Who knew the Chaosettes were so now? We knew we had a bit of style. Moxie. There’s even a pretty one (Amiee). But the zeitgeist? So that’s what was in the bottle the man gave us. He may not have had a puppy in the van, but his candy was good. We like the idea of making stories out of games and games out of stories.

Take a few minutes to watch (Bostonian — AHEM) Seth Priebatsch’s thought-provoking TED talk about ‘the game layer on top of the world’. The next decade, he says, will be the “decade where the framework for the game layer is built”. We want in. We are in. We are so totally in.
If for some reason that video doesn’t want to embed for you, click here.

It’s hard to explain what we do, what a Chaos Thaoghaire event is like, or even what it all means. But those of you who have come, or are regulars, or have walked out in a huff will know that we take our commitment to the ludicrous seriously, not because we’re wacky or quirky, but because we like the idea of creating a sort of story hothouse. By turning everything upside-down, enforcing a set of rules, and shouting and banging a lot, we like to think people forget they were ever self-conscious and just get with the story/game sausage machine already.

There’s a game layer on the top of our world, and it’s in a matrix of stories, most of them funny, and, as we learned at the last Chaos Thaoghaire event, many of which frequently involve references to real or simulated awful, awful things done to real or imagined or synthetic representations of creatures often found on a farm. What is it to participate, anyway, you ask? I ask.

Oh, and some of you are wondering how I got out of the woods. Keep wondering. Wonder real good.

Anyway, it’s far too nice out to be in this house, and the kitchen smells rotten, and I’m typing this standing up, and that has nothing to do with anything, does it?

Thanks to everyone who came on Wednesday night, especially our storytellers: Jaime Nanci Barron (who curated), Jimmy Duggan, and Mary Kate O’Flanagan. Well, and me, but really I’d rather thank you lot for listening to what turned out to be a much longer story than I’d intended.

While you’re waiting for us to get the whole night online, check out our August Chaos history.

If you’re not sure what we mean, you should be aware that we use the Chaos Thaoghaire Time Machine to travel back to olden times in the Swiss Alps and change the future according to our lady whims. Does this past make my ass look fat?

Before you go, be sure you check out documentary producer and local wit Jimmy Duggan talking about sexy sex sheep.

More soon, promise. One of our friends is overstimulated, so it’s time for a few awful realities to keep his mirth from escalating to joy. Not in these parts, you don’t, mister.

Stay tuned for news about our Electric Picnic appearance.

It’s not relevant, it won’t help our search rankings (because we have to compete with all them thaoghairetical physicists out there), but it’s the sort of title you come up with when you’ve found yourself, not once, but twice in the Hieronymous Bosch horrorshow that is Tesco in Ringsend. No garlic or bananas, but plenty of garlic bread, and streams of banana Yazoo for the fiends. There was a live man in the queue doing chickenlingus on a whole roast bird, right through the plastic. I left with some orange squash, some Panda peanut butter, and an old grapefruit I wrestled off a slightly older lady.

I came home and lost my appetite to the sound of someone vomiting out the back door of a neighbouring house.

Anyway, I guess to make it relevant, I’ll pretend I’m talking over the PA system in a real Centra. Do they have a PA? Or do they just do Adrian Kennedy phone show?

Attention all shoppers:

Quick change of plan! Due to a total bummer all around, Charlie Connelly won’t be able to curate Wednesday’s Chaos Thaoghaire. We’re bummed. We hope he’ll give us a raincheck because he’s deadly.

But don’t fret!

You there, in the “I’d do me” shirt! You can read Nuts when I’m done here .

We will be expertly curated, amused, delighted and otherwise charmed by the newly-wed Mr Jaime Nanci Barron, whom you will remember from February’s Sex Chaos (you can listen to his story “I’m TALKING to Nick NOLTE” here: http://chaosthaoghaire.com/uploads/jamie.mp3).

That baguette is not for sale!

We will also be joined by screenwriter, everything-writer, all-around excellent woman, Mary Kate O’Flanagan, telly producer Jimmy Duggan, and nonspecific media what’s-the-opposite-of-darling and Chaosette, Me, telling a true and also truthy tale that is sure to lose me the respect of my remaining peers.

As usual, Chaos Thaoghaire will kick off at around 7:30, upstairs in The Odessa Club, Dame Court, Dublin 2.

This joke is getting old! I’ve always wanted access to a PA system, but I forgot to think of something to say.

Where was I?

Since I’m easily frightened by chewing gum, spiders, Jeff Buckley’s singing, and my local supermarket, sometimes I go to the Baggot Street Tesco, where no one knows how to fashion a Chipstick into a shank. Not too long ago — like maybe two weeks ago — I saw these stickers.

If you have a set of eyes and they’re connected to a brain, it will take you less than two weeks (or two weeks less than it took me) to notice that these are all over the place near the end of Baggot Street. Or were about two weeks ago.

What gives? Has anyone solved this delicious mystery? Given that they seem to have appeared well after the 20th of May of this year, I’m guessing it’s the sort of in-joke that forms on a night out, and that’s a lot more poignant/funnier/deeper before the West Coast Cooler wears off. Only one person takes it totally seriously and goes panting around with an armload of stickers.

Did they get their Russia on or what?

The top one says, “Call me and we walk to Moscow on 20th May” and the bottom one says, “Met you this weekend. Miss you so much.”

Being a major sap, I’d like to think two consenting adults either found each other, or at last discovered that fine and wavy line between stalking and romance.

Here’s a close-up of one. My Android camera is a bit crap.

It’s August, brah.

Since we’re not particularly concerned about the actual truth here at Chaos Thaoghaire, we’d just like a good story to go with it. Can you write us one? There are 10 — count ‘em: TEN– Chaos points for the person with best story to go with these stickers. That’s enough to get you started with the victory dance in round one, only to be knocked off your smug perch by the time you’ve seen what we’ve got in store for you in round two.

THAT’S RIGHT, YOUR SMUG PERCH.

For a whole host of reasons, only some of them financial, I didn’t get a vacation this year. The last time I took so much as a weekend away for pure pleasure was June 2009, and I could lie and say that I’m not looking for sympathy, but if I weren’t looking for at least a little, would I bother saying so? Would I bother even referencing the nearly THIRTEEN MONTHS since I actually got to go anywhere for fun?

I would not.

But it’s not my point.

No. In light of my inability to afford even a few days away (and now it’s time as much as it is money), I’ve been doing a lot more aimless wandering closer to home. The directionless, plan-free wander, the long sits and stops for snacks, and extended, meandering conversations — they are all things I require to be happy, and I’m not that bothered where I do them, as long as I’m fed, exercised and conversed.

I used to be a bit of a checklist-traveller. I’d see every major sight, archaeological site, and any minor attraction that related even tangentially to one of my interests, until I realised that my best days, at home or abroad, involved walking and loitering like a proper flaneuse. I like the mental productivity brought on by bouts of mobile laziness.

Turns out that silly-season experts agree, not with my excuse for laziness, but that it’s not that important how long your holiday is. The intensity and quality of experience is more important than where you go or how long you stay.

While in some ways I’ve had the most traumatic summer since the one where I cashed in the savings bonds I got when I was born in order to have an utterly terrible time in South America with someone who didn’t love me even in the slightest (the story behind ‘Anus and Andes’, which I’m not telling anytime soon, primarily because it’s kind of a shit story), it’s also been the best in years. I’ve worked harder, been through more, and have not left Dublin except for work, but I feel like I’ve been on holiday for months.

I’ve spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly with friends, collecting people along the way, inventing schemes that may or may not come to fruition, swapping stories of our own failures, eating ice cream for dinner, starting bands that never find a drummer, living at the pace of thought. Or according to this dude, the pace of community. There’s even a prototype of a walking house, although I’m not sure that would focus my mind in the way that it should. I’d probably just get drunk on my own power and try to destroy the city.

I’ve always said that Dublin is like your neediest friend. You can’t love it, you can only exist in an uneasy codependence with it. It comes to your party uninvited and stays on your couch for three weeks. It gets your dog drunk, it breaks your mom’s good china, and perpetually owes you fifty bucks. It’s off the scale for neediness, and nowhere near as funny, attractive, important, or interesting as it thinks, and yet there’s something about the place, something fundamentally but endearingly dysfunctional that prevents me from ever fulfilling my promise that I’m definitely, absolutely, totally fucking moving home as soon as I get the chance. It’s got some kind of complex pathology that leaves it always on the brink of fucking collapse, and yet I just cain’t quit it.

Yesterday my friend Aoife and I ran/cycled/walked to the South Wall, picking and eating blackberries along the way, then talked shite as I poked at the ground, picking up bits of broken crockery and oxidised metal, and accidentally unearthing the spine and claw of an animal. Then we sat on the concrete in the sun and talked more shite that ended up turning productive.

I had every intention this summer of visiting a friend in Vienna, going to see my dad in Italy, getting back to Boston, maybe a trip to London (which I’ve still only seen in fleeting glimpses on flying visits). But this summer hasn’t been so bad after all.

Urban wandering rules. If you haven’t done any aimless wanders in the city yet this summer, why not? Leave your camera at home. It only makes you postpone the experience. Get ice cream for dinner. Start a band or join the Go-Gos cover band I’ve been trying to start since 1988.

That post had a totally different point when I started it. Or actually had a point. But it’s a nice morning for a run and I’ve been sitting here in the dark (if I open my blinds, everyone will know I’m a slob), and I have far more to say than you’ve got the patience to read.

But I want to know this: why is Belinda Carlisle wearing pajamas in that video?

How much of a story can you invent before you become a liar?

This piece was in yesterday’s Guardian and follows this piece by David Mitchell from a few months ago.

A good story omits or changes anything that might break the spell before it hits its absolutely-not-natural climax. It’s not a crime to write about a medieval peasant eating a breakfast no medieval peasant would have had. I’m not worried about what you’ve had on your Corne Flaykes, so long as you tell me something I didn’t already know and cram in a few poop jokes and a pun or two.

And then there was this piece in the Boston Globe, about Eben Horsford, inventor of double-acting baking powder and Viking Boston. I didn’t have a clue that I came from a makey-uppy Norumbega until I saw this on the Cartogrammar blog a few months ago. The Globe article makes a point that I like to make about Celtic Ireland. Maybe it didn’t ever properly exist in the Iron Age, but by the 19th century, the construction of that collective historical memory shaped modern Irish identity. It’s not so much a lie as a truthy story.

Where’s the line, then, between fictitious history and historical fiction? And what makes a story true?

At Chaos Thaoghaire, we ask storytellers to be ‘truthy’. If we wanted a list of facts, we’d file that police report, and anyway, Officer, we really were just holding it for a friend, and also, my speedometer is broken and I didn’t see the sign, and MOREOVER, it’s not even loaded! We invite you to change names, dates, identifying details, anything that allows you to get to the greater truth that forms the foundation of any good story.

I’ll be telling a story at the next Chaos Thaoghaire (and I already know which one, thanks to your votes and my lack of faith or interest in the democratic process), and again at the Electric Picnic, but my memory is fuzzy at best, and mostly rubbish. I remember most of the facts, some of them vividly, traumatically, embarrassingly. I remember roughly how long I spent in those woods. I remember how long it took me to deduce that when a man in a car asks you if you’re “working”, he does not mean “Are you in employment generally?” The greater truth at the root of these stories is that what goes in one of my ears comes out of the other in about six shades of prismatic stupid, plus indigo. I used to feel bad filling in the gaps in my memory with what seemed like believable details, but that’s how we shape narratives. It’s not the details that give it meaning. The stories are true, but I can’t tell them as they happened. The only danger is when you confuse the greenhouse with a warm place to live.

Once you get down to the writer’s granular level, it might surprise you how much of non-fiction is invented, and how much of what gets called fiction is a lot truer than anything that relies on verifiable fact. The closer you look, the fuzzier the line between historiography and historical fiction, which is why the Chaosettes are quite happy if what you tell us is a kind of historical fiction. Which is why we love a Hills marathon. Which is why I don’t care if the Vikings didn’t land in Boston a thousand years ago. I like Horsford’s story better than the real one.

I quit a PhD (in archaeology, in case I’m so self-involved that I assumed you already knew) because I’d become the pigskin in a game of politics, but the other truth — the one I am happier to talk about because it doesn’t make me squeeze pint glasses until they shatter — is that I was beginning to have a crisis of faith in our ability to piece together a believable narrative about the past, no matter how many material memes we can get our mitts on. I never thought I’d discover anything major, nor that I was doing anything that would feed the hungry, solve the energy crisis, or heal the bloody rift between Heidi and Lauren, but I never found a comfortable vantage point.

It’s not that the facts aren’t true, it’s that I was arranging facts that weren’t mine, and I was more interested in the stories of the present and the recent past. Archaeology is like herpes or malaria: you’re infected forever, and you just learn to manage the flare-ups. But I stumbled into journalism and Chaos Thaoghaire as different ways of getting to the truth, demanding different forms of honesty and integrity. I’m much more comfortable crossing the rope bridge that is the shaping of non-linear memory and experience into narrative that serves our own ends, especially since Chaos Thaoghaire stories are free of the need for fact-checking (although I wish people didn’t also apply this to journalism).

I like this recent exploration of what historical fiction does, and the way these invented histories are being taken more seriously, partly because I relate it to the way we tell stories at Chaos Thaoghaire. We’re distinctly American oversharers, and influenced by the very Irish way of telling stories, with embellishment and fabrication. With a combination of historical fiction and fictional history, a series of carefully selected half-truths, lies, and unverifiable details, someday we’ll arrive at an honest story.

But it leaves us with another question: how much truth can you tell before you’re intruding on someone else’s experience? I guess I’ll find out when you punch me in the face or when Heidi and Lauren finally rear up and rip out each other’s vertebrae.

Please don’t punch me in the face.