Small Fragment from A Life in Scribbles (Diaries January 2010 – December 2023), Dieter Ohler. >300,000 words, or >800 pages.

February 26, 2010
I’m certain they shoved discount-store brains from Aldi into my skull back in ’97, to replace the rotten superbrain I used to have. Get it? No, I don’t get it either.

March 18, 2010
Mama is falling apart. Has been for a long time. But now it’s happening faster and faster.

July 10, 2010
Lehmbruck: Büste der Knienden. The most beautiful sculpture that exists. No idea how long I sat there. No idea how long I stared. A long time.

July 28, 2010
Picnic with R and S near the inclined plane of Ronquières. Drove all that way for a few soggy sandwiches beside boats that rise and fall, captains inching closer to death with every meter up or down. Left the world’s sorrow around seven. Ate fries on the road back. A large with mayo and bami.

October 01, 2010
Chemo has started. We visit every day. “Everything’s fine.” Easy for me to say. I don’t have cancer. I’m not puking in that bed. I fetched water for his roommate—his wife had forgotten. The man’s got liver cancer. More cancer. It’s everywhere now. He knows his odds are slim. Just when I had managed to shove the word cancer into the backroom of my mind, that fool drags it back into the spotlight. As if things weren’t heavy enough already. What an idiot.

October 03, 2010
When the weather was good, we carried the plants outside. When it turned cold, we dragged them back in—otherwise they’d die. That was the rhythm of nature. And we stumbled along behind it.

January 01, 2011
With all the dead in the world, I’ve started another endless project. How on earth do I explain this again? I don’t know. Actually, I know a lot. Some even say I know everything.

February 09, 2011
Since the second day, every day feels like the one before it, like the one before it, like the one before it, and it’s starting to piss me off. How long how long how long is this madhouse supposed to last?

February 23, 2011
Papa is home now. He’s come here to die. Just a trembling heap of flesh is left. That’s all. I realize only now I never really talked to him. “Is dinner ready?” “Where are you going?” “Is the laundry done?” “More endives?” That’s the summary of a childhood. And now I’m supposed to talk to him. “I’m going to the garage, need to top up my coolant.” “Is it okay if I cook endives later?” “Your trousers are washed, I’ll take them out of the dryer.” All he wants is morphine. Doesn’t give a damn about the rest. I’ve tried finding common ground. He’s not into literature. Not into art. Talks of continents and minerals bore me to death. We stand on opposite sides of the line. And suddenly, one small point of agreement: euthanasia. We’re glad. He squeezed my hand—the first time in years. I regretted the question already. He kept squeezing and I sat beside him. I asked the difference between agate and amethyst. Maybe I can still learn something in this short time.

April 15, 2011
Language, the maker of time and space. A fleeting attempt to tame the untamable, to forge the illusion we mistake for truth; scaffolding for our shaky existence. A labyrinth of past and future that imprisons the present. The clock ticks, but the clock ticks in language. Language shapes the world, but also traps us inside its limits. It is architect and jailer both. Bringer of clarity, bringer of confusion. Words tint reality. Did man invent language, or did language invent man?

May 02, 2011
Bought chicken. Copied a recipe onto Post-its. The food was disgusting. Checked the book again. Turns out chicken isn’t cooked the same way as rabbit.

March 05, 2012
“Thingy, there, chair,” says mama, and we know she means milk. Early on I grasped that language has a hidden simplicity—if you can find it. Sometimes that means abandoning words, sometimes swapping them for better ones. I don’t need dusty lecture halls to understand language. A mother who stutters, stumbles, and strings poetry out of fragments is enough. That’s where I learned love for words. The daily fight to extract meaning from half-shattered syllables, gestures, a glance. “The pony jumps, well no, like that thingy, pony, over there”—all to say it’s raining. That’s rain. No metaphor comes close. Raw beauty. Flawed perfection. Zero polish. Just messy, unfiltered poetry. Metaphors are strong tools, sure, but too often a cheap disguise for shallow thought, a jungle of poetic lianas—see, even I can do it. I bang and rattle and fumble with words as if they were something and nothing. But no, the art of omission often carries more weight than piling on metaphors. Back to pure simplicity, like mama taught me. One word. Literature rarely grasps how powerful a single word can be. Doesn’t even have to be the “right” one, if spoken right. Who ever thought “chair” could mean “milk”? Right context. Right glance. Go study languages, fill books with verse—you’ll never get there. No pony will fall from the sky, no chair will soak in coffee. That’s mama’s world. That’s our world. How rich a childhood can be. How wild an imagination, only to be clipped at school, where milk is always milk, and a chair always a chair. Always inside the lines. Even in literature words must stay “understandable.” Even in poetry nonsense must be contained. Dada is long behind us. But poetry needs more aphasia. Society needs aphasia. We were privileged; we learned from the highest master. Aphasia is our mother tongue.

June 28, 2012
Mama sat at the kitchen table again, staring at the wall, as if answers might crawl out of it. They never will. Coffee gone cold. No words this morning, only sighs. Sometimes I think her sorrow is a physical thing, seeping through the house. She tries to hide it, but you can feel it everywhere. Maybe one day it will lift. Not today.

September 28, 2012
Derrida is like the maverick of philosophy, yapping about language as if it were a carnival ride. He fucks the world of words and meaning so hard you don’t even know where you are anymore. Texts hacked and diced, language broken down until it’s just confetti. “Tear it apart, see what’s inside.” Meaning here, meaning there—who gives a fuck. Meaning shifts, mate. Language isn’t fixed. Never. There is no truth. That’s his shtick. Easy for him to say. He can feed us whatever bullshit he wants—we don’t get it anyway. Or maybe we do. That words have no fixed meaning—that I understand. But Derrida never touched aphasia, far as I know. Probably didn’t get it. Yet if he says language is a dirty thing always moving, never nailed down—you inevitably end up with those poor bastards whose words never come out right. See, words and sentences aren’t tidy. No no. Derrida and aphasia: same roots. Punk rock linguistics. Middle finger to anyone who thinks language is neat and controllable. Aphasia is the perfect proof of how fucked-up language really is. A glitch in the Matrix. Derrida shits on the idea of word-control. People with aphasia shit along. Either way—props to Derrida.

November 28, 2012
Mama is a master of silence, a virtuoso in a world deaf with noise. To us, she speaks poetry; to others, she annihilates small talk and banality by refusing them. Sometimes it’s resistance, her small revolt. Sometimes a shield against what she can’t handle and knows others won’t understand. She has turned silence into sculpture, carving space with it. Only those willing to listen will hear. The few words she does speak carry more power because she doesn’t waste her breath on garbage. Essence is hard enough, even before you unravel it.

December 04 2012
Mama was cold and couldn’t sleep. I told her I’d put on her socks. Black ones, or the pair with the little deer, I asked. Her choice. She wanted the deer. She looked at me with gratitude, tapped my hand, said, “Good boy—or no, something else.” “Merci,” I prompted. “Yes, that’s it. Good boy. No. Merci.” I helped again: “Merci.” “Yes. Merci, merci, merci.” She was happy. She’s wearing the deer socks now.

December 09 2012
What the hell am I even doing here? I should be in a studio making work. I should be writing. Maybe even building a career in art. Instead I mop piss, wipe shit from asses, butter bread, haul bodies around, wash the disabled, scrape pennies from the welfare office, and watch time slip away.

January 18, 2013
Dad’s off to the clinic. He’s started vomiting his own shit. Never seen anything like it. He’s suffering, and watching him suffer guts me. Ambulance. I brewed coffee for Mom and me. Now and then a text from I, who rode along. Scans / maybe surgery / patience / bad / worse / even worse / obstruction / intestines / twisted. I’ve no clue how guts are supposed to be arranged, but clearly not like his.

April 29, 2013
Riding in the car with Mom is an adventure. She comes alive. Every tree, every house, every passerby gets her commentary. Everything’s either wonderful or ugly. So much emotion in one body. The radio was on today—Boudewijn De Groot. She opened up like a flower. Normally, her mouth struggles to gather words for her thoughts. But now a smile broke through, and she wandered into memory. Words that usually hid in the fog of time suddenly floated up. I don’t know where they came from, but they came. Sometimes she stumbled, laughed it off, hummed, tossed a word back in. She found comfort in a time when words were still hers, when sentences rolled out effortlessly. For a moment the line between past and present dissolved. Her voice whispered words. I treasured every one. In that simple joy, on the road to nowhere in particular, life briefly felt whole again.

July 31, 2013
I know it isn’t a competition, but Beuys beats Picasso.

September 27, 2013
Rückriem. Rocks sliced apart. Marche-les-Dames—rocks too. I had to learn that in school. Some fool plummets down and suddenly it’s worth knowing. What crap. Rückriem never mentioned. The important things left unsaid in school. Geology, geometry—fine. Doesn’t have to be much to be something. A puzzle with a few pieces. As a kid, puzzles were fun. Rückriem’s like that. I think it’s beautiful. Cuts and boreholes. And then they tell me I don’t understand shit. Son of a midge, son of a bitch, son of Bogdanowicz. Whatever. I don’t understand anything, according to the world. One more thing I’ll gladly add to the pile.

June 9, 2014
Now and then a boat passes through the lock. Hello sailor, hello skipper, hello boat. I feel like Van Ostaijen when that happens. Boats hauling sand from Holland to Brussels. Boats hauling sand back from Brussels to Holland. Must make sense for the economy, though I don’t see it. Some link in the circle cut away. No one can explain it. I don’t fuss—just say hello, write their invoice. I’m not supposed to dwell on it. Most men here talk about “their” lock as though she were a mistress with hard nipples. That’s not what I think at five a.m., stumbling out of bed, skipping a shower, scalding my tongue on rushed coffee, ramming a salami sandwich down my throat with two fingers, and racing to her like a lunatic. I expect more from a mistress. Shifts swap, rhythms vanish. I sleep when I can, not when I should.

July 16, 2014
Saw a BBC doc on monkeys. I must admit, I recognized myself. More and more I feel like one of them: picking lice from my pubes, fiddling with my cock, howling through the house. No film crew has shown up yet. Maybe they never will. How would I know? I sang, too—“the tree stands on the mountain ali alo.” Still remember it. Long song. Long enough to fill a day and drain a bladder. Sweet nothing at all.

November 19, 2014
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry—the poets who didn’t give a shit about convention. Literary junkies who grind the brain down and tear language apart until it’s unrecognizable. A ticket to fucked-up wonderland where grammar and syntax are optional trinkets. It’s all about language itself, not that roses-and-moonlight crap. Words ripped apart, slammed back together like factory workers rushing the night shift home. Meaning? Who gives a fuck about meaning? It’s rhythm, sound, the stutter of words exploding across a page. Think abstract art, but with words. Aphasia’s evil twin. Two sides of the same deranged coin. Language is there, but trapped deep inside a fractured skull, leaking out broken, derailed, rusted. Sometimes it’s funny, because at the end of the day we’re all just clawing for scraps of meaning in this fucked-up world. The difference is, people with aphasia live in that poem every day—they can’t just close the book when the nonsense overwhelms them. I side with the literary junkies, find beauty in the chaos. For Mom, the same chaos is hell. For her, this revolt against prefabricated language isn’t a choice but a curse. A perpetual pile-up of words in her head is her brutal reality. Yet she forces us to see language for what it truly is—how it shapes us, how fragile it is. A weapon, or a lost battle. Either way, both worlds kick you hard in the balls and demand you look again, think again, feel again. At home, we can’t take words at face value. It’s all so messed up, but from here we glimpse the beauty of imperfection.

January 14, 2015
Crowds in Colruyt. No clue what they all need. Love, maybe. Didn’t find it myself.

April 15, 2015
Mom carries herself like a rabbit—and you don’t hurt rabbits. You care for them. There’s a pact between us, silent but binding. We share a humor that teeters on the edge. Convention and empathy both tested, teased, stretched. Mom revels in that humor—born of love, respect, and a heavy dose of sarcasm to lighten life’s darkness. We embrace absurdity, laugh in adversity’s face. She refuses to be reduced to a victim, mocks her lame legs, her scrambled sentences. Her eyes shine then. Eyes lived-in, telling more stories than books, stories she can’t tell. A quiet rebellion against a world that pities her, that relegates her to the shadows. Our comedic theater is a strange comfort in her fight to survive. She laughs life down, lightens its weight. We both enjoy it, and the laugh-lines deepen year by year. But she won’t step into the spotlight. Not allowed. Not tolerated. She’s grown used to it, accepted it, laughs quietly behind the curtain where all the junk is shoved.

May 2, 2015
Some dream of climbing Everest, of cruising Route 66 westward. Mom dreams of spreading her own bread. Of not depending on Dad for something so trivial. Just once, to wield the knife, slap jam on toast. To me, that’s a far more beautiful dream than Route 66, or freezing your balls off in Nepal. In a society that chants equality, the disabled dream of things far richer than the mobile ever do. They dream of the banal—of the acts others no longer notice, the motions taken for granted. That’s why they live more intensely. They see, hear, feel, and know what’s missing. Their freedom lies in the mind. The disabled slog under the shadow of a society quick to overlook the weak. Spreading bread becomes monumental. An unreachable dream. Nothing is ordinary when you depend on someone else to wash you, dress you, feed you. Life broken down. A lame dog begging crumbs of compassion—that’s the harsh truth. A slice of bread becomes a favor. Up on the highest mountain, climbers overlook the weight of such struggles, but no mountain can compare. That never makes the headlines. Not spectacular enough. Journalists skip it. Spreading bread, for Christ’s sake. Who cares? That’s the absurdity of a society where everyone’s “equal.” Only dreams that can be achieved are allowed attention.

September 28, 2015
Started night classes in antiques. Like diving into the underworld—only instead of drugs and violence, dusty furniture and paintings with more scars than any junkie. Another excuse to hide in a world where I know something the rest don’t. Cozy history lessons on a Chinese bowl or a bronze mortar while Rambo: First Blood plays on TV.

October 6, 2015
Same old, same old. Eyes on infinity in Valhalla. I deserve a Pulitzer for Madness—no doubt. Spare me the whining, cowboy. Enough clowns win prizes for nothing, for everything, for zero, buy a house with a pool in Oudenaarde, roll into retirement, but all they’ve done is shit out garbage. Still, prize on the shelf. All I’ve got is a thermos from Albert Heijn and a pack of condoms—and I had to buy those myself. The Firm, Star Trekkin’, and I was back in time. Doused again in dish soap and toilet rolls. Incomprehensible, indecipherable.

October 15, 2015
CT scan of my brain. I said I didn’t get it. “That’s just science,” Dad said. But science doesn’t mean shit to me. Sorry Dad. Papa papa. Je suis ton fils, mais ton fils de pute. Comprimé et érigé de merde. Physics, chemistry—dark chapters. All I recall of chemistry is Mendeleev’s table. And by recall I mean: I remember where it hung in class. Numbers and letters, supposedly important. Some fool Russian scored a prize for it and made history. Hooray. Party hat on, and we marched naked through class singing “Happy Birthday,” but he’d been dead forever.

August 14, 2016
Whenever I watch my father care for my mother, I soften. It isn’t some romantic fairy tale, but rather a raw ballad of sacrifice and endurance. Like a modern Don Quixote, he charges at the windmills of ignorance and prejudice, holding his beloved Dulcinea close. He struggles upstream, resolute, shouldering the weight of a body broken beyond repair. His hands, rough as coal shovels that could split wood without an axe, turn gentle when guiding her through the labyrinth of daily routine. His love is an inexhaustible spring flowing through the drought of their shared fate. In the silence of their enclosed world, he embraces responsibility with a lightness that almost deceives. Daily life becomes a dance of careful gestures, a choreography of love and understanding that transcends the body’s limits. He carries her burden not as a cross to bear, but as if it were simply another part of himself.

August 29, 2016
[Memory] One day we came home from school, and mother didn’t say a single fucking thing. Not a word. She didn’t look, didn’t move. It was as if a thick, dark fog had sunk into the house, and nobody knew what was happening. No contact, no spark—she was gone, lost in nothingness. We looked at each other, then at father, desperate for guidance. He didn’t know either, but told us to eat, later told us to do our homework. The clock kept ticking while we sank deeper into quicksand. Then suddenly—a howl, raw and tearing, as if she was ripping herself apart. We watched and wept. Then came the confession: she had killed herself while we were at school, she stammered, as though it were some grim achievement. Only she hadn’t figured out how to finish it. Even that she failed, but she had done it all the same—suicide inside her skin. She wanted to escape this world, clawed for a way out of her prison. But she remained alive. Not for love of life. Not for love of us. Simply because she didn’t know how to destroy herself. And what were we to do with her, with us, with all that wreckage? We just looked.

September 15, 2016
Words often escape my mother, but she always finds solutions. Countries mean nothing to her, yet with her hands she redraws geography in her own language—and we understand. What might have been a crumpled map of confusion became our living atlas. Her gestures are our secret code, a shadow-dance of silence and movement. Poetry spoken by mute voices. With one motion we know exactly whom she means. She points to the winds like a native scout guiding the tribe: south is “L,” because Africa begins there; east is “I,” in Thailand; west is her sister in America. And everyone she holds dear gets a place on that compass—one smaller than it should be, because the world never made room for her, never accepted her. So she wanders like a muse of lost language through a nameless realm, where all dissolve into an indistinct mass and no ship of thought can dock.

September 27, 2016
Jean-Pierre Brisset, forgotten thinker of our time, first-class lunatic. Not Darwin babbling on about apes—no, Brisset swore mankind descended from frogs. No doubt about it. Language, people, language—that’s the key. The root of evolution. That’s why man comes from the frog. French, of course: l’eau—the frog’s home. And where does man live? Logement. Voilà. Try poking a hole in that, in a world where every pin’s already been lost and stuck long ago in Uncle Fons’ ass. And that’s just the start. Une grenouille n’a pas de pouce… A frog has no thumb, but in becoming man, it grew one. See? The logic is uncanny. Still—nutcase, I say it again, nutcase. Yet a rebel of language, slaughtering linguistics’ sacred cows with nothing but a pen. A preacher of revolution against the dictatorship of meaning. A genius derailed, chewed up and spat out by a world that only craves surface junk. He was the bull in the china shop of words, laughing at anyone who tried to impose order on the chaos of language. And what a refreshing vision he had, cutting through the rigid crap of language purists. Speech? Born from animal cries. From the croak of a frog. Quoi? Now that’s creative thought. Surrealism distilled. The beauty of language lies in its brokenness, as Brisset said. Chaos. Pure chaos. The child’s joy of adventure. He didn’t have to convince me. Language isn’t a neatly trimmed English garden, but a wilderness of sounds, a dense forest where you’re meant to get lost. Always shifting, always escaping meaning, and you never find the path—but at least you’re an explorer, not a dull architect. Words aren’t obedient puppies. They’re beasts, roaming, clinging, devouring, mating. Anarchy, pure anarchy. A torrent of sound. Brisset stirred the pot of the absurd. Humans live in society? En société. Or en sauce y était. Or en seau sieds-té. Language is nothing but a capricious game of echoes and accidents. Not a cage, but a stage for imagination. Thus the world begins: as a wild beast in an ocean of banality. Down with proclamations, long live the rhapsody of phonetic revolution. Où es-tu ? – L’eau j’ai. Où es-tu logé ? On l’eau j’ai, d’ai en l’ eau ; on logeait dans l’ eau. L’ ai eau jeu, loge. Nous loge ons, nous logeons dans la loge. Viens dans mon l’eau, dans mon lot, jeu mets en ; dans mon logement. Eau logé ist, il est au logis. C’est ici mon lot, mon l’eau j’ai ie, mon logis. Le lot naturel de chacun c’est d’être logé. Eau logé, ils sont, aux loges ils sont. And so life began, a storm across the plain of linguistics. Proletarian and prophet.

February 6, 2017
Today I sat there looking like a complete idiot again. Customers at the register holding black radishes. Never seen or heard of the damn things. I had to ask what they were. They stared at me as if I was the dumbass. Of course. Apparently Meus cooked with them. His showpiece, “forgotten vegetables.” Well, they were forgotten for a reason. And if they’re forgotten, people shouldn’t act like I’m the moron for not knowing. No one did. But Meus has to make himself interesting, and once again I get to be the punching bag. I don’t go around shoving forgotten artists down people’s throats just to laugh at them afterward. They don’t know Edmonia Lewis? Well, they’re buying black radish and they’ve never even heard of Edmonia Lewis. Let Meus start there instead of making me the village fool. Rotten bastard.

August 31, 2017
At first I didn’t know what to do with my mother’s language. Mutilated sentences, grammar shattered, syntax turned upside down, words slipping away without anchor or direction, fragments cut and spliced, a collage of syllables and broken gestures. Despair on both sides. Every conversation a battlefield, a warzone where meaning vanished in the crossfire of fractured thoughts. But slowly, I began to see the fierce beauty in it. The circus inside her head was torment for her, but we learned to live with it, and from the ruins of her speech she created something luminous. That ultimate rebellion against linguistic order was pure experimental poetry—better than any so-called experimental poet could ever write. It wasn’t play, it wasn’t craft—it was necessity. Language as untamed beast, roaring, wild, prowling a surreal landscape. Language turning on its maker. The voice of the unsayable, the speech of the unspeakable. In that raw, unpolished chaos we tried to understand each other, every word a riddle, every sound a mystery. The border between word and meaning blurred, and in that absolute freedom where every rule was broken and every convention defied, we stumbled—yet those scraps were the essence of poetry in its most radical form.

January 24, 2018
Radio 1 asked me to throw my text about the disabled on air:
“Throughout history they’ve kept renaming us. Disabled became ‘person with a disability.’ That turned into ‘invalid.’ Then ‘handicapped.’ Then ‘differently abled.’ Then ‘person with limitations.’ Then ‘person with specific care needs.’ Do they really think the condition itself becomes less severe by changing the term? Words shuffled around by people who don’t have a clue, who only do it for moral polish. Do they really think someone can suddenly walk again just because they’ve been rebranded as having ‘special needs’? As if a missing leg grows back because the bureaucrats updated their vocabulary. Pure bullshit. A disabled person stays disabled. All those euphemisms don’t make life easier for us. In the long run, we don’t even know what we’re supposed to be anymore. It drives us mad. Only people without disabilities care. They need to label a reality that isn’t theirs. They don’t know, they don’t understand shit about what they’re talking about. They call it stigmatizing, but every renaming strips us of more dignity, because once again it’s they who decide what we are. All that coddling, just to ease their own conscience. Selfish bastards. They always know best for someone else. As if we went around naming them. As if we stuck labels on their faces because we thought it suited them better. We, the disabled, at least have the decency to treat society with respect and let them name themselves. But they? They once again know best. And so, another voice is silenced. Do we get a say? Are we trampled in that debate too? We’re not even allowed to choose our own damn word. Political correctness is one big steaming pile of crap. Enough is enough. Period.”

March 22, 2018
Every screw in the hardware store has been counted, and the ones left uncounted stay that way. A bit of wandering, loitering. Good day, madam, good day, sir. Counting until my fingers fall off. They say it’s important work, otherwise I wouldn’t do it.

March 30, 2018
Mother called. She was furious at the world. I first thought of telling her not to be, but anger is better than resentment, and resentment is better than hate. Problem is, anger runs out. If I could order more online, I’d do it immediately. Pick-up at the post office. I wouldn’t mind paying extra. Some things you shouldn’t economize on.

July 1, 2018
Headache. Not inside my skull, but on the scar that splits my head. And then? Then nothing. I crawl into bed.

February 18, 2019
With Pushkin and Dostoevsky to the hospital. Pushkin for a brain scan, Dostoevsky for pills to keep his left eye from dissolving completely. Silent appointments, set long ago, as unshakable as monks at prayer or Christians fasting. My straitjacket on: first a drawing folder and two spray cans—good for the CV—then the fourteen pointless stations of the cross toward Asse, where I collapsed out of the car, crushed. Solace on the radio, at least: Ann Christy, Dag vreemde man.

March 24, 2019
I’ve realized I’ve lived longer with scrambled brains than without. That won’t change. Everyone’s got a dent in the bodywork. There I lay, alone in a little bed in Wallonia. My forehead in my occiput. My occiput in my ass. A quarter turn twisted. Resistant lobes tied with a white scarf. Where was the devil’s advocate? There was only the devil. Only foam at the mouth. No tools to haul the memories back. Gone is gone. A long time gone. I’ll make macaroni with ham and cheese sauce.

May 4, 2019
Fucking hell, walked into a gallery today. Pure misery. Honestly, I’ve rarely seen such a pile of crap lumped together. Art, they call it. Art, my ass. I immediately made some bad drawings of my own, just to feel better.

June 15, 2019
Bought two chicken fillets at the supermarket. Also a tomato, a pepper, onion, cream, coconut milk. I only ate the tomato. I think it was poisoned—now I’ve got stomach cramps and diarrhea. Maybe I’ll have to go to the hospital. Maybe I’ll die there.

June 26, 2019
Note to self: don’t forget your pills.

July 1, 2019
Another pile of nonsense in the newspaper supplements. Sometimes I think I could do better, but apparently the editors don’t. My texts never pass their so-called quality test. Fine, I accept their verdict, keep scribbling, and grind my teeth at what does get published.

July 29, 2019
It’s all a mess, but in the end it boils down to this: I just want to make life as bearable as possible for myself. Do as little as I can of the things that make me sick to my stomach. That’s more or less the plan. Took me a while to realize it.

February 14, 2020
Valentine’s Day. A discount flyer from Aldi. That’s all I got today. Happy Valentine’s, Dieter.

March 24, 2020
I’m waiting for the day I can, like Manzoni, sell shit for 120,000 euros. Until then, I keep slogging along. Just a shrimp with the ambition to set all four corners of the world on fire.

May 31, 2020
Four Jazzmatazz records and a best-of. East Coast / West Coast. Bling Bling, bang bang. Street cred and pimp swagger. Gang Starr – Guru. Soft and groovy. Mellow yellow and jazzy jazz. Eternal glory with jazz heads who discovered hip hop, eternal glory with hip hoppers who stumbled into jazz. Pimp daddy on a roll. And now: pizza with tomato and cucumber. Anything’s better than whooping cough, ‘cause then you’re flat out. Red alarm light: ping ping.

August 11, 2020
Lost for days now. Can’t help it. Headache. Metal taste in my mouth. Sleepless nights. Coffee with no taste. Letters unopened. A tiny hero in my bed. My state secret, swallowed. It doesn’t end. Staring through the window all night just to make sure no one came calling. Days too hot. Bare arms, bare legs, bare skin, bare women. Makes you crazy. Out in the street a neighbor keeps shouting “ona tam, ona tam, ona tam.” Another threatens to call the cops if he won’t shut up. Any minute now the sun will come back up. I’ll hear it when they announce it.

May 22, 2021
Helpless, moved, I watch the tragic spectacle dinner has become for my mother. Sometimes she smiles at me, fragile but sincere, and waves like a child. That’s the kind of thing she enjoys, as long as there’s something to distract her. The last greeting of a soul clinging to a world slipping away. I realize each slow moment is one to treasure. One more chance to hold onto what remains of the woman who is my mother. She seems to understand this too. So she eats slowly, each mouthful a tiny victory over the chaos that has taken her mind. Her slowness is more than a physical handicap; it’s a symbol of her defiance against the inevitable dark pressing in. Her jaws grind like forgotten gears in a rusted machine. Her gaze drifts far away, as if searching for a lost piece of herself. The spoon lies idle in her bowl. She looks around and starts talking, anything to avoid the food. This is how she fights time. Her slowness a silent witness of her unyielding spirit. Each bite an act of will. Seconds turn into minutes, and fragments of her slip away. I wish I could pull her back from the darkness holding her captive, but I know it’s too late. Sometimes a spark of recognition flickers in her eyes. For a brief instant, she returns to us, to the living, and stretches out her hand like a lost child finding the way home.

December 17, 2021
[Memory] I’d just learned to read at school: Jan, house, book, bag, garden, sister — those kinds of words. At home, words fell away. Everyone else could show their families what they’d learned. At every kitchen table sat a mother pointing out words, reading along. But I was standing in a clinic next to a mother with tears in her eyes, struggling in vain to drag a word out of her twisted face. The words they gave her in rehab, she couldn’t read. But I could. How strange was that? And what if I learned to read for two, I thought. She came home, but not a word came out. The radio had gone silent. She wasn’t next to me to say if I’d read it right. So I decided I would read to her. I sat beside her and read from children’s books from the library. Slowly, guessing what the words might be. But she didn’t know either, so when I didn’t know, I just invented. It didn’t matter whether it was right or not. It was a simple act, but it meant more than any masterpiece. No story could compare. My words and my time gave her a glimpse of a world she no longer had access to. From children’s books I moved on to the newspaper, imagining myself a news anchor delivering the world in black ink. She nodded and pretended to understand. She didn’t care about the news, but at least the boredom was broken. I turned black stains on paper into images and we laughed at the sorrows of strangers. I sat beside her, and the mother who couldn’t read, taught me to read. That’s the paradox of aphasia. She taught me the beauty of language. Not metaphors or flowery excess, but language stripped to the bone. Beauty in simplicity. Not a word too many. Poetry in the everyday. She taught me there are no heroes. At best, a few tragic figures wrestling with the banality of existence. How beautiful language can be when every frill is cut away.

September 5, 2022
Mama can’t feed herself anymore. Papa sits beside her with the bread he’s buttered. With the kind of care that leaves no room for mistakes, he lifts it to her lips like a last offering to a god who never answered his prayers. She eats, slowly, painfully, eyes heavy with silent sorrow. And he just watches.

September 7, 2022
Mama no longer eats bread. Bread has been replaced by porridge. Papa sits by her, spooning it into her mouth while she chirps like a bird, commenting on everything. Patiently, he continues. She laughs, she’s happy.

September 10, 2022
Today came the day Mama suddenly stopped laughing. She clamped her teeth shut, pressed her lips together, shook her head. No more porridge for the little bird. No more coffee. She couldn’t explain; she no longer had the words. Somewhere, a switch had flipped. She didn’t want to eat anymore. Her mouth was sealed. Papa tried again. She cried NO — and this time no really meant no. Not yes, not maybe. This no was true. She shouted it, then locked her teeth again.

September 18, 2022
No one dares touch her now, afraid she’ll shatter to pieces. Her body is covered in scars from a war she never chose. Her eyes look weary, like she’s just run a marathon through her own pain. The inevitable decline. She wilts like a flower left unwatered, and we stand powerless, only able to watch. Life wrings her out like a lemon left too long in the sun. Her world shrinks to screams. Every movement is torture. Time slows. Hope dissipates. Bedsores gnaw like rusted nails through her flesh. Her body nothing more than a ruin. Blood, sweat, and rotting skin. Even a breeze makes her scream. You can’t even look at her without her howling in agony. Cries that slice through bone, cries you wish you’d never heard. Each of us is relieved we’re not the one in that bed, yet each of us would gladly take a share of her pain. Her eyes plead for release, yearn for peace. Her broken body is too far gone for rescue. We can only wait for time to show mercy.

September 19, 2022
We crawl toward the end, no doubt about it. And Mama seems wrapped in a strange mix of surrender and peace. Though life has stripped more from her than it ever gave, she accepts what’s coming with a serenity that feels almost cosmic. As if she’s suddenly unraveled the universe’s secrets. After all these years her body is a war zone, yet she lies there with a grace nothing can touch. This is nature’s order, and rebellion against it seems pointless. Her flesh has been consumed like prey devoured by a predator. She has suffered enough. Fought enough. Or so I tell myself.

September 26, 2022
Mama refuses food. Slowly she refuses water too. She dries out like a forgotten plant on a windowsill. A living portrait of self-destruction, she looks at us as we enter the living room, as if nothing matters anymore. Her thirst for water traded for thirst for oblivion. Just weeks ago I brought grapes, white ones, her favorite. She ate them happily. I knew they were only a stopgap, never enough to sustain her. But something was better than nothing. Now even grapes she refuses. She’s buried her thirst under layers of self-destruction. The last fortress of resistance has fallen. Each sip refused is another nail in her coffin. Slowly she evaporates, like a puddle in the burning sun. All we can do is watch.

September 28, 2022
For Mama there is no decent death, no dignified ending one might expect as a human being. The mercy shot of despair is a foolish illusion, like the rest of this senseless existence. It is the story of impossibility. No exit from suffering for the “incapacitated” — a term as cold as death. A tragedy: some must rot while others are spared that road. She wants the pain to stop, that much is clear, and we understand — but the law does not. Politicians decree she must go on suffering, though they never came to watch her show — just as they ignored her in life. To them, as a disabled woman, she never mattered. Now she clings to hope of release that cannot be reached. She gropes for an escape but finds only darkness. No saving hand, no mercy, no way out. So she lies there, in her nest, surrounded by those who love her. We keep caring for her, feeding, washing, talking to her as pain twists her face into something like a wrung-out rag, as morphine thins her blood, as her expiration date long passed. No deliverance for her. That’s the verdict of those who demand she suffer. But the show must go on. And us? We grin, because dignity is long gone from this society. We sing nonsense songs, dancing mock-rituals round her bed, axes in the air, hands on our mouths, up and down, up and down. Mama laughs, imagining she dances with us — but then we scold her, forbid her to think, because if she still thinks, maybe she still has willpower, and what would politics say then? Incapacitated means incapacitated. Which means: suffer, bitch. And so we throw confetti we punched ourselves, blow three times on the horn stuck up our asses. Once for Mama. Once for the law. Once for Death.

October 4, 2022
Breakfast this morning. I ate salami with garlic, drank black coffee. The nurses washed Mama. All was calm. And then, suddenly, shuddering, faint moans from her bed. Everyone leapt up, rushed to her side. She looked at us in fright. Confused. Her last glance. I looked back through tears. She slipped into a coma. The nurses dressed her, combed her hair, folded her hands neatly. I only wanted to sit beside her and never leave.

October 11, 2022
Choosing an urn for Mama was shit. Really shit. All of us together in the showroom. It felt like stepping into death’s lobby. A bunch of ashtrays screaming “Pick me! Pick me!” Big, small, shiny, dull, fancy, plain. All empty, all filled with despair. It was like shopping at IKEA for a vase. A real mindfuck. Death had taken her, and now we had to decide how to lock up the remnants of her life. How the hell do you choose a pot for someone’s memory? Everyone chimed in: “Too big.” “Too cold.” “Too blue.” “Too flashy.” Like we were picking an outfit for her. It all felt fake. Mama had been warm, real. And here we were, surrounded by cold ceramics. All we needed was a plain pot to dump her remains into. Nothing more. She wouldn’t know. It wouldn’t bring her back. Only the funeral industry would sigh, sorry we didn’t fall for their trap.

March 27, 2023
How I miss conversations with Mama. Everyone else avoided them; I loved them. However long they took, we’d always get somewhere. Out of the blue she’d say “chair.” Just that: chair. And it could mean anything. Hungry? No, chair. Something in the house? No, chair, come on, knife, thingy, chair. Did she need the toilet? No, over there, chair, no not chair, knife, no, chair, from Agnes. Was it family? Of course not. Chair. Outside? No, thingy, Agnes, or Mama and Papa. Something from the past? No, knife, Agnes, over there, French. Painting maybe? Chair. She couldn’t possibly mean just chair? She’d laugh: from there, you know, over there, come on. And on it went for hours. Until we figured it out. I realized “chair” carried infinite meanings. For others it’s just something to sit on; for Kosuth it’s an artwork with three questions. For Mama every word was infinite. That’s what I miss. I have those conversations with myself now.