March 1, 1989: The Day I Should Have Stayed in Bed

One of the most significant dates in my chaotic, unpredictable, bizarre, and absurdly surreal life, far from stress-free, is March 1, 1989.

The day I should have stayed in bed or summoned an alien to immediately catapult me to an intergalactic dimension where chickens practiced yoga while pondering the serious dilemmas of laying eggs in space.

But none of this happened and that morning I was as dazed as a crushed snail on an ice rink during a heatwave. I absolutely had to buy a specific wooden bread cabinet at Ikea, which in hindsight, it might have been better to decide to leave the bread in the bag it came in and just put it in the kitchen cupboard.

On that unsuspecting morning, I walked into Ikea Sliedrecht and ran into an old classmate.

Jaco van Dam. Jaco happened to be there with his sister and her children and I was there with my parents because of that ridiculous breadbox. Quite a coincidence, considering Hoek van Holland and Vlaardingen aren’t exactly close to Sliedrecht.

We hadn’t seen each other in about five years. We were in the same class (1982/83/84) in high school and had both left school prematurely at eighteen. We did have (useless) lower secondary school diplomas and Jaco went on to do some more schooling (no one knows why).

For those hoping to read the most romantic plot ever about us: don’t count on it.

Jaco was a good excuse for many teachers to visit the psychiatrist weekly just to make it through the rest of the week at school.

Sitting in the same class, a meter apart, with idiot number one was like trying to solve a marble maze while sitting in a spinning washing machine; completely pointless and extraordinarily irritating, but you always come out with a story to tell.

Teachers went crazy because of him, and I had a front-row seat to it all. Jaco was an expert at annoying teachers. Punishments: Jaco was a regular at the janitor’s office. Extra writing assignments, detention, extra homework: he collected them like stamps. And then there was the infamous “square schedule”: a week of school every day from 8 to 5. Jaco had so many square schedules that he almost started looking square himself. During his school years, Jaco saw the school more often than his own home.

He chronically sat backwards in class while telling the teachers how to teach, what to teach, when to teach, why to teach and more nonsense like that. The most annoying thing was that he was actually right, lol. Anyhow he was a lousy student you could never stay mad at for long.

In short: know-it-all antics, jokes and punishments dominated and I already felt sorry for his future wife back then. You had to be crazy to marry someone like that!

And now, for unclear reasons, we had to run into each other at Ikea. No one knows why and we exchanged phone numbers and I called Jaco later that same day to arrange another meeting.

Whether that was such a good idea, you can read in the follow-up stories and it was probably a moment of temporary insanity.

That was the beginning of the craziest movie you’ve ever seen.

To be continued…

Fake Eraser story read here