 Friday, June 20, 2003
Mr. O'Hara
In rain-besotten Ireland there stands a public house by the name of O’Hara’s. It is painted the color of the peat fire that warms the interior and scarcely a night passes that the chief proprietor, Mr. Coinneach O’Hara, doesn't pose in the doorway proud as a Beefeater outside Buckingham Palace. Ivy frames the pub like a halo and mosses and lichens fill the space between the road and O’Hara’s. The air is filled with something between a mist and a sprinkle. For every variety of green in Ireland there is a variety of rain. Mr. O’Hara begins each day with the pleasant agate of the Irish Times and a cup of hot tea. It doesn’t much matter what the news is, the ritual of creating meaning from the wriggly symbols is enough. He has the craggy face of one who has lived well, yet one still capable of surprise. “The face at twenty is a gift,” he always said, “the face at forty is what you’ve earned”. Near the peat fire retirees hold court on the events of 1921, cursing the perfidious English and lamenting the death of Michael Collins. Finely carved canes lean against the bar like horses in a corral. A group of forty-somethings sit around the single pub table, enlivened by a half-dozen pints drunk in honor of a work friend who recently quit. They talk work, sex, movies, and occasionally drip acidic comments about co-workers not present, making the rest glad they came. Invitations to parties here imply “Come or be talked about”. The retirees and the workers never mix, although both are often present. The retirees always sit at the bar and the younger folk at the table. The young people can't imagine sitting at the bar and having to stare at their own visages, growing more silly-looking by the pint. The old ones can’t imagine having to sit around a table, shedding their cherished illusion of solitariness for the forced bonhomie of a small table. But everyone loved Mr. O’Hara. “Mr. Oh - who you like in the 5th at Galway?” asked one of the regulars. “‘Break a Leg’ – trainer says he’s ready!” (0) comments • • • • • Friday, May 09, 2003
McGill found his wheels one fine spring day in 1992. Tires met road with an able intensity, gravel spritzing in all directions like a mini-sprinkler. The dew was early morning-wet; he had sat consolately on the wet cushions of the lawn chair in his bathrobe and didn't care. He felt the water giddy-up through the cloth to his bare skin. The horizon
had a look of longing about it and he aimed to touch it. He shed the dew-logged robe and grabbed a pair of shorts and shirt and lit out like Huck Finn for Any where. No destination, just a tankful of gas to burn and a horizon to gambel with, in an old bruiser of a car, a black Cadillac Seville with 108,000 on it. Into the biting sun the car strode, a six-pack and a collection of snacks of varying vintages at the ready. He opened a beer and it sung in his mouth, not because it was any better than usual but because it had a celebratory connection in it. Oh, he thought, the very reinventableness of everything! Cowboy, garabage man, kariokee singer - I! He pondered Mardi Gras. Are the masks for sexual license only? Or could there be a freeing up inside, where a beggarman can be king for a day? Ferris Beuhler took his day off and really lived - what if we gave ourselves permission to really live just one day? He came to a mom-n-pop gas station in Merrillsville, North Dakota. He filled the tank and bought his first Icee in twenty years and inquired if there were any job openings. He slung eggs and bacon at the conjoined truckstop restaurant for the next year. People stopped him and asked for his autograph because he looked like Dale Earnhardt even though Dale was dead. He would always sign, sometimes to complaints like, "He didn't make his E like that!". He wandered from job-to-job and found little merit in that, like wandering from woman to woman. Sex, he figured, is about the most meaningful non-meaningful thing there ever was. Muggeridge convinced him that sex was the mysticism of a materialist society. He wondered what fool made up the cliche, 'he has an eye for the ladies' for there weren't a man born with coursing blood that didn't have a similar eye. Even preachers couldn't miss a D-cupful if their life depended on it. • • • • • Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Down Naughten Street a stranger walks
the former “Irish Broadway”, Now warehouses and non-descripts Prosaic as the day. What interest would he sure provoke if this be eighteen-eighty! Fueled by Finney's "Time and Again" I’d follow like a matey. Fast he walks to young St. Patrick's Worshipping in Latin Swimming in the pre-modern Faith Chin above the patin. Greek myths flatten to soap operas now Brilliant men seem dull, Pascal accused us of needing war Ending ennui's lull. The answer lies if we could just move faster than light's speed, or see the world through eyes less blind awakened by the Creed. (0) comments • • • • • Wednesday, February 19, 2003
So I blast through the day like a tailgunner pilot, hitting the marks, I’m on cue, I’m cutting down enemies – the details, the errands, places to go and things to do just so I can get to….to what? To a warm bath and a book? To a forest primeval? The hurry and hustle prolongs the length of the langorous time, so that that time be extended so long that I am suddenly behind again and a viscious cycle ensues – more bobbing and weaving requiring longer pslamic time, requiring….
At least now I have a “place” place. In the hallowed library, the luminous child in the Bouguerau painting gleams with soothing regression. The wall of books stand meditatively still, they speak volumes (puns don’t kill, people who use puns do). (0) comments • • • • • |
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Desperately Seeking Retirement      |
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