A walk down memory alley

December 11, 1988, Sunday

Four days of
foreplay
and by the end of the week ...
Is no one real anymore? or anymore real?
I touch and tease and talk,
But I don't see him when he's not there.
And when he's here his face is not familiar.

Moving in dreams,
And yet I lack sleep.

December 13, 1988, Tuesday

I met a damsel in distress
Who fought dragons with broken wine glasses
She moved in shadows of candlelight
She showed me sights without a sound
And broke the silence with laughing gods
I'll build a tower for my lover
Keep her safe from herself

Instead of throwing myself under the academic bus this afternoon, I decided to drag out that old yellow spiral-bound notebook and see what kind of crazy shit I wrote almost twenty years ago. These were two particularly poetic passages that stood out from that cold December; the first entry was for Todd, the second for Melissa. Funny how I never wrote anything readable before then, and sad how even then what I wrote was pure shit.

The uselessness that was Todd (although I still sometimes mistype his name as Tod, German for death) dragged on till late the following summer. The bizarreness of Melissa petered out sometime in the spring.

After a few more pages--on the level of "I still smell you on my clothes"--we get to this:

December 14, 1988, Wednesday

The moon wasn't right tonight, but I was. And I remain hungry. If I get on your nerves, just brush me off. Both of you are pretty good at it already, and you're such great teachers. Perhaps I may one day brush you off like the dandruff you left on my sheets or like the mud caked on my muffler after we trampled it in your car. I may just fucking wash my hands altogether and be done with it.

And then there's some Russian phrases. We three were studying Russian together; in fact, Melissa and I met in Russian I my first semester at UTA. I was smitten. Todd was in a different section, but the subsequent spring semester we were enrolled in the same section of Russian II.

If I remember correctly ... and I do ... that double-whammy significantly contributed to my almost flunking out of college:

Fall 88 GPA: 4.000
Spring 89 GPA: 2.385

But how exactly did I manage to earn my one A that term in Russian II? The one class I only went to when I was drunk and depressed? (My one D was in PHIL 2311 Logic, as if my personal life needed that little reminder! Too bad there wasn't a PHIL 2312 Fucked-Up Crazy Shit that I could've drunkenly aced!)

Now I rarely write bad poetry (or poetry at all). Bad relationships no longer inspire me. And I don't compose verse as I'm getting laid. I only pray I have the good enough sense to burn all these notebooks (as well as push this big delete button) before I die.

Nur ein bisschen

All throughout the German language course Saturday morning I kept thinking that the grammar my teacher was going over was too easy for me and that I should transfer to a more advanced level. Then we had to open our mouths and introduce ourselves, and the realization that I have absolutely (or at least almost) no vocabulary under my belt or in my head hit me square in the face. Worse: we had to read a short passage from the textbook and then translate it into English. I started to think that perhaps I should drop down a level instead. Or two. Maybe I'll just ride it out for a couple of weeks.

I like my teacher. That's an improvement over the angry (and smelly) Romanian from this summer. She talked about being a girl during the Berlin Airlift, jumping up and down on the mounds of rubber at Tempelhof with excitement when the one plane would tilt its wings to let the children below know that it was going to drop chocolates with tiny parachutes down to them. I almost always like people who can share stories from the Cold War. I wanted to shrink her and put her in a tiny box for my desk and make her jump for joy every time I lifted the lid and dropped a Hershey's kiss down for her.

I especially liked how she introduced herself and then immediately admonished us not to pronounce her name "like Americans." Now that's the German efficiency (and domineering) I can get behind! Ah, we shall see, no?

Köln

Just a week-and-a-half ago I spent a blissful couple of days in Köln by myself visiting museums and enjoying the culture of one of Germany's largest and oldest cities. Click on the image to see some of the highlights of that excursion.

Unfit for Life

Learning German is making me even more unfit as a human being. As if having studied Spanish, Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Ukrainian, and Latin have made me either marketable or more lovable! But German is becoming a special case: I’m not learning to communicate (i.e., how to buy falafel from the Turks) but rather to sit in a dark room alone with several dictionaries in order to decode, decipher, un-encrypt—to translate, carry over—semantic meaning from the Devil’s tongue to the language of angels. And I’m learning this “skill” from an angry Romanian woman whose smell I’ve grown accustomed to already.

So, I won’t be making friends in German. That’s involves a specialized vocabulary that my skill set can not at the present time manage. My morning language course, too, can attest to the fact that in German I will be (in the most absolute sense) all by myself: I’m not only alone in my endeavor to take the advanced reading/translation course alone but I’m also enduring, surviving the more remedial—actually the most remedial—course in the program. I’m surprised each morning when the short bus does not appear outside my dorm to carry me off to class with the (other) retards. (But at least I actually brung myself a real wordbook from Amerika to helps me with the studying.)

Yesterday afternoon I spent about four hours translating selections of Kandinsky’s aesthetic theory, and now I have a few pages of Walter Benjamin to tackle, conquer, capitulate to by my next class Monday. Benjamin and Celan are the main reasons I’m here in the first place learning the unlearnable with the unlearned, but I guess I’m not the first to blame my misery on G-d’s chosen.

Now I have five days all to myself. The others—those people—are heading off to the great Benelux conundrum, but I, because of UNRESOLVED ISSUES stemming from the GREAT UNPLEASANTNESS cannot fathom venturing near that part of the planet at this time. Instead, I’ll be visiting some of the cities nearby, exploring the offerings of Dokumenta in Kassel, the sculpture exhibit in Münster, and the great Civilized City of Köln. To further prove just how useless my German is, I will be tackling each new city purely in my native tongue. Halleluja! Hosanna hosanna! Pray that the train union strikes do not keep me in Marburg….

Internationalismus

… or the post where Euro-Franz offends absolutely everyone. (By the way, here "euro" is pronounced "oy-Roh," pretty much how a Jew would address Rosie O'Donnell.)

Sitting at Café Angst yesterday afternoon, I asked myself the following question: is it racist for me to call my professor a smelly Romanian? She is indeed from Romania, and my nose can attest to her smelliness especially after sitting rather a bit too closely to her these past couple of days during our one-on-one sessions. And the next question: why am I in Germany studying German with a smelly Romanian? (I guess maybe a better next question would’ve been: why is this particular Romanian smelly? But my advanced education and intellect preclude obvious segues.)

Then I remembered: my morning language instructor is from Hungary. Quick: what’s German for “What the fuck?!?!” So I am sitting miserably at Café Angst—and no, that’s not the real name of this place, but Café Angst is such a better, more appropriate name for the basement of the Mensa, which is Roman-Germanic for "Student Union Building (SUB)"—slowly realizing that I’m here (heute Deutschland) studying German with a bunch of foreigners (“New Europeans,” I believe is the official term used by the US State Dept.; Morgen die Welt! no doubt.)

I refuse to believe that these so-called new Europeans are somehow better or even similar to the old ones. When are the old Europeans going to export their superior "bathroom technologies" to the east? Will there come a day of no smelly Romanians? Hell, why doesn’t Herr Professor Dingleberry just outsource the whole fucking program to the Chinese? That way, my solid German education would be just as good as poisoned dog food without the messy analogy.

Herr Professor Dingleberry, you must know, is the quintessential oompa-loompa kind of German who has a surreal lilt to his perfect cartoon caricature voice. I suspect he secretly wears lederhosen and plays the tuba.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to accept “feedback” on my German from teachers who misspeak and mispronounce almost every word in English. If I can understand their comments in not only broken but completely butchered English, then certainly any poor slob on the streets here won’t bat an eye when I use the “soft” pronunciation of the German ch instead of the “hard” one. But as the Nigerian woman who sits next to me attested, there are still a few old Hitlerites who appear out of nowhere (history? the bushes?) to scold foreigners for speaking English and/or bad German. Funny how it takes an 80-year-old German fuck to protect the language from a young African and Asian woman who came all this way to study the devil's language and who are simply waiting at a bus stop.

Oh, and you thought the Nigerian woman was going to get off easy: I refer to her (in my mind) as the Nigerian communist because what is mine is hers. One day this past week she, throughout the course of the class meeting, had "borrowed" my dictionary, pencil, pen, and notebook. A question I had never really considered asking before: Can I borrow my dictionary again?

Funny how speaking Polish last night after the concert with Kasja was the most normal I’ve felt since arriving in Germany. Looking back at just last week, speaking Spanish (with a lisping Castillian inflection--I sounded like a gay Puerto Rican--redundant?) was pure bliss, being able to express what I wanted and being able to understand the replies. The people I share English with here are not worth the pixels on your computer screens. Besides, there’s no way I could capture their insipid conversations and “observations.” (Case in point: we see a fabric store, and one says, “There’s a fabric store. I like fabric stores.” Gee, thanks for sharing. Why don’t you save that to blog later and just be quiet for now?)

The cute Azerbaijani boy asked me rather rudely in German on the way to the concert last night, “You don’t speak anything other than English?” I replied in Russian that I understood pretty much everything he was saying to the people he had just been speaking Russian to, and then in German I filled out my resume: Polnisch. Spanisch. Japonisch. Suckmydickbisch. I didn’t take it too personally, though, because he’s probably the prettiest eye candy around. When he wasn’t looking, I snapped a few photos of him. What the hell is going on with my fetish for widow’s peaks?

Required Reading (definitely though with love)

This Independence Day it's important for us Americans to finally get it through our thick heads that there is a fundamental, essential difference between nationalism and patriotism. And that neither of those has anything to do with hegemonic warmongering. Just to keep us straight on those points, here is one of my favorite poems from patriot Nikki Giovanni:

I Laughed When I Wrote It
(Don’t You Think It’s Funny?)

the f.b.i came by my house three weeks ago
one white agent one black (or i guess negro would be
more appropriate) with two three-button suits on (one to
a man)
thin ties—cuffs in the bottoms—belts at their waists
they said in unison:
ms. giovanni you are getting to be quite important
people listen to what you have to say
i said nothing
we would like to have to give a different message
i said: gee are all you guys really shorter than hoover
they said:
it would be a patriotic gesture if you’d quit saying
you love rap brown and if you’d maybe give us some
leads
on what some of your friends are doing
i said: fuck you
a week later the c.i.a came by two unisexes one blond afro
one darker one three bulges on each showing lovely bell-
bottoms and boots
they said in rounds:
sister why not loosen up and turn on
fuck the system up from the inside
we can turn you on to some groovy
trips and you don’t have to worry
about money or nothing take the commune
way and a few drugs it’ll be good for you
and the little one
after i finished a long loud stinky fart i said serenely
definitely though with love
fuck you
yesturday a representative from interpol stopped me in the
park
tall, neat afro, striped hip huggers bulging only in the right
place
i really dig you, he said, i want to do something for you
and you alone
i asked what he would like to do for me
need a trip around the world a car bigger apartment
are you lonely i mean we need to get you comfortable
cause a lot of people listen to you and you
need to be comfortable to put forth a positive image
and digging the scene i said listen i would sell
out but i need to make it worth my while you understand
you just name it and i’ll give it to you, he assured me
well, i pondered, i want aretha franklin and her piano
reduced to fit next to my electric
typewriter on my desk and i’ll do anything you want
he lowered his long black eyelashes and smiled a whimsical
smile
fuck you, nikki, he said

And below some more worthwhile reading this holiday: first, an op-ed about immigration hysteria, and secondly, an interview with probably the most intelligent conservative thinker I've ever heard on what's wrong with the current administration.

• The Founding Immigrants
  By Kenneth C. Davis
  Published: July 3, 2007
  Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.


• Interview with Victor Gold
  By Bill Moyers
  Aired: June 29, 2007
  The impact of the sound bite mentality which you find in both parties...is there's been a debasing of the system. Because if you listen to these — I call them the Stepford candidates — on both sides in these debates the only two candidates that speak clearly are the ones they call the kooks.

Desperate Measures

I have run dangerously low on my cologne and need every person in the world who reads this blog to find me more. (Well, actually I just need one of you to help.) Apparently this particular kind is not sold in the US (or perhaps it's just not sold in the otherwise thriving Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis), which makes perfect sense because the only places I’ve ever bought it previously was in Japan and in Poland. It is Chanel’s Platinum Ēgoïste eau de toilette. It comes in 125 ml (4.2 fluid ounces) and—most importantly—is not a spray bottle.

I’ve been wearing this for the past nine years. This last bottle has lasted almost five years because I wear so little of it at one time. It delights me. Is there anyone out there who can help me get my hands on another bottle? Of course, I will pay for it as well as for shipping. Or perhaps there is something in the United States that I can send you in exchange. (Democracy? Freedom? Sure … just let me contact my president!) Send me an email at skajlab at hotmail if you’re willing and able to take on this mission. God speed.