I'm an animal.

Since no one seems to be particularly alive I hereby allow myself to ponder freely upon whatever I feel like. For example, inspired by my dad and Ape’s family: The immorality of mixing meat from different animals in one sole dish.

You should know, that for the Ape family it is something of a challenge to put as many different animal meats in the same dish, and get away with it (something which they don’t always manage). As for my dad, he brought me disgust and inspiration when telling me of an extravagant dish consisting of a large turkey, in which there was a goose, in which there was a chicken, in which there was dove, in which there was a quail. And in the quail layeth an egg. Yeah, an egg in a bird, in a bird, in a bird… Or something along those lines. This is something that the old Romans used to eat. According to my dad.

Like the Janssons, I love food-related challenges. And like some of the more spoilt Romans, I adore gluttony. But there is something absolutely unethical in putting meat from different animals in the same dish.* I say we lose a portion of our humanity for every bacon-enfolded chicken breast we cut into.

Let’s say I was killed for food. I died for you. Then at least make me the star of your meal. I gave my life for your fucking jambalaya, don’t throw in a damn chicken next to me! Or a pork sausage. Or something else dead with a potential soul that isn’t mine. And don’t you dare eat me on weekdays. At least not my good parts. You're just shoving me right into your mouth without really tasting. Have my intestines for a hasty Tuesday tv-dinner, but damn you if you consume my fine buttocks in front of Days of our Lives! See me, see my value! Invite your friends to indulge me. Or better, have them watch you indulge in me. Make a sauce béarnaise to go with my inner thighs or smoke my cheeks with juniper berries. I don’t care exactly how you prepare me, as long as you do it with love and devotion. Think of me, who laid down my life to satisfy you.

One dish, one meat, one life, one soul, one love.

*Some of you out there might consider it absolutely unethical eating animals in the first place. And let’s not forget, we do have a former vegan in our midst (however, these days she’s *only* militant). I too, find it a somewhat weird and questionable custom, killing for food. But it is how I was brought up. The problem is that meat and the animals who bring it to us are way underrated. Cherish the meat, cherish the animals.

Amazing grace, cookies on sale.

I go around praising nature, but am really complimenting man’s domination of it. Flowery pasture fields, neat bushes along the road, planted trees and newly mowed lawns. I choose to see harmony before subordination, and I take pleasure in it. For that I feel cheap. Then I go around disliking people for what they are, while wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to pity us for what we can never be. For that I am confused. Then I go around dreaming of all the things I want to be, until I clash with the things I most likely will become, or already am.

Neat bushes along the road. And I still see harmony.

I was six months old, speaking in tongues in the local missionary church to an audience in awe, when suddenly…

Someone pointed out that listening to a baby gurgling couldn’t possibly be considered divine. And that was the end of that career.

Howdy! I’m experiencing something of a spring break from the supposedly wondrous world of developmental psychology (babies!) and have thus taken refuge in the countryside. The soothing spring air will cleanse my mind and the crystal clear sunshine will burn away what stains I have gathered in sin. The euphoria of this last weekend is taking its backlashing toll in the form of melancholy. Oh, woe! There is nothing to do but wait and possibly gluttonize. Everything has a shade of black to it and everyone is looking at me with pity. And I’m looking back in fear.

All the goldfish in the garden pond are dead. It appears they drowned and ended up deep-frozen within a solid layer of ice. And now they’re millimeters away from reaching air and the possibility to rot. That’s the thing about spring. It’s such a dramatic process, this restarting thing we’re doing. Old presumptions and dirty secrets suddenly have nowhere to hide and are forced to stand, bent down, in an unforgiving, dazzling sunshine. It’s not like we have a damn choice. If we want to restart and get renewed life, we have to encounter the stale and the old and the stinking. Like making that unpleasant phonecall so that you can move on. Or cleaning your room in order to get your candy. That’s spring for you. Together, of course, with brand new clothes in bright fucking colors. No wonder people get anguished and depressed.

Me, I’m not depressed at all. I just need some well-deserved cocooning. Weeklong. Planning on pondering upon whether I’m more of a sociopath or a socioholic. Might settle for sociorexic. And daddy promised to remove the fish. Only a couple of millimeters now…

What is the Matrix?

Like a bolt of lightning to my chest, it just occured to me I have a womb.

My very own personal womb. Within this physical thing of mine, I can - with a little help and luck - create another human being.

It’s not the potential baby that is the most thrilling right now. Just knowing that I have the technology is overwhelming. And I’m not talking about THE technology, as in “wow, I can probably create life”. Because, see, that is old news. I knew this before. We were taught this in school. Nothing new. Don’t get me wrong, baby production is probably way exciting, but I’m not really planning on finding out. What I would like to find out, is the character of my womb. I have a thing in me, which gets little or no attention, but holds certain unmistakable qualities. Like a heart, only I don't need it to beat. Or a soul that I never consult. I suppose the best way to get to know one's womb is to actually baby-produce, but in my case, I’m just going to fantasize, because that’s how I roll. My womb fantasies are naturally best kept to myself, as it involves some heavy navel-gazing. I can tell you that I am planning on naming her Gob, as he is my favorite character in Arrested Development, but that is all you need to know.

Having a womb, recognizing its grandeur, and then not use it. That is power. It’s like having 24 million dollars, telling the world about it and then live off of porridge for the rest of your life. Just because you feel like it. It bugs people.

And for now, dear friends, that makes me feel bigger.

...................................
Let me just add that I'm partly doing this because my previous quest to explore and appreciate Ulf Lundell turned out a disaster. The man is not a "genius". So I'm into wombs now.

three hundred posts and babbling

Serves me right. I diss psychology and it disses me right back. It’s a proper butt fuck. I failed! A whole test! For the first time in my life! It feels strangely releasing. I think, if someone would really piss me off now, I might be able to kill that person. Because I have failed in school I am now half-way to becoming a juvenile delinquent. Or wait, am I too old? Because if that is the case, it would mean I’d just embody the pathetic student who can’t deal with problems maturely. And that, dear Oddballs, would be the opposite of “Newsflash!”.

Where am I going with this? First, let me present to you my conclusion, however superfluous: Just because you hate something (psychology) doesn’t mean you don’t think the knowledge isn’t worth anything. To many nots? I do not disagree. Anyway, stay with me! I’ve been watching the first three episodes of Whedon’s Dollhouse that Ape gave me. And I have got to say, I was a little disappointed. Maybe Eliza Dushku isn’t the right person for the job. She is also the producer. Weird, no? I like her, and she is a good actor. But in this context, she’s not doing it for me. The first episode was ok, like, I think I might be liking this, give me more! The second one was good. The action! The beginning to crackle of the Echo! And then there’s episode three and I am on occasion downright bored. What is this? I had not expected this series to be so excruciatingly mainstream. Everything about it breathes déjà-vu, and not the eerie concept kind but the been there done that kind of DV. If it had just breathed a little more Whedon. This only breathes pleasing the masses and gaining little or no nerd-respect. But mark well, I have not yet given up on Dollhouse.

To move on, I was now supposed to elaborate on why I think psychology is made interesting when watching Dollhouse. Like how they approach the concept of personality and its psychological, biological and cultural components. Or how they don’t. I don’t know, I suddenly lost my inspiration. And I have also reached a higher, much better level of my previous conclusion. So basically, I’m just going to drop the part where I argue for my cause and skip ahead to my final and possibly incomprehensible words:

Just because you are disappointed with something (psychology, Dollhouse) doesn’t mean you don’t think it isn’t worth… Nothing? Funny, I’ve always pictured myself master of negations. Turns out I’m not. But then again, I never pictured myself failing a test.

I go now…?

Lately Very Hungry II

Studying psychology sucks. There is nothing challenging about it whatsoever. Not at this level anyway. I need my mind to be fucked at least once a day to function properly

and I ain’t getting anything.

I can provide you with stunning statistics, I can estimate your IQ to be hereditary to an extent of about 70 %, I can I can tell you exactly why I almost had a panic attack just from having to go to school too early and I CAN draw a random graph where the variability is: high. I know the name of Freud’s daughter. I could point out Pavlov’s face among a hundred. I can perform an experiment on you and tell the world something mildly interesting about your working memory. I can probably - amateurishly - diagnose each one of the Oddballs within seven minutes.

But none of this satisfies. None of this makes studying really worthwhile.

Edit: What I MEANT to say with this post was that this shit affects my whole life. Without the challenge, without the mindfucks, I get nothing to work with. I have nothing to rest my mind on. I need a constant flow of new frameworks to help nourish my own weakling of Creativity and I don't have the power to provide myself with the tools. I'm spoiled rotten from earlier studying, and the reality of psychology is slowly killing what little self-grown spark I have inside me. I'm drowning in reason and I'm not allowed to scream. I picture myself older, and seemingly satisfied with just this, and I want to strangle that me with a chain.

I'm leaving the countryside first thing tomorrow.

So it all started when Moa the dachshund disappeared when mother and I were out taking a walk. The sun was setting, it was cold as ice and the dog ran off. We tried to find her by following a track of blood through the woods. You see, Lisa - also known as The Stupid Dog - and her master had been out earlier that day, taking down two roe deer. On our way out we had met Lisa coming home from hunting. She had a lofty way of carrying her head and she willingly let Moa smell her bloody nose before running inside the house to rest. I later figured this had made Moa somewhat bitter, remembering the good old days when she was the one being out killing creatures with the help of father’s rifle. Now she was reduced to a simple pet, out strolling with unarmed women who very seldom left the imagined safety of the forest’s main road.

Now Moa was gone and we had for once left the road and were running around following red stains and paw prints on the frozen white ground... Read more!

Eventually we came to a dark wall of large pine branches that we forced our way through, only to reach a small black river around which the winter had not yet gotten its freezing claws. We had to turn back. It was getting dark and we didn’t want to risk not finding our way back once the blood track was hidden in darkness. Also, we didn’t know how far away her goal was – the spot where they had taken out the intestines of the deer. Moa the old dog was blindly hunting something already dead.

- If she dies out here, it’s your fault.
- I know.

We got on our way back, feeling extremely deprived. At home, we told the Hunter what had happened and that we feared for the dog’s life. He refused to help us, claiming that she would find her way home. I went to tell my baby brother the sad news.

- Oh, H. I have to tell you something (embracing him).
- What?
- It’s Moa. We lost her.
- What? How?
- She disappeared. There was a lot of blood…

After having failed at gaining sympathy from either man in the household, mother and I went back into the woods, this time in a car. Half way there, we met Moa. A now cold and fantastically fat little creature, walking towards our searchlight. And I was happy.

However, as I later celebrated her homecoming by making pizza, the damned dog started to puke. And what came out of her wretched little body was what I imagine vultures wouldn’t even consider for an entrée. From there on she was put in quarantine, in the enclosed space of the hallway. We put Lisa there as well, seeing as she was part guilty. Then we had our pizza.

As we were sitting upstairs a couple of hours later, watching a film, we noticed that the entire interior of the house had started to reek. First it was a sort of faint fart smell, which later that night grew in density and became like a fog of horror and rot (and we had been watching The Mist).

- God, I hate dogs!
- Don’t say that, she can’t help it.
- They’re only fun for a while. These last years are ugly. They grow old and eat too much and puke and fart and smell bad.

It was one thirty in the morning and I decided to go to bed. The stench made it impossible to watch another x-files episode anyway. I was just about to place my head on the pillow as it struck me the quarantined animals had no water available in their designated cell. So I headed downstairs, towards the smell. How I cursed my decision when I saw what Moa had done on the floor. There were half-digested bodyparts lying around and there was no way I could go to bed without cleaning it up. I know that dog. It would soon wake up and go and re-eat what it had just puked out. And judging from the size and texture of it, Moa would probably die if she seriously tried to digest it. So there I was, cursing stupid dogs, dead deer and weak stomachs, dressed in plastic bags and armed with a hundred tissues. Constantly gagging, I had to focus real hard on not throwing up myself, causing tears to come out from my eyes. I held in my hand what I took to be a roe deer liver, still stomach-warm and smeared in a dog’s brownish gastric acid.

I lost a piece of my soul that night. And I caught a glimpse of Hades.

I also watched the whole second part of Arrested Development season 3. All in all, it was a good day.

Words from my heeeaaart (it's a soft one, it's a lost case)

I dance my way to the bathroom to get my daily double dose of antihistamine. Well there, my ever-leaping body drops the tiny pill in the sink and I immediately get pictures in my mind from Trainspotting, where the protagonist digs through a toilet filled with faeces and vomit to get back his involuntarily pooped capsule of… I don’t know. Amphetamine, perhaps. I look at my recaptured pill. This one looks poop-free. I gulp it down together with some water, spray stuff in my nose and dance my way back to the couch. It’s going to be a good day today.

[behold: important super-potent mega-message]

The purpose of this post, my dears, is that I want to tell you (and myself) that I am now officially going into study mode. It will last until the end of this month. I don’t know exactly what it will entail. I don’t necessarily want to know. I know that I will have to come up with, type down and properly arrange an amount of ten thousand words in less than twenty days. It’s not too much, and it’s not a little. This phase, this study mode of mine, might mean that my internet time will be reduced. It might also, judging from earlier study mode experiences, mean an improved online presence, however desperate and anguish-smitten. I know that you never really expect anything from me. But this time it’s a double-tie kinda thing. I want you to expect very little. And very much. And nothing.

[end of ISPM-message]

And it turned out a great day! On my way home from an awesome school day I pondered upon what has tormented me the last couple of days. Namely, what kind of booze can replace whiskey? As in, what can I drink in small amounts every day, that improves my essay-writing, doesn’t blur my mind, has about the same potency as whisky, but is drinkable by me? WELL, as I searched Systemet five minutes later for a suitable strong drink it suddenly hit me. It has to be sherry! I know it’s about half as strong as whisky. But that’s a minor problem. I can drink twice the amount and it will cost about the same. I found the coolest bottle with a crazy sherry-madame named Alicia on it. I sort of loved it. Then, at an arm’s length away, I saw port wine. And from what I recall, port is the shit. It’s from Portugal! Very attractive bottle, too. See picture. I decided that sherry is too sweet and went for the port. What would you have done?

Rest in peace, oh mighty Lord Freelance...

This is what morning brought me - disaster, before I even got a first sip of my morning tea. Two birds, one as dead as a very soft rock, and one mourning and dumbstruck, just outside the glass walls of my balcony. I ate my breakfast ponderously, wondering why I had to begin my day with death.

Unfair or not, I had to do the right thing. I took a deep breath and went out to the winged and shattered couple on the balcony, swiftly knighted the dead one as Lord Freelance of Many Skies and gave his presumably faithful dame the name of Lady Trueheart. Before I took the body away from Lady Trueheart with my plastic bag-covered hand, I promised her that her man would be well taken care of. I dug a grave, six birdfeet down, with my spade, and put the Lordling in it. I found a pretty rock and a pink rose and the funeral was concluded.

My only problem now was the lonely birdgirl (or was the lady a boy?) who still had not moved and possibly suffered from internal bleeding or some obscure mental illness (aren't they all?). I decided that what she needed was to get away from the unfortunate spot which she, for some reason (possibly out of shock) had chosen to contaminate with loads of poop. I put her in an apple tree not too far away and left her there with her lax body and panic-stricken eyes. Planning for a new life, far away from glass balconies, or dying, only to join Lord Freelance, I don't know.

You might find me crude and inhuman for documenting this tragedy. But for their deeds they shall be remembered, as I would have wanted, had I gone through what they have.

So fly freely, Lord Freelance and cry dryly Lady Trueheart, for life is unfair and you never know when you will hit that window that will break your neck.

Edit: I know that you don't exactly knight someone into a Lord. But it was birds! It's a whole other world, them birds. I mean, they fly! Plus, I really like the verb. To knight someone.