Month: December 2004

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.