nonliteral

What can anxiety do for you?

Do not ask what can you do for your anxiety, but instead ask yourself what anxiety can do for you. It can get you slimmer, it can make you hyper aware, it can reveal absolute limits within which you can still barely function. All in all, it's one huge act of self discovery! You charge blindly and unwillingly where your mutined chemistry leads, agitating your body and spirit to the very essence. One can only accept it, waiting for it to end, or can charge ahead against the wave. The more you fight it, the harder it becomes. Sometimes you create trouble in the outside world just to match disorder in your head. It all must be hectic, unpredictable, make it or break it. Anxiety is not punk rock, because it asks for safety, reassurances, where you can't find any. It's against the principles of DIY as well, because imprefection is not to be tolerated. You think everything hangs by a thread, but rarely we see the thread and can do something about it. It's anti-life as a human existence. Therefore, we must embrace it to climb back to reality, to accept life as it is, make is as you go exercise, getting across the river by jumping from rock to rock. We rebel against the life, we do not accept the terms, because they are not fair and do not work in our favor, we can build fortresses of security, only for them to be razed sooner or later. We leave at peace from time to time, untill it rocks us. Well, we can screw it by making choices, it can work for us if we do things despite. Hitting against the wave it is. The more choices we make, the more we will retrieve some sense of control. Just saying, we can determine ourselves, so even if it scrathes us, we do not lose touch with reality.  

Seize the means of distribution

Brothers and sisters. Fellow music makers. All of you that are sitting in your homes with headphones on producing your next song. As you are probably aware, we have seised the means of production. Lesser than ever before, we depend upon expensive studios to make and record our music. Music making equipment is getting affordable now, and you can make a decent song on an absurdly cheap equipment - not to mention that the audience has become more receptive to lo-fi sound. But there's one thing we are lacking - the means of distribution. 

To publish your music online, most likely you will use places like Bandcamp. But their player sucks, it poorly supports embedding to social networks, and most importantly, much less than ever people are downloading music to listen it from their devices. Now it's all about streaming. I usually listen to music from Youtube these days. Unfortunately, everything now is a service. 

But most services and if not all are private, use untransparent alghorithms, feed you commercials, there we need our own service. But that costs money and you need people. The desire for an independant service could lead eventually to another private and untransparent service.  

Driving is a social event

I talked too much about music lately, and although I have a new album and it's New Year (Happy New Year everyone - that's settled) for a long time the topic of driving was eluding the posts here. Finally, I have to look upon what is now a significant part of my life, having influenced me in many different ways. It could take a couple of pages to do that so I'm just going to write about a single specific aspect of it, and it's already in the title. Yeah, driving a car is a social event. 

You may struggle with driving technique, or traffic rules, and it makes you discouraged, and you may think you will never get better, but only if you could perfectly control the car then anxiety will wear off? Or you may think you will die in a crash or whatever, but in the end, it's the social aspect of driving behind all these fears. The moment you enter the street in your car you are connected with random people either driving other cars, or pedestrians, or (oh, these suicidal guys) cyclists. You enter and find yourself with others of whom you know nothing, you may not even know if they want to move forward, or left, or right, or reverse, or just stay in place. You try to read the situation, look for clues, maybe stare into the rearview mirror to check the driver behind, do some basic profiling and wonder if this guy is going to be pissed if you don't start moving quick enough when the light goes green. How will she/he react when you hit him if you are on a hill trying to climb and you fuck up the clutch? What will random pedestrian do standing there on the island between lanes, is he suicidal, waiting to jump in front of your car as you are passing, or some drunk which will blissfully take a bold step in front of your car? What if any kind of shit happens and the other party is a bit insane and has a baseball bat, a gun? What if someone gets so angry at you for your random mistake and tries to get you out of your car by force? 

I would not self diagnose myself as someone who has social phobia, and I can manage almost all social situations. I am old and experienced and so I don't get impulsive. Usually I am very patient. I can tolerate someone stealing my place in the long queue while waiting for a less generous green light. But I used to live a life in which I could choose people I meet, places I go, and of course as a pedestrian I meet all the random people as well - but I am a pedestrian with 44 years of experience, I can read the situations and I think I am very good at that. But as I drive all of this is taken away from me, and I am driving blind in a way. 

Lost in Music

Where do I start? Where do I go? I am swallowed by the music. Will it spit me out at any moment? I don't think so, it isn't likely to happen, the machine has picked up a speed and momentum is too strong. It is to be determined if the machine is actually moving inside a vacuum, so it will just pick up more and more speed, or does it move inside some substance, gas like or otherwise, which will gradually slow it down. It must be the former, things always stop, but it does not seem that likely for the foreseeable future.

Playing in no less than two bands, just a year after when I started to think that band activities are definitely part of the past and that in my age it must be over with these things. That alone gave me one final push to finally release my first proper solo album in nine years. I have a video announcing the release here. Aaand, I have yet another video inspired by the drawing made by my Celik Promet comrade, Midzi, it's here. It's the closest you will get to new music by Celik Promet these days. But we must do with what we have. 

Finally, I was about to sit down and write a music review of a recent concert. I never meant this to be a blog about my music activities. But it's midnight already on a workday and I must postpone it, as I do with a bunch of other things.

Burn the Flag Day

You will know when the time comes. Get your flag and just burn it. Burn it already. Sometimes true appreciation can only come out of disrespect. Love for our great flag is now taught in schools for generations, younger generations will not know any other way of being. They are already blinded by this kind of plastic love which creates its own unreal subject, and yet it is completely swallowed by it, not finding any way out of the rat maze, and sticking to it stubbornly even when there is nobody around to challenge it. 

On another note, a friend is not truly a friend without some distancing. You may not like your friend, but it's useful to despise what you don't like about them for their own sake and for the sake of friendship. Do not create a bad symbiosis, apathetic peace, getting along where everything is understood and unspoken, don't miss great opportunities for friction! This is when important things happen, this is a unique human touch. Being with, but not just being. You can give up on a friend and that's fine. Just don't let the emptiness reside between. 

You can give up on a country or a friend. But the myth of a country or a nation may haunt you much more via its representatives, symbiotic subjects, narcissist community, incestuous libido promoters, and since we are all aready deep in disenlightenment - it’s turbo powered priests, riding among sick and poor behind bullet proof glass, and still preaching the same story not of heaven on earth, but of glorious past that is now lost - but if we all try enough, we may enjoy the same glory again, although that supposes that some people will be very rich, and most will only have their flag to wave and use it as a toilet paper when they find none.