What to do with the churches.

Here, on 16th of October, 2009 my feet touched the pedals as my fingers let go of the brakes. It seemed like the coldest day of the year. That day the temperatures dropped to minus and I felt like I always feel in winter, overdressed, while the rest of the world go around their days in just sweaters. Absolutely unfair. The road takes me past the previously mentioned church, with short people standing around it always, idling the day away, dressed not to kill but to die. A left turn past the kindergarten the childish laughter may feel like hope, but gets destroyed by what you see in front of the high-school. Will these kids ever have a future? The other day a friend told me she started drinking at 11, she said, they would walk right past that school and go up the hill to the castle and get wasted on cheap wine. My insides rotted for a second and then regained consciousness. Alcohol brings the worst out of everyone, I thought. Even at the best times, when the buzz they describe as liberating does a better job at tying their hands behind their backs. In a drunken state, the “stupidity”, “bad humor” and “likeness to betrayal” cells go crazy. I have never seen anyone remotely funny when drunk, only desperate, pressured into “having fun”.
The market smells of fruits and vegetables, somewhere in there a distinct clear flavour of broccoli. I now know what I will eat today.
I must pass the squares with tons of incompetent people unwilling to move out of the way. On a bad day you can see forever. I can imagine bombs floating across the square, destroying the three bridges, burning down the bourgeois architecture. Sometimes instead of bombs, there would be flowers everywhere, blooming at the the same rate as explosions expand. I ride my bike and think about a list of beautiful words I know. Poignancy. Banality. Deployment. Presence. I thought about the best description of an orgasm I have thought of the other day. I said to myself. “It’s like a sudden erruption, a volcano or earthquake, or both, emerging to an unquantifiable strength which feels exactly like millions of high-schools ending class, the kids running out into a first summer day.”
Can you think of any moment when you could actually see your lovers soul blossom? The kind of emotion you see in their eyes when everything seems at it’s right place. And what a place to be.

Semicolons and colours around them.

Some things flow amiss as you step out of yourself to regain consciousness. You turn around to see a palette of 60 human beings typing away what it is to be code that runs like clockwork or text that will turn those zeroes into meaning. Through a thought-o-scope, you would stare through and see a million colours as well as a billion of dimensions. This big room with six hard working teams is called Social Innovation Camp. Sceptical of the name, I joined in to see what I can contribute. In a horizontal alignment, the ideas grew only on brainstorms, code was imported and re-used from all continents and presentations were made in clouds.” NGOs are failing”, was the theme of discussion, if only they knew NGOs were never there to make change. The spectacle knew this, and put them there in an asserting manner. “Change is the thing capitalism does not want, but it knows it must give the feeling that there are people out there working towards it, with caviar in their hands.” I kept in mind that we were not there to solve any problems, we were only touching around the borders, to see how far things would go. At least I was.

Photo: Matjaž Rušt

In Vienna, the windows of Zara, Bvlgari, Calvin Clein, Tommy Hilfiger begged for paving stones, for a violence that would go beyond the point of return. Like travel becomes obsolete when the only things we see are McDonalds signs; every city, a map of another. How does one find peace and safety in an epicenter of noise? Do I even want to be safe? These pressing matters are in our shoes everywhere we walk, drift, converse. And what of them? We surely don’t converse enough.

Fin de siècle.

What more must there be acknowledged? It’s there in our bags when we walk out of your stores. We find it in the banalities of daytime politics and the unreasonable profits based on slave labour. It is being debated in the streets and ignored in schools. There is plenty of it between our lovers toes but none on the airwaves. The enchanting aura of excitement when passions are acted upon! We search for and are found. In books, between some pages and on camera films where the soul escapes prison and is brought back home.

Have you felt how some places are before their time, others are moving fast and some seem like time just ran out of gas and had no other plans than to sit there, wilting? It’s the same with people, cities and worlds. The ones that call themselves developed make names for all the rest. We are different, we take our time and give space for recollection. “Is this what we wanted and are we anywhere near our goals? Have our goals changed as we evolved?” Every now and then we would stop and ask these questions because we felt it necessary. And that’s how we make things work.

Into a flux, a travel, a poem.

I now found myself drifting, whether it was through streets or situations, there was a substantial increase in the numbers of nodes in my network. A new street meant a new branch and every occurrence provided an input for the map I was tactically developing, steadfastly scheming. The nodes all meshed wonderfully, with a feeling of elation and success. In an awakened state, perception is a mixture of raw input and the cognitive references from our lived pasts. In a dreaming state, all the references from the day that passed are thrown around and played on shuffle. In a drifting state, references are constructed and deployed into the map of my presence [dasein].

If you happen to feel free.

In Berlin every wall is tagged by defiant youngsters and their fancy pseudonyms, gracefully avoiding any kind of dynamism. Lost within its borders, graffiti has lost its potency at the time when it became l’art pour l’art, when it became predictable and decipherable only within the elitist scene of hipsters who are talented with drawing and much less with thought.

In Czech Republic, every word sounds like a smaller version of words and meanings which are home to you. The trains take longer than expected and are by no means safe from the falling trees. In supermarkets finding pure water is a struggle. Every person wears some type of jewelry which makes me uncomfortable and jumpy, in poorer countries the spectacle makes up for appearances with cheap jewels. The cravings for a soft bed get replaced by a hard cold floor.

In Dresden friendships always only accumulate.

On German autobahns the whole nation loses its frown, every german who looks like he is planning a new Reich while getting gas for his precious car turns out to be a happy fellow being politely explaining how he is not going in your direction. When one of those 30 people you inquire finally allows you entrance in his vehicle, the world for a moment (or the time being) seems a better place.

Thesis 19 [of "20 Theses on the Subversion of the Metropolis"]
In the metropolis, just as work has become superfluous, paradoxically, everyone has to work all the time, intensively, from the cradle to the grave and maybe beyond; evidently the compulsion to work is evermore obviously a political obligation inflicted upon the population so they will be docile and obedient, serially productive of goods and individually occupied in the production in and of themselves as imperial subjects. We vindicate the refusal of work and the creation of other forms of production and reproduction of life that are not burdened under salary’s yoke, that are not even linguistically definable by capital, that start and finish with and in the Common. Guaranteed metropolitan income can become a Common fact only when the practices of appropriation and the extension of autonomy over the territory massively impose a new balance of power. Until that moment, it’s probable that it will instead be – as, for example, what happens in the local and regional proposals of a so called “citizenship income” – another passage in the fragmentation of the Common and in the hierarchy of the forms-of-life. Moreover, as the autonomous experiences of the ’60s and ’70s have taught us, it is only when we are effectively capable of putting our very lives in Common, of risking them in the struggle, that any egalitarian vindication has sense. In our history, there has never been an economic vindication that wasn’t immediately political: if factory workers said “more salary for all” to mean “more power to all”, today “income for all” means “power shared by all”. As singularities that have chosen to be on the subversive side, we must have the courage to construct and share the Common above all among ourselves. This is what will make us strong.

The plans have been laid out. In our endless travels we have learnt that the subversive is indeed glorious. We were there. Our means have changed, but the goal has always been the same. With every acquaintance we confirm the fact that: WE ARE HERE, WE ARE EVERYWHERE.

Increasing stasis; a noisy epicenter of noisy colours: 003

Exactly six minutes have passed while I was heading out from my street, into another and then onto Dunajska street. When you enter this monster, everything devours you in a sense that the billboards cover more of your visual sensory channels and the noise becomes overwhelming to the point of migrating out of yourself as you can no longer hear or feel yourself and your presence in time. Ljubljana is not a big city, but its intensity increases with every crossroad. Capitalism invented saturation and all these crazy colours we now know, buzzing our brains into consuming anything that lies in our path. The height of awful architecture rises with the saturation of advertising, banal gestures of discounts in a world that knows none. A horde of people on bikes and roller-blades maneuver through the cars and walkways and the future seems at least somewhat possible. It is noon and everyone is running around with lunch, the bums do their crosswords, the buses stop and then leave again. To navigate through the crowd the paths you select are not always right as the fluidity of the city is hard to work out. Once you are in the center everything lies down, a city just becomes another generic map with no sense of aesthetics. This daily travel completes my day, it is the dose of samsara, a place I need to constantly visit in fear of it ever changing.

Shifting streets; a hovering omni-presence: 002

You are probably heading out from Metelkova, as you push your bike softly and slowly towards the crowded areas of town. The horizon closes further in, tighter up. The sun-drenched areas get smaller with every pedal. In-between these walls the historical passage can be read like the layers of ice of a glacier; graffiti has truly become banal ever since it started appearing on t-shirts or even earlier. “After everything I had seen, only banalities still interest me.” My inner monologue changes with every recent outside influence, quotes stay in my head and they are always coherent with my fleeting voyages. Describing and applying myself to the surrounding makes up for the lost influence of awful architecture and white walls. When was it in time, that people decided to make cities as boring and uncreative as humanely possible?

Shifting streets; a looming presence: 001

Everything opens up. The looming weight of the surrounding buildings disappears. I am now in a place of a million colours and ten thousand scents. It feels more like a gathering ground for normal people doing normal things as the food market is Ljubljana’s most warm place. The poignancy escapes me as I fall into a labyrinth of fresh foods and exchanged smiles. Sometimes on Saturdays, there will be a crowd so big if looked upon, would rather seem like a dozen hundred birds picking on a loaf of stale bread. A Saturday’s routine quickly becomes an epic voyage on finding the most scrumptious tomatoes on the market. All the streets that surround the market are filled with hungry eyes or satisfied bouncy walks. Riding through, I thank all the old wrinkled women for their offers and continue my way with a big grin from the warm feeling I got from the surroundings. The tall heavy architecture that is the Faculty of Law draws a colder image that ends a beautiful part of my daily travels.

This makes sense.

SadRooftops got it’s printed version today. It is laid out on four pages on A4, containing six of the stories you could find on this website. It’s printed in beautifully kerned Helvetica Bold and Palatino on recycled thin paper. It is absolutely free upon requests. I also enclose the PDF version, but encourage you to get a free copy of the printed one.

Requests: thetestimonial[at]gmail[dot]com

PDF: SadRooftops001 (ready for print)

Website mockup: 01

I did this for a website but pulled out at the last moment for my own reasons. Click for fullview.

Task #1

1. Scan the weather report for a rainy day.
2. Get up early, choose a path with a lot of low trees.
3. Ride along the path feeling happy as if it was your first day alive.
4. Find a roof over your head.
5. Wait until it stops raining.
6. Ride the same path back home.

Notice the branches are just a little bit lower.

Prove your point and destroy it.

Velikokrat danes slišimo, da so v recesiji izgubili največ prav tisti, ki so v zadnjem času največ pridobili. Kvečjem lahko v tej izjavi zaznamo sam srž gnilobe kapitalistične ideologije. Le ta vse oblike življenja posploši na ekonomske faktorje. Tako so prestrašeni bogi debeluhi, ki morajo dandanes v tem nekrivičnem svetu premisliti o nakupu jahte, katero so prej kupili brez pomisleka, na slabšem od tistih, ki že prej niso imeli nič in so zdaj izgubili še to. Življenja se pač ne da kvantificirati, pa tako ostane nekje na robu med manj pomembnimi temami za diskusijo. Če pa je izzvano, je to zgolj na ravni življenskih stilov in konsumpcije, na površinskosti, ki si jo lahko dovoli samo obstoječ družbeni red.
Z medijskim občevanjem s sedanjo skoraj orgazmično krizo pa je s spektakelskih odrov potisnjeno  še tisto upanje po “zeleni” revoluciji, pa tudi če je ta le fiktiven preskok v marketinških teorijah, kjer je bilo potrebno izumiti samo serijo novih “buzz-wordov”, “know-how” pa je ostal isti in nikoli ni bil predmet kritičnega premisleka. Ob vseh izdanih filmih, publikacijah, oglaševalskih kampanjah in paradah se dejansko ni zgodilo veliko na področju resnične spremembe okoljskih politik, da ne govorimo o praksah. Socialno oglaševanje ni nič drugega, kot priznanje produkcijskega sistema, da mu ni mar, saj razume, da oglaševanje ne prinaša sprememb drugje kot v potrošniških orgijah. Podobe bojo nahranile potrebe po podobah, potrebe po spremembah pa tako zelo demokratični, sicer pa impotenten diskurz o potrebnih spremembah. Prehod v samozadosten razvoj znotraj kapitalistične produkcije pa je sam posebi popolnoma kontradiktoren, saj kapitalizem vedno proizvaja presežke po najnižjih cenah, pa če mora zato izkoristiti ilegalno sekanje gozdov za brisanje zahodno-civilizacijskih prezgodnjih ejakulacij.

Search for another.

It would seem, at times our lives are nothing but a very distinctive search we start in our adult childhoods, bored with our own minds we ghastly touch the edges and reside to thinking there is nothing more. Our imagination went all grayish. Learning became slower or obsolete. Our bodies produced weird amounts of hormones and we go on spending all our days in beds. Slowly we slide in to “the first”.  The first is a cyclical entanglement in many different networks of relationships. The first is all the people you know and all the people that know you. The first is all the places you visit and the stories you told. The first, is a omnipresent state of apathy, of grandiose settlement for keeping in line, for painting within borders. The first is the weight of your life pressing down on you as much as it can, slowly erasing those parts of the map of your mind you haven’t explored recently. In this state of exhaustion, of complete and utter passivity, we search for the other.

Outsourcing in the year 0 wasn’t a smart idea.

There seems in every person is a threshold, a line where the page breaks and we go “fuck this” in our heads and reside to pulling triggers, kicking chairs or taking big leaps from buildings. Or simply resort to change. Somehow change becomes an ugly word equated to weakness and a foolish path to better ourselves.

Was it when Jesus spoke of sins and commands that drove people to no longer resort to their own judgment of right and wrong, but to some external set of rules? Religion seemed to be this new product that came with a handy ctrl-alt-delete button that would stop everything and let you start from the beginning. Confessing proved to be a well thought of concept which brought us only so far. Try thinking about religion as outsourcing, when you put your trust into an externality, you depend on it. But when that company shuts down, we are left with that same know-how we now call “culture” and a white space where there used to be divine meaning. How do we remedy this?

There is change, and radical change. Some people resort to the latter. Suicide basically means someone is so sick of something that he sees absolutely no better outcome of this situation than to take his own life. Or is that the last crumb of control over our own lives that we lost when Catholicism was still considered a good idea (think of it as Windows in ‘95) and got back after the big Enlightenment era but haven’t found any proper use of it.

“The other day I woke up way too early all by myself, everyone around me was still sleeping as the sunlight hitting the white walls scattered all over the room announcing the birth of a new day which promised an ounce more than any other. The moment I rode my bike past this violently blossoming tree the smell of it came as a giant relief that there still is something alive in this dead block of a city. It was the kind of a smell that would bring about anyone considering “radical change”.”

I’ll sleep underground.

Sometimes you’ll go and think about how fucked up you are, and how bad you are at with coping with life, or relationships, or feelings. Or you’re the one on your own, wondering how everyone around you got to where they are with their fuckedupness. And in both cases you’ll either realize you are just as fucked up as anyone else, or how everyone is just as fucked up as you. This feeling is always universal but it rarely provides any comfort.

In loops.

I will wake up at 6:50, splash scolding cold water at my face and slowly grasp what feeling alive feels like. Left leg goes in, right leg goes in, buckle up. Remove glasses, right hand, left hand, head, shirt on. Back to sharpness and focus. Focus. Take gentle steps not to wake the neighbors , the rooftops are locked up because of suicide attempts. Climb up the ladder and look down on the city. It’s brighter than I had imagined it to be. Funny how we still hang out with people that make up the forced friendships formed in school. The fog rises from the roads and these are the first people out in the streets starting their ridiculous days, walking around and taking some fog along with them, so it raises fully in other parts of the city. That means that my spit could be above some other part of town right now.

I got bored with people in general so I laid back and stared at the sky. It reminded me of a movie that was just starting. Fade in, opening credits, only I was no director but just an actor, a horrible one at that. I imagined the movie in my head, a boring tale about someones day, drifting around the city without any real purpose. The kinds of movies that are somewhat pleasing to watch, but leave you with nothing to hold on to. This was my life and not many people would watch it with me.

Now, I could hear the first bird choir assembling in the trees beneath the building, for a moment out of tune they aligned their beaks to play the soundtrack, but no one had listened or even cared. The sun swept along the morning and as the clouds got older, they went “Dammit, we can’t even hold it together until noon anymore.” and floated apart to let light fight with what remained of the fog. The battle was won and I spent the rest of the day on the roof observing what had changed below only to find this was all a permanent loop. There was always a certain feeling of excitement in the opening credits, and overwhelming sadness in the ending. Somehow I was always waiting for the next one, the next beginning of the day that might bring anything in the universe along with it. But it never did. Still with every morning next to you, the possibilities seem endless which makes this actor role somewhat bearable.

Alive in the present.

Things seem fine.

Where are you going?

Always feel safe.

New memory.

My iPod hit 4:34 and the desert we were walking seemed never ending. It was the fourth day in the wild without shopping malls or shower heads and the sky just didn’t want to go dry. By the time we adjusted to the colours in our surroundings, adapted to something we thought was normal, a desaturated world where the greens were all dirty and the reds unclear. “Wait, when was the last time I saw redness?” I thought.

We survived this part of the trail and reached a cabin up north and set up our tent. Even when we laid rocks around it we had no idea what kind of storm was coming up behind the hill. Getting through my book, warm and cozy, I heard the wind getting stronger with every blow. It had this end-of-the-world-aura formula they use for bad horror movies in the americas. In less than 10 minutes we were holding down our fortress with our bare hands from the inside, outside, you were wet in a millisecond. And I was.

The bathrooms were filled with tourists drying off their tents on the ceiling, it looked like spider-man camp up there, dripping down on us, changing into something less wet. An hour of feeling uncomfortable went by, minute by minute accepting the oceans in my shoes as something people in the desert would dream of.

The panicky runny people outside calmed down, even stopped in amazement. They all got our attention from the inside, staring at something in the sky. We all ran out to see as our eyes, shocked with colour and light, winked simultaneously, slowly making out what was this little patch of a blue sky the sun managed to burn through the thick misty clouds. The light encompassed the area we were in and everything gained perspective as well as sharpness and contrast. The world seemed right for those 5 minutes and everyone around me was gazing at that window with dropped jaws. It dawned upon me that this was the first time I saw a clear sky in 11 days. I don’t know what everyone else was thinking, but I normally stare at the sky a lot, I often wonder how it would be to live without this blue gradient of a canvas that expands over us, or what it would be like if it someday just changed into green or some other silly colour? What kind of effect would that have on us and what kind of an explanation would science come up for this change?

Iceland.

There is another world most of us don’t know. It is hidden in the endless panoramas of Iceland, the endless gazes into what seems like another planet. This world, however, is different. It is a parallel universe with nurturing wilderness, the kind of grasp that it provides is a different kind of being alone. The good kind of being utterly lonesome but not in yearning for any kind of company. The kind which makes self-realization an easy task to do and self-criticism apparent and what is even more important, constructive. There in the puddles of Landmanalaugar, I found what was self evident from the beginning; like anywhere else there are no coincidences, probability makes for accomplices and change creates meaning.

Observations: II

In the midst of the economic meltdown, the following became apparent: Those that feared and worked throughout their lives to eliminate any sense of socialism came to grab it’s very essence; the free-market’s safety-net, it’s biggest rival for a help in hand.

Observations: I

What we have learned:

From our observations we have found that life has not progressed over the succumbing weight and presence of the spectacle that is today more important than ever. The economic crisis now shows the layers of artificially accumulated capital entangled between the prevailing orders. We, the wretched, will welcome any red numbers with sweating palms, reaching for our stones and books. Until then, the corpse remains twitching.

I hear music.

All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

The future.

A part of the polar icecap that stretches out for 2 kilometers falls into the ocean and a skinny model in Santa Barbara gets splashed by a deviant wave, roughly one foot higher than the average that day. She shakes off the water and an activist sets a Hummer on fire somewhere in San Francisco.

The thing is, Zycha, I don’t feel as we have much time left in the present. Time is shifting and we have to change our mindset. We have to start enjoying the future as if it was the present, because it does hold so much more. In the future, we will invent so many things. There will be so many wars fought, and even more lost. The smog will turn dark grey and the stars will just be an idea. But we’ll have so much more to laugh at. We will take all of this foolish mass of unimportant knowledge and grin a big smile in the face of Alfred Binet. We will take a hand saw, and cut right through every cross ever built. We will plant handmade explosives in the ground around churches, so they collapse under the weight of their own guilt. Humanity will no-longer have guilt. The notion of freedom and the weight being lifted will come as a spiritual rise in the chests of nuns and sexually backward priests. People will come out of their nests and feel just how important the last breath they took was.

Purchased experiences don’t count. Nr.1

I open my eyes and dive in this pool of substance I warmly name reality. My reality. My dear reality! I wipe my glasses with a cloth I located on the blurry floor. Putting them on, the flow of the world jumps into focus. The leaves out the window go brittle sharp, the surface of the table makes me want to slide my palm across it. The floor is crisp and strong and smooth. I want to walk on it sliding my hand on the table observing the sharpness of the green/blue contrast that makes up the beginning of my day. I am happy.

I like my reality, it’s the air that surrounds me that makes me feel like myself, and I like myself to that extent. Don’t you? So this flow of air and channels of waves I receive are mine and my body generates them under no outer influence. This feels better than anything derived from a screen or processed through speakers. This is the sound of the world, raw. This is the way it should be. This is how I should take every moment and dissect it until I know it’s very substance, and live it. This is how I don’t need any chemicals or any money. This is all I’m taking to my grave.

Newness.

Somewhere, sometime, in the desert of Arizona, a few scientists drink their morning cup of tea and delay work until they can. Their collegue drops to the floor laughing, crazed with ecstasy starts crying. “We did it! I did it!! It smells, it smells like New!”

And since then, this refined fabricated scent fills our shopping malls, our shoes, our bags and trails. This is all we have left. A chemical stench flowing and gnawing on our sensory functions, developing thirst and need for newness, that special feeling of fulfillment that embodies the sensation of paying for something you don’t need.

3, 2, 1

I love you and I love to touch you, to run my fingers through you, smell and admire you. Your type is correctly kerned and appealing, as are the textures all over your beautifully aligned and cut pages. Opposed to humans, your spine is strong and it never lets go. You spark my imagination and let my thoughts flow through time and space without any barriers, for the moment that I lay you down and close my eyes and think of the possibilities. I love the thought that you were once something alive and living, a proud tree that expanded beyond any human truths, and you must be so giving to let me admire you in all these different forms. The older you get, the nicer you smell, and the fact that you are still around gives you profound meaning. I could build walls with you and surround myself with your smell and never feel lonely again. So you exist in minds and times and sullen libraries, waiting to be picked and brought home, bought or stolen. To be read and understood, never mind by whom or what. And when I’m halfway through you and I see the end approaching, I get sad butterflies and I slow down and try to memorize you as much as I can, and when I finish you, I couldn’t let you stay on that shelf of mine, I want you to enjoy yourself in others, gazing back in their eager eyes with your words and letters, throwing meaning and intelligence in their heads, hoping it gets used once in a while. My book, my friend, I will keep you by my bed tonight, so when I wake up I might have a chance to believe in the future.

Feel.

I can’t help but think if something went wrong some one hundred thousands millions of years ago, when the earth’s crust was just getting colder and there was an awakening of new souls and we chose our paths differently. I can only hope we would today be trees. Trees growing some 10 meters apart, yearning and waiting years and years for that crisp spring day when our branches expand, leaves explode and we get closer and closer untill our leaves touch. And we stay touched, in a caress so gentle we can barely feel it, but that’s the best way because then you’re never really sure and you get surprised and surprised and surprised, moments on end.

And we would be standing there together for what seems like forever, with the birds and the bees and the sun, clenching for that rain or letting the snow fall off our backs so we can breathe a little. We would not care about time because we were beyond it. Our only communication would be when seemingly terrible winds blew and we whistled words in each other ears only we understood, and then it would stop and we would swing in malady but we would know it would come again, because you told me once that: “This is where life breathes and expands.”

And I can’t do less but trust you.

Your secret society.

One evening, shaving off a dreadful old beard, smiling at myself and how I look with just a moustache. I decided to keep it, thinking how much it enlightens my mood every time I see myself in the mirror. It was a fun quest every time I sat up from the toilet to discover a thick line of hair stretching above my lip from one side of my face to the other.

Strange things started happening. As I walked out of my building the next morning I ran into an old neighbour from a few stories above mine. We bumped into each other in the hallway when he stopped, looked at me and gave me a thumb-up and a tap on the shoulder. I was sleepy and didn’t think much of it. The light went green and I looked at the driver waiting for his portion of the green lights that day. He looked back at me as I walked pass his humming old car and gave me a nod of approval. My mouth went dry so I stopped at the market before going to work. I got some coconut water and oranges and as I was waiting to pay, the worker smiled at me and said “Don’t worry man, this one’s on the house.” and I walked away without paying. I started connecting the dots. All the men I ran into had moustaches.

I believe that there exists a wide array of secret societies. Baldness society. Moustache society. Fat upper arm society. Jumpy walk society. Dry-hand society. Furious-acne society. Goatee society. Loud-breather society. Sweaty palm society. Greasy hair society. Lazy eye society. Dandruff society. Paleness society. Thick beard society. Unable-to-grow-a-decent-beard-but-still-try society.

Every dysfunction and every embarrassing feature sets a new line of comfort in a secret society that connects through secret hugs, nods of approval, thumbs-up, shoulder-taps, smiles and hats-offs. They have no leaders, no slaves, just a growing base of members that expands with every DNA inflicted dysfunction. This is the modern tool of people who are set in poor social surroundings and search for comfort elsewhere. Look around you and you might find warm looks and occurrences of likeness and belonging.

Developing habits; a chronoclasm.

Have you ever experienced a morning where you walked a straight road enveloped in thick mist, so the rising sun at the end of it made it look like you were walking into some kind of heaven-like place, an after-world where everything looks far away with it’s opacity lowered to 15% and the only possible trouble is deserts of whiteness away? Could you get used to this feeling?

So our meetings became quite regular, but not repetitive and nowhere near planned. We would mostly run into each other in the city and then spend the day talking, sometimes our minds would fall together like oiled Lego’s, other times we rather chose to contemplate our own individual problems, than some larger cosmic truth. It was an uneventful time and I would not be surprised if a tumbleweed passed us by, if it would, we would burn it to create some symbolic space for change of meaning, or meaning of change. I just think we should just never fear change.

Him and I decided to make a collection of writings. It would contain questions and meaningful thoughts that challenge the everyday mindset. These writings would be passed on only to people we would agree upon, people ready or in need of change. The first pages tumbled on…

What if size sets the pace of your perception of time? A fly’s life which counts one day for us means a lifetime for her. What if her perception of time is slower than ours? Imagine mountains peacefully observing the passing of civilizations or just how when you’re a baby, time seems to be flying and at 20 everything starts getting slower and slower and slower until you’re 50 and it seems like nothing has and never will have any closure. Then at 80 we shrink back as we take the photo-finish sprint to death, so life seems to hit the wall just a bit too fast and our loved ones move on and wipe us under the carpets. It’s a natural process and we just can’t seem accept it. It’s hard for us to accept anything natural these days isn’t it? Our schedules filled with non-sense meetings, work hours and pressured sleep cycles. It seems that we can’t find the time to question time? Is it the lack of time that makes us apathetic? Will there come a time when everyone will accept the fact that time is not like air or water? We brought it upon ourselves and now we have to find a way to break it. A chronoclast.

Seeing god.

I stumbled down and I could not stop laughing. Even when I stopped my insides were laughing. Everything got dark and I became paralyzed. My body froze. My mind shifted between 7 different dimensions. My senses changed and I could feel everything in the room. I could hear the flowers grow, the tea dissolving, the wood tables stretch and squeal and moan with the temperature going up. I saw black, but a different black. A black that covered the world, but made sense. My feet started getting cold and I could smell skin coming off behind people’s ears. I could see sound waves through the air and the heat motion through the room. All in shades of black.

Then, a change of perspective. All the dimensions fell in one and now I see the world different. There are colours there I have never seen before. I can’t find words to name them or even describe them. Sounds of nature dying out and mechanical processes enfolding, scraping metal off metal. Binary in the air, waiting to be put in line, then coded. Words crawling around, sad how no one uses them anymore. And feelings, millions and millions of emotions waiting to be hurled out in the world, into each other’s faces and faces turning away from problems. I could sense them all, all at once.
And then I thought: “If the world I know, this maddening society that is metaman, where everyone is so unstable, where everyone starts and stops crying in a matter of seconds… Could everyone start crying at the same moment, so the flood of salty water would cover the earth’s face and wash everything away?”

Interfering wavelenghts.

“I was thinking about something the other day. I think that western civilization is one big massive failure. The silent failure we all embody. But with time I analyzed and of course found positive things that came from it’s upbringing. Let’s say, medicine. It cures a big portion of the diseases we know, it lenghtens our lives and so on. A big plus. And next to medicine is hygiene, you know how some royal families died out just because their teeth were so rotten they infected their brains and dropped like flies? A whole family tree swept under the carpet. But compared to today, do we have more diseases than, let’s say, 1500 years ago? It scares me that today, no body is really doing well. Sure, we all say we’re doing good but we also all have some kind of psychological problems. In our tuxedo’s, expensive shoes, well made hair we all seem determined goal-getting workers but is it really so? I think everyone is severely confused. We’re driven to this point where we don’t know what to do anymore, and this moment becomes so frightening and lonely we don’t realize everyone is the same mess, but nobody can find any comfort in it.

Do we get ill, or do we get ill just to get treated? Are we so disconnected from our own selves that we have to always think there’s something wrong with our minds or with our bodies. Is it just because all these cures are available? Does a new cure spawn a new disease? Where is the limit?”

He thought and nodded in agreement when he opened his eyes and looked into mine, saying:

“And what about cleaning products. Every store has about the same percent of food products and cleaning products. Or when was the last time you ran out of food at home, and the last time you ran out of shampoo or some other hygienic produce? It seems the world today consists of spoiled brats who would rather go hungry than smell their own scent. Brats that suppress everything they want to say and nourish silent addictions. Brats that have everything laid at their feet but refuse to see how it got there. And all these brats will be running the world in few decades. My feet shake at the thought of this.”

I guess at this time our wavelenghts interfered and we were on the same page. We told a story finishing each other sentences.

“If you can imagine a human mind with everything it can do, imagination, physics, math, language, imagine the space of thought it’s possible of. I can imagine this big block floating over our heads expanding with every flow of thought. Now imagine everyone in the world with this block of expanding information.

Do you think if you put it all together, would it be bigger than the universe? Would it expand faster? What if everything is just a brain function that we all share to some extent? Just how we all feel cold the same to some point, then it becomes subjective. Like some people experience lucid dreams and make plans to meet up other people in them. Think of the possibilities, even thinking is creating.”

No tears.

I was riding the train. The air smelled old, like seats of a previous era, an era that reflects so much upon today, a polaroid-like contrast stuck somewhere in time. The trees raced by while I thought about how many times the window next to me passed the same tree, never touching each other. We trust everything just a bit too much. The places and the people went by and no one had any excitement in their eyes, is that normal or is it the disease of our time, I can’t tell as I couldn’t tell gold from stone because I was never too fond of one or another.

A man sat down next to me, he smelled of trees and a newborn’s pinch of cinnamon. He wore thick framed glasses which made his eyes look incredibly big, his lower lip sticking out a nuance too much so he licks it, just every now and then. He looks at peace with the world. Noticing how I analyzed him, he asks if I really want to know.

“What? If I want to know what?”

-”What happens.”

“What happens when?”

-”Well, soon enough.”

“It was the third day of May and I got up for school, I turned 12 that year. As a child I had many imaginary friends, shapes I could construct with my fingers named after people I’ve known and lost, sharing the most intimate parts of my soul with them, sometimes they would even protect me. Birds fluttered around the garden and mom and dad already left for work. The grass was unbelievably green. As disturbed as I was, the Ritalin they fed me with didn’t help much, if it ever helped anyone. I secretly stopped taking it some months ago.

I was a depressed and sad child and nothing could catch my attention. At least I looked like that. However, that day the grass moved me. It was saturated, like it had a glow of it’s own, not just a mere reflection of the sun. I ran out of the building and stopped in the middle of the park, looking around feeling a confusing energy around me, an aura. As I sat down my chest was pulled down to the ground, I didn’t even catch a breath when I realized that my eyes were focused on the sun. Everything changed.

My body got weaker, my vision blurred. Eating food that I couldn’t pick from trees myself did not make any sense anymore. The only thing I could feel were goosebumps, just goosebumps. I hardly remember how pain feels. Inside, my will found a constant. Feeling alive became a constant. Old taught dualism failed inside of me, there was a ying, but no yang. Black but no white. Positive but no negative. I got an instant need to learn, travel, meet, talk, listen and most importantly, live. Like normal people need protein, I need occurrences. And experiences, my vitamins. Love are the fatty acids. You can only go on without them so long. Then you slowly start dying from the inside out.

So I am here, at the end of the world, talking. Oh, I have grown so weary of it. Here, my friend I stop. I stop talking and from now on I just listen. Breathe out and tell me everything you ever wanted to tell anyone.”

A Googolplex of colours.

The blueness of the sky changed rapidly, a decrease of Cyan and a twenty point increase of black, just enough so the colour looks like on one of those IR images. The cracks got wider, just enough so the knowledge could flow out of them for everyone to adopt. Hanging in the air and we, the children grabbing meaning by it’s throat and proclaiming it ours. Step by step and hip by hip, in coherence, we took words out of each others mouths and wrote them down. We turned our backs to conventional morality, drew a line in the sand and did not have the patience to wait for what was about to happen.

Smoke started coming out of the bell towers of every church in the city. Priests running in agony and fear of what would happen to them. Everyone who ever sat in an SUV jumped out of it and ran for their life. Everyone knew that material possessions were no longer safe. Owning anything else but passion became extinct. It was forbidden to forbid.

The city came alive. The cars were destroyed and beautiful things were assembled from what remained. Parking lots lost their lines and became playgrounds painted in every colour the world has to offer. Nuns were making love with sex offenders in the park near where homeless people tried on expensive clothing that CEOs left behind, running to feel the breeze of the river they used to observe from their buildings. Math teachers started singing in the streets whilst painters debated logic and arythmetics. Librarians tore books apart and alcoholics found clarity in the colour of the sky. Introverts became poets, poets went forever silent.

I have just woken up. My thighs feel hot and sweaty but my feet are well cold. I am lying in my bed contemplating the dream I just awoke from. My head feels light, my lungs open, waiting to inhale the fresh air of a new day. I turn around to see if you are still sleeping. Your breathing is easy and your eyes are racing left and right, in the same moment I imagine sending you a telepathic message to open your eyes. You look at me without any surprise and whisper “The future. We have to invent it, the old world is just behind us.”

Zero-gravity mode.

Lungs have mass. Weight. I have no idea what they stand on or hang from, but we all feel it. On dark, boring sundays or wickedly ordinary meetings. In times of stress and times of lightness. The weight is steady but grows with age. Like a back struggles with the weight of the head growing heavier with every year of a poorly digested diet.

There is and there must be a cure. Music. Music can elevate the lungs to such weightlessness, a feeling of total elation as the spirit grows higher and the mind feels free. Joyous or maudlin, tender or violent, a melody can twist a stomach or well tears in the eyes. It can procreate situations or bring back long forgotten memories, smells and aspirations. Aching pains, increased heartbeat rate and thus muscular bloodflow. Inertia, passion, alternate realities or higher forms of awareness. Hopefullness, agony and divine purpose. Bring together or set apart. Plants grow and wounds heal.

Still, the best of all are the lungs. Such ease with which they float and make the fingers twitch and thighs rub against eachother with eyes turned upward and white. Of life and awareness, of freedom and creation. Can you hear it? Can you feel it?

Your life in html tags.

Imagine. It’s 2020. You wake up for your 18th birthday. You are not someone who enjoys birthdays. You never enjoyed birthdays, especially not your own birthdays. Grumpy and sullen you drag your feet to the kitchen where your mother greets you with a weird excitement in her eyes. It’s nice to see that, but sadly it never means anything good.

Your parents sit you down with the laptop on the table. “We have something to show you …” “My god, I hope it’s not a video of my birth uploaded to YouTube.” Instead your parents show you YOUR blog. A blog documenting your life from the two weeks before your birth, your mother all poor sitting on the couch not being able to move around like she would want to, till this week, when your father updated it with his thoughts on the event that is just taking place.

“We are going to tell him about the blog on his birthday. I think it will be the best gift a child at 18 can receive.”

It is a nice idea, no doubt about it, but consider this. The blog. Your blog. Your life in html tags is the most boring piece of shit you’ve ever read. Your whole existence reduced to a couple of ASCII encodings putting toghether the most boring story ever told. It’s shit, worse than shit. It’s a story you’d wrap your dog’s shit in if you got it for a present. It is written in Courier, the font you’ve despised since that pop-quiz in 2nd grade. #08e7f5 is the colour your Mom chose for the background. “I thought it fits your personality well.” This is far worse than every gift you’ve ever received. Not only your doubts about your uneventful life became true, they are well documented. They are saved in the binary landscapes of the multimedia landfill funkadrome for everyone to read. But no one comments. No wonder. I don’t know anyone who would comment and I am really proud of this notion. Thank god no one commented. What would they comment? Who comments something as insignificant as a drop in the ocean which doesn’t even produce a wave strong enough to distort the image of yourself staring back at you. This is it. 0 and 1, if not even more dull. You could at least have a disease, something growing out of your nostril and no one to explain what it is. Something, anything… they could have walked in on you when you were touching yourself, but they didn’t.

The most depressing part is, you’ve known this already. And the fact that you know it now for sure doesn’t change a thing. You’ll go through diets, 10-step programmes, yoga and books about self-improvement. You’ll never change. This is your story. As boring as #FFFFFF. As boring as whatever happens to Britney these days. As boring as a new-age furniture shop. As boring and bored as the face staring back at you.

A Douglas Coupland moment.

I rotate and walk back into my hotel room, closing the smoked-glass sliding doors behind me, and then fall back-ward into my cool Fortrel-sheeted bed, when suddenly a new feeling washes over me – a feeling at once destructive, romantic, and grand – like falling into a swimming pool dressed in a tuxedo. I have this feeling no room is ever really quiet; this feeling that even in the quietest, emptiest, and most uneventful of rooms there is always an event of profound importance occurring. This event is Time itself, foaming, raging and boiling like a river, roaring through this room and through all rooms – Time flowing through the beds, gushing from the minibars and churning from the mirrors, and Time, with its grand, unfightable sweep, taking me along with it.