When I started being a punk at 15 I certainly wasn’t a conventional punk by any standard. I remember having this jeans jacket I decorated with hundreds of needles, medals (I had lots of chess medals I had won when I was 10-11 years old) and other weird regalia. I did the same thing to my shoes, and I put monopoly bills everywhere and bells. As you might imagine that looked seriously weird. I looked like a decorated pin cushion and the monopoly bills and bells gave it a strange surreal after touch. It didn’t take very long before everyone started to complain about the bells I tied to my shoes. When I walked through school it sounded like it was Sunday. It was a rather quick transformation from being an unnoticed little nerd to most weird creature that ever walked the school. Most people felt I was nuts but there also was some admiration of people that admired the courage of what I was doing.

The school principle didn’t care much about courage. That’s not what our schools are for, courage needs to be punished somehow as it doesn’t produce the model citizens schools like these are build to produce. The principle called my father to school and told him I should be sent to a shrink. My father was pretty embarrassed, being a rather model citizen himself, but luckily he’s as allergic to the idea of shrinks as I was.

I walked around like a living Christmas tree for a few months until I got tired of it and changed my strategy. It did get me into some trouble – there was this big Chinese kung fu guy who didn’t appreciate my sense of fashion very much and on top of that I had demolished the glasses of his brother when he and some of his stupid pals tried to harass me in school. He stalked me one night at a club and when I was bicycling home he came after me and would have beat me up if some people didn’t pass making him change his mind. He cycled on. His plan was, however, to wait for me in the dark forest between Geldrop and Mierlo. Luckily the idiot wore a white shirt so it was easy to spot him in the dark and avoid him. The guy looked like an overhormonized version of Bruce Lee so I suppose I was sort of lucky. The point in life is rather to pick the right sort of fights and avoid the ones that have no spirit. When I demolished the glasses of his brother that was a spirited act: they never harassed me again. It did evoke another guardian but death was stupid enough to wear a white shirt that night.That’s the lovely thing about death: its so ultimately predictable.