Blood-clot coffee & keeping a son woke-free on my 1 year Substack anniversary

1 year and 150 articles later I am somehow, someway still ploughing along

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I suppose this is an anniversary piece of sorts and so it affords me the opportunity to take a breather from publishing more newsy things. One year ago, give or take a day or two, I first put digital pen to digital paper on this Substack publication. A rough tot of my historic posts reveals that I’ve produced over 150 different pieces of writing in the last year. Some good, some bad and some downright ugly as the aging Clint Eastwood might say.

My most pleasurable scribblings, and the ones I fret over like a clucking hen, are pieces like this one where I draw a little from my day-to-day experiences of life, past and present, and then attempt to thread them through the needle of some current global outrage plucked from this increasingly dystopian world of ours. A world that seems to spit problems out faster than I can write them down. My current preoccupation is both a personal and global issue. World wokefication of my son and our children’s generation as a whole.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the findings in this specific aspect of my journaling would altogether pass muster with a Dr. Fauci or a Health Minister Donnelly definition of rigorous analysis. Although, to be fair, I’m not quite sure either is into actual analysis, scientific or journalistic, when all’s said and done. Just two more political message-makers looking for the biggest platform to whore their pseudo scientific messages and third-wave chauvinism. Now, that’s just an opinion of course.

Now, while there certainly seems to be an appetite for this peculiar form of writing of mine, for sure, it must be said it’s not of the type likely to be featured in a peer-reviewed journal or even in the Journal.ie for that matter. Some of the conclusions drawn might require a more lateral than logical approach to dot connecting. When dots are connected at all.

A genuine problem though is that information hungry readers often don’t have the time to walk down a winding path with me for as long as I might like and often I’m competing for attention with a funny meme or the latest viral sensation from Tik-Tok. So, when random people do dock in here for a quick cup of tea and a read they often only have bandwidth for the basics like a police detective arriving on a crime scene with his notepad:

“ Please Ma’am, just give me nothing but the facts today” - and preferably in as few words as possible. Thank you very much.

However, as this is a kind of birthday post, were going to do a little luxuriating and allow for a sprinkling of self indulgence while in the composition mode. As I relayed at the outset today’s little ditty starts out with my ongoing endeavours to ward off the woke-if-ication of son number one. And from that starting point we’ll see what develops.

Yesterday, I collected said flesh and blood from his workplace. He works part-time doing evening shifts in a hotel in Galway city. In addition, he’s also a first year student in the University College of Wokeness in the same town. Despite my best attempts, miraculously, he’s seems to be a good kid and these midnight drives home are my new favorite time of the day. He’s a bright young fella but full of a lot of the type of global idealism I am more than a little skeptical about and allied to this he seems to possess a worrying and innate trust in the goodness of the state and world around him. And what it can achieve for people.

I try to utilize these drives as an opportunity to challenge some of these ideals but in many ways it’s a bit like revealing to a child the truth about Santa Claus. They’ll only accept the new reality in their own time when an invisible layer of innocence is removed from their life and they see it afresh with new eyes. Often, as with Santa, by the time you break the news, they already know. As you’re second in the queue line behind their own lived experience. This is probably the most frightening aspect of being a parent. Some lessons in life can only be grasped through experience and the destruction of a layer of your child’s innocence and that the chances are very high you won’t be in the vicinity to protect them or assist them at the moment of metamorphosis.

So, it brings me no joy or success really to have these conversations with my son and I can only entertain them by utilizing humour and by depositing an exaggerated and almost ridiculous version of my own beliefs onto the table in regard to the wholesomeness of this global village we all inhabit together. I do this so that he might be nudged into conversation and debate through the sheer outrageousness of my words. I guess my goal is to encourage him to question the world around him while fighting the temptation of foisting too much of my own thinking down on top of his own growing and curious mind. It’s a most difficult urge to beat down particularly with the people you love the most. You want them to learn from your mistakes but understand too that the greatest lessons of your own life were only absorbed through your own missteps.

Sometimes, when we’re both in the mood for a chat, these spins home descend into a wholesome argument about something topical and relevant. Last night, for instance, I made the mistake of enquiring about one of his English lectures. He’d a class earlier in the day on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I read the same novel in the same university a generation earlier. Soon though, my mood darkened as he started chatting away contentedly about not the novel itself but rather the application and understanding of Wuthering Heights through the lens of critical race theory. I don’t remember consuming the novel in this manner as a student but then again I only summoned up the energy to attend a total of about 15 English lectures and tutorials in the entire academic year of 1991/1992. So it’s entirely possible I might have missed something.

For those unaware, the character of Heathcliff is variously described as a moor, dark-skinned and a gypsy throughout the novel. So my son started explaining the benefits of understanding the characters, their interaction with each other, and indeed the author in the context of the background of the accepted mores and biases of the time period in which the book was written. It all seemed to me a little too akin to an almost academic way of apologising for what the characters say in order to make their words acceptable for consumption to young readers eyes in the year 2022. The cynic in me wonders about the bona-fides of any aspect of critical race theory in any form. None of this seems to bother my son in the slightest but nevertheless I tried to steer the conversation back towards the beauty of the writing and the range of feelings and emotions in the characters. However, I got the sense I was losing this conversational tug-of-war and so I put a benign fatherly bookend to this segment of our talk.

“ I swear to god if you come out of that fuckin’ college woke I’ll strangle the life out of you..”

I couldn’t tell whether the subsequent laughter was to do with the fanciful notion that I might defeat this 6 ft 2”, near nineteen year old, in either a physical or intellectual confrontation anymore. Probably both I suspect. We moved onto a conversation about the treatment of Travellers down through the ages. I made the point to him that I had a greater appreciation for a specific aspect of Traveller culture that I didn’t give due respect to pre-covid. Namely, their absolute resolve in protecting the integrity of the tribe and handing the bloodlines over to a new generation. We discussed some of the uglier aspects of this as it pertains to the treatment of women. Then I asked him a question that I don’t know the answer to myself and so wondered if he might apply some of his new, funky and progressive college thinking to it.

If different gypsy or Traveller tribes from here and around Europe were not discriminated by 19th century society what would have happened to their indigenousness? Would they still be recognisable and as strong as a tribe today?

I suppose the question is would multiculturalism inevitably have diluted and all but destroyed the tribe?

Of course, this brought a wave of gut outrage and indignation. Flow of consciousness type stuff and before long I was once more in severe danger of being mentally arm-wrestled to the point of submission on a range of points. I haughtily offered the opinion that we were engaged in an out-of-the-box thinking exercise and that he shouldn’t be shouting at his poor old father. As a peacemaking exercise I sniffly offered to help him out with his cloistered and wokey inside-the-ever-reducing-box of clever thought processes.

“ You’re nearly three weeks in college now - have ya considered trying any hard drugs yet? I’m pretty sure I can get my hands on some LSD or psychedelics from some people in the “enlightened movement”. You should try all this shit while you’re young. You know what I mean like….More drugs less woke…”

Fortunately, this brought more laughter rather than serious consideration ( I hope! ). As an aside, when we are in full bickering mode I start referring to the unvaccinated as “the movement” like we’re the French resistance during the second world war and obviously with the added benefit of better access to illicit narcotics. This talk of “the movement “ - drives him, to use an accepted academic term - Doo-lally.

We switched gears into a favorite topic of mine. Coffee. There’s been a picture circulating on the Telegram groups about Thrombosis Ireland advertising on some of the disposable coffee cups in the Galway University my son attends. Your guess is as good as mine as to why the healthiest cohort of people in the country need to receive warnings about the risks of blood clotting while eating their lunch. So, I enquired of my son if he’d seen any evidence of these cups. My son hadn’t seen them and was skeptical as to whether these cups existed or if they did exist that they came out of his college. So I showed him some peer-reviewed photographic evidence.

I could tell the photo perked his interest. So I decided to see if I could rope him into some clandestine undercover intelligence work for the movement.

“ Look, we have spies everywhere sham. I’m getting intel from all over the movement. Will you see if you can get your hands on one of those cups for me? “

” Yeah, Yeah….”the movement” is it….I’ll look into it tomorrow with my “woke” friends will I? ” he replied a little too sarcastically.

“ Just the empty cup now, Don’t be drinking any of that fuckin’ woke coffee in there son“ - I added helpfully in my best Fox News Dad kind of voice.

This initiated the response I was looking for. A deep sigh. Exaggerated eye-roll. Sad shake of the head. Victory, in other words.

“ Good man, and if you can’t bate away the thirst go down to Naughtons on Quay street and have two or three pints of Guinness for yourself. And don’t be beating yourself up too badly if you miss the odd Emily Bronte lecture either. In the meantime I’ll get cracking on the LSD ”

I don’t mind telling you, it’s a damn near full-time job keeping this child on the straight and narrow.

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Later, as I was stretched on the couch trying to figure out something worthwhile to write to mark this one year anniversary I kept coming back to thinking about our earlier conversation and my own first year in University. All the fun and frolics I was fortunate enough to enjoy but at the same time I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the mistakes too. Markers for the future road I would end up travelling down. I’m thankful my son doesn’t appear to share many of these kinks of nature and I suppose I feel comfortable joking with him to a degree on some of the subject matter above as he’s fully aware that I possess these kinks. There’s a subliminal message of “ Don’t end up like me” in the jokiness which I think he fully grasps.

When I think back to my own English lectures, all those moons ago, and the other three subjects I “studied” in my first year I can see now that I was blessed with luck to get through the year at all. The pass mark in those days on any subject in an Arts degree was a meagre 40%. My first year results read:

Sociology and Politics - 41%

Legal Science - 42%

Economics - 42%

English - 44%

The only reason I remember this set of embarrassing results is due to the fact that if I had received 13% less across those same four subjects I’d have failed all of them. Thirteen is lucky for some I guess. Of course, I took away entirely the incorrect learnings from this episode. I was not inspired by notions of a lucky escape and applying myself harder to my studies at hand but rather comforted that I could just about survive, well enough, by continuing to shuffle over to the college bar in the Quadrangle a lot more often than sprints into the James Hardiman library of a fine autumnal evening. I might well have considered myself a kind of under appreciated master of efficiency. A line of thinking not in any recipe book for high academic achievement. And a harsh lesson I learned much to my chagrin in the same university a couple of years later.

It was the January mid-term sitting of exams. The new gym, which I guess is an old gym now, had just been built and I had just finished my final exam a little before the allotted time and was lounging outside in the corridor smoking a cigerette while waiting for a few friends to finish up so that we could all head into town on the beer. Quite suddenly, two supervisors of the examinations landed out and over beside me. They brought news of a problem with the first exam I had sat about a week earlier. To be precise they revealed they couldn’t find my answer book to that exam. My initial reaction was to enquire why the hell they waited a week to tell me about this problem. The reply was a kind of sheepish explanation that indicated the rationale was that they didn’t want me worrying about it during the course of the rest of my exams. At any rate, they advised I had to go immediately over to visit the lecturer responsible for the subject that involved my missing paper. I was pretty pissed off to say the least. One of the guys lingered and was a smoker too.

“ They didn’t tell you because they’ve been monitoring the rest of your exams to see if you’d try pulling the same stunt again. But you’re in the clear coz you didn’t ”

And by stunt the implication was clear. That I’d purposely taken the answers out of the examination room and destroyed them. Now, I was really mad. So, I hot-tailed it off to meet this lecturer and gave her both barrels before she barely had time to open her mouth. In fairness, she never made the outright accusation herself and soon settled me down. Eventually, she laid out what she was gonna do.

“ I’ve gone through the papers and marked most of them. I am gonna give you the class average as a score on this paper. Would this situation be acceptable to you? ”

The class average was somewhere over 50% and given my addiction for numbers in the 40s it was an outcome I was more than happy to entertain to be totally frank. I left her office delighted and went off to get royally drunk and celebrate.

I woke up groggily the following afternoon in our flat out in Salthill. My bedroom was about as tidy as my mind which is to say it was hard to make out the colour of the carpet given the amount of collateral student damage that was on the floor. Anyway, I got up and took a shower to clear my head and when I re-entered the bedroom I spotted out of the corner of my eye, my then girlfriend’s green fleece lobbed in the corner of the room. I immediately got a sinking feeling deep in my gut when I saw it laying there in a crumpled heap.

The first day of the exams had been sunny, cool and crisp. A typical frosty January morning. However, the days after were even more typical Irish weather. Rain lashing down sideways with Atlantic ocean driven wind. I’d worn the green fleece on the first day of the exams but upgraded to something a little heavier when the weather changed. I’d not looked or thought about the green fleece since I threw it to the ground over a week earlier. I snuck over to it, picked it up and searched the pockets with my hands. “Please God No” I hymned to myself on repeat. But there in the inside pocket I felt the unmistakable bulk and crinkle of paper. I pulled it out and saw my exam paper and inside the folds of the exam paper was the answer book from the examination under the microscope. I sat on the bed and now wanted to puke for more than one reason.

A burning rage rose up in me. As all the casual carelessness, fecklessness, thoughtlessness and inability to focus on exactly what I am when I am doing it caught fire inside me. I cursed aloud the distractedness and day-dreaming ever present in my psychological make-up. I immediately knew if I brought it back now the lecturer would struggle to believe that it was an accident. This was quickly followed by a worry that I might even be kicked out of college or at best the rest of my time would be coloured, rightly or wrongly, by the incident.

I can remember as clear as day sitting down on the edge of that bed with the green fleece laid across my bare knees and lighting a cigerette and deciding to burn the answer book. I started talking to myself. I’d just fucking set it alight and forget about it. It was an accident. You didn’t mean to do it. You’re a hopeless fucking jackass but at least you didn’t mean to do it and besides no one would believe the truth. An internal dialogue that tried to admonish, soothe, advise, and forgive all at the same time.

I smoked another cigerette and then another but couldn’t bring myself to tear the papers up or burn them or doing anything except stare down dumbly at them. Soon, I could feel the tears rolling down my eyes, big angry fucking tears as I discovered I wasn’t able to do what needed to done. The problem in the end was a simple one. I knew I’d always know the truth. And that in itself is a contradiction about me and my life. It’s not like I don’t have deceits about myself that I am well able to live with or things that I have done that I can comfortably allow to be left unsaid. I was surprised, annoyed and almost shocked, to discover this new feature about myself. Often, when I think of these oddities about myself now, in the dark of a sleepless night, I wonder if it would be entirely more peaceful to be either fully moral or fully immoral. Rather than this weird patchwork of something in between.

Anyway, to cut a long mortifying story short, I put on some clothes and stuck on the green fleece once more and trundled into the College with my answer book and resigned myself to the fate of facing some piercing questions. My indignant anger at the implicit accusation of 24 hours earlier now replaced with embarrassment and no little shame. I laid out what had happened as best I could and while the lecturer was outwardly sympathetic I had a sense she wasn’t really buying any of my story. But who would in fairness. I escaped any official censure or discipline so I should be thankful of that I suppose. At any rate, a month later, when the results were posted I received a score of 24 or 25% but in truth I didn’t need to look. I knew my result would include a little punishment beating and that my consistent hovering around a passing mark didn’t have enough fat padded in to withstand any post yuletide trimmings.

So, it was then that my run of inattentively skating by was brought to a shuddering and inglorious halt. But, at the end of the day, I knew I only had myself to blame. As I look back now I suppose I’m glad that I did make that sombre journey back to her office with my paper but also a part of me wishes I just had the balls to burn it and forget about it.

In the aftermath it didn’t exactly inspire in me a fresh zeal to tidy up my act or redouble my efforts to work harder so as to make up for my massive own goal. No, for a long time afterwards I spent most of my time between Taafee’s pub on Shop street and Mulhollands bookie office down on Cross street. Certainly a helluva lot more in both than visiting any lectures on campus.

Consumed by a memory too painful to burn and too hurtful to learn from.

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