The Hook (1st)

Thank you for your attention.  Attention is indeed the commodity of our time, so, in the name of not wasting yours I will try my best to get to the point.  As the title suggests I am shamelessly trying to hook you.  My aim is that one day your attention will be the commodity I can use to get by in this beautiful and savage chaotic order we call the world.  But in this fickle era of likes, clicks and cowardly trolls the onus is on me to provide something that reaches all the way down and tickles the nethers of that questing mind of yours.  So lets get to the hard sell.

So what have I got to offer you?  Well, I’m sick of travel blogs, no, not exactly, what irks me is the milky, white-breaded backpacker who interrails and hostel sleeps his way through a few months and without scratching the surface – “and by the way aren’t tins of coke in Venice just extortion,” – proclaims unbound wisdom of the open road.  And lets be clear.  I have no problems with anyone, the world and your life is yours to do with as you wish and I fully applaud anyone who pushes the envelope to adventure til it breaks or even only gets a little soggy.  I just think I can go deeper than a few Parisian street side cafe selfies and a grey scale account of, “we went there and we did that. Oh what fun.”

I want to make a complete picture and cram it through your eyes and into your brain til your heart bursts.  My story isn’t all wondrous freedom and immaculate sunsets.  Seven years is longer than most and shorter than many to be free wheeling your way around Europe’s gutters and undercurrents.  Now, my story is not one of unrelenting hardship, far far from it, and to say or imply any different would be an injustice to the multitudes I have met whom bare-knuckle-box with some of life’s most sinister evils.  No, my story ascends to stary nights of tranquil tear welling beauty only to descend (understandably rapidly) to near death, bone shattering cliff fall.  It meanders through rose tinted balmy Spring meadows of love all the way to sepia beard freezing times of heartbreak.  The word travel lost its meaning for me, I was simply living.

This blog is not just an attempt to engage with you in a bid (possibly a doomed one at that) to begin a life as a writer.  It’s a way for me to share in the story of life.  However small my contribution to that infinitely grand narrative may be.  It’s a way to relive and reevaluate the remarkably, I would say, blessed, story of my life.  I’m thirty three now, still a pup.  I live in a wagon in a field in Germany and it is by far the most settled this Irish man has ever felt.  It is time for a recounting and in the telling reignite the wick of  dusty memory.  And from the lofty heights of this, new, settled, fieldlife, gain and more importantly share, dare I say it, a speck of wisdom.

That’s it.  All I got.  So if this is the rabbit hole for you, strap in and stay tuned. If not feel free and enjoy where ever that RSI destined index finger brings you next.