Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 19
June 6, 2017
Standing Rock Documents Expose Inner Workings of “Surveillance-Industrial Complex”
Part 2 of a three part expose of collusion
Leaked documents and public records reveal a troubling fusion of private security, public law enforcement, and corporate money in the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline.
On a freezing night in November, as police sprayed nonviolent Dakota Access Pipeline opponents with water hoses and rubber bullets, representatives of the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, North Dakota’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, and local law enforcement agencies frantically exchanged emails as they monitored the action in real time.
June 5, 2017
Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy
This a posting of a recent article in The Nation, so I can understand the use of the possessive determiner ‘our’ but neoliberalism is not just destroying ‘your’ democracy, it’s destroying democracy.
How elites on both sides of the political spectrum have undermined our social, political, and environmental commons.
By Christopher Lydon
June 4, 2017
Told You So
Three years ago I photographed a UFO, not once, but a dozen times over a period of one and a half hours. It was in May 2014. It was later dismissed by two friends, one a professional photographer and the other, an academic physicist and they both had plausible explanations albeit a little too technical for my comprehension, for why my photographs were not what I thought they were.
[image error]
Ever since President Kennedy challenged his scientists to put a man on the moon, I’ve been fascinated with space travel and the possibilities for the world of communication with another, alien, intelligence. I’ve read all the UFO stories and trawled through You Tube for the whistleblower stories. I have at least three books about what was found at Roswell in the early ’50s. This is one of the dozen photographs I took in the sky over Dublin in 2014.[image error]
Dr Steven Greer has always stood out as one of the people with the most credibility in the world of UFOlogists. Greer is a retired medical doctor and ufologist who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and The Disclosure Project, which seeks the disclosure of allegedly suppressed UFO information.
Last night I watched ‘Unacknowledged’, Greer’s fascinating, crowd financed documentary and it’s an eyeopener. Of course it’ll be dismissed as the conspiracy theorist’s wet dream and it most likely is, already but then, that’s what happens. You can buy Unacknowledged through a number of outlets. I watched it last night as an iTunes’ rental. Catch it if you can, the future of the world could depend on it.
[image error]
Lost in a Kaleidoscope
For the past six months my mind has been lost in a kaleidoscope, one full of flashing lights and shiny objects, all of them a breath away from tangible. Of course, most of the past six months has been spent recuperating from an operation. That recovery left me sitting, helpless, confined by my physical surroundings and, even worse, a prisoner in my own mind.
Restless and immobile, my mind was a fidgeting insect trapped in a glass, buzzing, searching, never settling. Drugs and alcohol became useful distractions as much as acquiring them was a daily sport. But soon even they lost their lure and lustre. Friends grew wary as their eyes became glassy, dulled by my increasingly awkward importuning.
[image error]Confined to one room, as though in a self imposed solitary term. I learned to lever myself from my couch onto a desk chair with wheels and levers to adjust posture and elevation. Soon I contrived to get around the apartment by pushing the chair with my crutches. A trip to the toilet was planned and executed like a trek, alone, in the Himalayas.
Every day, awake and dressed by 8am, I rose to cook my breakfast and drink my first coffee of the day, a strong Sumatran brew, toasted wheaten bread and an omelette of two organic eggs with a slice of parma ham. Some days I decided to have two cups of coffee.
[image error]Yet I was locked in a groundhog morning and though each day began with such determined industry, it ended with nothing done and nothing achieved, no dreams conceived and no goals reached. Instead, my life became a nightmare of daytime television, depressing news broadcasts and the frightening repetition of a parade of ragged and tired old movies, tv crime series and lurid game shows.
Endless hours of navel gazing is not good for the soul no matter what people tell you. It is an orgy of self destructive introspection. Of course you fight and resist with every fibre of your existence. This is not me, I told myself. There are things to be done and great things to achieve, poems to compose, books to write. If I let a minor and temporary physical disability control me, how could I face those people I know who’ve struggled with far worse all their lives and never let it hinder their progress and determination?
Solitary introspection does prompt unscrupulous personal auditing and the mind provides warning mechanisms to avoid self pity although even that’s never fool proof. 2016 was my annus horribilis. It began in January when I broke my left wrist and since I’m left handed, it was the beginning of my solitary year because a writer who cannot write is like a one legged footballer, not much use.
This injury coupled with the arthritis gnawing my ankle to a ragged mess meant for a time I was walking with a stick I couldn’t lean on since it was too painful for my injured wrist. Undaunted and writing again, my increasingly restricted mobility made my horizons contract – a walk to the shops became a campaign, carefully planned from clothing, footwear, bags and shopping lists to the chosen route, meticulously prepared to minimise distance and discomfort while maximising my goals and achievements.
Nevertheless, all things considered, the first half of 2016 wasn’t so bad, in retrospect and particularly considering the year’s latter half. In those first six months five poems were written and substantial progress was made on two novels. There was time, too, for blogging, an exercise, I began to believe, helped save my sanity in the darkest hours.
It wasn’t all gloom. The plaster on my wrist came off in April even if alternative [image error]treatments to alleviate the pain in my foot became decreasingly effective. By June I was using a walking stick all the time and though my horizons were contracting, I took a train to the west of Ireland for the wedding of a friend where, drunk, I danced, hopping on one foot and balancing with a cane and spent the next week in the company of another great friend, sightseeing, talking and dining out.[image error]
All of this was a prelude to the inevitable, surgery I knew would leave me housebound for at least three months and a recovery period of six months or more. That happened in December and I remained, incarcerated, for three months after before the surgeon sawed off the cumbersome plaster cast and my leg emerged again, thin, smelly and strangely distorted. But it wasn’t over and I was far from dancing. They gave me a rubber boot but now I could get out again and travel.[image error]
Over all this is the tantalising expectancy, an intangible anticipation of what? That I might begin to write again? Wake up in a verbose fervour, thinking in verse and plot structures but none of these things happened. Like all things, it is patience that’s required. My own company never bores me and I’ve become used to my idiosyncrasies. Even the demons of solitary navel gazing couldn’t scare me. Slowly but surely, I’ve begun to walk again. Now I can take a bicycle, occasionally, as pedalling a bike is a beneficial exercise.[image error]
But after this protracted journey into the unknown and unfamiliar corners of my psyche it was time to address the real issue and that was grief. Grief for the death of my father who died in his 94th year, December 2015. But that hasn’t caused your writer’s block, surely, I asked myself because, after all, you spent the first half of 2016 writing?
Now I’m no longer sure. Loss and grief must be addressed and dealt with or they’ll linger forever, like a shadow in your life. So that’s where I’m at. Trying to come to terms with that loss so I can begin again. Six weeks ago I began writing this blog again after a three month absence while I lacked motivation like a beat up old junk in the doldrums.
There’s a faint breeze in the air, not enough yet to fill a sail but it carries a promise of more to come. Physical injury has stopped me long enough to realise I must go on even when it’s slowly and with patience.
June 3, 2017
Sometimes Stellar Storyteller Six Word Story Challenge
I’ve had a go at this. Ernest Hemingway is often attributed the concept of a story told in six words but his story, about ‘child’s shoes, almost new, for sale’ but some literary detective traced that story to a newspaper in the first decade of the 20th century. Still, the point remains the same, the essentials of a story can be shrunk to six words, at a stretch.
Challenge open Saturday 3rd June 2017 – Thursday 8th June 2017
Welcome to the Sometimes Stellar Storyteller Six Word Story Challenge.
For those who have never dropped by before a new prompt is posted every Saturday morning at 9am GMT.
Today’s prompt is:
Deceiver
My attempt at today’s prompt is:
She spewed vitriol disguised as honesty
Remember to share your entry on social media using the sharing buttons below! Let’s tell everyone about our challenge, the more the merrier!
Use the hashtag #SixWordStoryChallenge.
*******
How does it work?
Leave your story in the comments until Thursday 9pm (GMT)
Like, comment & engage with other authors
Come back on Thursday to vote for your favourite
Bask in glory if you’re a winner.
Never tried microfiction before?
Never fear, help is at hand. Click through to my post on writing the best six word stories for inspiration.
Can I share my story?
Of course…
View original post 105 more words
IMAGINARY
He was tired of the repetition, the daily slog, the inevitability of it all. Even when something different happened – a change in the weather, a new person in the neighbourhood, even a sudden and common threat. It didn’t matter because he knew already, none of it’s real, it’s all imaginary.
May 31, 2017
TRACE
Roger the Cat was a highly skilled forensic analyst and moved about in tiny blue plastic bootees, examining, observing, collating and calculating. A tall human committed this crime, he concluded, with facial hair and dirty fingernails. His work done, Roger left, but not before leaving a tiny trace of himself.
Morocco’s Tree-Climbing Goats Prefer Spitting Out Seeds to Eating Them
Having observed these tree climbing goats while on a bus ride to Marrakech and then pondered the suitability of rubbing an argan oil lotion, peddled by a trader in the souk, into my skin, this comes as some relief to me, if not the goat.
SOME PLANTS RELY ON BIRDS or the wind to carry their seeds far and wide, while others have evolved prickly seeds that can hitch a ride on the coat of a passing animal. But the Argania trees of Morocco have a different dispersal method: climbing, spitting goats.
May 29, 2017
LiveLoveFleshBlood…Brilliant
If you don’t know Imelda May, you should. Writing about her makes me dyslexic, I can love or loathe her but I still listen.
Ok, I’ve had the advantage of listening to her, as a teenager, singing back up vocals to bands in Dublin pubs. I watched her enthral a pub of Irish music fans with a jaw dropping rockabilly set that included an untried song she’d just recorded for her second album.
My heart melted when I heard her sing ‘End of the World’ on her ‘No Turning Back’ album of 2003, because that was a song first performed by one of the regrettably forgotten queens of country, Skeeter Davis.
Best of all, though, was when, in a recent heatwave, we were sitting out on my roof, listening to the incredibly soulful, Life Love Flesh Blood, her new album and a friend of mine remarked between tokes, ‘what the fuck are we listening to?’
Because I could say, probably the best album by an Irish artist in a long, long time.
The title is uncompromising. It’s about human things like childbirth and heartbreak. It also draws from Imelda May’s background, Dublin’s Liberties, my own neighbourhood, where everything is down to earth.
Happily, she’s employed the genius of T. Bone Burnett to stew her vocal genius into a soulful masterpiece that is never overpowered by its wondrous accompaniment but enhanced.
It’s 2am, people are banging on my door and I can only say that’s a testament.
[image error]
Postcard from a Pigeon
- Dermott Hayes's profile
- 4 followers
