My one hundred and eleventy fifth birthday present to myself (I’ll share)…

As it’s my one hundredth and eleventy fifth birthday today, I thought I might do a quick check. There is an old joke about a Jewish man being knocked down by a car and when he gets up he blesses himself by making the sign of the cross. The driver of the car at first checks that the man is not hurt and when he discovers that the man he hit is uninjured, the confusion hits him.

“You’re Jewish?” He enquires, observing the obvious from the man’s attire.  When the man tells him that he is indeed Jewish, the driver of the car then asks why he blessed himself to which the Jewish man answers,

“Bless myself? I didn’t bless myself! I was just checking.”  The driver asks what he was checking.

“Spectacles, testicles, heart and wallet”

I’m a bit like that these days.   As the years pass, I have become more conscious of the possibility, if not the likelihood that I may someday soon, forget more things than I care to remember.  I am constantly grabbing my back pocket or slapping places where pockets should be and shouting “My keys!” or “My Wallet!” only to discover they are exactly where they should be.   Those who love me most are familiar with my antics and make fun of me for this particular foible. When I was a younger man I wouldn’t get upset about such things, but as the years sneak by, I have started to wonder if in fact I’m forgetting more than I should.  I guess I am not alone in that fear and although I am still a young man in my head; my recent medical dilemmas have made me question things more and more.

Because I write, I worry that I will struggle with language.  That would be such a monstrous and tragic thing for me it really would.  To lose words would kill me.  So, I have chosen to start this day off, this very special day, my one hundredth and eleventy fifth birthday, by adding to my vocabulary, and indeed yours. I am making up a new word for my birthday, a word that is all mine, but I will share it with you.  Hey… that’s the kind of generous guy I am. If you’re thinking ‘you cant just do that’ well you’re wrong.  I can do whatever I like…It’s my birthday!

I’ve looked it up and while there may possibly be a word in another language spelled this way, there is no English equivalent that I know of and that word – My new word and gift to the English language and myself is Aphisma.  I plan to sneak it into my new latest book. Of course I’ll be gutted if the word already exists so please don’t tell me if I’m wrong. I will be Aphismatic.

Aphisma A.fiz.ma. (Noun) Meaning ; loss of ability to remember where you left something leading you to slap your body in search of the said object only to then realise you are an idiot and your glasses are in fact on your head.

Use example – The extensive bruising to his torso and buttocks, was caused by his acute aphisma. Who would have known searching for things you haven’t lost about your body could cause so much pain.

Happy Birthday to me… best present of today… so far !!!

Max Power’s books include, Darkly Wood, Larry Flynn Bad Blood and Little Big Boy

You can find more details about Max Power’s books here : –

http://www.amazon.com/author/maxpower

https://maxpowerbooks.wordpress.com

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twitter @maxpowerbooks1

Read free previews here;

Little Big Boy https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00WRP0J8E&preview

Darkly Wood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B004DL0PMU&preview

Larry Flynn https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00MZGSY3M&preview

Bad Blood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00Q39HGEK&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_8ZOMwb0R

 

In the belly of the beast…

 

When you put your hand inside a dead animal not long after it has passed, you can expect to find the heat of its body still present. Cut open a still warm belly on a winter’s day with a light dusting of snow hardened on the ground beneath your knees as you work and you will feel the heat on your face.  Steam will rise from the still warm intestines of the recently deceased beast. Your breath will grow heavy with the effort and the vapour cloud that gives it away, will mix with the steam from where you have cut open the poor creature’s, fresh warm belly.

 
Reach inside and you will feel the moist, discomforting awfulness and if you nick the lining of its gut, the foul stench will draw you back and away as it catches your breath and makes you wretch. You might well look at your hands and feel the cold on them as the winter air chills the wet, bloody red mess that they have become. You know that you have to go back in again. That texture, that thick squelch of limp jellied offal still clinging to the warmth of life, turns your stomach. You know that moments before, this was a vibrant beautiful creature, a beast of the forest free and wild, alive and vibrant.

 
Where its heart once beat now lies a limp organ, blood thickening and cooling with every second that passes but with just enough heat to remind you how close you two are, separated only by a spark of life. But you have no choice. Time is against you and the barest sound makes you cast a nervous glance over your shoulder. Desperation has overtaken all other things. Logic is gone and you are driven by need. You must reach back in no matter how much the thought repulses you. And you are repulsed. This is a vile act. It is not just unpleasant, it is sickening. You take off your coat and roll up your sleeves and the cold air on your skin reinforces the contrast as steam continues to rise from the gaping wound. Soon you know, your arm will be as your hand, covered in a congealed mess of blood and worse. The place where you nicked the stomach is oozing, leaking its contents right where you need to slide your whole arm inside. You have no choice and you lean forward.

 
You delve back in, reach deeper, pushing against the resisting innards and your arm becomes enveloped in the heat of the mass of organs unrecognisable to you as you turn your head to the side to avoid the stench. There is something damp against your cheek and you know your face has touched something all too repugnant for you to want to think about and you close your eyes and press on.

 
You can’t find what you’re looking for so you begin to panic just a little. What now? Do you need to peer inside? Pull the flesh apart and place your red-cheeked face close to the opening in the animal’s belly? Will you stretch the skin and place your face ever closer so that your nose feels the warmth of the last remnants of its life force, while your ears are nipped at by the cold of the winter morning? And what can you smell as you try to see inside? What is the sight before you? Can you see what you are looking for? Is it really possible that just there, embedded in the thick pink lining of the creature’s intestines you have finally found it?

 

 

You don’t even know what you are looking for now do you? But you were looking. You were stretching your arm inside and you could smell that vileness? Such is the power of the written word. From nothing life is brought to an empty moment in the mind’s eye. It can be a writer’s wish to make you see the sparkle and shine or if they so choose to bring you with them on a journey to despair.

 
I can’t speak for anyone else but it is really the only reason why I do this. I love telling stories. In my head I am quite literally telling you the story as I write as though you were sitting right in front of me. It is very odd because I love engaging with people. Normally I love to exaggerate or twist a story when I meet people to see their reaction. I am a demon for it. It has been said of me that you shouldn’t believe a word I say but I’m not a liar just a spinner of yarns.

 
Telling stories face to face is my television. Writing is my radio. You have to listen to my voice on the page and fill in the blanks for yourself. Sometimes radio is better. When I write I don’t get to see your face but I do get to imagine it. When you read the opening part of this piece, did you fill in the blanks, were you listening to my radio of words? What was the animal in your minds eye? Was it male or female? Where were you? Who killed the beast?  How did it die?  So many questions can arise without you noticing and you simply fill in the gaps for yourself.  Now, do you really want to know what you were searching for as you knelt in the snow shoulder deep in that carcass, or would you rather decide that for yourself?…

 

Max Power’s books include, Darkly Wood, Larry Flynn Bad Blood and Little Big Boy

You can find more details about Max Power’s books here : –

http://www.amazon.com/author/maxpower

https://maxpowerbooks.wordpress.com

fhttp://facebook.com/maxpowerbooks

twitter @maxpowerbooks1

Read free previews here;

Little Big Boy https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00WRP0J8E&preview

Darkly Wood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B004DL0PMU&preview

Larry Flynn https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00MZGSY3M&preview

Bad Blood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00Q39HGEK&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_8ZOMwb0R

 

 

Oh no I didn’t… Oh yes I did…

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes.  Some are real, genuine events of global proportions and some are more personal or intimate by nature.  Most of my disasters have been created by my own hand but occasionally, I have faced very personal moments of crises that perhaps to the outsider or indeed in hindsight seem relatively trifling.  My earliest memory of such a catastrophic event goes back to when I was six years old.  I’ll let you judge for yourself the scale of the cataclysm.

Often when you look back so far it can be hard to pinpoint your exact age or other details but for me this one is easy for it happened in Ms O’Sullivan’s class when I was six years old.  I began school with my very first teacher at the age of five and I was carefully nurtured to become a fan of the schooling system for as long as I was under her care and tutelage.  After her came the Christian Brothers, so my honeymoon didn’t last long and I would soon enough be disillusioned. That being said I pretty much loved my teacher, who was surrogate mother to thirty plus boys for six hours every day.

People always remember their past with a certain rose coloured hue and perhaps I am no different.  One thing for sure is that times were certainly different back then. By the age of six, we were seen to be capable of much more independent function than our counterparts of today.  It was a good three quarters of a mile to my house from school and I had to cross one major road and two minor roads to get to my house.  My loving mother brought me to school every day and collected me after school, but I knew the route by heart.

The day of my disaster started normally with no hint of what was to come.  By mid-morning everything fell apart.  I had cramps in my stomach and had to go to the bathroom to vomit. The solution back in my day was not to call my mother.  We didn’t have a telephone in our house.  No one on our street had a telephone.  When we eventually ordered our first telephone for the house many years later, we went on a two year waiting list.  Ah God be with the days when technology consisted of a wireless radio and a black and white television set with one channel.

So rather than have a six year old explode across the classroom for the rest of the day, the only answer was to send me home.  The problem with that of course was that there were quite literally no spare staff members to escort me, so the answer was to find a boy who lived near me and he could escort me home.  That boy was Paul and without further ado we set off home. 

I made it out the gate when my tiny little tummy told me I was going to need a toilet very soon.  I told Paul and we hastened our pace.  It was a race to the roundabout by the church and we crossed the main road without being killed, at which point I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and told him we’d have to cut through the grounds of the church.  I began to suspect that I would be evacuating my bowels very much against my will at any moment.  I didn’t want to be on the main road where that to happen.

I half ran, half shuffled through the grounds of the church, the now pressing matter of clenching the tiny little cheeks of my little bottom together becoming a matter of near crises management. The rest of the route home could be largely made by a detour along the service road at the back of a row of shops that would see me home save for the last two hundred yards. 

I walked knock-kneed along the empty lane with Paul threatening to abandon me if I fell afoul of my bodily imperative.  With only fifty feet to go I was clutching my bottom and I actually began to cry with the pain.  I daren’t pull my little green shorts down and empty my bowel in the laneway!  Even at that very young age, my mother had drilled a level of propriety into me that I simply couldn’t bring myself to poo in public, no matter how dire my need.

But much to my absolute horror, nature beat me down. In an explosion of shame, I oozed forth and the fact that I was wearing shorts meant I could not conceal my vile emissions from the world. I felt no relief.  It was horrific. What spilled forth and emerged from the leg of my shorts could not have been worse. I was stunned by my own shame and embarrassment. Paul didn’t hesitate.  He abandoned me and ran off, leaving me in a state of shock.  I could neither go forward nor back.  If I walked fifty more feet I just had to turn left walk a few yards to the main road and go around the corner to my house.  I could be there in three minutes.

The problem was that the street would be full of people and they would see what a dirty little boy I was.  I don’t know how long I stood there but it felt like a very long time indeed.  A lump came to my throat and my eyes welled up.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted my Mam.  I needed to be rescued or for the ground to swallow me up and at six years of age, I had no mechanism to cope with the trauma that had befallen me.

Eventually, I acted out of need if nothing else.  I had no choice but to make the walk of shame home so I stepped from the lane and walked around the corner. To my relief, there was no one around.  I could see the main road and I quickened my step.  There were people everywhere up ahead and I tried ever so hard to hold back the tears.  It was bad enough that I would have to display my shame without adding to it with tears like a baby.

Then a miracle happened.  Just as I stepped into the flow of people on the main street, my mother appeared as if sent from God to answer my prayers.  She was as shocked to see me,as I her and I ran to her instinctively.  The tears I had supressed burst from me in an explosion of six year old babbling and I ran to her open arms.  She reached down and caught me as I jumped into her arms, my rescuer, my darling saviour, my mother.  I was her little prince and she had saved me.

She looked at me in disbelief and didn’t say a word.  It took only a moment for her to register the foul smell and feel of what had happened, as the unpleasantness settled on her arm and she turned and spun around to get me home.  I clung to her, the relief enormous and sobbed into her shoulder.  My shame transferred to broader more capable shoulders, I was able to finally relax and let my mother shoulder the burden…

Max Power’s books include, Darkly Wood, Larry Flynn Bad Blood and Little Big Boy

You can find more details about Max Power’s books here : –

http://www.amazon.com/author/maxpower

https://maxpowerbooks.wordpress.com

fhttp://facebook.com/maxpowerbooks

twitter @maxpowerbooks1

Read free previews here;

Little Big Boy https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00WRP0J8E&preview

Darkly Wood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B004DL0PMU&preview

Larry Flynn https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00MZGSY3M&preview

Bad Blood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00Q39HGEK&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_8ZOMwb0R

Somewhere for Donald to rest his beer…Sure ye’ will be grand…

I asked a friend of mine from Sligo this morning what he thought of Donald Trump being elected and in his best, softest lilting Sligo accent he said…  “Ah” followed by a suitably short pause and then one more word which he felt summed up the result … “Americans.”   It’s probably a sentiment being echoed about the place today as the news spreads.  Ah America what were you thinking.  You do know now, that you are basically the country with bad hair. Yep that’s who you just became.  Poor auld Donald wakes up every morning and looks in the mirror and thinks …yeah lookin’ good!  Yep and you’ve elected him.  Worse still, he’s surrounded by people who can’t say, “Seriously Donald, you can’t go out looking like that!”

My other half tells me if my tie doesn’t match, she definitely wouldn’t let me go out looking like a prize tool that’s for sure…and that’s a good thing. That he can go out with an orange face and that…hair, shows really poor judgement.  It should have been clue number one folks.   But look, don’t panic.  He is going to embarrass you around the world and for those of you that know that, just look away.  For those of you who can’t see that, well keep taking the tablets.

But here’s the rub.  I have some bad news to impart so you had best sit down.  Are you sitting down America? Grand so how can I put this.  It is no big deal.  You’re making a fuss out of nothing whether you’re a big Trump fan or a Trump hater.  So he’s a tool.  He is not the first tool you’ve elected as president; no doubt he won’t be the last.  OK so populism has won the day, big swinging appendages.

The truth is that most Americans seem to be under the mistaken impression that America is the most important country in the world.  It isn’t true.  The American media encourages that falacy as it looks inward so much and Hollywood has completely tricked you.  Don’t worry; don’t concern yourself that like in the movie Independence Day, Donald trump will have to face down some Alien hoard with a machine gun in one hand and a cigar in the other – Not going to happen!

Donald Trump won’t have to fight off hijackers on Air Force One and land the plane himself – Definitely not going to happen.  He has a big desk and a roundy office.  He ain’t going to war with the Chinese; he buys their steel for his hotels.  He is not going to build a wall around Mexico and some of you might be disappointed by that others delighted but again – ain’t going to happen.

In all likelihood, you will get to realise what kind of man you’ve elected over the next four years.  That the majority of you seem to be able to ignore his bad hair, misogynistic, racist rantings and his comfort with lying openly  and defending the indefensible, is something that will come back to haunt you no doubt.  But in the end, as he carries out his duties over the next four years, these  ‘quirks’ of his character will deeply affect your daily lives.  But you voted for him and what that brings, you get to experience and judge for yourselves.

But like I say, you’ve invested way too much in the notion that the president of the United States is all that important.  He has way less power than you imagine and the sad truth is that he won’t make America great, he will perhaps make you suck air through your teeth occasionally and say things like, “wish he hadn’t done that” but that’s the height of it.  If you’re gay or pro-choice, that’s a different matter because no doubt he will appoint some very conservative judges to the supreme court but in fairness, the majority of you guys voted for that so love it or hate it, that’s what happens in elections. 

On this side of the pond we’ve long since learned that our leaders are a bunch of muppets.  You get the government you deserve, by which I mean, if you vote for someone, you’ve made that choice as a group and you have to live with it until next time you get to vote.  We’ve had some doozies let me tell you but I never lose sleep over it.  If you want to see prime WTF politicians, google Jackie Healy Rae.. and you think Donald’s hair is bad.

It could be worse.  In your now seemingly totally populist culture, you could have been offered Kim Kardashian as a candidate.  Imagine if you woke up this morning having elected her as President!  I know what your fine upstanding Mr. Trump would say about that… It might involve a slap to the posterior to start with, followed by an indecent proposal and after she rejected him, he would toss as a minimum some sexist comment like, “At least me and Kanye have somewhere to rest our beer.”

Now there’s an idea! Next time around Kim for the Democrats against Donald going for his second term.  You thought you had a bad choice this time around? Best of luck America, we’ll be thinking of you, sure ye’ will be grand… oh and try not let him out on his own too much…

Max Power’s books include, Darkly Wood, Larry Flynn Bad Blood and Little Big Boy

You can find more details about Max Power’s books here : –

http://www.amazon.com/author/maxpower

https://maxpowerbooks.wordpress.com

fhttp://facebook.com/maxpowerbooks

twitter @maxpowerbooks1

Read free previews here;

Little Big Boy https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00WRP0J8E&preview

Darkly Wood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B004DL0PMU&preview

Larry Flynn https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00MZGSY3M&preview

Bad Blood https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00Q39HGEK&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_8ZOMwb0R