MY BRAINS

so it's gray most days now and that makes it really easy to sleep
especially the nights when its freezing cold and then you spend a half hour in the sauna before bed and you spent the entire day carrying around a real heavy camera, film holders, a flash, a tripod thats near-broken, and caught all kind of stink eye. and then you lay down, turn into a vegetable, and wake up a newborn at 11 am just in time to catch some weird american show you always watch (but never saw at home) about finding people affordable property that also matches their personality

no more run-ins with hells angels, no more night trains.
things are getting quiet
and i'm getting bored



except for the fact that i'm giving my very first real lecture to an audience of people. and not some art fags either but the NORTH AMERICAN STUDIES DEPARTMENT at a university. youre probably asking "mark? public speaking engagement? most of the time he's filled with non-sequiturs and in a weird fog"
yeah everybody, i know. i'm surprised too. but i get to go back across the country again and see a new city and hangout with the same creepy ambassador i met last time who is obviously voting for the wrong party every single time and who also needs to wipe the creepy smile off her conservative face.

at least i can put this on my resume when i'm applying for jobs to teach "photo 1" at a community college in 15 years after i finally get an MFA from "I.T.T. TECH" or "university of phoenix" for more then i can afford and "THE GREAT DEPRESSION PART DEUX" finally comes to an end.

the good thing about going across the country again....
i spend A FULL WEEK in a small town outside of helsinki WITH A CAR THAT IS GENEROUSLY BEING LENT TO ME BY A GREAT, NICE WOMAN who cares enough about my lifes work to help me out for a minute with access to a car and a 3 story house to myself.
so this town i'm living in is pretty quiet and seeing as how i'm trying to stay dry and stay sane these days means that there's nothing for me to do at night except think a lot about art, edit my pictures over and over and think about what i saw on "dr phil" in the afternoon.

i'm on hiatus from cooking because in a moment of honesty with myself, i recgonized i'm really not good at it.
now my diet consists of peanuts, jaffa (finlandese orange soda that is better then anything ive had in the states), rustikki (it probably just means "french bread" in english but thats the one i grab a couple times per week), meetvursti (this one is questionable because it looks like salami but someone told me it's like hotdogs where it's just a mix of all kinds of animal bits and pieces.), cucumbers, bananas, coffee and red onions. thats it. you can live of all that. you can totally live on less. the lack of variety is a little bit of a downer but what can you do? sometimes you have to trade good food for the most beautiful natural settings you've ever lived and probably ever WILL live in.

it's pretty beautiful here. more biking... some beer drinking, river sitting, squirrel watching time last week was pretty incredible.
i actually made a video on my camera but then later realized it was more pathetic then funny that i spent an afternoon drinking beer and stalking squirrels in some wooded area.


the craigslist finland ad that i posted has received a total of ONE response as of today, wednesday, october 8th.
it was actually from someone living in a distant city that moved here from canada, found it funny, and completely agreed.
she told me that it's pretty tough getting to know some finns and that they "dont make small talk the way 'we' (north americans) do" because they're "quietly evaluating our personalities from a distance to judge whether or not we're worth getting to know".

...less then reassuring but theres always the landscape yeah???
did i mention the landscape?

i'm going to come home with a portfolio full of pussy pictures.
and no, i don't mean actual vagina photographs but just overly sentimental ones full of rivers and trees... the kind of shit that people don't start to make until they've reached retirement and joined a garden club and got E.D.


all that shit aside, i've met cool people here. and in helsinki. mostly in helsinki.

so how about that landscape???? huh?? huh???? pretty pretty


the title of this video is "I COULD HAVE DIRECTED 'LOST IN TRANSLATION' " no actually its just called "wow, this is really the view from my kitchen? sick"

seriously, i know i make a lot of jokes about "oh shit sucks sometimes im all alone" but really i can't and shouldn't. i'm here taking pictures of all kinds of shit. its real incredible to look at stuff here. and i'm moving to helsinki in january which basically means a truly incredible time as i've got a cool homie there and it's got a lot more stuff to do besides drink lager or lager or lager and probably the questions about my origins will probably cease or at least be less frequent. if i hear "are you a turk?", "so, youre jewish?", "are you arab?", or "so you're italian right?" one more time i'm not going to do anything but it's still weird know what i mean?
definitely ready for helsinki.

the grass is, was, and always will be

greener,

- beaner

also, my camera got returned to me by the "finnish lost property service"(thankyou finnish integrity) and that means ill try and put some more stuff online instead of just writing all kind of shit