I wake up automatically at about 6 am. I get my son out of his crib, cause I can hear me. He lets out enthusiastic sounds and he hugs me. I have already prepared his bottle. 150 ml. 5 spoons.

I worry if I really put in 5 spoons.

I have to tell myself I did put in 5.

Zuzi says it won’t kill him if I put in 6.

He drinks the bottle lying in my lap on the couch.

I take off his sleeping bag when he’s finished.

He slides to the ground. Takes my hands and leads me to my study. Yesterday we opened the box of a board game and the contents are everywhere.

Kinda like my memories. My thoughts about life and my life and everything.

There are small parts. I am worried he might swallow some.

So I get his favorite toy.

The vacuum cleaner.

I pull it to the living room. He follows more enthusiastically than Japanese tourists flock to a photo opportunity.

While he is in seventh heaven with his vacuum cleaner I prepare food for myself. Oatmeal with some chocolate mixed through it. And green tea.

I am still reeling from a very strange dream I had. It’s so disgusting I will not even write about it.

It’s a combination of the problems people have written me about during the day and my own general feeling of not getting what I want and the impossibility of getting what I want.

But the dream delivered its message through some nauseating imagery.

While that is unfolding on one track or lane of my mind the other lanes also get busy.

When I look at my life, but also the lives of all those in my life, I see how money dominates and permeates everything. It’s the driving force by how people choose (are actually forced) to spend their time.

Couples fight about it.

Almost anyone I know worries himself or herself sick about it.

People read about it. People discuss it.

Most of my students will devote quite a bit of teaching time talking about how to get more money. Most of them have no idea how money works and what to do to not just get a bit of it, but to get a shitload of it.

I know, but I don’t have the personality to do it. I sort of enjoy the things I can do to get a little bit of money. I would not enjoy the things I would have to do to make a shitload of money. It would cut the human connection out of the equation. And that is exactly what I like about what I do. There is at least SOME human connection involved. I know all these people will forget about me as soon as they don’t need my services anymore, but at least for as long as it lasts what I do is for the most part about exchange, about talking about things that they care about, about emotions. Not about invoicing. Or accounting. Or numbers.

But that makes me stuck selling my time. There is a clear ceiling to it. Even if I sell all the available time I have it will not make me rich and it will not free me from having to work. Which is what most people are really after when they think about money.

Money also ensures that I – but anyone I know as well – spend my time mostly with people I would not spend time with if I had an unlimited supply of money. This of course also means that I don’t spend that time with the people I do want to spend time with, but whose presence in my life does not get me money.

I suppose I could choose to just give up on money, drastically reduce my activities and then go do the things I desire. But… you need money for that. Plus, my favorite people would even then not be available, because they are stuck on their own treadmill in the game of economical survival without betraying your own soul too much.

Then my mind wonders to the Netherlands where people smashed shops, bus stops, train stations, cars, etc. Why? Because they are tired of the lockdown restrictions.

I have quite a bit of anger inside me, but that’s not something I would do… I do not see the point of it and perhaps my most important rule in life is: do not hurt others.

Percentage wise there are very, very, very few people on this earth I would consider hurting. Israeli soldiers kidnapping, torturing and shooting Palestinian children being high up on the list.

I think most people are nice.

We just seem to stay separated and running past each other, always rush rush, because of our economic system and money obsessed culture.

So many people crave intimacy and I see them look for it in all the wrong places.

Partly because it is well nigh impossible to find healthy intimacy.

We are all too fucked up.

And busy, busy, busy. Never questioning what that even means. To be busy. Busy doing what?

I’m a hippie who never allowed himself to live as a hippie. No wonder I feel disoriented.

On the one hand, especially in theory, I am all free love, rock and roll, drugs, empathy, we are all one, let’s live in a commune and have group sex while listening to the early music of the Rolling Stones, but on the other hand – the hand that wins most of the time – I’m just a slave to our money obsessed culture. With the difference that I will not tolerate a boss in my life. And that if I can ignore some administrative rule or avoid mindless bureaucracy I will.

That’s my strange mood.

My mind jumps in all directions, so I don’t know if anything I have written makes any sense to you.

I have to enter my treadmill now.

Consider donating to the site.

Am spilling my guts here and am going to be honest as always: I do want something in return. It doesn’t have to be big. But something.