The Day I Brained Eddie Copeland

The trouble with getting up earlier in the day is you’ve longer to wait for your favourite television shows to come on. That is what I’ve been finding, rising at 8am like I’ve been doing this last week due to the heavy heat.

Quite near my house the Future Brain Surgeons of Northern Ireland have been swarming en masse round the edges of their kingdoms chucking petrol bombs and assorted masonry at the pigs and miscellaneous opposites in neighbouring estates.

I don’t get the same high-octane adrenaline rush I used to when witnessing riots first hand or on the television.

I used to go to riot all the time back when I was a teenager. To begin with I always positioned myself in the centre of the rabble, not too close to the front to risk getting a plastic bullet in the eye or too far to the back to look yellow. I weren’t much of a thrower back in them days. Still amn’t. But the first time I picked up a bit of masonry to chuck at a pig was also my last. It were a quarter-brick with a brush of white paint up the side. It horned off three ways at the end, this brush of white paint. I never forgot it, the most memorable piece of masonry in my life. Well, I stretched my puny arm back, felt the drag in the slight weight of the quarter-brick and threw that thing for all it were worth. It gained more height than distance. For a bit I thought it were gonna fly backward. But it arched thinly when it reached its full height and fell at speed right on the noggin of former political struggler and official riot organiser: all round hardman Eddie Copeland. He fell in a crumpling way, like a sack of spuds cut at the bottom just right after all the spuds fall out. The collective knew instinctively who threw the brick. They rounded on me simultaneously, their fantastic instinct in mentally plotting the trajectory of flying masonry amalgamating in their hive mind dynamic. Then one shouted:

 - It were Danny Pongo! – And I ran. Like the wind.

 Up above the pigs in their chopper followed my progress over walls and through strangers’ gardens. I were chased by two rotweillers and beat with a broom by an old cunt with ‘sympathies’ for the rioters. Not once did the pigs intervene. Not once. I reckoned they were up there, those sky pigs, on the radio to their ground based colleagues giving them reports on how far I’d got. Probably up there taking bets on how far I’d get. Then, just as a stitch set in, I turned a corner and a hole in the street where a manhole cover’d been torn up provided my escape.

And there I was, Danny Pongo. Down in the sewers splashing in the shite and detritus. My sanctuary and my natural habitat.

     

So in the years that followed I completely never participated or was ever up there on the front lines with the rest of them. Never had to wrap my face in a heavy football scarf or sport a pair of shades to avoid identification. Just hanging back instead, an autonomous observer. Mostly I used to stand on shop roofs or shimmy up lampposts. I liked to view proceedings from a high vantage point.

They were far more inventive and resourceful in what they used to throw at the pigs back then. They had javelins, waterbombs filled with piss, used those lasers that can blind pilots and take down airplanes (haven’t seen em this year on the tele), hardened dog shit in a catapult I saw once, golf balls whacked off rooftops, fireworks fired outta pipes like ‘My First Bazooka’ (it were mainly 8 and below that were at this). One novel move they pulled this year was setting a bus on fire and driving it at the police lines. It careered straight into a police landrover injuring all five pigs inside.

I guess the word this year for them was: audacious.

The other day while out to stock up on supplies for over the 12^th I included in the shop a porno mag, as my internet’s being a cunt and I can’t watch my blue videos.

I got home and smelled the new magazine smell. It has been years since I’ve bought a blue book and smelled the ‘New Magazine Smell’, - something far removed from ‘The City Stink’ (talked about in last post).

Then I opened it and got my cock out and began playing with myself; stiffening the old ham javelin up in preparedness.   

I went at it for ages, just staring at this wet red gash…and it dawned on me, how much of a resemblance a cunt has to a stab wound.

So I put the magazine away and slapped my cock like you would a bad dog’s nose.

I thought to myself: I must be very depressed. Or maybe I wank too much over blue books. Maybe I am jaded with the blue books.

Then I shimmied my thoughts on to more productive things, like how to get the smicks to stop their rioting and get some peace in the Middle East!

And I thought if I’d the money and could commandeer some pig choppers I’d strap amps to the underside of those choppers and fly over those troublesome neighbourhoods blasting this at em:

Sometimes I Can't Deny, Some Days Just Pass Me By

I'm sitting writing this in the central library so's to get out of my house for the afternoon. I usually won't go out in this heat. I don't have any threads to match this weather. I've been lying out on my big faux-leather sofa this last two days in the nip playing with myself, my big fan on the coffee table going hell for leather and keeping me cool. But the fan, my only fan, has gone and packed in and the place is hotter than a nun's cunt at benediction.

I put on my cardigan, bare chested underneath, and my wranglers and went at a slow pace down to the bus stop, my head bowed in mind of the dangerous rays of the sun at my eyes.

On the way I met Mad Otis and his da. His da was rocking the 70's hippy-provo look: long, greasy rat-tail hair and and one of those green canvas army jackets with some European flag on the arm. He wore a beard, that'd obviously been dyed jet black, and smoked a cheroot.

 - Was up the road gettin some lacks for mah doors, – yelled Mad Otis in my face.

 The da went to speak. He spoke like a drunken retarded man. His head slumped one side to the other, like a metronome in slow motion. I noticed the plate in his head, gotten as a result of Mad Otis dropping the radiator on his noggin that time.

 - Nothing against blacks, but did you hear there's an African deli on the Lower Ormeau got busted recently for havin a putrid sheep's carcass in the back and no runnin hot water? Said the da, drawling.

 - Aye! - Went Mad Otis quick and impatiently like he'd been waiting weeks to speak. - Fuckin rattin Vietnamese Crows in their display cobinat an' all, Danny Pongo! Fuckin rattin bastards were smogue'lin em here taped to their legs under their big African man-skirts you see them walkin about in! Fuckin' sellin you dead crows! Crows're the same fockin world over, fuck's sake! I go into Ormeau Park with mah fuckin crossbow and skewer a few of em on mah bolts – fuckin cook you one Pongo, tell you it'll taste the same as any of the ones those African boys got down in that deli of theirs!

 - Maybe you could open yer own deli, Mad Otis? Went I.

 - Might be a business idea in the workings there, Mad Otis, - Went his da. - See though, there's a lotta young people, young men getting sick now, Danny. See when you eat chicken and yer sick the protein travels to yer brain and collects there and makes you sicker.

 - See all the shite they put in the chicken, and all the food as a matter of fact, all the time: additives, colourings, all sortsa chemicals -

 - Correct! - Went Mad Otis cutting me off, the spit flying out his mouth, - To fockin bulk it out and give the livestock more weight an' all!

 - But that's not all, - went I pointing into the sky. - You see those big long streaks across the sky. And you see those whispy fingers coming away from the main body of the streak like ghostly branches? Well them's what you call chemtrails, Mad Otis. They are being sprayed outta private airplanes under the direction of a hydra-headed Luciferian New World Order that work behind the scenes of common times endevouring to control each and every little thing.

 - And this is the way they get started, - went Mad Otis raising his voice. - Spray us with fockin fly spray and get us all sick and weak. Well, they won't take me Danny Pongo! They're not gonna take me!

 Mad Otis's da then leaned in close to me. He was missing many teeth and his tongue was thick with brown gack. He said – Wow!

 But this is only a heavily edited portion of the discourse Mad Otis and his da engaged me in. In reality it lasted exactly 32 minutes.

One bus had passed me in the course of their talking to me but I were too nervous of both of them to cut either one off and go sprinting after it. Luckily they'd cut into a good deal of my waiting time for the next one, so I wasn't waiting too long in the stinking, sticky sun.

I was amazed to discover, when I got off the bus in town, that Belfast had now well and truly entered the 21^st century by acquiring itself 'The City Stink'. I have smelt 'The City Stink' in London, Dublin and Barcelona. It fills yer nose with a cool putrescence. It is most noticeable in the shade. There is every sort of bad odor on the aromatic palette of 'The City Stink'. And now Belshite's got one too.

I saw a lotta sites walking through the heat this afternoon. There were a lot of men, tough nuts, with their soft steroid muscles bulging underneath their latest up-to-date Rangers strips. I saw them only in the middle distance pointing this way and that, up & down, and at each other, heads red and shouting, their (for the most part) shiny bald burnt red heads gleaming like cummy wet bell-ends with a dose of something or other.

I had nowhere to go – just knew I had to get outta the boiling confines of my dirty little hole.

So I dandered up to Bosco's to buy a few e's, cos it were sunny, cos its in the sun, this type of year in fact at a festival down south, that I took my first e listening to Shakedown play this number:

So when I get home I'll stick it on, bang a coupla Bosco's e's and dance round my living room to it in the nip...