Catch-21
Like a Catch-22, just short of people being so stupid as to make two concomitant impossibilities require each other, but with the same metaphysical charlie-horse.
As many of you may know, I was married recently. Leaving that aside for the moment, or perhaps forever, it then became necessary for me to obtain a copy of the marriage records. In the early 2000s, the Irish government set up an independent website for the Office of the Registrar by which you can order birth, death, and marriage certificates, as a way of expediting the previously lengthy mail-order process. Due to Covid-19, certificates.ie is currently operating at a backlog of 11,000 certificate orders, and is averaging at a pace of 30 business days per order. (As a side note, I learned this information immediately after being informed that the wait for processing times of Stamp 4 applications, which used to be immediate on attendance at an appointment and had been hovering at 8 weeks, had just been reduced to 2 - 3 weeks upon receipt of application. I received this information while on hold with the department of the registrar, who answered the phone to tell me about the backlog so quickly I could swear her bureaucratic spidey-senses told her that someone out there was feeling optimistic.) Anyway she tells me that there is an 11,000 document backlog on certificates.ie and that I’d have my document much quicker if I ordered it by post. Not owning a printer, like most millenials, I set off on the 40 minute walk to the home of my only friend that does. I filled out the form while kneeling in the street in front of her door and took it to the post office, where a portly small business owner was trying to chat up an unwilling teller by talking relentlessly about his own personality and another, too-willing teller was trying to chat up a pair of indie rockers on what seemed to be a weekly trip to ship out band merch to overseas fans. The whole scene felt very normal, which, of course, felt extremely weird.
Walking back along the North Circular Road, I ran into two friends that I hadn’t seen since the wedding, which wasn’t surprising, since it was only three days before. M works for an internet and phone provider, and just that day had been dealing with an ongoing situation involving a landowner and 30,000 unsuspecting neighbours. The 30,000 unsuspecting neighbours (including, one would assume, the landowner) have been suffering from poor internet (or cell service more likely) throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The only way to solve this is by putting a tower on - you guessed it - the land owned by the guy I have only identified as The Landowner. Phil O’TheField has, in the way of all canny landowners, cottoned on to his bargaining power in this arrangement and has asked the company for an exorbitant sum. Which leaves us in an interesting position, as listeners; who are we rooting for? If the struggle is between the landowner and a large corporation, your obvious radical recourse is to say, “fuck them both.” But that’s too easy, and it’s also not how conversations work - a nuanced politic seldom lends itself appropriately to the work of pea-hen shock-and-awe that makes gossip fun. Intuitively, Phil O’TheField versus the Mighty Dublin Corporation presents us with a nice picture - Phil, in his canvas smock, on a field of sheep. Surely the Might Dubs don’t need all that money! But, fine country man though he is, Phil is a landowner, and thus the optics belie a murky class situation. What’s more, he’s fucking over 30,000 of his finest country neighbours! We end up back at the earlier conclusion of our good politics - it’s all fucked. This, as noted, does not make for very good gossip. I head home through the Phoenix Park.
The next morning I took another walk through the War Memorial Gardens on the phone to a friend. As I was unintentionally harassed off the path by a precarious biker, a swan minced in from the Liffey to harass me offsides for a bit of bread, which I didn’t have, because bread stops me up, and also because I’d finished my pain au chocolat on the way there. I relayed my registration woes, as well as the phone provider story, to my friend, S, who lives in Glasgow. And I guess, in the immortal words of Smashmouth, the years start coming, and they don’t stop coming. By which I mean, S told me a similar story, set in Glasgow - it seems a large portion of the residents of a certain suburban area of Glasgow have been suffering from poor cell service throughout the duration of the pandemic. Same problem, same solution, only this time, the plot of land on which there would need to be a cell phone tower is publicly owned. The way I hear it, there are an equal number of complaints from constituents of the affected area - it would seem that the same number of people would be outrage by the placement of the tower as are outraged at the lack of service in the area. Colloquially, reports seem to suggest that almost every affected member of the populace feels both ways, equally strongly. But - I get it. Fuck the cell phone towers, and also fuck anything keeping me from going about my life in the way that the new structures of being alive on the planet demand. Additionally - fuck consistency! It’s not my job!
But… it’s got to be someone’s? Hasn’t it?
Eventually that swan did leave me alone, but not before fixing me with a particularly accusative stare. And like, was he being an asshole? Yes. But he was right, kind of. I’d had bread that morning, kind of, and I ate it all for myself, kind of, like an asshole. And who cares if bread is bad for swans! He saw me for the asshole we all are.
It was a beautiful morning, though. The sun rose over the Liffey, making it glow between the Phoenix Park and the War Memorial Gardens like a ribbon of caramel between two sablé biscuits, and S told me about the breakfast they were cooking - silky collard greens under a crackly fried egg - and it was all, in the end, crumbly and weeping and ugly delicious.
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I guess that’s all we deserve! More to come soon I think, I hope, I want you to want