“You must go, Tudor.”
“Why?”
“you’re nervous.”
I keep my mouth shut and that’s fine because I have a headache.
But if you’re reading this, I’ll be going for a while.
“Then try not to worry, Dad.”
No thanks on duty? Inflation goes up and up and up. Grocery, pub visits: money is running out of my wallet like flies. The war in Ukraine continues. If you listen to the radio, the Russians occupy more and more territory, and if you watch TV, you hear that Ukraine has a chance to regain Crimea. Because of this corrupt war, soon there will be no gas, no raw materials, no grain for Africa, making the famine greater than it already is, with all its consequences. And what happened after Putin? Then there’s monkeypox virus on the way and another covid virus on the way. Viruses are after us and we do nothing. Confidence in politics is gone. We no longer like democracy. Fewer and fewer people vote. We live in a house haunted by fake news that people want to fight with fake news. I mean, I live in constant fear of getting Alzheimer’s, but it seems like I’m doomed to conscious Alzheimer’s. I’m really excited about Rutte. In almost all Dutch newspapers, Rutte is ridiculed, belittled, humiliated and reprimanded – and not for the first time. But everyone also knows it’s absurd. While I don’t like being insulted by clinical images, I have to say we are stuck with an autistic sadistic masochist prime minister who challenges us by bullying and harassing us with the intent to beat him up. A man would be in about five hundred pages in the manual for classifying mental disorders. A walking neurosis among a group of psychopaths who pretend to be nurses.
“Dad, rest now.”
“I rest, though I feel that the Earth itself has become the Titanic. We are plunging into the universe. Anyway. I will continue to write and follow that war. What was destroyed should not disappear from the news.”
As you get older, you become more numb, but you are more concerned about the rest of your illnesses.
“Rest, Dad! Travel to your sense of humor again.”
“When I rest I get migraines, and when I don’t rest I get headaches.”
Theodore Holman (1953) is a columnist, writer, and television and radio producer. Every day, except Sunday, you can read his column here. Read all his columns again in the archive.
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