three times thanks

I took the drive to the volcano at dawn. I wanted to avoid the traffic that becomes impossible before nine o'clock. I wanted to see the glow of the remains of the recent eruption. And the morning light, it is something spectacular here. The mountains were blue from their western side and slowly turning to rose from where the sun was going to rise. White tufts of clouds were hanging on to the sides of their tops. Lower down in the valleys colours mixed into a dark green-red shade that contrary to the common belief is not at all brown but -green-red!

As I drove down to the south and curved along the coastline towards east, the colours changed. Each minute added saturation to the reds and the yellows whereas greens lost their reddish tinge and assumed the brilliant tropical shade that goes so well together with everything in nature here.


My heart was light. Pleasure was pouring directly from my eyes to my heart. I thanked God for my eyes. For what is beauty but the feeling of awe induced by a visual stimulus? ( did I say that?)

The sun rose over the Indian Ocean. It was so bright all detail was lost. It was like a gigantic sheet of aluminum foil where the remains of the morning clouds were mirroring themselves. The wind started to wake up bringing the parfum of the flower plantations. The smell from the earth mixed with the flowers and brought an immediate association of church-going old ladies on a Sunday morning. I giggled to myself and thanked God for the head that amused me without asking.

I got to the place where the lava had cut the Route National n°2 in Tremblet. I parked the car and continued on foot. There were a lot of gendarmes, some tourists and locals as well. The hours around dawn are for the bicyclists as the heat gets scorching before noon and the diesel fumes very hard on the lungs.

The "coulée" was, how should I put it...it was there. Now you imagine a dark brown cliff with smoking trees sticking from underneath it you pretty much get the picture. Once the people shut up, I heard it crackling silently and could quite clearly see it still glowing from the inside. All of the sudden I realized: It was moving! One can accept a cliff rattle a little and glow a little but they are definitely supposed to stand still. This one wasn't. With unhurried determination, it was making its way to the ocean.

The gendarmes were very blunt and matter-of-fact. One could easily have thought that they were there to make sure that nobody steals the "coulée" that had made such a nice appearance in TF1 news already. But that was not the case; they were there to keep stupid people from taking a walk on the brittle crust and falling into the 800-plus centigrade molten stone. No matter how clearly the facts are stated there is always someone who cannot resist the temptation. It is the Government's fault if they burn themselves. So there, no smiles, no bonjours.

I turned back and stopped for a coffee and a "pain chocolat" in a roadside café.
One could see the hardened lava stream from the year 2001 all the way from the mountainside to the sea. Two-meter bushes and trees and shrubs were pushing from the ground already. Down on the beach lava stones were rolling back and forth with the waves, slowly turning the cliff to a beach, filling it with black sand grain by grain.



I realized that the creation was still going on, that God was tinkering with this little island and probably liked what he was doing.

I thanked him for letting me watch.

He said:
"Stick by me, I'll be your guiding hand
but don't ask me what I think of you
'cos I might not give the answer that you want me to..."

(oh, well...)

and he signed here:

ty-a-pology

Some people find it difficult to accept that I use a word in the headline that gets a red line under it in their spellcheck. I sympathize with them and relieve their suffering. Think of the texts as impressions rather than academic exercises of grammar and flow.

hot for teachers

About a year ago when I had decided to stay in la Réunion, I decided to do so properly. Properly means getting to social circles, to know people where you have to, bien sur, master the language. To master a language -unless you are a genius or a toddler- you need a teacher. On a dinner with my friend Brieuc I presented my problem: I admire the French language, its expressiveness and imagination. Your Mr. Le President is a fantastic speaker, I'd love to learn to speak like him!"

Brieuc looked at me knowingly, his face lighted up and he repeated: "Mr. Le President...wait a second, I think I have just the right guy for you. Have a look and see, no obligations". The rendez-vous was set to saturday morning. At 9:10 there was a knock on the door and a very tall and a very black man entered. He presented himself, and his credentials. He was a professor of the French language at the university. We talked a little over the coffee and obviously, he was screening my needs to plan his policy.

I have a problem understanding French dialects. This man had a very heavy African accent he seemed totally unaware of. So we did grammar, some expressions where in addition I had to do an enormous amount of guessing and excusing to understand what he said. Finally I started getting Brieuc's joke. This man was indeed speaking like Mr. Le President, only that the president was not Mr. Chirac as I'd expected but Mobutu Sese Seko.
A very respectable statesman, no doubt , but not the one I wanted to sound like.

After some time I saw Brieuc and he burst out laughing. "I knew it. But wasn't he tall!"
Undeniably.

So he gave me another phone number. This time it was a woman, an Alsacien, tall and sporty. I had no difficulty communicating with her. She gave me lots of feedback on my mistakes which I gladly took. She also cooked me a nice meal and we went to concert together. Unfortunately, having mostly educated riding horses before, she had very confused ideas about French grammar. I like grammars and I like making questions and tired of her nonsensical attempts to explanations I decided to quit.
She had a depressing aura of sadness about her.
She was quite tall, too.

The third one was again a professor at the University, a lady slightly over my age. She had a problem with her apartment which she wanted me to rent and she also wanted me to buy her furniture. I met her a couple of times but I made no progress. I have to admit, though, that she was a better cook than I am.

So here I am, two years in France and still talking like a spanish cow. But with my bovine accent I've managed quite well: I've rented a flat, bought a car and got it registered and insured, had water, electricity and phone connected. Banking is still a problem but so it to the french also but a few. You are faced with a deep-level incompetence combined with superiority and stupidity that resembles a Monty Python parody. The only way to cut through is to know a Somebody or be one. A recent expat from behind the Moon is not ranked on their lists.

So, being a Modern Man I amazoned a Transparent Language French Interactive CD. I get my pronunciation evaluated with a meter. It goes to green if I do OK, yellow if I flash and hardly moves most of the time. It is quite eerie, repeating the phrases aloud in an echoing room. If I ever had a neighbor doing that, I'd probably call in the Basket Squad.
The most depressing thing: A black labrador barking outside keeps getting better scores than I do.

I wonder how much he'd charge for a lesson... a Franfurter?

flickr

I am amazed: Flickr really works! All the time I struggled with the wanadoo server and Freeway trying to upload just to get "indisponible" written across the screen.

Amazing people on flicker.com with amazing pictures...three hundred frames of whales' flippers and tails!

I am starting to like this, honestly!

Jeff and I

Jeff Beck. Since my hair started to grow it was him. All along the years of becoming I listened to his odysseys as he explored there and back and a bit further. I remember going to see the Antonioni film "Blow Up" just to see him bash up his guitar. I was maybe fifteen at the time. He took off from the Yardbirds as they hit the scene, turned down an offer to join the Zeppelin where his friend Jimmy Page became the Guitar Hero with tricks they'd figured out together. He made the first ever heavy rock album with Rod Stewart, remember the one with the green apple on the cover.

And on he went. Fusion with Jan Hammer, jamming around with people like BB King, John McLaughlin's Shakti and Buddy Guy. he had a following of people who tried to figure out what he did and how and picked up what suited. Of Jimi Hendrix he said: "Oh, the black guy from the States who stole my fuzz box". They played together and exchanged ideas.

I love to listen to him. When he does heavy it is screaming. He attacks, howls and surprises. An when he slows down to a ballade, time stands still. My favorite is "Where Were You" where his technique becomes inaudible. It is a soul singing if I ever heard one. A different thing is to try and play it. I suppose there are people in the world who have it figured out but he is still the one who came up with it.

I go over and over back to his oldies: "Ten Years Time Ago", "Shapes of Things" the two versions with Yardbirds and with Rod. "Heart Full of Soul", oh definitely yes and "Plynth".

I am getting old finally realizing that my guitar playing was just a joke. I did it because it was the thing to do in the seventies with long hair and stuff. I never really worked on it but in my dreams I'd go on stage and flash...
Flash what?
There are people who have the talent and the toughness and very little choice as to what to do with their lives. Music chooses them.
I had the choice and took off for a bourgeois profession and a paycheck.

At fifty, most people look back. Some have more to look back than others, some have a selective memory and change victims to heroes and the timeline as well. Here you see Garbidz looking back:



As to me, I got an Olympic White Jeff Beck Signature Stratocaster from eBay.
I hope these hot dogs of mine won't let me down as I'll play back to my youth.
(now let's see, we have an "A" somewhere here, don't we...)

What a lovely lady...a bit demanding, though...all my time and the skin of my fingers and we've only just began...

Tigers: Hormone vision

I am a romantic, a love freak.
I do not want to have sex with another man’s wife, nor do I think that making love should be an extreme sport of some kind. I love to love people and to make them love me. It’s just that when you finally got them loving you they need so much attention that my mind gets very irritated as it cannot go out wandering.
Women in love behave like four-year-olds: Papa look, papa see, papa hear, papa play…
They also have a hormone vision. In your silence they see things that you never imagined that could be seen or heard in somebody who is not even quite there.

I’ll give you an example:

As we know, tigers are nothing but dumb cats and young tigers are but gigantic kittens. They play kitten games. Their size does not mean intelligence or dignity, far from it. One day in march I went to the zoo with my that time girlfriend. Tigers were out, it was a nice sunny morning with fresh-fallen white snow. There were two teenage tigers getting bored with each other, picking up a fight, bouncing back and forth.

I started throwing snowballs at them.
Their striped faces lit up with enthusiasm and they started to chase the balls in mid-air. Sometimes they got snow on their faces, sometimes they missed and were clearly puzzled where the thing that existed a while ago had vanished. A teenage tiger is about two and a half meters tall when it jumps up in the air, quite a magnificent sight.

People gathered around the gage and there was a laughter. Tigers were having a good time and so was everybody else. So I thought. But my companion was standing with her back turned at the animals and me. She was sulking. As I asked her what’s the matter she burst in tears and run away. I caught up with her and asked what was the matter. She sobbed that there were two young girls looking at me. I had just seen two red skiing overalls but nothing of their insides.

She had seen more. Her legal position had been threatened. Never mind the laughter, never mind the fresh-fallen snow or the silly striped animals. The puppets in her terrarium had started to move on their own, she was not in control any longer. Funny how my mind takes me to good times and pleasant places while hers pushes her off the cliff if she wasn’t on the alert.

I wonder how such minds could be educated if at all.
Is there a Nirvana for souls like hers...

lightfish

Who has been fishing knows the very special kind of a catch, or rather, a near-catch. It is the Lightfish. When you throw in your line, you can see a silvery golden flash next to the ripples circling your float. Next thing you know, the float sinks about half a meter, then pops up to the surface with absolutely nothing left of the bait. Sometimes the hook and the sinker are gone as well.

You bait another hook, throw it in and see the flash, maybe feel a tug and pull up and empty line. This can go on three-four times, until either a cloud covers the sun or there is a bass barely size the hook trying to impress you. I do not know of anybody actually having caught a lightfish. I do know of many who pretend they have done so not to mention those who maintain that the talk about lightfish is just a waste of time and people should get serious and concentrate on phenomena already defined and securely fastened in the world of reliable science.

To my great surprise, I read the Dalai Lama refer to the lightfish when he was giving a speech in a meeting of buddhists and neuroscientists. To him, it was a creature brought about by one of the the four poisons, delusion. Our destructive emotions make us see what is not there and not see what is there. Instead of looking at the world as it is we are looking at the phantoms of our mind.

Now having learned the name of the lightfish, I have been able to get a closer look at it and, as could be expected, it is not a fish at all but a flash that deviates our attention from things we really do not want to see. I take my own addictive behavior as an example. When trying to figure out the motives why I changed from a loving and worshipping husband into a grumpy old man I saw the flash and changed the subject. But as I learned it was a lightfish, I could call it by the name and take a closer look, reluctantly but anyway.

It was then and there when I saw the pattern of a dependent mind that keeps on wanting more and more while getting less and less out of what he's got.

How everything can be less than nothing and silence a deafening noise.
In a flash.

another blog in finnish

in case you are interested, I keep two blogs from hereon:
http://garbidz-fin.blogspot.com/ in finnish
and
http://garbidz.blogspot.com/ in english

in case you are not interested, I still do
(et je m'en fous)

...couldn't find a rhyme in english

the towel

There is a towel on the floor.
Its colours are faded but one can still see its once-ochre tiger stripes and the rows of grand felines embroidered on its ends.
For five years it has travelled with me around the world: Finland, Norway, Antilles, Mexico, France, Mauritius. I do not think it will travel much any longer. When colours fade it is good bye time.




Five years ago I fell in love. It was an accident. I never meant to as my experience had shown me that I was created a loner.
But there I was, blinded by the beauty and charms of a young woman whose appearance to my life had been preceded with magical signs which I had ignored. My deep-frozen heart melted and warmed up, she tipped a toe and dived in. If one can imagine the merry month of may all of a sudden brightening up the gloom of December, one can imagine how I felt.



I had never understood how elderly men lose their heads over young foolish women. After having lived it, I know. The mythical spring of youth does exist. Taking a sip has a price to it. Some of my friends cut contact. There were some who told me I was a fool and everybody saw it but me. My son sympathised with my and once upon a beer he confided how sorry he will be when my new flame takes off.
"Inevitably", he stressed with a no-nonsense stare in his water colour eyes.

What did I care. I lived. My heart was filled with joy and laughter. I had someone to dream about when I was away from home and someone to come home to. She was not stupid, either, though her youth made her appear so at times. Is clairvoyance intelligence? I do think so. Is telepathy intelligence? I think it might be even though we easily assign it to some external immeasurable energy radiating from our bodies. The one might ask what is stupidity but the answers one gets are not of much use.

I got this towel as a present one November night.
I loved it, it was beautiful and she had given it to me. Normally, people do not use towels as furniture covers but I did. I spread it on the sofa to take a nap. Watching TV in an easy chair I wrapped it around my shoulders. When I had to stay out of town on my work I always had the towel with me. It was a portable part of the home I had got, it radiated warmth and happiness.

Inevitable things have a way of happening sooner or later.
There had been too much strain on our relationship, too much separation and different coefficients on our life curves started to show themselves. I had not remembered what pain was. Seeing her love fade away and the distance between our souls spread I felt as if my heart had been pulled out by the mouth. I could not hide from the feeling; it was the last thing I felt going to sleep and it woke me up in the small hours of the morning. I stared a lot at nothing. Days went by in indifference until I fell sick. Even the sickness did not feel like anything compared to the pain. I realised I was going to be all right eventually, got discharged from the hospital and started to learn to walk again.

I decided to move away, to start still another new life, reset my values and try to regain balance mentally and physically.
I packed two suitcases and got a job on a little island in Indian Ocean. Palm trees, sandy beaches, sun and sea. Not much of a job but decently paid. No friends, social tabula rasa, my choice whom I' want to meet or what to do with my time. Some time alone is good every once in a while. Too many people around make you lose your aim. Most of the people are just a waste of time. They talk just to state their existence but their function remains vague. To me the function is essential.

My function now is to find my function.
My favourite way of looking for it is to have something to read under a palm tree and then sleep on it.
On the towel.

Next Tuesday I'll get myself another one.
It will be pink.