A few rough days lie behind me, but now I think my situation will improve once again...

My boss agreed to change my job into a week-by-week schedule. I will now work one week as usual, then the next I will work from Vienna over the internet, which should make me feel a lot better and get my stress level down a bit. Of course, from Vienna it's a bit hard to make music, but I will hopefully get other stuff done. Or at least get some time to relax.

My spring allergies have almost died down, so I'll soon be able to sing again without sounding like a crow.

It's kind of weird at the moment since the last time I really worked on any of my projects was two weeks ago. I'm one month behind with my plans for 2007, and that's really bugging me.

I'm also turning 23 pretty soon. Twenty-three. It feels like just yesterday I was still 16. And I haven't visited a dentist in six years and I'm having nightmares about the things the dentist will do to my teeth after such a long time. But from what I hear, I'm definitely not alone with my dentistphobia.

Muddasheep's Daydream Part 9

Can I murder someone?

It's just one of these questions we all know and have gone through. If there were no consequences, what would you do? Would you kill people? Would you rape women? When I say that in every human is a person that is able to do anything, I heard a lot of protests recently. I say that I would definitely kill somebody, if only to observe what it feels like to take somebody else's life.

When I write stories and people get killed in these stories I try to imagine exactly what the scene looks like, and how it feels to, for example, get a dagger forced into your head from under your chin. I ask myself what it would feel like if you had an arrow shot in your chest, or for how long you could survive. I do research on what the metal does to your body, and how to cut off tongues but still being able to survive. Or how you experience a fall from a cliff and finally hitting the ground.

Not only that, I also imagine all day how I could possibly die or be severely injured any second. I walk up the stairs with a fork in my hand, and imagine tripping and the fork forcing itself right into my eye. I imagine losing fingers, I imagine falling into glass doors and slitting my veins open. I see myself in car crashes, getting pushed aside by trucks, or getting hit by a train when crossing tracks, and how it would feel to be split up into pieces. Probably there would be just a quick signal of pain and then you're gone. I imagine cutting through my fingers when cooking, I imagine being burnt in my face when holding a pot with hot water and tripping, the skin burnt away to the bone. And there's always the heart attack. Your heart stops beating. I had several occasions where my heart stopped beating for short amount of time, but those one-two seconds felt like hours. Similar to when the heart beats too fast for a split second. You feel like you're going to burst. And then there's always the insects that could overwhelm you, the asteroid that could hit any second, and the crumb that you suffocate from.

And at the end of the day I just wonder why I am still alive.

Thanks to the support of my friend Darrn the music collection known as "Remains" is now available on the new thing of the internet - Vuze. The benefit of this is that I can provide a torrent download for people who want to get Remains and it might get some bandwidth pressure off my server.

Added the above images (and two more) to the stuff section. Just as a side note, those spray paintings appear on walls in Russia.

I remember in 1996 I read in various magazines that the band Take That had broken up. Following that news and according to several other mags at that time a few people - mostly teenage girls - killed themselves after hearing that their favorite band was no more. And in 2006 the band actually came together again and announced tours and a new album. Now don't get me wrong, I don't really care about Take That. But what I find kind of interesting is that the suicide of those girls is now actually in vain. I mean, it kind of was in vain before as well, but now it's just twice as senseless. I wonder if the band members ever thought of that.

Just wanted to recommend a few things. There are several books available already for the webcomic Order of the Stick. The comic has it all: Unique art style, greatly developed characters, entertaining storyline and humor. If you don't know it, start reading now. If you want to buy the books start with "Dungeon Crawlin' Fools", continue with "On The Origin of PCs" (containing all new comics not available on the net), "No Cure for the Paladin Blues" and then finally "Start of Darkness" (again completely original story not available on the net), which is brand new and not released yet (pre-order!).

Same goes for the webcomic Sinfest. It's plain awesome and funny 99% of the time and there are three books available on amazon.com.

The new Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero is out. I guess it's something you have to hear for yourself to be able to form an opinion. You can listen to the whole album on the official site.

For more music, take a look around the internet for Morphine. It has been recommended to me by my friend blackjack. My favorite songs so far: "Whisper", "Shame" and "I Had My Chance".

And I've probably said it already, but short stories by Roald Dahl are very impressive. The book Collected Short Stories contains all short stories and is absolutely recommendable.