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“Life is like a box of chocolates” – Forest Gump (or actually, his mother)

Admit it, you all thought it when you saw the headline, didn’t you? It’s the sort of sentence that really sticks if for no other reason then because of how often Forest Gump repeats it to us during the film (and probably the book). Of course, it really makes little sense. The punch line  ”You never know what you’re gonna get” may be true about life, but it’s hardly true about a box of chocolates. You are almost certain to get chocolates out of a box of chocolates. Then, to be fair, the meaning of the metaphor is more along the line of how one cannot easily judge from the appearance of a chocolate how it’s going to taste. And so it goes to the element of seemingly random surprise that does sometimes seem to dominate life – at least it dominates the life of Forest Gump a lot – and the ability to enjoy it, whatever taste you receive. The sentence also seems to be what saves Forest Gump from the fate of Jenny, who symbolizes her generation much better in her restless idealism, drug abuse and finally to a too early demise. Forest on the other hand embraces passivity and lives exclusively in the moment, reacting to things that happen to him. So, to Forest, life is indeed a box of chocolates. It is hard, however, to claim the same for Jenny’s life. Her metaphor would most likely be “Life is life a broken ladder – one long disappointment”.

Well, when you write things that initially exist exclusively in your head (until you transform them into words and they somehow become living stories that annoy other people), you sometimes wonder about this sort of sentence. The life-metaphor. As it turns out, life it like a lot of things; chocolates, chess, a rollercoaster, a flower and so on. So, this got me thinking about a theme, I would do – a theme of things that  life may or may not be in the hunt for something that life really isn’t. It’s harder than you think, finding something that life really isn’t. Here are a couple of attempts so far:

Life is like a nuclear bomb – it eventually kills everyone.

See? Who would have thought.

Life is like a giraffe, long and useless.

Life is like an iPad, at lot less than you would expect

Life is like money, something you never have enough of and always worry about

Life is like a cheeseburger, addictive and very unhealthy

Life is like a fossilised sea turtle shell, surprisingly ancient and yet seemingly pointless.

I will come up with more useful observations on this subject soon, I promise you.

So, it’s the New Year which often brings with it a disease of futile contemplation as to what the future brings. Since I already know this, I thought I would spare everyone the hassle. So here it is: the future revealed.

Alright, where to start. First of all the world does not end in 2012 no matter how the Maya indians felt about it. It turns out that whoever founded that theory really hadn’t spent more than a few minutes studying their calender system anyway. Instead the world ends in 2017 on an quite normal Wednesday for reasons unknown to all but the squirrel that causes it. And also, Elvis was in fact not dead, but he is kicked to death by a rampant mule just outside of Tulsa in 2015, no one will ever find out why.

Sports fans will be interested to know that international football will be dominated by Wales in the years to come, starting with a highly surprising win in the world cup 2010 where they aren’t even qualified to participate. The Super Bowl will eventually be acknowledged as the biggest single day sporting event, but only based on the average weight of players participating. Sumo wrestlers will continuously attempt to overturn this decision. Women football will be banned by law due to a dangerous epidemic of narcolepsy among its fans. Tiger Woods will make a remarkable comeback in golf but eventually be defeated by Kim Jong-Il who, much to the surprise of many, really is THAT good.

Those with an interest in politics will be glad to know that most politics still won’t make any sense in the future either. Oh yeah, and Norway implodes in 2014 due to what scientists describe as “a really bad case of having it coming”. I am not sure that is really political, but perhaps it should have been. The financial crisis will end the exact moment when people (on a particularly cold Monday) realise that the value of money is all made up anyway. Journalism will continue to deteriorate and write about it. There will be no more World Wars, but the earth will win a major strategic victory against The Moon in 2016. The war will be mostly fought on sea.

The next generations won’t have time to ruin everything, but it turns out that they actually would have, the punks. Finally, during 2010 (very early in fact) the misspelled word “teh” will permanently replace the word “the”. This will according to everyone born before teh year 1992 be considered teh end of teh world as we know it. To all of those people teh actually end of teh world in 2017 is considered a relief.

That is it – enjoy teh future everyone! And a delayed Happy New Year!

The vote was tight, and only thirteen minutes from the deadline was the outcome decided. I want to thank everyone who voted and I hope you will all enjoy this life confirming little tale of Christmas Spirit! A merry Christmas to you all and a happy New Year!

Read the ending here!

Most Christmas Carols end happily, but is that actually what the people want? Well, now we have the chance to find out! All you select few readers of my blog can now help decide the fate of a young boy named Toby, and his arch nemesis, the killer robot named Powner 3000 in this slightly unusual Christmas Carol that I have chosen to name A Democratic Interactive Christmas Carol. I beg you to take the time to read these few lines so that this undecided story can have its just finish!

And aside from this I wish you all a very merry Christmas!

So, I finally got around to ordering my own internet connection with some much required help from our neighbour. I have been wondering when I would encounter this specific bureaucratic nonsense that people down here refer to with a shrug and “It’s Spain”, and this was to be the day.

First, I didn’t think it that bad. We called up the Internet service provider and discussed the location for my new line and they asked for my identification number, which always strikes me as slightly unnecessary as I am ordering something to my own home which I am very unlikely to run away from, but they do this all the time down here. Then we went on to my bank details so that I could pay the bills, and then they got my VISA card number to pay for the installation. But THEN it got strange. Until then my neighbour had been on the phone and been the mediator, but now this was no longer allowed. First of all, the call was put through to Argentina, where (much like USA and India) Spain employs people for no money to do meaningless things like support. Second, there would now be a recording of the conversation and only I would be allowed to speak on my own behalf – it was all very solemn. I was asked to confirm all manner of formalities before we could proceed with this life-and-death business of ordering an internet connection. At some point I half expected to be asked if I was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, but I wasn’t.

Well, the conversation begins and first they ask me to confirm my name, which they have no clue as how to pronounce, but I just agree that I am indeed Signor Hrep Groan-burger. Then they ask me to confirm what I am ordering and I have to read my passport number, my address, my contact phone number and my VISA card number out loud – for the record. Then she goes on to reading a document to me of the same length as a disclaimer for a software program that no one ever reads, not even the people who write them. Time just went on and on. She kept telling me about senseless things in a language that I only partially understand, but I was generally very agreeable. I thought, if this official recording is used as an actual legally binding contract then we have in fact saved ourselves a bit of trouble – not having to send a contract to me, and me not having to send it back. But then, something went wrong with the recording and we had to start over – splendid. Armed with patience, I went through the same thing again, and I wasn’t really that upset yet. And 45 delightful minutes later we were done, and she thanked me kindly and said that she would now mail me a contract to sign, that I had to return to Madrid. And this was just too baffling. Why, for the Love of all that is holy, did this unfortunate Argentinian and I just spend the better part of an hour discussing senseless legal mumbo-jumbo that, frankly, none of us understood if it wasn’t binding anyway? What was the point? Someone owed both her and me an hour of our lives back. Something like that can make you feel as though the world is taunting you, it seem incredible that such a thing was ever conceived in it’s stunning idiocy by anyone – and to imagine it actually being carried out… well, it’s Spain, I suppose.

So, who do I turn to for this hour of my life? A clever demon of binding contracts have stolen an hour from the Argentinian woman and myself, but probably only I have really lost anything. I am guessing that if those 45 minutes would be sliced away in the name of efficiency, my friend in Argentina would be out of a job. So, even though she is wasting her time thoroughly, she is getting paid for it. I just lost my time.

Now, I was thinking about how to get it back, and then it dawned on me: if I wrote an entry on my blog about it and had just five people waste nine minutes each on it – then, from a point of view, I would be even. So there, now you go and find someone YOU can steal time from. Preferably from Argentina so that the circle may one day be completed, thank you.

I have been in Denmark the last week or so, if you wondered where I have been and have missed me terribly. And now I am on my way home from the joys of Autumn Denmark. I was there to participate in my grandmother’s 80th birthday, which was lovely. Conversation just never dies out at a party where so many of the guests can’t remember what they said ten minutes ago. But then I also had to go home again, and for some reason that is just always so much worse than going out.

The first part of my journey was a train ride across the wet, grey desolation that is Denmark at this time of year. Now, the weather is not actually that cold, it really isn’t. But when you are waiting for your train to pull in, the wind will find you, and it will feel like it’s pulling the very life from your helpless flesh. It does not matter how much clothes you put on (but in Denmark you’d better try anyway), it will just tear right through it – dragging your will to live with it. It was also early in the morning, which just made it all that much more enjoyable, but no one knew what time it was anyway. You just can’t tell. The fact is, that when summer is officially over, Denmark is invaded by a layer of low hanging, grey clouds that flood in and hide the sun and sky for six months. It is like God just turned the contrast on his LED TV waaaaay down. The clouds only leave the sky to hurry out to sea and get more water to throw at you.

But, eventually I got into the train and found my seat. And I was soon joined by my companions who were hideously morphed people-walruses. They dragged themselves to their seats and tried to squeeze me out trough the wall. I fought relentlessly for my seat, and to be fair the woman walrus actually did try to contain herself to the natural habitat of her own seat. The male however was the real joy. He was the sort of person who didn’t exactly snoar in waking condition but instead moaned constantly like he was the horny German gardener in a porn-flick. I didn’t mention that fact to him, as his hand was larger than my head. So, he moaned obscenely through our four hour journey to Copenhagen Airport, to my delight. He was later joined in the seat next to him by the tiniest lesbian I have ever seen – and that soothed my pain slightly by relative comparison. I can only imagine the joy a tiny, slender lesbian must feel being squashed up against a huge sweating man-whale who moans constantly like he is having slow, noxious sex. So that really put my suffering into perspective for me.

So now I am waiting for my plane to board at Copenhagen airport. For those who have not been to Copenhagen Airport, it’s a contraption of fancy restaurants, fashion boutiques and jewellery shops exclusively designed to make you feel guilty about not having more money. No matter how much money you actually have. I would post this to my blog right now, if I could afford the price of the Wi-Fi here. But the fact is that it would be cheaper for me to upload it with my mobile phone, and I simply refuse to do either. So I will post it tonight, when I am once again in a country where you can actually tell the difference between early morning and mid day. A place where the sun still exists. So when you read this, I made it back and I am likely to be sleeping.

Two small things published under Texts and Oddities today. I started writing them both a day when I was feeling slightly ill and tried making sense of them today. It’s rather remarkable how much your frame of mind changes under such circumstances. They are called Chessplaying Trolls in The Back Yard, and Solitary Argument.

I think one of the most profound characteristics of writing is having to deal with failure; not failure limited to rejection by a publisher, but fear of encountering and facing a failure you yourself have crafted. Quite possibly this also applies to many other aspects of life; of daring to move beyond the familiar patterns, but I will contain myself mainly to the theme of writing here and let people make their own conclusions.

Our failures tell a lot about us, possibly more than we wish to know ourselves and certainly more than we wish to have others know. Therefor, probably, writers and other artists are often very protective of their works and sometimes reluctant to risk trying to publish it. Facing a very physical, crafted instance of your failure is hard to ignore. You wouldn’t believe how often I have wanted delete the short story of the IKEA sofa that I published here the other day, but I haven’t done it yet. To me, it’s a failure, and all I really want to do with it is delete it. And possibly it should be deleted so that no poor soul has the grave misfortune of reading it, but I have to learn and so I have to face failures. This blog is not just meant to be about me posting short texts to potential readers and curious friends but a sort of professional diary and mental work space. Yes, the idea of a mental work space sounds awfully pretentious, but give it a chance before you discard it.

Generally, writing is thought of as a mental, intellectual creative art form. It’s about having the ideas and the thoughts, and while that may be partially true; more than anything else its a craft. The idea changes profoundly on its way from your mind to paper, no matter how thoroughly you think you have it thought through. Writing is something that you get better at by doing it, that you rehearse and practice constantly if you want to be good. To create a text, to build it, is a very different thing from analyzing it. Sure, it can help to be good at analyzing your own work, but if you want to build it yourself, you analytical skills are more likely to inhibit you than assist you. Take the sofa-story for example – I still believe the idea of it could have worked. It could have been amusing and even just the slightest bit interesting, but it didn’t turn out that way. And that is not the idea in itself, its just poorly crafted. The sentences don’t flow the way they should, and the implicit structures that should have formed the basis for making it funny somehow just collapse.

Again, the sound of implicit structures and flowing sentences sound intellectual, but they are actually not. I don’t think that many if any writers plan every finer point of their writing – the flow and the interesting structures that make it good. Its a craft, a feel that you have when you are doing it, that this is right. This works. And sometimes it doesn’t work. You toil with a text for hours on end, and you keep changing small tings to improve it – but it doesn’t happen. Perhaps you are having an off day, or perhaps you are simply just not good enough as a craftsman to make this yet. That’s what happened with the IKEA story, took me several hours of annoyance, and I just wanted to delete it. Admittedly, I wasn’t having my best day and did have some trouble keeping my mental focus. But there are also lessons for me to learn from this abomination of my mind, so that the next time I try to create a story with two layers that are suppose to interweave into something amusing I will remember this failure. And hopefully I will learn from it as well and get better. I believe that if you have taken the strange choice to write, you cannot fear failure – you are more likely to encounter it here than in most any other professions. And you will only have one person to blame for it as well.

But like any other craftsman it can help to have a place that is defined as where you work and where you can evaluate your own work. A place where you go when you work, where your tools are. That is a keyboard or a pen to a writer, but more than that it is a place in his or her mind. And I actually made this blog partially to expand that workplace. So that I didn’t only have my current novel and my private battle with it, but a place to make small attempts at other things and practice daring to make them public. To practice having people either love or hate what I did.

Now, none of this will help anyone who already read Of Hopelessly Immature Furniture and feel that I owe them five minutes of their lives, but perhaps they find it a bit more forgivable now, seeing as I still spent more wasteful time writing it than they did reading it.

We cannot be afraid of failure, for only the lessons of failure and the will to risk failure will help us expand ourselves beyond the boundaries in our lives that inhibit us and shorten our days and our lives. Fear keeps us at home where we feel safe and where the days pass, literally, like sands through the infamous hourglass. Writing is where I come to seek out failure, to do battle with it every day – and a few times I feel like I win. But certainly not always, and even when I don’t win, I still have to write about it. Because, that is what I have chosen to do.

My wife and I tried to purchase a couch yesterday, and somehow that turned out to be a strange, little novel in my head. It is based on a true story, though, so… Well, it is anyway. It can be read here.

• Title: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
• Original title: La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana
• Author: Umberto Eco
• Published: 2004 by RCS Libri S.p.A – Milano – Bompiani

I believe that there is a certain path that many people took in regards to reading Umberto Eco. It started out when they read the best-seller In The Name of The Rose, which has Eco’s first published work of fiction. Many people loved that book in spite of the very academic passages that sometimes seemed to sneak in between thrilling scenes of the main plot – or at least they loved the film with Sean Connery.  From then people would go on to read  Foucault’s Pendulum – the second published work of fiction by Umberto Eco. Foucault’s Pendulum is however not a particularly accessible book, one might even say that it can come off as slightly pretentious. Or very perhaps, depending on how many years you have spent studying philosophy, language theory and so on. And then I think many people sort of gave up on Eco. Not that he doesn’t sell well – he surely does, but have you noticed how suspiciously new and untouched many of his books look up there on the book shelves in people’s homes? It has seemed to me that Eco was in danger of becoming the sort of author many put on their shelves for looks rather than to read. But then, suddenly, this book called The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana comes out and it is time for everyone to pick up a book by Eco again, I promise.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is about an ageing antiquarian named Giambattista Bodoni (named after a celebrated Italian typographer) who has a stroke and loses a vital part of his memory. He remembers every detail in history and anything he ever read very well, but he remembers nothing of his own life. He knows not his wife, and does not know his own name – yet he recites Plato flawlessly. In short, Bodoni carries with him the memory of his time, but not the memory of himself. He sets out to remember himself then, which he eventually tries to do by revisiting a reclusive house in the country that his family lived in during the years of the second world war. There he finds, undisturbed, the physical remains of his childhood memory in magazines, books, records and such. Bodoni then begins a journey through the history of his youth, but The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is perhaps more accurately a history of Italy itself through the period of fascism and war. Not a solely a factual history, but a history of the nation’s soul and what it went trough during those years – torn between nationalist fascism and joyful, almost naive Americanism. Throughout it all, Bodoni is chasing the story of his first love, a face that he cannot find but that he knows to have dominated him throughout his entire life.

First of all, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is just really well written and one of the most enjoyable reads in our time. In my opinion this is by far the best book by Eco (I haven’t read the The Island of The Day Before yet, though) when it comes to the feel, flow and strength of his language. In the other Eco books there is always a feel that the storyline is consciously interwoven with facts on history, philosophy, religion and linguistics in a way that divides the narrator into two separate personalities: Eco the dramatist and Eco the tutor. In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana the narrator is a more natural and poetic instance than seen before. At the same time the image of Italy during this period of time is just painted marvellously and the use of colour prints of adverts, stamps, magazine covers and such printed in the book itself works really well. Its sort of a journey of critical nostalgia through a questionable time in Italian history, and its a journey you won’t regret taking. Of course, Eco couldn’t resist having a true academic as a narrator, as it gives him the options to reflect on the contents of his story, but it has never worked as well before as it does here.

This is a book that everyone can read, and that everyone should read, if it were up to me at least.