Welcome to my story ...

Hello dear reader,

Thank you for showing some interest in me.

My writing-name will be Benjamin Supertramp. I chose this name to honor Christopher J. McCandless. His story is truly inspiring for me. If you want to know more about him I would recommend you read 'Into the wild' by Jon Krakauer or you can watch the 2007 movie adaptation with breathtaking music from Eddie Vedder. In any case, although I could have never met Chris (he died about 2 months after I was born), I do consider him as a friend or at least someone I would have loved to be friends with and have endless philosophical discussions with. 

So in memory of Christopher J. McCandless a.k.a. Alex a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp.

Since some friends of mine do not speak dutch, I will probably write most of the time in English. In any case this blog is more for myself than for anyone else, so if I feel sometimes like writing in Dutch or Spanish or some other language, I will just do that. You can always trust on your best friend 'google translate' or ask me to translate it.

I will probably write a lot on this blog, in the first place for myself, and in the second place for anyone who wants to follow my journey and wants to know about my crazy adventures. Though a lot of you might start reading my blog superbly motivated and with the best intentions, I know from experience already that most of you will not even read half of what I am going to write down. And that is just fine, unfortunately our society makes sure we do not have the time anymore to listen to storytellers. Although the story might be interesting, another persons travelling can sometimes get ... well ... just plain boring, especially when you have to read it instead of listening to the story firsthand. You can not feel and see the excitement of the storyteller while his voice is trembling of passion and his feet are already itching to lose himself in a new exploration of the world. This is how I felt about a lot of travelling blogs I tried to follow. I wanted to know about this guy's quest or that girl's trials, but I ended up being bored because I felt like I was just reading somebodie's diary.

So now ... although I write mostly for myself, I do feel like I need to somehow entertain my public, I need to please the crowd. I need you, the reader, to not get bored of me, I need you to live the story with me and not be some faint-far-away-reader at the side. So for the people who hate reading, or the people who do not like to start on big junks of diary-like texts (like this one is apparently becoming while I am writing it), or the people who get easily bored, or the people who cannot spend more than a minute on my blog, or anyone else ... I will try to make this a little bit more special, exciting, interesting, experimental, ...

• To begin with, there will be big diary-like messages, like this one. If you want to, YOU CAN SKIP ALL OF THAT. To all who read it, congratulations to you; to all who do not read it, you are also congratulated. Yes I just did that, I used a line from 'de burgemeester'.
• Because of the invention of social media, skype, ... it has become truly hard to disappear from the known world. I will try to not kill my digital life, so we can still stay in contact and you can perceive my stories coming from my mouth instead of reading them on a screen attached to world wide web.
• I promise to make pictures and put them on this blog. For the reader, this will help your imagination in living the story with me. For the non-reader, the pictures are the story, make up the adventure yourself while you watch the pictures. It is not super important that you know exactly what I am doing, it is way more important that you get a feel for the atmosphere and the setting I am trying to transfer to you. Pictures are an excellent medium for that.
• Music. Music! Why does anyone read a blog? Do we really want to know from minute to minute what anyone else is doing. No. We want to be inspired. We want to feel alive and we want to know dreams can come true if we pursue them. We want to experience the world through the eyes of the wanderer, the traveler. We want to feel the whole world while we only have time to get a fraction of it. We desire the nomadic lifestyle but we cannot leave our comfort-zones. If you really want to follow me, if you really want to be inspired by me, if you want to know about me ... let me inspire you and let music be my voice. Music is a much better way to convey emotions and ideas than anything I could write. Let me deliver to you all the music that inspired me to be who I am. I made a list on 'spotify' (you can make an account for free) and that list is called 'B Supertramp'. If you are ever listening to this list, you come closer to my core than anyone reading this blog. The list will also be forever a work in progress, it is possible tracks will be added or removed or even re-added and re-removed.
• Next to Music; books and movies have had a great part in building up my wandering mind to what it is. I would like to invite you to read or watch some of the stories I was (and still am) most captivated by. You can find the list at the bottom of this blogpost. It is possible the list might change and become bigger over time as I have still a big 'to watch - list' and an even bigger 'to read - list'.

I think this post has now become big enough to scare away almost every reader I might have had, so I can safely assume this is now a complete private blog. If you got through all of my mumbling and you are still here reading this sentence, I wish to thank you from the bottom of my heart, for you must be a very good friend of mine and those are very rare and precious.

Peace out.

B. Supertramp

Inspirational movies

• Into the Wild (2007)
• What the Bleep do we Know!? (2004) and all of it's sequel material 'What the Bleep! Down the Rabbit Hole - Quantum Edition' (2006)
• The Fountain (2006)
• V for Vendetta (2006)
• The Matrix (1999)
• I Origins (2014)
• Requiem for a Dream (2000)
• The Truman Show (1998)
• Les Intouchables (2011)
• El Laberinto del Fauno (2006)
• Earthlings (2005)
• Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)
• Forks over Knives (2011)
• The Imitation Game (2014)
• Balance (1989)
• Coraline (2009)
• The Nightmare before Christmas (1993) and actually almost all work by Tim Burton
• Avatar (2009)
• Up (2009)
• Inside Out (2015)
• Wall-E (2008)

Inspirational books

• Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
• A brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
• Πολιτεία (Politeia) - Plato (I read the dutch translation 'De ideale Staat')
• De Ketter en de Kerkvorst - Etienne Vermeersch & André Léonard in conversation with Joël De Ceulaer
• De Vrolijke Atheïst - Jean Paul Van Bendegem
• The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
• The Dalai Lama's Cat - David Mitchie (I read the dutch translation 'De Kat van de Dalai Lama')
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
• The Hitchhikers Trilogy - Douglas Adams (Although it is called a trilogy, it contains five books. I read so far the first three of them: 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', 'The Restaurant at the end of the Universe' and 'Life, the Universe and Everything'.)
• Sofies Verden - Jostein Gaarder (I read the dutch translation 'De Wereld van Sofie')
• The Tao of Pooh (and the Te of Piglet) - Benjamin Hoff