Our sun is dying. The sky is hidden. Stashed away
In the air an emptiness. Dust settles. Neither cold or warm
A grey blur, shapeless. Manifested from all of us. Just out of sight
Drifting off to sleep. Don’t fight it. There’s nothing left in this world for us.
When it gets cold. The cold gets inside of you.
First your bones, then your thoughts, you care less, stop cleaning.
First you stop cleaning your house, then you stop cleaning yourself
Then you end up just lying in bed. Itchy.
Then eventually it starts to thaw, and you wake up a bit.
Shower, Shave, Shit, Clean up the house. Eat something.
And suddenly it’s Monday and back to work.
This is a song from my September bandcamp EP which I still haven’t released yet, it seemed like I had done loads of music, but then I haven’t finished any of it so I will probably do that this weekend.
The video is just my filming outside the window of a taxi. I want to do a proper one, this city I live in now Zhengzhou is impressively bland. It’s a huge city with apparently 13m in the metro area, and historically very important, but there is really not much to do here, and I live in the burbs so it is just endless high rise buildings.

I’ll write a bit about the history as I understand it and intersperse it with depressing pictures that I took walking around.
So the two main rivers in China, the Yellow River and Yangtzhe meet in Henan, we are on the Yellow River and about 20km away is the ancient town which is apparently where the first emperor of China put his palace. I’m not sure why here, because where I used to live is where all of the best farmland was, and it’s still the richest bit of China.

There is also this amazing temple complex in these caves where they have these Buddhas carved into the rock in this huge cave complex, it goes back for about 3000 years and you can see all kind of historical events reflected in what the Buddhas look like. The Shaolin temple is also nearby, they rebuilt it in the 00s and you can go and study kung fu and Zen buddhism there.
I haven’t been to either yet, because I’m damn lazy.

In modern history Zhengzhou being right in the centre of the country is one of the most important railway stations in China and it was crucial to the Chinese revolution that the Communists convinced the railway workers to their cause. One of the monuments downtown is this modernist pagoda to commemorate the railway workers. There is also a little museum in the shopping street which tells you about it.

But it’s really not an interesting city in itself, it’s just huge. There is a nice modern tourist bit with some huge buildings, but that’s every city in China. I’ve actually only ever lived in the rich bit, it is quite weird living in Henan where everyone is kind of used to saying ‘we are one of the poor parts of China. Like China isn’t poor anymore, but you can still see, like everyone eats really spicy gross noodles all the time, you can just imagine it being grim as shit even 10 years ago with coal dust in the air all the time and everyone only eating noodles all of the time.
As you can see from the pictures, I don’t really care for the picturesque. I’m single and lazy so generally I will go for a walk at some weird time on my own listening to some podcast about some bullshit and take pictures of empty shops and abandoned things.
Let me do the pictures and see if I have any more thoughts

No, not really. I haven’t taken many pictures since I’ve been here, to be totally honest I am bored as hell. I am doing my Masters and working and don’t really do anything else, my free time I just watch films and shit. I’m 44, I can’t be arsed to go out.
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