Axel's Rants 2.0

I guess I'm like that friend who falls of the map and then turns up again as if no time has passed, picking up right were you left off. Jeez, I really am a bit like ol' Mumrik aren't I? I see it now.

Anyway, here's me picking up where we left off.

Eleven years and not a day goes by that I don't think of you though I no longer cry. I still daydream what could, what should have been Imagine how you would have looked at this age The guilt comes and goes The pain ebbs and flows But I've learned to let go of the rage I still long to speak to you Still think about how you would like some random thing that I see You've infiltrated my soul over time You're gone but not far for you dwell within me.

Just a subpar poem I wrote to mark the day. We'll listen to punk music and toss petals on the water together this year, me, Kåre, Helena and your dear little namesake. He doesn't understand why we do it but he knows it means something to his pappa.

After quite the dry spell, I'm back to rate your cats, and today it's a double-feature! Ladies and men and nonbinary friends, meet Sofus Sofokles and Tulli the Trash Queen, two foster cats submitted by Camilla.

According to Camilla, Sofus has quite severe social anxiety. Simultaneously, Sofus hates being alone. Now, I don't know Sofus' backstory, but I can speculate. Perhaps Sofus was once an extravert but following years of public scrutiny, has understandably withdrawn from humanity? Thankfully, Sofus has found a companion in Tulli and loves to cuddle up. Sometimes that one special soul can break through that nervous shell and when you find that, well... you best cherish it, Sofus. However, with a name like that, I'm sure Sofus Sofokles is a deep thinker and doesn't need my advice!

We do have a bit of backstory on Tulli the Trash Queen. Rescued from a trash heap and equally reclusive, Tulli here nevertheless would like you all to acknowledge her status as an absolute QUEEN. Doesn't matter if it's queen of the dumpster, Tulli is ROYALTY! As such, Tulli does not associate with just anyone.

Being well acquainted with the concept of being a (drama)queen surviving in a dumpster(fire), I can tell you that Tulli deserves a bit of respect for moving on up and out of that situation and into a more healthy environment. That said, Tulli still enjoys a romp with bit of trash from time to time, surely just to remind Tulli of how far they've come.

Rating: 10/10 Good kitties! Would 100% adopt were I not living the life of a constantly traveling musician.

Word to the wise: wait until all your friends and lovers are dead to pen your autobiography, provided you survive them (which I probably won't). Micke was not here to read what I wrote about him. Kåre, however, is very much alive and probably wants me dead at this point.

He still built the chapter page, thankfully, and says it should be ready for release in a week's time. That's Saturday, the 15th, for accuracy's sake. Here's a very short teaser:

Recently, I've been putting some serious thought into my writing style and I thought, 'why not put those thoughts out on my blog?' Indeed why not? Here we go:

I prefer first person present tense to past tense. Past tense is distancing. Considering the trauma I've endured, it could be said that there would be a value in distancing myself. But there is something rawer, more challenging and powerful about placing yourself back into shoes you've since outgrown. It can be deeply uncomfortable, indeed, it blisters the feet from time to time.

Kierkegaard once said that 'Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forward'. That's one of the true challenges, not inserting what you now know into the passages. People tend to insert their current awareness and experiences when telling a story in past tense, and in a way, it's cheating the reader out of the experience you're trying so hard to convey. To force yourself to recall the immediacy, the lack of awareness of what you now know, but then could only agonize over, speculate or dream about takes guts. It's an active re-immersion. For better or for worse.

Some might ask if doing this to myself is productive. Reliving my darkest 48-hours while creating Under the Surface (the memoir, not the album) put me right back there in many regards. Goodbye Susto is probably... different? It was, after all, a time of awakening, of growth and renewal that I so desperately need to reconnect with right now.

Perennial flowers go through a yearly process of emerging from the soil, returning to their roots, growing them stronger, deeper, reemerging time and time again.

That's what I hope to accomplish with this. The seeds planted in those days became rooted. But like the perennial, those roots go dormant in a long, harsh winter.

It's difficult to describe the pain of pouring your heart into an artistic endeavor that never realizes its full potential or sees the light of day. Although it will never compare to the loss of Micke, it results in a kind of grieving process all its own. My albums are like children to me, made from my essence and experiences, the emotional equivalent of DNA and epigenetics, I imagine. Even today, it's depressing to think about. So I think about it as little as possible. Move on, make new things. However, revisiting the situations those songs detailed, if only in prose format, has brought the ache of failure and loss back to the foreground.

I do not have the masters for Goodbye Susto at my disposal. That hardly matters; I never was fond of the direction it took once control over it was stripped from me. All I have is a set of digitally mangled demo tracks to piece back together. Still, these recordings were indicative of a particular time in my life and, although I could theoretically re-record it all, it wouldn't quite capture the essence of what it was back then.

Today, I sat down and literally faced the music, so to speak. I've begun with the first song I managed to write as I emerged from a vast creative desert.

Behold! The latest in my recreations of my BFF's teenage goth prose.

Draft One of Chapter Two as returned by the 'editor'.

Our discussion that followed, roughly translated:

"Hey, just remove that section. Nobody cares about U.S. customs."

"Everything? And the discussion we had while trimming the tree?"

"Let it be. Not everything needs to be presented exactly as it was."

Hej då, Oslo! Back to Stockholm to celebrate in-between days with M and hopefully write a bit more, if such things are allowed. The in-between days (mellandagarna) are the days between second Christmas and New Years. I prefer the Norwegian word for it, though (romjul), because literally translated it's Space Christmas. On the other hand, I like the Swedish name because... well, The Cure.