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The chorus of this song is:

What's the bizness yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way
From a distance yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way
I'm a victim yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way
I'm addicted yeah!
Don't take my life away don't take me life way
This chorus is perhaps the richest lyric I've ( Read more... )

Happy Bloomsday 2014! I wrote the below to j_joyce. As you can see, it's an attempt to write in Joyce's style. Unfortunately I am no James Joyce, but it was good fun writing it. It's hardly edited at all - I thought about perhaps revising it, but figured that I'm being arrogant enough claiming I can write in an any way Joycean way without implying that I ( Read more... )

I had a dream last night in which I kissed a girl who was surprised by how agreeable that was and so whose boyfriend I found myself. But it was a little more subtle than this, and I confess I'm a little proud of my dreaming self's psychological acuity. When I kissed her, she didn't just reciprocate; I felt with my lips that hers clenched in ( Read more... )

When I lived in Galway back in 2008 or whenever it was, I briefly worked a terrible job as a door-to-door make-up salesman. You'll be glad to know I was rubbish at it. Going to work was in the first instance going to a small office in the town centre. We would run over responses to all the things people were most liable to say on realising we were ( Read more... )

On the Dublin city bus back from the airport over Christmas, I became fascinated by every part of a woman a few seats ahead of me, across the aisle, because she dressed in a way that I can't describe except as a fin-de-siècle Viennese aristocrat's dress; and because she dressed so simply perfectly. From her immaculate red nails to her fine ( Read more... )

When Seamus Heaney died, I didn't quite know how to react. I had had to read his poems in school and I loved them then, but on the whole I'm insensitive to poetry, so picking up one of his collections to read in remembrance would have been a chore, and so have missed the point. So, as I was reading some epic poems at the time, I bought his ( Read more... )

I'm just at the end now of the family holiday in Edinburgh, where we go each year for the festivals. I've been back in Scotland two or three times since I left last August, but this time I've been hit more strongly than ever by the sense of home I get here ( Read more... )

I took the notion a couple of years ago to keep a diary, to counteract my startling ability to totally forget things that matter to me. But 'keeping a diary' is a deeply unnatural thing for me to do, so despite trying as hard as I could to fulfil my obligation (which was how I saw it), I lapsed after a few months. For one reason and another, I've ( Read more... )

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(Holy shit!)

The first thing to say about this was that the St. George's Spirits Distillery in Alameda has a tour exactly as brilliant as zentiger and all his friends say it is. For $15 I got a tour by a fairly annoying over-enthusiastic guide (which is not why it was brilliant), and then a taste of two vodkas, a bourbon, a rum, an absinthe and a sweet dessert liquor, ( Read more... )