Sleeping on the Park Bench

I woke up one morning on the park bench, remembering a dream.
„Why would you want to sleep on a park bench?“ God had asked, „That is about as desperate as you can get.“

„Well, I didn’t exactly want to sleep on the bench,“ I replied, „it just sort of happened.“
„You want a thousand dollars?“ he asked.
„Uhh… no. But since you ask, five thousand would be nice… have you ever slept on a park bench?“
He laughed, and that was the end of the dream.
It only remains to add that I have no idea how I came to that comfortable bench.

Children

Little sons and daughters of bitches. And bastards. We all say son-of-a-bitch, as if the father had nothing to do with it. Alright, I’m not a bastard in the original sense of the word, but I’m sure there are some people who would call me a motherfucking bastard.
I’ve got two children, and I love them, but when I see how they edge up against each other, how they needle each other to the point of insanity, I start to wonder: why in hell do they do that? Rascals.
It seems as if there is something in children, just the same as in adults, which makes them want to fuck with other people’s minds. The nearest available victim is the sibling, since the parents are basically unapproachable in that area (well, most parents anyway, I’ve seen kids who torture their parents too). Not that they stop there, the same thing applies to any group of children; it starts in kindergarten.
I’s a thinkin’: ah, my innocent, wonderful little son, such a smart little boy… then I hear how he pissed in the bushes of the kindergarten playground and mobbed some poor ass together with his friends. Alright, I’s thinkin’, pissed in the bushes, don’t give a fuck about that… My daughter didn’t piss in the bushes, but I’ll just bet there were far more hurtful verbal cat-fights that went on.
Mobbing. Just a new word for an old thing: people fucking over other people. Children do it just the same as adults, and I wonder why. Why? Why do humans do this? It seems inseparable with social life, and that is exactly the thing that makes me insociable. I don’t engage in that shit, at least not consciously. That’s the thing, it seems to be a basic instinct among social animals. Establish the god damned fucking pecking order. Who is the boss, who is the henchman, who is the outsider…?
God, how I hate it. I know it’s normal, but I hate it all the more for it. I just don’t understand why people have to be so hateful to each other. It’s like the wolf-pack I once observed in a wild animal park. The park-ranger (for lack of a better word) explained that a wolf-pack is a social group, as we watched one of them being harried by the others, yelping in helpless fright… and a hierarchy must be established. And reestablished, again and again. And the poor bastard on the bottom rung of the ladder, well…? Harried, a miserable fucking life.

It’s wrong. I’m telling you, it’s wrong. Even the last poor bastard at the bottom has redeeming features. Maybe he has talents that could help us survive, as a group. And if not… we are not wolves, dammit. We are smart enough to see beyond the basics. Teach your children that, force them to it, the way I (try to) do. Sometimes you have to use force, mental force that is; explain it, again and again. Make them understand, show them. At the very least, you should try to fight against base instincts. Teach them that this is a place worth living in, even for the lowest of the low. The lowest human being has beauty within them, just the same as a wolf on the bottom rung. Poor bastard. I once read a book in which a child was killed by his own father for losing food which was essential to survival. The father simply dashed his head against a rock. The kid was a little fuck-up, I suppose, and his father lost patience with him. What he might have been capable of no one will ever know.
Base = bad? No. Base = stupid. The basic survival strategies of a pack of wolves should not apply to us. We are that much smarter, dammit. I think. Or are you nothing more than a wolf? Are you a child? Do you really believe that there is a single human being, or, for that matter, a single wolf on this earth, without any intrinsic value? An intrinsic value afforded by the simple fact that they are alive, and among us? They belong. They are beautiful.

Hellstrøm’s Dream No. 226

I dreamt I was wearing cozy sheep-skin house-shoes, but I told them a funny story, and they had to laugh and in so doing became a single tiny pink sheep. It had a magic wand, and it told me I had three wishes. Do you want to be shot to death? it asked, hovering in front of me. No, I don’t want to be shot to… Two wishes left, said the sheep. At this point I’m not sure what happened, but the upshot of it was that the sheep had fucked me over again, and I had only one wish left. Clever little ruminant, dammit; or perhaps I was just too drunk.

So there I was, my feet getting cold, thinking hard about what my last, my one and only best wish, might be. The one thing I cared about above all others. When I finally told it my wish, the sheep laughed. You’re kidding, it said. That’s it? Not world peace, or death to the pope or something? That’s it, I said.
Wallah! it said, waving it’s minuscule wand at me. I was fairly sure it wanted to say voilà, but I made allowances for the fact that good French pronunciation might not be numbered among the assets usual to a magic sheep. Then again, perhaps it was a word utterly sheepish in origin.
I have been blessed by a little pink ruminant, I thought to myself on waking. Anything that comes after that can only be better.
We shall see if my wish comes true.

A Bit More Than Less

You’re staggering down the sidewalk, cuz’ you’ve had a bit more than less. You know, because the bartender asked, shortly before you left, closing the place down with your last order: don’t you think you’ve had enough?
But, oh hell, you think… no. I want more. A little bit more.
So there you walk, so to speak, in the early hours of the morn’, thinking that you want more. But all the bars are closed. Going up a quiet little side-street on the way home, you fall in to the well-trimmed hedges on the side. Laughing out loud, you lie there, in the shelter behind the bushes. Thinking about what people will think when they see your legs sticking out on the sidewalk on the other side, you have to laugh even louder. It’s fucking hilarious.

It’s a lovely night, so you decide to lie there for a while and look at the stars. Everything is fine, the bushes support your waist comfortably, and you feel the cool lawn behind them on the back of your head, like the hand of a lover.
With a sigh of contentment, you settle in. It’s so wonderfully peaceful. You wouldn’t want anything less than that, and you can’t ask for more.

Food

I love food, and it occurred to me that I haven’t written a blog about it in a while. That’s because I’ve been living in a furnished room with a shared kitchen for the last year or so. Circumstances led to it, ahem, I won’t go in to that now.
The point is that this shared kitchen is as near to hell as I can conceive. The state some of my fellow –lets us say inmates– leave this kitchen in is such that I lose the desire to cook. Generally, the pan I need sits on the stove, crusted with… something. All the pots are in the dishwashing machine, which is full but hasn’t been started (dirty dishes are piled on the counter in front of it as well, of course), and the counter is covered with spattered oil… I’m no clean-freak, for Christ’s sake, but that’s too much, even for me. So much so that I pasted a notice on the cupboard exhorting the bastards to keep the fucking place halfway presentable. Lot of good that did.
So I tend to limit myself to salad. I don’t think there is a single being in this place who has ever used the salad spinner, so I can be sure it is as clean as I have left it. Yeah, salad is delicious and healthy… (Hellstrøm dreams of himself eating a three-inch steak, tearing huge chunks of half-bloody meat off and swallowing them whole…) yeah. I’ve been getting thinner day by day.
But, I did recently eat a wonderful meal. The place I work at had an anniversary, and they celebrated by having a colleague cook for everyone. I had heard she is an artist, but even I was pleasantly surprised by what was dished up, so I will describe it for you.
First, pieces of veal tenderloin wrapped in bacon, roasted and then drowned in a heavenly gravy, served with spätzle, which is a sort of germanic homemade noodle (it looks like a bunch of stunted worms have decided your plate is a good place to be, but it is delicious), and carrots with ginger-orange sauce. Oh my God. The German’s say „I sat down in it“, meaning I ate, and ate, and ate. You betcha.

Then, when I was already fit to burst, came a feta-spinach lasagna. I thought I was full, but this was so good that I simply couldn’t stop. Even a stomach shrunken by daily salad just couldn’t say no. The only thing missing was wine, but lunch at the office and all, no dice with that. If I was the boss, you can bet everyone would have been pissed out of their minds.
Then came desert. No. I just said no, I can’t. It looked nice though. Some kind of stewed fruit thing, different kinds of berries, layered with sour cream, very beautiful, but I just couldn’t.
Christ, I love food.