the world has turned and left me here

dress up

When I got back to Munich, Martina was waiting for me at the S-Bahn station. It was a nice surprise since I didn't expect her until the evening. When evening came, we got all dressed up and went out to eat. This was apparently the first time Martina had been on a "dress up" date. All the other German Startlodge guys said they'd never done it either; apparently, it's not as common as it is in America for young people to go in for this kind of formal stuff.

Drawn by the prospect of live piano music, we went to the Cafe am Beethovenplatz. Had great food (great looking too--as Ed says, "presentation") with wine. A Beethoven bust glowered at us from across the room. Turned out to be jazz piano but that was okay. A tackily-dressed woman with a red blinking light on her cap (think LA Light shoes worn on the head) sang "The Girl From Ipanema." At first her unusual appearance and expressiveness made me think it was affectation, but after watching for a while, we decided it was all sincere; she just lost track of the fact that people were watching her when she sang. Sometimes she would look over at the pianist, and he up at her, perspiring, smiling, pleased to be setting her movements to jazz chords. It was beautiful to watch two people so completely in synch.

Martina and I had a lengthy discussion about a Rubenesque painting hanging on the wall. It was difficult to read visually. Eventually decided (okay, I decided) that it depicted the aftermath of a sixty-nine, with one figure laying back on a pillow looking satisfied and the other one possibly wretching over the foot of the bed. Yeah I'm pretty refined, I know.

After some walking around we ended up in McDonald's for some water. A guy wearing only a leopard-skin-print thong came in and ordered something with his friends. We drank our water outside by the Karsplatz-Stachus fountain. There an athletic-looking dog entertained us by chasing a Coke can. The owner would wave the thing from side to side, double-faking, and the dog would crouch low to the ground, trying to guess which way it would go like a goalie. A frantic chase would ensue. Sometimes the dog would have to plunge into the fountain to retrieve it, and then would do that full-body shake thing. I noticed leopard-skin thong guy was standing around off to the side talking to his friends, and wished that their fates would collide: water-shedding energetic dog and practically naked guy, all on a slightly cold evening. It would have been appropriate somehow but I guess I didn't wish hard enough.

Martina and I got tired, fought over who was going to sit where in the S-Bahn. When we got in her car I had to sit in the back because she had completely taken out the front passenger seat. I had lots of legroom but it was a funny situation. "Home James," I told her.

return to munich

Yo, I'm back in Munich! Since the trip was successful as far as "experience collecting" goes I'm now faced with the task of transcribing a notebook full of hastily jotted entries and random scribbles. Am going to have to abridge it a bit I think. Will post the entries on past dates, chronologically, so you may have to go to the archives to get some of the earlier ones. That is if you really care. ;)

pictures from Berlin

swarm stupidity

Almost missed the train. Eric and I were having so much fun goofing off and eating that we lost track of time. At the entrance to some ritzy multi-colored restaurant we grabbed a box of matches each, and Eric taught me how to flick them in the air while striking them simultaneously. Walked around doing this for a while. (Maybe, as I write this on the train at a safe distance, Berlin is burning to the ground in my wake.)

We saw a Frauen Fitness center where women ran on treadmills in a window. I decided I would walk back and forth in front of it with 5 second rest intervals to see if I could get a reaction, but Berliners are apparently too serious to find any humor in this. Wound up eating in a restaurant where a Spanish-looking girl, sitting alone inside by candlelight, had given me a prolonged, direct look when I passed by earlier. Tried Berliner Weiss Rot Bier--sweet like canned fruit and served with a straw in a cocktail glass.

Eric and I noticed a big flock of birds landing somewhere off in the distance as we were looking for a place to eat. Eventually we came to this place. It was a courtyard closed in by condos, and the birds were making a horrible en masse racket up their in the climbing ivy. Twice, Eric threw rocks into their midst, starting a chain reaction that led to half of the birds flying off, circling, and landing again. "Swarm stupidity," he said.

At the train station an Italian guy was talking on a cellphone next to me. As he talked, he gesticulated wildly, so much so that he kept bumping me with his arm.

Tired now, but can I go to sleep? In need of a good shower and my own bed for the night. The trip has definitely been worth it, but I'm ready to go home, program, listen to Rage, hang with Martina, etc. Munich, I miss you.

not welcome

If there is something sinister about this place it is latent, not like in Amsterdam, where I was always careful to cover my Nexicam with my jacket for fear of inviting a mugging. I do not feel any such immediate physical threat in Berlin. Rather, the sinister things must come from little things present in the environment, like the way people move, or (to give a concrete example) the fact that only once so far have I actually heard English spoken by someone on the street. (English is quite common in both Amsterdam and Munich.) Have seen no American tourists come to think of it. It just basically feels like I'm not welcome here.

Now I have to say I feel a little warmer towards Berlin, after having played some frisbee in front of the Berliner Dome. People are getting off work, which means more are out and about, and there's more going on now.

Heard choral music in the Berliner Dome as I descended the staircase, and stopped on a balcony to listen for a while. I'm not sure about the choir, but the acoustics were great. After one "Amen" ceased there was nothing but smooth echo upon echo, like receding golden waves of sound, for about five seconds.

Here's the ceiling of the Berliner Dome.

Strange and bad music is now taking place behind me at an open-air cafe. Two Italian-looking guys equipped with cello and guitar the perpetrators. Eric is nearly 15 minutes late.

the Berliner Dome

There is definitely something sinister about this place. If your environment looked like Berlin, I can understand why you might turn out like the Berliners I've seen thus far. The older people seem quiet and sort of resigned to their fate (their insides slowly withering away?). The younger people seem frustrated or angry. They smoke cigarettes against walls and then toss them onto the tracks with the same "I don't care" flair. Seems it's cool to not give a f*&#. Shave your head and get a tattoo, who gives a f*&#? They're well on their way to becoming like the older generation.

Have just visited the Berliner Dome. Unfortunately, the crypt beneath was too dimly lit to photograph without a flash. But totally quiet. Smooth cold marble. Stillness. All the coffins were set out on the floor. Some contained "unknown" persons. There were many small ones for children that died in the first couple years. At one point I got kind of spooked imagining what would happen if, in defiance of the stillness and smooth gray marble floors, everyone, known and unknown, were to suddenly burst forth from their coffins. Like lightning striking nearby on an unsuspecting and sleepy gray day.

An hour left before I meet Eric. Going to play some frisbee in front of one of these monuments; hopefully the sight of me enjoying myself may revive someone's withering insides.

on "The Alchemist"

Coelho I respectfully disagree with you. Destiny is never so simple as that. To inject purpose into life is to falsify it. What we seek out is not a point in space-time, but a volume (perhaps infinite). I do not want to write "the program," but simply to do some programming. Similarly, Eric does not want to unify physics by making the Standard Model flawless, but simply to do physics. It is not a point that can be reached, for if it was reached, what then?

What you seek transforms you. If you seek a point you will become (or remain) one-dimensional.

Berlin Tiergarten

Am in the Berlin Tiergarten now. How can a place like this exist inside the surrounding industrial wasteland? Beautiful willows beside ponds. I'm laying under a birch tree. A dog has just jumped into the pond, paddled around ineffectually, worried the duck community. Peaceful. But not representative of Berlin, I'm afraid, so I've got to move on.

big meh-loh-nays

Past tense: last night Eric and I ate at an Italian place in Berlin. Had wine, spaghetti, and some appetizer dish with tomatoes and basil. Our waiter was a burly guy who spoke German with an Italian accent...quite confusing. We were scoping some chicks that walked past and I looked up and realized that our waiter was standing around scoping them too. After they had passed Eric and I were trying to reach a verdict, and the waiter joined in. "Nothing," he said, cupping his hands over his chest. "I lika them...witha big meh-loh-nays." Eric and I drank to "big meh-loh-nays."

As we passed the Amsterdam Cafe, I in my Amsterdam shirt (not being able to resist the temptation of a nice clean shirt), lightning struck the building beside us, loudly and unexpectedly. There was no rain or anything at the moment. Just flat, gray, unmenacing clouds, so it scared the heck out of everyone around.

Whenever we remembered to, we pressed the first call button on the apartments we came to. A trail of crime.

Walking around later, we went through a small courtyard. Strange, other-worldly sounds were emanating from some place below us. We descended cobwebby steps, ducking pipes, into a landing. Beer bottles and random junk laying around. Through a window we could see the keyboardist of the musically-formless ensemble running his hands up and down the thing, braps and twangs accompanying him from a place we still couldn't see. Guess it was just a band practicing. On the door was a poster of a young William Burroughs. I tried to peel off the top layers to get the poster for myself but ended up peeling off part of Burrough's face. Felt bad, and apologized to him. "Sorry, I shouldn't have done that." Nearby, a surrealist film theater.

Present tense: am heading into Berlin for some grokking. Punk-looking girl across the way grokking me.

The Berlin Ostbahnhof, and to a lesser extent every other major S station in Berlin, looks like the belly of a giant metal and glass whale.

pictures from Zeuthen

the beach in Zeuthen

People-watching on a small beach in the burbs of Zeuthen. Gray-haired, pot-bellied old grandfather burying his little granddaughter in the sand. Fat little child airplane, bare-bottomed, with huge orange inflatable wings, taking off towards the water. Will never make it aloft. Dad and teenage son having one of those "I'm still the man around here" playful fights over some precious beach towel real estate, Dad winning out. Mother seems to have accepted her fate with this pair of monkeys. Yutes hangin' out to the side (marginalized?) by a graffitied shed. Young lovers loving, getting a little too amorous perhaps. Stark naked boy running after beachball and falling flat on his face in the sand. Dad and teenage son still provoking each other.

This place is nice. Funny that I almost gave up on finding right before I actually did. I had walked half an hour, and came to a place that overlooked the lake. On the far sidee a beach was visible, but this was at least another half hour's walk, as I figured it. I was about to go when I became aware of the sounds of children laughing. The beach was only about 50 meters further.

lattice quantum chromodynamics

Just took a nap and followed that up with a very pleasurable shower. I was pretty dirty after Amsterdam, having bathed only once over a span of four days. Was noticing that if I rubbed my face of neck I could scrape off a thin film of gray grime.

Sat through a lecture on Lattice Quantumchromodynamics (LQCD) this morning with Eric. Quantum is a bunch of needless complexity, and the results aren't really that satisfying anyway. For the most part, you can't eat quantum. Only nonsense exists on the scale of nanometers, "information dressed with gluon dirt," to use the lecturer's own words against him.

Or at least that's how I feel about it. I guess there are some people who are really into it, but I'm certainly not one of them, and Eric doesn't seem to be either, even though he has a deeper understanding of it than I.

A little background: Eric is working for the DESY project in Zeuthen, a suburb of Berlin, on some electron beam detection hardware. It's a self-contained little physics community complete with housing and a cafeteria. In theory, you'd never have to leave.

morning in Berlin

Morning in Berlin after one of those nights that doesn't seem to have happened at all. It's like I rolled over once and then it was time to get up.

"Holy sweet g*#damn" I need some coffee right now.

Berlin is orange sunlight dawning on a grid of glass and metal. A church on the horizon with the top chomped off, half-eaten.

There is some Dutch painting we discussed once in Art History in which a small church on the horizon serves to direct the viewer's attention, by means of a steeple, to the glories of heaven above. I wonder if a smokestack belching smoke to heaven above would have the same effect. Maybe we should mate the two: a church with a smokestack rising from its midst to both direct our attention to heaven, and to belch smoke into it, thereby taking care of two things at once.

pictures from Amsterdam

holy sweet g*#damn

Train to Berlin. Rhythms, layers of train sounds evoking songs in my head. I've been away from my music all this time too. Today "Falling For You" was going through my head and it got to that part where the slightly macho sound gives way to "Holy sweet g*#damn, you left your cello in the basement." The phrase "Holy sweet g*#damn" is so quintessentially Rivers. It reminds me of why Weezer is near and dear to my heart (though if another Green Album or Maladroit issues forth it may be three strikes and you're out, bros).

This dude who was already trying to sleep at 8:30 looks like a scaled-down Dr. Ramaha. Only probably not nearly as big a badass.

power thief

Just when I found the most symbolic and all-summarizing sight in Amsterdam, my camera ran out of power. One hour to departure so I didn't have time to go back to the city. Had to find an outlet somewhere in the train station. You have no idea how hard it is to find an outlet in a public place until you've tried. They are extremely careful not to make any available. Found some in a CD store, but had to ask the dude behind the counter and got denied. Eventually I plugged in behind a snack food stand, using the last free outlet on a four-outlet strip (how careless of them!). Ran the cable down my leg. Drank a bottle of water, looked out the window, tried to be as non-chalant as possible. Got away with it. Hope the picture was worth the trouble.

multilingual beggars

In less than two hours I'll be on my way to Berlin. Hanging at the wharf right now, gray sky, incoming wind, sound of waves lapping at concrete.

Most of all, I love the multilingual beggar. He first tries to determine what language you speak, and having done so, he commences to panhandle you in English, Dutch, Croatian, Lakota-Sioux...

We need to get these people jobs as translators or something.

A barge called "Innuendo" is floating past. Wonder what it's like riding her.

Okay, finished a brief meal consisting of nuts and raisins, eaten from my upturned frisbee. Time to cut this after dinner rhetoric short.

activism

Drinking red wine in the Cafe Katoen. Upwardly mobile aloe vera plants in the window. Dark wood, red tabletops. Murky white chandeliers, the lights themselves seated in ornate crinoid stems. Seems to be a student hangout. U of Amsterdam nearby. Cute girls at table by window, and cute waitresses. Back spasms (freakin backpack...).

Yeah it's too bad that people were smoking so much weed at Korsakoff Sunday night. Otherwise I would have asked for Rage, Weezer, Tool, or something a little harder and faster. But the poor heads wouldn't have been able to handle it I'm afraid. Heads think "Get up, stand up" (boop-ee boom boom-boom) "stand up for your right" when it comes to activism, and I think "Why stand on a silent platform? Fight the war, f*&# the norm!" with Tom Morello punishing his guitar in the background. The message is the same, the delivery totally different. For me though Marley is strictly for chilling out, not for getting motivated. Rage, on the other hand, makes me want to high-kick those bastards in the face.

combinatory fantasy

"Is there, is there balm in Gilead?"

"No, but there sure is a lot of dope."

Sitting beside a canal in a very un-scenic location. Oh, a dude just moved gotta get his bench quick! Aaah much better. "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd playing on a radio somewhere.

Is there anything more than combinatory fantasy, really? Can you imagine something so completely outsie of experience that neither it nor any piece or aspect of it ever crossed the threshold of your senses?

checkout time

Morning. Didn't want to get out of bed, but had to, it was checkout time. Walked the 20 min. to the Muni Theater area bleary-eyed and morning-vulnerable. Am now drinking cappuccino in front of The Bulldog.

A purple-haired girl walked past.

Still need more coffee.

enormous pancake

Had the enormous pancake I sought after. It was thin, covering an entire plate, and about 18 inches in diameter. Cherries and cherry sauce on top. Waitress good-looking. Music, for the most part, really terrible.

Afterwards decided I'd see "40 Days and 40 Nights." Was alright...I think only a Catholic can fully understand the mentality of self-denial, indulgence, and the pleasure of rule-making and subsequent rule-breaking.

kick a pigeon

Kicked a pigeon. Maybe because it was stoned, I don't know. The feeling of connecting with something solid, and then of launching into the air, was wonderful. As it flew off it was crapping with fright. A totally satisfying experience for me.

Pigeons live in a world of feet. Most of them have learned to read the expressions of a pair of feet in the same way that we're fine-tuned to the expressions of the human face. Usually they know a beligerent pair of feet when they see one.

Sleepy now (again). Am going to try to find this Dutch pancake place I saw yesterday for dinner tonight.

The Condomerie

Must get my lazy ass out of bed and caffeinated. Did not sleep enough last night so siesta time set in pretty early.

There is a place down the street that sells only condoms. It's called "The Condomerie." For reasons unknown to me, the outside is decorated with big leaning pine trunks. Last night I passed a tour group led by an English woman who stopped and said in a most proper British accent, "This...is the Condomerie." Almost wanted to turn around and follow just to hear her say "This...is the Cock Ring" (a gay club about a block farther).

head culture

An interesting thing to watch: the cleaning crew on Dam Square at about 9:00 come out in bright orange suits and round up all the garbage with a high-pressure hose.

Head culture. Strange to be surrounded by so much of it and yet not buy in. To me all these Bob Marley shrines everywhere seem pretty ridiculous. Wonder if the average head knows what he stod for, or just that he smoked a lotta weed and encouraged others to do the same.

Korsakoff

Last night came, at long last, and I went to Korsakoff. Check my review of the place on Amsterdam Hotspots for the gory details.

Got back around 4:00 am. My back was completely exhausted from all the walking/dancing, like it never has been before. Wished Martina was waiting for me with a massage (she's a pro at this since she works in physical therapy).

Don't know why but I woke up with the lyrics to "Without Me" playing in my head. Tim is long gone, I suppose to The Flying Pig, another hostel that's just as cheap and boho but is much more difficult to get into. So long.

Maybe the headlines today will read "Man Who Doesn't Smoke Weed Visits Amsterdam!" Subtitle: "Doesn't smoke weed for a whole day!"

Europe the Tim way

Friendly Canadian dopehead introduced himself. Asked if I smoked, and when I said no, he couldn't believe it. "You're kidding, right?" he asked, fully expecting me to let up, laugh and be like "Of course I smoke dope. I'm in Amsterdam aren't I?" I had to repeat myself several times over before he saw I was being serious.

It's funny, Tim's idea of getting culture is first getting stoned and then tripping out in some Museum or another. This morning he wanted to find a "Coffee Shop" (Amsterdam's codename for a hash bar) before going to the Van Gogh Museum. We looked all over the neighborhood for him. No luck. I of course went my own way when it came to the Van Gogh Museum. Maybe things like this are fun stoned, I don't know, but I do know from experience now that in my normal state of mind I'm usually bored and uninspired by Museums and such.

However, seeing Europe the Tim way has got two distinct advantages. First, it's fun for you during the process. Second, you get to report back home to all the eager ears that you saw Famous Big-Name Thing X (conveniently omitting the part about the drugs), thereby earning your "Saw Europe and Got Culture" merit badge. If people ask any really in depth questions you may be in for it, but who's going to do that anyway?

Here's Famous Big-Name Thing X. Gimme my badge!

in search of bigass bread

Got my bigass piece of bread. It is quite bigass. I'd say it must be about 1 kg. Finished the half of it and couldn't eat any more. This and a coffee cost only about 3 Euros, making it one of the cheapest meals per nutritional unit that I could have possibly gotten.

It's funny--nothing of note happened this morning while walking around. (I'm never really myself in the presence of another person.) It was only after I sat down in the Dam Square not far from my hostel that I started to notice interesting things.

A Japanese guy sitting in front of a pile of 9 empty beer cans. He has one of those moles on his neck that has been dutifully exuding dense hair since the day of his birth (maybe) and has now reached a length of about 2 inches, turning gray at the ends like the hair on his head. But when he gets up and calmly walks over to join his tour group, I see that it must have been mere chance that placed him there. Soon after, some guy comes and disperses the neat pile of cans with a kick.

A little Japanese girl fascinated by the pigeons. Her older sister, noticing this, takes her by the hand, and together they gleefully cleared the area of birds.

Sitting eating my bigass bread. Black dude with way too much underwear visible, and gold chains, walks over and starts saying something. Pushing drugs, but all I catch are the words "the best." The best what? I chew my bread, then tell him matter-of-factly that I'm busy eating. He leaves.

You gotta watch yourself here, especially if alone and looking touristy. There's this one guy who tried to panhandle me once and I completely ignored him. Apparently this pissed him off. "You're so f*&#ing blonde," he muttered. Everything he said was in this quiet voice at this frequency one doesn't usually pay attention to, like he half-did and half-didn't want you to hear him. I think he wanted you to think he didn't want you to hear him, thereby lending importance to his words ("Oops did I only think that, or did I say it aloud?"). Anyway it was creepy. The second time I passed him I heard on his special frequency that I was "a d*&#head." "I want to see it when you're on the street and've lost everything," he said. The third time (no, I wasn't about to avoid him, or a confrontation with him if it actually came down to that) it was "oh, I don't f*#&ing believe this." The fourth time he wasn't there. I wasn't just walking up and down the street for exercise, I was looking for bigass bread. And I won out in the end.

weed and sewer-reek

Have now "scoped the place" and "picked up the vibe." Not really. Was walking around with Tim until about 2:00 when we finally parted ways. We were boring each other...we both came alone for a reason (I assume in his case) so now's not the time to go back on yourself and play latch-on. I don't know who latched on to whom but we need to sever this freakin umbilical cord and go it alone.

About the city: streets even smaller than Munich, radial plan even more confusing. Presence of water canals everywhere probably responsible. (Like any other city, apartments line the street, but unlike most, what I take to be the personal boats of the residents line the canals. Wonder if people take the boat to work in the morning. Are there water-traffic jams? Boat stop lights?) Strange smells, the two most common ones being weed and sewer-reek. Sometimes you smell weed and sewer-reek together.

Found Korsakoff (an alternative club). Will go there tonight or tomorrow night. But right now there's a lot of interesting people on the street (I'm in the center of Amsterdam not too far from the Red Light District) including drug pushers, prostitues, pimps, stoners, rastas, etc. Going to go check it and get a bigass piece of bread to eat.

scuzzy and boho

Arrived at Amsterdam Centraal. Have found a place to stay, a hostel called The Meeting Place. Scuzzy. Boho. Check out "my" room above. A bit slow at the moment, but then again it is only 11:30 am. Guy just woke up coughing like a TB patient, coughed his way into the bathroom, and then puked weakly. Hope this doesn't happen to me...

Caffeinated. Ready to do this. Scope the place, pick up the vibe.

the sour smell of feet

In Holland now, less than an hour away from Amsterdam. I now know what that sour smell was that I kept wondering about last night: feet. The sour smell of bare feet.

leaving munich for amsterdam

Tonight the ever-burning artificial orange sun that presides over Kunstpark Ost has a friend. A real moon, and just as orange, with a wisp of cloud slicing across it (alluringly) has joined it on the Munich horizon. As in "Un Chien Andalou" I see the barber observe this wisp of cloud and then reenact its motion on a woman's eyeball with his razor.

The whole world is orange.

I have practically nothing with me in this bag here. Leave it all behind and bum off life for a while, I say--make a bet on that winning personality of yours.

Now on the train: 5 others in a small, hot compartment, 3 beds to a side stacked verticaly. 2 Germans and 3 Americans doing the surface-skim thing. One, who has just graduated from UCLA, said he got really bored of Munich during the four days he spent there.."one day too long." Have resisted buddying up to anyone. I came alone, not to make friends, since I have those already, but to get to know myself better. Okay, of course no miraculous self-revelation is going to occur here, but you know what I mean. Sometimes you just need some R&R with #1.

what lies ahead

The greatest adventure
is what lies ahead,
today and tomorrow
are yet to be said.

Saturday night I'm going to Amsterdam for a few days. After that, Berlin and Eric. We'll see what comes of all this. I probably won't be online the whole time (I *hope* I won't be online at all actually) so this thing is going to be dormant for about a week. Will take a pen and legal tablet and do things the old-fashioned way. If I achieve my objective there's going to be a lot to tell about when I get back.

please explain the hedgehog

I'm reading a book that talks a lot about omens. Now everything seems to be one. A dead hedgehog beside the road. (Heck I've never even seen a live one! Have you?) One of the two wall lights in my new, dungeon-lit room in the basement blowing out when I flip the switch. Locking myself out of the house ten minutes before a haircut appointment, then realizing I'd locked myself off my bike as well, and would have to travel the kilometer by foot, and afterwards find something to do outside until Startlodge people come back from work. Bumming around in our garden and finding a four leaf clover. Thinking wow, and then noticing the five leaf clover right next to it. The rest only 3 leafers. Freakish.

But what does it all mean? Probably what I already knew: that I need to get out of my room more often.

Still, the hedgehog needs explaining. Maybe he's the key to everything.

drum circle

Mattias and I went to the English Gardens today and mostly just tossed around the frisbee. But we also stopped to watch a drum circle. Talk about attracting strange people: muscled Jamaican dudes making a collab-o with white Germans, everyone doing their part, even if their part was simply producing a very specific little dinging noise every 4 beats; a bare-naveled chick with Zack de la Rocha dreds hopping around formlessly; an old witch of a woman looking up religiously at the trees (affectation?), then joining in with ceremonious chest-shaking; a beat guy with limp skanky hair and limp skanky clothes prowling around slowly, tooting on a sax, then panning the crowd, paranoid, trying to see what kind of impression he had just made, all the while leaning forward like maybe he was going to hit you with his sudden sax-weapon if your face betrayed the wrong one.

styrofoam avalanche

Just came home from work today (early, practically no one there) to find Martina stretching in the backyard after a 3 hour run. I knew Mom's over-cautious packing job on those CDs would come in handy...Martina got caught unawares in a styrofoam avalanche. Genuinely scaring another person has got to be about one of the best feelings in the world.

Yesterday was a Bavarian holiday so we whiled away the time beside the Isar. The day was absolutely beautiful, even if the water wasn't at all suitable for swimming. The flood aftermath continues. Town like Dresden which are downstream are now getting hit hard, with the highest water level ever recorded. This is Europe so you can be sure they've been recording for a while now.

kicked out and proud of it

Martina's here again! Last night there was free entrance to all 33 clubs at Kunstpark Ost. Six of us went and we basically experienced the whole spectrum of clubbing.

Finally got into Kahlinka (after Eric and I had rudely been denied admission I was pretty darn curious), which had table-top-dancing scantily clad girls and guys and played a fast and furious house remix of the song "Kahlinka" and some other supposedly Russian tunes.

Then after that we hit the Keller. It was as good as it's ever been, not too crowded, but still real crazy, with wild moshing ushered in by System of a Down.

Got kicked out of the Munich Beach Club: it was super fun! At first they wouldn't let the six of us in, probably because we were five guys and one girl, though they wouldn't answer Martina when she asked why. Just as we were ready to move on they changed their minds. We went in and were surprised to find that nothing was going on, even though it was quarter to one. (What exactly had the bouncers at the front door been protecting anyway, we wondered?) Inside we headed straight for the indoor sand volleyball court, which was dark and going unused, and Martina and I started playing. Then some guy came over real pissed-like and told us to get off. Martina was mouthing him and I was just laughing the whole time. He decided to do the macho thing and escort us from the club. Martina told him she thought he was "real cool," while I danced across the floor, occasionally getting weak shoves (merely suggestions as to which direction I should be heading) from him in the back. There was no parting kick in the pants; we didn't end up on our faces drinking gutter water. On the whole it was a pretty sub-par throwing out. I felt cheated. ;)

After this we danced to techno, since Mattias was along and yes, we aim to please. My first techno experience. It was a special show, "Deep Space Night," (which they wouldn't let us ever forget, broadcasting it on the screen one word at a time on probably 20 different occasions), and the lasers were great. Green waves of light crashed over us. Strobes. Starbursts. Helicopter scans. All the while thumping, thumping. "You're no longer in control of your movements. The sound has taken over your body." Sometimes it's nice to just dance amorphously, to be a techno amoeba, rather than worry about whether or not this or that alternative song is going to go into double-time or (Incubus-style) lose all semblance of rhythm.

against all odds, everything works out

For the last week I've been trying to prepare the red eject button. When I pushed it, I would bail out of my flight back to the U.S., and instead remain here in Germany for the next semester. But of course there were a lot of factors to consider so I tried to put the actual decision off as long as possible.

Then over the weekend I made up my mind to stay. There were still some major obstacles to overcome, namely that of finding lodging here in Munich, and changing the date of my flight, so my future was by no means certain. Here's what happened.

On Sunday my landlord suddenly materialized, unbeckoned. We got to talking. Within ten minutes I had secured a room in the Startlodge keller for the next two months and someone else's room after that. Now I don't want to make this sound like it was an ordinary occurrence. Because it wasn't. Lodging in Munich is more expensive than in any other German city, and rooms are in general extremely hard to come by. (This is what originally motivated Siemens to set up Startlodge for its student interns.) And I had been under the impression that Startlodge was full up for the next two months, and furthermore I was almost certain that the room in the keller wouldn't be rented out for a long period of time, but would be kept free for people who only needed to stay in Munich for a few days or a week at a time. Meeting my landlord on my way out the door, a half-eaten sandwich in hand, and getting a room was...improbable, to say the least.

So much for the first major obstacle. I started to worry about the second. I would have to wait until Monday morning, a mere 4 days before my intended departure, to change the date of my ticket with the travel agency. When I handed over my ticket the lady looked at it with dismay and told me she probably wouldn't be able to change the date, as it was through Air Canada and, well, this is Europe. But she told me she'd try. I waited in silence for several minutes while she tapped through screens. I should have been nervous but wasn't. There was something about this whole thing that seemed destined to be. I had felt it the previous day when my landlord appeared. I felt it now as I watched her, and reached into my pocket where the dreamcatcher that Martina had given me (saying mysteriously "you're going to need it") was. At this precise moment she looked away from the screen and told me she had managed to get the flight. I was all smiles. I asked her what the chances of this happening were. She told me 5%.

Now I'm not a superstitious person. In fact, I'm probably one of the least superstitious people you're ever going to meet. If I believe in anything it's in the triumph of the rational mind over the superstitions of the past, and in keeping with that idea here's the probability that these two independent events would take place, if you figure there was a 5% chance of either happening by themselves: .25%, or 1 in 400. Let's assume that what actually happened to me was the only way I would stay in Munich (which is completely reasonable...I don't think I would have gotten a room elsewhere, and if I had to pay another $700 for a ticket from the U.S. to Germany, I wouldn't do it). Then, were we to rewind the tape and repeat Sunday and Monday 400 times, on 399 of those times yours truly would end up on a plane back to the U.S., and only in 1 case--the reality that I'm in right now--would yours truly be sitting in Munich, Germany, kicking back and thinking about the upcoming 4 months at his cool (to become even cooler shortly) job at Siemens, hanging with his German friends, with Eric in Prague or Berlin or who knows where else, and with the wonderful girl he just met and doesn't want to leave because this could only be the beginning: Martina.

deluge

For some reason Ed's stay here was attended by incessant rain. On Saturday it was raining when we went to Andechs, raining when we got home 10 hours later, and raining the next morning when we woke up. Only this morning (Tuesday) on the way to the airport did the sun finally come out again (because Ed was leaving?).

The Isar was the highest I've ever seen it. Other cities with bigger rivers running through them (Passau, Dresden, Prague) are flooded. It's practically all you see on the news right now, these non-Venetian cities looking just like Venice.

Maybe the next time Ed tries to enter a European country, the ambassadors of every European nation, remembering well that fell weekend in August 2002, will turn out in full force to beg him to turn back for the love of god.

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.

the good portugese samaritan

After several nights of the Munich party scene, it was a rainy Sunday and Ed was bugging me to find something to do. Travelling very far from Munich was pretty much out of the question. We looked at taking a flight or a train to Paris only enough to convince ourselves it wouldn't be possible. Then I remembered an email I had gotten from a friend that described a day's outing near Munich, and within a few hours we were on our way to Andechs monastery.

It was a miserable rainy day. The S-Bahn left off about 5 km short of the monastery itself, so we had a 45 minute walk on foot, in the rain. Our sneakers were heavy with water when we finally got there.

(Certain colors look so much more vivid on a gray day, don't you think?)

The original plan had been to attend Catholic mass in the hopes of hearing the Benedectine monks at Andechs sing. But the sanctuary turned out to be narrow and confidential, not the kind of place where soggy non-Catholic American boys easily remain anonymous. So we instead went straight for the food. When we opened the door to the brewery pub it was like stepping into another world, into the Prancing Pony at Bree or something. Warmth. Yellow light. Smiling faces. Wooden floors, and a big yellow dog sprawled out lazily beside his master. The sounds of merrymaking. Ed and I gorged ourselves on German food, putting down Leberkaese, Grilled Pork, two enormous pretzels, potato salad, etc. Probably the best German meal I've eaten to date.

Afterwards we wandered around Andechs for a while and then decided to go before darkness set in. We got creative and tried to take a different path back, through the woods, where swollen waterfalls roared brownly. We passed sheep on a hillside. An apple tree presented itself and we plucked two, ate them along the way. Eventually, though, we had to admit to ourselves that we had no idea where we were going, and that the best course of action would be to retrace our steps back to Andechs and go back the way we came. (The ability to admit you're lost, and to resist the temptation to deduce the way from your misinformed American sense of absolute direction, is one that you should learn while here in Europe.)

But because of all the time we wasted in the woods, darkness came too soon. It was still raining and Ed and I were worried about not making the S-Bahn in 20 minutes, and then having to wait another cold 40 minutes for the next one. Unexpectedly, a car stopped, and we got a ride from a young Portugese guy named Fernando. He had been on his way home from work--heading the opposite direction--but turned around and stopped for us because he said he "knew what it was like to walk in weather like this." We parted on friendly terms. Not once had he started in with any moralizing or proselytizing. It seemed like a genuinely selfless act.

You know I can get pretty cynical about things and people sometimes. But it's hard to be cynical when you know there are people like Fernando out there, who turned his car around, away from the warm home that awaited him, and gave two dripping wet total strangers a comfortable ride, in the opposite direction, asking for nothing in return.

spam will be the end of us all

Spam mail is slowly bringing our world to a screeching halt. Sure, you may only spend a few minutes a day now sorting spam out from real mail, but every day it takes a little longer. Ten years from now the process of sorting out the spam mail in your Hotmail inbox is going to consume most of your waking hours. Productivity in the workplace will plummet. Leisure time won't exist. There will be so much spam to sort through that people will starve, and the human species will disappear from the face of the earth in the most fitting way possible--not through weapons of mass destruction or for lack of ozone or because of a wayward comet, but because their inboxes are filling up with stuff about aphrodesiacs, debt consolidation, and Britney Spears.

space monkeys

My bro Ed is here! It's funny, when he got here, I think I was about as tired as he was, and he was the one who had just made the Trans-Atlantic flight. He went to bed early and then got up at 6:30 this morning to go running for an hour. He told me he would have to do this everyday, and it smacked of addiction. With me it's coffee. With Ed it's running long distances. Man I'm such a weenie of an older brother.

Ed, Martina, and I went to Munich to hang out today. At the Marienplatz, Martina got a kiss from Captain IRON-Y. I was jealous. ;) At the Viktualienmarkt, we ate a big bag of cherries, and then followed that up with Nuremburg sausages on Martina's suggestion (she's from around Nuremburg). We wandered around indecisively for a while and eventually decided we wanted to go to the Deutsches Museum.

Only we sucked so bad at finding the right U/S Bahn that we lost Ed. We were filing onto an U-Bahn, Ed first, and then Martina and I realized it was the wrong one, but it was too late, the doors closed, separating us. Panic. We followed after on the next U-Bahn. No Ed at the next stop. We hopped yet another one back to where we started and then, by some miracle, there was Ed in his maroon "Rolla Optimist Club" t-shirt. I was afraid I'd lost a brother for a while there. We made some "in case you get lost" plans as a result.

The Deutsches Museum was closed when we got there, but the Skyshot was still going. The cockpit is a steel spherical cage that hangs suspended between two steel towers. Two people get in and powerful springs shoot them way up into the sky, you oscillate above the city for a while, and then you come back down. Ed and I went first and were laughing and yelling stuff like "Work it like a pony!" the whole time. Then Martina conquered her fear of heights and went with me too. It was pretty funny to watch...she didn't open her eyes until we were in the first descent, and only then did she let out a belated scream.

The adrenaline rush came from falling, but the thing that really sticks with me is the sight of blue sky above and me rushing headlong towards it, towards outer space, blasting off like a space monkey.

i'm so geil

I saw the greatest 80's video ever made on television last night. It was so good that I thought the whole time it was making fun of the 80's, but it was in fact genuine laughable 80's garbage from 1986. The song was simply called "Geil." It was off "The Geil Album" by Boris and Bonker. Geil is a German word which until now I thought was synonymous with "cool" or "awesome," but it actually has a double meaning: geil means horny, esp. if you apply it to yourself. So there were these shaggy faced German guys with Axel Rose party hair in the back singing

I'm so geil,
you're so geil,
everybody's geil.
Geil!

and I got this feeling that the word geil was just coming into it's own in 1986, in order for an entire song to be structured around the utterance of this one word in different contexts. If you can imagine a song based solely on the word "radical," back when "radical" hadn't been added to our language yet, and it was fun just to say "radical" for the sound of it or even to make a dumb song with an even dumber video that relied on it, I think you're close to the feeling "Geil" gave me.

What would happen if I suddenly started averaging more than 6 hours of sleep a night? Or if I stopped drinking coffee? Or listening to alternative music constantly? I should try this and see. One of these days normality is going to be so far back in my forgotten past that it will once again seem exciting to be normal.

the big picture

Leave America. (Zoom-out.) See Germany. (Slow pan.) Compare. (Look at your reflection in the mirror. Do you like what you see?)

documenta

Today we went to Documenta, a big art exhibition that takes place in Kassel once every 5 years. Nicole (who hung out with us in Munich about a month ago) and Sabrina (Mark's best friend who's studying law) came with. It was probably the most intellectual stimulation I've had since coming to Germany.

Okay, a lot of the exhibits just didn't elicit any sort of reaction from me, but there were also a suprising number of good ones. One in particular, "A Million Years," which consisted of some big ledger books and a central chamber enclosed by glass in which two NPR types delivered dates over a PA system, was really great. There was like a 10 second pause and then one of them would say in a soothing voice at about one third normal speed "nine-hundred fifty-one thousand two-hundred and seventy-three..."

"B..."

"C..."

They were counting down but at the rate they were going I doubt they finished the million.

Another exhibit was comprised of a long, long series of tiny black-and-white photographs that wrapped around several rooms at eyelevel. Each one depicted a different modern dilemma. Homeless people. Breast cancer. Riots. AIDS. Racial tension. Nuclear disaster. There were so many it was almost beyond belief--geez we've got a lot of problems these days.

In a separate building near the river there was a multi-room exhibit on harbors, fishing, the sea, etc. Photographs of all these things were punctuated by essays. The essays were so over-rationalized and filled with Marx-horny intonations that they were almost impossible to read and keep a straight face. There was a constant wistful Commie undercurrent and lots of impressive but tell-tale words like "mercantilism," "post-industrial capitalism," and "space appropriation." It was overdone.

In the green space outside of the main building a few tents had been put up and some activism was going on by the looks of it. When I saw this sign that proclaimed "No borders" I got really interested, and decided to talk to the people. I ended up talking to this dude wearing a white plastic bag like a lab coat and rolling a cigarette by hand. He had on sunglasses and a Cypress Hill t-shirt. I told him I agreed with the idea of making freedom of movement a basic right. We soon got down to more specific things, and I said something about the flux across the U.S.-Mexico border increasing everyday, and then he was like "What? Are you kidding?" He started in on some stuff about cameras and surveillance and fences, and got kind of worked up about the "control system." I saw that the "control system" in all its various incarnations was the machine he raged against. Okay, I tried to tell him, the control system is there, maybe its growing every day, but the flux of culture is increasing every day and this is something which is beyond the control of any traditional "control system." But my feeling was that this guy will probably be raging against machines and systems all his life because that's what he was born to do. He will always be bitterly discussing control systems with passers by while rolling cigarettes with nervous hands.

At night we decided to hit several parties. The first was a house-warming party for one of Mark's friends (Mattias), and I got to meet some cool people, one of which (Stephan) showed me how to open a beer bottle with a second one. The Germans are so versatile at beer bottle opening...while the American looks around for the proper instrument the German has already opened three bottles in his eyesocket. There were quite a few physics guys there, and also Russian younger than me who couldn't speak any German but could converse alright in English. We took vodka shots with caviar and tried to pronounce the Russian "cheers" (there seemed to be many words for the sentiment) without much success.

Oh yeah, Ollie and I continued the survey from the previous night. This time we actually found some people who identified with ("were proud of") their country. So if we're to conclude anything at all from the few data points we collected, it must be that there is still not a total disconnect from nationality with the younger generation. Even though Ollie and I seem to be in a state of total disconnect from our respective countries.

We left. We picked up Mark's friend Pia on the way to a party out in the boonies and it turned out to be pretty lame, at least for me. There was a cover band playing oldies, classic rock, and 80s stuff, but it felt way too much like a Nebraska hoe-down minus the country music. My fellow Americans, we must protect the Germans from American country music, we must contain the virus that is eating away at our very souls. Steel guitars, twangs, and crap-kickers shall not impinge upon this sacred place.

Our third and final destination for the night was a club called Lolita (like Nabakov's book that I'm reading right now). It was just one room scarcely larger than an average living room but packed with people. The atmosphere was cool, but I still wasn't having a great time. My brush with death in the boonies probably had something to do with this. They were playing too many oldies, it's always too many oldies, we're not our parents here, okay, so let's listen to our own music. But eventually things got up to date and the place started rocking. People standing on chairs and windowsills, grinding. Then we had to leave. It always decides to get good just after we decide to leave.

proud to be

The much awaited weekend in Kassel has begun. Last night Mark and I went to the Spot, which had been billed as a club that rivaled (or even surpassed) the competition in Munich (The Keller and The Backstage). However, it seemed things have changed since Mark's last visit; the gothic room was now hip-hop, and the alternative room was a mixture of all kinds of musical genres. Things got started with some System of a Down and then some Rage, and I thought they'd stay started, but they kept reverting to crummy oldies songs and rap.

So we had to amuse ourselves mostly. Mark's friend Oliver was there. He studies English and can speak the language so well that I forgot he wasn't a native speaker. We got into what has to be the most theoretical dicussion about modern music that I've ever taken part in. I could tell he was very much in individualist mode, super-anti-mainstream, you know, when anything popular is by this virtue alone strictly out. (Ken Bayer calls this "The Anti-Kitsch.") It wasn't just in music either. We eventually got to talking about identifying with any larger group, any group at all, even one's own country. Then we conducted a brief experiment in which I asked (with Ollie translating) some random people whether or not they were proud to be German. We asked the first girl, a little half-pint in orange, whether or not she was proud to be German, and she said no, I'm Lithuanian. Ha ha. Yeah I don't think I'd be proud to be German if I was actually Lithuanian either.

The night came to an end for us around 5 or 6 am. Mark had to get up for a dentist's appointment at 9 or so, and I had to get up around 11, so we're both short on sleep right now.

slapstick

Ah but the follies continue. I forgot to mention it, but yesterday on my first attempt at water skiing, I held on way too long even after I lost my skiis and was mostly underwater, and when I came to my senses I realized there was something strangely free-feeling about my lower extremities. While I fished around for my trunks in the middle of the lane my friends, not knowing what had happened, were yelling at me to grab my skis and get out of the way. But I was kind of preoccupied so I only shouted back "okay." I had to shout back "okay" like five times because my life vest turned me into a bobbing buoy that couldn't double over in the necessary position.

But wait, there's more. I think today tops yesterday.

I was riding back from work with a sack full of groceries. There was a backpack on my back. A PDA was strapped to my side. I looked like some sort of geek commando riding no-hands will all these useless artifacts of modern-day living dangling off my person. I only get into bike wrecks when riding no-hands, it seems, but what made this one special is that it was so slow-speed. I slipped off the front of my seat, and with nothing to support me, had to plant my feet on either side of the bike, tried unsuccessfully to let the bike roll out from under me, tottered, and came crashing down on my side. The artifacts piled on top of me. My bike started to continue on but then decided to join the fun and, cornering, crashed down in like fashion on top of me. Of course I was cursing and stuff, especially because I feared I had crushed the eggs or, worse yet, my PDA, but soon after that I was laughing. It must have been hilarious to watch. I wish I could have seen it. I would crash again if it could be videotaped for me later.

But only two eggs were crushed and my PDA seems okay. Geek commando survives another day in this jungle. Afterwards I laughed off and on about the whole thing for probably an hour.