Abandoned roads - Jos Lammers

couldn’t find. No longer used to look at normal life.
I can actually pinpoint it, maybe. The beginning. Or
the push in the direction of a guru and a life as a monk
anyhow. It was on a Monday. Sunny, just like now. The
philosophy course where, after high school, I thought all
my questions about life were going to be answered, I had
given up only after a few months. Calculating statistics
and probabilities didn’t do the trick of finding my way
back to that feeling that flowed right through my head
when lighting the big eastern candle as an altar boy, with
the church organ roaring and everyone singing Gloria for
god being among us. Or when on Saturday mornings, after
a whispered confession of my sins (‘nagging my brother,
chatting in the classroom’) to a face in the half dark, the
priest made the cross and said god had forgiven me everything.
Frolicking home through white streets, everything
was just fine inside. Till the next sin.
Doing good, I thought, after quitting the university’s
statistics studies. So I worked as a nurse’s aid in the Onze
Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis and wondered ‘what next’. Even
though that question gradually penetrated less often
through the glass bell that the daily water pipes and
pills put over me. Like that mescaline trip that sunny
day. A reward for putting one of the flower children in
the Vondelpark in touch with the woman with the green
eyes. “Heavy stuff”, she added. So Fred Winkelman, a
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