I kinda want to regale yis with more river tales. Like the one about the solitary staring horse we all laughed at because it appeared depressed and its mane looked like a ridiculous comedy wig. Or the observation that a group of swans rarely takes off from the water without at least one of them dropping a grenade's worth of reeking shite that seems to fall in sickening slow motion. Or the swarm of sand martins we met, flying in their thousands from tiny holes in a Tipperary ditch like something along the Nile. But I'll rein it in for now and ease myself back into music blog mode.

A couple of weeks ago I promised a close friend of mine that I would do this charity thing with him because another guy pulled out. Said undertaking had something to do with rowing and it seemed to be in the near future. Or at least those were the details I kept with me after he hung up. Yah, I know, if I was one of the X Men, my name would be 'vague' (Or 'Mr disappoint-o', but that's another story).


It turned out I had volunteered to be man number ten in a ten man canoe trip from Thurles to Waterford via the river Suir. Not only this, but the bunch I was to canoedle with were outdoorsy tree surgeon types from the south, all aged around thirty, with personalities that ranged from half mental to full mental, as Cork personalities tend to. Furthermore, they'd done this sort of thing before. These guys had muscles and outdoor skills, whereas I had man boobs and indoor skills, no, wait, scratch that, I had man boobs and an interest in indoor pastimes. So it was a moment of great WTF-ery when I lowered myself into a two-man Canadian canoe somewhere near Thurles on good Friday. Especially when I now consider that I wasn't feeling a hundred percent (you can check the comments on the previous post to see Frank cajoling me into the thing - it's easy to find as it is just above the bit where someone calls me an insipid hipster cunt).

Now. If, last week, someone flat laid out what the above undertaking actually entailed, I would have balked. The distance to travel was about 115 kilometres. The gang were mostly completely unknown to me. The experience was to take place on a river, and I have phobic suspicions of deep water with no added salt. Worse still, I have an embarrassing history of feebly hanging out (but not being able to keep up) with grizzly outdoorsy types who can run up trees like monkeys, sporadically whip their cocks out to pee with no shame (overboard in this case), yodel at the moon, or generally do such stuff as weld mountain bikes out of old prams after work for the craic. I am used to being absorbed by such groups because of my clownish instincts. Which is a bit pathetic.

Yet, yesterday I climbed out of a canoe after almost four days on the river. Sunburned, bruised, covered in slimey river shite, phoneless, muscularly deformed in new remarkable ways, but still somehow intact. And happy.

I'll surely write something more about the four days because there were brilliant and funny things that happened. At the moment, however, the trip is a river shaped blur, a dream stream of forward motion, swan coughs, weirdly verdant scenery, hilarious Cork shite-talk, a perfect half car upturned in slow flow, campfires, the mysterious gravity-like relationship between river water's speed and perceived time, and, mostly, those clockwork muscle movements that ended up breaking any pain barriers I thought I knew.

And there were endorphins too. If I felt shite at the start of the trip then I felt a lot better by Easter Saturday, only one day in. It might have had something to do with the fact I hadn't seen a road in two days, or that every corner I turned revealed another grey heron, swan, or cormorant pulling sluggishly ahead of us under blazing unseasonable sun. Or it might have had something to do with the insane banter men of my age have with each other when they are bobbing in canoes in places phone networks struggle to cover. Or it might just have been the company of Frank. Whatever, it was more of a tonic than anything a doctor prescribed me.

Best of all, by the end of the trip I had graduated from incompetent paddle wobbler to something like a canoeist. I feel sort of strong too. Like I could open a jar of marmite without asking for help and shit.

MP3: The Byrds-Ballad of Easy Rider

(one of my favourite ever happy sad songs, and one I sang in my head a few times over the trip. In case I sound like a sentimental drip, I'd also like to add I sang Britney Spears' 'womanizer', The Beastie Boys' 'fight for your right to party' and the 'euro cycles euro baby' radio ad a lot too).

No work until Tuesday, so music blogs a comin'.

Also Karl and Seán now have a regular podcast thingy. Relevancy, rap and funnies guaranteed.

Sometimes depression can be all the clichés - storm clouds, oppressive moods, darkness sweeping in. But most of the time, depression is mundane. It is a boring, listless seep into things. It is a watery gap that forms between your intentions and your actions. It's a soft drizzle that washes the colour from the things you typically enjoy doing - like writing a blog, reading a poem, going for a walk, or playing a computer game. Not a storm cloud, just a shadow that falls over unlikely thoughts, at unwelcome times, bringing all that is mundane with it.

Depression might be a pair of socks not washed, a curtain unpulled, or ingredients left uncooked in the fridge. Or it might be phone calls left unanswered, emails not returned, and invites left hanging. Soon, the internal disease is easily counted through all of these external things, seeping slowly; a breaker carrying the crumpled flotsam of weeks and months of half-living - this breaker moving constantly, ahead of a shallow tide that creeps ever further into a life that you are not on the best of terms with anyway.

Depression is a curse not to be wished on anybody.


As soon as I am feeling sunnier I will write more stuff here. Until then, I advise you to think about some of the people you know and how they feel. If they haven't contacted you for a while, maybe they are waiting for you to contact them. Because that is what depressed people do, they think nobody wants to contact them and waiting for contact that never comes reinforces this irrational feeling of being ignored. A phonecall (not a sympathy phonecall) can sometimes mean the world.

BE AWARE

MP3: Adem-These Are Your Friends

About ten years ago I lived in this absolute kip of a flat on the corner of Parnell St and Gardiner St. It was such a shitehole it doesn't even exist any more. It went negative equity and then the landlady sold it to make glue or something, it was that bad. My last memory of the place was this thick grey filth climbing up the walls and a spoon standing weirdly in an old chinese takeaway box - as if it were supported by bacterial material from all sides.

Our neighbors hated us. If we breathed, they called the cops. If more than two friends called over of a night, they called the cops. If they saw us accessing our post in the corridor of the apartment block, they called the cops. The janitor hated us too. If he thought some weird shit was going on in the entire shitty apartment complex at night, he went for broke, called the cops, and blamed us. If I had a fiver for every time I answered that manky door and a garda was stood behind it, I'd be minted.

Here's the thing, the people who called the cops most were horrible people. A woman lived next door to us. She smelled of meat and was always there, all the time. She had about a million children and she used to scream out onto Parnell street most nights at random men and women who were in her company. One day, her door was hanging loose on a hinge and I could see in to her flat, a manky pit of loose blankets, oven chips, Sunday World-elds, grease, and playstation controllers. Of course, we never bothered her. Live and let live.

Aaaand then, one night we had a couple of mates around. The flat was loud until about 9.30pm. At 9.01pm there was this demented rapping on the door and a wrecked voice screaming "OPEN THE DOOR YIS CUNTS. YIS CUNTS. THERE ARE CHILDREN TRYING TO SLEEP. I'LL FINISH YIS, YE SHOWER OF COLLIGE CUNTS".



MP3: Gang Gang Dance-Glass Jar

We didn't answer the door.

The rapping then levelled up to kicking. At this point we had turned any stereo sound off but we were afraid to answer the door. In fact, the stereo sound had been off for about 20 minutes (quite politely) at this stage.

She started reefing heavy kicks into our door. "Scum!", "Collige CUNTS", "I'll get yis fucked out of this place, ye shower of CUNTS". Whack. It was toenail breaking stuff. Bam. She kept doing it and screaming  until it got to the point where you knew she had completely forgotten about her kids indoors, who were being disturbed by her.

We went to bed.

The next day, the guards called around with a landlady from next door. It was 'serious'. It turns out that we were 'anti-social' and a neighbour had complained.

Have you ever seen a cheesy music video or ad clip where a lithe person swimming underwater at night is lit by millions of tiny phosphorescent lights? I used to think such stuff was bullshit - like twinkly crapola deployed at suitably romantic moments in Smashing Pumpkins videos, in Dawson's Creek, or in any subsequent Smashing Pumpkins or Dawson's Creek derived thing.

This was what I thought until one May night where I ended up standing in my boxers at the end of a wooden pier. In a bay! On the Pacific-facing side of Vancouver Island! An unlikely situation that was made possible by the school I was attending at the time, an international college founded on the principle of "educating future leaders for a changing world" (except in my case, they only got the 'changing world' bit factually correct).