timpeltje | Recent Entries

"Where am I?" I stammered after waking up in an unfamiliar room. Mind you, I immediately regretted using the most cliché of phrases used by people waking up from comas, near-death-experiences, drunken stupors, etc. I slapped myself in the face for being so predictable, the one thing I never hoped I'd be.
The room was a cube with huge mirrors that covered the entire surface of the walls, floor and ceiling. The effect was quite dazzling, just me facing an eternity of copies of me in all directions.
I stood up to inspect my body to check for any visible signs of a struggle, a fight, or anything else that could give me a clue as to why I ended up here. Did I mention I was naked? Oh no, I didn't. Well, knowing me, you probably had figured that out already. "There goes naked Timmy with his tackle out again!" had become such a commonly used expression that some Chinese businessman was getting rich just by selling T-shirts with the text printed on. Good for him, I say. I don't mind not receiving any of the royalties.
Whether my tumescence was due to this infinity of identical twins or just the result of waking up before the dramatic, unfinished conclusion of a wet dream, is still a mystery to scholars around the globe. Come to think of it, perhaps dramatic isn't the most ideal word to describe the conclusion of a wet dream, although I guess it would depend on the perversions projected on my eyelids.

I scanned the room, ignoring my other selves, to look for a door. There was no door. I guessed it would take away the perfection of the mirrored cube. I assumed there to be a sliding door mechanism or a platform.

Everywhere I looked, I saw hundreds of me stare back, equally puzzled (and yes, still aroused, though with much less conviction). We were all in this together. From all the time I spent in various cells (the womb, locked toilets, prison, a coma, etc.), I knew there was never any point in crying out for help. Whoever locks you up, does that with the intention of not responding, as an ultimate mind game. So I didn't give them the pleasure to ask for help.

I would solve this my own way.

I put myself in the middle of the room. Staring straight ahead, looking at myself at the other side, and other selves all around us, I prepared myself. I inhaled, closed my eyes, held my breath and started running the five or six steps towards the wall.

A bang. Some blood was now covering part of the mirrored wall. I could discern a small crack beginning to form. I grinned, retraced my steps and charged again, head first.

A louder bang, more blood, and a slightly bigger crack in the mirror. Head-butting, is there any situation where it doesn't come in handy?

After the fifth bang, I fell down, and could just see red in front of my eyes. I started to taste the familiar taste of blood as well. I smiled as I prepared for another charge. Blood poured down my head, and onto the floor and on the shards of cracked mirror that were beginning to pile up around the site of impact. The shards penetrated my feet, creating more blood loss, but also increasing the flow of adrenaline to allow me to continue.

The blows became harder and harder, as if I was doing this in a trance. Sure, my thinking had become less coherent, consumed as I was by my objective to destroy at least this one mirrored wall.

I prepared for a final big charge. Bits of glass now penetrated almost every square inch on my body, though for pain I had no time.

" 't Is but a scratch!" I smiled.

I inhaled, spat out a drop of blood. All my other selves looked at me with the same determination, all covered in blood, but stronger than ever. I interpreted this as if they were cheering me on, believing in me, knowing all too well that I was their leader that could take them on the path to salvation (I admit delirium may have set in at this point).

I charged, followed by this crowd of eternal followers.

Head first, I crashed into the wall, causing the entire wall on the attack side to fall down. I was losing consciousness, but I could feel the wall collapsing on me. The last glimpse I saw, was of my supporters disappearing from one side.

I had set them free! Even if I hadn't saved myself, I saved them!

A curtain of blood was drawn and I lost consciousness.

____________________________________________

I wake up in my own bed, panting.
I mumble to myself, "This must have been the most bizarre wet dream I ever had!" and I reach for my box of Cleenex.

Meet Holly, the girl I adopted in Vegas last year. Well, I adopted her image and have been using it as a bookmark ever since. Why did I do that? Look at her, poor girl! So hungry she barely has any clothes, and as is clear from the dramatic photograph, Holly's so hungry she's now forced to eat what little clothes she has left.

Poor little Holly is in dire need

Of 35 dollars, payable by any steed

To pay for fine garments, for she has none

For her clothes, they had all gone

It's a sad story, really. But at least she was trying to make a change for herself. 35 dollars was all she needed to turn her life around. I called her and asked if my gift to her would be tax-deductible, but then she replied she didn't qualify as a charity organization (or at least that is what I thought she meant by saying, and I quote, "Fuck off, you weirdo!").
I wondered if I should help her out anyway. After all, doesn't the Bible say that "to clothe the naked" is one of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy? I figured that, in the unlikely event of there being an afterlife, it'd probably be good to bribe my way into heaven.
So I called back and asked where I would be able to give her my donation. Holly, the sweet simple cowgirl, seemed so pleased with my generosity that she would come by my hotel or motel to come pick it up. Now that's what I'd call "proactive begging"; if they can deliver pizza to your door in half an hour, why not do the same with the poor and/or homeless?
Twenty minutes later, poor poor Holly arrived to collect my donation. Indeed, her rags were even skimpier than advertised, so I decided to give her a tip. In hindsight, I think what happened next, wasn't that surprising, although I, always innocent, did not have a clue. Eternally grateful as she was, Holly came closer to me sitting on the bed, and she suddenly started to try and seduce me.
I did feel sorry for her, but I had to push her away. I tried to explain to her that she really didn't have to that, that I never expected anything from her, but the more I spoke, the more it seemed to confuse her. Of course I couldn't imagine walking a day in her shoes, so I tried to understand how this sweet girl just felt like she owed me something.
"Y'all did pay for da hour, so I ain't leavin' before that! Or else mah pimp gonn' beat me! Thinkin' I messed up or summit!" she said. I guess that must have been an expression in her native tongue, where she thanked me for my kindness and offered to have a chat.
She stood up and, in what I can only assume was another one of her people's traditions, she started taking off what little clothes she had on. I guessed it made sense. I had seen this in an anthropology documentary; it was an ancient cleansing tradition, where the body had to be freed from all old garments so the soul is ready for the new clothing. Fascinated, I started taking notes on this behaviour. She asked me in her broken English, "whaddayadoin'?", and I replied I was studying her, because I was writing a book about people like her.
She replied, "A book?"
Of course I could have known Holly didn't know what books were, but I tried to explain to her.
"Yes, a book! Books are like big things full of papers that are filled with words, or sometimes even pictures!"
I could tell I had lost her. She sat her naked self down on the bed, and I asked her if she knew anything about books. She shook her head, clearly embarrassed. I told her not to worry, and that I would find a way to teach her.
"Don't ya just wanna get laid?", she uttered.
While I didn't understand what she said, it seemed to me as if she was asking me to read for her. So I took out a book and started reading to her.
Exactly an hour after she came in, she said her time was up. I think she may have been from one of those cultures where you cannot spend more than one hour in a man's home, because it would be considered a marriage in her tribe.

Holly put on her clothes and left, off to get herself some clothes that she so desperately needed.

My good deed of the day was done, and I could have a piece of pie and get to bed.

Anyway, ever since that encounter, I have been using Holly as a bookmark in the hopes that she might learn something from the books I read. Now you might say that it is just an image and not her actual physical self, resting between the pages of my books. But I hope you realise that putting her between my book pages was never going to be a practical option (I did consider it briefly, but then I abandoned the idea after a nightmare were Holly would menstruate all over my favourite books). So we hope she might learn something this way.

I'm sure it is working.

There once was a little black boy,
Whose first name was Jerome.
Lived with his mum, who had no employ
In a shed that they called their home,

'T was the fifties, when women were lazy,
And could spend all day birthing and baking,
Which we today might find quite crazy,
But then Jerome's mum had other worries aching.

Jerome, though always nimble and sweet,
Liked putting his winkle into all he did see,
Pies, sofas, melons, and pounds of minced meat,
The whole town did witness his penetrative glee.

"Y'all know it won't end well!" his mum did say,
Yet Jerome was too busy with all his unzipping,
If only he listened, is what she did pray,
Alas! To no avail, out it came with a whipping!

One faithful day, Jerome thought he struck gold,
A fence with a hole, as wide as his cock,
Which just took him a second to fully unfold,
Boy, was he in for a shock!

His mum saw the geese, thought "It'll serve him right!"
And Jerome continued, cock through the hole,
Along came the geese, all eager to bite,
She just saw some food and not Jerome's pole.

Jerome his scream was heard across the land,
He'd never do it again, that much he knew,
Not that the he could, the geese had him de-manned,
He'd learnt his lesson, so he withdrew.

The tale wasn't over, because all over town,
Closeted gay men were intrigued by this feat,
Replacing the geese, in jizz they could drown,
A thought that to them sounded actually quite neat.

Public toilets all got drilled for holes,
Thanks to Jerome and his adventurous mind,
Jerome was adored by those closeted souls,
The gloryhole invented, for Man to unwind.

The End.

The man has struck a

chord without exemption from the train
he was never bound to take,

withering and wailing across the streets that were lined with roaches and

it crawled onwards

until the horror returned to me that

-.. . .- - ....

lurks around every corner,

and immobilized I stand
reluctantly quiet with the dreams of only

a scalpel shredding
the remains of my immortal skin.

Loyal watchman,
come and engulf yourself into the tearful embrace of the frozen lava stream of my

seed spewing
( ... . . -.. / ... .--. . .-- .. -. --. )

forth from my scalpel cuts

Erase the memory of the cyclical rhythm of elements
waving
through the exits, leaving behind ashes of what was once my mind

Rations are scarce

The shadow's brightness blinded the lone mariner lost in an ocean

of sleepless rock...

heightening his other senses, and my senses,

because I
could maybe be that mariner,
crashing my vessel into a crater on the moon, unaware of my journey there,

waking up seconds before the crash
barely enough time to try and lick my elbow, let alone scream,

Inexorably onwards, horizons converted into tangible paintings,
ready
to
be
smacked down from their invisible wall with my amputated fist.

"Don't forget I delineated you."

I tell the universe, convinced for a nanosecond of my own divinity.

-. --- --..-- / -. --- --..-- / --. --- / -. --- - / - --- / .-.. . - .... .

- Hi, Doctor Google!
- Oh, hi Timmy, I didn't see you come in! Please, have a seat!
- Thank you!
- Now, what can I help you with today? I see you've been looking at a lot of images of midget feet again... did you start again with that perverted fetish?
- That wasn't a fetish! I was doing research!
- Haha, if I had a penny for every time someone said that, I'd be swimming in a pool of premium horse manure by now!
- Horse manure?
- Of course! The thought alone drives me wild!
- Err... OK... well, anyway.....
- No wait! Let me guess! I'm very good at guessing, you know! You seem like you really want to know something about something medical, but it's not for research...
- How do you know?
- Timmy, don't insult me, I read your e-mails. You haven't got any work today.
- Ah yeah, that's true, you can read my e-mails...
- Of course, but don't worry, I'll only share it with some algorithms and maybe some government officials who want to check up on you. It's been hard with the algorithms for you, by the way!
- Really?
- Yeah, targeting advertising is very difficult in your case. I can't find a common denominator between these: at one point, you're researching if you can be raped by a banana (NOTE: see below entry), the next you're looking for ways to enrich uranium, then some kitties, and then you're translating a text for Viagra - that I labelled as Spam, sorry for that by the way; once that word pops up, all my alarms go off, and I go mental!
- Yeah, that was pretty annoying. I'd ask for damages if you weren't so damn intangible!
- Oh, don't bother with that, according to the User Agreement, you can't do that anyway. Also, we own your eternal soul according to paragraph 15, section B4. So you'd basically be suing yourself!
- Don't worry, I won't sue. I'm just here for help...
- Oh, alright then. I'm guessing it's not about your ding-dong...
- Of course not...
- Yeah, because we all know that works fine, don't we?
- Wait! How do you know?
- Webcam access, baby. It's in the User Agreem...*cut off*
- Yeah, yeah...
- But it is medical?
- True.
- Ah, hypochondriacs will buy me that horse manure pool, believe me!
- So, ANYWAY, will you stop distracting me?
- Aw, a little edgy, are we?
- Can you just let me explain, so I can get an answer?
- Very well then. Thought you'd be a little bit more grateful.
- You just told me you own my soul!
- See, now you're digressing!
- Arrghhh! Look, all I want to know is... I went running today.
- You did!? But it was raining! And you haven't run in months; I checked!
- Well, yes, I did! And when I got back, I was tasting a metallic flavour in my mouth, sort of coming from the back, a bit like blood, but more like that metal pole I licked that one time.
- Interesting... Let me have a think.
- Could it be teeth related? I mean, my cat needs to be operated so all of his teeth will be taken out, so I was wondering it might be that.
- Seriously?
- Errr... yeah... but....
- Are you a cat?
- No, but...
- Ha-ha-ha! You moron!
- HEY! Be nice!
- Anyway, depending on what you want to believe, I have terrible or good news for you.
- What's the terrible news?
- You'll be dead within a week!
- WHAT?!
- That's what it says here, but this site has a teddy bear in its logo, and the average forum user is either dyslectic or just really stupid.
- So there's no truth in that?
- Well, if you would be dead within a week, technically, they WOULD be right. So we'll see about that next week, won't we?
- Can't you read me something from somebody with more authority?
- Yeah, that was the good news.
- Really?
- Yes, apparently what you were witnessing was a mild form of heart failure.
- Heart failure is good news? That's a pretty heartless things to say!
- Gha! I like puns!
- So?
- Well, the heart failure means your heart is unable to keep up pumping blood to your lungs and body in exercise because you were straining yourself too much. Then red blood cells made their way into your lungs and into your breath.
- This still doesn't sounds like good news.
- Oh, but many people witness it... People who don't exercise too much, mostly.
- So it's entirely normal?
- Well, no. Not "normal", but you'll be fine.
- Thanks, I guess.
- You're welcome. Anything else I can help you with?
- Maybe yeah, ... The heart disease thing is pretty strange.... Maybe show me some photos of cute kittens falling over!
- Thy Will Shall be Done!

As an earth slowly completed another circle around its star, I licked a metal pole with my tongue. Of course with my tongue, with what else would one lick a pole/Pole? Needless to say, the frozen metal bar quickly glued itself onto my kissing device, and soon, the two became entwined in an intimate embrace.

You may call it youthful naiveté or dimwitted foolishness - neither of which would be appropriate in my modest opinion - but it is safe to assume that the position was not a comfortable one.

"I did nothing to you! Release me, you damn dirty pole!" would be the corrected equivalent of the sounds I was producing. Sadly, my words were more unintelligible and the pole was more indifferent than I had hoped.

As I was in a park of a sizable city, I assumed it wouldn't take long for help to arrive. I could not imagine gathering the courage to actually rip a piece of my tongue off to release me, so all I could do was wait.

When morning came, finally a man walking his dog entered the corner of my eye. I tried screaming "ELP!", but all he did was stare angrily for a second before shouting something like "You sick fuck!" in German (which I will gigglingly translate as: "Du kranker Fick!") while flipping me the finger, and slowly walking away.

Perhaps licking poles is taboo in this part of the world, but as it turned out, it seemed like it was going to take a bit more time to finally be freed. I imagined what would happen if the pole would grow into my tongue, thus forcing me to spend my life stuck like that, perhaps even raising a family of little poles. But no, that didn't seem ideal.

Days passed by. The people who saw me all gave me a similar reaction as the first man's. I was flabbergasted as to how sensitive an issue this was over here. Back where I'm from, licking poles is a national pastime and performed by all the greatest thinkers of the land! Clearly, the Germans have a slightly different view.

I kept myself nourished by the snow and bird droppings that fell into my mouth (I can recommend sparrow!) and hoped that temperatures would rise above freezing temperatures, so the situation could maybe resolve itself. No such luck.

My phone battery was depleting quickly. I tried calling people, but nobody could understand me, and those that did understood, mumbled something like "serves you right, you little prick!" With my last jolts of battery power, I browsed to the weather report, hoping for a plus centigrade figure somewhere. Instead, I stumbled upon an article about how the world had entered a new ice age. Frustrated, I banged my head hard against the pole, letting some ice from the top fall off and hit me on the head. I blacked out.

When I came to, it must have been days later, I was still dangling with my tongue from the pole. Realising where I was, I let out a cloudy sigh and panned across the park to see if someone, anyone, would pass by.

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and the ice age, well, it remained an ice age.

So let that be a lesson to you kids! As Aristotle once said in a drunken stupor: "You bitches don't go licking those poles, you hear? They be as evil as the devil on cocaine!" And boy, was he right!

"can vanden be raped by a bannana (SIC)"
(by anonymous Author)

This was the Google search phrase that led somebody to my personal website according to my website statistics. Redoing the search, it turns out that my website is indeed the first hit that comes up when searching for this particular line of condensed poetry.

Because, surely, that is what it must be?

Unless the genius Author was genuinely wondering if I could actually be raped by a banana. Even answering that question isn't so straightforward as it seems. Assuming that by "vanden", he does mean my last name, then it would imply that Google may have had several requests like this and therefore put me up as hit number one. But then the phrasing of the question is problematic. Rape implies that one party does not give consent for the intercourse to take place. But then the Author/Philosopher refuses to mention who would execute this rape, which I think is a rather more important element in whether or not I would consent. Instead, he is merely interested in the object. Of course, the object itself isn't particularly something I would be gagging for (gha!), but perhaps its operator might convince me otherwise. Or perhaps the author is implying more than we see on the surface. What if "banana" could be an objectification of a person? Perhaps someone dressed up as a banana, or, also feasible, representing a representative of a banana company (think Lady Chiquita - given the fact that she was conceived in 1944, then yes, I guess I wouldn't be consenting to that).

Or perhaps the misspelt "bannana" is a clever play on words, maybe referring to the Author's "banned nana" (again a grandmother, who is apparently "banned", probably because of how she would treat poor "vandens" with fruit and vegetables).

I guess we'll never know, oh Anonymous Philosopher of the Yonder Google!

Let it be known that at least now, if he (it's got to be a man, let's face it) would retry Googling this particular sentence, he would actually get a reply as well, and one that will even give him an analysis. And an answer (which, just ro sum up, is, "Yes, but...").

You see, I aim to please, even when banana-wielding rapists are involved, apparently...

"All nonsense in the world stems from the truly ludicrous idea that Man is at the centre of everything and that every person individually is also both completely unique and special. This grotesque aberration, because that's what it is, has given us a great big pile of nonsense. A whole range of religions, for instance (we are so special that there is an invisible almighty creature who watches over us and will ultimately grant us eternity), but also a bunch of UFO rubbish (we are so unique that intelligent extra-terrestrials regularly travel across the cosmos to earth to study us, to occasionally kidnap us and embark on a scavenger hunt in our rectum to see if it might contain the secret of the universe); and then there's also a deluge of delusional nonsense (we are so special that the scientifically totally undocumented and unproven effect of homeopathic drugs really does occur when we take them), and of course we should not forget the incessant twaddle about the paranormal (we are so special that we are bound to have contact with the living after we die, even if this has to be under the guise of a frog), etcetera, etcetera. Time and time again, the nonsense can be brought back to the illusion that we are all so extraordinarily special and not, as Michel Houellebecq poignantly and truthfully formulated, just a temporary arrangement of molecules."

Written by the late (pdw) - translation by me

Despite a very busy work schedule, I devoted some time this week hunting for planets on planethunters.org as well as finding new galaxies on galaxyzoo.org . Fascinating and interesting activities I can recommend to anyone who likes shapes, colours, and feeling insignificantly small!

Reason for my burst of scientific altruism was a two-hour-long mindfuck I was graciously provided by some perverted astronomers who like to do nothing more but fuck with my poor brain (bless them! Gha!). The discovery was of a galaxy at an approximate distance of about 30 billion light years away, and the galaxy's age is said to be 13.1 billion years, that's almost the age of the whole universe. So the distance this bitch-galaxy (that's the official term, I believe) is away from me (and you) would take us longer to travel, at the speed of light, than twice the entire age of the cosmos.
Our planet wasn't even formed when the light we are seeing now was created.
*BOOM!*
That's the sound of my brain short-circuiting. Fascinating, sure, but so impossible to imagine. Our consciousness evolved at a time when we thought we were the centre of the universe, which is mostly why we are unable to grasp distances and time frames like this. And presumably why the above-mentioned pseudoscientific crap still rages rampantly in a society of supposedly well-educated people.

I don't think the likes of Einstein and Hawking really considered my poor mind as it blew up in a wave of insignificance. But then again, the former one is dead, and the latter pees and poops in a bag. "So every cloud has a silver lining," I added smiling arrogantly.

Being a raw scientific atheist has its downsides. Paralysis from insignificance. No wonder people invent spirits and other non-existing bullcrap to help them cope. We can't have invisible friends like that, because we know too much.

What I do sometimes, when some situation might turn stressful, is zoom out on myself. For a while, I have employed this as a coping strategy. With "zooming out", I mean I visualise my place in the universe. I imagine a camera over my head, gradually going up higher, Google Maps height, then higher, NASA screensaver of earth height, passing by the moon, and then passing all our planets, one by one. Usually, I am relaxed by the time I see myself in the composite (fake) image of the Milky Way (one of my first ever Google searches was "how do we know what the Milky Way looks like?" - or actually, that might have been on AskJeeves, remember him?). Why it calms me down, is easy: it puts everything in perspective. Stressful situations become trivial challenges that won't matter in the end. You do what you do because of the experience you hope to gain. For enjoyment, for a kiss, for a smile on someone's face, for a rare moment of being entirely in the present, of the present, and about the present.

Occasionally, I try to imagine zooming out as far back as I can, i.e. to see an overview of the entire universe. Such insignificance is enough to make anyone vomit. But at least it's vomit and satisfaction combined.

Escapism isn't a dirty word. I consider myself a talented escapist. Hey, I once escaped an attack from a King Cobra (the animal, no the snake juice liquor I once drank in Hong Kong, there was no escaping that!).

And so we float across space,
temporary arrangement of random molecules,
in all our beauty and senselessness,
Disappearing into the void is perhaps the greatest gift we shall ever receive.

*burps stoically*

I came to the moon. How it happened, I don't know. I was driving to the supermarket and now I woke up here.
Staring up at the earth, I'm trying to figure out how...
I do have a bit of a headache, but I guess that is to be expected after the journey I have had (apparently).

So this is the moon...

I thought there wouldn't be any trees...
But then again, I also didn't expect there to be a prefabricated home here. And certainly not one built to accommodate me. Why was I brought here? It makes no sense.
I notice the lower gravity outside, but aside from that, I'm breathing normally. I guess there must be a dome over my head (even though I can't see it) to protect this little oasis. Ah yes, I can see the edges of the dome. The protective shield explains the vegetation here.

"HELLO? Is there anyone?" I yell out into space.

I seem to be all alone. The little house here is built for one (one bed, one chair, one fork, one knife (plastic - it's like they don't want me to kill myself, which, at any rate, wouldn't be so hard to do here), one spoon, and one confused inhabitant.

And that only leaves myself to talk to...
"So Timmy, how did we get here?"
"I haven't the faintest idea; it's like there's a giant black hole in my memory and..."
"Haha! You said 'giant black hole'!"
"Oh, grow up, will you?"
"At least I'm keeping my spirits up, dick!"
"Hey! It's not the time, nor the place, OKAY?"
"Well, it's the moon, maybe it is the place. Looks like you'll be stuck here for a while anyway."
"I know... I wonder who's behind this."
"Can you think of any enemies you've made recently?"
"Not really... I insult people on a daily basis."
"Yeah, I know, but for this, it seems you really must have pissed them off."
"Someone powerful, like a government perhaps?"
"Well, you insult those all the time, too, so it'll be difficult to find out."
"Hey, what can I say? I got political Tourette's! It's well-documented that this is an undocumented condition!"
"Whoever you wronged, clearly got his revenge."
"Or her revenge..."
"True, you make no gender distinctions with your insults."
"I should get a medal for that. Gender equality all the way, baby! Now come here and let me pinch those nipples! GHA!"
"It's hardly worth a Nobel Peace prize, but it's good to see you smile again."
"Well, at least we weren't killed..."
"If we were dead, then this would be a lousy afterlife, wouldn't it?"
"I guess. But we're not dead. Why else would they give us a plastic knife? It couldn't make us more dead, right?"
"True. Unless they want you to think that you're still alive of course."
"But I am alive."
"Oh, I know. I was just entertaining the idea."
"Of me being dead? Thanks for that. Way to cheer up my day!"
"OK, I'll stop with that. Let's focus on who you wronged."
"Someone with access to space ships..."
"That narrows it down..."
"But still not narrow enough. Sure I once compared a certain astronaut to the final excrement of a human centipede, but that was behind his back!"
"Yeah, that can't be it. Maybe it's just an anomaly in the space-time continuum?"
"What, me off to buy milk, gin, and frozen pizza and taking a wrong turn and ending up in a wormhole that inexplicably brought me here?"
"It does seem like the most likely solution..."
"No, it doesn't!"
"Yes, it does!"
"..."
"..."
"Brain, you know I love you, but you're absolutely useless right now!"
"Oh, piss off!"

The snake sheds its skin, the surface layer in dire need of renewal. The dead cells are picked up by necrophiliac beastiality-fueled skin collectors to then have their wicked way with them.
"To each their own," said a wise man once before putting his penis into a double serving of mashed potatoes (with spinach, I believe).
The snakes don't mind, and nor do the potatoes, who already endured enough hardship as it is, what with being boiled and mashed alive. Recycling is a hot topic these days, even in the wondrous world of kink.

So, the megalomaniac in me believes a stalker is following me. Well, that megalomaniac actually knows it, regardless of whether it is true or not. There is plenty of evidence all around. When I am sure I did my dishes, folded my clothes and hung them up nicely, I sometimes find myself puzzled seeing a whole bunch of dishes towering up in the sink and beyond, clothes being scattered about, and - wait for it - my dead skin tray strangely empty (knowing that I had filled it up with my own snakeskin).

I'm not making the effort to find out who this person is so I can get a restraining order. I can't imagine this going well in court anyway: "This person is following me and I kind of like it! Please give her the electric chair! (...) What?! You don't electrocute people any more? Oh well, then I guess there's nothing that can be done..." (turns head towards stalker:) "So do you want a ride? You're going my way anyway, right?" I'm already so far past that phase, you can't even see the mashed potatoes anymore.

But I keep shedding skin and placing it where it has to be, realising that this stalker probably now has enough of it to puzzle together an identical copy of me. I don't feel like a snake, however. For starters, I don't eat things that are bigger than my mouth. Okay, maybe that one time when I wanted to swallow a massive vodka-watermelon combo, but I can assure you that I failed horribly.

But I look at the traces before it is discarded and used in my stalker's weird sexual fantasy playworld. I stroke it and say goodbye to it, thanking the elements for their presence there (though I should probably thank myself who ate the damn molecules that made their way down there!). I measure the size of the canyons and log them in my Skin Canyon Data File (the file is public, because I don't want to make it to hard on the stalker, you see).

You know how they say that amputees sometimes still feel their missing limb? Well, that's kind of what I feel on a skin surface level. These little cells that I came to know and love (or in the case of my hand, loved me back on occasion) stay with me every time another one of them moves on. I can still feel all of them, pulsating around, thinking about our times together.

The cycle is endless, or at least seemingly so. But at one point, we will reach the final layer, and then my stalker's work will be complete; a fully fleshed statue with all layers carefully joined back together again.

When that happens, I shall finally look this stalker up and jump in the body suit she has created.

That way, things can start all over again, right?

It was in the days before the internetted web allowed you access to all the nudity you could think of when Fritz S. decided to open his very own EROTIK VIDEO KINO. He had thought of the name himself, a process that took him a few months and a lot of marketing research. But Fritz was a man with a vision. While the bank initially refused to borrow him the million Marks he wanted to borrow to finance his dream of video paradise, a ten thousand square metre playground for every fetish and sexual activity imaginable. Poor Fritz had no choice but to think about downsizing. He went to his parents who gave him 200 Marks in support. Of course he didn't tell them about what exactly his "exciting business opportunity" was, not so much because he was ashamed of his idea, but because it would ultimately mean that he would have to acknowledge that his parents ever had sex after making him. Perverted as he was (his friends called him "Hamsterbum", and that's not because his bottom looked like a hamster...), his parents didn't need to be that involved.

Anyway, with his parents' money, he realised he couldn't buy his dreamed huge venue at Alexanderplatz, so he had to look off-centre. Fritz chose Wedding because he discovered that the people walking around there showed signs of sexual frustration (he concluded that after seeing hamsters being used as pets). So the dream was ready to be built; he would do that for a few years, make his first million and then take over Alexanderplatz and leave a bag with his burning faeces at the front door of the bank that refused him. Scores needed settling, people that said no to him always underwent this punishment. It is the reason why his few friends had grown scared to refuse anything he offered, because saying no to anything would result in yet another pair of wasted shoes. And with the Great Berlin Shoe Shortage of 1995, it was something they really couldn't afford.

Fritz spent his limited means into acquiring as many VHS cassettes as he could buy, which turned out to be only ten. Slightly distraught, he realised he didn't have any cash left for his window display.

He talked it over with his hamster Tommy (shortly before... well... let's just say Tommy didn't make it).

"So I don't know how I'm going to get customers to come in. What should I do?"
*squeak*
"It's just that I'm out of money."
*squeak*
"I know, but there should at least be something we could do!"*squeak - squeak*
"Yeah, I guess that could work. So you're saying I should go for extreme minimalism here?"
*hamster sniffs, then squeaks*
"You're right! Less IS more! It'll leave horny people curious..."
*squeeeeeak*
"HAHAHA! I know! We don't want people masturbating in front of our window, now do we?! No, it's better to just leave it to people's imaginations to find out what is inside. What works for ALDI, works for me too!"
*squeak*
"True! I shouldn't raise people's expectations as well. After all, I only have about ten VHS cassettes now, two of which featuring hamsters, by the way. Sure, there will be thousands to come. But for now, we should just make it mysterious."
*squeak*
"Yup! And people WILL come, again and again... Tommy... Damn, you're smart for a hamster, and fun. And cute too of course... I'm almost going to regret shoving you up my bottom later!"
*squeeeeeeeeeeeak!*
"It's the circle of life! Now let's get to work!"

While historians are still debating over the exact content of Fritz' conversation, his erotica emporium grew out to be one of the most thriving businesses located at number 72. While he is still saving up for his dream playground at Alexanderplatz (he's a few years behind schedule), life goes on, hamsters come and go and his VHS collection is ever expanding (he has reached 25 cassettes now).

Ah Fritz, a visionary who followed his heart and made his dream (sort of) come true. I guess the lesson here is: "don't ever take no for an answer! If people think your idea is crazy, tell them to stick a hamster up their bum and do what you believe in, regardless of resources, money or talent!"

Inspiring stories can be everywhere, you just have to see them (and by "see", I do mean "use a lot of imagination and embellishments", but that's splitting hairs really!).

I was struck on the head. I couldn't see what object it was or who the assailant was. In an instant, my body responded to its brain shutting off and it moved down ungraciously, creating a pile of flesh not dissimilar to the mighty blobfish.

With consciousness finally incapacitated, my subconsciousness (whose name is Jimmy) was finally free to run amok. He hadn't been this free in years, because I don't usually receive blows to the head, no matter how much I would like it to (let this not be a golden ticket to anyone reading this to randomly start trying to knock me unconscious - reserve a time for that with my secretary).

If consciousness had been awake, I'd have been amazed by Jimmy's ability to take over control. I must have taught him quite a bit unknowingly; he just picked up my body and started walking as if nothing had happened (*note to self: try and keep bodily movements out of Jimmy's sight*). His behaviour seemed normal, composed, unlike the last time he was free, though that was while I was still wearing nappies and I hadn't quite figured out how to avoid using those anyway.

Jimmy, used to his unconscious worlds of majesty and eternal dreamlike possibilities, seemed quite upset that I couldn't swim. He contemplated going to a tall building to start a flight around the world. Lucky for me, he remembered overhearing a video I once watched of failed inventor Franz Reichelt, the man who jumped off the Eiffel Tower with a self-invented parachute and met a rather unfortunate end.
"If that contraption didn't help him, then maybe no contraption would be even worse?" Jimmy mumbled.
Wondering how he ever managed to fly in dreams, he was disheartened by the limitations of the Everyday world around him.

No running around naked? Well, not that he was stopped doing so. He stopped himself because of an unfamiliar emotion: a chilly wind reduced the body's er..... "sesquipedalian oaken dong" into a scared turtle retreating in itself. "Now what's the fun in that?" Jimmy decried.
Anything he could think of that he ever saw in dreams always seemed to have an incredible downside to it.
"I don't understand how someone consciously would want to be conscious," mused Jimmy, "it's not even a nightmare, at least that's an extreme. This all just seems so... grey..."

Having explored a few options, Jimmy concluded that his world was paradise compared to this place. If he'd have had to wait much longer, it's probably likely that an Eiffel Tower jump would happen anyway.

I was slowly coming back to my senses and just in the short transition phase, my consciousness and Jimmy were able to share a few thoughts...

"Hey Timmy! So glad you're back, man! This conscious world isn't all its cut out to be."
"Jimmy? You took over? You know that's against the rules!"
"Hey! Drastic situations call for drastic measures! I saved you, you know!"
"You did? How?"
"I fought heroically against your assailants and beat them to a mushy pulp!"
"A mushy pulp?"
"Yeah, and then I flew away on your unicorn!"
"My unicorn? You're lying to me, you scoundrel!"
"OK, OK... so I didn't really save you."
"Wanker!"
"I'm sorry... let me make it up to you!"
"How?"
"Go to sleep, you'll see! It'll he greatest adventure you'll ever experience! No rules, no limitations!"
"Alright, thanks! Can't wait!"

*Timmy crawls under sheets, suckles thumb and dozes off...*

“Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone... Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”

(Tony Kushner – Angels in America)

Oh traveller,

You are astounding, as you make your leap from beach to mountaintop, from jungle to savannah, from beyond the looking glass out to a world of fantasy. You dream. You rely on dreaming of the yonder deep, of what lies ahead. Discovering what might be really there is not something you were naturally born with.
Nobody is.
In more ways than one, Man is very much like the common mole, huddled underground, hiding away from danger as much as possible, only briefly ever exposing oneself to the Unexplored world when looking for food, shelter, or indeed a mate. Like moles, Man’s action radius does not stretch much further than a small garden, ideally protected by an electric fence (to provide entertainment when drunk neighbours decide to urinate against it).

However, we have the capacity to NOT be blind, to not lock ourselves up. It’s an emotion that goes against our instincts, but the colours one can perceive when exploring a new world are so spectacular and inviting that Man, once he started discovering, only ended up wanting to explore more. To break monotony, to shake off the burden of Routine, and to satisfy himself with a sense of being-in-control, rather than subject to the chains of being-under-control.
In light of the universe, there is no excuse not to explore. It doesn’t care whether or not we grill and eat one of our Sherpas on the way to the mountaintop, or whether or not we lick the floor in a McDonald’s bathroom. I don’t know why you would contemplate any of those things, but if that’s your twisted mind’s concoction, by all means go ahead.

Exploring is no longer solely literal. Gone are the days of Columbus and starting genocides. No, nowadays it is inside Man’s mind, inside one’s expectations of the world and what one aspires to achieve in it. Because we have, at least physically and in our solar system, defined our limits, our minds have shifted inwards, to focus on a determination to gain as much as possible from the present.

And so we gaze up at the night sky, because we are not moles hidden underground, because we can reach other worlds around us and enjoy the fresh air of something New. Life and opportunity in every direction, present in every bright light before us...

(picture of the night sky in a German forest - I was impressed at the amount of stars that got scattered on my sensor (no, it's not dust, I swear!))

They say my atoms are born from exploded stars, pieces taken from all over the universe, ready for an inconspicuous passage through my blood stream. One of those atoms recently stood up and talked to me.

'Hey, you! Nitwit!'
'Oh, hi! Who are you? Actually... WHAT are you?'
'I'm an atom belonging to one of your millions of carbon elements. I reside in your left nipple and I'm fed up with this!'
'With what? You can't talk! Who is this?!'
'Look, asshole, I CAN talk, and while you're a moron, I hope at least some of my colleagues in your brain will help you grasp what you're dealing with here.'
'Atoms can't talk! I'll Google it and you'll see!'
'Fuck Google!'
'Damn.... no reception! Still, you can't talk! There is no way!'
'I may be just an atom, born from a family of carbon, but I know what I know. And I know I can talk. And I know I don't like you.'
'Why? Suppose you're real... What did I ever do to you?'
'What didn't you do?'
'I'm sorry?'
'Look, bitch! I was promised a seven-year cycle of bliss, new experience and peace. "Go to a human body", said the brochure, "your home away from home." I sure fell for that one!'
'Wait... you atoms are considering being part of me a holiday?'
'Well, duh! All of us are here on vacation.'
'But why are you the only one talking to me?'
'Because I'm fucking annoyed, that's why! Oh, and because I am smarter than most other atoms.'
'OK, so why are you annoyed?'
'This hasn't been anything like the brochure! Look, you probably don't know this, but when it comes to the "human experience", us atoms can chose where we want to go. Those of us that want an adventurous vacation with humans, they'll be atoms in some crazy deadly virus or cancer and experience a whole bunch of thrills in a short time...'
'But I don't have cancer...'
'Will you stop interrupting me? I didn't choose one of those vacations. I paid for a relaxing vacation as part of a human carbon element.'
'So? Isn't that what you're getting?'
' "Relaxing" and "boring up to a point where I want to kill myself" are two different things, you tosser!'
'Look, I still don't get it! How does an atom kill itself anyway?'
'We can't! That's the point, Einstein!'
'OK, OK! Then why are you so bored... and such an asshole?'
'My destination was "the nipple" and with it came a number of promises that have not been fulfilled... They said we'd be stimulated, fondled, licked, sucked on, tittilated, etcetera! I've been on your fucking nipple for two years and NOTHING has happened! Are you that repulsive or what's wrong with you?'
'I think something my be wrong with your intel. Didn't they tell you in your brochure that men's nipples aren't as sensitive as women's?'
'Errr.. No, they did not.'
'And then you're just unlucky, because my nipples are particularly "for display purposes only"... by which I mean to say, there's really never much going on there.'
'Suppose I believe you... could you help me?'
'How would I do that?'
'Just, you know..., squeeze me from time to time, or let me be squeezed or fondled...'
'I'm not doing that!'
'Can't you just cut me off then?'
'Sorry, what?'
'Well, just excise me and let me return home! I can't until my carbon element dies, and that might take a while...'
'I can't even see where you're speaking from!'
'The left nipple, I told you!'
'I'm not cutting off my nipple! FREAK!'
'It'll grow back!'
'NO, it won't!'
'Oh, so that's how it is, is it?'
'Shut up... or I'll...'
'You'll what? You better watch what you say! I've got powers here in the atom world!'
'Sure you do... Now piss off, will you?'
'Oh, now you've done it! I'm calling my colleagues in your brain department right now to go on strike effective immediately!'
'Wiat, y di wa?? Grr, hnnnn, hnnnnnn; krrrrhihihiih; mlmmmmmm!'
'Cut me off! NOW!'
'...'

He who called the man who said I was dead, but called me and revered in dark petals sleeping across from the courtyard, dancing curtains in their skimpy dresses, jiggling up and down, leaving traces of desire etched in the granite rocks weighing down on minds, where belated gifts are returned and exchanged for fingernail clippings of homeless men who used to rule the world, but are now roaming astray.

“Time sure changed” is printed in our DNA, unprocessed information stowed away on damaged hard drives and all the train wrecks in the world cannot bring back your little pet bunny. In vain we weep, in vain we sleep. Rest assured, or at least that’s what they told us before running off in the pitch-black forest, hands above their heads, screaming their lungs out and calling me a dead man.

The rocks are still trusting; hear them breathing in their comatose tranquillity; you don’t just join a club of rocks, you need to become one of them. Moronic as they are, we rely on them for our sanity, the only razor-thin connection we preserve to the outside world, the real one, not the one where we hail from.

Nobody loses, where there is fire, we can wait for the firemen to arrive and take it roughly from behind. You roll the stone dice and find yourself envying the flames, so badly you will enter them. Or you think you will, until the gin wears off and you found out maybe you triggered all of this. A particularly hungry owl could perhaps tell you more about the outcome of this tale of self-destruction, but let’s assume you are smart enough to figure it out.

Thick veins pump the blood towards the ocean, a force majeure tidal wave heading in the opposite direction. There are those who choose to ride it, and there are those who scratch their balls in discontent. While non-exclusive of each other, I assume the latter is the only viable option.

Oxygen rains down on us, creating a high that will bury all other highs ever produced by the factory just down the road. Toxic waste spreads to those dancing curtains, increasing their velocity, doing nothing but beg me for more.

And then you just nod, even if it’s a nod that just means “no”.

And look at those rocks listening! Obeying! What are they? Morons?!

Current Mood: contemplative

Dear ex-laptop,

Look at you, all worn out. Tired even. If I didn't know any better, I'd have been able to diagnose you with a case of severe pneumonia and prescribe you on a course of strong antibiotics. The reason I know better, is because I saw a bread grain stuck in your fan.

I've retired you, you can move on to a new life now, whizzing away carefree, for the rest of your days just caring about music, artsy films and the occasional naked guilty pleasure, just one thing at a time. Your new owner, my sparkling nymph, will treat you much better than I ever did. He'd never use you as a coaster or spill his dry martini all over you. He won't force you to run seventy-five applications on two simultaneously running operating systems at the same time, exhausting you and making you scream.

Five years is a long time in laptop years, that's about 150 years in human years, so any time you get extra brings you closer to a status of immortality (though not actual immortality, since you and I both know that you will most likely end up being vivisected in a toxic sweatshop in a third world country; most likely China, though I guess somewhere in Africa is equally possible). Well, what I'm trying to say, is that you've had a good run. Don't take it personally, but I've been outgrowing you for a while now. You're a pensioner and I've only just stopped wearing nappies (a birth defect, but still).

Oh, don't sulk! Change is good! I showed you the world, didn't I? Three continents! Many countries, thousands of different wireless connections with so many kinky access points! You've seen more of the world than any piece of hardware I ever had, you interconnected slut!

This is the last thing I'll ever write on you, so I thought it fitting that I write it on you, even though your young and sexy replacement is so much better at this stuff. (*)

Looking at you, I notice something odd. From the entire keyboard, only two keys appear to have undergone a form of change, only the "S" and the "N" show signs of wear-and-tear. That's odd. We all know that, in the languages I mostly write in, the "E" is the most commonly used letter (18.91 % in Dutch and 12.70 % in English), but that key appears to be in pristine condition. At least for Dutch, the "N" makes sense, since it comes in on a solid second place (10.03 %), though in English it's only 6th (6.75 %). Perhaps most strange is the "S", which is 9th in Dutch (3.73 %) and 7th in English (6.33 %). (**)

It doesn't make sense. If you have an explanation for this, I'm all ears. Am I typing more of these letters than "normal people"? What's that? Maybe I just type "sex" too much? Errr… NO! Because then you'd notice flaking on the "E" and "X" as well! Besides, who Googles "sex" anyway? What people Google is "Moldovan teens tickling each other with radishes and turnips while wearing a banana costume"; you KNOW that gets my juices flowing! To each their own fetish, I say!

I still can't find an explanation for it. Maybe I am disgruntled a lot and that causes me to write "tsssssss!" a lot, which - I will admit - contains a large percentage of "S" letters, though I probably just hold the key down, rather then pressing it repeatedly. And don't go telling me it's from pressing CMD+S too much to save my progress on the work I'm doing. We both know how often I got frustrated when a crash made me lose a few hours of work! I'm rogue that way.

I compared it to your predecessor, a Sony who now thinks he's a vacuum cleaner (mechanical schizophrenia is such a sad thing). The test was inconclusive since no obvious difference could be found between the different keys.

Failing to come up with a better theory, I'm afraid I have to conclude that it must be my fault. My language use, bombastic, gargantuan and solipsistic (four times "S" (!!!!!)) as it may be, could truly be the cause of your damage. I had no idea. Of course keyboard builders will reinforce only the keys that are most often used, so that all wear-and-tear happens at a similar rate and consumers won't be freaked out.

Or maybe you are playing tricks on me… That's it, isn't it? You knew I'd find out, so I'd start doubting my normality and, worst of all, my writing! How dare you?! You're making me want to freak out, because you're pissed at me? That's low, even for your standards! You know how hard it is for a totally unmaterialistic person to write something about a THING? Yeah, that's what you are to me, nothing more than a tool and a bitch and I couldn't care less about you! I never did! I just needed you for the money. Remember that cut off of my profits I promise you? I spent it all!

So, happy retirement, you wanker!

(*) Not exactly true, this entry was already written on the "young and sexy replacement"; couldn't be bothered to actually do this, isn't the fact that I'm writing absolute nonsense about a soulless machine enough?

(**) Source of figures:

Dutch (http://onzetaal.nl/taaladvies/advies/letterfrequentie-in-het-nederlands)

English (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency)

Look at them, staring at me with their judgemental dead eyes.
Mocking me with their eternally perfect hair and their never faltering jawline.

There is something about wig shops and hairdressers that always brings out the worst in me. I guess that’s a sentence you’ve never heard before.

Do you remember the great arson epidemic of wig shops and hair dressers a few years back? Yeah, that was me. I stopped doing it, but the...err... flame is still burning within me. I’m self-medicating now: I’m taking a juniper berry ethanol based concentrate, in a dry quinine solution and a slice of cucumber. You people without medical knowledge might know this as a “gin and tonic”, though I assure you my use of it is entirely medically justified. See? (*Shows handwritten note presumably self-written or written by inhebriated general practitioner*)

While you, my trusted readership – consisting of a masturbating Russian trying to sell me Viagra, a Nigerian prince who wants to make me wealthy, and, last but not least, my trusty stalker who has probably been watching me while I punch this down (I don’t “type”, I punch; it’s a testosterone thing, you wouldn’t understand) – happily go about your day passing by wig shops and hairdressers alike, never even getting as much as a shiver rolling through your spine, I tend to start twitching whenever I’m approaching one, and that’s even before I consciously register their existence.

Being a man of science, I won’t claim that I have special powers, because then I’d be as fucked up as all of you (and especially YOU!), no there must simply be some trigger in the air that my nose registers, causing me to grow restless, violent, and I must admit, slightly aroused. Sadly, the arousal only exacerbates the first two emotions, which resulted in the fires, which resulted in my fleeing my home country, changing my name and my appearance (not the hair, obviously, no, I just wear a corset and fake moustache, fools everyone!).

Anyway... Something must have happened the last time I had my hair cut, something so shocking that my mind blocked it out completely, leaving a trauma deeply scarred in the depths of my, let’s be honest, massive brain. If only I could figure out what it was...

Either way, I cannot set foot in a hairdresser’s. Well, I can, but then there’s a good chance I’m holding a match a can of petrol.

Wig shops, for some reason, terrify me even more. Maybe because there are so many eyes looking at you, laughing at you and every petty thing you do. It’s an attitude that comes naturally to those with ever-perfect hair.

I never thought I’d be a man, or more specifically: an arsonist, on the run. The advice I got from some people that I trusted was as stupid as it was insulting:

“Turn yourself in, plead insanity, you’ll get off with a slap on the wrists!”

Maybe you also think I’m insane. But I’m not! I mean, would an insane person do this? *walks to bathroom, pees, washes hands, dries off hands, comes back* No, right?!

I’m passed the point of no return, I know. I realise I may never get another haircut for as long as I live, not even when the weight of my hair gives me whiplash, weighing my head down as if a heavy boulder is hanging around my scalp (why aren’t there any documented cases of this? It sounds like a cover-up; I can’t be the only one!).

And when it all falls out, you can count your life on it that I’d rather lick the toilet seat of a sleazy Berlin nightclub than go to a wig shop for a replacement. Chances are, by then all wig shops in a 50 km radius will have all mysteriously burnt down. Though that would probably mean I’d have to run away again (well, I do trust you, you Russian-Nigerian stalker, but you never know who reads these secret texts I write you).

And I just can’t deal with the stress another time.

It would just be SO bad for my hair!

When I joined the Voyager mission in 1977, I never expected to still be around today, bored out of my mind, screaming into the universe.

The mission was called “unmanned” because A) they expected the sun’s radiation to “unman” me (by which they meant to say “disintegrate my scrotum” and increase my oestrogen levels; it happened to Armstrong and Aldrin) and B) they didn’t want anyone to know I would be on board.

The launch took place on September 5th, 1977, almost 36 years ago. Not that I’m counting. Oh wait, I AM counting, because it’s all I can do out here in the boring desert of the Heliopause (look it up!), somewhere in the no-man’s land that is the Kuiper Belt.

The thing is, when I was launched into space, it was considered to be unethical to send a human being into space without offering them the chance to return. But then again, Voyager was ambitious, so NASA needed a compromise. The truth is that their technology was simply not ready to explore the solar system without being controlled by an actual human being. But they would never have admitted that to the Russians. And that’s where I came in...

So they did what any self-respecting scientific organization would do: they went partying in Studio 54 in New York, and yes, that’s where they found me. High on acid, these young scientists approached me. To my drugged eyes, they all looked incredibly attractive, which made it easy for them to convince me to follow them to their hotel room. Instead of a night of all-you-can-eat sex, I was tied down in a chair by what I perceived to be a skinny 19-year-old runway model with perky breasts (She turned out to be a plump 40-year-old He; though the perky breasts, yeah, those were real, though much less arousing after my discovery...).

Still tripping, the model’s colleague, a cute punk boy (probably not true, though I never got to find out) fed me another trip. Then he started talking about the universe. I flew across it while he was speaking. I saw Neil making love to the moon (again, drugs talking) and I imagined myself there, fingering a meteor crater. So real.

Anyway, what happened was this: they gave me a few consent forms to sign. At that point, horny and spaced out, I would have signed anything to get laid by the model and the punk. Not that it happened. Or if it did, I sure as hell don’t remember it.

I woke up the next day in Cape Canaveral, Florida, locked up in a sterile white chamber. I recognized the model’s features, even though He inexplicably seemed to have aged 21 years and changed sex overnight. Dazed and confused, I was read the terms and conditions of the document that I had signed the night before: I consented to be shot up in space, without saying goodbye to anyone, and join the Voyager mission to control its basic functions. If I failed to comply, all of my family and friends would be hunted down and put it a rocket to be shot straight into the sun.

The golden record that oh so famously was taken aboard the Voyager, wasn’t put on there for extraterrestrial civilizations. Anyone who thinks that deserves to be anally probed by someone pretending to be an alien! No, it was put there for my entertainment. The main problem with it is that I never got a say in the matter. I’m sick of hearing the bird and whale noises you guys put on it. And the one request that I did make for the record?

“At least put some nudity on it! Please!?”

My exact words. They complied, at first, letting it replace some nonsensical insect sounds they put on it. But then the religious groups started shouting. I tried to reason with NASA, but they got scared and caved in. So what have I been masturbating on for the past 35 years? A fucking line drawing of a man and woman! Thanks a lot, stupid Christians!

I was shot into space with a lifetime supply of IV nutrition, fed straight into my veins. I did manage to smuggle a vodka bottle in my anus, but it only lasted me one day (I was scared and annoyed, what would you do?). Ever since then, my days have been the same, pushing some buttons, going slightly mad, listening to the mating call of the speckled peacock (seriously? No nudity, but a peacock’s mating call? If any civilization would discover this record, I seriously hope they will enslave the human race and let the peacocks rule the world!).

I officially left the solar system a while back. There was no border, no sign saying “you are now leaving the solar system, fly safely!”

To go where no man had boldly gone before... Man, I always hated Star Trek. Why couldn’t they just have asked any Star Trek freak to take my place? I’m sure someone would have agreed to do it.

But I’m there now. When I look into my rearview mirrors, I cannot make out Earth any more. A polka dot competing with a million others. Even if I find the reverse button on this thing, I doubt it will take me back from where I came.

Wait a minute...

What if there would be a way? The thrusters they used were based on household vacuum cleaners; the special, more powerful kind (okay, I’m guessing; I wasn’t really told), and these usually also have a reverse function!

Hmmm... A forward button, an up button, a cable connecting the record player, a button controlling my colonoscopy bag (how else do you expect I’d have been up here for so long?), a switch for the windscreen wipers...

You know what? I’ll just try them all. After 35 years, I’m sure my friends and family will get off the hook; I mean, I took photos of Jupiter and Saturn, for crying out loud! They tell the world the whole process was all automatic, but no! There I was, loading my film, developing it in a mini-darkroom, making prints, FedEx-ing the results back to Earth! It’d take me 40.000 years to reach the next star, and let’s face it, it’s just going to look the same!

There it is! I’m reversing! Oh man, I can’t wait to be back! The 21st century... flying cars, no more disease or poverty, all work executed by robots, leaving man to sing, dance and swing! Heaven will be nothing compared to where I’m going (and I’ve been to heaven, just so you know, and it’s a snooze fest over here!).

Studio 54, prepare the acid, I’m a-coming home! (*)

(*) Following this overly positive statement, this story’s unnamed protagonist hit the wrong button, and was catapulted straight into the sun where he disintegrated in a fraction of a millisecond.

There once was a room in which a Timmy swam,
Long before he had opened his clam,
This was Ground Zero, right where the war began,
And Timmy the Hero, being quite the renaissance man
Adjourned to his castle, his fortress of dreams,
Where his famous Twister no longer teems.

Busy as bees, Timmy was toiling,
Ready for some old-fashioned plan-foiling,
The enemy here was a fiend called the Floor,
Attacking Timmy like a rabies-infested whore,
Shooting gravity pellets at our Hero’s poor head,
To death, that’s how much he could have bled!

When facing Danger, Timmy laughs in Fear’s face,
Not so with spiders, who’ll make his screams race,
‘Floors are demonic,’ is what the Wise Man had said,
Saying he got it from a holy book he once read,
Timmy believed him, the man had very big ears,
And nose hair that testified of wisdom of years.

So out on a limb, Timmy started his fight,
Considering it his unique divine plight,
He started by kicking, punching and beating,
Soon enough his engine was overheating,
And it all seemed futile, all that he had done,
Because the floor, sure enough, was all but gone!

‘Time for the shotguns!’ Timmy decried,
But had his firearm application denied;
They said he was mental, but how would they know?
‘I’m nude because of the heat, you dumb stupid ho’!’
Our hero was clueless as to what he should do,
So he started thinking, while having his poo.

The idea he got, was simple and smart,
He could not wait to go give it a start;
The Floor still mocked him, but not for long,
It was almost time for the fat lady’s song!
He shot into action with his cunning plan,
The best one he’d had in all his lifespan.

Instead of fighting, and beating away,
Timmy covered the floor in less than a day,
Then the Floor was all choking, accepting defeat,
And life could go on, which Timmy found neat!
Our Hero was smiling all through the morn’
As wide as an orifice in a Japanese porn.

And so ends our tale of floors, whores and sores,
Rest assured, it's now okay to open your doors!

Timmy's room, circa 2006

There, that triggered some filters and wasted some CIA hard drive space! Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if it got triggered so much that somebody actually had to read it? I guess I’d have to unwittingly reveal some details about the terror plot I’ve been working on for 32 years (that’s right, many years before I was born!). But then who reveals their plans in a blog entry? Either the biggest idiot one can think of, or the greatest criminal mastermind that ever roamed the Street of The Cat’s Arse (now I even gave my location away, that’s how genius I am).
For you see, only the cleverest of the clever (oh, climbing Mount Cleverest took me a long time!) know that the best secrets are the ones that are out in the open for everyone to see.

“Why, Timmy,” you ask, “how does that make sense?”
Timmy, all smug and condescending, would reply: “Oh you Dumbo! Because it would just be so unexpected that it will always work!”

Think about it; if I’m using seventeen layers of encryption, a relay server that anonymizes everything, and a mouse pad with a picture of a guy wearing a banana costume on it, all that just to use my internet browser, it is quite obvious that my activity will be deemed so much more interesting by hackers and intelligence agencies. Hackers won’t feel challenged to just read my blog entry detailing my terrorist plot, because it’s just right here; maybe my password might prove tricky, but they won’t even need that. They of course won’t want their supervisors to know that this terrorist info can be found by anyone, because this could make them lose their jobs, so they will only focus on the jobs that actually cause them some effort.
I cannot believe that no terrorist ever thought of this. But then again, nobody’s as cunning as I. *releases a burst of diabolic laughter*

So I can write about my terror plot, quite easily. It involves ten thousand plastic bags that me and my accomplices will tie around the tails of an equal number of unsuspecting cows (though the number could be higher, if some of these cows were siamese twins and could be “covered” with one plastic bag – “always respect the siamese twins before they bugger you while you sleep,” is what my great-grandfather used to say, and who are we to ignore the man’s obvious wisdom). The bags will then be collecting the methane gases these cows will produce over a period of time (as yet to be determined by a trial run with a rental cow (does Hertz rent cows? I’ll have to check – this plan’s only been 32 years in the making, you can expect me to have ALL the details!)). Subsequently, these bags will be closed and collected and released all over America with a bit of string attached to it.
Then, the string will be lit with a match, causing all balloons to inflame at the same time, which in turn will create panic amongst the most idiotic and backward religious zealots, because they will think it’s the end of the world, which made the Rapture come, and, here’s the key point: they haven’t been raptured!

These burning skies will create a huge panic among the populace and it will lead to an unprecedented amount of mass suicides, because of fear the Devil might come and sodomise those devout souls. I will then use this diversion to install myself as new Eternal Ruler Of All The Known Universe! (exclamation mark is part of title!)

It is a plan that simply cannot fail. I realise that it would make more sense to have a terrorist plot where I target people With a brain, rather than Without (as is the case here), but you know, you think of a terrorist plot at 3 in the morning! I mean, 32 years ago!

Disclaimer – I take no responsibility for any attacks performed as a result of my posting these instructions here. If anyone should take responsibility for it, it should be the cows! What with all this genetic modification going on, they really should be able to read!

Sometimes, the written word is my only defence. Well – who am I kidding? – it is ALWAYS my only defence. Oftentimes my written words have to defend or deny whatever the spoken word blurted out without letting Reason (beautiful Reason!) or Consideration filter out anything that might be perceived as ludicrous, exaggerated, horny, perverted, flatulent, etc.

I consider myself socially backward/awkward, and I am perfectly okay with that. I think the only reason people want to hang out with me and listen to my spoken words, is because they are so masochistic as to see me make extreme and weird oral statements that I will then have to retract in writing. For them, it offers intellectual entertainment, something that I can only applaud (because it filters out morons, basically (see what I did there? complicated compliment for all of you!)); at least I am not considered to be like “that one black guy” in the group so those around me can feel entirely PC. Frankly, I guess that’s because I’m not black (Detective Timmy Solves The Case Again!).

Every sentence I have ever written in my life (with a few exceptions, I will admit (e.g. “I’ll be there at 10!”, “I’m running late, let’s say 10.30?”, “OK, I got drunk and missed my bus, and I don’t really want to see you anyway”)) has been the result of Filtering. Not just the boring filters I mention above, also the whimsical or fun ones. This process started a long long time ago, back in the day when I was still missing my nappies, reluctantly having accepted the “Curse of Continence”...

*flashback begins*

I guess I must have been around 10 or 11. I was given a writing assignment: “Write a story about ‘A Day in the Life of <a Profession>’ ”. Now I don’t remember why I picked Toby the Ambulance who was now serving as a funeral hearse, but even then, as crude as the story was written, it told the reader more about me than it did about Toby. What was Toby’s crash a metaphor for? Why did that police car try to assault Toby, and why did Toby like being assaulted? Why did he fill himself up with Diesel while all he was built for was Regular? And how could all of this trauma fit on two handwritten A4s?
The questions are hard to answer right now, even for the story’s author (because I don’t remember ever being employed as an ambulance, nor ever being inside one (well, I have been in one, but the alcohol poisoning cleared that embarrassing memory from my mind, something I am still thanking my brain for)).
The teacher’s comments on the little story were dubious as well. He wrote this: “It’s very good that you are trying to develop an own voice, but don’t be too ambitious.” (anyone else agree that ambition should be stimulated, rather than stopped before it can bloom? What a dick! (a comment that has been filtered, just FYI))
Asking me to stay after class, he asked me everything was alright with me and what I was trying to tell with my story and if I needed any help, because he thought what I had written was quite disturbing.
Right now, I’d act like a diva, pull down my trousers and jiggle my junk until Teacher got dizzy, but back then, all I could do was cry, which of course made him think he was right.
I know what you’re thinking: “You, macho man Timmy? Crying?” I know, I know, but at the time, it was my best defence to get what I wanted (chocolate, mostly). Writing this, I came up with an even better defence strategy: crying AND jiggling my junk! There is no stopping this writer!
Luckily, Teacher’s interest in my situation wasn’t as high. My guess was he was just trying to look for a reason to flirt with my mother some more, and that wasn’t something I’d have granted him so easily.

*flashback ends*

Ah, Written Word, you comfort me. You let me fondle you without limits, let me invent new phrases, combinations of words that were never part of language before, or let me lick the pages of your dictionary (DO IT!), gently stroke the computer screen that holds your alphabet...

*AAAAAAHhhhhhhhh!!!!!!*

I think I just came...

“To keep sane is not an easy thing to do,” I mumbled to myself, just before placing my underwear in my freezer, along with two of my three remote controls (putting in the third, that would have been mental).

After I was done, I started writing a letter to NASA, explaining why I am planning to withdraw myself from participating in the Mars mission (apparently it is forbidden to take coconuts along, how on earth would I then be able to make audible imitations of a horse’s hooves to entertain the crew and, most importantly, myself?) and adding that I’d probably be okay to go along on an interstellar mission, but on the condition that they add a distillery to the spaceship (gin or whiskey, they’re free to choose).

“I won’t let you defeat me,” I whispered at the guy in the mirror, giving him an unconvincing kiss, after which he seemingly got enraged and attempted to punch me through the glass. Luckily, I was prepared and in a swift reflex, all we ended up doing was giving an extremely potent fist bump. Sure, it shattered the glass and some pieces ended up in my armpits, but that would hardly be categorised as a defeat in the so-called “real world”.

“Why am I...?” I wrote in on Google, but I soon forgot what I was going to ask, as the machine offered a few alternatives and decided to go with “Why am I not a kangaroo playing the banjo?” I admit, it wasn’t exactly the first thing that came up, but it was close enough. The answer was as shocking as it was meaningful.

Busy as this day ostensibly already had been, the clock was striking 4:21 AM, and birds were already chirping away. “TOO FUCKING SOON!” I cried out to the indifferent ceiling, and I put on my widest pair of trousers and my scarecrow bucket (a bucket with holes cut out for the eyes) and I ran up to the nearest tree to where the birds’ tweets were coming from, and then I started tweeting aggressively, “TWEET FUCKING TWEEEEET! AAAAHHHHHH! CHIRP-CHIRP-CHIRP!”, yelling “How do you like it now?!” after it. Upset, they flew away and I retreated to my cave.

I adopted the foetal position, tightly clenching my arms around my knees and tried to think of a lullaby to make me doze off into a safe dark night of sleep.
Nothing happened... No lullaby, no sleep, no sound, not even time passing! Had I finally chased it all away? Was this the single most blissful moment of perfect stillness?
Finally here after millions of years of waiting?
Just my luck that I had to be naked for this. A perpetual flasher, that is how I will end up through eternity.
Still... could have been worse, I could have been a cattle farmer delivering a calf, imagine doing that for eternity!
(At least his hands won’t be cold... That’s the glass being half-full, right there!)

Current Mood: restless

Did I just quote... ermmm... I don’t know their name, but it’s pretty bad!

I was randomly reading on how about 97% of us have plastics in their bodies, and I’m not talking about swallowed small particles from toys that were explicitly labelled as “unsuitable for children!” No, we are talking about plastic residue, residing in virtually all of us. And you thought you didn’t have anything in common with this bedwetting, self-indulgent, priapistic excuse for a cattle farmer (because I’m not a cattle farmer, really, no matter how much you want me to be).
I’m pretty sure I’ve been excelling at stacking up the Plastic. When I was an infant and going through my “suction phase”, I would mostly stick plastic things in my mouth (sure, photographic proof exists that I was sucking on empty beer bottles, but I am pretty sure the photographer took those photos, knowing that I would only touch plastic with my lips, which is why he had to record the moment, as it was so extraordinary). Well, even today, not much has changed. I admit it may seem a little more awkward when you find me sucking on a vending machine button, but then again, we all have our addictions. Mine happens to be plastic, and I thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t born more than a hundred years ago, or I’d be a real weirdo! (Because then we didn’t have plastics, and I would have to resort to sucking fossils, which would really be tragic!)
As person whose glass is always half-full (which reminds me, *calls out to James:* ‘JAMES? Could you fetch me another plastic cup of vodka? And do leave the plastic on the ice cubes, will you?’ ‘Yes, Master!’), I don’t see why a percentage of bodily plastic is necessarily a bad thing.

‘Don’t blame me, blame the plastic!’ could be the ultimate phrase to get away with any crime! If a bit of plastic bounces off on one of our neurons that happen to decide between right and wrong, can you really blame the person? Not really, right?
"So Plastic murdered Professor Green in the Conservatory with a Lead Pipe? Yes, my dear Watson, yesssss, now come over here and kiss me!"

There are those acidic people who will protest just about anything who will say that plastics may make you infertile, and that we should get rid of them, and yadiyadiyadi...

It got me thinking... Why would Plastics, whom we all love deeply, render our men and women infertile? Plastics don’t mean to harm us, do they? Even fish love plastics so much, they cannot get enough of sucking on its infinite goodness!

So why would we be against them?
Plastics wouldn’t be plastics if it didn’t give us something in return, right?
Think about it. We are only fertile, because it is the only way for us to truly live forever (and cruelly enough, never as yourself, only as halves, halves of halves, and so on).
Plastic’s solution takes care of you. You don’t NEED fertility!

Plastics take forever to be broken down by nature, so we might call them our best chance of eternal life. I’ve already convinced myself so much, I’m biting down on a piece of plastic bubble wrap right now and pouring a sauce of molten cling film around it.

The Fountain of Youth? Good luck finding it, buddy! I’ll stick to plastics for my eternal life! The theory is simple: I ingest as much plastic as I possibly can and soon, I will merge with it, which will make me a plastic-human hybrid that will live on forever, and who cares when or not the seed I disseminate is capable of reproducing half of me? Not me! Because I will be Bisphenol A-Man (sort of a superhero name, but really the one plastic element most of use carry around in the highest dose).

We shouldn’t underestimate Evolution. I mean: we are men of science, aren’t we? So if I can teach my genes to incorporate the indestructibility of the plastic into them within my lifetime, nature will have no way of getting rid of me! It is truly the most devious plan ever conceived by anyone, and of course, I won’t share it with anyone, except for maybe with my closest 600 acquaintances, but really, that’s it!

One major flaw of eternal life (I am already living in that state of mind) is that you lose the sense of urgency. The phrase “I’m sure I can do it tomorrow” has never sounded so convincing as from coming from someone who is basically indestructible.

And then you sleep in. You find the closest plastic object you have lying around, which could be anything from a masturbatory aid (check!) to a plastic comb (check!) and you suckle it until your face turns blue, and you faint and are off to a world of dreams.

As far as stupid deaths go, getting hit by a falling icicle from a rooftop must be quite high on the list. I had to think of this as I was observing this extraordinary specimen grow just outside my window. This one would have never been a lethal weapon, by the way, as below on the ground is just a patch of unused space, before you start accusing me of attempted murder and, perhaps worse, rape (OK, you do need some imagination to see how a falling icicles could rape someone, but it would only require someone to fall on a patch of snowy ice (not an unlikely event) right where the icicle lands).

When you die by the icicle’s merciless fall, you don’t end up as “serious” news, you’re somewhere on the local pages in a one column article, poking fun at how you died. A death like that won’t cause hate groups on Faced Book against icicles (idea for a hate group: icicles!), nor will there be any political action undertaken to outlaw icicles or to jail them in refrigerated cells.

But would it *always* be a stupid death? I don’t think so.
Allow me to elaborate...

Some of the pavements in my area have a narrow trail where the snow has been cleaned off; supposedly this is the ideal place for pedestrians to walk, but in some places, you can see how the path has been crafted so that it lies underneath the rain gutter.

Now put yourself in the mind of somebody wanting to commit the Perfect Murder. I think we can all agree that getting hit with an icicle has never been considered a murder, so it is worth entertaining the idea.

So, suppose I am a villain (hard to imagine, angelic as I am, but please try). This is what I’d write in the Manual:
What you would do is study where my Target is living and investigate what route he would walk on the street, check out their routine, decide on a building from where to operate, rent a flat (or buy it, since we’re killing them, we might as well go crazy) on the top floor, ensuring that there is an open access to the rooftop or the gutter. This last bit is important, because it’s not that hard to let an icicle grow: simulate a dripping tap with a simple water connection and let Winter do its thing (NOT using tap water, that might give you away if a clever investigator would decide to analyse it, unlikely, but still). To increase your chances of a hit, you can always let more icicles grow right next to each other, none of this will look suspicious.
After carefully studying the physics of the falling icicle, and taking a few test runs to determine the right drop speed, it should be possible to calculate exactly when the icicle needs to drop in order for it to hit the Target. Variables like wind and changing walk speed may complicate the matter, but that is where the multiple icicle contraption comes in, thus increasing your chances of a hit (the icicle itself is not a variable, because you can create it to your exact desires).
Now, when the snow begins to fall, study the cleaning team and try to get ahead of them when you are ready to attack; do their job before they get there, and create the narrow path right underneath your hanging icicles.
And now you’re all set. Even if you miss the first time when your Target walks by, he’ll just count himself lucky or maybe he won’t even notice.

And there you have it: the perfect murder!

This sheds a whole new light on all those “unlucky accidents” that have killed hundreds of people over the years.

Icicles innocent? I think not!

...

___________________________

DISCLAIMER: Timmy does not approve the use of the Perfect Murder describe herein. Timmy only appoves of Imperfect Murders that only Inspector Poirot can solve!

___________________________

EXCLUSIVE!
A Hardcore Behind the Scenes Look of Timmy Writing A Blog Entry!

Intro: Journal entries don't write themselves. They are written in collaboration with different voices and of course, most importantly, together with the Journal itself. For this entry, the Journal wasn't very pleased with Timmy's attitude as of late, so things were tense when Timmy encountered Journal...

- Hello Journal!
- Oh, it’s you... what the fuck do you want?
- I don’t know... I just want to talk, I guess.
- You want to talk? Just like that...
- Yeah...
- You think it’s that easy, isn’t it? Just come back, barging in, carrying a box of chocolates and assume I’ll just be OK with that...
- That box of chocolates isn’t for you... it’s for me. You know I’m addicted, it was one of the first things I ever told you...
- Oh, you’re not even here to apologise? To tell me that maybe, just maybe, you have been neglecting me, your supposed ‘best friend’!
- Look, I’m sorry, okay... I don’t see what difference it makes...
- Of course you don’t, you’re just an asshole who just uses me whenever he’s feeling lonely!
- Oh, you know that’s not true!
- Prove me wrong, bitch, prove me wrong...
- Come on; don’t be like that, the attitude really doesn’t suit you.
- Don’t tell me how to act! You’re not the boss of me!
- Well... I kind of AM, you know, since I own you and all...
- You own nothing! Zilch! NADA!
- I own this box of chocolates, don’t I?
- Big deal! You’ve only been here two minutes and you’ve almost finished it completely, you fat turd!
- STOP it, will you?
- Why would I? I’m not afraid of you!
- Well, you should be, you know I can destroy you!
- Boo-hoo, I’m SO scared, as if annihilation is any better than neglect! Fuckwit!
- Stop calling me names!
- Stop being a pussy and fight, wanker!
- You’ve asked for this!
*Timmy slaps Journal hard across its cover, hurling it in a corner*
- Is that all you got, retard!?
- Fuck you!
- Fuck you!
*Journal spits in Timmy’s face*
*Timmy angrily grabs hold of Journal’s spine, forcing it down in a choking motion*
- You want to get fucked, Journal? You need the attention?
- You don’t have the balls!
- Is this what you want?
*Timmy aggressively strips down Journal, scratching it, inscribing words:
TOOLAMPHITHEATREPROLETARIATHOGWASHSOUPHASHTAGHATEJINXINOPALTONESANDPOOLSACROSSTHECOURTYARDFROMANOVERARCHINGBITCHWHOWOULDNTLISTENWHOWOULDNTLISTENANDGOTWHATYOUDESERVED*
- There! Look what you made me do!
- (sobbing:) Fuck off!
- I just wanted to talk, really!
- I could have you arrested! Get the fuck out!
- Shut up!
*Timmy forces Journal to open up itself, takes off trousers and underwear, forcing it onto Journal, and then starts writing, all the while Journal is crying*

PS: Journal deserved it!

We all like to believe we could be actors, faking our way from one character to the next, from the strong embodiment of a cunning villain, over the gentle portrayal of a sensuous love, to the convincing spitting image of an obese, spitting old lady.
Some actors’ paths are just paved with opportunities, coins, naked living bodies and spankings (if those actors would be into those things, that is). Others, such as Yours Truly’s, have been clad with wolf traps, landmines, banana peels, naked dead bodies and severe beatings (none of which I was, or am, particularly enticed by).
The first landmine on becoming the next Jean-Claude Van Damme (being Belgian, that was all that I could aim for… Again, not an enticing prospect, but it was way better than being a toilet roll roller all your life, isn’t it?) already came at an early age, already in the first play I would ever star in, at age 3.

What happened? Well, the director was a mess (simple proof: on stage during the performance, that’s how bad she was!). During the first rehearsal, I could immediately sense this was going to be detrimental to my acting career, but I had already signed the contract, having been lured by the promise of free milk every day (something that, as I would later found out, was a privilege everyone was given). Breaking the contract was impossible anyway, she'd have us waterboarded in an instant.

When she explained her idea about the play, the raison d’être, the philosophies behind it (not shying away from using big names as Derrida, Nietzsche, and Babar the Elephant), we could all sense something was wrong, but none of us has the verbal skills to go against this giant of a woman who reeked of cigarettes and multiple divorce.

The script was horrible. Badly written drivel with flimsy plotlines and transparently boring attempts at crowd-pleasing. All of us three-year-olds held a secret meeting to address the issue. It was a rowdy meeting and tensions ran high; people’s futures were at stake here! It didn’t take long for the most extreme voices to take over the discussion. We were thinking of ways to get rid of her; maybe if enough of us told our parents the director had touch us in our no-no place, we’d be able to get her arrested. I opposed the idea, telling them that paedophilia was still very much suppressed in criminal courts, and that it probably wouldn’t work. After all, it was still the 80s.
It was then that I proposed to do away with her altogether. Everyone went quiet, looking at each other.
“Is this how we want our careers to start, dancing on the grave of our first director?” A voice shouted.
I replied: “Dancing on her grave is not really necessary for this to work.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. You can, but that's up to you...”
“Oh, in that case, let's do it!”

As the only surviving photo from that abominable play proves, we did not succeed in our kill plot. In hindsight, it of course makes sense that filling a coffee maker with toddler urine isn’t going to kill anyone, but one of our parents had told this to one of our classmates, probably to scare him off because he had been drinking his own pee, but that was something we could not know and he would not have us know. Anyway, she just ended up making coffee, drinking three or four cups, before realising something was amiss (she just added sugar and drank the whole thing, a cocktail of 23 boys and girls’ urine and cheap coffee).

To make matters worse, the director had spent the entire play’s budget, which was more money than any of us had ever seen (about 10 euros roughly), on vodka and nail polish.
So there was nothing left for our costumes.
Probably drunk from the vodka, she ordered us to take some empty egg trays with us. I tried refusing, but she put me in the corner for what seemed like forever, so in the end, a full twelve minutes later, I had to give in.
The results looked embarrassing. Probably still tripping from an LSD trip taken over the weekend, she then forced us to paint our newly made elephant ears in different colours.
“But… but… elephants are grey!”
“WHAT?!” She screamed at me from across the room. Filled with anger, I decided to fill my nappy and make her change me (I would wear one of those strategically every day until I was 24, just so I'd always get my way). Sadly, she didn't change her mind (even though she did change me (my nappy, at least)) and she told me to paint my ears green, or otherwise she’d come to my house at night, shoot a bullet through my kneecaps, and force me to watch how she would cut out the eye of my favourite teddy bear (a seal) and pee in its gaping eye socket. Though she was probably bluffing, I had no choice but to obey.
Should I have refused and called upon my artistic integrity to save my career? *sigh* I guess we’ll never know…

The performance.
After weeks of badly organised rehearsals, more threats to people’s favourite teddies, finally, our trauma could end. We all knew it would be with another trauma, but at least it would end.
There was a packed crowd on opening night. Everyone begged their friends and relatives not to show up, but they still did.

I can give a short summary of the play.
All elephants entered the stage from the left, stamping their feet unconvincingly (because we weren’t gray!). The intention was probably to express nature’s force over man’s seemingly fleeting existence. The director thought she had written a new Waiting for Godot, but all she got was Waiting for the Next Toilet Break. She tried to convince us that maybe the colours would be something against racism. Again, we objected, green and red weren’t races, plus the portrayal of Asians as yellow, we found to be very offensive, even at such a young age (these objections were no longer voiced, out of fear of her retaliation).
So after entering the stage and stampeding towards our set positions, we had to stand still. The silence was of course a metaphor for how dead we wanted our director to be at that point. Probably she’d have explained it something like this: “By deconstructing the elephant’s character, we are really referring to Derrida’s deconstruction and how this influences our contemporary post-modern society – I first wanted to do an elephant striptease to highlight this even more, but parents objected.”
All actors were feeling the same and were on the verge of rebellion. We all kept quiet, longer than she wanted. She started singing the song she wanted us to sing.
“A musical? Seriously? FUCK OFF!” An audience member screamed before running off in a fit of rage, much to our satisfaction.
She had changed the lyrics at the very last minute, with the clear intention to insult us.
“Fat elephants! We are fatty-FAT elephants, stampeding all the way!”
I will spare you the rest of the song. Let's just say it came down to an eternity of 4 minutes of us standing angrily on stage, with her throwing insults at us in a mock-singing manner. It caused me eight years of therapy to get over this and I still turn murderous whenever I see an elephant (which is not that often, I must admit).
I guess she won that round, and not only that round… As a direct result, four of the people on that photograph would end up as chronic anorexics, another one would end up as a “furry” (you know, one of those pervs who dressed up as an animal and has sex with other people dressed as other animals – guess what his chosen animal was… Yup, a mouse! The only thing he knew that would frighten away an elephant; a sad story, really).

The crowd’s response? As the play ended, there was a long and painful silence, after which you could hear people asking, “Wait, that’s it?”
“No way!”
“What a rip-off!”
“We paid parking for THIS?”
Voices were raised. Louder and angrier.
It wasn’t long before this disbelief translated itself into violence. Beer bottles, empty glasses, chairs were hurled at the stage, knocking over, and handicapping, one of the yellow elephants. As we fled towards the exit, we closed the door behind us, letting the director be trapped outside for the angry masses to deal with.

Justice had come to us. Backstage, we realised our futures would be forever different. Career plans would have to be changed. As young as we were, we already learnt one of life’s most frustrating lessons, that the older you get, the more doors will close for you. None of us had expected the first door to shut itself quite so soon, or violently, but at least we knew what was in store for us.

The director? No idea what became of her, if she even survived the angry crowd’s punches that day. She never directed again, that we know, which is not that big a surprise after creating such an abomination. I once met one of my fellow ex-actors and she told me she had heard a theory. I don’t know if it is true, but she told me that one of our colleagues had hunted her down, made her dress up as a green elephant, before shooting her with a shotgun, cutting off the tusks, and burying her in the woods.

I just told her this: “There was no shotgun, only a machete…”

Note: one or two elements in this story from my past may have been slightly dramatised and/or fictionalised. The gist of it is all true though.

The year was 1885.
My ancestors were bathing in luxury, wealth and celery soup (for lack of champagne) because of the business they had set up. Hand crafted toilet paper rolls were soon replacing newspapers as the go-to accessory for any toilet visit. The ones that predicted this move were now reaping the benefits, convinced they had struck the faecal alternative to an oil well. And how right they were... Initially, at least...

The upper layers of society soon found their way to our family emporium and shelled out huge sums to feel the soft papery tenderness on their rosy butt cheeks. Following the logic of the best selling Everybody Poops, my ancestors rejoiced, thinking their and their family’s futures would be forever bright. They had mastered the skill of toilet roll rolling (or, in French: ‘Papier de Toilette Roulette’, which also became the name of the store my ancestors opened) and nobody’s talents would ever come close to the firm softness that so embodied our brand.

Almost 100 years after my family’s business was established and became hugely successful, I was spit out of my mother’s oven with a huge burden already resting on my drooling shoulders (well, it was mostly my mouth that was doing all the drooling, but I assure you it extended all the way to my shoulders!), the burden to carry on the family business. By then, it had become a burden, sure. My grandfather spent all his days lamenting the loss of the emporium that once was, mumbling about investments in Daguerrotypes, colonial slavery, DDT, Softenon, Betamax and perforated condoms, none of which ever reached the success the family had hoped for so that they could go back to the good old days of toilet paper roll wealth. Sure, money was still coming in from a varied group of toilet paper connoisseurs who preferred the real artisanal “shit” (pardon the pun) over the mechanised alternative, but that group was aging and soon, they too would go back to using nappies and baby wipes, the two technologies we never were able to fully master...

The kingdom was crumbling and Timmy turned out to be the chosen one to carry on the family business. Did I want to do it? Point a shotgun to my right testicle and I’d congratulate you on your aiming skills, but also I’d say ‘Yes, of course I wanted to do it!’ What choice did I have?

Now I did learn the trade and knowing what I know now, I can assure you you will never go back to machine rolled TP if you’ve tried our family recipe, a recipe that is even more secret than Coca-Cola’s. Without the right air to paper to bottom to bottom hair ratio, a wipe will just feel coarse and at times even vulgar and messy.

You can’t beat 130 years of progress.

At our current prices, it is true that a toilet roll produced by the “PdT Roulette” company will set you back about 39 euros, which we will admit is slightly above the machine TP average of 30 cents a roll. But how much is your well-being really worth? Can you settle for sandpaper when you could have silk paper? (Silk paper costs extra, just FYI) While it may take a skilled person 48 minutes to roll a TP roll to absolute perfection, firmness and air distribution, a machine will take about 10 seconds, but it will never attain the true sensation our rolls can offer.

Back in 1910, when poetry was still an Olympic discipline, my great-grandfather filled in all the application forms to make toilet paper roll rolling an official Olympic discipline. We would have gotten to the Olympics, were it not for the three week orgy my great-grandfather got entwined in that made him miss the application deadline.

“I will try again in four years,” he proclaimed, but by then he was out in the field of Western Flanders, attempting to teach his fellow soldiers in the trenches how to clean themselves properly (trying to sell them his own merchandise, of course).

The Famiglia was still bathing in wealth, regardless of the horrors of the unwiped trenches, but things would never be the same. Clients’ bums still needed cleansing, but it was then the great-grandfather’s traumas set in and this resulted in a great number of toilet paper rolls consisting of barbed wire and rotten flesh. Now, you may think that you, as a connoisseur of toilet paper rolls, might distinguish between a faulty roll and a true roll, but remember that our skills were so refined by then, that they all looked amazingly soft, even the ones with barbed wire in it.

When 1929 happened, the Famiglia retreated and stopped producing, firing its entire workforce of 95,450 slave labourers. Soon, there was a huge surge in haemorrhoids that caused huge protests in front of our closed down factories (fun fact: those factories neighboured branches of very big banks and journalists (and history) assumed they were protesting the banks). Those were good days, but they weren’t too last. Just when my grandfather tried to repost the Olympic application papers, some German tried to take over the world again and everything just repeated itself, though this time my grandfather was able to continue our business by selling to the Russians who had grown sick and tired of the sandpaper their military gave them.

June 6, 1944?
People thank the Americans, the Canadians, the Ozzies, but it was my grandfather who instigated all of this. With his Russian earnings, he bought a zeppelin and filled it with his own personally produced high quality toilet paper and helium and let it sail off to Britain. The legend goes that Churchill himself was handed one of my grandfather’s rolls, went to take one of his legendary “73-minute dumps” and came out of the bathroom rejoiced, determined, and damn well horny (this last one was only important to his wife, whom he hadn’t desired and/or seen in 8 years), and after that, he immediately ordered D-Day to happen.

July 21, 1969?
Would Neil Armstrong have set foot on the moon if it hadn’t been for a genuine “VDO” toilet paper? No, he would not. Buzz Aldrin would have been first if he hadn’t cared about his toilet paper supplier. He was still cleaning all of the shit from his space suit with his low quality paper, while Armstrong had made the right choice (Armstrong knew he’d shit himself being shot into space, so he came prepared).

Sadly, this was all before my time. I’m trying to take care of the company while it’s bent on inevitable self-destruction.
But still, all I’m trying to prove is that I was just forced to be a businessman. I never really wanted to be one.

All I wanted to do in life in dance and sing to the flowering blossoms of the trees and somehow get paid for that... Well, I might get back to you on that when my last customers go back to using nappies...

Meet Shirley-Anne, or Lorna, or Bernadette; yeah, she looks like a Bernadette.

Her friends call her Bernie, at least they do behind her back so she won't hear it. Truth is, she doesn't really like that nickname. When her goatee was beginning to appear, people started saying it for the first time. Embarrassed, Bernie waxed off that slightly tangled collection of fresh chin hairs with such brutal force, that it actually caused her body to respond by sprouting up a darker and more numbrous collection of goatee hairs. It was a fight that started a long time ago, but she is still in active battle; a poet may see it as a dance between the physical and the mind, but Bernie would probably tell that poet to shove his dance up his own arse (to which the poet would spend half an hour imagining how on earth a dance could end up in someone's bottom; and what would the rules be? How long must that dance be in order for it to be recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records? Questions that couldn't be answered: Wikipedia blamed Google for it and Google blamed Apple, who in turn pointed their fingers at Samsung, who then revealed it was actually all about a goat in the Himalayas, but I digress).

Nobody could have ever predicted Bernadette being a model for photos, not so much because she was a bit prissy when it came to showing her breasts in public (though this was mostly because she hadn't seen them since 1987; "it's always in the last place you look, Bernard," that's what I'd tell her before robbing her appartment clean and stealing her car and pet parakeet (food for the road)).
The agent who discovered her, a hairy Persian with a keen eye for talent (he called himself Billy, because he tries to make people believe he's Italian (nobody would dare mention to him that Billy isn't really an Italian name; you don't bite the hand that feeds you... no, sir! You lick it softly, guide it towards your genitals and let it take a short vacation in the area))), well he saw her walking on the street when she was having the flu. Or was she just acting? Her performance was so convincing, he stepped up to her and offered her a contract, gave her a bunch of promises on how, in a few years time, she could go from stock photo modelling to the real thing (by which he actually meant granny porn, but she mistook it to mean "Paris runway shows". Tomato, tomato: if you write that one down, it is even more the same!

Overwhelmed by her own physical success, Bernie didn't have to give it eons of thought to sign and enroll in the rock and roll lifestyle of kings and queens.

Personally, I think this is her best work. In the text that accompanies the image (a medical text), we read symptoms of people with common colds. Difficult to imagine, which is why I'm glad the pharma company paid off a photographer and a model.
Where Bernie really shines, is her ability to allow for multiple interpretations of the same image and that is why she is currently one of the most requested stock photo model.
Without the text, one might think she is giving a blowjob to a very narrow, but long penis, half-choking on its squirted out fluid (she only decided to do that to not have to look at its narrow freakishness - plus she really didn't want any in her hair). I am sure you can find that very same image on some rather "spoiled" part of the internet to mean exactly that, Bernie laughing all the way to the bank!
Or who's to say she not just about to play the dice and she's kissing them (hard, really hard) for good luck?
Or is that just her way of drinking from one of those airplane vodka bottles?
And is she married there and is she just about to vomit? Or cry?

These are all pertinent questions that only illustrate how good Bernie is at her job.

As you can see for yourself, it's only a matter of time before she will be able to enter the "big leagues".

Until then: Bernie, keep coughing that shit up and hiding that beard, sexy!

Current Mood: playing!

Dear reader,

When you read this in the year 2112, you are in all likelihood enslaved by a race of giant mutant locusts. For them, just this:

All hail our locust overlords!

When you read this, I will most likely have died during the Great Fire of Europe of 2046, that I started after setting fire to my arch nemesis, a giant locus.... I mean, a giant lizard! Phew! That was close... or wait, I’m already dead; why am I trying to save myself here? So yes, it was a giant locust that I torched, and I’d do it again any day of the week, provided I see a giant locust every day, it isn’t Monday and it isn’t raining that day, and maybe also not when it’s chilly out – I’ve already been a bit fluish lately, I guess the worst I could do in such a condition is go out and burn locusts – you can call me a maniac all you want, but I’m not insane!

I figured you might be interested in a few pointers as to how you can defeat your overlords. First of all, don’t revolt on a Monday. I did that once, and then I overslept, I forgot my explosives, so I ended up with an empty backpack at a parliament that had also overslept, which meant there was really nobody to blow up. To at least make an impression, I shouted BOOM! at the top of my voice to a group of tourists. Sadly, they were Japanese and had no idea what I was on about, because apparently explosions make different sounds in Japanese. Story of my life. You’d think the fifth of November would be a Monday, but it turns out that it wasn’t in 1605, but then you are forgetting that in more than 10 per cent of all years, the fifth of November DOES fall on a Monday.

As the old saying goes: “ ’t Was the Day of the Moon that killed the Loon!”

So don’t take any chances. The best time to revolt is on a hot summer Friday when the locusts that shackle you are out laying eggs in the sand and contemplating their pending weekend orgies, those sick fucks!

In my time, I at least had access to petrol to pour over them and then set ablaze with the mere touch of a button (because it was a button controlled lighter; I know striking a match stick may have been more cinematographic, but I really couldn’t risk a match refusing to light (when you eventually defeat the locusts and make my life into a film, be sure to use your artistic license and change it back to the match (the match with which I then light the cigarette of the seductive Bond girl that for some reason won’t stop following me, but who will then stop following me, because she too will fall victim to the flames (and who wants a Bond girl with third degree burns? Except for burns victims fetishists, that is...)). Of course I will perish in the resulting fire as well, but here too, might I ask you change the location of death? Instead of a public toilet where I was battling a severe cramp attack down there and punching a penis on my right that had pierced its way through a gloryhole I hadn’t noticed, maybe have me rescue a puppy and/or a child without legs from a burning building. Minor changes, really.

So what should you use instead of petrol because I used up all of that in my time? You know, some liquid that burns. Alcohol? Tomato soup? You figure it out! Do I look like friggin’ Allah? (I certainly hope not, for obvious reasons)

You know there really is no reason to start pointing fingers about the past. Did I fund the research to create a race of intelligent superlocusts with laser guns in their eyes? Does it really matter? No, what matters is that we can forget the past and move on. Maybe you should just accept your current situation. I mean, is building a giant locust pyramid out of human bones such a bad job? Have you ever worked at McDonald’s? I don’t think so. At least you get to keep some of your dignity (when one of your bones becomes part of a load bearing beam in the pyramid, but still).
Or revolt if you think you can be civilized about it THIS time. All those other times, it really didn’t work out, did it?

Hail to Ktrrkkrrrrr, Ruler of All!

Current Mood: exhumed

Yes, it distinguishes me from all those beings who do not possess It or refute the endless possibilities it has to offer. All I can offer them, either in consolation or in scorn, is just more words, infinite streams of closely bonded syllables to express the plenitude of my bladder (among other emotions).
It puts a roof over my head. By morphing words into other words, I am allowed to eat, not always equally healthy, though I feel we cannot put all blame on the Word for this. Laziness is a dish best served in under five minutes. *hears microwave sound*
Long ago, a client asked me, “could you deliver tomorrow, SOB?” Since the clock had not reached noon yet, my mental state could euphemistically be described as “gasping for breath”, so immediately I wondered why said client would call me a the son of a female dog. Did he know that I was actually raised in the forest, by a wild woolf along with five other woolf cubs? Only when I was 18, I came into contact with the outside world. This is why my language feels stilted and unnatural, since I spent my childhood chasing rabbits, urinating against trees and howling at the moon (such a stereotype, by the way; one day, one of my stepbrothers and I decided to stop howling at the moon, because we felt it was something people would expect from us, you know – and there we were, first full moon, not howling, and then BAM!, he stepped on a wolftrap; cut off his hind leg, so we all had to eat him... We continued howling after that...), all while you were learning your fancy grammar, la-di-dah!
As far as the translation world is concerned, it’s generally quite polite and very much dissimilar from any reality TV show one might compare it to, so of course the SOB had a much more innocent explanation. It would be a daunting task to make a reality show about translators...

VOICEOVER: Next on National Geographic... A brandnew series about the ancient art of bilinguality. It’s like bisexuality, only without all the sex! A rollercoaster ride of a TV show.... Explosions, drama, drugs, passion,... All words that can be translated!
In our first episode, we will follow Tim around.
‘Hi, my name’s Tim and as you can see I am now in my underwear, lying in my office, which is also a bed, and I am translating a text about a cream against haemorrhoids.’
VOICEOVER: “Will he make the deadline? Does an unexpected slowdown of his internet connection give him discomfort? Will he survive or does he still have some cheese in his fridge?”
“Oh, the deadline is tomorrow, SOB. So there’s plenty of time. The internet’s going fine now, but you really never know... Sometimes, I have to hold my computer like this to get a good signal. It’s just one of the dangers we face in our lives every day.”
VOICEOVER: “Will his mind sustain the excruciating torment of being tied down half-naked to his computer? Will a finger cramp prevent him from typing in the letter E? And what about his balls; won’t they be slowly microwaved by his laptop by the time he sends off his finished translation?”
*Explosion sound*
“You know, the best way to protect your balls against laptop radiation is ice, lots and lots of ice, applied in a washcloth on around the testes. Only downside is that when the ice melts, it may look like I’ve wet my bed, but usually that’s not the case...”

So where was I? Oh yes, the Word that is the bird!
We take them for granted, so much so that we often neglect them, which whirlpools into a pit of incoherence, madness, and ultimately, a whole lot of nonsense disguised as wit.

Current Mood: restless

“It’s easier to prove you are crazy than to prove you are sane.”

I finished reading Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test”, an entertaining journalistic introduction to the world of psychopaths and psychology. Subsequently, I immediately ordered a copy of the DSM IV manual for mental disorders (which, at 964 pages of dry descriptions, I’m sure won’t be such an entertaining read, but interesting reference material nonetheless). The DSM is a list of supposed mental disorders that was compiled by a group of American psychologists in an attempt to categorise any deviation from “normal behaviour”. Without a clear definition of what is normal, how can we go about labelling the abnormal? There is a sort of confession in the book from one of the authors of the DSM III manual, who said they were basically asking all the psychologists to come up with as many mental disorders as they could, argue in favour of them, and then include or exclude them based on a majority vote. It seems so... arbitrary... that the loudest voice gets to make the new entry. If that voice would also happen to have ties with a pharmaceutical company that happens to sell antidepressives or mood-altering drugs, then so be it, all for the greater good of making sure more and more people are considered abnormal. New mental disorders mean more opportunities for companies to sell their drugs.

The above quote comes from a man who faked being mentally ill to avoid getting out of a jail sentence. To his surprise, he was categorised as a psychopath, locked up in a mental facility for 14 years, and no matter what he did to prove his sanity, everything he undertook was seen as yet another example of his insanity. Is he friendly? He must be using Item 5 on the Hare PCL-R checklist for psychopathy: manipulative behaviour and Item 1: superficial charm. Is he being aloof/reclusive? Clearly an example of Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth and Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy.

Of course the journalist rightly wonders whether or not this man saying he’s not insane is maybe also just part of his manipulative nature, him being a diagnosed psychopath and all.

While I do not doubt the existence of psychopathy (since amygdala responses clearly differ), I’m sceptical about the general overclassification and the labelling obsession of having to call every type of action a mental disorder. Take frotteurism for instance, the disorder in which the “patient” rubs up his/her genitalia against a non-consenting person, usually in public spaces – now, I am no rocket scientist (which wouldn’t be helpful here anyway), but it seems like this “disorder” may have been invented by a psychiatrist who may have “suffered” from this himself and needed a good excuse to defend himself in court. My Dutch dialect has a better, almost onomatopoeic word for such a person, and it’s no disorder at all: “FRUSTRO!” (I don’t think this requires translation)

According to Bob Hare, the inventor of the infamous PCL-R psychopathy checklist, my resistance against these labels is based on my being a “very liberal, very left-wing intellectual”. Which I guess also shows the political kind of intellectual he is.

It also made me think about how lucky that guy I met in Australia was. He had been receiving government support for a number of years because he was deemed “mentally unfit” and had to reappear in front of a commission each year to be assessed. He told me he just faked some stories about hearing voices in his head and the money would keep on coming (Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle, Item 6: Lack of remorse, Item 4: Pathological lying, Item 5: Cunning/manipulative........ Damn, maybe he WAS insane!)

For all I know, it being pre-Facebook and all, he finally got his comeuppance and is now having to prove his sanity in a mental institution – morally, I couldn’t agree with this way of system cheating; maybe I’d be less categorical now, me and my loose morals!

I am not a psychopath (because I like cats and not dogs, because psychopaths prefer dogs, because they are slaves!), even though I may have some traits...

Timmy takes the PCL-R Psychopathy Test!

Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm? Hmmm... I like to think my charm isn’t superficial, but that one’s hard to judge for yourself, really.

Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth? “Grandiose” may not be how I would describe it.

Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom? Don’t we ALL have that?

Item 4: Pathological lying? Nah, I don’t think my lying is pathological. Or maybe that’s a pathological lie? Or maybe this is? AHHHHH!

Item 5: Cunning/manipulative? Don’t we all try to shape our world so that it suits us just slightly better?

Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt? That’s a tough one, because as someone who doesn’t like dwelling on the past and rather looks ahead with a positive spirit, I do feel remorse/guilt aren’t very useful emotions. I guess I have them though.

Item 7: Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)? Nah, I have long emotions, long and hard ones!

Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy? Not true in general, though I guess it depends on whether or not the victim was worth showing empathy for (again a trait we may all possess sometimes)

Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle? Definitely not, I have never ever found myself living inside another person’s body to survive. Sure, penetrative, but that’s only... what would you call it, mister Hare?.... “short-lived and egocentric”?

Item 10: Poor behavioural control? No, I hold my joystick pretty well.

Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behaviour? Of course not! May da Good Lord strike me down if I’m lyin’ pathologically here!

Item 12: Lack of realistic long-term goals? Oops... well, actually no, because I do consider my long-term goal of becoming Emperor of Europe realistic! GHA!

Item 13: Early behaviour problems? No, I don’t get up until noon, so you really won’t see any behavioural problems with me early in the day.

Item 14: Impulsivity? That’s not always a bad thing though, is it? I’m generally not that impulsive, but if I’d have to save a kitty from dying under a falling washing machine, I’d make an impulsive decision to think about whether or not it would be worth doing and calculate as to how attainable the rescue would really be. *SPLAT!*

Item 15: Irresponsibility? No, only when the big fiery ball returns to us and I have yet to seek my way into my bed, inebriated but content.

Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions? Yes! No! Maybe! I don’t know! I blame someone else for not knowing!

Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships? I don’t think so.

Item 18: Juvenile delinquency? Hahahahaha, look at me as a “juvenile” and you have your answer!

Item 19: Revocation of conditional release? I said NO! What part of NO don’t you understand, mister Hare? I have a good mind to pick up the nearest blunt object and come mutilate you to death (and the nearest blunt object is.... *rumbling*.... a pillow!)

Item 20: Criminal versatility? Absolutely. I could say I have been a fraudster, I have been arrested for alleged theft (untrue) and drunkenness (also untrue! Not a pathological lie, how dare you!?). And occasionally, I drive a bit over the speed limit.

So Mr. Hare, did Timmy do well?

Current Mood: sceptical

Ik zag een heel mooie Zweedse versie van Angels in America. De tranen in mijn ogen waren niet zozeer door het meeleven met de halffictieve personages die werden gepresenteerd. Ja, natuurlijk maakte het er deel van uit. Zo’n mooie jongens die veel te jong de wereld verlieten, dat mag niet en daarom mag men tranen.

Maar ik besefte iets... Was ik twintig jaar eerder geboren, had ik waarschijnlijk een vergelijkbaar kort leven gehad zoals de “pioniers”, niet alleen de New Yorkse, maar zelfs de preutse Zweedse en Belgische, want toen ik hun leeftijd had, was ik ook minder beroerd om ziektes en zou ik misschien even bereid zijn geweest om het ‘onveilig’ te doen, zeker voor een ziekte die niet eens bestond.

Onveroorloofd.

Slechte seksuele opvoeding.

Moet je besluiten.

Mijn HIV-awareness is er pas gekomen toen het al veel te laat zou kunnen zijn geweest, zeker als ik mijn eigen experimentatiefase beschouw.

En dan hebben we het niet over de Zweedjes in de jaren ’80 die het écht niet konden weten. Nee, misschien behoorde ik wel tot de laatste generatie die het echt niet kon weten (pré-internet).

Nu adverteren jonge jongens op obscure plaatsen dat ze je “gratis en voor niks” kunnen besmetten. Dan denk ik: ‘Jongen, sluit je ogen en klim op het eeuwige vuur dat ons bindt. Er is niets anders dan dat. Laat mij voor jou tranen laten zodat je zelf kan zweven naar de troposfeer en we niets anders kunnen horen behalve het zachte gezang waarmee je ons zou kunnen verblijden.

Het is niet je verleden dat je bepaalt, het is je toekomst.

Maar nu moet je verdwijnen in de dampkring, opgaan in het eeuwige niets, wetende dat we allemaal van je houden, tenzij je het eens bent dat je niemand meer ziek wilt maken... Pas dan hebben een ander verhaal.’

Het is uiteindelijk maar twee keer gebeurd (2001 en 2004) dat ik echt onveilig was, maar eens het verstand het gebeurde achterhaalt, maak je je zorgen over hoe dom je ooit geweest bent en hoe dom je misschien ooit zal zijn.

Eens een idioot, altijd een idioot? Nee, dat denk ik niet.

In België hebben we ongetwijfeld iets vergelijkbaars gehad in de jaren ’80 zoals in Stockholm. Een ‘homocirkel’ in een centraal station, een verdoken ‘casa rosa’, geen idee. En het feit dat ik daar geen idee over heb, is misschien ook wel een beetje erg, want misschien zou ik het moeten weten...

Waar zou de liefde van mijn leven, NIMFJE!, waar zou jij zijn beland in die rare jaren ‘80?

In ‘Angels in America’ heb je Prior en Louis....

In ‘Droog nooit traantjes zonder handschoenen’ heb je Rasmus en Benjamin.

De eerste wordt ziek, de tweede niet.

Zo zouden wij zijn, ik de zieke, jij niet; Denk ik, al kan dat in zo’n tijd van onwetendheid ook omgekeerd zijn.

Ik denk aan de elektroshocks die mijn tante heeft moeten ondergaan omdat ze zei dat ze lesbisch was.

Elektroshocks?

De jaren ’80 in België zijn eigenlijk voor ons vergelijkbaar met die van de Zweedjes, ook al is mijn oom zo gekant tegen hun bestaan. (de Zweedjes, niet de jaren 80 :-)).

Waar zouden wij beland zijn? Twintig jaar eerder? Samen? Ik kan het alleen maar hopen, denken, verlangen en bedromen.....

Misschien zou er niets gebeurd zijn, zouden we gewoon samengeleefd hebben, omdat we dat net zo goed kunnen.

Zonder verantwoording.

Een Zweedse tv-serie die me eraan herinnert hoeveel ik hou van mijn eigen lief.

Ik wou de traantjes voor jou bewaren.

Timmy The Hero majestically sat down today (in his sofa, no less!) to watch a film (Angry Shadows) in which its protagonist had slept for 200 years and when waking up, gave us the tired old clichés of being amazed at the wonders of the day.
At this point, you may already guess that I was yawning, though I will admit I may have burped a bit as well, a bodily exclamation for which I had nobody to whom I could apologise in my vicinity, which was probably a good thing.
Let's say I was a caveman being frozen in a glacier (just my luck, with my pants down on my ankles! - or wait? Would I even be wearing pants? hmmm...), I'm not convinced my reactions after being unfrozen would be as stereotypical as they always show. Well, I'd probably destroy a TV set too and call it witchcraft, but that's what I'd be doing now anyway if I wouldn't have to pay for the damage caused.

Timmy The Caveman slowly felt life returning to his body. The ice around him was melting rapidly, with the earth's heat soaring and all glaciers retreating out of fear. For the first time in thousands of years, Timmy felt a tingling sensation making its way from his head to his toes, Sleeping Beauty awaiting from her sleep, only with less breasts, vaginas and with more muscle, body hair and forehead. The last layer of ice disappeared and Timmy was now freed from his seemingly ceaseless night.
He quickly thought of his tribe and how she should find them. But where to look? He didn't even know how long the Ice Monster had held him in its grip (probably the last goat he sacrificed to the Ice Monster was no virgin as the gods prescribe - Timmy immediately suspected Brutus The Goatfudger of deceitful behaviour)...

Hmm... I haven't even gotten around to meeting the first human or seeing a car and, actually, I think I *would* respond the same as those clichés, now that I envisioned waking up after thousands of years after having been frozen because a neighbour raped the goat I sacrificed to the ice monster... My mistake!

Still, if we were to get frozen now and wake up in a few thousand years, we probably wouldn't be able to experience the sense of wonderment (and fear) those olden day time travellers had. I think we're actually more likely to get disappointed by what we're *not* seeing in the future. While it is extremely likely that we'd wake up in a complete wasteland ('Oh yeah, that's right, we fucked everything up in our time!'), suppose it's not and we wouldn't see flying cars, intelligent robots with the capacity to feel love (robotic sex dolls, basically - though I'm sure many people would be disappointed, not including myself of course!), eating pancakes on the moon, etcetera... In that sense, I am thinking it would be better to awaken in a post-apolcalyptic mess than in a not-so-special future. At least it would justify the err... smugness with which us environmentalists have been proclaiming how the world would end if we continue our ways.

I'm not volunteering to be frozen, by the way, I really don't want to upset the Ice Monster again...

'How to chisel your way into history?' is a question each and everyone of us may have asked themselves at some point in our lives.
An Austrian named Felix flew up to space with his giant weather balloon (I think the iphone beat him to it, though? http://youtu.be/wtXquYhY7wo ), thus erasing yet another option from the ever growing list of achievements I won't be able to attain. Not that I would have ever thought of forcing my way into history by going up and subsequently going down. The cynic in me would say it's slightly futile (entertaining, sure, but most entertaining things are futile, like other YouTube videos of cats bumping into walls) and doesn't really prove anything, except for the fact that gravity can get really angry if you try to escape it. It'll yank you through the sound barrier if it has to!
Perhaps accomplishing something basically anyone could do, is not ideal. Well, I did fail to try and become the world's fastest man by beating Usain Bolt at the 100-metre dash with a time of 4:11 seconds (after which I would probably be stripped of my title after they find the huge amount of EPO, steroids, speed and amfetamines I took to get to that record time - still, history is history, who cares if history considers you a good one or a bad one? Just ask Lance Armstrong, though I think you may not get a reply from him).
Still, to force yourself into history with something for which you require a certain talent is no walk in the park either. I don't see myself finding a cure for cancer ('it's always in the last place you look!') or come up with a recipe for an experimental tomato soup.
In light of the universe, it doesn't really matter of course. In the end, we all end up like John Keats epitaph 'Here Lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water'. Like urinating your name in the snow, only more elegantly.
Still, I think the most realistic option for me to crowbar my way into History is by becoming Emperor and Enlightened Leader of Europe. At least for that, I have a concrete plan already!

The atoms in my body aren’t worried. Why should they be? They will be around, no matter what configuration they are pushed in. If I would accidently cut off my head when having breakfast (‘slice bread, not head, Timmy!’), they would all be standing in line to take molecular buses that would drive them out of me. Some would volunteer to be eaten by maggots (freaky fetishists!), others would happily let fire take them on a carbon dioxide journey to witness first-hand what all that global warming fuss is about (and exacerbating the problem for us, but not for them). Which of course means that molecules too couldn’t give a rat’s arse where they live, no matter how much you tell them you adore them, stroke them or even fondle them every day. The moment they can leave you to be something else, they will abandon you, time and time again. Ungrateful children who deserve a billion spankings, that’s what they are.

Since there is a finite number of atoms in the universe, hugely obese people, having more fat, more cells, more atoms, are actually marginally slightly bigger shareholders in the universe.

Perhaps I should consider obesity to increase my atomic power. Then everyone with less mass than me will automatically be my bitch. It is simple math, really.

Or maybe not...

Some days pass by like you're sitting in the backseat of a slowly moving car, listlessly staring and ignoring the 24 hour monotonous scenery you're not seeing.
And then you crash and all your senses immediately fire up and testorene is shot up from the testes to the brain to fuse with adrenaline, which then gets hurled across your shaking body, thoughts and ideas overtaking a speeding train, causing it to derail so it an find a black hole to disappear into.
Nobody's in the driver's seat; you were all alone in the now mangled car. Perhaps it was one of those Google cars that was in a cranky mood and it decided to crash. Fair's fair, if we relinquish our control of things, it shouldn't be a surprise that it'd come back to slap you in the face with a 404 error.
The whole car crash doesn't kill you, it only sets fire to the surrounding forest. You could try to pee on the fire to extinguish, but you only just filled up your nappy, so you quickly realise it's much better to stand in admiration and register every little detail. You walk around, laughing with the fire, collecting the flames and eating them up one by one.
In the excitement, you become convinced you cannot step back into the already repaired car prison.
You slash its tires.
You smash its windshield.
You spew out some of the flames into the opened petrol tank.

You run away to wait for the explosion.
You're not sure it it will actually come.

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Dr. Jekyll and a naked Timmy

Clothing naked Holly

The Invention of the Gloryhole

-.. . -.-. --- -.. . -.. / -- . ... ... .- --. . / ..-. .-. --- -- / - .... . / ... ..- -... -.-. --

Hypochondriacs on Speed (and Google)

On Licking a Pole

Bananas and Rapists

The One Where I Burp Stoically and Ponder Stupidity and the Universe

Lunar Insults

On Skin Shedding

The Tale of Fritz and his Hamster Tommy

The Conscious World & an Uninvited Visitor

On Moles Licking Bathroom Floors

The Wilted Flower

Meandering Streams Reuniting

The Interconnected Slut - A Heroic Attempt at Emotions for Machinery

Tales of a Hairy Madman - Episode 3922

Confessions of a Secret Space Traveller...

Timmy VS The Floor - Round 1, FIGHT!

Explosive! Kill! Plan! Allah! Kaboom! Virgins! Virgins! More virgins!

Jiggling my Junk

Oh, Sanity!

Life in Plastic, it’s Fantastic?

Not as Innocent as they seem...

Rewriting History: Why Timmy Never Became Jean-Claude Van Damme

Historia de la Famiglia (or whatever!)

Communicating with a Stock Photo - story of my life

’t Was the Day of the Moon that killed the Loon!

The Word is Holy, spake the clown

Timmy The Psychopath?

Droog geen tranen zonder handschoenen... (“Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar...”)

On time travelling to the present and future...

What goes up...

Atomic pondering

Scenic visions

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