i am never sad, in the moment that i leave, because i am too nervous that everything won’t function the way that it should. after the last hurrah of a second pizza regina, my brain crashed and then the worst part of the trip: when i know it’s over, but still must wait for the few hours before i am on the plane, on the way home. i suppose i behaved rather coldy towards pazi and her mom but that is my defense, i can’t let myself get too down about it all. i would have cried in the car when she told me, you are like my second daughter. i feel really numb right now, i just don’t care about life or the future or anything. i want it handed to me. the flight on the way home is longer, you are flying against the jetstreams, a minor opposition. ah, how symbolic, as it always is with me, that the wind patterns naturally flow to the east, and with them i go. going home is a physical struggle. i wish i could return home in secret, without anyone even knowing, for once i am not looking forward to the stream of chatter and exchange of stories with everyone i’ve been away from for two weeks. life goes on without me and sometimes i hate that. it is harder to sleep on this flight because my body has fully adjusted to central european time, and so it is shortly after two pm in my head. almost eight hours left. melatonin isn’t working. everyone needs to close their windows because the sun is so bright. it makes me always think of how i once read that heidi klum likes to pluck her eyebrows mid-flight, since you get the purest radiant sunshine at 30,000 feet. if only i brought my tweezers, they have been packed since yesterday afternoon and hopefully are sitting happily squished into my toiletry bag in the belly of the plane, underneath me. they just fed us some pasta with inexplicable foamy stuff on top, i think it was meant to be cheese. i took a pill and want to go to sleep but jesus christ people close yr windows! the seat next to me is empty. i will contort my body in order to sleep. we are flying over england now.
10 Feb
this morning i went in the bathroom and the radio was on, it was playing take me home tonight! which reminded me of last summer, going to lunch for my birthday with my boss in his old slate-blue corvette with the top down and that song was on the radio and i was sort of embarrassed but i like the part that’s just like ronnie said…be my little baby! so i didn’t care. we went to the candy store and he bought me a whole bagful and this morning as i rubbed my sleepy feet on the bathroom floor listening to that song i suddenly became really sad, like i was going through the end of some kind of era. that can’t be, i’m just here in germany. in a matter of days i’ll be lassoed back to normal life. all these revolutionary prospects i’ve dreamed up for myself will evaporate. i can go back to pretending that i don’t want anything else out of life and that i didn’t spend the whole day taking pictures of the subway station tiles. today all the trains i took inside of the city, i didn’t pay for, or rather, i didn’t punch my card and i feel remorseful now. i took the bus to the s-bahn in riem and listened to dilettantes watching the fields roll by and you could see the mountains because of the foehn and i thought about how great this song was as a soundtrack for me on this bus ride right now. first rain. then sun. i had to change trains at ostbahnhof and now all of the announcements come in english after german, i remember when it was not like that and i hate it. i hate the accomodation. i can’t stand all the english words: on the radio they play songs, in parking garages you buy tickets, between meals they eat snacks.
at karlsplatz everything is torn up under construction. i can’t wait until i come back next time, what will it look like? i walked all the way around stachus looking for the tram station 27 richtung petuelring. to the pinakotheke. the pinokothek der moderne is one of my favorite places in munich, the building itself is so unadorned and plain, it gets its point across so easily. the glass doors are definitely twenty feet high, and the stairways are all sweeping and delicate. i like to go look at all the old olivetti typewriters that sit exposed on low white display tables. i have been to the neue pinakothek but everything there is not new, they have renaissance sculptures and paintings that are technically more fascinating to me than photographs but one trip of feigned interest several years ago was enough.
after the pinakothek: shopping! the sun was really out, it was warm and i waited for the tram with a gaggle of students and i thought, i am old. i remember being a part of an irritating group of teenagers, all brazen and backpack-ed. i went to the hugendubel and bought a copy of feuchtgebiete. then i went to optimal for the longest time, and found some great things and left €125 poorer. i counted out my money and went to the marienplatz kaufhof, even though it would have made more sense to go to the karstadt at hauptbahnhof since i was already on a u1 train. but i like the marienplatz kaufhof better. i bought three tubes of german toothpaste because i have a gross (and groß) fetish. then i bought chocolate. i also bought a chocolate bar before i went to the record store. i was so hungry but i didn’t feel like stopping and eating so i bought a bottle of tea and i wanted some chips but they didn’t have snack-size bags so i bought a regular sized one of kettle chips: tomato and basil. i shoved them in my face while i walked to my train, not caring what a pig i looked like because: i will never see any of these people again! i ate a ton of chips even though i really didn’t like the way they tasted and then i threw what was left in the bag away before leaving the frauenhoferstrasse station. so i went back to the kaufhof and bought €20 worth of chocolate. now, weighed down by eight LPs, books and probably 2 kilos of chocolate and a 2 liter bottle of volvic iced tea, i decided to make my way back to aschheim to wait for pazi and her dad to come back from their ice-cream-convention. where they had procured for me a scoop of coconut ice cream, a bit melted but very dense, creamy and good. i sat on the internet for eight years tonight. i watched gossip girl and rock of love bus and concluded i wouldn’t have missed anything if i never saw either episode. as soon as i got off the train in riem it was super windy, and i thought all my shit was going to blow away while i was waiting for the bus. that is all i can hear now, the wind battering the windows; it sounds so sinister. in chicago it is like april. the rest of my time here will be incrementally colder.
9 Feb
today we went to the ingolstadt-village. outlet shopping! it was like driving to america in 45 minutes. i kept thinking about the graduate seminar on marieluise fleisser that i had taken at uic, and her drama pioniere von ingolstadt, hey, das ist uns! beim outlet-shopping in ingolstadt! i don’t remember the work at all, something about soldiers and bridges and poor disenfranchised townspeople. it is very romantic in that downtrodden marxist way! yes, ingolstadt, birthplace of the reinheitsgebot! all the things in ingolstadt that might be seen and learned- and here we were, outlet shopping! as i wandered among piles of discounted tommy hilfiger jeans, wondering, who would want these?- wondering why the doors to all the shops were open though it was very cold and intermittently snowing? better to give the impression of a welcoming shop while the heating ducts suspended high over the wares pump out more heat to keep up with the freezing air slipping through the doors. the only place that i was even remotely interested in was the le creuset store, where the prices were so much cheaper than in america but i could not think of a practical way to bring home a slate colored dutch oven that weighed fifteen pounds. i always want the impossible. i bought a tiny green apple shaped ceramic casserole, i have no idea if one is supposed to fill it with casserole, it doesn’t jibe with my idea of a casserole. i will probably use it to hold my kosher salt. from each warmed store and back out into the cold, a most unpleasant feeling (like a reverse agonizing version of cannonballing into a pool after sitting in a hot tub). we ended our non-spree with coffee at the san francisco coffee company, where everything was in english: the sizes small, medium, large, on the receipt it said “to go” and “enjoy the coffee!”. i got…einen large cappuccino. it came in a substantial white ceramic glass and i relished the foam, eating it off the top with my spoon like it was ice cream. i stirred in three packets of sugar, it was not enough but i would have felt silly going for more, afraid of being teased by everyone. i feel like needing so much sugar reveals my americanness, surely it is more european to enjoy coffee without sugar. being american is taking some kind of easy way out- i mean, coffee by nature is not a pleasant flavour so we put cocoa powder and sugar and cream and caramel syrups and sometimes whipped cream in our coffee so it is more palatable. easy. i want to drink things like straight espresso and whiskey, neat. but my constitution is not so tough, in tastebud or liver. america was also the topic of conversation with our coffee, about how our cars are crappy and taxes need to be higher to pay for our dilapidated infrastructure. and i can nod, because i agree, but i have to admit although this is a mere taste of our own non-sweetened medicine, i feel a little bit aggravated that people who have never even been to my country feel as though they have authority to speak on how it should be run, how our affairs can be handled and our problems remedied. it is strange at times like these to realize, the rest of the world knows so much about my country and i am so ignorant of theirs. but we invented the outlet mall! pioniere! we like to think we are pioneers and take our coffee sweet.
all my friends are dead or they’re dying
8 Feb
we were really lost this weekend. every time i’m here, i learn something new: for instance, that the signs on/for the autobahn do not have directional labels. though we made it to tuebingen with a greater ease than i had actually anticipated, we still ended up going in the wrong direction on the way home because we had no idea if singen was north or south (it is the latter). i like to think i have a knack for directions and finding my way around wherever i go, and as i said out loud yesterday- one of the things in life i am least afraid of is being lost (except metaphysically). the world is finite, i don’t believe in being lost. we had a whole buffet’s worth of food in the trunk and our conversations were punctuated with an occasional “i’m hungry” which eventually was “i’m starrrvving” by the time we arrived. ulrike’s apartment is only one room, a tiny kitchen, bathroom and balcony. i was hoping we’d be first since it was not even 7 but when we walked in there were already a few people in the kitchen. i froze up and loitered in the other room pretending to read nothing on my phone so i wouldn’t have to introduce myself to them. they got an extra chair for me and so i was crammed into the kitchen with pazi, uli, her boyfriend max, and another couple kristian and anne. i am an american and i am also shy and i told uli, when she asked if she should speak english with me, that i understand 99 percent of the german i hear but can only reply 1 percent of the time. so in the kitchen i was in the middle of everything, silent, staring at my shoes, wringing my hands, i thought: i will pretend that i can’t understand them, it will be a game but of course it surely seemed like i didn’t understand them anyway because i was so zoned out. pazi immediately started digging into the food the minute we got there and opened everything up and though i was ravishing moments before we’d walked into the apartment, at that point i couldn’t eat. i was so nervous i couldn’t eat! so, drinking first. drinking on an empty stomach is something that always gets me in trouble and a lesson i never learn. i had one drink. i poured another. i went into the kitchen and ate some things. more people arrived, a german guy and his columbian girlfriend, valerie and she gravitated towards me because she heard my american voice. i was sitting in a chair by the computer, a bit off by myself and on my third (but really more like, two and a halfth, since one got knocked over by someone) drink: i was beginning to loosen up a bit. i went to sit over by valerie’s boyfriend because the topic turned to flying and i admitted that i was a total aviation nerd and he said he works for lufthansa. so we geeked out about airplanes and frequent flyer programs and he told me to fly on american if i ever go to latin america and he also said that he would like to live in a terminal of the frankfurt airport and i gave him a high five in concurrence when he said that heathrow is the worst airport ever. these were my people. he also began to tell me about the time he toured america on a greyhound bus which is so romantic in the gross idealistic way that i tend to be. there was also a point where i was arguing with him about the beauty of the german language- even they don’t think it is, my ears must be unusual. too bad that he was attached and also that his girlfriend was absolutely fucking adorable, we had one of those wonderful drunken conversations that is totally euphoric from the newness of the person, like let me tell you these stories you have never heard!, people are so fascinating in these first exchanges that even while listening to people debate the merits of celine dion versus toni braxton, i was able to beam at them with joy. when valerie and her boyfriend left rather unceremoniously i felt a bit sad. i am so tragically starry-eyed about people, i am sure we were not destined to be friends because really, if i was sober i could have never let myself become so engaged in a conversation. but i was drunk i stupidly asked her about colombians who fuck donkeys and she had neve heard of such a thing. i think pazi and i talked to her for a good two hours, maybe more. after they left i started my path to total obliteration. some hirsute boy in a dirty beige shirt was scrolling through winamp on uli’s computer and played sonic youth’s ‘100%’ and i turned my head and grinned to a friend who would understand but was not there, like, i just knew that would be the dude to play such a song! then i went over and played wilco’s ‘i’m a wheel’. i think people started leaving. another drink. i didn’t know if i would be able to go to bed soon and if i started to sober up and i would be kept awake it would have been annoying. uli’s boyfriend max dug out a bunch of coins from a drawer and said he was going to get more cigarettes. i wanted to go out on the balcony but one can’t just go out on the balcony and stand amongst the crates of empty beer bottles, to look at the twinkling hillside that i assumed was in front of me- but could not be sure since we arrived after sunset. der max came back and we talked about how- much to my chagrin- there is no equivalent word for fuck in german, since it is so versatile and wonderful. he pointed his pack of cigarettes in my direction and offered me one, even though i had told him that in america max is a dog’s name, after he pulled out his ID to show me that his name is not short for anything. we went outside and smoked, one cigarette. i didn’t notice it. i couldn’t even tell, i could taste the cigarette only a little. i was shivering and trying to make a point, in german, and i flicked the ashes into a pot of dirt and we kept talking and he offered me another cigarette and i was starting to get it, how useful smoking can be, it is fun to gesticulate with a cigarette and punctuate things with a sharp inhale and i felt so absurd about it all, like a teenager, but it was liberating: this person i was talking to, had no idea of me as the version of myself who doesn’t smoke [and never has- indeed i feel a lot like my status as a non-smoker is a considerable part of my identity] and now in his mind he will remember standing on a balcony freezing, talking to this american girl, lighting her cigarette, like something totally normal and not something that she openly detests, it made my sentience evaporate and made the conversation we had not seem as heartbreaking to me as if i was standing there, hands under my arms, rocking back and forth on my feet without a prop. the whole act was subversion and i could have smoked until the pack was gone. there was no evidence of smoke in my hair or my shirt, the wind on the balcony was blowing it all away so swiftly that it might not have happened. we came inside and everyone was already asleep, strewn all over the room and i saw a small sleeping mat that was for me. i drunkenly changed my jeans in the kitchen, my faculties were not in order enough to do more.
i fell asleep next to a two kilogram bag of ritter sport chocolate that a guest had brought and the six of us had rifled through earlier and i’d chosen the yellow one all in russian because i thought it would be an adventure, turns out it was chocolate with sunflower seeds which i unfortunately can not recommend. i fell asleep right away, blissfully, under the thick duvet instead of sleeping bags like everyone else on the floor. my pillow was a giant stuffed tiger, his tiny arms knocked flaccidly at my cheeks as i tossed and turned. when i woke up i kept imagining the taste of cigarettes and my stomach was in turmoil. it was 11, i rolled over and gingerly extracted my iphone from my bag and listened to some music, don’t cryy-yy-yy, tears so bittersweet, until everyone
was roused and i went to the bathroom intent on brushing the awful taste from my mouth but being scared that the toothpaste would make me throw up immediately. if i live to be old, that will probably be the most constant of my life’s lamentations: if i only would have thrown up! i could have saved myself a lot of torment. i brushed my teeth and there was no other way for me to be but supine, otherwise bad things might happen, back to laying on the mat. everyone was digging into the bag of chocolate and making coffee and i read the let’s go guide to new zealand on the shelf next to me. when max and pazi went out on the balcony to have another lucky strike i thought i might die, the evocation of everything i’d put into my mouth in the last few hours came washing over me relentlessly in furious waves, unstoppable and i rubbed my stomach gingerly for mollification. we got in the car to drive home, though we didn’t really have any idea of how to get where we needed to go. i was in a zen-like state of trying not to puke, when pazi pressed a button that activated the child locks i thought for sure i would blow chunks all over her dashboard because i couldn’t open the door. i leaned my seat back and closed my eyes and “gangsta’s paradise” was playing on the radio and i was trying to rap along in my head to divert my thoughts and i wished i believed in god so i could ask him to make the hurricane in my stomach abate. once we got on the A8 in the right direction i had one of those typical car-naps, neck crooked and mouth agape, coming to periodically and thinking how stupid i probably look but not wanting to know if my stomach was still so angry. when i finally woke up for good i felt somewhere between hungry and…sour-hangover-stomach. a dusting of snow covered the rooftops and fields but not the road. i paid to fill up pazi’s gas tank so she would buy me a bottle of iced tea (since i was wearing sweatpants and suede boots, not thinking i would be seen in public) which i drank in one gulp because i needed something syrupy and smooth. i ate a ton of salami and a dense piece of bread to tide me over until the schnitzel with potato salad was ready and thankfully i was able to put away the same amount as usual despite spending most of the day completely nauseated. i just took a bath to make myself feel better and i feel a little cleaner but still a bit unbalanced. or lost. every hangover is always the worst, bis zum naechsten mal.
an account
6 Febtoday i was feeling rather detached and cold, literally and temperamentally. last night i don’t think the lights went out until almost 2, and though i slept until 11:15 this morning which one would think would be more than enough sleep, i was hoping for more time with the tv off. i fall asleep to the light of the screen, and i wake when my ears notice the volume. last night we went to dinner at pazi’s old job to see her old boss. i have fond memories of going there in 2004 and spending hours talking with him at our table. the last few times i’ve been there he has busied himself with other customers, planting himself in front of the small television they set up on a table in front of the kitchen. in 2004 we all sat and watched bayern münchen beat the crap out of amsterdam. he ostensibly recognized me, then asked me if i was from la- when i answer no, that is that. we sat at the corner table. i was so full from our brunch earlier- we went to the vorstadtcafe which i had remembered from some previous visit, fondly, and for something like twelve euros i got the ‘miami beach’ (yet never was able to figure out just exactly what about my particular breakfast was supposedly to convey=miami beach) which consisted of sunnyside eggs, huge slices of potatoes, two pancakes with fruit. and another plate of fruit with two kinds of marmalade, butter and peanut butter for the overflowing basket of bread they brought to our table. and i also had a cappuccino,
which arrived and i remarked, ‘oh, someone loves me at the vorstadtcafe.’ that someone was NOT my stomach for the rest of the day. we wandered around schwabing in the sun which was warm and radiant, it seemed to inhibit our food-comas. we found a belly-band thing for the newly-pregnant britta that says in jewels, “due in september”. thoroughly cheesy but really way less offensive that most other things at the maternity shop, particularily the clothing emblazoned with phrases like “sexy mama” or “it started with a kiss” (EWWW). we walked up the hohenzollernstrasse and leopoldstrasse but there wasn’t anything interesting. this caused me to wonder out loud, if there is nothing good to buy or if i am just not into buying things. nothing caught our eyes and after a couple hours i was getting tired so we decided to go back to pazi’s parents to sit on their balcony (since it would have caught the most sunlight). by the time we went to the getraenkemarkt and bought a coke for me the sun was already retreating behind the clouds. no problem, i spent the next few hours looking at the internet on the laptop. a coca-cola, more coffee. by the time we drove to the city and sat down for dinner i was still not hungry. glaring at the menu before me i did not want to choose anything, i felt like i could have just cried because i would have to choose- social conventions dictate that i must choose something- even though i was staring at the menu but i wasn’t seeing anything- fleish, kartoffeln, pommes, and everyone ordered in the most rapid succession even though i said i wasn’t ready, and then when it was time i shook my head despondently and mumbled softly, in english, i don’t know, and someone said schnitzel, and kleines schnitzel and i think in my head i said “you can do that?” but maybe when it came out of my mouth it was, koennen sie’s tun? and then the salads came and schnitzel and mineralwasser, who fucking knows why i ordered a mineral water but i couldn’t drink another calorie. after dinner we went on a walk in the sendlingerstrasse, and i saw things in the shop windows that were more interesting than what we’d seen in schwabing. or maybe it was just because everything was closed, and i couldn’t have it. i realized, sheepishly, that the restaurant was a block away from the sendlinger tor but i only knew how to get there from karlsplatz. i pathetically thought about the last time i was there and the day before i left and how i went to sendlinger tor and took a few pictures of myself and then got back on the train. there will be no such romantic solitary excursions on this trip, i feel nothing but embarrassed for wanting only to aimlessly ride trains the whole time i’m here. when yesterday we sat down on the U6 to the city i exclaimed, i want to marry this train. pazi asked, why? because she is the normal one and not me.
so i sheepishly had to take furtive iphone pictures of the signs at studentenstadt because sometimes i forget that i will never see anyone around me ever again. sometimes with me, the most rational thought it always the hardest to find.
this morning i only drank half of my coffee, last night before falling asleep i ate a ritter sport with whole almonds, the entire thing, just sitting in bed watching cheers. i wasn’t even hungry, i am out of control. so today i wasn’t hungry and had only a banana and glass of orange juice with two ibuprofen. for my knees and shins and hamstrings that all inexplicably ache (possible explainations: the three flights of stairs to the apartment, my new not-yet-broken-in boots, uneven cobblestone sidewalks).
only one more week here, my problem is i never like to think too far into the future. not two weeks or two months. in one week i have nothing to live for anymore, i won’t know where i’m going and all that will matter is where i’ve been. i can be standing around somewhere in two weeks trying very hard to find a topic in the conversation that will allow me to boastfully interject, well, when i was in germany earlier this month. when i was not here and you were: i absorbed a lot of telenovelas. i drank a lot of milchkaffee. i learned that gegoren means fermented and also that i do not like maki with fermented soybeans. i thought i wanted to come here for months to learn the language but i realize that i just won’t, i am lazy, i’ve always been this way. coasting along. i can’t even write a resume. i will pay someone to do it for me, i can’t begin to see the tasks i perform at my job in such descriptive consequential terms. i can’t begin to sell myself. i am sure i will be in elgin forever. in regensburg i shook pazi’s hand promising her one million dollars if i ever got married and had kids. i am guessing to her it was like some kind of scene from the terrible rom-coms she loves so much, i bet in her head she could imagine the day when she would come to my baby shower and cheekily demand her money. i suppose i haven’t ruled out marriage, but that is only halfway there. it is mildly offensive to me that whenever i claim i don’t want children the fucking standard response is ALWAYS, oh, but you will change your mind. no one ever tells anyone who desires to be a parent, but is perhaps unfit or not ready to be: oh, but you will change your mind. i wasn’t put on this earth to worship a god and i wasn’t put here to try my best to get into heaven and i wasn’t put on this earth to have kids. i still haven’t figured out why i am here, but it is probably closer to: to drink the heart-patterned head off my cappuccino, to walk down streets i will immediately forget, or to dream about marrying a subway car.
4 Feb
today we went to regensburg. i was glad to be away from the blare of the tv. i don’t know if it is just because the shows are in german or the fact that they are all about the tribulations of really fat people or siamese twins joined at the crown. i can not stand television as background noise and the last few days it has been on from the moment i remove the pillow from my face. until i am finally allowed to fall asleep but then of course i need to have something on my laptop that i want to see. is this a case of me liking what i like and being intolerant of what others do? at any rate. it is always nice to get out of the house. to see as much as i can while i’m here. so today we went to regensburg. we thought at first, maybe we’ll go to nuremberg but i have been there twice, even if really the first time only involved getting two of my friends’ navels pierced and eating at pizza hut and the second going to see sleater-kinney. when we left the sun was shining and the forecast was that the day would be lovely- but as soon as we got on the autobahn the fog descended suddenly, like a cloudy net thrown over bavaria. i feel like we flew to regensburg. we arrived and parked near the theater, and found a cafe where we had lunch and the free wifi signal refreshed the weather on my iphone, where i saw that it was 2 degrees at home and i didn’t feel so bad about the dreary rain and clouds in germany. we had a nice lunch and i ate a really long salami baguette and a cappuccino (god i am addicted to cappuccinos). the restaurant was huge, there were two floors in fact, and we sat in the back where it was emptier and of course five minutes after we arrived a gaggle of really young looking kids came and pushed all the tables across from us together and planted themselves there. ah, so much for whatever notion i’d had of a private quiet meal. there were quite a lot of americans, which prompted me to ask if there was a university there and pazi to answer in the affirmative. i always feel quite territorial over this place, which is a fine and great way for me to exercise my pretension at home, but i am always swiftly put in my place when i am lazily telling a story, in english, in public, in germany. one of so many americans. one thing that struck me about regensburg, from the few alleys and fussgaengerzonen that i saw, was the proliferation of churches and bookstores. perhaps to counteract one another- one to propagate ideas that cannot be proven, and the other filled with pages of knowledge and fact.
we only went inside the dom, which was huge, its gothic spires shrouded in fog. i should have expected this, but it was freezing (duh, the cost to heat such an enormous cathedral would be exorbitant) more so than even outside. wandering through, i couldn’t help but think: this thing looks exactly like the one in delphos, ohio. albeit much, much older and therefore more impressive to me. we lit a candle (well, pazi did, i refuse to give any money to the catholic church and as i don’t believe in the afterlife it seemed silly for me to spend 0,50 to light a candle just to be able to plunge it into the tiny sandbox only to see what it feels like, [because i am curious about these things like a child]) and i took a picture of the table. i like churches but only because occasionally i like to think of myself as an aesthete. i had grabbed a free city-magazine from the entrance of the cafe and inside there was an article about interesting shops and one was a second hand music store so we went there and inside they were playing german reggae. at least that is what i thought it was, it sounded like reggae and the lyrics were german. it was, to say the least, objectionable- though when i mentioned this later pazi told me it was some kind of austrian folk music (which prompted a giant question mark to grow over my head, really). then they played ‘are you gonna be my girl’ which always manages to provoke in me the utmost disgust, so while i’m kneeling on the floor flipping through LPs in my head i am growling, why is this song being played in a tiny store in this city and not ‘who put the devil in you?’!! i found a best of brinsley schwarz record, a scratched up copy of patti smith’s easter, and a copy of jonathan richman & the modern lovers that had a ripped up sleeve that i thought, maybe, i could glue? except i didn’t buy any of these. i should live here because in the last few days i have had no desire to buy anything and indeed, haven’t spent any money except on edibles.
we went into a few bookstores and i stroked the spines of the little yellow reclam volumes, remembering a time when i could read through them. what a bizarre turn on for me it is to even read the names of the authors. we go to the kaufhof and pazi buys a datebook for 2009. today i also promised pazi one million dollars if i am ever married with children. i told her to write it down, regensburg, vierte februar zweitausendneun. versprochen! as much as i like to complain about how being single is not part of my identity, i spend an awful lot of time wondering why i am, how i can remedy it, what haven’t i tried, or if it ever even will be over. today when i was talking about erin and luke and how they got back together after so many months of being apart, but who knows why, i said i don’t believe in destiny and that it’s true i am always rational but the way it happened it was like maybe it was just meant to be and i glanced at pazi and she was teary-eyed and smiling, it made me embarrassed for her. emotion is embarrassing for me. ah, there it is, the cause or the effect, the fortification brought on by the aftershocks of my most recent “relationship”. how far away from that i was, watching chunks of ice float down the donau, we were the only two people who were anywhere near the river that day.
is it it just me, or in america is everything so fenced off and protected everywhere you go? i could have walked right to the edge and laid my body down onto the current.
two two
2 Febi guess jetlag makes one have outrageous dreams because last night i fell asleep at 9:30 and dreamt i was talking to nate archibald about ‘confessions of shopaholic’ then all of the sudden i was driving a rental car and i was going through an intersection and there were all kinds of police and firefighters going underground through a bunch of manholes and then i went home and my mom was in the basement and said there had been an earthquake. gossip girl and natural disaster, i need to write it down because it is just so stupid. today we went to munich, and i guess an analogy that i am probably not allowed to make is that of bedding an erstwhile lover, except that is sort of tragic and me and this city have nothing so tawdry or regrettable between us- what i mean is it’s easy, and comfortable. i have noticed this so much, and i know i have times before, but i feel so at home here, but this is the first time i really have had to stop myself and think- i am in germany. i am in another country. eeeeeeeeeeee. i didn’t type that, i just let my finger rest on that key for a moment while i looked away, but it is sort of apt. counterintuitively, the language has been effortless, like a surprise that my tongue even remembers the shape it needs to form to say things, as soon as i felt german arms around my shoulders words were spewing out of my mouth.
today we had sushi in munich, a nice leisurely lunch that lasted probably two hours- this is the shit i would do all the time if i didn’t have a job. then we went walking in the same places, and the whole time i am thinking, i should be taking pictures. absurdly for months i had a picture on my computer desktop of the nordfriedhof u-bahn and now here we are, rolling through the place that i stared at for so many weeks, like it was an amusement park, like it was mythological. i was trying to take pictures with my pupils all day- the immaculate grey bricks that make up the curbs, the way a slice of lemon languishes at the bottom of my schweiger glass, the stripes on the vinyl fruit stand awnings, everything, everything is beautiful from every angle.
we went on just about the most apathetic shopping trip ever through the kaufingerstrasse, i don’t know if we were just not really in the mood to shop or if there just wasn’t anything good enough to buy. we (i) spotted some cakes in the window of a cafe on the residenzstrasse, i picked out a himbeerkuchen that i will eat tomorrow for breakfast. then we went out for pizza tonight at the same place as always, and even when we arrived at 8 we had to wait for a table which never ever happens. there is some kind of huge sporting convention, i’m guessing in riem, and next to us was a table of about twenty people, i think they were australians. at least the loudest few sounded australian, are britons ever so boisterous? it always makes me feel rather smug and superior when i encounter these english-speakers, it makes me talk german with greater ease as a way to prove my superiority in the heirarchy of foreigners. i never want anyone to hear: a voice that shows which country i’m from. when i speak english it is like i’m telling a secret. i wanted to kill all those loud annoying restaurant patrons, but i couldn’t tell if everyone else there felt the same way. i devoured a pizza regina, with mushrooms like butter and paper-thin prosciutto. then we came home and had some wine with rice krispie treats and watched “what women want” with mel gibson. that movie seemed so dated because i can barely remember a time that mel gibson was respected as an actor instead of ridiculed for being a deranged anti-semite. what else- it is one am and i am not tired. tomorrow we are going to do nothing. grocery shop, i think. the deutsche bahn workers are going on strike so we can’t go to the city. but it is only for 12 hours. hopefully they are back up and running on wednesday, what will i do without the lovely filthy perfume of the subway against my nostrils for the next two weeks?
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