“Solitude is independence. It has been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve… From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh.”

– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Solitude always comes first. For most it’s the few moments spent brushing their teeth and washing their face in the morning, or alone in the car and up in the elevator to the office, or walking the grocery store isles on the way home – maybe even later eating dinner in front of a screen. But for some, like me and some other scattered Steppenwolfs, solitude is where we first matured and where we go to become ourselves. Like him, all I’ve ever wished for with each passing year is more solitude and independence. Not long ago now, my wish was granted and I found it as cold and vast as he describes. Yet it quickly became the kind of cold that suffocates you, and I found that its dark stillness isn’t the dark one thinks of in contrast to light, it was the darkness of the absence of light, where no contrast exists at all.

Solitude came first, and then the hot raw steam of flesh, where everything became permitted like a manic but somehow soothing and controlled free jazz improvisation.

Here will live my shamelessly unfiltered stories of the unabashed deep penetration I’ve experienced of my body and self – all that the darkness squeezed out – told in amateur stream of consciousness style and interwoven with bits and pieces of all my friends who wait to greet me in my solitude in the form of books, films, art, and music.

Tales of my delicately sordid life, dispatched from my solitude. I think on the topic of each Steppenwolf would have agreed with Bob Dylan in saying, “you must pick one or the other though neither of them are to be what they claim.”