the world has turned and left me here

ed's last day in munich

Another gray rainy day. Appropriately Ed bought a Nirvana poster with Cobain blowing out a smoking gun. (It came down to this or Cobain with the words "I hate myself and I want to die." Tough call. Ed wisely opted for the subtler of the two.) Trying to skewer pigeons on the tips of our umbrellas. Wittelsbach Royal Palace. Opulence oozing out of every pore. A hall lined with literally thousands of marble heads. Gold leaf crawling over everything like a fungus. A settee above which green pleats unfolded, parting in half, from where they were gathered into a hemisphere about 20 feet up, like a giant wall-mounted squid. A room studded with miniatures. The urge to appreciate art clearly superceded here by the urge to collect it. Elsewhere, a music store with old tattered copies of Schumann, Schubert, Chopin. Doener for lunch. The Deutsches Museum, both of us tired and unable to read many of the displays. "Interactive" turning out to mean "press this red button to set things in motion and then sit back and watch passively." Thinly masked boredom. Beating our retreat back to a coffee shop. Inverse window-shopping: Ed and I watching people pass by, voicing over silly things, laughing hysterically, making people paranoid. Second wind. More shopping. Ed finally finding some shirts he liked at "The New Yorker," of all places. Home to my dwindling food supply, then to bed early, both of us exhausted thoroughly by the day.