johannes k.

the and of a to in i it with that you at this on from he my or we but as be they for not ...

oh dandelions, my heart. why do human beings keep lawns? perhaps it is part of the illusion of control.

this is slightly related.

when i was an artist i would write poems about soap operas and dead dadaists and translate them into french using google translate and make recordings of me reading them — this was when it was still a novelty to be able to instantly translate things using the internets.

the dutch language is famous, well semi-famous, for a number of things, being quite unintelligible is one example. so when something is gobbledegook you can say : it's double dutch to me. quite possibly because dutch is my first language, this seems unreasonable. have you tried making sense of finnish? or icelandic? ha ha but then you wouldn't have the alliteration and if you said double danish, for example, people might think you're talking about an especially large pastry.

anita lane died. she was born in the same year as me and she and nick cave left australia for london in the same year and month as i arrived there ... but that's a different story about a different time, although it is not unrelated as you will see.

the day before your birthday is actually more interesting in some ways than your birthday, i mean the day before you were born. there was a version of the world in which you didn't exist (and there will be again). in my case the last day on which this world existed was exactly 63 years ago. wouldn't it be more interesting to celebrate the anniversary of the last day that there was a world without you in it? humans are much too focussed on their own existence and this leads to existential crises and personality disorders. perhaps we could start a tradition on the day before our birthdays of lamenting the passing of a world in which we didn't exist, where we consider how thin our existence actually is and how slight the difference is between a world in which you apparently exist and one in which you don't.

ok so. i got corona.

a few people were interested in keeping abreast of what was happening to me and how i was feeling so i wrote a sort of diary and also to try and keep my-so-called-self more or less sane, since i could think about little else. i also posted a few times every day a single line about the fact that i was still alive with the date and time — á la on kawara — because ... well ... you've got that disease that killed three million people in the last year and stopped the whole world more or less in its tracks.

and bigger than the few people who give a shit about you want to realise because the whole corona thing is too big to contemplate. people would write to me and say : glad to hear it's not severe — and i'd be like, actually you know what IT FUCKING IS SEVERE!

je bent in relatie tot de ander. het is eigenlijk net als licht.

do not be afraid: nothing doesn't exist