Some visual stimulation for you, taken last Sunday night at Streedagh Point again. We joked in the car, rushing to get to the beach in time for the sunset, that some people hunt tornado’s/big storms and soppy Lou’n'Ben hunt sunsets! Awww.

I don’t play with my photo’s in Adobe just in case your wondering, I don’t even crop them – I just resize, so these are, as always, ‘as is’…

glumbert.com – Guitar never seemed so hard

Really beautiful song, wish I could figure out how to embed it here. The more I listen to it the more I like it, suits the mood today.

Ugh. I don’t feel too good today. Nothing major, but I’m sure it will do no harm to work out my thoughts here..

There is another reason why I haven’t been writing much this past week (other than spending time with Benny during his 6 day straight stint). The truth is, as fun as counting down the days til I’m done with the hell-hole is, I’m genuinely scared of being out of work. Scared of the inevitable guilt trip and having to deal with the worry of finding something else.

It’s one of those logical-Lou versus emotional-Lou things. The narrator, the logical side of me pooh-poohs my worry – ‘it’s not my fault that the job was so dreadful’, ‘I honestly tried to stay in it as long as I could, to rise above my stress, my inability to cope with the badly run nature of it, the horrible anger of the customers’. The story runs that, ‘I never really found a job when we got down here, I found something to tide me over and it had to end when I found myself slipping in and out of depressive bouts and anxiety attacks because of it.’ I tell myself ‘you can get a job making sandwiches if the money really becomes an issue, there’s always Dunnes (a large supermarket over here)’ etc. and anyway, ’something will come up, don’t be so negative, you’re looking at jobs everyday, you’ve applied for some already, it will work out’.

But the emotional, or to be more specific, depressive side of me isn’t buying the logic. It’s finding the unluckiness of the situation hard to stomach and telling me it’s my fault, that I am spoilt and stupid for giving up the job before finding something else, that I will worry every day that I amn’t working and that I should feel guilty for not working while Benny is still having to slave in that shitty job of his.

The logical side counters back ‘But I saved long and hard, I gave up luxuries, I worked hard for the portion of my savings I am using to give myself this option of taking time away from a job that’s harming my health to find something better.

And on, and on, and bloody on, the battle wages inside my head. Perhaps writing it down will help, externalising is always good.

To sit down and write about it hasn’t appealed thus far. And I knew if I sat down to write it would come out, so I enjoyed my evenings, watching films with Benny, not thinking about what I think about all day in work. Looking at it that way it probably wasn’t such a bad decision.

I do a lot of things, have done a lot of things, in my life that others would regard as not normal. I break the rules. I get questioned, I probably get looked down on for it sometimes too. And finding the strength to take the unrecommended course of action and justify it can be difficult, you have to be sure of all the angles when you take a risk. My brain, my inner self, is just doing what it always does, what it has to do to make sure the risk is a good one. To date I cannot recall a risk or a decision such as this one that hasn’t paid off, I don’t do things lightly. But one is always afraid of resting on ones laurels, of being complacent.

The logical part of me has arms folded and eyes thrown to heaven at this stage, ‘you’ve already done it!’ it cries, ‘why in the name of all that’s sensible are you going over it again and again now – it’s done! get on with it, you can’t go back anyway!’.

I read somewhere in the last little while, about the nature of worry in our society. It mentioned something about only feeling like you deserve something after you’ve worried about it sufficiently. I am genuinely pissed off with my worrying habit. I need to peel apart the good, analytical aspect of it from the bad, habitual depressive side of it. I shall give it some thought.

The other aspect of not wanting to write is that I just don’t write well when I’m down. I don’t have the flow, the passion to get it perfect. It stops and starts and gives me a mild fizzy headache and unfocused eyes.

I’ll leave it at that for the time being. Take care all x

Sorry guys, totally unplanned slippage of daily entries this past while. I think it was probably to do with Benny having to work six days in a row and us having only one day off together. I didn’t really want to be nipping off to write during what little time we had together, and I wanted to make his time off as pleasant as possible. Plus, I’ve gotten pretty nifty with the aul downloads so we’ve been enjoying quite a few films over the past few days – fun, but time consuming.

Anyway, I’m writing this in work so I don’t have enough concentration to make it interesting. And I’m getting more than my usual share of evil people this morning. I feel like I know a *little* bit more about what it was like to be a slave when I’m spoken to the way I am by some of these people, it’s a particularly grotesque insight into the lack of basic respect and empathy people have for the people that ’serve’ them. Still though, only six working days left after today!

Apologies, I hadn’t meant not to write for two days. Day the first, we watched Koyannisqatsi, which we enjoyed but ran way over into my allotted writing time. Day the second, well, we got half-cut looking at videos of St. Petersburg on you tube. There are times when the application of a little alcohol lubricates the writing, and then there are other times when you just know it’s time for bed. So I went to bed and didn’t leave it for nine and a half hours. Uncharacteristic. Well, characteristic when there’s stress, and last night that stress decided it wanted to mutate into really vivid, really life-like sci fi horror dreams.

Turns out I’m a cylon too. No big surprises there, although I thought I would have needed a better figure.

Well, I’m pretty sure I am – I seemed to be the only one to still sense the threat out of everyone in the room, even though he was doing his level best to charm me into thinking he wasn’t that threatening – there was that moment of recognition between our eyes, and everyone else was dumbstruck and under his spell while I was trying to alert them to the danger. Tools.

Anyway – you weren’t there, so that all probably looks rather bizarre, particularly if you don’t watch Battlestar. Also, bear in mind, I still haven’t woken up. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those days where I either don’t fully wake up or only manage it at around 9 o’clock tonight.

I may be back later with something more substantial, just wanted to say a bleary eye’d morning hello

I read two short stories today, by chance, which collided in my mind in an odd sort of way. The first is one of John Baileys (I was reading back through his archives to keep me sane in work again) and is called ‘Mommy, this house has hamsters!’ and the second is called ‘A Haunted House’ by Virgina Woolf. Isn’t it odd how these things can overlap. They’re very different obviously, and I’m not inviting a comparative analysis of the two, it’s just that they both touched my heart in their own lovely ways, and I just wanted to share them with you.

Today was pretty horrible, which was expected. It’s somewhat easier knowing I’m leaving, in the sense that I’m not so bothered about the thought of being given out to for any one of the myriad of things they find to nitpick in there. I’m on a weird sort of cusp of feeling excited about the prospect of getting away from the there and dealing with the uncertainty of finding something new. The mood is still predominantly good though.

It’s a stormy day in Sligo. I love the drama of the weather here by the Atlantic – the clouds move like they’ve got somewhere to go round these parts, the shift in colour, shape, depth and tone by the second. It’s easy to get sucked out the window looking at them.

I find I don’t have a whole lot to say tonight. I’d love to have time to sit down and write some fiction but I’m headed off at the usual pass of not knowing where to start. I wish I could just be half way through a novel and just dive back into it rather than figuring out characters and plots and all that palaver. Lazy git that I am.

And so to the TV, my brain is sufficiently melted to allow me to slosh around in that pool rather happily tonight.

Take care all xxx

Well, I did it. We all knew it was coming, just didn’t know when. But it is my pleasure to announce that this coming 2nd of July I will be suffering my last day in the eighth level of hell.

The last few straws settled on the camels back this morning, scattered from the high and mighty faceless scheduling department that made the decision unarguable.

As you all know two weeks ago I worked two 1pm to 9pm shifts in a row. I didn’t complain, just figured it was my run of bad luck, bound to catch up with anyone in there at some stage. Then I found out I had another two in a row to do three weeks after the first two. I had also been supposed to work a 1pm to 9pm this week which my new tl managed to dissuade them from, just.

I asked if one of the proposed two 1pm to 9pm shifts could be changed to something slightly earlier, even an 11am to 7pm, anything so I didn’t miss my evenings with Benny. They wouldn’t do this.

Then I asked (giving four and five weeks notice respectively) for a day off, any day during the two back to back 1pm to 9pm shifts. They wouldn’t do this either.

Then I asked to swap with another girl who kindly offered to give me two of her 11pm to 7pm days during the first of the two weeks. She got a new position on a different team so I wasn’t allowed this either.

Then I had to repeat to a lady twenty times in eight minutes that I couldn’t put her through to a manager (I started counting after the fifth or so).

Then I was handed the following two weeks shifts which included another six day run (I’m in one at the moment) which ended with me working both the Saturday and the Sunday.

I spoke with Benny, I wrote an email detailing the exact reasons for my departure, then I got screamed at and spoken down to by angry/repetitive/deranged/deaf/no English/psychotic customers for the rest of the day (ok, there were a few sane/pleasant ones).

So, the hunt is back on. Big time. I have enough saved to see me through two months without work. I like beans, I budget good, I haven’t spent anything on frivolities in the past two months save a take-away here and there. Benny’s completely behind me, he knows I stayed as long as I could and I’ll go back to making sandwiches sooner than keep putting myself under the stress of that job. I was done with call centres when I left the old place, over cooked to the tune of two years. Frankly I’m grateful I managed another three months.

But it’s done now and I feel the weight lifted, I know I’m trading the stress of the job for the stress of finding a new one but it’s genuinely preferable. I have a good feeling about it all, believe it or not. I can’t quite shake this feeling that something may be coming, something good.

So as they say, ‘Ce sera sera’… my party piece as a child, the first song I ever sang in front of an audience, as a little girl of eight or so, in my blue Brownies uniform, with my bowl cut fringe. I can still remember the blinding lights that caused me to sing the whole thing with my eyes screwed up like I was doing a particularly hammy ‘chinaman’ impersonation. The fluorescent bleached discomfort on the faces of the parents, missing their soaps, seated awkwardly on secondary school plastic chairs – their arses flowing out the bizarre gap at the base which drew manys an aspiring fencer to land his compass point on that most succulent butt-cheek-shaped bullseye. The little girls mummified in sellotape in an attempt to keep their ‘wings’ aloft, the massive attack of wind I suffered queueing up to go on. I’d say the girl standing behind me might remember that aspect of the nights performance too you know.

Before you read tonight’s entry – stick this on in the background if you want the full surround sound experience…

Had a Pearl Jam night tonight. Why would I do such a thing to myself? Pearl Jam are my favourite band, but I don’t listen to them very often because the music is so loaded with connotation and suggestion that it usually throws me right off course. And it did it’s job unflinchingly tonight. Well, that and the bottle of Pinotage.

There are some songs that I’ve listened to tonight which are as close to prayer as I’ll ever get. Songs so extravagantly meaningful, emotional, and hardwired into my heart, as to leave me shelled out after listening to them. Songs that bring me back to the time that I first listened to them with such attention to detail as to leave me feeling like I have genuinely left this room tonight.

I’m listening to Release Me right now. It is autumn, now winter, rain, concrete, old warehouse building, long walk, red hands from the cold, my old earphones, the walk from the college in Finglas. Nights at a kitchen table, speakers with a bright blue cloth covering them. A kitchen with an old scratched wooden table, the scratches all oranged and yellow from congealed varnish residue. I am in a car, in a purple haze of twilight, in the back seat, hurtling through country lanes, looking through the front seat, the only child understanding the love of two brothers united in singing this song, their hearts pouring out the agony of it, filling the car up with the might of their emotion. I can feel winter on my skin, remember tears and embraces, promises and emotions I thought would never leave me. They didn’t, they helped to make me what I am, how could they leave me? I remember stories, countless cups of tea, an old rug, a badly painted mantelpiece, a Christmas tree, a cat I loved. I remember more than I could ever, ever hope to write, even if I wrote until I died.

They were somebody else’s words, but tonight they’re mine. I need release, from an old pain that no amount of words would let me deny or ever forget. It’s not a big pain, not a constant companion, just one of those many, small, deep little stitches that holds the whole quilt together. It’s the stuff that’s sown in deep, deep in the heart, right down there in the places we fear to feel through for too long. Where the old hopes and beginnings of new loves are bound together, where the narrating brain can only regard from a distance, hoping to trail it’s enquiring fingers only so lightly off the gentle curve of that weave once more, just a little touch, that’s all we’re allowed. But what a thing to be able to do, what a gift.

When I was younger, much younger, thinking about a love even further back, one where immersion in the past made up the larger part of it’s substance, I wrote something on a piece of soft recycled paper and put it in a cassette box. It was a meditation on time travel, I had some epiphany on how, through music, and an almost obsessive attention to the retention of detail, it was possible to go back. To close the eyes and go back, sit in the old place, let the skin remember the touch, picture each and every last detail of the moment that you had to feel again. The piece of paper disappeared, the exact wording of the epiphany forever lost, perhaps I am only imagining that is what it said. Maybe I put it in that time capsule we buried in the Phoenix Park – how apt would that be!

Oh the things that make up a person, imagine the overload of knowing what makes everyone’s heart what it is? Imagine if we could plug into each other, or if everyone had words to describe all the days, all the movie reels of scenes, all the tiny scrapes and furrows that make their emotional selves what they are? If we all could have that release, let some of that immense pressure we don’t even know we’re under flow out, and up, and over and beyond. There’s a pattern artists, paint it for me please, someone, show us that burning black fire, those whispy spirit-white plumes of hurt, all of us burning in our chairs, on our streets, at our televisions. A whole world of unspoken, unrealised feeling – what awful channels it sometimes gouges, what beautiful rivers we can all be be tributaries of…

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1271043,00.html

 I am so angry about this my heart is actually pounding. Genuinely, I’m speechless with rage at this stupidity and ignorance. Though I doubt anyone that reads here regularly would be confused as to where I stand on this, I’ll say it anyway – this horrific treatment of Salman Rushdie is so wrong, so unfair, so stupid and evil and ignorant as to be hardly believable. What is it with people threatening to kill people because they have a different perspective on something? How? Why? What is so profoundly wrong in that society that killing someone for an opinion, for words, or for ideas is actively encouraged?

My heart goes out to Mr Rushdie, a fabulous mind, someone I always fancy I’d like to have a chat in a pub with. I need to do some thinking on the mentality behind this evil so that I can find some peace in an explanation.

I wish I could write music tonight instead of writing English. I’d like to open my mouth and have Radiohead stream out (2+2+5 – Hail to the Thief) or maybe paint, I would like to projectile vomit paint. I would like to soar through the sky at the pace of this song, grabbing ribbons of cloud behind me, tearing holes in the whole ungrabable fabric of the daytime sky. I’d like to make a video of an ultra glossy red eighties sports car, slipstreaming and sparkling, a multicoloured glass shell on a red body, blurring through Russian neon night-time streets. I would like to eat piano keys, open my forehead and pour out the light of a million remembered daylights. I would like to remove my jaw, and let the waste of knotted braincells wasting themselves on eating and regurgitating the same ideas and facts day after day, fall from the pit of my brain, straight down like the contents of a dump-truck. I would like to take a camera into one of Frida’s paintings and show you the black on the inside of one of them skeletons. I would like to carry the flag at the front of the army, on a white horse, roaring the way onwards, chin on shoulder, whites of eyes and pupils soot-black, screaming their insistence of success behind me into the terrified eyes of dripping brown-and-metal knights. I would like to be a dog on a beach running at full tilt into the spray, sand-ghosts ripping alongside me, running for to turn into the wind. I would like to scream an operatic note into a dome of stars and black ink that I nearly fell over looking at one night in Bailieborough. I would like to plug my mind into this computer and press fast forward and I would like to share a cigarette with Virginia Woolf in The Hours.