the world has turned and left me here

sleep now in the fire

The barbecueing process can be expediated by the use of a blow-drier, as Startlodge resident Nick demonstrates here. Don't try this one at home.

red berets

Note to self: don't go to the Keller on Saturday nights, because the DJ sucks. I've made this mistake before and now I need to record it somewhere for future generations to read and heed. Another note to self: don't stick out tongue while moshing to Blur's "Song 2." Ouch, it still hurts. :p

Afterwards while I was waiting for the S-Bahn there was some sort of episode involving some drunk guys and the S-Bahn red berets. There were maybe only two or three drunk guys and seven, I repeat seven, of these S-Bahn guys standing around trying to look official with their hands behind their backs. (It's funny what ideas a uniform puts into people's heads.) As far as I could tell it was just a personal dispute between one small drunk guy and one of the red berets, but the rest were there to back him up, just in case. It made me feel safer let me tell you.

the holly and the ivy

Oh I forgot about this picture which definitely takes the cake in this new genre I've invented. It's from a small German town near the border of France, close to where Martina lives.

rage in bloom

The sun woke me up this morning, for the first time in a week I think. So I took a picture I've been planning for a while of the creeper hanging from the Startlodge balcony. But I'm afraid it's not nearly as spectacular as it used to be, before this whole deluge set in.

Fall seemed to descend on us overnight here in Munich. One day we were going to the Isar to sunbathe, and the next there was a chill in there, leaves suddenly falling from trees, people wearing coats and scarves, and this red creeper ablaze in our backyard. It wasn't one of those things that slowly dawned upon me. It was summer one day and fall the next, seriously.

So today I invested in an external CDRW. It seems contradictory, I know, but this is all part of my plan to break free of my computer, which has a choke hold on me right now: it's the source for my music. Music is important to me and I don't want to have to remain within ten feet of my computer to enjoy it. The next step in this process is getting an MP3/CD player, a decision which I've been on the brink of making for the past two years. Tried out the RioVolt SP250 in a store today and it blew me away; the sound quality was great.

I swear, any one of these German schoolkids could be in a freak show back in the States for their mad soccer skills. 8 and 9 year olds with more soccer sense than American highschoolers. Maybe I should kidnap some and start a business.

oktoberfest #1

Oktoberfest experience #1 came and went. It was another cold rainy day in Munich (c.f. previous three). Intense smell of beer when you enter these tents, and cigarette smog hanging over everything. The tents are of course huge and can probably hold 5000 people each, and there are many such tents. But today was Friday, and we went after work, so there was absolutely no place to sit in any of them. So we drank our two masses each and ate our gigantic pretzels standing up. Many intensely drunk people. Outside, it's like an amusement park, with roller coasters and such.

Hmm not a whole lot to report on there. Maybe I'll go some other time when the weather is a little better, if it ever gets better, that is.

pizza hut

Well there is hope after all. It just depends on someone sparking me into action, because otherwise the modus operandi for me is escaping into a virtual world whenever there's problems in the real one.

Tonight my mission was to eat at Pizza Hut. It helps to have a mission even if it is a dumb one. But this mission wasn't completely contrived to keep my mind busy, I actually was quite interested, suddenly, in seeing how a European Pizza Hut stacked up against an American one. Especially after eating Pizza that tasted like a feedlot (as someone in the family used to say) at Siemens the previous day. Well it was pretty much what you'd expect. The ambiance was a little different, granted--there was no burnt-out twenty-something waitress serving you in the middle of a darkened red carpeted smoke-saturated jukebox-equipped wasteland--but the pizza was the same.

This silly little mission cost me an hour of walking through the streets of Munich at night during a cold rain. This was mostly because I recalled seeing a Pizza Hut somewhere in Munich, but it was just a vague feeling that had no coordinate system attached to it.

Afterwards I experienced a few moments of convincing aliveness in the U-Bahn. I was looking out the window at the pillars flashing by and suddenly had a feeling of motion, of moving forward quickly, and felt excited for no other reason than this.

a descent into the maelstrom

"Suddenly--very suddenly--this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than half a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven."

Got absolutely soaked this morning. Through some sort of misunderstanding (there are many such misunderstandings) I didn't convey to my roommates that I wanted to ride with them to work, and heard them leave ten seconds before I made it upstairs. It was a cold and wet ride. My pants didn't dry out until noon, and my shoes never did. But in some grim way the whole thing was kind of funny. Ten seconds--tying my shoes maybe--determined my soggy fate.

Being out of touch with reality, and even out of touch with myself, has caused a lot of problems lately. Despite that realization I'm proud to announce that I will probably be in self-imposed exile from reality for a while to come. If you happen to see me away from my computer, please point me in the direction of the nearest one, and don't mind the glazed dead fish look on my face or the fact that I do not return your very real human emotions.

Down I go.

falling apart

A sleepy ride home. Waking up to uncover some new facet of the already too confusing situation; it is complete chaos in here (my skull that is). What just happened? Where am I? What have I done? Was it the right thing or not? Alternately angry and sad. Rage and then Radiohead. Who's to blame for this? I can't remember who said what and it doesn't matter anyway.

Out of sight, out of mind, right? Riiiiiiggghhht.

Fall can be a lovely season if you just accept that it's not summer or spring. You have to accept it as it is, and it's a season when everything dies, crumbles to bits. If you let yourself fall along with it it's a peaceful feeling. Fall-ing apart.

scaruffi on america's problems

America's worst political problems according to Scaruffi. This is really interesting even if the guy is maybe a bit of a crackpot. (For instance, he classifies Richard Nixon as a dictator responsible for the 8th worst genocide in the history of all dictators who committed genocides.)

the eyeball guild

In order to get stuff for my contacts, even the simple all-in-one type that I use, I have to go to an "Optik." This is irritating. Contact fluid is just like any other commodity in the U.S. and it can be found in any supermarket. But here in Germany this is not the case. I'm wondering if this "Optik" thing is a holdover from the middle ages, when goods and services were partitioned by guild; maybe the "Optik" is the present-day equivalent of the eyeball guild. Or something.

the byproducts of addiction

This morning I went out of my way to plunge through a group of gulls in one of the Siemens parking lots. They were all white except for one, which was black. I think it was a crow. Did it think it was a gull?

Our landlady has a weird way of making her will known. Rather than speak to us in person, or even permit faceless two-way communication by emailing us all, she shows up during the day while we're at work. In her wake: a checklist in which smiley faces, blank faces, and frowning faces measure our performance over the last week. Frowning/blank faces are the norm anymore. Sometimes if we're lucky we also get a note that goes into further detail. In this weeks' we got chastised for leaving dishes laying around. "In one room we found 6 coffee cups and an empty glass," she wrote. I wonder who's room that was? ;-)

Well, in my own defense, those coffee cups don't sit there for more than two days. They're just the byproducts of advanced coffee addiction, and people who aren't familiar with the byproducts of advanced coffee addiction can't really be expected to understand.

My friends, now is the time to be young and to acquire addictions that we will need the rest of our adult life to recover from.

guerilla radio

Last night decided to go to The Backstage. Entrance is free right now. But when I got there the music was live German ska--not exactly my thing. There were a lot of punk types getting totally trashed out on the sidewalk when I arrived, and there were even more when I left, less than an hour later. I fled to the Keller.

On the way there I saw the drunkest middle-aged women I've ever seen. They were hiccupping loudly and I couldn't help but laugh at them. One of them, the drunkest, kept looking at me with her drunk eyes, hiccupping, and at one point told me she loved me. I found that I could understand their German and they mine for the most part. Maybe I've found my perfect training grounds.

The Keller was good, as always. But there was a surprise. For those of you who aren't in the know, the current obsession with me is Rage Against the Machine (c.f. giant flag on my wall). And in particular their third album which I just got into the other day. That's what I really wanted to hear last night, but I didn't expect to in the least, since I've never heard it played in a club here before.

As I hit the Keller dance floor, almost on queue, Guerilla Radio starts playing. I was...out of control.

When all was said and done for the night the S-Bahn stranded me in Giesing, as for some reason the track between Giesing and Neuperlach Sued was closed today. There were no U- or S-Bahns leaving until almost five so I was forced to shell out the usual outrageous sum for a taxi.

My English-speaking German friends weren't there, since I was alone, and I realize now that I didn't say a word of English to anyone the whole night, which is actually quite an accomplishment for me.

frisbee hawk

A field of green but yellow on the edges. Late afternoon. A small sliver of moon in a blue sky. A hawk is off in the distance swinging back and forth above the yellow edges, way up, then stopping midair to hover motionless like a giant hummingbird. Suddenly it dives.

I found that my frisbee could reproduce this. If I threw it high into a prevailing wind it would come to a standstill, hovering because of its spin but unable to make any headway. Eventually it would tilt and dive in some unexpected direction.

For a while I tried to throw it to the moon but my backhand isn't good enough yet. Then, nonsense getting the better of me, I tried doing handstands in the long grass. A little forward momentum helps you get your feet in the air so I was running before the plant. Called it quits, laughing, when my body swung full circle once and hit the ground with a thud.

expectation eggs

I've been quiet lately. Because I don't have much to say. When you don't have much to say, you should be quiet. You shouldn't keep talking and blabbering on to fill space, because that's what everyone else does, and we're not about that here. No, there are rules in this place. We suggest you follow them. For your own benefit that is. You'll thank us later. We're looking out for your best interests, and it's really not in your best interest to talk on and on about nothing, because people may take that as a sign that there's really nothing inside you anyway, that you're some kind of strange orange peel of a person. And we don't want that. We want you to make the best impression possible but still not misrepresent who you actually are. (Who are you actually?) What you've got to realize is that the readers of your weblog don't want to sift through steaming piles of word maneur just to extract the few tidbits of genuine expressiveness that you may have accidentally let slip through the cracks. They want genuine anecdotes that come straight from the heart, things that you may have actually felt or thought in the moment and not just made up on the spot. Please leave out the filler. There's no place for formalities here, none for paragraphs devoid of content, doilies, colorful packaging meant to get people's attention and generally distract them from thinking about the lump of plastic they just shelled out another buck fifty for. Stick to the facts of the matter. If there aren't any facts of the matter, that's another thing, and maybe you should seek additional help if you don't believe in the existence of facts. Facts exist, and the fact is that people don't appreciate being led on for five minutes by some snazzy title or other just to find out that the entry they were reading was a complete waste of their time, that they're now five minutes closer to their inevitable death, and have absolutely nothing to show for it. So please, cut out the bulls*@#.

use this sidewalk at your own risk

Last night on our way to Kunstpark Ost we ran into a bunch of cops. It was a drug check. Somehow, out of the four of us, one of them voted me "Most Likely To Be Carrying An Illegal Substance," and I got the full pat-down treatment. Actually, I got the pat-down plus the I'm-going-to-stick-my-hands-in-all-your-pockets-myself-and-see-what-turns-up treatment, and it was weird. (Any time a third party, and especially a German police officer, rummages through your pockets, its going to be pretty strange.) My instinct was to tell this guy in my best Charleton Heston voice of outrage, "Get your hands off me you damn dirty ape." But this isn't my country and for all I know refusing to submit to a search could land me in jail, which would be bad for me since the bits of paper that allow me to stay here could be torn up in a moment, and my tenuous hold on this place lost.

They have different laws here. As an example, the other day I learned that it is completely legit to pick and eat apples from someone's tree as long as you don't set foot on their property. So if you can reach the tree from a sidewalk, say, the law allows you to pick as much as you can carry in your arms. Another example: you're responsible for keeping the sidewalk in front of your residence well-lit and free from snow or ice or you'll have to pay for any accidents people may have on it. In fact, they even go so far as to mark some sidewalks as private, with signs that say "Use at your own risk," in order to avoid this sort of liability.

What would you think if a sidewalk in the States was marked "Use at your own risk?" I personally would expect it to suddenly terminate on the edge of a cliff, Shel Silverstein-style.

soul blubber

We must trim away all the soul blubber.

host upgrade

Well well, looks like my host has gone and done it to me again. Because of an upgrade I haven't been able to logon to MovableType for a while now. Note that the URL for this site is now this, though you should be redirected anyway. I've gotta change a bunch of permalinks that refer to the old one in order to get the pics back.

cosmo

So I was sharing my impressions of Berlin with some Brits last night, and they both claimed to prefer Berlin over Munich, saying Berlin was edgy and trend-setting and Munich was just traditional. I, of course, prefer Munich to the Berlin I visited (if for only two days). Berlin seemed to me like a big cubist experiment. Everything was either falling into ruins or under construction; Munich, on the other hand, has a well-kept, established city nucleus that promises to remain this way. When I termed Munich cosmopolitan they disagreed with me. But cosmopolitan means "having constituent elements from all over the world or from many different parts of the world," which definitely doesn't fit Berlin from what I saw of it. Maybe it does have the second largest Turkish population behind Istanbul, but otherwise, it's a German stronghold.

Maybe this was just an example of polite disagreement for the purpose of making conversation, or maybe it's an example of extrapolation from too few data points. As they say, you can take a single point and draw any line you want through it.