"That in a person which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness." - Antonio Porchia

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Robert Gallagher is dying of cancer. Ex-sailor and dentist, bald-pated yet bearer of an unrepentant shock of white hair, Robert always had a wicked glint in his eye whenever we met. Only last summer we had picked him up in a quiet village in Leitrim where he had been watching the Lions with Des in one of those tiny pubs where you find three or four generations of a family having pints or soda, and took them up the road back to town, where they walked straight into the local dive bar, no doubt to regale its clientele with tales of capers abroad and digressive insights into human endeavour.

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Coupling damages, even as it supports, when it supports. Coupling occurs when one is struck by the desire for a better life enabled by union, the joining of visions, aims, skills, resources, even hearts, driven (one hopes) by a deep sense of affinity. Eventually, union may lose its necessity, or appears so, usually when you feel stressed out, unsupported by the other. Then you see what union suppresses (individuality, the particularity of vision) or encourages (weak willpower, bad habits). How to be one's own person in a union? Nevertheless any strain is necessary... to know the limits of self... of union.

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This diary is 14 years old this month. Wow.

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