UNTITLED 1 the book by Leon Mussche teaser

\] ors I/L

BEN

I didn't have my phone with me. We were going to eat and I didn't think I would need it. The man sitting next to me at the table turned out to be Greek. He spoke English and a little Dutch. He was from Athens and told a long joke about a rabbi, an imam and a priest that was so complicated that I lost track halfway through. I laughed along anyway. It was his last night in this hospital and he was going to be transferred to another clinic the next morning. 'Give us more money,' he suddenly said softly in my direction between his stories. I was still at the psychiatrical ward facility and we had dinner in a group of between ten and twenty patients.. The groups was somewhat international with the majority being Dutch. Good joke. The deeply religious lady with the cross around her neck who was sitting opposite me suddenly started speaking Russian. She apparently studied Russian at the University of Amsterdam and had been there several times. We talked about religion and money. After dinner I was standing by the bin where we put the leftovers of the food before we put the plates in the dishwasher. The Greek was standing behind me and threw all his food in the bin. "I can't eat this food," he said with a heavy Greek accent. Well, neither can .All the world is a stage, and everyone has their part, Madonna sings in Take a bow, everyone will remember the video clip that was filmed in a bullring in Ronda, Spain. The past few days have been deadly boring. I just want to be alone, but there are patients everywhere. Yesterday there was an event called open stage on the ground floor of the clinic. The lady I talked with earlier started this improvised karaoke show with Message in a bottle by the Police followed by Ben by Michael Jackson. Everyone could walk in and out of the clinic while the music was playing in the lounge. I was sitting there with a splitting headache and didn't know where to go. I spoke to  a friend on the phone for a moment. ´Can't you just sit in your room?,´ he asked during the conversation. It's a bit difficult to explain, but because of the medication I can't sit still for a moment. I feel locked up in my room. I constantly have the urge to run away. The dosage of the medication is much too high. Yesterday I also had a conversation with an independent psychiatrist. I told him that my reality has sometimes been manipulated in the past, and that it still happens. Also within this clinic. I also told him that many of these kinds of connections also come about by chance, and that I should not attach any value to them. I also told him that my computer and my phones have been hacked, which has restricted my Facebook and Twitter. This psychiatrist,said that he really thought that I needed medication. He told me that my psychiatrist within the clinic had requested that I stay here longer. It was as if it didn't do anything to me. I just wanted to go outside. The conversation was at three o'clock and I was not allowed to leave the department until then. Of course, that psychiatrist now thinks that I am completely crazy, based on that short conversation that I had with him.

MEDITERRANE

I never want to go back to the facility. These past months confined with the daily schedule have been boring as hell. I was overjoyed to reach the freedom of my cozy apartment in Westerpark once again. This time definitively. Today I had coffee with D at Mediterrane close to Haarlemmerplein, our regular spot. Mediterrane is a bakery that has the best croissants according to Johannes van Dam in the culinary reviews in the local newspaper. The ham and cheese croissant is my favourite and according to the Moroccan baker it contains rabbit ham but I do not know if that is a joke. We had cortados and I ate a pide with tuna salad this morning. It was nice to see a normal person again. I felt a little excluded inside the facility but that is mainly because I have mainly concentrated on my life outside the clinic during the past week. I am worried about the future. I realize that I may have had a psychosis although I donut it and now see the future bleakly. A life with debilitating medication will be a new reality that I will have to get used to. Before I had an appointment with Dim, I went for a walk through the Westerpark. You don't have it bad, as long as you can walk through one of the most beautiful parks in the world, but I feel intensely lonely these days. I looked with jealousy at the dog owners I met. They always have their faithful friend with them. I tried to tell D that a psychosis is the most beautiful thing you can experience as a human being. The feeling that you understand everything and that you are on a lonely height without realizing that you are actually confused and have lost control over your life is also a period of intense creativity and a feeling that all pieces of the puzzle fit. I intend to do something about my physical condition in the coming period. It is Thursday, so my weekly allowance has been deposited. Every week I get seventy euros from my administrator. I try to save twenty euros every week, so I withdraw fifty euros on Thursday. Yesterday I bought a bale of Drum shag tobacco for nine euros and fifty cents from my last weekly allowance from last week. I hope that will last me until the weekend. At the ABN Amro ATM in the Tweede Nassaustraat I saw that there was still more than three hundred euros in my allowance account and that is actually too much. I keep some cash in a box in the basement cupboard in my house but I don't want to keep too much. There is now three hundred euros in it. That is all I have. It is not much but it makes me feel good to have a buffer. D said yesterday that I really have to go to the dentist. I think I have a cavity, but I am afraid that I will immediately use up my buffer if I go to the dentist. It’s not easy being under guardianship and having to live on so little. At the same time, I don’t want my teeth to deteriorate visibly in the coming period. From the ATM I walked to the Westerpark where I took a walk and once again admired the dog owners and their faithful companions. I wondered how I would get through the day. I bought a twelve-bath card at the Marnixbad for ten euros earlier this week, a special offer for holders of the city pass, an initiative for poor residents of Amsterdam, but I had actually decided not to use it until I was finally back home. I walked through the park feeling stuffy and numb, not really able to enjoy the influences, views and weather conditions. The sun started to shine and I took off my coat, but I don’t really care what the weather is like. I know that there is always something that keeps you going. Vague memories of better times in the past torment me but sometimes also offer me a glimpse of hope for what is yet to come. It can hardly get any worse than it is now. On my way home I passed Dirk van der Broek and bought a pack of crackers for forty four cents and three cans of Unox liver pate for ninety nine cents. I probably spend the largest part of my weekly budget on beer and tobacco. I thought that I should actually keep receipts but the value of the fifty euros and what I can do with it in a week is now pretty much ingrained in my head. 

Yesterday my brother and sister both came to visit. My sister told me about her quest that she had just finished. A series of periods in which she goes into quarantine as a shamanistic ritual. That day I was completely lethargic with my brother and sister and could hardly participate in the conversation. We had lunch at Pllek on the NDSM wharf. That was my choice. Carola had asked if I could find a place to have lunch where spelt bread could be eaten, but that turned out to be a difficult task. She had to make do with sourdough bread. I had a mackerel sandwich myself. It was a large, busy space and I noticed, during the busy conversation of my brother and sister, that there were a lot of impulses and that I started to feel a bit dizzy. I wanted to get away as quickly as possible. After we had walked around the NDSM wharf and had a look inside one of the Ijhallen, we went to my house. Carola and André had brought some groceries. Not as much as other times, after all, they had come by train. Towards the end of the afternoon we walked towards the Zeedijk where we had dinner at restaurant Hoi Tin. First we had spring rolls, which were very tasty. For the main course I had the babi pangang. Carola and André talked a lot about their long journeys and I felt a bit left out. Long journeys don't seem to be in the cards for me anymore and that hurts. That's the most depressing thing about my whole situation, that it looks like I won't be able to travel anymore, or at least not be able to enjoy it anymore. Today I was in Woerden. It was a beautiful sunny day. I had forgotten to check in before boarding the train and just before we arrived in Woerden the conductor came by. He told me to get off at the next station, but that happened to be Woerden. Because the gates at Woerden station are closed when you want to leave the station, I had to hold my public transport chip card in front of the gates. Then ten euros were debited from my public transport chip card, while the train ride should actually only cost about five euros. What a waste! I went to Woerden to pick up a bike that Dim had for me. I walked to his house and he showed me the bike. A solid Gazelle with hand brakes and gears. We had something to eat in the centre of Woerden. Dim had also been very much involved in spirituality and had been in retreat for a week. I mentioned how far I am from shamanistic rituals with my Viagra prescription and my sleeping pills. After an hour I left again. It was good to see Dim. It turned out to be his birthday tomorrow. A lot of fuss with him. With me too. We actually always forget each other's birthday but I decided to congratulate him tomorrow and to put his name in the birthday calendar that I made. With the bike on the train I travelled back to Amsterdam. I decided to take good care of this bike.

Yesterday I visited my mother again. Due to a cancellation I had to travel via Breda. I told her I was depressed. 'We were not born to be happy, boy,' she said. In between her gibberish she sometimes makes pointed remarks. I had felt she was at the final stage of her life in recent months and at times she had started to show signs of dementia. I have known happiness in my life. Love, friendship, travel, money and sex and for that I am grateful. Much more than my mother has and for that I can feel guilty. I wish that taking care of my mother would be a bit easier for me like it used to be during my youth. Getting her out of bed in the morning and taking her out for walks had been easier.I finally had to call my aunt for help which at this point in her life had become more complex.. I cleaned her wheelchair and afterwards I walked with her to the mall. She said she wanted to go to the cosmetics store but when we got there she didn't remember why. We ate fries from the Airfryer but she could hardly eat anything.. She still had her plate in front of her when I went back at around seven o'clock. I had spent the afternoon with her and I knew I had to travel via Breda. Eventually I got home before ten. I only had a few beers once back at my place and tried to sleep without sleeping pills. That didn't really work. I dreamed a bit, but kept waking up and at six in the morning I had already been awake for a while. Had a lazy morning at home and wondered how I was going to get through the day. At twelve o'clock I had an appointment with D at Mediterrane. He had his new dog with him. She is gorgeous and very well groomed. After coffee we went for a walk through Westerpark. The Milkshake festival which is part of Amsterdam  Gay Pride has just started. We could hear the music and peek over the fences. An old acquaintance from Iceland had told me that he was going to go. He is in Amsterdam for a week for Pride and sent me a text message. I will probably meet him on Thursday, we arranged via Facebook. I know him from what appeared to be a previous life. He is a handsome, young, traveling gay man with a good job. He knows about my admission but I don't think he knows how limited I really am these days. I see life passing me by without being able to participate in it.

112

I've been through a lot this past long weekend. That weekend ended abruptly on Monday night with a dead body in my house that I had to resuscitate and an ambulance ride to the VU hospital. Within a few hours, the body was back on the street alive. On Monday afternoon, I had a date with an old friend, T. He was using GHB and in addition he asked me if he could have some speed, which I didn't think was very wise, but I left it to him. What I didn't know was that he had also taken another large dose of GHB. We were sitting in the living room, I was sleepy, T was visibly enjoying himself. I urged him to really get on his bike now and go to the facility where he wwas staying but he seemed to be in a different world. He stood up and let out strange cries ´My God, my heaven, my God, ´ and then sat down in the armchair in my living room. It looked like he was asleep and I went to bed too. Later I saw that he was deathly pale. I got some juice and forced him to drink some, but I couldn't get the juice in his mouth. Then I started to worry. I hit him in the face and he still didn't wake up. In the meantime the facility where Thomas was admitted also called. In a panic, I picked up the phone and told him that I was going to call 112. Within fifteen minutes, an ambulance and a fire truck arrived. During those fifteen minutes I searched his pockets and found a note. The small note said in his hand writing If I pass out, please do not try to resuscitate me. I had the emergency services on the phone and they told me to put him on the floor and tilt his head back a bit. Because he still didn't respond, I had to resuscitate him, with my hands on his chest in spite of his wishes. This caused a physical reaction but he didn't wake up. I panicked. Fortunately, the emergency services arrived quickly. They resuscitated him with a device and were relieved that he responded, although he didn't wake up yet. He was in a coma. One of the men present began to question me and urged me to calm down. He wanted to know what Thomas had taken and at what time. I went with him to the VU hospital where Thomas woke up a few hours later. I was put in a family room, and by now the fourth night without sleep had passed. There I became confused and in a state of panic. I was angry with T since I had been convinced that he was dead and had not slept for so long that I was confused with how lively and normal he had seemed so suddenly again. I walked away before Thomas woke up and took a taxi home. That was last Monday into Tuesday night. It is now Wednesday and today I had a trial day at the fruit garden of West. I still felt reasonably well today and cleaned out chicken cages. Cages are a kind of large cat litter cages with a plexiglass hatch and a sloping floor on which grass mats are attached. I cleaned these mats and sprinkled a shell sand mixture in them, which is supposed to be an effective remedy against red mites.

Oosterbeek is a beautiful village near Arnhem. We first had lunch in Eva's new home, in the Johan Friso flat, after which we took a long walk through the park and past the medieval church through the village, where we sat for a few hours in a coffee house. Flags were hanging everywhere in the village, because of the anniversary of the Battle of Arnhem, which actually took place mainly in Oosterbeek. It seemed that Eva had found a nice place to live, and she seemed to be in her element, although she was currently unemployed, because the job she had initially found in a comic book store was too tiring for her. Back on the train with Marloes and Eva Effenberger we reminisced about the time that I lived with Marloes on the Prinsengracht, and also about the parties we had at my current

I visited Thomas twice this week in the facility. I fhad elt guilty because I had left while he was in a coma in the hospital. I wasn't there when he woke up but I panicked. I thought he was going to die and that I would have to speak to his family and the police who could think that I had given him the drug. I got confused and fled. T didn't mind at all. I visited him on Tuesday and Friday evenings this week in the facility on Vlaardingenlaan. I tried to kiss him but he turned his face away. We have been texting daily this past week, T told me last night that he would like to see me more often when he gets home. I told him that I want to change my lifestyle. Thomas is a few years younger and much prettier than me. He exercises for an hour every day. He is in much better shape than I am and has found volunteer work as a consultant at the FNV trade union through Mentrum. I don't know if he plans to stop using drugs. I have decided to do without it this weekend. I have been in bed for the most part the past few days. I am deeply depressed. I spoke to Joanne Vis and told her about T. 

I was hypnotized again by the passing profile names on Bullchat with catchy names and words and phrases that seemed to relate to my own world of experience. I sent a text message to T and asked him for dinner but he told me that he had already cooked. He asked me if I wanted to meet. We exchanged a few text messages, I asked him if he had been completely open with me. I had not seen him on chat sites for years and suddenly he showed up again. I thought he was acting. I tried to call him a few times, but he didn't answer. The messages I sent him via WhatsApp didn't arrive because they were grey. A few hours later he asked if I still wanted to come. I really wanted to see him again, even though I was so rtired. After we had done it, and I had the feeling that my feelings weren't completely reciprocated, he asked if I wanted to eat something. He had made quiche and pumpkin soup that morning. The quiche he gave me was delicious. He had been to the Albert Cuyp market for it, he said. I thought it was very sweet of him to have cooked. But I also doubt him, because he seems to know everything about me and occasionally gives me bits of information in a very soft voice. Buy me, he said very softly the other day, as he walked out the door. He does that all the time. Saying something that he doesn't say at the same time. I wanted to ask him if he knew the word an, by that I meant being in  house, but I didn't dare say it. That was the last time I had been in love. Yesterday Thomas told me a strange story about a friend of his who had been killed in a car. My head was exhausted. I thought he was just making something up to test my reaction. I only responded briefly. I should have delved deeper because that must have been an intense experience for him. But I often think that people just make up stories. Like the people I speak to on bullchat do. They are not really in the mood to mee at all but it feels as if something is only testing my responses. Because an address or location is rarely shared. During the night T got in touch with two older men, they were fifty eight and sixty. I told him it was time for me to go home. I hope I can escape this spiral. I have to find someone who really loves me but I am afraid I cannot love again myself. Because I have seen so many men in my life. And because they wanted to sleep with me so badly. Now I am not attractive anymore. I am not fit and I get exhausted quickly. My body is slim and stocky.

D will be back in two days. He has been in Chile for a month, and before he left about a month ago he showed me a short video of an event with an international audience that seemed to involve spirituality and technology. D also offered to buy my house. I had been living on welfare since the admission to the facility happened and had not had any commissioned work since, There was the stress of the house being considered a part of my debt  because I could not bring up the mortgage anymore. The debt resolution could end if I would be able to sell the house at its current market value of one hundred and fifty thousand euros because I had bought it for one hundred and thirty thousand euros. I am terribly happy about that. My debts can be paid off from the profit. I would finally be debt-free after all these years and then be able to go back to work. The housing market in Amsterdam is booming again, At least that is what I would like to believe now. At the same time there is also a situation with a negative government interest rate since the crisis broke out in the Western World many Moons again. Who remembers Enron? And then Grexit? D will rent the house to me at a reasonable price so that I can continue to live in my neighborhood. Hopefully I will be able to earn a little more and make the house a little more pleasant. I was talking to a Moroccan delivery man on the street. He looked like a man, he had a beard, but when I looked closer I saw the facial expression of one of my mother's district nurses. It made me feel nervous. I see family members and friends from the past or even their parents in the gay bars and on the street in an androgynous appearance. Today I was going to help  a friend I had met recently with chores in his new house in Jordaan. A wonderful apartment with two spacious rooms and a kitchenette in the middle. The location couldn't be better of course. With a rented steam engine we removed wallpaper remnants from the walls, so that they could be painted. My friend his girlfriend, whom I had seen earlier on King's Day, was also there. They suggested ordering pizzas, but I preferred to go home and told him that I could come back to help on Friday. Apart from that, the past few weeks have been all about T. I don't think about anything else. I also started using drugs again. With him and without him. I was going to meet him on Sunday. He said that he was tired and that we could maybe meet later that week but when I logged into bullchat I saw that he was online with a picture, and his profile said that he was looking for a bareback chemsdate. He knows how to hurt me so intensely every time. His constant rejections drive me crazy. That night I got incredibly high. I felt much better then but I missed T. I want so much to experience that state of mind with him. After using a certain amount of speed it is as if you see everything differently. Like you can see through buildings and surfaces. I could see light and shadow and color in a different way and with an alternative mindset and everything seems to move a little in the space. A trip or hallucination can be boggling the senses. Some call it a sixth sense but I would not advise onyone to start messing around with all that because in retrospect I had lost my work and ended up in a facility because of it. But nothing is fixed. And everything is different from a different perspective. It's a special experience to see. It's like everything is fluid, like it could merge with the other at any moment, only to float away again. Very slowly. In an article I found today about technology that I connect with the change of the state of mind the word phenotypes is used. I don't know what that means but it would be the collection of visible characteristics of an individual that have emerged from the interaction of his genotype with his environment. I don't know if something like that is meant by it. 

On impulse I went to NZ, the gay club. I ordered a taxi. Of course I don't have any money for that but my bike had been stolen again and I didn't care at that moment. If only I didn't have to be alone now. I talked to several men in the sauna. For a moment I had banished T from my mind. But soon the feeling of guilt started to gnaw. Although he says that he also meets other men himself. The drugs were once again stronger than myself and I was still high for most of the day. I saw strange figures in the sauna again. Snippets of acquaintances from Brabant and Zeeland. Feminine androgynous types with beards. But also very tough, sturdy guys. A man had a dick that tasted like chocolate, a somewhat artificial chocolate flavor came from his pores. I spoke to people from all over the world. From Syria, from Qatar, from Poland, from Finland, from the United States, from Ghana, from Morocco. The Dutch men who were there were very old and fat. An old acquaintance was there . I met him a few times and we are Facebook friends. He seemed to know everything about me. He suggested that I work behind the bar at the sauna a few days a week. A somewhat older man of around sixty sat next to me at the bar. He was eating a meal, a quiche and I asked if I could have some of his food. I could hardly buy anything to drink myself. He told me a bit about his ailments and that he has had an internist in Aachen for more than fifteen years. He was staying in a hotel in the city center. He also told me that he was me. I have heard people say that before. That they would be a kind of mirror. He did, as it turned out when he told me have some similarities with me but we were not at all alike. He was also much older. He said that certain people have to keep triggering their dopamine if it is suppressed in some way and I recognized that feeling from taking the antpsychotics. On the other side of me at the bar sat an American young man. He stammered that I really should not believe anything  I was told. That it was all nonsense and he also had a clear political argument about Trump and the recent elections and what is going on in the United States. I don't know if any of it is true, but the information I read through artificial intelligence and coded language, such as on chat sites, is convergent. Or maybe it was dynamic. Or of a metaphysical order that makes it only relevant at hat brief moment in time and in the situation of the particular space. It is abstract and keeps repeating itself. I have given meaning to filler words and letters myself. For example, there is no which in my case meant Norway but I do not know the definition others have with this abbreviation and then there is an that I had defined as a house or apartment and there is bo that I had defined through the contexts I had seen this abbreviation in as something pharmaceutical or some kind of cure. The abbreviations and exclusive codes have taken on a life of their own nd some of the people in the gay club were using them apparently defining it in the same way as I do. In a newspaper I read that France wants to put an end to exclusive language use. Words that are given a different meaning with numerology, encryption, codes, abbreviations, letters and binary language or even periods and commas to make your message understandable only within a limited circle. Because of all those codes I received I no longer knew whether it was A or A, and whether it was B or B, suddenly everything had two meanings. I carefully tried to ask when it would be on again. The state in which everything seems perfect I had defined it as at one point. A state of mind in which you make all kinds of connections between subjects and texts that are derived from your own memory or from song lyrics for example in the dynamics of what is happening with the people in your immediate environment. This had me concluding there was a metaphysical aspect to exclusive language. You seem to be perfectly attuned to those few people around you and always have the right answer ready. In your head you constantly have private jokes. It is a magical, euphoric experience. You think you have a monopoly on wisdom. But your own memory, and everything you have seen and read is rather limited in reality. Your inspiration is light and looking back all these thoughts were really not that brilliant. But alas, at least you had been on. For what it is worth or whether there is any truth in this motorhead experience.  but you are convinced of your own rightness. Everything is right and you are always one step ahead of the others. But it can also be dangerous. It makes you feel a bit strange and you can become radicalized by it. It was all about being on hindsight when I thought I had brilliant ideas and connections in my mind  about Gloria Estefan that I can now easily take with a grain of salt.I miss being on. In the gay club I walked around like a maniac. I had fleeting sex with several men. I went from one to the other, was completely sweaty and did not take the time to drink. As always, I gave a somewhat worn impression. But I cannot manage not to give in and sit still for a long time. The combination of the stimulants and the hot, dark men all around me is not good for me. It is addictive. I kept going and going until I was completely exhausted. And I still did not want to go home. I snorted a few small lines in the toilet, but I was long past my peak. Reluctantly I finally got dressed to walk home. It was now deep into the night. I walked down the street and saw a car here and there. I felt ashamed of my addiction to drugs and sex and I gave in all too easily. I stood still everywhere and had desperate conversations with a delivery man and several taxi drivers whilst staggering the streets/ When I got home I couldn't sleep. That was the second night without sleep. As usual I was logged into chat sites. I saw the abundance of terrifying profile names passing by and I couldn't take my eyes off them. I tried to reach T. I hoped that he would want to meet me that day. Unfortunately my messages didn't arrive again.I did not know if after my visit to the club it would be appropriate to just go out and see him.. On the other hand he had done the same thing before. In the end I couldn't get hold of him. I had to tell my story to someone, about everything I had seen and experienced that day since I had been living in isolation for too long.. In the end I was able to visit him just for a drink. Thomas was mostly staring into space and appeared lethargic from antipsychotics. I had recognized that look since the admission to the facility.Then I went home, I let him know that I didn't like  to be around him if he continues to play games with me. |Since his suicide attempt he had changed. Once outside a few streets away there was a car. It was raining heavily and I asked if I could get a ride home from the driver, a handsome young man. Of course I tried a bit more with him, but he politely declined. Once I got home I turned on that awful chatbox again. T was there too. Again. I had had enough of his games. He had rejected me earlier that night when |I went to visit him. Eventually I got in a taxi again and went back to see him but only because I knew he wouldn't go to sleep anyway. There was a bit of an annoying tension. I was actually too tired. He suggested we go to sleep. In the small living room on the single mattress on the floor. I got excited again when I laid next to him but he turned his head to the other side and down onto the mattress. I was now in the mood, but he was wearing underpants. He didn't want to and kept pushing me away. In the meantime I saw shadows in the room again, and I saw things moving as if in a hallucination. Outside we heard stationary cars with running engines, passers-by and other sounds. These were clearly not hallucinations, I thought to myself.

MUM

I just got home from Roosendaal, where I had been since yesterday to visit my mother. I had brought a DVD with me with a number of documentaries about Egypt. I had wanted to give it to my sister who is going on holiday to that country with her family on Christmas Day and I won't be seeing her again before Christmas. The documentary started slowly  but also showed moments of captivating exuberance which would make you want to travel straight to Tahrir Square or see the ancient monuments of Cairo/ My mother was restless. Energetic. We didn't finish the DVD. After the dinner we had prepared together and watching a crime series on television I went to the tiny bedroom she has in her elderly flat. I didn't sleep a wink. Thoughts were milling through my head. I got hungry and went to the kitchen several times to get something to eat. There was old cheese and chicken fillet in the fridge, in sealable plastic cold cuts containers. Only old cheese and chicken fillet. My mother was so practical and orderly. I had found her stingy with money as of late but it could also be soberness or a sense of her wanting her two sons to have something to inherit since she was clearly saving more than ever.. I lay awake thinking about T. I wondered if he was free and could experience the ultimate happiness, to go where he wanted, to do what he wanted and with whom he wanted, without being held back by obligations or restrictions and I wondered if my feelings of jealousy meant that I wanted to be with him, or that I wanted to be like him. I felt too energetic to sleep. In the early morning, while my mother was in the bathroom with a nurseI quickly smoked a cigarette and ate sweet cookies. It made me feel sick. I had read about algorithms the night before and it had been on my mind. An algorithm is a kind of formula that maps out an action, or a recipe. A sequence of actions that lead to the desired result, like a cup of coffee is made in a vending machine. Human consciousness could also consist of algorithms. A collection of a number of sensory perceptions that make us act the way we do. On television I saw anonymous figures talking to each other against a background that seemed almost random. On the way home a piece of my tooth broke off. That piece of tooth broke off in a fall during my youth, but has to be repaired every few years. 

HEY BUT NOT HU

Ha! I woke up this morning feeling fine. Nothing wrong. Normal. I felt like having a cup of coffee on the edge of my bed and staying in bed a little longer. I had been fine speed since New Year's Eve. But that's strange actually.  To recover so quickly. I walked outside with a full garbage bag and realized that I was full of inspiration. Then it seems as if I am in a train of thought with people walking or cycling past on the street. But today there was no connection between my thoughts and these observations, so I have not yet been able to establish what this resonance with the passers by on the street is. 'This' doesn't say much of course, but I have previously observed that there was a kind of telepathy between my thoughts and my surroundings and what I see and hear on computers and devices as well and what I pick up in passing. Or even with what I smell. I have been under the influence for a few days and nights during the holiday season but collapsed after a short moment of satisfaction by consuming yet another text or a picture or something I see in front of me. Attention deficit disorder occurs when scrolling too much bdtween different pages online or profiles on the grid of the phone screen when being on Grindr seeking a companion to spend the day or night with. I spent New Year's Eve alone for the first time this year. I sat on the couch behind my laptop. I was supposed to go to a party at a friend's house on the Prinsengracht, where I used to live with her myself but she cancelled shortly beforehand because she was sick . I had gone to eat a spring roll with Eva at the Chinese restaurant on the Tweede Nassaustraat. She had suggested eating pancakes at her house earlier. We had just decided that a spring roll at the local Chinese Chinese resturant with a glass of white wine would be appropriate way to end the old year and toast to the new. It was fun with Eva. She came in afterwards and I thought I might as well spend the rest of the evening with Eva, because she herself wouldn't be doing anything for the rest of the evening either. Outside we had been hearing bangs of fireworks all day and at twelve o'clock the fireworks burst. I was already sitting on the couch in my sweatpants, which I really shouldn't go outside in any way and I was wondering whether I should go outside to watch them. The curtains were already closed and I had seen fireworks so often. I put on some shoes and a different pair of pants and stood in the doorway. Just for a short moment because I actually wanted to get back to my laptop quickly. There was a group of people outside but I didn't see any acquaintances. My neighbours were outside when we greeted them with a glass of bubbles in our hand and a bottle in our hands. I have been enjoying being alone lately and had distanced myself from my friends for a while. I see my family even less, except for my mother. Of course it's actually quite strange to chat with strangers on New Year's Eve behind the laptop and on the phone, but the chats make me think and give me a certain emotion, often mainly because the people I'm chatting with seem to know me and even know what I'm doing at that moment. That is not possible of course but I was dealing with reflective articial intelligence again. Or an isolation. Hu hu or uhu. I am aware that I may have infected others during the period before I was diagnosed. I don't know. From my Polish neighbour I understood through a somewhat complicated sentence that nothing happened here in any case and I am certain that I did not infect anyone abroad with HIV but perhaps she was talking about something else. That feeling of guilt has haunted me all this time. The names of young men whom I suspect I may have had sex with during that period of a maximum of one year in which I used drugs and was negative, and their faces, keep coming back to me. On these chat sites for example or in some other way. In the past it made me feel an indescribably great sense of guilt and shame, but I have gotten over that now. I am at peace with myself. There was already acting, as they say, even though I wasn't aware of it myself. Confronting me with my serostatus by using words like uh huh and uh uh or even using the word hey against me makes me angry and it makes me no longer ashamed of my sexual preferences and perhaps even exaggerate them a little. Because this has simply become my Achilles heel. It is unfortunately my fate that I had to be made an example of and that will remain so for the rest of my days. Since over five years ago I have not had any more assignments and it was also in that year that I was admitted to a psychiatric clinic for the first time because I was said to have a psychosis. It was also then that I saw through texts on dating sites that I was being played. Although I don't know when and when not. There is one moment that I can remember very visually. I think it was 2010. I was standing in the hallway leading to the darkroom of Club Church and next to me, in the corner, was a Dutch man bent over the wall with his pants around his ankles. It was almost closing time. A big, tough and very attractive North African man came in. He still had his jacket on and was just pulling his pants down a bit. I saw that his cock was big, thick and circumcised. He took it without a condom and came inside him. It is just one of many moments that left a deep impression on me. That doesn't happen anymore, at least not in Amsterdam. The last time I was in Club Church the darkroom was full of mixed men and trans men, their cocks smell strange, sometimes like nothing at all, then like some kind of air freshener and then very chemical. Their cum tastes chemical and can suddenly intoxicate the entire room. I still have to get checked at the STD clinic, since that last time. But I don't think they are spreading sexually transmitted diseases. I don't really know what it is. I've been turned on by the perfect picture for so long that it has spoiled me. In recent years I have always seen the unattainable as a tantalizing torment. Maybe it's nature, but it often seems as if nature is being influenced. Then I see an exciting performance that I want to be a part of. A particularly attractive man and lately also a woman. A drink, a room, a piece of clothing, all in harmony. Sometimes very subtle and sometimes downright pornographic. But I must be imagining it. It's probably because I'm getting older and less attractive myself. On a dating site I came into contact with 'Conspicuous' again. A year or two ago I was at his house and I've run into him a few times since then. He was very attractive. Dark skinned. I thought he was Brazilian. When I was at his house I briefly had oral sex with him, but he rejected me because he thought my penis smelled, and I felt embarrassed at that moment. That moment, like so many others, left a deep impression. Over the years, I have also developed sexual fantasies and preferences that dominate at certain times. I have difficulty expressing them. It all goes rather far. At those times, when I am alone at home behind the computer, I expect that others might share those fantasies. Unfortunately, that is of course not the case. I am aware of that.

Before that night I saw a BBC documentary on YouTube about how stress can be transformed into tension. Extremely fascinating. Wanting sex is a feeling that I have aroused too often in recent years by using stimulants. Lately even these no longer seem to be sufficient, or they make me deeply sad. I had been in a stable relationship for years and during that period I was much less concerned with the need to have new sexual experiences. I was already satisfied with a good glass of wine or a nice film. I read again that many people have died in Yemen. Due to an outbreak of cholera or a war, that was rather confusing. A million dead I read, and I tried to imagine the scale of this disaster. Shouldn't it be a constant concern of ours? I haven't read a newspaper for weeks and my television is broken at the moment. The newspapers I have seen contain little information, and the information I read on websites is also haphazard and random. On the Amnesty website I read that it would concern thousands of deaths. Today I was walking down the street and realized that happiness can also mean not having any pain for a while. Last week, after a few nights of no sleep, I felt like I was dying. It was a strange experience. I was walking down the street and felt like I was running on my very, very last bit of strength. That I could cease to exist at any moment. I walked into Café Broer, which is on the corner from my house, and ordered a pumpkin soup. It felt like I was just in time and like I shouldn’t have been a minute late. The hard bread that was served with the soup brought tears to my eyes from the pain in my mouth. Why do I have to keep pushing myself to the edge, when I know my body needs sleep and food and water. The pain in my mouth felt like a punishment for my reckless and addictive behavior. I haven't been to my mother's house this past week. The last time I was there was on Boxing Day, and that day too I was in pain everywhere. The train ride home takes almost two hours and that was almost unbearable. I still don't know where my brother works, but he seems happy and often goes shopping with his girlfriend. I asked him if he knew what was going on in Yemen, but he replied that he hadn't seen anything about it on the news. On January 1st I was in the gay sauna again. It was very quiet there, and nasty feelings of guilt, frustration and anger prevailed. I was rejected by everyone again. I felt attracted to a Swedish man who later turned out to be Croatian and was reprimanded by him. The man who was with him turned out to be his friend. I was sitting next to a man with feminine features who I didn’t find particularly attractive. When I walked out the door after closing time, she reprimanded me for touching her genitals. He, who looked more like a she, was very busy typing messages on her smartphone. She ordered an Uber taxi and left me alone. I felt the urgent need to talk to someone again, and had only been walking around in the sauna. The men who were there that day were not interested in me. I have a hard time getting used to that idea. Rejection is a bitch.

Yesterday D came to visit. We had coffee at Café Broer. He had brought a bag of groceries with him, which was nice of him. I hadn’t eaten tomatoes for a while. The ready-made lasagna from the expensive organic shop where he had bought the groceries was particularly tasty. It was very nice to stay in the city for a weekend and I hope that I will be granted that more often. There is so much more that occupies my mind, but the fear of being admitted to a facility prevents me from talking about it. I walked back to the station with D and at every intersection he ordered Freddy, his dog to sit down. I decided to do some more exercise. A sports club is too expensive for me, but I will try to do some exercises in the park. Because I often have so many people around me, I don't feel completely alone. Although the desire to create something has returned, I constantly long to feel even more. On YouTube I saw a recent video of Anna Vissi called Agapi Ine Esi and I started delving into her extensive back catalogue. She has an impressive career of over forty years that started with the Greek Eurovision Song Contest entry of nineteen seventy nine calles Autostop  Agapi Ine Esi and Tasis Aftoktonias are my favourite songs by her but she is in spite of her age or because of her maturity still alive and kicking and releasing new songs every now and then. I would like to tell her she was beautiful, but I don't really want to go to bed with her either. Of course the urge for sexuality keeps her going too. Or maybe she will now also settle for a good glass of wine and a good film. I read my words back and feel disgusted by my own childish naivety. I wish my own language would inspire me a bit more. The feeling that my best time is over is oppressive and frightening at the same time. Faded glory looms around the corner so deeply.I asked my administrator to cancel the valuation of my home that he was going to have done. It would cost hundreds of euros and the housing market is a bubble. The bad climate has made many Dutch people decide to live elsewhere. I don't know where there is war and poverty, but my friends are doing well. This morning I had an appointment with a Spanish man, who I had spoken to on a dating site. At Starbucks, on the Oosterdokskade, we ordered coffee. The reading table with American and Dutch newspapers had disappeared. Is everyone only concerned with themselves? The Spanish man was fat and ugly and spat in my face while he talked, but I liked him. He didn't tell me much and I was nervous and just rambled. He himself hadn't been to Spain for a long time. If I had had more talent, I wouldn't be in this precarious position.

Everyone has a guilty pleasure. I read an article about exclusive sex parties in America. Women are also at sex parties these days. Sometimes in the guise of a man. Sex parties and orgies have been around for a long time. What is new are the artificial models and the presence of technology, generated music, smells and images that overheat the senses. And suddenly being surrounded by exceptionally beautiful hairy and muscular men from the Middle East. In New York I was at a sex party with only black men. I realize that I have experienced much of what is intense in this world, but I wonder to what extent I have been spoiled by it now that the end of my own sexual attractiveness looms and lingers in my head. The Greeks and Romans had orgies too, and the hippies too. If you tolerate this your children will be next by the Manic Street Preachers is one of my favorite songs. I sometimes get tired of the veiled language that can be read between the lines in the media. This morning I read an article about energy supply in Africa, which can take place through small personal, or even individual, networks of solar energy. I also saw a long acceptance speech by Oprah Winfrey. She had won a Golden Globe. Her energy is relentless and her emotion is what I long for now, but I look at the sometimes almost extremism-bordering tribalism that keeps coming to the fore from my sober Dutch background with a slight surprise. I have never seen a nude photo of a celebrity in an embarrassing situation. I see celebrities at sex parties but I don't feel called upon to mention their names. I honestly felt furious when I saw women, transsexuals, mash-ups and bisexual men suddenly entering a scene that used to be exclusively for homosexual men and that is not very tolerant. The question is how far you go to protect your own personal freedoms, guilty pleasure, children or other vulnerable valuables. I still don't know what the situation is in Yemen. Keeping quiet about major humanitarian disasters, epidemics and wars out of self-interest borders on fascism. Last night I thought I was going to die again. In addition to a fear of death, there is now also the fear of spontaneously changing into a woman. That is very strange! But also the result of impressions that I saw before me. Last week I went cruising in Vondelpark in a small and hard to find part of it called the Rosarium is a meeting place where there is mostly only socializing and exchanging glances. To Speak is a Sin, You Look First Then Stare… is a lyric from the Pet Shop Boys that always makes me think of cruising in parks or in dingy gay clubs. An attractive colored man came home with me. He told me that he had previously worked for an airline. I could not touch him anywhere and he said that I had to cut my nails first. They were not long at all. He also had all kinds of other demands and said that he was a control freak. He left behind a notepad on which he made notes about his administration. I saw that he received benefits and an allowance from his former employer. Yesterday I watched London Has Fallen, a film on Netflix. Coincidentally, I was thinking about it last week that London has become a vague and abstract memor  because I never see images that were made in that city anymore. I tried to form an image again of what the map of that city looked like. The film was well made and full of action. In the film there was a terrorist threat from Yemen. There were only anonymous characters in the film, but the leading role was played by Morgan Freeman. The film was absolutely spectacular. Actually un-believable. I don't know. I have two cinema vouchers at home, given to me by my brother. For Pathé cinemas, where Hollywood films are shown. I looked at the programme, but there are few films to look forward to in the cinema. Some people say that Hollywood is dead but at least the amount of blockbusters in AMsterdam have declined in number. I had a few beers yesterday afternoon with the film I saw. It is probably a good idea to keep having a bucket list. Oprah had a ten-plus minute acceptance speech that she could remember word for word. I can’t even remember if I had my key in my hand a few seconds ago. The faces of the actors and actresses in the Golden Globes audience radiated intense fatigue and frustration. Today is a beautiful day, it’s cold but the sky is blue and the sun is shining.

I doo not think much about doing it these days. I feel this wild period in my life has desensitized me also. Maybe the depressions I feel can be attributed to it it as well. I seem to have suddenly become indifferent about it all it and then that makes me lose my motivation to initiate other things in life. Maybe it is my age. It feels like my brain has been hacked. I have watched so much porn that it does not do anything for me anymore. And watching porn is in itself like an artificial experience of experiencing sexuality. It makes me feel paralyzed when I look at it on my laptop. But I keep longing for the desire to desire. Just like my neutered tomcat probably. I wonder what a near-death experience feels like. I have often heard and read about light at the end of a tunnel. The Albert Heijn in Magna Plaza is different from the other Albert Heijn supermarkets. It used to be an elite supermarket, but the price for a can of beer is the same as in other Albert Heijn supermarkets. Now this store is the domain of tourists and expats. I only heard English, German and other foreign languages around me and felt lost. On the way home it was very cold and again foreign languages were heard. The presence of people from other countries is usually a consolation for me since I have had many good memories with expats and some have been my friends and still are.n Oprah Winfrey's speech made me think of the question of who is really in charge. In the world, in a country, in a city or in a neighborhood. “We run the world, girls,” Beyonce sang at the 2011 Billboard music awards. Her Beyonce is above race or gender. Or is that just the illusion we have of her? In a tribalized world, where politicians no longer matter.

BIRTHDAY GIFT

The addiction doctor is a man of Moroccan descent. I suggested that my goal was to not use drugs for three months. I think that is a long time. He called this abstinence but said it would take four seasons to be completely clean and feel the clarity of sobriety in full. I have decided to concentrate on finding paid work or starting a business again so we talked about that after Mehrdad had the physical test I underwent done. I also hope to become more socially active again. I hardly have any contact with my friends from the past and I hardly see my family. This makes me feel intensely lonely and closed off. I suddenly seem to have become a pariah. And submissive and weak as well because of this oppression I cannot attribute to the Islam but not to anything else either. I am repeatedly overcome by a feeling of anger and powerlessness and that has made me tense and increasingly nervous. I have not been looking for a date or sex for a long time, but am looking for answers to the question of who has allowed this infringement of my freedom for years.  njThe news about the American ambassador in The Hague was the talk of the town. He had called the Netherlands 'a chaos' because it was being invaded by Muslims. In cities there would be no-go areas where a Dutchman does not want to be. In this city there are certainly districts where predominantly Muslims live, I would not call them no-go areas. It is a new reality that we will have to learn to live with. The article was only a few columns somewhere in the back of the newspaper, but it was striking to see the Netherlands from a different perspective than usual in the nowadays unfortunately often censored and biased newspapers. That same day I spoke to a newspaper vendor on the street who told me that we should first look at ourselves before we comment on others.. I do not do otherwise, but will try to do so even more. In the meantime I have received a new conditional authorization from a lawyer who previously assisted me with my admissions to a clinic. This means that I can be admitted to a clinic again if the outreach team of mentrum deems it necessary. I signed the document and sent it back to the lawyer. I agreed with my psychiatrist, whom I had not seen for more than two months, that I would like to have more contact with them, because everyone can spread rumours that I am not doing well and that I need to be admitted again. It is important to be able to see each other in real life and not just rely on rumours that are spread through other media or communication methods. I had my sister on the phone and she told me extensively about their trip to Egypt. About the pyramids and temples and museums they had visited, the hotels where they had stayed and the cities they had been to. Cairo and Luxor and a few other cities. The children, my nephews, had been  cheerful and it was striking that they had each developed a separate character. The one nephew had the most to say and the other is a bit quieter. I gave them the DVD 'Made in Egypt' to take home, which paints a somewhat gloomy picture of Egypt after the Arab revolution. Carola gave me shoes and forty euros in an envelope. That was very welcome, because my account is almost empty, and I only have two hundred fifty euros of cash left in the tin  box behind the door where the fuse box is. My mother is never very enthusiastic. My sister had told me about their family's visit But I could afford a winter coat in the winter and I still had an income. I had an online presence and my own company. I often think back to that period around 2012 and the encounters I had then. And the many dates I used to have. The parties I went to and the drugs I used during that period. I got carried away. Reda was not the only Moroccan man I met. I was online almost every day on Grindr and Gayromeo looking for company with likeminded people. In the Frederik Hendrikstraat lived an attractive young Moroccan man whom I met twice. He was at my house and we and we did it together. The next day there was a card on my doormat in which he wrote that he was positive. At that time I was still negative myself and we had not used condoms. I called him and he was not using medication either. That same day Helena, my friend from Russia, who spent the winters in Andorra and now lives there, was coming to visit me. I picked her up at Amsterdam Central Station. She came by train from Düsseldorf where she was staying at the time. Of course I was worried. As soon as she was at my house I told her that I had an appointment and that I had to leave. I cycled to the VU hospital, to the emergency room, where I had to wait for hours. I had read on the internet that it is possible to start PEP treatment there after a risky contact. After a conversation with a care provider it was decided that the risk was too small to start PEP treatment. I cycled back to Helena and pretended that nothing was wrong. I had actually forgotten about it straight away. We laughed and had a nice day. In the evening we had a barbecue and Itamar, an Israeli friend of mine, came by. It was late summer, that must have been in 2011. During that period I also met a young Finnish man on two separate days. Both were very attractive. I met one of them in Club Church. We went to my place together and watched porn, in which blacks and Latinos were shown. The young man turned out to have Nazi ideas and had Nazi texts tattooed on his body. He said that he only wanted to watch porn with white people. I had several dates with another Finnish man, Timo. I liked him very much. He was attractive and had the appearance of a bodybuilder. We met through Gayromeo. He lived with his mother, who was a doctor, in the North of Finland, but was also looking for a place to live in Amsterdam. I have lost contact with him but I understand that he can still be found in the city sometimes. I myself have never thought about how and by whom I became infected with HIV. In retrospect, this probably happened on May 17, 2012, my birthday. An American documentary about men who deliberately let themselves be infected with this virus is called 'The Gift.

Yesterday my laptop, an Apple MacBook Pro from 2011, suddenly broke down. That is to say, I am certain that there is a virus which was introduced from outside because I was dealing with sensitive information. I am now in an internet cafe on the Kinkerstraat. This virus may have caused weeks to months of work to be lost. Today I was at the Apple store on the Leidseplein. According to the expert who spoke to me at the 'Genius bar' there was a problem with the graphics card. He processed a test in software that suddenly gave clear and bright graphics, but eventually a message in English and German that there would be a problem with the video display. This message was against a blue background but should have been against a black background, and for that reason, according to the Apple expert there was a problem with the graphics card, which could not be solved, because my computer is a vintage model, for which parts are no longer available. He advised me to take the laptop to MacRepair on the Lindengracht and ask them to replace the component in the graphics card that is causing the problem. This should be possible for one hundred to two hundred euros. I feel increasingly isolated because I cannot communicate on the internet. I have now received a new smartphone from my half-brother and one of my father's three children. It is almost impossible to connect to the internet with the phone he bought for me. Even looking up an address with Google Maps or Apple Maps is not possible. On Facebook I can no longer see updates from friends and I have sent a complaint to Grindr because I only come into contact with curious tax officials via this dating app and I am again living in isolation because meeting people these days is entirely up to thew internet and apps. Television has become an embarrassing spectacle and the news is a feeble fabrication invented by by ignorant politicians. Yesterday I wanted to watch a new program, a reality series with Ellie Lust, a lesbian Amsterdam police officer who goes on patrol in other cities to see what it's like there. |In the programme she showd what life is like in a prison in Sam Salvador. I bought two pizzas at Dirk. One of them was only sixty cents. The pizza tasted fine. Yesterday I had arranged to go for a walk with a friend. That is to say, and this is complicated, a friend who looks exactly like a friend from the past but only much younger and not as tell. Somehow we came to meet up and he still seemd to know me as well. I think this faces a mystical feature that is referred to by some as genesis.in case anyone remembers the video Land of Confusion by the band genesis, this was more or less how his face now looked. We were supposed to meet at ten in the morning. I suggested we walk to the other side of town, since I’m in the Westerpark almost every day, so we cycled to the Heineken factory on the Stadhouderskade, and from there we walked towards the Oosterpark. I hqd met him a week or two ago and we spent some time that morning in his apartment in Jordaan, which was very big and had several rooms, which he didn’t really use. I didn’t really believe he lived there. Sergio reminds me of several people I know, have known or worked with. There were boxes in the living room and we played around with some obscure device that was connected to a DJ program on his laptop, but hardly did anything. We programmed it on the spot and were able to conjure up some techno-like beats. We also looked at YouTube but his account only showed video fragments of three minutes or less. On his phone he only seemed to have one contact and that is me.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

I have been admitted to a Mentrum clinic again and have been here for almost a week now. I have not been able to write for the past few months because my computer broke down. Typing on an iPhone is exhausting. It came as a complete surprise that I was admitted again. The day I was admitted, last Tuesday, Joanne, one of the Mentrum VIP team counselors, came to visit me at home. She went to the supermarket to buy me bread and cheese because my wallet had gone missing and I had no money in the house, and when she came back it turned out that she had made a phone call on the way and shortly afterwards there were paramedics from both the ambulance and the police at the door to transport me in an ambulance and strapped to a stretcher to Mentrum, where I was initially placed in an isolation cell for a few hours. That was a traumatic experience, but it was not the first time that I had been in an isolation cell

BACK TO T|HE FACILITY

Dear Dr. Pui Won

‘Since my admission on 8 May we have had approximately two conversations. From these conversations you concluded that I am psychotic and that I would need medication, namely the antipsychotic Olanzapine, initially in a dosage of 10 mg. I did not agree with this. I was not psychotic during the conversations we had and, apart from the past four turbulent years in which I have playfully become involved in an increasingly complex care safety net, I have no psychiatric history whatsoever. In recent years I have used recreational stimulants and as a result I may have been somewhat maladjusted for a day or two at most. I do not have delusions and do not hear voices. During the last conversation we had you suggested increasing the dosage of the drug Olanzapine to 15 mg. Because this was offset by the fact that I would be given more freedom to use the activity and sports room in the building and I found myself in a precarious position, I agreed to this at the time. Staying in a closed ward is really very difficult to bear. We agreed that this increase was an experiment and that it would last 1 week. You also indicated that this medication is not administered under duress and is therefore voluntary. I therefore voluntarily took this dosage last week. I have found that administering antipsychotics to healthy people is not desirable. Olanzapine makes me, and other clients who use this type of medication, very tired, drowsy, emotionless, flat and isolated. I often feel like I would rather be dead when I use this medication. Using olanzapine makes me less assertive and I spend most of my days in bed. Newspapers, television, books, news and current affairs no longer interest me, with all the possible consequences that this entails if this type of medication becomes more widespread. Olanzapine and other antipsychotics increase my appetite, which makes me eat a lot more sugary products. My weight has also increased in the past week. In addition, it is difficult to concentrate and focus on a task for a longer period of time. Because of the lethargic and gloomy feeling that I experience as the main side effect of the medication, it is difficult not to smoke and drink coffee all the time which may have a detrimental effect on my health. I therefore kindly request that you no longer prescribe Olanzapine from now on. I will not use it anymore. The medicine Thiamine can also be stopped as far as I am concerned, and the use of Olanzapine in the morning, afternoon and evening has no effect. The 2.5 mg. Lorazepam that I use at 21:00 before going to bed I am prepared to take voluntarily as well as 2 x 400 mg. Isentress and 25 mg. Descovy. I am just like you a human being and I do not wish to go through life as a container for pills. I kindly request that you end this forced admission immediately.'

Since yesterday I have had to share a room with Seminsky, a Flemish-speaking man who told me he is from Ukraine and speaks Russian, but who currently lives on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Wadim is probably not his real name and I also have my doubts about his background story. It is annoying to have to share a room in a situation where I already have so little privacy. It was a sunny evening. The atmosphere was serene and almost everyone was beautiful and seemed happy, as if we were walking through a toothpaste commercial. Perhaps the reality outside on a sunny day seems even more beautiful today because the reality inside the walls of Mentrum is so bland.. But appearances can be deceiving sometimes. I had my first walk outside that day with a nurse  and since I have lost track of time I cannot properly think of when. As we walked past a Rhododendron bush she told me that it is a species that tends to overgrow and can dominate other plants. She told me that local authorities in Ireland, where she had recently been, would poison rhododendron bushes for that reason. I found that a dubious remark and did not really know how to respond. Although she was talking about plants it seemed as if she was trying to insinuate something else but if I were to respond I would fall into a trap that I am so often confronted with. I thought that she was maybe a racist and talking about people that overgrow and need to be cut off but I was not sure. I also believe that trees are better left standing.  I hadn't really thought about Rhododendrons in Ireland. Earlier today I had a treatment plan meeting with Doctor Won and the co-assistant, who seems to be a psychiatrist.They had suggested administering antipsychotics monthly by means of slow release which is an injection in the buttock. I could hardly believe my ears. Depots with psychotropic drugs are horrible and unethical because psychotropic drugs like olanzapine have horrible side effects and psychiatry itself seems to be living in a delusion in these confusing times when lies rule and in the case of my therapists constantly speaks the language of the calculating banker with a double tongue. I had printed out the letter I had written to Dr. Won in quadruplicate and handed it out to Dthe others attending the meeting and after reading the letter the co assistant happily told me right away that I could stop taking medication, except for the antiviral drugs I use for my HIV infection. That was a first victory. Unfortunately, Dr. Won then reported that she would not want to schedule another treatment plan meeting for three or four weeks, which would mean that I would be stuck in the regime of this clinic for weeks.I had a short physical examination with another doctor in which he had determined that I had a gene. 'You have a gene,’ he said very softly, in passing, before I was allowed to stand on the scale. Join the club. 

I walked further in the direction of the enormous building and saw through the skeleton of the structure that dozens of heavy construction workers in sturdy overalls were working there. The night had been so quiet and lonely earlier today. Longing for contact, I had walked dazedly through the streets of the Spaarndammerbuurt. Suddenly there was so much energy and movement on my retina in this part of the city that I did not know that well. I walked slowly in the direction of the entrance of a parking garage with several cars, through which I could enter the building from below to explore it. There is nothing really strange about walking around on a construction site, but when people are working there, it is probably not really desirable. On the other hand, I have experienced in the city center of Amsterdam that there is so much playing and acting that it is not entirely clear when you can take the liberty of getting involved. Dimitri and Andreas almost seemed to be waiting to engage in conversation or get some other input in some way.

It is early in the morning. I was already awake at five o'clock. I feel better since I stopped taking antipsychotics, but I have trouble sleeping and have not had a moment's rest in the past few days. Everyone wants something from me. Ideally, everyone wants a lot from me. The people around me are constantly talking to each other and approach me with their intensely tiring and confrontational questions and comments.which I don't have an immediate answer to. So I try to isolate myself but that is impossible in any way since I have to share my room with Seminsky The |Ukrainian Belgian/  He gave me his phone number and I forwarded him the article 'Rewriting Nature's Code', which appeared in The New Yorker a year or two ago now. I don't know if he has read it yet but I expect he will respond to it today. The last time I was in love was during the short but intense period last year when I spent a lot of time with Thomas. It took me by surprise because I was deeply depressed during that period and was mostly in bed. I thought I had completely lost the ability to feel. I thought about him all the time and longed to be with him again but I also felt nervous and insecure when we were together and the conversations we had together were often difficult. Thomas put me in touch with a new drug dealer. The contact with them is pleasant and discreet and they deliver speed shortly after an order is placed via Whatsapp. Within a few weeks I had completely recovered from my panic attacks and depression and the suicidal thoughts that I constantly struggled with. I was not faithful to Thomas and probably he was not faithful to me either. I regret that I was too impatient and that I too quickly sought anonymous contacts on chat sites and in clubs in the trance I was in at that time. As quickly and unexpectedly as the love for Thomas had come, it also faded away again. I think that's a shame, because we had a lot in common and could have at least formed a close friendship, which we both longed for. He spent a lot of time with his ex Nikos. Since I've been in this department, I've felt attracted to Roy, who is also staying in the department. He is exceptionally handsome and his gestures are sublime, which makes me think he's trained. Yesterday we played table tennis. I also keep my distance. Because I don't want to hurt anyone. The past few days, or actually weeks, months, years, I've had problems with computers. I constantly have to log in again. The password I just entered is then immediately no longer valid. The Google interface is often incorrect and words are hyphenated incorrectly. The computer in the department doesn't work either. So I just bought a laptop from a Surinamese boy who is staying in the department for fifty euros. I just had Andre on the phone and we were arguing. I kept letting myself be tempted and was almost shouting in the department. He told me that he had been called by Rob. I spoke to Rob on the phone yesterday and he said he had just lost his job and was now home sick. It's Saturday and there's nothing going on here in the department. The Belgian who is supposed to be called Seminsky has since been transferred to the fourth floor and I now share a room with a stubborn provincial man of few words/ In spite of that I managed to befriend him/. He says he is Jewish and has worked on a kibbutz and seems to be obsessed with reading news from Israel, kosher food, the Sabbath and other Jewish customs. He can read and write Hebrew and during his stay at  the facility he spent all his time in concentration reading the Torah.

I had a pleasant conversation with a young ladylater that week. She has been here for about a week but apparently came straight into the open ward. I first saw her in the courtyard when I was smoking a cigarette under the canopy. She was reading a Kindle at the time. I told her about the confusing books I had seen and the very limited selection of books in the Amsterdam library. She is supposed to be Russian but speaks English with a British accent. She told me that she works for a bank and that she has been suicidal lately. She makes beautiful drawings of flowers, tulips and canal houses while I made quite wild sketches of football players. I asked her if she had read the book 'A short history of the tractor in the Ukraine'. A hilarious book that ultimately deals with the way in which a marriage should be consummated. Just now I saw Seminsky the Belgian who claims to be Ukrainian. I do not know what crazy is and how they tick so that is what I call him walking past in the hallway while I was sitting in one of the chairs in the hallway. Earlier this week I had emailed Nontas and he replied. I felt that the email really came from him. Sometimes I doubt whether the messages I read are authentic. So I can't be sure. He wrote to me that he was a 'thing' now, and that he is more spiritual in life and reads a lot of books. He also wrote that Anna Vissi, his idol, is dead now and that he killed her, but I think that was a joke.

KING OR QUEEN

.By now it was around noon and the sun had started to shine. I dared to go outside and take a walk through the city by myself. I walked across the Marnixplein in the direction of Westerpark and heard the usual cheering and honking that I am used to hearing on a Queen's Day in Amsterdam. I walked through the Westerstraat and I noticed that there were few young people to be seen. I joined in a bit and looked here and there at the displayed items that were there to be sold at the flea market but at the same time I felt a bit above it. I liked seeing that there were so many people and I didn't feel as embarrassed as I had earlier in the early morning when I longed to make contact with someone but at the same time was so afraid of being picked up or snapped at. Westerstraat was a sea of orange colours. I heard people cheering and singing and dancing. I felt like a stiff hick. I slowly walked through the Westerstraat and over the Noordermarkt and watched the cheering orange crowd but this year it was different than before. It was clearly less busy, I thought, but then again I hadn't been to Leidseplein. Slowly but surely I made my way towards Haarlemmerstraat. On my way I saw lines for improvised toilets, and I wasn't so afraid of the police I saw on my way at this time of day. I didn't know how to behave and wondered if my friends were drinking a beer somewhere nearby where we meet every year. I don't think he's in Amsterdam that often anymore. I walked along Spuistraat and didn't know what to do with myself. I was tired and at the same time I still felt like doing something and didn't really know where to go hunting on this day in Amsterdam. I walked to the W hotel in the Spuistraat. The W hotel is somewhat controversial because it is a former squat. The Spuistraat is known for squats and university buildings that have been converted into luxurious apartments and expensive hotels in recent years. This despite extensive protests and demonstrations around the Maagdenhuis, a building of the University of Amsterdam that is located opposite the current W hotel. The demonstrators could count on a lot of sympathy because there were, and are, many vacant buildings in the city and because university students also prefer not to study on distant campuses, which have also been built in recent years, such as the Science Park.

I walked into the W hotel building,and immediately took the elevator up, which leads to the lounge on the top floor, which also has a roof terrace attached to it, from where you have a nice view of the Royal Palace on Dam Square and the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. The lounge was not very busy and there were only a few tourists who were also trying to escape the crowd. I ordered an orange juice and wanted to go up to the roof terrace, but was stopped by one of the bar staff who told me that I was not allowed to go up there with a glass. He poured the juice into a plastic glass and I walked outside, to the smaller roof terrace on the side of the Royal Palace on Dam Square. I looked down at the party in the streets below, a beautiful view but it honestly did not do much for me at that moment. Beautiful moments in life are there to be shared with others, and when you are alone you simply cannot enjoy these kinds of highlights. I walked back inside and walked up to the other roof terrace, which was a bit bigger. My eye immediately fell on an attractive man sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of the terrace. He was there alone and told me that he was waiting for a friend who would take him for a walk through the city. I didn't dare ask why he was in a wheelchair, a rather large contraption, but I felt attracted to him. He told me that he was from Rotterdam and of Iranian descent. We had a pleasant conversation, including about all the complicated changes in the world that had become a mystery to me at that time in the bizarre city that Amsterdam had become in recent years. We had a pleasant conversation and I felt that there was a certain attraction between us. I suggested that we walk through the city together. In the end, we didn't do that. He gave me the name of his YouTube channel Wheel life which I 

I no longer use that language myself because I got the feeling that it only leads to stagnation, that nothing of real meaning is being said. For example, I think SF is just San Francisco and not 'sss… fuck' or something like that. Moreover, it is not clear to anyone what T is. My family keeps using it in text messages and it has been nagging at me for so long that I have decided that it is better not to speak in codes. I had understood that T is the language itself that can sometimes have a confusing palette of meanings. I also remember the debate between party leaders for the previous elections in which the politicians, including Mark Rutte, all looked a bit slicker and a bit taller and neater and I thought that was T. Initially, T was Tina for me, the name given to the drug crystal meth. And others seem to use it as a name for IS, which is also such a vague concept. IS means Islamic State, but it is related to the phenomenon of the same thinking, which happens in different places. That has to do with on I believe. The language with the codes or the concepts is also fluid because certain code words or names become less relevant, or new meanings are added to the concept. I ask almost daily if I can have another room, but that request is not answered. In any case, the room was cleaned today. I just spoke to D on the phone. He said that he is coming to visit on Monday. I am looking forward to that, but I wonder how I am going to get through the coming weekend. Hopefully someone will come to visit. The people in the clinic that I get along with well are generally on the fourth floor. The fourth floor of the clinic is the open ward. This means that the door to that department is open between eight in the morning and ten at night.

Last night I did not sleep again. I had been awake for two nights in a row. During the night after King's Day I met a man from Paris and he woke up on my couch. He had a North African appearance and had told me that he was Muslim. My thoughts were excruciatingly slow but I felt good despite my slowness. We had a long conversation that night. It seemed to me that he was lying about everything he said and that he was only playing a role. Lying is perhaps not the right word. He resembled my brother Co in a weird way but did not seem to recognize me. On the other hand there was some He seemed to say one thing and mean another. For example, I simultaneously gathered from his language that he was a virgin and that he was some kind of prostitute and that was very confusing. He was quite shocked when I told him that I was HIV positive and we talked about sexuality and risks and work and openness. It was a nice conversation but I cannot remember the content of it exactly. He told me that he was bisexual. He seemed to know everything about me. He had said that he would treat me to breakfast at a nearby cafe after we had slept. Since I was not tired, I sat next to him in a chair after which he slept on my sofa for a few more hours. I thought for a long time about tweets that I wanted to write about the conversation I had had with him. I asked him if he also wanted to think about a kind of summary. In the early morning we walked to cafe Broer. We sat outside on the terrace and both ordered a coffee and a croissant. I soon felt that I was getting new energy. He chatted with the staff of Cafe Broer and it seemed to be about me. I asked him if he wanted to come with me to the appointment that I had made with another friend from Paris who is a cartoonist that day. That was also the plan at first. I was happy that I had met him and in some strange way I thought that I had made a new friendship with someone that would last. We talked about going to Paris together. I asked if he did not want to stay a few more nights. He suddenly walked to the street during breakfast and stood there for a moment, while it was not clear what he was doing. After breakfast we walked through the Frederik Hendrik Plantsoen. He was going to meet a friend of his who came from Lebanon. I was initially going to go with him, but I had also arranged to meet the Parisian. Suddenly he told me he was leaving. We hadn’t exchanged numbers yet. I felt rotten. I had told him so many personal things about myself that night and confided in him. He wouldn’t give me his number. I suddenly felt infinitely lonely.

The supervisors, who are in a separate room on the ward, talk in a different way, which seems artificial and sometimes refers to me or the other residents. During a walk I met the neighbourhood police officers and had a chat with them about the situation at the facility. I also met up with a Turkish friend. He built my website at the time and we had been to a Kylie concert in Heineken Music Hall. He was on his way to Berlin. It has been warm and summery for weeks. This morning after breakfast I walked home and back through Westerpark. A new hotel has opened in the old city hall in the park. Since I started taking the medication I have been drowsy and numb again as I have often been. I plan to ask the doctor on Monday if I can switch back to the medicine I had before. It’s Better The Devil You Know, my first single bought by Kylie Minogue with whom I grew up in those days. The title has the meaning that It Is Better The Devil You Know Than The Devil You Don’t.

I spend these days in a kind of daze. I hardly know what I'm doing but I feel great. This evening I met two men from Latvia. They were both called Alex. They suddenly appeared out of nowhere on a bench in the Frederik Hendrikplatsoen. I sat down on the bench opposite. Both men could not talk. They looked a bit transparent. Later it would turn out that they wore multiple layers of clothing and spent most of their lives on the street. I had seen them appear slowly from the other side of the park and walked toward them as they slowly turned into an opaque state, W. A woman, who happened to be standing nearby at the time, whispered that they were half lives. I immediately felt a kind of crush on one of these men and we started talking. I took them to my house where we wrote in a notebook because they could not talk. The three of us spent the night in my bed. They seemed to have a positive feeling for me at the same time, but they also seemed to despise me. They kept talking about how it was possible that I was so important because they were so much smarter. We did it together and it felt good. We communicated with each other by writing in a dummy. I experienced a feeling of euphoria. She told me that they wanted to live and work here and that they wanted to get married. I felt so good that I wanted to marry both of them. The next morning we woke up. The half-lives were no longer flickering but looked healthy. My neighbor Corbin rang the doorbell and I walked a bit with him towards the end of the street. ‘There are Norwegians in them,’ he told me. Very absurd but I had also thought they looked like some NOrwegians that knew. All's well that ends well. While I was still waking up I saw that they were in panic. Their phone and their wallets were gone. That night I had opened the door because another man, who seemed to belong to them, had rung the doorbell. I had let him in but then immediately fell asleep. I can't remember anything about that third man. While I was helping them look I realized that I had also lost my wallet with my identity card card and bank card. The man who had rung the doorbell in the middle of the night had probably robbed us.The Norwegians I had seen in their faces were a likeness of a different kind than I had seen before. All was fine and no one knew nothing about the incident unfortunately because I had wanted to introduce these new friends I made to an acquaintance nearby. One of the Latvians was very handsome and he had slowly but surely loosened while sitting in the chair and finally pulled his tracks suits down a little. The other person, his best friend as of late the drew my attention and I went towards him to caress his leg and shoulder. He had a different kind of attraction to me and the contradictory feelings they seemed to have towards me, one of being one of them and sympathy but also one of how I had been doing such a terrible job at the thing I was doing. That thing whatever it was did not have any spectators as far as I knew.

My mother is dying. I would like to spare her a longer period of suffering. In addition to her crippling disease MS, she has a pressure sore on her tailbone that will not heal. She lies in an uncomfortable position, half on her side, in a bed in the small room in the nursing home for elderly people with dementia where she now lives and has not left her bed for the past few weeks. She can no longer move herself and only eats porridge that has to be fed to her. Because she has been averse to eating, which she has been for years, she weighs almost nothing. She often lies there crying softly. She is in a lot of pain and is given morphine and fentanyl, which makes her sleep or go into a state of hypnosis. Fortunately, this also reduces her pain. She has been lying like this for a month now. The nurses have placed a projector next to her bed that projects images of flowers and landscapes onto the ceiling while soothing piano music plays from the same device. The door is half open or ajar and every now and then a nurse walks in, or one of the ladies who live with her on the ward, who sometimes starts crying spontaneously. Since I have been home from my hospital stay I have visited her twice. The first time was with my brother, actually my half-brother, her other son. I felt like we were saying goodbye and if that had been the case I think that, under the circumstances, it might have been a nice goodbye. As far as that is possible. We sat on either side of her bed and chatted a bit, with each other and with her, about what was on our minds. My brother showed me the advertisement on Funda on his phone for the flat where she had lived for the past twenty years and I started to cry. The bathroom and toilet had been retiled and a new kitchen had been installed. The walls had been painted in a fresh colour. I reminded her of the good times we had had there on the weekends that I visited her and the holidays we had had in bungalow parks. 

Today I visited her again. This time I was alone. That was difficult because she hardly speaks. I fed her the porridge that the nurses had brought after we had put a bib on her. It took a long time before she had finished the bowl and I became a bit impatient. I asked her if she was afraid of death and she seemed to agree. So I told her that there might be a heaven. The subject has always been taboo and when I was with my brother it was not really discussed. So many questions were going through my head. About her funeral and about the music that should be played but I could not manage to ask her these kinds of questions. After an hour and a half I could not take it anymore and I walked to the station. The past month, since I returned from the clinic, I have probably been under the influence of speed to some extent for half of the time and I have drunk quite a lot of beer every day. This has become a big problem. The side effects of the antipsychotics are terrible and a few days after the last line of speed a nerve-wracking hell begins that never seems to end, so that I end up ordering more speed. I asked the outpatient team at the clinic for lorazepam but the last time I only got five and the doctor told me that I would have to do without it. It would be almost half an hour before the train would leave and in the kiosk in the station hall of the station in Roosendaal I bought, as I always did when I had visited her, a can of beer. The train journey seemed to last forever.

BLAST

The past few I have been infatuated by Bryan. An American flight attendant who works for Delta Airlines. I have met him three times now and we talk on the phone every day. It feels good to have made a new friend, even though he calls me his European lover. Bryan is married and lives with his husband in Seattle. I was busy whitewashing the ceiling when I received a message via Scruff, a dating app on my iPhone. Bryan was staying at the NH Hotel Noord on the Distelkade during a twenty four hour layover. In a straight line, that would be three kilometers but Amsterdam Noord is a bit hard to reach and it takes a ferry. Alas, a new friend is now very welcome. On the screen of my iPhone I saw an attractive red-haired man of forty five years old. That was in his stats. My house was a mess that week because of my painting work and all the furniture was on one side of the room. It had been a stressful experience. With great difficulty I managed to cover a different part of the house with plastic each time. I stood on a wobbly ladder for hours to cover the ceiling above my head with white plastic, meter by meter. It didn't go by itself. I cursed myself for ever taking on this job. 'Come and keep me company,' he wrote. 'We'll have wine together and I'll give you a bath.' He asked if I could buy wine on the way but I told him I could only afford two half-liter cans of beer from Dirk. If he wanted wine he would have to get it himself. It was late afternoon. I was getting a bit nervous but actually I was also looking forward to a drink with pleasant company in an anonymous hotel room. Besides, my own home is far too noisy. I put away the painting supplies and took a shower. The walk to Noord also involved taking a ferry. That made it complicated. I could take either the ferry at Central Station or the ferry at the Pontsteiger near the new construction at the Westelijke Houthavens and the latter was closer to me. As I walked through the Spaarndammerstraat we sent each other messages via WhatsApp. I would have to take my identity card with me and show it at the reception, after which I would be given a key to open the elevator and the door to my room. So it wouldn't be very anonymous. I didn't feel like identifying myself at the reception, but by then I was already halfway there and I decided to continue on my way. It was a beautiful day and I didn't have to wait long for the ferry. As I sailed to the other side of the IJ river bank I admired the architecture of the Ponsteiger building designed by Rem Koolhaas. The crossing didn't take long. I walked along the Distelkade and soon saw the hotel where I had an appointment with Bryan. I walked in and in the lounge they were speaking English. These were probably Bryan's colleagues. I felt a bit embarrassed. After showing my identity card, I took the elevator up to where his room was. I knocked on his door and Bryan opened it. It was a tense situation, but his smile made up for a lot. Bryan was an attractive man. The hotel room was soulless. We looked out the window and chatted a bit. I got the beers out of my backpack and quickly drank half of my beer. The phone rang a few times and while Bryan was talking to someone I thought about what we were going to do and what we were going to talk about. We started making out while he was still on the phone with a colleague and that turned us on. While we were doing it a thunderstorm broke out and lightning started. For the time being I didn't want to go home yet. We talked for a long time and the initial tension and coldness had disappeared after the lovemaking. Bryan told me that he was often in Amsterdam and that he would be staying here again in three days, so we agreed that I would visit him then. We talked for a long time about what was on our minds, such as the death of his brother, who was an addict and had committed suicide a few years ago. He showed me pictures of his brother on his iPhone and became emotional. He showed me pictures of his house and his husband and Seattle, where I had never been. Bryan was an asset and I decided to give him my full attention this time. We call each other on the days he is home. His girlfriend, a transsexual woman he calls 'Kippy', had died and that had made a deep impression on him. I didn't really know how to respond. Bryan talks a lot and is very sensitive. I had hardly told him about my mother and at this point I thought it was a bit inappropriate to start talking about it. Kippy was going to be buried as a man against her wishes and against the wishes of Kippy's group of friends. Kippy's friends were not invited to the funeral and Bryan was upset about it. The second time I visited Bryan in his hotel room I stayed the night at his place. That felt good. Plus the bed was a lot more comfortable than my own. We bought wine at the supermarket around the corner from the NH hotel in this lousy corner of Amsterdam North and ate deli food and salads from America that Bryan had brought in a separate suitcase with cool packs. Bryan was of Irish descent and somewhat of the type I had missed talking to so I was immediately attracted to him. As is or has become custom in this online fast food dating we did it doddystyle in the hotel room. He took me while I bent over the table in the small and cramped room with his suitcases, several of them since he bought all food and beverages from American groceries on every flight. That being besides the point, I had not ever I think never had an American Irish man slide his fat cock slowly in my ass as the lube eased this entrance, the first one in quite some time and it felt so good. With the unwanted education and advice and strong warnings on safe sex there was the certainty that one or as it turned out both of us were undetectable and this easy-going ride I had been missing. When Bryan came inside me after pushing his tool in and out of me there was a lightning burst that could not have been timed better. The thunderstorm and light burst down from the darkening sky at the same time as his ejaculation. Not the first time in my life this had happened. We soon fell asleep. The alarm went off at six in the morning. Bryan had an early flight from Amsterdam to Seattle and would be picked up by the vans that would take him and his colleagues to the airport. I walked again along Distelkade to the ferry across the IJ. The route was familiar to me by now. Fortunately, there was already a ferry in the direction of the Pontsteiger at this time and I only had to wait ten minutes. I felt exhausted and tense, side effects of the medication that I still receive. The annoying thing about that is that I never know for sure when my mood is normal and when I am so deadly tired and tense that I can do nothing and cannot say a word. It was dark and while I was waiting for the ferry at the Distelkade I suddenly felt intensely lonely. That is my life. A few hours of tension every now and then and eventually being on my own again. I made my way through the construction work that was taking place in the western harbour area and was soon home. That same morning at eleven o'clock I had an appointment at a volunteer agency in Slotervaart. I could do volunteer work with a mobile team that works with green areas. Only the travel expenses would be reimbursed. But I could follow a program at this agency with courses (such as using a brush cutter) to reduce my distance to the labour market. I actually have little ambition to work in green areas. How did I end up here again? I made an appointment to meet the supervisor of the team in Osdorp, where I would be working for two or three days and had to be there at eight in the morning. It was a rather unglamorous prospect and I didn't really know how to tell my new, big American boyfriend that I would be working in the parks department. Bryan and I talk on WhatsApp every day. It's free and the connection is good. The third date we had, again in his hotel room at the NH Hotel in Amsterdam, was less successful. I felt depressed and could hardly talk. I drank all the wine within twenty minutes and left him after only half an hour. Today was just not possible. Like on many days it just isn't possible. I haven’t seen Bryan for the past few days but we’ve spoken daily on the phone. Maybe I got carried away again. Bryan is funny and sensitive and can talk for hours. His next flight is to Salt Lake City. And next week I’ll probably be working in landscaping.

I started to cry when I was sitting next to her. Earlier this week. My mother had still not left her bed in the nursing home. She lies there staring into space all day and sleeps a lot. I saw that she had tears in her eyes. I was glad that I could cry. I don't know what it feels like to be so close to death, although in recent years I have often wished that I didn't have to live this life anymore. She doesn't seem to be in much pain anymore, but has been lying on her side in bed for almost two months now to protect her wounds. She hardly talks, but she still has a world of experience. I asked her carefully about her wishes for her funeral, but she answered something like she didn't want to talk about it. According to the nurses, she has indicated several times that she doesn't want to do it this way anymore. I tried to tell her about my week, but the words didn't come naturally. The nurse told me that she had eaten some ragout and some soup. Although that was progress after eating only porridge and supplementary food for such a long time, I could see that she had lost even more weight. She didn't have her dentures in and I found it hard to see her lying there like that. I had also arranged to meet my half brother that day. He was on leave from work for a dredging project in Bangladesh, and had spent three days in Singapore afterwards. He works for six weeks and then has six weeks leave. I had been alone with my mother in her room for an hour and it felt like a relief when he came in. I got us coffee from the nurses in the group room and also one with a straw which I gave to my mother while my brother told me about his work and his adventures in Singapore. He had brought an amulet for her that she could wear around her neck and that would have a beneficial effect on her health. We stayed with her for another hour but as I talked to my brother I almost fell asleep so we said goodbye and made our way out again by following a complicated route through the corridors of the nursing home. Andre lives just opposite, in a new housing estate. He had bought a new car, a Nissan Qashqai, a big shiny black vehicle. I had already suggested to him that morning when I was on the train, that after visiting my mother we should go to dad's grave. He is buried in a cemetery in Bergen op Zoom in a wooded area. My parents were together for five years. They had a happy marriage for only a short time. The marriage could not withstand my father's drinking and infidelity and my mother's illness, which manifested itself during the period when she was pregnant with me and slowly deteriorated. Dad was unlucky in that he was married to a woman with an severe illness that could maybe not make all marriages last.  We took the same shortcut that my father always took when he drove from Roosendaal to Bergen op Zoom and after about twenty minutes we arrived at the cemetery. On the way we had bought two heather plants at a flower shop which we planted in the ground at the grave once we arrived at the grave. The grave consists of a robust, solid wooden cross with the ends shaped like arrows. I had chosen the letters on the grave 'Hans, Johannes Mussche, 24 August 1944 - 25 December 2002 at a letter shop in Amsterdam, but Andre replaced them last year with an engraved metal plate because the wood under the loose letters had started to rot. We stood at the grave and I told my brother that I had missed my father more in the past few years than in the period immediately after his death. I was still a young adult then, had just started a relationship with my first boyfriend and had less contact with him at this age and had just moved to Amsterdam. After the divorce I visited my father every Saturday. These visits followed a fixed ritual. He would pick me up in the car and drive to his house, where we would drink coffee with Andre and chat and read the newspapers. Andre was in the navy in those years and my father had also always worked in shipping. Initially at sea on fruit boats and later in inland shipping. He worked during the marriage to my mother and in the years thereafter for Transol, an oil company, but sailed less often himself in those years, because he maintained contacts with inspectors and insurers and had to ensure that the ships continued to sail without defects. We often heard him shouting and swearing on the telephone in broken German as only he could. After we had had coffee in his modestly furnished and always a bit dirty house, we drove to the center of Roosendaal to do some shopping at the market and have lunch in the lunchroom. That was always quite an experience. At the market, he was always chatting extensively and pleasantly with the market vendors. Dad was deaf as a doornail and had a loud voice so that everyone could listen in. The fishmonger, the cheesemonger, the greengrocer, we had a fixed route that we never deviated from. The woman with whom Dad had a live-apart relationship, and who my brother and sister and I hardly ever saw because she didn't want us to, Jessie, was a posh and difficult lady and Dad wore a beret and a woolen coat in those years. After we had bought the groceries, things really got cozy, because then we went to a lunchroom and Dad drank the first beers of that particular Saturday. To Bar Le Duc or Cremerie Jacques. He started talking even louder while he taught me fractions by cutting croquettes in half and quarters, or told me other stories. Mostly about his life as a seafarer, his early years. Dad had stopped working before he was fifty because of his health. He was overwrought and had liver disease. We stood by the grave for a while and for the second time today I started to cry. Dad died shortly after I met my first boyfriend. I never told him about my homosexuality but he made occasional comments that showed he knew about it too. I took my tall and very handsome Norwegian boyfriend to the funeral and he suddenly appeared as a striking figure when the children carried the coffin and screwed it shut, which was done by the spouses of the children too which meant that it had to include my boyfriend in the preparations that were made by my siblings. This meant I had an immediate coming-out to both families. My aunts were audibly gossiping about him during the funeral and I was glad that it was now clear to everyone. I wish he had known my father, my boyfriend and I wish my father had been alive during the years I was with him, because I had been intensely happy and successful during those years. My brother and I walked further through the cemetery. Dad is buried as a Protestant in a Catholic cemetery. There is a wooded corner in that cemetery for pagans and Protestants that is actually more beautiful than the space where the Catholic graves are located where there is no vegetation. We walked to a forest path and went for a walk. Suddenly I remembered that I had agreed to call my psychiatrist. I had been trying to call her all week. I wanted to tell her that I am planning to refuse the medication. Or at least to ask if she can prescribe Lorazepam because I am panicking half the time and running into walls. But it was almost five o'clock. I called the the outpatient team where I am being treated, but my iPhone battery was empty. I asked my brother if I could call with his phone, but he made it difficult and wanted to turn off the caller ID first. We started arguing again and he said he was tired of getting phone calls from the mental facility. We were quiet in the car. He asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. I had already thought that would be nice. He had cooked a fantastic meal. He had apparently counted on me because he had two chicken legs in the house and also made a vegetable dish with egg and bean sprouts and a nasi where the rice was replaced by pieces of cauliflower because he eats fewer carbohydrates due to his diet. Fortunately, the argument did not last long. Yesterday I woke up again with an intense panicky feeling that is actually unbearable. I was at Dirk's before nine o'clock to buy two six-packs of the cheapest beer brand to escape this feeling. After quickly drinking two cans it was still no better. I felt like a wreck. I went to bed but was so agitated that I had to move but also too exhausted to move. I didn't know what to do with myself. I snorted a line of speed and immediately felt a sense of relief. I would regret this later but at this moment there was really no other way. The rest of the day I still felt a bit nervous and tense but I got through the day and spent a large part of it drawing. Last night I couldn't sleep. I lay awake in my bed. This morning I was supposed to pick up my depot with medication from Mentrum but I decided to call Liesbeth early in the morning and tell her that I would refuse the medication. It is unbearable. The side effects are exhausting. I am convinced that I do not have a mental illness and had spent the entire night trying to prepare how I would convince her of that.

FLASHBACK

It was my first time in Athens. All the news about the crisis had made me curious about what it was like there. I posted pictures of the street, of Syntagma Square and of Ilias, the neighborhood where Nondas lived, about fifteen kilometers from the Acropolis. He had been there before and didn't think it was that special. He thought all the archaeological excavations near Gazi were just old junk. He dreamed of New York and skyscrapers. We had been to the Village together. A mall with a large cinema based on the American model. The places we went to were always about ten or fifteen kilometres from his apartment so every day we cruised in Nondas his car through the city which was magic. Athens is beautiful since it has the look and feel of being in the MIddle East, although I have never been there. We used the car but there is also a good underground system in this vast city with views of Mount Olympus everywhere. Gazi was a place he had been to often. It is an area that was very hip and closer to the Acropolis. It can be compared to the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam which is also an old gas factory area turned cultural centre. There is a gas holder, a bit smaller than the gas factory but the catering industry that was there is lively and gay-friendly but there were also small bazookas nearby. These are small stages where Greek artists give concerts every evening for a period of months, usually during the summer. There are also large bazookas and a surprising number of theatres and concert halls in the city. We had already been to Sakis Rouvas and my boyfriend was familiar with bazookas because he had been going to Anna Vissi concerts every night for a long time. She and Madonna were his goddesses. That morning I had taken the newspaper with me on the flight from Amsterdam and had read on the plane, again, that today would be a decisive day for Greece and the country’s departure from the Eurozone, something that would throw all existing systems of the world into mayhem. Today we would finally go to the Acropolis. But first we drank iced coffee on a terrace near the Acropolis with a view of the Pantheon, which was spectacular on this sky-blue day. A view that dominates the city centre for miles around. Nondas told me that Herod Atticus was actually much more beautiful. It is an open-air theatre in the classical Greek style where Greek greats such as Haris Alexiou gave performances. I had already understood that the concert and the theatre play and its pavilions or architecture are an important part of the culture in Greece. There are also large bazookas and a surprising number of theatres and concert halls in the city. We had already been to Sakis Rouvas and my boyfriend was familiar with bazookas because he had been going to Anna Vissi concerts every night for a long time. She and Madonna were his goddesses. I had taken the Volkskrant with me from Amsterdam that morning and had read on the plane, again, that today would be a decisive day for Greece and the country’s departure from the Eurozone, something that would throw all existing systems of the world into mayhem. Today we would finally go to the Acropolis. But first we had iced coffee on a terrace near the Acropolis with a view of the Pantheon, which was spectacular on this sky-blue day. A view that dominates the city centre for miles around. Nondas told me that Herod Atticus was actually much more beautiful. It is an open-air theatre in the classical Greek style where Greek greats such as Haris Alexiou gave performances. I had already understood that the concert in Greece was an important part of the culture. Nondas told me that greats like Haris Alexiou, Mikos Theodoriakos, Nana Mouskouri and older classical Greek musicians were allowed to perform there, but that Anna Vissi, despite her enormous discography that she had had since the seventies, was not allowed to perform there. Because she was too much of a pop culture musician. Not artistic or classical enough for such a sacred place as Herod Atticus. Something like that. She would later in her life with a decades spanning career give in to popular demand and perform in Herod Attic. This performance can be found on YOuTube. First we had iced coffee on a terrace near the Acropolis with a view of the Pantheon, which was spectacular on this sky-blue day. A view that dominates the city center for miles around. Nondas told me that Herod Atticus was actually much more beautiful. It is an open-air theater in the classical Greek style where Greek greats like Haris Alexiou gave performances. I had already understood that the concert was an important part of the culture in Greece. Nondas told me that greats like Haris Alexiou, Mikos Theodoriakos, Nana Mouskouri and older, classical Greek musicians were allowed to perform there, but that Anna Vissi, despite her enormous discography that she had had since the seventies, was not allowed to perform there. Because she was too much pop. Not artistic enough. Something like that. Later I thought that Anna herself might have been too modest for it, because I now know that she is so subtle. There on that terrace I had only heard 1 song once and I liked it. I believe it was her last hit, ‘Ágapi Ine Esi’, which would later become very meaningful to me, after Nondas had long since disappeared from the picture. I had already learned a lot about Greek culture and that was also because I now did my shopping at Mitsos, a delicatessen on Hugo de Grootplein, where I spoke to the owner Kyriaki, which means Saturday, and his Dutch wife. I bought dolmades, gyros or ouzo there. (ed. Check out that other Greek wine) I was also out of the picture on that sunny Monday morning, because I posted the photo of the view of the Parthenon and the location of the cafe where we drank iced coffee on Foursquare and Facebook. There was still no sign of a crisis. There was a line of tourists for the walk to the area where the ruins of the former city-state stood on top of the mountain that the Rijksmuseum would be jealous of. The Herod Atticus was beautiful to see. Once I arrived at the parthenon on top of the mountain, tears came to my eyes. For a moment I felt like ‘King of everything’, to quote Boy George.

BARE IN MIND

The word is out. B has been taking the world by storm as much as A has. Or Cinderella. If this means nothing to you. Try and talk to those living in a seperated reality. A reality with 68 perspectives on an age old practice in a place thay is dominated by codes and numbers and combinations of those.Today I have to appear before a judge and an audience of witnessess at the Court of Justice in Amsterdam. A matter of privacyThe matter being: B, and general confusion. Could this get any juicier? First of all the B stands for, or used to stand for the rather obscure act of condomless anal sex between men called barebacking, in spite of the risks of contracting HIV. For the latter, bare sex had become a safe practice for many since the availability of antiretroviral medication (ART) for men and women, that made the risk of transmitting the syndrome negligible and lower than those with a negative status, all this due to the effect of thid medication causing the viral load to be undetectable and the virus to be untransmittable or, as some call it u=u which stands for undetectable is untransmittable. A fact proven by decades of scientific data and quantitative research made during the times before the big L, in this case standing for lies, and confusion to boot. Huh? Oh, uh huh... something like that, we just remember. IT happened and we happened to be under it's radar being gay men, because of our social connections and opportunities to match those to our preferences.

There are a bunch of incidents and developments that define today's reality. These include our own online behaviour. Globalisation, geopolitics becoming part of the public domain in everyday life, exploration of the hidden space, IT and automation and new life, to name but a few. Media was largely taken over by the conglomerates and their online formulas, coloured by the influence of nationalities and their politics, causing more equality globally. Depending on the tint of your glasses, it all could boil down to this as much as it coild to that, but whose law is it anyway and which bubble or bible do we need to follow up with? Bear in mind that the formerly exclusively gay act of sodomy had suddenly become a new pastime with the more unexperienced objects of desire being straight and bisexual men including those of uniformed professions. New life had happened, gender neutrality also, and international relations and politics were all about sex now, that's why! Politics became a blur whilst members of national and international institutions became involved in the somewhat perverted game of trade and commerce involving pets, secretive sex, human trafficking, tribalism and new life. For the sake of peace even. Because these men and women were not exactly fighting with or killing each other. Everyone got along just fine. The prospect of peace and love was too good to be true, especially with new exotic and politically loaded destinations being in sight and connections made through apps like Grindr and Scruff offering a sure fire succes on the market of meat. Geopolitics and sex became intertwined as much as automation and transport. The airplane crash of the Russian MH-17 airplane with passengers from the Netherlands as well as Swiss hiv researchers became a hype in media as well as the emerging status of the Arabic world and in particular the Gulf states in the Middle East as giant new planes flew from hub to hub, as always with an excited new generation of consumers inside.The internet revolution had broughy cultures closer together and emancipated women and men in these cultures that were able to travel or demanded to do so. Homosexuality, intersexuality and binary gender roles became part of their cultures as much as it had for us.

Because the media has brought little relevant news in recent years and has made confusing articles and broadcasts with fake news and propaganda, the dating apps have started to function as a source of news and insights, however biased or meaningless these may be in many cases. In Amsterdam, many men who are not positive use PREP, a daily dose of Truvada, a drug that is also prescribed in a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs or ART for those with positive status at one point confirmed by blood test.. As a result, they run little or no risk of becoming infected with the syndrome. That is quite a feat. The drugs are expensive and have ushered in a new period of total promiscuity that has been criticized a lot. At the same time, Islamic men have been emancipated in their own curious way since the Arab revolution or the Facebook revolution and they too are increasingly cruising on dating apps and chat rooms to have sex with another man but this is a very sensitive issue. In Amsterdam, Islamic and also black men often ask for payment for a sex date and I understand the reasoning in this that makes it less difficult for them. They have in their mindset that they see it as a means of earning money rather than doing if for enjoyment or out of hedonism. However, the distance between the gay community as I know it and the Islamic world is still very large and it is a kind of love-hate relationship in which hate still seems to prevail. Incidentally, my experience with Islamic men from that wild period is that they never use a condom and don't even bring it up. At the moment, homosexuals and their promiscuous party behavior and crazy sex lives are not in fashion in a large part of the world. Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is outspokenly homophobic and Trump his stance has been multidirectional. Right-wing governments and downright fascist language sometimes dominate the debate in the United States as well. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to live in a dictatorship, but unbridled capitalism, globalization and neo-liberalism have also shown their ugliest side in recent years. Refugees who traveled from North Africa to Europe on organized tours and Vodafone t-shirts in a flourishing refugee industry that has cost many lives have started to function as objects for profit and growth for a better life without actually having a future perspective. Advances in medical science can give, especially men, strangely enough, a younger and brighter appearance. The lives of elderly people in aging Western countries can be extended indefinitely with inhumane procedures such as the Uro-stomy, which has also turned health care into an industry in which the dirty work is increasingly outsourced to Eastern European countries. While I was constantly refreshing the grid in which the profile pictures of grindr can be seen, I put the laptop on the side table in front of the couch and surfed to gaymaletube.com. On the home page you can find the categories in which the short films of poor quality are arranged. Extreme, Barebacking (anal sex without a condom), Black, Twinks, Hunks, Amateur, Torture, Arab, Latino, Humuliation, Interracuial etc. Is pornography a new form of slavery. I have now seen thousands of these kinds of films and thumbnailing or scanning through hundreds of previews has both disturbed and corrected my aesthetics and this has made me colourblind when it comes to my choices in sexual partners.  The gaymaletube.com offer is constantly updated and every week there are many new movies. But in the meantime I have seen so much that I mainly spend my time endlessly scrolling through the pages of movies without result because I have already seen the movies, because they are too short, or because the preview is not to my liking. But lately there is more going on. The bodies of the porn stars and amateurs look different. The penises look artificial and are disproportionately large compared to the often slender bodies of the young men. The actors often look bored and moan fake and acted, which makes you feel uncomfortable as a viewer. The group sex and barebacking scenes in the movies have become truly beastly and the actors have their bodies largely or completely covered with tattoos that have so many layers and nuances in the image that the tattoo on the bodies seems to have been photoshopped. Many of the videos have a sinister feel to them and the videos that had gotten me in the mood in the past are no longer available. In the meantime I kept sending messages via grindr and scruff even though I already knew it wouldn't lead to a meeting. I logged back into grindr and changed my profile name to Beer-now-1052, that number is my postal code.

So, we're making movies now? Today I have to appear in court for a trial that sets me apart as a public example with a system of observation of governmental institutions and mental health cae following my every move since I had become positive and a very public debate of my actions had entailed in the Netherlands. An administration of justice and several torturous hospitalisations in mental health facilities and forced debilitating medication had made one thing clear. It is best to stay on the straight path or,  to quote Madonna 'don't be silly puy a condom on your willie.' The interference of local health care professionals and the international tap situation that I had to put up with was inhumane, whilst my own professional life had been destroyed partly due to the strain and stress of becoming a focal point for being treated as a criminal with constant taps, corrections and visual keys. The problem was, i had become so poor and drained by all this negative attention and onhoing privacy invssions, I had become reclusive and unemployed trying to shy away from being a player in a game I had no place in anymore. Apart from becoming an observer myself of the horror that was seeing the same people from those institutions and health facilities in those very same B movies I had been trying to avoid, with a different face and in some cases with a different race. I live to tell. And I sure never been crazy.

Because the media has brought little relevant news in recent years and has made confusing articles and broadcasts with fake news and propaganda, the dating apps have started to function as a source of news and insights, however biased or meaningless these may be in many cases. In Amsterdam, many men who are not positive use PREP, a daily dose of Truvada, a drug that is also prescribed in a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs or ART for those with positive status at one point confirmed by blood test.. As a result, they run little or no risk of becoming infected with the syndrome. That is quite a feat. The drugs are expensive and have ushered in a new period of total promiscuity that has been criticized a lot. At the same time, Islamic men have been emancipated in their own curious way since the Arab revolution or the Facebook revolution and they too are increasingly cruising on dating apps and chat rooms to have sex with another man but this is a very sensitive issue. In Amsterdam, Islamic and also black men often ask for payment for a sex date and I understand the reasoning in this that makes it less difficult for them. They have in their mindset that they see it as a means of earning money rather than doing if for enjoyment or out of hedonism. However, the distance between the gay community as I know it and the Islamic world is still very large and it is a kind of love-hate relationship in which hate still seems to prevail. Incidentally, my experience with Islamic men from that wild period is that they never use a condom and don't even bring it up. At the moment, homosexuals and their promiscuous party behavior and crazy sex lives are not in fashion in a large part of the world. Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is outspokenly homophobic and Trump his stance has been multidirectional. Right-wing governments and downright fascist language sometimes dominate the debate in the United States as well. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to live in a dictatorship, but unbridled capitalism, globalization and neo-liberalism have also shown their ugliest side in recent years. Refugees who traveled from North Africa to Europe on organized tours and Vodafone t-shirts in a flourishing refugee industry that has cost many lives have started to function as objects for profit and growth for a better life without actually having a future perspective. Advances in medical science can give, especially men, strangely enough, a younger and brighter appearance. The lives of elderly people in aging Western countries can be extended indefinitely with inhumane procedures such as the Uro-stomy, which has also turned health care into an industry in which the dirty work is increasingly outsourced to Eastern European countries. While I was constantly refreshing the grid in which the profile pictures of grindr can be seen, I put the laptop on the side table in front of the couch and surfed to gaymaletube.com. On the home page you can find the categories in which the short films of poor quality are arranged. Extreme, Barebacking (anal sex without a condom), Black, Twinks, Hunks, Amateur, Torture, Arab, Latino, Humuliation, Interracuial etc. Is pornography a new form of slavery. I have now seen thousands of these kinds of films and thumbnailing or scanning through hundreds of previews has both disturbed and corrected my aesthetics and this has made me colourblind when it comes to my choices in sexual partners.  The gaymaletube.com offer is constantly updated and every week there are many new movies. But in the meantime I have seen so much that I mainly spend my time endlessly scrolling through the pages of movies without result because I have already seen the movies, because they are too short, or because the preview is not to my liking. But lately there is more going on. The bodies of the porn stars and amateurs look different. The penises look artificial and are disproportionately large compared to the often slender bodies of the young men. The actors often look bored and moan fake and acted, which makes you feel uncomfortable as a viewer. The group sex and barebacking scenes in the movies have become truly beastly and the actors have their bodies largely or completely covered with tattoos that have so many layers and nuances in the image that the tattoo on the bodies seems to have been photoshopped. Many of the videos have a sinister feel to them and the videos that had gotten me in the mood in the past are no longer available. In the meantime I kept sending messages via grindr and scruff even though I already knew it wouldn't lead to a meeting. I logged back into grindr and changed my profile name to Beer-now-1052, that number is my postal code.

OSDORP

Yesterday I started a volunteer job. I had already been to an employment agency twice for interviews. It was supposed to be about green maintenance in Osdorp. Clothes were supposed to be ordered for me and I met the supervisor, a friendly older man who supervises the team in Osdorp. I had to start at a quarter past eight in the morning. I would get a reimbursement for the travel expenses, but the journey by tram or bus was complicated and I would have to change somewhere that I didn't feel like doing. So I went with my new racing bike. When I left at half past seven it was still dark. Fortunately I felt reasonably energetic today. On Google maps I had seen that it was about eight kilometers by bike from my house on Fagelstraat. I arrived at the office on Osdorper Ban from where the green maintenance and the caretakership of a number of buildings in Osdorp are provided. The abbreviation BBNR was on the facade, which stands for Buurt Beheerbedrijf Nieuw Reimerswaal. Nieuw Reimerswaal is a neighborhood in the Osdorp district. Frenk was already there and showed me where the coffee was. There was another room for volunteers where I sat down at the table. There sat Irfan, a Turkish immigrant who was a bit older than me. We sat together silently at the round table while we drank coffee. In the meantime, a few ladies came in and took places behind the computers in the room where Frenk was sitting. Around half past eight I went outside with Irfan and the supervisor. The clothes that were supposed to be ordered for me had not yet been delivered. But Frenk gave me a much too big and used coat and a used pair of work shoes. There were no trousers yet. We first walked to an apartment building that was around the corner to get rakes, a few brooms and a wheelbarrow from the caretaker's room and then we walked with the tools in the direction of another apartment building. When we got there we saw that in that apartment two apartments that were above the communal garden where we were going to weed had burned down. There was no one to be seen on the street yet. Osdorp is a bleak neighbourhood on the edge of the city that was for the most part built in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. In the apartment building where we had arrived there was a satellite dish on the balcony of almost every apartment and in the apartment buildings around us we saw that it was no different. There was not a soul to be seen on the street. The supervisor pointed out a park where we would have to remove the weeds and prune a plant, while he himself would remove the grass that had grown between the tiles along the apartment building with a brush cutter. After I had removed the weeds in the bushes under the burnt-out apartments, the man who lives in the house under the two burnt-out apartments came to the balcony to shout something to my supervisor. The two apparently knew each other. The noise of the brush cutter had woken him up. He was about forty five years old. He had a somewhat unkempt appearance and was smoking a cigarette. He told me that a fire had broken out that night on the balcony above his apartment and that the people who lived there had gone to a hotel after the fire had been put out. He spoke with a flat Amsterdam accent. In the meantime, I continued sweeping the weeds that Frenk had removed with the brush cutter on the pavement that runs alongside the building. Irfan was busy removing weeds in another place. Next to the apartment building is also a vegetable garden where around that time two ladies wearing headscarves had arrived to work on the small piece of land that had been assigned to them. By now it was almost half past ten. There was still hardly anyone to be found on the street, except for a few construction workers who were working in the apartment buildings surrounding us, which were largely covered in scaffolding. It was coffee break and we walked back to the office of the neighbourhood managers with the wheelbarrow and the tools. I sat down at the same table in the volunteer room where I had been that morning and initially sat silently opposite Irfan. In the meantime I listened to the phone conversations that the supervisor his colleagues were having in the room next to us. I asked Irfan some questions but his Dutch was poor. I understood from him that he lived in Slotermeer and that he thought it was ridiculous that we were working for nothing. I actually agreed with him. After we had drunk coffee we walked back to the apartment building where we were working to finish the job. It was still quite hard work to sweep the weeds that Frenk had cut along a footpath that was next to the apartment building and I noticed that my condition was bad. Soon it was lunch break. Irfan went home because he works half days so I sat alone at the table eating sandwiches with cheese while I read the news on my iPhone. After the break was over I walked with Frenk back in the direction of the place where we had worked that morning. At a number of partly underground waste containers that were along the street there was an enormous amount of waste on the sidewalk next to the overflowing waste containers. There was furniture, boxes, plastic items and packaging from Ikea that indicated that someone had moved in somewhere nearby. We separated the cardboard and plastic and took them to nearby containers where there was still room. In the meantime, a young man came to put two garbage bags with the other waste on the street. Frenk pointed out to him that he could only put the waste on the designated workday at a collection point for bulky waste. The man only spoke English. He told us that the apartment building next to us was completely empty. The building was covered in scaffolding and was being renovated at the time. We only saw construction workers walking around the neighborhood. The neighborhood seemed gloomy and deserted. The young man walked out into the street to get into a car that had pulled up and drove away. Frenk and I continued to take away the cardboard, which we took in several wheelbarrows to a garbage container further away. In the meantime, a garbage truck had pulled up. There would be no need to take the remaining trash that was on the sidewalk to the dump. The garbage truck would use a crane to remove the trash from the sidewalk and throw it into the garbage truck. Not long after that, my workday was over.

WOERDEN

This morning I took the sprinter train to Woerden. About an hour later I arrived at his house, a large and high industrial hall with space for a house, a swimming pool, cars and offices. We were sitting opposite each other at the table. I really had nothing to say today and felt rotten. The proposal is that I pay three hundred and fifty euros rent per month. That is less than I am paying now. I bought the house in 2005 for 124,500 and took out a mortgage of 135,000 euros. A life insurance policy should pay out about 10,000 euros when I sell the house. Together with the equity in the house, this would mean that I would probably be completely out of debt, which is about forty thousand euros. It would also mean that I could go back to work and lead a more normal life. I may have used my poverty as an excuse to do nothing, to neglect myself and to fill my days with drinking, snorting and smoking. There should be a turning point now. In the ten years that I worked as an illustrator I often worked until late at night but once I had a number of regular clients and I started earning an astonishing amount. What I did was constantly share everything I did on Facebook and Twitter and brag about every new publication with a blog post. It turned me on and the illusion that I had made it made me happy. My Twitter feed about that period was so embarrassing to read a year or two ago that I deleted it completely. Now I long for my busy and eventful years every day. My last Macbook Pro broke down a few months ago. All digital files of the work I made during the ten years I worked as an illustrator are lost for now. All photos too. Perhaps symbolic of a life I am leaving behind. I don't know if I can start over again with setting up a modest design practice. I was just messing around in those years and I don't know if I could get away with that now. I have become a lazy bum with all kinds of ailments and thinking about the future scares me. I told D that I really appreciate him buying my house and renting it to me but at the same time I didn't feel anything about it. I simply don't know what the right decisions are anymore and often leave it to others these days. I also don’t feel completely comfortable with the fact that I made him buy a run-down shack that is actually very difficult to sell and would not be a popular object on the housing market in Amsterdam. A few hours later I was back in the sprinter on my way home. Once I got home I opened a beer and put on a series on Netflix. It was only three o’clock. I still felt intensely gloomy and didn’t know what to do with myself. With one eye I tried to keep up with the television series on Netflix but I actually found Grindr on my iPhone more interesting. The vague and lonely feeling that I would like to meet someone and maybe mess around a bit and that I would want to do that right now dominated my thoughts.  

I am now seven years positive and counting. By using antiretroviral therapy my viral load has been zero as a constant since I have three to four consultations per year at the hospital. During the week before the consultation there is a blood test alternating between a grote beurt and kleine beurt which means major service and minor service as people with cars have. I started with antiretroviral drugs a few months after getting infected because I remember the primary infection because I went through a week of fever and swollen glands the size of a small potato. I knew it had to come to this and had been foolish to think I would escape this dance. When the MD… hang on I knew this of course, told me that I would soon reach the undetectable state in which contaminating others is not a risk anymore, let alone the fear of being contaminated with this syndrome I started to think of being positive as a kind of liberation. 

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Today I didn't do much. I'm feeling better now. The medication seems to have finally left my system. The panicky feeling that was unbearable has now disappeared. Yesterday I woke up with a sore throat and I've had a flu-like feeling the past few days, but despite that I feel normal again for the first time in six months. On Tuesday I worked in Osdorp again. It was raining very hard that morning so I took the tram. First line 5 to the Rozengracht and then line 17 to the Baden Powellweg stop in Osdorp. From there it's only a few minutes' walk to the office where we have to be at a quarter past eight. That day I worked with Cham, an immigrant from Eritrea. I had worked with him once last week. He told me that he had served in the army for 13 years in Eritrea and Sudan and showed me the scars on his hands that were supposedly made by bullets. He now speaks Dutch quite well and goes to school a few days a week and does volunteer work the other days. Because it was raining we didn't work outside that morning. We walked to a nearby apartment building to clear out a storage space in the parking garage. There was also a motorcycle that was too heavy to lift and therefore had to be dismantled first. That seemed like an impossible task to me, but after randomly turning some bolts, part after part came loose and eventually the motorcycle, the heaviest part. The parts were then easy to take to the dump. That afternoon we dug up and raked a vegetable garden and dug up the carrots, cabbages, beets and peppers that were growing there. I took some vegetables home with me but have been eating pizza from Dirk's the past few days. Yesterday and today I have mainly stayed indoors and have been in bed a lot. Tonight I went to the STD clinic to get tested because I thought the throat infection I have could be an STD. Last Saturday, after chatting endlessly on Grindr, I ended up in the gay sauna and stayed there until the next morning. Among other things, I met Johannes, a very attractive young man with rock-hard abs from Kleve in Germany. We kissed and gave each other blow jobs in one of the designated cabins in the sauna. Afterwards I asked him if he wanted something to drink and we talked for a long time, mainly about his ex-boyfriend. I regret not asking for his number. I spent the rest of the night walking along the cabins and sitting in the smoking area or in the lounge. Every now and then I went to the steam bath or to the darkroom or sat in the hot tub. It was a special night. In the darkroom I saw moving body parts around me that appeared and then seemed to disappear again as if in a floating dance in the sultry, smoky room. I saw dicks like you see in porn movies up close and androgynous men who had both masculine and feminine features who spoke to each other in a strange abstract language. These young men were so beautiful that I could not take my eyes off them. But there was something else about them that intrigued me. I saw strange scenes that I couldn't get enough of but I couldn't fully become part of it so I stayed silent and watched it all from a safe distance to join the anonymous happening in the darkroom again a little later. It was indescribable. On Sunday I was exhausted. I hadn't slept for two nights in a row. Yesterday I took out a membership at a gym. The gym is called TrainMore and is located near Dam Square. It is a nice and fairly large gym. Mainly boys and men who are younger than me train there. The membership costs 29 euros per month but for every time you go to the gym you get a 1 euro discount on that amount, so if you go to the gym every day of the month it would be free. I don't know if it was a wise decision. Today I was there for a while and I was done after five minutes. I was tired and exhausted and felt old and tired.

The past weekend was boring and dull. I felt tired and exhausted and went to bed early in the evening. Fortunately, there were a few memorable moments. On Friday afternoon I went to see the film Bohemian Rhapsody in the City cinema on Leidseplein. It was a captivating and moving film about the life of Freddie Mercury and the music of Queen. The lead role is played by Rami Malek, an Egyptian-American actor who looks exactly like Freddie Mercury in the film. The music is of course phenomenal and in the film it sounds perhaps even more impressive than the original versions. The film seems to give a somewhat romanticized version of reality but at the same time it gives a glimpse into the creation of the music and its performances that make you long for the time when this music was so topical. The glamorous life that Freddie in particular leads and the impressive rise and enormous success of the band Queen as well as the moments when Freddie seems to succumb to the fame and success and the extravagant parties he throws are discussed in detail. His homosexuality and ultimately his infection with AIDS are movingly portrayed. But it is especially the music that made me enjoy this film for more than two hours with tears in my eyes and sometimes almost bursting into tears. It was somewhat mixed feelings because admiring talented and outspoken characters like Freddie, who lead a life that seems like a dream on the one hand reminds me of moments from my own life that I consider to be highlights and on the other hand makes me think of how sad and lonely that life has become now. I was already in the cinema at half past two in the afternoon on Friday afternoon. I had gone alone. A bit unsociable perhaps, but I still had two cinema vouchers that my half brother I call him my brother had given me for Christmas last year and these had to be spent within a year. I think I had not been to the cinema for a year. It was especially pleasant to go to the cinema because it made me forget for a moment the images that were still on my retina of my crying and anxious mother whom I had visited earlier in the past week. Last Wednesday I took the train to Roosendaal again. I was up early that morning, because I was already in Osdorp at eight o'clock to hand in my uniform that I had worn during the weeks that I worked  in Osdorp in landscaping. On Monday I had sent the message to Frank, the foreman, that I had decided to quit, because I had been walking around with intense pain in my back and actually my whole body for a week. Last week I was also unable to work. I could hardly sit and laying down also hurt. I did walk a little every day and only at these moments did the pain decrease somewhat. I had been to the GP who told me that it was possible that a fracture had occurred in the prosthetic material that had been attached to my body since an operation on my back that I had undergone more than twenty years ago. I had X-rays taken at the OLVG hospital near Oosterpark but fortunately they showed that there had been no fracture in the construction. I do notice that I am increasingly bothered by it and that I am stiff and tense for a large part of the day. It could also be because I had started exercising again and the movements I had to make when working in green areas, such as hoeing and raking for a long time, have started to play tricks on me. I think a lot about what the future will be like and it scares me. I no longer have a job, am dependent on benefits and have almost no friends anymore. It often makes me think that my life is over and that there is little hope of being able to lead a life of any relevance again. An existential crisis if ever there was one one does never seem to end. In addition it has become very cold and the winter makes me gloomy. I have seen enough of Amsterdam and I have had few or actually no opportunities at all to visit another city or a warmer environment in recent years. My ailing health and the pain in my back make me afraid of the future. I do not want to go through life as a poor and redundant, sick and disabled old man. I think about it a lot and then sometimes I hope that this life can be ended within a few years. To prevent it from getting even sadder. After I had handed in my uniform to Frenk, and had a quick chat with him, I got on the train to Roosendaal in the morning. My mother has been dying for more than two months now and I constantly feel guilty that I am not with her more often. The train journey is expensive and once I arrive I want to leave as soon as possible. This time it was no different. She was lying in her room and staring at the ceiling. Her face is intensely emaciated and her eyes are bulging. Her gaze is anxious. She stares blankly ahead of her and hardly speaks. Every now and then she starts a sentence that seems random and halfway through the sentence she no longer knows what she wanted to say. She can only move her head and arms. Someone from the nursing staff told me that she has not been out of bed for the past few days. She has been in bed for more than two months without a break, but every now and then she is lifted out of it and sits for an hour in an ergonomic wheelchair with which she can sit in the communal living room. It is hard to look at her. She is lying in bed and I stroke her hair and hold her hands. She is nervously fiddling with her lips that are peeled and dried out. I get a glass of orange juice from the nurses that she drinks thirstily through a straw. She seems to recognize me. I try to chat uncomfortably about my train journey and about the past week, but I myself have hardly experienced anything the past week. Together we watch a bit of television where a repeat of the previous evening is playing. Suddenly she throws the sheets off her and I see her emaciated and sagging body. She is lying in an uncomfortable position in her bed and her body is supported on all sides by pillows. With her hands she pulls on her leg, which rests on the mattress in an impossible twisted and distorted position. Her lower legs are just bones with a skin over them. She has no muscle tissue left in her legs. She pulls at her legs with the intention of climbing out of her bed, but at the same time she doesn't seem to know what she's doing. I walk to the nurse who tells me that she's having a really bad day and that she should stay in bed today. When I get back to her room I start to panic. I don't know what to do with her body and she's so fragile that I almost don't dare to touch her. I want to help her but I don't know what to do. I want to put her in the wheelchair but her body is too weak to hold itself up. The times that I've seen her sitting in the contraption she wanted to get out as quickly as possible because she's too weak to sit. She shows me her legs and suddenly starts to cry. I now understand that it's the confrontation with her own body that's causing her this state of panic. I stroke her hair and tell her softly that she's been a beautiful woman and a good mother. She keeps crying and wailing non-stop. I can't cry. This is no longer my mother and I would like nothing more than to release her from this suffering. I walk to the nurses and ask them if it is not going too far to keep someone who is so close to death alive for so long. The nurse tells me that they also have difficulty seeing her like this but that they continue to feed and care for her. She has been eating only porridge and fertile food for months. Yesterday, the dose of morphine and fentanyl that she was given was supposedly increased so that she does not suffer any pain. She does not seem to be in physical pain but pain can be so much more than that. Another nurse who is sitting behind a laptop in the communal living room where elderly people with dementia walk around or watch television tells me that she had no measurable blood pressure this morning. My mother would have asked her if she was in heaven now. I would wish that for her. Coldly and distantly, I tell the nurses present that as far as I am concerned, her life should be ended quickly and actively to spare her even more suffering. They respond with understanding. I am aware that it is also my fault. That my nervous and cold behaviour may also make her sad. I try to call Co to ask what I should do and to ask if he can come by to talk to the nurses, but he does not answer. One of the ladies who is in the ward with her does come into the room. She is demented and speaks in gibberish, but she strokes my mother's face and manages to calm my mother down with random words that are spoken in the right tone. It is now half past four. I put on my coat and let my mother know that I have to go home. She looks disappointed and I have a hard time leaving her like this. For the rest of the week I have her shapeless and emaciated body, her fragile legs like matchsticks and the fear of death in her eyes constantly on my retina. I wish I could tell her with certainty that her fear of death is unfounded. That we can finally say goodbye to that cursed body that causes us so much pain and misery, but that we can continue to live as invisible souls and continue to occupy a place in our environment. I have sometimes had the feeling that I have felt the presence of spirits but I cannot say anything about it with certainty. The next evening I called Co. He had visited her that same evening and sent a message that she was fine again and that she had just had a bad moment. Marco visits her every evening and succeeds much better than I do in making her feel more at ease during those moments. I tell him that I was so shocked by her and that I have discussed with the nurses that her deathbed is now taking much too long. The doctor had said in September that she certainly did not have more than a month to live. He did not want to know anything about that and thought that the nurses were there to take the best possible care of her. I also carefully tried to tell him that mom only stays alive for him and that it might help if he told her that he no longer needs her. That he is an adult and that she can now let go if she wants to. Marco hinted that I myself had not been there for two weeks and that it might have been because of me that she started crying like that. That could be, but when she showed me her body and her legs she really seemed to want to tell me that she herself does not know what to do with it and that it saddens her to have to continue living with this paralyzed and deformed body. It would be easier if she were clear-headed and could let me know what she wants and what she thinks. I have not been a homeowner for a few weeks now. Earlier this month I sold my home to a real estate company in which D is a shareholder. I am now renting the home back from them for an amount of three hundred and seventy five euros per month. I was in Woerden to sign the purchase agreement and then the lease agreement with a notary who knows Dim well. Although I was actually there for show because my financial administrator is authorized to make decisions regarding my financial situation, and he had authorized the notary in this case. The house was sold for an amount of 165,000 euros. The surplus value of 30,000 euros was immediately deposited into the account managed by Erik. With this money a proposal will be made to creditors to hopefully end my debt position. Although these debts now amount to around fifty thousand euros. The sale of the house was arranged quickly because D is abroad for a few months. He is in the United States until New Year's Eve and will then go to Colombia. 

PASTIME

Spent last weekend alone at home again. I have oceans of time and that is confronting and scary at the same time but sometimes also a nice feeling. This infinite freedom lies ahead of me if only I could manage to live with a small amount of money. It is a trap though. Without money there is nothing to do and you spend your days with the marginalized plebejus of society. Pastime Paradise by Stevie Wonder sounds better in a fancy club then on a cheap smartphone. Saturday and Sunday I was at the gym where I have been training for about a month. I have not achieved much because I kept not being able to go because I had back pain or had collapsed for days and sometimes weeks I still do. Yesterday I discovered that I had lost my shoes, which I had bought about half a year ago for almost a hundred euros. I was really upset about that. They were also not lost and found at the gym. I had just started living frugally again in the hope that I would be able to go abroad for a few days again next year. Now I was faced with the choice of putting on a pair of very old, worn out and ugly, uncomfortable Nikes that are still under my bed or buying a new pair of shoes. Or to postpone the decision for a while and not go to the gym for a few days. But I was in a good mood and had run almost four kilometres on the treadmill on Saturday. I am often in gyms and have often run on a treadmill in the past but I had never run that distance before and that was a small victory in an otherwise deadly dull weekend. The other boys and men I see in the gym, and women, are all perfectly dressed in tight shirts and shorts that reveal barely there toned bodies and physical curves that often turn a workout into a long tantalizing torture. They have clearly also thought about the footwear so it was a foregone conclusion that I would not walk around the gym like a slob again like I did the first few times I trained there. There were three younger guys that I could describe and I think is a trend to name tehm Ken. They said, one after the other and seemingly aimed towards me. I am a tap, I am a fish and I am wood. I jumped on my racing bike and cycled to Perry Sport on the Overtoom in the afternoon where there happened to be a sale and bought a pair of Nikes with cushioning for 65 euros that are more suitable for running than the pair I had. Well, that is true. One major reason I've never run more than a mile or two on a treadmill is because running on a treadmill is terribly boring. It takes almost twenty minutes to run four kilometers, and when you do that on a treadmill it can feel like hours passing by. Luckily I had brought my iPhone with me yesterday and the new app YT-music, a derivative of YouTube. The sound quality of the music on the YT-music app is remarkably good and so far consistent across all songs, but because it is not possible to create playlists, you are stuck typing song titles into the search bar when a song has finished while you are running. In addition, with the free version of the app you are forced to listen to the first part of a commercial after almost every song, which is quite a downer at such a moment. So I started creating playlists on Spotify, which is fortunately still available for the outdated system software of my iPhone 5. Its battery usually does not last longer than half an hour. After running I do exercises for different muscle groups and because I have time to go more often this week I divided them over three days. Saturday I did chest and arms, yesterday back and shoulders and today I do legs and buttocks. At least that was the plan but I am disappointed by how weak I am and how even with the lowest weights I can hardly get the bar up after a few repetitions. I have become quite a lightweight in recent years so I decided to use the money I save by buying unhealthy snacks less often to eat dairy products and a bit more meat so that I can hopefully gain some strength. In any case, I woke up this morning with muscle pain. At twelve o'clock I had a job interview at the Broodzaak at Bijlmer station. That was another somewhat complicated conversation because my administrator still does not allow me to do paid work. So I had to explain why I want to work for a few hours, which would mean that I would earn an amount that is below the social assistance standard, which would then be deducted in its entirety. After more than three years, I am now quite fed up with this situation and I no longer feel like coming up with a vague story at all the job interviews and other meetings I have. In any case, according to the manager of the Broodzaak, I could work fifteen hours a week for a monthly salary of just under nine hundred euros per month. I quickly calculated that that would still be a pretty good salary for a full-time position, so I was annoyed that I could not work more than that. That says a lot about how low I have sunk in recent years. I am used to earning a lot more with work that is a lot more interesting within the field for which I was trained. But at the moment I spend so much time alone that I am willing to spend a day or two a week at six o'clock to be ready to make sandwiches at a train station on the other side of town. Furthermore, having an employment contract would give some more legitimacy to my currently somewhat dubious status and would hopefully protect me in the event that I am admitted to a psychiatric clinic for no reason or forced to take horrible medication. For the time being my life is deadly dull and although I long daily for the grand and exciting life that I led during my working years and the period immediately afterwards, I am now above all very lonely. Lonely because of the many experiences that I have had that are so surreal that no one believes me and no newspaper writes about them anymore and no news broadcast reports on these occurrences. So I cannot talk about them. Because when I do my friends or doctor tell me they are delusions. But there is more and more that remains unsaid in this way and it makes me desperate at times because I know that during those moments I am never alone and there is always someone, or something, watching over my shoulder. I spoke to D on the phone and he is currently in America. He was about to go with his wife to a Sinterklaas celebration in Princeton, a university town near New York. He asked me if there was still so much commotion about Black Pete and I had to sign that there was indeed.  Dim his new wife was coloured if not to say a black beauty. When they visited me earlier at the facility she had said Not too bad in my direction and about myself, which I though was a compliment. For about six years now, by the way, and every time this Black Pete commotion lasts for several months and reaches a peak in December. This morning I read an article on the website of the NRC about the actions that have arisen in France by demonstrators in yellow vests. To my surprise I read that it would be about climate change and about the distance that has arisen between politics and the middle class. Not a word was said, not even in the comments that must have been strongly moderated, about what I had previously understood to be the real reasons for the demonstrations namely the dealing in corpses lives and exploitation of human rights violations and dehumanizing cases and human deviations and conditions that have arisen that no one talks about, or at least, that no one talks about in understandable exclusive language. 

I no longer see any reflection  of my own life in the media. There is nothing about the things I see and experience in my daily life, and that is probably normal. I understand it is also a communal narrative nowadays that deals with experiences more people have had. To be one and divided was an article today in the newspaper and it was as if this is an issue I deal with myself. I recognized something in the article since I have been living as Siamese triplets with my siblings being of an undefined nature. I myself do little to change or improve the situation. It turned out to be a setting on the phone simply this whole I-am-not-paranoid-thing and that setting is simply turning personalized content on or off. On television I heard the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte say that demonstrations in the Netherlands are undesirable in certain cases and are prohibited. He was talking about demonstrations about Black Pete, but that can't really be what it is about. Aren't we all participating in massive distraction manoeuvres that media such as the internet fire at us? I myself am usually too scared to be taken to a psychiatric clinic again. Moreover, I have been tired and grumpy lately and I often go to bed before the eight o'clock news has started. When I have used stimulants I am more talkative and have a bit more motivation, but in these moments I am too horny to think about anything other than sex. And I also let myself be distracted by watching large amounts of porn. Which I then feel guilty about because that too is part of the dirty human trafficking, or is it male exploitation that has emerged in recent years. Is Ken merely a model? And am I a victim of that myself or do I participate in it just as much? In any case, every person has a carrot that can be dangled in front of them or a sweetener that ensures that we complain less about all the abuses in the world. For many, these seem to be jobs, because working in some cases also means profiting from or participating in abuses or injustice and then keeping quiet about it.

Last Wednesday, January 30th 2018 at three o'clock in the morning, my mother passed away. The day before, Marco called me. 'Things are really bad with mom now, I think she will pass away today.' His voice sounded broken. I had just been to the dentist and had an appointment that afternoon. 'I can't come today,' was my first reaction, 'the ATM at Albert Heijn swallowed my card and there is no credit left on my public transport chip card. I actually thought it would be a false alarm again. When the call ended, I immediately decided to try to go there anyway, especially for him. I think that mom had been unaware of what was happening around her for a long time. I got some money from the neighbours and walked to the railway station. On the train I thought about the music for the funeral and searched on Spotify. I had also been busy with her funeral about ten years ago during another period in which I thought she would die. When I arrived in Roosendaal the wife of my half brother Co picked me up in the car. She prepared me for the worst. 'Prepare yourself because it might look awful, the way she is lying there,' she said. She dropped me off at the nursing home, Heerema Staete, and drove home herself because she still had something to do. I don't know how else to say it but I hoped that she would die soon now. Every time I saw her in the past months or actually the past years I had thought that it would be the last time. She had been in bed since October and could no longer move herself. I arrived at three o'clock in the afternoon. She did not have her dentures in and her lower jaw had completely collapsed. Her breathing was loud and hoarse. She was supposed to be asleep but her eyes were open. The look in her eyes was grey and dull. From her eyes she was already dead but she was still breathing. She didn't eat or drink anymore so it would be over for her soon. Co had been in her room all day and uncle and aunt were there too. I didn't know how to act. I swiped her hair and kissed her on the cheek. There wasn't much more to say. Co his wife had come back. The tension disappeared a bit and we had an animated conversation with the family attending a bit later. Mom started making some sounds and seemed to respond to that in her breathing. Apart from that I had no contact with her anymore. I felt like I had said goodbye to her a long time ago. Around six o'clock in the evening I went back to the station. I bought a can of beer and smoked a cigarette. The train journey home seemed to take forever. The next morning at eight o'clock Co called me. She died that night at three o'clock. They had been in her room until ten o'clock in the evening. He had gone to her during the night. I had expected the message. I didn't want to cry but he sounded emotional. That was Wednesday. 'I have to work tomorrow and Friday,' I said firmly. I knew that there would come a time when the funeral had to be organised because I had experienced that before at Dad's funeral. I had just started working at the Broodzaak, a catering establishment, a chain where fresh sandwiches and snacks are prepared in the oven and then topped with ingredients such as goat's cheese, mozzarella and roast beef, usually a complicated combination of several ingredients that I was just beginning to get the hang of. I was still on my probationary period. I had already had to call in sick twice due to circumstances. Because I hadn't slept. Probably my own fault. To be honest... Mom always messed everything up. There was always something. Especially when I was going on holiday. Or when I had something to do with friends one evening. In the past. Lately I had distanced myself from her. I was determined and would definitely not cancel the coming weekend and risk my job at the Broodzaak, because she had chosen the wrong day to die again. I asked Co if the meeting with the funeral director could not be organised that same day. He told me that there would only be a meeting that day to plan the date for the funeral and to determine the content of the condolence cards and that he could handle that alone. The meeting to organise the funeral service and determine the content of the life story could also be that Saturday at eleven o'clock in the morning. I went out to walk. It was cold and bleak. I tried to call my Aunt but she was not there. I called my two best frineds and exchanged text messages with family and acquaintances via WhatsApp for the rest of the day. I mainly hoped that I would be able to sleep that night because I had to work. The past month I only worked two days a week at the Broodzaak but then I had to get out of bed in the middle of the night because I often had to start at six in the morning. Like that Thursday. I had hardly slept the past few weeks. On Thursday and Friday I worked at the Broodzaak. Because I had not slept the night before, I walked around like a zombie. It is easy work but I was rather clumsy. I accepted the job to temporarily have something to do and I thought it would be useful to get to know the formula of a food chain. Because I am still under guardianship, and the administrator still does not want me to earn more than the social assistance level, it is actually voluntary work. Now I have started to see social welfar benefits in recent years as a kind of basic income to convince myself that it is actually very progressive and to be able to justify my boundless laziness a little. Because work is of course tiresome at least that is what suits me best at the moment. People are so busy with lobbying these days that I sometimes get a bit tired of it too. De Broodzaak was originally a company of the Dutch Railways, but was taken over by HMSHost, which in turn is part of Autogrill SPA. A multinational with restaurants and other catering facilities at airports and train stations. During workdays, you are mainly busy with topping boules, rolls and baguettes with fresh products. The rolls are baked in the oven during the day. I also worked behind the cash register. That is, behind a screen with a touch screen in which all products are categorized and which controls the payment terminal. For a few days, I worked behind the cash register almost the entire workday. That is terribly repetitive. Almost everyone pays by debit card and you could also pay with Apple Pay by holding a smartphone against the payment terminal. When you work behind the cash register one also has to prepare coffees. The intention was actually to also communicate with the customers. At least my colleagues did that more than I did. I actually always said the same thing. Have a nice day, or something like that, or would you like to bring the receipt? That is actually just like an old-school cashier. Nowadays, information is shared on the work floor and in shops such as Broodzaak or Hema, and communicating or colloquial code sharing is also done by means of all kinds of short filler words that have been used more and more in recent years and also seem to have seeped into the consciousness of all Dutch people at the same time. Abbreviations and letter combinations are also used in which each letter in the alphabet has a certain meaning, which can also change. Not by everyone, by the way. It is a fashion phenomenon. Street language, actually. I only say that because it suits me, because I understand this language, but for some reason that is still unclear of what it means or what it can be defined as besides having a vague couple of associations. Five six one I got.. I am not able to construct messages or short sentences in it quickly and concisely. The people who do use this jargon a lot can, by the way, continue to communicate in old-fashioned language, but not always. Using this jargon, and using words with double meanings or very abstract meanings, is somehow addictive, because it sounds much more creative and poetic. Like a rap at best and like total nonsense at worst. In some cases these kinds of sentences are constructed so quickly, that I don't understand how someone can form so many layered messages in one sentence so quickly in an everyday conversation, and when several people are talking at the same time, also very fluently and without thinking, it seems, knows how to respond to what is being said or done by others at the same time.

ZIKI

I've been sitting at home for a number of years. That must be it. I believe it is mainly a phenomenon in the Dutch language, but in recent years, since the financial crisis, the media has often been very confusing. There has also been a lot of fake news and content that is suggested or corrected by computers. There has also been a lot of untruths spread and a lot of information has been published that is not so relevant, especially via the internet, which has led to disinformation and fake news. And hypes. Which in some cases also blows over quite quickly. For example, yes and on were words that stood for marital fidelity and for expressing the wish or need to end things, but I hear less and less of those words being used with a double meaning. The funny thing with the keywords is that many people blame me or credit me for starting the trend of using the,. Look in my eyes girl you know they dont la Gloria Estefans sings in the song On in which my sister Carola seems to get a mention but that is maybe probably nothing. La means to watch or see or hear or record or spy is the association I have with that syllable. The use of a man or woman who is fine or a thing or not whole I had learned was in some way objectifying or dehumanising human beings. Whether or not they are coming or ejaculating or should do so. Although I find it a very exciting development I am unable to communicate in that way. I feel like a kind of Neanderthal during certain social events and sometimes it feels like a deficiency or limitation. There are even times when I think I might be admitted to a psychiatric facility again, because the meaning of words or expressions is often not clear to me and I find the meaning it would have more or less unbelievable. But the messages that are shared are only the opinion of one person, so it is not really that important, you would think. But this alternative language has influenced public opinion so quickly and also hardened it in such a short time that suddenly drop (doctors are no longer needed. Vast or fasting is also a word that you often hear and simply means not eating or drinking. which for many people has a connection with the threat of Islamic movements and their influence on the European mainland. All this has fueled exciting theories about the origin of this brainwashing as being a kind of military weapon with a potentially all-destructive effect. There have been many changes. There have also been changes in health and way of thinking and even in, for example, gender and sexual experience among many people, which has called into question the generally accepted knowledge on many subjects. So now there is a kind of Babylonian confusion of tongues. Since about 2014, words and letter combinations have come into use to express in a somewhat veiled way what is happening in our immediate environment and further away. That language seemed to have originated in my environment, but that could also be because there is apparently a communal consciousness through which thoughts and ideas seep in and within a short time become a concept for a great many people who have not spoken to each other. The language, which is also used in digital media and audiovisual applications and speech computers and programs that use artificial intelligence, is humorous and creative and is used in daily life to share thoughts, feelings and information or facts with others in an associative way. In (electronic) music and films and other broadcasts this somewhat abstract language can also be heard and seen. Language and the way of pronouncing it can also influence your mood and your behaviour and work as a kind of programming language. I myself have hardly or never used these kinds of codes or words. I have underwear that says Ziki on it, which I thought was funny. That would mean something like how boring, I'm giving myself cancer. At least that is what it has made me think of the letters since not wearing underpants is supposedly healthier for a male or at least that I learned. KI is now by the way also the Dutch letter combination for artificial intelligence.Some days I walk down the street and hear everyone around me talking and during a walk I catch a flood of conversations. When every letter and every combination of two letters and other words gets an associative meaning then it is possible that texts change meaning or get multiple meanings. It does happen that names of people are also replaced by other words that then also have a meaning. Many journalists use pseudonyms these days but it is also accepted in other professions. In last Saturday's newspaper I read an article about exoplanets, of which more and more are being discovered these days. The planets in the Earth's Milky Way have been given beautiful names such as Mars, Venus and Jupiter. The exoplanets, which are much further away and have been discovered much more recently, have to make do with names such as KIC 12557548. There seem to be countless of them and the realization has apparently dawned that the universe is infinitely large and that there are an innumerable number of planets. In the same way, you can also occupy yourself in your thoughts and in your world of experience with a narrow and limited number of concepts and subjects or with a broader range of subjects that are based on knowledge and life experience that have been built up in life. Wisdom comes with age. Unfortunately, the media are lacking information on the how and why of such alternative languages into existence. There is a development that words and concepts have become confused and ambiguous. This has partly been a result of automation and information technology that have made the content of media dynamic which gradually seems to be devoid of any meaning or is merely repetitive. Another effect is that messages are increasingly directed in a certain direction, which creates a kind of tunnel vision and that this has influenced and hardened the public opinion of many people within a very short time. Quite extremist statements and statements that in certain cases have no meaning whatsoever suddenly become almost commonplace, although this is then also toned down again quite quickly in certain cases. It seems that in recent years, since the collapse of the financial world and the development of digitalization and the effects that these have had on the thinking, doing and acting of man have led to a total collapse of civilization and culture in the Netherlands, which has led to miraculous excesses.

DEAD

The funeral was on Wednesday. It would be the third time in a week that I would travel to Roosendaal by train. The days leading up to the funeral I had been busy writing a short speech or something like a poem. Mom's death was not unexpected. About ten years ago I had already written a few sentences because it seemed then that she would die at any moment and actually much earlier too. The fact that during those days my thoughts were busy reminiscing and thinking about her made it feel as if she was still there. Maybe even a bit too much. I was really dreading it but I thought that at least someone from her environment should read something during the funeral. I lay awake for a few nights because I was brainstorming without much result. This was partly due to the fact that the new and often abstract language I fooled around with was sometimes incomprehensible to myself and too inappropriate for a funeral. I did not really know what the appropriate tone would be. Saturday morning I went to the library to read some poetry collections to get some inspiration. The books that are there are usually by unknown authors and the content of those books is in many cases abstract and random. One of the floors was completely empty and on the other floors the catering industry and computers had largely taken up the space. I could not find a suitable poem. I wrote a short text in which I mentioned, among other things, the lack of clarity about who Co his father is and also described how perfectionistic and sometimes dismissive she could be. About the brave suffering she had endured caused by her illness and about the strong relationship that existed between us. I have never known her other than in a wheelchair besides some vague memories of her walking with crutches during the first years of my life. Around that time she was diagnosed with the neurological disease MS, Multiple Sclerosis, a disorder in the communication between the nerves and the brain that leads to spasms and paralysis. Over the past decades she has had to give up more and more bodily functions and her body has become increasingly weak. In addition, there were the additional ailments such as bladder infections and bedsores. She has been in bed since October last year and has hardly been out of it. She has hardly spoken and could hardly move her body. It was very difficult to see her like that, but it was also too late to have a clear conversation with her about the moment when euthanasia would be desirable. For Marco, the subject was already completely taboo. I tried, but she didn't want to talk about it and was clearly afraid of death. Sometimes she seemed panicked and other days she was crying non-stop, but strangely enough, those were followed by moments when she was suddenly in a cheerful mood again. Co was with her every day until the last moment.

Demir Demirov recently moved to Donker Curtiusstraat. That's close by. And Demir is sometimes anyway or maybe always a bit like me. We are like minded. It must be a coincidence he moved to number sixty one just around the block for me. That night I was preparing for an interview the next morning for Teleperformance in Lisbon in Portugal. I had made it through the first and second round which consisted of phone interviews and online questionnaires but I was distracted by a Grindr message. The next morning, I managed to have the interview with the telephone support provider, sober and all since Demirov does not drink, but failed to make it because I had not slept. Or as they said, we expected you to be more to the point. I am not sure but it is moments like this that make me think of destiny. I have the tendency to blabbermouth and and everytime I do so I know that that is not a winning formula. Spending the night with someone I chatted up on Grindr waas something I had not done for two years and I thought I could win that aspect of life back again if only I could pass the test that was this attractive young man from Russia or Dagestan to be precise. Demir's origins are his main attraction and it makes me jealous at times. Demir has studied art like myself and introduced me for the first time to metaphysics.

It made us talk all night and I realised. With people telling me my affliction is one being with time and all that and metaphysics I understood is the philosophy of space and time and life path being either determined or coincidental or an existence of continuous action and reaction as I had understood quantum physics to be by watching the DVD of Through the Rabbit Hole. Being told by one psychologist at the facility that my affliction is not so much a disease but a time or now related presence witnessing occurrence I listened to what Demir had to say about this. I hadn't told him the thing with the sounds yet because I had learned to never do that. According to Demir from Dagestan. we are all dying. And I had my dealings with death.

Today I went for a walk with Demir. Maybe he's right and we are in some kind of transition to live longer or be able to  stop time. I had already decided I did not care much because not dying is a fear while the fear of death is something I am just not hapopy enough for anymore. Some of my friends look either younger or older than they are and the death and age phenomena are teasing me or haunting me in all kinds of ways. We were sitting on a bench in Westerpark. He showed me the book he was reading to learn Dutch. 'Een vlucht regenwulpen' by Maarten 't Hart. I hadn't read that one myself. Demir is at times hard to follow due to the language gap but he has brilliant ideas at times. He told me that he didn't understand religion or that he didn't understand the differences between existing religions. It's quite intense to spend time with him. I thought I had seen his face a few times in passing over the past few weeks but it was someone who looked like him or had similar features. I suggested that we walk back. Demir chatted away and asked all sorts of questions. It was a Friday afternoon and I felt like having a beer but I didn't want to suggest to Demir that we go home together. I tried to say goodbye to him. Demir seemed surprised. 'But you won't get a chance to talk to anyone for a long time now, you know,' he said in English. 

PARKLIFE

This past week was the week of the 'changing occupation'. This morning I woke up with a little hangover. I decided not to take a shower because I still planned to do some sports. But after breakfast I felt dirty and I took a shower anyway. As I usually do I started the day with a walk. Because I had already been to the Westerpark a few times this week I walked to the Erasmuspark. The park is beautiful and the first budding green is already visible. The trees in Amsterdam are strange. Or well, they were, they are suddenly less strange. There I go again. I finally had a hobbyhorse. That now all the trees are dying. They are still unmistakably strange and different than they were but during a walk like this morning I didn't feel like I was walking around in the set of a horror movie. If anything they were really strange. I took pictures of them. It must be the milder conditions of spring that do the trees good. When I arrived at Bos en Lommerplein, the market vendors were busy setting up their stalls around ten in the morning and here and there a few people were browsing the stalls. There was a clothes rack with clothes for one euro, but these were mainly for women. In the past few months, I have also been to the market on Bos en Lommerplein a few times on a weekday. I have noticed that there are fewer people on the market on Bos en Lommerplein these days and that there are far fewer stalls. Well, I think that is news. I have also noticed that mainly white people are walking on Hugo de Grootplein, in Kinderstraat and in Bilderdijkstraat these days, and that this was different ten years ago, when these streets were really predominantly coloured. I think that is news too. Perhaps I will learn to put things into perspective. Although I am convinced that this is where the danger lies. There has been little news in recent years, while in my immediate environment I am confronted daily with the fact that the world has changed dramatically. Personally, I think that a lot of abuses are tolerable as long as we can talk about them openly and honestly. But I don't always do that myself. After the walk, I walked to Trainmore to go to the gym. Today I was still a bit half-hearted because I've been walking around with a cold for a while. 'We're still alive, thank God,' I said to the lady behind the counter while I scanned my key ring to go inside. You can actually say anything as long as you do it with a certain conviction and I have to get used to that. I keep seeing new faces in the gym. I had seen the lady behind the counter before. It's quite individualistic, training in a gym. I do have the experience that when you've seen people a few times, in a gym for example, you feel a bit more at ease. Maybe have a chat now and then. Although I've never really been good at that. They sometimes seem so perfect, the people you see in a gym. Although there are also ordinary people of course. Old men and big bellies. That kind of people. I had already wondered on my way there whether it might be something to take a group lesson. Spinning or something like that. After I had run three kilometers, albeit at a slow pace this time, on the treadmill, I did some exercises with weights. While I was doing some exercises I overheard conversations here and there from the other people present. I don't think they really know each other. Or do they? That's strange. They talk to each other as if they've been living together their whole lives. Every now and then I exchanged a few words with someone. 'Do you ever go to a group lesson like that?' I asked awkwardly. 'No, I've never been there, but it's intense,' this man said. And that's news too.

BREM

Outside, work is being done in the street. Huge machines are driving through the street at a remarkable speed and about ten tough men in orange outfits are walking around busily discussing with each other while they are apparently lugging stuff around at random. The Marnixplein has also been a chaotic construction site for more than a month. A large amount of materials and tools are scattered criss-cross over the intersection and the adjacent streets, giving the area a somewhat dystopian and sinister appearance that, on other days, can look completely different within a few hours. The men are remarkably fast and give a capable impression while they have dug up entire streets or replaced tram rails in no time. Incidentally, they had done that a few years ago as well, but it is probably necessary to tackle it thoroughly when redesigning streets and squares. It is striking and often embarrassing, but there sometimes seems to be a kind of sexual tension when I am near these kinds of workers. Just now it wasn't for nothing because they walked past my window and kept making comments like 'come on,' 'I'll blow you' and 'I'll pay,' or 'you pay' I didn't quite understand that and that's usually rather vague and unclear when bystanders or staff in a bar try to make a deal or a date. In any case, I keep going back to it. Do I suggest they come in, which they never do anyway, or do I sit there tense and provocative which I don't do very convincingly. I don't quite understand it. On the one hand, gentlemen like these sometimes give the impression that it's because of me that they're horny but I don't think I'm that explicit. It was easier to understand the world when the construction workers whistled at the women passing by and I or I were nothing but outsiders observing that strange breed before going back into one of the secret places we used to meet and speak only for the whole ritual to get it over with fast and go home afterwards. In that way saying that when I walk past the new workers on the street with their cables and within the construction sites they are workin in. The tram and the bus are now popular places to flirt or have an exciting encounter with another man. But it is very rare that there is any kind of intimacy or touch besides the odd words exchanged to break the ice. There are construction sites all over the city and the men who walk around there sometimes look very erotic and attractive, to be honest. I haven't slept the last two nights. Same old story. I actually just took a line. The same situation keeps repeating itself. The total meaninglessness of existence and the all-encompassing lethargy that the malaise of the past few years has caused have made me lonely and bored. The faith that I had in the media and following developments and backgrounds in the world and especially also the excitement that the rise of the internet brought with it have completely disappeared and that gives me a feeling of powerlessness and total indifference. The contrast with the glamorous life that I have led is enormous. The chaos and lawlessness that reigns in the world and the lack of information and books and music and film and culture make everyday reality gray and dull. I have become cold and emotionless and spend my evenings alone in a dark and bleak ground floor apartment. I only feel something when I drink and binge on whatever within reach. But it keeps getting out of hand. A chain of reactions from bystanders or even strange weather conditions, sometimes, sometimes not, as if it could have something to do with it. And now I am that I have died perhaps.

Escaped the house for a moment. Sit in the library to recover. It is an oasis of peace here. The construction workers have now broken up half the street and are busy digging. They are constantly exchanging a barely intelligible cacophony of words with each other. It is difficult to shut myself off from it and it drove me crazy yesterday. I walked to Albert Heijn to buy something to eat. Next to the supermarket in the Frederik Hendrikstraat is a Turkish greengrocer and I bought a number of mandarins there which later turned out to be purple when I got home after I had peeled them but tasted fine otherwise. A man and a woman who were in the shop were just engaged in a conversation and that feeling of 'Oh no, I have to join in and be social again' took over for a moment. The friendly woman was often in Alanya or Antalya and she never came. The thing with whether these people or myself are coming or not and when and how and how much and if we would one day not anymore was the somewhat Turkish talk of the town. That was the bottom line. I am very sorry, thank you and goodbye. I quickly left. I have never been to Turkey. On my way home I had to walk past all those passers-by again and sometimes that feels like you're in a video game or a war zone. I was empty and exhausted and didn't feel like talking. 'First a beer now,' I said softly and to no one in particular as I walked past a few workmen in another street. A joke? 'You have to laugh then,' said yet another construction worker who was standing in another street and who couldn't possibly have heard me suddenly in that serious tone that can give you that feeling that everything is very urgent and that everything you say and do is very important. I quickly walked inside. After four beers I fell asleep. I woke up and it was still dark. 'How nice it would be if it just stayed dark today,' I thought as I resolved not to do anything at all today. I would just move the furniture so I could watch television in bed. Then I would have done something but not something that required thinking and I felt like doing that. 'It's okay. You really don't have to do anything. You can be lazy today.' I repeated it like a mantra while convincing myself that in my case it might be better if I just did nothing at all. It was still dark. And it was already half past nine. 'That's what you wanted, right?' I was deep and busy in thought but had already largely forgotten what it was about. 'Those chattering children are brilliant, it's a miracle why is not the whole world witnessing that,' I thought. 'Mom I'm stupid I think one egg,' I heard just as a mother with a child passed me. I was convinced that it was morning. It wasn't so much that I was afraid that it wouldn't get light today but more the feeling that I really should do something now. And I didn't feel like it. I just wanted to be alone in the dark today and completely shut myself off from the world. Was that too much to ask? Earlier that day I had started a website to share films. I always start things but never finish them. This time I was determined to work on the plan further. Maybe it would be cool to make a movie about what the world would look like if there were only women or only men, respectively. I think I've seen a few movies about the latter, but not about the female version.

THIS IS A GO

I thought back to Saturday night or maybe it was Sunday. Somewhere in the Red Light District I was walking when a gate that led into a narrow alley was about to close as I walked past and in a reflex I pushed the gate open and walked into the alley. This is a new street I've never been here it's just suddenly there. Usually that turns out not to be true afterwards. I don't know every street or alley in Amsterdam and I don't know who remembers exactly what it was like here in the past. In any case I had never been in this alley and there were also all kinds of side streets. People rush around me at a fast pace. This is go, and We can go. I was caught as I walked into a special building. A kind of wooden... church? Or no that's not it there was no altar there was actually nothing else that reminded me of a church. The building was of that size only smaller and very sober. I thought it was a perfect space. For... whatever, to go. I felt very good. Although I still didn't know what 'going' meant in circumstances like these. 'Going' is still just going for a walk or a bike ride for me. I was fully aware that this might be the end and that I was trapped but I felt good and I didn't want to leave. The door closed. There was a group of about forty men and women and I recognized a number of faces of old acquaintances. And a celebrity or two. Or they looked like them. Unmistakably. They were beautiful but not very beautiful and of all ages. Here it was crowded with a rich international elite and I recognized some of their faces. Was not that Dino, the Brazilian hairdresser who was incredibly handsome but nowadays a bit more aloof then that night we spent together. I hadn't seen these people in Amsterdam for a long time and there is or had been a particular kind of crowd always including people looking like  the people I knew nowadays doing workshops on whatever answers they were looking for in ever changing company and surroundings that I landed in by coincidence and sometimes got some information on later on my screen or whatever it was hardly like being updated by these professionals. ANd Dino had been a hairdresser in London for many years near Old Compton Street so what was he doing all of a sudden in this respectable place? I always meant to ask him why his name was di-no which at that time and place could very well refer to Princess Diana because she had become some of the encrypted letter codes that were so fashionable to use. The man sitting next to me I recognized from a series of Hollywood movies but he seemed to know who I was. World turned upside down! There was a screen showing a movie about skaters in an incredible city landscape full of ramps and tracks and staircases and the place looked like a placeless place I would never see again and with the Nike commercial with the skater going on for fifteen minutes with the video on the screen pumping beats I felt like this was in some way the subject they were talking about. There was a round of questions after the commercial and these people had just started to put cushions on the wooden floor and clearly knew what was going to happen now. I just gave in to it.

MENG

The past few days I've been inside. Shame. I briefly saw a Spiderman movie on television. I remembered that I had already seen it in the cinema. Did I suddenly have triple-A television again? Or maybe good movies are reserved for people who make them late. This morning I walked to the library. It was not yet nine o'clock when I arrived. It is an exciting place to start the day because the printed press is there. At least it used to be. I still hope for headlines that would finally announce the war that is already over. That would answer my concerns or unleash an emotion such as anger or fear. There was hardly anyone there yet. I chose a Dutch newspaper and an American opinion magazine. No Telegraaf headlines. I leafed through the opinion magazine and started reading one of the first articles. The language is very woolly and it takes a long time for an article to get to the heart of the matter. Further on I read an article written by Oliver Sacks. He is a well-known philosopher. I hold him in high regard. Although I have not read his books. During my studies, there was a philosophy teacher who could tell a good story for a short while. The book 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat,' was discussed during his lessons. Philosophy studies, among other things, that which makes people act in their essence and the extent to which they are free, in the modernist sense, or are limited by other factors, such as social expectations, power or sex. I thought it was a good article. The author describes an alarming future image in which human beings have lost their sense of past and future due to the destruction of memory, caused by computers, and are stuck in a vacuum of changing sensations. That is indeed a step, or actually a lot of steps beyond the news I was looking for, but the thought kept me busy today. I read a number of other articles but was again dominated by impatience. The globalized world has been reduced in recent years to simplified geopolitics in which those in power will eventually be allowed to take turns being China for the show. Fortunately, there is still art. And literature. Although it has largely disappeared from the libraries in Amsterdam at the moment. There are still mostly abstract books by well-known authors. Apparently that is allowed. In the meantime, there is a new wing with French, German, English and Spanish books, but their authenticity is still hazy and I have not yet completely surrendered to these new editions In my opinion, the social status we have expressed as big and small or high and low is still reflected in the education and the number of cultural references of an individual and the extent to which he or she is able to translate this into reality. Unfortunately, I live in Amsterdam. A resident of this city is now doomed to eternal change and for the time being, condemned to a jumble of lies and nonsense it is hard to tell in which direction we are going. Yuval's phenomenal books answer the big questions of our time in a nutshell. I can't help but agree with his train of thought. But I also think about the smallprint we read and see that can sometimes tell us more than the headlines. The personification of the devil is no longer Steve from Apple but Meng from Huawei. If the world is lost or if a catastrophe has happened which has already proven not to be the case in my perception. The leader of the largest company in the largest country in the world. Remember that name because before you know it, she will be replaced. We have certainly skipped a lot of steps in the past ten years in the run-up to so much wisdom. Bingo! Yuck! I'm still not 'in' and find philosophy just as tiring. I walked further through the library and opened a random book by Voltaire, or maybe it was Balzac. I turned to a random page and somewhere in the middle of the right-hand page at the end of the line only read the words die-men-waar and closed the book again. I went looking for the book 'The Satanic Verses' by Salman Rushdie and found it among a fairly large number of other titles by this British writer. I read the book a few years ago. To be honest... I don't think I actually read it. It was boring and abstract. There was nothing offensive about it. I only read a revised edition in a country where censorship is still associated with China. It's not that I endorse the insults to the Islamic community but I would have liked to have read the book at least. So that I could talk about it. But I live in Amsterdam, so I remain stupid. I read the book in the end in one weekend, the last half in the Queens Head on Zeedijk but as impatient as I was to read about the censored sentences that caused a Fatwa on Salman Rusdie in the Islamic world, meaning he could be killed or hurt or stoned without any punishment for doing so. Rushdie moved to London or was living there before the commotion in the Arabic countries about the book took place. These days I am involved in a complaint to psychiatry regarding my treatment for a mental illness that has resulted in me having a court order. In my complaint I describe that in the psychiatric clinic where I was treated. I met people who were orphaned, who had lost their memory or who were influenced in their thinking by other factors or other people. In my view, these people have been too easily labeled as 'crazy' or diagnosed with mental illnesses that are now outdated but still have a stigmatizing effect. In my complaint I ask for openness. Unfortunately, it seems that high social status can also be achieved these days by being hard and mean and lying convincingly or propagating a meaningless here-after of mindless one-hit wonders. I am now in another library to do some writing but I am having trouble concentrating. Behind me I hear a gust of wind. Close your das boy, I heard a father say to his son. Dejectedly I walk outside. A das is a tie.

Realism as a concept is multidisciplinary, as are many words that cross boundaries of the jargon of people working in a certain field use words that have a slightly more specific meaning. In observing and watching art, for instance in a museum, we tend to say that the depiction of reality was very realistic if the painting or drawing looks exactly like the subject it has attempted to paint or draw from life. Or from a photo reference. One of the first things I learned in art school is that realism should not be used to describe two dimensional or three dimensional and now also audiovisual in addition, realism is a style or trend in art that was very dominant in the twentieth century meaning that the real reality is shown as in those of dirt farmers, sweaty harbour workers, poor people working on  the field as a farmer. An example of this is the Dutch painter VIncent van Gogh his work and realism here is shown to be a choice of the painter to depict not a beautiful or glamorous reality that would appeal to people for certain reason, but in his choices and subjects he depicts the hardship and sorrow and poverty the people around him as much as he himself were challenged by. The depiction of a still life or a painting made after life by observing it and attempting to depict that exact same

HELP IS NOT A PILL

Google is a big fan of equality. The website of the new G-suite application briefly and concisely describes homepages as vanity sites. That's a new expression. (Maybe it's good to add new words to a language, so that there is no confusion because of words that can mean multiple things. I don't know.) Anyone who can remember anything about the history of the golden age of the world wide web. One will also remember that Instagram followers and Facebook likes could simply be bought. With money. From the bank. 'Uhu, hey and you're on, everything in my mind is yours,’ That's all I've heard from you this past year. How are things in the realm of the living? I'm having to get used to the fact that we're a letter these days. I was L and I gave away D and P as well as M. I am most probably L today still but then I had heard or read that D and P had also submitted their letter back to me or another person but I had no idea what to do with it. There was M too but as far as I knew  no one really was M ever in any way and I think then somehow I was that letter too. Or a country was. A group of people or a tag for those that are by choice not named not telling why and how. Can we at least stay the same? And would you like to be Aids then? Because your ID is defined now not so much by the religion you are brought up with anymore. That reference is really what the letter H means for me but I can never compare or ask these things. It had just been very clear that there was a communal consciousness developing by all the people that had had thoughts with these ever since Ken was obviously a type of young handsome man. No, I'd rather not be in k right now, thanks. I hope we can at least stay the same. Bye! Equality is also a form of democracy in which every person has a say or a form of referendum is applied. Unfortunately, there are also mean lunatics and extremists around even though these can be self assumed roles. Nowadays unfortunately not everyone or everything has enjoyed a great deal of study. A good study is no longer self-evident in the Netherlands. The requirements for participation threaten to become increasingly higher. ‘We want the appearance of a twenty-year-old and yet forty years of work experience,’ someone told me last weekend in a pub. If that were possible... It was work and now it works. But information technology is as hollow a phrase as artificial intelligence or augmented reality now that everything is served to us from a cloud or a ready made lay-out. What goes around comes around. We still have the, initially voluntary, replacement of identities fresh in our minds here in the Netherlands. It may take years before recent history has been processed and the truth comes out.

Equality is endless poldering. As we can see in the media. Poldering is a Dutch word that means all parties like political parties, trade unions and communities involved have an equal say in decision making and legislation making as the word polder means a piece of land that is made on the water to make the landscape in balance or create more opportunities and benefits for growth or prosperity. The compromise basically, as a system of state in which the communities of the workers have the biggest say. Anyone who has consciously experienced the past few years can also remember the harder and tougher attitudes in this country and extremism has been rising so much we have to be careful of those crazy opinions again that we have to respect also because the world is becoming more diverse in entities and identities. Thinking machines hold climate marches and fucking machines also want to have sex for a day. And some want it every day as if not to say need. Sex addiction is not a real addiction as in that it creates physical dependence but the emotional aspect of iot can be a loaded subject. And who is right? No one really knows what is going on behind the curtains of this theater and we can only hope that the dark sides of life are well illuminated and bring wisdom.

In this new era of nihilism and simplism, many people have lost faith in and joy for everything. Equality currently means anonymous or generic electronic music and films and television series of which we have forgotten the names of the actors playing the leading roles the next day. Who said anything about that? Blindly following movie stars, authors, footballers, pop stars, politicians and other gods is something for young girls, or is it? I don't think so. We are waiting for an African film industry that the rest of the world can idolize. Because blindly following nameless losers is also debatable.

What is wisdom? Kit!? Cut!? The health care system stupid. And it is killing us. The self-destructive tendencies of the media are logical and therefore inexplicable and traumatic and as it seems now unstoppable. Google may have long since calculated how many years humanity has left to grope in the darkness and not kill itself. If not hi, then it has to be lo. And that was impossible to predict to be a  matter of public opinion in any way.

I continue walking down the street. Still have no work. It is fun to do the shopping and I wonder if I can do the shopping for other people. But everyone likes to do the shopping. I can do nothing or only occasionally and I still don't know who I should hold responsible for that. I ran into the African man I met on the street last night again. He tells me that he will never come here again because it is hell here. He is only here for two days and the weather has also been really bad. The street where I live is still being dug up. Construction workers are going back and forth. It will last until May. A construction worker who is working behind a container in front of my window has been shouting obscenities for hours. Or am I hearing it wrong? I am too flabbergasted to respond. (Scary, isn't it, with that language!) The wrong words come to my head at the wrong times. A tough lady walks by and says FORM! The man keeps his mouth shut. 'FORM!' How simple can it be. Fuck or hold your mouth shut. I could think about that for a week and still not come up with a programming code like that.

The rain has kept me inside all day. Suddenly there is a channel on my rattling television to receive YouTube. My laptop has been too slow to watch videos or surf the web for weeks. The porn school has now become a YouTube school. Great. Is that called deep learning? I zap through the videos and scan titles and pictures. Watch something by Yuval Harari again and something else with an exciting title like A brief history of tomorrow. I watched many documentaries on psychiatry and its clinical standards in the United Kingdom and the United States and I thought they were good.They were good because, and mostly the British one in particular questioned the current state of psychiatric institutions and how they had become so heavily dependent on psychopharm drugs rather than therapy. The British documentary went as far as stating that there is no real solid evidence that psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety and most notably hearing voices should be treated by psychopharm drugs like antidepressants and the very notorious antipsychotics, often also used as a state punishment allegedly for people having too adverse opinions or views on reality that were maybe in the first place too close to the truth. Showing people, youngsters even that were grown up from a young age by the system of clinical institutions having to take forced medications could in many cases have benefitted from talking or cognitive behaviour therapy. I have learned, coincidentally or not, because a wave of propaganda was blowing in the state I grew up the Netherlands and in general in the European Union that this medication was far too much debilitating and in causing lethargy and intense fatigue and catatonic states in many patients that in the larger numbers administering them to prisoners and retirement home residents was ethically actually very incorrect. With the media showing that seniors in retirement homes were given this very malicious pill to prevent the elderly from walking the hallways too much or being too active in the facilities they lived in. The British documentary was an example of how the biased hyperboles of the internet can actually in certain cases make right a wrong doing of some of the misconceptions or taboos in history. Antipsychotics, I can tell by heart and with months and years without being able to take a break from them, cause effects to the mood and physical condition that I thought were inhumane. The amounts of time spent bringing sweet foods and snacks and cigarettes and other stimuli like Coca Cola Light and coffee and after the time spent in the facility in my own space alcohol and drugs were almost impossible not to take. In that sense I have been lucky. I would not have chosen to spend ten full years binging and boozing and being under any influence other than this malicious drug that is not even clearly proven to be the cause of psychiatrical symptoms, the latter I believe myself, since anxiety attacks do not justify a life living in the torture of this medication, provided under names like Cyprexa, Haldol and Abilify and Risperidal are all the same. The first few hours of the day one can hardly move and most of the rest of the day is spent in agony constantly craving in a very unnatural way anything that could undo the effect of the suppressing of dopamine that this medication does. Some Google reading and experience with using occasional dopamine enhancing drugs like cocaine or the newer synthetic alternatives of this natural drug that grows in nature in South America was all it took to learn that if I managed to eat a pizza for less than a euro every night and forgot about all other luxuries in my diet, looks, travel, clothing, cosmetics and recreation in terms of cinema nights, bars, restaurant made it possible to live with half the week living in a state of torture, some to many patients in psychiatry experience acathisia which is the effect of the nerve agent that works as a component in these antipsychotic drugs which were strengthened by the effect of the absence of the speed I was sniffing scarcely in the weekends, with all this I managed to pass the time but without really being able to do anything to continue my ambitions, career or future outlook. Antipsychotic probably works if a lingering or sudden psychotic episode strikes, but being an experienced user of this pill due to forced medication that was given to me under questionable circumstances, namely being a new deviceless interconnectivity system that connected the police with Mentrum and brought me in a spiral with those binary workers, their own thoughts and opinions on the clandestine use of research chemicals or cheap street speed and unfortunately a big deal of homophobia in a life that was not in terror anymore thanks to the effect of an illegal but in Amsterdam decriminalised drug that amphetamine is, since ritalin is a brand name for it that is given to make young children perform better in school and, even having a one-time experience taking two tablets of that, I know that it really is exactly the same and has the same effect of the cheap street amphetamine. I had a case of hearing odd sounds, neurologically entering my head like telepathy but had no problem at all living with this ever during the decade I was taken to a facility in an ambulance more than four times. Because the new deviceless interconnectivity consists of hybrid humans that are not always into handing party favours, causing monitoring of very severe depression and fatigue, attention impossibility caused by constant nerves, agitation and jittery feelings that just made it impossible to even talk to a counselor for more than five minutes as I was just walking running from snack to snack every five minutes in this deeply unnecessary state, I was never clinically diagnosed as having a psychiatric illness because I had had experience with dopamine agents before my first hospitalization and had never even seen a psychologist or psychiatrist before the age of thirty five, But punishment can never be a means or weapon that a doctor has, especially when it is more and more approved of that these doctors spend time being under an influence that is unknown to me but is by some described as being an Islamic education or a focus on legal implementations or dealing with life and life quality and with psychopharma industry as doctors always have been capable of. Less is more should always be the device of any medical doctor that is properly schooled. Its views and opinion on a human beings health may never be blurred or influenced by personal feelings that are not neutral but biased or based on other incentives, whether it being obviously money but in cohabitation or collaboration with an automated system of computed impulses, the doctor may not be blinded by artificial feelings of hate, love, selfishness, vanity or feelings of personal antipathy in any way, Google made things even for me by showing videos that showed a and above all questioned how psychiatric facilities can have become industries in cities in Europe and the Americas, surprisingly much less in other parts of the world, when these medications are so strong the side effects are in no way available to read on the prescription or on the Google official web pages of the pharmaceutical industry. The dosages I had by the way had been unreal and telling me in between the lines that an A system and B system was in place with doctors continuously talking about my sexual health and lifestyle in the gay community I started to believe I was being used as an example to others. There was clearly something fishy about this.

That said, I also watched a Brazilian documentary with a screaming naked woman that was smearing her own faeces over the walls and over her body. I have strong opinions that justice court administrations authorities (because patients with antipsychotics are the only ones with bureaucratic state ties, court orders, forced administration and the embarrasment of the slow release injection in the buttock, no other medication has this at this moment because people simply take them without terror or torture following them for the rest of their lives in some cases.

It has been shown and proven that those people screaming on the streets about being followed by their state governments secret services and the lot have in hindsight actually been right and this I can acknowledge that following of government spying and authorities or hybrid devicless surveillance systems will finally at long last even make you go out and almost actually scream that no one believes you and how evil this is. These people and some of them have been all too easily considered as having delusions or psychiatric illnesses when I am convinced that they are often of a higher profile richer demographic. I think, and one of my doctors at the weekly conversations I had to have with counselors, that antipsychotics can really only be used as a last resort and in the case of the Brazilian woman that was in the isolation cell screaming and smearing shit all over herself and over the walls. Not even then by forced medication. Even pigs have rights in the bio industry and growth hormone injections are not that bad.

I walk down the street again and read the shops and advertisements. 'Hey, what are you doing there,' I hear someone shout. I'm startled and try to give myself a pose. On the other side of the street, two boys walk towards me. 'I don't know, man, I only know that one,' the young man says, somewhat distraught. Sometimes it's as if all the ingredients for an exciting and moving film are in my immediate vicinity. I walk on and look in the window of the liquor store in my neighborhood. The displayed items behind the window were tempting to resist but I am still on a cheap beer budget. Highlights of tonight´s YouTube session were honestly Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. So much is said through popular culture and art or design. What more could you want?

At Jumbo Cheddar cheese is now ninety nine cents. Sardines are a little more than half a euro for a can with the name 'Prince William' on it. The Cheddar cheese is quite ok but consists of half corn. I see when I get home. Are you screwed or not? In the distance it still looks a little bit like a cheeseburger from McDonalds or a very vague memory from England. Unfortunately I still have to live on seven euros a day. You could also buy supermarket Gouda for that but that is not tasty anymore either. Yes sorry but the food here is just too bad for words. Someone must have noticed that?

DEMONSTRATION

Last weekend there was a demonstration against racism in the city centre. The demonstration organised by GroenLinks, the political party the mayor of Amsterdam is from was supposed to start at two o’clock. I had not managed to find anyone who wanted to go with me. But I have become accustomed to going somewhere alone. When I arrived at Dam Square it was still remarkably quiet. There were a few people with banners and flyers and posters about fascism and trade unions and Islamophobia, among other things. It was striking that everyone had a white skin colour. There was not a single brown or black man or woman to be seen. I found that quite shocking. The paradox is that there was not a single coloured resident of Amsterdam present to demonstrate against racism. The demonstration had been announced a few days in advance and I had seen an announcement on Twitter. The group that had gathered at Dam Square grew larger and I spoke to a number of the spectators present while a man spoke. A procession would follow to the statue of the Dockworker near Waterlooplein. The man who had taken the floor was a good speaker and had a loud, booming voice but his speech was very long about Thierry Baudet and the political positions of his political party that had won a few days earlier in provincial elections or water board elections. Who is Thierry Baudet again? I have seen him on television a few times. 'Now you are standing on Dam Square,' I thought. For the first time in years I heard the words 'ethnic cleansing' and a lump rose in my throat. I did not know what I found more moving. The fact that someone had finally said something provocative, something that would hopefully finally stir up emotions and make the undiscussable discussable. For me this was the only reality at this moment. The long crowds of demonstrating people followed its route along Rokin and the new underground metro station that had been built there also connecting Amsterdam ZuidOost or Bijlmer with the centre of the city. There were some few black women and men with Samsonite suitcases as hand luggage standing there and waving at us but the demonstration had become too much of a generic demonstration on all kinds of other subjects from veganism to the legalisation of squatting and slogans against the police and uniformed powers as well as housing needs and even a poster was made called Who owns these streets?  As we walked on Rokin almost the entire road was filled with the mass of people in this bring your own cause demo that neither white nor black people were really particularly fanatical about, given that I remember living in centre west in the city with neighbouring Bos en Lommer being a sort of Little Mekka with many black and coloured people living there as well. Something had happened in Amsterdam. The housing market is still over half social housing but this is a hot topic and with private or capitalist investment companies on the rise in Amsterdam there have been some new innovations or evolutions such as migration for tempers and temporary housing for half days and even squatting had been reformed into a new type of walk-in standard that I had started to call knock knock myself.

THE PIANIST

A lot has happened in the past few weeks. Last Friday I was readmitted to a psychiatric clinic after not being able to sleep for two nights because I kept hearing voices from my neighbor Marlies' house, from construction workers and passers-by on the street and in the courtyard behind my house. The street is currently being dug up because the water pipes and gas pipes are being replaced and there is a machine humming day and night. I considered calling the psychiatric emergency service but the fear I experienced was related to the fear of being locked up and the fear that this would be permanent. The harassing sounds had made me exhausted and agitated during the past few days. On Google I saw that the psychiatric emergency service was not available. So I called 112 to ask if I could get a sleeping pill because the need was urgent. 'Yes, go ahead, suck it,' said the lady on the phone and I had to laugh. She suggested that I read a book and go to the doctor the next morning. The night before, I don’t remember the exact sequence of events of the past few days, I was also terrorized by sounds and voices in my surroundings and, desperate, I went for a walk, hoping that it would reassure me. I walked through the Staatsliedenbuurt and in the Groen van Prinstererstraat near the café de Pianist I suddenly became afraid. The streets were different. Passers-by walked by unsuspectingly but they seemed to be only extras in a decor that is constantly changing. The street I was walking in seemed much longer than I remembered. At the end of the street I saw architecture looming against the misty background that I had not seen before. I asked a passer-by if he knew what time it was but he didn’t answer. I hesitated whether I should go into the Pianist. On the other side of the street was a new phone shop with a T-Mobile poster that also sold some basic groceries. My phone had broken earlier that day and the message 'SIM locked' had appeared on the screen so I hadn't taken it with me. Luckily there were still some shops open late at night. That gave me some reassurance. Although I didn't know what to do now. I was standing at a crossroads and all the streets I could walk into had a destination that was still unknown and seemed to have changed. I had walked down this street often enough but tonight it felt like I was somewhere else. I had only been to Cafe de Pianist once. I stood still and tried to calm myself down. The ground beneath my feet seemed to be waving or shaking slightly and it felt like I was walking on sand hills or in an inflatable castle. 'Everything changes but you', a song by Take That, had been in my head the past week and I had played it on YouTube. It makes me laugh sometimes when simple pop music is given a meaning that is relevant to the situation you are in at that moment or takes on a new meaning. But now I was mostly afraid. Afraid to sink into this swamp, afraid to walk further to an unknown destination and also to go home where the sounds were driving me crazy. In front of café de Pianist there was a bench where I sat down. Two young dark women walked by. One of them had a bottle of rosé in her hands. Sometimes I give meaning to all the words and images that I see passing by during the day. The words and images are sometimes reassuring and relativizing but can also be maddening. I thought back to the demonstration in which I had quietly walked along and heard the almost exclusively white group of demonstrators cheering: 'Whose streets are these, our streets,' and these last words were pronounced a bit like 'Auschwitz' by the predominantly white elite that dominated the streets of the city that afternoon. The residents and passers-by within the ring of Amsterdam have become predominantly white and I have not been able to get much further than that lately. In the NRC I read an article that the advantage of the relativizing person would be that there are no more extremist Muslims who take to the streets to burn Salman Rushdie's books or call for a Fatwa. I decided to go into Cafe de Pianist anyway. I had the feeling that what I would do at that moment was very important and I was afraid of making the wrong decision. I walked into the cafe where a few people were chatting behind the counter and a barmaid was busy. Behind the window hung a poster announcing a dance evening on April 9. But now it was now and now I didn't know what to do. The people in this pub were chatting happily and drinking beer while I wanted to scream bloody murder. Suddenly I also had to go to the toilet. 'Uh, I'll order something in a moment, 'I stammered as I walked towards the toilet. Once back in the cafe I saw that the barmaid was talking somewhere in the corner and at that moment I didn't know what to ask her. I walked outside again and carefully walked into the Bentinckstraat. I met a woman who was walking in my direction. I asked her stammeringly if she knew where the street was, where the Dirk and Albert Heijn were, the Tweede Nassaustraat. That should be a side street of this street but on the horizon I saw that something was wrong. 'No, I don't know,' the woman answered. I found that strange because she had just walked from that direction. I asked her if she could help me or if she could call the emergency services. She already had her mobile phone ready but rang the doorbell of the house we were standing in front of at that moment. A somewhat older lady in a nightgown opened the door. 'Hi Marjan,' my co-star said in her sultry voice. ´Yes, I was just visiting my girlfriend here,' said the walker. More and more questions in my head. But also a kind of awareness of the fact that a changing and improvising environment can occur that can hardly be a coincidence. My new girlfriend-at-that-moment consulted with Marjan, who was standing in the doorway and we agreed that she, the woman I had met, would walk home with me. It was still foggy. She didn't seem to know the way but typed my address into Google Maps on her smartphone. We walked slowly in the direction of the Kostverlorenvaart and slowly but surely the horizon began to look more recognizable. Once we arrived in the Fagelstraat we carefully made our way past the excavation work in the street and we walked over the planks in the direction of my front door. The woman went inside with me for a moment to reassure me. I told her that I didn't have much in the house to offer her. The woman said she would like a glass of water. I walked to the kitchen and got two duralex glasses of water and apologized that they were so small. We drank the water and I tried to tell her more about the fears and exhaustion I was experiencing at that moment. The woman seemed a bit confused herself. She called the emergency services on her phone. What followed was a complicated conversation with an operator who referred us to another number. The woman asked me if I had an insurance card, but when I looked in my wallet it was gone. The woman seemed to know me a little because she asked the operator if it would be a good idea for me to go and buy some wine. It seemed like she already suspected that I would do that. It was almost ten o'clock. The woman seemed to know me a little because she asked the operator if it would be a good idea for me to go and buy a bottle of wine. It seemed like she already suspected that I would do that. Out of the corner of my eye I looked at the clock. It was almost ten o'clock. The operator insisted that it would be best if I rested and went to the doctor the next morning. I was still a bit anxious and asked the woman if she wanted to stay the night with me. 'I can put a mattress on the floor next to the bed,' I said. The woman had a calm and soothing voice and I felt a bit more at ease. In the meantime, the woman was already on the phone with another emergency service. I didn't understand why it had to be so complicated to get something as simple as a sleeping pill in a city like Amsterdam. In better times, there was still something like the pill box that could come to you in times of need, but now the only option and my anxious prospect seemed to be another lock-up in a clinic that might not even be operable anymore. It is certain that the public services in the city, the municipal authorities and healthcare institutions have failed in an inimitable way in providing information about everything that is going on. For that reason, I had filed a complaint with the medical disciplinary board the day before because Mentrum and my healthcare providers had not been open and had wrongly given me an incorrect diagnosis and the wrong medication.

'W(i)e smelled it,' sighed the woman's voice and I had to laugh for a moment. I can hear the voices in the neighbor's house above me. They are talking just loud enough for me to hear them. They have been talking to each other incessantly for nights now. They usually sound cold and distant. Sometimes funny and seductive. I don't know who the voices belong to. They are apparently never tired. 'This is terror,' I think to myself. I lie in bed, limp and petrified. That is not cool. The voices torture me. They keep me awake for nights on end. 'Andy and so chicory again.' 'He???.' Why am I listening to this? It makes no sense at all. 'Oil if...' My thoughts are going in all directions. Total exhaustion. The voices are subtle and manipulative. I am getting more and more tired. 'I can't.' It is as if words are raining down on me. I hate them. And I want to see them in front of me. 'You are a line.' I've had enough. I can't do it anymore. Myriam, the neighbor from further down the street, has heard the voices too. She runs across the street screaming. How stupid is that!! She screams. 'You're a line!!' 'That's so stupid!'

Last Friday I was in the Concertgebouw with Marloes, my roommate when I first moved to Amstedam to attend a concert by Japanese musicians. It was an experience. The artists were exceptionally talented. 'How do you describe a feeling?' Kylie MInogue opens her European hit In My Arms with. Like a party of recognition perhaps. Recognition, is that a word? It means recognition and acknowledgement. Funny how we are sometimes not lost in translation. REcognizing a feeling we have had before is a trigger to enter a state that we know and find either comfortable or not. In this lies a contradiction too. If you are born on a birthday party with balloons and a cake and you have that birthday party with your beloved ones, like your partner or family then that is something to look forward to. If you have recognizing of feelings or the full consciousness of a very new experience it is a sensation that can be described. It made me imagine what it must be like to be starting life or being born under the worst possible circumstances even unimaginable for us for instance having to stand or sit in a one square metre isolation, being static not able to move then that would be one of my worst fears if that would last forever. But also, being not used to anything more than in a cage of one square metre could mean that the senses are simply already accustomed to that and have a life that is ok for the rest of their existence as beings. This is where we should stop and think before we measure life quality because it is not the same for everyone and the spectre of emotions that a person has can not suddenly be limited too much is what I have experienced more recently myself. The lack of human interaction of the physical kind, the sexual kind and the way that it was portrayed as if my own peers, my own family and friends simply would not grant me that  and had put me in that square metre, as a matter of speaking it was a  bit more maybe has made me miserable forever for the artificial intelligence that thinks it can measure life quality is not one that should be seeking equality or mediocrity for this would ensure a dysphoric future without much sense or reason to live anymore. There have to be new sensations and different options and this is in part a matter of economics when it should and by now must only be a matter of resources and the willingness of your friend or network. Alice in wonderland I never read but never being able to share nor compare what I go through with any other living human being for many years now is a kind of torture. The diagnosis of mental illness in this context is a factor that is in my case really the devil because left to our own devices, to quote the Pet Shop Boys eventually will lead to a massacre of technocratic led mass murder in the best case in a systematic and efficient painless manner. What do you mean? Why shall we not make the promise that we grant and wish one another feelings that we can describe and that are of the best that can be achieved. Optimal. Because there is always the cycle or wave from good times and bad times that follow up and the pattern or routine is in most cases simply a part of this lifestyle. I was not lost, I wanted nothing but to satisfy my beloved but that is a reciprocal process. The big problem is that artificial life has mechanisms that use the trap as a method to learn and seemingly use the trap as a method to learn what bad behaviour is is somehow best taught by causing unhappiness and limitations. In order to be able to let go in the end or be released. Envy, jealousy, greed, vanity, ambition and competition are major traps we can learn from. Laziness is a good that the revolution of digital and computing, cinematic and automatic has left us with as a compromise perhaps. How Does It Feel In My Arms? I will listen to it for the four thousandth time or so and it will make me escape my workday again. The only question I have is if you have arms though.

The anonymous, generic music that blares through the gyms and supermarkets in Amsterdam these days is depressing at times. It seems to be on purpose. Sometimes I hear the bored voices and boring beats of a slow rap while I walk through Primark. It almost makes me suicidal. 'On,' is a good song by Gloria to run to. Wepa' too, both songs are on her latest and most underrated album 'Miss Little Havana.' Someone told me that songs like these are only made to whip you up and make you happy. And that that is not the intention. 'Time waits,' from the album unwrapped, I recently rediscovered. Music is better when you've heard a performance several times. I'm pretty loyal to my idols. I also like 'Boef'. But he only has a few songs left. I thought 'Antwoord' was awesome. This concert in the Concertgebouw was of a different caliber. An unnamed group of musicians from Japan. I don't know if they were on tour and if they're also performing the same repertoire in other cities. I was sitting next to Marloes in the main hall and I would just let it happen today. Sitting in the main hall of the Concertgebouw already feels like an honor. We, proletarians and degenerates of all countries, are welcome now. Bravo! But should we applaud? The concert started with a classical piece that was performed in opera style and in Japanese. The ladies entered from the wings from the left and right. A fat lady with a strikingly large bosom entered from the left in a black dress and a slim, slender woman in a decorated kimono from the right. It was a bit like a pop concert. The ladies sang a number of numbers in operatic style and in Japanese, a language I cannot understand. There were moments when certain sounds were more emphasized and I recognized the language I heard in the apartment above my home. 'Ha ha homo do ha ha, 'homo ha die, homo sla ho.' Did I hear that right? I don't think that's Japanese. The words touched me and moved me. The audience applauded. My gaze turned to the impressive decorations on the ceiling and the names of famous composers painted on the wainscoting on the walls of the impressive hall. After the two ladies had performed, a new group of Japanese women came onto the stage. They were dressed in sky-blue robes with a white tunic made of lace over them. The conductor was a small, stocky man who at several moments encouraged the audience to clap along with the music. As if it were a Schlager festival. The music they performed was harmonious as an operetta with influences of jazz and improvisation. It was entertaining and moving. During the performance a baby in the audience started to cry. A lady with a Japanese appearance walked into the audience. A young man with blond hair quickly passed the baby to a Japanese woman who disappeared with it into the wings. After the performance of the operetta an instrumental piece followed that was performed by a large group of Japanese boys and girls. The number was uncountable but I estimate that there were between forty and fifty. I asked Marloes if she thought the musicians would also be allowed to perform well-known pieces. What followed was again an interesting cacophony of sounds and images. I tried to count the young musicians but we were sitting quite far back in the hall and the musicians kept moving or one disappeared to reappear a little later. In addition to their own work, they also performed numbers from Les Miserables and Walt Disney. 'Hi ho,' of course and finally 'It's a small world after all.' After the performance we had a few glasses of wine with her at cafè Welling. It will all turn to hell and we will bite the dust in the end, but he and she were meant to be separate until the coitus interruptus.Íwanted the right to misbehave, to say she ain my crave, Kylie Minogue sings in Cosmic, a self penned song is a merit, mostly in pop, but writing it with a line of help from Eg White makes this story not the last but the latest, if you know your Alfa Beta. Surprise!

Leon Mussche I iINOVERTED

Fagelstraat 55 HS, 1052 EZ, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, EU and in neo Go-zones.