I feel as if I have awoken from a deep sleep.
For the first time in 18 months, I have found new music that moves me.
It’s like I have been buried underground, listening to the worms and centipedes all this time.
Suddenly, I’m receptive to new tunes, it seems the gloom has passed.
Ladies and gentlemen: Jesca Hoop.
What do you do when you read a tweet purporting to be a suicide note? Do you take it seriously? Do you wonder if perhaps it’s some form of creative musing? Do you DO anything?
That was my dilemma this morning, when I started reading tweets posted from within 1km radius of my location.
There is was “Personal Post: Suicide”.
My problem was, the damn thing was in the Spanish language, linking via bit.ly to a blogpost, and while I have a decent grasp of Spanish, I wouldn’t pick up on nuances suggesting it was a gag the same way as I would in English.
“27 Minutes Ago,” it said beside the tweet. I’m too late now anyway, I thought, trying to give myself comfort.
He wrote, “this is the end of the road”; “soon I’ll lose consciousness”; “I’ve just taken 146 pills”; “I’m lying on my sofa, waiting for this to happen”; “goodbye life, goodbye world”.
Great. What do I do? Phone the police? And tell them what? “No, I don’t know the guy, nor even his name”; “No, I don’t know exactly where he is”. “Yes, yes, I read this on Twitter, what’s Twitter? Oh, well, Twitter is…”
And all this in Spanish you realise, because this is happening in Barcelona. So I phone a Spanish-speaking friend to parse the blog post, the language, to assess the gravity of it. “Too busy, sorry,” she replied. I felt like a fool trying to explain the thing to her. She must think I’m mad. Shite!
What now? Check Twitter again, see if he’s still tweeting… nothing… nothing for the last 35 minutes.
Do I look-up the whois on the domain name on which the blog resides to get a phone number; do I tweet back to ask “Um, are you still alive?”; do I contact his followers; or perhaps I SHOULD call the police.
Then, suddenly, signs of life, 40 minutes after his suicide-post, he tweets again, he’s still alive, it’s nothing related, it’s a retweet, boring in its absolute normality.
What DO you do?
–
Here’s his Twitter - “Post Personal: El Suicido” (February 3rd around 10am GMT). It’s an odd time to commit suicide, I thought.
Fourteen months to the day since my last post, but I’ve been paying the domain name and hosting charges, so we’re still here. I’ve been drawn to writing of late, so perhaps you’ll see me here more often.
In the meantime, what really spurred me into action today - recovering my forgotten username/password and so on - is the launch of my new site Dublin Rocks, which attempts to list upcoming gigs and concerts in Dublin, Ireland, it’s something of a challenge, but I’ll give it my best shot, nearly 2000 events on there right now. I invite you to visit, and give me your feedback.Until later.
I was testing Google’s Gaudi application today, which allows searchers to find words buried in the audio channel of videos they watch.Being Irish, I decided to search the word “Ireland” and was intrigued to find Obama, Larry King, Rudy Guiliani and John Edwards all speaking about Ireland recently… except they weren’t, they were speaking about “Iowa”. Why? Well, it seems Gaudi needs a little more tweaking, when the word/name “Iowa” is spoken, it thinks it’s hearing “Ireland”. Shame. And I thought we were suddenly popular!
… publish those intentions, for even if you doubt you can complete it, other people’s expectations will make you do so.
So. I’m on my first week of marathon training. I’ve never run, or trained, in my life.
I intend to run the New York Marathon in late 2009.
Below, taken July 31st, my running-companion, personal-trainer, and myself - the day we received our training schedule. First run-out took place on August 4th.
I was at a free bar on Friday night, American Apparel have opened a new shop in BCN, so they threw a night.
Every two-bit mod in the city was out - they’re so not used to free booze here - so due to the queue at the bar - it took so long to get to the bar, I only got one solitary beer all night! And if you’re wondering why I didn’t ask for something a bit stronger than a beer on that occasion, well, when I got there they reported that they had no clean glasses - I nearly said gimme a dirty one then - but anyways - tis a handy way to control free drink, with no available glasses.
… hard to believe. Quite bloody frightening. More here.
I was in Berlin at the weekend, and I picked up a copy of “Der Tagesspiegel”, a broadsheet struggling to communicate the message “Ireland” and “No”, visually. They did it in the following way:
Click for full view.