The happy place

There was a chill in the air today. The sun hidden but it was bright nonetheless.

And the gravel is swept off the ground, but still the city is dirty; I saw dried vomit on the sidewalk for example.

I am starting to like it here; it feels like home

I am not just a face

And the people I work with; the Germans: I will probably soon leave them, but nobody knows yet.

It’s the best assignment I am likely to ever have, and yet now is the time to move on.

There are several people there who are both kind and frankly speaking super smart, and generous with their knowledge.

I’ll make sure to let them know before I leave how much I appreciate having worked with them.

But they will not disappear off the face of this earth. I might see them again

Or maybe not

Even though nothing turned out the way I’d hoped when moving to the far north, it’ll still work out

I believe it’ll work out.

Somehow

I dreamed that we were living in my grandmother’s house, the one I grew up in.

We’d inherited her dog, it was translucent and blue, with surface like that of a peeled grape or a cartoon jellyfish.

It was OK to eat this dog, it didn’t harm it.

There were pieces falling off it looking like gelatinous candy, which tasted very synthetic and bad, like of something chemical or the rind of an orange.

And there was someone smoking in the TV room

And the walls were nicotine yellow from the smoke

And I didn’t want my wife to find about the smoker, because it was some relative of mine: an old hag.

But then I woke up

I am at work today

My head is filled with smog

That’s right

There’s a basket here. It’s filled with Easter candy.

Many years ago, exactly, there was an egg brought by a consultant.

It feels like an earlier life: different city, different office landscape, different job, different people,

I was different too.

And the egg was different; there were hundreds of maggots crawling around the candies therein.

Unfortunately

During the weekend, there was vomit on each sidewalk.

And broken glass of course.

Like the whole town was hungover.

But today again there’s people out.

But I’m inside, having a great time with my work and my coffee and some music in the earphones.

I’ll have to enjoy myself before AI comes for my job.

And then what?

My hair, it’s thinner. It used to be I would grab my hair it would amount to four portions of pasta, but now it’s not enough even for one.

And the beard is getting gray

I am fading from this world.

I dreamt last night that my wife had bought these pan pizzas, you know the type you put in the microwave and cook for two minutes

And that on these pizzas were the flavour of bees

But all of the bees — there were lots of them — were dissolved by the honey

Like bees stuck inside pollenated figs

They tasted only of pan pizza and honey

But I knew that there were bees there

I expected to be stung, but I wasn’t

I didn’t finish my slice

Because in the dream, I’d lost my appetite.

When I woke up, I still had the memory of feeling being stung on the tongue

When I sat by the computer today, I left the window slightly ajar, so that I felt the chill spring wind on my back, and next to me I had my dog.

The orange dog, she spends the day mostly sleeping while I work. When she does, her eyes resemble two em dashes — — , and on her face is the faintest little smile which makes her look so serene. (Like this: —◡— )

The cats, on the other hand, now sit next to each other by the opened window, miaowing miserably; trapped as they are, inside this little apartment.

On the computer, there was a lot of heated discussions back and forth. Some people even expressed various forms of disappointments (I’m being vague on purpose), but I have learned that managing other people’s feelings is out of scope; managing my own is more than enough for me.

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I later went to the office (because now it’s next day, I never published yesterday).

I was walking in the heavy rain which made the world feel smaller and softer. For all the coldness there was something cozy about the whole thing.

On my way to the office building, I might’ve let a drug addict in, but it could also have been a fronted developer.

Or a combination

Now having completed yet another Umamusume: Pretty Derby A+ run and eaten a soggy cold McDonalds apple pie, lying on the bed next to the little dog, I feel this weird sense of contentment.

Straddled at the mouth of the port of Rhodes, it’s said there once stood the Colossus, letting triremes pass between its legs.

Once I was in Greece with my parents. With my white sun bleached hair I might have resembled an albino with my blood red nipples as an extra pair of misplaced eyes.

Wearing my T-Shirt and a pair of swimming goggles, I was set to swim between the legs of a Greek man.

However, on seeing — when navigating the murky waters of the Mediterranean Sea — his penis hanging out through the open fly of his white boxers, I changed my mind.

It would’ve been infeasible for the Ancient Greeks to build the Colossus in such a way that he was actually straddling a body of water. He must’ve been standing on land.

And now it’s just dust…

And the man whose legs I didn’t swim through after all, who didn’t have the sense even to put a pair of proper bathing shorts on,

He was no Helios.

Much like yesterday, I’m not sleeping. My sinuses are congested, and I’ve got a fever. I’ll probably be tired tomorrow. (It’s technically tomorrow now)

I can pretend that I’m on a charter holiday, that the cars passing by outside are from a busy street maybe in Athens.

One time I visited a Greek lady, we visited her apartment. She made us pasta in the shape of tubes like straws, and with a red tomato sauce. This and french fries must be typical Greek food, I thought.

I was a child then, who collected colourful rocks which I bought in plastic boxes. I did find a bright turquoise rock in the Mediterranean Sea, but it turned out to be just some play doh or other type of clay, because when I tested it with my teeth, it broke.

There’s lots of garbage in the Mediterranean Sea, and sewage water from hundreds of thousands of toilets, no wonder that there’s also play doh

And my nipples sore and blood red, so mum made me wear T-Shirt even when swimming.

That was kind of her.

And I bought a bronze shield. Of course it was real bronze. And an Athena figurine.

Also made of bronze.

But no swords; they wouldn’t have been possible to fly home with

Did you know Athena competed with Poseidon about naming Athens?

But yet it is a paradise.

Greece with fried aquarium fish and pommes frites, and this straw shaped pasta.

It’s true, the aquarium fish, they fry them whole with head and everything.

there’s one more memory in the head, but I’m not sure whether to write it out. I’ll think about it and decide next week.

That which lie hidden in the snow is now visible. For example I’ve walked past this deck of discarded Pokémon cards on the side of the sidewalk leading to a school.

As I see them lying there in the sun, weather beaten and deformed, it fills me with sadness.

Picturing in my mind eye this child who lost his deck of cards, maybe. Possibly there was some act of malevolence behind this, how else would they end up there?

It’s a tragedy in miniature to find something bought for with children’s money discarded like that.

Life doesn’t care whether you’re grown up or a child when dishing out misery.

I dreamt that I was both a pig and a package of sliced ham.

There was another pig who had made me into the sliced ham package, but somehow I had managed to free myself to some extent from this curse, and now back into my original pig shape, I was the one hunting this antagonistic pig.

I had located this other pig’s package of ham, with the plastic packaging and everything.

And as I ragefully bit into it with my pig’s maw full of hatred, and as I did, the package turned into the black furred coat of this other pig, and I felt that with its rising panic, the realisation in him or her that I was the one doing it, not the other way around.

And to the sound of me taking a bite of this — the sound as if taking a big bit of a green apple — I awoke