New Orleans is no more. Nomor'leans. Exploding trains. City officials' meltdowns live on the radio. Uniformed men and women who could possibly do something, hurry up and wait, tangled in red tape. TV stalwarts are wailing on-air. High-flying zillionaire Presidents are haughtily humiliated by the Earth's genuine dominion.
Poverty stricken amidst the deluge, kids are washed away, wives drown. "Chaos" don't describe it. "Armageddon", not quite, but that depends on your perspective. Suffice it to say, it's gone too far.
I can take it no more. Nothing is no more. No more nothings. This is out of control. This shit is out of control!
I can’t live with being threatened by the squalid pile of fecal filth rotting around the corner because one day soon, inevitably, a tempest of epochal proportions shall descend upon Dublin and the rivers and canals and sewers and drains will spew their bilious loads and the waters will rise.
From bend of shore to curve of bay, shitsam and crapsam will surge before the rolling storm. The shitebrown surging sea. The sphincter-goosing tide of scum will pour into the seventh ward, calm, inexorable, vile and immutable.
I must do something. Something, to prevent the mass of human detrius washing over me uncontrollably in a diluvian Dublin. The miasma of toxic piss choking the air is bad enough without a fetid tsunami converting her cobbled and potholed streets into a suctioning death-drain of untreated sewerage subsuming us.
Even as we seek refuge, the water rises to our cold attics and shoebox apartments. We have not abandoned them because we still have hope. We are fed on the dreams of reasonable response. Yet, paddling desperately, crowns pressed to the ceiling, we refuse to open our mouths to call for help lest we imbibe the toxic soup.
Rescue is nigh impossible. We cling on desperately, hoping we can stay float long enough so that relief workers can reach us in the treacly swell. There is just a mood-worn eerie silence reflecting back to us, attempting to disguise its presence.
Through the lopping sludge I believe I can hear the distant sound of men in dinghys. Help approaches! They are come to save us! We shall be saved! But wait! They row right past us, daubing a morbid X on the outside wall as they move ahead to search out the living or more likely, discount the dead.
With the air pocket in the Green Zone shrinking, I become resigned to my fate when, with a bubbling sound, something surfaces and comes through the balcony door. In the skinny light it begins to circle like a shark. Here in my final moments in my horror of horrors with poison filling my world it has come to torment and mock.
It sinks into the black pool. My eyes fix upon its last position. I bubbles up again, this time closer to me. Desperately short for air, I suppress a scream.
Suddenly possessed of a fear greater than my inveitable drowning in slurry, instinctively I claw my way towards the corner of the room to shelter my back. Death is taking too long.
As I look around again I can no longer see it. I tilt my neck back to desperately pull on the final reserves of air. My stomach is sick. I cannot remember anything about my life. I do not know anything else except drowning. If I stop drowing, my life will be over. For some reason I cannot stop fighting it but I cannot physically continue.
Then I see it. It comes to the surface with one final 'plop' and splashes my face. The pair of blue and white boxer shorts, shit hardened and with the fly spreadeagled like a giant set of jaws swallows the last remaining pocket of air. Engorged by the bile, blood and bacteria cascading through Dublin it swells like a balloon. The evil, shitty underpants swim sadistically toward me.
Claustrophobia and coprophobia replace desparation as my final emotion.
This magnitude of turpitude and multitude of miscreants requires international rescue squads. Thunderbirds for N'wo'leans. And Dooblin too.
RADIO (Mayor Nagle, hysterical): "WHERE DO WE GET 500 BUSSES?"
It's a big country. The American refugees are reported by the rich man's media to be raping and beating each other in N'wa'leens. Should we be shocked? Or rather, surprised? But it's a good idea too. We now can mow them down as we watch them drown.
40,000 US reservists are reported heading towards (not away from) the zone of destruction (for once, not entirely of their own making).
It's ok lads, it's all destroyed already, nothing for an American army to do here. Oh, what's that you say? You're here to help? With respect, good buddies, that's what you always say.
Mmm? OK. Come on, then. Please. Treat my home like it was a foreign country. Yes, "Get some", I believe is the expression, right? "Get them" and save them. And kill the ones that need salvation most whilst they rummage in bins for scraps of food and lift garbage stock like wide screen consumertron TVs that in actual fact have been amortised to zero-value since midnight when the water broke through the warehouse door. Driven deranged by dreams of consumerism, they pick through the wreckage of a lost civilization like vultures.
So long as you take care of the important things first. Meanwhile, I'll hold my end up. I'll keep Dublin free for ye, lads. So long as it doesn't snow here I think I can keep things moving. Send me backup when you break through in the 'Raq, or the 'Leans, or the 'Ghanistan or wherever you spread your eagle's wings.
I just hope there's no snow. Please, don't let it snow.
The underpants loom out of the swamp, scaly and slimy brown! I scream for help pointlessly, but not a sinner comes. The boxer shorts clasp my face and mould themselves onto my head, muffling my screams. I'm suffocating in shite before I get the chance to drown in Dublin's sewerage.
In my throes, I endure my first and last nervous breakdown. There is no aid available at the end of the world.
Not so. For no such fate will I wait.
During the night, with the a mop, two pairs of rubber gloves, three bin liners and a face mask, I discreetly check that nobody is about and descend to the street.
Swimming goggles cover my eyes. I wear a cheap fleece, old hiking boots and a tracksuit bottoms from Penny's. I have a headlamp. "It's just like cowshite", I tell myself, thinking back to the pastoral bliss of my youth. "Think of it as just like cowshite."
With the triple-bag open on the pavement, I pike and stab at the dried mass of stripes and shite locked as it is to the ground with the mop. The crud encrusted entity is melded to the wall and floor. I flick at the congealed blackened mass of it. It won't move. The mop handle bends and strains. Maggots sprawl in the sulphurous streetlight. I gag and persevere.
"It's no worse than cowshite", I tell myself, which isn't so bad when you get used to it, although I don't usually dwell over cow shite. All I know is, it comes from cows.
The whole disgusting mass is fossilized, at one with the concrete and stone blocks and tiles. I must strip the bulging mass of encrusted shite and underpants while attempting to not come any closer to it. Finally, adding to my gnashing desperation, the mop handle snaps with the stress.
I do the next logical thing. I scream uncontrollably into my face mask. Then I get a grip. Looking around in the dead of night, there is nobody else here on this street.
At last, I resort to tugging at it with my double-gloved hands. Stubbornly, it does not want to move. Finally, I lift the edge up a tad but a sharp smell erupts from the shit-saturated underpants and I swoon.
Just a bad case of cowshite. "Cowshite." I hate it. I never quite knew how much before now but I fucking HATE cowshite!
I FUCKING HATE COWSHITE!
This is all I'm thinking as I apply one final, massive effort, squatting over it and effecting a deadlift. The underpants yield suddenly like a sticking plaster coming off the floor with a quick wet-dry splashy ripping sound. The sharp stink of uncontrolled human excrement is reinvigorated. Wet rag glistening in my hands, with the changing forces, I stumble backwards and fall over. Automatically I reach to put my hands behind me as I'm tumble off the kerb. The fetid mass slips my grip.
As I attempt to cushion my fall, (tweaking my wrist as I do so) and arcing above my head, the shit-sodden weighted boxers land upon my crown with a plop, extinguishing the headlamp's rays but affording me a glimpse of brown drool on the lens of my goggles before doing so.
I'm across the tram tracks in the dead of night sitting up, the shit filled underpants stuck to my head like a parasitic alien, cutting out the light and air. At this point I don't see much more point in screaming. It won't change a thing. I can't even hyperventilate because it's so foul.
Defeat is not an option, and humiliation is passing. Before being utterly overcome with despair, I rip the cruddy loaf off my forehead with distraught howls. Throwing it down, frenetically I seal it in its three-bag sarcophagus. Tears sting my eyes and fog up my goggles. I'm bawling with terror and disgust. I wipe the goggles and swipe lumps of old jettissoned crap off my head and face, my whole life with these excremental execrable underpants flashing in front my mine eyes.
Sloping about like a night crawler, I tow the toxic package in to my kitchen, and recovering some determination, unload it into the washing machine and slam the door. Setting the temperature dial to maximum, I don't neglect to throw in some fabric softener while I'm at it, I'm fond of myself like that, and a lay on a double dose of washing powder.
I hit the shower as hard as I can. This has been a baptism. There is much work ahead. I'm taking control. No more suffering in waiting. No more nothings.
When the laundry cycle runs through I will forge my superhero identity: The Fartastic Captain Thunderpants, Man of Wind. My mission: "To clean up this town." It won't be difficult to find things to clean in Dirty Dublin.
There are 1.6 million stories in the Greater Dublin Area. This one is shite.
It strikes me that if Dublin had foisted upon it the same floody fate as New Orleans, nobody would notice. The Dirty Town is submerged by filth every day and there isn't even a calamity under way. Yet when the reservoirs, lakes and rivers burst their banks in a tide of salt water blended with dog faeces, human urine and generic filth, the people of Dublin will be locked in an eternally petty, envious blood-feud with their neighbours, simultaneously attempting to juggle saving their own skins and taking advantage of other people's misfortunes.
01:15
Most powerful superpower reduced to sub-3rd world situation. "Looters will go directly to jail." Why, it sounds like he's making his own laws now. The Robin Hood of the ghetto comes by in a boat with cigarettes and beer to help stranded people get through the long, flooded night.
09:00
1666 Major conflagration as The Great Fire of London sweeps through central parts of the English capital, burning for 3 days
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| Cor blimey, anyone else fink it's 'ot in 'ere?, 1666 |
We’re DROWNING here!
