title: I Went to the Worst of Bars Hoping to Get Killed. But All I Could Do Was to Get Drunk Again
author: Ciran g Arnold
description: "I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again" is a diary of sorts, following invisible men, down piss alleyways and into empty bars. The photographer accompanies the seekers of oblivion, their lopsided faces caught between ecstasy and apathy, their mouths chasing the numbness of inebriation. 
  
  This is Ballinasloe, a sandstone town on the River Suck in the easternmost corner of Galway in Ireland, seen through the eyes of a native, Ciarn Og Arnold. Within the rabble, Arnold trails after the cast-offs, invisible men who spend their time in murky corners, choosing to do nothing but drift and drink. Ballinasloe is a mouth; in Irish, mouth of the ford, mouth of the crowds. We claim to hate it here, writes Arnold,  but the truth is that we choose to stay, hiding from reality, drowning in drink and wanting to be left alone as we await whatever fate is in store.
  
  Over the years, Ballinasloe has become a ghost town, its immobile economy holding back only the indifferent. Its empty clubs are the ordinary voids of an orthodox escapism, the unvarying nightly vocation that is also creeping annihilation. The town is haunted by the absence of those unseeable others, who have also departed  the suicide kids of Charles Bukowskis poem, from which the books title is taken.
  
  Ciarn Og Arnold (b. 1977) is an Irish photographer who studied at the University of Ulster (MFA Photography, 2012). His work was included in An Irish View at Rencontres dArles in 2009, and featured in Source magazine. As winner of the 2015 First Book Award, his book was published by MACK, and the work exhibited at Media Space, London. This is Arnold's first book.
zlib_text: **Jim Thompson**
  
   **Savage Night**
  
   **1**
  
   **I'd caught a slight cold when I changed trains at Chicago; and three days
  in New York-three days of babes and booze while I waited to see The Man-hadn't
  helped it any. I felt lousy by the time I arrived in Peardale. For the first
  time in years, there was a faint trace of blood in my spit.**
  
   **I walked through the little Long Island Railway station, and stood looking
  up the main street of Peardale. It was about four blocks long, splitting the
  town into two ragged halves. It ended at the teachers' college, a half-dozen
  red brick buildings scattered across a dozen acres or so of badly tended
  campus. The tallest business building was three stories. The residences looked
  pretty ratty.**
  
   **I started coughing a little, and lighted a cigarette to quiet it. I
  wondered whether I could risk a few drinks to pull me out of my hangover. I
  needed them. I picked up my two suitcases and headed up the street.**
  
   **It was probably partly due to my mood