Watcha Want?

Listening to the “Meister”, as he is called by his fans in Germany. Million Miles. Elegant misery… is that all we can aspire to? Revel in depression… as a friend once said to another (we were still young and foolish, not yet old and foolish) “You don’t understand; it’s about feeling like shit, and that’s really cool.” The other fellow was sort of, well, how shall I say it, uh, set back. He felt himself put down. He really didn’t understand, simply because he had had an easy life. He just didn’t understand how you can revel in the shit because you have no choice. Take what you can get, and that has to be enough. Better like it. And you know, that’s where melancholy comes in, because melancholy allows you to revel in the bad moments. It allows you to enjoy them; in German: “auskosten”. Google it, you lazy ignorant fuckers. That is the very important function of melancholy. So, watcha want? Listening to Moonlight Mile from the Rolling Stones and enjoying the melancholy. Oh, and jfyfi, I would look up how to say “auskosten” in English on the fucking ever-present-helpful-makes-me-helpless-and-I-can’t-remember-a-damned-thing-because-I-can-always-look-it-up-in-the-fucking… net, but I can’t connect at the moment of writing this, thank God, because the bloody walls here are too damned thick. Nice to know that the physical world is still good for something. I’ll just have to post this blog later.
Watcha want? You want everything to go your way, just like me. Good luck; no chance. It’s up to you to revel in life just the same.

Lying to Yourself

Nothing is better ingrained in the human psyche than lying to yourself. Who, after all, knows you better? There is no one on this world who can fool you better than you can. You fool.
The question is, who lies to himself better? Have you ever met someone who lies to themselves better than you lie to yourself? I’ll bet you have, and you felt like an idiot after it came out that they’d fooled even you. They sounded convincing, didn’t they? Because they lied so well that they believed in it themselves, totally. But it served their purpose: to convince those around them.

I am certain that this is an evolutionary phenomenon. Humans have removed themselves from the natural cycle to such an extent that they have an evolution all their own. That means that our crazy, big-brained thoughts and desires have a huge influence on our evolution. Our brains are far too large for our own good. We all lie to ourselves, and the lies influence what we and those around us do. They influence which mate we choose. They influence how we treat our children. They influence everything.
I once read a sci-fi novel where a race was described in which the females had, through natural selection, become stupid. The males of this race believed the lies they told themselves with regard to the superiority of males over females to the point where they preferred females who were not quite as uppity, who didn’t argue all the damned time… and so on. Hell, I can understand that! (Mr. Hellstrøm does the Groucho eyebrow thing). And over the millennia, this led to the stultification (wow, that is a cool word, I didn’t even know I knew that word until just now) of the females, to the point where they were hardly more than helpmates, a means to reproduction. They could hardly even speak anymore, such was the loss of intellectual capability.
So, you see what lies can lead to. The little lies you tell yourself could influence the entire evolution of mankind. Perhaps they have already… Jesus. Look out.

Another Glass of Wine…

to Give Succor to My Ailing Existence from Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars. My song of the day. The day went well, the evening was swell. But then a woman dashed it all to pieces with just a few words. Damn you women. I love you, but you’ll kill me yet. Or, more likely, you’ll just reduce me to a weeping lump in the corner.
To conclude: Princess of the Streets from The Stranglers.

Intimate, Intimidating

Sweet  Dreams, as rendered by Marilyn Manson, followed by Tank, from The Stranglers, yeah, that fits this day. It’s a good start, motherfuckers. Yup, I mean you.
You know what I love? The fact that I can name a Photoshop layer “Balls and cock oh yeah baby”. I know it sounds crude, and I can’t quite say why it gives me so much satisfaction to do so, but it does. This bears examination (uh, no, not the bears which shit, proverbially, in the woods).

Perhaps it is because, back in the day, as an apprentice of the reproduction arts, I could not have afforded myself this grace. That was a world of layers of nameless plastic film and paper. No one who has grown up in the digital world can understand what the fuck we had to deal with, back then. Tons of slick material, analog stuff, you know, like, real. Film, with layers of fucking emulsion on it, for Christ’s sake. Egg-white. Slipping and sliding through our fingers like a pile of damned eels. Big vats full of poisonous chemicals. The scanner you have now did not exist, instead we used a monstrous photographic machine, bigger than a man, with huge blinding lights and utilitarian reflective surfaces and what-not. Thank God we don’t need them anymore: they were intimidating.
Ahhh, bullshit, I loved those machines. You felt them. You caressed them. Have you caressed your scanner lately? Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if you had, because people love their machines intimately, no matter if they are big sons-of-bitches or little cute sleek thingies with friendly surfaces and happy colors. Machines are alway extensions of our selves. They are tools, nothing more, nothing less. And we love our tools (especially men, grumble, why do women not love their tools? Or do they after all?)

Mom and Dad

It’s like when you’re suddenly on TV: Hi mom! No, but it isn’t, it’s just a fucking blog, and who knows if mom is reading it? A shadow of doubt there, thank God. As Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain said, “it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.” So maybe I am lucky, and, although I haven’t kept my trap shut as Samuel recommended, at least mother, perhaps, hasn’t read all the foolish things I’ve written here and still has doubts as to whether I am a fool or not.

Yeah, so I am listening to Taxman from the Beatles, which doesn’t fit in the least, but oh well. Sometimes the music is on a completely different tangent to the thoughts. Or whatever. Not just sometimes.
And dad? He knows I am a fool, and he’s proud of me anyway. Good dad, honest dad. Back in the day, when I was a baker, my first profession, he said: that’s a good, honorable profession! I’m proud of you, my son! And he meant it, and I am very, very thankful for that. I suppose there are many dads who are real bitches, but my dad is one of those rare cases who doesn’t give a fuck what I do for a living: it’s alright. When he reads this, he’ll say: my son is an author, that’s an honorable profession! Ha. Haha. Muahahaha…! *gasp*
Listening to Zhopa, from Leningrad.

How, Oh How

How, oh how, dammit, did the authors of yore do it: Abstain from being repetitive. Well, some of them simply didn’t, and it didn’t seem to bother them either. But so many good authors I’ve read manage to cover similar ground again and again without repeating themselves. It’s horrible; horribly good. I ask myself whether they had such good memories that they knew exactly what they had written in the past, or if they searched, in the minute and painstaking hours of the night, through their old manuscripts to see if they hadn’t perhaps said that in just that way and change it accordingly if necessary. I am inclined to believe that they simply had good memories. After all, those were the days where one had to remember innumerable stanzas of epic poetry by heart just because someone thought that was an important part of your culture. Try that today with the typical pupil and he or she will tell you: are you insane go fuck yourself.

Baro Foro from Gogol Bordello, for those who are interested.
I write on the computer, like any normal human in this day and age. And, when I have nothing better to do and the crazy world closes on my mind like a bird of prey screaming down out of the blue at 300 mph, I do a search in my manuscript for repetitions. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. And what do I find? More repetitions than I care for, to put it mildly.
My memory simply isn’t that good. I’ve been trained to forget what my mind considers to be nonessential, and that could include some things that are, in fact, not quite as nonessential as my mind believes them to be. It’s a day and age of discarded information, and sometimes I ask myself what treasures are being discarded simply because my mind didn’t even bother to look properly. I read the first three words and already my mind is deciding wether to ignore the rest or not. Maybe i should, after all, at least read the first complete sentence before reaching a decision? At least that much?
Nah.

Authors are Whores

Those damned authors are at it again…

Shall I explain that statement? Authors allow themselves to be fucked by words. They also encourage words to copulate, and they’ll do anything to make the reader cum (intellectually, of course, har har). God help the women and men who live with authors. They daren’t believe a word they hear.

Gnaaaahh…

There are those times when something rears up inside one and sort of screams and gibbers at the world. Something that protests at the craziness and futility of it all. It’s the insane little mouse in you giving the swooping eagle of life the finger right before the end. And who knows… maybe he’ll get away with it. This time.

Mushrooms, non-magic

Pfifferlinge. Butter. Salt. Pepper. The four necessary ingredients for Happiness. Butter in the pan, middle heat, cut the large pfifferlinge in half, the middle sized and small ones you leave in piece (haha little word play there, pff). Butter melted in the pan, pfifferlinge cut? Well, don’t stand there like a damned fool, toss the pfifferlinge in the pan! And when they’re in the pan, continue tossing them: I mean, with the pan. Don’t you dare take a fucking spatula in your hand, you son-of-a-bitch. Toss them in the pan, take the pan in your hand and toss those little fuckers. Oh dear, you’ve burnt your hand. That was a misunderstanding, my God, are you that drunk? You are, of course, supposed to take the pan by the HANDLE. Jesus. So anyway, now you put some salt on the pfifferlinge, and you grind some pepper on to them. I particularly enjoy a mix of white, red and black pepper. Freshly ground it must be, though, otherwise it was all for nought. If you have, at this juncture, established that you have no pepper grinder and no pepper corns to grind, you can toss the whole in the garbage (but not the pan, perhaps you will have occasion to use it in the future). If you have, however, fortunately, pepper to grind, then you’re well on your way to Happiness. If all has gone well, apart from your burnt hand, those little pfifferlinge are already done! All that remains is to eat them.
I, personally, am eating them to the tune of Money, as rendered by the The Flying Lizards, accompanied by a glass of wine.

Inverse Civilization

I have a question for you: Do you, if you should be one of those terribly unhealthy people who populate this world by the millions and eat that kind of shit like me, put your potato chips in a bowl or just eat them out of the plastic bag? And, no matter which way you answered that question, what does that say about your degree of civilization? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you eat them out of the bag. Well and good. That could be taken as a sign of inverse civilization. If you do put them in a bowl, this blog is not about you, so shut up.

You ever heard the word “uncouth”? It’s out of fashion nowadays, but it is a really cool word. It means uncivilized in the sense of having no fucking manners and no bloody sense of propriety.
Just as an in-between: listening to Guns of Brixton from the Clash.
And apropos the civilizing influence of religion: What an Old Codger I Am from the Stranglers.
So, whether you had heard of uncouth before or not, you know now what it means. And eating potato chips out of the bag is, yeah, you guessed it, uncouth. Sorry, it is. And that is inverse civilization: the more civilized we get the less civilized we are; civilized in the sense of “couth”. Civilization led to potato chips, “just like marijuana leads to heroine”, as William Burroughs said. But the fact that we get potato chips in a plastic bag, only possible through civilization, allows us to eat them out of said bag, which is, like, totally uncivilized.
Oh wow, random selection, right after old codger I get God’s Great Dust Storm from Katzenjammer. Just goes to show that religion is good for something after all, on occasion: inspiration.