Vix was standing in a field.
To his left stood a red barn. It looked as if it had just been painted, and was in good shape, even if this kind of barn most definitely must have been built long ago.
The barn was surrounded by green fields as far as he could see, and to his right a horse was drinking out of a wooden trough. The horse was light grey with small black-patches all over and a long ragged mane. He seemed like a kind of working horse rather than a show horse or something fancy.
But he seemed like a good horse, Vix thought.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a person came riding towards him on a tall black horse.
He was dressed in full plate armour, and was holding a long sword in each hand, and at first Vix didn’t recognize him, but as he came closer he could see that it was his friend from the living prison he’d once been trapped inside.
Vix tried to wave and make himself noticed, but his friend ignored him and instead rode straight towards the white horse and decapitated it in one movement.
As Vix stood speechless, the blood started gushing out of the headless body and into the water-tray and the surrounding ground, as if its life-juices returned to their origin of water and earth.
His friend rode towards him holding the horse’s head by its blood-stained mane, his two swords dripping with blood in the other hand.
"What the hell are you doing?" Vix shouted, with tears in his eyes. "He seemed like a nice horse."
His friend just stared blankly back at him, like his savage actions meant nothing at all – almost as though he hadn't even noticed what he’d just done.
Then, a sense of panic grew inside Vix, and he said to his friend:
"We have to get rid of this head. And you have to clean your bloody swords. Otherwise we'll be in deep trouble when they return."
Vix didn't know why, but he had a strong feeling someone would be returning soon, and that they would be in deep trouble when they eventually did.
"That's fine", his friend said.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Alone, all one
Njoro gently dried the Savage’s face with a warm cloth.
He’d been getting worse and worse during the early morning hours. His temperature was constantly rising and falling, and he seemed either to be delirious or unconscious.
She’d tried everything to restore his balance, but it seemed almost useless at this point.
It was as if the imbalance in him had grown too extreme for repair, and that no-one but himself could reach in to where these things could be set right again.
Maybe it wouldn’t even be possible at all in his present incarnation.
Most things pointed towards that.
She wondered what she would have to face if things turned out that way. She had been too shaken to have any clear vision since the Savage entered her world, and now she was focusing too hard on trying to help heal him to be able to see into her own future at all.
Whatever the outcome she would have to put her trust in Life, as always.
The great force of Life would always reward you for daring to trust in it.
He’d been getting worse and worse during the early morning hours. His temperature was constantly rising and falling, and he seemed either to be delirious or unconscious.
She’d tried everything to restore his balance, but it seemed almost useless at this point.
It was as if the imbalance in him had grown too extreme for repair, and that no-one but himself could reach in to where these things could be set right again.
Maybe it wouldn’t even be possible at all in his present incarnation.
Most things pointed towards that.
She wondered what she would have to face if things turned out that way. She had been too shaken to have any clear vision since the Savage entered her world, and now she was focusing too hard on trying to help heal him to be able to see into her own future at all.
Whatever the outcome she would have to put her trust in Life, as always.
The great force of Life would always reward you for daring to trust in it.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Full cycle
The ticket for Okinawa lay on his desk, on top of the closed laptop.
It was early October, and Vix had spent all morning preparing his move, like most mornings for quite some time now.
He'd packed everything he could think of as useful to bring into his new future, and had left the rest in selected piles on the floor.
The piles were getting quite big.
Once in a while he would walk over to the desk, pick up the ticket and read the destination out loud to himself:
“Oki-nawa!”
Then he would smile, and investigate the ticket printout a little.
After he had made the decision about moving on that day before the summer, he had started working very systematically on executing his new plan.
The first thing he had done, was to go and pick up the little red box from the top of the shelf.
The box itself was a simple cardboard construction, and wasn’t really all that red anymore. On top of it, written in weak, worn-out marker-pen greenish grey stood the words:
“Secret Stuff”.
Inside, there were various items of varying importance to Vix. There was a torn one dollar note, an old comic-book, a passport, a pile of stained letters from various official instances, a half-empty packet of chewing gum, a playing-card (the Jack of Spades), and a leather wallet.
Inside the wallet were a series of plastic cards. Most of them for various bonus-programs at stores he’d visited once but hadn’t had the nerve to refuse the offer of joining their bonus program when the cashier had asked, in their robotic part-of-the-job tone.
And then there was the ID for his old bank account.
This account had been with him since before he’d left, and like most of the other luggage from back there, he’d left it untouched and un-thought of since his departure.
Finally it was time to face it, and put it to use.
It wasn’t a question of a bottomless supply, but rather like a decent pension if he put it to modest use.
The ticket reflected such modesty.
He would have to fly via Tokyo. It would take time, but that was fine with him.
He owned time, and anyway he’d read somewhere that because of the Earth’s curves or something, the actual route to Tokyo passed over the North Pole, which he found very exciting. He would try to tune in to check if he could sense anything special when they were near the pole point. You’d never know what could happen.
The last few weeks had been filled with lots of dizzying emotions shifting between tranquility and restlessness fighting hard for his sole attention.
The more he had thought of it, the more he realized how these last few years had just been pointlessly dragging out, and sometimes he would feel very sorry for all the time he’d wasted.
Wasted in the wrong way, that was.
By thinking about these things, he had also discovered that he had forgotten all his motivations for coming here in the first place. Not that it had been the wrong move initially, he didn't have anything to stick around for back where he came from.
Not that he really cared about.
It was just that back then it didn't really matter where he set course. All he knew was that there was no 'home' left, and that he had felt a strange kind of magnetism pulling him towards this city.
This time it was different. This time he had an actual feeling of being on the verge of something new. Genuinely new.
Whatever that was.
For the last three days he had even gone through all his vinyl records, even the ones serving as a base for his bed.
He’d done this quite a few times before, of course, but this time he set out with the intent of actually doing something permanent about it, and not just end up playing old classics into the night, and then going to sleep and waking up in a mess of empty sleeves and stray vinyl all over the floor the next day.
No, this time he had actually gone through the whole pile systematically, put the more or less insignificant ones (about seventy percent it turned out) in crates by the door, to take away to the second-hand store the next day (with intent of parting with them forever).
The interesting ones (the remaining thirty percent), he had played through one after the other, side after side, and then thoughtfully decided if they were real essentials, or if they had to end their relationship with Vix from now on.
The essentials had amounted to about ten percent of the whole collection in the end. “Not bad!” he thought, even though he knew it was.
He had then checked every song on every essential against his library of digital music on the laptop harddrive, and if he could find it there he had put that record in his special boxes for bringing to the small storage space he'd rented for the stuff he would keep. Just in case.
If he couldn't find that he already had the track digitally, he had recorded and catalogued it there and then, before filing the record in a box.
All this had of course taken many hours and numerous mugs of tea to pull off, and when the last record was done, he'd celebrated with a loud playing through of an early nineties techno record he thought was long gone.
This had been around 5 AM, and his neighbour had of course gone completely off his trolley and shouted threats of axing through the wall to behead Vix.
But instead of getting nervous, Vix had started giggling and just let him shout until he ran out of steam.
It had felt nice.
It was as if they were just good old friends with the mere habit of addressing eachother in very noisy and rude ways whenever they communicated. Which wasn’t actually often, as his neighbour usually did the shouting and Vix usually was preoccupied with shutting up.
After this, their last communication, he had felt content with the day – and night’s work, and thrown himself across the mattress on the floor to catch some rest.
And when he woke this morning, he had just continued going through his remaining belongings.
There were masses of stuff on the computer that he had forgotten all about.
He decided to get rid of all this digital junk too, it didn’t really matter if things had any physicality about it or not. He wondered whether Buddhist monks had to include their files and folders when it was time to sum up their seven earthly belongings.
Vix owned a total of 1.322.432 files and folders, which he himself concluded was far too un-Zen, and so he had rearranged his folder system in every category, put a lot of stuff in the trashbin, and then backed up his most essential stuff to an online storage service.
He thought of sorting all his notes, but ended up just collecting all the documents in a folder on the desktop to go through later.
Maybe it would be a good pastime for the plane-journey.
He named the folder "ITS_JUST_LIFE".
After a short tea-break, he finally emptied the sack full of his unpaired socks on the floor, picked out seven matching pairs, and put all the remaining socks back in the sack.
He then carried the whole thing outside, and threw it in the dustbin.
This made him feel indescribably satisfied.
Back inside he sat down by the almost empty desk.
He opened the computer and logged into his blog.
Then he wrote down some words he had found on the back of the sleeve of the rave record from last night’s neighbour-tormenting session.
It read:
The interface between physical manifestation and abstract idea.
As a symbol.
Balanced.
What can the human race learn from the realm of physical law?
What function in it?
Stern reality.
Is there nothing left to chance?
How to match free will with unfree order?
Life lives inbetween.
Life suffers when forced into total control.
Reality collapses when raped by total chaos.
This eternal riddle.
Does it help to try to understand?
Does it help to ignore?
Is the key to translate?
Are we the ones who forgot our place?
The Inbetweeners?
Diplomats?
How can mere humans make peace between the two strongest forces in the Universe?
Is love really balance?
Will we ever get it right?
And left?
Are these the right questions?
Can I shut up and dance?
He uploaded a picture of a sunny beach with a nuclear explosion in the horizon and posted the track "Earthbeat" by PM in the post.
He loved this track. It had traces of a dubstep beat and pace, but sounded strangely harmonic and frankly quite pompous.
It was the kind of cultural fuck-up he always dreamt the real future would hold when he was a teenager, the kind that would give any sci-fi story the authenticity needed to keep up at least his interest in it.
Future acid dub, it was.
He logged into the dubstep forum and located the thread where he initially found the link to the track, and wrote:
Future acid dub!
Strange thing, this 'future' business.
Come to think of it he'd always loved music he considered to be 'futuristic'. But futuristic in the sense of describing the kind of future that never came - the more promising kind of future.
Maybe he loved it because it was the carrot on a stick he needed to keep up his hopes through the darkness?
From old Jamaican dub to New York disco to Italian electronic pop to Detroit techno to German minimalism to London dubstep - in Vix’ mind all of it was music that pointed towards brighter days - even the darker stuff, with its promises of technological superiority.
The stuff that was supposed to save the world.
His harddrive was full of these things, and it made him happy to think that he could carry them all with him inside such a small piece of gear that his laptop was.
At least he wouldn't be lacking entertainment, if that's what he would call music.
Mr. Friend would not have been pleased.
He thought of the old man, and smiled.
So many things had changed so fast.
But it didn't really matter. He had been going around in circles for a long time now. But the circle was about to end. He could tell.
It had gone full cycle.
But where exactly does a circle end, and another one begin?
It was early October, and Vix had spent all morning preparing his move, like most mornings for quite some time now.
He'd packed everything he could think of as useful to bring into his new future, and had left the rest in selected piles on the floor.
The piles were getting quite big.
Once in a while he would walk over to the desk, pick up the ticket and read the destination out loud to himself:
“Oki-nawa!”
Then he would smile, and investigate the ticket printout a little.
After he had made the decision about moving on that day before the summer, he had started working very systematically on executing his new plan.
The first thing he had done, was to go and pick up the little red box from the top of the shelf.
The box itself was a simple cardboard construction, and wasn’t really all that red anymore. On top of it, written in weak, worn-out marker-pen greenish grey stood the words:
“Secret Stuff”.
Inside, there were various items of varying importance to Vix. There was a torn one dollar note, an old comic-book, a passport, a pile of stained letters from various official instances, a half-empty packet of chewing gum, a playing-card (the Jack of Spades), and a leather wallet.
Inside the wallet were a series of plastic cards. Most of them for various bonus-programs at stores he’d visited once but hadn’t had the nerve to refuse the offer of joining their bonus program when the cashier had asked, in their robotic part-of-the-job tone.
And then there was the ID for his old bank account.
This account had been with him since before he’d left, and like most of the other luggage from back there, he’d left it untouched and un-thought of since his departure.
Finally it was time to face it, and put it to use.
It wasn’t a question of a bottomless supply, but rather like a decent pension if he put it to modest use.
The ticket reflected such modesty.
He would have to fly via Tokyo. It would take time, but that was fine with him.
He owned time, and anyway he’d read somewhere that because of the Earth’s curves or something, the actual route to Tokyo passed over the North Pole, which he found very exciting. He would try to tune in to check if he could sense anything special when they were near the pole point. You’d never know what could happen.
The last few weeks had been filled with lots of dizzying emotions shifting between tranquility and restlessness fighting hard for his sole attention.
The more he had thought of it, the more he realized how these last few years had just been pointlessly dragging out, and sometimes he would feel very sorry for all the time he’d wasted.
Wasted in the wrong way, that was.
By thinking about these things, he had also discovered that he had forgotten all his motivations for coming here in the first place. Not that it had been the wrong move initially, he didn't have anything to stick around for back where he came from.
Not that he really cared about.
It was just that back then it didn't really matter where he set course. All he knew was that there was no 'home' left, and that he had felt a strange kind of magnetism pulling him towards this city.
This time it was different. This time he had an actual feeling of being on the verge of something new. Genuinely new.
Whatever that was.
For the last three days he had even gone through all his vinyl records, even the ones serving as a base for his bed.
He’d done this quite a few times before, of course, but this time he set out with the intent of actually doing something permanent about it, and not just end up playing old classics into the night, and then going to sleep and waking up in a mess of empty sleeves and stray vinyl all over the floor the next day.
No, this time he had actually gone through the whole pile systematically, put the more or less insignificant ones (about seventy percent it turned out) in crates by the door, to take away to the second-hand store the next day (with intent of parting with them forever).
The interesting ones (the remaining thirty percent), he had played through one after the other, side after side, and then thoughtfully decided if they were real essentials, or if they had to end their relationship with Vix from now on.
The essentials had amounted to about ten percent of the whole collection in the end. “Not bad!” he thought, even though he knew it was.
He had then checked every song on every essential against his library of digital music on the laptop harddrive, and if he could find it there he had put that record in his special boxes for bringing to the small storage space he'd rented for the stuff he would keep. Just in case.
If he couldn't find that he already had the track digitally, he had recorded and catalogued it there and then, before filing the record in a box.
All this had of course taken many hours and numerous mugs of tea to pull off, and when the last record was done, he'd celebrated with a loud playing through of an early nineties techno record he thought was long gone.
This had been around 5 AM, and his neighbour had of course gone completely off his trolley and shouted threats of axing through the wall to behead Vix.
But instead of getting nervous, Vix had started giggling and just let him shout until he ran out of steam.
It had felt nice.
It was as if they were just good old friends with the mere habit of addressing eachother in very noisy and rude ways whenever they communicated. Which wasn’t actually often, as his neighbour usually did the shouting and Vix usually was preoccupied with shutting up.
After this, their last communication, he had felt content with the day – and night’s work, and thrown himself across the mattress on the floor to catch some rest.
And when he woke this morning, he had just continued going through his remaining belongings.
There were masses of stuff on the computer that he had forgotten all about.
He decided to get rid of all this digital junk too, it didn’t really matter if things had any physicality about it or not. He wondered whether Buddhist monks had to include their files and folders when it was time to sum up their seven earthly belongings.
Vix owned a total of 1.322.432 files and folders, which he himself concluded was far too un-Zen, and so he had rearranged his folder system in every category, put a lot of stuff in the trashbin, and then backed up his most essential stuff to an online storage service.
He thought of sorting all his notes, but ended up just collecting all the documents in a folder on the desktop to go through later.
Maybe it would be a good pastime for the plane-journey.
He named the folder "ITS_JUST_LIFE".
After a short tea-break, he finally emptied the sack full of his unpaired socks on the floor, picked out seven matching pairs, and put all the remaining socks back in the sack.
He then carried the whole thing outside, and threw it in the dustbin.
This made him feel indescribably satisfied.
Back inside he sat down by the almost empty desk.
He opened the computer and logged into his blog.
Then he wrote down some words he had found on the back of the sleeve of the rave record from last night’s neighbour-tormenting session.
It read:
The interface between physical manifestation and abstract idea.
As a symbol.
Balanced.
What can the human race learn from the realm of physical law?
What function in it?
Stern reality.
Is there nothing left to chance?
How to match free will with unfree order?
Life lives inbetween.
Life suffers when forced into total control.
Reality collapses when raped by total chaos.
This eternal riddle.
Does it help to try to understand?
Does it help to ignore?
Is the key to translate?
Are we the ones who forgot our place?
The Inbetweeners?
Diplomats?
How can mere humans make peace between the two strongest forces in the Universe?
Is love really balance?
Will we ever get it right?
And left?
Are these the right questions?
Can I shut up and dance?
He uploaded a picture of a sunny beach with a nuclear explosion in the horizon and posted the track "Earthbeat" by PM in the post.
He loved this track. It had traces of a dubstep beat and pace, but sounded strangely harmonic and frankly quite pompous.
It was the kind of cultural fuck-up he always dreamt the real future would hold when he was a teenager, the kind that would give any sci-fi story the authenticity needed to keep up at least his interest in it.
Future acid dub, it was.
He logged into the dubstep forum and located the thread where he initially found the link to the track, and wrote:
Future acid dub!
Strange thing, this 'future' business.
Come to think of it he'd always loved music he considered to be 'futuristic'. But futuristic in the sense of describing the kind of future that never came - the more promising kind of future.
Maybe he loved it because it was the carrot on a stick he needed to keep up his hopes through the darkness?
From old Jamaican dub to New York disco to Italian electronic pop to Detroit techno to German minimalism to London dubstep - in Vix’ mind all of it was music that pointed towards brighter days - even the darker stuff, with its promises of technological superiority.
The stuff that was supposed to save the world.
His harddrive was full of these things, and it made him happy to think that he could carry them all with him inside such a small piece of gear that his laptop was.
At least he wouldn't be lacking entertainment, if that's what he would call music.
Mr. Friend would not have been pleased.
He thought of the old man, and smiled.
So many things had changed so fast.
But it didn't really matter. He had been going around in circles for a long time now. But the circle was about to end. He could tell.
It had gone full cycle.
But where exactly does a circle end, and another one begin?
Monday, January 4, 2010
Doomed
Mac knew that things weren’t going his way.
Not at all.
Not even slightly.
He was shaking all over, feeling cold as the ice beneath him.
The efforts of the Witch didn’t seem to help much either. She’d been padding him with reindeer skins all around his body and given him hot water with dried peppermint leaves to drink.
It was as if her very gestures warmed him more than the actual hot fluid and furry covers.
He was sometimes delirious, seeing old friends in the cave entrance from time to time. He was happy they would check in on him, but their faces didn’t reassure him very much. They would be smiling when they arrived, but soon adopted gloomy expressions, and some even shook their heads as if to tell him he’d really made things difficult for himself this time, and that there wasn’t much they could do at this point.
All this and more he could read out of their faces, and at no point did he find it strange that he could do so.
It wasn’t until his Grandfather stood in the cave opening that he got a little worried. Worried, not because the old man had been dead for years, but because his presence made him remember so many things from his childhood days.
Emotional memories.
Noise.
His granddad had been living next door where he grew up in the forests just a few hours north of Petrograd, and together they had been hanging out a lot, getting into all kinds of situations.
Sometimes situations involving big trouble.
His granddad had a simple philosophy:
Life, was all about survival.
That, and having fun.
Much fun.
They would spend a lot of time in the outdoors, going on all kind of expeditions in the forest. Mac had learned to face some basic facts of life on these trips. One being that you should always make sure you were on top of things, whenever setting out to challenge the elements.
Not so at this present moment.
He’d also learned that it was either a question of the survival of you, or your prey.
Not necessarily him at this present moment.
This might be a good moment to get seriously worried.
His granddad suddenly interrupted him:
“Why weren’t you listening?” he said.
This confused Mac. There wasn’t another being on this planet that he had listened to more than this old man.
“What do you mean?” he answered, not finding the slightest bit strange that he had gotten his voice back.
“I mean what I say, as I have always done. Why didn’t you listen? Look at the mess you’re in now.”
Mac felt a rush of sadness inside.
A feeling he hadn’t felt since last time he saw this man.
When he died.
“But what do you mean? I owe you everything. All my skills of survival I can thank you for. All my preparations for these challenges were made from your advice. I don’t understand.”
Mac was on the verge of crying, and it almost made him panic – something he never did.
“To think that I spent so much time on you, and all you ever learned you could have learned from the most insignificant, lost fool on Earth.”
The old man looked both defeated and angry at the same time.
“Please, I don’t understand. I listened! I did nothing but listen.” Mac tried to file his protest without bursting into tears. He was suddenly the seven-year-old boy out in the woods again, only he couldn’t ever remember ever being corrected in this way back then.
“Matchek!” the old man said sternly, addressing him as a young boy. “Survivors don’t just barge into situations and act as blind idiots. They don’t close their ears to their surroundings and dilute themselves with their own excellence. Real survivors listen all the way. Didn’t you get this? It was my only message to you. Why did you stop listening?”
“B..but. I listened.” Mac tried to protest.
“No you didn’t. You stopped listening when I was no longer there. Real survivors keep on listening. Listening to themselves.”
Mac couldn’t hold his tears back.
“I listened, I really listened!” he just repeated.
“Then,” his granddad continued, “then maybe you listened to the wrong Self.”
The old man left, and Mac cried himself into a deep sleep, unable to stop shaking.
Not at all.
Not even slightly.
He was shaking all over, feeling cold as the ice beneath him.
The efforts of the Witch didn’t seem to help much either. She’d been padding him with reindeer skins all around his body and given him hot water with dried peppermint leaves to drink.
It was as if her very gestures warmed him more than the actual hot fluid and furry covers.
He was sometimes delirious, seeing old friends in the cave entrance from time to time. He was happy they would check in on him, but their faces didn’t reassure him very much. They would be smiling when they arrived, but soon adopted gloomy expressions, and some even shook their heads as if to tell him he’d really made things difficult for himself this time, and that there wasn’t much they could do at this point.
All this and more he could read out of their faces, and at no point did he find it strange that he could do so.
It wasn’t until his Grandfather stood in the cave opening that he got a little worried. Worried, not because the old man had been dead for years, but because his presence made him remember so many things from his childhood days.
Emotional memories.
Noise.
His granddad had been living next door where he grew up in the forests just a few hours north of Petrograd, and together they had been hanging out a lot, getting into all kinds of situations.
Sometimes situations involving big trouble.
His granddad had a simple philosophy:
Life, was all about survival.
That, and having fun.
Much fun.
They would spend a lot of time in the outdoors, going on all kind of expeditions in the forest. Mac had learned to face some basic facts of life on these trips. One being that you should always make sure you were on top of things, whenever setting out to challenge the elements.
Not so at this present moment.
He’d also learned that it was either a question of the survival of you, or your prey.
Not necessarily him at this present moment.
This might be a good moment to get seriously worried.
His granddad suddenly interrupted him:
“Why weren’t you listening?” he said.
This confused Mac. There wasn’t another being on this planet that he had listened to more than this old man.
“What do you mean?” he answered, not finding the slightest bit strange that he had gotten his voice back.
“I mean what I say, as I have always done. Why didn’t you listen? Look at the mess you’re in now.”
Mac felt a rush of sadness inside.
A feeling he hadn’t felt since last time he saw this man.
When he died.
“But what do you mean? I owe you everything. All my skills of survival I can thank you for. All my preparations for these challenges were made from your advice. I don’t understand.”
Mac was on the verge of crying, and it almost made him panic – something he never did.
“To think that I spent so much time on you, and all you ever learned you could have learned from the most insignificant, lost fool on Earth.”
The old man looked both defeated and angry at the same time.
“Please, I don’t understand. I listened! I did nothing but listen.” Mac tried to file his protest without bursting into tears. He was suddenly the seven-year-old boy out in the woods again, only he couldn’t ever remember ever being corrected in this way back then.
“Matchek!” the old man said sternly, addressing him as a young boy. “Survivors don’t just barge into situations and act as blind idiots. They don’t close their ears to their surroundings and dilute themselves with their own excellence. Real survivors listen all the way. Didn’t you get this? It was my only message to you. Why did you stop listening?”
“B..but. I listened.” Mac tried to protest.
“No you didn’t. You stopped listening when I was no longer there. Real survivors keep on listening. Listening to themselves.”
Mac couldn’t hold his tears back.
“I listened, I really listened!” he just repeated.
“Then,” his granddad continued, “then maybe you listened to the wrong Self.”
The old man left, and Mac cried himself into a deep sleep, unable to stop shaking.
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