ingredients: some tobacco (a gram is enough), one cigarette paper, an almost empty lighter.

recipe: take the paper in your hands. between the two thumbs and the two forefingers. touch it. turn the paper in that way that the glueing side is on top pointing away from you (my way, there are three others). take a lump of tobacco with the right hand (or left but then i don't guarantee for the rest) and put it on the paper. hold on to the lump with your left thumb. distribute the tobacco fibers with thumb and forefinger of the right hand while the left thumb assures that the tobacco stays on the paper. put your two forefingers on top of the tobacco. make sure that the two fingernails touch each other (part of the magic performance). press the side of the paper in front of you with the thumbs against the forefingers which are on top of the tobacco inside. take away the forefingers. put them behind the paper (on the side of the paper pointing away from you). roll the paper over the tobacco with your thumbs. once. twice. not more than three times. this is the difficult part. no more explanations. this is magic. the paper is embracing the tobacco now. lick the glueing part with your tongue. push it with your forefingers against the paper so that it all sticks together. seal the deal. take away the parts of tobacco sticking out of the front and rear of the cigarette. you are almost done. the cigarette is ready now.

finish: put one end of the cig in between your lips. take the lighter. try to light it by turning the small wheel by about 90 degrees with your thumb. it doesn't work. try again. no luck. try and try and try. after about twenty times the lighter lights up. and either the cigarette is not close enough to the flame or you are not prepared to inhale to make the end of the fag flame up. that is the meaning of life. you know it is there. but you can't grab it. you are never there at the right time to hold onto it. it's a flash coming as fast as it is going away.

p.s. after all this shit i need a fag. and i have another full lighter. fahck the meaning of life.

The biggest waste is the waste of time. Because you will never get it back. Or always if you believe in Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. But that is probably even worse.

Rainer Langhans im taz-Gespräch "Trau keinem unter dreißig":

Das Ende des Interviews der Frankfurter Rundschau mit der Wiener Schauspielerin, die vor kurzem ihren privaten Briefwechsel mit dem negativen Dialektiker veröffentlicht hat:

Sehe gerade, dass es außer unserem Antville Minima Moralia Weblog noch einen Ort im Internetz gibt, wo der olle Adornotext momentan diskutiert wird. Im Forum der Popmusikzeitschrift Spex. So sehr weit sind sie da noch nicht (bei Aphorismus 7 oder so), dafür scheint dort mehr los zu sein. Mal sehen, vielleicht kann man die Teilnehmer ja überzeugen bei uns mitzumachen, um unsere Diskussionen etwas anzuheizen. Heute morgen habe ich übrigens gerade 109 L'inutile beauté reingestellt. By the way, die Diskussion zu 108 Prinzessin Eidechse war (und ist?) recht aufschlussreich.

(aus dem Aphorismus 103 Heideknabe der Minima Moralia von Adorno).

the simple is almost always the right. and the most beautiful. just think mathematics. in maths though the simple proof is the hardest proof to find. actually you can't find it. it has to find you.

After sex all animals are sad except the cock and the woman.

This famous Latin proverb is originally attributed to Galen, a Greek physician from the 2nd century AD who linked the four temperaments sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic to bodily dispositions. Sometimes (without the cock/woman add-on) Aristoteles is named as the author. But maybe it is just a universal truth of collective wisdom which can't be traced back to one single person.

Yes I must admit that I recently had that postcoital blues. It seems to be especially devastating when the sex before was intense and the ascent to the climax took some time.

My theory is that the depression after is linked to the realization that the merge with your partner was just a temporary one and the dénouement works like an invisible wall which is suddenly erected between you two out of nowhere. The result is a feeling of extreme solitude hitting you.

La bête à deux dos (Gargantua by Rabelais, recycled in Othello by Shakespeare: the beast with two backs) turns into two humans with two backs again. It's the painful process of individuation which we have experienced first at birth when pushed out of the warm cosy womb of our mother. The baby's cry is welcomed by the world, the postcoital sadness isn't. It is the deception that the physical fusion which Georges Bataille called la petite mort, is not permanent.

Will the real death be the blissful merge with the universe or will the individual subsist as soul or karma as the religions assume? We won't know in this life for sure and maybe never.

A question to my female readers: did you ever experience the feeling I am writing about here?