THE UNRAVELLING
I don’t know what to think any more about anything. It’s exhausting, life and trying to hold onto your principles, values, morals and ethics in a world where in some cases you’re literally bludgeoned into HAVING to compromise them. Social media is a case in point. Personally I’m getting tantalisingly close to “off-lining” from the socials. Increasingly I get the deep feeling we’re all being played by billionaire tech-bro scum boys who have zero social responsibility, accountability or ethical bones. To be honest I’m terrified at the direction of travel the world is being hurtled by these bastards and I don’t want to play any part in the carnage.
As governments ever-so-casually mention sending out fun booklets on how to stockpile essentials like water, tinned foods and medicines, life ploughs on ludicrously with overall wilful ignorance and apathy. I’m not immune to that. Shit is exhausting. Caring is fucking exhausting! Giving a shit is almost impossible, at least in this stage of life. You need freedom to care, the time to put into changing things, the financial stability to do the right thing, day-in-day-out, relentlessly, with little to no positive feedback on the effort. You find out that most recycled plastic ends up smouldering on the side of road in Mexico or some shit, kids rummaging through the toxins to see if they can find anything of “value”.. for instance,, and it’s like this for so many things! A tick-box excersize badly designed and really only there for show.
I went to a “business breakfast” the other day put on for Waterford businesses to showcase the “green pledge” deal run by the council. The intiative gives businesses a rates reduction if they achieve two “pledges” a year. I get it, it’s little steps in the right direction. Don’t get me wrong.. but.. THE WORLD IS FUCKING BURNING AND CROPS ARE FAILING!!!!! I fail to see the point in having to “encourage” businesses to change their lightbulbs to fucking LED’s and learn how fucking recycling bins work!! Surely this should be a thing anyway!? A hotel owner on the panel was whinging about how her minimum wage kitchen staff “who are very young” (she kept emphasizing) HAD to be made to empty the recycling bins out into the yard and sorted into the right bins so they “got the message”.. what message is that!? That 50year old female hotel owners who’ve grown up as a 4th generation wealthy hoteliers are cunts with no attachment to being a 17yr old with literally NO VIABLE FUTURE hurtling at them? Then there was the butcher who admitted to not taking up the higher costing green energy provider for his newly aquired super efficient freezers that he got a green grant for, because it would cut into his margins too much.. it was grand though because he’d got rid of his polystyrene packaging and cellophanes and got himself an electric car, something that obviously runs on magic and not the result of A FUCKING POWER PLANTS BURNING SHIT!…
It all felt futile to be honest. Sat in the room I started zooming out, something that used to happen to me as a kid and has happened often through my life and is the reason teachers hated me, why I don’t really take anything seriously and why I’m finding it increasingly difficult to negotiate the world we find ourselves in right now. All I could see was a room full of ridiculous humans, none of us of any consequence in the scheme of things, sat in a room pretending to be professional grown ups, with important jobs, snouting for morsels of imaginary money for stupid shit that won’t make a bit of difference to climate change/crop failure/global hunger/genocide/war-mongering cunts/tech billiionaires intent on creating robot dog soldiers and flying kill-bots/flesh mangling nano-bots/toxic fallout from various weapons of mass destruction whipping around the atmosphere/shittons of jollily named “space-junk” encircling our beautiful planet none of which any of us were asked or given a choice about .. etc etc etc..
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My brother gifted me a kayak. I called it “Mungling” after my dead dog (the shitpig, RIP). Yesterday I took him out. He is a 12ft long touring kayak, banana yellow and doesn’t even make a sound cutting through the Blackwater’s black, water. You feel the Blackwater river as you kayak her, she is Kali energy and you have to negotiate her body with respect and a calm mind. I went out for three hours or so. I paddled past Meta cunts’ new house, the windows were shuttered, the meadows surrounding the house golden and freshly mown. I found a comorant tree on the banks identified by the shitewashed boughs that rendered the river bank chalky, the birds to-and fro’d over me, their dinosaur calls echoing eerily over the water. I stopped paddling and let the tide take me sat in silence and just watched and breathed and let my brain shrink. I had passed a family of swans earlier, all romance and aloof beauty. A seal’s slick black labrador face surfaced ahead of me, blinked slowly, took a breath and slid back under. An electric blue spark of kingfisher skirted the bank, dodging nimbly between low hanging branches of goat willow that dipped their fingers into the rising tide. Then, the majestic sillhouette of a sea-eagle spread itself against the tree-line, crows made tiny by its presence bravely dive bombed it, shouting what would probably be obscentities, or perhaps this behaviour is an act of respect and they’re shouting blessings or prayers, or maybe just a pure and simple “Howya”!. The sea eagles are a recent resident of the tidal stretch of Blackwater and rumoured to have nested and successfully bred.
As I watched the bird dissappear around the meander of the river, I felt it. THE GLIMMER. That elusive thing everyone is chasing. The magical, rare thing… My paddle had given me multiple injections of reality and this final one had lit it, the soul fire of wonder. I felt like a child again, the world big and powerful and full of fucking beautiful stuff! The earth had provided my medicine. I created a pocket in my mind and sucked the feelings and sights in, I lined it with emerald green silk and fastened it with a found golden popper shaped like a sea eagle. This will be where I put these things from now on. Reality events. Things being a human animal on the planet for a little while, notice. The evening was beautiful. The sun literally sparkled on the river surface, a cliched dance. I came back a better human than when I went, with some fight put back in.
