Sunday 9 November 2014

Decision made

If I digress at times throughout the course of this text it is because the thoughts swirling around my head are so confused and unfiltered that it makes it virtually impossible for me to speak about them, and only a little less difficult to write about them.


I must begin again with a qualification. Not one of the points of argument or criticism in this article are concerned with the question of whether or not there is a God. Nor am I interested in anything he may, or may not, have said or done but I am sharpening my knives for some of the people who say and do things in his name. After-all the Roman Catholic Church is a man-made empire regardless of their reasons for beginning it in the first place. Every one of it's theological doctrines relating to this topic are the words of men not Gods. Each of it's pre-conditions and rules come from the mouths of men claiming they understand the mind of their celestial master. Whether a believer or not, you have no reason to accept any of the things these men have been telling you and even less reason to allow yourself to be influenced by their self-ordained (quite literally) moral authority. 
'De Omnibus Disputandum' - Karl Marx

Three weeks ago my sister Mairead asked me if I would be my little niece's Godfather. My other siblings had all done it for the other children so I guess it was my turn. After initially declaring my unease and taking some time to consider whether I would be able to do it, I finally had to say no. I thought about it quite a lot and more than almost anyone in my position would. Because of this I know she respected my decision even if it was disappointing. That doesn't stop me feeling an acute sense of despair at having to let someone down. Since then, when I have mentioned it to a few of my friends I have found it difficult to articulate effectively my reasons. Most people find it a bizarre thing to have done, I suppose because it is so often an automated response to say yes. Anyway, as a method of absolving myself somewhat I thought I might stick some reasons down in a word document.


Each of Mairead's three children have been conceived through IVF and now each one of them is a baptised member of the society that considers their very conception unethical and sinful. This disgusts me absolutely and is one of the core reasons why I refused the request. But if a child's parents can accept the evil paradox in full knowledge of the facts then I don't think it is my place to proselytise to them directly. So I shall proselytise to you instead...

You know they think these children are illegitimate? You know they think it violates a marriage because the process includes masturbation? You know they think the scientists and doctors who deliver you a baby this way are villainous murderers because some of the eggs are destroyed along the way? You know they tell people that children conceived through IVF are more likely to have birth defects without resolving the scientific reasons behind it (The birth defects are more related to the initial problems regarding the parents infertility than they are to the IVF process)? 

Remember, these are all church teachings and not the word of God. This is why it was impossible for me to stand up as a proxy for this church's inscriptions on the blank moral canvas of my five-week old niece. She still has me always, just not like this.

At some point during my considerations it was put to me that myself and my siblings had not been pushed in the direction of Catholicism or Christianity, not really. It is a typically apocryphal description of how religions operate in Ireland and in my case it is simply wrong. The apparent hereditary character of religion should probably be proof enough of this but anyway, I will elaborate. I 'am' Catholic and I didn't have any choice in the matter. I went to two Catholic schools, both of which took time away from teaching English and Maths to shove their own religious diatribe down our throats. Even this might be seen as the broadening of a childs mind to help them develop a spiritual understanding. But it never was that, it was always awful indoctrination. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the only eating we ever did was on the Roman Catholic wafer. I wouldn't even have known Islam existed then or that eastern philosophy might help me develop spiritually. At that time I would barely even have been informed that there were a million other forms of Christianity. Obviously those protestants were wrong! 

The supple brains of young children will accept what they are being told as indisputable, grass is green, blood is red, God is great and he is Catholic. So it becomes very difficult to change afterwards and even when it does, open dissent carries a burden of shame for some people.

I really have trouble with any kind of indoctrination. Anything that tells people what they should believe or feel about something only encourages narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Thinking for yourself and being yourself regardless of what other people might want you to be are the greatest things you can hold on to. If only I had a little more confidence I may have been able to dissent earlier than I have.

I live in Northern Ireland, a country historically segregated along religious dividing lines. Violent, murderous dividing lines and although I am not naive enough to think religion was it's only defining factor, no-one could excuse it of some of the shared culpability. Yet we continue to propagate the dividing lines by forcing our children to join us on one side before they've even spoken a single word. Tony Blair once remarked in a debate about how touched he had been at a meeting that bridged the religious divide in Northern Ireland. Christopher Hitchens then hung Tony by his own petard when he asked him in a gloatingly droll tone, "Where does the religious divide come from?" I always think of Hitch when I think of religion in Northern Ireland.

However far we have come, protestant and catholic are still attached as labels and the ludicrous prejudice and suspicions persist towards the other despite a more enlightened population. I hope that when I send my children to school that the factors determining their destination do not in any include their membership of one church over another. I know it seems utopian but it shouldn't be. 

It is possible that you think I have been totally selfish here. That I have made a mountain out of a molehill and that I should have kept my mouth shut and gone along with things like everyone else does. I can understand that but it is not the way I want to do things. I genuinely think the baptism is a bad thing and that it would have been extremely hypocritical for me to have gone through with it. It would have been a completely vacuous ceremony if I had been involved and anyway I hope that my little niece would rather have an uncle who actually gives a fuck about her to say no for the reasons I have. 

Wednesday 20 August 2014

My catholic ireland

The Catholic Church in Ireland has in most instances seceded its credibility and influence. For many people who would have once slavishly cooperated with its ludicrous demands there is merely disillusionment and apathy. I have gone past the point of disillusionment by now. I have reached eager hostility.

When my sisters baby was stillborn last year I was sad. She was devastated beyond anything my meagre emotional abilities could understand. You do what you can to help people at these times to ameliorate the pain and provide whatever inadequate succour you can. Later, I began to familiarise myself with a former teaching of the catholic church that any babies that died before being baptised into the church would never be permitted to enter heaven and be left to dangle in limbo for eternity, motherless. Obviously because of recent events it excited my interest. I admit that it may not seem like such an utterly malevolent thing to say in 2014 but it decades gone by in devout Ireland this was a truly evil idea. To tell young mothers who have just had their hearts ripped out of their worlds, young women who believed with absolute certainty in an afterlife, that their child was not worthy to join them in heaven, that they would never be seen again stuck somewhere between heaven and hell was unjustifiably cruel and abusive. Yet this is what happened. Misery heaped upon misery. Lives ruined for parents who could never get over it. God will accept murderers and rapists with the correct access codes and a little repentance but he doesn't want to know about your dead baby. 

This stuff is real. This stuff happened. It has been perpetuated because we have allowed it to play a persistent role in our lives. The good doesn't outweigh the bad. It merely provides shelter for its perpetrators.

It seems that in Ireland, just as everywhere else, that religion is hereditary. I was a Catholic before I could walk, before I could talk, before I had developed the cognitive ability to realise that a piece of wafer is not also the flesh of a two thousand year old man from the Middle East. Get them young and you get them for life! History tells us that they took that particular motto to its sinister extremes.

Baptised as a baby I am now one of the flock. Free to have the same opinions as everyone else, free to learn the prayers and dogma of Christianity, free to disassociate myself from people who’s parents and teachers have slightly different opinions to what mine do. So the guilt begins to seep into the conversation around the age of six. All those terrible things that a child is capable of need to be addressed. For a short period at this important point in a child’s development the maths and English lessons are dispensed with to make way for the classes preparations for First Confession. I’ve thought about this as coldly as I can and I will try to distil my opinions succinctly. There are certainly children in these classes who require a little extra help with their reading or their writing or their counting. Nevertheless their valuable time at school is being used to tell them how they should feel guilty and beg for forgiveness from a supernatural being they can’t possibly understand for the crime of slapping their sister or stealing an extra biscuit. As well as this they need to be coached to ensure that they interact in the correct manner with the elderly virgin who will be their direct interlocutor when they repent for their sins. Of course it all ends well. The child may not be able to read any better than yesterday but God will have forgiven them their childish misdemeanour's. This is all assuming that they have been forced in the right direction and have chosen the correct god. Otherwise these kids are condemned to eternal hell.


Next up for us kids is the beginning of the financially incentivised indoctrination. The first holy communion and later confirmation are the two major milestones on the young catholic’s résumé. The child is quite literally forced into these religious ceremonies. They have absolutely no right of refusal and for the most part don’t even fully understand what they are about. Community peer pressure comes into consideration for most parents in Ireland because even the non-religious wouldn’t want it to be said that their child hadn’t been confirmed along with his classmates.

It is not the theology itself that incites my anger when I remember my religious experiences as a youth. The fact is that many or most people pick and choose the bits they personally require and dispense with the more ludicrous and nasty elements of Catholicism in favour of a bespoke type of religious moderation that really isn't catholic at all. More often it is the repression it always had on free thought and critical thinking. In my school religion was taught an examined in a way no different to biology or maths. However it differed in being a subject not only to be learned in the classroom but a doctrine to be enforced by peer pressure and ceremonial propaganda. 

It amuses me now to remember the teacher student dynamics that often occurred at those sports-hall masses we used to have ash wednesday or some other nonsense. Back then we would have been sniggering and laughing as adolescents do, not taking the event very serious at all, until one of our teachers would come along telling us to be quiet and show some respect. The teacher would be satisfied that he had imbued us with the appropriate level of contrition and we would sit quietly and listen as just a little pang of the old catholic guilt rises in our bellies. Thinking about it now though, I see that the sniggering and laughing boys were showing the appropriate level of respect all along. We were the silly little boys not grasping the full significance of the ceremony and the teacher was the dutiful overseer of virtue. Now I see that the teachers had taken a break from teaching and that now they were enforcing.

It is true that the Catholic church has displayed an outward growth in humility over recent years. There is more room for open discourse with the population and even some theological concessions have been quietly accepted. However, it is always a retreating tyrant that begins handing land back to the natives. Modesty is a weapon to shield decline. Where was the humility when their power in Ireland was seemingly exponential? Was there any modesty in the horrific and malevolent acts they committed when the island was theirs to be pillaged. They preach forgiveness if you repent. So they repent.

Tuesday 15 July 2014

My Venlafaxine

I wanted to die again. However briefly the feelings gripped me the compulsion was always an earnest one. A more effective form of pain relief does not exist. This time I began goading myself to see if I had the balls to do anything about it. I didn't. I am very lucky I didn't.

Venlafaxine is a good drug. Maybe even a great one. It has certainly had a positive effect on my life. Almost seven months ago to the day I reached the lowest point of my depression. A complete mental capitulation whose antecedent causes I had been ignoring for too long. It spliced me right out of my work and social environment and had me bouncing from doctors to psychiatrist, to mental health clinics. I've never been as sick as I was at Christmas. I have never felt as lonely and rejected.

The point is that Venlafaxine, though by no means totally responsible, has had a dramatic effect upon my recovery. I think most people who know me would believe that my climb out of the sewers of despair has been both majestic and seamless. It probably appears as if I am more often happy and contented than I have ever been before. For the most part I would agree but there is still remaining something a little apocryphal in this idea. Depression still owns me. I will almost certainly remain its bonded chattel for the duration of my lifetime. I can have no control over the capricious malevolence of this master. All I can really hope to do is to shore up my defences as best I can. Learn from all the thrashings I have received from his hand and confront him. Eyes fixed, chest out!

It is my recurring inability to protect myself that makes me so fucking angry with myself. Despite being fairly intelligent I have a cancerous streak of naivety running through me. It encourages me to overlook obvious oncoming symptoms of depression. It allows me to completely ignore dangers I would otherwise be guarded against. It tickles me into believing that doing the same thing again and again will not have the same desultory affects.

So when I say that Venlafaxine is a great drug that has helped me massively I also have to admit that I disrespect it by pushing myself down to a place where I know I should not go. Drinking often and in high volume has in my case always at some stage resulted in a snap because the elastic has been stretched too far. I know this. I bet a lot of other people know this about me too. I am Bart Simpson continually touching the cupcake despite the electric shock.

I can't say I didn't see this Saturday night/ Sunday morning coming at me. There is no way I can suggest that it wasn't a certainty to happen if I continued as I had been doing. What does this mean? Well it tells me that I have some power to change the course of these events and by doing so resisting or at least delaying the agonising rupture of my progress. It tells me that I made a mistake once again by going beyond my safety threshold and that I am entirely to blame for anything destructive that I may have let happen.

I hope that once more the Venlafaxine has resumed its steady good work as the tyrannical alcohol subsides and my serotonin comes out to play once more. I am still a young man. Dans la force de l'âgeStill capable, still progressing, still stupid, still naive. If I can protect myself better from the constant self-criticism, the loneliness and depression by learning from my previous mistakes then perhaps I can at least allow myself to face it down with weapons more suited to the task. Eyes fixed, chest out.

Monday 5 May 2014

Purposely chose mighty ducks over road to damascus. It's much more relevant to me

I think I have a fairly good idea now of how Gordon Bombay might have been feeling before he met those mighty ducks. Outwardly stable, inwardly tormented. Carrying around a personal sense of failure and hopelessness. Unable to avoid the self-destructive behaviour that I'm getting a little too old for. Abusing the medication that I should be submitting everything to. But like Gordon, I'm just not happy.

 I really am rather lonely at this point. Partly from my own designed isolation, partly because people I want to spend time with don't want to spend time with me. Perhaps it is more to do with being in the wrong time and place. If I'm not thinking about smashing the people I live with in the face with a hammer I am completely apathetic of any relationship with them at all. I'm the last single man standing now and it's magnifying the impression I have of myself as intrinsically unlovable, desperately condemned to my own company. I realise I don't want a girlfriend but I doubt whether I'd be capable of having one.  

I am having a heart attack now. I've been having this heart attack for some time now. 

I have to be one of the stupidest people I know. I do things that are severely damaging myself just because I can't resist for a few hours. I continue to do things I don't enjoy because I am too lazy to change. I am so stupid I was staring at a kitchen knife briefly last night before realizing that I didn't want to die, I simply wanted a different kind of pain. Something to distract me. Well they do say a change is as good as a rest.
I think sometimes that the realisation and diagnosis of my depression leads me to an expectation that it doesn't require constant treatment. That it can look after itself for the most part. Would I have the same careless disrespect for cancer? Would I continue to eat a side of bacon with every meal after a massive heart attack?

Here I am standing in the wrong clothes for the context or standing in the wrong context for the clothes. I'm a square peg and home is a round hole here. I always have been. Pressure is building with hideous subtlety for me to make something of myself but even static pressure causes opposition to weaken over time. I shouldn't be here, never should have been. 

So I went out last night and had some drinks. Had a look around, saw one thing that I like and a whole lot of shit I didn't.

Off Monday, must drink Sunday excitement! The Dj was playing this set-list in here when I was nineteen and it wasn't good then. Fat bald men throwing punches because of their paranoid perceptions. I doubt anyone was giving your missus the eyes mate. Drunken girls showering the ground with spilt super chips. Checked shirts that were out of fashion before the Apaches had their first glance at John Wayne's unsteady strut. Is this where Romeo first saw Juliet? I doubt he would have wanted her so much laid out on Monaghan street, fake tan mud-slide dressed up in yesterdays sale. Extreme emotions, we all love or hate each other that bit more at night, intoxicated.

In the middle of all this a friend of mine suggested to me that my standards are too high. My expectations of myself are too high, leading to disappointment. My expectations of a girlfriend are too high, leading too a lonely life. My expectations for life are too high, leading to depression. He thinks I would be better off doing what he has done, take a fairly average girl that I share almost no common interests with and whom I have no exceptional chemistry with and "give it a go". When I replied that there was a word I could use to describe what he was saying, he wasn't unhappy with being told I considered that settling.

I won't ever apologise for having this idealistic streak inside me. More than any other character trait I possess it's the one that make me what I am. Believe me when I say it makes me a more sensitive person, a more caring friend, a more hopeful human being. It's what induces me to pine for people and things I can't have because ideally I can have it all. But it is also what makes particularly susceptible to severe life-threatening depression. It is going to kill me or make me stronger. Unfortunately, it probably won't ever be able to make me happy.

So nothings changed has it? I say one thing and do another. I can't protect myself from restlessness. The consequences remain the same. The needy sadness, the pathetic hopelessness, the kitchen knife and the office scissors. I'm a selfish cunt really! Some people have made the effort for me when I won't do it myself. It'd be rather nice to have my might ducks moment

Friday 25 April 2014

My blueprint

In Jack Kerouc's novel The Town and the City George Martin attempts to impart a little fatherly wisdom upon his favourite son Peter. It's not about pointing Peter in the direction his father would like to see him. That time has already passed by. It's George's idea of the Golden Rule for anyone who truly wants to live their own life:
 ' Keep your chin up and just wait for the best, or the worst, whichever fate chooses to deal you. But be brave, be gay, be a genuine man whatever you do! That's the way to live. Don't worry, don't repent. Work hard and do your best. It's the most any of us can do.'
Yeah you really do need to be genuine whatever you do. Otherwise you're just pretending. Admit your faults and motives, especially to yourself. Like the things you really like and don't feel embarrassed because collecting Boyzone memorabilia probably isn't cool. Wear whatever clothes you want even if you live in a fashion vacuum. You look so much better when you display a genuine personality. Show your real emotions to people because it is the only way to feel as if you are really being yourself.

Be brave and live your own life. Attack it when the time comes to go after what you want. Believe in yourself with conviction. Prepare well and don't drift. Don't become your parents unless that is genuinely what you want to do. Avoid unnecessary restrictions and procrastination. Make the iron hot by striking. Learn every single day.

Work hard. Man you have got to work hard. This is the one I never truly believed when I was younger. I thought I was smarter than everyone else, better than everyone else. Perhaps I was a long time ago but I've lost it all because I considered working for anything to be trying too hard. I was wrong. There is so much satisfaction in knowing that you really have put in a shift for something worthwhile. Remember that tired happy feeling you get when you have really pushed yourself for something and now you can relax on the sofa?

I try to be genuine but it isn't always easy. Sometimes laziness and lies are an easier option. I am a terrible son, an apathetic brother but only maybe sometimes a good friend. A slave to demons and historically unmotivated as well as a propensity for pathetic attention seeking. Underachieving by my own standards, no-one else really matters here. Still, I'm not a bad person, it's just that there is this one chance at life and then nothing so I might as well make it really me while the game is still running.

Thursday 24 April 2014

drinking

Briefly I was back where I don't ever want to be. Sick and depressed with a dread in my stomach about having to see tomorrow. Pathetically fearing sleep because of the hallucinogenic dream nightmares. Feeling worthless like an old 50p. Three fucking horrible black days. Body and mind ripped apart and strewn out like animal carcass. My only true interlocutor is a blank page I couldn't force myself to write to.

Greasy globules of sweat disappearing beneath my uniform collar. They leave a silkworms trail along my face, stinging my eyes along the way. I think I'm about to have a redbull heart-attack and if it were to leave me unconscious it might even be a result.

Fucking alcohol. Fucking stupid me.

  You should avoid alcohol while taking this medicine. 

I have to come clean this time. I really have nothing or no-one to blame for feeling this way. It wasn't like I needed any encouragement to push the boat out just a little further upon a tide of tequila. I know I suffer from depression. I know I can sometimes struggle with drink depressions. I know I am on anti-depressants and I know better.

Saturday was a great laugh. An absolute belter of an evening. But I think for the first time that even a really fun night on the booze didn't get to within a galaxy of being worth the days after. It has scared the shit out of me in a big way. I really don't want to have to feel like that again. My brain felt to me like it was floating around inside a test tube, banging against the glass. The worst three days of 2014 by far felt as if time had stopped and I was the only person moving. I wanted to be held, dependant, looked after. It wouldn't happen however. 

I don't recommend binge drinking to anyone ever if it leaves you in tears driving home from work two days later like it did for me. That's the thing with these drink depressions, they tend to leave you vulnerable to some emotional conflict that you can otherwise control. In my case it lead to a very disappointing end to something I didn't want to end. It was dead anyway, it's just that it has been said now.

Fucking alcohol again. Fucking stupid me again. 

When you know the risks and do it anyway it doesn't seem fair to go crying to friends even when you really need them. Sometimes a hug makes it just a little better but I don't deserve any.

Thursday 27 March 2014

Badly expressed thoughts

I haven't written anything down in a while so let us see if I can't string a few lucid sentences together. Stephen Fry said once that a thought badly expressed is a lie so going by that standard I would not take any of this too seriously.

How can I express an uncertain emotion or vague yearning? With words for sure but I'm out of practise. I seem to have forgotten how to make the dance. I feel like there are a lot of things I am unable to make dance these days.

Lately I have been stirred by restlessness and unsettled by the trajectory of life. Waking up from dreams truly disappointed to find that the brief moment of perfect excitement never really existed in the first place. Waking up from dreams to drag my feet through the muddy water of the set routine. It's not all bad, it just isn't living the dream.

This life I lead now, the transitory phase between old and new, was meant to be an exciting time in itself. That was my expectation anyway. By now I was expecting a thousand fold increase in intelligence and roadmap all laid out. Things rarely work out how you expect, especially when expectations are so often unrealistic.

Tell me Mr Cooney, what exactly were you expecting?

I expect to be high all the time.

Feeling like I'm the passenger of a train with the sensation that the station is moving rather than the train.I haven't even begun to make my mark on the world yet and I am floundering. This life I lead, Work-drink-study-work-t.v.-dream-run-standstill, seems good to many people, perfect to a few more. It just seems a little unambitious to me. I am not judging though.How could I when I comply like all the rest.

I understand that there is comfort in the monotony. From an evolutionary or even anthropological point of view I would imagine it all began as a way of prolonging survival. Every animal wants to survive and the most effective way to do this must be to make it a matter of routine. For many people this is the only way to live. Everyday predictable and boring but safe. Flip it over and it's soul-destroying, imagination restricting and a graveyard.

Here we stand together, a few of is in the wrong time and place. Frustrated and jealous and grasping for something that just isn't there. Pining for something different without understanding what it is. Sometimes wondering if it isn't a what but a who. Whatever it is I need to satiate my yearning heart it isn't in anything I see everyday.

So once again I sit here staring at a computer screen unsure of my conclusion or what even lit the fuse for me to start writing at all. Perhaps it's just a part of my personality. An hereditary gift that leaves me in an almost constant state of longing. But then I think believing that would be nothing but a cop out.

My genes are sealed but I still have time before my fate is.