„In u, mijn ziel, meet ik de tijd.”
— Augustinus
mother turned 89 yesterday and since i was born on her twenty-third birthday, this is day one of my sixty-seventh year.
you were the best present i ever had, she has told me, more than once.
yes and sadly it was all downhill from there! is one of my standard but finely honed responses to the never-ending repetition of her all too familiar tropes. these are the soft weapons that keep me safe.
throughout the year i deflect questions from the general public and avoid providing answers about the date of my birth but for some it becomes a slight obsession to find out what it is. they even surreptitiously consult official documents that are on the public record, or, in a moment of weakness, i might let the cat out of the bag, perhaps because the questioner is the 14 year old child of a friend with a beautiful mouth, albeit with artificially straightened teeth.
the teeth of my own children have grown every which way and this makes their smiles absolutely unique but in what they call ‘today’s competitive world’ having crooked teeth can negatively impact your career opportunities so any middle class parent worth their salt employs an orthodontist to ensure their child has the best possible start in their adult life.
whilst sort-of-grown-up children like myself, whose PTSD is due amongst other things to emotional neglect in childhood, might well ask their parent (were any point in doing so) why did you subject me to all that bullshit when i was too young to defend myself and unable to utilise logic and/or reason to explain what was happening? now parents live in fear of their children accusing them of having been tight-arses and not buying them the right brand of sneakers for example, or refusing to participate in the orthodontic industrial complex, and this being the reason for them living in decrepitude in adulthood — or indeed of being sued by them.
but once they know, they never forget — or they do and then they ask you again, and you laugh at them.
still, god must have been hilarious1 when He wrote in the Book of Life that i would reach my 67th year.
it’s ridiculous. absurd. preposterous. how is it possible that this body managed to survive for 66 years and 1 day? i almost have survivor guilt.
despite the fact that on several occasions in the year of our lord 1978 i allowed derek to put his short but fat cock into what gerard kornelis van het reve would have called my secret entrance and ejaculate even as the sphincter vehemently protested and tightened with fear, which probably made it extra pleasurable for derek, and that meanwhile said derek was also regularly ejaculating into the secret entrances of random men in bushes on nights when mine was not available, i did not get AIDS.
now that would have been god being extremely hilarious, paying with your life for allowing something to be done to you because you were young and/or stupid and/or you didn’t think it was ok to say : no, don’t do that, i don’t like it. this supreme dramatic irony is usually experienced almost exclusively by women and perhaps this is why i feel so deeply and tragically connected with them.
and in the next episode :
how i didn’t die from a heroin overdose.
how i wasn’t decapitated by a big portable metal warning sign picked up by a whirly jig during a storm in south melbourne in 2011.
i don’t know if i should mention here, or not, that the phrase ‘god must have been hilarious’, with its use of the word in its archaic sense of ‘boisterously merry’, rather than the modern meaning of something or someone being extremely amusing, is from kurt vonnegut’s novel cat’s cradle. i wouldn’t want to give the impression that i am well-read because i am not. i may have a phd from and obscure university in the australian outback, and a mickey mouse masters in theology and religious studies from the second best university in amsterdam, but i am merely a scavenger, a bricoleur, a dilettante, a jack of all trades and master of none, my name is in fact johannes factotum, and this was the alleged reason for the powers-that-be at the aforementioned australian university, where i was the golden boy for the first five years of my so-called academic career before my slow but inevitable demise, as the university succumbed to bean counters and human resources management graduates and general shithousery, refusing to promote me to senior lecturer.↩︎