A sea of receding hairlines, paunch bellies, tracker mortgages, credit card overdrafts and costly divorces/breakups/at least one bad fart away from a separation greeted the Old Ship last Saturday night as the prodigal sons of CBS Arklow were welcomed back to the town’s warm and welcoming bosom. DJ McGrath spun hits from Big Tom and The Mainliners and Engelbert Humperdinck as ever-dwindling testosterone levels and the stress-induced wrinkles of child-rearing were clearly etched on the faces of past pupils lamenting the now strangling conformity of their miserable and pointless consumer and social media-driven lives.
Organised by top wanker, Robert Mullervy, the master of ceremonies made sure to make everyone feel on edge with his constant muckraking of embarrassing past pupil anecdotes. The sausage fest was sorely lacking feminity after the stripper failed to arrive. This was strictly a leave your wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, sex-slaves, cats and dogs at home night as former classmates joyfully regaled old stories of bullying, harassment, beatings and intimidation. And that was just from the teachers!
There was an unexpected live video link from Australia featuring former atheist turned Koranic scholar Brother Mohammed Mates, now head Imam of the Nation of Islam, Queensland. Brother Mates disapproved of the drinking and Edmund Rice-shaped cocaine mountain he witnessed being consumed by his former classmates but preached forgiveness for such haram.
“What are ya up to yourself these days?” was the common question of the night to your humble narrator, due to a regrettable information vacuum existing from my non-existent social media presence to advertise my non-existent achievements.
“Well, I’m a failed writer still living in my childhood bedroom, wanking into the same crusty cum sock since puberty dawned. With no future prospects of flourishing independently, I punctuate this fatalistic despair with bouts of binge drinking and novenas to Our Lady. I’ve essentially become the typical bitter old barfly I once feared becoming in my own youth but decades before time, blaming everything and everyone for the downward trajectory of his existence.”
“Oh, right,” replied the horrified inquisitor.
“Sorry, this night out is exclusively for the successful alumni of CBS Arklow, you know the ones that get up early in the morning, keep the recovery going, grindset-mindset, Tesla driving hustlers who have broken the mould by imaginatively getting married, shitting out 2.4 kids into a suburban hellscape all funded by a JOB they despise but yet have to endlessly trumpet through the wailing and gnashing of teeth on LinkedIn. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Your humble narrator was subsequently held down by his compatriots and branded with the scarlet letter of “L” for loser on his forehead, before being unceremoniously discarded into the adjacent Condren’s Lane as he pondered: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
