Experiencing The Netherlands

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 09:55

It is so weird to read anything from the Anglophone media report of life in Belgium. For example - see the link - there is according to the NYTimes a cult of Medievalism going in Flanders like say Americans with their cult of re-enactments of Civil War scenes. I think daily I obsess over the literal past one walks through there (in Bru-town) and generally I find people (t)/here could care less about the past. In fact they seem to see it as something dirty to wash away. In Brussels I don't think a day goes by where I don't see the old forgotten typically Belgian style antique doors, staircases and windows laying in rennovation dumpsters parrallel parked on the streets - those old beautiful well made fixtures to be replaced by modern international building design show elements. We all know what French doors typically mean but nowadays even the Belgians have forgotten what Belgian or Brussels style doors are and how they differ from French doors. Belgian doors can be found on balconies facades of old town houses. They are three piece doors with the center being larger and wider than the two sides, one side of which is stationary. Then that NYTimes article went on a bit about Belgium going through something of an identity crisis and that whole Flemish nationalist party stuff. Belgium has had an identity crisis since 1830 when some Saxon Couberg however they spelled it was a landless royal in search of a country to keep as a fashion accessory. What a climber.

The New York Times should be paying me to write properly on life in these here southern low lands of Western Europe. I think though the US media is only interested in propagating their own views on places and not interested in really what is going on in the places they appear to be reporting on or rather manufacturing "news" on. Meanwhile, I still don't think New Mexico has been an actual state in the USA for 100 years - yet. So I assume the NYTimes knows even less about New Mexico.

So goes Belgium so goes the EU... Poland is aggressively, shockingly, working against gay rights EU obligations for religious reasons even though it is just now a part of the EU. Latvia has some creepy state initiated (as opposed to a religious ideal) racial and anti-gay rights issues that are being implemented and it's rather shocking but everyone else is like, oh, that's Latvia. Try growing up now-a-days with samesex feelings in Romania now that its part of the EU. Meanwhile, Holland and Denmark are more creepy than the Vlaams Belang Flemish Nationalists and don't get me started on how smug France is being while being no different that BE, NL or Denmark. France just manifests its own racist ideas in smooth suppository Latin like ways by disguising it under the veil of what it means to be French.

The Danish/American couple that were couching surfing through here on the wekend were sooo smug. The Dane was a man who I guess survived heroin addiction and reminded me of a born again AA type, so we talked about BJ in Ohio and how his recovery is hampered by ineptitude of not just the American system but with an ineffectual Ohio system twist. The Dane recovered from heroin because of a remarkable heroin survivors program in Denmark - I wish we could send BJ there. The Dane's woman - the American, Jewess - whom I actually really liked was beyond belief - she aparantly believes in racial theories - so I kept my mouth shut just to hear what foulness she would let out. It was a good tactic on my part - otherwise as you know from my reading my blogette, Experiencing Belgium, that I tend to come across crazed and delusional and all Grey Gardens like - not to mention at times totally illiterate... But the American's racial ideas were a bit over the top as she thinks Israelis are beneath Eastern European Diaspora Jewry - which my old Israeli pal back in Tel-Aviv would just love to set her straight on and put her in her place beneath him - all of which is fine by me but she was just so annoying and Evangelical about her views - meaning her way of seeing the racial pyramid must be spread: Like in some form of hand ringing obsessiveness that if she doesn't get others to believe with her then she might have to admit maybe she is also like Grey Gardens little Edie just plain wackoo...

I went to the beach today first to the protected dunes which I find such contentment in as I learned how to do from reading Terry Tempest Williams. I like this seaside enviroment here because - I figured it out today - if you didn't hear the ocean it looks alot like Colorado Plateau New Mexico. I prefer the more quieter desert but the seaside air is perhaps even better. Of course today is a holiday and I swear some Dutchlings share the same DNA as a more bovine species such as their forefathers used to chase the tails of to make a living making cheese... I found some little used old brick path probably left over from the war and sat on the side of that. That was the closest to having some space to myself. It was strange that no one else saw this path because I just turned off a busy bicycle pedestrian trail - actually it's more a non-automotive super highway with three lanes - thus, yay - no cars! Just horses, bicycles, pedestrians... then there was this little path but nobody was using it and it lead to some really beautiful natural places of rolling hills of scrubs and shrubs... it doesn't just look like NM but it looks like a flat version of San Francisco around Mount Tam... just as magical and if I could just find some place to be comfortable I would sit there for hours... There was not, however, the smell of sage brush or juniper. In fact there really wasn't any smell at all - just the sense of sea saltiness.

Meanwhile, most of the nature area paths were overrun by idiot people in such an evocative and thoughtful and peaceful landscape yahoo's yakking loudly on gsm's or dangerously riding bicycles in gaggles of lycra clad Eddie Merckx style pro-cyclist types, like it's some bicyclist petit tour de France in spandex on bicycle paths chocked full of bovine family idiots on bicycles... get me out of here - so I did by finding that path less taken - no wonder here people fall into compulsive sexual encounters in the dunes given the stress of these hoards of noisy people....

On the other hand lots of youngsters though were learning how to ride their bicycles without training wheels which I liked seeing. I can remember learning how to ride a bicycle like it were yesterday. Learning how to ride was the easy part. Learning how to make turns and stop was frightful... I remember where I got the hang of it and when: Next to a big old Juniper shrub on a corner which I fell into. I love the smell of prickly juniper to this day from growing up in a synthetic suburban cantonment like Worthington Estates was... or is... who knows, who cares...?

Meanwhile, my beard is only like one centimeter long, meaning it is very short and it still gets alot of attention because of its saffron or roux color. Some woman pointed to me and said I had a Flemish cut beard. Like I am sorry, Ik spreek ook Nederlands, and I was right there - do these people think they live in some Matrix program and that I am not human? ...to quote Clare from Six Feet Under to her brother Nate with the kid and that annoying wife - from an episode I saw ages ago... or maybe, do I just look deaf - ?

Most of the people I see here though look like they could do with a broader gene pool to play in -I should know.............. from my own family tree or rather twisted weather ravaged Juniper family bush (no not that Bush bush family but a twisted and tangled family vine not a family tree if you will) not quite a healthy family tree experience. Yes, that was my portal experience into the trapping of this mortal coil.

Some Indonesian fluff chic of a middle aged gay male accosted me at the seaside today. Slightly bearded as (s)/he was with his/(her) hair in a pony tail the size of a fist on the back of his head - except given the way his hair is naturally it was a black puff the size of a tennis ball - which if you looked at him square on the face you didn't see. I was laying in the dunes to keep out of the wind (in my clothes) though some guys were totally naked and it's just not warm enough for that, yet. When this guy with the black tennis ball poof on the back of his head approached me, again those angular movements of walking like from the Todd Haynes movie SAFE - this because of the soft sand of the dunes makes walking difficult. But I was obviously not interested. The look he gave me though: Eyes looking over these silly glasses giving me the impression of a woman while holding some towel over his naked chest... Square cut bathing suit worn ridiculously high... Womanly movements and yet simultaneously man. Transexual? Perhaps, who knows. It was probably Jan Morris... (the author of Trieste: The Capital of Nowhere - great read by the way). I am all for people like that having rights and indeed I'd even hang out with them if there was a chemisty of some sort. I used to do my grocery shopping in German Village, Columbus, Ohio, back in my Dollville days with a handsome yet pre-op Vietnamese young man. I liked looking like a straight opposite sex couple happily going shopping because that was what people wanted to see us as and not for what we really were. But this "two spirit" guy/gal in these Dutch dunes was all sordid and silly at the same time. I mean I was looking at a physical man and yet seeing the spirit of a woman vaguely obscured by the masculinity of a male physique.
Whatever.
To each his own.

Meanwhile, I found an image in one of the magazines here in this little quaint Dutch house I am staying in - sadly no step gable roofline - of a woman I liked - yes that way - opposite sex attraction way. I am struggling with opposite sex attractions and feelings it is so humiliating. It started again from perusing some mag like Arena or Squeeze with fashionably clothed models strewn about in lascivious socially decadent ways, that the more I see these magazine advertisements, the more appalling I find them. It seems worse than porn like, somehow. I mean at least porn knows what it is and knows its limits and the viewer knows it is porn and that's that. But these fashion mags are more deviant than porn because they pretend not to be using porny situations to sell us things we don't need by making us feel inferior to the models and the sets they pretend to be living in ... so anyway - I got a boner over this vague image of a woman somehow exposed and clothed at the same time... I blame having to fuck Bart into oblivion all those years when he was tired of me and was in his "do me" phase - so I was saying, I blame Bart for this new bi or opposite sex curiosity. I still haven't had sex with a woman and it's about time... Maybe I am saving myself for opposite sex marriage because in that regard I am rather technically still a virgin. I just feel sort of guilty about it. I mean I'm not supposed to want this, right? Which isn't to say I didn't like eating my Algerian pals hot young bitch bubble butt asshole all night even if he couldn't be fucked hard or long enough because if I do it the way he wants he usually hits me afterwards with this reflex of getting pissed off for fucking him so hard. Naturally, I liked that and found it irresistable and totally adorable - even if I got a black eye from it. I like how he then would as quickly as he reacts physically suddenly apologize so profusely, instantly afterwards... But why am I digressing into this sort of sordid filth that dare not speak its name? I haven't been naughty like that for quite sometime. And really it is time I set aside things like that in my life and also in my writing. So my apologies there 'bout that. My soul is still not yet unhooked from my human flesh and bones with natural and unnatural animal desires.

I still have no clue about going home to Dollville to see the dad...

I think I will look for a cheap flight from Paris non-stop to Detroit and get one of my nephews to fetch me there after I tour Muslim land in the motor city. I am curious to see how Islamic Detroit compares to say Islamic Brussels - as I find those cities rather similar - gutted and destroyed by post WWII capitalism eating itself and yet somehow still clinging to life. In both cases if it weren't for Muslims those cities would just become desertified post urban squallor. So I find this parallel of a tale of two gutted cities interesting. Naturally, I want to explore it. I guess I will have to rent a car there though since there is no more public transportation worth its weight in Detroit... Or perhaps my Dollville friend Chris will meet me there as he too likes exploring post city spaces, plus he knows Detroit already. He likes driving and roadtripping and we get along while we pretty much agree on nothing but architecture and urban planning or rather disintigration.

After the states I want to go either back to Yemen or to Morocco or Egypt as I haven't been to anywhere African. I still want to make it to Namibia and Mali one day before the teaching program I want to do starts in the autumn in Villette. I want to look for teaching work abroad, if nothing comes up then I will do the program in Bru-town. If I do find work abroad then I will save the Bru-town program for the next school year.

I am seriously very interested in working as a short term (one year) contract English teacher in the UAE - in particular Sharjah the really conservative town near Dubai. Nobody wants to work in that conservative environment as westerners drawn to that part of the world want Dubai so they can maintain their decadent Western ways - the very ways I want to unlearn and unhook in myself. Sharjah is where you have to start if you want to work in Dubai now. Actually I think Sharjah would be fun for a year - I really don't want to work in Dubai - but I would like to see it in some context that I could afford to see it in as it has gotten shamelessly expensive. I just didn't know about the place when it was affordable. Dubai is what we here at the Experiencing Belgium desk call the Inter-Galactic New Las Vegas in Arabia. I mean I really believe that Dubai is the New Las Vegas and better yet totally inter-galactic at that! Las Vegas (Nevada - the gambling town) has devolved into a family values theme park experience. Dubai ironically has replaced the old neon Vegas in a science fiction like way. Despite the social problems in the labor of building Dubai - not to mention the environmental ones - I still find Dubai to be unlike anything imaginable - and thus I really must start up the Experiencing Dubai desk there - soon! Plus the pay is way better for teaching English than in Yemen as well. Does anyone out there know if the UAE needs a professional blogger to build up and export virtually the image of Dubai as the Inter-Galactic New Las Vegas of Arabia? Well then, please write me here and make my dreams of Dubai come true!

The computer here at this present Experiencing The Netherlands desk is next to a window - I keep seeing middle aged and aging Neanderthal Nederlanders (the Dutch in Holland if you have a short attention span) who were out in the sun and got beet red stumbling around with large cans of beer in their hands. The younger ones looks like Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson home video wanna beez like my nieces and nephews. Looking like they just got back from a porn set or a gym or both.

thats all for now...

From this from this here present Experiencing Belgium desk now temporarily installed as the Experiencing The Netherlands desk in Scheveningen at the seaside longing to be the Experiencing The U.A.E. desk in Dubai.