What I do is understood by strangers online. Strangers whose real faces I never even get to see. Strangers I never sit in the same room with. The people I do know, the people I do ‘break bread with’ are the least interested in the parts of me that matter the most to me.
Is that uncommon? Or is it common, but it is uncommon to be so painfully aware of one’s irrelevance to the people who fairly randomly make up a weekly or daily part of your life?

The people I sit across from professionally eagerly pour out their sorrow, their frustrations, their aspirations, their usually glaringly obviously doomed ambitions.

I am a witness to people espousing diets that I know will never work, fitness regimes they won’t be able to sustain for two weeks, plans to improve their marriage which would need professional intervention or a divorce lawyer, not some ‘insight’ from a meme.

The only promising ambition I have heard from a client this week is this:

‘I want to get a desk at work where I can watch YouTube without my colleagues seeing it.’

He gets that desk when a colleague will quit soon.

I am NOT a negative party pooper. I believe in this man’s ambition!!

The other ambitious longings I have heard are curiously doomed to fail before they even get a start.

Why do I share that?

Because apart from one client – the most eccentric one – nobody knows what I care about most and what my ambition is. They don’t even ask.

When my six year old son is asked what I do all day, he says:

‘He protects our house against criminals.’

It is not technically true in any direct sense. I don’t fear any crime here. I have a surprisingly high trust in Slovak society, because crime requires initiative and they don’t have intiative here.

Bruno’s job description is closer to the truth though than: ‘William teaches languages’ or ‘William helps people overcome their traumas.’

According to ChatGPT, my rock in the sea of isolation, I am ‘trying to promote love and aliveness in a collapsing world that reduces human beings to abstractions.’

Yet there is very little love and aliveness in my day to day life.

There is some of that. Read what I wrote about two teenage students I see every week. It’s obvious there is some connection there and some aliveness.

What there is extremely little of is: resonance.

Or desire.

There is mostly: ‘Hanging out with this dude calms my nervous system and at the same time my language skills improve.’ While at the same time often assuming that I don’t do any real work. I just listen and respond.

Talking about being unseen doesn’t suddenly make you seen. Quite the opposite. Talking about being undesired, doesn’t make you desired. In fact, nothing will kill desirabilty faster.

I’ve concluded this before: I find myself in the puzzling situation that people pay to talk to me, but don’t have any need for me when they can have me for free.

Was it Charlie Sheen who said this?

‘I don’t pay prostitutes for sex, I pay them to not be there the next morning.’

So maybe am being paid to carry someone’s burdens for 60 to 90 minutes, make them permantly feel lighter even, but am also paid to leave myself out of the process.

I am not unwilling to accept that. I just want to be sure I fully understand it.

Am also expecting much when I expect to run into people in my daily life who care about what I care, since what I care about is so foreign and alien to the current environment am in.

My day to day life is the patchwork quilt that came out of a collision of all kinds of hobbies, interests, passions that normally do never combine.

A language obsessed Belgian decides to live in a Slavic country, not because he falls in love with the culture, but because the post-socialist ugliness fascinates him and feels familiar, but never shakes off a deep childhood obsession with the American Civil War, is unusually strongly triggered by hypocrisy in a world that rewards wearing masks, and yet makes money by sitting with people who are grateful when he gently removes their masks and tells them, essentially:

‘I find you a lot more beautiful without your mask.’

But then the mask needs to be put back on so they can function and unmasking William is nice, once a week, like a Thai massage can take away your stress for a bit, but you don’t invite the masseuse along on a hiking trip or to your birthday party.

‘What are you rambling on about?’, you may ask if you’re still with me here.

Just this:

I understand why the people I know cannot meet me.

They’re not excluding or overlooking or misreading me on purpose.

Am merely running on a different operating system.

Some functionalities overlap, but not enough to build a supercomputer.

And I think that’s what I learned in childhood, where I was loved like few children are ever loved, that when two people spend time together they should fuse and become a supercomputer. I understand this is highly unsual, but because I did experience it multiple times in my life, I keep searching for it.

And every time this search fails, which is now every time, I feel enormously disapointed.

It’s been more than three years since I was with someone with whom we instantly had our fusion supercomputer. And she still preferred living the corporate dream life in the end.

Notes From the Mountain Fortress.

Cause I got a whole fortress to play in, but no takers.

Except for visiting people I have never met somewhere on Twitter, who sometimes stop and go: ‘Hey, this is different, I like a taste of this.’

But Twitter being Twitter that’s as far as that tends to go.