topotales

My friend Kye, who was really into astrology, once told me that people pass through particular years of their lives that are full of change - years when the stars and the planets of their astrology are so much in flux that everything changes.  This must be one of those years.  Let me show you:

February: I have a nervous breakdown

March: Pnut doesn’t care that I’m crazy, asks me to marry him anyway.  Appropriately, at carnevale in Venice.

April: Quiet… too quiet!  I am home with various medications, Dad flies in from the US to keep an eye on me.

May: Drugs, more antipsychotic drugs.  The right drugs?  The wrong drugs?  Let’s experiment!  We get Charlie the wonderdog, to keep me company.  Let’s face it, two dogs licking your face makes you happier than one.  Oh yeah, I get lyme disease, too.  Wedding planning for Chicago in June.  Family drama and fighting.  Paperwork.

June: Back to the job I hate but which I may or may not be losing. More family fighting about the wedding. We get married.  Luckily, I have plenty of tranquilizers to go along with the antipsychotics.  Then, the woman I consider my grandmother passes away after kicking a rare leukemia’s ass for over six months.

July:  My mother’s brother, my Uncle Budda dies suddenly of a massive heart attack.  The family dog, Rudy, has to be put to sleep.  Oh… and I lose my job, finally, formally.

August: Plans to move to the US are underway.  Embassy visits, paperwork.  A house-hunting trip to New Jersey!?  Looking at nursing schools and prerequisites and trying to figure out how the fuck I’m going to pass math classes.  I attend the memorial service for the woman I consider my grandmother.

September: My mom is diagnosed with a stage one tubular carcinoma in her left breast.  I’ve already been to the US twice this year, and we can’t afford a third trip.  I’ll have to manage my anxiety knowing she’ll be here for my wedding in October two weeks after her lumpectomy.

Paolo lost both of his parents to cancer.  The tumor in his mother’s head made her blind when he was six, and she lost her mind over the following few years.  She passed away when he was twelve.  That was the last time he ever cried.  His father was found to have a metastisized (to the bones) lung cancer when Paolo was eighteen.  He lost him not long after.  Now, he has a brand new family.  A huge, loud, obnoxiously loving and close-knit family.  And the C-word makes it’s appearance not long after.  I hate that fucking word.  I hate it for him, and I hate it for me.

I have led a relatively easy and blessed life.  I’m not sure if knowing or not knowing anxiety and grief make them any easier to live with.  All I know is I fucking hate cancer.  And my mom is one badass little Indian lady.

Pnut and I have decided that instead of giving presents at our wedding (which Europeans think is odd anyhow), we will donate ten euros per guest to the Cancer Research Foundation.

Do you know anybody who fought or is fighting cancer?  Please share your story.

So here is an email I lurked out from under the hansosan this morning.  I post it here because it’s almost exactly how I feel about IKEA (everything except the part about trying to build my own stuff… because even being half a lesbian doesn’t mean my limbs are safe from power tools).  The sad part is, most of the furtniture Pnut and I own comes from IKEA, because (disclaimer!!) it’s the only stuff that broke down into small enough pieces to fit up our hamster-sized elevator.  It’s a matter of hell vs. 8 flights of a (spiral) staircase.  Perhaps the only time IKEA wins, in my book.  If you wish to nay-say, you first need to come over and try moving some shit up our stairs without puking.

Anyway, here’s the ’san’s response to this article by David Pierson; I couldn’t have said it any better:

I HATE IKEA SHOPPING. [The boss] would buy half the store if I let her, and all I can think of in there is how I am going to have to spend the rest of the weekend deciphering Swedish cartoon instructions, yelling to disappearing family members while trying to hold electric screwdrivers
into awkward angles after dropping essential tiny bits into dark corners, just to build something I should have made myself in real wood, if I would have had time to figure out what it was I really wanted and cleaned up my garage to make space to do it… I hate screwing into lousy particle board that will emit carcinogen PU vapors for the next decade, cardboard backs that will sack out of their nail fasteners in just one season, the unrepairable cigarette-paper thin printed fake veneer, drawers that I know will rack apart and lose their bottoms no matter how much extra glue I squeeze into their joints. The most insidious part comes after you’ve put them finally together: the
doors weigh more than the whole cabinet, which requires me to screw the humongous front-heavy blocks (zero fasteners provided for that part of the job!) to my crappy walls if you don’t want to find a family member crushed to death underneath it one day.

The only spot in the shop I liked was the left-over bargain corner where I occasionally picked up some wood to chew up into something else. That cooled a bit after I once picked up a 2 meter long mirror there, and only remembered just in time at the check-out that I came driving our super short and tiny Lupo car, which would have made for some great candid camera shots in the parking lot.

None of this livid aversion has had any effect on what really ends up into our house, because there is not one room left uninvaded. Not a year goes by without another batch making its way into our already overstuffed rooms. From the bunker-like units with sliding glass doors ((heavy!!!) in the bedroom to the fake-leather cardboard boxes on the shelves in the privvy, they’re all silent testimonials of the unwritten conspiracy between the marketing moguls and the real decision power in our home.

Sigh.

GUESTPOST BY HANSOSAN

I don’t remember when I first tasted grappa.  I must have been just twenty, when a bunch of my high school friends travelled to Italy, all squashed into a white Nissan belonging to  Koen’s mom.  I remember my clothes slowly getting wet driving home as the soaked tent dripped through the back seat cushion from the trunk, after breaking up from a flooded Austrian campsite.  That poor car took quite a beating on that trip, but Koen’s mom, who still had a fish store at the time, was very nice and forgiving.  We all came from families where eating and drinking well was very appreciated, and you can see how we took those traditions into our own lives.  At the time I was experimenting with cocktails, and I still see me drinking my first sidecar, on a metal terrace table near Pisa.  Courageous as we were, we also ordered octopus.  A big plate filled with soft, big, pink chunks of fibrous meat with the round feet still attached arrived.  All garlic oil and wine, it was delicious.   I have ordered a lot of disappointing or even horrible octopus dishes since, knowing that somehow, it can be fantastic.  Did we finish that meal with espresso, and a grappa ?  I’ll have to ask the others.

Koen later married a lively girl from Rosheim in Alsace – also a fine cook and a great source of delicious wines from some small viticulteurs like Maetz from the same village.  But as after-dinner drink, the huge bottle of Italian grappa was always on offer too.  After their divorce, we tried to stay friends with both of them, but I now wonder whether that isn’t the most likely course to lose them both.  When we helped her move out, back to her family in France, she left us a whole box of bottles – also the grappa.  I felt embarrassed – I could hardly put that bottle back on the table next time friends would be eating with us.  So I brought the whole box to the small cabin my parents had in the forests of the Ardens.  That cabin had no electricity, so the dark evening by candle light were a great place to sample nice drinks, and the freeze proof  grappa wouldn’t mind overwintering in a place without heating.

A couple years after I started work, I ended up spending a lot of time in Tokyo, fixing one of those impossible  joint-ventures that were en vogue then.  The Australian head of the office, left it up to his secretary and a friend of her to rescue us occasionally from the obligatory under the bridge after-work drinking, and take us to something more sophisticated.  That often translated into very expensive but fantastic Italian cuisine, way above the low end of the market standards I was used to with my friends and family.  One funny difference was that although the dishes were traditional, the eating style was very Asian communal, everyone reaching with their chopsticks into each other plates, sampling all the fare and ordering more of the ones liked best.  And I still think that, as long as you’re not eating in one of those places where every dish becomes a piece of art, that is a lot more enjoyable.  In one of those places, where the girls were clearly familiar with the staff, we got a special grappa at the end.  It made such and impression that ever since I have been trying to find it back – a quest not really helped by my only recollection being the scrambled up name “lepertone torte”.  For long I wasn’t entirely sure it even existed in Italy – Japanese are notorious for relabeling drinks – and probably the memory of that evening is better than whatever I could find.  But I now think it must have been a grappa from “Le Pergole Torte”, from Tuscany.

When Paolo & topo started to show up at our place, it didn’t take much to find out Paolo likes a good grappa.  As with anything remotely Italian, he is also convinced that the only really good ones can only be found in Italy, preferably somewhere close to Venice.    Mussels, pasta, fish, whatever… the Belgian variety just isn’t up to standard – and who are we to argue with his memories ?  But it is certainly fun to take up the challenge – especially the time when we battled in the kitchen during the great Carbonara Contest !  (I almost creamed him there…)  I did find a very good grappa di moscato from Alba locally – but it has one drawback : the cork must be deficient because the bottle is always emptier each time I check… .   It’s good competition for that fantastic Grappa Ruta - rue flavoured - he brought along. He did not give us the full background though - here is what I found on the net : “In homeopathy, rue is sometimes used as a fever suppressant, but according to Italian folk-lore it not only increases male potency but assists women to relax. A fairly useful combination.”  I couldn’t have said it any better.

Yesterday we were back at my parents cabin.  We had come in early, driving in breakfast for the 20-ish relatives my Mom annually invited, and it had been a full day with a little bit of hiking and an awful lot of barbecuing.  After surviving war famine, my Mom doesn’t believe there is such a thing as too much food.  Most people had left before dark fell and I was sitting with my dad outside as the day cooled off, chatting about work, spilling my guts about all the crap that I was going through lately.  Somehow these conversations occur so much easier there, amid the quiet of the trees.  Still stuffed, I didn’t care for the usual evening tea and chocolate, but when that old brown grappa bottle surfaced, I couldn’t refuse.  My dad claimed the taste remained as great as when we brought it years ago, but of course there is no way to prove that.  But the memories that come with it, apparently have gotten richer over the years too.

GUEST POST BY HANSOSAN

After turning 45 a few weeks ago, my guarantee must have expired, and like with any household appliance, suddenly everything started to fail unfix-ably.  In the middle of the night I wake up with a small, red balloon shape on my left elbow, hurting whenever it touches something slightly more solid than air.  No big deal, according to the doctor - 3 months before it will be fully gone.  I still have no clue how I got it - too much elbow work at the office ? (nah, I’m the last one)  Too much reading on one side in bed ? (nah, impossible after a life’s training), so the mystery remains.  Pills, rest and ointment.  Soon the skin starts to blister off, the balloon shrinks and the pain stays.

Then my abdomen decides to turn itself into a double eight knot and perform inside-out acupuncture with rusty nails (or so it feels).   A couple nights and days of trembling, sweating and having crazy fever dreams convince me this isn’t going away by itself - back to the doctor.  After trying to punch me at the right spot to maximise the pain, dear doctor starts to look a bit more worried.  Casual questions quickly evolve from “Where did you eat last weekend ?”  to  ”Any stomach cancers in the family ?”.  Immediately stop pills #1 (elbow), take pills #2 (antibiotics) & #3.  Echo  immediately required.  This triggers strange memories of pregnant bellies, but this analyst assures me that 95% of the echoes he does are for sports injuries.  Unfortunately he doesn’t have time to look at my elbow… .  Echo only reveals that my liver is in perfect condition - once I get off the pills, I look forward to a continued life of beer sampling !  Off to a hospital scan - drinking a liter of foul marker fluid, getting stabbed with needles in the remaining functional arm and pipes in places that should never see traffic in that direction, I get cooked in a giant microwave. “This will feel hot, this is normal”.  I bet that’s what that woman said to the poodle as well.  She finishes me off with a few tight turns of irremovable tape over my hairy arm.

Now God really gets going : over the weekend I develop an eye infection.  Eye drops from the cupboard.  It gets worse.  Ointment from the night pharmacy.  It gets worse.  By Monday I’m willing to perform a diy head transplant.  Right now, please !   (No donors or takers found).  Doctor prescribes stronger drops.  It gets worse.  Can’t really drive anymore, can’t read, can’t watch TV.  Seppuku looks more and more appealing by the hour, if I didn’t already knew how that felt from last week, and I’m not even allowed to drink my two sips of sake.  Doctor now looks really worried, and sends me off to the hospital with an emergency appointment in 10 minutes.  The hospital is 15 minutes away.  If you know the way.  And you can at least see.  Not my safest trip.  Once in the hospital, I get the “pick your number and stand in line” treatment.  My number is 609.  After 6 other people and now half an hour too late, they start on number 610.  I politely approach the receptionist - ready for that impromptu head transplant - she only got away because hers looked so horribly empty.  I finally get sent off into the caverns of the hospital.  The sadist architect of course enjoyed hiding the opthamologist 6 corners, 3 turns and 5 doors away from the entrance.  All well indicated for people with excellent eye-sight, no doubt.

The opthamologist (a gem - she possesses this rude directness that Flemish people love from each other, but fail to grasp why others are offended by it) drips a few things in the eye, scratches it with something that looks to my other eye like a 20cm needle, then calls in her assistant to marvel at the unique sight of a well developed tree-shaped infection.  Immediately stop the eye drops, now go get a gel… .  Come back in the evening for a pressure pad on the eye.  I perform the reverse journey home mainly by following my own tear drop scent trail.  I suddenly wonder why we make heroes out of healthy athletes ?  Anyone dealing with a serious handicap (no, not my chicken shit) faces way tougher battles.   The pressure pad feels like somebody called Cassius applies pressure on your wounded eye.  And I get to stay home for 3 more days, because clearly I’m exhausted, otherwise all these infections wouldn’t show up, I’m told… .

In the morning, I decide this justifies recording for posterity.  Hence the patch pic.  It only took me 22 tries to get it fairly sharp in the mirror, aiming the camera from below.  Thanks, my eye is getting better - I managed a whole day of work today !  Which my boss saw as the perfect moment to give my job to someone else.  But by now I can take the elbow pills again, so with a bit of luck I may still survive till Topo’s next wedding party !

GUEST POST BY HANSOSAN

It just isn’t fair to let Scapi occupy all the limelight, so here is at least one exclusive Charlie shot too… 

Oh boy, I'm so nervous I could start smoking...

Yeah, so remember that tick-bite I got on SATURDAY?  Well, by Wednesday it looked like this (don’t worry, I kinda exaggerated about how close it was to the goodies (kinda):

And then the doc told me I have Lyme disease.  Yeah… you can rejoice now - YAY!!!  The joys of this year are seemingly endless.

I’ve spent plenty of time in North Africa, India, Mexico and loads of other places where you think twice about brushing your teeth with the water.  [Paolo just asked me to insert Italy into that list... not sure what that means... please come to our wedding].  Anywho, I’ve had plenty of grody diseases that have made me crap and puke and expunge… things that humans shouldn’t have to imagine expunging, and usually in embarrassing or less than comfortable places at that.  But this takes the fucking cake.  I GET A GRODY DISEASE IN FRANCE??  LESS THAN 30 km FROM PARIS???  FUCK!!!

Besides this, Paolo has been in bed sick with the flu the last couple of days.  And the hansosan came back with more than bursitis… something about his colon and intestines exploding… I dunno, I forget what it’s called.  But, you know, nothing as bad as LYME DISEASE.   FROM A FUCKING BLOOD-SUCKING INSECT!!  DID I MENTION IT WAS A FRENCH INSECT????

Seriously people, if you get bitten by a tick and anything feels funny… or looks like this, or like a bullseye?  You’d better get it checked out.  Because if you don’t catch it right away, lyme disease can stay pretty quiet in your system for years and years… like until it creeps into your heart and spinal cord and maybe even your brain.  Fifty bucks at the doc is better than a lifetime of TICKBITE IN YOUR FUCKING BRAIN.

PS- (DID I MENTION I HATE TICKS???)

Friday night:

Hansosan, his daughter and I head down to Fontainebleau to catch up with P.  The hansosan has decided to come along despite an extremely painful bursitis of the elbow.  About a half hour past Paris I ask him to pull over so I can vomit copiously at a gas station.  I’d forgotten my meds.  Ten minutes back on the road, and his daughter faints in the car.  This is not something unexpected, as she has spent the last year battling unexplained fainting fits that look a lot like epilepsy but haven’t been properly diagnosed.  We finally roll into the campground around midnight, and the gates are locked.  I call P and he helps us chuck all our packs and bags to the tents.

Saturday:

It is now day two without my meds.  This was a bad idea.  A very bad idea.  It rains most of the day.  P, of course, manages to climb anyhow.  I spend the better part of the afternoon making moss-fairy boats.

The fairy’s name is Esmerelda, by the way, and if you can’t see her then you don’t believe.

I curl up with the dogs and pass out.  I should have brought my meds. 

When we get back to the campsite I notice a few ticks on Charlie.  I pull them out.  Then I notice a few ticks on Scapi.  I pull them out.  Then I realise that the lovely afternoon nap was had in a tickbed.  I rush to the tent and call P in to do what true love requires.  Luckily, no ticks in my ass.  Unfortunately, one has embedded itself close enough to my hoo-ha to make me scream and yank it out before P can reach the tweezers.  I burn the sonofabitch.

Saturday night:

I’m twitching and jerking all over the place.  My brain feels something like fireworks if they could make them into a yo-yo.  I hold myself together reasonably well and we have a lovely birthday dinner for the hansosan.  His daughter faints again on the way home.  This time, it’s a long episode.  We sit up with her for an hour or so, until she feels well enough to go to the tent.  We all go to bed.

I wake up in the tent and smell shit.  I mean- I smell SHIT.  Like somebody rubbed my nose in it.  Since I feel a bit like a crackhead in withdrawal, I sense that smelling shit could just be another side effect.  So I wake Paolo.  He is blind without his glasses but finally finds a pile of puke in the tent and cleans it up.  To Charlie’s credit, he actually tried to wake Paolo up several times before depositing the little pile of grass and bile neatly next to our heads.

About an hour later, I wake up in the tent and smell shit.  Paolo’s glasses come out again, but we don’t see anything.  Back to sleep. 

You can repeat that last paragraph two more times.

Sunday:

I wake up in the morning to find that Charlie has projectile-liquid-shit all over my sleeping bag.  And my backpack.  And my clothes.  And my side of the tent.  Everything on Paolo’s side of the tent is perfectly clean.  But I have been sleeping in diarrhea.  I run out of the tent and vomit copiously.  This is not the way to start day three without meds.  Lovely P cleans everything while I writhe and moan in the car.

So, to sum up the weekend: bursitis, vomiting, fainting, tick near hoo-ha, projectile diarrhea, and no meds.  Oh… and we may have climbed a wee bit as well, but I’ll have to let you know once I’m properly medicated again.

GUEST POST BY HANSOSAN.

Do you know that beer used to be just an alternative way to store grain, and make drinkable liquid available in an environment that got more and more polluted ?  The stronger beers were only developed later as a way to evade the taxes on spirits.  As always, we have a historic background - more lies and falsifications than facts, still - enough years to accumulate the myriad of details that builds up the fractal richness you taste now.  But indeed - in the open-sewer industrializing cities like Gent, the clergy advised women to give their kids beer rather than the horrible water.  It was sound advice then - and profitable too for all those brewer-monks.  Figuring out how to control the yeast and bacterial processes involved came only very late - so don’t believe for a second that our current beers with the ancient sounding names like “Vieux-temps” and “Emperor Charles”, taste anything like the acid stuff our ancestors drank out of the stone jugs while working in the fields.

Beer drinking is learned young here.  My pregnant wife was still advised to drink lots of fortifying stout, my small kids got to stick their fingers in the foam at parties - I drank my first glass way before I needed my first razor, in the youth house in the old converted city hall of Werken.  Low-alcohol “table” beer was present everywhere, often instead of fancy waters, cola or wine.  Somehow I suspect this led to a more mature use of alcohol later on.  It wasn’t the forbidden fruit, or less the macho-potion or the oblivion drug it often is in more ‘regulated’ area’s.

One way I survive boring family parties is to go sit next to the oldest person alive and ask them to tell stories about beer when they were young.  Those were the days that brewers were more common than bakers - in the tiny village my dad grew up in, there were already 7 pubs.  There is one left now.  The only brewery in the neighbourhood (Esen) almost closed, if a bunch of independent louts hadn’t stepped in and revived it all (the Dolle Brouwers, or Mad Brewers).  They now brew some of the most creative concoctions around - I suggest you start with Dulle Teve (Mad Bitch).  That brewery visit guided by their Mom I consider one of the best tourist trips you can take here.  And this is the scale that seems to fit us : a small firm, making a living, and a unique, rich product.  Whenever we try to grow beyond that (look at Hoegaarden), often the uniqueness disappears, the magic is gone.  It’s this special link, me knowing someone that is related to the brewer, or knowing the order of the abbey, or weird facts that celts developed coopering for their beers while the romans were still using amphora’s for their wines, that makes beers special to me - not just something filtered out of the chemical industry, pushed on me by a marketing bureau.

I realised student life was over while slowly getting dizzy from the second or third Grimbergen Triple, under the jade shade of Ginkgo leaves in the garden of the Blauwe Schuit in Leuven, chatting to an old teacher friend.  How long this beer culture will survive, I don’t know.  Economics for slow food are all wrong - no wonder Interbrew is Brasillian now.  Belgians evidently suck at protecting what’s theirs.  The orchards producing the cherries in Schaarbeek, essential for the real Kriek taste - are all swallowed by the sprawling city.  They are now coming from Pepingen or Gooik - if not from Hungary - if at all from a cherry tree… .

But, I once learned in a winecellar in Alsace, from the daughter of a long line of winemakers making the unique Rouge d’Ottrot: it does not matter that unique knowledge might disappear - it is the now that counts - so live to the fullest now.  That is the only obligation we have.  So I will open my 3 different bottles of geuze, taste each next to the other and compare.  I’ll let my kids try them all, and ask their opinion too: so they may learn that details matter, that there is a level of quality you cannot measure with a stick, but that is perfectly noticeable with a bit of experience and openness to all your senses (yes, cheers to Christopher Alexander).  Why don’t you pull up a chair and try it - there is still enough for all !

A big, huge THANK YOU doesn’t even begin to cover it.  Guess I’ll start gearing up to clean that garage…