Matthew T Connery

Being a young and naive traveler, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me where all the fat people were when I was in Paris and subsequently in Bayonne in southern France. When I arrived at a topless beach on my first day in San Sebastian, Spain, I wondered no more. ¡No me gusto! They’ve all been excommunicated here. The shame of these people, however, failed to make the trip.

I’ve adapted to a comfortable routine for my week on the Bay of Biscay. 7:20 a.m: awake to my alarm and promptly shut it off for ten more minutes of light sleep. 10:09 a.m: wake up appalled to see how much I’d accidentally lost of the morning. Then I take a labyrinthine path along the gridded streets of the quiet city to the Parte Vieja. I stop for tea and a doughnut on the way at the same warm cafe where the ceiling fans robustly churn. One morning, an old Basque gentleman stopped on his way out of the bakery and demonstratively bent over my table and looked at my writing, notebooks sprawled before me among my teapot, cup, and empty plate. He must’ve been in his eighties–his thick tanned skin pulled tight over his knuckles as he leaned on his cane to peer in at my pages. He said nothing to me, but he looked me in the eyes as he stood back up and gave me an ok with his free hand abandoning the cane and smiling as he shuffled off towards the door.

Continuing to the famed beach of San Sebastian, a well-noted haunt of Hemingway in the twenties, I sit for two or three hours on the fine white sand accomplishing little more than people-watching and laying some ground work for melanoma. Mount Urgull and Mount Ulia hem the borders of the teardrop bay. Urgull was once a military outpost of the region and a castle still stands along with a presiding statue of Christ as though He was Spain’s great military visionary. Both are visible from the beach despite their proximity from the sand.

The San Sebastian beach is the greatest beach in the world. An old-fashioned Spanish promenade with lively bandstands featuring old men with red and white striped outfits and black hats holding golden trombones and trumpets borders the yawning, arching spine of the beach itself until it is consumed by the lush growth of Ulia and Urgull, which rise to the lowest white clouds skimming the sky. The effect of the topography is that of an enveloped security. When this feeling is matched to the expectable placidity of stretching out on the sand, watching the blue water mingle with the bluer sky, following their horizonal dialogue of color, it is as though one recedes into one’s own imagination. It is an impossible beach. It could not exist. And there you are, in its benevolent sun.

I spent five such days in late August and early September. Twice daily I went to the beach, once in the late morning and again in mid-afternoon. When the fuzzy orbs of the streetlights became illuminated and the electricity of the evening was ignited, I’d slowly join the crowds leaving the sand and heading to the gaping promenade. It is against my nature to abandon prose in favor of the stifling and unimaginative substitution of pictures, but I would like you to understand better what my lack of talent fails to completely deliver. This photo: http://wikitravel.org/upload/en/0/00/San_Sebastian_Panoramic.jpg (Sorry for the lack of a hyperlink, but if you’re ambitious enough to sleepwalk through my writing, you’re adept enough to cut and paste. And don’t get sidetracked opening another page! You come right back here and finish this Verse!) As I was saying, this photo encapsulates the feeling of seclusion that so captivated me those five days several summers ago.

Wait. No. Nevermind, dear reader. I was on a course to tell you more about Spain. It was a phenomenally quiet time, similarly structured to the implied period of rest shared in separate stints by Jacob Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Of course, much is intrinsically suggested in such a differentiation between the 1920s and the 2000s. Unlike Barnes, Ashley, or Hemingway, I perused six Spanish broadcasting channels, two of which were Spanish, two French, and two in Basque. Google the geographical location of San Sebastian and you’ll understand why the local language is split thee ways once you figure out who the Basques are. Until you’ve sleepily turned on the television in the middle of the night in Spain only to see a Mario Van Peebles film dubbed over in Basque, you haven’t really lived. Or Al Bundy dubbed in French. That was pretty strong as well.

I’m not going to round out this narrative because a funny thing happened to me on the way to concluding Verse 107. Inside my safe where all my writing rests, I was researching my time in Spain and flipping through my heavily stamped passport of the last nine years. My 34th year, of which I currently enjoy, was to feature my return to Paris and San Sebastian as all the characters of The Sun Also Rises, the novel that began me on my travels, were thirty-four. Mid-Verse, my excitement got the better of me and I booked a round-trip ticket from Boston to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris for later this year. I was not contemplating a trip at all, yet there it was, booked and confirmed.

Four days and two arguments with American Express later, my trip is now cancelled. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” This trip was my foolish consistency for nine years. I am not the man I was at twenty-six, nor would I choose to be. I believe my days of traveling alone to be passed. They served their purpose. And now I have another. And I embrace that with my eyes wide open.

A.L.Y., happily in Amesbury, 2010.

In Verse Thirty-Six, I regaled my readership with the tale of my evening in Rome with a Scot named Ally. To remind anyone who cares to be reminded, I was sitting in the dimly lit converted basement-turned-bar of the hostel I was staying at near Termini in central Rome. It was a Sunday night in late January and I sat at a small table writing and listening to my iPod. The room was all brick and mirror, lit only by pin-pricked red lights on strings, bulbs no bigger than candle flames. As midnight approached, a popular American spectacle infiltrated my evening, though not to my dismay. It was the Super Bowl.

I moved from my small, wobbly table to the bar where I sat beside and began chatting to a pale Glaswegian named Ally. We spoke of the general things expatriated travelers generally talk about, namely what we’re escaping from and what we’re running to. But once the game began, we intermittently watched the first quarter. It was his most significant exposure to American football and after patiently watching the first fifteen minutes or so, he largely dismissed the sport, pointing out that rugby is a much truer, tougher version of the same essential sport. All the pads and equipment of American football dilute the action. Rugby players were tough. Football players were mild by comparison. I agreed with him and felt the same ever since, until now.

Tonight at the Garden, former middleweight and super middleweight boxing champion James Toney is making his mixed martial arts debut against former heavyweight and light heavyweight MMA champion Randy Couture. Toney has swollen from being a 168 pound champion fifteen years ago into a bulbous 240 pounds. Couture, though older than Toney at age 48, is more or less carved out of wood. My interest in bringing all of this up (and how it relates to two people discussing rugby versus football in the basement of a Roman hostel) is as follows. Toney is an American, born to American parents in Michigan. Being a life-long American, English is his first language and he has no accent, no speech impediment, and he’s a man in his mid-forties. When I was watching recent interviews with him leading up to tonight’s fight, I noticed something all the interviews had in common. Toney is so hard to understand because of being punched in the head for the last quarter century, his speech gets subtitled.

Couture on the other hand, as well as every other MMA fighter I have ever heard speak, has no trouble. Meanwhile, Toney’s punch-drunk speech is hardly an anomaly. Many aging boxers suffer from the same problem. Yet MMA is the sport under scrutiny from mainstream popularity in the U.S. because of its brutality. Boxers wear large gloves which cover the entire hand and feature much more padding than MMA gloves which are designed merely to cover the knuckles and weigh only about four ounces. Now, I am not a physician, nor do I have a degree in sports medicine, but here’s my theory: padding is actually counterproductive in both combat sports and football.

The helmets and shoulder pads in football allow defensive players (or whoever’s the aggressor during any particular point of contact) to transform themselves into missives, lunging themselves full-force at an oncoming human being who is not necessarily positioned to withstand the blow. What chance does a quarterback or runningback have when trying to advance the ball when a 235 pound athlete launches himself at his head or neck or knee while leading with the protective covering of a helmet or shoulder pad? I say get rid of the pads. It sounds crazy at first but it makes sense. Bone crushing hits take place because players are protected enough they can do just about anything they want to. Without pads, no one would try to take another guy out by launching himself head-first at his opponent. Instead, you’d have to tackle someone. Tackling barely exists in the sport anymore. No one seems to wrap up a fullback anymore by skillfully grabbing a hold of him and pulling him down. Players and fans alike want the thrill of a big hit to take someone out.

Based on the drooling phenomenon of aging boxers and the comparatively healthy aging MMA fighters, perhaps the same is true in fighting. I’m no expert, but it seems to me that getting clipped with a clean overhand right and knocked out in one punch is less dangerous than getting whaled on for twelve rounds and hit literally hundreds of times with a more padded glove. Most MMA fights are fifteen minutes if they go the distance. Boxing is more than double that. While MMA is an exciting sport because of how quickly the action takes place, it offers far less of the sustained round-after-round damage boxers are exposed to. In MMA, if you get hit cleanly, the fight is usually over. In boxing, you stand there because the damage in each blow is often not quite enough to knock you out, so you merely absorb more and more punishment in a war of attrition.

It’s become more prevalent in sports media that the level of abuse football players subject themselves to is astounding. Concussions are historically dismissed and players somnambulistically plod on in a fog of aphasia. And post career, their bodies are disasters. Thirty-five year-olds have the joints of men twice their age. We tune in, we call ourselves fans of certain teams and players, and we don’t much care what happens to them as long as our team wins. Meanwhile, the NFL certainly doesn’t want anything to happen to its product, which is the jewel of the American sports world and perhaps the very crown of our culture.

My prompting to write this is the unpopular release of news from a credible study that ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and ALS-type conditions are linked to brain trauma in athletes prone to sustaining multiple concussions. Boxers and football players were those identified as being most affected. By no means am I boycotting the Nittany Lions on Saturdays, the Patriots on Sundays, or the Harvard-Yale game this November. Nevertheless, this seems to me to be a question worth discussing, not dismissed like a veggie plate at a tailgate party. It seems that football would come to lose my interest over time if twenty-five years after being a Super Bowl MVP, a mute Tom Brady came out in his wheelchair to toss the coin at the opening ceremonies of the 2028 Super Bowl.

There’s a fine line between vigilance and conspiratorialism.

I was recently driving with a friend when she noticed an itchy pink welt on her forearm and made a joke that it must’ve been a bed bug that bit her. I asked her why she made the peculiar allusion to the virtually fictionalized predator that’s taken about half as seriously as the Bogeyman. She explained that bed bugs have actually been in the news quite frequently of late as the vermin have made some sort of a comeback, allegedly due to the decreased utilization of DDT and other pesticides that had all-but eradicated bed bugs over the last couple generations. Recent media reports have also indicated the small, sleepy troublemakers have infiltrated movie theaters nationwide, even prompting a Times Square theater to close its doors to address the problem. Aside from my brief initial reaction of ‘Ew,’ I got to thinking: beware the possibility of an anti-green, anti-organic movement across America.

Beginning predominantly in the 1950s, companies began making major advances in improving the efficiency of food-production in this country. This meant finding ways to ship food longer distances, allow it to sit on store shelves longer, enhance the convenience of food-preparation by minimizing cooking times, and most of all: make food cheaper. American industry succeeded admirably as it always seems to when properly motivated. The trouble with all the progress that was instigated in the fifties has become increasingly evident in the last ten to twenty years, and ultra-obvious in the last four or five. Cheap food proved to be rather expensive after all. Environmental concerns and health problems aggressively marshaled the better instincts of many conscientious minds and a significant portion of our population began making different choices.

A great example is the often misunderstood and quasi-buzzworthy high fructose corn syrup. For those who don’t know, here’s the deal. HFCS is both much cheaper and much sweeter than sugar derived from cane. When industry figured this out in the seventies, companies replaced sugar with HFCS in just about everything and improved their profits as a result. While there’s nothing exactly unsafe about HFCS or anything like that, it is a very insidiously dangerous ingredient to have worked into myriad products, and here’s why. Fructose, in the high quantities Americans consume it, significantly distorts the systems of the body, specifically by not stimulating insulin as other foods do like carbohydrates. When we eat carbs, insulin is summoned to regulate body weight and to tell the brain we’re full and to stop eating. Fructose does not behave this way. And because it is incredibly easily digested compared to its much more complicated cousin sugar, it allows people to eat and eat and eat. Fructose, while obviously existing in nature, does not exist in the quantities Americans now digest it. In fruit and honey, fructose is prevalent, but only in a fraction of the quantity and poses no danger.

As an example of the effects of HFCS, find an overweight soda-lover and give them a two liter bottle to chug. They’ll put it away like the left tackle on a high school football team at a kegger. The next day, give them another bottle, but this time choose a soda made using only sugar instead of HFCS. It will take Porky much longer to down it and he’ll be slower to want to go for his afternoon trek to Arby’s afterwards. Sound unlikely? Look around at your countrymen. There’s an explanation to be had for our obesity and HFCS is part of the equation. By unnaturally extrapolating the sweetener and synthesizing it into a cheap sugar substitute and putting it in everything, it gives Americans not only lots of calories, but calories the body ignores because of how easily they’re digested, how the body stores those calories, and how unrecognized they are by our appetites.

Dozens of other food additives and processes have similar stories resulting in other contributing factors to health problems or environmental concerns. HFCS is just an easy example and a familiar one to most people. Whether pesticide or preservative, the food industry accomplished all it set out to in making a loaf of bread that can sit for a year and a half without growing mold and we all drank the Kool-Aid to one extent or another. Now, as ‘organic,’ ’sustainable,’ ‘locally-produced,’ ‘all-natural,’ ‘preservative-free,’ and other words and terms become more prevalent within our culture, thus demonizing everything from McDonald’s to Cheese Nips, the American food industry might just be a little pissed.

Bringing this whole thing back to bed bugs, my thought is simple. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the same companies that once were patted on the back for developing chemicals that could save our blighted strawberries or that could slash prices by discovering a synthetic sweetener to cut production costs might go looking for their accolades again by playing to people’s fears and getting them to think twice about going green. After all, if Mr. or Mrs. Natural Fibers finds a bed bug infestation in their parlor, their priorities might shift just enough for them to again begin believing that chemicals maybe aren’t so bad after all. If pesticide smeared cherry tomatoes were good enough for their mom and dad, and there were no bed bugs chomping on Junior in the middle of the night, then it could be good enough for them too.

Now, does this mean that the bed bugs were somehow unleashed on New York City by the makers of Count Chocula? Don’t be silly. Does this mean that the bed bugs don’t even exist in the first place and that they’re an invention of the media to increase panic and stimulate the masses to fearfully fun out and buy diamond earrings from the jewelry company that pays for advertisement time during the news? No, it isn’t that either. The truth is, I wouldn’t have a clue what sort of shape an industry-spawned anti-green movement would take. Moreover, I don’t know if such a movement would even occur. Maybe the avaricious food producers are simply assassinating the Keebler Elves, executing them one by one in back of their little treehouse workshop so they can begin production on a new organic cookie they’ll charge eleven dollars a bag for and make the same dough they were accustomed to under the arthritic hands of the head elf in the red hat and yellow knickers.

As I began, there’s a fine line between vigilance and conspiratorialism. I’m merely thinking out loud and being cautiously skeptical of an industry that abused out trust.

Jerked behind the navel, a grotesque and jarring lurch courtesy of the runny ice of the southern island of New Zealand’s Fox Glacier, I felt the fear break over me that doused two others and never let them up again. Reveling in the common bond of shared terror, my heart sickly acknowledges their spirited fellowship in death. But by extension, consummated by their blood, they consecrate the holy danger I once worshiped and still revere. Even four thousand rounds fired in war, if avoided, become little more than a great story instead of another’s tale of your gruesome death.

I clambered over Fox Glacier following a happy, bearded maniac expertly whacking ascending stairs into the ice with a well-worn, long-handled axe. Running parallel to us, a hollowed out cavern burrowed through the block to where a cold river flowed through the glacier like a dream within a dream. It gushed and plunged across uncharted, unknowable distances, but we could hear it to our right on this stage of the glacier. Awkward on steel spikes strapped onto borrowed boots; slip left and head to the hospital, slip right to the cemetery sans corpse. They won’t be finding you.

Infused with horizonless delight, I clunked up the frozen steps, my spiked feet biting with unstable uncertainty into the soft ice. On a long, narrow plateau, our small group spilled onto the cold sheet like colored marbles unloosed from a velvet bag. As I was first in line behind our axe-wielding guide, I was happiest to have arrived, having nearly caught the business-end of his axe in my forehead on more than one occasion as my enthusiasm overwhelmed my prudence, causing me to follow too closely. The expanse of frozen acreage lay largely flat before us, creating the illusion of a limitless winter pond for skating rising like a gray dais into the low wool of the stratus clouds. Both the extra inches of height added by our sole’s toothy spikes and the toddler-like uneasy gait they elicited further enhanced the environmental depiction of a January afternoon getting ready for a pick-up hockey game from my youth.

While no aficionado of the movie or novels, the impetus for my arrival in New Zealand was the first Lord of the Rings film. Having nothing to do with the plot, the mere complexity of the beauty of the Shire’s scenery in the film was enough to propel me home from the theater, discover online where the film was shot, and book passage to the tiny nation. Tidal green fields, crisp and remarkable mountains, chiseled fjords, waterfalls both thin and darting and stoutly formidable, all seamlessly amalgamate the landscape. There was a second, unanticipated commonality, however. The other correlation was that of having a band of patchwork travelers brought together, having left their worlds behind them to immerse themselves in the clarity of the void of their predictable life. This was prominently on display for me at Fox Glacier.

I was conscious of the shift as I crouched into a narrow cave, just large enough for a small and quasi-limber adult to negotiate. The light inside was like that outside; the bleached gray light of the overcast sky was veiled further by the translucent blue ice, deep and inconsistently aqua, like an iris. The blue grew ghostly as I slipped and twisted my way through the asymmetry of the narrow cave. Ahead of me, trapped by the asphyxiating ice, the sound of the live river crushed my ears. Hewing its bed in the impermanent ice, the river rammed its way perpendicular to the cave I traversed to get to it. After only thirty tricky feet or so, I came to its frozen banks. Water splashed on my boots and I was thankful for the spikes. The idea of rubber soles naked on the wet ice was enough to conjure an image of a cartoon man on a banana peel from the funny pages, both legs comically shooting upwards as a panicked look swam over his face. But I wasn’t Dagwood Bumstead out walking Daisy.

My world was muted blue, further enhancing the feeling that I was inside an enormous eye and staring into the flowing thoughts of the mind. I had only a moment in the annihilating silence of the consuming calamity of the trapped, fast-flowing water before a girl’s voice resonated indistinctly through the cave from its opening. Erin, a fellow American traveler, had called to me to be certain I was ok. It was enough of the established presence of the rest of the world to beckon me begrudgingly back to the inner limits of the danger of the glacier.

It’s easy, having avoided danger, to convince yourself that you were never in danger. Twice, in foreign countries, I ignored the posted warnings of national parks departments and explored a glacier beyond the boundaries deemed acceptable by their directives. Both times I came to no harm, though I relished in the gleeful foolishness I exhibited, whether legitimate or contrived. Over the passing years, I felt silly for ever thinking there to be a significant threat in my rashness. Two Australian brothers, undoubtedly feeling no differently, were crushed by one hundred tons of falling ice last summer at Fox Glacier having bounded over a rope warning them not to advance to take a photograph of a terminal sheet of ice. One body was recoverable. The other was not.

I remember, in the wake of the glacier many hours later and out of danger in the cold November afternoon of the May day, how I floated to the back of us twenty travelers beneath the donning Southern Cross feeling not quite to have cheated Old Scratch, but certainly to have averted his snare still set for another and sniffed his charred cologne. In the setting gloaming, I lived for the first time as I ever truly wanted to, in the clarity of life and death, as in war, assured in my everlasting faith of My Love.

In appreciation of appreciation…

While youtube is not my most frequent destination on the web and the web is hardly the most frequent destination of my eyes and mind, I nevertheless found myself transposing a long URL into google that was sent to me in a text message by a good friend. I was completely unaware of the nature of the clip, but as it was sent to me by someone who has never sent me such a thing in the past, I felt obliged to her to investigate.

The video was about four and a half minutes lifted from Conan O’Brian featuring his interview with a comedian whom I had never seen before. Whether the episode was a month old or six years old, I couldn’t say. But as I am a sucker for incisive social commentary shrink-wrapped in caustic humor, I was more than captivated by what I saw.

The comedian in question is someone who appears to be well-known, just not by me. His name is Louis C.K. and the excerpt from the interview began with the following line: “Everything’s amazing right now and everybody’s miserable.” His suggestion on how to remedy the latter half of this equation is very much in harmony with my own views. Quite simply, it amounts to deprivation. The image he utilized to illustrate this point was to posit that every American could benefit right now by having to use a donkey to get somewhere, preferably with pots and pans clanking on either side of the burro.

I am sensitive to the idea that the most likely way of ensuring this kind of mass deprivation would be through catastrophe. Even if this would ultimately improve the quality of life of the survivors, there’s no way I’m going to wax poetic on the idea of some pseudo-apocalypse wiping out most of us and leaving the rest of us somehow more fulfilled by the idea of being able to go without almost everything we now have so that we can finally appreciate the balance of our lives. That leaves the heavy question: how then do you set about cultivating appreciation in our society.

“We live in an amazing, amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of, like, spoiled idiots.” People, younger people in particular, talk about their flights with the melodrama of a daytime television catharsis. They complain about security, bureaucracy, delays, and minor inconveniences. I, too, have been guilty of this. The part that tends to get left out of the tale is what follows after all the airport suffering: you flew. You sat in a chair in the sky, you non-contributing zero. “New York to Los Angeles in five hours. It used to take thirty years and a bunch of you would die along the way. Now, you watch a movie, take a dump and you’re home.”

By the time I was old enough to have a basic understanding of history and time, I remember learning about World War II and contemplating how long ago it was and how far we must’ve come since that point in time. Well, that war ended in 1945 and I was born thirty-one years later in 1976. The older I get, the more conscious I become of how close I really was to that era. It now being 2010, my birth was closer to 1945 than it is to where I am now to 2010. Thirty years is nothing. The relevance of all this is to call attention to the fact that we act like this technology has been around forever. It hasn’t. It speaks complimentary volumes about our race’s ability to adapt to technology, but it also demonstrates what gets sacrificed along the way. As Einstein pointed out long ago: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” It is not our technology which needs to evolve. It’s our basic humanity. Their relationship to one another is inverted and as one increases, it seems as though the other is logically decreasing. Furthermore, both the permanence and prominence of technology in our culture is not present merely through advancement and quality of life, it’s largely base commercialism. Every dollar spent costs us double for what we lose in both literal financial resources and figurative human ones.

There’s no gimmick forthcoming to hoodwink people into appreciating their lives. The possible exception to this is the unlikely rise of a generation that rebels against the excess of modern day in favor of the pure enjoyment of a conservative life. Old jazz, rebuilt, would bulldoze the booty reverie of hip-hop. Dialogue driven filmmaking would dominate the ocular orgy of CGI. A calf or jawline could again become sexy instead of full-frontal nudity. Late afternoons on a boardwalk could be quietly spent staring out at the ocean and talking softly instead of a cacophonic blitz of media to annihilate the senses and derail the very need for the arch-individual mind. Quiet would be the new noise. Contemplative simplicity could replace eighteen percent interest for every conceivable want, every excessively accessible and slippery desire. While the basic precept of generational rebellion would at the every least suggest that such an idea is conceivable for this ghostly generation to arise, I imagine it doubtful at best. My reason is deconstructable to the lack of money in simplicity and deprivation. There’s big money in excess. There’s bankruptcy in commercial abstention. And there’s a lot of industrial power backing the areas of our economy to drive us to keep relying on what may be consumed as directly proportional to the way we think of our quality of life.

For everything new we pull into the fold of our lives, it must take the place of something existing. This is not to demonize all new things. But if you’re content quietly playing cribbage with a friend, beware the call of World of Warcraft. And the next time you fly, if you can think of it, can you conjure a small smile and admit to yourself that it’s pretty damned amazing.

Thank You God, for my beautiful life.

It’s a clear, cool morning in Inverness. I leapt, freezing, into bed last night just after eleven, following a mile-long walk home from downtown. The crescent moon hung like a shining, mateless earring in the cold, November sky. Only the periodic sentinels of amber streetlights marked time with me as I walked, my head immersed in James Blunt. It was a short first day for me in Inverness, having arrived from Glasgow by train on a sunny, cool autumn afternoon around two and without accommodations. By four, I had chosen a bed and breakfast, inexpensive in the off-season, and walked the two miles from the train station, burdened all the while by my pack, yet I relished in the unusual exercise of walking with such weight.

The pleasant proprietress met me at the door of her home and showed me to my room. It was a tiny, lovely affair far more like a legitimate bedroom than a hotel room, and certainly nothing like the hostel room I had so recently left in Glasgow. Two other bedrooms were cloistered together in my corner of the home, but both were unoccupied. As such, there would be no competition in the bathroom for the morning shower, something else starkly differing from my recent immersion in hostel life. An affectionate orange cat, Cuillin, named after a mountainous region in the Scottish Isle of Skye, lazily sprawled on the dark countertop above a whirring dishwater. The countertop was warm to the touch, forging a comfortable pad for the portly cat.

My hostess, Janice, who used the word ‘wee’ frequently, as in ‘here’s the wee kitchen’ and ‘here’s your wee bedroom,’ gave me keys and I immediately lit out for downtown before the light failed. It was nearing five o’clock. More importantly, it was nearing the winter solstice, some five weeks away, and northern Scotland is far to the north of my native New England. It was quite dark by the time I’d walked the mile to the city center, a hamlet little larger than the cities to the north of Boston I’d spent so much of my life meandering through. Downtown, I walked through a windblown outdoor market housing merchants packing up for the day, but still passively peddling woven rugs, wooden carvings, jewelry, and cyclamen. I inadvertently segued into a charming pub adjacent to the dwindling market across the street from the River Ness. The pub, The Castle Tavern, provided evening meals of comfort food to warm the body from the damp autumn chill. I ate venison and red wine casserole. It amounted to respectable crock-pot fare, which seemed an appropriate evening meal for my first night in northern Scotland. Elaborate woodwork around the bar and railings accented the dim hominess of the tiny pub, so small is was stuffed with the slim occupancy of twenty patrons; twenty loud, profane, and friendly patrons.

Like a slow-acting venom, the evening chill bit slowly and steadily into me as I walked home with uncertainty. I had no cell phone and no recollection as to the name of the bed and breakfast. Under the benign, tawny fire of a streetlamp, I pulled the keys from my pocket to inspect the keyring for the name of my guesthouse, but found none. It was simpler finding downtown by evening light than returning home in darkness. I trod on, swivel-headedly searching for the memorable sights I had kept such close track of earlier. They came slower than expected but ultimately delivered me to my room. Once there, I made a large mug of cocoa in the shadowy kitchen, not bothering to turn on a light outside my bedroom. Cuillin slept soundly on the counter space above the dishwasher, though the machine now lay dormant. I drank my hot chocolate and watched a made for television short by Stephen King entitled, “The End of the Whole Mess.” It was a tale about a brilliant young man who found a chemical compound inducing passive tendencies in mankind and easily disseminated by water. I fell asleep before it ended, but being from King, I didn’t prognosticate a positive outcome.

I slept, quite cold, in the comfortable room. I fell asleep listening to Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps,’ while alternating tucking my cold feet into the warm bend behind each knee of the opposing leg. I awoke to a cold, clear Scottish morning at 7:30, though heavy beads of water on the large window across from my bed filled me with delighted weariness in contemplating the cold, wet morning awaiting me. I remembered how the wind pressured the house all night, infiltrating my dreams of you; morphing quiet moments of discussion into torrential expeditions of adventure.

Janice had my wee breakfast for me at 8:30 as I had indicated on the card she left for me the previous evening and hung on my door. I had two sets of company at the table. When I first sat down, a mother and her one-year-old were just finishing their breakfast until the child saw me remove the lid from my black cherry yogurt and insisted, through a series of gestures and noises, on having her own yogurt. Janice and her mother obliged, and the babe smugly faced me in her highchair, racing me to the bottom of the yogurt cup. I won, but she put forth a valiant effort.

By the time I finished my yogurt and toast, I received fried eggs over potato scones with tomato and black coffee, and the two generations of the first family were replaced by three generations of another. A girl of twenty-five, her mother of about fifty, and her mother of perhaps seventy all sat across from me, teasing one another about who snored the loudest when they weren’t good-naturedly socializing with Janice about her high season and off-season, making it seem as though they’d made many trips here as a triumvirate over the years.

That’s it. There’s nothing more. It was the conclusion of one day abroad and the beginning of another. No epiphany. No momentous occasion. I merely showered after breakfast and set out for downtown again. The walk was all browned oak leaves and stove smoke, save for one bush of withering pink and white lantana, smelling of a February greenhouse stuffed with flowering pansies. I hugged the bank of the fast-moving River Ness and stood in awe of its formidable flow. It charged Ecclesiastically as I simultaneously did. And did not.

Thank You God, for my beautiful life.

It was four years ago today that I began my first job in the car business. In honor of this dubious anniversary and considering that I once again find myself on a showroom floor a couple days each week, I would like to tell you about my last day at that first job. I shall do so through the lens of A.L.Y.

“Today’s not going to get much better for you than Aroon Desai,” Jason said without looking at me.

“Why’s that?”

“Guess what I had to do while you were on your test drive with Desai?”

I responded by staring.

“We’ve been going in one by one defending our jobs to Cecil.”

“Why?”

“Because the dealership is having a bad month so Mick put him up to it. It’s just a scare tactic. They pull shit like this all the time. Just go in and tell him what he wants to hear; rah rah rah, let’s beat the shit out of Motorcars up the street, and that kind of shit. Just don’t take it personally and don’t buy into it. They just don’t want anyone to get too comfortable, especially when we start off a month poorly. It’s the fucking car business.”

He noticed the strain on my face and started in again. “Don’t concern yourself. Look at this place. No one has been coming through the door lately. That’s why you have nothing to worry about. It’s not like you can fish for referral business or cultivate something out of the people you tried to sell six months ago. You haven’t been here long enough. You’ll be fine Young Abe. He has no authority anyway. He’s the lowest man on the managerial totem pole, the cleanup boy after the corporate circle jerk.”

Jason, shortly after I returned apprehensively to my desk, took off to help a customer. I tried to busy myself in my CRM tool, making notes about a strategy to eventually land Aroon Desai, but I was really waiting for Cecil to come around the corner looking like a broken down character in the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas special. He had that rigid, half animated papier-mâché movement about him, along with a horseshoe hairline of short gray hair and an oversized maraschino nose.

My stomach sank sickly as he approached. I was a fourth grader on stage having received his cue and forgotten his lines. My composure and intelligence were like two mating lobsters in a grocery store showcase tank. I rose and followed him across the showroom into his office. When I sat down, I realized I had no memory of walking across the showroom. Immediately submerged in introspection, I hadn’t formed a memory of my own movements. When I took my seat across from him, it was as if I had just woken up. There’s got to be something wrong with me.

“Especially given your massive underachievement so far at this job, which, to be honest, you’re lucky to have, why should we allow you to continue your employment here?” After my face went red and subsided, it was the silence I focused on more than his cocked head and his small, squinting eyes. I instantly remembered putting my pencil down in the middle of examinations in college and taking in the florescent hum of the lights, watching everyone else work with noses to the desk. The hum of lights was loud and grotesque, just like they were now. “Why should we allow you to continue your employment here?” he demanded.

“Would you agree with me that if one chooses to answer a question, that it validates the legitimacy of the question?” I asked calmly, carefully.

“What?” He tightened his already folded arms. I consciously loosened my grip of the chair handle and let my hands hang casually off the edge of the chair’s arms.

“Have you ever heard someone respond to a question with: it’s beneath my dignity to answer?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You’re telling me it’s beneath your dignity to answer a simple question from your boss? Who the fuck do you think you are?” He uncrossed his arms, leaning forward onto some papers. His elbows slid a few inches across the desk as the papers slipped. His movements were quick. His jaw was clenched, his lips pursed.

“I didn’t say it was beneath my dignity to answer your question. I merely asked you if you were familiar with the concept.” It took great effort to keep my body still, my hands open. I feared he could hear my voice tremble. Before he could speak, I continued. “You know we’re not doctors though, right? You know that we sell cars in a slow-paced sales environment. You know that I was hired here because our general manager, your boss, believed I was skilled at dealing with the clientele our product attracts. And you also know that I am the only one who works here who receives a salary because our GM offered it to me because he said, and I quote, it would take me a while to figure out how to sell and to get some momentum going.”

“That’s right,” he said, reclining back and slithering his arms back to a folded position. “But why do you deserve the opportunity to continue trying to sell Mercedes-Benz?”

“I’m not going to answer that question. If you don’t think I deserve the opportunity to continue working here, then just tell me and I’ll go. No one has to fire me. But I believe I am a valuable enough quantity to employers that if whomever I work for thinks they have enough cause to question my worthiness of being on the payroll, then I will happily seek other employment.”

Cecil leaned forward again, picking up the papers on his desk and slapping them onto the short filing cabinet adjacent to him.

“No one said you didn’t deserve to be here and no one is asking you to leave. I didn’t even question your worth.”

“It’s precisely what this exercise is doing. It’s literally questioning my worth.”

“So tell me why you belong here.”

“No.”

We were sitting across from one another at a poker table. I was all-in for my career. No one was going to knock on the door to interrupt this scene. The phone wouldn’t ring. Someone was going to have to end this.

“You won’t answer my simple question?”

I shook my head both slowly and slightly, staring him disdainfully in the eye. All I wanted to say was “what the Christ is wrong with you?” Still, I wanted to be the professional one.

“Then go send in Ray. I’m sure he will be professional enough to answer a simple question.” I did as he asked and returned to my desk, shaking.

For the rest of the afternoon, I steered clear of everyone. Jason was immersed in selling something six times more expensive than I had attempted to earlier with Aroon Desai. When he stole himself away for a moment to ask me how it went with Cecil, my furious evasions were enough to stalemate him.

I was a little more open with Allan who peered even further over his glasses at me than usual. “You’re smarter than them. And they know it. That’s why they don’t like you. They like dumb fucks like Ray. This place is a sewer.”

“How did you last so long in this business?”

“Me?” He fidgeted with his Panerai. He laughed. “This business has changed a lot. It fit me at one time better than it does now. Now I’m old and I know a lot of people who come back and see me. So I just ignore the Micks and Cecils of the world. You’ll be ok though. You’ll be ok.” He said the last three words with a sweeping gesture like a conductor concluding a symphony. He grabbed my wrist reassuringly and walked away.

Being a Friday night, we closed at 7 p.m. with only three salespeople and one manager on. It was Jason and I, an eighteen year old Iranian kid, and Cecil. I spent the last hour out on a test drive in an S Class. We drove around and, in so much as it was possible, I really just hung out with the guy with no effort towards trying to sell him anything. My only goal was to make it back to the dealership, segue out of any conversation with the customer, and be in Jason’s E350 with him by the time it was 7:02. Fortunately, everything went perfectly as I shook hands and said goodbye to the customer out in the parking lot, apologetically explaining the lateness of the hour, and went inside to grab my things.

“You ready? That S Class guy still here?” Jason asked.

“All set. Just going to say goodnight to Cecil.”

“What’s that stuff you got?”

I ignored his question as I rounded the corner to Cecil’s office. His head was in some papers when I entered. I hadn’t seen him since our earlier confrontation. “Cecil?” I said.

“Yes, Abe.” There was nothing in his demeanor that suggested animosity from our meeting. That made things a little harder. But not a lot harder.

“I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be in for work tomorrow. I quit.”

I could have slipped a roll of nickels inside his suddenly open mouth. He looked quite different with his small eyes open enough to see the whites. “Why?”

“Because of you.”

He recaptured his composure with astonishing quickness. His anger also.

“Go clean out your desk.”

I gestured to the bundle under my right arm, the framed photograph of Julia and I clasped in my fingers. “I did right after our meeting.”

“Go write a letter of resignation.”

“Okay.” I turned and left the office. Jason was standing by the front door. He picked his head up as I approached.

“All set?” he asked.

“All set.”

Well, dear friends, (and by ‘dear friends’ I mean inebriated shut-ins who accidentally stumbled across this forum looking for biographical information on Matthew McConaughey and Sean Connery and inadvertently ended up here), this, as you can see, is my one hundredth Verse. Moreover, it is the one-year anniversary of the beginning of this project. I have to say, I’ve been pleased with the experience. I’m not certain what it has amounted to, but if I concerned myself with such self-interested pseudo-historical musings on my own work, then I wouldn’t be a very ambitious writer.

My mood of reflection stems not only from the dual significance of the Verse count and anniversary, but also from the possible conclusion of this debacle of occasional dissent. Unlike in the past when I pondered giving up this project, I am tempted now to sign off feeling to have perhaps accomplished all I set out to. In the past, such ruminations were embedded in childish frustrations, feeling unread, therefore wishing to go unwritten. Now, that is not the case. I’m delighted with my readership and have used my little soapbox here in my virtual Hyde Park to my every advantage.

I’m not saying there were no clunkers along the way, of course. Unintentionally, though through necessity, the lion’s share of my Verses was allocated to travel writing. I touched on most of the places that I’ve been to, though I’ve only uncovered the top-most echelon of my overall experiences abroad. I’ve been topical, at times. I’ve landed on everything from baseball to beheadings, holidays to innocence, not to mention a lot of ground in between. Of course, what I purported to be, which is a forum of dissent, if not downright antinomianism, has not been the most frequent of my thematic occurrences. This is by careful craft. In my opinion, the trouble with rebels and counter-culturalists is their one-dimensionality. Resisting the insidiously sad American way is commendable. Doing it in such a way that it becomes as blindly thoughtless as the spirit in which one is supposedly rebelling against is moronic. Moderation in all things, the wisest of us once said.

Dissent is like intelligence. Intelligence is a wonderful thing, but if one assiduously labors to cultivate ones’ specific genius with myopia, then the product is a brilliant mind that is socially inept, can’t parallel park or balance a checkbook, and worst of all, lacks the ability to unearth his or her genius in a fashion to make it digestible and relevant to the rest of us. Dissent is similar because what most dissidents seem to forget is that discovering a point of cultural contention is the smaller issue at hand. Finding a means to harness the strength of the better instincts of your fellow man is the generation of power. Otherwise you get some lunatic riding a pony down Route 128 in protest of high gas prices. It’s funny, but by my math, that makes you a punchline.

So where does this leave a forum I have entitled 21st Century American Antinomianism–the truth is, I’m not sure. I didn’t set out to make a difference. I’m not smart enough to think that I have any business making a difference. But I do believe I have some ideas worth sharing. It’s like wandering through an unmown meadow–almost everything is somewhat nice, but there’s not a lot your tempted to pluck and take home with you. And this is how it should be. You should be more concerned with your own ideas than mine. That’s the point. The point for me is in my dilemma in discerning to write another one hundred Verses between now and, God willing, July 22, 2011. The pros and the cons are equally obvious. I’m just not yet certain what I will choose to do.

Rest assured, should God forbid anyone actually care, I will continue writing in much the same vein as I have throughout this forum’s existence. But, for lack of a better word than Verses, these entries here have really been short essays. They total probably 120,000 words in-all. I have never thought of myself as an essayist in the same way I consider myself a poet, a short story writer, a journalist, or a novelist. It might be best for me to return to the hats that fit me better than the one I have worn for the last year.

If these are my final words to you, however, I will make use of one of the flowers I have gathered on my walks through others’ pastures, which have in turn caused me to focus on my own, and this flower is regarding individuality. The process of self-discovery is an inherently dissenting activity because it entails a rigorous moral examination, often resulting in the rejection of popularly accepted ideas. “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” Emerson asserts this belief insisting on the freedom of unlimited personal rights and duties. The great law of the mind allows no boundary to freedom. His essay “Self-Reliance,” 1841, offers his broadest definition of that law. “He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

We, you and I, decide what is right and wrong. And if ever that ideal clashes against concepts of illegality, immorality, or any other benchmark for right and wrong, then battle continuously until the expiration of your very blood. It is the noble truth of my life, not to combat the ills of society, but to challenge the ills perceived as virtue or otherwise accepted as common. This is my antinomian cry and just off-center at my core. It stems from a deep-rooted, ripping frustration I cannot fully express, only marginalize to harness it through effective practice, never to suppress and never to uncork in omnidirectional anger.

I say off-center at my core only because, well, You already know what’s at the center.

A major factor in writing consistently for an audience is the simple guideline: keep your readership happy. Not being in the custom of adhering to this axiom, I’m fearlessly going against this conventional wisdom by foraying into, you guessed it, the unheralded world of poetry. Adhering to my five percent rule, seeing as I’m closing in on my one-hundredth Verse, I’m due to dump my fifth collection of poetry on you. I expect most of you to have already departed from this page by now, but for the insomniacs/masochists out there, I hope you enjoy what you find.

THE TAO OF AMERICA

Negotiating hypothetical thickets of liberation,

The individual cultivating independence

Summons a lumberjack’s alienation

Having hollowed hallowed ground grown conflicted,

Complicated by the matrix beyond such simple spaces.

Experiments in misery, sojourns of survival

Create appreciation through deprivation,

A riverside revelry, a meandering reverie

Around cities juxtaposing what God wrought so sad

The inexhaustible variety of life,

And the vitality of illusions stored in man’s ghostly heart.

We strive for an assuaging sound bite

To smash the individualist’s alienation

And give rise to the united protest of nationalist independence

Spawned by Joad’s soliloquy or Julian West’s epiphany.

To embrace America, it must be vigilantly resisted,

Contradicted with a stentorian cry

After first wresting with God: national Penial.

Freedom rings its clear note across America

Before its immediate capture and marketing.

Between that moment and the explosions of terror,

The American dissident renews the nation,

A weak wave lapping at an evening shore.

SPACING

Elicited not only by ancient, alluring pressures

But by sweetly mildewed adolescent pleasures,

I imagine you in sunshine, acquiescing

To the beautiful damage of those destinations

Derived to deliver quixotic, thoughtless charges

Towards the buoyant, forbidden echelon

I’ve discovered in the sober, simple presence

Of your peaceful breath, your gracious fragrance.

Obliterated in the contrast of my loneliness,

The night slowly erodes by the dichotomy

Of your ecstatic eyes, mellowed, separated

By two towns from my disappearing lips

Consumed in consternation, frustration.

Muscles ache with intense pressure

As the panicked grasp of the heart endures

Before failing without the wisdom of the mind.

SUMMER READING

Laps stacked, facing sea and land respectively,

Old timidity lost in the sweetly caustic and comfortable,

Sweetly lost now in the newly assuaged domain

Of this slow augmentation unrolling on the shore.

Geometric shapes shone, golden lights

Populating the shadowed houses, scuffed with dusk,

On the rise above the rustling beach grass

As ocean fog sulked in, clinging to the dimming homes,

Making lovely summer novel cover artwork.

Down the beach, fireworks, towns away,

Burst like lightheaded lights in the head,

Burned like ecstatic, grasping flashes–

The lovely lunges of raving hunger finally unfurled

As my bare feet slipped beneath the sand,

Burrowed where it was warm from the day’s sun

And wet from the recent rise of the tide.

In stagnant parking lot light, our night ended

In the awestruck connectivity of promise.

The next morning, your perfect footprint in sand

Adorned, white on black, the passenger side floor–

One step and forever away from commencement.

DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON

As the sounds grow incessant–

Stentorian proclamations of the picayune–

The amniotic dream of armageddon

Lulls me lazily away.

After thousands of generations,

Perhaps two now pass unquestioned

Of noise and manipulating machinations–

Deity-defiling, avaricious young poisoners

Slaughtering every form of faith

Through ubiquitous influences of industry

Until doctors are rendered

Conniving marionettes. Doctors!

Mistrusted calluses! Slaves in trade!

In my reverie, I sneak armed from the farm

For black tea, green tea, red wine, brown rice;

An adventure for lamentable luxuries

To treat my wife and children and I in our den.

IN A MAZE

Anointed with fury and mischief in the Massachusetts woods,

Empowered, overcome with antinomianism gone berserk,

I contort my fate, answer God’s call or change the subject.

The agent of my socialization, a tender heart in need of my care,

Encompassing compromise and quashed individuality

Appeals lovingly to promote my public integration,

While a secondary pact glimmers in the darkening east.

In celebration of myself and in magnificently hidden love,

I excommunicate us honorably to an unbound land.

Caught, brimming with off-grid reveries, feeling superior

But sometimes shameful, indistinguishable echelons

Of responsibility kneel on my freedom.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

America, at least,

Has outgrown the existential questions.

Why are we here?

What is the meaning of life?

We have satisfactorily answered these questions

For ourselves,

By refusing to.

Once, appeasing the magistrates

Dominated the national agenda

And quashed the bonds of love

And progressive reform.

Now, credit scores and the rough beast

Of cultural conformity and consumerism

As medicated by oppressive communicability

Erode unnoticed, the noble meaning of life.

Opportunistic, disguised gods fill the void.

The verisimilitude of virtue

Interpreted by hollowed rituals

Anesthetizes the evaporating soul

Giving up on life and not knowing it:

It’s the new national pastime.

125 A.F.

Evolving beyond sloppy alcohol,

Sloppy unorthodoxy, the sloppy self;

Auto-obliteration dismisses

The economic ineffectiveness of Christianity

By replacing it with virtueless Buddhism;

The annihilation of desire

Through the convergence of Ford and Freud,

Promiscuity, drug-vacations,

And assembly line, bio-engineered caste conditioning.

Desire is pressure

Pierced in didactic dystopia

To cadence peace with alleviating streams

Until pressure becomes gentle fluids flowing.

Axiomatic truths instill themselves early, insidiously.

Consumption is the mother of all invention.

Utopic souvenirs are whittled out of P’u

And what man has joined together,

Let not Nature cast asunder.

DEAD AIR

Where are our martyrs?

Are their endeavors twisted in jargon

Police spokesmen, and alternate crimes?

I am a terminal illness away from beginning to live.

Bills, now, bind me

And the vague expectations

Of self-interested sympathizers

Calling out sideline signals

To an impetuous, precocious quarterback.

Assassins, arsonists, artists

Must put down distractions,

Begin a revolution.

You’ve been bought by blinking lights.

You’ve been thrown over while you slept

And somnambulistically carried on

In a coffin undulating at sea.

I am a terminal illness away from beginning to live.

I am a terminal illness.

Now this is Ireland. Darragh and I, five months after meeting on the other side of the Earth and a week after I explored the Western half of Ireland on my own, predominantly in Galway, drove in the rain from Cork City with steaming paper cups filled with black coffee to pick up Mickey in the village of Ballyhooly. We spent a few blurry nights with a cross-section of his friends in a pub called The South County. A boisterous, cheerful man named Bubner nursed a perpetual and largely fictitious cold with hot rum toddies. A French couple I had little chance of understanding in the din of the bar and under the weight of much Guinness grilled me in their thick accents about United States foreign policy. And two girls, a commanding German named Heike lobbed bad jokes while a short Irish girl named April chimed in with innocent questions about America as though she’d never been outside of Cork.

As much as I tend not to be excited by food, one thing I look forward to when traveling is discovering something new for me to return home with, forever tethering me to a trip. My surprising epicurean find in Ireland was stumbled upon at 2:45 in the morning after emerging from my first night at the pub to recover before bed with something from the nearby chipper. Apparently, a common chipper convention all over the country is to make sandwiches, (mine being of thin-sliced steak tips each night) that incorporate big, soft french fries right into the sandwich between the lettuce and tomato. If I had known french fries were coming inside my pita, I probably would have refrained. I was unaware they were there until the first bite was in my mouth. It was a fantastic utilization of the french fry.

Ballyhooly wept in the bleak, sweet decay of wet October. Green fields and long stone walls were canopied with damp foliage, having peaked perhaps three weeks prior. Liver spotted yellow leaves carpeted the narrow streets, accented the white steeple of the downtown church, and nestled underneath the windshield wipers of Darragh’s old blue Ford Fiesta. With Mickey now aboard, we drove on, arriving in Dublin near midnight at Mick’s friend’s Eamon’s apartment. Eamon was a hard-drinking kid of twenty-two with a red face and a desperate drive for alcohol that was disturbing for his young age. It transcended a young man’s appreciation for hard-living revelry and dipped into some menacing abyss. What but design for darkness instigated his fearful future, I worried within five minutes of meeting him and the sofa that would be mine for the next three nights.

The four of us lit out into the midnight after toasting with Absinthe, as illegal in Ireland as America. We took a long taxi ride to downtown. I had thought we were in Dublin at Eamon’s, but apparently we had a ways yet to go. Darragh, Mickey and I were stuffed in the small backseat. Eamon, drunkenly loquacious, annoyed our driver with senseless, slurred banter. Mickey and Darragh, while always friendly and cheerful, had the effect of making me feel quite Irish as we were starkly similar in our propensities for reticence that never crescendoed to shyness or unapproachability. I was satisfied to connect my blood to its roots here and contemplated it in the freezing back seat of the heatless car. The old Peugeot shook as we tried repeatedly to escape the draft of a large truck, the cross winds sliding us across the leaf-strewn two-lane highway. Meanwhile, one of the more popular DJs in Ireland was on the radio talking to a music fan from Boston, who mentioned on-air of how he once lived in Newburyport. How shocked I was to hear Newburyport mentioned in the middle of the night on a Dublin radio station in the back of a taxi, I cannot relay. I was too surprised to mention it to anyone, fearing how unbelievable it would sound.

We went to a pub. Then another. Then a club. In the cacophonous din of the club, entering the unreality of annihilated senses, my most distinct memory was of Eamon, who had two drinks to our one at the first pub, and three to our one at the second. He came up to me where I stood watching a Shakira-ish woman dancing. He threw a sloppy arm around me and spoke with heavy eyelids and a mirthless intensity. I couldn’t hear a word. Not one. The arm not around my shoulder held a just-purchased Red Bull and Vodka. When he finished his muted soliloquy, he downed it in one and smashed the glass on the floor at our feet. Over the music, no one could hear a thing or noticed. Even I couldn’t hear the shattering glass, though I lightly felt the shards upon my laces. I finished my pint, my third of the night and fourth drink overall when factoring the Absinthe, and had nothing more. He, quite literally, was drinking enough for two.

We waited in a queue for a cab on O’Connell Street from 3:30 to 4:15 in the morning after another steak tip and french fry pita at the nearest chipper. There were brewing altercations all around us. Only the cold and the determination of most people not to lose their spot in line kept a long rope of us tightly cloistered from both the cold and the fighting. The original four of us, plus two others named Nigel and David, all packed a cab and made the long drive back towards Eamon’s. We were all shattered to various degrees and instigated by various factors. Walking from the cab to Eamon’s, I was forced through his physical insistence to carry Eamon, who hung onto my neck with much of his weight. Immediately though, Nigel, who went by Nidge and whom I had not yet spoken to, intervened by disgustedly pulling Eamon’s weight from me and saying something I found at the time to be incredibly wise and metaphorical. He said, “If you don’t let them lean on you, they will make it on their own.”

I spent the next day by myself discovering Dublin. In the quiet and clear-headedness of the day, it didn’t take long for you to emerge. I spoke to you in an unuttered dialogue, never even crystallizing to soft thoughts, just a slow stream of consciousness that allowed me to observe the city through both my own perception and through your absent, well-loved eyes. I walked through Trinity College after a fried shark sandwich with a fruit crumble and pot of tea for dessert in a small cafe adjacent to the college. It was something out of a small neighborhood I know you’d have adored. I felt your enthusiasm for the tiny shops and I haunted your ghost, my footsteps always following the path I knew you’d have chosen. I felt the cruelty of our separation keenly.

I saw the two of us kaleidoscopically strobe across my darkened mind in an alley alcove when faced with only your ghost–a quixotic nexus cementing itself audaciously in the living world–and strode on. The sun was setting as I entered the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I thread through the cemetery and the late autumn garden yielding to its perennial ending. Circling around to the front door, closed against the cold, I was surprised to find it instead closed for the night. I slid over to the closest window and peered in. I could see nothing through the dark glass. I rested my forehead against its hallowed coolness. In the dusky light, I saw my eyes reflected dimly back to me. How could it be anything different to me than your eyes across from mine as we leaned against each other, forehead to forehead, with all the world far from us…

A.L.Y., Dublin, Ballyhooly, Galway–a past lived in present tense.