Popular culture in the age of the Internet

The Ultimate Showdown. Brilliant, fucking brilliant. Made four years ago - where the hell have I been?

We are accidents waiting, waiting to happen

Indeed, we are.

What scares me is, what if she's right?

Writing

This writing thing, it is for lonely people. Indeed it is. When the days are made of good tidings, we need not making a fiction out of the night. It's so true. And yet for some people night is all they have left, for the good tidings come no more, and loneliness is their hideout. Sometimes I too wish I didn't know how to write, but sometimes I watch myself in the mirror, I stare right into my tearless eyes as they are reflected in the cold surface, and I feel thankful for being able to, at least, make some order out of chaos by shaping characters into words, words into sentences. Until one day I'll forget all about it.

Words left for the dead

My home never had a fireplace, or anything remotely similar to a fireplace, so my memories of fire come from someone else's hearth. My best friend's grandmother lived in a dark, narrow street in the village, in a very old house - one of those old houses with the toilet outside, in the backyard. I haven't been there for years, and I don't expect to ever get back there; but whenever I look at a small and cosy fire burning in a fireplace, I'll remember her hearth, small, painted in a thick yellow outside. I remember the wooden chairs around it, the worn coloured pillows on them, the warmth of the fire in that cold house, the white cat always sitting in the chair closest to the fire, purring all night long. It was the only white cat of the whole village - I dare say, of the whole county. I cannot remember who gave the cat to my friend, for both me and him were rather young when it happened. Nor do I know how did that mysterious person came across a white cat in the first place, in an area when all cats were gray, yellow, black or all these colours together. It doesn't matter though: the cat was white, snowy-white, unique in every possible way. My friend could not keep the cat at his own place, so he left it at his grandmother, recently widowed. And when he left the village few years later, the cat remained with the old lady, purring by the hearth in the cold winter nights. I remember it clearly, for I was there quite often, the cat being mine in a way - I was one of the very few people he liked - and my friend's grandmother being like a grandmother to me, the one I never had close to me during my childhood. There were several old ladies from my village that could win the title of grandmother, actually, and I liked them all the same. One of them, who used to take me to the football matches, died long ago in a sad accident at home. Another one died years ago, defeated by an old age, and a failing body - and yet, she was strong enough to refuse treatment. She wanted to die at her home, and not in some hospital, far away, locked inside unfamiliar walls. And so she did; and since her passing, I never tasted pomegranates as good as the one she used to gave me every autumn, for she had a pomegranate tree in her small farm. One of them still lives, still struggles against her health, her old age, her grief towards a never easy life. Her eyes shine whenever she sees me - and whenever she sees me, she tells me the same: that she likes me so much, that I'm like a grandson to her, that in fact she likes me better than most of her sons and daughters. I know it is true, and she is actually like my grandmother. All of them were. I never told it to any of them, and now that there's only one of them still alive, I suspect that I won't tell it to her. There's so many words left for the dead within me. I suppose it is more appropriated for me to die as well with them.

There is someone missing in the picture, of course. My friend's grandmother died not too long ago, after a long, quiet grief and a disease that ate away her memories and her conscient mind. After I left the village I saw her only a couple of times, if that much; the last time I saw her I was stepping out of the train, and she was going in, helped by her older daughter. I only recognized her because of her daughter, and it shocked me to see that old lady from my childhood so wrinkled, so sick, so defeated. She died shortly after. The white cat had died long ago - lucky him, he didn't saw the fire on that house being put out forever. I remember the cat as he grown up, and become a huge, powerful cat, able to beat in fighting any other cat in the village, and most of the dogs too. His territory was a wide part of the village. But his hideoud was that old house, with his seat by the warm hearth. Nowadays there are still some white cats in the village, the descendents of the old and seasoned warrior. But none is like it. Cats, too, are never the same. Like people.

Incendiary rounds

Cease fire!

It's too late now to cease fire. Too late. We press on, guns aiming the night, spitting bullets by a gut of fire. We move on, through ruins of the city blasted by the war. We track the living and we hunt them down, and we shoot them, we open fire again and again, even when they are defenseless, even when we were told to stop. Why should we? Why stopping when the frenzy reached its heights? Wasn't this the purpose? To build up wrath and hatred, to hold ourselves back, to endure everything until nothing could be endured any more. Then you will be ready, we were told. Then we were ready. Then they unleashed us. Now it's too late to stop us. Now we are oblivious to the orders echoing in the dark alleys. Now we hunt. Mercillesly and restlessly, we hunt. We pull the trigger and life goes out like a candle vanishing in the dark, alone. We rip flesh and break bones with bullets. We send them screaming with incendiary rounds. We scatter them with our own shadows, threatening, looming over the walls.

There is no cease fire. Not anymore.

Do or die, they said once. So did we.

Still on, forgotten

So many time, and yet so many electricity still left between here and there.

Before time

To be right before time is exactly the same than to be wrong. It's useless, for no one will pay any heed to you; and once time proves you right, you might turn to everyone around you and say, not without arrogance, "I told you". They might as well reply "good for you, now fuck off". They will be right. What use is that now?

I rather be wrong when I'm supposed to be wrong. When for some reason it would be unlikely that I'd see differentely. Especially because it's not because one is right before time that one doesn't make mistakes. Sometimes, one ends up screwing up even more.

From a conversation*

As a matter of fact, no relationship should ever be broken by a love affair. Because love might well be just that: an affair, something that has a limited lifetime, something that doesn't last the test of time, of distance, of difference. But friendship is seldom just an affair, for it is not by any means bound by time, distance of differences. Time might pass and the friendship remains. Friends can be friends being half the world away from each other. And what frequentely kills a love affair - the individual self of the pair, and the differences between them - are of little, if any, consequence to a true friendship. And we must not forget that, in time, or so people say, the most intense love tends to give way to the purest form of friendship, when two people share a lifetime together until the end of their days.

This doesn't mean that friendship is better than love, or more useful. The truth is, we do need both. For different reasons. It merely means that one shall never overcome the other. If that happens, then something is amiss. In friendship or love.

*of couse, this was edited and expanded, but you've said yourself: I'm always expanding myself.

Winter blossom

Sometimes I cannot help wondering if I had it already, if I found it already. And sometimes I can't help thinking that indeed I did, I did found it many years ago. Too soon, all too soon. A flower blossomed before its time, it was beautiful but could not resist the cold winters, and it withered and died. Or did it? Sometimes I'm not so sure of that as well.