EXPERIENCING BELGIUM
Friday, October 24, 2003
 

Belgian Disregard and the Iron Heel

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 13:27

Outside the six panes of old glass and painted wood doorway to the balcony over the street I can see snow falling hard and fast. Snowflakes the size of potato chips. An unwelcome cold penetrates the lower portion of the room keeping my mind sharp and the air fresh. Its late autumn – it should feel like Halloween is near but it does not because this is Belgium.

I passed the day yesterday - and this is in some ways as simple and meaningful as my life gets - cooking and illustrating. I made burritos because you can’t get good simple food like that here. But somehow i did that without too much fuss - usually it’s a huge mess and time consuming. I spent most of the time happily working on this year’s annual Halloween illustration that I like to dream up.

I went swimming last night with the team but all the guys in my lane used to be made up of mostly Flemish guys but now they’re francophone and they aren’t so friendly. These guys are mostly younger than me except for one or two and now there are seven of us in that lane. I left early after a half hour because, I don’t know... I kept having death-obsessed thoughts in the deep end (a recurring swimming problem I have which might be related to when asthma kicks in slightly, or I am truly just another crackpot in need of therapy). So the language dysfunction was bothering me but not upsetting me like it can; I was more bothered by my lane mates disregarding me - its not like i don’t try, (make eye contact, smile, use a few French phrases and English words simply), with these guys but there is this phenomenon called Belgian Disregard which you get here when you don’t understand the language and then ad that to cliques and its kind of tiresome, then do all that with a tedious “gay” twist. Not that i really go to swim team practice to socialize but there is a point when people won’t look you in the eye and your always looking at their backs.

Like I said that disregard and my thinking about (my own – future tense and my moms – past tense) death when i was swimming head underwater in the deep in - the social isolation of it and the mental isolation of it and how morphine is a relief to it - and why the fuck does my brain go there when I’m busy swimming...?

So I got out of the pool took a solitary hot shower. Then took a long walk to the Metro and rode home.
All of that makes it sound like I am depressed but i don’t think so - not anymore than I would expect with my families anniversaries at this time of year and then on top of the autumn season being a season of vegetative death. Plus to day is nearly wintry cold. Kind of freakish extreme you might find more normal in Ohio or the Midwest!

Yesterday began really noisy, a bunch of school kids having a field trip on our street - ok that kind of noise isn’t so annoying as the LARGE FRIGERATED truck parked outside with its compressors running even though the outside temperature is at freezing IS... then some depannage (tow) truck sitting on the sidewalk outside the door where we have this fragile gas connection. With this kind of weather at the moment I don’t want the trouble of a severed gas line with the time it takes that to get fixed! The city will rush out at a moments to turn off the gas if a leak occurs but will take weeks to get around to actually finding the time to repair it and under the sidewalk is their responsibility... since the tow truck driver is this young hot Belgian stallion who I see driving around and find totally hot and decent looking - like he should be in college not driving a truck. Eventually I go to his truck window and explain in English, (not knowing what language might be his mother tongue so English is often times a safe bet here to not offend anyone), the situation with the gas line and could he just move his truck forward a meter etc... At which point he looks me in the eye (gets points for that! and added points for having drop dead gorgeous eyes at that!) and says in English...

"In Belgium we speak French"...
And without missing a beat...
With my right hand in a fist I hit my heart then made
A rather infamous salute as I once saw in the movie American History X.
A gesture he did not much appreciate!

Nor do i suspect he got the subtly of that bit of sign language being my comment on his spoken comment. There was a police agent just there standing around not doing much and I explained the situation with the truck parked on the sidewalk to him and he looked at the gas line which is sunken down with obviously reset paving tiles replaced etc. and so he goes and talks to the cute truck driver boy. Then policeman walks away with a sort of aimless gesture (I remember a sign i once saw near Park St. at the North Market that said "cops are crooks"). Then the truck driver boy backs his truck up and goes forward and backs up etc... and then makes some gesture i didn’t’ understand but perhaps a gay insult gesture - so i just repeated it back to him thru the window. We smiled at each other and I swear there wasn’t a malicious look in this boy trucker’s eye - which is the deception of beauty. Trust me I wouldn’t trust him - even if he was pretty enough to make me want to engage in anally penetrative sex with his boy truck drivers ass - and I swear there was something in his eye that said that’s precisely what he had in mind. It was all like a cheap porn story sequence.

I told my predominately francophone neighbor Jean the story in the afternoon at the kitchen table here and he really liked my ballsy (sign language) reply but then his grandmother was German back then - he laughed so hard and hit the table - but we both agreed that the boy truck driver would not get the subtle mirror in your face sign language comment i made.
I said to Jean:
"Petit pays petit esprit".
I read that once in King Leopold’s II Ghost.
Which impressed Jean that I could quote that and speak it and that I knew who said it.
That being what Belgium’s King Leopold II said about his Kingdom’s subjects - can you believe that - and people here are still rather monarchical in their ideologies despite the insults of the previous King. Go figure. Its not like England where those poor English can’t liberate themselves from such an old family of the land. But here the monarchy like the country only goes back to 1830. I find that strange and sham like, stage theatre prop.

Jean also asked in what century does this boy live in when he thinks to say “in Belgium we speak French”.... what about the Dutch speaking majority - what about the German speaking minority, what about the unofficial languages of various if not ALL Arabic dialects, ad to that a few eastern European languages, not to mention some English and other European languages thrown in because of the EU and all)...

Then en route to swim team practice Günter and I talked about European tendencies toward fascisms these days – namely, typically, Austria, but now also shockingly, Switzerland; increasingly, France also where everyone thought they were immune to such thinking; like always though invisibly so and therefore more dangerously so, Denmark - and then how Flanders/Vlaanderen always gets the blame for the Belgian version of fascism when there is a franco-version for Bruxelles and also another in Wallonia alive and kicking but then no one seems to mind...

Yesterday I saw this francophone (white) also young and adorably kind all too innocent looking Belgian boy actually young twenty-nothing viciously insult an older Moroccan woman - nearly spat on her – this while we rode the tram home last night... while all of us in the tram just stared and there seemed to be this sense of shock you could feel in the tram - and the boy was relentless and the woman was calm and detached and cool when normally you think oh she’s going to go really crazy in that way north Africans can or are known for at least according to Lonely Planet guide books. But she didn’t.

I think the only place you can go to, to be really safe from fascism in this day and age is Deutschland – ironically the old Vader land! Because they know better than any of us how that plays out after it all comes to a head. Certainly Israel gets away with a shameless amount of fascism however it seems to justify its actions.

So after Günter and i talked that over - I said you know and in the states we have economic and corporate fascism running right out of the white house and Günter was like yeah, wow, Matt that’s really great you can admit that.
Then we arrived at swimming.

The natatorium was cold but the water not as cold as i expected - the swimmers, however, weren't so warm and I was rather cold myself but not in any sensation of temperature just my attitude.
While in the deep end I worried and wondered when was the last time my old street saw such a gesture as I had made earlier in the day. In what time, what year, what context - if ever did men like that walk this street? I then supposed so as an answer to my question. Were they sexy, stupid or intelligent? Did they believe in things or just do as they were told?

I was reading about Jack London the night before, how he had what would be considered today rather racist back in his time, but how despite that he wrote the Iron Heel in a color blind way - bringing the races together to fight the “iron heel” of the corporations. Whatever you do read that book!

I guess i got too much on my mind.
Normally drawing calms me down but when the cold air kicks in my asthma kicks in - and when it does it constricts my throat and my thinking in a way.
I don’t know some days it's hard living with yourself as I presume you know from your own experiences.
All my adult life I have thought i don’t like who I am inside. I miss who I was as a kid. I wish I were a better person but it’s like in my DNA to be a malcontent - social critic.

In the deep end I thought about death, the water, the suffocation, the slow eventuality of the inevitability of death. It made me fearful in a way that was not panicking but rather existential. I thought about what my mother’s thoughts were when she was alone and with my dad at the end. Before the morphine haze took over. I wondered if my own death would be fast and unexpected or slow and in such a way I would have to make a peace with it while yielding to it. It was then that I became angry at my lane swim mates for being unwilling to try and communicate with someone in another tongue, someone from another land – from another age. If I were ten years younger they would have brought out their English skills to impress me but in gay middle age someone like me is in the way, taking up space, different, foreign, and perhaps a threat to the cosy myth of linguistic isolation in the capital of Europe. Eye contact and a smile, forcing conversation between guys without a common language – the awkwardness of it can bring on laughter and a bigger smile. And the smile of a stranger can dispel the threats of ones inner demons and familial ghosts who linger inside.

And i try not to remember as I last saw her in decay of cancer and morphined relief but in some other way of being before all that.

That’s what kind of day it was.

Tuesday, October 14, 2003
 

The Falcon to the Snowman: This is not America

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 11:15

The great thing about European TV is the occasional brilliant documentary on "American Life" by that I mean life within the United States, sometimes these are about the unseen and unrepresented poor like those stuck out back in the Bush country of Texas or the latest on Prison Life which is fast becoming another for profit industry. The sort of documentaries that PBS might broadcast say after 11pm and no one watches the Public Broadcasting Service much these days anyways! After seeing two separate dramatic documentaries on U.S. American Prison Culture and the statistics of that - and who doesn't know these days someone stuck working or living in a prison - maybe it really is time that We The People admit to ourselves that the ideas our governance was founded on, namely Equality and Liberty and Justice and the like, were just Kentucky Blue Grass (the illegal kind in case you are not a Libertarian) pipe dreams. Let's face it today's fixation with "freedom", whatever is meant by that, probably only relates to certain corporations that dictate life to the U.S. citizen consumers. Freedom perhaps of Economic exploitation. The fact of the matter is if you do try to live your life thinking in terms of Equality, Liberty and Justice among other great notions - you will find yourself caught in the inescapable quagmire of the U.S. Inc. Prison Systems. Perhaps it's time to stop telling everyone in the states they have specific Constitutional guarantees because the citizenry has been duped by the Bushies and Arnold who ignore those very guarantees and no one cares. It is precisely that the voters elect these idiots and there is no public outcry that makes me not want to return there even to visit my dad or say see the Midwest in autumn.

It is for this reason that I say it's time the USA renamed itself to say FUCSONA the Forcibly United Corporate States Of North America and wrote a constitution that details what is really going on. To do this would at least be more honest so that the former citizens now so called consumers can know what is expected of them (their life and soul). This way those innocents might learn how to survive without falling into the traps of personal economic incompetence that leads to a life behind razor wire never far from the paralyzing lethal injection "cocktail". It really is now as Benjamin Franklin wrote of as the inevitable conclusion of Democracy, a paralyzing corruption of that very notion into something sinister and dictatorial.

Lets face it the America as we were taught in school has now been proven to be what is was an experiment and the Bushies and Arnold are the fellows in the Lab coats pulling down the very apparatus of that great experiment (and cashing in on its dismantling). It was that great experiment in Democracy that led to the automotive, oil and military industrial corporations who then found Democracy to big a threat and they silently ended that experiment and its been a corporate-ocracy every since. The carrot before the donkey was a VISA or AMEX card and the senseless idea that anyone without a credit history could buy anything - it was precisely that carrot that led the donkey out of democracy and into the confines of socio-economic control on a scale better than any one dictator from history could dream up.

If you disagree with me then when you sit down again to do your finances to pay your rent or mortgage payment, car payment, car insurance payment, health insurance payment, credit card debt consolidation payment, child care payment, school tuition payment for you or your children, AOL Time Warner Cable TV payment, to pay your utility payments, your gasoline payments, and so on and so on month after month, year after year until the day you die - tell me that isn't some unattainable carrot dangling before you to lead you somewhere that you are oblivious to. That is not a life of Equality or Liberty or Justice or "Freedom" it is a life of complete economic control of which you are but one single horse of power in an team of quite a few million harnessed and reigned in tight. Now with the Bush administration on the carriage they are ready to drive this powerful team around the world trampling on anyone unwilling to be harnessed in with the team. It's the very Four Horsemen of the apocalypse (Bush Sr., Jr., Cheney, and now add that Austrian, Zeig Heil!) that we the American voters set up on this powerful team who with whips in hand with the U.S. Prison System for your glue factory just outside the razor wired pastures of your retirement, that is if you make it that far before the diet of fry pit factory food doesn't kill you first.

This is not America.... No?


Tuesday, October 07, 2003
 

Making Barbarella Boobs Out of the Rockefeller Brothers Dicks

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 15:17

Hey Zinneke!

Maybe I told you this story before but the only times I went to the World Trade Center was with this Puerto Rican guy who I was kind of dating back when I was living in New York City. This was when it was really empty down there on the weekends, we'd go in between the towers somewhere on that wind swept plaza and lie down and smoke a joint and make out real heavy, then we'd lie back and watch the towers swaying in the breeze like they were two huuuuge Barbarella breasts. We'd laugh about that and make out some more...

So I guess we didn't know it then but we made boobs out the Rockefeller brother's dicks. Heheh.

Another email excerpt from Ronirokit my crazy Colorado comrade.
 

Where souls collide/life post America's automotive Apocalypse

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 01:19

Missing Appalachia,
meeting a wild eyed southern boy like you,
without the obligations of architecture and the implied refinements.

I like life without the States better.
A space outdoors
is the best way to meet;
under the sky with nothing to hide.

It's awkward meeting a stranger,
in your home,
in a cafe...
It's awkward meeting a stranger,
a street can be a substitute though...

Being on a wide open land for me is better than mountain confinements
or urban car canyons we think are streets.
The streets came before the automotive
and the streets will remain.
The high plateau,
that's where strangers should meet,

its where souls collide.

Life has a natural dignity outdoors.
When the oil stops Civilization will return.
Inside buildings Life becomes undignified in communal routine with walls
under necessary shelter.

When civilization returns will we be there for it?

I wish I could have given you that high plateau.
Saturday, October 04, 2003
 

To Live & Die Without L.A. - Shock Talk of the Street

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 02:46

Hey there Bill

Yeh that murder a couple doors down the street is actually quite shocking. And i am sorry if I am only relating this to my own experience to my sister back in '76. That then seemed a bit more cinematic and surreally suburban and Virgin Suicide like. This seemed (by comparison) rather lonely, uneventful, totally unneccessary and I'm lacking precise words here but also mundane. Like it should be more shocking than it is. Of course it is the shock talk of the street with all our neighbors and its sad it takes this to get us all talking but on the other hand therein lies a certain comfort (that when push comes to shove we all do talk, language dysphoria or not).

I was making pizzas in the kitchen when this Flemish inspector stopped by to ask questions. I could follow along quite well with his Dutch since I understood the context of the questions - and I always thought something like that would be really intimidating and scary and it seemed all rather pleasant despite the circumstances and actually neighbourly. Unfortunately Bart and I saw nothing unusual this morning as we both departed here before 9am when it supposably transpired. Although what transpired exactly and the how and why's we still don't know yet.

This email was interupted by our neighbor Jean who came by with his story about the news van de dag van de straatje...

The "Bird Lady" as I call her who runs a pet shop for bird people always gave Jean a bag everyday of the floor sweepings which were full of bird seeds which he'd spread out for the birds in the empty lot behind our building. So when Jean stopped by there this morning on his way to the baker across the street - he peeked in through the window and saw that floor wasn't swept up (thus the seed bag wouldn't be ready yet and his friend no where in sight and the store door oddly open wide on a cold morning) then he saw her lying on the floor in the back of the shop and yelled for someone to call 900 (the old emergency number here) and he ran in and saw his friends body all bloody and her lying on her back. The man across the street ran over and he checked for a pulse but there wasn't any and then the media arrived and the medics and then finally the police. Then the medics left because the woman was dead. Jean was held for questioning and had to have his shoes photographed since he was in the crime scene. The Bird Lady was retired and working to suppliment her state care since she was raising her daughters two kids since her daughter is dying from cancer. So this is a very sad story when you hear all this from Jean. And it is. The other missing piece to this story is a fellow who was sorta harrassing other shop people around here this morning. So we all want to see this story played out soon and the person who did this found.

When Jean came over this evening I made a pot of tea and he told us his whole day which has been defined by this shocking interuption to the normal usual uneventful routine of his mornings. I knew something was up this afternoon if the politie/police blue and white tape wasn't enough! because Jean is always around and if I don't see him I hear him outside but today I didn't and it turns out it took the police hours to sort out their investigations that required Jeans prescence.

After we had tea (at the moment all this is on TV news as i write this, seeing the street out the window and on the TV at the same time - woof! some sexy police men! were around today that i missed). Then after our obligatory to the dead cups of tea we walked the dogs together - he has a little dog named Lola, (what 67 year old single gay man doesn't right?), slightly more than a lap dog - every morning the Bird Lady would greet Lola with a dog treat so Lola was actually the first to find the Bird Lady - isn't this awful I still don't know a proper name for her - on the floor and according to Jean, Lola was running in circles around the womans body on the floor expecting a treat.

Now all of this doesn't seem so banal or mundane but involving all of us on the street. Especially if no guilty person is found - then we are all involved because it could be any of us next time this sort of thing happens. So we are all sorta hoping this story ends soon. Sounds strange to talk that way but there it is. Well Bill I am really glad your package arrived today because it will give us something else to occupy our minds with. This sad story which unfolded only five doors from ours and not farther than the distance across the length of some American sized attached multi-car garage.

There is a cafe between here and the Bird Lady's shop so we are all going to meet there when this is over and sit down to some Belgian brews you know the one's served up dark in those glass goblets. Its not a bad way to be remembered or waked by neighbors in this day and age, eh? Although if this drags on we'll be doing this a few times more I think between now and then.

I told Jean I would buy him some bird seed for wild birds (somewhere else) for him to give the birds out back. But since the man who owns that lot mercilessly cut down all those everygreens there aren't so many birds around here anymore anyways - at least the pigeons still hang out there for Jean to tend to.

The BBC's radio news today here suggests the heat is on under Bush juniors butt to account for the lies his administration dishes up daily to the American's and rest of the world. The other news here is saying the Pope is dying but i thought that was understood now for the last ten years.


Thursday, October 02, 2003
 

James Howard Kunstler (has)* READ MY BLOG!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 10:26

James Howard Kunstler READ MY BLOG!!!!!!!

James Howard Kunstler READ MY BLOG!!!!!!!

James Howard Kunstler READ MY BLOG!!!!!!!

Author of GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE
and HOME FROM NOWHERE
and THE CITY IN MIND
and the forth coming novel MAGGIE DARLING

Actually read this here Blog!!!!!

I have shelved as a low waged Nickled and Dimed slave wager Kunstler's GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE at 24-7 McBooks: art, coffee, books, cds and art countless times. I always shelved that book "face out" (because everyone should read that book!), on the shelf instead of library style with only the spine facing out. Me who has never worked a job for more than seven dollars an hour and never with health care or decent transportation or housing - got read by a published literary longtime personal hero!

*Here is a common limitation of the English language, when I say James Howard Kunstler READ MY BLOG!!! I do not mean this as a command to an author I really admire. I am jumping up and down and saying he actually stopped by my blog pages and read (as in the color red or has read) my blog. Yeh well I know low wages tend to result from Miss Education but I am using what I got and I am still always grateful whenever I finish a book from cover to cover no matter how short that book is.

Wednesday, October 01, 2003
 

Stalingradlaan

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 19:45

Hey Zinneke,

I wonder if they will ever finish that town (Brussel/Bruxelle/Bruxel)... I still have such strong memories of arriving there for the first time from Paris, getting off the train at the old Zuid Station on a misty Sunday morning. Walking through the green and yellow lighting of the station, pasty faced morning travellers steeped in the urine of generations, finding myself in the Sunday market with all the fruit and vegetables and fabric in the fog swirled up by the hundreds of people, the Rai music competing with the Gypsy kings. Lost in the crowd and just wandering around until i found myself on Stalingradlaan, a huge empty monumental avenue with trees growing crazy and big beautiful blue stone pavers slanting at angles like the bottom of a river, no cars on it, just rusty weedy tram-tracks and a catamaran. Trying to find my way to the center of Bru-town, and the center always seeming to move further away. Finding myself on the empty ruined jungle of the Martyr-plein while looking for de Grote Eiland. I was so happy to have a bad sense of direction, so happy to be lost in the ruins of that strange capital; a very small, very old woman passed by and i asked the way to the Grote Markt/Grand Place and she took my hand and walked me all the way there, telling me all about her grandkids - this was quite a shock coming from Paris! I have had the great pleasure of knowing Bruxel and Lisboa back when, and before, of having connected with people who all drifted to these places to make something where there was nothing but the past stories crumbling down around an older misunderstood foundation. And I do cherish those memories as the happiest times in my life. From here in Colorado, USA the sun shines in through the windows, mid 70's (F) to mid 30's(C)... and i think often of the Indian summers of Bruxel, and that northern light you spoke of...

Remembering Belgium from an email from my former neighbor and Comrade/Ex-Pat now sadly repatriated, otherwise known as Ronirokit.


 

Brother Wolf and Sister Moon When There Are No More Places Left For Sanctuary

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 16:57

Hey there Michaela!
I am glad you liked that email thing I just sent you to cheer you up. It's true I do think about you alot. I do, I really do even when there haven't been emails between us for awhile.
I remember you from when we used to work retail "health food" minimum wage grocery.
I remember your fab house.
I remember your weedy backyard and that odd freakishly tall sunflower from one summer in your garden.
The old metal lawn chair.
I remember your kitties
Your hot boys that were just toys that didnt wash.
I remember your sexy bro' and I remember your fab dreads.
I remember your old truck and motorcycle,
how you sometimes spell your name Mike.
I remember how you seem to dance the sexual dance of identity from being a boy to girl, to a girl who likes boys, to a boy who likes boys, to a girl who likes girls.
I remember you in Belgium when we visited Brugge and looked out from that tower with the sinister spiralling stairs.
I remember your pictures from Belgium that are still here on our computer.
I always miss you when i think of these things, like now.
I remember how whenever I would hear your voice at work how happy you could make me by talking to me.
I remember your flakey sense of humor that sometimes would be so off the wall that I had no idea what you were thinking or talking about!
That is just how i like you.
keep singing and dancing and let the sadness pass thru you like one of the old ghosts inhabiting your old house sometimes will.
...your beautiful tumble down old house, Mike...
its such an architectural explanation to me of who you are!
How sometimes the lights are on in your home when only the kittie are!
And the porch swing swings alone when noone is on it to know.
The kitties know they rule.
The pumpkins commune with the rocks.
The stars watch you and you are never ever alone no matter what you think in a solitary sleep at night.
Hang on Mike.
I am attached to you in very virtual and long distance ways,
your other, not really handsome, not really your real brother,
brother, and sister too, all in one.


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