A Thousand Plateaus

it has gotten dark very fast and the light has turned pink and menacing, as if a thunderstorm was about to break loose. the electric lights on the wall of the little café by the beach are flickering every now and then like lightning.
“what are you thinking?” jodie is asking me.
“hm, dunno. wish i had brought my guitar. or that i could work on getting ‘dialogues’ right. i have this increasingly weird feeling that life is too short, that there are a million things i still want to do and that even hanging out here with you, with the sea just behind the dunes, it feels like, hm, like it isn’t right.”
“yeah, i think i know what you mean. it’s not very flattering for me, though!” she’s laughing.
“yep, i know. i remember how i once said to somebody when she suggested that we’d go on vacation together that i don’t want to go because it would feel like a waste of time…”
“you can be so fucking charming!”
“i can, indeed!”
“have another dutch cookie…”
“you know how to make me happy.”

the past nights i had the weirdest sensation before falling asleep. when i was lying in bed i suddenly felt a weight upon my chest, even when i turned on the side it wouldn’t fall off. it felt like suffocating : even though i was breathing in deeply and consciously and slowly the air didn’t seem to reach my lungs. as if i was breathing in a vacuum. usually i lie there for three, four minutes and then the pressure and panic is so overwhelming that i’m getting up, and usually it gets better then. what is this? age? neurosis? psychosis? wrong mix of chemicals in the brain?

we saw a live seal at the beach today i tried to take a picture but it disappeared too quickly. most of the day we walked by the beach, talked, read, and i tried to work on some lyrics, but it’s difficult without the guitar. i should have brought it. we decided to drive to amsterdam again tonight, just for sightseeing and having a fancy dinner : no more smokes. i fell in love with “Verkade Fijnproevers Toffee Crunch” - cookies. and i’m missing the gym. well, there’s not really much more to report. guess we’ll return tomorrow or on sunday, depending on the weather.

“you never did it?”
“no.”
“come on, be honest, phil! not even one puff?”
“you know that i don’t smoke…”
“yeah, but this is different!”
“you see, i don’t know, i’ll probably go all paranoid and freaked out. also i can’t really handle the amount and intensity of my ‘natural’ perceptions. i don’t really feel the need to enhance this by anything!”
but i couldn’t really convince her so in the afternoon jodie and i drove into amsterdam in search of the nearest coffee shop.

back at the beach jodie lit the joint and instructed me:
“you simply breathe in deeply. two, three times.” it felt weird and unpleasant when my lungs filled with smoke. why do people smoke at all?? at first i didn’t notice anything. then, slowly, the sound of the waves seem to change. they started to ring like bells when they rolled onto the shore. quite nice actually. i remember jodie talking next to me, but i didn’t really pay any attention because i was so amazed and stunned by  the sun which had almost gone. and yet the light was shooting in slow motion over the dunes and when the ray reached us it was dancing in front of our faces like a dragonfly. i tried to touch it but each time i stretched out my hand it escaped.
“i know why you’re snickering!” jodie said
“why?!”
“because the drums are too slow.”
“what?”
“the drums are too slow. the drums are too slow. the drums are too slow. the drums are too…”
“i know. but what am i supposed to do about it?”
“come on, we’ll go to the peanut gallery and find out about that!”
and she stood up, took my hand and pulled me to my feet. we started to walk back to the apartment, and when we had reached it we both were pretty sober again.

and now i’ve got a giant headache. jodie’s getting us a pizza while i’m  uploading the photos we took today on her macbook. jodie searching for her cigarettes in amsterdam:

couldn’t sleep very well tonight, so i got up and went down to the beach, which is just a five minute walk from the apartment jodie and i are staying at. it was weird, because it was pretty clouded and really, really dark after i had crossed the dunes. i could hardly see the water, and when i finally did my feet were almost caught in a wave. i sat down in the sand which was still warm and of course i had brought my mp3 player. unfortunately the battery died halfway into the first song, so i listened to the waves, and i think i must have sat there for almost two hours.

we slept in this morning and then had a lavish breakfast in a café in the little dutch village. jodie suggested to drive to amsterdam in the evening, so we’ll probably do some sightseeing later on. right now it’s another coffee, another chapter of jodie’s novel and for me another piece of strawberry cake

“fear is what i feel at the slow unraveling of me” jodie and i are singing along to the indigo girls while we are speeding down the highway.
“just like thelma and louis”
“yeah” i’m grunting “louis de funes…”
and it made me think about something that daphne had said the other day when we were talking about cinema.
“i don’t like the humor of jerry lewis…” she had stated and then added with a deadpan face “…too subtle.” and i snorted my coffee out of my nose.

this morning at eight jodie called and asked “care for a little unplanned trip?”
“hey, spontaneity is my middle name!” i answered. ignoring the irony she said:
“i’ll pick you up in an hour. pack your bag for an overnight trip!”
an hour later i was sitting next to her, driving towards the dutch border. he brother had rented an apartment until the end of the week but couldn’t make it, so she took over.

and this is why i’m sitting in a café with sea view now, jodie next to me (she even brought her macbook :-)), and the salty air is making our hair blunt and brittle. i hadn’t realized before that it’s really just a three hour drive to the coast, so we arrived at noon already and spent the day sitting in the sand, watching the seagulls, reading, eating ice cream and fench fries, observing the other tourists and just ‘decompressing’, as george costanza would put it. we might stay until sunday, so mixing “dialogues” will have to wait

packing my bag i realized that the last real vacation i had was in 2001 when i went to denmark with somebody for two weeks.

bought fruit today. the fact that this is worth mentioning should tell you something either about my nutrition or about the startling eventfulness of my life.

yesterday i met with a couple of friends : d. had been to the italian deli and had bought ham, sausages, cheese and fresh bread, c. and g. brought six bottles of red wine, jodie brought tomatoes and butter so we sat in the garden in the backyard of the ‘connection’ and had a kind of picnic, which was really, really nice.

i gave c. the 40 seconds portion of “dialogues” that i want her to play flute for. maybe we get to record it later this week. it’s really the only thing that’s still missing (except for the vocals, but they’re always last). i took alice’s advice and tried to get some distance to the song before mixing it.

mood-o-metter : somewhere between 0.5 and 0.9

oh fuck! worked all day long on the song. then, at night, i decide to listen to the first guitar only demo version and i feel that this one is so much better because it’s so much simpler and doesn’t have beats and cymbals and crashes and rides and bass drums. *sigh*.

* S I G H *

just when i was desperately trying to come up with drums for “dialogues”, jamie “threw a naked drummer at me” on facebook!

feeling dizzy. as if you’ve been standing only a couple of centimeters away from the canvas when you’re painting a life-size portrait. i need to get some distance to the song again. working on it started out all enthusiastic and full of amazement where it would go to. but right now i’m sort of stuck rhythmically. it’s the old problem of having a diamond in the rough and then working on it and with every new facet you add the stone might break into pieces. i’m so afraid that i might ruin the song. because this one, it does feel like a good one, like a really good one. its melody keeps haunting me.

today i met with a guitar and bass player who’s also experienced in electronic music and producing. this might turn into a collaboration. we’ll see.

i’m sorry for not writing more, but my mind seems to be stuck in that song. weird. as i wrote on facebook: “put mind on autopilot. expect crash every minute.”

by the way : the new blog.com editing tool sucks BIG TIME! :-(