THE RICHIE ALLEN SHOW

I don’t say this often, well, amybe I do, maybe I say it a lot, maybe I say it a lot more than I think, more than I realize, but if I do, if I do say it a lot more than I realize, you need to realize I must really mean it a lot, cause I will not be bullshitting you, I will not be bullshitting anybody, least of all myself, I’d just be shoveling bullshit back into me own mental housing-estate, stinking up my own self-respect and probing integrity, trapped wallowing in my own bullshit all me life,,, Which is one definition of commercial radio, I shoveled up enough bullshit there when I was building myself a career not a life, part of the job-description in any mainstream media, withholding so much of your livelier thoughts and opinions, too often asking questions you know you’ll get no real or even wrong answer to, cause it’s your job to make it sound all right! I was leaving too much of myself at home. So now I’m at home, unabridged, un-redacted, no accountability except to myself and any guests I choose to invite into my home, all the men and women who’ve informed and fascinated me with their unabridged, un-redacted thoughts and opinions, storied interpretations of how and why this world got to be as it is or as it seems to be, experts from their own chosen field in which they feel perfectly at home. I didn’t invest all this sweat-equity to feed on muppet-puppet-platitudes and bullshit placebos. I may have the gift of the gab, but I swear I’d chew me own bollocks off if I ever start sounding glib! I don’t want to leave one cliché-ridden bone in me body untouched and contaminating me human natural! We can agree to agree or agree to disagree. Though as an interviewer I’m always inclined to find something to disagree with, cause I’m a big fan of a good agreeably un-agreeable argument, more likely to enlighten the world with its’ multiplicity of disagreements debated un-disagreeably. Unfortunately so many of the people I truly disagree with decline my invitations. But I do live in hope they might eventually see the value of disagreeing agreeably and the world will be a better place for it! I don’t want anybody apologizing for what they think, I just reserve the right to disagree with ‘em! And thereby hangs a lively chat-show!

And am I looking for the truth or just a lively chat-show? But it’s not about me. Well, maybe it is, maybe a lot more than I like to think it is, but if it is, I’m just another fella’ traveler on my own self-inflicted journey to enlightenment or otherwise! I’ve always considered myself a “decent bloke”, a “regular guy”, as the Yanks would say, just a baldy bespectacled Irish Paddy of a drainpipe sluice, as I would say, tryin’ to separate the sewage from the crystal-spring-water, a trained journalist gone rogue and resolutely independent, no auto-cued virtue-signaling :snowflake” who’d cover up their own trigger-warnings just before they shot you in the back point-blank! I’m not a “truth warrior”. Anybody calls me that I’m liable to punch ‘em in the nose, make “truth” more complicated than they ever fucking dreamed it was! If I have to tell somebody they’re lying, they must be a better liar than they thought, if they don’t even know it themselves, and why would they believe me? If I can convince you I know the truth better than you do, maybe you’re a worse liar than you need to be? I’ve never had somebody tell me I’m lying, cause I never tell anybody I know what the truth is, with a big T-T… I’ve just looked at the evidence and formed a credible opinion. Sometimes it seems plain as day, sometimes as murky as being three sheets to the wind and just as volatile! But if somebody rips me toenails off, tosses acid in me face, sticks a red-hot poker into me gut, then tells me it was an accident…Why the fuck would I not think they were lying!!???

Of course I would never really punch somebody in the nose or stick anybody in the gut just for calling me names. I’ve been called a lot worse than “Truth warrior”. Just rolls off me back. Sticks and stones, 1066 and all that…Though I was once told that Zen masters would every now and then whack their students with a big stick when they were least expecting it, catch ‘em off-balance, bring ‘em back down to earth, their minds too far gone into empty space! It’s all about balance, balancing something with nothing into a well-being everything. I’ve been told many times I think too much, you’re thinking too much, Richie, you have to try not to think too much! I’ve never been much of a meditator. I think the closest I’ve come to thinking nothing is after a few pints in the pub watching a football-game on the tele’, England at least making it to the last sixteen of the World Cup! cause I may be Irish, but I live in England, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdogs!

I was out jogging the other day with my dog - I forget his name for the moment, but he’s a chirpy little fella’! Suddenly this terribly unchirpy fella’ starts screaming bloody murder in my face, for no reason I could think of. He was walking his dog, maybe I’d interrupted their meditation together, rudely dragged him out of his Zen zone..? He did piss me off and for a moment there came close to whacking him with a big stick to disarm his lack of mastery of himself! But I didn't, just kept jogging on, left him screaming bloody murder to the wind of a world that had obviously robbed him of any peace of his mind he had left, a world that didn’t give a flying fuck about his mental derangements. needed to get something out of his system. And I did feel bad I couldn’t help him at all. I was told later he was a local looney, best to just ignore him. But I couldn’t help thinking that was no solution at all. I read somewhere that meditation is like a catalytic converter, soaks up all the negative energies and reinvigorates ‘em positive. Sometimes you have to go comatose to get a fresh perspective on life, when all the wheels have come off your trolley, all your baggage piled on top, can’t budge it neither this way nor that and your plane’s leaving in five minutes!

But let’s get back to what I didn’t know I was saying a lot, but if I am it must mean I really mean it a lot and it’s not just bullshit. I mean, anybody puts themselves out in public on a regular basis is bound to start repeating themselves more than they’d like to think they do, to get their fundamental message across. Cause everybody’s got a fundamental message to deliver, and repetition is a fundamental way of eking it out from their generally scatological subconscious, right? Even the oldest jokes can still be funny, the oldest songs still comforting or invigorating, gateway mantras to re-balancing the nerve-endings. But if you never jump into fresh water you’re in danger of becoming a politician, thriving in your stagnant pond, caught in a rat-trap truly baited with bullshit, forever determined to calcify a system the bones of which are brittling all over the fucking place! Bullshit seeped into thisd world’s blood-veins, all patched up with professional ghost-scripts and photo-ops. Don’t take my word for it, listen to the Prime Minister, to all apparent intents and purposes one of the most powerful muppet-puppets on the planet, representing the will of the British People, the face of it’s decisions, democracy at work and play, the façade of its’ “duly-elected (sic transit Brexit malarkeyings)…recently divulging why she’s making a deal in case there’s no deal and how we need to deal with having to make a deal that’s no deal at all but she’s dealing with it cause it could otherwise be a very big deal if the deal is taken off the table altogether and we’re left dealing with the mess left on the floor of the House or - God forbid - having to send it upstairs to the Lords’ chamber-pot for them to deal or just shit all over it! And you can kiss my big sninny Irish arse, loving-pumps, if you think I don’t know they and you have already cut your own deal and it’ll have to be the good God’s jesus himself could convince me it’ll be any deal that benefits the commons, to be bent systematically ever more peer-shaped even in their own realm! We’re being fed the leftovers from Brussels’ own stink and I can smell it sprouting from here to Downing Street, via the White House and Tel Aviv!

I think we need to call the cops, but shite ‘n’ strike me down with a pink elephant I believe they’re already here breaking down me front-door! I must’ve gone the right way up the wrong-way system! Either that or I sprung some trigger-warnings on you-tube…I should never have posted that pic of me dear old gran with Val Doonican and a poster of Che Guavara in the background! Unless of course it’s my virulent periodical rants about that racist, apartheid, genocidal war-and-power-mongering, kid-and-motherfucking Zionist State of Israel, that would tirn the whole fucking Middle East into their concentration-camp, set an example for the rest of the world, then shovel out Holly-wooden holocaust industry memorial blockbusters to explain and justify its’ unimpeachable actions! And it’s them brought the anti-Semitic task-force to my front-stoop, pledged to rid the world of any Zionists who just want to be Jewish, and anybody else who just wants to be a human-being and not a fucking robot-slave!!

Maybe I just haven’t met the right robot yet? And if my dearly beloved future Mrs. A. is listening to this, I am very happily at home, darlin’, not prowling the local Apple store in search of cybernetic companionship! She knows who I am, as much as anybody knows who I am…Her baldy bespectacled Irish paddy of a drainpipe sluice who loves her to bits! Humble am I to the point of knowing it’s only love can break your heart, un-humilkiated enough to know it’s only not being able to freely speak and think your own thoughts and opinions can break your spirit! pharmaceuticals, vaccines, direct and indirect energy weapons can un-naturallky wear down your body… Fear of everything can obliterate your soul! If the only way to keep us safe is full brain and body-cam implants back of our eyeballs, so our government can always know exactly where we are and what we’re doing and warn us that something really wicked this way is coming!

Sometimes I feel like…I feel like we’re being frozen in time, this world’s being frozen in time, put into some kind of freeze-frame : one-stop shopping, one-screen-viewing, one-thought-thinking…Everything going so fast but to the same one place. And the quicker we get there the sooner everything else will be over, in a flash, a flash-flood of knowing we were wrong, we didn’t think it through, we let ourselves be fooled by so much glitter and sparkle, blinded our eyes to any real beauty, any real beauty of simply being natural, amazed by our human nature, curious, tender, resilient, creative, thoughtful, innocent of any crime that would defile its’ own innocence, utterly fascinated by this life on earth, that would carry on forever if we just let it be…in its’ own time…no artificial deadlines. Sometimes it feels like we’ve created our own disease, so we can spend our lives looking for a cure, looking for an answer to a question that didn’t need to be asked in the first place. But experience seems to tell us that we’ve already lost that innocence and there’s no going back to the garden, too many weeds grown up, too much lack of tenderness. And we’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. So if there is a cure, if there is a cure for this disease it’ll have to come from ourselves. Go looking for somebody else to find it for you, like looking for a haystack in a fucking needle!

The biggest thrill I get on this journey, my own self-inflicted journey to enlightenment or otherwise, the biggest thrill I get is when somebody changes my mind. In one moment, one living breathing moment, one light goes out and another light comes on, and suddenly the room in my head gets so much brighter! And I wonder why I hadn’t just switched it on for myself in the first place? Somebody else had to do it for me, show me where the switch was, and they did…And I feel so fucking grateful, so humbly un0humiliatedly thankful that somebody has given me this gift! I don’t say this very often, and I’m not sucking up, not kissing anybody’s arse, not patronizing anybody at all…but thanks, man! Thanks, woman! Whoever…thankyou from the bottom of my heart! cause at that moment I know without a doubting shadow in my heart that this world doesn’t yet belong to robots and psychopaths!

It’s about the process not the product. You want product, go google yourself into a smart-phone… And if you think this is a load of old bollocks, feel free to tweet me.. Right of reply…I’d prefer no death-threats.. But other than that you can say whatever you like, cause I’m a thick-skinned baldy bespectacled Irish paddy of a drainpipe sluice, who may sometimes sould like I’m a foul-mouthed dickhead talking through his arse, but everything’s connected, and if everybody could just connect their arse to their mind and their heart, maybe there’d be nobody crapping bullshit at all!

Now I think it’s time for a little Billy Joel!

**** A pastiche tribute to the actual RICHIE ALLEN whose podcast regularly informs & delights me. Should he ever read this, I hope he’ll forgive, I couldn’t resist.