Lyrics: “The Way I Tend To Be” – Frank Turner, 2013
In a message to a friend this weekend I said “I’ve been back at work for a week and feel like I could use time off again”. Which was meant hyperbolically. More or less. My mind is all over the place once again. I still haven’t sorted / edited all my Scotland photos to put them all together in a post here. I sometimes wonder what’s the point. The whole existential “what am I / do I want to be doing with this space here” question. I have some vague ideas, which I might try out next week. We’ll see.
Instead of time off I’m working with a mix of “mini break” and “microdosing delight”, the latter a concept from Dr. Rachel Barr.
Mini-Break in form of not driving home from the office on a Friday afternoon, but grab a bite to eat and go to the movies. Mini-Break in form of a gig on Saturday evening. Where I had planned to arrive early enough to have dinner at a restaurant and not just McDonalds, but a jammed motorway and full car parks threw a spanner in that plan. Cue a tiny internal meltdown / freakout, whatever you want to call it. But after that I was doing ok and felt grateful that I can handle these moments so much better than I used to. I found free on street parking elsewhere and it all was fine in the end and didn’t let all that ruin the evening.
The movie: “One Battle After Another”. I had seen the trailer and thought it was interesting enough and I sort of like Leo diCaprio, but hadn’t read anything more about the movie as such. Sometimes I think it’s good to go and see a movie without knowing too much about it from reviews and such. Sometimes I think it’s better to know what you’re getting into. I still don’t though know if it had been a different movie experience had I known more before. I liked parts of it, parts were a bit weird. All in all I wasn’t quite sure what that film was supposed to be. It was parts critical social / political commentary on the sad and scary state of the US. That part sort of worked for me, even though the lighthearted / comic approach sometimes felt too shallow for such a serious topic. In my eyes it also tried to be a satire about the racist/ White Power / nationalist militia movement, which didn’t quite work for me. It was all too on the nose, the characters too much of a caricature. The part that worked best for me was the satire about the other side of the spectrum, the middle aged, former lefty revolutionists, stuck in their old-times revolutionary ways. And Leo must have enjoyed playing a stoned, stumbling 50 years old and the revolutionary hotline bit through half of the movie was really quite funny. But all in all… a kind of weird movie.
The gig: Tim Vantol and his band, who played a ~ 300 cap club in Cologne. I haven’t seen Tim play a show in a while, the dates or locations never quite worked out for me. It was a good gig, live music always helps to brighten a day. But OMG it was so loud. I have no idea why that was or why noone else in the club seemed to mind. As I do these days I was wearing earplugs but I still found the volume unbearable in the first few rows where I started the show. I moved to the back, where it was (more) bearable. No idea how the rest of the audience managed it all, as I did see more than enough without any kind of (visible) ear protection. Their loss, I guess.
While I was away in Scotland autumn really arrived here in Germany and I haven’t taken any nice photos of colourful foliage yet. I’m afraid it might start being too late soon, so this morning I went out for a walk while listening to a podcast. It was a grey morning, but a bit of colour helped. Microdosing delight and all that. And I won’t beat myself up for having a wrong setting on my camera and thus messing up the first few photos and not noticing it till long after.
