I sleep a lot. Most of the day I am asleep. I wake up very late in the afternoon. I need the little black cat to be with me, and she usually does not make an appearance until sunrise. So, I toss around waiting for her – not having gone to bed myself until close to dawn. I dream a lot. Long dreams like stories almost. In them everyone is still alive. My mother, my father, my aunts, my uncle, my grandmother. And we do things together. Go on trips. I find myself in a lot of unk

I am not going to make this long. There is a lot to write, to think about and to self-examine. Especially self-examine. Back when I wrote this 2 months ago I was wrong in something quite fundamental, and that was my underestimation of the resilience that societies have. I thought things were far more fragile than they have turned out to be. It seems that it isn’t that easy to break the backs of people. Although… Back then I put another photo of Sokak Restaurant (one that I ha

This man I know. In general good health as far as I am aware. Very intelligent. Educated. Creative. Sophisticated. And scared to death of getting sick with the virus, as I found out earlier today. Sequestered in his home. Food delivered to a closed door which he only opens once the delivery guy has departed. Everything gets sterilized. Washed down with disinfectants over and over. Anything that comes into the house in the way of edibles gets soaked for hours in vinegar water

Which is also the America that we lost… Because regardless of whether we ourselves were Americans or not, the music was ours. We lost the music. They bid their silent adieus and gracefully vanished into the night. So gently, so quietly that we didn’t even hear them leave. Maybe the last bloom of Western Civilization – they knew it was time, these American musicians. And they fell silent. This is a song list. It is random. There is no particular order. I add whatever comes int

Kemal. He is a wily old geezer. A Kurd from Ağrı who has been around the block a few times. He owns a tiny tea counter in the marketplace. And he is a very special friend. When the marketplace closed down I heard that he had gone back to Ağrı where he still has a small place. I didn’t call him. I couldn’t bring myself to even do that. I was completely devastated anyway and anything to add to that… Somehow it was too much. I didn’t call a special friend. And for this may I nev

My nearest and dearest appear to be worried about me. “What difference does it make if you fret like this?” “You cannot change anything, so why not try to be ‘more normal’ about all of this?” These are the kinds of things that I am getting asked. This was the gist of a long phone conversation that I had with someone especially close to me last night. And others have asked me as well. I am no one special. I am just an ordinary, somewhat above average talented graphic designer

I saw this a little while ago: https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/12/why-are-some-alt-media-embracing-a-permanent-police-state/ I wasn’t going to post anything for a while. I was all written out, after the last one. But now I think I will anyway. Because I asked this question too, and pretty much at the start of all this. And then very shortly after I asked it (gave them the benefit of the doubt for a week or so) I got rid of the lot of them: One fine morning, before I even fin

This time next year – if it turns out that this is indeed a massive pandemic that in the meantime has killed millions, as they are now predicting, I will be humbled and apologize. And I will take all of the ridicule and abuse that this entails. But, more importantly, I will go in front of the mirror and take a long hard look at myself. I will confront my life-long mind-state of inherently questioning not only everything that comes out of any “authority”s mouth, but also of an

A few hours after I made that post yesterday, about half of which asks the question “who benefits” to which I myself cannot find the answer, I came across this video. This is not primarily about the virus. It is about the US economy. I have pasted the link from the time where he actually talks about the virus and what it might mean. But, to really get what he is saying one needs to listen from the start where he is talking about the US economy, which he says has been in terr

And I am alone in my fear. Blogger is now putting page views right next to the posts on the dashboard, so one doesn’t have to go to a stats page to see if anyone is viewing the blog. No one seems to, literally not a single person, so I can probably start looking at this thing as a private diary. Which is good. Because I do need to talk about this stuff, to articulate it, bring it outside my head where it is just running in circles or rather downward plunging spirals. I need t

I have not written anything on this blog for a long time. I could say it was because nothing terribly interesting was happening and that I was sort of vegetating. Not true. There have been events, especially the military operations that my country undertook in Syria last Fall and Winter that had me beside myself. Back then I made some videos that I shared on FB, but I did not feel up to writing about it here. And I would probably not have felt up to writing about this curren

I haven’t wandered inside this market area for years. Normally I have no business there, no shops to go to, no friends to visit. I made the whole specifically for the page. What surprised me was that it wasn’t nearly as conservative as I remembered it to be. Obviously there are far more women wearing scarves, and shorts are somewhat thin on the ground. But the difference between my avowedly “progressive” neighborhood and “conservative” Üsküdar is far less pronounced. Which is

My housemate Hafize has been taking care of a young crow for the past few weeks. And the relationship is becoming so hilarious that I want to make a note of it. Bıdık, as the crow is named (means little one in Turkish), was found between two parked cars in the dead of night in a neighborhood called Çağlayan where Hafize had gone to visit her sister. Baby crows are actually quite big, you know they are babies from their wings which are still unformed and their beaks which are

I am not terribly patriotic when I think about Turkey as a whole. Sure I want the country to be OK. Sure, I want it to get out from under this yoke of oppression and tyranny – which I am fairly confident that it will, sooner or later. Sure, I like hearing the music, or eating the food. But, I do not well up in tears when I see the flag or anything like that. I do not think we are better than anyone else on the globe. I become a bit more involved when it comes to Istanbul. Bu

I may have found a way to put my street photos to some use. Not in terms of creativity, or design. I still have no ambitions or confidence in that regard. But there is something else that has been bugging me for ages, and there I may be able to do something with them. Which is trying (against all odds) to change the perception that people have of my city by starting a Facebook page (awful design, but nothing to be done about that, it is the thing that has the reach) where I s

I am very upset about this. In fact, I obsess about it. For the man himself and what he has been subjected to obviously, but I also obsess about what this means. In Gordon Dimmack‘s words “this is the biggest story ever, in ever ever – bigger than Brexit, bigger than anything else” – speaking as someone from the UK. As someone from Turkey, Brexit has never been high on my agenda anyway, but looking at it from here, Julian Assange’s plight is a bigger story than all the horror

After exhausting home and cat photo topics I have ventured outdoors with the phone and have started taking street photos. I still get nervous when I point the thing at people but I am also realizing that, unlike a real camera, the phone does not seem phase anyone. They probably think I am just texting someone when I hold it up like that. The results aren’t great or anything like that. No Cartier-Bresson in the making. But I do enjoy it. I am also finding (as I also did years

Whenever I see a photo of myself taken by someone else I have a massive shock. This isn’t something new, or something that is age related. Obviously I no longer look as good as I used to, and I wouldn’t expect to come across as a glamour puss in photos. And like I said, it isn’t a new thing anyway, I have had this experience for decades. The shock has less to do with how I look in these snaps than it has to do with my expression. Really really sour. Bad tempered. A very nasty

Never done it before. Never had the slightest interest, in fact. But now that I have the phone camera I have started to explore, starting with my own home and my cats. Which is probably how most people start with this. Their homes and their cats. And it is a lot of fun, I must say. A new toy, a new playground. Although it proclaims to have a high resolution (4000something pixels) it isn’t a very good camera, as I found out when I looked at the photos at 100%. But it is more

For years I had a Blackberry. Something like 15 years. And then in the end the battery gave out and because it is such an old model it could no longer be replaced. At least not here in Turkey where HRH has banned Blackberry phones because they refused to hand over the user data to the government. So, I have had no choice but to go out and purchase a new phone. Being a consummate hater of all things Apple, I went for a Samsung A50. Android, a google product – which makes it ha