Ibis. Sheraton (Crown Plaza or some other nonsensical word implying superiority). The last two ‘cafes’ that I have sat at. Writing? If ‘Please see attached file’ passes of as writing, then yes. I mean, the Ibis wasn’t so bad. I had put up my father there for one night, since I know he likes his space to deal with jet lag, and I went there in the morning to work and meet for a coffee. It’s full of the common people, people with some semblance of common sense – no need for frills or boutique hotels, or the need to be a part of the revelry in the city center. People like my father. Sure, the atmosphere is lacking, the cappuccino comes from a machine, yet there is still something good about the place. Or maybe it was the company.
Now, the Sheraton is a whole other monster. There’s one just out the front doors, or connected even to Schipol, and I found myself there ‘working’ for the morning while I awaited the arrival of my parents. The infamous team Zoom call was made among a swarm of others spewing the exact same bullshit into their laptop screens. And if you thought that was bad, looking up from my screen I was confronted with dozens of cut & pasted businessmen, spewing their own brand of bullshit, without the comfortable space of bandwidth – I mean face to face. As their faced contorted in meaningless smiles and nods, I recognized my own discomfort. Sweaty balls in tweed trousers, razor burn brandished above a too tight dress shirt neck collar to ward off any bohemian stubble, a streak of L’Oreal eye cream remaining unsmeared on the top of the cheek to hide any signs of the late night jerking off session, reeking of ALLURE Homme SPORT picked up at the same looking duty-free in every airport of the world. Acronyms flying throughout the salon, I sat there in disgust, but also with a fair share of admiration and awe at all the Richard Yates characters that were there in person and breathing the same air as me.
It is now Sunday morning and I just saw off my dad at Utrecht Central, where he caught the train to catch a flight to his next destination, Gdansk, to breathe some Baltic sea air and clear his head. Mid-October we’ll all join him; sister, mother, grandchildren in the Polish countryside. For now, I am here, in my sanctuary, Broodnodig, a befitting name, since I also felt the need to come alone, clear my head, write to a friend. On two recent occasions I had started a post and ran out of steam. The first was a rant when I saw someone reading Rutger Bergman, and the other was during a flight from Nuremberg, returning from a business trip where for two days I was doing the exact same as the paragraph above with the exception of the fragrance. I still think I’ll publish these unfinished pieces, if you don’t mind.
I’ve been able to finish The Crisis of Narration, however midway through, I realized I could not give it the attention that it deserved. It struck me that the writing was such that each sentence would require a pause for reflection and contemplation, a luxury that I could not offer these days. At one point my attention was simultaneously being demanded by Milo, the wife, my parents, some pesky colleague, foot high blades of grass – already I”ll call a spade a spade – two foot high weeds on the lawn. Even in the absence of half of these demands, I still find it a struggle to do what I would like to do most – think, read, write. This has given way to acceptance that these are my days right now, and some day I’ll return to that. For now I’ll have to concede defeat, I lost Jitse, I lost. I need a car, I need a diversified stock portfolio with a 3.2% annual compound interest rate, I need to familiarize myself with the latest flavour of bullshit – adding THE AI to everything.
Next to me sits The Passenger: South Korea. I’ll finish it in the next few days, without much fanfare. I’ll still give it to you – maybe you can find someone that makes use of it – but as far as good reading goes, it’s not something I’d recommend. A lot of facts, and so far, with only two essays remaining, not a whole lot of narration. In between I have finished another Roth, check GR soon for a raving review, and I’m tempted to go on to the next; The Human Stain; if only to finish ‘The American Trilogy’. Speaking of Yanks, I have recently found a podcast that I’ve enjoyed, the hosts are literature professors that go in depth about the merits of The Great American novel. Each episode they pick a book to discuss if it qualifies as such. That’s my sales pitch. The next novel that I want to read that is on their list would be Carson McCuller’s ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’. Are you game? Understand if you want to focus on the East instead. I’m not even sure when I’ll get to that, if I’m not mistaken my next Knausgaaurd will arrive in the beginning of October. A few weeks ago, in the heat of summer I had the idea of writing about couples making passes at each other, and it was my intention to write about the frustration of saying all the right things, playing coy, the build up of alcohol, skin, the summer sun, a twinkle in the eye, only to find it all for naught and going home alone. Do you understand, what I would have been getting at? If I need to make it any more obvious, I’m talking about you reading Knausgauard. What’s it gonna take?
Alright, the nagging voice in the back of my head, the one that tells me I have to do this and that, has returned. Congratulations on the take-off of the guided tours, this really pleases me to hear and I’m not surprised to hear that it is already something of a success. Looking forward to hear about it when we meet. Since you’re back in the game, if that Sunday isn’t enough, we could follow up with a Zoom call.
Call for action
Since cycling around town with a toddler strapped to my front handlebars, I experience a heightened sense of the dangers that other cyclists pose. Even when my son is not with me I’ve grown increasingly infuriated with those that don’t abide by the rules. A cheeky omission of the red light, too few lumens on the front light – these things I can tsk tsk. The ones that enrage me the most are the texters, tiktokers, google mappers, spotify song skippers. Especially when I’m overtaking on the left, I make it a point to lean in slightly with my shoulder and cut quickly in front to signal my displeasure at this clear violation and in the hopes that they snap out of their trance. Next time I’m contemplating doing the same and then slamming on my brakes to force a fender bender from behind, a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the people.
The bike traffic in Utrecht is becoming increasingly congested. The commute from my flat to the station can sometimes be entirely fender to fender, and this morning, yet again, at least three culprits were texting and driving. Occasionally you can see the bike police set up on the bridge, but in my opinion this surveillance isn’t done frequently enough. It struck me that the state isn’t doing enough to curb this practice, and I seriously wondered if we as a society could take matters into our own hands.
What I envisioned was an additional storage mounted on the front handlebars, something akin to the field hockey stick holder I’ve seen before, which would house several easily reachable sticks which would then be deployed by cyclists, against cyclists not adhering to the rules. The intention being, not to beat the culprit, rather when passing by, the stick is inserted into the bike tire spokes with the intention of: a) causing severe damage to the bicycle b) physical injuries to the rider and c) a cracked screen at the minimum, if not complete destruction of the smart device.
Give it a week, and I guarantee no one, absolutely no one is going to be on their phones while cycling. Lost? You pull over and check. Running late? Voice activate a message. Don’t like that song? Tough luck, suck it up for three minutes. I haven’t a clue how these things work – in this faux democracy I think it would entail some politicians debating it (witness the Fat Bike endemic) before a law being passed. With my method it would simply be a blitz on social media that starting October 1st, the sticks come into effect. Now before getting too philosophical, I’m certain this kind of self-policing state has been attempted before and failed. But then I think back into Shantaram, and recall that something similar took place on their streets, and as far as I know, life goes on. The other vision that comes to mind is something along the lines of Mad Max, but I’m only suggesting taking this approach on the bike lanes. For now. I suppose the caveats that come to mind would be sticking the stick into innocent riders, like into that bastard that cut the line in front of you at the kibbeling stand, who’s violated some unwritten rule of social construct, but not the one that the stick is solely intended to be used for. No, you know what, there will be a by-law that says the stick can be applied to those people as well. Then of course, it’s easy to see where the rich take this – inevitably we’ll see phone-less bike chauffeurs shuttling the wealthy in all their pomp – fine. I can live with that. So long as the streets are safe. We don’t have time to debate or examine the history books. In the rule loving Dutch society, I’d like to see for once, a strong enforcement, from the bottom up.
Notes from the Airspace between Netherlands and Germany
It was possibly my first entry into Straightread where I wrote to you from a plane. I could be wrong, but I have no way to check from where I am presently seated. 11C, while my boss is a knight’s move, yes, literally, away in 12 F. The screen has been darkened, if he strains enough he’ll see that some funny business is going on instead of a spreadsheet. It’s a risk I’m willing to take, since I have not had enough time, strength or energy to properly write for quite some time now, as evidenced by the chirping crickets that has become our site.
There’s been a few things I had wanted to write to you about, I’m going to have some verbal diarrhea on the plane, I fear that it will be very much a recounting of information instead of a story, had I the time I’d introduce characters, a story arc and a tightly knit ending. But, I’m repeating myself, I’ve capitulated. The work and the domestic duties have conquered me. All I’m left with is recounting information and if I’m lucky some rants, though sometimes the battery is so severely drained I can hardly muster up the strength to comment on how much I fucking hate the KLM lounge and everything that it stands for and my colleagues whipping out their penises to compare their Explorer status, one of them so well-endowed that he is a few flights away from reaching LIFETIME PLATINUM.
Fatima has aches and pains. She is pregnant again. I shudder to go back to read Straightread entries from the autumn of 2022. The house is so overladen with things; I have found myself ordering three types of organizational apparatuses from amazon, to no avail, everything remains unorganized at best, or broken at worst. The result is that my approach to life is to take it on a daily basis. There are no grand plans for the next weeks or months, if I can make it through the day without losing my mind, it is considered a success. There are reinforcements coming in September, ‘Babcia’, grandma in Polish will be (wo)manning the kitchen, so there’ll be some relief, but that’s ages away, there are many days left to conquer before then.
The trip to Herzoganaruach has been every bit as dreadful as I imagined. The hotel breakfast, the brands, the people, the meetings – I realize how unauthentic I have been and I have no desire to do it for much longer. I’d like to somehow take the time to live, the way I want to live. If it means poverty, then I’m willing to chance it. (Re-reading this a few weeks later I take back that last sentence).
Okay, some of that is out of my system, so now I turn my attention to this interesting little essay that got me to thinking. Please read, before proceeding with this paragraph any further. So, what would be the implicit message of Utrecht? I’m not sure it’s big enough to have a strong enough message on the forefront. If I had to stretch it, then I might say it is to be young(er). Attend more festivals, eat more vegan. Free the nipple, wear fewer bras. Have a social conscience, perhaps that is it. This, of course is heavily influenced by the large contingency of students, and maybe there isn’t a strong implicit message since the young change trends so frequently. Yesterday’s cryptocurrency trading club is today’s running club. This perception is of course largely influenced by who you associate with. It wouldn’t be too hard to find a group of starched dressed shirts talking about the trading commissions offered by the Trading 212 investment app. The upstairs neighbors are largely patriotic, while a trip to the voorstraat bans anyone who is wearing orange on the same chauvinistic grounds. If I look at a larger sample size of The Netherlands, smaller than some large global cities, then is it okay to label the aphorism ‘Doe Normaal’ as the implicit (or even not so implicit) message? There is perhaps no real need to be ambitious here, since what you’ve got is already pretty damn good. Do you think you’re qualified already to have a stab at what Seoul is trying to tell you?
That time when…
I’m on a roll, it seems. There was a sense of pride this morning when I strolled into the office, the first to arrive on a Friday morning, shortly after 8:15 am. Plenty of time to spare before the 8:30 meeting – a meeting that I already discussed with another colleague was going to be entirely useless, a meeting, like all other meetings that have occurred with this group, where my contribution would be to say good morning at the beginning and ciao at the end. Despite that, today was going to be a productive day, one where I was going to make a difference in the world. Well, the meeting got canceled at 8:27 am and by 9:15 am all my ambition had been shot. It’s now 11:12 am and I have not much to do, so I’m listening to Post Malone’s new album – not out of any appreciation for the music – it’s more of a cultural expedition to see what the American youth of today are about – pick up trucks, NFL, Trump, Maga, Post Malone putting out a country album. Yeehaw! God Bless America. I can hear F-1 Trillion in the background of all great American Wal-Marts. Mind you, I did see some teens discussing the merits of Oreo Flavoured Coke at the Albert Heijn, but at least there we are all spared of Post Malone’s seamless transition from hip-hop to country. Something like that needs the commentary of Eason Ellis. But fuck, really, why am I complaining? If I angle it correctly, in my mind you can view this as BEING PAID TO WRITE. The dream is sitting here in my little lap and all I can do is mock it.
Well you didn’t ask for it but here are some observations that I noted down, the last time this group convened. Are you sick of this already? Just tell me and I’ll find some other way to vent, probably to the poor souls of Goodreads, before I’m kicked out there and then I’ll take it to the streets.
There are about seven of us in a meeting room, and three others have called in and are being transmitted to us on a giant TV. We took turns staring at the screen so as to not be rude. I started to write, while two others were online shopping, another was perhaps actually working, the one opposite from me looked like he was browsing vacation packages. Up on the screen, there was a dude with dreadlocks piled into a beehive, combined with the tribal pattern (branded) t-shirt and it struck me as odd. Did he realize the mammoth clash in outward appearance, the hippie vibes emanating loudly while discussing payment runs and bank code execution in SAP. Did he realize where he was working? Ah, another brethren who hates the system, but finds himself handcuffed to it. The weekends are for revolutions. I could not wait to get out.
After a half hour of this hippie-cum-banker my manager left, to have a smoke. I started working on my 6 day World streak. We did a connect 4 – all of us in a row on our phones. Days like this make me feel less bad about being at home and mowing the lawn on company time. Everyone is better for it. The rastafarian spent the last 15 minutes trying to fix an error on what he was demonstrating. Power to the people. The mediator interjected to schedule a follow up meeting.
It all reminded me of a time I attended a university lecture from a visiting professor. It was one of these obligatory courses in our curriculum that was a guaranteed 8 because of how openly simple it was. Business Organization 101. I got into tens and thousands of dollars of debt and spent the best years of my youth doing that. Well, I went to this lecture because I paid for it. Along with about three other people – everyone else already clued in that you could get an 8 regardless of anything you did – and we sat there for a solid hour, while the visiting professor – also out of some weird obligation to ‘Educating our Youth’ was on full blown auto-pilot. No one was listening to what he was saying – I mean no one because no one was there, except for three of us, and we weren’t paying attention. It didn’t even matter because all of his lecture notes were provided to us on a powerpoint slides (which we could print out at exorbitant rates on the university computers, each page cha-chinging the CEO’s, I mean Dean’s pocket.) This was way before smartphones and that is perhaps why I remember the lecture so vividly. Not the content, but just the phenomenon of spinning around the world and colossally wasting my time there and thinking what the fuck. Precisely that; what the fuck; was what had to be going through all our heads during that meeting with the hippie on the screen. We were only there because we were all getting paid. Where, who in society do I go to explain that this is all a farce. Society – please let me read and write while receiving a monthly allowance that let’s me live. No one is going to say sitting in that empty lecture room, that useless SAP meeting is better. I’ll even write beautifully, I can stop all this complaining. Even if no one reads it or pays attention, apparently there is a market for that.
September 27th – Eindhoven Airport
100 people are attending a newspaper conference. 45 of them are writers and more than 38 are editors. Of the people at the conference, x are both writers and editors and 2x are neither. What is the largest possible number of people who are both writers and editors?
You see, it is a question such as this, taken from Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) that I’m 100% certain Paul Graham aces without batting an eye. I know the type, I know the type well. An acquaintance of ‘the smartest person I know’ – in the sense of intellect being determined by something such as a GMAT, annihilated the test. He, like Paul Graham, is a software engineer. It is by this metric, that I assume Graham reached his conclusion that Cambridge is the intellectual capital of the world. People there geographically amassed, that can get 700 and above on that test. Narrow? Sure, but doesn’t someone that solves the above like a tic-tac-toe puzzle deserve some recognition (if not millions and billions from Silicon Valley)? If I’m not mistaken, I showed my Dutch ex-girlfriend a graph showing the inverse relationship between IQ and religious belief. She had a similar reaction to you, she was flat out pissed off at me. Rightfully so too. Nevertheless, I found your critique of the article a little harsh, if I may say so, as if he was not qualified to make the main point of his article, that cities deliver an implicit message, because he had only lived in the Western World. Sure, it’s tainted with chants of USA USA in the background and bows at the altar of capitalism with the holy trinity of Ambition, Ambition and Ambition, (U poor? Ur fault.) but I found the idea quite interesting to explore when I came across it on a Reddit post (story for another day).
As for this acquaintance of mine, I now come across every so often on holy gospel in the name of C, on LinkedIn, the latest boasting among late night hackathons in his twenties that he looks back upon with a chuckle and more often than not a hommage to AI – which leaves me in a quandary. Because he’s leading some kind of sales force, tech sales? I don’t even know what that is, to be honest, but to me it seems kind of a waste to have someone of that intellect selling an AI that is probably blazing a pathway to ‘learning’ the type of porn that I’d like best. But, being who I am, I HAVE TO respect that 700 score, merely speaking to him leaves me intimidated. But.. tech sales.. Really? The AI? Perhaps I do not worship The AI enough to appreciate it. The Maniac sucked for me, afterall. Another memory of him was when he was starting out in the field and how he had his entire team of interns build a stock trading platform for a billionaire hedge fund. Earlier this year my friend was to head out West for some skiing and fine dining. I picture my friend, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham wearing turtle necks and partaking in some fine dining somewhere in SoCal, talking about which city they could siphon talent from and a roaring laughter coming from the suggestion of heading East, a thought that could only be entertained by middle managers tasked with obtaining cheaper labor. The 700 GMAT scores stop at the Greenwich Meridian, afterall, and anyone without that is deemed surplus.
87, that’s my guess. 87 can be both writers and editors. Wrong? Fine, punish me. I deserve to do meaningless work and be poor. There’s for sure 1 person at the conference that can’t be either.
(rereading this – I don’t think it’s clear but I don’t have time today to make my points clearer in the main text. The points are: I sympathize with your feelings of a dislike about the narrow mindedness of these types of people and their thinking (while at the same time I find them intimidating), and I think in your case that may have clouded over any appreciation of Graham’s ideas).