Today's visionary parade

Today's visionary parade of words and images, bits and pieces of nothingness, details that matter, kids that draw outside of the lines, crushed beer cans aside the pavement and the flickering letter of a neon billboard dream portraying plastic androids, emotional wellbeing advocated on an incorrectly spelled piece of paper in the mailbox, keys ringing and chiming before the keyhole is found, a lover watching moonlight from the wooden kitchen floor, a cockroach hidden behind the washing machine, all brilliantly polished in domestic CGI, paradoxic nonsense covered with fur, sweet n soft and straight from the caramel ice cream vending machine, can you hear its noise, it's like a mother giving birth, such sweetness about to appear, about to be consumed, eaten by this world's giant belly. I'm exploding.

Welcome to Breadcrumb Crater

Welcome to Breadcrumb Crater, established in 1999, the wooden sign said. It was placed right between the two largest oak trees of the forest in such a perfectly symmetrical way that you wouldn't be surprised if someone were to tell you the trees were planted right next to the sign. But then again, the sign said 1999 and these trees looked like they had been there for ages already. For all we know, they could've been planted hundreds of years ago by two native American love birds as a token of their never ending, undying and unconditional love. At least that's what I liked to believe when I first put my backpack down against the trunk of the largest oak tree. Wouldn't it be nice in an ironic kind of way if this had been the one the girl had planted, I wondered. Quite typical of me actually, to start dwelling in my own auto-generated thoughts and swing a boomerang right into the usual stream of consciousness which should have been directed at the goal of my journey, but at this particular moment it obviously wasn't. Maybe it was because I had already walked such a long way, with my eyes and feet pointing towards this sign, the next intermediary stop. I had reached that stop now, overwhelmed with joy, relief and most of all a strange kind of exhilarating tiredness. The kind that keeps you up at night to talk and talk because you know before dawn you will kiss her, and you know that this talking only builds up the tension even more. Sure, you're tired. Sure, she's tired. But you're both immersed in this great energy streaming passed your every vain, like a non-stop rollercoaster after closing hours with the lights out. That's how I felt. The air was fresh & healthy in a non-hippie kind of way: straight in your face unbreakable. My eyes meandered along the contours of the tree crowns until they reached the circle's starting point again. My dizzy head needed a cigarette. I tried to blow the smoke through the imaginary circle I had just drawn with my eyes, but gave up quickly and threw myself against my heavy backpack.

(to be continued)

Outside

It came back to me today when I was mindlessly browsing through one of those women's magazines: a rather hip 'n trendy lingerie designer posing under a cobblestone bridge by day. It wasn't so much the picture that brought it back, it was the notion that at least two people (the designer and the photographer) had to be standing there, by day.



It brought me back to those days in high school when we rarely got to see the world outside the school walls. Actually, there were low-maintenance pine trees in front of the walls. Cover-up nature. But whenever we did get the chance to go outside during school hours, I was jealous of all those people and their freedom to go and walk about, do their thing on the street, simply be part of the city. The same envy sometimes overwhelms me when I see journalists on tv waiting at the steps of some court house or a guarded gate. Inner city jobs are different; sure you'll hate the rain and bus delays and buses that -in all their haste not to be delayed- rush through puddles along the pavement, but you'll come across scraps of paper, roof top poetry and people you'd never see in OfficeVille.

Maybe tomorrow I'll deviate from the daily A > B and back > A route, to recalculate.

Drown me

- opening from Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Today's truths

The christmas tree loses its needles and sometimes the heart does things because of reasons reason cannot grasp.

Headphone universe

A lot of people on the street with headphones on today. Not that they weren't there yesterday or the day before, but because I was one of them. It's like when I was a kid, I really wanted a Lego space train, and all of a sudden I began seeing hundreds of references to the Lego space train all around me, as if the world was telling me get your parents to buy this for you. Or even more concrete perhaps, when my parents had just bought a new car, we noticed a lot of people driving around with the same car. It's like the tentacles that spring from within your brain become more receptive towards certain specific impulses. Or maybe it's vice versa even: it's our brain that echoes outward ripples. Maybe it's a little bit of both? I guess that's why Freud saw phallic shapes in all kinds of man-made artifacts. Behold, the awesome powers of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Just like headphones immerse your mind & body into your own private universe and leave you happy and drowning. We're all wandering about in the same streets, we're all seated in the same train, but the state we're in is so unique that the outside world is nothing more than the background curtain of our own drama. Maybe tilting the camera way up and zooming out, we could see reality as it is: people as tiny moving dots, cores of circularly radiating waves, and in between the void, the objective void paved with streets and traffic signs.

Corporate life and the hours that remain

Matter has tightened its grip on me; my boss has requested a company car and I'm probably getting a considerable pay raise some time next month. From a future mother-in-law's point of view, this is a good thing. But along with it side-effects have also started to arise at the surface, like a Moon-sect gathering of frog eggs: they are all married to each other but the overall fertility rate is questionable. Being a part of a 9-to-5-but-most-of-the-time-6-or-7-corporate apparatus has numbed my tentacles that used to pop up every time the space time continuum would bend its boundaries in a giant gasp. It would yawn in all its privileged majesty and switch sides in bed, opening up the funnel through which words, images and thoughts of various weights and colors could tumble down and find peace (or war) throughout the nervous channels of my brain. Now those vessels are filled with words you can only hear in the metropolitan business districts. Luckily, I still don't know what they mean.

I'm sure the antidote is still there somehow, I just need to find you.