Quare Thinking

 1964

Why is there always a shitty underpants at a lake?
Why do teenagers have to scream hello for so long when they are only coming back from the jacks?
How do fags always light in films on the first go?
Why is my smear  nurse called Dora the Explorer?
Why does she bother to leave the room when I undress?
She is going to see me naked anyway.
Actually worse than naked -  half naked with socks on.
Socks made your nudiness nudier I find.  
Why did I not answer my penpal for 24 years?
Whose leg do you have to hump to get an armchair  around here?
Why is my cervix tucked under?
WHAT is it tucked under -  if you wouldn’t be shouting?
Why are the pipes connected to breathing and swallowing so close, and will I choke to death if I take a Sanatogen alone in my  kitchen?
In the song Yankee Doodle is he calling the pony, the hat or the feather Macaroni?
Does a dentist take out his own tooth?
Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?
What do people in China call the good plates?

Shellbombelle

Who do I think I am?
Why am I stored as Mad Michelle on everyone’s phone?
 I know this because everytime someone has to check my number the jig is up.
 Apart from the giant in the book shop who has me stored as Michelle Brackets Crazy.
He has an excuse in that his wife is called Michelle, but you get my drift.
Mad Michelle?
Is that what it comes down to?
Mad Michelle.
I suppose it is madness to operate from the perspective I do, and only last week I wrote a line with an eyepencil across a napkin that said my brain is hardwired wrong.
Things that would traumatise other individuals are like water off a ducks back and things that others would not notice leave me bereft and distraught.
My thinking is all quare.
I remember as a small child walking home from my Nana’s house down Johns Road to the Square.
It was Christmas and there was a frosty fog on the darkening streets, the lamps lit in every window, and I hurried in my coat and bonnet past Traynors.
A blind man is tap tap tapping his way with a cane up Johns Gate Street.
I know he is blind as not only does he have black glasses and a white stick, but he has a partially sighted wife who links him by the elbow. Tonight he is alone, and I walk on the opposite path, watching in amazement as he negotiates the broken pavement and holds on to the walls, the stick held out in front like a beacon, the bells ringing in Rowe Street  Church for evening Mass.
I hung back to watch him, and to listen quietly to the other sound I can hear, under the bells.
It is the blind man softly whistling. The blind man is whistling, I think.  And then I realise what it is.
I walked home crying.
That night in my bed I thought of it again.
I think of it still, in my bed,  40 years later.
Children remember everything.
 The only part of one’s life that is not impacted on by ones childhood IS childhood.
From that moment I knew that life was unbearably sad and beautiful at the same time.

 1974

A big country man at the strawberry fair nudged my Mother and said –
“She’s a fine lump of a child” and I never forgot that either, and began to believe that I was as big as a bishop and looked like the elephant mans ugly sister, refusing to be photographed and running wild and amok. In school I thought they were joking when they were  deadly serious and vice versa.
Things were either ridiculously easy, or just ridiculous, and I hid in wardrobes, danced across desks and went on the hop for the crack, forever being hauled in to be given down the banks or threatened with expulsion on any given day.
Recently I was given some old photographs by an older friend and saw the face of the young Michelle on holidays. By my present condition, I am positively skeletal, and smiling unsurely into the camera hating my teeth. God help me, but now when I am 3 times the size and with teeth like Agrajag from coffee and fags, am photographed about 20 times a day - 19 of them by myself.

 1984



As humans we need to be loved and minded, we are creatures of the light, and so it was to Spain and it’s bright golden light I took myself off to, leaving the rolling ship with the spectacular seascapes and the beloobas crew, and lay like Mama Cass by the side of a pool I could only walk around in, eating Cornettos by day and drinking Sangria by night and contemplating the whole messy business of living and dying and breathing in and out in the interim. Of course a woman can’t be left alone to contemplate her life over coffee cups and books in deckchairs without a hundred ex –pats with mahogany tans and t-bars coming to her rescue. 

And so I found myself being taken to Chinese restaurants and English markets with a pair of Scottish Lesbian Prison Officers who called me hen and fought about me nightly when they were full of drink and a  Lothario from Liverpool who was operating a lucrative cut and shut business with ringers, and who drove me into Torreiéja in 4 different cars in a week.
 I was still a year away from a seachange in my life and so I decided to  fly home and do a course in psychology and read myself into awareness.
And learn how to meditate – properly.
And float.
“You can’t learn all that stuff out of books" says my Father, when I advise the man who had our house geopathically stress tested when I was a teenager,
(sitting stubbornly in the chair half under the stairs when he was advised to move because of negative leylines  this  man who is learning in his 80’s to be mindful and present and aware himself)
 that Doctors are not always right, and to stop googling symptoms and watching horrific videos  of earwax being syringed on his tablet.
Of course the doctor is right he will say, sure didn’t he train?
He learned it out of books I will pronounce and flounce out the door.
I also advise about alternative treatments for persistent conditions, giving him tissue salts and Bach flower remedies for arthritic pain or insomnia, advising acupuncture from the Skin and Blister –
let me stick a few needles in you says she to me in the car home under the purple sky –
You’ve needled me enough I reply huffily drawing my cardigan around me and she laughs saying
that’s Liver Chi – repressed anger.
What I discovered in the last 50 years was this -
Nobody gives a shite about what you are doing, wearing or thinking as they are all too busy worrying about their own selves.
All of us carry a black balloon of thought above our heads, and sometimes the balloons bounce off yours, and sometimes the strings get knotted together, sometimes they join, sometimes they bounce away again.
It all depends on how you react to the moment.
What I discovered was this.
Geography has decided your name, and your religion –
You had NO choice about where or when you were born nor to whom, or when, or what you would be called - but you can choose what you believe in THIS  moment.

1994

You CAN control your thoughts if you try and not just pretend it is your age, or geography that has made you the way you are, you are not going to read the same issue of a newspaper every day of your life, and you cannot keep doing the same thing over and over and hope for a different result.
Miracles happen.
When we are born we are given a name and a basket and what we put into that basket defines who we are. We put all the good and ALL the bad into the basket, and in case we lose or forget the awful things we take them out and admire them and compare our baskets to everyone elses, and check to see that ours is worse and bigger than all the other baskets. We tell anyone who will listen how terrible and outrageous our baskets are all the time.
And then we expect miracles.
You can sit around waiting for your life to unfold like somebody queueing in Argos waiting for their number to be called.
You can say yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, all your life, working your balls off to pay for bricks and then spending those bricks on the place where you go to lie down at the end of it.
Or you can live a life.

2004

What would you tell your teenage self I was asked recently.
My first response was she wouldn’t listen and my second was to tell her she was beautiful and capable and amazing and that her life is miraculous,  that she is alive and spinning on a dot at 12,000 miles an hour, on a planet  the size of a grain of sand in the Sahara, and that she doesn’t have to think terrible things as they are wrong.
They are only something she thought ONCE and now believes.
Everything you believe about anything is only a thought you had once.
That she is not a body with a soul inside it, but that she is an eternal soul walking around in a body.
I would tell her that she should not react personally to anything another says or does as they are only bobbing their black balloon at her  and showing her their basket.
You thinks too much hun said a handsome man to me one night.
I think quare things.
Descartes was wrong.
I’m pink therefore I’m spam.
I try to be mindful and present and aware and I try to learn, as the more I learn, the more I find out I don’t know.
I have only been meditating for 22 years.
I learned to float in the last year of a 7 year cycle – seven sevens is 49 and 7 is my lucky number,  and I lay back in the clear glassy water, feeling the tension of the knotted cords in my neck, lying further and further back, feeling the water wet my hair and then finally, listening to the voice beside me saying
 “Trust, trust the Universe you believe supports you”   finally took both hands off the firm sand,  stretched them out tentatively and floated.
I’m doing it I shouted and felt a tear slide down my face into my ear.

2014

Parmahansa Yogananda in his seminal Autobigography of a Yogi  recalls a meeting with his deceased Guru Sri Yuketeswar who had appeared to him and told him that the other place  is so beautiful, so amazing, so filled with light and peace, so  filled with colour and a  love so huge  it would take the eye out of your head.
He also described the earth as resembling a tiny basket suspended under a giant hot air balloon.
But what do I know, I’m only Mad Michelle. 
PS. The blind man was whistling was “Joy to the World”

Portrait of Michelle Dooley Mahon Courtesy of Jackie Edwards Art 

MDM October 22nd 2014