Things to do in Dublin when you're dying

1. Drag yourself to the supermarket with trackie bottoms and a hoody on over your PJs to buy medicaments for the return to robust good health. Haven't showered, haven't shaved, not eating properly, look very sad and lonesome like Droopy Dog/Chris O'Dowd off the IT crowd with a facefull of stubble and possibly, a heroin habit. Stare blithely through the shelves for some minutes and perhaps even fall asleep in my standing momentarily before weighing up my options. Lemsip sounds way too girly - like gymslip, or a delicate wild herb for ladies' troubles - so I go for the pornstar and rugged sounding Panadol Max Strength.

2. Watch TV. A documentary about sperm last night on Channel 4. A quarter of a billion sperm are ejaculated on average - apparently, I'd never have the patience to count them, Lord knows - but only about two or three make it as far as the egg. This is because, and you'll forgive my layman's terminology here, women's fiddledy bits don't like the look of invader sperm and are hostile towards them so as soon as the quarter billion hopefuls get to arrivals, they're attracted up dark alleys, attacked, beaten to a pulp and left to die. The ever dwindling number of survivors go through endless other travails and assaults, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, until a few of them reach the egg and fertilise it.
It's like nature's X factor except Simon Cowell isn't there rolling his eyes and telling tear-stained tadpoles that their tail action is shit and they'll never make it.
Anyway, women have some cheek, killing our sperm like that. You'd think they'd welcome them and their 'DNA payload' what with its key role in the miracle of life and shit, maybe plump a cushion and offer them somewhere to sit with a nice cup of refreshing green tea before sending them on their next leg of the journey rejuvenated. Anything instead of massacring the little critters!
I like to think that when the sperm that was me in a baser form arrived at the egg, I hung back a little, lit a fag, read the paper, wondered if I'd remember this for my first blog some thirty years later and made that egg fucking well wait until I was good and ready. Hrrmph.

3. Come up with a pant-wettingly funny joke about a hard-of-hearing man going to the doctor.

"Doctor, I'm very sick, I need to be examined but please speak up because I'm a little bit deaf."

"Certainly my good man, can you list the symptoms?"

"Of course. There's Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa...."

4. Spunk €500 on car insurance. Yeah baby! If you're feeling sick and down in the dumps, answer interminable questions from an endless series of faceless phone drones about your claims convictions refusals of insurance in last three years is it in your own name and how many years no claims bonus and can you furnish proof of that and your average mileage (in kilometres) and is it kept at that address in a garage or driveway for at least four nights of the week? It'll remind you of just how much worse you could have been feeling before you bothered, and will teach you not to complain in future, you ungrateful shite.

5. Come up with another side-splittingly hilarious gag about a really slutty girl, who's the town bike and everyone has shagged her. Anyway, one night she goes to a talent show in the local pub, and when she walks past the Clapometer machine, it red lines and explodes.

6. Google-research a spot of cosmetic self surgery. (What with the old reshesh an' all, I'm cutting back on the botox). I have a skin tag on my neck that I don't like much but apparently, if you tie thread or dental floss around the base of it and tie it tight, it starves it of blood and it just kinda dies and fucks off.

7. Get an e-card from hope which is a talking cow sitting at a table full of beer and wheeze, laugh and splutter till I cough up mucus and almost die. Maybe my appendix got hocked up as well, who knows, sure it'll never be missed unless I'm in a mad dash one day and need a supplementary reference section for myself with a full list of attributed sources.

8. Start reading Marley and Me, a book I borrowed from my sister. Immediately resolve to track down the most pathologically stupid rampaging dolt of an animal in the entire world and keep it as a pet. I would then write a light, breezy book about our comical madcap slapstick adventures, but with some endearing life lessons along the way, and make millions.
Get depressed when I realise there's nowhere in the apartment where I can keep a Rhinoceros. Fucks sake.

9. Be aghast to realise how the blog has been neglected during my brave battle for life.

10. Curse my anal-list-completion habit that means I can't write a numbered list of stuff without finishing on a nice round number, even when I've run out of stuff to write.

11. Ah fuck it, everyone goes crazy once in a while, huh?