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Morning rituals
May. 6th, 2006 10:57 amI feel something of a traitor to my own kind.
Deprived of the keyboard so often lately, I turn myself to books and then am in fact reluctant to return to the keyboard when my chance does occur, because the books have so effortlessly reabsorbed my attention that I am accosted by guilt for ever having temporarily abandoned them in favor of a computer screen. Were I actively writing, there would be no guilt, but I hardly count the memes of a pseudo-leper as a creative act. But I have digressed greatly from my original thought, to which I shall now return by an ambling route that may serve as some explanation for what inspires me to feel traitorous.
In seeking something else to read, I happened to pick up one of Rey's books; The last volume of Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt. It's a delightful work, full of rambling little essays that require little preface and are small gems in their own right. Wandering through this just shortly after having skimmed a volume of Dave Barry, I find myself forming an unintentional alliance with and longing for the other side of the Atlantic, from whence I come. I mean no slight to Mr. Barry, perhaps it is a matter of purely ethnocentric perception, but American humour seems to me a more forced affair; the language services the joke, rather than the other way around. Mr. Adams writing has an elegance and honesty that seem more subtle and effortless when contrasted with a work of American humour. Mr. Barry is a thoroughly entertaining person, but I cannot help but worry that he was not inspired to polish his craft of writing purely do to the environment in which it was learned.
I have digressed again; I do not consider myself a good writer, and in anything close to an essay format I am prone to ramble at great length and with little purpose. My condition is currently exacerbated by several nights insomnia and a rather alarming event involving cars going round a track for hours on end, which is currently taking place some ten miles away and which I am still able to hear, despite the headphones which are feeding me Indigo Girls. Miles. Hm. I truly have gone native, which brings me slowly around to my original point. There was, in Adams book, a short and very straightforward essay on the proper making of tea. He explained the process quite simply with a teabag, which is in and of itself something of a blasphemy, which he admitted. There was a very honest admission that very few British know how to make a proper cup of tea in the modern age, either. The admission does not console me while I sip two-minute Irish Breakfast tea out from the microwave. For many long years I did not make tea at all, and thought little of it. I am not British, I am Irish by birth and proud of it, however much my history and accent might lead one to make an erroneous conclusion. Being Irish is hardly an excuse for not making proper tea, and I am fairly well-versed in the art, but what I meant by that is that for some years I subsisted on an admittedly somewhat toxic diet of coffee and scotch. I felt no guilt about this, save for the guilt involved in my descent into alcoholism, which is another story entirely. Some years later I am consistently sober, and to assuage the damage done by a few years of coffee, scotch, and constant stress I have found myself a frequent tea drinker. This only serves to underscore my accent in some people's eyes, and I find myself longing for that rich and dangerous cup of coffee, if not for the additional caffiene then simply to abolish the faulty image I seem to project of a mild-mannered aging British man. I have a tattoo, a temper, the kidneys of someone else. I do not wish to be seen as some raging drunken Irishman with a sordid past, either, but even that is in some ways preferable to the other mistake. I am an expatriot, and a legal American, and I came from an area where British politics were always viewed with the kind of wary suspicion that waits for it to come knocking on your own door in the night so you can bash it's head in. I am not British.
I have spent more time in England than anywhere else in the world, and confronted with an attack on Britain from anywhere in the world save my own homeland I will take up the cry of defense with great loyalty and even a strength of predjudice against 'the enemy' that I always find alarming in retrospect. It is in this fashion that I can feel myself a traitor to an art that originated in a country that is not even, in many of my thoughts, my own. I am well aware of my status as an emmigrant, and it is not for nothing that I have my origins in the land of the Catholics.
I shall sit here, and drink my microwaved, teabagged Irish Breakfast tea, and fret.
Deprived of the keyboard so often lately, I turn myself to books and then am in fact reluctant to return to the keyboard when my chance does occur, because the books have so effortlessly reabsorbed my attention that I am accosted by guilt for ever having temporarily abandoned them in favor of a computer screen. Were I actively writing, there would be no guilt, but I hardly count the memes of a pseudo-leper as a creative act. But I have digressed greatly from my original thought, to which I shall now return by an ambling route that may serve as some explanation for what inspires me to feel traitorous.
In seeking something else to read, I happened to pick up one of Rey's books; The last volume of Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt. It's a delightful work, full of rambling little essays that require little preface and are small gems in their own right. Wandering through this just shortly after having skimmed a volume of Dave Barry, I find myself forming an unintentional alliance with and longing for the other side of the Atlantic, from whence I come. I mean no slight to Mr. Barry, perhaps it is a matter of purely ethnocentric perception, but American humour seems to me a more forced affair; the language services the joke, rather than the other way around. Mr. Adams writing has an elegance and honesty that seem more subtle and effortless when contrasted with a work of American humour. Mr. Barry is a thoroughly entertaining person, but I cannot help but worry that he was not inspired to polish his craft of writing purely do to the environment in which it was learned.
I have digressed again; I do not consider myself a good writer, and in anything close to an essay format I am prone to ramble at great length and with little purpose. My condition is currently exacerbated by several nights insomnia and a rather alarming event involving cars going round a track for hours on end, which is currently taking place some ten miles away and which I am still able to hear, despite the headphones which are feeding me Indigo Girls. Miles. Hm. I truly have gone native, which brings me slowly around to my original point. There was, in Adams book, a short and very straightforward essay on the proper making of tea. He explained the process quite simply with a teabag, which is in and of itself something of a blasphemy, which he admitted. There was a very honest admission that very few British know how to make a proper cup of tea in the modern age, either. The admission does not console me while I sip two-minute Irish Breakfast tea out from the microwave. For many long years I did not make tea at all, and thought little of it. I am not British, I am Irish by birth and proud of it, however much my history and accent might lead one to make an erroneous conclusion. Being Irish is hardly an excuse for not making proper tea, and I am fairly well-versed in the art, but what I meant by that is that for some years I subsisted on an admittedly somewhat toxic diet of coffee and scotch. I felt no guilt about this, save for the guilt involved in my descent into alcoholism, which is another story entirely. Some years later I am consistently sober, and to assuage the damage done by a few years of coffee, scotch, and constant stress I have found myself a frequent tea drinker. This only serves to underscore my accent in some people's eyes, and I find myself longing for that rich and dangerous cup of coffee, if not for the additional caffiene then simply to abolish the faulty image I seem to project of a mild-mannered aging British man. I have a tattoo, a temper, the kidneys of someone else. I do not wish to be seen as some raging drunken Irishman with a sordid past, either, but even that is in some ways preferable to the other mistake. I am an expatriot, and a legal American, and I came from an area where British politics were always viewed with the kind of wary suspicion that waits for it to come knocking on your own door in the night so you can bash it's head in. I am not British.
I have spent more time in England than anywhere else in the world, and confronted with an attack on Britain from anywhere in the world save my own homeland I will take up the cry of defense with great loyalty and even a strength of predjudice against 'the enemy' that I always find alarming in retrospect. It is in this fashion that I can feel myself a traitor to an art that originated in a country that is not even, in many of my thoughts, my own. I am well aware of my status as an emmigrant, and it is not for nothing that I have my origins in the land of the Catholics.
I shall sit here, and drink my microwaved, teabagged Irish Breakfast tea, and fret.
