60° 10′ 15″ N, 24° 56′ 15″ E

3/9/2008, 
7:30 a.m.
00500, #3 FLR.

+15 °C, 6 m/s, 69 %.
40 000 RPM, 3 min.
88,6 MHz. 128 BPM.

0,4l, 2–3 tsp., 80 °C, 3 min.
(+310 kCal.)
75B, 36–38, 28, 56 kg. 37.

Max. 3 pers., 240 kg, 1,6m/s; #1 FLR.
3. A1, 16355, 2,00€. 17 min, 3,4 km.

00180.
1,9 m/s; #7 FLR.
8:10 a.m. +3,15 h.

121 KB/s.

10:30 a.m. 15 min. (+240 kCal.)

050 088 598.

12:15 p.m.
1,9 m/s; #1 FLR.
8,90€, 3536. 45 min. (+658 kCal.)
1,9 m/s; #7 FLR.

050 088 598.

4:32 p.m. +3,35 h.
1,9 m/s; #1 FLR.

050 088 598.

0,3 km. 65A, 2,80€. 12 min, 2,6 km.

00500.
25A, 1,6 m/s; #3 FLR. 92.

050 088 598,
050 088 598,
050 088 598!

…

050 088 598?               

5:02 p.m.
1,6 m/s; #1 FLR.

5,7 km, 32 min; 145– 167 BPM. (–334 kCal.)
0,33 l, 4,7 % vol., 4,50€, 3536. 30 min. (+132 kcal.)

6:13 p.m.
1,6 m/s; #3 FLR.
(+1235 kCal.)

0,4l, 2–3 tsp., 90 °C, 3 min.

050 088 598...

1, 3, 2, 1, 2, 1.
9:05 p.m. MTV3: 2046. 129 min. 7.4/10.
16 cl, 13 % vol.
(254 kCal.)

11:30 p.m: 7,5 h.

4/9/2008.
:||
∞

THE DRUNKEN ELK

We do what we must to keep life interesting.

A typical night out on the forest, I was lurking lazily in the cliché sunset searching for my delicious autumn treat: apples. This fruit is nice and mature after summer, with a noble taste of rot and an appropriate smell of shit not quite appreciated by the masses.

I had my dose of apples, and one thing led to another, one unstable hoof in front of the other. I ended up alone and bitter, stuck at an afterparty the shape of an asshole. I was rather drunk, but instinct convinced me there was even more booze to be consumed at this sorrowful sight. Nobody else was there to do the job, so I took the offer. ”Säkert,” I thought. ”Skål!”

I did feel the subsrcibed stomach ache accurately arriving and telling me to get out, but I couldn't really move. Bored,  I OD'd. I climbed even higher into the party venue, an ancient apple tree that reached the sky.

I passed out with some random stick tickling my private parts and woke up with my raisin eyes all dried up and my sweaty body shaking like a bad egg dough still in the mixer. I honestly thought I'd climbed a long way last night, but now find myself almost on the ground. I am stuck, but not in the sky; in something that only just qualifies as a bush. With Beethoven's Sonata No. 8 playing repeatedly in my sore head, I am currently in the process of welcoming the familiar cocktail of sticky post-nutrition making its way, with pressure, out of my battered figure.

Still, it was fun.

Please also read the true story of the drunken Swedish elk. 

FLOWER POWER

The lily is a crystallization of mass 

production, but extremely difficult to hate.

 

Someone who buys flowers, be it for themselves, the hurt girlfriend, the dead grandmother or the bloody newborn, is a nice person. A good person. He brings colour and joy to others, he brings summer into winter. Put a bottle of wine on the side, and you are the closest you can get to being an angel.

But the business side of the Flower is blossoming, and flowers are a huge fucking business. The flower auction in The Netherlands is organized daily in the fourth largest building in the world. A vast amount of all of the world's commercial flowers travel through it. Sweaty, stressed wholesalers bid on the most innocent and delicate individuals, which, with their divine buds still closed, are brought onto the stage for examination and flown around the world to your local florist.

These symbols of freedom, then sold as joy and goodness, have built themselves an intelligent shield against any accusations of being a commodity like anything else – a waste of money and the environment. In their soft petals and seductive scent lives a perfect veil of evil.

(Just a thought. We are not willing to give up our regular rose dose either.)

NONSENSES

The introduction of an article is a tool,
a means of helping the reader form a general idea 

and attitude towards the body text.

Waking up, I check the time to see if I am still tired. I've slept for eight hours. I am ready to rise, says the clock.


I feel cold, so I check the thermometer to see if I really am.

I feel a bit sick, so I take my temperature to find out if I am imagining it.

I am hungry; I cook some eggs and set the timer to five minutes. The eggs do not taste normal, so I check the date on the box to see if they actually taste bad. Apparently they do not.

I watch a film. I am not sure what to think, so I read reviews online to form my opinion.

I buy tickets to a concert, where I will observe others' reactions to decide whether I like it or not.

I listen to some music. It seems too loud. I check the settings on the speakers. It is not.

I weigh myself. I feel good, but the scale tells me I am too big.

It is snowing horizontally, but I have to take the car to the supermarket. I cannot see, but I drive at 120 km per hour since that is the speed limit.

My GPS tells me to take a left turn ”now”. I feel like I should go in the other direction, but I turn, nevertheless, and get lost.

I drive around looking for familiar corners, but soon the light on my petrol gauge tells me I cannot drive for long.

I leave my car and come across an enchanting landscape. I pick up my camera and concentrate on taking a photo of the view. This way I will know later on in life that I was there, then.

I need to cross the street. There is not a single car anywhere, but I only trust the traffic lights and wait for green.

I take the train. When it stops, the sign at the station says Amsterdam, but the announcement says Rotterdam.

ON MAIL DELIVERY

Having delivered mail for 

a few weeks, I find myself 

feeling deep affection for letter boxes

and wanting to push things into them.

 

Letter boxes come in different sizes and degrees of tightness, as do the letters that they devour. An ideal combination for a mailman is a hard, heavy piece of mail and a mature letter hole, one whose cover is not too tight but not entirely loose yet either. In this case, the mail can easily be delivered with one hand, the right hand, which makes things quicker since the left arm is holding the pile of undelivered letters.

Trying to push a small, soft letter into a tight box is the worst. It requires two hands, one for opening the slot and one for placing the item inside, and can be painful, because the delivering hand often gets stuck under the stiff cover. These situations give me cuts on my fingers and make the process slow and complicated. Whenever I find myself holding a hopelessly flabby letter, I hope that the previous penetrator has accidentally left the target hole open.

Rubber bands for binding the stacks of mail

Mail and boxes

Delivery bag

These boots are made for mail delivery

Please think about your mailman – take care of your letter box!

THE PIANIST'S FINGERS

The pianist needs a hand 
more than most of us.


The pianist walked with disturbingly long strides and had a strange snap in his left knee every time he bent that leg: it was his fingerprint, it actually gave rhythm to his piano music as he pushed the pedals, they said. Each evening, he determinedly made his way to the National Opera, the architectural monster, which often hosted grand performances. He, however, did not play for these extravaganzas, but instead for the small piggy girls practicing their pliés and échappés in the uglier part of the horrendous yet glorified building.

On this day, he once again obscurely entered the rehearsal room and sat down quietly on the familiar stool in front of the black, shiny piano, the opposite in its appearance of him, the pale pianist in his worn-out greyish suit. As always, he tapped the cover three times before opening it and unveiling the beautiful keyboard. He took his fingers along the black and white keys and tried to deeply feel the instrument, his love affair for more than 20 years.

The pianist was a timid man in his thirties. He had an exceptionally boring face, not a pianist's face at all, which he had tried to lighten up the previous evening with a few drinks. His playing had lately worsened alarmingly, and he, with strong defence mechanisms, had concluded that the reason was his recent birthday: age was making his fingers stiff and numb. In a desperate attempt to stop time, the pianist had taken several sips, perhaps even glasses, of old absinthe in his dusty, dark attic room.  For that night, he had forgotten the growing pain in his limbs and enjoyed the unexpected pleasure of not being able to play properly.

The hungover pianist now bent his arms backwards and forwards and stretched. And, like so many times in the past three weeks, he felt a strange tingle between his fingers, in that small bit of skin that ties them together and keeps them from spreading out all over the place. The round girls in their white leotards took their positions next to the ballet bar. The teacher's indifferent hand gave the pianist a sign: begin, please. For a quarter of an hour everything went rather well – he was able to forget the pain, you could even say he played with ease, passion and confidence.

Unsurprisingly, disaster struck soon. Mistake after mistake after mistake after clumsy mistake! The pianist just couldn't order his lifeless hands to find the sharps and flats on the keyboard. The girls had to stop, they had to start their movements over again every time the pianist played a wrong note or rhythm and interrupted their développés, their awful arabesques and graceless fondues. At first he made a pathetic attempt to cover up with an awkward laughter. Next, he tried extremely hard to gather himself and concentrate, but it went from bad to worse. In his pain and embarrassment, even the simplest chords were impossible.

And so the pianist finally took a closer look at his hands, something he had been avoiding for as long as possible. Surely this kind of pain was not normal for his age, he now thought.

He lowered his heavy head, and in this bright light, in this terrible moment, he immediately noticed what was happening to him. Deep down he had known it for some weeks, but it hadn't been apparent until now. The skin between his fingers had begun to grow towards his fingertips, and now almost reached the first joint on each finger. It squeezed his hands into an uncomfortably curved shape and tightened the sore fingers together. Oh dear, the fragile, almost see through skin was growing quickly and visibly. 

The shocked, web-handed pianist collected his sheets, cigarettes, gloves and coat and quickly began to make his way home. Snap, snap, snap, said his knee, as he left the grand instrument, the long-legged teacher and her piglets forever. He falsely imagined them missing him deeply.

PLAY – ORGANIZED AND ORDERLY

Play is practice. 

Play is simulation. 

It aptly activates children's brains, 

but it is not innocent.

 
Games, toys and children's equipment are designed to incorporate and promote certain skills. The little girl nurtures her piece of plastic and dresses it in pink, while the child in blue is caught up in a simulation of war or the act of driving his 3-inch metal car.
 
Fortunately, gender-neutral modes of play do exist, too. The outdoor playground, with its jungle gyms and monkey bars, originates from Germany and is in use worldwide today. The playground is, ultimately, a version of the man-made park: nature reconstructed in city space, tamed, shrunk and adapted to the needs of us humans. It is safe and restricted, usually fenced and physically differentiated from other public spaces. In all its ostensible freedom and good-willed simulations of nature, it is still a venue of control.

When childhood is understood as a passing chapter in life, it is appropriate to shove this short, mental play phase into physical areas of acting out needs and developments necessary for leading a successful life. Let us cage and control the conformist little monkeys! Let's program them to learn how to climb an aluminium igloo in the city centre, to try rock climbing on an apathetic mini mountain made of small square stones. Most importantly, let us Keep An Eye On Them.

”City streets are unsatisfactory playgrounds for children because of the danger, because most good games are against the law, because they are too hot in summer, and because in crowded sections of the city they are apt to be schools of crime.” (Theodore Roosevelt, 1907.)

Play, isolated and categorized like this, is sadly separated from adulthood and from inspiring public spaces not designed exclusively for it. Thus, play is accidentally deprived of important forms of freedom and healthy anarchy. It begins to lack life. 

Amsterdam 2011

Amsterdam 2011

Helsinki 2011

Amsterdam 2011

THE STORY OF JARHEAD BEAR – part 6 of 6

This is the sixth and final part of
the story. If you are joining us now,
you can read the previous parts starting here. 

 

Passing days bring along more long hours of exhausting examination of others, who are seemingly
living a better life. An unclear, incoherent viewpoint. One angle, no escape. Turning its head hurts as the jar's plastic edge rubs the bear's skinny neck.

Jarhead Bear realizes a new threat, which replaces the now dead mosquito as its main point of hallucinatory focus. A couple of vertical, two legged, oddly moving huntsmen appear to be chasing it, they are trying to disorientate mother, trying to catch the whole crew. Strangely enough, they are not shooting, just appearing in sight every now and then.

Could they help?

But Jarhead Bear knows no other way than to stay in the only world it has come to recognize in the past weeks – the foggy, reeking jar. It will continue to run away from its possible rescue and follow the leader, even without an ounce of genuine will to do so.

This story was inspired by experiences

of office work and the true story of 'jarhead' bear. 

THE END

THE STORY OF JARHEAD BEAR – part 5 of 6

This is the fifth part of
the story. If you are joining us now,
you can read the previous parts starting here. 

Jarhead Bear, desperate and unbearably thirsty, has now been trapped in its plastic prison for a dozen days. If only it were able drink the raindrops that draw a dotted sheet on the wrong side of the jar. Since there are no more recognizable smells of food, the cub's sense of hunger is beginning to wear off at the same pace as its last bits of energy. The jar only inhabits a reek of the bear's own, quiet breath, elevating from the depths of its empty stomach.

When things seem so unfortunate that they cannot get any worse, Jarhead Bear gets an unwelcome visitor. A demonic mosquito, complaining at the top of its tiny yet intolerable voice, finds its way into the cub's container home. This new, uncomfortably lively friend troubles its tired ears and eyes all day and night.

Wandering far behind its crew, the travels of our distressed bear have become agonizing. From its jar filled with the most horrible of sounds, Jarhead Bear stares at the blurry image of its mother, teaching the other cub to find and eat berries, those treasures of the green ground so unreachable from behind the stinky obstacle of life which once was the greatest pleasure of all.

Continue to the final part...