Thin ice

Now that I'd seen that fly on the window sill, and have jotted down and uploaded that short zen-like thing, you might even think that this is the long version of it. At least it hit me now, as I've just done it.

Anyhow, the story that I've kept here for a while is about this burger place owner who said about a little guy, that was going around and talking to everyone and anyone there while waiting with his Mom to get the food, that he'd be living even on thin ice. He will yet find a pretty girl and then he'll be able to live under any circumstances.

Well, right here I don't want to go into details why the owner felt like adding that last part, as he also had a girl behind the counter, and another one in the kitchen, and who knows how many others at different places there or other places in his life. If you see what I mean, who makes the living for whom, after all.

The way I see it, the problem is not that people are not able to survive. They do try, and rather hard also. The problem is that they're systematically being robbed of all their chances, no matter what and how hard they try. While others use that situation for their advantage. And this has nothing to do with making your living even under hard conditions. This is but the total contrary of live and let others live. That's what it is. But now that I started, let me take it somewhat further.

It's not like we have to help ourselves and the rest have to get on themselves. And then we can quote one of those hundreds of good sounding, but basically absolutely unhelpful slogans to try and prove that it's all your fault if you're not able to get above the system that you're just as much a part of as anyone else around you.

The system was NOT made for YOU to succeed. Even if you made it, and think you're finally there. No, that only means you gave in. But it's neither like if you can't help me, then you rather try to fix your own problems first, because unless you can do that, you can't help me either.

Until we don't change the very world we have created for ourselves, there's no possible way to get out of our misery, exactly because there's a natural way how the real world that we're living in, can survive. And no matter how much we're trying to prove that it can exist also otherwise, and even better with our "help" - which is only disturbance and nuance to it, that it has never asked for -, there's only one way to live together.

And that is not a hidden mistery or something like that. You don't even have to have a university degree to understand it. Just use your own intelligence born with you, right in order to survive. And this is also something that we have been robbed of so long and so purposefully by this consumer world and all of its lies: our own common sense.

That's how we can be turned against each other, when we're successfully convinced by the profit-makers that we cannot live without their toys, and that we have to serve their system to make our own living. Which basically means that we give even that little money back to them again and again, so it will never be ours. Simply because it does not exist, not in their hands, and not in ours; it's only a game, and a self-distructing one. As you can see that so well from examples like the so-called economical crisis.

Co-existing can be reached and kept up first of all, by accepting and respecting each other as people, by understanding we are all the same, regardless sex, color, nationality, religion, and all these things we ourselves started to use and abuse so effectively, but only to result in the sorrow world we're living and suffering in. And yet we're still trying to blame it on each other, instead of starting to change it together.

Do you think it is really shocking that Grace Jones is dancing naked on the open scene? She's been doing that for so long, maybe only in little clubs and not on huge stages. And why, there are so very many women who can (nearly) only make their living this way, even if they're as intelligent as her. Simply because this is one of the consequences of the rules we've set up for our own little world on this planet.

For the very same reason I don't support today's superficial gay movements, and especially not their parades at all. Making whores out of men wouldn't help it all. How can you ask for respect, or even being accepted when you shake your butts naked in public? Sexuality, and private life, as also its name suggests is for our own and only our discreet personal relationships, and no-one else has anything to do with them.

To make it public, or as they like to put it, to come out, is to let yourself get all confused and everyone else, too, about reality. Which is that it is your own life, and exactly this part of it has nothing to do with anyone else in the world, but your lovers and you. Exactly as you usually don't talk in public about your close friends and what you're doing in your private time. Or if you do, then it's definitely not private at all, but a superficial something to show that you have that, too, like everyone else, so you fit in, and now you also follow the rules.

You know what it means to make your private life public? It's nothing else but to let yourself being robbed of your personality, and to make you being controllable and giving up yourself completely to those who couldn't get this close to you before the time of the so-called social forums (like this one, for example).

Don't you think there is a connection between everything? Even when the knob on your chest's drawer falls off again, and you think how much you paid for it to get it fixed, or for the new one, or anything else, to that matter. It all comes to one thing: profit versus us. Either way you go, until you take part in this, you follow their rules.

We are not machines, but we have needs like them, and we have to be maintained like them. But it seemed that we were less easy to be ruled than them, so the industrialisation started. And then the age of computers, and so the mainstream use of computers with human work force. Simply because this seems to be the easiest way to make more profit with less expence, investment and effort.

Most people would after all give up anyone else around them, simply to avoid experiencing the same. As if that really means they prevent anything by doing so. On the contrary, they only support the rules of those who try to use us as mindless and soulless machines, or only figments of them.

It is definitely not an achievement, and it is not the future, I hope. Do YOU want a future where you're a mere cogwheel, and are even supposed to be proud of it, to serve a self-destroying system that destroys you and even the very hope of a liveable future? How far we can go on like this, living up all the natural resources of this world, including oil, coal, and minerals, without replacing them, so that we support the balance where we took them from? And at the same time we're using up our very selves, instead of relying on the natural balance and our common sense to live together with our environment and each other without killing everything and everyone, as proud and important ones.

Yes, it can still go on for a while, and the numbers only matters for those who make profit of it. But also for them only until they will have to face that from nothing there is nothing they can gain. However the order has to be maintained, if not naturally then artificially; either with dictatorship and wars, or with commercialism and loans.

People like me who used to spend a bit more time thinking, and when they come to some conclusions they share it with others in this or that way, used to be called thinkers or philosophers. Have you heard that word about someone recently? I haven't, for sure. The only word I've heard: "Do as you're told!" and also, in a not so hidden way: "And shut the fuck up! Don't think we're interested in your opinion" Now, there's your brave new and tediously sick world.

These days if someone is thinking, they're looked upon as useless folk, as dreamers and idealists. Well, not only today, I know that. And we even have funny expressions to show that philosophising about something leads only to nothing. No, and you know why? Because until something is done about it, it only stays ideas, and not actions: that simple.

But I'll never stay out and tell anything like this in Hyde Park, or spread it in secret like Goldstein, so no-one will really know whether I exist or not. And that is because I know very well that unless someone comes to this conclusion, I or anyone else can tell whatever they like, there will be no effect on others. And you have a great one.

balance

the little fly is warming itself in the sun
the sun so mighty does not care about it
it does not ask for money in return
and does not want to destroy the fly for it

they fulfill their purpose in this life
they don't want to change this world
and that is exactly why they can live in it
to their fullness, and not care about it

my ideals

Instead of arranging huge international sport events - yes, I mean the olympic games, and football championships, for instance - we could help people right there where's a war.

And I don't mean flying over and bombing. Do you think it really helps them? Would you want that were you in their place?

I just can't see the world as a whole, and absolutely not as modern, when exactly those who have the money and the power to help those who suffer, use these things to gain more of them, and to turn people's attention away from important things.

But we all know this, and yet we think it's more interesting to watch it on teevee and important and glorious to partake in these games. And how long we want to pretend to be children who put games ahead of reality?

Let the children be children while they can and if they can, instead of stealing their childhood and turning them into precocious and overdriven little adults. And let's see the real needs, and what we can do to help them.

our world view reviewed

Do you really think there's a Catholic, a Lutheran, or to that matter a Jewish or a Muslim god? Do you think we can take the Creator apart?

Look at creation. Do you see any labels there? It's only in our heads. For a while we were able to live as part of our environment or just didn't have enough tools to tear it all apart.

We still don't want to see what we're doing. Too much blinded by pride, and fooling ourselves that we need all what we've created at all price. What's it going to be worth when there's no more playground that we left for ourselves?

We're not the masters of this universe. In fact, we're far from being our own masters. We can't save ourselves, we can't even behave ourselves. But we can always pretend. Good luck.

Don't worry, be yourself

In my early twenties I used to make my own jewellery, and buy cheap seventies retro clothes in second-hand shops, because back then this was not so chic that you could get it prefabricated in chain shops. And first of all simply because I loved some people's style, and wanted to look like them.

But also I was never afraid to behave how I felt, and say what I was thinking. I probably didn't lie more in my life than I could count on my hands, and also then only to avoid to hurt someone unneccesarily. And I'm not saying this to sound like I'm a saint or something like that. Simply this was and still is the easiest and most natural way for me to be(have).

So it can surprise me more than many other things (for instance direct lies on the news, as I know it's all politics) when I hear my boss tell me on one of these putrific one-on-one meetings (as even its name suggests it) about the team I'm working with: "Well, you're all strong personalities, yet you work together pretty well."

This together with the problem that after my 3-month probation time I yet haven't reached the 99.5% accuracy rate. To which I pointed out that each month I enter more and more orders, not 5 or 10 more, but hundreds, and make less and less mistakes (like from 10 down to 5). But, obviously statistics rule.

And so I wonder, how she really meant that comment, and why she brought it up exactly now, because, believe me she's trying to be a foxy player, but to me it's quite easy to see through this bullshitting. Yes, we have personalities, and don't become robots at work either, even if the work itself is robotic. When that becomes a problem, the world is soon over, I'm telling you that.

The spot

The spot was turning, moving, changing slowly
The spot looked almost like a flower only
The spot suddenly took to wings and disappeared
So it was a bug and not a banshee as I feared

I think, therefore I am...

not employed by a Shared Service Center. One day I'm going to write that book. Until then here's another story from my personal experiences while working for such places.

What can motivate one to go to work each morning more than statistics? And then especially the kind that takes everything into consideration, except that it is about a human being, and not a machine. 

I mean when you have to register orders with 99.5% accuracy while at the same time you cannot communicate directly with the customers, neither the salesmen - though you have to read their often incomprehensible emails to do your job -, instead you have to ask the so-called local team to contact them to find out what they really want, but at the same time your employers prefer you to work with as few cases sent back with questions as possible...???

And then you get a complaint for everything, even if you asked and the local team simply forgot to inform the customer that you'd fixed the mistake, and anyhow it happened before the goods they'd ordered left the warehouse, and they got all the correct documentation with them.

Or if you correct a mistyping because the salesman sends a mail asking for it, but since you didn't notice it yourself, it counts as a mistake... And how many times the salesmen write I made a mistake, correct it. The customer receives a notification about those cases, too, as soon as I put the order in the system. Who's to blame then?

And so on, and so forth... It all reminds me of this fantastic and sad sad story from the pen of one of our most famous author, called The Tragedy of Man, and about the scene in the (maybe not so far) future when everyone lives in a phalanstery, and makes the exact same kind of products in the exact same kind of fashion, exactly as they are told. And when the re-incarnation of Michelangelo carves a nicer chair leg than he's supposed to, they punish him for it.

Actually, to me the future seems even worse. When all of us are worn to the last in our nerves, both physically and mentally, and there are no more cheaper countries to move these jobs to, then it will be completely automatized, and we'll become useless and die abandoned of our very selves. Cheers man.

The bird's song

I have wings on the left and on the right
I have also far extremes on both sides
And I can fly high up in the sky
But to drop a bomb, that wouldn't I

Yet you run like hell when I drop on you
Still you're running into your own doom
Blindfold and ignorant, hateful and arrogant
Instead do something else, something that really helps

talk to me

Jeez, I love so much writing, simply writing. Only to express myself. With no need to meet any expectations. It's so great not to write for any publishers, but to myself. And whoever reads it, and then if they feel something because of that, either good or bad, then it fulfilled another purpose, I guess.

And though I try my best to say things as clear as possible, I do it only because I want to be clear, first of all, to myself. I love language, no matter which one, as fragile as it is with its thousands rules we made up during thousands of years, our vague attempt to communicate the impossible - feelings, dreams, all the things we feel and the things they make us feel as a response.

People can be very funny when they try to blame misunderstandings on language barriers, and not high enough level of a certain knowledge. There are things in everyday life we won't ever be able to explain to each other exactly the way we perceive them. Because it's impossible without seeing each other's mind.

on the verge

I recall sitting on the window ledge of our fifth floor flat as a teenager. I dont think I wanted to jump. But I was wondering how it might have felt falling in reality. I guess I was falling emotionally. I didn't feel safe in a long while. So I might have gotten used to that condition not to worry about how it would be if I did jump.

Something that hits me now, after all these years, is that though plenty of people could see me from the five-story block on the opposite side, no-one called the police or the fire department. Anyhow, my Mom came home and asked me what I was doing there, and if I could close the window from the inside, as it was rather cold out there. I'm sure happy it was she who discovered me, and so there was no furhter ado about it.

What this memory makes me wonder about is that it is really the arrival of freedom that creates the vacuum. Because something was certainly pulling me down into the abyss. Was it too hard for me to comprehend independency, was it the fear of it, loneliness or something else? Maybe a wound I didn't yet know how to let bleed in a way so that I can survive it? I lost many of the closest people around me for different reasons by that time. And I'd seen many of them losing others.

It was no war time. Or rather the war was going on inside the society. Just like now. And one thing is for sure - when those people I knew back then decided to lose each other, they didn't do it out of curiosity. Like the many people who leave this country to go abroad and try their luck there, they certainly don't do it out of sheer wonder lust, like our prime minister believes.

our world view

I often got surprised by the way we think about the world and each other. Or to that those who were here before us. If they looked out of the caves, and thought there was something mightier out there, much bigger than them. Do you think they thought about each other as men and women? Certainly there were physical things easier done by men, so it was done by them.

Now that I think about our present time I feel nearly shocked that we had to get this far to discover we're discriminating each other by, for instance, putting women into another category that results in them receiving less salary, and even less chance to be who they really are as a person.

I mean it's one thing that technical development has always been much ahead of social achievements. Of course, those who have the money to buy or get something built, saw and will always see machines as much better investment than people. Machines don't talk back, don't argue, don't die. They can be repaired, and with a certain technology they can repair themselves. And then, if I may ask, what's the point of us being here at all?

But then again, thinking about different sexes as different species, or even subordinate, dependent classes capable of less things than the other, is just as surreal as to believe you'll find a different God by calling to him in different names or languages. Culture should never be about that.

are you an alien?

It's very funny and frightening at the same time, to see how people seem to be shocked, for instance, at work, when they discover another face of you. As if they didn't have many things inside of them, feelings, talents, thoughts. And as if all that wouldn't come out of them just the same in due time. That is, basically, when they get a trigger to surface, or for the exact opposite reason, in lack of impulses, or in such an atmosphere where all this is getting constantly suppressed.

Well, I have experienced this maybe more often, as I am still very honest and open, even now, near fifty, so I don't think it'll change. But still, as it takes time for me, just as for everyone, in a new environment, to get used to the conditions there, so it might shock people around me how I am when I'm myself without being cautious at all. And when I am taking back, I do that because experience taught me that so many are terribly afraid of being themselves, and when they see that other are, they put up such a high wall in front of them that it becomes completely impossible to co-operate normally like that.

So, when I, so to say, come out, even if I try to do that step by step - instead of simply giving myself fully, and right because of that it takes out a lot of energy of me, pretending to be someone else - I can see that those I am working, learning, doing whatever with, they are almost like they either can't believe it's me or who knows, they might just as well think I'm on drugs.

strange fascination

Everyone reminds me of you
but nobody takes after me
and no one is the like of you
to me they're the same, it seems

the end

The question is not when the end will come and what will happen. We all know what the end means. The question is how many of us feel sorrow for it. That we let it go in its entirety. That no-one will ever see it again as it is. Not for millenia. Or millions of years. Or ever again.

Though I'm a funny person, I've been often asked why do I always look so sad. And I was surprised when I heard that question for the first few times. But then I realized that I'd probably understoood it as a mere child, by looking at the world as it is. That is, as we make it.

The end is here. It's been here ever since the beginning. The real question is if it is worth to destroy it. Destroy each other. With our arrogance and selfishness that we let infiltrate our every act and thought. Instead we could give up useless things, and take care of each other, of this world.

Now I know it was not my own death I couldn't comprehend when it first came to me. But no longer being part of all this. So I hope ever since I'm not the only one who feels it's worth to make it worth. It's only up to us. Every word, each and every minute of it.

Lost time

We're living in times lost,
not only because we're lost in it,
but especially, as no matter when we live,
it's wasted time to go against time itself;
Both to try to change it from as it happened,
or pretend things didn't occur the way they did.

Instead we can face and accept time,
by realizing that it's gone for good,
by understanding that it can't be wasted;
As it won't let us, its consumers, change it,
but it leaves its mark on us, as parts of it.

And if we're able and willing to take that in,
then we can really go with it and live it,
but either way, it's happening;
It can't be stopped and it can't be forged,
or if we try, then we waste our lives, not time.