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spent yesterday doing a preliminary bibliography, locating transparencies, fixing computer stuff and transcribing into digital form an 18th century gothic german poem for father, about to head out on yet another epic lecture tour to estonia and peru. nothing out of the ordinary. then in the evening watched cronenberg's career peak in videodrome at a friend's house on the other island, while his two deceptively identical black cats refused to let themselves be played with.

a high point of the evening was when black cat turned right out of the living room and black cat immediately jumped up on a chair to my left. this was before I realized he had two black cats and I swear, for about a second and a half the only question on my mind was whether his cat might be bilocating, or just warping space in an unnatural manner.

resocialization and shift back into the rhythm of the familiar ordinary more or less complete. started reorienting myself towards people to see and places to go from here, rather than dwelling on the inbetween disjuncture. guess after years of subjecting myself to it, dislocation is starting to become a natural medium.

long and confused dreams, including an interminable sequence where an old friend from high school tried to explain that she had become the mistress of a married family friend twice her age. haven't seen her for more than four years, last I saw she was a fey-ish acupuncturist in oslo; he is short and gnomelike island intelligentsia. the two have never met, thank god, nor will they if it is in my power to prevent it. still, dug out said friend's phone number and left her a cheerful but slightly strange message from the borderland of dream when I woke up.

today, I pack for the next couple of weeks and prepare to head in to oslo tomorrow. helmet- you got space saturday to sunday/monday?

rain and howling winds, down south. just back from spending several thousand NOK, buying two pairs of trousers, -40C boots, three books, an RJ-45 cable and a packet of CD-Rs. online now to buy uk tickets.

despite my best intentions and sustained effort, I still fail to plug my sweet but very complicated toshiba m30 into the domestic broadband configuration. it does tend to behave in ways that challenge conventional models of consciousness ascription- it took me two months of sweet talk for it to accept wireless connection. for ethernet, I suspect I may have to purchase a ram upgrade to sweeten the deal.

still phantasmagoric, though the ghostly roar of fresh memory has subsided to a pleasant background hum of mild disbelief- did that really happen to me? suspect my taste spectrum may have suffered a spectral quake.

now- bravely onwards. elysium beckons and there is plenty more lying on sofas to be done, listening to the wind and turning the remembrance of things past over and over in my head until the things gleam like shiny little self-contained pebbles fresh from a mountain stream. failing that, I may just plug my PS2 back on tonight. it's been a while...

spent the day yesterday restless and subject to compelling phantasms, nostalgic and dislocated from the journey. after three months of continuous immersion, return to the familiar was a very strange experience. took me a while to start recuperating my ability to relate meaningfully to things. channelled sleeplessness into productive activity by driving out to pick up nomad father in tønsberg at 2am, saving him an expensive cab drive home from wherever it is he's been this time. picked his brain on the way back a bit, talked a bit about fieldwork, mostly to distract myself from the roaring phantasms in my head. spent the night down in the (cold) boathouse on the dark shore- for no good reason except I wanted to sleep without anyone else under the same roof.

dreamt the usual strange sargasso of alien rituals and transsexual demon hunters. only remarkable part of the dream was a darwinian poetry competition at my old high school, where people who delayed in handing in their poems got a sledgehammer to the side of their head. I spent my allotted time trying to find a copy of ginsberg's howl, to fend it off as mine, and failed. in the end -after the sledgehammer- I wrote more or less the following: 'years later they meet over a waffle on the ferry north. do you remember cambodia? she asks. yes, he says, and smiles'. clearly my dream self knows not the difference 'twixt cryptic prose and poetry. yet the passage is, I guess, surprisingly apposite to certain aspects of my situation.

slept til 1 today - exhausted, and in wild motionless flight from the world I would wake up into- then spent the day wandering around in a mild, slowly clearing haze, remembering, watching the passage of the sun through the living room windows, eating some cookies and reading an old dungeons&dragons supplement while my soul trickled back in through the top of my head.

gently, gently.

back in the south now, after one seriously intense weekend. one of those rare brief spans of time that take place entirely in a parallel universe where everything that happens is suffused with a luminous halo of amazingness. incredible. if I had died this morning I would have died at peace with the universe, blinking my eyes in astonishment at my luck.

the 4 foot tall bornagain christian mountain sami with a hat singing eric clapton and santana in sami on saturday night was just a teaser. for once, however, I am not even going to drop tantalizing details. except the dwarf, of course.

more updates later, when I've unpacked. to those academic voyeur lurkers, fieldwork as such defined in geographic terms is over for a bit now. tune back in january.

decided it was cheaper to buy a whole new ticket from kirkenes than to journey to alta and stay in the hotel. am therefore flying with sas braathens out of kirkenes monday morning. to avoid possible malfunctions en route monday morning - take the school bus to tanabru 7.30, then the bus to kirkenes that gets to the airport an hour before the flight leaves, things always go wrong when you have least time - I'm taking the sunday evening bus to kirkenes with psychic sami chick and space-elf, spending the night at space-elfs place and getting leisurely to the airport the next morning.

somewhat strangely, I found out last night that space-elf is a "starchild", an alien incarnated on earth to bring light. guess my nickname choice was good guesswork. the two of us sat up til late, late last night in the central gamme chatting. then she begged me to come sleep in the main house because she was house-scared and alone and we'd been talking horror movies. not every day an attractive older woman begs me to sleep at her place, so I acceded- different rooms though. then this morning she made me a high-energy vitamin drink. she is a local distributor for these drinks, so I got a brochure as well.

I know I've been saying this for a week, but today I really do have to tidy the gamme. also drive to finland to buy a cd-r to burn a kundalini dance meditation cd for space elf. and start packing my car. and maybe drive to tanabru to buy some proper insulated -40C boots: the snow is hard and crackles underfoot today.

got a lovely email from my former boss at the internet company where I worked in 2000-2001, during my warehouse-in-shoreditch-full-of-artists-and-dotcommies-including-me-break from academia. I have very fond memories from that time, for many reasons, not least of which was the motley crew of coworkers the founders had assembled for me. they'll be hosting a christmas party in london early december and sent an email invitation out to all former employes - including most of the people I worked with back then. very nice.

it turns out today that according to one of the passing-through characters here, space-elf is also a reincarnated elf. man, my nicknaming arts indicate that I'm scarily in synch here... increasingly, I'm also starting to wonder just what kind of phenomena on or off earth, imagined or not, might not fit into the sheer oceanic all-encompassingness of the new age. if someone can be both a reincarnated elf and a reincarnated alien at the same time... she also used to be the sister of my hostess in another past life, when they were both native american shamanesses. man, I say.

I'm now waiting for someone to claim that in a past life they used to pilot a giant robot with rocket fists called mazinger. in atlantis, maybe. maybe that guy I refer to as "giant robot pilot" in my scrawled notes.

dead day, just meandering. hate tidying but it needs to be done. walk out at 12.30 noon and the sky is gloriously pink with the fading echo of the set sun. great... just what you need to motivate yourself.

space elf came came around to my gamme to smoke this morning and ended up chatting for a couple of hours about life and family and things. charged situation defused, thankfully. I have been entrusted by her with the task of tracking down a telepathic shaman-acupuncturist experimented on by the us government, who lived here for a month a couple of years ago and was last seen heading into the amazon seeking ethnobotanic insight in 2002. the things that come your way if you just sit in one place, minding your own business...

-15 today. snot freezes in your nose when you go out. indescribable feeling, vaguely remembered from colder winters in youth.

planning my departure in the course of the next few days, feeling surprisingly very melancholic about it. getting to alta from here is a mammoth 10-hour bus ride that coincides painlessly with no flight patterns known to man up here. at least one night in an alta hotel- chance to grab some mindless tv after long abstention. after roughly a week in the south or two at most, with a few days in the capital, I'll likely be in the uk early december for a week or two- principally in cambridge but with some sojourning to and fro london.

today tidying the gamme, preparing to wash the place out tomorrow. very tired- it's 10pm and it's been dark for more than 8 hours... things that make you go 'hmmm...' have since yesterday succesfully been defused into things that make you go 'phew...'. no complicated antics, thank god.

on the internet buying a ticket south - no departures on the 27th, so I'm aiming for the 26th. could buy it with fusioned übergiant sas braathens, but I'm going for cheap alternative budget airline norwegian for ideological reasons, even though this pumps the price up a couple of hundred kroner. mostly because I disagree with the loss-making pricedumping strategies of the conglomerate.

there are apparently reindeer in the western fence today, but having been utterly unable to track down any of my informants by mobile phone I am not about to venture off the beaten track to locate this fence ("you take left off the road at the big lake halfway to varangerbotn, then its a few miles inland...") with my malfunctioning car, get stuck and eaten by wild boars while hopelessly wandering the trackless slippery wild wastes looking for a human face.

hopefully there will be slaughtering activity tomorrow- key informant number one said they might be able to find a spot for me on the reindeer dissembly line. this would entail full slaughterer dressup, rubber gloves and entrail handling. highly interesting, given my nearly masochistic predilection for embodied phenomenological approximation. I'll keep ye posted.

btw, the other terminal is not manned but childed by an 8-year old kid with a mobile phone, surfing her friend's dating page and telling her friend which local boys have visited. cue casual lines such as 'you know such and such, he used to say he was 17 but now he says he's 50. yech it's so sad...'. another little reason I'm glad I'm not a parent in today's world.

drove out into the world today, intending to go to bugøynes and talk to the marketing boss at a reindeer meat producing company there, and while there try to get an interview with the alien-abduction sami-healer woman that lives there. a very elusive figure.

drive drive drive, and suddenly I found myself at the airport in kirkenes. 80km too far. thankfully I had made no fixed arrangements, or this would have made a gesture of impoliteness. by the time I got back to where I was supposed to turn left, 80km back, i had been dark for several hours, it was past closing time and my one elusive piece of human evidence regarding contemporary alien-sami contact wasn't picking up the phone. presumably she had been abducted.

clearly this is not my day. spaced-outness is apparently one after-effect of reiki initiations - had it not been such an integral element of my daily habitus, I would have inclined to that explanation. as it stands... I think I might just go home, tidy the gamme a bit and have an early night...

back at the healing farm, course over. would write extensively about it but right now I feel like I've run a marathon while being trashed continuously with a soft but heavy padded stick. lots of unfamiliar pains and some random weird-shit experiences of the kind that probably don't lend themselves too readily to a journal article. interesting though.

finally learned the symbol gestures- they progress in complexity from the one smooth movement of the 'right here buddha nature' symbol to the 'no past, no present, no future' symbol, which consists of five interlinked ideograms comprising 21 separate hand gestures. a bit surprisingly, it took me less than 20 minutes to memorize it.

the strangest thing about this was initiation into a 150 year old japanese system that traces itself back to tibetan buddhism, in eastern finnmark, by an icelandic and a danish master: heterogeneity or what.

very long day. attunements, then bang, straight into learning the postures and practicing laying-on-hands. first thing, I had to perform a whole 1-hour reiki healing session on one of the other people, 15 hand postures 3 minutes each plus various cleansing practices. then 5-on-1-healings and a rather nice chair-healing with the (recently divorced) space-elf, whom I probably wouldn't kick out of bed even though her sons are close to my age. also lectures and a chai session. surprise surprise, the reiki master said I had a spectacular aura, a kind of golden spiral vortex of light descending into my head, full of nature images. 'meget smuk' were his exact words. very pretty. nice and it helps pull newage chicks, but come on... what is it with these newagers and my bloody aura?

tomorrow even longer day, the level 2 "attunement" in the morning, then learn the three symbols and practice remote healing, as well as rehearse a number of other procedures...

man. sign up for a reiki initiation and what do you get? 4pm to 10pm with a crazed, rambling, gnome-like dancing monkey of an anthroposophist, vomiting recycled steiner-tilted new age jargon with a touch of blavatsky, capra and pop hinduism for hours and hours and hours, non-stop. to top it all, in mumbled danish! goddammit give me some substantial techniques! I want to learn the three symbols and their names and the 45 hand positions and have my aura 'attuned' with the master symbol, not get a truckload of washed-out 70s age of acquarius bullshit about 'the universe is energy', archetypes and reichian psychology shoved down my throat by a balding self-infatuated nisse... during the third hour without break I started fantasizing violently about watching him being eaten alive in a pool full of starved goldfish. final question from a concerned woman: 'is all this necessary for reiki?' he: 'no, it's got nothing to do with reiki, really'. well fuck you! aaaaaarrrgh...

add to that some self-expressive 'joyful' 'free-form' 'kundalini dancing', a 'guided light-meditation' and a roomful of menopausal women and you have my friday night suicide recipe.

bush wins by a depressing margin, and the world is set full speed ahead into the void, with a crazy armed nuclear fundamentalist cowboy-pope antichrist at the helm. america will veer recklessly on into the dark deep reaches of the extreme right, beyond blue into ultraviolet and madness, propelled by the solid popular mandate. talk about a tyranny of the majority.

man, things are so fucked I don't even have the energy to sum up the fuckedupness in words. everything is wrong.

I was born in the US: this means I am a natural-born american on paper. with a blue little american passport. for years this has been a slightly awkward running joke in my leftie-liberal circles... I think it is time now to terminate this affiliation. I want no part however small in the madness of uncle-king sam. according to this site, unless I want to take up arms against the US government to overthrow it [hmmmm...] what I need to do is make a declaration to a consular officer at the embassy in oslo. which means waiting another month or two.

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oh look. here's part of an entry I wrote in a previous online life, in february 2001, on the occasion of bush starting off his political act in the global theatre with a little bombing strike on baghdad- as clear a message to the world about where his intentions lay as imaginable...

"I remember the inauguration. I watched the entire affair live as it happened, zonked out in my sofa one lazy, gray afternoon with nothing to do, shuddering with fear and loathing... I remember thinking that my god, if this had happened in a muslim country it would have been presented as religious fundamentalism... I mean, preacherman with thunder in his voice, hymns, invocations to god and the entire myth structure of the American dream-apparatus... democracy, liberty, freedom, dignity, civilisation... all these beautiful concepts with little connection to reality... all invoked as triggerwords, with no basis in the actual state of the State's affairs... all nicely backed up by God. what happened to the God of Nature of the founding fathers? my theory is he killed himself out of either disgust, pity, self-loathing, guilt, or the unbearable realisation that the little verminous, scheming, crawling gutter creatures he had populated his beautiful globe with were made in his image..."

after a night of howling winds and strange dreams I woke this morning with a twitching muscle in my left shoulder, to what looks like a new murky era of global bushism... spent a  dejected half hour in a very hot shower, trying to reconcile myself to the likely fact. failed, but decided to get on with things, even though the planet is progressively more and more fucked and more than half of americans clearly think they're on the right path.

nothing at all [as opposed to just nothing] has been happening for the last week or so- the weather persists in erratic oscillations, with the result that every natural surface approaches conditions of zero friction, covered as it is in ice with an inch of water on top during the day... which then freezes at night. howling winds, and rain alternates unpredictably with snow. not ideal conditions for sticking relatively fragile four-legged friends-to-be-slaughtered in the fence. there are rumours from the elders that there won't be proper snow til january...

have heard that expression a couple of times now, among herders. 'de gamle sier at...', or 'the old ones say that...'. interesting- seems to be an implicit concession from the younger, sedentarised generation to the elder generation that spent more time outdoors, living in closer proximity to the herd. nowadays motorization, changing habitation patterns, increased material affluence and closer integration with the life-cycle machinery of the majority society tend lead to less time spent living in the field. the elders are thus more in tune with nature, able to read the signs and predict the patterns... though to what degree their prognostication is trusted is not quite clear.

also - after three months spent in engaged mode my subconscious was threatening a burnout. thusly as no great events were on the horizon I locked myself up with an old turn-based strategy computer game and whiled away the last few days in a haze of escapism, laying waste to fantasy landscapes with demonic armies. it never ceases to amaze me just how devotionally absorbed I can get in these things- quite literally 8 or 10 or 12 hours can pass at a time with me thinking of nothing outside the framework of the game I am currently immersed in. I temporarily forget food, drink, myself, my posture, my concerns and the entire world, everything. sheer one-pointedness of mind. and how I do wish I could muster that kind of absorption for other activities... not even sex provides that degree of total unselfconsciousness to me.

this weekend I get my level one and two reiki initiation [...?!], then monday next week I'm driving down towards karasjok and kautokeino, planning to end up in Alta for a seminar by friday, four to six hours drive west of here. from there I might either drive bravely on to tromsø, another three or four hours, to chat to the people at the center for sami studies, or turn back and head here. depends on the weather... of course the moment I get to tromsø the weather will turn sharp and cold here, and they'll slaughter the remaining 600 calfs in one go and everything will be over for this year before I manage to get back. just one of those things...

am giving serious thoughts to heading down south end of this month or early december. would be useful to talk to some admin people in the infrastructure. also I might take a brief trip to the uk early december to talk to supervisor and meet the new intake of 1st-year PhDs at SPRI, which includes a norwegian reindeerologist-in-the-making working on the politics of reindeer herding... could be interesting.