2015 already?

The year 2014 really flew by, didn't it? It seems like I barely read the words "January 1st, 2014" on the screen of my mobile phone, and all of a sudden I am back in Amsterdam celebrating the New Year 2015. 

And what a fucked up year 2014 was. We saw the outright demise of all things most of us used to take for granted, except of course those willing to question what they saw, because they had known all along; the CIA torture report, the NSA scandal, the rise of the originally US-financed ISIS, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. The fall of capitalism, the undermining of citizens' rights, excessive police brutality, fracking, free-trade agreements, increased fascism, Ebola, the revival of the Cold War, and of course the ever-lasting greed of mankind slowly propelling a small number of psychopaths into power whilst oppressing the rest of us.

Ha. It seems like the developments of this year literally force me to rehash the same old topics again and again. It's just getting worse. I have heard so many stupid utterances by unreasonably powerful people this year that I see no way things are going to stay the way they are for much longer. We're on a slippery slope, heading straight to hell. People are getting pissed off at a system that is slowly beginning to show its rotten true face, slowly beginning to show that it is no longer upholding the values it was created to protect, slowly beginning to show that it is made up of greed, corruption, and egomania. Which is nothing new to a lot of people, but unfortunately not enough people feel the need to bring on changes. Of course there are protests and riots all around the globe, but they're always dismissed by force or rhetoric and therefore those who used to be in power remain in power, and the damn population still votes for those retarded fucks. I simply don't get how a majority of the people can actually vote for those that have proven again and again to be unable to represent the voters' will. And I'm not even talking about Obama here, he has done a few very good and a few very bad things, but the actual issue is the whole Democrat/Republican debacle; neither of them have remotely done what they claim to stand for. It's time to find an alternative. Same thing for Germany; the Christian-Democratic-Union coupled with so-called German-Social-Democratic-Party (they somehow forgot to include the whole "social" and "democracy" part in their political policy) have been in power way too long, and the other parties don't really show any differences in their program either, so we're in somewhat of a rut. I can't emphasize the importance of change once again here. 
But that's of course not remotely everything; we also saw the rise of a couple of cruel terrorist organizations (Hamas and ISIS), that both used to be US-financed, but then went rogue and started attacking America with its own weapons. Which has happened quite a number of times, and could have taught the US government long ago that funding renegade movements usually does not yield the results that they hope for, but apparently they're too stubborn to learn from their mistakes.
Furthermore, we saw Russia being turned into the root of all evil once again by smart propaganda. I don't want to glorify Russia here, they have done some questionable up to downright horrific things in their time, and have some very conservative laws that do not really seem to fit in our time anymore, but they are not the main aggressor in the newest scenarios unfolding in Eastern Europe at the time. The NATO expansion to the East has been going on for a few decades now despite many critical voices from within the US government, and poking a sleeping bear with a stick will eventually get it to react. Russia reacted by "taking back" Crimea by means of a democratic referendum, which then sparked multiple movements also wanting to join Russia. And then the US just installed a new "democratic" government in Ukraine, of which some ministers are openly affiliated with major Nazi parties and networks! And now Europe is being entangled in some economic sanctioning scheme directed at the Russians, which is just stupid strategically. An alliance between Europe and Russia would be much more viable for both parties than a European-American partnership could ever hope to be. But thanks to Europe's head being so far up America's ass, we're facing a new Cold War that might actually turn hot this time, seeing as the propaganda is much more elaborate and the fronts are more hardened than ever.
Oh, and let's not forget the past few months which saw multiple unarmed African-Americans get shot, including a twelve year old child, by police men. For some cases the reports are obviously unclear, and I am not one to just generalize an entire group of people, but these cases show that racism is still much more present within the American everyday life than one would believe possible in the 21st century, and that it is an issue that still needs to be evaluated over and over. The war on drugs is partially responsible for this as well, mind you. There are less African-American than Caucasian drug users, yet there are more African-Americans rotting in jail cells for drug-related offenses. The profiling used by the DEA is clearly racist, and gives police an easy excuse to target ethnic minorities for strip searches, which obviously leads to those minorities feeling mistreated and unrepresented by those that should protect them and their rights, and that is something that cannot possibly stand! All citizens have to feel that all governmental organs are serving and protecting them, not just a few, otherwise the entire system of democracy and freedom doesn't mean shit.
And finally, we also saw the Ebola virus cripple West Africa, and we saw just how short the attention span of the media is when it comes to an actual crisis. Ebola was in the news for a couple of months at best, and all of a sudden it disappeared. Not from Africa mind you, the people there are still suffering, and there are still people there trying to help, and funds are hopefully still going there too, but the media's attention just switched to more violent and sensational stories and completely started ignoring the virus it made out to be the "biggest epidemic of modern time" just a few months ago. It's ridiculous, really. And then those damn tunes that are made to "help" the affected regions by donating part of the profits to charity. I mean I don't disagree with the essence of these actions, but if you want to help the people, then just donate to some medical NGOs instead of buying a fucking song which will also make some musicians, producers, and label bosses even richer. The whole thing is just perfect promotion: crappy singers are selling millions because they appear in such songs, which is why these tunes are in themselves corrupted and used by those people to gain more fame than they deserve, and that is just pathetic. So yes to helping those regions crippled by Ebola, and no to phony charity song projects. 

But of course there were not only bad things in 2014, there were quite a few personal highlights, and a few global things went quite well too. For example, the legal status of cannabis. Things improved quite drastically last year, and I am sure they will skyrocket in 2015: more and more states are thinking of legalization, Uruguay and Portugal have shown that liberal drug regulations are the right way to go, and there are more and more experts in all fields speaking up for the green plant. And in Germany there are now pro-legalization ads running in a couple of hundred cinemas all over the country, right before blockbusters like "The Hobbit". It has also been a good year in terms of the overall opinion on drug use generally. People that have been sworn enemies of the dreadful plague they believe psychoactive substances to be are now speaking for a more lenient approach, because many are starting to realize that prohibition is criminalizing the wrong people and allowing the actual criminals to make billions of dollars by being the only supplier for a gargantuan market. And those wrongly criminalized are branded as, well, criminals for life, and will always be looked upon with suspicion, and furthermore receive a 'training in crime' when imprisoned seeing as they are living in a confined space with all kinds of sick people, forced to join a gang in order to survive the time there. So a friendly pothead that got caught a few times too much goes to prison and comes out a hardened criminal with new knowledge on all kinds of illegal activities and not many perspective besides a gangster's life due to his criminal record, which he only got for being thrown in jail for burning some plants and inhaling the smoke. 
But I'm getting off topic. I told myself to do less rambling in these posts, and I'll try and stick to it a bit. I was talking about the general consensus on drugs slowly drifting towards a more lenient approach that focuses on education and emancipation of drug users rather than their wrongful criminalization. We're not there yet, not by a long shot, but we're seeing the first signs, the first underground tremors of an earthquake that will eventually spawn a tsunami of reforms regarding psychoactive substances, and it's nice to finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. And of course there's always the usual suspects trying to hinder that development, but it's somewhat like Domino; once the first piece falls, all others will follow. And I don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm sure it will happen, and I guarantee that the world will be a better place for it.

Anyway. There's also some personal highlights this year that I would like to share with you: I am more and more sure of needing to get the fuck away from studying, and rather focus on finally starting to build my own career, on my own terms, and not in some goddamn company where I work so that my boss can make tons of money, just so that I can retire when I'm seventy and "enjoy" my few years of lousy retirement. Hell no. I'm thinking of signing up for an online degree in freelance journalism, expanding my blogs, work freelance, do some small jobs to make ends meet, and get back to Asia, preferably Shanghai. I can't take the European way of life. People here have so little ambition, they cannot think outside the box; it's school, study, work, marry, retire, die, and I can simply not do that! And the mentality of the population, especially Germany, is so fucking apathetic, it's unbearable! Everything is stagnating, everybody is afraid to do their own thing and take risks, all everyone wants is diplomas, jobs, security and routine, and that just pisses me the fuck off!
I wasn't born to pay bills, I was not born to work for some rich ass-wipe! I want to travel, learn, write, see things, just fucking live, and not merely exist, and seeing the people at university and all round me just existing, essentially wasting their lives on some bullshit diplomas so they can work for other people, never leave their home country (except for the obligatory trip to Majorca every year), and at some point just slowly rot on their couches living off their lousy retirement funds, really makes me sick to my stomach and drains my energy up to a point where merely existing doesn't seem all that bad anymore. Shanghai is just so much different from that, most people there are there to make their dreams come true, to live out the American Dream in its original essence, to truly live and make an impact on the world. Shanghai is where things are happening, Asia generally is, and I don't see any reason to miss out on that. I love writing, I love Shanghai, I love Asia, and I don't see why I should not at least try to tailor my life to suit these passions in a way that I can still make ends meet and live comfortably. Which is why I am seriously contemplating making some money until the end of the academic year, then leaving the rotten village I am currently living in, quitting the studies I don't enjoy anyways, and going to Shanghai on a student visa to just do my thing and try to build an existence doing what I enjoy. And if that doesn't work I can always go back to studying seeing as I have the advantage of being young. I still have a good chunk of my life ahead of me, and I've always lived by the maxim of not ever regretting not having tried something I think could enjoy, so I just need to get off my ass and finally make things happen. No more working to get a diploma, no more learning things I have absolutely no interest in, just hard work to get to my goals, and then enjoying the fruits my labor will hopefully yield. 

But I don't want to bore you with details of my plans for the future any longer. It's getting late, and I have to get up early tomorrow, so I'll just add the music in the morning and post this thing by evening. Few is really left to say, except that I wish all of you reading this a happy New Year, and I really hope that whatever you're trying to do, whatever things it is you set to accomplish, that you succeed at all of it, and that things turn out for the best. Selah.

  
Dilated Peoples - You can't hide, you can't run

 -> This is pure old school right here! Such an epic tune with an awesome beat and the amazing artists of Dilated Peoples filling the track with great, meaningful rap, it's hard not to love it! Plus the beat is such a neck-breaking piece of awesomeness, that, coupled with aforementioned rap, you cannot not listen when this bad boy is played, so...Enjoy!


Marco Polo feat. Masta Ace - Nostalgia

 

-> And here is one more track that is old school as fuck! The legendary Masta Ace together with Marco Polo and a scratched-up sampled beat that underlines the funky awesomeness of this tune simply deliver their message straight to the heart of any real Hip Hop head! And the rhyming is mind-boggling too; "People in the audience, Masta Ace the name/ I write rhymes and insert them inside your vein/ They run through your bloodstream, get inside you brain/ 'Cause I first put my name up inside the train/"! If that's not fucking awesome, I don't know what is, so... Enjoy!

Jack Johnson - Good People  

-> This is just such a true song on so many levels. Firstly, the number of people I would deem 'good' is actually receding, at least here in Central Europe, and that song expresses just that. Secondly, the good people have mostly disappeared from TV and the news, simply because yellow journalism has become the norm, and the tragic stories of murderers and rapists attract a much larger, more easily sensationalized crowd than stories of the good neighbor who helped get kitty down the tree, and so they're the ones that make the newscast. Which is sad. We shouldn't constantly be shown the bad people, because that creates a negative sentiment in the population, and that just sucks. But anyway, this is a really cool song, so... Enjoy!

Warren Zevon - Keep me in your heart for a while

  

-> A beautiful Warren Zevon song right here. This is the kind of timeless music that would fit at any given occasion, ranging from birthday to funeral. Zevon just has that exceptional voice and is in essence a great musician, which makes his songs so amazing! I really, really enjoy this song, it has this strangely positive vibe to it that coupled with the melancholy in the lyrics makes for an interesting ride. Enjoy!

Spag Heddy - Pastanian Express

 

 -&> "THIS IS PASTA", orgasm-inducing drop, melody, more pasta. That's pretty much what this pure bit of Drumstep filth has to offer, and it does not disappoint in the least! This song has an awesome melodic part, coupled with such epic drops and funny, well-used vocals! I really enjoy Spag Heddy's work, and this one is no exception! Awesome tune, great artist! Enjoy!

KDrew - Bullseye 

 

-> Wow! Just wow. This is one of those fucking filthy tracks that you stumble across every few months or so at best! A great melody brought on by those wobbly high-pitched notes, entangled in a maze of amazing bass and drops, fused into four minutes and ten seconds of musical awesomeness and pure energy, propelling those listening to push on and go forward! I fucking love this kind of music, this is why I always include electronic music on here! Epic track, amazing artist... Enjoy!

So, this concludes today's entry, which turned out to be a whole of a lot longer than I had expected it to be, but seeing as I think I have touched on some interesting issues it should still be manageable as readers. Oh, and you have probably seen the changes that I have made to the blog: layout and theme has been altered entirely, and I have decided to embed the actual video for the selection of songs at the end of each post, which I think will be much easier on you guys' eyes, and make the whole page more attractive to potential readers. But the entries will remain the way they always have been, I have no reason to change the way I convey my message on here entirely!

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this post, liked today's musical selection, and that there are some things in this entry that you can take away for your own life, you know the deal...

Peace!

"Better watch out, 'cause I'm the assassin"

are the words that Bruce Dickinson is screaming at me through my 6-inch sub-woofer and 2-inch speakers as I am writing this post. 
And I just deleted about 450 words that stood here simply because it got to a point of being barely understandable to myself the next morning. Which is why I decided to not continue or god forbid publish that god-awful mess I had created and start anew. Normally I would just dump that kind of rambling on you and expect you to make sense of it, but I was so displeased with the way I had portrayed things in those now lost sentences that I could not bring myself to actually go on working on them. Hence the deletion. Anyway, it is not like I am keeping some grand literary creation from you, no, I am just protecting you from really really bad and disorganized writing with weird to no real points being made. But seeing as these words will never reappear again, there is no real point in talking about them here either, so I will now go on with this post.

I am unsure if I'll be able to find a good topic today though, my last post was not that long ago and my inspiration seems to have been drained by it a little to be honest. Plus I've actually started to work on a "trial novel" so to say, which is proving to be quite time consuming and taking a lot of my energy and creativity. But I am not going to forget you guys, and so I decided to sit down today and not work on aforementioned novel for a while but write this entry and vent a little about something that still needs figuring out. 
I have to say though that when I started writing this blog I thought I had a lot more to say and could go on easily filling pages for ever and ever, but it is actually getting harder to find themes to wrap my words around than it used to be. Then again I may just not be in the mood right now or something like that, but I doubt it to be honest, as I've outlined in an earlier post it is usually a bad mood that induces the best kinds of creative outputs. And I am not in a bad mood. But maybe a bad mood to write? Is there such a thing? I don't know where one could find that out and am too lazy to skim through the masses of articles and essays debating the existence of a writers block, I've read too many of those in the past half year. Yet I am still not able to form my own opinion on the subject and can not for the life of me figure out how to figure it out and it's driving me a little crazy. Just a little though. It's not like a dominant nuisance within my existence, just a little speck that keeps nudging me every now and then when I am wondering why I sometimes feel able and sometimes unable to produce nicely formulated sentences that have more meaning than mere mundane statements barely resembling coherent lines of thought. I am quite puzzled by this to say the least, and am at some point at some time going to get to the bottom of it, but in all likelihood not today and not anytime soon, but as soon as I do I will publish the results here and revolutionize writing forever. Or maybe I'll just forget about it. 
Either way, this is definitely something that has somewhat peaked my interest these past weeks but I have never had so little inspiration that I actually included it in a post. Well, today I have apparently reached a new low, and so the paragraph above here came into being. What can I say, shit tends to happen. The self-loathing is not as strong in me as it may appear to be in these sentences though, I am just setting ridiculously high standards and expectations for myself that I have so far not be able to reach in any form or shape. Which is good, because it means that I am always striving for further excellence and have not exhausted my full potential quite yet. Perhaps I never will, but perhaps I won't even have to, but who knows. Nobody knows... Nobody knows but me... Anyone remember that song? Is that even a song? But whatever, back to topic. Well that actually kind of says it all doesn't it, nobody knows and no-one could possibly know and that's the great adventure blah blah blah. I mean come on. We all know what would follow if I went down that road, essentially non-sense about life being a journey with an unknown end and life being the mean to get there that should be exploited to its fullest extent because the journey that is the mean is in itself the end and so on and so forth. And that is not the least bit satisfying to read or write because it doesn't hold any existential answers with substantial potential to enrich you, your life, or your way of thinking. 

So I'm not touching that topic with a ten-foot pole today. Instead I'll focus on something different alltogether. What I intend to center my focus on this time is the issue of mental stability, normality, and the so-called abnormality that is often treated with dangerously lethal and mind-altering pharmaceutical poison. I am not saying that people with psychoses or similar problems should not be receiving medication, I am not saying that these diseases are not completely real. All that I am saying is that there is a line that is rather thin between simply not being the way one is expected to be and actually being insane in the membrane. I mean, this is especially an issue when you're using psychoactive substances as part of your life-style, the assumption is automatically that you must be deranged and your brain destroyed by drugs. And that you need more drugs to "get better" again. Isn't that bullshit? And isn't it equally nonsensical that once you get busted with such substances, you get the choice of getting locked up in jail with rapists and murderers, or getting locked up in therapy with criminally insane rapists and murderers? That we have sunk so fucking low is just mind-boggling to me. I have touched on the problems created by prohibition before, I know, but this aspect of it occurred to me again today and did so with such intensity that I really felt compelled to write about it. So, let's get back to it then, shall we? Let us take an example to illustrate: A friend of mine is a completely healthy and normal young adult, he has finished his education and was about to start working at a company making money and so on, his life was developing quite nicely. Along came the state and its repressive executive organs, and found a couple of magic truffles (yeah, truffles, like the ones that grow in any forest in Central Europe) and a few grams of grass (yeah, the wild-growing weed). And now my friend is in a therapy where he doesn't belong with criminally insane assholes, with the therapists trying to force-feed him insanely hard medication that I myself have tried. Trying this shit made me realize how fucked up the entire system is, it was harder than most illegal drugs I have tried so far, and completely debased my inner make-up, changing my entire personality for a couple of days. No illegal narcotic has ever done anything even similarly gruesome to my psyche. So why the fuck are we still relying on this system?

Well, the explanation to this is much more logical than I would like to admit. There is a percentage of people in these therapies who are there because their excessive drug abuse has cause their psychological make-up to derail and in these cases aforementioned "medicine" is actually use- and helpful. The problem here is that those there because of penalties of the prohibition are thrown into the same pot with those described before, which causes normal people who've enjoyed psychoactive substances and simply got caught to be turned into dulled zombies because of the drugs they were giving, turning their brains to mush much more than illegal substances ever could. And that is what's wrong with the entire concept, and would be easily avoidable, like so many things, by the legalization of such substances. Then these institutions would be filled with people actually needing help and perhaps even pills in order to get in touch with their inner-self and achieve a feeling of mental stability once again.
But of course not, because drugs are bad, and doing drugs would be bad, and you wouldn't want to be bad by doing drugs, 'cause that would be bad, mkay? Gotta love South Park. But I am once again getting off track.
The vital point I want to get across though is that the prohibition of psychoactive recreation-enhancers is once again proving to be more harmful to those partaking in such pastimes than the substances themselves, making the entire assumption that such a system would protect the citizens and minimize possible harm being inflicted to them fallacious. I do realize that I have made this point before, but I feel the need to emphasize it constantly because most people seem to still be stuck in the 30s-thinking that Weed=Heroin=LSD, which in 2014 is just a sign of incredible backwardness and inability to adapt and think outside the box, and it is just sad to see just how many people, and especially people in power still think this way. I mean we're seeing such powerful movements, such intelligent and well-respected people speaking up for either marijuana or other drugs and their legalization, and still the corrupted and greedy governments controlled, among others, by powerful pharmaceutical industries are still unwilling to give in and finally listen to the anguished cries of wrongfully criminalized citizens. "Controlled" - by that I don't mean an evil illuminati-like secret puppet-master pulling the strings of all governments, but rather that most political parties' campaigns and other funding is 'sponsored' by various large industrial and financial players, meaning that they have a very high amount of influence on the politicians' doing within the party, and therefore also on the world-leaders seeing as no party without substantial 'sponsoring' ever won any elections, or very rarely to say the least. And that is the problem in any so-called modern-day 'democracy'. The word in itself is composed of the ancient Greek "demos", which means as much as "common people", and "kratos", which essentially translate to "rule". So it can be translated as "the ruling of the common people", meaning that the citizens themselves should be empowered and the representative government should enforce their wants and protect them from harm. But the will of the common folk is too often, almost exclusively overlooked and undermined by those in power, and the will of the small percentage of industrial corporate giants with enough spare cash is too often enforced and adapted. 
Which once again leads us to the root of all evil: Money. It's impossible to opt out of the monetary system and maintain a standard of living worthy of a dignified human being, but it's at the same time the exact same system that corrupts and destroys our integrity from inside, slowly turning us into something worse than any junkie, always chasing for the next dollar and striving for the highest possible accumulation of wealth imaginable, until we realize the emptiness and shallow instability in our life, but at that point it's too late. And well, to quote Snoop Lion: "Money makes a man, and that's a crime/ If we all were rich we'd spent more time/". Not to rehash his words, but this sentence holds a lot of truth. If we didn't have the constant pressure of maintaining a certain amount of valuable assets in our life, we would spend much more time focusing on learning, loving, laughing, and simply living. We could get out of the hassle of worrying about paying bills and simply indulge in life to the fullest extent, take time to cherish those we love. But that is unfortunately an utopian fantasy for obvious and unfortunately very logical reasons. Unless we'd go back to simple trading, like a watch for three hams or something like that. But then again, we would need to define which item is worth which other item(s), and for that we'd need some sort of centralized institution to regulate the exchange rates, and we'd back to an abuse-able and possibly corrupt-able system, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place. It's a vicious cycle, isn't it? But well, if we can't change it we can at least use it for our own purposes and defy its laws by working within to be able to live outside. And I know that I have said the exact same thing before, but I could not think of a better way to formulate it, and since I am reopening a topic anyway I can also plagiarize my own works. And fuck quoting, my words are mine to use and re-use as often as it pleases me. 

But it is getting somewhat late, and I will in all likelihood go to the first lectures I have in the morning. Plus I know for sure that I will have a hard time falling asleep today, so I am really considering at least lying down pretty soon in order to trick my body into sleep-mode. Or I'll just lay awake for a few hours before I fall into a somewhat psychotic half-sleep that leaves me drifting in- and out of actual dreams, which is not even remotely relaxing, but a dreadful and in itself tiring experience that usually leaves me with close to no power and motivation the next day, and is something I should definitely avoid. And seeing as I have prepared enough smoke-able material I am really hoping to be fine this time, and retain the ability of functioning properly the next day so that I can attend all lectures. 
Although I really have to say that attending an English lesson in an all English study seems kind of silly to me, I mean, proper command of the English language should be a requirement for international studies whose sole teaching language is in fact English. But this is not the first time I have been annoyed by English classes, I have always had a certain aversion towards them, mainly due to the fact that I could not be bothered with doing anything but still maintained an almost perfect grade which really really pissed my teachers off. Because they couldn't let me fail but couldn't get me to participate the way they wanted to either. It was quite fun for me actually in retrospect, but I remember that during the times themselves I was thoroughly pissed by this and just wanted English lessons to disappear from my life forever. I mean, I obviously enjoyed creative or essay writing, but there were almost always boundaries or themes to adhere to which really took the wind out of my sails. But I usually managed to skirt around these 'rules' and create something well-written but subliminally offensive to the teacher. Still, I am usually more than annoyed by to me nonsensical English lessons that always seem to take place in whatever level of education I happen to be. And that is fucking displeasing. I do not want to demean all English lessons though, e.g. the correct format for specific types of letters and similar things are topics simply necessary to be learned and do not come naturally. But things like grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation come easily to me, I have never ever had to learn any grammar rules or anything like that. I just feel the way the words need to be, and it's this way for all languages I speak. I mean of course for a completely new language I need to have a look at basic sentences and the likes in order to get a feeling for it, i.e. for Chinese. But once I got that feeling for the prose of the language and the way it needs to be used I am able to formulate proper sentences without learning any further rules.
It's always been like this. For mathematics and things based on it the exact opposite applies though. I mean I get the logic behind the exercises, but I can for the life of me not figure out formulas, can not calculate in my head, and am completely useless for all tasks that require complex computations. Well, it's always Ying&Yang, up and down, and a balance of power as the British would put it, so if there are a number of things that one excels at there is an equal number of things one, put rakishly, quite simply sucks at. And that's life, many great philosophers have already said and formulated it, but I'll stick to the words of Mick Jagger: "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need", which quite simply sums up the way life goes. What you want is not always what you'll get, sometimes you'll get the exact opposite, but you'll usually get by and get what you need to, well, get by.

And this pretty much concludes this post, which once again turned out to be quite long. I am getting more and more fond of writing for an eternity and just letting my thoughts go, because I am no longer in real need of thinking about proper ways to formulate delicately as I did in the beginning, I now have an approximate idea of what I can write and how, I have gotten a certain feeling (in italic because I have to emphasize that it's a subjective emotion exclusively felt by me at least in this moment and in my near surroundings. I do realize I can not possibly be the only person thinking that, but for the sake of this entry I am) about my writings on here and am now at relative ease when composing a post, meaning that my mind is no longer hung up on finding nice metaphors and similes or words or formulations, but rather focused on creating content on a certain level, leading to hopefully even more enjoyable texts for you. But then again I have never published anything that I did not think of as being of adequately high quality, so the difference may not be as noticeable whilst reading, but whilst writing it most definitely is. Anyway, I am getting lost in ramblings once again, and will now (finally) leave you be with some music to enjoy:

Harry Chapin - Cat's In The Cradle
-> Wow, I can not believe I didn't feature this classic on here yet! And to all of you naive souls with not enough musical knowledge out there: No, this is not a Cat Stevens song. This is a beautiful and deep track by Harry Chapin, and somewhat relates to the tangent about money and its time-consumption somewhere above, seeing as with the dough out of the picture the whole story would have been quite different. Anyway, great, meaningful and simply dazzling tune... Enjoy!

Black Label Society - Fire It Up
-> Another great song that has not quite stood the test of time like the one featured above yet, but still is a great tune. Gotta love Zakk Wylde and the guys, Black Label Society had always had a certain outlaw kind of flair, and that coupled with their awesome Heavy Metal music just makes them irresistible to me, meaning that I had to share this song with you, so... Enjoy!

Snoop Lion - No Guns Allowed (feat. Cori B. & Drake)
-> First off let me start by saying that I thoroughly despise Drake as a rapper and probably also as a person although I can't say that with certainty. I mean, yeah his flow is somewhat 'special' and yeah he is on time unlike many may claim in this song, but he just doesn't deliver the emotions and rhythmic variations that this track so clearly offers, and that's just bad to say the least. But secondly, I want to say how fucking great this song is. I don't give a fuck about questions of Snoop's authenticity in this case, I don't give a fuck about it being mainstream and way too well-known. No, this is one powerful piece of beautifully sad music coupled with a deep message that America should definitely start wrapping its ugly head around. But leaving all preaching aside, this song is really chill and amazingly melodious, so... Enjoy!

Ice Cube - Today Was A Good Day
-> I did not feature this song yet? Did I just miss that whilst skimming through my blog right now or did I actually not put this song on here yet? Shame on me! This song is so old-school and awesome, just describes the rough realities of a poverty-stricken part of the population but in an essentially funny or at least ironic way. By portraying mundane or simply 'normal' things for the middle- and upper-class citizens as being the requirements for the day being good where Ice Cube is from, he shows the social inequalities and lack of perspective and law there. And the song itself is really really chill, I simply love sparking up to it, so do the same and... Enjoy!

2Pac feat. Snoop Dogg - 2 Of Amerikaz Most Wanted 
-> Such a classic and epic collaboration of two of the biggest MCs that Hip Hop of the early nineties had to offer, it needed featuring here and I am again disappointed with myself for not having put it up here earlier! Starting with blatant disrespect to Biggie, and continuing to one of the most awesome, funky, and simply cool tracks. Really a gem I stumbled upon, should have been here already, but well it is now, so... Enjoy!

Flux Pavilion - Dropkick
-> This is apparently a rip from a set that Flux and N'Type played for the Rinse.FM radio station. And as you know I adore Flux Pavilion's music anyway, so I had to put this on here as soon as I found it, this drop, this nicely melodic yet fucking heavy bass-sound prevalent throughout most parts of this rather short, but notwithstanding extremely awesome song is just too great to be put into mere words, so... Enjoy!

As said before, this post turned out to be almost as long as the last one, which was not intended but nice to see nevertheless. I was actually planning to release it while it was still March, but well, April happened all of a sudden and now it's the first post for it, which is not necessarily a bad thing but was not my intention meaning that I am kind of grumpy right now. And by the way, quick word about April's Fools: Fucking stop it. 98% of these pranks are not even remotely funny, most of them extremely annoying and nerve-rattling, and some of them even downright dangerous, so please for fuck's sake leave it be. Just one year of peaceful silence and no nuisances on the first of April would be nice. That's all I'm asking for. 

Peace!