Cassandra Voices

Author: Billy O’Hanluain

  • A Fairy Tale of Dún Laoghaire 2

    I knew the game was up when my mother told me that Santy had given her a list. I had heard about his many imitators and knew they were just benign North Pole ambassadors who lacked his Arctic magic.

    I met one of them once in Lee’s on the main street of Dun Laoghaire, in a family sized camper tent with a strip of silver tinsel stretched around the entrance. His cotton wool beard dangling on an ear-itching elastic band as his nicotine coloured fingers rummaged in a plastic laundry basket that was loaded with presents. There were two baskets, one dark blue for boys and one pale blue for girls.

    He sounded just like the driver of the 7A bus who brought me home from school every day. “Ah, son have ye been a good lad?” It was like First Confession all over again except with different costumes and just like my first time in the confession box armed with a few well-rehearsed sins, I told him that apart from puncturing my neighbour’s bike I had been a good boy. He coughed and scratched the stubble under his beard. “Ah, you’re a decent lad, a fine fella….” He was a little unsteady in the deck chair where he was sitting and I was afraid he might fall over and injure himself. That wouldn’t do, not with it so close to Christmas; there was lot of work to be done yet. That’s how Santy was in Lee’s. Or was he one of the ambassadors? I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was, he seemed very anxious to leave George’s St as soon as he could and get back to The North Pole. This was the busiest time of year and every hour spent here in Lee’s was time lost from directing operations in his snow drifted toy factory, far from Dun Laoghaire. All of that cold and blizzard white frightened me, I imagined the North Pole as a television screen of swirling frozen static, with no button anywhere that could ever switch it off.

    Why had he ended out living in such a desolate place? Something eerie hovered around Santy. Who was he really? Had he done some terrible thing? He spent his life making toys in the world’s most inhospitable place. Was he trying to say sorry for something? And who were the elves? The only dwarf I’d ever seen for real was the one who sold newspapers outside Glasthule church on Sundays. He frightened me; I’d take my mother’s hand and cling to it like a gold ringed shield as we walked inside. My mind chalked up questions. How had a team of news-paper-men ended out working with Santy? How had they met?

    Then one night, a few days before Christmas, a dream came to me that put me right about so many things. There were seven other dwarfs I’d heard of before; the ones who lived with Snow White. I always liked that story but felt it ended very unfairly for them, with all their joy taken away from them by a tall Prince on horse. Each time I read it, I hoped that she would stay with them, that she would explain to the Prince that he’d have to find another story but she always rode off with him, leaving them behind, unhappily ever after.

    In the warm cinemascope of my pillow, I saw the seven of them trekking towards the world’s darkest corners and everywhere they went they wept for losing her and cursed themselves for being short.  Their tears froze when they fell to the ground. Everywhere they went to forget their sadness; they’d leave behind acres of ice and snow, a dark white continent of loss that spread out behind them like a cape that would never be big enough to conceal their seven tiny broken hearts.  And that was how I learnt that The North Pole had come to be.

    Trailing far behind them I saw a man, who looked like a drawing from a story book, swaying in the cold and losing his balance on huge grey mirrors of ice. He was weeping too and cursing what he had done years before. He had let go of a rope that dangled deep down into a well. Children used to speed up and down the well, like a thrill ride, collecting pebbles down below but one day he, the village well man, had let go of the rope, his trembling hands not sure of themselves and two children were drowned. I learnt at age eight that the saddest people wander the furthest.

    And so the world’s saddest tall person and the shortest tearful seven met each other and started on this strange enterprise together. Santy was forever lamenting what he’d done and the dwarves learned to forget just a little, the young woman who’d once danced through their days, as they helped him build his toys in the cold.

    I was always relieved when a dream put me at ease and whispered some new part of an old truth to me. I’d add it to the old truth and for a moment my mind would ring clear as bell with fresh understanding. It was as if I saw further and more clearly how things really were. I kept these truths, the old and the new, like nuggets, deep in my story pockets, to help me along my way.

    When I was leaving the tent in Lee’s he handed me a package from one of the baskets. I pointed at him and asked him, “Santy, did you really once work at a well? I know how The North Pole was born.”

    “Am I well? Sure, Santy is always well, off with ye now”

    My mother pulled impatiently at the hood of my duffel coat.

    “Ah, what are you saying to the man, Billy…?”

    She had said it, “The Man.”

    So he was not Santy, he was “a man”

    I knew that Santy wept most days for what he had done.

    I tore my package open and saw that he had mistaken me for a girl; a string of plastic pearls, a tiny mirror and a comb.

    I went home, put on my necklace and waited for the real Father Sadness to come.

    Feature Image: O’Connell Street, Dublin, Christmas Tree, Lord Mayor Ben Briscoe, Santa Claus, Dublin Photographic Archive, 1988.

  • Flann O’Brien Labs Assess the €9 Lunch

    Breaking news from The Kimmage Chronicle: everything you need to know about live music and €9 lunches in the shifting Covid-19 landscape.

    Following rigorous retrials in the Flann O’Brien Laboratory, the €9 lunch – hitherto thought to be just a step too far in terms of potentially spreading Covid-19 – has been found to be safe.

    Food, ranging from the modest ‘soup and sambo’ combo to more complex multi-calorie three course meals were systematically cross-referenced in terms of price, calorie count and potential infectiousness.

    Volunteers, who are now all on intensive slimming and exercise programmes, were fed multiple meals that ranged in price from €6 to €54 (six times the potency of the €9 threshold).

    The temperature monitoring of participants followed swiftly after each meal consumed, and the volunteers were suitably napkined by lab researchers, and wearing suits designed by NASA, while conducting tasks.

    The results are startling. Volunteers reported feeling a definite ‘sense of the absence of hunger’ after consuming those meals that fell into the lower price range, whereas the mid-range meals produced both ‘an absence of the sense of hunger and also a deep feeling of gastronomic satisfaction.’

    Lunches above €30 uniformly produced unsettling emotions among all volunteers such as ‘being ripped off’; ‘being made feel inadequate by words I didn’t understand on the menu’; and ‘a sense of peer pressure to eat beyond my means in places recommended by the Irish Times.’ Physical symptoms included participants feeling ‘bloating and drowsiness..’ Remarkably, all participants tested negative for COVID-19 in each of the price categories.

    Now, at the government’s bequest, the Flann O Brien Laboratory is carrying out extensive musical research on volunteers as they work off the calories.

    Three distinct live music experiences have been set up, along with cutting edge gym equipment for the volunteers, allowing them to exercise while being exposed to potentially infectious music.

    1. Live Classical Music

    This is without doubt the most expensive experiment ever undertaken by the Flann O’Brien Laboratory. It involves the RTE Symphony Orchestra with featured soloist Finghin Collins playing Beethoven’s ‘Emperor Concerto.’ Each member of the orchestra was flown to Cape Canaveral, where Astral Tailors designed suits for them that entirely sealing their bodies, save for fingers or lips where necessary for playing their designated instruments. Circled around the orchestra is the gym equipment where the volunteers vigorously work out. Their body temperatures are taken at the end of the concerto’s three movements. The test is being run nine times.

    Collins said: ‘This is definitely a Beethoven Marathon like no other. The adagio, famously used in ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ may induce feelings of almost unbearable melancholy, but hopefully without transmission of Covid-19. Who knows how we will feel after playing it nine times or indeed how the volunteers will feel having to listen to it nine times over the course of a single day, while simultaneously lifting weights and doing press ups! It’s an audience like no other. This is History!’

    1. The Jazz Improvisation Group

    To protect the Jazz musicians, NASA’s Astral Tailors joined forces with suit makers ‘Brooks Brothers,’ purveyors of the most dapper jazz attire ever conceived, to design sealed suits that wouldn’t look out of place in The Village Vanguard. Style meets the absence of gravity like never before!

    An assemblage of work out equipment has been placed around the Jazz stage. The quartet is led by tenor saxophonist Michael Buckley, who will play through John Coltrane’s entire ‘Giant Steps’ album, nine times, just as the Symphony Orchestra are doing with Beethoven.

    ‘Forget touring the world with Glen Hansard and playing ‘Falling Slowly’ a million times over, no, this is my greatest challenge ever,’ said Buckley. He concluded: ‘Playing through Coltrane’s changes on the seven album tracks, nine times in one day, is the toughest task I’ve ever been set, I love my new suit though!’

    Researchers are especially keen to ascertain if there are any signs of infection or changes in temperature between the tempo shift in a ballad like ‘Naima’ and the complex up tempo chordal changes of the opening title ‘Giant Steps.’

    1. Techno/Dance

    Here, NASA have collaborated with Daft Punk’s design team to come up with an innovative sealed costume for turntable maestro Johnny Moy. There will be no gym equipment here as volunteers will be administered with a dose of lab-tested MDMA, which will keep them dancing without pause for nine hours. Researchers are especially keen to discover if, during the Techno Test, volunteers will refrain from hugging each other and declaring their undying love. Moy said ‘Am well up for it! A nine hour set is a fuckin’ dream come true, I’ve got ten bags of bangers packed here, bring it on!’

    Preliminary data from these tests, subject to peer review, indicate we can expect the NCH to open before The Electric Picnic (which NEPHT want to see rebranded as ‘The Acoustic Brunch’) is allowed to relaunch. Jazz as always is being overlooked. Buckley and his combo are running through ‘Giant Steps’ for the eighth time now and researchers are monitoring each segue very closely.

  • Poetry: Billy O Hanluain

    Gold Fish

    I envy the gold fish
    the dignity of his fits
    and spasms mid the
    glass shards of his
    smashed aquarium,
    the water that was his
    air, evaporating, floor
    board sucked around
    him, gills screaming,
    cold blood pierced by
    the furnace of room
    temperature, epileptic
    defiance as oxygen
    congeals his world.

    The brittle bowl that
    held my world has been
    drained of chance and
    flooded with numbers.
    The days are stale and
    plain, the months are
    undercooked, the year
    unseasoned. But I have
    no gilled valour. I do not
    scream among my shards
    or gasp for air and tremble.
    I walk like a patient, long term
    on the ward, round the well worn
    radius of park and asphalt and wait
    and wait, binge watching banalities,
    downloading instructions for how
    to pant on.

     

    Rare Aul Pompei

    Town was at its eeriest today.
    A rare aul times Pompeii. Its streets
    broad and narrow, frozen by the
    shuttered and unlit lava of lock
    down. A hollowed out commercial
    carcass. Sleet spitting gulls circling
    the wreckage like white painted
    vultures. It appeared to me, like
    a join the dots puzzle in a macabre
    children’s book. The outline of some
    familiar things visible, the numbers
    though were like memories I struggled
    to evoke, as when I swim against the high
    tide of waking, trying to remember a
    dream. The numbers were a maze of
    dull dots, the pencil of my mind’s drawing,
    faltering and I was forgetting how to count,
    hardly knowing where I was. All the familiar
    turning to fog as I got lost in an echo’s frail
    memory of the sound that first bore it.

     

    One Year Anniversary

    I walk through the shuttered reminders of my life before.
    An abandoned theatre, the play I acted in is long over,
    the poster curling on the tobacco stained walls of a
    a boarded up, once
    Flowing Tide.

    The unbrowsed books on Dawson St peer out at a
    camp site of shame; tents pitched in the doorways
    of travel agents that sell trips of a life time to locations
    that shimmer azure blue like lotto day dreams. A bronzed
    honeymoon couple jet ski over the sodden reef of a
    a sleeping bag that has a dormer extension of rain pulped
    Amazon stamped cardboard.

    The shops tremble, empty, like DT sweat sheets, withdrawal
    symptoms from the sugar rush of compulsive shopping. Stephen’s
    Green Shopping Centre is a stale wedding cake whose icing has fallen to the
    ground, like vast sheets of nuptial glaciers, so you can see the putrid fruit,
    held inside by a frayed, once loved silver band.

    The place is emptied, like sink poured Tesco wine,
    the broken promise to never drink again.
    The whole place is a broken promise.
    Window displays of garish coloured children’s
    clothes turn and stare at me with uneaten
    crumbling cupcake eyes.

    The mannequins are mute Midwich
    orphans, stranded on the low tide shore of stunted
    commerce, their plastic, cash starved eyes look right
    through me.

    It is a drained aquarium full of writhing, rusting gold fish,
    a carol whistled out of season, a joke that nobody
    has laughed at for a year, lurching, searching for a
    punchline to belt up his trousers with.

    Outside morsels of memory
    from the time before
    are being torn at by
    gulls whose pen sharp
    beaks scrawl the grey
    parchment sky with manifestos
    of a new clawed and feathered
    city, not mine but theirs.

    The headlines in Bus Stop Newsagents read:

    “Search for Teen Torso”

    I have come too far in one year
    I turn away and try to remember
    the way home.

    Featured Image: © Daniele Idini

  • Head Shop

    Tedium was tip tapping on the pane of Gibbo’s day, the hours slouching into another shite night alone, like the slow but certain, annihilating course of ink on blotting paper. A visit to Tosh in the Head Shop “Happy Daze” on George’s St might just resurrect the dregs, if not by consuming a selection of the products for sale there, then at least by listening to Tosh describe them and the effects they’d produce, the feelings and sensations they’d induce once ingested.

    The shop was dimly lit like one of those places that sell lizards as pets to stoners; it smelled of stale joss sticks and half eaten Govinda take away trays. Dub reggae oozed like liquid hemp from two battered vintage speakers that stood at either end of the glass cabinet containing all the pills, powders and shrooms, which looked like the moist, fecund sex organs of alien amphibians. And then there was, Tosh.

    Some people become caricatures of themselves but Tosh took it to another level entirely, becoming a parody of the caricature itself. He was pencil thin and tall enough for half of his body to be in an entirely different, Himalayan weather system, to the rest of him. He didn’t wear clothes; they hung from him like sheets of washing out to dry. The brown, round neck Aran sweater that he wore like a second knitted skin, billowed at the slightest twitch of his body.

    He had that wizened pirate look that comes from years on the high seas of late nights, rolling spliffs in other people’s kitchens, at parties that always ended with dawn breaking on crushed green cans that spread like metallic spawn from butt soaked sinks.

    Of course he had a benign, pointed satanic beard too! And he wore an earring that was given to him by a German girl he’d spent the night with after seeing Marley in Dalymount Park, years back. Everything was “Years Back” with Tosh except for his eye brows which were fierce as fresh printed font. He wouldn’t have looked out of place on the cover of “Mojo” magazine talking about his comeback album but he had little to come back from, other than his greatest hits played in the kitchens of Dublin where he’d roll the best numbers while talking about Syd Barret,  arcane sub clauses in the Brehon laws and mumbling something about the Tuatha De Danann being connected to the Mayans.

    “Ah Gibbo, my man! How are we today? Are ye in for a buzz or a chat or a bit of both? I’ve got some crackin’ new stock in from a warehouse in Budapest. I’ll talk ye through it in a minute but c’mere, how did ye get on with them ones I sold ye last week?

    Did you do as I told ye?

    The cheeky half, chased by a full one just as the half is settlin’ in nicely, then when you’re tilting full gear on the whole one, drop the last half, see, that’s how ye play a two pill game!

    D’ye remember I wrote it down for ye? Like how to take them properly, in the right order, there’s no point in double droppin’ these, that’d just be bein’greedy and ye wouldn’t be lettin’ them tell their story, it’s a three act thing, ye got yer intro, yer crescendo and yer beautiful sunrise fade. Apart from the obvious whack off them, did ye get any of those subliminals, I’was tellin’ ye about? There’s a nuance to them, like they’re not in yer face, but they’re all over ye at the same time.

    So Gibbo, I have another fella like yerself who comes in most Fridays, now, he loves his food, he’s all culinary, mad into his ingredients, would know his way around all them African spices on Moore St, so, when I’m talkin’ him through the pills I go all Master Chef with me metaphors but you’re a man like meself who’s into his tunes  so I’ll keep it musical for ye, so ye get me drift, I love doin’ the R+D on this shit, I take it seriously, I want me good customers like yerself to know what they’re getting’ into and always remember Gibbo, when ye feel yer bowel howl, ye’ll know they’re kickin’ in, c’mon, are ye ready?

    These ones here I call Kittsers, after yer man David Kitt, half an hour or so after takin’ the first half, ye’ll feel a warm acoustic vibe comin’ over ye, a half full but well in to it crowd in Whelan’s buzz, but ye’ll feel a slight stitching of electronics studded around the hinterland of things, I don’t wanna say “a glow” but ye get what I mean, the Kittsers aren’t too strong though, when ye drop the full one, it’s more of a Boutique festival vibe, like Whelan’s morphin’ into a Body and Soul stage and it goes on like that a while, a more genteel “Gloaming” vibe than yer urban “Lankum” trad, they’re smooth, the muchies with these pills are organic, d’ye get me, I found them a bit shite in the end to be honest, like being at some gig in the Iveagh Gardens and ye wonderin’ how ye ended out there?

    Nah, I like a bit of grit in me pills.

    These ones here are more like it, though may I say, they are strictly for well-seasoned travellers like yer self. I call them, “The Gaffs”.

    About twenty minutes after taking the first half, remember yer maths Gibbo, half + full + half, the only way to do it, the narrative, the flow, that’s what yer after,

    It’ll start to feel like there’s a house party in yer head, a good one with all yer mates there, you’ll feel them coming in, a mad rush at the front door, swingin’ bags of cans, it’s not Whelan’s anymore man, it’s a stairwell full of people ye hardly know, that you’ve never seen in yer house before, one of them nights that’s goin’ to swell, it has its rough edges too though when ye start comin’ up proper, a Garda siren lickin the walls blue and white, ye might feel a tremor, a panic but it’ll pass with a rattle of worry farts, when ye drop the full one it’ll be like the house has been dipped in spirits and torched with new beats you’ve never heard before, some Brazilian dude is DJ-in in yer front room, Favela-Fuckin’-Chic, wadin through a block party, a carnival and a  sudden flash of asphalt wasteland in the room, there’s no lettin’ up with these ones, pure ritual,

    ye’ll be all alone but surrounded by people, nice bit of hallucinatin’ on these too, the party will become external, people will leave yer head and pour into the kitchen, ye’ll meet people there ye haven’t seen in years, ye’ll feel the erotic rush of a whole house heavin’ with the dance, like a greedy snort of Pentecostal Poppers,

    the colour range on these is like a serious fuckin’ festival rig, ye’ll end out focusin’ on the colour of the kitchen door for way longer than’s natural, ye might even feel a Oneness with shit that’ll make ye oblivious to all the other shit around you,

    ye know like when all of life’s asteroids are comin’ at ye, thick n fast and ye do a Han Solo on it and go straight into Spiritual Hyper Space, bypassin’ all the mundane crap that brings ye down, it went like that way for me anyway,

    these really are quality pills, all the colours get like a Biblical Dulux paint catalogue, ye’ll start makin’ connections between things that’ll fade as soon as ye try thinkin’ of them again, ye’ll remember nothin’ later, yer mind’ll be like The Shining maze, bein’chased by half formed feral sentences, ye’ll wish ye had a brain stenographer with ye to record yer thoughts, ye’ll think they are important but they might just be shite but who’s to know,

    they’re roarin’ “Tune” in the front room, ye’ll have strobe light black outs on the dance floor, not knowin’ how ye arrived into the glare of the kitchen light, ye’ll feel epic and loved, all the walls of the house throbbing like a heart pumpin’ speed, the kitchen and the front room will seem like they’re different hoods in some huge smudged metropolis that yer racin’ through now, high as some released captive thing, a vertigo in your stride, fearless, ye’ll have flashes of being all alone because you are all alone, reality sneaks in the fuckin’ cat flap the odd time with these pills, like morning light torn from a drawn curtain, a prison break on the dance floor,

    there’ll be a blonde PR bird at yer living room door with a clipper board, askin’ ye what guest list yer on, ye’ll have to choose carefully or ye’ll be fucked out high as a kite cut loose, tremblin’ alone on the quays, freezin’, neon taxi slur in the puddles, ye’ll look back at the entrance to The Liquor Rooms and ye’ll realise it’s yer own gaff, the door into yer own livin’ room and everyone there is bein’ sliced by strobe, tribal Batucada Beats, and the bird who had the clipper board has lassoed you with her eyes, ye’ll get a lust rush but it’ll be a brain boner, yer lad will be limp as a droopin’ glove, ye’ll think of Lou Reed, “between thought and expression there lies a lifetime”, the music will go all,

    ah- whacka-whacka-whacka, ah-whacka-whacka-whacka,

    ye’ll get down on yer hands and knees and try crawlin’ away from the echo but soon enough ye’ll surrender to it sweatin’, relieved that it’s yer new Master.

    these pills can have quite a rough come down, the worst kind of psychic turbulence but they’re worth it for their plasma screen clarity and the integrity of their buzz, when ye come down proper, all the people who weren’t there will have gone but ye’ll be glad ye met them anyway.

    Are ye with me Gibbo? Am I givin’ ye a few ideas for later? C’mon, I got a couple more to show ye.

    I call these pills “The launches”, they’re cunnin’ little bastards, the first half comes on all warm like yer at some art openin’ in a warehouse, somewhere in the Batter, NCAD heads wearin’ vintage gear, some lad in a knit wear bobble hat, stooped over a lap top playin’ Ricardo Villa Lobos minimal techno, craft beards and shite lager but it’s free, so ye dive in and talk crap about the installations, ye’ll get these comin’ up jitters, feelin’ that what yer sayin’ about the installations isn’t the right thing to be sayin’ about them, like yer out of yer depth at a party full of those Irish Times “ 50 People To Watch in 2009”, ye know the fuckers, video sculptors ‘n vegan choreographers.

    Ye won’t feel like yer one of them, me and you Gibbo never make it on to them lists, but once ye drop yer first full “Launch” ye’ll feel better than all them cunts collaged together

    You’ll feel like you’re the artist, that it’s your launch, you’ll have interviews about your work runnin’ through yer head, ye’ll feel like ye own the room, on top of yer mad out of it game, ye’ll see yer self on the box talkin’ about yer difficult second album even though you’ve never played a note in yer life, it’ll be like ye become whatever music yer listen’ to, it’s so real, ye’ll feel ye’ve got the fingerin’ all sorted on the tenor sax yer mimin’ the fuck out of in the mirror, ye’ll see posters for “An Evenin’ With Gibbo” flappin’ on the lampposts in yer twisted, head fucked streets, you’ll believe you’ve really gone and learnt an instrument, then the most fucked up, loved up shit kicks in,

    Yer playin’ stadium concerts now, yer the lead singer or the guitarist, ye can be whoever the fuck ye want to be, snortin’ lines of adulation, ye grab yer crotch and gurn, “I am Live Aid. I am Freddie Mercury”, a Nuremberg crowd rush of pure fuckin’ love, the best gig ye ever gave to yer reflection in the mirror, yer all alone and shittin’ yerself, a stab of the fear, but ye mange to pull yerself back into a pub sized gig, yer listenin’’ to Howlin’ Wolf, built for comfort, “300 Pounds of Joy”, it’s Walters in Dún Laoghaire and ye command the room, ye’ll see everyone ye knew there when ye were young and they’ll love ye, ye’ll feel Savoy 1 screen stretched, everythin’ about ye will feel epic, it’s the maddest rush.

    I, like, became Marley in Dalymount an’ I seen meself singin’ as Marley to me younger self and the German bird that gave me the earring, fuckin’ multiple identity trippin’

    The come down from these is smoother than you’d than ye’d think, like a class of farewell tour, a “for one night only” vibe, ye’ll see posters for yerself again but they’re smaller, ye’ll be back to playin’ Whelans, but it’ll be a good crowd, when ye come round ye’ll have forgetten all the interviews ye gave but ye’ll know ye did give them,

    ye won’t even have a ticket stub to one of yer own gigs.

    The rest of the gear I got is natural, herbs and shrooms, Inca gear, it’s not really party gear, it’s all about foliage and mad ancestral voices,

    These first two herbs work in seconds, they both wreck yer sense of time, one makes nine hours seem like it’s just two minutes that’s passed and the other stretches two minutes into what seems like nine fuckin’ hours, so, you choose dependin’ on how yer fixed for time, both have the same immediate effect of ye seein’ foliage growin’ on yer walls, it’s Amazonian, the green is so deep ye could swim in it.

    The Shrooms are ancestral though, I got an intense Ogham Stone vibe off them, like I was rubbin’ my hand up one of them and understandin’ this 8th century braille that was chipped into them by some mad mason monk years back before, like when ye know some of the Brehon Laws were still standing, I felt like a kind of gutter with all this mythology streamin’ through me, playin’ me Bothy Band and me Ó Riada sa Gaiety albums backwards and hearin’ messages from The Tuatha, ancient secrets that would make Fatima blush, d’ye get me, I had some experience of knowledge, somethin’ unbroken, like I was totally plugged in to the whole meaning of shit, like, I saw through it all, connected it all up, wrote a new fuckin’ alphabet and found a story way out of it all, I was it all, I had Prophet deliriums, I sweated two languages and learned a third, I tied myself to a post and crawled through centuries to tell people what I’d learned , the further I went the less I remembered until I had no idea where I was or what I was doin’ and I’d forgottin’ what I was supposed to tell them and they didn’t like me for that.

    Ye just don’t know what portals the shrooms are goin’ to open up for ye Gibbo.

    Are ye with me Gibbo?

    So, what’s it goin’ to be? A bit of herb and nine hours of Kittser?

    A mad one or a quiet one?

    You tell me.

  • Nobody told me there’d be days like these

    Lockdown measures remind me of the prescription of anti-depressants and other psychiatric medicines. They are both harsh, and both are administered in response to a moment of crisis; both often have severe side effects, which in time often obscure the initial malady that required their prescription.

    Anti-depressants can be beneficial in stabilizing a patient and alleviating the most distressing symptoms of whatever underlying trauma caused them to present to a doctor in the first place. The logic of medication should be that once a certain stability has been achieved, a less medicinal and more holistic approach should be available to the patient including intensive psycho-therapy, talking therapy and most crucially for any patient, being properly listened to.

    This, unfortunately, is what so rarely happens with cases of depression. The initial period of chemically enabled stability is seen as progress, and the primary causes of trauma remain unacknowledged, or only partially addressed.

    While the trauma remains essentially untreated, the patient will find himself having his doses upped and reduced, his prescription swapped and changed, leading to him suffering a range of side effects which take centre stage in the narrative of his condition. We become transfixed by the shadow but not the object that casts it.

    It is not very different to what we are now experiencing with Covid-19 and our second lockdown. Lockdown is the strongest non-pharmaceutical intervention available. It is the equivalent of ECT bolted through every nerve end of our society. One doesn’t have to look hard to see its devastating side effects.

    Like our patient, who hoped that his medically induced stability might create an environment benign and supportive enough to allow him properly to address what lay at the root of his problem. Our first and very lengthy period of lockdown should have been used to confront and mend some of the systemic flaws in our health system.

    For decades we have had a two-tier system obscenely tilted in favour of those with private medical insurance. Almost 700,000 people were waiting on a hospital appointment as of the end of May.

    We have also out-sourced the care of our most vulnerable to privately run ‘Care Homes’ that are mostly staffed by poorly paid workers. The final years of so many of our parents’ lives, and in time our own, is a for-profit-business. There’s great money to be made in dying.

    I am sure that I am not alone in feeling like a child eavesdropping on a parental row – leaning over the bannister upstairs to hear what’s being shouted in the kitchen below – when it comes to the bickering and blaming between NPHET and the government.

    It’s a reckless side show of hopeless administration and even worse leadership. There have been failures in testing, track and trace, and screening at ports and airports. It has just been reported that the UCD lab is to suspend all Covid-19 testing over two weekends due to staffing issues.

    A mere 23 ICU beds have been added since the pandemic began, despite Ireland having the second lowest number per capita in the European Union when we entered the crisis.

    Fix what is broken and we might have a better tool for confronting the virus.

    Now we are patronized with talk about ‘behaving well,’ and maybe being able to enjoy Christmas. We were encouraged to come out and clap overworked medical staff rather than see them receive an immediate increase in salary, something which the government lost no time in awarding themselves, just as hundreds of thousands adjusted to living on €350 or less a week.

    Covid-19 has held an unflinching lens to the structural inequalities in our country. Those who can, work from home, their salaries largely unaffected. Mainstream radio and print media run nauseating life style features about how much money people are saving, while another grubbier realty is far closer to the truth, that hundreds of thousands of workers are down many thousands of euros since March 13th.

    We are a great country for cake sales and 5k sponsored fun runs, but not so good at drawing a line in the proverbial sand and saying enough is enough. We acquiesce too much, and are now complicit in our predicament.

    Did anyone else find an eerie symmetry – a dark poetry – to how on the very day we went into a second lockdown, our government voted to seal the Tuam Mother and Bay Home files for thirty years?

    As we lock down now once again, we seem to be burying our past, perpetuating the shame, punishing again those who suffered in denying them light and justice. We live in the strangest and most disturbing times.

    Nobody told me there’d be days like these.

  • The Shelbourne’s Moving Statues

    Editor’s Note: On Monday 26th of July the luxury 5-star Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin removed four bronze statues depicting two Nubian princesses from the lower Nile with slave girls holding torches. The statues had stood outside the five-star hotel since 1867. Billy O Hanluain reflects on the decision.

    If the owners of the Shelbourne Hotel were genuinely concerned with slavery and social justice they might consider a tangible gesture addressing its current practices in Ireland and elsewhere rather than tweaking its exterior in an act of ‘woke aesthetics’.

    Imagine if they decided to host a conference on human trafficking and offered reduced rates to the organisers and attendees, perhaps even flanking the exterior with banners promoting the event? Imagine they took a stand on homelessness in Dublin, an issue that is literally on its doorstep? Imagine they took a stand on abolishing zero-hour contracts in their industry?

    These statues do not neatly fit in to the modern narrative of slavery in the Americas, they refer to a period nearly a thousand years ago, depicting Nubian Princesses with their slaves. So, by implication they portray the enslavement of black people by other more privileged black people. The African continent had slavery of its own long before the Atlantic slave trade began in sixteenth century, culminating in the brutal colonization of most of the continent by European states.

    If we are to go back four thousand years and posthumously ‘correct’ the sins of that past, I would fear for many heritage sites around the world tainted by practices and beliefs very much at odds with current ‘enlightened’ standards. In any therapeutic practice, acknowledgment of the past is critical but the difficult work in healing is always how we manage the present, the now, which is after all, the only thing we have.

    Remove the Pyramids?

    An exhausting and myopic focus on the past can become a virtuous smoke screen for not dealing with present injustices. It is so much easy to bicker about past injustices rather than root out their practices in contemporary society.

    Moreover, while we are at: if the hotel is pursuing a ‘woke’ agenda maybe they should consider changing the name of the hotel itself?

    It was named after William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, Lord Shelbourne (1737-1805), the first Irish-born British Prime Minister (1782-82), responsible for granting the United States its independence at the Treaty of Paris in 1783. This newly independent state became a slave-owning state until Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation in 1862.

    A devotee of laissez faire, Lord Shelbourne did nothing discernible to improve the conditions in Ireland that would lead to rebellion and ultimately the Great Famine.

    Lord Shelbourne

    Correcting the past is an impossibility, the real challenge is dealing with the present. One doesn’t need to spend time on a Buddhist retreat or on a therapist’s couch to know that the only thing we can actually change is the present moment.

    We can seek to understand the present better by having a fuller understanding of the past, but the past remains, unchangeable. A far greater challenge is the existential one of living an ethical life in the present moment rather than attempting the impossible task of rectifying the crimes of the past.

    The removal of statues seems to have been opportunistic. It’s as if the owners are trying to gain kudos in the zeitgeist. But it is far easier to make a cosmetic change to the exterior of a building and lay claim to an enlightened agenda than actually take a political and ethical stance on live issues of social and political justice.

    Imagine the socially sensitive and woke Shelbourne, discretely provided a few rooms for free to the homeless, or to those fleeing domestic violence, or even to refugees? Then it would be putting its money where its mouth is.

  • On Procrastination

    2019 has taught us all we need to know about Mortality. So many writers, musicians, and actors that we loved passed away this year. Some left us far too soon and others bowed out with a fine stash of years under their wings. I suppose, all we can learn from this, is that our time is now.

    The best way to remember and honour the dead is to live our own lives to the fullest; pull up the anchors of dreaming and set out with our sails full of doing and reach out beyond ourselves. It’s only in the doing that things get done. 2020 Ahoy! Here I find a few old words of mine on the seductive dangers of not doing.

    Procrastination is a very cunning mistress. She masquerades so expertly at being a muse; seducing me with an ever expanding array of tantalizing tasks that acquire greater urgency with her every whisper and sensual suggestion.

    “Hey, Boy … why not tidy the kitchen, it’ll look great when it’s done,” she coos.

    Slipping her deliciously slow fingers into mine she continues to tempt me. Her voice and reason are pure alchemy, transforming the meaningless and mundane into pure, vital essence.

    Procrastination’s devastating twin sister is OCD. When they both conspire against me, I loathe myself for being unable to resist their time wasting charms.

    They sprawl decadently on my sofa, dressed in the most time-consuming lingerie, all is slow with these sisters. Sister Sirens, time suckers, flunky cleptos, robbing hours, days, minutes, always adding to their secret stash of stolen years.

    They annihilate calendars with their every breath and dine on menus stuffed with meticulously squandered weeks, dessert is a slow century drizzled with wasted opportunity. From the lethargic folds of my sofa they sink into a Valium trance of speech and so begins another game of Fifty Shades of Delay.

    My self-loathing comes to a boil, then slowly simmers as yet again I obey. We have no “safe word,” me and the Sirens so our sessions can last for months at a time and they are cruel task masters.

    OCD whispers and giggles into Procrastination’s ear, “No, no you tell him…” she drawls in her finest coquette snail voice.

    “Billy (both syllables stretched to breaking point so as to make me sound almost Chinese, Bi-Lee), it’s been such a long time since you rearranged all those vinyl LPs into any meaningful order,” she points her tired languid fingers towards my unruly collection. “How about alphabetically or even by genre … we love it when you do it by genre as you get lost and start over and over again with all the persistent denial of completion so beloved of a perfectionist like you … we’ll flash you a little stocking if you do it, the ones you like, the ones weaved from broken clocks and stitched with stolen moments and studded with frozen minutes plucked from every unfinished thing you ever touched … just think of us and learn to forget that task that’s begging to be done … Good boy … and when you’ve done that, come lie with us here and meditate on how clothes dry, and feel us warm by your side, the three of us sinking in the moment, watching the wind drag its heavy cargo of clouds from day to night … don’t move, don’t say a word … stay with us from here to eternity…”

  • Randal McDonnell – ‘I’d gladly strike the first match at his cremation and spit paraffin on his embers’

    I was sickened to read a fawning obituary to an absolute creep and impostor Randal McDonnell. It fails to mention that he was a predator and pederast with an insatiable lust for young boys.

    He made a misery of my late teenage years and I carried for way too long the shame and guilt for what he did to me as though it had been my responsibility.

    Twice he seriously abused me, even once video recording the abuse so he could press pause and marvel at the highlights of his wickedness. I didn’t have the luxury of pressing pause on what was happening to me, nor was I later able to scrub the tape of my life clean.

    In my own delusional way, I put it all down to a wild adventure, but I know now that was just a hopeless coping mechanism. They say not to speak ill of the dead but I’d gladly strike the first match at his cremation and spit paraffin on his embers. When a few years back I wrote these lines, it was him I was referring to. Go rot in hell!

    ***

    As the calendar grew thinner and the water colder, I swam further out into October and November’s waves….cold. Cycling down to the Forty Foot on the green bicycle my mother had bid on in Buckley’s auctioneers, Sandycove. The bike locked with a combination of my age my year in school.

    Undressing, the breeze all salty around my jangling Autumn bollox. Holding the hand rail, my feet on the went granite, down into the waves, nerve enough to swim out to the buoy.

    Arms of rock on either side, at low tide, laced with green weed, kelp and periwinkles, full tide, they were harbour champions, granite guardians.

    And I swam out beyond their embrace, a wink from the Bailey light house, staining their wet side in crushed orange, a neon wink from Howth.

    The currents singing their own wild liquid song and me tossed about like drift wood, soaked, fucked, dream song. My arms, all fifteen years of them, ploughing through the dark spilt ink waves.

    Into the neon Dún Laoghaire, sea-salted, cold blankets of water.

    I saw the spires of the Town Hall, Saint Joseph’s and Saint Michael’s, the clock on the Town Hall, a tiny pale moon chained to Time. The lit front rooms of the houses that looked out on Scott’s Man’s Bay as I swam further into the night.

    And there I saw him first, a shadow on the shore. Me bobbing like a seal, him, fawn coat, tall and dry.

    Late night eel in the water, I weaved through the water, home to the railing that would hoist me back to land again.

    And there he was with his hard leather glove applause, chiming with the wave lapped steps.

    Shaking with the cold, I stepped out of the water.

    “You are a brave young man, you must be freezing…such a brave young man”

    He had my towel, all ready in his hands. Up the jelly fish licked steps I climbed towards that blue Dunne’s Stores towel that had just a while ago been in my bag.

    Rubbed down like a gold medal otter. Who was he? Why me?

    “Such a brave young man, and so cold, let The Count warm you up”

    My shoulders first, then my shivering ass. The Count knew well how to warm up a trembling lip biting lad.

    I saw the smudged lights of Dalkey as he grabbed my pleasure.

    I came with shame. My white seed floating on a wave that bit my toes with a fresh assault of cold. Who was he? And why did I let him? He held me tight around the neck as I wept into the waves, tears in salt water. His huge leather gloved hand over my mouth, a dark cloud hiding the moon. Forty Feet of silence and salt sprayed shame.

    I dreamt of a knife, a blade that would rise out of the water, a sharp tool of the tide that would slice him.

    I passed out, so as not to feel his Terra Ferma paws on me. I am a wave not a boy. I am not here.

    And then he let me go and all fifteen years of me clung to the rail that led down to the deep and I watched my vomit float, an angry broth on on the night water…..

    Obituary: ‘The life and death of Randal MacDonnell – the most remarkable Irish figure you’ve probably never heard of’ – Independent.ie

  • Overheard in the Local

    Overheard in the local last night
    D’ye go to mass at all?
    Ah, just the odd time, ye know, Christmas ‘n funerals.
    I see, I do go meself most weeks, don’t agree with it all but
    I like the words but I tell ye something ye get a very different
    class of a handshake down in Terrenure than ye do in Kimmage.
    What d’ye mean?
    The other week I was having an early one in Vaughn’s in Terenure
    and said I’d go to mass there. Me favourite part of the mass is the aul
    handshake with yer neighbour, ye know, ‘Peace be with you.’ I got a
    fierce slippery shite of a shake from an uppety aul one down there,like
    she wouldn’t mind if I was doin’ her plumbin’ or rakin’ her garden but she
    wasn’t mad keen on seein’ me in public like, know what I’m sayin’? Like an eel her hand was.
    Sounds like a fuckin’ posh parish.
    Now your talkin’, different ball game up in Kimmage Manor. When ye shake with yer neighbour up there it’s like sayin’ ‘Done deal mate!’ like you’ve agreed on the price of a car, firm as fuck like after a mad barney, like real, ye know?
    Feck Terenure man, up the Manor! Pint?