A SHORT STORY BY BLINDBOY BOATCLUB
Me: I know dude, total buzzkill sluts. Lol. I fucked most of them anyway, don’t worry. How you get views? *100 emoji*
Conlaoch: I search the most googled words that week for males aged 10 to 25 then use those words in the YouTube titles. That’s it. *laughing-crying-face emoji*
I start devouring Wikipedia articles on conspiracy theories. I could totally bring something new to this genre, something quirky and outside the box. There’s lots to take in: 9/11 conspiracies, Saddam Hussein owning a Stargate in the dessert, Obama controlling weather to invent climate change, the Hollow Earth theory, celebrity Illuminati puppets. But this is all basic shit.
But seriously though, ‘Yo, what would I do if I was early ’90s RZA from Wu Tang Clan and I was about to make a dope beat that changed hip-hop production forever?’ I wouldn’t copy trends, I’d sample classic soul, stuff that’s still there in musical consciousness but hasn’t been touched yet by hip-hop, then mix that up with some contemporary gangster shit to keep it relevant and gritty. YESSSSSS, that’s it. The fucking ‘moon landing was fake’ theory. The Robert Johnson of all conspiracy theories, the originator. No one talks about it anymore, no one thinks about it. That’s what I need to do.
The theory goes that the moon landing was faked by the US to put the shits up Russia. That it was filmed by Stanley Kubrick in a Hollywood back-lot, and the sheeple ate it up because it was on TV. What if I proved the moon landing was fake, but not faked because of the Cold War, faked to distract us from Islam taking over Europe? Yes. It was fabricated, and Islam was invented in the ’60s, under our noses, but we were too busy looking up at the moon to notice it happening. The CIA, KGB, Mossad and M15 rewrote all the history books and invented this big religion, to enslave us and keep us in fear, all because in the ’60s we got too woke from taking acid and listening to Hendrix.
Shit, maybe they killed Hendrix because of that? Jim Morrison and Marley too. Mainstream media has fed us this myth, this fake religion that was made up while we were obsessed with exploring planets and building rockets. You put a dude on the moon, it’s so mindblowing, you can feed the world any bullshit lie. Why not?
What else happened in the 1960s? The first mass immigration of Islamic Algerians happened in France (hired actors). Israel started throwing its weight around (anything with Jews is great).
Peak oil from Saudi Arabia (follow the money). The roots of the EU were sown (one-world government). Think about it. Those countries were just Arabs before the ’60s, like Aladdin and stuff.
They went around rubbing lamps on camels. Look at the film Casablanca from the ’40s, it’s in Morocco, you see any Muslims in that? No, just Arabs rubbing lamps and wearing turbans and smoking hash. No Allah, no burkas, no jihad, no sharia. Now all we care about today is Islam this, Islam that. They tell us that Islam is a threat, and what do we do? We shit our pants and obey whatever the one-world government wants us to obey, like good sheeple. It’s made up. It all ties in. This is all an easy sell. I’d believe it. It’s perfect. That’s that gangster shit, that Wu Tang shit. The moon landing is the obscure soul sample, the Islam stuff is ODB’s gritty lyrics about selling crack. Damn, this is so creative. This will get eaten up. If I just throw the right soundtrack on it, maybe Erykah Badu or Death Grips, I can get Huff Post sharing it,
BuzzFeed, Lovin Dublin, fucking Vice would share it. They don’t care what they share so long as it gets views and has the appearance of being woke.
Those alt-right edgelords who normally make conspiracy or Islam stuff are just computer dorks. They get the branding wrong every time, using basic system typefaces, bad editing, awful soundtracks. I’m the Marshall Jefferson to their Kraftwerk.
Those pricks at Body & Soul will beg me to curate a space, and I’ll show everyone. Ocras, Aoife, Guff, Síofra Condon, the total cunt. I heard she sucked off a guy at Irish college and isn’t even a real lesbian, she just pretends so people don’t call her privileged.
My hands have that twitch they get when they want to shake with excitement but can’t because I took three Xanax today, lol.
As I slump on that shit bench by Smithfield Luas, the Dublin clouds over the Liffey look like black tyre smoke, blocking the faggot sun that whimpers out a mushroom colour. The sun is such a dry shite loser. I could even stare at it directly because it couldn’t penetrate the cloud. It looks like a crap Penney’s lampshade behind a curtain in a student flat. The sun over Dublin is a pathetic weak asshole, too scared to express its true potential. Always asking permission from the rain to shine, letting the stupid drizzle get its way every time. Puffing out passiveaggressive UV rays through the mist that would give you freckles on your nose and you’d never even know what caused it. Not like the one on the continent, or in Croatia or something. It’s probably the reason everyone around here are such buzzkills. They catch loser off the sun. I should move to Croatia after the moon-landing video.
I fix the brim of my paddycap and make my way back to the gaff, with the sun tapping me on the back like an old woman telling me I’ve too many items in my basket for the queue I’m in. What are the logistics of getting this video made? I’ll need to borrow Dad’s 4x4 Land Rover and round up my film equipment.
Two Canon D7 cameras, zoom mics, tripods and maybe a few strong lights on stilts. All sorted, only Dad’s in Palermo and has the keys to the Rover.
The next morning, I’m forced to book a bus ticket on Bus Éireann, which is the worst service known to man. The drivers are ungrateful and smell like dried-in sweat, the floors on their buses are filthy, and I know someone who got tetanus from sitting on a fingernail that was jutting out of a seat. All the camera gear packed up in two big rucksacks. Feeling a bit shit because I took two more Xanax before bed so I could get to sleep. I had to take one when I woke up too, to stop feeling like shit. The bus is leaving at 11am. So I get an Uber down to Busáras near the Liffey. I’m going to west Clare by the way, to this place called the Burren. There used to be this fridge magnet in Mum’s kitchen, on the fridge obviously. I always hated her shitty apartment. She lived there after her and Dad split but it was only bought so Dad could rent it out to Polish people. So I despised it when she had to move in. I was like 11, she’d just stay up in her room, whimpering and drinking. It was the first time I ever got depressed or scared.
I used to stare at the fridge magnet of the Burren, to try and pretend I couldn’t hear her cry-drinking in the next room. This little photo of a pale stony desert, I couldn’t believe it was in Ireland. It was just grey rock, for miles and miles. I was the one who found her body. I thought she was just having a lie-in, but when I walked into the bedroom, her skin was violet and she had puke all over her face. She was naked too, which was even worse. I stared at that fridge magnet of the Burren while I waited for the ambulance to arrive, and it’s the last thing I remember from the apartment before I left to live with Dad and Caroline in Wicklow. The Burren looked like a different planet. It looked like outer space. I couldn’t think of a more perfect place to nail this moon-landing video.
I’m halfway through this bus journey and need to piss furiously. It’s one of those regional services that takes about a bajillion stops in the most isolated areas. It’s basically just going left from Dublin and stopping in every sparsely populated ditch that has people with green teeth, hurling jerseys and that muck-savage look of confusion that conveys a fear the British will be back at any moment to steal their spuds. Actual human cows who have sex and fight at the same time to a Kings of Leon soundtrack. I never even knew Ireland could get this rural.
The bus climbed shitty purple mountains for, like, a half-hour, those mountains that don’t even have grass, just short brown stumps that are always wet. Like in the film
Braveheart where Mel Gibson is dressed as a smurf. This whole place is a Jameson advert for thick Yanks. The driver goes up these mountains, only to pause at a fucking pole in the middle of nowhere and not one person gets off. The bus stops themselves haven’t even been changed since the ’70s, they still have the old logo of the red setter. This is why these Bus Éireann pricks need to be privatised and replaced with actual hard workers who want to get up early. They’re wasting everyone’s time, going to bus stops that no one is getting off at. The way down the mountain tickles my bladder, which swells to a whopper aching sting as the bus descends more.
When you need to piss this bad, you get an intense pain on top of your dick and then think about dying. I take three Xanax there and then. There’s no way I’m getting him to stop this bus, just so I can piss, and then everyone can look out the window at me pissing and I become the guy who pissed in the grass for the rest of the journey. The other passengers would probably film me pissing against a rock on their bogger Nokias and put it up on Bebo or whatever they use, and then everyone up in the Batter would see it, and they’d call me piss tourist. I’m not being the guy who pisses on the floor of this bus either. I’m just going to have to pretend that the next stop is my stop, and then wait for the next bus.
It’s at least another twenty minutes of tiny isolated road before the driver stops and shouts, ‘Polagoona, anyone for Polagoona?’
There’s two elderly women and a man with Down Syndrome left in the cabin. I get up off my seat with the utmost care, and grab my sack full of gear. I’m tip-toeing down the aisle with scrunched knees, my stomach crushing my belt because it’s so full of piss. The engine vibrations cause the piss inside to swirl around but the three Xanax make it feel tolerable.
‘This is my stop,’ I say. The driver doesn’t give a fuck and he smells like dried-in sweat.
On the roadside, I wait for him to drive away, then watch until the back of the bus is far off on the road. I pull my pants down around my ankles and try to push out a piss. I’ve been holding it for so long that it shocked my bladder or something, because it’s not coming. No matter how hard I try, I can’t piss. I try thinking of a river, I try squatting, I even drink some of my water. No piss. I can’t
“The other passengers would probably film me pissing against a rock on their bogger Nokias and put it up on Bebo or whatever they use””
fucking believe this, so I take one more Xanax. If I can relax a bit more, the piss will just exit naturally.
I’m staring at the yellow-with-condensation times on the bus stop, there’s no second bus coming after the one I’d just gotten on. Typical. I’m stranded in some gaff called Polagoona, in what I can only assume is either Galway or Clare. It’s starting to get dark and a bit cold. There’s a cluster of lights a few miles away in the distance that defo has to be a village. I’ve got my credit cards. If I can just get as far as there, I can get a hotel or something, relax, maybe have a pint. It’s going to be fine. Everything will be OK. I’ll be laughing about this later in bed. I’ll head to the Burren tomorrow and shoot the moon-landing video then. This whole situation makes for a pretty masso tweet anyway — people will think I’m fucking loopers, down here in boggerland.
‘Lost up a mountain, in a secret location, working on an exciting new project,’ I type. No fucking reception on the phone though, literally not one bar, so it doesn’t send.
I look up from my phone and it’s gotten darker still. The road that leads down the mountain to the lights is snakey and convoluted, with no streetlights. This is scary. Well, like, it should be scary, but not really because I’m very dozy from all the Xanax.
It’s going to be a pretty long journey down that road, and it’ll get darker with every step. I’ll probably be hit and killed by some in-bred culchie driver who’s after drinking paraffin out of a tractor engine. Those lights in the distance aren’t going anywhere though.
It’s probably shorter to literally go straight for them across the field. Like, a beeline. Just walk straight at the lights, across that big field. It looks pretty flat and uncomplicated as fields go. No big hedges or anything. My stomach is still so inflated with piss that I have to completely open my jeans. But that kind of hurts when I walk so I’ll just take the jeans off. Better take my underpants off too to be safe. This is the biggest erection I’ve ever had. When you need to piss this bad, your bladder expands and stimulates your prostate, and that gives you a piss horn. I’d read that on Google on the bus. We must have been in, like, Kildare when I looked that up because that’s the last time I had 4G internet on the iPhone.
I’m determined to get to those lights. I don’t care that I’m walking through a field with no pants and on a boner. There’s no one around anyway. This ground underneath is pretty mushy. My leg got stuck a few yards back so I pulled it out with my arms. Got mucky hands. Good job I’m not wearing pants because it would make this way more difficult. There’s this odd smell the deeper I walk. I’ve definitely smelled it before. It’s kind of cheesy and earthy and eggy. Where do I know this from? This is worse than trying to name a song, why can’t there be a Shazam app for smells? OMG, that’s so creative, I better patent that when I get back. What the fuck is that smell? Oh shit, I know. Guff ’s fireplace, in J. Morrison & Sons pub. The turf. The ground smells like the bucket of turf beside Guff ’s fire. I must be walking across a peat bog. Mum used to tell me stories about these when I wasa kid. She was a blow-in from Clare, but she went to college and met my dad in Dublin and never went back. She used to tell me about cutting turf in the summer with her dad.
It’s too dark now but I’d love to see what this bog looks like. Maybe I could get some turf for Guff and bring it back. I’ll take out the iPhone for the torch and point it at the ground. It’s all brown and wet, but crazy spongy, like a bouncy castle. I’ll walk around another bit, look for a good patch with the light, and then rest the phone on my bag. Fuck it, I’m here anyway, why not? I’ll dig a bit of turf for Guff and bring it back in the rucksack. Might as well. How cool would that be? Who the fuck up in Stoneybatter would just wander into a pub with their own turf that they cut, lol? I can get one of the tripods from the sack and use it like a kind of shovel to dig bits up. It’s really cool, the stuff gets spongier and less like earth the deeper I go, the eggy smell is way stronger when I dig. I’ll keep digging for a bit. Shit, I think I hit something?
With the iPhone light shining I’m seeing what’s like this strand of dark leather. I pulled loads of muck and turf away, and I can make out a long thin shape. Call me nuts, but this looks like a weird skinny leathery black leg. Oh fuck, no way. It’s a fucking bog body. Oh shit. They’ve only ever found like six of these in Ireland. I can’t believe this. We studied these in Leaving Cert, they even took us into the National Museum to see them. Irish mummies, my teacher called them. So basically, these dudes, like, kings or something, would, like, get murdered or die thousands of years ago, and then they’d get buried in a bog and their bodies would preserve perfectly, until they get found by legends like me.
This is such a me thing to do. If ever there was proof of what a total ledgebag I am, I fucking step foot into a bog for the first time in my life and find a fucking bog body. Ocras is going to hate me.
I reach into my rucksack to take out the 7D camera. I have to start vlogging this discovery immediately. Fuck the moon-landing video, this is history. I just discovered history. Holy shit... what if I claim the body as my own? I should do that. Fuck giving it to a museum, he’s mine. I could like take the bog body back to Stoneybatter and put a cool hat on him. Maybe take him to Body & Soul and put him behind a set of decks, call him DJ Bogger. Fuck ya. A bog-body DJ? That’s next-level. Daft Punk can shove their robot helmets up their hoops. DJ Bogger is what’s happening this summer.
I don’t fucking believe this, where is my 7D camera gone? I think I placed all the cameras in the other rucksack, I must have left it on the bus because I was so distracted by needing to piss.
For the love of Jah. OK, one more Xanax before I flip out. I still need to piss. Do not even tell me I’m not getting this act of ultimate ledgebaggery on camera, and my phone battery has just about enough to use the torch a bit more. If I even chance the iPhone camera, the battery will go, and then I’ve no light. FML.
Maybe it’s for the best. I’d have to vlog with no pants on a piss horn, that would take hours of keying a blur in on Premiere. It doesn’t matter. I’m already planning on digging this ancient fucker up, throwing him on my back, and making it down to those lights. I can ring the bus company and get the cameras back in the morning, although what if that Down Syndrome lad stole them? No time to think like that.
I get down on my knees and start pulling the turf away from around the body while I still have light from the phone. I can make out little details the more I pull. The legs are real skinny and mashed together with rope around the feet. This rope looks like it would fall apart if I touched it. His dick is tiny. As I scrape away more turf, I can see that his stomach is, like, ripped open and even his gut casings are intact, all black and leathery. This is fucking incredible, dude is perfectly preserved, except for his nipples that have been cut off. He defo had a gruesome end. Someone really hated this guy, he must have been a total asshole.
As I dig further up, where his neck should be, my hand slips and I fall forward on my stomach, on top of the body. I reach with my fingers and realise that I’ve obviously been lying just at the edge of a ledge. I grab the phone to shine some light ahead of me. There’s a big sinkhole and I’d almost fallen in, close call, but now I’m lying on the rim of it, on top of this bog body.
Couldn’t see it in the dark obviously. The rest of the bog body is protruding from the wall of this sinkhole. It must have been recently sunk, and that’s what budged him to the surface. My chest is on his, as I poke my face over the ledge and shine the light. Looking down, I can see his head sticking out from the wall of the sinkhole. He’s got a big mouth full of teeth grinning up at me and this baldy head with one tuft of red hair. He would look so cool DJing at Body & Soul, my God. I’d put a tank-top on him, with an LGBT rainbow. There’s easily a ten-foot drop underneath his head, with water at the bottom. I could pull his legs, that might drag him from the hole’s wall, but his head would probably come off if I applied any pressure. He’s no good to me without a head. I’m defo going to have to climb down that hole and clear the mud around him that way. Shit, this will be difficult, but not impossible. I place the phone on the ledge, so that the light points into the hole, and I climb over and kick my feet into the soft wall to get some ooting. Good thinking, very Bear Grylls, so creative. If I can just dig the mud out from around his head, I can take the whole body and then bring him down to the village.
I’m making good progress, but it’s starting to rain, which is when my leg fucking slips so I grab onto the head and hang off it. I clamber with my other hand to reach the ledge, but it’s too fucking wet and the rain is getting heavier and washing all the mud down into the sinkhole. I can feel the bog body starting to loosely slip towards me and out of the wall, with me on the end.
It’s stretchy and leathery, like a dog’s chew toy, but it can defo hold my weight. I have him headlocked, but he’s just pushing out of the wall of that sinkhole like a difficult shit exiting a rectum. The rain looks fat in the blue light of the iPhone on the ledge. This is so slippy. He comes free and we both splash ten feet below. Thank fuck this water is only reaching as far as my knees, but the hole is filling up with rain and mud pretty quickly. I try to think of how I can get back up to the surface, but then the light on the phone that’s illuminating us goes and I’m standing in pitch black, down a hole, holding this bog body, with nothing but the sound of rising mud around me. I hadn’t told anyone back in the Batter that I was going to Clare. No one knows I’m here. My only hope is that someone will find me in the morning, someone walking up from that village in the distance.
I remember Mum’s stories about the bogs. About lights known as will o’ the wisps that flicker over turf when gas is released. How these lights lead people off their paths. There is no fucking village. There are no people. This is the middle of nowhere. Just me down a hole, with a bog body, getting ready to drown in muddy turf and be dug up in another ten thousand years. Cradling this cunt who died a millennium or so before me and I’ve no pants on. I want more than anything to feel fear, regret, doom, panic, I want to fight for my life, to feel anything at all. But I’m too numb from Xanax. I feel nothing, I can’t feel my last moment. But at least I can finally take a piss.