Hey Joe

Early in his short career, Jimi Hendrix wrote a blues song called "Hey Joe," that was nothing more than a pretext for his improvisatory guitar genius. The lyrics are simple and formulaic:

Hey Joe,
Where ya goin' to
With that gun in your hand?

I'm going' to shoot my old lady
I caught her messin round
with another man.

I'm reminded of that Hendrix song every time I leave my house here on my Philippine island and walk down the highway. Every time I do, I hear someone yelling "Hey Joe!" at me. It's an exclamation that foreigners have heard for decades in the Philippines, ever since World War Two, when American GIs were the first foreigners ever seen in some parts of this country. You won't hear it in Manila or in any tourist area, simply because there are far more foreigners around. But down here in the Sticks, where foreign faces are still a notable occasion for the natives, it's uttered almost as a joke. Living here as long as I have, however, has made it the most irritating phrase I know.

One of the things that some people hate, but that I happen to love, about living in a big American city is the utter anonymity that living there makes possible. One can live anywhere in such a city without ever knowing the names of one's neighbors and, more importantly, without their ever knowing yours. Standing in a crowd, one might as well be invisible.

But here in the Philippine provinces, from the moment I emerge from my house to the time when I go back inside, I am the center of attention for whomever is outside. I am aware of a number of eyes that are on me. I can feel the weight of their stares. My Filipino friends are shocked when I tell them this: that when I go to town, or to the market, or into a mall or supermarket, I am watched with unnerving scrutiny. The looks seem inspired by various things, everything from simple curiosity to sexual attraction to downright hostility. I have found that wearing sunglasses helps to soften the stares.

Men will make comments in dialect that are easy to guess at as I walk by a group of them, and the comments are usually scatalogical. They will make feeble jokes, like all of their jokes, at my expense. There are even a few who will simply stand in my way, agape, and scowl at me as I pass by them. Women will be so bold as to address my companion with questions about my sexual predilections. Am I sadistic? they will ask. (They have all heard stories about how foreigners are all sexual "manyakes" [maniacs].) Young women, many of them still in high school, will exhibit curiosity in easily misconstruable terms. Most of their overtures are innocent, but I have never been crazy enough to take therm seriously.

Taken all together - the pervasive heat, which glues my shirt to my back within minutes, the constant hazard of being overcharged for everything (my companion handles all my cash transactions), the staring eyes, the contemptuous jokes, the come-ons, and the cries of HeyJoe - it is with understandable relief that I arrive home and close the door. It is only within the walls of my house that I can relax, that I can let down my guard and be myself. I am rarely out of range of one or another electric fan. And as time has passed, I have found fewer occasions to leave the house. Moritz Thomsen, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, got it right when he wrote: "I think anyone who has not lived the wholly public life of a foreigner in a small town, where every scratch and belch is noted with fascinated curiosity, cannot realize how essential it is to have a place of refuge where you can hide from time to time and reform yourself."*

Privacy is something of which Filipinos have only a nebulous understanding. For them, to be "private" seems to carry some of the Latin meaning, to be "deprived." Rumors were spread among my neighbors about my staying indoors so much - that I must be hiding there, that I'm living here in a Philippine province because I am on the run for some mysterious offense. Like everything else, these rumors are merely to be endured. There is nothing to be said. And how should I explain myself?

Why did I have to travel six thousand miles to become a recluse? In Alaska, where I lived prior to coming to the Philippines, I lived indoors because of the cold, which lasted half the year. Despite it's reputation as America's "last frontier," I didn't encounter much in the way of outdoor activities there. Here, among 7, 107 islands belonging to the Philippines, beaches are ubiquitous. But because virtually all of them are privately owned, and because Filipinos seem to fear the water (most of them never learned how to swim) and would rather not further darken their brown skin, the beaches are deserted. I don't go sightseeing. I have seen all the sights worth seeing. There are no centuries-old Spanish churches on my island. There are several garish mansions, all belonging to the despotic governing family. There are views, most of which require some amount of travel to view.

So I stay indoors, watching the American - and some British and Australian - news, Hollywood movies, with an occasional foray into a true foreign film (Filipino movies and TV are beneath comment), reading and writing, and going online. I show up when I'm invited to a bash, with barbecued pig, lots of tuba (fermented coconut juice), and Empy (Emperador Brandy). But because men and women are segregated, and because I can hear my lonely electric fan calling to me from across the kilometers, I don't stay long. And as I stroll toward the highway to hire a trike to take me home, I always hear, like a constant refrain, voices calling "Hey Joe!"


*Mortitz Thomsen, Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle

Willful Neglect

In various places of the world, especially wherever the Spanish established a colony, the Day of the Dead is not just a day set aside on which everyone visits a cemetery to pay respects to their dead loved ones. For families it is the actual day on which an individual - a mother or father - had died. It is a day fraught with superstitious rituals that are supposed to guarantee that the dead will rest in peace. April 23 is traditionally believed to be the day of William Shakespeare's birth. One of the reasons we know this is because it coinicided with the day of his death in 1616.

What is there left to say on Shakespeare's 450th birthday, except to comment on how someone so universally revered could be so obscure to the vast majority of people. It's only partly because of his stature as probably the greatest poet-playwright in history that most people are willfully ignorant of his work. Literary fame is only dimly recognized today. And it doesn't seem to matter that he's as strange to native English-speakers as he is to speakers of some aboriginal language in Papua New Guinea or in Amazonia.

The King James Bible was published in Shakespeare's lifetime, and most people today can't read it without consulting a glossary. A Christian friend of mine, who believes that the original Bible, written in Hebrew and Greek, is the inspired word of God, prefers one of the modern translations to King James' because the language of Shakespeare's age seems to him to put distance between him and his Creator. Never mind that the Standard Text, as it became known, contains poetry that occasionally rivals that of Shakespeare, and that, for centuries, it was the only book that could be found in nearly every household where English was spoken and that it provided uneducated people with beautiful and noble language with which they could describe the most mundane events in their daily lives.

What most people who fear Shakespeare's language don't seem to grasp is how utterly clear he is, and how convoluted and muddied English has become since his death 398 years ago today. Would Shakespeare be able to read The New York Times without a lexicon?

Proscription Television

I recall, with enough residual amusement, watching The Playboy Channel in the mid-1980s, when the amount of quality softcore erotica was scarce and the channel's producers had to resort to airing hardcore, adult movies with their hardcore scenes scrupulously "softened" to appease the FCC, which forbade (and still forbids, I think) scenes of suchan explicit nature shown on a licensed cable channel. This often rsulted in reducing feature-length movies like Debbie Does Dallas to sometimes half their original length. The raison d'etre of such movies was compromised by the removal of depictions of genitalia and penetration to the extent that they were rendered pointless [pun]. The Playboy Channel's censorship was self-defeating - porn stars, while well-equipped for combat copulation, are no good as nude models. And the very notion of a porn movie without porn is nonsensical.

Here on the Pacific Rim, some of the major American cable channels have Asian affiliates whose programming is tailored for a non-subscription, basic-cable audience. Consequently, much of the strong language, graphic violence, and the nudity that are routinely featured on programs produced by HBO, for example, have to be removed in order to reach a PG audience. The appeal of programs like Boardwalk Empire, now in its fourth season, depend to a large extent on plentiful gore and sex. Game of Thrones, also in its fourth season, is a clumsy mixture of medieval fantasy of the sword and sorcery variety and soap opera - and is HBO's most unlikely hit show. But it, too, is awash in blood, butts and breasts - all of which has to be excised when every episode is aired, often on the same day they are seen in the States, on HBO Asia. Without the periodic surprise of spurting blood and/or heaving naked bodies, Game of Thrones is a thoroughly moribund and feeble saga of Lord of the Rings proportions. The shows fans, sensing this, try to argue that the TV series doesn't do the books on which Game of Thrones is based justice. To which all I can say is -- the nudity is so much better on TV.

No Exit Poll

[I wrote the following piece in November 2012 and, somehow, never found an opportunity to publish it. As time passed and its topicality receded into the distance of irrecoverable days, I have turned back to it as more than just an anecdote. So many months after the event, I think it captures more than just a moment in time, a few hours of a day when an American presidential election was taking place thousands of miles away from where I was traveling to a nearby city.]


While the election results were just beginning to be counted on Tuesday evening, November 6, 2012, it was early Wednesday morning here in the Philippines. The only ATMs on my small island that accepted my American bank card had been "offline" - so I was told -since the first of the month, and rather than throw away much-needed money on a Western Union money transfer, I decided to buy a ticket on one of the shuttle vans that zoom past my house every hour to use the ATM in the nearest sizeable city called Tacloban.

I knew a dispatcher for the van company who arranged for the van to pick up my girlfriend and I on the highway just before dawn. I always bring my girlfriend along for protection. She protects me from being overcharge for everything from soft drinks to house rent - since everyone suffers from the delusion that all foreigners are millionaires. It was my first ride in a van in almost five years. (I haven't ridden in a car, dear reader, since November 8, 2007.) On climbing inside the van, I was relegated to the rumble seat nearest the sliding door. There wasn't a seatbelt in sight and as soon as the van hit cruising speed (approximately 80 kph), I also noticed that all the "oh shit" handles near the ceiling were missing. With the window open, I had to cling to the sliding door whenever the highway took us veering to the right and onto my girlfriend's knee when it took us to the left.

Having traveled often on the highway aboard a trike or on the back of a motorcycle, I knew that the internationally-observed rules of the road were regarded rhetorically in the Philippines, like friendly advice rather than enforceable laws. And many drivers on the roads had either never bothered to acquire a license or had one that was expired, simply because they couldn't spare the money for the fee. This meant that even the most rudimentary driving regulations were ignored - ones like not passing on a bridge or on a hill or a curve.

All manner of conveyance known to history, from wagons drawn by water buffalo, pedicabs and motor scooters to jeepneys, SUVs, vans, buses and trucks all travel these spindly highways. Right of way is negotiated only in the breach. The speed at which the van was moving made the passing world into something of a green and grey blur of coconut palms, rice paddies and wooden shacks. And people seemed to glance at me as I sped past their inscrutable lives. I latched onto a certain view of trees and houses and engaged in the fantasy of living with that view always before me. Everything I knew started and ended there - my boyhood, school days, my first encounters with love and death. But when I opened my eyes I saw a different view sliding past me - another group of people, another arrangement of destinies.

The speed of the van became more alarming when it drove that Wednesday morning past uniformed boys and girls on their way to school. I saw the usual number of women with babies stapled to their chests,who are everywhere in these overcrowded islands. And toddlers scampering within inches of the highway seemed inured to the life-threatening passage of buses and trucks that do nothing more in warning than give short blasts from their horns as they explode around curves.

Imagine a busy two-lane highway slicing through the heart of your neighborhood, with homes, grade schools, basketball courts, and meeting halls all abutting within a few feet of it. For reasons that are hard to explain, this is precisely what a typical provincial barangay is like in the Philippines. It's as if the houses were situated that way before the national highway was put there, when it was a dirt and gravel road. And rather than require that houses too close should be moved or removed, the highway was laid down smack on people's doorsteps.

Speed limits through these barangays are posted at a maximum of 60 kph (nearly 40 mph). Since delivery trucks and passenger buses are on tight schedules, they go as fast as mechanically possible. If one of them should lose control, which happens occasionally, the flimsily-built houses would offer little resistance as they careened straight through them.

Dogs laid and men stood on the highway's brink as if to say, "Go ahead. Hit me!" But the true heroes on these highways are the pedicab, or"multicab" drivers - bicycle-driven taxis for one or two passengers. Unlike Thailand, where the bicycle is in front, or Vietnam, where they're in back, Philippine trishaws, modeled on the motorcycle trikes, with the bike mounted on the left. This makes the steering a lot harder, but it also exposes the driver to the brunt of traffic.

It seemed that around every curve there was one of those large signs with the cryptic message ACCIDENT PRONE AREA. Areas don't have accidents. People do. What made the message on the signs more emphatic was the sight of some of them grotesquely bent out of shape. Had the sign been in an accident? There were also signs that read SCHOOL ZONE and REDUCE SPEED AHEAD, to which my driver paid no attention. I wondered how many Filipino drivers on these highways understood what the signs meant, since English is spoken sporadically, at best, in these provinces. I have found that my knowledge of Spanish has actually got me quite a lot farther in breaking down the formidable language barrier here than English.

We covered about a hundred kilometers in two and a half hours, with an average speed a measly 40 kph. The breakneck spurts of speed, that momentarily made the journey feel like a marathon roller coaster, had been neutralized by the nervous jockeying for a break in passing every trike or pedicab or wagon. I withdrew all my cash from the ATM, and when I finally made it home it was going on 1 pm - Midnight Eastern Standard Time. I turned on my TV, expecting the worst when I tuned to CNN. But Barack Obama had just been declared the winner by Wolf Blitzer. I double-checked the BBC to make sure it wasn't another 2000 election night gaffe. But the BBC had also declared the winner. I called out to my girlfriend, who had patiently endured the campaign year along with me, and she was pleased enough to come tome and give me a hug.

On my way to town a while later in the day, I asked the trike driver if he had heard the news. He was either oblivious or indifferent - it was impossible to tell.


In his book, Essays of Travel, Robert Louis Stevenson captures the peculiar aspects - for the traveler - of a road:

And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our minds by a road. In real nature, as well as in old landscapes, beneath that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is plunged and saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. Travel is brought home to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in the distance. Sehnsucht—the passion for what is ever beyond—is livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of junction. There is a passionate paragraph in Werther that strikes the very key. ‘When I came hither,’ he writes, ‘how the beautiful valley invited me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top! There the wood—ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain summits—ah, that I might look down from them over the broad country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys! Oh to lose myself among their mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came back without finding aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to surrender our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the rapture of one single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition, when there is changed to here, all is afterwards as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.’ It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods, and overlook from the hill-top the plain beyond it, and wander in the windings of the valleys that are still far in front. The road is already there—we shall not be long behind. It is as if we were marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far before, heard the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some friendly and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long miles of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?

Apostrophes of the Sun

Throughout the long days - thirty-nine in all - of what was optimistically, if erroneously, called a "brownout" that followed a cataclysmic typhoon here in the heart of the Philippine archipelago last November, I had alot of time on my hands and I managed to find great pleasure reading The Stories of John Cheever. Considering all of the marvelous qualities of his writing to celebrate (like his love for words like "probity" or how so many of his characters "lighted a cigarette"), I thought I should devote a post to Cheever's inimitably loving evocations of time and place.

While some claims have been made for Cheever's moralistic side, his confidence in universalities, his faith in what he himself (in his story "The Jewels of the Cabots") called "discernible moral truths," I prefer to think of him as a humanist, a writer who, long before he ever committed a word to paper, had chosen man over God, this world over the next. You can see it, hear it, and almost feel it in his celebration of the sun, the sky, the trees, the rain and snow, the falling leaves, the grass. He once said: "One always knows reading Fitzgerald what time it is, precisely where you are, the kind of country. No writer has ever been so true in placing the scene." Cheever was too modest to admit that he was talking about his own writing. One can sense the turning of the earth in his stories, the exact angle of the sun giving one the time of the year as well as of the day. And he could do it in one or two sentences.

But Cheever was always acutely aware of how his exteriors seemed to mirror the interiors of his characters, how the world in his stories somehow reflected or reinforced the moods of his people. And the way in which Cheever ties memory in with a sudden awareness of the season is one of the ways he gave his people a place all their own in the world.

The following are a few of my favorites.

"Snow lies under the apple trees. We picked very few of the apples, enough for jelly, and now the remaining fruit, withered and golden, lies on the white snow. It seems to be what I expected to see, what I had hoped for, what I remembered. Sanding the driveway with my son, I see, from the top of the hill, the color of the sky and what a paradise it seems to be this morning - the sky sapphire, a show of clouds, the sense of the world in these, its shortest days, as cornered." Oh What a Paradise it Seems

"The afternoon sun was clement and pure, and only the colored shadows made me remember that it was midwinter, that the cruise ships were returning, and that in another week jonquils would be twenty-five cents a bunch." "The Season of Divorce"

"Then it is a summer night, a wonderful summer night. . . . Up on the hill, the ladies say to one another, 'Smell the grass! Smell the trees!'" "O Youth and Beauty!"

"I took the regular train home, looking out of the window at a peaceable landscape and a spring evening, and it seemed to me fishermen and lone bathers and grade-crossing watchmen and sand-lot ball players and lovers unashamed of their sport and the owners of small sailing craft and old men playing pinochle in firehouses were the people who stitched up the big holes in the world that were made by men like me." "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill"

"For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better. That part of their experience that is distinct and separate, the totality of the years before they met, is changed, is redirected toward this moment. They feel they have reached an identical point of intensity, an ecstasy of rightness that they command in every part, and any recollection that occurs to them takes on this final clarity, whether it be a sweep hand on an airport clock, a snow owl, a Chicago railroad station on Christmas Eve, or anchoring a yawl in a strange harbor while all along the stormy coast strangers are blowing their horns for the yacht-club tender, or running a ski trail at that hour when, although the sun is still in the sky, the north face of every mountain lies in the dark." "The Bus to St. James's"

"The peculiar excitement with which the air of the city seems charged after midnight, when its life falls into the hands of watchmen and drunks, had always pleased him. He knew intimately the sounds of the night street: the bus brakes, the remote sirens, and the sound of water turning high in the air - the sound of water turning a mill wheel - the sum, he supposed, of many echoes, although, often as he had heard the sound, he had never decided on its source." "The Pot of Gold"

"It was nice driving home after parties in the snow, I thought. The snow flies into the headlights and made it seem as if we were going a hundred miles an hour. It was nice driving home in the snow after parties." "The Fourth Alarm"

"He walked in his garden at half past three or four. There was a quarter moon, the air was soft and the light vaporous, the clouds formed like a beach and the stars were strewn among them like shells and moraine. Some flower that blooms in July - phlox or nicotiana - had scented the air, and the meaning of the vaporous light had not much changed since he was an adolescent; it now, as it had then, seemed to hold out the opportunities of romantic love." "Marito in Citta"

"It all began on an autumn afternoon - and who, after all these centuries, can describe the fineness of an autumn day? One ought to pretend never to have seen one before, or, to more purpose, that there would never be another like it. The clear and searching sweep of sun on the lawns was like a climax of the year's lights. Leaves were burning somewhere and the smoke smelled, for all its ammoniac acidity, of beginnings. The boundless blue air was stretched over the zenith like the skin of a drum." "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow"

"It had just begun to snow. It was a little while after lunch. What an old fool your mother is but as old as I am I never cease to thrill at the miracle of a snowstorm. I had a lot of work to do but I decided to let it go and stand by the window awhile and watch it snow. The sky was very dark. It was a fine, dry snow and covered everything quickly like a spread of light." "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow"

"It was an evening in the fall. Bellevue Avenue . . . was declining, but it was declining gracefully; its decay was luxuriant, and in the back yeards roses bloomed in profusion, and cardinals sang in the fir trees. A few householders were still raking their lawns. . . . The sun was setting - there was a show of red light at the footof the street." "The Music Teacher"

Omagh

The 2004 Irish/UK film production Omagh is a superior docu-drama. The details of the event portrayed in the film are written in stone: On Saturday August 15, 1998, a beautiful summer morning in an Irish village called Omagh, Northern Ireland, close to the border with the Irish Republic, was interrupted by the detonation of a huge bomb, planted in the trunk of a car which was parked on the main street, known as High Street, in the commercial center of the village, when large numbers of people, including school children, were present. The bombers, members the Real IRA, called the police several minutes prior to the explosion and told them where the bomb was. Taking the warning seriously, police arrived on High Street and began to tape off an area - about one block - and to tell people to leave the area when suddenly the bomb went off, killing 29 people.

After showing us the creation and the placement of the bomb by men of the Real IRA, the film focuses on one family, the Gallaghers - specifically on the father, Michael - who lost Aiden in the explosion. Once he learns of the bomb (and I wonder who could not have heard it in such a small village), Michael goes to the center of town, looking for his son. He finds a friend of his son's in a field hospital but he's unable to tell him anything of what became of Aiden. We see Michael sitting and waiting, until he is brought before a policewoman who asks him for a detailed description of his son's appearance. A short time later, Michael is met by a priest who, we must assume, tells him that his son was blown to pieces.

After the appalling excitement of the opening of Omagh(traveling to a remote farmhouse before dawn, watching, as if from a hiding place, how the bomb is manufactured and prepared, and taking us all the way up to the explosion - all handled brilliantly), the rest of the film deals with the aftermath - the long bureaucratic foot-dragging of the "official" inquiry, the revelations that the British government knew about the bombing and, because of secret dealings with the Real IRA, did nothing to either stop it or warn of it, the failure to prosecute those who did it - which is a part of the story that must've been told, but it bogs the film down from about midway. Even the eventual admission from the government ombudsman, that forms the climax of the film, feels too much like an anti-climax. A title at the end of the film states that "Since 1998 the British and Irish police have made 94 arrests in connection with the Omagh bombing. No one has been convicted."

The personal story of Michael Gallagher, his loss of a son, and the impact on his marriage and on his family is the focus of the story, although we meet others who lost someone in the explosion. This is a common device in such docu-dramas. Think of the Titanic disaster reduced to the fate one insignificant boy, played by the insignificant Leo Di Caprio. It's assumed that the totality of the event can neither be told nor properly comprehended without this narrowing of focus. Unfortunately, it also has a belittling effect - it makes the event seem smaller and considerably less important. In the films United 93 and Captain Phillips, we feel something closer to the full impact of two events of significant size, involving large numbers of people. One took place in the skies over the American Midwest, and the other in the Indian Ocean. I mention these particular films because they were both directed by Paul Greengrass, who also co-produced and co-wrote Omagh. Greengrass is expert at the film treatment of critical moments in history, like the hijack of United flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and the hijacking of the Alabama Mersk tanker ship by Somali pirates. Omagh was directed by Pete Travis, but it looks and feels like every other Paul Greengrass film: the overwhelming emphasis on the nervous, furtive, handheld camera style, the long-lenses that bring sometimes distant backgrounds much closer to figures in the foreground, the use of the camera as a witness to and a participant in the action, the real locations, the natural lighting, the emphasis on an uninflected, unglamorous, unadorned, "documentary" style.

But thematically and structurally, Omagh resembles another film about a moment in the history of the Irish Troubles: In the Name of the Father (1993). That film also centered on an IRA bombing, the bombing of a nightclub in Guildford in 1974. Among the victims of that atrocity were Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong, and and Carole Richardson who became known as the "Guildford Four." In the Name of the Father was about a terrorist attack, but it was also about police and political corruption that put these seven innocent people in jail. Gerry Conlon and Paddy Hill served sixteen years behind bars, until new evidence was found that exonerated them. However, Giuseppe Conlon, father of Gerry, who was arrested later as part of the "Maguire Seven" was never acquitted, since he died in prison. There was a genuine feeling of uplift at the end of In the Name of the Father, regardless of the years of their lives that the accused lost in prison. It wasn't because it was a better-made film, but that it was differently-made. The director, Jim Sheridan, chose to use dramatic devices, like period ('70s) music and much more dramatic acting and staging. Except for the vividly-observed explosion itself, and the carnage and confusion of its immediate aftermath, Omagh avoids dramatic emphasis completely. There are no scenes of outpouring grief, only a few brief shots of men carrying coffins. And there is no music, except for a song under the end credits. If the rest of the film is a little tedious, it's the more truthful for that.     

I am an Irish-American with utterly unsentimental feelings about the Old Country. In fact, I had to turn my back on the subject in the early 1980s when it became obvious to me that there would be no end to the internecine violence that has afflicted Ireland and the six counties of Northern Ireland for centuries. Despite encouraging signs that the people themselves have had enough and genuinely want to end the violence, and there have been some political moves that demonstrate a will to co-exist, I am still not ready to wear a piece of green (to avoid getting pinched) or drink green beer on this day. But I have to admit that watching the early scenes of Omaghput a lump in my throat. Maybe I was disgorging a potato?

My Battle With Drink

St. Patrick's Day is just around the corner. Time to descant on a common weakness. Or is it "decant?"

MY BATTLE WITH DRINK

by P.G. Wodehouse

I could tell my story in two words--the two words "I drank." But I was

not always a drinker. This is the story of my downfall--and of my

rise--for through the influence of a good woman, I have, thank Heaven,

risen from the depths.

The thing stole upon me gradually, as it does upon so many young men.

As a boy, I remember taking a glass of root beer, but it did not grip

me then. I can recall that I even disliked the taste. I was a young

man before temptation really came upon me. My downfall began when I

joined the Yonkers Shorthand and Typewriting College.

It was then that I first made acquaintance with the awful power of

ridicule. They were a hard-living set at college--reckless youths.

They frequented movie palaces. They thought nothing of winding up an

evening with a couple of egg-phosphates and a chocolate fudge. They

laughed at me when I refused to join them. I was only twenty. My

character was undeveloped. I could not endure their scorn. The next

time I was offered a drink I accepted. They were pleased, I remember.

They called me "Good old Plum!" and a good sport and other

complimentary names. I was intoxicated with sudden popularity.

How vividly I can recall that day! The shining counter, the placards

advertising strange mixtures with ice cream as their basis, the busy

men behind the counter, the half-cynical, half-pitying eyes of the

girl in the cage where you bought the soda checks. She had seen so

many happy, healthy boys through that little hole in the wire netting,

so many thoughtless boys all eager for their first soda, clamoring to

set their foot on the primrose path that leads to destruction.

It was an apple marshmallow sundae, I recollect. I dug my spoon into

it with an assumption of gaiety which I was far from feeling. The

first mouthful almost nauseated me. It was like cold hair-oil. But I

stuck to it. I could not break down now. I could not bear to forfeit

the newly-won esteem of my comrades. They were gulping their sundaes

down with the speed and enjoyment of old hands. I set my teeth, and

persevered, and by degrees a strange exhilaration began to steal over

me. I felt that I had burnt my boats and bridges; that I had crossed

the Rubicon. I was reckless. I ordered another round. I was the life

and soul of that party.

The next morning brought remorse. I did not feel well. I had pains,

physical and mental. But I could not go back now. I was too weak to

dispense with my popularity. I was only a boy, and on the previous

evening the captain of the Checkers Club, to whom I looked up with an

almost worshipping reverence, had slapped me on the back and told me

that I was a corker. I felt that nothing could be excessive payment

for such an honor. That night I gave a party at which orange phosphate

flowed like water. It was the turning point.

I had got the habit!

I will pass briefly over the next few years. I continued to sink

deeper and deeper into the slough. I knew all the drugstore clerks in

New York by their first names, and they called me by mine. I no longer

even had to specify the abomination I desired. I simply handed the man

my ten cent check and said: "The usual, Jimmy," and he understood.

At first, considerations of health did not trouble me. I was young and

strong, and my constitution quickly threw off the effects of my

dissipation. Then, gradually, I began to feel worse. I was losing my

grip. I found a difficulty in concentrating my attention on my work. I

had dizzy spells. I became nervous and distrait. Eventually I went to

a doctor. He examined me thoroughly, and shook his head.

"If I am to do you any good," he said, "you must tell me all. You must

hold no secrets from me."

"Doctor," I said, covering my face with my hands, "I am a confirmed

soda-fiend."

He gave me a long lecture and a longer list of instructions. I must

take air and exercise and I must become a total abstainer from sundaes

of all descriptions. I must avoid limeade like the plague, and if

anybody offered me a Bulgarzoon I was to knock him down and shout for

the nearest policeman.

I learned then for the first time what a bitterly hard thing it is for

a man in a large and wicked city to keep from soda when once he has

got the habit. Everything was against me. The old convivial circle

began to shun me. I could not join in their revels and they began to

look on me as a grouch. In the end, I fell, and in one wild orgy undid

all the good of a month's abstinence. I was desperate then. I felt

that nothing could save me, and I might as well give up the struggle.

I drank two pin-ap-o-lades, three grapefruit-olas and an egg-zoolak,

before pausing to take breath.

And then, the next day, I met May, the girl who effected my

reformation. She was a clergyman's daughter who, to support her

widowed mother, had accepted a non-speaking part in a musical comedy

production entitled "Oh Joy! Oh Pep!" Our acquaintance ripened, and

one night I asked her out to supper.

I look on that moment as the happiest of my life. I met her at the

stage door, and conducted her to the nearest soda-fountain. We were

inside and I was buying the checks before she realized where she was,

and I shall never forget her look of mingled pain and horror.

"And I thought you were a live one!" she murmured.

It seemed that she had been looking forward to a little lobster and

champagne. The idea was absolutely new to me. She quickly convinced

me, however, that such was the only refreshment which she would

consider, and she recoiled with unconcealed aversion from my

suggestion of a Mocha Malted and an Eva Tanguay. That night I tasted

wine for the first time, and my reformation began.

It was hard at first, desperately hard. Something inside me was trying

to pull me back to the sundaes for which I craved, but I resisted the

impulse. Always with her divinely sympathetic encouragement, I

gradually acquired a taste for alcohol. And suddenly, one evening,

like a flash it came upon me that I had shaken off the cursed yoke

that held me down: that I never wanted to see the inside of a

drugstore again. Cocktails, at first repellent, have at last become

palatable to me. I drink highballs for breakfast. I am saved.