On the Friday Eve of the two day music festival known as Oxegen, Jimlad and Curly Dee were fashionably prepared: 2 tinned rice puddings, 2 tinned scotch broths, 2 tinned stews, 3 tinned beans, 2 tinned curries, lots of parboiled rice, 1 jar coffee (fair-trade), camping pots, 2 plastic mugs, 2 plastic plates, 4 packets of crisps, 3.5 large packets of peanuts, 1 large packet of cashew nuts, 1 packet of pistachio nuts, 6 small packets of popcorn, 1 large packet of marshmallows, 2 packets of biscuits, 1 jar chocolate spread, 1 jar peanut butter, sleeping bags, airbed, torch with siren and flashy lights in case of emergency, torch, mini torch, 12 plastic bottles of cheap beer (no glass allowed), 6 cans of beer, 8 cans of stout, a little water, a bag of light clothes, coats for the rain, toiletry, tent already set up by Curly Dee’s brother, tickets 4 miles down the road, all done by 00:30. Perfect. Except, ah yes, 0 camping stoves, 0 bread and obviously, 0 cop-on. So we drove and got the tickets and drove to Punchestown with most of our food rendered almost useless, hoping that we could survive on peanuts and beer. If not, cold tinned Lidl stew would taste good to a pair of starved cadavers. Anything would taste good when you were starved, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t? Eugh. Thankfully it didn’t get to that, but I’ll never be able to look a peanut in the face again. Mind you, I could never look them in the face before, since obviously they don’t have a face for me to look them in. I did bring myself to eat some of the food they sold at the event, and survived. €7.50 was only a small part of the price I paid for daring to try that tiny pasty tray of “pasta carbonara” they sold at one of the stalls. I won’t do that again.

We got to our destination at 3:00am in the morning to be told that actually, we couldn’t get in without the car parking permit that they sold at the Ticketmasters stall, which was shut, so we would have to go home and come back tomorrow morning. But the guard on duty let us in anyway, being an understanding sort of man. As soon as we parked the car we knew it was going to be a weekend to remember. The loud conversation of passers by appeared to be an attempt to say the stupidest things that came to “mind”. I have observed this sociological behaviour before, but on a much smaller scale. It was amazing to watch this time. You see, there were so many drunk people that everyone had a chance to realise, subconsciously, that the drunk people seemed to do stupid things and get laughed at, and then PRAISED for bringing happiness to so many, and then everyone would say of the very drunkest, who always seems to be called Cooney, “Cooney’s a legend” and everyone decides, “Cooney’s a Hero”. And deep down, everybody wants to be a hero, so even in the improbable event that one isn’t drunk one does exactly the sort of stupid thing Cooney only does because he’s too drunk to do anything else. But one can’t quite measure up to Cooney’s actions so maybe a little more drink will help, and soon everybody is drunk except for the snobbish aloof observers, and me and Curly Dee. Does anyone know, is Cooney a second name or just a nickname that people give to some guy from some place of whom the only predictable thing is that they will consume large amounts of alcohol? Is there a Cooney family somewhere that carefully breeds these legends?

The first thing that happened when I got out of the car was a young fellow (Not Cooney. HE was fighting someone with his jumper somewhere in one of the campsites over a personal dispute. The dispute was personal only to Cooney. The other guy didn’t have a clue why he was being attacked other than that it was Cooney. What a Hero. There were probably more Cooneys out there. Maybe they knew the reason.) who detached himself from the crowd and, drawn to my philosophical aura couldn’t help but ask me that ageless question, “Have you got any boppers”. Of course the answer changes with context but in this universe the answer happened to be, “No.” at that time. Curly Dee then entered into the mood of things with another question,
“Do you know where campsite A is?”
This provoked a thoughtful pause, and Curly Dee offered a little more information,
“I think it’s near the main stage”.
There followed a few hesitant starts to sentences until the proper form of words was found, and then,
“I don’t know, but I’D imagine that the main stage is the one with the most lights, so if you head towards the place with the most lights you should find your way. And, I don’t know about you, but I’d say…” the finger wandered vaguely for a few seconds before resting decisively on one brightly lit area (which later turned out to be exactly where the main stage was, proving the cognitive ability of our newfound companion) “it’s over there”.

Having successfully answered our question, it was our companion’s turn. “Where are my f***ing friends gone? Have you seen my friends?” We hadn’t seen them and couldn’t answer the former question, but since he had asked two in a row the game of philosophy was ruined. Had we lost? Should we continue? Besides, he hadn’t answered our true question. Where was our campsite? But where were his friends? Seeing that we were useless to each other, we parted company.

Eventually we discovered that the campsite was half an hour away and headed there with some of our beer and popcorn. We walked through the mass of tents to reach our own, almost missing it because of its easily overlooked nature. We then discovered that Curly Dee’s brother had spilled beer inside our tent, which looked a little bet down, but we fixed it up and put our airbed inside. Unfortunately it turned out that the airbed had two holes and only one stopper so it became a mat. That was ok. The main thing is that we could fit the bed into the tent, as it was easily overlooked in nature. Here is a picture to demonstrate this fact. See the tent on the left? That’s someone else’s. Our tent is the one with the red curly haired girl “in” it, laughing.

She’s laughing at this,

followed by this,

(just checking he’s still alive)

Nobody seems to know this man. He was just walking through our area when he fell down, possibly on account of not being able to see. It had been noticed that his pupils were the size of pin-holes which would surely have made seeing a little difficult. Eventually some security guards came and took him away, having been alerted by some genuine humans (probably girls). We never saw him again. But anyway, the tent was supposed to be a two man tent but it turned out that three people fit in it. Curly Dee’s brother came in during the night for some reason, asking could he sleep in it. As I was asleep myself, (we had decided to come down on Friday to make the most of the weekend but since we arrived at our tent at about 4:00am after having about 4 hours sleep the night before (party) we were too tired for fun) my instinctive sarcasm rose up before my brain could tune in and said, “Sure, why not just cuddle up between me and Curly Dee (my wife) here”. So he did, being drunk of course. My sarcasm always gets me into trouble with drunk people. At least we knew him, unlike the people in his own tent who thought that they were sleeping beside him until daylight revealed someone else, a complete stranger who simply wandered off again in the morning to get lost in the vast crowd of tents.

Having had such a wonderful night’s sleep we just had to have more in the morning, and we missed all of the less interesting/unknown bands. The sky was like this:

And this is Curly Dee smiling to show how much FUN we are having:

But we plucked up the courage to brace the weather for the big bands. I was looking forward to taking these next photos. I remember reaching into my pocket in the satisfactory anticipation of getting a chance to use my latest toy, the digital camera, for something a little more momentous than worthless photos like those above. I knew these next photos would have value because I didn’t need to pay through the nose to see stupid people, but musical superstars were another story, a better story. My hand groped greedily for the shot I could show off to my friends, groped desperately. Changed pockets. Patted my coat, my trousers. Sent a signal up to my mind, waited. Waited. Waited, received a signal, check the car. The car, of course. Out of reach. Need legs. Tell mind we need legs. Mind sends a messenger down to legs. Legs turn body. Eyes! A message from eyes. It says: Can’t see stage. Mind calls a meeting between hands and eyes. A compromise is reached. We will get the camera tomorrow. Hands will produce an alternative for today’s concert, worth exactly what we have lost. A picture is worth exactly one thousand words so here you go. One thousand words each for every picture I wanted to show you.

Very good.

To be continued…

Well, now that I’ve grabbed your attention, I may as well tell you this has nothing to do with facebook. But wait, don’t go now. I’ve given my brain the evening off!

(that means you can have fun here, on this page)

Not that I care if you like being here. I’m way beyond that sort of thing (insecurity). I realised it today, when reading a message on gmail, sent by Facebook (maybe this is a bit about facebook). You see, I used to have to hang out with people. Then email solved that inconvenience. Then there was facebook, which some people complained wasn’t as good as email because it encouraged you to gain more friends and then it told you how they were doing. But you don’t hear people complaining about facebook these days, and that’s because now you can go all combo on its rump: Friends – > Facebook – > Gmail – > Gmail Filter – > Me . And don’t even get me started on Me – > When I feel like it – > Spam facebook – > Friends again! Sometimes I miss the days of Me < – > Friends, but then I remember how insecure I was then.

So I thought it was all going really well. I even made Facebook translate itself into Irish so that it became Friends – > Facebook – > Irish – > Gmail – > Gmail Filter – > Me. But consider the situation where someone gets an email telling them about a party that happens in Bealtaine, then go to themselves, “Bealtaine, that’s May, but this is April, maybe Bealtaine is April. But then what’s May?” but OUT LOUD they say to themselves, “Bealtaine, that’s April”. Then they think, “But the 8th of April has passed. How stupid. I only got that email today.” Then they think, “What’s Aibrean?”. I’m saying, if they thought that, then they’d realise Bealtaine was May.

(by the way, I didn’t actually give my brain the night off, but I will the next time and it will be hilarious!)

So what’s the point? The point is they SAID it was April first, but they THOUGHT it was May first, but now that they’ve said the wrong one out loud, if someone had been there they would have been like, “Ha Ha” in their heads. I probably wouldn’t have been sure if they didn’t laugh out loud but that’s probably what they would have been thinking.

But I’m just letting you know I knew it was May first. I didn’t really think it was April.

A hotel bar in Zurich, a conversation, an atheist banker and his colleague, me. He was surprise at my faith, he said, considering my reputed intelligence. I didn’t say much; just that intellectually I didn’t really know, yet didn’t think certain knowledge of a creator was possible for a creature anyway, though faith found itself welcome in my philosophy regardless and that I also wanted to believe (The mention of either my ability or inability to think has the uncanny knack of derailing my thoughts). Conversation changed, and lead to my dreams (I would love to be a writer) and lead back to my writers’ inspiration, my faith. He pointed out that although he agreed with me that it wasn’t possible to prove God’s existence, it would make for a much more interesting book if I could somehow arrange for the protagonist do so. It wasn’t until weeks later, on a tiny plane headed for Luxembourg, bored, that I seriously thought about how I might approach it.

And then it came to me – the proof! I couldn’t believe how simple it was, how no one had ever followed what seemed to me at the time to be the most obvious line of thought, following from the idea that there is either existence or non-existence, from there through Godel to show the necessity of an omniscient being, then considering that the Prime Mover of Aristotle must necessarily be combined with the omniscient being to become omnipotent, and finally noting that omnipresence follows easily from the other two.

But the question of why no one had thought of it until now troubled me. Was there a conspiracy to keep the proof from people? It was so simple that surely everyone should be aware of it. What if I wasn’t the first person to think of it? The thought of a spiritual conspiracy began growing larger in my head, as simultaneously I remembered I was thousands of feet above the ground, with only a few feet of plastic unconnected to the ground by anything other than what made up the remaining thousands of feet – air. A happy thought – What if everybody who some unknown, malevolent spiritual entities couldn’t distract enough met an unpleasant end before they managed to awaken the world to the proof? But what of the others on the plane? They didn’t deserve to be caught up in this – unless that is, if by (only apparent) coincidence their thoughts were also converging on the proof of God. Somehow we’d all been conveniently placed on the same plane!

But then it turned out to be complete arse, so the plane didn’t crash.

A little neuron that had up until now been spinning around with a bunch of its friends trying to see what all the fuss was about, but couldn’t get a word in to ask – suddenly managed to grab my attention. “Hello, Jim lad” it said. “Would you mind explaining? I don’t really understand.” (Of course, not all my thoughts are brilliant). Apparently this one has been wandering around going down every logical avenue to try and see what is going on, and it still couldn’t make the connection! It’s probably one of those dull, uninspired neurons that I try to discourage because they’re just so boring.

“Well you see” I began…

“No” it said, “I don’t.”

“Yes, but if you listen you’ll know. Aagh, I’m too frustrated to think now!” (These boring thoughts always have a habit of making it so hard to think.)

“Right. So there’s either existence or non-existence, ok? And not everything in existence can be logically derived from the rest of existence, cos of what Godel says. So the bits that can’t be derived must come from somewhere else, but they can’t come from non-existence because, well, it doesn’t exist. Apply Godel’s theorem to anything other than absolutely everything that exists, and obviously the bits that don’t fit in the system could be derived from somewhere else. But in this case, there’s nowhere else to derive them from.”

“”

“But you’re still not really using anything more than Godel – no stoke of added genius – just applying it to all existence. And you already know that’s silly. If you’d proven that everything actually had to be derived then you wouldn’t even need Godel’s theorem in the first place.”

“Oh yeah. I knew that already. But for a moment there it seemed… sigh … anyway come to think of it, who says the choice is only between existence or non-existence? What about potential existence? After all, probability isn’t just the result of chaos. It’s just as fundamental as causality is at the quantum mechanical level, at least from what we can see now.”

“Mm, I can see where you’re coming from. That would have been a much cleverer argument against what you were saying. But you’re still clearly an idiot since it took a no-brainer to prove you wrong” said one of the neuron’s friends.

“No. Just a trick of the mind. The same thing wouldn’t have happened on the way from Zurich”

“Why not?”

“Well it didn’t, did it (for starters)? And they didn’t give me free wine on the other flight. It’s quite possibly Luxair’s fault. It was only one glass, but taken at a high altitude perhaps it did something to my sense just at the moment I tried to use it. You see?”

And the neuron thought it was possible, and didn’t have the knowledge to decide on how probable that idea was, so being a regulatory type rather than an imaginative, creative, active type, it allowed for the possibility that I wasn’t an idiot.

I mused on.

“It seems Godel simply allows for the existence of truths that cannot be proven, like that a God could be real. But that doesn’t actually prove he’s real.”

And the little neuron agreed that God might exist, and continued to live with my faith, since all it cared about was that I didn’t believe a definite falsehood. Besides, it had found divine inspiration to be fundamentally useful, and modern thoughts are all aware of evolution and how they should hold on to agreeable qualities.

But an evolved feature only becomes advantageous after it actually pops into existence. Or, if you like, a potentially existent object only shows itself to be agreeable to existent objects when it becomes actually existent. Yet if an existent being doesn’t have any part in its own creation, how can it prove it was created in the first place? All it can do is to follow its nature, as though there actually is some authority behind it. And maybe there is, but sometimes one’s nature is wrong, so maybe there isn’t. Or maybe there’re both, but only the good can be an authority over existence since saying something is bad is the same as saying it isn’t agreeable to the rest of existence.

But then, a fundamental paradox is that to agree with the rest of nature you invariably end up having to stop trying to force nature to agree with your survival, and that can be disagreeable to one formed by the natural laws of evolution. Unless either you have no sense of moral outrage against pain and death, or you’re reconciled to something or someone who is greater than nature itself, meaning this is the second false dichotomy in the space of one blog-post and I really have to stop babbling before I’m found out.