Peering Through Misty Windows

The Bosphorous

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:43:24 +0100

We went away for her birthday – although by the time we were actually going, I had forgotten what had made me want to take her. An eastern city she hoped would be filled with eastern promise. For me, another attempt to win a mother’s love, and fail somehow, and only then realise that I had been trying. Even in the airport, she merely followed, like a dog. Her mantra for the trip was that she didn’t want to have to think, which left me in the unfortunate position of having to think for two – not the easiest way to relax. I fought through the lines, the directions, the checkpoints – she floated in my wake, mind filled with the words of dead men whom she felt akin to. They would have dismissed her in a moment as a simple woman – but then that is the beauty of feeling a connection with the dead, you can assume they would have felt it too.

It was colder than we were expecting. We jumped on the last metro from the airport – running and giggling in heady expectation and nerves, knowing we were getting closer to our destination, feeling in our hearts that we were merely receding further from home, the string that attaches us across the world to love and security growing thin, disappearing into the darkness. The metro slid out, the carriage brightly lit, lots of men and one other woman, eyes and subdued foreign talk – they knew we were strangers – we felt unwelcome, but didn’t acknowledge it. We were too loud, defiant, but our stances turned inward, enclosed. The traces of western influence were everywhere, marring our tourist desire for exquisite orientalism. I was anxious for it to be what she had expected. A couple kissed greedily in the carriage ahead, a middle aged man looked on with disapproving jealousy. An elderly couple, large-nosed and dark-skinned, sat together without saying a word – when they got off, he led, she followed. My mother shouted out that we were at our stop. In a panic we jumped off, and it was the wrong stop, as I had guessed. A man opened the doors for us, and we got back on, but only just. I felt annoyed.

We got a taxi from our stop. As I conversed energetically, trying to make him feel as though we were friends, as though his comments weren’t falling on tired, desperate ears, she stayed quiet, refusing to engage, ‘not thinking’. I had to chat with extra vigour to allow for her. I had to remember that this was her trip. He tricked us when we got out, charged extra, pretending we hadn’t given him enough. We didn’t realise until the next morning in our cramped room that looked nothing like the ones on the website. She woke me with the news, said she’d known something wasn’t quite right. We lay in silence, and I fought the despair. I couldn’t help but be angry – I didn’t understand why anyone dwelled on bad things, but she did. She liked to. It was one of our many differences. Irreparable differences. But it had to be put aside, she hadn’t been thinking, and this was her trip.

We had two full days. By the second, my mother and I had grown sick of one another. I had grown sick of thinking for two, and she had grown sick of being told what to do. We chatted, miscommunicating, saying things that didn’t suit the other. Her quoting, me joking, both suffering. She read as I told an anecdote, and I told her it was rude. She told me I was very bossy, as we sat in the palace of the sultans and drank coffee. We were lost to one another, lost on the way. My heart cried out in agony, wondering how one could lose one’s mother. How one could dislike one’s mother, and want to love her so much as well. We walked home in silence. She went to bed as I cried in the shower. I thought my agony would fill the entire city, the city of our unhappiness. The enormous river that ran through it was the distance between us. I didn’t understand when it had grown, this void, or why, but now we looked at one another across it, and I screamed out to her, but she couldn’t hear me. She turned away and read a book by the dead.

This was our last night, and she refused to get up. She stood, tiny body, enormous presence to one who has been her child, and told me I was difficult to be on holiday with, on her holiday, and packed her case for the morning. She returned to bed, and I sat on mine, staring. My body was on fire and she couldn’t see it. My mother, the child. The petulant bitch. How had this happened? When I was small she had read me all of the Little Women books by Louisa M. Alcott. On Christmas Eve, she would climb into my bed and tell me exactly how the next day would go, unfolding each separate hour like a chocolate from a shiny, crinkly wrapper. Now we didn’t like each other, and I wanted to cry. I had lost my mother.

I told her to come out, I couldn’t bare the idea of having failed so completely. To have to acknowledge our loss. So we went. We had a meal with a chatty waiter, and went to a traditional show designed for tourists, overpriced. We giggled at how appalling it was, and at the ignorance of the Americans sitting beside us, with their eternal positivity, saying to one another ‘well, it was an experience!’. We mocked, and I secretly envied the simplicity of it, and we went home. The pain lingered, but not too much – we both counted down the hours until we got home, got to others who understood us better. I saw her writing in her journal on the plane. She said ‘looking forward to getting home – to house, kids, dog, guinea pigs, lover’. It made me wish the plane could go a little faster.

When we got home, people asked us about it, and we told them how great it was, how beautiful the buildings were, the weather, the food. We didn’t mention that we had lost each other, out there in the east, and that we could never find one another again. We didn’t mention that. Now we have coffees, and talk about things going on. We pretend that the river that divides the city is far away, and that we are no longer standing on the banks, as I scream out, and she turns away to read the books of dead men.

John Doe

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:39:39 +0100

He couldn’t breathe. He felt only the constriction, magnified, illuminated in his mind above all else, glowing, pumping along with the blood, the rhythm, beating below the tight tug of the rope, trying to push through, willing him to live. He wouldn’t live, although in this moment, when the choice had finally been removed once and for all, out of his control – victim of his previous self, of only minutes ago – he wished he could. He saw his stupidity, he saw with terrible desperation his daughter’s face, smelt her child-baby-power-warm-milk smell, saw summer evenings, low sun lying, resting on the edge of the world before slipping off to sleep, saw this from the rolling swirl of a convertible car looping around the bend of a winding road with no end up / down the coast of the American Pacific, high walls, steep edges, sound of the engine and the lapping lips of the ever-hungry, tasting sea below, smell of salt and gas and fresh freedom. He thought of his mother, holding him as a child, her arms wrapped tight. How long it had been since she had been his mother, and not that woman who annoyed him with her callous words and broad dismissals, and slept around, and sought forgiveness – sought and sought and sought until she had sucked the life blood out of you. Bundle of contradictions. Thoughts of his wife could not be removed from the realm of melancholia. Even the early days, that tug at his heart / stomach accompanied her image in his mind. They had met in the dark days of his life, they had wed in impurity, in filth, the filth of his daily existence, that no amount of Californian sunlight could penetrate – he lived in a state that light had forgotten, ignored. He lived in perpetual darkness, beneath the thick covering of his skin.

They had met on the set of a film they were both cast to star in – Big Pussies Get Fucked Hard 3 – in a big house in the lower hills of Los Angeles, a house where no one lived, used for films like these, soulless, just like the people who worked there. He had fucked her from behind while kissing some other woman – he didn’t know her name – as she groaned, pretending to enjoy it, in fact focusing on making her face stay sexy and holding her stomach in. Dettol Sex, he called it, the kind of sex you had in porn flicks. Every time he came he felt as though his body had betrayed him, and as though he had lost a small part of himself he would never get back, seeping out the end of him like gloopy, sickened tears. How could his cold, dead body produce that warm, creamy liquid, he wondered. But he was known for being a reliable actor. She had contacted him through his agency two months later. He had forgotten what she looked like, and approached the wrong woman in the corner cafe where they had arranged to meet up. He had dreaded it. Thought she wanted a date, tips, maybe she had thought she would be business-minded, make her own films, ask him to act in them, of course she wouldn’t be able to pay him up front she’d say, but if he would get on board, invest his time, energy and dick, she could set up the website, they’d be millionaires, she’d always wanted to direct. Fuck no.

The place they met in had been chosen by her. Pretty, corporation-quaint, on Melrose, with painted upbeat messages on the wall, colours, 20 kinds of tea – made-to-order individuality, barista’s reluctantly wearing nametags, smiling through gritted teeth for dingy apartments and a desire to make it big in Hollywood. The perfect place for people who had sex on film – a shrine to the unreal, the double-life, cognitive dissonance, the realm in which the population of L. A. Survived – just. She had looked the same as she had on set, fake, perky and plucked, smiley, giggly. He got the impression that she only understood about 40% of what was actually happening in the world around her, and that she bluffed the rest, through force of habit. She was not smart, and she was not naturally attractive, but through extensive surgery, training, semi-starvation and caked-on bronzer she had made herself sexually-edible. Rapable. And that was something at least. He wondered, as she chattered on dimly over her peppermint tea about different films she had worked on since theirs, and double-anal and cumshots and gang bangs, how she slept at night, if she cried at all, or went to sleep with the tv on, to drown it out. He imagined she didn’t cry, too real. Probably with the tv on. He didn’t think she was someone who would seek out company for distraction, who would fuck for fun. She was one of those highly sexed pornstarts who could now only see sex, intimacy, as their work – she had lost the original idea of what sex actually was. Perhaps she watched her own videos online in bed, but not for pleasure – to critique, to learn her best angles, to train herself, so she could make it big, be one of the great stars of the industry. He scoffed inwardly, with no outward sign, sipping his black coffee and appearing to react to her trite conversation – really? Oh, cool! Yeah yeah I know Mandy, great girl.. Oh you did? That sounds like fun, wink wink, nudge nudge, playful, authoritative, in control of this stupid female creature sitting across from him.

So it had come as a surprise, when in the carpark, she had blurted out that she was pregnant, and that she thought it was his. She couldn’t tell for sure who the father was, of course, she had been on the pill, but she was pregnant, and the timing meant it was either through their shoot or two others, but she had told him first, because she couldn’t remember the name of one of the other guys and the third guy refused to meet up at all – smart guy. So that left him with a maybe baby and a crying 22 year old pornstar with bleach-blonde hair in a parking lot in L.A., with passersby staring as they stood awkwardly in the dead heat and odd droning silence of a Sunday afternoon. The heat. Up close, with an arm around her shoulder as she wept, exposed, trying to pull herself together – don’t fucking cry, for fuck’s sake, don’t you know the rules? – he could smell her sweat, the only small evidence of her original state of being – human girl. In that moment, he felt sorry for her. He remembered, somewhere deep, the idea of real life, of not living / acting, of backyards with small blow-up pools and running around with a dog he loved but who died when he was in his teens and far away and who he had almost forgotten, and eating hotdogs in buns with ketchup and spilling it and getting a sharp smack and red hot tears and cool fresh sheets unexpectedly and just living. He asked her to marry him, and she had said yes. They never found out for sure if the baby was his, as soon as she was born it hadn’t seemed to matter that much, since he was the only dad she was ever going to get anyway, so they might as well make do, and anyway, they needed all the money they would have spent on the paternity test for drugs.

They didn’t suit one another, but she was grateful, and he was relieved for a while from the loneliness and deep terrible lack that his life consisted of – better to come home to someone you dislike than nobody, and there was the baby. But to pull it off, they needed the drugs. They had both dabbled before. But now on the long, bright West Coast evenings, light and unfulfilled potential pouring in through the slats of the cheap white plastic blinds of the front room on their red, sore eyes, when the baby was asleep, and the idea of having sex off-set made them both want to burn up in hot flames from a blowtorch their respective genitalia, drugs slotted in nicely. They would end their days in a haze of oblivion, get up in the morning, keep busy, until evening again. This life functioned as well as they needed it to. They did not require self-actualisation; they lived on the treadmill of life, running running and happy to be going nowhere. Once or twice, she had overslept for a shoot and gotten into trouble and done them out of at least two grand each time, which he wouldn’t even care about except that their smaller amount of money had to be spent on baby food or formula rather than quality heroin, and he’d be pissed off for a few nights and drive around until late and she’d put the tv on going to sleep alone, but they always pulled through – the next time she would let 5 guys come on her face and maybe double vaginal, so she’d get a bigger paycheck, and they’d celebrate.

He did love his daughter. The best he could. He would have given her anything, the problem was that he had nothing left to give. So then one morning, a Saturday, when his daughter was napping, three years old and curly-haired and full of tantrums – who could blame her, in this house? – and his wife had gone out to their regular dealer to try to get some stuff that they’d pay for later in the week – he had some idea how she would manage to convince him, he didn’t blame her either – he decided he’d had enough.

So here he was, in the closet, as the beam above him creaked, and some semblance of real life passed behind his eyes before the final gush, and someone cries cut in the background.

Friday Nights

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 22:15:38 +0100

When she walks out into the cold crisp yellow-lamp-light-ultra-violet-blue night, she is a tornado. She is a twister, an earthquake, a volcano. Her chest is writhing, tormented, shaking. Her body cannot express itself. It is too weak, too physical. She doesn’t understand, walking across the street, seeing the dull brown brickwork, the flickering lights of bluish television behind white lace curtains, how no one can hear her - she feels so loud - she is erupting.

Nothing stirs, except a cat, scurrying from below blueyellowwhite van to below blueyellowred car. Cats forever moving in the night, from one safehouse to another, back and forth, back and forth. Colours created by dusk. The world makes quiet world sounds - hum of street lamps - meandering cars - creaking on its axis. The distant hush__hush__hush__hush of the sea, in out, in out. She is dictated by the sea, the moon. She is nothing.

Sometimes she finds this a comfort. Her inevitable failures will not matter, they will amount to nothing, a whisper on the wind, too fast to grasp, passing. Now she finds it infuriating, intolerable - she is nothing, where she walks, this grey cement path, between blueyellowgreen grass, is nothing, doesn’t exist, because it didn’t exist, and because it won’t. (Her feet sound lightly, scuffing the cement - her pace is fast, she rushes to reach nowhere quickly). This grass grows, is cut, grows, is cut. It’s as simple as that. Nobody misses, remembers, the grass that was cut. Transience destroys her every thought, hope, dream - ha, to dream, she hates herself for even thinking of the idea of thinking of the idea of thinking of it. Push it away, away, away.

She despises being within herself, despises it. Impermanence. This flesh, if only to tear it were to reveal: She would tear it this second, rip-tear-lacerate - pump blood. Blood rich with what is inside her - blood of fury, hot-hot-red, pure red, and singing, screaming herself. But to tear her skin would reveal only more flesh, layers and layers of animal fat and bone and marrow. It would achieve nothing, and she walks on.

She is a tornado inside herself, a storm, a storm that leaks hot salted rain, and nothing more, and stops, because it achieves nothing, only trivialises. She wishes, as she crosses the road, whiteyellowbrightagainstdeepblue headlights in the distance, coming towards her - who? Home to bed, home to safehouse, hide, forever - she could be a lion for a day, and stalk an innocent antelope, watch it, smell it, desire it, and chase it down, and tear its flesh, claws and teeth, and eat its warm meat. She could do this and be satisfied, and share, and not talk, but share. She longs for that.

She cannot talk - she was not taught. She can imitate the sounds, and understand what is said to her, and she can pretend to talk back, but she is only imitating sounds. She has grown suspicious that the people who profess to talk to her, are too, merely imitating sounds. Sounds of their parents, of their parents, of their parents. She wonders which generation was responsible for forgetting how to talk. Maybe nobody ever could. She is not one to idealise the past, or the future. These sounds make her grow weary - they are exhausting. Nothing is said, but they require response. But to be alone - as she is now, watching the night set in, watching her breath before her, step right, step left, step right, step left - each breath one-breath-less to the end - ah, is that a comfort? Only if it is a choice - and how to be sure, that one has chosen, and not been forced to choose? There lies the eye of her storm. There lies her fury - insolvable: To be oneofmany - obliterated. To be one - isolated. To think of oneself so intensely - redundant, inescapable - layers upon layers of idiocy in a single thought.

She walks, and if our senses were of a different sort, she would be seen - by anyone who happened to look out from their yellowcreamwarm windows, to shut the blinds, to close the window - lock out the encroaching night, do not let it in - to be glowing, a raging red beacon, fire in the yellowlamplight-interrupted-darkness. As it is, she turns a bend, towards the sea, and fades, a deepblackblue speck in the deepblueblack night.

The Space Between Tick & Tock

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:50:19 +0000

The dissolution of her illusions made her feel shrivelled and worn and old inside – all used up. Like a balloon that has been allowed to stay blown up for days, and has deflated and become ugly and useless of its own accord, and all the more pathetic for the memory of what it once had been. As though her mind had been raped over and over without a sound until all of the worth she had felt in it was gone, destroyed. She didn’t even want to look at it. She sat on trains and rejected her thoughts as clichéd, pushed them out like playdough through a spaghetti-maker, looked at the sea and forced her mind to remain blank – no meanings, no metaphors. It was frighteningly easy. She watched television and only watched it – nothing else. She watched it the way obese people keep eating after they’re full, late at night, the way drunkards keep drinking, until they can stay awake no more, oblivion – fuck it, that had become her 21^st century-saturated mantra. And she loved it. What else was there? Worthlessness. People had for so long been focusing on the exterior they forgot there was anything else to see. And if that had happened now, who knows what else had happened throughout the ages that she was too stuck in her own particular time to appreciate. Young monks her own age and younger had spent hours and hours and weeks and years painting patterns into the margins of the Book of Kells. She could not comprehend believing in anything that much. She couldn’t imagine focusing on anything with that much dedication – except herself. She was her own God, her own Book of Kells, but she would have nothing to show for it throughout the ages. Nothing. She would be a statistic in an endless stream, a raging tidal wave of numbers. The general public, in the beginning of the 21^st century; there was her legacy. They would be talking about her. She believed and didn’t believe that people changed with society. She believed simultaneously that people had always been worthless and that they were becoming more so. It was a difficult combination to stomach. She had been better than this. She sat and thought - and disregarded her thoughts as having been thought better by someone else before, but unable to escape her own measly mind persevered in spite of herself – of how the progression of one’s life from birth to death is the slow acceptance of one’s lack of importance in the world, one’s inevitable average role in the system of things, in the mechanics of time. She was just a matter of a few clock ticks, a few bell tolls, and then on to the next, and what harm, what difference? None. She sat and looked, and tried to remember what it had felt like to have hope, to look forward to something more than the weekend or the changing of the seasons. She couldn’t remember, and she knew she had lost something irrevocably, something that had possibly been the best part of herself. And yet she couldn’t mourn what she could not grasp fully, and she sighed, and forgot, and returned to her surface self. Soon these moments of regret would stop altogether, and she would be left in peace to live life on the face of the Earth, without any delving or digging to find white rabbits down dirty, frightening burrows.

Let's All Sit Around and Watch

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:01:00 +0000

Television has a bad reputation. It’s widely considered to be a brain-dead activity, something that is taking over our lives, ruining free-time by creating a society of apathy that is lacking in creativity or communication. Nietzsche said that the modern attitude to leisure time as time to ‘relax’ after work would eventually destroy the intellectual mind, making people think that intellectual pursuits were ‘work’ activities, and thus not something they wanted to do after a hard day at the factory / school / office. Television’s presence in modern life is extensive, as research carried out by Paul C. Adams in his essay ‘Television as Gathering Place’, has found; ‘Watching television is the greatest single use of “free time”…not only in post-industrial societies such as the U.S., but also in industrial and many preindustrial societies.’ In 2011, Official Nielson figures showed that Irish people watched an average of three hours, thirty-seven minutes a day. That’s a lot of TV. One of the most widespread fears regarding television, is the view that watching it is an anti-social activity. It is well known that the TV must be turned off for family meals, and it is considered a little odd to have the TV on in the background on a romantic date. To an extent, this is fair enough - there are certain occasions when you do not need to hear Ryan Tubridy’s voice in your ear. Having said that, there’s something to be said for television’s presence in the room in certain social situations.

Sure, Nietzsche had a point about leisure activities, and it is true that television has its negative aspects. On the other hand, he also said that men ought to whip their women, and died alone and insane. Maybe, if he had spent a little more time chilling out with friends and family in front of the TV, he’d have had a little more to talk about with the people around him, rather than just writing away angrily in his room all the time. And maybe, if he’d had the opportunity to observe social norms as they are presented to us through interaction within television programmes, he would have been able to get a girlfriend without feeling the need to whip her to keep her in line. Maybe not, but anything’s possible.

My point is that television is a much more useful and necessary social tool than we give it credit for. I believe that television is a bonding device in modern society that allows for more successful interaction and communication in almost every social dynamic, be it within the family, peers, colleagues or couples. In fact, I would argue that many of the social situations we find ourselves in today would not be possible without the mediating device of the television. Television not only provides a talking point for other situations, but the activity of watching it itself allows for a time of communal experience without great effort on the part of those involved. This is also true of films, naturally. Think only of the dreaded First Date situation. Where would all these young budding couples be without the wonderful opportunity for shared experience afforded them through the cinema? We’d all be stuck at home alone like Nietzsche, that’s where. It has been proven that the activity of watching television – or in this case, films – is especially useful for male viewers, as it allows for a level of intimacy with another person that they are comfortable experiencing. This is discussed by Nancy M. Hopkins and Ann C. Mullis in the academic article ‘Family Perceptions of Television Habits’, where they claim that, ‘By focusing primary attention on the television, a simultaneous activity involving interaction can take place with the co-viewers. Touching is acceptable under those circumstances, while otherwise it may not be.’ In other words, no first moves would ever have been made were it not for the beauty of the screen. Thanks, TV.

Socially, it would be difficult to imagine life without television as a reference point. Friendships within school, the office or college, can often circle comfortably around the shared experience of watching a comedy together, or of watching a great movie in the cinema. It is possible now to quote television amongst your peers without even registering that it’s a quote – they have become so integral to communication, especially, I would imagine, in groups in their teens and twenties. I for one cannot imagine being able to find a single group of friends in Trinity who wouldn’t have automatic reference points (i.e. quotes) that immediately imply a shared meaning from a film or television. I can say almost anything from Father Ted – as can all of Ireland, surely – without ever having to explain myself; ‘I’m putting you on my list of enemies Tony’. For my particular group of friends, shouting ‘Father!’ and running theatrically away, would not suggest a sudden case of insanity, but instead bring to mind The IT Crowd, and through that, our trip to Morocco, where the joke was first formed. Thus one can see the associations brought about through the shared experience of television. Comedy in particular, as I think I have suggested, immediately creates a positive association. Standing around and discussing Peep Show is essentially modern day social code for ‘I have a great sense of humour, and so do you, this is great.’

It is also very important to consider the role of television within the family unit. Television is especially useful in today’s modern world, where parents can often be too tired after a hard day’s work to do anything energetic with their children. According to Hopkins and Mullins; ‘Joint television viewing requires little parental planning or input, unlike playing games or reading to children.’ Thus, although perhaps it is not as actively interactive as other options, it is also more realistically achievable, and provides a means of relaxation alongside familial bonding. It is also ideal for those parent / children relationships that may be a little more awkward and formal than others. Think of all those awful, austere fathers one reads about in old Dickensian-style novels. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if those fathers and sons had been able to sit down together and watch the rugby, or maybe even an old episode of Fawlty Towers? Look, for example, at The Royle Family. This highlights the importance of television in family relations two-fold. Not only do the characters of the family within the show base their entire lives together around television, but they are also in a show that is itself ideal for family viewing (it’s so, like, meta). Where on earth would Jim, Denise and the rest of the gang be without television? Certainly not sitting around together anyway. The incredible amount of time they spend together as a family is only made possible through the comforting background presence of television in the room. It allows for a natural flow of conversation that can end in a lapse filled by whatever is on the screen, rather than an awkward silence. This, although clearly presented in its most extreme form, is also true of real families spending time together. Having the television provides a safety net for the conversation – if there is a lull, or a lack of anything to talk about, one can watch, or discuss, what is on the screen. It’s a perfect third presence in the room – one that never stops talking, or get’s awkward, or goes to the loo and leaves you alone together with nothing to say – it’s brilliant.

Now I am aware that it could be said that family viewing is unlikely, that children are generally watching the most inappropriate things they can find, off alone in their rooms, avoiding communication, but it was found by the Irish Broadcasting Commission that in 2005, the show that had the greatest number of viewers between the ages of 4 and 17 on an Irish channel was The Late Late Toy Show. Now if that isn’t a family bonding experience, I don’t know what is. Certainly, there is the problem of what is being watched and where, but studies - such as those carried out in the article mentioned above – have shown that; ‘Careful and judicious use of television may suit the emerging lifestyle of dual-career couples and their children, especially if programmes are carefully chosen for co-viewing and attention is paid to the need for discussion during and following viewing.’

Thus I would like to conclude that television, far from being a negative aspect of today’s modern world, is a positive means of sharing and communicating with those around you. It is a very necessary social adhesive in today’s society where most technological developments only encourage further anti-social behaviour – innovations such as mp3s, kindles and lone-player video games. Instead of the old Irish tradition of a storyteller, we have television, a teller of endless tales about anything you like, with pictures to accompany them. Instead of the old English tradition of reading aloud after dinner, or perhaps listening to the young lady of the house play a little Chopin in the evening, we are free not to be bored out of our minds, and watch TV together instead. Not only that, but we can stay at home and wear snuggies while doing it! Sure, television is slowly turning our brains to mush and requires less energy than sleeping – but at least it’s doing it to all of us together.

Vixen 521

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:17:38 +0000

He had told me to meet him outside the drugstore at the corner of Lackan Park and Cuneas Street. I stood out in front, so he couldn’t miss me. It was cold. The glare of the gaudy white window shone upon me, the green neon cross, with its constant ‘hmmm’, expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting, forever, and ever. I looked out ahead; the park was dark. I heard the jostling buzz of traffic in the distance, faint sirens, receding horns, life going on - but not here. The street was quiet. I began to feel as though I were on a stage; on show, lit up so bright and the darkness all around – like there could be an audience out there, just beyond my eye’s reach. I always feel like I’m being watched when out in public. Always aware of how I would appear if someone were looking at me at that moment – ever the object. I tugged at my skirt absent-mindedly, and glanced at my reflection in the window. Fine, I’d had to rush, didn’t finish work until well past 8.30, then the Underground was late, and I’d gotten ready quickly to be here for 10. My lips were still ‘Vixen 521’ red. Red lips always made me think of sensual danger, as though blood stained, a devouring woman. Red lips telling a story of past sins; delicious.

I rubbed my gloved hands together to combat the cold. My breath made a billowing stream of condensation each time it left me, a ghost, losing a little of myself with every exhalation. What time is it now? I peered in at the clock behind the pharmacist’s counter at the back of the store – 10.42! I could’ve frozen to death at this stage! I let out a little groan, and started shuffling from one foot to the other to combat the freezing sensation covering my toes. I looked around, willing him to come into sight. A car crawled past filled with young, overweight Latino men. They were quiet, windows up, prowling the streets for something to do, something to ignite them – they stared at me, desiring me to offer them amusement, to give them a good time – I stared back in pointed disgust, then looked away, not wanting to give them an opening. The car trailed off into the blackness, the grumble of the engine fading to nothing, the tail-lights eyes in the back of its head, receding out of sight. It made me feel relieved, then oddly sad, abandoned, as I watched it go. I shook myself. If I had been waiting for anyone else, I’d be long gone by now; home, hot shower, bed, then on the phone to Nancy, talking about how I would give the guy hell next time I saw him. But for this particular man, I’d have waited an eternity. He was different. ‘Debonair’ Nancy had called him, when he’d stopped by the diner that night. He was a real gentleman, just like the ones you read about – dashing, tall, brown hair, blue eyes, brilliantly white teeth… His teeth were so noticeable – I’d never seen teeth before, the way I saw his, I’d just taken them for granted, but they were dazzling, hypnotically white. He was so beautiful. Beautiful. I sighed, and felt butterflies of expectation in my stomach, warding out the cold. I don’t know why he fell for me - it remains a mystery to this day, despite his reassurances and coaxing caresses. The first time we’d met was the night Nancy had called him debonair. He was in a booth, alone, a long camel coat folded beside him. He wore a grey suit, well-fitted, expensive looking, his face buried in the menu. I’d checked myself quickly in the mirror behind the counter before walking over to take his order – my blonde hair tied back in a regulation bun, my green eyes bright, my cheeks flushed from the hot kitchen. When he looked up, his eyes…his eyes! Everything else melted away, all I could see were those piercing blue eyes. I forgot myself, that I was a waitress, that I was 21 and had just come up from the South and lived in a flat on the outskirts of the city in a Greek neighbourhood. That my favourite food was P&J sandwiches, my favourite singer Van Morrison, the early years. At that moment I felt like whatever he told me about myself, or about anything for that matter, I would’ve believed. He could’ve told me the sky was red and I’d have argued it to my dying day. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before – it reminded me afterwards of those hypnotising snakes you see in the east coming out of baskets, the way their eyes envelop you, and seem to go in crazy circles - at least in cartoons. He told me afterwards that it was the two of us falling in love at first sight, but when I told Nancy she said it sounded like the two of us losing our minds at first sight. She hadn’t been a fan of us dating right from the start – she couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something about him she didn’t like, said he was almost too perfect, that you couldn’t get a firm grip on him, he was like sand slipping through your fingers. I didn’t know much about that, I’d always thought he was just the right amount of perfect.

As I stood reminiscing, forgetting myself, he appeared silently out of the darkness. The cat, which had been loitering around the bins near to me, jumped suddenly and scampered off, startling me out of my reverie. Before I knew it, he was all around me, embracing me entirely. His warmth reminded me of just how cold I was. Momentarily irritated, I tried to push him off. He grabbed my arms, and looked me in the eye without saying anything. I caught his stare, and he smiled. I couldn’t stay mad; I was just so happy to see him all of a sudden. I asked where he’d been, and he said sorry, someone he used to know had held him up, couldn’t get rid of them. I wanted to know more; who did he used to know? A woman? He smiled, and started walking, linking my arm. Yes, a woman – but she was gone now. I didn’t like it one bit. Through my mind went images of him and some beautiful, mysterious woman, foreign no doubt, and petite, in a wild passion, as I stood like an idiot outside a goddamn drugstore. As I brooded, and we walked in the opposite direction to that which the young men in their frustration had gone, away from the liveliness of the city in the distance, I felt him looking at me. But he wasn’t, he was looking straight ahead. It was more that I felt him looking in me. I felt ashamed of my thoughts, as though he could see them, and disapproved. He was a lot older than me. I pushed them out of my mind, and made myself think of the night ahead. Before I could ask, he said ‘we’re going to my place, I think it’s about time you saw it, don’t you?’ He smiled, and drew me near as we walked around the corner of Bauss Street. My stomach turned – his place. His home. It had become a sort of mythical place in my mind, as though it didn’t actually exist. I had waited so long to see it, had begged to see it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it now. I immediately wondered if it had anything to do with the woman he had just been with, and suddenly felt uncomfortable, although I didn’t know why. The street was yellowish and dim. As we progressed, a hum grew loud in my ears. The streetlamp at the far corner flickered and groaned, attempting to stay alive, to fight the fatigue overcoming it. There was something so desperate about it, so disconcerting about the erratic, jumpy light, I shivered. I felt a cold creeping over me. The isolation of the street, the quiet of the night, both slowly dawned on me. As he walked, I listened for his breathing, but somehow felt that I could only hear it when I actively tried. I grew uneasy, and I felt, as though in reaction, his grip tighten slightly around my shoulders. I had a sudden urge to turn back, but I couldn’t. What would I say? I looked up at his face, and saw he was smiling slightly to himself. God he was beautiful. I felt that familiar feeling of reassurance wash over me; but this time something of the uneasiness remained. This was a new sensation, to see him and remain unsure. I didn’t like it.

He led me down a maze of side streets for what seemed like an eternity. My nose stung with the cold, and I nestled into his warm body for protection. He wrapped his coat around both of us, never relenting his pace. I stumbled on, allowing myself to entertain the bulging dark notions that filled my mind. I was jerked back to reality by a sudden halt. I peeked out; we faced the enormous, ornate door of a building that stood cramped between other, similar buildings, on a residential street that was clearly in the higher-class end of the city limits. I’d certainly never been there before, and I knew the city pretty well. In fact, I was proud of my geographical knowledge of it. In the early days, before I’d landed my job in the diner, I’d filled my time by getting $1.25 trams all over the place and walking home from wherever I landed. Sometimes it took hours, but I was guaranteed never to make the same mistakes again. I had a mind for directions, and landmarks, just like my father; so I was told. I didn’t know, I could barely remember him.

He rooted a key out of his pocket, temporarily dismissing me from my warm coat-sanctuary, and fitted it into the gold-leaf lock. It clicked, the door groaned open. ‘You should get some oil for those hinges,’ I said in the hallway, shaking the cold out of my bones. ‘You could wake the whole neighbourhood with that big creaky thing.’ He smiled wryly, and said I was right, he should, but I could tell he had no intention to. I felt foolish. A realisation had been slowly expanding in my mind, like water in a balloon. As the door shut behind us, it burst, and flooded me entirely. I did not want to ascend the stairs to his apartment. Dread seeped through me. He walked directly behind me, so I couldn’t pause to get my bearings. I couldn’t let him see, even for a second. The fear was growing, fear of him knowing I was scared, fear of what lay ahead. My heart thundered, I prayed he wouldn’t hear it. All the while I kept my steady pace, and he kept his behind me. I felt his presence at the back of my neck, tingling. His foot fell on each step like the drum in a funeral march. The panic grew quickly, painfully in my chest. At that moment, all I wanted was to be at home, in my Mother’s house, in my own bed, looking out, through the mesh that stopped mosquitoes entering through the open window, at the stars, hearing only the hum of the insects, the rustle of the great oaks in the garden, feeling the light breeze wafting in, playing over my thin white sheets.

At the top of the stairs, there was a door. He whispered in my ear to open it. I hesitated. I didn’t want to, not yet, I wasn’t ready, I wanted to go home. He tipped me, ever so gently, on the shoulder. I entered, and he followed. The door shut with a heavy click behind us, and we were in darkness. I felt his breath on my neck, felt his presence swell behind me as though his whole form, his whole being, was growing, looming over, encircling me. He lingered just beyond the realms of touch, but I could feel him. It was then the clouds lifted from my foggy, grey mind, I knew. A surge of red. Perhaps I had always known, that it would be like this. I took a deep breath, and turned to face him. His eyes and teeth glimmered in the faint light filtering through the net curtains covering the musty windows. His mouth was open, and he was panting slightly. He saw my face slowly fall into one of defeated recognition, and he smiled.

Mornings with You

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:32:00 +0000

Mornings with You,

Sun, rain, gale or snow,

Light shines through your smiles,

Pure contentment.

Tousled hair pokes out from twisted sheets,

Smooth skin, calm skin, soft to touch.

Warm body, entwined in mine, a mess of limbs,

Morning love.

Groggy eyes, sleepy affection, potential of our day,

Nobody else (that’s how we like it),

Bubble.

Scrambled eggs, toast and tea, duvet on the couch.

Sit so close our hearts might touch,

Bliss.

Title (i)

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:27:00 +0000

I marvel at how many amiable people there seem to be in the world. I get a taste of them from le interweb. I marvel because I wonder how, with all these Means of Connectivity, designed so that one can SHARE with friends, never be isolated, it is still so possible (more possible even? Impossible to say, I’m idealising the unlived past) to be so achingly alone. So desperately.

Ah the cliche. Surrouded by water, but not a drop to drink - the greater torture of seeing what you cannot / do not have.

There are so many ways to access people ‘just like you’. Same sense of humour, same interests, same views (is it on some level actually more depressing to know for sure that you are so unoriginal? Everyone comes across the same, everyone links to the same viral videos, everyone comments on the same events, says the same things, with slight alterations in phrasing, thinking the same thoughts - what’s the point in you, if there are so many carbon copies of your early-20s-free-range-chicken-liberal mindset? Just a question) But you don’t KNOW these people, do you? You couldn’t call them, when the cloud settles over you, the cloud that makes everything you see through it look grey, cold (it is impossible to predict, but it comes, and stays a while, and leaves, but will come again, always).

Surrounded by people, but not them, not really, by their bodies, their fleshy armour, their shaved and tanned and plucked outer-shield, ready for public presentation, giving away nothing. Or surrounded by their image, their projected idealised electronic selves, an even better, less approachable version of the physical presence (what’s the point in physical presence now, when there are so many alternatives? It is now possible for a hermit recluse living in a cave to have more friends than I do. Interesting). There is no way in, except through words (damnable limited frustrating meaningless / meaning-FULL words), or friendship, but friendship is a difficult thing. Acquaintances are my personal forte. That I can do. Light chatter, a few laughs, drunken tomfoolery - what is it worth?

These ’friendships’ embody the age we live in - they have the depth of a computer screen. So many people liked and disliked (can I say ‘liked’ now, without Facebook popping into your head? It is worrying, destroying) over such simple little events, their fate decided in my eyes. And why not? Who cares? Snap judgements are a necessary part of life in the age of accessibility, the age of liberalism gone mad, we’re-all-the-same-let’s-all-communicate-online(-but-not-really). It is only my opinion of a person, and there are so many others to take their place, in my world of acquaintances who I barely know really but can use to socialise with, so as not to appear alone. It is safer to reject a person - so they cannot do it first, figure out that you have nothing to offer but uncomfortable truth - you piss and shit and have red marks on your body that cannot be seen under your clothes and you cry sometimes alone at home, and they’ll know, and they won’t want to know. Another layer of bedrock over my body’s cave.

Who are you really? Lord knows.

So many potential relationships - people to turn to in times of need, and to comfort in times of strength - washed away by the onslaught of bodies, by the mass of PROFILES, of too many options. People who, on those awful grey days, would know, and come, and sit and talk, or not talk. But you know none of them. You really only know about three people in the world, (and that is stretching it, that is your outlook on a good day, usually it would be one) who aren’t related to you, and even then, you often communicate in ‘nothings’ - chit chat, surface matter, like those insects that float on water - too light to penetrate.

I write this as though I am open to suggestions, to new people, to friendship, to honest uncomfortable true friendship, and perhaps I am (I like to think I am, but I like to think a lot of things about myself that clearly aren’t true). But perhaps I’m not really. I am a bitch in many almost imperceptible ways (and, it goes without saying, in many perceptible ones too, but those are the less dangerous ways).

We are all both so kind, so open, and yet so incredibly cruel, and closed, and unwilling to allow those who we do not deem worthy, in. Ha, like we have any knowledge of what is worthy - but we hoard the idea that there is some form of social cast. People have always had categories, and now, since we are breaking down those imposed by society, those unspoken, unacknowledged ones of our own are growing stronger, and firmer in their places, like great big tree roots reaching deeper into the fissures of our brains. The inherent cruelty of our own subconscious selves makes solving this impossible (not that I ever proposed solving anything - let it burn and watch the flames grow higher, that’s my motto), but it also makes self-pity, which is so delicious, very possible, so perhaps in a way we have it good. Unsolvable.

Sprouting Mind

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:26:00 +0000

I hate these things, these green objects, munch, munch, munch, healthy, healthy, fuck. No - not hate, I don’t hate them - I must learn to stop using the word hate so excessively - I don’t really hate them, I don’t stay up at night thinking about them, plotting my revenge on their existence, they didn’t pillage my land or rape my women (my women?) - I am largely indifferent to them. In my day to day life, their existence alongside mine on this GODFORSAKEN planet is completely coincidental and of no importance. I imagine my life would not be much different did they not exist at all. I wonder. Perhaps my life would be enormously different. Not just due to a few less fart jokes, a few less dinner time battles as a child, different Christmas traditions (what would replace them, I wonder? What is the veg that would take their place, the one that didn’t quite make the cut as things presently stand - asparagus perhaps? Mmm, pass the Christmas asparagus - urine jokes replacing fart jokes - ah, and life goes on. See, I told you it would make very little difference). Perhaps, at a push, in a slightly negative mood, I have a passing, ethereal dislike for them. I realise ethereal is an odd adjective to use here, but ethereal is what I mean - well, dreamy, sort of, is what I mean, but I don’t want to write dreamy, I’m not doing a junior certificate exercise in descriptive language for fuck’s sake. So fuck off with your comments and suggestions. I know what I’m doing. If there is a misspelling, it is intentional - it has some hidden meaning that you don’t understand. Idiot.

Anyway, sprouts. Did I mention I was talking about sprouts? Did you know? Did I know? I knew a girl once whose great aunt was a Brussel-Sprout. Lady Brussel-Sprout the third, married to Lord Sprout of Brussels. It got very confusing for visiting foreign dignitaries, being introduced to Lady Brussel-Sprout of Brussels in the Manor’s vegetable garden - I think it was something of a private joke of hers, receiving them there. She hated sprouts too (no, not hated, had an ethereal dislike, yes), ironically (was there any need for me to say that? You saw the irony without my pointing it out - superfluous, narrator). Couldn’t stand them. In fact, she tried to have them all destroyed - it became her mission in life (so maybe she did hate them after all really, I don’t dislike them enough to do that). She rounded them all up, all over Brussels, and had them buried in a great big pit by her house in the garden. Only problem was, a year or two later what should happen, but the greatest brussels sprout plant that had ever been seen in the history of sprouting things grew straight out of the pit, and grew to such a height, and so extensively, that whenever a slight gust of wind came along, brussels sprouts flew from the branches, and it rained sprouts all over her lovely house and gardens (I realise brussels sprouts don’t grow on branches, I am not completely ignorant of all things cabbaceous [a word to describe plants in the cabbage family, sounds real, doesn’t it? It is real now], but in this case that’s how they grew - I suppose they were seeking revenge).

I have used up my brussels sprouts anecdote. What did you think? It was an idea. An Idea. Ideas, The Great Evaders - they flitter and flutter and appear and elude. They keep themselves busy, you could say. An idea is a leaf, a thin, crispy leaf, ready to fall, but not, swaying, swaying, swaying in the breeze. - never still. It must be exhausting to be an idea. Trying to get heard, trying to shout above the din of more loud, pressing ideas - such as ideas about dinner, and comfort, and those awful bossy ideas, about work and vacuuming and itching. Itching, now there’s one powerful idea. Itching ideas beat brussels sprouts ideas in a second. Itching ideas beat almost all others. Although, maybe they’re just thoughts - ideas have to be notions, not just mental reactions to physical conditions (that sounded more impressive than it was - I’m good at sounding more impressive than I am). Ideas are a different breed - ideas can make money, thoughts can’t. What a shame that I am so preoccupied with thoughts and not ideas. I suppose I am doomed to be poor, but not thoughtless. Ideas though, they remind me of animals passing in the night - difficult, near impossible to spot, moving furtively over dark landscapes. And most people aren’t even bothering with trying to see them they’re at home, immured against the cold and dark, wrapped up on the couch with tea and a full, bouncing belly and bedsocks. Nothing wrong with that, that’s what I do, but you’re not very likely to catch sight of a passing fox.

Why would you want to catch sight of a passing fox? That’s the problem with extended metaphors - they can extend past the reaches of one’s memory. Foxes have red fur coats and bushy tails and they certainly do not eat brussels sprouts except that one from the West Country - you know the one - he loves them, to be fair, can’t get enough, and boy oh boy can he break wind - he’s causing 10% of the hole in the ozone layer all by himself, purely from his obsessional love for brussels sprouts. I suppose that was another brussels sprouts anecdote I could have told. You never expect you’ll have two. Oh well, too late now.

Useless Students of Ireland

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:39:29 +0000

The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) organised a student march on the 16^th of November 2011, to protest fees and the cuts in the grant system. These, as we all know, have been introduced by the current government, as a means of solving the budget crisis being suffered by the Irish economy. Despite pre-election pledges made to the USI last year (most notably by Labour TDs such as Eamon Gilmore and Ruairi Quinn), the government has gone back on its word, and according to The Irish Times, the Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn has admitted that ‘there is an inevitability to fees in some form’. It is being proposed that, at the very least, fees of 4000 to 5000 euro a year will be introduced, and that a cap will be placed on the number of students permitted to third level. The government have also proposed cutting the post graduate grant completely, despite having already cut the undergraduate grant by an average of 8.8%. Without doubt, these proposals are bad news for the student community in Ireland in the current climate. It goes without saying that, if put into action as proposed, the changes would be enormously detrimental to Ireland in the future, as they quite clearly provide a short term solution to IMF requirements, without any foresight as to what the country will need in years to come (i.e. a highly educated workforce that isn’t located entirely in Australia or Canada) to retain financial stability. An Irish government working without thinking about the long term effects, who would have thought, right?

Not only has the USI organised marches over the last two years, but they are also continually promoting their campaign to call up TDs and reminding them of their promises regarding student fees. One of the main tag lines designed to incite outrage this year has been that, when asked, ‘not one stated that they would keep their promises’. This is all very well and good, but the cost of advertising this campaign in two of the main national newspapers has been estimated by USI President Gary Redmond himself as approximately 17, 000 euro, which seems like a shameful amount to spend on what, in my opinion, is a largely superfluous effort towards change.

This may seem like a grandiose statement, but it seems clear to me, and one would think to most, that it is an inevitability that governments lie when trying to attain power in times of election. It seems like a given that one cannot trust government pledges made when their main focus is ensuring votes. I’m not offering a solution to this fact, merely pointing out that an expensive campaign designed to remind us of the fact that we were told lies regarding student fees, is not going to affect the government’s behaviour now that they are in power. It is an inefficient and ineffective way of fighting the introduction of fees – no government minister is going to decide now, after a few phone calls telling him/her that they’re a liar, that they are going to amend their ways and resist changes to student financing. Ultimately, it will not affect their decision making, they have nothing to fear from this campaign, especially as they can assume that most of those protesting now will have been forced to emigrate, and thus be incapable of voting against them by the time the next election rolls around.

The main issue that arises from a study of the USI anti-fees campaign though, is that of the march itself. This year’s march was something to be marvelled at, for all the wrong reasons. The majority of students who could be seen participating in November’s march, were most certainly not there for the cause, or due to any serious consideration or personal outrage at what was being protested against. Most of the students whom I could see, were treating the march as a joke, and making a mockery of the serious and life-changing issues at hand. People made ‘hilarious’ signs, with slogans such as ‘No fees, more gees’, or ‘first Dobby, now this’. It was an opportunity to socialise, to be ‘a student on a march’, not to incite any real change in government policies. This may seem harmless, but it is lessening the seriousness of the message for those of us who truly do want to prevent these devastating proposals from being introduced.

I admire the attempts at change being made by the USI as a whole. It is certainly an admirable cause, and undoubtedly ‘somebody has to do it’. My issue lies with the methods adopted by the USI in making change, in grabbing the attention of government officials and actually affecting their decisions making. One slogan that could be seen at the march was ‘If this was France, shit would be on fire’. Not that I would ever encourage violence, but I’m not sure that I would rather be on a march in which I overhear two girls saying that apparently last year’s one was ‘a great place to meet people’. It seems to me that money, time and effort are being thrown into a campaign that will not in any way affect how the government decides to approach student fees and grants. I am not, on the other hand, proposing a better idea, but then, I’m not running the USI.

Heart

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:35:09 +0000

Come home,

Not in person,

In heart,

Before it gets too late,

Before the fire goes out,

And before I forget,

I’ll miss your scent

(Human-Metallic, like coins almost).

Minnie the Dog

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 22:53:00 +0000

My dog is dying. She has strokes, and moans, and can’t move, and then she becomes quiet, and I think ‘this is it, she’s going, she’s really going’, but she doesn’t, she gets up. I bring her up to the bath in a towel and hose her down, and wash the parts of her fur that she has been sick on with bath cream (she loses control when she has her strokes, gets sick, pisses herself, shits herself, she can’t help it). She stands there bewildered, unsure of what has happened, helpless, like any old creature that is slowly losing control over their own body. She lies still for a long time after, recovering.

My dog is almost 17. My stepsister Claire got her as a gift when we moved into our new house. My other stepsister Elizabeth and I got cats. This is fitting as Claire turned out to be a lesbian. We got her from the pound and she was sick. She had been on a traveller site, abandoned, left with a fear of people and kennel cough and loads of things that made her hide and quiver and not eat in our presence. That’s okay, we were a young, optimistic family, making rights of previous wrongs, making new beginnings – we could wait, we could love a damaged dog, we were damaged too.

Minnie became a pest, she was loud, vivacious, she jumped on guests – I would walk her and she would tug away and I wanted to kick her, and only just didn’t. Other times she was funny, other times she was great. Most of the time I didn’t really think about her – but I knew she was there, waiting. When we were kids (Claire, Elizabeth and I) we would go for big family outings every Sunday, with my Grandparents and sometimes my aunt and uncle, and they would bring their dogs too, and Minnie would get thrown in the river / lake / sea by my Grandfather, as she was the only dog unwilling to get in the water of her own accord. We were a dog-loving family, a people of walks and Sunday lunches and picnics by rivers / lakes / the sea.

My little brother and sister were born when I was 10 and 12 respectively. At this time, the other dogs in the family from the era of The Sunday Walk died / were given away. Minnie remained, but grew to hate her own species. It was a funny personality change. She could not stand dogs. Perhaps it was her loss. Perhaps, as we believe, it was her mothering instinct kicking in on walks with two helpless babes. She would allow them to pull her fur to bits, and wouldn’t move, would just look plaintively at us, hoping we would remove the child, and allow her to guard them from other dogs in peace, climbing up the couch onto the windowsill, keeping lookout, barking as potential canine predators passed (or the postman, who would violate her sanctuary by sticking evil, unwanted bits of paper through the door, to be promptly chewed and disposed of by her).

Minnie was loved, but possibly neglected in my teens. Her family changed, and walking the dog was not top on the list of priorities. She became overweight; we had to give her hard food. We would be annoyed when she was out, because she would lunge at all passing dogs, the owners would give us dirty looks, thinking ‘what a bold dog they have’. Not at all, she just decided her own preferences. Minnie loved cats, she would never touch a cat, she wanted to be one. She lived with cats all her life, up until recently. She would share her bed with them, mimic their behaviour, play with them, idolise them. Minnie was always minion and protectress of one or other of the many felines our family went through – thanks to the big road near where we live, which eventually got most of them.

Back to the teens – this was our era of change, beginning with the birth of the children. Then, later, the family began to fall apart, after what were one or two, or perhaps even three good years with all of us. Claire moved in, citing irreconcilable differences with her mother – only later did we realise that these irreconcilable differences may have been caused by Claire, not her mother. Then there was the incident, the move out, the drama. Eventually, by the time I was 17, both of my stepsisters were in the process of losing all contact with the remaining members of our family – only now is hope of contact with Elizabeth, who has had a baby, looking possible. Minnie remained, and became mine more than ever. In the early teen years she had been there through the hard times – through the rough times at home, where it felt as though I would never escape, where I could feel so deeply unhappy. She was there, beside me on the couch, wide eyes looking wonderingly at me as I cried tears into her comforting fur coat. She was there through the early heartbreaks – bullying friends, cruel boys, general low moments. She would lick my cheek or my hand, to tell me it was okay, she was there, she would take care of me, she was my friend. But when the others left, Minnie became mine more than anyone’s, and I loved her more than I ever had before – or at least realised it better.

Minnie met Reg when I was 17. It was love at first sight, they hit it off immediately – that’s how I knew he was a keeper. I think Reg loves Minnie almost as much as I do – but he couldn’t love her as much, I know that. We walked her, and brought her to nice places – Glendalough, The Devil’s Glen, The Glen of the Downs. We laughed when she jumped into the lake, she had always hated water! She was becoming such an eccentric old timer! Her little legs paddled away, and we would hold onto each other, falling over laughing. We would sit on a bench and kiss, and Minnie would stick her nose in, and try to jump between us, saying ‘what about me!?’ and we would walk on, and be happy, all three.

When I was 19, further cracks began to appear. My Mom and my stepdad began the long, drawn-out process of separating. Minnie, like me, knew there was something not quite right in the house. She was there when rooms were changed, when the kids were told. She finally came with my Mom, to the new house, 5 minutes away from the other, so the kids could travel between the two easily. It was a relatively amicable break up – I for one felt an old hat at dramatic change, and didn’t think too much of it. Minnie was there on my last night in the house I’d been in since I was 6, the house she had been in all her life. She watched tv with me in our little study, before I gave her a pet, and headed up to bed, to cry a few small tears at the loss of my room – the room that held so many memories, good and bad, the room I had dreamt in, had had long, romantic talks on the phone in, had snuck friends into for quiet sleepovers and joints, the room Reg and I had first said ‘I love you’ in, that had been our den, our secret base.

Now Minnie is in her new house, a house I do not live in most of the time, but visit. I wish I could live with her every day, but these things happen, and you don’t think about them. Sometimes I think she is a total pain, like when she pretends to not hear me on walks, and trots off in the other direction, seeking out smells I couldn’t even imagine, or when she trips me up, standing right behind my legs, traipsing around the house after me, sitting in the bathroom patiently while I shower. Most of the time though, I love her to bits, and think that she must really be one of the best dogs that ever lived. I can’t bring her on long walks anymore. She can’t go far, she is too old, and has arthritis. I first realised I couldn’t after a walk about a year and a half ago, where she couldn’t get into the car after, and Reg had to lift her, and she looked embarrassed and miserable. Now she can only manage a short circle around the estate – and in the last few weeks, with the cold setting in, even that is proving a strain. She gets her strokes now, if that’s what they are, her fits, and it always seems to be with me, on or after walks. Maybe I expect too much of her. Maybe I’m in denial. I think it’s a bit of both.

Minnie, other than my family, is the only creature in my life that has experienced what I have experienced alongside me, and she is the only one with whom I have not argued. She has been a rock, and now she is dying. Tonight I carried her up to the bath to wash her after she had collapsed in the hall, and called out to me, yelping, and I cried a little, and wondered what I would do when she too is gone. I never really understood how true the idea of someone’s dog being their best friend was, until I realised that Minnie, my best friend, was dying.

And then there was No Thing

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:51:19 +0100

Was that death, that sharp smack across my face? My cheek burns, my ear rings, but doesn’t too. Doesn’t at all, in fact. That was quick, and what do I make of it now? Life was not all that, if this is death. This isn’t all that either, both seem to have been nothing to have made such a fuss about, but this is certainly better than what that was. There sit the others that I ‘knew’, although I think to claim to have known another is ridiculous - I see that now. There are those others, then, with whom I cohabited the space, the air, the time known as that of the living - life. Are those tears they seep? How silly of them, ha, to cry over this sharp smack I have received. This is nothing, here I am, although not there with them, sure. Was I ever there with them? They can still see me - there I lie before them, pale and still and made up by the man downstairs in the cold room who took liberties, not that anyone will ever know, or mind. Take all the liberties you like, it is just a body, who cares? Take liberties with my house and car too, they are not mine now, they never were. They were metal and rock and wood and things of the earth which I tried desperately to hold onto and bargain for and exchanged another substance, paper, for, and moved and wielded as best I could. But look, they have won, they shall always win, I am gone, they remain, how foolish I was to think I ‘owned’ them. Nobody owns anything. That is the same as my body, the earth has it back, it never lost it. That body shall burn or rot, or whatever they choose to do with it, and either way, it shall return to the earth, and then become the food of worms, and the food of a bird, who shall be the food of a cat, and then does that make my body the body of a cat? No, it is the body of the earth, as is the cat’s, as is all things.

He broke those fingers, so that they could be intertwined together across that stomach. Crack, crack, crack, they went, each one. There was a certain satisfaction in it. I saw from him that he would love to have broken the fingers of a woman who could feel it. What does it matter? At last he could gain some living satisfaction from breaking the fingers of a piece of the earth. I am happy for him. To think of the thoughts I spent on that heap of mass, that defecating machine, that blood-pumping, food-ingesting thing that lies there, as clean as it can be (still filthy, all bodies are unacceptably filthy, full of shit and piss and caked blood and unmentionable things). Ha, it is funny, looking on from here, the farce of it. There they sit, those that I ‘knew’, those who I now see I knew nothing about - all lonely, all perverts, all filled with more hate and bile and despair than I ever gave them credit for. And how they mourn me! How funny, when I too was filled with these things, and now no longer need to be, as I am freed from them, from their thing called living, their ‘gift’. Some gift, next time I’ll take death, thank you. They did not know me, but now they feel they did, and that they can sit and seep liquid from their disgusting forms, and ingest hot drinks, or alcohol, which they shall also seep, piss, and make noises, words I believe they’re called, and express across their personal voids that I was good and that they shall miss me. They need to scream to try to say anything (I do not mean scream as in raise their voices, I mean scream as in say anything worth saying, say anything that will penetrate - they rarely if ever succeed, certainly not now, they speak in clichés, in words heard and said and heard and said and incomprehensible and without meaning, saying things that mean nothing, making their noises about nothing. Most of them will never do anything else, they do not know there is anything else). They say it was such a shame, that I was so young, that it did not have to be this way. They curse that sharp smack - how they hate what they do not know! Ha, I laugh, watching them cry, watching as the woman whose body released my body leaks tears and lets out primal wails and noises and must be led from the room, so as not to expose the living to too much truth. Her feelings are based on nothing, little does she know. as soon as she encased me in my body within her body, she ceased to know me, she ceased to be in any way connected. Nobody was connected. Life, the body, life through the body, is disconnection. Only now do I see and know and understand, and I know not one of these people, dressed in black, black clothes of the earth, on pink, ugly flesh - flesh covered in red spots and rashes and blue bruises and deep burgundy gashes. They spend this time, as all time, as time between fornication, distraction from past and future fornication, their genitals call to each other across the room, wait impatiently to connect with another’s, any other’s, to perform the only truly satisfying act one can have in life, the one we have made so many rules about, forbidden and isolated and tabooed - such a shame, when it is nothing but a source of satisfaction, but then life is not for satisfaction, it is for survival. How filthy it all is, what a joke. Life is the earth’s cruel joke. It is the labour we must undertake, the earth is our master, and death is our release, our freedom, our reward. What a funny trick, how clever, to convince us otherwise, to trick us into wanting our punishment. We are creatures under the spell of illusion, unbreakable. Maybe we weren’t always, maybe that is why the myths were first suggested to us, carried by earth’s messenger, the wind, into our ears from nowhere in particular, and taken as gospel, actual gospel. Life is a gift, one must live it, one must not reject it, one must not seek death early, one ought not to want to anyway. It was never very convincing, deep down, everyone still knew. And here I am, nowhere, and finally free from it.

How funny, what a delicious, satisfying sharp smack I have received. What a pity, although not really, as I care not, that those bodies, that I conversed as best I could with, in the forms that life allowed, do not know yet. I shall be happy for them, if I still remember that there was a them, that I once thought I knew, when they receive it too.

The Myth of Ireland's 'Free Fees Initiative'

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:14:37 +0100

University students seem to be unanimously keen on keeping third-level education as it is – free and ‘accessible to all’. There is no selfishness in their desire to keep education this way, as it proves that we live in an egalitarian society, and that the system provides equal opportunities to those from different socio-economic backgrounds. Upon the introduction of the ‘free fees’ initiative in 1996, The Department of Education and Science declared, “These decisions are a major step forward in the promotion of equality. They remove important financial and psychological barriers to participation at third level.”

This belief is a desirable one – the education equivalent of believing Band Aid made a difference, or that your clothes aren’t made by children. In other words, it is a myth. College educated people, more than ever, prove to predominantly come from middle to upper-class backgrounds. They come from homes which could generally have afforded fees, had they not invested so much money in providing a private secondary education for their children instead.

In an Irish Times article in November 2010, it was reported that the progression rate of schools in south Dublin to third level education was “more or less 100%”, while many schools from poorer areas of Dublin showed a progression of rate of less than 10%, and that these rates of entry “have hardly changed at all over the 15 years of ‘free fees’”. These statistics make complete sense. The introduction of free third-level education made little difference to those from disadvantaged backgrounds, as they have always been entitled to receive free or partially funded third-level education through grant systems. Thus, the introduction of free third-level education essentially made it free for those who could already afford it – the middle and upper-classes.

Naturally, the introduction of free third-level education also changed priorities within the secondary school system. In Ireland, entry into university is based entirely upon Leaving Certificate results. Therefore, families from higher socio-economic backgrounds who no longer had to worry about paying for third-level education, could now pour cash into ensuring that their children would get the best possible secondary education, thus improving their chances of getting into the best courses in University, and placing those from working-class backgrounds at a greater disadvantage than they had been before. It is estimated that up to 70% of Leaving Certificate students take grinds. Grind schools do not provide education – they provide training in how to answer questions in the Leaving Certificate. Schools such as The Institute – which has seen no drop in numbers since the beginning of the recession – teach their students the best way to achieve high points, and thus enter university, rather than trying to actually educate them for the sake of education. Although attempts have been made to change the education system so as to avoid this learning-by-rote system perpetuated by grind schools, not much has been achieved. As a result of all this, those who can afford a better secondary education are more likely to get into college while, prior to the introduction of free third-level education, those with money spent it on University, while those who couldn’t would receive a grant. This ensured that most students would receive the same free second-level education – an education which awarded a student’s natural ability and merit, rather than their ability to learn passages written by clever grind-school teachers by heart. Further proof of this pattern in education comes from the shocking statistic that not a single student entering a course in pharmacy or medicine in 2008/9 came from an unskilled background (i.e. from parents who had not been educated at third-level themselves).

Not only have free fees helped only those who could already afford fees, and created a greater divide in educational advantages at a secondary level, but they have also proved detrimental to those unable to afford university, through a depleted grant system. Government funds go to maintaining free fees, therefore forcing cuts in the grant system. This means that those who have already struggled to make it to third-level, are now unable to receive sufficient financial assistance to attend university. This year, the non-adjacent rate has been changed from living 24 kilometres from your university, to 45, making an enormous amount of commuting students unable to afford travel expenses. Also, the actual requirements to be eligible for a grant have become more extreme. This leaves students at the bottom of the socio-economic spectrum without the means to attend their hard-earned places in university, inevitably causing an even greater disparity between the economic classes in education.

It is for these reasons, amongst others, that the notion of free fees being an equalising initiative is a myth, which has proven over the fifteen years since its introduction, to have only hindered rather than assisted the less wealthy of Ireland’s citizens in achieving a better education.

Homecoming

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:14:13 +0100

The fallout from a shell was what had made him lose his hearing. Now he could only hear a faint whine, that sound you hear on an aeroplane when your ears are about to pop due to the quickly rising altitude. He heard that all the time. It had kept him awake at night at first, lying in bed in the hospital on the far side of the world. Now he lay awake in bed for other reasons, back in his clean, freshly-painted house, next to his ginger-haired fiancé who slept soundly, in the knowledge that he had come home ‘in one piece’.

Is hearing not a piece?

He often got up deep in the night and drove around the town, looking for some action, for something to do. He had been banned from driving by the doctor, because of his disability, but at night there was nobody to stop him, nobody to hurt. He sat behind the wheel at the red lights and watched the prostitutes wave coyly at him from the corners, and his lips, which held one of his secret cigarettes – hidden in the boot under the cover where the spare tyre was kept – broadened into a wicked smile, a leer. He would feel himself growing hard at the idea of their filthiness, of their disgusting willingness. Before they would get to him, strutting across the street to him in their cheap gaudy sexy heels, the light would go green, and he would speed off, exhilarated, leaving them confused and angry and humiliated and 40 dollars down on what they thought they were going to get that night. They would yell and make a dramatic vulgar gesture and turn back to their friends, who would delight in their sister’s embarrassment, in her rejection.

Dogs eating dogs eating fleas.

His fiancé was very willing to please him, to pleasure him. He could not pick fault with her ability to give, no matter how much he wanted to. She fucked him the way she felt a soldier who had lost his hearing fighting for his country ought to be fucked – vigorously and regularly. He couldn’t stand it. He could hear nothing, except the sharp whine of his existence, as she sat on top of him, or lay beneath him, and thrust her hips dutifully for the protector of her home.

She wanted to go ahead with the wedding as soon as possible. She was pretty, but not exceptional – so close, agonisingly close. She enjoyed the attention she got, hanging on the arm of a damaged, war-worn soldier. She would hold her head high, as though in defiance, and become mothering, and help him along, help him cross roads.

He wanted to beat her to death there and then for everyone to see. To watch the blood pour out of her dutiful, righteous face as he kicked it in, further and further.

He went to lessons to learn sign-language, funded by his government. She went along too, to be able to speak to him. He pretended not to pick it up. He had nothing to say to her. She chatted away to the teacher, and spoke of her difficulties in trying to get through to him. One day she said, wet-eyed, and ashamed, that she felt as though he had never really left the war zone, had never really come home to her. He couldn’t react, because then she’d have known he could lip read. When they got home, he went out into the woods behind their house and shot a rabbit, and then calmly and purposefully hacked its ears off with his Swiss blade. That way he was able to sit across from her at dinner.

Some nights she would go to bed first, while he watched television with a beer, following nothing, but knowing it was what he used to enjoy doing, before the war. She always left a note on his pillow for when he came up – ‘I love you, good night’.

He hated her so much it felt like a knife tearing through him. All that she was, all that she represented, all that she had made him lose.

He wanted to scream, but knew that he wouldn’t be able hear himself even if he did, and that she would wake up, and be frightened, and try to speak to him, holding his face in her hands and crying desperately, trapped in this world of silence with the man who had replaced the boy she’d once loved, and maybe, having failed that, try to make love to him - the only means of connection left to her.

Instead, he took the note, and put it with the others in his bedside drawer, and got into bed, moving slowly and carefully so as not to wake her, and lay down, as he had done the night before, and would do the next night, and the night after that, listening to the constant whining sound which would follow him throughout the rest of his existence, and tried to remember what music sounded like.

Yes, it’s wonderful, she would say when asked. Yes, she was just so glad to have him home in one piece.

Thoughts in the Month of August.

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:34:08 +0100

This has been a long summer of nothing. Grey clouds reflecting grey lives, wet, muggy heat threatening a storm that never came. We have been trapped in the moment before the storm for months. Arrested development thus ensued. Thoughts have been few and far between, and unabashedly melancholy. That is what this summer has done. I apologise for nothing.

1) Sometimes I feel as though this dull ache requires drastic measures, a severing of limbs, or loved ones, if only to give it some locatable source. It is the aimlessness of it that is killing me, gradually. In fact, it is aimlessness itself - aimlessness, restlessness, helplessness, these are my silent killers, my patient death.

2) Writing is thought to be therapeutic; demon-releasing, thought-ordering. Is writing good for us? Perhaps the process is, but the end result is not. There lies the black and white evidence of our imperfections, our fears, our insanity - exposed, open, unforgettable, because we ourselves have recorded it, transferred it from an internal turmoil to a public anguish.

Do we want foreign souls so greedily feeding off our own? Do we, in times of peace, of calm acceptance and balanced steps, when searching through a desk drawer, shifting notebooks on a shelf, wish to be suddenly confronted by that other self, evidence of that lurking presence - that self-loather, that pervert, that stark, red-faced honesty?

Honesty is a dangerous substance, to be treated with extreme caution, if used at all. Perhaps, then, the best thing to do, is to write and destroy - burn the evidence, burn it up, so that it is no more, and in the final smoke and ashes, lose those words, those thoughts and aspects we would rather not remember.

3) It is torturous to love - to love oneself, one’s family, one’s friends, one’s partner (partner - the person you have teamed up with in the three-legged-race of life, against all others, run run run to the finish line, and be happy even to have found them, to be in the race at all, and don’t let go, regardless of who they are, of who you are - fear encloses).

It is torturous because people are awful - flawed - filled with malice, jealousy, fear, narcissism. How could one truly love such a desperate creature? Why choose to even try, when there is such a plentiful supply of dogs, or, for those who need to feel as though they have earned love, cats?

The problem seems to me, to lie in the fact that we are, of course, people ourselves. We love as a result of this flawed nature we also find in others - we love not in an attitude of selflessness, but out of an inherent desire to be loved in return.

So, those who ought to reserve their love for dogs, love the best people they can find (who, being people, are not much of a substitute), and those who ought to love cats, love assholes, and spend their time working desperately hard at being loved back.

4) Written to a friend who was a friend, and is now one out of habit.

Who the hell am I to tell you how to live your life? You look like you’re having far more fun than I am. Do whatever the fuck you want - no life is necessarily any better than any other.

We all find ways of being unhappy, feel free to find your own.

5) Poem: An Arts Student

You were bullied once,

For two weeks in second year,

Your parents had to come in,

It was all very dramatic.

That is how you know you understand it,

And feel entitled to speak at length on the subject,

You are someone ‘speaking from experience’.

You sigh meaningfully mid-sentence,

Adding dramatic effect,

Hinting at past woes, at depth of emotion,

Over glasses of cheap wine and a joint,

In the back garden of a friend’s house

(not a friend from school, someone new, fresh, without evidence).

You don’t mind baring your soul,

Telling it how it is,

You think you’re impressively honest, frank, open,

You think (deep down) that these qualities,

Make you seem confident, sexy.

There is nothing much to say about you,

Except that there have been thousands like you,

And there shall be thousands more.

6) I keep checking my phone for a reply to the cruel message I sent you.

I would wrestle you to death, if only to avoid the dust settling over us, over this weak flame we cherish.

I receive nothing, and think perhaps I am already in the process of wrestling you to death, of strangling the last few gasps of air out of your lungs.

I don’t mind really, it is something to fill the void.

6 1/2) Why, when you’re a child, does no one warn you about the void? It is the most dangerous part of life, and yet we are told nothing of it. It is kept secret, hidden, as though we were not destined, inevitably, to find it for ourselves. And when it is found, it is impossible to lose - it can only be ignored for short periods of time, with much distraction, before pushing in upon our minds again. Why did our parents not explain to us, the danger? How could they though, when still trying to understand it for themselves. It is the unspoken - and yet every day, people are slipping down, gone forever, unnoticed, or, at least, unacknowledged. Hundreds, thousands, millions, disappearing, while sitting across from us on trains, queueing ahead of us in cinemas, or lying in bed next to us, in the deep forbidding silence of the night.

The Backburner

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:07:36 +0100

Roger Morehouse lives in number 78, Creddington Heights, Bray. The house is small, cramped and dark, like a cave. It was built in the 60s as a part of the Irish government’s quick-fix housing scheme. It is a dusky brownish-grey on the outside, and is wedged in a cul-de-sac between two other identical houses. At the end of the road there is a small pedestrian alley that Roger avoids after nightfall, because the local teenagers use it as a loitering spot, smoking joints and drinking the hours away. They wait, like a pack of restless wild dogs, for someone to devour, and Roger cannot face them. It seems every week there is some new writing on the white-washed walls of the alley; Sophie luvs sex call 0879876546 4 fun timez. He had called once, under the cover of darkness, but had hung up quickly as he heard the voice of a young girl answer.

The windows of his house are single glazed, and it depends on separate, plug-in gas heaters for warmth. The sitting room wall has a pea-green patterned border dissecting it. There are certain rectangular patches, where the light has hit the pastel-blue paintwork of the miniscule kitchen over the years, and has paled it to a sicklier, paler shade. The carpeting and furniture reflect a style of cheap opulence, an attempt at low-budget grandeur, resulting in a miss-matched distasteful effect. The faux-crystal chandelier in the living room acts as an effective home of numerous, secretive spiders, and Roger doesn’t even bother replacing the bulbs anymore. Instead he depends on the light of the corner lamp to read the paper, and the television. There is an air of mustiness, dust collecting, webs in shadowy corners, a faint odour of boiled water - the smell of things unused, untouched.

Roger is unaware of any of this. When one has been somewhere long enough, experienced it for long enough, one forgets it. It is like trying to see your face without recognising it, or trying to remember what it was like to have sex for the first time. Roger has become lost in the haze of familiarity. Roger fits into the house like a piece of the furniture, and moves through it silently, mindlessly. He knows its nooks, crannies, temperament. He has lived there since the age of two and a half, when his parents moved up from Co. Clare, so his father could set up a country-style bakery near the seaside, for the tourists. Roger’s earliest memories are mainly made up of smells. Freshly baked breads, sickly sweet apple pies, hot cross buns in Spring. Roger had never moved out of his parents’ home. He had never been given the opportunity or the incentive. It was always something to be put on the backburner, to be done when there was more time, more money, and then his father had died, and he no longer had the option. Only once in his life had it seemed like a possibility.

Her name was Cynthia Dixon. She was small, a little plump, in a good way, with hot-red cheeks and watery blue eyes. She came from a middle-class family, but had to work because her mother was a ‘drunken disgrace’ and her father was what she poetically called ‘a husk of a man’. She had always had a way with words, much more so than Roger himself. She worked in the local butchers, serving the customers, charming the auld fellas with her flirty chat. Roger used to go in for the ingredients for his Dad (steak and kidney twice a week, and a bit of liver on Wednesdays). He was quiet, shy, didn’t like making eye contact, and laughed nervously at her suggestive jokes. He reckoned that if he took her out, he could create a whole new persona for himself - become more like her, tame her even. He imagined himself, all puffed up, with the arrogant swagger of youth, and her hanging off his arm, looking meekly up at him with awe and rapt attention. No such luck. Turned out, she had a lot to say for herself, given the chance. As they started courting, she grew in confidence, like a tyre being pumped with air. She had opinions, passions, dreams, and he was her sounding board, there to worship and adore. It became clear pretty quickly that she was smarter than him, but he didn’t mind, he liked listening to her talk about great literature and what her life would be like. He fell head over heels in love, began writing awful poetry, in which he compared her to Greek goddesses, and stealing the occasional warm bun from the shop for her. He tried to read the books she talked about, but he could never really get through them, and she moved so fast, that he was generally able to abandon them. Sometimes, they’d hop on a bus into Dun Laoghaire, and share a cup of tea and a scone between them, or walk along the pier and get ice creams.

When she was feeling indulgent, they’d talk about getting married, and what their house would be like, and their kids’ names. She was going to be a famous writer and intellectual, and he was going to look after all the technical stuff, like publishing and finances and meetings. They began putting the occasional few coppers aside, in what she called the ‘future fund’. She hoped to go to Trinity college, which would cost a fair bit, but he’d work to help her get through, so that she could get a good job and they could buy a nice house, in Dalkey maybe, with a big garden for the kids. He’d sell the bakery and work purely as her manager / accountant, and on weekends she’d read him what she’d written and he’d teach her to bake fresh bread, which they could eat on Sunday morning with sausages and scrambled eggs.

Then one day, it was over. It was September, and the last days of sun were beginning to wane, the evenings were beginning to creep up on unsuspecting dog-walkers and bathers. People found themselves shivering unexpectedly in their back gardens, and had to start remembering to bring out jackets when leaving the house. He’d met her on Bray pier, and had brought a crumbling tiffin square for them to share. There was a slight wind, which made her cheeks glow and her hair streak across her face, but the sun was beaming brightly, and the last of the summer strays were braving the Irish Sea. He didn’t really remember much about what she’d said, something about different levels and her satisfaction. Mainly, he remembered the feeling of the chocolate from the tiffin square, melting in the tissue in his trouser pocket. He knew it was melting, could feel the heat through the material of his trousers, the moistness seeping through, but he couldn’t take it out. He felt ashamed at bringing it out for her, his naivety, thinking she’d be so pleased, and maybe give him a loving glance and then a kiss on the cheek. He remembered walking home, feeling his eyes grow hot, hating himself for being so foolish as to bring out a stupid fucking tiffin square, thinking himself an idiot. He thought she was probably laughing about him already to one of her new book-club friends. Maybe she had seen the chocolate melting through his trousers. Maybe she knew. Of course she knew.

So that was the end of that. After a while, Roger stopped thinking about her. He didn’t forget, just stopped letting it push its way to the forefront of his mind. He wrestled it back, into the recesses, where it couldn’t disturb him in day to day life. The only bad time, was the night time, when there was nothing to keep him occupied, no mindless chatter, or tills to be counted, or bread to knead and prepare for the early morning start. It was night when his thoughts caught up on him.

Every evening Roger sits in his chair, beside the empty seats of his mother and father, and watches G.O.L.D. or maybe Sky news, for something to chat about with the customers in the bakery the next day. ‘Jaysus, did you see that flooding in India? I hear the death toll is over 200 now. It’s terrible, terrible.’ He has filled out a lot since his youth, but still maintains the same boyish face, the same open, trusting features, easy smile, although the signs of drink are starting to show, and there’s a worried look around the eyes that sometimes appears on quiet days. He drinks at least 6 cups of tea a day, each time with a Tesco digestive, and talks aloud to the radio on Sundays. It is only the night that troubles his life. He worries about it from about 6 o’clock onwards every day, although without being completely aware of it. It comes as a creeping sense of dread in his stomach, a feeling of slow growing emptiness, starting at the bottom and slowly working its way up to his heart. He often takes indigestion pills when he gets home, denying, laughing it off to himself as a result of his poor diet and liking for whiskey.

But lying in bed, in the unforgiving dark, Roger’s mind defeats him, and he thinks about his life. He thinks about nursing his mother for years and years through her dimensia, and taking over the bakery, and the few brief, fumbling sexual encounters of his twenties and thirties. He finally, inevitably thinks about her, and the life they could’ve had, had he been able to hold on to her. Regrets, trampled dreams, crushed hopes, well up past the limits of his stomach and overflow in to the rest of body, flooding his mind and senses. His hands always ache when this happens, as though the feeling has reached a final wall and swollen there, and he has to flex them under the covers as he lies there with his eyes shut tight. The last he’d heard, she’d run off to London with the son of a publican in Stillorgan. His mother had been delighted, because she could spend the next few months saying how she’d told everyone so, and how the family was no good, and thank God her Roger had dropped the ‘striapach’ before it went too far. He had said nothing.

As the moon rises, he wonders where she is, what she’s doing at that moment. Sometimes, maybe once a year, he strolls into a bookshop, and looks for her name amongst the new releases. He goes slowly, feigning indifference, looking for a sign of her, leafing through books two or three times, for proof that it was real, that she had achieved what they had dreamed of. But it’s never there. On those days, he returns home, defeated, dejected and alone, and sits in the lamplight with a glass in his hand, and waits for night to come.

Talk to Me

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:44:15 +0100

Talking is a means of organised distraction from communication. Verbal language conveys all of the inane, and none of the important, or the real. It is what is not said that truly makes us feel something, the spaces between, the layers below the surface of the words being said and heard, and said and heard, forvever and ever. It is all nothing.

This is why silence makes us so uncomfortable.

When we truly know someone, words become largely supurfluous to our meaning. It is the presence that we learn to know, the tread, the air, the breathing, the gestures. That is true communication. That is all we have. It is so vague, so weak, yet worlds can be built and tumble with an interlocking of hands, or a head turned away.

This is why silence between friends and loved ones can be so delicious, and so devastating.

Possession

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:02:41 +0100

Women, throughout history, have slept with artists - painters, writers, musicians - as an attempt to possess their art indirectly, as a way of quenching that insatiable desire to possess the feeling they receive from the art itself, the indescribable exquisite emotion only art has the power to convey - that separate reality to life found only in true art, not the mere cheap imitation of life found in the art of frauds and fools.

It is not the same for a man, they do not possess, receive, embrace through sex, as women do.

It is an unsuccessful venture - women cannot take in through any form of physical action that bright force from whence true art flows. Yet the pattern remains the same - hence groupies, hence whores, hence that subservient attitude of women in the presence of great artists throughout history. When will we learn that the only means of access to that fountain of artistic creation is unrelated to our instincts towards procreation? It comes solely from within the individual, and is not relational to the other sex, it is independent.

Men have never had any problem understanding this, so why have we? Perhaps, as I have suggested, because of the nature of our role in procreation as receivers, not givers. We cannot expect to always receive. We must learn not to expect to be given to. We must stand alone in conception.

Henry Billington's Rise to Glory

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:57:43 +0100

I can’t write anything at the moment, because any time I go to, exam guilt kicks in, and I know I ought to be studying instead. So thought I’d post the first section of a story I’ve been writing for ages now - I’ve had this section written for about half a year. I have a fair bit more, but think I’ll just put the opening chapter up for now. Hope you like it.

Henry Billington had always been told that he would make a good writer, and therefore, thoroughly believed himself to be a good writer. He felt that he had been given the gift of a name that would suit the cover of a book, or the subdued but undeniable respect of a University lecturer when announcing it to a class. Henry’s self-belief was admired, notably by his female peers, but was also present despite his not having written very much, if anything at all, other than snippets and scraps. Henry believed that his youth ought to be spent living, not laboriously trying to write: Plenty of time for that when he had some experiences to actually write about under his belt! Anyway, Henry was convinced that these little flighty moments of inspiration, scrawled here and there in his untidy male handwriting, were an important part of the process, and would come in useful when he sat down to write his Ulysses equivalent, which, alas, he had not quite gotten around to reading all the way through yet, but knew was completely genius.

Henry had studied English in college, as a sort of background check as to what had come before him, so that he would be fully equipped to contribute significantly to the body of English Literature when his time came. He felt that this was an intelligent and logical step in the development of his masterpiece, not seeing any need to rush, and had immensely enjoyed his four years of 3^rd level education, which had resulted in a 2.2 (a result he was sure future scholars would scoff at, and use as an example to their students, that even geniuses like himself hadn’t necessarily scored top marks in college!). Yet now Henry was at a crossroads. He had completed college, and had seen no need to extend his education, feeling it was about time he got cracking on his future Penguin Classic. He had gotten his parents to set him up in an artist’s studio in the city, claiming that the work he produced would undoubtedly pay them back tenfold. They believed this completely, or at least his Mother did, and his Father wanted to.

His studio was positioned on the top floor of an old Georgian house which had been renovated in the most modern of styles, without being excessively metallic (like it was designed to be inhabited by a robot, as Henry felt so many modern places seemed to be). It had Magnolia walls, easy-clean surfaces, jutting lights, subtly positioned electronics and leather couches. Henry had inserted his old desk by the window, overlooking the square park onto which his building faced. The park was surrounded by black metal railings, filled with lazy, swaying trees and tidy blossoming hedgerows, with city traffic streaming relentlessly, resignedly around the edges, and the sounds of children playing, engines humming and general hubbub drifting throughout. Well, Henry soon realised that this set up just wouldn’t do. Days were spent absent-mindedly doodling, looking up videos on YouTube (which he initially convinced himself was research on the ‘modern psyche’) or staring out at the traffic, and people walking in and out of the park. Henry would try to imagine each of their lives, where they might be going, what they might be worrying about or what sins they may have committed that secretly dogged their souls. Then Henry would realise the time, sigh at his own painfully literary brain and it’s musings, and wish he had only caught his genius and transferred it onto the laptop open before him. He would stretch, yawn, notice a slight rumbling of his belly, and call it a day, his mind already fast-tracking it’s way to the approaching night in the city.

After a week or two of this, and virtually no results, other than a tipsy 4 a.m. paragraph on the idiocy and power-trips of bouncers, and a vague outline plan for a short story in which a man murders one such bouncer who has always bullied him, Henry decided to move his desk into his bedroom, facing the wall, with no distractions, and to use a typewriter, to avoid succumbing to the siren call of the internet and all her sinful glories. It was only when a friend called in for a visit, and found Henry at 3 o’clock in the afternoon wrapped up in bed and snoring heavily, did Henry realise that this wasn’t an ideal set up either. It may have been at this point that the first seed of doubt and fear entered Henry’s head as to his own genius, and his capacity to write ground-breaking words. Maybe it wasn’t until Henry had tried writing in the kitchen (ended up cooking time-consuming meals at very odd hours), the bathroom (never had he or his teeth been so clean in his life), the surrounding cafes, the local library, the train station and finally, desperately, perched alone on the top of a mountain about an hour outside of city limits, that Henry consciously realised the possibility that perhaps he might not be an incredible writer.

This was a devastating blow to Henry Billington. As soon as it occurred to him that there was a distinct possibility that he had been fooling himself into believing he was a literary legend in the making, the thought grew, until it filled his whole head as an undeniable fact. It was like a balloon filling up with water, heavy and fat and strained, until finally it burst, and flooded him entirely. Henry was completely destroyed, and he was angry. All that he had believed to be true of himself, all of his confidence and self-image had been based around the fact that he was brilliant. Everyone he had ever interacted with, he had treated as someone lucky enough to be noticed by a brilliant man. Not that he was rude or anything, he had just always pictured his friends or acquaintances being interviewed for a documentary about him in the future. If anything, this made him seem quite humble, as he felt that people were indirectly aware that he was, of course, a genius, and that he would probably eventually be forced to leave them all behind in his life of increasing intellectualism, and so made a special effort to act like a likeable ‘everyman’ type. Henry’s mystique wasn’t exactly hurt by his intensely good looks either. His achievement when it came to looking effortlessly attractive, with a good head of chestnut hair, healthy build, 6’2’’ of height and deep brown eyes, had only added to the general aura of success that surrounded him. Henry was an amiable guy, easy-going with friends, and an undeniable ladies-man, but not in a smutty way, more in a classy, casual way, like James Bond. Money had never been an issue for him, and if asked to describe him, his friends would have said he was definitely well-off (and would let you know it) but also extremely generous as a result. He loved taking them all out for dinner and buying drinks all around until they were nicely sloshed and could chat unreservedly about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It was a part of who he was, a bohemian benefactor one might say. It was made especially easy by the fact that Henry didn’t actually have to earn this money, but was given an open ended allowance by his Mother (unbeknownst by his Father), but that’s beside the point.

It was on a night like this, about a month into Henry’s secret and shameful realisation about himself, when he and his friends were stumbling back to his place for a joint and some late night debating, that Henry first came across Maxwell Greeves.