Esnesnon 5-10-09

Good afternoon.

J'ai le feu du volcan,
La chaleur du désert
La saveur de la terre,
La lueur d'une lune claire
Je n'ai rien que dans le coeur
l'immensité du ciel ouvert...

Well, it's another completely normal day, there is nothing special going on today and nothing at all has happened. Please stop telling me otherwise. Yesterday was a special day, the day before, that was a special day, tomorrow is special to me, but today isn't. I'll explain in rather random order. I won't explain anything about tomorrow, it has something to do with harps and Guinness. And a flying cat, if I'm at it anyway. Yesterday was 'animal's day,' which probably has a better sounding name in English. If it doesn't, I don't want to know. We (that being a couple of people and not me) ate chicken, pieces of a cow, goat and we made jokes about bestiality. Then me and my little brother performed a sketch about Buddha beating the crap out of his roommate. As two Dutch comic figure ducks commented: 'Dierendag, de enige dag waarop seks met dieren mag.' So much for animal's day. The day before that was october the third, a local Dutch holiday. Several traditional, crazy people, and the population of the city of Leiden, celebrate the lifting of the siege of Leiden in 1574. I happen to study history, so I'll explain: The Netherlands were property of the Spanish king in those years, and a huge source of income. It wasn't really a country, just a couple of bustling cities and spatially challenged swampy lands. Every city liked to stick to it's own traditions and rights, but the Spanish king wanted to end that and rule the Netherlands as one region with the same taxes and laws. The cities stubbornly resisted. Also, we had quite some protestants, who were at odds with those catholic Iberian fatso's. The Spanish sent a small army and the inquisition and a war broke out. That was about 1567. In the years that followed, the Dutch cities were either captured or besieged, while the Dutch armies, led by William of Orange, also know as 'the Silent,' were defeated and did little more then guerrilla warfare in the swamps.

Leiden was also besieged. The Spanish simply waited outside of the walls, starving the city until the people of the city would surrender. They almost did. Mayor Van der Werf stood on the square, sword drawn, vowing he'd rather cut off his own arm to feed his people then surrender the city to the Spanish, nicknamed 'the Bacons,' I kid you not. He did not cut off his arm and neither did the people surrender. Well, this could have gone on for a while, but one fine morning some Dutch guerrilla (which is a Spanish word) bastards flooded the low lands around the city and the Spanish cowards fled for the rising water. Early in the morning, two young boys scoured the streets of Leiden (I refuse to write Leyden), and decided to take a peek over the wall. They noticed the Spanish camp was deserted, they had left in all haste. The two boys lacked the brains to inform the citizens first, and instead they climbed over the wall (this part of the story is a bit strange) and walked into the Spanish camp. There they found a huge pot of... I don't know what it's called in English, it's some kind of stew. First they nearly killed themselves eating, then they alerted the citizens, and then they ate some more. The Spanish were gone, the people of Leiden were free to eat all the food the Spanish left, and on top of that the Dutch guerrilla bastards came by on flat-bottomed barges with a lot of stolen food: herring and white bread, which they handed out so everyone could eat until they got really sick.

Guess what, 435 years later people still eat herring, white bread and the strange stew, now an essential part of the Dutch cuisine, and as the people of Leiden say: that herring's gotta swim. In other words: they all get completely pissed. Fortunately 3 october is a saturday this year, so everyone gets their hangover on sunday. We were guilty at home too: we honoured the tradition by eating herring (well, I didn't eat herring because I'm barking mad), white bread, the stew-stuff-thingie and hitting the alcohol before lunchtime. Good times. We had some family over, who were there to celebrate Leiden's Liberation and some other, unrelated thing, not worth celebrating. During the weekend I kept playing Nocturnes, like the bittersweet, almost painful number 12, and going maniacally depressed. Good times. Oh, and I painted a part of the shed in our back yard yesterday. It was dull and my wrists started to hurt after a while. While I was at it, I had a bit of a Zen experience. Not that I saw the light by painting a shed, or that I discovered how wonderfully romantic ordinary labour is. (If there would be anything glorious and romantic about hard, menial labour, the duke of York would be tending his own damn garden.) No, I was able to calm down and slow down my thinking process. I need that, because my brains are doing overtime all week unless I'm careful.

While I was painting though, I struck me that I might suddenly learn karate, after which I could win a local karate championship, get admired by everyone, get revenge on a couple bullies, and somehow manage to get a car and the admiration from a foolish American girl. Then my brain started to complain. No, said my brain, why the hell would you want a car or the affection from a brainless American female, who won't put out and will probably lack a sense of humor and the ability to have a normal conversation too? A girl who will leave you the moment someone else learns karate, for appearently that's all it takes? Why do I want revenge on some small minded local idiots or admiration from other total idiots? I can't identify myself with the karate kid at all. At that point I elected to put down the brush and rethink my life. It didn't work out. My life has been rethought for me, by a figure with a black top hat and pink feathers. All I can do is admire, dream and stroll through life. And when I encounter another lifeform or a computer, I make snarky comments.

But hey, let's not go all passive! What would I like to change about my life? Here's my chance, I have a blog, a purple scarf and a university! What more can a human being need to become independent? I would like to become less tired. I don't know exactly how, since sleeping doesn't really work and I don't want to let go of all my mentally exhausting activities. Maybe if I'd find some more physically exhausting activities that everything would line up again. Maybe I should stop being a good student. But a better idea would be to find a way to unwind, get myself a hobby that does not involve huge amounts of concentration, maybe I should get a life, maybe I should start using cannabis more often. I don't feel for any of those things. I want to keep playing the eternal game. Nothing should change. I don't want to get old, I don't want to be tied down. Let them hate me as long as they tolerate me.
I should stop writing, Chopin is playing in my head again.

Hugo Maat.