Loose Cans

Two hours bang on after the interview, which went spectacularly, the manager calls. "Can you start Saturday at six?" "Saturday at six? Ummm...uh...YES! YES, OF COURSE!" "Can you also do Sunday at five?" "Yes, definitely."

Oh, man. Oh, man. Whee! BASE pay is €10-11 per hour, and it's scaled on experience, so it goes up. Even so, that's as good as Monaco. Plus it's in Euro, so I can finally stop worrying about the damn exchange rate. I am going home to celebrate: here's the Morrison's site. It's just the classiest damn place I've seen in Dublin. I am thrilled. Now all I need is for the Yankees to win tonight for life to be, if just for a moment, if just for a breath, perfect.

"My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject."

I once saw on a wall in the Musée Pompidou, "Plutot de changer le tableau, changer le regard." Rather than change the picture, change the view.

Finally, Beckett says of Proust, "The observer infects the observed with his own mobility." Put these three together and you have a damnably confusing aesthetic.

Jameson says this with regard to a hotel in LA called the Bonaventure, architect John Portman Assoc.. The place is wildly disorienting. The essay FJ writes on it is fascinating and I recommend it.

But then, over your bowl of breakfast chili, you read Sidney saying:
"From so ungrateful fancy,
From such a female franzy,
From them that use men thus,
Good Lord, deliver us!"

And your wry, lonely reply is:
To so ungrateful fancy
To such a female franzy,
To them that use men thus,
Good Lord, deliver us!

I never said I objected to reading Sidney and Spenser, Shame. Sidney especially I think will fit. I objected to learning about what they were wearing when writing. Lovely to read about love sometimes. "Courtly love" is completely different and completely boring. I like Sidney because he was all about the adultery.

Norton propped open next to my tea cup, read also Gregory Corso, asking if he should get married. I'm so sorry he's dead. Updike can be so cute sometimes: "VB Nimble, VB Quick." Finally one of my favorites, Harry Matthews, "Histoire." "The popular context of her militarism." One in every ten years I manage it.

Incidentally there was no second Troy for her to burn. A projected project fell through owing to the insurmountability of four months' aggregate awkwardness and tension. So there went that. No worries, though; all for the best. Wouldn't have worked. Rolled with the punch and came up swinging. Besides I need work more than play.

Speaking of swanky hotels, my interview at the Morrison has been kicked back to 3:45pm today. Killing time. Somewhat nervous. I browsed their cocktail list this morning. Pricey, but class. Their Bellinis, maybe the classy drink of the decade, run at €15, so do their Stockholm 75's. But those are Champagne drinks. Their Mojitos are €11, same as Monaco, but the difference is that the Morrison's are made with quality Cuban rum, 3-year old Havana Club (a rum which cannot be found anywhere in the states, for obvious reasons. All the Cuban stuff here is such a novelty. All we get in the states is "Cuban-style" rum like Matusalem and Marti), where Monaco's were made with the execrable house blend, Calypso. Considerably less seductive than its namesake. Their Alabama Slammers are not Alabama Slammers at all, though--they've replaced the all-important Sloe Gin with Absolut, an adjustment I find baffling. Maybe it has something to do with decreasing the syrupy sweetness of the drink. But even so, definitely the kind of place where I need to be working: a haven for the discerning drinker with money to burn. Whiskey selection is middling--certainly better than any pub's, but not as good as Monaco's, which for all its foibles, did have a very solid back bar. I am thinking this job is something I need to talk my way into. Show a surprising breadth of knowledge, coupled with the kind of bluster I'm so comfortable with, and which gets me into so much trouble sometimes. Say a little prayer for me?

Apologies for the choppy blog yesterday. You all know I hate typing on smacky keyboards. I was doing other things. Plus ill from weekend. My voice was scratchy this morning. Sounded better singing than I usually do. Have been up fighting with Faulkner. He makes Proteus look easy. But maybe that's because I've read it. Or maybe where Joyce is thick and you just have to read every word, Faulkner's a fucker. You read every word and still it doesn't make sense. Apparently it all makes sense by the end and then you have to go back and read it again and again, but frankly I think that sucks, as a way to do it. No denying that the man can write, though: "a veil like shining wind." But Sound and Fury is right, damn it. Tempest-tost all evening over it. Thank God Sadie bought and quickly finished Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, the new Sedaris, so I have something to distract me tonight. Tomorrow they give us a family tree for the Yoknapatawpha novels and things will make sense. Meanwhile how many fucking Quentins are there in this goddamn book? And who the hell is Damuddy?

I think I'll go buy some school supplies. I have no notebooks or folders yet, and practically no books. But then I also have to buy posters. My walls are still woefully bare. My room is palpably un-pimp. An hour to kill.

Back in Dublin, as I so often find myself. Not just in Dublin, but back in Dublin. Hauled back, retrieved, reclaimed. Spent the weekend in Stirling, Scotland, home of William Wallace, playing ultimate all day, partying all evening (though drinking lightly enough; hangovers and ultimate do not mix, as will be shown shortly), and sleeping all--wait, no, that's wrong--sleeping very, very briefly. We slept as much as we played: three hours a day. Furthermore we slept on the floor, crammed in, more like sardines than spoon. This is like the diner in th'adage: Waiter, this soup is terrible. Also there's too little of it. Resolved, that I must invest in a therma-rest pad. Mercifully my duvet, bless it, saw me through these nights of woe as well as it was able, and for this it earns thanks.

To get to Stirling is quite an exercise in travel coordination. You take the train 2.5 hours to Belfast, the train to the harbor, the boat--and what a boat!--two hours across the Irish sea to Stranraer, Scotland, the train two hours to Glasgow and finally the train 40 minutes to Stirling. The boat is the crazy thing, though. I was blown away. The biggest boat I'd ever been on was the Staten Island ferry. I expected much the same thing. No. The Stena Line is like a damn crusie ship: restaurants, arcade, televisions with movies, kids' area, huge in general, a duty-free-style shop (assuredly NOT duty-free, though), everything. I was pretty stunned. Anyhow, we set out on a 1:20pm train from Dublin and got into Stirling station at about 11pm. We hit the pub by midnight, left at around 2, hit the club (I hate clubs) till four, in bed at 4:30am and then it was Daybreak, Gentlemen! at 7:30am. Wanting death.

Shambled through our first game, but won. We were very few: Cian, a key player, had blown his ankle playing Gaelic a day before, and was out of commission, and Fiona had, quite brilliantly, left her passport behind and wouldn't make it until that evening. So we had one sub, I think. We were also three girls on the line at all times, as we have strong girls, plus we thought it was a co-ed tournament. Turned out it was Open. Co-ed means that both teams must field a minimum of two girls on the line at all times, and if the other team plays three, you have to match it. Open has no such restrictions. So we were often lining up against lines with seven guys. It boils down to speed and height. The difference in throwing isn't huge--our girls are very solid players--but the physical differences between the genders mean that you end up with mismatches in the end zone. Even so, we won all our games on the first day, and rather convincingly, despite Yvonne's (our captain) grumbling about how she had though it would be mixed.

Our team name, by the way, was Wet Beavers. I now have a shirt I'm thrilled about wearing in public. It has a cute cartoon beaver laying out for a disc.

That night was the party (the point of tournaments is really the partying. There's no two ways about it). The theme was a five-year-old's birthday party. Needless to say, there were priest and paedo costumes in abundance. One team all wore diapers, bonnets and little else. Few people actually went as five-year-olds. But why quibble. We finally got out of there at three or so, singing at the top of our lungs, "HEEEEY, hey, BABY, HOO, HA, I want to KNOOOOOOOOW if you'll be my girl...two three four five six seven eight HEEEEEEY...." at LEAST fifty times. I subsequently developed a wicked sore throat, to say nothing of wrecked calves from dancing all night. Clubbing-related injuries, though, were right in line with the real theme of the weekend, so far as we Beavers were concerned: ridiculous injury.

I had one legitimate one: somehow I jammed the index finger on my throwing hand, taking away my forehand for a game or two. But then between completely neglecting to warm up or, more importantly, cool down, and then dancing all night, I ended up almost totally incapacitated. My calves, 72 hours later, are STILL a mess. To say nothing of my shoulder. Rubbish.

Then Seamus practically broke his fucking knee trying to catch a disc in a handstand. He fell over all wonky and we ended up having to physically carry him everywhere. He'll be on crutches for a while. It was funny: we'd walk out of the pub, he'd have one of us supporting him under either arm--he couldn't walk without support--and I'd be staggering under him because of my calves, and we looked a mess. Anyone passing must have thought us drunk as shit.

But I think Yiv's injuries win, so far as sheer comedy is concerned. Fortunately, all of hers came on the last point of the last game, or the subsequent call. We won the Plate (we won five of six games, and came out in 8th place. That's top of the "plate level." Not much of a distinction, but we did get a cool William Wallace statue, and UCD got bupkes) against the home team, and after the whistle sounded, we decided to play one more point. One for the road. The twist: every catch must be made as a layout. A dive. This was epic. Sparky laid out for the first time in her life. The she dropped the disc. Yiv also laid out, but she caught it. Unfortunately, she basically caught it with her mouth. It clipped her under the lip and she developed the most lurid blood blister. She was pretty woeful about it. But even better was the call. Stirling Blaze decided on Spanks and Layouts (a call is the fun, often humiliating game or whatever the teams play after the match. We had already done the punishing Zulu and the mortifying comedy breakdance battle). This involved three people from each team lining up. The one at the back runs up, swats the one in front of her on the ass, then the swatted one runs up to the guy in front of him and gives him a massive smack, too. Then this last lays out for no good reason. Yiv was at the back, LD (a loaner to us from the Great Britain Juniors) in the middle and me at the front.

So Yiv spanked LD so hard she wrecked her elbow. It's still fucked up. She can't actually throw on it. A perfect capper to a ridiculous, but entertaining weekend. I came home and slept. A lot.

I have "Tailgate Chili for a Crowd" in the slow cooker. A week from now, I'm never going to want to see chili again. No classes today or tomorrow. What I do have tomorrow, though, is an 11am interview at the Morrison hotel. Big. Voted hippest hotel/club in Dublin. They're looking to revamp their cocktail selection. Been by there about four times now. Met the manager twice. Let it never be said that I am not persistent. Now I just need to not fuck it all up. If I get this job--deo volente--I am set for the year. Kiitos.