Big Man

I had a great day today, and I was feeling BIG, until I saw this:

https://vimeo.com/152764616

„Quotable“

Political correctness is about denial, usually in the weasel circumlocutory jargon which distorts and evades and seldom stands up to honest analysis.
– George MacDonald Fraser

I Lied

Once again, I lied. I said, that’s the last cigarette, that’s the last drink, that’s . . . whatever. I lied. Five minutes later I lit the next cigarette and poured myself another one. Because I felt like it. Not because I needed it, not because my will was too weak, no . . . simply because I felt like it. Just because fuck it.
I am fascinated by the human ability to lie, especially to themselves.

Listening to Eine Sirba from 17 Hippies. Enjoying it. Two in the morning, drumming on the table, drinking my third ouzo (the one I said to myself I wouldn’t drink) after a bottle of wine, halfheartedly hoping I am not disturbing my neighbors. It’s not the music, I have headphones on, but the drumming. Or maybe the whistling. I have a horrible tendency to whistle to the music I am hearing, and when I have headphones on I can’t hear myself whistling, so it is in all likelihood completely out of tune (got a good ear, always in tune if I am listening), which would, presumably, make the disturbance worse. Sometimes I wonder if all the women who left me did it because of the whistling, out of tune or not.
Probably they can’t hear me, I think to myself. The neighbors, that is. Another little lie, maybe. I never hear them, except when the new neighbor next door taps her toothbrush in the morning. She’s a cute young blonde who always looks sad. Her bathroom, that is to say her bathroom sink, apparently, is attached to the wall where my head rests on my pillow in bed on the other side. Every morning she taps her toothbrush against the sink in a certain way: tap-tap, tapetetap-tap (took me a while to figure out what sound that was). Jesus. Like a damned alarm clock. I know then that it is 6:45 am. Way too early for me. I don’t hear a thing otherwise, she probably showers and all, but it’s just the tapping I hear. It’s really bizarre actually, and I have to grin every morning when I hear it. Then I fall asleep again, in the comfortable knowledge that she has at least derived some sort of satisfaction from tapping her toothbrush against the sink the way she always does.
But I digress. Lies. Well, I say to myself, don’t take them too seriously, those lies. And don’t worry about the whistling. If I can put up with toothbrush-tapping at 6:45 am, they can put up with whistling at all hours. Ahem.
Can’t seem to stop digressing today. Now listening to Chest Fever from The Band. I don’t know why, but I just love the organ melody in that song. That’s no lie. More ouzo… another cigarette. And now Demon Kitty Rag from Katzenjammer. Yep.
So, I’m on a roll now. Gotta work tomorrow, and that’s the reason I lied to myself that I would not drink anything after that bottle of wine. I just know that no bus will come and knock me on my ass on the way to work, so I’ll have to deal with the hangover all by myself. Oh w4ll . . . Dammitz . . . hard to type with a cigarette between your fingers. Never could stand having the thing hanging in my mouth for more than two seconds. Lithium from Nirvana. Yeah. Yea-yeaaa-yeah. Not gonna crack, and so on. Turn it up.
Oh. Mekons. Dancing in Your Head. One of my favorites. A song that literally forces me to drum on the top of my desk. And whistle to the guitar riff . . . sorry, neighbors. Not. Another lie.
Ah, hell. I’m going to bed. Hah, I lied! But I will, soon, just one more . . .
Mr. Hellstrøm whistles to Down By the River from Milky Chance.

Yikes!

I’m never going in to a natural shallow pool of water again. You’re thinking: what’s he got this time? What neurotic, crazy idea has presented itself to his addled mind, resulting in this silly resolution? It’s Humboldt, the crazy bastard, it’s the eels, man, electric fucking eels! They’re gonna get me! I’m not even goin’ near the edge, now that I know they can jump the fuck out if they want to. Shocking.
Thanks to Why Evolution is True for giving me real nightmares.

Don’t You Get Your Hopes Up High

Dash ‘em down, those hopes, for fear they will be disappointed. Keep your head down, baby, flak will fly. Don’t dare rely on anyone else, even if they have tried never to disappoint you, because, no matter how often they may have proven they love you, they just might throw you in the ditch after all. When it comes down to it, they won’t be by your side, will they? You are alone. Never ever trust.
Why can’t I do this? Because I can’t. I believe it is better to be fucked over by the ones you love than to distrust them. Without that trust, life is meaningless.
Of course, this makes me victim to every single human being who doesn’t adhere to the same ideal. All those damaged women I’ve met, who would actually like to believe that I love them… can’t. They’ve met too many men on the way, men who have used them, or men who simply didn’t give a fuck one way or the other.
You simply can’t imagine the energy I’ve expended in the effort to make a woman believe that I love her. All the crazy things I’ve done, just to prove it… just a waste of time. I can prove it again and again… it’s no use. They will never ever believe it. Damaged.

And the more damaged people I have to do with, the more damaged I become. I try to love and protect them, I try to convince them, desperately, that it doesn’t have to be that way… and I fail. I begin to wonder if they are not right.
I hate righteous people, but nevertheless I feel a sort of righteous indignation when I am confronted with this lack of trust. It hurts me deep inside to think that someone I love might not trust me. I give them my trust, I lay it on the altar like a sacrificial animal, and say, take it. They take it, but it it is not reciprocated. I put more animals on the altar, and say, see: do you now believe? No. Like jealous little gods, they want bigger animals yet. More. Insatiable, never satisfied.
Well, alright, I’m willing to lay something on the altar, now and again. Keep the flame glowing, that’s only right, for Christ’s sake. But the basic trust must be there. That would be a matter of renewing the trust, not of establishing it. For me, it’s established in the moment I say: I love you. I don’t say those words lightly.
Agh. Fucking blog, I hate you. You seduce me in to saying what should be left unsaid, what should be understood without saying. But it isn’t understood. People don’t understand. I have to say it aloud. Again and again and again.
Listening to Doina-Sirba-Hora, from Das Blaue Einhorn.

Some Days Are Like That

The teenage years are long gone, but nevertheless your girlfriend, the woman you love above all, tells you is she ending the relationship by sending you an SMS to that effect. Nothing personal, right?
Then, crying, before you even have the chance to get miserably drunk, you spill your first glass of wine in a simple mishap, splashing it all over the table and wall. Of course, you are living in a furnished room, so neither the table nor the wall belong to you. You spend the next half an hour desperately trying to clean it up, thinking of the bill the landlord is going to present to you after he has had everything renovated. But of course there is no way to get red wine out of wallpaper, and it seems the table was never properly oiled… the stains will remain forever.
In the process of cleaning, or rather trying to clean, shortly before giving up, you tear a fingernail off on the corner of the table. You watch the blood oozing out, cursing in pain –I can’t fucking believe this!– knowing for sure that the wound will infect itself in the next days no matter how well you take care of it.
Fuck it, you say too yourself, I’ve got to get out of here. You go down to find that some fool has parked so close to the car that you can’t get in. So you have to crawl in from the passenger side, so angry that your coordination is affected. First you step in the deep puddle there, soaking your foot completely, then you slip and bang your head on the gear stick, allowing a beautiful welt to blossom across your brow.
By now you are barely in control of your rage… you are so furious that you’ve almost forgotten the sorrow that is weighing your heart down like a ton of bricks. Almost. She… she…! With a sigh that lies somewhere between relief and deadly misery you settle down in to the driver’s seat at last.
After having missed gears a couple of times, causing horrible grinding noises that make passers-by look at you curiously –how embarrassing, as if you hadn’t been driving a stick-shift for the last twenty years, for Christ’s sake– you back out of the parking space somewhat abruptly, grazing the car parked next to you. Not the car that was parked too close, which you were conscientiously trying to avoid, but of course the car on the other side. And you’re driving the car of your ex-father-in-law, a cantankerous old fellow who will simply freak when he sees the scratches on his car, the car your ex-wife kindly allowed you to use without his knowledge while he is away on vacation… this thought is stopped abruptly by you grinding the car in to the big rock behind you, the one that is so hard to avoid because it is just a bit too low for you to see it in the rear and side mirrors. The one you’ve watched others crashing in to from your balcony time and again, laughing and swearing it will never happen to you. Unconsciously you are also cursing the circumstances which force you to rely on the kindness of your ex-wife.
Motherfucker! you scream, slamming your hands against the steering wheel again and again until the bandaid comes off and the blood from your finger drips on to your new pants, which had somehow remained unscathed up to this point. Startled, you jerk your hand to the side, causing little droplets of blood to spray all over the passenger seat.
It’s then that the landlord drives up in his Porsche convertible and parks in the spot you’ve just vacated, giving you a quizzical glance as he goes by. You’re reluctantly thinking about getting out and telling him of your little mishap with the wine when your cell-phone buzzes again. It’s another SMS… And it serves you right, you lazy bastard! she writes.
You get the picture? Some days are like that.

Plenty of Time

Laughing eyes almost crying, sensitive, inviting, demanding, promising… but we’ve got plenty of time. No hurry, we can eat, drink, talk. Everything is good. Nothing to fetch back… we understand. Everything. It’s all right. Nothing can kill that feeling. Nothing can stop us. Never ever. It’s like ginger and garlic, lemon and pepper… perfect. It’s so good it hurts. It’s hard to believe. It’s: I don’t deserve this. Plenty of time, because it’ll last forever. No need to push it. Just being near is more than enough. Electricity. Insanity. Oh, God, the smell of it.

So, maybe you’ve had that feeling. But when you have it for months on end, you start to believe it. You’ve thrown away the forces of time, like excess ballast. That is what I mean with plenty of time. Nothing to fetch back, and then you know: it’s real. Christ, it’s real, everything you wanted, all that you’ve stayed alive for, all you’ve fought for, no longer hopeless and in vain…! It’s in your fucking lap. It’s in your hand, and you don’t dare close your fist, for fear you’ll crush it.

Rock ’n’ Roll

How do you define rock ’n’ roll? I define it as sex. Indeed, it was originally a slang word for the sexual act. The sexual act? Which one? There are so many possibilities…
Which begs the question: is sex about procreation, or about eroticism? You may argue that the one has nothing to do with the other, but I challenge you to substantiate your arguments to a most surprising degree, for you will find it very difficult to convince me that the two are not inseparably entwined in the human psyche. Even though I do not wish to produce further children (for heaven’s sake, I already have enough of the little rascals), I still want to make love.

I? I want to…? Or is it my body that wants to rock ’n’ roll? Gotta be careful there, because there are animal desires which control you, you little porcupine. Basic human needs that are genetically encoded so deep in our psyches that we can’t grasp them intellectually. The need to procreate. Never forget that humans are animals… spiny, squishy, crazy little animals. Perhaps part of our craziness lies in the need for more than simple procreation. In fact, I don’t even think we are alone in this, in the animal world. Plenty of animals show a need for more than the simple sexual act. So perhaps we are at least not the only crazy animals. Perhaps all animals are crazy. Perhaps life itself is just an insane anomaly.
Yeah, but now rock ’n’ roll is just a kind of music, which is pretty damned funny when you think of the original meaning.
Listening to Na Hui from Leningrad.

The Black Hole

Sometimes I have the feeling I am about to burst. Then the tears leek out, like steam that’s been compressed, under extreme pressure, liquified not through cold but through gravity. The inner gravity of the black hole in my soul. It consumes my emotions, sucks them in for fear of letting them out. As if something that strong would destroy my surroundings if it got loose.
There are too many emotions in there. It’s developing it’s own dynamic.

People, dogs, children… drunkards, fools, friends, acquaintances, assholes and dangerous maniacs. It doesn’t matter who they are, I don’t want to hurt them with the blunt objects which are my feelings.
So just leak out a couple tears, that won’t hurt anybody. But what about me? I don’t think I can take it any more. The pressure is building, even the black hole can only hold so much… the situation is desperate. The black hole may explode, and what is then unleashed will be far worse than anything the black hole was constructed to prevent.
It’s all so dramatic. Haha.

Going Overboard

Like, in the sense of, doing too much, like hey, no don’t… no! Too late. You already have.
Excess leads to wisdom. The problem is, when you’ve excessed enough to get that far, you can’t spell wsdion anymore. You’ve gone overboard. You no longer know or care what wisdom is. Perhaps that is the quintessence of wisdom? No, it can’t be. At the very most, you know the morning after what wisdom is: don’t drink more than you can hold.

The funny thing is, excess has other advantages as well! It allows you, for instance, to forget all those wonderful women you have been acquainted with… at least for a while.
Now, I don’t want you to think I am a misogynist. I really like women; sometimes I love them. Some of my best friends are women. Heh. But they do seem to have a penchant for hurting me, and they always manage to make me feel like it’s my fault in the end, even though my reasoning part tells me that this is not the case. Perhaps I just haven’t found the right one. Perhaps my reasoning part is just a complete idiot and doesn’t understand a fucking thing.
Listening to Babubudu, from Leningrad.