You're like a trampoline. Every time I'm down, you're so accommodating, but then you just throw me in the air again.

One careworn black-plastic hand across my face can wipe my eyelashes away, daring the combination of vulnerability and brash commercialism and breathtaking beauty and rash advances and cloying femininity and upswept education and unclean laziness and sick sweet bloody smiles and intriguing artifice and ancient promises.

Overall, it's something you want and yet something you feel deeply uncomfortable about. That's because the wanting it isn't allowed. And when I allow myself to want it so crassly, so publicly, turning my yearning into a hit-single product, you somehow feel like you've been cheated. That's okay, I need to be the only one anyway, or else no one would give me any money. So you can feel good about the repressed Puritan past of your strange uncontrolled country at odds with itself, and the way the unspoken things take over your mind and your life and your every action.

Do we talk about sex? The question becomes so much bigger than the topic. To fuck or not to fuck? Talk-show hosts could discuss it for days, but they'd never dare to define exactly what they're discussing. And meanwhile I just throw my limbs around in some padded room in the dark, hitting the wall on every beat, tossing my head until my neck breaks, trapped in a painted-on latex suit that leaves nothing to the imagination. After a while it gets assimilated, and then I move on to bigger and better things.

But for now, let's take it out on the freshly-mowed green common and defile our childhood memories. They're good for nothing else. For the set of this music video, let's use the house your grandmother died in. And if you want the spectacularly blond Swedish triplets in the gold-plated swimming pool, that'll be no problem. Halfway down the marble staircase and someone yells "Cut!" because the jealous boyfriend just got here and parked his car in Camera Two's sightline, so we've got to get someone out here stat to placate him and get rid of the eyesore. Sure, it was new and fashionable, last year.

Everything happens over yonder in the minor key, and stuff floats on the radio waves from a hundred years ago to yesterday, compressing the most exciting century like an accordion, from the unofficial dissolution of the East India Company to the drafting of Elvis. And then just long enough later that a baby could legally drink, video killed the radio star, and the age of cynicism dropped sharply, and old revolutionaries with scruffy beards were still writing campaign poetry in prison, and the internet made it all too easy, and music kept being redefined, and then you had two options: keep up and close your eyes halfway and act like you know it all, or let it blow your head away and become utterly incoherent as you submit to the blast of the future, like all the stars in the Milky Way shaken together in a midnight martini.

(Rather than try to fix the problem, just validate my feelings.)

A year ago I took some language proficiency tests and was very indignant upon seeing the results.

Now I just took some more, this time from Cactus Language tests, and the results made a lot more sense to me. My scores were:
- English: 40/40
- German: 36/40
- French: 29/40
- Italian: 22/40
- Spanish: 14/40

Now that's reasonable. I took a glance at the Dutch and Portuguese ones as well, but decided not to press my luck. If only they'd had a test for "xxxxx"... :)

If you can read French, you ought to check out this article, Confession d'un fou, about the mysterious language "xxxxx"... ;)

I don't know if it quite counts as "satire," but it's an entertaining and thought-provoking read, on a topic close to my own heart, and written by a guy who knows what he's talking about. (Please don't let his bitter tone get to you.)

The sun moves on, the day has spent its force,
Yonder it speeds, new day eliciting.
O that I am swept upward on no wing
To follow it forever in its course!
Then I would see by deathless evening rays
The silent world beneath my feet,
All valleys calmed, all mountaintops ablaze,
And silver brooks with golden rivers meet.
No mountains then would block my godlike flight
For all the chasms gashed across their ways;
And soon the sea with its warmed bays
Would open to my wondering sight.
But now the goddess seems to sink down finally;
But a new impulse wakes in me,
I hasten forth to drink her everlasting light,
With day in front of me and at my back the night,
With waves down under me and over me the sky.
A glorious dream, dreamed while the day declined.

- Faust

Someday, you will might open your eyes and realize that no, you didn't actually know the difference between "right" and "wrong," "truth" and "lies" at age twenty.

Someday, you might look back on the passionate statements you made, and cringe or frown or – best of all – just laugh at your past self.

"Like everybody else, I'm searching through what I've heard." Cat Stevens sang that in the background just as I was writing this. Aren't we all? And there's no end to it. We keep hearing new stuff for our entire lives, and if we want to be able to interact with the world around us at all, we have to sort through it all and decide what we think, what we believe, what we know and what we can never know. Let's look up the lyrics to this song and see if Cat has any other appropriate insights for me at this moment.

Man may live, man may die
Searching for the question why
But if he tries to rule the sky
He must fall.

I forgot to mention this part: many times when you're trying to be deep and explain some universal "truth," you can look back at the lyrics to some old song and see exactly the meaning you were trying to communicate, except put much more beautifully and concisely – and rhyming on top of that.

Why do I even bother? :)

I love discovering new and completely mysterious things.
Number One: numbers stations!
Number Two: who knows?

I look just like Buddy Holly.



The above picture is drawn by the miraculously hilarious beatonna, whom you all ought to know by now.

My boss is going to Copenhagen in December and might get a chance to meet Obama AAAHHHHHHHH too excited can't handle this.

Why do I still feel the need to make a disclaimer whenever I do anything that reveals the truest me?

I am an artist, and artists blindly follow a pure harsh yearning, whether towards the truth or away from it I am not sure.

If I put painful reflections of reality in my song, or if I take reality and twist it around so that the opposite thing actually happened and then I put THAT in my song instead, either way I shouldn't feel like I have to explain it.

Ars gratia artis, ars gratia artis. I repeat it to myself as I walk through the dark, hands in my pockets, feet stepping gingerly on the black wet sidewalk, hood over my head and shoulders hunched against the November night.

If I listen to music, the first song that comes on my shuffle strikes me deep like a laser of grace. "Somebody could walk into this room and say, your life is on fire / It's all over the evening news / All about the fire in your life, on the evening news..."

I don't want no part of this crazy love
I don't want no part of your love
I don't want no part of this crazy love
I don't want no part of your love

Somehow, his voice is both righteous and gentle at the same time. This is what I need.