Blood Sugar Bojack-19 Apocalypse 2020

This is "a blog about records, concerts, photography and stuff."

Well, I cannot exactly tell, where this post will go, because I have way more things on my mind than I can possibly mention, especially with my temporarily (hopefully! I'm losing my patience here) affected vision, which forces me to enlarge my browser window to 175% and hover over it with a 200% loupe on top to write this. Just try this shit at home! Takes a lot of the convenience out of the internet.

One thing is for sure though: Most of it will fall into the stuff category, as in personal stuff, deep stuff, bigger picture stuff... But first of all I have to start with the most important thing which is on everybody's mind right now: you know it, it's Bojack Horseman!

No, that's not Bojack, it's me. Freshly hairwashed. In the hospital where I had to stay for almost a week. But that's not Bojack's fault. (btw: No spoilers please, I still have to resume binging through the whole series.)

I have brought up Bojack recently in my review for the new Insect Ark masterpiece "The Vanishing" though. In the first season Bojack has a dream of fading away into nothingness, which I connected to the theme of the album. Ok, after rewatching it now I must admit it's not exactly a dream, but only one small part of a big drug hallucination. It impressed me though and still ranks as one of my favorite sequences of the series so far. Besides that whole underwater episode of course.

What I didn't say in the Insect Ark review is that the feeling of watching yourself from the outside and witnessing that person disintegrate had become a not daily, but still disturbingly familiar experience to me at that point.
There were times when I was hanging in my chair, weak and tired, with an invisible weight on my chest, knowing that this could not go on much longer, yet paralyzed by the possibility of a possibly devastating, even fatal diagnosis. I felt like my body was taken away from under me and I was just a spectator. Had I poisoned my lungs? Was my heart slowly giving up? And what about the weight loss?

I'm still far from being thin and I cannot tell how many kg I have lost, because I hadn't been on a scale for a long time, but it must have been at least 7 to 8 kg. I particularily lost my ass, so I'm a big guy who feels his bones while sitting now.
Other people noticed it earlier than me. The first time it was brought up, it was a customer of mine who applauded me for it. I shrugged it off. "No. Nah, I'm not on a diet or something."
From there on I realized that I already had to significantly and increasingly tighten my belt.

Later I earned more praise for the diet I wasn't voluntarily on. It must have looked like a diet though. Ok, if you took a look at the ridiculous amount of juice and sugary soft and energy drinks in my supermarket shopping cart, you could notice that something was off. Hell, I even noticed it myself. But then on the other side I wasn't eating that much bread with meat over the day and I countered the evil drinks with fruits. Loooots of fruits.

When I was watching that Bojack episode on Netflix I was probably accompanied by a ginormous bowl of fruit salad.
Apple, pear, banana, clementine, mandarine, blood orange, mango, watermelon, honeydew melon, delicious galia melon, always two or three or four of  those with not one, not two, but three, four, four and a half table spoons of yoghurt and maybe, when I was being frivolous, a little bit of bitter sweet dark chocolate rasped on top of it. It became an elobarate process, almost a ritual. I even inside-jokingly considered starting a fucking Instagram account for my fruit salad excesses.

Of course that looked like a clear sign of a planned diet from the outside, but nope, it wasn't. I was just hooked and high on fructose and needed that juicy fruity sweetness.

Maybe I actually lost part of my weight because of my new eating habits. The chicken and the egg, you know. But all? Never.

Not too long ago one of my uncles miraculously lost a lot of weight too, a lot more than I did. He died of cancer.

Fuck.



I have diabetes type 1. Noone can say how long I have it. Or maybe someone can and hasn't told me yet. What do I know, I'm completely new to all of this.
The mean thing is that the symptoms are not only harder than those of type 2, they also show much later, when already eighty percent of the insulin producing cells in the body are inactive.
The hard symptoms started around the beginning of December with an incredible thirst and an abnormally coated tongue, which I blamed on a too spicy pizza at the time.
That's a thing with all those different symptoms your body is running through: you find a possible reason, you hope it passes and don't connect the dots to a whole.

Jo Quail

It was the weekend when Mono and Jo Quail played at the Mojo Club in Hamburg. I remember how happy I was about the volume of orange juice I got there - a big cup full to the brim. And after the show I was so thirsty I gulped down two energy drinks in a row so fast that my brother didn't even notice it.

For a week I drank so much, always in need to flush another taste over my sore tongue. Then I was fine. At least kind of fine for a time. I still drank a lot more water, juice, soft drinks, tea than before though.

And it probably was also around this time when being tired during the day gradually became more than the regular just being tired.

December 15th 2019: The eye crisis. I've already told and mentioned this story several times, but of course now I judge it a little bit different.

The Hirsch Effekt

I went to see The Hirsch Effekt and The Intersphere in Hamburg. As expected it was not only a joy for the ears, but also quite stressful for the eyes, because both bands were really generous with stroboscopic light effects. So my eyes were a little affected, but I was ok... ...until I got into a big traffic control, where the police redirected the whole Autobahn over a rest area.

"When was the last time you drank alcohol?"

"Don't know, must have been months ago."

"Any other drugs?"

"No."

Then he did that pupil test where they flash right into your eyes:

"I'm afraid you are showing a reaction."

After a second of being surprised I gave him the extreme light show explanation and luckily he believed it after I could immediately tell him the bands and venue.
From then on my eyes began to hurt and my sight got a little bit blurry.

During the next day it got better, but on the weekend it got worse...

With my knowledge from today my next step would have been to try to get an emergency appointment at the oculist, who would then - as it happens quite often - have discovered my diabetes.

Instead I just went to the optician to make a vision test and get a new pair of glasses, because I had been wearing my recent ones for an eternity anyway.
Rest of the story: My eyes recovered over Christmas, in early January I fetched my new spectacles, it was a catastrophe, I returned them, made a new test and it turned out that my eyes were fine and I didn't need a new Nasenfahrrad at all.

In hindsight I still blame the combination of the Hirsch Effekt light show with the stress of the following pupil test afterwards as the trigger, but I assume that I was much more receptive for that vision disorder due to my escalating diabetes.


For the following weeks I have no shows or other happenings which I could directly link to a particular stage of my sickness. I've only been to Twin Temple and Hexvessel on February 2nd, and apart from that being a total blast of a night - and me being happy with the orange juice again - I think I was ok on that day as far as I remember.

And while I spiraled into fruitmania during February there were more than one ok days, when I just felt tired and still did all the normal things you do while working and not working. Or to stay within my typical not so personal blog subjects: I was strolling around taking photographs as well as being creative with DruturuM. (When will the shows for "Druturum V: Wayfarer" and "Druturum VI: Tightrope Walkers on the Junction of Memory, Dream and Oblivion" happen? Well, I was determined to finally organize a date, when my hospital stay and that whole corona business crossed any possible plan...)

from my stroll one day before hospital

But then there were also those other days when I woke up with cramping feet and parts of my body feeling numb. When I felt random pains here and there. When I finally vegetated in my chair with an invisible elephant sitting on my chest and a strange smell in my nose, while I was calmly in an almost peaceful surrealistic distance contemplating about what I would do with the rest of my life if I would end up learning my expiration date.

Important notice: This may all sound dark and almost kind of suicidal, I know, but it was only my mindset in those specific situations. I'm pretty sure now that I must have been dangerously close to falling into a coma, so I don't feel any need to blame myself for whatever was going in my head.



But let's be completely honest: The state of the world does not make it very hard to wallow in dark places, right?

And I'm not even talking about the current corona zombie apocalypse yet.

I'm not trying to be overly pessimistic, just realistic, but the dry fact is that we have been deep in the middle of an apocalypse for a long time. It just went on so slowly or so far away from our comfortable homes, that we didn't - and still don't - recognize it. We are the daifly that doesn't believe the snail is moving.
From the Bible to Roland Emmerich we've been conditioned to visualize the apocalypse as a sudden dramatic worldwide event, and from the failed doomsday predictions of Jehova's Witnesses to the deflagration of the year-2000-panic on January 1st 2001 we have been underwhelmed by the reality of no action-packed extravaganza, in which some American movie star saves us all, happening. Thanos doesn't snap us away.

No, it's all creeping up on us, even though we all have know about it happening for a long time. People Ignorant dumbasses are claiming that climate change is a hoax or a hype, as if it was some fresh media conspiracy trend, when in truth the human influence on Earth's climate has been a scientific topic for over half a century and an accepted fact at the latest since the First World Climate Conference in 1979.
I remember that it was already a huge subject of news and reports during my childhood. The warnings from back then have changed of course: There is no "We have thirty twenty ten years left to stop the most catastrophic effects from happening" left anymore. Many events are happening stronger and faster than expected. And there's not a single serious scientist left on this whole planet who doubts the reality of the whole thing. It's a global consensus.

And yet we deny it, we shove it off. Instead of facing the problem, which is too huge for our tiny little dayfly perception anyway (and damn, it's only one of countless global problems, which  are all inseparably interconnected with each other), we pretend that our own little empire will last forever if we just go on and change nothing - or even worse if we elect the most incompetent, hateful, stupid clowns, losers and dictators to be our leaders. Because that has helped so often in the past. Learning one little lesson from history? No, fuck you!

So many things, which have been unthinkable not that long ago, are now widely accepted like some force of fate we can't do anything about; Nazis in the parlaments and regularly murdering (or trying to murder) folks in Germany? Yeah, well, it's what they do, right? Traditions.

Yet also that problem is only a Fliegenschiss in relation to the bigger picture, to the sum of all fuckery which plagues us.
It's hard to stomach that there's already a whole generation grown up out there, which must be under the impression that the level of dystopian absurdity we are living under is normal. It's not. But how many years and decades can you remind yourself and others daily "This is not normal"?

But maybe I am totally wrong in this. Maybe this is normal. Maybe all this is just an expression of human nature as it has always been.
I'm from Central Europe after all, and we Europeans are the Nobel Peace Prize decorated world champions in outsourcing reality,

For decades we lived in a bubble of perceived peace and prosperity, when in truth we just passed wars and misery to substitutes all around the globe. And when just a tiny fraction of the pain our way of life is co-responsible for knocks on our door, we close it and erect fences - on the outer borders, far from our everyday sight -, so cruel and deadly, the MAGA cult leader in the White House would have wet dream about them. "Build that wall like Europe does!" just isn't catchy enough as a phrase I guess.

We'd rather endure that far beyond our sight, under the surface of the sea, the Mediterranean becomes a mass grave than being confronted with the faces of the needy.
Because it is true: They are a threat! They are a threat to our hilarious collective illusion that our turbo-capitalist world of eternal growth will go on forever and the invisible hand of the market will magically keep us all from harm. It never has and it never will.
The fact that this understanding takes longer to reach the - what a colonial times bullshit term - "First World", than all those countries which have been plundered by it for decades or even centuries, won't change that ultimately the fate of us and them will lead to the very same conclusion.

Just like the virus doesn't differentiate between races, genders, the rich and the poor, the failure of our species is upon each and every one of us. Well, technically of course not those who will pass before we're there, but most of those who are young now will very likely be crushed by the comet we created. There is no plausible hope that we can limit the climbing of the global average temperature enough to prevent a point where civilisation, our life is just not sustainable any longer.

We are losing Earth.

If we ever even had it. One day in the far future, when alien spacecraft will park in Earth's orbit and time-scan our tiny little dot in the universe with it's advanced technology, humanity will probably be listed among "various others" in the analysis of the most successful life forms.

a lonely survivor, 06/2009

Among the many more persistent creatures there will of course be the good old dinos, who only made room for us mammals after a cosmic cataclysm. T-Rex with his ridiculous tiny arms was the undisputed apex predator of this planet for around two million years.
Homo sapiens has been around for not much more than three hundred thousand years. Most of it has been a good run though, hanging around in Africa, gnawing the remains from the bones much more dangerous animals have left us. (Sorry, but that noble hunter and collector dogma is scientifically outdated - we are anxious weak scavengers.)

Remember: Those were not some primitive apes with crouched walk and flat foreheads! Those were people just like us today, exactly as intelligent as we are now, only with less technology, medicine, history. And less microplastic in their bodies.
If a time-traveller abducted a baby from that time period, it would probably grow up to be a perfectly normal person... or it would even more probably die from all the new germs and viruses the human immune system had to adjust to in the meantime. But still, you get my point.

Who knows when thimgs started to go wrong? Were it the tools we invented? The taming of fire? The development of language, which took a huge chunk of our whole existence and assumingly was still not fully completed when we finally started to roam to other continents like Europe forty thousand years ago?

In Eurasia the modern man met the Neanderthals and co-existed with them for a couple of thousand years. Quite a respectable while, given our racist nature and the fact that we actually faced another race, whereas today we only make up differences where there are none. There is only one human race left. Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis shared cultural practices like music, painting and funeral rites - and who knows what more. The cause of the Neanderthal extinction is unknown, yet there is no proof of a terminal conflict with our ancestors. Maybe they were just too few, maybe they fell to sicknesses we brought with us. Sorry! Or they even died in a similar way to the dinosaurs, only on a much smaller scale, not caused by a comet, but a huge volcano eruption.

However if there has indeed been a long period of peaceful co-existence I count it as the most amazing and sadly also the last true great achievement in our history as a species!

But since then... You only have to take a look at our lifetimes and look at the countless big decisions our societies and humanity as a whole was confronted with. It seems like whenever we reach a crossroads we're determined to choose the wrong direction.

We are simply not made for decisions, for existence in larger groups, we have always been unfit for the civilization we invented. Most of all that has occured in all history we know of has been war and pain. And that's not just a dramatic exxageration for the sake of a Voivod reference, Try to show me any believable source which proves the opposite!

But wait! we hear some optimistic voices saying now, maybe we'll come out of this singular corona crisis as a better society.
Ok, I am sure that things will be different, but better? Seriously, as if the infamous one percent would allow significant social and economic change to happen. I don't think so.

But you're always free to show me I'm too pessimistic. Give us that unconditional basic income for a couple of months now and I will indeed have hope! Not hope for stopping the end of human civilization, which will occur not in a million or a hundred years, but only decades from now, but hope for a small window of ignorantly blissful Middle European cosiness for a brief amount of time until we will be flushed down the toilet of history all the more thorough.
 




Yet first of all and the far most important for me: Let's survive this shit!
Or more egotistically: Please let this party flu, as some still to this day foolishly perceive it, never touch me!

At the beginning of the month I was just one strangely sick man. Now I am a potential risk patient in an evironment possibly just weeks or days away from a ghostly silent viral dystopia.

Fuck.


This sucks more then anything else right now.

Followed - with a much larger distance than we have to keep to other people now - by the fact that the one food which I am not allowed to eat at all from now on is honey of all things. You know what I do for a living? I sell fucking beekeeping equipment! This is cruel unfair shit, man.


Connecting the bigger picture I have been rambling about for various uncontrolled paragraphs now with my personal experience of this month (I can't believe there's still one third of March left!) I'm fully aware that there's a parallel theme of denial in both.

Even though not one professional has told me that I was remarkably late - many diabetics are undiagnosed for much longer -, I could and should have called the doctor much sooner.
But it's always easy to say that in hindsight, when you're no longer walking in the shoes of your yesterday self.


Ok, my state of the world address got far beyond the point of being useful as a metaphor, but it seems like some forms of denial and ignorance must have been important human survival techniques still engraved into our DNA, be it as an individual or as a collective mass.
Did it have to do with shit like not getting too scared and traumatized while hungrily hiding from lions and hyenas to leave their prey and let us have dinner? Something like that?
Whatever the reason for this behaviour pattern may be, it's a main cause for our downfall now.


Damn, it's time that I conclude this text! Noone will read until here anyway and I'm beginning to incoherently jump back and forth between everything.

By the way, did I mention that now, several days before I started the first paragraph I have already ditched the Windows screen loup for most occasion and have reduced the magnification of my browser from 175 to 150 percent? So there is slow, slow progress with my eyes happening. That's a major silver lining.

last self (one day) before hospital

However, back to not even three weeks, but a felt eternity ago:

A visit to the doctor was inevitable. Yet since self analysis is way easier than action on its behalf (also keep in mind that avolition is a symptom of the sickness), that didn't happen overnight.

A couple of things had to happen first:

• My vision began to be affected. Fuck, not this again!
• I had already told my brother that I was not feeling well and going to call the doctor soon.
• And  I also had to read a ghost entry on Facebook of someone being interested in a certain event. And that someone I knew had just recently died at a much too young age.

I made the call and was told to come to the practise immediately, since I couldn't rule out that something was wrong with my heart. Turned out that my heart was fine. It was almost a sidenote, when the doctor asked me if I had any problems with my diabetes recently. "What diabetes?" - "Well there we have the surprise of the day."

Next stop: emergency hospitalization.


My stay in the hospital would be the story for its own second post of this size, but since it would involve a lot of stuff about other patients I don't think that this is the best place for that story.

Let's just say that four out of six nights ranged from terrible to absolute nightmare. And apart from the shock of night one nothing of that shit had anything to do with my diabetes diagnosis.

The last night, in which I didn't even sleep for two hours, included enduring raspy screams of the phrase "Ich will nicht mehr leben!" ("I don't want to live no more") and worse for hundreds of times.

As grateful as I am for living in a country with a healthcare system that does not let sick people on the street just die; being put in a room with a person suffering from pneumonia and withdrawal symptoms when you need sleep and healing yourself can become a real form of psycho terror.
And thinking back to my time as Zivildienstleistender (= performing community service instead of military duty) I know now that watching cases like that as a part of work is a totally different beast than being the patient in the next bed.
The nurses and the doctor agreed that I couldn't get well under those conditions, so that could have played a role in getting me out of the hospital into ambulatory treatment.


Which meant that I am measuring my blood sugar and inject myself with four pens of insulin every day now. I got my first instructions almost in passing here and there, then I was accompanied by a consultant via daily phone calls, until I got my first of many future appointments with a diabetologist last Thursday, when despite the current situation the sleepy town of Itzehoe was still astonishingly alive. At least most people were keeping their safety distance to each other.

Corona Pommes, Itzehoe

And now? I am signed off sick and quite busy navigating through my new carbohydrate-counting life with my bloody rookie's knowledge. Of course there will be a proper training event, but who knows when? It's a group thing, so of course it's suspended.
At least I won't have any breaks in my rhythm of exclusively eating and injecting at three square meals a day for the foreseeable future. Keeping it simple for now.
Except for medical appointments and lonely walks I won't leave home for as long as it takes, no matter what. I'll be a model social distancer! (Or is it distancist? My command of English fails me here.)

Because - and that's a sentence I never thought I would to say out loud, until my hospital roommate's death wish forced me to do it - I want to live!


Ok, that's a good closing word.







This blog will now properly return to its normal format. As far as that is possible, of course.

I do have new music to review and expect more to arrive here, but I think I should feature more photographic posts (I've already done a good bunch of interesting film camera things this year) to fill the void left by all the events that are now canceled. Even though Roadburn isn't officially done yet, everybody knows it cannot under any circumstances happen in April. Also no Chelsea Wolfe. Misþyrming on the Eater weekend? I don't think so. Swans in early May? One can hope, but as things are progressing worldwide I have my doubts.

At this point I would be the thankfullest man if live music would return in June and I could see Louise Lemón on stage again. Or if not that then at least Björk with orchestra in Berlin! That's in July.

My last chance to see live music for a long time was Bohren & der Club of Gore on March 5th. And boy could I have used that smooth and soothing slow motion jazz then. But I was confined to hospital. At least I was able to give my ticket into good hands.

And even though this was a big pain during the first days there, in hindsight having missed an awesome show is probably still much better than to be hospitalized right now.



Take care, stay safe, stay home!

And watch Bojack Horseman, if you haven't yet! I will now finally continue where I left off.