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So, I received quite a bit of spam today on a site that I work with. This was in no way surprising but the topic of my spam was. I mean, I expect someone to attempt to sell me Viagra using spam or to convince to increase my… size (how do they all know?! Who is telling everyone this?!) or anything that could be bought spontaneously or in a weak moment. Exactly for that reason I had not expected to be spammed into the ground by this guy selling… Grand Pianos. I know, you are thinking: how did that happen? How did someone decide to try and sell grand pianos using spam-mails? Well, it’s actually quite easy once you think about it.

I mean, imagine that you are waking up on a lazy Sunday morning and slowly you finish scratching yourself and tumble over to the computer. Now, it’s early in the month and you still have some disposable income and you are already considering how best to waste it – by no means excluding sordid options, by no means. You are open to any offer on pills, pumps and female shaped balloons and if someone told you about how you just won the special Bolivia Lottery for Former Llama Breeders, you would be ready to go nuts over that too. Instead, though, you are confronted with a series of staggering deals on Grand Pianos. So, rather than ending up with a suspicious but basically innocent bottle of blue pills that you will probably never use until you are at some poor souls bachelor party and use it to spike his drink, you end up with a three meter long, black grand piano that you somehow squeeze in between the back wall and the front door of your apartment just as you realise that you can’t even play the damn thing. Right about this time a bottle of Viagra is beginning to sound pretty good.

So, what on earth do you do? Your apartment is completely ruined by this majestic, black monster of a musical instrument that shouldn’t by all rights even have been able to get into your apartment in the first place. There really only is one thing to do – you have to sell the damn thing. So, then you start trying to get the spammer to take it back, but he is a spammer – no way. He probably lives somewhere in Africa or China where he mass-manufactures Grand Pianos in small sweatshops and then smuggles them all to the west using very obese humans for mules (it’s the only way known to successfully smuggle a grand piano). Then what? You try to contact friends and relatives on Facebook but no-one needs a grand piano or they are too embarrassed to admit that they do. Using Ebay only gets you banned from the site for selling that sort of illicit product.

So, what can you do? Only one answer: you set up a mail-server and you start spamming people with offers on Grand Pianos. With the awesome power of the spam-mail at your side, soon your piano is sold, but then it happens. Offers keep coming in on the damn piano even after it’s sold and it’s just too darn tempting. Before long you are trying desperately to import a batch of “genuine” Steinways from some guy who supposedly is named “Nick” and lives in Boston but still for some reason prefers to send his Grand Pianos from Porto Alegre using a small, fat Mexican named Pedro who has an uncanny amount of room up his backside.

For a moment everything is well and money is just pouring in but then Pedro gets caught burping up sequences of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto in C major right as he is passing through the toll at Amsterdam. Suddenly, you find yourself a wanted man and fleeing through Europe desperately dragging your last genuine Baldwin SD-10 Concert Grand Piano behind you in a thin rope hoping to sell it at a bar in Marseilles for a boat ticket to Buenos Aires. Much later, retired and living with your much younger wife – a once-beautiful and famous concert pianist who never could give up the habit and married her pusher – you tell small children on the small market square on Sundays how you were once a big-shot, a major player during the legendary days of illicit grand piano smuggling at the very beginning of the century. They, of course, don’t believe a word of what you say.

And really, who wants that?

I thought I had better breathe a bit of life back into the blog. I have been gone for the last months for two reasons: I decided that I needed to focus on getting my novel back on track and then that I also had to do a bit of work to earn money for staying alive and such minor details. This has kept me a bit busy, but now I am back to give you a new, strange short story. A short story about time travel, money and sudden friendship. A must read for all who have just built a time machine and are thinking of using it! Read it here!

“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.