It has taken a brief and bitter struggle with myself but, now at one a.m. of a new day I am going to write. I could have left myself in the comfort zone and tomorrow, rested, record today’s events as a coherent and pretty whole. But that would hardly be an accurate picture. No, this must be presented as the shattered, multi-faceted image it is. I’m playing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the background, partially in the hopes that the literary spirit of the great HST will give me some semblance of inspiration, partially to heighten the sense of lost sanity I find a day begun at the other side of the country, with an extra hour squeezed in where no one wants and no one expects it to be.

I awoke in Salthill, in Galway city, the Atlantic Ocean barking at me a stones throw from my window…actually that’s just poetic licence, I didn’t really have a window, just the living room floor of a friend’s apartment. Its window wasn’t mine, and it faced in the opposite direction to the sea, onto the back yard of a rather unappealing bar. But the sea was audible and I knew it was there.

The friend I had visited had changed since I last saw him, in that most meaningful of ways, where your tolerance for him has been decimated. One incident is all that’s required to illustrate this.

[Setting: Nighttime, ext. Brendan and Paul sit on a wet rock beside the Corrib river and a canal. Brendan drinks Belgian beer, Paul a bottle of mixed berry cider]
Brendan: Do you know what’s nice? Having someone to love.
Paul: Yeah…Not to sound like a prick, but how often do you think about how you feel about her?
Brendan: Well, not constantly, but every now and then it intrudes into my thoughts like…
Paul:[sharp intake of breath] That’s not a good sign.

I reckon he’d have came up with that, even if I’d said something along the lines of “I ponder my feelings for my girlfriend constantly, and refine my concept of how I feel about her on an hourly basis.” Paul moved from his home and university to be with his girlfriend, but that wasn’t the beginning of his marking out a monopoly on romantic understanding. In all the years I knew him in Dublin he was always locked in some long term relationship or other, which took up most of his time and, all the more irritating, parts of his conversation. And now after two months without seeing him, these comments stung fresh. Their subject was closer to my heart than before, and my recollection of them blunted. He was rarely correct in his statements, but there was always the chance I could be wrong in mine. I haven’t laboured the point. But I think I love my girlfriend, and every now and then something she’s done or said intrudes into my thoughts and I know.

Paul’s brother Kevin had come to Galway with me, and returned with me today. Kev and I are also good friends, and play in a band together. Unlike me however, Kev has taken the jump and immersed himself in music, studying performance and music technology, while I’ve taken the surer path and chosen law. It’s about now that the band is building momentum, and unless something drastic happens our paths will undergo a jagged schism - my band will no longer be mine, and I’ll just be a barrister who plays drums and classical percussion - which I can live with, but all the same, it’s sad. Today was the first time we talked about it, the unhappy details about the point at which I’ll have to take my final leap from the whole flaming vehicle and how we’ll get a replacement to clamber on. Taking a bus across a country is different to taking it across a city - you step out the other side a different person.
When on the first day of college I looked for words of wisdom from my tutor through a beer tinted haze, he said something I thought unlikely.

“You’ll probably find you’ll make new friends at college” he said “And the people you hitherto thought to be your friends were really just people you were hanging around with.” He was right in the first sentence, and about the implied fading away of my old friends, but unfortunately, he was about the ‘just’ part. They were and are the people I love and slowly, slowly they are going away. Our paths our set to split and I shall miss them.

On that note, dear readers, I shall sleep.

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While on a bike ride at the canal, i started looking around. Dodge a person here, dodge one there. It was like an old Nintendo game. There was nothing better! Inside this game, i had my thoughts about the various interesting people in my life. How the wind whistles through your golden hair on a beautiful, warm day. Those two over there look interesting. I “quacked” in their general direction as they pondered the extent of what wholeness means. Where mist blew across the wet path a small rainbow formed at 42 degree to the sun. Not only that but it moved as i tried to pass it.

There is nothing more pleasant than being near water. It is the infinity that humans can understand. My Affinity. Any infinite is one thing: everything together. All inseparable.

So many little dogs waddling their owners along. The runners, joggers, walkers, and vagabonds not quite comfortable with the status quo. We always look, and we always find. But we question whether now is that better tomorrow. And we look. What must be done has already been decided just not revealed. The known becoming infinite, the easier to find. You will know and we will always find.

A man wanted to join me in his run and with a supernova we were side by side. 1..2..3..4…..42..43. He’s done this before. The exhilaration of speeding to get that glimpse of what matters and that is all. The freedom of connecting the lowercase whole experience. There is always more to find and explore just around that corner. The expressed fact that we are even capable of such a thing is utterly astounding. This knowledge of what we do can bring together all things.

The umbra canal path was more in the air. It did not keep its distance. I am one with the wind. Then the water, the sun, and lastly the earth. I have never felt more complete.

As the mutual energy of my last relationship drained to their respective decanters my eyes opened once again. Found in Indianapolis, on a canal, dodging the fledgelings, a man found happiness in wholeness. You will understand when you know nothing to pi.

Basking on the grass next to the sculpture, a couple rubbed each others arms. They lazily watched the acrobat in the sky. The man pulled right and it twirled counter clockwise four times. The man pulled left to narrowly avoid a death as the Red Baron had had.

They sat, pondered, walked, watched, jogged, focused, biked, felt, roller bladed, read, flew kites, relaxed, and threw the baseball… into the canal. All on the edge of danger. The ball, a super hero, was impervious to wind. It received the sun and we shall go to the moon. Post eclipse a reality is revealed and it is to grow, seek, and find the wisdom. The process may come to you but when you come to it then does it click.

I have found the me that I am now.

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(The Dublin Bus: Bus of the Ford of Hurdles)

Of all the popular myths you know about Ireland, it is unfortunate that the most irritating and banal of them all, is also the most true. It rains. It rains in a way that robs your sight of colour and mind of mirth. It’s raining right now, and so, instead of an enjoyable cycle through the crisp october air, I’m sitting in a bus, blinded by condensation, and wholeheartedly enjoying the anonymity and indifference of my fellow passengers.

Back when Ireland was a gloriously impoverished nation, ie. the 80s (yeah that’s right, while you were discovering gyms and the Walkman, we were emigrating… and then discovering the gym and Walkmans in other countries-perhaps the reasons weren’t purely economic…), before we were wealthy, the bus, like every other place where more than two people congregated, was a social amenity. People -strangers that is- talked on the bus. Being a child of the 90s, and young adult of (may the FSM forgive me for using this word),noughties (seriously WTF is the noughties?-what’s the acronym-00s? can’t we go even a decade without abbreviations?), this seems as distant a concept as hara-kiri. How does it come about? What do strangers have to talk about? Perhaps there were only a few set topics of conversation in less materialistic times- perhaps we’re all just that bit more sophisticated. I mean we have divorce in this country now, and high paid, high commitment, high technology jobs . Surely, this not talking with hitherto unknown people can’t be a retrograde step?

And then immediately to my right, a man starts talking to his friend about law; which is my subject/major in university. He’s a student, which means that he probably goes to the same college as me. We have the same lecturers, the same classes, and both of us think what we’re doing is pretty interesting. But naturally(or unnaturally as the case may be) I’m too scared of making an ass of myself to strike up a conversation, I just keep typing, writing for people I may never see, to make a connection half a world away, a connection that could be just a metre to my right… And now they get off the bus.

I do talk to strangers, but only in situations where it’s acceptable, where it happens all the time, like in college, in societies, at gigs. How in this space of ten or twenty years did the bus become unacceptable ? It’s not like the physical space between us has been increased, quite the opposite, modern buses provide about as much leg room as the glove box of a Mini Cooper, and considerably less air. So why do I not have the wherewithal to turn to whatever individual has been jammed into me in a vaguely intimate and entirely embarrassing way and say “Buses kind of suck, don’t they?” But i have come to my stop, just in time to miss half my first lecture, and my musings end here.

My impromptu verdict: I blame society, because otherwise I would have to blame myself.

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