This contribution has been in limbo for many months, its first breaths happening at the height of the pandemic and its lockdowns, but also in the restrictions of semi-privatised caution that began to take hold between them.
Somewhat maltreated by the folly of the Covidiots, in whose mirror a deeper recognition and naming of our hard-won and hard-won, but of course also first-born reality, despite all criticism and doubt, order and security, more to appreciate and above all more to promote and defend.
Where Covid (secretly now because bizarrely ignored) deciphers inadequacies and banana republic manoeuvres, where everything is tumbling as if it were the end of time, the thumbscrews of the Braintrust and Ethical Dwarfing have been flipping to a new level for a few weeks now.
The next long-awaited surprise for the slow worm of Western civilisation. The chicken coop of the neglected affluent.
Everything is designed as a continuation of very talented scriptwriters, the show of the Blue Planet, in extraterrestrial broadcasts probably always the best amusement, reaches new storytelling levels, you can be sure that the ratings of the Alienbunnygod explode out there behind the Kuiper.
But more or less, depending on your needs, at other points of illumination
Instead
I want to tell you about Anna, about scorched flesh, about Austrian traces of slime and even more about the feeling that nothing can ever be taken for granted in a world in which we allow what we allow, and in which Covid like Putin's war is just the tip of the iceberg of disgusting weakness of character and mendacious greed.
And when you rub the consternation out of your eyes, the home sapiens standing naked before you, this allergy of the planet, then you can define harrowing balances, but once again you have to postpone consequences, live and love with that which defines the present.
I mean just imagine first of all locally we would still be governed by Kurz and Strache, Kickl would have something to say, then the red Heinzi's disgusting prank orgy as a twink of a mass murderer gets lost in the by-catch, you have to bow to the cheerfulness that we are just a bunch of useless remnants of international importance, with a beautiful capital if everything there is not blocked by the vaginal fungus Rutter and consorts.
Dat is unfortunate and undiplomatic for this mainstreamer and portfolio appearance, but that is also necessary, it is time to choose between decency and character pig, between wriggling through and walking upright.
I tackled this some time ago and smiled at myself but also paid for it with pure loneliness.
If you only apply a little yardstick, and really only half of your own, and even then hardly anyone is left, Gaddafi's bride is an article on this elsewhere, also out of amazing turns of phrase nailing in the province, then you're in the how then, what then, loop, puzzling what we endure for a bit of cuddling, as regularly as possible and up to 40 holiday days on top of that.
The great moralists understand, but I don't want to be one of them, we don't have to get ourselves all worked up again and at times we're just still lost in a dithering drift. There's no forwards and no backwards right now.
We pay in life's lies.
In the Covidiotia we made our being into, this has become more precise, but we were already successfully resuming our old repression, our ignore charade of a burning biosphere notwithstanding.
It's all very much in motion there too, but the backslash of the Greed Generation had already formed. The black rock cripple toads. And the illusions of my beloved Fridays Rebels are almost as blown away as Greta's leadership. Glasgow has rebaptised itself as a fiasco, and all the rest we incubate is equally lost in the trick and cheat heaven of global lobbyists in elite service.
Gentle Feather, Chieftain of Armageddon Guards
But then the crazy Russian came along and went one better. Even if he were to row back now, the biting wounds of the last few days and years will fester and burn until we finally understand that only consistent and efficient action and change beyond emotional consternation can save us from our self-fulfilling fears.
Panic was always a bad counsellor, and a humanity at peace that groups itself around decadent packaging at Louis Vuitton prices and thinks of this as progress, while in Yemen and not only there children are starving, what should you tell them if they are now shivering from a tactical nuclear strike.
We can allow this emotional chatter to flow into a (trans)personal reorganisation, forming the social awakening in a more active, humanistic and yet also more powerful way.
The real price will be the end of convenience. Perhaps not so bad in exchange for dignity.
Anna
doesn't care about such details right now. She fled with her friends to Lviv shortly after the start of the war, where far too many German speakers betray their mindset when they call it Lviv, and is now trying to do what she can to support the resistance and the more helpless by volunteering there.
I had lost touch with her a bit, never really understood some things, which also fits in well with the fact that we were only prepared to perceive Ukraine to a limited extent, it has been Russian Warship Time there since 2014, but the world usually prefers to turn round and onwards.
Tonight she warmed one of her chameleons in her lap in the cold of the shelter, she should be able to do this without fear in dancing joy with her beloved, she stays voluntarily by the way and would have friends and open doors everywhere.
By the way, she just had Covid, but these little things are not another report, there are now enough, the intensity of the media avalanche is unbroken and of an almost decadently dynamic totality, what is happening here is the first social media war, even the apolitical banalities of Anonymous are hacking into history almost heroically, whereby heroism, this word now probably belongs for longer to the Ukrainian people and those unfortunately very sparse Russians who allow themselves to be imprisoned for wrapping the most harmless criticism of Stop War in **.
My foreign shame about us here, on the other hand, has reached a new high when I follow the discussions about stopping oil and gas imports, so I really prefer to think about Anna and whether our economic growth is negative.
Suggestion for goodness sake: wealth taxes like before neoliberalism to pay for all this shit and that's that.
Anna comes from the wonderfully young and modern, smart and free attitude to life of a Ukrainian generation that is more westernised than we are, and yet is still allowed to have a love of her homeland, not a fart in folklore. Under Russian occupation, as part of the LBGT world, it would probably be similar to Femen.
Of course it is more of a symbol to me, and of course we are all doing more than we can to absorb the largest refugee movement since the Second World War, Europe is growing and those borders are finally being defined that some have never wanted to respect or understand.
Even the one or other politician or captain of industry outgrows himself, even though so many are being exposed as caricatures. First and foremost, once again, all the silent, mute artist jesters and entertainers, Nina Pröll, what do you say to all this? Lischen, Lischen and you?
But these are the side notes of the doom scroller, who also works out what threatens to blow away in such colourful times in line with the title.
It's 13:11 on a random day, you're snoozing through an endless essay, things are suddenly no longer dead straight. You want to plan for next winter, for a new decade? Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of all, that we stop pursuing illusionary strategies.
Our actual reality, just hatching from the egg, this jumble of dynamics, the absolute chaos, the godless game of a myriad of players, it is important to understand that the fragile framework of what we have managed to draw on paper will be so far removed from any truthfulness that the future is unimaginable.
A wonderful moment.
Freedom awaits behind this shift
My own reaction to this is absolutely appropriate, but more about that another time. Freedom has become a very elastic concept; it usually ends as soon as we start talking about money, liquidity and wealth. But the ways out and alternatives are thankfully just as numerous and remarkable in the chaos as the aberrations and losses of what we believed in.
It's fun to retell things.
In the midst of all this, in this eruption of the repressed, and we are far from being at the end of the madness, a new quality can be discovered, a sometimes speechless beauty of what is happening.
The aesthetics of the postmodern awakening, the interstellar blossoming of all who begin to surrender to the flow of the unknown.
Freedom is no longer an insult to its meaning, it is this rucksack that Anna's fellow citizens carry, the plastic bag and the oligarch's villa that are now made available to the displaced.
Like many before him, Mr Putin has willed evil and invoked good, a parable that knows how to repeat itself again and again. Out of a longing for love. A lonely old man among lonely old men. Maybe I'll turn round in time.
We will still be grateful to him and his Incel brothers when we look back, they make freedom more tangible again, especially for those whom even Covid did not wash their heads enough and of course more consternation and reflection is to be expected here in Europe while many countries in the world are still in the last or penultimate century to which the would-be Tsar longs to return.
Many things and the values derived from them are all too readily defined by their absence: love, lust, security, intelligence. Freedom is no exception; it is abused beyond measure.
An Instagram account.
A Lonely Planet banality.
But the iron grip of the mighty nothingness that takes your breath away will teach you that you should pay more respect to existence. Whether you are granted 20, 5 or 50 years of life, you should smile at this simple memory of annihilation with the wise response that you should agree to celebrate.
And if the situation slips from his grasp, kick him in the balls.
I had told you
Scorched meat promised, a forgotten rump steak on the grill of sensationalism, a drone piloted into your Beliefs, all of it needing add-ons and loops and breading between the lines, we're all dripping together towards apocalypse, the last days of humanity as we knew it.
But that's okay. We've all become a backdrop. An origami of mammon.
In a way, we are roubles.
Because some very smart people seem to realise this, it is quite possible that the lid will once again be put back on the pot. Ceasefire, peace talks. But I don't just mean that in relation to the Ukraine conflict. I'm also referring to the resulting realisations, which we will manage away just as we did with the financial crisis, the climate or the pandemic.
As always in different dimensions, and thankfully, despite an increase in stupidity, there is always an increase in intelligence, evolution and all that.
The turning point has nothing to do with this rascal's prank from the Kremlin, the honourable Mr Scholl fits in wonderfully with the German Trantüten, but is historically meaningless.
The front lines of the psyche of an elite in urgent need of therapy will be more complex than can be explained in brief diagrams; we are already failing to draw up diagrams of the Russian oligarchy, how much more difficult is this if we want to communicate the true penetration and interconnectedness of all these processes.
What I like in this multidimensional Go is that the insecure concern of democracy is almost embarrassingly superior in its reluctance to confront. And that may annoy and displease an anti-capitalist, but it's better than the other way round.
Sanctions and the pariah status of the Russian steppe, which will also go up in flames this year and can probably expect little help from the despised West, are a fuck-up finger of our potential and I hope that negotiators and handlers of the geopolitical dramalette will remember and make smarter use of this in future.
Cohen already knew that there is crack in everything.
