The aftermath

What bugs me lately is that in order to decipher, unravel, make sense of something one must be a dispassionate observer. BUT. That's exactly my problem as of late. I feel too much of an observer. I feel totally disengaged with life. Things are happening and I don't give a damn. People die, animals die, and I am blissfully detached. On the contrary, I read about a character in a comic book suffering and I cry. It's fucking tragic, crying for paper people and not crying about my father who died. It's tragic cause he turned himself into a total stranger, and I had to build a fortress to keep him out and never let him hurt me again, and I don't have a single happy memory from him. Even now, in his last days, I stood by his side and let him feel loved and safe, but I never opened the door of my heart to him again. The door does not open anymore, a wall has sealed it off, and I can't pull the wall down for anyone, anymore. It's tragic cause I am turning into a total wacko and feel pity for those people and things inside my head (and other people's heads) and not those around me. It truly makes me worry. Perhaps I should not worry, but I feel I am turning into a walking statue. I feel I am losing my connection to real life. And what is real life, exactly? That sanitised, joyless version of working like a slave and your every surprise being predetermined, your every choice and encounter controlled? Is it any wonder that I sympathise more with heroes from books and comics?

I want to give a few kicks to a few asses, but haven't discovered the people these asses belong to. YET.

In la-la land.

My father is alive, though far from ok. So are we. Alive, but far from ok. La-la-la...

Bad news

My father has a generous bout of pneumonia. I don't think he'll live.

Wee-ha!

Surrealism still rules.

My father is in a very weird condition. He tries to prove to us that he is still fine and perfectly capable of going around without any problems, so keeps getting up (and falling down). We tried everything, from sweet talking to reasoning and even treats. He just won’t listen. Every now and then I can hear him getting up, then after a few moments the tell tale sound of him falling down. He is covered in bruises and abrasions, but won’t listen to reason. So I let him get up and then fall down again, since my lower back is killing me and the only alternative I have is tying him up to bed somehow. I am nearly thirty, a bit late now to start BDSM/ incest sessions with my father. However, there are moments I want to throttle him, I swear. In such a case I leave the room fuming, or God/dess knows what I’ll do. 

On a happier note, I am not working for these past days, and I have been constantly filling envelopes with things and posting them. The pile keeps getting smaller. Earlier on my father was asking me for his scales, and he meant his cane. Another day he wanted something else, I think the TV remote and he kept pestering me to give him the electric heater. It takes a lot of patience not to smack him unconscious sometimes… He is honestly THE most stubborn person I know, and needless to say, he still pisses himself, and the washing machine is working night and day. My mother is a heroine, but I don’t want heroic status. I want my quiet. Unless there is some sort of payback soon, I’ll kill him and spend the rest of my time behind bars. Now he is asking me to buy him a bicycle.

Sick and tired.

It seems that every person who has contacted me lately seems intent on one single very particular thing: busting my balls. It's also interesting to see how they do it. Whenever they talk to me, all their insecurities go in full tilt and they just have to let me know how wrong I am. They begin by projecting all their personal behavioral patterns onto my entity. If they are mind numbingly stuck onto specific notions, they accuse me of small mindedness. If they are the type to lose their patience if someone does not immediately fulfill their wishes, I am the one who's unreliable and hypocritical. If they are scared of me because I am too much, I immediately "become" too picky and fascistic in my approach to things. None of these people know me. None makes an effort to get to know me; they just assume. No questions, no discussion. I am the poison of their status quo, the worm inside their golden apples of perfection. Therefore, I have to be squashed. They proceed to attack this entity that they see in my place in order to purge themselves of all the crap they carry within, they demonise me because they don't have the guts to see that I only mirror what is happening inside their own minds. I am the outside manifestation of their inner issues. And they try, oh how hard they try to insult and belittle me and make me sorry. Well. Human nature, I suppose. Sing on, my dear ones, sing on. I don't give a fuck about what you believe. You were the ones who approached me to begin with, I did not. Heee he he, and once they realise I am not another Spice-Girls-In-Reverse brainless scared little gothette/fashion victim, that can be easily manipulated and impressed, they rear like panicked cockroaches. I am not the one who needs attention or asks for contact. I write "Sorry no new pen pals" for a reason. To avoid the likes of you, dear open minded people. To avoid sixty pages of gossip or people who are pleasant only if someone pats their backs. So come to me all guns blazing, come to me full of insults and spit your poison. I care not. I know what I am. People attack if they feel threatened or cornered. If my being myself makes you so scared, if you can't take the heat, then STEP OUT OF THE FUCKING KITCHEN. I have a job to do and you only annoy me.

Krista, Beth, Carrie and the rest, thank you for embracing me wholly and without judging me. At least there are some people out there who have the guts to embrace difference, perhaps because it feels familiar...

Strange dreams

About dawn break. The ship approaching. Soon.

I am nettled by the feeling there are things just beyond my reach. Human beings, me included, are predictable and boring. We squabble about petty things: power, cosmic affluence, money, sex. There must surely be darker desires than this, there must surely be other pleasures, other ways to spend time. There must be something different than what the average human dreams about.

I am bored of myself. I need to rediscover myself. I feel mind-numbingly predictable. But I don't know how, I don't know what to do. I suppose I'll find out.

Heartache

Image: Yoshitaka Amano

 

This is a moment of happiness. Coffin: The art of Vampire Hunter D by Yoshitaka Amano is in my hands, a huge volume gathering all the fantastic works that Amano ever made on this hero. Words can't describe the feedback one gets through his creations, the longing to be somewhere else, to be someone else. For if our parents, religion, sexual preferences, place of origin, colour of skin and even sex mean nothing, what's left of us is our legacy. Or is it? Amano was hoping this art book to be part of his legacy. What is going to be mine? Friendship books? Old letters? Do actions matter at all? What people see, what people say about one, does it matter? When my ashes will be travelling the planet, will other people's opinion matter in the least?

We all exist to nourish God/dess

What kind of nourishment do I offer to Him/her?

True art makes me weak, and don't get me started on what true art is. Just remember those times you ceased to breathe in front of a work of art. There, that's true art for you.

Biological warfare…

Second heat wave in Athens. My house looks like a bomb fell in, but the type of bomb that kills only cats. No matter where one looks, there are cats lying flat on their backs, sprawled like butter onto the floor, four legs stuck in the air and slowly turning into pools of hairy goo. It is a disaster of biblical proportions: so many tummies to rub, so little time.

I am mightily pissed off.

I am furious. They burned mountain Parnitha (the last forest near Athens) to a crisp, together with thousands of animals; deer, birds, tortoises. Anything that did not manage to escape (and we all know tortoises can’t run) was incinerated. 40,000 to 50,000 square acres of forest are now ashes due to arson. It virtually stabs me in the heart. They treat this planet, Gaia, as if their great great grandfathers had a contact with God himself and he gave it to them as a playground. Or rather, they treat her as an expendable whore, to fuck and use in every desirable way before killing her. This is the place your children and your children’s children will live on, you bloody fuckwits. It’s a loan from them, not yours to do as you please. 

Isn’t it funny, how uncaring people are total breeding machines, producing children in the same way other people produce farts (and devoting the exact same amount of time raising them, hence more robots walking this planet), while conscious people think twice about having children? Why bring a child here in this world? Why give birth amidst the ashes of a post-apocalyptic landscape? Show these children what? Take them where? Teach them what? When all the animals are gone, there will be no-one left to teach us unconditional love. When the last tree is gone, I hope the waves rise like the ancient Leviathan of myth and drown us all. Fish will come to swim under the ceilings of Chapel Sistine and inside Louvre; our houses will be populated by mermaids. Perhaps when this comes to pass there will be a new start, with no humans anywhere in sight. Perhaps dolphins will learn to walk. Perhaps not. In any case, it would be more appropriate for them to inherit this poor planet. It’s only us, humans, that take away what we can’t replace, and burn down that which doesn’t belong to us. It’s only us that open our way through reality with brutal force, and send quality of life to hell for our petty plans and egos. No animal ever does that. 

I swear, the first villa that I see built on Parnitha, I’ll bomb it myself, and impale its owner in the garden on a very high stake. Very post-modern and appropriate.

My new career as a fan

See the expression, "when the shit hits the fan." My father who used to live in Corfu alone (Corfu is a lovely Greek island both my parents come from) with a nurse who took care of him is now in the house with my mother and me. The one who was taking care of him left and he can't really stay alone or take care of himself, so here he is. Take my non-existent free time and make it shrink even more.

I have a new cat added to the swarm of cats that we have in my house: she is a white Persian I found on the stairs of my building, obviously abandoned. I am still struggling with her ear and eye infection, she is months old (and not spayed), and small in size. I have the strong suspicion she is an albino. She, on the other hand, is convinced she is my tail, and therefore follows me everywhere, even to the bathroom, and "talks" to me all the time. She has the type of flat face an animal would acquire after a collision with a wall at a hundred miles per hour: looks like a crossbreed between a goldfish and master Yoda. Not pretty, but certainly ugly enough to be lovable. She also ignores my mother and everyone else in the house. Bloody Persians. Never had one before. Such attitude!

I am going crazy as I practically have no time to myself. My mother is not doing too well either. The second day my father was in the house, he was running a fever and also had a few seizures (he is epileptic.) So my mother come to the kiosk in a rather flipped out mode and I ask her if everything is OK. Her answer?

"Oh, everything is fine. Your father is lying on bed, pissing himself from the seizures, I have a house full of pissed underwear and sheets, the cats are meowing because they are hungry as I had no time to feed them, the dogs are barking cause they want to get out but I can't take them out because during the power cut the fat lady from the other floor was stuck inside the elevator and now the elevator is out of order, and I ask your father if he wants to eat and he tells 'not now, I am fixing the car.' So I ask him, 'what car?' and he says, 'the Renault. My hands are very dirty, I have to wash them first.' " 

 

The polite reader can hopefully understand the situation and forgive my long absence. Or, as an old guy with Alzheimer's put it, "since we don't smoke anyway, what do we need the fridge for?"

 

Needless to say, all these are happening while Greece is in the middle of the worst heat wave (of the month June) of the last 150 years... We get such temperatures as 43C (110 F) daily. Straitjacket, anyone?

Moonlight...

Last night I went to rooftop. The moon is nearly full, but not yet. I could hear the birds of night, uttering their monotonous songs with what sounded like reverence; I could feel the wind carrying all those news and bits of information. Life being created and life ending. Ghosts resting gently upon mossy rocks. Teenagers dancing. The city mysteriously alive, pulsing, breathing. The moon illuminating everything with a secret smile. My heart felt like it was ready to burst with longings I could not put to words. I wanted out. I wanted to float like a balloon and follow the silver brilliance to its source, vanish. Be gone. Disappear. I wanted so many things, too many to count. My entire being is made up of longings...

Hands free

Image taken from "the Unspeakable Vault of Doom", see my link "Cthulhu humour."

It's irritating. All those fools walking the streets speaking out loud to nobody. All those people, wired and cabled, like they're parts of some huge experiment in human gullibility. They are giving us, original lunatics, a bad name. We walked the streets talking to ourselves and our entourage of invisible friends for thousands of years before they came to be. And what are they worried about anyway? Brain cancer? Do remind me if peas can get cancer. I don't think so. :)

Tearing up things again.

Music: Agalloch: Ashes against the grain.

Song: Fire Above, Ice below.

"The woeful silence and wind's reflection/

Of your body's pale ode, an icy fortress of blood and ages/

Sky fire above, ice below the hearth/

Fall away from me to that citadel at the end of time/

Where death sleeps and dreams of your buried pain/

There has never been a silence like this before/

There will never be an ode like this again."

It has happened twice in the last three months. Been tearing up all those things I have been keeping as mementos. Old letters, letters and photos of boyfriends, terrible poetry I had written when I was ten or eleven, diary pieces complaining about boyfriends I never had, clipouts from magazines, copies of letters I had sent to people... I have been keeping those things believing they were in a way describing me and what I am. Problem being, I'm not that person anymore. I do not care about those people, don't communicate with those pen pals anymore and generally these are just old skins I have shed on my way to now. Like an idiot I have been holding onto skins while the original is here in flesh and blood. Who needs those things? Certainly not I. So I tore and tore and tore until I had a trolley full of past and then I went and emptied it into the recycle bin. I felt relief.

It's amazing how much papercrap one manages to accumulate in any given amount of time. For me, at least, it's papercrap. Other people with different inclinations collect other types of crap. Notice the keyword: crap. These things are just material objects. They are not us. Western civilisation has given to death the status of the absolute end, while it is nothing more than the transmutation of energy. So people collect things in order to keep death at bay, they hide under tons and mountains of bullshit. One day death comes and finds them and those left behind throw everything away, or suffocate under their crap, harbouring the illusion of those things being the person that is gone. We have promoted material objects to people. Congrats.

What is it about death that scares us so much? Probably the dissolving of ego, the loss of personality. Why? Ha. I wish most people HAD some personality, in order to be justifiably scared of losing it. I am being mean again, I know, but believe me, you have no idea what being mean is about and I'd rather leave it at that. I however promise that at a later entry I might decide to analyse what good and evil means for me. You don't have to agree, of course. You don't even have to read it, so...