Loose Cans

"Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning
Find someone who's turning
And you will come around."

--Annie Lennox covering Neil Young.

It's not something I would have expected myself to do. Use a song as an epigraph, I mean. But it feels apropos. Neither up nor down, neither happy nor sad, merely a rational appreciation of a situation. This is what I'm trying to do. Appraise the situation rationally and objectively because I am trained to do this, and not try to take personally the intense, pervasive sense of alienation, or the painful sense of displacement. It's hard, folks, it's really hard. This is going to be my second night in halls--in my room--and I sincerely hope it goes better than last night. Or, as it were, this morning, because instead of sleeping, I ended up wandering around Rathmines (the little burb I'm living in) for a good two hours, from 3:30 to 5:30am, just trying to sort everything out. Because some things are as they were expected to be. I am indeed being constantly scrutinized, my every motion attended upon by the ones fortunate to be from a blameless nation (well, currently blameless)--or at least it feels this way, which is what counts.

I don't know. It's hard to sit here in this sweltering cyber cafe on Upper Rathmines Road because the internet in the rooms won't be ready until fucking Christmas (Christ!), and type out the total upheaval of what was a hitherto well-ordered, comfortable life. Let's start with the roommates. As it turns out, at least two out of five of them just met their first Jew yesterday--me. Let's run that tape once more: they had NEVER MET A JEW. I haven't asked the others; it's freaking me out. The jewvirgins were from Wicklow and Donegal; if you've ever met anyone from Donegal, you know that they are im-fucking-POSSIBLE to understand. This is a much bigger problem than the Jewish thing, though. Because most of them might as well be speaking another language, for all I can understand them. This is hard, and all there is for it is to stick it out. Shouldn't be a problem in a month or two, though.

But now for the hardest thing--aside from the sudden deceleration of my life because of this bullshit with the internet. Readers who didn't go to Horace Mann will find this a little strange, but Horace Mannequins will be nodding their heads knowingly: I miss the cockiness.

I miss, more than anything else, the unshakeable conviction that we are unconquerable. Intellectual thoroughbreds, is, I think, the best way to put it. Horses bred for one lone purpose: to completely outstrip the competition. Gold in the veins, if you will. Well maybe that's pushing it. Because it's not the oftentimes noxious sense of superiority I miss, it's the competition. I lived off that race. We all did, in one way or another. I loved it, thrived on it. It fit me well. But now, so far as I've been able to tell--and I hope dearly that I'm wrong--I've been put out to pasture. I've been stripped of that singular purpose. Nerdly was studly at Horace Mann. Density was pathetic. And for all we railed against it, we loved it. We ate it. And now it's gone. Intellect seems a shriveled virtue. Amongst my suitemates, this is. I will post, and do so with glee, if it turns out to be otherwise. But I am as yet disappointed. The big words have fallen out of my spoken vocabulary so as not to further alienate everyone, which is why this poor blog is so hopelessly saturated with them.

My saving grace is the iPod. I cannot shill for it enough; it's an absolute lifesaver. It's incredibly therapeutic to let music modify your mood, these two ineluctable ineffable effanineffable things. "The ineluctable modality of the audible."

My suitemates: Ben, from England. God knows where. Hipster, a bizarre schizoid amalgamation of mod and punk. Focus on romantic poetry. Keats/Byron especially. Had the decency not to laugh at him. Will do so later, though. Smokes like a house on fire. Brian, from Waterford. Most interesting of the bunch. Least transparently insecure. Pharmacology, and not happy about it. Adrian, from Donegal. Crazy motherfucker, though you wouldn't know it without talking to him. Looks totally inoffensive. Told us about his friends' drunken escapades crashing old cars together at high speeds, and, when met with incredulity, proudly provided photographic evidence on his mobile phone. Sketchiest person ever. Science. Apparently did extremely well on his exams. Martin, from Navin. Plays guitar. Badly. Doing English, God only knows why. Hard as hell to understand. And Vincent, from Wicklow. Science. Nice kid, nerdy, bad posture, few distinguishing characteristics except for his being a very skillful juggler. Even brought juggling pins. Only one who doesn't seem to be a total fucking slob. I never thought I would be the neat one. Or the skillful chef.

I've had to buy a new cell. T-Mobile, when they tell you Yeah, sure, we got outposts all over Europe, are a bunch of lying thieving ass hole bandits. The number, for those of you in America, is now 353-87-245-8037. Pour ceux qui habitent autrepart, je pense que vous tapez la meme chose--la misma cosa?--mais je ne suis pas tout a fait sur. L'autre possibilite, c'est 087 245 8037. En tout cas, I use vodafone now, the phone company that advertises on the Manchester United jerseys. Man U is absurdly popular here. Calls to me are free; I'm not sure about how much they'd cost you. Also I have no land line. It is, apparently, just too much of a hassle to organize the billing of a thousand individuals, and therefore they have not even bothered to try. I am wondering if vodafone is paying them off. I'll probably try to post frequently from this cafe, pain in the ass though it is. It's only 3 euro (would you believe this damn keyboard doesn't have a euro key?) an hour, which is awfully nice of them. Also they have shitty cappucino, which adds to the charm.

I have idea how I receive mail here. I'll find out in short order. The address will be something like this, though:
Sam Ashworth
Trinity Hall (possibly add (90.07.1?)
Dartry Road
Dublin 6
Ireland.

Holy shit. Ireland.

Do write. Or call. I need to read or hear the American inflection I love so dearly.

Contrary to the tone of this letter, I think I'm doing okay. I am still perfectly enamored of the country, and it's going to get much better, and soon. I suppose it to be normal to be severely thrown off when dealing with such a radical tempo change. I'm used to presto, or occasionally scherzo. I like things pronto. This place is none of these. But once I find out what it is...

Because it just vindicates everything I've ever thought about my generation.


"The inspiration for the mtv original film." Beautiful.

So I finally got the comments link up. Props to the computer department at Horace Mann for teaching me some shred of HTML; I never thought it'd come in handy. So post comments!

Last night I went out for one last dinner with Nick. Where else could we go but Mama Mexico? Manuel, the owner, was happy to see us, and exhibited great regret, feigned or otherwise, when I told him I was leaving the country. Across from the little table Nick and I were sitting at was a long banquette of high school kids, probably sophomores, and suddenly the nostalgia came crashing in. I will miss Mama's. I have some lovely memories. I have few lovely memories of the West End; the memories I was able to carry out of that place are awfully dim anyway, as the lighting was terrible. It occurs to me that I will also miss Mexican food. I picked Mama's last night because I needed mole sauce. They make delicious chilaquiles, and I figured, where am I going to find a Mexican joint in Dublin? Because there are SO many Irish-Mexicans in the world.

So then on my walk home, I was on 95th and Amsterdam, walking past an italian restaurant called Acqua, which my father designed, and the owner came running out to greet me. Sebastiano had lost 30 pounds, he looked great, and he invited me in for a drink. I once wrote a great big essay on Sebastiano for Desai's 11th grade english class, so we got to know each other. I gave him my news and we talked and drank. I had a Peroni because what the hell, I'm in an Italian restaurant, and the Irish probably don't blight their shelves with Italian beers anyway, so it was my last chance. This has been a week very conscious of last chances. We watched the Yankees and Jason Giambi dispatch the poor foundering White Sox, 7-0. I am gonna miss my Yankees. I wonder if I can still get the Times delivered in Dublin.

I am aware only that I am boarding a plane today. I know where I'm going, but I don't seem altogether cognizant of precisely what I'm about to do. I've lived abroad for extended periods--six months in France when I was seven--but certainly never alone. I am pumped and nostalgic, but not anxious. My mother has taken care of that for us both.

The feeling is not that I'm going far away. This blog, my lovely iChat (sweet mac version of AIM), my camera, my phone. These are things which allow for limitless movement and near-total stasis. Stasis in brightness, as it were. The fewer buttons I have to push, the closer I am. If I look someone up on my phone to call over (god bless the world traveler phone), I just look for their name. I don't have to type in the number, which means I don't have to type in, or even see, the 212 or 917 I will be pining for. I am apparently 353-1 from now on.

I am attached to these small things. My internet suffix. No longer .com, but .ie. This bugs me out extremely.

He's so CUTE!


This also lights a fire in my patriotic loins...or that might just be the redhead angel.

My dorm romb!

Forgive the screwups. Still tangling with HTML.

Phlog. It's like a photo blog. Only the photos have to be sorta smallish. Oh well.

Packing. Two suitcases down, one duffel to go. This is exciting.

This is voice.

Because this is a raging thing, Life, and all we can do to slow it down is to race along with it. A train moving at an equal speed appears motionless and so do its passengers, whom we look at confused as to why they are sitting there. And so we accelerate with our devices, our free roaming charges because we never know, our hot laptops burning with airport extreme, our self-focusing digital cameras because frankly we have neither the time nor the dexterity to focus on the dog with its head out the window ears whipping in the wind and our iPods because this is how we gauge the speed of the raging, because the tempo of the music must match the tempo of the day, of the place, of the room, or else it is all out of sync and so we change the song because we perceive this wrenching out of synchronicity, because we cannot cope with four four time if the world is waltzing.

Just wanna see if this works.

'S'all on Salon

Update: YES!

I kicked like hell in the womb, apparently. Danced. And one day my parents were driving somewhere and they passed a sign indicating "Loose Cans." So my father took to calling me Loose Cans Ashworth. This struck him as hysterical at the time; I doubt my mother felt the same way.

I maintain this to be both an absurdly prescient nickname for me and a particularly apropos name for blogs.

This is voice.

I suppose this voice is here to take the edge of what might otherwise be a grotesque phone bill. Calling from Ireland to the states.

It occurs to me that I have no reason, save vanity, to be writing. This blog is built on the illusion that others will read it. Let me know if you do.