Not related to any current event. Found over on Eddie Campbell’s blog.

I vaguely associate the smell of an Aer Lingus-plane on a early-morning flight with the even vaguer idea of “home”. The smell of tea, coffee and warmed-up, pre-packed Irish breakfast wafting through the cabin, together with an layer of that special Aer Lingus-detergent that I seldom sniff on planes of other airlines, the hushed English conversations of those people who have not yet fallen asleep thanks to the drone of the engines. I wonder if this is because I fly back to the place I was born and visit my family, or because it is the smell of a plane returning me to where the Mountains of Mourne come down to the sea.

Oh the frustration of not being online. It has driven me into a nondescript hotel bar around the corner of my new home, a brightly-lit impersonal bar full of rugby posters, two waiters and a drunk Irish couple and nothing else. Except myself, trying to connect to the web via my Internet-on-the-go-modem, a giveaway for the Dublinblog that I actually never gave away. I doesn’t work however, so no chatting to my girlfriend via Skype, no emails to read, no updates on travel blogs to publish and no thumbing-up on Facebook. It does seem I’ve really become dependent on the web. Being offline for the last 5 days already made me almost miss a meeting with the editors of one of the magazines I write for, not adhere to deadlines for another one and generally feel left out of the picture. I am online at work, but not to an extend as I was in my old house. So here I am, feeling the forces of withdrawal. It does feel as if this is depraving me of getting and staying in touch with the outside world. Hell, the outlook of doing manual research (in libraries! With books!) for articles in the next week or so without access to Google makes me sweat, almost. Also is this something I haven’t done in ages. The most frustrating thing about it is the fact that I can’t send this short piece here to my work-email to review it again tomorrow, not safe it in Google docs or do anything with it except use it as some kind of relief technique for the frustration that’s boiling inside me for almost a week now. What I’ll do is phone the Analog Girl later on, just to ease my suffering. Calling people on the phone is at least something I am still able to do, just like 10 years ago.

“Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache.”

George Orwell, Down & Out in Paris and London

I get high from time to time. Not on heroin, not on crack, sometimes on weed and quite often on beer. Not because my life is boring. But because I need a good high from time to time to keep me balanced. Not a Hunter S. Thompson-esque ether binge, but a decent high where the world stays outside. The world with its mortgages, happy families and plane crashes. The world which I sometimes feel the urge to keep outside with this extra little help, the world like an angry swell battering the dike, waiting for the storm to gather more strength.

A high can mean many things. To sit at home, snug in with the newest Captain Alatriste-novel and not leaving the room before the last villain is skewered by sword and the last page is read. To sit in front of my laptop with three bottles of Beck’s and to read all the blogs that you can’t finish within 5 minutes at work. To rock out with friends in the third row of a Down show. To watch all 195 minutes of “Apocalypse Now Redux” with a big fat joint and enough chocolate bars. To write this text while “Davidian” by Machine Head keeps hammering out of my headphones.

I get high from time to time. I have a good job that enables me to pay all bills and still be able to buy beer and books at the end of the month. All the problems that my friends and I have are made up things, created in the western world, things that the average bloke from Sierra Leone would be very happy to endure. But nevertheless I keep getting mad once I visit some of my old friends in their new 3-bedroom home, friends who not once left the town they were born in for longer than two weeks. Old friends who know me for ages now, but who keep thinking I’ll end up on O’Connell Street, begging for change for the next fix, once I mention the word “weed”.

I get high and read books. I need these 2 hours every three or four days because most people are dull and empty, glued to their everyday-lives and the promise of safety and wealth like dumb cattle. And I have often enough tried to explain my motives and favourite types of beer, but now I refuse.

I get high. And prefer to grab a couple of beers and a Neil Gaiman novel to leave the world outside. At least for a couple of hours.

Image by a4gpa

Because I can and it is my birthday today. And I’m old now, so don’t expect anything hip in here.

As long as Tom Waits is out there I know it all can’t be too bad.

Nice effin life.

Dimebag. HORNS UP.

Because I think of drinking red wine everytime I listen to them, and because “debauchery” is one of my favourite words in the English language.

Because of Iceland, I guess.

“New” Soundgarden video, from the maker of Metalocalypse. Listen loud.

I’ve just written the 10,000th word of the content for the upcoming Sonic Iceland-website (which will also form the backbone of the book), my partner Kai will give a lecture about our travels & open the Sonic Iceland-photo exhibition at Germany’s biggest photography fair Photokina in 2 weeks, and I can smell autumn creeping into Dublin through my open window. Which is my favourite season. So it seems the end of the year will be as awesome as the beginning and the middle. And just because it feels and sounds right, here are the Heathers. Without TV-spot for Northern Ireland.

– An Electric Picnic playlist.

I’ve spend the weekend over at the Hobbiton-for-adults that is the Electric Picnic in Stradbally. In general, and in comparison to binge-drinking triathlons like the Wacken Open Air, it must be one of the nicest festivals in Europe. A tidy festival arena with little helpers constantly collecting rubbish, the hippie-eske atmosphere of the Body & Soul area, a pretty diverse line-up ranging from singer/songwriters to Dubsteppers and last but not least sunshine on Friday and Sunday made the festival this year a very pleasant experience. But. Mere mortals had to pay 240 (!) Euros for a weekend ticket, and the prices for food and drink…phew. For a single meal, you would easily end up spending 10 – 15 € at one of the falafel/crepe/chip/pizza-stands (though the quality of the food was really good).

Is this a sign for Ireland returning to the devil-may-care-habits of Celtic Tiger times, recklessly spending money for good times-sake? Or was it still a bargain to see bands like Roxy Music, LCD Soundsystem and Massive Attack for this amount, compared to the price of a single ticket at the O2? Where you pay 68 € just to see Arcade Fire?

Whatever the reason, there were still tickets available at the box office on Friday. And without sounding cocky, I think that the high price also prevented many a drunk teen soiling their wellies from the inside, as seen on Oxegen each year.

Image by Tim . Simpson

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It seems he is looking at me. Shit. I only want to go into Tesco, grab the bottle of water and the toilet paper I need and head home. But this man standing in front of the supermarket is trying to grab my attention. And now he’s coming towards me. With a smile on his wrinkled face, wearing a red, worn-down jumper and a pair of washed-out corduroy trousers, he does not look like the average sponger or even a beggar, maybe he’s doing some fundraising or just in need of a conversation.

“I’m really sorry to bother you, and I don’t want to waste your time, but..”

Brilliant.

“..I’ve just come down from the north, I received a phone call yesterday that me mother is sick and in the hospital here around the corner.”

He is speaking with that strange accent from Northern Ireland that I always struggle to put somewhere when I hear it, stretching the O’s and U’s and not rolling the R as much as Dubliners do. My mind jumps on the word “phone”, and maybe he’s one of those guys who ask if they can use your phone and run away with it. He looks fit enough.

“So the first thing I do is to drive down here to Phibsborough where me sister used to live, but you see she moved away last month and did not tell me, and so there’s no one at her place, and me ma you know she has cancer and I really want to see her…”

The hospital is a five-minute walk from here, maybe he needs directions.

“..but now I’m stranded here as I have no one besides me ma and I’m asking all them good people shopping here to help me out with some small change. I don’t want to bother you really, but maybe you can spare some change, whatever you can dispense with?”

I feel almost a bit disappointed. All this ado because he wants to ask me for some change? But then, his story is not bad, compared to the people in dirty tracksuits that normally ask you for change straight away, and sometimes curse you when you ignore them. So I give him an Euro, for his tale of the sick mother and the misplaced sister that may be true or not.

Image by pidgeonpoo