ten thousand percent chutzpah

not sure if i am sick or jetlagged or how much of either combines to "both". my brain is like oatmeal when all we can stomach are leafy greens and tonic water.

(moreover, thanks to europe, i am down to one cup of coffee a day. maybe that's it. please hold your applause; shit like this aint gonna last more than four days into the fall semester.)

back stateside, my father sets his fork down with a soft ting. it is 8am at this table, 5pm in switzerland, 5pm my heart. he's in his rough brown robe. meagre chest hairs lean out to read the wall street journal with him, which fans out around a bowl of cereal like an open wing. he is eating the cereal with a fork. "i just realized i have lived in this house longer than the one i grew up in, and at the time, that felt like forever." a page of the newspaper is lightly delegated to its other side. "and i like that." fork into cereal bowl.

i am thinking about going back to bed. my coffee mug is red, just red, nothing else, and i like that.

and then -- suddenly -- the fern that has kept placidly to itself in the corner of the living room for the same length of time that my father has lived in this house has been eviscerated with a fantastic and enviable gusto, its bowels spread for our inspection along a long stretch of (new) carpet.

my parents recently bought a puppy -- golden retriever no. 8 in the sequence of dogs that have lived in this house. my family could measure time in dogs.

meet: rosie. or, colloquially, rosie-goddamn. she is a machine.

every night i dream of mountains

a fear of heights and a desire to go alpining aren't necessarily complimentary to one another, but one does one's best. i have pushed myself in many new directions these last six days, and i dont have time to try and write about it now. i will in the states, though, promise. for the moment, a picture of some of where i was hiking (read, kicking my own butt):


i am currently in zurich, and flying home at the end of two days. i dont think it will be that hard to leave europe --after all, after a month spent in one city and then another, it all becomes rather similar-- but man, that magical place in the swiss alps ...

lets just say that i have the world's best job waiting for me next summer.

part of me wants to get on a train and go back, through the tunnels and into the gondola and to 10,000 feet of no-air edge and snow and frozen lakes and meadows and whole herds of myteriously chiming cowbells swallowed and lost in the fog, swallowed in the folds of the mountain, and miss my flight home. either i go home or i go to gimmelwald.

or ... i go home ... and then i go to gimmelwald ...

ladies and gentlemen, i am here to report that the swiss alps are indeed real.

this is not to say that i ever really doubted their existence necessarily, but the mythology, built out of postcards of charming pastoral scenes and the occasional wanderer who has returned and for whom a lack of approproate descriptive words renders them slack-jawed and gestulating violently with their hands as if they could pull the compositions of sheer magnitude out of thin air ...

which is sort of what i am doing now.

it is raining and at least 3/4ths of the residents in the hostel have planned to stay in. i didnt come all the way to the swiss alps to read in a nice little cabin.

off into the thunder and wet and majesty!

this is where i am:

and this is where i am going:

adam is going home early; he has been sick for most of the trip so far, and made the decision yesterday on the train back to germany that he's not going to spend buckets of money to be miserable. i didnt realize he was going to get off the train when he did, so it was an odd quick goodbye on the platform, feel better, have fun.

all over europe, the male pigeons are puffing up their neck feathers and dancing in circles. in the parks of amsterdam, along the high castle walls of tubingen. the latter, as i witnessed this morning, can prove to be a rather tricky place to try and mate. one bad choice of footing and -fwoop- the bird is dropping into space. babymaking failure.

i am debating the purchase of a pair of hiking boots. unfettered and footloose. all is well.

apologies ahead of time for my shitty spelling; this computer thinks i am writing in very poor dutch

interesting amasta-facts:

-every year when amsterdam drains its canals, they pull up about 20,000 bikes
-pot isnt actually legal; tolerance is just very high.
-nevertheless, less than 10% of the dutch actually use it.
-but they like it because the tourists boost that industry to a worth of €4 million.
-it costs €150 for a lady of the night to rent out a red light booth for 8 hours. a customer pays €50 for 15 minutes with her in that booth.
-that is a potential gross of €1450 a night.
-there are panic buttons in every booth-- if something untoward happens, the lady can depress the button and watch as her assaialt is beat to a pulp by the ladies from the nearby booths.
-second to show up is a security service, just to make it official. last to show up are the police.
-the EU is trying to put a bookend on the red-light district. shut down by 2015.
-the EU is composed of prudes.



"homesick? how can you be homesick?"

you obviously dont know what it is like to be from california!
i am walking many miles every day. i am getting a tan. i eat a lot of muesli. and investing in local specialties -- french fries or raw herring between two slices of bread, dangling my feet over the canal. i like getting lost. i like not knowing what exactly i am eating, or where exactly i am sleeping tomorrow night.

this morning i found an unfamiliar piece of lingerie in my bed. i dont know how it got there. i was flirting with a graphic design student from brazil who studies in italy and is here in berlin to look at schools. i know it was not his lingerie.

hung over in berlin. coffee, just some fucking coffee, some green-painted picnic table on the street, in front of a cafe. four persian men are joking and being loudly amicable. cigarettes being enthusiastically truncated by four loudly amicable train stacks. they have two vans that are totally packed with orangina. one of them gets up from their table to slide open the door and boom, there they are, like bricks in a wall, all these bottles of orangina. cigarette smoke. the sound of a palm slapping a green painted table top.

i am watching the bicyclists buzz by. it is good to be back in germany. there is a tremendously tangible difference between countries that did and did not get money as a result of the marshall plan. even a shitty handle on the german language is better than a zero handle on czech or slovakian. on the other hand, coffee with baileys -or a similar alcohol- was available almost everywhere in prague. gott damn you, germany, you aint measuring up.

coffee and europe have a different sort of relationship than coffee and california. if one orders a kaffee -a groß kaffee - it is very likely that one will receive a couple shots of espresso instead of our watered down home drip-and-dunk. there are starbucks everywhere, and i have only broken once. it was across the street from the staatopera in vienna and it was raining and i was alone and the classical architecture was overwhelming. just a fucking cup of coffee.

adam and i have lost all sort of a plan; the only thing we are sticking to is our final date of departure. everything is up to chance.

one anecdote:

adam and i had been seperated at the train station, but we both decided to get on a train to salzburg as planned and see if we could find the other there. it never happened, and i didnt end up seeing him until a couple nights into vienna. (during the elapsed time he had gone through slovenia, croatia and italy in a search for a small town in the mountains where his great grandfather was born. i cant begin to tell the story as well as he can, so i wont even try. lets just say it involved impossible train stations, armed gaurds, snaked, deserted mountain paths, and people showing him baby pictures of his mother.)

so i took the train from munich to salzburg on my own. three people sat down with me -- two men and a woman, all wearing jean jackets. the woman was wearing aviators, and one of the men had a mullet. this same man was carrying a beer and small dog prone to explosive sneezing. (if there is one thing i love about munich, its the open-container policy. moreover, all city dwellers have to pay a pretty hefty dog tax, which means that people who have dogs tend to actually want them.) we ended up making conversation of sorts, between my shitty german and the aviator-lady's pretty decent english. i asked about the words for sneeze and rain, the mullet man asked me if i lived near highway 101 in california. the other man didnt know any english at all, except for one phrase which he kept repeating after he saw it made me laugh:

"yes we can! yes we can! yes we can!"

just landed in prague. adam and i ate at a chinese restaurant down the street from the hostel. we were the only people in the restaurant, and some music came on magically just after we ordered. christmas muzak tunes. chinese food in the czech republic. its like we have some existential point to prove.

or maybe just i do, i dont know.

yesterday was the great bratislava adventure, during which the emphasis changed from being in bratislava to getting to bratislava. another point to prove. i am putting forth the hypothesis that slavic train stations are actually portals into another dimension -- kiosks open and close with apparently zero relationship to the clock, bus tickets are indistinguishable from parking tickets, the hallways are always empty and echoing even if there is no sound to be echoed, it felt like. deserted. there is a definate case of the fuck-its going on in bratislavia; things are falling apart, and its not that they dont have enough money to fix things up - which they dont - but also that nobody seems to care. pride of residence. adam and i bought some ice creams in the station (the only open kiosk and the only visible source of food) and ate the while waiting for the train back to wien. it felt ridiculously decadent.

and it felt good to get back to wien, back into the week of rain in the city of museums and sophisticated music. the sun came out this morning and i had a difficult time recognizing the city.

the more i learn about these cities and the more i talk to (read: drink with) strangers from other countries, the more i learn about myself. part of me wants to say that if my teacher hadnt died, i wouldnt have gone on this trip.

once i start thinking that, i know that i am thinking too much.

into the most haunted city in europe!

i went to mass at st stephens cathedral this evening to hear the schubert b minor. while the priest was droning on in german, which is a language that i can only use to navigate train stations and buy beer, i began thinking a lot about this last year. somewhere between exhaustion, frustration, and epiphany, i began to cry. the lady sitting to my right handed me a tissue, the lady to the left smiled at me and whispered something in german. they must have thought i was very pious, or guilty, or both.

vienna is very museum-heavy, man. kind of has a brutishly classical industrial feel.

it is raining quite a bit and i am too proud to buy an umbrella.

i am in a hostel right now on the outskirts of vienna. my cousin --adam-- and i have been seperated -- more on that later --, and i leapt at the chance of a bed for 15€. i can look out the open window to my left, the cool air blowing up from the city that is spread out below. i have a room to myself, but it is rural and lonely, and i am anticipating meeting adam in a couple of days down where the fireworks are coming from.

i have five hundred things to say, but i am also eager to catch the first train out of here in the morning, so to bed soon. i have been living very much moment to moment, and it has worked out splendidly. adam and i have hooked up with the dubliners something real -- we'll be randez-vousing a couple more times around the continent.

primary nutrients: kepabs, beer, and pitarittos (pita bread with stuff in it, all rolled up in the style of a burrito)

a realization: i miss the city already.

this trip is making my heart explode. i am continuously overwhelmed with joy. tomorrow i will descend into the city by myself, speaking shitfaced german and wearing an orange dress. aaahaaaaaa.

also, you can buy beer from vending machines here.