Memories of Suburban Tears

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 10:23

Yesterday I went riding on the non-automotive bicycle pedestrian path here in Scheveningen (Google earth it if you need more information on the place) north into the dunes - the wilderness is protected so you can't go crawling into the dunes themselves but then who needs to? Not everywhere is Fire Island - though on the beach side here it is just that... didn't go there though. The light reflected off the dune grass looks velvetee green. I can stop looking at it.
For two days in a row now I saw some young woman of non European origin in camouflage clothes with a camera who seemed more interested in shamelessly voyeuristically photographing the people in the wilderness trails place though she simultaneously seemed to be projecting the image of a bird/nature photographer. Whenever I looked at her - her camera was pointed on me. She had strange movements - like the main character from the Todd Haynes film SAFE who near the end moved strangely, angularly, across a rural New Mexico landscape. That same movement was captured in the affische poster for the film. It's an image I cant get over as if it means something else that I just cant put my finger on. Then I went up these old wooden stairs to a small lookout point with one bench and was watching the sun on one of the many ponds behind the seaside. So many birds and fresh air... and most importantly that quiet from non-automotive areas... then along came an annoying Dutch couple who didn't speak to me upon entering a tiny public space - their arrival breaking my solo meditative nature observation meditative moment then they were followed by the creepy photographer woman - who in this strange little space of a lookout point seemed more like a shamelessly voyeuristic Mossad agent except such an agent would never be as silly or as bumbling as she.
So I left...
...continued north and found another lookout point. Sat just outside the legal area on a soft mossy dune side - and then an annoying UK family of three arrived making so much noise just as I was getting all nature quiet contemplative like. Again what those people had to photograph I don't know what but when they arrived they didn't bother to speak to me either even though they sat down less than one meter away. Then I heard the camera click and again when I look its pointed at me despite all the other amazing scenery to photograph...
...then they left.
It felt creepy like - on the one hand - impolite and unwanted almost sexual overture like and on the other hand it felt like idiot undercover Euro pol international police... Which given the proximity of a military training facility in the dunes I figure they are part of some international military police academy the sequel training facility for working incognito.
...And so after the annoying UK family-ette left I dissolved into the landscape and enjoyed the moment of aloneness very much. Then bicycled home very fast to where I am staying for the exercise. Made some tea and ate two bananas, some very good dates I bought here imported from Iran but from a Turkish shop - had tea and dates with fresh yogurt, toast with jam... The dates being so good like confiture on a pit or stone.
For the moment I am alone. I can hear the music of the next door neighbors computer playing anything from Phil Collins Miami Vice theme to Italianate Operettas. I am not annoyed by this in fact it stave's off falling into feeling too alone.
In Schreveningen it seems the church bells go throughout the night marking the hour and half hour. I haven't heard this in Belgium. I like church bells like I like minarettes. There are many silent minarets nearby in Den Haag/De Hague. Church bells make me think of Poe's For Whom The Bells Toll... or is it Bell Tolls...? Everytime I hear church bells I am somehow happy to be reminded that I am mortal and that we all die - it makes me thankful to be alive at that moment so it is not depressing.
The bicycle trails here though remind me of growing up in Worthington (Ohio) with the bicycle trails along the Olentangy River - I would go there back home in Dollville a lot and sit on the bench next to that polluted morass - smelling the diesel of state route 315 and the noise of that across the river beyond a chain link prison like fence - not to mention the helicopters and planes from that small air field out there. There is a Fishing Access off Wilson Bridge Road between the bridge and the entrance to the office park on the north side - where the access is. My father had alot to do with the idea of a little space there being set aside probably 40 years ago as a fishing access. Some town planner knew my dad and it was dads suggestion that perhaps made the river park there possible. That parkinglot access for fishing was still there the last time I was in Worthington though now it is has evolved more into a public recreation and sports access - occassionally there are still fisherman using the place as it was originally intended. At the bottom of the fishing access is a car park if you walk along the trails south from there to state route 161 or on to Antrim lake - that was where I used to go to be alone and find some solace in the fake man made environment there. If you go there and find a bench perhaps I sat there too back when I used to be really depressed with chronic depression and fatigue and would go be alone there and often times I would just cry and then feel better looking at the nature remnants. Memories of Suburban Tears.... I actually would wonder about what woodland Native people lived there - I would think about the old farm that had been rendered obsolete by real estate developers in the 1960's. No wonder I grew up a depressive lost kid a condition which still dictates much of my lifes current limitations.
Ok enough of that... I received a short note about a blog in a comment section of my Experiencing Belgium blogette which I am posting here for you - the link not the comment.
I liked the essay at that blog about the shock of moving to Atlanta - interesting though all the same - to use the cliche from Gertrude Stein about Oakland, California at the turn of the last century - "There is no there, there" which now applies to most North American cities. The essay about Belgian Waffles was worth reading too especially if you want to know more about Brussels.
Back to coastal Holland - I really do like the scenery here in the nature area - and honestly it is better than the Prozac effect. the sense of clean seaside air. I really am thankful to be this much farther away from my ex and all that discarded amputated gangrene bodily limb that has been festering away for five or more years...
Or maybe Siamese twins being cut apart would be a more accurate description of my state of being human at present.
...but i don't want to default into isolation and the loneliness of bachelorhood that so many men and even women know so intimately. It is sort of raw like - and I admire those who are accustomed to being alone with dignity and a humor.
...but i don't much like Dutchlings in public park spaces.
...even as strangers on the streets here...
In that sense all this here makes me appreciate Sint Joost/San Josse in Belgium and it's anarchic linguistic melange but me thinks I should spend more time in nature...
That will be my new albeit late new years resolution.
By the way - there is a ground floor apartment beneath this space small and cozy Dutch house - it must be tiny - and there are sometimes two or three annoying low life Dutchlings who are often there - total Dutch white trash - which there is no shortage of. Sorry but it takes one to know one and so I am an expert on this... Appa-inbred-lay-shia-an as I am... (Appalachian - wikipedia it if you don't understand the difference between white trash and redneck or hillbilly).
...the house I am staying in is not so far from a tiny version of a found object art museum of a house. In fact my host Tijs while on the beach saw what I thought was a pile of garbage consisting of ropes and plastic strings mixed up with dried seaweeds and I thought he was going to be a good Protestant Dutchling and chuck it in the trash can at the beach entrance, but no, he took it home and threw it in a heep on the floor next to the fireplace. After he departed for Paris I hung it on the wall on a lonesome nail above the eating table... Now a huge pile of sand sits on the floor boards where that thing lay.
There is a Pathe cinema nearby in a disguisting casino like coastal strip of concrete conspiracy such that you could be anywhere and nowhere at the same time. But you cannot eve see the sea behind those buildings. What kind of idiotic developers do this - so I may go there to the cinema solo after Easter to avoid people. I haven't seen a movie in ages or a DVD - don't even know what to see or whats on or worth the trouble.
I want to become the ultimate tourist and travel back in time to see places I visit as they were intended prior to the petroleum automotive age destruction we live in. Schrevening when it was a seaside village had as a the tallest monument the church which still standing after two world wars has been rendered obsolete by being dwarfed and hidden from the sea by the Concrete Conspiracy.
My host in Schreveningen who I have hosted many times back in Villette is charming and sweet towards me and honestly I don't understand him at all - I admire him very much and perhaps even envy him - anyway his partner lives in a fab house in De vague Hague. So Tijs divides his time between here and there - it is just that I am not sure what he thinks or is passionate about in general. I know he is passionate about the ecosphere human life depends on but it is more like I do not comprehend how northwestern Europeans express or live out their interior passions.
At least here in Holland the keyboard I use us a qwerty board lol I am so tired of Belgian azerty keyboards.
See you around the bend where hearts can heal and souls can mend
as the Baghdad Burning blog goes.
Which the bend I guess being referred to there is the Tigris and Euphrates river bends for which there are many bends. I like the idea of a bend or wrinkle in time as that great children's book by L' Engle was titled.
See you around the bend in time where hearts can heal and souls can mend. I need such a place along such rivers. Unfortunately of late for Iraq and Baghdad the river bend tends to be the mythical river Styx that separates the underworld from the realm of the living. Whether we all know it or not we are all longing for the area around the Tigris and Euphrates to be healed after the global military industrial complex ruined such a historical place for corporate profit.