To Kill a Child

Just wanted to share one of my favorite short stories.
It is horrific, and morbid and I find it slightly disturbing that I am so drawn to it.
Perhaps it is the truth in the morbidity that I find so disturbingly fascinating.
This story has been read by almost every Swede I believe, it is by no means a hipster-obscure dusty old tale I have found.
It is however, haunting;


Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease, and only one minute before a woman screams out in horror she can close her eyes and dream of the sea, and during the last minute of that child’s life his parents can sit in a kitchen waiting for sugar, talking casually about the child’s white teeth and the rowing trip they have planned, and that child himself can close a gate and begin to cross a road, holding in his right hand a few cubes of sugar wrapped up in white paper, and for the whole of that minute he can see nothing but a clear stream with big fish and a wide-bottomed boat with silent oars.

Afterward everything is too late. Afterward there is a blue car stopped sideways in the road, and a screaming woman takes her hand from her mouth, and it’s red with blood. Afterward a man opens a car door and tries to stand on his legs, even though he has a pit of horror within him. Afterward a few sugar cubes are strewn meaninglessly about in the blood and gravel, and a child lies motionless on its stomach, its face pressed heavily against the road. Afterward two pale people, who have not yet had their coffee, come running through a gate to see a sight in the road they will never forget. Because it’s not true that time heals all wounds. Time does not heal the wounds of a dead child, and it heals very poorly the pain of a mother who forgot to buy sugar and who sent her child across the road to borrow some. And it heals just as poorly the anguish of a once cheerful man who has killed a child.

Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child
he can still feel entirely at ease..

That part has been etched in my mind since the age of twelve when I first came across this story.
How one can captivate such horror in such simplicity.. It is certainly a beautifully crafted sentence.

Read the full short story here.
Or click here for the original Swedish version.

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GarageBand

Lately I have been getting into to songwriting, I know...weird.

It's just such a nice way of indulging in writing, you have such limited space or time to tell your story, even limited syllables to do so. That's also where the challenge lies. But it's fun, it's really fun.

I am by no means a musician. I can, like most people, strum a G, D, A on the guitar. But that doesn't mean it necessarily sound good, or even decent. Actually more along the lines of "CRANG CRANG PLOINK *crap* CRAAANG". And I won't touch my piano as long as we are living in an apartment complex. Wouldn't wanna ear rape the neighbors in such a way. Anyway, safe to say I am very limited because of it.

It all started when my brother asked me to help him write lyrics to one of his songs. I was nervous, terrified.. But it went ok. He liked it, his band bought it.. it made it onto their album, which I am very proud of indeed.



So anyway, I downloaded the garage band app for my phone, and suddenly a whole world of chord progressions opened up for me.
Though my brother (you can call him Jimi Hendrix the Swede) and my dad (aka Mr has been playing the guitar since the T-Rex was roaming freely, and I don't mean the band) are on me about the mechanical sound of it.
And yes, naturally you don't get the life and sound of organic instruments. But for me to reach that I'd have to learn bar chords and I blame my little retarded sausage fingers for my incapability to learn just that. I mean come on, my pinky is like 3cm, how am I supposed to reach across like half the guitar neck with that. (perhaps the ukulele is more in my range)
I'm sticking to my little phone-machine and hoping that someone who can play (i believe that would be my brother) will eventually put down the guitar track on at least some of the songs.

Looking forward to spending some time with my brother working on this. But that requires a trip to Stockholm, thus vacation days. Babysitters, studio time and so on and so forth.. (Because adulthood fucking sucks.)

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Creativity Demands Creativity

Are you a creative person?

Congratulations, and to quote one of my favorite TV-characters;
- Welcome to a life of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt!

Creativity - the need to create. Whether it is composing, writing, painting, photography or making pine cone animals or ships in bottles I would claim it's far beyond a hobby.
If you suffer this condition, you need it.
It is my firm belief that creativity that's not allowed to roam freely, that is kept locked up inside will inevitably wither but never die. It will just lay there and fester.


It's like those nightmares where you scream from the top of your lungs in horror, but not a sound will come out.

For many years I searched for my creative "out".. I feel like I've tried it all.
I've played several instruments, I sang, I snapped pictures, I painted, though my paintings were reminiscent of those painted by zoo-animals.
Nothing caught my real interest though. I quickly got to a point were it just wasn't fun. I didn't care to learn bar chords, or advanced piano sheet music, nor painting perspectives or the technicalities of photography. Nothing ever worked out as I wanted it to anyway. My hands were always left incapable of performing what my mind so desperately wanted them to.

You feel inadequate, without that out. You're screaming, without a sound.

And then I found it. It was there all along I just somehow forgot.
Writing.
I used to love to write. I wrote stories any chance I got as a kid. I, as many others, gave deep poetry a shot as a teenager as a way of dealing with all that teenage-angst, but then I somehow forgot it.
The written word has always been my favorite way of expressing myself. When I first met my husband, I didn't always tell him how I felt, and I've certainly never been, though I wish I was much of a "show-er".
As cheesy as it sounds, I wrote him, and you know what the best part of that is? The written word remains. 9 years down the line, those letters are still here and I hope when I am being particularly hard to love, he brings them out to remind himself that sometimes, I can be nice too.
Anyway, a little off topic there..

I've come to realize that creativity does not only demand creativity, it also demands confidence.

Do you remember when you were little, and you'd painted something which you proudly showed you parents, who went; "Oh wow, that's wonderful... What is it?"
You didn't take offense, you just went ahead and explained that obviously it was a robot-moose family that lived in the spaceship in the background.. or something. And so you parents went;
"Oh, well of course it's robot-moose.. I see that now!" and then they hung your surrealistic piece of art on the fridge.

What happens to that confidence? Who or what is it that is robbing us of it?

Take my sister for example. I am not by any means saying she's painting robot-moose or the like. I find her paintings striking and absolutely great. I have no idea how they would hold up in the "art-world" but she made them, hung them in her living room and thus is saying; "I made these, they turned out great and I have pride in my work." And I can't help but wonder, who will question it?
That kind of confidence will get you far. "I made it, I'm proud of it and I don't give a shit what some unemployed art-major might have to say about my work in comparison with Picasso's!"
I may not have majored in art, but trust me, she wins!

Dare do it! Or the demons who keep your creativity locked up will eat you alive.
"Creative people are more prone to depression."
Yes, I am willing to believe that. It's like being left completely unable to move or communicate yet having your senses and consciousness intact. The claustrophobia - I can't even think about it.

No, you might not be Picasso, Hemingway or Antonio Vivaldi but who cares? Do it!

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