Balls,
Yangoon/Myannmar, November 2015

January

January is this shitty month of dying.
It’s like people hold on through December, see one last christmas
and then just loose it and call it a life.
Jan Wigger died, whose articles in Rolling Stone I remembered
and I liked the music he liked and he was
younger than me, and this is what happens when
you reach a certain age, people just die who are
younger than you, which is kind of sad,
but then again: Is dying not always a sad thing, no matter if you’re
young and die without having done so much with your life
or being old and die and asking yourself if you have done so much with your life,
so is it not always this sad thing?

And Marlena Shaw died, and I pulled out on of her records and listened to her voice
for the very first time in a long time and that was not a sad thing.
And Mary Weiss of the the Shangri Las died, who became famous when she was
fifteen
and afterwards no one heard anything about her life and for a very brief moment I
wanted to read what she had done with the rest of her lie but then I
forgot.

And Frank Farian died and I listened to some Boney M. and I
remembered
that weird guy who was just dancing and not singing and I
had seen Boney M. on television, when there was still Television and everybody
watched just about pretty much the same stuff and next day we would talk about
that

And now we talk about the series we streamed but no one watched it,
like I
watched the third season of True Detective yesterday, which was also about
lives
passing
and you only have this one story, that makes up your life, not like on TV where
you
see thousands of stories and there is always another one you can try out and see,
if this a story that could make up your life.

And
Frank Z. from Abwärts died. Which I
never listened to when they became sort-of-famous in the 8oies, because I
did not listen to Punk, I was not angry when I was young, I
was just sad most of the time, so I
Listened to Joy Division and Bauhaus and I
missed out on all this Punk-stuff and being young and angry, it is only today
that I started listening to Punk, as I
am old and angry now, so now I get where the music is coming from.

And Melanie died. you know, guitar picking and that soft voice in Woodstock, for
some things
I am too young to have actually been around, when they where a thing,
but for a lot of things I have been around, when they were a thing.
And our neighbour is dying for some time now. He
is lying in his flat underneath ours and waiting for death to come.
He is very religious, so the few things he still does is going to church once or twice a week
and when he comes back I hear his probing, slow, heavy footsteps on the stairs,
it is like death itself is coming up the stairs
and then he slams the door shut behind him and then for days on
you hear hardly anything coming from downstairs.

And my mother died in January a couple years ago.
It was her birthday. She somehow held on to this day,
but I don’t know if she was in a mood of celebrating,
she drank too much and took some sleeping pills and then
her heart
just gave in
and that was that, came to the world on a day
and left it on the same day, one of these miserable wet dark cold days of

January.