July 21, 2017

The Irish are addicted to poppers and make the worst porn.

Rain through the night and chill heavy rain now at morning. This is my Ireland.

Rose yesterday and walked toward the sea. Kept along the high stone walls that look into the harbor– gulls, cormorants, swans (a black swan among them, probably brought here as a novelty–though now that I think of it, there are black swans on that lake in Cork) and a gray heron. Went to the end of Nimmo’s Quay, hoping for the shoal of jellyfish I saw there once. One jellyfish was spread out like spilled molten crystal on the sea wrack. The stormy sky toward Connemara was varied and dramatic. Rain started and stopped. I crept along the margin of the sea, probing in the tidepools.  Picked up shells. I was at peace as a man seldom is. Rain, rock, moving water, the call of wild sea bird, yellow flowers in the crannies of broken stone. Having lunch in the King’s Head I hit upon the subject of my next play, began to write. In the early evening, hiked to Nun’s Island to see a piece called Yellow Moon, done by youth and community theater forces. It was sweet and affecting --a sort of Highlands Stagger Lee-- and lead by a girl of amazing fierce beauty, and a boy with remarkable expressiveness, a potentially fine actor. Again, it was not a play, but a story-theater event in which the chorus told you what was happening and what you ought to think about it. Leaving the Arts Festival I will have seen some fine theater, but only no actual play. Growing fond of weissbier. In the dark of night I went to St. Nicholas to hear Lankum, an extraordinary and original folk group, whose unusual vocal technique was abetted by the resonance of the church. Lovely. Home in the rain, to discover that my key no longer worked in the outside door. Hussein the Mauritanian tried to help, but it didn’t work for him either. It was midnight. Hussein called the landlord, who arrived with a minimum of grumpiness, and we discovered that the cows in the other apartment had flipped the clip on the lock that prevents any key from turning. Rang and rang until they roused. They could not be made to understand what they had done, and it was only when they discovered they couldn’t get out, and panicked, that one of them, during that awful flailing of hands, accidentally opened the clip. Jesus, how I hated them. But when I was inside, my coleslaw chips from the chipper were still warm and not that wet. I think, and have always thought, that I could dwell here happy.

From my bedroom window I can see the houses of the Long Walk, the place where I would live if I could magically live anywhere.

When I came to the end of Nimmo’s Quay, there was a tall stone with puddles of rain around it. The stone smelled like piss, and I realized it was the custom of men to piss on it , either for magical reasons or because it was so far from anything else. I honored the custom, for there was nobody else in sight.