Tuesday 23 June 2020
I do not know where to start from.
It’s been more than two weeks that I didn’t post anything here. And with each day, I feel less…
Who would believe that this line break represents more than two months of my life. We are Thursday the 3rd of September, I am on a train between Copenhagen and Berlin, and I am trying for the umpteenth time to come back to these diaries. Maybe the trigger this time was new “Corona alert” I am currently living: one of the musicians we were working with in Copenhagen received an email from her university telling her she was in the same room of a student who was tested positive. In one minute, everything was changed; she had to take the test ASAP, and isolate herself until she gets the results. We had to stop the rehearsals, pack our gear, and go back to the hotel and wait for her tests to come out. Now I am on my way to Berlin where I will have to isolate myself until she gets her results (I cannot take the risk to contaminate my family, especially Evan who is traveling back to Canada in 3 days).
Anyways, and to go back to the June 23, after writing the title and the first two and a half sentences, I saved the post as a draft and went to sleep. I opened it many times since to try to continue/finish it, but i only ended up adding a line to one of the two lists that followed the laconic opening paragraph:
Subjects (to be developed in the post)
• return to “normal”
• situation in beirut
• depression
• need of a closure
• comparison with war
• how fast we went out of the confinement (and in of course)
• projects made during corona and waiting for finalising
• first concert / first time on the road / first live streaming ever
• live talk + music without trumpet
• musica sawa + kelna ya3ne kelna
• new talk with hatem that sums up everything (conclusion)
• new back to normal: i am now stressed by things to be done to a point where i cannot give time to the corona diaries
• Gimme a break from social media
• Gimme a break of everything
• 4 August!!
• concerts of the summer
• end of presence/absence
• first travel abroad + and new corona alert
• planned visit to beirut
Documents (to be used in the post)
• talk exploratorium link
• talk with hatem link
• new comics (to be drawn)
• photos of corona notebooks
• things made in the first 4 months and not used yet: bath tub solos / electronic solos (light metal etudes, solo piece for crackle synth, etc.) / “A” trio new tracks /
• “While listening to Andrew Lafkas” (to be recorded)
• solo piece for radio art 106
• lebanon stuff: kelna ya3ne kelna + feed beirut back + 2 new pages on lebanon
• gimme a break and other new works on photos
• ringtone for contemporary music month
• drawings on restaurant notes (corona personal info, etc.)
• T-shirts
• concerts pictures with andrew and ute and tony
• pictures from décrochage
• beirut won’t cry cover
• new beirut stuff: new epilogue to history of leb. / êtes-vous un vrai libanais?
Reading these two lists today make me live again so many specific moments from the past three or four months, in every small detail.
Where was I then?
Where am I now?
Where will I be then?
Why and how did these rather silly questions gain so many new meanings in my daily life?
Why is time so confused nowadays?
It is hard to say. I always suspected life to be ever changing. But not to that extent!
The only way to try to find some answers is the good old way: to dig back in the things i made/felt/thought/feared since this Tuesday 23rd of June.
It is maybe time to finally use those two lists!
One last thing before calling it a day; in the draft, the two ever-growing lists were followed by an undated and capitalised message-to-self:
MAYBE MAKE THIS THE LAST POST AND/OR ONE THAT WOULD READ LIKE A LONG CHAPTER
I ended up following neither of these friendly recommendations.
Do expect a lot of news from the front in the upcoming days.