27th of September

Unpleasantness in the golden cage Cookies. Bruno, natural born communist, starts handing out cookies to all kids. A skinny mum, skinny even by Slovak standards, rushes towards him. She’s not liking this. Based on her words it’s because she doesn’t want to take advantage of his generosity. My accursed empathy however says that she is one of those Sugar Exorcists. It’s not the sharing, it’s the sugar that bothers her. I make a loud internal memo to from now on only bring dried mango and nuts to this place. Nuts for the Slovak coconut culture (see previous installments of writings from the Slovak underground). All adults here are communicating via their kids. What they are saying is intended for the adults, but for some reason we can not accost each other directly. I think craters would appear and the dragon that lives under the playground would devour us for disrespecting his rules.

Later a girl asks if she can have another cookie. But I have heard the girl’s mum say she can have only one. I ask the girl if her mum is ok with that. Bruno lies in her stead, the little knight in shining armor, and says yes. I say they should ask her mum. Loud and in Slovak, so the adults here can think am this responsible dude who doesn’t want to give their kids diabetes. Am already plagued by a voice in my head telling me that the parents here now think am a bad parent for supplying my child with cookies. In Palestine and Lebanon parents worry about bombs consuming their children, here we worry about our kids consuming cookies.

Then the kids want to play monster and since I am the only child here with the size of an adult they always ask me and only me. I only grab Bruno, but the other kids also want to be grabbed (if any Catholic priests are reading this, no, you cannot have the address to this playground), including a girl. Am from Belgium. There is a joke in the movie ‘In Bruges’. Belgium is famous only for chocolates and pedophilia and they only have the chocolates to get to the kids. It’s obviously no fun for her to outrun a monster that is clearly not even trying to get her, so she starts making sure I can’t do anything else than either catch her or jump over her and I can’t jump much. So I touch her once by the shoulder and listen for police sirens. It gets easier when she pursues me with a wooden stick, so I can just fight off the stick and that’s fun enough for her, except that at one point it makes her fall and her mum sees this.

This is a damn playground. The level of toxic conditioning one needs to undergo to turn this into a Woody Allen experience is insane. Later a parent works up Hamas levels of courage to ask me if I speak Slovak. Which means he already knows I speak Slovak and his curiosity now trumps his European reservedness enough to find out why someone from the west would speak this commercially not very useful language. I love Bruno and I want him to have a good time, but standing at a playground, nothing seems more fun than to just be doing my job and not have to decipher a million social clues per second. Just imagine the calculations that go into telling a stranger’s child not to do something.

Like a few days ago some kid spoke in a forceful voice to Bruno and I barked he should remain calm. Instantly followed by wondering if 4 parents standing close now thought I was some psycho. Peter Crone always says ‘life will present you with people and situations to show you where you are not free’. For me that’s Slovak playgrounds. It’s different on Belgian playgrounds and that’s not because of the language, because I feel much more awkward speaking Dutch (I have an accent that is associated with a city of Belgian style rednecks, hicks and hillbillies), it’s because Belgians are more relaxed. Being a total chameleon I just start thinking like a Slovak in situations like this. Surrounded by Americans I’d end up being Mr Superlative. ‘oh, that’s so amazing, oh my goodness, that’s wonderful!’

Yalla yalla, gotta work now.