Panic

Start strong, keep the reader's interest and finish with a flourish.

Nah, you'll accept what I give you and you will like it. Dance, supposedly literate monkey, dance!

I'm going to offer up a stunning revelation, the likes of which could close out the week in any sensational soap opera (right up there on the dramatic spectrum of sensationalism alongside discovery of evil twin, marriage to said evil twin, committing murder of evil twin in complex self-defense plot twist and finally engaging in evil twin necrophilia....it's a dark vision of the televisual future when I rule all with an iron fist):

My mind panics and fucks up in curious ways under miniscule amounts of pressure. It's a finely tuned, fully functioning piece of meat-apparatus (giggle) under mild to extreme levels of duress, but as a general rule, its resting state is one of confused, hysterical terror (think puppy faced with a Hoover....of cats). As you will no doubt be aware by now though, this blog is no arena in which for me to provide specific examples of such duncery. Ha! Tuck yourself in and marvel once more at my continuing defiance of normalcy. My ongoing rebellion against sensibility. A dirty protest upon the walls of considered thought. The typed equivalent of stabbing oneself in the eyeball with a fork while trying to eat at a buffet (shout out to Mr Phil). Or inadvertently vomiting in one's own face after a night of excessive drinking (*citation needed*). Now, on with the show.

"I have an idea for Mother's Day...."

A simple request emerged from the ether of silence in Number 63.

"I want to get as many people as possible to ring my parents' place back in Ireland, and leave a voicemail wishing my mum a happy Mother's Day. You can say whatever you want in the message; tell a story about me, insult me....anything."

Straightforward. Problem being that I loathe talking over the phone. I lose all control over my ability to express even the simplest thoughts, stumble relentlessly over my words and trip hopelessly through whole conversations without making a midget's molehill of sense. The tension rose internally. Alfred Hitchcock was conducting the synapses while my heart beat to a John Williams score. I lifted the receiver.

"Hi, Mrs Kelly. This is Deebs, your son's flatmate. I'm just calling to say 'Happy Mother's Day' and thank you for giving us your son...."

So far so good. Turning a bit religious at the end there, as if I'm in the presence of The Chosen One, but it's salvageable.

"....with his lovely blue eyes and his....scraggly beard...."

Alright, probably shouldn't have turned to make eye contact with him there, examining his face as may a lovelorn cannibal. Still, nothing out of the ordinary said so it could have gone worse. Now just wrap it up and it's done.

"....so....er....happy....day....to you."

What in the ever-loving fuck? Was it too hard just to part without saying something unusual? Why "happy....day"? Fuck you, Alexander Graham Bell! Your invention renders me dickish and verbally uncoordinated.

That, though, is hardly going to have any long-lasting ramifactions on my psyche. No harm, no foul as they say. It's not as if I repeated my party trick of doing/saying outlandish things to let down a girl rather than just, you know, being up-front and clear about my intentions, or lack-there-of. Well, now that you mention it....

"I've hit women before."

I'm really not in the habit of abusing lady-folk. I cannot stress enough how much of a woman beater I am not. Equally, I cannot begin to place enough empasis on the lengths to which my mind will go to distance me from (nothing resembling so much as mildest) peril. There was a context to the remark within the conversation that led to my remark. There was not a justification for saying it. The horrified silence was reaching into a vast, timeless expanse of space beyond mortal comprehension. I knew I needed to say something to set the record straight. I am not the Tyler Durden of Female Fight Club. I had to retract that explosive soundbite.

"Yeah....it's been warranted. They had it coming...."

Another woman successfully spurned by the most abstract methods. If nothing else, my rejections offer with them a degree of finality that just saying "no" can never hope to match. There really is no coming back from those iterations. Far worse than simply Twirling about the place, poking girls in their ears and pretending it didn't happen. I was in receipt of significant flak for the cultivated mirage of my violent tendencies towards the supposedly fairer sex, from members of it.

"Would you rather hit a woman or a dog!?"

I don't hit women! We had established this. Nor would I hope to ever find myself in the, frankly ludicrous, hypothetical situation of having to decide between assaulting a girl or a canine. Honestly, I had to think about it.

"Dogs are only barely sentient!"

Neither are a lot of women I know! And it's not like I go around inflicting harm upon ficitonal dogs either. Well, now that you mention it....

"Never have I ever killed any animal bigger than a rodent."

Dateline- Edinburgh. January 2012. A cold and windswept winter's eve. The scene- a top floor flat, inhabited by students of a feminine origin and seemingly a conductor of all known weather ills. The gale was drawn to the place. And apparently we had exhausted all the sexy questions in the drinking game by this point.

I drank.

For those not schooled in the intricacies of this particular endeavour, this was a signal that I had, in my (remarkably) continuing life, on one or more occasions been responsible for the death of a creature larger than that of the rodent family. The murmurs rose in number and volume within the group.

"What did you kill?"

Not a woman. I haven't killed a woman.

A few years ago, when she was clearly very sick, and I was horrified at the merest hint that she would suffer in any way, I made the decision to put my dog down. I'm not meaning that I shotgunned her in her adorable, fluffy little face, oh no. I'm saying that I made the choice to carry her to the local vet and ask him to do the right thing. It was heartbreaking. Tears were shed. I loved that dog. That was my tale of animal woe. I'd had my dog put down. Did that count? No. No, that wasn't the same as killing her myself. My answer had been a sham. I was an accidental fraud. Set the circle straight, that's what I had to do. Either that, or communicate that, perhaps, in choosing to bring Mins (for t'was her name) to the vet, I still harboured residual guilt for my decison. I looked around the gathered assortment of characters (my two flatmates, six girls and I formed the nucleus), searching their faces for the correct route of clarification. Recant or tell the heartwrenching tale; there was no third option.

"I hit a dog with my car."

WHAT THE FUCK, BRAIN!?

"But....you don't drive."

Good point. I don't drive. Back down. Back away from the fiction, brain. Let sanity shine through, just this once.

"Yeah, it was while I was learning."

A collective gasp and groan of horror enveloped the room.

"What kind of dog?"

A reasonable question. What type of dog had I mown down on my imagined escapade? An invisible dog? A dog of the mind? Clarify for the nice people.

"A small one. A terrier."

Great. Yep. Why help yourself at all, mind? Pick a cute dog. Go on, make it the most adorable squished thing since someone stood on sliced bread. You fuckwit!

I've been reliably informed that backing out after drinking, and setting the record straight (pre-canine murder), would have been scarcely remarked upon. Revealing the true tale of pet loss would have been met with group-wide synpathy and an "aaaaaaaawwwwwwww" from the assembled lady (and even lad) folk. But no, I had to go and kill a false beast. Had the subject not been hastily changed by those wishing not to drown in their own tears at that point, I likely would have continued to speak of the adorably deceased creature that I had concocted for no logical reason.

"Yeah, there was a kid there too. Really cute kid. Holding a lead. No dog attached. Well, certainly nothing that could be classified as "dog" anymore. Yeah, poor kid, crying. Think he'd dropped his ice-cream in all the shock too...."

Fuck you, tangled, irrational thought processes!

****No women, children, animals or ice-cream were harmed in the composition of this post.****