Category: Writings

Neal’s Belch no.193 from 2005

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “Quad Eriles Dectaforum”, which of course means “Que Cera Cera”, which translates as “When shit hits the fan, it’s always a good idea to attempt to switch off the electricity at the mains, using nothing but the power of your mind.

However, it is an even better idea to just hit the “off” switch with your finger”. I think Roger Moore said it best, when he said “A pound of sausages and a bottle of low fat milk please. Lovely weather isn’t it? Yeah they’re all back at school. Poor bastards. Never mind, they’ll have a week off at Halloween”.

That said, I’ve always thought that there is no harm in trying to live outside of the ordinary. Where would we be had some adventurous person not ventured to rub two sticks together to see if they would make a good musical instrument. Immediately of course the sticks started to burn, and fire was discovered.

Sadly the cavemen who first discovered it decided it didn’t have a high enough pitch. In fact the fire was so quiet that he couldn’t hear it at all. He just made up the thing about pitch, to make it sound like he knew what he was talking about.

Where would we be, for that matter, had Jesus not stuck with his chosen career of carpentry? There would be no sightings of his mother’s face in blocks of wood and polished floors, and our spiritual life would be the less for it. Jesus, quoted in his biography said that he did things “the Elvis way”. He loved his mommy, and at the age of seventeen he made his first record for her as a birthday present. Sadly gramophones had not been invented yet and Mary mistook the gift for a flat circular fish plate.

The next two months of Jesus’ life were a misery. Every five minutes he was being asked to “magic up” a few more loaves and fishes, so that his mom and her husband Joseph could show off their strange new plateware.

I’ve never been a big fan of fish. The problem is it looks, smells and tastes too much like fish. If that could be changed somehow, I’m sure that I would love it.

I also find it strange that cats like fish. What on earth do they say to their cousins, the catfish, when they see them eating creatures of the sea? Maybe they just don’t talk to their non oxygen-breathing relatives, or perhaps catfish are not considered to be “cats”, because of some sort of snobbish or arbitrary decision make by whoever is responsible for naming things.

While I’m on the subject, why do so many Americans insist on naming their children “Jon” (see for example, Garfield), when apparently that word is also common slang, in the U.S., for lavatory?

I have other questions too, but you are not qualified to answer them, so there is not point writing them here. There are others who can satisfy my lust for knowledge, and no doubt I will meet them tonight when, as is my habit, I visit the local coin laundry to mingle with the good people who frequent it.

I don’t have any clothes that need to be washed, but if anyone asks I’ll say I’ve come to purchase my dinner from the vending machine within. I don’t want them to know the real purpose of my visit, which is to cleanse the dolphin-juices from my serviettes and tableware. Sadly it is politically incorrect to eat dolphin meat these days. Those of us who have developed a taste for it are considered unkind or cruel. Well, I’m not cruel. I can honestly say, with my hand on my heart, that I have never killed or even raised a fist to a dolphin, not even in the heat of anger.

Not that they don’t deserve it.

Dolphins are among the most environmentally unfriendly creatures on this earth. For one thing, they eat tuna, which as we all know is in very short supply. I tried to get a can of tuna for my lunch yesterday, and the shop had run out because one of these dolphins had been in there shopping a couple of hours previous. For another, they’ve got whiskers. I do not trust any non cat-related creature that has whiskers.

That’s just silly.

Neal’s Belch 189 from Jan 2005

As a former piano player, I appreciate the anger caused by the misuse of a keyboard on the cover of a certain album by The Beatles, the name of which escapes me, on which the band members were to be seen using a keyboard as a sort of mat to cross a muddy road in Winter, in the vein of Sir Walter Raleigh. Although of course he did it much more stylishly.

Sadly, he cheapened his reputation by going on to invent a rather tacky stunt bicycle for children, hence wasting his wonderful talents which he could have put to much more productive uses.

Uses such as, for example, inventing a method whereby footbridges might be built using much cheaper materials and lower labour costs. He really was an asshole to come up with a puddle traversement system and just leave it at that.

Surely it was his duty to share the endless possibilities of this discovery with the world? Think of all the men and women who died building the Golden Gate Bridge, when all along they could have just tossed a giant cloak across the river and barely gotten themselves wet.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Neal has finally run out of ideas for a Belch, and has taken to writing down whatever words spring into his mind, without even caring to consider how they look to the reader. And you’d be largely right about that, but you really shouldn’t think so much. You’ll end up with an oversized brain and then you’ll have to spend money on a new hat, your credit card debt will get out of control, your finances will spiral into a cauldron-like hole in the earth, rather like Dante’s famous seven circles of hell in the book / painting / poem / movie / cartoons “Dante’s Inferno”.

I can never remember which it is, but I’m sure it got rave reviews at the time. Those sorts of things always do, don’t they?

That’s a rhetorical question by the way, but that doesn’t mean you are not obliged to answer it. It just means that I can’t hear you, so I will just have to make a best guess as to what your reply will be, and then let you know whether you are right or wrong.

As it happens, you’re right, but there’s no need to be so cocky about it. Any idiot had a fifty: fifty chance of getting it. It was just a case of picking the right fifty. Not all fifties are the same, you know. Some are a little older and have become discoloured, and fifties manufactured after nineteen ninety are smaller, due to the Irish Central Bank’s efforts to reduce the sizes of coins to make them cheaper.

Then there was that other thing, The Yellow Brick Road, which resulted in a sudden and unmanageable increase in demand for yellow paving, and had appalling economic consequences. Frankly, I don’t care about that, but it’s interesting to note that both Elton John and Captain Beefheart performed songs about the yellow brick road, yet neither were used for the motion picture “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, due to the film-makers having rushed it out decades before these wonderful soundtracks were ready.

And that brings me to my point.

An early 2005 “MatchstickCats.com Editorial”

Picture this.

Two cats walk into a bar. One of the cats spots himself in a mirror, becomes confused and assumes that he is already drunk. He makes his way home, cheefully counting the undimished twenty Euro that he came out with.

The other cat reaches into his fur and realises he has lost all of his own money somewhere between the bus stop and the bar, so he heads out into the street in search of some free entertainment.

Not halfway to the kerb he spot a busker, sitting on a ballister playing some melancholy thing on his harmonica. Noticing the empty whiskey bottle beside the musician, the cat settles himself down on the pavement, right beside the busker’s collection cap and in just the right place to breathe the alcolhol fumes being exhaled from the mouth organ.

It is a little known fact that cats’ brains work better when they are intoxicated.

The reason for this fact being little known, is that it is completely untrue. The cat, however, is not aware of this. And as the whiskey steams around his tiny head and body he starts to ponder the mysteries of the little world in which he lives. He comes to realise that Pi divides into itself exactly once, and is startled at his discovery. Being drunk he fails to realise that it is mindbogglinglingly obvious to anyone with even the most remote grasp of mathematics than any number will divide by itself exactly once, assuming it is offered the opportunity to do so.

Sadly though, so many of our numbers are going through their lives without ever once experiencing the pleasure of being divided, not even by themselves. Strict religious doctrine and suffocatingly conservative goverments have put a stop to this. The resulf of course is a nation of frustrated numbers, who take their unhappiness out on the innocent of our society. Hence the increase in robberies, violent assault and jaywalking that we see in the annual reports published by the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO)

Unfortunately those figures cannot be trusted either, because the numbers are of course themselves criminals. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s radius is pi time it’s radius squared, not that that’s going to help in any way.

But at least now you know.

From 13th Jan, 2005 – Editorial

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “quad etait demonstrandum,” which of course means “Ask not what your country can do for you. Instead, go to a fun fair and win a giant teddy bear called Lucy which takes up half the house and you may even have to get rid of your other bears Harry and Barry, despite them being much more loved and one of them being a gift from your boyfriend who is most upset and offended about the whole thing.”

On the other hand, where I wear my watch, I can tell that the time is fast approaching six o’clock, and that can only mean one thing.

It’s time to turn to cheese. Cheese is the be all and end all of everything. Without it we are mere apes, incapable of making a feast from some mouldy milk, and therefore wasting all of our intellectual advances of the past eight hundred years. I say eight hundred because, of course, that’s the number of years that have passed since the invention of the steam toaster. A fine contraption if ever I saw one, although I should advise you that if you have one of the early models, now is the time to open the bottom flap and empty out the crumbs that have gathered within over the years. You can always use them to make some kind of a stuffing, or perhaps a cheese omelette.

Nowadays of course all the young people have George Foreman grills instead. That man is a genius. All that time when we thought he was being beaten up because of weakness, we didn’t realise he was just in a creative trance in his corner of the ring, busy thinking up new ways to fry pork chops without the fats rolling back in. And besides, just as there are many religions, and many paths to god, we must tolerate these young people who use these fancy contraptions, for there are many ways to a cheese sandwich..

Cheese omelettes are lovely by the way, especially if you add plenty of onions and chickens and things to disguise the taste of the eggs and cheese and stuff. Not that I’ve got anything against eggs or cheese. It’s just that they do not belong together.

Eggs are a breakfast item.

At a stretch they can be used for luncheoning, but let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Cheese cannot be eaten before eight pm. It is a wonderful foodstuff, but it’s use is either as a late night snack – a toasted sandwich perhaps after a night of passionate drinking, or if you must, a cheese and wine party slightly earlier in the evening, of the sort that a colleague of mine used to organise every year. A perrenial cheese event, if you will.

But I won’t.

For I, as the responsible and caring editor of a cat themed website, must remain impartial in all of these matters. I care equally for both Harry and Barry, as I do for Lucy, the oversize fun fair bear won at Funderland last week. Or was it the week before?

I am open to correction. I am also open to omelettes and the cheeses and eggs therein, and will give all of these wonders of the culinary world the benefit of the doubt until I have tried them. This is, after all, a public service website, created to educate and inform you, the humble and ingorant reader, so that you may dare to hope to become less stupid.

And who am I to stand in your way? I don’t want to be the cause of another Tieneman Square, and besides you’re not driving a tank. Just an oversize car. And after all, I’ve always been stone cold rigidly opposed to the idea of two streets or parks or squares in the world being given the same name. There are two many “Chestnut Close”s and “Hillside Park”s and “and “Dargan Street”s for my liking. And I will not contribute to the confusion by creating another “Tieneman Square”. At least not until I have visited the original one and come to a conclusion, one way or another, as to whether or not it is to my liking.

Published as Neal’s Belch or Neal’s Issues circa 2005

3x/4 ^72+ (3y-7) = 4. Although of course that’s just my personal opinion. I’ve always, from an early age, held strong convictions on certain elements of mathematics. In my first year of school I held the class up for half a day while I explained to the teacher why I felt that two plus two is equal to five. I patiently brought her through my arguments about encouraging positivity and aiming higher than the rather easy and defeatist objective of “four”. I simply felt that she was not pushing us enough, and I was not prepared to stand idly by while my future was sold to the gods of complacency and underachievement.

Nowadays of course we’ve all realised that there is no need to educate our children. I certainly won’t be sending my children to any sort of a school. The risks of catching nits are far too high. My local private school breeds them in the chemistry lab and throws them at cats to scare them and make them think they’ve got fleas. It’s all in the interests of science, of course. They are carrying out admirable research into whether a nit can be used as some sort of a flea placebo. The theory is that animals can be tricked into thinking they have fleas, and that therefore they will scratch themselves a lot more, and the static electricity produced can be harnessed and used to power inflatable emergency rafts and toasters.

I myself have two emergency toasters, and of course I make sure that they are never both in the same building at any one time. I don’t like to take risks with anything. I’ve been stung too many times. Just yesterday a wasp leapt out at me from behind a window ledge and attacked me in broad daylight, apparently for no other purpose than to exert mindless violence on an innocent member of the public.

Which itself is rather stupid, because I am not a member of the “public”, and to the best of my knowledge never have been. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to join such a stupid and pointless organisation, other than to mock and ridicule the other members secretly from the inside, without their knowing. Just like I used to do in the Beavers.

I must say though, I think people are rather lazy in their negativity about getting stung. It’s not always bad. Spiderman got stung, and ended up being able to jump over things in space, and star in movies. I’d love to be able to do that. And I live in hope, although so far the only thing that has happened to me as a result of an insect bite is that I’ve developed three extra personalities.

That reminds me, I’m starting to think that one of my personalities, Brian, is a schizophrenic. He seems to spend an awful lot of time apparently talking to himself in two alternating voices. One of my other personalities, Zebadee, is a psychiatry student, and he disagrees strongly with me. He argues that that fact that I am conscious of Philip talking to himself, means that I must be psychic, and that what I’m actually hearing are Brian’s memories of a conversation that he heard earlier, between myself and Zebadee.

I’m inclined to agree with Zebedee. Not least because he has spent several years in University studying all this stuff. I must say, that was a wasted time of my life. I deeply regret that I didn’t pay attention during the lectures that Zebedee attended. I wouldn’t even have had to pay any fees for the course, since of course we shared a body. That aside, I’ll tell you one thing. Sharing a personage with another personality is not a pastime for the claustrophobic.

I never had any privacy in those days, except at night when we would hang a blackout curtain between our inner ears. It didn’t work of course, but we would convince ourselves that we couldn’t hear each other’s thoughts when the curtain was up.

It was the only way we had of keeping sane.

Neal’s Belch no. 176 from late 2004

Back in the old days in the wild wild west, there were of course very few, if indeed any at all, women. We had to make do with what we could get, and if the dog was on heat, well you damn well made sure that you got what you needed out of the situation.

You’d usually get the dog to mate with the neighbour’s scruff bag and produce some puppies which you could then trade for some magic beans, have an adventure involving a giant at the top of the resulting bean plant, and survive to sell your story to a publisher for millions of Euro, so that you became wealthy and therefore a more eligible and well-known prospect.

My own great grandfather owned several puppy farms in the late eighteen hundreds, and my mother’s attic is full of mementos and keepsakes from those days. Yesterday I was up there looking for one of Bowsy the bear’s eyes, which seem to have gone missing at some point between 1999 and 2004, when he was living in the attic. That’s got nothing to do with the story. I just thought that it would be nice to mention my oldest surviving childhood bear, and perhaps stretch the “mention” out to two or three paragraphs. If any of you have a problem with that, talk to the hand.

Be aware, though, that the hand only understands sign language, and furthermore has an extremely limited vocabulary. Unlike you, the hand has not had the privilege of a taxpayer funded education, and the benefit of a loving home and a varied social life. The highlight of my hand’s day is when I wash him with cheap liquid soap, after I’ve been to the toilet.

As a matter of fact, I have two hands. But one of them is rather shy, and prefers that I don’t mention him in these essays. And I think that’s perfectly understandable. Just because I am in an extremely public position here as a future renowned content creator, that doesn’t mean I have a right to bring to the fore the private lives of my hand. So let’s leave it at that, and let them have their privacy. Please, please, leave my hands alone to get on with their lives.

Anyway, me and Bowsy go way back.

I first met him when, as a rather troublesome eight year old, I applied for a position as “circus freak”, on the basis that I don’t have a belly button. Bowsy was working in the circus’ personnel department at the time, and was sent to check out my story. And I must say he was very thorough.

First he telephoned all of my references at the maternity hospital and the orphanage where I was alleged to have exposed my belly button three weeks previously. Damn liars they were. They didn’t even have the guts to make a police statement. But at least they agreed to vouch for the absence of my belly button, so they came in useful after all.

Bowsy also lifted up my t shirt and had a look at the hole where my belly button should be. In the end, after a long and pregnant silence, he simply said “Yup”. Then he went quiet again. That was the first and last time I have ever heard Bowsy speak.

No matter how much I’ve tried in the intervening years, I can’t get a word out of him, even when I offer him marmalade sandwiches, which he loves, and a keg of beer to loosen his tongue. Last time I did that, he accused me, through a solicitor’s letter, of “trying to introduce him to the demons of drink so that I could have my wicked way with him”. The “him” at the end of the letter – the glaringly visible use of the third party, was a dead giveaway. Clearly this was all the solicitor’s idea, and Bowsy would never say such a thing about me.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the legal profession. Maybe it’s because of the time when I sued the circus for wrongful dismissal, after they discovered my fake rubber “empty belly button hole” prosthesis, and the bastards counter-sued me for fraud.

During the trial, I stood up and made an impassioned speech about liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the vintage comic actor George Burns, star of one of my favourite films “Oh God, you Devil”, who had sadly passed away the previous day at the age of one hundred, and who I felt deserved a mention. The jury looked at me as if I had two heads.

And as it happens, I did. Perhaps in hindsight I should have applied for the “two-headed freak” position at the circus instead of the absent belly-button job. But those were the early days of my career and I wanted to ensure I didn’t get typecast.. I suppose I could have benefited from a visit to a careers advisor before I ventured out into the big bad world.

The ironic thing about all of this is that I honestly do not have a belly button. But I felt naked without one, and frankly the cavity looks rather vulgar, so underneath the no-belly-button prosthesis, I had a belly button prosthesis, which I wore when I went to the freelance make-up artist who designed a no-belly-button prosthesis to fit over it. I managed to convince her that I had a belly-button, which I said I wanted her to cover up.

She also disguised my second head as a mole. And that’s been the bane of my existence ever since. I can’t go anywhere without some asshole asking why there’s a mole on my shoulder, and irritating kids coming up to me wanting to pet it because he looks “cute”. It’s a mole, for chrissakes, not a kitten. These are the same little bastards who dig holes all over your garden, which cause your cat to trip over and break its neck.

And your cat, after all, isn’t trying to cause any harm. It’s just going about minding its own business, looking for a small, fertile rodent to kill and extract milk from, such are a cat’s natural instincts. I say we stand up and do something about these damn moles who go around interfering with our thirsty cats.

Neal’s Belch 184 for 22nd Dec 2004

I’ve always found the misuse of language irritating. Just yesterday I saw a Spanish dictionary being used to prop up a leg of a table that was a bit wobbly. Worse still is the use of the symbol @ instead of the word “at”. Everybody knows that @ must only be used for two things; e-mail addresses and price labels on items of fresh produce that are sold by weight.

Pricing items according to how much they weigh is ridiculous. Just because something weighs two pounds, that doesn’t mean that two pounds is an appropriate resale value. Not least because we no longer use the pound here in Ireland. We prefer to use shiny chocolate buttons instead. I’ve always been a great admirer of people who indulge in the chocolate button. It displays a great self-control, to be able to wear that much confectionery on one’s clothes without getting stains all over the place. Not only that, I’m amazed they don’t just eat them when they get hungry.

It can be very difficult, even for the best of us, not to succumb to temptation. The late Mother Teresa said it best, when she said (at an awards ceremony) “The reason why I don’t have very many possessions, is because I ate most of them. By the way, thanks for this engraved thing. Is it edible? It sort looks like it might hurt my teeth”

Dental problems of course, have always been a great problem in the third world. When you get hungry, you’re bound to eat all of the toothpaste. Who wouldn’t? Several years ago I came up with a practical solution to this, which involved making the toothpaste taste less nice.

Sadly, few if any of the manufacturers took it up, and as a result I have had to sell my house to pay back the mortgage that I took out on foot of my expected earnings from the patent.

In the end it was okay though.

There was a clerical error at the bank and they accidentally gave me a new mortgage on the bank building itself. The lobby can be a little cold and uninviting but there’s a porter who opens the door for me and knows me by name, although he tends to get a little less friendly around four pm when he’s trying to empty out the bank so his friends can rob the place.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of bank porters. They seem to spend half the day smiling maniacally at people, and the other half of the day locking things. If they wanted to do that all day they would have been beter advised to take a job as a canal lock operator. Assuming, that is, that somebody was prepared to offer such a position. What with automated canal staff and ship’s cats nowadays, there are fewer and fewer jobs available in the water industry.

I myself was once part of that industry, when I worked at a bottled water manufacturing plant, and my job was to go out onto the lake and gather up the water in the plastic bottles, ready to be sent to the shops. There were strict quality control measures in place, and I was required to throw back any water that looked dirty or had amoebas swimming around in it.

People are so prejudiced againts ameobas, and with no cause. They are the most modest, simple life form in the universe, apart from their arrogant insistance on having millions of square miles of raging sea to live in, when they’ll never be able to do anyway except float about in it

But that was a great time in my life, bottling fresh water to be shipped to the thirsty in Mother Teresa’s hospital in Calcutta. I felt like I was contributing something important to society, thereby serving out my one hundred hours of community service for robbing the bank that I live in.