mummery

a mummery is a ridiculous ceremonial. i know this because i once wrote the word in a book and much later i ran into it again and even though i wasn't sure that's what it meant i believed it anyway. i can say it 10 times and nothing will happen besides the fact of having said it, it will maybe seem i am saying something else, the 5th or 6th time i say it, i could confuse myself, but most likely even that would pass without serious consequences. 

i find most social interactions to be forms of mummery and i laugh at them once everyone has gone home or once i have returned home or if the lights go off. sometimes i laugh at them on the way home. or on the way to somewhere else. but i laugh, i really laugh. once we said goodbye i look left and i look right and i cross laugh. i laugh at them by myself because most other people take them very seriously. except f. we can draw the curtain and laugh together. 

we've got a lot to laugh about together, so i'll be doing that for a while. my stomach is full of laughter. it has contaminated my head, my hair is full of grins, my eyes are full of tears, salty watery smiles digging into my cheeks like that one drip spoiling the exterior of a glass forever (or less), rendering it unusable until further washing, my neck and shoulders, dancing together to some forest rhymes, foyer rhythms, everything comes together like neighbours from all floors in the elevator, what a thrill in the stomach laughter is, and so are elevator rides, sometimes, and then there's my ears, awake, hearing me out more then ever, taking laughter in stereo, they are good sports, they pay so much attention, and my breath, gushes of laughter from my stomach, it's all there is, i think it's all love.  

i keep my cheeks dirty and my eyes where i can't see them and my laughter in my stomach, expanding, expanding, like the porridge in the story, taking over the village, et caetera. it took so long to realise there's no fear in laughter. 

thanks. 

good night.

another november

sometimes i think there is no pain -  but that's when i know the pain is just too overwhelming - when aloneness is no longer the disease, but the cure.

i said that. to myself. not whimpering, but whispering, another november ago. 

long letters are not a gift horse

being alone is great. i say this after six days of minimal social interaction, limited to strangers who work in shops i visit and assume i speak their language (i can say no-thanks and yes-thanks but to every other sentence addressed to me i simply nod or grin). what i felt and what i didn't say (because i didn't have to whom) after one day was quite different. it played in the league of sorrow and sadness and pitiful misery and it made friends with the daddy longlegs that lives under the living room couch. 

but then, oh, it got better, i started to feel the rhythm of this alone-ness and dance to it and everything fell into place like the 1500 puzzle pieces that are lying on the floor would, with the difference that they would only turn into an ugly (or beautifully kitsch, if you prefer) picture of three girls on a motorcycle and my newfound sense of being wouldn't. it won't. really. 

i had many notions spinning around in my head and sometimes, usually after a meal i had assembled based on want and consumed less speedily than when in company (!), they would slow down and i would be able to grab onto a thread and weave them into long emails, cracked-open-heart-and-soul emails, bizzaro-mackrel-and-cheese emails, spur of the moment emails, delicate-30-degrees-wash emails to people i felt tuna with. it's good to let it out in writing. it's soothing like camomille on pinkeye.   

unless you wish for a reply.
then the pinkeye is back. 
camomille never happened. 
shit. 

i read of a man once who kept a list of all the people who didnt reply to his letters and when he was fed up with waiting (years went by, the man was patient!) he killed all of them (he was also mentally unstable!) using the pen he wrote all his letters with on the same day even though they lived in different countries and some of them where out of their houses at parties or yoga lessons. but he did it. and what i learned from him is that to avoid breaking a good pen one must refrain from writing to people who can't reciprocate. (i learned this word in first grade from my deskmate who was surely a precocious little fella and it has since left a profound mark on all my human interactions - that's perhaps why i nod and grin sometimes to people whose words i don't understand. so they don't feel terribly alone because their sounds go right through me and float off the surface of the earth into space where no one can hear anything because there isn't any sound because the molecules are fickle out there.) 

why not sneeze, Patti Eadielisan?

imagine you suddenly feel removed from yourself
you can't
it's senseless
why it happened to me i don't know
i wasnt suddenly removed, i just suddenly felt as if i was removed from myself
and always had been
and never noticed
as if i wasnt sure i was living 
or not living 
guessing i must at least be alive

this uncertainty means she has too much time on her hands, said the gentleman who was just passing by walking his past, tense
i do
i have open time on my hands
it's so heavy i need to sit it on my lap
slap slap
all this open time that lets me look into it -
that lets me look into things
that lets me look into me
this i dont-know-who i've seen a million times
scary like porky pig's dog-canary 
(not scary-scary but more like "why don't you do something? - well, i can't tell you"
"can you sing? - no, but i do" "please, stop - please, start")
continue. 

 it's not easy being this dog. i feel like this dog, disguised as a standalone human, i feel both like this dog and like a human designed to function independently. 
design vs. application.
intent + dissent.  
screaming and kicking. 
chasing my tail.
i'm chasing my tail.
do not disturb.

some circus

I've attended a strange party for the last 6 months. life at one of its most interesting, me at my most aware. fulcrum, panem et circenses, mostly without the big colorful posters or the gigantic circus tent. grind grind grind, not teeth, but sprockets, or the pen to the paper. 

occam, thanks for your razor

when you get a painful vaccine in your arm the world, which was waiting for this particular event to happen, goes mad: everyone seems to hit you right there, where it hurts, like they had been always planning for it. 

but it's not some conspiracy, it's all about where you put your attention or where your awareness is (temporarily) higher. 

and as my senses are usually as acute as apendicitis just before the (vermiform) appendix bursts, everything that happens around me contains some message, some reference to my mood and my feelings. especially in times of melancholy, the universe  seems to get me. (with a careful insertion of mockery laughter)

it's surely a self-preservation mechanism for the self-centric eccentrics, who know they are meaningless in the grand scheme but muster dimwit hope that, somehow, they're not. 

so, ok, then the radio is not really sympathizing with me, but i don't dislike living by means of this magical delusion.

summer bummer

(anne emond)

good i'm going back to rain. very good. how quickly we forget.

initials B.B. and M.E.

What do Mircea Eliade and Brigitte Bardot have in common? is a question anyone with a little bit of time and a little bit of imagination can answer, because it is obscure and unimportant so you can make up anything you want for the sake of conversation. And it's the kind of thing you could easily talk about at 42 degrees celsius. Especially inside your head, using different voices and maybe even different accents. But how B.B. and M.E. visited me on the same day to deliver an important message is something else. Or wait, no, it's just what I said above.

B.B. says/sings that she has a lover during the day and a husband during the night and then she exchanged the lover for a husband and got a new lover and so on and then it stops cause she's not in the mood to take another lover in the meantime (because eventually she gets old and cares more about stray dogs and their rescue and maybe putting ribbons in her hair and lots of make-up on).

J'ai pris l'amant pour mari 

Et un amant pour amant 

Qui deviendra mon mari 

Aussi longtemps 

Que je n'aurai pas envie 

De prendre un nouvel amant 

Qui remplacera mon mari 

En attendant

It's deep french pop sailing in shallow waters.

Now M.E.. Some hours before this song came into my ears I was re-reading M.E.'s Noaptea de Sanziene, where Stefan, who wants to live outside time (with a capital T) doesn't understand why he has fallen in love with Ileana while he loved his wife, Ioana.

Where can such love go? Anna Karenina, Tristan and Isolda? It would be too sad. A love that replaces another, an adultery that would be just like any other, born from Time, eroded by Time, destined to death, like any creature born out of death that returns into death. If I can't love one the same way I love the other one, what's the point of this new love? Why did I meet Ileana? Why did I fall in love with her? I've always loved Ioana; from the moment I saw her I understood that I've always loved her, that this love was destined to me. Then why did I fall in love with another? Only to sleep with her? If this new, unexpected, unsolicited love would only lead to replacing Ioana with Ileana then it would make no sense.

And on the dusty train platform, looking at the people running like mad to get on the train that wouldn't leave for another 15 minutes, this idea that we only replace one love with another, mechanically, meaninglessly, brainlessly (but not without hope), seemed extremely revolutionary, even intelligent. I don't consider it such anymore, however, it's the kind of awakening that can never come post-priori simply because we give too much meaning to our actions and attractions.

Who cares. 

That is, Dr. Who cares.

(cause he has two hearts and is a time traveller). 

thanks for axing

but i still don't know.

lisa says on a night like this

this sample of bad filming is to be looked at with wonder, for it is not the bad filming that matters, but something else. the man in the center, ok, in the blurred center, the stiffer one, is lou reed. himself! he's 70, has big biceps, he's on tour (or was?) and it was great to hear him and see him (stand unbendable) from the back of the room, the best place to be at so the illusion created by his ultra reedish voice would not have to endure even the slightest doubt at seeing his new (sic!) exterior. it's not shallow, or it is, but it is only because i want to preserve him in my mind like this.

but you see the woman in the up right corner? she's called joan as policewoman, and she opened for lou reed. she must've thought of herself as quite the entertainer, cause she spoke between each song (and there were many, each like a little drop of poison), in a soft porn voice, like a housewife who works part time for some erotic hotline, her first few songs sounded like the mating sounds of some species of chicken, mumbled words were only hiding up the ineptitude of the lyrics, some of which went like this: you'll start your engines like a virgin as long as you jump the ride or don't you know i'm your woman and you are my man? or I just want your love / I want it now / I want your face inside of my mind [...] ‘Cause I don't come with a manual. / No, I lost it long ago.

yes, she has definitely lost her manual, her manual ability to slap herself off stage because she is embarrassing, yet somehow, there is always an amusing dimension to a total lack of personal sense of the ridiculous.