Crossing Paths
Wandering in the city today, tasting the air. Down Henry Street you can feel this thing gnawing down on the citizens. Grinding down the haircuts, shortening skirts, exposing skin and prejudices. Watching the drunks, the junkies, the pickpockets. The Henry Street hawkers and walkers.
This street vibrates at a crossroads. A heat exchanger for the city. Social groups pass over and through one another. Strange alchemical reactions occur here. Odd growths and mutant strains of Dublin flourish and cross pollinate.
A startlingly camp young man served me in a shop. He looked about fourteen, I guess he must have been older. He actually shrieked with joy at my choice of hair goop. How refreshing change can be sometimes.
Two young gurriers stand in the street, being studiously ignored, as they scream at long haired, middle class teenagers. ‘Heeyar! Heeyar hippy! HIPPY!’ ‘Heeyar ye fuckin’ ginger fuck! I’ll fuckin’ batter yeh!’ I give them the Face Ov Doom. Some things never change.
At Jervis street I pass a man I may have worked with once, but he does not notice me and I walk on.
Mary Street is transformed now, akin to a London backstreet. All life is here. A Polish shop offers ‘30% off Jars’, electronic phone repair shops with menus entirely in foreign tongues, Cyrillic alphabets and Chinese logograms. An asian family emerge from ‘Asian Market’ passing four immaculately dressed African men heading on into town.
One of the asian girls laughs in reply to a sibling, ‘Janey mack, you should have seen the state of him!’ The Dublin accent rolling off her tongue is pure inner city, shaded by the East. The idiom is Dublin to the bone.
On Capel street a short, middle aged man passes me. Bald, with a close cropped grey beard, he wears pale blue crocs, a huge pair of square diamond earrings and a short purple skirt. People lean out of doorways to stare. Love to know where he’s going.
On Abbey Street a figure emerges from the Garda Ombudsman building. An angry slouch, thin shoulders poised in an attitude beneath a hoodie. Cigarette, mobile, gold hoops, one blade haircut. Slouching along in that rolling, open crotched, alpha-male waddle so beloved of the city gurriers, she passes me, bellowing away into her phone.
The city is playing with me today.
On I go, I pass a woman I knew as a child. Twenty years or more have passed. She does not notice me and I walk on, lost in a web of memories strung amongst the familiar streets.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Good entry, sir. Glad to see a new post.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Good stuff! That’s a brilliant bit of writing right there. “…she passes me…” was a sudden milk-out-the-nostrils moment.
August 27th, 2009 at 9:34 am
You brought us all along on your surreal walkthrough. Giggling at the tweener shopkeeper — oh, the joy of helping someone make the RIGHT hair goop choice. I, too, get a huge giggle out of seeing brown and tan faces with mouths filled with Glaswegian; it’s a shocker every single time.
August 27th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Ta’ all.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:36 am
Nice one. Could really envision everything. Makes me excited that we might be able to make it to Dublin next summer. (We’re hoping to make a UK trip but this time bypass England and see the Celtic nations, drinking much beer at every turn.)
September 9th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Excellent! A meet up would be great. Keep me posted on this, maybe we could convince Neil and his fabled girl to venture down South for an evening or two.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
She exists, I swear. But when other people are around she turns back into a tailor’s dummy with a big red lipstick smile drawn on it by some madman.
But yes! Sounds good to me. We have our border papers and special Southern identities all in order.
August 10th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
I know, you’re off on some wild honeymoon trip, but thought I’d check in to see if you’re blogging any. Then I noticed that it’s been 2 weeks short of an entire year since you last blogged here. Wondering: should I just delete the feed?
August 12th, 2010 at 7:02 am
Yes, you’re right, it’s been dead here for almost two years now. Although I have been very busy writing for my college course, unfortunately I could not post that stuff up. The wedding and work sucked the rest of my available time away. The blogging environment has changed too, as people have drifted away to other platforms or just stopped. I’ve been struggling to come up with a decent way to overhaul the site and give it a new direction.
I’m considering the idea of setting up a new site which is more of a ‘this is me and this my writing’ on donalmurphy.org. I think it might be time to separate out thegurrier.com and fold it into the other site. I have the new domain registered and some of the other wordrpress prep work done, I just haven’t had a free weekend to pull the trigger on the project. Another project for this holiday.
So in answer to your question don’t delete it just yet. I have plans afoot.
August 12th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Sounds good.
I keep hoping that Diaspora* will get up and running, so that we could all start playing around with that.
I know that some have given up with the blogging thing … but, once you wean yourself from the FaceHook and Twitter, well, you’ll find all sorts of time, I suspect.
August 12th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
The Diaspora project is a valuable one, but it will be a slow burn. I do hope it catches on though.
Facebook I spend no time on, but Twitter is a real, valuable and fun tool. It’s not without reason that most of the old gang of regular bloggers have moved on to Twitter. It provides a superior, more immediate publishing platform for short form conversations, comments and link/news sharing. I think the key to that has been the mobile element. Most of my friends now use a smartphone of some flavour to access Twitter rather than a PC or laptop. In addition it remains one of the few social sites that it is resistant to trolling due to the nature of the system.
I’m not sure where blogging goes next now the first flush is over. I think most people are happy to migrate on to one of the other social platforms that provide a more immediate experience. I have not seen a compelling replacement for the blog publishing platform yet and I still use and recommend wordpress for any of my clients looking to manage their own website for their business or organisation.
August 12th, 2010 at 5:56 pm
Hmm.
To be honest, I haven’t tried Twitter, but I really can’t see myself doing so. I believe I’ve just exceeded the maximum length of a tweet, as a matter of fact, and haven’t said a darned thing, really.
We’re avoiding the smartphones. Call us Luddites, if you will: we’re sticking with long-form, and there we’ll remain.
As to why: it’s more about who’s archiving what, claiming ownership of the content, etc. I just can’t see leaving my content in the hands of some corporation other than my ISP (which allows me to backup my content, and to quit when I wish).
Just because I don’t say anything of importance doesn’t mean I should forgo ownership of that content, as is the case with FaceHook. Twitter, to a lesser extent, although it’s archived and kept forever … which is a bit troublesome.
Network analysis, is what I’m avoiding, with all of them, I suppose.
December 6th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
That was a terrible piece of irrelevant junk. It amuses no one to hear your pointless musings as you wallow in nothingness, a sad life you lead my friend.
December 6th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Sorry you feel that way Rufus, but I guess you can’t please all of the people all of the time, nor would I intend to try. Thanks for the unvarnished commentary though, bracing.
December 8th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Is Rufus, indeed, human? You know someone of that name who would make such a comment?
Your life must be truly odd. Well, either that or people who refer to you as “friend” have a different understanding of the term. Or, I suppose, it could be sarcasm? A jest?