The Blindboy Podcast - Ratworm Lung Disease

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

A phone call about what life was like before the internet, then I read a short story about a fella who eats slugs  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pinch of Vincent, you wrinkly Phillips. Welcome to the Blind By podcast. As I record this right now, it's Tuesday the 5th of November, which means I'm gonna go to bed tonight and then I get to wake up in the morning and find out who the new President of America is.

I'm not looking forward to that. I'm not looking forward to that. I'm not looking forward to waking up tomorrow morning and reaching for my phone to find out. It's an awful feeling. I remember it from 2016. I remember it from 2020. That used to not be a feature of my life. I used to not wake up in the morning, pick up a phone and then feel terrified to read the news. What first triggered that fear? January 2016,

woke up, picked up my phone, David Bowie's dead. Out of nowhere, David Bowie's dead. Big shock, wasn't expecting it. Massive Bowie fan. One of those artists where I could say that his music saved my life. And what I mean by that is, when I was a teenager and I'd be going through bouts of severe depression or severe anxiety, and I wouldn't have had the emotional maturity or tools to help myself. I also happened to be properly rediscovering the music of David Bowie. I knew Bowie's music from my childhood because my brothers were listening to it. But when I was like 17, once every two months I'd save up 25 euros and I'd buy a new David Bowie album and CD and only listen to that.

And that gave me a feeling of purpose, meaning, and allowed me to connect with my emotions when I was getting panic attacks for the first time and didn't know what they were or have any language for what they were and felt like I was dying frequently and listening to an album like Aladdin saying, having that to turn to and to absorb myself in, that literally saved my life. So when David Bowie suddenly died in 2016 I experienced a shock and a complicated grief because his death brought me to a place in myself where I was very very vulnerable and raw.

So seeing Bowie's death on my phone, just waking up and David Bowie's dead, that left a little fear response in me. And then six months later, fucking Brexit, Brexit, I remember going to bed, going to bed and going, oh god, I can't believe I'm going to wake up, I'm going to wake up and find out what the Brexit vote was. And then I fearfully, I woke up, fearfully reached for my phone and opened it and looked at Sky Nose.

It's David Cameron resigning and I'm like you did fucking what? You fucking mad English cunts you did fucking what? Fucking Brexit. Poor old Brits. I really feel sorry for for I feel sorry for the people of England, Scotland and Wales for that shit. Like when I'm doing gigs if I'm gigging anywhere over there, I'm just talking to the venue staff and they're like, yeah we used to get a lot of funding from the EU but now that money doesn't exist anymore and this venue is really struggling. Brexit was so silly. So we all have to go to bed tonight, to go to bed tonight.

And I'm going to wake up and find out who the new president of America is. And it's either gonna be... Kamala Harris, who's going to do evil things while pretending that she's not doing evil things. Or Donald Trump, who's going to do evil things while telling you that he's doing evil things. And let's be realistic, a third party candidate isn't going to get fucking nominated. The system of American imperialism will continue. What's being decided is the tone, the tone of how it will be continued. Like my American listeners keep asking me why I haven't done a gig. Like I haven't done a gig in America.

haven't done a gig like I haven't done a gig in America. I was my last gig in America, Los Angeles 2019. Five years ago. I gigged in Los Angeles in November. 2019 which is the exact date and place where the events of Blade Runner take place and I had a wonderful time. I loved being in Los Angeles, but I was supposed to do another American tour. Right now, this month, I was supposed to be doing an American tour.

A big one. It was offered to me. And I just said, no, no, I'm not gigging in America while you're in the middle of an election. Just not doing it. It's too tense. It'd be difficult to put on a good show. I'm gonna leave it

a while before I go to America to do gigs. I want to gig in, I want to gig in fucking. I want to see places. I want to see Cincinnati. I want to see Cleveland. I want to see Pittsburgh. I want to do gigs in all the places that once had thriving industrial centres in the middle of the 20th century and have since experienced a massive economic downturn. And I want to fetishise, I want to fetishise the America of my youth. Like I want to go to Pittsburgh because of Flashdance. I love Flashdance. It's a visually stunning film. It's a visually stunning film.

It is a visually stunning film. I'll put Flashdance on in the background. There's beautiful shots of the city of Pittsburgh, this industrial city, steam rising from the steel plant, and a loud color palette and grainy film. I fucking love Flashdance. When I was a child in the 80s and 90s, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, you couldn't escape these names they were all over television. These were important cities and films were made in them because they were full of people and prosperous. I want to go to Cincinnati and eat a Cincinnati chili. Looks like dog shit. It's shit chili on a lot of spaghetti. I don't care, I want to eat one.

I've spent a disgraceful amount of time walking the streets of Cincinnati on Google Maps. I fetishize Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and Milwaukee. I fetishize these places the way that Americans fetishize the west of Ireland. And what I'm fetishizing here, it's the America of my youth. You see, here's the thing. If you're my age, if you're an elder millennial,

I grew up with America being represented in films and television. It was like a vision of heaven. There was no internet. The only America we saw was what was curated to us through films and television. The only time I saw a skyscraper was on a film about America as a child.

I'd wait around for the bits in American films where they go to the supermarket just so I could see the big bags of crisps. Like fucking Home Alone. He was eating a giant tub of ice cream and a large packet of crisps. We didn't have that. We do now. Now I can go to the supermarket and there's an entire aisle of crisps that are larger

than my head. That didn't exist when I was a child. Ag and Dad's ice cream didn't exist. Ice cream in a That didn't exist when I was a child. Ag and Da's ice cream didn't exist. Ice cream in a tub didn't exist. When I was a child, ice cream came in a block and your ma had to cut it with a knife like it was an animal that she was killing. Ice cream came in in rectangles, in rectangles, and it was just vanilla. It was just vanilla. That was it. I'm talking late 80s, early 90s. It was just vanilla. Vianetta existed, but realistically, no one's eating fucking Vianetta.

That was too fancy. It was at least 1995 before Vianetta stopped being that fancy. And then you turn on Home Alone, and fucking Macaulay Culkin is sitting down with a bucket of Hagendash. There was no Google. There was nothing. You couldn't go to the library. American films when I was a child, it was a portal to heaven. Like, you have to ask your dad, dad, what's Macaulay Culkin eating? Looks like a big bucket of ice cream. What type of ice cream?

I don't know because it's TV. It's TV, we can't rewind television. And the ice cream's gone now. You've just seen it for one second. You saw a three second clip of Macaulay Culkin eating a giant ice cream and now you're never going to see it again. maybe next year, when they show the film on TV again at Christmas. And the giant tub of American ice cream has to live in your head as this wonderful possibility of a thing that you can get in this magical land called America. And when Americans would visit, if they came to Limerick, people would follow them around,

because the Americans had really clean white t-shirts and and their denim jeans were different and their shoes were different. I could think I told you this before but when I was a child when I was I was about six years of age my neighbors had American grandchildren that were my age and they would visit every summer so every summer I got to speak to American children and these American children who were my friends would visit every summer. So every summer I got to speak to American children and these American children who were my friends would come every summer.

They knew about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a year, a year before we knew about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Even though Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was actually being animated up in Dublin, but I've definitely covered that in a podcast before. But anyway, when I was a little child, these American children visited for the summer and they're talking to me about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and I'm like, what the fuck are they?

What the fuck are they? And then they took out, they had a little Donatello tie and a Michelangelo tie and I got to play with these turtles. But the turtles cartoon was an abstract concept. It was a cartoon that was only being shown back in America. So they had to describe to me. They had to say, well this one's Michelangelo and this one's Donatello. But there's other ones, but we don't have those ties of fucking Leonardo and Raphael. And there's a rat called Splinter. And they had to describe the turtles universe to me, and I'd no way of seeing it. And then when they left and went back to America, and the turtles didn't exist in Ireland yet, do you know what I did? I got snails. I got real snails from out my back garden,

and painted bandanas on their shells shells and named them Donatello and Michelangelo and whatever the fuck have you and I played turtles with real snails with painted shells and waited until turtles came out here in Ireland like a couple of months later. I'm not even sure what pint I'm trying to make lads. When I was growing up America was a very special place. Everything was bigger, everything was better, they had more money. The films came out first, fashion came out first, music came out there first. The internet didn't exist so America was a fantasy it was an advanced alien civilization and if you were lucky enough the aliens would come down and

visit and tell you about things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or tell you about giant ice creams and gigantic bags of crisps giant bags of crisps, giant bags of crisps, the ones that are bigger than your head. These used to only exist in American films. Doritos, Doritos, they only existed in American films. You had to imagine what they tasted like, or maybe you're a friend who went on holidays to America and they had to describe the taste of a Dorito to you. There was no online, you couldn't go and buy Doritos

and have them sent to Ireland. That was unthinkable. Our crisps came in tiny packets. I remember my first packet of relatively large crisps. And I don't mean the big giant packets, the big giant American packets that we have now as standard, but just slightly larger packet of crisps. They were crinkle cut, ready salted, and they cost 50p.

It was about 1992, and my older brother worked in done stores. And one night he was working in there late after it was closed, packing shelves. And they got in these new crinkle-cut crisps in a slightly larger packet, and he brought a packet home to me, and he woke me up in bed at like 12 o'clock at night to feed me ready salted crisps from a large packet, and I ate them feeling like an American. And the packet of these crisps, this is true, this is all 100% true, the packet of these crisps was so fancy that my ma wouldn't throw it away

and she put my sandwiches for school the next day into this fancy crisp packet. And I remember that because I remember being in the schoolyard taking out this packet of crisps and then like three or four people around me reaching their hand into the packet of crisps to get a crinkled cut fucking crisp. And it all they get is a shitty little ham sandwich. I've got listeners to this podcast who are 20. I'm just trying to explain what it used to be like. I need to, I feel like I'm at an age, I'm at an age where I'm young enough that I can do a podcast where I've got 20 year olds listening, but I'm old enough. I remember the world before the internet. And I need to tell you what it was like

Because it's getting to the point where people don't believe it and before the internet America was a magic. It was a fucking different planet full of aliens It was a genuinely magical place and you only experienced what was curated to you. That was it. And the great lie and illusion of America was curated through the propaganda of film and TV and we lapped it up. I remember being a child there was there was a TV show called Moesha and everyone in Ireland and probably England too. You just watched Moesha on the TV. It was a sitcom. It was a sitcom aimed at young teenagers or kids

and it was shown every day on TV and it was about a girl called Moesha who lives with her family in America. Moesha was huge, absolutely massive. Everybody looked at it. But we had no idea that the actress who played Moesha was a gigantic singer in America called Brandy. Absolutely huge. Number one albums in America. We didn't know. We had no way of knowing. Her music wasn't being played in Ireland or in England. How could we know?

How would we possibly know? I'd need to meet a human being who also knew that. I couldn't read about it online. There was no online. Like imagine watching a TV show and Ariana Grande is a character on the TV show and you have no idea whatsoever that she has a gigantic pop career in America.

Just no idea. She's just an actress on television. And if you're a music fan, I strongly recommend listening to Brandy's first album, self-titled album. It's from 1994. I think she was only 13 when she released it. It's one of the best R&B albums of all time. And you don't even have to like R&B, if you're a musician. It's one of the most beautifully produced and engineered R&B albums. Full fucking stop. Incredible album. But this was the world before the internet. This is the world before you could answer any question you wanted about anything. And I kind of miss it because

you had to use your imagination, you had to imagine. I remember again before the Internet, I remember seeing a Tupac CD, seeing a Tupac CD in the local music shop. It was behind glass and seeing this Tupac CD and thinking, wow he looks like a cool rapper, this Topec fella. It was a shop in Limerick called Empire Music on O'Connell Street. It was the only shop in Limerick where you could buy rap music. The rap music was kept behind glass and there was only ever about 50 CDs.

And at any one time you could only ever see the front cover of 10 of those CDs. And at any one time, you could only ever see the front cover of 10 of those CDs. And I'd go there every week and I'd stare at those CDs for maybe an hour. I'd stare at those CDs because there was no internet. And there was one Tupac CD called All Eyes on Me and a black background and Tupac is just there

sitting on a chair, looking like the coolest fucker in the whole world. But that CD is an American import. It's like £30. So I had to save up my money for months to get £30 and then buy the Tupac CD. But for months and months and months, I had to imagine what Tupac's music was like. Tupac wasn't played on the radio in Ireland. His music videos weren't played on TV. You had to exist in a world where Tupac didn't really exist. I'd never heard of Tupac. Here's all the rap CDs and that one there looks like the coolest one. And something I miss

about that is it made art almost religious. When it comes to film TV music, you can kind of consume whatever you want instantly now. And that does devalue art. But when all you've got is this CD behind glass with one photograph of a fella called Tupac, and you don't know what he sounds like but you know he looks cool and for four months all I'm thinking about is I wonder what he sounds like that elevates that that CD it becomes a fucking relic it becomes a religious item it becomes an object of obsession of imagination and every week I'm going back to the CD shop going I hope no one bought the two-pack CD I hope no one else wants it and then finally I buy it and it the 2-pack CD, I hope no one else wants it.

And then finally I buy it, and it's like a religious experience. And I know you might be thinking, ah come on, blind boy, surely you could have asked them to play you the 2-pack CD in the fucking record shop. No. So in the old days, the facility did exist to walk into a music shop and say, I'd like to buy this CD. Can I hear it first? Most places would do that for people. But not if you were a child. They wouldn't do it for a child. And... The rap CDs were US imports.

The record shop had to go out of their way, at greater expense, to bring these CDs in from America. So they were all wrapped in plastic and they were a lot more expensive than regular CDs. So if I said I want to hear that 2-pack CD, they're not gonna break the seal to play it for me. Come on, Blind White, they must have been playing 2-pack on the radio in 1996. No, no they were not. They were not playing Tupac on the radio in 1996. After Tupac died in 1998, then they played the song Changes on the radio a couple of times.

And rap music did not become mainstream in Ireland until the year 2000 after Eminem's song Stan. And I remember because I was there. And all the people in school who used to take the piss out of me for listening to rap Music all of a sudden wanted the lawn of my Snoop Dogg CDs. So look, this is why I fetishized Cincinnati This is why I fetishized Cincinnati in Milwaukee. I'm old enough to remember fetishizing America as an Alien advanced civilization that could never be touched. A perfect heaven.

Footer rap music and giant ice cream and giant crisps and skyscrapers. And new Nike Airs. And clean white t-shirts. And places called Pittsburgh. With steel factories and steam rising against a blood orange sunset. And I remember the moment when that all ended, when the veneer lifted. The moment when America became something you could touch.

And it was in 1995. The Simpsons episode, Who Shot Mr. Burns? The very, very famous Simpsons episode, where they ended a season on a cliffhanger, okay? Mr. Burns was shot at the end of season five. I don't know what the fuck. Season seven, Mr. Burns was shot

and they left us on a cliffhanger. And we had to guess, who shot Mr. Burns? And this was huge. And we waited an entire year. who shot Mr. Burns. And this was huge. And we waited an entire year. Who shot Mr. Burns? We waited a fucking year. And then the new season of The Simpsons came out on TV. And then it's revealed.

Maggie shot Mr. Burns. Could have never have guessed it. Maggie the baby shot Mr. Burns. My god. The next day on the radio, I vaguely remember this because I was a child. I remember my older brothers talking about it. The next day on the radio in Ireland,

after we found out that Maggie shot Mr. Burns, there was big arguments on the radio. I think it was the Joe Duffy show. There was big big arguments on talk radio in Ireland because what had happened was these two lads in Dublin I think had put a huge bet with Paddy Power that Maggie had shot Mr. Burns and they won a lot of money and Paddy Power had given them really good odds because the idea that Maggie was the one who shot Mr. Barnes that was nuts so Paddy Power

gave huge odds and the lads won a ball of cash but and this is the first time I ever heard the word the Internet so a few months previously Dublin had opened Ireland's first ever Internet Cafe. In those days, if you wanted the Internet... In those days, if you wanted the fucking Internet, you'd have to walk into a place called an Internet Cafe, where they would have a computer, and then you'd give the computer money, and you'd get to use the Internet for an hour. And nobody knew what the internet was. So anyway, these two fucking lads in Dublin,

they had used this new thing called the internet in an internet cafe to go onto the internet to find out that Maggie had shot Mr. Burns because the episode aired in America like a week beforehand and the Dublin lads went onto a Simpsons forum or they spoke to aired in America like a week beforehand and the Dublin lads went on to a Simpsons forum or they spoke to someone in America but then they went, oh okay, Maggie shot Mr. Burns let's go to Paddy Power and rip him off and it worked

and there was a huge big debate about this what do you mean you use the computer to look into the future? People couldn't understand it. People didn't. And that was the moment that this ended. That's when the era of cultural scarcity ended. Not ended but began. And as the internet started to creep and bleed into our lives, everything got a little bit closer and smaller. So from about 1998, by 1998 everyone knew what the internet was and some people even had it in their houses and their home computers. I didn't get a PC and the internet until 2001. But in the period that the internet started to expand,

what you also had was the rise of globalization. Globalization is a word you hear a lot. The latter half of the 20th century was about the Cold War. The two great superpowers. You had capitalism, which was led by America. Then you had communism, which was led by the Soviet Union and all the countries that it influenced.

That was the Cold War. In 1989, the Soviet Union fell. And capitalism won. America became the only global superpower. So leading up to the fall of the fucking Berlin Wall in 1989, so leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and afterwards, capitalism no longer had a competing ideology. So capitalism became unfettered.

So globalization is, from the 1990s onwards, advancements in, we'll say technology, transport, faster communication with the internet. This greatly increased the speed and volume of the trade of goods across borders across the world. And then with the fall of the Soviet Union, now you've got a big chunk of Eastern Europe and Asia now open to the free market, open to exploit their resources. You had organisations like

the World Trade Organisation or treaties like NAFTA liberalising the free movement of goods between countries. You've got the European Union liberalizing and making it real easy to move goods between countries nice and cheaply so that there is globalization right and to simplify it by 1999 I'm able to buy Doritos in Limerick. In Limerick I can go to the shop and buy a giant bag of Doritos like I live in America. Eight years previously, early 90s, I'm looking at Home Alone and giant bags of Doritos and big fucking tubs of Hagendaz, they may as well exist on Mars. Now they're in done stores in Limerick in 1999. So that there is that that's the process of globalization. But now I can't fetishize America anymore. Now America doesn't seem as magical anymore because

I've got Doritos in my local shop. And then after 9-11, after 9-11, everybody has the Internet. And now we can use the Internet like from 2002 onwards. We're seeing America. We're seeing videos of America, what America's actually like on the ground. Like I remember probably 2003, don't know what the website was, some, just some discussion board, like Reddit but not Reddit, just being able to watch real Americans talk or talk to Americans on the internet in the early 2000s and being like, oh my good god you're so racist. All you're doing is complaining about black people and using the n-word.

What the fuck is this? This wasn't in Home Alone, but for me personally and I'm guessing other people my age who grew up with the highly curated wonderful version of America that's only portrayed in film and television and then to also come of age and to see actual America and speak to real Americans and see images and videos of actual America and the internet in the early 2000s and and to be exposed to a grimy gritty the underbelly of poverty and inequality and and hearing stories about people who have to sell their cars because they got cancer.

I'm following a feeling this week. I'm not too sure why I'm speaking about this stuff, but I'm following a feeling, which is what I always do. And I think what the feeling is, it's hovering around the concept of make America great again. But because I grew up in Ireland, seeing the greatness of America portrayed to me in a hyper real fashion purely through films and television, it's easy for me to see that Make America Great Again is a fucking myth. And those cities that I keep mentioning there... Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh... I know the names of these cities because the TV and films that I was exposed to as a child in the 80s and 90s,

these cities were a big deal. I also know these cities because when I was a child, I fucking adored my world book Encyclopedias. I was so fortunate to grow up in a house where we had a full collection of encyclopedias, even though they were from 1976. But me, as a young autistic child, my fucking best friends, was a full alphabet of world book encyclopedias. Hours and hours as a child, just looking through these encyclopedias.

Let's open D today. Let's open E or F. But I remember, I remember like Detroit, fucking Cincinnati, Pittsburgh. They had the biggest articles in these encyclopedias. They had like 25 page long articles dedicated to these cities because they were so important and they were so prosperous and they were so wealthy because the fucking encyclopedia was printed in the mid 70s. These cities were the industrial heartland of America. They were around the Great Lakes area.

After World War II in America, these cities were where steel was being processed, there were cars were being made, massive, massive industry and huge employment for a massive working class in America where people had unions and job security and you had a wealthy working and middle class who had very good quality lives, millions of people, and Trump's Make America Great Again message. He harks back to that in a mythological way. He says to Americans, we're going to bring back American jobs.

He'll go to Cincinnati and say, we're going to bring the industry back. We're going to make cars here again. We're going to make soap here again. There's going gonna be jobs. And it's appealing to people who remember their working-class parents and grandparents having solid careers, health care, unions and being able to afford houses. But it's neoliberalism and globalization that killed all that. Those jobs went to emerging economies in the global south where people can be completely exploited due to a lack of labour regulations.

And now we have all the choice that you could want in a Home Alone movie but no jobs, no unions, no home ownership. The shit that used to be cheap is now expensive and the shit that used to be cheap is now expensive, and the shit that used to be expensive is now cheap. Housing, education, healthcare, in most capitalist economies in the global north, these things 50-60 years ago, those things used to be affordable. Housing, healthcare, education used to be affordable for working class and middle class people. What was really expensive were things like washing

machines, video recorders, televisions, appliances. These things used to be mad expensive. Like just look at any game show. Look at any game show in either America, Ireland, whatever, from like the 80s. Look at the prizes they're giving away on the game shows. Washing machines, VCRs, TVs, because those things were fucking mad expensive. When they broke you got them repaired. You kept them for years because they were being made by people who were being paid properly and had workers' rights.

Now appliances like washing machines or fucking TVs, they're so cheap that people will just buy a new one rather than get them fixed. Because they're being made in China or Pakistan, where workers are exploited and then those goods can travel freely through borders via globalization and we get them nice and cheap. But education, healthcare and housing, they're now all at the mercy of the speculative forces of the market. These are now, these are assets that investment funds invest in. So now these things are mad expensive.

Donald Trump's not gonna fix any of that. I don't think Kamala Harris is either. Because it's a global system now. It's a fucking global system. A system which is, It's rewarding billionaires. It's rewarding billionaires, and it's creating more billionaires. And Ireland isn't helping any of it because

this is where billionaires come to to wash their dirty money and not pay any tax. I think what I'm teasing at with that geriatric millennial rant, something about make America great again and my fetishization of like Cincinnati and Milwaukee, they're two sides of the same coin. I want to visit these cities so I can feel the fetishized America of my youth. The one that I saw in Flashdance, or the one that I saw in Home Alone, which is Chicago I think. I'm looking for a nostalgic comfort of fake

America that was sold to me through films. And I think that's what the people who, aside from being fucking giant racists, I don't want to leave that one out, make America great again people. They just want to be able, they want to say the n-word out loud They want their old neighborhoods that used to be full of white people to be white again aside from that hatred What they actually fucking want is a bit of socialism the great America they're thinking back to Of industrial cities where people had jobs, that environment is hostile to completely unfettered capitalism because their grandparents had workers' rights, unions, healthcare, collective bargaining, strikes, and an ethos that the collective

of the workers is powerful and that the capitalist factory owners should fear the workers. That's all socialism and Donald Trump isn't going to give you that. I saw a very sad story during the week about a racist Trump supporter. I don't know if you remember 2017, the Unite the Right rally. I believe a woman died at it after a right-wing protestor drove through a crowd with a car. But the unite the right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, it was a really depressing and frightening rally where a lot of fascists got together to unite and they all held tiki torches. They marched with torches and it was very disgusting

and frightening because it reminded everyone of Nazi rallies, fucking Ku Klux Klan rallies, it wasn't nice. And a lot of photographs of those racists. They went viral at the time holding their tiki torches. It was 2017 and one of these viral images of these white angry fascists with their tiki torches marching together. There was a fella in one of those images and just a few months ago I think he died by suicide. He had five children. Big racist Trump supporter, hated immigrants. He lived in Arizona near the border with Mexico. But he took his own life because he got caught smuggling fentanyl across the border from Mexico into the United States, using his whiteness and his citizenship and the privilege that goes with it

to zip back and forth, unfettered, over the Mexican and American border with fentanyl, knowing that it's highly unlikely he's ever gonna get caught because he's white and he's a US citizen. He was getting paid only 250 quid a trip from the Mexican mafia and then eventually he gets caught, he got caught doing it. He became everything that he was angry about, he became his fantasy of the criminal immigrants crossing the border, bringing their crime. He became the fantasy of what he hated and the shame of it was so great when he got caught and his name got out.

He took his own life. And also how desperate must he have been to have five kids and to be smuggling fentanyl across the border for 250 quid a pop. I haven't a clue who I'm gonna wake up to in the morning as fucking American president. I honestly cannot call it. I cannot call it at all. If I have any listeners in Cincinnati or Milwaukee, will you make yourself known to me please? Or Pittsburgh, because if I do do an American tour at some point those are the cities I want to visit so I can get a glimpse at the America that I remember from my youth on the television. Another thing with globalization is everything is looking the

exact same. I was in a shopping mall in Toronto last year when I was on tour. Might as well have been Limerick. Everyone wearing the exact same clothes, the exact same shops, the body shops, Starbucks, an Apple store that looks the exact same as an Apple store in Ireland. And now buildings look the exact same all over the world too. If you go to any place in America, Canada, Australia, where there's new builds, everything looks the exact same. Because of a thing called rain screen cladding. Look up rain screen cladding building.

All architecture is becoming homogenized. The materials are becoming homogenized. Rain screen cladding is, you'll know it when you see it, but it's like a modern building and it looks like it's made out of Lego. I walked around the city in Ohio on Google Maps. A city called Dublin. Dublin, Ohio. Because I was curious, I'm like, I want to see what this place called Dublin looks like in America. I walked around fucking Dublin, Ohio, which is a city that's only seen a population growth in the past 20 years. And it might as well have been any part of Dublin that's been Dublin, Ireland, that's

been built up since the Celtic Tiger. Or it could have been anywhere in London that's been built up in the past 20 years. Everything is homogenized. This is turning into a phone call podcast. I didn't intend this to be a phone call podcast at all. I wanted to read you a short story this week. That's why I didn't have a hot take prepared. I had no hot take prepared because I wanted to read you a short story. My book Topographia Hibernica came out this time last year, but the paperback, the paperback version

of Topographia Hibernica, It's out today in bookshops. It's my collection of short stories, which I poured my heart and soul into over two years of writing. And that was externally rewarded because it became a best seller and it got really, really good reviews. That's nice, it's nice, but it's not important.

What's important is I enjoyed writing the book and I can stand over the work. That's what's important. Whether critics like it or they don't, or whether it sells well or it doesn't, those things are just nice. Those are nice things and isn't that lovely, but they're not important.

After the ocarina pause I'm gonna read you a short story called Ratworm Lung. It's written in quite a detailed third person prose. It's a story about a man who eats slugs and it's quite surreal. But when I write surrealism I don't get magical. I try to keep everything within the rules of possibility. So even though the short story is quite surreal and fantastical at times, everything's grounded in reality. This could actually happen. But we'll do an ocarina pause first before I read this short story.

Here's some fuckin', some fuckin' adverts. This prick of an ocarina. It's my big fat ocarina. There you go. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What comes to mind when you hear the word gratitude? Maybe it's a daily practice, or maybe it feels hard to be grateful right now.

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The dog-friendly Bay Socarina. Doesn't have much range, but it's quite pleasurable, I enjoy it. Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the Blind Boy Podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, entertainment, whatever the fuck, please consider paying me for the work that I put into this podcast. Because this is my full-time job, it's how I earn a living, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I pay for all my equipment, it's how I my electricity bills, it's how I feed myself, this is my actual full-time job.

So if you enjoy the work that I'm doing, please consider paying me. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee, once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. Listen for free. Because the person who is paying, is paying for you to listen for free. Patreon.com forward slash the Blind by podcast. And I would like to remind you, if you're becoming

a new patron, please don't sign up on the Patreon app on your iPhone. Because Apple are dirty bastards. And starting this November, if you were to sign up to my Patreon and give me the price of a pint, using the Patreon app on your iPhone, Apple are gonna take 30% of that. They're gonna take 30%. And then Patreon take another 30% I think, leaving me with just a few sips of that coffee or pint. So if you'd like to subscribe to my Patreon, just go to patreon.com forward slash the Blind By podcast. Try and do it on a desktop if you can. And also become a paid subscriber please, because Patreon will give the option to be a free subscriber.

That only benefits Patreon, that gives you, gives them your data. But it doesn't give me any money. But by all means, still listen for free. There's just no incentive to subscribe to Patreon for free. That just benefits a company called Patreon. So gigs. My gigantic UK tour. June 25th. Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield Glasgow Edinburgh York London Norwich and

there's some other place I'm Bexhill Manchester I'm doing loads of gigs go to go to fain.co.uk forward slash blind boy for the full list of gigs in my UK tour come along to that, that's going to be tremendous fun. I can't wait for that. Vicar Street in a couple of weeks on the 19th of November. That now, I think that's sold out now. I think that's possibly sold out. Sometimes people give tickets back so you could still chance it. But I didn't anticipate that many people wanting tickets And I want to make sure people still get a gig so I'm gonna add a second Vicar Street show

On the 27th of January, so if you couldn't get tickets for that Dublin gig on the 19th of November I'll put a second show on the 27th of January 2025 and then look February 25th, Leisureland up in Galway, Crescent Hall in Drahada and the Waterfront Theatre in Belfast. So that's enough gig plugging. I'd like to read you this short story which is from my book Topography of Hibernica. Paperback is out today. You can get it if you like. I loved writing this story. I fucking adored writing this story. I think I spent

Geez nearly two months writing this story, which meant I spent two months Living living in this character's world. I'm gonna go saying there It doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter how the book was received. What matters to me is the process of writing. What makes me feel warm and fuzzy and gives me meaning is thinking about the time I spent writing this story, living in this world and having the story reveal itself to me through flow like a waking dream. I wrote this story in a very detailed third person prose. Writing this felt like painting a massive painting where every single brush stroke has purpose and intent. If I was

to see this story as a painting it would be a big, Hieronymus Bosch style triptych. I was reading a lot of James Joyce around the time that I was writing this, in particular James Joyce's short story, The Dead, which I did an entire podcast on about two years ago. So the prose of The Dead definitely guided me when I was writing this story and I don't want to spoil it for you. This is a fucking ten thousand word story about a man who eats slugs. A man called Joop Holahan who at one point in his life was admired by all the women in the town and now he eats

slugs and I loved living in this world for two months so here's a crack at it and you don't have to listen to it if you don't want to you just got 47 minutes of a phone call there so if listening to short stories isn't your thing you can just check out now that's no problem but for those who do want to hear a short story this one is called Rat Long Worm. Joop Holahan had been a fancy man to the women of Tarless in his time. They went arseways for his Greek squint and the streak of Kevin Costner's jaw under his teeth. He had a wardrobe pregnant with Ben

Sherman shirts that glistened like a pack of fruit pastilles. Every weekend he'd pick a new color and drape it over his shoulders, his television presenter shoulders. A hungry head of hair for eating tubes of bril cream, above and caucas' paradise, the local disco on a small stretch of floorboards atop a bar and grill. It's an Aldi now, but it was a Templess sound back then. It had a tropical theme in the time of line dancing. The fingers of Tarlys, reaching through the pink flashing cloud of a fog machine, to touch the tribal tattoo on Joop's tricep once the shirt came off. He was the child of Prague on a horn. Arms the guards wouldn't dig out of a shinner's back garden.

His arse too. None of this gym shit. Pumped up from when they used to pay a tenner a brick on the building sites. A Jack Russell's arse. Fighting to get out of the stonewashed 501s. The women of Thirless would rest their Bacardi breezers on it. And fuck me, could he line dance? Didn't matter what the DJ threw at him.

Could be Garth Brooks, could be Gigi D'Agostino. He had his own way of line dancing. A flamenco flare, a cowboy on a beach he was. Doing a sailor step shuffle on stabby patent shoes that could burst a balloon just by tipping off the gossamer of it. Short floor words and a Bruce Willis vest with crystals of odourless sweat giving him big red fireplace nipples. Effortless pull-ups on the fire exit so you'd see the fur of his

Europop oxters. Topless and shining. The din of links. Tobacco on the bollocks. No selfies. Your head was the camera back then. Famished gants dripping from here to Ben Bulbin and back in a devil's echo. Other men would hide behind the car-park bins, breastfeeding their pints just to watch him barnacle the women of Thirlis buckled on the bonnet of his Toyota Celica. And now look at him. Over in the cul-de-sec, a terror to the slugs with salt. Heineken and Kebab's hadn't been kind to Joep in the twenty-odd years that followed. He rode the back off the Celtic tiger, but the recession had the baiting of him. He glared into too many blue sparks from a welder's torch, and his eyesight wasn't

the best. His chubby heart would flutter at a flock of seagulls slicing through the moonlight that he must have stuck for a meteor shower, panging for a hot orange rock of luck. There'd been money in laying bricks and he even swung a jab at being a property developer, but lost it all to a timeshare in Belarus, scammed by a plastic-chinned economist from RTE. No family to speak of. Joop had never landed a solid woman, and he wasn't his foc looking for one now. Sure, why would anyone take him in this state? And wouldn't the rejection be a disrespect to his younger self? Wouldn't it be better to exist as a memory in their heads?

At least he held on to the Pebble Dash bungalow in the cul-de-sac. But it was forever condemned to be a bachelor's hall. You couldn't draw in a woman with an uninsulated crawlspace attic. The mania of a tall hedge, an ivy sucking all the light from the windows. A woman would walk across his cul-de-sac and never know it was there. Joop was tucked away under a brick in the dark, only crowding out for shopping and Tuesday's Dole. He stuck himself to the walls of the bungalow. They knew more about him than he knew about himself. He had become invisible.

The ivy brought wildlife after the rain, himself and the long olive slugs of the back porch, ozing up from the dirt in their hundreds and laying disco-like trails across the decking. On nights of Heineken, he was king of the slugs. Seldom and Gamarda, they were devoted to him. He can have the lag or he can have the salt, he'd splutter. And they'd fizzle our fatten depending on his mood. Big Hieronymus bashed head on him. They were fucked out of their way. In their hour of judgment, he'd wash the slithery cunts away with a roar of ochre piss from his manhood, chomping bites at the teal steam of his voice darting up in the dark, taking

gullible words back. And if the whiskey from Aldi was involved, well he might pick up a slug and slide it down his tongue. Then imagine himself as a future shorted property developer, perched over on the stool of an Ister bar in Heathrow Airport Lounge, laughing with the pebble-dash gable wall like it was an aisle chic on a flight to Riyadh. This life that had nearly been in his fists. Directing torrents of fizzy champagne piss up towards his lips. Splashing it on himself, despising himself, sure who be looking? Slugs are the oysters of the porch when your eyes are gammy,

with whiskey on board. And then would come the line dancing in the warmth of the bungalow. The fawn sat in a teacup, reverberating Garth Brooks through the kitchen, crooning over the gas hob, while Joop's withering kneecaps did their best through denim on the lino, and fifty minute flappy wanks to the Salika bonnet lickouts in the car park of Coco's Paradise before he lost himself to the inevitable suffering of existence. With a peperami of a langer and a manky snooze in the acrylic recliner, he laid bricks in his dreams and all the slugs were gone by dawn, back into the concrete like slimy fairies. The next morning he'd suck a silk cut and stare at their pearly

trails and his head would be transported back to the kebab boxes that littered car parks on the Sunday after a serious night on the dance floor. He'd take that over this in a pulse. The sun didn't spoof at this hour. It let him know that his tribal tattoo was melting green around a sprawl of lavender veins and they don't really sell Joop anymore and these no fucking aftershaves smell like a grapefruit's fanny. The music they have today is the aborted heartbeat of his unborn child. You couldn't line dance to it if you tried. According to Dr. Kiley with the bacon and cabbage face,

the slugs were how he contracted rat worm lung disease, angiostrongylus cantonensis, a desperately rare affliction. The doctor had to drag the information out of him, asking mad intrusive questions like, have you visited the tropics at any point? asking mad intrusive questions like, have you visited the tropics at any point? The Polynesian archipelagos or Hawaii at all? Have you had any reason to drink rain water, Mr. Holahan? Have you consumed unwashed lettuce maybe? This is very important for your prognosis, Mr. Holahan. I need to know if you have ever, intentionally or unintentionally, eaten a live slug." Jobe lied and said that he was forced to eat a slug by the continuity IRA who had hunted him down after he caught them raping a postman. The doctor made a face. Jobe was fond of a

good lie, like being best friends with Pat Kenny, or being born in Portugal, or finding a dog collar that can turn their barks into words. You'd take his stories with a lick of salt. But this story was different, this one was real. He practiced it to the gable wall, so that it wouldn't sound like one of his lies. There's a parasite. An exclusive tropical parasite, he'd say. A rat-long worm, they call it.

You get it from slugs. The rat gets the worm from eating a slug, and the infected rat passes the worm in his droppings, and a slug eats those droppings, so the parasite is in a new slug, which is eaten by another rat, and it goes on and on and on like that forever, until a human disturbs the cycle.

And I won't tell you how I disturbed that cycle, but now the rat lung worm is inside me and it's traveling up towards the lining of my brain. There's no cure for it. It's too rare, too special. He'd always thought it would be the whiskey and the recliner that would kill him in the end. But the truth of it was, he had a queer excitement about the rat lungworm. God was shining a torch into his shit eyes. It was the most interesting thing to happen to him since the 90s.

It was a movie star's melody. Type of disease Keanu Reeves would get. Jobe's favourite film was Speed. He'd watch it on tape, and feel the blood hot in his throat over the mad bus with a bomb that would blow up if the bus ever slowed down. And he worshipped the ankles of Sandra Bullock. He'd see himself in Sandra Bullock,

eating watery oysters in the departure lounge of Heathrow Airport. She'd run her fingernails through his full head of hair, and they'd laugh about getting Ister juice in his curls. Back in the porch, the Ister was a slug and Sandra Bullock was the moon. And now he felt like the boss in Speed. And the rat-long worm was the time bomb, ready to blow his head open if he ever slowed down. And sweet mother of fuck was he lonely in the cul-de-sac. But the rat-lung worm climbed into his heart for a while and made it beat faster.

He named the worm Vincent Melrose, which was what he'd want to be named if he hadn't been christened Seamus Hoolahan. Duke didn't stop eating the slugs either. He'd wither them with salt and let them sparkle to death in his jewels, and the glamour of the disease restored a strain of confidence that stretched above the back porch, over the bony alleys and ghost estates as far as the Byros and O mountains.

He began to venture beyond the bungalow and slither up into the bowels of Thurliss town. He'd developed a way of walking, which wasn't quite walking and wasn't quite line dancing, but an agreement between the two. The worm told him to put on his old Ben Sherman shirts, even with the belly roaring to get out from under the buttons. Stonewashed 501s having a nervous breakdown around his crotch. The muffin-top love handles blushing pink against the Tiferary wind, and brilcream sliding through his silver hairs. A man who knew what he wanted for breakfast. And after the car park of Aldi he'd go and say to anyone who'd listen, Did you know this place used to be Coco's Paradise?

I've a worm in my head that'll kill me. He expected surprise, to be treated as an exotic novelty, an expensive parrot, someone who'd inspired distant adoration, but instead, he got pity. Oh, you poor man, Jesus, Joop, if there's anything you need, let me know, they'd say. And Thirlis Town was humming with stories of poor Joop Hoolahan, above in the cul-de-sac with the parasite. An online donation page was launched on Joop's behalf by Dicky Harlehy, the Hyundai salesman on the Dublin Road.

A fiver here and fifty euro there. The memories of Joop commanding the dance floor in the days of Coco's Paradise was enough to stir a nostalgic generosity in the middle-aged hearts of Thirlis. The bones of 8,000 euro was raised, the cheque flew in the letterbox of the bungalow one morning. A warm bubble of gratitude fought to expand in his belly but then he felt embarrassed or belittled or ashamed and Dicky Harley was only a show-off with his Hyundai dealership. And Joop remembers, like it was yesterday, when Dicky would go red in the face talking to women and copying his dance moves with a tiny priest's arse under the Wranglers. And Joop hated every single person who donated that money, and he hated himself even more

for needing it. Madeira cakes were left at his door, mass cards dedicated to St Vitus. He hadn't seen this much attention since 1996. And the women of Thirlis were back at the porch like the slugs. Women with haircuts and slabs of husbands. Nessa, Noreen, Maude Cleary, Julia Feeney, Agnes Burke. Women who'd known the cherry-coloured bonnet of his Toyota Celica, who had shouted,

Come inside me, Joop, go harder, drive right into the back where the sticky buns are. In the time when condoms were for Protestants, long before husbands or haircuts. Sure he couldn't bring that up now. Even Mary Crawford visited his door. A regular fling from Cocos. A bit more than a fling, really. He'd have nearly called her a girlfriend. And she still had the delicate neck but the eyes that were once bowled like a cat's had a concern in them. She talked with her teeth and said, Is it growing inside you, Joop? Is it really in your brain? He evited the question and said,

I was cursed with the bland hair, Mary. It always thins on you. Half expecting a compliment. And Mary looked up at his sweating scalp on top of his squint and noticed the sour smell of yesterday's drink on his breath. Then changed the subject. You still at the line dancing, Seamus? Joe puffed back his shoulders,

sucked in the gut and gave her a wink. And oh Mary, you wouldn't have brought that up if you didn't remember. Line dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire. Come in past the hallway and we'll grapevine and pivot to a bit of Billy Ray Cyrus. Mary took a step back and her eyes scanned over the ivy that was eating the bungalow. I don't know why I'm here to be honest Seamus. I wouldn't say that I care about you. I wouldn't say that you even enter my head for that matter.

But I took that ferry to Liverpool and you're the only person who knows that. My husband doesn't know. And I think about that. I think about it every single day. And I suppose I'm never free of you because of it, and I felt some obligation to check in now that you're sick. This isn't about you, or even me.

I'm doing it for someone else." Duke made a face that let Mary know that he had forgotten about all that business because it wasn't very important to him. He closed the door on her and found himself in the hallway and said to nobody, three o'clock is hardly too early for a Heineken, is it? And soon he was planted on the back porch, langers with cotton-eyed Joe farting out of a tinny phone speaker at twice the BPM of a human heartbeat. The Ben Sherman button rung, duck arcing a silk-cut purple, pretending it wasn't Baltic with the east wind, pretending it wasn't too far gone. He shuffled and pivoted to the beat, thumb in the denim

pocket, spine erect, as good as he ever did it, and the Heineken splashed on the wooden decking like rain and woke up the slugs from the earth and the bricks, drooling towards the bosey smell of the hops and the yeast and the sugar for their supper, adoring him, needing him, wanting him. From above, their trails looked like the striations of an anus, and Joop was the whole, line-dancing and choking on fags. Where did you come from? Where did you go? Which one of ye gets the salt-dyed jaw? Joop sang to the poor old slugs. He was the centre of attention again, as he plucked one up and dazzled its neck with a shake of salt from the celery kept in the windowsill. The slug dissolved in his fingers and hissed innards from the leather of its khaki skin,

it slushed in his mouth all electric and viscous. The slug was an oyster now, and Juke's head was in Heathrow Airport Lounge with the Isle Sheik and Sandra Bullock. He'd just flogged a block of apartments to a gobshite in Tora Malinas and was negotiating his tongue around Sandra's mouth. There was talk of a quick fuck in the disabled toilet. There was the cheesy apple waft of an open bottle of mo'e on ice and howls of laughter. They were flying somewhere with a white beach that would take the eyes out of your head. He felt the piercing

yarn from motherly warmth wrapped in the curious expressions of the airport peasants, devouring this radiant and successful man. But now young Mary Crawford was there with red eyes and she didn't belong here, and her visible sadness was wrecking his buzz and it stopped being Heathrow Airport Lounge and became a concrete ferry terminal in Ross Laer full of vending machines and suddenly it wasn't an Ister it was just a fucking slug in his mouth and it was giving him the gawks and he said to himself Jesus Christ there's a parasite in my body and it's travelling up towards my brain and it will kill me. And he said to Vincent Melrose, the rat lung worm, I would have called the child Vincent, you know, regardless of gender.

Dupard Vincent Melrose say, man up you fucking arsewipe, that's my name now, shut up about it. And there was no appetite any more for Heineken's or silk cuts or oysters of the back porch. No amount of billy ray Cyrus could soothe him of the dread that was rising cold on his palms. He wobbled to the kitchen. The harsh fluorescent rod of a ceiling light was turned on. It woke a woodlouse trapped in the plastic of it and projected it on the walls the size of a German shepherd. Joop caught sight of his own reflection in the window, the ashen jawline and sinking eyes like the pockets of a pool table. He tore off the Ben Sherman shirt and let the kitchen see his skin. It was cold.

I'm a man drowning and waving his arms, he said to himself. He waved his arms above his head and took in the wind of his armpits. He splashed on a palm full of Jo by aftershave and rubbed it in. Magnolia sandaled wooden onions, wafted through the bungalow. He reached for the mobile to call the office of Dr. Kiley with the bacon and cabbage face. As the tone rang, he wished he'd have listened to the doctor's words, rather than trying to impress him with the lies he'd pulled out of his arse about the IRA. But it was late evening now and the doctor's clinic had no answer. His bowled tourniquet. So he took to Google, on the old beige monitor

in the parlor, to learn about the parasite that was growing inside him now. The grandmother carpet, bare chest in the chair, with a blue panic illuminating his flesh. He read about the illness that would take him. Severe headaches, neck stiffness and fatigue, vomiting, unusual sensations in the skin, such as tickling, tenderness, or burning, paralysis, coma, seizures. The list of symptoms swung into the front of his head like a soft pink hammer. The human is a dead end host for the rat-lung worm. It can't reproduce inside us. It has nowhere to go, and so it journeys to the meninges of the human brain to die.

Joop thought of his skull as a graveyard and felt the grope of an anxiety attack. He saw what was ahead of him. Waking up one freezing morning, paralyzed in the acrylic recliner, no movement or ability to scream for help. A fixed stare at a greasy gas range, waiting for death by dehydration. Jupe knew for certain that he would die alone in the bungalow sometime over the next few months.

And he cursed the slugs of the back porch. And he cursed Mary Crawford for bringing all of that back at this hour of his life. What good was there in reminding him of that? Fairies and tears and tough decisions. What was the point of that type of thing? Winter slined into spring. The worm crept up his spine. Sandra Bullock went to heaven.

A slug hadn't been entertained in the bungalow on the porch since the day Mary Crawford called. And there were sudden jumps of the heart in the silence of night-time. A fright that might be a cousin of guilt. Notions of contacting her. To finish the conversation, she tried to start on the front porch. The whole procedure must have meant an awful lot more to her than it did to him if she needed to speak about it at this stage. It happened so long ago. Maybe he should listen to her experience of it all.

But when Dupe travelled inside himself with questions like that and had to root around the shamus of him. He'd feel a ferocious repulsion He'd find a person very deserving of rejection and punishment and disgusting things He had separated from himself at some point in his childhood He sensed that he was born with a feeling of love But it had dried up or shut off, he couldn't remember. It was as if the very essence of his shamelessness needed to be concealed with a sweeter smell, and he was in no way comfortable in this interior world. The sheets of his bed knew him better

than he knew himself. And before anything resembling a feeling of sadness or self-compassion could arise, he'd become angry with the person who had caused this journey of introspection and so he'd lie awake until the room was glowing and Mary Crawford was only a little slut who shouldn't have let him ride her without a condom in the first place. And didn't he give her the money at the time to go to Liverpool to get it done and hasn't it been made legal since and isn't she doing grand for herself now with a husband and children of her own while poor Joop has nobody, only a parasite climbing up into his brain so fuck Mary Crawford and her memories. On those mornings he'd hunch at the beige Dell monitor in the parlour like a bird dipping his beak in the fifth mug of Nescafe, with two eyes hanging out

of his sockets from tiredness. He'd read the comments in a rat-long warm support group on Facebook and experience a sense of belonging to someone or something. The rarity of the disease meant that the Facebook group was small, just a few hundred accounts. It was a haven for the afflicted and bewildered. Due to the humidity, Hawaii was ideal for the growth and reproduction of the slugs and rats that serve as hosts for the rat-long worm parasite. The majority of the group members resided in the Hawaiian islands. The page was a place for outpourings of support, camaraderie, links to updates on treatment and pleas for a wider understanding of the disease.

This was a community who didn't feel heard or noticed. Duke could never tell if he was experiencing the symptoms or if he was only imagining them. The years of drink had his bones sore and his skin prickling. He would post in the mornings under the name Vinnie Melrose and soon grew popular in the group because he was from Ireland. Ratlong warm was rare in Europe but not unthinkable due to the warming climate. He enjoyed being Vinnie Melrose on the Facebook group. Vinnie Melrose had no reason to think about Mary Crawford and her abortion. With regular posts, he attained a familiarity

with some of the group members, in particular, Skye Riley from Oahu, a divorced woman of 42, whose 10-year-old son, Aaron, was infected with the parasite. Skye began to message Joop. She was a believer in alternative therapies. She had always yearned to visit Ireland, as her grandfather had come from Kerry. She found herself drawn to this Vinnie Melrose character.

Skye told him of the great expenses she endured with no insurance onto the American health system. Her little son Aaron required regular pain medication and steroid injections for the inflammation since the parasite had entered his nervous system. Joop felt a tenderness towards Skye, a sudden and over-familiar affection, a fantastic obsession that he understood to be love, but it was more of a deep need for a connection with himself that he would shine on a person like a torch and call it love. He began to click on her profile several times a day and pore over the little details of

her life. He would like all of her comments. He followed the page of the Hibachi restaurant where she worked in Pearl City, Oahu. Left an anonymous review praising her table service and friendly manner, he ranked her male friends and arranged them into threat levels in his mind. Sky's ex-husband was a biker, and Joop imagined sending the continuity IRA to stab him. He wept over the photos of Aaron before the rat-lung worm destroyed his young life. He wept over the newer ones, where Aaron had a translucent head like a gasping goldfish with rings under his eyes that carried an adult

sadness. There was one photograph of Skye and Aaron in their small apartment, with a white tropical beach visible in the distant background. Skye had strawberry blonde hair and one of those faces that looked like she'd been told two conflicting pieces of information, but Joop's eyes could make her look like Sandra Bullock with the right squint. She wore wooden beads as jewelry, and in another photo he saw a feathered dream catcher hanging in her kitchen. Sometimes she posted about an amethyst crystal that she needed to keep inside a lead jewelry box because of its power to influence events in

her life. Joop would fantasize about solving all of her problems. He would imagine providing for her and saving her son's life. Marrying her on an ivory beach under a pink sunset in matching linen with those Hawaiian garlands that they have. Eyesters on ice went my way, line dancing on the sand, while her friends and family envied her and fixated on him, the waves curdling and clacking the round pebbles of the shore, like something out of an advert for life insurance. Joop and Skye would message every day now, not just to talk about rat-long

worm disease. Conversation turned to more delicate things. Favorite foods, travel, interests. He would ask her if she remembered line dancing, and she said that she would have been about 12 when it was popular, and that it really wasn't that big of a thing in Hawaii, but she used to love the backstreet boys. Emojis emerged. She'd ask, Isn't it 5am in Ireland now, lol? How do you stay up so late?

She asked him why she was his only Facebook friend, and why his profile photo was Gart Brooks and why he didn't post any photos at all. And he said it was because he kept his disease a secret, that he was a property developer, and he was terrified that his investors would get cold feet if they knew he was sick with a parasite. His property portfolio was situated in different time zones, so he did business at night. Joop stole photos from the Facebook page of Dickie Hurley, the Hyundai salesman, and messaged them to Sky, Dickie's six-bedroom house, with the chandelier in the hallway, his ten acres of land, his pony, his speed butt, his face, his new teeth, his full head of hair. That's me," he said, getting on in year's mind.

Wow, you sound too good to be true, she said, with a winking emoji. Surely you have a wife. Kids, what are you not telling me, Vinnie? Winking emoji. And Joop said, Oh, Skye, I had a wife, Mary, but she died a few years back. We have a son in his twenties, also called Vincent, but he's in university now studying to be a bomb disposal expert. Wow, she said. I bet he's as handsome as his dad, lol. And Joop said, lol, back. Do you miss Mary? How did you guys meet?

Skye asked. We got pregnant out of wedlock and just got married, that's how things were back then. I do miss her. But you must move on from these painful memories or they will take over your life. I'm so sorry about this Vinnie. If it's not too painful to answer, how did she die? Juke took a few minutes to respond and said, "'It's okay, Skye. She was a victim of a terror attack. A bus she was on exploded. I don't like

to go over the details.' "'That is heartbreaking, Vinnie. You should be so proud of your son for growing up and becoming a bomb disposal expert. His mama is looking down on him with a big smile," said Skye. Joop then offered her money. He proposed to wire her 1,000 euros to help with Aaron's next round of steroid injections. Skye took some time to respond. Joop felt the terror of abandonment and thought about killing himself. The next day, Skye declined his offer. She explained that she didn't feel comfortable accepting the money, but Dupe insisted. He had just closed a huge deal and Mike and us sold a condominium he'd developed. He was feeling very generous and wanted to help her because he could.

It would mean a lot to him if she would allow it. Skye graciously accepted. Dupe took one thousand euros from the fund that was raised for him by Dickie Harlehy. It was wired via Western Union under the name Vincent Melrose. Three days later, Sky messaged Joop a photograph of her and Aaron sharing ice cream in a booth of the restaurant she worked in. Big guy is killing this Sunday. Thanks again Vinnie. You really brought a smile back to his face. Aaron looked stronger.

He looked like a normal boy of his age, enjoying normal things that boys his age enjoy. A wave of pleasure and excitement jolted through Joop. He felt like a decent and worthy person. He felt like all the change and possibility in the world. He felt like Bob Geldof. He did a little barefoot line dance on the granny carpet in front of his computer monitor. He noticed the static electricity in his soles. The fizzy violence of Heineken hitting the back of the throat floated into his mind. He got an ocean to buy a crate of it in Aldi,

floated into his mind. He got an ocean to buy a crate of it in Aldi, but now that he'd found love, he wasn't gonna fuck it all away and drink. He couldn't stop now. If he slowed down the worm would make his head explode. He felt his hands burning as if they were fondling a small fire and experienced his first seizure. The worm was in his brain. Skye said that Big Pharma had a cure for rat lung worm disease, but they were holding it back so that they could push steroid injections. Vaccines are actually biological tracking devices created by you-know-who. Joop agreed. She asked him if he thought about love, if he thought about a future,

and if there was another person in that future. She asked him how he could be so driven and successful in the property business despite the rat long worm growing inside of him. Jupe told Skye that he lived without any symptoms because he bathed in a holy well at the foot of a mountain near Thirlis. A natural spring, where slugs clung to the rocks. The slugs were said to worship at the feet of the hero Cú Cholainn, who ate them before battle. They were blessed by the goddess Bridget, and their trails sparkled with stardust from the other world. For thousands of years, people have travelled from all over Ireland to experience the healing

power of the slugs and the water in this holy well. Of course the doctors don't want to admit any of this he'd say and you won't read about the well online because this is all local indigenous knowledge that was passed down orally. He informed Skye that he had no symptoms, no fear, no pain, no headaches, no burning of the skin, no seizures. The rat-lung worm was still in him, but it was made inert by the satiating water of the holy well. The worm told him this in a dream. He had found the cure. I am living proof of the healing power of the water in the well. I am living proof of the healing power of the water in the well." And these words that he pulled out of his hole unfolded before Skye like a soothing

blanket. She messaged him about the photographs on Google of Thirlis and the Tipperary Mountains, how it was like a fairy-tale land of grassy glens and dells and hills. She could imagine the puka and fairies emerging in the morning mist over the magical landscape, long-haired goblins bathing under waterfalls, and white horses galloping into the sea foam and turning into diamonds. How the ancient Irish were actually aliens who came from a star system called Zeta Reticuli. How it reminded her of the way her grandfather had described Kerry when she was a child, and Joop said it was exactly like that.

Maybe you and Aaron should come here and live with me. I have all this space and no one to fill it. The long hallways of my house are empty except for the sound of my own footsteps. Come here to me, Skye. Little Aaron can bathe and drink in the waters of the own footsteps. Come here to me, Sky. Little Aaron can bathe and drink in the waters of the Holy Well. Kukul and slugs can crawl all over him. He won't need any more steroid injections. He'll be free from the pain and torment like I am. You and I will get married.

And what about my job, my life, my family?" asked Skye. And Joop responded that it was fate that brought them together, and how foolish it would be to ignore the universe when it creates two souls that vibrate at the same frequency, live fully, laugh often, love deeply. And the vice inside of Skye, which had been sensible at one point in her life, had long been silenced by the terrible pressure and sadness and hardship of it all. She'd rather listen to hope, no matter what shape it took. Before long, the two of them were talking about flights to Ireland.

Skye still had some apprehensions. She trusted this lovely Irish man named Vinnie Melrose. He had sent her money, after all. A faker wouldn't send money like that. But still, a niggling caution in her needed more proof. She suggested that they make video calls. Joop said that he was too old for that class of technology, and it was a miracle he was even able to text her on the Facebook. Sky was endeared by this response,

imagining him as a rugged man of the meadows who spoke with the mountains and the deer. Sky then intimated the possibility of video sex, hoping that this would entice him to appear on camera and allow her to dispel any small doubts from her mind before she made one of the biggest decisions of her life. This suggestion made Joop feel incredibly angry because Skye was pure and perfect with a sick son, not one of these young whores that they have now who show their tits and

arseholes on the internet. He didn't say this to Skye, and instead told her that he had been looking at flights from Oahu to Shannon, that there's one in a week, and that he'd wire her the money immediately. That's a lot of money, Vinnie, she said. There's no price tag on this adventure, he said. You'll fly to Shannon. It's only a short bus to Thirlis, and once you get here, ask for the greatest line-dancer to ever grace the town.

You'll be shown where to find me." "'Lol,' said Skye. "'You're hilarious, Vincent. I guess that sounds like a plan. I can't believe we're actually doing this.'" The money was wired. Young Aaron was informed. Bags were packed. At Oahu Airport, Sky bought him a

battery power bank for his gaming tablet and one of those foam travel pillows to help with the pain in his neck during the long flight. She held his fingers like she'd never let them go and kissed his forehead while he slept beside her. The warm pink sun blessed her face through the oval airplane window and she listened to the hope in her chest. Her eyes flew out over the Pacific Ocean, across the silver cloud and swept below the valley lakes, through the purple heather on the mountains of Thirlis, the Aldi-Kar park, slithering down the ivy that clung to the bungalow where Joop lay, firm in his acrylic recliner, the ghost of Coco's paradise, himself and the rat lung worm in his brain, friend of the slugs in the rain, Joop wafting through the letterbox, a warm, spicy blend

with a hint of freshness, complimented by top notes of mandarin and sandalwood, heart notes of tonka bean and skathol, creating a lingering seductive fragrance. Right, I wanted to leave that digest twitchy. Um, I'll catch you next week. Next week is Science Week. I'm gonna be speaking to a neuroscientist about the human brain. Might ask him about rat lung worm disease. But uh, yeah, Science Week is next week. There's gonna be lots of fun stuff happening from the 10th of November to the 17th of November

all around Ireland. I do Science Week every year. And you can go to sfi.ie to find out more about Science Week. I'll catch you next week. Rub a dog. Don't eat a slug. Put a shell back on a snail and paint it like a teenage mutant ninja This is an ad by BetterHelp. What comes to mind when you hear the word gratitude?

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