Good afternoon

my house overlooks a playground in dutch suburbia

there’s kids playing there and i just heard one of them yell:

“Do the apocalypse! Do the apocalypse!”

the pattern of fingerprints on my ipad looks like a man dressed in a white tiger outfit with a lolling tongue. I just woke up from a long nap and i can taste that i should have brushed my teeth before taking it. There was a lot of honey in that bowl of home-made granola. My mom’s first try. It was more crispy than it should be, but i wouldn’t call it burned. How much of my reluctance comes from how much i love her?

I imagine kids games are a transparent membrane through which to observe the collective unconscious. The glee at watching an untenable world get out of hand. Reckless media narratives.. what’s reckless about trying to uphold.. something that’s breaking? ah, it’s the part where.. like Hannah Arendt said, if you keep lying to people it’s not just you they stop believing - it’s the idea that there’s even a reality to share at all. “But RJ don’t you know your buddhism? It’s all relative anyway!”

I don’t love how automatic the mechanisms are to elevate this unmooring to a sort of spiritual enlightenment. It’s also easy to test.. Will you keep your cool if your personal life falls apart, if it swallows your loved ones. “What ‘it’ are you referring to?”

Nothing gets past you my love. It. This crocodile, this.. bullfrog with teeth, the various maws of nihilism. You think ‘apocalypse’ is gonna start somewhere, expanding like a sinkhole? Until it collapses enough of everything, that our system stops, and falls away. and then, those who were lucky enough not to get by it, will get to start over.

Oh, sweet sweet sweet fool. I once dreamt of that too. For my privilege to come through for me once more.

No, apocalypse is a psychological thing - even a psychic phenomenon, that hits everywhere. The people we lose to delusions. The suicides. The environmental exposure cancers. Pesticidal alzheimer’s. Long covid. the dust bowl.

The takeover of the political system, by forces which fear democracy.

Here in the Netherlands, we somehow ended up with a prime minister who is not a member of any party, but he did used to be the head of the intelligence agency. And our last prime minister - who held the job for 12 years - is the head of Nato.

That suburb i’m peering at the world through? It’s on the edge of The Hague, and i’ve lived here for most of Mark Rutte’s tenure. I’m about to leave to and go live on a farm in the countryside. Run to the forest. Head for the hills. Because i’ve seen enough. And i do not think that this place will be spared. It already is not being spared. Over the last few years - since corona basically - if seen my neighbors grow more antsy, impatient, cruel, and scared. I’ve seen them weaken, and not replenish. I fear the same has happened to me!

They called the cops on me and had my beautiful plants confiscated. 10k views on youtube. that was the moment really, when i had had enough, and got ready to leave. it’s already two years ago, but i am leaving.

The netherlands has a reputation for tolerance and peace. I naively trusted that reputation, but i think it was a warning for me that came on time.

Because next time the test comes i won’t be here to be disappointed.