Hell hath no fury...

Many of you have messaged me in recent months, telling me you have grown weary of the stale profile blurb at the side of my page. I hear a lack of curiosity in your voice when you ask me when my philosophical treatise on the Joker will be published. The simple answer is never. I recently burned bridges with the Irish Church of Satan, after a farcical preliminary meeting with the ICS high council. It was arrogance on my part, perhaps, that assumed we would merely discuss the colour of velvet the book’s cover would be. Instead, we bickered about the content, which was all-too-ambiguous for today’s Satanists. Bold statements, as candid as they were controversial (and witty), have made way for drab words of uncompromising pedantry. God be with the days when Anton LaVey peddled Satanism with a knowing wink of his malevolent eye and a subtle tongue-in-cheek that coloured his prose. His wicked genius enabled him to fleece those who wished to demarcate themselves as individuals, by having them subscribe to and promote a uniform organisation. A martyr for his cause, he risked the dreaded penile paresthesia by having lengthy, contemplative sessions on the toilet bowl. He chuckled, no doubt, when people asked him where he came up with ‘this shit’. 

Anton LaVey

I should have known what paucity of intellect captained the ICS when I discovered that they were based in Tullamore, rather than the obvious choice for wickedness and deviancy: Tubbercurry, County Sligo. After arriving at the station, I found my way to the Satanic ‘lair’ by a treasure trail of clues hidden about the town in red envelopes. I found the black, metallic entrance to the lair, down a secluded, dark alley behind Cosgraves [sic] pub. Despite the door appearing to open of its own volition, the interior was miserably disappointing. No excessive use of velvet was used in the decor; no floozy women lounged around to help cultivate misogyny; no chants set the atmosphere. Perhaps the greatest disappointment was the lack of intricately designed blow-up dolls, which allow forbidden fantasies to come into play. The ICS consisted of a small room where men in their early twenties played with their phones and laptops. Devoid of any Satanic pretence, they spoke in terse utterances of pedantry and dull sarcasm. I was informed on no less than six occasions that Satanists don’t actually worship Satan, a fact I had known for a long time. Mentions of God were met with troubled frowns, quickly met with crushing arguments about it all being a fairytale or Jesus being a zombie. Most of the time they played on Facebook, posting memes of pages such as Satanism Ireland, Shit Irish Satanists Say, Irish Satanist Memes, Humour Only Satanists Will Get, Overheard in a Satanist Meeting, I’m a Satanist from Ireland, more importantly, I’m a Satanist from Offaly, and Irish Satanists Against the Harm Caused by the Conformist Herd.  During a conversation that paddled in the shallow waters of one-liner philosophy, one of the members derided Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins (I wasn’t sure who was who, as they were all dressed the same - the Satanists, not the tiresome religious commentators).  Another cautiously admitted he had quiet respect for the former, hurriedly qualifying his comment with a baseless argument of how Harris departs from “the rest of the herd”.

When we finally begun discussing publication, I found that the printers wouldn’t be rolling just yet. While they had initially been dazzled by some ‘epic’ quotes from my manuscript, they had grown wary of it, unimpressed by its failure to simplify matters into dismissive polemic. I discovered, unfortunately, that these dullards come from a generation of men who subscribe only to the basic and foundational. The pornographic pictures they were looking at told me everything I needed to know. A picture of a vagina prized wide open is the greatest conquest to them, in their quest to disrobe everything, not realising that it is the play between concealment and revelation that so often stokes sexual fires. 

The picture looked something like this.

Instead of bearing witnessing some special sexual prowess, they settled for a picture that virtually every woman on the planet could take. Ambiguity, self-parody, playfulness, and irony are all lost on these minds. As I slowly explained this to them, Bane Smogan, the Church’s leader, lost his temper and began accusing me of every Satanic slight in The Devil’s Notebook. Reflexively, I told him he was so herd he smelled of cow shit, upon which utterance the argument descended into a provincial, Dublin-versus-Offaly slagging match, peppered by accusations of Nietzsche misappropriation and speculations about sexual prowess. The confused mess of an argument broke out into fisticuffs, which I started after Taigh (that’s his real name) showed contemptible ignorance of The Gay Science. I launched at him, shouting, “C’est des conneries!”, in the hope that such a cultured pronouncement would mitigate my act of savagery. We tussled around the room, and I finally got him a headlock, before throwing him at his goons. I then darted out of there, but they pursued me all the way to the train station, where they managed to get a few licks in. Despite the many witnesses and security cameras, neither the Gardaí nor the local people would help me press charges. The physical pain was nothing compared to the thought of these uninspired, predictable bores winning the day. With no other course left in my pursuit of justice, I summoned  a power greater than their organisation could ever hope to be. I called RTE’s Joe Duffy Show and told them that their members had accused the Iona Institute of homophobia, trying to impose Catholic beliefs on everyone, and using their influence to silence the media. It was the break Iona had been waiting for. According to a reliable source, the Irish Church of Satan have now been disappeared. Their lair entrance has been bricked up, and not a fearful soul in Tullamore will tell you anything about it. The town's inhabitants hide behind their curtains, and everyone looks over their shoulder. A dubious victory perhaps, but as the Joker says in the greatest Batman graphic novel ever written, ‘He who laughs last, laughs loudest.’

The Day God Rested

In my more thoughtful moments, I consider it wiser not to resent a curse that afflicts us all. In the final analysis, who can reasonably complain about something which could potentially make a victim of anybody? Some receive little pain from it, others overcome it quickly, and there are those who seem to have received nothing but a boon from it. I refer, of course, to our experiences in our childhood. I am not going to tell you of a childhood comparable to the horrors suffered by many people; on the contrary, my childhood was generally pleasant and largely free from incident. However, one Sunday many years ago, everything changed. On the day of the All-Ireland hurling final in September 1990, I experienced a dread that has followed me the rest of my life. I realised then, as my mother prepared everything for school the next day - and as Cork caused an upset against Galway -  life was taking my freedom away. I would not be returning to the safe bosom of the mixed school I had attended, with gentle teachers and lots of kinaesthetic learning. Instead, I was moving next door, to the more academic boys’ school, a place I knew little about except that it was attended by big lads and my day would be longer. Since then, by the power of association, one seventh of my life works against my ability to relax and enjoy myself. I know, and many of you also know, that any effort to make Sundays good is futile. If you try to enjoy yourself, you hear the ticking clock, knowing well that you are up early the next day. Have you ever gone drinking on a Sunday? Your sense of fun and obligation lose out equally. You could try to do nothing, but what a sinful waste of such precious free time. Sundays mean little more to me than early closing hours, fewer transport services, and the alienating feeling that accompanies trying to work on a rest day. Going to church makes so much sense to me in this context; the day is made for begging on your knees for protection from despair. “Go worship me on this day”, commanded God nonchalantly, when humanity asked what to do at the weekend. Even He didn’t wish to contend with the seventh day.

I have also come to see parallels between the working week and the myth of Sisyphus. Monday to Friday is the hard grind of pushing the boulder up the hill; Friday evening and Saturday are the perceived moment of glory, the self-deception that one has final finished with the grind; Sunday is watching the boulder roll back to the same position you have pushed it from all those times and the realisation that you have to do it again tomorrow. But it’s more than that. It’s the end, poisoned by the feeling of inevitable doom. The mind adopts the malign meaning from this day, and it spreads to other aspects of your life. By the time I was ten, I was dreading the unknown perpetuity of the afterworld that awaited me after this one. No human mind has the capacity to bear the weighty meaning of eternity; it overwhelms our finite minds. It kept me awake one night, twenty years ago, for reasons I didn’t then understand. Thankfully, this dread has long since passed, assuaged by the apocalyptic-like fear of a one-way ticket to infinite oblivion. If you ever find yourself awake at night, anxious about your future, or in a near- asthmatic state that nostalgia brings (or both, God help you!), check what day it is. I’ll bet it’s a Sunday.
 
Those of us from Ireland know the anthem of apocalyptic Sunday horror: the Glenroe theme music. When that tune played, we knew it was the last chance to get our homework done. Incomplete homework stained the soap opera with the association of impending doom. Memories of childhood Sundays have largely evaporated through the passing of time, yet the feelings of anxiety and the theme tune of a rural drama remain. They remind us of the reality of existence, and how we are faced by two- and only two - possibilities: a meaningless life eternal, which distorts everything in its limitlessness and seems torturous in length, or eternally not being anywhere, never returning. Technology won’t save you. Even if you imagine yourself outliving the sun, the expansion of the universe is bound to get you. In any case, if you lived to see your trillionth birthday, it’s virtually zero when it stands beside eternity. Elimination is certain. Dinny is dead. Teasey is dead. Even Miley is dead (four years already!). The game is over, virtually before it’s begun. And worst of all, my best tool for depicting the deep sorrow of our vulnerable, transient existence is a dated soap opera about rural Ireland.

And it gets worse...