The power of music and dreams

Hello earthlings! I'm back home again and into the old routines. Sometimes going to a very different place and doing different things can make you see your life from a different perspective. I don't know if that was the case this time, but maybe it's too soon to tell.

If music be the food of love; play on

What I do know is that this trip has brought me closer to a love I cherished as a young man. The car we used to drive to Germany had a cd-player, but it broke down and we were left with just a tape-player and a radio with poor reception. Now I dislike listening to the radio a lot. The endless mindless babble, the commercial breaks and the lousy choice of music makes me want to turn the radio off after about ten minutes. So this left the tape deck. A long time ago, when there were only vinyl records and casette tapes, I started to make a collection of music. I'd borrow albums from the library or from friends and put them on casettes. Later on, when cd's were introduced but were too expensive for my small allowance, I would copy them to casettes as well. In this way I amassed quite a collection of all kinds of music. From pop to metat to classical. Still better were the collections I made for special occasions or to share with friends. It would take me hours and hours figuring out which songs to put on the tape, in which order and on what side, always making sure to leave as little silence as possible. Through the years I've bought many of the cd's that I had on tape, but many of the collections remained. Faced with the prospect of driving for hours with nothing but a radio, I decided to delve into this hidden storehouse of music from days gone by. Selecting the tapes to bring was a much bigger task than I had envisioned. Many labels were missing and some of the tapes had miraculously been switched from they're original covers. Also, playing each tape brought back memories from the time that I had made them. Times when I used to sit alone in my room for days and listen to music and dream my dreams. Even though my love for music was fed and made more readily available with the general availability of cd's, something special had also gone missing. The quiet humming of the tapedeck has always had a soothing quality for me, something a cold laser-machine could never have. I wasn't able to bring many tapes on my journey, but I have them here and it gives me great pleasure to play them again now, rediscovering some of that calm and joy contained in them. They are like old friends that stand by you no matter what. They always have time for you and are always ready with a story to tell and make the passing of time more bearable. Now I think back again to those days when I dreamed my dreams and wonder what has become of them.


















The interpretation of dreams

For me, holidays are usually times for relaxation and forgetting as much as I can about daily routines. I eat more, get more exercise, do things I normally wouldn't and never worry. This was pretty much how it went the past week, for the exception of one particularly vivid dream that got me thinking. I don't know what triggered it, the bad matress, the change in scenery or just listening to my old Tom Petty tape. Hearing music again that I had loved in Highschool would account for at least part of it. In this dream I was back in Highschool.

There is a South-African exchange student. He is very handsome, but that isn't the main attraction for me. He also has a winning smile and even though he is extremely popular, he hangs out with us, a bunch of nerds and misfits. Everyone wants him, and whenever he's around there's a whole lot of flirting going on. Being gay isn't an issue when you're getting that much attention. He just smiles his beautiful smile and laughes kindheartedly at the more bizarre attempt to get his attention. Even so, I have other issues on my mind. I have decided to join the local freemasons lodge, but to be able to join I have to solve a series of puzzles. My quest has led me and a group of friends to a hidden room in the school. The room is filled with colourful displays like in a museum, and there are supposed to be clues hidden in the displays. One of the clues leads me to a white brick wall. It consists of a series of bricks that you can either pull out of the wall or push into the wall, forming a sort of climbing wall. I figure it out quickly enough and at the top have to choose between two record covers, one of which is the classic cover for The Beatles' Sgt. peppers lonely hearts club band. I can't remember what the other cover was, but I get confused and chose it instead. Choosing the right cover would result in a door opening and acceptance into the Freemasons lodge. The door however does not open and I know I have chosen wrong. I realise too late that the Beatles cover contains hidden freemason symbols. Me and my friends hang around the room for awhile and then leave. Walking through the hallway I am talking with a classmate. She is worried about meeting a boy she has met during the summer vacation. It turns out that she had borrowed some designer clothes for the trip from a friend and had been wearing them when she met him. Now she is worried about him being dissapointed with the way she normally looks. We discuss different ways to deal with this crisis as we meet up with some friends. They tell us that all our efforts in wooing the cute South-African guy are in vain, as he has owned up to having a boyfriend back at home.

The next day I started to think about what this dream could mean. Clearly highschool is a place filled with frustration and unfulfilled desires. The South-African exchange student being the ultimate object of desire, irresistable and unreachable. He symbolises everything we want from life and still believe we can achieve. Succes in life and succes in love. Finding a partner and not settling for just anyone, but that beautiful and warm person to make us feel whole. Sadly, he is already taken and will remain unreachable. In real life I will have to settle for something less or not at all. The freemasons lodge symbolises somewhere we can belong, something that will make us more than others, better, more attractive even. Through skill and wit we can achieve this, but sadly again, in the dream my efforts only go so far and at the last hurdle I get confused and fail. Even worse maybe is the knowledge that comes afterwards. I did know the right answer, I needn't have failed, if only I hadn't been so confused. This underlying theme of not being able to live up to expectations is repeated in the story of the girl. She has pretended to be someone else, end even though this has given her some succes (the summer crush could change into something more) she is worried that she cannot live up to the boy's expectations. The dream is basically telling me is this: try though I might, through persistence, intelligence or by pretense, I cannot achieve my goals.

Of course it's up to me to take heed of the dream's message or to get over this fear of failure. But what's more important to me is this. We live in a society where being succesfull and happy are synonimous. Our entire education and every aspect of our daily life focuses on achieving material succes. We want happy smiling faces consuming as much as they can and not thinking too much. Mental and spiritual growth are fine as long as they lead to greater productivity. But to paraphrase Amelie* "it is every persons undeniable right to make a complete failure of their life" I think I can be happy with less, not achieving much of anything and just live.

*Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, France 2001

Into the east

Hello earthlings! Today I'm off to the west to pick up a car that will drive me and my friends to Germany for a five day holiday.
















This is my start-of-the-year getaway, a tradition that takes advantage of low-season prices and the lack of work in january. Destination this year will be Germany's Hochsauerland. I've never been there before, so this should be interesting!

Where to start

Hello, earthlings! this is my first shot at writing one of these online diaries. I hope you can bear with me as i take my first tentative steps into this new frontier.

First, let me tell you some things about myself. I am a 31 year old guy living in Groningen, that's a student city in the north of The Netherlands. For everyone who doesn't know where that is (probably more than 99% of the world population) try mapquest or a good old fashioned atlas.

I came to live here with my boyfriend, but as I am now single again I'm sticking around for the great atmosphere and the wonderful job possibilities. At the moment I work as a shop assistant in a cd/dvd/book/toys discount store called BRAVO. I used to work for an international chain of entertainment reatailers, but at some point got transferred to my current job, which is part of that same company. All in all I've been in their service now for over 5 years, and although I enjoy it a great deal and get along very well with my co-workers, I think it might be time for me to find shelter elsewhere.

You might well think what a smart, funny and creative guy is doing working as a lowly shop assistant? Well, let me tell you it wasn't my boyhood dream by a long measure. When I was still a smiling happy-go-lucky kid I dreamt of being a biologist and working with plants. A dream that was quickly squashed in highschool. I don't know who they did it exactly, but i managed to become horrified by the subject very quickly. So instead my dreams now became of erecting huge buildings and cities. My megalomaniac schemes ranged from re-arranging entire countries to designing intercontinental infrastructures. Even terraforming new planets was a task I saw myself doing. (If any government or private investor is interested: I still have the plans somewhere). Sadly also this dream was unceremoniously crushed during my short stay in highschool and I fled into the world of writing. I wrote like a man posessed, short stories, longer stories, epic stories, trilogies and finally (with the help of my best friend) even a Fantasy Novel so epic in scope it resembled life itself. Unfortunately there's no such thing as an education in writing (in the Netherlands at least, oh to have been born in America!) So I chose a career as an artist, and by some cosmic misunderstanding was accepted into a world renowned art school, the Rietveld Academy. I foresaw a bright future as a designer, blending disciplines into new art forms with the freedom to be as crazy or different as I wanted to be. I actually saw myself living in an appartment in Copenhagen surrounded by minimalist furniture and being held tight by my amazing Danish boyfriend Erik.

Sadly, art school turned out to be quite different from what I had imagined. Being of latin-american origin (I was born in the north of Argentina) all my teachers expected my work to be infused by a kind of latin american fiery passion, when all I wanted was to make ice cold conceptual monstrosities. They would complement my colour use one day and tell my drawing style was disgusting the next. Slowly it dawned on me that all they wanted was a blank canvas on which they could project their own ideas on art and beauty, and weren't interested at all in a new and different voice. After two years of resisting this brainwashing and trying desperately to 'do my own thing' the school and I went our seperate ways.

My take on the Holy Trinity, a painting representing 'power'

My head spinning and my heart thoroughly broken at saying goodbye to yet another dream, I turned back to my old love of writing and enrolled into a course for commercial writing. I seemed to have found my place at last. Here was an educative institition that cared nothing for the content of my work, but only for it's effectiveness. I found that my two years at art school had given me at least something of value: the abiltity to conceptualise. Brimming with enthousiasm I forged ahead. I learned a lot about language, writing for an audiencem how to edit someone else's writing as well as my own and even some graphic design. Still, fate couldn't have been more unkind. After some disastrous entanglements with love in art school, I was glad to be in a class where noone had caught my eye... untill a few days into the new school year. Looking lost and confused, the most beautiful guy I had ever seen walked into my classroom and introduced himself. From that moment on i experienced a crush, an infatuation and finally a love unrivaled by any since. We seemed to have a lot in common and during the year we became fast friends. The school year ended and i decided that teh time had come for me to confess my feelings for him, feelings that I knew would never be returned as he was of the 'straight' variety.
Yet i needed to get it off my chest, so I wrote a hauntingly beautiful story that made my feelings all too clear. He took it really well, and we said goodbye for summer break.

After the summer, everything was different. Our friendship seemed to have vanished like a patch of fog in the sun. He rarely came to school and after a while just left completely. I suffered. I was lost and confused. My schoolwork suffered too. My motivation, or my muse if you will, seemed to have left with him and I didn't care about anything anymore. I went through the motions for a few years after that, but I wasn't kidding anyone. I've not written anything even close to the things I wrote that year. Finally I gave in and dropped out. I needed a job fast, and looking around I saw that a record store was searching for staff. Music being my biggest hobby and having a storehouse of knowledge in that department, I decided to give it a try. The crazy bastard that ran the place at that time hired me (mostly because of my language skills) and I've been in their service ever since. So this is me, an amateur writer, designer, photographer, architect, editor, artist, with a love for megalomaniac projects and unfinished dreams. A shop-assistant in a minor city.