X Pat: Quantum leaps, beer and knitting
August 2006
Despite my worldliness, coming to Belgium was a
true quantum leap. According to the uncertainty principle of quantum theory, it
is possible for a particle to be in two places at once.
This has been intuitively known in Belgium for
centuries, I realised almost immediately upon my arrival here, after my
mid-career year out trying to make it as a male geisha with Tokyo’s female
executive crowd.
In Belgium, you are always in at least two places
at once. You might innocently go on a daytrip to Liège and find you have turned
up in Luik instead. Marilyn Monroe exclaimed that “diamonds are a girl’s best
friend” and Marilyn Manson warned the beautiful people that “it’s all relative
to the size of your steeple”. But how would either Marilyn have coped had they
decided to hit Antwerpen’s diamond-studded shopping boulevards for a spot of
designer consumption therapy only to discover that the pilot had taken a wrong
turn and landed in Anvers.
How many residents of the capital have been
embarrassed beyond words in front of foreign guests who have turned up
exhausted and dripping at the front door, cursing and asking loudly: “Why did
you tell us you lived in Brussel, not Bruxelles? Were you trying to get rid of
us?”
This surreal multidimensionality extends into
other domains of life. Take Belgium’s highly evolved café culture. There are
bars to suit and serve every kind of social, political, intellectual and sexual
persuasion. Here, beer is not just a beverage. It is a full-bodied statement,
albeit one that can get a little slurred.
In Belgium, you can indulge your diabolic
mischievousness with some devil’s water (aka Duivel). Let rip your suicidal
sense of adventure with a lethal dose of Morte Subide (Sudden Death). Be a bad
influence on your friends by dangling some Verboden Vrucht (Forbidden Fruit)
under their noses.
Being the bohemian freethinker that I am, I
decided to go with a friend to a fradical student café in Gent (Gand/Ghent) for
a dose of Delirium Tremens (Trembling Delirium).
Dressed in my Malcolm X glasses and Indian
kurta, I stepped into the bar’s dark and smoky interior. Spiky beards, goatees,
dreadlocks, crow’s nests, chrome domes, mullets and spikes were spread out
before my eyes like a multi-coloured hair jungle. Then I saw it.
Embroiled in a heated socio-political debate, a
group of fine young radicals were frantically and calmly knitting various
garments. Hating to be left out, I decided to join in by knitting my brows in
confusion. Missing a stitch, I was forced to start over. One of the students
noticed my bewilderment and invited me over.
Pretty soon, I was enthusiastically debating
the sorry state of affairs in which we lived while knitting my mother a pair of
socks. By the end of the evening, we had the world’s problems pretty much
stitched up!
But then I had to beat a hasty retreat when one
of my companions decided to pose the most difficult question of all: “Hey Pat,
you haven’t told us yet what the X in your name means?”
Ahh, damnation, I’m not ready for this, I
thought as I dashed out into the drizzle and darkness. Daddy, classicist and
champion of humanity, why did you have to burden me with such an oblique and
obscure name? Oh, holier-than-thou father, why must I carry the burden of your
universalist views on my narrow shoulders? Why couldn’t you have just called me
something regular, like Joe? Dear Reader, I wish to share with you the dark
secret of my name, but I must first build up the courage…
By Khaled Diab
This article appeared in the July 2006 issue of
(A)Way magazine.
More X Pat
Episode II – X Pat and the chocolate
factory
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