the world has turned and left me here

bike wrecks revisited

To revisit an old topic, bike wrecks are hilarious. This time I was coming back from having my hair cut for 36 Euros, propelled by the thought of the lovely Steffie who gave me my first and last haircuts in Germany, when I passed one of those signs that gives a readout of your speed. As I reached my top speed the gears gave out--something they've been doing for a while now, and always at the worst possible times. With suddenly nothing to push against I found myself flying forwards through the air like a rider thrown off a horse. My body hit wet asphalt, skidded for a while. Amazingly I did not break anything (though something strange is going on with my shoulder muscles on the side that took the fall). And like the last good wreck I had, obscenities quickly turned into fits of hysterical laughter, and I wished that more people could have witnessed the spectacle and laughed their asses off with me.

what's going on in the white man's mind

This is the face of what may be the ugliest cat in the world, and what is definitely the ugliest $1500 cat in the world, because Chester has a pedigree. He belongs to Normen's sister Sandra. (Sorry Sandra!)

Spent the last three days in Obersimten hanging out at Normen's house, a trip that had been in the works for a while now. Since his internship at Siemens ended, he's been working like a dog to remodel his parent's old house, and is almost finished with the upstairs level, which now becomes his apartment. It looks damn impressive I must say, more like it belongs in an upscale Manhattan highrise than in a small German village with a population of 646. It's decked out with a nice stereo system, futuristic yellow couch, flat screen TV with a DVD player, a wine bottle rack in the kitchen, huge executive's desk, and has Normen's own artwork on the walls. No comparison between it and Normen's closet-sized apartment in Munich can possibly be drawn. Hey but maybe you'll get to see it for yourself on MTV's Cribs once Normen hits it big. ;-)

So between working around his house and stuff we did some partying. On Friday night we hit the Spirit in nearby Pirmasens, a disco club which--get this--used to be a church. From the outside it still looks like one:

Pretty standard really. In fact you might not think anything was amiss except for the "Spirit" sign above the doorway, and the small one above that proclaiming "Karlsburg Ur-Pils," the dominant beer of the region. But inside certain differences become apparent:

It was definitely the most fun I've ever had in church (!).

Saturday night we went to a party in Kaiserslautern (yes, Martina and Normen live about an hour's drive away from each other). It was shaping up to be pretty lame. There was techno playing in the bomb-shelter-style basement, but nobody was dancing to it...if no one likes the music you might as well have none, so at least people can hold conversations...we were on the verge of leaving when the people started getting interesting.

There was a German guy who looked like Lenny Kravitz, who said in fluent ebonics which I think only I deciphered, "You gotta keep your eyes open man." His eyes widened in demonstration. "You never know what's going on in the white man's mind." Normen and I of course adopted this one. Another black guy had the affect of a comedian and was apparently pretty hilarious, though I could only understand bits of what he was saying. There was a little dude whose every move was a slithering rave move, whether he was dancing, walking, or just gesturing in conversation. But the funniest thing was this totally drunk 40-year-old guy who started dancing on top of a pool table.

There was a chant of "Take it off!" as he showed us seductive glimpses of a beer belly. We had turned away and were talking again when suddenly there was this huge thud and the sound of breaking bottles. After about half a minute the guy appeared again behind the pool table, picking himself off the floor in a suddenly serious mood, as if there was some semblance of decency to be maintained...which there wasn't, because his entire person--from his white t-shirt to his shining bald head--was now covered with smudges of black floor-grime.

in hibernation

Went skiing (count the i's, there's two of 'em) in the Austrian Alps these last few days. It's not quite ski season yet as most of the mountain slopes don't have snow. But above the Tux valley in South Tirol there's a glacier called Hintertux that's good for year-round skiing.

Of course my ski ability was pretty pathetic compared to the Austrians, most of whom were probably skiing before they were walking. (Shoot probably everything in the Alps knows how to ski, from babies to small furry animals to blocks of cheese.) Wednesday was a beautiful day up on the glacier and I got a lot of skiing in. Thursday was not so great--even though it looked okay down in the valley, there was a bad snowstorm up on the glacier and they weren't running the lifts. Rather than hang around in my hotel room for another night reading I decided to get out of Vorderlanersbach. As I left I realized that, over the past two days, I had probably spoken a total of 50 words to other human beings. What was so strange about this was that it didn't strike me as strange.

It's the old language thing again. Just when my German is starting to get passable I throw myself in with a bunch of Tirol Austrians who are supposed to speak German, but in actuality speak some sort of weird Russian-Italian-sounding German, which I could hardly understand a word of most of the time. Sheesh, and I thought a strong Bavarian dialect was bad!

As a result there was a lot of time to think. The point of the trip, for me, was not to think--to act, for a change. But there were so many hours spent on trains, buses, lifts, and in my hotel room that I could not really properly escape from thinking. Aside from the exciting moments on the slopes, the whole experience was tainted by a sort of purposelessness...I knew that I had to get away from it all, but at the same time once I'm "away from it all" there isn't really any strong motive or desire behind anything.

I thought that the dream was dead. Dead in the only way that dreams can be killed, from the inside. But it's just in hibernation. I must recover, forget--forgetting is one thing I'm damn good at--and then try again. Still, experiences are not just something that I wish to pile up between me and the past, in order to obstruct my view of it. They are the raw material out of which I create things. Erdos said it: "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." In my case replace "coffee" with "experiences" and "theorems" with "software" and there you have it.

green

Matthias and me after the latest bout of Startlodge hair-dyeing.

aristocracy

In front of a giant mural depicting seraphim with elongated upstretched arms flanking the entrance to some sort of Greek temple, on a Steinway piano lit orange from within some twenty feet in front of me, Jean-Yves Thibaudet breezed through Chopin, a trite Liszt piece, labored through Ravel and rounded out the program with some strange Debussy. During these latter pieces the silver-haired man beside me was snoring audibly. Thibaudet came back for three encores even though he caught some people in the act of leaving with the second. As a tribute to the German crowd, his final encore was the Liszt arrangement of Isolde's Liebestod, by Wagner. Didn't stack up against the Horowitz recording (but then what does?). Thibaudet was good, though I got the impression that what I had paid for was not so much music, but the mark of status. The Munich aristocracy was out in full force. Many exotic birds about--and qualified keepers of exotic birds, if the looks of their men said anything.

Went to bed early and woke up disgusted with myself. Disgusted because, laying there with my eyes closed and preparing to get up, I was so completely out of touch with reality. But this is a normal part of getting up in the morning as you transition out of the dream state, right? So I don't know why it bothered me so much. Things will not be immediately better. It's going to take time to unlearn.

one day left

Oh yeah, one more day to go and my internship is over! I don't know what I'm going to do, who I'll do it with, or where I'll be doing it, but I know that it will be something other than sitting in front of a computer. During these last two weeks I've had nothing but work on the brain. Imagined perl scripts floating around in my head when I toss and turn at night. Database design in the shower. XSLT on my bike on the way to work. But I guess I'm not a true geek, because this actually bothers me a bit. I have this nagging feeling that I've left something behind, lost sight of something essential. Reality, perhaps? It's kind of a bad word around here these days but it's the best word there is for it.

After having bled at the ears over this last project of mine (I deserve no sympathy, I know, because as we discussed before it's my own damn fault for caring so much about my work), tomorrow will hopefully be a pretty laid back day at work. As is the tradition in my department, I'm throwing a small going-away party for all the other peeps, which includes cake and junk food and sect to drink and stuff. Then in the evening I'm going to see Jean-Yves Thibaudet play at the Prinzenregenten Theater. The weekend belongs to the murky (and possibility-laden) future but it will probably involve some unleashed craziness.

Stay tuned for more details.

today

Hey, did I just call this or what? Today is the first sunny day since Thursday nearly two weeks ago!

tomorrow

the mind's antipodes

Saw Our Lady Peace last night at the Backstage. They were pretty good and the crowd was small enough that I could watch all the lead guitarist's weird facial expressions as he jammed out. It was a Stevie Ray Vaughan thing, like watching someone having an orgasm during every guitar solo. Afterwards there was offline music and I partied until the wee hours, kind of unintentionally because I missed my connection back to the S-Bahn at 2:00. I ended up just riding around in a tram for a while trying to get back to the Backstage. A drunk was riding around too and it was a pretty sobering sight (ha ha). No seriously. This guy had no face, he was just this hunched over leather jacket with an incongruous floral cap obscuring all but his gray beard. I watched as he slowly brought out a flask from inside his jacket--he almost couldn't manage even this--and took a swig.

Finished my book of two Huxley essays while I was waiting. The first, the famous "Doors of Perception," was really great, perhaps because it was rooted in actual experience rather than intellectual synthesis. The second essay, "Heaven and Hell," was the latter to read. I couldn't believe that a writer like Huxley could churn out such a piece of crap. And that it would continue to be published. After about ten pages discussing the power of gems and shiny objects to transport one to the "mind's antipodes" (the mind's antipodes! the mind's antipodes! a phrase that quickly became ridiculous through repetition, as "the bowels of the earth" was to Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth) I wanted to toss it in the wastebasket. But I stuck it out to its unenlightening end.

dogmatic thought

It is perpetually night here. Why should I open the curtains when all that stares back is black night, my own reflection in some giant glazed-over dead eye? Today there was a glimpse of sun for a while--the first in over a week--but it only appeared to taunt me, and was taken away before I could do anything about it. After work me and the South African wandered around in a neon wasteland of sex shops, casinos, and small Turkish fast food places in search of a respectable place to sit down and eat. Finally the Shanghai Restaurant made an appearance. It was pretty respectable in all the usual ways, and the bill supported this conclusion. I had a Tsing Tao Chinese beer and we talked about dogmatic thought. Occasional talks about dogmatic thought are necessary and if you think otherwise then you are just plain old wrong.

When someone comes out with an absolute statement of any kind these days, I am just amused. Verbal dinosaur bones. Intelligent people have no business with such things anymore--they're rules designed to cripple the analytic mind in order to reach a quick conclusion, something I guess we needed in the past to survive mammoth attacks, peasant uprisings, world wars, etc. If you want to construct your own personal rule system then be my guest. But please don't inform me matter-of-factly that margarine is better than butter or that the difference between science and non-science is that the former contains theories which are falsifiable by possible outcomes. Or at least precede them with the words "I think." If you detach any human statement from the human context and you get nonsense, I should think that this is obvious. Even our greatest abstractions (in mathematics perhaps) will never be anything more than symptomatic of the human condition, and to imagine that we are somehow discovering truths that exist "out there" is a crock. We are discovering ourselves and nothing more.

orange

Me sporting my Irish heritage, the result of our efforts.

finger hooking

Hey fellow time travelers. It was a weekend well spent here in Munich, as Martina came down to hang out with me. My up-till-six Kellerage the night before with the South African didn't prevent me from going again with Martina Friday night. Was cool as ever. Word has it that Kunstpark Ost--the largest party zone in Germany and probably the largest in all of Europe--is going to be torn down in February, and replaced with (of all things) a family amusement park. Supposedly it will be rebulit across town in the West but this will require at least three years. Crummy news.

Saturday was another installment in an ongoing sequence of crappy gray Munich days. But since I had my esteemed colleague Ms. Berger along with me it wasn't all that bad. We made mischief in the city for a while (blowing out a giant candle and running away like criminals, holding an impromptu soccer match with an old yellow balloon that a surprising number of passers-by joined in on) before we drove across town to try give a friend a pleasant surprise. It was the mirror situation of one of my visits in Kaiserslautern, when I made Martina drive around blindly at night looking for Normen's house just so we could give him a Big Mac. In both cases we were unsuccessful. It wasn't so bad this time though, as we had long spaghetti, Pfalz wine and oven-roasted chestnuts (yum! a new one for me) at Startlodge instead. You have to cut an X in the top of the things or they'll blow up like big popcorn kernels--which happened to Martina anyway when she looked in on them.

Saturday night I put myself under the care of an expert and we dyed my hair orange. Got progressively more silly afterwards: arm wrestling at first, then thumb wrestling, and then a Bavarian sport known as "finger hooking" in which you lock index fingers and try to pull the other person all the way across the table. Martina won this one--upper body strength isn't very important; strong fingers are.

She listened as I talked into the night about my problems, always me and my reality problems, like a good sport. As before nothing was solved but it did me good. I saw her off in the morning, this craziest of girls and closest of friends over here. A skeleton named Hugo with a disco ball in his lap was riding in the back seat. Her first day of her new job was Monday--we reverse roles now, she becomes the one pinned down by a job, and I the freelancer (in two weeks that is).

cultural parity

A sort of cultural parity between the Old World and the New has been achieved.

We Americans have always felt hopelessly uncultured compared to the Europeans; we have contributed only the most meager offering of classical music, literature, or fine art to the world in my opinion. We cannot speak multiple languages and have little knowledge of cultures other than our own. Most of us have never left and will never leave our country. And we are failures when it comes to The Art of Living, will always be ashamed of our own, recognizing it at once as inferior when we are first exposed to the European lifestyle.

But the Europeans are similarly and equally humiliated by our superiority in this matter of what is cool. They strive to understand our pop culture, to dance to our music, to achieve coolness. But it always comes off as awkward. Coolness is for them as out of reach as is cultured for us.

you're so freaking blonde

A few days ago for no good reason--perhaps out of sheer boredom--I dyed Alan's hair blonde. Now whenever I see him in the mirror he scares me.

(The title: when I was in Amsterdam that weird dude who got ticked off when I ignored his drug-pushing activities said this to me, half under his breath in that creepy way of his. Apparently this was some sort of insult in his book. A prophetic insult, perhaps?)