I have been forcing myself to write something tonight to only end up writing this about not being able to write, even though then, my statement is false, since I am writing now.
It’s like the riddle ‘what gets wetter as it dries?’ *
But then again it also isn’t really like that, because the content of what is said is ultimately irrelevant.
I could be writing about how I fell from the sky without a parachute, landed on both feet (it’s all in the landing), right in the middle of an ongoing orgy, but none of it would not really be happening.
Anyone who writes is a masochist by definition, some in the more literal sense than others (though I will leave it to your imagination to decide how literal it would be in my case).
I am focussing my thoughts on a bigger piece of writing these days, that’s true, though it is mostly in my head.
If I have my lapped top on top of me, distractions are easily within reach. Then research quickly turns into a video on youtube of a cat falling over (this is of course an overdramatized statement – I have never watched a cat video online, may Da Lord strike me down right now if I am lying *looks up with a hint of religious fear* because of course I watched some: I even made a cat video myself one time – to date, it remains my most succesful work of art, which I guess is understandable, since its message is more accessible to the majority of internet surfers who need a break from all the porn (there’s only so much onanism one can do in a day...). The critique on society is perhaps more palpable than with any other piece of art ever made in the history of the world. I bet if Assad and other despots would spend a bit more time watching cat videos, they might realise the error of their ways and hand out free ice cream to make up for it.

My hands are shackled to my keyboard. Carpale and his Tunnel Syndrome are tempted to make their way into my fingers. But fingers refuse it, like they refuse to be soaked in water for longer than ten seconds (whenever I am taking a bath, the tips of my finger I always keep above the water – wouldn’t want to drown and/or to get wrinkly skin). Like an escapologist, we try to struggle our way to freedom. Unlike the escapologist, however, it won’t be with a key that lies hidden in his lower intestine (I know this because I used to date an escapologist – or maybe the boy just had issues, it’s hard to be sure of these things), it will be by beating the board of keys underneath our fingers. Sometimes I think it would just be easier to go fetch a key down “there”, but I can’t be arsed (pun definitely intended) to go along with it. Sometimes the hard way out can also be the easy way out.

And we ride along on our imaginary horses with our imaginary friend in an imaginary wilderness of balloons and flying monkeys. There is no alternative but to ride that horse downstream, because that way we reach the end of the world (not the end as in “destruction”, but the literal end of this flat surface of land). We never asked for reasons any more, we stopped doing that a long time ago.

Reasons are SO 2004 anyway. Best nobody should bother with them for as long as we all may live.

This text does not exist.



* = A towel!

Wonderful news from the world of physics today. It turns out that CERN scientists may have found something that resembles the Higgs Boson particle they were looking for.
I'm not being modest when I say that I can take some, if not most, of the credit for this discovery.
'Why?' you ask.
Well, simple really: last year, I spoke the following prophetic words,
'Somebody should find that thing!'
And less than a year later, my vision came to life. Today was an emotional day, you can imagine.

But how to explain Higgs and his Boson to the layman, i.e. You? After all, we don't all carry triple PhDs in Physics like yours truly (I bought mine online after a strenuous 12 minute oral exam on star signs; best €50.000 I ever spent).

As I am now also trained to be a teacher, I will provide you with two explanations, each suited to a different audience of mine...

1) Higgs Boson for animal lovers:
OK, so imagine that all the particles in the universe are hippopotami. When the universe was created, all hippopotami were blown into space, drifting further and further apart. But of course hippopotami must eat. That is why they stay in their field, the Higgs Boson field, that drags them towards it with promises of fresh & tasty puppies (or whatever hippopotami eat), creating a sort of drag on their expansion. Because hippopotami are so ravenous whenever they see a puppy, no physicist has ever been able to actually observe one. That is why the laboratory at CERN has been firing the hippopotami at each other at almost the speed of light (which confuses the hippopotami's biological clock, causing them to not devour their puppies as fast as they usually do). Now when these hippopotami collide with each other, it is obvious that it is a messy affair. Because of the speed, Higgs Boson gets confused and reveals one of his tasty little puppies, for just a split second, before the puppy is split in two and becomes an unrecognisable purée of organs and puppy juices. So what the scientists now did, was observe the puppy, right before it got mangled.


2) Higgs Boson for lovers of JG Ballard's ground-breaking novel (and rather mediocre film adaptation) Crash:
Imagine the Large Hadron collider as the ultimate destruction derby tournament. If you've read the book, or the Wikipedia summary (make an effort, will you? The book is short!), you'll know that it is about people getting off on crashing cars. So in this scenario, it would make a lot of sense to replace the particles with big Volvos driven by naked Brazilian car crash lovers. What do we know about naked Brazilian car crash lovers?
1) They most likely have herpes;
2) They speak Portuguese, unless they are native rainforest people, in which case they shouldn't be driving that car anyway;
3) They climax when their cars crash.
Point 3) is what interest us physicists in this case, because the event of a climax of one of these Brazilian race car drivers has never been witnessed by the naked eye. This meant that we built this huge billion euro tunnel to investigate whether or not Brazilians could actually climax at all. The answer, as it turns out, is: "Yes, but only very briefly and inobservable to the naked eye."


To conclude, I wish to thank CERN for believing in me and not giving up on what I told them to do. I will gladly continue taking credit for any new discovery they might find. Next time, they should invite me to their after party, however (I hear those physicists have the best orgies!). 

And now I boldly go... um.... where... um... whatever, I don't like Star Trek anyway...

It may have been one of the first times since I have been in Berlin that I took a ‘commuter train’, i.e. a train that people take going to or coming from their place of work.

I had just dandled my way to the Belgian embassy (which is difficult, if you bother to look up the definition of ‘to dandle’) where I finally tried to register myself as an expat (of course, I didn’t succeed in registering, because I had hundreds of documents with me proving my German residence, but not the one that they required). They were reallly nice there, though – talked to a lovely lady who would invite me for receptions at the embassy and was keen to know more about what I did (reminds me about that time in Sweden where we were invited at the embassy for dinner, just because the ambassador had a free night on his schedule (which I guess must happen a lot, since I don’t imagine there to be many diplomatic conflicts going on between Belgium and Sweden... or Germany for that matter)).

The linguist in me couldn’t let go of the fact that the plaque of the Belgian embassy that they recovered from the rubble from the Second World War translated ‘embassy’ as ‘boodschap’ (or ‘message’ – ‘Belgian Message’) as per the German ‘belgische Botschaft’. Nowadays, ‘boodschap’ is either used as an errand one has to run or colloquial as a bowel or bladder movement (large or small ‘message’), which made me imagine what a ‘Belgian Message’ would look like. The plaque was really nice; it had bullet holes and everything!

Anyway, on my way back (after a stop-over at the film development factory (or ‘shop’)) I found myself on an S-bahn train filled with commuters. It occurred to me that it was that time of day when ‘regular’ people get off of work. This meant full trains and standing up, something I’m not accustomed to, probably due to my irregular train usage hours.

An older woman resting on a cane stood at my stop where I had to get on. Stumbling on the train, she scanned the seats for any empty ones, but all seats were filled and everyone looked away and those that did spot her quickly looked away too. After two stops, when several people left seats that were quickly taken by younger and fitter people than her (she tried to take them, but was of course too slow), it dawned on me that she would not get a seat from anyone on this train. People coming from work in this particular competitive society have a sense of entitlement that I don’t share with them. It really annoyed me I couldn’t find the right German words to just ask that bunch of people if any of them would like to help an old lady, but I couldn’t just let it go, since it was annoying me so, so much.

Another seat came free and I jumped in front of two people who tried to fill it (and who did notice her struggling, I’m sure of that), so that she could sit there. I had to guide her, since she didn’t really believe me at first. Confused, but incredibly grateful, she rested herself and I did the same to my mind.

Why did I never join the boy scouts?

I like my current smartphonelessness (patent pending on that word).
Someone in Barcelona did me a favour.

Some might say he half-molested me in order to take a piece of what was once my property and make it his own (I'm fairly sure it was a boy, not being sexist, just realistic).

Half-molested?

Well... I guess it depends on how you look at it. To take something from one's back pocket down a pair of extremely tight-fitting trousers, you can't really call it molestation, maybe not even half-molestation, because you know, then they would have at least done something.
In my mind, at the time, I was just considering an all-too-eager admirer with too much confidence. I remember a brief sensation, or maybe I imagine remembering it to make me feel better, but anyhow, split seconds where I thought my bottom was fondled, which had me arrogantly looking at someone without a face, who was probably already running away.

I could have gotten the phone blocked. But why bother? A thief needs to survive. We let our bankers steal our money and we'll happily pay for their mistakes. I guess it's only fair I support the thieves that actually take personal risks. Maybe I won't shout this last sentence out loud; won't want to seem like too easy a target.

I knew and know from experience that thievery is omnipresent among the Spanish; some people brush their teeth, others steal, that's how the world works. But since I know, I will admit that these are transactions that take place with mutual consent so I can happily give them forgiveness. Spanishness is a birth defect, nothing less (to my Spanish friends reading this; know that I am just an outside observer and that you are an exception to any rule mentioned here).

The day after, we thought we had found the culprit. A midget, a gay one, wanted to seduce me. I was struck by his candour, his spirit, to go for the Tallest guy in the whole of Barcelona. 

DRAMATISATION:


I wanted to explain to him that that's not the way you balance the universe. If that were the case, giraffes would be wooing ants and short stories would marry the Bible. 
Of course I did not have the Spanish vocab for all of this. Sure, I can talk sexy-talk in Spanish, but I can do that in any language known to mankind, as long as words aren't a necessity. Everyone is blessed with a number of talents, I guess. *Coughs*. 
I remembered the couple of pimps and fat prostitutes that tried to "tempt" me into patronage the night before. With the incredibly seductive "OYE!" (pronounced "OY!AY!") a number of fat prostitutes tried to get my attention. I tried to play deaf, but that was a risky strategy, because for all I knew were Barcelona whores sign language teachers in their spare time. And in a fight with them, they'd have won, I have no shame to admit that. 
But no, I had survived the fat prostitutes and their pimps following me for ten minutes. The midget wanted my attention. 
Being small of stature, the boy (I want to say "man", really, but can't) probably thought that my first minutes of ignoring his gazes and winks were due to his invisibility. So he upped the ante and took out his best material. 

What followed was a a visual display of obscenities and vulgarisms that I will not burden my innocent readers with. He turned bitter because there was no reciprocity. In his view, I guess both of us were freaks in this country of In-Betweeners.
It may be the last time that a midget goes after my affections, but I guess we all must make choices in life...
Mine was to not get raped by a midget, plain and simple. 

But was he my thief? He could have easily used his voluminous teeth to grab hold of my mobile in my back pocket, but using trusty old Pythagoras, I calculated that even on high heels, he would not have been tall enough to reach my back pocket. 
And no, my bottom isn't that high, the midget was just that small...

Last week I spent a few hours browsing through all the crap photos and videos I took when I first had the ability to take crap photos and videos. I found that the videos had one constant: I liked to record myself singing & I had no idea what to do with a video functionality. 

Because, in that day and age - you kids may be surprised - people didn't really record any videos with anything. Sure, there were fancy & expensive VHS camera recorders, but the leap to Digital had not really been established, we just played Snake on our Nokia 3310s. Recording videos was just completely useless, nobody did it, because there was never a reason to...
There was no YouTube where you could display yourself to the world and Facebook was just the wet dream of a couple of rowing twins who fantasised about getting screwed over by a geek with an erection. 

All of these videos were taken with a Konica-Minolta A800, an 8 Megapixel powerhouse that I bought in Australia for 800 Ozzie Dollars to replace my 2.1 Megapixel Hewlett-Packard camera that I had been carrying around since 2001 (it reached all the way up to ISO 200 in light sensitivity and you could print up to A5 with it, and this is really all you need!), but since I had dropped it one too many times, I could only operate it while firmly pressing the battery lid.

I showed the below video to Erik first, because I wanted to see how it made him feel, and his response went far beyond what I could have expected, and it just made me want to be with him so badly (no, he didn't want to sign me up as a singer! He doesn't even like my singing!). I just wasn't sure if my intentions were clear. I wanted to include the cat jump, a link to him - a view of the future, because that's the only thing not from that period, the 'Before-Time' - it's like a vision of things to come. 

It showed him the Timmy he met for the first time. All Kurt-Cobain-y and sideburned and messy. All of this, except the cat, was recorded before I met him. 

I will admit there is some embarrasment in showing this, but on the other hand, there is also some personal history involved.
Take for instance the very grainy video with me dancing open-blue-shirted in a dreary room: that was taken just hours before the Thai police decided to arrest & molest & harass me.
There were geckos all over that room, my neighbours even smiled at seeing a gecko with a very long neck, which turned out to be a snake, which didn't give them a very comfortable night. That was also the same day I almost drove over a king cobra that attacked me while driving past it (because I was on a scooter and I panicked and accelerated instead of braked, okay!? The thing covered the 3 metre road when I saw it, anyone would accelerate! :-) ). 

In case anyone would be wondering.... Have I stopped recording myself singing & dancing? The short answer is, no, I haven't. Maybe I'll show these in 5-7 years... Now all I need is some policemen to arrest me, a snake to attack me (I saw a centipede today! Almost there, just cut of a few more legs!), and a song to seduce me....

It doesn't even feel like it was me, but it frees up a lot of hard drive space reducing the past to this, which is ultimately what Memory itself does... 

Choosing to live in a place that is virtually empty is both nice and excruciating.
Nice because I could make a nice wardrobe for myself to hang my too many clothes in. Nice because you can keep an empty space empty.

Excruciating, because I have to care about what I want my kitchen to look like.

My initial response "Like a Kitchen?" failed to convince the jury, so they sent me to Hell. Well, "Hell" is just another four letter word to describe that other four letter word IKEA. If by some miraculous mistake, all intelligent people in the world were wrong and there would be a God, then my personal Hell would be eternity in IKEA.
I dreaded going, postponed it with a phoney excuse of being impotent and/or incontinent, but in the end, I decided I may want something else than doing dishes in my bath tub and eat toasted bread all the time (I don't really, but the World wants me to want that, I swear!).

I remembered my last visit at IKEA in Belgium and it was exactly the same the first time I went here in Berlin, now about four weeks ago. As soon as I entered, I immediately forgot what I had come in for. I started getting irritated by the whole concept of interior design (I am quite sure this is why I wanted to make my own wardrobe for instance - I had no intent of giving some dead Swedish billionaire my money for a wardrobe that wasn't what I had in mind - but at least, for my wardrobe, I had something in mind). To me, a kitchen is a kitchen is a kitchen... is a kitchen. If it has a sink and a stove and maybe a fridge (oh the luxury!), I'm a happy camper. I don't care what it looks like, I don't care about having my tap signed by the Chinese child labourer who is forced to act as the representative of some Italian designer, so I won't spend more than the minimum amount on those things.

So again, the first time I came home with nothing, apart from a 99 cent toilet brush and some hate for mankind (that would change into love again soon, but still). But I had to return, I had to go back, I knew that if I wanted to spend as little time as possible caring about this, I'd have to go back.

And there I am having to choose. I stand there looking at taps. I feel like I have to fart a bit. I scratch my bum until the gas gently releases itself into the store ventilation system. I try to find a reason to care. In the end, I go for functional and cheapest. But it turns out that that one just "happens to be out of stock", but we have this one that's only 30 euros more expensive than the other one. Is 30 euros extra worth not having to come back here? YES IT IS, I scream and immediately show a nipple to underline this. Am I cheap? When it comes to this, I am, yes.
But the point is, I really don't care. I am a practical person, if something I don't care about is "acceptable", I will go for it - I won't make love to it, but I hardly feel that's necessary for a piece of furniture. Suddenly, I found myself having to care about all of these things and I just wanted to weep. Maybe "wanting to weep" is a bit soft, I found myself "wanting to burn down that IKEA after having locked everyone inside", yeah, that's more like it. But of course I didn't do that, mostly because I didn't carry any matches.
I try to imagine the world of design, people wanting to die for some oddly shaped chair that isn't even comfortable. That's probably even worse than IKEA, because the shit isn't only on display, as it is in IKEA, it's also coming out of people's mouths. And I couldn't possibly be held responsible for the smashing of those mouths if I would be in their presence.

So...
Only today, three weeks after I bought the damn sink, I got my tap installed and connected and working. Of course, I had chosen a sink without a hole for a tap, but they don't tell that at IKEA, they make you come home home, realise that there is no hole and then having to find out that they actually sell a tool for making said hole. Immediately, I felt the urge to go and damage a hundred of their horrible mass-produced photos of city landscapes, each one more stereotypically bland than the next. This is not a crime, it's constructive vandalism at best, at least the mass produced photos have something unique about them now. Besides, they want to force people to buy their extra tool anyway, anyone who had to come back for this (even though he bought the more expensive tap specifically NOT to come back!) would think about making them pay.

Making the hole in the sink involved some unpleasant drilling (I guess this is a pleonasm (though I assume Erik might disagree with that *VERY dirty laugh*)). I hate the sound of a drill. I tried it for a few seconds on the sink last week and it just annoyed me so much, that now I got myself some earplugs before I decided to try it again. Once I was "in there" however, I enjoyed watching the aluminium/inox top flame up and melting from friction, misshaping the drill piece as well, but in a beautiful coming together of melting metal and violent fire. I do like welding more than drilling, but, without the sound, it would have been the same. The power of welding is more subtle and mystical.

Because of having to make decisions about things I don't care about, I also postponed decisions I do care about, like where I'd put my darkroom. First it was my laundry room, then it was part of my studio (but that would be a shame), now it's part of the staircase and that's where it's going to stay.

Still, gradually things are looking like a Timmy-Boy lives here. Chaotic, functional, private, but pleasant.

One thing I love about Germany is their gigantic DIY stores (gigantic compared to Belgian standards). I guess I like raw matter more....

If I were a Greek man, I would probably be unemployed and angry at the debts some old people are making me pay back for the rest of my life too. I'd be on the streets, shouting slogans to unite the people to reject the EU/IMF plan that will sell out my whole nation and burden regular people with decades of debt. Maybe I wouldn't set fire to buildings, or show my manboobs to policemen (because that's what I would have as a Greek), but I'd be pissed off too, I'm sure.

I'd also have a very hairy chest if I were a Greek man. Probably even worse, I wouldn't have money to buy a can of shaving cream every day to get rid of all that hair (and, seriously, I'm not butch enough to wax that all off). 

A Greek opposition leader called to unilaterally reject the EU, go out of the EU, take over all the country's wealth and spread it evenly and fairly. As the first riots popped up in earlier years, I probably would have agreed to have her or him (I wasn't sure if the name was a boy name or a girl name, hence the sexlessness - I only studied Ancient Greek and her/his name wasn't popular two thousand years ago) institutionalized, because that was the general sentiment our media put up of the Greek protesters.  

I just looked at my bare chest and tried to imagine it full of that thick black Greek hair, and also with that olive skin. Still, I guess being a 'bear' in a country that invented man-boy love shouldn't be all that bad. I could be poor and starving as a Greek man, at least my local Erik (who would be called Erikostomopoulos undoubtedly) would be equally hairy, so it would never really be an issue, or maybe he would be too young to have hair on his chest... no, wait, that's probably an illegal thought, because I can imagine babies being born with mustaches there... I'll go for a hairy Erikostomopoulos then.

So the neoliberal machine now seems bent on privatizing all of Greece (Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" at work - after a crisis, the neoliberals come in action to take over a nation), ready to milk its people dry.

And as a proud and hairy Greek, I'd watch over my nation and sing the Greek national anthem that goes something like this: "alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, èta, tèta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, ksi, omicron, pi, ro, sigma, tau, ypsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega!" (that's their anthem, right, their alphabet? Yay, I still know it :-)). 

I'm glad they can vote in April, I'll be rooting for an "Icelandic" result, regardless of the consequences (it'll come our way anyway).

It feels odd to write this down, but who else would write an In Memoriam for him?

The backstory: Erik had his big move yesterday from Gent to Brussels, moving from our cosy apartment to his very own place in Brussels. I’d given him everything he needed to have the landlord sign for the water and electricity paperwork so we could settle everything well.

It’s not an In Memoriam for the apartment, if that’s what you’re thinking.

Erik asked our landlord if he’d be home yesterday evening to sign everything and hand over the keys. So after having closed our apartment door for the very last time, he went down to knock on our landlord’s door to sign the final papers.

He gave no reply, which was annoying. So Erik tried calling him, heard the mobile phone ringing in his apartment, remaining unanswered.

Our friendly downstairs neighbours agreed to let our landlord sign them for us and that would be that...

This morning, Erik texted me that the man had apparently hung himself yesterday, quite probably during the whole move.

It was quite clear that he hadn’t been happy, maybe ever, having always been on weed or other drugs.

It’s sad. The few people I know who actually have enough money have always been the most unhappy. Our landlord raked in about 4000€ a month from rent from his tenants plus everything he made from having the peepshow and the sex cinema where Gent’s horny older men went to get their daily wanks.

I cannot say that I was extremely surprised (I actually remember telling Erik that I might see our landlord committing suicide one day). It comes with the lifestyle of having a porno empire where you employ a squad of raunchy looking Eastern European women with cross-eyed breasts with the only intent of emptying the pockets of a bunch of sad old (and probably married) men. At least he had a succesful business plan. He provided a service to those people who maybe didn't want to cheat on their wives, so they'd just go for an easy wank. 

Sometimes in his life, he also wanted to make a change. When E. came back from visiting me last year in Berlin, he was full of energy, liking the manner in which nudity of older people became a subject of the people at the gallery I was interning for. He liked all the political ideas and the hope and effort. Should we have gone round to talk to him about it more and convince him to be a more active part in it? Well, he couldn't really be trusted, the things we asked him for the small part of the project he did not do... But still, we wonder about his timing, he knew Erik was going to knock on his door later that day to hand over the keys....
Maybe he was in love with Erik, a feeling I could understand, I would also kill for Erik, though not myself :-)  -this is how AWKWARD it gets thinking about this. Why the timing, when Erik had only agreed to see him a few hours earlier? You don't hang yourself because of a futility, right? 
Earlier, he fixed the roof-gutter in our last week there, had only just had the façade painted a few weeks before.
It's weird, it's weird, it's weird.......Another one succumbed to the age-old Belgian disease of not wanting to talk to anyone about your problems.

Still, to make this piece of writing more into a proper In Memoriam, I must say he was actually a really really kind man who always wanted to be helpful, in his own way. He was genuinly nice.
I always feel it is important to appreciate the person you are renting from (i.e. giving hard-earned cash to someone else because some paper says it is his property), and both of us did, at some level.

Of course he was quirky, sure, he may have lived in a Mongolian tent he had built on his terrace, but at least there he could say:

“Come in, come in! There are no worries here.”
“Err... OK, but our boiler is broken, could you get your plumber to come by and...”
“Shhhh.... sit down.... no worries... everything will be alright. Here, there is nothing to worry about..

Wouldn’t we all want a tent like that?


 

'So, what happened this week then?'
'Well, there was this thing in the sky, right...'
'The sun?'
'No, not the sun! It's this thing called a planemo and there are millions of them scattered about the universe.'
'And what are they, then?'
'They're planets whose mother stars didn't want them, the man on National Geographic said in a sad and gloomy voice and they're everywhere, only we can't see them, but we can feel them, in our hearts maybe.'
'And...'
'Well, they're all alone without the warmth of their parent star, orphans of the sky, lone travellers among the mystic voids of space, eternal wanderers of the universe, rejected by all and everything.'
'That's a bit overemotional, isn't it?'
'Well, no, because there could be life on them, kittens who also get abandoned by their parents because the parents thought "well, since our sun didn't want to keep us warm, why should I give my kitten warmth? Why don't I just abandon it?" And then the kitten would die!'
'But it would be too cold for life on them, so the kitten would be dead anyway, wouldn't it?'
'No, the man said that there was life possible, because of global warming before the planet got thrown out of its solar system, so there could be microbes and other life, maybe tortoises or Mongolians or something.'
'Thrown out of its solar system?'
'Yeah, and then we're having global warming too, so maybe the sun will reject us too and throw us out because we didn't care for the polar bears, even though they would attack us if we tried to take a photo of them having a baby, unless we do it in a Dutch zoo but don't tell anyone about it.'
'I don't think you need to worry about that happening.'
'But maybe we could adopt one of these lonely planets. There's room enough in our solar system, isn't there?'
'I'm afraid it doesn't really work that way, Timmy.'
'Oh, I know there will be lots of paperwork for the adoption, but I can fill that in. If every solar system would adopt another planet or two, maybe there wouldn't be any abandoned planets any more and all the planemos wouldn't feel so lonely any more, and then the kittens living there will see their mummies again, so they can drink milk and have a chance to grow up.'
'...'
'I want a pretty planemo, though, not an ugly one with lots of oil and refuse. Or maybe we can take a pretty one, but also an ugly one, so they won't be jealous. But no red ones!'
'Why not red ones?'
'Because that would upset Mars, because then Mars will be thinking it will be replaced and think that people will say, "Oh! Did you see that new red planet, it's so young and pretty, let's go there instead of boring old Mars!" and then Mars would be lonely too, even with the sun shining on it.'
'Anything else you don't want them to have?'
'They cannot be named after chocolate bars or Disney characters, because the other planets won't like that.'
'Planets aren't named after Disney characters, they're...'
'YES, they ARE named after Disney characters! And besides, they should be named after... bananas... or chips, but not asparagus, because I don't like asparagus!'

*runs off to play*