Who am I?:
My name's Lorcan. I know weird, right?
The true Gaelic spelling is 'Lorccan'.
It means "little fierce one" in English.
Go figure...Where am I?: Ivy Exchange in Dublin City, Republic of IrelandAge
20 years old
Sex: Yes please.
Occupation: Writer.
Aim In Life: Be a burden on society, failing that, a poet-cum-novelist.Most Hated Things: Rude people, bad drivers, spiders and the dark. Favorite Authors: Anything by Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Tibor Fischer, Virginia Woolf, Wei Hui, Bret Easton Ellis, William Nicholson, Milan Kundera, Siri Hustvedt, Franz Kafka and of course the delectable Michael Cunningham, Melissa P, most poetry. Movies: Way too many to mention but if forced to pick a top six I'd say Magnolia, The Grudge (original), The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Postcards From The Edge & Lady Vengence. Music: Anything but country. I love Tori Amos, I like PJ Harvey, Jack Johnson, Imogen Heap, Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, Tricky Blowback, Fiona Apple, Garbage, The Pretenders, and anything else basically. 80's stuff is cool too, The Shins and The Doors rock!.Favorite Person: My boyfriend Matt, my friends Susanne, Jenny and Willim, also Cathy, Jonnz, Gary, Heather, Paul and Kiran and a handful of others! And of course my dog Roxie, not human, but she still counts!
Fav Quote?: "Everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like a sort of chunk out of you. I don' think they realize it, but it's like 'grrr do this, grr do that...' But you do want to stay intact--intact and on two feet." --Marilyin Monroe
"Razors pain you, rivers are damp,
Acid stains you, drugs cause cramp,
Guns aren't lawful, nooses give,
Gas smells awful,
you might aswell live!"
--Dorothy Parker
[BobbyJohn] Meet Beej! Fun, interesting and even has a cast list! Classic.
[Adam] A cute Chicago blogger who's precocious vocabulary is put to good use. Excellent entries which keep you coming back for more. Beautiful grasp of language, I defy you not to be impressed.
[Ginger] Interesting and amusing entries. You'll just want to carry her around in your pocket!
[Mark Wilkinson] A very interesting guy and some very interesting blogs too...refreshing.
[Bryanboy!] A bisexual internet icon who is creative, and hilarious. I love his blog. THIS ROCKS!
[Gloriana] What's not to love?...
[Serena] Sensitive and gentle musings from a deep south singer, with some really cool lyrics. You'll find it really difficult not to love this blog.
[Marky] Some basic downloads here, I'm trying to convince him to start a blog, 'cause he'd be a good blogger, click on and pester him!!
[Chloe] Introspective and talented artist chick. She'll keep you thinking and coming back for more. Like a clingy puppy.
[Paul] Oh what is there to say? I find this hard to stop reading. Criminal! Period.
[Xaos] I like Xaos! Poetic and hypnotic. Xaos is just Xaos, and we wouldn't want it any other way!
[Happy & Gay] Some thought provoking entries here. Make this blog a sure stop.
[Rob] A friend of mine who matriculates at the most famous uni in the country, Trinity. Rob's pretty shy, but funny and ultimately unknowingly charming. Looking for humorous intelligence? It's all here.
Favourite memory?: Probably my first date with Matthew, and also my last night working in the wine store, Jenny, Willim and I went out for drinks and got very drunk. Good memories! And MAN those hotdogs from the street stall were DAMN good!
Near death experience?: A serious suicide attempt.... a few drugs overdoses but nothing too serious *cheeky smile*
Best experience: Eating chocolate. Always. Or a really good orgasm, but it's a close call.
What are you reading at the moment?: "Veronika Decides to Die" by Paulo Coelho. Brilliant, and believe it or not, very uplifting. Recommended!
Excerpt from The Voyage
Lorcan Black
"The moon is high, and white, like the eye of some God peering down at us through some hole in the heavens. The stars are cold and appear as though sprinkled across the stratosphere like sugar, or crystallised salt.
It is the sea that draws me down here. As a child, at night, restless or sleepless I would sneak from the house and come down here. Down where the shells are washed up onto the beach, where odd trinkets slipped or overthrown from passing ships way out on the ocean are offered to us, as sacrifices washed in from the sea.
At night there is a certain calmness, a quietude not found anywhere else. It is known only to those who live by the sea, who know that it is not merely an ocean, it is a being. Great, ancient and to be respected.
I used to sit here, for hours; shoeless, sockless, my feet in the sands. Our rambling old house watching over it, like a mother, perched on a spit of land looking out onto the sea. This old house was so aged that it almost breathed itself, watching out over the sea like a sentry from sunrise through sunset. The back garden runs toward the cliffs, if you hop our wall in the back garden and follow a trail down the hillside to the right, it will lead you to a stretch of beach and it is here that I sit. The sun has already set, I came late and my father and stepmother had already departed for the airport, and I was left alone, as I had wished.
A cool wind blows in off the sea. Waves roll into white surf and fizz on the sand, gurgling and spitting over rocks as the sea drags them back out. I sit there for hours.
As I stand to go in, I am irrepressibly drawn further down to the water, to the white of the surf. The cold washes my feet and dazzles my toes with its coolness. Each new wave that rolls up swashes around my ankles until I can no longer feel any warmth from them.
I think how easy it would be. How peaceful, to be washed away by the sea, caught in it’s own natural dragnet of currents. Washed out to the centre of this great being, to be swallowed up in the spit of some unknown God, washed white and sinless.
It could be so easy, I think, as my toes flirt seductively with the fresh wash of waves rolling in, the hiss on the sand augmented in my ears by the night’s silence. I walk in deeper, deeper still, until I am knee high in the water and it rushes in with the tide, closer, further, up, up, up until I am hip high, tendrils of seaweed tickling at my feet, sinking slightly into the underwater sand as another wave knocks me off balance.
It would be easy. I would wash up somewhere eventually, another beach or a dock, perhaps further out, perhaps upon the rocks of the land spit, home to the lighthouse. There they would find my body, wrapped in sea weed, skin pickled by the salt, and bloated with water. No longer a name, no longer a mind, no longer living… it is just me and the sea, to whom I offer up my penances, and it takes them gladly. The moon watches, the stars wink and somewhere nearer to the village a dog is barking in the on-coming blackness."
©The Voyage*, by Lorcan Black, 2006...
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You Are 72% Evil
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You are very evil. And you're too evil to care.
Those who love you probably also fear you. A lot.
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You Are 87% Sexy
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Your Sex Appeal Is: Off the Charts!
Let's face it... you're one of the sexiest people around. And you don't let anyone forget it.
You're crazy hot, and you deliver on what you promise. You are definitely one wild ride.
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Thursday, June 07, 2007
"If I Build A Wall, A Hundred Feet Tall..."
She's leaving, my best friend. I honestly feel like I'm losing something major, like a limb. A whole limb. What am I going to do? Who am I going to text at three in the morning? I wish I could resolve these problems that are forcing her to go, to run, to find a better way, but I can't and I honestly want to beat the shit out of that dickhead.
So Roz, mo hunni, I know the feeling. I've been there, I know this dark wave, and you can do it. This is for you...
"Extraordinary Machine"
I certainly haven't been shopping for any new shoes
-And-
I certainly haven't been spreading myself around
I still only travel by foot and by foot, it's a slow climb,
But I'm good at being uncomfortable, so
I can't stop changing all the time
I notice that my opponent is always on the go
-And-
Won't go slow, so's not to focus, and I notice
He'll hitch a ride with any guide, as long as
They go fast from whence he came
- But he's no good at being uncomfortable, so
He can't stop staying exactly the same
If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can't help it, the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine
I seem to you to seek a new disaster every day
You deem me due to clean my view and be at peace and lay
I mean to prove I mean to move in my own way, and say,
I've been getting along for long before you came into the play
I am the baby of the family, it happens, so
- Everybody cares and wears the sheeps' clothes
While they chaperone
Curious, you looking down your nose at me, while you appease
- Courteous, to try and help - but let me set your
Mind at ease
(Chorus)
-Do I so worry you, you need to hurry to my side?
-It's very kind
But it's to no avail; I don't want the bail
I promise you, everything will be just fine
If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can't help it, the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine!"
by Fiona Apple.
Why do some customers just point and grunt? Like how am I supposed to know that means Smirnoff Vodka, or Huzzar, or even Grey Goose (assuming they'd pay that much for vodka)? Like would it kill 'em to go the extra breath for a few measly syllables?... Obviously it would....
Maybe I'll just grunt and hand them a bag, see how well that goes down... I swear, are they raised in barns?!
Thursday, May 31, 2007
"Elizabeth said she cried when she saw this movie, but later said that it was terrible. She realized what had happened to her book, which meant so much to her. In hindsight, there really is no way that Prozac Nation could be made into a good movie. It's a collection of her ideas, reflections on events and feelings that come with her everyday life." -some randomer on YouTube.
{About the author Elizabeth Wurtzel's reaction to the movie version of her groundbreaking memoir, "Prozac Nation"}.
My thoughts: I should fucking well hope so. I was close to crying too, it was so awful.
Another excerpt from 'The Voyage', the main character is sitting in front of a fire in an old house with his two closest friends, and after an odd run in with what seemed to be a homeless man in an abandoned hunting lodge, they have returned home, where before the fire, the main character has an extreme panic attack and lapses into an unconscious dream state...
***
"Our conversation returned to speculating on the bizarre old man in the ruined hunting lodge, and little by little my mind began to wander.
I stared into the yellow crackling fire, charring the wood logs as they crackled and burned and I thought about what Ted had said about acting, being what the public expect you to be. I was beginning to feel like I was more fluid than solid. It suddenly seemed to me that we were all just as water, encased in a body. Our souls being nothing more than an invisible but fluid psychic substance. Was I the personality I appeared to be? Or was it just a form I channelled my energies into? Was it just a suit my psyche was comfortable fitting into?
I had trouble thinking about it. When I thought about myself, I thought more about my body. 'I' seemed imaginary, detached from my body. The mind is not physical like the brain, it is not tied to anything, it is a product psychically formed through a group of emotions, experiences, values and memories which seem to come together to define this 'self' people call Jeff, this self that I wear, like a mask.
As I sat there, silently half-listening to their conversation and debate, I began to feel unusual, light-headed. I wondered after a period whether I had fallen asleep and was now dreaming. Was I awake? How could I be sure I was awake?
Kate turned to me and put her hand on my knee.
"Are you alright?" her face, wan and imploring, gazing into mine, her speech seeming to me to be coming through a thick water, the vowels and consonants drawn out and slow. I felt a pressure on my right cheek and realising it was my hand, I had the nervous impression that my face had disappeared, and Kate's staring eyes were looking straight into the concavity in the front of my head where my face used to be.
Kate's words were no longer interpretable, burbling into the air in nonsensical sounds. The air took on a thickness, and the room and everything in it appeared to be in some way artificial, as though if I were to place my hand on the wall, my hand might pass right through it, like submerging it into a gooey treacle-like substance.
I began to grow extremely anxious, and stood up, moving away from the sofa and Ted's chair, further into the middle of the room feeling more light-headed and less dense. I walked toward the wall, and leaned against the bookcases, my back to them, trying to make sense of this dream, this fugue state, this alternate environment I had some how been trapped in. Ted rose and seemed to come toward me in slow motion. I recoiled in horror and stumbled through an air heavy as lead, into the hallway, my hand running along the wall but not feeling it, and I fought to reach the door at the end.
My head spun violently, and the last thing I could make out was a terse, primal scream billowing up out of my body and rising into the air like a fog.
I clasped my eyes shut tight. That was when I disappeared. I felt weightless, I found I could not think, nor hear nor see or speak. I felt only the air. I was no longer physical. I had evaporated entirely and I felt a sort of surreal wave of peace wash over me in this blackness. The wind and rain did not exist here, in this state.
There was a feeling of oneness. 'I' had ceased to be. A voice streamed out thoughts, and the voice said: "This is it now, this is all there is." and then the voice fell silent. A buzz rippled through the blankness, the buzz of the nonentity. A stillness not unlike death, the stillness of non-existence.
This stillness stripped away the fabric of time, present and past; it was all that was left. The entirety of the sensual world had ceased to be.
The voice came back one last time, and the words streamed out into nothingness, it said: "This is the bottom, the abyss, and the end…"
After that, there was nothing, not time or madness, not feeling nor being.
Existence had ceased to exist."
©'The Voyage', Lorcan Black. 2007.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Conspiracy Theory?... Really?...
Watched something on TV about the world's most famous conspiracy theories... the Queen Mother was really a shapeshifting repile, as they all are (in metaphor perhaps) and the Royal Family conspired to murder Diana Princess of Wales and make it look like an accident (okay...good lord, let's not go there! Can... open... worms.... EVERYWHERE!) and crop cirlces are made by aliens from outerspace who are trying to contact us via coded symbols and general ridiculousness like Elvis is still alive, like Marilyn was murdered (when it's been reinvesitaged and assured she died of an accidental overdose), Bill and Hilary are really aliens trying to take over the world... I could go on.
Why not claim Alanis Morissette really is God?!
Some of those things are just plain worrying (in the sense that it worries me what people will believe. Elvis? Alive?...*exasperated sigh*...)
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Arctic
Nothing lies here.
Cold blue-white landscape where
only
ghosts of the old walk,
down snow trails
un-trodden for decades.
Only Scientists who-
Carefully- make their way
over old bones unfound,
frozen, preserved under ice;
Pickled by hard frost, withered
as babies in bell jars.
There is no God here,
in this desolate wasteland,
void of rule, all Wind and Ice.
May 27, 2007. LB.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
"Never going back again,
Crucify myself again..."
~Tori Amos, lyrics to 'Crucify'~
I want shot of the place. All the old ghosts, memories, the old familiar faces rising up from depths I'd rather they'd stayed hidden in. I want nothing to do with it, not more than I have to have all ready. I can't half live here and half live in the city just because of work.
Do you think it's natural to dislike your hometown? I guess it has something to do with the fact that all my worst memories are based here; I think I'd rather live anywhere but here and yet I'm tied to the place, a sort of umbilical tethering me down, one I just can't seem to cut through fast enough. It's nice to see my parents but this place, why in this place of awful haunts and dread phantoms I'd prefer to leave behind?... If I could I'd cut them loose (these phantoms) and throw them to the wind, these dirty, gritty ashes that stick and stick no matter what...
Friday, May 25, 2007
Crystalline Shatters
I am a plate of glass:
one whip of wind and
I blast into a thousand shards,
fractured, little tiny pieces.
My sharp edges are splattered
with masochistic gore.
I am the dual-sided god
forged in a reckless Fire
and I rage like un-fanned flames;
ready to break and destroy,
burning and
murderous.
Electrified as a nervous wire
my roots jitter and creak.
A disquieting sea collects at my feet,
cauterising my nerves to fine red, cinders.
Here are the dust particles
that signalled your leaving.
I keep them in a jar and
all night they howl out to me.
They are a curse, these ratty
atoms of your desertion,
I have lost the lid and they
choke the air with their dryness.
I can hardly breathe. A high tide breaks behind
barren eyes, waking sleeping giants of distress.
Hysterical and flighty I have lain
in the crypt where crouches death,
your noxious gasses cannot quell me.
I am fragile; there is a fine art to these
things, these things waiting to happen,
a glass bomb waiting to explode,
Crystalline Vesuvius!
Through prismatic eyes
my worldview shudders distorted:
the reflection could well shatter me.
My barbed edges are a warning
not to stray too close.
Shinny and attractive,
lacerating you as they sparkle.
Do not touch me:
my glass front is newly mended
and fragile as a new fracture
free from its oppressive plaster.
Here are my glacial crevices,
my splintering cracks,
crystalline shatters.
Published 2005. LB.
Monday, May 21, 2007
I ran into my grandmother's sister the other day, who looks frighteningly like my grandmother Kate, and I went over (because I knew she'd seen me, and though I'm not at all close to her, I felt I just had to, my grandmother was pulling me there, toward her). At first she didn't recognise me and when she did, her face fell and she stopped dead (well not dead, jeez, I'm not that bad). I gave her a gentle hug and a kiss and asked her how she was. Usual shit "Oh I'm all alone up there" (her apartment), what a crock... she's got like five kids and a herd of grandchildren who visit all the time but I let it slide. I walked away feeling shocked (at her likeness) and angry.
Alone? Alone?! That woman doesn't know the meaning of the word. My grandmother suffered alone, she only had us to look after her. Where were her sisters when she needed them most? All eight of them, who she raised and bathed and cooked for when her mother lapsed into senility? Matthew was waiting inside the door of Ivy Exchange and when I stepped into our lobby we took the lift up to the garden, crossed the green expanse to our building and up to the third floor. I stepped into the hallway of the apartment and burst out crying.
Matusko hugged me and I lay down, crying and let it flow, I just let it out and it felt good, it felt refreshing. I never just let myself cry, it's not something I do but I knew it was all right to. My legs just gave in. I remembered that the morning she died, as we left for the hospital, I'd grabbed my iPod and in the car the song that I'd accidentally chosen was Tori Amos' 1000 Oceans. I listened to it then, in the dulled, gold glow of the light through our heavy cream curtains and let the river go.
Roz had a ...well, not 'visit'... but shall we say message from my grandmother, she said she put her hand on my shoulder in the kitchen that evening. I'd spun around to face Matthew but he was on the couch. I was confused but then I understood.
She does it when I need her.
Friday, May 18, 2007
For a Silent Muse
In the light of a classical God you
stand disconsolate against the wall,
a strange Atlas holding it upright.
I can't determine your train of
thought or that certain gleam of
Eye, shinning at me as it does.
Your silence fills the room.
A twitch works itself
uneasily in your strong jaw.
Your worn kneed blue jeans
look sad to me, paradoxed against a white wall.
A wind sighs through an open window
looking, in vain, to be breathed in.
Words have lost all meaning
here but eyes, like axes, shine truths
across this air holding us apart.
This is a limbo, this pale dimension
of bare walls and careful nurses.
Held back tears
blister in your eyes,
your lids red with this strain, yet again.
This pain has no redeeming value
and I have no more use for self-destruction.
Our distance tells me its unspoken portent.
Your footfalls
Echo
maddeningly
down the hall,
Your final jarring walk
to the door.
LB. May 18, 2007.
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