IN WEIRD WE TRUST...

As you know, I’m not keen on putting people into categories.

But I do believe there are archetypes; Jung lets me get away with that.

And I do not discriminate against any of them- which also lets me off the hook in a moral sense.  

I have always been fascinated by those people in life who seem touched by the hand of God.

They can do no wrong.

At school, my first encounter with such a person was Padraig Hurley.

He looked like just a normal kid- but the girls loved him.

He was good at sports. He was in all the clubs and was a prefect, and won all the awards, etc.

And you wouldn’t know it to look at him…but he was a great fighter.

He even kicked the school bullies arse.

Spring Heeled Jim.

At the other end of the scale, there are people like me.

I never got it right.  Could never seem to.

As anyone who has been exposed to childhood trauma will tell you, it puts a jag on yr brain.

Distorts your life, your world view, your behaviour.

Especially if you have a sensitive, artistic disposition like me.

I used to have apocalyptic nightmares; not sure whether this was prescience in terms of the fate of the planet and the species...

or a natural subconscious reaction to the screaming & thumping coming from Mum & Dad’s room.

I used to wet the bed.

I even pissed my pants occasionally with fear in the world outside my bed. 

Oh, I was a world beater, even at that age. A real mess. 

I never knew where the next violence or abuse was coming from.

So maybe I attracted the priests.

They can smell the weak, the desperate…like a shark to blood.

& I certainly was a weak child.

As I got older...

Well, in ‘A Moveable Feast’, Hemingway spoke of ‘the man who was marked for death’.

That’s how I felt, most of my adult life.

Like i was somehow cursed.

The internet tells me now...I am not alone.

I didn't invent alienation- urban or otherwise.  

But prior to my logging on...

the people i came across in my daily life would never admit to any kind of weakness.

So I felt, for the most part, alone in it.

I guess I still do, occasionally; feel weak, alone, frail...

Like I'm the only one who feels it, or gets it.

Which is absurd.

The only difference is now…

I stand up for myself.

& others.

& I don’t fear death or punishment.

What could be worse than what I’ve been through to date?

Torture?

Gitmo?

Kidnapping & beheading?

I’m not afraid any more.

Of anything; not even being misunderstood.

I know who I am, know how I like to communicate…& people can take it or leave it.

And they do.

Not everything I say is pennies from heaven.

Far from it.

Like the Dalai…take what I say that you like, and leave the rest.

I'm like a weird Lama.

A fucked up one.

But for the left.

So take on board what you will, and leave the rest where it lies.

& I will do the same with you.

We are not always going to agree.

But if yr party line is blatant unashamed racism or hatred…

I will lance you like a boil.

It’s not a fucking crusade; hatred just seems to find me.

Eventually.

Even when it is hidden- it might take time…but the truth will always out, eventually.

I now get very angry at even a whiff of injustice.

I hate any kind of bigotry or discrimination against people.

I hate it. Hate hate, as we have already established.

& I have had plenty of reason.

I was exploited for being weak.

Tough shit; you know I dig Dawkins, and its survival of the fittest.

& I survived.

Not very dignified- I never looked like Rambo, hiding in the forest eating things that made Billy Goats puke…

If you had a camera- it would have looked pathetic.

It was a lot of ducking and diving.

Hiding in caves.

Cold rice and rat meat.

Trying to keep Catholic dicks away from my arse.

Dodging the punches.

Weave. thrust. parry.  

Trying to dodge beatings from all comers.

Of course this is not to be taken literally.

I am trying to tell you how it felt…in an absurdist way.  

The point of the story is, that when you have had a ZAP put on your brain by cruelty- as Willard put it- you come out with a somewhat distorted perception.

From a young age, I was seen as being weird.

My nickname was ‘Oddball’, after the Donald Sutherland character in ‘Kelly’s Heros’.

I have always been drawn to the weird, and the wonderful.

Still am.

I loved reading about Yukio Mishima’s suicide, & my favourite book was the companion to the ‘Killing of America’.  Hardly ‘choose yr own adventure’.

But…maybe I was choosing my own adventure.

Through the madness I saw in the world.

I’m not saying I approved of it all- certainly not- but I felt I understood it.

I understand weirdness.

& I engage in a little myself.

I’m with the surrealists.

My heroes are Bunuel, & Dali.

David Lynch.

Sometimes, I can write within the comparative safety of the strict narrative.

I can tell it like it actually happened.

But sometimes, I am seized with the irresistible urge to drift into the surreal.

Irony.

I noticed in the US- irony is not widely tolerated.

They seem to take you literally. almost without exception.

I’m not sure why that is- whether it is a post 9/11 thing, or an American thing.

But I was thrown out of parties for it.

You really have to pick your audience.

& my brain doesn’t always do that.

When people know me, they know when I drift into it.

After this year, & the business with my fun-lovin’ priest & our very own Summer of 42, I am given to saying…”all we are saying…is FUCK PEACE!!  JUST KEEP THE GODDAMN CATHOLIC PRIESTS AWAY FROM THE GODDAMN CHILDREN.”

This is a somewhat surreal, ironic statement.

In itself, taken at face value, it could be interpreted literally.

It quite clearly screams bigotry against a group of people as if they were all given to the same urges.

Or one could take into account where the statement comes from, my fairly well known agenda & see it for what it is…

An absurdist, ironic statement.

Who could take it literally?

What…there are NO decent hard working clerics who can’t resist poking children?

Of course not.

That’s like saying all Americans love war.

‘KEEP THE GODDAMN CATHOLIC PRIESTS AWAY FROM THE GODDAMN CHILDREN’ is my melting clock.

I enclose an excerpt from my first book containing my childhood recollections of what happened to my brain as a result of the trauma…& Dali does get a mention…

 The pain altered my vision, my perspective, and all of a sudden my little world began to melt, like a Salvador Dali painting.  The clocks began to melt.  The tables grew legs.  The sink developed jaws, and opened wide as if ready to consume all the players in the torture show.  The blood on the cupboards began to bubble and steam.  The paint crackled and peeled, the holes in the walls that my father had punched collapsed and became these vast portals into nothingness.  The wind would whistle from this nothingness, and rush about the house like an angry rhinoceros on heat, looking for something to fuck to death.  The ground beneath me began to give way, until it felt like there was nothing there to support me. 

It seemed as though the atoms supporting me had thrown in the towel, deserted for good, and I was floating on nothing.  I felt as if I would fall at any moment, swallowed up by oblivion.  The pain had metamorphosed into some kind of natural opiate.  It had become a hallucinogenic.  And like some kind of cosmic helicopter swooping down to rescue me from my horrific reality, the hallucinations trammelled me up in their spongy pillow grip and took me away to another world.  A yellow submarine was my saviour.  I had transcended, and become a new being, in a completely new world. 

This is my way…

My attempt to make some kind of sense of the pain of the absurdity of human existence.

My Melting Clock.

And even a melting clock gives the right time occasionally…