greed

it is xmas that is around the corner, all that i can think of is greed and that i hate this season. i hate it even more when i am going to be away from my whole family. my friends are all going to be with their families. i have friends whose families feel like my own and that would welcome me at this time of the year, but it just is not the same thing. i really do not understand what goes through my head at this time of the year. which ever way i slice it, i do not like it. i never liked it. my memories of it are a mess. i never understood what this time of the year is supposed to be about.

i am sitting in one of the local watering holes, and at the table next to me, they are speaking arabic. from the tone, egyptians. a look at their faces tends to support the misr hypothesis. yes, i miss the nile, it is good to hear the speak. it is warm there now. it might even be that next week i take a short hop over there, stay for a few days. get lost in the masses, wear a head-cover and boring unpretentious clothes that do not allow any imagination as to what kind of feminine curves i might have. i really like the anonymity of traditional islamic grab. the funniest thing that i ever saw however was once a man walking in alexandria wearing a white robe and headdress, carrying a bag of groceries on each hand and exhibiting one hell of an hard-on. i just burst out laughing, and it was a good thing that i was not the one driving. so much for the idea of what that kind of dress can hide in a man when there is a bit of wind and the good man did not wear what would have been proper, that is, the long cotton underpants. it was summer, and it was funny, and it has nothing to do with xmas or greed, but a whole lot with the irony of what life is all about.

am i pleading, begging, arguing or just dreaming of getting the hell out of here? it could be.

but what is it that i am trying to escape?

life could not be better. all the indicators are up. i am surrounded by dear dear friends, yet. i am pissed-off. i am in a fighting mood.

tuesday i had a crash of sorts. i had a discussion with one of my colleagues with whom i work intensely and well on a matter that had to do with me and my mimic. i was telling him one thing, and he claimed that my mimic was saying something else. fuck! i actually argued with him that he does not have a clue about my mimic and what it means.

just monday evening i found myself with some like-minded people in a restaurant in another city. among them one whom i particularly like. i had a two hour train ride back home and the discussion was going well, i would have loved to stay longer, and moreover i would have loved to stay with that one particular person. so as it is with these intense geek moments, i asked if i could crash on his couch, he declared having no couch, but a bed. there in front of everybody, and my little wonderful mind told me that was exactly what i wanted, and i gave him a look that he interpreted as reproachful, and all that was going on for me was surprise and sheer embarrassment. look, i do like my private life private, but all of a sudden, it looked like i was arranging to share a bed at the dinner table like a casual affair. i was not ready for it, and then when somebody else offered me a bed, then i realized two things that yes i wanted to share a bed with him and in all likelihood we would end up at the very least talking until the wee-hours and i had a deadline that required my presence back home the next day. after maneuvering myself in such a tight spot, for once i was saved by my own procrastination that required my presence back home, or something like that. i wonder what the real big deal would have been if i would have just accepted his offer. is it not that everybody sooner or later finds out about who is sleeping with whom?

again, my mimic got interpreted in a way that just did not correspond to my internal state by someone who clearly is also on my good side on monday. on tuesday, the same happens in a different context. it just often happens that my face lies. my mimic rarely corresponds to my words. it is damn frustrating and i am pissed-off about it. on occasions my face actually expresses to others what my internal state is, however when it is something about my affections and private life, it does not. i have only recently gotten to the root of this strangeness of mine. it is not a pleasant one.

today i decided that it is time to attend to my needs. why on earth do i ignore my own needs?

and, yes, i am fine, very fine. xmas will pass, it always does.

clogged up

really. that is how things started me on blogging. the kitchen sink on the pied-à-terre was clogged up. i opened it up, and there was no obstruction. that was two and an half years ago. come to think of it, a long time. much has happened, some of it i have discharged right here in the kitchen sink, a lot not.

i have poured my heart out in "fluage" and i have tried to be as sincere as i can when i here attempt to answer the question of how i am. mostly i am, often i find the how a bit irrelevant.

i have been in love i don't know how many times since the blogging started, and that is irrelevant too. i am always in love, mostly with a stone, or with the spiders that share my living space. spiders, i love the spiders unless of course one errs into a place that i claim is mine, and then i get rather basic about it, and the spiders loose. no, i am not a good Buddhist, but then, on days like today, i feel like i am a good nothing. if at least i could be a good thief! alas, not even that!

i am often very sceptical, and there is precious little that i believe in, not even logic, not even maths. it is all abstract, and i love the abstract. love? yes love. love. that too is pretty abstract. what is love? liking, loving, being passionate, being intensely curious. the abstract is my love these days.

i keep a portrait of a friend of mine pinned on a wall because each time that i look at that face and see the representation of that expression that to me exudes calm and serenity, a lot of my fears evaporate. other friends have wondered what it is between him and i and i have found myself a few times tempted to somehow justify my need to be reminded of his existence. it is a need, yes. i do however count my blessings that i have not developed an obsession with him. loving is nothing more than the pleasure of having experienced presence and knowing that for a few moments you have shared existence without the lecherous morpion of possessiveness.

there is nothing harder for me right now than to admit my own needs, and to allow myself these. i pray, i do not believe!

about jewels

today while minding my own business, that is, wrestling with a self imposed deadline in a attempt to preempt total panic later when the real deadline falls, the phone rings. i pick it up and on the other side is one of my dearest friends, colleagues, lovers. you name it, he is it to me or has been at some time. because he spent five weeks in a de-stressing therapy clinic and i have myself been up in the air quite a bit, it has been a total of eight weeks since we have seen each other, or so he tells me. for my part i have not really been keeping books.

a couple of weeks ago i buzzed him on email and got an answer with contents that roughly translated that he was not yet ready to talk to me. i mailed back that he should take his time, after all, that is all that is really his, his time. not having an expectation or anticipation as to how much time he needed for himself, i also put the whole to rest. i love him dearly, intensely, even passionately but i also have the same attitude towards my work. when he rang today, i was both surprised and pleased.

he told me about his experience at the clinic and that is a story that is not mine to tell. i shared with him the events of my last eight weeks. it was on sharing those events with him that i became aware of how very much has happened in this life of mine during the past eight weeks. that feeling that i had four weeks ago after returning from a week over-there-somewhere attending to matters close to my heart, is not a feeling, it is an attitude, a way of being and living. it is relatively new, change has taken place in this life of mine. that bit about me not recognizing my life since is real.

roughly one week ago i met with a dear soul who this summer populated my carnal distractions and when the animal who i am decided that also good affairs must one day come to an end, he decided that i am a cold blooded bitch. in our most recent meeting i could barely recognize the man, and i wondered who that person there talking to me was, he seemed so foreign. i cared so very little for his troubles and tribulations. i wondered why on earth i had even bothered to call him up when i passed his office. yet, i remember well one moment earlier this past spring when this man touched me, and i ingested a wonderful drug. i knew that it was a drug, it is a drug that i have taken before, it was the abysm of falling in love. we do fall in love with our own neurosis, and so it is also with me. the love affair with the own neurosis, is however therapeutic, if not narcissistic. what a delightful choice the psyche gives you, you fall in love and then you may choose therapy or narcissism. the choice is yours, it always is. on occasions i forget this so very basic bifurcation in every day life.

it was in my week away one month ago that i faced that choice once more. i went for therapy, and i felt like a total fool. imagine me having this man whom i very much like, and whom i admire, right there sitting next to me. imagine me sensing his presence, imagine me feeling insecurity. mine or his, it really did not matter. then i feel him pulling back and away, i turn around and tell him exactly what all of his tossing, doing and bending activates in me. then imagine the two of us alone in the privacy of his kitchen a few weeks later. imagine him calling me yesterday with a wonderful stratagem just to talk but having not much to say. it takes so little to make me happy. our call lasted less than ten minutes, and i was delighted, even satisfied. satisfaction sounds perverse now; perverse is the very idea that the seducer is now being seduced. yet our egos are so very delicate and brittle. shattered egos make for very deep neurosis. being the fool whom i am, once more i wrote to him again... and again i felt like a divine fool. i like being a fool at this point. i have given up all pretense of wisdom, enlightenment, or for that matter common sense. i am as i am so be it.

at the end of our phone conversation today my friend and i were bubbling. while we were not looking for it, we have found a deep friendship. he told me about his therapy, his falling in love, his needs, his life's errands. i shared with him my struggles, my falling in love, my fascination with the muses, my passion for life. we concurred on the matter of sharing a bed with each other.

misunderstanding

i have been struggling. i really have. i have tried not to struggle and the more i try not to struggle, the more i struggle. i do not like this one bit.

i feel the ground changing under my feet faster than light travelling through space, and it is hallucinogenic in all its forms.

yesterday i had an encounter with a colleague that was of the strangest kind. but what is strange? at one point i was muttering to myself that i am indeed the grand-dame of whores. if so, i like it. i love it. i am self-absorbed with it!

one thing is certain about my colleagues, those with whom i share a common discipline or work: they range from the highly underpaid university professor to legal counsel types in high places.

here i am in the midst of putting myself through a lot of self-generated stress working on a project that is absorbing every cell of my body, and this wonderful colleague comes to my office for a coffee. i have a whole world of understanding for his condition, he is single, retired and has a lot of time on his hands and no financial worries. i am single, live alone by choice, can not find the time to do all the projects i want to do, and count every cent three times before i spend it. a bit of conversation is good, and an occasional coffee with a colleague can be refreshing. however with this one case, i am wondering which muscle it is that i am exercising now.

it is a good one, this case. before leaving yesterday my colleague claimed that i should be giving him more warmth. i smiled and remained distant and cold, and told him that he gets hot coffee and the occasional warm meal, but that is it. that part of our interaction does not bend me out of shape in any way. i have almost fifty years of experience of keeping men away from my body, and i am quite sucessful at it. but then i had to start early in protecting my own physical integrity. i experienced a first attempt at rape of the age of seven. i had the reflexes and the presence of spirit at that age to escape the ordeal physically unscathed, psychologically the incident left a deep wound.

when my colleague yesterday went on rambling about what all women secretly deep down really wanted was to be taken by force and be raped, he got a lecture on how very ill informed his opinion was. he backed out and tried to defend his reasoning by citing the german popular children' songs that clearly in his opinion can be interpreted to represent that secret wish. i remained most unconvinced of such reasoning. every part of my being was on alert.

never before in my life have i felt the kind of rage that i felt yesterday. i felt the rage and i remained calm, assertive, and with a smile. if there is at least one woman without that kind of deep desire, then the claim is false. this woman - me - does not have that deep desire. i have looked deep down, i have embraced my own sexuality, and there is no such desire. not here, not with me.

it is however easy to get confused when it comes to sexuality and agression.

i may live alone, claim that my life is that of a monk, and pornographic details of my private life may or may not exist. i am neither asexual nor abstinent. i know moments of lust and play when force is involved. still, those moments have nothing to do with some deep secret desire for rape. those instances when force is involved in the expression of sexuality are moments of extreme clarity and deep desire that can be communicated and shared between consenting adults.

that part had nothing to do with me feeling like the grand-dame of whores. in an exchange with a cousin - an honourable member of the legal profession - we ranted a bit about the kind of life that we live and how we exchange our intellectual services for money. i call this the life of a whore, and he confirmed it by telling me that is exactly how one of his universtiy professors had described the legal profession. then we ranted about the medical doctor's attitude towards money, and decided that we had still much to learn from them if we really wanted to be professional about it. anyhow, if i am sick and my medical quack does not heal me and i die, do i get my money back?

time to get back to basics: the ultimate conspiracy

i am here in a titter, and i ought not to be. my trouble is with the ought, and there is no titter, nothing to laugh about, and frankly... i ought to. it is something about a day job, and right now, i could not even be arsed about another kind of job. i just can not help it, you tell me day job, and i think blow job, with or without hyphen. it really does not matter, does it? i mean, the hyphen does not matter. according to oxford dictionary the word blow-job does not exist, so do not be such a blow-through cock. i mean, don't be such a valve. a valve - in case that you have lost the logic train here - is a clasper of a male butterfly.

i asked the question - how are you? - of my brother today, and he was just getting out of bed. siblings of a kind we are, he sleeps with his computer, literally. really, he has the thing - well, it is not a mac, so it is a thing - set up so that he can chat from all the comfort of being under his comforter. at this point i am just glad that my love for sushi did not kill me this time. after all, i was at that much fated sushi bar in one of the european capitals on that very fatal day for one very dead ex-soviet - ex-all - now. i wonder if that was all a ploy to promote the new 007 film? perhaps not. even hollywood is not up to such tricks. but then again, why would they not? there are a lot of unemployed and not yet too old soviet spies who will do anything for a piece of action, to say nothing of what they would do for a bit of sushi. they have never questioned the legality or morality or it, why would they start now with such inconveniences? it is after all just another day job. i mean the day job about in all discretion putting some polonium 210 in somebody's sushi - or was it in the wasabi paste? - and then gracefully exiting the scene to not ever be traced. really, i like such thrillers. you know, the bards are suckers for thrillers. i, i just have my pretensions, so i think that i ought to like thrillers, write one and then just ride the tube to the top of the new york times best seller list. no hyphen on best seller, i know that much, and when it is convenient, i too can follow the orthography rules. best-sellerdom obliges!

truth is, we have all missed the cold war. what could be more appropriate than to have a reincarnation of it just when another copyright industry product - a film - is being launched? it helps sales, and it stimulates the economy. it creates jobs for carpenters at the studios, and keeps students from starving while collecting ticket stubs at the entrance of the movie theatres. it is all for a good cause, ain't it. i know that my sarcasm reeks, you do not have to remind me of it. but then it was i who reeked last night, and for once i pittied those who shared public transportation with me on my return from a most enjoyable dinner invitation. you see, butter or any other cow dairy product, even in small amounts, gives me a glorious case of flatulence for starters and then a good case of diarrhea. i get tired of being a pain in the ass about being strict about what i eat, and then i get my gut to pay for it. i drank lots of water and tea today, and yes i feel as good as new, thank you.

am i digressing? giving the tone that this post has picked up, it seems that "blogging drunkenness" is an essential part of my victual persona, and i can not possibly not blog about what is happening in this world and that once more has not affected me in any way. still, that other blog remains closed, and i was there and had sushi on that day. it could have been the day before, but what is one day between life and death? still, i am tired of blogging here and there, and everywhere. there are such things as tags and search engines and i am not bent on creating the perfect web all by myself. really not. i am ambitious, bent and driven, but me too, i have my limits. the kitchen sink will now have to accommodate some of drunkenness.

see, i was at a lecture of a most distinguished philosophy professor this past week. you know the kind of professor who has an entry in wikipedia, who has known a few dead philosphers, is emeritus at a few universities, travels here and there, and has lots of interesting scholarly opinions. i listened and took notes, and i came out of the lecture with the distinct impression that this man was repenting for crimes committed during the second world war. i was totally unimpressed and rather much in my own ego trip albeit a bit upset with myself that i have not read enough kant, aristotles and varela. i would have loved to argue with the man, but somehow reason took a hold of me and i left the lecture at break and skipped the discussion. it could also be that i was plain aghast with the remote possibility of the implications of what i had overheard two faculty members in their shabby jumpers and dreadful outmoded trousers chipper at each other. not impressed, the woman in black walked out and asked the girl at the café bar if she had soya milk. she did not. nowadays you can get soya milk in many café bars in london, this was not one of those. it was not in london either.

back to my titter that is not happening or why i am feeling insecure about producing a piece of work that i know i am damn well qualified to do? was it because before i was commissioned i was asked if i was qualified and my impulse on the moment was to ask the good man if he was joking. instead i said something or other, and then had to manoeuvre myself out of the something or other and sound brilliant, while all it felt like for me was that i was one hell of a bullshit artist.

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1.1 metamorphosis without the butterflies

i woke up one morning this week remembering a dream that involved a swedish thirtyish male somewhere in a kitchen half-naked à la Tyler Durden but without the attitude. needless to say that i woke up laughing and humbled by the thought that this is how old age is sneaking up on me. for my mid-life crisis i married a man eight years younger than i, so this dream, is clearly marking the advent of old age. it came sneaking by having a rather prototype male appear in my dreams in the absence of eros.

when the day starts with such psychological petty crimes and then the phone rings and a past lover is on the other side, life is taking its course. a colleague of mine has these days taken to hinting something or other about my men. oh, i get him loud and clear. i will need to face that one straight one of these days as it becames necessary, if it becomes necessary.

on wednesday i walk into my therapy session and the therapist happily announces that she has found my file again. again, i had to laugh, that internal laugh that is half irony, half satisfaction and two-thirds insight, because that very morning i had thought about this episode of the loss of my therapist's notes on my case a few months back. now, it is not everyday that a therapist and member of the medical profession loses a patient's file, and i remained most unconvinced of its loss, and took the view that it had been misplaced somewhere in the office and its many papers and shelves, and in due time it would surface again. it did, it was among the empty file wrappers.

that morning my thought of that misplaced file was that when i entered the therapist's office for the first time over one year ago, it was because i had more than just issues to resolve, i was in the throws of a depression that was choking my life; i needed help. there is here one person who clearly does not have her shit together - that is me - and goes for help to this other person - the therapist - and that together-person then looses the file containing all those notes about who is related to whom and who did what to whom, where and that whole relatory of recollections that get spewed during the course of therapy. ah! perfection is also not to be found at this address. what a delighful relief!

when a past lover rings early in the morning, i am barely awake, and he has good news for me. for a while back there while i was in the throws of some deep funks of depression a few months ago, i did worry about the state of affairs of his marriage following one long call with him. he is a good friend, our separation was a necessary step for both of us, we remain faithful to each other for there is nothing that can separate good friends. now it was easy to joke about the postulate that perhaps he did not need a maitresse, as is common in france, and a few other places in the world. in fact, having more than one relationship that involves copulation is very common among the human species. it so is that the invention of marriage and the preaching of some alledged morality principles within a few degenerate doctrines has caused this de facto practise to be one that is frowned upon. i know, how in our family the gossip of other people's affairs is often used to preach what should be. needless to say that in this very same family of mine, all sorts of overt and covert relationship behaviour is to be found, however nobody talks about it. that is what they call normal, and that is what i call hypocritical behaviour. but then, that is me, the moral me.

all social criticism aside, it was good to talk for a while with this dear friend of mine. it was especially good to remind him that he too is human, like the rest of us. and like the rest of us, he also does not always have all his shit together, and does not always behave ideally. he is a fantastic friend, and always was, yet he too is not perfect. i too often forget that i do belong to the human species and am vested with all the wonderful incongruities and caprices that so characterize the beasts whom we are.

recently i was visiting a friend and cousin for a week and we ended up discussing a lot of our private issues about lovers, loves, life, fortune and fame. she is the ever wise art historian, and i am the insane writer. while i was visiting her, i was also in the midst of a sweet confrontation with one of my dearest muses who was in town at the same time. at one point she declares that he is not up to my level and that i idealize him. i do idealize him and what pleasure that is! on the other hand, inspite of all my cousin's deep insights into french men's behaviour, this is not a question of levels or worthiness. when is another being worth another? never. we, human, we deserve nothing, have a right to nothing. we are alive, we breathe, we eat, we sleep and sometime in between sometimes we connect with each other. sometimes there is poetry, other times there is ease, and most of the time there is nothing at all. in all cases, i say there is life and relationship.

i return to my lovers. literally, i often do that. i return to them for the lessons learned and return to them for the caresses and the pleasure of their company. sexual copulation is not always involved. lover is a word that makes me wonder. lover is often riddled with meanings belong to some social canonry to which i do not subscribe. but then i already have trouble with the concept of falling in love, and certainly no understanding for that other concept that involves perfection when it comes to the object of one's affections. it was exactly to this point that my therapist and i returned on wednesday. if relationships fail these days, one reason can be sought in the idealization of the relationship itself, and the requirement that it has to be perfect and compliant to several concepts of social canonry, and that is so oblivious to the needs of our soul, spirit and psyche. we need dreams, ideals and angels on occasions. i do well surrounded by a few muses whom i love and respect, and who give me the raw pleasure of sincerity.

at this point i recall another french man in my life, another past lover, one whose tracks i have lost, one with whom i conceived a child. one man who was pure poetry. our child left us both before his farewell, and in the deepest core of my being there is this taste of life lived to the fullest that has stayed with me. he is one of the rare people that have departed to not be heard of again. i have no idea of where he is living now, or if he is living. does it matter? no. he enriched my life with his presence. what more could i possibly want? i have my peace of mind.

perhaps this is not old age at all. it can be that one night i dream of an unknown swedish adonis by the kitchen sink, and then the next night it is somebody whom i know, and it is something totally different.

how am i?

i, little me, how the fuck am i?

let me tell you. it is 16:13 according to my friendly local mac sitting on my lap, and my stomach is growling.

i spent the best part of the morning researching a paper, and i think some circuit overheated and i forgot to eat. then i decided that my dizzy spells were due to lack of fresh air and went for a walk and to return a few empty bottle and aluminium for recycling. a few times i had to hold on to the next anchored object as i felt that i was losing equilibrium and would fall down if i did not steady myself. i stopped at the local grocery store on the way back and bought some food, however i had plenty of food at home. i ate when i arrived home, but i need to slow down and cook myself a good soup, and i am feeling more on speed than on anything else. my stomach keeps on growling, it too must be on speed however it feels like it is on laxatives.

i am slightly confronted with my therapist's assertion that my psyche is doing rather well. although there are still a few psychosomatic mysteries in my physiology, the dirty work is done. indeed the depression is gone, and i remain convinced that that depression was necessary in order to illuminate and deal with childhood traumas that were indeed blocking all my self-expression. it has been an interesting road, but the one ahead promises adventures of another flavour and depth. i am anxious, yes, but the good kind of anxious that gives me inspiration each morning, and makes very clear as to why it is that i get up every morning.

clearly, i do not get up to eat. on the way back from my walk, recycling center and grocery parade, i met somebody whom i had not seen in ages. she said something about me needing to eat, i look very thin. i do not feel very thin, and in comparison to one year ago, i have a couple more kilos. i am however lean, and between my muscles and my skin there is indeed not much of a fat layer.

i am as i am!

anyhow, what time is it in tokyo?

or the colour of dissonance

yesterday something strange hit me in the morning and i found myself wearing two mismatching jumpers and a pair of old blue jeans discarded by my son many moons ago. i just could not not wear those two jumpers. one is mustard colour and it has light and dark blue plaid and the other is khaki green. the khaki green and the mustard just dissonated in all tones. this is how i arrived at the dojo for morning aikido practice. morning practice yesterday was a catastrophe. so much so, that the fact that we were almost all slightly off, is not even a consolation. shomein uchi nikyo? you must have been kidding! i could have given you kote gashi or shio nage, but nikyo was temporarily not available (it reminded me of what happens when a server goes down and a service is not available). i do not know if my particular bent for such jumper colours had any influence in my body's ability and aptitude in aikido techniques, but what is certain was that i was fully absent at one point and caught myself thinking of the analogy of learning aikido with the subject of a new project that i just started last week and that will be absorbing me until the end of the year. i was thinking of potentially paid work while on the tatami. i was thinking of the work, and i was thinking of money. i was thinking? oops! yes that project involves looking at some data from japan, but really... it is far far removed from anything martial or anything fictional.

then this morning under the shower i found myself having some strange ideas. i recalled a conversation that repeated itself twice this weekend, the matter of what language is my mother tongue. i do not take well to inquiries into my mother tongue. it ends up being a rather long story and most people end up much too fascinated by it, and that to me is uncomfortable. i like comfort, and english is my primary language, and no, i was not born in an english speaking country, and the rest is history. so when on saturday and then again on sunday somebody started the conversation, i warned them that they did not want to get into it, it would get complicated. well, it was not my concern for their ability to follow a somewhat errant life that preoccupied me, it is just that i remain intensely private, and i really do not necessarily care, or am uncomfortable with revealing all the facts of why my language history developed the way it did.

so this morning i am holding one of this long shower-monologues and saying to myself that it is not easy to be myself. then i caught it! being myself is the easiest thing in the world, it takes absolutely no effort what so ever. no effort! yes, being me, takes no effort what so ever. then i got back to thinking of the catastrophic training yesterday that had me on the verge of tears at one point. when this one aikidoka complained about my ukemi - still nikyo - and i was more than mildly irritated by my own contention that it was this tori's technique that sucked, not my ukemi, then i felt that there was something that i was not getting. it really can not matter how good or bad his or her technique are, if i am attacking and taking ukemi properly, that is, without falling apart at the seams or separating like mayonnaise, then if he or she is complaining, what does that mean? in a morning when training was going so catastrophically, it is amazing to discover how much was happening that was precious and brilliant. by the next round it was i who was tori and sensei uke, and i got to feel how my own technique was full of holes and got hit several times in a way that that our sensei is rather good at: mercilessly and ruthlessly with all the love in the world. come to think of it, such catastrophic and dissonant days are precious indeed, there is much to learn, if one is thirsty for the lessons.

but what time is it in tokyo, really?

i had a fantastic weekend in france! i was in the city where some of my dreams began when i was barely fourteen...

confusion and simplicity

so, what is going on? what is it like, when all seems effortless?

where was i when i stopped posting here on a more regular basis?

i think that i was at the same place that i am now. the thing is that the earth keeps on spinning on its axis and flirting with the sun on its orbit, and somehow in the meantime pluto has been reclassified as a dwarf planet. pluto is unperturbed by all this commotion and reclassification, and so am i.

i have been traveling a bit much since april, or at least that is how i have chosen to call it. i feel a certain restlessness when i do leave on a trip. i like returning home, and it seems that i need a bit of time to settle back, but then i get restless about the settlement process, and it takes a while until i find my groove. i am starting to suspect that i have no groove at all.

summer was much too passionate for the monk whom i am. in one week i found myself between three men, and somehow this was a picture that did not fit my self-image. it turned into some exercise of figuring out who is the whore in all of this, and who is the fucking therapist, and i was much too relieved that i was blessed by the professional help of my own therapist, an experienced professor of medicine.

to me psychotherapy is working when i can laugh out loud in the therapist's office about this amusing and adventuresome construct that i call my life. lately there has been a lot to laugh out loud about.

when yesterday i became fascinated by a few bits of jammed plastic joined by a few screws and their owner expressed his potential gratitude by promising not to marry me, i was most amused. finally i could smile like the cheshire cat. i would have loved to take the whole thing apart, unscrew it, find the source of the malfunction, and repair it. however there was a train to catch, and the gadget was as insignificant as my own life. i like the perspective that looking at the whole of this existence from the reference point of a few pieces of plastic offers.

the attentive reader will catch on on what has changed in my blog writing, the insider will conjecture as to the why, the rest know or guess, that i am exercising the tools of the mystery writer. i always said that mystery writing is not my genre. could it be that i was lying, or was it just plain ignorance? did i forget what i said? was it science-fiction that i said that i would never write?

i had a very fabulous weekend, a total luxury: aikido, excellent company, a lot of behaviour to observe, good interiors, restful nights crowded with strange dreams, and a few moments that i would not have wanted to miss. however i could have done without the intestinal indisposition. before leaving for this weekend for the few hundred kilometers by train, i was about to call it off... had it not been that up to one week prior to departure i had said that i was going, and then a colleague bought me the ticket and by wednesday last week, the whole was a bit on the very committed side. now, was the hesitation real, or just a certain fear or letting life happen and flow?

we arrived at the destination, we all got our three protocol swiss kisses, and i delighted in a the details of the ritual and in one case, in the scent of after-shave. i do get weak knees when i smell a good men's perfume, so much so that i have taken to wearing men's perfume myself. it is so simple, i like men's perfumes and i prefer to separate the perfume from the man. while the perfume can be changed, the man usually stays the same, even when he grows, develops and matures.

am i being seditious? am i trying to provoke? hardly. i like what i like.

i am not used to attention. i thought that we all crave attention, and in particular it seemed to me that i had been looking for it all my life. then in the course of the past few months something changed. i have had more attention than i could imagine possible. here i am seeing my dream getting attention, and i am thinking it is me who is getting attention. no, it is my work, the expression of what is mine. that is the expression of that which is mine and yours, that which we share, sharing life, that is.

"more often than not i can not tell where one being begins and the other ends, and perhaps that is what it means to touch someone"

within the past few months confusion has given was to clarity and simplicity like a morning fog that dissolves in the sun... yet now the days are getting shorter, autumn is here, it is november.

in may of this year, on my second trip out of the local garage, it dawned on me, i have no choice other than to live my dream.

the trouble with us

first let's be clear who that us is. it is you and me, it is us or how we relate to each other as humans. the trouble is that we are animals, and we are the kind of animal that does not want to be one. in short, the human condition is about being an animal, and wanting to escape it.

what leads me to such brash, rash and abrupt conclusions?

in the absence of some form of relating there may be you and i, but there is no us. so it was that a week ago i sat next to a man and he proceeded to behave in a way that i would call oscillatory. he went from deep personal confessions to bad jokes within a short period of time, and then back to the deeply personal and intimate, and so on. now this man is wonderful in my eyes exactly because he exhibits such behaviour that makes his doubts palpable and his fragility evident. other than oscillatory, he behaves like the prototype macho. he seems very real to me, and he feels very far from the idealized utopic view of what a man ought to be; and he struggles with his ego and whatever will and drive he has. he remains animal and he keeps on censoring the animal as though that animal had no right to exist. this is how i chose to describe this man's fragility.

take for instance his smoking. he says that smoking is not a good habit, yet he confesses to not being able to stop. i get that, i certainly get that he feels like he can not stop smoking. i also sense that he is making some progress in coming to terms with his own limitations, he has stopped counting how many cigarettes he smokes in a day. this knowing and not acting according to the knowledge is the kind of behaviour that i find in many around me, and certainly one that i know well enough from my own experience. i know what i ought to do, i feel a craving, ignore the good intentions, and do give in to the craving that the animal whom i am commands upon my rational illusions. but not always, not on all of life's little issues. the animal is simple, and the animal is not linear.

last night my son gave me the key for what i was looking for. i had been thinking about self-confidence, however he pointed me to self-esteem. yes, they are not the same. one being can have loads of self-confidence and zero self-esteem and the result is the animal being out of control. the animal me that is, not necessarly the man. that man from last week is one whom i admire and one that has me being grateful that he ever showed up in my life. he showed up at the right time, with the right attitude. it has taken me years to see him a bit better for who he is. my delay residing in the fact that he seems so much like me, that i end up hardly ever being able to distinguish between what is his and what is mine.

i remember that when i first became aware of his interest in me, i could only feel the attraction that admiration catalyses. i felt that and i felt my own confusion about being attracted to the man and at the same time seeing a father figure in him. at that time when this had happened i had not yet gone through deep psychothereapy and i had a few unresolved conflicts floating around in my mind gnawing at the very essence of my being and paralyzing any expression of what is mine. the idea of engaging in sexual interplay with a man whom i saw as the father that mine was not, was at best disconcerting, it was incest. impossible was the overwhelming feeling of the whole encounter and our interactions that followed, totally impossible. my immediate reaction was to send him a letter in which the tenor was that he was to keep away from me. imagine desiring him, and imagine not being able to imagine anything more than to be held in his arms as though we were both asexual. for months, years, i censored my desire for him, i wanted him to be my missing father. the psyche had censored the animal, and reason was beyond hope then.

then we fast forward to last week and his admissions of his own daughter's sexual advances towards him. at that point i felt like i had fallen victim to my own fiction, and that my madness was the only reality keeping me sane. within seconds i had a whole tempest of feelings back on my lap, and i had invited none of it. we were sitting next to each other, and my immediate thought was how very much i did desire him, and how good it would be to forget all social convention, pierce through all the barriers, and experience the complete sexual beings that we are with all our weaknesses and strengths. yet, i did nothing and said even less. i offered good, reasonable, sound counseling. the coward whom i am, retreated, my animal's cravings for his body were censored and discarded.

the day after this rather intimate and personal exchange there were a few moments when we could have met, we both were in the same building, however between the many floors and the crowds, neither made much of an effort. the next day we exchanged emails and i returned to being my very intellectual mask, a real mask as effective as a man's macho mask, and once more the animal got to take a back seat to that very much in command intellect.

it could be that one of these days one of us will be foolish enough to grab the other, and just let the natural animal satisfy its cravings away from psychology and concepts of propriety. it could also be that nothing ever happens, and that we are left with the assurance of the knowledge that nothing outside ourselves can cause any trouble.

tell me, why do you write?

above all i write for myself, because i need to communicate, and because often when the time would have been right, i can not find the words. i call this writing, fiction. yet, the fiction of this life of mine is based on my experiences and on that which i feel, whatever random and associative thoughts meander through my mind that find their way to my fingertips. the whole of the fluage blog is special to me as it is the one that is dedicated and above all inspired by my most adored muses.

last week one of these muses and i spent the whole of sunday evening together with a group of other aikidokas. those few lines i thought that i had forgotten were inspired by that evening and our interactions which i fail to understand. i feel that i have no way of reaching the man, and all that i have access to is the muse: he inspires me. i am aware that the man is far from perfect, but then humans are only perfect when they are not perfect. it is exactly his fragility, weakness, sincerity and so very human condition that inspire me.

i write for myself and my very selfish need to share life as it happens.

to the few, the young, the brave

be warned, i am clumsy when it comes to dealing with comments left on this blog, and if that was not enough, i think that sometimes beta.blogger has an appetite for comments and devours them before they appear. do not ask me how this can be, technology is as human as the monkeys doing the coding.

here i am

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perfection: the way it was

i have a thing or two for dark dank rooms and men with firm glutæi muscles. other than that my tastes are perfectly normal, however i am not quite totally sure that the devil wears prada. you, the devil, and i are on a first name basis. it has always been that way, we are best friends and companions since time irreproachable.

- life goes on and i do not quite know how it got to be this way -

if you - or anybody with the ability of speech - would have asked me some 35 years ago where i would see myself 35 years from then, i would have been the one with not much of a clue. i can only suspect that in putting myself back then to being barely 14, all that i could think of then was that i wanted to study medicine. medicine. there you have it. i had been exposed to the books that medical students drag home during the breaks, and i liked what i saw and read. i also heard all the gory tales about anatomy labs and what abuses cadavers and students get to endure, and i was not impressed. i also liked architecture, but that seemed very remote as i had no access to the world of architects in those days. agronomy was a dream, a very romantic dream that nobody around me ever listened to or gave any encouragement.

then it all changed. why am i writing this now, and why are there tears flooding my eyes?

it was an accident. i was doing the dishes and a glass slipped off my hands. reflex, slow reflex. when i went to catch the glass that slipped off my hand a sharp edge cut through my left wrist and i could not move my left little finger. needless to say that it was a bloody mess. i was alone and called my father across the street at work. in hospital they stitched the tendon back together and then the wound. i really do not remember either the pain, nor the stitches the blood. i remember however how some physician spent a whole lot of time stitching it back. i most likely do not remember the pain in hospital because there was a local anesthetic applied. the wound healed well, and soon i could move my little finger again. however in the freezing cold of a northern american city i could always feel the internal stitches until years later they finally dissolved. it was nothing, a little cut, a mended tendon and a few shredded plans about medicine. instead of flying back across the atlantic to europe, i remained in north america. i had registered at school, i had left my room ready for my return and i was looking forward to seeing my school friends in the fall. it was not to be.

my parents had other plans, plans that i will never understand, and plans that i do not need to either understand or analyze. these plans affected my life and that is as naked a fact as i have ever witnessed. somebody does something and it has consequences or not, the fact lies in the the doing, not in the consequences? no, the consequences are also a fact, a consequential fact activated by another than the primary actor. should i get theoretical now on causality theory? no, not now. causality theory is nothing that i call fiction, it is circumstantial abstraction.

but do not let me lead you astray, i just looked up sachverhalt in order to find the word in english that i wanted right now to express something that comes close to circumstantial. this looking up from german to english is nothing that i could have ever predicted 35 years ago as one of my actions. then i wrote portuguese, did not know one word of german, and my english and i had a tenuous relationship. then germany was a far away country that i never planned to visit, much less live in, and i would be willing to bet that i had never heard of switzerland other than in geography classes or referred to as la suisse. that one day i would be sitting at a dinner table in lisboa surrounded by distinguished members of the legal profession and caught myself speaking as one with swiss roots and national esteem. but it was not i who was defining my identity as such, it was the distinguished round that clearly assigned me this role. my swiss roots are the ones that i have grown by studying and working in this country, they do not stem from blood lines or other historical or biological facts. if i speak of national esteem, and not of pride, it is because there is something that i call swissness, and others may call swiss culture, or suisse raison d'être that has somehow become a part of me. nationalism in any shade is something that i can not and do not want to accept.

i am right here, not enlightened, not famous, not glorious, not anything in particular. i am here finding my place and looking into identity and knowledge. i am here facing the bloody fact that is some foreign concept about perfection and satisfying my perceptions of what the expectations of others might be. i am here reminding myself that nothing outside can cause any trouble.

it was upon my return from the ivy league circuitry that fourteen years ago i came here in search of myself and then wondered off north and east to return with one word alone, sincerity. extreme sincerity.

it is not every day

it really is not. it is not everyday that the phone rings and it is one of my friends around the corner that erroneously rang me; god only knows after what. it was morning and i was still in bed half asleep after a very late turning in last night at three this morning.

he rings, this friend of mine, and he is apologetic about his blunder, i sounded sleepy. i thanked him for the keys to his apartment that i had picked up last night before going to see a flick at a good old movie theatre in town with a retired and somewhat lonely colleague. i thanked him, the one on the phone this morning, and remarked the fact that the keys were pink after all. yesterday he had asked me what colour i wanted the keys, red or blue? i said pink. in fact they are more like fuchsia or magenta, however this bit of naming colours is not exactly my strength, and metal coloured keys is a very local thing that keeps some of the folks sorted in terms of what key goes into which hole. so, barely awake, and with a set of keys to his apartment in a ridiculous colour, i shared with him my excitement, and told him that i had had an orgasm right there and then when i got his keys last night. we laughed, we often laugh.

this one friend of mine, like another one at the same address, are both jurists and as close as i get to having two brothers around the corner from me. we hold each other's hands through thick and thin, to say nothing of a few fun and animated social occasions or bits and pieces of our lives. we have helped each other move apartments on more than one occasion, we have stood ready with moral support and prepared meals through exams and dissertations, and when we need a good shoulder to cry, we know where to go. we also have no difficulty what so ever in making bad jokes while half-awake.

it is not every day that i am home. but how am i?

i am thinking a lot more than i had expected that i would about my dear - not better half, not worse half, not half at all - with whom i spent last weekend. he is an angel, he is a muse, and he gets to me every now and then. in the last two decades i have fallen in love with him several times. i neither believe in this thing of falling in love, nor do i like it whenever it happens to me in spite of my own lack of belief and my insistence that each time that i do, it is with the world and with life that i fall in love, not with someone in particular. in between my falling in love with him, and with the world, my fancy trails other chimeras and fantasies, yet we return faithfully to the eternity of our dreams and the lightness that our shared times indulges us with. sometimes it is this lightness and ease that i suspect has had me so confused, if not apprehensive and confronted. but is it an indulgence?

life goes on, or so it pretends. i have been feeling very light and i need to return to my silence, and my monastic life. therapy has been good, really good. it is not every day, like today, that i make waffles and end up not managing to get one single one out of the waffle iron in one piece. all three waffles disintegrated in small pieces all over the iron... i forgot some ingredient and i do not recall which one. i make buckwheat waffles from my own recipe that i have forgotten to write down. this is my life, a recipe that i have forgotten to write down. sometimes it works, sometimes, it doesn't.

she said

she said, originally uploaded by intutum.

i said that i would, i did. i have been travelling and i have been gone far and wide. i am still on the road, and for the past four weeks, this is the first sunday that i am anywhere close to that place that i do call home on occasions. the travelling is still not yet done, next sunday i will not be here again.

in a way i am really tired of the road. in another way i did schedule the return to this blog for a time that has made it close to impossible to post much of anything at all.

this being as it is, i am not here to either offer excuses or detailed travel logs of my geographical errands. i just miss my diatribes on the trying to figure out how the hell i am doing, and discovering again again how very alive i am. alive and in love. but what is love really?

good to the last

good to the last, originally uploaded by intutum.

a friend of mine asked me recently if i cared. i did not have the courage to say that i do not care, not in that particular case.

yesterday a bus drove past me while i listened because i cared to listen.

the cry in the wild

if you have ever wonder where i get those titles for these posts, you clearly are bored with your life, and bored as you are, you are also a voyeur: you want to know what the fuck i have been up to while keeping silent and being absent from this blog.

the return of cairo otaibi to the kichten sink, or how one human being keeps on writing, walking, farting, and breathing, would also do well as a title to this post.

but what is it with intutum? intutum is a nick, a TLD, and it is a project. it started by me - whomever hides behind this screen - picking intutum as a nickname in my fist forays into the interacting internet. i certainly did not know what the fuck i was doing, and i was much too chicken to really show up with my name and face, thus i picked a nick. then one thing lead to another and intutum became one nice name and i registered the top level domain name with icann. now i am wondering what to do with it, as i have more TLD then i can make sensible use of. then for add insult to injury, or just before it, i started blogging at intutum.blogspot.com and caused a whole lot of commotion that i will never quite understand. after much careful and deliberate consideration, that is, what the fuck, i did remove the offending material from that blog and started writing something else there... however that one is not flowing easily.

however of late i have been quite active and present in the blogoshere under what is considered my legal civil name, and that is forcing me to think about how i want to use my time and reconsidering the whole idea of blogging under a pseudonym.

so, i was gone for a few weeks, and i was gone for a variety of reasons including the one that i felt my therapy was going through a point that made it difficult for me to keep on blogging about it. what i needed to write, i needed to do offline. time is just one freaking limited resource, and i can not just transcribe to latin alphabet every daredevil half-baked thought that pops up in my mind. writing is a lot more than free-flow, and sometimes free-flow is necessary. i just happen to think that the results of some of my free-flow writing exercises are not for all eyes. some of it just needs to get out and to never be looked at again, and that is one practice that i use: writing free-flow and then forget about it: shelved, archived, forgotten and disposed of.

it turns out that i still do not know what to do with this blog, and i do confess to love writing it, and getting a few things off my chest in this voice. yes, this blog has a voice, it is one of mine, and i write it with all the sincerity that i can muster. in a way, it ends up being a wonderful training ground for the attention whore in me. here, i have no face and no identity. cairo otaibi is a pseudonym, it is not me. it speaks with one voice, a sincere voice that i generate from the deepest corners of my being, yet it is not me. frankly, i have no clue as to who i am.

i was gone... therapy, travel, conferencing, beach, family. i was gone and then there was my return home. i had barely landed and while sharing a meal with a good friend i got a text message on my mobile. i looked at it and it was not from one of the contacts stored in my phone and i did not recognize the number either. i made a dismissing comment about it and my friend and colleague commented that there were too many men in my life. i laughed and agreed with him, and presupposed that the text message could not possibly be from a man in my life as those have names stored in the mobile's memory.

this text message incident does reflect a bit of the state of affairs-affairs these days. i am not stressed, or arsed in any way about any of it. i thought that this day would not happen ever, and that for ever i would be stressed about the fact that i live alone and have failed my perception of other's expectations of what my life ought to be. that ought-to-be state meant married, and taken care of in some suburban ghetto, living the illusion of happiness and wealth, overfed, and forced into the straight jacket of mores and appearance.

so here i am, i return home and to this blog. i am blissfully living alone and writing, struggling and dreaming. i have long term relationships with a variety of friends, a few physical and psychological affairs, and i am, if nothing else, a student of life.

so it was that recently i was a conference and over lunch had an interesting conversation with a fellow who seemed to be rather well versed in history. it was the sort of the funny incident that only amuses me. he told me a lot about the history of the place that we were at, and that in my reckoning i ought to have known better, but i somehow oversaw the detail of introducing myself. after all, i was wearing a name tag badge, so was the fellow. judging from the ring on his finger the bloke was married and judging from the note that he gave me with his email when he left the conference, this acquaintance was not about a professional interest. i am amused at such behaviour and although i may be a bit naive and often much too distracted or busy with my own crap to notice such things, on occasions i do recognize when a man is making a pass at me. this married man was, and i am amused.

what i find totally magnificent was that the whole time that i was travelling, not once did i ever think of those other men in my life. i saw myself calling a friend in italy because i felt i had a duty to. i could hear myself making an effort to think of my german friend whom i had invited to join me on this trip because we have often spoken about being in that place together, and i could feel the loving surrender of my muses as though they are the air that i breathe.

back from reality

it so happens that the 30th of September caught me while travelling and quite off-line. i am off to a bit of mingling with a few old chums - i am right about the old part, however they do fail the chum test in every which way imaginable.

i love internet cafés but 2€/hour are a bit stifling on my creativity, so i will return to regular posting when i can hug my broadband.

what is for sure is that today was spent taking my place, and that i am rather surprised that i do know where my place is.

the next installment of the "kitchen sink" is going to be fun and totally unpredictable.

taking a break until the 30th of september, 2006

i wish this life:





here is a big thanks to hugh macleod for publishing this cartoon just when i needed it.


it is that i am just so damn tired of addressing the question of how i am doing that even the idea of getting laid makes me start to laugh out loud, really loud. hysterics or histrionics, you pick the label, i just do not care. it will be your label, and this is my life. i need a break from the madness of this blog, and yes there is some madness to this blog. it is the only kind of madness that i am deeply and madly in love with, my own madness.

within the past few weeks i have not been seen blogging much, or writing much otherwise. you guessed it right, i am feeling very blocked at this point. i have been blocked for the past year or even past year and a half. the novel that i am working on like an idiot is just not flowing, it is not coming, and it is so damn frustrating to have the story, write about the story, characterize the characters, and then have the bloody story just not flow! it is  stuck in the pipeline. yes, i have been reading a lot, and no i have not been drawing enough, nor have i been taking enough walks along the beach, or walks for that matter, or hiking... it is time for me to go take a hike.

i wish this life shit was more meaningful, it ain't! i wish hugh good luck or whatever is on his list, after all that is what it takes for both selling wine and getting laid, or at least that is what i have been told. i am no  good with lists anyhow, but have always been showered with luck.

did i ever tell you that one of my grand-fathers was a wine producer? yeah, it totally ruined the possibility of becoming an alcoholic for me. i grew up around wine, and to me it is something that one adds to soup to make it edible.

if i am to put away all the babble and nonsense speech aside with the incongruent and fuzzy logic that this scribe is fond of displaying, then i can tell you, the few brave souls that click away to these pages, that i am truly exhausted from spinning my wheels in place. clinically speaking this is called depression. it really is not a roller coast ride, nonetheless an intimate relationship with this condition is not for the faint hearted. the way that i see it now, is that this is a necessary condition in coping with past traumata. there was an event last year that triggered the unveiling of a repressed memory that had served up to now to keep all the trauma out of conscient examination. the day that i remembered that trauma is still well etched into me and i faced emotions and feelings that threw a whole world out of balance. it was my world crumbing, and behind the ruins i saw a beautiful landscape that i had always wished was not just in my imagination, that that beauty had somehow a bit of reality. behind that shattered world, a reality is emerging, a reality much too tender, delicate and precious and very foreign to me.

i am tired of looking for excuses, and i am tired of making myself wrong. i need time offline when it comes to answering that question of how i am, i need silence.

inshallah!

Technorati Tags: abuse, aggression, amour-propre, art, depression, gapingvoid, recovery, trauma, zen

the thing with the storyteller (part three)

(continued from part 2)

all that i ever wanted to give you is freedom...

on monday one corporate legal counsel held the storyteller in his arms. the story teller was crying, he is one of her very best friends. together they share a passion for life lived to its fullest, something about a city in north africa and a deep commitment for peace.

what remains of a love affair when the ashes in the fireplace are cold? sinnan. once more the storyteller returns to it, this place, and what it is that remains to do. action is all that there is, and action is not about doing things, and certainly it never was a circumstance or an excuse.

it was on a bridge over this river of chance, near a place that should hold history and fright, that the the storyteller one fine summer evening came to realize that it is action that will make a difference. the storyteller continues and crosses that bridge, the storyteller can not turn around.

how does a storyteller, a woman, an hermit and a damned mortal human being deal with the path so chosen? where does it begin and how does it start?

choices they say, is what life is about. choice to this storyteller is a very poor cousin of what the woman discovers. listening to music reveals wonder. music is, like literature, something that passes on from one human to another through some representational abstraction of letters or notes either on paper or as sound produced by a musical instrument created be it by the simplest of craftsman with the most rudimentary of materials, or with the most farfetched gadgetry out of the quantum kitchen of technology. use a stone, or use a quantum-well, music you can make. music is not about technology, it is about rhythm, and it touches the soul directly. choice is an illusion; in reality there is only one path to now.

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual
.

Albert Camus  (speech, Nobel Banquet, Stockholm, 1957)

while the hyperlink has restricted associations and recall from the fuzzy to the explicit, and it has made knowledge a resource yet to be fully reckoned with, if it has not totally redefined it, the storyteller remains in the privilege of painting the common joys and sufferings, like the musician remains in the privilege of resonating with our deepest senses.

while in americana one wonders about the epidermic truth of the fiction-absolute of tom wolfe, in europeana the storyteller wonders why the  rift between the shores of marseille and martha's vineyard have grown apart, or why supposedly smart-grown-up-people who claim to know what is good and right, do all the wrong things and nobody dares to tell them one simple piece of information, that they are wrong. wrong. but who would dare to say so and risk life in its process?

when the man in montana tells the storyteller that he is tired and dealing with existential angst and that the world out there is wrong and not ready for life, then this storyteller listens and knows that most of all he needs to be listened to. although the world out there surely looks to be out of order, it is not, this is the world that we have created, this is the world that we live in, it is ours. for the storyteller, the woman is not important, neither is the man, but something grander is important, the moment, the instant, and every and each breath of this life. war happens, men kill each other for reasons beyond comprehension, and then find excuses in the texts of history books. causality becomes an excuse and tragedy and drama become a certainty, and we go on and call it war, or we call it life. when the man in montana is grieving the pain of the past, the woman wonders about what is real and what is absolute. perfection may be the ultimate utopia, but then utopia is never perfect, and the storyteller would warn that never is not absolute. then they say that the storyteller is sultry while the woman keeps herself veiled,  the unattainable recluse whose skin you may touch, and whose being you may experience. she returns, and then it all starts again, once more, like the seasons on the shores of europe. she returns and the seduction continues.

when the tears shed in paris are recalled, the woman knows that the storyteller will go on, day after day, one step at a time, one word after the last, and again the fears are recounted, retold, rehashed, and eventually conquered and embraced. fear, once more fear. fear is just another emotion, she says. then the woman appears and she is divorced from fairness. the universe is complete; it lacks a sense of fairness. the world is as it is.

when intimacy is felt... what happens then? it was felt. the first time, it was not recognized, an abyss summoned the woman, and the world lost its innocence. the storyteller froze, the woman tasted paradise.

(to be continued)

Technorati Tags: alone, fluage, story, storytelling

4 AM

i went to bed relatively early after a delightful and distracting afternoon spent with a dear dearest. we met at the "rosengarten" and we drifted off to a short walk along the river...

"yesterday was for falling in love with you all over again. thank you for being yourself. thank you for laughing and crying with me"

still around 4 am i was wide awake and felt a cramp coming on my right calf muscles. it did. ouch. my body is manifesting itself, and the greek aikidoka who told me that i do not take good care of it was right. at the time, i would have rather punched him out, i had just tensed up on taking ukemi and it had hurt like hell. it was more an irritation to my ego than a physical injury, it also gave me a chance to just shut up, the tears came, the pain subsided within hours, and there was no injury. the art of shutting up is a long lost and neglected art. shutting up and crying can do wonders on occasions.

it maybe that this is all about me being tense: my diet for the past couple of weeks would give a rash to any nutritionist; even a teenager on fast food eats better than i have been eating. it is time to hit the magnesium and the vitamin supplements. soya milk and coffee is a rather lopsided diet even if i do eat the occasional french fries and drink a beer now and then. remember that beer is considered food in bavaria and i did live there for a few years many moons ago.

there is at least one good reason why i have not quoted james joyce here before, although of all the dead men, he is one of my favourites, still today i make an exception.

„Herr Dufy wohnte unweit seines Körpers.“
"Mr. Dufy lived not far from his body"
James Joyce

this little bit of wisdom is one often quoted by another of our many aikido sensei, and the one that my aikidoka colleague had chosen to start off his shodan essay. somehow there is a lot more there than meets the eye. so it is that this very little sentence penned by joyce best describes my sentiments of what it was like to spend an afternoon with that dear dearest of mine, a man alive. this man is the same one whose domestic drama i refuse to be a part of. still, i find myself, if not a part, certainly a curious observer of the dynamics in his domestic strife. see, i run away from anything to do with jealousy and possessiveness like i would run away from the pest if i knew what "the pest" smelled, felt or was like. screwed up relationships based on possessiveness and desperation i have never quite understood, they remain, so to say, a curiosity that i am much too ready to investigate. no doubt there is some form of self-interest in this research of my life.

now simon and garfunkel sings "bridge over troubled waters" one of my all-time-loved songs associated with memories of growing up in california. los angeles that is, where people are superficial, flicks get made and somehow we all are on the forefront of the groove of whatever is next. deep down i remain an angelino (not an angelina), but you would have to pay me damn good money to live there again. i will be accepting offers from now on.

Technorati Tags: james joyce, mr dufy, music, sense, sensei, talkingheads

Rainy day

Rainy day
Originally uploaded by ariari.

From Japan with love.

it is twelve noon

i woke up today way past ten in the morning. after one week of my kind of slow roasting and torturing hell, yesterday i finally got out of my head and out of the house and went to training. i had not trained all week, nor had i gone running or walking. i had not left my home for a whole week, and not one single night had i slept in my bed. for somebody who trains around four times per week, runs, and walks a lot, this is unusual, and this is one of the colours of my depression. this bout has coincided with my therapist's vacation, and frankly i do not want to go see her substitute. i told her i would use my writing if anything happened... (i wonder what i meant)

on the way to the dojo i called my legal-brains friend and told him that i have a problem. he offered to meet me after training at my home. on the way back from the training i stopped by at the restaurant around the corner where my round of colleagues, the old boys club, were meeting and told them that i could not join them as i was not feeling well. from one of them i did get a look of serious concern, and i very much appreciated that look. yes, that is how it was. there was no way that i could sit for a couple of hours and talk geeky and science stuff around a couple of beers and some french fries. i am tired of keeping up appearances when my innards are being thorn to pieces.

when i got to the dojo i thought that there was no way that i was going to make it through one and half hours of training without hopelessly breaking down because i could not concentrate. the minute that i sat down in seiza while waiting for sensei to enter the tatami, i felt like i was being pulled straight up through my spine and that there was  a lightness that i had not felt in a long long while. still, how on earth was i going to survive the training? training means concentration. i took ukemi like a fool, and i rolled and rolled forwards and backwards like a perpetuum mobile, and  i got dizzy. the words of another aikidoka from our dojo kept on repeating themselves in my head "I do not dwell on problems with thought; I rather let my body "work" on these problems" that he wrote on his shodan essay which i translated from german to english. i remember clearly from when i translated it, that sentence left an impression on me. when i looked at the clock on the wall yesterday during training i was alarmed for i thought that there was still an hour to go. i can not read a clock on the wall without glasses and i train without glasses and very rarely do i wear contacts during training, so i can see where the big hand of the clock is but i can not really see where the small hand is. shortly after i had looked at the clock sensei starts the last exercise that we usually do (suwari wasa ryote tori kokyo ho) and i am a bit startled. not half an hour had gone by, rather one and half hours of demanding training.

having released my apprehensions to the demands of aikido training, and after my brief stop at the round table i was finally home again. my legal-brains friend arrived shortly thereafter. we had tea, we talked, i cried, he listened, i argued. when i went to bed after i just slept. my head still feels heavy and this is far from over, still the cacophony inside my head is starting to make sense and i start to distinguish that which is mine, truly mine, from the horrors of abusive imprinting. i learn with my body.

Technorati Tags: aikido, amour-propre, art, family, friendship

falling masks

depression is the bitch of all bitches! a damn necessary bitch if you - the depressed - that is me, is going to get well again. i really thought that i could just wish this one away. no. wishes are wimps when it comes to depression.

when the deep blue funk of depression has sunk its gnawing teeth into the flesh of my being, wishes wilt, dissipate and decompose before the next funk hits me. i am paralyzed. the thing is, my face keeps on smiling, and i keep on being my witty self, charming, verbose and all too understanding.

i have known this bitch for long. i remember it from my college days. then i did not know what it was, i just kept on plowing away with the insanity of 23 semester units, training three hours a day, and freelancing for the campus paper. sometimes to not go insane, the coping mechanism is to act out the insanity in what you do. but then there is always a residual that gets shoved away by some mechanism of procrastination. that residual that you keep on shoving away is that bit that you do not want to look at. not because you are a wimp, but because looking at it will uncover pain that you fear unbearable. the choice becomes to bury your head in the sand or jump off the next bridge. i have always gone for the sand option. sand is my element. i have two stories drafted that have something to do with the desert and sand. i love sand. in particular, i love digging in the sand with this fucking head. i mean, burying my head in the sand.

now i know that this lovely bitch is called depression. fuck, i studied chemistry, i know more genetics than my doctor, and i have much too clear a picture of my situation. it does not help to have a clear picture.

when every single of your wishes and dreams got invalidated and your self-esteem and amour-propre thorn to pieces and tossed out as scum while growing up, it may have helped that intelligence kept you on this side of insanity, but the wall between you and insanity is  permeable and elastic. it is the kind of wall that you walk through back and forth all the time. people tell me how strong and courageous i am, i listen, and i know that they have no clue. it has nothing to do with courage, and it has a lot to do with walking back and forth through that ethereal wall that separates insanity from sanity. i know my wall, i have seen it in all shades. i never took drugs, i did not need to. i listen to other's accounts of their drugs experiences, and somehow i do not get curious. i have been there.

this week i have been nursing my bitch and learning to love it. i need to reinvent it, for it has decided to keep me company, and frankly, i do not want to live with a bitch. it is time for me to drop the mask, i am tired of being the wise clown smiling. there are so many stories that i want to share!

Technorati Tags: depression, insanity, mask, psyche, sanity

god

rain, i love summer rain and it will do this to me every single time. i have not yet had breakfast. last night i poured a glass of wine and then sat at my desk, another six hours later, at three in the morning, i realize that i had not had my wine or anything else to drink for that matter. it is raining. i got up six hours after going to sleep and i do not recognize myself again.

i walk outside to the garden to check the beer snail traps. i am starting to think that poisoning the slimy creatures may be better than drowning them in beer. you know, snails, actually here we get the kind without a shell that are called slugs, but what is a bit of fuzzy terminology among friends? you know what i mean, don't you. fuck, you don't. but do i care?

each day i get the pleasant task of recovering over ten slug corpses from the beer trap near my basil. the slug creatures have been going at my basil as though it is the only greenery in the garden. we have a huge green garden! why my basil? the wetter it is the more slugs there are crawling around in the direction of my basil. for god sake, it is my freaking basil, there are lots of other gardens and other green things to eat. i got it, i do not put ivy leaves on my buffalo mozzarella, but then it is well known that i am a prima dona when it comes to what i eat. why do i care about slugs? i don't.

i got a call late last night that got me down to earth. imagine that you are thirty years old, have two children, and you have just woken up from a couple of days in comma following the second operation in four years to remove a brain tumor. how would you feel?

Technorati Tags: rain, words, work

lunch time break

"ragman" is on my mind, and very much so in my mind. it is an idea for a rather plain vanilla story, the kind of story that happens often on earth and leaves no imprint or trace, and on some occasions, a bit of genetic material gets propagated. as they say, happy people don't have a story to tell. they, again there they are, the all knowledgeable they! opus dei!

i am known for building bridges, they are those unlikely bridges that uncover realms best left unattended. is this a journey that you want to enter?

i have been reading a bit on genetics and mental health, and me "knowing" quite a bit about the molecular nature of genetics, and the forever so uncertain reality of mental health, have found myself disagreeing heavily with the author of the book that i have been reading. remember, but you can not remember, i never told you that i have studied genetics and topology and that i could really go off the deep end with mathematical representations.

i found myself yesterday fending off indiscrete questions from one of my best friends. we often have rather candid conversations about intimate and personal issues, but then when another is involved, i warehouse a lot of trivial details. the details that i call trivial are the kind of details that turn art into pornography. did you ever wonder why pornography is such a widespread mainstream phenomenon? what is pornography really?

pornography and history, or man's fascination with its bodily functions! but here i diverge.

in returning to the initial train of thought, ragman is on my mind. also working in the background for days is the two hour conversation that i had with one man who after thirty years still says "i love you" and means all and nothing with it. i am free with him. they say that is easy when i live in europe and he lives in north america out in the wild. see i have tried hard to invalidate his views somehow, i do not want to listen to what he is telling me. it all resonates much too close to home.

the truth remains a whore, and whores are honest even if some may be conniving, but such is the nature of truth. in other words, truth is illusive. still, when i hear something that strikes a chord in some inner part of my being, i do recognize the ring of it.

i am a bit thoughtful and doing this bit called the core dump. i am here.

Technorati Tags: context, core dump, floue, genetics, history, honesty, opus dei, postmortem, things, truth, whores

vanilla or chocolate

i sit down to scribble this, totally energized and with a certain idea in mind that i want to develop. my mobile bleeps with a message... i am gone, really gone. one more fucking distraction!

i was thinking about the kind of sex that people call the vanilla kind of sex. yes, i do think about sex, and yes the uninstructed may meet me and conclude that i do not have a sex life. i am always amused by what people get as first impressions. i had no idea that i look less than vanilla! live an learn, they say. these they have a bit of being both right and wrong. it is good to lay here on my bed with the notebook propped up my legs and writing while listening to rai music! i am in a wonderful mood, with or without vanilla.

but what is it with the chocolate? i love chocolate. dark plain chocolate, the darkest of them all, and even more after sex, you know, the vanilla kind. no thrills, no frills, just good and plain. i know, i know, that is not what you call vanilla! my vanilla is my vanilla! chocolate is no replacement for vanilla sex, so stop your wild fantasies.

do you know what i really resent?

oh, that will take quite a long post and i need a shower now. that is how i am, needing a shower and in one hell of a fucked up mood.

Technorati Tags: chocolate, friendship, fucked up, vanilla

mustard!

but tell me, how are you really, he asked.

i went silent.

yesterday evening i had a couple of friends over for dinner in the garden, that is, we had a grill party for three. these two friends are married to each other, and i, of all people, am one of the marriage witnesses. mind the fact that i am at best critical of the marriage institution, and all much more pro-family. to be family in my book you do not need either the state bureaucracy for confirmation, nor a DNA analysis. to be family is a matter of values and shared experiences, something about caring and sharing in life.

last night we ended up having a most revealing discussion about mustard. it so happens that when i went to the supermarket to grab a few items and the mustard was on my shopping list, i got grabbed by one of those pretty teen girls on summer vacation to be interviewed about my mustard shopping habits within the context of market research. now, i buy mustard maybe once in two years, i am terrible brand unfaithful, and i can tell the difference between french dijon and süss-senf (that is easy) but really of all the candidates for a market research interview i am at best not very middle of the curve. besides since my son is in the usa this household's mustard consumption has gone down considerably. he was fond of eating french fries with mustard. needless to say that the deep frier has also moved to the cellar and is being totally ignored.

it appears that i am not typical when it comes to mustard. my friend with whom i have spent a couple of weeks at the beach not so long ago shares with me at least a similar brand unfaithfulness, however her husband is throughly meticulous as to the choice of mustards that go on his table. buying the mustard is one of this man's many contributions to family life. last night he set the table, and of the three different kinds/brands of mustard available in my fridge, two met his criteria and were on the table. for a good while last night we discussed the politics of mustard, and frankly that topic does beat discussing the events in lebanon right now. i have hit the point of refusing to discuss the present day war. i am tired of it, and i am very tired of humans fighting each other.

i have a deep love and longing for family and my life has been etched by having my own family torn apart in a feud that i will never understand, but which i have had to accept. it is the way it is. all my life "family" is what i have looked for and tried to create in this empty and meaningless life of mine. slowly it is starting to dawn on me that perhaps my life was meant to be otherwise, and that the search for family i was to find elsewhere and with another expression. being a pacifist is one hell of a bitch. in a world brimming with frustration and aggression, how do you create peace? i decided to start with inner peace, nothing else is within my power.

my dear brother, so how am i?

Technorati Tags: aggression, family, freedom, friends, mustard