Resisting cake

I was planning to metaphorically pound the kaka out of the likes of Renee Zellweger in a fabulous morceau of star related journalism, smelling like a sewer and oozing with juicy shallowness. It didn’t really work out. So I hope everybody likes existentialism. If not, I will have to use the good educational methods of my parents and their parents before them which roughly come down to the following sentence: “Open your mouth, you big baby, here comes the yucky stuff.”

Throughout my entire fluttering life as a stray pigeon of sorts I have always been inclined to associate myself with rubbish, no matter whether it was human or not. Dear and deer to me were: the less fortunate things and loci, the animals preyed upon and the gently intoxicated people, talking to each other with low and lowered voices. When life hit 24 everybody around me was fine still, and I reckon my life back then existed of a circle of mesmerizingly quiet people with hopeful eager looks and sad but determined faces. They were of the kind that could’ve had everything but didn’t bother to actually get anything at all, the lucky unlucky ones, vagabonds of their own making, destroying their proper destinies just because they could, and not because they were compelled by king, wife or body. They were a smashing set of people, and even though I often ardently resented them, there was no hatred in my resentment. My idealistic friends, dining on cheese and wine, eating and singing, dancing oft, believing themselves into the sky and talking dirt to where it belonged, on and in the ground. Where are these people now? None of them have died, but I don’t see them around anymore. What the hell happened, in these mere five years? Did they all get syphilis?

On a summer night in 2007 I was promenading with my very temporary girlfriend through the woods of Waasmunster, in the remote, damp, dark and very Flemish region of the “Waasland”, or “het woasland” as we called it. Her name was Onoma, and she had a great pair of brains. I mean this, bien sur, in an allegorical way. She was real girlfriendly too. When I had a sore day she cried like a crocodile and when I cried revolution she looked worried and acted feverish and said crazy things like: "it will be alright, all of it." I didn’t have a lot of sore days, and the day that I’ll cry revolution is yet to come, so I guess the burden that I layed on her was really fairly minimal. Still if you would have asked her about me back then, I’m sure she would have told anyone that I was the most difficult, least dependable sorry son of a brothel’s bitch in the entire world. (Not to mention what she would say if she were to be interviewed right now, after all this hissing and fighting and breaking and bitching and the likes.) I thought she was being unreasonable all of the time, but she didn’t really care for reason very much, so she took it as a compliment of sorts, which it wasn't. The sun was shining still, even though it was three o clock in the morning, it was just one of those long days, and the birds were nakedly fluttering in the silvery dew of the sunlit night. It was a very strange day, I reckon. We walked silently until I told her that I loved her, not because I really did, but because I felt I had to say something that sounded kind of important. She responded I was a bastard, which was true, but the statement was kind of ruining the atmosphere, which was a shame. I asked her what happened to us, since we were so crazily in love a couple of months before that, and it had seemed things would never change, back then. She pondered about that for while, tilting her head, and resting one finger on her lips. I thought she looked very dramatic, but in a bad way, as if she were a butch woman in a filmic adaption of a Hemingway novel. The pose didn't fit her. She started, her voice sounded high pitched and shrill. “When I first met you, first saw you, you were promising like a young Lenin, minus the evil, swinging your hands and talking your nonsense and wearing an enticing pair of plastic boots. You looked so alien and at the same time so real that I just had to hug you and kiss you. And fuck you, too”, she said. I told her that it was the most pathologically romantic thing that I had ever heard, and that I thought it was quite fantastic. I stopped and looked at her in the enchanted forest on the fringes of the deep and dark and moldy town of Waasmunster. The skin of her face was as smooth as a silk sheet, but her eyes were hard. They reminded me of chicken eggs. “But after a while I got used to you, the flamboyance faded, the boots were replaced by quite casual shoes, and now…”, she deliberately paused, for dramatical effect. She seemed about to continue her sentence, but thought the better of it and remained silent. I understood everything, as everybody would, trying to pierce through a hard and unforgiving mask as was hers. “When I leave you, which will be very soon, I’m getting myself one of those rich type of guys, outfitted with a suit and driving a Benz and living in a loft. No more flamboyant losers, like you”, she finally said. When se pronounced the word 'loft' I vomited on her shoes. She didn't like that. I never kissed, fucked or hugged her again. The loss of love is no big deal, I believe, but to lose the sweet clinging of bodies in passion is a goddamn fornicating sin. There’s no truth behind this fact, since the surface is all there is in human life, and the surface is more than enough to get you a giant headache every single day of your life. I have one right now, writing this, as a matter of fact. There's your proof.

So what happened to you, my friends? You are, of course, eating modestly sized cakes in your appetizing houses, not really loving your wives anymore, maybe hating them a bit, even, but feeling perfectly contented with all that. You are rocking your babies and singing to yourselves, because your voices have become to stifled to sing out loud. That’s okay, so it goes. But how, my friends, I will always remember our ridiculous revolutions, our laughable manifestos and our dancing parties, lasting and resonating through and beyond the nights of our short lived youth.