well, here we are, on the cusp of the beginning of the beginning to the rest of the year. i know, that sounds ridiculous and i apologise, i might be high. are people allowed to write substack posts when they might be high? i guess there’s only one way to find out. so not sure where this is going to go...i’ve been spending a lot of time alone. nobody’s around, nobody’s doing anything. everyone is either in hiding or recovering from holiday...or both...soon it will be all over, the sensation that life hit the pause button for a few months. i’m looking forward to it. now i have two distractions in my dutch language class. no, i’m not going there, not the italian bird nor the lithuanian who may or may not return...friends and invisible friends...i’m proud though...i could have spent the last two nights on the lash, reacquainting myself with the bollekes, seeking out the blackout as a new method of killing time..but no, i kept it to pricing stereos, well, turntables, thinking about building a tower of LPs that other people used to own. reck-auds; but that’s just a meaningless distraction. i need meaningful distractions. i guess they are not distractions but passions at some point. obsessions. then all time until the next holiday evaporates and there you are, somewhere else you didn’t need to be, just for the chance of a change. but this sounds a little like whingeing in my ears and whingeing is like static or a skip in the record....i have to fix it, recalibrate it...i listened to iggy pop’s lust for life for the first time in months, maybe years because i’d gotten sick of it. but time and perspective, i was transfixed. wear headphones when you listen; loud. let it seep into you..it should be the opening soundtrack when they show a piece of me staggering between pubs and cafés in sunglasses and some sort of hat, a rooster on my shoulder...then they’d talk about me. i’d have to take up painting; howling at the canvas, dancing around in one of those loincloths, throwing paint everywhere...or dip myself in bathtubs of paint and use myself as a human paint roller on the canvas and lust for life playing in the background as opening credits roll...starring ed norton or somebody...

anyway, i’ll be packing it up this morning and going to brussels for another day but i think more exciting. people will not shout when they see each other for the first time since the holidays began, but they will be pleased to see one another. i can’t figure out why. everything seems so impermanent.

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i’m settling in…it’s odd how a three week experience can evaporate into nothing so quickly…i still have occasional holiday flashbacks while standing innocently in the kitchen, waiting for the hot water to filter through the thimble-like tea infuser…what’s this? tea? yes, old england habits die hard. it’s three in the morning and i can’t drink beer, it’s too early and i have to go to the office in brussels today. asphixiate myself with fake cheer and the shiftless boredom of bureaucracy…the tea is a vanilla infusion…i got it from ‘the antwerp tea party’ which doesn’t sound very flemish but they have a wide assortment of tea and this is what i decided yesterday, walking around aimlessly “in de rustige wijk van de Paardenmarkt in Antwerpen”, you see? i’m practicing already and our first class dutch class back again is not for another week. i’m a good student, i can even pat myself on the head….(shhh, i stole it off their website, i know, i know, terrible cheat…)

i don’t have enough to say this morning to complete an entire journal entry and i feel like i bombarded people during my last few days on holiday in bosnia, trying to reintegrate myself into normal human culture after weeks of solitude…nobody is here to socialise with…more will be trickling back this week before the first official day back at school for everyone next tuesday…well, everyone in flemish-speaking belgium…the french part, the walloons, they have to go back a week earlier, yesterday in fact, they were back in school. the flemish might tell you that’s because the walloon kids are not so bright and need the extra week to catch up but i’m not getting mixed up in belgium’s crazy cultural rivalries…the truth is even weirder…wallonia’s ministry of education based its entire reform on the advice of chronobiologists, who are scientists who study biological clocks, and child psychologists. so the walloons might argue they have a more scientific approach to child education. this gives you a good insight on the craziness of having a country split in two linguistically and culturally…i read that when wallonia implemented the shift, the flemish ministry of education explicitly stated they had "other cats to whip"

other cats to whip is not even a flemish expression originally…it’s french. i don’t know about you, but i find that ironic. the flemish ministry of education using using a french expression to dismiss walloon culture (the walloons speak french they say but don’t tell a french person that…)

what i can’t imagine is why would they have even thought of this, whipping cats? i know it’s an old expression but was there some moment in medieval european history when cat-whipping was in vogue instead of cat idolisation which we all know is a social media frenzy….but when i look it up this morning i see that cats were widely associated with the devil and witchcraft, so public violence against them was common and often festive…often festive. imagine that. we never had cat-whipping episodes in dagestan as far as i know..

i’m not much for mixed martial arts or even dagestani patriotism but since we are talking about cats, there was a viral video showing one of dagestani’s most famous, toughest mma fighters, khabib nurmagomedov being freaked out by a cat…for even more context than you ever imagined wanting to know, khabib is also famous for his childhood bear-wrestling footage…and the other social media element (not that i’m spending my free time watching tik-tok videos of dagestani mma fighters, i swear, ha..) is that islam makhachev, dagestani’s ‘other’ famous mma fighter, has a pet cat called Toni that had its own instagram account…in any case, i’m nothing like dagestani’s famous fighters, not in demeanor nor appearance and i do not have any cats to fry or whip or wrestle…and yeah kolya, i can say to myself, imagine how much you have enlightened the world with your cat discussions…

now, to get that taste out of my mouth (not the cat, i assure you, just the whole social media surfing in general) i am going back to drought and the memories of my dried up reservoir lake in jablanica, even here in antwerpen, things are getting bad because the rhine river has dried up so much that its making transporting goods a problem…well, for one company anyway, a chance to exploit drought to squeeze more money out of people…that is to say that one of the largest french container shipping companies said it will apply an “inland emergency fee” as the low water levels in the rhine disrupts inland barge traffic…this is the topic to bring up at your next big dinner with friends…because true enough, the drought has lowered the rhine to such a degree that it has reduced transport capacity, created congestion and thus higher operating costs…you see how this works? no rain leads to lower rivers and more expensive transport which will lead to higher food costs (which is why drinking bollekes is a genius move because it is brewed locally, no shipping costs and thus, no inflation…no exploitation…)

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i’m working hard in my head. building what’s inside there, bonfires? ne, as they say in bosnia…i didn’t learn many words…but to be fair, i didn’t speak much, other than to myself and since i was not speaking bosnian to myself, there wasn’t much point in learning…otherwise i’d be fluent by now…ha…but you know, the difference between “ne” and “no” is pretty small and there’s always just shaking the head nyet or нет, and all the words are spilling out now, they might the giddy sensation of rain falling this morning when i woke and this afternoon the windows were all clattering and the curtains are dancing in the wind like whirling dervishes and i can hear the music of rain and feel the shush of a cool breeze and suddenly after months of suffering the world feels like paradise again…not that it ever really feels like paradise except in certain secret moments but it isn’t real paradise only the ‘feel’ of what you think paradise is supposed to feel like…that’s what i’m done saying. wind and rain and cool temperatures have finally chased the evil hell spirits of heat and humidity and dying dead air once and for all which gives me time to finish my studies and take my exams and become belgian so i can move the coldest country in the EU and never suffer this hot hate oven of living again but i don’t even know where that would be, do you?

ok, maybe finland or sweden but i don’t think even if all goes well and i pass my exams and file my papers it won’t be so fast, they say four to six months and if that’s true, it’ll be the first truth told by a bureaucracy in the history of mankind so i guess i would imagine more like a year which maybe will let me out in time to avoid the heat of summer again…then of course, i’ve got to learn swedish or finnish and i haven’t even finished learning dutch yet so maybe i’ll just have to break down and buy some kind of cooling system for the flat…like jaga cooling system that they say drops the temperature but bonus, creates humidity…so you sit like a little begonia being slowly cooked in a hot house…

look at me, all those words and fuck all said. it’s almost like a magic trick, isn’t it? most of my friends are still gone, out on holiday…they started their holidays after me so won’t be back until next week and then it all kicks off again, kids go to school, everyone back to work and it’ll be as though nothing ever happened.

it did happen though and that’s what feels so alientating. i’m here but it doesn’t feel like i’m here…mostly because a lot of people are gone on holiday still so this half-eaten feel to antwerpen is both disquieting and luxurious.

but something did happen and i found myself reading “robert eden” by jack london because something caught my eye in the Tulibris during lunch hour yesterday and saw this passage where he writes “what do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men?” and i thought that’s exactly how i would normally feel except there’s nobody here to hate…there is room to roam, space at the bar, nothing is sick and rotten yet but it seems like we are always on the verge of it…i keep looking at the clock or the numbers on the phone and i can’t figure out yet if i secretly i enjoy it or despise it.

and don’t worry, i am nothing like Quentin in “the sound and the fury”, twisting the hands off his grandfather’s watch and breaking its face because we all know that despite destroying the mechanism, the watch continued to tick loudly in his pocket and that would be worse, trying to destroy time only to find out it cannot be destroyed.

i don’t know how i got to the destruction of time from wherever i was…maybe perfect repetition murders time more effectively than chaos does so if i just hang on another week or so, everyone will be back in place, performing their same tasks at the same time with the same expressions on their faces and all will revert back to the same dull series of days which get lost in the sinkhole of infinity…

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well, here i am back in antwerpen again, zip, zoom wham. that’s what it feels like…a bit like that scene in Snatch when an entire transatlantic journey is reduced to roughly a few seconds: suitcase, cab, airport/plane, passport stamp, London cab—bang, Avi has arrived. that’s me here although there are no missing diamonds, no Franky Four Fingers…ah what a larf, maybe i will watch that tonight if i can find it…

but outside of that, it is eerie to be gone from the heat (here it is 24° instead of 40° and the sun is not beating down on me and what is the first thing i do? of course i drop my bags and go to café Hopper and sit there on the terrasje, chain-smoking, reading the one book i wanted to take with me but left behind (the uses of disappearance by nikolai varin, that auld family favourite around the campfire you can’t make because of fear it will all torch up and turn everything to ash in a matter of hours…) and the bollekes, oh my, the bollekes! that was what i missed most from antwerpen. not my flat, not my books, not my friends but the bollekes and before i judge myself too harshly about that one, this is about quality (freshness) and not quantity although yes, the chain-smoking got out of hand because it wasn’t so hot and the freedom of smoking when you are not sitting in an oven is exquisite…)

now, as far as assessments, i go back to work today but from home luckily and nobody is going to be around although no dutch language class still until next week…

life will slowly begin its crawl back to its own banalities. i’m sad it’s over, even the suffering. the weather here is cooler already and we will be back to rain and grey very soon, perhaps even today. for now, that seems like a pleasure, a relief, but soon yes, of course, it will become that slower reality of common experience.

for now, back to my own shower (you’d be surprised how exigeant i have become because the pressure is perfect in my own shower, unlike the slow dribble that came out so unsatisfactorily in my bosnian cabin…and then stock my refrigerator with food, well no, in reality stock the cupboards with food i don’t have to cook to eat, stock the fridge with beer and milk and cheese and ganda ham…come to think of it maybe since i’m working from home i’ll have the time to make myself an omelette later. or rush like a maniac to Fritkot Max oh yes, i’ve missed those! a nice very first dip of a piping-hot, thick-cut friet into a mountain of cool, sharp mayonnaise right on there on the sidewalk, standing, not sitting, maybe even walking but that takes extra dexterity and i’m out of practice.

it’s so odd that what is home is all the unhealthy bits; the bollekes, the friets…i feel like i’m missing something…i am, i’m sure…but these are the first hits of what settles for home these days.

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this continues to be part of my integration back into civilisation…i’ll be leaving later today, slowly spending more time in places with steady wifi so that i can start stuffing myself with useless social media (more useless now in hindsight), useless news that never changes (yes, then no then yes then no again…this is the iran v trump saga, same with ukraine same with economy, same with human misery). everything stayed steady in my absence.

i haven’t met any birds on this trip…not that i expected to exactly…i thought it would mostly be transients and families here, everyone leaving traces of garbage behind them. cigarette butts and plastic wrappers, bags, bottles…but really, nobody…hey sexy, want to walk through the dead lake muck and see if we can dig up the tombstones? not a great opening line here at the exotic beach bar (real name!) which is a bar on a beach which was probably once quaint, a little hidden alcove but now is it just a place to drink shitty lukewarm beer and look at the mud and dirt beach. mud is a feckin luxury here because that means liquid is somewhere but this is not even a draught so much as draining…

i don’t think about Eglė much any more. I did the first few days but it’s been drained out of me, all of it, desire, gone…not just for her but for anything…the heat sucks the life out of you and survival and comfort is the only thing that matters…life reduced to simplicities…well, survival and comfort are not simplicities but stripped of all else, there is a certain simplicity, less options…and maybe that’s good, less options. no one to choose from to ogle, no one to infatuate with, nothing to eat, well, same things to eat, plenty to eat, just no variety…lamb and lamb….i guess all the lambs in the hills are gone…when i have energy despite the heat to eat, that is…a bit of pašteta (meat spread) & freshish bread: this, i’ve been told, is the ultimate balkan lazy meal. I buy a tin of Argeta pašteta (chicken or turkey flavor) and a fresh loaf of white bread (hljeb) and just spread it on the bread…yumyums are falling from the sky!

**

i’ve been doing a lot of reading in place of the doom scrolling and christ knows how many boring articles i’ve read about people rediscovering themselves in the absence of social media and yes, maybe it is true, there is a certain levity in being free of social media…but it’s like going through periods of detox…you say oh, reality, this is lovely but you can’t wait to get back to drinking and drugging again.

i’m not saying that the reading has led to any profound satoris or anything…i grew up in a place not like this but with this sort of aura, i don’t even know how to define it properly, perhaps just this heavy weight…even on holiday and i think maybe all the killing and suffering lays its mark in the land and that what i am feeling is some sacred aura of misery…the only problem is this place is not normally like this…this could have been a great summer holiday but it isn’t. or maybe it is. maybe spiritually i’m advancing in ways i didn’t even know existed. no long nights out because you have to be up and out so early to enjoy the few hours of tolerable heat residue that remains at 1 or 2 in the morning…

no, i don’t even know what i’m saying…i’m going back sad and the idea of being in my flat again, well, no, there is a worse heatwave there now i think…but what i mean is that there will be no dead lake to confront and that alone will be victory.

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so not everything is grim. i mean yes, the lake that my rented holiday flat overlooks has dried up. historic drought. ok, it’s not ‘real’ lake either, it’s an artificial reservoir. or was. now it’s dried up and where it isn’t dried up it is mud. there is still some water, it’s not just a dustbin basin, is that the heatwaves trigger an immense surge in elecricity demand for air conditioning (which i don’t have…i have a rickety floor fan whose squeaking and creeking is the loudest noise for kilometers….) anyway, the state utility company has historically drained the reservoir to critical lows to keep the hydropower turbines running…so that’s the logical explanation.

it’s creepy of course…stocks of "more than two million" fish, they told me, perch and trout, alike were killed off by the sudden drop in water about 40 days ago. so, not a fish death for me but it’s fecking hideous, the loss, the look, all of it…the best part is knowing it is right outside my window, the flat that was supposed to be so lovely really just reminds me of the horror…

the whole trip so far in fact, has been planning around what you can't do, planning around the heat. the flat is nice enough, sparse, cheap-holiday minimalism, built entirely for quick turnover rather than actual comfort. lying down on the floor with my eyes closed in front of the rickety fan. that's what i remember most so far, suffering. the most interesting part of this suffering has been that until now anyway, there has been no one to complain to. suffering without having someone to complain about it to is a new sport…and thinking in my little economics mind i begin to realise that suffering probably only produces value when exchanged. i mean, until you tell someone, you're sitting on an illiquid asset. but complaint converts private misery into social currency: sympathy, anecdote, identity, evidence. without an audience, there is no market. you're just holding depreciating misery. so let it out everyone, suffer live and out loud!

i start to think about this quote i read yesterday by Cernuda banging on about being a poet, saying something like it is accepting the punishment of seeing what others ignore, and sure, that sounds noble and it rang noble in my ears all during yesterday morning’s hike, but now i start to think that the genuinely difficult version would be accepting the punishment without getting to tell anyone that you’ve accepted it. imagine that. well, actually, now that i think of it, people are tortured all the time, suffer all the time, without the slightest ability or even freedom to complain about it. but does it make them poetic?

sealed suffering, sealed in heat, and until now, no capacity with such dodgy wifi, to complain to someone about it…congratulations, you get to feel it a little…this is my big chance after how many days? ten or fourteen, something, i’ve lost count, i only know that in two days i fly back somehow, back to civilisation…and my complaint, stripped of all poetry is that i get a few hours in the morning before that feckin sun bears down...i take a cold shower and sleep in the afternoon all windows closed, all dark shudders and curtains closed so a dark room to sleep in....wake up to read around 10 pm and then sleep on and off again until 1 am when i usually can sit up and make coffee and not be hot, open all the windows, let the cooler air in...

then again, maybe that is a blessing in disguise.

holiday suffering, maybe that's the new cool.

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well, it’s hot. it’s hot every day. near 40°. hot and very dry. i guess it’s hot everywhere. but here, i sit and type this into an email to myself that i can’t send until i go to restoran ostrožac at the top of my street on the M17 highway which has a better wifi connection...that’s the story here, the whiz-bang, the fact that the wifi connection in my flat is so dodgy that i’ve pretty much given up on it...but you know, i’ve leaned into it...unplugged. why do i need to know what’s going on in the world? the dutch i learned over the last many months feels like it’s diminishing...i can feel a word by the hour leave my memory...well, here i think and speak in english...i don’t dare mumble a word in russian although many of these people would probably know it when they heard it and resented it...jedno hladno pivo, molim, i learned. “another cold beer”...a bit of the auld sarajevsko pivo, it’s called...the bars back in the main town of jablanica are far too long a trek in this heat, so i’ve settled into a rhythm: a quick walk down to the small local convenience kiosk to stock up on cold cans of beer then back to the room to sit at that sleek little wood-veneer desk staring out at the empty basin.

oh, ok, it’s not that bad...i adjusted my expectations...i get up around dawn and start walking along the local roads that parallel the dried-out lake basin. it’s not really even that nice, just a narrow series of paths, lots of loose limestone scree that shifts under my trainers with every step. the mountains are all limestone so i’ve been reading up on that when i stop somewhere that has wifi...when, more like if. it’s ok here at the restoran ostrožac, a bit of grilled lamb, delicious, cold beer, delicious...and i forget all the other shit…

none of the views are proper panaroma...there’s some side of a grey, jagged wall of rock that seems to lean in toward me, blocking out any breeze, with low-lying, scrubby brush that offers zero shade. i’m never really ‘in’ the mountains, i’m just grinding along the side of one...more dust dust dust everywhere, choking on dust, covered in dust, all of it that same colour of limestone ground down to dust.

dust and beer and heat. no, it’s more. i’m reading ivo andrić who is a bosnian writer and because i’m in bosnia...and i pulled a quote out of it and have been mulling it over all morning...something about how every generation has its own illusions with regard to civilisation. he says some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction and i guess we all know what our generation believe in, right? i mean hard to ignore with global warming, heat wave after heat wave, the stupid lake i’m supposed to swim in all dried up due to drought...all around us that monster perched to the east, putin, waiting to unleash...i can feel it more here...well anywhere outside of antwerpen where it seems like an abstraction...war is here too of course, the scars of all of it. sarajevo about 80 km from here, that four year siege we are all too young too remember but yes, i do remember seeing images of people running from snipers...anyway, no need to get dark. sucking down another beer...it would not be good to be hungover in this weather....the beers are tasty but well, anyway, i’m going to come out this way more often in the next few days, slowly start integrating myself back into humanity...so there will be more…all the bitter notes and dry observations of solitude…

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so there i was this morning, sitting in front of my fan in only boxers and t-shirt pretending to work from home, when i came across a story of tragedy in the newspaper about a family of three from bekkevoort whose 5560 € luxury villa holiday turned into a nightmare.

ok tragedy in this case is a relative term. i use it because the newspaper i read the article in portrayed it as one. personally, i’m going to admit with a wee bit of shame that i got a little schadenfreude from reading about how upon arrival, they discovered severe hygiene problems, including rotting onions and vomit under the blanket on the sofa, and fled back to the car after just half an hour.

how am i going to feel bad for somebody pissing away 5560 € on a luxury villa holiday? spoiler alert: i can’t.

however, the article wasn’t really the point. the point was that reading it also reminded me shit! i’d forgotten all about the holiday that i booked in march for in jablanica, bosnia! so i spent a good half hour frantically searching my personal emails for the confirmation of the lodging i’d booked and confirmed that i leave this monday!

(yes, that’s a lot of exclamation points but the terror only eased when i found the confirmation and searching my work emails, saw that i’d already requested the time off and apparently panic causes exclamation points…)

in fact, i was nearly impressed with myself retroactively. i’d even booked a flight that i’d totally forgotten about, although i see i’ll be flying a polish airline to warsaw which is the opposite direction of bosnia of course but it’s all in the interests of saving money...a few hours in chopin airport and then landing in sarajevo which itself is likely to be an exciting destination...in hindsight i could have maybe paid a little more and had a more direct flight, at least one that from the start flies in the right bloody direction (southeast) rather than northeast but feck it…it’s done and i’d already paid for it all in march...

once the intial panic wore off, i sat back with a satisfied smile…the unexpected gift…one minute i’m thinking about how to skive off work and the next minute i find out that in a mere five days, i’ll be off work for three weeks. (i killed the urge right there for another exclamation point because panic and giddy relief might not be far apart in the adrenaline department but i don’t want to subject you to abusive exclamations pointing.)

i’m trying to remember now why jablanica and why bosnia. of course, in march i was skint and no i don’t even remember why…i guess i wanted to be some place where no tourists would be… some place that i could get a way for a few weeks at a reasonable price for lodging.

that’s how that article set off the memory alarms…when i found the receipt i saw i was spending about 800 € maybe for lodging and flight for nearly three weeks and this family is pissing away nearly 6000 € for their luxury villa holiday. i don’t normally care what people do to be honest, poor people don’t get holidays, me in the middle, i get more than i can take but have to book everything months in advance to find good deals and even then, down to the bottom of the barrel..bosnia, right? the place on the jablanica reservoir where i am staying for less than 30 € a night is an artificial hydroelectric lake. my croatian friend jakov exclaimed immediately back when i asked him about it, that jablanica is shit. an artificial lake full of mud deposits, he warned. well, i guess i won’t risk being so disappointed about the hygiene then that i will run home after 30 minutes like the horrified family ...then he added that the folks are rather primitive in bosnia, so there is garbage everywhere. shitty living, shabby houses, lots of mud, you get the drift.

that explains the cheap prices then. no luxury for me but what do i need luxury for? i’ll just sit there on my lake of mud surrounded by garbage and knee deep in the fragmented minimalism of faruk šehić…despite jakov’s assessment which i have a feeling is tainted by history, namely a full-scale war between them where both sides committed atrocities against civilians and prisoners in areas they controlled, i booked the place anyway, fuck it, right? think of all the money i’d be saving, i remember thinking and think about all the cheap food and rakija i can pound down while i sit in my broken chair on the mud-slide reservoir.

even after jakob wrote to me again later as he continued to register his memories of why he hates bosnians, i was undeterred…according to him bosnians or bosniaks, not sure, i guess i’ll learn when i am there, have no coast of their own, croatia is too expensive for them, he scolded, so they all go to bloody jablanica. i’m thinking personally that i have no war history with them, no dogs in that fight so i’m thinking of course more along the lines of what might bosnian birds look like in jablanica. the beautiful peasant women of jablanica in all that mud…sure, that made me think maybe there will be bosnian peasant women hydroelectric lake mud wrestling. what i even need books for? mud wrestling and rakija oblivion, i won’t even know what country i’m in…

yeah well, eventually i run out of ways to amuse myself with that absurdity. the dust settles, the laughter dies away and, almost against my will, my thoughts wander back to eglė, who you might remember as my lithuanian friend. i try to bend them back towards bosnia, like uri geller with a spoon, but they keep springing back.

so no, of course i haven’t thrown in the towel as they say, …i didn’t forget…i can’t forget and if anything, her silence has made me feel unnaturally enamoured with her...even when she kissed me i didn’t have any wild illusions of heart throb but the truth is, in her absence, i am growing fonder of her by the minute...i’m hoping that this is because she is playing hard to get, including not going to the dutch classes any more, but it seems hard to believe that she would stop trying to learn the local language just to avoid me...i hope the idea of kissing me isn’t that repulsive...i have many references of failed and half-hearted starts with a wide array of females in the last few years, a lengthy cv of failure so if only i could contact her again, which i refuse to do now because those three times without a reply were enough, i might entice her to break the chain of bad luck...come fly with me to beautiful bosnia, the postcard i never sent from the local postkantoor giving the coordinates of my beautiful holiday shack, the mud pit love shack as the b52s…

to aid me in my efforts of distraction, i let myself wonder why a newspaper would make headline news of some bekkevoort family’s ruined luxury holiday…the simple reason is because the newspaper i happened to be reading was “het laatste nieuws.” …if you don’t know what het laatste nieuws is, let me tell you: it’s what many might regard as a sensationalist, emotional-outrage sort of tabloid. i don’t read it for the topless glamour models, like the ones that used to appear on page three of the sun back in shitty auld england. i read it because the literacy level required of its readers is maybe secondary school at best, which means that, with my nearly secondary-school level of dutch, i can almost read it.

i know that the embolism of melancholy is finally busted for certain when i realise need to get off of here and look for a hostel bed in sarajevo because my first night is not in the lodging i booked…in fact, it’s not until three days of casual exploration that finally arrive in jablanica so off i scuttle…

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i celebrated the heat by going to luddites books & wine and grabbing a laszlo krasznahorkai book i hadn’t read (not the only one i hadn’t read but one which i hadn’t seen translated into english before : “seiobo there below”) nothing says i’ll be normal despite melting like an urs fischer wax sculpture, like trudging through the verbal blizzard of krasznahorkai...

there is no time or interest, to be honest, in mourning or celebrating the fact that belgium beat the united states in a very controversial match where the president of the united states inserted himself into world cup administrative business, because belgium didn’t just beat the usa team, they humiliated them - no one outside of united states was rooting for them, the new symbol of perpetual evil...too preachy, i know, too political, but we all felt this was a new form of injustice, changing the rules at the last minute.....sadly, despite that grand victory, our proud lads could not squeeze past spain and we are out, the world cup is over for us, for the massive crowds gathered at public viewing zones across the country who were completed gutted when the late winning goal went in…it was a brutal string of bad luck…we were genuinely on the verge of forcing extra time despite being completely depleted by injuries…so, for we belgians, even though i am not a belgian yet i am getting closer, i can smell the double-fried ossenwit in the friets now, inching ever closer to freedom to eu citizenship, being knocked out of the world cup sucks…

all of this to avoid telling you that eglė, who many of you know now as my new lithuanian friend, has not been in touch since the stray kiss after belgium’s shocking victory over….i can’t even remember who any more and does it really matter since we are out, we are out…and we won’t have another chance for four more years…by which time i should be belgian and then free to live in a country with a better chance at winning the world cup like france or spain, ha.

what does matter is that they worked out how that fire started…they say that workers accidentally struck a copper water pipe while drilling. they also say that the resulting water leak made contact with the main power supply, triggering a severe short circuit and extreme temperatures…and i have to wonder, i guess i understand for legal purposes to find out why, but what difference does it make to the five women who died…they gave a briefing for the relatives of the victims and the residents of the apartment bloc…unintentional arson and unintentional manslaughter…one of the fatalities is an 80-year-old woman: A resident on the fifth floor. another victim is a 93-year-old resident and her 54-year-old daughter, who was visiting with her own daughter – the granddaughter – to show her school report.

so the fact that eglė is too embarassed by a kiss to return my now three messages which, yes, i know is two messages too many, and hasn’t been back to dutch class, pales in comparison to five different tragedies but for me, who can only reflect on the general nature of tragedy rather than mourn individually, no, it isn’t tragic but it’s a shame…another damp squib so to speak, in the history of near victories and total failures for me…

i also read that the mother and graddaughter tried to flee but thenrealised that the grandmother wasn’t with them. the daughter is thought to have gone back inside, and both of them were then trapped by the smoke.

so again, who cares about the fact that it is hot hot hot...how many variations about complaining about how hot you are, are there? it’s a phenomenon. i no longer suffer the heat, i become like the chuck norris who makes onions cry...i embrace the heat now. i lean into it. it’s the only logical response. spending my days looking for second hand fur coats during my lunch breaks at the maissa vintage in brussels, for example…

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many things happened last night but keeping my head cool was not one
of them...first of all 'we' (belgium - please note, state authority, are my heroes,
rode duivels, see?)…we were losing by two goals with about 5 minutes
left, a sure loss…everyone was getting more drunk to drown their sorrows in advance and some were kicking chairs etc angry at more disappointment just as we exit the
heat wave and allegedly are set to be plunged into a new one.

but then: look, romelu lukaku! what a name, a magic song spirited off the tongue.

and should i dare i say this? yes, eglė…my new lithuanian friend, came along tonight…no poetry to translate, we were just there to watch the late match. she was bored. she was tagging along, mind if i tag along, she asked and i shrugged of course, understate, underplay…she explained further that she felt obliged to pretend to be a belgian supporter even though she hates football because, well, to be belgian apparently is to love the rode duivels.

i looked it up for her: the nickname goes back to 1902 apparently. belgium, in red jersies, beat holland pretty handily. some journalist coined it, saying belgium had fought like red devils. does the devil come in many different colours now? peace and love hippy devil? right wing devil? cancel culture devil? it seems silly. all devils are red but belgium were wearing red jerseys so, frankly, red devils was probably some version of racist remarks back in 1902 because everything was racist but at least he says ‘red’ meaning it wasn’t all in black & white in 1902…

aside aside, we, me and eglė or eglė and i, tentative still around each other, new pals…we felt obliged to cosplay belgian supporters so we made a game and used the crayon to put the veritcal stripes zwart, geel en rood. (black gold and red that's us
damn it!) on our cheeks and it turns out she speaks french as well, no end to
talents so she translated lukaku's post match interview to explain with all earnest why he deferred the penalty kick to his teammate --eglė said, lukaku’s father died last fall and this guy is still messed up about that, he was berated in italy where he plays (nobody talk about eleanora shhhh) and that, she explained is why he didn’t act cowardly but bravely and frankly…most sports interviews are just a few handfuls of empty clichés and it's over and you wonder why they were asked in the first place knowing they would say nothing but lukaku was pensive and honest and automatically now he is my favourite player.

then we sat around bar wasn't closing right away and we were drinking beers from plastic cups outside, smoking, a bit drunk and she leaned in and kissed me which yes, i could tell it was coming, she telegraphed and i thought to myself sexist! why isnt the man doing this and the truth is that not that i was scared but that it hadn't crossed my mind.. we are friends who only just started hanging out and she immediately felt horrified, said sorry i'm drunk and ran away down the street. yes i chased a bit yelled her name but i didnt want to seem like a nutter or make the situation worse so i stopped and decided to give her space and walked back to the pub. yes, of course, drank another beer although this one was to let this new event settle in, take a breath, have a roll up...then the text came “sorry kolya, i just broke up with someone and
was mixed up” and since i was drunk, i typed back "no worries,” and wanted so badly to say something clever, you know, what cool people say who know what to say but i just wanted not to say "more" but just added a smiley emoji because i'm a fucking idiot and now she’ll never talk to me again but then i saw some news flashes: people talking about a fire…

as it turned out, earlier in the day, (the news had somehow escaped me, working during the day in brussels and coming back directly to a bar to meet eglė, well before the unexpected victory and the unexpected kiss,) just over the other side of the schelde river in linkeroever district, five people died and several others have been injured in a fire that broke out they said, in a 10-storey block of flats…that puts a little levity on it all, puts it in perspective the kiss and i saw another man saying his parents-in-law, one of them ex-mayor of antwerp bob cools, had been successfully evacuated from the building and taken to hospital.

then the kicker: “we tried our utmost to save the cat but unfortunately in the end we were unable to,” he said.

and i thought four or five people and a cat died. i had been oblivious, cheering football, the zwart, geel en rood still smeared a bit on my cheek i noticed looking in the mirror but not wanting to wipe it off, wondering to myself did eglė wipe hers off too and then thought if i tell her about this fire, she might forget about the kiss and her embarassment and my stupid answer and tomorrow night we’d see each other in class and we’d have both forgotten it all…

but i know better. maybe she won’t come to class or maybe i won’t. maybe we both won’t. maybe we’ll both be hiding from each other but then run into each other in the street and laugh at ourselves, silly, skipping class to avoid each other’s embarassment and then of course, fate pushing us back together anyway, oh no you don’t, kolya and eglė…or, we both go to class and just pretend nothing happend, still friends, our faces still painted, “i never took a shower, i didn’t want to wash it off…” - ha, no, that would only be me, looking stupid and smelling bad.

so maybe i’ll just send one text…”did you hear about the fire?”

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well today is the day…i woke up this morning for the first time in days of this fever dream of horror almost feeling comfortable, a pittance, 24°. a cool breeze. the storms are coming. two days ago, i felt what felt like a saharan breeze but this morning, it is refreshing and the absence of heat makes me feel like i’m flying with happiness this saturday morning (could be the coffee too and a new band i discovered last night, norwegian psych rock which is not really saturday morning gummy head energy but fuck it. mingus could work too but i was on youtube watching world cup highlights (i slept through spain against uruguay because i had to wake at 4 am to watch belgium make mince out of new zealand) when i saw this video from live in kexp which i think is seattle maybe…in case you wanted to hear what i am listening to on first cool morning in a week… slomosa

the bigger news is that i did something i rarely do which was to submit a prose poem to a literary magazine…the catch was that it is in lithuanian. i have a friend, egle, from vilnius, from my dutch class who i didn’t mention during all the madness of lost phones and heat waves. not to replace my eleanora obsession but infinitely more accessible…anyway, elgé and i went out to sit out on the terrasse of café oud arsenaal, drink a couple of westmalle dubbels which is switch from my usual bollekes but it’s a heat wave, things change…anyway the idea is, well, egle found out i wrote because it was in a notebook i had with me and she asked me if she could go through it…so sure why not let a relative stranger read my notes and gibberish prose since i write to strangers on substack all the time but they aren’t right in front of me which makes it a bit different…anyway, she found this one she really liked and said she’s help me translate into lithuanian…sure, why not, it seems pretty random but she knows somebody somewhere in vilnius who is on staff at this magazine…so we chain smoked in some sort of cheap imitation of inspiration and well we came up with this and i sent it this morning:

Sąnaša

Taip, būtent taip ir buvo,
mes tai darėme realiu laiku, ar ne?
Ir tada, tarkime, na, štai mes čia,
tu niekada neišėjai. Arba aš niekada neišėjau,
nežinau, kieno bute esame... Bet kokiu atveju,
tu vis dar miegi šioje idėjoje, o aš turiu šiek tiek
laiko pasėdėti ir parašyti apie praėjusią naktį,
kuri šokinėja tai į šešėlius, tai į šviesą.
Ko iš tikrųjų bijojau? Turėjau keletą teorijų,
bet nė vienos konkrečios.
Gėda; o taip, dabar prisimenu,
tu man papasakojai apie mano gėdą.

what do you think, ha ha, it looks like gibberish to me but when she read it back well, it still sounded like gibberish, i’ll be honest, it doesn’t resemble anything i’ve ever heard…but you know maybe it was being a little high, i watched her lips when she pronounced the words (not in that way, get your mind out of the gutter) and besides, some words i could see that her mouth opens slightly, but her tongue shapes the vowels…which reminded me for reasons unknown of someone tying a cherry stem into a knot with their tongue but i didn’t say that to her - well i guess i did now, elgé, sorry, but it also reminded me of tong, which is dutch for tongue, so words are sticking to my subconscious, the ceiling of it somewhere, yet to say that full sentence in dutch, well, let’s just say, good thing i’m still studying…now that heat wave is over our classes start up again next week…

so i guess i will go for a bike ride somewhere…the middelheim museum park maybe depending on when the storms are due to arrive and they will probably be big ones so that will be fun too, a little symphony of thunder and lightening…

otherwise, i guess i’ll see what happens when i’ve used this poetry formatting inside the article which i’ve never done before, i hope it isn’t shit when it’s done…the funny thing is, if i’m lucky, i might be published in a literary magazine in a language i recognise nothing from…it seems almost anonymous and thus safer that way.

giddy mood giddy mood, let your hair down.

i will be back to my usual morose, existentialist whining soon enough but for now, this relief of heat is enough to make me giddy. it’s just the gypsy it’s just the gypsy, it’s just the gypsy got me tipsy in my soul…i think that is a jazz song…it was written down in my notebook several months ago…i must have heard it on the radio.

i have no ending today, how about that? just a beginning.

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the worst is yet to come, but i don’t want to whinge like everyone else about the heat, i can’t breathe, i can’t eat, i can’t sleep, the heat wave is like falling in love everyday of suffering, the hittegolf they call it here and next week it will be even worse, double down on suffering…you can’t drink beer in this heat and if you take long drags of a spliff or even a roll-up, you risk simply disappearing into vapor. that’s how i imagine it anyway, sitting in front of a fan, putting my head under the sink, experimenting with not moving for hours at a time….

no, i did not come to complain about this new form of suffering, another layer of things to complain about. i came to talk about condoms.

that’s right. that’s the news. fuck the heat wave.

the image that remains with me is twenty-four truckloads of contraceptives sitting in belgium while committees, agencies, contractors, inspectors, advocates, politicians, and warehouses all continue to exist around them.

it’s the best story i’ve ever heard, how the contraceptives themselves become like characters trapped in a beckett play.

they cannot go to uganda. they can’t be destroyed. they cannot be used, of course not. they cannot leave.

every month another invoice arrives to confirm their continued existence.

this is not fiction. i read in real newspapers how contraceptives and health supplies, originally funded by the u.s. agency for international development (USAID) and intended for low-income countries in africa, were stranded in belgian warehouses after the u.s. government cut foreign aid funding.

the truly absurd detail is that the original purpose of the objects becomes irrelevant. they cease being contraceptives and become bureaucracy. their function is no longer to prevent pregnancies but to generate reports, audits, statements, storage fees, and newspaper articles.

that’s often how institutions fail, they say. not through malice. not even through incompetence. through bureaucratic paralysis.

so i learn new phrases in dutch that she is not teaching us in class. glaring newspaper headlines like “miljoenen condooms en anticonceptiepillen van USAID dreigen verloren te gaan in loods in geel” — who wouldn’t want to learn that phrase, right?

and geel. why the condom centre of earth? (geel is world-famous for its community care system for people with mental illness. i don’t know if that’s why the condoms ended up there. probably not. but still.)

i could bang on about condoms instead of heat but there is even more going on beyond work, beyond dutch classes, beyond studying for exams and that is of course, the world cup which our glorious belgium is taking part in…(notice censors and government officials, how i used the word ‘our’ and ‘glorious’ when talking about belgium…does this boost my points when applying for citizenship?)

and they played to a draw against egypt, whose best player used to play for liverpool, a team who is the favourite of so many of my friends. monday night. iran. a country at war with the country hosting their games, their players shuttled across the border for ninety minutes and shipped back to mexico afterwards. marooned in tequila they can’t drink, surrounded by women they won’t sleep with. “we” play them today. i will take one sip of beer for every kilometer covered by amadou onana. eleven kilometers per match. i estimate i won’t make it past the hour mark.

but before that, i have more suffering to suffer. more heat to let settle into my flesh and bones. and then a whole week of complaining about the heat. it sure is hot. i can’t stand the heat but i can’t get out of the kitchen. and if i can’t get out of the kitchen, i can’t get out of the heat, stuck in it like a condom in geel.

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a fucking catastrophe how quickly things fell apart this last week. it started with a simple login error, a glitchy vpn, an ip address appearing to drift across the map, and a security protocol that decided i was a threat to national stability. i entered the wrong password three times in a fit of pique, and the screen flashed the digital equivalent of a slammed door on a finger: account suspended, contact administrator, verify identity via sms.

it could have ended there but when i reached for my phone to grab the verification code, i found the punch to the kidneys: my coat pocket was empty, the phone was nowhere to be found in the flat, i had not been to the pub so the only other option was the train back to antwerpen from brussels after work.

not even drunk! i might have taken some solace and shrugged if i could have blamed it on being wrecked coming out of a pub in brussels, falling asleep on the way home, but i’d been stone sober, on my way to the evening dutch class. somehow i hadn’t even noticed it was missing, entranced, no doubt, by how i might approach eleanora during smoke break.

and so that evening’s fiasco with the ad5 portal, the one demanding i verify myself via a phone riding the rails somewhere between brussels and antwerpen, is where annoyance hardened into terror. i had no idea how much my sense of belonging in the universe was tied to the phone because when i discovered it missing i became unmoored from my substation of compliance & servitude. the lost phone triggered not just panic but an unflinching need to offset the lost phone, lost life, with an explosive, unrepentant rendering into oblivion. a couple of spliffs and eight bollekes in a very limited period of time rendered me as numb as i dared to feel.

that in turn meant going to work with a hangover, late, fucking around with the sncb staff to try and see if anyone had reported finding my phone. to be fair it’s not the kind of phone that attracts theft so i figured probably a member of the sncb cleaning staff would find it wedged between seats one night, but every time i asked they checked and came back to tell me, no, nobody had found a motorola moto g-something-or-other, the sort of aggressively uncool job that announces, loudly, how little its owner cares about phones.

soon i found myself like a reluctant widower, going back and asking them every couple of days if anything had been found, and then by magic i discovered at the centraal station, in a back room, that it turns out it had been there for a day or two before, inexplicably, it was sent to a station depot, a warehouse sort of holding pen for forgotten umbrellas and chargers. and i had to pay a fee just to get them to acknowledge it. once i had filled out enough forms and paid enough money they finally, reluctantly, produced it, and of course by then the battery was dead so i had to wait until i was back home, finally recharged, and in the end the magic motorola song sound played out and i found my hundred messages from the gmail telling me to acknowledge with a code sent via text to the phone i’d lost in order to unblock my email and thus my substack fees.

i don’t even know what the fuck i was going to write about on substack any more to be honest. i forgot it all. i plunged into a miserable torpor. i called in sick several days, i admit. i also admit that in desperation i went to a palm reader named janneke raaphorst who practices “aquarian palmistry.” it’s a bit more ritualistic than a standard fortune-telling session because she combines hand-washing with reading. she told me, scrubbing some sort of liquid soap between my fingers, that she saw the phone near water, in the hands of a man in uniform. the scrubbing, i have to admit, felt quite good in the end, almost like a hand massage, which i’d never had before. the depot, when i finally found it, was nowhere near water. but the apparatchik who produced the phone did wear a uniform, of sorts, and i have not yet decided how much credit she is owed for that, which is somehow more humiliating than believing her outright.

so, for now, i’m just trying to restabilise myself, having taken the sick leave of a psychological trauma, and decided an afternoon getting stoned and watching reruns of the series grenslanders, fully wallowing in guilt and remorse yet simultaneously elated that i had access again to both my phone and my email account. a week of dutch classes missed, of course, which meant a week of smoke breaks missed, which meant eleanora had by now surely been approached by someone with a working phone and a better coat.

ps apologies to all those whose emails or articles or stories i haven’t liked in over a week but i will try and catch up gradually over time…

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there is a lot to come to terms with, or so i think in my grandiose scheme of myself…i have to wonder who i am sometimes…i’ve held this candle to eleanora for weeks without knowing anything about her and then a wild weekend in lyon, france later and someone else floats to the surface, lila. one does not replace the other i tell myself but in the sense of filling the emptiness in my being, yes, they serve the same function. it makes me wonder why anyone is with anyone, this idea that both eleanora and lila serve the same function. of what exactly? filling the emptiness, yes, but is that all people are reduced to being? is that what our friends are? solutions to emptiness? how do you know who is there as a prop in your being and who is legitimately there for a reason and is it for their reason or yours? this is where it seems impossible.

we have another bank holiday weekend, this time for pinkstermaandag they say, as if it means something…in english, whit monday, same meaninglessness. i look it up: pentacost. i look up pentacost thing and just find it to be more milking of this whole crucifiction business. i never paid attention so much before. i guess i was in that stupor of bank holiday means getting leathered twice instead of once on the weekend. i’m not religious though, i’m not going to feign interest. it’s a bank holiday and it’s hot here, not just warm. i’m staying in, curtains closed. i don’t care about the blue skies or the sun. i don’t even like the sun to be honest. it seems to conspire against my annoyed, cynical being, trying to force happiness in with its sunshine crow bar.

so i have left the flat to go to work during the week and go to my dutch class and yes, i did see eleanora…it was strange, i’m not going to lie. lila and i exchanged details of course but what that will mean in reality is another matter. i tried that long distance relationship stuff with marieke, christ, remember her? from berlin? that whole crash and burn? so i dunno about lila…i suspect that lila is not that bothered either way…that’s nice in one way, it was nice to experience lyon with this 24 hours sizzle thrown in almost like a last-minute alteration to the solitude i expected.

so it’s a quiet sunday morning, i’m listening to morphine and i’ll smoke a joint after i finish reading my self-imposed obligation : sebald’s “the rings of saturn” which comes highly recommended from someone, i can’t remember who. I found it written down on a napkin with a lipstick lips print but without any recollection of whose lips or recommendation it was. i just ordered it to be delivered and it arrived yesterday so now i’m stuck. i could always just go out and get wrecked since we have tomorrow off another bank holiday (the month of may is the freest month of all.) but i’ll feel better sitting here forcing myself to read.

also, i think i’ve decided i’m going to go to jablanica for summer holiday which is the cheapest place i could find with man-made sludge lakes and brutalist architecture. i’ve been warned by a croatian friend who is clearly biased against bosnians that jablanica is shit. an artificial lake full of mud deposits, she said. plus the folks are rather primitive, according to her, the croatian. there is garbage everywhere. shitty living, shabby houses, lots of mud…and mud bath is supposed to be therapeutic treatment now so fuck it.

she also told me that bosnians have no coast of their own, croatia is too expensive for them, so they all go to bloody jablanica.

so it sounds like i’ll be doing a proper bosnian holiday with real, live bosnians. an interesting place, an anti-vacation place, which explains why it costs a half of what other destinations cost.

it isn’t just the cheap holiday guiding me of course, it’s the mud and the garbage and the poverty. it might be the new aesthetic for all i know.

i open a random place in sebald and find a skull.

"it was not until then that st peter mancroft's repeated request for the return of browne's skull was acceded to."

i guess this concerns a man who wrote obsessively about death and impermanence but couldn't even stay buried, his own skull becoming an exhibit, an object, a curiosity. the irony is complete.

tuesday night i plan on surprising eleanora. i still can’t bring myself to sing to her in the smoking lounge in front of the other mechanically smoking students but i’ve learned the opening stanza and can recite it, with passion, as though it were a great italian poem which, according to some, it is.

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well it, i learned all sorts of stuff on friday night, how to miss my train, hanging out at a the phoenix bar happy hour, meeting some people and following them, don’t you have a train to catch no forget it i’ve still got time, following them to big easy is all i remember and then out to some other part of the city and finding even more people, more students everywhere and everyone fascinated that i am not french, that i don’t speak a word of french that everyone can practice their english on me and then, at the end, lila, i want to say of course but of course not because nobody was expecting this, not her, not me, not the train i missed not the friday night where i had to say i’ve missed my train and have no place to stay…well, i could find a place, i could afford it even if it was not in my budget but i didn’t want lila to know that…i wanted her to help me solve a housing problem when it was two or three or even four in the morning and we had been out drinking with her mates all night, a rucuous loop of females and a male or two scattered in …all that dark hair cut into a sharp, slightely uneven bob that she said she did herself with kitchen scissors over the bathroom sink and this was precisely the image that made me like her, not just her face, her actions, her mind…

no delicate polite laugh either, a sudden throaty bark that ended in a cough sometimes because she too rolled her own cigarettes just like me. i watched her all night, not just when she talked to me but when she talked to her friends, fluctuating between an intense, intimidating stare that she seemed to always hold one beat too long as if she was making sure you weren’t full of shit or believing that she was…and how sometimes that same face settled into a bored, intellectual mask before a sudden warmth warmed me, whenever an idea excited her, something somebody said or something she thought…no makeup of course, not that kind of girl, maybe a bit of dark eyeliner but probably not, could be a bruise for all i know or knew and adding to it all was the intoxication part, not just the beer but the sensation, the random chaos of meeting and there we were, walking somewhere i had no idea i’d offered to walk her home and of course, well…of course nothing…i’d been pretending all along that i had not chosen to miss my train…that this was all part of the preprogrammed agenda, getting drunk and wild…

and now i’m dripping with lila soft on my skin, perfume and soap aroma in my nostrils, stuck in there even after i leave and i wake up now here i have my bag, it is what day? saturday morning it must be, right, if i missed my train and i was due to go back friday night to brussels and i am still in lyon, what does it mean, what happens? it is saturday is what it means so i will gauge the lila weather, would i stay another day? did we have that much fun? when she wakes…well, i’m pacing, smoking, wondering can you smoke indoors, if i go outside will i lock myself out but i think i remember we were smoking and drinking and yes, i found an overflowing nashtray so we are all good…a girl like lila is not going to worry about secondhand smoke and smokes herself if i remember all our dirty kisses but now she’s woken up and instead of lying there weakly and calling my name that she probably doesn’t remember because here is what happens: i fall for someone so fast that i remember her name then inevitably she will wonder who the fuck is smoking in her kitchen and here she comes shuffling out in panties and a tank top, i gander appreciatively she is sleepy and appears to remember me, vaguely.

“still here?” she mentions, rooting around for coffee and finding a jar of instant puts the kettle on…

“i didn’t want to leave without…”

“oui, oui, je comprends…”

I don’t know what that means but she says it anyway…what language did we speak last night? surely english because i know no french or very little bonjour, croissant…

“café?” she is smiling at least as she pours hot water into a mug she pulls out of the sink and i do want it but…

“how about we go to a real café?”

“i’m not leaving like this..”

“like what?”

she stops and looks at me like i’m mad…

“like this, my head, my hair…”

i want her again but we don’t have the drunken darkness to hide within so i don’t know what to do or how to do it. offer to leave, offer to stay?

“you are leaving?”

“i dunno, i have to check the trains, buy another ticket…”

“you can stay here if you want but i’m going back to sleep…” she leaves the coffee, hers and mine that was never made, and heads back into her room. am i supposed to follow?

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so we moved this mental circus all the way down to lyon, france. (that’s the royal “we” because of course, i’m traveling alone…) quite a haul: four and a half hours of mechanical rhythm, the thump-thump of low frequency vibrations. wedneday night, right out of work. i debated the weight of the extra night hotel versus the chance to walk up early and walk the city before people start moving in…metallic scream of the rails. i took vassily aksyonov’s the burn (oжог) with me for the ride, it’s not name dropping if nobody knows the name…

i highlighted this line because it heals at the same time it wounds…it is the brutal reckoning of one of those fragmented reality hangovers…i know them.. knew them…but because of all the studying, haven’t gotten wrecked much and to be honest more modest drinking habits are based on my fear of emptying my head of all the information i’ve been putting in it…erasure by alcohol…

"This all the tricks of a hangover, all these spasmodic memories, balderdash with five-kopeck pieces... Less should be given way to! In general, to hell with the cursed potion! Are there few other joys in life?"

it’s just time waiting to happen…i was preparing, as i watched the last sketches of daylight give way to night, for an interview with eleanora, who in my dreams, is assessing me as a potential date… “and what about all these drunken nights of sloppy bollekes, kolya? are you going to take me out drinking tripel? do you want me sipping something with three times the amount of malt than usual, that high alcohol content you like so that i can get as intoxicated as you?”

(here my daydreams or twilight dreams sunset dreams if there were sunset there is not it is cloudy and rainy and darkness is almost a rellief…accusations from eleanora already when we haven’t had a date yet and then, out of guilt, i switch spotify to lucio dalla and listen to l’anno che verrà and practice my lines, caro amico ti scrivo…because this is still my plan, my secret attack, to just casually sidle up next to her during our smoke break and start singing…)

maybe it was a nightmare..;that would be the name of my autobiography, the portable nightmare.

i dreamt last night that someone slapped a plastic explosive on the side of a building here and checked the headlines but it was dream…

i’m calm anyway, it’s good to get away…good to ride the rails in thick black night of a late spring evening…but rain rain rain every feckin day it’s scheduled…this will fit my mood…i can only afford two nights in a hotel and its not bad, i won’t reveal the exact location in order to keep the paparazzi at bay but it is, i read from hotel propaganda, tucked right into the steep, gritty slopes of the 1st arrondissement. they didn’t say that, i did…i’m trying to make it sexy…, the historic working-class district where the silk weavers used to live. i don’t know what the 1st arrondissement means but that’s the fun, you know? just going, not knowing, not planning.

but that is all behind me and this is my first morning, how does lyon feel? very cold, windy, raining. this is like english holiday weather, caravan holiday…a fresh misery, the placenta of a fresh memory place over the pancake of living…no, placed over the older layer of misery. we are building a skyscraper of misery…i’m not miserable, i should stop pretending…i’m neither happy nor miserable, the perfect state of equilibrium…it’s a testiment to mediocrity…i smoked a pre-breakfast joint outside…i tried to walk but the rain is lashing down…was lashing down, i’m back inside wondering what museums to see because clearly there will be no walking tours…

what does a man who has everything want in a museum? madness? regality? there is never any problem in antwerpen…what if i skipped the museum and spent my time in lyon day-drinking? now wouldn’t that be a waste of time? of course so no. no day-drinking at least until i’ve seen one museum and spent a few hours to offset the carbon footprint of oblivion…

i know, i decide. i will go to see Giulia Andreani at the contemporary art museum look at this, who doesn’t want this on holiday after smoking a bit of a joint and moving on an empty stomach…did i get breakfast? no, i’m sure i didn’t. i wanted to explore a café but this rain is a misery. i’m almost tempted to go back to bed…

but this painting is going to inspire me to move, fuck the rain…what am i some rain-fearing expat? yes it inspires me. museum opens in a few hours. i will go out and try to find an open café somewhere…learn some words in french…café. croissant. this is france is it not? i’m already a francophone…i should have moved to walloonia. the language is easier to learn…

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i took a little break from everything yesterday. no studies, no thinking…well, early in the morning i did read through more of alisa ganieva, a dagestani writer that i like, a book called “the mountain and the wall”. it’s about a rumor spreading through dagestan that russia is building a wall to cut the caucasus off entirely.

now it’s afro-bossa by duke ellington and his orchestra.

but yesterday was amazing sometimes, how far the mind can slip away after smoking a relaxing spliff. no studies, no pressure, no failures…in one moment after smoking one i feel it but i’m not aware that i’m not aware i have smoked the spliff. i don’t consciously think, oh my, i’m high. it's only with perspective of time that i’m able to realise wow, yes, i was gone, like an astronaut tethered to the space ship, walking in space.

the mind needed the break, i plead guilty, judge. i didn’t mind either, sitting on the terrace of café baron with a nice bolleke or two in the sun, watching people without them knowing.

if i look back on the week, it is already gone. that’s what happens when so much activity; the studies, the classes, the work day, get crammed in together…time loses meaning…it might have been last monday but it felt like three months ago by friday.

i still didn’t work up the nerve to speak to eleanora and i know equally that i am building this up too much…obsession distorts…what are my true feelings? do i have any or is she simply some sort of distraction, an alternative method of substitution, real for imagined…it’s not like i stand their during smoke break and imagine us on the very terrace i was on yesterday, imagining how she might pause before answering simple questions, not out of insecurity but because she actually considers them. imagining that the delay is small enough most people would miss it but i feel it, every bit. maybe i just want to care about someone or something to notice the details and yet, imagining it, i see the details that don’t even exist…it’s an odd trade-off. reality (cowardice and fear) for imagination (sitting at terrace with her and noticing that pause…) when i ask myself what do i fear, rejection, i realise no, i fear disappointment…that i’ve built her into more than she is, or that i’ve built myself into more than i am…that’s the funny part about the drift between reality and imagination…at what point the departure from reality becomes an excuse in and of itself to ignore reality because the alternative is better….but what really gets accomplished that way, right? just temporary escape…but i think all these hours of studying and working earns me the escape and overcoming the guilt of escaping…that’s my official exccuse…

today i am going to meet up with lotte, who is in asset management for this investment firm in brussels but lives here in antwerpen. lotte, i might or might not have mentioned, is someone i met in a bar a year or so ago…we don’t see each other often but she likes to smoke a joint with me from time to time and we sit out, talking…well, she talks. she talks about her fascination with jung, about seeking more self-control, more realisation, about how she runs her section of the firm…she’s attractive yet i feel no attraction to her, i don’t know how to explain my relationship to her…we only see each other once every few months, we smoke a spliff have a few drinks and then leave…we know very little about one another…

that way i can ease into my sunday night…i work from home tomorrow and we only have a three day work week thanks to ascension. i was thinking maybe i'd take the train to bruges for the procession of the holy blood. it seems like the right thing to do, the kind of thing a person does when they live here and want to feel they are making use of it. someone learning a new language so they can become a citizen of belgium but i already know i won't. what i actually want is to be somewhere the language is not flemish and the architecture is not pointed and nobody is performing their medieval inheritance for a camera. i checked the departure board from brussel-zuid and see that i could leave right from work on wednesday evening and get a train to paris or maybe lyon. i’ve never been there before, to lyon. somewhere long enough to let another language wash over me and become nobody's guest.

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i thought i was depressed for the last week or so and dug into it deeper, how-you-say, leaned into it, embraced it, wallowed in it like a kid making leaf angels in a pile of autumn leaves, (i saw this once and was forever jealous) but then i realised it wasn’t depression it was apathy…and i know it was apathy borne from too much caring. not caring, trying. i realised i must be suffering from burn out. so much study, all work and no play…all the culprits gathered in one brown paper bag…

only another three months to go, ha! telling myself that would be depressing even if its true. apathy works. if i tell myself i don’t care if i win or lose. the winner takes it all now i’ve got that feckin abba song in my head, that’s bad news…what i mean is, my life could be so much more horrible. had my parents not moved me to london, for example, that butchery of war would have called for me…i was looking it up the other day when i wanted to feel sorry for myself. i looked at this map and saw the high percentage of dagestanis fed into the sausage grinder of putin’s war…

but i don’t write here to be political or to bore people to tears, stop stop i am just trying to illustrate the pointlessness of my apathy…my life could be that…being hunted down by ukrainian drones..yet here i am instead, whining about how uninspired my life feels because i have to study to learn a language well enough to pass an exam as a part of becoming a citizen of a new country and study for the ad5 exam to improve my professional status…they are all banalities in the larger scope of things but they are better than the alternative and it was that specific mentality that pulled me out in time for me to water my eleanora infatuation…

it’s true that often the only thing that interests me about sitting through that language class three nights a week is the fact that eleanora willl be there. don’t get me wrong, i don’t see sit in the back of the room on purpose just so i can insure getting a chance to stare at the back of her head, not to ogle that raw silk of hair that had been left in a drawer for a century. oh, that’s weird, i know…once i went to paris, to the museum of romantic life it was called and they had a clip of hair from georges sand…that’s what i thought off but eleanora’s hair doesn’t shine with the synthetic gloss of the industrial products.

the truth is, my heart beats faster whenever it is time for a smoke break and i stand off to the side and watch her out of the corner of my eye, pretending to look at my phone while she looks at hers for real, cigarette pinched between her lips, eyes slightly squinting either because of the smoke or because she can’t see well but doesn’t want to wear glasses or contact lenses, not because of vanity but because she likes the idea of struggling to see, likes the concept of seeing things differently than if her corrected vision were perfect.

and the first class we had after the last time, when i’d given her all that food for thought by addressing her suddenly during smoke break and asking her how milano was…that first smoke break two days later you can’t imagine how i tore myself up debating talk to her again or play if cool….i know that the smooth operator way of handling it would have been to go back to her the next time, just as directly, just as friendly as if we’d known each other for years and i thought i could sing that lucio dalla song this time only i didn’t memorise it right yet and didn’t want to fuck it up so i thought that this is something to pull out for a first date, walking her home, breaking that uncomforable kiss or don’t kiss goodbye…not for a smoke break during language class…but then what would i say to her if i went up again, my empty sack of conversation starters and by the time i thought i’d come up with a couple of less stupid-sounding thoughts, my cigarette was finished and i lit another but she was done and headed back in without looking at me, i mean, she could have snuck a glance and smiled as she passed by but i don’t know what goes on in her private life, what goes on in her head…maybe she is overwhelmed by thoughts of how boring she finds her life waiting for someone to enter but no, i feel certain she has a boyfriend either in milano or in brussels or maybe even here in antwerpen…none of which would rightly explain why she is sitting in these language classes to begin with because she is italian and already has an eu passport so yeah, as she goes by and i’m hastily puffing away at a second smoke, i realise i could just ask her that but it’d be too personal and she’d probably feel uncomfortable and smile that way and think to herself why is this creep bothering me again during smoke break and all that thinking pretty much ended it for me, it seems so much more romantic to admire from afar than to consecrate my feelings, whatever they might be about her, with something like a date or a relationship or doing brunch every sunday, wordlessly reading the gazet van anterwerpen over lattés, fresh pressed juice and croissants over at dellafaille on museumstraat, only our fingers touching, pinkies interlinking…

none of that will happen at this snail’s pace but it’s fine…patience is prince, something else is king. sorry. i thought i could be more profound but it turns out, no, that expression doesn’t exist…nee yoh, not that either, you see how i used nee yoh? fluent in flemish, ha, dutch, nobody even knows what is what…

the truth is i know the coward’s way out…how too burst through the mundanity, the boredom…it isn’t hitting on eleanora, putting us all in danger…it isn’t studying more or harder…it is oblivion…but i’m not going to smoke a fat joint or sit around drinking bollekes, life is too serious right now, too much to accomplish, i have to do something with the chance i’ve been given when my parents moved to london fifteen or twenty years ago, lived there long enough before going back home to kaspiisk to die probably, that i could become british just so i could move to belgium before brexit and be frozen in time here waiting for something to break….i’m lucky not to be raw meat in the putin death machine…everything else is toppings on ice cream..

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they call it survival. all different levels. could be surviving a bombing, a stabbing, a broken heart, a car crash, whatever it is, it isn’t good. nobody says they survived falling in love. nobody says they survived winning 2 million € in the Lotto.

since somebody took the time to write to me and asked me if i “survived” the four day easter weekend bank holiday with two mates coming down from london with the intention of all of us leaving pieces of ourselves over the vlasmarkt or mechelseplein…the answer is yes. i think…no i was trying to be clever there and its not clever…i know that… the truth is sadder…dealing with the reality that life is already passing us by and getting wrecked three nights in a row is about two too many…

but that’s it for the whinge. the truth is, if i keep bearing down, i can take my dutch language exam as early as july…i’ve been taking the practice exams and it still feels like i don’t have a change…the reading comprehension is good the oral comprehension less so and written, well, we mustn’t say a word about that yet. i will practice by writing graffiti in dutch on the walls of bathroom stalls like the romans did, didn’t they. or was that only monty python? nah it was all the rage in pompeii and herculaneum.

as you may recall, i am also studying for the ad5 exam in august. my whole boring career rides on passing this one…

so i find myself in the unusual position of being too busy to allow my existential dilemmas eat me alive slowly like a flesh-eating bacteria. so no time and nothing to write about…well, nothing but eleanora, right?

well, short story even shorter, i worked up the indifference to walk up to her during the smoke break right after the easter holidays were over and asked her if she had a good time going back to italy for a few days.

i did it because i was feeling a bit sick in the head after the anticlimactic reunion with tommy and fake ringo, all the way down from london town, and wanted something better than my life swimming past my drowning mind with indifference, to look forward to…c’mon we lads on the lash had the time of our lives…so yes, i had nothing to lose approaching, casual-like, looking up at the nightening sky…i thought about using the can’t find my light bit but no, we all deserved better than that so i told her straight out, smoking puffing around my head as i marched with bluster and purpose in her direction, no doubt terrifying her with my certainty but in the end, i just stopped in front of her and said “so how was milano?” - and don’t worry, i didn’t make us both suffer by trying to ask her in dutch as if we were still in class and not on a smoke break…i said it as if we were good friends…that’s right. i told myself, if i act as though we were friends convincingly enough, like those star wars jedi mind tricks, and no i didn’t really believe that, i believed she’s wonder to herself, who the fuck is this guy, why is he talking to me when we are not in class?

ok, she was taken aback a bit at first, of couse. she was used to sitting there quietly contemplating dante or boccaccio, smoke streaming carelessly from between her lips, an airless exhale of almost regal certitude. so it was natural that she was abackamacka when i just popped up there to ask a question out of nowhere.

milano was very nice, thank you for remembering, i think she said.

so there, all out of conversation. cool, i probably said and exhaled more smoke. it’s all a blackout at this point. then i said well, gotta go study and waved off walking away.

now she has something to think about.

who to avoid if we ever paired-off for question and answer exercises in class.

or who to seek out…yeah, right, fat feckin chance. but i’m playing with house money now, i think i got a try out.

photo: Bernard Buffet, 1999.

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good news as we fly into easter weekend. for one, in recognition of the religious significance of this weekend meaning, thanks to the crucifixion of jesus, i get today AND monday off work, i am going to take my first break from studying. this is code for a weekend on the lash. that’s right. my friends tommy and ringo are coming down from london for a long weekend, crashing at mine and giving me a built in excuse to drink all the bollekes i’ve missed out on drinking due to studying over the last month or two. and no, ringo’s name isn’t really ringo but he has a name so unique that he would be instantly identifiable to friends reading this so i’ve renamed him ringo in the interests of preserving his anonymity and to keep his missus from knowing what he is really up to because she’d wallop him if she knew the reason he wasn’t going with her to trafalgar square to watch the ‘realistic’ crucification scene in the passion of jesus play on good friday, was to get wrecked in antwerpen. so, ringo, your secret is safe here.

tommy is a drummer friend who i will forever remember for chugging a bottle of red wine during rehearsal in an overheated and cramped dalston rehearsal studio. we were in a band called dog whistle at the time and he and our guitarist, rory, were having spats every five minutes about how this new song we were working on, “carpet bombing a gogo”, was supposed to go. everytime rory stopped and said tommy was dragging, tommy would take another large slug off his wine bottle and tell rory to feck off. it wasn’t that he drank red wine during rehearsal but that it was like 40° inside the rehearsal studio. anybody drinking luke warm red wine in a sauna and still rigorously drumming without passing out is a good man in my book.

anyway, they are both taking the eurostar down to brussels today and i’m going to meet them at the midi-zuid station and at some point after dozens of pints we will take the train back to mine in antwerpen where we will spend the rest of friday night and then probably all day saturday and sunday on the lash…

i can feel some of you wincing at that confession but look, for the last month or two i have been studying and working nonstop so i need a mental health holiday and this is what you’d call the raman noodles of mental health holidays in fact, a cognitive fog meant to replace using my brain for the next 48 hours or so.

some of you are wondering about eleanora, the italian i have pacing from afar, thinking of serenading.

well, we have not advanced. she is going back to italy, she announced at class when mevrouw annelies asked us the other night just before class was ending: “voordat we naar huis gaan... laten we even over het paasweekend praten. Wat gaat iedereen doen?”

to everyone’s great relief, she did break down and translate that she was asking us to talk about what we were going to do for easter weekend because otherwise she was staring out over a sea of blank faces and would have to admit failure; that none of us had the slightest idea what she was banging on about…

eleanora, who everyone listened to with bated breath or perhaps just me, everyone else was either preparing their answer or coming down from the trauma of having had to present theirs already, said only "Ik ga... naar Milano. Met de vlieger." this only opened the floodgates to thousands more questions like is milan her hometown? is that where italian boyfriend she is cheating on with the flemish boyfriend in antwerpen lives? is she going back for good? is milan just the gateway to somewhere else more spectacular filled with eleanora replicas? But before i could carry on, (there was a brief exchange between mevrouw annelies and eleanora that i missed during my frantic speculation) suddenly, she turned her cannons on me:

"En jij, Kolya? Wat ga jij doen met Pasen?"

of course, i don’t know how to say i’m going on the lash with my mates from london…i do know how to say “zuipen” which is spot on (and i was frankly proud to have learned that verb without even realising it through osmosis most likely,) but i can’t really say getting wrecked, a knee’s up, leathered, what have you, because i would probably only disappoint mevrouw annelies and eleanora who would be expected something less debaucherous and less honest, so instead, i quietly slipped into:

“ik ga naar…”

but i couldn’t come up with a fictitious destination like milano but i did think for a millisecond how funny it might be if i said milano and then asked eleanora which flight she was on and then say to her wow, what a coincidence, that’s the same flight i’m on and the rush to buy last-minute tickets but no, i am not that crazy yet so finally with everyone bored with waiting, i said “leuven” and don’t ask me why because i don’t know, i must have read something about it recently.

fortunately by then class was over so mevrouw annelies couldn’t ask me what business i could possibly have in leuven and i of course escaped having to make something up that would make no sense, like the fact that it is the home of stella artois and that in turn makes me think of that line, “hand me a stella and fly” which amy winehouse sang in “you know i’m no good” but that probably isn’t a good enough reason to visit leuven, especially because i’m not a lagerhead: i only drink bollekes now.

so for now, i’m off the fire the cannons of moral turpitud. enjoy your chocolate bunnies and milk-fed lamb. Salukes!

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