(I’m at Inscribe, the weeklong European Inkhaven in the hills of Spain! Please forgive any roughness as I settle back into the daily posting schedule.)

Look, I’m sure there are leagues of people who would love to live in a charming Swiss town. Safe, prosperous, picturesque. You’re cradled by the Alps! There are spotless streets and people with very white teeth.

But what it amounts to, ultimately, is the utmost degradation of the human soul.

Oh, I don’t mean the Nazi collaborations or child slaves — we’re all adults here. But I’ve been lucky enough to citizen six cities across four continents, and I’ve never seen anywhere more hostile to life as it is meant to be lived, or a culture so complacent, cowardly, and conservative. And I’ve lived among the Dutch!

This last year I’ve grown steadily more convinced that one must lead life like Conrad and Kapuściński. (Bipolar? Better than uni, like St. Simeon Stylites, that auld columnist … though I confess I’ve applied for an Antarctic post.) ¹

But enough with the preface. Story time.

A Note from the Underground

I was travelling from Zürich to Lausanne because I had heard shout that the university archive at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne had a book on ‘medico-legal hypnotism’ decommissioned from the old police scientists’ library, and I happen to share the late-19th-century fascination with hypnotic crime.

Halfway through my train route was Biel, a small bilingual city straddling German- and French-speaking Switzerland. I decided to stop there for the afternoon to visit a tenuous social connection I’d never met — all I knew was that he was looking for a friend in Switzerland, and this had made its way to my Turko-Marxist contact, who had passed it on to me knowing I was based in Zürich.

He greeted me at the station. He stank of marijuana, to my disappointment — the Switzerland of drugs — and he always paused in his speech. It turned out to be a friend of a friend of a friend situation, one degree more than I expected.

“How do you .. know Monsieur?”

I said I didn’t, but that my Turko-Marxist friend with whom I discussed transgressive literature probably did.

“Monsieur told me .. you’re Turkish.”

I said I wasn’t, but that my Turko-Marxist friend with whom I discussed transgressive literature probably was.

“My friend, his name is Monsieur .. but I call him Mister, ha .. he tells me to go to church.”

I said something polite about proselytizers.

We walked to his apartment so I could drop my bag off before touring the city, and I had this sort of sinking feeling. He admitted to smoking to calm his nerves about meeting a new person; he apparently hadn’t had human contact in days.

When were in the elevator he said, “This is the part where I stab you .. ha, ha.”

It became very quickly clear that he was gut-wrenchingly, tragically, torturously depressed.

His apartment was tidy. I wasn’t sure whether it was because of the nerves or the language barrier or the drugs or brain damage from longstanding depression plus the aforementioned drugs, but it was difficult to communicate with him.

No, he didn’t have a job. No, he didn’t go to a therapist anymore. Yes, he had tried a bunch of antidepressants, and none of them worked. He said he used to be normal, until one day in 2012 he just woke up ‘like this.’ Spontaneous brain damage, or something.

“Ha, I tell this to Monsieur .. he talks about CIA experiments .. but I don’t know.”

Monsieur was apparently a mysterious man in New Jersey he spoke with online.

“His name is Monsieur, but I call him Mister,” he repeated.

I probed some more. He didn’t have a job. He lived off disability payments and money from his working mother, who on top of it all had cancer. He had a Pokémon card collection worth tens of thousands of dollars but never actually played the game. He was learning how to draw.

Desperate for anything in common, I said I liked sketching when I was a kid, and asked to see his art. Strangely, he wanted to watch me draw instead. He flipped open a reference book and pointed to a picture of a cat.

Dutifully, I did a quick illustration; he looked at it, flipped to a different page, and pointed at a picture of a tree. This repeated a few times.

Every sketch he’d pick up admiringly and shake his head in awe. It was repulsive. I’d never been so keenly embarrassed, that he was so impressed by something I hadn’t really tried at in the last ten years. Eventually the shame, pity, and discomfort stewed to the point of nausea, and I demanded to walk outside and see the city instead.

Biel is the watchmaking capital of the world. Its medieval old town is unusually intact, and statued fountains adorn the squares. Waterways run to a lakeside park, where wine-country hills rise behind the city. I walked around for hours and looked all the sickeningly pretty views and thought about how much Switzerland sucks.

My walking companion treated me to his ideas about the ‘Moslemification of Europe.’ I said look man we’ve been out in the city for three hours and I haven’t seen a single hijab.

“Yes .. they’re hiding .. they’ll come out one day soon.”

He took me to a smoke shop, where a girl was chatting happily with a man behind the counter. As soon as he walked in they both shut up and looked incredibly uncomfortable.

“This is my US friend .. visiting.”

He gave me his card and asked me to buy a gambler’s pack of collectible portraits of World Cup players (at this point he was treating me like a man made of gold descent from heaven to bring him fortune). He was careful not to touch anything until I had opened it and examined the contents, then exhaled in disappointment.

I spent the whole day just getting more and more depressed. I couldn’t do anything to help this guy. I didn’t have any advice. In the end, I conceded that Monsieur was right, and just told him to go to church.

When we parted at the station, he looked at me with dull, sightless, stupid eyes.

“You are a special .. a really special person .. you’re an antique.”

I decided I wasn’t actually a narcissist, because hearing that made me want to kill myself.

---

I arrived at Lausanne — a city miserable with midges and contaminated by French — and made my way to the EPFL library. A horrible building.

Look at this thing. It’s named the “Rolex Learning Center” and it’s designed, of course, by the Japanese. I walked the weird sloped floor down into the archives (where everyone knows the good stuff is), and found good news bad news.

Good news: the book was a well-cared-for edition of “Hypnotism and Analogue States from a Medico-Legal Perspective” by Georges Gilles de la Tourette (of the eponymous syndrome) — high potential!

Bad news: it was in French. What did I even expect.

Disappointed, I crashed on a friend’s couch that night. The next morning, I wandered through the terraced vineyards that curl along the shore of Lake Geneva and pondered what the purpose of all of this was. Surely, as the protagonist, every misadventure I have holds a moral lesson?

As I ambled around, I realized it: I suffer from a persistent conviction that it is the coolest thing in the world to be an absolute loser, to have no responsibilities, to be a slacker, a wastrel, to worship at the shrine of sloth. Every hikikomori NEET an ascetic philosopher king! And indeed, I had spent most of last year in idle bliss.

But this was God tapping me on the shoulder and wagging his finger. Message received. I’m cursed to accomplish things in life.

And I gotta get out of this place.

1. The secret sole goal of conq dot blog is to maximize PPPP (peak puns per parenthetical). That was what — 15? Hardly readable, but gunshots keep the rent low, as they say. ↩︎