- feeds your head
fungi
I’m sick right now. Not as in suffering from a life threatening disease or even bedridden, just your average cold and fever. One of those everyday kind of things that happen to most people a few times a year. At best it allows you to just relax and lie on the couch and watch movies or read books and drink tea, and at worst it annoys the hell out of you because you can’t do anything but lie on the couch and watch movies or read books and drink tea.
When you enter that latter stage of frustration there’s pretty much nothing that will prevent your mind from running amok on you. You start thinking about all the things you could do if only you weren’t sick right now, and the fact that you probably wouldn’t do even half of those things if you weren’t sick doesn’t really matter. It’s the illness that prevents you from doing them, not your own lack of motivation or engineering. At least that’s the case in the initial thought loop. But then, as frustration grows, so does the thought clutter in your head, and you start reevaluating every single aspect of your life. Read more of this post
disco
I don’t know how to categorize this text (poetry?), so if you have any suggestions please let me know!
But do you get what it was? What that thing was that hit you? That tremendous force that knocked you to your knees. Had you on your face nailed to the ground. Do you know what that was? Do you? That was life. The whole massive reality of it. That’s what that was. Life. Raw and unfiltered life. With all its crudeness and flaws. The real deal. Life. You can’t run from that. You can try, but you won’t win. No one ever does. There’s no use fighting it, you can’t win. No one does. The best you can do, your very best shot, is to just smile and enjoy the ride. Enjoy it while it lasts, cause it won’t. Nothing ever does. So enjoy it. Make that your one goal, the sole objective, the singular task. Then, and only then, will you ever even have a fighting chance of standing up. To not have to spend the rest of your days on your knees. Enjoy it. That’s the only way to stay up, to stay afloat.
One of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me was taking me out to jump in rain puddles. I have never been as close to giving up as I was at that point in my life and that particular day was one of the really bad ones. It was in summer and there had just been a thunderstorm. We were sitting on the couch in my small one bedroom apartment and I was having repeated attacks of panic anxiety followed by endless crying. And he said: “Come on, we’re going to go jump in the rain puddles.” At first I thought “no way, there’s just no way I can do that”, but for some reason I still let him take me outside.
He led my by the hand in that tender way you do with someone you know you need to take care of, someone small and fragile. And I don’t know if it was that or the fact that I hadn’t really jumped in any rain puddles in years, but I felt just like a little child again. Like that little child I once was. The good parts of being that little child. And I started laughing. We both did. Just like two five-year olds. It was in the evening and the sun was just setting, but it was still warm. We got soaking wet and people were staring but it didn’t matter, we just kept laughing and jumping. Read more of this post
dumpster
As long as I can remember I’ve occupied my head with thoughts about femininity vs. masculinity. Not in the sense of gender confusion, or as in the feeling of having been born with the wrong genitalia, but as in not being comfortable with the assigned role. I was just never very good at being a girl. Not only in my own head but also in the eyes of others. It was, and still is, frequently being pointed out to me that my behavior wasn’t very ‘ladylike’ and that girls “aren’t supposed to like/be/say/do/act like that”. As a kid this type of comments would make me quite uncomfortable and I would spend a lot of time trying to figure out why. What I couldn’t get my head around was what they actually meant because I was a girl, I was very much aware of that, so why wasn’t my behavior or interests considered appropriate for a girl? If I, as a girl, was doing it or into it, didn’t that then by definition make it ‘appropriate for a girl’? The unanimous answer was no. It wasn’t appropriate to like horror movies, metal and dirty jokes, and it wasn’t acceptable to burp and take long strides when you walk, nor was it ok to sit with your legs far apart or state your opinion loudly. And laughing too loud or getting in fights was also off the agenda. It was ok to play with dolls as long as the dolls didn’t get involved in sex or violence and it was ok to play dress-up as long as you dressed up as a princess and not a pirate. But I did both. That was the thing. I actually played princess and pirate. And I liked horror movies and Nancy Drew books. I could never understand why I had to choose. Read more of this post
get real
I am working on this semi-fictional short story right now. I say semi-fictional because it’s based on a real event. Sort of. Actually it’s based on a person I saw at an opening. The rest is pure fiction. All made up by me. But the person exists. I don’t know him and I have never talked to him, but he does exist. I know his name, what he looks like and a little bit about what he does. That’s it. And it’s not like he’s one of these fascinating freaks or anything like that, he’s just a sort of regular guy in the creative scene. I made a few behavioral observations about him that night that for some reason triggered a story in my head. I’ve changed his name, for obvious reasons, but the character is him. Or is it? Not really. How could it be? I don’t even know him. So is the character based on him? Not sure. In order to base something on someone wouldn’t you need to know something about that person? Like I said, I really have a very minimal knowledge of this person, pretty much nothing apart from those few glimpses of pretty normal ‘being at an opening behavior’ I got that evening, so how could the character possibly be based on him? Does it matter? I suppose in the grand scheme of things it’s pretty inconsequential and irrelevant, but in my own head this raises several mildly interesting questions. Read more of this post
This is a performance pice, i.e. written for the spoken format, but since I’ve been getting some requests for the text I thought I’d share it here in written form.
Questioning.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. And those of you who fall between these categories. My intention here tonight is to be pretentious. I would like to share with you some insights I have made through a series of nervous breakthroughs using the method of questions. I intend to proclaim questioning as the origin of knowledge. The ONE thing that keeps us from repeating new versions of the same old mistakes over and over again. What makes us move on. Allows us to reach new insights, gain new and deeper knowledge. Only through questioning can we identify bad ideas and false assumptions. Questioning is the only cure for prejudice. What prevents us from getting lost in a labyrinth of dead-end ideas. Hardcore, old school critical thinking. Questioning. Read more of this post
berlin street art - if you know who the artist is, let me know!
A couple of months ago I had a discussion about friendship versus family. In that discussion the argument was raised that family means more than friendship. That family is more solid, more reliable. I vehemently disagreed. Just like I always do when this topic comes up. Just like I do when the same topic comes up in the constellation friendship versus romantic love. I truly value friendship. In fact, it is quite possible the most important thing to me.
I don’t know if I have a lot of friends, I don’t know what constitutes normality in the number of friends you have, but I have a bunch of people in my life that I call friends. People who are dear to me, people I love. That’s how I define friendship, as a special kind of love. Essentially a friend is someone you forgive for being who they are. A love that is, in that sense, unconditional. It has nothing to do with demands and duties. Friendship just is. Of course you have expectations, but it’s only when those expectations get completely adjusted to the character of a person that friendship emerges. The expectations become realistic. That’s how the love is sustained. Loving exactly what you have and accepting what you can expect. Read more of this post
A friend of mine got pregnant a while ago. Nothing special about that, women get pregnant all the time. But in this case it wasn’t planned nor was it desired. Also happens all the time. All part of life. Reproduction. A fact of life. But mainly for women. And don’t get me wrong, I know the XY people also have to relate to the reproductive issue. For instance the almost complete lack of control in relation to your own reproductive contributions. A woman always knows if it’s her baby, a man doesn’t. Being pregnant and giving birth is an exclusively female activity. Something that doesn’t actually have anything to do with men. Men are only in on the actual conception, beyond that point they really have nothing to do with it. In fact, they don’t even have to be there in person, a sperm donation will do just as fine. The manufacturing of babies is something that takes minimal male involvement, but requires a tremendous investment for a woman. In a lot of parts of the world it can even be lethal. As ‘natural’ as it may be, giving birth is a dangerous activity. According to the WHO 1500 women die every day due to pregnancy or childbirth. That’s more than half a million women a year. Of course the danger is greater in the so-called ‘developing countries’ but women actually die of pregnancy related issue even in the ‘developed regions’ of the world. Baby manufacturing isn’t without risk. But we don’t really like to think about this here in our part of the world, we like to think that having babies is all about happiness and anticipation. Of course we are at some level aware of the fact that it’s not all fun and games, but we prefer to actually not think about the risk it poses to women’s health. And if we add abortions in the equation the situation becomes even grimmer. Because when the anti-abortion crowd, the so-called ‘pro-life’ band of idiots, are getting louder and gaining more influence, the dangers of abortion increase for the simple reason that the medical supervision and assistance for these procedures are decreasing. Read more of this post
same person, different shoes.
I just did something very horrible to myself. I exposed myself to the world of fashion blogs. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m nauseous now. I actually don’t have anything against fashion per se, there’s a part of me that enjoys it immensely. I like the aesthetic aspect, the sheer visual appeal, but above all I think fashion has tremendous subversive potential. Unfortunately this potential is very rarely used. And that was why the excursion I just did was so revolting. It could be so awesome, so earth shatteringly radical, but it’s not. It’s the exact opposite. It’s bland repetition of the same old formulas over and over again. Consumerism, name dropping, brand enslavement, plastic and the same pacifying ideals over and over again in an endless loop that never fucking stops! All this time, all this energy, that’s wasted on something that’s so stupid it’s even painful to watch. It could be so good but it’s just mind-numbingly boring. An army of clones that look like bland copies of each other. Add to the mix some shallow exhibitionism and you have the world of fashion blogs. At least the majority of them. I’m sure there are other things out there. Or rather, I really, really hope there is. For the sake of our species I hope there are at least some people in this scene that actually have some sort of reflection type behavior happening. I feel I should be honest and say that my investigation wasn’t that thorough, nausea came in the way. But this way I can at least cling to that last shred of hope. Because what I did find was so depressing it made me want to cry. Read more of this post
