I recently discovered that I can be a good friend. This gives me a new sense of purpose, knowing  lot of stuff, feeling intelligent and cultured etc. did in the past but does not anymore. I admit I want or even need to feel special in order to be happy. Not the best, but good in what I consider to be important. Being able to befriend well has this effect on me, because I always wanted to inspire inspiring people but also because I actually think it is very difficult. First of all, it’s improbable to get together with people of whom you like all apsects, all the time. So there is always friction. Then, what about a friend whose status becomes different to yours? Are you jealous or ashamed? Do you apply pressure on your friends to approach some kind of ideal behaviour? What about their morals? Or friends, who make you feel not only good. Maybe they are ill, fall on hard times. What about a friend who is happy but you are left out? Somebody marrying and talking less and less to you? Being a genuine friend is hard because many toxic emotions need to be reigned in. You either have to work hard to overcome them or not feel them at all. Friendship is like an art. Think about it. We turn to art to see, feel, experience the most intimate things, taboo desires, extreme fear, incomprehension and wonder, confusion, emotions. We trust art with this, because it is made to appeal strongly to our senses. but it is also by many definitions, without purpose.  We don’t trust the art industry, but the artist is this mythical almost crazy person who cannot help but to create, guided by inner demons and we let them show us our own. The artist is so far out, that we grant them immunity from judgement and don’t perceive them as a threat, when they hold up the mirror for us. Just like an artist, a trustful friend is a person so far out, that they have immunity. A person who doesn’t compare herself to you, wont be jealous or ashamed. Someone with abstract ideas or so much to do, that they just don’t bother to judge. Someone so little touched by necessity that they don’t feel robbed when giving more than they receive. Somebody you can harm and they will still love you because of their own inner convictions. A friend is a pretty weird person, it takes luck, ideals, discipline and meeting good people to make one. It’s the average mindset that counts, of course, sometimes the artist does not only live for their art, sometimes a friend will have bad feelings. But the good artist-friend will return to their ideals. Sitting in my new headquarters behind the statue of Gustav Adolph IV. They say it points to St. Petersburg, because he had founded a city there, lost it and with it all the splendour of his country for 200 years. Pity, but like all of those grand stories, that are made up anyway, it doesn’t interest me anymore. Smaller stories, those people tell about their lives is what I’m now looking for. Not like they wouldn’t be made up. But they are more rooted in reality, how you live in a place, what your struggles are, what good or bad your life has brought, what choices you have, how you overcome problems. These focus on persistence and creativity and are therefore highly inspiring to me. They show personality and ways to make and consume joy, from which I constantly learn. Dostoevsky learned the richness of human nature in a prison, me, travelling quite comfortably to beautiful places. I like to think, I would have done the same in his shoes. I chose more comfort because I am used to it but also because it’s the only thing I understand. Were I to go where people hunger or are ill or don’t even have electricity I would not so much grow as a person as be obliged to change who I am. That’s not my goal. I like how I am and want to learn from similar people, with different lives to become better at handling my slice of reality. That’s why I travel to Stockholm, to develop friendships. That is possible, from this I can learn. This comfort is something I can share with people I care about. Somehow they experience beauty and bien-etre through me and this really is my principal source of joy. A friend asks me to discover a place she only knows superficially, to find a place she remembers, another wants a souvenir, for a third I find just the right plushie toy in a book shop in Gamla Stan, with another I learn his language and all of this is life, is thinking, growing, inspiring. I wanted to inspire people since I went to Egypt at 18, feeling the urge to contribute to humanity something equally perennial like the Horus temple in Edfu, started writing, imitating old books, learned about art and ideas and even science, physics, math, just to be able to impress before doing it for the joy itself. Then the sense of discovery became unbelievably beautiful. But inspire I did not.  That only started once I began forgetting what I learned, stopped caring about precision and efficiency and literary form. Once I got some money, gained confidence talking, finally mastered the kind of stupid joking that is part of my personality, but that I used earlier to hurt and attack and quite often failed in. Life in a way continuously pushed me to the atypical, strange, the independent and detached and there between the gentleman cynic, the heir to old culture, the banker of trust and lightheartedness and Rodin’s famous comedian upon the gates of hell, I seem to have found my place.