verganheitsbewältigung

I’m not sure when it happened. Sometime during this past decade.

Do you remember when you last went to a wedding or function or any type of show or event and there wasn’t a rabid herd of cameras snapping and flashing every ten seconds? As a friend of mine recently noted, the snap-happy mentality even reigns at funerals these days.

Once upon a time, the past could be lost in the mists of time. You could remember shit the way you wanted to. Every time you told the story of what happened, it would alter slightly: some parts embellished, some downplayed, until you reached a reconstructed version of history that you could live with.

Now there are photos – and even worse, videos – to blow those mists away. No matter how much you rationalise, philosophise and comfort yourself with a few healthy delusions, the truth will always exist on YouTube.

Much as I would like to know who really wrote Shakespeare, who really assassinated Kennedy and who wrote my telephone number in that public toilet in Blackpool, I hope we never invent time travel. History is a dish better served braised.

As you may have guessed, tonight’s gig could have gone better and I’m hoping none of those filming their sets caught the mc by accident.

Ah well, maybe I’ll tell this story of telling stories a few times and see whether it takes me closer to, or farther away from, the truth.

And the New Year blows in, casting away the spent leaves of summer

Today was summer’s dying breath. One last stand before autumn sets in for good. Goodbye to sun and all that.

The New Year used to start with the spring awakening on March twenty-fifth, and now it begins pedantically on January first, separating two indistinguishable days of midwinter. But for me, it has always been the arrival of autumn that has heralded the New Year. No doubt this is largely a relic of the new school year starting on September first in England, combined with the way Finland seems to revive from its two-month aestivation. Autumn has always been the time to embark on new things.

My birthday also sits on the cusp of autumn. The change of season marks a personal new year, too. This year, I was to throw a joint birthday/leaving party. I've spent the past twelve months counting lasts: this is my last Winter, this is my last Vappu, this is my last Juhannus, because I’ll be gone by October. This New Year was to be the start of a new era.

Yet now I have to face my looming birthday in the knowledge that I am to remain here indefinitely, in the same miserable situation, and that this New Year’s Day will fall between two indistinguishable days of autumn drizzle.

I am trying to make the best of it. I’m taking on projects to stave off the feelings of failure, of treading water, of disappointment in myself; even though I have little hope of them amounting to anything. A friend surprised me the other day by saying that I make a habit of exceeding myself in everything I do. I would say that I've underperformed at everything I’ve attempted. If I’m such an overachiever, how come I’m still ‘here’, both physically and metaphorically?

In fact, that sense of failure is currently so overwhelming that I’m finding good news hard to take. Other people’s, that is. My friends are landing great new jobs abroad, getting married, being offered amazing artistic opportunities, gaining PhDs… the list goes on and they’re all younger than me. And while I’m happy for them, because they’re my friends and they deserve their success, each of their triumphs is another poke in the eye that reminds me of my failure.

One wet and gloomy autumn night years ago, I got on the wrong bus. I was tired, the windows were steamed up, and I didn’t realise until it was too late. Until the bus reached the terminus and I was disgorged into some godforsaken hole in the suburbs of Vantaa. Late night, no way of knowing how or when or if I’d ever get home.

That’s how I feel right now.