One day you’ll find yourself hooked on painkillers. Not heavy prescription drugs turning you into a floating junky, with nevertheless a tiny drop of self-destructive romanticism saving you from complete lameness, but blunt fucking headache pills: aspirin plus ibuprofen plus caffeine. You’ll be forced to swallow at least one every night to avoid waking up from an excruciating headache keeping you in bed all day long in complete darkness and silence, so one every night, or 2 if there is already a trace of pain or just tension in the back of your neck when bedtime comes – this to avoid having to take 8 the next day – 2 every 4 hours – if it’s failed… You’ll never know if by doing so you’ll fuck up your liver, screw your precious intestinal flora or increase your blood pressure and provoke the brain stroke that will kill you, but it’s not as if you’ll ever have the choice, and none of the numerous medics you’ll consult about it will be able to give a clear answer (the pharmacist at the corner of Kottbusserdam and Planufer will warn you about them each time you’ll buy some, the one further down will let you buy 4 boxes at a time – that’s where you’ll go).
You won’t remember how and when the headaches started – still you’ll know that in your intoxication years, you’ll have regularly suffered from headaches that you’ll attribute to the recurrent processing of alcohol through your metabolism, and learn how to wash down a ibuprofen pill with a big glass of iced Coke before going to bed when drunk – that at some point will happen very often. More than it won’t. So maybe it will have started already by then but like many other things in your life it will be happily numbed by a crazy ongoing whirl of partying, boozing, dancing, polyamouring; conjuring a incredible energy that also helped studying, working, reading books, conjecturing about art and politics, painting, shooting films, playing music, writing poems; launching endless new projects with performances, videos, new bands playing new musical styles, writing in magazines, organizing festivals; roaming northeastern Europe to see as many museums, exhibitions, performances, concerts and improbable films as possible, festivaling, clubbing, raving, testing new drugs, demoing; taking classes in Paris, teaching art in small cities all over Northern France, graduating in visual arts then start again in cinema studies, then finally joining a high-tech art school, flirting with local politicians to be funded, hanging with the hip crowd, sometimes doing any job or just begging for food until the next paycheck – and that will be before you’ll even enter the dance world…
When you’ll decide to refocus your energy into butoh dance and resolve to quit alcohol to restore your health and self-discipline, you’ll forget about these early headaches, but soon your damaged spine will start to interfere… You will have been badly crushed by a car back in school and though your right leg will take most of the hit and will have to be carefully re-constructed and reeducated over a long and painful process, your whole body will stay shaken and unsettled for good: your pelvic bone will keep slightly askew, your dorsal vertebrae will pop out of place regularly, your neck will stay stiff, your damaged nerves will remain insensitive… Intensive dance training and strict diet will cope with that for a few more years, but for some accidents once in a while, but little by little you’ll have to reduce the training, you’ll regain the kilos you lost out of mere motivation and the deep joy of dancing, then exceed your comfort mass, and the headaches will take over until they’ll become central in your life.
For instance you’ll have organized a complex cinema concert project for a festival back in your hometown, together with friends and colleagues of that cinema and cultural studies magazine for which you’ll work for many years. It will require to create and perform a soundtrack for a soviet mute black and white movie – it will be Abram Room’s 1929 The Ghost that Never Returns – and you will be asked to sound electro – whatever that means. You’ll love the challenge and decide to combine minimal rhythmical computer music with improvised noise parts on a Theremin – THE original electronic music instrument, released by Lev Theremin in Soviet Union a couple of years before the film…. It will be a long process, starting with finding a suitable film in the catalogues of Soviet movies available in France, then negotiating the rights, obtaining an exclusive video of it and illegally digitalizing it to work on the computer music parts, buying a Theremin and learning how to use it, solving the problem of the absence of subtitles (you’ll even have to proof-check the translation from Russian yourself – the only time ever your knowledge of the language will have a concrete application)…
You’ll ask one of your favourite music collaborators – who is also an electronicist and an improviser, on top of being a good friend, a fine gentleman and an avid cross-border Museums expedition partner – to join for the show; and after a few months of hard work, you’ll take the train (you’ll be living in Paris then) with all your material the day before, have a nice evening with friends and go to sleep in a flat someone will lend you, but when you and your heavy suitcase will reach the top floor of the house, an incredible pain will shatter your spine into pieces, rush into your neck, explode in your head an leave you paralyzed on all four, crying and vomiting. And you will have forgotten your pills. The concert will start at 11:00 pm the next evening, you are expected to supervise the complete technical installation on location in the morning, do the sound-check and a couple of runs in the afternoon, socialize with the officials at some point, be in charge…
You’ll make it in the end, though when you’ll show up in the morning pale and mute like the ghost of the movie, you won’t believe you’ll do anything good that day. What will save you will be a benevolent and charming crew-member who will accept to step out of her job for a couple of hours to slowly and softly massage your neck with the tip of her fingers, using only the weight of your hanging head according to osteopathic techniques – plus swallowing a few fistfuls of headache pills. That will be the closest you’ll ever behave like a diva before a show. You’ll never let yourself short of pills ever again.
