some thoughts on music, vegan dining options, homelessness and more

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note: this is a bunch of scrambled thoughts that are too short to turn into a full blog entry but need to get out of my head. essentially a form of twitter feed, just without the garbage (i.e. twitter). i was listening to the much recommended 'the cold vein' album by cannibal ox while typing out these words

there is nothing quite like el-p production. i'm currently homeless in terms of music genres and keep cycling through slowed/reverbed tevvez songs, slowed/reverbed yeat songs and medieval inn music that makes me want to replay gothic 1 and 2. i don't remember how but on my quest to again find sonic satisfaction i stumbled upon an old el-p track on youtube and like so many times before fell into the rabbit hole. drones over bklyn -> deep space 9mm (my personal favorite) -> how to serve man -> \$4 vic -> this video on the korg youtube channel where he produces a beat from scratch -> the rhythm roulette episode with el-p -> meanstreak (in 3 parts) -> reagan by killer mike -> a christmas fucking miracle and so on. there's only one good way to get acquainted with an artist and that's through world of warcraft pvp videos. in my case, it was hoodrych 6 that introduced me to el-p probably like 10 years ago. i was still living in a bavarian city of 70k inhabitants and had just dropped out of 9th grade. wild times. the audio engineering on display in every el-p instrumental still amazes me to no end. makes me want to get big into synthesizers

i have moved again and now live in a 3-room apartment in the city of halle. everything is right around the corner. the contrast between my previous living arrangement, a 1-room in a desolate outskirt, and this is predictably stark. there are things i miss, of course. the clean air, the quiet, the nature, the cozy bus and tram rides that took forever, the cheap rent payments. in the end, i'm still glad i made the move. the casual racism and extreme nationalism, the complete lack of self-awareness, the levels of poverty, the stasi-style neighbor gossip. fuck all that shit

the vegan cuisine here is severely lacking in comparison to berlin, though perhaps it's an unfair one to make. had some burgers some time ago that were pretty much inedible. my favorite place is probably lilobowl. i always get rice as a base, some beans, some smoked tofu, some pickled ginger and whatever else i'm feeling in the moment. let no one else tell you otherwise: eating healthy is the best thing in the world (as long as you don't order at dean & david in my humble opinion)

i think a lot about being good and coming to terms with my personal failings. the other day, i got a subjectively disrespectful text message and, as usual, my first instinct was to cut the person off. the sheer lack of self-reflection insulted me. i'm not sure when i started emotionally distancing myself from people that hurt me in some way or other, but it's a habit i'm now stuck with, i suppose. it takes surprisingly little effort to forever alienate me as a friend, and that's probably a thing i should tackle. then again, i think it's better to have no acquaintances than have ones you don't feel connected to any longer for whatever reason, whether the alienation happens abruptly due to a single situation or slowly over time. and multiple fuck-ups. it's a lonely existence, but it's based on integrity and principles, and maybe that's good enough, even if the principles are dubious. i'm still trying to figure it out

coming from welfare, being able to buy a washing machine and other critical appliances/furniture on a whim is a blessing. being able to do white-collar work in the comfort of one's own home instead of doing heavy labor and in the process trading a relatively menial sum of money for back pain is a blessing. i want to be more grateful for all of that. also, i still developed lower back pain, but that's because of me day after day making the conscious choice to not exercise, not because of my job

i recently watched a documentary on german women that have been homeless for varying lengths of time. one of them is roughly my age. she was sleeping under a bridge in cologne for about a year before moving into a government-sponsored home for the homeless. the apartment doesn't have heating, mold covers the walls. according to her, the government told her she shouldn't be able to get comfortable in the place because it's temporary housing for the homeless, implying that the homeless deserve only slightly better than the low standards that chip away at their sanity daily? it's a pretty sombering thought that due to forces outside of your control - sudden development of a mental health-related condition for example - you could lose your well-paying, cushy job and be forced to live in a cold and moldy home the owner refuses to take care of. the additional stigma of being homeless will probably help in making the situation worse. i look back on my life, especially that one night i spent on the warm summer streets of stuttgart, and the many more nights after that i spent in temporary and less temporary shelters, just to have the chance to go back to school and get back on my feet, and get goosebumps trying to imagine being confronted by that situation again. even though i try to live pretty minimalistically and aspire to be comfortable in the face of poverty, once you've been through the grinder, you are probably willing to go to any length to avoid it in the future. perhaps even death. i hope we can do better in the future

when i think of the arbeitsagentur and the jobcenter, i think of bitchy middle-aged women with shoulder-length haircuts trying to get you to do the absolute lowest-skill jobs that do nothing to help you reach a higher living standard or at least the next step on the way to independence. i pray to god they will one day sit on the opposite side of their desks, their spirit being ground to dust by the snarky remarks uttered by their assigned case worker, an equally bitchy employee with the same snobby attitude, existing only in their comfortable upper middle-class bubble where 'you just have to get off your ass' and wealth will magically appear. i also pray they will be forgiven after. there's only three people working at the jobcenter i've interacted with that treated me like a human being, trusted me and believed in my plan to become a fachinformatiker, refusing to put me into their useless programs and instead giving me time. i will never forget them. thank you, frau k., frau d. and herr l.

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