the world has turned and left me here

hier Franz

Waking up late, meeting at the same place as before, going to eat Turkish Doener for lunch, getting coffee and becoming altogether too caffeinated so that we're buzzing at the edges, listening to Bach fugues pouring forth from a seated accordion player in a tunnel, clinging change thrown into velvet box, some solar power rally going on with a line of twenty-something bongo drum players waiting for the speaker to finish so they could show us all how happy solar power makes them feel, finding the English Beer Gardens, a clarinet player in a gazebo, Bochy-balls, the announced "Number One" turning out to be rapid German read by overly dramatic woman and punctuated by Schoenberg bursts of atonality from an accordion, total crap, seeking and finding the Chinese Pagoda, drinking liter beers together, Eric becoming suddenly more interested in physics and the explanation thereof, having a huge prezel, stumbling around, sitting down, getting up again, revisiting the solar power convention where the solar-powered bongo drummers have been replaced by a Mexican band with too many guys playing too many lame clacking instruments, eating sausages at the ghostly quiet Hackerbraeu Haus and laughing about anything and everything, the bathrooms afterwards deserted as was everything today and reeking of excrement, "Hier Franz," Eric getting his train ticket to Berlin, both of us laying down in the middle of the Karsplatz in front of the Neues Rathaus, remaining this way until we gradually acquired acolytes to whom we passed the torch of this newfound religion when we got bored and left, walking back to Eric's hotel, awkward goodbye, then to the U-Bahn for me, trudging the last several kilometers by foot through sinister empty marshy fields, then down S-Bahn side trails with distant pinpoint orange glows at the end which never seemed to get any closer, finally, home again home again jiggity-jig.