Inside we pushed our way through the crowd. The venue was jammed with people, the air sweaty and scented with sugary liquor shots. Neon and mirrors shone behind rows of bottles. Somehow she managed to sequester a stool by the bar. I stood beside her and we roared at each other over the loud voices and pumping music.
The music pounds and you lean in close to each other to try and discern what’s being said. You brush skin. You smell the scent of each other. For a moment, for a fraction of a moment you dare to wonder, what would happen if I just kissed her now? Would she slap my face? Would she kiss me back? Would the world around us run in slow motion as we taste each other’s lips? Our hearts beating faster, our hands reaching out to stroke each other’s backs and arms. Could it be that this is what she’s thinking too? I humour myself and entertain the notion. Then let it go.
(Excerpt from a short story I’m writing at the moment)
Today
Today it was the hardest
Today it hurt the most
I dreamt of you and then I woke
to nothing but your ghost.
In every greying memory
In every darkened sky
I try to find the lines and curves
and colours of your eyes.
Now the night is close
A snap will draw your blinds
I take a step to walk away
and leave a love behind.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Here comes the Sun - Nina Simone.
Day 04 - A song that makes you sad
I often wonder if I should talk to you about how many friends I’ve lost to depression. It seems like too serious a topic for me to write about on what is (most of the time) a whimsical blog. Maybe someday I will try to address it, with the proper reverence those people I’ve loved and lost.
But if I’m to tell you about why this song makes me feel sad, then I need to tell you about my friend Roberta Grey. Roberta died 4 years ago at the age of 28 after a long battle with depression. She was equal parts inspiring, beautiful, intelligent and delicate. Roberta wrote for an Irish newspaper, and my friends and I loved reading her weekly column to find out if she had mentioned any of us.
At the funeral I held it together until they played this song at the end, within the first few notes I broke down. Here comes the Sun sung by Nina Simone was the last song Roberta ever listened to, and I’ve never heard a person’s personality captured so perfectly within a few simple strikes of a piano keyboard.
(30 Day Song Challenge)
I’m too obvious when I write music; Tom Waits hides the melody behind disorder, he makes the listener work to find the hook, that’s his genius.
Teenage Fanclub, The Academy, May 30th
It’s not easy to get moving on a Sunday evening, but with tickets to see Teenage Fanclub in the intimate surroundings of The Academy, Dublin, I managed to drag myself off the couch. By 9pm The Academy was absolutely (claustrophobically even) jam packed with an audience of mostly 30-somethings and Teenage Fanclub hit the stage to huge applause. What struck me most about the bands’ middle-age appearance was you could be forgiven for thinking someone had made four clones your geography school teacher and ushered them on stage, perhaps to teach you the importance of columbus cloud formations through the medium of song.
Unfortunately during the first few songs it became apparent we’d been lumped with a tone deaf sound engineer. The vocals were buried under bottom-end-bass murkiness, so much so that the sound engineer tried to compensate by pushing the volume on the mics, which just lead shrieks of feedback. Truly amateur stuff. I’d been to The Academy recently to see The Lemonheads and the sound was crystal clear, so this was a disappointment.
However (and I think this is testament to Teenage Fanclub’s polished performance) the songs were still very much enjoyable. Great catchy guitar riffs and beautiful melodies; Teenage Fanclub have their delivery down to a fine art. Their sound is clean but at the same time it’s easy to see why Kurt Cobain considered them one of his favourite bands, their chord formations are beautifully clever and instantly accessible, meaning you can sing along even if you don’t know the song. If you’ve never heard them, imagine someone put Crowded House at one end of the Large Hadron Collider and The Byrds at the other, then smashed their molecules into each other, the resulting gooey hybrid would be Teenage Fanclub.
Surprisingly, exactly on the 60 minute mark, the band finished up, coming back a few minutes later for a perfunctory 10 minute encore. With a total gig time of around 70 mins, I was a bit pissed off. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by too many 3 hour Springsteen concerts, but I expect more than that, especially from a band with a 20 year back catalogue. I guess in their defence the tickets were only €25 (2 pints however, cost a pricey €10.50 on the night) but if I get my ass off the couch on a Sunday night, I expect at least a 2 hour gig.
The short set, cramped surroundings and dreadful sound quality, means at best I could only say this gig was average, which is a shame because the band played beautifully.
Teenage Fanclub’s new album, Shadows, is available now.
(I first posted this to culch.ie on June 2nd)
Fate Baiting
Confidently proclaiming something will not happen, in the hope that by declaring it won’t happen, you’ll coerce fate into actually making it happen.
Examples:
“Listen man, I just know there’s no way I’ll score this weekend”
or
“I know for sure I won’t pass that exam next week”
Human Beings and the arrogance of “heaven”.
A couple of weeks ago I passed a long studied-for exam. As it was the first exam I’d passed in 18 years, I was delighted. I went out that night and met a few friends from work, had a nice meal, a few beers and came home a happy man. And that’s where my happy buzz ended for the night, because when I got home I found my little pet hamster had died.
Kind of funny right? Like something from a Farrelly brothers movie. Well, while the dark humour of it wasn’t lost on me, I did feel genuine sadness, because (as ridiculous as it sounds) I couldn’t help but see a noble aspect to how she went about her final couple of minutes. Knowing that she was about to die, some latent programming kicked in: she left her nest, dug a small hole in the centre of the cage, curled into a ball inside it and simply stopped breathing. I guess, in the wild, they know that it would be unhygienic to decompose in the nest. But to me as an emotional human observer, this was a sad thing to see.
Right, so what has all this got to do with heaven?
Well it starts with this: I’ve yet to speak to anyone, religious or not, who would say that my hamster is going to heaven. The notion is ridiculous, right? Of course it is. We are the only creatures chosen by God to go to heaven (as long as we worship the “right” God, but that’s a different matter). Hell there’s even people signing up to have their pets taken care of by atheists after the rapture!
So why should we deserve this honour? Why are we any better than cats, dogs, sheep, dolphins, fleas, cockroaches or whales? Why stop there? In the grand scheme of things, in the vast, incomprehensible, tick-tocking march of time, why should anything we do matter, or make any difference, in the “universal” long run? Why should it buy us a ticket to heaven? Looking at the big picture, does anything we do matter any more than the things the creatures all around us do on a daily basis? Do we get a heaven purely because we’re self aware? Why does that deserve to elevate us on the heavenly scale? Is it because we can appreciate beauty? One man’s beauty is another man’s rotten apple.
Our human heaven is borne of our human arrogance. The egotistical notion that we are more important than every other creature. And we’re not.
Perhaps it’s just that we’re too close to the earth to see that we’re no different than anything else on it. Maybe if every person got to see what the earth looks like from the moon, more would realise that we’re all just the same. We’re all struggling to survive. We’re all affected in similar ways by our many different loves.
I think, the pictures we paint, the songs we sing and the art we bring to life matter right now. Sometimes that now lasts in the brief moments after the right words are spoken, and sometimes that now lasts a few thousand years in the right story or oil painting, but never the less, that now is fleeting. And that’s why we should treasure it. That’s why our lives matter at this very moment. That’s why we should do everything we can to make sure that our fellow human beings can enjoy their now as much as we do. Because there is no heaven, just now.
I think, these lives are all we have, so we should do all we can to make sure that whatever silly little dream we carry around in our hearts, happens.
And we should start now.
The sky is blue
The air is still
The sun is back with pride
I’m sipping coffee
drifting through
It’s good to be alive
The odds of annoyance
At the age of 34, with some good luck and modern medicine, you could say I’m less than half way through my life. Taking that as a given, let’s make a few assumptions:
- I started interacting with other people, through speech and actions, around the age of four.
- That gives me 30 years of interaction with other humans.
- During that time I’ve met many people and been in many situations. Sometimes these people have been annoying, and annoying things have happened.
- Let’s be optimistic and say I’ll live to 100. That means I’ve had, roughly, a third of all the interactions with other humans, that I’ll ever have.
- If that is the case, and we take into account some basic laws of probability, then that means I probably haven’t met the most annoying person I’ll ever meet.
- In other words, the most annoying thing that will ever happen to me, probably hasn’t happened yet.
This is pretty distressing.
I’ve met some huge assholes in my time. HUGE.
Casting my mind back on the scale of all the annoying things that have happened to me, inevitably leads me to this conclusion:
Sometime in my future, I’m going to be kicked in the balls by George Bush, while he sings “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas.
My light shade.
Notes on my light shade:
- It’s made of light cardboard.
- I felt compelled to take a photograph of it.
- It’s damn near impossible to put a new light bulb in it, without de-constructing the entire thing.
- It smells of nothing and dust (confirmed).
- It’s probably not very interesting.
- When discussed in a blog post it provides me with mild distraction from job-related stress.
- I wish, instead of a light shade, it was a winning lottery ticket.
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