The Shamalan Trilogy Pt1 : FUBAR

Etims proudly presents The Shamalan Trilogy by Estadio

PART ONE: FUBAR

“It’ll be all right this time”,

“No it feckin won’t”

“Aye it will..here have a fiver”

‘OK, that’ll do nicely”

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“Alright, there appears to be an event happening. Central Park was just hit by what seems to be a terrorist attack. They’re not clear on the scale yet. It’s some kind of airborne chemical toxin that’s been released in and around the park. They said to watch for warning signs. The first stage is confused speech. The second stage is physical disorientation, loss of direction. The third stage… is…..FATAL” 

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After the last few weeks or so immersing myself in the ever more populous cyber-sphere (and a thousand pints of Guinness), my monitoring the outpourings of thousands of peely wally, attic dwelling ‘internet bampots’, the first two warning signs were plentiful. In our very own internet version of Central Park however, that third ‘FATAL’ stage portrayed in M Knight Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ was replaced by

‘…..thumping of keys to post on message boards and blogs in a fit of disgust, murderous intent and suicidal schadenfreude’

Or in the case of Sevco boards ‘monosyllabic grunts echoing backwards through time to the sound of suckers emerging from the primordial sludge’.

Even though the ‘third stages’ may have diverged, at their core the similarities between the  celluloid ‘masterpiece’ and the blinding supernova of boiling blood on websites across the known universe are more than obvious; both undoubtedly resulted from some strange toxin dispersed around the air ways or over the electronic ether.

In the concept film, our wee green planet’s vengeful vegetation excreted their poison into the air and harnessing the power of the wind, justifiably infected those deemed guilty of throwing MacDonald’s packaging into the Clyde, putting paper in the rags recycling bin and placing the dark green Buckie bottles in with the brown Magners’ ones.

The internet imbroglio arose in black dudgeon at the incongruous Judgement of the Nimmo commission on ‘oldco’s’ soul, publishing it on the world wide web and like the flora of the film, the strange world of Scottish Football decided it had had enough. As keyboards were pummelled to submission, fragments of revenge spread out from supporters everywhere; the widest gamut and cross section of the football asteroid belt was represented. Observers ranged from phlegmatic and sober commentators, lawyers steeped in the world of precedent, commercial experts, well meaning eejits, rebels, revolutionaries and of course a substantial population of gibbering conspiracy theorists, all with a suspicion that something, large or small deliberately stinks in the state of Scottish Football’s la la land.

In the case of this w.w.w. phenomena (who the feck cares about the planet being wiped out by the vegetable equivalent of the stench from Jabba Traynor’s gusset after all?) spurred on by rampant expectation,  the tea leaves of the judgement were read and the reaction was as stark and final as the falling Sword of Damocles. To mix metaphors and misquotes from films ‘all Hell was unleashed’.

Those of the blue persuasion excepted, the imagery conceived, committed to words and communicated was in turn brilliant and stygian, hilarious and manic, but most of all exhilarating and funereal as it conjured up visions of a reptile pit of the venomous fork-tongued bastard offspring of Swan, Allan, Farry, Smith and Peat coiling their urgent limbs and cloacae in ecstatic throws of karezza, all pleasuring Lord Nimmo Smith in a nostalgic  re-enactment of their days at public school (or in the case of Smith and Peat….allegedly dogging school)!

The vision was impossible to erase as I and probably a million others became obsessed, reading every single eruption of angst, repeated a hundred times (sometimes by the same person) in one of those seminal events that hypnotised you into staring immovably at the computer screen, conjuring up in your mind the features, sounds, motivations and environment of every pseudonym who poured out his or her vitriol.

The Armageddon of Regan/Doncaster and other harbingers of doom may have been a figment of their nightmares, but here was an apocalypse of souls predicting the sinking of the world into the bowels of hell. Even those of a more placid and analytical persuasion, while not empathising with the ‘final days’ envisaged by some of the more morbid authors, still pronounced that the decision was an abomination.

Aficionados of the outré and psychotropic and friends of Shyamalan may be able to confirm his despair at wasting so much time effort and money on his own obviously inadequate plot! He must have been rueful as he followed the unfolding pandemic that was in the process of thrilling, confusing, terrorising, amusing, entertaining and shocking the world….(When Dante creates a tenth level of hell and even the Pope resigns to concentrate on what was happening across the Celtic Diaspora, something tells you that it might be worthwhile getting a case of Guinness in and watching the conflagration take hold.)

Undoubtedly as Shyamalan read the electronic chatter (BTW I hear that Etims is his preferred conduit and first call in the morning with a coffee and Tunnock’s caramel wafer) and entered the labyrinth of paranoia, he must have marvelled at the multitude of Machiavellian intrigues sculpted by the chromosomes of the Gaels, Celts and Picts. He must have reflected on the loss to his own imagination of an abstemious youth as he witnessed rewards being harvested by middle aged raconteurs raised on the mind altering  VP, EL D, Four Crown and Scotsmac. Within those ethereal walls he probably discovered a reality to trump all of his brainstorming sessions, mind mapping meetings and manufactured pharmaceuticals; here he found a community that revelled, agonised, rejoiced and flailed itself in an almost exclusive monopoly on what it perceived as the external world’s talent for subterfuge and corruption in its eternal battle to wipe out all things Celtic, all Sainted schools and all beliefs Catholic.

Meanwhile the sevco devotees (do they do devotion?) had reached the edge of the mud and were contemplating dry land while screaming at their own methane wisps and  “Peter Lawwell is the Anti-Christ”.

Back on the football sites (Celtic mainly but not exclusively) some of the thoughts and analysis were brilliant; some disturbing but realistic; some were possible but erred on the side of delirium tremens and some obviously arose from the experiences of those who had spent most of their lives in the earthly equivalent of Pandora’s box.

But just about every single one was riveting. Here was the encapsulation of life, of hopes, of fears, of logic, of dreams and of nightmares.

Ultimately the conclusion of course was that the world was FUBAR (look it up) and irredeemable, and made demonstrably so by this one decision concocted in the echoing chambers of orange halls and the secretive ceremonies of masonic lodges across the world.

If that was true of course and was allowed to continue, we were doomed and damned, but the proposed actions of leaving it all behind struck me as not only simplistic but counterproductive. I’ve never been a fan of turning on my heels and saying…..’here you go mate, it’s taken us 125 years to get here, but feck it….you win, you have it all.) And of course if it wasn’t some plot dredged up from the swamps of bigotry then it would prove even more counterproductive, pointless and suicidal.

To me it seemed that we were all missing something, something so obvious that perhaps the elephant in the room was irrelevant. Perhaps we needed to pull back the curtains and through the windows stare back down the road we had journeyed to build this house. Perhaps there were other monsters lurking, monsters that viewed gorillas and elephants (or even unicorns) in the room as mere aperitifs.

I switched off the computer and tore myself away from the girding of loins and sharpening of pikestaffs.

What state was football really in? How had we really got to here? How had football from its earliest organised days as it took over the grafting man’s life (specifically in Scotland) ended up on such a mess of contradictions and corruption that the seers of the world wide web were so convinced that the Devil was amongst us?

Was there a first domino to topple and eventually lead to the ridiculous decision which vies for a medal in the obtuseness of decisions involving Scottish Football and the Law. (John Wilson’s ‘Not Proven’ and subsequent breach of the peace slap on the wrist undoubtedly is miles ahead in gold medal position).

I thought about us as thinking beings and I came to the conclusion that the decision was not really that unexpected or even a conspiratorial strategy. It was biased! But without trying to be too cynical I concluded my first can of Guinness with the empirical observation that

……….FUBAR is the normal and natural state of a world which is inhabited by or even tangentially influenced by the human species?

I cannot blame the creatures of the blue lagoon for this after all in my timeline they still think that a super doper evening’s entertainment beneath the cascading acid rain is farting in the mud to make pops!

So eliminating them from the equation I opened my second can and was brutally honest with myself…. “We have just about screwed up everything we have even considered never mind actually interfered with”.

I had to admit that much of the irrefutable evidence lay with me, my mates and decades stumbling blindly through dark days of idiocy. I am now convinced that original sin is real and that baptism isn’t all it is cracked up to be, as we all seem to carry with us the tendency to take God given simplicity and turn it into a Gordian Knot of hellish complexity.

From my earliest days when I turned my head away from being breast fed and could see that there were other even more pleasant and diverting activities involving the female form, life began to ravel into a tin of spaghetti. From then onwards, every lesson I ever attended, every book read, every experience I had at some time or another triggered a sense of bewilderment. I would often be found at the back of the class greetin ‘ acid tears at man’s folly or convulsed in fits of laughter , as our teacher waxed lyrical on some other historical disaster that someone thought their little darlings needed to be aware of as an encouragement in pillage, war and murder.

“He did ‘what?’ …..nawww! ……and he’s a hero….ffs!”

It was obvious even to me at the earliest of my conscious years that humankind, faced with a multitude of crossroads, invariably and against all known statistical theory, bounded in a mad frenzy of blind optimism down the well-intentioned and even more well-trodden route that led inevitably to a confrontation with Cerberus terrifyingly guarding the entrance to the fires of Hades.

Seriously I used to sit in total awe as the question ‘why, do we keep making the same mistakes?…And why do we glorify them in the annals of history?’  kept peeping over the parapet of bewilderment.

And then it came to me…………..We only THINK we are feckin clever, smart, and intelligent! But the reality is that we aren’t!

That belief and self-deception is Utter Keech, – (you will of course note that the initials are UK……a very good reason for voting ‘Yes’ come 2014!)

If we even had a veneer of wisdom about us, surely once…just once…. we would have taken the alternative path; one strewn with fruit, loving partners, sober companions, honest judges, benevolent football authorities, level playing fields and insightful, articulate, perceptive journalists and media.

Nope! Not once! NOT one feckin time did we take the path to contentment; the evidence of that ubiquitous folly lies tattooed on history’s soul.

With the abandon of a wean walking under a table and thumping it’s cranium on the oak leaf, we take that same trail to disaster again and again while convincing ourselves for some strange reason that this time we will reach the green rolling fields of Elysium instead of the snarling three headed monster beckoning us into the jaws of his slabbering canines while whispering rhetorically…… “well look who’s here again! Who’s a silly boy (and bhoy) then?”

Where does this incomprehensible self-belief come from? From what roots does the Venus flytrap of ephemeral astuteness spring?  Surely after 200,000 years, if even one or two lessons had ever entered the human psyche that innate brilliance would no longer see us striving to fashion ever greater weapons with which to obliterate each other (in the name of an all loving and benevolent deity), continuing to wage wars, committing genocide, spreading disease, polluting the waters and land, and then ridiculously convincing most of our peers and co-owners of this god given and unsurpassed intellect that these are all ‘good’ things. Oh and of course, ridiculing to the point of strangulation any dissenting voice.

Just how feckin brilliant is that? Zippidy doo dah!

Even after all those millennia I wonder if we have made any advances whatsoever.

What exactly have our razor sharp neurones and synaptic flashes of insight enabled us to achieve?

No doubt the national curriculum majors on such humane advances in the common good as giving the conch of power to such marvellous paragons of enlightenment as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Berlusconi, Mugabe, and a hundred other multi cellular diseases including a class apart of hilarious inbred hangers on who come under the category ‘royalty’ – what a hoot that is!

And of course page after page of political hocus pocus is buttered with delights and stalwart humanitarians and peacemakers as Nixon, Regan and Bush, or on these ill fitting islands astonishingly Thatcher, Major, and Cameron. Oh I know that we have avoided (for a brief moment or two anyway as even the gods of disaster wouldn’t countenance this) foisting George Ian Duncan Smith, William Hague and Michael Howard (him with the ‘look of the night’) about him, onto ourselves, hey but in reserve we put out the welcome bunting for Blair, Brown, Mandelson, Clegg, Lamont (J) and a supporting cast of intellectual dwarfs.

And we call ourselves ‘CIVILISATION’! We call ourselves ‘CLEVER’!

Then in our smug self-congratulation we give ourselves the right to lecture so called less developed countries on the folly of their ways; us who created a breed of sub-humans called investment bankers and even after they corrupted and then atomised every simple principle of barter and exchange, causing famine, mass unemployment, despair and death across the world we STILL can’t see what we’ve done wrong. FOR FUCK’S SAKE! If anyone ever talks to me about the higher intelligence of the human species I will ……………..no I can’t………..FOCUS may be watching and I will end up on the end of their petard.

And talking of FOCUS, that Kubrick inspired cohort of pointless organisms back we come to football.

Like everything else that nature, serendipity, fortune and happenchance has provided, we have taken what began as a simple delightful sport that captivated the spirit of creation, imagination, inventiveness and pleasure that could surely develop and evolve across the world as some sort of shibboleth of unity and turned it into ……..oh……..FUBAR!

Aye…. what’s that up ahead? Oh joy of joys…..it’s another feckin crossroads.

And who’s that standing there with the map and travellers guide? Why it’s a wee man in a black cromby and spivs hat, a wee vengeful bastard who was probably sat up the front of the class, stayed away from the bad boys,  looked out the corner of his eye at the bad girls  and read ‘the Prince’ before he put out the light and plotted his revenge. And here is, back now and in his blinkered judgement, he’s made it, he’s got dough and he wants even more. And by feck, you are going to find out just how much more he wants, how he is going to get it and how he has never forgotten that you made jokes about the plaster over his NHS glasses in front of Mary McConnell!

It’s always a ‘he’; a ‘he’ with the antennae of a Barras stallholder looking for a ‘lucky’ punter or as it is known in the world of commerce and weapons export, the ‘capitalist instinct of a master of the universe’ looking for a shortsighted mug!

And there he stands now at that crossroads, his probosces tingling and juices pumping as this phenomenon called ‘football’ propels its leather sphere towards him. His eyes dart in the direction of the commotion but what he sees is not a sport, not a pastime, not a diversion for the working man’s few leisure moments. What he filters out is the picture of all those people following it, the jingle jangle of all those pennies, thruppennies and two bob bits that could be rolling his way. Instinctively he knows what is needed was to convince these ‘lucky punters’ that his ideas are ‘good’ and off they will go following his directions down the road to hell depositing everything they have in his banks on the way. He pulls a fiver from his pocket, waves it in front of the advancing column and as if hypnotised by the artistic beauty of its colours, in an instant they stop and drool in unwavering gaze at the false god of greed that flutters in the breeze.

 “You want some of this don’t you? Isn’t it a good thing that I do? We will all have more money….although some more than others and when that dries up we’ll change the rules to generate more and in the process we’ll all get even richer and live happily ever after….and if we don’t then you can at least be happy that I am richer and will live happily ever after and …………..you will all go baa baa baa.”

And what did the so called ‘wisdom of the crowd’ do?

Did the mesmerised mass eye this dirty wee inadequate tosser with suspicion?

Naw WE turned into the ‘madness of the mob’. After all “we are so feckin clever” that we had stopped listening after the “‘we will all have more money’ bit” and instead mouthed our gratitude….”Thank you kind man, you are indeed quite brilliant. Your plan is without doubt feckin magic….it is indeed A GOOD THING”

If only we had said…. “Oh no It’s not” or more aptly perhaps…“Oh No!!!! It’s snot”.

After all the whole of world history……THE WHOLE OF FECKIN WORLD HISTORY …….tells us that  having pointed us in the direction of doom, that brilliantly wee helpful shite at the crossroads will take his gnarled finger of fate, stick it down the throat of dreams and induce a technicolour boak of such gargantuan proportions that for the remainder of our days we will be trying to keep our heads out of the egg, peppers and tomatoes while buying in to the ‘the next good thing…..and the next ……ad infinitum’.

So to get back to Derek Nimmo, his band of O’ Brithers and that decision that is so obviously NOT GOOD  as it undermines just about everything that is positive in football; are we going to be really clever again and do nothing apart from hit the websites with futile words of rage?

Sadly I suspect we will.

But perhaps I’m wrong. I see that one new site has created at least a mechanism for doing something a bit more than shouting from the rooftops (More of that another time) and the peelers are doing everything they can to convince the nation that they are only only a few mudskips ahead of Sevco in their dash for a multicellular brain (more of those another time.)

I wonder mind you if perhaps we are being blinded by our effrontery and looking missing the real problem, for I believe that the LNS decision is fairly immaterial to you, me, football and Celtic in particular.

Incompetent and crass at best and corrupt and cowardly at worst as it may be, the mealy mouthed folly of a decision that was monumental in its undecisiveness leaving everything open to interpretation and nothing to logic or rationale is in itselfa symptom of a more pervasive disease. This real illness parallels that of the chancers who see the game as one big ponzi racket.

These inadequate hide in plain sight; they are here with us and accepted by us all….and THEY ARE NOT MASONS/LUDGE MASTERS or if they are, that is not their raison d’etre! But they are experts at what they do and as their occult cauldron simmers, they cast their spells and curses.

Guess who the evil intentions are aimed at? To say ‘fans’ or ‘supporters’ would be a generalisation. To say ‘the soul of the game would be too ethereal.

They are aimed at us….Etims (and other websites/blogs/message boards) because that is where the lifeblood of vision, opposition, ambition and imagination for the ‘truth’ lies. Already there plans in train to go for our jugular.

The ‘perps’ are ill matched bed partners with the money men….in fact the money men hate these witches and wizards, but they think they know how to use them; they think they know how to control them.  The fifth columnists in turn hate the money men; but they love their money and they think they know how to use and control THEM!.

This is truly a marriage that is fashioned in a loveless void…..the time has come to stop it…..AND IT CAN BE STOPPED.

This may be our generation’s last chance to retrace the steps back to every crossroads we’ve taken a wrong turn at. The past wrongs CAN be righted and those that would see Etims obliterated (and other websites/blogs/message boards), CAN be stopped.

As we revisit the decisions and reverse them we also need to ensure that we grab every devious wee turd by the scrotum and squeeze his nuts till his eyes fire across the wilderness like two lost scuds. With his entrails then hoisted atop our own standard we really can disinfect the past and get rid of the disingenuous homunculi who lied and cheated us of our sport.

This will be the ‘mucking of Geordie’s byre’ on a nuclear scale.

So who are these blackhearts………for obvious personal safety and security reasons I need to keep my own counsel….just for the moment.

However in part 2 I will cover just who is involved in this nightmare, how they are operating and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. I’ll show you how we allowed them power, and how we have failed to capitalise on their obvious weaknesses. I’ll demonstrate the immoral chains that bind them to those with cash and provide the first steps that we need to take in identifying who the individuals are.

And then in Part 3 …..ah, that will be the runaway rollercoaster ride as us and them hang on for dear lives as we pummel each other until one or other of us fall into the waiting swamp below where the sevco fans have just discovering the delights of an opposable thumb, as they stick it up their archie and sing gstq! Part 3 will also reveal how we get rid of the archaisms of the SFA, the self interest of the SPL and replace them with an approach that at least gives us a chance of regaining credibility at club and country level.

But to do any of this we have to make sure it is us who hang on to that big dipper and we must start that planning NOW! …………..Well after part 3.

For instance, look out that window again; that monster is at our gates and in tow it has already recruited one of the fan sites; a site that apparently is championing the cause that the future of Celtic/Football would be assured if European football adopted the Russian/Ukrainian model.

At times I shake my head in weary disappointment. Has our support been subjected to a surreptitious lobotomy of any vestige of not only our founding principles, but of the basic ethos behind any sport?

Russia and the Ukraine may not be the worst when it comes to football corruption and abuses of human rights but that’s only because other eastern European countries treat their players according to 17^th century conventions on ‘how to keep your slave under control’.

I’ll reveal more of that in part 2 as well.

So for the moment, keep safe and if you feel the approach of the creatures of the night, just remember “Who ya gonna call?”

THE ETIMS NEW MONSTER BUSTERS ARE HERE!

Eat yer heart out now Shyamalan!

Hail Hail for the moment.

Estadio