Blow my prose, it’s runny.

Phillip O’Sophie is an Irish poet and storybook architect. He wrote many things in many books with many pens. Today, and undeniably tomorrow, he is considered one of the finest minds of our time. The fact that he is the only being in existence that consists chiefly of mind, however, gives him some significant advantage in the judgement of his ranking.

Here is a poem of his. I hear it won various literary awards you’ve probably never heard of. Keep in mind that this poem was written during a time of great political unrest. It is important to appreciate that events do most certainly influence an artist. Read with some aura of this contextual knowledge if you wish to unlock the various truths contained within this seeming enigma.

Money and breath,
Why do they spare me?
If money and breath were love,
Then do they spare his?
Alas, it is not with pity
That the greenery becomes love,
But it is in the minds of today
That they seek.
Upon a blanket of self-conciousness,
Lives the book of Lisa’s.
The dripping of rain
Down the fields,
The meadows,
The grass that grows
Where life forgot
The mystery
Of day.
Build shelter for the food
That makes its nest upon the sky
For there it finds the honey-pie
And then you know, quite clearly see,
The mystery unravels.
Sweetcorn and pea.
“Sit down,” says the chairman.
“Stand up,” persists the llama.
“Good morrow,” says the policeman.
“Good marrow,” says the farmer.
The human lives,
He does not breathe.
He does not see
The money and breath
That lie lost to me.

- Phillip O’Sophie, 1976

“The Phillip O’Sophie Treasury : Love is like the tender pork” can be purchased from Amazon for around £12.98.

A Clockwork Orang-utan

Noughties Noughties Noughties: that’s definitely the spelling. How could it ever be anything else? As of yet, they’ve hardly been a wayward or mischievous schoolboy of an era, and I wouldn’t go so far as to personify them as some latex-clad sex goddess. As such, the Noughties are not ‘naughty’. They are not nautical, not nauseous, nor are they a Scottish “knot”. They are, ofcourse, just the “Noughties”. Leave the “Naughties” for the Blackpool strip den’s pun-based advertising campaign.

Growing up in the Noughties is good stuffing, but at the same time it fills me with a pint of frothing rage. Why? Many reasons really. The first being the obvious, the lack of decent music (Ladio Gaga, Ladio Googoo); second being the less obvious, the lack of fitting trousers; and the third, the lack of any sort of robot overlord. Nope, not one single robot overlord. It would appear I will be part of the last teenage generation to live in a decade not dominated or cruelly enslaved by one. My mother and father thought it best to conceive me a good few years early, the selfish bastards.

Think about it. Watch for the signs. How could you possibly think otherwise? The Tentacles (my vote for the next decade’s name) will be governed by the machine! A new age of steam will emerge from the fumes of today, and from those vapours will come the mechanical monarch. He will rule us with a literal iron fist. We, as the worker, will obey.

It may seem farfetched, but aren’t all forms of establishment initially seen in that doubting light? Take communism, for example. People may have been sceptical about those first few Marxists, but look where they are now!: graveyards.

Irish Rover All-Terrain 4×4

I type this from the garden of a rather large house. On many an occasion, I have been told that my own home is rather large, but what solid evidence there is of this, except highly detailed architectural drawing, escapes me. Yes, this particular house is much larger than my apparent luxury chateau. My personal home could be described as the single speck of acne upon the oiled face of some almighty rock Gollum. Seriously, this thing is incredulous. So big that it has its own sauna, so disbelievingly large that it has its own swimming pool, so giganotosaurusly carolinii that it even has its own conservatory full of exotic plants. It’s a portly bugger, I’ll be honest.

I’m here on holiday, if you were wondering. I haven’t broken into Richard Branson’s outhouse or some National Trust treasure. It’s a holiday home in Cork county (the bottom bit of the Republic of Ireland) that me and my family are renting for a fortnight. I wish I could describe the place as a ‘simple’ and ‘honest’ affair, but really it’s far from that. It’s basically some soulless building bought as part of some capitalist venture by some greedy Irish capitalist with a pocket full of cigars who recognises that holiday-makers love paddling and sun-bathing. Good Lord, since when was I so left-wing? Book a DJ, Marx, it’s time for a communist party.

Nah, really, I love the place. At the moment, I’m sitting atop a small cliff, embraced by a crisp wind, watching an expanse of sea dotted with buoys. There’s also a fishing complex out in the bay that dips with a lonely melancholy. It’s beautiful. My only real concern with the view is the grass in front of me. It hasn’t been cut.

Oh, the gardener is a lazy-arse. Unless he suffers from dwarfism and enjoys hide and seek, there’s no excuse for the length. I only need to walk several feet into it and I’m confronted by wild Pokémon (namely level three pidgies and the occasional caterpie). I lost a tennis ball in it yesterday, aswell as my virginity. I really am not fond of this tall grass malarkey. It’s very scary business.

I will stop now as my grandfather wishes to tell me of the time when he ran over some cattle. It sounds rather hilarious and not the sort of story I would want to miss. Good day, madam.

The Guernsey Missile Crisis

Where on Earth have I been? Oh, well, for those who didn’t realise that was a rhetorical question, various places. I could list them, if you wanted, though I bet you’re hardly interested. ‘Not blogging’ is the main point, certainly not blogging (if that verb even correctly describes the production process behind my packet of verbose spanners). I just hadn’t the time. I’m back now though, back like Shady, and that’s what matters.

I suppose it’s high time we got straight into something. An anus perhaps? Oh, how dare you, there are children in the barracks, you can’t say things like that. You can’t slit their throats either, that’s hardly fair. Yes, you can quite happily cut their hair. You can cut mine too, if you like. I haven’t really been looking for a trim, but if there’s one going around, I suppose I ought to join the queue.

Put down your fishing nets and ill pets, it’s time to busy yourselves with a story. I have plenty on offer, but there’s one I think you’d like. Oh no, nono, none of that fairy tale claptrap, this is rich and raw reality. Was rich and raw reality, at any rate. The event took place long ago. This, my prized mango plantation, is the story of the Guernsey Missile Crisis.

The year was 1954, a good few years before the invention of The Beatles. France, a powerful conceited state, had control of a small local island known as Guernsey, and the United Kingdom, an equally-powerful snobbish state, had control of nothing. The United Kingdom had always been jealous of France’s ownership of Guernsey, so it decided, being a bit greedy in its ways, that it should spread its influence throughout Europe.

It tossed its velvet curtain over the northern segment of the continent in one dastardly move, even some of the more southerly bits. In a matter of months, Swedish youths were pinning photographs of the aristocracy on their arms, and Norwegian Ridgebacks began debating the superiority of certain types of pate. The UK laughed a throaty guffaw at its achievement as it hovered on the Xbox dashboard. Guernsey was a mere speck in size in comparison to the new British empire.

France choked on its own grapes. It now appeared a shoddy second-rate country with a measly amount of chattels overseas. “That wasn’t on”, the French thought, so they fought back. Harnessing the advanced technologies of their country, France littered Spain and Switzerland with the suds of frogspawn. A life cycle later, the two countries fell to the military might of the French frogs. By 1956, the whole of Spain was ripe with the croaking of the amphibian warriors, Switzerland in a similar state.

Press reports from France accounted the influx of frogs as “merely a seasonal occurrence”, but the United Kingdom knew this was just a cover. Mother Nature wasn’t capable of such malice. Even God, who in an act of similar magnitude had once inflicted pain on the world in the Great Flood, had reportedly apologised and vowed to never operate in such a way again. This was an act of humanity. All bodies of omnipotence were out of the question.

BEEP. FUZZ. WHIRR JACKETS. There goes the alarm. Story time’s over for this week. Yes yes, I know, I didn’t get to the ending, but a man only has so much time. I shall conclude the tale some other day, alright? Hopefully before the apocalypse, but I can’t promise anything.

The Sexy Electric Napoleon

My dear French friend and associate, Maurice Neon Blanchefleur, distinguished critic and fellow connoisseur of the arts, recently sent me an email in praise of my bloggings thus far. “Much more than a tour de force but a tour de France,” I quote, “the velo of my mind needed more than lubrication”. Upon reading, he adored it, he absolutely devoured it, and not only him, his Parisian friends too. It would appear I have made quite a mark on the striped and moustachioed sector of the world, diverting them from their primitive customs of fashion and electro to the ways of the modern gentleman.

His message reads like this:

Dear Mr Rattigan,
Thank you for your recent purchase of Viagra from our online store. Our company expects delivery will take between three to four working days to process and complete. We appreciate your cooperation.
We hope to hear from you again!

Oh, ha, that appears to be, ahem, the wrong- the wrong email. Spam, spa- bulk, yes, from the bulk bit, that bit. Where do these raunchy buggers get my email address, I ask you? Oh, Lord…

His message reads like this:

Monsieur Rattigan, my sweet prince of a cauliflower,

I have been meaning to write to you for some time now, but you know how it is working in a jazz bakery. Henri Renaud isn’t all too pleased about it either.

How have things been on the dirty side of the Sleeve? It has been months, perhaps longer. It feels longer. I find myself sometimes, amongst the daisies by the apartment, weeping, wanting time to beat to a quicker pulse. Oh, she’s an anabolic android when she wants to be, a cruel leopard mistress with an aluminium leg; but when I want it, she continues to suck on her cigarette, stopping at the lights when the rain falls, her own needs.

France has plunged further into financial crisis than the rest of Europe, I should tell you. Our digital vineyards and light displays have proved more costly ventures than initially thought out, especially on top of these silly fuel prices. Most of us now have to write haikus instead of sonnets to save notepad space. Troubled times indeed.

We stay strong, of course. We are French, it’s in the bone. You can’t just crush our spirit. We are the bovine men, chewing the chains of liberty! Eugh, you know the rest of Europe has a nasty stereotype that opposes the idea? Oui, I read it on the netspace. Plopsicles!, what tripe. Phileas Fogg, you know him? What a strong character he was. In the novel an Englishman, but conceived in the mind of a burly French writer, so therefore a character heavily influenced by the burly French times. Perhaps, I speculate, secretly French himself, his membership at the Reform Club simply a front for his gravelly French deeds. That is not to say that you English sort can’t be strong too. I just believe we’re probably a bit stronger.

D’accord, the economic situation had really opened my eyes to something new. The capital bled fresh fruit in that light. True inspiration. Ah, Paris, je t’aime! The city is so beautiful, even during hard times. I adore the sounds of the place: gurgling intoxication flooding from the bars, screeching mopeds, police chases. The sights too. Oh, the sights. The rich choking on fine wine, fine food; rats drowning in the gutter; prostitutes beaten, slung to the side of the road. Ah, bliss, and to think I almost traded it in for London.

I wrote a few things for the column with my brain food (the chic of thievery and unemployment, that sort of thing). Oh, chocolate Christof, they were gobbled up. Who knew the striped convict shirt would prove such a profitable rebrand? Stealing became fashionable again too, and not just with the filthy under-classes.

The editor asked me to write more. He was enthralled by the reaction I was making. I can’t deny it was a bizarre sight. My take on life is generally considered gospel in France, but this was something else. People were bending over backwards to submerge themselves in what I had to say. Obeying too, that was the odd bit. I was the sexy electric Napoleon of journalism – still am, infact.

My articles have changed France, so it was with intrigue and excitement that I looked over la Manche to my literate friend in England to see what changes he had brought about. Sadly, not many it would seem. The most influential thing you’ve produced is a shopping list. I do enjoy shopping lists, but that one of yours was most dissatisfying. What do you do with all that Colgate?

Your blog? Hmm, well, I suppose it shows potential, but that’s about it. Nothing more than fancy words, really. On the positive, I suppose you could say it’s much more than a tour de force, but a tour de pants! Ha, “pants”, because it’s so rubbish. Oh, ho ho, the velo of my mind needed more than lubrication, otherwise it would rust under the overload of mediocrity! Ah heh, I am taking the piss of you, eh?

My apologies, monsieur, but plainly, I’ve farted better crêpe.

Love and butter,

PS: I may visit you as soon as I have sorted my isometric Passepartout.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, with revision, it would appear I completely misread the email. I would like to be excused now. Would you recommend a noose or bullet for one’s own suicide?

Bass, Tuna, and a load of old Carp

Oh, rhythm, I feel like playing bass. The dulcet twang seems to follow me about these days, preying on my ears like honey. The plunk doesn’t actually stalk me, I’m sure, but I feel it does. I hear it everywhere. Like a recurring shell of flatulence, deep and soft, yet edged with a sharp point like the wit of an angered butcher.

I used to play guitar when I was younger, some classical thing. I gave it up after a few years though on grounds of phocomelia. Needless to say, I didn’t really enjoy it; I felt like I was introducing some sort of Spanish inquisition every time I was asked to give the thing a whirl. Chords here, chords there, and not a pair of cords in sight. My fingers couldn’t even keep up. The guitar was twice my bloody size to start off with, and it would fall horrendously out of tune after a few strums, leaving me routing about a fish market for the electric tuner.

With all the grief that surrounded my guitar playing however, there’s no denying I got an odd trickle of enjoyment from it. I remember particularly playing Danny Boy in front of a large crowd and watching the gathered gawp in astonishment as I made the pipes call without a bloody pipe in sight (or a smoking jacket, for that matter).

Apart from that, when I talk to people about my musical happenings past and present, I’m generally shunned. It would appear I’m not a particularly musical person in modern terms: I don’t swan about the place with an eye or pod, and don’t indulge in much Lady Gaga. I also don’t spend hours of time farting about the Internet looking for some experimental acoustic record plucked from the arse of some Swedish eccentric…

Oh, I’m sorry, what was I saying? Bass, was it? Oh, yes, the bass, it’s all good stuff. You should try the scampi though, that’s more than heavenly.

A Pothole in the Void

Some manner of time ago, DeviantART, the famed kawaii-clogged art website, told me that my blog (or, “Journal”, as blogs are known there) was empty. It was a frightening moment. One of the most frightening, infact. Indeed, it’s still up there on my list of Top Ten Most Frightening Moments, ranking at about place six (which isn’t bad for a new recruit).

Funnily enough, before I had even noticed the absence of Journal entries, a big thing running through my mind at the time was blood. I was also considering writing a blog, though that’s hardly relevant.

Part of me seemed very passionate about the whole ‘blogging’ thing; almost as though it were a calling or vocation. I was told recently infact that a gang of liberal skin cells toured my respiratory system in agreement almost every other weekend. Whether that’s true or not is another man’s game. Regardless of the potential microscopic demonstrating though, the other part of me wasn’t so enthusiastic. I put it down to ‘lazyarse-itus’ rather than political grounds; religious obligations; what-have-you; but the point remained that within myself existed that view of conflict.

Before I could proceed, I knew that I would need to convince myself that blogging was the option of the wise. The solution to this was ofcourse a cleansing. I took a shower, before indulging in genocide. Many consider this hindered my movement, but “nay!”, I say to those horses, feeding them straw and teasing them with nuzzles. Yes, I was imprisoned, but what do you domestic animals know about imprisonment? More than it did anything else, it made me realise the priorities in life. It also gave me time to write my partially-autobiographical thriller, Mein Kamphy Kushion.

Oh, well, yes, with hindsight, I suppose neither of those things did directly help with my blogging problem, but I’m no miracle worker. At least I dropped the soap in the non-metaphorical sense, unlike the other inmates.

I shall finish here, rather abruptly. Good day.