After a live filled with images, without reality, people, community and communication, being amused to death and turned into a spectator, all that remains of me is emptiness, loneliness, rage, disbelief, sadness and despair. But: I can still switch to the real me, the football player. So I play 4 to 6 hours a day, seven days a week, improving my skills, all in vain, but at least then I'm alive, not a zombie.
Even if you never read a book, read ‘Amusing ourselves to death’ by Neil Postman and you'll understand why we have lost or are losing everything that makes us human, and have to deal with, to name only a few, a psychopath becoming president of the USA, right wing extremists in governments of more and more countries, children being destroyed by ‘social’ media, arms races in schools involving knifes and even guns, people unable to talk in complete sentences, kids unable to concentrate at school, bullshit jobs, lawyers and investigative journalists shot in broad daylight, ten percent of the population addicted, five percent of the population on anti-depressants. Because the screen, which is the cause of a radical change in culture, is omnipresent, you see the same problems in every developed country.
If I could make a wish, it would be to live in a world without any screens, when there were still people, able to communicate, instead of empty vessels attached to mobile phones. And a world where it would be totally uncool to drink, use drugs and waste your life and totally cool to explore and use your talents. A world that is not an amusement park, but a world you can actually live in.
the Ball and I...
…were inseparable. When I was in primary school, I couldn't wait for the break, so we could continue to play football on the school playground. Where you were either Johan Neeskens or Johan Cruyff. Arguing which was the better goal keeper, Piet Schrijvers or Jan van Beveren - van Beveren, obviously. Sitting in tears in the classroom (embarrasing, yes), because I was punished and sent back to school by a groundskeeper for running on the newly sown grass, so I couldn't play football.
Arriving at the club when I was eight or nine years old, discovering the place was deserted. Ok, there was a blizzard and it was -20 degrees, but is that enough reason to cancel the football??
Loved any sport actually, tennis (together with football my favourite), hockey on the street with home-made sticks, badminton, table tennis, darts, canoeing, climbing trees (ok, not a real sport, but briljant anyway), as a kid racing with my small bike across the island Terschelling, to be the first at Hotel Paal 8.
Only when playing an intense game I felt really ‘alive’ - the rest of the time was a siesta. Now I have a huge hole in myself, as I had to switch to survival mode when entering secondary school, and never managed to switch back, losing my life in a black hole: television.
Positive
I will also write about stuff that can prevent falling into one of these traps, or that can get you out of one. For instance, in my case, I almost drank myself to death, having had no goal in life after school had destroyed me (more on that in the chapter Addiction), but after discovering I could sing and the enormous joy it gave me (music is my other passion, listening and now also performing), didn't need the alcohol to fill the emptiness anymore, because I wanted to learn by heart all the briljant songs composed by Schubert and Mahler, and so got rid of the emptiness by filling it with music.
So, without the help of a clinic, a therapist or whatever, I switched from drinking 12 Duvel a night or a bottle of Single Malt Whiskey to nothing. Best thing I ever did - too bad my father felt the need to ‘teach’ me how to drink. Did I ask for that? Did I need that? No, I needed a father that saw me for what I was: potentially a world class athlete. And act accordingly: stimulate me in sports, not in drinking. All I needed was a little encouragement. Unfortunately, he had an alcoholic as a father himself, who destroyed his own family (my father's brother and sister both drank themselves to death) and thus didn't provide an example to follow.