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. 

but she breaks just like a little girl

if drawings had ears we'd play her some bob dylan and she'd stop crying.

spring fever

“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” Mark Twain

                                                                                                                             

sometimes the disease fits the symptoms so you accept the diagnosis. sometimes the observations fit the theory so you think you're validating it. when i get tired of being wrong, when i get tired of uncertainty or indecision, something. yes. something.  

welcome to this spring

here came spring, real spring, warm spring, may spring, oh yes, and together with its friend the wind it spreads joy or pollen, dust and little particles that make you sneeze, and what better way to wake up than by expelling stuff out your nose and perhaps mouth at speeds ranging between 150 and 900 km/h, i heard this somewhere, such crudeness the morning has when you've got a jet plane coming out of your nose, maybe a race car if not a jet plane, and then it really becomes a race, first sneeze-car in pole position followed closely by another one and another one, you should aim at the window, so they go away and race till they dissolve, or else, if your head is still facing the pillow, they'll be stuck there, in your pillow, racing all day but mostly all night, every night, and you'll hear vruuuuum! vrrrruuuum! when you try to go to sleep and your dreams will become more vibrant, like sitting in a 4d cinema, yuck, yuck like when cheese ball snacks fall into your bag and you can never pick up all of them and they stick together (wouldn't it be so great to be able to expel them like pollen out of your nose?), no, no thank you, welcome, spring, but don't sneeze on my pillow.

reflection

beat it, paulie, 

her breast hid away,

beat it, i don’t want you around,

edgar, listen,

(such a funny name for a breast, edgar)

listen, edgar, 

my name isn’t paulie, 

i don’t have a name, 

but you can call me paulie,

I am really you,

you're looking at yourself,

this is me that is you,

in a mirror, a mirror doesn’t have a name either,

it's everyone she meets,

I am you, she is us,

we are the same.

edgar couldn’t understand.

he was more like a can on the streets of a windy town,

or like a little bully called frank who grows up to be a disco bodyguard,

or like cocoa milk getting cold on the window sill,  

he reacted, but couldn’t understand more than a garden chair would.

breasts are beasts without ‘r’s, 

beasts without hours,

hours without beats,

beats without skips,

skips without hops,

hopes without dreams.

breasts are beasts from dreams skipped in no hour’s beat.

we're going to delphi.

i had done something bad, but not bad bad, more like kid bad, and all these people at this horrible dinner party were playing games in twos and purposely left me out. so i started playing with this cat they had in the house and they were paranoid about it getting killed, and the cat, to piss me off and get me into more trouble, opened the back door somehow, and there, right there, waiting, was this big fat cat who hated her the most and wanted to annihilate it. they started this massive chase and at times cat fur would fly here and there, and i screamed and everyone screamed back at me thinking i'm the boy who cries wolf to take them away from the game, especially this boy i had come with, he was being so silly. but the cat was saved so we left, and outside, on what looked like a building site, some woman asked from afar for directions and i realized we were in india. then i got contact lenses and i was on a bicycle and i couldn't see so well.  

i am as old as i am young

getting old is but an instant.

that instant it takes to finish your breakfast 

- during which time you heard a good story you laughed at

maybe had some muesli

an apple

a coffee with too much sugar -

and then one day you look down at your hands

- the same hands that held the spoon to your muesli

or the apple to your core

or the laughter to your mouth -

and you get scared. you don’t recognize your own hands.

you go to the mirror and you don’t recognize the mirror.

you are in someone else’s house.

so, it has come to this

one day, in class, i couldn't pay attention. it was both the loud chewing of the person next to me (we will call her gluta) and my very sleep deprived irritable self. so i started a paper war. this person, gluta, seemed horrible. i gathered all these creatures to fight her. while i was sitting next to her i couldn't imagine anyone worse than her. i didnt really see her. all i know is that she eats shrimp salad like some people take baths: with loud splishes and splashes and that she speaks like some people fart: with confidence, getting high on the whiffs she got.

(gluta wasnt asian. she uses chopsticks because i cant draw forks.)

i am a haunted home without a house

my mother says parents can give you everything, except for luck. i dont know what luck really is, it's not reliable like sense of humor, it's not even transient like good looks, i really can't say anything certain about it, but it seems to be nice odds, odds in your favor. shifting probability. but then again, everything seems to be just chance. probability. odds. timing.

i did feel lucky many times in my life, like last night, in my dream, when a plane crashed into the building i was going to go into if only i would have found my lipstick in time. i didnt find it, so i didnt go in, so i didnt get squashed by this enormous plane (and i dont even use lipstick in waking life). i dont feel lucky that i have these fears of not finding a place to stay in time (i will be roomless, roofless, rootless from march 1st) turn into plane attacks in my dreams, but i dont feel unlucky, either. 

therefore i will become ruthless and let go of worries that i wont find a place and whatever happens will happen anyway. and if it will be terrible, i guess it will build character?

extremely strange and incredibly fast

yesterday morning, very morning, as i was walking towards the train that would take me to the cinema(s), i noticed my shoe lace was untied. i looked at it and looked away within the same second, simply because after my quick evaluation of the gravity of the situation i have concluded that it wasn't going to necessitate a pit stop.

but all of a sudden a man walking towards me spotted my weakness, stopped, looked me straight in the eye and zoomed in on his own face (like the nemesis of a ninja would) and then made this very strange, almost bird-like whistling noise, and in 3 seconds i was completely surrounded by all the random citizens who happened to be in the streets at that moment and recognized this man's cry. even mothers with their children came, but of course some of them were covering the young one's eyes.

what appeared to be like the oldest man in the circle approached, closing the circle behind him, and said to me in a german for idiots, nein, nein, nicht richtig, schliessen die muntzer oder nein gezucht! i am not an idiot so i didnt understand that, but i saw him pointing at my untied shoe lace so i said schuldigung, tucked it in my shoe and wanted to go about my way, beginning to become aware of the disturbance my shoe lace has caused them. but they wouldnt let me. one of the children who was allowed to look started crying when he saw how i tried to cheat by tucking it in, so his mother had to pull him away from the circle which got a bit more tighter around me. then i remembered the note, the note was going to save me, i pulled it out and handed it to the old man. he read it, sneered and whistled. everyone went away immediately and i was free.

ok, i must confess i might have distorted facts a little bit. it wasnt a note at all, it was my festival badge. no, my passport. no, my copenhagen resident's card. i can't well remember, it was all so extremely strange and incredibly fast.

a nest of angry knees

nate (i mean nature, but we're on nickname terms), in all its generosity, has not bestowed upon me an essential thing, essential only to my current and most exciting interest, and not essential in loose terms. yes. cinema. 

so this generous nate gave me a nest of angry knees and every time i'm in a cinema they go wild. negotiations aren't going well. but everything else is.

going gloriously. 

so dear knees, please, bee-have.