Will write for booze...

Speaking of Contest's I'd win...

2012-01-16T19:55:00.000Z

My other love: Fashion

2012-01-16T19:53:00.001Z

How to Make Sushi...

2012-01-07T14:24:00.001Z

How to make a Zine... zine?

2011-11-09T00:20:00.000Z

I'm going to be making an appearance at the DIY skillshare festival this weekend, so I decided that instead of staying in bed and complaining, like my normal sick self, I would make another instructional zine. I originally made a 'How to Make Sushi' zine, a skill everyone should have if they're partial to deliciousness.

They were quite popular (in fact I have none left), and so I made a much more obvious alternative. I just finished it there, and I hope it's acceptable. Quite frankly I'm so fucking tired I don't care. Just fuck off and make a fucking zine. Thanks.

This is how the thing is laid out.

(It's much smaller in real life.)

Drinking

2011-11-07T01:22:00.001Z

(Writing and drawings from Pepper Morrison 10, 'Ad Nauseum'. Apologies for shitty photos of drawings, I don't have a scanner at the moment. There's actually a pretty good picture at the bottom x)

It would seem that I've given up drinking.

I have never had a problem with drink. Wellactually, that is entirely untrue, I have never had a problem with booze in thesense that most people would not understand it to be a problem. I know lots ofpeople who have 'a problem with booze' in the more traditional sense, but Ihave always thought that was an entirely inaccurate way of describing whathappened to these people when they drank. It seemed to me, that drink seemed tohave a problem with them, rather than the other way around.

At first, because we're young, they just seem tobe a laugh. They drink all the time, they are 'party animals', and generally inmuch demand and reputable for their ability to make a session become a party.Things seem to flow easier when there is someone running around in drunkentomfoolery, generally people follow suit. They lead the way at parties. Butthen gradually they begin to get this way at lesser functions, until theybecome (as selfish as it sounds) a chore to be around. And this is when thepanic starts to set into their hungover face. Because they have stopped havinga laugh and they realise that booze is out to get them.

It haunts them, torments them, beckons to them tocome and play and forget about everything. Drink forces its way in and makesthem blurred and happy at first and then gradually more and more worried as itcalls louder and louder. Into daily life, into conversation, into wants andneeds. All this happens as though completely exterior, as though booze is notan inanimate liquid, but almost an all knowing deity that has an immense holdover its subject.

This is booze having a problem with you. I amvery lucky to not have these particular problems. Drinks problem with me is tocause a vague sense of unease that can't be shaken off, not quite out tooverpower me, but just to let me know that it's lurking away whenever I swig.Don't get me wrong, I love drinking, and I love being drunk. I love not havingto take responsibility for anything and since I am quite loud and obnoxiousgenerally, drinking allows me to reach new highs of disgusting vile rudenesswith nothing but drunken smiles in return. It lets me kiss people and talk shitto people and have nights out with people that become mushy and turn into amontage of dancing and staggering and laughing and laughing.

But it is a fucking bitch as well. It would turnon me in a second. Well in all honesty it would hint to me from the start thatit wasn't entirely on my side, planting that vague but horrible question in mymind. 'What next?' And all the meanings it could possibly have. What nexttonight? A sense of waiting, waiting for something big to happen, a kiss or afight or an adventure. A sense of dissatisfaction with what is happening rightthis second, this conversation is never enough, what next?

And what next after the adventurous kissingfight? How do I get home? That one seems small but it encompasses every elementof my anxiety. That future of aching hangover and swaying at a bus stop rackedwith nausea and bitter self hatred as the sun rises. In the same crusty clotheswith the same crusty night stuck in my head. Or getting home before the thing.The adventure. What if my panic makes me leave before the big thing happens?

And what next? What next in everything? What thefuck is going to go wrong next? In my stupid little life.

Booze makes me anxious. It makes me panic. Itmakes me stop enjoying myself. Of course there is a lovely blissful time rightin the middle, where I can truly let go. Well as I type this, I realise thatthis is what I have constructed from the events I have been told about in thattime, because in order to go past the worry I have to get so very drunk I can'tremember anything of that particular portion of the night. The parts I rememberare me being socially awkward and trying to be funny. Running betweenconversations to try to not miss a thing and instead just getting nothing fromany of it. Dancing in clubs for the three hours they're open after paying atenner for the privilege.

I mean, there were good times I remember. Iremember kissing a beautiful girl in a room filled with balloons and the bestof motown playing. And lying next to her on a couch while she curled up next to me. She slept and I watchedBreakfast at Tiffany's.

And I remember climbing onto my friends roof tofinish off a night of drunken silliness. I smashed my bottle of 'wine', whichhad become some horrible concoction of anything left over at the party. It hadvery luckily smashed all over the road and I plonked down on the pavement inwhat can only be described as a tantrum. Sorcha sang Kate Bush and danced and lured me to her house. And throughsome strange sorcery I managed to drag myself onto her roof, much to her (andthe following day, my) surprise.

And I remember a million other times where amillion other amazing perfect things happened. But the next day, the headachesand the inability to move and leave and just losing an entire day to mydrinking the night before brought a very minute and special kind of shame. Butto be honest, none of it seemed like a problem at all. It was just part oflife, you drink and have a laugh and suppress the rising panic and then feellike crap the next day. It's just the way it goes kiddo.

Giving up drink had never appealed to me. Orrather it never occurred to me as something a person would do unless they hadto. Even now, after not drinking for a few months, if someone tells me theydon't drink my brain immediately demands to know WHY? WHY NOT? And then thesocial side of my brain enters and equally rudely shouts DON'T ASK BECAUSETHEY'RE PROBABLY AN ALCOHOLIC. Which is just mortifying really. I think I wouldbe much less ashamed of myself if I was able to suppress my brain's naturalinstincts on all occasions. It irritates me that my brain does this because ifsomeone doesn't smoke my natural instinct isn't to begin an onslaught ofpersonal questioning. There are simply people who smoke and people who don'tand my brain accepts this with great ease. I understand that smoking anddrinking (while often done hand in hand) are very different activities, and itis normal to view them differently. Drinking is central to Irish socializing,Irish youth and Irish sex. Americans can approach and exchange numbers and evendate and kiss sober, but to do so in Ireland takes a balls of concrete. Soif life is for the sole purpose ofprocreation, as the Catholic church is correct, then booze is the lubricant forlife itself. Without it the Irish would remain celibate and childless. So it issubconsciously considered crucial, unlike smoking. Which is simply considered tobe delicious... by me.

But then Eavan gave up drinking and has beensober for fifteen months or so. Eavan is not as delicate as I am. In fact sheis the opposite of delicate, to the extent that how well she would survive inprison has been commented on by numerous unrelated groups of her friends. Shehas the cast iron will of an ox (and incidentally the immune system of one aswell). In the last fifteen months she has been to festivals, countless clubnights, parties, sessions and meet ups in pubs. She remained in constantmotion, rocketing from one event to the other in a flurry of popularity thatshe refuses to acknowledge. And she does every single thing sober, and has anamazing time in the process. Like all other things she does, she made the rightchoice look like the easy choice and the most appealing choice. She did notbecome preachy or evangelical about being on the wagon, she just went out anddanced her face off and could do so every night of the week because she washangover free. She was saving huge amounts of money and could remember everyminute of these new booze free nights of fun.

On her one year anniversary we sat in the smokingarea of The Dragon and drank booze free 'cocktails' (that were closer toresembling strawberry milkshakes. They had oreos in them and everything) and wecelebrated. And then a few weeks later I went out on the tear and got into sucha panicked state that the night became the illusion of total disaster. Myfeelings on that night could not have been further from the actual events thatwere taking place. I went to the Abbey theatre for a new and hip club night,which was paid for by the lovely Rachel Noble. We got some food and I partedways with them as they went to a party and went to the girls apartment inTemple Bar for a natter. They offered me a bed for the night which I turneddown and instead left at about 4am and caught the last bus to the party Racheand the others had gone to. While I was there I chatted to loads of people andeven got a lift straight home in the morning.

Now doesn't that night seem lovely? But itwasn't, it was awful. I made it awful by panicking about how I was going to getfrom place to place throughout, and about whether where I was, was the bestplace to be. The very worst that could have happened to me that night was thatI would have woken up in the girls apartment, safe and warm and among friends.But in my mind I was in some sort of demented nightmare, where I wasuncontrollably trying to sabotage my own night and end up as far away from myown home as possible for, that all important of things, the morning after. Bythe time I got to the party I was near tears of panic, which in hindsight justseems completely bizarre. I was hoping to just get a taxi home from there but Idiscovered that Aine had left minutes before my arrival and I was now'stranded'. I was close to a break down at this point, miserable at myself formaking such terrible decisions. Eavan was at the party and spent the next fewhours listening to me whine literally non-stop about what was in actual fact avery mild predicament. I was sobering up at this point and beginning to getgradually more and more hungover and as a result was finding being around mydrunken friends almost impossibly irritating.

And I started to become more conscious of howmuch drinking stresses me out. The morning after I just try to blank the badpart from my memory and remember the jokes and silliness and the singing out oftune. But it is there. Blind panic. About where I am, what I'm doing and howthe fuck I'm going to get out of there.

So I stopped. I didn't say 'gave up' yet anddecided I just wanted to see what it was like. I think I was worried that boozemight have a problem with me, because with the self denial about how much Ifreaked out when I drink I began to wonder why on earth I would ever drink.Maybe booze was out to get me and would call me back. But no, drink doesn'thave a problem with me at all. It seems to have let me go with good grace,having never had a grudge against me.

There are some problems. One problem is worryingabout being the boring sober person, or since I got my new camera, the soberperson who recalls every element of the silliness the night before. This isquite easily avoided by not being a bastard.

A bigger problem is people getting a bit freakedout when they realise they are pouring their heart out to a sober person whowill remember the conversation. They get even more freaked out if theconversation is in depth on both sides, because why on earth would a soberperson open themselves up for no reason? It seems almost suspect, which isannoying because I like drunken banter.

But my mates don't mind, and generally peopledon't even notice I'm not drinking. Which isn't necessarily the best reflectionon my behaviour when sober. But they did tests on groups of sober people in adrunken environment to see how they reacted. One group was given booze and theother a placebo, and unsurprisingly the two groups when socializing togetherboth acted more or less the same, as you would expect. But bizarrely when theyreplaced the placebo group with a group of people who were aware what they weredrinking was non-alcoholic, the results were exactly the same as the prior experiment.If you're around drunks you act a bit drunk, because a lot of drunken behaviouris just from being in a social situation.

Bizarrely, so effective is this non-placebo, Ihave woken up with a hangover.

Don't worry about asking me why I've stopped drinkingthough. Everyone does and it doesn't bother me, so long as a vague answer aboutit disagreeing with medication I'm on doesn't bother you. So long as nothing issaid about me chain smoking. And cackling like a lunatic and generally beingobnoxious.

(Side note: I do actually still drink. Just very rarely)

Yet more chocolate skulls...

2011-10-28T01:29:00.001+01:00

This one is far more impressive and entirely unappetising... But it still chocolate after all. Buy it for me on the choccywoccydoodah website here.

I promise I'll return to normal zine related posts soon...

2011-10-27T15:56:00.003+01:00

In the meant time, here's something weird to celebrate my 70th post. Yay!

Also the jury is still out on this one, but it's probably NSFW...

(actually, I just watched it again, and it's definitely NSFW)

Sure, tiz only water...

2011-10-26T01:28:00.000+01:00

I live where this was filmed.

I'm not joking. I really live here, in this field cluster of hell.

Rural? Yes. And very Irish. And Irish weather. It's been raining, and flooding...
Dundrum shopping centre flooded,

And so did this bus.

And then the darts stopped for a bit. So. Basically I didn't go to college today. That is all...

Mini Edition of "CRAP FROM MY MOLESKINE!"

2011-10-23T23:07:00.001+01:00

Yet another motto... Most simples...

rawr.

Halloween is Very Important in my Chocolate Based Religion

2011-10-23T02:30:00.000+01:00

This is a £50 chocolate replica of a real human skull. And it is covered in edible gold leaf. And you may buy it for me here.

A fine tribute to the chocolate gods.

We're all naked underneath our clothes...

2011-10-21T18:53:00.001+01:00

Except. Some of us aren't.

I also managed to 'fix' the blog. Thank bejaysus. And of course, by fix, I mean make it super boring again. And I added those little boxes at the bottom of posts so that you lovely readers can still be shy and just give me a little click instead of having to write a time consuming comment. (I'm sure you're all very important)

Yet Another Edition of "CRAP FROM MY MOLESKINE!"

2011-10-13T23:56:00.000+01:00

I have no idea what I just did to my blog. Destroyed it apparently. Dear lord. Anyway, if you have any idea how to use it, here's some more tat from my moleskine.

Here we have Marilyn and Elvis...

And now for EXTREME CLOSE UP!

Rawr.

A Sneak Preview

2011-10-07T15:17:00.002+01:00

Some drawings for 'Porridge', my latest offering to the zine universe. Chronicling my educational hell, from playschool until now.

This is to accompany the story of me smuggling jigsaws out of playschool in my knickers.

And then, just a general motto...

A Mini Edition of "CRAP FROM MY MOLESKINE"

2011-10-03T12:44:00.003+01:00

A lovely drawing of me in the future.

rawr.

And now, for a midnight edition of "CRAP FROM MY MOLESKINE!"

2011-09-30T00:12:00.000+01:00

Yes, yet another wonderful edition of my shitty drawings. Though not these ones, these next two drawings speak of unquestionable, universal truths, and are therefore, epic.

And now for EXTREME CLOSE UP!

rawr.

I'm setting up a zine society in college.

2011-09-29T14:47:00.001+01:00

In other news:
I went for a walk yesterday, this is where I live. It's actually quite pretty...

Time for the First Instalment of 'CRAP FROM MY MOLESKINE'

2011-09-28T12:16:00.001+01:00

Yes. I am indeed one of those wankers who not only OWNS a moleskine, I actually draw it in quite a lot too.

So here is 'some crap from my moleskine'

Lady face and shout out to my first and only love Inklude.

Check us out, we're pretty badass...

Now for some SUPER CLOSE-UPS

Rawr.

The Big Disgusting World

2011-09-27T11:06:00.000+01:00

Today I have to go out begging for jobs. Why can't I just be Leigh Bowery instead? He didn't have a job, he just dressed up as penis' and had a good time...

Incidentally, this documentary is fucking deadly, I've watched it twice now x

Dublin Zine Fair of Joy

2011-09-24T17:09:00.002+01:00

The time has come yet again for a zine fair review. Well the time was slightly before now, but I tried to upload some video's on here and it didn't work, so I gave a guttural scream and swore I would never touch technology again! Or rather I gave up and briefly watched Jeremy Kyle. Anyway...

This year, the zine time fun has been sparse. Not that zining is a pass time that absolutely overloads my calendar (what with the gala dinners and all) but this year there has been next to nothing. I did do the anarchist book fair, and got to meet a wide range of weirdos with an appreciation for DIY shit, and if I'm honest, one or two proper weirdos... I had chocolate peanuts on my stall for sharing and one guy kept coming over and just sort of... touching them... So only wrapped sweets from now on.

Anyway. The Dublin zine fair was organised by the lovely Sarah Bracken of Baby Beef fame, held in the Ranalagh Arts Centre and filled with lovely ziney people. And even a band. I got quite an impressive haul actually...

Take a moment to salivate over the ziney goodness. Now on to location.

I didn't know that Ranalagh was posh, and I still am not entirely sure if it'd considered so by anyone else, but we were right next to a super posh supermarket and there was no where to put burnt out cigarettes ANYWHERE. Also no one was smoking. That's a sign of affluence if ever I saw one. I went looking for a lighter at one point and had to venture down a dark alley before any smokers revealed themselves. Like troll creatures we hide from the light.

I was wedged in between Last Bus and Loserdom and tried not to bash elbows too much. It was a good and bad location because on the one hand, I had really high standard or really great old school zines all around me. On the other hand, my rag had to measure up. At times I wanted to strangle them both as their welcoming smiles and colourful publications made people skim past my monotone stall. Also I was reading a book, which probably didn't help.

But Gypsy Rebel Rabble started playing nice and early and made me relax and just enjoy the day. I never have much faith in acoustic music, but there are always people who you could hand a tooth pick and some string to and they'd macgyver an epic tune. These lads are those types and are thus practically over equipped when given functioning instruments.

That was all in real time. Terrifying.

So I did my usual buzz of going around and taking pictures of the various stalls. I usually have a terrible time trying to remember which lovely individual was attached to what lovely stall, so this time I had a plan. A devious plan? No not really, I decided that if the stall had a card, I would take it and use it to give the details of the picture. Simples!

Or not... Bollocks.

Sarah did give out these:

Which had information about everyone on the back:

Including little old me:

But even with this information on a plate I'm still finding it impossible to match people with pictures.

Also, if I'm honest, my camera and I have had a tenuous relationship for some time now and lied about how much battery it had before I left the house. So halfway through snapping it suddenly dropped to the mechanical equivalent of a spluttering cough. Though that may have something to do with all the recording I was doing. Long story short, I didn't get as many pictures as I'd hoped for. Of course, some tables are easier to recognise than others...

Philip Barrett's stall for instance is still my favourite and stick out like a well drawn thumb. Got my hands on the last copy of 'Matter 12#', Phil's self penned comics and stories.

And I occasionally gave myself a hint as to the identity of the table owner, as above. Patrick Brown according to the photo. Really lovely guy, great for a chat a trade.

There was no one at this table, unless you count the utterly terrifying doll creature.

Look into its evil eyes...

But again I gave myself a hint by taking a picture of their card.

Emma Elisabeth apparently, and she can't be all the evil because she also has dolly mix. I'm disappointed I didn't get to chat to her because I just hopped on her blog there and her stuff is really nice.

Then we have the Escapism crew, who I did chat with repeatedly. The girl at the stall was completely mental, and I thoroughly enjoyed having the chats with her. I even bought both Esc zines, which you can have a look at here.

Also on their table was showcase comics, which look really amazing but at a whole 4 euro were slightly out of my price range

Oooh look! Other people who do stuff in black and white. Like some other very talented person I know (me. I'm talking about me).

I may have gotten slightly over zealous with the record function on my camera...

Yeah, sorry about that... From terrible recordings back to terrible photos.

Photo to prove that people did in fact attend. And to the girl in the centre, that is the best facial expression I've ever seen.

That's what I like to see, big piles of zines and people milling about hungry to paw through them.

I have no idea what this is (spaceship?), but I'm an origami freak and I immediately want it.

Also, this is really bad, but Eavan just rang me, and now I want to go out for pints... So I'll fill the rest in later, and if you happen to hop on in the mean time and see your stuff, drop me a comment and it will make the filling in all the easier!

Right, pints have been had, now back to work. Here we have... woman hiding behind vintage suitcase...

The lovely 'Superhilbo' (adorable blog here) helped me out hugely by giving me info on these two pictures. This is what she said:

"Hey Pepper! Nice round up of photos and vids from the day, fair play to ya. If it helps, the second and third pics from the long list of photos, have Albedo 1 and Superhilbo (respectively). The table highlights Issues of Albedo 1 and Longstone Comics 'Smiling at the Sky' comic...

...Superhilbo was sold out so empty space in pic! (good thing even though its a gawping space!!) :)"

Don't know if you noticed but eh, she complimented my blog... Not bad yo.

The woman who created this bizarre tea bag zine contraption had the most gorgeous baby ever. Also she needs to contact me because I want one of those tea bag zines.

Lunch was brought in for Anto (of Loserdom fame) and consisted of a giant lunchbox of veggie deliciousness in the form of cous cous and moussaka and such other complicated things. I didn't happen to see anyone give him a giant slice of watermelon, so turning around and seeing him slicing it up with what looked like a fucking hunting knife gave me a bit of a fright. Or rather a fucking heart attack.

He might look innocent...

But he will kill again.

Now for some more Gypsy Rebel Rabble! Enjoy x

On the outside...

2011-02-24T11:17:00.000Z

If you add up all the time I spend on public transport a month, it comes to 56 hours. 56 hours of sitting and listening to music and feeling bored and static. There is very little movement to something like transport, just sitting very still and trying not to make eye contact with people. My headphones are very helpful in this ignoring process.

When I had glandular fever I didn't quite hallucinate. When I'm ill I never seem to get any symptoms that are dramatic enough for my tastes. I like visual ailment, something you can (hopefully not literally) sink your teeth into. I like things like rashes and swelling and bleeding, so that you can SEE the damage, not wishy washy things like headaches and tiredness and vague pains. Hallucinations are something in between, a fever is something real that someone else can feel if they press their fingers against your forehead. And a hallucination is understood, it's the result of that feeling against your fingers, if you're hot enough. But my 'fever' never got all that bad, and I never had full on visions or anything. I just got quite hot and uncomfortable and started to have trouble differentiating between dreams and reality.

I was certain that it was unlikely for my ex to have come to my room with some friends to hang out with me, while I writhed about in my sweaty diseased hell. This is not helped by how mundane my dreams tend to be, mundane and very 'real'. When my bout of glandular fever ended it was followed by 18 months of 'fatigue' something I constantly complain about because it sounds like Victorian nonsense. The hysterical woman fainting into lakes in big hats and long floaty dresses. But along with the fatigue, my inability to differentiate between reality and dreams continued. This led to a very embarrassing situation where I informed various people in my year that our lecture on Renaissance lit had been cancelled. This was based on a conversation with our lecturer in which she had EMPHASISED that no one seemed to have read an e-mail informing us of the cancelled lecture, So in my class rep dutifulness I went around informing people. This conversation turned out to have been a dream and led to a panicked text message being sent around saying that the lecture was still happening. I wasn't sure whether I was more distressed by how real the entire dream had seemed or how ridiculously boring my subconscious is.

A friend at college, Tito, tried to cheer me up by saying that he has dreams that involve lecturers on occasion too. He had dreamt just the previous night that he had discussed a variety of 80's bands at great length with one of our lecturers.

'Yeah, I woke up and was like... Why did I dream I was talking to Stephen Boyd about Oingo Boingo?'

The point of all this is that I've been listening to a lot of Oingo Boingo at the moment. While on the bus.

Normal programming appears to be quite sparse...

2011-01-20T15:11:00.001Z

I have been working very hard on my new zine. It is 50 pages long and only 9 of those pages are drawings and only two of those drawings are any good... but still, everyone should buy it. In the world. My mother bought five of them, which is either a good sign or...not a very good sign. I did sell one other one, but I can't for the life of me remember who bought it...

I'll take some pictures of it later. And maybe clean my room. It's disgusting.

For now, watch this:

Or listen to this:

Notice that was not a request. The first is a 19 part documentary about kraftwerk, and all the amazing shit that could possibly mean. The second is what I listened to as I glued the new zine together. Fucking delicious...

Idiot.

2011-01-03T15:41:00.002Z

Well, as I'm sure you've come to expect from me by now, I have done something monumentally stupid. I am aware I am a delicate person. I know this and I loathe this and write and complain about this in any medium I can get my hands on at great length. I have never been to a festival and doubt I ever will, I have never travelled and even avoid staying out all night at friends houses, so fragile is my demeanor. 

It's why I've never had much interest in taking drugs. If I want to have a strange, out of mind or body experience all I need do is alter my sleeping pattern so slightly that it would not be discernible to the naked eye. I even recently gave up drink, because after years of trying (very hard) to ignore the terror that the introduction of a new chemical creates in my little wormy mind I realised that I had to give in and stop trying. Simply being in a situation that is outside my house is disruptive enough to my perception of reality without having to add something as potentially exciting as alcohol. 

So with the painstakingly first hand knowledge of my ridiculousness I decided to chug a pint of energy drink at midnight in order to force myself to study after a day of procrastination. I did eventually study, you'll be happy to know, at 5am. It is now 8:45. I have never been so alert in my entire life. The particular brand of chemicals which I chose to poison myself with was aptly called 'Relentless'. Even before I knew the horrifying effects it would have on me I questioned the title. 'Relentless is not a positive thing. It's an adjective I would associate with rapists' I said to Eavan on the phone. Well more accurately I shouted. I should have known something was amiss when I couldn't control the volume of my voice and my leg jigging reached a stage where my foot seemed to be trying to physically hop away from my body. 

To be honest, other than the insomnia, I get most of the symptoms the drink is creating without any stimulants necessary. My mood just swings up and down, and is no small part aided by my compulsive eating habits. For example, my hopes of sleeping at any point will not be helped by me eating an entire packet of chilli nuts for my breakfast just there. Chilli nuts which I bought specifically to eat as energy food as I studied diligently into the night. I was slightly peckish and decided that it would be 'sensible' to stay in my room instead of wandering around the house when I was trying to sleep and to just eat something that happened to be knocking about my room. Why these chilli nuts seem like a good idea! But of course just one or two. Thirty seconds later and the page I had been classily using as a plate is now empty but for chilli dust and what look like the inane scrawlings of a mad man.

It's is something I wrote while having one of my stimulant free mood swings. I suppose at the time I considered them to be 'notes', but now I just consider to be... worrying. I remember writing them when I was on the phone to Eavan during an 'up' swing. These swings predate my anti-anxiety medication and are something I enjoy. For the most part. That is to say, I like the productivity that comes with these bursts of adrenaline, along with the flow of ideas that my brain explodes into. These are good things. What's bad is that the adrenaline and flow of ideas manifests itself verbally, which means long phone calls in which the only person talking or interested is me. My closer friends have learned to expect this on occasion, and for the most part have also learned that trying to actually respond or interact with me at this stage in my minds proceedings is pointless. Their part in this bizarre little play my mind likes to invent is to be very quiet so I may rant at myself. Gill used to use these phone calls as an opportunity to catch up on chores, mending clothes and such.

It seems strange to me that while feeling like this as the result of energy drinks, I find the written result of feeling this way without energy drinks. If that makes sense, which it probably doesn't as making sense long ago ceased to be my goal. The actual words on the page make no sense at all, and the handwriting is literally demented. It seems to have been written by some sort of Mr. Hyde style manic villain. There are no full sentences and the words are barely legible, which is why I have the courtesy to type all my zines for you lovely people. The really sad part is that the page outlines the sort of conversation I have described above, and out of the ten topic changes I wrote down, Eavan managed to get a word in edge ways and contribute one. One in ten. How embarrassing. 

This was a topic to do with her believing that soap opera's and dramas were real when she was little. And not just in the sense of overly indulging in the narrative of a drama, but believing that cameras were just magically capturing real life as it happened. In this sense Eavan was ahead of her time, what with the onslaught of reality tv that is currently groping the airwaves. This brought us (me) to the topic of childhood misunderstandings and delusions beginning with me explaining that I felt quite the opposite about things that happened on tv. I believed that what occurred on tv was happening physically in the television. A misunderstanding which was rectified by me watching people on television watching a boxing match on television that was also happening in real time. On television. Confusing I know, but earth shattering for me at the time. How was the boxing match happening in real life and on the television at the same time? 

Such a strange thing to believe but nothing compared to how I understood 'the past'. I believed that 'the past' was happening simultaneously with the present. Like a parallel universe, with a cave woman version of myself doing the same things I did in a cave woman setting at the same time I did it. She got up from her dirt bed and put on her fur skins and ate some raw zebra or something and then stared at a rock for a few hours while I watched tv. What is even more strange is that when the confusing boxing match on television thing happened my Mum went to great lengths to try to explain how television worked and to correct my mistake, but was somewhat nonplussed about my worrying concept of parallel universes. When I asked her if the cave girl version of me would be doing what I was doing at exactly the same time as me, she just slowed down drying the dishes and looked ponderously off into the distance. 'No', she said, 'she would be doing it... now'. 

All children have blindspots about how things work though, which brought me to telling Eavan that one my sisters friends once asked me what a television character was doing off screen. She was sitting on the couch facing the telly and I was standing to the right of the set. When the character on screen exited the frame to the left, without thinking she asked what he was doing, assuming that with my slanted perspective of the screen I could see off into the distance of tv land. She immediately remembered that television didn't work that way and got very annoyed that I tried to pretend I could see the man chatting with other offscreen characters. Another one of Aine's friends momentarily thought he could look up the skirt of a girl on a magazine cover. We caught him tilting the page and trying to see her knickers.

This sort of behaviour is fine in children of course, it's when it continues into adulthood that it becomes a problem. My Dad once told me of a friend of his who for years, well into his late thirties, would come downstairs in the morning, sit at the breakfast table, close his eyes and steal a cornflake from the bowl next to his. He honestly believed that when he closed his eyes, no one could see him stealing the cornflake. He became invisible. His famiy did eventually have to 'confront' him about his cornflake stealing habits, and he was apparently mortified as one would be. But that for the least is a harmless delusion, effecting only the person actually thinking he's invisible. Another of my Dad's friends was terrible to get up out of bed in the morning, and his wife would keep waking him until she heard him walking around upstairs preparing for work. So he developed a technique of leaning out of bed and banging his shoes around the floor as though he was walking around. This would give him a few more minutes of sleep before his wife realised that the 'walking' had stopped and would go upstairs to wake him again. 

Lowry once told me of a friend of his who was even worse at getting up in the morning. So he ingeniously (and moronically) made a make shift bed underneath his actual bed. In the morning he would be woken, he would get ready for college, wait for his parents to leave and then he would roll under his bed and go back to sleep for the day. This just seems completely insane to me. How on earth could you not be caught doing this? What if you snored? 

But in saying that, I saw a youtube video of a woman who hid in a mans house for weeks without being discovered. She would just sneak out at night and eat his food and things while he was sleeping. The video was terrifying of this woman creeping around silently in the dark, it was very believable that she could go unnoticed for long periods of time. The video itself was probably a fake, but it was on Panti's blog and there was a link underneath it to a very real newspaper article about a Japanese woman who had lived in someones house (possibly in a cupboard) for years without them noticing.

It's believable that someone might go unnoticed because even if you know that someone is in the house they can he hard to find. I saw a podcast on 'Current Tv' that was just a guy walking towards a camera talking about a time when he was minding his parents house. He went out for a few hours and when he came back it had be ransacked and so he rang the police. The response was amazing, helicopters and squad cars and everything combing the immediate area for the burglers, but sadly they turned up with nothing and went off on their business. The guy was sitting in his parents house, suitably racked with guilt when he heard a noise upstairs. One of the friends he had been out with was still with him and they both heard it when it happened again. So they went to investigate and eventually decided that it had come from what had been his brothers room. He went in, didn't think he could see anything and was about to leave when he heard the noise again. Like someone bumping something or other. In the corner of the room was a bunk bed with a desk underneath, like you get at argos, and crammed behind that was the well hidden figure of one of the burglers. So he and his friend went back downstairs and rang the police again. As it happens if the criminal is at high risk of escaping, as much manpower is sent out to try to find them as is humanly possible. But, if the criminal is 'trapped' in the house then the occupant will have to wait until a squad car is free to go around and make an arrest. 

After about an hour the police came and went up to the room to investigate, but couldn't see anyone and actually tried to leave. The burgler had to be pointed out three times and they had to crawl behind the bunk bed a bit in order to actually find him. One of the police men got really excited when this happened because it was his first arrest on the job. 

And that was the 'conversation' that I had at Eavan. Not only did she have the patience of a saint to not hang up on me, she also encouraged me while I obliviously deemed the conversation to be 'genius' and made her recite all the different topics I had reeled through with the speed of a coked up maniac. 

It honestly amazes me that Eavan has never tried to physically beat me to death before, and even chooses to spend her free time in my company. The only logical explanation is either that my Mother is paying her (which is unlikely because Eavan is saintly and unmaterialistic) or that she feels a vast amount of pity for me and takes on humouring me as a social penance. Which is why I suppose people buy my zine at all. As a social penance. You feel obliged to buy a zine out of pity for the artificially 'Relentlessly' energized human waving a badly photocopied ball of pages in your face. 

And for that pity I thank you, because I have no shame and I'm 2 euro richer for it. It's now 9:45 and the guilt from using the time I have spent in an insomniac turmoil to rant about energy drinks instead of studying for my exam that's in 23 hous and 15 minutes is driving me to crawl back into bed. Because that is how my delicate little brain works. It's only a matter of hours before the stress at a standard exam makes me literally sick and I deem myself unfit for human consumption. Though at that point it could be argued that the diet of chilli nuts and 'Relentless' didn't help at all.

Returning to normal transmission in 3...2...1...

2010-12-31T00:46:00.001Z

Well, this is embarrassing. On occasion I get an e-mail and I just leave it. Until it becomes far too late. And it would almost be worse to respond... something similar happened here. I was in theory waiting for my new camera to arrive from Santa. And thank you Santa, the camera is truly glorious, I have taken around a million pictures since I got it. Mostly of me at a myspace angle looking smug in utter delight at my glorious camera.

It me around seven years to upload these photos. It means that every time I upload photos, everything I type afterwards is written in a frustrated daze. I think I'm typing, but when I look down I've created an origami swan out of the keyboard. Which is unfortunate really.

Anyway, some news to catch up on. All photos care of my gorgeous new camera...

Punt magazine number 4...

Their covers are just to die for.

look at that. It just makes me want to chop off my hands

for they are not worthy

And now just to open it on a random page...

Why what's this?? Could it be my little zine?

Why yes it is.

They did a gorgeous article about the independent publishing scene in Ireland, mainly zines and the 'Independents Day' zine fair. And they put my little rag in it! I couldn't have been more flattered. I keep carrying it around with me and sort of 'accidentally' taking it out in front of people I want to look impressive to. Or at.

Not really. It's on the coffee table for more or less the same reason.

And there you have it. Three paragraphs of utter famousness.

I am genuinely really pleased about this because at the zine fair I was sort of in awe of Punt. It was just so sleek and professional looking, and the editor works for the Irish Times and thus is a real normal person. A grown up even. And when they contacted me about Pepper Morrison, they said that it was their favourite zine from the fair and they just fell about laughing reading it I didn't know what to say. They even said I was a good writer. I was so pleased I weed a little bit.

In other 'news' (though it barely constitutes conversation at this point) I was snowed in for a week or two, so I did a new zine to keep me occupied. It was very intensive and I learnt a few things about myself that I am prepared to divulge only in the strictest confidence. And that is; if you have an obsessive personality and you take on a project that involves huddling over a desk for god's sake put on a bra. I would literally wake up and shuffle over to my desk in my knickers and t shirt and draw until I was called for dinner. My back gradually turned into a question mark. I can't explain how incredibly embarrassing it is to be so delicate that I could fuck up my back from fucking DRAWING.

But anyway. Some pictures of the new zine.

I did two covers and I hate both of them equally.

Though in saying that the two backs worked out alright.

That is Pepper Morrison in a gas mask. For those of you who keep thinking it's a duck.

One picture from inside that I'm actually pleased with.

Click on it for full glorious effect.

I quite like this one too.

Because even though I hate mushrooms I seem to be quite good at drawing them...

I'll try to update things slightly more often. I'm sure you were frantic at my absence. And now I shall post this scrawl, because like every other post with pictures I am too fucking fed up when I'm finished to bother reading the bloody thing again. So you will just have to take it, typos and rambling and warts and all.

I really love my new camera...

Exchange Market Review

2010-11-29T03:32:00.004Z

The first ever Exchange Market was on Saturday the 27th and was an amazing success (even if I do say so myself). I say amazing because everything was against us, the weather was vile, driving was treacherous and there was a gigantic anti-IMF protest on which I assumed would scare people away. It turned out to be the saving grace, because once the protest ended we have waves of people coming in and shuffling around looking at our crafty delights.

My Dad drove me in after going out in his car to scout around and see how bad the roads were, it had to be done, but it struck me as being quite a strange way to see if it was safe. Like jumping off a bridge to see if the bungee cord is working. As a result we were somewhat late for set up, but I am becoming something of an expert at doing these lovely fairs and can set up in roughly seven minutes (including smoke break because I'm so badass).

I had a primo spot right at the front,

My stall was the first one you saw as you walked in.

I decided to be adventurous and try to sell some 'arrrrt' as well

I'll give you two guesses as to whether I sold it or not...

My zines, laid out haphazardly next to Beata's Cookies

She had made a range of deliciousness and put them in lovely bags

To my right was the lovely Omar

Selling a range of delicious cakes

Which smelled delicious

But I am allergic to...

(they tasted delicious too. Allergies be DAMNED!)

And to my right there was a lovely couple

selling hand crafted wallets and and notebooks and things.

I actually didn't get either of their names much to my eternal embarrassment. The problem with these things is that you set up your stall in your own little world and exchange pleasantries with the nice people around you and before you know it you've been sitting next to someone for five hours and you have no idea what their name is even though you've been talking for ages...

This was their table anyway,

I think they do a stall every weekend at Sheeban Chic so if you like any of their stuff drop in and have a look.

They were also burning these lovely natural incense sticks.

Though admittedly I wasn't sure what they were up to
when they lit the first one.

I though they were doing some weird
ritual cleansing of the table or something

Between the incense to my right
and the lemon cake to my left
I was positively knocked out with delicious scent.

So to give my nostrils a break I went around the stalls and admired the other wares.

Lads selling some music.

I took about three pictures of these guys because the chap on the right kept accidentally making stupid faces

when I was taking the photo.

When I took the first one I looked at the result on the little screen, saw the bizarre expression he was making, looked up and without even having to say anything he just sheepishly said

'Sorry...'

So out of the three attempts, this one was the best!

Some lovely records!

Next to that...

EXPLOSION of Christmas cards!

The lady sitting at this stall was absolutely lovely,

knitting away and chatting.

ugh, I am such a shit photographer,

Which is a pity, because this chap
was the most fashionable person there.

I slunk off in my ill fitting black ensemble in shame...

Not before looking at what he was selling obviously,

a fan of drawing naked ladies,

much like myself in that respect.

In terms of liking DRAWING naked ladies,
not as in I am a naked lady...

I actually remembered to get the card of this stall
and now I can't find it.

Damn.

It was something to do with tiny pieces anyway, so if the tiny pieces lady happens to read this, leave a comment and I can put in actual details.

The tiny pieces thing is quite apt, considering that all her stuff is made from painstakingly glued down pieces of what I can only assume is shrapnel or something...

Vintage clothes and stuff at this one.

There were two girls manning this stall and the one who isn't pictured bought a few of my zines and chatted to me about Alan Moore when she spotty me nerdily reading 'Watchmen'.

Jewelry by a lovely lady.

I very nearly ended up at the table next to her

which she had lovingly coated in tea

But I decided to go with my primo door spot

This was possibly my favourite stall of the day...

And while the cards were gorgeous,

and the biscuits you can catch a glimpse of in the corner there were lovely it was not because of those...

It was because of these.

Home. Made. Truffles.

50c each or 5 for €2

The chocolate ones were literally glorious.

It was borderline comical when I tried one.

I was speechless.

I can't actually express how divine they were because the words to do so do not yet exist...

mmmm...

Actually I think it's a tie for

my favourite stall between the truffles and this one.

I mean just look at this stuff!

I think that I effectively scared the shit out of the lady sitting at this stall by shouting about trades and how nice her stuff was for just long enough for it to become palpably uncomfortable.

She still traded though!

I got one of the blue cards for two of my zines.

Happy out.

My pictures just seem to get progressively worse really...

I mean come on, this one is dark and ugh.

Just terrible photography,

I hope it doesn't diminish how nice the stuff on the table was

Lovely knitted pin cushiony things are what jumped out at me.

...Terrible terrible photographer.

Maybe I should take classes?

Though I would consider that almost too lame to handle.

The teacups were lovely, but wait for it...

Hand carved crochet needles.

My god. Just gorgeous.

I was holding them up, examining them, considering purchasing,

When I remembered that I don't know how to do anything other than basic crochet using my finger.

Very high tech me. But that's how nice they were.

I literally forgot I had no actual use for them...

Sorcha and Laura live across the road

and came over to help me out.

Or in Laura's case do some light shopping.

I should try to include at least one

picture of me in my blog posts.

To prove I was there.

So there I am, looking tired and somewhat cross eyed...

And people actually came!

Mainly protesters who felt strange

as they left the 150,000 strong mass

and wandered back towards reality.

I took some pictures when the place was a little quieter as well.

There was quite a lot of artwork and photography on the walls that were of a really high standard.

My pictures of them are humiliatingly terrible...

That one isn't actually that bad

Oh but wait. The Worst Picture ever.

Blurry, over exposed. Just kill me now.

Only I could ruin photo's of such gorgeous art.

Though on a much more cheerful note, I spotted one of our signs from the exhibition closing on the wall!

Which sort of defined my general feelings on this pineapple upside down cake.

Not only am I allergic to flour, I DON'T LIKE PINEAPPLE.

But for this beauty I would make an exception...

So, that's all the photo's there. I made fuck all money, ate so many truffles I nearly died, talked shite to anyone who came anywhere near me and got about 4 pages into my watchmen comic. And of course thoroughly, THOROUGHLY enjoyed myself.

The Exchange volunteers were amazingly helpful and there in force. I really like how adaptable the space is, and how they sort of understand that the DIY spirit can be maintained even with some mildly commercial enterprises (like markets).

I do have some mild criticism about how the tables were laid out, and the lack of chairs. I ended up perched on a stool next to my stall because there simply wasn't enough room behind my table for me to stand without being on top of my neighbours. Also they were using the stage pieces for tables which are quite low. It seemed to suit some people but since I had my boards propped up in front of the table some of my stuff was obscured unless you came right up and peered over them.

These are more observations than criticisms because really, there wasn't much alternative to how the tables were laid out and we were warned they would be low and to bring something to put on the table to raise our stuff. And they actually offered me some wall space to hang up my boards...

Hmm... Forget I said anything...

It was a really fun day, small markets are way more fun than big ones in my opinion. And now I get to say that I was involved in the very first Exchange market, because I'm big into being able to say I did stuff yo.

Exchange Market today

2010-11-27T09:42:00.002Z

Last night I woke up because I could hear thunder. Well I didn't wake up, I was still awake thinking about the various things I needed to get ready for the fair and the various things I should have done but didn't etc. Sleep is for people who don't have anxiety disorders.

I decided I was simply wasting my life in a futile attempt to sleep so I got up to watch the lightning that generally accompanies thunder. When I looked out it was snowing. Thunder and lightning and snow. It was amazing, my brother and I ran outside and started sheepishly throwing snowballs about and running around. We just got the genius idea of making a snowman when the asshole asbo children from down the street emerged from their fucking cave and we had to run back in and hide.

Now, it's slushy, manky, icy, scary, grey shite everywhere. Sadly this does not bode well for the Exchange Market... Basically if you feel like braving the sleet do drop by!

Exchange Market

Temple Bar

noon

Get a fucking move on...

2010-11-23T19:45:00.002Z

I have an essay to do, and so my life becomes an exercise in procrastination. I have changed my sheets, made the most elaborate bagel known to man and de-tangled every tangled wire within ten feet of me. I've been putting this essay off for the best part of two weeks at this stage, and I all I want to do is crawl into bed and read my New Irish Poets book because Eavan and I had a poetry rant last night. It was over the phone so she didn't get to actually witness the veins pop out of my neck at the very MENTION of Patrick Kavanagh. I just don't understand the appeal of a poet who has these insane delusions of grandeur. Eavan says that she doesn't want to read stuff by NICE people, she enjoys reading things by a bastard. I just have a very low tolerance for assholes. It seems that any writer or poet who didn't utterly reject Ireland doesn't appeal. Eavan guessed at this last night and snarled 'I bet you like... Beckett, don't you?'

'What's wrong with Beckett??!'

'Nothing', she said, 'to be honest, I really like Beckett, but I bet that you like him too, don't you?'

This is how our conversations go, if generally they are somewhat less intellectual. Though treating dead poets like they're featured in a gossip columns isn't really very intellectual.

Ok. Back to the essay.

(Update: Eavan said I misquoted her, she said she likes 'HONEST' poets, not bastards, but that she also enjoys the poetry of bastards.) 

Inklude Exhibition Closing Party yo...

2010-11-22T16:59:00.001Z

We cocked up the opening, but my god we weren't going to fucking let the closing go without a bang! And so I was up at an ungodly hour (lets say 11) to make fifty fairy cakes for the party at 6pm on Sunday. Five different colours and three different flavours. I would have had a better photo of them if they hadn't been savaged within twenty minutes...

I also brought plastic champagne flutes, chocolate stars, alphabet and little lemon jellies for toppings. Stephen and I made 'Eat Me', 'Drink Me' signs for the table and the old fashioned bottles of popper top lemonade. They were drawn on paper lovingly tea stained by myself the night before, along with fingers pointing at the food in case the NEON cupcakes weren't enough to draw people's attention.

When I arrived in exchange to start set up, there was a capoeira workshop going on. This involved deafening tribal music and chanting. Apparently the ritual also involved filling the gallery space with instruments that weren't currently in use and about forty rucksacks. This was not ideal, since I had buns to start icing which at the time were sad plain buns sitting separately to five bags of play dough coloured icing. I cleared a little space and starting drawing the hands for the tables. Then Stephen and Coffee arrived. Coffee had bought nasty styrofoam cups and I sent him off to get nice ones and set Stephen to drawing. Leigh arrived and in an effort to remove the condensation from the window, smeared the drawings that had been painstakingly drawn on. She then quietly sat blowing up balloons.

The window was more or less salvaged and it actually worked out better because a guy from the Guardian came and took loads of pictures from outside of us milling about inside looking arty... We are in The Guardian (bizzarely in the travel section) and even though we only got a small mention, it's still always appreciated that we get publicity without having to pimp out Leigh Arthur... 

She's so used to it at this stage she even did the voices for that clip. 

Anyway, we ran around getting ready, in the process smashing a teapot when one of the tables collapsed. It was generally hectic in a very old lady tea party sense. The place looked quite nice in the end. The floor was strewn with glitter and there were balloons everywhere. 

This made the event more exciting as they occasionally burst throughout  the night. Same with the popper top lemonade, it sounded like a fizzy  drive by.

Much to our surprise and delight, people actually came!

If I squinted, it almost looked like a proper grown up gallery opening. My Mum, Dad and little brother Sam even dropped in. Though I think this was mainly due to them knowing there would be fairy cakes...

Eavan and Gill came too! Which was lovely. They not only came and stayed for most of the night, they accompanied me when I went on a mission to retrieve chips from burdocks. I had spent the whole day making buns that I was actually allergic to, so I hadn't actually eaten anything. Water, water everywhere...

We all had some fun with the 'Eat Me' sign in the most truly juvenile sense...

Then I decided to attempt to be a good blogger I tried to get pictures of everyone in the collective who was there.

Leigh and her art... 

Niamh and Rachel and my stupid low shutter speed

Rachel MASHING a fairy cake into Niamhs face

Stephen, giving the cheesiest grin in town

and Lee, who is utterly terrified by it.

Claire, Roo and Stephen 

And me... 

And Stephen being haunted by the ghost of Rachel's past...

And again, to prove I'm a good blogger, some pictures of art.

And balloons

And bubbles...

The event went really well, and the clean up was relatively painless, other then the copious amounts of glitter which Claire kindly hoovered up. We can fuck up, but we fuck up better and classier then any other collective I know!

Also I learned of my natural talent for taking terrible pictures of people...

Inklude exhibition yo...

2010-11-18T15:21:00.002Z

Yesterday was, to say the least, a stressful day. I had been drawing away for 15 hours to get my stuff ready for the Inklude exhibition opening night, which was supposed to be Thursday. Drawing for 15 hours does weird stuff to your brain. Really weird stuff. I was literally having difficulty focusing on things that weren't my drawings. Such as people, and reality. I turned into a weird hunched gremlin, only scurrying away from my work area to smoke my stressed little brains out. I go into quite a strange mode when I have to prep for an exhibition. The last one was D'laf (Dublin Lesbian Arts Festival)  last year. I literally worked non stop for a week to get stuff ready for that. Towards the end of my work frenzy I woke up at 6am to a disgusting smell. It was me. I hadn't had time to shower for like four days, and was positively rancid. I got up right then and there and scrubbed the shame off myself. 

Anyway, this particular round of frenzied drawing happened on Tuesday. The plan was simple, draw until you die Tuesday, hang stuff on Wednesday, opening on Thursday. Simple as. But then as it so often does with me, disaster struck.

On Wednesday, I got a phone call, or a facebook message or a fucking smoke signal or something telling me that the space was already booked for a closed workshop on Thursday. It would seem that no one had told Exchange that we were having our opening night that night. Super etiquette fail. We had essentially organised an event in Exchange and not told anyone who actually runs exchange about it. To add to this, traffic was almost comically bad getting into Dublin, and my Dad who had kindly  offered to drive my giant bits of 'art' and myself into town was slowly starting to hate me. It took us two hours to get there, and as we inched along I got gradually more and more tense. By the time my Dad had to make an illegal left turn to get me to exchange I could have crumbled a concrete block with my bare hands.

I arrived in a terrible mood, but found that a closing party had been organised for Sunday and every ones stuff looked gorgeous. It was difficult to stay annoyed.

So now for some pictures, after we finished setting up. 

Mainly Rachel's stuff at the top there, 

The black and white one is Lee 

and the little one at the bottom is Stephen.

That's Coffee Black's stuff on the left (in MY spot!)

And that's my obnoxiously coloured stuff on the right.

 Get out of the way Stephen!

Ah, that's better. 

Kev, Ruaidhri, Niamh, Rachel, Stephen and Lee

Oh and Coffee standing on the right,

 I decided to torment him a bit with my epic camera skillz.

Torment continues....

Note: Coffee is blatantly looking at my tits.

But I suppose I am attempting to lick his face...

You win this round Coffee...

Some people weren't there to be tormented by me.

Niall was one of these lucky people.

Here's his gorgeous stuff.

And Ruaidhri.

Looks fucking deadly!

 But some people were there by the time we finished up. 

Kev with his freakishly nice drawings.

Claire, looking stunning as always.

And her art is just gorgeous!

I hate attractive talented people...

Stephen sitting next to his drawing.

Which is like, conceptual n'shit.

We went for Eddie Rockets after finishing up to celebrate.

He has coupons for free fries. YAY!

And me, sexily posed in front of my stuff. 

Leigh, haloed by her paintings.

 The flash made her look slightly less beautiful then usual.

So here she is in front of my stuff,

being all hip n'shit.

With her motherfucking cup of tea...

And sure why not.

One more for the road.

Come to our exhibition.

2010-11-16T03:27:00.000Z

Inklude exhibition

Exchange, temple bar

16.11.10

19:00

There will be cupcakes...

Just flicking through the paper...

2010-11-14T22:39:00.001Z

My Dad was reading the Irish Times in bed and found a little article on the Independents Day zine fair and spotted a name he recognised. There on Page 9 of the Weekend Review section he saw 'Pepper Morrison'. He was so excited he even got up and showed my Mum. I was out and it took her three phone calls to get through to me. They both think I'm famous.

This is good. People must share my delusions.

It reads: ...happy we went to- The Independents' Day fair for DIY zines' comics and records at Dublin Food Co-op on Sunday. We left with an armful of reading, including zines lovingly crafted by the young (Mission by the Shanganahg Youth Project, €1) and the young at heart (The Fossil, €2, or free to pensioners). This comic by the talented Patrick Lynch was a great find as was Pepper Morrison's delightful eighth zine, full of charming stories and illustrations dedicated to her mother and her grannies. And Tinderbox made our day with its limited-edition zine of illustrations inspired by songs tucked into a 45 vinyl of our choice (Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now - don't judge). See independentsdaydubln.blogspot.com.

CHARMING! They think I'm charming. Writing about people pissing and standing next to vomit at bus stops has earned me the title charming.

Well done to Patrick Lynch for getting his stuff actually pictured in the paper. I should contact him and we can commune and be smug together. He can be legitimately smug, I can be half a sentence smug.

Normal Programming to Resume Shortly...

2010-11-14T21:42:00.003Z

I haven't had a chance to put together a decent post in a few days. I have a disgusting essay that I've been avoiding and also the small matter of the first Inklude exhibition coming up which due to bronchitis I have yet to even begin prepping for. It's not for like, three days or something. LOADS of time!

So in a vain attempt to stop readers becoming bored and hating me (you fickle types you) I have some video's.

First, some music by Australian artist 'Pogo'. He makes music from old movies.

'Alice'

'Expialidocious'

'Wishery'

And now just some stop motion stuff I like.

Suggested by Brian:

Is this stop motion? It's fucking deadly either way...

No it's definitely not, it's just sped up and slowed down. But still. Its deadly.

As the title implies I will get back to normal posting soon. Just insanely busy... though in saying that, attempting to size the video's correctly has taken me more than an hour. I could have just done a proper post in that time. Feck sake...

2010-11-10T02:52:00.001Z

So this morning I crawled out of my room in search of sanctuary. I had begun one of those horrible cleaning spirals when you decide that in order to simplify cleaning you need to remove lots of things from your room. Then half an hour later you look around and the mess you started out to clean has developed into some horrendous monster that covers the entire floor (and partially the walls and ceiling). It is no longer your room. It is the messes room. You are merely visiting.

I woke up to this misguided attempt at cleanliness from the night before and recoiled in utter horror. I needed immediate escape and so stumbled downstairs in my underwear (Getting clothes impossible. Wardrobe obscured behind mountain of paper and plastic). It lit up my little face to see a letter addressed to ME! This never ever happens. Ever. Unless it's the library telling me I'm scum for not returning things.

Note: adorable illustration

It was from Phil of Black Shapes fame.

At the fair I'd asked him to hang onto a copy of his new zine for me and between my asking and taking my leisurely time to stroll over to him he sold out!

So he said he would post it to me the very next day.

Fucking sound out! Thanks a million...

Note: Matching peach coloured stationary and zine (gawgeous)

I was so excited about getting post, that I knew I'd have to put it on the blog under the guise of it being somewhat related to zines. So in order to make this post seem less creepy, here's the rest of my haul from the zine fair on Sunday.

Artfully laid out on my desk we have a veritable ORGY of diy wholesome goodness!

It was a remarkably good haul...

So to start we have the scarily professional looking Punt.

(It took me three goes to even SPELL professional. That is not good.)

Issue 1 Vol 1 €2

That's right. TWO EURO. How is this two euro?

I joked with the editor (Emma Somers) that to get such cheap printing she must be sleeping with the printer.

And now that I've had an oppertunity to examine it further at home, it is not longer a joke.

This is just too high quality to be sold at €2. I'm in complete awe.

Issue 2 Vol 1

I took pictures of some stuff I liked inside too.

"my friend & I are far too close,

& are wondering if you might consider

coming between us, & inciting a

sort of horrible, irrational jealousy..."

The inside is filled with gorgeous graphic design and layout.

I very nearly licked the page at one point. It's just delicious.

I mean it's full of interesting articles on the Irish health system and independent book sellers and things,

but I was too busy wanking over the design to appreciate such things.

It's not vulgar!It's a beautiful thing...

I mean COME ON!

Just look at it.

Issue 3 Vol 1

I'm almost licking the screen just looking at it...

Ok that's more than enough about licking. In all seriousness I really am impressed by this publication and it has definitely raised the bar in my mind. My black and white papery creations look positively pointless next to these glossy beacons. I'll have to make sure to store my zines away from the Punt magazines to avoid jealous rages and possible fires.

So onwards! Though from this point on, I have not read all the zines as I only got them two days ago and I'm trying to learn to have that self control thing. I tried to watch all 63 hours of 'The Wire' in 24 hours. Since then I have been trying to learn how to pace myself.

So here we have some zines by Patrick Lynch.

I've read the one on the left and a smidge of the middle one and I'm fucking loving it.

The drawing is deadly, but more than that the stories are fantastic.

So here we have Philip Barrett's zines which are easily my favourite.

I read the one on the right the second I got it, sitting in my kitchen still holding the envelope.

And I read the middle one about forty seconds after I got it at the fair.

I'll be sad when I've read them all so I'm stalling on the left one.

I haven't read this yet,

but it's apparently put together by something called 'Downright Bockedy'.

I have read 'the monkey-head complaint' (which you can have a sample read of here and here) by these guys and now have very high expectations for Inside Outsiders.

This is another one from Downright Bockedy.

Not only have I not read this one, I hadn't even OPENED it when I took this picture.

Which is why this is accidentally the back cover...

Yet another Downright Bockedy one.

All writing this time.

Another downr... no not really.

I bought this one expecting it to be some sort of manifesto for the Tinderbox Network.

Pleasantly surprised would be a massive understatement.

It's full of gorgeous drawings (this one by Claire Gallagher)

and writing all based around the theme

'In These Shoes'

I mean come on! Dawwww... (by Bianca Fons, entitled Toni)

Another Patrick Lynch one.

I must make sure that this blog doesn't become some sort of shrine to

Cardboard Press and Downright Bockedy...

Then on to the lovely 'Loserdom'...

I'll just open a page at random.

WHY, what's that in the bottom left corner there???

Could it be an absolutely lovely review of my very own little rag?

It reads: It's rare these days to get a zine from Kilcoole, a few years ago every second Irish zine was from there; but alas all those up-and-coming punks and zinesters have moved on or grown up from the simple pleasures of creating folded, photocopied treatises! Anyway seven issues in seven months of Pepper Morrison is pretty good going - they're all of a good consistent quality too! There's personal, anecdotal writing on various subjects from school, college, being sick with glandular fever, waiting out all night for the first bus, friends being bursting to piss on bus journeys and having to hold it in, haircuts and more. With some really cool simple black-white contrasty artwork and clean layouts - it's a nice package. I hope Pepper can keep making zines for the long haul and not burn out with the one a month buzz as I'd like to see how this progresses.

My face nearly fell off I was so happy when I read this. In fact this whole entry was just an excuse to say that I got some post and a good review. Sadly the very thing Anto was excited about in the review I haven't managed to keep up. Mother took me longer then a month to put together because I wanted it to be really nice for my Gran and Mum, so I'm WAY behind in terms of a zine a month. But in terms of blogging I'm miles ahead... So overall I'm almost 100% non constructive. That's quite impressive in my mind!

Independent's Day...

2010-11-07T19:57:00.054Z

The  zine fair  was today. I was really scared I wouldn't be able to go because I've been horribly ill all week. Bronchitis and I have a long history of fucking hating each other. My immune system and I are no longer speaking and I'm trying to organise a restraining order against my bronchus. This is mainly because I have what can only be described as a 'comedy bladder'. I have, to date, pissed myself three times since I got sick last Thursday. I am 20. I do not enjoy pissing myself. Though it is an event met with much hilarity by family members. It begins innocently enough with a laugh, which my bastard lungs turn into a vile coughing fit. And then the sudden warm gush of shame...

Incidentally I'm on a huge amount of codeine and am somewhat spaced. Forgive the meanderings of a drug addled incontinent moron.

But anyway I made it to the fair, and other than a seven minute long coughing/wheezing/heaving fit in the bathroom it went remarkably well. It was in the Dublin Food Co-op as I have alluded to in previous posts, the third annual 'Independence Day'. Aptly named for the almost religious DIY spirit. It was gorgeous. About forty stalls of fellow zine making eejits. People who like myself refuse to accept that zines are an obsolete format and still delight in staying up until 3am covered in pritt stick. Which is great, because it means that I'm not some xeroxed weirdo, standing alone waving my rantings in peoples faces. Nothing gives me more joy than getting big load of zines and knowing that I get to paw through them all when I get home, like some literary pervert.

I did some bad ass trades and even cracked and bought a thing or two. I try not to start spending money at these things because once I start I'm fucked. I just buy one and say, well sure since I'm here, I'll have five of each. I go temporarily insane for the zines. 

Anyway. Some pictures.

Some of the sexy organisers...

Jenny (after this Eavan pointed out that bribing people to buy stuff doesn't really make sense)

And the lovely Aoife.

So, here is my clearly beautiful table at the fair. Note lollipops in order to make people talk to me. It worked for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and it worked for me...

To my right:

Paddy. Who I proceeded to torment all day.

Some of his lovely stuff.

And to my left: MYLER! With her lovely cat pillows.

Not really.

Actual person to my left

And directly across from me. The ultimate distraction. CAKE! 

Gluten free brownies to the left there. GLUTEN FREE. CHOCOLATE. ETC.

And whatever that is. Bake oat bar. BAKE. OAT. BAR. ETC. 
My head was going to explode..

So I decided to go for a wander around and painstakingly photographed all the tables. Sadly most of the photographs turned out really badly so I only have about half of them up...

The lovely  'loserdom' table. I only noticed the morgenmuffel zine in the photo. Raging I didn't get a copy!

And the many many many gorgeous loserdom zines.

Punt magazine. Beautifully printed, ridiculously professional looking.

Gorgeous jewellery

REALLY gorgeous jewelry. That I very nearly bought. 
But it was €15 and I generally lose one in sets of earrings.

It's part of my mind's effort to drive me insane.

Some loveliness from the Tinderbox Network.

Adorable  Melodic Deathship duo. Really interesting idea, music distro at a zine fair.

Zines are sold at gigs loads, I've just never seen it done the other way around.

The Melodic Deathship youth team came over and took some lollies off my hands!

One of my favourite stalls, 'Baby Beef'. I look on the level of detail that goes into this stuff with a mixture of awe and envy.

Just look at it all! Gorgeous.

I'm not sure who these guys were, but their stuff was gorgeous.

I hate not having money...

(Update: Turns out this was the A4 Sounds table. Their website is so sexy I'm salivating...)

And gorgeous jewelry. I'd love the jigsaw earrings. 

In fact, consider the idea shamelessly stolen.

Lovely feminists. Really lovely in fact. 

Listened to my inane rantings and laughed politely. 

In fact could have ranted at them all day!

The guy who happened to be manning this table at the time was quite weird, but it wasn't his stuff, and even his strangeness didn't take away from how nice the stuff on the table was.

Another one that I have no idea about, but I just loved how the table looked. 

It's like my future mood board for my vintage gaff.

Absolutely lovely Leah on the right and... I actually don't know her name.
Which is odd because I spoke to her with alarming familiarity throughout the day.
I shall quite comfortably blame the codeine for that...

(Update: Myler just informed me that her name is in fact Ariel, so mystery solved!) 

No idea who this is either... (codeine)

...codeine...

And my very favourite stall, Black Shapes. 

I even spent money on some of this stuff. 

That is true dedication right there...

(Phil was a gem and cut me a deal, thanks Phil!)

I really enjoyed the day, even with my vile poppadom lungs. It was well organised, the people were lovely and friendly. Eavan was there helping me all day because I'm all weak and diseased. She didn't mind though, she practically creamed her pants when lynched came on. (oh yeah, fucking epic live music too, delicious!)

I had loads more photos but the flash on my camera seems to be all over the gaff at the moment so I took lots of pictures were just black blurry smudges (how can one see the blurs if the picture is black you may ask? Well my camera FOUND a way, just to annoy me). Anyway, I'm really sorry if your picture isn't up. Rest assured that if it's not here, it's in my personal wank pile.

And now, to finish up, some pictures of Michelle Doyle.

Michelle Doyle

Michelle Doyle.

Eating falafel.

Like a starved gremlin.

Thanks.

2010-11-04T23:17:00.003Z

Getting shit ready for the Independents Day zine fair dealy and threw on Belleville Rendezvous. I forgot how much I love that movie...

2010-11-03T19:31:00.005Z

The zine fair is this Sunday. I've been so busy having delicious friend dates with Eavan that I haven't gotten anything ready at all. Though frankly if the choice is sipping virgin cocktails and cackling away like loons or standing alone crying over a photocopier (as all technology constantly defies me), Eavan will always win.

So anyway, here is there sexy blurb that they sent me...

Independents' Day is an annual event, now in its third year, bringing together independent record labels, zines, comics, artists, writers and musicians to showcase Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture.
Along with stalls where producers will be selling their wares, there will be an exhibition of independently spirited artists and photographers; screenings and a presentation by Dublin Community Television (DCTV), a workshop in stop motion animation and screenings of short films.
During the day performances taking place include: trad-folk punkers Lynched, electro-acoustic songstress Niamh de Barra, hairy trad by Moses Moorhous and to close down proceedings grungy rock n'rollers Sea Dog!
Independents' Day is a non-profit event its' sole aim to showcase independent/ D.I.Y. culture in the current day. There is a modest entrance fee of €2 towards expenses.

And you can view their bloggo here.

Come the motherfuck down x

2010-10-26T02:59:00.007+01:00

It is time.

For fucking adorable baby photos.

Ready?

I get gradually more insane with each picture.

Note. Adorable dress.

Mildly insane.

I still make the face I have in the first picture whenever someone is taking my photo. It's a disease.

2010-10-22T23:00:00.002+01:00

Chromeo finally wrote a song about me.

So whenever you or anyone else tries to speak to me now, ALL I HEAR IS THIS.

Mrs. Sandman

2010-10-18T00:30:00.004+01:00

I have always known that Eavan has some form of undiagnosed sleeping disorder. It remains undiagnosed because she comes from a family that would refuse anti-biotics unless there was actually a woodland creature living within your wound. They would hardly consider vague weirdness to do with sleep a legitimate reason to bother a doctor. As well as that, her entire family have mild sleep disorders, when she lived at home she used to get me to ring her house phone as late as two in the morning, and was surprised that everyone in my house was long asleep.

Me- ‘It’s a Wednesday Eavan, they were in bed at like, half ten’

Eavan- ‘Pfft, whatever, your family are weird’.

Her sisters used to read loads of Sweet Valley High books to just keep themselves above the level of insanity. The exhaustion that goes with insomnia is a strange one, and shitty teen novels were the only thing that maintained focus without requiring any mental effort whatsoever.

Sleeping disorders are very difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat. Eavans one is particularly difficult to define, with her reeling wildly between not sleeping for days, to sleeping for 17 hours in a row. She also has a hilarious habit of falling asleep very suddenly. She fell asleep numerous times upright on her chair in school with her head flopped back and her mouth wide open. One night she fell asleep in a club about five feet away from a pounding dance floor four times in a row. I thoroughly enjoyed shaking her awake, even though every time she opened her eyes she thought she was in some sort of fight and lashed out at me. My personal favourite though, was at a party where she fell asleep standing up. Everyone assumes she’s joking until that glorious moment when she opens her eyes and looks around all sleepy and confused and the penny drops that she isn’t pretending, she is in fact insane.

I find it’s very important to wake her up quickly on these occasions for several reasons.

Firstly the longer she’s asleep the harder it is to wake her. She’s almost impossible to wake up in the mornings, I once threw my bag at her head in order to wake her and she simply threw me back a filthy look and immediately went asleep again.

Secondly, waking her up startles her, almost like waking someone who’s been sleepwalking. I’ve found that the longer she is asleep the more it startles her and the harder she finds it to reinsert herself into the situation she snoozed out of.

And thirdly, it’s hilarious.

I’ve gotten used to her weird sleep behaviour and can tell over the phone if she hasn’t slept because she sounds like she has the flu (and since she was never allowed anti-biotics as a child she has the immune system of an ox so her flu’s are rare and quick). She can power through like all insomniacs can, but she functions best when she’s slept, and sleeps best when sharing a bed or room with someone else.

This would be because of her 5 year relationship with long suffering sleep partner (and boyfriend) Ste. She is used to sleeping along side someone, usually crammed in Ste’s single bed she would just conk out. This makes for some interesting behaviour when she sleeps in a bed with anyone else. At a party once Eavan had a tipple too much to drink and after puking all over the lovely double bed she had been kindly left in she came down to the bed Finn and I had bagsed for the night. She said that she couldn’t sleep and then snuggled in between us leaving me with about 4 centimetres of bed to try to sleep on. Being so uncomfortable I couldn’t sleep and so I got to watch first hand as Eavan snuggled up to Finn. I remember actually thinking at the time ‘aww, she thinks it’s Ste’. Sadly, unlike Ste, Finn smells like a girl which must have freaked out the sleeping Eavan. She sniffed sharply, recoiled and then in one swift movement pushed Finn out of the bed onto the floor. The sound of a sleeping body hitting a wooden floor is one of the most profoundly hilarious things I had ever heard and I can still remember the sudden thud followed by Finn clamoring back up swearing and mumbling.

This is not the only occasion Eavan has done this. My parents were away one week and I had Eavan and a few other friends over for a drink. Wanting my room to myself I put Eavan and Gill in my brother’s bed and Mark and Simon on his bedroom floor. Eavan again cuddled up, sniffed and ejected Gill from the bed, which again I had the good fortune to hear from my room. Eavan informed me later that I had missed Gill falling on Mark, who then struck out in shock hitting Simon who instinctively punched him back. All the while Eavan slept like a baby.

I’ve shared a bed with Eavan many times and have been the subject of this habit she has of shoving people onto the floor but with slightly different results. She snuggles up to me, has a sniff and tries to push me away from her but because I outweigh her about 3 to 1 she simply pushes herself back across the bed giving me loads of room. It’s just further proof we’re the best duo ever. Even when she’s unconscious I balance her out perfectly so take that Batman and Robin. (They slept together too didn’t they?)

Heather

2010-10-17T23:30:00.002+01:00

Continuing in my theme of discussing bodily fluids and functions at length, Heather told me a story about her and her ex girlfriend going home from prodigy. She was going home to Wexford and had invited me down to the Harbour Bar in Bray. A pub that is neatly divided between the ‘Old Man Bar’ and the ‘Hip’ side we sit in. The old man bar has trad music on a lot, is the stereotype of the ‘Irish Pub’ and only has a men’s jacks in it. The section we skulk around in always makes me think of when your watching some awful teenage tripe, and they have this hip hang out spot that simply wouldn’t exist in the characters little disaffected small town. That’s what the harbour is. It’s filled with old couches and posters from old horror movies, weird lighting, and weirder artwork. It’s the (not as hip as it’d like to be) hang out spot that shouldn’t exist in bray. It was for some time, if not my local, then certainly my regularly attended pub. I attended so frequently with the same group of people that I associate the place with me being devoid of any charisma or personality. I seemed to just check in my ability to have an interesting conversation at the door, and would just sit staring at people worrying that I was being a pain in the hole.

But I don’t frequent the place anymore, and so can again enjoy it for catching up with people. Heather was heading home and so had invited out a small gathering on Wednesday. Eavan was out too, and the combined lure of the two of them was too much to pass up so I trundled out on the bus.

Heather was in full swing when I arrived, shouting and cursing in her insane Bray/Wexford accent that makes everything she says loud and hilarious. It was in this manner that she relayed the story of when she went to see the Prodigy.

She explained that she was very excited about seeing them perform and had been dancing around and jumping all over the place when they came on. She had run into Eavan at the gig and gotten her to get her a pint, as they were being ‘PRICKS!’ and wouldn’t serve Heather because she wasn’t over 21. Eavan interrupted at this part to point out that it wasn’t very relevant to the story. To which Heather responded by shouting ‘IT’S A VERY LONG WINDED STORY!’ which I found disproportionately funny and laughed hysterically for a few minutes about. When I’d calmed down she went on.

Heather stressed that while she had only had two pints ‘THEY WERE REALLY FIZZEEE’, and was very sure to stress the exact fizziness. So when she and Kate left, her ex Kate, because even though they had broken up they were still friends you know? (Eavan again pointed out that this wasn’t totally relevant, to again be shushed by Heather). So they were walking along the quays quite quickly and Heather suddenly felt sick. They were in a rush for the dart so without stopping she leaned over the railings and promptly threw up while still walking. Feeling better she picked up her stride again.

Sadly she felt another wave of nausea and leaned over again while marching on simultaneously retching. When she finished this round of puking she glanced down at the ground to see a thin river of liquid on the ground, and remembered a strong instinct to ‘NOT STEP IN IT!’ She followed the trail along the ground and looked up, to see that it was flowing from a man who was walking towards her, while simultaneously pissing.

Away with the...

2010-10-17T22:45:00.004+01:00

When I was young the fairies came. Or at least I believed they had.

I realize now the arrival of fairies in my house must have come after much concerned discussion between my Mum and Dad. They were concerned about my dependency on pacifiers, or ‘dowdies’ as they were referred to in my house. That little thing that parent’s give their children to sooth them to sleep and momentarily shut them up. I was essentially the dowdie equivalent of a crack addict. I have seen many pictures of me and my sister in our matching teddy bear P.J’s, hers blue, mine pink. There’s Aine with one dowdie. And there I am, with two in my mouth and one on each finger. Why did my parents keep buying them? Could they not understand that I clearly had a problem? I was the scarface of dowdies.

Luckily for parents, they have an amazing tool at their disposal, childlike wonder and belief in magical bullshit. There are general ones, like monsters of some sort or another. Something that only truly resonated with me when one of my cousins wouldn’t allow me to go upstairs in case ‘The Wolves’ got me. ‘Wolves’ for god’s sake. Just hanging around upstairs in my house, waiting to kill me.

Then there are more specific ones, like the Easter Bunny who until recently was an entirely American phenomenon. My Mum didn’t really get the Easter Bunny so much, so while other kids had their eggs hidden around the house, turning Easter morning into a Kodak moment of chocolate searching fun, our eggs were generally just sitting on the table. I said to my mom once that in a cartoon the Easter Bunny put an easter egg behind the curtain. And when Easter came around she did just that. With just my egg. My sister and brother’s eggs were side my side on the table, and mine was on the windowsill. But even with this amazing lack of imagination on my Mums part my tiny hopeful brain thought that the Easter Bunny must have heard my conversation with Mum and left it there because he knew I wanted to find it there. Because the Easter Bunny, like Jesus, is omnipotent.

And the tooth fairy. A pretty general one if not very clever one. I spent my childhood waiting for even the slightest wobble in any of my teeth and then I would swoop in and perform minute dental torture on myself for several days until the thing fell out and I could get my hard earned pound. At one point I was missing six teeth at the same time, and while that may sound distressing you really can’t argue with six pounds.

But my parents needed to utilize a vague magical creature, one that didn’t have as specific a job description as the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. So they chose fairies. They had never come up before with my parents really but no explanation was needed. The existence of fairies wasn’t something that needed to be debated or discussed. Of course there were fairies!

And not only were there fairies, they were coming to take away my dowdies. As fairies do. I didn’t question this either. This was amazing to me; real fairies had contacted MY Mum and were coming to MY house. My Mom smiled down at me and lied through her smiling teeth.

‘The fairies are coming to take away your dowdies. You’re a big girl now, and there are lots of babies who need dowdies who don’t have any. So the fairies come, take all the dowdies that you don’t need anymore and give them to little crying babies who need them very much’

She lifted me up and got me to put all my dowdies in a little bowl on the window ledge (window ledges seem to be a running theme in the supernatural element of my household). I was ecstatic with excitement. I would have to wait until the next day to see if they had come and taken them away. They would flutter into the house, possibly down the chimney. Or maybe they would just magically appear? No they would fly in a window that Mum had left open, and then they would go to the windowsill and see the insane amount of dowdies left out for them and think to themselves what a good girl I was helping all those little crying babies. And then they would pick one dowdie up, just one each because fairies are so small that they can barely even carry one. And away they would go struggling to carry their bounty off to all the needy babies.

In the morning though, I actually forgot about it until my Mum said it to me. I was just sitting down, listening to the snap crackle and pop of my cereal when my Mum reminded me. She lifted me up and showed me that the dowdies were all gone! The fairies must have come while I was asleep! I was unbelievably excited. Everyone had Santa and all those other guys but no one else had the fairies dropping in to get there old stuff and redistribute it. I was special, I was different to everyone else, I had a direct line of communication with the fairies. I walked around my kitchen beaming about this until it suddenly dawned on me. I was now entirely without dowdies.

I didn’t panic right away. I just felt a little bit puzzled. What had all that stuff about being too big for dowdies meant anyway? I decided to just act as though nothing had happened and casually tried to get a dowdie off my Mum. You know, just a little hit to make the come down easier. She had probably assumed that the fairies thing would distract from the lack of dowdies for slightly longer than thirty seconds. And she explained then there were no more dowdies, I couldn’t have them anymore, the crying babies needed them and there would never be dowdies again after the fairies taking them.

The reality of the situation gradually sank in. Those thieving bastard fairies had STOLEN my dowdies. And now I wasn’t allowed have ANY? How would I sleep? How would I go on! As my irrational hatred for fairies began to rise up in my throat my face crumpled and I wept. I curled up on my Mum’s lap and grieved and mourned for my dowdies. Which were now plugging the screaming hole in some undeserving brats face.

Pepper Morrison 8!

2010-10-17T14:51:00.010+01:00

I worked my little fingers to the bone on this yoke right here. And so far it's gotten rave reviews... From my sister and father, but still, they are hard to please. I took a few pictures...

Front Cover

Back cover

And together...

Here's a little sneak preview of what's inside.

Something my Grandmother taught me

And something my Mother taught me.

I'm off to photocopy the thing now.

2010-10-13T12:54:00.001+01:00

Being home with an earache (the least hip of all ailments, other than a toothache. Or possibly chlamydia...) isn't so bad with Oingo Boingo to keep me going...

WERK

2010-10-12T21:09:00.009+01:00

So, on Saturday I went to 'Werk' in the Abbey Theatre. Hosted by queer events and production company 'THISISPOPBABY' I knew nothing of what to expect. Something about a labyrinthine club with belly dancers and fire throwers tucked away in corners. I imagined stumbling around in a daze seeing strange erotic snake charmers and women with ambiguous sexual morals moving rhythmically in the shadows. I expected everyone to be dressed like some sort of savant with big glasses and lots of gesturing and drinking gin and tonics or gin and nothing.

I basically expected this:

Nothing could live up to these expectations. Nothing. I doubt if even the event that clip is depicting lived up to its depiction.

Before I went I did adjust my expectations when the lovely Rachel (who in a loving gesture had lovingly bought me the lovely ticket x) told me that there were going to be stand up comedians. Stand up comedians? The image of a pumping dance club had to be gradually wiped from my little brain. I replaced it with alcohol. We drank on the bus in and outside, being the classy youths we are and were well 'prepared' on arrival.

The theme was 'Fat of the Land'. I had no idea what this meant, and one of the girls said to dress for feast for famine though she may have made that up. The place was decorated sort of like a hight school prom, with shiny black fabric covering the walls and lots of sparkly shit about. There was this little room where people would usually get tickets for stuff with a performance thing going on inside. Two topless men were sitting facing one another, one was thin and was praying looking up at the ceiling. The other was fat, wearing a fake pope hate eating McDonald's chips after he blessed the praying guy. Sometimes he would throw the chips at the kid or at the glass you were watching through.

From left: Rachel, Alanna, Clara and Me

That was the only really weird part of the night. It was hosted by a Jesus in a snappy suit, with a nice crown of thorns. Brian Cowen stopped in to say Yeat's 1913. Two guys did a rap version of a sinead O'Connor song. It was all quite funny, nothing taking itself too seriously which is nice. Though it was funny during the 1913 thing as it dawned on the audience and they looked around in smarmy glee that they knew and recognised a poem.

Alanna in front of this projector thing called 'Secret History of Light' or something like that. That was quite nice, in a stoned lava lamp sort of way.

There was a cool interactive part of the night, with a weird game that you had to lie or something. You went into a little room and answered no to a load of questions and if you answered no to loads you got to go on stage and lie for booze.

I didn't win. Whatever. The rules weren't explained properly. And I was wearing the wrong shoes. And the sun was in my eyes.

Alanna and I looking sexy (drunk)

Sketches...

2010-10-12T02:50:00.004+01:00

2010-10-11T12:25:00.009+01:00

Another delicious zine fair of fun on the 7th of November. This time in the Dublin Food Co-op and since it's on the south side my direction giving skills end here .

It's called 'Independents Day' because of its D.I.Y or die die die buzz. It's been ages since I actually thought of my zines as anything other than a nuisance. It will be nice to chat to other annoying people about how no one wants zines anymore!

In any case I'm super excited about it because they contacted ME! I feel mildly successful... And by 'they' I mean Anto of Loserdom fame. Back in the good old days, there was a zine distro right in the heart of town. It was called 'Red Ink' and before I started wasting every penny I had on cigarettes I would waste every penny I had on zines and feminist t-shirts from there. Loserdom was one of the very first zines I ever bought, and I still have a few of them knocking about somewhere. At the zine fair during the Summer, I went for a wander while Coffee Black looked after my shit and upstairs found a Loserdom stall.

Now, I have a very annoying habit of hero worshipping strange people. One of these people is Panti Bliss, Dublin's most successful drag queen. I read her blog everyday and love her to bits. I finally had a chance to see her drag show and stood in awe of her amazingness. Afterwards she went outside for a cigarette and I got the courage to march up to her, and say HI PANTI- and then realized that I had literally nothing to say to her. What could I say?

HI PANTI I LOVE YOU AND WANT ONE OF YOUR WIGS TO CUDDLE IN BED.

I was also horribly drunk which wasn't helping matters at all. So I basically blathered about the show and her being 'mazeeen' (amazing in sobriety) while my friends stood around the corner literally breaking their shite laughing. They said they would have helped me, but by the time I'd said hello, it was already far too late. Thank you. You utter bastards.

Now, it wasn't as bad with the Loserdom situation. But I did make an arse of myself yet again. I got really excited when I saw 'Loserdom' written and then tried to communicate my waves of Ziney nostalgia to the stranger sitting at the table looking puzzled.

'OH MY GOD I LOVE YOUR ZINE I USED TO BUY THEM LOADS WHEN I WAS YOUNGER AND WOW I CANT BELIEVE YOU'RE ACTUALLY HERE AND A REAL PERSON AND CAN I TOUCH YOUR FACE...' and so on. In such mortifying fashion.

Why can't I just behave in a remotely normal fashion around people that I admire? Why can't I go,

'Well done on being deadly, isn't it a lovely day? Do you like sandwiches?'

Something normal like that.

Anyway, I expect to see you all at the zine fair creating a human barrier from any zines I recognize to stop me being a complete fucking idiot. Danke.