Day Three hundred and sixty five - A solitary reign

Jesus fuck, I'm actually here. I actually made it.

And I'll own up to it - many times in these past few months, especially in this last quarter, I felt like giving up. There were so many days and nights when I sat here in front of this screen, and I just stared at it, the blank 'page' all but taunting me. 'Come on', it said, 'I dare you. I fucking dare you. Do it. Write. Come up with something.', it would say, and I'd stare back into that void, minutes stretching into hours of being unable to come up with a single word, and as time ticked away each day, the screen would say 'I thought so.', and those days... man, those days I didn't really want to write anything at all. Not even an album 'review'. And then, a word, or an image would come to mind, and I'd start typing away, sometimes furiously so, just to make sure that I wrote the post for the day. And, you know, it's like I'd set up myself to fail in the first place.

As I sat here in this room a year ago, thinking about what this year would be like, I made three somewhat unofficial resolutions : one of them was to write every day, every single day of the year, and to write a minimum of 500 words a day. I know that here and there, there were days where I didn't hit that mark, there were days where I wasn't feeling well or whatever and I wrote maybe a couple of paragraphs only. But then there were the days where I far exceeded those 500 words, so maybe it makes up for those where I didn't reach that mark. I'm not very inclined to compile the data for every single entry I did for this year, so my guess is as good as anyone's as to whether or not I managed to maintain that average. The real problem with that 500 word a day target was that it required me to be very sparse with my daily posts when it came to the bit where I wrote about my life. Sometimes I had to edit myself, weeding out what stories I felt weren't going to be told, but then also I had to pad out whatever I wrote, so that I could stretch it a bit longer. And I wish I could say that doing this every day, that writing here every day, was fun - but most of the time it just wasn't. There were days I dreaded having to do this, but on the other hand there were days where what I wrote came easily and flowed well, and on those days I felt like I could do it forever and ever. To be sure, I'll never do such an undertaking again, not unless it's for good money.

The second resolution dealt with cleanliness. By no means do I live in a pigsty, but I admit that sometimes my laziness keeps me from keeping my room as clean as I'd love to, so that's a work in progress. The final resolution is at once my greatest achievement of the year as well as my biggest failure. You see, my one great ambition for this year was to start taking better care of myself, health wise. And that proved to be a daunting challenge in and of itself. I succeeded, in part, during those first four months of the year, because I was for sure eating much healthier, I wasn't drinking at all, and then May came along, and what began with a beer or two turned into a month long binge drinking session. I was drinking every day, eating all sorts of nasty shit, and by June I had to decide whether I wanted to live or whether I wanted to die. And I chose life. 

I started going to the gym pretty much every day, my resolve unwavering. In time I began losing weight - not all of it, but some, enough weight to make me feel much better about myself, and unfortunately enough weight for me to somehow think that I had reached where I needed to be, and thus, relax a bit and... try to do 'normal' things again. I completely misjudged everything, and both November and December would prove to be crucibles that I would not be able to come back from unscathed. The things I put myself through... man, they did a number on me. And as well they did, for they helped me harden the resolve I need to feel for what lies ahead, but it still hurt, nevertheless. It fucking well hurt. So - idiocy heaped upon idiocy - here I 've found myself barely going to the gym these past two months, facing health issues again, imbibing poison by the gallon again, stuffing myself with shit again, and guess what? That weight I lost decided to make a come back. And what do I do now? Now I start again, that's what. That'll be my reward - not my punishment, but my reward : the pleasure of beginning it all anew. And this time.... motherfucker, this time we stick the landing.

This year wasn't the hardest I ever had, not by a longshot, but that doesn't mean it was an easy one. There were certainly some... interesting and unexpected developments this year, and sure, they had their effect on me. I am only human. And as I started to look forward, and at what's coming next, for the first time in many a year I decided to be something I'm usually not : strong. In many different ways, I suppose. I had to figure out though, what does being 'strong' mean? Well, this year I found out that sometimes it means resisting the pull of our smartphone, and not texting that very special someone and telling her how much you still love her, and you resist that motherfucking temptation no matter how drunk you are. It also means finding it in you to go through your contacts list and eliminating those phone numbers and e-mail addresses that serve no purpose other to maybe re-visit aches that ought to remain in the past. This is such a big part of the act of letting go, of finally letting go, and yet it goes so unnoticed. It's mostly gone now, my contact list full of people I haven't talked to in ages, wouldn't really want to talk to again, or just don't care enough about anymore. From now on, I'm only keeping what's essential to me. And I write this even as I wrestle with the possibility of - yet again - divesting myself of my music collection; not only would it help further the steps towards where I want to go, it would also be testament to how much this year changed me. I don't know, we'll see. 

But, having said all this, I have to look back now and be really thankful that I had to go through this year - I see it as necessary bridge for me, though the crossing of it, and the fording of the raging river that runs beneath it will be a monumental task. There was pain, most of it of my own creation, most of it invited by me, but it wasn't shapeless pain - rather, it helped forge the way forward. But there was also honesty, and this year - for the first time in many years - I was honest with myself. I hope I can continue to be so, in the future. I also wanted to have reached the end of the year with a clean conscience, that I had tried - one last time - to see if I could live the way 'normal' people do, want the same things, do the same things, and this year was the year I realized that no, I no longer have it in me to want, to actively want and seek those things. It's all just too... too trying, too exhausting, and I had what I had, and I have to be content with that. This is the path, this is the way forward, the moment where I become one with the void - the void where one does not want, one does not desire, one does not look for, the void where there is finally only peace. I tried, I failed, I screwed up, I was screwed over, it is what it is. There is no shame in living one's life in a solitude of one's own making, and there is no shame in living with an unrequited love that will never be known to another living soul inside one's heart. It's not even a choice, it's nature. There's no shame, and I will never feel it, ever again.

This is it - the end was always coming, and now it's here. I'm certain I wanted to say something else, and I'm sure I'll remember it tomorrow. But today is what matters, and tomorrow? Well, tomorrow will be day one of year one of the new epoch - the epoch of the Invisible Man. My name shall be Invisible Man the first. 

Again, I thank any soul who was foolish enough to waste their precious time reading my words. I didn't do this seeking an audience, and to know that some wandered here - and have remained here, I do look at my stats - is somewhat humbling. 

I end this year with a bittersweet taste in my mouth : there's only the one thing left to do, but unfortunately I couldn't time it so that it was done ere the year ended. It's something that'll be done in the next few days, and oh how I wish I could have started the coming year with that hardship fully behind me. 

Let's do this, aye? Let's close the doors on this project, and on this year. Let's say our farewells, our goodbyes, let's say one last hurrah, and be done with it.

I'll see you in the next life.

[This is the playlist for December.]

Day Three hundred and sixty four - Everything

So... was this everything? Like, everything, everything? No, not by a longshot, and it wasn't even a lot - but it was enough. I told all the stories that had to be told, and I omitted a number of other stories : there was the one story that I only told one single time in my entire life that I elected not to tell now, and nor shall I be telling it ever again. There were many, many stories I chose not to tell at all. Some out of respect for the parties involved, and others - on the opposite end of the spectrum - just weren't worth my time. It'd be a kindness to even consider them a footnote in the story of my life. What I wrote here about my life, was what mattered, or at least what mattered enough for me to commit it to the ether. And yet... that said... and with the benefit of hindsight that nigh on a year brings... would I do things differently, were I to begin anew today?

That's a tricky question. In truth, I myself don't really know the truly, one hundred percent, accurate answer to that question. There's a part of me that thinks - no regrets. Things are as they were meant to be. They unfolded the way the way they were always meant to come to pass. It's fate, written in the stars. But there's the part of me that rebels against such notions - and maybe because I think I am the one who decides my fate, but also because deep down I think that all things can ultimately always be improved, perfected, even if by the teensiest bit. 

Recently I wrote about how I wished I had been more kind to Sofia when I wrote about her part in my life; though I may claim that when I revisited those days, I invited pain and suffering back into my soul, and those feelings tinged my words somehow, that's no excuse. I failed when I wrote about her, but not only her. I have known for a long time that I wasn't often loved by someone in my life - and let's not confuse all the 'love' I was offered, when in fact it was not 'love' but rather passion and libido and loneliness speaking for whomever it was that proffered it to me. There were two, only two instances of love, both of them very intense, both of them very, very different. One, I can only remember now by the hurt that coloured it for half a decade, the other I will always carry within my heart. But them two, them two they cannot be denied. And I ought to have paid a more dignified tribute to them. This I regret, and I have somewhat atoned for the injustice I did to Sofia's, but I have not yet done the same for Silvia's. And maybe I should not thank her - maybe, in truth, I should apologise to her. But I've already done that; I've already written about my repentance for how I allowed our story to pan out. Theirs are stories that I will always cherish, but must remain firmly left behind. It's a strange dichotomy, this - feeling that I am at once immensely grateful for having been graced by the light of their loves once upon a time, and that I must at long last put that light behind me. If there's a lesson I ultimately learned this year, is that there's nothing wrong with carrying a love inside me, e'en if it means I must needs carry it for as long as I live - it's just the way the cards were dealt, and I can - always - choose to be destroyed by it, or be defined by it, or be uplifted by it. I know what I have chosen. I know where that choice will take me. It takes me... north. And I will arrive there with a smile on my face.

Day Three hundred and sixty three - Nepenthe

Was there a last time? Was there ever the last and only moment when we were alone? There was, though it happened only in mind and soul, it only happened within the spheres of imagination and within the realms of dream. You held a solar knife in your hands, and as you saw me approach, as you saw me descend from the lunar seas, you held out your knife, and sliced through time and space itself : all stood still - for a millisecond that lasted for as long as we wished it would last, nothing in the universe moved. There was utter silence, utter stillness, utter order. It wouldn't be long until chaos set the norm again, but for this instant, this all too brief instant, it was just the two of us again.

Under a night sky full of stars we sit - we sat - we will sit; but for now, for now in this perfect moment, we sit, and we look at the stars above, hanging still in the heavens above, their light frozen in time. Where we're at, it's where there's time without a time, where there's no time, where there's everything without a time. Had we already been here? It feels so familiar, and yet it feels like that undiscovered country. It feels like returning to a place one had never been to before. Maybe echoes of us were here once upon a time, or maybe they are yet to be here. Here we are, at the end, at the end of everything, but there is no end, there is no goodbye. There is no last kiss. There is only one last touch - my hand on your heart, and your heartbeat melds with mine; we beat in time for a fraction of a second. Once, there had been a possibility that our hearts would beat together, once there was the thought that our steps would always rhyme, but all that's gone, all that's in the past. Our time approaches, so near that I sigh. Our time here is almost done, and we both know that. There's only time for one more thing. There's only time for one final question. 

'Is it far, this place you're going to?', she asks, already feeling that time is about to burst into its inexorable passing again. He turns and looks at her, a sad half-smile on his lips. 'Is it far? It is as close as the harvest moon in the evening sky, as distant as a dream upon wakening; Near as a rainbow, and so remote you could walk for ever and never reach it. Is it far?', he asked softly. 'No, my love. Not far.'

Day Three hundred and sixty two - Here's where the story ends

There are regrets. Of course there are regrets. But regret, oh that motherfucker, regret is also a time travel machine. It's June 2011, and I still love Silvia with all my heart, with all that I am, and months after we'd said our last, fateful goodbye in Geneva, I'm sending her a text telling her how much I still loved her, though by my side lay Filipa, she of the most amazing breasts I've ever seen, she who gave up on all she dreamed of and was but a hair's breadth away from achieving until I came along. I'm saying to Sil that I love her, so so much, and her curt reply, some hours later, is 'No regrets. Ever.', and that was the moment I realized she would never love me again. It would take me a bit longer for me to realize that I too didn't love her anymore. And when I realized it, then a part of me also felt like that I would never love again. Not like I loved Silvia - and to be fair, I didn't want to love anyone like I loved Silvia. There was so much pain there. So, so much. And I didn't want to live through that again. I wanted the fairy tale. The 'happily ever after' - and between Silvia and my one true shot at that, there was an ocean of bodies, most of whom I can barely recall their names.

And then, jesus - Sofia. Sofia was an unexpected presence in my life, I never imagined that someone such as her could come crashing in through my life, fuck me, what an intelligent, assertive, determined, explosive, firecracker she was - and still is, I'd wager. Shit, not 'wager', I know she is. What a bombast of a woman, she is. And as I type this, in the very same room where I wreaked havoc upon her body, where I did things to her she'll never allow another living soul to do to her, this room where we fucked the living daylights out of each other, this room where I told her I didn't know how to make love, all I can think about is... regret. 

But not regret for her, no, but rather regret for what I wrote about her in this here blog. I knew... I feared... that when I got to to the portion of my life where Sofia graced me with her presence, that it would hurt, to think about all those things I'd forbidden myself from thinking - seriously thinking - for over a decade. And naturally, I found myself revisiting those days, those legendary days, and the pain I felt was awakened anew in me. And... what I wrote about her was unfair. I ought to have written about her in a far more positive way. You see, in all these years between then and now I never blamed her for not wanting me. I always knew the whys and wherefores of it, and I understood - I wouldn't have wanted me either. But if there was sacrifice - from me - it was always born from a place of love. And I am to blame if I didn't take into account what she desired to attain for herself without any help or input for me - and though I may say that what I did and what I gave her came from that love for her, I wish I could've understood just how much it meant for her to be able to do those things on her own. It also shows how different we are - and how sadly broken I am. In my life - especially so in my adult life - I'm not used to being given things very often, whatever the intent. And so I give, because giving is all I know; indeed, I give though I expect nothing in return. How could I, when I myself deem myself unworthy of receiving the barest of minimums? I couldn't. As that splendid bugger W. H. Auden once wrote :

[S]he was my North, my South, my East and West, 

My working week and my Sunday rest, 

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; 

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. 

If I'm honest, then I'd have to say that the main reason why things haven't really worked out between me and the others, is because they really can't compare to you. They - or anyone else, for that matter - will never be you. They can never make me feel like you used to make me feel. And, you know, I neither ask it or demand it of them. It's just a hard and cruel and inescapable truth. No one will ever be able to replace you, though I drowned myself in an ocean of bodies and noise, though I have heard giant proclamations of love that I would never be able to respond to, though there is - between you and me - a chasm that's so far apart and so darkly deep that will never be bridged ever again.

But that's ok. I am fine... content. There is a sort of happiness in this. I know that I love you with all my heart, and I always, always will. Even if I wanted, I could not kill the last, good part of me - the part that loves you still.

Believe me, this is not about being bound to the past. It's far bigger - and better - than that : I am bound to this one love I feel for you, and it makes me so happy, to feel it, to just feel it. I know that we will never be together again. I doubt that we'll even see each other again. But damn, if only you could imagine how much I miss you, and how much I miss your voice... these are the things that make my heart ache every now and again. 

Still... it's time to look forward, to move on in another direction. If I've told you this once, I've said it a great number of times : I am glad that you've found someone who really loves you. And it also gladdens me that you have found someone whom you really love as well. It's rather easy to find someone who loves us, not so easy to find someone who deserves our love...

I hope that your life shall ever be full of good things for as long as you live.

If it leaves you more at ease, know that I no longer entertain the notion of a possibility that we may ever be together again, so don't worry, I shan't be bothering you ever again. Truth be told, I know - I have known full well - that I no longer mean anything to you on this emotional level.

I will never regret telling you that I love you. I will never regret you or wish that I'd never met you, because once upon a time you were all I ever needed.

I'm not ashamed that I love you - I am a better person for it. I do wish that you were still mine, and that you still wanted my love. This love... it can never be taken away from me, it's mine, and it's something that I treasure above all things. It won't ever disappear... does not happen.

I leave you now, and I promise, I leave you to be happy and devoid of my presence forever. It's for the best, mine and yours, especially yours.

But even if I have written all this, and poured out my heart, you know that I couldn't just pass up this opportunity to tell you once more that I love you. Always and all ways. Forever and for ever. World without end.

Day Three hundred and sixty one - Kaleidoscoping

Some things that I knew about this project early on : I knew exactly what the last two posts would be called, and - for the most part - what they would consist of, though I briefly entertained the idea of combining them into a single post, but I ended up deciding against it. Then, some time after the half way mark, there was something that happened during that time in my personal life that helped me steer my path towards where I am heading. In truth, I always knew I was heading somewhere after this, though I did not yet know where that would be, and now I have a much clearer vision of that. That chance encounter with a ghost from my past led me to listen to what was my favourite record from 2019, by miles ahead of any other record that came out that year - even topping Mono's 'Nowhere Now Here', something which actually contradicts what I wrote yesterday, but them's the breaks. That record is by a band called 'Her Name Is Calla', and is titled 'Animal Choir'. I wrote about it some years back on this post, back when I was addicted to listening to it - and I was, I listened to it all the time, so much so that I highly doubt I listened to anything else for months on end other than that record, and shortly after I wrote the aforementioned post, me and singer Tom Morris engaged in an online conversation where I showed him my thoughts about the record, and he was kind enough to read my words. 

As I returned to the record, midway through the year or thereabouts, I found myself fixating - yet again - in everything it originally held sway over me : Tom's amazing voice, the beautiful, haunting melodies, and above all - his words. This album is nearly perfect to me, and most of all I prize two of its songs : 'Frontier' and 'Bloodline'. The latter is especially relevant to me, and to now, and to all the decisions I've been making. There's a line in it that I have always loved : 'I don't want to be a part of this'. And as this year moved on, and wore on me, I found myself repeating it over and over again. It came to steel my resolve, in order for me to take the steps for what lies ahead. It also came to inform much of my writing from July onwards - as the tale of me came to an end, I started writing down some stories; some I came up with, others were dreams I'd been having. It wasn't until I'd written a bunch of them that I realized I could connect them, tie them to a sort of thematic recurring idea, that of repeating patterns. Loops. The ones we don't want... and the ones we want. Whatever fiction I wrote this year ended up touching on those ideas, and maybe, had I been born more ambitious, I could have crafted a decent story out of all those dangling threads.

But loops, man, those damned loops. They always, always remind me of this bit from 'Bloodline', this bit that's run through my head so, so many times, especially this last quarter of the year : 

'We wanted this loop and we’ll live it out now for as long as we can

I don’t want to be a stranger in a strange land anymore.

There’s nothing else to say, there’s nothing else to do

This is the part where we change or we fade or we dig even deeper down

I’ll see you in the next life.'

In 2020 I wrote :

'These decisions are the type of stuff that I've never been good at. I never knew when to stop. I never knew when to let go. I never knew how to move on.

And as I listen to these words, all I can say is 'I don't want to be a part of this'. I'm exhausted. Life has been draining me and I have so little joy in the mere act of living. Maybe I don't live at all, I just exist. 

Maybe I'll learn these lessons. Maybe now. Maybe in the next life. I'll see you then.'

I've changed since then, especially in this year that's about to end. I haven't changed enough, not yet, that much I know, but it's something I'll be working on with more dedication henceforth. I found strength in me to do things and make decisions that I wouldn't have been able to do four years ago. I wouldn't have been able to do them a year ago, even. But now, for my sake, for everyone's sake... I'm finally letting go. And letting go isn't synonymous with forgetting, and it isn't necessarily the same as moving on - in this case I mean I'm finally making peace with what's inside me, and what I carry in my heart, and the fact that it will be mine alone for as long as I live. I raged against such notions in the past, I do so no more. I accept it, I welcome it, and acknowledge that it is no burden - it's just a facet of the ever changing prism that is me.

Day Three hundred and sixty - WE

Who : Arcade Fire

Album name : We

Formed : 2001

From : Montreal, Canada

What do they play : Indie rock / chamber pop / art rock / baroque pop / symphonic rock (at least according to Wikipedia)

Release date : May 6, 2022

I only know one thing about this record for a fact. It's the only Arcade Fire record I have two versions of : a cassette version and a picture-disc version, because that came in a bundle when I purchased the album. But other than that, I know nothing of it. I have never listened to a single song from it. Never, ever. For some reason I can't explain, I have never felt tempted in the slightest to play this record. I knew, right from the beginning, that this was a record I was buying for no particular reason, other than maybe a slight feeling of guilt for never having bought the previous record, 'Everything Now'. And today... well, today was the day. Today was the day I finally queued it up and pressed play. And what did I think about it? It's ok, it's nothing spectacular, probably a bit more balanced as a whole when compared to the previous entry. In a sense it feels like it condenses a bunch of everything they've done since the first record up until the latest : there are the galloping piano sections, there are the sing along songs, there are the electronic elements that were so prevalent in 'Reflektor', now more subdued and restrained - and that's probably for the better. There are the songs that evoke nostalgia - I'll confess to have not really paid that much attention to the lyrics, so I can't really attest as to whether or not that nostalgic slant is present there, but in terms of music, there are songs here that certainly could have been recorded in the late 70's or early-to-mid 80's, they have that familiar sound from that era. Especially maybe the 70's - I could hear some prog in some songs, and also those pastoral melodies that wouldn't be out of place in something that came from a Canterbury scene record. 

There's good stuff here, but again - it's all mostly unremarkable. Listening to this album - as well as the previous two - made me think about my writing here on my blog. Very often I find myself struggling to come up with a viable idea for a post, and I resort to these little reviews/critiques, and I end up littering it with filler. That's the impression I get from the band, that sometimes they just use some half baked ideas and use them as filler. And not a particularly interesting kind of filler, either. Truth is, I wouldn't be able to name a single song that stuck in my mind. And maybe that also serves as a metaphor for where I am now, and where I'm going. There will always be some things from times past I will always love, and there'll always be something very specific for which I will always hold an eternal love, but maybe it's time to realize that what captivated me in the first place is no longer there - because I remained stuck in love with a memory, while live moved on. It's good, but not great. Fond, but not in love. It's all just so very... ok. And it's ok, to be just ok. Not everything needs to be super duper amazing, really. It's albums like these - to be fair the last half of their discography - that make me realize just how much of a desert island disc 'The Suburbs' really is. That's the benchmark, and if nothing else by the band holds a candle to that, then there's nothing wrong with that. At least not for me, not anymore. I don't even know what to give this one. A six seems a bit low, but I don't think it's a seven either. Maybe not even a six and half. Fuck it, a six it is.

And so we reach the end of the Arcade Fire discography review. I chose not to review their eponymous E.P. - I never did like it - and nor shall I be reviewing the soundtrack they wrote for the movie 'Her'. I am not inclined, not even one bit, to listen to soundtrack music from movies, at least not now. Maybe one day later, I'll pick it up and play it. So, all this done, was it worth it, this little experiment? Yeah, it kinda was. It was fun to revisit those early albums, and think about the stories that brought me to and bound me to them. I'd say that at least that first half of the discography was a fun thing to do, and the other half I knew would bring some challenges with it. 'Reflektor' didn't give me anything new, that I really feel like going back to time and time again, but 'Everything Now' certainly contributed with a heap of songs that moved straight into my favourites. And who'd've thought, considering my initial impression of the record? There were positive things to take away from this, for sure. And so the march towards the inevitable end continues. I can't wait to get there.

Day Three hundred and fifty nine - Time is running out

Yesterday, as a sort of early Christmas 'gift' to myself, I did something I had only done once before in my life. Then, as now, it completely broke my heart, it left me in a sea of tears. I've cried so much, my tears are becoming a sea. Every single word hurt, every line came straight from my heart, and left me feeling empty and mangled. But it had to be done, it's part of the process of saying goodbye. It's also a guarantee that nothing similar will never happen to me ever again. But look, it's Christmas, after all, and though I do not celebrate these days, today I come bearing gifts.
These gifts come in two forms : for me, from me; and from me, to you. For me, it's always for you.
The first gift - for me : I gift unto me the act of fading away, and now, I am becoming increasingly harder to find. This I gift to me. This is how I begin to disappear, this is how I start to become a memory, one that will grow dimmer with each passing heartbeat. Maybe it's already been noticed, maybe it hadn't, but the first steps are already taken.
The second gift - for you : I gift you my choices for my two favourite albums of the year. They have a number of things in common : they are both from Japanese bands, they are both from (roughly) the same genre, though they accomplish their goals in wildly different ways, they are both from the same label (Pelagic Records) and last, but never the least, they are the only two albums that came out in 2024 that I actually listened to, so the odds of one, if not both of them, being my favourites were always pretty high.
Let's look at the first : The band is called Envy, and the album is called 'Eunoia'. It's a really hard band to describe, their sound ranging from the hardcore and heavy metal worlds while also touching on post-rock, shoegaze, post-hardcore, screamo, and god knows what else. This being their eighth studio record, it's an indredibly tight, melodic, emotional journey, a whole that's made from individual slices of art, each episode a venture into climatic bursts of joy and sadness. It's very nearly a 10/10 for me, and I'm looking forward to finally getting it on vinyl sometime next year.
The second - and my undisputed favourite - is by a band called Mono, and the album is called 'Oath'. True story, they are the only band in existence that I'd buy an album by them without listening to a single song from it, because I know it will be trasncendental. Which makes it all the more confounding the fact that I do not, in fact, have this record... yet. I missed out on the initial pressing, and I'm waiting for Pelagic to release a new one, they always do with this band. But that didn't, obviously, keep me from listening to this record as soon as it came out, and in typical Mono fashion, they delve into the post-rock, contemporary classical soundscapes, though they themselves eschew such terms when it comes to describing their music. But Mono isn't just music, it's beauty, it's poetry, it's peace, it's catharsis. Though I knew of the band for a long while, and listened to a song of theirs here and there, I've been a dedicated fan of the band for a fairly short amount of time only - it was the the release of the 10th anniversary edition of their majestic that finally convinced me to get to know them better. And what a payoff it's been, they keep getting better and better, their music more poignant, more laden with beauty, more emotionally charged. I highly doubt there'll ever be a year when one of their releases isn't my favourite from that year.


That's it then, six days to go, six more entries, then the inevitable comes.

Day Three hundred and fifty eight - So here we are

If you were on the outside looking into my house, you would never guess that it's Christmas. It's something that has been de facto absent from our lives for many a year, and I can't even begin to remember the last time a Christmas tree went up here. I don't know what happened - other than everything that happened between us in this family. It wasn't just the one thing, the one inciting incident, it was maybe a lot of small things, and a whole bunch of big things, but eventually, somewhere along the way... things just stopped happening. There are no decorations, no lights, no presents... no nothing. It's just another day, just another ordinary day. And me, personally, I stopped caring. I stopped having reasons to celebrate Christmases, they became days of extreme loneliness and isolation for me, then they became just... just meaningless. But there is a part of me - and a not inconsiderable one at that - that really wishes this day still held a potent meaning to me. I wish, I wish, I wish... but I made sure to make the worst decisions possible, decisions made possible to make an impossibility. Of course I miss the warm glow of the lights, and the presents, and being... huh. Being someone that I am not. Being something that I am not.

It still is somewhat an amazing thing for me to ponder and accept the notion that the only person who ever seemed to care about reverting my distaste / apathy for these occasions was She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, who, in a quite uncharacteristic show of actual empathy, told me she found it unacceptable that someone she cared for and loved (her words, not mine) would have no cause to celebrate these 'special' days. Eh, it is what it is. Everything is too far gone now. It's just one more thing for me to finally let go of, these delusions of normalcy.

It's somewhat of a comforting thought, that I'll never have to tell these stories again, not to a living soul. It's... sobering, to realize the folly of entertaining such notions. How, in what conceivable world, could I ever explain to anyone what's like to be me, how could I explain 'The House of Sorrow and Regret'? I can't, I won't. I won't have to. Not anymore.

Day Three hundred and fifty seven - This boy's in love

Don't let that title fool you, today's post was meant to be part of yesterday's, but I was so damn tired and sick yesterday that my head felt like mush, and for me to even wring out what words I could manage was no mean feat. This title comes from a song by a band called The Presets, and it just so happens that it's a) my favourite song by them and b) the only song of theirs I actually like. Now, this is only relevant because saturday I went out for dinner with my best friend, Hugo, and one of the very many things we talked about was that whole desert island discs thing, and how I would find it a nearly insurmountable challenge, to whittle it down to just the ten entries. And out of the top of his head, without even putting that much effort into it, he comes up with at least seven choices that would make his list. And there's the thing for me... I can't decide now because I feel I'm always in a state of flux, and what's relevant for me now, isn't necessarily going to be so in the future. This is true for everyone, I know. But when the idea first came up for this exercise, when we were supposed to do it on the podcast, I made sure to place some caveats, to make things more interesting. One, there would be no compilations. No greatest hits, no best ofs, no nothing. Two, there would be no live albums. Everything would have to be studio recordings. And then I ran into a problem.

You see, I immediately started thinking about albums that I'd really consider putting on the list, but the more I thought about them, the more I realized that what I really liked was only - and if I was really lucky - one or two tracks from the record, the others being truly unmemorable. And I couldn't waste such precious real estate, so to speak, on things that I don't love from one end to the other. So I made an exception... besides those top ten records, we would be allowed to record one single CD with the individual tracks we'd love to listen to - well, if not forever, then for as long as we lived. And that made me realize that are many, many bands I thought I loved... that I'd never consider one of their albums as a desert island disc. Bloc Party, for sure. There's always a track or three in each album I love to pieces, but I don't love the entirety of any of their records. Ditto for, say, Franz Ferdinand. But all those bands have at least one thing in common - I love more than one of their songs. And when I mean love, I mean these are songs I'm happy listening to very, very often. However, what I don't know is whether or not there are many bands that fit that particular 'I like one song only' bill. I'm sure there must be many, but for the life of me I can't think of any other than poor The Presets, a fine band in their own right, but one I can't never seem to really enjoy that much. And I did try - I listened to their two first albums, and found them so overwhelmingly 'meh' that only one song stuck in my mind all these years.

And it's a fitting song, I've recently gone back to it after a few years of not listening to it, and the way it ends, how it ends, my god, it's so fitting. 

'This town, these streets, your friends - we'll never see this place again

They'll think about you now and then - they'll never see our faces again.'

There's only one song left in our hearts. It's a song to say goodbye.

Day Three hundred and fifty six - The last good day of the year

We're in the home stretch now, the end is inching ever closer now, and soon all of this will be behind us. With just a few days left to go, until the end of the year and until the end of this project, it's time for me to start saying goodbye to things that will not be carried forward into what's coming ahead. Time to say goodbye to parts of me, time to say goodbye to places I'll never return to, and yes, time to say goodbye to some people. That'll be the hardest bit, because for the most part, those will be conversations that will be happening inside my heart only. There might or might not be one happening in person, and there might or might not be one happening that will come as a surprise. But it makes no difference, the decision's been made. The next few days, the few remaining days ahead, they won't be easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is, I imagine. There's something I have to do that I do not relish, though I know the exact words that will come from me. I deem it a necessary sacrifice, and I pray with all my heart that my action brings only peace, and no pain. There are sights I need to see, and places I need to be, because I'll not be seeing them ever again. There, in the quiet places of the night, in the deepest recesses of my soul, I will turn inward, and say the names of the places, and whisper the name of the one I love, and say my goodbyes. There, in secret to all but to my soul, the journey begins. Soon, my love. It won't be very long now.

[This is the playlist for November.]

Day Three hundred and fifty five - Rubber ring

With ten days left to go, it's time to look ahead, and not necessarily at what's going to be - the future is still very much terra incognita for me - but at might have been. And I say might because I'm fairly certain I won't have time, inclination and patience to actually go ahead with it, even if I stuck to a weekly basis. I would need the whole trifecta of those ingredients - time, inclination and patience - to actually go ahead, and the absence of any of those would mean the idea would be doomed from the start. I wrote not too long ago about how in the very late 90's, early 00's, I became a huge Nick Hornby fan, the height of that fandom being when I lifted his idea for '31 Songs', his book about songs that have a deep connection to him, and used it for a string of posts I wrote in one of my old blogs. And I wanted to revisit that idea, not on a blog, but rather on a podcast I was envisioning that would have weekly rotating themes. There would have been a segment where me and my friend S. would give each other a record the other never listened to before, and then we'd both discuss it, see what we've liked and what we didn't like about it. That would have been called 'Trading tapes'. Then there would be another segment, also music related, called 'The songs that saved your life.'

It's no secret that every single title from this year's posts are song titles - and yes, as I've been compiling the playlists for each month I've been finding out that here and there I've repeated some titles, and there was a need to do some adjustments and corrections in that regard. There are a number of bands which have contributed heavily to the titles list. Out of the blue, I'll say Placebo, Covenant, VNV Nation, Depeche Mode, but also - and perhaps most importantly of all - Morrissey and The Smiths. I've been a huge fan of both for decades now, and it's to them I turn to very often when I'm in need of inspiration, introspection, or even motivation. But it's also a testament to how we change when songs that were once just something that you ignored because they didn't say much to you, until that one day when you listen to them and they just gain a whole new life. One of those songs was 'Rubber Ring' for a long time, I'd listen to it, I'd not mind it, but it never stuck. It wasn't until fairly recently - and I'd say like about a decade ago - when one day I found myself listening to it more intently, and one line from it really stuck with me : 'But don't forget the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life.'

That there line sent into me a question, a question of whether or not I'd ever listened to a song that could be rightly considered life-saving for me. Music, as a whole, yes, it's saved my life and my sanity multiple times over, but specific songs? I don't know. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that - not very often - there would be a song for me that would be so potent, and that would come at just the right time in my life, that I could consider it had saved my life. But how many were there? Probably not very many. Do I change then how I define 'saving my life'? Because not every song that saved me was one that kept me from jumping into the abyss. No, some songs helped me not reach it at all. Some songs showed me there was wisdom in taking the other road, the one that leads away from the chasm. But lists, man, lists are hard. I said before that so many of the songs I chose for my '31 Song' thing I did on that blog - songs I then considered to be my all-time favourites - would not feature at all in such a list, were I to make it today. So how would I decide which would ones would make this list? I don't know, I really don't. It's far too titanic a thing for me to consider right now. I could maybe come up with some three or four songs, hell, if I'm honest some more - but those would be songs I've already written about, and I don't really want to tell those stories again. My hope is that from now on, I can fill my day with new songs, songs of then and songs of now, and maybe, just maybe, I'll find some more that will save my life.

[This is the playlist for October.]

Day Three hundred and fifty four - Two (I would have saved her if I could)

Who : The Antlers

Album name : Hospice

Formed : 2006

From : New York City, U.S.

What do they play : Indie rock / indie folk / art rock / dream pop (at least according to Wikipedia)

Release date : March 23, 2009

This is really, really strange, because I am one hundred, no, one million percent certain that I have already written about this record in depth, but I can't find any post in any of my blogs, and nor could I find any email I might've sent to someone where I talked about the album. Now, the other option would be that I wrote it in my previous Instagram account, I remember I did a 30 day challenge where I picked a different song every day that reminded me of whatever the prompt for the day was, and for sure, one of the great tracks from this album - 'Sylvia' - was one of my choices on that challenge. I'm not too sure what I might have written back then, but I'm certain I wrote that it all begins in London. 

We travel back to 2007, and it's late July, I guess, when me and my then girlfriend, Silvia, move to London. By then, our relationship was already on the rocks, there were cracks showing up all over the place, and though she knew I'd cheated on her, she still found it in her heart to give one more chance. But our time together there wasn't easy, as I wrote a few months back when I detailed the history of that relationship. I might have said that Silvia and me never had a fight. We never had. In truth, I don't really think I ever had one of those fights that you see in movies, awful affairs that turn into shouting matches, and the plates and the crockery being thrown against the wall. I'm too much of a wimp for that. But in our dynamic, in our own particularly fucked up dynamic, we 'fought' by saying nothing to each other for days on end, sometimes weeks even. We'd go to bed together, sleep together, not say anything, get up, go to work, and rinse and repeat. And that hurt more than any verbal assault hurled my way. I had never realized just how cutting silence could be. Especially because I wanted to break that silence - badly so - and tell her all the things that had been welling up inside of me, tell her I did not want to lose her, tell her how much she meant to me, but also tell her that I needed to feel loved by her, and ultimately... we'd only have those conversations when it was too late to turn back. 

When she left me in London, to come back home and work for a prestigious architecture office, I was devastated. London, a city that I love to death, has always made me feel completely alone, and now, without her, that loneliness deepened to a point where I wanted to die. But our story was far from over, and sometime in 2008, I persuaded Silvia to return to London, and after much cajoling and negotiating - aided by the fact that she had been sort of duped about that prestigious job she was offered - she came back, but alas - she wasn't to stay very long, and whatever strains we had put on our relationship, were more deeply accentuated. Very soon we were not talking again, there was too great a distance between us, and we were marching on towards the inevitable end of us. 

One of the things that saved me was music. I was downloading and torrenting like there was no tomorrow, and at some point I had a 1 TB hard drive full with music. I made it a point to listen to at least a couple of different records every single day - usually during my commute to work, and believe you me... I listened to a lot of crappy music. Bands that were decidedly quirky and whose music was not for me. I'm looking at you, Marmaduke Duke and Dananananaykroyd. 

I also had a weekly ritual, or I should say, mostly weekly because it always hinged on whether I could afford it or not, and that was doing the rounds of my favourite record shops. That included going to Camden and Notting Hill Gate to go to the second hand stores, and then to the big stores, your Virgins, your HMVs, your Towers, but also - and this was decidedly the high point of that ritual - that meant going to 'Sister Ray', quite likely my favourite record store. They have a huge selection of everything, and I bought many a record from them. And one of the records that I found through them was something that they were playing one day at the store. You know when you hear something for the first time, and you have no idea who it is, or what they're saying, but deep down you understand that they're speaking directly into your soul? There was a rather pretty girl at the store, and she was behind the counter and I'd already risked her wrath and eternal ridicule some time back when I inquired which song by 'The Strokes' we were listening to, and she just looked at me and said '....it's Phoenix'. Having decided that the reward was indeed greater than the risk, I asked her what we were listening to, and she said - very politely - that we were listening to a band called 'The Antlers'. I bought the album there and then - on vinyl, and I no longer have that version, it was sold off years ago with the collection I had at the time. Bear in mind that I didn't even have a turntable back then, I was just collecting. My version of the record came with one of those download codes, and as soon as I left the record store, I was initiating the download. And this being still the 3G era, eh, it wasn't as fast as it is now. I got on the bus and went back home, and all the while I was sat listening intently, raptly, at that music - I had a really good pair of Sennheiser headphones, so the music came through crystal clear. By the time I got to the third song, I started crying.

'Hospice' tells the story of a healthcare worker at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a female patient who has terminal bone cancer. The songs detail their romance, the downward spiral they both fall into, because of the nature of the relationship, and it being tinged by Sylvia's - the main character - traumas, fears and the pain the cancer wreaked on her failing body. As you may understand, this isn't easy stuff to listen to. This is deep, this is poetic, and this is messed up. This is human, all too human. That third song I mentioned, it's called 'Sylvia', and it's a song that begins slow, burns into a fiery crescendo at the chorus, mellows out, and ends in a cathartic confession from the despairing hospice worker :

'Sylvia, can't you see what you are doing? Can't you see I'm scared to speak, and I hate my voice because it only makes you angry.

Sylvia, I only talk when you are sleeping. That's when I tell you everything, and I imagine that somehow you're going to hear me..."

I know I used this bit in a previous post, I know. But the very first time I listened to this song - and I mean listen listen - and especially this last bit... I knew that some soul out there understood me, understood my heart, my pain, my misery, my being incapable of speaking to the woman I loved because I was afraid my voice would make her mad. And it's a funny thing : though I've listened to this record god knows how many times, it's still the only record of theirs that I've ever listened to. And that's because I'm really and truly afraid that everything else by them just doesn't hold up and somehow affects my appreciation of this record. The same thing happened with Mount Eerie, and I have a bunch of bands where I only know the one album from them. 

It should be pretty obvious by now that I love this record, from beginning to end. Maybe because there's a personal connection, I don't know, maybe because this is one of the rare records where I feel the music is telling a story that completely relates to what I was going through at the time. It's one of the very few records I know would be a desert island disc. This one could only get a ten out of ten Sylvias.

Just to wrap up this rant, what moved me to write this post was me returning to it last evening. I had not listened to it in full in a few years now, and as I kicked back in bed, ready to relax, I got it spinning next to me. I lay in the dark, silent, immersing myself in that world again. I ended up talking about Silvia with someone who I love with all my heart, and I told her that I knew the exact moment when I realized I didn't feel love for Silvia anymore. And that moment never came for my love for the person I was talking to. It endures, it burns eternal. After listening to the record, and sure I'd already written this story before, I did a search through my archives to look for it, and found nothing. What I did find were still some emails we exchanged - and some records of instant messages as well - and they were all mostly from the final months of our relationship, and good god, I know that we shared a very great love once upon a time, but the pain, the pain... if these had been letters, I am certain the words would have been smudged with my tears. There's much I can't remember now, because thankfully it's all in the past, but going through these emails was excruciating. Some of them brought me back to the exact moment they were written and my heart was rent in twain. 

Something I wrote back in late 2010 was this : 

'You know... I feel like I'm your enemy. I feel incapable of waking in you whatever it is that's necessary for you to become what I want the most. I feel empty without your love, Silvia.

And it''s all I want... it's all I need... and no matter what I do, or say, we only manage to drift further away from each other.

I carry a pain inside my heart, one I feel on a daily basis. Sometimes, during the course of my day, and sometimes multiple times a day, my heart aches and aches so much, that all I can do is sit on the corner and cry.

It aches because I don't have you. It aches because I don't feel your love. It aches because I'm feeling increasingly helpless in trying to get you to show me your love for me.

It hurts, Silvia.

Tell me what I can do to feel your love again. Please.'

When I finally, finally felt free from the crushing weight that was that one-sided love I carried with me, I swore to myself that I would never again put myself in such a vulnerable position. That never again I would beggar for love, that never again would I implore for affection. Not long after that, I found myself in such a position again, and look at me, we're almost at the end of 2024 and I still find myself begging for something I will never have. 

[This is the playlist for September.]

Day Three hundred and fifty three - Closing time

I know what I'm going to write about, but I'm not sure if I know exactly how to write it or even how to structure it. Because I can say it began yesterday, but no, it started in November. But let's begin with yesterday. I woke up with a line in my head, I knew it by heart, but somehow I couldn't remember where it was from. So, google being my friend, it just so happened that the line in question is from 'Afterhours', a song by Swedish electronic band Covenant. Said song comes from their album 'United States of Mind', a record that was living rent free inside my head some twenty something years ago, and which proved to be highly influential for me - the title was the direct inspiration for the naming of my first blog. 

The line from that songs goes like this : 'I have devils on my mind and the hour's getting late', and these past couple of months I feel I've been losing my fight against my own inner demons. Case in point : yesterday I went out to do some shopping, and I did something I've never done before in my life, ever. And I can't even explain why I did it, it makes no sense to me, but I ended up buying a bottle of whisky. Which is something I've never been a fan of, really, though I have drunk bourbon on occasion. But whisky, man, I think I can count by how many fingers I have in one hand the amount of times I drank whisky. So what madness drove me to do it? There was a devil on my shoulder, you see. The same devil that told me a couple of months ago that since I was on the right track, that I was ready to try and do things normal people do, the same devil that told me that one drink wouldn't hurt, the same devil that said that I should punish myself for having been so incredibly stupid. I knew that somewhere down the line I would be tested. And I always feared I would fail. I'm not strong, I'm not. So much of the strength I once had has waned, and I'm on a bad path again. 

My initial thought was that I was buying the damned thing, and what with me not being a whisky enjoyer, I'd only have a wee dram every now and again. But that devil, man, that devil... that devil egged me on until I drank the whole thing, and the worst part was that by the end I really didn't feel that tipsy. I felt so lucid that I began thinking about this post yesterday. And I felt good - and I loved and I hated that feeling at the same time. The devil on my shoulder told me I could do this. I could handle it. That maybe I could even handle one more bottle. Maybe I could move on to heavier things. Maybe I could do this on the regular. And I slapped that devil, shut him up, and went to bed. And though it whispers still in my ear, I can't listen to it, not anymore. I know where that path leads. And if I go down that path, I'm going to die. And I don't want that, I really don't. Again, there are lessons here. And I have to learn from them, and continue on. Many changes are afoot, and I can't look back, I can't. How does that old song go? Problems with the booze, nothing left to lose.

[This is the playlist for August.]

Day Three hundred and fifty two - It wasn't meant to end this way

The last girl I ever dated could seriously cook. Like really cook, cook, but her heart wasn't in it, it wasn't her passion. It was something she was born with, for some reason, everything about how food works and how it works together with different ingredients just made sense to her, innately, and once I asked her how she came up with these dishes, always on the fly, and she'd produce these masterchef quality dishes that always amazed me, but that she always felt were subpar for whatever reason. And she told me that as soon as she looks at an ingredient, a picture forms in her mind, and just like that she knows which flavour profile will match with another, it's like a whole complex equation being calculated in picoseconds, and she starts assembling everything, tossing this in the frying pan, cooking that in the pot, while a sauce is whisked into existence, and something the gods would kill for is brought forth ex nihilo. She was, naturally, shocked when I said I couldn't cook for the life of me, and nothing in how she created her dishes actually made any sort of sense to me, but for me that was ok, I don't need to eat something with a ganache every day, nor have I a desire for things that are drizzled in olive oil, or marinated or cooked sous vide. I like things simple, I said, but she didn't really understand what I meant.

One day I decided to surprise her, and said that I was going to cook for her. I'd actually prepare dinner, I'd sort of learned a recipe from a TV celebrity chef, thought I could pull it off, but her reaction was one of utmost reluctance. I said I really wanted to do it, she asked me not to, I insisted, and oh boy. Fine, she said, I'll be around if you need any help. I told her I didn't, gave her a kiss, and told her to go away, I'd perfectly fine. I wasn't, of course, I fucked up big time because I thought I'd memorized the recipe and the steps required for the preparation, but I hadn't. And even the most basic of tasks proved to be a dire challenge : I was dicing an onion, and exactly at that moment she was coming back from the shower, took a look at me, and asked me what I was doing. I very politely replied I was dicing an onion, and she looked at me as if I'd said the craziest thing ever muttered by anyone. That way, she asked, and I said yes, and she rolled her eyes and called me crazy under her breath. I'm fine, I'm fine, everything's fine. The recipe ought to have taken some twenty minutes or so from start to finish, it took me like an hour and a half. By the time I'd clumsily plated the thing up, and laid them on the table for us to eat, I was already dreading what came next. We sat opposite one another, and she looked at it with an expression that said do I have to eat this, and I encouraged her by taking the first bite, and yeah, it wasn't great but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting either. She took a fork and prodded the fish I'd prepared en papillote, covered with green things - which ones they were god only knows - and was it properly cooked, was it not, who could say? Well, she could, and she took one tentative bite, chewed it, begrudgingly swallowed it, and turned into Gordon fucking Ramsay in front of me. Yeah, bland, the fish is overcooked, and the vegetables are under seasoned. Well, I learned my lesson that day. 

Some weeks after that we are out for a walk, and though it's still early winter, it was like a perfect spring day, and we sit in the sloping lawn of a public park, warm under that cerulean sky. She places her head in my lap, and lies crosswise, looking up at me. We're both smiling, and everything's great, and she says she thinks we should break up. What, I ask, and she says she's not feeling it, what, I ask, hey, tell you what, she says, let's just quit while we're ahead, she says, what, I ask, and I'll give you a lift so you catch the bus home, isn't that nice, she says, what, I ask, and just like that I'm off home without ever quite getting what had just happened. What?

[This is the playlist for July.]

Day Three hundred and fifty one - Joanna

Joannie and me worked together a few years ago, and for the first couple of years we had no interaction for anything other than professional matters. Though she sat quite near me, her desk was opposite mine, and sometimes we'd exchange awkward glances with one another, there was nothing connecting us at all. But in a way I always felt fascinated by her, though I could never explain just why. She walked with a curious gait, not quite a limp, but there was definitely something about the way she moved around. I'd always felt curious about that, always felt there was a story there. One day I was off work for a couple of weeks on holiday, and in the meantime there had been some reshuffling around the layout of the office. When I got back to work, I noticed that her usual desk wasn't there anymore, and I didn't see her at all that day. I was too wary of myself to actually ask anyone whether she'd left or not, so I just sat sullen the whole day, doing my usual work only half-heartedaly. But she was there the next day, though, and now she sat exactly right next to me. Unusually for me, I smiled when I saw her, and having noticed it, she returned the smile, albeit just briefly. I sat down on my desk, and immediately I noticed how she smelled - I have no words to describe it, other than the best summer day I ever had as a kid, with the sun bright and warm, and strawberries, and an endless joy in my heart. As I turned on my computer to start working, the scent of her began to overwhelm me, and it was all I could do to keep focused on work. A couple of days after that, she turned to me and asked me something about work, to which I couldn't seem to find an answer, because the only I wanted to say was how great she smelled, and that's exactly what I did. And she looked at me, and said thanks, and I apologised profusely, and she said it's ok and told me to reach out my hand. I did so, and she fumbled around in her handbag, until she found what she was looking for, and produced an intricately wrought phial, a clear blue liquid swirling inside it. She took a dab from it, and ran her perfumed finger across my wrist. So that'll you remember me, she says. And that's how it all began.

I ask her out a few days after that initial moment, and to my surprise she says yes. And I say to my surprise, because after that moment with the perfume, it was as if nothing had actually happened, but it was just as she said : so that you'll remember me, and god damn me, did I do anything but think of her? Did I bollocks. But I wasn't seeing an opening there, and it had to be another work-related thing that got us talking, whereupon I proceeded to ask her out. And she asks why I hadn't done it before, and curse me for a fool and twice so for a coward, the words seemed far too heavy and impossible for me to articulate before. But she says yes, and we go out for a meal. I try to impress her by taking her to a fancy thing, and I can tell at once it's not her deal, and it isn't mine either, so why did I try so hard? We eat dinner mostly in silence, I'm thinking she's thinking she made a mistake, I'm thinking I made a mistake bringing her here. Mentally, I'm flogging myself, whipping my flesh raw, what stupidity on my part. But next time, she says, can we just go for pizza? And I didn't even consider the possibility of a next time, but she continues, or just a burger, even. Next time, I question, doubting why she'd even want that. Yeah, she says, next time's on me, and why, why, why, does she want a next time, but I don't ask  her why, I nod and we walk in silence.

It takes some three dates before we kiss, though we both confess we'd been wanting to do it since that time at the office with the perfume. She kisses hungrily, like she wants to devour me, whereas I am somewhat more delicate, and she tells me to lose myself in her. I've been feeling strangely inhibited, and she assures me it's ok to let go of my inhibitions. But I don't know why, I feel like something's not quite right. She takes me by the hand, and we both get in a cab, and she asks me where I live. Your house is nearer, she says, and I reply I'm not quite sure how my wife would take it if I took her home, and there is a pregnant pause, and then I say it's just a joke - and it was - and my house it is. We get to my place quick enough, but then I remember just how messy it is right now, there's clothes on the floor, a few days of washing up that has not been done, and jesus, I'm already apologising, and she tells me not to worry about it. We go in, and she tries not to notice how messy everything is, and leans back against the door, inviting me to her arms. We kiss under the mistletoe that's been left hanging for years now, and my hands study her, search her, explore her, and just as I'm approaching down below, she suddenly stops me from reaching that golden lair, and thinking I'd done something completely untowards, guess what - I started to apologise again. But she shakes her head, says it's not that, it's not what I think, but there's something I should know. I'm kind of dreading where this is going, she's taking me past her upper right leg, and then past her thigh, and she lets my hand rest there. I see now, and the way she walks now made even more sense. She tells me she's an amputee, and ok, that's decidedly new. A few years before she started working in the office, she'd had a bad car accident, she'd been hopped up on painkillers, and managed to wrap her car around her tree. A miracle she says, she came back with only minus a leg. Oh, and some nuts and bolts for measure too. Christ, I say, and she asks me if I want to see it. And I don't know, that's got to be pretty fucking weird, but I say yes, and she strips down to her under wear and she has one of those crazy robot legs athletes use, something straight out of Star Wars, and we go and sit down on the couch. I think I'm in love, and after we're sat she removes her prosthetic leg, and she tells me how sometimes she can feel the ghost of her leg, and I say I see, I say I understand, but fuck me, I don't, and there's a real part of me that's fearing how this is going to work out. Her eyes are luring me, lulling me into a sense of security, and I am going inside her, but the stump against my flesh is just so weird, so different, so new, I recoil, and she thinks I hate her, and she starts to cry, and I say no. Let me get used to it, and I ask her to extend her leg to me, just as if she was reaching out with her foot, and I look at it, I touch it, caress it, kiss it. I ask her if she minds, she nods with her head, saying she doesn't. It's wearing off, that initial reluctance, and as we lay there while I get to know what fills the void of what's missing, she tells me story of the accident and its aftermath in detail. Still, it takes me a few times after that night to get fully used to it. Then it just stops mattering. If it didn't stop her from doing everything she liked, why would it stop me? 

But me and Joanna were never officially anything. I'd asked her a few times, and she said she didn't need for us to be anything other than what we already were, and I asked what that was, and she always replied we were something good. And so we went along like that for a few months, until one day I noticed she'd stopped coming to work, and we only ever talked when we were at work, I never had her number or actually got to know where she lived. I tried asking around if anyone knew how to reach her, but she'd never had made any friends there, and no one seemed to care either way. I tried - to no avail - to coax it from a guy I knew in HR, to see if there was a number I could reach her, and he said the best he could do was call her and see if she's ok. Some time later he says that yeah, she handed in her resignation. I saw her yesterday, from across the road. We both looked at each other, momentarily locking eyes, instantly recognising one another, and then we pretended like we didn't know each other.

[This is the playlist for June.]

Day Three hundred and fifty - Still fighting it

The truth is, if it wasn't for my son, if it wasn't for his presence by my side back in 2013, I would not be here anymore. Today marks his twenty-fifth birthday, and a huge part of me still sees him as this child I fell in love with when he was born, but he's not - he's a grown man, to the best of my knowledge a good one, and though he takes after me in far too many aspects of his life, and oh how I wish he'd taken more after his mother. I can only wish is that for him, while he walks this earth, he knows nothing but happiness. And with that, we close down the store for the day, it's time to celebrate with the boy.

[This is the playlist for May.]

Day Three hundred and forty nine - Take the long road and walk it

One of the very many exercises in futility that I occasionally engage in is painting these 'what if' scenarios in my mind and see how much I can delude myself into thinking that any of them could have ever been a possibility. These are usually thought experiments along the lines of what could I have done to make a relationship work, of what could I have done differently in my life, whatever. Stuff like that. But I rarely think about how my life would have been had I been born with different skills. Whenever I think about the other 'what if' stuff, I'm never changed at all from how I've always been, it's just me pondering about this choice or that choice. But what if I had been born with a different set of skills? The inherent problem is that I don't even know what skills could have proven to be life-changing for me. I do know, though, of certain skills I wasn't born with, could never hope to acquire - and this because of how my brain is wired, some things I just can't wrap my head around - and that I do wish I had been born with. And maybe not all of them, but at least one of them would have been gone. And at least one of them I've always known to be a determining factor for one of other skills I do not possess, but wish I did, to be an impossibility for me.

Now, about two of these I am sure I've written about before. So I'll just touch briefly on them, and none of these are in any particular order, if I'm honest. Any of these three skills would have been a boon, and maybe I do have a preference for the second I'll be writing of, for reasons that I think are blatantly obvious. Months back, when I started jotting down the sad little story of my life, I mentioned how I never could get numbers. Maths were always difficult for me, and fairly early on I just gave up. I couldn't understand any of it, I couldn't even begin to attempt understanding when letters and other arcane symbols were thrown in the mix, so I've lived my life safe in the blissful ignorance of that particular realm. But the truth is that I wish I could've gotten numbers, I really do. There are so many things I've watched or read or saw in person where I felt that a fairly deep knowledge of mathematics could have helped enjoy whatever it was I was doing even more. I remember a bunch of years ago I met this kid who was big into maths and video games, and one day he shows me the most complex equation I'd ever seen. I thought this was some kind of maths conundrum that had never been solved, or something like that, and he just said that it was the very simple and basic algorithm for the random enemy encounters in a Pokémon game. To his eyes, it was basic and simple, aye? To mine it might as well have been the formula for the atom bomb. And not knowing, getting, understanding maths... directly leads to the second skill, the one I might have had a slight bias towards. And it really does break my heart that I, a music lover, was born without any music in me. I've tried playing a bunch of instruments, none with any skill. I was terribly terrible with a flute, atrocious whenever I turned on an old electronic piano thingy we used to have when I was a kid, the acoustic guitar my brother used to have was no more than an outlet for noise making, my bass playing - the one instrument I really wanted to play - was beyond the pale, I once sat behind a drum kit and couldn't play anything, it was just too much. And I ascribe this lack of ability to play music to my inability to understand numbers and not being that great either at detecting and memorizing patterns. It's just too mathematical a problem for me to overcome.

Last, but not least, is something that I maybe I've always associated with me not really being savvy with numbers, because in a sense it is. It's something I've been accused of for a long while - decades, even - and I never denied it. I'm not great at thinking visually. Look, it comes as no surprise that I always hated visual arts classes. I've always sucked so bad at drawing, even my stick figures are horrible. The way I associate it with me not being a numbers guy is that I've never been any good at things like proportions, perspective and I've always well and truly disliked using a compass. These things have always baffled me beyond reason, but I'd be lying if I said that this extends just to drawing on paper. It does not - it extends to so much else. Some months back I tried to learn how to edit videos for youtube, and if I did understand the gist of the thing, in terms of stringing bits of audio and video together, there were so many other visual elements I could never think of, and I often watch videos with fancy editing and effects and I always wonder where people get those ideas. Even when it comes to writing, I'm not thinking visually - what I'm doing is thinking about the words, and only after do images come to me. Back in 1995, me and my friend S. set out to create a story together, though originally it was meant to be done by him alone. For some reason lost to the mists of time, I got involved with the story - meant to be called 'Of birds & real people', I think - and we were both still riding high on our Sandman devotion . S.'s art was, at the time, highly influenced by that of Dave McKean's and I fancied myself a Neil Gaiman wannabe, and we wanted to create something that would be along those veins, and we were both getting into 'Cages' as well, and one feverish night I had while on service in the Air Force, I came up with what I thought was a pretty good story, all the cast of characters, most of their individual arcs, pretty much all the beats, and I wrote a little bit of the script, and when I presented it for S. to read, he found it awful, and indeed, it truly was. But there was that underlying note of disappointment in him when he told me just how much I sucked at thinking visually. And right then and there I realized I did. That's not where my strengths lie. I will never be great at translating images into words, but plucking words from the ether and make them manifest images afterwards? I ain't too shabby at that. Not brilliant, mind, but compared to any of the other skills I lack and just numbered, I'm a fucking goddman genius.

[This is the playlist for April.]

Day Three hundred and forty eight - Cripple and the starfish

'Oh, I love this', she said, 'What is that perfume you're wearing?', and at that I smiled. I knew exactly just what I would reply, though I also knew I wouldn't know exactly how to phrase it. This is the thing : she loves how I smell. She loves how I smell. She loves I smell. She loves how I smell. And I tell her that this is a perfume my gran bought me from the pound shop round the corner, and that this is the last thing I have that still reminds of her, and so I  only wear it on special occasions. And she didn't even laugh and said 'Oh, you're so funny', she just nodded, assenting solemnly that she understood. I understand her, she understands me. No words need be said. 'I like the snake on your tattoo', say she, as she traces the outline of my tattoo, the one that took hours and hours to finish, and pain without end before it was done. I smile, again, I smile, always I smile, because her is smiling, and love is smiling, and love is us. I look at the stars above us, and though it's a warm summer's night, the chill still permeates our naked skin. We are naked, naked under the stars, dancing to my naked skin, and dancing to my naked touch, dance me to the end of love. My touch on your skin is electric, it sends sparks running down your cortex, and oh, how your touch electrifies my skin, and it send shivers down my spine. And in that black night sky, I point at the stars above us, a trillion stars, we're lost and found. But we found each other, and we lost each other. Oh lights go down, it's dark, all around me darkness gathers, are you here, are you there? I don't know, I have to know, let me be this seeker into the mystery, let me dive deep inside you, from cunt to womb, to the cradle of life, let me be inside you, in you, and of you, forever and ever. But time is running out, time is running out. And that's a good thing.

[This is the playlist for March.]

Day Three hundred and forty seven - Du nordavind

I am not me, not anymore. What I am is a promise. A vision. Something that will have to be chiseled from stone, then forged in the fires of volcanoes, until all I am is a wisp of smoke, and I am lifted up high, high where eagles dare, and I am carried away by the north wind. I ride alone and along the currents that whip past me, I learn the name of the wind, I tell you all the names I shall give you, I tell you all the names I gave to the sea. The wind is an unforgiving mistress, though, and as it eddies about me, I am sent careening down, like this morning's morning minion. I careen down an infinitely winding expanse, tunneling down at speeds faster the ken of mortals, I am not I, I am the wind, the wind itself, it is I, or an eisegesis of I, I don't know, I can't go on, I must go on, where I am, where am I, in a time without time, where there is everything without a time, here and now, there and then, my god, I am everywhere and nowhere. Can you hear my heart beating? Do you know its song, its tempo? Take my hand, and guide it to you. My hand on your heart. Can you hear? How the low throbbing of our twinned pulses beat in time? And above us, the stars, only stars, how they light our eyes, and in our eyes myriad googolplexes of stars, our eyes are universes, gateways to what? to where? See there, see now, see how that man falls an endless fall down an infinite well, see how the patterns repeat themselves. Can you see? Can you understand? You do, far away in those distant shores, and us parted halfway through creation. It's a chasm I cannot bridge, not in this lifetime, but there will be an eternity of lifetimes, there will be a path back to your arms, I am Eros, you are Thanatos, but together, oh together we are united states of mind. I'm falling, and I can't stop now, it's too late, I've not yet begun to fall, I can still stop myself, my outstretched hand reaches out to I, I can't grasp I, I'm losing my balance, I fall, I fall, but the wind, the wind carries me aloft, I soar on wings I never knew I had, vast, majestic, see their beauty as they flap and I rise, so glorious, I am a star, the star of the morning, but my wings are clipped by some unseen hand, I am falling, falling again.

I wake in the middle of the night, sore and with the rusty taste of  blood in my mouth. In the darkness of my room, I sit against the back of the bed, the metallic railing cold and biting into my flesh. My heart beats and in the dark I listen to its percussive melancholy rhythm. It tells me of a choice, one you chose, and wisely so. In the dark I smile, content, but not happy, alone, but not lonely, unliving, but not dead. I wake in the middle of the night, and think what a weird dream that was, that I was falling and then that I had woken up but I was still sleeping, but I am awake now. Am I? My bed swirls, spins, faster and faster, round and round, and round it goes - and where it stops nobody knows. It's magic, it was magic, it could only have been magic. When the moon is full we shall assemble to adore the potent spirit of your queen, my mother, great Diana. I'm there, aeons in the past, in that stretch of land by the sea where the sisters are loosed in a winter's night sky. Abracadabra. Abraxas. Magic. And I wake up again, though this time I doubt myself, I had been so sure, but of course now I know It's for real, because I think, and I remember, and it's cold, it's so cold, oh dear god please hold me, please hold me and see me through these nights until I go. Please. Please. Please forgive me, but I won't be coming home again.

[This is the playlist for February.]

Day Three hundred and forty six - Put your money on me

Who : Arcade Fire

Album name : Everything Now

Formed : 2001

From : Montreal, Canada

What do they play : Indie rock / chamber pop / art rock / baroque pop / symphonic rock (at least according to Wikipedia)

Release date : July 28, 2017

Why Arcade Fire? God alone knows, I mean, their first three albums proved to be momentous in my life, as I've related. But since then I've not paid much attention to them, so why? Why pursue this lunacy of 'reviewing' their albums? I'm very, very sure it's got nothing to do with me having some difficulty coming up with stuff to write. I certainly cannot be that. Surely not.

And so we come to 'Everything Now', and two things about this record are true : I never listened to the whole record until today, and it's the only record of theirs I do not own. Which is a strange thing, for various reasons, and if 'Reflektor', their previous album, which I really don't love but don't despise either, was one that I actively sought on vinyl, and ended up paying a premium price for it - it was fairly expensive to get one some years back - this one I rarely felt the need to have. That's because the only time I attempted to listen to this album, I stopped halfway through, thought to myself 'what is this shit?', and never ever listened to it again. Good riddance, I always felt.

So I wasn't really looking to today. I knew I'd have to do it, some time or the other, but I did not relish the thought. And so when I pressed play on the record today, and the first half-dozen songs had played, I wanted to give up again. It's all just so... unremarkable. It's got some nice melodies here and there, but it's nothing to write home about, really. I'd even venture to say that some of those first six or seven songs are downright mediocre. It took all I had to continue listening.

And I did feel tempted to stop there and then. If, as usual, the best songs are the ones that come up first in the record, and those were pretty meh, then how good could the other half be? Well, pretty damn good. I'd say they're pretty fucking fabulous, and some of them shot straight to the top of the list of my favourite Arcade Fire songs. From 'Infinite_Content' onwards, and though, eh, I do think that 'Electric Blue' is somewhat bland, everything there is just a banger. The last four tracks, in particular, 'Good God Damn', 'Put Your Money on Me', 'We Don't Deserve Love' and 'Everything Now (Continued)' are just as good as any of their greatest songs from previous records. And 'Infinite_Content' has some melodies that harken back to the whistful, nostalgic sounds of 'The Suburbs', an album which I love to death.

Now, this being said, will I be moved in the future to pick up this record again and listen it start to finish? Probably not. But the songs I singled out are already part of my playlist, so they'll popping up a lot in the future. As a record, I don't think it's such a good one. At least half of it borders on the banal. Then there's the other half that is just outstanding. This would have been a five star EP, for sure, had they released it with just those final few songs. As a record, I'll give three out of five Good God Damns and I'm being pretty fucking generous here.

As a treat, from now on I'll be sharing the playlists for each month. I tried to do it on Spotify, but there's some songs they don't got there, so fuck that. Youtube it is.

[This is the playlist for January.]

Day Three hundred and forty five - I'm so tired

Motherfucker, I already wrote my post for today over three hundred days ago. Sometimes I do hate myself. But this is a sure sign of a very, very tired mind, one who's swamped with work, and is in dire need of a long, long time away from everything. And hopefully, that time will be coming soon, though not away from everything, but away enough from everything I know to make a difference. We'll see. There is a long trek ahead of me, many, many miles to go, miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. Is it obvious by now how much I love Robert Frost? Without him, much here would never be extant.

I knew that this year would test me. And though I did not know just how it would test me - and believe me, this motherfucker threw some unexpected curveballs my way - I knew that I would not weather all the tribulations I'd face. I knew that some of these trials I would be failing. What I... ngh... hope... to take away from all these... ngh... failures... is that I learned the lessons they presented. That they taught me what not to want. What not to invite into my life. What not to... ngh... hope for. 

Ah well, that's hope for you, in a nutshell. Hope should be a controlled substance.

[As an addendum to this post, let me add that I was halfway through a rather lengthy post about how me and a couple of my closest friends had been recording a podcast up until a few months ago, when we sort of abruptly stopped, and we've been trying to figure out how to return to its original intent, something we started deviating from somewhere along the way. I started musing about how one of the episodes we wanted to record but never got around to was what we wanted to be when we grew up. And I was going to say that I knew I would never be a football player, because I never was the athletic kind of guy, but that due to having grown up in the 80's, I wanted to be an astronaut because of the Challenger accident - something I quickly gave upon once I learned just how much stuff I'd never understand I'd actually have to understand. My other big idea as a kid was that I wanted to be a lawyer, mainly because of a TV show called 'L.A. Law' and my unrequited love for one Susan Dey. As I was writing yesterday, everything felt all too familiar, so I did a quick search on my blog, and wouldn't you know it - I'd already written about this, and it makes sense that I did, since I did set out to write my story. But for a few moments there I was really happy that I'd found something to write about - I'm struggling to come up with ideas - only for me to realize I'd already written about it. Eh, it's not like there isn't enough repetition here already...]

Day Three hundred and forty four - Don't want to know if you are lonely

And so it is that I find myself in this desolate, windswept stretch of land, its shoreline stretching as far as the eye can see. The air here is biting cold, and though I'm wearing very warm clothes, I can still feel the chill running down my spine. I know this cold, I have felt it before, right here. Though not now, and though I am iteration of that soul, it was me without being me. The wind tugs at me, waving my hair across my face, a fury of tendrils. I watch the rolling waves in front of me, the sea raging and tossing them with frightening might onto the shore. I look at my watch, and think to myself that it's not going to take long. I hear a voice calling out to me (had I heard that voice before?) and I turn my head to where I thought the sound was coming, and I see her trudging slowly through the wet sand. I have not seen that face before, and yet a part of me knows it intimately. It's the part of me that exists where there's no time. Where there's everything without a time. As she approaches, I see a radiant smile, in a freckled sunny face. We exchange pleasantries, and then start talking about what had brought me here. I tell her what I am looking for, and she knows where to take me. Do I have the correct tribute, she asks, and I say I do. I do.

We walk on, for long minutes, in silence. The sighing wind sings a song, a song to say goodbye. We are not far, now, she says. I nod. She tells me it has been her family's duty, lo these many centuries, to keep it safe. To keep it secret to all but to those who would pay tribute. I understand, I say. I had travelled far and wide to finally reach here, I had to travel north before I could travel south. I had to go far away before I got close. And now, only by staying here could I go far away again. My hope... my hope is my enemy, but I hope nonetheless. I pray the tribute proves enough.

We arrive at what seems a ramshackle hut, weathered and beaten, and she motions me inside. It's unassuming, spartan, and yet homely. She points to where a hearth hisses merrily, and with a wave of her hand the glamour is lifted. Here I am, after all these years, my God, here I am. The Lares shrine, she says, and I stand in awe of it. The time to pay tribute is now, she says, and from my pocket I remove a small handkerchief that's neatly tied. Blood seeps from it, drippety-drop on the floor, and I kneel before this god of old. I open up the handkerchief and remove its contents, and then lay them at the statue's feet. It is good, she says, he is pleased, and praises you for your sacrifice, she says. May I ask what it is, she asks. And I say a name, and this name is a sacrifice. She nods. And your boon, what did you ask for, she asks. And I tell her it is the boon of remembrance. Ah, she says. You wish to remember something, to forget something, or that someone else might remember something, she says. A wise choice, Mnemosyne would have extracted too great a toll from you, she says. I understand, I say. Will you ask for it, she says. I will. I must. Then ask and it shall be yours, she says. And I say but one word to her, as our eyes lock in an instant that lasts infinities. Remember, I say.

Her eyes dance through the centuries, and through the Pleiades - oh look, as they are loosed in the winter night sky that is her eyes! I bare my chest, and she draws closer to me. I nod, and the places a hand on my chest. She feels my heart beat. My hand on your heart, she says. My hand on your heart. This is it. This is forever. Listen to my heart beat, I say, listen to the song it sings, it sings in time with the universe, ever searching for its soul, entwined now. And she dances. She dances. 

Day Three hundred and forty three - In every dream home a heartache

My house is a time machine. Well, sort of - while I can't travel backwards or forwards in time, sometimes there are moments in my house where I feel transported to the eighties. Especially in my kitchen, and doubly so in a winter's morning, with the sunlight dim and filtered through the window, as it hits the inside in just such a manner that there are moments when it's not me who's standing in that kitchen floor, but rather the six or seven year old version of me. While I'm sure that there have been many changes in my house throughout all these decades I've lived here, my house really hasn't changed that much. And the kitchen area might just be the area where there has been the least amount of change, other than some new kitchen appliances that have been purchased throughout the years. 

There's an area of the countertop that was reserved for Claudette, a guest that rented a room here when I was a kid, and who always fascinated me. I can barely remember her, but she was always so very nice to me. And she was the one and only person I've ever known who drank milk of the powdered variety - I tried it once when I was very young and found it very unappealing, and have not felt the urge to try it again in more than forty years. But I see ghosts of the large metal can in which it came, and that was usually resting by the corner where the countertop formed an L. 

This story I'm not sure I wrote about here or not before, maybe I did, though I don't think so. But this powdered milk thing left me thinking for a long time afterwards that a lot of different things could come that way. And sometime before I entered my teens my brother got a chemistry set as a birthday present. It came loaded with test tubes, a couple of beakers, a dropper, a thermometer, and I want to say a Bunsen burner but I don't know for sure, as well as a bunch of chemicals and suchlike. And - God as my witness - I could have sworn that there was one sachet that said 'Powdered Electricity', and of course it made sense to me that such a thing existed - if there was powdered milk, then why not electricity? It all made perfect sense to me. Sometime during that time frame, and this would have been late eighties, my father's business had a stall in the local fair, and in an uncommon act of generosity on his part, he gave me some money, and told me to go to a nearby diner and buy myself some 'powdered electricity' - and boy, did my eyes light up at this! Above all, it validated my reasoning that everything and anything could come in the powdered variety. I took the money, ran to the diner, briefly talked to the owner and said I wanted as much 'powdered electricity' as my money could buy, handed him the money, and then left. I might have waited impatiently for, erm, powdered electricity to be produced by some arcane means, unknown to me. I was but a child, after all, an incredibly gullible child. Eventually, though, I had to come back to the stall where my family was, and naturally, I never spoke of what happened. In fact, it wouldn't even dawn on me until much, much later that a) maybe 'powdered electricity' never existed other than in my mind and that b) my dad had given me the money for me to either save up or go get something I wanted. What a doofus I was. And to be honest, I still am. I still am that gullible kid that so easily believed in anything and anyone. 

It's too late, I find, for some things in me to truly change. Hence the reason for my next step. There is a future ahead full of lessons to learn, and full of ways for me to acquire the balance I need. It is a road, one that I must walk alone, and a road that will not diverge into two. It's the long road north, and soon I start the steps that will take me away. It will not be an easy task, saying goodbye to everything, though to much I'll say goodbye to, it'll be done in secret, and to my heart only.