#so i decided to check out that blog for old time's sake and HOLY GOD

[ukiyosen]

just made the mistake of scrolling through the writing prompts page after like a year and oh god i have THOUGHTS

[jackie-shitposts]

I Thought Thieves Love Jules!

Carmen strolled out of the elevator, feeling pretty beat after her workout with Shadowsan. Not that she would ever admit that- she had wanted to keep going, but it had only been two days since she got electrocuted in Egypt, so Shadowsan made her cut her workout short while he continued. Carmen sauntered over to the counter, taking a long drink from her water bottle, just as Player’s image appeared on her laptop screen. “Check it out, Red. Julia just posted a new entry on her blog, about a recent find in Columbia.” Player said, ”But it totally digresses into fun facts about fair trade coffee, including a “Red Blend.” Carmen leaned onto the counter. “Could be another riddle to solve?” “Good thing I learned a thing or two about code-breaking from Julia.” Player smirked, clearly excited to show off his new skills. “Every paragraph ends with a number. If you line ‘em up like they're a date and time, it’s tomorrow at 8am.” “Seems Chief wants an opportunity to thank me over coffee.” Carmen quirked an eyebrow. Seems as though she’d be seeing her favorite agent-turned-historian-turned-agent-again in the field, per Chief’s request. “How can you be sure it’s not a trap?” Player asked apprehensively. “If it were, Jules would’ve worded it differently.”

“OoOoO, are we talking about Jules?” Zack asked, peeking his head out from the doorway.

“That ACME gal Carm has a crush on?” Ivy chimed in, peeking her own head out from under her brother.

Carmen rolled her eyes at the sibling’s cartoonish antics. “Jules and I are just friends, you two.”

Ivy scoffed, entering the room and flopping onto the couch.  “Yeah right- then why did you specifically go to her when you needed help decoding the relics?”

Carmen casually took a sip of her water before answering.  “Jules was already familiar with VILE- getting a stranger involved would’ve only made things more complicated and dangerous than it already was.” Zack hopped onto the couch opposite of Ivy, resting his feet up on her knees. He pointedly ignored Ivy’s protests of, “Zack, gross!” and smirked at Carmen. “Oh? Then why did you ask Devineaux where she was in Louisiana?” “Hey, you never told me about that one!” Ivy gasped, feigning betrayal. “I was just surprised ACME let that driving disaster use a car,” Carmen quipped. Player laughed on his side of the screen. “Don’t act like you’re any better, Red. Don’t you remember your first caper?”

Carmen gasped, pretending to be insulted. “Says the 17 year old without a learners permit.”

“Not like I have anywhere to go.” Player laughed, before refocusing on Carmen’s interrogation. “Speaking of firsts, how about when you first met Julia? I listened in, and it totally sounded like you were flirting with her. You called her “Jules” on your first meeting!” Carmen narrowed her eyes at Player in defiance.  “I was just sitting across from Jules so I could blend in while keeping an eye on Paper Star. And what’s wrong with nicknames? I called Crackle “Gray” and Ivy “Ives”. I don’t see what the difference is.” “The difference is that you and Cracker used to be best friends, and now we are best friends. However, you and Jules were not friends at the time.” Ivy said, emphasizing the nickname. “His name is Crackle now.” “He went and rejoined VILE, I think I get to call Gary whatever I want.” Player chimed back into the conversation. “Why did you leave the Magna Cartas with Julia, anyway? You had one conversation with her, what made you think leaving them with her meant they were in “good hands?” “While sitting next to her, I noticed Devineaux’s briefcase, and she said they were travel partners on business. I figured that meant they were law enforcement also trying to recover the documents. Leaving them with Jules simply saved me the hassle of returning the documents myself.” Carmen explained casually. “What about the fashion show in Milan, Carm? Why’d you have Julia help us then?” Zack asked, a shit-eating grin plastered onto his face. Carmen sighed in annoyance. Why won’t they just get off her back about this already? “Jules was the only ACME agent around, and I knew that ACME would be able to get the gowns to safety. And before you ask,” Carmen pointed at Ivy, whose mouth was already open with some smug retort, “I put her in charge instead of you because she would know where the gowns could be put for ACME to return.” At that, Ivy simply leaned back onto the couch and mirrored her brother’s smug grin.  “Yeah, that was a fun night.” She smirked, and Zack tried to hold back his laugh that came out as more of a snort. Carmen raised her brow at the untold story, but she decided not to press. For the sake of her sanity.

“Well, what about Stockholm?” Zack blurted. Ivy and Player’s eyes snapped to Carmen, looking for any hint of discomfort, and Zack immediately tried to rectify the situation. “I-I mean, yknow, you just were gonna go try to get her help before-”

Carmen cut off his anxious rambling, smiling warmly. “Don’t worry about it Zack, I know what you mean. I wanted to talk to Jules to see if she could get ACME to back off. While that obviously didn’t happen, I know Jules didn’t try to betray me.” Carmen glanced out the window for a moment, whispering quietly to herself. “I don’t think I could be angry at her if I tried.” Carmen turned back to her friends and smiled. “Plus, she helped me out in Monaco and Ile De L'oleron afterwards, so-” Player practically leapt up from his chair, causing a loud crash as he knocked the fidget spinners off his desk and dropped the rubix cute he was playing with. “Yeah, let's talk about Monaco! You can’t tell me you guys weren’t flirting at the party. She was so confident you were going to deliver the goods to her door, and you trusted her not to stop you when you stole the eggs. Come on, Red, you know she was flirting with you!” Carmen felt Zack and Ivy’s eyes on her expectantly, and she chuckled at Player’s exasperation. “Player, I’m pretty good at reading people, and I’m fairly certain she wasn’t flirting with me. Even if she was, I was not flirting ba-” “Then what about the roses?”

Carmen’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. How did Zack, of all people, know about the roses?

“Oh my god, the roses! Carm, why the fuck didn’t you tell us about the roses?” Ivy exclaimed, springing up from her relaxed position on the couch.

Carmen bit her lip before answering. “They were just flowers, as a thank you gift for the help. How do you know about them, anyway? I didn’t buy them until after you guys left.”

At that, Player piped up once again. “So Red, you know how at the end of each month, I look through our funds and see how much we spend on capers, to set our budget for the next month? Well, it was pretty interesting for me to see that you used our encrypted card to buy a bouquet of red roses from the flower shop across the street from Julia’s apartment, on the same day we left her the goods.”

Fuck. Carmen needed to shut this down, now. “They were just a thank you gift guys, nothing more. Just something Jules could keep for herself. And red is my color, so the roses seemed like a good gift. Now if you’ll excuse me,” Carmen glared at the redheads sternly, daring them to stop her, before looking down at Player with the same forbidding look. ”I’m going to take a shower. Player, let me know when you’ve got a red eye to Seattle ready.” Carmen closed the laptop, tucked it under her arm and walked out of the room without looking back. ~~~

The video call flickered to black, and Player leaned back into his chair, sighing. Red can be so thick-headed sometimes. As he booked her flight, he thought back to their teasing and banter from moments before.

Red seemed pretty genuine- maybe we were wrong after all.

Player took a deep breath- he didn’t want to call Carmen back so soon, especially when she seemed pretty pissed at the end of their last call- but he had booked her flight for a short two hours from now. So, Player reconnected to Carmen’s laptop, still looking at the red eye information on his other monitor, before hearing a loud, exasperated groan coming from his speakers.

“Holy fuck that was such a mess!”

Player’s head snapped towards his other monitor. The laptop had been set on the dresser across from Carmen’s bed, where she was laying sprawled out in agony. Player quickly hit his mute button and sat back to watch.

Carmen’s arms raised up to cover her face- though Player couldn’t see it, he was sure her face was covered in her signature color. “God, and the roses- why did I use the card for the roses? That’s a basic credit card slip, how am I so stupid!”

Carmen sat up, hands still over her flushed face. “I’m so fucking lucky they didn’t hear us on the ferry or at her office, there’s no way they would’ve ever let that go- I thought I wasn’t being obvious about this stupid crush-

That was all the confirmation Player needed. He clicked unmute and nearly shouted, “So you do have a crush on Julia! I knew it!”

Carmen’s head snapped up to the source of the sound, her face as red as her coat hanging on the wall’s hook. “Player! What the fuck are you-” Carmen froze as she watched Player pick up his cell phone. “Player, if you do what I think you’re about to-”

“Then what? You’re two thousand miles away Red, I'm practically untouchable.” He laughed and grinned smugly at the webcam as he dialed a number.

“Player, you are so dead next time I visit Ontario!” Carmen yelled before she threw her door open, barrelling down the hall to the stairway.

~~~

Zack and Ivy watched in silence as Carmen walked out of the room. When they heard the door to the stairway close, they looked at each other, before they couldn’t take it anymore and burst into laughter.

“Holy shit she looked so mad!” Ivy wheezed through her laughing fit.

“I know! Do you think that means she was telling the truth?” Zack questioned as he tried (and failed) to calm his giggles.

“No way.”

“But she seemed pretty-”

“What are you two laughing about?” Shadowsan’s stern voice stopped the twin’s giggling dead in its tracks. Just as Ivy opened her mouth to make an excuse, since she doubted Carmen wanted Shadowsan involved in her love life, (he is like her father, isnt he?) Zack spoke up.

“We tried to get Carm to confess that she likes Julia, but she kept on telling us she just likes Julia as a friend. Maybe she wasn’t lying, most of her reasons were pretty solid.” Ivy would’ve smacked him then and there if Shadowsan hadn’t interrupted her train of thought with a small chuckle. Since when did Shadowsan chuckle? “On VILE Island, Carmen was trained to be a master of deception. Do you not realize that she was also trained to survive any interrogation?” Shadowsan said, with…humor in his voice? Zack and Ivy were silent for a moment. “Wait, does that mean she actually does like Ju-” The moment was interrupted with a call on Ivy’s phone. When she looked at the caller ID, her eyes widened as she answered it and put the device on speaker. “Carmen does have a crush on Julia!” Player shouted from the phone, just as the Crimson Gay Ghost herself burst into the room and crashed into Ivy. “Dammit!” Carmen yelled, taking the phone from Ivy who was now on the floor with Carmen and laughing. “Player, I’m going to fly to Ontario and kick your ass!” Player’s laughing from the phone was almost drowned out by Zack and Ivy’s. “Oh no you’re not, you’ve got a flight to catch in two hours!” “OoOh where to? To go see your “favorite ACME agent”?” Ivy teased through her laughter. “Yeah Carm, I thought thieves love Jules!” Zack said as he laughed. Carmen jumped off of Ivy, her voice a noticeably higher pitch and her face extremely red as she shouted, “No! I mean- well, that is- I just-” As Zack, Ivy and Player continued to tease an extremely red-faced and stammering Carmen, Shadowsan smiled and quietly walked out of the room. It seems the war may be coming to a close with ACME on their side, but that doesn’t mean Carmen has to stop chasing someone.

[theliterateape]

How Free is Our Speech and Who Decides?

by Don Hall

"Donald! If you say one more word, I'm sending you to the Principal's Office! Just. SHUT. UP!"

Third grade. Mrs. McWilliams. As the resident 'new kid' I was isolated to begin with but I had ridden this roller coaster before. Two boys in class decided that I was their enemy (or rather the object of their boredom) and they had taken to stealing any toys or books or games I'd grab during in-classroom recess. This was the third time and McWilliams had had enough of my gift for non-stop verbiage.

There it was. They had ripped the CandyLand game out of my hands and aside from just marching across the room and beating them to death I had no options but to sit there and take it. McWilliams had completely cut me off at the legs. If I say one more word, I’m screwed.

Except…

I grab some construction paper and a crayon. I draw what looks like two parentheses with a line through:

( | )

Sort of like an early emoji before there even was such a thing. In my brain, it was a butt. Then I drew the same butt with lines coming out of the crack and another with several circles coming out. This was my best guess at drawing the litany of profanity I wanted to yell. My nine-year old imagination couldn’t come up with anything quick for ‘cocksucker’ or ‘motherfucker’ which, all things considered, was probably a good thing.

I walked over to the boys and flash card style, held each one up to them making a stern and angry face.

The boys ratted me out. McWilliams fished the paper out of the trash and LOST. HER. MIND.

Two hours later I’m underneath my mother’s dining room table waiting for her to come home and belt me. McWilliams was apoplectic; the Principal was horrified. They sent me home early and called my mom at work to tell her what a perverse and awful monster I was. I had drawn pornographic pictures in class!

In hindsight I get it. I was an obnoxious kid. I was smarter than most, was full of more energy than five teachers could handle, and I thought nothing of breaking the rules for the sake of breaking them. 

It seems that we are at an impasse when it comes to our personal rights to free speech. Laws against hate speech are already a violation of the First Amendment (which sets out that the government cannot create and enforce laws abridging speech) but we get around it by using the old chestnut of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The idea that by uttering racial slurs is somehow in the same ballgame is tenuous but still sticks.

The other side of the debate is accountability for words spoken or written. Call it whatever you choose—cancel-culture, public shaming, mob justice—it amounts to groups of people with no individual authority but the power of populist organization to effectively shame companies into firing offending employees. It also, on a far smaller but more destructive level, harbors a revenge justification against those who err in public for any reason (Amy Cooper is a solid example).

When the religious decide you can’t do or say something, well, Holy Shit.

The Critical Race Theorists who advocate curtailment of speech offensive to minorities insist that individual instances of hate speech are never the isolated, unpopular speech of a dissident few. Rather, they are manifestations of a deeply ingrained cultural belief system, an American way of life.

Hate speech is so dangerous because it plays melodies that are so deeply rooted in the culture as to be structural parts of everyday life for large numbers of Americans—perhaps even a majority.

“Your motherfucking son spray painted my house, bitch!”

The woman was a good six inches taller than my mom and outweighed her by at least seventy pounds. Earlier that day she had decided that I and my other eleven-year old friends were too loud just outside her window.

She screamed at us through her window. We cussed her and then ran off. I had come back with some red spray paint and had tagged the side of her house with a defiant “FUCK YOU!”

“What makes you think you can accuse my son of vandalizing your fucking house?” Mom was tiny but the Irish made her think she was much bigger.

“The little dumbass signed his name.”

She was right on both counts: I had signed my name because I was a little dumbass.

When a homophobe uses an anti-gay insult, he's signing his name to it. When a misogynist says something obviously anti-feminist, he's a dumbass. Things get stickier when the racists aren't dumbasses and refuse to provide an incriminating signature.

The question that some would prefer we check off in the “Answered” box is likewise a tangly mess. Is the n-word (a word so thoroughly aggrandized that, like He Who Shall Not Be Named in the JK Rowling books, the utterance has increasing and horrifying power) “hate speech” or just hateful speech? Is it racist or merely racial? Queer used to be a slur but when GenZ kids regularly describe themselves as such, no one calls the language police.

The lack of any clarity along these lines is resulting in a quandary for everyone involved in words or merely dealing with other people and being in a position to have to communicate with them.

In the film Dangerous Liaisons The Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) plots revenge against her ex-lover by ruining his young fiancée. There’s a lot of betrayal and a duel that ends in the death of a dude who duels and all. In the end, she is boo’d a bunch and she is disgraced. Now imagine if her big sin was to call someone something on the hate speech spectrum or espouse an ideology deemed wholly immoral. Sure, booing her then seems appropriate but for her to be completely eviscerated for it? To have the booing crowd pressure her work into firing her? Putting her behavior on social media so that she can never be hired again? Seems like an overreaction.

Seems like the permanent record one receives from going to a religious school.

Seems a bit religious.

When the religious decide you can’t do or say something, well, Holy Shit. You don’t have to go all Goody Proctor and the witches beings drowned to see if they could float to see a more recent example. Operation Rescue was the anti-abortion group in Wichita, KS when I happened to be going to high school in…Kansas. Randall Terry had a unique approach. If he disagreed with you (and if you were anything but fully anti-abortion in every possible scenario, he disagreed with you) he would yell over you instead of have some sort of heated discussion.

The local broadcasters stopped putting him on television because he’d just get on there and scream people down. As if, by drowning out their ability to communicate with anyone, he was likewise obliterating the message entirely.

He and his crew were out of control. They had determined that anyone associated with abortion in any way whatsoever was EVIL. In fact, I remember a group of them screaming at passers-by in downtown Wichita on Douglas Avenue for not joining them. They had extra placards with pictures of butchered fetus parts on them and were foisting them on people. If the person demurred (you know, maybe they had an appointment or needed to go impregnate someone so they could have a reason to slaughter the baby) the group would scream at them until they basically ran away.

At the time, I was anti-abortion but a prolonged summer of being around these religious screaming whack jobs changed my mind. Truly. My ideological change from pro-life to pro-choice had more to do with disgust over these idiots than any righteous belief in the autonomy of women.

This is not to say that I didn’t come around with a more progressive view. It took some time but a woman’s right to choose which surgical procedures she employs on her body is pretty much her business. If someone can elect to tattoo 75% of her skin, decide to stick Botox in her face, and fill her tits with silicone it isn’t much of a stretch that she should without obstacle relieve herself of a tumor that will become a human tethered to her hip for life.

The idea that human life is valued in the world is perhaps a goal but certainly not a reality. An ideal to uphold but not a realistic approach. Some lives matter. Lots of lives don’t so much.

Ideals are exactly that: goals. “I disagree with what he says but would die to ensure his right to say it” is a goal but would I really die so that someone unbalanced or religious is able to say “God Hates Fags” or “All White Americans are Racists”? Probably not.

Would I expect you to die for my right to say whatever I want? Not unless I'm a sociopath or a moron.

So no one is really going to die so that someone else can insult another person or espouse an ideology that differs from his own. Established fact. Where does that leave us as we navigate the increased opportunity to show our ass's in public more frequently (considering that social media and the whole of the digital highway is now quite public)?

Self censorship is completely legit so the folks complaining about people being afraid to speak “their truth” because of repercussions are simply pussies.

Around 2010, I was working for the public radio station in Chicago. I also had a blog from before I was hired. It was entitled (with an intentional wink at the rightwing NASCAR crowd) "An Angry White Guy in Chicago". Being fairly progressive in politic, the fun in the name was that people on the stereotypical raging caucasian dudes would jump on expecting me to parrot their ideology only to have themselves smacked in the face with articles against George W., in favor of the queer nation, and railing against the tendencies of unregulated capitalism. Also, as my mom used to point out, a lot of profanity.

The meeting was called because there were concerns about employees of an NPR station with social media and blogs. The concern was that these platforms might paint the station in a bad light if a lack of objectivity presented itself. The management had come up with a policy limiting our ability to utilize these methods of communicating and asking that they be able to censor us when necessary.

I listened.

My boss came over after the meeting.

“So, Don, what are you gonna do about your blog now?”

“Wrong question, boss.”

“Wrong question? What’s the right question?”

“What are you gonna do about my blog?”

He paused. “Probably nothing.”

“Good answer.”

I had come to the conclusion that any business that decided to censor me wasn’t worth my time working for and that has held true to this day. I suppose the fact that I’m not a racist or a sexist or a religious-type saves me from being relegated to the heap of dumbasses who sign their names to their intolerance. Being far more tolerant but more discriminating (or skeptical, I guess) has likely made me less odious.

At some point I did change the name of the blog mostly because, with Donald Trump suddenly in office, the joke wasn’t as funny as it was before. Self censorship is completely legit so the folks complaining about people being afraid to speak “their truth” because of repercussions are simply pussies. If you believe it, you can prove it, you should say it but don’t blame the mob if they don’t like it. This includes college professors, linguists, journalists, activists, and those dumb shits who think they can post memes on Twitter but shouldn’t lose their jobs if it’s anti-Semitic.

On the other hand if the best you can do in the face of language you can’t abide is scream down your opposition, you’re no better than the anti-abortionists of the eighties and you should look closely at your maturity level and how cultish your beliefs are. Chances are, if you’re so impassioned by your beliefs and refusal to hear anything that may contradict them, you’re a religious nut of one stripe or another.

“You’re a racist, man!”

The guy was in the casino I was managing, trolling around, trying to bum smokes and vouchers from paying guests. When I told him he couldn’t do that, he decided to play what is commonly referred to as “the race card.” This card has now become the rosary beads to flash around as a sort of secular religious icon.

“You’re racist, man!”

“OK. You still can’t solicit cigarettes or cash on the casino floor.”

“It’s because I’m black!”

“No. It’s because it’s against the rules. It’s a colorblind rule.”

“RACIST! RACIST!” He started screaming at me in order to what? Shut me up? Scare me away? He got loud and animated. I just stood there and watched him lose his shit like the girl who lost her shit on the white professor whose wife had written that college Halloween costumes are not the height of racist demonstration. You remember the video. I was mostly surprised at how calm the professor was in the face of such unrepentant childishness.

His accusation didn’t rile me up because I had no reason to be defensive. I know who I am and he doesn’t. He might as well have accused me of being a vampire or a Scottish lord. 

“You finished?”

“You gonna kick me out, racist?”

“I’m going to ask you to leave unless you put some money in a machine.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I’m gonna kick you out.”

“Because I’m black?”

“No. Because you’re an asshole and assholes can be any color under the sun.”

To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?

— Christopher Hitchens

It seems like an awful lot of this battle for freedom of speech is a struggle for who gets to say what without living-threatening consequence and who gets to dole out those consequences when they decide it goes beyond a predetermined boundary. The idea that those who can wield the iconography of secular religious thought are somehow the disenfranchised is a fantasy in the exact same way that the idea Christians (or Muslims) are in some way marginalized by those who do not believe.

These days political thought is indistinguishable from religious rhetoric. So many looking to assert the moral ground upon which we all must stand or be banished. The mistake made is to embrace the idea that the digital space is real life or even matters that much. As someone who dumped Faceborg a while ago and whose dick didn’t fall off and life didn’t end, social media is not the sum total of free speech.

A friend who works for Netflix recently made an off media comment that the company is noticing that the social justice crowd is fighting online for more inclusive and political content but that no one is watching it. This indicates that either they’re all just a bit full of shit or there simply aren’t as many out there as the noise of deplatforming and calling out signals.

The best form of “deplatforming” is to ignore the people who can’t understand that all speech is free but if you scream in the wrong person’s face, you’re gonna get popped in the jaw. 

Or at least kicked out of the casino.

[sublimenegroengram-blog]

Weekend in Prague

Hey again, it has been a while hasn’t it? (Got to stop starting my blogs like that). Anyway I have been up to many adventures during my absence, doing stuff like: firing guns, looking at strippers, getting drunk, neglecting my duties as an adult and the activity I’m most well-known for…..gaming! Fuck off I know what you was thinking you dirty little sket get your mind out of the gutter. Seriously though I went on a stag do with my brother as you know he’s about to get married.  We went to a lovely little place named Prague, had loads of history in the city and erm….loads of night clubs with women dancing naked in them. Here is what I experienced by only spending a weekend in such a place.

RIGHT, first thing. I was fucking waved on the plane. Yep 9am in Gatwick airport and 14 guys turn up to the Weatherspoon’s to have a few pints, now call me a lightweight I don’t care but seriously when you have had nothing to eat for the last 24 hours, a few pints of beer hits you like a rock bottom. Not ooooooooooonly did we drink there, we were drinking on the plane like we were about to shoot a music video on easy jet. I had 2 bloody Heinekens and a bit of Bacardi (gotta sneak that off duty stuff on. You know how it goes). Flight was madness, simply put. I, my brother and my cousin were all rapping to mask off by future, to the disdain of the other passengers but hey I payed for my ticket and we are giving you a free performance, be grateful. Not only that we brought a superimposed cut out of my brothers’ face on to the plane just in case you know, everyone forgot who he was. We weren’t the only people going to a stag do in Prague though, seemed like everyone had that idea down and good god did they put ours to shame. One group came in pink shirts, they all had this selfie of a man and a woman with the caption “we know what you’re thinking; we can’t believe he pulled her too”. That is a group chat level roast and here was us rocking our own clothes and some inebriated banter as a counter.

So when we got off the plan I was still tipsy carrying my luggage, walking into random people and saying sorry to inanimate and non-sentient objects because shit, I don’t want them snaking me to airport security do I? Anyway a top lad named Steve who was with us on the stag do decided to swipe my cousins passport while he went to toilet on the plane, this caused……a rather hilarious outcome.

 Cousin: FAM where is my passport?!

Me: *trying not to giggle* I swear you had it when you boarded

Steve: *looking at me* yeah he did, I saw him put it in his pocket.

Cousin: FUCK SAKE MAN I left it in the suitcase and we can’t even claim that past here!

Me: you’re stuck in Prague mate. I heard the men like a bit of chocolate in their diet.

Cousin: WHAT?! Ah man I fully messed up.

 We could have kept this going, honestly we really wanted to but the guy who was checking our passports at the little gate looked like he was one step away from saying “fuck it” and shooting up the lobby. So we handed my cousin his passport, I got punched in the arm causing it to go dead (even though I wasn’t the one who pranked him…..wanker) and we all skipped off into an uber and in to the city.

 So we’re in the uber now and we’re still drinking. I think it was dark rum I was having cause when we got out the cab I legit felt like I was walking on a cruise ship. Here is where it gets long, we go to the main lobby and we are all drunk. We had to then speak to the manager who (unsurprisingly) spoke very little English, tell him what rooms we wanted and where we wanted them and pray to god no one was occupying them. We were stuck in this little situation for a good hour trying to figure out what boss man was saying while he was trying to figure out what we were saying. We then had to fill out forms declaring that we would have our asses out of the place by 11am on Sunday. After all of that we just dropped off our shit into our rooms and then headed out to see what the city was like. Easy right? WRONG. 14 pissheads in a city they don’t know? It was like watching the chuckle brothers abroad.  We didn’t know where the city centre was so we kinda just wondered in a big group, hoping to see something that resembled a restaurant. These times I had to break the seal and because I didn’t know where the toilets were in this damn place do you know what I did? To save me pissing all this alcohol out on my jeans I clutched my damn piece and BOOOOOOOOTED to my nearest alley way, my first few hours in Prague and I was holding my dick running around the place, smooth Phil smooth.

 So when we headed back to the hotel after grabbing something to eat we thought “hey wouldn’t it be a great idea to rob my brothers clothes?” my brother obviously being the stag it was just right we pranked the shit out of him. So that’s what we did. When he was showering, someone snuck into his room and robbed everything. He only had the outfit he went to the airport in basically, He wasn’t happy. Not one bit. Just went full sniffer dog and searched every nook and cranny for his stuff. It didn’t last long because he could even find Madeline McCann if he was angry enough, anyway night time came, pre drinks came, cab came and then we hit the city properly…..or so we thought. See we ended up in 3 different caps, that’s ok. What is NOT ok is the fact we ended up in 3 different parts of the bloody city even though we all said “take us to old town” so I’ll tell you where I ended up. I actually ended up pretty close to old town to be perfectly honest, our uber driver dropped us outside a strip club though, and straight up there was a woman dancing at the door in a skirt shorter than my dads temper after arsenal losing on match day.  So after that brief encounter we met up with everyone and ended up in a club named M1. You can just tell British people were going to be in here, it’s named after a motorway for fuck sake. Needless to say the club was on point. Music? They dropped humble by Kendrick Lamar and a bit of giggs for good measure, when then happened the inner road man was unleashed in us all. It was a tad intimidating for other people seeing 14 guys go “HOL UP BITCH SIT DOWN, BE HUMBLE” over and over again while flinging out gun signs with our fingers cause you know…..gotta keep it south London. Now after that we all kinda wondered around for a bit, was about 1am and you know what? We ended up in a strip club.

Holy hell them places are crazy; these women do not skip a day at gym. They were climbing poles and just chilling at the top with a glass of wine. They were inserting some diabolical shit into each other…..no seriously….. Some of the dildos they had were possessed, that stuff was just drilling away and the women were just like “its calm fam, I do this on the reg”. Now I got approached by one as she offered me a lap dance, also she told me to stop snapchatting the footage because you sorta can’t do that…..ok who am I kidding she came to me to tell me to stop snapchatting. She did EVENTUALLY offer a lap dance, I politely declined cause I’m poor in another country and I’m also a gentleman (yep….a gentleman). See now the thing is she put her arm around me and cause I’m 5’2 and she was like 6ft in heels her boob was basically hugging my face. My words were muffled when I tried to talk to her and the whole encounter got awkward after 5 minutes, so much for my first time in a strip club ey?

Right this is really lengthy so I’ll cut it here for now but part 2 will be coming soon! I’ll also continue my Rutlish stories later down the line. Until next time ciao!

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