Where is the… the raw cruel pain of being alive? I had dreams for a while. I remember having them. At least for some time. They would often come out like popcorn in the microwave: salty or sweet, hot at first and with a smoky aftertaste. Simpler days, when reading under the blankets at 1 AM was the best it could get. And following the lines of an old library tome I was escaping reality, somewhere far beyond where anything was possible…

The raw and the cruel are right here. COVID-19, Australian fires, Florida storms, plane crashes, killer hornets… But is that all so abnormal that we feel suffocated or maybe it was always out there in a form or another and what is actually happening is just a sick form of feeding hard to swallow information to everybody in order to induce mass psychosis and depression. I don’t say we shouldn’t be careful and protect ourselves or that all of the above is fantasy. But what if all this negativism thrown at us just another form of war? What if we needed a war in order to progress, to boost “post-war” economy, to shake us form the procrastination that engulfed us as of lately?

I ended up living the big city life even if it was never on the Christmas list. However, moving into a thirty story apartment block didn’t result in having the immensurable fun that one would expect. It’s been almost half a year and still don’t have a clue who lives next door. I get out early and come back late in the evening and working every other weekend doesn’t help a lot. When I actually have the time to sit with myself and ruminate at the inequity of the universe I realize that what I got is a little cement box I call home where I am more isolated than I have ever been. But hey, I am living in Paris…

There is more magic in this city when you don’t stay around for long. I used to visit someone by train a few years back, when I was still in the south of France. I would stay for the weekend and then go back on Sunday nights. I admit it was a whole other type of experience. Each time I came it seemed new, even the streets I had seen before. It was Paris after all. The scarcity of the time I had for the visit would assure it was great and maybe at times frustrating that I had to leave so soon. I have seen more things in Paris those days than I have since the 1 year and 10 months of actually being a resident.

Then came the lock down and the anxiety at the same time with the sharing of a 350sqft one room flat. Suddenly there is no more air to breathe in Paris, there might be poison in the water and you have to keep the distance. Luckily by nature my work can not be done from home. That helped extend a little my existential space. Wash your hands, drop the mask, disinfect your phone, take a shower, disinfect everything, don’t breathe when they speak, don’t take the bus, the floor is lava…ffffffffuuuuuuu….!

I have books I haven’t read, Reddit, Post Secret, Amazon Prime, things to write, music to listen to on YouTube, old folks to worry about everyday. Yet all I desire is to take my car on a Saturday morning and speed up on the highway to the west with W.A.S.P. on loud and leave everything behind. Who cares about love in time of Cholera? I dream of putting my feet in the cold water of the Atlantic ocean seconds before jumping all in. The cliffs of Etretat are amazing to gaze upon when you just float on the fresh salty surface, then the feeling of the hot pebbles on my skin when I get out. It may be better even than the taste of Richard coffee in the morning.