Weee

This is a beautiful day for me, giving how it started: well one of the monitors just blew up and the projector, well it just blew as well. Fish at lunch. My eyes rolled as I finished my lunch, and went down to the garage and just grabbed my old wheels and went down the road without a definitive destiny. I just wanted to go north and hear some groovy nineties jazz.

When I said I didn’t have a destiny, I had. First I went to pick a person. My company that day. It turned to be the best company I had in a long, long time. She didn’t know where we were going, neither do I. The traffic was infernal as usual at a Friday night. But damn, if the company is good time just passes by without you noticing it.

We went down to an old place of my childhood, the beach. Well in the last day of October it was a pretty decent day to have a bath if you are some crazy surfer, body boarder, wannabe,…like some there, in a completely flat sea. But I am not someone instructed to talk about this. Resuming it was a beautiful day with some clouds but with an even more beautiful sun, that sadly in the last minutes was hidden by clouds and late fog.

Bla bla bla. What I am trying to say is that she was the best company I could wish for. And to be written some place where even she or anybody can see I made some promises, which I intend to fulfill whatever happens:

I will always love her. For what she is. For what she will be. And for what she was. And above all I will always be a friend.

Since I have written it down most of you that know me, must know that I am pretty sure of what I am talking about. And for once in my life I am. You may ask why. I will answer you that there is no whys just truth and in that truth is love and above all the wish to see somebody other than me happy.

Water

Water…H2O, white solid or almost colorless, transparent, with a slight hint of blue or crystalline solid or liquid. It is so volatile and transparent. It has no taste or smell. Everyday you see it as a liquid a solid or vapor: three phases. Water is so different from other substances. How can you say it is beautiful? No, water is the most common molecule on earth, it isn’t beautiful, it is just common.

Really beauty comes with rarity. You can even argue that we are made, between 55 and 78%, of water and that humans are beautiful. Yes you are beautiful, but it is not the water in you that makes you beautiful my dear. It is the association of all molecules and elements. The other 45 to 22% are responsible for the beauty in you and what made me fell in love.

Did you notice how water is volatile? It freezes in your fridge; it evaporates with just a focus of the sun. And it goes on and on in those cycles that you have learned when you were a child back in school: rain, rivers, sea, evaporation, clouds, rain,….

Water does not stop. Water is here for some time, but then it just goes away. You need it, it is a fact, but everything has water in it. You don’t need it directly, you can just eat oranges, pineapples, carrots or even potatoes and get the water from there. Sometimes it feels good, especially after running or when you are thirsty, but isn’t a coke, or a juice better? Of course it is.

It feels good when you are taking a shower or when you are washing your hands not because it is water, but because it is warm and comforting as any other fluid at 40ºC and it cleans all the dirtiness in you. You’d rather take a bath on perfume or milk don’t you? At least I do.

You know? I am talking but many time ago someone who I cared a lot about told me I was water: too much ethereal. And I know that. I am inconstant, imprecise, inaccurate and vague. And how can you trust in somebody like me? Well I ask you, how can you trust in water by swimming on it or laying on your back in an ocean full of water? Water kills, nevertheless you trust it, so why don’t trust me? I never killed someone did I?

But back to water I made a quiz to see if I really was water. Well here is the result: “Your element is Night. You are mysterious and intense. You despise sunlight, and thrive in darkness. You have a little evil inside you. You control the darkness.”

At first I laughed, of course it is just a little pretentious and omnipotent to think that we can be compared to an element and quizzes, well they are just right as a 3 year old talking about math, but it has some truth in it. I prefer the night to day, I am more productive at night and everyone says that I am very intense playing sports, writing or playing an instrument. At the same time they tell me I am mysterious because I really don’t open myself a lot to other persons.

But yes. Water is like night. And assuming that more than 90 % of water is in the shadows and very deep where the sun doesn’t reach we can associate a lot both water and night.

Concluding, I don’t trust water, it’s sneaky. A rogue. Just like the night. Night is not a good counselor neither is water. So I will always treat water with great deference and respect as it deserves, but never as a friend. You have two possibilities: you love water or you hate water. That's simple.

Nightmare

She is hearing voices. Yes she is. Horrible voices. She can’t sleep and just crawls by night. By day the voices don’t let her live neither. Staring down the street she sees a blurry avenue full of black dressed gentleman with no face passing her by and muttering senseless words. She stands there useless, powerless. The world is passing her by. She is in a square, she can’t leave it. Take a step outside is risking being drowned by those indistinct individuals.

- What am I?

- You are you.

- How certain of that am I?

- You will never be.

- How can I be happy then?

- You will never be happy.

- So what am I doing in this world?

- You are rotting until the day your day arrives.

- Am I suffering then?

- Yes you are. You will only stop suffering when you die.

- If it is as you say why is there a God looking for us?

- Darling, there is no God, and no salvation, just me.

- And what are you?

- I am your imagination. Your inner you.

- May I kill you?

- If you kill yourself maybe you do. We are one and as one we die.

- Where am I then?

- You are in your square. You can’t leave. You can’t be happy. And you will rot in it.

- So…

- When you die, I’ll die with you and nothing more exists than that.

- So is this just it?

- Yes, a lot of suffering.

- No chance of being happy then?

- No, no chance at all my love.

- Let us stop end it then.

- Yes I see you stopped questioning. You are unhappy the solution is obvious. Believe me it just takes a little courage.

- Yes you are right.

She took all her courage and took the rope lying next to her.

Then she climbed back to the light.

No shadows, just a beautiful dawn, with the sun behind some clouds playing hide and seek.

Oh beautiful world. Your beautiful sounds and your beautiful people. How is it possible to them to be so different? How is it possible for us to fight the demons inside our heads? How is it possible to even imagine them with such a beautiful place to live?

Yes, in the moment she woke up she had fought her imagination to death. She realized that there is no reason to be unhappy. There is just no reason.

“Darling, come down! Breakfast time.”

She is hearing voices. Yes she is. Beautiful voices.

Muryan and Blind Zero at Fundação A Lord

What a gorgeous night. It was raining so hard I barely saw the road with my bad windshield full of marks. Remember me to clean the car next time, please. Well, it was obviously fun to make so many kilometers to see Blind Zero, but I made them with extreme pleasure. When I arrived at the foundation it were 9 o’clock and it was supposed to start at that time, nevertheless they only opened the doors around 10. Well I was tired, but I didn’t mind. I love Blind Zero since 1998 when I was just 9 years old, and wait one more hour to see them is just a small sacrifice to my legs, even if it was for the sixth time. (Yes I paid 10€ to see them for the sixth time).

Like me the around two hundred persons had paid the same and have filled the amphitheater. So it obviously should worth the money. And I say to you that it was the best spent 10€ in a long time, and coming from someone so hooked to the money like me is a strong sentence.

Well I was born in Lordelo, it is the city in my heart, my roots are there, and even not living there it is with extreme pleasure that I go there every once in a while. And Lord, well it is more than a foundation it is an electrical cooperative which is the engine of the city. There are two similar cooperatives and the only ones in the country are A Lord and Celer right in the next city, Rebordosa. They are rich cooperatives which help the population at the various levels, being above all a philanthropic organization.

Back to the old cinema from the eighties, now reconverted to a beautiful and modern amphitheatre we started with Muryan, a band with nine years from Ovar. Well, in my research I found nothing about them, so they must be pretty in the underground scene of rock. Anyway, they have a pleasant alternative rock or alternative metal. I say metal and rock because they reminded me a lot of the first albums of Incubus. Quick and sometimes slow. Heavy and sometimes smooth. But there was too much confusion of sounds in my opinion, and the tracks where too long. I didn’t know at the time if they were still playing the same song or if they passed right to the next one without even stopping. But it was a good appetizer overall indeed. I hope they have more mainstream success notwithstanding that they are a little late in this scene of the alternative rock.

Then they passed the folder to Blind Zero. I can’t stop realizing how good as a band they are. They look just like a family which makes music with closed eyes. Beautiful. Hearing those tracks from 2003, 1998,…brought so many memories. So many wonderful memories. Some sad and some happy. Some riffs make my spine shiver just like that. I always associated Blind Zero with night, emotions, love and mystery and it was what made the difference to me. But then, Luna Park, “Two Days” a revitalizing song from the forthcoming album, and then of course “Slow time love”. Oh so beautiful, so full of hope. Damn I wish I had someone to hold in those moments or someone who had the same smile like I had on my face at that time or even just the same sense of obfuscation like I had. Damn I can remember Zé Nuno, Manekinhas, Rui, Fábio, Pedro,… Blind Zero makes me miss my friends that even not liking what I like are there enjoying because I just enjoy it.

Finishing like I said during the concert, Blind Zero are smashing, fantastic, chimerical, fanciful, stupendous, unreal, whimsical, excellent and a joy to behold.

Black love gives way to Blue love

I think that love is black. A real deep black, sometimes like anger or rage: dark, sad and melancholic. At first it is I think, and if you don’t fight that love that comes from your brain it always will be black. And no one would like to be the target of that dark love.

When I talk about dark love I’m talking about the need of possession, the need of attention, jealousy and all those feelings we have tried sometime in our life. If you are madly, deeply in love for a short time you will experience these kinds of feelings, then, if you don’t trust the person you love those feelings will always come to surface: a black opaque surface like oil. It slips through your fingers but leaves marks and they are hard to disappear. You know? Friendship is the foundation of love, and someone told me that friendship is like a flower, you need to water it, expose it to sun and treat her with delicacy, if you sprinkle the flower with that crude, that black and concentrated oil you will kill it. What I mean by killing it is just that you will lose the person you love and you will have always that sentiment that hurts a lot, sometimes rejection, delusion and sadness generally.

Yes, you need a change. And that change is when “black gives way to blue”. (I am writing this text because I’m listening to the new album of Alice in chains with this song beautifully closing the album.

I don’t mean that blue which chock, and hurts our eyes. I mean the ocean blue, that deep blue full of emotion. That’s the color of love, and not red. Red is passion in my opinion. Love is so much more complex. You really need to trust somebody to give her this love. It’s much more than say “I love you”, it’s actions, beautiful actions.

“Lay down, black gives way to blue

Lay down, I'll remember you”

It’s the action of laying down, and expect it to come, it’s the act of waiting and have patience, with no dark feelings, just go with the flow you know. It’s the act of remembering even when sleeping or doing your everyday stuff. Oh, you know, there are things you should not describe. Let me just say that you know if you love someone when the love you feel is blue. That slow, calm, thick and consistent blue that you can watch and dream just by looking at. It’s a thing you feel, you don’t describe.

Concluding just let me tell you, if you have a relationship and you feel that way or if you love someone that way, you are someone blessed and a great person, because it is really, really hard to be so altruistic, giving love with wanting nothing in return. If you are one of those people, I bow down to you because you achieved something I have not achieved yet, but I feel that I am really, really close. My love has always been blue, but a choking blue, not a warm and deep blue that I want now.

She doesn't love me.

There is a little black spot on the sun today, it's the same old thing as it was yesterday sang Alanis many years ago in a show for MTV. From there it was Born Alanis Morisette MTV Unplugged.

But I’m not going to do a review of a cd today, I’m in a turmoil of revelations, emotions, well, everything. At first this year has been one of the most difficult to engage seriously. Around here nothing works. No timetables for nothing, I sleep by day and crawl by night. It is really difficult to maintain a constant and good pace. The fault is mine, I know, but everything around me is prone to bring me down, down and even more down. Don’t tell anybody but I’m really getting over it. I’m sad obviously but I am starting to realize that I am a man. No helps, no excuses.

I miss those good old times when I could ask my parents for help. Nowadays, they are still there, but not to help me in my options and every day, every hour I have to take one. And they are difficult.

Should I study or should I write? When I was ten they would advise me, now the option is mine, all mine and every action has a reaction, hasn’t it Newton?

Yesterday I had to take one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had, let´s just say that I’ve been in love for a girl for some time. A long time maybe for me. Well, I’m not shy and in the moment I knew I loved her I told her. No one has ever had the same attitude of indifference and detachment from human feelings like her. But I’m no quitter so I kept on trying, giving everything asking nothing in return. The summation of frustration kept growing and growing until reach rage and fury. Last night, during a conversation she just told me to shut up, she didn’t want to talk to me. Well it hurts you know? But, ok, one more for the summation, I had take so much until there, why not take some more in the face? It looked like I liked to be dumped and trashed in the corner of inexistence and oblivion.

But what made your summation tend to infinity? You may ask. Well I will tell you. I realized how sad it is to be silenced by someone who we just want to love. How sad it is to be expecting love of someone who don’t even know what love is. It angered me so much to the level of explosion. Well, in a harsh way I said to her to go to hell, in the end what I needed her for? Nothing. So many beautiful girls, so much beauty in the world, and there I was: sad and unhappy. What a difficult decision it was to ask her to tell me: “Diogo I don’t like you and I will never like”, but I asked, and with all her indifference she repeated my words without the slightest hesitation.

What a terrible person she is I realized. Sometimes in the past, even when I didn’t loved the person next to me I would be pleasant enough to help that people get up. Society is so insensible, so detached from the old values of love and friendship…I don’t believe in God in a traditional way, but today I will pray to find someone who has the same value as my love. Is it too much to ask? I don’t think so.

What hurts even more, is the feeling of loss. First I lost somebody I was in love to. Then I lost a friend. Then I knew the world lost something. I don’t know what but maybe love.

Today I found a friend, a good friend, we talked for a little bit, and he said his life was like a boat sinking because of all the works he has to do and tests. My life is a little boat too and I have just a bucket in my hand. I will have to work hard pumping out the water until reach a shore. Every hour I keep pumping it out I get closer and closer. And I get away from the corpse of that awful person who I know has sank a long, long time ago and now lies on the deepest of the deepest oceans, without love or light.

But my heart, my heart has a little black spot today and the sun, well it will always have another black spot when I look at it with her name written there.

Goodbye to her.

Hello beautiful dawn.

Jack

Jack was born somewhere in the past. Jack was born in a country. Jack was the name of that five pound baby with parents which were white on the outside but grey on the inside. Oh, Jack…poor Jack, if you knew, if you just knew, what was waiting for you, here, outside, in this world marked by confusion and disorder, maybe you wouldn’t want to be born. But the choice wasn’t yours.

Outside the mirror from the nursery their parents watched his chest going up and down, calmly and gently. In the world of that young Jack there wasn’t hate or anger just love. Jack has always been full of love to give, but the world wasn’t ready for him, at least not at that time. As they watched they held their hands together for a moment, right before they follow different paths and unleash loneliness on that poor boy.

Jack was the age of the reader when he met her and he was lonely. She was tall like him, not too skinny, not too beautiful, with long dark hair just like Jack’s hair. Her eyes were…beautiful but mysterious, Jack could not describe them on that moment

Jack fell in love. He was a romantic and a really wonderful person on the inside. Jack was in love. Jack is in love. Jack will be in love. She wasn’t. She is in love, she will always be in love.

Nevertheless, the world was unfair, and people so beautiful were like butterflies on a highway: they didn’t stand a chance against the fast cars that ran over them. Jack was a butterfly, and she, well she was the car that trampled him.

She didn’t realize how beautiful Jack was. She has been always too busy to notice him, like every other person in the world. Everyone was always too busy to watch Jack giving love without receiving anything. An unfair trade, everyone would agree in a normal world. But this world will not be normal until each one of us notice the beauty of the butterflies that surround us. And Jack, we should have noticed Jack but we didn’t.

Days passed. Now, in the present, they love each other and she is holding that beautiful butterfly with his bare hands. On that moment she promises that she will love him forever and ever. But Jack has been in this cruel world for a long time. Too much time.

If there is a God, Jack will be meeting him in a short future. But by now Jack knows how to describe her eyes. They were green as a leaf from an orange tree, clear as water and water they are while he is leaving this world. I wish him the best luck in his next world. By the time he arrives there Jack will have been suffering in this world the same age she will have by the time she dies. And by the time she dies she will have been suffering all her life like every one of us because we missed the chance of having the right person right next to us.

The Fixer - backspacer review

In the last month I’ve listened to the new cd of Pearl Jam a lot. It's called Backspacer.

Well, at a first look backspacer is a joy to behold in what I call the "music world today". Most of the bands play and record sad songs, with slow tempos when the song is about love or life in general, being generally sad and lonely we become depressed. On the other hand, some bands worship gods, monsters or devils with heavy, dark, emotional, quick or slow metal. Well there are two sides and nothing in the middle. That bothers me. And for a long time I´ve been looking for something balanced and good-tempered. Well I've found it.

From the roots of the grunge, from the early nineties, here they come again, Pearl Jam: decent, canny, full of energy. A beautiful rock which we can dance to the sound of.

Fixer is the first single, I see others coming but it is the first one, and the song I like the most.

Well it transmits a message full of energy. Along with revitalizing "yeah yeahs" there are some part of the lyrics that I would like to explore.

"When something’s dark, let me shed a little light on it

When something’s cold, let me put a little fire on it

If something’s old, I wanna put a bit of shine on it

When something’s gone, I wanna fight to get it back again"

Yeah that's it. I want to give light to things. I want to be fire and shine, and above all I want to fight for the things I love. Such a beautiful message in the world of rock, which is always so sad, leading us to thoughts about death and destruction. No Pearl Jam stopped it. Thank you.

"When something’s broke, I wanna put a bit of fixing on it

When something’s bored, I wanna put a little exciting on it

If something’s low, I wanna put a little high on it

When something’s lost, I wanna fight to get it back again "

Again. I want to fix things, be exciting, I wanna live happy and once again fight for the things I've lost. What the hell? Everyone says: no! You can't, that grade is too high, that girl is too much for you, and you can't have that car. No way! Fight for it!

"When signals cross, I wanna put a little straight on it

If there’s no love, I wanna try to love again”

That's right. Keep always things simple. No crosses, only straights. And love. Love, be loved and spread it along the world. Strawberries Fields Forever isn’t it?

Well, by this time you can deduce that I felt in love with this song. And right you are if you think so. It's my alarm clock ringtone and it makes me lift up from bed at seven AM full of energy.

Thank you Vedder and Pearl Jam for this piece of heaven and relief coming from the nineties.

Now I realize how old I am getting. I loved the music from the nineties. It was so happy sometimes.

Stories to another time.