Street projections

- Our exact experiences are lost....in the ocean of memory

like the airplane's black box after the crash.

The present and the future are constantly crashing you know

becoming the past

- whatever

- Join me in a dive among memories and streets

- Have you forgotten to take your medicine ?

- What we find might be garbled fragments

...lies, fantasies, impressions and monstrous hybrids

Colour street

Sauntering down from Crown mountain and Mill hill, wayfaring with clumsy steps on the street named after a small paint shop that was located here a long time ago. I was drunk and had lost my cell phone and couldn't call anyone. It was late at night after a bash on the outskirts of town and there was bright moonlight and I had wandered into the city on the defunct railway that runs below the mountainside next to the mirror-like sea. I thought of him the tall lanky marine biology student I knew who had lived as a boarder in one of the houses on Cololur street. By a cosmic coincidence, we had both been heartbroken at about the same time and it was only natural then that we thereafter became drinking buddies. Somewhere along the way all that changed, we graduated, moved in different directions, you hit a new path and profile yourself, you shed your skin and move on. "Once we had dreams, now we have schemes".
Writing a story is synthesis, putting the pieces together. Walter Benjamin also advocated something of the opposite: "irrkunst", the art of wandering about, getting lost, losing oneself, because therein lies discovery.
Walter Benjamin was ill when he fled the Nazis but he was still cracking jokes with his travel companions. Their aim was to hike over the Pyrenees to Spain and then slip into Lisbon in order to travel by boat to freedom in the United States. He came a long way but had difficulty obtaining an exit visa. He died on September 26, 1940 at the Hotel de Francia in Portbou, Catalonia. There are divided opinions about the cause of death, but the most common basic assumption is that Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets some time after the visa application had been rejected. The man whose major work was called "Das Passagen-werk" put an end to his life by reason of a closed passage, but in a turn of events, the border and the passage was apparently reopened in the days following Benjamin's death and his fellow travelers could resume their journey.

Rumour has it that Benjamin carried a trunk with him that contained unpublished and unfinished manuscripts. That suitcase was never found. One can only speculate as to what was hidden in those writings, the secrets died with him. I think of my friend the tall lanky marine biology student. He came to a crossroads and embarked on a new path in life and we lost touch. We entered different passages. Who knows what would have happened (to us) if he had taken a different direction: our potential friendship is like the mysterious lost trunk, filled with possibilities and wonderful wanderings. And what would have become of Walter Benjamin if he had managed to cross that border, he was only 48 when the lights were put out.
I would like to call him up and say "you are still a colourful presence in my mind"

The flaneur

The flâneur, the person walking about, enjoys the luxury of being away from home but at the same time being at home anywhere: he or she (etc.) is a peripatetic home traveling through the city's byways, the flâneur is the center of the world but remains an observing unknown, a spectating cluster of question marks. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito, says Baudelaire. Sometimes there is the desire to be a resident but curiosity, sadness and restlessness forbids it. Wanderer, refugee, everyday deserter, chameleon, tourist, itinerant, vagabond, scavenger, scout, slacker, day laborer... what semantics is appropriate for this particular walking person? Some believe that the word flaneur has its origin in the Old Norse word "flane".
Will Self sees walking as “a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum”. He describes the solitary walker as “an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveller”. Free and alone in the maze of the city, the flâneur craves a revelation that might change his life.

*

- Why don't you tell it in your own words ? I think that last fragment is stolen

- what do you mean with that snotty "your own words"? words are public things god damn it

King street

The disbanded swedish Indie band used to sing "Now that the king is dead and his queen is free, I'm going to the front of the line, reinventing my life". It rhymed in swedish. This time around there are no queens in sight, and no reinvention. The street feels somewhat anonymous to me now: like a person at a party who avoids deeper questions or like a friend who has decided to convert to a distant acquaintance. I bet being king must be lonely. It's lonely at the top, so they say. "Now we're going to dance to my tune! I have nothing of value but my longing is real." I don't know why I lost almost all of my friends, perhaps we've all become lonely (disbanded) kings who have retreated to dimly lit apartments, ruling over a flickering TV set, a computer and a netflix account. It's alright in the kingdom tonight.

*

There is no president of grief
it is a kingdom
ancient absolute with no colors
its rule is never seen
prayers look for him

(from W.S Merwin - Presidents)

North and south mill hill street. Twins.

Rebecca Solnit writes about the desert and "the abundance of absence" that seems to prevail there. This is not a desert but I feel the absence, it is as if everyone has vanished or changed beyond recognition. What remains are the empty backdrops of the houses and some hollow question marks in my head.
Was this where he lived? The enthusiast who played music with the disabled. He spoke Swedish with a wonderful idiosyncratic Dutch accent that seemed honed from walking these windy streets. "De e jäidra bra ljyd veity". I used to borrow a Roland Alpha Juno 2 synthesizer from him.
These are twin streets that once led up to the mill, but the mill no longer exists. Absent. Joseph Brodsky writes that water is the twin of music, he seems to think that both of these mediums are rippling fleeting mirrors that reflect moods, environments and time but each in its own way.
Twins. Deep bonds. Pollux gave up half of his immortality to be with his deceased brother Castor. In Michel Tournier's novel Gemini the twins Jean and Paul are so closely connected that they are collectively referred to as Jean-Paul but Jean soon develops an urge for independence and tries to escape from their twinhood cocoon. A worldwide hunt ensues. Paul cannot endure the absence. Neither can I.

*

Seaside street

The vault-like sports hall echoes the 1960s. Mild green interior painted when the Social Democrats had around 50 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections. Behind the handball goal cage and beyond the wall are labyrinthine corridors consisting of changing rooms, storerooms, chancellery offices and toilets. And deeper down in the building we find the caretaker's quarters: a windowless room with a storage cupboard, a chair and a desk and lots of tools and old newspapers. He had no friends but he received a lot of mail. "All the subscriptions made me feel part of something bigger". He was interested in facts, "these sentence-based chunks of the world". There was a toilet that only he used. He was said to be sitting there smoking or looking through porn magazines. Handyman rain wank. "Stranded without love" but he had a wife, a quiet artist who painted pictures of the sea. He was dogged by persistent rumours - that small town curse - and could be seen roaming the building like a diligent squirrel bent on fixing things.

*

And in the garden next to a brick house, there is disagreement between two kids in the sandbox. A boy proclaims: "I was here first!". The other replies "I'm older than you, I was here long before you were born...." A woman comes out on the terrace and reprimands the children,
- stop that noise!....you can both play in the sandbox...cooperate! ...that's what adults try to do.
Mister Busey, boozed up, shabbily costumed, visiting the mother, chimes in from the porch,
- tee ar why..means..tomorrow is really yesterday....

The red clay tennis courts beyond the trees are run down and dilapidated. The net has collapsed and resembles a pulled fish trap and the lines have popped out of the substrate and resigned from their service. The umpire's chair has been knocked to the ground like a big fallen chess piece and here and there grass and moss have started to appear: "nature" is gaining ground. Somewhere in the trees the cuckoo is heard. The wagtail was once the cuckoo's mother, but the cuckoo ate her when it grew up. Farther away emanates the single-minded sound of another bird, harping on one note, it's the warmonger who tolerates no vacillation or contradiction. "How did we end up here?" the diplomats ask and "Why doesn't he remember?" During the war we lived in exile from the conversation. We who used to talk things over, exchange ideas, back and forth, and we went to lunch with our opponents. "A gentleman's sport". Now they want a different order, a different game.

*

George Haddad street nr 7, Damascus

When consulting the maps, you find no results, the street does not exist there, but Bunte, the West German weekly magazine, states in an issue from 1985 that the apartment at number seven is located a few minutes walk from the rose beds in Subki park. The testimony tells us that the street is lined with fashionable villas adorned with colonnades and that it also contains a private clinic and a consulate. The man at number seven is a German or Austrian businessman and lives registered under the name of Georg Fischer but he is in actuality the wanted Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner. It is said that he has helped the Syrian intelligence service with interrogation and torture techniques and in return he receives protection and housing. Two guards in olive green army jackets accompany him on his daily walks to the market. Still, Syrian officials deny that Brunner is even in their midst. France, Germany, Slovakia, Austria and Greece wants Brunner extradited and brought to justice.
Some sources have provided information stating that he kept a small colony of rabbits on the roof of the house at number seven. And he often cooked homemade sauerkraut. He has lost an eye and several fingers after receiving letter bombs, in 1961 and also in 1980. It is believed that at least one of them bombs was sent from Mossad.
The Bunte reporter describes Brunner's apartment as large: four rooms but two of them are empty, as if they were desolate memorial rooms for all the innocent people Brunner shipped off on trains to concentration camps. When asked about his former acitivities he shows no remorse, he would do it all again if given the chance, he says.

The daughter in Austria does not want to be interviewed but leaves a statement where she bluntly denies having any contact with the father. Soviet sources say otherwise. The uncertainty thickens and Justice seems elsewhere. The last sign of life was registered by Austrian intelligence in 1995 when the relatives in Rohrbrunn called Brunner in Damascus to convey that one of his sisters had died. The years passed and rumors about his whereabouts abounded. At various times he was reported to be staying in Brazil and also in Egypt. However, for those in the know and who try to hunt Brunner down, and who collect all the data they can get, he is widely believed to have died in Damascus in 2010 at the age of 98.

*

Workshop street

I entered the street, I was stripped of context, a kind of defoliated persona. The sky was filled with big dark clouds and I could almost hear it murmuring "I am distance itself". You walked past those homes and industrial plots, strolling by a cannery and large deserted parking lots where seagulls strutted about. And you end up by the waterside, by the rocks and the red little shacks and rookeries. There you feel the heart swelling to and fro like the sea.

I think of the guy I fished with here. A seeker who also sang and played the piano. I heard he killed himself. Mark Fisher writes that the depressed person has only one belief, namely that he is without illusions: he imagines himself being in possession of a kind of clarity, a "depressive realism", and he is stuck in the belief that everything is objectively hopeless and totally pointless. And then you act accordingly: the depressive is unable to see beyond that hopeless horizon.
"The gray sky in my sight melts into tears"

*

The melancholic

"Inside me there is a squeaking unsatisfied creature that bleeds blue melancholy while the bell tolls"

"Above all, what you need is a stylist?"

We're all gathered in the school's wooden assembly hall and the local punk rock talent has just performed a song about masturbation. The next theme up for consideration is a seminar on "Melancholia".
Susan Sontag breezily moves a hand through her dark hair. A stir of mixed feelings, she carries an ambivalent passport. "Depression is melancholy, minus its charm" she says. Yes, they are more or less synonymous, but melancholy has a more flashier poetic side to it.

E.M Cioran, sleep-deprived and dragged here from his parisian attic, voices that "Melancholy is the strangest flower of self-love - a dream stage of egoism- which under its melodic name hides self-pity and the pride of defeat."

Freud stubs out the cigar in an ashtray and laments, "Melancholy implicates an inability to mourn"

yeah you can't let it go man... murmurs someone in the crowd carrying a grief without object.

Julia Kristeva, keen on picking up the Freudian hat, proceeds cautiously as if threading barefoot on wet bathroom floor: "My depression points to my not knowing how to lose....the disenchantment appears to awaken echoes of old traumas.... the disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; I live it as a wound or deprivation".

I would say that democracy is an ability to lose....

Sellars doesn't know what to make of it but he brandishes a manual called

"The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition", and reads aloud while I fall asleep:

"The DSM-5 outlines the following criterion to make a diagnosis of depression. The individual must be experiencing five or more symptoms during the same 2-week period and at least one of the symptoms should be either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.

Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day.
Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day.
Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain, or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day.
A slowing down of thought and a reduction of physical movement (observable by others, not merely subjective feelings of restlessness or being slowed down).
Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day.
Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day.
Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day.
Recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide"

*

How much can I blame society for this malaise? A society that has made individual self-interest into something of a virtue and where only twenty percent (or so) of the workforce have a job that can be considered “self-empowering" and where the unemployed is often eking out a meager existence below, or barely above, the poverty line. "The poverty line", now that's depressing.
Do I need a starting point of humility as a home port? ‘Port Humility’. An ability to lose? Simone Weil writes that humility is the same as love for the truth, neither more nor less. It sounds like something simple and unremarkable, easy to lose. But some truth, or information at least, is for the melancholic perhaps too difficult to carry, it is on the other side of a barrier of anxiety, it must be sneaked across the border undercover, and in very small doses.
- "The melancholic may be temporarily incapable of living in the world and must find a way, some kind of healing formula, so that he may reconnect with the world and with himself".

*

East crown mountain street

I am a bundle of nerves thrown out into the universe and who suddenly become stationary on East crown mountain street. Winter sun. Mild and windy. A one-way uphill type of street: it's like Time, there's no turning back to really see what happened and feel how it felt. West crown mountain street is also (partially) a one-way street but stuck in the other direction. Never mind Time, we're here to read Space. For Walter Benjamin, there was nothing that was not a text. Old villas in wood and Eternit plates with stone foundations proliferate here. Crooked, chafing and leaning. I read some bohemian permissiveness into these quarters, in these signs for houses. We are out walking in the low winter sun. Our shadows are long sliding statues from the museum.

*

North harbour street

The old workshops and warehouses have disappeared and given way to houses with condominiums for those who have substantial amounts of money. Somewhat posh and yellow seaside buildings are multiplying with their backs to the cliffs. Along the waterfront there is now a restaurant, a marina and a wide footbridge that leads out to the bay of eels. Further out, I see the tilting blue barrels of the mussel farms, like a congregation of inward-looking bobbing heads debating for and against. They are blue eyeless dialecticians.

Writing to his mother in 1861, Baudelaire recalled, “our long walks and constant affection! I remember the docks! So gloomy in the evenings”.

We talked about the past and you said it wasn't better back then, but it was at least more carefree when you could smoke in restaurants, it was the time before "personal health" became a religion. I said that the Reactionary and the Revolutionary secretly share the same Utopian bed, but in opposite directions; the former believes that paradise is in the past and the latter believes that the kingdom of heaven is in the future. For Walter Benjamin, the past is both a process of decay and a process of crystallization, which contributes to new forms. Our task then becomes to dive into the ocean of the past and rescue pearls from the depths, and the pearls come back to us as fragments of thought.

*

Turner Street

I came here floating on a benevolent stream of rejection letters. But by being a failure I at least exercise the kindness of not making my fellow humans envious of me. So my failure is their blessing you could say: they are safe, because through our interactions they are in no way in danger of being tormented by envious feelings towards me. That must be a good thing. I'm a benefactor of mankind!

*

- Success and failure are servant categories.... why not simply live and see how it goes?

- You cannot simply dismiss them like that, for one thing we constantly evaluate our judgments and actions with this couple of concepts...

- Well, I'm not referring to it in a nitpicking philosophizing way but rather saying that you should stop thinking about them so much.... pursue what is meaningful and interesting instead and the rest will take care of itself...and also I think you should to some degree appropriate the concept of 'success' and define it in your way

- You almost sound like a postmodernist but sure thing

- hehe... and another thing that strikes me just now... Christianity was founded on a failure you could say.... so for those who are believers it means that a failure is a starting point for the western judeo-christian hemisphere

- A failure was a starting point for christianity?... I'm not sure if I'm following you here

- Would you say that the crucifixion of Christ was a success? Maybe for Pontius Pilate and his team...

*

Similarities and differences. At a table in the café someone has underlined in the newspaper that "Nietzsche, just like Hitler, had the dream of being an artist; was constantly puttering about with diets and had a drive to hypostatize his personal failures into a "global conflagration".

Cabin Street

At the back of the house was the pond teeming with tadpoles. I rarely saw any "ready" adult frogs, wonder what became of them. It was as if the brood stayed at the idea stage, they never crossed the threshold. Some authority dismissed them. One can imagine the "threshold-people", individuals who always feel rootless, as if constantly teetering on the threshold between different worlds: "he stood on the threshold between a world that was dead and a new world that was not yet able to be born". This is the predicament of the mourner, the refugee and the ineffectual daydreamer, or perhaps it more closely resembles the situation of the depressed: to be stuck in a foxhole between the past and the future, trapped inside an unbearable now.

Midgard's house

James Joyce said that language was his straitjacket and he tried to burst out of it with every sentence. Something analogous to that can perhaps be said about Nicke's relationship to his hometown: while growing up he tried with every effort and action to get out of this cluster of houses and streets, as if the city was a vile net that prevented him from living a free, full and prosperous life.

The linguistic equilibrist Joyce writes, via his alter-ego Stephen, that he intends to fly past the nets that language, religion and nation constitute and he intends to do so through silence, cunning and exile. The net Nicke wanted to avoid was, as I understood it, the bigotry that lay like a blanket over the community: the almost pathological and constant self-deprecation and the bullying of all who were oddballs. Nicke lived with his mother and a sister in an airy flat in the large Midgard house which was next to the cinema. The building was a solid, ornamented brick house with bay windows and high ceilings built in 1913. Nicke called me "Bringan" as a salute to my skinny complexion and we used to watch american sitcoms, smoke and talk about girls and play Nintendo. His sunny swagger and cockiness constantly got him into trouble with the reinforcers of the status quo but the same outspokenness seemed to go down well with the ladies. He dared to think big, loud and naive and he could be sensitive which was a bit of a taboo in those school corridors. Later, Nicke somehow managed to get into a high school in Stockholm and he rented a room in a basement of a villa out in an upper class neighbourhood. After a while I took the long journey and visited him, I nervously got off the commuter train on a cold winter's day in an unknown Stockholm suburb, and there was Nicke smiling and blowing smoke rings like an escape artist puffing on his victory cigar.

Bathhouse mountain

A white and gray apartment area overlooking the rocky granite archipelago that is a prelude to the strait we call Skagerrak. Wind-swept rosehip bushes, seagulls, Chilean-Swedes and marine biology students lived here. I came out of one of the gates here with tears streaming down my cheeks and carrying a bag containing my belongings. The note of banishment ringing in my head. Love trouble. Finito. We had broken up before it even had started it seemed. She was a reddish girl from Stockholm deploying a slow dark sassiness that could transform into something devastatingly sharp and I loved her with all the madness in my soul. She went to see the movie Titanic with her chatty friends for about twenty times and I had a theory that she in reality had a crush on Leonardo Di Caprio. Who could compete with that?
This neighbourhood was also for a short period of twisted time the quarter of that tweed-clothed myriad minded man, ”the bullockbefriending bard”, playing jazzy tunes on his saxophone and who later was praised by his former teacher as ”by far the best I ever had”. Excessive and exuberant, he seemed driven by an ancient mental engine or an inner light that had some phosphorescent quality to it. I once shared a taxi with him for about 15 kilometers. Someone had spilled beer on his pants and he said that "reality has too many heads".

*

Can you catalog a love affair? Can grief be systematized? Perhaps both of these phenomena – love and grief – are largely situated outside the scope of analytical systematizing thought and instead benefit from the random insights and discoveries of the wandering. "Take what you gathered from the harvests of chance". Rebecca Solnits writes in the book Wanderlust that "the random, the unsorted allows you to find things you didn't know you were looking for".

Women in the streets

Circa 1951. Nineteen-year-old Sylvia Plath notes; "Being born a woman is my terrifying tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to socialize with rowers and sailors and soldiers and the bar regulars – to be part of the scene, anonymous, listening, recording – is all in vain due to the fact that I am a girl, a feminine always at risk of victimization through assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misunderstood as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, dear God, I want to talk to everyone as heartily as I can, I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to be able to travel west, to be able to walk freely and unrestrained at night.”

*

- You know, this might not be so well-received in some circles.

- What kind of receivers are you talking about then ? Can they even imagine being in someone else's shoes?

*

The gentrified cannery

Long egg-white building with a copper-red roof. Rounded tall windows. Some would perhaps say that the house has an "older charm". Once a cannery, nowadays a residential building offering sea views. And there are some shops on the ground floor and I used to work in the sportswear store on the corner. Armed with a pricing gun, clothing alarms and a pile of hangers, I was busy getting the garments ready for sale. Sweating profusely. The manager had started several stores in nearby towns and he only hired young persons who could imagine working inconvenient hours without extra pay.

"It' s a shame the plane is leaving on this sunny day". The radio blasted out rock music in the dark catacomb-like corridor that led out to the warehouse. I can see Cranley smiling and moving about in there, a big soft-spoken opportunist, the ideal traitor. I regret confiding in him. His debut novel became something of a success and he subsequently quit his job at the shop. On one occasion he was interviewed on the radio show we frequently tuned into and when asked about what he had done in the past he told a story where his extensive work experience at the sportswear store was conveniently omitted. We tell stories to serve a purpose. He was like the building: redefined, reweaved, gentrified.

The Boxer

It happened on Mountain street, I had my guard down, and out of nowhere the Boxer punched me in the face and then he said,

- you will never be as successful as your father!

The boxer stood squirrel-like with large constantly visible front teeth. An ominous sign. The appearance was as perplexing as the words he had just uttered. What did he want to achieve? And why did I feel mortally wounded? The gong is ringing, the round is over and I stagger towards my ring corner. Battered. "Losing in your hometown. You wish the ground would open up and take you down”. The coach whispers in my ear,

- every victim is a potential executioner.
It feels like I'm done. I have exposed myself too much. This will never work out. I wish to disappear somewhere deep in the greenery of the interior. "Cunning and hopeful...."

Say after me...."Living well is the best revenge, living well is the best revenge, living well is the best revenge...."

*

Die Tröte

He came here riding his bike from a distant abode. He imagines someone in this place playing a fanfare of friendship with the bugle, die Tröte.

*

Walter Benjamin is in an airplane and he is looking down on the area and reads the neighbourhood as if he was reading a word in a dictionary. He acknowledges that the word has both an expressive and a communicative side. He sees how the word is defined and how it is inflected, how it bends and turns - morphology and grammar - and he gets a semantic overview but senses that there is something more to it. Mr Benjamin has, analogously, on the flight, a majestic view from his height but senses that there is so much more to see down there at street level; small subtle height differences; the play of light and shadow; lampposts; flora and fauna; people coming and going out of houses; traffic congestion; fragments of dialogue; laundry fluttering on washing lines and music emanating from an open bay window. Down on the ground so to speak, a language user get three-dimensional contact - pragmatics over semantics - and interaction and the analogy of the word as a neighbourhood take on another life: here we get the real usage, the flow, the daily course of events and the depth, the intricate associations the word carries with it, but at the expense of the cool overview.

Sigh road

Why do you always greet me with a sigh ?

Because you have wasted too many fuses, as I see it.

I try to be attentive to the fact that there are limits...

yes, exactly, and 'this is not Nam there are rules'

South harbour, the bus stop

In the 19th century, Charles Baudelaire strolled along the quays and looked at the ships and thought to himself: "These great beautiful ships that lie on the still water, imperceptibly rocking, these strong ships that look so languid and nostalgic - do they not ask us in an unknown language; 'when shall we set off for happiness?'"
I'm down at the bus stop by the quayside. There are no passenger trains here, they have stopped going to these backwaters. This bus stop is the scene of "welcome" and "farewell" with the sea lapping and lapping against the stonework. And tugboats are moored on the other side of the dark green basin. "Make me happy".

A long queue has formed and it leads to the bus that will take us out of here. Weather-beaten after too many dives in the seedy ocean of Humanity, Martin Amis is talking to his mate about teeth, Keith and the appropriate use of adverbs. He says when you're under forty you say hello but when you're over forty you start saying goodbye. And then we're gone, in the rub of time.

Light switch, man switch

A few bent crooked pines under the gray sky. Saluting. Mother is buried in the cemetery below the hill. It is a place of dreams and reminiscences. I dreamed I met my brother in the parking lot here, he was standing well-groomed in front of a red Chevrolet. He was freed from the shackles of ailments and seemed clairvoyant, ready to go, ready to take on all the unimaginable things life throws in your way. This is the last stop before you leave the city and disappear on the small winding country roads that takes you into the coniferous forests and past patches of arable land and a couple of lonely-looking houses. "Light switch, man switch, film was broken only then". Out here you can get lost and find pleasure in it. Some kind of numbness has taken a hold of me, I wanted to say something important to you but now I just feel a diffuse emptiness. The area is somehow introverted, closed, secretive, "a murky needly catalogue of unsolved crimes" that seems to embody something from Lao Tzu, "He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know".

*