CC25: The Owl Triangle

multiloquent

quidnunc

idolum

My eyes were startled into catching Kate the librarian having sharp words with someone at her counter.  I saw you trying it last time, she was saying.  You can't rip pages out of the books.  I didn't, said the man.  Oh, you didn't, but I caught ya in the early stages of the crime.  Kate had a hard authoritative way that belied the smiley loveliness of your fundamental association with her.  The man she was giving out to was the fat pigeon racer.  I'd known him since I was young as he lived in the same area as me growing up.  I'd always see him out in the field behind our house racing his fat pigeons.  They were pigeons that were so fat they could barely even fly and their aeronautics suggested cooked Christmas turkeys being yo-yo'ed in the air.  When they were released, thrusting themselves forth and bobbing up and down clumsily, trying their best to get into racing formation, there would always be a bunch of crows perched nearby watching them and hacking up crow-style laughter.  I think the fat pigeon racer was an uncle of Emer's friend, Carol.  They were related in some way anyway.  She had mentioned him before.  Said he was a bit of a quidnunc in the family.  Couldn't keep his mouth shut, nosing around in extended family business, and always spreading talk about who was seeing who like a comedy granny.  He was a stocky man with an out of control grey moustache that was like a large dead winter rat glued to his upper lip.  Whenever I saw him, I always thought of a display of old slippers shelved in a charity shop, for some reason I will not bother to investigate.  Although he loved his fat pigeons, he had a peculiar obsession with owls.  He was a regular in the library and I always spotted him looking at pictures of owls and walking around with owl books tucked under his arms.  And, though Kate hadn't actually seen him do it, I'd noticed him once tearing a full page out of an Ireland's Own magazine.  On the pilfered page, a picture of a green barn owl dribbling a not-snoring mouse from its gob.  He went Ssh to me when he saw me there.  I hoped it was all important work for the government he was doing.

I went back to the e-mail and tried to figure out if I was going fucking nuts or something.  If it was really Da McNamee, why the hell was he contacting me as though I was on old sparring partner or something?  I'll say this, I didn't find his new writing all that inspiring at all.  I preferred it when he was just writing on walls.

Well. 

It was obviously some fuckin joker who must have got wind of my interest and was taking the piss.  Go ahead, I declared to the internet.  Deliver your thin idolum and waste what pitiful time you have if that's all you can be arsed with.

Or if it is the real Da McNamee.  Great.  Nice to hear from you, mate.

There were no other e-mails.  I was as popular on the internet as I was in real life.  This rank of aloner had not really affected me before.  Always quite happy with just a few people in my acquaintance.  There was no need for so many friends.  Too many friends led to too many forced and obligated future apologies and higher odds of more knives heading your back's way than Caesar's.  Best to keep it limited to just a few who you only see every once in a while and me, I'd survived with only one or two to satisfy my social hunger and they'd done  just fine up until now.  Well, up until a few months ago, when Emer and I parted ways, that is.  The internet's social snares had nearly passed me by and this had been a source of great comfort as it was a celebration of the anti-social misanthropy I'd bathed in for years.  But with Emer gone, the misanthropy took on an uglier form.  I no longer had something in my life to level these tendencies.  Emer was like a brace I wore when we went out into the community sphere.  She made me feel secure and  fairly operative as a public manifestation.  On November 16th, the night of our fated battle inside and outside of McManus's pub, I'd actually quietly took pleasure in the fact that I was not like the others, not like Paidi and his crowd, not like the random cliques scattered about, but, and this was slightly unnerving to acknowledge, I was also glad of the fact that I was not exactly John Carroll either, not a complete outcast among those around me.  I had a wife.  And she was popular.  So I didn't have to be a well-liked individual.  I'd been able to continue being myself with her, steadied by her sturdy support.

She used to try to hook me onto the social media things all the time.  I realised after a while that it wasn't for my well-being in the modern world, or for her genuine interest in how I might contribute creatively to this new practice, or even out of an excuse for less real world contact (which I'd suspected all along as we were married in the dawn of the age of clicking and shit when you're living together you tend to look on any break from your significant other as a tiny rapture).  But no.  It was simply because she was obsessed with the whole internet thing and just wanted another contact on her web page.  Her husband.  A friend.  Contact.  I was destined to be merely a link on her social media from the moment of 'I do' until death did us part.

But I knew myself that it wasn't for me.  I was a mouth.  Mouths are not accepted easily.  Even those of us with charm enough to convince an ear to listen and love, deep down in that receptive ear, there is a loathing.  In the brain, talking to myself, I'm Oscar Wilde, or Martin Luther King , but in the world outside of that, I'm crude, hard, and loudmouthed.  No elegance at work.  Wasn't always such, I should say.  When I was younger, I found it hard to begin a sentence, and even harder to finish the sentence if I'd mustered the brevity to begin one in the first place.  But then one day I was born all of a sudden.  A nasty egg cracked when struck with the correct blow, and out flowed a horrible juice.  I became a man of multiloquence, and have been ever since, so I knew I would just get into trouble with all that online claptrapping.

'I don't know any of those people anymore.'

'It's not like you have to talk to them every day.'

'Why bother with it then?'

'It's a good way to keep in touch with the world.'

'What world?'

(BEEP)

'This fucking world. (angrily checking a text message she has just received) What other world would I be talking about?'

'Well, I don't know.  It's the internet, isn't it?'

'Nobody says the internet anymore, ya knob.  (laughing to herself)  We just say the name of the site or the app or whatever.  If we're being general, we might say the net or the web or online.  Jesus.'

'I'll try to remember those terms.'

I did and I didn't.  I'm not a complete gobshite. 

So here I am.  Online.  Surfing the apps.  On the sites.  No choice anymore.  Emer's absence draws me closer to a world that appears even more removed than my usual.

Well.

Ah fuck this self-pity nonsense.  I did enough of it at home on my tod.  Why bring it kicking and screaming into my civic day?  I looked around for Kate the librarian.  But she was gone.  Probably on her lunch.  It was about that time, right enough.  I got up to leave.  The fat pigeon racer was in a corner ripping the shit out of an owl encyclopedia like a demon on the loose.  He looked up and Ssh'ed me as I passed.

A poster on the notice board caught my attention as I was leaving the library.  It was for a gig in the Spirit Store.  It pulled me to it because my friend Bao had invited me to go to that very show, but I'd forgotten all about it like the dozy prick I was.  Society had been knocking on my door, after all.  The show was by a British folk band called Three Angles.  Like a triangle.  Except they were called Three Angles.  Though they had a triangle on the poster.  'Imagine Pentangle with two less members' read one of the magazine write-ups.