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.