Outside satan.

I haven’t written here in ages. If I read the previous entries I’d probably remove them but I’ll let them be for now. Inevitably most things are behind me, except the alphabet of limbs. Three drops into each ear, three times a day. I’ve got both otitis externa, inflammation of the ear canal, and otitis media, inflammation of the middle ear. I’m coughing my lungs out. There’s a war in the area between the tympanic membrane and the inner ear, including a duct known as the eustachian tube, which I think might also be a gateway to Pandæmonium or Dis. Is this really you? If you are who I think you are, how you’ve changed! Your brightness that outshined everyone is gone.

I’m practically deaf at the moment. I tried listening to music and ruined one of the speakers. I’m in a vacuum. A little small space where creatures are whispering and unknown instruments are playing.

I’m trying to tweet but can’t really get used to the format, the hysteria, the simple reason being that not much is happening, especially now when I’m sick. I’m sitting here and my mind is blank. The room has the temperature of a dead giant. I’m not miserable but I’m not catching the big fish either. I’ve got the fever of a coming summer.

End.

I’m writing mostly because I can’t let my last entry written here this time be about Terrence Malick. The fact is, however, that I’ve been engulfed in work and nothing of value has happened. Life’s been rectilinear and I’m a very dull boy. The hedgehogs are building an opium den where the opium poppies grow in our fading garden. The poppies look like stone sculptures. I posted a picture of one of them on Facebook but no one reacted. When no one reacts I have to study it again to see wtf’s wrong but intriguingly enough there’s nothing wrong with it. It was just overlooked. Why? WHY?! The waxwings are undoubtedly the dens biggest customers but soon they’ll be gone. Everyone will be gone, including us. During winter, this town descends deep below the surface, near the earth’s core.

The sea invites me to walk straight into it and disappear because it wants me here. Today I found a cross built out of driftwood on the beach; it lay in the sand without something to signify and looked misplaced so I carried it to a place in the woods where I buried a magpie a couple of weeks ago. I have vague memories of finding crosses here before but they’re probably fabricated.

It’s once again time to endure the horrors of changing milieu, of acclimatization. Stockholm obviously never feels unfamiliar to me, no matter how long I’m gone, but in a way it’s painful for me to see everything I’m so used to with new eyes. I’ll see what’s in front of me and what’s not. Inevitably most things will be behind me.

I’m writing a short film for a friend I haven’t met yet.

The new world.

Terrence Malick. While I can truly dislike his way of (in my opinion) visually overdramatizing, his constant use of voice over and the persistent christian overtone, his films always move me in silent ways. He portrays innocence and the loss of it. His directing itself comes through as incredibly innocent, with an almost childlike fascination of the world, of love, of what has been and is no more. A humility before the creation we all should have, whether we’re atheists or christians. It’s beautiful, and affecting to me mainly because I think of my own shortcomings (yes, it’s always about me); I think of the time when I viewed the world in the same way and why I’ve since almost lost the ability. Almost because it comes back to me when it’s never expected. I do long to return to a time, or more preferably a state in present time, where everything I see isn’t filtered through a dirty window, where I don’t feel the constant need to defend/despise myself and where I can’t see through the vessel I claim to be me because it’s still genuine. Ok now I’m about as dramatic as Malick but that’s what I feel. Nighty night.

Undertow.

Last days of October. My sister’s birthday. My last week here. Melancholia, fear, excitement. I’m not well but I need to go back now, otherwise I’ll get too used to the isolation, make it my normality and then get caught in it. To some degree, I already have. My sister’s in Paris. She showed me the Parisian backyard of her hotel this morning when we skyped. There was a dog there. Most likely a French dog. I yelled hello and it barked once.

Today on my one hour run I went exploring where I haven’t been before. I found an area with grand villas by the sea. In one of the gardens I saw a man with a leaf blower. I yelled hello and he barked once. Then I saw a dead eider.

I’m neglecting my work. I’m bored. I’m terrified. I was not born in Reykjavik.

Status quo.

Ok so I’ve stirred things up. I’ve challenged the status quo. I accidentally (yes, really) read a very dispiriting letter from my father to my mother and consequently sent them a letter where I write they might as well get divorced instead of continuing like this, where I say this family more and more feels like a black hole I need to get away from not to drown. Where I finally acknowledge that I think they’re spreading so much negative energy and that it’s such a waste. So pointless. Everything I’ve been wanting to say is in that letter, because it’s time to confront, because time is running out for them in a much higher degree than for me. In this situation change is always positive, whatever it might be. I tell them that in resolute honesty. I have to, since they’re not going to bring it up. They’d probably rather die miserable than bring it up. I don’t know how it came to this but it ends here and something new begins, for them and for me.

5:11pm

Many dislike Sleeping beauty. They say it has no plot. I think it’s brilliant and brave. Emily Browning is a revelation. Fearless.

Strike a match.

If you lit a match in zero gravity, would it smother in its own smoke? I went down to the beach, it was pitch black, and someone lit a match by the horizon. A massive match. For a brief moment there was daylight. A red luminous ball of plasma. A star. White phosphorus turning red, then crystallizing. The crystallized mass, now a distorted snowflake, a collapsing cloud, then fell into the ocean, still shining underwater but disappearing. Maybe this was a piece of HE 1523-0901, a red giant star located in the Milky Way, approximately seven and a half light-millennia from us, the oldest object yet discovered. Nearly as old as the estimated age of the universe itself (13.7 billion years).

“It is believed to have formed directly from the remnants of the first-generation stars that reached the end of their longevity and exploded as supernovae early in the history of known matter.”

In other words, a piece of what others would call God. We all know worlds meet and collapse at night.

9.28pm

One of those slightly surreal days today. On my run, furthest out by the barbed wire fence, a little girl was hiding among the dunes. She might have been five or six and her face was pale and her expression playful in a very peculiar, almost uncanny way. She followed me and let out high pitched shrieks that somehow reminded me of a deer, every time hiding behind a dune. At first I thought she was alone out there since I didn’t see anyone else and I started thinking about the child demon in Hour of the wolf but then her parents came out from the woods, both dressed in alarmingly red overalls.

By the end of the beach on my second round a middle aged man was flying a RC plane, the transmitter amusingly huge in his small hands. He guided the plane to fly beside me for a while and I, feeling like an awkward version of Dale Cooper, gave him thumbs up. He said something in russian and then started to laugh so piercingly it was probably heard all the way to The Kremlin. I’m not sure why.