Month: November 2005

Circa 2005

I must say that, having been to see the new movie “Walk the Line”, based on the biography of Johnny Cash, a long-held bitterness about the world’s attitude to white vests has been reawakened in me. For those who don’t know, this all started a number of years ago when I spent a Summer working as a sock model for an underwear manufacturer here on the east coast of Ireland.

You are probably not aware that there are two completely different ways of making string vests. The traditional method, of course, involves simply knitting the vest from a long roll of white string. This was perfectly adequate for many centuries, when the only cats were tigers and lions who lived far away in the jungle, and were of no particular threat to the average male whose string vest had a loose thread. When wild cats wanted some string to play with, then just had to go find themselves a sheep.

Then of course, somebody invented the domestic cat. And everything unravelled. So the clothes designers came up with a new idea. Most modern string vests are made by punching a series of holes in a plain white t-shirt, until it becomes effectively a string vest, with the advantage of not being made from a ball of string. Now, these vests bear absolutely no relation to the awful string vests of the early twentieth century, yet apparently it is “uncool” to be seen wearing one.

However, if the aforementioned movie is to be believed, Johnny Cash’s career was going reasonably well until he ditched his cool white vests and started to dress entirely in black. A feeble attempt, of course, to turn himself into an artificial black cat, thereby attracting good luck. However, Mr. Cash apparently misunderstood the concept of “crossing your path”. Rather than traversing the carriageway directly from one side to the other, as any competent black cat will do, Cash decided to stop halfway across, then, in a pathetic attempt to outdo his feline heroes, he “Walked the Line”.

The result of course was Cash’s infamous arrest for jaywalking, followed by a spell in prison. And rightly so. But the point is, Johnny Cash has recently attracted a new generation of young fans, despite having been seen blatantly wearing a white vest on at least two occasions, as depicted in this authorised biographical movie. Not only that, there have been several films over the years in which vest wearers have been depicted as tremendously cool and macho – Martin Sheen in “Wall Street”, for example, and that guy in “Rambo”.

And Bruce Willis in pretty much everything, except of course “The Sixth Sense”, in which he played a **** ***. (I’ve deleted a couple of words here in case you haven’t seen the film yet). Those guys don’t wear vests because if they did, you would be able to see their decomposing arms, and that would distract you from what they are saying. There’s nothing more irritating than having someone stare at your decomposing elbows, when you’re trying to gaze into their eyes and tell them how much they love you.

Actually, now that you mention it, maybe that’s why my fiancée Joanne won’t let me wear vests. It must have been when I tripped over that puppy last month. It did hurt at the time, but I’m not a cry baby so I didn’t check myself into a mortuary or anything.

Anyway the point is, I’ve never managed to get the hang of these damn subtle differences between the real world and the word of make-believe. I mean, last night I dreamed that I was eating a cat. Yet, when I woke up, I was ravenously hungry. That’s ridiculous. There must have been at least a half pound of meat on that thing. But of course a dream interpreter will charge you a week’s wages to tell you that the cat whose meat you ate in the dream was made of “black matter”, like the stuff they’ve discovered in black holes in space (see figure 2, above) so it just makes your stomach even less full than it was before you started the dream.

Then you pay another week’s wages to a nutritionist, who’ll tell you cats don’t contain enough vitamin “C”, and you’d better buy a bucket of these orange tablets or you’ll die. Well, I didn’t buy them, and I’m still here. Instead, I fed them to my neighbour’s black cat. My experience with the dream interpreter has led me to believe that a black cat is some sort of creature that’s made from anti-matter. If that’s the case, they probably spend their entire day getting hungrier and hungrier. Poor bastards. So anyway, I ate it.

From circa 2005. Not intended as anything other than piece of nonsense writing.

It feels like several years have passed since the events of September 11th 1999 . And, for me anyway, they have faded into memory and I cannot for the life of me remember how I spent that day.

One thing is for certain. I was several years younger than I am today, and the turn of the millennium was but a pair of cat’s eyes on the horizon of the winter solstice, waiting for it’s arrival to shed disappointingly little light on the eternal questions which we therefore carry with us into the twenty first century.

And now here we are, three fifths of a decade later. Yet can it be called a decade when it splits it’s legs unequally, not only between the nineties and the “noughties”, but between two centuries of different beginnings, and between two milleniumias: one now wholly of the past, the other almost entirely – and in any case sufficiently so for it to be predominately the case and therefore the dominant simply by the application of the principle majority rule which any healthy democracy knows is the fairest possible way, albeit not a perfect one – of the future?

And where are we today? As a child I used to visualise the months of the year as being arranged in a wheel shape, with November at eleven o’clock on a steep incline, and this time of year at the bottom of a friendly downhill slope from Christmas. If I’m right, that means we go back round the same wheel every year, which means that effectively the passage of time can only bring limited advances until we end up back where we are, like a year-long Groundhog Day.

That is why no amount of training for years in space, and engines that last forever, can enable man to reach the furthest planets. It is simply chronologically impossible to get to anywhere that is more than a year away.
That’s why plants flower but once a year, rather than trying what they know is unachievable – flowering continuously through consecutive calendrical cycles. It’s why animals go into hibernation to make sure they are not active continuously for more than a year at a time.
For if nature allowed us to continue something through two years in a row, she knows we would recognise it second time round, and know that she was cheating and re-using the same year all the time.

It’s why the world can only grow big enough to spin once on it’s axis in any year. And thank god for that. Our lives are busy enough rushing around from place to place. The last thing we need is to live on a planet that spins, say, twice as fast as it currently does. No doubt some pharmaceutical manufacturer would come up with a cure for dizziness, and through lack of competition keep the price high until it’s patent runs out after seventy years (thirty-five new years).

Clearly the less adventurous among us would have to move to one of the polar extremes, which rotate less quickly. And what with the melting of the ice caps, we would experience an extreme shortage of ice and have to drink hot beverages all the time. The resultant extra heat would cause untold acceleration in global warming, and we’d be pretty much bandjaxed.
Don’t say you weren’t warned. Or at least, if you must lie, try not to lie to yourself. It’s one thing deceiving others – it’s quite another to try to con yourself. That’s just a recipe for disaster. Just yesterday I tried to trick myself out of five euro which I wanted for sweets. Next thing I knew, I’d inexplicably lost five euro of my own money. I have no idea where.

Published as Neal’s Belch or Neal’s Issues circa 2005. Although I see I took the liberty of updating my age for a mid 2000s IYH Blog rehash. I won’t be doing that again.

You may be aware that recently I suffered an injury to my right forefinger, causing a bruise which has taken this past ten days to heal. I’m pleased to say that I am now on the mend, but my scrape with the wall did cause me to contemplate my mortality, or lack thereof. I have been alive now for almost thirty-six years, and therefore assume that I am immortal. However, it may be that my hand and legs are not. And apparently some people who lose limbs choose to hold a burial service for their lost body part. This of course is not to be confused with the phenomenon of dogs who try to bury a bone in the back garden, but instead end up burying one of their own lower legs.

Anyway, I’ve decided that if it ever turns out that I am not technically “immortal”, and I do die, I will get around this by holding a burial service for my body, as if it is simply a missing limb. I will then ignore the fact that I am dead, and carry on as normal, hoping nobody notices. If necessary, I will declare my departure in my tax returns. I am, after all, a law-abiding citizen, and will not under any circumstances seek to undermine the authority of the government in matters of the re-allocation of incomes towards state spending.

My only worry is that my body will decide that I am dead, and hold a burial service for me at the same time that I am holding a burial service for it. I suppose at least we could save money by having a double plot, and be buried side by side, but who then would carry on the important task of being Neal?

Perhaps Justin, my middle name, could take over. I’ve always thought he was a nice chap, and it really is time that he got some of the limelight. Incidentally, since when has lime been capable of emitting light? That’s the most stupid phrase I’ve ever heard, yet I continue to use it. I’m like a sheep that blindly follows the herd as they are rounded up and pushed through the gate by the three-legged dog that for some reason is carrying a bone and, rather appropriately, looking sheepish.

That reminds me. There are not enough webcomics about sheep in this world. Perhaps if I get time I will create Matchstick Sheep, but let’s assume for a moment that I don’t. What is going to become of our children, who are being raised on a diet of Battle of the Planets and Huckleberry Hound? Where are our city kids going to learn the ways of the farm? There are far too many children in my locality who go through school without learning how to milk a cow. What on earth are they going to do in the event of a dairy workers’ strike? Does nobody think about these things any more?

And while I’m on the subject, why does a pint of low fat milk take up exactly the same amount of space as a pint of regular milk? Surely if there is less fat in it there will be less of it. And why have the bottled water manufacturers so far failed to come up with a “diet” version of their beverage? Those of us who try to diet are constantly being told that we have to cut out fat and unhealthy stuff from our lives, and drink more water, but when we try to do so we are cut down from all directions, like a forest coming under attack from a sword-wielding newspaper proprietor who has run out of paper and needs to get his hands on some quickly.

And that reminds me. If something is fried in fat, and you eat the something but not the fat, isn’t that a fat-free meal? And what happens if you make sausages out of a nice part of the pig, rather than it’s stomach and urinary equipment? Are you still allowed to call them sausages, or would you be in contravention of European Union regulations regarding the naming of food items? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter since you would probably give them a more upmarket name, to avoid selling yourself short. I always try to avoid selling myself short. I’m five feet, ten and a half inches tall, you know, and proud of it. It took a lot of effort to grow this tall, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to pretend to be shorter than I am, just for the sake of not looking greedy.

Furthermore, I’m hungry.