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.’