My 1st encounter with Alex

In oktober 1999, 4 years and 8 months after I first connected to the net, I would meet a netfriend IRL (in real life) for the first time. Often I had wondered how it would be like, when words, unspoken words, nothing more but characters on a screen, would turn to flesh.
 I chatted with Alex frequently on  DICS, the Dutch Internet Chess Server, usually about 4 o'clock in the morning or even later. He lived in Leuven, Belgium at the time, where he logged in from the university. At 4 o'clock in the morning, indeed. I never understood how this was possible, but it was in Belgium after all.

The IRL encounter was scheduled at Halloween  on the 31st of October in Ruigoord, a small village, close to Amsterdam, which consisted of no more than 2 crossing streets. In 1973 it had to make room for a harbour. The inhabitants had moved out already, and the whole village had become a ghost town. Then it was squatted, and it became an  refuge for artists and psychonauts from all over the world.
One of their most ambitious projects was the tower of Babel, in which I would meet Alex.
I warned Alex that Ruigoord would be hard to find, that I would be unrecognizable in my skeleton costume, and incommunicable because of the acid, but nothing could scare him off. 
Halloween night, 1 o'clock. The acid worked real good, I WAS a skeleton that night! Inside the tower I slowly walked against the wall, stepped back, walked against the same wall again, etcetera. Of course no one spoke to me. Then all of a sudden a boy stepped in front of me.  'Hello, I am Alex!'

Kasmir Lounge, Amsterdam, the day after

Titia, Werner, Tamara and Alex