Diary of an unborn writer #5

A scratchy lo-fi punk number (probably without a bass guitar):

So what if I ate

Your precious last potato

So what if I ate

Your last can of sardines

So what if we had

Awkward sex that night when we were drunk

That what lovers do

When they’re called flatmates

I've been quite lucky with flastmates. I’m living now with a dear two who are set to be engaged. Luckily there’s been no sex between us though I am privy to their nightly gyrations through the oh-too-thin wall of our flat.

I thought I’d have my revenge when Zuza came over from Prague for a long weekend – a noisier hen you will not find – but somehow the bastards were sleeping. Damn them, but well done Zuza for stopping by, hope I’ll see her again some time.

Suzanne and Jens – the soon-to-be-weds – are like gems from Zeus’s harvest. Living in Amsterdam would have been a grimy hell had it not been for their warm and total assistance with anything I need. Job searches, paper work, food and money.

Suzanne even bought me a speaker set for Sinta Klaas – an early Dutch Christmas - because she knew how much I was upset by having to listen to Sufjan Stephens through a tinny laptop. Perhaps she overestimated my grief, but with twin 30W speakers and a kickingsub woofer, I can see how my old life grated.

Suzanne's only vice is the oppresiveness of her charity and sometimes, after a breakfast and smoothie delivered to me in bed, followed by tea, I feel a little like Lenny's mouse from Of Mice and Men. Such is the curse of living with a woman of spotless nature. Dependable and devoted, I love her like a closest sister and judge her just the same.

Jens is her fiancée. A German of considerable stature, we have completely nothing in common though I’ve never known such mute warmth. We engage each other with stories of drinking episodes or conversations about hot women. His luxuries are James Bond and video games and he makes an elegant simplicity out of loving them. I have never known anyone to laugh so hard at the Simpsons or to be so captivated by explosions.

A chef at a local hotel, I’ll occasionally come home to find pork chop and a dozen vegetables thrust in front of me and firm insistence that I eat.

These are good people with which I live, not least because they’ve taught me Northern European standards of house keeping. I now wash up with clockwork integrity and hang up my laundry the day it’s finished in the washing machine.

It is certain my habits have changed.

Two and a little bit years ago, I received a phone call from Thomas – a less elegantly clean German – calling all flatmates home to take on the kitchen.

There – in a scene that made Withnail & I look like Good Housekeeping - we found pie gravy on the walls, pasta-coagulated mould in the sink and green fur lining the bowls of several broken red wine glasses. Thomas had been right to call for the infantry and in keeping with the times, we decided to smoke a joint to prepare ourselves for the cleaning ordeal. Don’t recall how it got clean either.

It was a time when life was a separation between endless outdoor parties, I think I entertained three simultaneous lady friends, ecstasy charged our veins and red wine was our morning tea. We were also experimenting with seeds that contained an organic equivalent of LSA, that could be bought from the Head House across the street and amongst the pasta and pie gravy grime was apparatus of extract DMT – the chemical the body releases when you die.

I began to weep and welt through the mistress heavy month

Veins span chemically diffuse becoming rusty

Brain expanded to a pop

Heart wrecked for no one else

Drugs made this one a shell

Irrecognisable