Dream Nr. 456

My Dearest,
I was a fool to join this venture. I never thought it would end like this, with me writing to you. We went in with a clear mission. Booty, slaves. Nobody knows better than I that no plan survives the first battle, but this… this is different.
We tore them apart. But then they got into our minds, and they turned us in to a thousand pieces. They ripped the puzzle apart and set it together anew, again and again. They fucked our minds. But I am getting ahead of myself.
We landed, we whipped them. That is to say, we slayed. We hacked them apart. Our weapons were superior, not to mention our tactics. Though they were not unused to war, as they had casual strife with neighboring tribes, they were compariaively disorganized. It was the usual bloody mess. We killed the men and children, we enslaved the women and what men survived. We used them as we pleased.
The women were the problem, that’s what I think. It may sound stupid, but they had a way about them. The music they played, that weird foreign beat, the way they walked. There is dissent. Our men fight one another for the women, though they be but slaves. The women are like a baking sheet full of cake, each one of them a piece.
The Captain has lost control. Rolf and Fjorad have disappeared. Murdered in their sleep? Eaten? The priest is gone too, not that I care.
It is insane. That beat . . . that foreign beat . . . I can’t sleep. The drums, these foreign drums! How can they dance to such a strange beat? They take our minds apart.
I would go away, but the men have disassembled our ship to build huts. I do not know how it will end. Forgive me for this disjointed report. I write this letter in knowledge that it will probably never reach you, my love.

Too Much

I’ve had too much. Fit to burst. I would very much like to continue eating and drinking, but… I’ve had too much. Of course I could, theoretically, go for the Roman thing and stick a feather down my throat, in order to vomit and continue eating and drinking, ad infinitum. But, decadent as I am, I am not that decadent. Jesus, that’s too much, even for me.
Listening to In the Colosseum, from Tom Waits.

Thank God for Reason

Did you ever have the feeling you would choke on the poignancy of it all? Like your life is so fucking full of meaning and emotion and you want to rip the hair from your skull because you just can’t take it? And the only thing that prevents you from doing so is your cursed reason? Thank God for it, because otherwise everyone would ask you, next day at work, what the hell happened to your head. And no one will believe you when you say it got caught in a harvest-machine.

Whoa

Whoa, boy, whoa. You ever meet people who can’t seem to relax? You engage them in a simple conversation, and it seems as if they take a harmless discussion as a challenge to their intellect. They are rarin’ to go. Whoa, dude, I am not trying to pierce your leather here, you think to yourself. Take it easy, have another drink ― no, I don’t think you are an alcoholic! Everything cool? Just relax. Everything’s cool, believe me. Breathe, just breathe . . . slow down, or you’ll die in a fit of apoplexy.

Rectitude

Ah, Christ, how’s a knight to live, in these hard old times? A knight of words, nowadays, needless to say. Couldn’t wield a sword worth shit. Could have, maybe, wouldn’t have, probably. A dreamy knight, I would have been. A knight who writes poetry because he can’t turn his fucking brain off. He would have liked to turn it off; he would have wondered at the way the other knights did.
And nevertheless he would have killed. He would have done his duty. Take the salt, and do the duty. With reservations, but nonetheless. Protect his own, and kill the rest. Lucky bastard, got two children to his name, survived to this day. He loves them. So, he’d kill.
Or I’d have ended up a peasant, a churl.

Vernissage

Just stuff the food and swill the champagne. Act like you think it’s art. Give intellectual commonplaces to your best. Be quasi, you casual little cultural fuck, you. Well… well, it’d be different if it was really good art, wouldn’t it now? Then, you could say: holy fucking shit, this is really cool stuff! or: I don’t understand it yet, but damn, I like it!

But how often does that happen? I’ve been to enough „openings“ to know… that I am not impressed. I know, that sounds totally arrogant, and it is. But, and here’s the wiggle, most of it isn’t even, well, how shall I say… acceptable? I mean, like, better than average. I’d be willing to praise anything above mediocre. But 90% is just plain CRAP, with some fucking kinky concept to accompany it in to the depths of creative hell. So just stuff the food and swill the champagne. Act like you… oh, yeah, I said that already.

Chili

I thank God for chili. Chili is even better than a shameless self-promoting blog. It makes up for being only almost as good by being completely honest. But honestly, when I moved to New York, my room was so small the bed bugs were hunch-backed! But honestly… ahem. Gotta find a better line of gab than this…
Alright. I could live on chili. I love it. It’s spicy, it makes me fart all day, it gives me garlic breath… no vampire from one of these ‘young adult reader’-books is ever going to even approach me. I exude an aura of unbitableness.
Listening to Le Pop from Katzenjammer, by the way.

Writers? Liars.

Always remember that all writers are liars. Every human being who ever wrote anything down distorted it in doing so. It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: anything you observe is influenced by the observation. God save you from the observation of a writer (damn, I can think of at least three different ways one might take that sentence…). Every one of them has their own slant.
They’ll wrap you up in their little words, a little present for you, only for you. Writers can turn even a truth in to a lie. Shakespeare said, kill the lawyers first. I say, kill the writers. The most dangerous species on Earth. They spread IDEAS! OMG! They’ll drive you fucking insane! The landing of non-benevolent Martians is nothing against this. Writers are among you!

The weirdest thing is, nobody knows quite what they want. Nor do they, it seems. In fact, hardly anyone seems to care what they have to say. But, nevertheless, as if everyone were after them, they have become experts in camouflage. If they have any truly resounding ideas, most of them have concealed it very convincingly up to this point (your dear blog-writer included, haha).
Of course, they do tell a wonderful tale, on occasion. Don’t discount that so quickly. Sometimes they manage to tie you to the mast and lead you through the channel of sirens, and that’s a fine thing. Very helpful against stress, I’m told. They might even get you to thinking. So pick up a book, and read some sensible lies, instead of dithering your time away reading this silly drivel. Bah, shame on you.
Driviality. It really is too bad I didn’t invent that word. Anyone who can give me a genuine quote with the word driviality in it has my respect.

Got Nothin’

Well, that ain’t true. Too bad. Nice headline though.
I’ve got something, perhaps less than I want… does that count?
Listening to Shika Shika from 3 Mustaphas 3. It doesn’t fit the headline… won’t tell you why I am listening to it, though there is a specific reason. Some things in life will always remain a mystery, haha.

The Power of a Child

All the hordes of promises you have made dance around you, needling you. Laughing you out. Though you consider yourself a man of your word, there is no way you can fulfill them all. Circumstances prevent you. That’s your bitter fate. The woman you loved above all, the woman you promised everything, in your heart, has turned away because you couldn’t fulfill them.
You’re ready to kill yourself. You even know how. It’s easy. Just go to the red light district, get the nearest whore, allow yourself to get connected to the pimp, who certainly knows someone who can sell you a pistol and ammunition. Costly, but worth it.

A fucking gun. Your uncle, the gentlest man in the world you ever knew, taught you how to use them. He allowed you to load a 22-calibre rifle and do target practice with it; fourteen years young, you were. You saw him shoot a rattle-snake that was lying on the hood of his pickup with a pistol. Afterwards he took it apart, cleaned it, and put it back together. The pistol, not the snake. You barbecued the snake. So you know what you are about, you have a good memory. Why would I want to do this, you ask yourself, once again. Because life has no meaning for you anymore. Without that woman, it simply doesn’t matter.
You are drunk. You know you are drunk. You know that when you are drunk your feelings take the upper hand. But on the lower hand, in vino veritas, you say to yourself. Why shouldn’t you live what you feel? Or die what you feel.
And then, in the middle of the fucking night, as you sit on your balcony –smoking your second or maybe third to last cigarette, you think– a family passes by on the sidewalk below. The child in the buggy they are shoving before them is saying “papa”. Papa, papa, papa it sings, so happy, so innocent. You feel an instant glow in your heart.
So much for killing yourself, you romantic jerk, you reflect.
The power of a child.