Sticky little explanatory post

Head Rambles Posted on by 17

Here is a small sticky post for new visitors, or visitors who haven’t visited in a while. You might notice that the writing style here has changed and that deserves explanation.

This site is now a legacy site left by the legendary Grandad who died on the 7th May 2025. His spirit lingers, and you might catch a faint waft of pipe smoke every now and then for no reason, but this is the new normal. I wouldn’t even be at all surprised if he leaves an occasional comment in some form or another.

Rather than let Headrambles stagnate, it’s now being occupied by his daughter. My name is Kate, and I’m pleased you’re here whether you’re a long time lingerer or a first time reader.

Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl.

 

Existential flourishing

Head Rambles Posted on by  

I enjoy my job a lot, caring for vulnerable people is frustrating and rewarding in equal measures. It’s REAL, you know? I worked in offices and shops for years, cleaned windows and drove taxis, there’s a lot under my belt. But this is one of the first jobs I’ve had where all filters are off, knickers are down and masks are removed. There’s nothing to hide when you’re somebody who needs a carer to help you with your activities of daily living.

There’s a thing that happens to a lot of people when they reach the stage of life when they’re no longer feeling useful to anyone. They can’t work, there are no children to look after, independent living suddenly becomes challenging because mobility is difficult, they feel as though there’s no longer any point in living and begin the process of dealing with just existing.

I don’t know how to explain to them that they have inherent value that doesn’t depend on external things to determine their worth, and that they deserve to love themselves for a change. It’s very hard to hold a mirror up and show them that perspective. There are still things yet to be done.

There’s a story in there, maybe. One of those fish-out-of-water life swap stories. Usually they’re written from the point of view of a father and son, or a mother and daughter… people who are both able-bodied and have the capability of independent living. Wouldn’t it be interesting to swap an 80 year old man with his 5 year old grandson?

Small children don’t question their self-worth much. They just explore and push boundaries. I wonder what that would feel like in an aching body with pressure sores. Would the 80 year old mind feel overwhelmed in such a young body with such an enormous sense of potential?

I know 40 year olds who have this same sense of existential vacuum and even remember feeling it myself. Somebody told me it was a form of passive suicide, this slip into addictive behaviour to cover up those meaningless days and sensations of pointlessness. It wasn’t a nice place to be, so I can’t judge it negatively in others.

I just wish I could help.

Please, if you can relate to this feeling and are able to talk about it I’d love to hear your point of view. Have you found a way out of it, or a way to cope within it?

 

The Fear

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

I’m sorry. I haven’t written on this page for a long time. I’ve had The Fear. This looks like many things:

1. Every time I open up dad’s laptop I’m instantly overwhelmed by 500 new messages, some of which are screaming about hacking attempts or accounts running out of juice or accounts threatening to be shut down due to inactivity. Sometimes, the messages are from people who haven’t realised that dad isn’t around anymore which is a painful thing to reply to. So, every time I boot this thing up I wind up frowning at the screen for an hour and not getting the thing done that I wanted to do in the first place.

2. Apathy. Sometimes I overthink things so much that they begin to weigh on me and become a much bigger problem than they need to be. The longer I wait to do the thing grows in direct proportion to the amount of dread and sadness that becomes associated with it.

3. Old people. Carers need holidays, of which a lot of them took. That left me and a few other carers on the broker end of the scale of life behind to do extra work. I enjoyed this though! I got to meet people I wouldn’t ordinarily have, got to hear their stories and admire their life scars. It made time fly, it was hard to guess what day it was from one to the next. It didn’t leave much time for writing, though.

4. Brain buffering. Sometimes it’s hard to think about things to write about. Sometimes it’s hard to think. Sometimes it’s as though there’s a little circle of dots moving around in circles in my brain, burning out its motor trying to process all the things that need to be done. I’m having weird dreams, none of them worth writing about. My brain is trying very hard to defragment itself but all the little coloured blocks keep falling out of my ear.

5. I miss dad, the conversations we’d have this time of year about cyclamen, and the days getting shorter. I’d tease him about Christmas drawing closer. I’m not sure if it’s a sadness or an emptiness that I feel. Opening his laptop or his phone triggers it, so I tend to avoid doing these things. I suppose this is the path that grieving takes but I can’t imagine it ever getting easier.

6. The tired. Always sleepy, searching apathy or escape. Pushing through that feeling is a reward in itself and wading through think gloopy mud is good exercise for the calf muscles but it would be nice if it could go away for a while.

Thank you for your patience. I can’t promise to do better but I’d like to.

 

A rehab story

Head Rambles Posted on by 5

Everything in the smoking room was brown. Everything from the walls, to the sticky floor,  to the public health information poster on the wall (which was pretty much illegible from all the brown), to the glass of the barred window which never opened.

We shared that room in various stages of our alcohol withdrawal, some of us grounded and locked down for the first week of our incarceration in case we take notions to wander out in the grounds and have ourselves a seizure, or make a run for it and aim for the nearest pub.

There was one week however, when everybody was locked down. It was during the autumn season of ’17 and a massive and violent storm had erupted with power-cuts threatened so they wouldn’t let us outside to smoke or wander in fresh air to break the monotony of sobriety. We were all stuck inside together, jonesing and shaking, probably smoking a lot more than we normally would do.

I’d rolled up a few cigarettes and was perched on the bench in that smoking room, not wanting to spark up yet another one, but not wanting to leave the company of my ragged friends. We took bets as to what the colour of the walls behind the public health poster would be, played word games, made up dirty limericks… then I spotted the air vent.

The screws were loose on the vent when I poked at them, so I pulled them out and lifted the sticky brown grille off. Behind it, inside the vent tunnel, was years and years worth of sticky brown fluff and gunge. I felt around in there gingerly, and… YES!!

There was a baggie.

Inside the little brown baggie were little brown pills.

Everybody in the room grew quite excited, and I’m sure were all thinking the same thing.

The most hardened alcoholic among us took the baggie out of my hand, opened it and pulled out the pills to see if he could identify them.

“Do you dare me?!” he asked, with a big grin on his face.

“Um, NO!” we all replied in unison, but secretly all probably hoped he wouldn’t listen.

He did not listen. He left three pills in the baggie which he stashed in his pocket, and swallowed the remaining two. ‘They taste like a hobo’s arse’ he told us, before wandering off back to his room to enjoy the buzz, or whatever there was to come for the mad bastard.

He didn’t die. He went very quiet for a while, then followed this up with a brief phase of intense paranoia, then about a week later he disappeared never to be seen again. Nobody knew if he checked himself out, or finished his rehab term, or wandered off into a forest to have himself a seizure.

This was a pity, if he’d stuck around longer, he’d have found the little bag of cocaine hidden inside the guitar in the entertainment room.

 

Hot Politics

Head Rambles Posted on by 7

Is it just an Irish thing to feel a little bit resentful when someone tells you they’re going, or have just been on holidays? I don’t get to go away very often but when I do it’s entirely deserved but there’s this feeling of guilt and shame about it if I wind up telling someone about it.

I feel this especially with elderly people who are stuck in their homes, between the same four walls day in day out with no way of escape without the assistance of a kind family member or a local club of some sort. They don’t complain about it much, so I’m not about to rub my freedom into their faces.

I got lucky though, I really did. My cousin works as a professional warrior for human rights and gets to travel the world organising protests and attending seminars, she frequently asks me to join her. I usually tell her that I can’t due to work and family responsibilities but this time she was quite insistent, and booked the flights before telling me I was going.

So, at the weekend I found myself in Seville. Summer in Spain is no joke, especially in Seville which got nicknamed ‘The Frying Pan of Europe’. No kidding. At its peak, while I was wandering around the districts I saw a billboard outside a pharmacy declare the temperature to be 45 degrees Celsius. I drank three or four litres of water a day but only pee’d once. Sitting down in the shade became problematic because lone tourists attract beggars and chancers, so I had to keep moving. I covered about 10km a day exploring the place in all its historic glory.

K8 in front of an impressively architected building

The first day, I had local beggars chasing me down for business but by day three I was brown enough that Spanish women would mumble complaints about the price of the fruit beside me in supermarkets thinking I was one of them. At least I think that’s what they were saying. They could have been KGB for all I know. I was just happy to blend in.

On the final evening, it was declared that I would join a protest with my cousin and some other equally powerfully spirited people. Entry into the world that evening was like opening an oven door, the sweat began to bead on my forehead instantly, and after fifteen minutes my heart began to race making my brain giddy. A permanent river ran down my back as I held the banner, but the energy of the crowd drowned out any discomfort and a woman with a knapsack tank sprayed us all down periodically.

It was fantastic. Such passion and gusto for the protest was highly infectious and before long I heard myself shouting along..

“END FLOWERY FAXES!”

… for I am not very good with politics and wasn’t entirely sure what I was angry about.

I used to think that protesting was quite pointless. Fat cats aren’t going to pay attention to them, it’s just a whole lot of noise to create awareness I thought. Now I realise that even if they aren’t effective at face value, they’re effective at holding a line and preventing things from going backwards. I sensed a fragility at the truth, a fighting fatigue. Some of these people had been fighting for decades not really getting anywhere. I learned very quickly to shut my mouth and listen to what they had to say but all I really learned was that the spirit of the people at events like these are shatterproof, and my respect goes out to them for what that’s worth.

I’m not a protester by nature but I can see now that it’s not futility I sensed before, but shame. Self resentment for not fighting for important things maybe. Bad things will always happen around me and I can’t change them, but if enough of me shouts about it, maybe there’ll be a tipping point.

I’m curious to hear if anyone out there reading is a protester, how did you first begin, and do you get the fatigue? What keeps you shouting about the flowery faxes?