Friday, April 30, 2010

Time and Space

so many times i've wondered where i've gone
and how i found my way back in
i look around awhile for something lost
maybe i'll find it in the en
d

I have not written for a long time. No real reason. I guess mostly not much to say and not much to complain about. Spring has sprung in Sweden and the days are once again long. The year is coming to a close and my return home is imminent. It has been a self indulgent year of introspection and discovery. A luxury. Almost guilt inducing if one readily accepts such emotions.

I am thinking of my two big storage units full of stuff. I do not really miss any of it. Well, my freedom enabling Acura. I have to struggle to remember half of it. I miss the Arizona desert and all it's beauty. However I do not feel so inclined to go back on the hamster wheel. Especially a hamster wheel governed by the dictates of the mob.

Thoughts of selling Texas Tacos to expats on the beaches of Belize invade my thoughts. Going back to a more globalist socialist by the hour America just does not appeal to me. I feel like a (counter) revolutionary in exile and like Lenin in Zurich accomplishing nearly as little. Conversely, Rand, Burke, Paine, Voltaire, Jefferson and Mises have been my guides.

Sometimes you have to be shaken from your comfort level chair. I miss some of the places and some of the faces. The houses, the appointments, the deadlines, the gossip, the Stepford Wives, the bullshit-I could do without it. It is an interesting place to be. Odd. It is funny how you never really change.

I think I'll start learning Spanish.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Farewell TV People

The way these buildings are set up with large windows and fairly narrow roads makes for a sort of intimacy with one's neighbors. Kinda like the TV show Friends. Because our apartment is very large by Swedish standards it spans quite a few apartments on the other side. Through the year, we've gotten to know them all.

Admittedly their monikers aren't very creative. There is underwear guy, a middle aged man who routinely comes to the large window to look around outside. There are worker guys who inhabit the offices just left of us. We have breakfast people who have long, slumberly breakfasts at the picture window on the other side of their apartment. Finally, closest to my heart, we had TV people.

TV people had the largest big screen TV I had ever seen. It would make any American proud. It would greet me on those dark winter mornings when I was the first to wake and shower for the day. There was something comforting about it's presence, though I can not really identify why that is. If they were home, it was on.

We eventually got to the place where we'd notice if there was a break in the routine, which was basically eating and watching television on this mammoth screen. "TV people haven't been there all day". or 'Something's up, the TV hasn't been on the past two mornings". They were predictable. They were constant. They were normal. And then suddenly they were gone.

Yep. One day we looked over and noticed the behemoth fixture was removed from the wall. What followed was what appeared to be weeks of renovation. The renovation came to a close but the television never returned. They put up some stupid painting.

Then just as suddenly the apartment was barren. They were gone. Soon new inhabitants moved in. The new people don't have a name yet. They just seem so wrong and out of place.