Patsy’s paradise…

The Irish countryside… I fell in love with it the second I got there… the stark emptiness… the trees.. the open fields… words cannot do justice to the images flashing in my wee head…
There I was sitting on the back seat of my friend’s car driving through Belfast.. the land of Bono… IRA… and Guinness… yes I was in Ireland.. and I was off to meet Patsy the Pirate.

Well Patsy wasn’t really a pirate.. but I imagined him as one( my imagination is quite warped).. Now who really was Patsy?.. well Patsy is someone I would love to be in 30 years from now… I had been graciously invited over to his wee den for an evening of music.. tea and weed. A heady mix don’t you think?

As I stood at his door … I really didn’t know what to expect.. I frankly just had weed on my mind… I hadn’t smoked up for the longest time.. and I really needed to free my head.. my thoughts.. I was at the lowest ebb of my fruitless existence(mid life crisis).. and really I all I needed was that liberation.. that unadulterated freedom…

The door opened ever so slowly and lo behold…..he stood in front of me in all his glory.. Patsy… a man I can never forget… dressed in a loose black shirt with his hair combed back… nervously I entered his wee den.. his paradise…and what lay in front of my eyes was nothing short of a pirates den.

His lill chair.. the Persian rug.. a vast array of swords… books I had never imagined existed… and just about everything that Patsy had collected and conquered over the years from traveling across the world.

I sat on this wee chair sipping on some black tea and smoking some weed… I was high..( I almost always am)…but this was different…Pink Floyd playing in the back ground.. the dim red light…. And an unfinished canvas… which as it would have it was the topic of our discussion for the longest time…

Strangely so… it wasn’t the canvas.. I guess it was the weed.. our minds had been freed from the shackles of our mundane existence and was lost in the depth of that unfinished canvas… silver blue streaks across a white background… we all construed it in our own twisted ways.. but it was exhilarating just sitting there and hearing Patsy talk… about anything and everything… his days as a drummer.. his first Beatles concert and even about that unfinished canvas…

The evening was over before I knew it.. but images of Patsy and his paradise still flash through my mind .. that unfinished canvas.. (which I am sure will stay that way for all time to come).. the music.. the old black and white pictures of Patsy in his younger days.. all of it and more…
I might never meet Patsy again… but that evening he liberated me… he maybe even gave me a reason to live … that was Patsy… the pirate.. I can close my eyes and picture him standing on a deck of an old ship out to conquer the world…