The Haunted Car

Which would be a better name for my band, ‘Tinned Beef’ or ‘The Basement Tapas’? I’m just kidding of course; I have no band. None other than the one in my mind. But that one doesn’t need a name. Simply 'Band' will do fine. Besides, they have all sorts of problems, from the recurring death of the drummer, being bamboozled by the manager to the inevitable split-ups because of 'creative differences,' which aren't fooling anybody of course, we all know the guitar player is just a thug… We’re not bigger than Jesus, but a lot fatter (have you ever noticed how ripped He is? Wow!). However, I do make Him my bitch on the Telecaster any day of the week.

Anyway, just for the fun of it, I'll tell you about what happened today… ‘if you really want to hear about it.’ It all began after waking up and perceiving the world as a mighty boring place. Nothing abnormal. Feeling sluggish... The perfect way of facing any new day in all its horribleness is of course by reading, the wholesomest antidote against the Big Worry. I slid the curtains open a foot width for letting in some morning light and read a few pages in a book with a title that will mean nothing to you: Het Sadistische Universum (The Sadistic Universe) by Willem Frederik Hermans, the old sour sweet Mandarin Hunter.

I got up. Coffee & eggs. Good old C&E... yum yum. Then ogling the Great Outside through the window… la fenêtre I like to call it. And why wouldn’t I? After all, a man’s language is his institution. Everything looked peaceful down in the street. It’s not a bad neighbourhood. Perhaps I’ll tell you more about it later, also about my neighbours like the lady with her daughter who's half Russian and half crazy. And about the old man who regularly sits in front of his house in his tank top singing ‘Costa Brava Costa Brava!’. But this is not for now. Things looked good outside, as I was saying. No threats. With fresh green leaves on the trees, the street quiet, the workfolk already long gone, Mrs. Purplecoat walking her little shaggy dog and no wind blowing debris over the tarmac. As long as there’s no wind, I’m happy. You can put that on my grave.

I got in the mood for a long bike ride, but it was raining and looked like going on for all the livelong day. So I took the old car instead and drove around a few neighbouring towns to look for more books in the second hand shops. At the same time, I was hoping to encounter an un-unearthed original Les Paul guitar, a record of The Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn or a bride-to-be, at least for a day. Vis-à-vis those last two things, I would settle for the original Holey Grail of Christ Our Lord. Or possibly a good Chinese replica anyway, of the Grail I mean.

When I drove home through the rain, later that afternoon, I was in high spirits. It had been an enjoyable day out rummaging and I had found many a good book. For to get some refreshments, I stopped at the local supermarket. Here I parked, took out the key and the engine died. It took me a while to notice something was amiss. The car was off, but the radio was not! This was not possible, defying the laws of logic and car mechanics. I thought that I was dreaming or hearing this music in my head.Tonight ight ight, live for you ou ou, for one night only ee… please give it up for… Tinned Beef! But no. This was all very real and by no means a laughing matter. I just sat there, with the key in my hand and the classical music blasting from the haunted machine through the cabin. Radio 4, the classical station is the only one of the country not driving me mad. But today it did. And nothing could be done about it. None of the controls worked. Nothing. Nothung! Fuga in F.

How bizarre. How grotesque, anomalistic, curious, outlandish, ridiculous… what utter fucking piece of Mephistophelean shit this was! Bubonic buggery bugger! Cry havoc and instigate Armageddon! That’s what any other hot blooded man would have thought. But I kept my cool. I quickly saw the consequences and the choices I was facing: to drive around till Kingdom Come in order to not let the battery die, or somehow clawing the radio out of the car with my bare hands, gnawing through the (live) wires… Flashes of fantastic fantasy went through my mind. Of performing some sort of miracle operation with a tooth pick, a coin, a piece of gum and supernatural engineering skills normally only reserved for silver screen secret agents. Something that would later lead to baffled comments from skilled mechanics. 'Frank, Bill, you gotta come over and see what this dude pulled here... stand back and be smitten. You's not goin' to believe it!' Or, or I could just go home and hear the Wiener Symphoniker perform Brahms’ third symphony all over the neighbourhood till it would die down in a pitiful decrescendo multo con dolore.

Both options looked decidedly daunting. So I started the car again and quickly drove to my regular garage on the other side of town, accompanied by the high baroque variety of slapstick farce music. The garage had just closed and the mechanics gone home when I got there, but the friendly guy from the office, who had just put on his jacket, helped me anyway. He diagnosed that it was the computer (pox on them! Pox on them all!) that had gone mental. So he popped open the hood, pulled the plug on the battery and the accursed music stopped. He then reconnected the battery and everything was back to normal.

I loathe car trouble, even worse than regular trouble. As far as I am concerned, the inside of a car is just as mysterious as the menstrual cycle of an orang-utan. Anyway, the car works fine again and I'm just telling you in case you ever have this same experience and don't know what to do: just pull the plug. Repair instruction advisable for almost every problem, come to think of it.

With Love

[for RDG; here's another recent nonfictional e-mail to a girlfriend]

Dearly Beloved Scumbag,

So… there I went again. Walking the streets of my town. I had done some groceries and came down Lesser North Street. From the corner of my eyes, I noticed the window of a shop selling luxury items of feminine clothing. There was obviously a sale going on because fluorescent yellow and purple pieces of paper had been attired behind the glass, on which texts in black marker were written. What was on them anyway? Not that I cared, but I looked nevertheless, falling for the advertisement heffalump trap. “All articles on the tabble 20% off”, the sign said.

Tabble? What the heretic’s balls is a tabble, I wondered. Could it be a term of the trade, known by all diligent housewives and other members of the shoppers clan? Could it be some sort of standard measurement, as in ‘three tabbles per square meter?’ Or another word for coupon? Get your hot ‘n’ trendy tabbles now! Cool tabbles, fresh from the factory! I really didn’t know… It occurred to me that the intended word could have been ‘table’, but this seemed too bizarre as a writing error. So I stopped in the street, looking around me for someone to seek counselling from. But there was none such person there. Everyone looked unapproachable and walked on without noticing my despair. I hesitated. Could they… could they mean ‘table’ after all? I peered inside and saw something of a table there. But a tabble… ? This was insufferable! I had to know and stepped inside, despite all my reservations.

A little bell sounded in the back of the store and eventually, a remarkable woman came through a stained glass windowed door. Hey, look at that, a solitary man in a women’s clothes store… how peculiar. But she had to attend to the customer. She looked just like Emma Thompson playing Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter films, the clairvoyant one: thick glasses and big bush of bleak red curly hair.

‘Hello, can I help you?’ ‘Erm, yes… this may sound a bit strange, but I just walked by the store and saw the sign in the window saying “all articles on the tabble 20% off”… and now I wonder what a tabble is… or that it possibly meant to say table… ’

Et cetera… that’s how it went today. Big fun!

Lines

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
The quick brown fox jumps over the lady bug
The quick brown fucks humps over the shady dug
The licked brown cock humps Topher the lady dog
The brick brown socks trunks over the crazy hog
The sick frowned hoax pumps Dover the Danish bog
Uh, chicken down ox bumps into the shaven frog
The stick town cops slump Grover the grainy hog
The slick frowned bitch creeps under my blood and bones
The blissful tits drip into my flooding boat
Full blown pocks galore in creepy cuckoo clock
The stillborn ducks junk over the ready blog
The frisk howls Molochs rumps the pastry plot
Fish stick clown rocks lumps stove her baby’s mug
Yer Mick down Jacques thumbs chauffeur the gravy flog
Apparatjik warlocks cups mower that stainy rug
A brimstone luck from the daily dawn

Symptons

Dear M,

I had meant to wish you the very best of luck with your knee operation today, but I’m afraid you will not read this before the blessed event. Once again, I was eliminated by a severe migraine this morning. It’s a very strange affliction with me, or so I think. It manifests itself differently in each person of course. My mother hasn’t got it at all, and neither does my brother. My father has it though. With him, quite often even for a number of days or longer. And you used to have it too, I clearly remember. Do you still? Anyway, in me, the thing displays strange, for me unheard of, phenomena. That’s why I want to write them down.

It doesn’t always, but it often goes like it did this morning. The announcement came last night (11pm): seeing blind spots and a ‘funny feeling’, some sort of exorbitant excitement with a ‘half-headache’. This morning, I woke up after wildsavagedenserampantcrazy dreams, and an unduly long sleep (10am). Fullblown headache.

Dragging downstairs… quickly two tablets of paracetamol and ibuprofen with instant coffee (because I diagnosed that caffeine deficiency was at the root of this ordeal, since I hadn’t drank any coffee yesterday, instead of my usual morning dose of five). Then I sat in my chair (10.15 pm) waiting for the pills to kick in, ready for the storm…

The second phase is worse: the headache steadily building up strength, with developing an intolerance for even the minutest photon of light (closing the curtains, hand pressing down hard over my eyeballs)… total incapacitation… lying down as much as my chair allows, even rolling on my side… rolling and getting chilly, shivering, having strange visions… from endless illuminating, fluorescent blue plains to naked bodies with ladies performing graceful indecencies upon themselves… cold darkgreen seas and a bunch of bearded Little Men in an Oompah Band…

Headache getting worse even, rolling in my chair, hands over my closed eyes… getting the urge to vomit (don’t worry, dear boy, my record still stands since that terrible day in October 1996 in the Sarphatistraat in Amsterdam. And you were there!)… Hovering between daydreams and unconsciousness… And then, suddenly, literary within a scope of three to five minutes… it's gone! Complete relief. This was 12.30pm. As if a storm had been raging at war power, just to stop instantly. Very strange. I got up from my chair, a bit shaky with a dull feeling in my head, but 95% better than the 3 minutes before. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

My oh my, it seems stupid, cruel and wrong of me to write to you about my own petty ailments, after your horrible operation I mean, but I hoped you found it interesting, or even amusing. Anyway, I hope your operation went like a snip and you’ll recover quickly, running the marathon like a Kenyan, beating Mike Powell’s long jump record, outtapping Fred Astaire, be a Sherpa, hauling tonnes up the Himalayas… et cetera et cetera. So I wish you a kickass operation with dropdead sexy nurses, flowers and kisses from your wife, eternal fridge-drawings from your children and lots of icecream afterwards… love you.

The Worst Thing Man Has Ever Done

Thank you for your kind and beautiful letter. But don’t write to me about balloons, my friend! Oh, my haunting memories! Hardly a week goes by when I don’t think about this...

It was a warm summers evening in Ostend, Belgium (no, rest ye, this will not be a parody on Dr. Evil's life story)... an evening in Ostend where I had come to for my holiday in July 2010. To see the coast and the place where the old glorious voodoo puppeteer James Ensor had lived & worked all his life. It was a beautiful sultry pre-night and after a hard day of seeing and thinking, I had rested my body down on a delightfully busy but peaceful beach. The sun had just sank in the North Sea, leaving the sky pink and purple, and all over the beach, people were lazy, drunk and jolly. The fin-de-siècle atmosphere was thick that night, overlooked by the magnificent old seaside theatre and hotels.

I lay reclined on the sand to make some drawings or do some writing and close to me a young family had lain down too. A fine specimen of a bearded hippie father, his young, smiling woman in a flowery summer dress and a little girl of four or five playing with a big balloon. All was peace that evening. The girl was playing with her balloon, giggling and crowing with timeless pleasure. She was playing with a balloon...

At one point, a friendly gust of wind blew the balloon out of her hands, bouncing it over the warm sand in my direction. The girl made some excited leaps while she danced over. I wanted to tap the balloon back to her. I had forgotten the sharp pencil in my hand. I had forgotten... There was a small poof, not even a bang, and then a little girl stood right in front of me, her angelic laugh slowly melting from her face as she sensed something extraordinary and mysterious had happened. She wasn't quite sure what exactly. Had I performed some magic trick? Was this a game? 'Guess where the balloon is now'? It must be, mustn't it? The world could not be as wicked & cruel as to killing her balloon. So I, the curly man, must have done something strange that would prove to be incredibly funny the next minute. Where did I hide it? She must have thought something like that. But then she saw the pink rubbery remains on the sand and the awful truth sank in: balloons can go poof… unsalvageable… gone! She didn't begin to cry, no trembling lips. She just accepted that the fun was over and returned to her parents without her balloon.

I was heartbroken. I had stopped her fun. I was responsible. There & then... I was there the night that fun ended... And I had ended it. The parents were laughing at the situation, accepted my stuttered apologies like kings & queens, and could see how sorry and shocked I was. But all this mattered not one bit to my guilt.

This is the most terrible thing I have done in all my life. Worse than all other heinous acts of my life of crime combined.

 

 

 

Four Condensed Letters to a Friend

                                                                         I

I'm excited... Let me tell you. You may have noticed some 'silencing' in me the last months. I have been publicly withdrawing, for reasons beyond my knowledge. All I know was that I felt I had little to share. The words could not connect into transferable language. I wasn't done with writing but I felt I should be writing “other” things, and didn't know what.

Lately, an idea took shape: a new blog! A blog with a single theme: the final solution for my former workplace. An autopsy. My many memories, current thoughts & feelings, loose inspired visions, all that. Dark! Not just the classic and petty everyday hatefulness, but instead a magnificent Inspired Malice! Writing within the defined structure of one topic would do me good, I felt. Furthermore, I thought that, with this writing, I could get rid of some of the worst hatred I have for the place, its dwellers and myself. All this by disclosing scandals and burn the façade of decency down to the ground, to scratch off the veneer of decorum to expose the bedrock of obscenity. And then to try and combine it with the most wonderful types of comedy, poetic wanderings, thoughts and a celebration of personality and language. A High Mass of spite if you will, a dark & decadent play with individuality.

I can see it all before me... there will be straightforward shame & scandal, shocking accusations, all interspersed with pieces of free poetic rambling. Some sadness. The end product will be a Moby Dick of a blog... the story of sabotage, failure, boredom, stupidity, selfishness, coping, salvation... the human comedy. And best of all: the opportunity for me to start writing again, real writing, like E.T. the Extra-terrestrial on his little bike zooming past the moon! Writing with cause & vigour.

For a title, I chose "Apocrief". I guess it translates as "Apocryphal" which sounds more like an adjective while my title is completely noun-like.

 

                                                                         II

Yes, yes… you are right and you are wonderful in all kinds of ways. Let it be stated and let it be heard! And I am too obsessed with the work-thing, which I shouldn't be. It’s a prison. However, in my mind, it's not a job thing: it's an injustice thing that has attached itself on my uvula and it irritates the hell out of me. I can't get rid of it. Perhaps by this writing, I thought; by turning it all into a macabre circus. But you're right in saying it is too dark... so right... and mucho brave for telling it to me straight.

I hoped to turn the new blog into a stairway to writing heaven... to start off with dark and sinister hatefulness and public shaming. And to end with pure, ethereal, love-filled detachment. To write myself away from the anger... and to roll in the dust laughing.

                                                                          

 

                                                                            III

My stories are beginning to crumble before me right away... The evil side of me isn't big enough en the person in me wanting to sing & dance is taking over... So even if I wanted, I could not write that beautifully dark and hateful blog. Shame, isn't it?

                                                                            IV

I don't know if I’m cured as you seem to think... I wanted (and still want) to write as from another personality. A poète maudit, a doomed poet... One who has given up on society. And a completely ruthless man. I wanted to stage a beautiful extravagant show, a sinister act of play ruthlessness. But my personality will not let me... I'm am a doomed poet!

Today I applied for a job as a chamber maid.

Pedro Heils Nutella

Hey, K.

Thanks for your link and your invitation to like it. I have to say that I would love to like that organization officially, but that I have a principle dislike of liking. It would sound more profound to say I have 'philosophical issues' with it, but no, it's more just a dislike of liking. Or, again, some rational blockade. I simply cannot bring myself to click the like button. Almost ever. Not only do I feel as if I’m labelling myself, putting free bumper stickers on my ass of all the cool bars I’ve been to; and not only do I think 'I like this part of it, but that part I do not like' (like is very absolute, more absolute than I am prepared to go with almost everything in life), but the greatest objection for me lies in the schoolboy & -girl feel of liking. ‘Do you like Bruce Springsteen? Ooh, I, like, totally like Bruce Springsteen! He’s so dreamy...’ (A preposterous example because no one thinks Bruce Springsteen is dreamy.) And so I feel childish and robotic for clicking like. Pure nonsense of course, but that's the loony I have to deal with.

It feels as if people are saying 'heil' to something. Messages popping up: ‘Bob heils K-Mart’, ‘Natasha heils The London Symphony Orchestra’, ‘Pedro heils Nutella chocolate spread’. Sometimes I do it for ironic purposes, like-clicking, and I have liked a few writers and musicians in the past. And the snooker player Stephen Hendry, whom I not réálly like, but counts as my favourite athlete.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with other people heiling all kind of stuff. That’s for them to decide. Live & let heil, is what I say. I greatly admire everyone’s moral flexibility in this. I’m even a little jealous about it. I wish I could cast my vote so easily and come out and say “I like Radiohead” (and I do), but then again, I would never go advertise myself as a Radiohead fan, a member of the Radioheadlikers tribe… Somebody help me, I’m so rigid (or free... which is the same thing in a way).

 

Facebook just isn't my habitat. So just laugh and shake your head when you think I'm overreacting, which is my speciality. However, thanks for sending me this. Perhaps I can just follow your link without having to heil them? I like you!

[Another old text posted to clean my computer.]

 

Social Suicide (or: On Being Yourself)

Over a course of a day or two-three, I posted the following bits on Facebook, my favorite enemy. Although no one actually unfriended me so far, the reactions it evoked (apart from a few friendly and intelligent responses) ranged from pure aloofness to primitive animosity. And these were just some innocent jokes. Imagine...

– Impossible love: he is a convinced atheist and naïve romantic, she is the personification of level-headedness.

– He fathomed his own emotional state like master perfumers analyze scents. ‘I feel cold, anxious, aggressive, ambitious, nervous, sexual, stoic, provocative, whimsical and omnipotent in a ratio of 13: 14: 32:2.5: 7: 11: 50: 17: 65: 2.’

– In books, I like to read about people for whom life is hell* – not about young, successful and happy people with white shiny teeth whose biggest problem is Which Shoes for Which Party. I transfer this interest in books in my interest in facebook I’m sorry to say.

*How the main character, aided by a big balloon, flies to the top of the trees where the bees have hidden their batch of honey… How a man’s self-image of being a Noble Knight is getting his arse kicked in every chapter… How a person can kill one little unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash with an axe and he never hears the end of it… How you can be somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs begin to take hold…

– The advantage of having Other People around you is that you get to know yourself. The disadvantage is that you stop being yourself.

–  ”The only thing I ever received from my employer on time was the letter telling me I was fired.” How about that for an opening line for a novel?

–  T-shirt: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.”

–  According to the Washington Post, the average Facebook user has 245 friends, but the average friend on Facebook has 359 friends. How about that! However, leaving this mind-blowing paradox aside... I have exactly 20 friends. What surprises me is not that I have this few. I'm surprised I have this many!

–  Writing is just a continuation of silence by other means.

–  My psychiatrist wants me to be a braindead, cold-hearted selfish hypocrite parasite. Those weren’t his exact words of course, but this was the gist of it. I’m willing to try anything to earn a respected place in society.

–  Someone informed me that I should ‘stop posting grumpy things at Facebook’. Grumpy? Is that how this all comes across to you guys? I thought I was cracking killer jokes here… but perhaps this explains the deafening silence then. However, the customer is always right… no more grumpyness it is. [followed by a photograph picked from the internet of a street sign saying “Bacon is the answer”]

–  Are you talking to me?

Wishes

My best wishes for all of you for the new year 2013. Whether it is happiness you are seeking, or adventure, kindred spirits or diabolical mirror images, earthly riches or mental health, shiny cars or a few new wrinkles around your eyes to prove you’ve laughed… May your dreams be dreamier and your truths be truer. And let’s keep these looks on our faces for another year.

 

See

I stare in the mirror and think: how can my reflection be that ugly while I am so beautiful & fair? However, then I it dawns me: by Jove, of course… it’s a ‘mirror image’! It is portraying the opposite. I feel relieved. But then I realize the implications for people who actually like how they look in the mirror and I feel sad for them.

Letter Found in A Bottle

“Shipped on a large vessel of a fish-catching or scientific explorationatory nature, traveling the icy northern waters, and what the thoughts are, gazing  at the foggy horizons, hanging over a railing, following sea birds with my eyes… Or an all devouring love, setting new standards in insanity, annihilating you and me, time and day, the world, the Gods… an all-sacrificing love between me and a 29-year old red-haired Japanese laboratory worker in the field of crop seed breeding… Or how my the neighbour from number 85 was found out to have brutally murdered the neighbour girl from 83, or, preferably, the other way around; who would have thought, the spindly, pale, blond Russian girl, possessed with raging jealousy and homicidal tendencies… Or a tale of an experimental program in alchemy, a roulette system, spiritualistic practices, setting up a catalogue for various garden, cloud (poetic) or shadow types… The endless reflections on life & being while fishing or cycling, sitting on a park bench or flying a kite… Or a new job, new buildings, new people, a new place to live, preferably abroad, or on some remote island… There are so many topics I’d have been thrilled to have kept a journal about, but apparently – because my lust for writing seems to be not very great – this does not apply to this one.”

My own words on March 3^rd 2011 in a journal about the state of my soul.

How to Become an Agreeable Person

For once, I wrote something in Dutch. I was sitting under slate skies on the shore of Lake IJsselmeer and this came out. Since few of my readers can read Dutch, I will present an (alas insufficient) translation. For those ghostly readers more familiar with that language, they can scroll down.

This is the advice I can give to those who are small and good-natured and want to pursue the best qualities in themself…

Greet no one on the streets. Take off your hat for no one. Resolutely slap the crying child when circumstances dictate to do so. Pick up the phone only if you have a desire for talking. Never answer letters on time. Ignore the dog that casts sad looks from underneath the table. Blow your nose in your hand and wipe it on a child’s comely golden locks. Play with wildest temperament your electric guitar in the darkest nights. And pick a bouquet of flowers for your loved-one from the tombstones of the graveyard.

Be endlessly generous in mocking the foolish, the witless and insensitive. Pardon not a single breach, it isn’t free you know. Wipe your arse with beggars’ letters. Do not refrain from larceny and murder. Stamp on wooden floors, talk too loud with people standing close by. Belch and stink, alike a dog. Decomb your hair, decay your teeth, grow your fingernails yellow and monsterly. And serenade your loved-one with a crooked trombone.

Stare the women at their tits, don't apologize for nature. Never settle for second best. Don’t laugh apologetically for other people’s faults. Mock all  spend-thrifts, public lovers, cripples. No mercy, no ‘understanding’. Leave no sin unavenged, turn no cheeks. Live by the principle ‘he started it’. Decline the tepid glass, wipe from the table the stale old bread. Don’t lift your feet when mother wants to vacuum at that place. Play someone else if need be; fake yourself, be salonfähig, sycophantic… completely false. And kiss your loved-one with garlic in your mouth.

Put a dead bird in your neighbours milk can. Freeze the people with a haunting grin. Spit a priest before his feet. Urinate from your garret window when the moon is full and bright. See the world as a storm of storms. Become high & low reviled, dastardly, heinous. Never discuss Religion, Ethics, Love, Being or Knowing. Don’t explain yourself to people who understand nothing. Calculate the number of the beast and deduct it from your taxes. Poison the city’s water supply. And tell your loved-one you love her, despite it all.

Place visitors in your second-best seat on a Monday. Wear outrageous pantaloons of green seal pup fur on Tuesday. On Wednesdays, wear a big red moustache and a golden beard. On Thursdays, run 500 miles. Visit close-by asteroids on Friday, and wonder about the men who live there. Water your flower on a Saturday. And on Sunday, fool yourself in thinking someone loves you.

These are some of the sacrifices you will have to make to become, in the end, a valued and accepted human being.