Wisdom

He wasn’t invited to the wedding, so the young man went out into the city instead. The city was in slight disrepair. The sidewalk was like a xylophone — the loose paving stones chimed against each other and as he walked down the main boulevard — past a strip club, still closed, a café and several boutiques — he listened to the tune the couple in front of him made as they blocked his way forward. Both were in black. Each had hair down their blacks to the beltline. The man was wearing a belt made of bullets. Her boots, thick in the sole, brought her almost up to his height.

The boulevard let out onto a plaza and he swished around the couple. On the left was a large building fronted with a massive colonnade, a wrought-iron fence and two silent, cast iron lions, each with a paw outstretched. The sun was out, having escaped from a bank of gunmetal clouds, and the young man slipped through the groups of people, past a beggar, listening to his own footsteps on the undependable sidewalk. Clink, clank clonk.

On the other side of the square stood a massive church backed by weeping willows. Their branches swayed in the breeze. In front stood groups of young people, laughing and smoking. He turned the music down as he zig-zagged through traffic and across the streetcar line that ran along the curve in the road. The old Sheraton building stood past the willows in front of him; to his right was another building, on its streetside façade, a mosaic.

The young man coughed and paused to consider which direction to go. He crossed. A sign told directed him through a wooden door to an old church, but when he peeked in and saw people paying, he paused. People inside lit long, thin candles. A woman handed a man a brochure across the small cash box. He turned away and continued walking.

An old mosque stood on the other end of the street through a line of youngish trees. He slowed his pace. The mosque’s domes were cocked at a strange angle to the street, and he remembered he had been here two days before. On the other side, he remembered, was a massive edifice crowned by a star and caddy-corner to that the Presidential Palace. He’d watched the changing of the guard with his friend, still lightly buzzed from the bloody marys and footsore from a long day of sightseeing. Hesitating, he rounded the corner.

In front of the mosque came a brief flash of light. A group of people in tuxes clustered around the doorway, surrounding a woman in a bridal gown with its train hanging down onto the yellow paving stones. The couple in the doorway smiled. The young man’s face grew hot as he realized it was the wedding party. His friend and his friend’s girlfriend stood near the doorway, smiles stretched across their faces, the friend’s hands clasped behind his back and his girlfriend’s arm crooked through his own. The camera flashed again. They all looked happy, frozen in a tableau on the steps of the mosques. On the bride’s small belly rested the groom’s hand, as if she were already expecting. The wedding party joined the couple on the steps, and for a brief second, everyone was perfectly still. Then, the bulb flashed again — the party dissolved in laughter and pats on the back and descended.

For a second, the young man thought they’d seen him. He felt shabby in his green T-shirt and dirty black jeans. Little flecks were scattered up both legs above the cuff and his shoes were dirty. He fumbled in his pockets and quickly turned back around the corner without looking back, the first three steps at a jogging pace. He exhaled. The sun warmed his face, and he fished in his pockets again for his cigarettes and a lighter. The sound of laughter rose and fell with the passing of each car down the uneven lane.

Willows on one side, wispy young zelkovas on the other, cars parking on the left. Two men yelled at each other from across the street. A woman, tottering in her high heels, brushed past him without looking at him as he struggled to light his cigarette — the cheap lighter smelled like gasoline, and her chiffon ruffles blew its weak flame out. He walked further down the alley, his sense of direction momentarily leaving him, and followed the sidewalk between two buildings to a set of steps down into a courtyard, and there, sheltered from the wind, he coughed out a cloud of smoke and stuffed the lighter back into its pocket.

In the middle of the courtyard stood a round little brick building topped with a cross. It was below the level of the street, and from where he stood he could see into the third-storey windows across the way. He took another drag and  headed down the steps. Here, too, the stones were loose. Adrenaline rushed into his body as he struck out at the railing, the long block of the step nearly giving way beneath his dirty shoes.

It was quiet in the courtyard, the surrounding buildings shutting out the noise of the street. The little chapel stood amidst the ruins of a foundation that was lined with little piles of stones, laid out like a checkerboard. He could hear but not see children playing behind the blocky rear wall. Each brick of the chapel was thin, maybe an inch wide, and they were stacked like books on top of one another. Without looking very hard, one could see which parts of the church were ancient and which were new. The old bricks were jagged with edges like ripped paper; the new parts fresh, each book-wide brick staggered at precise intervals, the gaps lined with even, white mortar.

He rounded a low wall, past a tree under which a bald man in an apron was smoking, and went inside the church. The same thin candles from the church across the street, some longer and thicker than the rest, burned in ornate stands, and in the corners, in low, tin kettles filled with sand. He remembered what his friend had told them while they were visiting the cathedral: “The ones in the corner are for those who died. Like, if your relative died or something, you put a candle in there to remember them.” He wished he had asked what the ones in the candelabras were for — for the living? for wishes? for good luck?

In the round hall of the church, people sat and prayed. The walls were lined with old mosaics — he snatched a brochure from near the door that told him, “this church has been built between the 4th and 6th Centuries A.D.” An elderly woman sat behind an ornate wooden counter — as he passed the people in the narrow pews, he could hear their whispers — fronted by jars of the candles. The bigger ones were more expensive. His emptied pocket revealed enough for a smaller one.

“Mm,” he said, gesturing to the candles.

The woman responded in her language. He nodded once and held out the right amount. She smiled.

“Merci,” he said, rolling the R with his tongue. The woman responded and sat back down on her stool.

Outside, in the entryway, he lit the candle off of the biggest one he could find in the gilt candelabra, and then bent, his knees cracking, to the large kettle on the floor. One other candle burned inside. He stuck his an inch into the sand and stood up. As the wax melted off of the wick, the flame grew tall, and he turned and left, feeling a little left out for not crossing himself.

The only sound in the courtyard was laughter, and the young man started as he heard a whump-clank! from behind the small church. The smoking man was gone. The young man followed the noise to the courtyard. Four children, maybe ten or twelve years old, were playing a sort of parkour, jumping between chest-high sections of brick wall amidst the small piles of stone.

Still fearing the awkwardness of a second run-in with the wedding party, the young man climbed over the wall at the edge and onto the grass rise that sloped down toward the floor of the area. He lit another cigarette. The kids were taking it in turns to jump. One, poised on the edge — it looks dangerous, he thought, hearing the clank of the brick on the powdery mortar below it — stopped. He grinned. He was missing his two front teeth. Then he waved at the young man and jumped. The young man flinched.

The little boy, now opposite, standing close to the young man, said something.

“Be careful,” responded the young man. “Don’t fall. Don’t fall down.” He felt stupid enunciating his words and talking so loudly. It seemed as though his voice reverberated from every wall.

The little boy responded. The next one jumped. With each jump, he flipped. Two of them leaned in close and said something, giggling, their eyes flicking over to him as he stubbed out the cigarette.

Another boy, this one older, his hair shaved close and his lanky brown arms hanging out of a loose tank top, yelled something to the young man.

“What?” he said. “Sorry, I can’t, um…”

The other boys joined in. They waved to him and began chanting, their arms reeling him in to the rhythm of their chant. The man felt compelled to stand up, though he could feel himself blushing and the situation seemed surreal and even oddly terrifying.

One of the children beckoned out to him. “Jump,” he said, pronouncing the U like an A. “Jamp, jamp!”

The young man stood. His hands trembled. He walked over the grass to the low wall opposite the children.

“Jamp!”

The man stood at the edge, testing the strength of the brick with his toe.

“Um, I mean, this is a bad idea, you guys,” he said, feeling like an idiot as he wagged his finger at the children.

“Jamp!”

The young man took a step back and then sprung forward, clearing the gap. Applause erupted. The tall boy in the tank top cuffed him on the arm. Blood pulsed in the young man’s ears and throat and walked, weak-kneed, to the end of the wall. “You kids are fucking crazy,” he said. The older one said something to him and cuffed him again. The young man patted his head and grinned. His stomach seemed to churn. He looked down from the low wall. Three young boys reached their hands up to them. I could crowdsurf right now, he thought to himself. One tugged on his jeans a grinned wildly. One boy’s head turned and his eyes grew wide.

Clank-thump. Jumping off of the wall, the young man followed the others to where the little boy with the missing teeth lay at the foot of the low wall, blood running from a scrape on his knee. One hand was clutched to the back of his head where he must have hit it on the stone floor. The boys talked quietly and the young man bent down and looked at the little boy with what he hoped was pity.

“Are you okay?” he asked. Another boy helped the little one up, wiping his knee with the cuff of the little boy’s shorts. A few drops of blood had hit the ground and had already soaked into the grit.

A list of helpful suggestions flew past in the young man’s head — you should clean it, should we call a doctor? see if his eyes are still focused —

The little boy began crying a little, sniffling slightly as he flicked dirt out of his knee. The tall boy picked him up and swung him up and around, putting the little boy’s legs on either side of his head. He carried the little boy off on his shoulders.

“Is he going to be all right?” The other boys didn’t respond. They walked up the grassy slope. The tall one disappeared beyond. A window slammed shut behind the young man.

At the top of the low wall ringing the courtyard, one of the boys turned around and flashed a peace sign to the young man. He waved weakly. Then the boy was gone. The courtyard was quiet again. Hopping onto the low wall, the young man looked across to the other side. Lighting the last cigarette in his pack, he turned around and walked up the hill.

When the young man walked around the corner to the mosque, there were two fat tourists stood on the steps in polyester shorts, the larger taking a picture with a massive black camera. A man brushed past him, blowing the ash from his cigarette. The wedding party had moved on and he was alone on the square in front of the President’s palace.

This is a first draft.

The title, incidentally, derives from the name of Sofia, the city.

•

So, the last post about the map was sort of weak, but it had been so long since I’d written that I don’t really care. I could’ve posted so much good shit about Eastern Europe, but I didn’t, and I think this does it more justice than any factual recounting of cool stuff I did or how “different” it was from what I’m used to.

I seem to have stumbled across my Muse again today, which is nice. I think the key is reading. I’ve been reading so little lately — besides, of course, keeping up with news/politics/what have you — that it’s no wonder I was avoiding this blog.

I don’t know how well-advised it is to do my first drafts here, but it’s a good chance for feedback if you’re willing to dole it out.

Sofia.

Die Landkarte

I have a large school map hanging on my wall that shows the continent of North America ca. 1961. Some of the details are different—Detroit and Cleveland still have over a million inhabitants, Houston is still around the 500,000 mark, Belize is still British Honduras and Jamaica and other former colonies have recently gained their independence as the West Indian Union. Some of the labels are antiquated and thus quaint. The Pacific is called the »Stiller (pazifischer) Ozean« (literally: “the still (pacific) ocean”) and Salt Lake City is labeled as the then-common German »Salzseestadt«. That notwithstanding, the map shows my home continent in its entirety and gives a solid overview over the topography, down to the larger-than-life waterways and the small dots of places like Uranium City and Los Alamos. You can get lost in this map. When I have friends over, I always notice their eyes periodically flicking over to it. When a conversation dies down, everyone turns to the map and searches out something they hadn’t seen before.

The Map.

I’ve been negligent again and haven’t written in here for over two months now. During that time, I went to Berlin, visited Ukraine, Bulgaria and Belgium, made new friends, drank just a little too often and worked a little too little, but it was glorious. There’s so much to be said about all of that in the next couple posts (if I get to it).

All of this is at least partially attributable to the End of the Grad School Debacle. I’m going. I’m off to the tropics. I’m looking at apartments. I’ve got a stipend. I’m in communication with bunches of new people. I’m breathing 90% easier about my future.

This flood of new mail, Google Earth zoomings in and out of northern Florida and daydreaming about what next year is going to be like and what it’s going to be like to be back on home soil has also made me want to bask for a little while. I probably haven’t written as much as I could have because I know in the back of my mind that I have to leave Bonn in order to write as much as I possibly can in Gainesville, and in so realizing, I can see the end of two incredible, vacationesque years on this side of the Atlantic. There’s probably never again going to be a time in my life where I’ll have this much slack to work with vis-à-vis workload/free time. I’ve gotten to basically live the social animal’s dream here in my neighborhood and travel pretty much whenever I feel like it, and once I’m a student again, with deadlines and constant brain stimulation and shit to read, I’m going to have to adjust at first.

Next year is a colorful and exotic yet familiar. Through the floodgates of the internet and the need to get my affairs in order to move back, I’m constantly reminded of The End of my stay in Germany, or, put in a different light, my Imminent Return to Over There. One part of me aches when I think about selling all of my stuff and possibly never seeing certain people again. The other part of me gets excited butterflies when ruminating about driving a car and maybe getting a cat soon. Part of me is mentally packing my stuff. The other part of me can’t think past next weekend. The Map is too colorful and detailed to ignore; the prospect of the Next Step is, too. In a way, it’s almost uncomfortable to read all of the different city names and think about living in the States, but in another way it feels me with nostalgia and a weird sense of what could be termed “pride,” or something like that. I’m having so much fun, but I know next year is going to be important and awesome. I’ve got so many Luxusprobleme I can’t keep track.

I made it look old.

All the Wine

I first noticed the man at the far end of the restaurant when my date arrived. She was twenty minutes late and came in flustered and blushing, her lips freshly-painted in a bright strawberry red. She apologized for her tardiness and sat down across from me as I stood to push in her chair, admiring the way her breasts filled out the chiffon, trying not to stare too greedily at her legs in their patterned tights or the perfect black circle of the mole just above her knee. Both the man at the far end of the restaurant and I looked at the woman like starving men: I with the satisfaction of one sitting down to eat for the first time in days; he with the hangdog look of a refugee. His look drew my attention to the empty wine bottle on his table, and I realized he must have been sitting there since before I arrived.

My date was a colleague, an adjunct at the university who had been hired by our department when one of the professors emeritus had suddenly had a stroke. He lay in a nearby hospital in a coma. He was probably going to die. The day after we had all heard the news, his wife, a tiny, bowlegged woman with brilliantly white dentures, arrived with several boxes and a relative in tow to clean out the office at the far end of the hall, a room the size of a utility closet. He had moved there after retiring on the grounds that “he didn’t want to take up too much space,” and by the end of the day, the windowless closet was back to being 101B, a white box ignored by the faculty until the department head ran out of space for his books.

As we chatted, my gaze flicked periodically over to the man. He was extremely tall. His knees rose off of the chair in which he sat. His slacks were too short, revealing meaty calves that seemed to go all the way down to his ankles, and he had a thick head of mouse-brown hair parted just shy of the middle of his large skull. As we made eye contact my eyes flicked back to my date, and I resolved not to look in his direction anymore, worrying that I’d come off wrong, that he’d see gloating where I’d only intended curiosity.

She wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped. She did everything she could to convey availability: with three fingers and her thumb, she glided up and down the stem of her wine glass, in which only a small amount remained. I topped her off as she careened between stories broken up by filler words:

“…and then, umm, you know, I said to him, I said, ‘you can’t be serious! She’s failing all of your classes!’ Right then, you know, right then I, like, put two and two together, and I realized he was, like, actually sleeping with her! So I was, like…”

I smiled and did everything the way cheap lad magazines instructed one to. I smiled, I nodded. I asked questions, bit a small piece of dry skin from my lower lip as I made eye contact, I ran my finger along the rim of the glass.

By the time she came to the end of her story and the food arrived, I knew I would be able to bring this woman back to my apartment and fuck her. The second glass of wine brought a lovely pink glow to her ears, where I watched her earrings tremble as she brushed an imaginary strand of dyed brown hair back over her ear.

“So, what do you think about the new major requirements?” she asked, by now practically jerking off the wine glass and biting her upper lip as I heard her legs uncross and re-cross.

I poked at the rice on my plate and launched into a clipped explanation of my viewpoints. Never in all the dates since my divorce had I been so certain of bedding a woman, and yet it seemed tiring. Not because it would have been hard to follow through. I could already see myself rolling down her stockings and unclasping her bra, and as these images were projected onto the inside of my skull I felt a small rush of blood down my back and into my pants. What followed, though, were pictures of after, images of her number on my phone – I hadn’t yet added her to my contact list – of her coy looks in the hallway of the Humanities building, of the slow but eventual devolution into efficient orgasms and then arguing, and then the day of reckoning, where dark silence would settle in in our department. Word got around fast among the faculty members, and I could already hear the whispers in the hallway, following my into my too-bright, south-facing office.

I found myself trailing off and my eyes slid off of her red lips, down to where her breasts parted, to the table and finally, without thinking, back to the man. A third bottle of wine now stood, a third of its contents already emptied. The man ate nothing. His left arm rested on the table as if it were glued to the tablecloth, his right hand made a fist around the stem of the wine glass. When I turned back to my date, my stomach sank. Her finger traced lines around the curve of her ear, then travelled to her bra strap, making small adjustments with a slight smack of elastic. I felt her foot slide across to me, the exposed toenail that peeped through the end of the shoe clawing clumsily at the hem of my jeans.

I paid for both of us and left a generous tip even though my chicken had been lukewarm.

“Thank you,” she said, her foot now making circles on my ankle. As we rose, she touched my arm and giggled. The third glass of wine had brought a flush of red to her sternum and my hand slid down to the small of her back as I led her, blazer draped over my arm, to the door. As I turned around the man looked up at me. He raised his glass and I gave a little nod. The third bottle of wine was empty.

The setting sun had dyed the sky a bright orange. My date and I walked to my car. She played with my lapels as we stood near the driver’s side and I found myself staring into the windows of the house across from the restaurant, watching a young woman talk on her cellphone as she adjusted the curtains.

“I had fun,” my date said, her head cocked. She was obviously waiting for my invitation.

“So did I,” I said. “Let’s do this again sometime.” I stuffed my hands deep into my pockets and looked at her with a little smile. She blinked several times. I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She scratched the back of her leg with an exposed toenail and there was a second of silence. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m really tired today. I’ll give you a call, okay?”

There was an awkward exchange. She rattled off an anecdote about grading papers and as I half-listened, the man from the restaurant stumbled out. I led my date by the small of her back down the row of cars.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll take the bus back.” She looked up at me with her head down, and I curled a finger under her chin, raising it up to mine and, with a final grin, I kissed her on the cheek once more, and then on the lips. I could feel her watching me as I walked back to my car, and then the sound of pumps on the sidewalk told me she was gone.

The man’s car was parked next to mine. He dropped his keys as he fumbled with his door, and I stood by my car, watching him, my keys still safe in the pocket of my blazer. I heard him curse, watching his pinstriped back as he fished around under the car, coming up with the keys held triumphantly over his head.

“Are you okay to drive?”

“Oh!” he said, much too loudly. “Yeah I’m fine.” He stumbled back in the car behind him as he fished around in the inside pocket of his jacket. “Got a light?”

“No, sorry,” I said, coming around the hood of his car. It was a used coupe with a dented bumper. I used a fingernail to scrape a dried piece of something from the varnish.

“Fuck,” he said. He fell back against the other car and it beeped in warning. I looked around and noticed a group of young boys across the street pointing and laughing at the man, swaying with a cigarette swinging around in his lips.

When the cigarette fell, the man slouched forward. “You should’ve eaten something,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive, pal?”

He looked at me with bleary eyes.

“Let me take you home.”

“Yeah I’m fine.”

“My car’s right here.” I walked back around the hood of his car and pressed the button to unlock it. The clouds in the orange sky, reflected on my car’s roof, formed strange faces. “Come on, I don’t want you to have to deal with the cops tonight.”

He bent over again, looking for his lost cigarette, and came up empty-handed. Sighing and reaching out for something to balance on – his hand found first the antenna, then the mirror – he shook his head rapidly. I opened my door. He stumbled over and got in. I started the car.

“Date didn’t show?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“She probably wasn’t worth it anyway.” As I pulled out of the space, I noticed again how tall he was. His knees were right up against the dashboard and, had he held his head upright instead of letting it loll around on his sternum, he would’ve been pressed into the headliner. “Maybe she was too short for you?” I said with a smirk, cuffing his arm. He said nothing.

“So, where do you live? What’s your name?”

He managed to get out that he lived north of the city center, up near the edge of town in what many would have called “the bad part of town,” in other words, where the immigrants lived. I took my car through the narrow alleyways of the city center. Parked cars and big trucks clogged the streets, and the light was blocked by the baroque façades that hung four and five storeys high over pavement. I waited at a red light. A crowd of school-aged girls crossed the street in front of us, each quivering around atop towering stilettos, their hair bleached and straightened into fibrous sheets of blond.

“Say,” I said, watching them cross, “why don’t we head over to the brothel? My date’s gone, yours flaked; let’s go get us some anonymous cunt and a couple more drinks.” I paused. “Well, maybe we’ll leave the drinks. My treat.”

He looked at me with a stare that could’ve boiled water before finally crossing his arms over his knees and letting his head fall onto them.

I turned on the radio. Every station seemed to have something about bailouts on it, so finally, I gave up and switched over to the CD that lived in my stereo, a mix of jazz fusion that I’d heard so often as to be able to tune it out. The ornate rowhouses gave way to newer buildings, their signs thrusting up in fluorescent colors in front of football field-sized parking lots. A hardware store, a supermarket, an electronics store. Near the highway onramp I took us onto a back road. We cruised through a neighborhood of little houses, newer buildings with square windows that glowed yellow against the deepening blue of the sky. The streetlights flickered into life overhead. I debated with myself, as I always did with these affairs, whether or not I should’ve just brought her home and fucked her. I pictured her wide eyes and the splotch of red that spread out in the cut of her dress.

His neighborhood was full of high rises, these prefab monstrosities erected in the seventies. They came into view and got closer as I sped down the open stretch of road that separated the large development from the rest of the city.

“What’s your address?” I turned to look and noticed that he had fallen asleep. At that moment, a cat ran across the road. I slammed on the brakes just in time as the flash of black and white fur careened over the street and into the field beyond. The man’s head slammed into the dashboard and suddenly, he was wide awake.

“What the fuck?” he said. “Jerkoff. Fucking jerkoff.” He leered at me again as he slouched against the window. He stretched his arm out and aimed a wobbly finger at my face.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”

By now we had arrived. The man glared at me with crossed arms, still seated at an angle.

“What’s your address?” I asked again.

“Turn left. Left at the light, then left again on D—— Street.” He paused and coughed. “She was reeeal sexy. Real sexy.”

“Who? Your date?”

“No!” he said, his outstretched finger nearly poking me in the eye. “Yours!”

“Yeah,” I said. Her face flashed again in my mind.

“I bet,” he said, rubbing one eye, “that you do that a lot.” He crossed his arms again.

“So, what do you do?” I asked him.

“I met this girl online,” he said, ignoring the question. “She was really nice. We chatted. We laughed!” His voice had taken on the defensive sing-song of the inebriated. “I met her once and it was fun.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Where do you meet one like that? A woman like that?” he asked me.

“I work with her.”

“Ohhhh,” he said, “Yeah. Now I get it. Fucking the company.”

The light turned red and I waited, my turn signal clicking in the background.

“I’m a teacher,” he said, answering my previous question. “I teach kids. I teach them. I teach them math and sports. It’s a lot of fun.” He began unbuckling his seatbelt.

“Whoa, we’re not there just yet,” I said.

“I bet you’re a banker,” he said, pointing at me again.

“No, I’m a professor. At the university,” I added lamely.

“Ha!” he said. “I’m a teacher. I bet you think you’re a teacher but you’re just the ideas guy. I have to work hard.” He laughed a weird, high-pitched laugh. “Go to the brothel,” he said. “That’s disgusting.”

We turned onto his street. He was already unlocking the door and had nearly fallen out of the car when I slowed down.

“Hold on there, friend. Where’s your house?”

He pointed. I tried to follow his finger as best I could and found a free space parallel to the curb.

For some reason, I found myself unbuckling as well, and I quickly moved around the side of the car. He had fallen onto his side and was flailing out with his arms. One of his giant hands hit me in the face as I looped my left arm under him and helped him back to his feet. We walked up the front walk and this time he managed to unlock the door without dropping his keys. Upon entering, he threw them aside and they landed on the parquet floor with a clatter.

The house was nice, I admit. It was the kind of comfortable family houses my friends’ parents had when I was growing up, its walls full of books and covered in quaint pictures. An overstuffed couch, a computer desk with a giant monitor on top and a flatscreen TV dominated the small living room. I walked over the bookshelves and wondered what I was doing here. The man lit a cigarette as I examined his pictures. There was a photo of a class. A girl in front held a bright blue sign that read, “Thanks, Mr. M—–!” Another picture contained what could have only been the man circa 1970, his thick hair longer and puffier. In his arms, he cradled a bundle with a sleeping face, a small child. Another picture showed him on a mountaintop. He loomed over the woman standing next to him, his arm, bent at the elbow, hanging off of her shoulders. I looked at myself in a small mirror and adjusted my hair. I wanted to ask the man something. He stared at me with a half-open mouth, his arms out to his sides with the palms up, as if in disbelief.

“I should go,” I said. “You doing okay?”

“That’s my daughter,” he slurred. “A bright girl. Very bright. Pretty. I just want them all to grow up and be happy. It’s important.” He raised his hands and let them fall. Suddenly, he lurched up off of the couch, I took a step back and found myself up against the shelves. I imagined the ensuing duel: he’d come at me, hands going for the neck. I’d take the heavy pot from behind me and smash it down over his head. We’d each grab a wooden chair and swing them at each other, knocking books off of the shelves; the picture of his daughter would fall to the floor and the glass would smash—

But he had already left the room and was walking up the stairs, three steps at a time. I heard a door slam and took a second look at the heavy pot behind me. It was an urn.

I must’ve spent another ten minutes looking through all of his books. I was disappointed to discover they were mostly thrillers, and there was a shelf of thin-spined kids’ books at the bottom of one of the cases. I walked into the kitchen and was about to pour myself a glass of water when I noticed the blinking red light of the answering machine. There were four new messages. It beeped periodically as the number flashed. As the phone beeped in the background, I finished my glass of water and then helped myself to a finger of the blended scotch from the cabinet sandwiched between refrigerator and ceiling. I pulled one of the stools out from the island in the middle of the room and watched the pots and pans swaying like giant pendulums in the glow of the recessed lights.

The beeping began to get on my nerves. I stood up too fast and braced myself on the countertop. Draining the whiskey glass, I took one last look around. The calendar was full of red ink. A cuckoo clock near the stove was stuck at 3:15. I set the glass down gingerly and put my blazer back on, clearing my throat and running a hand through my hair.

Loud snoring emanated from the stairs and I let myself quietly out.

I drove back into the city, and had to cruise around my block twice before finding a parking spot. I climbed the four flights to my apartment and looked at the clock. It was five till midnight. I flipped open my laptop and noticed how much empty space there was on my walls. One wall was given over to books and the rest was blank white, interrupted only by a single, massive oil painting. I thought again about my date and began to deeply regret not bringing her home. She was clumsy, she was obvious with her flirting but she was beautiful and had a purity of intention I remembered from my teenage years. She’d even dressed up for me, slipping those calves and that circular mole into her lacy tights, probably fiddling with her cleavage and trying on three dresses before settling on the one. I wore what I always did. I popped open the porn site I’d been looking at off and on over the past five years and wished I could’ve given her to the man. He would have wrapped her in his giant arms and carried her up the stairs, ducking to avoid cracking his head open on the ceiling as she giggled, one shoe still dangling from her toes. I’d never lost anything I didn’t mean to lose. I could have just given her away.

It took me hours to get to sleep. I thought I could hear the sound of that beeping answering machine as I closed my eyes and tried to count my breaths. When I finally slept, I dreamt of Room 101B. I walked down the empty hallway and tried to read the sign posted on the wall, and then I knocked.

“It’s occupied,” came the man from the restaurant’s voice from behind the heavy door.

•

This is a first draft. © Colin Bailey Williams 2012.

Korrektur

At some point within the last week, between half-baked decisions and a lot of public drunkenness (it was Karneval again this past weekend), I finally started revising again in earnest and reading something other than Wikipedia. It was surprisingly easy to just pop open a Word document and start making little changes, like working out instances where the tense doesn’t agree, refining word choice and sculpting the dialogue into something more refined.

I’ve been spending so long with old ideas that it’s gotten more difficult to create new ones. I haven’t written a poem in something like eight months. I haven’t written a completed story since almost college.

As time goes on, living seems to become so much more about correction and refinement than about creation. After graduating, a lot of what I have been up to is dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s. Try not to splay your feet when you walk. Eat something with vitamins in it every day. That’s not your cellphone vibrating; it’s just shifting in your pocket. Get out today and get some exercise. Look her in the eyes when talking to her. Pluck the errant eyelashes and sand out of your eye. Floss before bed. Hold the door. When walking behind someone, either speed up enough to politely overtake them or slow down so you don’t creep them out. Pick a way to sign your letters and use it everytime. Finesse supersedes growth.

As a creature of habit, I sometimes wonder which of the habits I currently have will carry over forever. After a certain amount of correction, something becomes so engrained in a person that it’s difficult to do it the second you think of it, like when an ex-girlfriend forgot her PIN and flew into a panic because something like that “doesn’t happen.” There are things I do almost every single day that won’t change, ever. The order in which things are inserted into pockets. The way your mouth opens when you yawn. These things have been corrected nearly to subconsciousness and perfection.

The first couple of grad school rejections have me checking my email every hour, just to be sure. Having a huge decision be completely out of your hands is kind of terrifying, but I’m trying to be safe in the knowledge that I’ve corrected and improved enough in the past to sweep the path for Future Me, and if I haven’t, tough shit. I’ll just have to revise some more until I’m finished.

Mitternacht in Bonn

I just watched the movie Midnight in Paris after having discussed the movie earlier today and having had it recommended to me by my family over Christmas break, and I reached a similar epiphany to the one Owen Wilson’s character reaches in the movie. Before I get into the details, let me say this: the movie was decent if schmalzy. I’m not a huge Woody Allen fan. I thought Match Point was terrible, Annie Hall was fine but didn’t completely win me over, and besides that I haven’t seen really any of his movies. But Midnight in Paris did a good job of synthesizing all of the things many of the things I was guilty of in choosing to come to Germany after my affair with the country when I was 15.

As anybody I went to high school with can tell you, I came back from my exchange trip in ninth grade thinking Europe was the best place on Earth. I thought the people were smarter, more educated, better-dressed, more politically savvy and musically ahead of the United States by quite a distance. After study abroad and after my current year and a half, I’ve slowly come to realize how guilty I’ve been of idealizing Germany, of putting it on a pedestal due to my own unwillingness to see its problems (excepting World War II, which is impossible to look away from). I’ve talked about this before. Germany was my Golden Place to Owen Wilson’s character’s Golden Age—a place where everything was better, and where the things I disliked about the US were nonissues.

This past week, I found out that an adult course I’d been teaching under the illusion that it was a paid job was, in fact, not paid, and after looking more closely at my schedule, that I’d even been working five or six hours more than my contract stipulates. Between this extremely shitty revelation, the problems I’ve experienced at the kindergarten and the general feeling that I’ve been kind of treading water for the past two months, I’ve started to think harder about my personal and professional priorities.

Ideals are just that—ideals. They’re impossible to fulfill. They exist to provide a carrot on a stick. If I didn’t have any ideals right now, I’d either be horribly depressed or blissfully ignorant, both of which sound like terrible options. Germany—as a concept, not a country—has helped me sift through things about the US I like and dislike, which has in turn helped me sift through things about Germany I like and dislike. Having been driven to the end of my patience by my employers, my own malaise and the bad weather, I was really reaching my limit this weekend. Having ideals and a sense of self-righteous anger, combined with watching a decent Woody Allen movie—along with an awesome fucking Mastodon concert on Thursday—have really helped me put my thoughts in order concerning Germany, next year and my position at work.

I want to write. I want to live in the States next year. I don’t want to work at this high school any longer than I have to. Perhaps most importantly at this moment in time, I want to stop letting myself get sucked into doing things for my job I don’t want to do and stop plaguing myself about what will or will not happen next year. Germany is not a perfect place. America is not a perfect place. Sitting around thinking about how green the grass is on the other side of the Atlantic, regardless of which side I find myself on, is unproductive.

It’s time to stop wallowing in Germany senioritis, and it’s time to start crossing things off my to-do list. Thanks, movie that I would give 3.5/5 stars to, for helping put things in perspective.

Also, the guy who played Ernest Hemingway was pretty hilarious.

Lehrer

»Scheiß auf Schule«! rief Sven*, als er wieder in die Klasse kam, nachdem ich eine Rede über die mangelnde Konzentration und das schlechte Verhalten in der Klasse hielt.

»Mit der Einstellung kommst du nicht so weit im Leben«, erwiderte ich.

I hate strongly dislike my eighth graders, perhaps because they crystallize everything I dislike about teaching at a high school. They throw their supplies around as if they had the motor control of a three-year-old. They lean in their chairs and swear loudly. They harass my one colleague, who’s new and has a slight Slavic accent, essentially declaring their dislike for her within earshot. They harangue each other and pass nasty notes. When told to open their books, it comes to light that they “forgot” it in their locker, and once the book is finally open, they stare at it distantly as if it were a magic eye picture or an object from the 1950s, something totally foreign.

I’m not comparing myself to any of my friends and acquaintances who are working in schools that demand actual grit, like the St. Louis gangsters Ann is teaching. I’m pretty sure I would absolutely lose it working in an environment like that, what with my sensitivities and lack of patience. I’d be run out on a rail in a school where you have to demonstrate real mettle. My teaching style thus far has been characterized by being fairly laid-back, by laughing at my own mistakes, by chastising with looks and eye-rolls and calls of “Leute!” But. The eighth grade, with their low-to-middling level of interest and achievement, with their shitty attitude and their adolescent  foibles etc. etc., is absurd—they resist all attempts at a connection. Yell them into cowered silence one day, and they’re back to their antics the next. I’m for replacing the eighth grade with one years’ unpaid internship at like a stable or a water treatment plant or an office with water-stained ceiling panels and bad coffee. I sound like an old man right now.

I should know better than to write blog posts when I’m in a bad mood, but there you have it.

•

What’s hard to deal with, here in this privileged position of being a lackadaisical Foreign Language Assistant®, is the lack of intellectual involvement. Sure, there are classes that challenge me and classes where I feel like I’m challenging my students. But, by and large, I show up, I watch someone else teach or I crap out some sort of improvisation of whatever outline I scribbled up the night prior, I go nap in the Ruheraum (calm room, where teachers get to relax), I read the newspaper obsessively, I watch/teach again, and then I’m out. Now that the kindergarten thing has gone somewhat by the wayside, my afternoons stretch to the horizon again, and my weekends are three-day luxury cruises with few interesting people on the boat, esp. since almost everyone I know is busier than I am.

One of my biggest flaws: I like planning the future, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it. The future right now consists largely of the Question: grad school, yes or no. Unfortunately, thinking this way means that the time between now and July is largely filler. It’s easy to shrug off getting close to someone, because I know I’m probably going to leave. I don’t want to get hurt or hurt anyone else when I go, but this means by turn that I haven’t been taking many risks. As the old German expression goes: “no Risk, no Fun.”

But idly sitting around like a member of the 19th-century landed gentry has brought me nothing except boredom, sluggishness and general discontent, which is completely unproductive. Writing in this blog more often is fine, but it’s also not helping me get any further on my novel or any other projects.

And here’s the thing: Sven*’s shitty attitude (to briefly translate the dialogue from above, he said, essentially, “fuck school,” to which I responded, “that attitude won’t get you very far in life.” How droll.) closely mirrors my own. I’m a hypocrite, because I don’t invest even close to 100% when I’m in front of a class. Not that you necessarily need to sweat it out for two hours over each lesson plan, but it’s kind of absurd for me to expect more effort from my students if I’m barely awake when I’m at work, isn’t it?

Teaching simply isn’t intellectually stimulating most of the time. I got more juiced in the five minutes I spent on Wikipedia after a smoke break than I did from two hours with my 10th graders. Hell, it was almost more rewarding to play tag with the kindergarteners when I was there all the time than it is to talk about cool stuff like sexism in advertising with my Cultural Studies group. I’m not that invested and my students aren’t that invested. In Germany, everything—and I mean everything—is taught to the test. Students have several exams a year, and then a big one in the tenth and a final giant Abitur in the thirteenth grade, and like 90% of their effort goes into studying for these tests. Creativity is hard to come by; real hunger for knowledge even less so.

And now I know how Mrs. Capes felt in my eighth grade German class, where I was just as culpable as everyone else in being noisy and disrespectful and dickish. We actually managed to drive that poor woman out of town after one single year at Stanton. And here I am, mentally withdrawing from my eighth graders for the same exact reason. It makes me wonder how so many wonderful individuals managed to make the cut as teachers without going out of their minds or turning into the specters that many of my colleagues here in Germany have become—half-awake, dissatisfied people who are mostly in it for the time off it affords them, which they spend raising their family and finding happiness somewhere else. When in school, these people complain. They complain about their students; they complain about the weather. They complain about their kids’ illnesses. There are, of course, people who are so interested in school that it becomes all they can talk about, which is equally depressing. But a lot of my colleagues love what they do, and do it well. I don’t think I can be that person in this school, and I started really feeling that way right when my energy was about to give out before Christmas break.

To be honest, I don’t even know if I was going anywhere with this, but it’s good to vent some frustration on the internet, I suppose. It just makes me sad that I can’t be a teacher like some of the ones I had for my students. I think maybe I make the cut in some of my classes. My kids seem to like me well enough. I wonder if the amazing teachers I had, the ones who made my neurons fire like crazy and made me excited to stay up turning Hamlet into a children’s book, or who got me rethink my political stances, or who made me grow to love Cleveland, or who talked to me one-on-one when I had issues, had the same problems. When you’re the kid in class who’s happy to be there—I was that kid in at least some of my classes—it’s easy to think these teachers eat, drink, breathe their subjects. But I’m sure my teacher-idols in high school had the winter blahs, or felt like giving up, or disliked a class, or thought about the day they could get to what they really wanted to do, like traveling the world, writing a novel, riding horses, whatever.

I feel intellectually underchallenged. I can feel my useless liberal arts knowledge atrophying. But I feel overwhelmed sometimes by how fucking difficult it can be to implant Small Piece of Knowledge A into Student B’s resistant brain.

•

I’ve set out a writing agenda for the next couple of months and I think I might re-enroll at the Uni Bonn to keep myself limber in the head. It probably also wouldn’t be such a bad idea to do some physical activity for once. The ennui will pass soon, I’m sure. I hope it does for Sven*, too, because that kid’s in for a very rude surprise once school’s over. He’s got three teachers trying to goad him into learning. If he keeps up the arrogance and lack of willpower, though, he’s going to find out you get a whole lot less help once you’re working for someone, or once you’re trying to get 14-year-olds to complete a simple task.

Interview

Interview with Myself

Due to our focus on the literary, the angsty and the foreign by way of author C. Bailey W. (me) here at Das Lichten des jungen C., we’ve had little time to focus on our other side of the coin, on Colin W., the orderly, honest, more family-oriented jungen C., whose presence on the internet has been dwarfed by my infrequent outpourings on subjects such as the Rhineland, the experience of working with children and my transitional period. When Colin W. and I split sometime in early 2009, with me taking over the roles of creative director and public face of jungem C., Colin W. was freed up to spend more time cleaning the bedroom and office of jungem C., renewing his ever-improving relationship with his brother and parents and taking small steps to improve junges C.’s German language abilities, while also making a huge behind-the-scenes push to refresh junges C.’s mathematical knowledge, something for which I regrettably took much of the credit in my last post here on Das Lichten des jungen C.

Colin W. has been content to operate behind the scenes here at jungem C., putting his efforts into the financial side of our operations and tending to our coal stove, as well as being our point person for bureaucracy and politics. We caught up with Colin W. in our offices in Bonn’s Altstadt, where he had just cleaned the kitchen and considered leaving a passive-aggressive note for his roommates. Outside it was grey and drizzling, but inside, our desk was bathed in warm light as Colin took a vitamin and leaned back. We talked with Colin about his misgivings about this blog and his thoughts on image and creativity.

C. Bailey W.: Hey man, how have you been? It’s been a long time since we’ve heard anything from you, yet you continue to play an incredibly valuable role for us here at jungem C.

Colin W.: I’ve been doing really well. It’s been nice to spend some time out of the spotlight and really focus on crossing things off of the to-do list. I’ve got some letters I’ve been meaning to write, and now that I’ve finished up doing a good deal of the legwork during our recent grad school push, I’m excited to get back to playing a more day-to-day role in our operations.

CBW: We’ve heard you’ve spent a lot of time talking to our brother over the course of the past year.

CW: I have, which has been awesome. It’s been great to really focus on being a person and a family member, not just an image or a set of loosely-organized ideas and personality traits.

CBW: Do I detect a note of bitterness there? Have you had a hard time adjusting to taking more of a back seat, particularly in our creative operations?

CW: No, because in a way I feel like “dividing up” the whole thing was really just a formality. A lot of what you do—and don’t get me wrong here, I like a lot of your work, generally speaking—ends up being very self-referencing. Either that, or it deals with the same themes that have cropped up for the past two decades. I mean, look at your old Livejournal. I think like half of those entries used the same emoticon, because they were always written in the same frame of mind.

One reason I’m really happy to sit down for this interview is because I feel like, while I don’t mind not being the “ideas guy” or whatever [laughs], it’s unfortunate that our readers have this idea that C. Bailey W. is really all there is to jungem C. I don’t think that does me justice. I mean, it’s tough to not have something like a blog be a little bit flowery and spruced up for the audience. And when it comes to fiction, I’m happy to stay out of the way, because, frankly, I’m not interesting or interested enough to spend my time on that. You’re better at that part of it.

But for God’s sake, if you read like creative nonfiction or a lot of other people’s blogs, they’re just blowing smoke up your ass and presenting themselves as they want to be seen. In my mind, blogs have an element of the brothels you see in Amsterdam, where the hooker is standing in a window smiling coyly at you and showing some skin. Blogs are window-dressed for voyeurs—when you write in a blog, you want to be looked at, but you don’t want to look bad. It’s about saving face.

I mean, how many times have you read about somebody taking a shit, or getting a sinus infection, or cleaning the house, or paying the bills? The only time you wrote about money, you basically threw yourself a first-world pity party. Isn’t that kind of unfair?

CBW: I think what I’ve been trying to do here at Das Lichten is to make my—our—trials and tribulations more interesting, and to distill things in such a way that they make sense and are fun to read. I obviously wouldn’t spend an entry writing about taking a shit or having a sinus infection, because nobody wants to hear about that.

What would you like to see us spending more time on at Das Lichten?

CW: Who are you to decide what people do and don’t want to read?

CBW: I’m the author; that’s my job.

CW: Point taken. But still, I think there’s a way you have of manipulating the truth that’s somewhat disingenuous. Most of these posts have you functioning as a sort of stationary object with things happening to you, like Benjy in the Sound and the Fury. Applying to grad school was a choice. Coming to Germany was a choice. Writing about the Rust Belt—that was a choice, not a duty, and sometimes I question the wisdom of having a privileged white person write about the working class. I feel like you write about these things as if they were problems that befell you, not choices that you made. Not to be arrogant, but these are things I worked very hard to achieve for us, and yet you take them for granted in your work here and even complain about them. Where’s the positivity? Where’s the agency?

Some of the other people in this blog are two-dimensional characters. You never mention girlfriends by name; your friends are presented as foils to you.

CBW: And yet people seem to react to it. The blog as a format is self-indulgent. It’s not about the other people, necessarily, but about places and experiences, even if these sometimes get boiled down to tropes or flat objects.

Again, what would you like to see us spending more time on here? Since you voluntarily allowed me to be our figurehead, isn’t it tough to try and counteract that from the sidelines?

CW: I see myself as being the coach. Or, if you like, I’m the President and you’re the Prime Minister.

I’d like to see us spending more time on being the main character and not the omniscient, yet helpless narrator. I’d like to see us spending more time on being a participant and not a spectator. Our life isn’t just one narrative, it’s several, and other people have a lot to do with this.

I also would like to see less time spent on image and more time spent on reality.

CBW: In past conversations, you’ve expressed your worry that I’ve worked to unify our image and smooth out contradictions. You’ve also said, and I quote, “you’re turning into a hipster, man.”

This opens up multiple questions. First of all, is it possible to create a narrative with all of the contradictions—in a word, a completely honest narrative—and still be interesting? Secondly, are you really a hipster if you’re earnest about—

CW: Of course it’s not possible to include all of the contradictions that exist in every person; that would just be silly. I’m not concerned about including everything, but I am concerned about honesty, and I think people’s internet presences have a tendency to be dishonest. You obviously can’t pack everything into this blog. Some things need to be censored. Some things simply don’t merit an entry.

As to the thing about being hip, it is pretty hipster-like that you just wrote an entry about heavy metal. Sure, you like metal, I like metal, and it’s not like you’re that guy from Liturgy, although the mere fact that I’m referencing him in this interview shows we both read Pitchfork from time to time (see “Album Review” if you have any doubts about that). The jury’s out on whether or not someone can be hip if they acknowledge being hip.

CBW: It seems to me that you feel insecure about writing here for fear of being judged, or that you dislike blogs in general. What do you have to say on that point, and what format choices would you rather seen being make for jungen C.?

CW: Maybe I do feel not insecure, but self-conscious about writing a blog. I second-guess everything you and I post on Facebook, for that matter. I guess we can’t help what we’re interested in on one level.

I do think more of this kind of thing belongs written in a journal, not on the internet. Like, this dialogue right here could be a journal entry, and could cover a lot more topics than we’re covering right now. Why did you choose to present this as a meta-narrative? [laughs] That’s pretty hip, by the way. I thought you didn’t like postmodernism.

What worries me the most is that you’re doing this instead of writing fiction. You need to write more fiction. Before grad school. Or at least edit your novel [sigh] —and I say it like that because it’s time to call it like it is, it’s a novel, not a “thingy,” not a “piece,” it’s a fucking novel that you’ve—we’ve—spent like two years on. Don’t shy away from calling it a novel because you don’t want to sound pretentious.

CBW: Describe for me what kind of role you’d like to play in the future.

CW: I… yeah, that’s tough. [scratches beard] I just want some semblance of order, and most of all I want to see junger C. really focusing on being productive. And happy.

Above all, though, I’d like to see less gloss and more diversity in the stuff we put out. I think we’re running the risk of getting stuck in one groove—think about it, like half of the stories you wrote in college were about industry, sexual problems and sometimes abuse. That’s depressing, for one thing, but there are so many more ways to deal with the Midwest. Don’t get lost in what’s easy.

CBW: Thanks for your time.

CW: My pleasure.

•

Author’s Note:

For the record: I wanted to conduct a little experiment by imagining myself as two people for the purpose of this entry. Part of me has misgivings about writing a blog. It’s easy to become too focused on how many people read once you throw up a link on Facebook and what kind of image you’re putting out there for friends/relatives/colleagues to read.

I’ve been doing pretty well, by the way. The metal thing is still happening. Concerts are in the works for February. I’d still really like to go to the UK, Poland, Ukraine and maybe France sometime before I leave, but I’ll have to see how that’s all going to work as far as finances are concerned. Karneval is coming up, too.

Otherwise, I’ll be biting my nails and fretting until I hear back from grad schools in the next couple of months.

Metal

Heavy metal is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the Midlands of the United Kingdom and the United States. With roots in blues rock and psychedelic rock, heavy metal has, to a great extent, been the soundtrack of my past two months, where, instead of writing in this blog, I devoted a great deal of time to working pretty hard, taking the GRE, applying to grad schools, writing a couple of letters, visiting friends in Germany, engaging in moments of excess and debauchery, second-guessing my plans for the future and acquiring more heavy metal.

In mid-November, I had begun writing a post that mostly dealt with math, because at the time I was coming off of a week of solid studying and attempting to reclaim, in scattershot fashion, my knowledge of algebra. I had to re-learn how to long divide on paper; I had to blow an inch of dust off of old tidbits like “y = mx + b” and quadratic equations, etc. Taking Modern Astronomy and Physics for Poets to fulfill Mac’s math requirements really didn’t do fuckall for my ability to use numbers. If I may quote myself from two months ago:

“I’m like most other people I’ve met—in other words, people who don’t or didn’t major in physics, math or mathy hard sciences like chemistry—in that I proclaim to anyone who will listen that I “hate math” and that “I’m horrible at math. I can’t even long divide on paper” (the latter quote is true, by the way). I have a decently tuned sense of logic (I’d like to think), but the whole realm immediately following pre-calc is totally baffling to me, and it’s clear I’ve forgotten quite a lot of algebra since senior year of high school.”

Whatever. Grad school stuff swallowed my December. Between working around thirty hours a week, not adjusted for lesson-planning time, I had quite a bit to get done. My evenings ended up being devoted to editing Part Two of my senior project/novel to pieces, writing and re-writing admissions essays, chewing on hangnails, drinking beer and going to bed.

I tend to cycle through genres in music as far as my listening habits go. I’ll have a month where I mostly listen to guitar-driven folky indie stuff, a month of d’n'b, a few electronicky albums on repeat, the occasional fling with jazz for a couple weeks. During all of the preparation and execution of grad school madness, helped by the well-timed rediscovery of Metalocalypse (a show about a fictional melodic death metal band. Hilarious) and Mastodon (an actual American progressive/sludge metal band. Awesome), my soundtrack moved away from Kuedo and Zola Jesus and moved more toward the Atlas Moth and Vastum. Metal’s been a good release of stress. I think it’s comparable to the relatively large amount of time I spent with dubstep, and as with any  genre, I tend to gravitate toward the more melodic, melancholic songs and the (let’s face it) slightly hipper bands (as opposed to like, Slayer or Static-X).

Erie, PA

The appeal is the same as what people call ruin porn, something I’ve also been known to wallow in on the internet when I have a couple hours to kill. It’s not just that looking at smashed-up buildings is really cool—on a superficial level, there’s something about destruction, of course, that’s tantalizing. Just like how everyone’s always stopping for car crashes or peeping out through the curtains when there’s an ambulance parked across the street, you know?

But there’s also something about looking tragedy in the face that makes ruin porn and metal appealing. The picture on the left is one I took in Erie. There’s a sort of second-world abjectness to places like Erie, and it’s chillingly beautiful in the same way as a harsh landscape or a forest after a fire. Somehow, life finds a way. Derelict buildings get burned down next to others that are rehabilitated. Grass finds its way up through city streets. There’s a survival instinct in places like Erie and places like Dortmund here in Germany that really appeals to me, and that goes for both the people who hang on or who work to improve the situation as well as for the deer who move back in and the saplings that bust through old houses’ foundations.

I wrote my template grad school essay (every school has different requirements, so I had to switch it up for each school) basically about the Rust Belt and how much influence it’s had on me. Sometimes I feel like a pretentious fuck when talking about that. This has a lot to do with the fact that, despite having put in my dues at jobs with hourly wages, I’ve basically gotten to live the bourgeois white person life people like Jonathan Franzen write about, at least as far as my education is concerned. I also feel like, when seen from the vantage point of Germany, the Rust Belt has a certain draw, because it’s familiar. The problems are predictable, as are many of the people.

But, in a way, working on my essay and editing the part of my thingy (the word “novel” still sticks in my throat) that takes place in Erie makes me take my homeland more seriously as an influence on my life. Metal has been a part of that nostalgic upwelling of nostalgia and empathy for the dying heartland and the gluttonous consumption of despair and renewal that power the Ruin Porn Belt. People growling and shrieking about death and despair and sexual inadequacy, to say nothing of the songs about Vikings and down-on-their-luck, teleporting Russian paraplegics, is the same as tooling around Erie with my grandma in the passenger seat, looking at neighborhoods left behind in the 1970s and locking the doors in the especially dicey parts in some ways. When you look especially at some of the more unsavory sides of black metal, there’s a lot of nostalgia there, whether it be for Wagner, for Odin and Loki or for a primordial earth without any life on it. Nostalgia and insecurity drive heavy metal.

Reading, editing, rewriting and rereading my missives on the Rust Belt was similar. It’s something I keep re-discovering, especially when I’m editing or when I read through old works. In my essay, I had a line that was something like, “My poems in high school were preoccupied by overgrown lots and heartbreak.” Maybe that line’s a bit half-baked, but I think it’s pretty true.

The last couple of weeks before the holiday break, I was itching to get out of Bonn. I took a couple trips to Dortmund and one to Rheinland-Pfalz, which helped bring in some Abwechslung, but I think my underlying drive was to get back to the States. This trip back was different than others in the sense that, where I was expecting some r & r, I got a whole mess of drinking a lot more cultural readjustment than I had really bargained for. I was kind of irritable the first few days. Seeing old friends was amazing, but somehow a little bit stressful. I was feeling pretty misanthropic, too, and mostly wanted to limit the size of groups I was hanging out it.

(As a sidenote: it’s kind of a chicken and egg question as to whether music influences mood or mood influences music. I’d say it’s a combo platter, but I’ve certainly felt more misanthropic the last few months, and I wonder what connection there is there to music itself. Tough call.)

Besides the epic, 36-hour road trip to Chicago for New Year’s, one of the more interesting experiences of my break was definitely being in Erie for a day. We went out to brunch with my grandma—bless her heart, she’s 88 and still pretty damn sharp despite the pink sweatpants and gloomy living room—and on the way, had a chance to scope out some of the more historical parts of Erie.

“Oh, this is such-and-such factory. They made munitions here during the war.”

Camera out. Click.

“This is the Bayfront Parkway. They started building this in the 80s. Before that, all of the streets went straight to the waterfront.”

“Cool.”

“Oh, that’s new,” she says, “they just built that Radisson and the convention center. Excuse me, Hilton. That went up in the last few years.”

My dad: “These used to be the public docks. People came out here with their cars to show off, you know, and get drugs and stuff like that. Everyone came down here when I was in high school. It was the place to be, once you could drive.”

Click. And so on.

Having things distilled for you by other people makes it easy to lap them up, because there’s a slightly rosy filter over all of the memories. Things like hanging out and buying pot at the public docks or something sound somehow awesome, as if you can imagine Harrison Ford in American Graffiti picking up there and hanging out on the hood of a Corvette, when they were probably just as lame as it was hanging out at Kent’s underage hotspots when I was in high school. Hardscrabble lives read really well in print and sound awesome when screamed to tremolo-picked guitars.

•

It’s interesting; last year around this time I was excited because I felt like I still had so much time in Germany to fart around and do cool stuff with my new friends. I had finally achieved some level of acclimation. This time around, I feel like time’s flown by, and I’m stunned that I only have about five and a half months left, give or take. Of course, it all depends on the circumstances. Grad school is far from a guarantee, although I’ve good good people in my corner and spent a solid amount of time chopping away at my crapplications. There are certain things that somehow seem less worth doing. Going to large social gatherings has turned into somewhat of a cost-benefit analysis, because there’s only so much time to really get to know people or whatever before I up and leave (probably) in July. It almost seems like a waste to make new friends, because I have a good few as it is. I find myself rationalizing scaling back and staying in much more than I psych myself out to go to some party for the sake of expanding my friends—my weekends have become much more about quality than quantity. When time gets short, it’s easy to become a homebody.

Senior year at Mac, I had two phases. In the first one, I was on the ball with homework but a total slacker on the weekends, staying in with the usual suspects to do our debauchery sitting down. Especially because I was working on the weekends, I didn’t have the stamina to go big. Right before the end, though, everyone went a little crazy. Of course, you have to pack every minute full right before graduation. I fully expect the same from this year. In winter, it’s easy to be lazy and wax nostalgic. However, we’ll see how summer turns out.

2012 has come with some pretty serious changes. The people at my second job really shit the bed on some key legal matters, which means my hours have been reduced, leaving me with three-day weekends like last year (yay!) and less money (boo.). I’m teaching a parents’ course in the evenings once a week, too, which means more things to prepare and less evening time to do what I feel like. I’ve been reading more. I’ve been keeping in touch with a lot of people less (sorry). I haven’t much felt like tending to my social network, and in a way I think this is characteristic of how I deal with the end-phases of things: withdrawal, apology, nostalgia.

However, grad school apps are done, and with some Opeth or Altar of Plagues roaring around in the background, I’m planning on spending the rest of winter working and waiting for all of the decisions I need to make—grad school, work permit, school stuff, lessons, some assorted personal matters of relatively high intensity—to present themselves. Now comes the waiting game.

Which will hopefully leave me with more time to update this blog, which is really hard to do on a regular basis for some reason.

Note: For ruin porn and news on various Rust Belt happenings, by the way, the website Rust Wire is really fantastic. They have some great articles and profiles of various decaying/rebuilding urban centers, such as Detroit, Cleveland and Youngstown, that are really engaging and sympathetic. Shrinking Cities is also really cool.

Wohnen u. Leben

My current state of mind can best be summed up in clichés right now: Flying By the Seat of My Pants is a phrase that pops into my head on a daily basis when I’m walking home and captioning up my day; Casting a Wide Net comes to mind as do All Over the Place and Throwing a Bunch of Shit at the Wall to See What Sticks.

I missed the Wild Beasts show but spent time with my new(ish) roommate. Things around here are changing at a faster pace than I can keep up with. For the second time in as many months, I’m in the process of finding a new roommate, a process that involves giving an endless stream of people a brief tour of my apartment and then passing small talk back and forth over tea to try to determine in 20 minutes’ time whether or not they’d be a suitable roommate. It’s heightened my sense that I’m a character in a book or movie, where faces appear, sometimes accompanied by a name. Only the important ones get the benefit of physical description, surname and memorable dialog. The rest are incidental to the main plotline.

The light outside was really weird today. A weird, morninglike mist hung in the air and I noticed for the first time that all of the cherry trees on my street were completely naked and the gutters filled with their leaves. It’s weird to simply not pick up on something like that. Helping my erstwhile roommates move out of our apartment and into their new one also increases the feeling of transition. Fall is my favorite season because of, and not in spite of, its weird brevity and transition-y-ness.

November’s going to be busy. I need to take the GRE in a couple of weeks, I’ll be working five days a week, Mondays and Wednesdays for about eleven hours at a stretch, there’s editing to be done, applications to be filled out, recommendation letters to wrangle, lessons to be planned, and of course fun to be had and concerts to attend. Normal people things. Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, at least as far as my laughably easy 2010/2011 timetable is concerned. But that’s okay. If I throw enough stuff at the wall—MFA apps, personal interactions, etc. etc.—something’s bound to stick.

Right?

Armut

Another day, another unrewarded peek at the balance of my bank account. This is the longest stretch of time I’ve gone unpaid since I started working at Dairy Queen at the tender age of 16. I’m dying here. I’m getting sick of living like a college student, seeing as I am no longer a college student.

In German, there’s a saying, „man redet nicht über Geld, man hat Geld“. Or, “One doesn’t talk about money; one has money.” I would amend that with the phrase, “…or not.”

The weather’s gotten cold. Two days ago, we took a lovely Sonntagsausflug to the Drachenfels (“dragon rock”), which is a way touristy castle perched up in the mountains just south of here. You trek up a path paved in asphalt that’s big enough for about eight people to walk abreast, past lots of little touristy stands selling honey and candles and souvenirs or offering beer and wurst, and parallel to the path runs a vintage railroad up to the top for which you have to pay like 7,-€ (not worth it).

For about ten minutes, it was nice to feel like I had the run of our little valley. I could see from the tiny black blob of Cologne’s cathedral in the north to the twisty blue set piece of the Rhine canyon in the south, and after having spent all of last week pretty much shut up in my room producing snot and heaving coal into my stove, it was pretty glorious to get a day in the fresh air and sun with people I like.

Adulthood seems to me to revolve pretty exclusively around how much you’re worth. Enjoyment is based on how much capital one has to enjoy oneself, and I find it increasingly difficult to have a good time for free. Hell, our excursion up to the castle even ended up costing me seven euros (for beer and chili on the walk back down), and at this point I’m so used to not having money that I stress out about having a good time even as I’m having it, wondering what kind of effect that’s going to have on future good times. Every action becomes a cost/benefit analysis in the adult world. It fucking sucks. If my parents are a reasonable standard upon which to judge financial circumstances, this is how life is going to be forever. Not that my parents are penny-pinchers or people who are overly obsessed with money, but money is a governing factor in our lives as a familial unit. The regular bailouts I’ve received over the past couple months of destitution make me worry I’ve become a cost/benefit factor myself.

But, soon I’ll get paid, and this is more than one can say for at least 10% of the American public and considerably more people worldwide who are victims of capitalism and bad circumstances. I started out writing this entry with the intention of bitching about my own circumstances, but as this article made quite clear to me, I should probably shut the fuck up and cut out the hand-wringing about my white people problems. Waahhh, I don’t have money. But. I still have a safety net; my parents can still help me out in the first place, my student loan debt is shitty but not unmanageably high (I hope) and hey, I even have health insurance.

Reading through McClelland’s piece really depressed me. The fact that the rape and pillaging of my state has been going on unabated for at least forty years and seems now to be both accelerating and becoming accepted as the status quo did a lot to put my grievances in perspective. They’re tearing my city down just like they’ve been doing in Detroit for the past ten years. My parents, too, work in public-sector jobs that, in the current climate, look like a nice piece of meat to be fed into the sausage grinder of Kasich’s austerity programs, and although the danger isn’t all that immediate, it makes me sick that union-busting, regressive apologists for the gluttonous global upper crust yacht set command us to pinch our pennies. Kasich doesn’t have to constantly worry about how much he takes in and gives out; eating out at a $10-a-plate Mexican restaurant, a luxury I look forward to when flying home for the holidays, would be beneath someone like him.

I thought a lot about my Uncle Dave and his involvement in politics after reading McClelland’s piece and spent the ride to work at the kindergarten blasting Masotodon and considering annulling my PAD contract to run for state senate. Then I pictured myself behind a podium at a debate, my fifty-year-old Republican opponent, his face brushed down with powder over orange pancake makeup, chiseling away at my defenses.

“My opponent isn’t even a religious man! Most of the photos on his Facebook page are of him drinking. Hell, there’s a photo of him in a miniskirt, photos of him laughing at two men kissing each other! This young, inexperienced socialist upstart wants to run for office why? So he can legalize all drugs and turn Ohio into the USSR!”

Being ever the blusher, I feel my ears getting hot as I summon enough passion to talk about my Uncle Dave, sidestepping the accusation of atheism but getting hit square in the chest by one charge of elitism after another.

In high school, everyone seemed to think I was going to go into politics because I talked about politics all the time. There’s a part of me that feels like I should make good on my anger, but I’m quite certain I’m 100% unelectable. If I’d gone through with my flirtation with Catholicism freshman year, maybe I’d have more of a chance.

•

I feel like I’m missing out on something big with this up-and-coming Occupy movement. Germany’s seen some decent demonstrations (albeit in Frankfurt and Berlin, both of which are several hours away), but here there’s not as much to protest about. There’s a part of me that wishes I were in the States to protest. Maybe I could help spearhead occupy Cleveland, turning Public Square into what it was meant to be. Hopefully Uncle Dave is proud of me anyway, regardless of my political laziness. I don’t believe in heaven, but it’s nice to think about him checking in from time to time in spiritual form.

I fully support what’s going on in the States and I hope like hell that it does something. It would be nice to see more of that outrage in Ohio itself, not just in New York and Minnesota and Washington. Where are the union acitivists in Cleveland? Where are the thousands of people laid off by LTV? Where are Youngstown’s Sheet & Tube veterans? If any of these people went to New York to protest, I strongly encourage them to get out of Zuccotti Park, get on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and take their voice to the foot of Terminal Tower.

Meanwhile, I’m going to Occupy My Desk Chair, throw another briquette into my stove and go get my laundry. I need to camp out here until my paycheck arrives so I can get back to being a good little capitalist.