**OVERNIGHT IN THE FEEDBACK LOOP** In the pebbled hush of the HR portal, I typed my dreams in lowercase— a selfie resume framed by weeks of forgotten lunches, grey in the way static flickers at 3 A.M. Servers hiss like serpents in Eden’s cubicle, sibilant with performance metrics. Somewhere, a chatbot flirts convincingly with a…
*Conditions & Maladies*
*Terms & Afflictions* Monday exists like a bootprint on sanded laminate, where the light undoes itself in lanyard loops— always blinking, never arriving. They send emails with subject lines like Urgent: Update Your Humanity, and we comply because the algorithm’s sigh sounds vaguely like mother. Lunch is overpriced calamari in biodegradable guilt. I name the…
The Green Lion of LSD: Alchemy, Consciousness, and the Acid That Devours the Sun
The Surgical Principle (For now, I’ll be using this weblog to work on my book Love’s Secret Domain. The book will be published in English, though I naturally write more intuitively in Dutch.) As we drove through the Høyanger Kommune, we saw a shadow-lion moving across one of the black-silver mountains. When the landscape speaks…
The Tragic Lesson of Arthur Cave: LSD, Misinformation, and the Life-Saving Power of Knowledge
The Story of Arthur Cave My book on LSD includes more warnings than the one on Amanita Muscaria. With the latter, not much can go wrong unless you consume a large number of mushrooms or have a sleepwalking disorder. Still, in the book Amanita Muscaria – the Book of the Empress, I covered everything that…
Rediscovering Denmark: Frikandellen, Red Cabbage, and the Subtle Art of Northern Melancholy
Frikandellen with Red Cabbage The Danes are a people who, for some reason, always remain curiously under the radar. Suddenly, you discover they also own Greenland. They’ve won the Eurovision Song Contest three times, but no one remembers with what songs. The Danes. A flat peninsula above Germany, where it rains most of the time….
Leonard Cohen: The True King of LSD and the Psychedelic Spirit of Hydra
Leonard Cohen as the True King of LSD My book about LSD is going to be a true deep investigation in more ways than one. For instance, I plan to displace Leary as the so-called King of LSD—firstly, the man couldn’t write at all, and secondly, there’s a considerable chance that his trippy writings served…
The Rascal from Alaska: Martijn Benders Blends Arctic Wit with Poetic Grit in New Single Review
Review of The Rascal from Alaska single for the article What kind of book do you want to write? The reason I always design the cover of a book first and only then start writing it, is because I see book writing as a form of materialization: you want to add something to the world,…
Kroes den Bock Revives Outlaw Country in Bold New Album: A Tribute, A Protest, A Legacy
Such a shame my father can no longer hear this record “Time to bring back the Golden Age of Country. Time for Kroes.” Kroes den Bock fuses the wide-open melancholy of Alaska with the smokestack realism of Helmond, crafting songs that feel as if Kris Kristofferson had wandered into a Dutch polder at dawn. His…
Magical Strawberries, Ghostly Visions, and AI Dreams: A Surreal Day in Germany
Diary 22-05-2025 I ate the most delicious strawberry I’ve ever had, sold to me by an old man at a strawberry-themed jam stall next to the bakery. Even the concept of a “jam stall” was new to me — I had never seen anything like it. He charged 14 euros for a kilo of strawberries….
Chicago Sun-Times’ Fictional Summer Reading List Blurs Line Between Satire and AI Reality
Chicago Sun-Times Publishes List of Fake Books The article opens with a recommendation for Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende. Supposedly Allende’s “first climate novel,” it’s said to blend magical realism with eco-conscious activism. The next book on the Sun-Times list is The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. This novel too does not exist. And it…