Herpes, by stealth*

Bet that got you interested, you filthy animals.

But no, I'm not sitting here tearing furiously my netherlands or anything, I'm talking about the facial variety.

I'm not happy. And who would, says you, be happy about having a stingy, crusty eyesore hanging off their lip. Stingy crusty eyesores are usually just hippies from Cavan and no threat to anyone's aesthetic but their own, but not in this case. (If you're wondering, what preceded there was a play on the word stingy. I'll move on now).

Anyway, time was when cold sores were decent and used to give you a bit of warning that they were on the way. You know, the unmistakable 'tingle' on your lip that announced the impending birth of the seeping, itchy callous that makes you a social pariah for about ten days. I'm sure there was a line in that song 'Rhythm of Life' about it.

Anyway, somewhere along the line, cold sores, known on Sundays as Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 or 2 or something, lost all sense of etiquette and propriety. And just started appearing on my face without so much as a doff of their cap or a by or leave from anyone. No tingle. No itch. No warning. The fuckers. It's like a child entering another teacher's classroom without knocking. Heresy. Go back out and knock before entering I say.

I'm mostly pissed off about this because I had an outbreak last night at about 8.19pm on my way to get the train to meet Radge in town for pints, as arranged over comments on the previous post. 8.19pm is a bad time for cold sore arrival (visitors always arrive at inconvenient times, don't they? I don't actually know this for sure, but my Mammy always says it) because there's nowhere open to get cream for it and you start to worry that you're not going to get it treated in time and so will spend a week looking like a grotesque fat-lipped bag of associational-sexual infestation.

Thankfully, when I got to the pub I tumbled on the revolutionary idea of visiting the late night pharmacy on O'Connell Street and taxi'd my way there and back in about ten minutes flat. I got those Compeed patches and thankfully, all is well and they seem to be working.

Although when the patches get over moist, fall off and start floating in your pint of Guinness, it is a little disconcerting.

Anyway, I just felt compelled to share all this with you for some reason, I have to get back to work now. I must come back soon and tell you all about my wisdom tooth though, I'd say you can hardly wait.

I also remembered midway through last night's pints that I need to tell you all about the most hilarious lapdance in history (Liverpool, April, the stag), and later on, I was reminded to post about the ants in my office, and later still, some pure comedy gold dropped in my lap when I was serenaded all the way home by a taxi driver who was also an actor and singer-songwriter looking for someone to roadtest his latest ballad on.

I really should go for pints more often.

*I hope this reads ok, I haven't time to check over it. Radge?

The secret to blogging success...*

...is...

Stop posting.

Seriously, I've just twigged that I've ascended dizzily all the way up to four in the Irish blog listhingummys despite not having had a flirty with my qwerty in weeks. Either it's broke or I'm much more popular when I'm not actually here. I quite suspect that as soon as my back is turned you all come out from under the bed like the toys offof** Toy Story and start partying and snorting cocaine out of each others' underpants and other such hedonistic carry on.

It's an interesting development though, less really is more. As in less me = more you. I'd look at my overall visitor figure for verification of this only it's been that long since I checked in with the relevant technology there I actually forget how to. Probably just as well though, because I now realise that the less I look at it the more it will grow. (Still talking about the visitor figure there by the way, ah-hup).

So anyhoo, I'm off to the pub at the first available opportunity to try my level best to get women not to sleep with me in what is really a cunning ploy to get women to sleep with me. I think I'll just approach a few with a contemptuous sneer and say "Here, you. Yeah you. Not a chance in hell of you getting me knickers so there's not. So jog on love. Next."

I swear, if any bird so much as looks at me I'll clasp my hands to my groin in a vice-like grip of terror and bolt for the door screaming "Rape! Rape!"

I think I'll follow up on my night of passionate non-sex by ringing a few publishers to boot - just to tell them all to pre-emptively fuck off, they're not getting first dibs on that bodice-ripping period sex drama Mills and Boons for the 21st century novel of mine. The one that I wasn't writing in the first place. Obviously.

So, all that remains to say now is to tell anyone reading this to go and piss off somewhere and never come back, you're not wanted here, you smell faintly of cabbage and I'd rather just write this stuff for myself without wankers posting comments and other such annoying shit.

It's like something Homer would say. "And the lesson here is, never try."

I'll be back in August.

*Shorter posts, coming to you since June 2008, when work got very busy.
**Offof is my new makey-up word, I tried it out in the last post and I like it.

Mammy, there's a fat person hiding in the cupboard

Listen, I'm still really interminably busy and I don't have enough time to go into this in the usual forensic detail - like, this particular post is eating into the time fastidiously allocated for today's 'luxury' tasks such as respiration, peristalsis, breathing and blinking - but I want to ask this.

What is it with the fat people everywhere? No, seriously. Every time I pick up a magazine or flick over to TV3 there's a real-life article or documentary there about the latest circus sideshow crying about their bed sores and showing us their wobbly bits and tables full of junk food. I've seen Gillian McKeith poking around knowingly in lunchboxes of, well, lunchboxes full of people's shite to be blunt, before making judgements on the state of some bugger's innards based on the cut of their crap. Nice. Although, from watching the slightly scary and skeletal Gillian, I've learned that alot of us suffer from 'greasy stool.' I always thought a greasy stool just a slightly fancier version of a working man's café to be honest but you learn something new everyday I suppose.

I saw another one about a humongous Birmingham City supporter called Barry, I think it was called Inside Britain's Fattest Man. Richard Hammond, him offof Top Gear that almost crushed himself a few years ago, presented and narrated it. It was like a 'numbskulls' documentary with cartoons of the inside of his body and the fatty deposits and what have you hanging around everywhere. Touchingly, it closed with a scene of Barry grunting and grimacing on the toilet showing us how, well, sigh, showing us how he takes a shite to be frank, complete with informative analysis from Hammond on volume, consistency and such like. I, er, shit you not.

It goes on and on. I've also seen celebrity fit club, a training camp for overweight famous folks, and I'm not looking at you Derek Davis, another one where skinny people try to put on weight and swap diets with fat people who want to lose it, and best of all, there was another one on about obese cats and dogs the other day. Obese pets I say, even the animals aren't safe as fattist documentary makers seek new material. Next week, they'll be doing makeovers for walruses or something - a bit of lipo and a moustache wax for instance - or putting elephants on crash diets.

I mean Jasus. I'm not getting into the rights, wrongs, whys and hows of obesity and diets and who's to blame and all that, and I'm sure it's neither easy or pleasant, I just want to know who decided to turn the whole thing into a repetitive freak show and present its underbelly to the world under some flimsy premise of awareness about health? There's surely a way of doing these things without turning the folks involved into some sort of 5p-a-look curiosity.

It's a load of stool if you ask me.