spokes

This morning I woke up in the work. It was six o'clock and a false alarm. The telephone rang again at 7. I had had four hours of sleep. The enteritis I had got of a sandwich in the cafeteria was burning and ballooning my stomach. I was hungry with a headache and zero appetite. Did my job and took off as the next guy showed up. My home is so ugly that it hurts. The furniture consists of four chairs, a table, a sofa and that's about it. But there is big glass door to the garden that lets eyes breathe.



I took to looking at my post. Friends are good to have if they know when to be there and when not. I love my loneliness. Only when I am alone I can get in touch with the Other Guy, the one who knows about beauty. He likes to be a little bit drunk so I've bought him a bottle of Canadian Club. After seeing "Lost in Translation" I'd wanted get Suntori instead, but, alas, not available here.

Alone I meet the music. I do not really know how to play but I like the sound I am making, My guitar is a Strat. I savour the harmonies, I listen and dream of fingers that could do the things ringing in my head. So many fantastic melodies pass through my head and I barely catch a note here another from there. The dogs outside are howling.
Margaritas ante canes.

I do not think, somebody else is doing it for me. This someone else loves oxymorons and great gestures. Today he said: "The opposite of love is fear". Then he shut up.

At noon I took a nap. There was a gentle figure all dressed up in winter clothes (the air con was at full blast) and told me about the things I've done. All the things she said began with: "If not for fear".

I woke up and it took me quite some time to know where I was.

From what I remembered of the dream, I reconstructed parts of my life. And, hell, that was the truth I had been looking for so long. I picture feelings as a cart wheel. In the middle ar the axis there is the state of "not-feeling". There are spokes that shoot in different directions. Your total feeling-state is a vectogram of these feelings. Now I realized that love is not an opposite of hate. It is easy to love and hate somebody at some stage of the relationship.
Love is not an opposite of not-loving, either, Zero has no opposites. (that's why so many people make themselves zeroes even if they could be somebodys).

I picked up the Strat and took on a harmony. Boy, do I love its sound!
I dropped some notes, came back to the original and made some arpeggios.

The music strenghtened my new view.
The opposite of beauty can be ugliness but before accepting this you ask yourself what is beauty.



Then you can ask what is ugliness and what is the good of the the two.

Beauty is something to approach, to have, to relish. I think that beauty is a branch of the tree of love.
Ugliness is something to run away from, to root off. Ugliness is nature's gift to know from the first encounter that this is something not for you. Trouble, stomach ache, worries.





The opposite of ugliness is not "tolerable". That is the state near the axis of the wheel of feelings.
The opposite of fear is not "unfear". That is a state of non-feeling. The opposite of fear is attachment.

In the search of beauty I search for love.
Please, do not confuse the industrial mush with Love,.

Love is not something that can be given or taken or lit up or killed.
It either is or then it is not. The best you can do is find it inside of you and show others that it is.

I say no more.

sunset soundtrack

The austral autumn nearly did me the trick this evening. Two weeks ago the sun set at 7 pm. I know as one of the highlights of my day is to go down to the seaside and contemplate the sunset. What is the big deal about sunsets, one might ask. A question like that define a person more thoroughly than I ever could. I just say that birds love sunsets, the muslims do their prayer at sunset, people here gather on the cliffs to look at it and as I know, even the monkeys of Upper Nile get together to howl on the riverbanks facing west at dusk.

Sunsets here are a real treat. When the sky is clear, the blue is overwhelming, penetrating, violent. When it is the monsoon season and whimsical winds throw about clouds of various sizes, shapes and textures, the sun's rays and the laws of optics put together a show that beats any home theatre set 6-0 6-0.

But tonight I nearly missed it as we are just about to reach Equinox and days shorten at a remarkable rate. At 6:30 there was hardly any light left.



Going down to the beach I had Pat Metheny's Travels playing in my iPod. Perfect strolling music! The waves were reflecting the still-lit sky in a shade of sheetmetal.
Clouds looked dirty. I sat down on a fence and changed to Remember Shakti 's "Shringar". It is scenery music, not going anywhere special but constantly in movement like the leaves of the trees or the ripples on the lagoon bay. As the flow of the music intensified, the colors went through their sequence. The sun set in the clouds, the light was very gently rose until it faded.
The music ended. I dried my eyes.



I did not miss anything. There was nowhere far away I longed for. All the loves I had were the times they were. All my dreams, my successes and my failures had no meaning whatsoever. I was in the now. The beauty and the harmony emptied everything, all my ambitions, cravings and regrets, of all the emotional significance they might have gathered along the years.
I was in the Now.

"Beauty is only skin deep".
?!

My foot!

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.

chomps

To be in a foreign country to think in a foreign language. It takes me to think about Noam Chomsky. I do not know how many languages he knows or whether he thinks in a language or in little clouds as I do but there is a connection between thinking and language and in French I am an idiot.

It is not uncommon to be an idiot in French, there are several millions who are idiot-natives. But I am an idiot-foreigner which bugs me as it is something new to me. Not really. i used to be an idiot in English as well when I was young and spending a year in the States. To my pleasure I found an article where the editors stated that there is a 30 per cent fall in the I.Q. as one operates in a foreign language that has been acquired after the age of 7.

So I could be a good policeman. I have flat feet en plus.

There was a story in the papers where one guy sued the police department for discrimination. His I.Q. was too high so he was "mentally challenged" for the job he wanted. the non-official explanation went that those too smart start either taking bribes or conspiring against their superiors. I have my ideas as to which one they consider more serious.

Everything is difficult in French, That has to do with the language, its grammar but also the fact that the French have had too much leisurely time to spend. they have become bored and started to invent linguistic traps to make each other look ridiculous. Of course, the written word is reserved to the few. to my surprise I have found out how few is a few. to look at TV-shows were people show off being able to spell correctly words that nobody -with the exception of the good monsieur le President- uses or understands. having look at the performances of Mr. Chirac I've become more and more convinced that he is on remote control. When he is giving the impression of reflection he is in fact fed the text he is supposed to utter. He operates in simplex mode.

Today, however, I good a good length of red tape cut into pieces. i managed to gather together enough documents to convince the moving company to invade my property in Paris, pack my belongings in boxes and ship them overseas to this tiny island. I got the water company to supply me with eau potable. The telephone line was connected and I got a generous offer of a wide-band Internet connection as well. EDF is giving me 220 volts which I sensed having connected the ground wire to the wrong connector. Luckily, I was not barefooted!

My life is starting to take a comfortable form. Instead of a hotel, I have an apartment quite close to a fishing harbour and a beach where I can sit on volcanic sand and look at the sun go down in millions of shades of gold and rose and blue. I got my car, it is insured and registered and it has a top I can fold down. A stereo, also.

All I am lacking is...
Well, what was it that spoiled the life in Paradise?
A snake.

I am lacking a snake and that sort of worries me as anything that seems too good to be true.

If God would have told Eve not to eat the snake, what would have happened?
But no. He was out to spoil it all, it was too good to last.
I just wonder if Eves of the world, when they do eat snake, do it just to get even?

dreamtiger ... for those who know

As most of us know, Dreamtiger is an elusive animal, much like a Lightfish.
Most of us have met the two of them in several instances of our lives but only a few have ever been able to either decipher their message not to mention to catch one.There is, however, an efficient way of catching a Dreamtiger. Get a package of Tiger Balm available in most Chinese Pharmacist’s and easily recognizable by the animal on its cover. Cover the shade of your night lamp with a warm-colored piece of cloth to achieve a soft light not offensive to the sensitive eyes of a night animal. Reserve a note block and a pencil at the head of your bed where you can be sure to find them instantaneously, half asleep or in total darkness.
On going to bed you have your feet rubbed with the ointment. You will probably sense a change in the feel of your feet and a tickle of anticipation in your stomach. Set your alarm clock as you usually would, brush your teeth and cuddle up in your bed.Dreamtigers start to move about between 1.30 and 4 o'clock a.m.. If there happens to be a single Dreamtiger in the area he will be drawn to your bedroom as Tiger Balm Toes ("Pleecoo") are one thing they cannot resist, no matter how shy they might otherwise be. You will be woken up having one licking the soles of your feet with its coarse tongue, eyes half-closed and vocalizing the gutturals than in Tigrish are used to indicate general well being and joy of life.

Carried away with enjoyment, it will not be bothered by your shaded night lamp so you can write it down. Usually at this stage they notice of you. If startled, it flees immediately from your sight and from your memory. This is why you were supposed to have the note block and the pencil immediately at hand. To write down a Dreamtiger you do not need much, an outline of the stripes of its face or a sketch of the spatial pattern of its whiskers and eyebrows will do. Unlike tigers of the jungle, a Dreamtiger does not have white spots on the backs of its ears, so do not waste your time thinking about what it might have been signaling on departure..
After a couple of encounters with a Dreamtiger you can run into one while wide-awake. At this stage, they are not visible but you can feel a gentle push of a hairy nose between your shoulder bones, accompanied by a warm flush of recognizing something you do not quite know what it is. The proper way of acknowledging the greeting is to smile inwards and say to yourself: "Wrrfff to you too!". I strongly advice gainst uttering Tigrish greeting exclamations in the public as they easily upset the unaware.

roots:
http://www.dreamtigers.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges
http://www.hermitary.com/whose.html

tropical

tropical

http://garbidz.blogspot.com/

Tropical is the word of the day. This island I am living on lies on the Tropic of Capricorn. That means that in the Winter Solstice around 22. december at noon the Sun shines from straight above. In the Summer Solstice in the middle of the Austral Winter it rises ”only” about 45 degrees above horizon. In the North where I come from the highest the Sun ever rises in Midsummer is around 53 degrees.

There are some direct consequences of this setup. The first one is that the sun’s rays cross a far lesser length of atmosphere before reaching the ground here than in the north. So the energy of the radiation is far greater and the risk of getting roasted alive very real. The second one is that the sun shoots up from the east between 6 and 7 o’clock in the morning and rushes down in the same hours of the evening. It takes time to get accustomed to its speed. ”Darkness fell” is a typically tropical expression. You can almost hear the ”thump” as it does so. The third one is that with the sun, there is the whole ecliptica nearly at right angles to what you are used to. So the signs of the zodiac instead of tangenting the horizon pass right above your head. Planets as well. And finally, the sun goes down with a leftward tilt. It took me months to accept this fact even though I saw it daily. As an experience it resembles slightly objects falling sideways.
They never used to do so but now they do it all the time and nobody’s seems to notice...

When somebody says ”tropical” he brings to one’s mind a picture of palm trees, sandy beaches, iced drinks and bikinis on the beach and hot parties in the night. This association comes from what we norhterners use the tropic for. We use it to escape from the weather of our winter, to get a break into our nine-to-five that has the color spectrum from grey to black. There are many people I’ve met here who have never seen ”live snow”. They freeze in their ”winter” when the temperature drops to 17 degrees centigrade. They give me, my T-shirt and shorts, the strangest looks in their parkas from below their woollen caps. If they’d know what kind of a weather we routinely face in Finland –voluntarily– they’d probably lock me up in someplace safe.

A tropical island is traditionally a place where one does not have to worry about tomorrow’s meal or anything else for that matter. Of course this stereotype is false and the times when small human populations could actually live off the nature are forever gone. But at least a part of the tradition is still alive. In the North we have things to do and if we do not make them in due time, it is serious. The things themselves might not be a big deal but the deadline is.

A short flight of fantasy explains why: There is the Winter. If you do not gather firewood, salt away fish and meat and mushrooms and fill your stocks with grains and tuberosities, the winter will get you. Once the ground freezes you are on your own living off your reserves. You can hunt some and fish but your neighbour –your rival–is doing the same thing and the resources are scarce.

Whereas in the tropic there is always something growing and flourishing and ready to be harvested. The sea never freezes, the fish are plentiful and dumb and can be caught with bare hands or a sharp stick. Your neighbour is doing the same thing but as the resources are plentiful you smile and share and enjoy his company.

Now as the times have changed and there are clocks and calendars and working hours and lunch breaks and deadlines this attitude does not fare very well. As the population has explosed and needs to be fed, driven around in automobiles and served soft drinks and satellite TV the quest for efficiency calls for the northern methods and mentality as well. Money wants to hear no ”manana” but ”done”.

So in the North it would be out of the question to have a bank make you wait for opening your account for three weeks. Or to have to go to the agency eight times only because somebody did not know what documents are needed to complete your dossier. You could not dream of having made a transfer three days ago and coming back from the weekend to see that not a penny had moved. You would not also expect the personnel know the details of your personal and professional life or to meet somebody at a party you’ve never met before who knows where you have been and how much you have been asking for.

One has to make choices. I have recovered from much worse than the slight frustrations that the manana might bring about every now and then. Here, the sun will come up tomorrow and the day after and if I do not get things done in my life, maybe my son will or maybe they do not matter at all.

So let’s just have a swim and a lunch.
And a nice day!