If Belgium had one face, I'd punch it

Things have escalated with Belgacom. We know more or less who made the fraudulent order now and the question becomes: what can we make a big, incompetent, systemically rotten company that thinks it still has the monopoly it was stripped of due to its rottenness and incompetence do about it. It's times like this I miss Anglophony and the sycophancy of its large companies' customer service bureaus when they realize they've been caught in the wrong. There are a lot of bad things to say about litigious societies, but one good one is that their service companies rarely spin this sort of surreal shittitude out for so long . . .

Mind you, living in Belgium, I'm starting to miss every other country I've ever lived in, not only the Anglophone ones. At least in Italy when things weren't working, you could flash a smile or some cash. Nothing helps here. No wonder they're the fucking Newfies of Europe. Only unlike Newfies, these people deserve it. Fucking country full of morons. I mean, what kind of buggerwitted muttonbrain raises their family in the shitty wet muddy bit of Europe nobody wanted, turned into a buffer state between two actual countries so invading armies could trudge painfully through this lousy wasteland instead of disturbing the Swiss and Luxembourgers and their great banks and functioning civil services? But the truth is even Belgians don't want Belgium to exist anymore. They should just turn this shithole into Naples' garbage dump and solve five or six problems at once. Fucking. Shithole. Fuck.

Anyhoo. I'm handling it. And yesterday I also addressed my unfocused paranoia that the F-word wasn't sure of my fidelity. It felt like a frightfully artificial conversation but one of the benefits of psychoanalysis is that now I feel reasonably comfortable with frightfully artificial conversations. Everything was alright. He reminded me of a conversation we'd had years ago: we'd agreed that when people are unfaithful, it's their own problem, and only gets to be a problem for their lover if that lover spends all his time obsessing about whether it's happening or not.

The thing is, it hit home because when I managed to end things with Bluebeard all those years ago now, he made my jaw drop by telling me he'd been certain I'd been screwing as many other men as I could fit between my legs for the entire length of our relationship. Not only was I not doing that, but the action of me doing that is so distant from my idea of myself that it knocked my socks off that a man who I'd spent the previous two years with could believe it . . . I don't know what his motives were for saying it, and hopefully I never will, but I still sometimes wonder: what would Bluebeard have been like, and what would our relationship have been like, if he hadn't had that paranoia? The answer I always come up with is that if he hadn't had that paranoia, he wouldn't have been Bluebeard, and if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass a'hoppin'.