Shrimped in the Vortex

They say fortune favours the brave but try telling him that having plucked up the courage to talk to the festival goddess only for her to turn out to be the best friend of the girl he was with the night before. With The Killers providing the soundtrack (they’re actually still alright), the boy they called Dag was banished from Molly’s chamber to the dank reality of a festival escaping him. We plodded back to our camp deflated, resigned to an anti-climactic return to Dublin and a hangover capable of taking the whole plane down with us.  We’d saturated our WhatsApp group in preparation but all the Rice Crispy bars in the world couldn’t save us now. We were doomed… and then the musically inclined freaks and geeks convention threw us a doggy life.

From nowhere the sanctity of our circle was invaded by balloons- hundreds of them, our marquee threatening to launch into space at the hands of a Pixar fanatic claiming to be a Balloonatic. Transfixed, we clung to the coat tails of euphoria in vain, our intruder less stimulating than we’d hoped. But as the old saying goes, don’t judge a Balloonatic until you’ve told him to leave. Grasping a knife from a mystery pocket, he slashed the dreams of every helium balloon hoping to fly that night and oddly, we fed off it. I looked to the Dag with a glint in my eye as I could see the strength in his paw returning. There was no need to say anything. We were going on an adventure.

In the distance an illuminated tree growing from the sunroof of a Volkswagen Beetle caught our eye. We knew our cars. The thud of the base shot the lights from leaf to leaf as a rave emerged at the foot of the evergreen. There was life in this festival yet. From the trippers to those that couldn’t get up again, we’d stumbled across an apocalypse. A body of a girl rose from the abyss peering up at us through her conjunctivitis. She was Irish, and you could tell she was excited to see us by the way her head bobbled. As words failed her, our eyes focussed. Like zombies to fire the crowd gathered by the insufferable beat box, motionless and dribbling. If this was a nursery rhyme, then this porridge was long passed overcooked and our meal lay elsewhere.

We walked for miles yet nothing seemed to get closer. We never questioned the way because we didn’t know where we were going. At least that was my story, until we arrived. Greeted by Mike and his bag of brown crystals, we had found Wiggle’s friend Natalie’s camp.  No Natalie here, a guy dressed as a lion tried to introduce himself but his best efforts were hampered by an evacuation of the mind. Out from his lap perked up a blonde astronomer, keen to assemble our star signs before we went any further. Blatantly ignoring her we moved on to SteveO from Jackass dressed like he was auditioning for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It was hard to tell if he was smiling or suffering but I reckon he liked us. Beside him, Mitch from Modern Family and his fictitious nearby girlfriend. We swapped nonsensical blabbering that seemed important at the time and shared an American Pie style fraternal nod as if to say we’d found our people. And then came the Australian with the elephant.

He appeared from the darkness like Steve Irwin reincarnate carrying the lifeless beast on his shoulder.  I bet you boys have never seen anyone fist an elephant before? He was right. Staged like an Amsterdam sex show (or so I’ve heard), the lights came down on a violent act of anal jackhammering. The elephant’s trunk seemed to perform a satisfactory Mexican wave as we split our sides laughing in disbelief. I’m bloody shrimped after that fellas. He sat down beside us as we extended our olive bag but despite his infectious laugh it was hard to ignore the elephant in the room. Before we could pry, an Indian with a bathmat for a cape came to save the day. Brown Batman, the Aussie yelled, and so it stuck. The more we licked our palms clean of the brown dust the better it seemed to get. The elephant grew bigger, the Aussie louder, even Mike developed a voice. What do you call an Irishman sitting outside? Paddy O’Furniture. SteveO’s brain was visibly melting, Mitch was up and down to his imaginary girlfriend and Brown Batman’s facial expression had frozen in time.

Missed a spot.

Things reached a momentary lull as we looked to each other to establish some sense of reality. I bet you boys have never seen anyone head an elephant before? Hold off on the reality. Taking rectal examinations to unseen new levels, the crocodile hunter drove his head up that elephant’s arse like you would a firework to a helpless cat on Halloween. He pulled out sweaty and satisfied and sat back down among us as if nothing had happened. That would’ve made more sense. At this stage we’d given up on Mitch, only spotting him dancing like a spastic hawk long after the heading. He returned in denial, stuck with the ball and chain don’t you know. He’s shrimped. As verbal assaults gathered pace, SteveO nonchalantly took centre stage. Anyone have any toilet paper? I just shit myself. As the boy in the striped pyjamas walked off into the moonlight with a hand full of his own shite, Brown Batman had been promoted to Black Batman and we needed to get the fuck out of there before our situation became permanent. We said our goodbyes, much to the dismay of Aussie Steve. You can’t leave me with these cunts! We had to.

When we got back to our camp our attempts to tell everyone about Narnia seemed to make it all the more improbable. Like retired soccer players harping on about the glory days, all we wanted was to get back in the dressing room. So as if just to prove to ourselves that all this weird shit actually happened, we went back. And there they were, shrimping more than ever. The elephant. Roscco ride the elephant. He approached it tentatively, not wanting to startle it but as he went to mount it the dumb brute collapsed from under him. He’s fucked man. In fact he was Styrofoam, revealed to us by an enemy camper who literally tore the hole off it minutes later, much to Mitch’s horror.  I don’t even want you guys to meet her. You’re animals. We were certainly something alright.

As the sun rose Natalie popped her head out from the tent. Turns out we were in the right place, but our time had come to leave. We walked back in silence trying to process it all. Each of us had front row seats to the freak show. If we thought a little less of ourselves, maybe we’d admit we were part of it. Played leading roles even? We left the theatre behind wondering if any of it were real, facing down the barrel of a daunting clean up. Amongst the carnage we found the popped balloons, and for the first time in a long time, we were normal.

 

THE SAME DIFFERENCE

Ever see that guy who braided his hair into an unsolvable maze for no apparent reason? He wore a shirt that he stitched together from his mum’s old dish rags and despite it being 30 degrees outside, he flaunted a scarf delicately woven with the shoe laces of the homeless. His trousers were legless but did just enough not to detract attention away from the fact he walked around on stilts. His outfit was complimented by a Titleist golf visor and an airplane seatbelt. You see, this guy was a true original. Hopelessly alone and bereft of friends, but undeniably unique.

Such originality is hard to find but people’s bizarre obsession with being different leads them to take extraordinary measures to ensure success. ‘So I found this really chic coffee place. It’s in an old shed at an abandoned farm that was converted into a café by this one eyed Vietnamese barista. You have to drive 30 miles to get there but it’s so worth it. She only uses reindeer milk and serves her chai lattes from old US military helmets. It’s a pretty holistic vibe, you know?’

Actually, I don’t. Whatever happened to coffee being about one spoon or two? ‘Ah, everyone was at it. Did you hear of this new Starbucks place? Instead of sizes being small, medium and large, they use like, some sort of foreign language to differentiate. It’s pretty out there man’. But alas, Starbucks saturated the market and their flat white was no longer desirable. Hipsters were calling their drug dealers looking for rare South American beans that had spent the longest time maturing in a pile of horse shit. You could give most of these connoisseurs a cup of decaf and they’d drink it as long as it sounded Italian and was sourced in a place that didn’t exist.

You can’t be alternative and trendy because today, that’s just called being a person. Like that bar that nobody knows about but everyone goes to. ‘What is it that makes drinking from a jam jar taste so much better?’ Absolutely nothing, you idiot. The urge to be different is ironically making us all the same. There’s more alternative people in the world today than ‘normal’ people. It doesn’t make sense. If you were authentically unique, you wouldn’t have to desperately flood your Instagram to prove it.  You’re fooling nobody with that manufactured ‘natural’ pose of you vacantly staring into the abyss. I can hear you through the photograph asking your mate if they’ve taken the picture yet. Just get the photo of you pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa like everybody else and piss off.

There’s nothing wrong with conforming on a small scale. That reputation you’re trying to uphold doesn’t actually apply outside your own bubble. Take music for example. It should be a pretty personal thing. Who didn’t love Kings of Leon ten years ago? Their first two albums were a fresh, rebellious sound and they were revered by all lucky enough to have listened. Queue big hits like ‘On Call’ and ‘Sex On Fire’ and they could be heard across mainstream radio the world over. They lost the majority of their original fan base as a result.  Why? ‘Because I heard them first and now everyone likes them. Such sell-outs. Some dick sung one of their songs in an X-Factor audition for Christ sake.’ Ok, so maybe their music did go to shit but more likely, they became too popular for the alternative market. Could you imagine, now God forbid, but if Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk smash hit was to revive old school soul so that teenagers today could appreciate such an iconic period in music? Wouldn’t that be the worst? The idea of James Brown in the running for Christmas Number One doesn’t bare thinking about, right?

We’re weird like that. I’ve got a friend that kidnapped a blind spoon playing busker and now openly refuses to let him out of his basement for fear that someone else might hear his sound. Why can’t we appreciate what we like as individuals? If lots of other people like it too, then we have things in common. ‘What’s good for the goose’ and all that jazz. If you’ve set the trend and now it’s become globally accepted, why bail? We are becoming possessive to the point of absurd.

The average life cycle from secondary school sees a boy enter the unknown and quickly conform. He wears a Canterbury tracksuit and drinks water from a protein shake bottle even though he’s never been to the gym. By the age of 14 he’s discovered girls and surprisingly, they don’t all like rugby players. He joins the drama society, grows out his hair and learns the guitar. Hiding behind his black leather trench coat for too long, he acquires a Nirvana tee online and presumes Dave Grohl’s their lead singer. He leaves school a confused, pubescent mess. He enters college without any of his friends and out of pure insecurity, he totally reinvents himself once more. He takes up smoking, but not a pack of tailors. He rolls his own whilst attempting to nurture his transparent facial hair. He signs Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ out of the library and positions himself front and centre in the cafeteria waiting to be noticed. And of course, he will be. Why? Because there’s a million other people just like him in the world that also think they’re somehow, different.