Nun: You don’t believe in God because of Alice in Wonderland?
Loki: No, “Through the Looking Glass.” That poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” that’s an indictment of organized religion. The walrus, with his girth and his good nature, he obviously represents either Buddha, or…or with his tusk, the Hindu elephant god, Lord Ganesha. That takes care of your Eastern religions. Now the carpenter, which is an obvious reference to Jesus Christ, who was raised a carpenter’s son, he represents the Western religions. Now in the poem, what do they do…what do they do? They…they dupe all these oysters into following them and then proceed to shuck and devour the helpless creatures en masse. I don’t know what that says to you, but to me it says that following these faiths based on mythological figures ensure the destruction of one’s inner being. Organized religion destroys who we are by inhibiting our actions…by inhibiting our decisions, out of…out of fear of some…some intangible parent figure who…who shakes a finger at us from thousands of years ago and says…and says, “Do it-do it and I’ll fuckin’ spank you!”

Dogma

I wrote this post when I first started the blog and nobody was reading it at that stage, except one or two, so I decided to drag it up again.

She sat at the back of the bus, long curvy brown hair. Soft brown Chinese eyes, between her legs was a threadbare schoolbag, she turns her face and stares out the grimy window at the January darkness pressing its face against the window of the bus, sleet and hail sweeps diagonally across the grid like streets of Limerick City, pounding the roof of the bus making a sound like skeletons fucking on a tin roof.

 
Four rows of seats up, there two boys and one girl, the girl has blonde hair with Fuck You red stripes running through it.

They are all fifteen or sixteen years old. One of the boys has a tattoo on his neck, visible through the open neck of his school shirt. The taller boy has his eyebrow pierced. His head shaved.
Cat-calls and racist comments soon followed and continued as the girl stared out the window into the night with that I’m Not Really Here look on her face as she ignored the comments. She was wearing the same school uniform as her tormentors, one of them knew her name. The abuse continued for forty minutes before the bus stopped, and she got off, walking down a dimly lit country road towards a house.

 
‘See ya tomorrow, chinky,’ the tattoed boy called pleasantly before she got off the bus and the winter gloom swallowed her.

 
I wonder where that girl went, would the same thing happen the next day, was it a cycle of abuse intent upon repeating itself? The Chinese girl didn’t look strong enough to stand up to them, and she look resigned, resigned to the abuse, to the ridicule and the pain. That was what the struck me the most from where I was sitting at the back of the bus. But maybe it didn’t have to be like that, maybe she had friends, and if not, maybe someone would befriend her, some boy whom she met in the woods that night, maybe he had an ethereal, otherworldly, lopsided but strangely sweet smile…and maybe he had to kill to survive.

All these thoughts bounced around in my head as I watched her tormentors from the back of the bus, still laughing, smirking, congratulating themselves on a hard nights work while the guy (me) at the back of the bus wondered what they would look like being tortured. That night, I wrote the first chapter of The Box Factory.

 
Seeing as how I am giving you this behind-the-scenes glimpse, of how I wrote the Box Factory, I might as well add that a friend of mine did, in fact, work in the building which became the title of the story. And it was called the Box Factory. It was a factory which made cardboard boxes for computer parts and printers for Dell, when the recession hit, Dell closed and the factory, which all the locals referred to as the Box Factory, shut its doors for good. It does sit in some desolate woods on the outskirts of town but unlike in the story it is perched almost on the shore of a large river.

 
One of the first casualties of the recession and the first blow to strike my hometown since the collapse of Lehman Brothers brought about the economic depression which followed, the Box Factory still stands today, sitting solemnly in a puddle of its own shadow as it slowly falls apart.

The little girl asked her mummy.

‘Disappointments are God’s way of saying: ‘’I have something better planned. Be patient. Live life. Have faith.’’

‘What is wrong with that man over there?’ The little girl asked her mummy.

‘He has Parkinson’s.’

‘What is Parkinson’s?’

‘Just God’s way of saying: dance, motherfucker, dance.’

So yeah, the Ariel Castro thing, with the three women and the child locked in the house. I was reading about his two brothers, who it would appear are innocent (kill ‘em anyway, just to be sure)

They claim to have been in the house on numerous occasion but they were only given access to the kitchen because Ariel told them he was trying to save on the old gas bill. He also had a radio or sometimes a television on to obscure any sounds. But could three women not scream over a radio or a television? Maybe they were afraid of the consequences.

It just brings back the whole Jaycee Lee Duggard. Natasha Kampusch and Josef Fritz thing. By the way Austria, what the fuck? First Hitler, now this.

But it’s not like Ariel Castro glided through life crime free. According to his ex-wife he was a psychopath:

In her petition for an order of protection, ex-wife Grimilda Figueroa stated that Castro had “broken petitioner’s nose (twice), ribs, lacerations, knocked out tooth, blood clot on brain, (inoperable tumor), dislocated shoulder, (twice, once on each side) threatened to kill petitioner and daughters 3 to 4 times just this year.”

Figueroa had further alleged that Castro “frequently abducts daughters and keeps them from mother/petitioner/legal custodian.”

That should have been a red flag right there.

It is a world-wide nightmare that you can get away with that in a crowded neighborhood for so many years….I know you are not supposed to judge people on their looks, but people judge me on my model like good looks so fuck it, Ariel Castro looks like someone created a time machine and snatched him out of his cave where he was masturbating between two lumps of rock and his name sounds like some kind of hybrid, politically correct, Hispanic, Disney princess.

Like everyone I hope he suffers as much as the women, I just doubt the miserable old bastard has sufficient time left for that to happen. But hope is the least thing to die as his victims are living proof of.

 ‘I hate charades,’ I  groaned. ‘Seriously, just feck off.’

‘Why?’ Jimmy asked.

‘It’s such a stupid game,’ I replied. ‘And I don’t want a repeat of the last time your cousin played with us and everyone shouted ‘fish out of water’ for ten minutes while he lay on the ground…you really should have told us he  was epileptic.’

‘Ten minutes. That’s all.’

‘Fine,’ I replied smashing a cement block over his head and sticking a Les Miserables DVD in his mouth.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Jimmy mumbled before he passed out.

‘Blockbusters.’

A knife-wielding man dressed up as Tony Montana from the 1983 classic “Scarface” taunted police during a real-life standoff in L.A. … and stayed in character the entire time.

‘It all went down at an apartment complex in Hollywood around 10pm Tuesday night. Cops were called to the scene to respond to a man wearing a Tony Montana-style white suit (with the big pimped-out collar) who began screaming at people while waving a machete.

‘When cops arrived, a police negotiator tried to convince the man to surrender peacefully – but he responded by screaming various quotes from “Scarface” while pointing to a DVD copy of the movie he was carrying in his non-machete hand.

Now that is what you call devotion. Well played, sir. Well played.

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time–

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You–

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two–

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

-Sylvia Plath

I’m guessing Sylvia had some father/daughter issues….they say every son grows up to marry his own mother (which would explain the high  divorce rate! haha!) so maybe every daughter grows up to marry her own father, which might explain the whole Sylvia Plath/ Ted Hughes marriage and the literary phenomenon it spawned. Plus the emotional train wreck that was her head, her life and unfortunately her early demise at her own hands.

Jimmy was sitting at his kitchen table, staring intently at a can of Pepsi in the centre of the table. Blood was running down his face from a gaping gash across his head.  His hand was clenched into a tight fist and there was a ferocious smell lingering on the air. Flies buzzed and darted around him.

‘Still got that OCD thing regarding Beyonce`,huh?’ I asked,

‘Nope,’ he replied never taking his eyes off the can.

‘Why are you staring into her face plastered all across the Pepsi Can?’

‘Its sugar free.’

‘So?’

‘So I’m waiting here for my free sugar.’

‘Riggght……that head injury looks nasty.’

‘I told Lucky Larry Landers that the reason they called them soft drinks was because you could bounce than off someone’s head without causing any damage.’

‘Did it hurt?’

 ‘No. Thank fuck it was a soft drink. Lucky Larry wasn’t so lucky though.’

‘It was bound to run out sooner or later.’

‘Still, in retrospect maybe I shouldn’t have flung a six pack at his head.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘Yes. The doctor said he was lucky to be alive.’

‘Well that’s Larry, being lucky and all.’

‘I think I stole some of his luck though,’ Jimmy said looking at me for the first time as he opened his fist to reveal his hand was covered in dog excrement. ‘Look what I almost stood on outside the front door.’

Mulder: Do you believe in the afterlife, Scully?

Scully: I’d settle for a life in this one.

One of the best things about the X-Files was it’s sense of humour and unwavering ability to poke fun at itself. I loved that show and some of the quotes/ one-liners were terrific.

Two teenagers talking about getting something to eat.

‘Domino’s?’

‘No. I don’t like their pizza. Always leaves me feeling like Danny DeVito took a shit in my mouth.’

Bizarre and very specific. I mean why Danny DeVito?