I finally found some time to sit down and respond to your letter, my apologies for the delay. I'm sitting in the store here in Stockholm, the day after my 32nd birthday, looking out the window at a crispy golden day percolating outside. It smells like sticky leaves and wet trees, and looks like the clouds are a little bit higher and a little bit slower and the leaves are all singing away their colors, and feels chilly like the time for mandatory sweaters is here: every indication that autumn has arrived. To celebrate I'm wearing the same colors on my body today as I see out in the world - yellows and oranges and reds and browns with a little green - which makes me wonder if I'm totally invisible as I ride my bike around the city, perhaps mistaken for a gush of wind rather than recognized as a flying man. While looking in the mirror this morning I noticed many more white hairs in my beard, many more lines under the eyes and up on the forehead, and some new stray hairs cropping up in some weird places.

I've been here for almost a week and even though I recognize the sway of the buildings and the lean of the people it doesn't feel any more like home, any more than it ever did. I love Sweden but it still seems like I don't belong here, which again makes me wonder if I am invisible somehow. (Being invisible can be a powerful experience, liberating, enabling, comforting at times, and is hardly ever as lonely or isolating at it might sound). But on a day like today - when the sun is out and there's the scent of mushrooms and berries on the breeze and I have a date to take a walk with a beautiful woman and I realize that I can sit on my ass all day making my very absurd artworks and eat whatever I want and go wherever I want without worrying too much about money - well today is not a day to wonder about darkness. There will be plenty of time for that in the winter.

I feel rejuvenated by my time in Iceland, which makes me realize just how depleted I had become before leaving. This depletion has to do with not making enough art, or the right kind of art to satisfy my lofty desires, and also not having a community of people to share my ideas with, and all of this is due to a kind of scattered focus which I have been struggling to shake off ever since breaking up with ___ and moving to Stockholm I suppose. Being in Iceland, feeling like I was out there on the edge of the world, being hugged by mountains and cooed by waterfalls frothing up from the magnetic vibrations of the purple black earth and pulled up by a sun which seemed to be spinning faster than physics can describe... well it did something to me which is indescribable but undeniable. I regained some vision while being out there at the end of the world, and remembered a lot of things I guess I suppressed about how I get along with others and what I expect and seek in my human relationships. Now I feel strong and clear and completely refreshed, but this confidence also has a price because I now realize that another change is quickly approaching on the horizon.

I had a realization. I now realize that I just don't give a flying fuck about how most people think the world should work. In fact I think most are just wrong, dead wrong, dying in wrongness, and I believe I have a potent vision that might be able to redirect the path by which things are flowing, or at least be able to cleanly remove myself from it so that I don't get swept away with the tide. I've realized that I don't want anything to do with this material culture: I don't want to buy anything except for what I absolutely need and I need so very little these days. I don't want to sell anything unless it's a well-designed, well-made, worth-while thing and there is sadly so very few of these things in the world and in fact most things don't need to exist, shouldn't exist, and their existence is a huge part of the problems that I observe, the social problems in people and the environmental problems of the earth. I don't want to participate in a culture of excess and waste, of materialism and fetishized desire, of corporate aesthetics and social hierarchies and technological networking and all that other bullshit that seems to make the world spin these days. Not only do I not want to be in the middle of it, not want to participate in it, but I want to dedicate my life energy towards breaking it down. This is a big realization because it means that my days working here at the store are decidedly numbered, but not necessarily my days in Sweden... but probably that too since there seems to be so little room for my breed in this outcropping of civilization. I've had a lot of time to ruminate over what's most important in my life while living out there on the fjord, out there at the edge of the world, and what I've been doing the last two years kinda seems like a big fat waste of time if it wasn't for the fact that I was analyzing this time very closely in order to reach this conclusion I'm describing to you now. Yes, of course, this time was important and worthwhile, but only in terms of affording the opportunity for this epiphany which I am having right now, and then comes the essential and urgent next step to act upon this impulse and redirect my life in a way that will accomplish my new goals.

Don't get me wrong, I've had a really great time here and I'm still very much here, still very much involved with living this life, and even though I'm wheeling and dealing with material clutter I am managing to do it with some wonderful resourcefulness which is a bit removed from how all the rest seem to be living here. I have everything I need to make what I want to make, except for a context in which to justify its making... but that's something that I am no longer convinced exists anywhere in the world, or rather, it will be wherever I am so why not go back to where there are people I can actually relate to. Of course I will never stop making art, or music, or writing down these weird poetic thoughts, but I'm beginning to think longer and harder and more seriously about dedicating my continued education towards skills that really fucking matter, in terms of survival. I want to learn to tend the land, build my own house, install a solar power system and recycle my gray water, raise animals and develop co-dependent relationships with them, and start weighing my human relationships in terms of a similar kind of co-dependency. The more open I become to this reality and the more I try to discuss it with others the more feasible it seems to be.