Pain, Beauty And Fragile Little Egos

"How you doin', Dude?"
"Ah, well, you know, strikes and gutters, ups and downs."
- from the brilliant Coen Brothers and "The Big Lebowski"

By Charley Brady

As usual, this was supposed to be a happy column. After all, I had met the divine Anjelica Huston on Sunday and let me tell you, she would cheer up anybody's life. Sweet, unpretentious, gorgeous. I could go on and on. But, sublime as she is I'll have to do this next week.

The rest of the world intrudes.

You know how it is: strikes and gutters, ups and downs.

Look, I hope that I'm not a bad guy. There are things that I love and things that I detest.

I love lying in bed listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony while imagining that Jessica Lange is next to me, and thinking of that great scowling head on Ludwig as he pounded through the rain.

I love bowling and getting drunk after I've hit a few perfect ones.

I love walking in the woods around Renville Village with the wind blasting into me and imagining that I'm Heathcliff, roaring his defiance even against nature.

I like being moved to tears by listening to the whisky-soaked, cigarette-smoking voice of Tom Waites as he sings "Martha", a pure hymn of regret and loss.

I like bugging my editor by going on and on about the things that I like.

I like walking into the Thatch Bar, where you see a glorious sunburst of flowers even before you've actually opened the door.

I like upsetting people of any religion, be they frock-wearing Catholics and Protestants or towel-wearing Muslims.

I like getting emails from far- right lunatics who I would defend to the last for their right to hate me.

I could probably do without being angry all of the time, but that's the way it is. When I see the likes of the monster this week that smirked his way into a miserable sentence after raping an 85-year-old lady, yeah, I'm angry.

How can you not be angry when you see a world that is this messed up?

(Although I have been known to break into songs from "The Sound of Music" if the party is good enough.)

What I don't like is hypocrisy and double-talk.

And what I certainly don't like is what they're doing to a young friend of mine due to their incompetence, bulls*** and downright deception with Fianna Fail's continuing cut-backs and complacency in the face of people actually dying in their hospital wards.

Amanda King of Galway is a beautiful twenty-two-year-old young woman who manages to smile through the pain that she is in, day in and day out.

Just to be in her presence makes me happy (especially as she helps me with all of the laptop mumbo-jumbo that I don't understand).

Yet, after years of wondering what was going on - this is a Third World country in terms of health care, after all - she was finally diagnosed with scoliosis.

For those of you who, like myself, didn't know what this was, it is a terrible condition that means that the more that the spine curves, the more the internal organs are affected.

Beyond lifelong disability it can also lead to death.

And Amanda agrees to speak to me even though she is now on a waiting list that will go on forever. And she's happy.

I am in awe of her nature.

It makes me ashamed of all the small gripes that I have about my own life:

"My money's been cut. I can't afford to take that trip to Florence that I'd promised myself. Boo hoo-hoo, I'm a big spoiled baby."

Talking to her really does make me ashamed of my own trivial woes.

Most of the other young people who are affected in this way have had no option but to hope that their communities will fund-raise for them in order to send them to the States or to Britain.

This is nothing but a national disgrace and our so-called Minister for Health Mary Harney should hang her head in shame and leave immediately.

Apart from anything else she is not a member of a party anymore, so she doesn't even have a mandate to make any damned decisions.

One thing that really tore at my heart was when Amanda said that she had lost faith in her own country.

But who can blame her when we have, on Sunday last, the famous Croke Park being ripped apart by diggers and every blade of grass being torn out because it will be replaced with specially imported grass from Scunthorpe in England as the U2 concerts are there from July 24.

But what Bono wants, Bono gets. Him and that other creep who wears a tea-cosy over his balding head all the time, The Edge.

As one fan who was at the Leinster final between Dublin and Kildare put it: "There will be an awful lot of complaints because Gaelic fans pride themselves on this superb ground and to hear that the sod is shipped in from England infuriates fans.

"People that were at the game were furious after the match. They had just witnessed this epic game and were not even out of Croke Park when the diggers rolled in to get ready for the U2 gig."

I couldn't resist asking 72- year old Mick Fury, who is a lifelong GAA enthusiast last night what he thought of both the GAA and Saint Bono about the decision. His words went along the lines of... oh, forget it. I can't repeat them in a family newspaper.

But I did get the biggest compliment that I ever got or ever expect to get, from him: "For once, Charley, I agree with you."

As for you, Bono, while you have 200 vans a day taking out the turf and spending a fortune to bolster your image just because you're an elevator shoe wearing little egomaniac, who looks as if he has just escaped from Oompa-Loompa Land, remember that the next time you start whining on about Africa and the world debt problem that there are people out of work here also.

And people like Amanda King, who certainly can't afford to go to a private hospital for an operation that is so badly needed.

And to all of you who have shelled out hard shekels to see his concerts, shame on you as well. Maybe you should have sent those shekels to Africa instead.

I'm off tomorrow for five days and while I know that it doesn't compare to the three months paid leave that our politicians are now taking, I'm grateful for them.

By the way, while Amanda waits for her operation, we now have a poll date of October 2 for Lisbon Treaty number two, with the hard-strapped government managing quite easily to find €220,000 to send us little cards telling us that this time we had better vote the right way.

And we wonder why people don't even see the point in voting anymore.

Hope to see you again next week. And as always...

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net