You’ve heard of the masturbatory fest that is the Arklow Billy Big Bollocks Big Business Awards, now experience the newly launched Arklow Dole Awards, with special guest star—and proving it’s never too late to come out of the Jobseekers Allowance closet—Best Newcomer Award winner, Dirk Coco.
Mattress Rapist Dick, Trashford Skodas, and a whole menagerie of other equally useless, famous-for-being-famous Z-list influencers/celebrities will also be present to give proceedings that real superficial feel of sticky red carpet tasteless tackiness washed down with close-to-date cheap Prosecco, as they compete with each other over who can take the biggest shite in the jacks, all live-streamed via THICK-TOK.
“Clout is the values-free currency of the always-online age—both a substitute for hard cash as well as a conduit to it. Clout is a calculus not of what you do, but of how much bulk you-ness there is in the world.”
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
The event will be sponsored by Amber Leaf, Women’s Refuge Castletown, and Dutch Gold, who will be launching their new line of draught products, launching in time for the peak Christmas domestic violence season. Free HSE “back-of-house” on-site drug checking, similar to those found at Electric Picnic, will also be provided upon entrance to the exclusive Bay Hotel event (and will be insisted upon if swabs are not volunteered).
Tusla child-catching services will arrive unannounced on their fuckin weekend off of all things—to catch and release any surrendered/missing/who-the-fuck-knows? children, with Father File acting in a purely “advisory: ‘Sure, we couldn’t be any worse than the shower now’” capacity, echoing the ghosts of the state’s past by merely replacing one unaccountable, incompetent, hierarchical childcare monolith with another even more expensive one:
“In many cases this resulted in people handing over minors to religious orders and their young, inexperienced members. This child-welfare role overwhelmed untrained religious order members. It was a cosy division of labour between Church and state – populated on all sides with members of ordinary Irish families […] where each stuck to their own and didn’t call out the other. The Ryan commission documented how religious orders resisted anything viewed as external interference – requests for accounts, institutional reforms – and how they were not pressed by state officials to comply.”
The Best Catholics in the World, Derek Scally
“Well, I did an Ancestry DNA test on my Hispanic-sounding surname, and it turns out my great-grandad, Dirk Coco the First, was also something of an inaugural champion, but for an entirely different event: the Brazilian Transgender Carnival champion and co-inventor of the G-string, which he proudly modelled wedged up his hairy butt-lifted arse to startled onlookers,” proclaimed a jubilant Dirk in his acceptance speech delivered to a comatose and overdosing audience.
“From the ruches he accrued from this patent, he then emigrated to Chicago, where he joined the Black Panthers whilst also quickly rising to the upper echelons of the Nation of Islam, becoming its first LGBTQIAASDFFAGSDFVFEGERGRFAG++++++ Supreme Captain and special advisor to the Honourable Elijah Muhammad.
“I’m truly proud to say that I have always had the blood of my LGBTQIAASDFFAGSDFVFEGERGRFAG+++++/black/brown rebels flowing through my veins and the gift of being a firebrand polemician (or trolling/grifting as I’ve finessed it), as my grandfather demonstrated so forcefully in his coaching of fellow Nation of Islam member Muhammad Ali with such incendiary statements as, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.’
Unfortunately, my grandfather’s roll of success was cut short soon after this, as he was arrested by law enforcement for mercilessly bumming the arse off a one-armed gigolo on Wabash Avenue and was soon forced to turn informant for the FBI, providing crucial information leading to the brutal slaying of Chairman of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton. For his safety, he was placed on witness protection, firstly in Salford, Manchester, England, where it was thought his uniquely Gaelic surname of Coco would help him disappear into the considerable Irish community arriving in their droves at the time.
In his spare time, he penned the classic ballad “Dirty Auld Town”—which many people mistakenly think is about Dublin—with the royalties putting him back in the big time once more and allowing the family to move to Rathnew, Co. Wicklow, where he raised a large family, including my father Dirk II, who would become Ireland’s first LGBTQIAASDFFAGSDFVFEGERGRFAG++++++ breakdancing finalist, losing out on a narrow split decision to a young, heterosexual Phil Lynott.
It was right then and there my father cursed all Cis/Heteronormative males, teaching me to blame them for all my own inadequacies and general life failures. Coming from this proud multi-ethnic heritage of social justice trailblazers, my rendezvous with destiny led me to become the Poundland Goebbels knock-off I am today, but whereas even he possessed an ideology, I grift purely to exploit a quick buck from my fellow social welfare recipients.
“Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown.”
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
“When entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labelled ‘privileged,’ there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order […] blame trans people, immigrants, secularists, internationalism, and the left for a hollowness at the core of modernity.”
Much like history’s most famous opportunist misfit miscreants—Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon—I’m not actually even originally from the nation I currently claim to represent. Projecting a crippling inferiority complex and desperation to become “more Irish than the Irish themselves” makes me punch down onto those less fortunate. Staring at the Nietzschean online abyss too long has definitely found it staring back at me, but you’ll have to excuse me now; I’m about to perform my party piece in the Amber Leaf Lip Sync Battle of “Three Little Birds” by fellow mixed-race prophet Bob Marley.
“Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right […] the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with C, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another C-word: conspiracy.”
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
“Well, it’s about fuckin’ time us Dolers were finally acknowledged,” protested an indignant Oranges Thompson. “Being on the dole is hard sometimes, with constant death threats, drug debts, cricket-score pregnancies, barring orders, and late Range Rover hire-purchase payments. And don’t get me started on me pet XL bully, Jack the Ripper, gettin’ stolen from me by de cruelty man from de pound. How the fuck else am I supposed to inflict my childhood trauma upon the community in the form of an Angkor Wat trail of pavement dog shite, mutilated wildlife, and limbless toddlers without him?”
Arklow Billy Big Bollocks Big Business Awards CEO, Greg Underpants Head and Crypto Euthanist, Ted Shite Talker, EV and Renewables Optimist, Busy Father #IRFU Till I Die” isn’t worried about this new fetal alcohol enfant terrible on the awards ceremony block, though, welcoming the awards as a potential earner for all:
“Listen, big business and the merchant class have always profited off the misery and exploitation of such canon fodder, and we will continue to infantilise them with a ‘dat a boy’ pat on the head on the one hand whilst simultaneously campaigning against minimum wage price hikes, equitable work conditions, and any entitlements and benefits beyond a chained ape on the other. The employment race to the bottom must truly be subterranean before we are ever remotely satisfied.”
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
We are already working on a new RTE pilot where the town’s most feckless dole merchants from tonight’s proceedings will attempt my herculean job for the day of single-handedly keeping the economy going, with undoubtedly catastrophic and hilarious consequences. The show will feature the nice earner of a novel cross-socioeconomic sponsorship by Boodles and whatever the ghastly riff-raff consume, Liga biscuits and coddle. Like rabid anti-Semite Henry Ford once so beautifully stated:
“The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same. Their prosperity depends on one another, and a proper relationship can be maintained only by giving the worker a wage large enough to enable him to buy the product he makes. […] The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.”
Parish Pump Permanent Pensionable Public Sector Paul watches on from his Bridge Night in astonishment at a smorgasbord of “NEVER WORKED A DAY IN THEIR LIVES fucking abnormal, weirdos, and freaks” gleefully fashioning the latest in North Face and Canada Goose apparel on the function room catwalk.
“In my buttoned-up, monocultural day, none of this shite existed, and there was none of this lazy autism around,” declared an enraged Parish Pump Permanent Pensionable Public Sector Paul, in a fashion that would make Joyce’s Citizen blush.
“Many of the traits causing social difficulties had been present throughout history, expressing themselves through archetypes like the hyperfocused artist or the absent-minded professor, and so did not need to be treated as diseases.”
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
I politely point PPPPPPP to the fact that the reason these ‘undesirables didn’t exist’ back in his day was that, at one point, Church and State inflicted a brutal program of de facto eugenics, institutionalising ‘out-of-sight’ more “SOCIAL DEVIANTS” per capita than Stalin’s Gulags.
“You either worked hard (“strictly following a prescribed ‘religious-nationalist indoctrination: suffering makes you hardier, and holier than others”) and paid into the system that hates you to begin with or were brutally crushed and driven to the mortal sin of suicide by Irish society, which was also simply explained away like my Uncle Ned’s one-way extended trip to America, where we are still waiting for even a solitary postcard back from. Once my endless toil is mentioned repeatedly in my eulogy, then I’ll meet St. Peter happily as my bastard children fight over whatever I leave them,” said PPPPPPP.
Your humble narrator challenged Permanent, Pensionable, Parish Pump Paul on this archaic view of a long-distant Ireland, as I fearfully mentioned that change is indeed the only constant in the universe.
“Sure am I movin’ with the times. I voted for that abortion referendum, even though we sent my fallen auntie Geraldine away, whilst I still preach from the other side of my slobbering mouth a peculiarly Irish Catholic version of an imported Victorian prudery which has survived longer amongst Ireland’s elders far longer than in the country of its origin. I will also not abide any of that smut talk within earshot of the delicate barmaids whilst simultaneously repressing any deeper acknowledgment of the cruel fate I consigned Auntie May to for practising the simple act of fornication all those years ago.”
“Choosing silence only increases the burden handed on to the next generation, because children realise intuitively that something is amiss with their parents, but struggle to approach it.”
The Best Catholics in the World, Derek Scally
Nominations are already sought for next year’s Arklow Dole Awards in other such categories as: Best Supporting Partner of an Addict, Best Rolly and Joint Skinner, Cheapest Crack Ingredients, Best Future Dole Merchant Producer, and last but not least the Lifetime Achievement Doler Award (which is already filling up fast, so nominate early to avoid disappointment).
It’s tough to live in a moment when so many truths that had been sold as settled suddenly become wobbly and wavy under our feet. It’s especially tough at a time when a great deal else feels uncertain: the possibility of owning a home, or scraping together enough money for soaring rents, or holding on to any given job, or even knowing how much the basics of life are going to cost week to week.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
It’s all tilting and rolling, and so much, like the assumed predictability of seasons, will never be stable again, at least not for several generations, and that is in a best-case scenario. All of this destabilisation places demands on us: to change, to reassess, and to reimagine who we need to become. It should not be a surprise that a moment this demanding is conjuring up some extreme behaviours and apparitions.
This week’s contributor, Voltaire, can easily be found signing autographs in some of the most sophisticated and esteemed watering holes Arklow has to offer, whilst discussing the merits of social democracy, socialist anarchy, and Air Fryer recipes that are only to die for.
Seeing that it’s seemingly de rigueur to profit online off others’ misery, please don’t forget to buy me a coffee. https://buymeacoffee.com/tylercheria
