The Unidentifiable Beauty

Months go by without a real moment of rest. Yes, the body recuperates by being fed, having reasonable good nights of sleep, a few kinds of energy building products and painkilling pills. Somehow the mind doesn’t seem to be influenced by the maintenance of the body. The search for some breaking fluid to slow down these restless thoughts isn’t very successful, being busy seems to give some relief, but at the same time seems to feed the seeds of incoherently growing mental ivy. It’s the mind that blocks the body, the ongoing thoughts of not knowing are paralyzing the fingertips.  It’s some kind of mindfulness that overrules the attempts to seek for mindlessness. I see others seeking for a cure, some drowning these thoughts by flooding them with alcohol, some trying to dry them out with unreliable smoke. Temporarily solutions with horrendous anti-social side effects and regrettable outcomes that appear when the elusive dreams are over. Silence could be an option if it wasn’t for the i...

Our history is drowned in dark moments, some we do remember, some we don’t like to remember but the most important is that we should remember the events where humanity took a wrong turn. We should teach the next generations about them, learn them to put dreadful happenings in the right context and hope history doesn’t repeat itself. It seems that over centuries the absolutely inhumane behaviour and excesses of crime against humanity are easily romanticized. Sometimes with commercial reason, pirates were just adventuring people who didn’t harm anybody according to the Disney Studio’s, sometimes with evil propaganda in mind. The controversy about removing statues of Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston and other Confederate “heroes” in the southern states of America is almost getting to the same proportions as the violent discussion about the Black Piet in The Netherlands. I remember the American soldiers tearing down a statue of Saddam Hussein, because “the bad guys” should be erased o...

The first day of 2017, it’s still early, when I hear some scratching at the kitchen door. No, for our four-legged friend it doesn’t make a difference on how long the day before was and just needs to do what it does every morning at 7, also on the first of January. Sometimes we decide to crawl back under the blankets together, next to the Lady of the House, but usually, I don’t. After a few hours of laying down, my back needs some vertical gravitation, my blood pressure can use a little caffeine and my mind longs for nicotine. The new year won’t change much in that perspective, the good intentions that I’ve taken are secretly stowed in a matchbox, which seems large enough. The fog over the valley creates a virgin look at the new year, it’s quiet and peaceful. Well, until the world comes in through the laptop, talking about the first victims of the year in a terrorist attack, Trump’s first tweets, burning ferries, bailiffs who even turn out to collect on New Year’s day, and the low-sl...

“Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”, a phrase that’s so often and easily put on a postcard or as a sincere sentence at the and of a letter or social media post. Without a doubt, it’s meant to be an hounest wish for all. Of course, we do know that just a small part of the world’s population celebrates Christmas and even fewer in the tradition of Christianity, in which “Santa” doesn’t exist and all the commercial overspending on credit cards has no place. We do know that the bearded figure we see as “Jezus” never saw a reindeer and that the whole story, or fairy-tale if you want to put it like that, took place in a society located in Palestine, without decorated Christmas trees, Coca-Cola trucks, Catholic bishops and some red dressed lunatic from the north-pole suffering from obesity. The celebration of Christmas is just a cultural and historical event that combines all kinds of ancient religions and rituals from over the world into one day, well two in some countries after labour uni...

Last Friday night, the findings of the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC), an international group of investigative journalists, published a few results of analyzing 18.6 million documents, from the world of football, for many months. The documents were made available by the whistle-blower platform “Football Leaks” to the German weekly “Der Spiegel”, a member of the EIC. Thousands of dodgy tax constructions will be revealed, not only from managing agencies, football club's and officials but even the crooked ways of famous players trying to avoid paying taxes on their income by creative ways of using tax-havens, shadow accounts, phantom invoices and multiple company constructions. But that’s not the essence of where the anger and naive disbelief comes from, to write this column. As many ordinary people, I was repelled by the fact that the Portuguese football player Cristiano Ronaldo diverted 63.5 million to a tax haven. This evasion of taxes saved him about 35 million. The...

There’s a devastating wind blowing from the east, hot air rising up in the west, cold water coming from the north and we’re in the middle. Unprepared and unprotected because we just don’t like to give up our pride and work together. There’s darkness escaping from within our own stubbornness, an open box of Pandora spreading a devil’s virus of anger and anti-intellectualism. The truth is something for academics, not for the people and certainly not for the ones they elect to rule. The Oxford Dictionaries honoured the expression “post-truth” to the international word of the year, it must have something to do with the context of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Post-truth: goodbye truth and facts. Welcome to hollow frames, idiosyncratic interpretations of the obvious. Journalistic fact-checkers exposed lies and half-truths but were then portrayed as offenders against those who were exposed. And because they do their work, they are seen as old-fashioned politically-correct peopl...

We were friends, yes we were close, as close as you can be to anybody. Together we scared away unwanted customers out of the shop, visited many blues festivals, had several quarter-pounders at the drive-thru, seduced our women and married our love, had dressed-up Christmas dinners, liked the famous sausages of the “Hema”, which we would eat in the mint green van, guarded the equipment of many artists, sold stuff at flea-markets and antique fairs, traveled thru Europe, scrawled along the beaches of Normandy and finally moved to Portugal. Nineteen years and six months we enjoyed each other’s company, trusted one another for the full hundred percent, had lot’s of laughs and shared moments of pain and grieve. Loyalty beyond any doubt, unconditional friendship, mutual respect until the day I had to put him in his grave and was putting the soil on top of my best friend ever. I cried for days because I knew that moment of saying farewell was nearby, he knew it to and seemed to be ready to l...