Sometimes my brain, my body does such endearing things .. The General sawed off a small wooden block (something like 2x2x1.5 inches) from whatever he was building and brought it to me while I slept, putting it in my hand, saying (knowing I like such things): There, a wooden block for you. And so I slept on, gently, unwaking, tired, for more than another hour, continuously holding the block in my hand. That primordial clutching instinct onto something comforting and dear :)

Poor Pumpkin will forever associate me with her mistress leaving for an undisclosed period of time, so this look falls under the category of: Human, I will end you.

.. And I finally managed to get the stupid Kresnik mug, which i have been in pursuit of for about a year - I wanted to buy this for the General, because this is exactly what he looks like and is: the Slavic God of industry, war and fertility. Hermes helped in the cutest way, directing me through busy streets towards the one counter where they had it in the entirety of the city, and once I was there, it cost EXACTLY the amount of money I still had in my purse (20 bucks). I had not a single cent more or less, but that exact number. This was of course at the city central post office, Hermes' domain.

While alone for two day and hardly leaving the apartment, I got into a creative frenzy, having seen the cutest tiny little print and because I always travel with half of all of my drawing supplies, I spent the two days making almost 50 tiny tiny watercolour 'print' imitations, no bigger than half an average phone. My PTSD from the boat is slowly lifting, with Drej's descriptions of art markets and coming spring inspiring me to - perhaps not truly CREATE anything - but certainly imitate well the things I see around me.. I'll try to fit it with a watermark stamp or the imitation there-of, and then get some money to add the cute frame and we'll take it from there.. 

PS Plus a random abstract, my current photography theme...

it's very difficult to write a love scene when you're ovulating ...

The research is killing me.

There is always a lot of charcoal when I cook....

This station we've just passed, this is where the witches gathered on Midsummer, or so the local legend tells it. The word Kres is very important in old culture. It means bonfire, but it also refers to Midsummer night, Fireflies, the God of sun, industry and intelligence Kresnik, and in a sense all sorts of magical things branching from all of the above. The station is called Fireflies, or it could mean the location where one of the signal pyres used to be. 

'Tis saturday. It's so late in the day that a blond man sat opposite of me and I thought if we come into another region where the sun will still reach us, I will ask to photograph his face, but the sun has since set and it was no deal between me and myself. People coming onto the train smell some of booze or of milk (farmland) or of DONUTS! It's Pust, the time when people put on costume to frighten the winter away! Grotesque creatures in long- wool hides, with horns, ribbons and cow bells move in packs, making terrible noise, making babies cry, crossing towns and fields to shoo the winter. They are the scariest part of Pust, but the most delicious certainly are donuts - puffy balls of oily dough fried brown and filled with peach marmalade. If you're a pro, you can eat five, although for a normal person one will feed you onto next tuesday.

A great way to cheer up a friend who's having problems is to explain to her in detail your views on Swedish migrant crisis.. O.o

That said, I am beginning to notice, listening to my plethora of Youtube channels, that almost all of the really big anti-SJW guys were victims of some sort of abuse. I know Milo Yiannopoulos was raped by a priest when he was 14, I know Jeff Holiday's father beat him savagely (I think it was his father, and I think he said he almost lost an eye..), I know Kraut and Tea had to clean toilets - not abuse per say, but still - and that TJ (Amazing Atheist) was abused in some sense, though he says he's not going to debate that in public... I don't know about Bearing.

Hm. 

Watching Spotlight again. It's such a shame all the big newspapers are going to shit, because if there was any integrity in journalism left, I'd have loved to aspire to a small job at a big newsroom like that. I'd probably be a blogger gossip columnist (shittiest job) by day and a relentless avenger of social injustice for the little people by night :D

John Wick #2

You can tell Americans love their bang bang movies, because this had less plot and lines than a Transformer movie, and Keanu Reeves had a very hard time delivering any of them, but the death toll was up in the hundreds. that said, it's a shame movies like this get nowhere near nominated for any of the photography or cinematography awards (like the sappy La La Lands and Oscar-baitey drama shit like that), because violence and NO realism in ANYTHING aside, the way this mess was made was BEAUTIFUL. Every detail, every tie, every car, every MUSEUM, metro, catacombs, gala, private residence and workshop was staged magnificently. It really makes me wonder if that's how Roman catacombs look these days, like a happening, as the last time I was there it was pigeon-shat-on sewerage. 

Trappist-1 gang

Ahh, the collective sigh of a band of planets going: Fuck. We've been found, guys. 

Drej said something cool tonight – while buying me street vendor pancakes. We went to a literary evening, a book launch from a guy we know, which was Hell. The book was okay, nothing at all special, just his anecdotes about being a tour guide, cynical, condescending and cherry picked accounts that were to illustrate the primitive nature of our countrymen versus the honest splendour of Thai people and their drinking and fucking habits… It was grotesque and the way people in the audience laughed was turning my stomach. The anal mountaineering by the publishers was so sickening, I shook towards the end. How "our whole nation will profit from a book like this" – and he meant it. Because he truly believed, the man who runs the most ‘high end’ publications and gets to picks the award nominees, that our country is so gutter-level, a book like this is remedy.

Guess it’s gutter-level now.

So Drej – who stands an iota more to ever get published by people like that, also because she’s the type to seek them out and shake their hand charmingly - seeing I was upset, said that the reason she doesn’t claw her way up the asses of people like those, is because if she ever succeeded – getting up into the asses of those, that is where she would be: published and one of THOSE people. 

The final bit was me trying to stand up and exit when the event was over, because Drej wanted the beat the crowd to getting the book by the counter, and the man whom I asked to move a little in his seat looked at me and ignored me. I took great pleasure climbing over him rather painfully and quite hurriedly and apologising loudly. 

I am so out of this fucking circle it’s not even funny. If I could forget the publisher and forget this night, I would do so gladly. I KNOW some day, if I want to see Goose lit, I will have to suck some proverbial dicks. But it wont be these.

Reading Tolstoy’s short stories and William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings. Morris’s novel is the introduction the world into the genre of ‘high fantasy’, a genre unlike any other until then, based on Norse myths and where places and characters such as Mirkwood, Gandolf and his horse Silverfax and the like come from…60 years before Tolkien.

General's line of the week (about my winter underwear)

"If a bunch of bad people broke into the house to assault you, headlines tomorrow would say: four would-be rapists found sitting on the sidewalk outside local pub, hugging their knees, rocking back and forth, whimpering, in need of immediate psychiatric assistance..."

Sleep paralysis episode

I had my second sleep paralysis episode in my life tonight. Half of the time I was laughing at myself, thinking: are you kidding me? Brain? Me? ME?? Come on! Like someone trying to pickpocket a professional jewel thief.

I went to bed at around midnight, cold and hungry, having just finished editing a text. G was long asleep and very hot, and angry for me having woken him up an hour before his alarm (graveyard shift), so for the next hour or so we lay in bed, him warming me up, me cooling him down, breathing peacefully. Then he got up and left for work and I finally fell asleep.

I felt someone walking on the bed, which woke me. Not only can there never be anyone doing that, because the bed is under the ceiling –there isn’t supposed to be anyone in the room. I came to, but could not move. I knew exactly what is happening. My eyes refused to open no matter how hard I concentrated on getting them, so I could see who goes there. They were going to have to wait. Then I assumed this weird tense sensation and a little bit of fatigue was a result of an earthquake waking me up (happens sometimes) or about to happen. I paid attention on whether plaster will start to dust down on my face, meaning I should probably try and roll off and get to safety of G’s mancave.  I could sense my mouth was open and I was screaming, but no sound came out, so I decided that is very stupid and I am not a screaming type.

Clearly, I was still asleep. But I checked every box on the ‘how to get out of a lucid dream’ list: I told my brain this is too obvioustly a dream and it should stop fucking around; I engaged the frontal lobe by thinking about horse race betting and prostitutes; I sought meticulously to any part of my body which would stir and thus connect the stem. I was also laughing, because if you don’t panic, the whole thing is pretty entertaining.

Finally, having failed to move my eyes, tongue, fingers, toes, etc, I figured I am still breathing, so I should pump so much air into my stomach, it will start to hurt. That worked. The actual pain broke the spell and I stirred and got out of it. By that point I was so bored I just turned and went back to sleep.

When I told the General, he said: it was just a dream. I answered: Ya think?! I kinda figured that one out halfway during.

Truly, tough, the trick is not to panic. If you don’t panic and you’re in no hurry (no-one walking on your bed, no earthquake …), the whole thing is kind of fun, especially if you are able to observe it consciously. Makes for a good story.

Hurry, spring! - The whimsical macro safari (a ton of macros for no other reason but fun, thanks to Drej)

Drey's been shooting macros since a few weeks back when she got herself a camera. She posts something adorable every day, fuzzy and spacey, on Face and Insta. The motifs are usually tiny tiny plants, that she makes to look like huge creations - and because it's winter, there is always something haunting about them, something otherworldly. Check it out  -->

I've been consistent in my stagnation and keeping very low, regarding photographs - in fact I haven't done a single real shoot since I got back from the boat last august. I applied to the next trip and today I submitted all of the required documentation to board my next ship. Ironically, neither one of my two medical certificates is valid and there is no way I can get the third one - can't be Bahamas, must be Bermudas - as they cost a fuckload. From the same doctor, same tests, same results, just different first page of the PDF form.

Anyhoo. Since it looks like I won't be going away after all, and since today was something like the first amazingly sunny day after a looong bleeeeak winter, Drey and I spent the morning - from 8:30 to something like noon, wrangling the crazy dogs and shooting tiny macro details of a hill we climb in the mornings. It was so lovely and warm, we were in absolutely no hurry at all. Even had sandwiches :D

 

The abstracts

Considering starting a page called "Despite of" :D

Namely, doing photos during doggie walks in spite of how much the dogs try to challenge it :D

What I was aiming for:

... What I got :D














Crazy mutt :D