flashback

Saturday 14th July 2015.
Out of the blue, Byrno the artist contacted me this morning to meet for coffee.
Haven't heard from him for a year.
We met up in the Costa Cafe at the White Water Centre.
The news today was that his father had died. Their relationship hadn't been great.
The father had been committed to a care facility against his will fourteen months ago. The justification the family used was that they were afraid he might strike the mother.
I told Byrno today that regardless of how bad he thought the relationship was, losing his father would be a big deal.
Byrno said: "I'm over it."
"No," I said, "you're in the middle of it. You are on a pilgrimage whether you like it or not."
We talked about God for a bit.
A year ago he'd insisted he didn't believe. Now he was more open to the possibility.
Suffering does that.
As does the awareness of evil in the world.
We start to wake up.
At one point Byrno said: "The young people aren't being taught religion in the schools. They need something. Maybe philosophy could do it."
I thought this was a quirky enough reflection from a guy who says he's an atheist.
While we talked the Costa Cafe swirled with life.
One of the White Water Centre security men strolled in and out of the cafe a few times.
He stayed in the environs for about half an hour.
Every few minutes he unleashed a few sonic whoops from a hand held alarm device which he held in the palm of his right hand. He seemed most amused by the process.
I wondered did Byrno notice.
I mentioned the harassment I'd been dealing with.
Byrno said: "Have you still got that website?"
I said: "I have."
He said: "Take it down."
I said: "I can't do that."
He said: "James it's your own fault. If you want to fight crime, join the police. You can't fight those guys on your own. It's not your war."
I grinned and said: "Right this moment we're like Saint Thomas Moore and John Howard talking about Henry The Eighth. John Howard is warning Saint Thomas that the anger of the prince is death. Saint Thomas is saying, why then the only difference between you and I, is that I shall die today and you shall die tomorrow. It is my war Byrno. And it's your war. All you nice family guys think you can escape by keeping your heads down. Oh they'll probably kill me first. But they'll get round to you. And before that they'll addict your kids to their drug poisons. Or they'll stalk your kids for sport. Or they'll kill your kids at a whim. I assure you this is your war."
He said: "Shut down your website. It's all you can do."
I said: "And if you created a work of art with one of your paintings, I mean something you knew you had been born to do, something really good, and then some drug gang, or IRA gang, or deviil worship gang, or corrupt cop or serial killer Larry Murphy, or some other such piece of crap, came along and told you to destroy it, would you do it? Would you give in to them?"
He said: "Yes I would. If my  life or my family's life was at stake, I would."
I said: "I don't believe you."
Of course the real question should have been, would he do what they said if they told him to destroy not one work of art but everything he'd ever painted over the past twenty years.

novelty music video in aid of something.

The song is a parody of Alfie by Neil Tenant.

The video shows me giving a lift to four rather attractive girls, which is a vague reference to the Bangles video where Mr Spock gives a lift to one very attractive girl and the other three Bangles.

I am bald as a coot and wearing a Star Trek uniform. The girls peer into the car and seeing my Star Trek uniform hesitate. This is a reference to the Sixty Miles An Hour video by New Order.
I say: "Oh this. Oh no. It's not what you think. The uniform is for my job."
The girls pile into the car.
Than I say: "I'm a starship captain."
The girls look alarmed.
We hear Michael Caine's voice from nowhere saying: "Right. Are we all settled in? We can begin. My name is..."

I interrupt to say: "Captain Jean Luc Picard."

Then the song starts.

"Once

there was a time

when I believed in transporter beams.
Mmm yeah

And once

There was a time

When time travel seemed a realistic theme

Nerdle ner ner ner

But not now

Ner ner ner

Now Im resigned

To the kind of life I've always reserved

For other starship captains

Less smart than I

You know

The ones who always end up married to Green Orion Slave girls.

Oh come on

Everybody knows that force fields are a crock

Just like a space ship going at light speed could never stop

But the more I live through

The more I find

I'm becoming more like William Shatner

Ner ner ner ner ner

Once

There was a time

When a man in a chicken suit was a stunningly realistic special effect

Mmm yes

And once

There was a ti-i-i-ime

When Captain Kirk groping the lady characters was politically correct

But not now

Now we've redefined

What's real

And what's accepti-bulllll
Ner ner ner

With the net result

The ratings declined

And the universe has become incredibly bloody dull

Oh come on

Everybody knows that time travel is a mess

Just like phasers are  ridic-u-lous

But the more I live through

The more I find

I'm becoming more like William Shatner

(Except for the hair)

Nrt ner ner ner ner ner"

cockroaches

Strolling in the town of Newbridge a few years ago.
A character called Andrew Roche approaches.
"James, I hear you've been having trouble from some lads."
"Where would you hear a thing like that, Andrew?"
"My mother told me."
"Did she indeed."
"Look James. I'm not in the IRA, right? I'm not in the IRA. But I used to be in it. And I know some lads who could call around in balaclavas to the lads who are bothering you. I don't think you'd have any more trouble."
A balaclava is a knitted mask that covers the face but leaves the eyes exposed.
Members of clan gangs sometimes wear them to make themselves feel tough when trying to intimidate people.
"My problem Andrew," I said gently, "is that I don't know if it's the IRA that's annoyed with me."
And the little piece of crap couldn't look me in the eye.

the best bit...

The best bit of Braveheart is when the entire English army is engulfing Mel Gibson's Scots and suddenly Mel points to the left and says "Look, a cricket match," and the English knights get all distracted and Mel massacres the lot of them. Apparently Mel won many battles in Scottish history with merry dodges of this sort. "Look, its Britney Spears." "Look, an episode of Coronation Street." And so on. But is it all historically factual?

mrs o'leary's cow

A few years ago I was sitting in a cafe styled The Copper Kettle on Kilcullen Main Street.
It was mid morning.
The cafe was full of the evocative scents and sounds of traditional Irish breakfasts and breakfasters.
The door jingled.
The police officer Stephen Kinneavey entered.
This is all I need, I thought grimly.
He fixed me with a speculative stare.
From the corner of the cafe near the window Mrs O'Leary, a dignified grandmother, looked up from her breakfast.
"You can't come in here you cunt," she shouted at Kinneavey. "Fuck off you cunt. Get out of  here you fucking cunt. You can't come in here. You fucking cocksucking cunt."
Kinneavey turned abruptly and left.
I paused with my coffee cup halfway to my lips.
She'd gone a bit easy on him for my liking but it was still worth the price of admission.
Not for the first time I was struck by the merry mystic superludities that gild the lily of small town life.

black lives matter

There has been much discussion about the present series of public protests in America and elsewhere over police brutality and in some cases murders committed by police officers.
The internet commentator David Wood has shared his views on the situation and I commend his opinions to your attention.
Mr Wood had in his youth served time in jails and in mental institutions in the United States.
His views have a certain informed immediacy.
He says there are five different types of police officer.

1. Time servers who just want to collect a pay checque and aren't looking for trouble.

2. Mr Nice Guys who want to be everybody's friend.

3. Dedicated ones who believe in doing the best job possible and that the system can be made to work for the good of all. Mr Wood thinks these sorts of police officer are usually Christians.

4. Dedicated ones who believe in doing the best job possible and who attempt to do that by being as strict as possible.

5. Human trash.

I think Mr Wood is correct in his assessment of the situation and that the issues re police brutality are substantially as he presents them.
In the small Irish town of Kilcullen Stephen Kinneavey has harassed me not because it's legal but because he is human trash.
He knows the gangland methodologies for harassment and he knows that a conviction is unlikely since many police officers will not properly investigate a former police officer and judges will not convict a police officer as long as the harassment stays within certain plausibly deniable paratmetres.
Irish judges can barely bring themselves to convict for murder never mind for walking up behind someone and shouting hello.
Human trash.
In 2014 I entered the White Water Cafe in Newbridge.
Stephen Kinneavey (then a serving police officer but shortly to retire) was sitting in the cafe in plain clothes at a table with Sergeant James D O'Mara of the Naas Traffic Division who was also in plain clothes.
Kinneavey roared at me as I entered.
He had been engaging in similar activities for four years up to that time usually roaring at me from the coward's vantage point in the shadows or from behind, sometimes in the street, sometimes in cafes.
His behaviour was of course illegal.
But like I said, try getting a conviction against someone for saying hello to you or waiting by your car when you return to it, or for sitting opposite you in a cafe.
Try getting someone to investigate it.
Human trash.
Stephen Kinneavey was engaging in this behaviour not because it is legal but because he is human trash.
On this day in 2014, I was reluctant to simply turn and leave the cafe. So I walked towards him and his friend and stood near the counter where they were seated, making positive identification of both police officers.
Sgt James D O'Mara's duty at this stage would have been to tell his accomplice to leave me alone and to ask me did I wish to press charges over what was clearly an incident of criminal harassment.
Sgt James D O'Mara remained silent, although he did seem to be trembling for some reason.
Perhaps he's in love.
As I stood there in no particular hurry to go anywhere else, Kinneavey became uneasy and shouted: "Ha, you don't even recognise lads from your own town."
But of course these weren't lads.
These were 50 year old thug police officers from An Garda Siochana, in plain clothes engaging in an harassment activity against a private citizen in plain sight during the Christimas season in a popular cafe, activities Kinneavey had perpetrated many times before against me as noted above at other locations in cafes like this one and on the street.
Strangely in all the years he'd been harassing me, we had never been introduced.
Human trash.
I walked over to the manageress of the cafe at the time, one Nathalie Collins, daughter of a famous horse racing trainer in Ireland.
"Nathalie," I said, "Officer Kinneavey has just engaged in an harassment activity in your cafe."
She said: "Do you want me to do anything about it James?"
I said: "I want you to know about it."
I had recognised Kinneavey's accomplice Sgt James D O'Mara from a traffic stop incident at the side of the road a few years previously where he had stopped my car and forced me to stand in a downpour in a tee shirt while he flung a photograph from my wallet on the ground.
A fat blonde lady cop had come running up out of the rain and retrieved the photograph with the words: "He did that by accident."
I said to her: "You stay right there," as I wanted her to witness whatever happened next.
The fat blonde lady cop had turned and run back to her squad car like a little fawn bounding up the mountain path.
Dereliction of duty, but we'll let that go.
By the way I saw her again just last week.
Six years later.
I went into Nass police station to collect my mobile phone which some kindly person had found and left there for me.
The fat blonde lady cop was behind the counter and passed me my phone.
Her eyes shone with bemused recognition.
She remembered me.
After all these years.
She'd lost a good bit of weight and looked rather svelte in her uniform.
For the record, I'd date her in a second.
No.
In half a second.
But I digress.
There is no direct evidence that Kinneavey is linked to harassment activities undertaken by the clan gang that operates out of the Alke Babish chipper and associated chippers in the town.
Nor is there evidence linking him to harassment activities by the Maloney gang, the drug dealers who live at my gate.
Nor can the decision by the Hutch gang to move to Kilcullen be linked to Kinneavey.
It is probably just a happy coincidence that at the same time as he began his harassment activities against me, these other scum piled on as well.
The question I leave you with is this, gentle travellers of the internet.
If human trash like Kinneavey feels free to harass me in the street and in cafes over a period of ten years, what has he done to other people?

criteeking david wood

The American interenet commentator David Wood is someone whose work I hold in high regard,
I think it's appropriate to have a healthily critical attitude towards those we most admire.
I rate Mr Wood highly for his scholarship, for his role in creating open discussion regarding Islam, and for his personal testimony regarding his own life experiences.
He has what I call the quality of the genuine.
But he's unlikely to be incapable of error.
For a start, I would not endorse his use of pejoratives in his assessment of the Prophet Muhammed.
Nor would I stand over all his textual criticisms of the Quran.
Textual criticism is by its nature quite a speculative science.
In Western university circles, textual criticism of the Jewish and Christian Bibles began in a serious way in the 19th century, largely among German university professors.
It made quite the sensation in academic and cultural and religious circles at first.
A speculation had only to be unveiled to be deemed true (or thrillingly dangerous) by the sort of gulpens who are overly impressed by university professors pronouncing sentence on Holy books.
Apologies to any gulpens reading this.
I'm a gulpen myself.
No offence.
I would suggest that the initiators of Biblical textual criticism propagated an awful lot of inuendo and had an awful lot of influence before the science established a few basic guidelines, and er, standards.
At one stage any ambitious young prof willing to devise a few sensational speculations about the Bible, would have been assured of money, influence, possible fame, and academic respect without any real testing for his often purely notional theories about who wrote what gospel, or when they were written, or about the manner in which they were written, or about what's a genuine gospel anyway, or about the version of Middle Eastern geography contained therein or about errors in the historiographic accounts of Hebrew kingships, Roman personages, politics and such like.
Thankfully a more measured view has prevailed as some of the earlier speculations about supposed inaccuracies in the Bible, have been refuted from within Academe itself.
I merely point this out to contextualise some of the criticisms of the Quran which are at present influential.
Some textual criticisms of  the Quran will most probably over time prove specious.
Some more will be irrelevant to the truth of the text.
One other proint as I attempt to critique David Wood, a man of towering courage and insight.
I've heard him answer some challenges by saying: "That's an ignorant question."
But surely whoever we are, every question we ask is an ignorant question.
We're asking the question to obtain knowledge because we recognise we don't know something.
We attempt to gain knowledge by asking a question in such a way that the answer may dissipate ignorance.
There's no shame in it.
And David Wood isn't always right.

ode to a thought

oh glistening thought
tell me you are more
than chemistry
woven into cell structure
electronically varied
by genetic dispositions
in the voodoo of my biology
and apelike inhibitions

i must know
are you an ultimately existant ontology
or just some whiff of the primordial soup
wafting through my neurology

come now glistening thought
you can be blunt with me
surely you are more
than a meaningless emission
an excrescence of physicality
accidentally dialled up
by jewelling jeans
over centuries of heredity

surely you are more
i need you to be more
say you are an ontology
not just some pseudopod
of relativist atheistic codology

is the wondrousness of my speech
just a bullock belling in the fields
an elephant trumpetting in the forest
a bat squeak
but even these
are wondrous enough for me
i think therefore i am
 neigh neigh and thrice neigh
i am therefore i think

let us be honest with each other glistening thought
if i am chemistry merely
what is your role
what is the keynote
that makes you shine
and how can i ask this
and be without a soul
for you an emblem of god
and yet you are mine

momentaria

mountains liszting through the dawn
choruses of birdsong
elgar the forests with bliss
kiss the hedgerows
where bumblebees beethovening in rose bushes
cavort on carousels of air
river mists
mozart the landscape
eternity dances
forward and bach

adieux mes premiers ministres

Today they said...

Outgoing Prime Minister Of Ireland Leo Varadkar: "Black lives do matter and we should listen to black people."

James Healy: "Does that mean when Doctor Andrew Boko Shingani harms a patient at Naas hospital as he has done, there can be no justice for that patient because Andrew Boko Shingani is black? Does it mean when Nurse Ruth Abeabuchi harms a patient on the Francks ward at Tallaght hospital as she has done, there can be no justice for that patient because Ruth Abeabuchi is black? Does it mean that when Frank Kamara disseminates pictures of a baby boy being raped in 2018, mafia Judge Elma Sheahan in 2019 can release Frank Kamara with no jail sentence because the life of the black baby boy and his blackness doesn't matter when rated against Frank Kamara's more important blackness and his more important life as a disseminator of a video of a black baby boy being raped and that you Prime Minister and Judge Elma Sheahan and our police force don't feel any duty to the black baby boy, either to find him, rescue him or to avenge his violation and murder and that your duties in the matter ended when you released Frank Kamara into our community? Does it mean that when a child called Adam was trafficked through Ireland in 2001 and held in Dublin by Samuel Onojigohovie (also known as Samuel Koulibaly) and his Nigerian devil worship ring for onward shipment to London where the little boy Adam was torture murdered in a satanic ritual, does it mean I say, that no action should be taken against Samuel Onojigohovie (aka Samuel Koulibaly) and his extensive Nigerian devil worship ring based in Dublin because Samuel Onojigohovie's backness outweighs the blackness and the life of the black boy called Adam whom Samuel Onojigohovie and his friends imprisoned in Dublin prior to shipping him to London for ritual torture murder and that your whole duty in the matter ended with an extradition of Samuel Onojigohovie to Germany and a blind eye being turned to the continuance of his devil worship ring in Dublin and elsewhere? I'm just asking."