gone to the beach

Greystones is covered in cyclists but he finds somewhere to ditch the car for a few minutes, drags the bike out, pins his wife's number on her back and kisses her goodbye and good luck. He wriggles his way back out, through a warren of affluence, parks in the village, goes for a wander.
He knows this place a little, sees the flat where he used to attend sordid little parties where everyone had The Best Time and posted their Magic Memories on Bebo after, replete with rictus grins and misplaced hands.
He's on the beach now, gritty underfoot. He's not 40 seconds in before he pisses, shivering at waist depth. He dunks himself under, trying not to gasp too loudly as he comes back up so as not to startle the old man throwing a tennis ball into the sea for his dogs. He gets out quickly - the freakishly good weather hasn't warmed up the sea. He checks his phone and retrieves his wedding ring from his shoe. It is 8.08 am, and now there is no-one else on the beach, only him in his trunks, a dozen crows and a crisp packet.
He reads a passage of deep, queasy unpleasantness in his book. Are we all the same? Flies feast on strands of seaweed and the hair on his legs. There are photos somewhere of him here before, fat and tanned and faking something.
Good citizens and their dogs are starting to fill the beach now, though the waves and the sea remain the only sounds. Another swimmer appears and lasts about as long as he did in the sea, though she doesn't look the sort to only be going for a sneaky slash. He wonders where his wife's at now. The gorgeous gorse on Bray Head. A text from his mum. A man from the Tidy Towns committee picking up detritus. More dogs. More crows. Flies on his feet.

Radge against the machine

I feel it would be remiss of me to let the decision of a blogging contemporary and like-minded soul to give up the ghost pass without remark. I've been at this for about five years now, and Radge was there when I began, putting his thoughts out there in the same kind of way I wanted to and chiming in with encouraging words on my own efforts as I went along. Personal blogging has always been an easy target for accusations of narcissism, though it rarely contains anything more revealing than a Twitter feed, a personal essay or newspaper column, and doesn't suppose that its audience are interested in multiple blurry shots of every drunken night out they have. Radge, as with so many of the others he mentions, was always trying to articulate life as it happened, equal parts appalled by and in thrall to all the things he encountered. Writing projects, without the usual incubation period. There was a brief period, probably early 2009, when at least one of these people, often Radge, could be counted on to have something great for me to read every day. Moseys around Dublin, thefts of PM Dawn, flights of fantasy,Serious Thoughts on Serious Things. It was exciting.
I survey my own 312 posts over the last few years and only feel pleased with vague snippets of a few of them, only feel that little bits of them capture what it's like to be me or someone like me in Dublin in the 21st century. But that's enough, quite honestly. If Radge can do the same with his 803 pieces then it was all time well spent.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know

January saw me haunting the streets of Stoneybatter at every available quiet or light moment, searching for our missing cat, Butters. The plumber had let him out, and he obviously bolted, then didn't know how to get home. I grew familiar with every every single street - invariably named after an obscure Scandinavian king or one of the more agricultural parts of  County Wicklow. The streets grew grubbier and darker every evening that I didn't find him, and with them my mood. The streets smelt of other cats' piss. I thought the brushes on the inside of every letterbox we posted heartfelt callusifyoufindourcat flyers through were going to eat the flesh from my hands. A young guard on a bicycle who stopped me late one night as I was checking under cars on Niall Street looked disappointed when I told him there were only Dreamies in the little bag I was clutching. He looked taken aback by my face, helpless and teary with the wind. My wife, who loves me very much, beat the streets with me more often than not, tried to tell me when it was time to knock it off for the night and bought me a lightbox to combat the dark and grubby beast that is my SAD. I took the head off her for telling me my dinner was ready one night, and hated myself more than I ever had before.

I am back in college now, part-time, adding another silly arts degree to my 'skillset' - so I sat in front of the lightbox with a history textbook or Great Expectations, letting the harsh light hit my retinas and waiting to feel better. And, stupidly, I did. I do. What a sorry mental condition to just be pining for the sun! Who wants to lose their edge, their excuse to be a prick and be bad at their job, to a high watt bulb and regular walks in the park?

Natural light slowly returned to the world just as Butters was found. Not by me - a great blow to the hero fantasy I had conjured up on cold evenings - but by a nice man called Des eight doors down. He was skinnier and had rotting teeth, but he's grand, the little fucker. Butters, that is. I have little reason to pour scorn upon the dental hygiene of Des. We gave him a bottle of Faustino V by way of a thank you. Des, that is.

So the returned cat and the improved mood leave me with just the streets to contend with. Because a place takes on everything that has ever happened there, and every bad fucking feeling you felt on it. It does. Thankfully, most of us only feel the ones that happened to us. But I've reclaimed the sofas of bereavement, school locker areas, and the lane in Wicklow where someone punched my jaw so hard that the pain made me vomit. Scraped off the residue of resentment. I will put the strut back into my Stoneybatter shuffle and the  aching streets will be glad of it.

Do you have a minute?

Are you having a good Christmas? Have you consumed? Do you spend an inordinate amount of time giving out about things beyond your control, TV shows you are supposed to like, social media trends and the decline in quality of mince pies? Do you have a pension plan? Do you feel really satisfied with life every once in a while and then worry that you're being smug and then worry that the act of worrying about being smug is in itself really smug, or else a mask for many other concerns because you aren't all that satisfied at all, are you? Do you participate in that ah here leave it out hilarity even though you know it's not really very funny? Have you ever eaten four pieces of shortbread in alarmingly quick succession? Did it hurt? Do other things hurt? Is it OK to go shopping on the 26th of December? Is it OK to loudly proclaim your despair with the world over people going shopping on the 26th of December? Is it? Have you read a book recently and was it good? Do you not have time for reading? Do you watch more than four hours of reality TV a week? Do you believe that America will ever sort its shit out with guns? Do you gripe about auto-correct? Do you jangle your keys? Would you buy a gun if you lived in America? Do you get vexed? Do you regret a lot of the things you did in your early twenties and some of the things you did last week? Do you think that foetuses have a soul and can you explain what that might be? Do you ridicule the religious? Are you, the evangelical church up the road wishes to know, the victim of an ancestral curse? Do you ever pray? If you do sometimes pray do you mentally sign off with "almost certainly not, I know, but just in case,LOL!!"? Did you read the small print? Have you claimed your tax back? Do you do something to break a sweat every day? Can you touch your toes? Are you aware that this entire concept comes from Padgett Powell's 'The Interrogative Mood', but that this particular dude hasn't read it because writing a whole book like this and getting it published and expecting people to pay for it would be taking the piss, right? Am I wrecking your head? Has anyone ever accused you of being a hipster? Can you go now? Is it getting better? Did you get what you wanted? Do you feel at home? Did you have a good year?

Priorities

I came home on Tuesday and started a new post. I wanted to to tell you about a nice encounter I'd just had on the bus, and by way of that, fill people in on what's been going on with me and ruminate on one or two things. As I do. But it wasn't coming out as I wanted it to so I left it for another day.

I won't be writing that post now.

I went to bed that night and did my usual ill-advised check on Twitter. News was just coming in about Savita and the first outpourings of anger were spewing thick and fast.

Savita.

I don't know much about her. I know she was 31, the same age as me. The same age as my wife. I know that she had a beautiful smile, was intelligent, that she taught children to dance and clearly had a sense of fun. I know that she was pregnant. I know that pregnancy can be a dangerous thing, but that modern medicine is continually making it less so.

I know that she spent quite some time in a lot of pain. That she knew her baby was going to die. That she died, and she didn't have to.

Women have been 'other' in this country for time immemorial. Our national religion and guiding light, Roman Catholicism, revolves around notions of women having sex being disgusting. There once, most likely, was a woman called Mary who lived in Bethlehem. She had a child called Jesus. She did this because she had sex. This revolts certain men, so they said that she didn't. A few hundred years later they decided that her mammy didn't either, and put it into writing. And so it began. All the words on the entire Internet could not describe the horrors perpetrated on the women in this country in the name of Jesus, and his pure mammy and nana.

They rumble on here, largely because setting up our own rituals for births and deaths and weddings is difficult, and because it hurts our parents' and our grandparents' feelings when we don't abide by traditions, like everyone else.

On Wednesday morning a student of mine, a Polish priest and a genuinely nice man, pointed to a picture of Enda Kenny in his copy of Metro and said "Is he a good leader? I hear he is Catholic and then I hear he is going to pass law for abortion." I gritted my teeth. Metro were a day behind on the Savita story, so I filled him in. He felt that he foetus should have been aborted, and would have been in Poland. I talked to students from Libya, Kuwait, Italy, Spain and Japan - all highly conservative countries in their own ways. All were sure that Savita would not have been let die in those circumstances.

This goes beyond the divide of pro-choice and anti-choice, this is about recognising women as human beings. As I walked up to the Dáil with Rosie and Colm on Wednesday evening we saw Willie O'Dea and Jimmy Deenihan slithering their respective ways out of there. They were welcome to stay for the protest. Tears were far more likely to break out than violence, but they knew what they were. Cowards who voted against doing anything about our law. It's well for them how they take the backslaps and the hoisting onto shoulders every few years, the triumphalism and the showboating, the expenses and the salary, the pints of Guinness from local businessmen when they go down the local. The prayer to shivering prayer until they have dried the marrow from the bone.

We let them go home. We hope they slept well. We knew, like Emer, that we're all complicit in this. We were glad they were plenty of men there, as it will take men as well as women to stop this from happening again. We sat on the ground and we thought about Savita and we felt sad and we felt sorry.

"Leah was tender-eyed"

With her pissy, mewling offspring all moved on, we sent our cat to be spayed in late June of 1995. 'Smiler', was the name she came to us with - presumably intended to be deeply ironic, as she wore the mien of a feline who dwelt too often on the sorrows of this world. I learnt a lot from her.

The vet sent her back with the news that she was already pregnant, and we greeted my mother jeeringly and triumphantly at the door with the news, for it was she who had wanted Smiler fixed - aware that our childish desire for kittens didn't extend much into the household hygiene end of things. We would later learn that she had just returned from a meeting where she had been fired. It would be much, much later that I would learn what that felt like.

Three kittens were born in a contained bloody mess in our hot press early one morning. My mother brought them out to the garden with a bucket of water before we got up, eager to avoid the months of urine-drenched kitchen that lay, inevitably, ahead. She hadn't the heart to do it. Or had too much, rather.
One was black and white, like his mother, and we named him Snoopy in a teenaged attempt at subversiveness. The other two were a brindled mix of black and brown and ginger hues, like a tomcat who skulked at the end of our lane. We called them Jacob and Esau, like the biblical brothers. When the vet told us they were female they became the lesser-known biblical sisters Rachel and Leah. I liked this, because I fancied a girl in school called Rachel, but it was Rachel we sent away for adoption, and Leah and her fattening brother Snoopy we kept.

Leah grew a cancerous lump on her leg when she was one, which we had removed. It came back, and we were told that having the leg amputated was the only option. So we did. Her appetite for hunting, previously voracious, was now curbed but she managed life just fine, operating under the sobriquet 'Hopalong' and far more affectionate than ever before.She grew squawky and grizzled as time wore on, and gradually became a toothless little gremlin of a thing, ugly-pretty in the same way that gnarled old men are.

It's early August 2012 and I'm back at the family home, visiting with my wife. Leah is squawking in a different key, and doesn't sound great. My mum explains that the vet has said he'll put her down, whenever they think she's ready. "But I don't think she's ready to go just yet," she says, as we watch her slow-motion lope around the garden. I doubt I was ever told where exactly she was nearly drowned, but in my mind's eye it was more or less precisely where she was at that point, seventeen years on and moving as tentatively as a kitten.

They decided she was ready on Saturday, and buried her by the roses, with Raffa the giddy spaniel in attendance. My dad called and broke it to me with his customary gentleness while I was out in the shops. I sighed and thought I was fine and then didn't feel fine, so took the bus back to my own home to scoop out litterboxes and write something about her.

who is showing whom their bloody rag now?

Every time I check your blog, to see if you've written a new post, I'm reminded of you being sad, and don't like that. I know it's not something you control, but you should never be sad, because you are a best fellow and I love you. 

Hello.
It's hard not to be stirred into action by a comment like the one above, even when it's from your younger brother, who visits the blog from time to time on his lunch break. I used to feel far more of a compulsion to put stuff down here, if only to feed the narcissistic impulse to share my epiphanies with whomever cared to listen. But what happened when I got depressed was that whatever worms of creativity lurked in my brain seemed to crawl off and die. That started with humour. Anyone who considers themself to be "a bit of a joker" should probably be publicly horsewhipped, but I suppose I do try and make people laugh on a daily basis, whether they want it or not. But that went out the window for a while, as did attempting to write anything at all. Because when you are low you feel like everything you've ever done is shit, and that when people say nice things to you then that is just them being nice. People were nice about my last post, and I appreciate that, but you kinda have to be nice when someone writes about being depressed. Really, though, if you wanted to read something unbelievably articulate about depression you'd go here. One can only assume that Allie just thinks everyone's just being nice, too.

Since my last post I've ended up doing what I never thought I would, by joining Twitter. You can felch me here, if that's your thing. I've also signed up as a contributor with the excellent new online magazine ramp.ie. You can read my first post for them here, and I recommend you have a good snoop around while you're there, as it's filled with great, diverse stuff. You can also sext them on Facebook, felch them on Twitter, roger them on your Skybox, and all those other things that the kids are into these days.

Now that I've cleared my throat I'll be back soon, probably with a post about violence. Yay!