to me, it’s scary; usually it’s not too bad, you wake up the next morning with three hundred quid taken out of your ATM and a traffic cone in your bedroom and you shrug it off, it becomes scary when you wake up next to someone.

The light from the window hit my face at an angle and I awoke in strange surroundings, there were clothes all over the floor, a dresser full of make-up and a mirror framed by pictures of girls hugging for the camera on the dance floors of nightclubs and at graduations and pictures of dogs and a giant poster of Johnny Depp on the back of the door and pink everywhere, pink slippers, pink dressing gown, pink stereo. Needless to say, this was not my room. I heard the toilet flush in the en-suite and the door opened, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Maybe she’d get dressed and leave the house, avoiding any awkward confrontation. But she emerged naked from the bathroom and fell back into bed, it was still early and we needed more sleep. We awoke again several hours later staring into each others’ eyes. Two strangers meeting for the first time. I held out my hand, “Hi, I’m Paddy.” I said, forcing a smile at the situation. She laughed and introduced herself; taking my hand, the blankets lifted to reveal her breasts…she covered them up again quickly before I saw them. I laughed, she seemed embarrassed. I’m sure I would have seen her breasts the night before, for all I knew I probably did unspeakable, perverse things to them involving masking tape and ice cubes, but neither of us remembered. We’d have to start again from scratch. I asked her what she was studying at college, where she was from, exchanged witty banter, and she gradually became less inhibited. I stroked her bare stomach under the covers and she curled up against me. I kissed her forehead and we just held each other, two lonely naked strangers trying to find a friend in an ugly world filled with Halloween monsters every day of the year. We laid there in silence, comforting each other for the rest of the morning, as the hangovers gently drifted away and the afternoon grew and came on. Her phone rang, jolting us back to life. It was her friends wanting to meet her for coffee.

I kissed her forehead again and turned away to allow her to get up and get dressed without me watching. She went to the kitchen and put on the kettle as I searched the room for my boxer shorts (I didn’t find them and had to go commando, the cold zipper scratching against my skin), we sat in her plain kitchen and drank tea in silence, avoiding eye contact. I walked her to town and we parted with a hug, never to meet again.

As I walked home, through a mess of discarded witches’ hats, broken pumpkins and abandoned high hells, I decided to give up drink until at least after Christmas and that I’d never again take white powder of any kind, it leads to all sorts of Halloween monsters.

I awoke on Wednesday with a bigger hangover than usual. Funds had been running low in the Garcia bank account and the previous night, I was forced to go to Aldi in search of low priced alcohol. As regular readers will know, whiskey is my tipple of choice, so I was pleased to find a substantial range of malts on offer in the discount emporium. The only problem was that they all looked seriously dodgy. No picture of Scottish highlands on the bottle, or Irish wildlife, or American iconography as usually comes with Scotch, Irish whiskey and bourbon respectively. The most appealing label design that was on display was a plain beige sticker that said simply ‘Whiskey’ in plain black typeface. This must be what it’ll be like to live in the future, in a communist Orwellian superstate where marketing doesn’t exist because money has been banned; people won’t need to choose between one brand or another, just the state produced product of their choice. I shudder to think what ‘Government Whiskey’ might taste like…probably the same as ‘Government Vodka’ or ‘Government Petroleum’ I imagine.

Having gotten the bottle home and cracked it open, my doubts were confirmed, it didn’t taste like whiskey at all, it was totally tasteless except for that familiar tingle on the back of the tongue, the body’s signal that what you’re ingesting is harmful…poisonous in fact…luckily the tingle becomes numbed after a few more swigs. I mixed the bottle of poison with a bottle of Coke and strapped in for a night of shirtless dancing at pantsless house parties, talking shit to strangers just to get a taste of their dope and urinating from balconies…the hazy details are not important to this part of the story, you’ve heard the usual shenanigans from me before; a good time was had by all, that’s all that matters.

What does matter is that I learned a lesson that day, standing in that discount supermarket. That lesson is that I am never going back; the hangover from the low quality alcohol isn’t worth it. Of course one should never say never, if, by some fortune I become some sort of street-bum, dancing on Shop Street with no shirt on, covered in prison tattoos of smiley faces with long, matted hair, shouting at the American tourists and yelling ‘Free Bird!’ at buskers who will be too young to get the implied Bill Hicks reference and actually start playing the song….then, I will gladly return to Aldi with my dole money and buy armfuls of industrial battery acid standard spirits and attempt to drink myself into oblivion, but until that time comes (two years after I get my Arts degree probably), I’ll stick to the good stuff.

But I digress…so there I was the next morning, in the foetal position having fallen off the bed in the middle of the night, too ill to move; the Ecstasy comedown, hash hangover and Whiskey sweats all battling with each other to see who could bring about my doom first. It was there, lying in a small puddle of my own drool that I began to plan my day. From the angle of the sun at my window (south facing), using my best Ray Mears woodland scout tricks, I guessed it was around 5pm. The Ireland V Cyprus match would be starting in about two hours. Yes, I know, I know, ball sports are the pursuit of closet homosexuals and the homophobes who watch them, however, soccer is different, it has a poetry, a certain aura about it, it’s no so much the game itself that I like, most of the time I don’t really care who wins or loses, in fact, 99% of all soccer matches are uneventful drivel that the world could do without, however, the events that surround it are some of the most interesting cultural happenings of our time. The best drama, the best journalism, the truest emotions that appear on our televisions come from soccer. In a world of canned laughter and repackaged news reports, this is something to be savoured. The titans of the game…not the modern pansies like Ronaldo or Henry, but the true personalities in the game’s history, like Paulo DiCanio; a neo-fascist with a serious small man syndrome who once caught the ball in his hands from a perfect cross in front of an open goal because the opposing team’s goalie was down injured, a gesture which brought grown men to tears with beef pie and Bovril dribbling from their gawping jaws. Or Cantona; a French warrior-poet who, upon his retirement compared himself to a fishing trawler, confusing an entire room full of journalists who still can’t grasp what he truly meant and weren’t prepared to question a man whom, with total disregard for his own safety, once took a running dropkick at a man in the crowd’s face during a match.

The guy deserved it though.

The best thing about the game doesn’t take place anywhere near the pitch however, it takes place in a warm RTE studio in Donnybrook, where a camera points at a table surrounded by four men approaching their mid-sixties shouting at each other. Eamonn Dunphy is the best journalist on television, on any medium in fact, you can shove your libel law, your college degrees and your press passes up your hole, Eamonn is where it’s at. A man whose face looks more weathered than a Norwegian fisherman’s boot and drips controversy out of every orifice of his body.

So with this in mind, I strode down the stairs of my flat, and switched on the television, ready to be greeted with Eamonn Dunphy jumping on a studio desk in a cocaine fuelled rant about how the manager of Cyprus isn’t fit to lace Roy Keane’s boot, but no, the TV only brought forth static, a grey mess of snowy silence. Nothing, on any channel. Was this it? Had the TV licence inspector finally caught up with me? Is this how they operate? Waiting until you’re too hungover to resist, on a rainy Wednesday evening, cut off the TV signal to the entire block before crashing into your living room through the window, wrestling you to the ground, your eyes welling up from the tear gas before they put you in flexi-cuffs and lead you out into the carpark by pushing you along via a sharpened broomstick up your anus and throw you in the back of a plain white Ford Transit, destination unknown.

I stood in the middle of the room with my eyes closed for a few seconds, just in case, waiting for the tear gas…nothing, just the white noise of the television. The satellite TV hadn’t been paid since we moved in, in fact, we had been getting free TV channels for a year before they realised I was not in fact Omar Pattell, the person whom the letters for the ESB, NTL, Gas, and TV licence all come through the door for, and finally cut us off. I sat down and stared at the fuzzy screen. I once watched a documentary that said that the white noise TV signal is the solar radiation left over after the big bang and what the TV is actually picking up is cosmic signals from across the galaxy. Seems fairly unimpressive to me, it’s certainly no match for Countdown, even without Richard Whitely. I looked at the clock on my mobile, 7:30pm, and wondered if Aldi was still open.

The very best thing about college isn’t the education; you can pick that up using the internet and a half decent local library card. Nor is it the social life; the all night parties, the drugs, the pint glasses of Buckfast, the sexual experimentation or the freedom to sit around all day drinking tea and talking balls. The best thing about college is the people you meet. Throughout the course of your life you will probably require the services of doctors, architects, accountants, business managers, engineers, politicians, drug dealers, journalists, teachers and almost certainly lawyers.

I’ve already gotten most of my future contacts book sorted. I have a raft of future doctors I’ll be able to call on in five years’ time when they qualify who will be able to furnish me with prescriptions for anything from Viagra (just in case) to Valium (because waiting for a bus is boring), they’ll be able to give me advice over the phone as to what that mystery rash that suddenly appeared might be, or why little Paddy Jr. won’t stop crying. I’ll have several psychiatrists and psychologists who’ll be able to give me sick notes for whatever dead end job I end up in, written on official letterheads. Should the need arise; they can also appear as a witness in court as to my questionable mental state.

The only section of my contacts book that’s bigger than the doctors’ section is the one set aside for the future politicians, twenty or so names grouped in order of likelihood that they’ll be Taoiseach, factoring in their party affiliation, street smarts, bribeability, ambition, oratory skills and how much dirt I have on them. Even if only one of them makes it to any sort of position of standing, I will at least be able to get some land rezoned to build a shopping centre, or if one of the ones hoping to run in Britain makes it, I might even be able to buy a peerage; I’ve always thought ‘Lord Garcia’ has a nice ring to it. If, on the other hand, someone from this auspicious list actually does the impossible and gives NUIG its first Taoiseach, I could get a handy job as a speechwriter, trying to capture the ‘yoof’ vote; creating cringe worthy youtube videos featuring the politician in question with their sleeves rolled up and loosened tie playing soccer with inner city kids (carefully chosen from a casting agency) with jumpers for goalposts. Or I could just blackmail the Taoiseach elect with the video of us in a threesome together on the night of the Students’ Union elections count, thus earning me a civil service wage for life on a Caribbean island as part of a think-tank examining Jamaican-Irish relations in my capacity as Ambassador (His Excellency Garcia might be a step too far though).

Because the future is a scary and unpredictable place, the names of some dashing young army officer recruits knocking around the college with their shiny shoes and STIs also appear in my little book; because one never knows when a coup or similar state of emergency might break out where dropping the name of a high ranking army officer could be the difference between getting the last seat on one of the choppers off the island before Leinster House is burned down and run the risk of being left behind to hold my own among the mobs of people revolting against the new ten o’clock off-licence closing time legislation.

The key section in my little black book at the moment doesn’t in fact contain any names of sweet young seventeen year old farmers’ daughters fresh off the bus from Ballynowhere to study in the big smoke who need a big strong boy to help them move into Corrib Village (“My shower nozzle seems to be broken, can you take a look at it?”)…no, the key section contains the name of two budding accounting geniuses who will be able to find a creative solution to any future financial problem I may encounter; whether I need help claiming two different dole cheques or opening a numbered Swiss bank account to avoid Johnny Customs Officer, I can count on their arithmetic.

However, at the moment the pages reserved for lawyers are blank, I find myself totally lacking in any potential legal help. It’s not that I don’t know any law students, or even anyone who has recently graduated law; that’s not the case at all, I know plenty of legal eagles, from the Legal Science student with a passing interest in the halls of justice to the A grade LLB student with their place in Kings Inns already assured. The problem is that it’s very rare that any of these become proper pin stripe wearing Johnny Cochrane wannabe junk yard dogs. Many of the people I know with law degrees work in banks, one of them lives on a mountain in Tibet smoking dope and learning the sitar, a shocking number of them become publicans, seeing selling fat frogs to fake-tanned sixteen year olds as the acceptable alternative to selling crack; with the bank balance to prove it. More work in call centres, or fast food outlets, or even worse, enter into politics. The reason behind someone training for so long to be something and then roundly rejecting the profession is a mystery to me, it could be that they studied law just to please Mummy and Daddums after not getting enough leaving cert points to study medicine, or it could be the stigma attached to lawyers, all the jokes [What's the difference between a porcupine and a Mercedes Benz full of lawyers? The porcupine has pricks on the outside…What's the difference between a lawyer and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist….What's the problem with lawyer jokes? Lawyer's don't think they're funny, and no one else thinks they're jokes.]

When a lawyer tells a member of the desired sex at a party what they do, there’s a shift in the mood, yes, they probably have money in the bank, a nice car and good genes, but there’s the risk that they’re either a gangster who defends murderers and drug pushers, or that they put grannies in prison for jaywalking, depending on what side of the pay grade they fall on. If the lawyer had lied (as the stigma suggests they might) and told the person they were a teacher or an accountant, the conversation would have gone on without the interruption of the pause for thought.

It’s this stigma, whether justified or not, that has left me with a gaping hole in my little black book. I will need a lawyer, as I have needed both barristers and solicitors in the past. I have always had the choice to either defend myself in court (which judges absolutely detest), or trust someone whom I met five minutes before the trial who took a massive wad of cash from me in exchange for talking out loud for thirty second in front of a room full of lawyers and criminals (you can insert your own joke there about the stigmatic lack of difference). I need someone I can trust, someone who knows I’m not a scumbag and who knows their way around a courtroom and that when the time comes, can competently argue that the hooker was already dead when I got to the opium den or that putting a brick through a McDonalds window is covered under the right to free expression as a piece of performance art.

Outside the halls of justice, I’ll also need someone to take a look at my pre-nup, my extradition orders and more urgently, the pressing matter of the TV licence inspector’s letter…there’s just no way around them that I know of, but a Johnny Cochrane or Ally McBeal type might know a way. So either I’m running in the wrong social circles, or there just aren’t enough law students actually becoming lawyers. At the rate I’m going, I might actually have to start studying the subject myself if I ever want to get anything done right.

Of course, the down side for all these people in my book, the future doctors, the future Taoisigh and the future publicans is that there’s no pay off for them in the relationship. There isn’t a medical student anywhere on campus who’s keeping a little black book full of names of Arts students, of course not, there is no professional service I can give you in return for your service, unless you get on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and need to know who played the waiter in Pulp Fiction (Steve Buscemi) or what breed of dog Snoopy is (a Beagle)…or if you need an article written in a hurry for a society publication, you can certainly give me a call, but that’ll only get me so far. Arts students like me are only good at two things; being lazy and displaying a moral flexibility in order to pursue further laziness. Maybe I’d be a good lawyer. I’ve certainly got the contacts for it, but for now, I’m getting the video camera ready for when the future Taoiseach calls about another threesome.

I spent the off season, you’ll be glad to hear, summering in a farmhouse near the French coast with René Descartes and Victor Hugo. Right now, you’re probably thinking I mean that I spent my hours reading their works, studying them in seclusion…but you’d be wrong. I mean the real, flesh and blood people. We shared a holiday home. They’re still alive; the reports of their deaths have been greatly exaggerated, they just haven’t been heard from in a while…they don’t have broadband in the coastal countryside in France yet, they haven’t updated their facebook pages recently. So there I was, one fine summer’s day, wiling away the hours, cooking legumes over the stove, when suddenly Victor burst through the door with his face slick with perspiration as he demanded; “Ou est Descartes?”

I paused for a moment from my labour, looked at him and pointed at the backpack on the table. “They’re in there” I said. He looked at me with a puzzled expression, and twirled his moustache as he did when he was confused. He walked over to the satchel and opened it to find several maps of the local area. He began shouting and waving his hands in the air; “Non! Pas des carte. Ou est Descarte?!” I began to grow angry at him, my pot began to boil over; “I don’t know, they’re probably in the drawer”, I said, walking over to the dresser and throwing a pack of playing cards at him from the drawer. He threw them back in my face and stormed out of the room again. For a man who is supposed to be a Romantic, he’s a cantankerous old bastard sometimes.

We now resume normal transmission.

The first years should have stopped reading by now; I don’t want them reading this.

I’m sorry you had to witness that; only a dickhead would start an article with a triple layered French pun about a philosopher with an unfortunate name and use the word ‘summer’ as a verb. My editor wants me to take it easy for the first issue of the new academic year, less of the swearing and talking about sex with strangers and drugs with new best friends because it’s going to be mainly first years reading this issue and they might get the wrong idea regarding what Sin Newspaper is all about. Well fuck that. I figure the first years won’t make it past the second sentence. Besides, I watch Skins, I know they get up to far worse than they did back in my day and nothing I say can shock them. The best we could hope for at a teenage disco was to hear a story about someone getting a shift, never mind actually doing it. Now all they apparently do is go around snowballing each other at discos (if you don’t know what that is, then google it at your own risk, if you do know, then shame on you…and you can contact me through the Sin Newspaper office) and using ridiculous new chat up lines like “My friend wants to know if you’ll shift me?”, which is a labour saving variation on the timeless classic “Will you shift my friend?”; it cuts out the middle man altogether, and by the time they’ve realised that you’ve just scammed them into kissing you, you’re already trying to discern what flavour alcopops they’re drinking by the taste of their tongue.

Besides, they should encourage first years to read about drunken messes like me, it gives them a barometer, so they know that they’re not ‘that bad’. Even I have barometers. These are people who are a hip flask away from becoming full blown alcoholics. We all know these types of people, the ones who fall asleep in the toilets of nightclubs, who fall through glass tables covered in cocaine at house parties, who convince themselves that vomiting on a night out has its advantages; like creating space for more drink and an excuse to buy new shoes in the morning. These are the type of people who wake up on the Aran Islands (not the popular Father Ted one either, one of the other ones), not knowing how they got there, with no money and thirty missed calls on the phone in their pocket that isn’t theirs, yet they still know exactly where the pub on the particular island is and can charm a pint of Guinness out of the owner’s daughter before they’d even think about looking for the boat home. We need people like this to show us how far the rabbit hole goes. First years don’t need to be protected by censorship, they need us to lay the groundwork.

But now I fear my wordcount has been reached and breached and I didn’t even get a chance to tell you about my real summer…all I’ll say is that Aran is a lovely place this time of year.

The cruelty of college is that there isn’t a minimum age requirement. One day, the girls are walking to school in their stockings and Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, with their hair in pigtails and carrying an apple for teacher, then in a blink of an eye, the same seventeen year old girls are let loose on a campus full of guys who have been brought up to be highly sexualised predators. The guys don’t let it show (some do, and are steered clear of), but it’s there, beneath the surface, like a caged beast waiting to get out. These are the same guys who have grown up sitting in front of a playsatation learning to shoot a Nazi in the face with ever increasing realism and cheer at live car chases on TV. Those guys who rob a bank, steal a fast car, and three hours later find themselves running on petrol fumes and four flat tyres, still slowly edging away from the cops, those guys are the gladiators of the playstation generation, they are our heroes. (Wikipedia search: Ritalin)

And these seventeen year old…or god forbid, sixteen year old, dainty flower specimens of girls, women is too strong a word for them, are let loose among us oversexed, chemically imbalanced young men. The girls don’t make it any easier, they wear short skirts, and fragrances that tickle and tease, plunging necklines and high heeled boots. That’s not fair, even soccer has rules, it’s like the girls are Brazil, and the guys are the Galway United’s youth B team. We’re always gonna lose at that game. For god’s sake, will you give us a day off, imagine what we could achieve if we had a day to ourselves to think, without a sexy girl walking past the window (Wikipedia search: Glass ceiling); “Gimme the number to Palestine, I’ve got an answer to that thing they’re involved in, get Mandella on line two, he’ll want to hear this as well. Also, fire all the Oncologists, they’re not needed any more, I’ve found a cure for cancer using Tic-Tacs and fridge magnets.”

Flash back to last week and our hero once again finds himself in a prickly situation. So there I am, staring into the mirror of a nightclub bathroom; she’s waiting for me in the smoking area. Barely seventeen. I begin to speak to the reflection looking back at me. “I’m fairly sure seventeen is legal, but is it though? They changed the age there a while back down from 18 didn’t they? Or did they bring it up from 16? I’m not sure, I should read the paper more. Is it worth the risk? Fuck, this pill is amazing, I can’t feel my legs. I think I might have given her a half pill too, shit like, the judge won’t like that when I’m up in court for statutory. I’m not even sure it’s worth it…but this could be my last chance while I’m in college. It’s like the fall of Rome, all I need is her twin sister and some baby oil and I will officially be a hedonist, even if I one day end up at the most boring of nine to five desk jobs, I’ll always remember this and know I coloured outside the lines in my youth. I dunno though….I dunno. I don’t think I could live with it. It’s wrong. SEVENTEEN. But is it wrong though? Society says it’s wrong, but fuck those old fuckers, I’m not THAT much older than her. I mean she’s old enough to join the army if she wanted to, and she’s been served vodka and diet coke all night (a cocktail unnecessarily called a Skinny Bitch, for future reference), so why not?” (Wikipedia search: Lolita)

And that’s it, it’s the fact that I even have to have this diatribe, the fact I’m talking to myself in the bathroom mirror surrounded by strangers while pilled off my tits, that nagging feeling in the back of my head makes it wrong. The fact that I’m massively drunk, a sexy young girl is throwing herself at me and I’m having second thoughts, that’s probably the biggest reason not to, but then again….SEVENTEEN!

I nod at myself in the mirror, “good hustle, go team, make it happen”, and escape into one of the cubicles for a piss. And there it was, the straw that broke the camels back, the reason that confirmed I can’t sleep with her; the stream of fire that seemed to erupt from my penis as I urinated. The pain nearly buckled my knees, I wanted to cut the top of my penis off. Even after I stopped peeing, there was a weird tingle there, like fire ants were strolling up and down my urethra. This couldn’t have been good. I began to panic; I broke out in a cold sweat. The pill didn’t help, I began to get paranoid and rub my face. I sat down and had a think while sipping Jack Daniels. “This is the main symptom of several STIs, but I’m not that stupid, I was careful….although…there was that girl last week…but no. Can you get it that way? I didn’t think you could, but you obviously can. I’m getting ahead of myself though, It’s probably nothing, although it’s obviously something, my penis is screaming at me. Shit. This pill is amazing.”

And there it is, the culmination of everything you have followed me through in the last year through this diary, it has all come to this; I’m sitting on the toilet of a really really bad nightclub, drinking whiskey, trying to guide my drug addled brain through the decision of whether or not to have sex with a seventeen year old, possibly de-virgin-ising her, and possibly giving her Chlamydia in the process. Hmmmm. I’m not sure this was in the NUIG prospectus. I need some advice.

I take out my phone and ring an old friend, a mature student who has been around the block and back again, he’ll know what to do. (Wikipedia search: Joe 90)

And he does, he advises me to go and make my excuses, tell her the truth and leave her in the smoking area, come downstairs and wait outside where he would bring me to a party.

By party, what he means is the afters of a dinner party attended by six middle aged women being thrown by a married woman he’s having an affair with. On the way I give him a pill and we stop at a sheebeen country pub where he knows the manager and can get booze after hours, the women had given us a list of items to pick up, and as he drives out into the wilds of the countryside, we crack open a bottle of champagne and his pill kicks in. (Wikipedia search: Gran Turismo 5)

The women love us, they had been hitting the wine big style since dinner ended seven hours ago and since then the cocaine mirror had been taken out and put away again and repeated until it was all gone. When we get there, we’re treated like pieces of meat. The fall of Rome is again upon me. One of them takes me aside when the rest aren’t looking.

“Would it bother you if I told you I was married?” she asks.

“Ah, it’s always the same way, all the best ones are either taken or lesbians.” I smile.

“What if I told you I was thirty?”

“You don’t say, you don’t look a day over twenty five.” In actual fact, she was thirty five and had two kids. My friend gave me the low-down on all of them in the car on the way over. But she had an amazing body for a woman with two kids.

We start to make out on a bed of coats upstairs; it’s drunk and messy and wrong and brilliant and sweaty and euphoric and taboo. She rips off my t-shirt and I pop the button on her jeans, this is the most turned on she has been in years and she’s the best kisser I’ve ever had.

But then…nothing. She stops, rolls to the other side of the bed and just looks at me, biting her nail in her mouth and staring at me in silence.

“What’s wrong? Come here.” I say, as I hold out my hand.

“Is it your husband? I understand, it’s completely fine if it is.” I add. Which was true, I mean I’m sure he’s a nice guy or whatever and if she thinks it’ll fuck things up, I’ll put on a shirt and go back down stairs. “We don’t have to do anything, we can just make out.” (Wikipedia search: Outercourse)

“No, it’s not that,” she says, after a long pause “,you’re just too…too young.”

I’m dumbstruck, pure silence, it’s rare that I can’t talk my way out of a situation, or into one as the case may be, but this was new. There’s no comeback from that. She got up, fastened her jeans and walked out of the room, leaving me looking at the dark ceiling wondering how the seventeen year old in the smoking area felt earlier in the night when I told her the same thing. (Wikipedia search: Amor fati)