change – Monocultured

But what if moss is good for the stone?

I’ve moved to my own place. After five or so years living with Anna, Albin and Eskil, and lately with Jan, moving to live on my own feels almost like a betrayal of some ideal. I’m not sure what ideal that might be, but it seems indulgent, bordering on, dare I say, bourgeois. I’ve never had a place of my own, so for me this is all terribly exciting. I’m like someone coming out as gay and boring all his friends by talking non-stop about how excited he is to suck dick; —Like, I have a fridge. It’s full of my stuff, and I just left five snowballs in there for a week!

Sara & Olle helped me move two weeks ago, and I’m now the shady subletter of Helgas previous apartment. It’s a one room apartment overlooking the river, with Norra Älvstranden on the other side serving as an example of just how low one might slip into upper middle class without realizing it. The Stena Line passes outside my window, as does the motorway, lending an industrial city timbre to the place.

Moving didn’t take long. Like a goldfish in a bowl, I hadn’t grown beyond what I could fit, and so transporting it didn’t take longer than an hour. Packing all my crud, crap and junk, took appreciably longer. When I cleaned out the room, it was emptier than it had ever been during my stay at Gröna Vallen. The indoor climbing wall was as I had found it, and for all the years I’ve slept next to it, I had tried it only a handful of times. My shuffling feet had scuffed the floor and my bike had left tracks where the rubber had rubbed off.

Living by oneself has upsides. Jerking off is easier than ever, and will be even easier once I hang curtains, seeing as how I live on the ground floor. Curtains would also allow me to work easier during daylight hours, and I’ll no longer have to fashion light controlling plastic head sleeves to get the retouching work done. I don’t own much furniture beyond a bed, so my living room is rather bare. I’m looking into getting an adjustable table and ergonomic chair, but this furniture business will take a while to arrange as work has piled up. I hope to get a coat hanger within two weeks, but am not taking bets on it. Laundry is off the table and buying underwear and shirts in bulk feels like an excellent solution.

Cleaning the old place out was sad. Sad like Bruce Banner walking down the road, but also sad as in confusing. When my year in Iceland was up and I got back to Sweden, it was as if I was the only witness to what I’d experienced there, and were I to go back there would be scant evidence of me ever having been there. Cleaning out the fridge, or the shelf in the bathroom, I felt something similar; I was vanishing the traces of myself, and was wondering what intangibles I was bringing with me, and what I was leaving behind.

This, of course, should only serve as a reminder that what is important in life is most often our relationships with other people, and that taking care of those, and being mindful of our friends, is a continuous process and should not only hinge on routine but on choice and hard work. (Most people know about this, but I am surprisingly resilient to the obvious) And in total contradiction to this, I have hardly met with anyone the past two weeks, except Sara who has taken pity on me and enjoys laughing at my idiot ramblings about how I will craft a table with a built-in scanner.

I’ll make good on this though. As soon as I have something to hang a coat on, and no longer live in paper bags, and have bought either a broom or a vacum cleaner, I’ll have you over for tea or beer and maybe Xbox if I lose my mind enough to buy one.

Writing. Reading. Outsourcing. Fucking on a train.

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

→ George Orwell: Why I write

The infrastructure of publishing constrains the thinking of writers. Obviously, all forms of art and design have some inherent constraints-but it seems to me that writers are especially misled by the apparent freedoms of language. Published language, in print, on paper, is not language per se: It’s an industrial artifact.

→ Interactions magazine, Bruce Sterling: Design Fiction

Nevermind, of course, that you can use ball-point pens to write whatever you want: a novel, a screenplay, epic poems, religious prophecy, architectural theory, ransom notes. You can draw astronomical diagrams, sketch impossible machines for your Tuesday night art class, or even work on new patent applications for a hydrogen-powered automobile – it doesn’t matter. You can draw penises on your coworker’s paycheck stub. It’s a note-taking technology.

→ BLDGBLOG.com, Geoff Manaugh: How the other half writes: In defense of Twitter

When you’re young, it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy, it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you travelled alone to Europe this summer you could surely do the same thing next year and the year after that. Of course, you don’t, though, and the next thing you know you’re an aging, unemployed elf, so desperate for love that you spend your evening mooning over a straight alcoholic.

→ The New Yorker, David Sedaris: Lost loves and lost years

Honey has completed her first project for me: research on the person Esquire has chosen as the Sexiest Woman Alive. (See page 232.) I’ve been assigned to write a profile of this woman, and I really don’t want to have to slog through all the heavy-breathing fan Web sites about her. When I open Honey’s file, I have this reaction: America is fucked. There are charts. There are section headers. There is a well-organized breakdown of her pets, measurements, and favorite foods (e.g., swordfish). If all Bangalorians are like Honey, I pity Americans about to graduate college. They’re up against a hungry, polite, Excel-proficient Indian army. Put it this way: Honey ends her e-mails with “Right time for right action, starts now!”

→ Esquire, A. J. Jacobs: My outsourced life

Critics compare him to Kafka, but it is from Borges that Auster borrows his allegories (detective work, biographical research) and his favorite theme: the impossibility of ever really knowing anything. This is an unwise choice of material, because he is not enough of a thinker to convey the fun that makes intellectual exercise worthwhile after all. The gnostic correspondences between Chinese food and food for thought; dog spelled backwards is god—this is philosophical writing?

→ The Atlantic Monthly, B. R. Myers: An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose

Meat! Blood! Meatblood!

Anna has a suggestion. Or rather, “suggestion” might not be the right word since that implies “choice,” something that I’m apparently not being afforded in the matter.

Anna solarised

It’s about meat. It’s not only about meat, but meat being the fulcrum around which whatever ailment she’s hell-bent on fixing pivots. Her brother recently transitioned from a newbie vegetarian to stone age diet kind of guy – from tofu and sprout, to meat and red wine. Wine might be anachronistic, but the point is to exclude carbs and cooked food in favour of blood and anything red.

I’ve been vegan for so long that it’s not something that I think about anymore. And because it’s such an engrained part of my personality, this is the part that Anna suggest I shake up, shake down, shake it the fuck around.

Gif animation party

All this to get out of a rut, as it were. To tear down and rebuild on better foundation. Also, there’s the idea that the lack of hormones and whatnots in a carnivorous diet make you lethargic, and if I drink the blood of a boar I’ll suddenly become Adonis incarnate and get stuff done and have more energy and so on.

This is about challenging yourself and re-evaluating who you are. And in my case, who I am. If you’re a docile guy, try to punch someone. If you’re aggressive, turn the other cheek.

At the heart of the matter is that I don’t like to be coerced, and while one of Annas’ great talents is to be convincingly convincing, I have a hard time fending off the onslaught of a circular argument: The reason I don’t want to challenge myself is because I’m not challenging myself. Replace “challenge” with what you wish, and it’s clear that what you need is not what you want, because you’re used to wanting what you don’t need.

Crying billboard model

I’m rambling a bit. If often takes me a while to decode the advice that my friends give me, and it’s always with the utmost hesitation and suspicion; if I’m not in a position to decide what is good for me, on what basis do I judge the value of others’ advice?

At some point you have to realise that you might be wrong, and goodness knows that I’ve dispersed my share of halfwitted suggestions and criticism to friends. I’m not sure how to properly respect the effort that goes into this kind of feedback. You get advice and get yelled at by friends because, for whatever reason, they care for you. I just don’t know how to reconcile (what I’d like to think of as) my critical judgement with an acknowledgement of lack of personal insight.