It's the end of the world

I haven't written anything here in over a month. Instead I have focused on fiction, and have written quite a bit, to my surprise.

So I have decided to close the shutters on the window into The Shows in My Mind. For now at least. Why keep a blog if I never write here? I may open it back up at some point, I may not. Time will tell.

Thanks to those who have read and commented, though there weren't that many of either kind.

Things change. Some things disappear, others appear.

Not only am I closing the blog, but my writing group may be disintegrating as well. For three years now there has been a core of people around which others have come and gone. Could Be King, the only published fiction writer among us, has changed jobs and won't have time to focus on much else besides writing his next novel. Finally Has A Kid finally has a kid, and will be spending most of her time being a mom.

We will try to keep meeting after the last scheduled huddle in December, and I dearly hope we can keep going. The writing class as well as the online community that followed it has fallen apart, so the huddle and my cronies are the only group I have to fuel my inspiration in the way that only fellow writers. Plus its a nice feeling to go there and feel inadequate too...

So. Bye for now. I will still be watching the shows in my minds, and I hope you will be watching the ones in your mind.

I don't have a TV now, but that's okay. The shows in my mind are almost always better.
- The Maxx, episode 1

The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sages steer by

The day started well enough. Woke up before the alarm, to warmth and hugs. Maybe the nervousness before an 11 hour flight stirred something in me, butterflies in the stomach and all that, and woke me, or maybe it was just the fact that I usually get up at 0545 and now I woke up at 0635. Some internal clock going off. "Wakey wakey! Rise and shine! I've got a nice cuttlefish for you when you wake up!"

I wasn't pushing up the daisies though, nor bereft of life. Not even tired, really. Excited. On the move. Being the control freak that I am, lists of what to pack and what to get done were completed weeks ago. Started laying stuff out in neat piles on the living room table during the weekend. Packed most things last night.

And then off to the airport. Mah Girl walked me to the train station, which is ten minutes from our apartment, and then I rode a train from there all the way to the airport. No changing at Centralen, no lugging of luggage from one end of the station to the other. Sweet.

Arrived at Arlanda with three hours to kill. Scratch that. Four hours. Why? My flight to Kuala Lumpur is delayed. Already. By an hour. Not a good start of the journey proper.

Then problems at check-in, something with the ticket that said I was going to KL and KL only. I spotted it when she tagged by back as "ARL to KLU", not "ARL to AKL via KLU". She looked a bit embarrased, and then spent ten minutes trying to convince whatever evil system she was working in that yes, I was supposed to go to Auckland. Airport voodoo was performed and the system acquiesced.

Now I'm at a café in the airport, having consumed a surprisingly moist piece of carrot cake (from a distance it looked like a brick, but it was still the most appetizing thing they had), tapping away. The wifi here is ridiculously expensive, so I'm writing everything I plan to post/send ahead of time.

A little more than two and a half hours to lift-off. The butterflies in my stomach have settled down. Or maybe they're just smothered under the carrot cake...

Born again? No, I am not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time

This must be some conspiracy at work.

Two days ago I met a religious nut on the train to work. Today, a small, unassuming man came up to me on the train home and handed me what appeared to be a yellow business card. Now, would I have written this post if it was a business card? Hell, no. Which, it turns out, is a very appropriate word here. Hell.

I can't take a good picture of the thing, so I'll paraphrase here. It said:

“Jesus loves people. All have sinned. You have sinned and the penalty for sin is eternal death. Only Jesus can save you from hell to heaven. God's gift to you through Jesus Christ is fellowship with God and eternal life. Welcome Jesus Christ into your life!”

I'm not kidding. I'm looking at the damn thing right now. What the hell is going on? Have the religious nutters of Sweden decided to band together and convert me? Has there been some secret meeting where members of various Christian churches sat down and said, “that bearded, black-clad must be brought into the light of the God-Emperor...I mean Christ!” I'd like to think they said God-Emperor. That's so much cooler than Christ. But maybe not.

Seriously. What the hell is going on? Are we experiencing a tsunami of religion through what is a pretty secular country? Will I be accosted frequently by morons that believe I need to be “saved”? If it continues, I will snap at some point, that's for sure.

Now, from the headline of this post and previous posts you might get the idea that I'm prejudiced towards religious people. And you would be right. I'm a fairly open-minded guy when it comes to most things, but I've yet to come across someone that has been able to explain “faith” to me in a way that makes me understand why someone else can believe. I think I've mentioned before that I have some very intelligent friends that believe, that would describe themselves as Christians, and even one that works as a priest. I need to talk to them. And soon. If this madness continues it may be too late to pull me back from my prejudices.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience

Second weekend in a row at a festival. I had planned to work in between, but was instead out cold with the Stomach Virus From Hell that managed to take down five out of the seven people that shared our house at the Peace & Love festival. Surely this was a weapons test of some kind. A military jet passed over the lake one day, when we were sitting on the porch, enjoying or trying to avoid the summer sun (that last bit would apply to me and Mah Girl). It must have dosed us with something.

And of course Faith No More was awesome. Phenomenal. Other bands watching Mike Patton lead his troops should just cease to exist out of sheer embarressment that they can't measure up. Might be the best front man ever. They worked their way through all their albums, and managed to play almost every single song that was at the top of my wish list. Telepathy was somehow involved. Me and Mister Patton communicating on some unknown mental frequency.

On Wednesday I got to see the mighty Neurosis annihilate a club in Stockholm once again. Not quite as intense as the last time I saw them, except the final song, "Through Silver In Blood", which is one of my favorites and which felt like an element of a ritual performed by urban shamans in the depths of some concrete jungle. Awe-inspiring.

Now we're at the Arvika festival, or to be precise in the cabin we're renting, about 14 kilometers from Arvika. Just hanging out for now, watching Mah Girl drink a couple of cold ones and now dozing on the couch. So far, we've seen Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode, both of which were excellent, as well as some minor bands. Tonight, a few more, and then home tomorrow.

So three of my favorite bands, Faith No More, Neurosis and Nine Inch Nails, in six days. How the hell did that happen?

Looking at me, some might believe that the best part about this weekend isn't the music, but the fact that I'm the designated driver and get to drive my colleague Stefan's kick-ass car, an Audi S3 that feels like it has a jet engine in the back when you hit the gas. And they wouldn't be far wrong. Such a fun car to drive, and not only cause it has plenty of horsepower, but also because it handles really well. If I ever feel like spending 300 000 kronor on a car, I may just buy me one of those.

Time is the fire in which we burn

I used to not do emotion, really. I'm a very analytical person, which has gotten me into trouble, mental health-wise, at least twice. Analysis is good, but it's not the end all be all of existence. The brain can't always rule over heart and groin.

Before I had a tendency to repress emotion, to not even let it impact me. There have been periods in my life when, I think, I have felt nothing. Zero. Flatline. Walking through life an emotional zombie. Numb. Not anymore, though. I've learned to see the signs, and to break down the walls that were there. They're not all gone, but I'm doing my best to turn them into rubble.

Why did this come up today? I watched an episode of a fantastic TV show, where one of the main characters goes back home and visits her father, who's suffering from dementia. It was powerful stuff, and invisible fingers plucked at my emotional strings.

“I'm losing time”, one of the characters said. I was reminded of a visit this summer to my grandfather's. He's turning 100 in a few years. One hundred years old. The mind boggles. He still lives alone in his apartment, though with regular visits from Hemtjänsten. I have several very graphic memories spread throughout my childhood centered on my grandfather. One of them is his calendar, which is the wrong word but not really, a red plastic box with buttons on top that you push each day to move it forward a day, a month, a year. This summer that box stood on a shelf in the kitchen, covered in dust, the numerals stuck between two dates. Broken. It made me sad.

Time grinds down pretty much anything to dust.

I bought her flowers today. Lilies. And a chocolate muffin. She smiled. That made me smile. No analysis. Just a spur of the moment thing, because it's the third today. So it was a good day.

One of television’s great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs

I like TV. I especially like TV when it comes in series form in a dvd box.

We're ten episodes into the second season of the West Wing. I think we've seen six episodes today. This is what passes for vacation for me, and I absolutely adore it.

However, I couldn't stomach another episode today. Instead, we turned to comedian Jeff Dunham's Comedy Central special that we recorded while we were away at my parents' place. Why? Because I needed the break, I needed comedy instead of intense drama, and I needed to disconnect for a while.

Because there is TV and there is TV. There is stuff that I can watch without any kind of emotional attachment besides the smile on my face, and then there's stuff that I can't watch without getting tears in my eyes when they pluck at the right (or wrong) emotional strings. West Wing falls into the latter category, as does Six Feet Under, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and a few others.

I'm not saying I dislike it. Not at all. I'm just saying that sometimes, a smile is the best thing there is.

(and did it work? Yeah, kind of, though Dunham isn't as funny as I would have liked...)

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution

To quote Dr Cox:

"Relationships? Well, Sigmund. Relationships are so... fragile. It just takes one thing, one... tiny little offense, and it can snowball on ya. And if that snowball starts to pick up speed, God forbid, you'd better tuck and go, my friend."

I'm not saying it's tiny. I'm just saying.

This machine will not communicate these thoughts

I stood on the platform last night waiting for a train home. Thick fog shrouded the world, again, and Radiohead's “The Bends” played in my headphones.

I've found that the greatest heights and depths of emotion rarely happen in what should be an emotionally charged situation, but instead when the mind wanders and I'm more or less shielded from any interaction with other people. Like last night.

There was no particular reason and really no particular emotion either. It was just...powerful. Dreamlike in it's intensity.

Then this morning, when the clock radio started (yeah, I set the alarm on a Sunday – places to go, people to see, things to do), it played Radiohead's “No Surprises”. It felt like the universe aligned, and is trying to tell me something. But what?

Best. Video. Ever.