The sounds of now

The rain is slaying the city, and knocks on my bedroom window like a winter tree branch in a cheesy thriller movie, only softer and faster, like the purple haze of stars this space pod pierces through. There is no sound in space, because there is no air. I am inside, the lights still on. I will never see myself lying in bed, here in this bedroom, here in this apartment, here in this building. The only way I will ever see myself is in the mirror or on pictures. I will never really see myself. There's a plane in the air. I can hear it, so I know it's not in space. Because there is no sound in space. It could also not be a plane. It could be a giant speaker faraway mimicking the sound of a plane in the air. It could also be a small speaker nearby mimicking the sound of a plane in the air. I am inside, the lights still on, while the rain is slaying the city. This city is on a planet, in a galaxy, in space, where there is no sound. The tap is leaking, I can tell. It's like the rain hitting my bedroom window, only softer and slower, like an orgasm on weed. I don't see the tap actually leaking, like I don't see the plane actually flying. I will never really see myself, only this purple haze of stars in space where there is no sound.

Period is but a dot.

Edmond Chen

The first time I met Edmond Chen, he was sitting on a box of something. It said something in Chinese. Sorry to say, I can't read Chinese, and I certainly couldn't at the time either. He was devouring an apple like a hungry stray kid, the juice dripping all over his lips. Those big, big bites sounded like a sword fight in the crisp snow. He was a small man, but looked strong, like an old tree. The wrinkles on his face were perfectly symmetrical. I don't usually notice these things, but maybe wrinkles aren't supposed to be symmetrical and we're all used to seeing awry wrinkles. Or maybe it was simply the glare of his face. With every apple bite, those glimmering Nazca Lines reshuffled their geometry like rrrusshh, rrrusshh, fountain firework. Edmond Chen didn't need no holy aureola to radiate, because I knew from that very first moment: this man is special. From a distance, he looked like any other middle-aged Chinese trucker to come through town. Only he was different, he was a mountain of charisma. He smiled like the Mona Lisa would have wanted to smile, and he spoke solely through his squinting little eyes. Edmond Chen never said a word, he didn't need to. He had a straight line to soulworld, yours, mine, your great aunt's, that guy that crossed the street this morning, everyone's. I don't think I've ever seen him mad. Mad of joy, oh yes! Whenever he was happy, he would summon all the humans around him by simply clapping his hands and slapping his knees, elbows, feet, forehead, chest, you name it. The man was an almost human drum kit. Every slap, every hit would thunder throughout the entire town, animals would run away and hide, while people would gather around to stand in awe and laugh deliriously, their teeth sparkling in the sun. Rocks would come crushing down and paint would come off walls, kids would start dancing like madmen and pregnant women would suddenly go into labor, rain clouds would disperse and our hearts would love love love. Edmond Chen was pure ecstasy, he was the Dragon and the Angel alike, he was a dear friend.

Things change

Everybody wore hats back then.
Like my granddad still does, when he's not taking care of my grandmother.
He'll be wearing his hat a lot more soon.

Awaiting His Majesty

- Sint-Pietersplein, Gent

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I am sorry

I am a commitment phobic, a little boy that sleeps with a teddy bear and pulls the sheets all over his head. To escape towards the stars seeping through the fabric, far far away. To bathe in the Pleiades, with the pleiades. To forever close the eyes and see the stars, seeping through the skin, so so close. Like the stranger's lips, far away and yet so close. I am a commitment phobic and I have hurt so many so as not to get hurt.

It's time for me to go back, to find myself through the rubble of broken hearts - bread crumbs, back to when I really was a little boy that slept with a teddy bear and pulled the sheets all over his head.

I need to know where this comes from.
Maybe that is what the Breadcrumb Crater is all about.

Feather

The world felt light like a feather tonight. No five layers of fabric to keep us warm, a sweater and a jacket sufficed. How light the jacket felt! Like a feather light. Even the buildings, their tons of layers of bricks glued together with the sweat of thousands of workmen long gone, were but tiny pixels in this azure ocean of miniature trampolines and kissing lip corners, teeth peeks and sweet saliva. A bird was singing on this first day people were talking spring. Still faraway, but a dot on the horizon, is the day skirts will touch the saddles and ice cream vendors will end their hibernation. A magnificently shining dot where we will wrap ourselves in each other, be birds and kiss like a feather light. Sweet saliva, sweet world.

I don't have to make the climb

Got home yesterday night, switched on the tv looking for something subtitled to watch while brushing my teeth and saw this:



This is just a small excerpt from the awe-inspiring 1970 documentary Woodstock, and somehow stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the film in the sense that here we have a young couple not necessarily wanting to be part of the action, dissecting from a distance not only the festival but their own generation almost like philosophers watching over the masses. Theirs is a lost generation, as the young man puts it, imprisoned by the urge to be free. Rather than a genuine state of mind that can be attained as much by squatting alongside a country road as by switching the batteries of your camera in a skyscraper elevator, freedom had become a conceptual goal that could only be reached through the well-defined channels of drugs, music, Eastern spirituality, free love and what have you.

Woodstock wasn't the proclaimed gateway to nirvana. It ended in the mud and fatigue, with junk and debris of untraceable origins scattered all across the field. It looked like a battlefield swamped with indefinable ‘stuff’ and here and there a human body crawling without any apparent sense of direction. Yet another lost generation had reached its culmination, there on the muddy fields of Bethel, NY. The proverbial bang they went out with: the roaring howl of Jimi Hendrix’ guitar.

On the other hand, it sure looked like one hell of a party, and graced the world with imagery of which even Hollywood wouldn’t be capable of, and yes, perhaps in essence every generation is lost, anxiously looking for a common denominator that connects & bonds us all in the comforting warmth of borderless unity, a global herd, although probably in the end

(...) everybody's looking for some kind of answer, where there isn't one.