relief, sweet relief

the stress test of finding what's left of your mind after heat wave left it ravaged

well today is the day…i woke up this morning for the first time in days of this fever dream of horror almost feeling comfortable, a pittance, 24°. a cool breeze. the storms are coming. two days ago, i felt what felt like a saharan breeze but this morning, it is refreshing and the absence of heat makes me feel like i’m flying with happiness this saturday morning (could be the coffee too and a new band i discovered last night, norwegian psych rock which is not really saturday morning gummy head energy but fuck it. mingus could work too but i was on youtube watching world cup highlights (i slept through spain against uruguay because i had to wake at 4 am to watch belgium make mince out of new zealand) when i saw this video from live in kexp which i think is seattle maybe…in case you wanted to hear what i am listening to on first cool morning in a week… slomosa

the bigger news is that i did something i rarely do which was to submit a prose poem to a literary magazine…the catch was that it is in lithuanian. i have a friend, egle, from vilnius, from my dutch class who i didn’t mention during all the madness of lost phones and heat waves. not to replace my eleanora obsession but infinitely more accessible…anyway, elgé and i went out to sit out on the terrasse of café oud arsenaal, drink a couple of westmalle dubbels which is switch from my usual bollekes but it’s a heat wave, things change…anyway the idea is, well, egle found out i wrote because it was in a notebook i had with me and she asked me if she could go through it…so sure why not let a relative stranger read my notes and gibberish prose since i write to strangers on substack all the time but they aren’t right in front of me which makes it a bit different…anyway, she found this one she really liked and said she’s help me translate into lithuanian…sure, why not, it seems pretty random but she knows somebody somewhere in vilnius who is on staff at this magazine…so we chain smoked in some sort of cheap imitation of inspiration and well we came up with this and i sent it this morning:

Sąnaša

Taip, būtent taip ir buvo,
mes tai darėme realiu laiku, ar ne?
Ir tada, tarkime, na, štai mes čia,
tu niekada neišėjai. Arba aš niekada neišėjau,
nežinau, kieno bute esame... Bet kokiu atveju,
tu vis dar miegi šioje idėjoje, o aš turiu šiek tiek
laiko pasėdėti ir parašyti apie praėjusią naktį,
kuri šokinėja tai į šešėlius, tai į šviesą.
Ko iš tikrųjų bijojau? Turėjau keletą teorijų,
bet nė vienos konkrečios.
Gėda; o taip, dabar prisimenu,
tu man papasakojai apie mano gėdą.

what do you think, ha ha, it looks like gibberish to me but when she read it back well, it still sounded like gibberish, i’ll be honest, it doesn’t resemble anything i’ve ever heard…but you know maybe it was being a little high, i watched her lips when she pronounced the words (not in that way, get your mind out of the gutter) and besides, some words i could see that her mouth opens slightly, but her tongue shapes the vowels…which reminded me for reasons unknown of someone tying a cherry stem into a knot with their tongue but i didn’t say that to her - well i guess i did now, elgé, sorry, but it also reminded me of tong, which is dutch for tongue, so words are sticking to my subconscious, the ceiling of it somewhere, yet to say that full sentence in dutch, well, let’s just say, good thing i’m still studying…now that heat wave is over our classes start up again next week…

so i guess i will go for a bike ride somewhere…the middelheim museum park maybe depending on when the storms are due to arrive and they will probably be big ones so that will be fun too, a little symphony of thunder and lightening…

otherwise, i guess i’ll see what happens when i’ve used this poetry formatting inside the article which i’ve never done before, i hope it isn’t shit when it’s done…the funny thing is, if i’m lucky, i might be published in a literary magazine in a language i recognise nothing from…it seems almost anonymous and thus safer that way.

giddy mood giddy mood, let your hair down.

i will be back to my usual morose, existentialist whining soon enough but for now, this relief of heat is enough to make me giddy. it’s just the gypsy it’s just the gypsy, it’s just the gypsy got me tipsy in my soul…i think that is a jazz song…it was written down in my notebook several months ago…i must have heard it on the radio.

i have no ending today, how about that? just a beginning.