Details can be so vulgar.

There's a strange equality to backpacking. You don't know where anyone lives, how smart they are or what they've done. All you know is what their accent gives away and how well you get on. There's a childlike simplicity to it.

The Dark Side of the Boom

I’m quite stricken recently by the sadness of people about the emigration in Ireland. Mass emigration to me had always been something that happened in the past and that we were glad to be out of. Songs of coffin ships were part of the romantic gloom of history.

When I decided to take a ramble around the planet it was a fairly light hearted decision. You go on the web one night with a credit card and a silly notion, and in 30 minutes you have a visa. Another 25 minutes later you have flights, and all of a sudden you’re giving up a job and flying to another continent.

The goodbyes are where it started to twinge with a sting that comes more from my country’s past than my own. I am perfectly happy to take a wander. It’ll be crap not to see friends, but it’ll be exciting to see this planet of ours. Yet still there’s a lingering, almost genetic sorrow in it, most likely brought on by listening to a lot of Christy Moore songs as a young boy.

Loneliness is a foreign land. When you’re at home you’re defined by your character. How you behave is who you are. When you travel, your identity is your country and if you left it in sorrow you can spend a lifetime of longing under Piccadilly's neon.

Write it, seal it, send it.

My attention span is not what it used to be. These days instead of reading a book, I easily lose an evening meandering the infinite fields of the internet with streamlined software, becoming ever more efficient at consuming vast quantities of vaguely amusing content.

*Scroll* *Click* "heh" *Click* *Scroll* *Scroll*

Looking back, it's a world away from my activities of old; I used read books, listen to albums in their entirety, and when I'd write a song I'd keep rewriting it until it became something complete.

But then of course, that's not really true. I've always been surrounded by albums I've only half listened to. I have drawers full of scraps of paper with a tenth of a song, or a clever line or a thought for a theme scratched onto them.

Maybe, then, it's just the things you finish that you remember. They're the things that write themselves into your life and become a part of you, and give a fullness to your past. And if that's true, that's all that matters. The scatty airy time wasted should be forgone, and in it's place a subject of substance that would stay the unbearable lightness.

The Past and Pending

A lot of people have a morbid fascination with the past. In the modern age where data is cheap, all emails are preserved, facebook preserves your old conversations, and you're constantly reminded of how you once looked and who you once knew.

The obsession permeates into the present. Anywhere something beautiful is happening you're guaranteed to see five cameras pointing at it. People are so preoccupied with preemptive reminiscence they barely realise they were there to see what was in the photo they just took.

A dimension of the hollowness comes from the focus on sight, as if all our perception is wrapped up in this one sense. For me, experiencing a moment is much more than that; there is subtle a feel to a place that can be masked by trying to fit it in a photo; chasing it and trying to hold it for eternity so that it runs away like a spooked animal.

To experience a place I allow it be tied to a time and become lost in the moment, and in that way it becomes part of the eternal wash of the world, mine, and no one's.

The Past and Pending