Riding a happy wave

During the week a series of unpleasant events took place: the car died due to a power takeoff failure and was resuscitated by an electrician; the kitchen sink got blocked and was duly unblocked by yours truly, using my prized new vacuum pump and a series of potions, acids and poisons; the corridor light bulb, embedded in the most absurdly designed ceiling light, went off and was successfully replaced today; the washing machine pump screamed and screeched and overheated only to be replaced by a plumber within 30 minutes, only 10 minutes after he was called (this state of affairs is unthinkable in Compatridia and Britain). All that after I today successfully extracted my new passport from the Compatridia Consulate: no laughing matter, given their intolerance towards shadows, smiles and concealed ears on passport photos, all those holograms and security features, or the biometric data stored in a microchip in the front cover (mine for a mere €75).

Am I on a roll? Maybe. This month I have met as many exciting people here in the Outpost as in the previous four years: Dancer, Dæmion and Jack the Wizard. Having met them and talked to them, and with a little help from One of the Seven, and even Zapata and pH, life somehow feels so much better recently. I even went to a pleasant office Xmas party last week, for f’s sake!

(This post’s title is from a cool corporate Xmas present I got this week.)

In perspective

The car broke down in the middle of the road yesterday (probably circuitry troubles), thankfully close to home. The washing machine makes very worrying noises lately. The beef we left out last night to thaw ended up being pork (by the looks of it) — we now need a different recipe.

However, it’s not like we have to negotiate checkpoints or snipers to go to work or that we haven’t eaten for days (au contraire) or that some cop might or might not bang on our door and carry us away, for a chat or more.

Precession of the equinoxes

to Hyperborean Hunter

Warm during the day, warm like a Scandinavian summer day; cool during the night, cool like a Scandinavian summer night. Hasn’t rained for weeks, just like during an auspicious Scandinavian July. An empty, oppressively cloudless brass sky, like that over cold deserts. Yet night falls at 5 or so.

The first two pictures were shot in Greenland by Hyperborean Hunter, long time ago. The third one in 2004, when  he visited here.

Night and day

Since I came to the Outpost I have had the feeling that the Old City could occasionally look like a very expressionist setting at night, streets saturated with long shadows, windows of abandoned homes gaping open, full of darkness, hardly anyone walking, passageways and streets narrow and precarious. I recently had the opportunity to shoot some pictures almost conveying some of this.

Here is something more colourful.

Ding dong…

… the pig is dead. I am not happy, of course. How could I?

The time of the pollsters

If the phone rings at 6 pm, as has twice this week, while you are making coffee, making arrangements or making out, don’t pick it up. It’s them pollsters again.

Therefore:

Message to the Principality’s market research companies:

I don’t vote here, I am not a subject of your Archbishop, I have no garden. I can’t really attribute properties such as ‘light’, ’sexy’, ‘lugubrious’, ’salacious’, ‘antepenultimate’,  ’parsimonious’, ‘daft’, ‘insidious’, ‘trite’, ‘tendentious’ or ‘juvenescent’ to particular brands of potato crisps, or any other snacks.

Peculiar Cartographies

I really enjoy this blog.

Cunctando regitur mundus

Even before I begin to write about what has been going on lately, I realise I am unable to. The elusive harmonies of internal complexities and daily interactions; emotions intertwined; the continuo of moods and emotional hues and humours; they all render this medium of external monologue unsuitable. Stream of consciousness would have been more suitable for the purpose of giving a feel of what last November has brought with it. Maybe fragments of internal monologue, perhaps splinters from the frozen stream of consciousness might do. The end product will not be coherent. The result will inevitably be unsatisfactory. Even before beginning to write about what has been going on lately, I realised I would be unable to.

The irony of it all. During the long desperate years of virtual stasis and futile attempts to construct a future, all I wished for was any future. This any future has been the present for the last five years, in the way daily life usually unfolds, as a seemingly recurring sequence of very short periods. Life, real life, has been eluding us, prizedly hidden in niches, nooks and crannies in time; present only in places away from this island prison; reserved for the Middle Kingdom where the triumvirate of Dream and Hope and deceitful Nostalgia reign. Very little life, very precious. We say that, in the midst of tedium and alienation and introvercy, change is secretly brewing. We know 2006 has been an annus mirabilis, and we know its moments were bitter and coarse and bruising. We have known meteoric elation and arid despair, both dulled by the stifling tones of provincial life and its trifling sensitivities, its honoured hypocrisy and its bombastic hollowness.

Yes, we still rage, rage against the dying of the light – or at least the absence thereof. Yes, we are still looking forward to again walking the big streets carrying our shopping home. Yes, we will ride trains and buses again going to work. Yes, we are again going to walk into a bar on a whim. Yes, we will again mingle with merry crowds at night. Yes, we will be listening to music among our books and be looking at the urban landscape out of the window into cold, cold November.

Until then we will continue performing little miracles against adversity and against our own shortcomings and insecurity and little despairs.