Hello, dear reader, and welcome to the main event! After spending more than a year setting the tone and meticulously laying the groundwork for this serial with the cluster of preceding posts I dubbed The Female Enigma Serial – Prologue: The Piper Parable, I am overjoyed to say that, at long last, now we can really get started! So with that memoir/tall tale malarkey behind us, let’s move on to the good stuff: the pure, unadulterated truth! Honestly, that’s always been where I felt both the most comfortable and most confident, and the thirteen months I had to wait before I could get to this point nearly killed me. Every topic I briefly touched on in the five-part prologue will be elaborated and expanded upon extensively in the posts to come, but I’d like to start things off with this first post by further introducing myself, the man behind the malarkey, and explaining why I created this blog, how it came to be, what my vision is for its future, and why I’m starting with this topic.

Note: Over the course of this serial I will do my best not to repeat myself too much regarding topics I’ve already explicitly covered in the prologue, although I’m afraid at least a bit of overlap is unavoidable.

 

 

Hi My Name is Mullarkey and I’m a Hopeless Romantic

Single… Wifeless… Virgin… Friendless… Relationshipless… Borderline morbidly obese… Drowning in debt… Obsessively compulsive… Hunchbacked… Excessive overbite… Glutton… Attention whore… Conceited… College dropout… Overly passionate about everything he’s passionate about… Shallow as heck… Greedy… Paranoid… Has pasty alabaster skin, apt to turning freakishly neon shades of pink, red, and purple depending on the weather or if it’s been touched… Jealous… Drama queen… Harbors a deep hatred for people he’s never even met like Drake and Tom Holland… Depends on his mother for so many things in life… Perpetually horny with no way to relieve it… Working in retail… Unchristian… Sinful… Lustful… Exceedingly neurotic… Utterly alone….. Uneven chest hair………. Neurodivergent…

 

I find a lot not to like about the guy in the mirror these days. With his innate ability to transcend all the malarkey I try to tell myself about who I am and what I’m not, he serves as a steadfast reminder of the pitiful, grating truth about this paltry life I lead. His influence is absolute and leaves no room to overlook, ignore, or omit a single shameful detail. Details, like the fact that I have been on this planet for 35 years and don’t have a single thing to show for it. That I’m basically middle-aged and still haven’t had a first girlfriend, first kiss, or first cuddle. That my solitary future terrifies the ever-loving bejeebus out of me and the notion that I’m running out of time and very well might die alone keeps me up at night. That there is a deep, physical, lonesome pain in the pit of my stomach that never goes away. That I don’t know if I can make the rest of this trip if it has to be on my own.

 

No spouse, no kids, no friendships, no titles, no degrees, no feats, no adventures, no pieces of writing that are even half complete, no great works of art, no additional languages known, and nothing of value or merit or note apart from having a pretty great family, filled with people who have done things with their lives. In other words, a complete and total nothing is what I see every time I look into the mirror, an empty husk of a man so wrought with personal despair and self-pity that he lacks even a single hope or dream to his name aside from an insatiable, undying yearning to be in a relationship… It’s all I care about anymore and it’s all I think about. I’m satisfied enough with every aspect of my life my life but this last uncharted piece. I guess you could say it’s my final frontier. 

 

 

 

The Mullarkey Mission

If you are reading this right now, I want to start by saying with the utmost sincerity, just one more time, thank you! My name is Mullarkey, and the content of this blog is what I like to call my malarkey. To be perfectly honest, you are the very reason that I made this blog, and you are what gives this platform purpose. This blog is my voice, and more than anything else, it gives me the means to connect with others who read it. I’ve always wanted to be the type that could write for my own satisfaction and have that alone be enough to sustain me, but that has just never been me.

 

From the first short story I ever wrote, I’ve been in it for the attention I get from my readers and the delight of watching or reading their reactions to what I’ve written. When my creative writing teacher in college used to read my memoir aloud to the class, I’d get high off the snickers I’d hear chortled from kids around the room and the smirks that would illuminate across their faces. There are not many things I’ve experienced in life that are better than that feeling, to tell you the truth. 

 

Although my motivations behind this blog may amount to nothing more than those of your run-of-the-mill, two-bit attention whore, attention is a very powerful thing, and enough of it has the potential to become something so much more than the sum of its parts. I think, for example, that with the right people reading it it might one day have the ability to elevate this blog from just a place I vent and share my thoughts into something that serves as validation to myself that proves I’m still worth a damn, a refuge for me to retreat to when I have nowhere else to turn and no one else to talk to, my salvation from a life of barren mediocrity, and my emancipation from a life with nothing to show for it, all rolled into one.

 

While the reasoning behind this blog’s existence may seem rather unambitious, the vision I have for what I hope it might become is exactly the opposite. Once I finish tackling this first serial about women and the like, my mind possesses a near-unending deluge of additional views, memories, life lessons, takes, tall tales, stories, anecdotes, memoirs, editorials, recommendations, and musings that I intend to cover in the serials and posts that follow.

 

I like to think that over a long period of time Malarkey With Mullarkey might grow exponentially, post by post, slowly turning into a sort of massive, multifaceted malarkey hub, made up of a catalogue with dozens of various branches leading to what will make up my entire illustrious repertoire of written works of all kinds. I like to think that maybe one day I’ll even be able to affectionately call this website my own magnum opus of sorts. Whatever the future holds for this platform, I’m so grateful that I’ll have people like you along the way that I can tell about the good times and the bad.

 

 

Mullarkey Me, Mullarkey You

While the egotistical truth may be that this blog was created solely as a means to garner kudos from my readers, what if what I write could be something more for some of you at the same time? Although I don’t claim to be any sort of ambassador for the various conditions and derangements I have become intimately familiar with over the years, like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Asperger’s, autism in general, depression, suicidal ideation, celibacy, and loneliness, to name a few, I do undoubtedly possess the unique ability to detail insightful first-hand accounts of each of them, and I think I’d be remiss not to recognize how invaluable such a thing could be for some people.

 

Not romanticized, exaggerated, fictionalized, sexified, and sensationalized portrayals of these things like those that are a dime a dozen in the media, but pure, unadulterated, raw, and completely true accounts, straight from the horse’s mouth! Although I’ve never been one to sing my own praises, I think it’s undeniable that for a certain group of marginalized people that can relate personally to my earnest testimony, along with anyone else that wants to relate better to those who do, some of the compelling accounts I provide on this blog might have serious potential to help both of them in some way, shape, or form.

 

 

Out of all the types of people who might derive something useful out of my content, I think it will hit those who can relate the hardest. My mental health rap sheet is miles long, and over the course of my life I have experienced a plethora of various sensations, urges, feelings, and thoughts that most have never known. Really, out of everyone I’ve ever met, the only people that have come close to being capable of truly relating to my illustrious psychological background on a real level have been those I’ve met at a mental asylum.

 

If you were to change that scale from those I’ve met to everyone across the worldwide web, however, I think the amount of people who can ascribe to my psychiatric mythos will grow by astronomical amounts. These emotionally damaged souls are my people, and I think they could get the most out of my content based on my own personal experience and how the stories and media that seem to be cut from the same cloth as me have always been my most cherished.

 

Whether it be championing those who are currently fighting mental battles similar to what I’ve faced, spreading crucial truths I’ve had to learn the hard way, or just providing pertinent insight for people who have never had to take Lithium or been tempted by self-harm, I like to think the content I’ve rendered here purely for selfish reasons also possesses the inherent, albeit initially unintentional, ability to be something special for some special people. Even if you can’t derive anything deeper from my content, it is my goal that you will at least find parts of it interesting, entertaining, or humorous enough to make you feel like your stay here at MWM was worthwhile.

 

 

The Good Life

Some of my “problems” I discuss here may seem trivial or trite, and just know that I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes I almost wish I had some sort of epic, three-act Shakespearian tragedy I could weave for you that would provide you with a more satisfactory reason behind my perpetual anguish, complete with awe-inspiring exploits of newly found courage, heart-wrenching catastrophes followed by life-altering epiphanies, and despicable acts of true villainy by larger-than-life antagonists that would all come together at the end to make for a masterfully fulfilling conclusion, flawlessly highlighting for you what has made me such a lonely coward. Truthfully, however, much of my plight is manufactured by my own mind, and the unsatisfying sum of the matter is that all things considered, I have a pretty good life.

 

 

I’ve got a tight-knit family that loves me very much and two places I get to call home, and I’ve never been without multiple pets at any point in my life. No one in my immediate family has any major health concerns like cancer, including myself; my parents are still together and madly in love, and I own almost every game and film I could ever possibly want—looking from the outside in, my life isn’t just objectively good, it’s great. Billions of less fortunate individuals would kill to have it, and before I go into great detail throughout the rest of this serial grumbling on and on about all the things I don’t like about my life, I think it’s important I preface it by flat-out acknowledging these facts.

 

I know that, to me, the pain I feel inside carries considerable weight and that my loneliness is far from frivolous, but no matter how many times I remind myself that the amount of hardship one faces in life is relative, all pain endured is valid, and that no one’s plight should be measured against anyone else’s, I still find myself wondering if all this emptiness I feel is just me not being thankful enough for what I do have. So while I may get rather dramatic while describing some of the ins and outs of my litany of quandaries, please know that I am well aware of the fact that in the grand scheme of things, all these problems of mine are purely first world.

 

 

The Closeted Extrovert

A true closeted extrovert at heart, I crave social interaction constantly and want nothing more than to be around people I vibe with as much as possible, but tragically have never possessed the skillset to see that desire realized. Instead, I have precluded any social advancement by settling for a quiet but easy life of seclusion and longing. Thanks to a developmental disorder, deep self-loathing, and more than a handful of insecurities derived from decades of failed attempts and abandoned hopes, any civil ambition I once had was snuffed out long ago. I don’t know if it was God’s callous jest or just cruel irony that I was born both with this profound yearning for social interaction and without either the charismatic aptitude or sociable savvy to see it quenched, but my social ambitions and desires have always far overreached my capabilities. It’s a quality that has come to define my entire life.

 

In my real life I have no friends, save my mother, but I’d like to think that maybe, after reading enough of my posts, someday you might be able to consider me one of your friends in a way, or at least as much as a writer can be with their reader. That is not to say, however, that my audience holds any power over my choice of the words I put to page. In other words, while I do think it would be neat if some of my readers came to look upon me favorably as a human as a side effect of what I post here, I am by no means letting that bashful fancy dictate or affect what I write or discuss in any way. Believe me, I’ve been down that road before, and it doesn’t end well.

 

When seeing the way I write on this blog, you’d be forgiven for envisioning me as some sort of suave smooth talker in person, with my wits quick and my tongue slick, but the tragic fact of the matter is that if you were to ever meet me in real life, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In actuality I am one of the most socially awkward people you are ever likely to meet, and you’d sooner see me dunk a basketball from a standing position than you would seduce a woman I’m attracted to. My Kryptonite has always been mingling with nice or beautiful women, despite the fact it’s what I’ve desired more than anything for as long as I can remember.

 

When carrying on real-world conversations with anyone but a select few members of my family, total jerks whose judgement holds no water, or customers I’m getting paid to talk to, I can’t keep eye contact for more than a split second, say anything I want to say with full conviction, or not come across as some sort of stumbling, mumbling, spineless poltroon who lives inside his own head and is afraid of his own shadow. I leave long, awkward stretches of silence when responding to others on the spot, where my brain goes to Defcon 1 and I frantically shuffle through dozens of potential replies in a frenzy, trying to find the most appropriate response before they disengage entirely and move on under the presumption I’m either just creepy, rude, or daft.

 

 

20/20 Perception

Living with these dire social deficits can get exceedingly lonely at times, and though they say Asperger’s or autism can have that effect on those that have it, I don’t think a diagnosis of either has to be detrimental enough in and of itself to mean the eradication of anyone’s entire social life. Rather, I think what can be attributed most to a lifetime of ostracization in my case is a hypersensitive awareness of my own perceived awkwardness by others, coupled with the fact that at my core I’m nothing more than a painfully shy, ultra-sensitive, and petrified little boy who cares far too much about what others think of him. Although autism can be, by definition, disadvantageous to the social lives of those who have it, it is my understanding that many who do are completely, or at least partially, unaware of the difference it makes in their behavior amidst social exchanges as compared to “normal” people’s. Because of this, they are unable to actively recognize how their interactions are affected by their social limitations as they happen. My problem has always been that I am painfully cognizant of my social quirks and shortcomings, have the ability to perceive how they affect my ability to interact with others, and can recognize in real-time when they take effect… or at least, that’s what I’ve always told myself.

 

I go through life, painstakingly scrutinizing every aspect of my every interaction as they play out, mentally identifying, annotating, and logging every mistake or ill-perceived reaction to anything I say or do from the other party to the most minute degree. Whether it be the alternating rhythm of or duration between my sporadic back-and-forth eye contact and how it may be interpreted, how the length of the pause I take before replying as I try to come up with the best response may come across, the degree of absurdity one of my botched responses may contain as soon as I finally do say it, the meaning behind the amount of movement and change in angle of the other person’s eyebrows as I speak, or how any tonal shifts or irregularities in my breathing may affect the other person’s perception of what I say, countless elements of my every conversation are scrutinized, thoroughly dissected, and painstakingly combed through in my extensive efforts to interpret and identify any mistakes I may have made so that I may learn from them.

 

With this immutable social decipher running in my head at all times, overanalyzing everything I say or do, more often than not I end up telling myself that I’ve failed every interaction I have, the person I’m interacting with has negative opinions about me, and that I should be miserable. The only person I don’t go through this exhaustive deconstructing process with is my mother, because she knows me better than anyone, interactions with her are as safe as they come, and she would never jump to conclusions or harshly misinterpret anything I say or do as something it’s not. 

 

 

Of course, I can’t discuss this without also addressing the possibility that I am not nearly as astute as I think I am and that I might be way off base with the nasty things I tell myself people are thinking of me. Maybe that girl wasn’t thinking about how much she hated me the last time we interacted, maybe that guy didn’t raise his eyebrows when he said that because he was put off by what I said, and maybe that girl’s exasperated sigh had nothing to do with me. In hindsight I’d say these are very real possibilities, but the problem is that in the moment I can never acknowledge it. While I’ll never truly know for sure, I tend to tell myself I’m spot-on with every tell and hint and indication I think I pick up in people’s behavior and my own.

 

A coward in the truest sense of the word, while I want nothing more out of life than friends, companionship, and a lover, I’m so terrified of potential rejection, teasing, and fallout that I don’t even make attempts or try to reach out and grasp what I want so badly. Years ago I had reached rock bottom, and I needed to connect with people someway, somehow, lest I lose my mind completely. And although I may have been too much of a yellow-belly to make meaningful change in my life through affable fellowship, I saw something like making all of my deepest secrets public on the internet and telling my most intimately arduous stories to complete strangers as altogether feasible. I told myself cold, anonymous popularity was as good as flesh-and-blood communion, and enter, stage left: this blog.

 

 

Blogger Beginnings

As with all great institutions, I think that before we look at what lies ahead for the future of this blog, we could benefit by first looking back at some of the factors that led to its creation. As I sort of alluded to earlier, this is not my first effort at establishing a personal blog. About ten years back I was attending technical college for the first time, when I claimed a domain for my first blog under the Blogger banner, and in a lot of ways it was very similar to this one. Just like with this one, I started by creating a distinguished identity for the page, complete with a tidy webpage layout, aesthetic theme, and a clean, visually appealing logo. Also much like this one, I created it to use as a hub for sharing my memoirs and all my various other writings with anyone who wanted to read them. Once the website was fully assembled and live, I went on to post my writing regularly for years to come. I cursed regularly in my writing back then and used hyperboles constantly, but really, apart from that and the obvious design distinctions, the only discernible difference between that first blog and MWM is that I published everything under my real, given name. Tragically, it took me ages to recognize it for the mistake it was, and in the end, my first blog’s legitimate identity is what ultimately led to its downfall.

 

Just like with what I run into with MWM, my early posts took me so long to plan, outline, write, edit, finalize, design, and lay out that by the time I finally published them, entire months could have passed. But I told myself that was the only way to do it if I wanted to put out a quality product, and so that’s how I handled every post in the beginning. I took pride in my work and was immensely proud of my freshman effort in blogging that I had worked so hard at creating. I made sure to share my every post across all of my personal social media pages—something that came with the unintentional side effect of more or less giving anybody that had ever known me at any capacity throughout my entire life the ability to read my innermost thoughts, deepest secrets, and darkest desires.

 

From my past and present co-workers, fellow students, teachers, doctors, chiropractors, bosses, acquaintances, people I met at the mental asylum, people my family knew long ago from church, random people I used to know in high school, my entire extended family, and who knows who else now had complete access to everything there was to know about me, and any concept of privacy or secret was a thing of the past. I knew this would happen once I started making my most intimate thoughts public, but I told myself it would be a good thing, that it’d sort of just be like I was famous within my own circles.

 

Things went swimmingly for quite some time as I continued to write and my audience continued to read, and after a while I even got used to all the publicity I received at school and family gatherings. For the first time in my life, I was being noticed, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. As I went on, I got more and more readers, still mostly people who knew me in real life, and over time I grew to expect a plethora of “likes” on each post I shared, as well as at least a few comments and maybe even a share or two. This newfound acclaim was as glorious as it was intoxicating, but it began to influence my writing in ways that I failed to recognize for some time. Somewhere deep within my subconscious, every post, comment, and share I got was slowly chipping away at both my integrity and my judgment. I became addicted to this element of celebrity I had taken on, and after so many posts, its influence on my writing started to show.

 

 

Unscrupulous Endings

The hallowed role of writer was and is something I hold in the highest esteem and treat with the utmost respect and seriousness. Before long my first blog had amassed dozens of followers that faithfully read every word I published and, in return, gave my very existence purpose. I felt like without this purpose my work would be void of both worth and meaning and suddenly felt a grave responsibility to never do my reader wrong or take them for granted. In an effort to uphold this sacred writer/reader relationship, I brainstormed a rough list of a few unspoken obligations I felt I owed to my reader and needed to uphold at all costs—a sort of sworn solemn oath.

 

I needed to respect them and the time and attention they gave me by only telling the truth and by giving them the whole story and not pussy-footing around topics that I never actually cover in detail. Similarly, I could never censor or alter any details in any way. I needed to only give them something to read if it was truly worth reading, and I could never provide them with material that was too cryptic or confusing to understand, including making it easy to follow by using correct punctuation and grammar to the best of my ability. Before the sun finally set on my first blog, I had violated every one of these rules, and in the end, it was that treason would be its undoing.

 

While most of these violations didn’t rear their ugly heads until late into my first blog’s lifespan, I failed to both refrain from any censorship and tell the whole story from the very start. The problem I failed to recognize when coming up with this code of ethics was the fact that my mom would surely be diving eagerly into every one of my posts as soon as I churned them out, but there were certain things I wanted, needed to talk about that would have dropped a bigger bombshell on her than Little Boy and Fat Man combined. At the mere thought of her learning about the depths of depravity her baby boy had reached, subjects like sex, porn, masturbation, women, body parts, and all kinds of other more embarrassing or shameful subjects were completely off the table from the jump.

 

At first I didn’t think this one caveat to the content I could cover would give me too much trouble, but once I actually started writing, I realized the blow it dealt the identity of my entire blog was positively lethal. Because of this, I walked on eggshells around any topics I was writing about that somehow touched on a no-no topic, and at times I even straight-up omitted vital pieces of the story because of the thought of her reproach. Regardless what the people today would have you believe that restrict you from using words like “die”, “shoot”, “bomb”, and “boob” on social media, censorship is never the answer to anything, and when it alters a work of art it’s downright blasphemous.

 

 

In addition to my heinous censoring, I would also occasionally alter my language to fit what I wanted the people I knew were reading to feel. I didn’t realize it until it was too late, but the element of celebrity I had taken on within my own little bubble came with unforeseen effects on my content. While writing, I would picture in my head specific people reading it and then make slight alterations to my writing based on how I wanted that person to feel towards me. Depending on the reader I was imagining and what I wanted them to think, I would exaggerate, downplay, warp, or otherwise alter certain details and variables in my writing accordingly. If I thought it’d make a girl I liked giggle, I’d put a humorous spin on something, or if I wanted her to feel sorry for me, I’d play up the emphasis on the sad aspects. Other parts I would make broad tweaks to based on how I wanted my readers to feel about me in general, making myself seem more heroic, less creepy, more likable, or anything else I desired. These altercations started out small and went unnoticed by me initially, but eventually I realized what I was doing, and they got progressively more exaggerated over the years.

 

The final mortal sin I committed while running my first blog was rushing posts. Smitten with all the attention and praise I was getting from every direction, it wasn’t long before I grew addicted to it. Sitting with that addiction for a while led me to start caring more about the attention than I did about whether or not the pieces I was putting out met my quality standard. Over time I started cutting corners in any way I could to expedite my process as much as possible just so I could get a hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine that came with their reactions a little bit faster. This inevitably led to a litany of half-baked, incoherent, and incomplete posts riddled with all manner of glaring mistakes, from grammatical errors to disjointed ramblings that no one could make heads or tails of. Like how I made alterations to my language, I think this hastened approach at putting together content was something I was sort of willfully oblivious to at first, with it manifesting itself initially as just a heightened sense of urgency to publish more content and do it fast. Somewhere along the way, however, and only after releasing butchered post after butchered post, I caught on to the sabotage that my blog was facing by my own hand.

 

This first blog of mine ran strong for more than 5 years, but in the end I knew my content was too far gone for any hope of redemption, and it was time to deactivate the site altogether. To say I was devastated by the reprehensible ending to this thing I had created entirely by myself and was more proud of than anything else in my life would be an understatement of biblical proportions. Honestly, I don’t think I can put into words just how hard this hit me and how much I hated myself for it. I promised myself I would never make another blog, and after so many years this first blog of mine became nothing but a blight on my past that I did my best to forget ever existed.

 

 

Mullarkey Origins

I censored details because I knew my delicate mother was reading, I altered language to make myself look better to the people in my life that were judging, and I rushed posts to publication because I wanted to bask in the attention I’d get from everyone I knew both online and in real life. Ultimately, these were the three primary factors that led to the shameful downfall of my first blog. If you were to take each of these three components and break them down to their root causes, really, they all come down to just one thing: The fact that most of the people reading my content knew me personally. It took years for this revelation to come to me, but when it finally did, so too did the idea for a new blog that I would write for under an alias, strictly for strangers.

 

I had had several other sporadic urges to create a new blog over the years since I had stopped actively writing, but this was the first idea I had for one that presented a solution to the biggest dilemma I ran into with my first. It was a curious enough idea, but the problem was that I had never fully rid my conscience of what happened with that first blog and remained steadfast in my affidavit to never make another one. I simply didn’t want to risk it suffering the same tarnished fate. I gave myself all the reasons in the world not to jump back into the blogging game, but even in spite of them all, this inkling of an idea for an anonymous blog persisted to take root in the back of my mind, where it would remain for almost another year.

 

 

Conception

The more time that passed where I didn’t have the ability to share my thoughts with the world, the more I missed it. I am a writer, after all, and after keeping the inner workings of my mind—Freudian and otherwise—under wraps for nearly half a decade, my insatiable need to set them free became too much to bear, and I finally came to the conclusion that it was time to open another blog. This idea never got past the pondering stage, however, mostly because I felt like I couldn’t even get started until I figured out what its signature shtick would be, and my idea tank was bone dry.

 

Rotten Tomatoes has their tomatoes that vary in freshness depending on the quality of the movie they’re representing, Liquid Death water has their whole badass metal niche with skulls on all their products and the tagline of “Murder Your Thirst,” and Fallout has its trademark retro futuristic analog tech and Vault Boy mascot that always pops up on any in-game (or in-show) signage or literature: Like these prime examples of fully realized shtick, a blog is essentially a brand, and I couldn’t so much as claim a domain name or design a logo until I had established a concept of the identity and themes I wanted to use. Even more important than this, I needed to come up with a pen name, an alias, a moniker, or a title to call myself that would fit right in with the chosen identity and themes. I let even more time pass, unable to think of anything. Then, in January 2020, everything changed.

 

I’ll never forget how it happened: I was hanging out with my mother not long after our whole family had just gotten together for our annual Christmas celebration. The festivities were through, everyone had gone home, and it was the new year. We were both sort of dealing with the usual post-holiday daze and regaining our bearings as we tried to readjust back into the harsh real world after a couple weeks of sweets, bonding, and merriment. We decided to go to a matinee at the local theater, as there had been a new movie playing that I was dying to see: Greta Gerwig’s retelling of the coming-of-age classic, Little Women (2019). Her previous film, Lady Bird (2017), had earned the title of my favorite movie of all time, so my expectations for this quaint little film were through the roof. Not only that, but Lady Bird herself, Saoirse Ronan, was playing one of the leads in the film as well, and she had likewise earned the title of my favorite actress through her masterful depiction of the titular onscreen persona.

 

I was beside myself in anticipation of catching a glimpse of Greta’s newest offering, but alas, fate had other plans. Just as the opening titles began to roll, I had a sudden jolt of an epiphany as a random idea popped into my head for the shtick question I had been mulling over for months: I am Mullarkey! My writing is my malarkey! Malarkey With Mullarkey!!! Suddenly I could see with my mind’s eye an early rendition of the header you can see now in the upper left-hand corner of this page. The idea came naturally, as my lineage is overwhelmingly Irish (from my mom’s side) and I’ve always been very overenthusiastic about my green heritage. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t come to me sooner. I could hardly sit still in the theater chair with my breakthrough jitters, as images of clovers and all things Irish whipped through my brain, and any hope of following the film became entirely futile.

 

As the film progressed I slowly pieced together the rest of the identity for this blog: The color scheme, the logos, the rough layout, the headers, the footers, and every piece in-between came to life in my mind. The only problem was that I am a bit of a forgetful Franny when it comes to ideas I manifest and want to remember for later. And since I’m a proper moviegoer who would rather eat stale popcorn than even think of using my phone during a showing, my only hope for not letting this new vision slip away forever the next time a different subject popped into my head was to repeat every bit of it over and over and over again until the end credits rolled and I could at long last get to my Notes app. To this very day I haven’t a single bloody clue as to what that movie is about. It would still be years before the actual blog materialized, but after that day I did create a Malarkey With Mullarkey Instagram profile and started posting memes, songs, and a variety of other random things I thought were neat to fill the void of not being able to post actual posts yet and get some exposure before I had my blog. 

 

 

Birth

I managed to remember every last bit of this blog’s shtick I had come up with in my head by the time I could get to my phone, and frantically wrote it all down once I did. It wasn’t long after creating the Instagram that I purchased the domain for www.mullarkey.blog and broke ground on this site. So, armed with nothing but a wee bit of unhoned, natural aptitude for writing and a genuine desire to connect with others, I rolled up my sleeves and got started. What I didn’t realize, however, was that WordPress is much, much more complicated than Blogger, and between learning it, designing various bits and pieces, and writing for my first serial, it would be another couple of years before I’d actually go live and publish my first post on November 9th, 2024.

 

 

A true product of my environment, I chose to make the subject of my first serial about all things related to the thing that never wandered too far from my mind: women. When I finally started publishing posts I was at rock bottom, at a time I’d never felt more alone, unheard, or emotionally drained, and this blog became my sanctuary. A place I could always go to to speak my truth to the world and be heard by somebody, anybody. Just like when I started out with my first blog, my posts were few and far between due to my efforts to ensure I didn’t put out complete garbage, but I was writing and sharing again nonetheless, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

 

Infancy

A bit more than one year on, and I had a five-part prologue to my first serial posted, along with a smattering of a few memoir chapters I wrote in college. It was much, much less than I was hoping I’d produce by then, but I was still proud of my measly sum of entries. And, just as I had hoped, writing under an alias gave me a type of freedom with my writing that I had never before had, and to this day I have never censored, altered, or rushed any content.

 

 

No Filter

Malarkey With Mullarkey is many things for me, not least among them a fresh start. I plan on not only using this platform to amend for all the ways I went wrong with my first blog by never falling into habits that betray the reader, but also by going a step further and doing the complete opposite. The way I used to censor or alter content, for example: Because my identity is unknown to you, I am unconstrained by your judgement and am therefore free to describe everything I discuss in such painstakingly explicit detail that you’ll practically have a one-to-one representation of what I’m describing.

 

I don’t know you, you don’t know me, and by not having to earn brownie points with you, I have the unique ability to speak straight from the id with no real consequence and say anything at all that I want to. You will only ever get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth here, and there is no such thing as TMI. I am in the business of telling truths, and business is booming. Whenever I bring up a topic of discussion or depict anything through my writing, you better believe I’m going to take full advantage of my station by spilling the tea and highlighting every last solitary particular. 

 

My brother likes to use the phrase “no filter” to describe his lifestyle, and I never really got it. But now, with this blog, I do. I have spoken through so many filters throughout my life with almost everyone I talk to, using them to dictate what is and isn’t safe to say, but this blog is where all of that dies. On Malarkey With Mullarkey, I am nothing if not a completely open book, and I pride myself on that.

 

 

The Female Enigma

Because my two biggest struggles in life are my loneliness and my incessant desire for companionship, there was never a doubt in my mind what I would write about first on my new blog. And, like when my dad was going to teach me how to play the guitar in high school and I didn’t want to even start unless I had a ’59 Les Paul Custom, I do everything I do either all or nothing. Because of this, I didn’t want my first serial to just be a comprehensive summary of women, love, sex, romance, and courting as they relate to me, but an exhaustive, all-inclusive, and complete covering of them and everything remotely related to them, as they relate to me, without a single overlooked beat or detail.

 

Making a few topical blog posts “all-inclusive” is a tall order by any measure, but it’s one I aim to conquer by the end of this serial through anecdotes, personal stories, painful truths, solemn secrets, contrasting comparisons, and anything else I find necessary to get points across. So in the posts to come under this “The Female Enigma Serial” name, expect to see these things covered the best that I possibly can.

 

 

Next Time, On The Female Enigma Serial…

 

“A Surrogate Social Life”

Over the years my job at the department store has been so, so much more than a job to me. To tell you the truth I don’t know if I could have made it through these years without the social exposure it affords me. But then again, maybe becoming so reliant on something so phony isn’t such a good thing…