It's My Party (I'll Make You Cry When I Want To)

Coming Home.

At last. That wretched three is gone. That ugly number that has haunted me for a decade. That pain in the arse that made others believe I was in my prime, while in truth I was curling up to die inside. That shameless liar always telling me I was invincible, immune to it all and ever-lasting, it has finally left ... never to return.

I shall not mourn its loss. I shall welcome the four, my new-found friend, shall frolick in the dying gardens of my mind, embrace decay, revel in finitude and observe the world with even more watchful eyes, as it keeps on passing me by, faster and faster.

Already my new age seems to be showing. A mischievous cold has snuck up from behind and made a home inside of me. It doesn't look like it wants to leave too soon. I sneeze and cough, wrap myself up in a blanket and blankly stare at the telly, while I hold on to a cuppa and nibble on some Paracetamol, like we old geezers always do. A pot of chicken soup simmers on the stove, its smell is almost a physical presence, as it lingers dominantly in the room.

I crave for a breeze to stir up the staleness inside and open the window. The air is clear and razor sharp. I look up to the hill, where the horizon meets the old, beaten cemetery wall. The sky lingers above and threatens in a deep steel-grey. A cold, sharp wind tears on gnarly branches of mighty trees, their leaves proudly displaying autumn's colourful palette of ravishing reds and yearning yellows. There is beauty in slow death after all. I can smell the coming snow, while the biting wind lashes out against my face.

In the distance a couple is walking their dog - or is the dog walking the couple? I cannot quite tell, but the animal oozes proudness and character and gives its masters a hard time. I leave them to it, close the window and return to my blanket. 

I take another dose of Paracetamol and glance at the watch. Only two more hours before getting ready for the party. No big deal, the glam outfit will stay in the wardrobe tonight. Just the closest of friends, a few glasses of wine and a dinner at a time where others enjoy the early evening programme. There will not be a band. There will not be drugs. There will certainly not be showgirls.

That's how we old geezers like to celebrate: everything happens not at all or early, except for lunch. You better get used to it.

Until You Cried

There is so much on my mind

As I lay here by your side

How could I ever be so blind

And let you slide?

Was it me you tried to find?

Find a way inside my mind?

I left and locked me up inside

Until you cried

Until you cried

I know how many times you tried

To walk together side by side

I always let you fall behind

Until you cried

Could there have ever been a way?

If I would turn back time

Would it still work out the same?

And while I watch you as you lay

I see the tracks of all your tears

Have all dried up and now I know

It's all too late

There's just one thing on my mind

As we lay here side by side

And while you lock me out inside

I watch you slide

I watch you slide.


Do not laugh too hard. It is only my first and only a sketch. The ghost of the song it will eventually become. If you insist on listening to this melancholic, sentimental dribble, I won't stop you. Just press play right below the photo of the torture equipment. A warning to the curious, though - headphones are strongly recommended, unless you also want to mentally scar  everyone within earshot.

The tools of a torturer.

Removed due to claims of audiophile harassment

Friday Street

The sky is a brooding, miserable mess, its moods swinging to and fro, from the sulking of a spoiled child to the hysterical weeping of a professional wailer. A thick, heavy blanket of grey clouds hangs low and looms above, pressing down on ducked, intimidated buildings and wet, overcrowded streets filled with an endless line of crawling cars. Glowing headlights after glowing headlights creeping through the pouring rain - a bleak procession that stretches across the intersection and beyond the horizon. It slowly parades past me like a giant line of drowning fairy lights, while I torpidly wait to plunge into the lion's den that is Friday afternoon shopping.

The traffic lights turn green. It is my signal to join the monotonous convoy that moves at a funereal pace. The sky turns from weeping to sulking, and back to weeping. Windscreen wipers are confused.

Galaxies die until I pull up to the car park of the shopping centre looming up ahead. I slowly weave through a trickling stream of stressed-out predators, hurriedly pushing their hunted prey towards their readied getaway cars. Their brimful shopping trolleys rattle noisily on wet asphalt, as they maneuver around the incoming, the searchers, the slow, the preoccupied and the I-don't-give-a-fucks. 

I manage to find a parking space on the far end of the place, turn off the engine and soak in the silence and the solitude, revel in it for a brief moment, while the rain pounds on the car roof in a rhythm I cannot follow. I get out and hurry to open my umbrella. I have grown beyond the years when it was uncool to carry one and much cooler to get soaked to the skin instead. For the fraction of a second I feel a little old. 

The rain continues to drum its rhythm on the brolly's canopy, as I hurry towards the shop that lures with its treacherous, warm light, its huge, illuminated logo and a store front completely made of glass. Huge billboards scream special offers in your face. Neck relax cushions are on sale today. Buy because they're cheap, not because you need.

Inside, there is no surprise. It is survival of the fittest, with the whole ensemble already present: there's the doddery, the impatient, the undecided. The stressed, the nigglers, the pushers. The cheaters, the stupid, the prepotent and the generally miserable. A smorgasbord of human misery. 

Chubby, middle-aged women with varicose veins the size of leeches become wild, unpredictable beasts. Old, scrawny men with no hair turn into bloodthirsty predators. Young mothers become lionesses, while they hunt for things to feed to their children. They skulk around overburdened shelves like scavengers around carrion, lashing forward, ripping out big chunks from the rotting carcass. They plunder and they ravage, they push the old and weak aside, they shove you out of their way and frantically fill their trolleys with goods like there is no tomorrow. Furies at work.

I warily move through the aisles, while I gather the little I need, pushing aside brimful, abandoned shopping trolleys, weaving through bickering couples and miserable spinsters, turkish families with armies of children and obese men with black, greasy hair. Now and again the sickening smell of stale sweat insults my nostrils. An unpleasant chill emanates from a row of chest freezers, while they hum a monotonous tune in perfect unison, as I make my way towards the checkout counter, where a pale, pony-tailed girl with a blank, expressionless face moves an endless line of items past a scanner, that beeps agreeingly every time she does so.

Her eyes are tired, her mood is hidden under thick layers of frustration, her moves are monotone and machine-like. She doesn't look up once, not even as I pay. 'Hello', 'Thank You' and 'Good-Bye' sound hollow, thin and rehearsed. Coming from an automaton, not a human being. I have no time for sympathies and neither has she, so I take my stuff and leave her in her misery. After all, I have my own miseries to drown. And as I leave I can hear her hum the same tune as the chest freezers. In perfect unison.

Drowned On Dry Land

These days I look like a ghost. A spindly, translucent figure that silently floats through cobblestoned alleys, haunting the early morning hours of a still slumbering town. Now and again I stumble across my own reflection, a shadow of a shadow, trapped inside a side mirror, a darkened window pane, an abandoned shop window. I squint and stare into a pale face with sunken cheeks, a gaunt, lost figure with hanging shoulders in an oversized coat, aimlessly meandering through wet, misty streets.

At the top of the hill I pause and soak in the city that stretches beyond the horizon. Down below the lanterns ooze a pale, orange glow, as I perceive the world through a cloudy, suffocating haze. Vision is blurry and sounds and sights are muffled, like they have been for weeks. A stray snowflake melts  and dies, as it settles on my shoulder. 

Reluctantly the town awakens as I steadily make my way towards wherever my road takes me. A battered, orange lorry slowly crawls up the road, collecting stuff people didn't think worthy of keeping. Around the corner a single mom is being dragged to the bus-stop by her two kids.

I stop and look at what I know I'll never have. I look at what I know I'll never be. I look at what I know I'll never want to become. Yet I desperately hold on to the petty remains of all that is familiar, while my world slowly crumbles to pieces. Feathers come cheap, while birds are nowhere to be seen. All that remains are memories from a time when everything was safe.

I cross the wooden bridge, its planks all soaked and slippery from sleet. The river's a thick, brown soup beneath my feet, carrying faded plastic bags and torn-up love letters to their uncertain grave. 

Fastened to the railing, numerous padlocks hold on to the painted iron structure in a desperate embrace. 'P+D', 'E♡K', and 'G+J 4EVR' - scribbled in shaky, clumsy letters on their brassy surface. A naive token of eternal love, fastened to what must seem to be forever to a teenagers' heart.

In the unforgiving daylight their love and their tokens are as flimsy as the bridge itself, ready to be washed away by the first flood of spring. In other news, Easter's a dud.

Pocket Revolution

A chill January wind descends upon town like a horde of mad, pillaging vikings, taking roofs, roads, towers, nooks and crannies completely by surprise, violently lashing thick and heavy raindrops against my exposed face. 

I turn up my collar and dig my chin deep into the fabric of my scarf, while the rain continues to pound on an unsheltered world, sparing no-one and nothing. It hammers against the thick, protective bark of groaning, disarranged trees and drums on colourful car roofs, bursting into tiny, glittering fragments on impact.

I quicken my pace and gaze into a dreary, weeping sky, where nature's diorama crowds layers of rolling hills, each one in different shades of blue-ish greys, against a snowy white horizon.

A short, stout woman dressed in a woollen sea of flapping beige coughs past me, sneezing noisily into a crumpled paper handkerchief. A moustached policeman struggles out of his patrol car and strides across the cobblestone road. The smell of coffee-to-go wafts over from his paper cup. An elderly, pale, skinny man wrestles with a mischievous gust of wind over the possession of a black, battered umbrella. Man versus nature. For a change, man prevails.

Below my feet the dirty, brown soup that is the river writhes and burrows through town like a blind, lumbering worm. An overweight, soaked-through nordic walker wheezes past me, already regretting his new year's eve resolution. While he slowly fades from the corner of my eye, I walk past a wall covered with fifteen year old graffiti. 

I stare at the faded colours and the broken letters and pity the same old paroles, the same old swearwords, unchanged for more than a decade, and wonder: doesn't this generation have anything to say anymore? Is rebellion smothered by glaring walls of music, painted with tiny headphones and even tinier iPods, or are the mouse click and the HD-screen the new brush and canvas of revolution? 

I stop for a brief moment and listen, but there is no answer, as the spirit of the rebellious youth remains silent.