the world has turned and left me here

lessons learned

Today, I was in the Daily Nebraskan. Now, the entire state of Nebraska is pissed at me for calling it boring & landlocked. Oh well I am honest to a fault I suppose.

Then today the culmination of all my parking fears was realized. My car was finally towed. Yup. When I went out to plug the meter again this afternoon, 5 minutes late, I already had a ticket. I cursed and moved my car but apparently forgot to plug the meter.

$100 in parking fees and a $53 towing fee later, I am pissed off but a wiser man than I was before. I am learning a lot about life these days. I mean, actually life, that thing I tried to avoid by never making any mistakes.

very well, where do i begin

My father was a relentlessly self-improving belingerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery...

No okay seriously for real now this is my attempt to retrospectively document all the strange things that have happened over the last five days. Here goes.

return to germany?

Recently got back in contact with Siemens in Germany. There are some possibilities. If I can manage it, I will go back and work again. Don't get excited though.

the super troopers chick

The next episode in the saga occurs Saturday night. I come back from the coffee house to find a $100 ticket on my car. For not having the little expiration sticker on the license plates. I am...enraged by this. Not to mention I must now, for the 3rd month in a row, wonder how I am going to scrape together rent.

You know, whenever I tell this story now everyone goes "oh yeah that's really important" and acts like of course what idiot would not have expiration stickers on his car? But I am here to say I couldn't care less about your little stickers. They got lost in some pile of other paper junk & I was just too lazy to find them again.

Of course I realize their importance yada yada but there are overall, frankly, too many tedious bits of paper which I am supposed to care about. The best way I can describe it is that it makes me feel like the protagonist in Kafka's The Trial. There, I'm done now.

So I was pulled over once for this already, by a female cop who looks just like that chick from Super Troopers. That was months ago though. Now, get this, I am driving around after getting that ticket and a cop pulls up behind me at a red light. I am 100% sure that with all that time to study my plates I will get pulled over again. Busted twice in one night for the same stupid thing. Oh no. Sure enough, as soon as the light turns green I get pulled over.

And it's the same Super Troopers chick. Only this time, I think, we're a little more comfortable with each other, having been in that whole cop / evildoer position before. (Maybe next time I'll ask her out.) She bears tidings of great joy however: I can just take the ticket down with my registration and get it voided. The next day I go down and do just that.

why

Okay this is still Saturday night. Right. I get a call from my friend Mike who says hey, the UNL women's soccer team is having a party & I'm going, here's the address. Me & Mark & Jeff drive down there but can't find the place, so we just go back to a bar.

The next day we find out Jenna Cooper was shot and killed at the party. Makes the national news. My friend Mike who was actually there when all this happened is shaken, changed, by the whole thing. There are too many coincidences here to mention & besides there are just some things you don't blog.

And I was just gonna go smoke my pipe on the porch & talk to Mark & Jeff. You have these chaos theory thoughts about "If only I'd just..." maybe everything would've been different.

By all accounts (and especially Mike's account, which I value more than any blah blah you'll hear on a newsfeed) Jenna Cooper was an amazing person. I believe that. And I am sad that we lost her, especially at such a young age & to such a bewildering, inexplicable act of random violence.

Why.

ben folds

It is Thursday. Today, Jake & his friend Doug & I are going to see Ben Folds in Des Moines.

Doug is a Catholic madman with no respect for your personal space, whom you love & simultaneously hate. Love, because he is so damn excited to be alive. Hate, because he showers you in spit & sweat & makes a total ass of himself in public, ie whenever there are other people around to get attention from. This is a crappy, overgeneralized character sketch but that's not my forte, I'll leave that to Dickens, who I'm sure would stretch his usual 3 page character introduction to like 50 pages in the case of Doug.

At any rate. Here Jake is upon arrival at Doug's place. After some rushing around, we finally get the hell out of Dodge, screaming Queen & Primus at the top of our lungs, pumping air guitars and pelvises up and down in the car.

I couldn't resist throwing this picture in, just to show you what a herd of madmen I've been hanging around with lately.

Stopping for gas in the standard Adair Iowa, Jake & Doug have a moment. Worse sins were committed with an air hose. But you don't get to see those. Those are in my...uh...private collection.

In Des Moines we got screwed over by Doug's "friend." This nerdwad had known we were coming for a week, but didn't want us to go out to dinner with him & his girlfriend. He offered us no help in selling off the extra tickets he bought for us, so we all ate 20 bucks there. Then he didn't even want us to sleep on his floor. No hospitality extended. Whatsoever.

Ben was awesome. For like 15 minutes, after playing a couple songs, he just screwed around telling stories and turning them into songs, e.g. the story of how he peed his pants in a Woolworth's once as a kid. And I thought man if the guy just wanted to do stand up for the rest of the show that'd be fine.

At one point he says "I've got some cool stuff on my computer I want you guys to hear, but it's at my hotel." Then he calls some guy over, throws him the keys to his room and tells him the room number. Five songs later the guy reappears with an iBook and Ben, indeed, sits there and plays some songs he's mixed together for us off his laptop. Only concert I've ever been to where a dude just screws around on his computer for a while.

We made it past security and down onto the floor for the second half of the concert. Doug started dancing wildly in the aisles--Jake & I thought here we go we're gonna get kicked out--but instead this girl out of nowhere starts dancing up to Doug. They pretzel. Jake & I hop up and down for joy when Ben plays all those great freshman year songs.

Ben Folds is awesome in concert primarily because he's so interactive. Between every song people shout stuff and he answers back, he tells stories, and he goes off on little improv tangents when he feels like it. Nothing is out of the box.

Afterwards we met him. He signed Jake's gopher shirt, Doug gave him a speech about why he should come to Lincoln, he drew a monkey face on another guy's jacket. I said, "You know we're just going to sell all this sh*t on ebay Ben." And he goes "Good luck." He's the same funny, self-deprecating dude on and off stage--in person Ben Folds is exactly like you think he'd be.

Anyway with no place to stay we just started back for Lincoln. Here's where the story gets good.

In Council Bluffs, Jake's transmission went out. We rolled the car up a hill into the nearest gas station. It's 3 am. Lucky for us, Jake's friend Harv was awake and came to pick us up. We crashed at Harv's place, then Jake & I got up after very little sleep to ride a bus out to Council Bluffs, where we sold his car for 100 dollars to a mechanic.

We were lugging around a glad trash bag full of his trunk contents and getting hit on by a white trash woman bus rider, who wouldn't stop looking at Jake's crotch, wondering is this rock bottom? because at that point, it sure felt like it.

tiny bubbles

Next time you wash dishes in the sink, check out the layer of dishsoap bubbles on the top once it thins out. Big bubbles have little bubbles between them. If you look closer, there's even tinier bubbles filling in the gaps between those. I strained my eyes but never saw an end to it...wish I had a magnifying glass so I could peer down to the smallest of all bubbles, molecular bubbles, and say hello there.

when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed

First of all, I want to know what the heck a "dooryard" is, you sweaty-toothed madman you.

No matter. Just wanted to say that the last four days in Lincoln have been the most beautiful days I can ever remember. All the lilacs are blooming on campus. I wanted to blog the lilac smell so you could download it and smell it for yourself, until I realized that's uhh...not possible.

roller skating

Jake & I the other night went to a roller skating party. We were wearing sandals. So on the way we stopped by and bought beer & socks. We stashed the beer outside the rink, behind a furnace duct, thinking that if anyone actually found it they by golly deserved it for being so clever. I halfway hoped someone would, just so I could feel amazed for a change.

Roller skating rinks have not changed since 3rd grade. You still get a blister almost immediately after putting on your skates. They still play 80s songs, there's still a blacklight on the far wall, there's still arcade games, and they still yell at you for horsing around & threaten to shut everything down if you don't behave.

Afterwards we went booze cruising (looking for a random party to crash) and ended up hanging out with 5 guys and 1 girl eating burgers in an apartment on the third floor. If you are just friendly to people & funny they will immediately realize you are a value-add to the situation.

three happiness

The next morning we wake up and, as our last little undertaking, Yun & I go to Chinatown. Yun is from southern China where families go out on the weekends for something called Dim Sum (literally "Small Servings"), which kind of reminds me of Chinese sushi. We park & enter the large dining room at the Three Happiness restaurant.

It's a very lively atmosphere, and straightaway Yun starts ordering Dim Sum off the carts that roll past. The servers lift the lid of each metal tray on the cart; if you see anything that strikes your fancy you take it, and they mark your meal card. We try all kinds of stuff. Some of it, I think, is really quite good, but Yun just scowls and keeps saying she's had much better. Her final verdict rests: it was bad Dim Sum.

Then we walk around Chinatown for a while, starting at this sign. Probably the first and last time I will ever see Chinese characters inscribed on an American flag. (Or? Who knows?) We go into quite a few shops, looking over porcelain figures, statues of Buddha, giant wooden dragons. Yun laughs at the bad English translations everywhere.

Before we leave we stop at the Sun Yat-Sen museum. It's just a smelly old room with no real artifacts, just a bunch of newspaper clippings, presided over by an old Chinese man who will talk on and on, pointing at things with his stick, if you let him. We produce the 8 and a half hour drive back as a means of escape--I wouldn't go there without some pressing excuse for leaving if I were you.

blonde redhead

When we finally return to Abbey Pub BR has been playing for a good 20 minutes (damn! damn! damn!). But they are amazing & I soon forget all the frantic rushing about we've just done, and am just glad to be there.

I will resist my urge to write excessive amounts about the concert. Or at least try to. The stage was small, barely enough for them to fit their instruments on I thought, and the venue very small too. Yun & I squeeze our way up to the front without difficulty. Between songs BR just messes around so that there's hardly any silence, one song just flows into the next. Unlike most every other concert I've been to where you get your songs shrink-wrapped, straight off the cd, these are real people making real music on the fly right in front of me. Holy crap.

On "I Get Rocks Off" Kazu and Amedeo go face-to-face & start singing off each other, there's this sudden dynamic between them & it's super exciting. Amedeo also goes nuts on his guitar a few times & that too is super exciting... basically I love seeing a band that enjoys their own music & each other thoroughly.

They play "Melody" and it's beautiful. For their encore they play three songs. Here's Kazu sitting at the keyboard during "Magic Mountain," which they follow up with "Water," a really rocking but hard-edge song, and I am afraid Amedeo is going to collapse the way he's staggering around in a guitar bliss.

Afterwards, partly at Yun's urging (hilarious to see how excited she actually got when he appeared on stage to clean things up), I went up and talked to Amedeo for a while, tried to persuade him to bring BR to the Sokol.

I also get to talk to Kazu & ask her all kinds of questions. Her jaw is still bothering her 8 months after the horse-riding accident in which it was broken--she says it may never be the same, and that it still hurts esp. after singing, which I guess explains their relatively short set. I confirm some suspicions about songs on their latest, "Misery is a Butterfly," and we talk about Mann's Magic Mountain for a while.

All this as if in a dream. This is the first time I've ever talked to anyone in a band after a concert & for some reason I expected to encounter unapproachable rock star egos. Especially with Kazu, I always envisioned her as this willowy far out Japanese goddess of inscrutable rock songs, but instead she was just a normal-size person without any pretensions, and actually seemed quite shy when I was talking to her.

The fact that I met them & they turned out to be so humble & real blew me away for the next few days, I couldn't stop thinking about it. This is a band. That was a concert. BR just gave me a new standard by which to judge things.

things go slightly awry

Ah but alas things do not always turn out as we want them to. At the Abbey Pub we sit around for a while until suddenly it dawns on us that Blonde Redhead doesn't come on until 11:45 pm (what the heck?) which means, with our last Metra leaving downtown at 12:40, we will probably end up sleeping on a bench in the train station if we don't do something fast. So we cook up this idea to leave immediately and bring the car back.

I am cursing up a storm because it looks like we will be late & I have just driven 8 and a half hours to see this band I've been planning to see for months now. We're both stressed out but still find some time to goof off some in Chicago Union Station between connections.

devon street

Then it's up to Northern Chicago to find a place to eat. Eric has suggested we try Devon Street, which we start walking until I call him & he estimates we have about 22 city blocks to go. We take a bus.

It's worth it. When the ethnic stores and restaurants commence it's all East Indian, I count 5 sari stores in the space of a block, then Pakistani and Afghanistani restaurants melt into Greek and Italian places, followed by Israeli shops with Hasidic Jews walking around in black coats, Cyrillic appears on windows and you're in Russia. Weird, like walking through half the world, a real cosmopolitan experience.

We search around and eventually end up at a place that serves an Indian and Pakistani cuisine. We get weird looks. Pretty good food--the nann is by far the best part, but the milk tea is good too. When we leave it's dark, and time to head over to the Abbey Pub for the BR concert--we hail a taxi.

run from fear, fun from rear

We get up & take the Metra from west Chicago into downtown. Buildings begin to crumble, people become beater, trash blows through streets, skyscrapers loom. I have this thought about really big cities: you pass this certain blast radius and it's like everything has been flattened, destroyed by a blast of some sort. Detritus. Trash. How can you help but be excited as you zoom through this blastscape to the very source? It's like going back in time, to the Origin of the Blast.

Yun & I get excited and wander around happily for a while before we get our bearings. Everything is frantic & alive. Eventually, we take a bus to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. There's a special exhibit of Lee Bontecou's stuff. He made this whole series of 3d pictures consisting of canvas stretched over wire frames, with various protrusions and black holes that seem to extend much farther back into the wall than is possible. Sometimes these holes are equipped with razor sharp teeth. They end up looking like the foreboding underbelly of some giant organic spaceship.

There's also a Surrealist exhibit upstairs ("Strange Days," after the Doors song). A series of paintings that appear solid blood red until you realize they are photographs of WWII soldiers, tinted so red you can barely make anything out. A neon sign: "Run from fear, Fun from rear." An 8-minute video clip of a condor trapped in an office room, trashing it. Various pictures of a sculptor's apartment containing 8 foot hight unnavigable balls of trash--"Excuse the mess," I try to imagine someone saying about this, impossible.

Although most of the stuff is pretty strange and or inane, I leave with this sense of clarity that was well worth the price of admission. Here, at least, were examples of people focusing all their intent upon something--everything was deliberate--there were no accidents--truth & beauty unfolded and you could pause, unhurried, to contemplate them.

stupid alan tricks

Yun & I leave for Chicago on a Friday afternoon with the sun setting. Soon it's dark and hours of crappy night driving ensue. I really hate night driving these days...tail lights are about the most interesting thing to look at.

Seven hours into the trip, somewhere in Illinois, I stop for gas and pull the stupidest Alan stunt anyone can remember. I drive off with the pump still in my car--the lock mechanism has not yet disengaged--I tear the hose clean out of the filling station--gas now starts showering down from above--the hose is lying there like a giant limp snake, still attached to my car--I run inside and make the attendant aware of the situation.

He has no idea what to do. Probably never imagined anyone could ever pull something like this off. Guess again buddy.

Meanwhile the meter is still running out there, charging up to my card. He stops it, but not before I've paid for this nice $10 gas shower. I leave name & number with the (still stunned) attendant & we head off to Chicago.

ceci n'est pas une pipe

Resurrecting an old bad habit, well it was never really a habit in the first place, I walked into Cliff's Smokeshop the other day and bought myself a shiny new pipe. Figure I need one before this weekend...going to Chicago with Yun to see my favorite band Blonde Redhead. No better way to fully grok a place than with an energetic friend and a pipe.

So I sat out on the porch in the dark thinking and smoking this treasonous pipe of mine. My college neighbors came and went. I've never really talked to them. Across the way, my other neighbors were making horrible sounds that I at first construed as an electrocution, but they could very well have been making a time machine. The windows were covered over with tin foil, as they always have been, though occasionally a crack would widen between the sheets and I would catch sight of the stark glaring light bulb inside. Sounds of sawing, drilling. If inside they were hacking apart human torsoes it would be none of my business because, by golly, this is America. We all have our own business here. Thank you very much now go away.

A cool night when everything is silent and listening down into itself. A plane passes over silently, leaving a contrail beside the moon. Far of whoosh of cars on the interstate. Sounds that are always there but you're just never listening.