in which I have been snorkeling since I can remember snorkeling. It not only frames the title of a book, sometimes the city itself, even if we have to make something up about it, Graz is basically ready to lie by the sea. From the mindset of its somewhat dawdling generosity.
The Adriatic Sea is rising and rising
And in an exaggerated drama combining Waterworld and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, we consume enough substances to almost find the title realistic.
Graz by the Sea began as a novel a long time ago, as a homage to our peculiar Styrian beatnik reality, at a nineties pre-network level, written with the first Brother with an electronic buffer, which a young person in Graz probably treated himself to, even before all the trips to the stars in the park.
There wasn't even Decarabia, the night demon of the third decade of Aquarius. But there were approaches that could show me something exciting if I recapitulate them.
If I now take new approaches to involving readers and future customers/members in the crowd choices, then I am daring to take an astonishing amount for my profession. It is up to me to decide where an idea, an approach, even a partially completed work ultimately leads or how it should change. The same goes for my crystal-clear willingness to include artificial intelligence instead of struggling to fight windmills against modernity.
I remember that at some point the printed pages ended up in the trash or in Barbara's memory box, but the original version of this Graz by the Sea began in a madhouse, obviously Sigmund Freud's, which had a damn bad reputation in the nineties. For good reason, as we will see. And it also reappears in a different beginning twenty years later.
A madhouse that is by no means friendly, in which a pretty Harley Quinn girl, a Riley - I wasn't even aware of these archetypes at the time - is kneeling on the floor in a straitjacket and has to satisfy a guard with her mouth when our hero comes by and does the only right thing: take her with him.
Love stories are inevitable in every world of my ideas and so the Peter Parker in me fled to the beach with his liberated anima. There, in a commune of relaxed Freedoms who had all their transmitters and barcodes removed, the two build a raft and set off on a long journey. The whole thing also had amazing connections to Doctorow's Walkaway, which was written much later.
This was the original Graz by the sea
, still very much influenced by Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, Kerouc, the inevitable Uncle Aleister, a bit of Hesse and Hoffmann, Joyce. I think there were also touches of hippie and Goa as a beacon of hope, Anjuna Beach and so on.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, basically everything with Nicholson, MTV was modernizing our imagery and visual projection culture. We hardly have such a mixture of basics to offer today. The average number of influencers is going fucking down in 24.
And in Graz, the small but fine alternative thinking was just beginning to reclaim the city park from old grannies, beer mat fights in the green spider. Petz from the Londoner next door, who later worked in the Scarabäus. The straw chairs hadn't been removed from the Q yet, and sometimes a stranger would put a piece of LSD in your mouth early in the morning. This is just to understand the frame that underlies my inner writing workshop.
Although the last few hours of yesterday were a little lacking in energy, colorless, it was probably due to the energy I had used up, which I have now regained. The weather is a disgrace for June. If even a Champions League final doesn't motivate me, it's time
To fuck Morpheus
But not the one from the Matrix. Idioms and pop culture have long had a problematic relationship. So I dance back in time to the idea and end up in a multitude of scattered hopes. Another overture, developed later, is also about ejaculating into the future. Here my frozen self, the hero, wakes up alone in the basement of the clinic and finds himself in a deserted Graz, perhaps a kind of Chernobyl mixed with a climate catastrophe.
At the other end, from the back entrance of the book, my daughters set out to find their missing dad and are taken through the airlock of the Biosphere dome, under which all the surviving city societies live.
Both concepts are now memories. And yet they are still a task. But I want to find myself in what is ultimately printed much more deeply than just being a mixture of rebellious Nicholson and Fallout Hero. I tuck my Seiz under my arm as an example. As if my armpit were reading it for me. I wave to Ottmar Krenn on the other side.
At best, a Roth will wave back at me, I seem to have missed the point of writing a little. Old approaches are outdated.
My last years in Graz were years of quiet urban zen. I can understand better than ever before the intuitive ideas on which I built myself.
Graz am Meer has apparently become a Blog, a possible city magazine, but also a social project for those daughters and sons who seem so often forgotten and who create a feeling of being lost whenever you meet them. And now the theme song is suddenly more of a book than ever.
Because I am so overwhelmed by names and memories that I could serve two of them. But on the other hand, in my multifunctional existence, I no longer see any need to limit something that can manifest itself naturally and immediately.
The feeling of acting unconditionally and purified, connected in the earth's crust with pink clouds as a halo. I am self-recognized and focus on autofictional writing.
The power of an identity revives the old and creates kaleidoscopes never thought possible. I have the freedom to live upside down. There is a bitter price to pay for being at home in the invisible. But it is also a superpower that hardly anything else offers. The bound dream of my happiness, I dream of theirs.
From these futures I arrive at a present of writing such as I have never had before. The sea seems to be the reason, Graz alone was never strong enough to inspire me to do more than exhort me. Doing is a stupid companion. I have long understood why everyone, or at least most of those who became something, had to leave. Even returning when you have outgrown the city is a risk in itself.
Suddenly everyone and anyone who can't get away from the gun barrel of the mind is the hero. I have noticed and am wallowing in aphrodisiac mood. All the filterless anarchy of my dignity is channeled into the intoxicated brand of the cellar children's tango in the fine dust of Little Berlin. Sometimes in the big picture.
The diagnosis of being an author is not an easy one.
On the beach I feel less like a stranger to myself. The embargo of the eternal search has failed, as has the concept of home. I will give you all the right to exist in my word pictures, to smuggle in new ones at any time, to make corrections, to feed the belly of the page number, as if it were important what will happen tomorrow or what once was and could be again.
The sails are set and take me from island to island. I sing to the dolphins what no one dares to think.
And yet I am also in my therapist's plain room. In Schlendrian, that's the name of my bar.
Injured, I sit down in the sand and am part of the heartbeat of the world. In this branch of longing, language is the means of breaking out of the predetermined into the creative being.
I create sensations, words and touches are my art. On crutches everything is fantasy, everything is possible. Muse, come and build me a castle. As I said, love stories are inevitable.
