When I was 17 I moved into a squat. I had been attending meetings where political activists and punks talked about squatting the former majors house of Eindhoven on the willemstraat. These meetings were quite ridiculous. I remember hourlong ethical discussions. Someone discovered a junkie was living in the house. Did we have the right to throw him out? After about 6 hours of discussion the general consensus was that, somehow, we did have the right to throw him out. Sunday morning around 6 o clock we moved in. Unfortunately, part a of the group were some jackass hardcore punks from Oss. These guys felt we had to barricade all windows with grids and spirals from beds. They had all kinds of wild stories about cops and hitmen, and the next 3 months these jerkoffs were constantly busy just barricading that house. Well, not me. I had a great time reading books on top of the roof. I couldn’t even for a moment imagine why anyone would like to waste time with something as idiotic as barricading based on some fairytale stories. I felt free and had the time of my life on that roof. Opposite of our building was a philips office and I was greatly enjoying seeing them slave away their lives while I was the king of the roof.

After 3 months of barricading the house looked like Fort Knox. Getting in was really complicated, one needed to climb a ladder to the roof and follow all kinds of procedures. Meanwhile, winter was setting in and we had neither water nor heating and just one electric line we borrowed from the neighbours. It was getting really cold, started to seriously freeze and we had one little gas heating we would sit around with about 10 people. I liked it because it was seriously romantic. I was in love with this punk girl who also lived in the house but unfortunately she had a friend and it was sort of painful seeing them together. With the exception of the Oss wankers we had a nice group going. The first months me and my friend Arno were the black sheep of the group since the Oss guys would convince everyone we weren’t real punks because we refused to barricade. However, as these guys regularily smashed up the living room piss drunk, cool as they were, the other people soon grow tired of their hardcore lifestyle and we were suddenly the good guys again.

I was hardly going to school that year, but in the winter I would go sometimes just to get warm. I remember sitting next to a blind guy in class. He really liked me, we used to have all sorts of philosophical conversations. He was, maybe because of his blindness, much more curious about his environment than most people who always take the environment for granted. However since we lived without water or shower it was quite challenging to sit next to me for him, I imagine, since blind people usually have a sharp nose.

I had picked up a girl in the bakkerij, M., whom I had a relation with for a few months. She was a gorgeous hippy girl and she lived in Waalre. I remember my pickup line I walked up to her and asked her if she wanted to have a pillowfight and she laughed and said yeah. She invited me to her house and we had sex. She told me her dad was a freemason and he had this huge collection of occult books I would sift through. One time I had to come eat dinner and she asked me not to say I lived in a squat and pretend I was a normal student. I came in, probably looking quite ragged as I was in those days, and her father sat there and looked like he wanted to shoot me. He had this eye disfunctionality where one eye always looks the other way so you can never tell what they are looking at. I found him a silly person. He would sometimes dress up in his mason regalia and get really pissed if I saw him walking around in it. I didn’t continue long with M. since there seemed to miss some essential energy in the relation, maybe because we are both cancer. She was a weird girl, I remember she had a room filled with beercans. Thousands of beercans from all over the world. She really loved drinking beer too. My friend Markje, the guy who drank a bottle of scotch a day, at some point just took over the relation and I didn’t mind since I wasn’t feeling I had any type of essential connection with her.