Anyone Fancy A Night With An Experienced Mother
I came across this on eBay and was sure that some of you young hot blooded males would be interested. You can say thank you later!
General
Chess?
I came across the following quote on a website tonight:
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
I have my own thoughts on what it means, but I’m finding it hard to put in words. Anybody care to help out? Translation please!
(via World of Inspiration)
The Big 3-oh!
Well, I’ve just turned 30, and guess what? The world didn’t end. Dammit.
So, on the topic of aging, what sort of old person do you think you’ll become?
BookCrossing: Where Is The Best Place To Release The Books?
A few months ago I posted about a fantastic website I had just came across called BookCrossing.
I have finally managed to register some books, and I now intend to release them into the wild.
The only problem is, I don’t know where to leave them. I live in Crumlin, but doubt that anyone around here bookcrosses. I see that someone else realeased one at Junction One, but it has yet to be claimed, so I have ruled that out.
I could get Mr Levee to release them in Belfast after work, but where should he leave them? I know that a few bookcrossers read the blog (Norah, Cybez and Jimmy Porter thats you!) so I would be grateful for any tips or suggestions you may have.
Imagination Cubed: How To Waste An Entire Working Day
I came across Imagination Cubed through its high entry in del.icio.us. It is basically a doodler type program (excuse the non-tech talk). You can draw pictures and create your own scenes, then click on replay and have your drawing repeated right before your eyes.
Better still you can invite friends to waste their time also and join you in a spat of artistic expression, or save your picture and email it to your nearest and dearest. What a fantastic idea!
It reminds me so much of my school days when I would have spent hours in the computer suite messing about with Microsoft Paint, creating birthday cards and crap pictures which my poor mother always pretended to love.
Shankill Road, Belfast (Near the 12th July)
A few trips through Belfast recently have taken me up the Shankill Road, and I wanted to share these thoughts with you.
Firstly, I like the Shankill Road. I can’t stress this enough. Along with the Falls Road, the Shankill has been at the epicenter of Northern Irish news and politics for many years. There’s no doubt that the Shankill Road harbours a colourful (deadly? murderous?) array of paramilitary characters, but aren’t there aggressors on all sides of our conflict?
A few weeks ago, as I was passing through the Shankill, I had to smile when I realised that the vast majority of shop fronts and buildings along the way were painted some combination of red, white or blue. I chuckled to myself: was this accidental or by design?
In the intervening weeks, the Shankill Road has been decorated from top to bottom with Union Flags and bunting and banners on every lamppost, supported by local orange lodges and businesses. The thing is, it’s a bit much. Looking up or down the road, your view is hazed by Union Flag bunting, like an Impressionist panting done by a Loyalist! Comes across as a wee bit insecure, if you ask me.
From Belfast City Centre to the Woodvale Road
As you come up the Shankill Road (from the City Centre), there is a lot of dereliction to deal with. You get that a lot around interface areas - no man’s land.
However, in the last seven days, a portion of waste ground on the lower Shankill has been fenced off. It looks like there’s some construction work about to begin.
Further up the road, the 12th of July is being built. Instead of the usual “Dump Wood Here” sign, a board cockily announces “Carlsberg don’t do bonfires, but if they did this would be the best!“. The structure is massive - that’s going to be some inferno when they light it.
As you pass the traffic lights up the road, you’re entering UVF territory (note the PUP office on the right-hand-side past the junction). The Shankill (like the Falls) is still the bastion of local businesses, and like its Nationalist counterpart is a bustling, busy community. I’ll always maintain these people have much more in common than they’ll ever admit - those steely, hardened faces are pure Belfast…
Pass The Rex bar on the right, marked by serious Loyalist murals - it was the scene of a Loyalist turf war a few years ago. I saw some tourists taking pictures last week (and I wonder if they visisted the bar for a drink, did they get served?). On up the road, there are some posters where waste ground has been fenced off. I must stop there someday to read them.
Stream of Consciousness
Sorry if that was a bit muddled, but I have conflicted impressions of the Shankill. On one hand, it’s the ‘home’ of mindless Loyalism (don’t start me on the cock-eyed portrait of the Queen Mother!), but on the other, the people of the area have come through their own Troubles, coupled with the decline of many local trades. Nothing has risen to take the place of those trades, and the area has fallen into decline, the people represented badly by the mainstream Unionist parties.
We talked quite a bit last year about Protestant/Unionist disenfranchisement. Well, the Shankill’s not that bad, as far as I can see. What it’s really crying out for is to have the paramilitary element removed. How can kids on the Shankill grow up normally when they have gang wars and ‘brigadiers of bling’ on their doorstep? They need and deserve something better, but no-one’s there to give it to them.
Regardless, everyday life continues as normal on the Shankill Road, just like everywhere else…
The Matrix and the Madness of Levee
It all started with The Matrix although I didn’t know it then…
Back in 1999, I had just started in my current job, and was hungrily pursuing a corporate lifestyle: introducing new technology, writing management reports, answering calls for support. In my private life, I was following the six-step Social Expectations programme : graduate, get job, buy house, get married, have children, work until retirement or death.
In 2001, something happened which has been gnawing at my soul ever since. Our daughter was born the month after 9/11.
It’s hard to explain the effect this had, but I ended up questioning the world we had brought our child into. Essentially, I didn’t want my child to have the same predictable life mapped out for her, to become a societal drone. Can you imagine bringing a child into this world, full of potential, a blank canvas, and then painting the same dull grey life that everyone else lives?
And after a few years of corporate life, the soullessness of this existence has left me feeling empty and unfulfilled. I sit in on office meetings and breathe in the hot air of self-important middle-managers, marvelling at the pure absense of passion in their lives.
In the last couple of years, I’ve become aware of a growing movement of people who are starting to challenge the accepted route through life. The most powerful statement I’ve heard asserts that if we’re all individuals, then it is not possible for a 9-5 lifestyle to suit everybody. You know, trail yourself out of bed, go through the motions, work for 8 hours or more, go home have dinner and watch Emmerdale, blah, blah, blah….
The Tailspin
The end result of this questioning has me in a complete tailspin recently. But at the center of it all, there’s one question to ask: am I happy?
Fundamentally, no. I’m in a dull, unfulfilling job working for employers that couldn’t care less if I lived or died (I have my suspicious about their preference though!). I had a few job interviews recently, and as I walked out of the latest one, I knew that moving jobs would only be moving the problem. Too many companies are like bureaucratic in a negative way these days.
And so I’m at a very interesting point in life which is both terrifying, but exhilerating. I feel a tiny bit insane with a combination of opportunities and fears. I want to spend my life doing something worthwhile, that I enjoy and that means something to other people. I don’t think I was cut out to be a drone!
Where Does The Matrix Fit In?
The central premise of The Matrix is that there are two worlds: one is the complex social model that we have been taught and indoctrinated with and through which we filter all our life experiences, and the other is how things really are. So, in their heads, people are running around living normal lives, but the reality is that they are all drones powering a giant machine.
Society can convince you that just about anything is acceptable: the clamour for more and greater riches, buying a Land Rover when you could get by with a Ford Fiesta, two parents working full-time while someone else raises their children.
The reality is that more and more people are chasing fantasies instead of cutting back the crap in their lives and enjoying the simple things. What hurts is that most people are still unfulfilled and unhappy. Even more so, because they’re in debt to the eyeballs, but that’s a discussion for another day.
Here’s something to end on a bright note.
Reckless Driving
Based on a true story….
So, there I was in my car, driving down a winding country road. It was a perfect summer’s afternoon, the sun was beating down, the traffic was fairly light apart from the odd truck driver or Ulsterbus. There were a couple of good tunes on the Radio and I was roaring along to them at the top of my voice when….
Ring ring….ring ring….
I cursed the mobile phone as it taunted me from inside my bag. On a whim I decided to fish it out, one hand on the steering wheel and the other fumbling with the zip on my backpack next to me in the passenger seat.
Ring ring….ring ring….
The steering became erratic as I struggled with the zip, but I finally got it opened and pulled the phone out of its hiding place. But just as I was about to answer the phone, the car veered and I dropped the phone on the floor between my legs.
The ringing stopped.
One I got the car straightened out and regained my composure, I decided to retrieve the phone from the floor of the car, so I blindly groped for it and found it again. Curious to see who was calling, I checked the call register and discovered that it was Mrs L calling.
“Must be important”, I thought, and rang her back. The conversation went like this:
Mrs L: Hello?
Me: You just phoned me…What’s up?
Mrs L: We got a letter in from the car insurance people this morning. There’s been some screw up with the payments and your car’s not insured.
Me: So, you phoned me – when you knew I’d be driving – to tell me that?
Mrs L: Well, I thought you’d want to know……
Me: *click*
The conversation when I got home was a bit more heated, I can tell you. Needless to say, the mobile now goes unanswered when I’m driving!
The Fantastic In Art And Fiction
What do you do when your girlfriend sprouts a set of wings and the tail of a serpent?
The picture above comes from the Fantastic in Art and Fiction website at Cornell University, which has an interesting and grotesque collection of dark images. The site is grouped into themes like Angels & Demons, Danse Macabre, Weird Science and many others.
I’ve been fascinated by the occult for years, and this collection reminds me of the appeal of the unknown. Notably, virtually all of the artwork is from centuries ago, before modern society replaced the threat of God and otherworldly influences with politics and terrorism.
Looking at some of these images, I remember the strange mix of curiosity and fear that I felt as a child, and the faces that would appear in trees and wallpaper and the knots in a door if you stared long enough…
I’m in the mood for a good ghost story now…
No News? It’s Not Good News…
I know it’s been quiet on The Levee Breaks recently. Still having a tough time at work, with no end in sight. Paranoia is running high eclipsed only by my stress levels.
I’m such a ball of negative energy at the moment.
I had a job interview on Friday last week, and did a fantastic interview with a panel of four (very professionally run, BTW). Needless to say, the weekend was spent dreaming of a job offer and how I might write my resignation letter without lacing it with anthrax…
Ah, but t’was not to be folks. I got a letter on Tuesday to say that I had been unsuccessful in my application, but (some consolation) I was first reserve for the post. All I need to do now is find out who got the job and reverse over him/her with my jalopy……
The sooner I get my arse out of that job the better. It’s really fucking up my chi…
