Triple-Take

 I've frequently noted this "triple-take" in my own mind, including this morning:

1) Reading about some other time or place, before I was born, and finding myself yearning for the idyll I have constructed around it. In this case (although I've never really been a proud Dubliner) it was an ill-defined idyll of old Dublin life, the sort I would glimpse when I heard people talking about "the rare auld times": images of barefoot children playing hopscotch and chanting rhymes, streets without billboards or engine fumes, thick Dublin accents, "porter running from the taps with a head of yellowed cream", broad Dublin salt-of-the-earth accents, a general atmosphere of piety, shabby gentility, patriotism, etc.

(It could, of course, just as well be some other idyll attached to some other time and place.)

2) The painful realization that it wasn't like that...that people back then also made stupid, smutty jokes (as I frequently have), that there was just as much small talk, that people craved excitement and novelty and convenience and garishness, that the washerwoman would have preferred a washing machine (who can blame her?) and the kids playing hop-scotch would have dropped it for video games at the speed of light.

3) The sudden, momentarily overwhelming urge to at least-- as far as I can-- live my life as purged of banality as much as possible, even to the point of caricature and becoming an object of ridicule. Much as I love jokes and comedy, I have very frequently felt the sudden urge to become completely humourless, as a a sort of counter-weight to all the tedious and depressing buffoonery around us.

Of course, this "overwhelming urge" has quickly passed on every occasion...