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'.

Duckfucking

Life feels like a shit sandwich buffet at the moment. The atmosphere of this fucking place is like Mexico City, with visibly yellow air; the fishermen are rioting; cocksucking shitwit Belgacom is still trying to defraud us; and the F-word has been being stalked by a black dog - painful to watch, and the corollary is that I feel absolutely alone in terms of organizing our vacations, disputing our fraudulent bills, grocery shopping, general household maintenance, etc, at a time when I'm absolutely exhausted from last week's junket and this week's deadline.

And then yesterday I grabbed his laptop to google 'Jews New York Jesse Jackson' ('Hymietown', he'd called it - I couldn't remember), and as I started to type the memory function called up a search phrase with my name in it that rather took me aback. I combed my porous memory for a time I could have used it myself for whatever vanitygoogle reasons and couldn't come up with one, which doesn't mean it didn't exist. Nonetheless, I was thrown on the possibility, which had never really crossed my mind before, that the F-word is not sure of my fidelity. I'd rather break my own nose than be unfaithful to him but I don't know how to bring that up in casual conversation. And then there's the possibility such worries are inevitable, no matter what assurances are given and received, because I travel for work a good deal. And when someone is absent for such lengths of time, especially to attend subsidized drinking events where the boy:girl ratio is 5:1, maybe it's hard not to wonder. That 5:1 ratio may be a more concrete bit of knowledge than the abstract fact that all those boys are unattractive. I've never met anybody at these functions who I'd have nailed even if I was on the prowl - there's something, as far as I'm concerned, fundamentally anti-sexy about business events, something just too groomed piggy.

But the bitch of it all is that there's probably some perfectly lighthearted explanation, and I'm just adding another section to an already overwhelmingly comprehensive shit sandwich buffet with this sort of double-edged paranoia. I'll sort it out. But fuck, fuck, fuck, am I ever tired of sorting things out. There's so much to sort out just living in this stupid fucking mentally feeble grinning cocksucker of a country, and while I know I need to put this central and most important relationship with the man I adore above and beyond concerns over our telephone service provider gouging us for hundreds of euros or how we're going to spend my all-too-short summer vacation, I feel like I'm trying to compose a symphony in a zoo while dodging all the shit cackling schizo monkeys are tossing at me.

I left my heart in Anjalakoski

I'm in love with Finland. It's hard to know where to start in terms of describing the place and all I loved about it, so I'll say this: having spent this past week there, I understand the desire to be rich. I would like to be rich and spend May, June, and July on an island in the Finnish archipelago close to Turku. I would sit in the sun for 22 hours a day, I would live in an outdoor hammock occasionally cursing the rain, chill, and mosquitoes, and I would never be sad again, because after those months were over I would follow the sunshine somewhere else.

It was a press tour so we drank and didn't sleep much, having to leave each town or area early each morning to go to the next facility. That was rendered easy by that sun, that perpetual sun . . . anti-drugs campaigners don't have much pull with me because they're never honest about the great things involved in smoking reefer, like fantastic sex and television being so much more interesting. In the same vein, all that struggling and neat-o sunlamp marketing at the SAD crowd always fails to mention that the other side of the coin is the fucking Scandinavian summer. I have slept about ten hours in the last seven days, had my tits bored off by what felt like hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and hours of conversation with men who were incapable of mentally handling any subject outside of their own mighty prowess as human beings, and drank roughly 10 times more than I drink in the course of a normal week. Yet I feel monumentally refreshed.

And it was beautiful, and the people were so kind, and their grim, unsmiling humour so bloody appealing. I have anecdotes about the random kindness from absolute strangers there that rival and surpass any anecdotes of mammoth stupidity and incompetent bad intentions here. I know I've got the rose-coloured glasses on: I needed a change of air, a break, and I got it over a sunny week courtesy of a flourishing industrial company that was happy to spend thousands and thousands of euros to impress me - and oh yes, I'm fully aware that being made to feel awfully important and clever by the organizers might have something to do with my brimming goodwill towards the place. Doesn't matter. I love the pants off it.

Also doesn't hurt that the food was fucking marvellous. They eat salmon the way Americans eat pork, except salmon is probably cheaper there than pork is anywhere. And so many wild mushrooms; it was morel season - and then the sturgeon, the fish eggs, the piles and piles of fresh lake perch - and then the berries - the strawberries, currants, blueberries, the sea buckthorn . . . Frankly, I'm pissed off to be back.