Nocturne, the blonde

Last night, at 3:30am, a Samuel Beckett play was staged on the street underneath my window. I was lucky enough to be awakened by it or I would probably have slept all night and missed out on this entertaining experience.

A group of perhaps a dozen youths on two-wheelers had come back from a night on the town. Exactly at my house, one of the young ladies had managed, as a lark, to kick off the chain of the bicycle of one of her female comrades. This caused the victim in question to undergo a fit of uncontrollable laughter in a deep hysteric voice as she went over the street on all fours to regain as much as she could of the content of her handbag, with which she had been parted with in her inevitable fall.

‘Hu… huuu… no dude, no… dude, but listen… li-i-i-sten… lis-huuu… I got to, like, huuu huu, my bag is, like… C’me help me now, you bitch. Listen! Huuu. I’ve got to...’ And so on and so forth. Other members of the party had, perhaps unknowingly, slowly removed themselves from the epicentre of the action, but were called on in booming voices to come back and help with the reconstruction of the disintegrated means of transport. ‘Oi, Pete, Pete… Oi, Pete… Pete… Pete… Pete… wait up! Pete… Pete…’ a voice cried out to a distend acquaintance. ‘Pete, Pete… Pete… come and ’elp with the bloody chain, man. No, Pete, don’t be such an...’ But Pete was such an. For the moment being at least. Some members of the company had decided that continuing their journey on foot was the best answer to their predicament, but the loudest, shrillest voice decided against it because of her hunger. ‘I’m not walking… I’m hungry! I’m nót walking… no, I’m hungry! Not walking. I am hungry.’ And she added to that: ‘Hungry.’

In the course of benevolent time–space, Pete, who had come back, repaired the bike and the actors scattered in the night to make merriment elsewhere.

Review of the Art Show

On the clean, light beige floor, a sunflower seed laid. Or so it seemed. A sunflower seed, or pip. Not a berry, nor a bud, no grain, germ, spore or sperm. Closer inspection showed it was a ceramic representation of a sunflower seed, baked in an oven at 1125 degrees centigrade in an engobe wash of white on a dark grey clay base. It was perfect in every way, dimension, and colour, with all the right sunflower seedness it could possibly aspire to, except for the element of Life, the possibility of brood, descendants, heirs, offspring, posterity, spawn, spouting greens and petals flopping about in the Tuscan wind, to end its life nipped by a woman’s front teeth or a parrot’s beak. And, of course, this seed or pip being not of natural but of a human species kind of origin. Human nature. A total fake. A perfect fake…

Right next to the first ceramic sunflower seed, a second ceramic sunflower seed or kernel lay, equally perfect in sunflower seedy replication. It lay on a tilt, casting a vague little shadow on the first of the sunflower seeds, which caused it no harm or devaluation but, instead, only added to the reality of the scene of sunflower seeds and pips. This effect was further enhanced by the object next to these two seeds, for next to it, adjacent and vis-à-vis, yet another seed, pip or kernel was positioned, brushing the second seed or pip but not the first since it was too far removed from the aforementioned seed replica.

Number four of the sunflower seed imitations was a little harder to distinguish as it was partly obscured by sunflower seeds seven and thirteen, about which further information will be given forthright in full detail. But first it is about faux sunflower seed number five we need to talk, which was quite similar in shape, appearance and behaviour as sunflower seeds one to four and it lay on the clean, light beige floor, sunflower seedy as can be. The same could be argued about pip six, as I like to […]

Tomorrow I'll go on... and on... and on.

Reading...

After having isolated myself completely on a well-known ‘social network site’ on three occasions, I recently found myself accepting people and writing snippets on it again. There was no particular reason for it and the writings (or messages) were improvised and in no way attached. Just some loose messages, mostly with nauseating comic intentions, reflecting on the social network itself and the ways of the people. Of course I should not have been surprised most of my choleric shouts received utter silence, yet surprised I was. Some people never learn. I am some people. I will collect a few of the blips here (only three days worth), not because I attach much value to them, but because this is a safe place (in case of termination of the social network site) and their writing will not have been a complete waste of time.

• Not having anything to say is no excuse for your silence.

• People who want you to acknowledge, approve of and applaud their happiness but exclude you from their sorrow or misfortune are not your friends.

• The pursuit of happiness leads to disappointment and depression. Let's pursuit adventure... or some form of interesting depravity.

• The difference between a Romantic and a Non-Romantic is about 300 friends... or 20 bucks.

• Too much humour leads to melancholia. Too much melancholia leads to depression. Too much depression leads to humour.

• Ah sentiment... as long as one uses it with a simpleton naivety, it doesn't even have to sound fake at all. I love you people!

• When someone tells me (for instance in a story) about a one-armed man, my first question is not ‘what happened?’, but ‘which arm?’ I think this says a lot about me.

• Aggressive, ambitious salesmen make me nervous and agitated. This is not logical: the one with the upper hand is I! They are the ones wanting something from me: I should marvel in my power. Same with women who say they ‘have had it’ with sexual advances from ‘pushy’ men. Let them realise they are the consumers in a buyer’s market.

• Amorality looks best in an extremely well-spoken, innocent and polite person. That’s my dream: a well-dressed cannibal who uses cutlery and a napkin. Evil doesn’t have to be banal.

• I’m a spy.

• Working on my Green Bean Spleen Machine. The girl in the Patent Office laughed in my face. Damnit.

• Conformity is the secret of success.

• My new aim in life is doing mischief. Forget about evil… it’s the little things that matter.

• Just mumbling to myself... here in a quiet spot of my own. When I post on center court and there's this deathly silence all around, I feel like I'm masturbating in public. Whereas... I just want to make love to you.

• Gawd... deliver me from my love.

• I started my morning with making some karate moves in the mirror. Very impressive!

• The cacti are sadly swaying back & forth in my windowsill…

• “Razzia Schnapps” how’s that for a band name?

• I like facebook… it’s all part of the discouragement policy we call life.

• Friendship for life… l’chaim!

• Oh it was a beautiful sight! The people fought like animals in there. At least those with a passion or necessity. The others just stood there blank-faced munching on a filet americain sandwich.

• I took a walk in the desert today. It had rocks in it and differently coloured sand.

• People need hardship to feel alive. Some turn long-distance runner, others go camping, women have PMS and some work in an office. I like to watch TV.

• Society is a goose-stepping class.

• To get through life, all it takes is a talent for colonialism.

• Don't you just love my facebook space? With all the portraits of my friends hanging on the wall, some snazzy state-of-the-art emoticon buttons. And then this emptiness in here! That's my specialty. This emptiness was designed by Albert Speer.

• Coincidentally, my disappointment was designed by Speer too. My shame? You guessed it: it's a Speer. My loneliness is a Speer 9000. If I didn't like getting dirty I would not come here.

At that point some people began to protest although the majority remained silent. Next morsels will follow…

Merchant in Drought

Temporarily nervous. Summer’s gone… everything’s gone. Drinking coffee. This morning, I found a torn old half-envelop under my bed with in my handwriting [translated]:

I’m a manufacturer of bell strikes
A merchant in drought
I supply the contours of letters
To the contour-needing powers
Only on credit… it figures

{more}

Do you know those little stripes through the Norwegian Ø?
We make them!

The lustre of gold, and quick(silver)
The shine of beetles, and the itchiness of bugs
I wrote the declaration of independence of protozoans
I’m the vortex direction operative

I don’t know when I wrote it, but it is as true today as it was that night. I must rewrite it one day into something formful… P.S. here’s a picture of my doorbell.

A Flower

If you don't hear from me for a while, that's because I have my flower to tend to. There is one flower in my garden, the sole survivor from the 2013 Sunflower Bonanza Project. It's a sickly little thing that had to be supported by a splint. But it was born at the same moment as the sun and I should prevent the tigers from getting it.

A Viking

I went to the lake again. To live a contemplative life… to watch, and think, and read. In other words: to be a bum. The air was still warm, but the sun had covered herself behind a thick layer of ominous clouds. There were few people there. I took off my clothes and swam half a mile out in the warm gentle water… ‘where stupendous waves rolled in thunderous motion’.  To think that I had not done this in perhaps seven years… swimming under apocalyptic skies in complete joy. It started to rain. I liked it. I was a Viking...

The Lake

As the summer gave a grand encore today, I got back to the lake to swim. The sun was hot and the water looked and smelled like stale vegetable soup with muddy overtones. All over the lake, patches of long strands of viny water plants came up to the surface, gripping the arms & legs of swimmers, much to the delight of some and horrors of many. The water was warm and still. I swam far out, beyond the first buoy and all the way to the farthest buoy. Birds and planes glided overhead, but I was miles below in my own watery world. A guy on a Jet Ski drove by, surprised to find a man in sunglasses swimming in the middle of the lake. He stuck him thumb up smiling and I replied the gesture. I was thinking about my great aquatic friends Huck Finn, Walden’s Thoreau and even Jeff Buckley. I loved the fragrant, dingy water. Back on dry land, grownups played beach tennis and children were yelling. “Ik ben gesteekt (‘I got stinged’) one of them bellowed. It was false alarm of course. The kid had lied.

I Wanna Be Loved By You

[published on Facebook in the same form]

‘Daddy’s got a fascist pamphlet to write’

‘Why are we here?’ That is the eternal question that has been breaking both professional and amateur minds for centuries. Some while leaning on a hoe in the evening sun out in the fields, others while scratching their learned whiskers, staring with burning eyelids onto their Biedermeier writing cabinets, muttering the words slowly and emphatically to facilitate the object’s penetration. And perhaps a third in jest, with a fake French waiter’s accent: ‘why are we ‘ere?’ However, since we are here no matter what, and have found few tools over the centuries to ‘crack the case’ as it were (God is rumoured to have gone to Tahiti for a drinking & fishing trip with his buddies), and since I consider the matter a rhetorical question, I try to spend as little time as possible on it. My philosophy is: we are here, and there we are.

But why are we here on Facebook? That’s a question I find harder to shake off. In fact, it is haunting me several times a day. One could say that it’s a choice we make. And, to further get to the core and lift the dilemma from the general into the personal, I ask myself: why am I on Facebook? There’s so much about Facebook I detest and saddens me to the point of complete despair (my fleeing the scene on three occasions proves my anguish) so why do I come back each time, to have my teeth kicked in and be thrown out of the brothel ass-backwards again? The answer is quite simple and can be stated in Paul Simon words: lookin’ for fun & feelin’ groovy. Facebook is very attractive for me as well, for many things and on many levels. If only I could solve the issue of the choking rage and spitting disgust…
 
I am absolutely convinced that there has to be a way to have fun without the annoyance and the consequent imploding & self-blaming. There just has to be. I should stop poking sticks in a dead horse and just learn to have fun with the other maggots that crawl around on it… So let me in this article – which I hope few people will read and only those with a lenient mind – examine myself vis-á-vis Facebook and find a peaceful understanding regarding Life on Facebook as we know it. Perhaps my conclusions and tools can even be extrapolated to the real world where similar problems circumlocute.

Let us begin our descent into the digital underworld. Where does my disharmony start? It usually does not start off with contempt but with humour; being amused by behaviour I find childish and, or foolish. I am amused and like to poke fun at it. Subsequently, like a floe, a chunk of ice, breaking away from the ice-field, so do I feel my own world view drifting away from large portions of the population. And because I am not blessed with a strong sense of self-worth, I don’t see my way as superior and others’ as inferior, in an aggressive, martial way. Different people’s views almost never make me mad with them; my faith in my own is too strong for that. However, the firmness of my convictions does make others’ ‘errors’ seem quite absurd… and being outnumbered so heavily does the rest.

Then, a counter movement rises up in me, more like a jester than a protester. When I feel a situation to be wrong and hear no one speak up, just accepting the downpour with moronic songs of praise… then then there are three things one can do. 1. Get out & Stay out… abandon ship! 2. Rely on reason and tell the people fair & square how you feel, preferably wrapped in jokes. 3. Rely on other people’s reason & insight and try to be an example, a subtle beacon. I’ve tried all three and nothing works. Getting out solves nothing and abandoning ship is forbidden by Thomas More; my reasoning seldom found a listening ear and a willing mind, my humour was undetected; and my examples have mostly been looked at with hateful eyes (apart from the obvious exceptions).

When we limit ourselves to the crusade against Facebook we can see: Facebook has stayed the same and will always stay the same. So let’s not be a stubborn mule and let’s approach this hornet’s nest from the other side. I now see that I have been looking at the problem from the wrong way all along. There’s a fourth way: changing myself! The problem with Facebook was I, not ‘the others’. I knew it, but I didn’t believe myself.

I tried to make fun of myself and others with friendly irony, cuddly sarcasm even. A friend of me told me yesterday she didn’t like my Profile Picture of the cartoon of me in suit & top hat. I told her: neither do I. I had meant it. It wasn’t nice… it wasn’t friendly. The picture was a joke, mostly directed at myself, but also with the message: look people, stop taking yourselves so seriously. Stop all this silly vanity, thinking you look good in a slick suit or a tarty wedding dress. My condemnation was wrong. My message was moralistic. There are no morals; there’s only reality. Morality is a sucker for babies. Things will never change. Progress is the carrot dangling in front of the horses pulling the chart. The next generation will wed in a gaudy suit & meringue, believe in posterity, in status, will be showing off and… will have their Great War all over again. It’s logical, it’s natural.

I must, for my own sake, come to terms with it. Accept. Stop caring. Facebook is half a world, a world of smiles, forced or otherwise. A world without shadows. There are ‘likes’, no ‘dislikes’, ‘friends’, no ‘enemies’… heaven, no hell. There’s applause or otherwise… silence. Facebook is the sound of one hand clapping. It’s a wold of self-promotion. We want to show our friends how pretty, successful (biologically, financially and social status-wise) we are, how funny, creative, animal-friendly, morally sublime, sophisticated and well-loved… All things nice with sugar and spice. To build a castle for our egos and roll over in our gilded vanity. And that is good… yes, that is good, I now see it. I was wrong, a Utopian Idealist and a Crazy Ascetic expecting a better truth of reality. It was as if I was asking from chickens to bark or whales to tap-dance. I wanted a ballet of monster trucks. And it ain’t gonna happen, brothers & sisters! It will not happen, Martijn. I was a pseudo Mormon chief. And a hypocrite! Oh yes, a hypocrite. The biggest! King Hypocrite the First. What was I thinking? Rejecting vanity is the vainest thing in the world. An impossible goal that can only lead to a conflict of interest. (And unhappiness! Do I expect to like myself when I can’t make the mental genuflection of trying to make other people like me?)

My problem was expecting something ‘better’… according to how I would like the world to be. Silly me. I can smile over my foolish old self now. I must stop being a hypocrite, stop dreaming and wake up to reality: the world is a market and we are all travelling salesmen of ourselves. We are scheming, manufacturing, spinning, stealing and promoting the product that is our Success. No truth, no whole package, just success. And while we’re at it, we let the spills, the victims and the environmental waste drip away unnoticed behind our backs. But look at our shiny products! Three for a dollar... I must learn to be my own window dresser and get away with murder. Smiles are like moustaches: even the real ones are fake. But that is good: fake is good. And lies are beautiful. Let’s keep our eyes on the price.

There are people who don’t know how to behave, to step in line, to master the art of conformity. A friend of mine for instance. He lives in a small village in the north. Once upon a time, our former Monarch, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands et cetera, visited the township. Everybody had painted their fences, installed a colourful display of flags, cut their lawns, washed their necks and cars and stood waving like mad along the route. All except my friend, who’s front yard was littered with beer cans and bicycle wrecks. A picture of his house appeared in the newspaper the following day, captioning: “Not everybody had made such effort to appropriately welcome our beloved Queen.” And that is perfectly okay… as long as you can take it and are not plagued by a conscience, that pushy little swine that gives you bad sleep and a bald spot if you’re a really serious listener to it. So when you have the maverick gene but a conscience too… you better conform to general stupidity and adopt the biggest smile you can afford!

Another thing I have learned is that another presumption of me was wrong, namely that it is purely a selfish act to share one’s happiness, success and conquests. There is no Law of Conservation of Happiness (when one man’s happiness would come out of the pocket of the next)… there may actually be something as getting happy from someone else’s happiness. I still think that a good grumpy funny story will make more people happy than a dull, sugar-coated drippy story, but that’s not the point. Sharing (and by doing so enlarging) happiness may actually exist!

We must optimise said market and get as many likes as we can tolerate, and then up our threshold. And when the old me would rather have owed up to a bank robbery I didn’t commit than telling about one of my virtues, the new me should not be afraid to claim the rescue of a stray dog from a well, or the personal acquaintanceship of a Hollywood celebrity. That’s the game! And that is how it should be played. I must cheer at each person’s longing for applause and learn to like applause myself. To dance & sing and learn how to bow with glee and grace! I must learn to embrace Eros and Madness. Amen, basta, the final word, the end, last round, schluß. I can’t change the rules, I must play along. I must say: ‘my friends, this is a jolly nice game we’re playing… who’s dealing?’

Poo poo pi doo!

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.