Start with an end

January - what will I remember?

Hola, dear reader,

we are doing 2025 all right, aren’t we?

I suppose I have to give you TW on death though. I lost someone (not David Lynch) and I wrote about it below.

This year I continue to slow down. I learnt that I am very quickly to forget about this intention of mine. Usually (especially in the beginning of the year, when resolution and goal are the hottest duo) I rush forward excited with ideas and plans and commitments, and I find myself barely churning in a couple of months. Irritated and overwhelmed. Very familiar pattern I am very prone to. And I know that. Knowing that helps me to build some safety nets. And rewire my own behavior.

At first of January my friends went to the day trip to our favorite badlands aka semi-desert called Monegros. It is famous for summer rave festival and also Javier Bardem fought a man with jamon leg in a movie filmed in this desert. It takes roughly 2 hours by car to get there. You need to leave Catalonia and enter Aragon. I decided to not leave my apartment.

I spent 1st of January mostly in my living room with hot tea and books. Everybody left, it was me and my son, but luckily me and him found a sweet spot of us being together. When each of us has some private and shared space. It never was so comfortable before. He grows old, little rascal, and needs me less and less. I will think about it later.

It felt like a right thing to do, to avoid rush and stay still at the first day of the year. We have a saying - you will spend a year in a way you met it. This is how I want to spend my year - unrushed. I want to remember that I need more reading, writing, thinking, drinking tea. And then to make art fervently and passionately. And move on after a good rest, but not in the grip of exasperation.

Few days into the year, we received the sad news that on the 1st of January our dear friend back in Moscow died. He sent me happy new year message on 31st of December and then he died next day on the train station. His heart couldn’t endure this world anymore. He could, but his heart decided otherwise. He was a reader of my dispatch, a member of my sketchclub, an ally and supporter, an art buddy and an old friend of more then 10 years. In 2012 we went to Brasil together and accidentally stepped into human shit on the beach of Rio de Janeiro one night, it was an inner joke for many years. I write this after a whole month had passed but I still do not believe it completely. I just cannot. I never wrote obituaries in my life, guess I just started. Loosing him makes me even more firm in my desire to go on with my art. I imagine how he says - his voice sounds like rumble in my head, he had this deep low voice - of course, you should do it, of course, you need to work on that project of yours or that. Of course, you can. Of course, you have to see the beauty everywhere and make art of it. And then share it with people as a content piece.

And then David Lynch died, and a lot of people said a lot of nice things about him. It mixed somehow with the death of my friend. Because he was also an artist, and David Lynch was.

End of December and January was an avalanche of beloved people coming to our seaside town. I was so saturated with love, connection, deep conversations. Loosing someone makes me see others more fragile and precious, myself included. As much as I was happy with my solitary 1st of January, I didn’t want to miss a chance to spend time with friends. They flocked to the Spanish coast from Serbia, Swiss, Sweden, Germany, Russia. We had a lot of meals, walks, hugs, talks. And in the end of January we are saying goodbye to the last Northern birds, as I hope that I will be able to preserve all the love that’s been given to me. Today is 1st of February and Imbolc, so I do a little meditation practice and think about all the treasures that I have.

My son brought some fever bug from school and me and Ariel got it too, so I have to say that end of the month was somewhat tiresome. Which corresponds with my social battery running off. I hope for a solitary and very scheduled February.

I tried to create a perfect week plan for myself with everything that I want to do and I already see that I am failing. I need to be very disciplined if I want to get some stuff done. And I aim for that. I will tell you in the end of February how it went.

Despite all the social activities of January I published two YouTube videos and I invite you to watch them. One is book related - it is failed readathon aka I read romantasy bestseller with my book besties. And the other is my studio set up which I filmed in November and finally took time to edit. Also I would be very thankful if you subscribe to my channel.

I also have a secret project I cannot wait to tell you about, but if I can tell or not depends on how good I will be with my schedule in February. If I soldier through, I have a chance to reveal you my secret. As much as I don’t like military terms. This secret burns, but I need to be secretive for now.

What did I find curious this month?

• I love writing and reading to the ambient music, but more and more recent playlists are AI-slop and I don’t enjoy it really. I learnt that if I put “before:2022” into the search in YouTube I will get videos with older playlists that don’t have AI-music

• By now I read the first volumes of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros romantasy books, and the whole new world opened to me, I cannot say that I love the writing style itself, but it is very entertaining and an interesting social trend to observe. I also aim to be as unhinged as I possibly can this year, so reading some spicy fantasy love stories is very much in line with that.

• The Ghost of Piramida documentary is about Danish musicians who arrived to the abandoned Soviet town Piramida at the the island of Spitsbergen to find sounds for their upcoming album. Both documentary and album are very good. I loved the voice of a storyteller - a man who lived in Piramida during Soviet times. Who thought that he won’t need to leave the place, but had to do it when the USSR collapsed. His emotion feels so raw, the man itself feels like a fish which was stolen from the water and left on the earth. I felt this same longing and loss while we were at the North of Russia last august and read memoirs of people who lived there in the Biological Institute.

If you’d like to support my work on an any scale, you can Buy Me A Coffee. It will help me greatly to spend more time making art.

Thank you for reading,

Vera