Dear Jinx, short but to the point.

Tick-tock goes the clock,
as it breaks and makes the lock,
shiver and take stock of the corruption round the block.
Then truth knocks,
and the cycles go in shock.
The hamster in his wheel picks up a glock,
and his spirit reaches dock.
Tickedy tickedy tock.

A limerick for the times you could say :)
For dark senses of humour.

Fill the silence

J.P. Chenet tonight after a long dry spell. It seems I must rediscover wine with the cheap stuff :)

Still suffering from complete block, but to brake radio-silence a half-thought thought will have to do. The cheap J.P. Chenet and Depeche Mode have me for the rest of the night.

When it comes to people, introductions and definitions haven't changed that much through generations. "Meet Marcus, he's a doctor."
It's a gross generalization actually, but the image is there; Marcus, elbows cocked and hands hidden in the pockets of a white lab coat like they rested now concealed in the pockets of his jeans, a stethoscope hanging around his neck and a comforting word on his lips, healing people.
Eventually I discovered he didn't listen for heartbeats and breaths and out-of-tune organs, he didn't hold the hand of solitary death, he didn't even use a stethoscope unless it was to judge the level of excitation he'd manage to instill in his lover, a lab assistant from the third floor.
He still stuffed his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, but all while contemplating the protein that defined his medical career.
"Diana... does something with computers." As a generalization it's accurate but unevocative. These days, most everyone does something with computers, but trying to elaborate on the specifics falls like the story of an odyssey through ever-changing seas on the ears of a desert rat.

Cut off from the past and unsure of the future we are alone in the universe and we are all wearing blinders. It feels like the ultimate isolation, an unfortunate and necessary side-effect of acceleration. The horse runs faster with blinders. The horse runs faster when it can only see the carrot ahead without the distraction of other horses at its side. The horse runs.
In the case of humans however, the run is conceptual, we chase after our own ideas trying to keep an understanding their meaning. The confused inhabitants of a planet of Frankensteins looking at the monsters settling in; there are so many and so many reflections of them we have to choose the ones we recognize. There is no return to a basic pattern, we have progressed too far and embraced too much, we have embraced the monsters.

There’s a story here, which could be important or might mean nothing: a night in the hotel room somewhere near Münster and near a river, poisoned with mushrooms and feeling the pulse of the universe and the breath of the earth. ‘Shine on you crazy diamond’ crooned in the background and I wanted to die because no moment could surpass this complete loss of self, this belonging.
But we live because we must, not an obligation but a necessity. We return to the reality of bank accounts and electronically signed letters in the mail and chip cards and jobs we cannot define and internet friendships and pre-packaged mystery food and global crises and local statistics and all of a sudden mathematics seem real.

The Modern World (Day 1)

And God said 'Let there be Light!',and thus the godly word was spoken, without definition or detail. And the team of seven tasked with this godly endeavor split off in search of a definition for this phenomenon that was yet to be, cursing vague requirements and the impossibility of thorough analysis before implementation. And each made a light as they thought light should be, and Five made Blue, and Six made Indigo and they both named it Light. One, Two and Three started the movement that would be known as Teamwork which ended in the first disagreement when One insisted that only Red could be light while Three discovered Stubborness and stuck with Yellow. Two was the first to ever compromise and in a futile search for Independent Thought picked a wishy-washy in between. And the Seven toiled and created, and competed to present the results of their labour. And the seven lights mixed under the godly gaze, and since no one had through to test for the possible side-effects of superimposing seven different implementations, the result was sudden and blinding. God, in his infinite wisdom, reacted quickly to this surprise (only surprising to the seven, since One without time is generally also One without cause for surprise) and quickly created the stratosphere for the seven to be blasted into. But now there was Light, and for lack of well-defined stakeholders to review this Light and more importantly a task force to possibly modify it, God decided 'It's good.'

Friday night randomness

I think everyone should take a moment to think about what annoyed them in the past week. The only time I feel comfortable doing that, is after a few glasses (still Chianti, still great):

- Obama won a Nobel peace prize? Great! When do I get my sobriety prize?

- Discussing the end of the book in the preface is simply evil. 

- Calling cards that tell you that you have 30 second left. Too short to say anything meaningful, but just saying bye leaves you with 20 seconds of awkward silence.

- Being bitched at for still being at the gym at closing time. Because there's nothing like getting yelled at by an angry russian while you're butt naked in the shower.

- Cold showers are an acquired taste. Cold showers with no pressure, however, are rather like Chinese water torture. 

- COP-15. If the point of state leaders is to appear like they're doing something while jacking off verbally, half my office would qualify. 

- Religion should not be publicized. It should be treated like a drug habit. 

Poetry and such

My dear Janis, it's been a strange night - a night like any other actually, until a poem raced through my mind. I'd written it years ago, but I was always aware that some parts were just filler; I'd look at it every now and then, and wonder and worry at the parts that just didn't fit. All of a sudden, tonight it formed itself, so easily like it should have been obvious all along. I love these moments, when words just pour out as if consciousness was not there in the way. Complete reality bypass, just words.

All it's missing is a title - I await your suggestions there ;)

 

Give in to me!

Forget the flowers and the sun, 

the dandylion light of day,

the naive blooms of spring to come,

the lazy, catatonic May.

I'll give you frost so cold you'll freeze

and burn in darkness with the stars,

the mad night rushing through my veins,

the black shine of forgotten scars.

Give in to me!

I'll be your queen, I'll be your slave;

entwined around you and cold as ice.

My love, we'll never warm a grave,

we'll burn the road to paradise.

I'll give you rhythm, worlds beneath your feet,

the bloody beat of crazy drums that call

in saltmine tears to loves we never meet,

in red-thorned fields to foes that never fall.

Come - kiss my hand!

Come - conquer me...

You don't need a safe place to land, 

it's fire that that makes history. 

I'm drinking a lovely Chianti and listening to Jennifer Hudson (And I am telling you, I'm not going). I'll have to pick up another bottle for your arrival.

earth2100

Janis, my apologies, I know I've been awfully uncommunicative (last weekend possibly excepted) - it seems I'm over that little problem. I've just spent a pleasant two hours with tea, a smoke and a movie. It was so perfect I wanted to give you a little review.

earth2100. I got it because of the title and because the alternative was Nostradamus and 2012 crap in French, and put it on as background noise while packing books away - 12 books later I settled down to watch it. 

It proposes 2100 as a world in ruins, total science fiction. Then it invites you to follow the story of Lucy, born in 2009. She grows up through what we could consider plausible for the near future: a world hooked on oil, ignoring environmental changes while causing progressively more damage. People live in really bad weather while Malthusian catastrophe nears.

It's written for an American audience, and the rest of the world only plays a supporting role in the unfolding drama, but Lucy's story is interesting enough to pull you through a century of eyes wide shut. The problem is that there is no time-bomb to blow us all to the seventh circle of hell, just a slow decay that we live with. Adaptability as the tragic flaw of our species? Shakespeare couldn't have chosen better.

Hurricanes, wars and rations, mass migration, mass starvation and an utterly existentialist plague all lead to complete societal collapse. It all comes across a little dramatized, a little patronizing and with a subtle whiff of political propaganda in time for the current cap-and-trade issue, but is still a possible path to purgatory. 

Probable? Mayhap - but the whole science behind predicting environmental changes seems rather 'this or that' to me and this movie also presumes to predict political, social and economic reactions. However, and this point remains valid: there is a problem now, and while we sit around like Trojans looking at the horse's ass, the earth is preparing for battle. May the best planet win :) 

Shards

Broke a glass today Jinx, and it inspired a stream of thought. I'm in Christiania again (no surprise) enjoying internet under almost luxury conditions: no need for the tarp, 5am so no bike traffic (Strøget empty, which is eerie since that never happens), Pink Floyd's Shine Part II playing, and cheap coffee from the 24hr bakery steaming beside me. I'm like an onion, Copenhagen is fucking cold and every piece of clothing is needed to keep warm. But I was talking about glasses...

My flatmate works in a bar, and from previous experience of hanging around those places I've noticed that every bartender, no matter how experienced, has dropped glasses in their record. Whatever the reason - off day, sick, distraction - the glass smashes, get's swept up, and the beer pours into a fresh one. Now if life is the bar, the hustle and bustle, then every society has it's smashed glasses. We speak of people being 'broken', fragile, transparent, clear - all these references to glass. In most bars when then glass breaks it ends up as shards in the trash, but sometimes you walk into a place that surprises you.

Sometimes you end up in a place where the shards get melted down, or glued back together, or fused in some other way to make something new. They hang down like crazy lamps around the candlelight, glow with strange colors through the tabletop mosaic, scatter the wall in a mirror of art. Sometimes you end up in a place like Christiania, where the shards aren't broken glass, they're just shards. Instead of fractions of a whole, they become new&different wholes. A guy came up to me today when I was drawing in Manesfiskern (Moonfisher cafe) vaguely intoxicated and wanting a drag. We got chatting (well mainly he sat there smoking and gesturing, that joint disappeared fast) and he told me about crossing India on motorcycle to catalog Tsunami victims. I have no idea what the guy went through - though if his stories offer any glimpse it was intense - but it left him crying, drunk and ranting about changing the world under the noon sun in Christiania. He'd had a job, normal life, and then woken up one day and looked at the world until dead Indian eyes looked back; it probably almost or did 'break' him. But in this place, this guy can at least get it out, talk to strangers, tourists (maybe they'll learn something), whoever he needs to tell his shit to, to deal with it.

I don't call that a broken shard in the trash, I call that a piece putting itself together. I've seen many a classmate in Canada exposed to many a smaller pressure bury themselves in drugs, sex, gambling, food. All manner of escapes that buried the problem far deeper than this guy could shove his, and cope far worse, while still being considered whole glasses. But being a whole glass, just to stand empty or hold a cup of toxic juice, might be more 'broken' than hanging out as a piece of lamp. We've all got our passions, histories, little niche in life. Some tend the bar, some sing, some hit on the ladies, some avoid the creeps, some dance, some drink, some read, some dream, and some sweep up the broken bits and take them home. This place is teaching me things about judging people. Oh, and by the way Jinx, want to know what that guy did before he left for India? He was a ballet dancer at the academy in Denmark. Little shard twirled like a spinning top, just goes to show.

Coffee's getting cold, the thing's I do to express myself online Jinx, so peace out.