SWB has moved! Find me at... this address
blackhallgreen

Allentown
for some reason SWB has been listening to a lot of Billy Joel recently, the first records I listened to as a kid, after school on my own, lifting the vinyl onto the old record-player in the never-used best room.
The SWB parents of course, after they got sick of Nigeria, and WAWA*, moved to depressed former heavy-industry Allentown, Pennsylvania. Just like the song.

But then Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy got shot, and there were race riots and the KKK, and the Cold War, and SWB's dad got a letter trying to draft him for Vietnam... and they had two small kids... so it just seemed like a good time to get out.
So they went to the UK in 1969.
And enjoyed the British Welfare State at its zenith.

not very exciting.
but more so than SWB's life.
yikes

*West Africa Wins Again: despite all the efforts of man, the climate and culture of West Africa conspire to defeat his efforts to improve his let. See the Poisonwood Bible.


Allentown

Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they're killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line
Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore
Met our mothers in the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we're living here in Allentown
But the restlessness was handed down
And it's getting very hard to stay
Well we're waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved
So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke
And chromium steel
And we're waiting here in Allentown
But they've taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away
Every child has a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face
Well I'm living here in Allentown
And it's hard to keep a good man down
But it's getting very hard to stay
in Allentown




Allentown

aaaaaaaaaaaagh my world is shrinking...
sudden burst of what-am-I-doing-here...

I need to go and study in London, is what I need to do.
I need to study with my old prof the lovely Kim H, and have nice chats about war and morality and Kant and neutrality in the pub.
I need to live in a kippy student flat in Balham where my desk is under my bed and i need to climb a ladder.
I need to work 25 hours a week in some laid-back cafe-type place.
I need to have irregular hours and go out for milk and not come home for 4 days in a row and just have blackouts and K-holes and be irresponsible and go back to strangers' gaffs in zone 6.
I need to be perpetually broke and sell my CDs intermittently in order to buy food.
I need to wear only TopMan clothes cos my friend works there and gets them for me for the 'slightly damaged' price.
I need to eat a lot of rice and tins of tomatoes and vitamin tabs and tuna cos i can't afford meat or fresh fruit.
I need to take sleeping tabs and spend whole 36-hour stretches in bed just because I feel like it and I've nothing on til thursday night.
I need to borrow books on psychology and chemistry and english literature and norwegian out of the Uni library and not any books on political science.
I need to spend entire mornings in cafes reading and sitting over one cappucino and chatting up the wait-staff.

i weep for my lost early twenties


a photo I took in my lost early twenties. Er...

never thought it would come to this...
SWB has been very remiss with entries recently, due to... you'll never guess... work! (Swb don't be doing computer stuff at home)

Yes, I am finally being forced to write stuff and be horribly efficient and 'sigh... I suppose I'll have to call them MYSELF then'-ish. Eww. I am even turning into the kind of boss people despise...

instead of

'hey, whatever. when you have time. cool. thanks so much.'

i am becoming

'if you could have that to me by 10am tomorrow that'd be great. Thanks'

Hell, what am I doing even in at that time...?

ANYway. Point is, don't hold your breath for new entries until October...

sorry to my readership of 3...

bye for now

swb
x

today, we have been mostly thinking about...

Marky Mark

hypochondriac swb
today, at the Accident & Emergency dept. of the Eye Hospital.

swb: well, they're kinda bloodshot

doctor: and you've had this for about 10 days

swb: well, maybe a week. but I've never had it before, and my eyes do feel kind of dry as well, gritty, you know... and I just thought

doctor(reversing my eyelids): it is all perfectly healthy

swb: well, they ARE a bit red. It's not very attractive, I think, and I want to go out tonight, you see and I thought maybe it might be a symptom of something systemic, you know...

doctor: systemic?

swb: you know... maybe acute liver damage, or hepatitis or something?

doctor: then your eyes would be jaundiced, or yellow

swb: oh right, yeah. so...

doctor: your eyes are slightly dry. The weather has been dry recently. I will prescribe some eye-drops, though you do not need a prescription for them.

swb: oh. so not even conjunctivitis then? I mean, my eyes don't look as soft and dewy as normal, that's for sure...

doctor: there is no sign of infection

swb: right. so, eh... how embarrassing (slinks out of surgery and through waiting room thronged with infants who have emptied bleach into their eyes, workmen with nails protruding from their eye-sockets, and many many elderly people whose retinas have disintegrated)


Thank God I have STD clinics as an outlet on which to burn out my hypochondria. If I were celibate God knows how much I'd fork out getting moles checked, ears tested and CAT scans done on my brain...

oops
i've been so busy at work trying to patch over the small diplomatic incident I caused with Bulgaria earlier in the week, (oops) that I forget to update you on the many fabbo happenings in my life.

Working backwards
thursday
SamSara for Capirinhas and Down Under for €3 stubbies.

wednesday
SeaPoint for swimming in the Sunset, and then looking for Mars (unsuccessfully) and Borzas for Fish and Chips

tuesday
Pizzahut for pizza

monday
Smithfield for to find a new flat. Morrisson for cocoa.

sunday
Stephen's Green for Duck-feeding. Cafe-bar-deli for pizza. UGC cinema for Swimming Pool.

saturday
Irish Museum of Modern Art for, eh, danishArt. Mine for chinese food. FL for water. Tease for vodka and coke.

friday
Maire's for GRE study. Mine for 10 things I hate about you

ah
Isn't it great when you have exes who you actually like?

When you can understand why you went out with them, rather than mentally going

I can't believe I went out with that wanker. I can't believe I went out with that wanker.

every time you see them.

So, anyway. No clothes were ripped off. But I still had an enjoyable lunch.
SWB has said it before, and I'll say it again:

Generous with sex=generous with money=generous with time=generous with affection=generous with emotions

Stingy with sex=stingy with money=stingy with time=stingy with affection=stingy with emotions

lunch
SWB is meeting an ex, MF, for lunch.

"Spending quite a lot of time with MF these days, aren't we?", you say.

Yes it's true. Maybe we're becoming, -eek- friends. We're having a BurgerKing picnic in the park, with cornettos afterwards. I will update after lunch on whether I managed to resist hopping on him and ripping his clothes off.

out of the blue
a former friend has emailed. I met Monica when I was 17 and she was on her Erasmus year in Dublin. She used to smuggle the underage SWB into trendy bars. SWB's Mom used to feed her. She used to help SWB with his Italian homework. SWB's Dad gave her lifts to Uni. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

But.
I haven't seen her since then. Haven't emailed since I was 18.
But she's coming back to Dublin for an MBA conference. Whatever that is. We're gonna meet up. Do coffee. Reminisce.

Monica says
say hello to your family too!
I am curious to see how your famous 'life plan' deevloped...................

yikes
I had forgotten about my famous life plan.
Its development has been rather stunted.
Oops.
I feel like such a fool.