AND SO IT WAS

. . . that for the third time in my life, I have somehow ended up in a rural province in Belgium, about 15 miles outside of Brussels. It is a place that cannot be found on any map. Near as I can tell, it is made up of strange brick houses, little country roads, thousands of acres of farmland populated by sheep and cows and horses, and a chain grocery store with an unpronounceable name that has the branding of a sci-fi pharmaceutical company.

Yesterday at sundown I walked down those little country roads bordering strange brick houses and endless farmland to get to that grocery store. I require a king’s bounty of fruit to exist, and so I went looking for it. Once inside the place, I realized that, in comparison to the modest Belgians around me, I absolutely looked like a deranged creep on account of my unwashed clothes and unwashed Edward Scissorhands hair. I did not remove my sunglasses. I had already drawn enough heat, and the last thing I needed was to be recognized or else I’d be signing autographs till midnight.

I am far from an expert on Belgian grocery stores, having only been to two in my entire life, and I have no doubt there exist chains that are more “fun”, but as far as Colruyt goes, it sure is spartan as hell. You take a massive unwieldy shopping cart from an overhang outside, then push it through the front door, where you are immediately railroaded into a rat’s maze of one-way aisles labeled with arrows. There is no music, no decor, no personality, no warmth of any kind—just a Soviet’s wet dream of sky-high grey skeletal shelves packed with foodstuff both natural and artificial, and a large refrigerated produce room separated by thick clear plastic flaps in which you marathon through lest you freeze your ass off. Take that however you will.

I suppose if you just wanted to get the job done and go home, you might dig the whole barebones industrial warehouse thing. I can think of at least one person who would prefer this. But as a red-blooded American clown who enjoys getting stoned and going grocery shopping at night, I am put off by it, as I like to Hang Out. I need the creature comforts of a cheery grocery store like Trader Joe’s. Grocery shopping, to me, can be meditative and peaceful so long as the store is nearly empty and there is no special hurry to leave . . . and hopefully I have remembered, in my drug haze, to bring headphones. Colruyt is not a place where you can do that sort of thing on account of it feels like it was designed in a lab by Big Brother. It is clear they want you to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

Finally, look how massive their receipts are. This is nearly as large as a legal size sheet of paper and it looks like bill a mechanic would hand you:

Anyway, I am done talking about grocery stores in Belgium!!!

I walked five minutes home past cornfields and cyclists to get back to my friends’ fortified compound, which is, yes, a strange brick house. Through the gate which is off the main road is a stone driveway that opens up into a sort of garden area and a grassy tree-canopied plot of land. All the way in the back, near the property line, is a chicken run which houses three chickens who are yet unnamed. And out from the forested places came running Billy and Molly the cats, who, along with the chickens, I am guardian of for the next week. They were excited that I had returned. I was excited too.

Oh! That’s the whole reason I’m here, don’t you know—to lord over the house and feed the animals. I am their Protector. Every year my friends Katrijn and Jef go on vacation, and they ask me to take on this gig, and for one reason or another I have never been able to do it until now. Well, now that I am once again an itinerant loser who has no reason to live, and who is every day little by little returning to the dust of the earth, I figured I’d trade the solitude of my high tower in Berlin for the provincial cadence of a country house in Belgium. In contrast to my Dracula cave, pretty much everything is nicer here, being that it was obviously masterminded by a woman. I feel as though I am staying in a spa resort. If only I had not forgotten my weed at home.

I have spoken of this many times on my website, so I won’t go through The Whole Thing again, though here’s the truncated version: Katrijn emailed me out of the blue eight years ago when I was dead broke and utterly broken in Portland. Back then I was (unknowingly) inhaling black mold spores that were growing in my basement, thought I had contracted mysterious STD from a surgeon’s doctor that ended up being a UTI, and made about a buck over minimum wage working at a bar / late-night sandwich shop frequented by the absolute worst demographic of human being and staffed by a bunch of cokeheads. I was sure I would never get laid again and I supposed my life was finally over.

And behold: One overcast day in Portland, in the darkness of my unraveling, I felt a hand reach out from the abyss and gently touch my shoulder. It came in the form of a sincere and dreamy email that had been written by a woman named Katrijn in Belgium who claimed to have read this very website, and who had identified with what had been written upon it. She wrote in a way that only someone whose first language was not English would think to write, and all the better for it. And yet still my immediate instinct was that one of my friends had sent it to prank me. I did not want to believe that because it felt too cynical, and I was at a real low point and needed to hear those exact words at that exact time—in this case from a faraway stranger who had contacted me in good faith—and so that is what I chose to believe.

I wrote back to Katrijn, and then she to me . . . and a little while later I received a letter in my PO box written on stationary she said her mother had bought for her in Vienna when she was a girl. She had the most beautiful handwriting I’d ever seen. I mailed a letter to Belgium in return. YEARS PASSED IN THIS WAY, us writing back and forth across the ocean and, hey presto, we have been friends ever since. Wow!

Christmas before last I flew to Belgium and spent it with Jef and Katrijn and her daughters:

And I was just here again in May, during which, among other things, her daughters beat the shit out of me while on our evening walk:

AND NOW

. . . eight years after first receiving that cryptic email, I have been entrusted with Katrijn’s country house and all the living things inside and around it. Isn’t that nuts? Mostly I have been reading and watching movies, and walking around the backyard with Billy and Molly. At night, Billy sleeps on the couch next to me, or else Molly curls up on my lap:

So sayeth my father:

Why oh why did I forget the weed!

Well, it is nearly 1:30 in the morning here in Belgium, so it’s time to Make Coffee and Watch Movies. But before I go, I shall conclude this post thusly. On Thursday when Katrijn drove me back to her house from the train station, Billy was waiting for us in the back lot. I stepped out of the car and he screamed because he remembered me. I walked over to him and knelt down to scratch his head. He loved it. And then Billy did something so pure and honest that my love for him grew tenfold: he waddled over to a mound of dirt near the strawberry patch, assumed the position, and started taking a huge dump.

Good-night everyone!