Secluded Alley

The secluded back alley was a training ground farfetched from the previous training grounds on which he's spent hours on. But the game was adaptability; and being able to use any strange space, and integrate its idiosyncrasies into a training regime, which would ultimately attain an improvement in an aspect of the game, un-trainable for most, was the beauty of it all. The secluded back alley was like an traffic-stripped T-junction, parts were rocky, parts were smooth, parts were sunny, parts were shaded, parts were covered with smashed glass from a group of drunk dickheads from the night before who had parked their car in the back-streets of Newtown but had then gotten lost. There was a wall.

He would train their almost each day. Starting slowly in a hoodie, but often ending half naked because of the drenching nature of the sweat. Many people would pass by him and he'd usually just try to ignore them as if embarrassed by the skill he was producing. The routine was usually similar almost each day. There was one lady that passed by, on the way to drop her daughter off, who he talked to on an almost regular basis. The techniques were practiced in 20s. Often cars would begin to drive into the secluded back alley - the secluded back alley couldn't accommodate both him and a car - and he would meander effortlessly into whatever crevice he could find, allowing the car to pass without giving it a look, but all the while wondering if the people within were particularly impressed by the last technique he'd produced. The lady would walk past after picking up her child from day-care.

One windy day in the secluded back alley he wasn't feeling well. He was thinking too much. Past mistakes flooded his mind, as the notion of confidence began to overwhelm him. Das Selbstvertrauen. And he started to think horrible thoughts. But they felt so real. Maybe he should just give up. Just quit the game now. He'd has some nice moments, he'd had so many bad ones as well. And sometimes, especially after the last year or so, he just felt like the bad ones were starting to take over in a malignant spiral which would lead to a putrid hate and eventual bitterness. Maybe quitting now was just the best thing to do, he could go out, not on a high, but at least not too far off the back of something that maybe he hadn't pictured as being his high, but could nonetheless suffice. The ball bounced away from him and into the gutter. He walked over to it, picked it up and stopped training.

The next day he walked outside with a hoodie on. It wasn't long before he was warm and just in a t-shirt. He felt good and he liked the way he played, his technique, he thought »Who else can do this?« and began to believe in a sense of arrogance that he had hyped; an arrogance that was so necessary to believe in.

Artistic Dilemmas #37

I'm sitting here watching Control for the second time, finally. I haven't really sat down and viddied a good film for a while. Well no, that's a lie. But still, truth be told, I haven't watched as many as I'd like to have. Not nearly. But what can I say? What can I do? There's just not enough time. I got the chance to read about Henry Darger a few days ago but still haven't gotten to a long list of others that I wish I would, Søren Kierkegaard's waiting. I find myself trying to plow through this amazing book, Heaven is a Playground, coz I just got my hands on a spanish copy of Hopscotch, La Rayuela. There's too much music that I can't hear enough of - speaking of Control, I haven't listened to Joy Division a quarter as much as I should have - how do I pick? Even now, I'm multi-tasking, writing whilst watching, and still there's an unlearned language waiting. And soon it all swirls into one big cyclone; writing, reading, watching, listening, learning... and it's as if I can only choose one.

Out of Chaos

Chaos is the precursor to...
Chaos is the precursor to...
Chaos is the precursor to...
Chaos is the precursor to.
The Sydney summer was about to set in, you could feel that, but it was pissing down with rain on this particular weekend. Possibly an omen? Who knows, but definitely a shortcut to a reclusive weekend.

The letter came in the form of a surprise, as if a piece of junk mail claiming you've won a million dollars materialised and inside sat the million dollars in cold, hard cash. Only this wasn't a million dollars, this was a summons for cash, for an absurd amount. And mid-way through a conversation his jaw dropped and completely losing interest, but being obliged to stay and listen when all he wanted to do was read that letter. Money is only money, but fuck. Maybe the showing was bad, who knows either way the receiving of this letter now and then was a crashing back into society of sorts.

So on this weekend, when he probably should have been out getting drunk after 3 social-interaction-less weeks, it was all to easy to melt into the couch and just read:

Cruyff didn't talk about abstract space but about specific, detailed spatial relations on the field. Indeed the most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing. 'No, not there, back a little... forward two metres... four metres more to the left.' He seemed like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra. It was as if Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realise an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered.

The head space he was inhabiting was incredible. One of complete indifference to an outer world he'd been secretly yearning to see again. It was as if nothing meant anything now in comparison to one piece of art. He packed his things and headed back over to the suburbs for a nice few days with the mum and the dog. They were both pleased to see him. If there was a place to be indifferent and reclusive, maybe it was better to spend some quality time with the familia.

Still a confrontation was always necessary and inevitable. Something like Saul Williams said, out of chaos comes order, but will order come from this current chaos?

The Space

THE SPACE IS a football field and sometimes balls get lost in its infinite crevices. It's not uncommon that I spend a few minutes inspecting the room for my ball. She says just use one of the other ones, but I wish it were that simple. Each ball has it's own personality and some will work in certain scenes, some wont. The space is great when it's filled with music and it becomes some sort of jungle, with balls beginning to create their own simultaneous rhythms that may or may not keep pace with the track on the radio, cd, ipod or computer.

The space is a football field and you could trip over at any minute; bicycles, underwear, clothes and cables subtly forge opposition players' feet. But likewise they act as a team-mates comforting shoulder to rest upon. At night there's a dog that only barks when you're having trouble getting to sleep and you wonder what the fuck a dog is doing in the fucking business district of Bankstown, then you remember a set of apartments is being built round every street corner and there's one staring at you straight through that window.

People talk about mice, but the truth is there are no mice on the football field. People talk and ask about the place being cold, but the truth is, you're never cold on the football field. But regardless, you always need to find that ball.

Escape this infinite Absurdity

The space was bare and the water from the first shower was cold, how could it have been anything else? It was scary just how much this reminded him of Germany. The loneliness, the eeriness. But there was no doubt something totally different, something ganz anderes. Everyone seemed to think he was mad for living in the space, but he didn't understand. If only they'd seen the place's he'd slept in before. That beach in Cadiz was easily the worst of them all, but airports in Paris, Barcelona and Copenhagen weren't shabby, except for the uncomfortable, anti-sleep chairs, then there was the little Hyundi Excel which had served him quite well, amazing in its multitude of sleeping position options and of course the various buses he'd specifically boarded, knowing that the cushioned seat and nice scenery provided ample bedding.

In Saaldorf, he'd awoken at 4 in the morning to a fit of sneezing and had realised then and there as his vision panned the Christ ornamented bedroom. With an energy that surpassed that of 4 in the morning he searched out a vacuum cleaner and began relentlessly cleaning the room. But he'd take joyful moments to remember what Oliveira had said, 'only by living absurdly can we escape this infinite absurdity,' alles klar.

Romantically Wandering Wieder

The decision to start, wieder, blogging again wasn't at all instantaneous. It wasn't the type of decision made with the finality of turning the cold water off whilst in the shower. It was, rather, a decision only arrived at after much deliberation, coincidentally much of this deliberation was done with the thought provoking patter of water droplets in the shower, all the while wishing that it could be glorified as a decision of finality, alas realising that that was hardly real and then re-affirming that it really all had to be done, whilst overhearing mundane friendly chit-chat from down the hallway, sickening in its politeness, which inspired reason to write. An attempt to avoid that disgusting formality or maybe just seizing an opportunity to portray a scene.

Why had a blog suddenly become of such relevance, wieder, to him again? He hated the fact that he actually found pleasure in the process of blogging. It didn't at all fit in with his romanticised view of how cosas should be carried out in life, yet it was so pertinent. Perhaps it had all merely started as a brief attempt at connecting friends whilst travelling. Definitely it had transformed into something more than that. A way of life, a necessity, an addiction, a phenomenon that consumed the every-day journal/diary process and fed hungrily from the likes of Kerouac and Cortázar, that made sense of the surrounding craziness, that glorified the surrounding mundaneness, and suddenly you'd find yourself actually having to stop yourself from asking the Zebhausers to use the internet and fervently posting just another quick blog. So, why then did a return to familiar territory and familiar faces encompass a halt to the whole damn thing? Especially when he'd told Ozzie that he was gonna fuckin' keep bloggin' even when he got home and why should that change anything, hombre? Maybe it was the fact that he'd unequivocally left that familiarity again, a notion that had settled and then bubbled within him before settling again many times. If that was so, it would be sad.

It was zwar etwas anderes. Something different aside from trends and self-consciousness in the public eye. It was the romantic wanderer within him. The romantic wanderer that would search for free-volunteer work in Brazil and Sri Lanka. 'Free Volunteer' work, now wasn't that something. He couldn't even muster a chuckle at the absurdity of the term's existence. He thought that he, she or it's - the romantic wanderer that is - existence had been dispelled with the final jump of Hopscotch through La Rayuela. He'd dispelled the romantic wanderer when he'd decided, and even stated, that he was going to bleibe in Australia, for at least a few years to come, hadn't he? How fucking typical that after barely 2 weeks of down-time, when the mind is allowed to wander, he was already beginning to lose previously vested faith and even considering travelling, wieder, with a romantic wanderer again.