Travelogue 1103 – 29 September

Animal Cruelty

 

There was violence in the city yesterday. The city observed it, gave a shiver. The city absorbed it, bit its lip, bundled us off to work nevertheless under overcast skies. We submitted to the drizzle absently, steps unsure, distracted, wondering where our train of thoughts had been broken that day.

Kafka describes the day a lazy day butcher led a live ox into his shop for people to tear their meat from it alive. “I lay for a whole hour flat on the floor at the back of my workshop with my head muffled in all the clothes and rugs and pillows I had simply to keep from hearing the bellowing of that ox ….”

The man who went on a mad shooting spree in Rotterdam yesterday was known to the police. He had been charged with animal cruelty two years previously. Some of the parents at my daughters’ school knew exactly who he was, the man with angry eyes who beat his dog. He lived around the corner from the school. The woman he shot and killed had complained about him. Something snapped, and he went after the woman. He also killed the woman’s 14-year-old daughter. Then he torched their flat. All this happened while children left several schools a few hundred metres away, in two directions. Then the madman ran to the hospital where he had been failing in his studies. He shot a teacher and attempted to start another fire.

The helicopters and convoys of emergency vehicles were a society’s testimony that we weren’t falling apart. Who was convinced? People were edgy, glaring at each other angrily and fearfully.

One parent texted, “Zal denken dat is meer een verhaal van America dan van Rotterdam.” But America limps on, and we do, too. The city takes it, absorbs it. We survive. We survive in the company of the murderer, a reminder of the terrible face of survival.

Travelogue 1102 – 9 September
Capricious Spirits

These summer interludes, when all day long the skies are clear and the temperatures are high, they inspire in me some sentimentality. Maybe it’s nostalgia. I’ve lived long, nearly equal periods of life settled in places known for their weather, either for glorious sunshine or for inclement weather. I’ve been ten years now in one of the latter, in a place famous for its dreary stretches of the wet and overcast. A day of rain would be another day of rain. But a day of sunshine is special. For people who have always lived here, it’s a day of release, a day to party. For me, it’s an echo of other places and times. Perhaps, in a similar way, a rainy day releases melancholy reflections in those who have moved to L.A.

The ghost is restless again. In the middle of the night, it found Josie’s doggie toy, the one that walks and barks, while its eyes light up. I had to stumble out of bed and down the stairs to turn the toy off. These are odd gestures. I continue to wonder about the modus operandi of ghosts. I find their logic really fascinating. What do these weird little gestures add up to?

In a similar spirit, I’ve been drawn into the recent media discussions about UFOs. We are positing that aliens have solved the enormous problems posed by the vastness of the universe and discovered a primitive intelligence that cannot seriously represent much of a puzzle for them. And what do they do with this discovery? Oh, they hang around, much in the manner of ghosts, playing hide and seek for fifty years, pranking our navy pilots and pantsing our farmers, leaving puzzles in the form of crop circles, and generally being silly. I think I would take a shine to an interstellar species that was this frivolous.