Calling all humans who have not yet been consumed whole and alive by a snake

Please contribute your opinions on a life-and-death dilemma I posted over on Clusterflock today.

Pedro

When I was 18, part of my extended scene included a dude called Pedro. He was about our age, probably 20, and he was homeless, living by selling and taking drugs, knocking on his clients and friends’ doors at 2 in the morning, asking if he could sleep on the couch. He was a friend of Tadhg, who shared a flat with Caroline and me.

I remember him calling and asking me to just look at his eyes, as he looked up to the light, his pupils huge and wide and black. Six tabs, I’ve just taken six tabs of acid, he said. I kicked him out. He stayed for a game of Trivial Pursuit once and I remember being amazed by his ability to answer every question and take the game comfortably. I hope he got hip to "Who wants to be a millionaire?" when it came around. Pedro. I met him on Grafton Street, or maybe it was Camden street, about 3 years ago, in 2005. I was so surprised to see him, even more surprised that I recognised him, I hadn't thought of him even once since then. Pedro! I shouted, and went to greet him. He looked at me with horror. Don’t call me by that name. That’s not my name anymore. My name is Peter.

What is this love stuff? Or, jealousy makes for better sex.

It is official, Howard Jacobson says so. He says:

"People will tell you: "We've been together now for 40 years, never had a cross word, she's never looked at another man, I've never looked at another woman." And there's enough of Felix Quinn [the lead character in his new novel] in me to think: "well, that would be a bit dull".... Jealousy quickens. And to miss the quickening of jealousy, is to miss a big part of erotic life. I'm sure you can settle down and have a nice domestic life without jealousy.' A pause. A wicked smile. 'But - why would you want to?'"

He says that jealousy is the 'quickening' of love. The glue, the proton, the enzymes, the baking powder, the bit that makes the heart beat faster. I kind of have a soft spot for a species that needs things to kick its arse in gear and couple up. Here's Jacobson on desire:

"Intense desire is living in constant fear of loss. Can you love someone properly, without fearing that you'll lose them? I doubt it. I doubt it. With love grows this real sense of danger. The world will take it from you! And one way to lose someone you love, is to death, or an accident, or any kind of mishap. And the other, is to infidelity, which is another kind of mishap."

But what is the stuff that is getting quickened? What is this love stuff? So there's a moment when we recognise that we feel 'love' for somebody, the romantic version also, that really only occurs in moments. A minute after the fuzzy wuzzies and we're having a blazing row with that person, the flame of passion flickers with the wind. That's a different kind of love to the the love that finds the lover in a myriad of forms, whatever happens to be around.

Is the addict in love with his dealer? Is that love? Maybe it is... It's perceived need, it's a craving that flows through the body, and the perceived one who can soothe and supply what is craved. That's often how romantic love at least, is perceived, experienced. A feverish surge of drythroated desire. Most people would probably not think of it as love. Who is to say?

More about home, and happiness

But happiness comes and goes, and when it's present there's nothing complicated about it at all. The only thing that's complicated about happiness is the search for it. I used to think that I needed to love everything about Denmark in order to be content living there, but that was never going to happen, because it just wasn't the right chemistry. So some people get a kick out of being stared at unselfconsciously by the local wildlife, and other people want nothing more than to feel entirely ordinary in the place that they live, not the weirdy one that lives on the corner. I think it is entirely dependent on the chemistry of the person in the place. When you find a place or a person that draws love out of you daily for it or him or her, then it's just a question of getting on with it. There is no more search, or expectation of finding happiness. There's just living.

Here is another one of Hugh Crawford's photos of the day. It was taken in July 1982, but the theme is universal. It describes, with extraordinary accuracy, except that it is clearly warm in this picture and in Ireland it is cold, how I am feeling today.

Eye witness speaks about baby whale creature

Ok, I am glued to the baby whale story, like, um, a baby whale to a yacht. So there is no great rescue mission underway, all the people in the viscinity can do is wait. The only thing that will save baby whale creature is if another lactating whale mother is found in the area. Here's what a yachtsman from one of the boats said today:

"It sounded like a bit of a vacuum cleaner on the bottom of the boat. I finally got up and here's this whale suckling the side of the boat," Peter Lewis told Fairfax Radio Network. "It was a very, very sad sight. It did it for about an hour, going from side to side on the boat and at times blowing air under the boat, and it just seemed to give a sigh out at one stage as if, you know, 'this isn't working.'"

(from yahoo)

So why can't they just make a gigantic rubber whalemama-like nipple and whack it on the side of one of the yachts and get this kid weaned? Of course they've had that idea. And dismissed it:

"They suckle for 11 or 12 months, so it's a long time — we'd just agree it'd be very difficult," the environmental spokeswoman said. "We think it really needs to find its mother or foster mother and those are really the only chances."

A small baby whale creature really would need to learn a lot of stuff from his mum, she is not just a source of nutrition, but she would also teach him how to be a whale. Maybe she is swimming the ocean desperately trying to find him, or maybe she just had an instinct in her to be free. Whatever way, from whatever human perspective we can look at this, this story is heartbreaking. There will, most likely, be tears at the end of it. I will be very happy to post about something else.

The baby whale who mistook a yacht for its mother

Ok, not the most cheery start to the day, but that's how it is sometimes. I just read this.
So sometimes, in the wild, a mother abandons her baby, who still seeks its mother, and decides that a yacht will be its mother instead. Hm. I'm imagining how the people on the yacht are feeling. They are most likely very rich, and on their holidays. Faced with a doomed baby creature of tremendous natural beauty, who is looking for its mum and thinks their yacht is her. They cannot help said doomed baby creature. There is nothing they can do, except watch, or leave their yacht, effectively re-abandoning the baby creature. Other rich holidaying people in the viscinity are encountering the same possibility, as doomed baby creature gets hungrier and circles them, trying to find its real mum.

I imagine lots of long distance emergency video conferencing with therapists; knuckles-full of diazepam and prozac getting knocked back; and a general panic as the waves of complicated emotion surge as the baby whale creature circles, crying out for its mum, wondering why its mum won't come and nuzzle baby reassuringly the way she always has, wondering why mum won't feed him the way she always has.

Need a lot of drugs to numb that. Need a lot of explanations to stop you from listening to the song of the baby whale creature surging within, making its last flailing dance of life inside you.

Fleeing the past

I've just read a remarkable article about some children of nazis who have converted to Judaism and gone to live in Israel. It culminates in a frank conversation with a relative of Hitler, who is probably the only one of the converts who freely discusses his family's nazi past. He describes his feelings on arriving in Israel in the seventies:

"I felt at home. I was no longer living in a conflict. I didn't have to reject the older generation."

Interestingly enough, there is some suggestion that his family's past has taken on a different face, in the following generation:

"Two of my sons are chauvinists and one of them is even partially racist. I can't listen to fascistic discourse. I don't suffer that."

Read it here.

Want to hear the sound of a giggling rat being tickled?

Now's your chance.

How it is

I feel a bit like this today.

Those darts of social pain

Have I blogged this already? Just found it, recently written in a notebook, written during some recent social occasion. I don't know who I was writing it to. Maybe you.

It's a look in the eyes, in the face, straight at you. Dislike. Suspicion. Retreat. Social awkwardness. And when you realise that you are, despite your mortification and your burning cheeks, actually no more and no less than anyone else in any room you will ever enter, but human and human alone and having the human experience of life, then maybe you'll be blessed with the capacity to be content with being no more, and no less, than that. And probably drink a lot less.

I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there. Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there.

Ants won't cross a chalk line. If you see them coming in your window, you can draw a line in chalk through their march, and they won't cross it. You'll see their frustration and their intelligence put to work at that chalk line, but they will not cross it. I don't know why. If there is a line of ants walking through your house, you can draw patterns in chalk and get pools of them that are encircled in chalk and don't know what to do about it.

I was thinking about hunger yesterday, about how we're all really just open books of information, however much we'd like to disguise it. It seems incredibly obvious, but we all just actually are what we actually are, regardless of costume. I suppose it's only really remarkable because of the elaborate games of façade building that are so much a part of how human beings socialise. So I was walking along the street feeling kind of hungry for something I couldn't quite name, and got the sense that whatever it was was probably attracting some kind of resolution scenario, whether I was aware of what was going on, or not.

Do you ever do that thing of looking at some particular other people's lives and think about how their lives seem to make more sense than yours? That they seem to be less complicatedly complex and more straightforwardly simple and quietly, daily burning with some of the key elements of life that burn in a huge pyre in the middle of your dark winter's night, and then not come again for weeks or longer? I do, sometimes.

People are different to a really very limited extent, we have different variations of the exact same desires and experiences of life, and usually, I think, most human beings ricochet around exactly the same tin can of humanness, just finding themselves lying on its side or its lid at different times, and for longer or shorter periods. (If you don't get the tin can metaphor, it's slightly but not really oblique, so just take a deep breath and read that sentence one more time, and it'll crack open its rusty beans to you, I promise).

What distinguishes us is the way our lives look to other people, and of course the kinds of activities that happen, the kinds of activities that don't; temperament; and how a person has been shaped by their experiences. Even within that, I don't think the variation is so extreme. And yet we all act like it is, or actually, feel like it is: we get huffy or passionate with each other, we like and dislike each other intensely based purely on how we think we're being perceived or understood, we respond and don't respond to each other's descriptions of exactly the same experiences of living, depending on the language used. We're peculiar, I suppose. Tigers don't seem to be like this.

And then there's the whole sense of expectation of life, based on desires that may go deep or shallow, or just stick around for a long time. And so it's kind of easy to look at your life to see if it's fulfilling those desires, and so find fault or sorrow with it if it isn't. But human perception is a highly volatile thing. At least, mine is. My humanness is at the mercy of the wind and the sun and the moment and what's happening in my body at any given time. When people ask me what it is that I do (for a living, or passion, or whatever) I usually have to stop and think about it to figure out what it is this week. This is, at least, how I have been living for a few years, now. I feel very unknown to myself, in kind of a very fundamental sort of way. I am amazed and embarrassed and surprised by myself quite regularly (usually in different moments, though there are those crazy times when all those things come at once and usually it's hilarious, at least, when it does. Mercies.).

You know, people change their diets and their whole world changes. Moods, energy, thoughts, the lot. It's amazing what happens. Truly awe-inspiring, the diversity and unpredictability of this life.

I met this chick last night who kept touching my arm fondly, and saying things like "I'm so glad you're here", when she had just met me two minutes ago and those two minutes consisted entirely of her saying how fab I was, and this continued throughout our brief acquaintance. So maybe she blows some people's minds by doing that, it's an easy enough tactic to execute once you see it usually goes well, and you know, it's kind of cool to be someone who goes around blowing people's minds. Sometimes. When it actually happens, though, without any wile or guile or lipstick pouting, it's a real conversation stopper. And that can be a drag when you're just keen for a chat.

And blogging these thoughts does seem like a kind of insanity, especially when you're sober and it's four in the afternoon.

Releasing the monkey

So I have a topic today, after a few somewhat heated email exchanges on the topic of 'cute'. Cute, as in this kind of thing. You know, the tiny baby animal, helpless in human hands, abandoned by its mother, rare endangered species with spiral tail, almost-human-looking kind of cuteness, that reaches just about every human being with any kind of a heart at all. It's one of those aspects of human hard wiring that reaches in and goes click every time, in the normal, healthy human being, especially female ones, who want to take it home and nurture it to maturity, or knit it a jumper for wearing at the first suitable opportunity.

We were talking about pictures of puppies in the window of a pet store, and the similarity of the puppy factory system to a whorehouse. Except that the she-pooches that are kept pumping out puppies are more like sex slaves, and not for the he-dogs' exclusive pleasure either, but for the pleasure of the pimps who own them, to make cash by selling the infants that result from their mating. So you could say that in that sense, it's even more repulsive than a regular old east european-style sex slavery brothel. Because here, the prostitutes are expected to actually give birth to their clients' offspring, which are then sold to people who have either responded in their simple human hard wired way to small baby helpless things in a window, or have desires about saving things and being saved (yeah, ok, they might just want a puppy, also. But that's not so interesting).

I have a friend who has recently returned from Zambia, where she and her husband were running an NGO for a few years. She told me a story about a man who approached her husband with a baby monkey inside his jacket, and offered it to him in return for her husband handing over some cash (with sinister overtones of what might happen to cute baby monkey if he didn't). Ok, so this is a slightly more intense version of the topic at hand, including as it does, the fact of cute chattel in nefarious and perilous hands, but we're getting deeper into the topic.

My friend's husband did consider giving the man money on the condition that he release the animal back into the wild, but realised that he would, in all likelihood, just go and hunt it back again, and sell it to somebody else (for meat or companionship). And given his understanding of the complexities of living in rural Zambia, and the Way Things Are, he just hissed at the man, and walked sadly away. The best he could do under the circumstances. Life is tough, sometimes.

And then I read a story about a diplomat of some advanced middle age, who walked into a lap dancing club in Estonia and saw a 20 year old lapdancer, "whose body invited sex, but whose eyes screamed 'save me'" and so he left his wife and three children to do both those things to her. And six years later, they are living together in a little flat in London, and she is performing in a more upscale venue now, a theatre in the West End, in a show where she tells the stories of her terrible childhood, combined with a little belly dancing. There are rumours of Angelina Jolie playing her in a movie, but her lover considers Angelina Jolie to be "too old" for the part.

Sometimes there's just a magical hook-up between the damned and the saviour-in-waiting. And when that moment happens, wherever the rendezvous finds the people concerned, what happens can be electric and overwhelming, accessing our deepest instincts: sex, nurturing, needing and offering shelter and basic resources. Skip two meals and watch yourself be conquered by the desire for food. It can block out the light of the sun.

And so we can become starved in other ways, too. Starved of the sublime, for instance. Starved of joy. Starved of the decadence of love without agenda. Starved of places to play. Starved of productive, fulfilling work. Starved of meaning in life. Starved of opportunity to be creative. Starved of community, of companionship, of high level human interaction. And then you walk in the door of an arts centre, a slight sweat on your brow... and a curator sees the puppy in you... or you have a random conversation in a bar with somebody who seems to be having the human experience of life too, and the synapses click and click again and want some more.

When we're starved of things, we go around with that hungry look in our eyes. A gay friend of mine once talked about the amount of information that is routinely exchanged by the barest glancing eye contact, on an average night in a gay bar. Novels of information up- and downloaded in miliseconds, everybody scanning everybody else for signs of being exactly the right fit, the right combination of understandings, of longings, cravings, needs, and that exactly right balm to send the needs and the cravings away for the night. Keep the wolf from the door (or invite him in to savage you). Until the next night, at least.

And so we howl in the night. And we write. And we sing. And we paint. And we dance with the fever until our need is fully sweated out of our bodies. For the night.

The sad bits

Yeah, and then I heard a Tommy Tiernan interview on RTE radio a haon, with the professionally bored Eamon Dunphy, who made sure to skirt the chat away from anything that might have been remotely interesting. Keep it light, keep it daytime. Tommy T was talking a bit about loneliness and regret and the pain of his separation from his children, and it was a bit of a breath of fresh air to hear these topics being addressed, though he didn't get very far in Dunphy's hands.

It reminded me of a conversation we were having last night, about this American tradition of sending out letters at Christmas with messages of the triumph of the family this past year, its successes and achievements and the brilliance of its teeth. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if one of those letters said, well, I experienced sadness profoundly this year, and it was a difficult journey through the darker parts of the human soul, but I seem to have learned something from it, and I certainly hope it has made me kinder and able to hear more of life, to smell more of life, to feel more of life.

But that would probably constitute something of a revolution. And not make you liked, at all.

It's still belting rain out, and I have only conversed with cats all day. And though Freddy's is just half a block away, and will almost certainly be some kind of friendly, I will still probably not go.

Bad memories

Memories can be great even when they weren't pleasant at the time that they happened. Have you noticed that? Bad memories can be wonderful. Just because they happened. Because they had life flowing through them. Often, it's my guess, it takes years to really appreciate that.

Riding into Black

I have one thing to say to all car drivers, when driving along unlit night-time country roads (not that you'd notice, because your headlights always light up the roads, so you never have to face the fact that the roads are actually BLACK at night) wherever they and you may be:

When you meet a cyclist coming against you, DIM YOUR LIGHTS DUDE. Don't wait for her to put her arm in front of her face to try to block out the glare in her eyes as she steers her bike around that bend, with the other hand.

Cycling home along black country roads is really a piece of work. When cars come by, as they do often on these roads that lead to and from Limerick city, there are these surreally intense flashes of strong white light and visibility, then back to black immediately afterward. As a car passes, you watch his headlights illuminate the immediate path ahead of you, so you can see if there's a rock in your way, ready to send you flying under the tyres of an oncoming car. It's no joke. Potholes, hairpin bends, high speed cars, that lunatic who passed me so close he could have kissed me while he was doing it - THREE TIMES last night (how did he do it?), riding the loudest motorbike I have ever heard, and driving faster than Evel Knievel in a determined moment - stones, uneven road surfaces (what, in Ireland of the four billion pound roads? surely not!) sudden gaps in the road, as in, here's the road, and then suddenly, here is no road, all these things are leaps of faith into the pure unknown, on the cycle home.

And I love it. The wind rustles in the trees, the air smells so good, your senses are WIDE awake, you can hear the nocturnal animals moving around, responding to you, doing their do. Everything looks unfamiliar at night, cycling home. You can forget what country you're in, who you are, what you're doing, where you're even going to. There's just the focus on the road, the task of getting through it alive, and being exhilarated by the journey.

I had a moment some day last week, when I realised that there was so much interesting about this city and just about anywhere I could possibly be, and that I need to write about it. That the streets are FULL of stories, and moments. And I slipped inside that insight, somehow, and space expanded within it. I dunno, I just started having fun here. It helps to have your eyes open, and a sense of humour handy. It really helps to have loving people about. That's a huge blessing.

It's amazing the kinds of moments you can have in your long-left hometown. I roared down O' Connell street (Limerick's Broadway) yesterday, on the bike, belting out Mystery Train at the top and bottom of my voice. God I love that song. I can smell that song. I can smell the wet heat of it. People actually jumped in the air. I'm having fun here. The most fun I've had in years here, probably. It's not so serious as it used to be, here. At least, what I mean by that is that clearly, I'M not so serious as I used to be, here. There's still a fair whack of seriousness around the Limerick streets. But your hometown can so easily bring out the seriousness in you in a what-a-pity-that's-happening sort of way.

And shortly after that, I was cycling over the Athlunkard bridge, and I saw a man walking toward me, on the footpath. We looked right into each other, and I realised that we had been in the same class in school when we were about six years old, and I realised that he realised the same thing. There may or may not have been crushes involved. They may or may not have been mutual. They were certainly unrequited (requiting it meant holding hands in an intensely meaningful way, at six). We each may or may not have lived out the legacy of that maybe/maybe not crush for a number of subsequent crushes/relationships. Either of us may or may not be still living in the shadow of that maybe/maybe not relationship scenario.

And we looked into each other, and we were kind of amazed, and we smiled. And I cycled, and he walked, past. Over the bridge. In opposite directions.

Motiveless joy

People are often suspicious of casual, inexplicable joy. It depends on the context. When you're at a party and everybody's having fun, nobody will look at you sideways for your meaningless joy. However, when you're walking down the street and everybody else is frowning, you can get the squinty eye.

The jetlag roadshow rolls on

The jetlag show is the longest running musical in town, this week. This morning I awoke at 3.30 am, so now I'm on Moscow time, or something. I'm having all sorts of strange combinations of feelings, today, too. A little earlier it was despondent and fine. I've just been experiencing loss of faith in good things. It's such a pity when that happens.

A cringe ricocheted through the afternoon like a bullet of lightning.

I saw an excellent band last weekend. They're called Fly Ashtray, they're from the Bronx and they've been together for years. They make a gorgeous fat harmonic rocknroll sound. A love vibe composed of the orgasm bits of classic 70's rocknroll, mixed together with a little avant garde kick to the left, and delivered with a kind of expanded punk soul. And I've got to mention them, because they've just emailed me to say they're going to fill up my iPod with free cds. And they rock. Truly.

Anyone got a joke?

Gonna kill you mister mosquito man

I've been feeling interesting combinations of feelings lately, sort of a bit like cornflake pizzas or jambalaya meringue, stuff that sounds impossible but works out kind of gorgeously in the moment. So today, it's sober and electric. Got the blues, and got electric. Yeah, I know. That makes me sound like Gary Moore. Well, so be it.

A mosquito slipped into my room while I was climbing back in from the fire escape. I said to him, "I feel like murdering you, little creature" and proceeded to interact with him in perfect consonance with my intention. The little creature had other ideas, however, and his DNA is clearly hip to this kind of jive, and how to deal with it. He's hiding out in my bedroom, taking his chances. I know the corner he's in. He's made himself invisible. Every now and then I feel his sting. That's my cue to not touch. All you can do when there's a mosquito in the room is kill, and not touch, and whip out the lavender oil. It's a pain in the arse, but that's alright.

Ah, a shift, over the course of this post, even. From sober and bluesy, to itchy and content. High and mighty and tired. Pointless and singing.

Betrayal and the moment in the door

I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently, on the tricky personal topic of betrayal, specifically betraying oneself. We had been caught up in a strange moment together, and by some stroke of grace, happened to be both willing to talk about it, even though it was the kind of thing people so easily dismiss and often don't readily address with each other, especially two people who don't know each other tremendously well. But we were willing, and we did talk about it, and I think we learned a lot about each other from that chat.

But the topic was not easy, and was revealing. The event happened a week ago. This friend, we'll call him Eric, happens to live a block and a half away from me. One evening last week I was going for an evening stroll and I found myself ringing on his and his boyfriend's doorbell to see if he'd like to come too. And his boyfriend - let's call him Klaus - Klaus' eyes were bulging out of his head at the sight of me standing outside in the hallway. I was feeling very strange vibes and feeling like an intruder, and a foolish one at that. I hit the sidewalk fast.

So we met and had a drink about a week later and talked about it. Turns out that Klaus is the type that does not like having people just drop by, considers calling unannounced to be a horrible thing.

Eric, on the other hand, is in love with the San Francisco model of living, and "wouldn't discourage it" (he can also be quite circumspect). And so, by not inviting me in that day, he felt that he was betraying himself in some way. And it led to a fiesty conversation with his newly-moved-in-with lover.

This has happened before, with a new male friend and his boyfriend. The first time it happened was with a friend of mine in Dublin, an artist, lets call him Egon. We hung out a bit together a few years ago, I wrote an essay for a catalogue of his. The specific boyfriend-tension event happened when his boyfriend attacked me verbally like a starving rottweiler at the opening of a show of Egon's, and I was literally energetically propelled out of the building.

Egon and I also had a moment in the door, at the opening of that show. We stood there, Egon at the door, and me out on the street, shaken and clutching my scooter. Egon felt desperately badly about it, apologising on behalf of his 'psychotic boyfriend' but I was just so shocked and I didn't have the courage to stand up and tell him how I felt about it, and be willing to hear how he truly felt about the whole thing. I hopped on my scooter and propelled myself away from that doorway, up Eustace street, as fast as I could get out of there. We didn't really talk about it again. There wasn't really any way into the subject. We have drifted out of touch, though I think Egon rocks and I am very fond of him, and his work.

So this chat with Eric was a little bit different.

That moment in the door is an interesting one. What is done, where each person stands and steps, how events play out, what feelings arise, and what place those feelings are given, subsequently.

And then, once it's done, what happens next: do you ignore it, silently denying that it happened, and forge alternative allegiances to compensate, or do you face the elephant in the room, like Eric did, and start talking about it?

I think what happens in these door moments can change the course of a person's life. These are the essential, easily compromised aspects of our lives, and the whole deal is done and dusted in a heartbeat, before we've even really noticed anything has happened, at all.