25.11.1999
"robbed"
Oh, yes, and more yet to come!
All this has taken time to digest, it's only now that I find moments to write up some of it... Hindsight: - don't hide between the star and its ray!...
(mental note: remember = survive) -
There was this second surprise, when I, still wondering about the red Peugeot and the sometime evil forces of imagination, descended the steps to the door of my basement flat. And this time it really was a bad one!
The narrow pane of glass in the middle of the front had been smashed, and the door was unlocked... I had been robbed! That was my first thought as I hurried inside. And in the next one I found myself cursing the landlord. The guy could have waited a few more days before checking whether I was still staying in his dump! But then it occurred to me that he surely is the type that keeps doubles of all the keys that give access to his 'property', and wouldn't go around smashing his tenants' windows... And, wow, didn't the place look trashed!? It always had been something a mess, but nothing even remotely comparable to what I was coming home to now! The contents of drawers - socks, underwear, shirt, trousers - strewn across the floor, all books had been taken from their shelves, then thrown around in some haphazard way, the sheets had been torn from the bed, the mattress pushed off of it...
The sight left me speechless. I must have been standing there for several minutes, looking around, wondering what the hell had been going on... Then, mechanically, I began to pick up the sheets of paper that made parts of the place look like the postmodern rendering of a snowscape, and started to reconstitute, be it in a random order, what used to be the pile of unpublished manuscripts on my desk. Obviously, those had not been what interested whoever had done this...