He read the following: 'with such a look of bliss on his face that the people realized he had been transfigured by a holy ecstasy'.
I see you lithe and watery-eyed, flitting and flecked from activity, your fine bounce and flawless stride pump the rivers of my ecstasy.
What's gone wrong, what's brought on such a massive change? From highness on the wine of life to hungover on earthly strife?
Gliding gulls in the grey sky. Dublin December morning. You're the golden summit of what comes up here to live every single day.
He worried that he was becoming numerically dyslexic.
He would seek out Catalan lessons in the new year.
It was the day when Unwin and Quintana came by.
One of those recurring dreams I have set on Abercorn Road. In a technology trance he thought of colonies on the moon and beyond, two thousand years from now. He heard her voice in the water from the shower hose that was running whilst he was being bastinadoed in the bath.
He had tweeted two novels worth of bile.
No story is completed until somebody reads it.
He heard 'God is interested in the details of our lives'.
He resolved to Bing the communion of the saints i.e. to search for the term.
I asked her what she thought of Anthony Burgess. 'Derivative,' she replied curtly.
He wanted to climb the seven mystic mountains of monumental love.
He wouldn't have minded a trip to the moon—but virtually, with a headset say. Not to actually go there himself.
A girl with the beginnings of a gunt stood at the bus stop.
I'm afraid to cry for you, angel, in case I won't be able to stop.
I'll see you sometime in some heavenly Newgrange on some solstice morn when we are reborn.
As for you, brother, I'm so sorry you never got to grow old.
He read: 'I don't know that I even believe in death. I'm not sure that we understand anything about the role of consciousness in space and time'.
Snowed in, I watched the sad old warmonger getting off on the temperature of his weapon.
I walked around Colindale in my 1970s mind with Totteridge and her tweets my ultimate destination.
Images of you dancing in white left a mark on my heart through the long lonely nights.
The 7th of April came. And then the 17th, and in the faded grandeur of Mountjoy Square, I could—to quote a phrase—connect nothing with nothing.
Home up through Dublin's little villages. Phibsborough one evening, Stoneybatter the next.
I saw four love hearts on your final ever Facebook post.
And then of a sudden it was the 7th of May.
One evening he began to think hard about seven seals, seven trumpets and seven vials.
He practised fanatically healthy eating.
He spent a lot of time in graveyards underneath flight paths.
He sometimes worried that he had an inordinate love of the calembour. He was punny like that.
He saw the heroin addicts of the city. There was methadone in their madness.
He thought to himself: curiosity felled the feline.
On the faded grandeur of Sherrard Street Lower I thought of my dear old friend John who had died that day. In Phibsborough walking down here I'd noticed that the John Doyle pub had changed its name, the signage gone that had borne his moniker and in its place was Doyle's Corner.
He had an epiphany. Sometimes the comedown is as edgy as the high.
Molly O'Toole played the violin. An amazing version of Amazing Grace.
Since he'd last sat down there had been 288 tweets about #Brexit.
The Throstles were formed in 1878, he learned.
It was the night of the Strawberry Moon, it was the 27th of June.
It occurred to him that a single phrase could take for days.
On July 10th it ended. Full stop. Period. He thanked God.
And before he knew it, it was the 13th of the 7th and the time was just right. And then it was the 27th and it was really right.
I dreamt I shared a plane journey with a deeply vain trombonist.
I realised that I had a decided preference for Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greek notions of the afterlife over later Christian or Islamic ones.
It was the 17th of August and my brain was in a whirl.
And then before I knew it, it was August 27th.
He thought that in the future everyone would have their own Wikipedia page.
Writing letters to newspapers wasn't doing it for him anymore.
He wondered what the heck did this mean: 'ah...fine wine is noyce but tis the bott of jack does the trick of all trades...'?
He read one of the best songwriters in the world who said: 'All you need are chords C, D minor, E minor, F, G and A minor, and that's enough for anyone.'
He read further: 'If you would a drown Mary Jo like Teddy did, you would still be in prison.' Dominic Albanese.
He recalled the autumn of 1998 and writing the following lines in a rehab clinic: 'Winter's kicking in and my rash-ridden arms can soon be hidden.'
True story. I'm coming out of the dentist's on Bath Avenue and walking along Grand Canal Street when the writer John Banville passes me. Mildly starstruck, I stop him and compliment him on his writing, basically telling him I'm a fan. He is polite but doesn't seem to want to be held up for too long but does say to me 'you've made my day'. Au contraire, it made my day to meet him! It was only later I realised I had a Richard Ford novel in my satchel that I could have shown Banville because right on the back cover was his blurb 'The best novel out of America in many years'. It would have been a meta kind of moment.
Suddenly it was the 27th of October. Almost a year had gone by.
He developed a fear of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities.
He said to the interview board: 'I can talk to you on any topic under the sun should you care to mention one.'
72 beats per minute. Confident as hell.
Her hair was a cascade of lush red ringlets.
He read the following: 'I am the god who puts fire in your head.'
Of course he had been fucked up once, but he began the process of unfucking up himself, and it worked out pretty well.
He woke up that morning to learn that the Arecibo message was 44 years old.
I'm struggling to say anything at all here.
It was November 17th. There wasn't a whole lot in his diary despite the fact that a year had passed.
He was elegantly isolated. The Beaver Moon was rising in Gemini.
It was the 7th of December and he was tired of his own behaviour, so he reached for the collection of primitive legends.
He loved Christmas. Lighting his Tilley lamp and feeding on a great big bowl of Edwards' desiccated soup.
It was deep in the midwinter and the birds appeared to have gone to ground.
Somebody tweeted: 'Went for my first run this morning since the cold snap kicked in. Brrr! And more bad weather due tomorrow. Sigh...'.
Christmas Eve, hard to believe. The time and the tide ain't waiting!
A headache and a hunger is no pleasant treat in the sweaty milieu of a city street.
It was Saint Stephen's Day and he drove into the town of Tiredness Kills.
Over Christmas he played Senet 'the game of the dead' and searched the sky for the Black Knight satellite.
He dreamt of Becca Hennon. The silence was her canvas.
He said to me 'In about a year from now they're gonna set me on fire about a mile from here'. We were standing in the grounds of Howth Castle at the time and to be frank he actually didn't look that sick. It's difficult looking back now to grasp that he was terminally ill. He'd laugh if he knew how much his passing effected me.
The whole afternoon was spent receiving flashbacks of dreams.
The head of the army brass band was there, a Major Dee.
I went to see Pintoro's Chimps, what an amazing troupe, at the Theatre Royal.
On Camden Street he could see up ahead the elegant southside where he once did live.
It was strange. The darling buds of May were now the darling buds of February.
A woman in the lift in the Revenue office in D'Olier Street laughed at something he said, revealing an upper bridge of supremely stained smoker's teeth.
The dreams continue day and night, there is no end to them.
On February 27th it came time to finish the notebook.
He dreamt like it was 29 nine years ago, walking up home from Fairview. A tramp in black with white hair and a serene face accompanied him. At Nazareth House the tramp claimed the moon landings were achieved by reverse mirrors in the Mojave Desert. Listening to the man it gave him (stoned) hope. His brother John, date of death July 25th 1969, was still around. Somewhere.
© Brian Ahern 2025
Comments
Post a Comment