Lost Among the Teutons

My Life During Wartime: Year-End in Berlin

2010-12-30T05:09:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve, or Sylvester in the local, comes but once a year, and as usual I really have no idea what I'm in for. Since I've come here, my most frequent observation has been of the traditions shared by Americans and Germans that differ not in scope but in tone. Buying groceries at a frosty open-aired hawk-market, getting a late Friday drink that eases lazily into Saturday morning—these things exist in America, but the essential character of the thing feels unmistakably, yet unvoiceably, foreign, as something I can nearly feel but can't hardly express. It's maddening that I've been here six months already and still can't put it quite into words, or never quite the right words.

Classes at the language school have been canceled more days than not this last week, as the year-end holidays approach, and my circadian rhythms have settled lazily into my new schedule of staying up for too much of the day to end and sleeping too far into the one to be begun. I excuse my own lateness for the few remaining lessons by telling myself that the shortened daylight hours must have a psychosomnological effect. This excuse is pretext in its entirety. But then the weather is cold, and a yule tree if we even had one would loom over no packages in shiny wrapping paper and cheerful ribbons, and the holiday spirit has seized me mostly in a fit of forgiving my own faults. I told the course instructor that I wouldn't be returning in January, using as an excuse possibility of work in Frankfurt, although I know by now that I'm not going to get it. I feel as though I'm being dishonest and even know enough by now that I could have begun, ich wünsche..., I wish I could come back next month, I wish I could be more certain about my plans at least, that I loved the class and never learned a language so quickly as I had here, but to pile on with sociable excuses and prayers would only compound the fraud. Ich wünsche für nichts.

Three months of these classes, and I still don't know whether that's the proper idiom. Like I said: Never quite in the right words.

The Roommate has plans to meet friends at a restaurant or club. I don't bother to pretend to be excited and ask lots of questions about it, and she doesn't bother to make up an excuse why she can't ask me along. She'd sent me an invitation to her Christmas party a few weeks earlier, which is I'm pretty sure her annual quota of Making An Effort. A few nights earlier I'd gotten told to drop by Marian's after midnight, once the fireworks have died down; the bartender was clear on coming by after midnight, and I got the impression that prior to that time the place was reserved for a private event. Everyone else whom I'd call a friend or even an acquaintance close enough for a party is out of town, many back in the States. Somehow this utter and entire lack of sociable options doesn't make me feel depressed or left out or even slightly constrained. I wonder if it's because I've always hated New Year's Eve, but there's really no way to tell.

It's been another sleep-late sort of day, and if my red wine hangover weren't enough to keep me indoors all day the wind outside is bitter enough to make up the difference. Fortunately, I have eggs and butter, rolls and mustard and cheese, and leftover stir fry and rice, so I don't need to go to the grocery before eating. Half a bottle of the dog that bit me is chilling on the balcony, too, so I don't need to leave even for that. I'm behind schedule all day, although since I don't really have anywhere to be or anything to do, I don't seem to notice it. Days like this it's easy to argue myself into rewatching Wire episodes and having a second microwaved cheese sandwich instead of going for a run and being prompt when stepping out to meet the night.

It's ten at night before I finally start running a shower, perhaps almost eleven when I've dressed in my first three layers. (Tshirt, collared shirt, turtleneck; the outer coat, scarf, and gloves would feel overdramatic before I actually leave the apartment. I've gotten a knit cap that comes down over my ears a bit, but from the cold I've taken to wearing the enormous DJ headphones, too, although I'm vaguely suspicious it's a bad idea when cycling through traffic.) The neck of the sweater gives off a comforting, unmistakable scent of winter, the subtle aroma that my mind tricks me into believing wool somehow gets when it's gotten wet from snowflakes instead of raindrops, faux-redolent with the imaginary whispers of cedar chips and coal smoke and pine needles; in my mind it smells the way the crunch of snow under boots sounds. I open the billfold before stuffing it into a pocket of thick-stitched black denim (ten euros), then look to the stashing place at the back of my sock drawer (nothing). I shall have to make it to the bank, it seems.

The Roommate's left long before I finally get around to it, so the apartment is impenetrably dark when I step out into the stairwell. If there's a moon, it's well hidden behind the clouds. Downstairs, the door to the back yard has blown shut, and I have to remove a glove to get my keys. I hoist myself onto the bike, which promptly slides under my weight and forces me into a halfways approximation of the splits. A week earlier a heavy snow had fallen on Berlin, the first of the year that managed more than a spare flurry, and for a weekend beneath freezing it seemed that there might be a white Christmas in the cards, but on Monday it warmed up again and the lovely drifts turned immediately to trickles of icy water and mounds of ugly slush. The snow fell even heavier the following weekend, though, and this time did not stop, nor did the temperature ever get back to zero. I looked at the weather report and thought I was looking at the wrong column of numbers, since the expected highs read minus four, minus seven, minus six. No, those were the highs; at night it fell to twelve or fifteen below many of the nights. And it kept snowing. By the fourth day it's piled up enough to cover every trace of green and gives the city a soft, pillowy feel everywhere except where regular foot or wheeled traffic has packed it down. When I turn onto the street, I'm nervous for the first time about traffic and manage to turn off my iPod without removing my heavy gloves.

I take the side streets, the smaller thoroughfares I expect to have fewer cars and pedestrians. It's a faulty strategy; there are no cars anywhere, or practically none, but Berliners have clustered on nearly every street in order to light off fireworks. For the first few blocks I imagine it's just a quirk of my own neighborhood, and not until the sixth huddle of pyromaniacs do I suspect that the entire city is like this tonight. There were fireworks perhaps most nights in the summertime, the final darkening of sundown in the west fought against by a defiant burst of fire on the eastern front, somewhere in Neukölln. At first I had probably thought them an officially sanctioned or organized display by the city itself, but by July it became apparent that they were mostly or all the work of wildcatters. Berlin is in this as in all social distractions a tolerant city. In America (I can't can't stop myself from making the comparison) such a display would require advance notice and a lengthy process of review, comment and appeal of an application to which no result was ever intended except to be bottled up bureaucratically until the elapse of the date of the requested permit. Here there wasn't even acknowledgment that it went on, no outward sign that a major municipal government might have some interest in making sure that its citizens are burned to death in a conflagration owing to negligent exuberance. Of course, Berlin's not been made of wood and paper for a century, so benign neglect is perfectly sensible. But so is New York City constructed of stone, concrete, and steel, yet anyone who's lived there knows the NYPD would drop you at Riker's even without a charge, simply because such a bare-faced offense necessarily strikes the orderly American mind as calling for--no: demanding an object lesson in the wages of stupidity.

That all, though, that nightly fireworks display over Neukölln, that was in the summertime. Then one saw fireworks explode only above the horizon of city buildings in the remote darkness. Now they're fired from all around. If not literally from every angle, they are erupting from street corners in so many directions that it makes as much as no difference. The first street past my grocery store—oh, charming neighborhood grocery store!—has become a free-fire zone, and immediately all my pleasant associations—fresh produce and warm dinner rolls being tallied by the women from the Kiez who never fail to respond "und auch Ihnen" to my mispronounced thanks—are rudely forced aside to make room for an imagined 'Nam flashback. I veer left to a smaller side street, hoping to find it comparatively emptier. Instead, I encounter a crowd of twenty-year-olds forming a battery of roman candles out of a snow bank. One of them drops a newly lit cannon—I'm convinced intentionally—and the first round whistles across the street and passes overhead, missing me by no more than a few yards. Grinning madly, he doesn't even wave or nod to signify that it was unintentional. I'm more unnerved than frightened, but I can't keep the image out of my head of a bottle rocket blazing in a perfect arc across the street and into my gaping mouth. I'm possessed by the sudden image of living out my days with tonsils scorched black and forever tasting of gunpowder, and I resolve to keep my mouth closed the rest of the way. This winds up being rather difficult when trying to pedal through five inches of slush, and I spend the rest of the trip breathing heavily through my nose to keep pumping my legs, carving narrow trails through street lanes covered with thick, wet, sticky snow.

I run out of narrow side streets and turn onto slightly broader thoroughfares, each lined on both sides with clusters of amateur arsonists. Groups of college students alternately handling roman candles and half-liter bottles of Tegernseer less-than-sternly face down Turkish families, the father instructing his pink-coated daughter how to aim a row of bottle rockets all at once while his wife barely tolerates his poor example. When I get to a neighborhood of taller buildings, say six stories or more of rough-hewn stone, with heavy imposing rooftops looming in the dim moonlight, the crowds have adopted a new game of aiming for an explosion over the tops of the buildings opposite. The fireworks do not explode above the buildings, but instead arc over and down behind them. I wonder what's behind those rooftops and how likely it is that none of them are made of wood or something else flammable.

Finally I reach Karl-Marxstrasse, the major road through Neukölln, and shit gets real. Crowds have assembled everywhere, and fire is leaping across the street in dozens of directions at any given time. Some arc their missiles over the opposing buildings, and some shoot theirs much lower. Still others seem to have no particular philosophy at all and simply point wherever it strikes them in the moment. The final hundred meters to the bank building is chaotic and senseless and bewildering and even though the air is cold enough that my glasses fog when I breathe out my nose the air itself is on fire.

I'm clumsy removing my scarf and gloves and retrieving my ATM card, and when I get out of the bank it's eleven fifty-eight. The street has grown so much more excited between five minutes before midnight and two minutes 'til that I expect some orgy of explosions when the clocks finally strike. But no clocks strike at all, or at least not here; instead the firefight merely continues. The crowd seems to have a sense of when midnight occurred and redouble their fireworks accordingly. I don't see anyone checking their cell phones or iPods, rather seemingly sensing the moment, perhaps from circadian rhythms or else from the unspoken wisdom of the herd. Either way, the night is crackling and bursting every other second; some of the larger groups have saved the best for last, or at least the biggest for last. I'm actually really impressed with some of them. Medium-rare terrified, too, of course, but impressed as well.

I wait on Karl-Marxstrasse perhaps twenty minutes after midnight before heading north again. The party shows no sign of slowing as I leave it. People see me peddling almost impotently as my tires slip in the snow, and they point and laugh, or else shout something I can't make out, or else shoot fireworks at me. Each time a missile cruises past my head I find I can't even tell if it was intentional or not. Neither answer would surprise me, I conclude, before catching myself and realizing that neither answer makes even the slightest bit of sense, or at least wouldn't in any context but this. Traffic has reappeared and it becomes slightly perilous to navigate in the narrower streets. I'm wearing my huge deejay headphones to serve as ear warmers, and before I make it out of Neukölln I have a minor catastrophe as the headphones slip down over my eyes; I try to return them to their place but start to lose control of the bicycle instead. Eventually I manage to get them back around my neck and suffer earlobes that quickly freeze red. With my ears finally uncovered, the city becomes a swirling river of sound; the cracks of exploding fireworks continue but now feel imminent, intense, almost sharp. There's something that could be singing off in the distance, or it could be shouting, or it could be the whistle of festive ballistics.

I approach Kotbusser Brücke certain the night can't get any more surreal. And perhaps it doesn't, not exactly, but I still have no idea what I'm in for. Along the Spree, more fireworks going off from both sides. The river is partly frozen, but not enough to stand on (as it will be in another week). The cannoneers on both sides ricochet their rockets along the frozen surface; skipping stones as painted by fire. When I get to the bridge, an enormous crowd has massed, clogging the sidewalks and eventually annexing one of the traffic lanes as well. Right as I arrive, a burning globe escapes into the air, going straight up. At first I can't make sense of what I'm seeing; a large paper lamp, or perhaps it's a kite of a wintry sort, has been released into the air, a fire burning on the inside heating the air enough to loft it farther and farther upwards, sending it listing breezily over the city skyline until I lose track of it, and it merely twinkles somewhere forever away, the most recent addition to a sky full of stars. Minutes later another kite swoops slowly over the river; this one is shaped like a goose and is even more beautiful than the last. I wonder whether this one is self-propelled somehow, like the paper lamp, or else merely gliding, when it flaps its wings and I realize that it's one of the real geese who live in the Spree. The crowd mostly abates their fireworks as the bird passes, terrified and uncomprehending, giving proper perspective to my own out-of-place nervousness.

A gaggle of Russians seem to have reserved Kirk Royale on the corner. From where I'm standing, I can't see much of their faces, but every glimpse suggests that they're all unbearably gorgeous. An earlobe like that couldn't possibly belong to an ordinary-looking woman. Such a minor arc of a chin in profile of course is attached to a face like a diamond. But she never turns and the fruits of my imagination is all I have. Over my shoulder I hear someone approaching, and as I turn to see a trim, muscular man in a well-tailored suit, I make out a few words in Russian. <<Mui khotim,>> he says into his phone, and as he passed farther I can't make out any more of what he's saying. It seems appropriate, his syntax amputated into barely articulated, intransitive desire. "We want." They want. Still talking on his cell phone, he crosses the street without looking for oncoming traffic and puts his other hand onto the small of a back of one of the gorgeous blondes. She smiles at him, and after they watch a little while later they return to the bar shivering. <<Ya khochu,>> I think. I want.

Kreuzberg used to be a working class neighborhood, or at least that's my understanding, but it became hip since the Wall came down and now is predominated by young people of means. It's also largely Turkish, as is Neukölln, and the Turkish Germans seem to regard the fireworks as a family event. This is not like Fourth of July in America, however, or not like any of them that I remember, with stern-faced patriarchs keeping a nervous eye on the preadolescents fumbling with sparklers. In the U.S., every family event retained its common, domestic theme, no matter what the event actually concerned. Among the Turkish families, however, the domesticity gets subsumed under a manic urge to blow shit up---an urge desperately shared by the members of the older generations who really ought to know better. The rest of the city addresses the holiday in typical, orderly German fashion; in Schöneberg, for instance, the law imposes no restrictions and the only limit one one's celebration is adult supervision. Here adult supervision is furiously egging the whole spectacle on. It's not the first time I've become sentimental about my neighborhood, but I have to say it out loud: I really, really love it here.

Both sides of Kotbusser Brücke have run out of fireworks and are becoming antsier. A snowball starts between those assembled on the two sides of the bridge. Taxis roll and slide slowly past and are spattered with snowballs. I don't know if they hit the car windows because they missed their targets, or because they hit them. Beyond the geese seem to have settled down as the fireworks have quieted, now swimming in the few unfrozen portions of the Spree. (The next week while running I will see one that seems to have lingered too long and became frozen-in.)

A Späti is open and I grab two more bottles of beer; on the way back down the block I see my friend the bartender. He gives me a hug and tells me to come inside, which I do. I spend the rest of the evening among friends, comfortably tipsy as befits New Year's Eve, and even get to chat with a pretty blonde friend of the bartender. (My embarrassingly bad German seems to pique her curiosity, like I'm a restoration project. It isn't until much later that this strikes me as an essentially German attitude to have.)

I don't really have a way of winding this up, so forgive me if I ramble. I've just read the Harry Potter books and have been thinking about children's fiction, fantasy stories like The Black Cauldron and The Hobbit and the like. I've never been entirely comfortable with that kind of children's book, as it's always seemed impossibly cruel to me in some way. You know a kid exposed to Hogwarts or Middle Earth or Prydain is going to compare his own stultifying reality to the fantastical alternative in his new best-friend-in-multiple-volumes. Real life isn't just going to be a letdown after that; it's going to be a minor-league existential crisis, and one at the age of nine or ten. When I was a teenager I thought this way, and then I grew up and I learned that becoming an adult means this impossible cruelty happens no matter what you read, that the beliefs of childhood are more or less all lovely dreams that, for your own good, are necessary to be punctured by the continued education of early adulthood. I can still remember what it is to believe in magic (this is of course a theme I've been thinking of recently), but such recollections come dressed in mournful tones, with the precedent knowledge that such belief is all childish delusion.

And yet tonight I saw a papier-mache flyer sent over the River Spree turn into a real living goose before my eyes, on a night when the skies above all the streets of the city sparkled with the light of one hundred-thousand shooting stars. All of this is perfectly predictable to my new neighbors, and also those people who live up north and shut in early and frankly consider this night something to be endured. And twice or more I had to remind myself to keep my mouth from falling open in wonderment. I had stopped gawking at open air markets and parties held in unattended city parks by the end of summer, but Berlin kept finding it in herself to amaze me in tiny new ways. Tonight was the newest, and by far least tiny of such ways. It was perhaps an exceptionally well-timed reminder, as funds draw low and job opportunities disappear and I wonder if this was all such a good idea after all, that what I've discovered to be the real reason for my coming here was one I didn't discover until after I'd come.

(Approximate route.)

Bauhaus

2010-10-19T07:31:00.001-07:00

On Sunday a friend suggested a day at the museum, prompting the recollection that the Bauhaus exhibit[link] had come highly recommended, spurring me to look it up online, all of which was precedent to my discovery that Sunday was, in fact, the last day the exhibit would be viewable. I already missed Bar 25, which closed in between IMs and whiny demurrals to the effect of "let's go next week," and I'd come close to repeating the error with this one, too. (I don't think I'm really getting the hang of this thing, whaddya call it, "being a grownup.") We arranged to meet at the front stairs (I'd never been there before but she assured me there's only one set of stairs, so there'd be no possibility of us waiting on the other at different locations) or, failing that, in the bookshop.

The conspiracy of a dozen little emergency meant I ran late, really to the point of inexcusably late. When I got there, there was indeed only one entrance visible, but I was hard pressed to call a staircase, instead (as you'd expect for what is, after all, the Bauhaus museum) a long winding ramp that seemed to approximate a mobius strip as much as a staircase. She was, natch, nowhere to be seen, so I entered and looked for the bookshop, hoping as I descended and got an impression of how vast the place actually was (and therefore how hard it'd be to find her if she'd already bought her ticket) that she had put up with my inexcusable tardiness and waited in the bookshop.

(She hadn't waited in the bookshop.)

Hoping against hope I checked the entrance again, then the bookshop again, then decided to take my chances that I'd find her on the inside. I asked the woman selling tickets if she'd perhaps seen a woman fitting the description of my friend.

She looks at me like I'm putting her on. No, she assured me; she hadn't seen anyone come in today. I tried to get my surprise across in rudimentary German---I had been told this was such a great exhibition. But then, I realized, looking around at the large, empty white walls that formed the entrance hall, perhaps this was one of those things that was quite cool for architecture buffs but dreary for everyone else. I myself found the initial glimpses rather uninspiring; for a museum, there just was a bizarre lack of anything to look at. I realized this might have played into the philosophy of functionality rather than ostentation that was really all I knew about the intellectual motives behind the architecture movement, but it just seemed a disappointingly restrained spectacle.

After minutes of pursed-lipped confusion, the ticket-seller's face lit up with realization. "Your friend; did she say she wanted to see the Bauhaus exhibit?"

As if there were a stupider question, I said to myself. Yes, I told her, trying not to let on my irritation. That's why I came here. I asked, since I wasn't sure but had heard, whether it was really the last day the exhibit was open.

"This is the Bauhaus archives," she told me, speaking very slowly so I understood. "The special exhibit is in the Gropius building." I stared blankly until she showed me on a map; I had come to the entirely wrong building, about 5 kilometers away by bicycle. The special exhibit was in a much larger museum; the building I'd come to was the Bauhaus Archiv, more analogous to a library than a museum. And today it was more analogous to an empty library, since nearly all of the interesting pieces had been removed in order to be displayed at the Gropius exhibition.

I'm sure I looked very much like a man so mortified that courtesy demands a false show of reassurance, but it was evidently beyond her to disguise her amazement at my stupidity. I'm not blaming her, mind; it would have taken superhuman restraint, or at least natural acting talent on the level of a young Brando. Fortunately, the friend I was overdue to meet was evidently a special ed teacher in a former life, as she was able to say, in deliberately paced speech, that "You. Should. Not. Be. Embarrassed. That. Was. A. Mistake. Anyone. Could. Make." Yes, I told myself, anyone could have made this mistake. Except anyone who had bothered to find out where the exhibition was being held---a group that included perhaps a thousand people crowding into the museum on the exhibition's last day, in contrast to the utter desolation at the Archiv.

Yeah. Not feeling too bright about this whole thing. The exhibit was really, really fantastic, as expected, but I've really an inadequate background to summarize it. One more of those things I'd somehow gone through life unbelievably ignorant of.

The Rich List

2010-10-02T04:12:00.001-07:00

I don't do politics here, but this is an interesting living-abroad crossover courtesy of Matt Yglesias. I've gone from the 107,565th richest person in the world to 729,114,447th, and all I had to do was quit being a New York lawyer.

Wait... wow. I'm suspicious of that first number, definitely.

Down and Out in DC and Berlin

2010-09-18T09:05:00.001-07:00

I've never read that Orwell book, actually, but the title's been imitated so many times before that I may as well rip it off—er, show it homage yet one more time.

So an account of how I wound up here may deserve to be told, at overlong last, because although Miss XYZ may think it's a cliché, I find my own story endlessly fascinating. No, wait, unbearably depressing, I mean.

Berlin's the second world capital I chose to make home. I left New York a year before my arrival here. Well, a little bit less, between that great city and this one, I was bound to a one-year lease in a cut-rate backwater of a shithole named Washington, DC. The reason I moved there was to follow a woman. I quit my job in New York, found an apartment, looked for work in DC to no avail, and resigned myself to the situation. I got furniture and an upright vacuum and a ton of new kitchen appliances, learned some new recipes and started writing the novel, volunteered for last five weeks of the Obama campaign and applied for a job in the administration (along with 300,000 of my new best friends). But such are the things one does for love, I suppose. Anyway, love (for which such things one does) lasted a shorter time than the lease. And although I didn't have a job in the administration, I did get great tickets to Inauguration, and my newly far-too-spacious apartment was a convenient spot for campaign friends to crash, and we spent the extended weekend in the house parties of A-list political bloggers, reunions from Kerry '04 staffers, and of course the various inaugural balls. Somewhere along this line, I mentioned to one of the perhaps thousand people I met or was reintroduced to that I'd been thinking of moving abroad. Not for any particular reason, only that I hadn't done it when I was younger, I couldn't find a job here and had some money saved up, and I wasn't tied to New York anymore and once the lease ran out in May wouldn't be tied to here, either. [ed.n.: I almost said "tied hither," just there. Just in case any of you feels the urge to lodge complaints about the style and/or length of these posts, you know... could be worse. – x.p.m]

"Berlin," said the first, a woman with whom I'd actually gone to college, who responded without a moment's hesitation or indeed even letting me finish my sentence. "Go to Berlin. It's cheap, and you can make art." I don't believe I'd told her about the barely-started novel, but somehow it seemed more like she could sense something about me than that she'd had a lucky guess. I asked others, especially those who had lived in Europe, and the agreement was eerily unanimous; if I had loved New York, particularly the LES, I would love Berlin as much or more. And that was that, it seemed.

Berlin has a seemingly active Craigslist page, and as my German had faded quite a bit since high school to the point where job postings in the vernacular were positively impenetrable, I started looking for jobs there. Immediately I came away nervous, even distressed. Each of the offerings was directed to any local handyman willing to move furniture in his own van, or else for gigs writing and testing video game software. The video game postings were particularly curious, but I came to understand (or at least suppose; I never was able to confirm this) that Berlin's young-persons reputation had come alongside a burgeoning industry in young-persons' technology. I'd given up on video games shortly after the second or third Mario Bros. Edition and hadn't played so much as a single game of World of Warcraft, Myst, Halo, Portal, or any of the approximately twenty groundbreaking-slash-revolutionary-slash-inaugurating-a-new-era-of-gaming products that had been released between now and when I'd hung up my NES paddles. Either Craigslist presented an unrepresentative selection of jobs (not an unreasonable conclusion, given the likely user base), or I was going to be in trouble finding work.

My sister had lived here before, in another German city when she took a year away from college. She came, found an apartment, learned the language, got a job, all without trying or at least without seeming to. I'd asked her for advice on how to line up a gig before I got here, explaining my troubles with the Craigslist page, and she blew off the question. Not rudely, mind, but with the air that everyone adopts when asked questions about the secrets of special experience that can't be explained but only learned. (Pregnant women get the same tone. And Vietnam veterans, I suppose. Probably this should have been my first clue.) "Just go," she said. "You'll meet people, and they'll clue you into jobs. If you're American, you find work." Relieved, I decided to follow her advice. I got a particularly cheap ticket, limited my Craigslist searches to posters looking for roommates, and learned to stop worrying and love the potentially disastrous uncertainty of it all.

Much of the rest I've already told you. I felt absolutely no urge to find work when I arrived; summertime's too lovely in Berlin to feel much angst about anything. I had been astonished to find how cheap everything was here, and work would have gotten in the way of Freiluftfeiern and long afternoons biking through Trip't-over Park. I had enough money saved up not to worry for some time, so for some time, I didn't worry.

After summer came to its (temporarily abated) end, I started looking for work. I had met a lot of ex-pats through The Roommate, but they all worked for American companies doing internet-based work, and their companies didn't seem to have a lot of openings for more of the same. Miss XYZ and The Roommate's other friends had all assured me, though, that even though they couldn't recommend me specific places, that finding work in Berlin was nothing to get worked up over. "If you're American," they all said, echoing my sister's earlier advice, "there's work." In the meantime, I'd need to meet more Germans in order to find local offerings, so I determined that my first obstacle was the lack of German suitable to meeting a lot of Berliners, to say nothing of what I'd need to get by in a Berlin workplace.

The Roommate had recommended the language school where she'd studied, which would also support a student visa. You already know die Sprachschule from some of my earlier posts. They offer sections in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings; I signed up for the afternoon session, hoping soon to make a switch to the evening session once I found a daytime job. It's odd; I hadn't earned a paycheck for more than a year at this point, and while I enjoyed the time off, I was starting to miss the feeling of leaving the office after a productive day, the sort of vaguely tired warmth that settles into a man's shoulders when he locks a door behind him having finished something that was challenging but is now done, and which mattered. Without getting into it, the corporate law job yielded few such moments, but I wasn't totally unfamiliar with the feeling.

As I've said, a summer in Berlin makes it impossible to worry; work will come, friends are everywhere, and anyway it's 8:30 and the sun hasn't fallen yet. Fall, especially as it turns to winter, brings different feelings. The air was brisk, even chilly some days, and grew positively inhospitable on the particularly cold nights, which happened to be increasing in frequency. Sundown no longer came at nine, and then not even at eight, and it was hard not to observe the shortening days as some sort of comment on the narrowing window of sunshine on my darkening prospects.

Language courses had been fruitful. The classes were small-ish, at least, and I got plenty of opportunities to respond in spoken German that was getting rather capable; if I was clearly a foreigner who hadn't mastered all the complexities of the grammar and still had a limited vocabulary, I at least came off as someone capable of carrying on a conversation. Reading-wise, I'd been improving at least to the point where I could get through German language job-search sites with the aid of a dictionary (it's not necessarily as easy as it sounds). I had been checking job sites more frequently, once a day at least and often more, trying to find different googleable combinations of arbeit, American, rechtsanwalt, academic editing, schriftsteller, u.s.w.

The Roommate actually brought it up, asking one day how long I was planning on staying. She'd asked me before, when we met for the first time, because she didn't want to have to post the apartment again after only a few months. I understood her reasons immediately, but it still put me on the edge of self-doubt. The second time she brought it up, I had found a lead. I'd put my name in with a European recruiter who had just sent me a short email; an American company needed lawyers in Frankfurt to perform corporate due diligence on an acquisition target, which happened to be the only marketable skill I'd acquired in four years at the firm and also proved to be remarkably remunerative. Doing the math in my head, even after I paid for a two month sublet and my own meals, the six weeks of the gig would pay for six months of continued unemployment; by that time, I would have finished the German course and perhaps another hundred pages of the novel and in any event would have had six more months of chances to find an office job somewhere in Berlin. Plus, it would be summertime again; you all know my feelings on that subject. There was no guarantee I would get it, of course, but how many American lawyers could there be in Germany looking to relocate for six weeks in the dead of winter? One thing that did bother me was that the recruiter hadn't specified the level of German I needed, but since he asked in English and the target was an international concern, I supposed it was almost certain that it would involve enough English-language documents to support my hire, at least.

Miss XYZ was excited for me, too. I had gotten the feeling she'd started to think of me as a fix-up project, her bewildered and clueless countryman, arrived in the city she'd called home for years and which she knew like the back of one's hand. As funds drew ever-lower, I'd taken to spending more evenings sharing a couple bottles of wine at her place, a two-bedroom apartment that she shared with a Spanish twenty-something, who programmed computer games, and was far more impressively located and decorated than the one I shared with The Roommate. "Pat," she had sighed more than once, in the same tone as my sister had brushed off my question nearly a year earlier, "it's easy to find a job in Berlin." Odd, I found it, that having spent six months here, I still hadn't made it inside the club of expatriate Americans, that I still invited and deserved the kid-glove treatment of a novice.

But now I had the job opening to look forward to. It meant not renewing my class at the Sprachschule, since the job would start in January, and the current term ran out in December. "Ich hab vielleicht eine Arbeit gefunden," I explained to my teacher on the last day of the term, whose disappointed look I couldn't tell was in response to my poor speech or else because she genuinely wanted to see me back. It wasn't the whole truth, but I didn't want to say the rest; either I wouldn't be back because I would be working in Frankfurt, or I wouldn't be back because I couldn't afford to stay. Classes these days still ended before the sun had sunk beneath the horizon, but only just, and it was properly night by the time I made it home on my bicycle.

Holidays had meant an early end to classes for the month. The recruiter had put me off a few times already; the client wasn't sure about the start date and hadn't committed to the size of the team, so he was being dangled somewhat, but he gave me the phone number of his associate, with a Washington, DC, area code, whom I was to call the following week to see if new information was available. Before I called, I wrote a short list of points to discuss; I knew it wasn't likely she had any confirmation on when the job would be staffed, but I wanted to know if she expected that to become known soon. Also, I still hadn't found out whether German fluency would be required; I'd gotten better, a lot, in my short time of regular study, but no one would call me an expert, by any means.

I caught her when it seemed she had her hands well full with a pair of stay-at-home children, and the conversation was distracted for the first ten minutes. (This was my dime, and long-distance, but I kept my frustration to myself.) She directed the conversation most of the time, leaving me few chances to ask my questions, but out of deference to someone whose opinion of me was directly related to my economic situation, I followed along patiently. When it finally came up, the question of language skills was out of her question. I told her I wasn't fluent yet, but that I'd been studying and getting swiftly better, and I could probably get along in most office situations, but that I was concerned about reading documents in technical legal language.

"So, what you're saying is..." she said, unsure of the words that wouldn't sound too insulting but still elicit the necessary information.

"I'm not fluent," I repeated. "If I have to be fluent to do this job..." I wanted to leave off, as she had, but decided it would be cowardly. "In that case," I said, "I can't."

"Well," she said, pausing for breath, "do you mind if we speak German, so I can tell for myself?"

What followed was … well, humiliating might be the word. For three months, five days a week, I'd been able to follow along in spoken conversation with classmates and instructor, to the point where I'd thought of myself as among the top two or three students in the class, and here I was, incapable of speaking. She hardly conducted a thorough interrogation, going on for whole paragraphs auf Deutsch, explaining the job and her expectations of my language abilities, demanding nothing more from me than the occasional "Ja" to continue, and only occasionally pausing to ask me questions. When she did, I found myself unable to answer in German, horrified that although I'd understood everything she had said, I mysteriously was without any ability to respond in kind. I tried to remember whatever mental state I'd taken up in my German class and found nothing but trace ancient memories of terrifying childhood dreams of wanting to flee some unseen danger yet being frozen in place, as if trying to swim through amber.

"I'm sorry," I finally stammered. "I don't think our connection is that good, and I'm having a hard time understanding you." I cursed myself; I know the words to say that. Es tut mir leid, ich glaube dass unsere Verbindung vielleicht ein bisschen schwach ist. Konnen Sie sich langsamer wiederholen?

"The connection isn't so..." she sighed. "Also, ich glaub', dass du sollst noch etwas dein Deutsch verbessern—"

"Ja ja, ich auch," I said. It was the last word I remember saying; she went on in German, explaining that I should keep studying German, and perhaps the job would involve enough English-language documents that they could carve out that part of the job for me. I don't remember the last thing she said, or what I did, only that when I hung up the phone my head was buzzing and I couldn't think straight. What it meant for whether I could afford to stay, I didn't know and couldn't work out; I couldn't even think of how much money I had left in my bank account, and doing the math was for the moment something well beyond me. I set out for a short walk and midway through decided to make it a long one; on the way back I stopped at the grocery store for a handful of fresh rolls and some vegetables and cheese, plus a new pot of mustard. For reasons beyond explaining, even to myself, times like this I just want a sandwich.

When I got home, Miss XYZ had sent me an email asking if I wanted to come over that night. She suggested I bring a bottle of wine to share with her and the self-styled Oracle, a friend of hers I'd known precisely as long as I'd known XYZ herself (they arrived together at Volkerball, which is where we had met). The Oracle had run into problems at work and just had been let go. She'd been looking for work, but even with her comparatively broad network, she had found no success in her own job search. "It's just impossible to find work in Berlin," XYZ said when The Oracle was away in another room, putting down her wine glass in order to retrieve a smoldering cigarette from an ashtray as we sat in her imposing apartment's living room. "No one can find a job, these days." I said nothing, only nodded, and reached across the table to pour myself another glass. I don't remember how that night ended. Not well, I don't think.

It appears I wasn't nearly as original as I thought I was

2010-09-13T01:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't really ever think I was being original, but still.

Have no fear that this is an update in lieu of a real post; I have a larger post coming up hopefully in the next 24 hours. The last one was the massive obstruction to all that comes after, so if I'm at all diligent, you should expect a new post once a week, maybe even more, while I catch up to present events. Thanks for your patience, folks.

The end of summer

2010-09-04T09:48:00.001-07:00

I've been promising this one for a while. Even in middle of this overdue spring-clean, this particular post has been sitting on the shelf for too long. I've tried to tell it in other places, to varying degrees of success; if I get it right this time, you'll understand my reluctance to tell it until now.

I was back in the States for three weeks in late summer, visiting friends and family in three states, going to a wedding, and playing guide on a friend's first trip to Burning Man. I came back newly shaved, in long shorts and sandals and wearing a fading sunburn, to a particularly bitter Berlin night; between August and September the seasons had lost no time in turning. When I got home I changed to jeans and a light sweater and dug a heavy jacket out from a storage box to hang on a hook by the door.

So I was excited to get one last weekend of summer when I accepted the invitation of, oh for lack of a better let's call them Gin & Tonic, a married couple and friends of mine from years back, formerly lawyers as well, who made their leisurely and elegant departure for Barcelona about the time I fled, ragged-edged, to Berlin. I'd been at their wedding, which took place upon a particularly lovely coast in Brazil during a February when New York (so I read barefoot on my work-issued Blackberry) was being paralyzed by ice storms, and they've always been good for a timely escape to the beach.

Airfare within the E.U. is astoundingly cheap, due to new competition from discount upstarts like Easy Jet and Ryan Air, and refreshingly easy, so long as one stays within the Shengen countries that have reciprocal recognition of each other's visa procedures. We landed at Barcelona International at perhaps eleven, and by eleven-ten I was off the plane, across the tarmac, and looking pitiously from baggage claim at the travelers from America and a dozen other countries still huddled behind great glass walls and waiting for the clerk at passport control.

I think I've mentioned this before, but it continues to astound me how much better the Europeans are at the ordinary daily actions that make up living. I ran out of my German toothpaste in America and had to spend the next week brushing with one of the major brands—of course it was flavored like mint candy; of course it was extra-whitening. You can't buy toothpaste that tastes like toothpaste, or makes no claim to give you a gleamingly, blindingly white smile. (I know, because I have sensitive teeth that are made more sensitive by whitening toothpaste; the ingredient that makes it whitening is an abrasive, often silica, and the mechanism by which is works is to strip off a thin layer of enamel.) You can't buy hand soap that isn't anti-bacterial and doesn't thereby contribute to the growth of antibiotic-resistent bacteria strains. You can't buy a human sized portion of food or get anywhere without a car or buy a bottle of beer and sit down outside to watch the sun set. The magnificently lubricated process from seat 32D to the full-faith-and-credit of the airport concourse struck me, of course, but I'd become rather adroit at simply filing such observations in the single file labeled "things we keep doing wrong for no reason."

I had waited at the airport for the other couch surfer's plane to land, scheduled to be perhaps a half hour after mine. We have a fair bit of history, I and—let's call him Diz for the moment. Now there are, as it turns out, two terminals in Barcelona's airport, so I spent a long time wondering where the heck his plane was, anyway, while he grew increasingly frustrated with why I was not where I repeatedly had told him I would be. Well, I say "increasingly frustrated," but there's a limit to how sharp an edge one's temper can take when it's seventy-seven Fahrenheit and breezy in Barcelona. When I finally caught up to Diz, he looked immaculate, in pressed shirt and sunglasses, and betrayed little if any irritation at the situation, despite having been directed to wait for me for almost an hour in a smoke-free zone.

As I mentioned, we have a fair bit of history, Diz and I. I mostly know him through the Gin half of G&T, who introduced us years back. We spent a couple of weeks splitting hotel rooms when we went to G&T's wedding in Brazil, and spent a fair bit of time comparing our respective lamentations about the rest of our traveling party. It turns out Diz shares my mellow sourness, which probably explained how well we got along together more than anything except, of course, the fact that we were the only two smokers on the trip. I've given up the cigarettes since then, but not the generally pissy disposition, and I was looking forward to seeing Diz probably as much as I was to seeing Gin & Tonic. Not half as much as I was looking forward to the beach and the last hot gust of summer, but still.

On the first night we headed to the football stadium. Gin had got four tickets to Barca-Madrid, which at the time of purchase was supposed to be a crucial match for both clubs, but which quickly turned into a laugher in the home team's benefit. Messi single-handedly dribbled through walls of defenders to punch in one of the later goals, and even to my untutored eye, it was obvious why Gin called him the game's best active player; it was a marvel to watch. Sloppy defense predominated on both sides of the field, and the home team won 5-3.

The trip out of the stadium involves a long trek that winds, multi-tiered, until it deposits the swimming crowd out onto the street and a wait for a taxi. We head home first, where Gin hands us the spare key and gives an introductory lecture on procedures for the weekend. Diz and I step outside and I'm sure look absolutely bewildered as our eyes race up and down through the brief visible stretches of the neighborhood's narrow streets scanning for any sign or symbol of a bar.

G&T have a much nicer place than is my place in Berlin. Which is to say, it makes me realize at once what a shithole I've managed my way into, tidily ordered and swept and mopped once a week though it may be. The airy room, not so much hemmed as canopied by the high, arching ceilings, don't shout out loud the proper luxury they've managed to achieve but rather mention it off-hand, casually misstepping with the sort of clumsiness that only sophistication can manage as to remind the visitor of his left-handed rubeishness. It seems to say, "Oh, but surely your place is just as nice, right? In its own way, I mean." The balcony framed by a pair of enormous French doors forms the vortex of a perfectly formed home that feels easily taken for granted in the Old World and naturally would command a year of Ivy League tuition to rent in the New one. And they're paying more for it than I am for mine, significantly, but I can't spend minutes there without getting the feeling that they know something about how to do this expat thing better than I do, that they have realized something that's still escaped me. The feeling lasts a moment, until I realize that of course they know how to do this thing better than I do. It's not just Tonic's international background or that Gin lived in Europe for years before I met him in New York. It's just another drumbeat of a slow, steady song reminding me that I haven't got a clue what I'm doing here.

Enormous though it is, every place gets cramped when its occupancy is doubled by even nominally welcome houseguests. Diz is to sleep in the guest room; I sleep on the couch. I offered to take the couch as an act of cheap charity to Diz, but also out of great indifference, as I tend not to mind sleeping on couches, and might even say I enjoy them as well as a guest-bed. Still, it likely comes to the greater discomfort of our hosts, who as a matter of habit and routine rise earlier than I do, even slumbering as I am on a couch in a brilliantly sunny room with a single sheet and pillow. Each morning I wake, blurry eyed and embarrassed, to find that breakfast has begun, that all the other occupants have risen at the customary hour for grownups, that only what appears to be a teenager or college student remains asleep on the extralong sofa in the living room. There is only one bathroom, and it connects directly to G&T's bedroom, so showers are accomplished in shifts, a great curtain shifting either to separate the master bedroom from the bath when its our turn, or else the two rooms from the rest of the apartment when it's theirs. Those nights we don't head out to a restaurant, dinners are prepared by T. The kitchen is perhaps the only part of the apartment that feels a bit cramped when more people than she is in it. I wonder if this is not an oversight but merely an expression of the traditional division of household labor that's evidently ingrained itself even into the architecture here.

Days are predictably spent absorbing ultraviolet rays. G&T live a few blocks behind the back of the Gaudi museum, the front of which looks out directly onto the ocean, but the trip to the beach somehow involves travel that is both lengthy and complicated. Their neighborhood is made of tall buildings built unbelievably close and divided by incomprehensibly tortuous streets. Automobile traffic presents no issue, as impossible in the streets, narrower at places than even one of those new microsized Smartcars. Not a single straight street is to be found in the entire district, each instead veering left and then right and occasionally horseshoeing around. The streets are irregularly marked by signs affixed directly on the sides of buildings approximately ten feet up, and it takes me til the end of the second day before I master the order of turns to complete even the relatively short trip to their building when unaccompanied. The buildings are high enough to block out the midday sun and, except for the occasional plaza or unusually wide intersection of three streets at cross-angles, feel like they're not merely towering over one but bending overhead, as if bending over the street below but arrested just as the instant of collapse. Nevertheless, the tight passages are somehow comforting rather than claustrophobic, almost as though the endless surfaces of brick and steel felt to the weary mind like soft blankets in the warm, sea-salty air. If I were a psychotherapist, or had one, I might linger over the possible association with the womb. As things are, I smear more sunscreen on my neck and ears and ask how far we have yet to go.

Once we finally have wound our way out of the dark labyrinth, we have to cross the space in front of the museum before searching for a possible crossing to the zippy oceanside boulevard. The museum's enormous round plaza feels like a grand yet unraised archway, flushing us out from what now seems near-nighttime into glorious sun. From there, we proceed down a long boardwalk before finally reaching the beach itself. The boardwalk's an impressive bit of construction in its own right; a great sculpture that reminds me of Calder but which is almost certainly something inspired instead by Miro stands roughly at the meridian of the Gaudi, and we pass on the left side toward the beach. Off in the near distance to the right is a row of immediately new, almost insistent construction projects, capped at its near end by an enormous sail-shaped hotel, a precise-enough replica of the more famous building in Dubai. The walk toward the beach ambles artfully around the last block of storefronts and apartments, pushing back the last fringe of the city so gently that one doesn't realize he's been swept, arm across shoulder, past a metaphorical velvet rope and escorted out of all memory of urban civilization. To repeat myself somewhat, were I a psychotherapist I might perhaps wonder at the metaphor of being birthed from tight, stony encapsulation into the blinding wilderness of white sand and blue skies. But the way it actually happened was I immediately felt like I was getting a sunburn and reached for the rubber tube of Neutrogena.

Ahh, the beach, the beach. The beach ran forever in at least one direction, the other appearing closed off by the new windsail building. Clothing is optional here, both tops and bottoms, for either gender, and I'm reminded again this is never really the attraction you hope for. A dozen or more topless women are in sight more or less at every moment, but it seems I've matured since being thirteen in this particular way, if (as is likely) in no ways besides: being thirty, it takes more than a woman being topless to excite me. Not much more, I'll grant; being topless and more attractive than the average Congressman, for instance, or being topless and not simultaneously attached at the hip to a svelte, blond Dutch boyfriend, would probably do it. Yet the application of even these forgiving filters quickly reduces the population of half-naked women to a null set. I note, silently and with some irony, that if the thirteen-year-old who eventually would grow to be me had been less obsessed with the possibility of someday seeing a topless woman he might never have bothered to learn the meaning of "null set." Or more obsessed, maybe, is what I'm trying to---I don't know, and while I'm at the beach I can't be bothered to think that hard about such things.

Mere existence on the beach is almost narcotic; although I can recognize perhaps seven distinct languages being spoken, everyone falls into a wordless, spontaneous order, guided by nothing except possibly some hidden code in the rhythm of the waves. Despite the blinding sunlight and (comparative) absence of needles, the scene would remind one of an opium den; Coleridge could have finished "Kublai Khan" uninterrupted, here. Without even being instructed, I adopt the local accustom of assuming every red mammoth to be a German on holiday. The crowd is international and universally adopts a posture of lethargic enthusiasm. A tall, lanky man whom G eventually recognizes from one of his language classes stomps down the beach wearing a broad grin and what looks like a thin carpet rolled up roughly.

The man nears and what seemed like a carpet turns out to be a construction paper recreation of a marijuana cigarette, far, far larger than life size. He's approaching group after group of sunbathers to hand them a sheet of paper that leads "Big Spliff" and describes the screenplay the tall man has authored and the production of which he is trying to finance by soliciting wary beachgoers. The plot is absurd, transparently born of the Big Spliff Guy's love affair with what he conceives to be his own deep, abiding intelligence and preternatural wisdom. The protagonist is a tall man toting a large spliff, a latter-day messiah who bestrides the beach as a colossal waste of time, bothering people who just came to sit in the sun. Well, you write what you know, I suppose. The style is self-indulgent and frankly amateurish, although clearly the product of someone who fancies himself a writer of the first rate. The flyer promises knotty philosophical problems and delivers about what you'd expect from a guy toting a big spliff, deliberate musings on whether what I think of as the color blue really looks the same as the color blue to you, man. One cannot fault the author's energy and enthusiasm for his subject matter. The picture scrawled of Barcelona looks like an awful lot of fun, even as it doesn't look an awful lot like the Barcelona I've seen so far. "Condoms and samosas offer testimony to the fact that the last night was not uneventful." I object to the gratuitous litotes, although one might well wonder that I don't cheer for it. The samosas line confuses me, so I ask G&T about it.

"Oh," says G, "vendors sell them at night. It's just like street food, for after a night of drinking." Every town's got its own specialty, I think; pizza in New York, felafels in Berlin, hot dogs somewhere else, probably.

"Oh," I say, as my mind fails to turn. After a beat I realize it hasn't resolved my confusion at all. "Wait—but then why would the samosas be near the condom wrappers? First, why are the condom wrappers on the ground at all; are people having sex on the beach? Not that I'm thinking of coming back later just to watch, mind."

"Of course not."

"But even if they are, what the hell is supposed to be the association? Are people supposed to be fucking on the sand, and immediately rolling off to grab a snack? 'Baby you were wonderful. And can I interest you in a samosa?'" G&T laugh, and Diz pulls another drag from his cigarette, although none of us move from our

Nights Diz and I head out to get impossibly lost in the city. Miss XYZ knows from the city and has directed me to try out a bar named for a particularly famous alcoholic-in-recovery. It's the sort of sourly dark joke for which we share an appreciation. That's perhaps one of the reasons she still keeps me as a friend; god knows it's a mystery to me, sometimes. I forget to look up its directions, though, so we don't make it to the Dryout Tavern until perhaps the third night. The first night, after the football match, Diz and I opt to stick close to home. This is out of an abundance of caution rather than a dose of laziness, as neither of us has any confidence of our ability to find our way back from anyplace not with direct line-of-sight to the front door. Directly across the street is a place just closing up; next door is a place that should have by now, to judge from the sparse clientele. We both pretend we're just grateful for the nightcap and try not to look too obviously forlorn at the absence of any women. The next night we head out farther, and the next farther still. The second night, G takes us to an absinthe bar, which underwhelms on every metric except the strength of the booze; it's overlit and almost looks like an American country bar, rather than the bohemian den of iniquity one would expect the Green Fairy to inhabit.

We don't realize it at the time but Barcelona's at the height of its real estate and tourism bubbles, and within the Euro Zone prices are comparably quite high. Bars charge more for beer than in Berlin by a fair margin, and more than I remember them costing in New York, even. Each night we eventually give up and head back to streets and the beach, where sidewalk vendors sell fifty-cent cans of Estella for a euro, which is still a pretty good deal. The dealers can't possibly make enough to afford Barcelona at those rates, I wonder, so it's an "aha" moment the first time (not the last) when I hand over a five for the beer and accept my change along with a whispered invitation to purchase one of their other fine wares, for obvious reasons not one they are advertising to the general public. I thank you for your kindness, Senor, but I have no need for hashish at the moment, I say in perfect Catalan. (Or else I just shake my head no.)

Diz occasionally drops out of the bar we're visiting in order to grab a cigarette. I have quit; he has not. Possibly that was one of the things that made us so tight, in the old days, was that I could always count on Diz if I needed a smoke buddy, and I never of course said no, myself. At G&T's wedding, the two of us bought short piles of cigarette packs and lighters, since we knew between the two of us we'd eventually get through them. In Brazil the packages are required to include a photograph of some horrifying illness or other that you get from smoking in addition to the textual warning, which was amusing to those of use who couldn't read Portuguese. The tracheotomy was blatant, and the dissected human heart, oozing plaque, even more so, but some of the others were ciphers, causing a table full of drunk Americans to scratch their heads as they lit up. One picture showed a dustbin of dead rodents and insects, which was never satisfactorily resolved but which we eventually decided probably meant that the same chemicals as are in pesticides are in cigarettes. Another showed a cigarette that was let smolder until the entire length was but ash and drooped over almost like a candy cane; I'm still rather proud that I was the one to figure that this was a warning that cigarettes cause impotence. One of our more health-conscious traveling companions, exasperated one night, asked us how the hell we could look at the picture of someone's lungs being removed and want to smoke. Either Diz or I responded candidly, "I don't know. It's like I see the picture, and I realize that the cigarettes are bad for you, and I wonder if I'm going to have my lung taken out, and I get stressed, and when I get stressed... I kind of need a cigarette." Some of the others may have laughed, but we weren't joking.

Eventually I quit by using a pill that blocks all the receptors in your brain, so that smoking a cigarette cannot reinforce the chemical side of the addiction. It also means that the cigarette no longer has any effect on the smoker, doesn't relieve the craving for nicotine. Normally, the relationship between a smoker and his cigarette is a really intimate thing; the addiction creates a void in the smoker's psyche that the cigarette is able to fill precisely, and uniquely—there's never anything else like it. That's the reason we weren't joking when we said the anti-tobacco ads made us need a cigarette, because any stress a smoker feels is never really relieved as perfectly, as neatly, as by a cigarette. In the same way, nothing else serves as a self-congratulation so well as a cigarette, nothing else captures the subtle poignance of a high moment. Smoking understands a smoker like no lover or friend he'll ever have, knows exactly what he needs and wants at any of a thousand moments. Probably nothing else humankind has ever touched has ever fit so perfectly into a 4pm escape from the office and also into the ten minutes right after sex. And like he'll do for no lover or friend, the smoker forgives smoking's faults, even becoming blind to them. Nonsmokers complain about the smell, which makes no sense to him, because the smoke doesn't smell like burning weeds; in the mouth of a smoker, a cigarette develops this sort of tinny savor, sour and pleasant all at once. It's the simplest, most complete relationship there can be: A smoker feels cravings, has a cigarette, no longer feels cravings. On the pill, however, you feel cravings, you smoke the cigarette, and the cravings are still there. Actually, it's a bit weirder, because cigarettes no longer taste good; they smell to the smoker like they do to a non-smoker. But the cycle of addiction is broken, so after a few weeks the physical addiction is gone, which isn't much comfort, because you realize that what you thought was a physical addiction was really, profoundly psychological, and there's no pill you can take for that. Eighteen months of breathing clean, I can state with certainty that I'm under no chemical temptation to light up. But still I sometimes remember how damn cool it felt to light a cigarette, and sometimes miss the gesture of it. The feeling of it—the high, the mellowing, the relief—that's all gone, but its pale reflection remains, like the echo in one's memory of a song all but forgotten. The image of myself as a smoker, nickel-plated lighter and matching cigarette case, dressed sharply and thinner than I am, drawing coolly, even contemptuously on the filter tip... I do sometimes miss that romantic vision. Sometimes.

I certainly don't miss being addicted, or the physical limitations imposed by smoking, which I'm only now beginning to realize, in full. I've been off the things for eighteen months, now, and for the first time since I was twenty-three I can run farther, faster, than I could a year ago; for the first time as an adult I feel better, healthier, than I used to. In Berlin I run eight miles along the Kanal and my time on the mile sometimes dips below eight minutes (I know, but it's a big deal for me). While in Barcelona, I run along the beach at sundown, following a four-mile stretch of boardwalk and matching the tempo of my trance-and-progressive iPod playlist, and when I reach the end of the beach I don't feel half-done yet, but I'm reluctant to run on the streets and turn back. All I could say about it is nothing new to people who run, and entirely inexpressible to those who don't, but the runner's high is a cliché for a reason. Sixty minutes on the track makes you feel brand new. Your body feels realer than it ever has, like you've only just learned how to make yourself move; skin hot under a layer of sweat feels tight, elastic, and it stretches over muscles that squeeze like there's nothing you can't lift or jump over. Your heart feels strong enough to power a car engine and your lungs feel like they could stretch to the size of a room, and even if you've got a bum knee, it hurts in a way that somehow makes pain feel like pleasure. You're delirious and clear-headed and feel like you could do anything; I don't have any real experience with drugs but I can't imagine anything, anything, feels this good. Even a shower and dinner and three hours of drinking and trying (once again) to find women and failing (once again), I feel serene.

On our way back that night, I realize I utterly have neglected to count the floor of G&T's apartment. I think I shall certainly recognize the door, but after the first few floors I realize I'm completely at sea. Their building has a central stair way that's gorgeous but not exactly confidence-inspiring, winding upwards in a steady if uneven spiral and bounded by a thick bannister constructed of heavy, dark wood. Nevertheless, the wood gives off a feel of being from perhaps a century before the last one, and each floor is just enough dissimilar from the one just below it that an upwards-bound traveler is bound to get suspicions about the professional rigor of the architect. (The guy who designed the balcony and the bay windows, of course, you can't help but have absolute faith in.) Fortunately, Diz is there to point the correct doorway out to me, as well as to puzzle out which key on the heavy keyring is the one that opens the chamber door.

After a few days our cultural inertia starts to feel inappropriate, given the present location, and Diz and I spend an afternoon at the museums. G&T are busy with other things, but they're able to show us how the trains work; the museums are at the top of a hill serviced only by a trolley line that seems otherwise completely unconnected to Barcelona's transit grid, and I'm pretty sure I would have gotten entirely lost if they hadn't held my hand through it. We see the standing exhibit at the Picasso museum and another at the one devoted to Miro, whose early works look suspiciously derivative of Picasso's. Then again, an awful lot of painters in the early 20^th century seem to be consciously or otherwise imitating Picasso, or so it seems I remember having heard sometime. If true, that would I suppose explain Picasso's reputation as the century's greatest artist, if nearly all his contemporaries found his approach so compelling as to see no other way to keep working but in imitation of him, like every ambitious author trying to match James Joyce. But then I'm not entirely sure that I'm remembering this the correct way. Indeed, I'm not even confident in saying Picasso is the greatest artist of the century, and it feels like that's the sort of thing everyone should be able to state with a fair bit of confidence. I shake my head, regretful at not having obtained a better education in the humanities, and walk through the rest of the rooms pretending to have a meaningful appreciation for the works on display.

Near the museums is the hilltop complex Barcelona built for the Olympics in 1992. It's truly monumental, enormous and white and gleaming, and empty except for a dozen other tourists, a handful of locals working food stands, and an extended family of languorous but technically wild dogs. Diz and I walk through the arena for the track events, then down a grand collonade that concludes with an enormous modern sculpture we're no better placed to appreciate for all of our recent civilization, and instead look out over the city that we don't really recognize.

On the trolley back downhill we hear English in an American accent floating up from a pair of blondes standing in front of the next care. The look in Diz's eyes gives away exactly what he's thinking, as I'm sure does the mirror-image of it in mine. We invent a pretext to swap our car for theirs and start a conversation. (Actually, now that I think about it, there may actually have been vomit in the first car we boarded. Which isn't to say it was the best way to introduce ourselves, all the same.) They seem nice and quite attractive, but something odd hangs about them that I can't place until they say (of course!) they're from Los Angeles. My snap judgment is that the shorter of the two probably has the better body but wears too much makeup. It's a relief when Diz says he prefers her, as I think I like the taller one. Call them Polly and Anna, the shorter and taller respectively—actually, I can't remember their names now, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if those really were their names; the encounter had that kind of artificial feeling. We talk on the short trolley ride and then part; Polly hands Diz her card and we leave with the undefined plan to meet for a late drink over the next couple days.

Diz and I amble our way back to G&T's, have a late lunch. When we speak, we each take turns avoiding the subject while utterly failing to convince the other that we're anything but single-minded on the question of what, precisely, it will take to sleep with the two Americans. When it comes up that evening, I say we should call them immediately to make plans to meet that night sometime after dinner, since we're only there for a few more days. G insists we should wait another day. Diz seems unsure, persuadable either way. This goes back a long way with G and me; in law school we had late-night strategy sessions on particular bedding techniques when we were supposed to be reviewing Property. (To this day, I cannot articulate the difference between interests appurtenant to a property and those incidental to said property, but can declaim at length why a single woman is more likely to go home with you the week before the start of summer of winter holiday, or before spring break, too, so long as the next week isn't taking her to Paris or a beach somewhere.)

Polly's card has a cellphone number and also her email; the domain of the address is her-full-name-dot-com. While G is out running errands and I'm distracted with something or other, T and Diz discover that she's an actress with a decent-sized list of credits, and uncover this exceedingly unsafe-for-work clip. (I don't care where you work, do not click on this until you're safely at home on a browser that doesn't record your search history.) T and Diz shout to me across the room until I come to watch; the three of us are all fairly drop-jawed and stunned into silence. I didn't remember Polly looking like she does in the clip, exactly—she wore nearly as much makeup, but it wasn't done so professionally, and her hair was straighter and pulled into a ponytail. But after the second or third viewing, the liquid-crystallized image and my shifting memories start to coincide: it is her; it must be her. T makes G watch, too, once he returns, and he roars with laughter and claps his hands. It seems he finds it entirely hilarious, what Diz and I have gotten ourselves into. I try to suppress the pangs of resentment at Diz, that between the two of us and the two Los Angelinas, he's been allocated the softcore princess.

G declares that we should make no definite plans but place a casual call late in the evening. I suggest an earlier call instead, to inquire at least about where they expect to be, and G declares it idiotic, saying that it would look overeager, even desperate. T jumps right into the conversation, to joke with her husband at my naivete. I keep it to myself, but I think there's no harm in making plans a night earlier but that with the clock running out on our trip there's more than a little to be lost by foregoing a night, even if we don't wind up reaching the conclusion that is, erm, ultimately desired. No harm, I think, in putting in an evening of introductory banter and scouting of relative levels of interest, before making an attempt toward the final event the night after.

"Look," G tells me, "what are you going to do? Give these girls a call and say, hey, it was great meeting you two hours ago, whaddya say we meet up again two hours from now?" He laughs at his own suggestion, and T chimes in enthusiastically. "Naw," he goes on, shaking his head demonstratively, "you gotta give it at least a day." I try to explain myself, but they're each having none of it. T takes G's side in the argument, and although I love them both as dearly as my own family, I feel a seconds-long twinge of cruelty toward them as they cackle at my ineptitude.

Diz still looks unsure but at first accepts the appearance of consensus as evidence of G's proposal being the shrewder one. Later he wants to revisit the issue; I'm frustrated with the process and snap a bit. "Look," I say, "either you make a decision, or I do. I don't particularly care, but I don't want to be on the special committee for the resolution of whether and when to call these broads." (I don't actually use the word "broads," but later, in exasperated reflection, it seems the mot juste.) Somehow the solution is reached to call later that night but to suggest a meeting the next evening. Diz places the late call, and they're out already. He can hear male voices in the background, laughing and speaking in English. G grins and says we should have expected it, that a chick like that walking through a town like this of course she's going to gather male attention like thistles onto wool socks. (G doesn't actually use this metaphor. But it strikes me as a better choice than the one he actually used and I've since forgotten; who doesn't like wool socks?)

Instead, the four of us head out for drinks, although only Diz and I stay out more than an hour or so. G&T take us to a place they know, a cafe dimly lit and furnished in dark, heavy wood. It's the sort of place that immediately makes me think of Europe even though I've probably seen them more often in SoHo or on the LES. After G&T head back home to get ready for tomorrow's early start (we've made plans to visit the local wine country), the unhappy couple order a last round of drinks before looking for another bar. The spot we ultimately wind up is covered in white plastic and lit in neon, so that the room acquires a foggy green feel. Diz is mellow, or at least seems it, and my mood lightens considerably after we run into a trio of German girls. They're from the west and I'm pretty sure they're speaking in a dialect, but it's pretty embarrassing how bad my German is. After all, I've been living there for the whole summer by now. I speak a few words, and when Diz asks if they understood anything I said, they shake their heads. I recite the lyrics of a song I just heard at Bootie Berlin, and they look at me at first like I recently wandered out of the woods for the first time since before the era of commercial air traffic. They know the song, it turns out, but its vintage makes it about as appropriate a card to keep in one's vest pocket as the lyrics to "Black Hole Sun." Or "I Kissed a Girl" (the first one. The good one.).

The bar announces last call, but the night still feels young, so Diz and I accompany our new companions to the boardwalk. On the way, I grab a six-pack of Estrella from one of the vendors and politely decline another invitation to purchase some of the guy's undisplayed wares. The five of us sit at the edge of the wood and watch the ocean, and talk for what must be at least an hour, perhaps more. I'm the only one drinking, Diz the only one smoking, but the three women seem to enjoy the company in spite of the two gentlemen providing it. I can't figure out which of two of them Diz is more interested in, so I take the safe bet and start talking more to the third, which reveals itself as a disaster when we get a quiet moment alone and I make a delicate proposition in hushed tones. She is, alas, flattered but spoken for; "I'm freshly in love" are, I think I remember later, her exact words. (T will find this formulation hilarious, for what it's worth. At this late remove I have to say I agree, although at the time my sour mood kept me from chuckling along.) The fumbled call and the late hour dictate that nothing's to come of the evening, and we don't even bother to ask for phone numbers or emails. Diz and I head home a little after they leave us into a night lightening already in the east to shades of dark purple-rose, and I think about toting the last untouched two cans of the sixpack back to G&T's fridge before tossing them in a trashcan.

A little more than two hours later G&T roust me from the couch. The next half hour I spend cursing the very existence of wine country; I'd curse my own mother if it was she who was keeping me from getting a few more hours of sleep in a proper bed, or at least on a reasonably soft couch. They've rented a car and the drive is nice, but I'm too tired to put up a suitable face of touristic astonishment. G asks from the front seat if I'm still sullen from not having called the Los Angelinas earlier. I should hold my tongue or laugh it off, but lack of sleep impairs my already poor conversational judgment, and I respond testily that being on vacation means there's no rule about waiting two days to call. T tells me again I would have looked ridiculous, and I think she means it in good humor, and I try my best to laugh at myself for her benefit. The Spanish countryside is pretty; all or nearly all the wine cellars are closed; the only place open for lunch has only salad and rice. Even this far inland, the Spanish summer has lingered pleasantly into summer, and the warm back seat and slow hillside curves rock me to sleep on the ride home.

I get the feeling I am not the only one holding back conversation as we take the subway home from the car rental. By the time we get home I am brimming with energy, not nerves or nervousness or anger or agitation, just a feeling allover that my limbs are charged with potential, muscles twitching and blood overflowing with carbohydrates. I tell Diz I'm going for a quick run while G&T are taking their turns in the shower. I do intend it to be short, notwithstanding my mood, but when I finally break through the carnival crowds and hit the straightaways, I feel my legs and lungs working in tandem like I can't remember them. I run until the boardwalk ends and further and still don't feel tired, and when I check the time on my iPod, I realize I'm going to be an hour or more in total, and also that I'm making great time. I practically fly back. After I've run seven miles I run into a football or rugby team fresh into their evening lap; even this deep into my run I match their pace, which isn't bad (although I concede that an amateur track team would have left me in the dust).

Confused by the placement of the carnival rides, I take a wrong turn and wind up running an extra mile or so down another pier; when I get home it's been ninety minutes. Since I checked my midpoint time, I've been worried that Diz would be miffed. Understandably so, given my short temper about delaying things with the American women even this late. But when I come through the door, he looks relaxed, sitting comfortably in a chair and reading a magazine. Grinning wildly from adrenaline, I can't keep a properly demure face when I apologize for having taken longer than I'd let on, but he waves me off; dinner isn't even quite ready yet, and he's already made plans with the American girls to meet in a little more than an hour. I map my run online and find that I went more than ten and a half miles in ninety minutes, for better than eight-and-a-half-minute miles. This information promptly goes into a status message update, with immodest punctuation.

Dinner is pleasant, and any lingering sour feelings toward G&T have been thoroughly extinguished. Afterward, Diz and I head out. Polly had suggested a place that's only a short walk from our place; Diz has a smoke and I grab a loose beer on the walk over. The place is done up like a German beer garden, with sculpted wood and fake greenery suggesting indoor tree growth; high tables and stools are carved from solid trunks or their plasti-wood approximate. By the time we get there, I'm entirely relaxed, like the entire trip has been exactly what I had wanted.

When we see Polly and Anna, the two of them are surrounded by Spanish and American men, and it's not hard to tell why. Both look stunning, really, hair and makeup and all the rest of things I really don't understand at all quite obviously having been labored over for some time. (Well, I assume labored over for some time; like I said, I don't understand these things at all. Maybe it's possible to make ninety seconds' preparations look like ninety minutes', if you know how.) They smile and throw their arms up when they see us; the men encircling them don't immediately scatter but look pretty pissed at our arrival. One of them keeps up an attempt at making conversation, although pointedly not with either Diz or me, but the rest of them sip their drinks and look conspicuously over their shoulders for other nocturnal opportunities. Diz has a grin that matches my mood as we settle down around the newly-cleared table.

Despite the plan of the evening that Diz is to take Polly's dance card and I Anna's, the two women keep orienting the conversation at cross-purposes thereto. When we get a moment alone I suggest to Diz that it seems Anna's more interested in him and perhaps we ought to switch, expecting at the very least a sarcastic reply, since my entirely disinterested recommendation does have the upshot of my being paired with the girl an entirely indecent movie clip. But if he feels any resentment he doesn't let on. I'm never sure if he was being sincere or just covering up to get along; I'm not sure which possibility would make me like Diz more, but either way, he's always been a great guy like that.

We pair off, and Polly and I speak at length. After swapping backgrounds and comparing LA to New York, she steers the conversation to fairies. I think I do a good job covering my surprise when she reminds me (I had forgotten) of the obvious connection with a bar named "Fairy Bar". They're everywhere, fairies are, singly on the menus and bar coasters, painted in clusters on the walls. Diz and I even had passed a mannequin fairy on the way in, next to which the two women will pose for multiple photographs later, as Diz and I are trying not to look like we're hurrying them out. I look again around the bar, and in the folds of what I'd taken to be fake trees, I gradually pick out the long, yawning faces of sculpted dryads. (Yeah. The place is called The Fairy Bar, and it took me this long to figure it out.)

There's no good way to say what comes next, no way that reflects well on her or on me. She, um, believes in fairies. I stumble carelessly into the conversation, mentioning a personal favorite coffee table book with pictures on each pair of pages of a fairy drawn so as to suggest it was smashed between them. I also mention having been to Iceland and that many adults there actually believe in elves and won't move large stones in case it's possibly and elf's home. "Oh, well that's the difference between elves and fairies," she says. "Elves will bother people if they feel like their territory is getting squeezed, but fairies will be nice to you as long as you're respectful." She tells me of the ritual she'll perform before pushing her lawnmower around her front yard, in order to give the creatures fair warning of the barbarous shearing she's about to conduct, and she frowns when I mention an old coffee table book of drawings purporting to be the remains of fairies that were smashed between the pages. I'm pretty daft, but it doesn't take too long before I learn to shut up and nod appreciatively at my good fortune of having met such a fascinating conversationalist.

Fortunately the paired-off thing doesn't last too much longer, and we join the conversation between Diz and Anna. Diz and I are pretty obviously (from each other's perspective, if not necessarily so blatant to the girls) trying to look like we're doing the inquisitive, respectful first-date thing without letting on that we've seen clips of Polly topless. She and I seem like we have at least something in common, having both escaped tiny interior-Western towns for the big city; we seem to have the same indifferent sense of alienation from the people we grew up with, or at least those who stayed there. Despite the fairy thing I think I have a moment of intellectual connection when I bring up Neil Labute; she's a fan, and I tell her I saw "Fat Pig" in New York with Jeremy Piven. She perks up at the mention of Piven's name but doesn't let on that she's been on "Entourage," and I don't mention it.

Eventually the everywhere-present fairies lose their luster, so we head back to Notable Alcoholic Bar, where our companions are a big hit. The place is positively jammed, with only one bartender. Our friends are evidently a big hit with the owner, though, as their glasses are the first refilled throughout our stay. I, however, am ignored when I stand near them, and I start slipping away to place my orders from elsewhere in the bar. Between that and Diz's occasional cigarette breaks, we get separated several times from the Angelinas, who anyways have been wrapped up by the owner/manager in conversation and champagne cocktails. The place is crawling with beautiful women, though, which may not quite tempt us to terminate our evening with the two of them but nevertheless alleviates any separation anxiety that might otherwise have begun to boil up. We drift away, order drinks, talk to people elsewhere in the bar, float back, catch up with our companions, then drift away again. Rinse, repeat; we're already in a lather.

The last time we return to the bar, they look animated. At first I think they're excited or happy, but once we hack through enough of the crowd that we can hear them, it sounds like they're on the edge of a fight. Or at least Polly seems on the edge; Anna seems almost amused. We're careful not to ask too much, but we get the impression that they're arguing over whether a local woman whom they'd met in the toilets had been genuinely friendly towards them (as was Polly's contention) or was sarcastically making fun of them (Anna's).

"I'm telling you, sometimes I just get connections with people, and I got this really powerful feeling with her. Although we don't speak the same language, I could just tell by her eyes that she was a really kind person."

Anna is unimpressed. "But I understand Spanish, and she was calling you 'a dumb bitch.'" She pauses, then revises and extends her remarks. "I'll grant that you do have a gift for forming connections. It's just this one I don't think you made it, quite."

Diz and I exchange millisecond glances and do a heroic job keeping straight faces. The two of them go back and forth like this for several minutes until reaching some incomprehensible compromise that allows Polly to save face. The spat has left them off-put, however, and we soon leave.

They invite us to come back to their apartment. Anna suggests we smoke either marijuana or hash, whichever they have, once we get there. Diz politely accepts; I tell her I'll pass. She asks if I'm sure. Pretending to crack under the pressure of interrogation, I do as best I can to make it sound sheepish and interesting when I say I've actually never tried it. (I realize it's not the best entres, but given the source material of my life I do what I can.)

The girls' apartment is reasonably tidy and relatively plain. It's laid out like a modified railroad, with a narrow entry hallway running past the small kitchen and a cramped bathroom and a pair of bedrooms at the far end, past a living room framed on one side by a couch and on the other by a squarish mass that I eventually realize to be a raised guest bed. It feels like an American apartment, almost, one of those places inhabited by college students in their year of off-campus living and the first couple of years after graduation before they finally manage a grownup-sized income. I wonder at feeling so much at ease, given that we've arrived nearly to the crucial moment, until I realize that for the first time I am in an apartment not significantly nicer than as my own, that for once I feel I can play at the level of the room.

Anna brings out her stash, and Diz sits beside her on the enormous mattress and starts rolling a joint. I'm at first expectant when Polly says she doesn't want any, thinking it might make a common front out of the two of us, but quickly I change my mind and decide I'd be better off if she shared it. Anna asks me if I do, and I tell her again that I've never tried it. She shrugs it and takes the first hit before passing it to Diz. She asks Polly again if she's sure.

"I will if he does," Polly says, meaning me. I've really never tried it, though offered many times, but it seems I've never felt so tempted. "Well," I manage to stammer out, trying to cover my indecision, but I decide not to. Anna shrugs both her shoulders and eyebrows in unison, and they continue to pass the joint back and forth. The conversation, meanwhile, between Polly and me has drifted a bit. With the air clouded with the smoke from the joint, as well as of our conspicuous refusal to share it, I'm having a hard time steering matters in any direction at all, let alone in the specific direction I'm hoping things progress. Minutes pass awkwardly, and I start to wonder what the heck I'm doing, and how I ever got to this age if this is all I'm capable of. And then I start to wonder about a great many other things.

Anna and Diz, sitting shoulder to shoulder, both have soft smiles on their faces as they stare vaguely into the middle of the room. Anna's dress is pulled up perhaps an inch, and Diz is gently massaging the exposed length of her lower leg. Feeling more than thinking that the moment is right, I slide my arm around Polly's shoulders.

"Stop it," she says. "I... I don't like to be touched." I pull my hand back, completely unsure of what to say or do. She sits beside me, and we are both still and silent. Across the room, Diz and Anna are still looking in our direction, but neither of them gives any sign of having heard what's just been said.

Polly finally gets up to use the restroom. Again sensing more than thinking, I take the moment to leave, too; while I'm fumbling around the kitchen under pretense of looking for a glass to fill with water, I decide it must have been the thing to do to give Diz an opening to make a move on Anna. Perhaps if left alone, the two of them can manage to introduce a more amorous tone to the late evening. Yes, I conclude; that was why I left, in the hope that Diz and Anna can set a positive example for the rest of the class. Certainly it's a more dignified picture than that of me fumbling through a cupboard of dishes in the hopes that a more compelling strategy eventually strikes me or Polly creeps up behind to wrap her arms around my neck, either of which would seem at this point equally a miracle. When the toilet flushes before I have heard a bedroom door latch closed, I decide the jig is up and return to the living room a pace behind Polly.

She sits, then I do, then she shifts a half-foot in the other direction. "Sorry," she says, unconvincingly. "I really just don't like to be touched." If I still believed the excuse a moment ago, the halfways reemphasis seals it as pretext. Later I'll rationalize, reconceptualize my mental state as a product of rejection and bewilderment, as an emotional expression of my diminished self-worth or else misdirected frustration and resentment, but in the instant I feel nothing. No: I feel like nothing. I feel like half a man, minus one-half a man. The joint is long-since finished, and Anna soon stands up and announces that she's going to bed. The other three of us don't even need to say as much, as everyone else's plans have been pretty solidly established by the circumstances.

"Do you think if I'd shared the joint, she would have?" I ask Diz as we're halfway down the street from Polly and Anna's.

"No," he says. He pauses only enough to finish the drag from his cigarette, and he knows immediately what I'm really asking. "I think they just weren't in the mood because... I don't know; they just weren't in the mood."

"Do you—?" I start, then stop, then begin again. "I'm not saying I know everything about women, but I know, well, I know at least enough to know what I've done wrong most of the time, or have a good idea of it. And I have no idea what the hell just happened back there."

Diz draws from his cigarette again but doesn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know either," he offers finally.

"I feel like shit," I say.

We walk in silence for a bit. The streets are empty and the city feels deserted; we walk on, matching its silence. Before we reach reach the block where we're supposed to turn left, I speak again.

"Gimme a smoke." I don't know if I expect him to argue with me or smirk triumphantly at the collapse of my willpower, but I'm relieved when he does neither. He just pulls a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and gives me a cigarette, and then his lighter. The first drag I only take into my cheeks, like I'm afraid of coughing after so much time away from them, but the second time I put the filter between my lips, I pull from the very bottom of my torso and fill my lungs with smoke. It's nothing like I remember, at first, but gradually I recall the dim memory of the first few cigarettes I ever had. My brain at once starts racing, chasing down the first memory of my throat feeling scraped from the heat of inhalation, the sensation of ammonia on fresh, pink lung tissue as distinct as if alveoli were taste buds. It hurts, it honest to god hurts, yet I deny the reflex of coughing, force myself to suffer in it. After another drag, I'm high, my head spinning, but the cigarette has no other consequence. No stress is relieved, unless by the gradual, plodding disappearance of memories behind us as we walk; no poignance or significance appears as if by magic in the clouds Diz and I are blowing beneath lowered heads.

When we get back and climb up the winding staircase in the dark, I step out onto the balcony. A man stands in the plaza below, swaying either from alcohol or from being still awake at five in the morning, and speaking to a woman. They're both dressed fashionably, at least as well as I can tell through the dark and the distance. They speak a while, in tones too low to be heard from the fifth floor or whichever one it is we're on. Diz goes to sleep but before he leaves, I ask for another cigarette. I lean over the balcony to smoke it and watch the man and the woman below. I can't help myself; I obsess over the question whether he will succeed where I so distinctly, undeniably failed, but after another moment they part, marking the end of the evening with only a lengthy embrace. As I snap the glittering butt-end over the balcony onto the empty street below, I reflect that I hadn't managed even that much.

I fly late afternoon the next day. Diz and I relate the story in installments, over breakfast and then during one last trip to the beach. T asks me which was worse, the night before or the German telling me she was "freshly in love," and I look at her like she's crazy. I tell her it might be the worst I've ever felt, and realize at once that I've no idea the words. My feeling is trapped in the inadequacy of my language; on any other day this might be a pretty big let-down for an aspiring writer but feels insignificant today.

"But why?" T asks, the genuineness of her feeling obvious on her face. I have absolutely nothing to say and just shrug.

I have leave them on the beach in order to pack in time to make my way to the airport. I don't think there's any way, really, to say goodbye properly when the people you're addressing are lying on beach towels; somehow the message never really seems to get through. I walk back, shower, and sign a card to leave beneath a gift bottle of wine on G&T's dinner table. I can't bear to put on my jeans, and so when I get to Schoeneberg after nightfall and step out into the Berlin night in autumn, I'm wearing shorts, shivering all the way to the U-Bahn station.

Holy shit

2010-08-30T02:03:00.001-07:00

I just realized it's almost September, which means the post I've been working on most recently reflects events that took place almost a year ago. My apologies, and I promise to have it done this week, for better or worse. It's not necessarily good, but I can promise you that it's far too long. I hope that's enough for you.

Mauerfall

2010-04-14T02:19:00.001-07:00

Twenty years ago, or a little more, on 9. November 1989, the Berlin Wall, which for a generation had prevented East Berliners from traveling to the West and vice versa, and which was patrolled by guards who shot and killed hundreds of Germans trying to escape, became at once porous with a miscommunicated order from the Politburo opened die Grenze and permitted Easterners to travel West openly for the first time since 1961. Pieces from the wall were chipped away that night, and although demolition did not begin until later, the ninth of November is remembered as the day the Wall came down.

I should resist the urge to bring this back to the American perspective, but I'm starting to think there's no universal perspective on this event, perhaps on any event, only a relatively close constellation of different national or regional interpretations. Living abroad, one discovers—and this is perhaps for the first time, or at least it was in my case—just how differently the rest of the world sometimes sees part of our shared history that one used to think was uncomplicated, or universally accepted by all to have happened the ways the American textbooks teach it. In her speech at the commemoration, Chancellor Merkel explicitly recognized the Soviet leadership, namely Mikhail Gorbachev, for "courageously let[ting] things happen." Would that, I wonder, not amount to minor-league blasphemy in the United States? We Americans have the enforced narrative, written into history's early drafts by Reagan hagiographers and parroted by our, ahem, learned political class, that the USSR remained malignant and hostile to the end, that only Reagan's courageous defiance and brinksmanship . Reality, of course, is far more complicated; Gorbachev had proposed glasnost and perestroika already by 1989, and although the East German government remained obstinately committed to the political ideology that the Soviet system would eventually triumph over the west, the government in Moscow had already made strides that, well I suppose they weren't unmistakeable, since a lot in the west had quite queer opinions of them, but were nonetheless enormous, and in the direction of a laying down of arms in the cold war, of acknowledging defeat rather than declaring surrender. (I should note that these historical judgments all come footnoted with the asterisk that means "as best as I can tell"; it's something of a murky field made no clearer by my utter lack of any particular knowledge.)

Actually, can I digress for a second? My German textbook just had a section on politics, wherein there was a frank, not uncritical, and open discussion of Marxism in the 1970s. Totally uncontroversial, right? After all, Marxism, while certainly not without its legitimate detractors, was one of two or three fundamental political ideologies that shaped the twentieth century and was responsible for a handful of major advancements and a share of significant abuses. Should have been a nothing-call; I was floored. I went to public school for thirteen years, and there was never an acknowledgment of the existence of Marxism other than in the obituary of the occasional hanged anarcho-syndicalist. It simply wasn't mentioned. To anyone who's lived in the United States, neither the entire omission of Marxism from public education is news, nor is the entirely transparent reasons for that exclusion. And to think, all this time I've been sneering at the poor biology students in Kansas, or what contortions must be being pulled during history class in Texas, and... I absolutely had no less of an ideologically filtered education than they had. Or not one so markedly better that I'm in a position to sneer.

My German instructor mentioned an event? a thing? a commemorative display? no, that last one is surely wrong---that would be taking place, a few hours after out class ended. It sounded like a good idea, so I went to the library, did some grocery shopping, and at the appointed time, went to where I thought I would be able to see it. I saw only crowds like I'd expect to see there any day of the week, and an art installation I'd seen being constructed earlier but not since it had been finished. Otherwise there was no trace of any grand event, and I pedaled home, trying not to dwell on the fact that I should have gone to Potsdamer Platz instead, where at least I could have lied and said I was close enough to the front of the crowd to see the giant dominoes fall.

I don't mean to suggest that I was disappointed not to have seen first-hand my little slice of world history, only underwhelmed at the reaction I did see in the city where I'd expected to find it. That's the surprise, though, when you're in it; that's another of the things I'm discovering while living elsewhere. When you're growing up, watching the world turn on the television, it's inconceivable that people out there, living their lives where the teevee cameras were, could possibly have any other concerns or cares than those than have you, the noble and enlightened television viewer. What else could someone be interested in! It's on television! When you grow up and move out into the world and maybe into one of the world's great cities, where these things tend to happen, you learn one day---or perhaps one day realize that you never learned it---that living through major events without noticing exactly them going on is the most ordinary damn thing in the world, that it happens to you a thousand times before you get change for the paper and a coffee at the newstand outside the stairs to the subway. I was in New York on September 11^th and watched everything happen---except a neverending plume of smoke from somewhere to the south---on cable t.v. I worked for the Obama campaign by trying to counteract any potential voter-suppression schemes by the other party in a state where no voter-suppression ever happened and which the candidate anyway eventually won by double digits. History happens, and it even happens next to you, but you've got to be joking if you thought you were entitled to advance notice with date and time; unless it's far closer than you'd ever wish, you learn about history the same way as everyone else does, in the headlines the day after.

[Update from the post-date: My currents, to resurrect an old habit. This post being written quite after-the-fact, these come with the same asterisk as my recollection of history, that they're as best as I can tell:

… reading: Koestler's Darkness at Noon, at long last. Recommended by a cherished reader of the blog who, and I'm just going to say it, seems more in love with things German than he does about anything about his own country, other than a perplexing, lingering [ed.note: two consecutive participles? sorry] allegiance to our horrifying sellout failure of a president, and who even insists that it's only the Berliners who know a damn thing about techno. It was invented, developed, and perfected, as was pretty much all western music, by urban African Americans, although it took members of my own race to over-commercialize it and drain it of its soul. Namely black deejays in Detroit and Chicago. All I'm sayin'.

… listening: deadmau5, "Faxing Berlin." Topical and booty-shaking. And to think, a North American recorded it. You hear me? I'm talking to you, nameless cherished reader!!!

… obsessed with: how many got-damn blog posts I have to write now. Wow, I have let this thing go, huh?]

Matisyahu

2010-04-14T02:16:00.001-07:00

So, apologies for the long absence. It's been pointed out by faithful reader Mr. Pity (and I don't call him that merely because of his awesome Mr. T impression) that I've been radio silent long enough to raise the suspicion that either I'm dead or this blog is. I've neither excuse nor satisfying explanation, really, so instead I'll try to make it up to you by posting a bunch of stuff right quick.

It was a dark and stormy night. This ain't the worst introduction in the history of the written language; it actually was a dark and stormy night. My memory is foggy on a number of details, but my underwear is still immediately soggy. My pants and shirt, too, and probably my socks, although of course I can't tell for sure, as they were stripped and lain over the radiator as soon as I stepped through the front door.

The lovely and talented, youthful and connected, charming and gracious, considerate and ... why is she friends with me, again? anyway, the always-appreciated Miss XYZ was unfortunately out of town tonight, when Matisyahu came to town, so her six comped tickets were scattered, like so much seed upon the wind, to several of her quite fortunate friends, including "Pat Martigan plus one." (My German's still regrettably shitty, so while I probably could have stammered out something to the effect of "That's Mrs. Plus One to you, buddy," the joke I've always wanted to make still was beyond me: "No, Ms. Plus One is unable to make it tonight. Nights like this she usually stays home, polishing our wedding rings and weeping.") I tried to make a joke about getting to see him "gratis-yahu," but the combination of Latinite and Semetic roots seemed too clumsy. Plus, while they mean slightly different things, the word "gratis," meaning "complimentary," sort of suggests the Hebrew sorce of the name "Nathan," which means "gift," which already can attach to "yahu," a conjugation of "yahweh." So I was kind of afraid I'd be taken to suggesting a link to Netanyahu, whose name literally means "gift of God." And that would have just brought every good non-Likudnik down, which wasn't what I'm about, man.

Because I'm broke, or cheap, or dumb, and also because BVG didn't have convenient routes to Columbia Hall, I had decided to take my bike. Right away my mistake was evident, and I pedaled through a light Berlin rain that seems these days not so much part of the climate as a deliberate aspect of urban design, like if some city planner had decided that vague meteorological hostility was as important to promoting good civic behavior as walkability-friendly zoning and resilient electrical grids. I was listening to the "To the Best of Our Knowledge" podcast on the mythical city of Shangri-La, and for a brief white shining moment it seemed there was something poetic about listening to the search for a mythical city hidden amid a range of inscrutable, imposing mountains while I was pedaling toward a vaguely messianic rap/rock act through a really quite inhospitable Berlin autumn storm. But then I just decided that was stupid.

I got there early enough that the floor lights were still on, so I walked about the back of the hall, listening to the recorded music and wishing I'd remembered to bring earplugs. Concert tshirts started for twenty-five euros, or closer to forty bucks American than to thirty-five. Most things here are cheaper than in the States; a few go the other way. As far as I can tell it's mostly consumer goods where the EU's better workers' rights and/or a floor of quality make it economically impossible for the Germans to reach American levels of cheapness. Starbucks costs a ton, but it's the kind of coffee you couldn't buy in the States with the proverbial fistful of fifties. And then there's the American cultural stuff that simply commands a ransom here; American sneakers, Yankees caps, or anything seen recently on MTV can get pricey right quick. The irony of course being that anyone from the States wants nothing at all to do with such crass emblems of American consumerism (excepting comment for the moment on Yankee fans, other than to note that the people who wear such gear here aren't fans of the team or even the sport, instead just liking the City of New York and electing the interlocking letters as the most economical way to advertise such).

A brief word on the venue: For the New Yorkers reading, it's maybe half as big as Webster Hall's upstairs? The closest I can come is the 9:30 club in DC, if it didn't have balconies. It certainly doesn't have any particular Berlin feel that I can tell, and I spend a bit feeling ashamed that after almost half a year here I don't know enough about my new hometown to begin mendacious sentences like "the peculiar Berlin aesthetic, at first apparently generic but gradually yielding to the attentive visitor such obvious giveaways as..." I spend a few moments worrying that I'm missing the real city that I'm supposed to be here to see, but then again I spend most of my time worrying about that.

The first act comes on and is generally ignored by the crowd. They perform the particular strain of heavy metal, or at least of very loud rock and roll, that remains somewhat concordant with hip hop beats thumping beneath and rap lyrics spit over-top. It inspires the question, half inquisitive and the rest masochistic, what sort of vocal stylings is likely to be paired with it, and I guess it'll either be a white guy trying to emcee like Zack de la Roche or merely shriek along, which I recall being the default option for bands of the sort. However, whether because of faulty microphones or out of a spirit of mercy, they've elected to leave the vocals out.

A guy in the crowd walks up to me and introduces himself. I'm writing notes to myself in a brown Moleskine, and it's not until later I realize he must have thought I was a reporter. He's from New Jersey, short, and obviously Jewish even before you catch the heavy Star of David buoyed cheerily by his chest hair. He's dressed in the kind of white-guy hip-hop attire that used to spark entire fashion lines in rejection of the gross appropriation, but somehow it doesn't seem too offensive, on him at least. He's really friendly and I'm embarrassed when I forget his name two minutes after he says he has to go and pushes through the crowd toward the stage.

This is my first visit to the particular venue, and there's something tickling the back of my brain that feels not-wrong but somehow off, as if there's a song playing in the background I subliminally recognize but haven't consciously realized I'm even listening to yet. For the first hour I think it's something unfamiliar about the venue, perhaps the weather still making me feel slightly off. And then I take a second look at two thick-ish women in dark sweaters and long skirts over black tights and realize: There are Jews here. A lot of Jews. Sure, there's a black dude over there, and I think I heard him speak English in an American accent; there's a girl who's too blond next to her boyfriend who's too tall for them to be landtsmen, but for most part it's like Christmas Eve on the Upper West side. The vague sense of something being off vanishes in the shock of recognition, and I start seeing in the crowd the particular slices of Jewishness that you get to know entirely in New York but I never expected to see in Berlin. The tall nebbishy guy in wireframe glasses with a generic last name who was raised secular and never particularly thought about religion at all until he started going to Hillel in college. A guy who would never wear a yarmulke but won't take four steps without his sloping jazzman's fedora, either. I see slices of myself everywhere: there a corporate lawyer trying to look like one of the crowd of young twentysomethings at a hip-hop show, here a wannabe writer faking it with the lifestyle until he can make it with the work, there again an American trying to be an expat and failing. I look again at the dark-sweatered, plain skirted women and realize they're Orthodox girls, the kind I'm pretty sure they don't. Elsewhere a shock of carefully drawn lipstick beneath a tight shiny-dark ponytail, a leather jacket and high boots that end just beneath the hem of a skirt: Orthodox girls, the kind I wonder maybe they do.

There's an energy to crowds that defies logic. This is not a unique insight, but it remains humbly true. No one knows what's happening, exactly, and it's easier to behave as just one of a crowd, taking your cues from the crush and flow around you. Everyone's here for the same reason, anyway, so why not act like a herd? There's a swell and a rush, and the noise level of the audience rises and falls, building until it reaches a critical mass and then---well, the main act hasn't made it on yet, so it just sort of fades away. The problem is that everyone assumes someone else has a better view than they have. The energy of the crowd feeds on itself until folks think that others in the crowd have seen Matisyahu take stage; their reaction in turn prompts others elsewhere to think the same; and eventually the wave of gasping reaches a peak, just before a technician reworks a guitar and the crowd's excitement falls away into a low groan. It doesn't change the reaction the next time one bit, and I count three false alarms before the lights finally go down.

When Matisyahu does take the stage, the lights are still down, and it's almost impossible to see a think until the background lights turn up slightly and he's standing there, enormously tall and silhouetted in green. He stands in one spot for the first song, moving only to do that swaying-bowing thing that certain more observant Jews do in synagogue or during prayer. It's a cool effect, although he's a practiced enough showman to start dancing for the rest of the set. I haven't seen him live before, and for his live act he alters even those songs I do sort of know, so that I'm mostly lost as to what I'm listening to. I'm pretty sure "King Without a Crown" was played, as was the song I remembered as being called "Because You Believe in Me" but is actually titled "Indestructible." I'm self-conscious during the songs I don't recognize, though. I don't know if he has a new album or if I'm just a half-assed fan, and when I can't mouth the lyrics I nod along and hope no one can tell.

Towards the end of the set Matisyahu brings out a special guest artist, and it takes me a few seconds before I recognize the guy who talked to me in the crowd earlier. Apparently the two of them are friends, and Matisyahu has brought him along on this tour. He joins him for a song and gets his own verse to freestyle. He's not bad, but I'm not exactly pained that I didn't remember his name and can't buy his mixtape.

He closes with "Jerusalem," as you knew he must have. I've heard perhaps four or five studio versions of this song by now, each of them radically different from the others, but the way he performs it this time nevertheless impresses. A mostly rock version, with guitars and bass turned up, the band infuses it with a steady, compelling, rolling sort of rhythm. Everyone sings along, and although I get most of the words wrong except during the chorus. At some point, and I can't tell when, I realized: Damn, I really feel it. I don't know a thing about the art of being a stage musician, nor am I even particularly an experienced concertgoer. I will say this, though, that sometimes when a show goes really well, it can convince you for as long as it lasts that this is the greatest concert you've ever seen. When it really goes right, it can leave you wanting still more while not making you sorry it's over. It's really amazing, when it happens, and it's strange, but I don't really remember it raining during the ride home. I'm sure it must have, but all I remember from pedaling home is relistening to "Youth," singing along.

The American question: Health care

2009-12-17T01:05:00.001-08:00

Sorry, one more post about American politics. A timeline:

December 5: Atrios emails Booman to suggest liberals should feign coolness to the Medicare buy-in compromise.
December 13: Lieberman comes out against the compromise
December 15: Lieberman says he opposed Medicare buy-in because liberals, notably Anthony Wiener and Howard Dean, supported it.

December 16: Howard Dean pens an op-ed (to be published the following day) saying that now the bill is unsupportable.

December 16: Jay Rockefeller calls Dean's comments irresponsible.

As the poet says, "Same night, same fight, but one of us cats ain't playin' right." Am I the only one coming to this suspicion?

If you haven't yet read them, and you care to, I think Nate Silver's comments on all the bill is ("To claim that a health care bill without a public option is anything other than a huge achievement for progressives is, frankly, bullshit.") and Matt Yglesias's on all it ain't ("That's what leverage looks like. Supposedly pro-reform Democrats have failed to exert any real leverage in this fight.") are worth a read.

My own thoughts? The president, in his address to Congress earlier this year, said somewhat aspirationally, "I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. " If one were to take that as a goal, this bill is a failure---more action will clearly be required by future presidents, because the compromises made in getting a bill passed will need to be fixed. But it's oddly unfair to the president to take him at his word on this; he was speaking almost certainly rhetorically. I think that what liberals should think of the compromise really should turn on whether one thinks the present bill would provide a platform for that future action, or else short-circuit popular support for more drastic change and further entrench an imperfect system. I suspect most experts believe the former, but I really have sympathy for the latter. But honestly, what the heck do I know?

---------

Update: In which I repeat myself in comments, and Ezra Klein ignores me. Dead to me, Ezra. Dead. To. Me.

Fahrrad mishugoss

2009-12-16T13:22:00.001-08:00

So a few months ago I locked my bike outside a bar on Mariannenstrasse (called, perhaps too transparently, the Bar on Mariannenstrasse), wheel-to-frame but (significantly, as it'd turn out), not locking the frame to the already-full bicycle rack. A few hours later I returned to find it... not there anymore. Someone with a pair of bolt cutters or (more likely) a van to haul it away had come across it and taken it. It's a story I'll tell perhaps at another time. For now, I only bring it up to introduce an old and familiar truth, that one forms attachments to a bicycle, like one does a pet or a favorite childhood toy, or maybe the girlfriend who you break up with because you didn't want to be tied down but you never knew how good you had it until after three horrible relationships later, when something someone says some beery night reminds you of her. Especially when you got it second-hand, you gradually begin to think of all the curious features of the thing, like a malfunctioning bell or the awkward slope of the handlebars, less as shortcomings and more as quirks or oddities, and eventually the things you love most about it. I paid only thirty-five euros for the thing, but as I put twenty-euro repair after twenty-euro repair into it, I became more and more invested (fiscally and emotionally). The night it was stolen, I had gotten to the point where I had never loved a bicycle as much as I did this one.

The new one's all right, though. The light doesn't work and the handlebars are shorter than I'd prefer. The first one had these long sloping handles, the curve of the handlebar was really a thing to behold, and the handles just came off the end looking like a decorative hilt of a samurai sword. The new one's got short functional handles, as long as my hands are wide with not an inch to spare. Spare, that's a good word for them. Functional, with nothing to spend on grace. It's got a boxy feel to it; the frame is this huge imposing triangle, all straight lines and hard edges, and you have to swing your leg out to get on or off; the old one had a curve to its frame and you could sort of step-through to get on. I got this one at the Flohmarkt for forty euros and should have known I'd put more into it soon. The front tire blew out on the way to the library one day, and the rear wheel started making this awful scraping sound afterwards. Just this awful sound like grinding your teeth against a chalkboard with your fingernails poking into a wet unhappy housecat. Awful. The guy at the bikeshop down the street said it was the axle and replaced it, but two days later the sound came back; turns out the whole wheel was beschädigt and had to be replaced. He did give me a discount roughly equal to the price of the axle I'd already bought. I had put a lot of money into the first bike, and never knew how good I had it. Ah, I never should have broken up with that girl. Bicycle, I mean.

Well, of course I've been using the new bike since then. Locking it quite carefully, one will note. I've even been riding it a lot just for exercise, since I hurt my knee my first attempt at a run since eleven miles in Barcelona, the night of history's worst-ever for-lack-of-a-better-word-I'll-call-it-a-date, which is a story I really gotta tell when I get a chance. The knee appears to be okay, although I'm keeping to shorter distances to be safe---this took me twenty and a half minutes today, good for a seven-minute pace---and for longer bouts of sweating I've been keeping to the bike.

This is of course in addition to the use I get out of the bike just in terms of getting around town. In medium traffic I move as fast as cars (in heavy traffic, faster), and I don't need to look for a parking space, just a signpost, and if it gets too cold or I'm running late it only costs 1.50 to take it on the U-Bahn. I absolutely love having my bicycle as a transit option---which it is in Berlin, and isn't a lot of other places, because of the accommodations Berlin makes to cyclists, like plentiful bike lanes and especially car drivers who know bicyclists are on the road and look out for them. I don't mean to belabor this point, but it is a real difference between the Germans and Dutch et al, and the Americans. Also: Foreshadowing!

Some of the improvements I'd paid for with the first bike were removable front and rear lights. I'd unclipped them and slid them into my bag when the bicycle was stolen, so I still have the heavy bits that make the light, but they are missing the clamps by which they're attached to the bike itself. Since those clamps are only for sale in kits for the entire light set, I haven't replaced them and have been riding lichtlos. I know that's against the law. I don't know how serious an offense it can be, technically. But I'm an immigrant without work or, really, any visible reason I'm living in this country, and it's not so far to the time I was here without a visa and technically subject to deportation if anyone had found out, and that mindset doesn't shake off all at once. Once you live like that there's an edginess that creeps back up whenever you see a police car, a fear no matter how irrational that lingers, makes you wonder if they're not coming for you, finally.

I say this by way of explaining why, once I determined I wasn't hurt, I didn't wait for the police to come or insist on exchanging numbers or otherwise make a big deal of it when a motorist collided with me as I came around the corner of Dresdener between Oranienplatz and Kotbusser. Right about here. The way it happened was, I was coming from the west and veered right onto Dresdener as a car that was parked to my right pulled out of its spot, its driver looking the other way. Given the turn and (as I remember it) what must have been a truck or other obstruction, neither of us could see each other from far away, although I was definitely the first to see him, as he kept rolling after I'd started veering to my left. I was going too fast to turn any more, but I think he eventually did see me and brake, and the collision---right on the knee, natch, but not the one that's been hurting---felt pretty soft. I fell over, but caught myself on the way down. I got up, stepped on both legs; they were fine. The other guy pulled back into his parking space. He didn't turn off the engine right away, but stayed there, lights off, the motor humming. As I watched him it was as though I could read his mind, so clear it was what he was thinking. Drive away, quick, before anyone sees. I would have been thinking it, too. But then he killed the engine and got out and I told him I was fine. His car might have been scratched, I guess, but if so I didn't see it and he wasn't terribly interested in checking. I told him he could go and he did, quickly.

At the time I thought the bike was completely intact, too. Well, this little plastic claspable case that sits under the seat, and the purpose of which I've never been able to figure out, had fallen off. But it's a cheap thing that I didn't particularly want. I'd walked it the few steps to the curb and everything seemed completely fine. It was only as I went rolling away did I hear that sound again of something grinding against the rear axle, not the same noise exactly as what the axle had been making that precipitated two replaced parts, but damn if it didn't make me think of just that. And as I pedaled through the streets of Berlin with a satchel of groceries slung across my back, all I could think about was that I really don't know how much more I can afford this city, how I keep thinking I have a budget I can sustain only to find out there's a dozen incidental costs of things that I hadn't planned on, and how much longer can I keep this up, and how much worse it could have been if I had medical costs, good lord. But I've taken two bikes into the shop I don't know how many times now, and I'm tired of paying for it, and I'm just getting ready for this one to be a full chain and gear or something more expensive than another crappy wheel. I notice the sound only comes when I pedal and not when I coast, so I do that, coast, as much of the way home as possible, pedaling furiously and then just leaning forward as long as I can, feeling like I can drift forever as the city grows darker and colder. The sun had gone down long before.

The next day I walk it down the street. My German's at least better here and I can explain what was happen with the passive "was hit (by a car)"/,,wurde von einem Autofahrer geschlugen." It has much less of an effect than I had assumed, and he just flips it onto its seat, turns the pedals with one hand while watching the chain, and in two quick movements bends a metal plate until the chain no longer rubs against it. So my bikeshop guy thinks I'm retarded. "Oh, you have a problem with your bike again? This problem here, that disappears when I apply pressure with my hand? Yeah. Wow. Those can be a killer.

Today, though, I noticed that I'm liking the new bike more. The short handles even; they kind of feel right, you know? Spare. Economical. Practical, minimalist, no pointless flourishes.

Sigh. This thing'll be the death of me.

,,Hat nummer sechs keinen Witz bekommen?'' ,,Doch,'' sagte der Bartender, ,,aber du erzählst ihn falsch''

2009-12-03T10:22:00.001-08:00

Small complaint, but I have to get this off my chest: In Deutschkurs we did a few days involving humor, Witze, Scherzen, und so weider. Supplemental homework was to learn a joke, each member of the class being expected to tell one over three days. Well, I don't know any German jokes, but how different could an American or English joke sound in translation?

Pretty different, it turns out. I volunteered on the first day, so I had completed my obligation. Nearly no one else even attempted to come up with one, however, which left a lot of dead time at the end of the second day, when it was obvious our instructor had counted on the tell-a-joke exercise to eat up a good twenty minutes that she otherwise would have had to spend teaching. Well, not to brag, but I'm one of the better speakers in the class, so I offered to tell a second one the next day, and then today when the clock showed minutes still left with no volunteers, the instructor came back to the well a third time.

Three days, three chances to tell a joke, three times I got it all out without any curse words and no grammatical mistakes so gruesome that they would have made it impossible to understand. Three jokes. Not one person laughed, not one time.

"I would, but I really need the eggs." "My dog, he has no nose." Nothing. Fuck you, humorless language students---how's that for a joke?

,,Halt es mal nicht für Krebs. Halt es mal für Krebs-chen.''

2009-12-02T01:40:00.001-08:00

Language courses continue. It seems that's the only verb the noun "language course" can take. It cannot "succeed" or "come to completion," only "continue." I still find it often difficult to say exactly what I want, or that when I believe I have succeeded I've in fact conveyed something quite different from what I intended, but I believe I'm getting better. The class does not seem to be moving as fast as it could. I missed a solid week with what could have been the flu or a bad cold, or even food poisoning. I'm insured but don't go to the doctor for the three days, and on the fourth I cannot find the right clinic at first, and on the fifth my symptoms seem to be on the decline. When I return to class the following Monday I appear not to have missed much that I can't recover immediately. I wonder how much I'm paying for this, but then set about relearning the subjunctive past tense. Ich hätte gerne, einen verschiedenen Kurs zu nehmen.

Full moons, or else the damp chills that these days seem permanent in the city, bring foul moods, and tempers don't flare but smolder beneath the surface during the section on interrogatories and statements of the form, Er/sie fragt, warum du ... hast. Our teacher asks the bubbly Spanish woman who always wears fashionable boots why she's incapable of punctuality. The Spanish woman in cute boots asks our fifty-something teacher why she has never been married.

The next subject is getting sick and seeking medical treatment. It comes a few days after I have returned from my own illness, and I brood over the ironies that the first immediately practical bit of language we have learned has come precisely when I can no longer use it. My own poor mood takes as its object our coursebook and its silly examples of patients who are incapable of sustaining a conversation any real human being is ever going to need. "Doc, you gotta help me---I get these terrible stomach pains after about my fifth cup of coffee that don't subside even if I have a second apfelkuchen." Du isst nie Frühstück, weil du musst zu früh nach Arbeit, täglich trinkst du nur Kaffee und isst selten Mittagessen, und manchmals du kommst nach Hause um neun oder später, und du weisst nicht, warum dein Magen dir weh tut? Meine Diagnose ist Schwachsinnig-heit.

We move on from the doctor's office to the workplace. We learn about jobs that are selbständig, autonomous, and those that offer Aufstiegmöglichkeiten, or opportunities for advancement. Our Lehrerin expresses her opinion that lawyers have excellent control over their working conditions, Arbeitsbedingungen, such as their hours, and have excellent prospects for advancement. I unwittingly am recalled to the four years I spent in those salt mines, the nights and weekends I was literally ordered to be in my office, and the dozens of associates who were fired or driven to quit before one was made partner. I chuckle bitterly to myself as I sip from my coffee, which I have dosed heavily with cream and sugar, but which is black again when it leaves my lips.

We are asked to list verbs that take the dative case, or the dative plus the accusative. I find the exercise very difficult, coming up with only the most obvious examples: "to be pleasing (to someone)" and "to seem (to someone)" in the former category, and "to give (someone) (something)" and "to show (someone) (something)" in the latter. The class lists off their entries, and I am apparently alone in having this trouble. After the fact I come up with schmecken, to taste good (to someone). Ja, says our Lehrerin. That is very important, wichtig. The next suggestion is winken, to wink. I think this has an exclusively flirtatious connotation, but I am not sure. Our Lehrerin responds Ja, but that dass ist nicht wichtig. The Spanish girl in cute boots begins to laugh and cannot stop herself. While she stifles the noise as best she can behind two hands, our teacher explains passen. "When I shop for clothes, I find, 'these pants are too small, these pants passt nicht.'" The Spanish girl in cute boots loses it completely.

I have now learned to translate the active voice to the passive, whether or not it makes the slightest bit of logical sense. "One is not permitted to beat children" becomes "children are not permitted to be beaten," which invites the question how to translate a Homer Simpsonic "...'cause if they do..." and accompanying shaken fist, into German (other than, of course, unwisely). Kinder dürfen nicht geschlogen werden, und wenn sie so tun, dann bekommen sie ein Schlagen!

My writing proceeds slowly, frustratingly. I have finished a draft of one short story and shown in to a few friends. One has returned a verdict (negative). It's entirely of my own making, but for the moment I'm trapped between two languages: I can't immerse myself in German while I'm devoting so much of the day to English, and I can't really get the work done in English while I spend half the day in German-mode. Each proceeds slowly, in its own way, for the time being, and I have decided (evidently) to let it be. Eventually I shall have to make a decision, I think. But for the time being I'm pretending I don't know that.

Lock the door on the Hall of Fame: The leader boards

2009-11-24T11:27:00.001-08:00

Can it be? a baseball post? After I up and moved to Europe? Well, it's this or nothing from me, so quit your damn yelping. It's award season, and I'm thinking of history.

Zach Greinke, the best pitcher in the American League, won the Cy Young award, which is supposed to go the best pitcher in each league. That qualifies as news, because the voters are not widely thought of as able to identify the best pitcher, and pretty much everyone was waiting for them to give it a pitcher who achieved more wins by virtue of not pitching for the woeful Kansas City Royals. As Joe Posnanski noted, a pitcher with as few wins (16) as Greinke had really not won the Cy except in very odd circumstances. Joe Mauer overcame the handicaps of leading the league in all three triple-slash scores (average, on-base, and slugging) and playing the most demanding defensive position to win the AL MVP despite not playing for the Yankees, and accordingly lacking the mystique and aura that are widely known among baseball people to follow truly great players. Lincecum beat Carpenter and Wainwright for NL Cy honors and Pujols winning his third MVP, which aren't as interesting for being either too hard a question or too easy of one, respectively.

Anyway, for reasons I don't recall right now, I was looking at this list of the players with the most career runs scored, all time. Probably it was because I was arguing with a friend over whether Rickey Henderson, recently elected to the Hall of Fame, or Greg Maddux, not eligible for a few years yet, was more deserving of a unanimous Hall ballot, which as you sure know, no player has ever received. My argument: Maddux did everything right, pitched to contact while still striking out a ton of batters, avoided the walk, won 300 games---there's no argument against him, whereas Rickey was a great player who still had a curious lack of power from a corner spot and wasn't the best outfielder in baseball during the time he played---not even the best left fielder. The counter-argument: What records has Maddux broken? Rickey is #1 in runs, #1 in steals, and while maybe Bonds was a better left fielder, no one's ever been a better leadoff hitter. Well, he's also #1 in being caught stealing, and being #1 ain't necessarily all you think it is---the pitcher with the most strikeouts is one of the weakest Hall selections in history. So I decided to look at the rest of the guys with the most runs scored in their careers, hoping to find some guilt by association with which to besmirch the good reputation of my dear friend.

Wow, is it not there. Looking at the runs leaders, one does not easily find any irregularity in terms of quality. In fact, up until #74, the list comprises three and only three subsets: Hall of Famers; active players or recent retirees not yet eligible for a vote, and Pete Rose (okay, Tim Raines is in there, too, but he should make it in during the next few years); and dead-ball era guys whose last game was in 1903 or earlier (well, Arlie Latham came back for four games as a pinch hitter and late-inning replacement at second in 1909 after a ten-year absence; he batted zero in two trips but must have reached on either an error or a fielder's choice, as he stole a base and scored a run; he fielded the ball cleanly and made the throw to first on both of his defensive chances---how's that for reading a century-old box score?). Finally at number 75 you get a real omission by the Hall of Fame, someone who played during what I'll call the Hall Era and who has become eligible, in Dwight Evans.

Well, that seemed interesting to me, that the top 75 run scorers would all be Hall guys, except for the last one. It's a curiously round number, no? How 'bout RBI leaders? Excluding Hall of Famers and ineligibles, you start with #29 Harold Baines (who's still eligible for a vote but only squeaked by with 5.9% last ballot), then #34 Andre Dawson (who collected the most votes after the two inductees with 67%, and has two more years to get 75%), and at #51 (Dave Parker) or maybe #53 (Rusty Staub) you start to see the picture start to look mixed. Home runs? it's more complicated, as you start with #32 Jose Canseco, but you follow that up shortly with #35 Dave Kingman, then #42 Darrell Evans, and at #48 (Dale Murphy) it peters out into a steady drip of non-Hall players, plus you got Fred McGriff and Juan Gonzalez and Andres Gallaraga mixed in there, who aren't eligible until next year but who have shaky cases and who almost certainly won't all make it in.

So by runs, the Hall has inducted more or less all the 75 career leaders that it can, and looks to induct the remainder when their time comes; in runs batted in, it's the top 50; and in home runs, the top 35. What about absolute numbers? There you notice something interesting, as the cutoff for runs is 1,475, maybe 1,480. Runs batted in goes to 1,500 (between Mickey Mantle and Dave Parker). Home runs could be anywhere from 443 to 451 (the collar around Bagwell). So let's call it 1,500 for R and RBIs, 450 for HR. That seems about right; when you imagine a BBWAA voter looking at a generic player, it's easy to imagine him being impressed by the big round numbers. The homers number is a little weird, and perhaps by coincidence sits directly between the 400 that represented a lock before the for-whatever-reason homer-happy 80s and 90s (I'm not avoiding attributing it to steroids, but I'm not absolving the new parks or expansion-era pitching, either) and the 500 that it became after. With hits it departs from the round-number pattern, as it's the 45 with 2,800 (again, excepting current and recently retired players, Pete Rose, and Harold Baines), or 2,775 if you assume Dawson and Griffey are in. Clearly anyone with 3,000 is an A+ lock, and it looks like for practical purposes, the Hall recognizes how out of reach that milestone is for even the greatest players and is willing to fudge that number for an A-minus student, as well, but won't give a full 10% discount. (Yeah, that's the best rationale I could come up with.)

First thought: What's particularly curious to note is that the runs leaders are comparatively overrepresented relative to the sluggers; I would have bet anything that the contrary were so, just based on the voters' reputation for overvaluing homers and ribbies in doling out the MVP awards. I suspect that the reason for this is that players who have great mashing seasons aren't especially likely to have great mashing careers, but true quality players score runs consistently across their seasons. That is, the RBI bias might result in a Justin Morneau MVP campaign for the length of a season, but it's unlikely to sustain a Hall of Fame career, whereas the skills that get ignored over a single season reveal themselves in the fullness of time to be more truly valuable.

Second thought: The round numbers of lock-candidates on the respective lists reflects an artificial symmetry, and one what's really on the brink of collapse. The HR/RBI numbers include a lot of players suspected or proven of using steroids, and Mark McGwire (who never failed a test) has been passed over twice now; it certainly seems that more of the leaders will wind up being excluded from the Hall for suspicion of using PEDs. Additionally, even though he's not thought of as a steroid user, Harold Baines appears right in the middle of the hits and runs-batted-in lists, but he'll be kept out of the Hall because those career numbers were because of a long career in a high-scoring era, and in spite of average rate stats. If you reexamine the lists for likely exclusions, the bottom of the "lock" lists becomes defined by (in each case: ballpark career numbers, number of Hall members-last guy kept in, first guy left out) the following, and forgiving/ignoring Rose and Bonds because you really have no choice:

Hits: North of 3,000, #23-Lou Brock, Raphael Palmeiro, or if you ignore Raphael, 2,800, #39-Babe, Baines
Runs: 1,700, #25-Bill Hamilton if you end the chain at A-Rod; #29, Winfield if at Palmeiro; or #33-Ripken, Sheffield
Runs batted in: 1,800, #13-Ted Williams if you end at Palmeiro; #18-Frank Robinson if at Manny; #20-Honus Wagner if A-Rod or Frank Thomas
Home runs: #5-Griffey if Sosa; #7-Frank Robinson if McGwire or A-Rod; #10-Killebrew if Palmeiro; #14-Mike Schmidt if Manny

Third thought: All told, I think this points to a welcome trend of the voters (in the aggregate if not individually) really internalizing a lot of the new knowledge of baseball. Whether it's in spite of themselves, as you see with runs being valued relative to RBIs, or as a result of the schismatic episode of the steroids era, or (my personal theory) the more traditional view, as reflected in the round numbers-test, simply becoming obviously unworkable as the historical context evolved, there is at least a hint of baseball's highest honor being awarded more rationally. It's only a hint, still, but in light of a pleasantly sane bit of year-end voting, it seems that we may finally be on the right side of the arc of history. (Well, Jeter did get another Gold Glove, so there's still a lot of work to do.)

Me and E. (an email correspondence)

2009-11-19T13:35:00.001-08:00

Me: You know, I'm actually liking the Dune miniseries (I'm watching the second one, Children of Dune, now)

Me: On a totally unrelated note, the actresses who play Alia, Princess Irulan, and Chani are all totally number fours. Oddly, they're quite a bit older than you'd expect for actresses (Alia, who I think is the h4wtest of the three in a contest where placing third is really no shame, is 43...). .

E.: I didn't know they made a second one...

Me: Yeah, I guess. 2003. It encompasses the books Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, I think.

E.: I'm getting old. Like, old for the earth. I thought the Dune miniseries was recent...

Me: Nine years ago ain't recent enough for you? The Yankees had just won the World Series, a Democrat was in the White House and Republicans were spreading crazy stories about how he was going to murder people... feels like yesterday.

The New Yorker Swimsuit Issue (a.k.a., the food edition)

2009-11-16T09:53:00.001-08:00

The New Yorker Food Issue just arrived in my inbox, and I've been spending the last hour or so reading about, inter alia, Thanksgivings abroad.

[Sidenote: I've been describing said issue over IM all day, and the absence of convenient italics therein forced me to experiment with capitalizations I found less than ideal. "The New Yorker Food Issue" is clearly deficient, suggesting as it does a single title, and while I settled on "The New Yorker food issue," I didn't like the casualness of that lower-casing of the issue. This is all by way of confessing my intense punctuation-and-style geekdom, that the availability of italics in this medium comes as a genuine relief. Also the reader kindly will note that while standard Bluebook style is not to italicize Latin phrases such as "inter alia," that rule follows the policy of underscoring vocabularies the reader is expected to find unfamiliar extends only so far as the presumption that a legal audience will be familiar with them. In other words, it's a genre-specific rule that really shouldn't be leaned upon for more than... oh, I'm sorry, is this boring you? Hey, fuck you, then.]

Anyway, here are the annals of a day in the life of a Michelin restaurant critic:

The waiter arrived and placed before Maxime a large white plate. At the center was her foie gras, a short pillar of puréed duck liver on a piece of crisp toast with a lacy web of caramelized sugar on top; the sides were studded with cherries and sprinkled with pistachios, and a transparent sauce, made of white port gelée, surrounded the entire creation like a moat. She considered the dish for a few moments, as if trying to determine the best angle of attack. With the side of her fork, she broke off a piece of the complicated construction, and tasted it. The dish, which I later tried, activated every sense with which humans are equipped: the foie gras was smooth and as rich as butter, its silky texture contrasting with the caramelized sugar, which shattered like a pane of microscopically thin glass against the teeth and tongue, its sweetness offset by the sour cherries, the rounded aromatic flavor of the toasted nuts, and the texture and taste of the port gelée.

"Excellent," Maxime said.
I asked her what she liked about it.
"It's not really a 'like' and a 'not like,' " she said. "It's an analysis. You're eating it and you're looking for the quality of the products. At this level, they have to be top quality. You're looking at 'Was every single element prepared exactly perfectly, technically correct?' And then you're looking at the creativity. Did it work? Did the balance of ingredients work? Was there good texture? Did everything come together? Did something overpower something else? Did something not work with something else? The pistachios—everything was perfect."

When her second appetizer arrived—the crab toast topped with toasted sesame seeds—she dipped the tines of her fork into a thick line of dark-green sauce that bisected the narrow rectangle of crab toast, and touched it to her tongue. Her eyes grew wide.

"This sauce is really good," she said. "It's so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing." She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that Vongerichten would consider the recipe "a trade secret." I later learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered English mustard and soy sauce.) "It's so complex," she said. "It makes me smile."

Her Arctic char arrived, on a bed of watercress rémoulade, and accompanied by a julienne of apple. She took a bite. "It's perfectly cooked," she said, excitedly. "I mean, it's textbook."

I don't know if I have a whole lot to say about this other than something just below the surface itches, that I'm pretty sure it pisses me off. I'm no ascetic---hell, I'm a fat guy---but there's something intensely respectable about the Buddhist credo that one should eat in order to live, not live in order to eat. That is, it goes without saying, completely incompatible with a carmelized sugar crust atop a slab of foie gras studded with cherries and pistachios.

War, warst, warum?

2009-10-27T12:10:00.001-07:00

Greetings, Agent Handler. You'll have to forgive me if I'm hard to understand, as I'm talking through a cold, one of the real drippy ones where one side of your head or the other feels heavier in the morning for having been the side you slept on, and until you get into the shower and just stand under water as hot and for as long as you can tolerate, it doesn't feel like your head is made of different tissues like bone and blood and cartilage, and certainly doesn't feel like you have discrete structures like sinus cavities in there, so much as it's all just one mess of coextensive jellied goo, harder on the outside surface for having crusted over perhaps, but essentially all the same stuff, your cheekbones crammed full of snot, what you thought was your brain just a three-pound booger having achieved a dim self-awareness since you last rousted yourself to use the toilets. Or in other words: I have nothing of real interest to report, really, or at least nothing you'd want to read more about. Language school proceeds. For the first time since before college I'm reading what I suppose qualifies as a "text" despite having more square meterage photos or cartoon illustrations than printed words. And those printed words ain't much to write home about, neither. The authors know that they're writing for an audience with exceedingly limited vocab and grammatical abilities and who accordingly can understand only basic sentences. It results in this weird Ray Carver-esque tone in a context where that dark tone seems a bit eerie.

A young man stands outside the gates to a school. If you were to see him, you'd think he were waiting for someone. But for whom; no one comes out of the gate. He watches a car as it passes. He sees his reflection in a window, pulls a comb from his pocket, and runs it through his hair. It's nice hair, shiny and thick still. He probably won't notice it thinning until he's nearly to forty. At least, it's nice to think so. A blond in winter clothes walks by. A pretty girl. He winks at her and grins, but she just walks by, the kind of girl that won't talk to you unless she knows you already. Well, how are you ever going to get to know someone if you won't say hi, he asks out loud, but low, growling to himself, really, and anyways she has walked on by already. He refuses to watch as she turns the corner and is gone. He waits more. The gates open, and a mousy little girl, dark hair tucked up underneath her an unfashionable hat comes out. She sees him before he turns to see her. She walks up to him and touches his arm. He turns and smiles. A polished smile; a convincing one. It's as though nothing of the in-between had happened.

There's also the revelation of the class fault lines within the class. Our instructor, I think, is genuinely sympathetic, but there's just a difference of experience that results in someone like her (someone like, say, me) not really getting it, not understanding just how different people's lives can be for the simple reason of them coming from, you know, like China or someplace. The Continentals and the residents of the former Commonwealth (just this Yank and an Aussie so far; I'm hoping for a Rhodesian soon, but I'll take a Canuck) take full advantage of the new vocabulary for frequency and durations of time, but the questions about how often someone goes out to dinner, on vacation, or to the spa turn one half of the class into the auslaenders who say ,,Nie." (Yeah, I know. Sorry.) It strikes me that this is a movie I've seen before. And how often do you eat candy bars? And how many do you eat? Oh, no, it's just that there's a funny---do you guys know "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" in Eritrea? No? Oh, well, it's a long story. Similarly, a exercise on the past tense that I'm quite sure was intended, at least, to be self-evident turns out instead as some combination of bizarre, hilarious, and vaguely cruel, as the Chinese and Koreans become puzzled what contrast there could be against a past where grandparents, parents, and children all live in the same dwelling, and one of the Middle Easterners insist that women don't really work outside the home today, do they? (Our Lehrerin insisted: Yes, we do. No doubt thinking: Some of us even teach German to clueless chauvinists.)

I still feel somewhat interstitial, though; I feel bad not really having down the technical points about which pronouns take which case (mit, dative; für, accusative, und so weiter), and don't think I'd feel right asking into the next class up, nor am I entirely sure I could hack it. At the same time, I suspect I'm not really being challenged sufficiently at this level, amusing as the malapropisms frequently become. During a bit of open dialogue on Sehenswerdigkeiten that tourists in our home country find berühmte, we learned that in Korea there is a place of indeterminate location where one can find many women, numerous rocks, and a lot of wind. I'm pretty sure that was the result of a mispronunciation, but under cross-examination the blushing witness just nodded in order to get the whole thing over with.

Then again, I've lingered with this cold for a week and a half and still don't know what I'm going to do for money in the future. I could just be grumpy.

Currently listening, watching, and obsessed with: This. (Downloadable here.)

Pat blogging! less-special-than-you'd-hope American news edition!

2009-10-21T09:06:00.001-07:00

[Ugh---updates from Deutschland are forthcoming but taking longer... I know, regular readers have been on this train before and know it takes a while, but I'm trying, really. In the meantime, here's more stuff from my latest foray into the Internets.]

Rush Limbaugh a victim of a left-wing smear campaign, you say? I had no idea thirty-two fat white billionaires now constituted the Left. A good rule of thumb is that when your political argument entails this guy or this one wearing a Che t-shirt and putting up ANSWER posters, you probably need to rethink that explanation. Liberals are making a mistake when they rush to defend one side of what is not their fight. Limbaugh versus the NFL owners is new money versus old; it's a story older than the sport, but that's what you get when half of the electorate proudly advertises they don't read books---you can't analogize to Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker. Limbaugh wasn't kept out of the league because of some fabricated quote attributed to him praising Martin Luther King's assassin; he was kept out because he's not their kind of people. And that's disgusting snobbery, and he's a horrible person, and I feel no need to take any side in it.

Mike Huckabee... what to say. I actually like Huckabee (the Colbert bump, what can I say), or at least find him personable enough. And it's worth noting that he's straight-up a die-hard on two of the three legs of the GOP platform: a former Baptist minister, he's got the evangelicals and the cultural conservatives down with Huck-a-bee[fn1], and while he's not particularly noted by the foreign policy establishment as a particularly comprehensive conservative, his views are no less confused on that score than anyone else the party's thrown up. But there it is, that third leg, the part of the party that demands its nominees recite the Club for Growth Pledge of Allegiance, and Huckabee's said things in the past that terrify those people. Like, you know, working people need a fairer shake from Big Business. (Yeah, they get terrified by some downright decent shit, these guys.) He's from Arkansas, represents people who shop and work at WalMart, and unlike a lot of supposed Christian conservatives seems to have taken some of that shit about the meek to heart. That, as you know, makes someone a crazy populist in today's Republican party, where straight-up anti-populism is officially a Traditional American ValueTM. (Don't sneer, Democrats. You remember the only one of your candidates who did so much as talk a good game about poverty? Right, John Edwards. How'd that work out for him?)

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fn1: Yea you know me!

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In unrelated news, a Times reporter who authored an unbearably entitled pity-fest for the now-merely-super-rich and their struggles in the present economic climate (example: it's harder to give $100 million to the Met when your trust fund dwindles from $500 million to $350 million. No, really.) predictably got a lot of resentful letters from the unwashed not-rich-at-all set. What strikes me as most interesting is that nearly all of the letters were about the reporter falling down on the job---yet he was incapable of viewing them other than as a psychologically unhealthy bit of jealousy at the rich people portrayed in his article. I've been thinking about this for a while---I think a lot of what you see in the Washington Post online chats, for example, makes more sense when you realize that establishment reporters are incapable of conceiving that their judgment has ever been in error. It just does not compute. So they ascribe criticism to foulmouthed lefty bloggers who just have a political ax to grind, or else poor hicks in flyover states obviously in need of a good 5th Avenue psychotherapist (that they can't afford).

Okay, hopefully in the next few days a real update. Sorry folks.

A word from die Heimat

2009-10-12T09:54:00.001-07:00

Well, awards season wraps up---no, you trivial tart, not that awards season, the one that matters---with the Rijksbank Prize in Economics Sciences (commonly misnominated the Economics Nobel) going to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, the former the first woman to win the award. (Unlike the other five awards, which've been around since 1901 if memory serves, the foundation for the economics award dates back only until 1969, so it's not quite as bad as if say the Medicine or Literature prizes hadn't yet been awarded to a woman.)

It's worth a petulant mention that the two new laureates are---well, they're not exactly nowhere on the list Mankiw disseminated earlier, but it's fair to describe them thus, them each being 50-to-1 shots. That list appears to have been generated by the London equivalent of Vegas oddsmakers---ah, the English, so adorable... they with their tea to our coffee, cricket to our baseball, international awards for advancement in economic theory to our college hoops and horse races----so one should note that it's not entirely fair to hold up that list of an actual estimation of real likelihood, or indeed anything more than a diversion for fun and profit. Yet this morning, I think, an awful lot of people were looking at the list as an actual estimation of real likelihood. (By the way, read some of the comment threads these stories generated. I'm convinced from reading a few of the Planet Money comment threads that economics, more than any other topic, inspires those who know the least to shout the loudest. As a comparison to the rest of the Internet, that's saying something."

It's also worth noting that Eugene Fama was listed as the most likely winner on that gambling pink-sheet. Like, Gene Fama? The award previously seems to have been given to an interesting mix of scholars---for the really titanic works (Paul Samuelson, Ken Arrow, Akerlof, Ronald Coase, Friedman), the odd innovation in finance (Scholes) or behavioral insight (Nash, Kahneman) or cross-disciplinary genius (Sen). There's the occasional crank thrown in, too---Lucas, Becker, Hayek---so there would have been some precedent. Still, it seems (with the luxury of hindsight, of course) preposterous to think the committee could have chosen, in the context of the present economic situation, a theorist whose major contribution has always been employed in the defense of the proposition that less economic regulation is necessary. (And I mean always has so been employed.) The committees are supposed to be insulated from fits of populist sentiment (umm... heh, funny story about the peace prize this year...), but for them to have endorsed the efficient markets' hypothesis now, you'd be talking about levels of insulation not so much on the "domestic residence in Nome, Alaska" level and more on the one of "personal apparatus appropriate for extravehicular space walk" variety.

And indeed it seems the committee did pick, at least in Ostrom, a scholar whose work shines a little brighter in the present situation, looks a little more prescient. Prof. Ostrom is, in addition to the first woman, also not an economist but a political scientist, although her work on commons' theory fits into what is sometimes called political economy. Now, I have a fair bit of training in some of these areas and I'd never heard her name, nor do I recognize any of what Wikipedia calls her notable works; one expects that had they thought to do this a decade ago, or were there no rule against posthumous awards, it'd be Garrett Hardin receiving the honor.

But I'm sure it's well deserved, and congrats to both the new laureates.

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this breaking news....

2009-10-08T15:03:00.001-07:00

Okay, so this is supposed to be about my new home, but damn, I do miss New York. This article about the dwindling existence of Jewish delicatessens in Newark is like a Philip Roth novel.

Sprachschule

2009-10-07T02:05:00.001-07:00

Part of the cover story for my being in Berlin is that I'm here to learn German. "Cover story" referring to how I justify my rather absolute departure to my parents, not in the sense of obscuring my true purpose here of espionage. Well, that and the formal reason required for requesting a visa, I suppose, but I don't think anyone expects you to fill that out in unlimited candor. Long story short: I'm not a spy.

Although my discoveries about the city would make an ... interesting chapter in the history of the American intelligence apparatus. "Dear CIA Handler, Although I understand the need for secrecy I feel odd not addressing you by name. May I call you the obviously pseudonymic 'Agent Handler'? I have discovered that beer here is very cheap. Also, they talk very fast and make unsuccessful attempts to be polite when they ask if you wouldn't rather speak English instead. The game is afoot, Agent Handler."

Back to learning German: It's actually something I'd like to do, as I'm getting embarrassed at my limited language skills. So I've enrolled in a language school, the one that The Roommate enrolled in for her own courses. As she speaks much better German than I do, it seemed a useful enough place to start. They gave me a quick interview, let me sit through a practice session of level A2, where it seemed I was probably best suited, and I paid my money and got ready to start the next day.

I have only the most obvious observations to make, but starting a new course in a language you already somewhat speak has this mildly schizophrenic feel to it, invariably---the chance that a new entrant knows exactly as much as the rest of the class is roughly zero, so there's bound to be some material the new kid is the only one not to know yet and also some drop he has on the rest of them. For me in this class, the rest of the class all know a ton of words from last week's lessons that I don't remember from sophomore year, yet the more advanced grammatical concepts and a handful of useful phrases that I know already perfectly well are still to-come, and get me nothing but blank stares when I answer the instructor's Kann mann seinem Vater Parfum schenken? that It's not impossible to give one's father a bottle of perfume, yet still it might come as something of a surprise. Yet my vocabulary's still limited, and my ability to understand spoken German still woefully below average, so moving up a level is, I fear, for the moment a foreclosed option. So I endure grammatical lessons I don't need, trying to amass vocabulary and remember the gender of all these damn words.

The word schenken, to give (as a gift), proved useful in demonstrating the difference between the Akkusativ and Dativ cases, or what we term in English that between direct and indirect objects. In grammar lessons the example was dissected "Jenna gave me a rash." Jenna: subject. Rash: direct object. Me: indirect object, and possibly projecting. It's not truly remedial school, but it's still pretty basic. I succeeded in containing my groan at being softballed through concepts I learned literally a decade and a half ago.

I was less successful with the groan that came when I realized how old that makes me.

When the mind isn't sufficiently challenged it tends to wander, to find avenues of amusement for the excess capacity not being required for the task at hand. So my suggestions to complete the model sentences tended not to resemble the offerings of the rest of the class. My brother gives me the same gift I gave him for his last birthday, in a resealed box. I give my parents heartache. I give Seth Rogan two more top billings to put it all together, tops.

I'm not relying solely upon German-for-Third-Graders to get me up to fluency. The classes are merely serving as the center of a makeshift language-immersion program. The plan for the next month is to spend as much time as possible in classes, or listening to my German tapes and podcasts, or reading the second-hand German novels I've purchased, or consuming German-language TV, movies, and radio. (I'm not sure how to fit in this blog without writing it in German, which the English-only readers won't like and the German-speaking readers will like even less.)

No time like the present to start, I supposed as I left the schoolroom, and on my way to the library to sit down with Schmidt's Bewährung, I slipped on my headphones and listened to DW's slowly spoken German news podcast. The first story was, to my still imprecise ear, about John Yoo, former Bush administration torture-enabler (big ups to Boalt Law School! by the way! great hire, fucknutz). However, as the word "Hollywood" and phrases that I gathered were the German translations for Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Home Alone came out, I realized it must have been John Hughes instead.

Holy shit, John Hughes died? I really don't know if I had heard and then forgotten that, or else if it was still news to me when I heard it. Much more than Farrah Fawcett, Hughes seems to me the third iconic corner of the triangle that passed this summer, along with Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy, figureheads who got their rise in the 1970s, when I was born (albeit more of a resurrection in the case of the 1960s' Kennedy), became megastars in the 80s, when I was growing up, and started if not a decline than an extended phase of middling-through in the 90s, when I was officially entering adulthood and one starts to realize that the beautiful illusions of youth are invariably complicated, that heroic stories are all myths or else lies, that the real nemeses of adulthood are compromises rather than villains. That these deaths came during the summer as it turned to fall, as the days shorten and memories of winters past return, I'm sure, already has been remarked upon by abler chroniclers of the culture than I.

It wouldn't be so troubling if the Hughes obit were merely another of the headstones one sees when reviewing the landscape of youth. But his death itself had been news to me It's not that it's unusual---it's precisely that so much of this is news to me; I used to be a regular consumer of perhaps a dozen news blogs, the New York Times in physical format, and the New Yorker and Atlantic and Foreign Affairs. Now it's a handful of commentary sites that keep me vaguely apprised of the general tenor of news, but hardly in-touch. It were as if my connection to America were disappearing not only from the past forward, but also from the present back into the past, a candle burning at both ends, dwindling twice as fast toward a vanishing center. Is my identity as an American necessarily the casualty of seeking a new home in Berlin? Do the forces of History simply always work like that, erasing like some overeager villain in a clumsy spy thriller of crime caper the traces that bear witness to the past?

The plot thickens, Agent Handler.

----

[Update: More than merely clumsily, I inserted several egregious grammatical errors directly into the part where I was talking big about how all the grammatical rules are so easy for me; my face is quite red, and thanks for the correction, "beyondo98"... if that is your real name.]

----

Off-topic: If all the playoff games are like last night's one-game play-in, it'll do more to make me resent being in Germany rather than New York more than a thousand visa worries, bureaucratic snafus, and linguistic frustrations combined. Of course, if they're all like last night's game... buy stock in the suppliers of cardiac medication and devices, I guess.

A riddle

2009-09-29T17:37:00.001-07:00

Ruth, Hornsby, Hornsby, Hornsby, Hornsby, Hornsby... more Hornsbies, Klein, Gehrig, Williams, Williams, Musial, Williams, Musial, Williams, Williams, the other Robinson, Yaz, Lynn, Brett, Walker, Helton, Bonds, Bonds, Mauer.

Reports from the internet

2009-09-29T17:00:00.001-07:00

Heywhaddyaknow:

Congratulations - you have completed Movie Lines.
You scored 4 out of 11.
Your performance have been rated as 'Failed'

I get nightmares. Evidently. Or something like them.

2009-09-29T05:35:00.001-07:00

Okay, beyond-odd confession. I've been having this recurring dream wherein I'm playing this computer game that somehow becomes real? you know? not like in Tron but sort of, but where all of a sudden the game pieces that I manipulate on the screen are duplicated in the real world around me? Anyhoo, this particular game seems to be a sort of board-game Dungeons & Dragons type, where you can generate archers, cavalry, peasants to till fields, etc., then deploy said pieces and watch them fight. (Note: This was probably inspired by the video game Trogdor.) It being a dream, the context is always a location that's almost familiar---e.g., it's the hotel where I stayed that one New Year's Eve when somebody still loved me, but out the window it looks more like Los Angeles in the summertime, and if you go around the corner, it's the sixteenth floor at my old law firm job. This particular time it was part of Treptower Park where I like to read when it's nice out, only in the middle of it was my father's house, and then next door there was a Hardee's. I believe this last point was a plot point my subconscious intended to develop in a later scene but somehow lost track of. Anyway.

One of the pieces available to the computer but not to the player (i.e., me) is a piece called the Black Knight, who can travel anywhere on the game board, has many different kinds of weapons like a mace and a sword, can attack every variety of the player's pieces, and is incredibly difficult to defend against. So when that piece appears on the screen, and accordingly, appears in real life, it is of course rather a nerve-wracking experience, as this armored and powerful figure is now trying to kill me.

Now, here's where it gets weird. The Black Knight character, when it appears, stops obeying the rules that govern real life. For the moment, kindly pretend that the "rules that govern real life" can be read to permit video game characters to leap out of your screen and chase you around your father's living room and/or old office building. Just humor me on this point; I'm hoping later to engage Ms. Pac-Man in an adult-themed fantasy you may wish not to think too closely about. But I digress.

Anyway, here's where it gets weird. The Black Knight, which as far as I can tell in the game is the one character who can use many different kinds of weapons---like a spear against cavalry, or a sword against peasants, or a torch against ... enchanted haystacks, I don't know---when he comes into my so-called real life abandons even that little bit of restraint, and starts using crossbows (not that weird) and ninja stars (weirder) and those stormtrooper-style laser guns from Star Wars (weirder...).

No, wait: Here's where it gets weird. The Black Knight, this faceless, hulking creature tramping around in six feet of black armor, like with wings on the helmet and stuff, flips up his visor to reveal that he's none other than 1980s and '90s pop star and former Smiths frontman Morrissey! And not current Morrissey, either, the one you can vaguely imagine being beefy enough to trudge around in a full suit of armor and angry enough to shoot a crossbow at someone. No, this is '86 vintage Morrissey, the one who wouldn't hit his worst enemy with anything deadlier than a gladiolus.

Interlude: When he pulls up the visor, Black-Knight Morrissey is singing this song, this song I don't quite recognize but that I can hear vividly in my memory even as I wake up, but of which I now can remember nothing other than the phrase "wonderful world" (not "Wonderful Woman"). And not a Smiths-era song but more one of those plinky-plinky songs from between Kill Uncle and Southpaw Grammar like "Sunny" or especially "Swallow on My Neck," like---but it still sounds like a really good song. And now I can't remember a damn bit of it other than those two words. You remember the story of how Paul McCartney originally dreamed "Yesterday" then woke up and played it on the piano and wrote it down and the next thirteen days kept asking all his friends if they'd heard it before because no one gets so lucky as to write a song in their sleep? Yeah, this is, uh, a different story. To say nothing of a different song.

So here's the thing. Apparently the only thing that can hurt the Black Knight is this crossbow that's a real pain to wind up and only shoots this dinky little arrow, so I'm winding it up and aiming carefully and shooting at him. Meanwhile, Morrissey the Black Knight has abandoned his sword and mace for---and I'm not making this up----an M-60 upright machine gun. Wikipedia says it fires 600 rounds a minute, which are now coming more or less directly at me, as I'm trying to squeeze my entire body behind whatever cover there is, which is invariably something like a big bush. (There may be variants of bulletproof bush in the computer logic of the video game, but not in quote-unquote the real world.) So I'm hiding, trying to duck machine gun fire behind the shrubbery, winding up this pain in the ass crossbow, and then I duck out, point and fire, and the arrow hits him, but apparently you need to hit the Black Night three times or something, so he starts firing back and me, and I just sprint and leap behind this really short stone embankment that barely covers me as I squeeze into the corner where the bank meets the ground, I can feel the air being torn by ten bullets a second passing just millimeters over my shoulder blades, which just. won't. squeeze down any farther, and without moving my arms enough to push myself over the bank I'm fumbling with the crossbow to try to reload it and it just won't fit right...

... and that's when I wake up. So I gotta stop eating before bedtime. I think, perhaps, maybe for a solid twelve hours before bedtime.

And a very merry Yom Kippur to you as well

2009-09-29T05:33:00.005-07:00

[ed. n.: Back to regularly irregular blogging schedule. Thank you, and good to be back/I'm so, so very sorry]

Most or all of my readers are former New Yorkers, at least, if not outright Landtsmen (sp?) themselves, so my announcement that yesterday's sundown ended the Days of Awe likely comes as no news at all. I haven't belonged to a synagogue in... far too long, and Berlin's not, um, noted for its vibrant and active Jewish community, so I didn't attend services. To be honest---that is, to confess my omission---I didn't even know where the nearest synagogue is, or where any is at all. Checking now, there appear to be four---the Rykestraße Synagogue in Prenzlauerberg, the Stiftung Neue Synagoge in Mitte (that address doubles as that for an Israeli restaurant) , the Neue Synagoge Berlin-Centrum Judiacum in Wittenau (another restaurant, this one Russian-Jewish and called Kadima), and the Joachimstaler Street Synagogue in Charlottenburg (on Joachimstalerstraße... natch). It's hard to tell for sure, as many Google hits are duplicative---the Stifting Neue receives foreign-language hits as both "Jewish Synagogue" and "La Grande Synagogue"---and the Stiftung and the Centrum Judaicum share not only the generic nomenclature "Neue Synagogue" but, confusingly, also the same street and number (Oranienburger Str. 28) albeit in separate neighborhoods. (I did a reverse search using each address and they appear to be legit. Odd. But I suppose when you're talking about the existence of a synagogue at all in Berlin, you're already agreeing to suspend your disbelief.)

Surprisingly, two days ago when I checked Google yielded few results for "things to do in Berlin on yom kippur" (the abbreviated "yom kippur in Berlin" yielded---no exaggeration---but a solitary hit, in the ahistorical hypothetical).

Going back online for the first time was an odd thing---I shall have to try it as a regular habit, to the extent consistent with my obligations to you-the-humble-reader. Well, I suppose it's always odd, but there's an extra layer to unfamiliarity when you don't quite speak the language on local teevee screens and newsstand front pages. Maybe it's just hte summer of Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, et al., but when I see an old celebrity's face and/or name, my first thought is the most final. But Roman Polanski (btw, least effective segue from Polanski to football. Ever.) evidently did not die but has merely been arrested in Switzerland.[fn1] Bridget Bardot has evidently only turned 75. William Safire is really dead, apparently of cancer. (He'd want it noted that no one ever died of "apparent cancer.")

Shanah tovah, everyone. Fifty-seven seventy, woo.

-----

fn1: Those notorious intermeddlers in world affairs, the Swiss. Honestly, even with sixty-odd years intervening, is there not something a bit outrageous about the inconsistency? "Gold for the Nazi war machine? Eh, not my department. Director hiding out in France to avoid prison for a rape thirty years ago? This will not stand, man, this aggression."

The "X" isn't for "Xavier"

2009-09-29T05:33:00.003-07:00

Hey, so this thing has been going on a while, and no one's asked about the extraneous first initial in the email address up there in the corner. But I'm out of things to talk about, so: How many names really begin with X, anyway? The one that springs to mind the fastest to the most people seems to be Xavier (alternately pronounced "Havvy-air" and "Zave-yer"). Would that it were so, but no. One, I'm not Catholic; two, I feel like Xavier's only ever a middle name (following Francis, after the Catholic saint; cf. point "One," supra). Three, I'm enough of a comic book nerd that, were my first name even slightly relatable to Marvel's X-Men, you can bet your sweet patootie I'd be broadcasting that fact.

(Note: If you or a loved one is addicted to gambling with their patootie, the State of Nevada urges you to call the gambling helpline. Trained professionals are waiting to help you get the help you need.)

This is all by way of the elaborate buildup that's necessary when one is explaining that his damn hippie-cum-yuppie parents, two highly-educated urbanites with perhaps a slightly deficient grasp of the classics, decided to name their firstborn "Xerxes." Couldn't even be "Xander," like the other way to shorten "Alexander," which while distressingly analogous to Topher Grace's name, at least sounds kind of tough.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, this was not me. I wish it had been, as I probably am keeping too much stuff, but it's not. Godspeed, young man, whoever you are.)

Anyway. One long and meandering digression to say: I kind of hate my parents.

Ein volk, ein ball, ein volkerball!

2009-09-29T05:33:00.001-07:00

[Disclaimer: Due to an unforeseeable sports injury involving the blogging muscle, I have not updated in, to quote one reader, "a bazillion forevers." Posts previously conceived and/or composed, including this one, are being processed as quickly as possible and will be released when I goddamn get around to it! Please note that the time and date of posting bear little if any relation to those of the events recounted.]

Okay, my bad with the Hitler reference in the post title there. Fine. Sheesh. Get more sensitive about it, whyncha?

The Volkerball tournament! The American squad comprises about a dozen members some of whom even show up to both the mandatory practice and the match, including, conveniently enough, The Roommate.

You might think of it as a fun, low-key way to spend a sunny weekend afternoon. Or you might think of it as basically like the Olympics, a zero-sum struggle amongst the peoples of all the world's nations for glory, eternal fucking glory, on the field of sport, but unlike the other Olympics here it's just the one sport, because there is only one sport, and that sport is dodgeball! (This was the attitude of at least one enthusiastic participant I shan't name.) Or you might think, as did evidently that team in the green shirts with the tin-foiled helmet and the alien theme, that it's the one German context where it's legally permissible to participate in Scientology rituals.

In addition, the teams are expected to bring concession goods, usually food, that are somehow representative of their homelands. I'm happy to report that The Roommate's mac-and-cheese was a tremendous hit, and I'm informed my own humble contribution (apple pie, with shredded cheddar mixed into the crust) was popular... although there was an awful lot of it left over at the end. Oh well.

At the end, the Americans made the first cut, surviving qualifications, and were shortly dispatched in short sets of the main event. But it's a moral victory. Or that's what we keep telling ourselves. Next year, I'm making the team, and it's going to be like the '69 Mets when Tom Seaver and Tug McGraw got out of their early-twenty jitters and finally put it together.

Currents:

... reading: Middlesex by Eugenides. Comes highly recommended by several dear friends with whom I evidently have seriously different taste in literature.

... listening: "Roadkill" by Dubfire. I know it's last summer. It still pwns.

Island

2009-09-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

[Disclaimer: Due to an unforeseeable sports injury involving the blogging muscle, I have not updated in, to quote one reader, "a bazillion forevers." Posts previously conceived and/or composed, including this one, are being processed as quickly as possible and will be released when I goddamn get around to it! Please note that the time and date of posting bear little if any relation to those of the events recounted.]

Further note: The events recounted in this post were originally recollected in the author's travel diary, an honest to god travel diary which is this adorable little physical item left in the author's apartment by two lovely ladies in thanks for one wonderful weekend. Aforementioned ladies shall go nameless, and the character nicknamed for inexplicable reasons AtoZ shall receive no further identifying characteristics, as the mention above and the details below may qualify as defamatory and may be actionable, depending on jurisdiction.

I write this whilst returning from Iceland to Berlin after spending one week there (Iceland) with AtoZ. I landed last Thursday night, just a bit before midnight, not to the hostel until well after midnight (still light out), and didn't see AtoZ until the next morning. Although it should be conceded that I heard him as he entered our shared room, boozily and some time after... I suppose I'd place it around three a.m. Friday and Saturday nights we moved from our affordable hostel to more impressive digs, a hotel in the center of Reykjavik, and then rented a car to tour the rest of the island. (Each of these itinerary points was at the suggestion of AtoZ, who'd recently broken up with his girlfriend and had heard that Icelandic women are easy and ... well, you can imagine, can you not, what was on his mind?)

Credit must be given: AtoZ's a natural traveler. His strategy (such as it was) of stopping at tourist info centers and asking the clerks, or assistants, or whatever, to suggest sleeping accommodations in the area where we were likely to end our day, and upon receiving such suggestion to lean on them to phone ahead and make reservations on our behalf, was inspired (if forward) and never steered us wrong. I shudder to think, though, what would be the fate of two Icelandic vacationers in America without a plan who hoped for such a favor to be repaid them as they drove down, say, I-95. But then some countries speak about crime in terms of "the murder" (no exaggeration, there---they had one murder there. Not one in all of last year; not one since 2001---one.) and some countries eat their young.

The rumors are, I can report, all true: Everything in Iceland is the most beautiful gorgeous got-damn thing you've ever seen. Well, in the case of the women it's exaggerated: people there look just like people. But Reykjavik is very pretty, and the countryside is nothing short of spectacular. AtoZ can't drive stick, and in any event spent the days dozing while trying to recover from what he blamed on a hangover and then overwork and what I suspect was swine flu (recall), so it was me behind the wheel as we cruised counter-clockwise 'round the country, my cursing at the natural splendor becoming more repetitive each time we turned the corner upon another scene of really just incomparable beauty. "Goddammit!" "Jesus Christ, will you look at hat?" These required more effort than was consistent with maintaining appropriate concentration upon the road, and after the first day or so took second stage in favor of the simpler replacement: "Fuck." That was short for "This scene of the Iceland countryside rushing past my eyes is so astonishingly beautiful I'm rendered incapable of but the most guttural and monosyllabic utterances." But within the cabin of that car perhaps most of the subtlety was lost.

The Icelandic believe in elves---not the Santa's-workshop variety, but human-sized dark creatures that lurk amid the countryside at night and play pranks upon their neighbors---but believe in them, not in the sense of belief in the afterlife or in humanity's inherent goodness but like belief that the sun will come up tomorrow or that it's carbohydrates that make you fat, like of course there are elves out there in the darkness beyond the bedroom window. But you can't really understand that intellectually, or at least it feels immediately different when you've been there, crossed the countryside. The eastern coast of the island, where the island's sole highway turns northward along the short, climbs the mountainside one hundred feet, and passes between the deep blue waves making their assault on the rocky foothills below, slashing through the jagged surfaces and points of the mountains' tiny pickets, those points and edges shearing the aerated seafoam swept along atop the waves, a beach if there even was one appearing only amid brief coincident moments when the tides all ebbed at precisely the same time, the ocean's spittle ricocheting off hard black stone and taking to the air as a blanket of mist soothing the angry surface of a stormy sea, below, and above, the mountaintops stretching up until they seemed to puncture the clouds in the sky, immense and glowing green with the grasses that managed everywhere the impossible feat of clinging to their near-vertical face, here and there a shelf appearing where the winds and the rains and the ices of winter had pried loose a stone wedge from the stony giant, where you hadn't actually yet you would've sworn you must have spied a lone eagle circling slowly above it all. It's so much more beautiful than anything you've ever seen that the natural world, that mundane thing you deal with all the time, seems somehow insufficient as an explanation. Here one understands superstition. Here one cannot disbelieve in magic, or in elves.

Our nights we spent in those few inns randomly dotting the highway map we got from the rental agency. Tourism seemed an oddly underdeveloped industry away from Reykjavik, in keeping with the generally depopulated tone of the back country. Travelers could (as we did) sleep in a converted schoolhouse in the southeast, an odd sailors' lodge in the north. But for three quarters of the perimeter of the country, which encircles probably fewer than ten thousand people (although possibly more sheep), the evidence of human intrusion into the land is only occasional. Settlements reaching a size worthy of the title hamlet are the exception, although one of which yielded us our beds on our first night away from Reykjavik. The rest of development consisted solely of a farmhouse and a barn, perhaps some odd other structure useful for agricultural purposes, but not after that first night's stop did we see a church house until the whaling village all the way on the other side of the island, in the northwest.

A few more highlights from the road:

Glaciers are imposing things. The first we saw up close we came close to treading upon, but only watched it, as it stretched from mountaintop to valley floor on its way to a long black sandy, hilly span between land and sea, from a little ridge to its west. The second had already plunged into a bay and was in the process of breaking up, surrounded by flocks of birds swooping, otters splashing, and one assumes fish, although those last remaining at a safe depth beneath the surface away from the innumerable predators floating or flying above. Barn-sized slabs of eerily blue ice hung in the water, the water the same perplexing color as the undersides of the icebergs, which invited the question which, ice or water, was naturally that color and which only reflecting the hue of the other. It seems water at that temperature, a thin sliver above freezing, adopts a new property whereby its coldness becomes visible, as though its component molecules were brittly near to solidifying as semisolid ice the same temperature but instead vibrated faintly on the surface of the sea, giving off a telltale pattern of little shivers. The icebergs, lapped on all sides with the slow waves from the otters and the sea birds' business, appear almost to be rocking back and forth, but when one focuses the eyes again the movement becomes that of the water surrounding them, and the 'bergs remain still, moving if at all only downward at an imperceptible pace, sinking lower into the water a thin sliver above the freezing point of water or the melting point of ice, as amid the caws and squawks and chortles and camera snaps and whirs, one imagines it possible to hear a dull, slow cracking sound.
There's a tiny ancient village squeezed among the inlets and coves that shred the island's northern shore. Or actually there are many, but I'm speaking of one. There's a village up in the north, enormous if you're coming from Reykjavik in the counter-clockwise direction and in three days you haven't seen anything larger than two farmhouses back to back, where when you drive into town you're greeted by what appears a great whale skeleton, a cluster of mere trace outlines against the sunlit sky until you get closer and see it's actually a structure built of thick beams the size of masts, lashed together as a building began and abandoned, or else some odd plaything for children to climb atop, which one later learns is or was once intended for great hides to be stretched and dried. A town where a handful of east-west avenues cross but a single north-south street, yet that street changes names multiple times without so much as a traffic sign to warn visitors, so comfortable is the assumption that one must be a native, mustn't one? One imagines being built up when the whaling trade could support a town of such size, and dwindling with the passage of time and the revolutions of the earth out of that era when whaling could support a town like that, before the rise of the petroleum age at once made going to see an expensive proposition and provided a cheap substitute for the whale oil that was the whole point of the venture, before humane causes scowled on the whole practice of whaling and a newly small world pulled away all the children who once might have grown to learn the trade, and one imagines a Northern summer, chilly and short yet bright, inexorably giving way to the long winter of history. And then one imagines the same town being discovered by the industry of international tourism, of a town nearly forgotten to history awakening sleepy-eyed and confused by the thought that Americans, Italians, South Africans would pay to ride along on the ships, the same ones that once hunted whales in these waters, and merely take photographs of them.

A beautiful country. I could say more, I could go on forever saying more---and perhaps I should, perhaps it's not fair that I even should try to wrap up this week in scant paragraphs---but they're announcing our descent into Berlin now. It's odd---I could tell when I really had moved there when flying into New York felt unmistakably like coming home. There's no other home for me, now, but Berlin doesn't feel like that. Not yet, at least; hopefully soon.

Currents:

... reading: The Recognitions. Still. I am... very still.

... listening: Billie the Vision and the Dancers. Everything by them. Especially this one.

... obsessed with: ... pitching a reality show: "Housecat versus Roomba. Two will enter. One will retreat to the top of the dresser and look nervous until dinnertime."

Fahrrad beschaedigt

2009-09-29T04:01:00.001-07:00

[Disclaimer: Due to an unforeseeable sports injury involving the blogging muscle, I have not updated in, to quote one reader, "a bazillion forevers." Posts previously conceived and/or composed, including this one, are being processed as quickly as possible and will be released when I goddamn get around to it! Please note that the time and date of posting bear little if any relation to those of the events recounted.]

So I took a very long bicycle tour the other day, and wouldn't you know it, the bike I bought from a street vendor for thirty-five euros isn't quite the most solidly built thing I've ever put my ass upon. (That honor, of course, being reserved for yo moms. Ach, schnappen!) Anyway, at about kilometer ten or twelve or so in the midst of crossing the street and attempted to make the right turn into the bicycle lane...

... and suddenly felt the front tire wobble out beneath me. While I'm, mind, more or less flush in the middle of the car lane. n what turned out to be a minor freeway's on-and-off-ramp. Thankfully no automobiles were terribly close by and I hobbled to the side of the road, legs stretched out on either side and tilting left and then right 'til sneakers scraped pavement.

On the sidewalk, the diagnosis was easy to make, even for a layman---the axle that connects the center of the handlebars down through a shaft at the front of the frame and joins the center of the front wheel, evidently the victim of pronounced metal fatigue, had been wrenched 90% of the way around, or far enough that the remaining portion clung on but hung over the side like the top of an opened can of tomatoes. It was, to put it lightly, not ridable for any farther distance.

I walked it (slowly, agonizingly, like tourist-visiting-New-York-City slowly) to the nearest S-Bahn stop (which was probably this one, if I recall correctly---out there), bought myself a ticket, bought the wounded bicycle a ticket, and wheeled it to the bicycle shop down the street (mercifully still open). I picked it up the next afternoon, good as new.

The next weekend I blew out the rear tire. Not far enough from home to take the train, it still felt like forever to walk it back to the bike shop. Although this time it was simple enough that I could get it fixed while I did my grocery shopping (conveniently, the store's across the street and I'd brought my bag).

These two trips, plus the front and rear lights I've had installed, have run to eighty euros plus. Which is more than double, not quite triple, the original price of the bike. And if you include the bike lock I bought from another shop, post-purchase investment is 314% of the sticker price.

Sigh.

Currents:

... (about to be) reading: two books by Doris Lessing, whom I just realized I'd never before picked up before.

... listening: The National's Alligator. Boxers has two great songs at least and I loved Cherry Tree, that latter an EP, but am finally giving this one a try. Worth it.

... obsessed with: the possibility of creating a "Don't"-themed monster-mashup with Foreigner, Pussycat Dolls, Simple Minds, Crowded House, The Human League, ATB and Brazilian Girls (both "Don't Stop"), R.E.M. ("Don't Go Back to Rockville"), Feldberg's "Don't Be a Stranger", et al. If you're the kind of person who read that last sentence word-for-word, I would bet that now you are obsessed, too.

Der Gross-Medien Matt

2009-09-28T13:56:00.001-07:00

Bad Boy Ygs was in my adopted hometown these past few; go read some of what he has to say. I note with some comfort that he is typo-prone in two languages. You will also note the myriad postings occurring before the 7:01 sundown here (1:01pm EDT), meaning he blogged about, inter alia, bagels (!!!) during Yom Kippur. And for some reason I thought he was Jewish...

Things haven't gone exactly as I'd planned---a wandering, desultory phillipic on why I haven't... what's that, now?

2009-09-16T03:16:00.001-07:00

So the posts below promised a bunch of previously mulled posts would all be forthcoming shortly, and they promised it ... well, longer ago than can be called "shortly." My bad; travel obligations have eaten into posting, and I'm now not so sure this blog was really a commitment I could keep to, what with my busy schedule of waking up in or about the morning and then later going to sleep, with two or sometimes three meals filling the remainder. My apologies; no excuses; hope to remedy it son, but in this case at least, past results probably are a good indicator of future performance.

I've been away from the city, and fall came to Berlin before I returned. The air is chilly, and it has that almost-scent that cold air in the fall gets, where you think you smell fireplaces and frost-damp leaves but when you sniff again you can't quite be sure (the olfactory nodes in the brain are the closest related to memory

I've done little since returning other than buy a proper drip coffee maker (the Roommate prefers the superior European coffee you get from a stovetop espresso maker; I can't live without the American-style quantity pot); although I went running again yesterday. (My trail regimen while on the road was interrupted by several injuries to my feet. And also laziness: Fat, drunk, and stupid ain't a way to get through life, but it suffices quite well to get through vacation.)

My new favorite trail is a riverside (well, canal-side) pathway---it's a fair ways away from my house, but it's possible to bike there and chain my Fahrrad to a fence or a street sign, then jog on the path as far as I feel like. It's called Mauerweg, literally "Wall-way," and it follows part of the old Berlin Wall. Right at the beginning is a monument to Chris Gueffroy, the last person shot while attempting to cross into West Berlin, just a few months before the Wall came down. Google Maps doesn't mark the monument but you can spot it here; the small white court and the shadow of the monument are visible in the satellite pic. Certain American conservatives have a weary tendency of accusing their liberal countrymen of being apologists for Soviet abuses, and while I'm leery of validating that narrative, Berlin retains a presence of its history---which in the last century has been an unhappy one---and the immediacy of these sorts of reminders make me feel like I never appreciated the full extent of human misery perpetrated by the SSR governments before moving here. And, I'm sure, I probably didn't.

Berlin running

2009-08-13T15:05:00.001-07:00

The bike's in the shop, and I haven't gotten much exercise in a while, so I went back on the track. My absence has definitely hurt my pace---I'd cut out running because of a hip-flexor thing that's chronic, not acute, and while I can run through it I thought I'd give it a break, so I haven't run at all in probably a month---and I wound up on the wrong side of 10-minute-miles. 93 minutes, 9.1 miles (on the way back I quit just past the big white tanks across the river). It's a nice trail, there. When I get the bike back I hope to ride through the city to the trail, then chain up the bike and run just on the trail itself, so as not to pound any actual sidewalk.

Midsommar

2009-08-13T06:51:00.001-07:00

[Disclaimer: Due to an unforeseeable sports injury involving the blogging muscle, I have not updated in, to quote one reader, "a bazillion forevers." Posts previously conceived and/or composed, including this one, are being processed as quickly as possible and will be released all at once. Please note that the time and date of posting bear little if any relation to those of the events recounted.]

You could spend your whole life in a place and never be able to explain what makes it it to a stranger, never adequately distill into words the real meaning of a place. Until this weekend, I still hadn't really understood something incredibly basic about Berlin until recent experience drove home what I'd startingly overlooked: No. Beer. Curfew.

See, in America, even places like New York, the legacies of the blue laws specifically, and more generically a sort of cultural corollary to Moore's Law, the pervasive American attitude that if something can go wrong not merely that it will go wrong but that there really ought to be a law against that thing going at all, wrong or otherwise, this would be unthinkable. It's profoundly un-American to organize a society without a failsafe rule against someone drinking nonstop without sleep for 96 straight hours and expiring from exhaustion. Sure, 99.9% of people will have the good sense not to try it, and the remainder will be prevented by sheer limits of the human body's capacity for exertion, but the thought that an errant peasant might somehow slip through the cracks and be saved only by legislative fiat mandating that drinking establishments close 8 hours every night, somehow, lingers on into the 21st century.

Which brings me to Midsommar. Er, brought me to Midsommar. Each of the past two nights, that is, until well after the sun had risen, sometime around 7 or 8 in the morning. Named for the traditional Scandinavian observance of the summer solstice, the German version was quite a bit less a lingering, surreptitious ritual from pagan religions long banished by the Christian church, and more two-fifty half-liters of Berliner and bootie-shaking beats from dusk 'til dawn. Which, even though I'm something of a pagan myself, was alright with me.

The entire experience seemed somehow quintessential of everything I've learned about Berlin, so far---the cheap beer and music are the obvious hallmarks, but there was a subtler current of unshakable relaxation in the air that eventually occurred to me deeply representative of the city as I've come to know it. (It should be conceded this was perhaps due less to insight and deep revelation than to dehydration, as I'd been sweating and drinking nothing but beer for nine hours at this point.) In New York and other places I've lived, it's quite frequent for these events to be more dance-music concert than dance party, eager attendees crowding the stage to be close to the beloved DJs, meaning anyone who actually wanted to dance was out of space, and out of luck. (One of the reasons I loved Bootie so much was that this almost never happened there.) Here that tendency is culturally foreign---Berliners just don't crowd---and if a particular room got too full, there was music coming out of three separate rooms at all times, so the overstimulated could just head across the hall to an airier room. Lines occasionally build around the bartenders and the bathrooms, but such moments were rare, and even then it just never turned into that crush that comes from a roomful of competitive jockeying for space at the bar that made a trip to a hot spot in New York so frequently a frustrating experience. Nightlife here is... just fun.

This persistent casualness has its downside, too. The festival started in an open-air concert space to the northwest of the Jannowitzbrücke (the bridge is marked here, the concert space mostly visible from the Google view), but eventually moved across the street to a river-level bar when that space was shut down; evidently organizers had neglected to obtain relevant permits or indeed tell the city that it was going to happen. Easy come easy go, I guess.

One thing remained constant, though: Albeit single and in my ... sigh ... thirties at this point, I still have no earthly idea how to pick up a woman on a dance floor. (Although I can come up with a series of increasingly bad ideas: do you stop dancing and try to talk? wait to follow them into the bathroom? lean over and murmur breathily "I like the way you move"?) So the morning after each night, I reluctantly conceded I'd reached the threshold of exhaustion, excused myself from the dance floor, climbed the stairs to the street level, and, trudging through the front doors, squinted in the early morning sun while trying to remember which section of fencing it was I'd chained my bike to. The bike being still a relatively new thing to me, when I was almost the whole way home I collided with a curb outside my building and gave myself a pretty impressive bruise along one shin. I prefer to omit some of the details when recounting the episode: "Battle scars from a long night out. Yeah, I'm a badass."

Currents:

... reading: Jeff Eugenides's Middlesex. Comes highly recommended by a lot of friends, but so far I'm still a little meh on it.

... listening: Lupe Fiasco's Mohammed Walks. Took forever to find (or find priced appropriately), but am I glad I did.

... obsessed with: it's old, but it's good---Keyboard Cat on Mario Bros.

Ich bin ein Fahrradder

2009-08-10T13:49:00.001-07:00

[Disclaimer: Due to an unforeseeable sports injury involving the blogging muscle, I have not updated in, to quote one reader, "a bazillion forevers." Posts previously conceived and/or composed, including this one, are being processed as quickly as possible and will be released all at once. Please note that the time and date of posting bear little if any relation to those of the events recounted.]

Berlin's an incredibly bicycle-friendly city. There's an intense commitment to making city streets safe and welcoming to bicyclists---local government has set a goal that 15% of traffic should be of the two-wheeled aerobically-powered sort, and they measure the amount of separate bicycle paths and lanes in the hundreds of kilometers, and motorists universally yield a healthy swath of shoulder to cyclists where there's no separate lane.

Actually, perhaps it's an equally accurate way of phrasing that to say it's a frustrating place not to have a bike. While still more like the New York-Chicago-Boston-S.F. model of American city than the L.A.-Phoenix-Dallas-Miami variant, it is a bit spread out, and distances on maps are deceptively long for the foot traveler, and while the train system is comprehensive and quite speedy, the nearest stop is not nearly guaranteed to be convenient (in my case, it'd be about 15 minutes walk to the nearest station, which serves only the single-least-useful line in the city; to translate to New York Standardized distances, it'd be like living on the LES but with all lines other than the L permanently out of service).

That general lament, plus the specific stuff---it takes me forever to make it to the Karstadt every time I discover one more thing that I need to get (this time it was a measuring cup, and there's something about little lined plastic vessels that feel emptier, less significant than other housewares), and I had to take a rain-check on a party in north Friedrichshain---added up. So this past week I gave in to the inevitable and got myself a Fahrrad---a second-hand model from the street dealers that line up twice-weekly on the Kottbusser bridge. "Nothing fancy" would be undue flattery for this thing: a beaten-down and squeaky one-speed with a barely- if at-all-functioning light. I took it for the color (1970s glittery orange) and the price (35 euros, or about $49).

But from such humble origins are great love affairs oft kindled, and this might be one of those. I'd never owned a bicycle in a city before---hadn't owned one at all since the Huffy I rode over dirt hills in grade school, or perhaps as late as sixth grade---having been a committed strap-hanger before, and frankly always having viewed bicyclists as a species of them from my window seat on the M15, a sort of reckless mobile hazard in spandex and wraparound shades, not really allies in our common war against the automotorists but freelance mercenaries as likely to run down a pedestrian as any sleep-deprived cabbie. (Two lawyers at my old firm were collided into by cyclists, in each case requiring surgery. No one ever got hit by a car as far as I know.) But things look different when you're sitting on the rubber seat---and it should be noted that Berlin's commitment to making bicycling easy has had the happy side-effect of making it safe, too, for cyclists but also pedestrians, since bikers aren't being squeezed between crowds and motor traffic.

Anyway, so far nothing to report but unadulterated pleasure: Trips to pick up groceries are something approaching bona fide joy, and nocturnal pushes toward the pub down the street aren't... well, they're prohibited in the letter of the law, but I don't know that anyone necessarily thinks that's really what the rule is. One thing: I'm the nervous son of a manic doctor who spent a lot of late nights piecing together (or failing to, which is probably more significant) the victims of car crashes who failed to buckle their seat belts, designate a driver, or protect their heads, and I really need to get a helmet soon. No one here wears them, of course, which ought to make me even more obviously spotted as an Ausländer. (As if that were really that hard to do before...)

Currents:

... reading: Gaddis' The Recognitions (still... this thing is huge, and I picked it up after getting through Infinite Jest, so it's not just comparison's sake)

You know what the funniest thing about Europe is; it's the little differences --- Grocery shopping edition

2009-06-30T11:03:00.001-07:00

When you relocate countries you discover---and it's really entirely foreseeable if you spent even a moment thinking about what it is that you're doing, switching countries, and what the consequences of that are likely to be---that life in your new country differs from life as you were used to it in dozens of ways that were entirely unpredictable. (Which isn't to suggest that I had, in fact, spent even a moment thinking through the consequences of what I'm doing.) Not just that they don't speak English, unless they do, but if they do that they drive on the other side of the road, or perhaps that their summer is your winter, and all the other touristy stuff, but rather it's the complete rearrangement of conventions forcing upon you the realization that you really are in another country. That people from other places than where you're from have ways of doing even ordinary things that are as sensible as the way they do them where you came from, or even superior. That your old life involved assumptions and choices you didn't even realize you were making.

I came to Germany from the States having been warned that grocery shopping's an ordeal here. Whereas in American people mostly go to the Kroger's, or the CostCo, about once a week and while there purchase every non-takeout food item they'll eat at home, in Germany they're reputed to be determinedly old-fashioned, so you go to the greengrocer for your produce, go to the dairy for milk and cheese, the butcher for your meat, etc. I was kind of excited, actually, about this, but it's turned out not to be the case, really. There are large supermarkets with aisle upon aisle of food, although for produce you do have to go elsewhere, to the local equivalent of a bodega.

And then, twice a week, you can shop outside, on the streets along the Kanal, when they set up the Turkish market.

Now, in the American metropolitan areas I've lived, we had farmers' markets, but they were decidedly bourgeois affairs, full of heirloom tomatoes and locally-grown organic produce that cost only three times as much as its equivalent in Safeway. The kind of places full of domestics-of-a-certain-age praise without understanding the chance to eat food that was grown without the aid of pesticides, swiveling between too-serious-for-Sunday theory-class types who proclaim themselves Very Concerned About Issues Surrounding Food, all the while mingling with the rest of the upper-class urban conspicuous consumption set. (Hey, don't knock it---having a stereo that's visibly expensive only lasts a year or so before it's visibly last year, which is an obsolescence problem not present with the heirloom tomato or peach.)

It's an entirely different thing here, starting with the name. Rather than honoring the honest profession of the farmer who grows the food, here its derogatory nomenclature follows the despised immigrants who sell the stuff (and whose loathsomely foreign-inflected Deutsch is of course light years superior to mine). It's also a weird mix of green market and street fair---someone scopes out the high-traffic booths at the ends and sets up selling fresh juice and grilled corn on the cob, and there's a cart or two selling artificial gemstones threaded on leather-string necklaces and Papierstrasseseifeunternehmen-brand soap in oversized chunky blocks---with a bit of the old country bazaar mixed in, booths selling textiles advertised with specifications I don't think I'd understand any better if my German were perfect, and more than a few places selling fashionable headscarves.

Mostly, though, it's cheap. Oh my gosh is it cheap. I went today with paper money in my left pocket and coins in my right, and two large bagfuls later, I hadn't reached into my left for anything more mercantile than the surreptitious relief of an urgent itch. Granted, coins in Europe actually stand for legitimate denominations, and a pocketful of clinky money is quite likely a serious amount of scratch. But that doesn't obviate the point that for under twelve euros, I got:

About thirty white-cap mushrooms (2 euros);
Two big bunches of scallions (1 E);
A kilo of cherries (2.50);
Three avocadoes (1);
A liter of yogurt (0.79)
Six peaches, at one euro a kilogram;
Three big leeks and one large eggplant, for a little over two, probably; and
Two unripe plantains.

I need to get tofu and cheese, too, and I already bought eggs---all of them cheap in stores---but that's probably all the food I'll get this week. And the euro sticker makes it look better than it is, but even converting from a little under twelve euros to a little under seventeen dollars, that's a damn sight better than Safeway prices. Better than anything I'd ever found in any food store in the metro areas I've lived. And look, I read Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein's blogs, including the one they do about food, and I've read Michael Pollan's book and I follow Marc Bittman, and yes yes yes, I am myself Very Concerned About Issues Surrounding Food, including why it costs so damn much for Americans to buy plain old ordinary grows-on-trees food, at least as contrasted with prepackaged value-meal food. But this isn't that kind of blog post---it's not even that kind of blog---and even if it were, I don't know a damn thing about why it is this way in the States. Presumably something with the system of distribution or the regulatory regime or marketplace consolidation has gone very wrong, but I refer you to the talented writers linked above who, unlike me, actually know something and may have something to say on the subject. All I'm sayin' is that a pocketful of change bought me two bags of fruit and vegetables, big bags, overloaded ones, that I had to switch back and forth between my arms as I made the rather short trip home.

---

Unrelated postscript: Mahmoud, your flow's like death in my sleep... I can't feel it. Snap! oh yes he did!

Typhoid Mary, Calamity Jane, Mustang Sally, and Swine Flu Pat

2009-06-22T11:57:00.001-07:00

I'm generally a skeptic of whatever attitude happens to occupy more than two cable news networks at a time. Americans deciding their votes on how much they disapprove of Bill Clinton's personal life? Like the existence of god, or bisexuality, it's easy to assert, difficult to prove. U.S. in a existential showdown with radical Islamists? My money's on the guys with the F-18s to cover the spread over the guys living in caves. Democrats oppose Bush foreign policy at their peril? This was prescient for about eighteen minutes, then lurched like a zombie for years after it had demonstrably ceased to be true. Barack Obama's election will change forever the way Americans govern themselves? Hmm, seems that the rich are getting richer at the expense of everyone else just fine, thank you very much, and that the policy-machine is reacting to, say, universal health care exactly like it did in 1948, 1961, 1969, 1977, and 1994 (indeed, the broad support for the inclusion of a public option makes DC reflexive rejection of it all the starker).

None of this comes close to my reflexive, unshakable indifference to whatever is the alarmist media's public health menace du jour. The summer of the shark; poisoned Halloween candy... they're usually either ludicrously overblown, or else complete bullshit. It's hard to tell which is the case when the news media's pack mentality leads them to instances of imagined public contagion. The major outlets appear to have internalized so thoroughly the lessons learned from being late to recognize AIDS in the 70s and 80s that a potential outbreak---any potential outbreak, no matter how unlikely---becomes a matter of urgent journalistic concern. The systematic overreaction, while stemming from an admirable preference for the ounce-of-prevention in service of the news media's public mission to inform the public, nevertheless has the unintended effect distorting that very public opinion they're trying to clarify.

I'm just kidding, of course. Journalists don't give a shit about trying to inform or educate the public; they're just looking for something scary. That's why the third rule of journalism (after "if it bleeds, it leads" and "if it's dead, we're live") is never merely to give the name for a health risk when a spooky foreign name will equally suffice. Hence, African killer bees, Asian bird flu, West Nile virus, and now Mexican swine flu. You know what they all have in common, over and above being evocative of tasty international cuisine? None of them han't never killed nobody, but somehow they absolutely paralyze CNN et al. with excitement over being able to pimp a non-story for two wee---er, I mean of course genuine concern for public health.

But Pat, you're saying, you live in Germany now, a country that's reasonably sensible when it comes to public health concerns. Surely, however, this must be an uniquely American phenomenon that you're now free from! And would that it were so. However, when I was about two hours deep over the Atlantic, our flight crew alerted us that the Gesundheitsamt had requested that we all undergo a swine flu test. (Fortunately---and as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up---the test was multiple choice. I passed, as the wrong answers were easily spotted: "Fever," "Vomiting, "All of the Above," "Swine-flu-ish," "Mexico," and any country spelled with one of those n-tilde things.) Exiting the plane was like being an extra in The Hot Zone, as dozens of medical staff in white long-sleeved uniforms and facemasks took our surveys and triaged anyone feeling less than 100% to some darkened hallway where, one assumed, they were either quickly euthenized, or else given free medical care and cannabis and permitted to surf Craigslist casual encounters for fetishists into latex gloves and paper masks.

Well, I've read Michael Pollan's book; if bad American habits are influencing the world's diet, why not destroy their sane public practices and peace of mind, too? And so once I was let out into the concourse, I put it out of mind. I had to steel myself for passport control, after all, and I wasn't sure if I had to get my checked luggage to port through customs, and my German wasn't really strong enough to decipher the helpful posted signs.

So three days later, I had completely forgotten the episode when I returned from a lengthy tour in the city to discover a telephone message left at the front desk for my attention asking me to please rufen Sie Frau Schneider an. It was quite late when I returned, so I waited to call the next day from the house phone, when I had the quite thrilling experience of speaking with the last German government official not to have learned fluent English. My own German was good enough to ask how someone's day has gone or to ask if the soup is vegetarian, but it failed at the specialized task to which it was being put, so I begged off to grab the young woman at the front desk. The hotel clerk, a lovely and helpful woman who's probably ten years younger than I am, for god's sake, spoke into the phone in short, competent German (of which I understand almost nothing) and nodded for perhaps a minute before informing me, in a voice that was perhaps too chipper for the occasion, that someone on my flight had tested positive for the H1N1 virus, commonly known as "the piggy flu." I was now, in the epidemiology parlance, a vector.

Thus began the interrogation about any symptoms I might have had, mediated by the increasingly reluctant translator I'd dragooned from the front desk. It turns out swine flu has remarkably non-specific symptoms, and apparently even most infected people report very minor effects from the disease, so its diagnosis is an imprecise business. Which would have made answering the questions I was being asked difficult, had they not been rendered in fact impossible by the fact that I was at that moment in the middle of a rather stern hangover. Making the good-faith effort to immerse myself in my adopted city's organic nighttime cultural activities, I had signed up for what the locals call das Pub-Crawl. (Hey, I never pretended that I was s-a-m-r-t.) One was required to pay a small handful of euros for the privilege of taking part, but in exchange each beer one purchased over the course of the night was accompanied by a complimentary shot of Jaegermeister! ("Complimentary" has several meanings, such as "displaying one's genial nature," "highlighting one's good side," or "without cost, downside, or drawback," none of which are at all appropriate in that particular sentence.) So my answers were of a rather dim tint.

I've probably been mocking, even scornful, of the medical profession in the past, but I'm now in a position where I appreciate the American doctor, or at least their professional obligations and privileges. If you don't follow my meaning, just imagine an extended conversation with your GP, and then imagine that instead of having that chat under the blanket of doctor-patient confidentiality, having it instead with the very attractive, and as far as you can tell very chatty, front desk clerk. Here's your phone receiver back; it turns out you've been exposed to swine flu! Possibly by contact as casual as sharing a telephone receiver with an infected person! I'm... I'm quite sorry. What's that? avoid physical contact for a week, sure. Um, well, I did have ... you might call it physical contact with somebody. Hm? No, um... maybe more than that. Um, the other night. With, uh, with a girl, I don't exactly recall her name but she was staying here... Right. Right, I suppose that you did see us.... Um... yes, the, erm, the "chubby girl."

I don't care how bad a prostate exam is, at least you don't spend the whole ordeal imagining your doc discussing the particularly fascinating results in your case with every pretty woman who works in the building.

Well, after a week, generally asymptomatic, spent within a walking, voluntary quarantine, I'm permitted to relax and can even shake someone's hand again. The upside of being OCD during all of this is that I probably washed my hands more than even the most risk-averse guidelines would recommend. Of course, if by the time I return to the States we haven't gotten over our national love affair with xenophobia, I won't be able to laugh it off quite so blithely when some asinine politician stereotypes Mexican immigrants as germ-ridden menaces, crossing the border only to spread their foreign plagues upon unsuspecting native-born Americans. Sure, Stephen Colbert's audience will laugh at the prospect, but I'll know the dark truth, that it's exactly how it happens.

Food me

2009-06-17T03:04:00.001-07:00

I missed this when it came out on Sunday, but evidently I need to go to one of the places mentioned in this article, "Heads Up -- Berlin's Hidden Restaurants." [added: Might as well at least pretend I'm going to read something, too, although I don't approve of the Das Books pun.]

Katzen

2009-06-15T04:26:00.001-07:00

So The Roommate has cats. Two little creatures, both stark white, each with eyes so creepily translucent (one marigold, the other cerulean) you'd swear they glow in the dark. You might even try to verify this in the dark one night, if the thought that you'd check and they really would be glowing weren't such a terrifying prospect that it's all you can do to squeeze your eyelids shut and lull yourself to sleep with the rhythmic nursery rhyme "I don't believe in devil-cats; I don't believe in devil-cats." I call them the Katzen of the Corn.

They're affectionate and misbehaving little creatures, the two of them. The larger of the two has decided that my bedroom is really a portion of his domain, an argument I have a hard time refuting, as clearly he's getting more utility out of my bedcushions than I am during the day, and at night.. well, he's already gotten so comfortable. They're accustomed to being fed precisely on schedule, and not shy about reminding one that they've been waiting as much as fourteen seconds beyond the accustomed hour, frequently by distributing the contents of the garbage cans across the kitchen floor.

Anyway, Get Fuzzy today just happens to record the circumstances of my awakening this morning, in eerily prescient detail:

Okay, two minor differences: It was an upturned flower pot, not a cookie jar, and the threat on the wall was natürlich scrawled in German. There really needs to be a word for something that's simultaneously adorable, hilarious, and more-than-a-little unnerving. Something that means not funny-ha-ha, nor funny-strange, but more like funny-okay-enough-joking--kids-now-where-did-you-lock-up-the-babysitter?

Roommated!

2009-06-10T05:03:00.001-07:00

The roommate interview process does not just produce deception but seems almost deliberately designed to produce it, perhaps the most intentionally mendacious process, outside of course the Craigslist personals ad. Consider the conversation I had earlier today with the potential Roommate (pR):

Pat: I'm clean, neat, considerate, usually away during the daytime due to my intense and well-paying job, and I just love what you've done with the place!

pR: Wow, that's terrific. There were a lot of great candidates, but I've picked you to be my new roommate!

Pat: Great! I heartily accept!

pR: Just a few more things you need to know; the trash gets picked up on Tuesdays, it'll be at least a week until you have your own mail key, and the downstairs neighbors have a young child and would appreciate it if you could be quiet late at night.

Pat: And there's just a few more things you need to know about me. I'm actually unemployed; I don't like to towel dry and instead drip naked from the shower to my bedroom; and the reason I'm even here is that I'm fleeing a prosecution for sexual assault.

pR: Oh, no.

Pat: Oh, and the complainant wasn't lying; I totally raped her.

pR: That's... that's awful.

Pat: Hey, what can I say? I'm a rapist. Also, I'm on fire right now. I've just ignited your sofa.

Fun times! In reality, The Roommate is incredibly nice and sweet and I'm far too fortunate that she picked me to live with her. She's what you'd call a Real Grownup, or perhaps Not a Complete Fucking Embarrassment of an Ivy League Education, depending on if you're from the coast of Maine, what with a real job and friends and a bicycle and she knows the names of places in the city where she lives (imagine that!).

I, on the other hand, have a real nice blender, almost criminally nice, actually, stored somewhere in a suburban office park in the Midatlantic states, along with a perfectly decent sofa combo and a kitchen knife with Japanese writing on the side of it. She should expect to be reminded of that if she ever gets too big a head.

I have arrived. Evidently.

2009-06-09T05:50:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting in a bar, constructed mostly of aluminum or its indistinguishable relative and illuminated in blue neon light, exclusively so if you discount the dim lights peeling off the cash register screens and some videographic abortion on Mtv playing in the corner. I am observing as a half-dozen young men I'd guess were from Poland or the Ukraine break up from their impromptu circle dance, which consists of the participants squatting with arms bent aloft, folding themselves into brief human H-shapes, and stamping their feet into the floor in something that even Helen Keller could tell isn't syncopated, and transition into new dance positions, presumably one intended to attract the attentions of the young women -- and I mean young with a capital Y, as in Y___ enough to be my daughter -- tipsily drowsing around the dance floor. Said mating ritual consists, for this approximate dozen Slavic tribal dancers, of the following: half drop to all fours, and the other half pantomine a jolly good ass-fucking, the latter doing so with with a bit more enthusiasm than, say, would be necessary to raise a Freudian eyebrow.

This is how the realization hits me: You've packed your entire life into an office-park storage unit in order to live in a hostel in Berlin. That's what you did.

About the aforementioned women I don't want to say anything. Actually, perhaps I should. It's not just an expression, that, to say a woman could have been one's daughter. It's a real, measurable, honest-to-God line drawn across the universe, and God help you if you wind up on that side of it, subtly demarcating that point in past time where, if you had been a kid just old enough and hellbent on screwing up not just your own life could have engendered, with the cooperation of a young, preternaturally fertile woman, an even younger woman, who by the magic of genetics stands a better than even chance being herself preternaturally fertile and on the lookout for the kind of kid just old enough and hellbent on screwing up not just his own life. That subtle dotted line passed further through the universe and through time, and if it's behind both you and the woman you're flirting with, then good for you. If it passes further, so that it falls between the two of you, you've entered a very dangerous place. And if it passes over the top of your head, too... well, like I said, God help you.

(Lest this be deemed a confession, I should clarify that this point has not, in fact, come for m. By the look of things, it won't come until next Tuesday.)

Oh, by the way? While I was telling you all that, the metaphysics of the universe and when the age of the woman on the barstool next to you means it's officially past your bedtime in this bar, one of the men I would have taken for Polish vomited into an ashtray. And vomited again. And blew what appears about a fluid ounce of mucus out of one nostril and onto the floor. And resumed dancing. And the thing is, he's now dancing noticeably better! as if the foamy ballast jettisoned from his bowels had been the impediment to his Saturday night fever, rather than the alcohol soaking through his stomach lining into his blood, muscles, and brain.

Oh, and he's taken his shirt off, too -- did I mention that? That was about the point when I decided I'd better leave the bar.

Life in the hostel -- living the dream. I'm meeting someone who needs a roommate tomorrow.