death and decay pt2

1704403387

i listened to "alleine" by yakary while writing

the morning

the clock strikes five ante meridiem. the image of jocko willink floats through the nebulas of your half-consciousness, the latter freshly stirred up by the jolly tune struck by world's most obnoxious busker, your iphone alarm. "just execute the plan", jocko says. "hey siri, set a timer for 20 minutes", you say after eliminating the noise source and stashing mr willink in the depths of your mind where he belonged. you try to fall back sleep, but the idea of taking the cold shower waiting for you gives you a stomach ache intense enough to keep you awake. every minute, you nervously turn your head and glance at your smartphone display to catch a glimpse of how much longer your skin can continue to stay warm for, almost like you're hoping for a miracle where the unpleasant thing that lies ahead would also have a bad morning and manipulate time to bother you another day instead. after a painful period of silent rumination, you disable the timer with a minute to spare and physically prepare for your frost plunge. the plan is at last being executed. somewhere in the world, jocko smiles to himself, entirely unsure of why

six months ago, i visited my hometown to hang out with my best friend after almost 10 years without any sort of contact, both with the place and the person. you can read about that occasion in more detail here, but to summarize: it hurt nice. it also ruined the months following my return, causing intense spells of existential dread that culminated in reading sartre and camus, and finding true purpose in romance. whatever you do, don't dabble in existentialist philosophy

when we were teenagers, my buddy and i would often indulge in what we called "asi-wochenenden". he would come over to my mom's apartment on a friday after school and stay the weekend to play modern warfare 2 on the xbox 360 or amnesia: the dark descent on the pc, drink becks ice or lemon, eat a family-sized pizza texas ordered from pizza royale some streets over, first- or second-hand-smoke a semi-healthy amount of cigarettes, and talk about life until we either dropped dead from sleep deprivation or the time of his departure rolled around. while many things are forced to stay in the past, this was a fond event we were capable of resurrecting, and so we made plans to do just that in december of 2023

the trip

the two female students sitting across from you on the train towards erfurt look similarly enthused to be up at this godless hour (the digital clock on the ice was displaying 7). you don't feel like sleeping. not out of lack of necessity but more because of your secret talent where you emit only the most disturbing of snoring noises and drool all over yourself in the process. the world was not yet ready to witness, and so your eyes remain fixed on your kindle app displaying whatever is written in "the happiness hypothesis"

it's always strange traveling through bavaria. the dialect triggers something in me that wants to stay buried, but it also feels good to be among "my people". for some reason, i wear my bavarian status as a badge of pride despite not really having a strong sense of belonging and leaving the state in a mad dash for freedom at 19 years old after feeling caged for the majority of my teenage and young adult years

long train rides are heavily romanticized, and for good reason if you ask me. it's a peaceful, sometimes scenic experience that's usually long enough for the anticipation to torment you in similar capacity as the boredom does, creating a unique blend of emotions that you want to both shed and endure for as long as possible. the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is just the cherry on top, at least on the ride to. fro not so much

the "weekend"

a strange sort of disorientation set in as i left the main station hall. the place was the same in terms of layout, but i was struggling to make sense of where to go despite having a clear goal. the shift from hour-long, constant anticipation to having to find meaning in now being in the middle of the thing you've been anticipating was particularly unsmooth, as usual. my steps took me to the rewe where we decided to stock up on mate and becks ice before returning to the man cave

feeling particularly trojan that day, i brought a fake gift - a digital copy of modern warfare 3 (2023) (not to be confused with modern warfare 3 (2011)). fake because i knew the havoc the sweaty, not at all casual lobbies would sooner or later wreak on our mental health, but since the occasion was very much nostalgic, it ended up being the perfect choice of game as it contains the exact same maps that modern warfare 2 (2009) (not to be confused with modern warfare 2 (2022)) offered back when we regularly did this sort of thing. while the 200 gibibytes of game data were being transferred from the steam servers onto the solid state drive, my friend manifested a chair out of thin air and placed it next to his bed in the vicinity of his desk. interestingly enough, this was the exact same type of poäng chair that we took turns sitting in 14 years prior, only that this one was black instead of red. the setup had been completed. all that was left, was to start up a game

league of legends is a fast-paced moba game hand-crafted by the devil in order to transform even the nicest, most genuine person into a subhuman creature filled only with hatred and disgust, both for his fellow creatures and himself. i had sworn off playing many eons ago. i couldn't imagine balancing being an upstanding person with a strong desire to do right by day and wish all sorts of diseases on my 0-3 jungler before running it down mid by night. fortunately, my friend was playing jungle himself, so that particular scenario could at least be avoided. he hopped on a discord call with one of his buddies and queued up a ranked match. the champ selection filled me with anxiety. many past acquaintances were left behind on this battlefield

after what felt like an eternity, modern warfare was at last ready to be played which my friend subsequently did almost non-stop for roughly nine hours through the night, rising to rank 31 in the progress. i would advise on kill streaks and how to unlock things, and try to raise morale once the matchmaking had done its thing and placed him in lobbies where one person would single-handedly destroy everyone else, including him. a timeless classic. still, much like me when i first played the new cod iteration, he would express his joy and astonishment when being thrown onto yet another reworked battlefield he remembered fondly from his childhood. it was the second-hand exhilaration i experienced that made it all work for me. all i wanted to do was sit and live vicariously

as my gaze was fixed on the somewhat distant screen, i meditated on the fact that if everything went according to plan, we wouldn't be sleeping for another two days. during hell week, navy seals endure a minimum of five days without sleep which involves bouts of hallucination. according to some random article i found via google, your body also becomes less great at killing off to-be cancerous cells after x hours of being awake. disregarding that, i mentally prepared for accepting my budweiser

to stave off illness and properly nourish our bodies during this period of extreme sleeplessness, the master of the house made someone working at some pizza place unknown to me assemble and deliver a diavolo. once that had been consumed, he reached for the ace(s) up his sleeve: three of the finest frozen tonno pizzas had been procured. whenever hunger struck, the oven would start glowing and happily exchange some of our time for a warm meal. a scissor would cut the pie into four pieces, and the comically large smart tv streamed tarzaned videos into our retinas as we feasted

sometimes we would also engage in focused pondering sessions where important questions such as "can one man eat pizza for 25 years and remain in good health?" would be asked and answers would fail to be found before the conclusion that it was all pointless anyway was arrived at. there was one particularly exciting hour (no sarcasm) during which we tried predicting and calculating when the bouncing samsung tv screensaver logo would perfectly slot into one of corners. unfortunately, simple arithmetic was never my strong suit, so we resorted to just staring at it until it did, prompting a brief celebration

the lack of sleep had at this point fully incapacitated the part of my friend's brain responsible for responding to visual or aural impulses within a reasonable frame of time, so he switched back to league of legends. he came dangerously close to reaching emerald league which is one league below diamond which is one league below master which is one league below challenger which consists only of the absolute cream of the crop of league of legends players. one simple win was needed to advance, so naturally the next four games were heartbreaking losses, causing the man in front of the screen to lament selling his account and end his discord call with his mates after announcing that he was at long last done with the game in that same tone of voice that was so familiar to me

as these things go, we eventually started watching skateboarding videos, starting with "paramount". this was prompted by me bringing up how palace uses house music and puts their own uniquely weird spin on what i consider to be a fairly homogenous skating montage scene. in return, he showed me nyjah huston's "'til death", his favorite, which had an epic score consisting of well-placed meek mill tracks. there is something satisfying to watching humans perfect the craft of spinning a piece of wood with their feet to stimulating music. i was quickly transported back to when i was amazed by young ryan sheckler doing a lengthy manual to the cure's "why can't i be you?" in "almost round 3". i went through multiple fruitless and ultimately short-lived skating phases in my life, so it was refreshing to reconnect with that

we made it to about 1am on the day of my departure. i thought about the prospect of zombily staring into the void for another 24 hours that included a 7-hour train ride and summarily decided that it was time to throw in the towel. navy seals we were not. after 45 hours of being "awake", my head finally hit the soft couch, and i fell asleep to mythicalkitchen's "food crime" playlist

the rear view

friday, seven forty post meridiem. munich central, platform 23, section g. you reopen your eyes after briefly resting your head in your neck and daydreaming of happier days. the train compartment you're currently supposed to be sitting in is suffering from acute nonexistence as the number signifying delay in minutes increases to 45 on the info display. the obnoxious hyena-esque laugh irregularly emanating at deafening volumes from the throat of the male part of the couple standing next to you puts an ever-worsening strain on your frontal lobe as it reverberates through the entirety of the city. camus' question on whether or not one should commit suicide is dangerously close to being answered at long last. the writing of your berggruen prize acceptance speech is interrupted by the low hum of your ice approaching. foiled once again

the trip played out exactly as i was hoping, like the olden days in many ways and yet different. we were still wearing nike and adidas trackpants, just like we did back when it was our sometimes more, sometimes less subconscious expression of rebellion against the authority of school and the catholicism-infused societal norms that mandated looking presentable, i.e. wearing jeans, while the strange man barely resembling a teacher who you suspect of being a wife-beater and pervert screams at you in front of your peers for doing the math question wrong. they could all get fucked for all we cared, and they can still get fucked to this day if you ask me personally

we never once left his spacious apartment sporting immaculately female interior design, a reminder that we and our lives had since indeed changed in palpable ways. the heartbreaker was now in a committed relationship with a good woman. he pays for his girly apartment with money earned from running his own business. we have become financially literate (well, on good days), more wise, more mature. the outlaw miscreants have adjusted to boring old adult life (well, boring for one of us, and it's me). it was a more controlled experience. two old men consciously rediscovering a sacred ritual long forgotten for the sake of nostalgia and rekindling a friendship

despite not sleeping, the atmosphere was a lot less gloomy than back in the day, too. when i look into the past, i see a small, dark and smoky room illuminated exclusively by my small tv. my friend is lounging in my red poäng, half-awake and existing in what can only be described as a corpse-like state. the smell of stale cigarette, energy drink and human condition is enough to overpower small- to medium-sized animals. chase & status quietly drum and bass along in the background so as not to wake my mother. fresh summer air tries to enter through the wide open window, but can not penetrate. all of that is history. instead, we now have a bright interior and triple-digit square meters to stretch out and walk around in. all of this didn't really strike me in the moment, but feels extremely liberating during this period of reflection. apart from good old capitalism, there are no more shackles, no societal norms to break because we mostly exist in the comfort of our own private spaces where they don't apply. no mothers, no schedules, no authority to contest our choices. in those two days, we transcended all of that. we wear trackpants because it has always felt comfortable. my friend smokes on his balcony three rooms over instead of in his bedroom not because anyone demands it, but because he likes to have a smoke-free home. we drink tea and flat whites/cappuccinos instead of almdudler because we're boring now. the only thing i was raging at was my aching lower back after sitting for an entire day

so, what has been learned? nothing, really. rather, a pre-existing notion has been strengthened through exercise. i've been holding onto the belief that true peace is spending time with someone close to your heart, doing and saying nothing in particular, and yet feeling whole. the sueddeutsche zeitung recently published an opinion piece on giving up your dreams and resigning yourself to reality, and that to me means accepting that maybe friendship much like adult life is mostly boring and doesn't need to be exciting to be worthwhile. i "wasted" 200+ euros and many, many hours of my life watching someone else play games much like we wasted many weekends of our childhoods attempting trickshots with the intervention on highrise, time we'll never get back, and every second of it was great

this is your reminder to waste your life on earth with people you can do that with. also, don't watch kenny vs spenny

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath