2023 m. rugsėjo 19 d., antradienis

The beautiful art of vulnerable storytelling: Billie Eilish's "TV"

On the June 21th, 2022, as the sun rose, so did new Billie Eilish's EP "Guitar songs".
A surprise from her end, as Billie shared later, the entire promote your song, create cover, film clip thing got tiring and she just wanted to share those songs just as they were. Just as it was in the old times, if you will.

EP is consisting of two songs and a dreamy, blurry picture of Billie's profile being merged into the nature of, what likely seems to be summer outside, or that summer being merged to her. It is unclear where one ends and another begins, the cover carries a bit of that circa feeling, old ass blurry film photo, and on the bottom right it has the names of the songs scribbled in a weird, almost obsessive way.



2018 m. gruodžio 2 d., sekmadienis

Regret machines

There is this video I discovered on youtube of Hannah Hanks, it‘s button poetry and it‘s called „Don‘t kill yourself today“.
I liked it immediately when I found it out and I wasn‘t even suicidal. I liked it, because it doesn‘t reach high. It doesn‘t tell you all that crap others usually do – how much you should think of your kids and mothers, it doesn’t tell you that same “suicide is a permanent solution” thing, well, in fact, it does. But it also does tell that you already knew it. And that’s truth.
It talks about the small things. It’s all about the Netflix trials and that chicken in the fridge, it’s about shampoo and conditioner. It talks about things we deal with daily, and sometimes daily things are all we need. Sometimes everything else is too much and it’s too overwhelming. Sometimes the last drop of your patience to deal with the world can be the price of the glasses you need. Which are, by the way, not only practical and needed, but also very nice glasses.
But I had weeks, weeks of ups and downs. Weeks of feeling nice and weeks of sick to my stomach. Weeks of feeling productive and reaching all time highs, and weeks of the opposite. And by weeks I don’t really mean weeks. I usualy mean seconds and hours. Just, some days some hours overpower other quite a bit.
And I just got tired. Tired is a word we use daily, and it might not signify how tired I was. But it’s there, between the devastation and defeat, giving up and hopelesness. And not even the fact that I’ve been there before helps. In fact, it makes me more tired.
And as I was riding the bus home, listening to that poem of Hannah, I started to come up with at least some reasons, but all of them just seemed as both good reasons to live and die for. Like, I should live to still get all the mail from Aliexpress. What then? Do I continously order to forever to keep me alive? Should I? I should probably do whatever it takes, but is this what the rest of my life looks like?
I have many clothes, some I should throw out and others I should probs donate to people, and still there woudn’t be enough to only fill one wardrobe that we possess. So wouldn’t it be better the other way around? I mean, he’d get to throw out the clothes and that would be the end of it?
I’d ruin somebody’s Christmas. It will scar people anyway, be it Christmas or not. But it’s not about them, not at that point, even if what I live for, is, in fact, people.
At that point it becomes about something you cannot bear anymore. In my case, many, many things piling up, it’s not one dramatic break up, not one lost job. What I feel like I cannot bear anymore, what weight I have on my shoulders and bear it with me through the streets merely looking left and right anymore, it’s about everything that I feel I cannot bear. It happens to me almost daily that I think ending it. I just almost never end up wanting it.
If I had a child and tried to explain, what’s happening to me constantly, I’d just go with “mommy is living very much, and sometimes it gets very hard”. That’s probably how I should speak to myself, too. That’s what it is. I am somewhat thankful for feeling so much and living so much, even when that living is a bare form of hybernation, because there’s much and I don’t handle it all that much, too.
Neither of these are much okay, but also I don’t imagine what my life would be without them. Some people have onsets of things, like flare ups, that put some sort of markers. Me – a bit, but not so much, really. At the end of the day I probably had unhealthy coping habits from as long as possible.
And I kept thinking, what is it that would make me not kill myself? Last time I tried it, I went on of those unsafe ways – by pills and stopped halfway due to exposure.
So I met this person and we talked and he said something very meaningful. That we don’t see the damage, the harm in pills. It’s a fairly new thing that we have discovered, it hurts - we pop one for pill, we pop another for a fever.
He said, if he was to ever want to kill himself, he would go somewhere very high. Where you can feel the danger and the fear of death. Kind of to check out if he thinks he doesn’t fear death so much. But don’t we, almost all of us still are afraid of it - and still jump?
I think I could have. If yesterday I went to a place where I could have hang out undisturbed for a bit, at the right time, I would have let go.
And what then? There are people who survived jumps from Golden Gate bridge. What they tell is that the moment they have let go of the rails, they realized they made a mistake.
How would it be for me? I’ll never know, and if I will, I will not be able to write about it. Don’t we all doubt it at the end though? Has there ever been a person who has jumped and before his body hitting the ground or the fierce armour of water, he didn’t regret it? Isn’t it what most of us are, just big functional regret machines? We have entire techniques to remove that, meditations, being here and now, not expecting things.
We are prone to regret and nostalgy, no matter how shitty the actual thing was. Does it mean I would have regretted it? Probably.
And as I was riding the bus, I thought to myself, that maybe, someday, they’ll find a drug coctail for me, and it will actually work. I just have to hold on till then. And that might mean holding till I die, but that’s an okay start.
 

2017 m. rugsėjo 11 d., pirmadienis

Tonight is not about the war

Tonight is not about the war.

Tonight is all about being alive. Tonight is about the perfection.

Tonight is the night I feel like I've been underwater for ages and I just dived up and gasped fresh air for the first time in ages.

Tonight is the night my memories come back. Real ones. Not those distorted by depression or the illness. The ones that were made before.

Memories of no regrets. Memories of how weird the life can be. How it switches everything, turns tables. Leaves you in awe.

Which I always used to pronounce wrong. Awe. But it's just such a nice word it deserved that. It has always been my guilty pleasure to mispronounce "awe", so it could gain some magical sound.

The texture of when this word leaves your lungs, travels through the vocal chords and echoes in one's mouth.

Tonight I feel so alive I don't want to sleep. I don't want to put my head on the pillow and close my eyes just in case tomorrow I woke up what I was yesterday.

Tonight I'm a small bird who started learning to fly by falling off its nest. And I feel both the excitement of the bird and the proudness of its mother watching from afar. It's now afar. The bird has learnt how to spread its wings so that sometimes it would be able to get above the common ground.

Tonight I'm the small wolf cub eating the dinner his mothed has brought him. Tonight I'm the mother who has successfully hunted down food for her cub after a long period of draughts.

Tonight I'm an owl with my big eyes scanning the forest. Tonight I'm an eagle screaming to its kind because he's no longer lost.

Tonight I'm a chicken breaking from its shell. Tonight I am sitting under the moon, somewhere deep in my mind drowning in nature's images.

I am no longer underwater.

2016 m. lapkričio 26 d., šeštadienis

Blindly keep going

I was supposed to be married by now and all I am is ill.

At some point I became aware that not only my shoe size is quite unique. I mean, my feet are huge and massive just enough for me to take ages to find the right shoes and I can cry all over the shoes I will never get to wear due to it. It is just so freakin' impossible to put someone in my shoes.

It's hard to notice when you become manic. You can notice it in the middle of everything, if you know this weird thing happens to you at all.

You are just living the dream. It's your time. You feel like you are in control of everything. See, that's the thing. Your mania is in control of you and it replaces your conscious mind imprinting into your brain the belief that you are in control. Honestly, at that time everything is about you, even if you don't notice it. Everything else disappears from the picture, everyone else does. Things that matter to you most of the time do not matter. Things that you would be against at all times when sane, suddenly feel like amazing ideas to try.

After each of the episodes you sit down broken somewhere inside, after fucking up something new in yourself, in your surroundings. It can be your views but it can also be your relationships. And I was supposed to be married by now.

Only this week had I realised some of the mess around me this summer, causing the most painful break up ever, was partly manic. At that time I had no way at all to know it was manic. I swear I believed the first time I became manic was at the very end of the summer, all that partying, staying up late, searching for one night stands which I thought I would never do and which I dislike. I could solemnly swear.

But I opened a random page of my calendar this week and it triggered something inside, making me rethink my year.

April 3. Got engaged.

2016 m. rugpjūčio 2 d., antradienis

Awake

your life is phases of narcolepsy
waiting
so patiently waiting
while finally
you'll fall asleep

your life is phases of narcolepsy
during the phases you eat and you sleep, you get laid
during the phases you are about
to jump out of the window
the good plastic window
in twenty-first century

your life is phases of narcolepsy
waiting
so patiently waiting
while finally
you'll fall awake

2015 m. birželio 28 d., sekmadienis

and to that certain someone who will most likely never read it

You were never even in my fucking life and I miss you so.

I have not known you, I never did. I did not get to at least touch your walls and walls from the other side of it nor find the gates. You were a very strict gatekeeper, you and your purple clouds.
They say you were a bitch and a disaster and I didn't even get to see that or check it out. Just as that - for a moment you were there with me and at another one you were gone, all justifying that you weren't your true self, and maybe weren't you, but I felt your kindness and your calmness all over the places we walked and visited and sat upon.

With me you were nothing what they talked of, you were a melancholic dream come true, giving me nicknames, the one in particular - you called me Alice, as I was all in the colors of that world, all in the phrases and actions of that world you said and for that particular moment I thought that it gave you some pleasure but maybe it bothered you deeply, not that I know, not that I ever get to know that one thing.

Why on Earth cry separating if the only thing I gave you was pure torture. Must it have happened, it was the first time someone ever broke it off with me so clearly. What if, you said, I would tell you, that this is our last meeting? And I asked if it was a theoretical or maybe rethorical question but later on I found it wasn't as you repeated it when I escorted you home at that night, pure night yet not dark, not that it ever gets dark on those dreadful summer nights. Here, you said, it's your favorite bus stop, and not that I would get on any bus possible, if there still were some going. You said your words as if you paid your respects and then you hugged me, and then, of all things, you started crying. It ain't fair, then again hardly anything is. You were leaving me and you were crying.

And I feel angry somehow, though understanding you completely. I might have not known you but you told me the reasons you are leaving me for, excluding me of your life as if I would have been some kind of foreign body, never supposed to enter and thus never to exit, but someone switched the cards and so you had to wipe it off from the table with your very bare and naked hands, your delicate and thin yet somehow long fingers, obviously created for playing music, for touching white and black  keys of piano of all the shades, as many pianos as you can throughout your life. 

I would have done the same, I guess, were you resembling me everything that I had just lost in this very short amount of time, then again, these things are not supposed to be possessed, they simply are and we get to touch them with the skin on our shoulders.

Were you resembling me that everything that you ain't feeling like ever able to touch again, above everything else, I would have suggested we part our ways, but as you were the key of our relationship, so it had to be your hand. 

And yet it bothers me: I am so many things, above the vocalist of a band or the friend of certain people. I am a book reader. I am a wife. I am a scout and I teach children. I am that person who makes very custom tea, that person who above everything else, adores coffee, adores it like you do - that's what I got to know about you at least,
And you've only seen that one thing. And it breaks my heart in ways. It breaks me who never got to know you. It breaks me who never will.
and I miss you so.

for life is what it is

for life is what it is
and nothing more
and nothing less
and maybe nothing all in all
it is that nothing that is filled with fears of things we've never seen
that nothing's
filled with fascination for the very existence
of things under the sky, around the trees and barking dogs
for life is only what it is
and there we fish for our purpose
await impatiently while it gets caught
and our sight's flickin' one another from in rather graceful ways
yet it is somehow us who have to catch it switch it change it and transform it
to meet conditions of our little lives
of our little soldiers
that come and go with times a'changin'
striving to change the oldest of worlds' orders
for life is what it is
it is no clue
it's not a single cloud surpassing surface of the pale blue sky
so faintly blue we mimick in way more vivid shades
locking all subtlety outside our door
outside the buildings that we live-have-sex-and-then-we-die in
outside the notes of our fresh-raw-naked songs
we come and go
we come and go in search for our borders
and hopefully we never see the end
researching how far one can ever go
through deadly gates of boredom
the gates of places where the souls are born
the gates of places where they sweep the floor
                                      and then they rise

for life is only what it is
way more than we could ever hope for
and nothing more
and nothing less