Thursday
Originally published in French on my blog.
Thursday morning, I set off on my scooter for work, minutes after the passage of the garbage truck. As happens every week, the containers, emptied automatically by a lifting system and barcode scanning, are left in the middle of the sidewalk, making it difficult, if not impossible, to get through - you may even have to get off on the road to walk around them. I had already approached a garbage collector about this, who replied that he would “talk to the driver”. Seeing that there was nothing to be expected from those guys, I had rang the refuse collection service, only to be outright insulted on the phone.
I then take my usual route, through woods and countryside, where I regularly stop to lay on the embankment the corpses of small animals - squirrels, badgers, foxes, birds, weasels, cats and now raccoons - run over by the drivers who have preceded me, and on which no one cares to drive until there's nothing left but mush. I'm thus risking my own life, since hardly anyone drives at less than 120km/h on roads with a 90km/h speed limit, and between the workers who didn't sober up the day before and the Karens stoned on anti-depressants - 300,000,000 (three hundred million) doses are taken in the country every year - like the one who sent me crashing off the road as I passed her, very few are even vaguely fit to drive.
On the way, I see buzzards already hunting, hovering over the fields, and kites soaring high in the sky. I see the world through their eyes, feel the wind in their feathers, and I'm right up there with them - one of my truly joyful moments of the day. I used to take another route, now impassable, where two little birds who knew my schedule waited on a fence for my passage to race me, which I obviously lost every time. I keep riding between meadows where peaceful cows graze, getting an eyeful of this beautiful nature, somewhat spoiled by election signs that nobody thought to remove.
I was recently talking about this simple bliss to an old lady I met on a walk with my dogs, who was very worried about “her Earth” which, as we all know, is going to perish because the average temperature has - temporarily - risen by 0.5°C (half a degree), but who hadn't noticed the lush vegetation, nor the massive comeback of rare species of animals - including red kites - in our regions, and who, having “no time” to buy her meat from the local farmer - 10 (ten) minutes away by car - contributes to the unspeakable torture of factory-farmed animals. This lover of nature, who believes that Creation is the result of chance and resents any idea of God - heredity, no doubt - also evoked with a tinge of nostalgia her poor father, a staunch communist militant who suffered from a slight case of self-doubt at the end of his life. It's good to know that the slaughter of a hundred million people was not in vain: it led to the self-questioning, albeit belated, of a Party member.
After taking a shortcut where I'm driving at 20 (twenty) an hour, given the terrible condition of the road, which has been badly patched up for 40 (forty) years - the burgomaster refuses to carry out the necessary work because “people would be driving too fast” - I come to the rows of hideous houses that have sprung up over the last twenty years in the dormitory village where I work, where fifty years ago you could still find two bakers, a butcher's, a grocer's, all the trades you can think of (roofer, plumber, bricklayer, carpenter, doctor, etc.), cafés, and even a hotel in front of the now disused railway station. The railroad that once carried hundreds of workers to Seraing [that’s in Belgium, dear reader] - the world's leading industrial hub then, now a cesspool of the unemployed and welfare recipients - and carried thousands of tons of local stone for the dozens of stone masons who once set up shop alongside the railway, has been dismantled to make way for a Ravel - a path for walkers and cyclists, the former regularly bumped into by the latter, who never ring their bell.
I will be spending the day with my 5 (five) colleagues, in a company that numbered 120 (one hundred and twenty) workers when it was founded, for my last year of full-time work in a job that nobody wants to do any more - because it's tiring - included on the list of 98 (ninety-eight) jobs in short supply in the country and therefore possibly on the verge of extinction. However the company is still running well enough to pay salaries and finance the boss's essential needs - winter sports, a 120,000 (one hundred and twenty thousand) euro car change every 2 (two) years - but not enough, it seems, to maintain the equipment, which is literally falling apart. As we're also short of orders, I get back on the road a little early, staying on the lookout in certain places, notably the one where I almost had a run-in with a “motorcyclist” - of which there are hundreds riding every weekend through the village - a spoilt pensioner on a machine he can't control, who was overtaking a tractor by cutting the white line on a blind bend at the top of a hill.
I also pass buses, some of whose drivers are hurrying to get to town at break time, where 12 (twelve) year-old girls will do them a “little favor” - of the kind that, traditionally, devoted wives do for their men - in exchange for the small bill that will pay for their basic needs: shopping, smartphones, alcohol and various hard drugs, which my wife learned from a former resident and a police officer in charge of returning serial runaways to the institution, that all young people consume in large quantities, apart from one or two isolated cases like this studious, courageous, disciplined, intelligent, honest, polite and respectful boy in her care - who is, incidentally, Muslim.
I pass the village supermarket, where the full parking lot tells me that the good people are going to fill up on toxic foods and other industrial ready-made meals - of which 30% (thirty percent), the official figure, will end up in the garbage can - which spare them the painful task of cooking, make them obese and destroy their immune systems, inconveniences that BigPharma promises to compensate for in exchange for their eternal gratitude and hatred of anti-vax, whom they'd like to see physically eliminated.
I ride into my village a little before the time when the containers, which haven't moved a millimetre since the morning, will soon be brought in, and up to my street, where the weeds are taking over everything: around the house on the corner, recently renovated as an Airbnb, where thistles a metre high are growing; in front of all the houses (except ours), whose outskirts are no longer tended to; in the pharmacy parking lot, overgrown with brambles and bindweed, where the lady on the opposite corner, the one who has recently had her eyelids redone, takes her dogs - two ugly, aggressive greyhounds imported from Spain - to pee, while never failing to rave about our handsome, good-natured and loyal Amstaff, a breed of dog that has gone out of fashion, now abandoned in droves in shelters where they can no longer find their owners and are therefore “euthanized” en masse. As they do every day, the Border Collies locked in the back garden overlooking my street bark desperately, not that it fazes much their owners, who have never taken them for a walk since they moved in three years ago.
No sign of the local gang of thugs who have been breaking into old people's homes for years, with complete impunity since there's only one - female - part-time officer left at the village police station, and the rules forbid her to intervene alone. Never mind, if they feel like it, I'll explain my notion of hospitality.
I'm reunited with my wife, who, at 62 (sixty-two), when she's not at work trying to rehabilitate children destroyed by their parents, often on her own, managing the homework, baths, meals and bedtimes of eighteen half-crazed kids - the profession of educator is also in short supply - is working her butt off in our home, in the vegetable garden or in the kitchen, interrupted ten times a day by phone calls from her distressed daughter, who can't make ends meet on the meagre 3,000 (three thousand) euros she gets from the state, between unemployment benefits, benefits for a non-existent disability and family allowances for two kids she complains about constantly.
I could go on for pages, but we'll stop there for now.
All this is worrying enough, of course, but there's a very simple solution, the one chosen by the good people: pretend. Pretend that everything is exclusively someone else's fault: the migrants, whom the Right must get rid of as a matter of urgency, or the State, whom the Left assures us isn't being nice enough to us and that things will change.
We also have to constantly reiterate that if things are going badly, it's because we didn't vote left enough, or right enough - because obviously so far things have been working so well. By dint of repeating it, one may even believe it, however obvious it may be that, on both sides, politicians are either opportunistic cowards who take their orders from on high, or nepotisers from dynasties of self-confessed criminals. In both cases, they are the last to volunteer to govern a people blind to the system's omnipresent depravities, starting with their own. That's the one good thing about democracy: you get the government you deserve.
Above all, we must hope that all this won't give any bad ideas to the masters of this world and their eugenicist buddies, who could legitimately harbor a touch of bitterness at the fact that the oil they have generously allotted us has enabled the herd to grow in a century from two to eight billion heads, and who, fed up with their whining and vehemence, might want to reverse the trend with the modern genetic and other means at their disposal today, or more prosaically, by creating a pointless conflict with Russia, sending millions of young illiterate junkies to the slaughter because nobody knows what the hell to do with them, only to replace them with more docile, less demanding people.
In short, the solution is to continue to live in denial, victimization and the law of silence until someone who only wants us well comes along and puts our garbage away, which should work, no doubt about it. The only problem being that it's now Friday.