my settler hat

I own a hat- yes I do - and I call it my settler hat, it's black felt and moderately brimmed curling all the way round and while not quite a fedora and more like a homburg I picture this hat on a dusty and probably illiterate Irishman staring back at me through the sepia toned photo-graph all the way from the 19th century- ay. It is thus my settler hat.

I was in diva bar last Friday waiting far too long for a friend to arrive throwing back a vodka and lemon- my second- listening to this awful pop fodder while watching some pretty somebody shake his sinuey shirtless torso to some top 20.... ah. Leaving my glass at the bar I pass my dancer friend on the dancefloor. "Say are you jewish?" Pointing to the hat.
"No, are you?" I asked, not being the first time someone has said shalom to me in a gay bar.
"Yes I am," he says taking me a little by surprise.
Hmmm. "Are you a practicing jew?" I ask. "Like are you going to synagogue tomorrow?"
"My parents bought be a property in Balaclava, if that's what you mean?" He giggled.

walk the line (of control)

I fell asleep last night reading Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, the book shutting, eyes shutting closed just as I finished the chapter on Kashmir and Jammu. And this is what I dreamt:

Surrounded by the sublime beauty of the himilayan footfalls I sling my rifle on my shoulder surveying the vast green land beneath. I am on duty, a Kashmiri dreaming the dream of an independent state not torn apart by foreign powers with their foreign motives and objectives, fighting with foreign weapons. As I enjoy the autumn sunshine in this reverie I am punctured through my woollen tunic, my phiren by maybe two or three or four bullets, one entering through my neck; there was red and then an overexposed white that bleached the land and the sky leaving only the man, the interloper that shot me; maybe he is Jaish-e-Mohammed or Harkat-ul-Mujahideen or some such but as I spit blood trying to breath I use my leeched strength to prop up my Kalish, aim and pull the trigger watching the bastard crumple, my weapon flashing without sound....

... and then I woke in such a state that I was convinced I was still breathing through the hole in my neck that’d been pierced through by a 39mm shell.

... a friend at work said she thought I dreamt a past life and well I suppose this is a comforting thought when maybe that this is all coming from anywhere but inside my head.

wrong side of the bed

Jolted awake by a mobile phone alarm that'd been thrown to the opposite end of the room the night before as I've the tendency to switch my alarms off in my sleep. It occurred to me early on that if I was ever to get to work/school on time the clock needed to be a good many feet away to make any such attempt by my sleeping otherself foolhardy. Now with my decaying wooden single bed placed up against the room's whitewashed brick wall I threw myself out of bed and like a stunned blackbird who'd flown into a glass window I fell back almost unconscious. Rubbing my head I laughed to myself as I had quite literally got out of the wrong side of the bed.

these red eyes - the mothman prophesies

I just re-watched Mark Pellington's The Mothman Prophesies starring Richard Gere and the beautiful Laura Linney and although it plays out like a made for TV adaptation of some article found in an almanac of the uncanny, I really dug it. It's a dark film that uses its lighting and soundtrack carefully so as to never really give you the mothman itself, a plus for someone who is tired of hollywood's tendency to overbudget and show everything when what we are really scared of is not the monster itself but a fear of the unknown that it represents, the irrational, the pale face at the window: death my friends, the undiscovered country (thank you mr spock). Although you gain a few brief glimpses of the mothman (or Indrid Cold) blurred or bleached out in overexposure, its nature, its intent are left dangerously outside our knowing.

Based on true events, or more correctly based very loosely on a book based on a series sightings of strange winged man/creature in areas surrounding Point Pleasant and Charleston in West Virginia between November 1966 and December 1967 culminating in the collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River killing 46 people. After the disaster the occurrance of sighting began to drop off and the film claims that this entity is somehow tapped into and attracted to death and references are made to other sightings through out the world including eyewitness reports of such a creature being sighted just prior to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Now after doing a little research on the topic I stumbled on something a little unexpected, something that to my knowledge has not been widely reported in the media and I suppose not surprisingly. The photo besides was taken by NY resident Steven Moran on 11 September 2001 and appears to show a large winged creature flying near the smoke and debris of what were once the Twin towers. Now according to Wikipedia the photo has not to date been discredited or shown to be manipulation or fake and so I am left feeling, well.. what the ...? Now according to mothman.us there were reports of non military aircraft in the area in the minutes just after the attacks, a few mentioned "winged, flying-men". Doing it conspiracy/x-files style these reports have been largely been ignored or not investigated by authorities.

Sights/sites

The Mothman Wikipedia

mothman.us

02.10.2006

So it's my birthday and I am 27, having spent the evening with friends, dinner at Lentil as Africa in Brunswick and not satisfied with my three beers (to their apple frusion and three coffees) I buy a longneck at the bottle-o on the walk home as I begin to see my slow slip into alcoholism with an austere sense of humour that maybe I'm carrying some sort of generational torch, some family tradition. I think to myself, only had I my i-pod to distract me, how surprised I was to find a birthday card in the letterbox from my brother and that I didn't even have a number to call and thank him, then I think of how my weekend date was just another notch to add to a failed love life and my job something that I can barely get out of bed for.

I went to the doctor the other week about my panic attacks and he suggested I see someone, talk about it, open up to a professional saying "You see," he told me "it's all existential. You don't have to do or be anywhere or anything you don't want to be. It's an illusion that we are trapped, it's only convention that keeps us here." You're wrong I thought, I am trapped. It's all in here.

Happy birthday g-man