Today I have listened to a documentary on the Beatles in German. I was surprised how early they started doing drugs and how much of it. I knew they did drugs early on, but I was surprised to hear they did so many and so early.

While doing the dishes, cooking, cleaning up, I listened to Verse Chorus Verse, a very detailed documentary on Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. I finally understand how fucked up things got for him near the end. The one who always gets less credit than she deserves is his first girlfriend, Tracy Marander who before he got famous made sure that for three years he could devote himself entirely to his art. Bleach, the album that served as the stepping-stone to his eventual break-out and likely parts of Nevermind were rooted in those three years that he was free loading and mooching off her. Then he is artistically ripe and he leaves her. She is not spiteful about it at all and in interviews you can still feel that she loves him and that those three years with him were perhaps the happiest of her life.

I should of course be doing something else than being a sponge for information.

The beauty of it blows me away. It’s not the same kind of dissolving in beauty as I experience when I see, hear or talk to Luna, there is a sadness to it. There is no sadness to experiencing and soaking up Luna, but there is a hypnotic, yet deeply melancholic quality to seeing Kurt Cobain diving in the drum set at the Reading festival or at seeing a video where you can see his band mates goof around and make jokes and then in the next image see Kurt bash his head against a giant amplifier clad in one of those white lab coats.

I wore one of those lab coats when I had to host those dreadful alcohol bacchanals in college when I was the president of the study organization and had no idea what kind of wasp nest I had managed to get my head stuck into. Again. I think I still have that lab coat somewhere in the attic. I kept the official distinctive ribbon with the soothing Slavic color combination, red, white and blue.

Luna is in Zurich, jogging from museum to museum. She’s eating passable food, though it can’t match the quality of Parisian bistros. I think of her and I feel happy, because I know she is enjoying herself, it’s obvious from the vibe in her writing and in her pictures.

I can’t watch docus on Kurt Cobain without thinking of my father. My first memories are the sound of a typewriter upstairs. My father was constantly watching the BBC, listening to vinyl records and hammering away at his typewriter. He wrote prolifically. He wrote letters to a cousin who was in the army and when his letters arrived the cousin’s fellow soldiers would group around the cousin who would read them out loud to them and they would all be laughing. It’s probably THE tragedy in my life that my father never found a commercial formula for his writing and his humor and that he gave up somewhere in 1994, just when Kurt Cobain was at the height of his fame and committed suicide or was murdered – am still undecided, though today am leaning towards the suicide version.

I also wonder why, when he was the age I am now, he started getting into body-building like a maniac. Every day after eight hours of really back-breaking work in often more than 40 degrees of heat, he would hit the gym and work out for two hours. He became massive without ever resorting to steroids. The very odd thing was that he helped get his training partner steroids. He drove all the way to Holland to get them for him, which in those days was a pretty risky thing to do, and it was just as a favor. Odd guy really. Why the body-building? He got massive, but it wasn’t going to become any sort of career, he would have had to use at least some steroids then. All that time could have gone to writing, but he was to afraid of rejection to keep going and in the end too proud to want to change much about his writing. Then eventually when I was at university and I was writing he wanted me to publish his stuff, which for some reason I never did, because the sentences were too long. After his death I wrote a story, incorporated a passage from one of his stories, polished a bit, and oh, the irony, it’s the first story I sent in to a literary magazine that got published. It’s called ‘Break the circle.’ It was translated into Slovak. Someone read it at some recitation contest and got compliments from the jury for it.

A couple years before my father’s death some Flemish writer came out with a book with a style very similar to my father’s, but like a castrated version of it, and am not saying that because he was my father, and this book became a bestseller, and it just made me want to burn the entire world, he could fucking have done it. And this spineless, humorless, sour looking dude had done it, a bestseller sort of in the style of my father. It still makes me want to vomit thinking of it. It’s actually one of the reasons I am in Slovakia, however crazy that may sound. Here I don’t risk switching on the tv and seeing that guy’s face on television in some kind of interview programme reminding me of the life I feel my father could have had. It saves me from thrashing four or five television sets a year. In Flanders we have only 20 or so celebrities and they are recycled for every possible televison show. I don’t know how anyone can still watch Flemish television. For me YouTube has totally killed off the TV star.