So, who is this band?

Oh, this is your blog.

Jethro Tull.. Must be a later record. I followed them quite a bit, for a little while. He chuckles. I like his chuckle a lot. It is one of his best qualities.

Oh, there's Traffic again. Don't be sad. I just want to see you get through.

When do we get the icecream?

Yikes. He gave up icecream for 25 years, until he met me. Now, it's icecream nightly. It's almost imperceptible, how it's happening, but it's happening.

Now, I reply. And dish out the Phish food.

I don't know if you're getting enough of the phishes, I say. I've got enough, he replies. I'm going to pause right there. That's more icecream than I've eaten in a long time.

It's happening. Slowly.

Dublin, rain, the street

I had a Dublin moment tonight, as I left the Luas station in Ranelagh. "How're you doing", asks the tall man to my left, quietly, on the street. "Grand, thanks", I reply. And we chat a bit, a few more sentences to the corner, where we part ways. "Lovely talking with you", he says. It is genuine and friendly. So nice, especially after a walk through the very weird parade that is Dublin's nightscape.

On Grafton street: a very old drunk man, stumbling down the street, a fresh gash across his forehead, yielding blood. At the top of Grafton street, several large bouncer-looking working class Dublin men held large yellow placards emblazoned with the legend, JOHN 3:7. Getting off the Luas, presumably to join them, was a very pious looking pale faced type, definitely more the 19 year old pioneer pin-wearing stereotype of fifties Ireland, but with a yellow tshirt on over his coat, again declaring, JOHN 3:7. This is a verse from the opium eater's gospel, the young one, and it has been showing up (some sort of cult seems to be emerging, on the face of tonight's attendance) for some years now just behind the goal posts at rugby and Gaelic matches, and, I suppose, has taken on a life of its own. My guess is that it preaches something about abstinence, maybe the guys holding the placards were fresh from some 12 step programme. I don't know.

I won't bother getting started with Temple Bar. As Friendly Ranelagh Man said, sure there's no one Irish in there at all. Truly. And for good reason.

I often encounter these random moments of friendliness, actually. They always come as a surprise. It's amazing how a momentary meeting with a stranger - nothing intense, nothing fancy, no big ideas - can feel very intimate. Some intimate part of you, touched. And then you say goodbye, and walk down the street. I remember a conversation I overheard on the bus from Girona airport to Barcelona, a month or so ago, between a girl from Texas and a softly spoken Spanish man. I sat behind them, it was a rainy night, they were speaking English, I am curious, I listened. It was largely chitchat, but you know, chitchat is some of the most interesting chat there is, really, especially when other people are having it. She was intelligent, independent, a 'good' girl, conditioned to be guarded with strange men. He seemed such a lovely sort. I sort of hoped they would exchange email addresses or facebook contacts or something. Afterwards, I saw her, on the train to Catalunya. She looked like she was thinking hard. Like the part of her that was forgotten from the thought, was suddenly sad.

Do you know the feeling of sudden sadness? The one that comes like a whirlwind, and tears through your body? The active sadness, the living sadness, that leaves space after it has gone, energy and joy the next day? Do you know that feeling, or anything like it?

So, according to my late night chat tonight, news from Roscommon is that apparently no one even says how-are-you-doing there anymore. What a pity. I'm glad they do in Dublin.

Knock on wood, baby. oooh.

I've just been involved one of those conversations that felt like we were rollerblading at speed through the boroughs of new york city. One of those conversations that had us. Tonight, at Freddy's. We drank of that conversation like two thirsty feckers, jugs and jugs of it, half afraid to stop in case there mightn't be more of it for ages. Beautiful.

Here's something I started writing in the street earlier tonight, and finished it just before that conversation happened.

Did you ever get the feeling that nobody likes you? I mean, nobody. I've had the feeling that nobody likes me. Just now. It's kind of still sticking around a bit. Yes. It's still here. The more people I meet, the more unfriendly things seem to be getting.

People keep sending me away. I must have some strange magnetism this evening. Even the bartender told me to get served by somebody else.

Knock, knock, knock on wood.

Jiving on the connections between us

There's a facet of new york life that I find disconcerting every time it occurs. Of course I love it also, and miss it when it's absent from a place I'm living in, but somehow here, it has a little uncanny edge.

I spent yesterday between union square and tompkins square park, hanging out a little at the howl festival, before doing my grocery shopping in trader joe's and hopping on the Q home. On the walk around town, I met a few people, had chats of varying degrees of depth, varying durations.

I was feeling kind of antsy.

Walking from 14th st. across town, I stopped by a tiny secondhand designer shop on 11th st. As soon as I stepped into the place, there was a seriously unfriendly vibe. The shop is the size of a shed, and stacked with driesvannoten and blahy miblahy, all the way up to the ceiling. In moving around one customer, I bumped into another, and she looked at me like I had shat into her fake ysl bag, so I said fuck this, and headed out the door.

The instant I hit the street, random passing bloke asked me, "what are you listening to on your iPod?" It was a direct question, and it got a direct answer. "Seal", I said, looking at him a bit defensively. I wasn't in the mood for some sort of coolness judgement. And I suppose I don't think of Seal as being particularly cool. Not in the way that John Lennon's Rocknroll album, for example, would probably be considered cool. At least, that's my expectation.

And this guy seemed cool to me. So I was wary.

Funnily enough, he said he liked Seal too. He said he was 31, and when he was 17, 18, 19, Seal's videos were around a lot. I told him that I had heard him before too, but not really LISTENED to him, you dig? And there was a nice vibe between me and this stranger, we started to groove, and then suddenly we were at the streetcorner, and I seemed to be heading straight across 11th st. and he was going downtown. And we said goodbye, and there was a really nice vibe there, and off I went. And I found myself missing this dude that I had just spoken to for approximately 90 seconds. Actually missing him, the way you might miss a lover, as I walked across the avenues.

When I got to TS park, there were large scale paintings wrapped around the park, many with painters working at them, and tables all through the park with people selling zines, soap, trying to impeach bush, tell you about their community arts centre..

The first person I saw when I entered the park was a bloke with a tshirt that said "Ollscoil Luimni - University of Limerick" on it. "Oy, you!" I shouted after him, "hey, you! I'm from Limerick!" Turns out his girlfriend, who was also there, had spent six months in my hometown. Nice to be able to pronounce the name Tom Collins (a Limk pub) a few times over in Alphabet city. Felt good, that.

I met a drummer who walked around with his sticks, getting kinetic with whatever was going on around him. There was a fair whack of old neighbourhood folks in the park, which was kind of great, and also a reminder that when these people go, the neighbourhood is literally history. At least, until gentrification starts turning backwards.

And later, there was a longish chat with a native upperwestside woman in her sixties, who was full of life and we jived a little about guacamole and rhubarb tarts in the all-sunday-long line at trader j's.

Random connections are rife in this town. They come and go like sparks from a faulty socket, like synapses z-zz'ing off each other. I suppose what I find disconcerting is that they go as unexpectedly and as casually as they come. No ceremony, no goodbye, no flinch or blink of the eye as its focus settles elsewhere.

I was raised in a landscape of casual friendliness, but this is new york city. With a population of over 8 or 22 million people, depending on how you define newyorkcity, it is so incredibly unlikely that you will cross another new yorker's path twice ever as to render the moment when that happens utterly sacred and monumental.

The odds against it happening are pretty stark. And yet it happens.

Something beautiful happened last night

I met Sol, a 93 year old native lower east sider.

Sol's a tiny little man and I saw him walk along the street as I sat in the window of some hip lower east side bar. He walked incredibly slowly, leaning on a stick, and I began to write, sitting in the window. I looked up and he had moved a few feet. I looked up again, another few feet. Then I got on a roll of something and didn't look up for a while. I didn't see him. Ran out into the street, crossed the road, to the corner. Looked in all directions. No sign of the old man. Turned to go back to the bar. There was the old man. Propped up against a tiny windowsill, sitting on the bones of his arse.

He looks up.
I say, hello, sir.
He says, do you like humour?
I say, yes I do, sir.
He says, I got a joke for you. Listen to this.
And I sit down.

We chatted for a while. He told me some of the best ba-boom jokes heard since the glory days of radio. Here's one of them.

I met a woman in the launderette.
She says "you married?"
I says "no"
She says "you a bachelor?"
I says "yeah"
She says, "how comes a you don't ever get married?"
I says, "Because I believe marriage is a big step. And I don't wanna break my ankle."

Ninety three, and he sat there balanced on a five inch windowsill on Ludlow st.

He asked me what my hobbies were, and then he told me, "I got hobbies. I like to paint". I ask him, "what do you paint, Sol?" He says, "miniatures. I got these business cards.." and he's rooting in his pocket for his wallet. Out come these business card sized paintings, or rather, drawings, and he shows me one. There's a house, and some trees, and two little birds sitting watching the house on a fence. It's a simple scene, a bucolic vision executed with simple lines, and entirely unlike anywhere he would ever have been likely to have lived or maybe even been.

I ask him, "have you ever been out of New York, Sol?"
He says, "yes, I went on a cruise once. Ten days. The Virgin Islands. I had my own room, the meals were nice, there was music. You pay more the higher you go up the ship, you know. I had a nice room".

He asks if I like the little drawing. I say I do. "And see, I made a gilt frame and put it around it, too. I made that." he says, indicating the brassy border around the business card edges. "I like to keep busy. I'm interested in ceramics. There's a flea market on Avenue A I go to sometimes and if it's cheap enough, I buy somethin there and fix it up". He started to name the major ceramics houses in Ireland and Britain. He looks back at the drawing of the birds, says, "and that's the house the birds are going to get married in". I don't understand. He says, "see that's the punchline". It's all punchlines and any opportunity to see the funny side, for Sol.

He's been living alone almost all of his life and the only family he's got left are a niece in Brooklyn who bothers him about what he's eating, and a nephew in Yonkers. He talks to them on the phone, meets them rarely. The last time he met his niece, he was giving her a birthday gift. She wouldn't let him make a phone call. "I gave her a nice gift, thirty five dollars it's a lot of money.. it was just a local call.. she is mean!"

He went to the local old folks' community centre and got driven away because he didn't want to sit listening to people complain about their aches and pains.

So he meets people from time to time in the way that I met him, walking along the street, saying hello, and having a chat. He says he has always had a funny way with women: he prefers it when the woman makes the first move, so to speak, and approaches him, then he can open up and tell some jokes and share some life experiences. "Always been that way, I don't know why".

He was in McDonalds the other day, and somebody came up to him and gave him two bills, a ten and a five, just to be nice. He doesn't rely on people giving him money though, he's okay. He worked in the post office for a long time and they had good benefits there. That was the best job he had.

Back in the thirties he used to be a button salesman. He drove wholesale buttons to garment factories in the LES. Back then, the LES was a Jewish neighbourhood, a garment district. It was full of warehouses and sewing factories, with Jewish women working their fingers to the bone. Sol is a New York city native, a lower east side Jewish man who has lived through most of the last century and is still telling jokes in this one. And they want to push him out of his nice three room apartment. And he ain't goin' nowheres.

A taxi pulled up outside this pub I had left, before I found myself spending the evening chatting with Sol. The people I had gone to the bar to meet were standing by the cab. "I'd like to go over to these people and say hello, Sol. I've really enjoyed chatting with you", I say to him. And he says to me, "When you're looking for a husband, make sure he's not a drinker or a gambler or running around with women. Pick a good man, make sure of it. Do you hear me? I say this to you as a father to a daughter. You understand?"

I say yes, Sol, I do.
And turn to cross the street.

We meet again.. and again

It happens all the time. Casual conversation, getting lively, getting on a roll, both people sharing the experience happily and sharing their observations about life and agreeing wholeheartedly with each other. Then something else takes over.

The agreeing just takes on a life of its own. The whole thing becomes about agreeing with each other, even when it's just a load of bollocks. He says something about feeling insecure sometimes in situations with people he doesn't know very well. She's not feeling insecure, nor does she have an immediate recollection of feeling insecure with a new person, but she agrees anyway. Yeah yeah absolutely. It's like the Titanic. It takes too long to stop. The iceberg is not moving.

But it doesn't resonate. He's not stupid. He knows she was insincere on that last oh-my-god-i-totally-get-you. He's suspicious now. He's met chicks like this before. Oh yeah, it's all great at the start. Then they start lying and he doesn't know where he is.

So the tide has turned, but it's way too uncomfortable for anybody to actually acknowledge, even to themselves, until later, when they're alone and analysing the whole thing. But right now, they're still together. Sitting at that table. And now, instead of manic agreement, what happens is a big fat silence, each of them alone in their own little self-bubble. Nothing is said. Nobody says "I don't get that". Nobody says "It's all suddenly gone strange, hasn't it?" Whole worlds are left desolate in the space between one person's declaration and another's lack of receptiveness to it. Tumbleweed blowing through and two desperately grinning people peeking in at the scene but unable to make anything grow there at all.

Last night I walked along my street in Brooklyn just slightly ahead of a couple who began to argue. I have never heard a fight between two human beings conducted at such a light, pleasant conversational level before. Not an ounce of passion. God, I remember the aria-pitched furies that Johs and I performed for the Danish public, blazing fire through the freezing cold Danish streets. Not pretty.

But the volume between these two last night was kept low, and gentle. Discreet in their aggravation. Keeping things looking good on the street. Having a fight. Totally comfortable in it.

They're talking about money. Both have thin, white voices. His is the first voice I tuned to:

- I mean it as a legitimate question. Where do you think we're going to get the money? I'm not coming over all no-we-can't-do-this. I'm asking you for ideas.

- But it's always the money. The money the money the money the money. First thing. Straight away.

- Look, I'm not trying to shoot myself in the foot here...

- It's like when I say like, like fifty times in a sentence. I don't have to hear about it all the time from you.

- Well I don't see you taking that burden off o' my shoulders.

- I just wanna make our lives more fun. It's like it's... regimented.

- I like order. You have always known this. I don't like debt. Especially not for something so... frivolous.

Walk down Grafton street in Dublin at 4 in the morning and you'll hear plenty of conflict, people screaming things that never make sense. Or Camden Street, down some alleyway, some girl is sitting on her ankles, heaving sobs and breaths, he having shattered her world in pieces again, and stormed off in disgust at her. Rage and pain and hurt, at volume.

Not like this.

This was something that would probably continue at that level for hours, days, weeks, without climax.

They crossed the road and I was tuned out of their bubble.