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. 

Summer In The City

This year's May ultimately unmasks last year's August as the deceptive and shamelessly lying crook it turned out to be.

While the ones' name promised joys of summer, making merry in the greenest of meadows and frolicking in the sun, it let the heavens pour at leisure instead, sucking all the colour from the sky, crowning weary mountain tops with unwanted caps of snow, reintroducing cardigans to an audience dying for the tiniest leftovers from a memory of warm and sunlit childhood summer afternoons.

The other - proud, loud and self-assured in the glistening sunlight - is far ahead of its time, blinds you with over-exposed imagery, belies its ancestral place and mocks the changing of the seasons with its overheated temperament, wanting to be top dog in a summer yet to come.

I look down on crooked rooftops as they simmer in the brightly burning afternoon sun. The heat parades triumphantly through streets, leans on terraces, lingers on squares, and invades the most private, hidden corners of the city.

Dehydrated tourists stagger aimlessly through winding cobblestone alleys like drugged lab rats through a maze. Water spills from a bottle and evaporates before it hits the ground. Steve McQueen completely loses his cool. A pigeon lights up like a match as it lands on the hot tin roof. I scatter its ashes across the concrete below, while a premature summer laughs in the rotting face of winter's corpse.

Summer Here Is Over

Late afternoon. My thoughts have already arrived at the weekend, but physically I'm still somewhere between work and home. All day long winter has cunningly been sneaking its way into the world, sending forth its vanguards in the form of the occasional snow shower, but now it strikes with all its vigour. It's not the vulgar, heavy snowfall that pours down on you like goose feathers from a ripped cushion, but the kind of mild and foggy, mischievous drizzle that just won't stop, slowly but surely dowsing everything in a milky haze.

Snow ploughs, taken by surprise, drowsily pave their way through narrow streets. The dissonance of steel grinding on asphalt insults my ears. I turn on the radio, but Katy Perry's voice turns out to be an even bigger insult. I switch to CD and Justin Currie tells me he hates the world they gave him.

Trees eerily fade into view, street lamps try to radiate light, while snow comfortably settles on everything, suffocating the last remnants of summer. Cars plough through streets like flat irons glide through linen sheets. The convoy crawls forward at sleep-inducing speed. It is a funeral march. Cars with muted taillights, heads bent and shoulders hanging, mourn the loss of summer. The brass band plays "Nearer My God To Thee" and everything sounds slightly off key.

We come to a halt and I start to wonder if home will ever be an option today. I glance at the fuel gauge and it tells me not to worry. Traffic lights in the distance turn from red to green. The procession hesitantly moves on. All is good. I can almost see the shore from here.

Before The Evening Steals The Afternoon

Vienna, November 8 - Justin Currie

He plays for half an hour. Short but sweet. Like the hint of a kiss from your mistress' lips. A glimpse at perfection. You take all you can get, but long for more, and while the brief traces of Ambrosia dry far too quickly on your lips, they leave you fully satisfied, while you still wish the door could have been left open a little longer. But there will always be another time.