|
cc16128
|
It's been my experience that only children never learn when to keep their fucking traps shut. An older brother would have beat that out of you.
|
|
only-children
talking
siblings
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
4835cb9
|
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
|
|
religion
patterns
gods
humans
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
3ca050e
|
We drank our whiskeys. It was the good stuff and it tasted of salt, sea, rain, wind and the Old Testament.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
2f23929
|
He was one of those characters who felt that a weak handshake could somehow damage his authority, which meant that every handshake had to bloody hurt.
|
|
handshake
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
514182b
|
Don't worry, Duffy. I like you. We'll kill you last.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
d932a69
|
Greek mythology has always been my Achilles elbow.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
6b19a3c
|
The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through ..
|
|
helicopters
riot
bombs
revolution
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
79ddf77
|
A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.
|
|
mercedes-benz
pimps
terrorists
cars
car
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
954aa8e
|
Johnnie Walker in the tea, Jim Beam in the coffee
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
26af19d
|
With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they'd be cooking chips at this hour was anyone's guess.
|
|
chimneys
chip-pans
cigarettes
fire
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
cb0a575
|
The problem with Double Fantasy was the arrangement whereby they alternated John Lennon tracks with Yoko Ono tracks. You couldn't escape Yoko for more than four minutes at a time.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
c6627de
|
A bullet in the head will fix an incipient asthma attack every time.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
7c3cc13
|
You painted it pink?' Price asked with a grin. 'That's lavender, you colour-blind eejit,' I said. McCallister saw that Price clearly hadn't got the message yet. 'Hey lads, you know why Price nearly failed the police entrance exam? He thought a polygon was a dead parrot.' The lads chuckled dutifully and somebody punched Price on the shoulder.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
bd2f17a
|
Keeping pigeons without a licence is illegal as well, but we can't have people going round shooting pigeon-keepers, can we? It is the job of the RUC to enforce the law in Northern Ireland, not paramilitary groups, not vigilantes, not 'concerned citizens', it's our responsibility and ours alone," McCallister said which made me proud of him. Not quite tears-in-eyes but maybe warm-glow-in-tummy."
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
60c165b
|
Intelligence is no substitute for wisdom. Live long enough to get wise, eh?
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
765eb64
|
How do you feel about homosexuals, Mr. Scavanni?' I asked. 'I think they're great. More women for the rest of us,' he said sarcastically.
|
|
women
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
34eadbb
|
The Bible says that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Well, trouble followed me like sharks trailing a slave ship. Even when I tried to get away it was there swirling in a vortex around me.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
b584874
|
A cocked .38 doesn't feel the same as an unprimed revolver. The frame tightens differently, the trigger is on a hair and this tension is communicated to you and the people around you.
|
|
revolver
guns
tension
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
59de19d
|
Radio One played "Ebony and Ivory," a new song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. The breakfast DJ Mike Read played it two times in a row which was pretty hardcore of him as it was clearly the worst song of the decade so far, perhaps of the entire century."
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
6166c8d
|
I remembered about the pharma coke, went outside and nailed a line so pure it was like getting yelled at by God. Yorkshire tea, Mrs Campbell's Black Forest, Bayer cocaine - the lunch of champions.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
0777450
|
A man once told me that all books should end at chapter seventy-seven.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
8ce56aa
|
You ever read Thucydides? I'll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
ded84e6
|
The darkness keeps its own counsel.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
b235d96
|
Twelve-year-old Islay. Good stuff if you liked peat, smoke, earth, rain, despair, and the Atlantic Ocean, and who doesn't like that?
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
3edb665
|
If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world.
|
|
irony
ireland
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
1be88a2
|
The driver had on Radio 1, which was giving us Kylie Minogue's 'I should be so lucky'....By the song's second verse I was already longing for an IRA ambush and and by the second chorus I was dreaming of a rogue comet strike.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
8b99c73
|
popular short
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
b2c4e44
|
Who do you think's after you, Shane, my lad? Or is it just the dark you're afeared of?
|
|
fear
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
cb45abb
|
The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.
|
|
time
reading
police
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
ea626a3
|
What's news?" She put the magazine down and looked at me. "Philip K. Dick is dead." "Who's that?" I asked."
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
801ab7d
|
But this was Northern Ireland in 1981 which was slightly less conservative than, say, Salem in 1692
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
7323779
|
more guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.
|
|
ireland
irish
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
da14ed4
|
You're a glass-half-empty kind of guy, sir, aren't you?" "I don't even acknowledge the existence of the glass, son."
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
70d8dae
|
Patriotism is a hard disease to eradicate, and ennui stamps us all.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
4ac31f4
|
coruscation.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
ad50489
|
thumbs through Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe and is momentarily
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
514ffda
|
If I don't make it, don't let them cast some asshole to play me in the movie version of this,
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
ea95dcc
|
Age hasn't matured you. It's made those traits that were ticks in the twenty-five-year-old into full-blown affectations in the thirty-eight-year-old.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
2eed768
|
Nelson had a face like Brian Clough getting sodomised with a pineapple.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
baa83f0
|
Revenge is the foolish stepbrother of justice.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
a48a4e5
|
Life's tough and even tougher when you're stupid,
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
ea34f32
|
As the Russians say, getting what you want sometimes requires moving like the knight in chess: forward and to the left.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
3dccd4a
|
squirrel is in a pine tree, when all of a sudden, it starts shaking. He looks down, and sees an elephant climbing the tree. 'What are you doing? Why are you climbing my tree?' the squirrel calls down to the elephant. 'I'm coming up there to eat some pears!' the elephant responds. 'You fool! This is a pine tree! There aren't any pears up here!' The elephant looks perplexed for a moment, and then says, 'Well, I brought my own pears.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |
|
9b6a2a6
|
Ireland in shades of black and green under the gibbous moon. Ireland under the canopy of grey cloud, under the crow's wing and the helicopter blade. A night ride over the Lagan valley and the bandit country of South Armagh. The music in my head was Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which opens with a hesitant syncopated motif evocative of Mahler's irregular heartbeat.
|
|
|
Adrian McKinty |