the world has turned and left me here

go clean your heart

Heading uptown on 3rd avenue last night, traffic is unusually heavy and our cab driver gets all worked up. Something is obviously going on. He's yelling across the way to other cab drivers to find out what: this is information exchange, old school, which also means that most of the time there is no information here, only the ritual exchange of good-natured insults. A driver from Bangalore insults the Sudan. Our Sudanese driver, in return, launches a salvo that ends with "go clean your heart." We're laughing in the back without knowing why.

Eventually the information comes through. Obama's supposedly in the Waldorf Astoria, they've blocked off 42nd street. So we get out and walk the last 20 or so blocks along deserted 3rd ave.

Between our president blocking off east side traffic, and our mayor blocking off west side traffic (see the Times Square Pedestrian Mall experiment) they've damn near partitioned the city.

from boomtown to bumtown

On the 71 line from Market to Haight there's a bum chuckling to himself in the back. Another one in a San Fran State University beanie shuffles on and sits down next to me, wrapped in a blanket. After a few stops, he starts nipping off a bottle, and after a few more he's loosened up: "The only difference between Mecca Godzilla and Godzilla...is that Mecca Godzilla...is a machine."

mario in the hood

Singer Mario Barrett was filming outside on my stoop today. I only noticed because the screaming groupies from the nearby high school were making it impossible to concentrate.

So, keep your eye out for a nationally-airing Yahoo! commercial featuring a dingy old brownstone and one warbling, phone-toting Mario Barrett.

digital electronics are made out of analog parts. discuss.

Hello to everyone who attended Analog Divide. For those of you who didn't get to attend, here's what happened: people tried to distinguish a vinyl record playing through a digitizer from the raw analog signal. People also drank a lot of wine. It was all part of the experiment, okay?

You can read more about the setup (or lack thereof) here. Without further ado, here are the rather curious results, in time order:

One enthusiastic participant took the test multiple times, so each line is the outcome of one guess.

Only 3 out of the 13 participants correctly identified the analog and digital signals. If the participants really had no clue and were equally likely to guess correctly or incorrectly, the probability of getting such a lopsided result is a little less than 1 in 10. (See binomial distribution). So it looks like you guys had a clue.

More likely is that most people really could distinguish the signals, but labelled them incorrectly. Before taking the test, several people asked "What's the difference--is analog supposed to sound better?" We told them "not necessarily, that's just what some people say" and tried to explain how the ADC <-> DAC circuit worked. Who knows if it made any sense. In the end, those people that weren't sure what they were listening for probably fell back on the labels "better" and "worse," mapping these to "analog" and "digital" respectively.

Does this mean you guys actually think a digitized signal sounds better? That kind of freaks me out. So here's a theory: the high frequency pops and hisses coming from the record player were converted to lower-amplitude noise by the ADC <-> DAC circuit. I'm still reading up on this myself, but here's a starting point. Less popping and hissing = "better" = analog?

This theory is supported by 2 of our 3 correct guessers, who said they were specifically listening for high frequencies and noise levels. One, wb, went from a string of correct guesses to a roughly 50/50 record after we started cleaning dust off the test albums. Our 3rd correct guesser, id, says she was listening for the "sound stage" which didn't come through in the digitized signal.

In the end, we must concede that the experiment was fun but woefully inadequate as a scientific inquiry. Many suggestions were made to improve things: use the same, artifact-free analog test signal for all participants; get the survey script working so the test would be double-blind; drink less wine, etc.

If you feel like taking an improved test, come on over, but I can't guarantee the less wine part just yet. ;)

Thanks to everyone who attended. All the code for this party was open source.

how to raise a confused child

Classic average joe brooklyn guy, with the brooklyn italian accent and everything, on the subway with his chinese wife and kid. Wife is stuffing her mouth with a dry sandwich, dropping crumbs into a host of christmas shopping bags attendant upon her feet. This family is awash in shopping bags. I suspect both parents are drunk, the wife more so. They look to be about 40. The kid is maybe 5.

Wife hands a radio to the kid. It's playing traditional chinese string music tinnily. Kid is very cute. She wants daddy to hear the music too so she holds the radio up to his face. "Turn it off," daddy says wearily. "What is that? That's not music. Is that some kind of chinese music?" he asks. Wife grabs radio from kid and repeats the childlike gesture herself: she holds the radio up to his face in a silent bid for appreciation. He takes the radio and turns it off.

a sushi bar built for one

how do you like them apples?

Back in Lincoln, Jake and I are walking around the totally deserted UNL campus. We go down to the sunken sculpture garden. It's always been a good place to sit and talk, or just sit, and this time proves no different. That is, until drummer boy appears.

This kid sets up a drum, puts on headphones, and proceeds to pummel the art quadrangle with poorly executed drumming exercises. There is absolutely no way we can talk over this. The sunken garden has become a foxhole, and we're screaming over the machine gun fire to be heard.

We get up to leave, noting with irony the one consistent theme of this trip: personal dynamics wrecked by the external, an invasion of the off-kilter. We give up on the conversation. Jake goes over and asks the guy a few questions before we leave, like "does it usually sound like that? I mean I've just never heard a drum sound...that loud..." But the dude either doesn't pick up on the subtlety or just doesn't care. After all, he's right next to a music building with plenty of practice rooms, so more and more this looks like attention-seeking behavior, plain and simple.

At this point I hatch a plan. "Let's go over to the bagel store. If they have apples, we're going to buy them." They're closed. So we try the Juice Stop next door. No apples in sight, but the guy behind the counter pulls out a bag of apples like it was a magic trick. For 45 cents each, we get the most beautiful red apples you've ever seen: shiny, firm, jeweled with condensate...baseball-sized.

We're like little kids again as we run back to campus. I've got butterflies in my stomach. We plan our escape route, leaving our shoes some distance away so he won't hear us, then find the optimal vantage point. There are a few innocent bystanders we must wait out, the tension almost unbearable as we peek over the lip of our sculpture garden trench. He's still up there hammering away when we launch the apple grenades on the count of three.

It's a dead sprint back to the nearest cover. When it's obvious no chase is being given--but that Mission Apple Silence has been successful--we take a leisurely stroll off campus, laughing and speculating.

Yeah I know, but the thing is, passive aggressiveness is just so much more fun.

F train blues

Tonight, the sing-song tone of closing subway doors was distorted into the bleating sound of an accordion. It sounded real nice actually. Each time it happened it was arresting, because you've heard it by now so many times, and it never varies from that sterile "bing-bong" you expect out of everything from elevators to the deck of the star ship enterprise to the door ajar sound in your nice new car. This time though it was different. This time it wheezed its booze tears out onto the sad old plains of graffiti rubbish. Can you blame it? No, but you can certainly demand the restoration of uniformity: send that sad bastard back to the hangar.

haste

Reality has a speed limit. I woke up this morning to a day full of appointments in my neighborhood, and thought boy, wouldn't a bike be nice right about now. New brake pads were a prerequisite to this. So I ran down to the bike store and back, put on the Goldberg Variations, and set to work.

I haven't really messed with my bike since I rebuilt it in Seattle, but the adjustment zen was still there for the channeling. Finally, five minutes before my first appointment, things were in working order. The Goldberg Variations closed with the aria--a perfect coincidence--just as I headed out the door...with flat tires.

historiologically speaking

"I love black and white cookies." We've only just met, and we're already getting her life story.

"I was like dating this guy, and, like, I bought him this black and white cookie, right, you know, and we went to Central Park to eat it, and he didn't even share it with me. That's when...I knew. It didn't occur to him to share it with me. He just like ate the whole thang. There's no way I could, like, be with a person like that."

This sort of thing is hard for me to resist. "You know what he should have done?" I ask. "He should have broken the cookie in half. Then you each could have worn half around your necks, and when you would meet, you could put the jagged cookie pieces together. They would fit like so. Then you could even both nibble a little of the edges as you lean your heads together."

Not knowing me, she went through a beautiful moment of bewilderment while she tried to figure out if my sincerity was mock. But the best was yet to come. She gets into an argument with a friend of ours who works in the tenement museum. He's telling us how the East Village, a once predominantly German neighborhood, changed ethnicities after a shipwreck on the East River.

"Historiologically, I think you need to get your facts straight," she breaks in. She starts trying to reconcile the current (very different) ethnic makeup with his story. But I can't pay attention. I keep wondering if she really did say that word: "historiologically." Perhaps I misheard her.

He starts to respond, but she leaps into the breach again: "Well, historiologically speaking..." Yes. She definitely said it. Unbelievable. I'm filled with an amusement that knows no bounds. I've stopped listening...it's just me and the word, playing over and over again in my head...in the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was hilarious...

"Historiologically."

Ben once dated a girl with a lawyer sister with a similar tendency to overstep herself in her bids for intellectual cred. When Ben dumped the girl, the lawyer sister walked up to him and delivered a speech which began with the assertion that "my sister doesn't need you, as she has many suitors."

Ben described this moment to me later. He saw the word "suitors" jump out at him, flashing on and off in his mind like a neon sign. "Suitors." "Suitors." He couldn't remember anything else from her speech. Everything fell away, except for that one wonderful word. That wonderful word which tried so hard.

variable output in the form of the tequila velociraptor incident

I am listening to an old Norwegian prog record by a band called Aunt Mary: Janus. I cannot recommend this record however. It's just too variable. There are moments of drony splendor, but they just can't make up their mind and keep tossing out more random stuff. Jazz riffs, falsetto choruses, bluesy guitar bits that disintegrate into laughter. It's just not something you want to listen to, though I'm sure it was fun for them to make.

Then I think, how is this different from me? If someone put the record of my life on right now, they would see me at the piano trying to play this Debussy piece, playing the right hand runs over and over, getting tired of that, hacking, going to my corporate job, coming home tired, writing this blog sometimes, drinking too much once in a while so that I lose all my sensibilties and start doing my stupid human tricks. Disintegrating into laughter. Variable output. Some of it might amuse or interest someone, but on the whole, this is not a record you just sit down and listen to.

Some people might call it "range," but I don't see it that way. I awoke this morning to the conviction that I'm a bad person. Here's what happened. I went to a bar where there was an unofficial holiday party for work. Company holiday parties are no longer a tradition for most of New York: everyone was going home with everyone else's wife / husband, and chaos ensued, so I am told. Not to mention the inevitable legal issues with the inevitable unwelcome advances.

So anyway, at the unofficial holiday party we drank a lot of Patron. Now in general I'm not a big fan of Tequila, and up until now I haven't owned any Tequila superstitions, like the "it makes me violent" one. But last night made me a believer.

I went up to a couple girls on the dance floor and asked one of them her name. Her friend butts in. "She's married." Whether or not this is the case doesn't matter; this is the worst possible place for a married girl to go, period, and is additionally the farthest thing from a place where you might go "just to dance and not be bothered," and say things like "I'm married" whenever a guy makes an advance.

"What the f@#% are you doing here?!!" I scream at them. "Get the f*@# out of here!" as I chase them off the dance floor. They are so pissed, but I have driven the moneylenders out of the temple, so I feel good about this.

Then there was the incident of the overcoat. As I leave, I can't find my coat in the pile--it has a new set of contact lenses in it, and my iPod, and I'm furious that I can't find it, and that possibly someone stole it. So I take someone else's coat. Eye for eye, coat for coat. "Come on guys, we gotta go, hurry up, I'm stealing someone else's coat," I'm telling my friends as I drag them out. The coat is huge on me. Clearly not my own.

Then as we're looking for a cab I wander out into the street and get hit by a cab. Lightly, I leaned back into it and he sideswiped me. The body of the car felt so fragile, like an eggshell layer around the machinery and people inside. The cab stopped to see if everything was ok, so I ran up and embraced the trunk, screaming "I love you." At this point Endorphinman one-ups me. He leaps onto the trunk and starts jumping up and down. I can see the passengers in the back window looking out with wild eyes. They are freaked out, they think they're being attacked. It's like some scene from Jurassic Park. Only in this version the Park is not filled with velociraptors, but instead with people who've drank too much Tequila.

So the cabbie hits the gas, just like in the movies, and Endorphinman flies off and hurts his wrist. The night more or less ends there, and I wake up depressed at what I've done & the way I behaved. I wake up with a need to confess these things to someone, so I call a few of my friends. But when I tell them they all think it's hilarious. Gradually they persuade me that my behavior was ok, but I still have this nagging doubt, it just doesn't match up with the rest of my life very well, like a humorous song on an otherwise serious record.

Out in the light of day, I'm still hashing it over when I pass an old man with a cap getting into his car. He puts his hand on the doorhandle, then stops. He's waiting for something.

Suddenly he breaks tremendous wind. It was probably audible across the street, let alone in my proximity, and it lasts for a long time. When it finishes he finally opens the door to get in. "Holy smokes," I exclaim.

What gusto! This man does not fear the embarassing episodes, the incongruous impressions he makes over the course his life. No. He celebrates them. He farts as loud as he can, then gets into the car.

ex-intrinsic eccentricities

Here we go again.

artisthe

my dog is an awesome dog

potatoes

I'm walking up the street at night. There is an old Polish lady standing out on the stoop. She has a funny old lady hat and glasses, and a bag beside her on the steps.

"Excuse me," she says as I pass, "could I ask you for some help?"

At this point I nearly keep walking, thinking she's probably just an old bag lady panhandling me. But there's something about her that makes me stop. "Yeah, what is it?" I demand.

"I have this sack of potatoes here and I can't carry it up the stairs to my apartment. My knees are bad."

"Oh. Alright." We start up the stairs together with the potatoes. "How many people did you have to ask before I stopped?"

"None," she says. "You were the first one I asked."

"Why did you ask me?"

"I watched many people walk by before I asked you. I looked at their faces. You had a kind face." Then she adds, "I'm something of a psychic."

There was definitely something a little weird about this situation. I deposit the potatoes in front of her door, make some flippant remark, and start off down the stairs again. There was no way I would have gone in. I don't think she would have asked me in either. Her bag could have been full of shrunken heads instead of potatoes. I could have been a serial killer with a kind face. But she had divined otherwise, and was pretty sure of her judgment. So was I for that matter. But you can never be completely sure of anyone, especially here.

So there she stood there in the lamplight at the top of the stairs, watching me go down. Part of me was pleased to hear that I had a kind face. Another part was a little disappointed. Could I be a badass someday if I needed to with a face like that, a face that was so obviously kind? The kind of face that lugs potato sacks up and down stairwells without complaint?

No, and so I realized something essential about myself. Whenever you become aware of something that is intrinsic to you, even if it's a good thing, it's a little sad--suddenly a bunch of possibilities just disappear.

the running of the suits

I awoke this Saturday morning to the sound of a band playing out on the street corner. Not so unusual for this neighborhood I'm thinking: possibly they're drumming up support for a show later in the day. But it keeps getting louder, and then I hear people cheering. Then I look out the window and what do I see but the New York City marathon running past my apartment:

banana bowl: i just can't get you outta my head

Bought it. "Golden Banana Bowl / You're lovin is all I think about."

next customer, next customer

After the Cards Mets game (go Cards!) I need to pay my bill at the bar. I go next door to McDonald's, which has the closest ATM. The grease fumes nearly overwhelm me.

Then to top it off the ATM makes a noise like its doing something and then promptly moves on to the "new transaction" screen. Uh-oh I think: I've had this happen before when the so-called "transaction" wasn't so transactional. Well the debit from my account is transactional, but it's not atomic with the handing me of actual physical money, or a receipt.

So, beligerent sports fan that I am, I give the machine a sound kick. Instantly this rouses a gaggle of torporous McDonald's employees from their group chat behind the corner, and into action. Or rather, into more meaningless chatter, this time directed at me. "Uh-uh, whatchoo be doin that for over there?"

I had unwittingly just launched myself into Jerry Springer land. I ran with it. We go back and forth for a while.

"I'm just trying to get your attention. You need to put a sign on this thing if it doesn't work, you shouldn't just let people use it."

"Mmm-mmm, Mmm-mmm, next customer," (to the next guy in line), "sir, sir, can I help you sir..."

"Alright whatever, listen, lemme ask you, how would you feel if a machine just stole 100 bucks from you?" I hoped that one would hit home. Nope.

"Call the number, there's a number right there on the machine."

"Ok but this is going to be a huge waste of my time, do you understand? I will spend way more than $100 of my time dealing with this. That $100 is just gone now. Why didn't you put a sign up?"

"Next customer, next customer."

Etc. So I go get a pen from the bar and come back to write down the number. She comes over and is buzzing around me like a fly, shoving their newly crafted "out of order" sign in my face.

I look down at the ATM and see a Win2k bootup screen.

blood

I almost don't want to blog about this. Oh well, here goes.

Two nights ago, walking around the streets of New York, we suddenly passed an old Chinese woman on the sidewalk whose head was laying in a pool of dark red blood. There was so much blood it's hard for me to imagine that she just fell down. The pool was being drained slowly by a grate beneath her head...you could hear the subways below...we found ourselves wondering where it was all being channeled off to...and her face, so motionless, peaceful almost, only her eyes looking around in slow incomprehension...

That image will stick with me for the rest of my life.

(There were already five people calling 911; the cops showed up moments later.)

expression, impression: 10 new york vignettes

You can express things. Things can impress you. It's all flow, it's just a question of direction: is it flowing in, or is it flowing out.

Every person has their own flux balance, by which I mean they express more than they impress, or vice versa. Perhaps this is what we mean when we say so-and-so is an introvert: his net flux points inward. Things flow in and he doesn't let all of it flow back out; he holds some inside. Or when we say so-and-so is an extrovert, perhaps we mean that her net flux is outward. She exudes more than she absorbs from the world.

I declare them both to be criminals in violation of the law of conservation of flux. ;)

Today I was an extrovert. I don't know what got into me, but I talked to more random strangers today than I've ever done in my life. Was it the autumn New York sunlight, which woke me up at that perfect moment when it streamed in?

I don't know where it came from, but I liked it. Here's ten vignette-style encounters from my day.

1: disturbance

Girl behind the counter in a small soho clothing store: all of the clothing was disturbing. I felt I had to point this out. The first t-shirt I came to was a joke shirt about crack. Yeah, I can tell you're having a hard time imagining that one. I was having a hard time imagining it and I was looking right at it.

The next had a giant realistic cross. Then there was a Richard D. James-looking technicolor zombie face. And finally a greyscale bigmac with a thin rivulet of dripping red blood slashed across the middle. There was no undisturbing t-shirt in the whole store.

I don't think she had given the trend much thought. She seemed really into her imac behind the counter (she was an introvert) but I hope she found the process of random sampling and statistical analysis at least somewhat amusing. She was at least listening when I made fun of her for playing AFI--I noticed she quickly shuffled songs. Impression. Not a whole lot of expression. I can understand now why extroverts get frustrated with me. I was hoping for *some* sort of response.

2: the leather jacket

Chinese 20-something guy in a clothing store on the edge of chinatown: this place had clothes I liked. I liked them so much that I started trying everything in the store on. When I reached the end of the rack there was a nice leather jacket, which I started to take off.

"No, sorry, that's mine," the guy broke in, obviously very embarassed. When he broke in I had just started wondering why a small independent designer shop would carry a leather jacket from the Gap. My recovery was to talk about what an amazing find he had made--a piece of clothing from the Gap that didn't totally suck. "I always put my jacket there," he said. "I've worked here for five years and no one has ever tried to put it on." Well," I say, "I guess no one with your same impeccable taste in jackets has come in yet." He laughed. His acute embarassment had dissipated.

3: in search of daniil kharms

Girl behind the counter in a soho bookstore: I came in looking for works by a Russian surrealist poet I had recently run across in a journal. His name is Daniil Kharms. No way will I find anything by this guy I thought. But instead she started rattling off titles after an amazingly brief pause. The information flowed through her so quickly it was almost scary...I don't think I could have googled it myself and read through the search results any faster. (Even with something like surfraw amazon.)

It reminds me of the jazz guitarist I saw last night: one of those quintessential guitar geek turned guitar god types who have basically zero synaptic gap between their mental music and their physical music, and can play anything under the sun. (Luke Sticka I'm talking about you here too.)

As I listened to her digging through the list of publications, randomly remarking on the interesting details of each, making connections to other components of the literary scene, I realized just how huge a book nerd this girl was. She seemed very nice and interesting. But there was a particular edge to her when it came to how much she knew. The edge was a thing called pride. I wondered how often people got this same impression from talking to me..."a nice person, but something about them makes me a little uneasy..."

4: starbucks bathroom line

Middle-aged woman in line for the restroom at starbucks: we talked about maine, the leaves changing color, commuting, los angeles, seattle, and the nature of time. Especially about the nature of time in new york, as she had been in maine for the weekend. After all this discussion, we were still waiting in line. "Welcome to the only semi-public restroom within five blocks," I say. There's always a huge line for the soho starbucks restroom. I'm not sure its worth the price of admission either. They should put a clown with balloons or something inside to compensate.

5: team leader, north pole expedition, 2003

Bouncer for an upscale outdoors clothing store in soho: yeah, when you have $1200 jackets like some of these places do, I guess paying a bouncer is worth it. This store was the funniest piece of pretentious crap I've ever been in. Hands down.

Every last piece of clothing had some inscription on it like "Team Leader, North Pole Expedition, 2003." On my way out I told the bouncer what I thought of it. And you know what? He lost his composure and burst out laughing.

"I know exactly what you're talking about man," he said. We had a good laugh together about whether or not they were planning to open North and South pole locations...so you could buy this stuff after, you know, you had actually done what it proclaimed to the world you had.

6: rawhide

Girls behind the counter at evolution, a science store: we talked about the recent T-Rex soft tissue find and the implications thereof. They helped me find a great framed atlas moth specimen. They are also surprised to hear that the cowhides which they are selling for 300 dollars can be picked up off the ground for free where I come from. Hey, when have I ever passed over an opportunity to tease?

7: zanzibar

Cabbie from Zanzibar who picked me up in brooklyn: I asked him all my usual cabdriver questions, which is becoming a sort of routine. (Random sampling, followed by analysis: the scientific method.) This guy was a character though. Man. I asked him to tell me one interesting thing about the island of Zanzibar. "You can't hardly kick a soccer ball without it going into the ocean," he said.

8: come on! come on! gadget arm

Turkish couple who run an artsy furniture store a block from my apartment: for some reason I had never been in the little bedford ave mini-mall. What a mini-mall though: a hipster coffee shop, hipster haircutters place, a tibetan clothing store, an indie music shop, a computer gear store called "mikey's hook-up" and this nice little furniture store.

The girl and I reminisced about Inspector Gadget. There was a chair that looked like the one the evil boss of M.A.D. would sit in at the end, growling "I'll get you next time gadget!" What was the cat's name? We wikipedia-ed it. Apparently just "mad cat." Guess they used up all their creativity deciding what body part Gadget would scream orders at next. She told me the Turkish equivalent to "Go go Gadget arm!" was something like "Come on! Come on! Gadget arm!" I got an impromptu Turkish lesson.

We then started talking about Turkish names. To my surprise I discovered that their names were all very literal. I started telling them the names of all the Turks I have known. I have known a guy named "war." Who names their kid "war," in any language? The couple's names roughly meant "frontier" (the guy) and "sweet smell" (the girl). The guy tells me Turkish girl names are always like this. Often they are the names of flowers.

This very literal, non-abstract naming system is totally foreign to me. Is it similar to Native American naming systems I wonder? ("Bird-That-Craps-When-I-Kick-It.") I left the store much more interested in Turkish culture.

9: gold-plated bananas

Girl behind counter at art store on north 6th: there's this one piece in there that I really want. I keep going in and coveting it. It is a gold-plated bunch of bananas clumped around a slice of banana trunk: a veritable golden banana bowl.

As I'm sitting there basking in its glory, the idea occurs to me, what if I buy this, and there's a break-in, and during the struggle I reach for this rather heavy clump of gold-plated bananas, and I end up bashing the attacker's head in with it? How will the headline read? We discuss this. The article will probably just say "with a blunt object"--newspapers never descend into the interesting, the actual, details.

But what if the headline did read "area man kills attacker with clump of gold-plated bananas," and then goes on to never mention that detail again in the 10-line article? Boy, that would be great. I should definitely buy the bananas. And hope someone foolishly tries to attack me.

10: day i almost cut my hair

Dude with the record collection at the bedford artist's flea market: he's playing a typically bizarre selection of music. Typical for this neighborhood of brooklyn let's say. I remember that there were a few irish folk tunes in there. But no matter, his record collection is great, way better than the last guy's, and I find a bunch of stuff, including CSNY's Deja Vu.

I ask him if he's taking requests. I can tell he's in his "I'm the DJ here" mode and that he's not immediately too pleased with my request. Maybe I look like I don't have good taste or something. He asks me which one, and I hold up the record and point to "Almost Cut My Hair" (this one goes out to you Drew). "That's a good song," he concedes, "but I've got this next one all queued up and..." I say "that's fine man, I'm gonna be digging around here a while anyway, so whenever you get to it."

After another song he puts it on. And it changes everything. We all have long hair now, we're all playing guitar in our heads, blissed out. People are humming along, tapping their feet. This was definitely not occurring during Irish folk tune happy hour. A guy even comes up later and asks him "what was that?!" and demands to see the record--which is so, so mine, the original UK import in perfect condition.

The song finishes and the DJ guy throws on the David Crosby solo album. We have a joke about those "back-to-back" programming segments on mainstream radio where they play, like, two Metallica songs, and then like two Pink Floyd songs. And they always have some dumb name for this little gimmick. I compliment him on his taste and collection as I pay for my three records.

Somehow at this point he throws in one of those f*ck corporate-america statements--it's really quite disconnected from the conversation when I think about it, but you know this is always on certain people's minds. "And I'm just the little guy," he says. "We're all just the little guy," I say. "But things are changing man, the huge corporation will soon be a thing of the past. Although they'll do a lot of kicking and screaming on their way out the door. Like you hear now out of the music industry."

"Yeah," he says, but this "yeah" is a total dismissal--he takes me for a wacko. I probably sounded like one. He goes off to pet some girl's albino chihuahua. Cute girls with albino chihuahuas are infinitely preferrable to political discussions, so I can't really blame him.

i'd like to file a noise complaint against the neighbor's wrecking ball

One of the not-so-obvious downsides to living in a "hip, up-and-coming neighborhood" is that you can't sleep in on a week day.

Take this morning for instance. I am awakened prematurely by the sound of a concrete smasher across the street going off every few seconds and taking all the nearby car alarms with it. After that subsides, someone starts a floor buffer up in the hallway right outside my door (they just installed wood floors). This is followed by the sound of a circular saw. In my hallway.

I was sleeping like a log, until I got sawed in half.

texas hold me night

91106. Collection of random stuff just like the rest of my life. I order takeout but then wander over to the bar on the corner. There are people inside playing cards to dub music. Gin rummy I am informed. Why rummy? I ask one of the guys on the side of things. It's a totally boring game. He asks me what game I would play instead and I say bridge. I'd play Texas holdem he announces. "We should have a Texas holdem night."

No I say, you should have a Hold Me night. A Texas Hold Me night. Just come in and hold each other. I can tell that everyone is simultaneously (a) creeped out but (b) amused. I suggest that once it gets going maybe they could have a Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer Night.

The TV is on and tuned to a local channel. It's all September 11th stuff, most of it ridiculous and totally repulsive but I don't want to say anything because I wasn't here. I notice--oh my god--this year they've spun 9/11 into a logo: 9 11 06 it reads, with the ones extending upwards like the twin towers. Every time I watch TV again I am filled with horror. This is reality, carefully manufactured and airbrushed in photoshop.

They made it a logo. I just can't get over that. It's like UNL agressively defending their rights to the word "Huskers" in white cursive on a red background. "91106." Closed captioning is on but I can hear them say it: nine eleven oh six. It has a nice ring. They show some guy playing bag pipes on Long Island Beach. What could any of this possibly have to do with anything that actually happened to real people.

When I walk outside I notice the spotlights extending into the sky just across the river, two parallel beams.

south beach, white boy

Notes from the outerground. The instant we set foot on the beach--pasty white me and my dusky Egyptian girl--we passed a trio of beach crazies: a leather-skinned woman tells me I'm too white for South Beach, an aboriginal man who up till now has been chanting "you gotta put it in a pouch, you gotta put it in a pouch" changes his tune to "god don't put the girl like that on earth no more," and the clear head of the bunch, a guy in his thirties, talks to me about Seattle. Seattle being my excuse for whiteness. I left Gollum City for Gotham City. Which in the end is only a minor improvement compared to Miami of course.

As we walk off the woman--who is really quite annoying by now because she is the only one among them who didn't change her tune--is yelling "white boy!" Every time she does so we turn and wave, until they are out of earshot. Here we are, South Beach. I am the lone white man; all other white men have turned to leather. Like the bums. There are a surpising number of them for such an upscale place--warm year round I guess. As one of my neighbors in Seattle once said of Arizona people, "they're just like a baseball glove." These are the bums. We see a woman bum made of baseball glove leather sleeping on a park bench with an empty bottle of rubbing alcohol beside her. Bums fascinate me.

Notwithstanding, I get the impression the majority of South Beach just stepped off the runway for a cool dip in the water before their next show. This place is of the body, in the same way that New York or Seattle is of the mind. What I see is pretty easy on the eyes.

We go to some incredible clubs. Saturday, to a smaller place called Blue with edgy house. It's small, oblong like a New York bar, not the vast expanse you'd expect of a Miami dance club. "Someone f**ked my washing machine, my washing machine doesn't work" a digitized voice complains repeatedly. We dance for 4 hours.

The next day on a tip we go to Niki Bar for recovery drinks. It's about noon and oppressively hot outside, we almost pass out on the way. Once we're in though it's low lying couches beneath bedouin tentery, and really laid back house spinning. We hit the beach but return after a few hours, driven in by sudden intense rain along with tons of other people. The club is packed and open to the outdoors. People are going crazy as sheets of rain surround the dance floor on two sides.

There was this beautiful couple on the beach; they too have been driven in by the rain. Earlier we were watching them down by the water, the girl in a lotus position in the guys lap and so obviously in love with him. My girl & I both agree she is the most beautiful woman we've seen: light brown-skin, a huge pile of auburn dreadlocks. She's just so natural in this guys arms. They're both fully dressed, as if some love impulse had compelled them to suddenly run down to the ocean and fall down on the sand together.

The rain gives us a chance to meet them. The girl is half Cuban, half Italian and the guy is Cuban. Our girls dance together. But the beautiful half Cuban girl has done a 180, she's so drunk now she can barely talk let alone stand up. It is sad to see such a beautiful thing in a state like that. We wonder how it happened...she was in a such a shuteye loveglow only 15 minutes before. We find out they have been up for 3 days straight but not much more about them; they disappear and we never see them again. We have to get up at 4am for a 6am flight back to New York.

come get your girlfriend out of my gutter

Two a.m. There is a girl wasted in the gutter on my street, sprawled out next to a bottle of something in a brown paper bag. It worries me until I get close enough to hear her talking on her cellphone. It must be pinned between her head and the curb. "Yeah I'm wasted. I just decided to crawl under this SUV here..."

louis l'amour man

At a party the other night, I meet a fellow who collects Louis L'amour novels. He has over a hundred so far. Says he carries around a checklist in his back pocket & is always dipping into used book bins. I love this town.

poopinators

And you thought you had a crap job.

Well it rained all the way to Baltimore, and Starscape threatened to Suckscape. When we arrived there was no live music, just a bunch of whiney shivering ravers and one lame house tent down by the water. A depressing spectacle. Then the rain let up, MMW played (albeit badly mixed) and the party barreled on into the morning. Tents blasted various genres of electro. I spent a good part of the time at the drum n bass tent (having travelled down with a bunch of dnb fanatics) but also was digging the disco house tent, which extended way out on a swaying wooden pier culdesac into the bay.

Left my camera in the car. The only time I wished I had it was at dawn, when the first rays of daylight illuminated the convulsing, overstimulated masses around me; many of these people had visibly lost their minds. It was a science experiment. Side effects may include dizziness, irritability, nausea, paralysis from the waist up*...

starscape

Going to Starscape in Baltimore tonight with EndorphinMan, who requires that we stop probably in some random bar in New Jersey to watch a World Cup game. This is fine by me, as long as we catch MMW at 9. Thunderstorms prevail--will they ruin the day or make it? Pictures either way.

princeton

Academia, will you ever forgive me for nights like this one?

yippy dog

A yippy dog lives across the hall. He was barking last night around 3:30 am, when I realized he is roughly the same size as the trash compactor slot. The trash compactor itself presumably resides in the basement, 5 stories down. I think this would be a good way to demonstrate the Doppler Effect.

boredom: the other mother of invention

(That's right, invention has two mommies.)

We all have different ways of dealing with the fact that we once lived, or still live, in this place called Rolla. There are just a lot of things you need to work out. Here's one man's way of dealing with it all: videotape yourself naked (except for a ski mask) in the bathtub experimenting with new solutions to an old problem.

built to spill and hair care products

I think I know why, at first blush, I didn't really get Built to Spill. It's because I kept wondering: "Are these sad songs or happy songs?" I just never knew what I was supposed to feel.

But if you survive the initial put-off, you get hung up on a couple fantastic phrases ("and god is whoever you're performing for") and then you just keep listening. You learn all the songs and sing along, because somehow in spite of their detachment they're really fun to sing along to. If you're like me though you may never "get it." Seeing Doug Martsch and his happy summer camp counselor approach to performing ("thanks so much for letting us play for you, we've just got a few more") only adds to the confusion.

This brings us to hair care products. This morning I dredged up some expensive hair stuff that I bought a long time ago, more out of desperation than anything else--I'm living out of a suitcase at the moment. Two peach-colored bottles with orange caps. Now, which one was shampoo, and which conditioner? Because you know just like the next man I've been trained to always use one before the other. I certainly wouldn't want to make a crucial ordering mistake and RUIN MY HAIR FOREVER.

It was surprisingly hard to figure out. These were high-end hair care products, and by that I mean they did not advertise themselves as one or the other in vulgar fashion. The word "shampoo" finally appeared, small and italicized, in a paragraph surrounded above and below by similar paragraphs in French and Spanish. French was first.

The intent was clear: downplay the fact that this is just shampoo. Once you've eradicated the idea of shampoo from the consumer's brain, and he views this squat peach bottle with an orange cap simply as another "hair care product" in a long litany of hair care products that he must ritualistically apply each morning, you've got him. The oh-so-confining 2 step process--which no doubt took some serious fanagling to foist over on us in the beginning, during a time when there was maybe just "hair soap"--will be eradicated in favor of an N step process. We all become Patrick Bateman. Exfoliating gel followed by mint facial mask followed by...

Ok, so where's the connection? It is this: we're moving towards an era of ambiguity, where the hegemony of discreteness gets smeared out onto the continuum. It's both good and bad. Good because the music you're listening to is getting more interesting. You'll be able to listen to it for the next 5 years and not get bored. Bad because you have to deal with more complexity now. Bad because you don't know how you should feel about it really. And bad because you're probably going to waste a lot of time in the shower squinting at strange runes inscribed on "hair care products."

things i wrote on my hand last night

A rather detailed street map of a place I ended up not going to.

"Man is evil to the extent that he is a social animal." Please note that I don't necessarily buy this. Or rather: I buy it--somehow it became my distorted takehome message from all that Rand--but I don't want to buy it. I don't know why I buy it. So something worth figuring out. Goes onto the hand.

"Regal Lager." This must have been a brand name idea. However, we're all done for the day palindromage enters the marketing playbook, because that means they've tried absolutely everything else. Hell, on that note, I still maintain the introduction of cuticle cream already implies the apocalypse. Honestly, what's left?

"Lycraphone." Self-explanatory.

french military victories

Stop me if you've seen this one already. Try "I'm feeling lucky" on the phrase "french military victories."

yet another post with new york in the title

To the curious: yes, I am moving to New York.

Come visit me! Well, let's wait until I find an apartment that isn't a broomcloset where I will have to sublet a corner behind the cleaning agents from 5 Romanians and their extended families.

Actually it's not going to be that bad. I've already done some apartment shopping this past weekend, and while it's pretty expensive, it's not as bad as you've probably heard.

See the thing is, when you're not living in NYC you get all this hype qualified with an even bigger dose of FUD from the people who already live there, because they want to convince you that (1) they live in the coolest place on the planet, and yet (2) you wouldn't be able to hack it there, so stay away and keep down the density. Too expensive, too dangerous, no room, unfriendly people, hostile people in business suits copping monster attitudes blah blah blah. Yet it's the coolest place, it's got everything, center of the universe blah blah blah. They're just protecting their territory I think. But they're right about one thing: it's damn cool territory. Worth protecting.

I've been ping-ponging back and forth between the coasts for the last two weeks and here are, in no particular order, several observations I made this past weekend in NYC:

People are friendly. They are actually friendly! Now I'm sure there's a lot of variation on the friendly axis--there are unfriendly places no doubt--but almost everywhere I've been in New York it has been easier to talk to people than here in Seattle. There really is no ignoring your fellow man like we manage to do so well here in Seattle.

It's dirty. There are rats in the subways and huge mounds of garbage bags on the streets (well, at least they're in bags). My first NYC subway experience was getting on the E line in a car where a bum had--I think, it's almost too unbelievable to be true--pissed all over himself. The urine was trickling down into the rest of the car. Some people sniffed, made a face, and headed for the other end, but most just plopped down without giving the urine rivulets curling around their shoes a second thought.

Honking your horn can mean any number of things. There's a lot of honking. The majority seems to convey your impatience to other drivers, but there's also little honks the taxi drivers give you to get your attention. "Hey, aren't you tired of walking?" The strangest use of a honk I witnessed was from an elderly couple in a car who were watching a young couple cross the street with their little kid. The honk was brief and light-hearted. In this case, the honk meant "We think your kid is cute."

The degree of diversity makes racism...impractical. It's just not much of a thing. I was talking with a pianist in a Cuban music group about this. Incidentally the guy looked whiter than me if that's possible. Picture the nicest band geek you knew in high school. Yet this dude plays in Latino clubs and spends most of his time surrounded by Latin Americans. "Back in Texas, I grew up in fear," he said. "I don't feel that here. Yeah, there's been a couple of times over the last ten years that I've realized I was in a dangerous situation, but that's generally because I was in actual danger. It was a rational thing--that's the difference. And both times I got out of there okay."

The panhandler headcount is surprisingly low. Again, maybe I haven't seen the right districts in New York, though I find that hard to believe since I walked all over the place. The whole weekend I had to ignore maybe 3 of them. Last night, when I got back into Seattle, I went up to Broadway to get something to eat and was hit up 3 times in the span of a single block. And one of them was sketchy...two guys who looked like they would jump me if only there were fewer people around. Of all the places I've been to--with the exception of Amsterdam perhaps--Seattle still takes the cake for me when it comes to unpleasant street encounters.

There are microscenes. Walking around, I suddenly found myself in Little Italy, where I got some amazing pizza from a motherly Italian woman. Everyone was speaking Italian. I left and was in a Chinese district in less than a block. I went to a jazz joint no larger than our living room at 8th and G, where a jazz trio played literally right under my nose. If I had leaned too far one way I would have gotten a drumstick in the face. In addition to some original stuff, they covered Bill Evans, Bartok, Bjork's "Come to Me"...man that is a great upright bass line if ever there was one.

On a completely unrelated note, this is what happens when grandpa turns into a squirrel. In case you were wondering.

the disco ball deathstar

...is fully operational. Or, at least it was fully operational, until I knocked it down in my attempts to manually spin it. For this I was chewed out by a local hipster who we will refer to here as "Darth." I thought he was going to choke me from across the room.

Note the large hole in one side, which, I would like to point out, I was not responsible for. That apparently happened the first time it was knocked down. But like any well-behaved deathstar it rose from its ashes for a sequel. And was eventually defeated by the good guys: namely, me and several plastic cups of Glenlivet.

This man is obviously quite amused.

(FYI this was Saturday night at Sub-Tonic in the East Village. It was an afterhours scene similar to the Eggroom in Seattle, only I am told populated by jazz afficianados.)

x11

Another one in the spirit of "Hackerhaus."

Eric was a real champ and showed me all around the city Saturday. He even introduced me to the fabled Susannah--the thief who stole him from this year's Christmas party at Jeff L.'s. :)

The three of us ate Korean and were then lured into a Japanese restaurant by a sign advertising cheap sake samplers. By feigning a deep interest in sake, we were able to score some high end stuff at no additional charge. Extremely tasty...now if I could only remember what it was called...

i just saw a wooly elephantine beast

This may seem like a lame celebrity sighting, but tonight Mastodon was up at the Cha Cha Lounge. They're recording in the area I think. I was struck by how young they all were for such a technically awesome band, none of them could have been over 25.

squidmaster 2043, new york tour

As a representative of Squidmaster 2043, I am here to confirm the rumors that he made an appearance in a large, famous office building in mid-town Manhattan while I was interviewing there.

As a result of this, an unfortunate young man who apparently did not believe in Giant Squids anymore lost a $100 bet. There are pictures to prove it, which I hope to obtain and post here soon. Remember: Giant Squids are not at all like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, they are very real people with feelings (and sometimes crazy mullets) just like you and me.

new york

I'm flying to NY today for an interview tomorrow...tell you more about it after the fact.

Besides I am too tired atm, having been basically evicted from my apt. last night by a power outage. I relocated to a hotel downtown where I caught 4 hours of sleep but, by golly, got my cellphone charged and received the call this morning telling me my itinerary. I didn't even know what time I'd be leaving until then. I leave in a few hours. Crazy eh.

flyaway hair + tight polyester pants = yes

If you don't think this is the most flagrantly awesome shirt ever, you don't belong here. Please leave now. Go worship the 80s some more with your mistaken hipster friends.

dumbest barnes and noble employee ever

A man walks into a Barnes and Noble. No this isn't the beginning of a joke. Well...maybe. You decide.

After wandering around for a bit I'm approached by a helpful employee. "Where's the Classics section?" I ask her.

"Classics?" she asks. She honestly doesn't know. I'm dumbfounded by this; how can you work in a store selling literature and not know what is meant by that term?

"Plutarch" I tell her, by way of clarifying.

"You mean like philosophy?" she asks me. No, I say, more like...Classics. You know. Ancient Greek stuff.

She deposits me in the Mythology section and says, "the Philosophy section is over there, if you're looking for, like, Pluto."

PLUTO???!!!!

(If I hadn't been so blown away by this, I would have said: "Yeah, Pluto, like, you know, the illegitimate offspring of Plato and Plutarch, because, like, the Greeks were gay like that and shit. Thanks so much for your help.")

the unbearable lightness of circus peanuts: or, i am a bad wingman

I can tell this is going to be hard. "Hey," I say, and it pretty much ends there. Ok, start over. Think of something to talk about. Come on.

"So this is my first time here," I tell her, somewhat of a lie, "and I was just hoping someone could explain this place to me, cause I don't really get it."

"What?" Now she thinks I'm retarded.

"You know," I continue, "like this back here." I gesture to a room behind us cordoned off from the rest of the club by velvet ropes and big guys with black dress shirts that say "Agent" on the back. Inside there are couches, arranged around a small central bar. Windows with metal-link curtains allow the patrons of this room to look out on the rest of the club. "What is this?"

"Oh, that's the VIP room."

"I see. Tell me, if you were in a room with green lighting and chain mail curtains on the windows, would that make you feel special?"

"Uh, I don't know." Giggles.

"Because," I add, acting very serious all of a sudden, "they sure would make me feel pretty damn special."

This time I really killed it. It's so, so dead. She looks off in the distance, pretending now that I don't exist. It's definitely a suggestion. I take it, but not before dragging out that wonderful moment of total awkwardness for far longer than politeness proscribes. I walk off. Sorry dudes, it's 3 on 2 now.

I hate this particular club so much that at certain moments I almost love it. It's hard to explain. The only metaphor I can think of for it is a circus peanut. They look tasty, and in fact are tasty, but there's actually nothing in them. It's a disturbing sensation: the wave functions collapse to nothing in your mouth, and you wonder what, if anything, you just ate.

You might feel ripped off at first. "Hey, I paid for substance, and you gave me the absence of it." But then you start to wonder how the hell they did it. Zero point zero calories. How can something so content-free even be brought into existence? In the end, like me, you might come away slightly impressed.

apologies to all the car owners i apparently threaten

Ok, seriously now, cyclist friends, what is up with cars rip-roaring past you when the light turns green? Half the time they don't even want your lane. They just want to...prove that (together with their giant, foul-smelling, fuel-guzzling transport machine) they are more man than you are? Are these people really threatened in some way by a cyclist?

"Wow," I think to myself at such times, "that badass just gunned his car up to 40 mph! He must have torn a tendon in his foot, pressing the gas pedal that hard."

squidmaster 2043 reunion tour

Yeah that's right, the squid rises again, run for cover or your flesh will be consumed by my ferocious little beak.

I've been saving my squidmaster 2043 costume from Halloween until I get a workable digital camera. For the last few months it has graced the entryway to my apartment, seated astride a dressmaker's doll that Jake and I found in an alley. It's my version of the lawn jockey.

Anyway, there's a "f*@# valentine's day" costume party in U district tonight. I decided to get squidmaster up to snuff again. At the end of Halloween night, stumbling around in the rain looking for a taxi, the 2-liter bottles which give the mantle it's distinctive shape pierced through the backside. Luckily I still have foam adhesive so I fixed it again. I also added some accessories that I didn't have time for last time around:

• A pair of black bug-eyed goggles.
• A chinstrap taken from a Czech riot police helmet. Surprisingly, it snapped right into the baseball helmet which is the mount for the mantle. As I discovered the first time around, having what amounts to a 3-foot tall windsail on your head can be a bit of a stability problem.

Hopefully someone there will have a camera tonight, so squidmaster can finally rest in peace...though he'll certainly be missed by all *sniff*.

dies irae, dies illa

The bass part from "Lacrymosa" has been booming on repeat from an adjacent apartment for weeks now. A game I'm guessing. Should the banality of the noise you're subjected to be factored into noise complaints? I.e. should blasting "Fuer Elise" be a felony? (If so UNL's belltower is on death row.)

My options here are, as I see them: (a) change my wireless router's firewall rules, which I've done before and is your typical passive aggressive geek approach, or (b) don my Squidmaster 2043 costume and charge their door, screaming the soprano part to "Dies Irae."

when quality and community mattered

On a flyer in my mailbox today enticing me to move to Canal Station in Ballard: "This urban village was designed to remind you of a time when quality and community mattered." So wait a second...quality and community definitely don't matter anymore in this place, but at least I'll be constantly saddened by their nostalgic apparition? Someone needs to go back to marketing school. Or learn to not be so honest. Same thing I guess.

you know you're in seattle when...

...you walk by a "community gathering place" on a wednesday night and you see, through the window, a shirtless man lifting a 5 pound weight with his nipples while a handful of people watch on, smiling and clapping in approval.

beer in the carburetor

My last night in Rolla I go over to Will S.'s house and we lay down tracks on his Concertmate keyboard (80 different rhythms, 150 instruments, small drum pad) into a crappy cassette recorder until 5 am. Lyrics from the heart--word.

We sing about the fearsome hierarchy of deep sea creatures, the mighty squid with his pulpy insides like stringy pumpkin guts, the shark, the whale. The whale finds himself beached in suburbia where he gradually adapts to the bewildering landscape of department stores and white picket fences. Pimple grease and 99% papers: we sing of math nerds. Racism, because, yo, we're not afraid to throw down on that. Finally an inane pop hook road song "rollin down 63" which basically just lists the towns on highway 63 towards & beyond Jeff City, but gets more boozy as we go so that at the end Will is chanting "beer in my hand, beer in the dash, beer in the carburetor..."

if you want a vision of the future winston

Among the sights and sounds this weekend:

• googlewhack
• on a street corner near me, someone put a piece of black tape over a portion of the "don't walk" hand, so that it came out like devil horns. yeah. rock on.
• bollywood night at the baltic room. spoiled indian princesses dancing just for you.
• capote
• saw a black flattened female boot in the street, one of those high-heel boots that zip up to the knees and are frankly kind of scary. is this a picture of the future? a car stomping on a human boot forever?

jamaimer, you've made a grave mistake

I was digging through my photo archives the other day and found this.

getting to reknow you

Then I was whisked off by my ever-more-delightful family into the western night for a happy Thanksgiving weekend with the grandparents. The second annual pheasant hunt was afoot. We got six this year, and I cleaned my first bird, a surprisingly bearable experience. Though Uncle Paul washing his bloody birdhands off in the toilet bowl was a little less bearable.

Ah but the manliness of it all, the predation, the killing, the subsequent blood & feasting & football. The day Paul joined us we got 4 pheasants and the Huskers upset Colorado 30-3. It made me want to belch & howl & pummel my chest expansively all at the same time.

And in another vein it was so nice getting to reknow my brother & sisters. I feel Ed and I are closer than we've been in years, probably since our boyhood summers hunting butterflies together. My sisters are growing up too fast & I must face that. Lydia is a teenager now, is tall and beautiful, and there are no older brothers to beat up any evil-minded teenage boys (which is all of them) that may appear on the scene. Rebecca is not far behind. They are both transforming, and it is both exciting & frightening to watch.

And to this of course add love of my parents & grandparents & aunts & uncles & cousins as I come to understand them better and realize all those things that are so essentially them. Before going off to bed my grandpa walks around with his belt buckle undone, a thing which he has always done for as long as I can remember, except I never noticed until now that I do it too. How many more thing have they given me that I'm not even aware of yet? I too am essentially them.

cottonball compost heaps of love

Congrats to Andrew & Jamaimer who finally tied the knot two weekends ago. The wedding was a pure formality of course--I can't think of a couple better suited to one another, and for whom marriage was such a natural & foregone conclusion. Had it not occurred there would have been something seriously wrong with the world & I wouldn't want to live in it anymore.

Thanks also guys for renting that killer jazz quartet for the reception which made the lack of booze bearable. (Some pictures from the reception are over on Wes's blog).

For the most part I had a great time at home in Lincoln. I rediscovered the wondrousness of Joe . 8th and G, former home of JakeJoeAlan, has finally peaked, thanks to new residents Chris & Dave and to the continued Joeness of the place. A detritic layer of thousands of colored cottonballs was augmented by 3 days of tinfoil parties culminating in a monstrous foil organism hanging from the living room ceiling extending tentacles to the couch, TV, into the dishwasher, and into the various compost piles of cottonball / beer cans / stuffed animals. The first night we made armor & helmets and I guess things got progressively more abstract from there.

Wearing a tinfoil helmet with a spoiler on the back (which by the way ensures that no matter how fast your head is moving, your heels stay grounded) I went to Luke & Heather's new gig night, and actually got to play with them, a rare and unexpected treat. They have a new drummer who I remember meeting at Lincoln parties years ago, a cool guy who spoke of the mysteries of the stuffed albino gorilla lodged in the Studio 14 marquee. (Stop reading this blog. Go retrieve it. Now.) Luke & Heather are the same great people . They are still driving my old Ford Probe, amazingly, and it still has my "Unix is Power" sticker on it. They are by the way engaged now, which is good, and pleasing to the Lord.

In addition to satisfying my longtime yen for a head spoiler I also finally got a game of gourdball together with Joe & Kim. Them gourds didn't stand a chance, nope, we blasted them into tiny pulpy gourd bits. Oldtime wooden baseball bat connects with soft explosive seasonal spheres and you feel so good inside, like Robin Yount must have when a breeze tickled his mullet and he knew, he knew.

Overall I had a much better time in Lincoln than I've been having in Seattle, which is confusing.

"something between crayons and yesterday"

You said you'd been having headaches, blackouts. The three of us were at the diner if you will recall. Suddenly I looked over and blood was running out of your nose. Your brain was bleeding. It had reached a point. You got up without much ceremony and went to the bathroom while I meanwhile stared at the big scarlet drop floating in your syrup. It bloomed slowly.

A few days later you took the Greyhound back to Lincoln, much to everyone's relief, yours included. It was sad for us on many accounts of course, as the end of a chapter. But not the last chapter thank god. The choose-your-own-adventure continues. We haven't died yet old pal.

squid helmet 2043

...is complete. Pictures to come.

pulling a begbie

When I awoke this morning, I found a Doors album in my playlist & realized that last night I narrowly averted what would have been my first drinking & puking experience. (Yes, I drink fairly often. No, I've never thrown up.) Apparently, last night I thought "Riders on the Storm" would be a good song to puke to. I also couldn't find my glasses at first. They were on the floor outside the bathroom. After taking out my contacts, putting on some music, and warmly embracing my toilet, I remember thinking "Gosh, it's pretty uncool to yak with glasses on" so I chucked them to the side. Though I was quite drunk, everything was carefully planned. Which means I wasn't quite drunk enough. Thankfully. :)

After splitting a bottle of wine & some subsequent revelry-making down at the War Room Jake & I heard about a warehouse party. We entered through an unmarked sidedoor that was just a piece of plywood with hinges on it. Down a giant ramp we went--an Italian painting looms above us--down into this vast unfurnished expanse of a warehouse. It's a dungeon of sorts, really dark, lots of weirdos & goths & hipsters running around in costumes. A DJ is spinning by the light of a candle / laptop glow on one side. There's a hot girl in a gas mask who keeps bumping into everyone...I don't think she can see very well at all.

Atypically, I blaze through a six pack of Beck's I'm guarding carefully with my feet as I dig the music. At one point, a girl starts dancing up on me, so I dance back, and then she tells me I'm a good dancer. Only her voice is a little too low. "Wait--did you just dance with me because you thought I was a girl?" he asks me. "Yeah," I say to the guy in drag, "because of these things," as I grab his boobs of crumpled paper. He runs off--very offended it seems. I can't stop laughing about this little encounter.

the great escape

Bad vibes, when strong enough, can make you do just about anything.

It goes like this: we're at a club and we see three chicks dancing by themselves. We're three, they're three, it's early. There's a one-to-one and onto function in other words. We move in to engage enemy forces.

Things don't go so well for either Jonas or Jake--one gets the cold shoulder, the other realizes he's got the grenade & will have to jump on it. The chick I'm dancing with seems cool. I play it cool. Things are cool, until I start to talk to her, and that's when the bad vibes started to kick in.

I need a break, so I beg off for a drink & grab my buddies to see how things are faring. Not so good they tell me. Then I realize the girl has followed me over--there is a counterattack underway, she asks me suddenly & really obviously what I do for a living, so I tell her: I'm a gravedigger.

She believes me for a while until I stop caring & I slide off into sarcasm. It becomes a joke. Then I see that I've made things worse for myself--my evasiveness and lying has made me infinitely more interesting. Jake & Jonas keep looking doorward and I use this as an excuse to escape her, but not before she tells me she really likes me ("I can see that" I say, surprising even myself with the coldness embedded in this remark) because blah blah blah. Jake is fending off an even stronger counterattack as we start for the door.

"Where are you guys going?" the blonde girl asks Jake. "Maybe we'll join you."

In reply, Jake lists off as many different Capitol Hill bars as he can remember, strung together by the word "maybe." We walk out the door.

And at this moment, Jake & I look at each other like fellow escaped convicts & start running. It's a full-out sprint up the street, around several corners, until we're sure we've lost them. We finally stop outside a convenience store, wheezing from the exertion. I've never ran from a girl before--have you? It's an exhilerating experience. Try it, you'll like it.

here, stab this

I guess I'm an easy back to stab. "We regret to inform you, Mr. Grow, that we have found yet another knife lodged between your ribs..."

an unfortunate sequence of events

* I walked out of the house & into a downpour, which was seriously waiting for me to set foot outside all day.

* After getting thoroughly soaked (but discovering that yes, you can smoke a tobacco pipe in the rain) I called a taxi cab.

* As I stepped into the cab, the rain stopped.

* Once I got there, there was no venue in sight. I must have got an old address, so I 411ed it, and found out I had to basically go all the way back to my place.

* On the way I got stopped for jaywalking. For jaywalking!

* When I got to the Shellac concert, it was sold out. I trudged home because, well, there's no way in hell a Shellac fan is going to scalp their ticket.

i like people

Today I met Brett Dean McGibbon down in Pioneer Square, where he peddles his hand-bound leather poetry journals from 18 years of accumulated motorcycle travel across the U.S., from upstate New York to Alaska and back via the American Southwest. So-so poetry, and a letdown when it comes to concreteness--I was expecting some real living rambling narratives but leafing through saw only subjectivity & inner observations. If I'm looking for substance & intellectual departures, give me Brennen instead. Not to malign; this Brett fellow was great to talk to & quite the hustler...handing out lines of poetry to all the pretty girls with a "pick a card any card approach."

One who stopped by appeared to be a regular. "Wait, I'll find you one you haven't seen," he says & digs through a hidden pile of cards. "Sometimes I find what I have to say, and sometimes what I have to say finds me," it reads. She doesn't grok it so she exchanges for another. She shares the latest news about her softball team with him: one of her players who had been throwing temper tantrums finally chucked his bat into another player's face, who got a mouthful of blood and broken teeth & is now suing tantrum man. So her season as coach appears to be over & she is feeling the heat for not preventing the incident.

Then as it turns out she is the GM for the one of my favorite sushi places right down the street--which is where I'm headed, and we talk about crossing the Asian / American cultural divide (she is half Japanese half French), and also about which dance clubs are the best in Seattle, and why the city is doing it's best to kill the club scene...which sucks enough as is.

From here I get segued into conversation with a Canadian couple down for the weekend from Vancouver...my first extended conversation with Canadians since moving up here. They're real cool & funny & the guy turns out to be an actor.

Hopping on my bike to go home, I log the first unpleasant human encounter of the day. It consists of me responding to a belligerently honking bus on my tail with the finger & a resounding "f**k you!" scream, in the middle of bustling downtown Seattle. Yeah I'm not wearing a helmet, but are you wearing a shiny badge? So shut the hell up already.

hi, i'm billy

However I feel compelled to spare this one little priceless incident from the broad stroke of summary. Jake & Penelope & I are hanging out, and Jake decides to fashion himself a helm out of a plastic grocery bag. He cuts a hole in it for his face, and then decorates the hole with a sharpie marker, adding whiskers and ears and the little forehead inscription, "Hi, I'm Billy." It is the dumbest thing any of us has ever seen but he insists on going outside with it on.

We're on the porch steps when bum #2819 walks up and asks for a cigarette.

"Sorry dude, I have oral herpes," Jake tells him. "Normally I would." The bum clearly doesn't believe him but there's no arguing with such matter-of-factness. The bum kindly offers him a dip out of a carmex container. Jake declines.

When he asks if we can spare some change instead, Jake instead pulls out his fantastic garbage bag helm and says, "You know, I've spent all night making this & I really want you to have it. I want you to wear it around proudly."

The bum just stands there, frozen, utterly thrown off, unsure whether he's just been delivered a serious insult or if he just happened to meet someone far nuttier than himself. Jake holds up the bag, waiting for the bum to assist him in this seriously strange beknighting ritual. Eventually the bum walks off in disbelief.

visions, visitations

I hate being an ex post facto blogger, but I've been busy / internetless the last two weeks. Here's a short rundown:

* Penelope drove all the way from Lincoln to Bellingham, WA two weekends ago to check out grad school there. On her way through Seattle she deposited Jake, who is now a Seattle resident. He's been sleeping on my floor for the last two weeks & will continue to do so till he can find a place...it's all karmic anyway: Jonas lets me sleep on his couch for the my first two months in the area, I pass the savings along etc.

* I spent an unhealthy amount of time at work.

* On her return trip, Penelope stopped in Seattle (this was last weekend) and we got to hang out. In an anthology I've been thumbing through for five years, she found the poem I've been looking for all this time, since reading it back in high school & sneaking the book out of my parent's library. We burned our feet on Alki beach, watched the National Geographic penguin movie, debated veganism, danced the Mambo to numbered sidewalk instructions on Broadway and went to a super scenester after hours party. Sunday we did absolutely nothing & that was by far the best part.

what good is gold in joyless nibelheim?

This week I had the extreme pleasure of seeing The Ring at the Seattle Opera. I'm not a big opera fan, mostly because the music isn't standalone...like a movie soundtrack, you have to hear it in its visual context, and I guess I've always disliked classical music which doesn't strive for that certain level of abstraction. (Like a pure mathematician genuinely pissed off when his theorems find application? A ridiculous reality-denying posture...)

The Ring however was an awesome blend of music, story, and visuals (aptly called by Wagner "Gesamtkunstwerk"--"total art work"). The special effects were amazing, from Siegfried splitting anvil and stump down the middle with the newly forged Nothung, to the towering dragon Fafner in part three, to the Rhinegold sisters suspended midair in their mermaid costumes. From our vantage point on the upper tier the visual trickery was often completely convincing: at the end of Das Rheingold, for instance, the characters walk down a wooded path, disappear over the hill, and then reappear as tiny figures in the distance as the path winds its way towards rainbowed Valhalla. Where the actual set ended and the screen behind began was impossible to tell.

If it hadn't been so enjoyable it would have made for a long week, as my week basically consisted of work, The Ring, sleep, work...nearly 5 hours of opera each night on 4 different nights.

(Please note that I'm taking an English translation for my title here, which is definitely not what my pretentious brother would have done. If you find yourself suddenly seized by a powerful desire to slog through the full German libretto you can do that here.)

impressions of bus 66

Today I almost started weeping for joy on the bus. It was the wrong bus; I meant to take an express bus down the interstate, but I ended up on one of those buses that meanders through a random cross section of districts, and so collects an equally random cross section of people. It was like coring a very old tree & looking at the striations.

An old man hailed the bus & was panting a little when he got on. He had a cap. A man with a crazed face that didn't fit the rest of him--wild horse eyes leering every which way, a frozen clown grin, a stilted bobbling walk--was he always this way, or is he a lobotomized ex-genius? Assorted young people. A thuggish kid. A Jewish girl who almost sits down with Crazy Face but instead chooses the thuggish kid. A Great Outdoors kind of guy, a businessman.

The splendid variety of life...the endless cycle of deaths emptying the bus and births filling it...the indifferent bus slicing through all of this, through time & space & the beautiful fleeting lives of its passengers.

feel like makin...

duh-nuh duhhhh
duh-nuh duhhhh
duh-nuh duhhhh

On a whim, we went to a country western bar last night for karaoke, where I sang the most overblown version of this song I could manage, screeching like an 80s imbecile rocker. No one can accuse you of bad taste if they're even going to a place like that anyway.

I came all the way from Missouri for this...?

damaged appearances

Another drunken rich chick doing a stupid thing story. (Hmm...should I start a category for this?) We were at Minnie's last night when a carload of drunken Belltown girls pulls off one of the most amazing parallel parking jobs I've ever seen...almost, that is.

She had at most two feet to work with, and was actually in the spot, but just kept on going & nailed the car behind her. The girls look around furtively. Unfortunately for them they're right in front of a bank of diner windows--it's like trying to get away with something in front of Hopper's Nighthawks. We're laughing our heads off at them. The chick in the front seat sees us, covers her face in embarassment and makes a phone call...the usual way of escaping uncomfortable situations these days I guess.

Undeterred, the driver does the forward-back-forward Austin Powers thing in the stall, and hits the car *again*. Our laughing escalates & they have the full attention of the whole smoking section now. Up until this point I think they were planning on coming inside. Now even the chick in the back seat who had been trying to communicate something to me covers her face, and they get out of there as fast as they can.

As we left, we checked--there was no damage to the car. Just damaged appearances.

majestic hunk of concrete

Tonight I got to see a drawbridge on Puget Sound in action. The first time this enormous concrete structure swiveled open, perpendicular to the road, to allow a barge of comparable enormity pass through, I watched in awe from my bike. What a majestic hunk of concrete.

An hour's worth of majestic concrete hunk swivelings later the awe had somewhat...uh...faded. Hunger, hunger took its place.

max headroom

I just whacked off all my shaggy dog hair & dyed it platinum blonde, because black was already taken by the 10 million other hipsters here on Capitol Hill. So now I look like Max Headroom.

"Hey k-k-kids, it's cool to stut-t-t-ter. P-p-pepsi b-b-blows!"

blowing up things

When I was 15, I was asked by the Inquiring Photographer at the Rolla Daily News what I'd be doing for my 4th of July. "Blowing up things," was my response. Mom & Dad were mortified when my smiling mug appeared in the paper with this caption, next to pictures of other decent upstanding citizens with far more boring answers.

So what will I be doing this 4th of July?

• Listening to Ives' Variations on America. A huge bitonal sea monster emerges midway and bellyflops into the shrieking audience. "Use your ears like men," Ives roars from behind the organ.
• Writing some code to do matrix inversion. For the last month I've been torturing myself in my free time with the intersection of 3 spheres problem, which is behind GPS & other cool things. Finally think I've got it...check out maelstrom in a few days.
• The standard thing. Skyrockets at night...

mystery in a blue car

Who knows what weird tragedy is taking place in a car outside this forlorn apartment complex. It started about a week ago, I think, when a man pulled up in a blue car and a woman walked out with her dog to meet him. She talked to him through the passenger window for about 15 minutes. Then she walked back inside, and he drove off.

Now a blue car--I believe it to be the same blue car--has been parked out there for the last several days. I first became consciously aware of the blue car as I was pulling the blinds a few nights ago, at about 1:45 am, when I glimpsed two human figures down on the curb. I put in my contacts and sure enough there was a woman wrapped in a blanket and a man sitting next to her.

When I awoke the next morning and peered through blinds, the blue car was still there, and the two people were sleeping inside it under blankets. By itself this isn't so odd. But the setting is a busy street with nothing on it except this apartment complex. Whatever they're doing down there, 30 or so odd apartments are looking down on it, not to mention all the morning commuter traffic that often backs up to a standstill right beside them. In short this is not the sort of place anyone in their right mind would hole up for a few days. There are parks and campgrounds and quiet little suburban backstreets all around here. Why, then, right here in this most unwelcoming of places?

Last night I brought all this to the attention of Jonas. Together we observed the woman rock spasmodically forwards and backwards in the front seat, in a schizoid fugue state that went on unabated for at least an hour. Either she's nuts or in a state of extreme distress. The man reclined in the back seat throughout this display. Jonas and I went to buy binoculars (it's all too Rear Window, I know) but by the time we got back they had laid down to sleep.

Now it's the following night and, again, they're sleeping in their car. What could possibly be going on here? Are you as curious as me now? Any PBS "Mystery!" watchers or PI hopefuls reading this?

Here's my proposal: ask me any questions you like, and as long as the blue car is still out there, I'll do my best to find you an answer. Caveats: I'm not going to walk up to them and point-blank ask them what they're doing, and I won't do anything that would require too much time or buying a bunch of stuff. But pretty much anything else goes.

Or, if you think you've already solved it--and don't need to buy any vowels--shout it out.

ezee tiger

A guy in a squirrel suit smoking a cigarette and drinking a Bud. That's Ezee Tiger for you, and I missed him here Sunday night in Seattle. From a review in the stranger, I give you the funniest song description ever:

"...Petrovic's stuff definitely comes closer to the tumultuous dirge of the Load/Bulb Records rosters than the Creation catalog. Would My Bloody Valentine ever write a song like 'How to Rock... For Red Bennies?' The spastic 1:42 sprint hyperventilates down the fuse from typical instructional track to some freak having a weed smoking, puking explosion. 'I don't like to take stuff too seriously,' Petrovic explains. 'I just thought, wouldn't it be funny if this sounded like a guitar lesson, but then the guy gets really wasted and shits his pants.'"

drunken rich girl loses face

Downtown last night, a group of drunken beautiful people file out of a bar. Jonas and I watch in disbelief as one of the girls runs into a "No Parking" sign with her face.

"Are you okay?" I ask. Her head lolls backwards to address me and she slurs, "Don't worry, it was just a joke." Right. The sign is still oscillating wildly like a giant metronome anchored to the sidewalk. It's very possible she broke some bones in her face, I'm thinking.

Drunken rich girl, you have no idea how happy you just made me.

crutch-stealing bmx kid

A hipster house party turns ugly when this 19-year-old drunken bmx kid tries to steal a girl's crutch. It's unclear why he did this. She had a broken foot & had gone to sleep hours ago, so there was no imaginable motive. Her hipster guy friends, though, were good enough to chase bmx kid down for her. A lame fistfight ensues in the middle of the street, and bmx kid eventually gets chased off.

Then in a save-face move he undoes his wallet chain--a big heavy wallet chain--and comes running back. Justin & I watch him go inside. There are shouts and glass-smashing sounds, and one of his friends gets on the phone with the cops. I turn to Justin & suggest we split.

Halfway home he realizes he left something back at the party & we turn back. I'm very apprehensive about going back, in cop avoidance mode you know, but Justin refuses to be talked out of it. So I park on a dark sidestreet and wait for him. He comes out a few minutes later though & says all is well again, bmx kid has been arrested, so we end up hanging out with the hipsters until dawn.

Everyone is remarkably cool & I just spectate. It takes me a while to realize these two guys who showed up together are a gay couple...not because one of them is indistiguishable from straight, but because no one makes a deal out of it. When dawn comes they leave with a girl from the house to go sleep in the back of camper-top truck down by the shore.

Occasionally friend-of-bmx-kid receives calls from bmx kid in which he threatens to break into a neighbor's house, steal his guns, and blast us all to bits. No one seems too concerned with these threats.

I must have passed out on the couch for a half hour or so. I'm still groggy when we leave so I let Justin drive. Mistake. White knuckles all the way home...I've underestimated the extent of his altered state. He is moving slow, like a stiff desert lizard coming out of his rock shadows in the morning, but the car is moving incredibly fast down these waterfall hills & around hairpin corners. He's drawling on about this & that & driving with his knees half the time. Seemingly, he's paying attention to everything but the road. It's all miraculous to me...each successive moment that I survive. The car might as well have been driving itself.

I wake up on a crappy couch about the size of my torso. It is almost 2 pm & I am in the University district somewhere. As usual, it's drizzling outside. I stumble out into the rain & find a place to eat a few blocks away. Then try out some basses in the music shop around the corner from Justin's before catching a bus downtown, where I walk into a Steinway dealership & try out grand pianos for a few hours more.

pinback

I am going to see Pinback today at neumos. You may gnash your teeth now. (Unless you're Joe, who saw them in Omaha last week.)

come unto me

The Mission down here in Seattle has a neon glowing sign: "Come unto me..." Posters of Jesus looking up-right-left-down tesselate the window. Eat your bread and soup & watch the can-can dancers.

montana: the gambling state

Montana has a gambling problem. Noticed this the last time I was up there--people everywhere turn their homes into mini-casinos. Just stick a neon flashing sign over your front door & you're in business.

Standing in line at the gas station somewhere in Montana, the little Asian woman ahead of me bought $50 in lottery tickets. An old man put $30 on a horse. Then it was my turn, and I bought a coffee. Where is my sense of adventure these days anyway.

diaspora

I'm moving to Seattle. To work for a big company. On a 6-month contract.

There's a diaspora underway: Andrew & Jamie moved out to San Jose last month. Drew got a sweet job at Specialized, the bike company. Long-time friend & class.com colleague Thao just moved out to Washington, D.C., where she will join her Chinese fiancee & work for a defense contractor. Nick W. left for the peace corps and will soon be in Nicaragua.

And now me, I'm finally getting the hell out of the Midwest, for a while at least. As recently as 6 months ago, I was still in "I hate Lincoln" mode. Then suddenly I became ok with it (complacent? stagnant?) because I realized how many friends I have here. Being in norm4eva has definitely connected me to a lot of local music cats & I've started to be a part of "the scene" here, I think. But there's also really great friends like Jake & Joe & Mark & Henry & Ann & Wes & Luke & Heather...

So ultimately the decision to leave was a lot tougher than I ever thought it would be. I was torn & it was sleepless night. I called a lot of people for advice, which is quite unusual for me, as those of you who know me can attest to. As with all good advice it simply revealed what I had already decided inside: that I needed to move on regardless of how painful it would be.

I leave in less than a week in a rental car to make the insanely long haul up to Seattle. Only taking my instruments, computers, and a few books. Everything else--including my current car--is going to be given away or storaged. Less is more. Kent taught me that when I helped move him in Phoenix...the dude divested himself of at least half of his material possessions in one night.

The night before I leave, everyone I know & love will converge on our place for what I'm betting is one of the best Lincoln house parties ever.

please don't ever do that again

Penelope and I were in Walmart the other night buying Scrabble, when suddenly she looks intently up my nose & picks a booger out with her thumb before I realize what's hit me. She gets offended when I call her weird...

pork rinds anyone?

Won this giant tub of pork rinds the other day at a Love Evil Funk Quartet concert. This was my reward for making a fool of myself, banging a pot with a drumstick in front of the Zoo Bar crowd.

Another guy won a tub of cheese balls & wanted to trade. Crazy mofo. The challenge of having to dispose of a large quantity of pork rinds is simply too alluring. Maybe I will have to build a pork rind containment facility. Do some groundwater simulations. You know.

my friend the random cat

After watching Being John Malkovich alone tonight I realized that was a mistake; it was for some reason pretty disturbing this time & I wished some people were around so I could, you know, right myself.

There was this cat randomly meowing outside our apartment complex. I let him in & we ended up hanging out together. I played piano for him. He ate my shoelaces. Etcetera. I want a cat.

do it yourself carsledding

To make this homemade car sled, you will need

1. a backseat shelf from a 1991 Ford Probe
2. two (2) ethernet cables, 8-12 ft. long
3. a roll of storm window plastic to make the underside slick
4. copious amounts of duct tape

Here I am, living proof that fun can be had, lo, even beneath the nightmare sulfur glow of a Lincoln Nebraska winter evening. External temperature: 4 degrees.

(Free Iraq?)

glory be

I can only refer you back to this entry.

final javelin acts of desperation

After pulling an all nighter this weekend, Jake is hit by a sudden burst of insanity & we tear off in his car. We're going nowhere. It's more sad than crazy or anything else...there's a sense of final desperation in all this & I know somehow where it's coming from.

We trudge out into the woods pointlessly, a cold gray day getting colder and grayer. Eventually he agrees to walk back to the car but is karate chopping everything in sight with a big stick. When we get to his car he javelin-throws this big stick at it in a final fit of exasperation.

Must have been a perfect end-on hit: when we get in we see the entire windshield has spiderweb cracks radiating out from the bottom. Jake is screaming and pounding the steering wheel but I'm just laughing, it's too funny, "You can't even have fun by yourself in this town without something like this happening," he says. On top of it all his cell phone is missing and we have to trudge back through the woods in the cold dark, calling it.

the fear

Last night Jake & I were driving to the store, when a series of cones walling off one lane from another on a one-way street severely confused me, and I ended up turning onto O Street brit-style.

"You're on O Street," Jake says. This doesn't click so he says it again. Suddenly I realize there are two rows of headlights up ahead coming toward me. I am driving right into oncoming traffic. I swerve across three lanes of traffic and merge to the far right, and we notice that the car we were headed for was a cop. I get the fear.

"Go go go" Jake's yelling "before he has a chance to turn around!" We tear out to West Lincoln and I turn off onto a sidestreet, make a few more turns and pull up in a parking lot. A black cat darts out in front of my car. "Gimme one of those cigarettes," I say. Usually I can't stand them. We pile out and stand out in the freezing drizzle of a terrible dark day turned terrible dark night, smoking two cigarettes, and discussing the enormous American flag that droops above us at a nearby gas station.

wudka

Walked into Wasabi last night to discover the place was practically empty. Got to talking with Rob the owner re his new venture, which is to ship a particular kind of high-grade Russian vodka to the states and become the sole distributor. He actually flew to Moscow for a week to seal the deal. Got so excited telling me about it that he went to show me the bottle he brought back & lo & behold, a few shots remained, so there I was drinking premium Russian vodka, just me & the owner, on a Monday night in a sushi bar. Ah me. Wudka.

time for a new bridge scoring system

Am teaching Mark & Henry to play bridge, so Yun & I can play with them. It's been awhile & I forgot how fun it was. 'Cept, Henry approached the thing orthogonally--like a gambler actually--with no regard for convention. He would always enter the bidding no matter what hand he had, and always pushed it to the 4 or 5 level, which meant we were always competing to see who could go set the least. Well it kept people from ever making game & I started to wonder: what's wrong with the scoring that it rewards this method of brute force bidding and not-so-fun gameplay? Because like it or not Henry was on to something...above the line points mean nothing until someone makes two games.

So, at nearly 4 in the morning, we wound up in the following ridiculous situation. Yun & I were not vulnerable. Mark & Henry were vulnerable and had a leg on. Because Yun & I had racked up so many points on their undertricks (which cost twice as much as ours), if they would have made their bid, they would have won the battle but lost the war. That is to say not even the 750 pt bonus could have saved them. So it was actually in our interest to lose the hand. Similarly, it was in their interest to lose the hand, and then let us make game and become vulnerable, in the hopes of setting us enough to dig themselves out of their hole.

So we played a bridge hand in which both sides deliberately tried to lose. It's actually a lot harder than it seems. Every card laid down was hilarious; often people would sluff off aces in non-trump suits when they clearly could have trumped. Oh, inverted world.

In lieu of a better scoring system, the next time we played I scored as follows. No concept of game, just play as many hands as you have time for, and total above & below the line points. To encourage people to bid up to the right level, I made tricks under the line worth twice as much. All other above the line scoring related to bonuses, undertrick penalties, and doubling remained the same.

It worked out okay. Henry had to adjust his bidding style to communicate information--which meant learning the conventions--and the bids were within bounds, so gameplay was typical & a lot more fun. Every once & a while you need to be reminded why there are conventions in the first place, and why they evolved the way the did. The best way is to play against a fresh mind. Just like in chess...remember how your little brother would somehow manage to beat you even if you knew what you were doing, and he didn't have a clue?

ben does the collabo thing

Got to see Ben Folds again, this time in the KC City Market with Craig. Guster headlined. Guster schmuster. Well they were okay I guess. Ben played a pretty short set but included were Fair, Selfless Cold & Composed, Steven's Last Night in Town, and Rockin the Suburbs, all songs I hadn't heard him solo on before. Actually for Fair all of Guster came out & backed him. This is how that started...

The Guster drummer, a wild birdman who bongo drums and cymbal clashes all with his hands, no sticks, came out & sang half of the George Michael's "Careless Whispers" cover with Ben. Which, incidentally, was funny and weird. Later he showed up again & started backing Ben on bongo drums. After the song Ben moved over to a drum set--being a former drummer himself till he threw his drumset in a lake c.f. "Army"--and for about 10 min. they traded off in a little impromptu drum circle.

Then it was decided the whole band should come out & play Fair & it was so right sounding it made you want to weep for the good old BFF days. Really, I think Ben is starting to wish he had a band together again. Flying solo isn't all it's cut out to be & you can tell he misses the collaboration.

He also came out at the end of Guster's set, backing them in a much less Ben-centric way. Really now, have you ever been to a show wherein the acts collaborate like this? Every other concert I've ever attended has had iron curtains between the bands, esp. the bigger venues. That Ben weaved the two acts together like this is amazing if you think about it--a total break with tradition. There's always some new amazing thing at a Ben Folds concert...never pass one up.

So we stopped at a Perkins on the way back in St. Joseph MO, after driving around the eerily silent downtown looking for a mom & pop's diner to no avail. It was 1 am. The place was full of mostly old people, which was really strange considering the time.

Quite a few oddballs were there. "Safari Man" was what we nicknamed this guy with a red kerchief around his neck, tan lapelled jacket, ruddy face, glasses on a string. Then we heard him talk & realized he had an electronic voicebox which made him sound like an alien. Thus the kerchief we figured, and from there the whole getup was the logical next step. The logical next step?

Also there was a small woman who looked like she was straight out of a Britcom. Gaudy hat with big feather, turquoise suit jacket and skirt, round face & build, a waddling little Mrs. Bucket. Her husband looked like a bald ex Hell's Angel. How.

The return trip sucked, we were both falling asleep & driving through dense fog. At 3 am I suddenly awoke (fear of death) in the passenger's seat to Craig turning east at Rockport, which was nowhere near our turnoff & 180 degrees in the wrong direction. I took over & he fell asleep almost immediately. Got back 4 am to unfortunately wake up Mike who was sleeping in our living room before a team Triathlon at 7 am with Andrew & Jamaimer.

an oven of madness

This is part two of yesterday. We went to Bricktop & it was without a doubt the best time I've ever had there. Yun, Mark, Jeff, Henry & I all there initially, but more people I knew kept showing up, including Jamaimer & Andrew.

There's a dj spinoff going on right now. Initial disappointment: when we first walked in the dj was playing rap crap & hip hop slop & it was the usual big brutal hip hop scene of no one's having fun because everyone's trying to act so damn cool. The next dj up was a little Vietnamese guy, Hassady, who I know through Dave, the frisbee team captain. House music, and at first there was a certain tension between the house crowd & the hip hop crowd who just stood there sullen, arms folded. Amid this a breaker circle started. Altho not as good as the last one it was super exciting, and was the segue into later full-fledged craziness which all participated in. The dance floor became an oven of madness.

Mark & I & Yun danced, Mark throwing in wacky Mark moves, Yun dancing with Asian grace & style, I becoming a glistening sweaty madman just like in Europe. Eventually Henry & Jeff danced a little too which was great since they are usually far too reserved. Hassady captured the essence of the place perfectly; he was voted the night's winner. Hooray for the home team.

Well this entry is lame but just suffice it so say it was a great time & seemed to me to be the all-inclusive peak of the summer, so many people were out last night, and everything was so crazy that it can only possibly slide downhill from here into slow autumn decay.

Oh, something I forgot: Yun & Jamie met for the first time, however briefly & confusedly. When two girls are happy to meet each other it is a beautiful thing. They grab each other by the hands or arms in an open & authentic way, eyes exchanging volumes of unguarded feeling, that is so completely unlike the typical gruff & wary first encounter of two men.

gone fishing

Yesterday was quite a day tho it sagged badly in the middle. Got up early after too little sleep (have been doing this for weeks anyway) to go fishing with Jake in a farm pond outside town.

After less than five minutes of waiting with both pulled in fish nearly simultaneously & went on to catch, I'd say, about 25 altogether. One of the first fish Jake caught was a largemouth bass that got mangled so badly by the hook that we decided we'd better kill it. Not having a knife, we took a rock and smashed the thing, but it took several blows & by the end we were so horrified of ourselves we almost got sick. We then tossed his dead body back in the lake--Jake assuring me it would get eaten--where it floated, a big belly-up accusation we had to look at for the rest of the morning.

Reminded me a little too much of the opening scenes of Spring, Summer... wherein the boy ties rocks to animals & laughs at their tortured state, and ends up paying for it in full later in his life. All life sacred? Maybe.

Anyhow the impetus for this little excursion: Jake is going to try to teach my to fly fish before our trip next month to Glacier Mt. National Park. I think I'm going to like fly fishing for a number of reasons. It involves skill--you don't just sit there waiting for a lucky bite as in bait fishing, but must cast & recast constantly with considerable technique. And you don't have to kill anything at all if you don't want to, not even something for bait.

Afterwards smelly muddy & sunburned we laid out on Jake's car in an unfinished suburb somewhere, eating burgers and listening to our beer bottles whistle at each other in the wind, a half-step off. Jake told me about how he used to come down here with his dog when there was still nothing, and how he would cut down plants with a wooden sword. (I too spent countless hours doing the same.) There is a certain kind of plant back home in Missouri that shoots up so fast that its trunk is the consistency of worthless styrofoam. It's like slicing through butter; there's a delay after your stick has passed through, and then the plant falls apart in two pieces, cartoon-style.

(The relentless advance of the suburbs all around us, styrofoam houses which sprung up only yesterday.)

out of it

Two incidents of amazing absent-mindedness I wish to document for the day.

Number One. I leave my car parked & running with the keys locked inside, started to walk off even. Thankfully, Yun was with me & she left the passenger side open. She got a big hug for being so careless.

Number Two. I am getting ready for bed & see in the mirror that I missed a belt loop. It had been like that all day. Worse, it was a belt loop on the front of my pants. What? How?

strategic equity

Yeah so there just isn't much time for blogging these days. And besides, not much to blog either. Even though you think there would be: my 30 hr work week does not crowd out my actual life, so I have one right now. Basically it consists of doing something athletic like rock-climbing or frisbee right after work, hanging out with friends until midnight, and then going to bed. While fun I guess there just isn't much extreme experience to document as a result of this regimen.

Alternately, I could start documenting the trite and meaningless observations that abound such as: last night a table of 40 something men got drunk next to us & started talking business & finance loudly. Apparently, "strategic equity" is something you get really psyched about at the age of 40. And your portfolio. And ways you've found to rip off the IRS. Please dear reader--if you care about me--kill me if I start to become so lame & so evil.

Heck, kill me now. Already I'm heading in that direction--my job is slowly becoming one of strategizing & making decisions--and I find it kind of fun. E.g. what bugs to fix & features to add that will gain us the most end users, or avoid bad PR from certain naysayers. This is where the cancer starts...then someday you wake up and realize your job is to stand god-like (mickey mouse like?) on top of a mountain, waving your hands & making decisions. The artist in you weeps; you create nothing.

a plug for brennen

If you aren't already please start reading Brennen's weblog instead of mine. Especially for entries like this one.

karaoke videos = no

Yeah, Japanese guys singing karaoke tonight at Wasabi. Dudes, that really rocked my face off. I have no idea what any of it meant although I assume it had something to do with mountains, since every video began with Mt. Fuji or something like it.

On a related note, I wish I was cool enough to be the chode who paraded around bare-chested long-haired in the Hotel California video...god, the porn industry must be using these karaoke videos as a filter.

yun's first baseball game

Tonight we went to the Saltdogs game--Yun's first baseball game ever. And she also met Jake for the first time.

After about three minutes in the car she turns to Jake & tells him he & I are very different...he's quieter, and shy. This is of course ridiculous nonsense & to prove it Jake leans on the horn for a few blocks screaming stuff out the window. Yun instantly gets really embarassed, as she will be countless other times that night when we make her stand up and sing "take me out the the ballgame" or Jake does the chicken dance or we both leapfrog up a hill.

Dawn, Jake's girlfriend & the Saltdogs mascot, comes over in her giant dog suit at one point. Of course we wrestle around and Yun gets pictures with her etc. Jake & I, still, are sort of in denial that it's really Dawn in there, it just seems like a separate big fuzzy entity. I'm sure it's a lot weirder for him. Anyway.

As I'm trying to explain the rules to her I realize that baseball is a baroque sport...so many special rules and cases and weird terms for things. The "batter" walks up to "the plate" for his "at-bat." The "pitcher" throws the ball to him, if it's a good one it's called a "strike," otherwise it's a "ball" (what? the ball is sometimes a ball?). Three strikes and you're "out," four balls and you're "walked." I think if you aren't a native English speaker none of this is going to make any sense to you. I mean, try to imagine that you don't know any of the English words for all these things, or maybe that you know them but from other contexts, and are listening to me Alan Grow try to explain the game to you...

rocking the suburbs

Saturday I'm awakened at noon when lightning hits the house next door. I am groggy & out of it but manage to make a few phone calls and then go back to sleep, waking up at 4:30 that afternoon. The weather is crazy--tornados etc.--so our camping plans are shot. Instead Jake & I sit out on his porch in the heart of suburbia and jam, while black clouds roll in and rain pours down.

Oh yeah I have a bass guitar now. It's an amazingly easy instrument to just pick up & start playing, until you want to hit something more than root I guess. Am taking lessons from Craig, Mark & Brian's little brother and an awesome bass guitar player, besides being a fellow frisbee player.

One of the strangest and most amazing sunsets later that night. For about a half hour, the sun glared orange from between a black cloud blanket and the horizon. Kind of like that apocalyptic afternoon I was in the belltower in Munich. Only this time, at the other end of the sky, a perfect double rainbow formed, the brightest and biggest rainbow I've ever seen in my life.

to bust

We (Mark Henry Jeff and I) decide to go up to Omaha for the night and hit a club. We touch down at a place called the Cactus Cafe, which is decidedly not our kind of joint. It is midnight. Uninspired rap interleaved with 80s hits. There are no available chicks left really, but there's this one super cute chick who looks a bit like Jodie Foster.

I'm too chicken to go talk to her. What the hell happened to me since last summer? Use it or lose it I guess. Anyhow Mark pulls a cool move and starts talking to another chick, asks her for advice on how to introduce himself to Jodie Foster, and once he gets Jodie Foster's ear he starts telling her about me. "My friend's really shy etc." He's pointing across the club at me. Mostly, I'm cowering, because the situation is not one a 23 year old man should ever find himself in. Maybe if you're 14 and you just got passed you one of those do-you-like-me-yes-no-maybe notes.

Nothing of course came of the subsequent introduction except that Mark got 5 points up on me. Then the 4 of us went to the boats and all won money. At three in the morning we started back for Lincoln.

Jeff, who didn't drink much but was somehow trashed, started puking. Seems like every 5 or 10 minutes we were stopping on the interstate shoulder for him to puke in the ditch. The trip was dragging on interminably: normally it takes about 45 minutes to get from Omaha to Lincoln, and we'd already been on the road an hour and a half. Then a cop pulls up behind us, lights flashing, spotlights trained on Mark as he held Jeff, tells them to stay away from the car.

Because, what would a night of fun without the cops be like?

After a cursory survey of the ditch situation she walks up to Henry, who's driving, and decides she wants to put him through the test. He had had 2 drinks 5 hours ago & we all knew he was fine. But the whole thing adds an extra half hour of sitting around in suspense--and I'm getting madder & madder by the minute.

It's just too ridiculous to me. I see too much of cops these days--nothing ever transpires, because nothing really wrong is ever going on--and they're always on a mission not to help & serve but to bust. There's a particular mindset that goes along with these random exercises of authority, and I think this mindset can be a pretty sick one.

I'm saying this stuff as we drive back to Lincoln. The sun is rising. At 5:30 in the morning I finally get back to my car at Mark's place, and the argument between Mark & I is getting heated. Finally I have an outburst, jump in my car and peel off angry. I wake up that afternoon and wonder, now what the heck was all that about? Words too cold to the heated deed breath gives I guess, I seem to have forgotten all my righteous rage. The intensity of feeling that had brought me back to life, for once, was extinguished, and I was again in my usual dreamlike state.

mammy's little baby

Blaring from the ice cream truck today, as it drove through the mostly black neighborhood up the street from us: "Mammy's little baby loves shotenin, shotenin, mammy's little baby loves shotenin bread." Something not right here.

mark destroys a hostel door

Monday morning. Mark gets up and says "I'm going to go take a shower" and flings open the door, tearing the chain clean out of the wall. Things like this definitely give one a sense of security.

We drag ourselves to Lou Manzatti's for some deep dish pizza. Wow, really good. As we're about ready to leave who walks in but those two Greek girls from the Green Mill? Weird. We sit down to talk for a while.

One of them gets convinced Mark has changed his t-shirt since they've walked in. It's his blue puma t-shirt and she swears the logo wasn't there a second ago. Before we leave Mark goes to the bathroom and comes out with his shirt inside out just to mess with her. Since getting back to Lincoln we've continued our trend of being really big jerks to girls.

the green mill

Sunday morning we woke up in the hostel to the sound of the hispanic housekeeper opening our door, which was only stopped by the chain. Mark sits up in bed & yells in this accusatory voice "whateryoudoing?!!"

Spanish coming from the other side of the door. Mark, who spent a half year in Spain and still speaks fluently, explains two or three times that yes we're in here & would you now please go away.

Yelping, I took a cold shower because it seemed there was no alternative. I assumed that all 4 showers would be on the same heater but no, turns out Mark's and the other 2 showers were all warm. So I killed him and ate his liver with some favre beans and a nice ciante.

We got Dim Sum down in Chinatown, this time at the Phoenix, and it was better than the Three Happiness where Yun & I ate. Then we hit the Michigan Ave. shopping district for a while, and had fish and chips at an English pub for dinner.

Later that night we went to the Green Mill, the oldest continuously running jazz club in the country, and a former haunt of Al Capone's. Very simple floorplan with a wrap-around bar. Small stage in the back. Green velvet booths but most people were standing.

As we walked in slam poetry was ending and a jazz quartet was getting ready. We went up to a couple girls sitting alone in a booth by the front & asked if we could sit with them. No they said, we have people coming, but then a few minutes later they moved & we got these primest of prime seats. As a result two other girls walked up & we suddenly we had female company. One was from Boston, her sister from Chicago, and they were both Greek. We used up all the sarcasm and outrageous lies we could lay our hands on. Meanwhile we got a tip on where the best deep dish pizza was from the Chicago sister.

The jazz was great, a blind black guy rocking on a Hammond organ, another playing bass guitar, a quirky Don King looking guy playing the drums and smiling to himself whenever he got hold of an idea. And a big white woman belting out vocals. The best jazz I've ever seen & heard but then I'm no aficionado.

so you're looking for a white bar

It's Saturday night in Chicago. Mark & I go to a club I've read about online called The Dragon Room. Concept is cool: mult-level with a sushi bar downstairs. But...

It feels like we're the first white guys to walk in there since 1996. All black dudes and chicks. You know that "do you mind if we dance with your dates" scene in Blues Brothers? Or the fraternity in Road Trip? Yeah, it was something like that.

But as a guy you can't just turn tail & run in such situations. You have to act cool, like you meant to do that & knew what you were getting into. So, drinks in hand, we went downstairs to see if we could get some sushi. The friendly black chick behind the bar says hello & then disappears, returning with the only white guy who worked in the place. "So she tells me you're looking for a white bar?" he asks.

Umm, yeah I guess we say. We must have looked real uncomfortable.

We ended up at a club called the Crobar. It was $20 at the door, and there was a vip line headed by an extremely gay man in a floral kimono and little John Lennon glasses. But the club was pretty good esp. for an American one, populated with beautiful people, the beautiful people. Mark & I were of course two of the most beautiful people there.

shoot the evildoer

Friday night Yun calls me at 10 pm and tells me she can't go to Chicago. Well, this is a big bummer & threatens to derail the whole Chicago trip of me Mark & Yun. After giving her grief Mark & I decide to hit Chicago anyway the next day, just the two of us. The other possibility was to languish in despair & boredom in Lincoln for a whole three day weekend.

On the way through Iowa Saturday morning we stopped in Adair, Iowa, where I bought a local newspaper. I also bought a strange ceramic sculpture for Jake which we had laughed and wondered about on our way to see Ben Folds nearly a month ago. It consists of a policeman, kneeling, holding an unidentified stick (american flag minus flag?), gun in holster in belt, while a blue-eyed angel rests her hands reassuringly on his shoulders. Yes, she seems to say as together they gaze off in murky ceramic reverie, shoot the evildoer.

The rest of the trip out there was uneventful (no pulling away with the gas pump still attached this time). Aside from the fact that I got my first speeding ticket. The cop asked me to come back & sit in his patrol car while he filled out the form--they now have computers in there that run Windows XP, that much I saw. I had on a purple shirt & a hawaiian lei, which I considered taking off because of the gravity of the situation. But decided not to.

On the cop's dashboard, a little sticker: "Excuses will not change the consequences." Well, neither will hawaiian leis I figure. Shoot the evildoer anyway.

Logistics. We planned on staying at Hostelling International Chicago, which is right downtown. They were full up & had been for a week. Next time, my advice is to call ahead to this place, and as before park in $5 a day parking just south of there around 800 South Wells St. Instead we ended up at Arlington House, a hostel near DePaul University north of the downtown. There's a redline stop about five minutes away & it is in a nice part of town. About a 15 minute ride to downtown from there.

forlorn looks outside your local chipotle

It is summer and there are a lot of foreigners running around campus. Today, I spotted two Spanish girls sitting outside Chipotle, alone. They had this forlorn look on them that said so this is America. Yes, things come around full circle in this great country of ours...

...a displaced Anasazi Indian checks into a hotel. There is a Kokopelli on the wall and he stares at it for a long long time.

threatened by ants

It's been a long time since I've had a day like yesterday. Yesterday, I actually got things done--I was performing at capacity. Not bad for 4 hours of sleep.

Was up in the middle of night trying to figure out important life issues. Coincidentally Jamaimer was up too because of a disturbing experience she'd had that day at work. So, we figured things out together at 5 in the morning. Her female advice was...indispensable.

Another busy day at work, and then I went over to the rec center & got a membership to the rock climbing wall for the summer. You can't get a non-student membership there, I guess to protect sorority girls from creepy desperate old men (like I will be someday or maybe already am?). So I was psyched and went climbing for a while, the first time in like 4 months.

A beautiful day outside and for the first time in a month we actually had numbers for ultimate, played a good game until dark. Went home, showered, called Mark & Yun & decided we're gonna go to Chicago, the three of us, this weekend. Since it's a 3-day weekend and, well, because Chicago rocks my face off.

Then I got to see Jake. Now that he's working two jobs--construction by day, a job waiting tables by night--he's a scarce quantity. Met him over at the Catholic church. They were celebrating some event or another in the basement and there was a keg, which made for a really weird sight. He & I and his girlfriend (of about a month) Dawn went up to the choir loft where there's a new grand piano, and Jake played for us. The piano sounds great--every note you touch sets of small cathedral echoes so it really doesn't matter what you play almost. But no he's good, in the past he's even willed music somehow out of the worst piano ever.

We went out for drinks at Zen's bar, which is alone among Lincoln bars in that you can actually hold conversations and there is no fratmosphere. Along the way Jake kept picking flowers and putting them in Dawn's hair. Already, she puts up with a lot of crap and is a super cool girl all around. Not for putting up with crap but just for being fun & happy. She's a mascot for the Huskers and the Salt Dogs baseball team. Once, Jake & I were driving around downtown when we saw a giant dog and a crocodile out in front of Runza's, and he's like "Dude, I think that's my girlfriend wearing a giant dog suit on the corner..." We stopped and it was.

On the way back we came across a swarm of ants. Jake & I stooped to watch. Individually, they were moving in little random circles, bumping into another ant about every second. At which point they would pause and feel each other, communicating something. It was chaos but something was clearly being accomplished, and none of them probably had a clue. So we stomped on them all.

(A giant peers down at a green blue planet. He sees pink bipeds running around frantically, randomly bumping into each other and exchanging worthless bits of information. Clearly, something is going on here on the larger scale which these things are not aware of. Or perhaps they are just in a state of denial. So he stomps on them all.)

the goto nerd

This morning I was on a radio talk show with UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman. Guess I'm kind of the goto nerd for the JDE program right now...whenever they need some PR I go and try my darndest. Mostly, I just try not to screw up.

So I was trying not to screw up today as I talked to the host & the Chancellor, fumbling over words etc.--you know, what I usually do--and I realized that here I am with two people who communicate with people all day long, every day, for a living. And on the other hand here I am a guy who sometimes goes several days without saying a single word to another human being. One of these things is not like the other...

hyperthermal monochromal boosters

Half-hearted attempt to keep weblog updated: ready, set, go. School's over & I am now transitioning to summer mode. Have a job now with a small spinoff company that will continue work on a few JDE Design Studio projects. It's exciting but I am still looking for a job on the coasts or abroad, something I can stick with for a year or two & get that all-important 2+ years of experience merit badge.

Was in South Dakota last Monday & Tuesday on business. At one point the 4 lane highway suddenly morphed into a gravel road, and then back again. That was the highlight of the trip for me. Yeah, it was a fun trip.

Then I decided to drive home & see the family, whom I haven't seen since Christmastime. That was great. My sisters are huge now, and I spent half the time remarking on this fact, which puts me right up there with grandparents and other mostly marginal observers of their lives. Saw Ed too though he slept day and night.

Ed & I overhead one little boy telling another little boy the following truism as they climbed a tree: "The nutsac is the wiener. And the wiener is the nutsac." (And at that moment, he achieved enlightenment.) Funny how misguided you are at that age, but you want to know the truth, you want to know.

At home I dug out all those old sci-fi stories I wrote when I was 14 and 15. Young male is oppressed by futuristic society, rebels or otherwise gets revenge, in the process using cool shit like "hyperthermal monochromal boosters." Dialog usually involves only one person. Talking to himself. Or the dialog is empty and declarative, obviously just a plot device. A lamentable reflection of the author's own state of estrangement, ha.

(He clenches his fist and fires the hyperthermal monochromal boosters on his jet pack. "Technology is a beautiful thing," he remarks to himself, hurling headlong towards his adversary. There is a crunching sound when his fist makes contact with the oppressor's nutsac. Which, incidentally, is the wiener.)

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.

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.

we shall overcome

Hrm, harum, not much to say, drifting back into normal grump and grind mode after an exciting Spring Break. At a party in Ft. Collins this weekend (ultimate tournament) I hit on a cute girl. Things go remarkably well until Andy decides to drop his drawers. Terrified, she leaves, letting suitor #2 collect her digits and completely ignoring subsequent advances from me. A crazy party though that eventually gets busted decisively, leaving the owners $1000 in the hole. Ridiculous.

This party was definitely the highlight of the trip: we didn't do so well, as usual gale wind forces prevailed and the tradition of losing in the most heartbreaking manner possible was extended to yet another tournament. This will go down in history as the rookie season I am sure, just wait another year or two you powers that be. We are big and fast and we eat corn. We shall overcome.

the divine earthquake

On the return trip, outside of Denver, I pull up to a gas station in some non-existent town by the name of Hudson. A guy at another pump notices the keyboard in my back seat & strikes up a conversation. He also plays piano. He talks about the music industry & then lets the cat out of the bag, he is a charismatic preacher in Lamar Nebraska, and plays mostly worship music he says.

Am I a man of faith he asks? Nope I say and heroically wrestle the conversation over to something different. He asks me about job prospects and I tell him I am looking coastal.

"If you value your life don't go to the coasts," he tells me. He had just come back from San Fran. Everything we've seen recently points to a disaster that's going to completely wipe out the coasts. "A seismic earthquake," he says, stressing the word seismic, which must feel uncomfortable in its new role as a superlative, I think.

Now, I can't help but chuckle over this. Just a few weeks ago I predicted, jokingly of course, that with the end of the conflict in Iraq, the extreme right would probably want to bomb the hell out of San Fran next. Now I learn that they are instead invoking a divine earthquake. Okay.

"You think?" I ask Ron. Ron's his name.

"Think?" He laughs at my naivete. "I don't think. I know!"

Give me that earthquake already Ron. Anything is better than this. West Coast, here I come.

explosive trucks

By far this is the weirdest installment in the whole Spring Break in New Mexico series. So last night I drove up to Los Alamos--it's in the mountains you know, the place they dropped the first atomic bomb, and still a huge secret bomb research facility--to see Eric, who was doing a physics collabo over his Spring Break.

After dinner we went for a spin around the facilties. Eric showed me this sign that said "Explosive Trucks" with an arrow pointing up the hill. We thought this was so funny we got out to take a picture in front of it.

Well. It was dark and the flash didn't work. However we were spotted almost immediately by a security guard in a truck, who slowed down as he passed us. He pulled up as were getting back in my car. Uh-oh. Eric's flipping out. I'm trying to stay calm. Dude walks up & informs us that pictures are not allowed anywhere near the facilities & starts taking down our info. He comes back with my license after a while & says we will have to wait for his supervisor to come.

The supervisor dude arrives. By now there are a total of six security trucks parked at all angles surrounding my car. Supervisor dude is wearing fatigues & carries a metal box the size of a notebook (in which he will lock up & transport notes?). Eric's flipping out.

We explain how harmless & touristy we are. I even get out my camera to show him the only picture (pitch black of course), delete it at his request, revealing a picture of me with my Grandma.

He says yada yada about this just being the policy & hopefully he will not have to file a report. Eric's flipping out in the seat next to me. The dude lets us go, and then we have to drive around for about an hour to calm our nerves listening to some irreverent Burroughs. Every once in a while the conversation hits a lull and Eric looks out the window, says, "That sucks."

The old fear of authority & that mortified feeling you get when you're busted is all we can think about, though we try to talk about everything else. Six police cars surround you, they shine lights in your eyes, a man in fatigues walks up, and you're back in grade school ready to throw up or crap in your pants because you've been sent down to the principal's office. They sure know how to evoke that feeling. They've got it down to a science.

We go to a grocery store & get a six pack and six york peppermint patties. I realize we're acting like Joseph K in Kafka's Trial, who starts behaving like a convicted criminal just because they suspect he has committed a crime, though he knows perfectly well himself that he didn't. Almost, almost, it was as if we were feeling guilty for having such a strange sense of humor. Only to supervisor dude had we (reluctantly) admitted that we had just found the "Explosive Trucks" sign funny. Why did we hold back this detail, ashamed?

"I'm sorry boys, I just don't see what's so damn funny about that." Supervisor dude's mouth droops seriously at corners. "Would you please come back to the station and attempt to explain your abnormal sense of humor to us sat-is-fac-torily..." He draws this last word out. "We just want to make sure everyone's on the same page here."

Well back at the hotel the beer & peppermint patties calm us down & we talk of other things genuinely, Eric explains some physics, tells me a nasty but funny problem devised by a Russian physicist, conversation dissolves into saying stupid things like "I am a butt machine" in Chinese & it's practically one subconscious talking to another at the end when we fall asleep.

Explosive trucks. "The explosion will be of extraordinary magnitude."

the velvet elvis painting sanctuary

Last night with Nicko down in Cruces. We were gonna play a big intense game of Risk with John but Nick & I split a pitcher of a porter at some local brewery, got kind of loopy & started arguing about the crappy paintings hung on the walls. Some artist thought it would be cool to blatantly rip off a Van Gogh starry night background and then, in the same style, have two sisters looming gigantic, piggybacking and laughing, in the foreground beside a cypress tree. The title of it was "Sisters." Barf. There was also an impressive sanctuary of velvet Elvis paintings in the back by the bathrooms.

John drove us home, then instead we just sat around laughing at Aquateen Hunger Force mostly, getting sleepier every minute. But Nick & I got a second wind and had a great conversation on into the night about how things are going for the both of us. Gonna miss him a lot...Nick is one of my closest buds.

I take my leave of the grandparents shortly. My bro Ed shows up tonight on a Greyhound to take my place. I will completely miss him. Bummer, big bummer, that we couldn't have road tripped down here together..."Al & Ed's Excellent Adventure" Mom was calling it until we found out our Spring Breaks were different weeks.

Now I'm gonna go visit Eric. Coincidentally he is in Los Alamos right now finishing up some research project or another. So tonight I will put a four hour leg on my return trip, and see a friend I haven't seen in over a year. Hi ho what a Spring Break it's been.

sunburn is funburn

Yesterday Grandpa & I hiked up Turtleback mountain together. It was a nice time, the weather cooperated, and it took us 6 hrs round trip. We were going at Grandpa's pace of course. Hey, if you can climb a mountain like that at all when you're 78 maybe you've got room to talk.

But I got burninated bad. So bad that later that night my lobster nose started to weep some sort of fluid, it gathered on the end every thirty seconds. Sure you wanted to hear this.

In the evening, after a few hands of bridge with the old folks, drove myself down to Las Cruces for St. Patty's day with Nick et. al. There certainly are some weird cats over at Kent's...Evan was eating soggy Ramen noodles with a cake knife...some crazed Creole pizza guy just walked in wanting to use the phone.

Nick & I & a few of his buds went over to this house party where they had green keg beer. There was something unusual about that house party...and it wasn't the green beer. I dunno, maybe it was the crowd, there were about 4 mohawks there, pretty favorable ratios, and no fratmosphere. Definitely not the kind of house party you'll find in Lincoln Neb. except maybe at 12th & D. But those guys are moving out I hear. Anyhow I digress.

Nick threw yogurt at me later that night, I'm not sure I even remember why, and then I somehow pissed Meghan off too & got yogurt smeared on my face. Again I fell asleep at Nick's. Awoke to drive back to T or C listening to Death Cab for Cutie, which is great music for the aftermath of just about anything.

new mexico and almost bust

Update on my whereabouts. Made it to NM okay, though just barely. I got out of Lincoln at about 10:30 and before you know it I had crossed all of sleepy flat Nebraska. When you finally hit the sandhills and the landscape starts to undulate off to the right and left, it's really a hell of a surprise, almost makes you jump after all that flatness.

I saw my first ever moonrise. A giant angry orange peel of a moon appeared off to my left, it was so orange and huge that it lit up orange layers of cloud around it.

Passed the fog belching factories of pre-Denver Colorado. By now the moon had paled enough to illuminate scrubby skeleton trees, and throw a ragtag assortment of rail cars standing still on the tracks into sharp silhouette. I thought some deep chord was being struck within me until I realized it was just that activity book they made for me in church as a toddler. Remember the train page with all those different buttons for wheels? Yeah, that's the chord that was being struck within me.

7 am found me crossing the tail of the Rocky Mountains, and the sun rising over mountain fields. An amazing sunrise is crucial to the success of an all-nighter.

Coming down into Northern New Mexico I entered a thick ground-hugging fog. It seemed to be coming up off the ground itself, and for a long time I wondered if I was driving into the smoke of a giant grass fire. Nope, it had rained the night before, and things were warming up so quickly that the grass was steaming, just like the ponds used to steam as I looked out the school bus window on winter mornings.

By Santa Fe, after 12 hours of driving with a few stops only for gas & coffee, the engine was starting to get pretty hot. I waited in a hotel parking lot in the shade for it to cool down. I read a newspaper. But to no avail, the remaining 4 hours of the trip were on pins and needles as I watched the engine temp push about as close to the danger zone as it could come. I called ahead though, and the grandparents, unworried, offered to come pick me up however far I made it.

I arrived in Truth or Consequences, NM at 2:30 mountain time. Grandma fed me & then I had to head off to Las Cruces by 4:30, in order to see the Nickman at his first ever public guitar-playing appearance. I started off in my car but then turned back, as it threatened once again to overheat, and a thunderstorm seemed to be brewing in the west. The grandparents (bless them) let me drive their only vehicle down there & arrived at the coffee shop at 6:00 on the dot, after a paranoiac hour of speeding and then freaking out and slowing down.

Nick & Meghan & I picked up right where we left off last summer, no weirdness or distance having crept in. We went over to see Kent, who now has a broken foot from trying to climb on the ceiling & is an even bigger hippie. At Kent's we met Jason, a Beat scholar who impressed me with his thorough knowledge, but later in the night was to inflict some rather derivative poetry on us. Slept over at Nick's apt. after 38 sleepless hours, and awoke to have great conversations with Meghan too about the evolution of man & America & television & education & growing up & form vs. content. All that wonderful crap. All that wonderful crap which it will soon be our duty to do something about, rather than just talk about.

Took my leave in the afternoon--not to interfere too much with their studying for tests and such. The plan is to divide my time between my Las Cruces friends & the grandparents anyway.

off to new mexico

It is 10pm and I am going to New Mexico to see the grandparents, and pals Nick & Kent & Meghan. 16 hours of driving and I'm gonna try to do it straight through. Dumb idea but it's got me excited. So long and thanks for all the fish.

words of wisdom

At a party Brennen & I search for the right exit song. "Let it be" plays. What words of wisdom are we whispering this time I ask him? "We're not gonna get any action, so we might as well go home," he says. Let it be, let it be.

breakers

Headed over to Bricktop last night, Lincoln's most Euro dance club, for their 2 year anniversary celebration with Mark. Saw some of the coolest breakdancing ever man, these breakers were going wild dancing on their heads with feet spinning like mad propellers above them.

Then afterwards to Dan's. I invited my Czech friend Jana over and realized an hour later that all of Selleck was present; was afraid to leave, as with all residents sleeping I was the closest thing to a resident, since I go over there a lot. A slick-haired Italian who "spoke five languages, owned his own company, and was a student too" showed up and for the benefit of his lady friends commenced to yakkety-yak into his cellphone in Italian. Occasionally a word like "Cornhusker" would cut through the static. He looked and acted so much like Jesus from the Big Lebowski that we all started calling him that.

Tried unsuccessfully to get people to play Twister with me but their mindset was the tiresome I want to get drunk & do nothing one. This poser who gets on my nerves more every time I see him at Dan's tried to get me into an "intellectual conversation" in which he claimed some TV show or another was actually worth watching because, in order to get the jokes, you had to be intelligent. Apparently knowing some trivial piece of high school world history qualifies you as intelligent...you know that old mistake of believing knowledge = intelligence which is generally exhibited by those who have a shred of the former and none of the latter. My database is bigger than yours, so whoopdeedoo? Whatever. I'm getting really tired of these extremely insecure types with small penises.

everything goes wrong and i don't care

The last time I had a day which was even comparably crappy was back in October when I got stitches above my eye.

Here's the recap. The work day sucks as things fail & I find bugs & get stressed about making a release tomorrow.

I then go out to my car and find a $30 parking ticket. Thanks UNL Parking Police, you usually figure in to these kind of days.

Since I promised Jamaimer I would help her with her evening class I go to that. I get saddled with a crying 6-month-old who is totally freaked out by me, and tries harder than any baby I've ever seen to push his way out of my arms. I mean he was physically pushing off me & crying because he couldn't get away. So I would trade him for a quiet baby and then she would start crying and trying to escape too.

Aside from that I must after years of programming in solitude interact with a bunch of little kids, some of whom clearly hate me, and the multitasking nature of the situation overloads my brain. At the end of class it's like I've been run over by a truck.

I go home. After a cup of coffee I start working on my car in preparation for the frisbee tournament trip this weekend. I change the radiator fluid & take it for a test run. In way north Lincoln it blows its oil cap and the engine dies, and I barely manage to roll it down a hill and into a parking lot.

I walk a mile in the cold without a good coat to a gas station and back, where I grab oil in the hopes of filling it up and driving home perhaps, then I get back and discover the blown oil cap which spells doom. Shivering, I call a tow truck, and arrive at my house finally at 12:30 am.

But you know what none of this managed to really piss me off or bum me out. Probably because I'm just numb these days.

jesus throws a killer house party

Big house party at Jesus's last night. Many frisbee people in attendance, some old-timers even, but a lot of other people too, just a big cross section of wild drunken humanity. The first keg was gone by 11 pm and I have no idea how that was accomplished...there were maybe 25 people there when I showed up.

Maybe this guy was responsible? Note Nebraska Ultimate symbol on Andy's cup. This would make a great advert for the team I think...well it would be truth in advertising at least. Truth in advertising. I'd drink to that.

Jake was there (as I said, random cross section) with his business partner. When I called him before the party they were doing their taxes. My pals Mark & Jeff showed up & made fun of people.

Things started to clear out--the tide went out again--leaving only the truly drunk washed ashore. A sing-along (scream-along?) started in the basement. Have never seen this happen in America, there was no music playing or anything and we didn't even know each other mostly. But someone would start a song & everyone would join in at the top of their lungs. There was ACDC and Sublime and that one Dead Eye Dick song that you'd think people had forgotten by now.

Jake conducts. Note Capt. Jack Sparrow fingers. At one point he started screaming "Mary Had a Little Lamb" over the din, and I found this so funny that I had to lay down in the basement beer muck and shoe slime and roll around in it laughing.

The house lost power twice during the night, somebody tripped a circuit breaker or something & it was a blackout for 5 min. each time. What a great idea if it was planned. Everyone just grabbed the nearest member of the opposite sex and well you know.

Brennen chills, baldly, by the door. Things are winding down.

Jake & Brennen & I eventually headed for Hiway D where we ate sundry breakfast foods prepared by the alluring Mary. Not up for breaking on through to the other side like the three of us did last weekend (random jam session), we took Jake home at 4. Brennen & I then visited Mary after she got off work.

Walked around freezing in the streets until she called to us from the doorway. The three of us watched Road House, the worst piece of cheesy 80's crap I've ever seen, one of those so bad it's good things.

I don't even remember falling asleep. But then it was dawn & the title screen was looping. Time to end this. We got up muggy eyed and drove home through the light traffic of normal go-getter types preparing for yet another day.

on task

I was on task. I swear. That is, until I was seized by the need to figure out the piano to "December 1963." Lemme hear your best falsetto. Oh what a night.

deep freeze

Sitting in my living room here listening to Mogwai, reading On the Road a second time and watching stalactite icicles drip outside. Given enough time they will reach the ground. Nebraska is a big deep-freeze cave with all kinds of deep-frozen wonders to marvel at, and slip on. Glaciers creep and groan across campus, impelled by the force of mere shadows which give and take the gift of melting.

The Nebraska Department of Tourism should hire me. If Nebraska even has one of these that is. I'm sure I could make them a bangup brochure and attract, say, a team of arctic explorers.

party + an inquiry into human rights

A long night of partying this way & that. It begins with Mark & I eating sushi at Wasabi, a pleasure which has been denied me for the past month roughly, and I sit down at the sushi bar next a hippie chick with beautiful eyes. There is some amount of vibe on both ends & for this reason it is very uncomfortable, neither of us know what to say really, and so in nervousness end up misrepresenting ourselves. She leaves eventually & we do not give chase. But the sushi is good.

We go to play pool at the Spigot. After the first game a group of macho guys challenge & beat us. We retire to the back, and the evening is at this point looking pretty lame.

Then Ben calls up & says come on over, we're having a seventies party over here with an emphasis on drag. I stop by my place, and Jamaimer makes me try on a dress, but it is like 10 degrees outside and I don't look outrageous enough, so I fall back on that old pair of stupid white corduroys from Germany and a blue polyester shirt.

Half the guys at the party are indeed dressed in drag. One shows the world to us while we're playing twister, and it is indeed disgusting. As all parties at Ben's this one fails to disappoint.

Jake arrives on the scene. The party is dying down, so we go with some people to Perkins, where every last person is our age, and drunk. Jake tries to hit on this rugby chick but she keeps going off on long tangents about geology, her major. Bad form, Peter, bad form.

On the way home Jake & I get into a conversation about abortion. This has happened before. I introduce the idea that the right to life is not a real right, though it is in most practical cases derived from the other two, liberty & the pursuit of happiness. Because I believe that if you are killed swiftly & painlessly (as you could be at any time of natural causes, let's admit) and have no foreknowledge of the event, neither your liberty nor pursuit of happiness has been impinged upon. These only apply when you're living and as soon as you're not, it doesn't matter. You don't feel outrage that your rights have been violated because you don't exist. Or even if you believe you continue to exist on some other plane I don't think you'd feel outrage anymore; it just wouldn't matter.

However, that said, killing is considered wrong because (a) the victim sees it coming, or suffers horribly, violating his liberty or pursuit of happiness and (b) all the people who knew & loved that person are affected, and suffer, violating their rights. What I'm getting at here is that what's really wrong is causing others to suffer against their will. That I believe is the axiom behind the axiom that killing is wrong. Rather than accept the latter as an axiom, I have tried to question why, and believe I have found a still more basic reason. One that makes sense to me at least.

Anyway this was just the starting point for my argument, which I finally finished explaining as the sun was coming up three hours later. It led to some shocking conclusions that, I am sure, would produce knee-jerk reactions in just about anyone, as they run counter to mantras chanted at us since birth. It produced knee-jerk reactions in me as I reasoned to them.

Jake for his part made me think about a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise, and now I understand his own position much better. At some point in a real disagreement between two rational people you get down to axioms which differ on either side, and then you can't go any farther. Then you just have to say, well, I am a different being from you & so of course my axioms are different. Not willing to leave it at that has led to more wrongly inflicted suffering over the course of human history than anything else, I believe.

And Jake & I did leave it at that, and continue to respect each other. It was one of the best conversations I've had in years.

a formal apology

To all the girls over the course of my life that I've hit on, I issue a formal apology if you found me to be yucky or unattractive. Tonight a chick who was both of these things hit on me & it felt like crap, a totally uncomfortable situation. I'm so sorry, seriously.

expected value goggles

Before going up to the casinos this weekend Jake had me all excited about playing roulette with the well-known martingale strategy. A friend of his made $1200 in one night this way. Of course, after I remembered my probability theory & did the math I realized it was bunk.

Bunk because, although your chances of winning your meager base (say $5) are good, the small chance of losing everything (say $155) offsets this. As a result your expected return is about -$1. It's not about probability, it's about expected value, which is just weighted probability. And of course you'll never catch the house playing a game for which its expected return is negative.

I was glad I remembered all this...sitting there calculating that crap for a couple hours turned me into cold hard expected value machine. I began seeing everything through expected value goggles, people & their silly tortured groans or converse screams of delight made no sense. People, I thought, these are just random events, you aren't "lucky" tonight, you shouldn't change to red because there's a long streak of black. If you do win, so what. There are no emotions here. Only expected values which are always slightly negative. This same principle probably applies to your whole life, in fact.

Still, screw it I said, and martingaled with a meager $40. After winning $20 I stopped & from then out bought drinks for those in need of drinks, which included myself. Poor Jake needed it the worst. As we played blackjack I was reading the optimal strategy off a cheat card, for which we were ridiculed mercilessly. (My hammer & sickle shirt also did not endear me to the Bulgarian dealer.) Even with the optimal strategy & martingale betting you have that small chance of losing everything. Which is what happened.

His friend won $580 on roulette. Oh well there is no emotion here. Except perhaps the secret desire to throttle your friend who has just won $580.

chinese water torture

A question I've been posing to people recently: if you were undergoing Chinese water torture, would it be worse if the drops came relentlessly at regular intervals, or if they always kept you guessing?

About 2 out of 3 people think the first is better because you could possibly tune it out. The other 1 out of 3, myself included, think the irregularity would at least keep things interesting, and that the sheer inevitability of a regular beat would drive one insane.

Well, this is by no means an exhaustive study, but I tried it out in the bathtub tonight. I was definitely wrong about the irregularity keeping things interesting. Although the beat was fairly regular, every once in a while the faucet would machine-gun me with 10 drops in rapid fire; not knowing when this would happen was awful. If the drops come at small, even intervals you could tune it out I found. Still, if the interval is like 30 seconds, you're not going to be able to time them anyway, and in this case forcing the victim to watch the drop form and anticipate its fall will probably drive them crazy on a longer time scale. I also found out it's still pretty bad with your eyes closed...when the drop suddenly detonates on your forehead it scares the crap out of you. This too would drive you nuts though in a jittery sort of way. So I guess it's all about your intended psychological effect.

I hope this information will be of use in your future endeavors in the field of torture.

three flat tires

I just finished digging my car out of the snow, futilely scraping ice off the windows, and pumping up three flat tires by hand. Looks like I'm not going to make that 1:30 class. Oh well, my triceps are bigger.

nomads

It is 1 am. It is dark & -5 degrees Fahrenheit. In spite of this I can see our neighbor across the street snow-blowing his sidewalk, and his dog jumping around in the yard like a kid that gets to stay up late. Why he just decided that now would be a good time to do this I don't know.

I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Why I decided now would be a good time to do this I don't know. The porch light behind him makes it impossible to see his face which is hidden inside the hood of a furry parka. It makes me think of this bad movie called "Nomads" that I watched at my best friend's house when I was 12. As the opening credits roll you see a black-and-white picture of a hooded eskimo. It has no face, there is just blackness where the face should be, and the camera zooms slowly up into the blackness until you are engulfed in it. I recall being scared to death.

Nameless terrors. The only kind there is, really. A hood but you have no idea what's inside it, could be something hideous, could be nothing at all. As soon as you know though there's no reason to be afraid. Why is that?

i'll make my own way

Soon I will hit rock bottom. But you know what I am actually happy about this. And no I don't need your help.

I chose this. I chose staying here in Lincoln even though Lincoln sucks, I cast my vote against job security, I chose not to scurry from one bomb shelter to the next in life like a furry little animal: from parent's home where they take care of you--to a college dorm where they take care of you--to a big defense sector company where they take care of you--to the nursing home where they take care of you. Some people never really leave the nest man. But what must that be like in the end, knowing you were always too afraid to meet reality head on?

This is gonna be tough. I don't care. I'll make my own way, I'll make my own way.

compound fracture: psych

Whoah, I thought I had a compound fracture for a moment today. I was playing ultimate & had just laid out for a disc. When I got up a round bump about the size of a half dollar was bulging out of the backside of my arm. I freaked out. But after calling Dr. Mommer it was decided that nothing could be broken (soft tissue? play on!) so I got back in the game. Sorry to disappoint you all, I have no disgusting 7th grade health textbook pictures of snapped bones bursting out of pink flesh to post.

i love everyone exactly the same amount

In the liner notes for "Fake Can Be Just As Good" you will find a little scribbled picture of a man standing beside a harpsichord. Above him it says: "I love everyone exactly the same amount." He is dressed in tailcoats and his nostrils are flaring, and he is looking at you and thinking this as he plays.

I just put together a Blonde Redhead compilation disc and it is probably the greatest thing ever. Instead of giving it to Kim I should just put it in a time capsule and bury it, along with the drawing of the harpsichord player with the flared nostrils.

so this is the new year

"So this is the New Year, and I don't feel any different." If you are like me you listened to the opening track of Death Cab For Cutie's latest, "Transatlanticism," at least a half dozen times on New Years Eve in order to get yourself in the mood. Of course if you are like me & cannot ever muster the proper emotion or impress on yourself the importance of a particular event as it is happening--esp. when this is demanded of you in some sort of social situation--you were unsuccessful at that. Oh well don't sweat it. Just don't ever become a flight attendant, a funeral home director, a greeter, or any other position that requires emotional labor. Or emotions in general...

So this is the New Year. I guess I do feel a little different, finally I have met a cool girl--Kim, Jamaimer's sister--and we've been hanging out some. Well, a lot actually. She has unusual taste, cries during Bjork movies, writes her own songs and records them. I suspect she can beat me at Scrabble. (I don't know for sure because we stopped after 3 turns.) We think alike on some of the important things. Only I dunno what's gonna happen, soon she will go back to school in Nevada & then maybe next semester to Berklee in Boston. And I will be who knows where: Seattle? D.C.? California?

So here's a dilemma I've been in before. You know, even though it didn't turn out the way I wanted to last time, I wouldn't have done things any differently. I met a person who changed me for the better & that was worth it. But at the same time it's not very realistic of me & as maybe you know reality has been my obsession for the last year, so maybe this time I should just stop being such a dreamy doofus. Or maybe I should stop being so indecisive. Maybe.

feats of heroism

Among other Christmas activities, the family went to see the Arch. I thought I'd include a few choice pictures of Ed who mostly slept through the ordeal but occasionally was awake enough to perform these amazing feats of heroism.

The Arch starts to lean. Dormant Ed suddenly springs into action, putting all his weight into it. Please note the heroic hair. Zoom in if you have to, it is definitely worth your time. This picture will appear on the front cover of "Edlas Shrugged."

Ah now this is a classic Arch picture. I don't want to detract from the magic or anything, but I would just like to draw your attention to the heroic photoshop job I did here, note esp. the right hand which actually seems to grip the Arch. Thank you.

home for the holidays

Went home to Rolla for Christmas and just made the rounds, hanging out with sisters, Ed, grandparents, rents, friends old & new. Rolla now has hangouts. Or maybe it always had hangouts and I just wasn't 21 enough. Anyway one night we went to Stingers, a dance club down by Zeno's, and it was actually kinda cool. Cool for Rolla. Saw a bunch of people that I hadn't seen since high school, many of them suddenly so fat that I hardly recognized them, but a few others that hadn't changed one bit.

Dustin Woody is now in a band with Eddie Weldon, the mad guitarist who used to wash dishes with me at Sirloin Stockade. I remember that sometimes after work we'd go over to his house (if you could call it that even--a few piles of trash and clothes and a mattress in the corner) and he would sit on the floor and jam for me, making Stevie Ray Vaughan faces of musical torture. The next day I'd just tell the rents that it took extra long to close.

Saw Hilary Miles, the girl I had a crush on for like five years in elementary and middle school. She was always in my homeroom, each year for five years, and I took this for a sign that it was meant to be. Now she's big. And I'm mean. For saying that she's big, that is.

Saw Chris Roberts. He is an arm wrestling champ supposedly, talks in a hick drawl and smokes cowboy killers. I smoked a cowboy killer with him. It's the taste that kills man, I don't see how people do it. But anyway he was cool and gave me the lowdown on the Rolla scene.

On different nights we also hit All Stars, the sports bar that is now in the old Uptown theater, and the grotto. Hung out a lot with Bri and Jeff, some with Turco, Daria, Suzannah, saw Uriah and Sarena. Played some Axis & Allies with Charles & Bri. So basically a bunch of random people all coping, as best they could and in their own ways, with the fact that they were in Rolla Missouri. Rolla is a sort of common enemy that people our age can unite against.

echoes of racism

Well this Saturday Jake & I went out party seeking. We ended up at Claremont apts. at 3 am, like we've done before, just walked around until we saw something promising through a window and invited ourselves in, pretending to be looking for a dude named John or whatever it took. Finally we found a prospect. The guy gave us a hard time at the door but once we went in we found, weirdly, that it was the same place we'd gotten into last time, when Jake told some beligerent dude he liked his haircut so we could slip out the door.

Here there was a really drunk guy who attempted the worst handspring I've ever seen, and knocked a big chunk of trim off one of the doorways. Jake got into one of those long discussions about mutual acquaintances that you can only have in your hometown. Then the testosterone levels got too high for us and we left.

Ironically, as we were arriving at the next party a gang fight seemed on the verge of breaking out. The friendly (to us) guy on the porch started yelling stuff at a bunch of figures across the street, who massed and walked over all 5 of them. Jake and I wanting nothing to do with this ducked inside to tell the guy's friends. When we went back out there, it was all handshakes and joking...apparently the 5 turned out to be hispanic. The guy on the porch as we later found out was 18 and about to enter Marine bootcamp. He says later, "I'm going out there to defend good Americans like Jake and Alan here," gesturing at us, "not those kind of guys out there who don't appreciate it..." He made it abundantly clear that "those kind of guys" meant anyone black or acting black.

And yet here's the guy himself bagged out with backwards cap. "I used to try to be black," he confided in us and you could only think "used to?" It was kind of fascinating, this simultaneous hatred for and idolizing of black culture that existed in the guy, who was probably the biggest racist I've met in a long time. He almost seemed conjured up to disprove a statement I'd made earlier that evening to Jake: that with each successive generation the echo of racism gets fainter until with ours, it's almost too faint to hear, we just don't care about it anymore, it's a non-issue. Well okay I am full of crap and generalizations, always have been.

After hanging out for a while we went to Hi-way Diner, where we lit an enormous fire in our ash tray that would gobble up the sparking packets of creamer that we fed it. That was really dumb and the whole place smelled like smoke afterwards. But it was 6:30 am and we are young and live dangerously, besides.

inflatable polar bear disease

It has apparently become okay to put a 6 foot tall inflatable polar bear in your yard to celebrate Christmas, as our neighbors did even before Thanksgiving. It's one of those cases that in Missouri would blossom into full-blown lawn gnome disease: the lights are all out, and there's also a giant Santa Claus figure backing him up. Anyway the spread eagle inflatable polar bear rocking pelvically in the wind was too hard to resist; we spotted a six foot long blowup red chili pepper in a Mexican restaurant we go to on Thursdays. The owner was nice enough to dust it off and donate it, free of charge, to the cause. The pictures unfortunately didn't turn out or you'd laugh as hard as we did.

the wasabi eating contest

Frisbee team co-captain Matt and his outrageous British accent are leaving Lincoln for good in less than a week, so Saturday we threw a surprise party for him at Lincoln's only sushi bar. As we waited in the back behind folding Japanese screens I came up with a great prank. I poured soy sauce into a wine glass--lots of people were drinking wine--and told people I was going to get Andy to drink it. Andy's a freshman punk (and hence underage) who of all people deserves to be had the most. No one believed I could pull it off, and I was going to wait for the right moment to spring it on him, so they forgot.

But about two hours later with a beer in one hand I casually handed him the glass and asked if he wanted to drink the rest of my wine. Without even smelling it--we figured you could smell the salt from about 3 feet away--he took a big gulp, all eyes on him. He was drinking water for the rest of the night.

Later I challenged Craig (Mark's youngest brother) to a wasabi eating contest. The game as I imagined it is like chicken, you keep matching your opponent in quantity at each stage until someone backs down. Now I don't know if you've ever had wasabi: it's like taking a flamethrower to your sinuses.

We started with about twice this much on a cucumber roll, and both of us made it through tearless. The second round was three times as much and as I stared Craig down, laughing as it started to kick in for me, his face and eyeballs turned red, tears welled up, and he gagged. I thought he was going to puke but he made it through and then conceded; he'd had enough. But to beat him I had to show that I could eat more. We rounded up all the rest of the wasabi on both trays--it dwarfed the roll, there was more wasabi than roll, even the owner of the restaurant conceded that it was a ridiculous amount. The crowd counted to three and then I was in a world of hurt for about fifteen seconds.

I didn't make any attempt at all to keep a poker face on, I just tried to remain standing. My face must have been all screwed up like an evil wry tribal mask. Like Craig I almost tossed the cookies, and when I finally got it down and looked around I felt weak in the knees, and my hands were shaking. Someone took pictures and I will try to post them.

Well this was just the launching pad for the evening. I tied a balloon to Matt's collar that said "Good-bye" (might as well have said "One night stand?" we joked) and we all trooped off to another bar. When the bars finally turned us out on the street, the balloon suddenly broke free and off it went into the night sky, all of us shivering and waving to it in the cold.

So then we went up to Matt's apartment which is on the eleventh floor of a downtown apartment building, and commands a great view of Lincoln. If you can call a view of Lincoln Nebraska "great," that is. For this reason the random group of intellectuals who followed us from the bar got to talking about Lincoln, the sort of way I used to think about Munich when I would climb the belltower for $1.50 and look down on it, immense but somehow vulnerable to analysis.

One guy with bulging eyes and fish-lips covering bunny teeth kept telling us "this town needs to be rocked," and had some big plan to wreak Merry Pranksters mischief among all the straights and stiffs. That someone would actually try to change this place & people was an idea I'd never even considered before. Since the day I saw Lincoln as it is, it's seemed hopeless & I've known I would leave, never to come back again.

There was another weird guy up there who looked like a cross between Michael Jackson and Milli Vanilla, with a leather jacket and mop-hanging hair, who seemed content with the fact that he was here, working in the library and trying to make it big as a guitar player. I found him super annoying.

I also saw a guy who used to live at 12th and D earlier in the semester--one of my favorite hangouts, not as good as Joe's house parties back in the day but still strange & good--even though I didn't recognize him at first. He told me that house has been a non-stop party for about 30 years, and has been the birthplace of quite a few bands; it would be interesting to read the history of that house I think.

Anyway as things were winding down my friend V got into conversation with a skinny but fierce-faced guy hugging a vodka bottle about an old friend of hers, a travel agent who used to be a normal dude but now has apparently gone nuts on acid in Albuquerque. What a wild world we live in--I tend to forget that.

greenland

I am trying to persuade my roommate to become king of Greenland. He is a forceful enough guy, a leader type, and besides is mostly Danish, which is good because Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Since 1979 it has been self-governing though...the door is wide open. Greenland is lonesome for its hero.

Besides there are only 59,000 people in Greenland. This is about a quarter of Lincoln's population. With a little determination, hard work, and some hobnobbing with the Inuits it shouldn't be hard to convince 30,000 people he is the man for the job. Then just think of it: a frozen wasteland over 3 times the size of Texas at your command!

spiderwebs

Today was a beautiful day esp. for November Nebraska. This is just the cat playing with the mouse before it kills and eats it, I guess, patting it around a little. (Somewhere I heard that most mice die of a heart attack before they're ever eaten.)

Anyway snow is on the way this weekend. But today a golden late fall day, we played frisbee behind Kauffman on the notorious hump that used to be Bancroft. The gravesite of my first ever college class. The sun was glinting off the grass and I noticed a million little spiderweb gossamers in the grass of the hill. If you looked close, you could see more floating down out of the sky, and I thought, have they always been falling and I never noticed? Were I to sleep standing for a year would I awake buried to the neck in them, my punishment for never noticing before?

dave's brother

A very sad thing happened a few weeks ago. The little brother of Dave, our frisbee team captain, died in Iraq when the truck he was riding in ran over a landmine. You can read a little bit about Jamie in this Daily Nebraskan story.

Only a few weeks earlier I met Jamie at a party. Dave had been telling us all for about a month that his brother was going to come home, and since he had turned 21 while in Iraq, they were going to celebrate hard. A real homecoming. From the way he talked about him you could tell Dave loved him like an older brother should, I heard all about him on those long frisbee trips. When I finally met him at the party somebody yelled a congratulatory "Hey, he's back from Iraq" and Jamie just had this look on his face like he wanted to forget that, didn't say a word but took his silent beer to another room. Jake saw this of course keen observer of people that he can be sometimes, told me later that night as we talked of politics and war--we stayed up till 6 am talking I recall--that that look was the first time the war had become real for him.

When I heard the news it was not war but death that suddenly became real for me. Previously it had never pierced my sphere of existence, I have been more fortunate than most in that, I guess. Admittedly, it's still remote, but I see the effect on Dave who's my friend. And the night I heard I dreamt of my own little brother. If you're reading this I love ya bro and I'll see you at home for Thanksgiving.

the harvest moon ultimate tourney

A weekend of ultimate in Arkansas and now I'm exhausted, and sick. We drove the vanagon all the way down there and got lost in the backwoods of Oklahoma. We weren't even supposed to be in Oklahoma, what happened is that I missed an exit and ended up heading onto the turnpike, which as you know only lets you off at 20 mile or so intervals. I was going to retrace our steps until my navigator (a non-American) thought it would be more exciting to try to get there via thin red lines instead of the thick blue ones. Well coming from Missouri I should have known better.

Anyway it rained torrentially, one of my wipers broke and then both when Dave & I stopped to try to fix them. I jimmied them together with hair band ties but from then on they did nothing. I could hardly see ten feet ahead half the time. Sheets of rain rendered everything blurry, and I hunched over the wheel to get as close to the sight of the white line as I could. Darkness swallowed us, fog attacked from outside and inside, collecting on the inside of the windshield. Defroster could not keep up and I resorted to sleeving it periodically. There was a terrible feeling of approximation in the way I was driving--an ambiguity about whether or not I was on the road that I almost couldn't bear. And it hit me, this is it, this is your life right now.

We passed through one small town after another and sometimes had to turn in random places to keep on the same road. Once we discovered we had been going south for thirty miles when we thought we were going east. Something I can't even mention here happened in a small Arkansas town ten miles from Fayetteville--hilarious story now actually--I can tell you in person if you remember to ask. Finally we got there at 4:00 in the morning, 3 hours later than we should have, and had to get up at 7:00 for the tournament.

It was a Halloween tournament and most teams played in costume. We went as Braveheart i.e. kilts and blue facepaint which Mommer sent me, ran downfield on the pulls yelling "Freedom!" at the top of our voices and a lot of other silly stuff. We went 3-1 on the day. The third game was super intense like nothing I've ever been a part of before, a couple moments were just pure animal.

That night of course there was the customary enormous house party. Saw some wild costumes: a girl in a full-size Mr. Potato Head with big velcro face parts, a super drunk guy dressed as a present with the label "To: Women, From: God," and a dude whose upper torso was an extended rectangular box over which a plaid shirt was stretched. I'm not sure how he could see in that. For some reason I laughed until I almost cried every time I saw this, it just made no sense.

We saved this party twice. The first time, they ran out of keg cups, and we had snagged some earlier and brought them along. Later when things were dying down we replaced the crummy angry rap which no one was into with the Blue Album--a sure bet with any group of geeks, and ultimate players are mostly geeks. Immediately people started coming in, singing along. By track 5 the first people were dancing but then angry rap was demanded again. Angry rap which no one there really enjoyed as music, but Americans continue to think is the only kind of music you can dance to. Well they got their booty pretense in after that and chicks were dancing on tables. Whatever. How come you weren't dancing to it before hmmm?

The second day I was sicker and we lost to a team of Oompah-loompahs, but oh well, that's the best UNL has ever done at that tourney. Got back to Lincoln at 1:00 in the morning and then the fun continued, I had to hit the books for a history test that same morning. Ug. Test went okay, but riding to campus in a cold rain was awful, like breathing in flames of pneumonia.

7 stitches

...above my right eye. I look like a piecemeal Frankenstein just in time for Halloween. I would post a picture but I look awful, since I have a black eye too. Happened at Frisbee practice Tuesday night. I was leaning out to make a block and caught the back of the guy's hand right in my eye, started bleeding a lot, confusedly I jogged in cleats over to a dorm to find a health aide. Called Drew and he took me in for stitches.

I had so much homework to do that night, and in the confusion I couldn't find my cellphone anymore, but I was trying not to think about these things. When I got home I slumped down, bummed, on the couch.

Then suddenly my ass started buzzing. It was Drew calling me on my cellphone, which was underneath a couch pillow. I was overjoyed. I still had tons of homework left, though, and this kept me up until 5:00 am.

On the way to class in the morning, tired as all get out, my bike had a violent blowout, so I had to march straight back with it on my shoulders. I drove my van (which of course I have no parking permit for, since I live off campus) to class and was late. When I finally got a break between two classes I ran out there to plug the meter again but they had already ticketed me twice.

However, we got our tests back in Real Analysis, a grad level class and probably the hardest I'm taking right now. I am one of 5 undergrads and the rest, 20 or so, are grad students. The prof announced that there were 2 perfect papers. And I won the lottery.

A lot of ups and downs man, hard to believe all this stuff happened over one 24 hour period.

yakkety-yakking

Now I don't want to mislead you, the pastoral scene I just described does not mean my fall break was the same. Mostly I wasted the break hanging out way too late and then trying to recover the next day. For instance, Saturday night Jake & I went from bar to party to another party to Highway Diner finally and I got home at 5:30 in the morning.

We got this idea that we would take my keyboard and set it up in the basement of the new bohemian house party place. It turned out well, it was cozy & dark and people lounged around while a strobe light kept time, eerie in fact, I played Radiohead and people dug that and talked. Then Jake took over and played for a while. I talked to some dude about my number 7 nightmare and he handed over this little book in which he had scribbled arrangements of circles nested in regular polygons, talking importantly and ridiculously about how the number 7 was actually special because only 7 circles came together in that particular way, harmony and light. Blah blah.

Jake wound down and people were leaving, and then this guy says he can play piano too, real modestly. Jake later told me he knew exactly what was coming next. So the guy sits down and turns out to be a professional lounge lizard, literally, played blues and jazz at restaurants, and was incredibly good. I was afraid my keyboard would never let me touch her again. Finally Jake, insanely jealous, asked for a lesson from the dude.

We packed up though, Jake & I & a frisbee friend we picked up at an earlier party, and headed to Highway Diner, where I ordered french toast and got it special-made by the large personality of a chick behind the counter. Along with Duffy's and its famous homeless guy Elvis act this is one of the truly authentic places in Lincoln, one of the places I would take a Lincoln visitor to.

Anyway Sunday night Drew, Jaimster, Jake & I hit the casinos in Omaha. Except for Jaimster (the DealSeeker) we all lost money. Jake was going to lose the most on the night since within a half hour of getting there he had lost $70 on roulette, betting on black with a friend of his. But at the very end he grew his remaining $10 to $20 through blackjack, then put it all down on roulette as we were going out despite our attempts to restrain him. Well he won on black this time and we were all laughing at his bravado.

On the way back he had us in stitches with his overexcited stories of freshman year. Back at the apartment Jake & I ended up talking and yakkety-yakking until 6 in the morning about relationships, abortion, morals, and then when we woke up about politics, war, and America until about 3 in the afternoon.

a claude lorrain

Just got back from picking up the old Probe from my uncle in Ames, the one I wrecked in the Arby's parking lot the first time I tried to drive a stick. Well I got it back to Lincoln okay. My uncle was very cool about it, couldn't sell the thing for more than a pittance so he decided to give it to me, and I'm grateful: kung-fu, the legend continues. The vanagon will be phased out over the next month, at the end of which I return it to the rents.

Driving back from Ames in the late afternoon was nice. Late afternoon is definitely my favorite time of the day, when the sunlight goes orange and the shadows get long, and the haystacks so to speak look the best. The landscape between Ames and Lincoln was just like a Claude Lorrain: trees in silver tensile detail, rounded hills with cornrows, everything ordered, geometric. It is corn-harvesting season right now. Combines stirred up giant billows of dust which trailed off over the interstate. Dust-moats floated, frozen in the act by a late sun.

Really lonesome travel is about the best thing you can do for your brain. Good thoughts always pay a visit.

think of the number 7

Tossing and turning last night I thought I was going crazy, crazy just like Kerouac's nervous breakdown at Big Sur, my mind kept jumping from thing to thing & I couldn't stop it, all were ridiculous things to think about at 4:45 am. I have never experienced anything like it and hope I never will again. Had a convincing sense of not actually existing, but the terrible thoughts kept coming & coming, from somewhere, not me, because "me" didn't exist. To keep myself sane I heard my voice start repeating, "Just think of the number 7. The number 7."

Clearly, when the thought of the number 7 is the only thing keeping you sane, you're not.

your typical unl student

So there was a Design Studio celebration today & someone thought it would be funny to order a root beer keg from Mum's Liquor. Came complete with tap and ice in a big red Budweiser trashcan. To this someone else added a beer bong, and sure enough wouldn't you know it we ended up behind Kauffman taking bong hits on the sidewalk. Some typical UNL student walks up, bewildered at first, asks if we have a permit to do this or what? Sure, we say, and offer him a bong hit, and straight off with a "heck I don't care" he agrees to. But he realized soon enough what it was & left without finishing.

blacklight jackson pollock

A funny night driving around in the vanagon with Jake, Holt, Andrew, the Jaimster, and some other random people we picked up, going to the mall in its closing 20 minutes to pick up a hip flask for Andrew & Jamie (who thought about getting it monogrammed), hitting bars, and then off to a house party.

After parking the vanagon downtown we took a bike taxi up to "The Bar." These things are only meant for two people abreast but we crammed five in there. The chick pulling us was pretty cool about it; she worked hard but we gave her a big tip. "The Bar" was quiet outside on the veranda; we fled when this one latch-on chick we know showed up.

At Iggy's they were giving out little glow bracelets. One broke, and the fluorescent goo started leaking out, so I took the end of it like a paintbrush and started slinging it on the bar floor, making a blacklight Jackson Pollock.

At Bodega's Jake stuck a Heineken label on his forehead and we went up talking to girls as if it wasn't there. If they mentioned it we would just give them confused looks, ask "What are you talking about?"

We hit up Jimmy John's for day-old bread, which was a mere 45 cents per loaf, and good. On the way Jake jumped into pretty much every bush on O Street. He also started going up to groups of chicks and telling them it was my 21st birthday. I played along and got kisses from 8 different girls (on the cheek, okay) out of it.

Driving to the party we stopped along the way and threw open the van doors to people on O Street, tryna get chicks to hop in. "How stupid do we look?" was the general response to this.

The party was pretty good. Jake and I took turns playing the crappiest piano I have ever run across, half the lower notes (the important ones) were one-time usage only. I got a 9th kiss on the cheek for playing some Coldplay for a bohemian chick.

At 3:30 in the morning as Jake was jamming out in a cowboy hat this weird blond Beck-looking kid with lambchops came and started freeflowing to it. He was decent. They synched up a couple times, but then Jake realized he could mess with him and started playing louder and faster, and the guy started talking louder and faster until he was screaming nonsense and then left. Jake finished the night with his Troll Song which had me in tears I was laughing so hard.

the landshark

This weekend went to an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Fort Collins, Colorado. We were almost all rookies--so was everyone else, at least they were supposed to be, but it turned out about half of them had played on national caliber Ultimate teams. So we got our butts kicked. Except for Wyoming, we beat Wyoming, woo.

We stayed at an ex-UNL player's house in nearby small town Wellington. From there it was a walk of about 5 blocks down to the T-Bar Inn. A local bar peopled with rustics and farm implements on the wall and a jukebox with nothing more recent than 1980 in it. I decided to hit on this punk-looking chick named Rachel--just for practice, you know--and she got so into it that I started to get scared. She was 23 (she said), had already been married 3 years and then divorced (aah!), came to the T-Bar every weekend (uh-oh), and when she drug me out to the dance floor to the mellow twangs of modern country pop she started booty-dancing, badly. It was ridiculous; I didn't know what to do. So I just kinda stood there and hoped she would get the message and stop.

I don't remember how but I eventually escaped that situation...in the end she forced me to take her phone number. Definite parallels between the whole thing and that scene in Swingers where Vince Vaughan walks up to that cigar-smoking girl. Only I couldn't tear my cellphone in half afterwards.

Ultimate people constitute a strange subculture. It is a sport which virtually no one watches except those who play it. Most people confuse it with disc golf, and take us for a bunch of stoners, but in fact it is intense and extremely competitive at these tournaments. But among ultimate players there's a lot of cameraderie off the field. We went to a big party thrown by one of the CSU guys, there were about 150 people there, doing boat races in the back yard and making such a commotion that of course the cops came and busted it.

At these parties there are many strange rituals, most of which I have yet to witness. They chug an Ultimate disc sometimes, that's about 40-60 oz, or about 4 beers. There's also this thing called the landshark. Someone strips naked, pinches an disc upright between their butt cheeks, and then they get carried around by teammates like a coffin and its pallbearers.

Well, it was a cool weekend, even though my face got sunburned so bad it is now peeling off in brown strips, and it set me back on homework. We got back to Lincoln at 1:30 am Monday morning. I had an English paper due that morning as well as a test in the next class. So as things turned out I went through the day on 1 hr of sleep. Yeah that sucked. But Monday night I got--get this--16 hours of sleep. Have recovered now but honestly I dunno if I can keep this sorta stuff up.

the foot reflexologist

I wanna know who the heck claims to be a "foot reflexologist" and posts comments in broken English about sour feet on entries over 1 year ago.

a tired organ grinder

The late afternoon sun today was a glowering dull yellow evil eye peering out of ragged shreds of torn hair clouds. Walking into the grocery store I looked up at a giant American flag flapping in the wind, and stopped, because its flapping seemed to go into slow motion, then the curling edges would speed up again, like my Time was a tired organ-grinder who couldn't keep a steady beat anymore.

Two nights ago I dreamt my reality was at the end of a long, dark, cork tube. The light at the end was about the size of a quarter. I could barely make out a smiling female face and blonde hair, and as I watched I started to move closer to the end of the tube. But when I made it to the end I saw that the face was really laughing demonically with sharp pointed teeth.

the belinda s. crane memorial convex mirror

Concocted a little story today as I biked to campus that had me chuckling to myself. It's about the convex mirror that presides over the gated exit to some marginalized administration building's parking lot. You see, as everyone in the department knew, this entrance was always particularly dangerous. But nothing was done about it until the day Belinda S. Crane, a woman with a chronic disorder in her neck vertebrae that prevented her from looking too far to the left or right, got her flashy little sports car run over by a cement truck. To those that still honor her memory, the mirror erected subsequently is known as the "Belinda S. Crane Memorial Convex Mirror."

squeezing out the slave

Chekhov about himself: "Write a story, do, about a young man, the son of a serf, a former grocery boy, a choir singer, a high school pupil and university student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss the hands of priests, to truckle to the ideas of others--a young man who expressed thanks for every piece of bread, who was whipped many times, who went without galoshes to do his tutoring, who used his fists, tortured animals, was fond of dining with rich relatives, was a hypocrite in his dealings with God and man, needlessly, solely out of a realization of his own insignificance--write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how, on awaking one fine morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a slave but that of a real human being."

my dean moriarty

A crazy time with Jake last night. Jake was my roommate from freshman year and is the closest thing I have to Sal Paradise's Dean Moriarty. We went to bars and ended up at the Spigot, where I started talking to this very cute blonde girl named Emily, the cutest girl in the bar and there alone (amazing). She turned out to be real cool & listened to the same kind of music I do i.e. metal & alternative. She's in security at the Lincoln Airport, and told us some funny stories about the kind of things she's found in people's suitcases, and how embarassed they somtimes get. According to her businesswomen carried the worst stuff.

She was stranded so Jake & I gave her a ride home in the vanagon. Jake started freestyle walking on the way to the parking garage, and then suddenly he was doing stuntman somersaults into the shrubbery. This stopped when he somersaulted into a rose bush.

Well anyway on the way back Emily saw her ex of about 2 weeks, and he passed by without hardly saying anything, so she was all upset & pissed at the male race. Jake, who broke up with his serious girlfriend about a month ago, was pissed at the female race. So the net result was that they started beating the crap out of each other brother-and-sister-like, and kept this up the entire ride back to her apartment, ricocheting around the back of the van and rocking the thing. I saw her punch him in the face a couple times and there was nothing friendly about it.

We said goodbye to Emily and moved on. We went to his sister's apt., but didn't know the number. Standing outside Jake told me about a police scene that was all over the local news that happened right on that very spot, they captured an escapee from the pen who was dumb enough to try to buy a gun off two dudes, and tell them he was the guy who had just escaped from prison. When he walked to the gas station to get a copy of yesterday's paper with his picture all over it, to prove it, they called the cops. How dumb can you be good grief.

Ended up at Claremont apts. where we searched for apt. 6 but ended up walking into another party. Bunch of dudes and a couple girls sitting around listening to Frank Sinatra. Ten posters in the living room, all black-and-white. Some drunk guy with a John Deere hat. Kind of a fratmosphere minus the frat. When we tried to leave this belligerent dude yelled at us that we had to stay. Jake walked up to him, shook his hand and said "that's the best haircut I've ever seen man," and with that we left.

We returned to another party we had passed earlier. Jake and I got into a big discussion that ultimately turned religious, so there we were at 5 am in the morning groping with big unsolvable questions on these people's porch.

Jake was practically falling asleep standing up when we got into the van and I drove him home. I kept having to shake him awake to get directions out of him, which were some of them complete dream state nonsense. But we got there okay, and then he had to smuggle me into his house so I could relieve myself, careful not to be seen by his (understandably) cranky mother who had to let him in the front door. I got home at 6 am as Drew & the Minnesota mountain bike team were rousing themselves from the floor for today's bike race.

screaming in disgust

Well I had one of the most disgusting experiences ever this morning. So I'll tell you about it. I woke up and had an English paper due in 2 hrs; no prob, only 1 page single-spaced and I'd already thought about what I wanted to say. Then the toilet downstairs decides to overflow. And it wasn't just toiletwater. So here I am literally screaming in disgust trying to figure out what to do, thinking towels? do we have any old towels? no, no old towels, no paper towels, i'm not gonna get this paper done in time, ah! So I drive like a maniac down to Walgreen's, buy 6 rolls of paper towels, rush back and get the problem under control. Then I'm supposed to sit down and write a nice paper about a Flannery O'Connor story.

Well sure enough I wrote a paper it but I was 15 min. late to class. After class I apologized to my prof. He said it was okay. By way of excuse I told him it had something to do with a "bad toilet situation."

"Please," he says, "don't tell me about it."

So I decided to tell you about it. Okay?

no initiative will go unpunished

You know you're absent-minded when...you almost walk out the door on the night of Sept. 11th with a hammer and sickle t-shirt, red on a black background, accidentally. I may not be Captain America but I know when I've gone too far.

help the stoner eat nachos

Sunday went and watched Drew as he raced 94 miles in 4 hrs, a total of 8 times around Branched Oak lake. Up until lap 6 or so he was in the lead group of 4 dudes way off the front. But the other 3 dudes were teammates and he had to fight off constant attacks from them. Eventually his legs cramped up so bad that he couldn't move them, and fell off the back, but still placed well in the end. When he got off his bike he was just about delirious: covered with salt from 4 hrs of sweating, could hardly walk, unable to control emotions. But he came to and I could tell he felt an immense sense of accomplishment after racing his hardest and longest race yet. In a way I was jealous.

I just hung out all day in the sun, which was about all I could manage after pulling an all-nighter. Oh and I helped the Jaimster (Andrew's gf) make little colored contact-papered cards for a game (she's a teacher). All were food pictures until I decided to throw a random smirking dude with sideburns in there--he ended up looking like a stoner. "These are nachos, kids, help the stoner eat nachos."

biker dude and his biker chick

The Drew & I were at Pipe Dreams--a head shop--last night looking for house decs etc. A biker dude in leather and bandanna was in there with his biker chick, also in a leather. He bought some smoking accessory or another & asked the owner if they could go out back and "do what they came to do," only the owner misunderstood you see, there being an adult novelty store somewhere in the back of the store also. So the owner says "Yeah, pretty much anything goes, except there are some rules of decorum round here..."

Anyway we saw these two later in the parking lot. The biker dude was all friendly and curious at this point, since we had inquired inside about getting a real Middle-Eastern hookah and sheeshah to smoke. He wanted to know what "sheeshah" was. We explained that it just made you more alert, kinda like drinking a coupla cups of coffee, since it was just flavored tobacco. "Aw, that wouldn't wake me up man," says the biker dude, "when I wanna do that I jest get in a fast car."

Well he has a point here. When I get up and exercise I don't need coffee in the morning, coffee's kind of the sedentary man's form of alertness, but really not a very good substitute at that. Endorphines man--the natural stimulants are definitely the best ones.

first house party

Had our break-in-the-house party last night, wasn't the greatest ever but not bad for a first one I guess, best part was at the end when we put on The Blue Album--at this point it was just me & the guys, and an amused Jamie (Andrew's cool & cute gf) watching on--and we sang and air-guitared it to it's happy conclusion.

radiohead, riverboat casino goofballing

Sunday Drewster & I drove for 7 hrs down to St. Louis to see Radiohead in concert. As we pulled up to Riverport Amphitheater after dark Radiohead had just come on stage, and we heard 2+2=5 booming from over the hill across the parking lot. Eventually we broke into a run.

The setup was amazing. The stage with seating was surrounded by a giant hill; most of the crowd was standing in the grass, listening to the music amped out of a second set of hanging speakers and watching giant video screens that they tuned to Thom and the gang. Behind the stage was a big flashing light board that somehow exactly captured the color and feel of each song: "Myxamatosis" was a violent heaving green, "Pyramid Song" a shimmering blue, "Paranoid Android" burst into angry red sparks in the middle. The stage was littered with all kinds of instruments which the band members moved about at random, demonstrating that yes they could play every one, Ed playing xylophone on "No surprises" and drums on "There, There," and of course Thom shuffling back and forth between various guitars and various keyboard instruments, or sometimes just singing and spinning around on stage into his own little thing. They tried to play everything for us but just ran out of time, after two encores of about 4 songs each they turned in. I sang and danced and practically cried several times the music was so achingly good, esp. Thom's voice smooth & clear on stuff like "Sail to the Moon."

They weren't afraid to change things either; Ed had some idea that he kept returning to in which he chopped through otherwise smooth passages, as if trying it out for the first time. I liked that. Thom also did this super lovable little dance after setting up the keyboard for Idioteque, sitting there on the bench swinging his arms back and forth for a while in his own little world.

Well as this was our first Radiohead concert we were both completely blown away. I mean, midway through the concert, I realized that no other band in circulation right now can even come close to this...with six awesome albums spanning the whole musical spectrum under their belts there's just no hope for anyone else. And what a show they put on, man oh man.

Still it seemed a little strange to drive 14 hours for 2 hours of enjoyment so Drew & I went to a riverboat casino afterwards. This was just plain old goofball funny. We walk in there with our casino id cards trailing behind us on the floor on stretchy little snap-on cords (got these from bored tellers at the front, whom we flirted with & teased) and each turned a whopping $10 into one-dollar chips. We walked around with our cheap well drinks looking for a blackjack table with a minimum $1 bid but the lowest they went was $5, so feeling like scummy cheapskates we went upstairs and frittered it away on blackjack machines, whom we accused of leading us on to get us to spend more, and argued with, until we lost it all & left goofily.

north by northwest: prelude

Geez there is just too much to write now it's overwhelming. Suffice to say I am back in Lincoln in new apt. getting settled in. When I find the time--tomorrow?--I will sketch out my trip to the Northwest and the subsequent long drive back home from Phoenix to Lincoln, which gave me lotsa time to reflect on & mull over recent experiences. Travel is always good for this...it was about a year ago, I guess, that I went to Vienna & had some of my best life-thoughts. Same thing happened on this trip. So stay tuned.

phoenix to lincoln

Upon my return to Phoenix the good times were definitely over for a while: I had a two-day hellish van trip without music or air conditioning back to Lincoln staring me in the face. My plane got in at midnight, and I had already moved out of my summer hotel, so I just took the van out to an empty field in Mesa & laid out my sleeping bag on top and slept in the wild. The sunrise woke me up so I only got 5 hours for the second night in a row--a problem later that day when, after hours of boring driving, I had to stop and take naps at truck stops or fall asleep at the wheel. Before I left I had to gas up, which sucked because the gas was $2.50 a gallon due to the valley-wide gas shortage brought on by several major gas line ruptures.

Anyway the part of the trip I was looking forward to the least was the drive through Kansas at night. The Kansas night turned out to be the tenderest & kindest however, I could see all the stars even from the interstate, and all my music (on the 2nd day I figured out how to get my mp3 cd player to work) suddenly started making sense. Jack Johnson floored me; I realized the songs came in pairs that were related thematically. I also realized that Blonde Redhead must be really into Ayn Rand. And other similar sudden truths came to me. Maybe by this point in the trip I was starting to lose it a little. Probably I was--when I stopped for gas in small town Kansas I took out my pen and gave the "don't steal gas" police officer picture a little mustache, and added, "Yeah, we bombed people so you could waste this stuff!" underneath him.

Eventually I arrived safe (if not sound) at the doorstep of my new apt. with Drew in the western night.

seattle

Seattle was a blast. By day Jonas & I lived the high life by dining out in expensive Redmond places, an Italian place with a huge wine list, an Asian restaurant where we ate a banana ice cream, a Japanese all-you-can-eat sushi buffet where Jonas ate grey murky crab innards until a waitress showed him how to crack the legs open proper. It was at this place that Jonas overdid the wasabi sauce: suddenly, his eyes got huge & frantic, and he started shaking all over like a volcano about to erupt, groping wildly for his ice water. I practically cried I was laughing so hard at the sight of poor Jonas.

By night we partied at expensive Seattle clubs, twice at a place called the Fenix Underground. Cover was $12 and a beer started at $5, steep. It was a split level deal; a live band played at ground level & you could watch them from a loft level. Below, in the dark underground level, there were two more weirdly glowing bars and a dance floor that was usually packed too close for comfort. One night the band did a cover of Tool's "Stinkfist" which was pretty amazing; the lead singer even sung through a megaphone on the verses, which is I guess how Maynard got it to sound that way.

Later that same night on the advice of some random dude we went to a club called the Standard, which had a dimly lit black & red fan de siecle feel about it. There was no one there except for the DJ, some people who knew the DJ, and a few stragglers like Jonas and myself. Despite this we got searched for weapons by security at the door. But later we started talking to the security guys, and they turned out to be okay, ran a record store together. By the end I had talked to everyone in the place. Jonas and I then drove out to the beach and watched the sun rise over the Seattle skyline, Jonas making me stop like every quarter mile 'cause he thought the view was getting better. The sunrise was indeed amazing as we crossed the sound back over to Redmond, with Mt. Rainier in calm brooding bigness off in the blue distance.

Besides all this we also did a lot of walking around Pike street & poking around in artsy stores & had a big conversation about Kafka as we went down to the docks. One day we hiked up Tiger Mountain in the Washington woods. Then on the last day we went bouldering at the first rock climbing gym in the U.S., where a funny climber dude named Hans talked to us about blind jazz men who played three saxophones simultaneously, and complained about their store inventory software (realizing we were computer guys). We bouldered hard for two hours and I ended up with 8 blisters on my hands.

Finally on the last night I was there Jonas & I had this great talk about America. Jonas's friends always joke that he's the best American they know but it had never occurred to me that *of course* he's the best American, he's a 1st generation immigrant. In fact these always make the best Americans, followed by 2nd gen. immigrants, and so on down the line. By the time you reach the 6th generation--i.e., me--you are a pathetic non-American who has grown up in a comfort zone & whines about the system way too much.

Anyway more to the point, we decided America was a new kind of experiment in which the interaction between people was not force (as in feudal times) or feeling (as in Europe or Asia or anywhere culture, tradition, etc. are emphasized) but a number, a quantified exchange of value for value. As with any good experiment, in order to see if the hypothesis--that this system leads to happiness--is true, you have to prevent other kinds of interactions from interfering. And this leads to America's state of culturelessness. Essentially when you immigrate to America you are asked to leave your own culture at the door; people who fail to do this & instead try to preserve it by forming their own communities are shunned, and are not really allowed to participate in the American experiment.

Because here we're not about the fuzzy interaction of feelings, tradition, society, community, etc. but about the crisp numerical interaction of dollars with other dollars. When these fuzzy interactions exist they are mediated by the dollar on both ends, insulating the people behind them, and this is how we have reached the form of culture we currently boast--pop culture.

Yes this eradication of all non-quantifiable relations with other people does leave something to be desired; that's what I'm really wailing & railing about half the time, the lack of fuzzy feeling interactions. But maybe we can all live without them & be better off for it. Well, that's the experiment, I guess!

oregon

Got a rental car and drove down to see B in Eugene. We picked big Pacific blackberries & went to the Oregon fair, where I tried to win her prizes by throwing baseballs at milk jugs but failed at this. Also failed on a rock climbing challenge in which I could have won back my $5 plus $5 more, all I had to do was follow the blue route, but it turned out to be surprisingly difficult and I fell off near the top when I tried to match hands and slipped. So was not feeling like much of a man after this. But it was all silly & rigged anyway.

Next day we drove out into the Oregon woods & went to a hot springs. There was a huge difference between industrial Eugene air and big pine tree mossy forest air, the first time I've actually noticed the difference, thinking all this time that people who complained about noxious city air were just exaggerating. Sometimes all you could smell was blackberries--what a great smell. The hot springs consisted of 5 different pools going down the hillside, each one a little cooler than the previous, so that when you started sweating you just moved on to the next one. When we finally got out I dumped a bucket of cold clear Oregon creek water over my head & suddenly achieved clarity through this act. Everyone, I decided, needs a bucket of freezing Oregon water dumped on them once in a while.

The third day in Oregon we spent driving up the coastline to Seattle. We stopped at a white beach hemmed in on either side by black volcanic cliffs with sea-carved caves, and a lighthouse overlooking it all. It was a place straight out of a painting. I ran out into the cold Pacific surf--too cold for swimming, B was right about this--and turned around before it got above waist-high. Later we also stopped & had clam chowder at Mo's restaurant, with the sun setting behind us on the docks.

portland

Ha, well here goes. So I flew into Portland from sunny Scottsdale AZ but my glad sunboy smile faded when I got off the light rail and walked to a grocery store: it was a gray day, and a beat guy with a feed & seed hat coughed and wiped a long tenuous spiderweb line of drool off his chin. In fact everyone looked pretty beat. (This though was probably just the area of Portland I was in.) When I got to my scary dirt motel I only left to go eat two personal pan pizzas at the Pizza Hut across the street, and didn't investigate the area further--full of liquor stores & adult shops anyway. But one good thing about poor old beat Portland was their light rail system, *exactly* like a European city in this respect, very cool & efficient & even cheap.

alt people

Went alt house party hopping last night with Nick & Meghan. First place I heard about through two druggie-looking L.A. chicks I met at Casey's, there were three bands that were supposed to play that night, but it ended up getting busted, so we quick jetted to the next alt party and had a better time there anyway I think. Alt people are funny though. The only scene that comes close is a coffee shop...I mean these hipsters you can tell spend every waking microsecond thinking about how to be alt, which primarily comes down to music, but there's thrifty clothes & shaggy haircuts to worry about as well. Every waking second trying to be different!

news from the front

Just took a close look at face in mirror. Music suddenly stopped playing, and there was this face which I examined as if a stranger's. Everything about it suddenly interesting and new as if I was seeing it for the first time. Tiny little unshaven mustache hairs, slight upwards curl at corner of mouth, pores on nose, who are you friend? I hardly knew ye. Unreal. This is when you know with certainty that you have been programming too much and too hard.

Good thing today was my last day at General Dynamics. All told, a crazy last week, with goodbyes and arrangements and errands and my developer tasks swelling up again after a lull. This weekend is the last in Phoenix--a very hip city, I dig you--and I will try to get and post pics of some of the sights I'll miss, along with rock-climbing pictures when I go climbing for the last time Sunday.

Then Monday night I am flying into Portland Oregon and will visit Bianca in Eugene for several days. After that it's up to Redmond to visit Jonas. Then back to Phoenix, drive 1400 miles to Lincoln, move in with Drewsky in our new apt. I am getting all newsy here. Sunday before classes start Drew & I'll be in St. Louis at the Radiohead concert. At some point I'll settle down to my last semester as old greybeard 5th year veteran last semester at UNL.

post-fig newton bathtub napping

Tonight after workout and a pack of fig newtons I fell asleep in the bathtub to the sound of dripping water. Guess I was real tired--it was a 3 dog night weekend since I took off work Friday--dissipation Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights leading to quiet Sunday during which I tried to integrate stuff (preparing for Math GRE), made phone calls, etc. Sunday tho was foreshortened cause of Saturday night when Nick, Meghan and I broke on through to the other side and saw the sun rise.

So today I was going to get a haircut at Great Clips but the woman who took my name down couldn't speak or hear proper English. I think she was semi-retarded, because I enunciated very clearly for her my phone number and she still messed it up, and was almost unintelligible herself through all the slurring. I waited around for a bit until it became apparent I was going to get her as a stylist and then I fled without a word. Mean? Yes, mean, but I didn't feel like donating the next three months' haircut to charity, which was inevitable if she understood my haircutting directions as poorly as the other things I said.

hindsight

Whew so Thursday night: beer & more beer at Casey Moore's, also an Irish car bomb and a Jaeger bomb. Unsuccessful attempts to woo a sarcastic girl with a less cute friend. I decide later that these two are like level 5 in the game, and I a mere level 1 or 2, so I should have steered clear. But you know what they say about hindsight. And about the sight of hinds. Oops that was offcolor. Anyway. They also had an annoying gay friend who kept producing weird items from his backpack. A stethoscope, KY Jelly, a pair of Durashears which he uses to cut a penny in half...scary.

Then it was off to chill at the Oasis Cafe. Here we meet a cool Hispanic dude named Pedro who starts bongo drumming to the music on a glass tabletop. He's wearing lots of rings and they go clackety-clack-clack-clack, and Nick and I are clapping, sometimes on and sometimes off the beat, digging it. Pedro comes over and so do his two friends--tough Hispanic lesbian girls named Laura and Africa--and they share our hookah for a while. They invite us to a party afterwards out of a sense of reciprocity. Very friendly people. We take them up on their offer and it ends up a Hispanic scene, but this not too bad, mostly just talking & singing folk songs in Spanish. By this time it is 3:30 am anyway and so we throw in the towel.

my pimp sensae

I owe it all to the Nickman. He's my bro out here in AZ and I'm gonna miss him, but he is also my pimp sensae. At the beginning of the summer I was in a pathetic couldn't-talk-to-girls kind of state and he made me vow to ask out 5 random girls by the end of the summer. It worked for him. And so now the 30-day Nick cure has worked for me, I am cured of my silly irrational fears and am one easy step away from #5, in fact at this point the problem is not going up and talking to girls but stopping myself from going up and talking to any/every girl.

Have had varying degrees of success & failure but that's not the important part so much. The take-home lessons are that (1) girls are attracted to confidence so by god be confident man and (2) it's not gonna work out with every girl, but you don't know til you try.

hookahs, belly dancers, coffee ground fortune tellers

A crazy night in Tempe. Was going to meet this chick J down at one of the clubs for dancing, but the first place we tried was playing crappy eighties music so we fled. I didn't finish my Heineken--she didn't finish her Fat Tire--if that gives you any indication of how bad it was. We met her Egyptian friend M and M's Egyptian boyfriend visiting from L.A. and headed up to Martini Ranch. Along the way we pick up this big Indian guy at a strip club, where Jenna Jameson was giving out autographs. Chief Broom only with lots of tattoos and much weirder.

Martini Ranch was fun but packed beyond belief, a suffocating affair. We dance for a while & it is fun. Then she gets call from the guy she's seeing (Alan receives a revelation at this point in the evening) and he shows up a tattooed sleazeball. Meanwhile Chief Broom without hardly a word hops in a black limo cab and drives off. He was weird anyway and strictly impossible to make conversation with. I tried. We all 5 of us drive down to the Oasis Cafe (sleazeball getting sleazier and sleazier in backseat with J).

When we walk in it is wild, like walking through a portal into a foreign country. Lots of Arabic types but lots of Americans too, all types in fact. People smoking hookahs everywhere. Outside we sit and smoke a hookah too, wow not bad at all, way smoother than pipe tobacco. We watch a belly dancer inside for a while--there is clapping and happiness on all sides, occasionally an Arab guy jumping out of his seat with loose arms to dance beside her, but she always puts her partner in his place with her fantastic feats of hip isolation.

I drink a Turkish coffee and M--who is very nice, I like her--looks at the grounds and tells me my fortune. I will travel to a foreign country and spend as much time there as I do here. I will lead three totally separate lives, I will marry but I will have no children. My quest for knowledge and experience will be unending.

A very good vibe this Oasis Cafe gives off. At one point I just started up a conversation with another table, met a dude named CJ and another named Samson. Samson was thrown off by my rainbow shirt and asked if I was gay. I explain that no I am just a happy friendly guy and that's what the rainbow stands for. We laugh about his name--I encourage him to tear the temple down--and this sets him off on a Hulk impersonation.

mount sinai part two

The sun was setting and I climbed to the top of a big rock out in the middle of nowhere Tempe, just north of Salt River. The wind roared over me flapping the collar of my shirt and I stood there on my rock singing opera into it. Planes, always the planes coming and going in Phoenix, flew overhead. To the east a strip club emitted its neon blue purple glow amidst orange rooftops. As I stood the sky in the east slowly turned electric blue purple to match, and off to the north thunderbolts from god tortured a distant hill.

kafka in the corner

So I'm outside at Casey Moore's and I catch sight of this guy in the corner reading a book. I go over because I've never seen someone do this at a bar. Turns out he is reading "The Trial" in German, and we start talking in German, he tells me he's sick of it here and is going back to Bavaria permanently. Weird thing is he looks just like Kafka...

alan's style guide for dudes

Alright it's time we had a little talk. Guys, no more striped or plaid shirts, stripes may be okay if they come to an end but the last thing you want is some endless pattern on your torso. Your torso is not endless and you should not want it to appear endless. So stripe only in moderation.

Solid colors though are the best. But definitely stay away from warm colors, ie red orange & yellow are right out. Unless you are my German friend Normen you probably do not have a personality that can pull off a yellow shirt. Orange is pretty tough too. Red can sometimes work but don't make a habit of it. Stick to cool colors and earth tones.

If you are a skinny guy like me for god's sake do not wear baggy shirts. I know your pain, everything is a mumu and usually you're just glad to find something that doesn't swallow you whole, but do yourself a favor, make the extra effort to find tight shirts. Flaunt your skinniness. America is not a skinny place--you should be damn proud that you are a skinny American.

Don't get tapered jeans. Let them flare or bag out a little at the bottom. Tapered jeans will make you look like a pear. If you're skinny even worse you'll look like a pear on stilts.

Guys stop spitting on the sidewalk. I freaking hate this, there is no reason why you can't ingest your own saliva or mucous, there is even less reason why other people should step in it. If you are trying to be tough realize you are sending a mixed message: "I'm tough but I am grossed out by my own spit and won't swallow it."

When you're working out don't check yourself out in the mirror every 5 seconds. Probably you are not any bigger than you were 5 seconds ago. And don't play dress up. Your hair does not need to be perfectly gelled, you do not need designer clothes, to bring the pump. If you combine these things people will assume you want to have sex with yourself. That is not really what you intend I think.

Don't be afraid to dance to music you like. If you're too white & uptight then take liquid measures to fix this. But don't be mister cool I'm just gonna fold my arms and nod my head seriously at the concert. That's not very stylin', that just says you're afraid to let go because of what other people might think. Beating people up in the mosh pit won't bring your dead dog back either. Remember, it should be about the music...if not then maybe you are tone deaf?

Above all be an individual--don't look like clipboard copies your friends. Especially for a guy you're expected to have the courage to look the way you want. If you don't you probably have issues and could possibly be a massive tool (cf. "Carson Daly"), which is the worst thing anyone can be.

san diego

Did the S.D. thing this weekend with other interns. Unfortunately we decided to leave (a 6 hr drive) at 1 am on Saturday morning, so we were all out of it during the day Saturday, everyone taking power naps whenever and wherever, restaurants, cars, the beach, etc. I woke up once on the beach so completely disoriented that I didn't know who the other interns were; I thought they must be my college friends or something.

But wow the beach was nice, started us all thinking about becoming beach bums. My back is now cooked lobster meat. Lotso unusual people on the boardwalk--strange people who just didn't care. Jen laughed on and on about this guy dressed up as Batman who had rollerskates, a g string, and a batman symbol painted on either cheek. ("Beach bum" taking on a whole new meaning...) Apparently he was known around there as "The Flash" and had a regular schedule. Then there was this guy on rollerskates who thought he was a ballet star and skated around doing arabesques and lip-synching to opera. We saw many retarded bikes. Rode a herky jerky little roller coaster that was actually fun. I stopped and played pickup ultimate with some dudes for a while.

Hmm no pictures unless I can beg some off the other people.

the great non-exchange

Oh to discover all the varied forms of ugliness inside girls! Perhaps they equal the ugliness inside of guys in severity, which I never in my wildest dreams thought possible. Mine was a Portrait of an Artist adolescence wherein I realized the shameful ugly desire that is being male but believed in the angelic other sex. Well I was wrong, my own fault of course for not believing in the essential symmetry of things (if nothing else). Just as ugly is the desire to be desired, and without reciprocation.

I once ranted about the economics of relationships. Now I am ranting about the lack of economics in relationships. Go figure. I am saying that it is even uglier when there is value exchanged for nothing--a guy who gets with a girl and then leaves when he should be repaying it with security & affection, or a girl who keeps guys hanging on her just for the affection & security. If there must be an ugly exchange of one for the other then so be it, that's better than getting something for free, the ultimate sin and impossibility.

Here I sit, ranting, hoping for the someday equal and hopefully not also ugly exchange, which I do not as yet know exists.

dueling bongos

Small drum circle tonight on Mill Ave with friend Kent and his friend Ben. Both good drummers, Ben getting into crazy dueling bongos affair with totally wasted existing drum dude. This guy was so drunk that he shrugged off his drum and passed out on the sidewalk at one point. But then he was back up at it again with glazed face and blazing hands. All good drummers in fact, except for a questionable cowboy who made no sense, spoken or rhythmic. I called him the Marlboro man 'cause of his big ol' mustachio and cowboy hat. Less bad vibes directed towards us than with Hans and Mabe, as rhythm is the most primitive and hard to disagree with form of music, pretty much all the passersby seemed to enjoy it. Some guy sat on Kent's clay drum and broke it in half though, ah life, ah life!

the vortex will suck you in

If I got a second chance at life I want to be water. It's like God just got bored and threw in all kinds of cool special effects into water that we will never explain, just to show off. (Or that are very hard to explain at least.) I have to say God gosh I'm real impressed down here and wouldn't mind being water if you could arrange it somehow.

Like check this out. Get in a calm swimming pool. Let your hand stick straight up out of the water, and then smoothly and quickly submerge it without splashing. If you do it right you'll see perfect little vortices spin off. Eventually they will die out but this sometimes takes a while. Beautiful to watch. Now, the question in my mind is whether or not the shape and size (ie the boundary conditions) of the swimming pool affect their lifetime. Perhaps with still enough waters and no boundaries in at least some directions you would get a vortex that just kept spinning. Like the red spot on Jupiter huh? There's something in Chaos about a simulation that discovered the red spot effect.

favorites

Strange guy talking to me when hanging with bongo drum Mabe and guitar Hans. He had a bunch of empty manilla envelopes under his arm. "What are those for?" He explains but I don't get it. This dude spoke some sort of dialect of his own--not at the word level but at the context level. He talked English alright but it no make sense. "You know," he says to me, expecting me to know exactly what is going on in his weird mind, "everyone tries to be better than their favorites. They try to compete with their favorites." I'm going favorites? what favorites? "You know like your favorite artist or writer or guitar player, you try to be better than 'em." Oh. Okay well why didn't you just say that in the first place? But it's just no good his thought patterns are just too different. Here's one the combine musta missed, Chief.

old faithful

Coming home from work Thursday I saw this strange sight. One of the sprinklers along the golf course blew a valve I guess. Between this and the terrible calibration of some of those sprinklers, which sometimes spray right over concrete and get me soaked on my bike, they're not making very good use of water around here. Esp. for a desert region that is going to have serious water problems within the next ten years.

casey moore's

For the first time ever I actually enjoyed a bar last night. The first dude I started talking to was a guitar player, had his own band, an old ex-80s-metal guy who told me a hilarious story about getting his golf clubs stuck up in a tree. Then met a girl from a small Missouri town that even I had never heard of. She turned out to be a defense lawyer for people on death row but she was really nice all the same, you'd never have guessed. Then I met a hebrew hippie girl from Pennsylvania, just coming through on a road trip of the U.S. with some of her buddies, and we got to talking about all kinds of crazy subculture topics. At 21 she was already a career bartender--didn't plan on going to college and was totally cool with that. She kept asking around for KB esp. of guys so I decided she was a weeddigger, a chick who goes after guys for their weed. Finally ended up having one of those drawn-out tongue-in-check discussions with a funny girl who told me her name was Bertha and that she had super powers.

But wow, what a cool place this Casey Moore's is! There wasn't a trace of fratmosphere--I with my new frat-looking hair probably had the most frat appeal--and I actually had a good time there, which I never thought I'd say of a bar.

frat hair

Ahhhhh help! I have frat hair!

gnarled hoodoos

It was a day of pun and hiking Saturday when the interns drove up to Sedona. Here is the Fellowship before 6 of us set out to hike Bear Mountain.

From left to right: Jen, Scott K., Lindsay, Nathaniel, Yours Truly, Scott M., and Ben. Not shown here is Tanya (behind the camera) but we wouldn't wanna leave her out--here she is earning the Jen-given nick of "Miss Attitude" after I turned the camera around on her.

Our travel guide on the expedition was a book written by local hiker Cosmic Ray, who despite his name gives straight advice. According to Cosmic hikers of Bear Mountain should look out for "stunning views of gnarled hoodoos," and advises the reader to "surrender to your imagination." So that's what we did. There were probably more "gnarled hoodoo" jokes than actual hoodoos themselves.

Here's the Scotts standing in front of a particularly gnarled one. (Why, what did you think a hoodoo was, oh beloved but dirty-minded reader?)

Wordplay wasn't confined to the subject of hoodoos, however, and in fact covered a broad range of more and less perverse topics. Among other things we decided that that a Kraft single should be termed a "chee," to denote it from the plural of several Kraft singles, "cheese." Here Ben, the trip's designated joker, has a good laugh during a break.

Along the way we came across quite a few cairns (so many that we stopped cairning, another pun we beat to bloody death). Too many in fact--they were misleading in places. Here is a retardedly large one. Somehow after this picture was taken Scott M. managed to stack 4 more on top, just to insure it really stands the test of time.

There was also some cool flora, like these tinsel flowers.

And check out this raging yucca in bloom.

It was a good 4 hour hike, even though the top was a bit of a letdown. The day was extremely hot and we all got quite a workout. Here we are afterwards (Lindsay's taking this one).

Finally here's some eye candy from some of those stunning views.

delight

Delight is laughing at perfection like a kid. You can't help it. It's me trying to paint in watercolors when I was six and getting frustrated and then Dad sitting down and quietly painting this perfect self-portrait next to me, a little watercolor Dad in a beard and red shirt, and me watching over his shoulder, laughing because he was so good I almost couldn't believe it. Or watching the rock-climber Diane do an overhang climb so smoothly it looks effortless. Or reading about this famous hack wherein two processes, named Robin Hood and Friar Tuck, resurrect each other when one's killed with a "Help, I'm under attack!" and an "I'll save you brave Robin..." from the other, so that, unless you kill them with perfect simultaneity (nearly impossible) they never die. Or watching stick birds hop around and realizing how perfect and silly it all is.

mt. humphreys

Sunday I drove up to Flagstaff and hiked up Mt. Humphreys, Arizona's tallest peak at 12,633 feet. The trail guide I read classified it as a "strenuous" hike but I dismissed this as written by and for the elderly. It was in fact strenuous. Never take these ratings lightly especially in a place like Arizona where average joe six pack is a tanned mountain biker who runs a couple marathons a year.

All told it took 6 hours to hike 9 miles of trail. I was also coming from 1,500 feet above sea level. At about 11,000 I started feeling the difference, and had to stop constantly because of light-headedness. It probably didn't help that the wind was so cold and hard at this point that I somehow got brain freeze externally.

The trail starts off by winding up through beautiful pine and aspen forests. I didn't suspect there were places like this in America; it was comparable to the forests I loved in Bavaria. Along the way knobby roots are worn smooth as your neighbor's coffee table by the endless rock polisher combination of trail dust and hiking boots.

In places the trail yields to scree slopes like this one, evidence of Mt. Humphreys' volcanic past.

Once above the treeline things change suddenly from balmy forest to bleak tundra. You hear a lot of tundra-hugging these days, but it really is a fragile, exotic sort of environment with lots of weird flora and fauna. Take this one for example, looks like something you'd find at the bottom of the ocean.

Nope, this isn't actually the top. It's a false summit. Beyond it there is still about an hour of hiking left before one reaches the top.

Yup, it's pretty windy at the top. There are a few man-made rock shelters up there but they still aren't much protection. When I made it up there were about six other hikers in one, all huddled together. One of them was nice enough to roll me a cigarette from my pipe tobacco when I couldn't get the pipe lit, and we sat around joking and laughing at one of the hiker's little dogs who were fighting. It was a mother-and-son brawl with lots of growling, teeth-baring, and ear-biting. Though the son was at least as big he got his butt kicked decisively.

And here's the sign. After taking this picture I got blown over, and decided that was about enough of that, so I headed back down.

a ham, a yam, a yamaha

Now that I'm rolling in the dough I finally made a big purchase, one that's been in the works for a while: a keyboard. Here she is, my new Yamaha P60. It has weighted keys that approximate the action of a real piano. Has a pretty full piano sound too for an electronic.

Like a needy girlfriend, I can already tell she's gonna demand that I spend all my free time with her. :)

seether and frapt

The Seether and Trapt concert came and went. Venue quite small and dark, maybe 1000 people there if that. Seether had some cool stuff up their sleeves, particularly their cover of Nirvana's "You Know You're Right" which was to a tee and took everyone by surprise. I worry about the dudes in Seether though. They seem like they may have been influenced by Kiss, 'cause the drummer had on a Kiss shirt and the lead singer had on some face paint that you couldn't see except up close. (Oh well, wouldn't be the first time I liked a band that liked Kiss--Rivers was a diehard Kiss fan before forming Weezer.)

Trapt, or Frapt as I will now refer to them, somehow got lead act. Presumably because of the incessantly played Headstrong. They were just a bunch of frat boys though, didn't have much on Seether, and the lead singer was this annoying good-looking Oscar de la Hoya pretty face. There was some young screaming girl hysteria when he first came out (yuck). In between songs he said some hoakie junk about how he could tell everyone was "feeling it in their hearts." Later he commited the ultimate unforgivable wrong and ordered people to jump. I hate it when bands do this. Just play your freakin music, and if it's actually good, people won't be able to stop jumping.

The mosh pit started small but got progressively worse. During the last two songs of the night I got thrown to the ground 3 times (slippery beer floor) and clocked in the face hard enough to make me head for the sidelines. Felt like I almost got my teeth knocked out. Whole nose sore today, luckily must have hit beneath the bridge otherwise it would have broken. People however were courteous and helped you up immediately--apparently, everyone has seen that devoid-of-content VH1 special on the history of moshing that talked about mosh etiquette, so now we can mosh proper just like Emily Post would.

But hey I shouldn't complain about that, fellow-feeling is a good thing and the Disturbed concert definitely could have used some.

Shopping for freaky alternative girls thwarted, there were none around sadly enough, all the chicks there looked like copies of each other cloned in sorority land. But that's an Arizona-wide problem from what I understand. Will continue to keep eyes open.

foam party

I heard that Club Rio down on the Scottsdale-Tempe border played alternative on Thursday nights, so longing as always for the Keller experience, I went. It turned out it was foam party night. Hanging over the center of the dance floor was a machine that would pour foam onto the crowd at regular intervals. The signs boasted that the foam could reach five feet, but I waded in and was completely enveloped so it must have been about 8 feet deep. Actually I kind of panicked a couple times 'cause all I could breathe in was soap bubbles.

It was basically like a sudsy version of MTV's "The Grind," with hiphop and rapcrap playing and a lot of white guys trying desperately to prove that, despite appearances, they were not actually white. I was in a good mood and just laughed it all off. I mean, poor white befuddled America trying so hard to be something it's not, trying to be "cool," something which will be forever out of reach. And then all the consequent bad vibes that emanate from these frustrated white boys--all the hostility and feigned aloofness and rejection of other human beings in order to get one step closer to cool, it all adds up to one big brutal culture with no one having a good time. But if you zoom out enough it's just funny. So that's what I did.

But inside I realize I'm still pretty torqued about this. The Disturbed concert proved to me that even with an alt crowd you can still get a bad hostile vibe, so I dunno where this comes from really. This coming Friday I'm going to see Seether and Trapt and we'll see how that goes.

herniation?

Tuesday was frisbee day and afterwards me and another hardcore guy decided to practice layouts. I should have known after I nearly snapped my neck on a faceplant that it was time to lay off, but instead I kept going, and promoted the "layout scab" from scar status back into primetime (8th time), at the same time landing on the zipper of my pants so hard that I wondered if I herniated my stomach. I called mommer the next day at work and discussed loudly the details of herniation--she can diagnose anything and convinced me I was okay.

Having a mom doctor is pretty swell, I have to say. When I broke my collar bone in Germany I didn't go to the doctor there, but just called her on the phone. She had me do arm lifts every which way and then told me what was probably wrong--a diagnosis Martina figured out pretty quickly on her own too, to give credit where it's due.

stick birds

Daydream in which I envision a balloon artist constructing a giant strand of DNA. I wake up beside the pool to see a little club-footed bird hopping around begging for crumbs. Actually the way they herk and jerk through their tiny lives, bouncing off the pavement on sporadic stick legs, makes me laugh--not cynical mad laughter but genuine amused-with-life laughter.

float trip

Woke up and went on a float trip down Salt River with some of the other interns. It was seriously like MTV Spring Break only in tubes going down a river; there was voluminous beer drining and much displaying of hot bods, including one exhibitionist chick with pierced nipples who went shirtless for the duration of the trip (4h). Lots of dumb risk-taking behavior in the form of cliff-jumping.

Sometimes the river would widen and get real stagnant and then we would sit around like a single big flotilla, as marshmallows were chucked around, listening to the latest hip-hop garbage on floating radios. The water in such places was absolutely disgusting, an amalgam of cigarette butts, plastic bags, crumpled beer cans, and general filth.

In other places it narrowed and got faster. Once during one of these stretches I thought it would be a good idea to try to stand up and surf. Of course, I fell off, and got drug along the rocks at the bottom by the tube I was still clinging to. (Later, at home, I took out my contacts and my eyes started burning and watering so bad from that poisonwater that I couldn't even keep them open.) After whole ordeal we went out to eat at Wendy's. I initiated a terribly hypocritical conversation about the evils of processed food while I wolfed down 4 junior cheeseburgers.

mill avenue

Tonight went to Mill Avenue to check out that scene. Much more my kinda scene unlike this whole rich-and-beautiful Scottsdale thing. Went to a coffee shop. Went to a bar named Ziggy's where a crappy boyfriend-girlfriend cover band duo had driven everyone out. Went to a place called "The Cue" with lots of pool tables in the back but a heavy fratmosphere. Went next door to the Mill Avenue Beer Company and caught an alt rock band named "Innocent Fortune" with a cute skinny chick on bass. She reminded me of that one Smashing Pumpkins guitarist. Band was prety rockin' for one that was just getting its start.

After this was feeling pretty good and stopped to listen to three street musicians, a Japanese guy named Mabo, a 2nd generation Swedish immigrant with red hair named Hans, and a toothless Mexican named Timothy. Some drunken middle-aged anesthesiologist set into to for a while (mid-life crisis material). After he left I sat down and started singing with these guys and did so until 2:30 in the morning. They grossed about $30 of rent money on the night plus some bread rolls a guy from the coffee shop unloaded on them. Not a bad life I'd say.

in need of a wendy

The other day at work I was doing something repetitious in front of a computer screen, and realized that although I could seemingly control it, I could not make my own mouth feel like mine. I bit its lips, frowned, licked lips, but it was not mine, it was someone else's down there.

I have decided that what is slowly happening is that my soul is separating from my physical self, like Peter Pan losing his shadow. In need of a Wendy.

bike path

Pics from a ride along the Scottsdale bike path.

When the woman you see in the distance came up to me she was crying, mascara running all over the place, because her fat little black dog (own words) got lost. I agreed to keep a lookout for it (though I don't think a fat black anything could make it very far in Arizona 110 degree heat).

There are tunnels beneath many of the roads so you don't have to 6 lanes of crazy traffic every block; nice idea.

And in one place there's a bridge over the road. The flaming bush on the left is a visual explosion of sorts, I took all kindsa pictures of it.

There are lakes along the way. This is my favorite, has a weird azure/green tint to it. Today I sat down beneath some shade trees and watched a turtle I had scared from his sunning spot drift farther out, his little head periscoping up every once in a while to let me know where he was.

And there is a park at the end where we play frisbee on Tuesdays.

blessing

On the glass front door of Denny's, only seen in reverse from the inside: "God Bless America" beneath an American flag. America Bless God, I think. Can one big abstraction really bless another?

microbursts

Driving around Phoenix today after dusk when suddenly everything got misty. "Strange," I thought, since it's not supposed to rain until monsoon season in August. The palm trees were swaying wildly. Pulled into Kmart parking lot where unreal praying mantis yellow street lamps glowered through the haze, as shopping carts wheeled themselves around of their own accord. I went up to a dude who was collecting them and found out that it was a dust storm. "They start out in the desert," he tells me, and last only for a few hours. Even worse he tells me are "microbursts," mini-hurricanes that come out of nowhere and vanish into nowhere, sometimes doing serious damage.

interstellar gnat dust

Whew this Memorial day was anything but a holiday. Woke up at 5:30 am to go hike Camelback mountain, a pretty steep little ordeal that's actually situated inside the city limits, with 5 other interns. Despite our attempt to beat the heat (which is really something down here, should get up to 108 tomorrow) there were a lot of other people with the same idea so we waited about a half hour for a parking spot. Afterwards went swimming back at the 'tel, then off for an hour bike ride down to a place by a lake where I could try my hand at the new pastels I bought (part of master plan to restore my faculty of vision). Went swimming again later once it cooled off and then played some bee at sunset, so it was quite a day in terms of physical activity.

Scottsdale for all its sickening affluence has got one thing right: there's a greenway that stretches for several miles with really nice bike trails. The trails are threaded through tunnels beneath all the major roads, so you can ride quite a ways without worrying about traffic of the four-legged variety. Whenever you pass lakes though you are besieged by clouds of interstellar gnat dust. The feeling of all these tiny bodies slamming into you is a strange one; you definitely do not want to bare your teeth, as they will "get up in your grill" so to speak.

crapuccino cowboy

Friday and Saturday consisted of a long two-day trip from Rolla, Missouri to Scottsdale, Arizona by myself in a 1984 Ford Econoline van. 1400 miles in all. The first 400 miles down through southeastern Missouri and Oklahoma were non-stop fun in tornado conditions. Of course the van is just this big box with wheels so a brutal crosswind like the one that dogged me through western OK made my already terrible gas mileage even worse.

The second day of travel, through the rest of Texas, across the ratlands of New Mexico, and into Arizona, was really hot. In fact in the middle of nowhere western NM I started having problems with the van bucking and losing power on gear transitions. At this point there were still 300 miles to go. I stopped it and poked around under the hood, changed the oil etc., but the problem persisted so I just took things real easy and didn't try to push 70. I took to patting the dashboard and talking to the van as if she was the worn-out but trusty horse and I the crapuccino cowboy on some long cattle drive across half the continent. Or at least it felt that way--maybe my steady diet of crapuccino and crackers had something to do with this. Anyway just to make things interesting there were terrible hill climbs around Flagstaff. Somehow though we made it all the way to Phoenix where I konked out immediately in the room.

batting practice

Was home for a week after crazy move-out/wedding events. Bummed around mostly, hung out a lot with B and the family. Noticed that I slipped back into the Missouri vernacular: "Sumpthin fer nuthin, mondee tuesdee fridee." Went to see my little sister in the fourth grade Missouri play, an annual event that has barely changed since I took part in it a good 12 years ago. On another night Dad and the two girls and I went out one night and had some batting practice. It's been at least 5 years since I hit a baseball. I was whiffing up a storm at first. Then I started connecting, and man oh man, did that feel good. I probably put a dozen over the fence--this on the field that seemed impossibly large back in the early days of kid ball.

a healthy specimen

Got drug tested the other day. As Fate would arrange it, I come walking back through the waiting room proudly bearing my "specimen" (this is their word for it) past three cute girls who weren't there before. This is one of those situations you just don't foresee. I mean, how do you walk through a room with a cup of your own pee in your hand and maintain some sense of dignity, much less an air of coolness? I guess I should just be glad I didn't trip and spill it on one of them--that would have been about par for the course for a guy like me.

you can't elope

The fact of the matter is, you can't elope with a cantaloupe.

bachelor party

Mark's bachelor party was last night. Since I was the best man I was in charge of the evening's shenanigans, some of which went off better than others.

The first thing we did was paint Mark's hair blue and put him in the day-glo orange and yellow jumpsuit. Then we walked over to Ryan's place, where we took a two-handled axe to a computer monitor. Geez you should have seen the geeks go at it! Way more pent up rage than I had imagined. In the spirit of Office Space, Mark started jumping up and down on the thing once it was totally gutted. I had this bad premonition something was going to happen right before it did, when he slipped on the glass and fell. Needless to say things went from 0 to serious in like 2 seconds when we saw that his hand was cut open. He ended up at the ER and got 4 stitches. (Sidenote: last time Mark did something wild, it was waterskiing our freshman year, and he met a similar fate at the hands of one of the water skis. The dude's being conditioned against wild behavior even though in reality he's the last guy who needs to be.)

Well that put a damper on things for a while, but luckily it happened early on in the evening (about half an hour into the bachelor party!). When Mark finally got back from the ER we headed over to a hotel where I'd rented the Medieval theme room for the night. It came complete with whirlpool and corny spray-painted medieval scenery, and we busted out the keg, which we soon discovered we couldn't tap correctly. Of course we all felt like idiots. Mark's older brother called and woke up a friend to ask him how to tap a pony keg but we still couldn't figure it out. In the end we came to the conclusion that the tap was a bad one, and sure enough it turned out to be. We made a mad dash for a replacement tap and finally had the Fat Tire flowing at 1 am.

At this point in my story I reach certain seedy unmentionables. If you think about it for half a second you'll realize the nature of these seedy unmentionables, so I do not really need to talk about them.

Anyway I have no idea what time it was that we finally crashed. In the end only three of us spent the night in the room. Luckily for my pocketbook, Matt woke me up at 10:30--half an hour before we had to vacate the place. It was a medium-grade mess. We dumped the keg bucket with a lot of wasted beer into the whirlpool. Drew had thrown the freakin phone book into the whirlpool at some point during the night, and when we peeled it off the nightstand most of it stuck, so we had to clean that up. And we had to steal the remaining tassels off the curtains to make things look symmetric in the hopes that they would not notice and charge me. Some of the people took a liking to the tassels during the night and wouldn't persuaded to leave them be.

So that brings us up to the present, which is a lazy sunny Saturday afternoon with absolutely nothing going on. There is going to be another raging party tonight which Drew is going to bartend for. After that I'm gonna need a break from all this dissipation like Kerouac does at the end of The Dharma Bums.

trapped in an elevator

Coming back from a party last night the elevator got stuck. It was silly of me to take the elevator anyway, I only did it because I had my bike along and didn't feel like carrying it up two flights of stairs. Anyway now it is 2:30 am. Within about 15 minutes a CSO (Campus Security Officer) shows up. He asks me if I'm claustrophobic and I say no, and then we just start talking through the door about stuff. He seems pretty cool.

Eventually I just lay down in the elevator and go to sleep. It is almost 5:00 am before they finally get me out of there, and when I do I get to meet the voice from the other side of the door. Only it is a voice plus a uniform, and somehow the buddy connection I felt for the guy is completely dispelled by this. Talking to the elevator repairman when he finally showed up at 4:30 I learned that he hadn't been called until 4:00--there was some kind of mixup between the operator who took my call and the CSO. I make the mistake of bringing this up with the CSO and this puts him on the defensive, so he counterattacks with questions about where I had been drinking, whether there were minors there, checks my backpack for alcohol--all the usual things that earn cops their reputation as pigs.

You were the voice of a friend man until your uniform came into play. What gives?

reinforcing behavior

Yesterday and the day before I was up for 40 h straight. Save for a 15 min nap outside in the grass that is, a nap that was interrupted when some girl I hardly knew sat down and started talking to me while I was still sleeping. Some 5 min later I realized I was talking to her. I honestly have no idea what I said to her; could have been anything. Dimly remember something about bowling.

Anyway it was a pretty apocalyptic sort of week for me. Friday we signed off on our Design Studio project, so all of a sudden I have about 20 more free hours in my week. I had two talks to do Friday, one on gravitational lensing which I started on at about 1:00 am Friday morning and finally finished at 7:30, and another in my QC class which I just jotted some notes down for right before going. The first one sucked, and the second one rocked. Now you tell me which behavior just got reinforced here.

judgemental looks

Standing around outside smoking a pipe I got hit up by a pair of Mormons on their mission trip. I have never seen a more judgemental look directed at a tobacco pipe as they questioned me about it, asking whether it was addictive, etc. Remember these are the people who will not drink anything caffeinated so already there I must be like public enemy number one. Anyway we got to talking and they came on strong with their smarm. But I kept stuff real, joked a lot, and called them on anything I didn't really agree with. I got out of it with the assurance that they wouldn't birddog me, refusing to give them my phone number or tell them I'd consider a single word they said, so V is for victory.

the essence of college

Too much frisbee playing last night led to crunch time on a paper for my physics course, which had to be done before 8:30 the next morning, and more importantly had to be done come 11:00 pm so I could get my drink on with Chris, Suga and friends. Well at 11:00 pm she was about halfway there and I just said screw it. Upon my return at 4:00 am, many beers later, I attempted to finish the thing but kept falling asleep with my hands on the keyboard. So I set my alarm for two hours, got up at 6:30 hung over but clear-headed and finished her off. Subsequently demonstrated that I could sleep soundly through the class. Experiences like this, I believe, are the essence of what it means to be in college.

barber's sonata

Barber's Piano Sonata Op. 26, you are strange, but I love you. In the third movement we finally see everything that is wrong, and everything that is right, with the world.

burning with energy

Sometimes my body seems to be burning all over with energy. Sometimes this is when I am trying to sleep, and then it's best to just give up on the whole sleep thing and just go with it. It happened last night and I was up dancing around to System of a Down at 4:00 in the morning. I got up at 8:00, after three hours of sleep, to the sound of Pat knocking on my bedroom door. I dressed in a flash and we biked down to Pioneers Park in south Lincoln, where we cheered Drew and the UNL cycling team on. We set up at the bottom of a long, painful hill, and screamed at the pelaton on its way up. I hopped up and down in a day-glo yellow and orange suit.

Next engagement was at 2:00 when we got a bunch of Kauffman people up for a game against the UNL Ultimate club team. First game was darn close, we lost 9-7, second game we were thoroughly demoralized. I am sunburned and short on sleep. But feel good.

Nebraska's sick sense of humor

Friday I was reading under these palm trees in Phoenix, Arizona.

Today I am in Lincoln Nebraska, and even though it is in April, it looks like this.

a pleasant surprise

My flight got in and I finally got back at 12:30 am. I was all ready to go to sleep when I opened the door to my room and found this.

It was a pleasant surprise, and I intend to thank the person responsible in similar fashion. Such is my gratitude.

impotence

Suburban America I know what you hide--impotence. For all that swagger and show you go home at the end of the day and copulate apathetically at best. This frightens you to no end when you think about it but mostly you don't think about it.

reality delayed by .1 seconds

Interviewed in Scottsdale, AZ, the capital of the upper middle class world, for a summer internship. After the interviews they took us out for happy hour. I returned to my hotel room happy. At this point I discovered that Russian choral music suddenly made a great deal of sense and I heard things in the Vespers that I've never heard before. The night was still young and it was time to go to a club named Martini Ranch. I called a cab. It was a white luxury car--everything in Scottsdale is a luxury car--driven by a deformed Slavic guy in a suit who flipped through radio stations asking me at each one if I liked the music.

The club was big and filled with beautiful people. Black limo parked outside. It didn't stack up against the Keller of course, but it did get me all nostalgic for the life again. A cover band called Wonderbread came in for a set. They had on giant afros, about 3 or 4 feet wide I'd say, basketball jerseys, and silver sparkling pants. They were wacky as hell. They did covers of Superfreak, Tupac, the Violent Femmes. The lead singer poured Jaegermeister into the waiting mouths of girls. As they played, a big screen off to the left showed a video feed of them with a slight delay between frames, because reality delayed by .1 seconds is so much cooler than reality undelayed.

retreat

Since about a week ago my left eyelid has had a muscle twitch. Starts in about every minute or so. Why?

Finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, now on to Exterminator! by Burroughs. Still on a Beat kick. I can't shake the feeling that things were getting better back then, that we were progressing in some way towards something and that it originated with these guys and others like them. Then I look at where we're at today. Somebody must have yelled "retreat!" because the tide is out again. To be fair I should say I'm probably borrowing this idea from Hunter S. Thompson...you know that scene in Fear and Loathing where Johnny Depp is looking out the window and thinking that he could almost see the high water mark?

frightened out of my natural ecstasy

I was in a good mood this morning until I picked up a newspaper. "Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!"

electrocuted squirrel

I don't know why this is so funny, but it is. Poor little guy.

straights and stiffs

Sometimes I wonder if there's going to be any place for me in this world of straights and stiffs. Walking around Lincoln I get the impression that there won't be. People, you are oh so normal, oh so unbearably normal, can't you see it and don't you bore yourselves out of your own skulls? I've gotta get outta here.

slightly mind-blowing

What a week and what a way to end it. So much to do and then I got sick on top of it all. I told my Quantum Computing prof I would have a proof of this one problem ready for Friday, and I had so much else to do that I didn't get to it until Thursday midnight. The crucial insight finally came to me at 5:30 in the morning. By 8:30 I had the solution written up, just in time to go to my first class. Here's the writeup.

So I didn't sleep for about 36 hours, when I went over to Drew's for a beer and Ocean's Eleven. Of course I fell asleep immediately and feel a little bad about this. As Erika said the other day, "My mind was slightly blown."

But hey it's Spring Break now. It is a beautiful day out there, like 70 degrees, and there's some camping in the works at least for the first part of the week. After that I'm not sure what's gonna happen--I was so busy up until now that I didn't even really have time to plan my fun.

gangrene

I have a scrape on my elbow from playing frisbee, and I put a bandaid on it too soon. As a result it smells funny even though the bandaid is gone. Funny and gangrenous that is.

that i exist

Sometimes I have gotten so far from reality and the conscious realization of my own existence that I am suddenly awestruck, glory-be, to find that there is a reality outside of me, or that there is a me. Now is one such insane moment. I am alive and I forgot this fact and I just now remembered...how amazing it is to exist! That I exist or that anything exists at all! It shouldn't be possible but it is.

lie-buying and lie-selling

Overheard an English teacher at the coffee shop today grading papers. She read off one of those passages that are extracted at gunpoint in English courses, the kind which typically go something like "gee i never thought of the fact that other people have different viewpoints and experiences and that we can learn a lot from them and gosh isn't it great now that i truly appreciate them..."

And she was so happy about this little falsified piece of junk, it was such things that made teaching English worth it for her, so she said. She seemed to be under the impression that this student was being sincere. Then I thought about it, and realized that she didn't think that at all--she was simply happy that she had managed to extract this token appreciation at gunpoint. She knew it for what it was. But of course she couldn't just say that either. So she had to lie about believing the student's lie. Lies on both ends is what this evil little game is all about.

Where are the thinkers, the revolutionaries, the free spirits in English departments these days? Didn't they used to be filled with war protesters and crazies and heads and nutcases? Why is everyone in the lie-buying and lie-selling business? Does anyone have anything new to say, or must we constantly revisit this tired, tired subject of diversity?

Diversity--a carcass left over by the tides that receded, now picked clean. A skeleton bleaching in the sun.

a matter of opinion

In Friday's USA Today: a statistics box gives the percentage of "Americans who think President Bush is respected by leaders of other countries."

Thank you USA Today. Now I can change my opinion based on other American's opinion of what international leaders' opinions are of my president.

Or I could just think for myself.

yarbles

Yarbles to you. Great bolshy yarblockos.

correction

Thanks to chunkylover57@aol.com for pointing out that the circuit highly touted in Every Home Should Have One actually contained a backwards multiplexer. The problem has been corrected. In no way should readers allow this unfortunate mistake to undermine the credibility of this web site in their minds; we here at "the world has turned and left me here" make it our sole purpose to deliver content that is factual, unbiased, and correct to the best of our knowledge. The person responsible for the mistake has been sacked, as well as the person responsible for the sacking, so we feel confident in stating that such mistakes will not occur again in the future.

indian shaving

Got a weird phone call today from Prashanth. He's like "Hey dude you got about five minutes?" "Yeah," I say. "Uhh I just shaved my head and I can't get the back. Do you think you could come down and help me out?" So I go down there and find my freshly bald Indian friend with shaving cream blobs still all over his head, the aftermath you know, and shave the poor little guy.

keep their heads ringin'

Went to Club Energy in downtown Lincoln last night with Autumn. It was a techno thing. Pretty fun, though my head is still ringing a bit this morning because they did their utmost to cause hearing loss. I've decided techno is definitely not worth giving up my sense of hearing for.

the buckle

Went to the mall with Drew and Kim. We had probably the most fun anyone has ever had inside The Buckle, with Drew and I at one point sharing the same tiny dressing room and shouting innuendos over the door. Elsewhere...

...Drew finds himself a "surprise."

every home should have one

My roomie Mark built this. As you can see, it is simply a circuit which computes 6 * n or 6 + n for any 4 bit input n.

egyptian king: party hard

King Amasis of Egypt (570 - 526 B.C.) in answer to criticism that he partied too much: "People with bows string them when they need to use them and unstring them when they've finished with them. If they kept them strung all the time, the bows would break, and then they wouldn't be able to use them when they needed them. It is no different with people's temperaments. Anyone who is serious all the time and never allows himself a fair measure of relaxation will imperceptibly slide into madness or at least have a stroke. I am well aware of this, and that's why I divide my time between the two."

According to Herodotus, that is. Decided on a whim a while back that I would read Herodotus' histories and it has proved to be fascinating, and--at times--titillating. I highly recommend them so far.

retribution

Wahooo!

It is 4:30 in the morning and I am still going strong. One of those weird occasions when I just never feel the need to sleep, except that I really should because I have a class at 8:30, and, energetic and wack as I am right now, I fear the retribution of the all-nighter.

The Pianist

Just got back from seeing Roman Polanski's "The Pianist." It made me hungry because the guy was starving for like two hours straight. And it made me want to play piano. Aside from that, I couldn't really tell you what the message was. It was a Holocaust thing, based on the autobiography of the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, who lost his family and was forced to hide out in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. Maybe it did depict the Holocaust more realistically than any film to date, but the film really had very little to say beyond the facts; it was just Szpilman's character being passively thrown into situation after situation and never driving the action himself. I hope the Anti-Defamation League doesn't hunt me down for saying it, but just because a movie is about the Holocaust doesn't make it a good movie; it's got to say something as well. "The Pianist" didn't. I have a piano bias and that still doesn't make it good.

the miracle of recovery is possible

From the State of the Union Address last night:

"Another cause of hopelessness is addiction to drugs. Addiction crowds out friendship, ambition, moral conviction, and reduces all the richness of life to a single destructive desire... Tonight, let us bring to all Americans who struggle with drug addiction this message of hope: The miracle of recovery is possible, and it could be you."

I believe George W. was speaking directly to me when he said these words, and I thank him for his encouragement this week as I wrestle with my own addiction and cut back to 3 cups of coffee per day.

the mall

Rode the bus down to the mall and Target, which brought back fond memories of last summer when I rode it to work every day at class.com. When I got on every morning the bus driver--Dwayne I think it was--would always say "Good morning, young man," since he didn't know my name. That "good morning, young man" always gave me a cool grown-up feeling.

Malls weird me out nowadays, especially those big department stores with their looming heaps of pastel-colored cosmetics products at the entrances. After that comes a protective layer of body lotions and women's jewelry. As a male if you can make it through these then the coast is clear, but I imagine many males recoil in horror somewhere short of this, and probably think the whole store is that way. But it's not dudes, you've just got to push yourself onward and head for the nearest down escalator, because if there is any product intended for the male species in the place, it's going to be in hidden away down there in the sublevels. Keep your eye on the prize. Once you've got it and made your purchase, you've still got the escape ahead of you, and this part can be tricky too. If you don't watch it you could end up wandering around endlessly in the Petites section like some kind of lost pedophile. The department store, of course, is going to make escaping as non-intuitive as possible, because if they had their way you'd be trapped in there forever like a wild animal, making purchasing decisions out of sheer desparation.

bowling for columbine

Saw Bowling for Columbine last night at UNL's film theater. Incendiary is definitely the right word. It's a pretty harsh criticism of America which centers around the question: why do we shoot each other here more than anywhere else? (Apparently over 10,000 Americans die each year in gun-related deaths, while in Japan, Britain, Australia, Germany, etc. the number is under 300).

Moore explores several possible answers, among them that we have more racial tension because of our higher ethnic mix, that bloodshed is a part of our national history/identity, or that we're simply a gun-saturated culture, with guns and ammo available over every counter and present in every home. But Moore discards these explanations because they don't differentiate us from these other nations without the "gun problem." We don't have a significantly higher racial mix. Germany, Britain, or basically any other industrialized country you can think of has had their share of bloodbaths. Canada has 10 million homes and 7 million guns, and arguably more "gun culture" than the U.S.

Halfway through the documentary Moore interviews Marilyn Manson, who (oddly enough) gives the explanation Moore eventually settles for: guns and shootings are a symptom of our fear of each other, a fear fed by the news media, by the government, and ultimately by the corporate world--because there's a huge profit in doing so.

As for me, I can't buy into this rage-against-the-system message, because it's just too adolescent. Sure, there's some truth in it. But pointing your finger at corporate America, or "the system," or whatever blanket conspiracy you care to conjure up, is a cop-out. Anyone can do that. And nothing is made better; you've just transferred the blame to a non-entity.

My own explanation seemed pretty different to me at first: guns and shootings are a product of our fierce individualism. It's also why, for instance, we drive cars everywhere instead of developing efficient public transportation, as other industrialized nations have done: because a car is about one driver controlling his or her destiny, and a train is not. And I think our individualism is something which sets us apart. The rest of the industrial world is socializing, and there's pressure on us to do so too, but there's more resistance from the individual here in America than anywhere else. So our growing pains are much worse.

Then I got to thinking...maybe individualism is just the name we give to our essential fear of "the other." Maybe it isn't the highest of virtues, as we'd like to believe, but an inability to cope with the idea of other people. This brought me around full circle...

paint it blue

A Monday night at UNL. It started with one head and spread. Drew, reaching way back to his days as an RC car spray-painter, played stylist for a night with a can of blue Jerome Russell.

Drew preps with a cup of coffee. Mark, at right, spectates.

I inspect the new 'do.

Prashanth gets in on the action with a racing stripe down the center. Drew insists on blue eyebrows.

The two of us with our stylist.

Jonas comes in and gets painted too. Here he is with his swirl. Note pimpin' 360 shot.

Drew monkeys around in our mirror afterwards.

Drew, in triumph, does a Patrick Bateman.

Sug

Just got back from a party at Suga's and it is now 4am. To recount, yesterday night was shaping up to be pretty extreme, as I was coloring my hair blue and planning to hit some clubs in Lincoln afterwards. But I ran out of blue right before I finished so I had to wash it all out. With Autumn and her friend Libby plus boyfriend Derrick I just went to eat at Lazlo's and then learned Canasta, as no one (including me) was really feeling up to the clubbing thing. Still it was a pretty enjoyable evening. Tonight started off pretty tame again with some bridge playing but things got better. At the end it was Suga and Hammond, his new pipe hanging out of the corner of his mouth, playing riffs on a giant wooden spoon for about the duration of an hour. The two girls left at the party got bored of this real quick. But to me it was hilarious, vintage Sug entertainment. I forgot how much I missed this guy.

Christmas break shenanigans

To recount some of the shenanigans that went on over my Christmas break...

Drewsky and I drove out to Laramie, Wyoming for a couple of days. We were going to ski at Snowy Range but the lodge burned down two days before we got there. So we just putzed around. The old part of town is still somewhat like it must have been originally, and has not yet been discovered and cashed out by the tourist industry. We ate in a wood-panelled bar beside the train tracks. Trains rumbled by in the night about every 15 minutes, shaking the tables. The next night the only bar open was the Ranger Motel so we went there to shoot some pool. There were five distinct groups there and not a lot of intermingling: a bunch of hippies with a dog, a group of frat guys, sorority girls, the locals, and two out-of-towners (Drew and I). The next day we went to the yuppie coffee shop downtown and saw the lead hippie with his dog at the hippie coffee shop across the street. The small town effect can be neat if you haven't felt it for a while.

After stopping by the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, we went on to Frisco, Colorado, where we skied with Kauffman peeps for the next three days. Hintertux paid off and I was attempting/crashing on a lot of jumps by day three. There was a hot tub at the motel, which was nice after a hard day of skiing. One night there was about the most densely tattooed dude I've ever seen in it, and all of them were (get this) Christian tattoos. He had a crucifix on his chest and an entire chapter from a gospel on his back, and I overheard that a belt of truth and a breastplate of righteousness were in the works. He was talking "the talk" with an older guy who I assumed was a preacher or something. Anyway after a while the Illustrated Christian left and we got to talking with the preacher. During a lull in the conversation, this guy got up quietly, climbed up onto the ledge surrounding the hot tub area, and did a somersault dive into the pool one story below. We had seen some drunk Colorado State students pull this dangerous stunt the night before but I never expected it from a fifty-year-old, especially since I had him cast as the preacher character. Guess that goes to show.

On the way back from Colorado Drew and I stopped at a Texaco for gas. None of the squeejees were there, but there was a second Texaco across the highway, so I ran across and brought a squeejee triumphantly back like an Olympic torch. As I was standing around idlely looking at junk food inside the station, the clerk gets a phone call, and says to me "Sir, the Texaco across the way called. They want their squeejee back." "We were going to take it back, actually," I told her, which was the truth, but less out of respect for property than from a desire not to see the squeejee-less Texaco benefit from the deal. When we did return the thing the clerks across the way were watching like hawks and waved at me, and there probably hadn't been that much excitement around the place since the last holdup.

stages of life

I think life consists of basically three stages: acceptance, rejection, and creation. As a child you accept every idea that's told to you because you have no reason to suspect otherwise. As a teenager you find out some of them weren't true and begin to reject ideas. As an adult you create them yourself, or possibly return to those first ideas and accept them on your own terms.

Well at least that's what I think should happen. But a lot of people never seem to make it past that first stage of accepting on faith everything that's poured into them (they're permanent children), and others never get past defining themselves in terms of ideas that they oppose (they're permanent teenagers).

I'm still in stage two I guess, but I'm starting to outgrow it. On my trip to Vienna I realized that I can't define myself as an antithesis--that I must be a thesis of my own. And recently I've started to see that a lot of what I do--pleasure-seeking stuff, craziness--is basically self-destructiveness, and to engage in it further with this knowledge would be to actively oppose my own existence.

4390 miles later

Well after 4390 miles of car travel I am finally back at college. Did New Mexico with the family (1094), then up to Iowa to see the other grandparents (1270), then back to Rolla for an evening of frantic packing (365), then up to Lincoln for moving in stage 1 (412), then to Laramie Wyoming (493), then to Frisco Colorado for skiing (212), and today back to Lincoln again for good (554). Am badly in need of a shave, am wearing a shirt that hasn't been washed in weeks for the third time, and just want to go to sleep in my own bed (whatever that means) for once. People are luring me into the living room with nachos so this is goodbye.

the plugged-in life

Lower and more apathetic than I've ever been...doesn't seem to be any point in doing anything at all. Yesterday enough coffee and a nice New Mexico sunset brought the answer to me. If you don't perceive reality then of course you don't give a hoot about anything real. Even though it's all a fog, I feel dimly as if I'm on the cusp of something, as if the very next step I take will be down one path or the other, from which there will be no turning back. I could renounce the plugged-in life for good and try to find something real to interest me, or I could just withdraw into a state of full-blown computer geekdom. Seems like it's one or the other though.

Too much thinking, too little doing. I lead a contemplative life in which all kinds of ideas pour in and out but nothing leads to action. But what, after all, is the point of contemplation if not action? I complain about my life having no drama, no narrative, but this is just the result of not taking action. They don't call a guy a "man of action" for no reason; taking action is practically a definition of what it is to be male.

But action without purpose is equally as bad as inaction (borrowing this idea from Rand now). Purpose, however, presupposes a goal to be reached, which must be a goal both perceived as worth attaining as well as perceived in the first place. So the problem here is once again not perceiving reality.

In my plugged-in life though I am a man of action, I do have purpose, and I do have goals worth achieving. Somehow though everything in my plugged-in life seems, ultimately, totally inferior to things in real life. Is this because most people around me are living real lives rather than plugged-in ones, and all this a simple case of feeling like the odd man out? Maybe so--and if I arrived at this conclusion you know what path I'd take.

But I've got some internal dissatisfaction with the plugged-in life that I can't shake. I imagine it's the sort of uneasy feeling that in a drug addict eventually grows until he voluntarily commits himself, no matter how great the alternate reality was for him, in order to rejoin the land of the living.

Nora Tschirner

Nora Tschirner you are the cutest girl ever. Please forsake German MTV's Hitlist and elope with me.

a trail of beer

Back in America now. The trip was a long one, and Canadian customs confiscated the good luck bamboo stick that I had bought for my brother. Also I was dumb enough to pack Augustiner beer bottles into a non-rigid suitcase, and one of them broke, a realization which only slowly dawned on me. I noticed a funny beer smell several times and that my bag was dripping but it took a while to put two and two together. The line to U.S. customs in Toronto was long, snaking back and forth, and I left a telltale trail of beer the whole way...thanks to me, the entire waiting room for U.S. customs probably smells inexplicably of Augustiner Helles.

But I'm in good old Rolla, Missouri now, and have been for the last three days. I went shopping at a supermarket the day after I got back. It was like being in a nightmare in which everyone is fat.

Saw my friend Kate yesterday. We talked about all kinds of junk over Denny's coffee, then went in for some blind pillow-testing and other randomness at Wal-Mart. There is a difference between "Firm" and "Extra Firm" and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

give muh nee

Stuttgart

Went to Stuttgart today. It's industrial and isn't really a tourist attraction. Ugly and alive, a hog-butcher-of-the-world kind of place, but I still managed to extract a bit of the aesthetic. The Staatsgallerie had a big Manet exhibition--the largest ever to come to Germany--and this was worth it. Or even a single moment like the following can make a day worthwhile.

On the train there I was looking out the window, listening to Rachmaninoff, and saw the first bit of blue sky I had seen in a week. I do not know what Munich has done to deserve this day-in, day-out blanket grayness, but it distinctly belongs to Munich, since every time I leave Munich I seem to return to the world of blue skies. This last week I worked on redesigning my home page, and realized only after I was finished that my color scheme was all gray--no color--just like the world around me.

I have nothing to drink or eat around here. Just one egg. (You know you need to go buy groceries when...)

last night at the keller

Went to the Keller for perhaps the last time last night. It wasn't a holiday or weekend evening so when I walked into Kunstpark Ost there was no one, absolutely no one around, and I had a bad feeling that I would be one of the only ones there. When I got there the attendance was pretty low and the party was late in starting...but indeed, it started. There was lots of room on the dancefloor--a change from the usual sardines-moshing-in-a-can scene--and I had a good time until the lights came on at 4am. Sigh. Keller, I love you and I'm going to miss you with every alternative bone in my body. What am I ever going to do with myself now?

customers who wear clothes

Ha ha I'd say Amazon's "related items" feature is getting a little bit out of control. The page for Ancient Echoes, an album of Russian orthodox choral music, has just informed me that "Customers who wear clothes also shop for:"

• Clean Underwear


• Ladybug Rain Boots


• Arm Warmers


• Cheetah Print Slippers

Customers "who wear clothes?" Are nudists also a large market segment now or something?

Nuremburg, Rothenburg

Met Martina in Nuremburg this weekend for the Christkindlmarkt, as she's kind of a local, having grown up nearby. It was a cold, rainy day, but this made the smells of Gluh-Wein (spiced red wine served hot) and Lebkuchen (a sort of gingerbread) coming from the stands seem that much more appealing. Both are Nuremburg specialties that, for many Germans, stand for Christmas.

To escape from the cold we went to the German National Museum at the south end of town. They had a decent collection of Durer and a famous Rembrandt self-portrait that I was surprised to recognize, but by far the highlight was the two-foot-high unidentified gold-plated object shaped like a missile. Some speculated that it was a hat worn in religious ceremonies, but honestly, it was rather obscene-looking and would have fit in just as well in the window of a Beate Uhse. It was anyone's guess. The surprising thing was that such an object would appear encased in glass under the blessing of a national museum.

We saw the second Harry Potter movie in the evening in what Martina informed me was Europe's largest cinema complex. We were both a little disappointed by it, though maybe for different reasons.

Sunday the weather was better. We drove to Rothenburg, an even better-preserved town than the pretty authentic Nuremburg. Rothenburg has an intact city wall over a mile long almost all the way around it. No cars are allowed inside the wall, and the houses are of the half-timber pointy-roofed variety that is probably summoned up when you think of a medieval village. Despite this--or rather because of it--Rothenburg is a bit of a tourist trap. There were a lot of tourists crowding the streets, and stone blocks bearing the names of Japanese donors in the city wall confirmed the impression. Okay maybe tourist trap is a bit of a misnomer...particularly if you use the cashed-out land of Wall Drug and Jesse James' Hideout as a frame of reference.

While in Rothenburg we visited the Medieval Criminal Museum, which sported a comprehensive collection of torture devices ranging from tongue-screws to chastity belts to iron maidens. For some reason I thought chastity belts were just a saying with no reality behind them, but in fact they do exist, and even have locks on them, to which paranoid husbands would pocket the key. There were of course a wide variety of executioner's swords and axes, but there was one form of execution that I had never heard of before: the lying victim was run over repeatedly by a wagon wheel, breaking his bones through sheer weight, or slicing him with a blade attached to the rim, or both. They saved this one for only the most serious offenders (usually murderers). Perhaps it wouldn't have seemed that severe in a society that plunged bakers into the river in a spiked cage for selling underweight loaves of bread.

Well, after some of the usual nonsense, Martina and I ate snowballs, a Rothenburg specialty made from strips of dough molded into a ball and covered with powdered sugar or chocolate. Then it was time to say goodbye, as Martina had to get back to KL before another work week began, and I had to go home an run myself over with some more with the wagon wheel of programming.

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).

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?)

the jack-o-lantern collab-o

Well we did a collab-o last night on this Jack-O-Lantern. It was everyone else's first time. We thought about paying homage to Homer Simpson, because the pumpkin is roughly the shape of his head, and also considered celebrating our South African heritage in the house through a tribal mask of some sort, but eventually went with this skull design that Mattias found somewhere. Pretty fun.

Martina's marathon

Well she did it--I knew she would! She finished 113th out of a field of almost 1000 women. Not bad for your first marathon I think. And she finished in under 4 hours just like she said she would. I'm so happy for her. And amazed, and all the rest. Wow! Way to go Martina!

Here are the results of the Frankfurt Eurocity Marathon.

mount sinai

Minor failures from this weekend that are worthy of mention: dying my hair purple, and quitting coffee. I kind of suspected that I would have to bleach my hair first before dying it and now I know for sure. It had absolutely no effect. Went without coffee all day Saturday--the first coffeeless day I've had in I don't know how long--and could have gone longer had I wanted to. But I went to one of my favorite spots in Munich, a little rooftop cafe near the center of the city called the Cafe Glockenspiel after I had proved it to myself.

West Munich is a place of despair, a bit like the Piranesi carceri that is Berlin. Run down, overcrowded, abandoned old train stations, tangles of machinery and wires that have no readily apparent purpose, a slowly fungating urban sprawl.

This weekend has been insanely windy at times. As a result of this there was a fierce sky overhead as I was sitting in the Cafe Glockenspiel, and I dashed out and over to one of the bell towers, where you can look out over the city for only 1 Euro.

As the sun set in the west only a glowing vent of orange on the horizon was visible, an angry rent torn between land and sky. And then the strongest wind I have ever felt set in. Yes, stronger even than the Bernoulli effect blasts that punish you for attending your class in Oldfather during winter at UNL. To me it seemed like the end of the world, or at least it would have been a fitting time to end the world if drama is any consideration there. From far below, the silly klingy-klanging of bells from the Neues Rathaus sounded. Hubris, I thought.

I returned from this Mount Sinai a little more alive than I was after work Friday. I now consciously attend to my need to heal myself, to repair my sense of reality, after each work week of destroying it in front of a computer.

good tempo

Well of all the unusual things to see on late night German television, I just caught 1959 black-and-white of Glenn Gould in the studio recording Bach's Italian Concertos. It was Gould at his foot-stamping sing-along best. But the really interesting thing was the studio producer, who by the end of the half hour segment had fully impressed upon me his lack of knowledge of classical music, and even of the artist himself, whom he patronized as a one-dimensional country hick from Canada who just happened to have some musical talent up his sleeves which was luckily recognized by Columbia records. While Gould was busy churning out a recording that we still listen to today this twit was talking loudly with one of the sound engineers about planting petunias. I swear. And at the end of it all there was this shot of Gould listening to a playback of one of his recordings--who knows what complex musical thoughts were going on, unspoken, in his head--and the producer had the nerve to pronounce, congratulatorily, "good tempo." What kind of remark is "good tempo" when made to the arguably best Bach interpreter of the 20th century?

Some things just don't change I guess.

the hippie time is over

Today was actually a somewhat nice day in Munich, nice enough to permit me to go throw around the frisbee at the English Gardens, which are now much emptier than in the summer. There were no FKK sunbathers today; "the hippie time is over." However there was a striking sundog above the twin towers of the Frauenkirchen as the sun began to set.

Once, I was watching my frisbee glide off into the distance when my focus shifted to a bird flying past. I followed the bird as it flew upwards until it passed in front of a distant airplane. My focus shifted again and I watched the airplane disappear into a cloud. But then it came back, circling, and it dawned on me slowly that I was watching someone's toy airplane.

the origin of desire

How odd. My attempt to eliminate all desires which do not originate with myself seems to have left none. I didn't do anything this weekend. If I had wanted to I would have. But that's just the thing--I didn't really want to do anything at all.

Granted, at times I thought of doing something to improve myself, of learning something, or having some unusual experience or another. Then I traced the desire to its source and found that it was only in order to appear more learned or more interesting to others. Perhaps one could mistake these desires for one's own--in fact I would argue that the lifelong process of becoming socialized consists of learning how to--and go through life merrily oblivious to the second-hand nature of them all. Ignorance might be bliss. But as for me, having exposed a desire as not my own, I cannot forget this fact and can only act on the desire in the most robotic and unsustainable way.

In physical terms, some people are sources, but the vast majority of us are either flux-conservative regions or, worse yet, sinks.

non-confrontational

Well the South African (Martin, if we're going to be exact about things) and I went to the Keller last night in order to rock out. It was generally a great time except for one pretty messed up incident.

The whole time there was this ape-dude who kept making a nuisance of himself. He was nasty, brutish and short (as Hobbes once said about life), with a scuzzy pony tail in the back and a face that hadn't been shaved in about a week it seemed. Rather than join in the fun, he spent the whole time making fun, and whenever someone on the dance floor was getting attention he would go mock the way they were dancing. He ran back and forth between the bar and the far side of the dance floor practically on all fours. He wanted to give the impression that he was real drunk and thus wasn't responsible for what he was doing, but I could see through that.

Anyway at one point the dance floor kind of cleared out and he took advantage of this situation to get more attention (which is all he wanted anyway). The few guys who were dancing out there tried their best to ignore him, but he was getting up in their face, slamming into people, and finally an Italian type had had enough, grabbed him by the throat and threw him backwards. A fight almost broke out. All eyes were on the dance floor and the vibe had clearly been ruined. Ruined by one idiot.

The ape dude went back to it again, but this time the Italian type and his friends decided to play it happy and just ignore him, and started dancing around like nothing was wrong. But something was wrong and no one would do anything about it. No bouncers showed up on the scene. Everyone was avoiding a confrontation and I couldn't see why. Why for crying out loud?!!

The ape dude got too close to Martin and me and Martin gave him a shove. He crashed into someone. A beer bottle fell to the floor and broke. As he got to his feet he headed straight for me, the only person who wasn't pretending not to see him. He just stood there six inches from my face, not looking at my face, but at my chest, at the dreamcatcher which Martina gave me and I only wear out in the open when I'm dancing. I felt the adrenaline in me. I was ready.

I yelled in his ear if he was happy now that he got everyone's attention. His response was to give me the finger, and then he suddenly changed it into a peace sign before I could retaliate. (His strategy of provoking, but not provoking too far, was way too calculated to pull off while drunk.) All eyes were still on us when the Italian type pushed us apart and signaled me to ignore him. A song must have started as the dance floor was suddenly flooded with people eager to get the situation over with.

The guy retreated to the corner and eventually must have left. The night went on and the vibe eventually returned. Martin and I even eventually started having fun again.

But what I still can't understand is people's non-confrontational attitude. There were a lot of "hardcore" people in there, a lot of dudes dressed in back, a lot of supposed badasses, a lot of angry music which we moshed and thrashed around to. And yet everyone wanted to avoid conflict when it came down to it. They preferred letting one guy ruin the night for everyone there rather than confronting this one problem, when clearly just one person willing to give ape dude an ass-kicking for the common good would have fixed the situation.

do as you wish with my underwear

Sometimes life takes a leak on you. But usually its your own fault in the first place. Like Sunday night, when I got back into Munich at midnight and tried to catch the last S-Bahn back to Startlodge without buying a ticket. The S-Bahn Gestapo got on the train just as I was, so I had to make a break for it, and ended walking part of the way home in the cold and dark instead of waiting around until even later. As it was I got in at 2:00.

I realized too late what I should have done, and it's what I will do next time. They usually start checking people's tickets at one end of the train and work their way to the other, so I could have gotten on at the opposite end, waited a few stops, and then at some opportune time got off and reboarded at the other end. Would have been smooth. Should have could have would have.

Oh yeah and I was supposed to move out of the basement and into a first floor room Saturday morning, but of course I was gone the whole time, so the poor new French guy had to stay upstairs on the weekend until I got my act together. When I got back from work on Monday evening with the intention of moving all my crap upstairs, half of it was already moved for me. Including all my underwear. But not any of the electronics. The landlady apparently took this upon herself during her weekly Monday visit, and left me a little explanatory (more like exclamatory) note. I was not sure what to think of this. I believe that the note together with the violation of privacy was meant to upset me, but since I don't really have a strong sense of privacy, I was mostly indifferent.

Again, I brought this on myself, so there's really no one to blame but me. And if I were to be honest my privacy probably would have been more violated if my electronics had been messed with. Do as you wish with my underwear but for god's sake, don't touch my computer.

beyond respect

Another weekend came and went. Saturday morning was a mad rush because my alarm didn't go off, and I woke up to the jolt of having to catch a train in less than 30 minutes without having packed the previous night. Made it anyway.

After a month or so of torturing each other via ICQ, which couldn't seem to bring anything to a satisfactory or decisive end, Martina and I finally hung out in Kaiserslautern and kicked it into friend mode for good this time. The main event was an American house party on Saturday night.

It was like walking into America after a five month absence. College football was playing in the living room and Air Force guys with Texas drawls were sitting around watching. There was a keg, and jungle juice in big gatorade coolers in the kitchen. Not only were people actually playing cards, they were playing Spades. Suddenly I could talk with anyone without worrying about being understood.

But I still felt a bit out of place. It wasn't just that everyone was a bit simple, which in itself can be okay, but that every conversation seemed like an apology for the person being the way they are, or worse yet an attempt to believe ones own lies about oneself by sharing them with a third party. Is superficial the word I am looking for here? Maybe. But it seemed to me to go beyond superficiality into the realm of deliberate self-deception, of dishonesty about this matter of who one really is. Perhaps, I thought later, the difference is that more complicated people pretend so well that a listener doesn't notice.

And then there was some sort of subtle cultural difference between us. One guy took me for a German, wanted to know if I was "doitch." I think it must have been my clothes, which have been drifting in a European direction too slowly for me to notice myself. Though most of them had been there for a year or two, they could hardly speak a single word of German, making my barely passable conversational German seem like an achievement, which it is not. But all this is not really surprising once you realize that these people have basically been living in America all this time, a little inland American colony known as an army base, and have never had to leave their comfort zone.

The landlord was an interesting character though. He was apparently good friends with all the guys, brought up a bottle of vodka upon their request, emptied ashtrays for people. He was short, with intense blue wall-eyes, and spoke English so well that I swore I detected a Midwest accent (or lack of accent as we like to think back home) in him. He had interesting stories to tell which completely made up for the fact that he suddenly began describing a painful back operation and that I wound up looking at X-rays.

The next day we did basically nothing except walk through the woods for a couple hours, during which I tried to articulate the indefinable problems that have been accumulating in my head. The forest was constantly changing character. Paths split, merged, disappeared altogether, led nowhere. I had no idea where we were most of the time or where we were going. In the end, I only managed to air the problems, and poorly at that. Nothing was solved but it didn't really matter because someone was at least listening to them. That's a start.

After we said goodbye I realized something: I have a lot of respect for this girl. I don't know why this should be surprising, but it is. Maybe I'm a misogynist. All I know is that there are precious few members of the female race that I can say this about. And I never expected to think this way at the end of a relationship, because relationships tend to slowly erode my respect for the other person.

Martina is probably the strongest girl you'll ever meet. She doesn't pity her fate in life, isn't a feminist, or even a post-feminist, whatever that crap means. If she wills herself to do something she does it...she wants to run a marathon in the near future and she will. She doesn't need other people in order to be happy in her life, much less a man. Basically there is almost nothing that she is afraid of.

To this end I asked her about bearing children, if she was scared of it, or maybe freaked out about the idea of having something grow inside of her. She laughed and told me she thought it would be cool, and considered herself luckier than a man because she would be much closer to the child than a man could ever be during those nine months. I asked her if she was afraid of the pain of giving birth. It was over soon she said. And added, laughing, "besides, I think it would be fun, because you get to yell as loud as you want the whole time."

At times it goes beyond respect and verges on awe.

Vienna #2

Here is a glimpse of Shaun and I together in all our radiant glory. Shield your eyes.

After Schloss Schoenbrunn we did something extra touristy and went to the Friedhof graveyard on the outskirts of Vienna. We had read that quite a few composers were buried here. Of course, their whereabouts weren't exactly advertised, as that would detract from all the other dead dudes there, so we had to wander about awkwardly for a while to earn this merit badge. Then suddenly we were looking at the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, and Brahms all lying within 20 feet of each other. Such an understatement would not survive more than a day in America, the land of Wall Drug.

We ended up on the opposite side of Vienna for dinner, in a little "wine tavern" (used in the loosest sense possible) that we had to trudge through several blocks of suburbs to reach because the bus lines gave out. It was basically no more than grandma's kitchen with a few picnic benches put in the adjoining room. The locals were really local-looking. And we were not. But it didn't matter, because "grandma" was nice and her accent not too difficult to understand, and the food good. Shaun and I had a great conversation there.

It was dark when we left, but the night wasn't quite over. Later we hit a club called "Excess." The only thing that was excessive about the place was the amount of people that were crammed in there; moving from one end of the dance floor to the other was quite an undertaking. The crowd was a bit older and girls were outnumbered by muscled-up macho guys. In spite of it Shaun made me proud by talking up a cute Austrian girl. It was his first real club experience, he said, and I hope it won't be his last.

It was difficult to get up the next morning on 5 hours of sleep but it had to be done. It was rainy. But our trip to the Vienna woods was well worth the trouble. Supposedly Kafka, Freud, Schubert, and a bunch of other big-names drew inspiration from long walks in these same woods, and you can probably see why for yourself.

We met this little guy along the way. He reminded me of the salamander (Oliver I think I dubbed him) that used to live in Grandma and Grandpa's farmhouse basement.

Then it was time for me to take leave of my gracious host, and the city where we had pretty much run the gamut of experience, both cultured and uncultured, man-made and natural. Somehow between all the rushing about I found time to reflect, and made some pretty important discoveries about things in general.

Vienna #1

Well Shaun saved the day at the last minute by checking his email (accidentally he said). Coincidence--or perhaps something that goes beyond coincidence, since there have been so many coincidences lately--struck again and decreed that we should hang out in Vienna together.

Saturday was a really long day that began for me at 5:30 when they woke me up on the night train, handing me two apologetic slices of bread and a coffee that burned my hands as I fished around in the half darkness, because the sides were too thin, thin like the kind of cup they take urine samples in. Morning had just dawned on Vienna when I emerged from the subway in front of the St. Stephan's Cathedral.

The first order of business after taking stock of my surroundings was to get coffee, as I continued to do in various places all day long. The coffee shops in Vienna are great, not just for melange (milk coffee) or moccha, but for the ambiance, which no coffee shop I have seen to date can touch. Wooden floors, seats with velvet, ceiling-to-floor mirrors, college students, aristocrats, people who speak german but answer their cellphones in french, regulars beginning to pour in and the good mornings multiplying, smoke curling. One peculiarly Viennese thing about these places is that they serve a glass of water with every coffee. The belief is that coffee dehydrates you. I can't second that officially, but with as much water as I rid myself of on a good day of coffee drinking, it seems plausible.

Shaun and I met in the Cafe Hawelka, and from there commenced intense tourist activities which were not to let up until nearly midnight. Saw Vienna from the top of the St. Stephan's Cathedral.

We ate lunch at the Naschmarkt, an open air market similar to Munich's Viktualienmarkt, except there was a lot more than just food. It was here among the junk bins that we came across this doll. I don't know why but the sight of a doll in a neglected or abused state has always made me sad.

After that we went to Schoenbrunn, the Hapsburg's summer palace.

We could have walked around in the garden for days without seeing the same thing twice. The trees were just beginning to turn so everything was golden to match the palace facade itself.

(To be continued once I get more pictures!)

the au

Yesterday was a holiday (celebrating the reunification of East and West Germany) and I desperately needed some time alone, away from computers. I had to resist the temptation to drag all sorts of things along with me like my PDA, books, pen and paper, frisbee, etc. It was good that I didn't, as I ended up walking around on a wide grassy area beside the Isar (the Germans call this an "Au") and started to recover myself a bit. There was a mallard that kept swimming past me, going upstream, then turning and letting the current carry him downstream in order to repeat it again. He went back to his friends across the way when they got attacked by a huge squawking flock of gulls that were fighting over some floating edible junk. The ducks seemed to me to be a pretty peaceful, self-contained community compared to the gulls, who even fought amongst themselves for the floating edible junk.

I found a place farther downstream where the water turned to rapids. I sat and listened to the roar, watched the smooth water undulate over a shelf and then turn back on itself, suddenly foaming white. Felt energized. Left happy.

Today I found the English bookstore I was looking for and got three books: "The Magus" by John Fowles, "The Doors of Perception," by Aldous Huxley, and "Atlas Shrugged," by Ayn Rand. The proprietor of the place was a little bespectacled bald guy whose blunt canines hung out over his lower lip, I guessed because he didn't have any teeth between them. He seemed a bit hurt that I didn't take his advice on books, but he shouldn't have been, because you just can't trust another person's taste in literature (or art or music or anything else) unless you know them really well. There are only two people in this world whose advice in matters of taste I actually trust.

Well tonight I leave for Vienna, Austria for the weekend. Through a coincidence too strange to overlook a relative of mine, Shaun Geisert, is in Vienna, and invited me to visit him *without even knowing my standing plans to do so.* At the moment I haven't heard back from him so I'm a little worried about whether we'll be able to meet up, but if not, I'll take the blame for being such a terrible ahead-of-time planner (or to be nice, "spontaneous").

And when I get back on Sunday night I'm heading straight over to St. Michael's church in the center of Munich, because Rach's Vespers are being sung there. If I manage to get a ticket at the door life will be beautiful.

the day the earth stood still

You should never, ever say things like "Gee, I haven't been sick in over a year, how great is that?" even to yourself. As a result of doing so I am now sick. Okay, maybe the recent Oktoberfest/Keller merrymaking has weakened my immune system or something. Just another reason why alcohol is a dumb drug, especially for a space cadet like me who's always complaining about being out of touch with reality anyway. I suppose if you're a sturdy prole-type who doesn't need his brain then it's okay; maybe you need alcohol at the end of every day just to forget the harsh reality you live in.

Well I have to say, scrubby bald earring dude at the Police registration office, I love you. You're my freakin hero. You knew in the beginning somehow that I'd be staying here longer than August, and made the first residence permit valid until mid-October, even though I thought this was silly and unnecessary at the time. And you hooked me up with humongo bigtime favor #2 today because I thought I was done for. Now I'll never again have to sit in that dim hellhole of a waiting room listening to squawling children for hours on end! Thanks again bro!

Another one to internalize: don't get on a train without first making sure it's the right one. Even if it arrives at the right time heading the right direction, that's still no guarantee. Because of this mistake I ended up here...

...some deadly quiet S-Bahn station where a train only comes once every half hour. As you can see, time has stopped. (Note the guilty rock still resting at the bottom of the clock face.) The other side was even more thoroughly smashed: there was no trace of glass, and the bent hands were convulsing like a dying insect. I watched a noiseless patient spider already in the process of claiming the clock for his own. Honestly, I was a little worried that I had entered some sort of time warp, and would never make it out of this place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

waterskiing

Today I went water-skiing. I never did actually get going; each time I fell on my face a little farther from the landing than I had the previous time. (Progress is progress though.) It wasn't at all what I expected, because rather than starting from a standstill behind a boat, there was a wire track in the air all the way around the lake, and when you started it yanked you along off to the side, not in the direction your skis were pointing. But there were some crazy wakeboarders there jumping like 10 feet in the air on the curves (just to rub it in I think) and one of them looked eerily like Kurt Cobain, except with lots of muscles and a nice tan. I felt pretty damn white around all these people...the first time such a feeling has come over me in Germany.

neuschwanstein

Silly me: I stayed up all night Saturday night and then went to Neuschwanstein the next day. (Don't nod your head, just shake it in silent disapproval.) Was practically falling asleep standing up. I was drunk off sleep deprivation, and the world was like a movie playing on the back of my eyeballs that I wasn't really paying attention to. But I did get some cool pictures and will be able to speak proudly of my typical touristic (terroristic, as my friend and coworker Michael likes to say) activities.

After some hiking we made it up to Neueschwanstein itself. There we took a guided tour. I was probably at my lowest point of the day, leaning against doorways at the back of the group, nodding off periodically, but I still managed to form some vague impression of the weird interior. In one room there stood a bed and a chair with a desk. Below about eyelevel they seemed normal enough, but at the top they dissolved into this fantastic skyline of carved wood. Maybe at one time it there had been some unifying forms behind it, but if so then they had been completely worked out, like that sequence of paintings of a cat that's in all the psych books, the one that gets progressively more obscured by ornateness until there's nothing but stained glass arabesques left of the poor kitty by the end. The carving was a similar deal. It radiated madness. Supposedly it took 4 people 14 years (or was it 14 people for 4 years?) just to carve these two things.

Everywhere were signs of Wagner's influence. There was even a cave recreating some famous scene in a Wagner opera, and mural paintings from Parsifal throughout one hall. We saw probably 1/100th of the whole castle I'd say. What stands there is only a third of what Ludwig planned to build, so I guess I saw about only 1/300th of the original fantasy.

Then, after 38 long hours in which more happened than has ever really happened before in one period of wakefulness, I slept like a log for a solid 11. Have you ever woke up with a suddenly sore neck from the head-banging that you did two days ago?

search complete: 1 result found

So last night a big group of us went to the Backstage, an alternative club in the West of Munich, not in Kunstpark Ost. People in the Keller have been telling me I should go the Backstage instead and it's a good thing I did. Insanity: my ideal song selection. Weezer, Rage, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Cake. By the end of it all I was seriously afraid that I was going to drop dead on the floor. Dance clubs like these kill people like me.

It was so much fun that we didn't want to call it a night at 3:30, so we went over to Wolfgang's house and had martinis and shot the breeze until it was all of a sudden light outside. We piled back in the car, bleary-eyed, and took the Autobahn back to Munich. What an incredible morning which normal people would totally miss out on: open fields layered with fog filtering sunlight from the still-orange half-risen sun.

Okay, but the title of this entry does not refer to the grand discovery of the Backstage, which granted has now become my club of choice. I met an absolutely beautiful German girl this weekend (she was staying in Startlodge only for a few days) and we connected. She's into endurance sports and is training for a marathon, which means she basically danced everyone else into the ground, hardly breaking a sweat. And she's got a great personality which synched with mine. That's all I'm willing to say at the moment so you'll have to stay tuned for further details.

slug

If you can actually tell that that's a slug then good for you. It was raining yesterday when I went to work, and the winding road approaching Siemens was covered with crawling slugs and snails. Not exactly a Yellow Brick Road on my way to see the Wizard.

Back in Junior High School my friends and I wanted to start a band. We called it Slug. I think that's all we ever got around to doing, calling it Slug that is, and even that took weeks of deliberation over a long list of candidate band names. Afterwards I made an iron-on design with a slug mired in goo. I still have the T-shirt somewhere. Maybe it's worth millions now. The fact that we never made a song shouldn't be an obstacle these days...all you need is a cool name like "Atomic Kitten" and some hype and you're a band.

complexity

Need contact fluid. The big bottle finally ran out, and empty eyedropper bottles are strewn all over the shelf in my medicine cabinet. I thought I'd stop by kd after work today (the place that offered a 10% discount for every point the German soccer team won by) as they seemed to have an abundance of hygiene products the last time I was there. As I pulled up John Denver's "Country Roads" or whatever that song is called was playing loudly outside, but it didn't quite sound like the way I remembered it, and sure enough a thumping techno beat commenced, signaling to me that the last song remaining unmixed on planet Earth has indeed finally been remixed. Leave it to Germany. Does this mean the Apocalypse is coming mommy?

It was some sort of grand reopening after having been closed for all of three weeks. You've probably already guessed the plot of this story; Alan looks for simple item (a la power adapter, a la Residence Permit) and goes away empty-handed and befuddled. "Broken beaten down, can't even get around!" Yeah that's what happened. But listen. Every imaginable hygiene product was in this place, from Buddy Boy condoms to denture fizz, and they didn't have a single thing for contacts. I just stumbled around, labels assaulting me on all sides, and suddenly began to empathize with this poor old guy who was despondently examining strange new-fangled items and randomly placing a few in his plastic bag. Yes, I thought, agreeing with him, this has gone too far. We should go back to a time when things were simpler.

But what a complex world we grapple with these days. During the time when things were simpler, we were barely surviving, and survival necessitated a simplistic view of the world in which rules of thumb reigned supreme. "When you see a bear drop to the ground and stay still. The early bird gets the worm. Look before you leap." But we're so far above survival concerns these days that we have much less need for simplifying. We have time to sit down and think, not just a split second to act. As Eric pointed out, we continue to add adjectives to the language: instead of just "good" and "bad" we have a whole slew of in-betweens. We're slowly but surely moving away from the simple categorical modes of thought that have kept us alive this whole time, and are moving into an era where a complex take on things is all of a sudden possible.

But we all have our moments when the complexity is too overwhelming for us, and for me it is usually in supermarkets. Super-markets. Marketing is super. Don't you think?

impress me with your now

Okay I think it's time to get out of Munich. Here I am in Europe and I've never even been out of Munich, practically speaking. Haven't seen the Black Forest, Berlin, The Alps, or anything else of note really. I confess I haven't even seen the "sights" in Munich--the Deutsches Museum or Koenigsburg Platz. What will I tell the people when I get back home? What famous names will I rattle off? What proud sightseeing claims will I make?

Well that's basically why I haven't done any of this stuff--because it feels like it's for other people and not me. I am weary of such things. The last thing I want to be is a tourist, seeing everything in Europe and yet seeing really nothing at all. Better to know one place well than skim the surface of many.

And I think I have began to get a pretty good feel for this place and the vibe it gives off. Not the old vibe, not the thousand-year-old-vibe, but the vibe that it's giving off right now. I have kindly asked Munich not to impress me with its Past but to impress me with its Now. It has. But it's time for me to move on, things are already starting to seem too familiar, and I begin to perform things routinely. Staleness is setting in. To me it felt like Eric and I tasted everything Munich had to offer on the last day he was here, and also kind of defiled the place with our irreverent American presence. And last weekend I came close to completing the KPO experience by beginning early and seeing it all the way through to the strung-out 6-in-the-morning end.

Time to get out. Plans are already in the works for me to visit Mark's hometown in Kassel two weekends from now. The following weekend my brother Ed is flying over to visit me, and who knows where we'll end up. Looking at Durer works in Nuremburg? Visiting Eric in Berlin? At the castle Neuschwanstein? In Paris, Amsterdam, Prague? (See how good I am at throwing out these names?)

goth watching

Armed with brand new bright red shoes and new clothes, I went to fight the good fight at Kunstpark Ost last night. Ended up at the Keller, only this time it wasn't so great. There were two rooms, one in the front that was too crammed full of people dancing to music that was either completely unknown to me (man there's a lot of mediocre alternative out there!) or too light, and another smaller one in the back filled with goth types thrashing around to music that was too heavy. It was cool to watch for a while though. I think I was one of about five people in this room not clothed in all black. There was this one girl from an entirely different planet, goth, thin like a twig and folded over on herself as she stood there, arms dangling limply at either side, a beer bottle attached to one, long hair falling in front of her face like Cousin It. Her dancing had more in common with a willow tree swaying in the wind than it did with what you'd usually think of as dancing. There was some slow, solemn song on, and all of a sudden every one in the little goth circle was doing the same swaying pattern, two steps forward and two steps backwards. I knew that I was not witnessing 21st century people dancing in a club but rather Celts from the European Iron Age performing an obscure rite of passage dance. These people have a keenly developed sense of the ritual, the mystical; most of us have lost it.

I spent most of the time in the other room, though, waiting around for the few songs I actually knew and liked. I stayed to the bitter end, when the lights finally came on at 5:30. We all filed out into the shambles that was Kunstpark Ost at dawn. The variety of crap you'll find on the ground there is amazing: flyers, watermelon rinds, banana peels, condoms, bottles and cans (just clap your hands). As I passed the entrance, there were still people bungee jumping from a crane they had set up, and while waiting for the train at the station I could still make out the crane on the skyline and the tiny bodies making that first plunge off the platform and into the unknown.

prinzen rolle

Oh, Prinzen Rolle, how I love thee, let me count the ways. I'm sure these things are horrible for me--they're just low-grade grahamcrackers with simulated fudge in between--but they make me happy. Average daily intake steadily increasing.

hier Franz

Waking up late, meeting at the same place as before, going to eat Turkish Doener for lunch, getting coffee and becoming altogether too caffeinated so that we're buzzing at the edges, listening to Bach fugues pouring forth from a seated accordion player in a tunnel, clinging change thrown into velvet box, some solar power rally going on with a line of twenty-something bongo drum players waiting for the speaker to finish so they could show us all how happy solar power makes them feel, finding the English Beer Gardens, a clarinet player in a gazebo, Bochy-balls, the announced "Number One" turning out to be rapid German read by overly dramatic woman and punctuated by Schoenberg bursts of atonality from an accordion, total crap, seeking and finding the Chinese Pagoda, drinking liter beers together, Eric becoming suddenly more interested in physics and the explanation thereof, having a huge prezel, stumbling around, sitting down, getting up again, revisiting the solar power convention where the solar-powered bongo drummers have been replaced by a Mexican band with too many guys playing too many lame clacking instruments, eating sausages at the ghostly quiet Hackerbraeu Haus and laughing about anything and everything, the bathrooms afterwards deserted as was everything today and reeking of excrement, "Hier Franz," Eric getting his train ticket to Berlin, both of us laying down in the middle of the Karsplatz in front of the Neues Rathaus, remaining this way until we gradually acquired acolytes to whom we passed the torch of this newfound religion when we got bored and left, walking back to Eric's hotel, awkward goodbye, then to the U-Bahn for me, trudging the last several kilometers by foot through sinister empty marshy fields, then down S-Bahn side trails with distant pinpoint orange glows at the end which never seemed to get any closer, finally, home again home again jiggity-jig.

thematic material explained

Why is it that all my recent entries center around clubbing experiences and the pursuit of girls, you may ask? Well, to this I can only say

This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
This is my time, this is my life
And I'll live it the way that I wannoo.
This is my time, this is my lihaha-hahaha-hife.
...

Barf.

indecent proposal

Let the tour de force continue: tonight Eric and I went to (you guessed it) Kunstpark Ost and had a blast clubbing it. To the two stamps still on my hand from last night I added a third. Maybe, if I don't bathe regularly for the rest of the summer and make it my special endeavor, I'll collect all thirty. I'll look like the Illustrated Man with club stamps up and down my arms.

We settled down in a club called Stars which had a live DJ mixing house and techno. As before, when we got there things hadn't quite gotten started, and everyone was playing that increasingly irritating "I'm stuck to the wall" game. There was a big open space. The music was playing. The dance lights were going. But nobody was dancing. Sometimes you have to bring the party with you, I guess, and Eric and I just started doing are own thing out there. He was wearing this black shirt with "sgi" (Silicon Graphics Incorporated) on it. I think people were laughing at the sight of us but we couldn't have cared less. After about five minutes or so we acquired some satellite girls who were ready to get the party going. Within an hour the floor was packed, and the roof was on fire.

As I've said before, in general the dancing ability of the average German has left me unimpressed. The guys often have no clue what to do, and there are still a few girls who are stuck in this silly swinging from side-to-side 80s mode. It's hard to find a girl who dances with energy. (Okay, except for the ones in the Keller, but they're psycho freaky alternative girls mostly.) At one point during the night, though, I found this girl who matched my energy and beamed my smile back at me. We had a crazy little bout that lasted for the duration of a song. And then she went back to her lame-looking boyfriend. (Why are the good ones always already spoken for?) But it was fun all the same.

Eric and I parted ways around 2:00 am so we could get back home at a reasonable hour. As I was waiting for my S-Bahn, I looked over at this girl sitting next to me on the bench staring at me all doe-eyed. She asked me a question in German but I had to make her repeat it in English. "Will you go to bed with me?" she asked. I was like whoah! stop the music! and just stared stupidly at her, and the guy who I had assumed was her boyfriend peering out at me from behind her. Could this be happening? Maybe she had been serious at first, just testing the waters or something, or maybe it had been a joke to her all along, for she quickly explained that she had only been joking. Joking? Stop freakin' messing with me!

Anyway, this unlikely opening led into a nice little conversation with her and the guy. We talked about pleasantries, the States, Munich, and Germany in general. We parted on pretty good terms. She seemed pretty interested in me and the guy didn't get sullen or jealous or anything, so maybe she had been serious with her question. But there's no way to know--the crafty little thing concocted a situation in which she couldn't possibly lose, at my expense. Girls can go to hell.

the keller

Last night I decided to go do the Kunstpark Ost thing alone. It was threatening rain when I got on the S-Bahn. Eventually we came to a standstill for some reason or other, waited like this for half and hour, and then started going backwards again towards Ottobrunn. Everyone seemed pretty hacked off about this, but honestly, the transit system is so reliable the other 95% of the time that it's wrong to complain.

I got there an hour later than I had planned but was still early; the party hadn't really begun yet. I payed 4.50 just to find out that one club totally wasn't scene. The music was cool--this is what had interested me from outside--but the place was one small room with about 20 people all standing around the edges not dancing or anything. In my initial disbelief at the lameness of the place I paced all around room looking for doors, staircases, trap doors, anything that would lead me into that crazy back room where everyone was getting down rather than standing straight up. I moodily had a beer and left as soon as I could.

Eventually I discovered where it's at (got two turntables and a microphone!). It was the Keller, which means "Cellar" in English. (Incidentally, it's also the last name of my mother's side of the family. Which is, also incidentally, of mostly German origin.) When I got there not a whole lot was going on, but the place was big and gave off cool vibes. For a while I sat at the bar and looked on as this guy with long headbanger hair and studded leather wrist cuffs thrashed about by himself. Except for him the dance floor was empty. As before, noncommital people clung to all the walls. Spectators.

I didn't have to wait long for a song I knew--STP's "Plush"--and then I was out there jamming with this guy. Pretty soon, some other guys joined in, and a hardcore girl who was to continue unfaded early into the morning made her appearance. This was only the beginning.

Maybe I should have said first off that the Keller plays alternative. Now, it is unclear to me exactly how one should dance to alternative; with hip-hop or techno there are well-established means of expressing yourself eurythmically, but with alternative this isn't the case. Unlike the former, alternative frequently has changes in rhythm, switches to double-time, to half-time, or even to sections during which there is no real discernible beat. Dancing to an alternative song you don't know can be perilous. By the end of the night I was comfortable and dancing to pretty much everything, but at first I would only dance to songs I knew. And the DJ wasn't helping me out much here by playing junk that neither I nor anyone else had actually heard.

So we had a little talk, and I told him that if we wanted to get this party started we needed to go back to some stuff everybody knew, Weezer's Blue, Green Day, Rage's Self-titled, etc. His idea of Weezer that everyone knew was "Island in the Sun" and this wasn't heavy enough for most of the people there. But the Rage, holy shit, the Rage...

It was a good thing he didn't play more than one Rage song back-to-back. The first one he put on, Know Your Enemy, illicited some beer bottle smashing right away. Total frenzy. Later we heard Wake Up, and around 4:00 am Killing in the Name, which killed me. It was the pinnacle of the whole outing for me, and after being in ultra-high-rabid-jumping-up-and-down-foaming-at-the-mouth mode for those euphoric 5 minutes 14 seconds I felt drained, and was ready to call it a night.

On a sidenote: met a cool freaky alternative girl from the south of Bavaria, and we may hang out again tonight at a different club. On another sidenote: I thought alternative was dead, but apparently it has just split into lots of little subgenres, the harder, newer of which I heard more and more of as the night went on. I didn't recognize a lot of those songs but people went absolutely crazy over some of them. Don't know yet if I'm down with the new sound.

Well after all this revelling there was the problem of getting home. I left the Keller at 4:00 am, and the next S-Bahn came at 5:46 am. I misread the signs and didn't notice that the 5:00 am one only ran on working days, so I had a lot of time to kill. Luckily for me I had my iPaq along with a bunch of Pocket books. I read Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" while I waited.

Tonight it may all happen over again. My friend Eric arrives in Munich this evening and we're going to do whatever spontaneous things occur to us as suitable for the day and age. So I've got to lounge around and recover from last night. My neck is getting sore!

plan to not have fun

It was a day full of experiences. I will begin at the beginning.

This morning I saw Mattias whiz by the kitchen on his bike, going off to work, and I thought "Let me see if I can catch him." I estimate he had about a 1 min. headstart by the time I finally pulled out of there. For the longest time I didn't even see him. Then I would see him rounding a corner off in the distance way up ahead. Gradually I gained on him, and finally overtook him just outside of Siemens after about 15 min. of riding--hard work!

I had to leave work early to try and get a residence permit. Even though I've been living here for over a month now, I still haven't taken the time to get this (bureacracy, bureacracy, everywhere, and not a drop to drink). Finally the pressure was put on me by HR so I had to. After waiting for an hour and a half, I was told that I had come to the wrong bureau, that because I lived outside of Munich, I wasn't in their jurisdiction but instead in this other jurisdiction blah blah blah. I asked them if the bureau in my jurisdiction used the same form, which was four pages long and tedious to fill out, so that I could reuse it. They said no. I left, thwarted. Kafka wrote books about such things.

The plan at this point was to go to the English gardens and have a picture-taking contest with Florent and Norman. Whoever took the picture of the hottest girl would win. I was in a pretty crummy mood after my dealings with The Authority, but it improved as I got nearer to the gardens and the impressive concentration of hotties thereabouts. It was a perfect hot day for such an endeavor.

Well, this was the plan anyway, but instead we played frisbee for a while and met a really weird guy from Barbados who threw a simple backhand with Baroque flair and claimed to be into all kinds of extreme sports, sometimes sounding Hispanic and at other times breaking into a Texan drawl. He offered to take us windsurfing, hangliding, waterskiing, "whatever we wanted to do," and he looked money, you know, but came across as a con man. After we parted ways we three made an attempt to do the picture thing but just weren't feeling it. What few pictures we took didn't turn out, and we felt kind of weird and covert about the whole thing.

Florent left for the beergardens to meet up with his French pals. Norman and I got to talking and found out we had come to the same conclusion independently: that the picture contest hadn't been fun because it had been planned too far in advance. It wasn't spontaneous enough. Planned fun is usually like this; it's almost work to go through the motions you've scripted for yourself ahead of time.

So we walked around for a while and did spontaneous things, and hey, what do you know, it started to get fun. We gawked and whoahed at girls instead of capturing them surreptitiously on film.

Why is it that German TV always shows the most sickening crap right when I sit down to dinner? I should have seen it coming this time. As I cooked my omelette, I looked at the TV and there was this huge, malformed breast completely filling the screen. It was from a botched boob job. Next, they had an interview with the owner of the malformed breast and she was expressing her dismay at owning such a malformed breast and not the Pamela Anderson Lee perkies she had paid for. (You see the rising action but I didn't at the time.) So I sit down and put the first bite of my tender, foamy omelette in my mouth, and what do I see on the TV screen but the very instant in the repair operation at which the implanted sack of whatever pops suddenly out the side of this woman's malformed breast? And this isn't the first time for such things. If it isn't a repair boob job it's some other horrendous surgical procedure, and you can count on it appearing at about 6:00 o'clock, as you're enjoying your dinner.

Meanwhile, somehow the hot sunny day had morphed into a threatening gray rainy one outside. I went out and had a cup of coffee in the rain, for the experience of having a cup of coffee in the rain. People need to go out in the rain every once in a while just like people need a good cry every once in a while. Standing out in the rain is like having a good cry, only you don't have to do any work at all.

the kaltenberger knight tournament

Yesterday we spent way too much in order to see a knight's tournament held yearly in Kaltenburg, outside Munich. It was a little more authentic than an American Rennaissance fair but not by much. The joust itself was an elaborate scripted battle between four good knights and four bad, the latter led by the "Black Knight," whom we cheered for loudly whenever possible. Unfortunately his unjust, backstabbing ways eventually brought about his own downfall (darn). Then the cast was introduced to the refrain of Beethoven's Ninth, a moving experience the first time around, but becoming plain old irritating after it had looped for about the 20th time.

It was medium grade fun but a bit too predictable. The coolest part of the whole excursion came after the tournament when we listened to an outdoor band consisting only of bagpipes, horns, and drums, with no mikes or electronic anything. There were about eight guys in the band, most clothed only in slatted leather barbarian kilt-like things. One was completely bald except for two tiny red horns of hair on either side. Another, the lead singer, had a long brown mane and evoked Mel Gibson from Braveheart. In the back there was a drummer with red hair and a skinny build whose arms flew up, repelled, from the drum which he beat on slave-ship style, and he was probably the most fun to watch. And the sound, the sound of these guys, was strange, a mix of Scottish bagpipes, primeval drum rumblings, and something like Rammstein unplugged.

Here's a colorful character we ran across. Don't even try to tell me he doesn't look like Gimli...

too much

Whoah, last night was just too much for me. Mark and I met Norman and Uva (another guy from work) at the University of Munich, where there was a party going down, a once per year thing. I think there must have been about five thousand people there. It was filled to the point of overflowing and we had to wait in line for about an hour just to get in.

Once in, we commenced with the drinking and dancing. There were supposed to be four different bands playing there but I only saw one. We moved from room to room, each one playing a different kind of music, and eventually settled down in the "pop" room (I think), where I commenced to get even drunker so that beyond about 3 am there are big gaps in my memory. Apparently Mark and I took a taxi part of the way home (do not remember any of this). I recall walking from the S-Bahn station in Ottobrunn to Startlodge; it was already light outside. What is normally a 10 minute walk seemed like 10 seconds. Do not remember getting into bed, or slamming doors, although Claudia remembered this detail quite well and chided me about it when I woke up. They said my alarm clock went off for an hour straight this morning. I never heard it. Eventually it must have realized that I was in a deep drunken slumber and just given up. When I finally did roll out of bed, both Mattias and Holger greeted me with "Oh, you're alive."

Yes, I'm alive, though I have to admit I've felt more alive on other occasions. It will probably take me all day to recover.

Definitely, this was the drunkest I've ever been. Only my 21st birthday comes close. Still, I remember nearly everything from that night, and last night there were many things which supposedly happened but do not exist in my version of reality. Where did these moments go? Was I aware of them but not making memories out of them, or was I not even aware of them at the time? Does my brain omit them only when I try to remember, or did it omit them to begin with? It is impossible to know.

It was too much.

the wcf

The World Cup Final is over, with the disappointing result that the Brazilians are once again the world champions. And Germany played so well (except for those two little goals of Ronaldo's) that you really can't feel ashamed of them. For the most part they controlled the ball. Their style is not Brazil's--the Germans favor a slowly developing attack, strategy, the artillery shelling of Kahn's kicks from the backfield establishing forward positions. You can see the Panzers rolling in. Brazil, on the other hand, has a completely different approach that relies on explosive attacks which one doesn't see coming, and raw speed.

Training a soccer team for the World Cup must be a bit like programming a Robocode robot. Robocode comes with many standard robots like Crazy, Ramfire, Walls, etc., each of which have their own specialized strategies. When I started writing Robocode robots I quickly discovered how to beat Crazy, Ramfire, and Walls, but couldn't beat all of them all the time with the same robot. The Robocode sample robots are essentially a test suite (like de Jong's test suite is for optimization algorithms), and if you can beat them all with the same robot then you may have a world champion on your hands. It's the same with soccer teams. Germany handled many different strategies well, including the overly aggressive strategy of the U.S., but hadn't quite figured out how to defuse the Brazilian bomb every time.

Anyway, after the game we saw this on the ground in the English gardens, and I think it pretty much sums up the post-game feeling.

the mother network

Guess I've been having too much fun recently to write it all down--but that's the way it should be, eh?

Last night I decided to tag along with Mark. He was meeting an old friend at a pub whom he hadn't seen in 5 years. The guy's name was Jan and he was a biophysicist who spoke astonishing English, a lot of fun to listen to. He just finished at Urbana-Champaign and will be doing his Phd at Stanford next. Mark was under the impression that Jan was still in economics, but in fact Jan chose between physics and economics a while back--it was just that all of Mark's information, including the news that Jan was doing consulting work in Munich for the summer, came from his mother, who heard from someone else's mother, and so on...who heard from Jan's mother. The joke was that this "mother network" was faster than any 10 megabit network in existence, perhaps achieved through some special quantum entanglement of their mother brains, but that the information was often inaccurate since the process of observing it introduced randomness, a la Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But we also talked about the differences between America and Germany (naturally), on which Jan was strangely reluctant to generalize (for a physicist that is), except to say that perhaps Americans tended to more extremes--"there's a wider Gaussian," as he put it. And it was also funny to hear him talk about what's currently "in" in physics. Apparently high-energy particle physics is "out," and the way he said it was exactly the way you would say last summer's fashions are "so last year," or something.

Despite having a bit too much to drink and having to get up with the working world this morning, I felt energetic. There was a pseudo-deadline at work today so I stayed extra late working with my project partner, and after that we went to have a beer together. When I finally got back to the Siemen's parking lot it was 11:30 pm and the bike shed was locked up. No problem, I thought, shrugging off my backpack and climbing over the chain link fence, I'll just hoist the old infertilizer over the top and be on my way. This proved more difficult than I thought, as straddling the top of the fence in the dark and lifting the bike over from one side was a balancing act that I wasn't quite up to at the time. I was just about to give up and throw the hunk of metal over by hand when the gate quietly swung open--it had been open the whole time, even when I was straddling it and reaching down for the bike. Sometimes the solution is the obvious one.

And this weekend is going to be a Weekend, a weekend with a capital "W" that is. Tomorrow Mark, his visiting friends, Norman, and I are going to shop around in Munich by day and party in Kunstpark Ost by night. Then Sunday, Sunday with a capital "S" that is, is the World Cup Final match between Germany and Brazil. We're going to watch it on a bigscreen in the streets of Munich with all the other frenzied German fans. (At this point I expect that a "frenzied German fan" will be a normal German with a silly hat or something, but with an otherwise stolid demeanor.)

the best haircut ever

It is Tuesday night and I'm itching. Itching to scratch my stomach, that is, because my sunburn is just getting to that stage. And I have this giant welt on my arm where some insect must have bit me last night (last night? or the night before?). I just remember waking up with a start and seeing furry writhing legs right in front of my line of view and shooting up into the air, from supine to upright in 0.3 seconds, lunging for the light switch. But it was gone. These Europeans have almost everything we do (except for Dave Matthews and air conditioning and screen doors). Yes, I would like some whine with my cheese, thank you very much.

This morning it was time to go get the mane trimmed. I now understand why Mark's hair got so obscenely long last summer in Germany--he didn't want to risk it with a German barber probably. But I did something trendy. I went to this hair salon that screamed expensive, and it was, about three times as much as I've ever paid for a haircut, but it was the best haircut I've ever had. First a girl gave me a shampoo and an amazing neck massage, so amazing that I forgot my shoulders were burnt to a crisp, and didn't complain one bit. Then another girl in bright red pants and hair dyed bright red to match cut it, and it was like watching an artist go to work. A third girl who was supposed to be minding the desk watched on, trying to catch my eye in the mirror and smiling when she did. Maybe--I like to think anyway--she was a little intrigued by yours truly, an energetic American of the variety you don't see every day in suburban Munich. After paying and thanking the red-haired artist especially, I left, and realized that everyone I had interacted with had been a cute German girl of about my age. Like I say, it was the best haircut ever. :)

Well, Germany is in the World Cup Finals. We shall see with whom--either Turkey or Brazil. If the former, there are going to be some serious street riots no matter what the outcome. My department was also holding a going away party for a coworker at the same time, so there was stuff to eat and, you guessed it, beer. I took this opportunity to have an Augustiner Helles Bier while programming. In spite of it I was probably the most productive person there, as almost everyone was standing around talking and laughing. Sigh. Programming and having a beer. This is one of those things that will simply never happen back at the ranch.

unidentified weird sound

Ever since I arrived here I have been hearing weird sounds at night. Not weird sounds so much as a single weird, recurring sound. I have hesitated to say anything about it to anyone, including my roommates, but tonight I got the nerve up to track it down.

So I am walking down the street at midnight. My shirt is off, as I got sunburned pretty badly today, and in one hand I have my PDA. The noise seems to emanate from behind a hedge that is too tall to see over. I raise my PDA on high and begin recording this thing while lightning flashes mutely in the distance. I am a little scared that as I'm about to round one of these hedge corners a ferocious-looking man in a bear suit will pop around it silently and then disappear again and I will pass out, like in Mulholland Drive.

But I get the recording. Listen to it yourself, listen very closely because the recording is much much quieter than this thing is in real life. It keeps me awake at night sometimes it's so loud.

I can only make wild guesses as to what it is. Is it a monkey of some kind? A parrot? A weird German owl? At one point its screechings were so plaintive that I would have sworn that some demon-child was being tortured nightly in my neighbor's back yard.

What do you make of it?

residual things to prove

We were coming back from Pep today by car, and all kinds of honking and hooting was going on. The Turks apparently won in their World Cup Match. We probably passed about ten cars with red Turkish flags waving out the windows, which just made the Germans shake their heads. When the Germans won in a nailbiter against the Americans 1-0 on Friday, only twice did they show any signs of elation: once after the goal, and once after the game. As the crowd streamed out the doors they were already in the process of becoming their usual, reserved selves once again.

Today I went to practice frisbee in the little park with the giant hill in the center. Behind the hill there was a small gang of German high schoolers all squeezed onto the same bench, enjoying a stealthy smoke and riding around their motorcycles (motorpeds? they were small, not Harley's, ok) occasionally. I just set up on the longest open stretch of grass and started getting into the routine of throw, walk, throw, walk. At one point my throw landed close enough to their bench for a blonde German girl, dressed in pink and very pretty, to use this as an opportunity to find out why I was playing alone. I gave her the standard "I'm from America, my German is bad" thing. She made a pathetic little girl throw in my direction, to which I managed "And you throw a little badly too" in German. Their was laughter.

I went back to playing. Another guy showed up in his Frosted Mini-Wheat motorcycle. Perhaps because I was perceived as a bit of a threat after the friendly attention I got from pink girl, someone made a noise as I was about to throw the next one. I kind of shook my head and smiled at this--it hadn't affected the throw at all, in fact it was one of my best of the evening--but the seed had been planted in my mind. From the moment of my arrival I had been a little at unease around this gang of kids; it brought back memories from those terrible Junior High days. I went through all the stages of paranioa, began to play out scenes in which I kicked the sh*t out of these cocky German warm-shower-takers in my mind. The adrenaline was running pretty high, and I was prepared to take action at any moment. Most guys my age would have been past that stage, mature, beyond throwing punches I suppose, but there were so many fights that I didn't get into but should have, so many omitted punches, so many stand-up-for-yourself situations that I just backed down from diplomatically, that I have residual things to prove I guess. Too little testosterone too late is the way the story went.

the big joke

Now I'm definitely having sleep problems. My little room is on the second story and is not air-conditioned. I lay in bed late into the night, a thin film of sweat over my body, the air getting thicker and thicker and my skin beginning to crawl with imagined insects. Last night I only managed 4 hours of sleep, the second time this has happened this week. But I don't feel tired so maybe I have nothing to worry about.

Things are no better at work. The other guys in my room have taken to going in early, because there's no air-conditioner in there and it becomes like hell itself in the afternoon. Gets difficult to think, and everyone's temperature begins to rise. There are many outbursts of frustration. You would think that a media office with a panoramic 3d screen and 20 pairs of 3d glasses that cost 500 Euros a piece could afford a simple air circulation system. The main office of the department just across the hall, where most people work, is well air-conditioned, so there's a puzzling discrepancy here.

I looked at my face this morning after shaving and saw a bunch of red blotches around my jawline, not pimples exactly but close enough. What with all this continual sweating I had a teenager's nightmare vision of my face slowly rotting. Jungle rot setting in, only on my face. It felt like I needed to take a hundred showers to get clean of this horrible feeling. As a kid, the constant affliction of pimples which began way too early in the third grade made me think of the following thing, which I remembered again today: I wished I could take a picture of my face every day, first thing when I woke up, in the same exact position so as to allow for a giant flipbook of my face over the course of my life. It would be weirdly fascinating at the end of it all to review my life in a few seconds, baby-face becoming kid-face becoming angular teenager face becoming bearded middle-aged face becoming wrinkled old man face. Somewhere in the early middle of this flipbook the pimples would be going off like firecrackers, and then they would gradually die out. I think at the time I thought this up I very much needed to convince myself of the transitory nature of pimples.

Today, again, we went to the Isar after work. But it was a totally different experience. For one, it was in the center of Munich. And the water was way too fast to comfortably swim in. It took Mark and Norman and I quite a while to get organized, so by the time we got out there, the sun had disappeared and the hot crappy day had been replaced by a grey crappy one.

There was some confusion in navigating Munich (big surprise here). Spirits seemed somewhat low, even with Norman around. We laid out our blankets and got to talking about girls, which led to some cynical remarks from me about another great exchange that takes place between the sexes. Norman wasn't taking any of this seriously even though Mark and I were. He told me that we were too young to think seriously about things. Maybe this is true, but I can't just give up on the world and consider it all one big joke as some people seem to. Pressing on, we eventually got to talking about religion and the ultra-serious, at which point Norman dropped the bomb and showed us why life had forced him to regard it as a sort of joke.

Out of respect for the guy I won't recount it, but suffice it to say that some awful (this does not begin to describe) things happened to him very recently, of which I had no idea, and now knowing them still cannot fathom. He was suddenly bitter about a lot of things. I can only hope that laying them out in the open did him some good.

Recovering the conversation, I told them about the five Platonic solids and how my introduction to them recently had been the closest thing to a religious experience I've had in years. I was completely amazed and mystified by the fact that there should only be 5. Why 5? Why not some other number, 7, 10, 11, an infinite number? I recall telling my professor about this and asking him these questions, and saying "Who decided this?" "What do you mean who decided this," he said, "it comes out of The Math. It's been proven." He didn't understand what I meant at first--a little archetypal, don't you think? "No, I mean in a metaphysical sense," I said. "Oh." And he laughed at this and the misunderstanding that had just taken place. "I don't know," he said, smiling.

Isar beer

Today after work we went swimming in the Isar. I would have included pictures, but, well, let's just say it would have seemed a bit weird to all the partially/completely naked people running around.

The water was clean and fast. On the far side the current really picked up, making it difficult to keep from getting dragged downstream. On the near side, however, the water was not so fast, and it was here that we discovered four bottles of beer on the bottom, no doubt left to get cold and then forgotten. They were unlabeled except for the caps which indicated that they were Munich beer of some kind. To me they were Isar beer. We joked about this being the origin of all German beer--"it simply shows up already bottled at the bottom of our rivers." I went and got one, pulled it off the bottom and made my way back to shore. Just like a commercial. It was good, and cold.

This made me a little rowdy on the way home. And I've got to hand it to Mark, his ultra-fast driving really makes one feel alive. At one point I was standing up in the back of his convertible yelling "If you like potatoes, say ho!" (in German of course) to the peace-loving citizens of some little berg. At 40 mph.

But hey, why not? You only live once. And besides, the message has got to be heard by all.

punks, the 80s, and the holy trinity

This weekend was a bit crazy. On Saturday night we went to Kunstpark Ost, the Munich dance club section, and had a rip-roaring good time. You could tell you were getting close to the place when it seemed like one out of every five people you passed had a red mohawk. Holger wasn't as impressed with the freaks as I was--he thought they were "designer punks." And I was thinking, would I know a designer punk from an authentic one? It reminded me of my junior high school days when we used to talk about bands, and this one guy would always say "yeah, they're sold-out" if it was a band that more than five people had actually heard of. Back then, I thought Green Day was the bomb, and his strident assertion that they were sold-out befuddled my poor impressionable brain. Now I just think it must be tough to be a punk, having to constantly deny the charge of being a sell-out or a designer-punk. They probably spend every waking hour thinking about how to keep things real and original-like.

I guess there was one big disappointment for the evening, and this was that yes, the Germans are in fact still in love with the 80s. You wouldn't know it from watching MTV (but that stuff's mostly imported anyway). All my roommates agreed when the question was put to them that the 80s were a cool decade with cool pop music, so that I then left, saddened and disillusioned with life, and threw myself into the path of an oncoming truck.

But I survived and went to Kunstpark Ost that evening, being the hardy American-type that I am. And I even danced to German 80s pop in a discotheque (did I just admit this?). Finally, I've found a country where, on the average, people dance worse than I do. Matt, Mark, the indefatigable Norman, Holger and his lately-arrived girlfriend Maren were present. A good time was had by all. When we got back at 2 I was falling asleep standing up, as the 1 hour of sleep on Saturday morning was starting to hit me.

And then today I went to my first beer garden with Mark and Claudia. I ordered a Mass (= 1 liter of beer in a huge freakin' glass) and put it away without any trouble. In the sky there were three clouds: one obscured the late afternoon sun and had a silver lining, another was a nebulous thing from which the incident rays fanned out like in a religious painting, and the third was a huge rolling cumulous that you could watch bubble up time-lapse-photography style. These three stood in a row like some kind of weird alignment of the planets, Jupiter-Venus-Mars. Father Son and Holy Ghost.

Afterwards we went to have some ice cream at an Italian ice cream shop, and sat outside talking about the older and younger generations in Germany, which seems to be a favorite topic of the younger generation (and probably the older too), though they obviously don't see eye to eye on a lot of things. We raced our bikes home--I had to lay down for a while to keep the old stomach in check.

if you like potatos, say ho!

"If you like potatos, say ho! If you like grapes, lemme here you say hhhhhhhhhhhoooooo!"

"We like quiet. Quiet please."

Alrighty-then. It is a Munich morning and I have just pulled an all-nighter, for no good reason other than that my brain would not stop. Every once and a while it seems like I need to do this to clean out the old brainpan. Guess I kind of let work follow me home a bit (my first mistake) and then I got to thinking about XML and XSLT (my second mistake). And the rest is history.

So I grabbed my trusty frisbee and went to toss it around on the soccer field at about 5:45 am, just to cap the night off. I wonder if the sight of an American throwing around a frisbee by himself at 5:45 in the morning freaked out some German brainpans as they drove past. I certainly hope so, because there's nothing as lonely as an incommunicable disease.

On that note, my German is finally starting to come along, ever since Norman told all my colleagues at work to speak German to me rather than English. And he's right, I should be speaking German, not relying on others to know English.

A word or two about Norman. We share the same room with 3 or 4 other interns, and he's been really cool to me, kindly imparting his knowledge of German obscenties and so forth. Holger calls him my "teacher" and he kind of is. He seems older than me, maybe 25 or thereabouts, wears loud mis-matched shirts and shorts and is a total riot to talk to. But then once we had a really good serious conversation--he and the French intern Florent and I--about Europeans flipping out over genetically engineered food and mad-cow disease etc.

This led to the common agreement that things would not change unless people started demanding quality over quantity. Although I'm still skeptical of all this food paranoia, the Europeans do seem to be a little ahead of the game by beginning to demand quality. That's a first step. If we're content to eat Big Macs, to eat food because it's fast, and refuse to pay a little extra in order to get quality food that comes from a known origin like the farmer next door, favoring the feedlots and a forest of supply-chain middlemen, we as consumers are sending an economic message to producers that says "I don't care what I shove down my gullet." Producers hear this, and know they can safely ignore how good it is and instead concentrate only on how much. Quantity. Mass-production, friends.

So, to reiterate, if you like potatos from the guy next door, say ho!

diver

Here's the approach to Siemens. Even though I was quite a ways away when I took this, you still can't see the entire thing. To give you an idea of just how big this thing is (since for some reason I seem to be determined to impress upon you a sense of largeness, so start getting impressed already), I walked out on the wrong side one day and it took me 15 minutes of skirting the perimeter to get back to my bike. In the picture you can see poppies in the foreground. I was wowed by them the first couple times, but since then have seen open fields that are nothing but poppy-red dabs of paint, poppies, poppiesssssss, my pretty, cackle cackle.

Ahem. Discovered the forest nearby, and I mean forest in the strictest sense of the word. I was riding the infertilizer. My launchpad was this dome hill in the middle of a children's playground, about 10 feet high. The sign by the playground had a crossed-out picture of pretty much everything interesting you could imagine yourself doing in this little playground, and said something about only allowing children under 14, but in the moment I felt about 14, and this was a launch, okay? From on top of this thing I got some pretty good speed shooting into the forest. Once inside it was dark, with tall, branchless pine trunks all around but a thick canopy above. Pine needles on the ground, fern, moss. Root tangles made the ride jittery in places. Then there was this transition in which things suddenly went from somewhat dark to spooky-movie dark, and the trees seemed to close in, and I started having to duck branches. I thought, turn back you fool, can't you hear the ominous background music and see it all coming?

But I got out of there okay. There were lots of paths leading in all directions. Eventually I found myself on the edge of the forest again, with a green field on my left. It was getting towards dusk (ah late summer days). Then I noticed some deer in the field up ahead, perking up at the sound of my bike on gravel. Or were they big rabbits? I couldn't tell, my eyes were pretty blurry from the fast ride, so I decided to slowly get closer. It turned out they were deer, mutant dwarf deer, couldn't have been much more than half the size of whitetails. I threw caution by the wayside and raced past them while they just stared, motionless, about 20 feet away, their heads pivoting slowly. Failed to make an impression apparently.

It's like this: during the day, at work, I sink deeper and deeper into this (stupor?) (hypnotic state?) frame of mind in which only me and my code, only the internal monologue and the program I'm working on coexist. In the evening, after work, I try to swim back to the surface. To actually taste food again and not be thinking something like "did I remember to handle bottom-up bitmaps?" and chewing but not really tasting. To talk to people, look them in the eye, think about them as people and not just a bundle of electromagnetic and acoustic stimuli that I must respond to, but are distracting me from my work at the moment. To feel things. It is this swim-to-the-bottom, float-to-the-surface oscillation that has become the daily way for me. My brain has inertia and I can't just pop out of one world and into another, it takes time. (To quote Jonas, I can't simply "close the drawer.")

And right now, sitting around writing this, I'm sinking in again. Gasp...up!

yours truly

As you can see, I got my NexiCam today! I also ordered a belt-strap carrying case, so now I'm an Ipaq-slinging geek. Hey now, bub, don't make me use this thing on you...

Fedex wouldn't deliver to me unless I was around to sign and fork over a ridiculous amount for the customs duty and techno-gadget tax. And, like every other business in Germany, they took the weekend off. The long and short of it was that I had to ride home from work today to wait around for it. Picked a crappy day to make the bike trip 4 times, too, as this morning was a gray drizzly one. Came into work dripping like a wet dog. The suits in the yellow elevator did not look pleased to be sharing the space with this soggy free-form hooligan (he's a programmer, no doubt about it) and carefully maneuvered around me as they got off.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll be able to put the camera to the test. Pictures--of the others in Startlodge, probably--are on their way.

what's the frequency, kenneth?

A bizarre but true thing that happened to Dan Rather.

no greater disdain

Performed the Saturday thing and went to Munich. Yesterday was a nasty rainy day, but the sun is shining today, cooperating with my plans. The S-Bahn into Munich races through green countryside and village scenes until gradually things turn slum, every flat surface getting graffitied over, and then finally it has had enough and plunges underground and stays there, beneath the streets of Munich. There is a transitional period from countryside to city in which brightly graffitied walls peek out from behind layers of trees and hanging vines, like some sort of ancient Mayan ruins.

I was alone this time and wandered off course into the Turkish part of town. But after a while I started finding the places I was after, clothing stores, second-hand stores, shoes stores, etc. No Lamborghinis or Versaces this time. Saw a cool pair of bright red shoes for only 25 Euros. Tried them on, hmmmed, walked around in them, left the store, came back. They were cool, but a bit Ronald-McDonald, and after a while I decided I would get a pair of purplish Kangaroos which were a little more subdued. But they didn't have it in a size large enough for my big American feet so I'll have to find them elsewhere.

Moving on, I found a righteous pair of orange-lensed sunglasses for 5 Euros and snapped those right up. They will be my inside sunglasses, since it seems like my contacts give me terrible problems if I don't shield my eyes somehow. Especially when programming...I've taken to wearing glasses all the time at work now because it got so bad.

There was a neat poster shop near the Hauptbanhof with lots of art posters. I had decided I would start decorating my room a little, as it looks like a monk's cell or something. It is also the smallest room of the 7 in Startlodge. Before I came, a Korean lived in this room, and it's just the kind of cell a Korean guy would not mind living in.

By this time I was getting pretty hungry. I ended up breaking down in front of a self-proclaimed "Tex-Mex" place, and got myself an enormous cheeseburger. This thing was epic. It had everything in it, and then some other stuff like chili peppers and cucumbers and what-not. It was a dribbling mess, falling apart as I ate it, just the way they should be. At this point two blonde American sorority girls walk in this little joint, no doubt attracted to the words "Tex-Mex" like moths to a porch light, and ordered tacos. They didn't make any attempt to ask the lady behind the counter if she spoke English, they just started right in with it and expected that they would be understood.

They left, and I decided to catch up with them. Indeed, they were Americans as I had guessed, two girls from Boston touring Europe after graduating from college. I had't talked to an American in three weeks. Back home cute sorority girl-types make me nervous anyway, and with these two it was even worse; I was a bumbling fool and they eventually went off in another direction.

What did we have in common anyway? These two were tourists, just barely skimming the surface, and I a person who has plunged in head-first by comparison. The only German word they knew was "Danke." Of all things, "thank you," as if they had ever once said those words in English and actually meant it. Watching them order their damn tacos made me feel guilty, guilty to be an American over here and inflicting my native tongue on people, but they probably didn't think a thing of it. They were from the mightiest nation in the world, and they were ::::sorority girls::::. I cannot imagine any greater display of disdain, of utter contempt.

Well I suppose that's what I get for breaking down and having a cheeseburger. Next time I won't give in to my weakness.

But enough of this, the day is just beginning. It is still sunny, so I think I'll take my bike for a ride out in the country. Tonight the few of us Startlodgers who are around for the weekend are going to the pubs in Munich. A busy day!

the existence of inverses

The rest of the world could be into heavy drug use, for all you or I know. They could be taking a complex combination of uppers and downers that somehow balances out, maybe intended to balance them out. Because they need coffee but don't want to get too hyped up, so they smoke a little weed, but perhaps that goes too far, so they do some speed and then pop some valium to smooth things over. Then they go to work just like you and you never know the difference. Some people say this is ridiculous, my theory of counteracting highs, because when you put these things together they don't cancel each other out, but add to make a different sort of experience, but to this I say posh, the existence of inverses. Everything has an inverse.

The day-to-day humdrum begins to set in, even here. That sense of newness which cannot be synthesized again, once lost, like one's freshman year at college, is fading fast for me. Got to get out and see the world and keep the feeling going.

Today I got to experience virtual reality. The room I work in doubles as the "Media Office." There is a giant curved screen at one end, and one puts on bulky stereoscopic glasses like the ones in the old 50's 3D movie theaters, only a little more sophisticated than that I think. Suddenly I was in a factory where orange robotic arms assembled car frames right in front of my face. Usually 3D stuff makes me sick to my stomach, perhaps because I am aware of the illusion. But the illusion was so good this time I didn't even notice it.

There is a lot of really cool stuff going on around me at work. Siemens is not a dedicated software company, so you won't find any people working on ERP systems or scripting or anything like that. The work going on is high-tech. It requires brainpower and computational power, the kind of stuff I've always wanted to do but have been told is a "dead end" these days. Well, okay. IT consulting may where it's at, but as for me, I'm not going to repair software systems but create them, and they're not going to be mind-numbing web development/scripting projects either.

if Job had a bike it would be "Colorado"

My navigational triumph of the day was making it all the way home from Siemens, alone, without making a single wrong turn. Basically this was possible only because I recognize enough landmarks along the way. I have become what I've always detested--a landmark driver.

This morning we had enough problems getting to work, as Halger's bike, a blue one with "Colorado" on the body, lost its chain a total of ten times. Each time he would have to stop and rethread the thing, kicking it and calling it names. ("Dieses Fahrrad ist Scheisse!") He just got back from a rough weekend at home where his girlfriend of six years let him know they were just friends. And on top of this his bike breaks down every 50 meters on his first day back to work.

Eventually he gave up and let Matt pull him the rest of the way to Siemens. With his hand on the back of Matt's bike, hunkered down and leaning heavily to the left, he looked like an injured athlete, a wounded soldier, being toted off the field.

Things started picking up again at work today. Perhaps I'm over the hump.

And now it is time for me to hunker down and lean heavily on some German grammar, in the hopes that maybe by the end of this summer I will actually be able to talk to the other human beings here.

bee

Yesterday and today I went down to the soccer field nearby to play frisbee with Matt and Mark. Got my fix. Have definitely missed being able to throw the disc around, maybe even play a game, and my frisbee callous has all but worn off. If you suddenly found yourself standing in the middle of this little soccer field I don't think you'd know you were in Germany...except for a tiny onion dome tower visible over the treeline, which you could easily miss.

Have gotten the development blues and now I'm in a bit of a slump. Funny how things flow outward from here. If I'm at a standstill on some project, I'm not much fun to be around. But when my project's going well interacting with people requires no effort at all.

the street musicians

Germany just beat Saudi Arabia 8-0 in World Cup action. (Better yet, some store promised they'd discount 5% for every point the Germans won by. I need to figure out where this store is.) France, the favorite, was upset yesterday by Senegal, so the French intern in my department, Florent, is going to have to put up with a lot on Monday. More than usual, that is. He already gets called "the frog eater."

Went into Munich with Matt today. Got a German grammar book, a German/English pocket dictionary, and a 175 g frisbee. The frisbee cost an outrageous 25 Euros and was the same kind you can buy in Walmart for 5 dollars, but timing is everything and I needed one badly.

After shopping around we got Leberkase on bread in the Market, at Vinzenzmurr, which Matt tells me is the German equivalent of a fast food place. Leberkase is a Bavarian specialty and reminded me of thick bologna.

Across the corner from Vinzenmurr stood the Church of the Holy Ghost, built in 1327 and decked out in the 1700s in full-blown Baroque style. And even if I hadn't known it was Baroque, it was obvious from the moment I walked in, and especially obvious when I saw the enormous ornate, gold-covered altarpiece. It is strange to think that secular art is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of Western Culture. Western Culture--now I sound like Rick Evans.

We were about to take the S-Bahn back to Ottobrunn when I heard classical music from nearby. Under the shadows of an archway, a quintet consisting of cello, flute, clarinet, and two violins played something from Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," Rossini's "Thieving Magpie," and Pachelbel's Canon in D, all cliched stuff but extremely well executed. The first violin was something to watch, bowing wildly, then suddenly turning the motion into a delicate pizzacato, then launching into fiery little passages, all the while peering out happily into the crowd. When he looked me in the eye I saw that very little of his brain was occupied by this process and was completely amazed.

Back home. Now that I have my German language books, there's no excuse any more. Think I'll make some coffee and then go sit in the garden and study.

a day at the lake

Today is a German holiday, Fronleichnam, so I have the day off. Matt wasn't sure what Fronleichnam celebrated. "I think it's just an excuse to take a day off from work," he said, and that's when you know you're in Europe.

But I'm not complaining. Happy Fronleichnam!

This morning the sun was shining (for once) so I went out to mow our microscopic back yard with the handmower. I churned through lots of little white flowers and moss like an axe-murderer.

Afterwards I started to feel ashamed of my homepage and decided I would revamp the thing. But then Mark, Claudia, and Matt asked me if I wanted to come with them to a lake. One moment I was looking into content management via XML and XSLT, the next I was flying down a German country road at dangerous speeds with the top down and the music blaring.

There are actually wide open spaces in Germany. Lots of them, in fact, you just have to get out of Munich to see them. I was hyper-aware after having two cups of coffee and totally into the moment, excited to be alive. When we got to the lake I unloaded the 20-case of Franciskan Weiss-Bier that I got for 10 Euros the other day (10 Euros!). I thought such a thing would be normal fare for the Germans but in fact my roommates were pretty amused by this and the looks I was getting lugging it around. We ended up taking the long way around the lake to avoid the beer garden, it not being exactly kosher to parade through a beer garden selling Franciskan Weiss-Bier with your own case of the same. My arms paid for it. Matt and I only drank three between us so the other 17 were dead weight.

For me it was a fun-filled afternoon of lounging around, gawking at the casual nudity, and people-watching. A Norman Rockwell boy jumped into the lake, all spindly arms and legs. A father took his toddler for a walk around the perimeter, buffering him instinctively when he got too close to the water's edge. A reclining husband with his hand resting on his wife's back. Two pairs of pregnant women and their two husbands eating and talking. Lovers, everywhere, lovers. People in the early or middle or late stages of being in love.

When we finally settled down, we were behind a thin fashion-designer type and his fantastically-made girlfriend. He was small, looked to be about 40, had close-cropped hair died blonde and a tan hide. To me he was "Versace." His girlfriend was a panther-bodied 20-something. They made no attempt to hide their amorousness. She enjoyed a popsicle and he watched, enjoying it just as much or more so. She poured water on his back and rubbed it in, poured the last drops of beer into his mouth from on high, he reached over and squeezed her buttocks, they slept with limbs intertwined. At any moment, I thought, these two are just going to start going at it, and none of these people around here will even take notice.

I took a walk in the forest. The trees were massive coniferous things with trunks limbless until about 20 feet up, as if to say "we have better things to do than waste our branches on you ground-dwellers." A thick undergrowth of ferns covered the ground. Beneath that, and sometimes breaking through on protuberances that may have once been stumps, was a blanket of moss so full that it felt like I was petting a cat when I ran my fingers through it. Smaller birch-like trees which held their leaves perfectly parallel to the ground punctuated the scenery. The amber late afternoon sun streamed through and it was like the pictures of forests you always see on posters, the kind with little motivational sayings in the corner.

When we left the lake we left fast, rocketing down the windy road through the little country villages and back into Munich. Whoever came up with Fronleichnam, thanks, and I hope this is the way you intended people to spend your day.

pip meets his benefactor

Man, today was pretty darn slow. No one showed up at work until around 11:00 so Matt and I killed time by playing "Scorched Earth" in the coffee lounge on his floor. The coffee stirrers make surprisingly good catapults.

All in all I think about five people came into work in my department. One of them was the fabled Artur Raczynski, who just got back from a two week vacation in Turkey and a trip to China before that. He's the main one I can thank for being here. He was tall, athletic-looking, with slick blond Aryan hair and a tan. Somehow from our emails I had expected an old professorial type, as would befit the lead of the "Industrial Visualization" group, but I couldn't have been farther off.

The weekend cometh. Tomorrow I go into Munich to shop around. I should probably register with the German government one of these days, too, since I should have within 11 days of entering the country and it has now been exactly two weeks. Or maybe I'll just buy some cool German shoes and call it good.

what's 'it' is weird and scary

It seems like it's been a long time since I've heard a new song that I like (excepting the tracks off Weezer's Maladroit and the new Eels Disc, Soul Jacker). Afraid of getting out of touch with the latest stuff, you know, and I catch myself ranting about Nu Metal, bubblegum pop, etc. a lot. To quote the Simpsons (ala Mark Dietz), "I used to be with `it', but then they changed what `it' was. Now what I'm with isn't `it', and what's `it' is weird and scary."

So I brought up the playlists at 93x and The Point, my preferred stations of yore, downloaded KazaaLite, a clone of the file-sharing system Kazaa minus the spyware, and now I'm back in business.

I've also revived the omelette. She was my constant companion last summer until I left her for a strict diet of Grape Nuts. They say you can't go back, but I say they're wrong, and I made a decent one tonight just to prove it. Eggs are not subsidized over here like they are in the States, where I could get them for 38 cents a dozen. Here they're more like 2 dollars for ten.

And you have to put coins in the shopping carts in order to use them. You get them back, of course, but coins in the freakin' shopping carts...

When I visited that big field the other day there was a blue sign on the perimeter with a stick man walking, a little stick boy playing soccer, a car driving, and a house, all slashed through by a giant red diagonal. No walking, playing, or driving I could understand, but the house meant--no building? As if people are going to sneak in during the night and surreptitiously erect a house.

America's best kept secret

The huge revelation for the day was this: no one in Germany has heard Dave Matthews. I asked all my roommates and coworkers and it was all the same. Somehow, amid Ashanti and P Diddy and that crappy new "Get It On" remake and Eminem's latest (geez how many times have I heard that in the last week!), German MTV "forgot about Dave." They even know about Weezer, for crying out loud, but not Dave Matthews, who is apparently America's best-kept secret. Someone asked me, "What kind of music is it?" and then I had the problem that so many other people have had. "Uh, it's like Jazz, but not really, kind of folksy, but not too folksy, you know..." How would you describe Dave anyway? Perhaps the European record execs were wondering the same thing and just gave up on it.

Matt showed me Robocode, a project from IBM that allows you to program robot AIs in Java and then pit them against each other in battle. Think I'm going to try my hand at it.

a new quest

Today I followed the tracks by bike to the place I'd seen by the S-Bahn, a big open field not far from Siemens. Auspiciously I was going to scope it for possible frisbee playing. But when I got there I realized that basically all I wanted to do was visit a big open field. In general no space goes wasted here, every last cubic meter is utilized, and I miss the wide open spaces.

As a kid I always wanted to ride my bike no-handed. I used to hear stories about my Dad in grad school riding home no-handed from the grocery store, a sack of groceries under each arm, and getting his picture taken by some of the neighbors. I learned how to do it the other day, and now I can feel cool cruising down the street with my hands in my pockets, although there really is nothing cool about the ancient bronze-colored bike I'm riding (the "infertilizer").

So I've reached a juncture. I can continue withdrawing into myself, into this weblog, and into programming, into books, or I can undertake learning German in order to socialize with my housemates. Work is fine, I can communicate well enough with the people around me to get the job done, but my housemates are starting to leave me alone, and I speak with them less and less. This life of solitude is great though. It's great to be able to sit down and see a project straight through without any interruptions. It's great to hone my skills, to flex my brain muscles. But will it last? I think that in the end I may regret keeping to myself while I'm over here. So my next big quest, the sequel to the quest for the adapter, is the quest for the "learn German" book.

I've been here before, in this exact same position, trying to decide whether or not to become a hermit for the summer. Last time around I turned hermit. But for some reason now, perhaps because I really could be incommunicado here, the decision stands out in high relief.

I thought about it today and made up my mind. It will be a new quest.

Captain IRON-Y

Took the S-Bahn to Munich this afternoon. When I resurfaced to the sound of the noon bells in MarienPlatz, the center of Munich, I was standing in front of the Neues Rathaus. This is an enormous neo-gothic city hall built by Mad King Ludwig II in the 1800's. Lots of people were looking upward to see some sort of display that was taking place with little mechanical figures, but I didn't see anything happening and got bored pretty quick. The hugeness and ornateness of the building impressed me but the kling-klanging of little bells did not.

Subsequently I wandered around Munich for about two hours, in search of (guess what) plug adapters. All the shops were way too upscale to sell something as common as a plug adapter. I passed a place with a Lamborghini in the window, I passed Versace, Milano, tons of jewelry shops, and even went down a street entirely taken over by nouveau riche art galleries. I was aware that I looked out of place with my "Computers don't affect kids..." t-shirt, corduroys, and sandals.

But the quest had to continue. Finally, having almost given up, I found myself staring into the window of an electronics store. Inside I obtained four American-to-German adapters for 3 Euro each. I was very happy! It only took me like six trips to find them...

After that I was approached on the street by an attractive girl who claimed to be from Romania. She fed me some story about having a baby at home and needing money, money for pampers, and always ended with a trailing "Jesus saves..." I looked into her beautiful lying eyes for a while and then told her I was sorry. She had turned to leave almost before I finished my sentence.

Back near the Rathaus again I ran into a curious thing. This guy had put on a policeman's suit and painted himself completely chrome-colored, from head to toe, so that he looked exactly like a metal statue. In fact I thought it was one until he moved. On the metal box he stood on were the words "Captain IRON-Y." There was a plate out front, and whenever people dropped coins in he would make different robotic gestures of thanks, then reassume with amazing accuracy the same position he had been in. To the little girls he blew kisses. To the boys he would salute. When someone missed the plate, he would scold them and point to it.

so much depends

Whoah boy, we've kicked the escapism into high gear now. I feel I've descended deeper into the realm of geekdom than I've ever been, and that I really need to get out and stop writing this weblog.

Last night I stayed up too late working on an XML-based random quotes system that I suddenly was inspired to write. Finished and implemented it today (check out the side bar). They must put something in the water here as I've had an unusual amount of energy of late, esp. for consistently getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night. I'm used to about 8. Today I expected to be completely out of it at work but found the exact opposite. It was my first truly productive day; there was no low point.

You may be wondering why I haven't posted a single picture, haven't listed off the people at my house, etc. Well, all this depends on me getting a digital camera. In fact, I've written a poem about it:

So much depends
upon
a digital
camera
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

Yeah, I'm looking at the few models available for the iPaq, but so far none has really "captured" me. Har har. Okay that pun was dumb, a thousand pardons. The two I've found are the NexiCam and the FlyJacket iCAM. Both have video capture which could be kinda cool.

Tomorrow is Saturday. Going to shop and explore Munich, I think, and may go to some sort of dance party my roommates are talking about.

the long way home

Today I rode back from work alone. It should have taken me 20 minutes, but instead it took me about an hour, because, honestly, I had no idea where I was going. I tried to find the way I've taken in the morning with Matt. At one point I came to a familiar place and felt relieved. Then I realized that it was only familiar because I had passed it no less than fifteen minutes ago, and had somehow gone in a big loop. This woke me up and I started paying attention to the sun.

After an hour on it I decided to christen the bike the "infertilizer" for obvious reasons.

It's time to admit I was wrong: Episode II was good. Though there are still fake plastic acting jobs (Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson), there was no counterpart to Episode I's young turd Anakin, the kid prompted Micah Weaver and I to start MST3K'ing the thing inside of the first half hour. No, this time around some good performances were turned in, notably those of Ewan McGregor and Christopher Lee. And Hayden Christensen as the teenage Anakin also did a respectable job.

The German movie theater was (surprise!) much different from an American cinemaplex. The "kinos" were the size of a high school classroom, about ten seats wide I'd say and a little deeper. I drank a Helles Bier (an original Munich beer) during the show and it was one of the best beers I've ever had. I guess it's no surprise that I enjoyed the movie so much. With a Helles Bier in hand, how could I have failed to?

After the show, I rushed over the the S-Bahn, which for the most part stops running between the hours of 1 and 4 am. Barely missed it. I wasn't about to wait around till 2 am to catch the singleton train back so I ended up taking a taxi, which cost me an arm and a leg. Between the show and transportation I spent way too much for one night.

And now on top of that I'm tired.

"So tired."

"I'm tired of having..."

there was evening, there was morning--the second day

My second day of work pretty much consisted of me installing the compiler and its associated tools...three times. Enough said.

The German guys have this habit of going for coffee in the early afternoon. I decided to come with and to give espresso a second chance, because after all I'm no longer Alan the diluter-with-milk, the coffee-for-pleasure guy, the i'd-always-take-a-nice-crappaccino-over-a-coffee novice. No, this is the wiser, more mature coffee-drinking Alan you're speaking with. The first time I had espresso was over a year ago and I've been through a lot since that day. I've changed. I remember feeling so completely ripped off when I paid three bucks at a Barnes-and-Noble and got handed a tiny shotglass of terrible-tasting black stuff. I confess I didn't really know what it was, and expected them to hand me a big mug of milk or something to dilute it with. The espresso betrayed me.

Today, though, I knew what I was getting into, and I'll be damned if it wasn't alright this time. Next time I better drink it faster. If you hesitate at all, half of your espresso evaporates before the first sip.

Went to a German mall after work with Mark. It was basically an American mall, except that all the stuff seemed cooler to me. The shirts and shoes and stuff are the kind that I am always looking for in the States but can never find, because all they stock is Abercrombie and Fitch and silk dragon shirts that might as well be mumus on a twig like me. There was an entire rack of 32-34 jeans--an entire rack!--and this amazed me to no end. Americans must indeed be the fatasses of the world.

But seriously, from the moment I arrived in Germany I started seeing people more like myself, people who dressed and looked the way I've always intended to dress and look. Except that I still can't communicate with any of these cool-looking people that I see.

Tonight I think I'm going to see Star Wars Episode II (in English, yippee!) with some people from work, even though I've sworn up and down that I don't want to see it. Going for the people (or so I tell myself). But I've got to get going quickly or I'll miss the S-Bahn!

off to see the wizard

My first day of work at Siemens! The bike ride there was a circuitous one that lasted for about 20 minutes. There seemed to be a dominant direction to the trip although I couldn't identify it for the life of me...this country is so non-Cartesian in every way that I've lost all sense of true North. Matt rode with me and had to ride back after work as well, as I realized there was no way I was going to be able to retrace our steps.

When the enormous Siemens complex finally appeared on the horizon, the closely packed streets gave way to a winding road through a green field. Red poppies were growing along either side. I was off to see the wizard...

Corporate Technology (CT), the division I work for, is on the sixth floor of building 33 near the center of the Siemens campus. This morning I met Pablo Gussmann, my project manager, and already have taken a liking to the guy. Most of the day was spent running around from building to building getting documents signed and processed. As a result I now have German Health Insurance. It is very unlikely that I'll actually use it on such a short stay, so maybe I should break my leg or something before I go back in order to get my money's worth.

Lunch was fabulous, and big. I was the last one done, slower even than the French intern who's on my project team, and this seemed to please him. People are always happy to get off the bottom rung. I could have chosen pizza but I went for (what I take to be) more authentic German food, the best dish consisting of small hamburger/sausages with bread crumbs baked into them. After work, though, I broke down and got the closest thing I could to American food. Cornflakes for breakfast, and bread and peanut butter for dinner. There was only one kind of peanut butter but many kinds of Gnutella-like chocolate spreads. Matt claims he's never had a peanut butter sandwich, and I've promised to remedy that.

Of all the people I've met so far, Matt and I have hit it off the best. Still, I realize that we have only talked of the past, i.e. what it's like in my country, things we've done, his job at Siemens, etc. and of the future, i.e. how I should go about getting an adapter, what working at Siemens will be like for me, etc. We haven't really shared any experience "in the moment," so to speak, and this is the stuff that human interaction is made of. You can digest the past a thousand times over and speculate idlely about the future with a person, but you won't really connect unless you interact in the present. You know what I'm talking about. Everyone, everyday, participates in relationships that remain grounded in things past or future, and there's always a feeling of distance in them, because there really is distance there--in time.

But I suppose it is customary to proceed chronologically. First people want to know your background, they want to read your resume and have you write essays about the most important event in your life, they ask you about your parents and brothers and sisters and where you come from. Then if they like what they hear they share the moment. After enough of this, if there is still any shred of mutual respect between the two parties, you are close enough to discuss dreams and hopes and things yet to come.

Looking out the sixth floor window after work I got a good look at the enormous construction project that I saw from the S-Bahn on my first day in Germany. A total of 11 cranes are putting together what I've been told is an office building. It looks more like a shipyard to me. at least at this stage. Rumor has it that the company behind the project has declared bankruptcy, so I'm going to ask around to see what else I can find out about it.

goldkrone

Well, so much for getting out and seeing places and things. Again I wasted away the day in own my little virtual world--an opportunity always present--instead of seeing the world which I'll only be in for the next three months. I decided in the morning that I would start this weblog and finally had it up and running by dinnertime. Exhausted two or three bloggers before one finally worked, and even then configuring the damn thing was a mess.

Everyone came back tonight and we watched "Spy Game" in English together. The guys and I drank three glasses of 28% Goldkrone mixed with equal parts of red Fanta, an experience which one cannot probably recreate outside of Germany. Matt and Mark seemed about as drunk as I was. This was a surprise, and I guess I have my year as understudy to the great Andrew Hammond to thank for it. Andrew, if you're reading this, I thank you from the depths of my...liver?

speak slowly and enunciate as if your life depends on it

Only slept for an hour last night. Blazed through Hesse's Siddhartha and feel a little silly about that. The day was gray but not rainy and I ended up staying inside most of the time, writing long emails. Matt was nice enough to let me borrow the power cord from his radio, and it works with my laptop's AC adapter; it's a temporary fix until I can get to an electronics store.

The only genuine experience I had today was an afternoon walk down to the S-Bahn station for some food. I ate some strudel and had some coffee at a small franchise-looking bread place clearly marketed at the S-Bahn crowd. There were no seats, only chest-high tables at which one ate standing up, with the window not 10 feet from the S-Bahn rails. Behind the counter was an energetic woman who spoke so rapidly I couldn't even tell it was German. I resorted to pointing and nodding and people probably thought I was mute or something.

Programmed a lot today--a comfort thing, I guess. All the same I kind of regret this and should probably make an effort to go see places and things tomorrow.

almost (culture) shocked

I awoke at 4 am with German words streaming through my head, some known, some unknown. Grabbed a book and started reading to silence them. At 5 I went back to sleep, and awoke around 4 pm for a grand total of about 15 hours of sleep. More than I've ever slept in one go before. I think this is not really because I needed 15 hours of sleep, but more an artifact of when I'm used to getting up. 4 pm Munich time corresponds to 9 am Central time.

All the shops are closed for the weekend now (damn!) and I am desperately in need of a power adapter for the laptop. Both Matt and Mark must have left this morning for Munich with their parents.

Ate dinner with them all this evening. Good sausage, bread, and salad, much better than the spaghetti I made for myself last night. When I opened the sauce that I'd just bought several hours earlier at a market, there was mold on top, even though the seal was unbroken. I scooped what I could see off and ate up anyway. The sauce still tasted slightly of mold. Reminded me of that time my freshman year that I let an ordinary coffee filter sit in the maker and discovered a rainbow-colored filter in its place several weeks later. Despite repeated bleachings, coffee made in it had an unmistakable hint of mold from that point onward. Whatever it takes to wake up in the morning, I suppose.

Tonight, in desperation, I took the S-Bahn back to the airport, hoping that the shops would still be open. Alas, they were not, and I returned defeated. All this occurred in one of the worst rain storms that I have ever taken part in. At one point I thought I was stranded at the BesucherPark stop. There was absolutely no escaping the rain, though I tried to in a glass elevated walkway above the rails; it poured out of light fixtures and blew up three flights of stairs from the station below. The lights even went out for a few minutes. When lightning would strike nearby, an audible click like the sound of something powering up would come from the metal handrail, so I was very careful not to touch anything metal in the place. I had no jacket and was freezing cold. At last the S-Bahn came, delayed, and I made my way back to Ottobrunn empty-handed.

across the sea

Toronto to Munich was a blur. I thought it would be a good idea to sleep deprive myself before leaving, so riding on 2 or so hours of sleep I boarded for the 10 hour journey. The food was suprisingly good for airplane food. I sat next to a large white-haired Bavarian with a ruddy Ted Kennedy complexion and exchanged probably a total of 5 words with the man the entire trip. We devoured our food at the same ravenous pace and both kicked back to a beer--Labatt Blues, albeit--after dinner. He was my kind of travel mate, and I hope that I didn't disappoint him in this respect either.

The sunrise heading east was amazing. The first indication of it was a light blue glow demarcating the horizon, which up to then had been indiscernible in the empty blackness of the night, and subsequently this line resolved itself further into a slow red haze that tapered off into yellow and on into a cool blue and was lost in the darkness that still largely enveloped the world. What a color gradient. I realized that we were not flying low to the Atlantic as I had imagined, but rather were scooting along high above a cloud cover with no protecting roof over our heads.

The German landscape is a patchwork quilt assembled pell-mell out of bright yellows, greens, and browns. There is not even the slightest hint of a rectangular grid to it--it is truly and wonderfully unplanned. Oddly enough, rather than single farms sitting lonely on their respective plots of land, the houses bunch together wherever there is a slight depression in the landscape. Going to investigate these places and their country roads as soon as I get the chance.

After some confusion I finally was picked up and showed around Startlodge, where I'll be living, by Brigette du Mesnil de Rochemont, the landlady. Too tired to really appreciate the peculiarities all around me. The smallness of all spaces is one thing that stands out. Yards, houses, streets are all quaint and confidential. The neighborhood I live in has wonderful greenery which I can only compare to the neighborhood Scott and I discovered at the top of the Incline Railroad in Chattanooga, Tennessee on our Spring Break road trip to the American south. Quiet and huge draping pine trees, flower beds, shrubberies, etc. Everything very well looked-after.

Feeling strung out and like going to sleep, especially since I want to be alert and taking in all this to its fullest, but have decided to stay up until nightfall here, which is a ways off yet.

Matt and Mark are the only two interns around. Both speak English much better than I speak German--which I've discovered is hardly at all--so that's what we converse in. It's a holiday weekend and their parents are going to visit beginning tomorrow. They decided to mow the back yard, as it's overgrown with tall dandelions and daisies. We laughed about using an antique hand mower for the job. The gas mower, however, turned out to be a grass vacuum in both size and speed, so they resorted to the joked-about hand mower. It was much faster. The yard is very small by Midwest standards and it looked like the first time they'd mowed it...two things which help explain why they had such a blast on the job.