Bonn, Germany



The only two public bathrooms in Bonn I have visited in this first month have special lights installed to prevent mainline injections. One’s in the university palace, the other under the train station, both flooded totally with the same radioactive glow of blue light that leaks through the doorway gaps. The whole idea is that this blue ligh reflects off the skin and blinds the addict’s eyes from tracing the oxygen rich veins down his or her arm. Looking at the mirror in these bathrooms will hollow your skin to a dull milk color and make you look for only a second that you’re the one who’s been foiled again by German anti-drug techniques.

I go back after this pause to the room where a 100+ group of Program students from the far east and the far west were received to learn how to navigate a webpage for course registration for international classes, all of us now with one-month’s experience in Bonn. One month ago, we all were in this same room watching another bilingual presentation in German and English with the windows open to the evergreen, manicured, and trash-free lawn, after just being received in the central court of the palace in which Kaisers of the disintegrated German history were also once received. There’s no ceremony like the one in my head with the horns and complexly dressed ladies overlooking from open windows. We’re clustered and fragmented, all remotely similar in clothes, but already blindly picking who we’re going to be best friends with for the next month of the introduction course, which is now over. I picked a girl, Sam, with eccentric antique class and a 6’6’’ man who picked up a nickname, Buffalo Dan, immediately on arrival. This is because he is from Buffalo, where the people, according to Buffalo Dan wear sweat pants and eat chicken wings all day. He’s told me twice about a story he’s been trying to finish about a cat that gets stuck on the moon but finds it better and wants to stay. The other in the circle was a girl who many have not seen in weeks. It’s rumored that she wants to be a German teacher but hates Germany and lays in bed for days only skyping her boyfriend in America, waiting for our departure day. The German past tense of skyped is geskyped.

In the long presentation hall of today, the view to the Rhein is again just out of reach, and the international staff draws the billowing peach curtains which run the 6-meter-high windows, leaving the windows open for a good chill. It’s dark so that we clearly see for the second time this month the mood graph. And I prove to myself that my mood meter is haywire. The Mood Curve is a rollercoaster of a chart in the PowerPoint presentation. Spanning the whole experience of a semester, it presents the whole group with their emotions: how they’ll probably feel for the next five months, so as to tell us don’t worry when you feel bad, feel like you don’t belong, feel like you’ve made a mistake, feel set back years, feel misunderstood for walking, feel like there was never any reason for you to leave, feel like you're stepping on flowers when you’re in a group with eight other Americans you have to take the bus with to class, feel bad when you finally get used to it and then have to go back home, how you feel when your memories of home grow stark, linear, and infinitely nowhere, how you feel when the present makes you tired and forgetful, how you feel when a foreign eye becomes a monster that is out for your soul, how you feel when you’d rather be deaf then here a word you don’t understand, how you feel when the ground beneath you sways and dances you like an exotic dream, how you feel when you hear a voice you’ve never heard, how feel when you finally get to see how it ought to be. It rises and sinks past days specified by our excursions, the highest being the day we tasted six glasses of wine in a basement. The next slide on the first day was the one where they talked about beer. Today is the lowest point on the curve. I know that the most of the students from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan don’t know English or German well at all. The Chinese do, though.

The class breakfast this morning with Frau Paust, whose resemblance to my mother is something I sometimes brag about, also marks the end of the first month. Last night I was told by the friends I’ve made how easy I am to embarrass, how often I just need to let go, because after all, I’m in some place I’ve never been. This morning she asked why I was always so afraid. I explained away my fear of surface relationships, something she noted was nearly impossible to pass in five month’s time. This is an especially difficult task, and I explain to her the American ideal of Study Abroad, the experience of endless befriending, endless minutes of sheer shock from the fun that comes with leaving America for change. But now I’m excited. Tomorrow I am going by bus (German trains are too expensive) to Berlin to see Sarah, whose year-long absence from home breaks hearts in Kansas, whose earned respect is expressed through long sighs of friends at home who need to see her now, but who I get to see.

On the plane here I watched the night as I was hurled into the future to find myself reverted to a child-like status. Being abroad is turning back a clock but drinking more. A balance made nearly impossible by not being able to communicate to anyone but people of the same status.

I crept to the kitchen late one night to open the door with the same involuntary embarrassment I with which I take every step on this land. I opened to the door to a dark room with a dark sofa and the dull outline of a figure in the chair. This pause would have lasted ages and likely been forgotten had the man in the chair in the dark not gently told me to come in. I gestured to the light switch and with minimal German requested that I flip it on. He was there on the phone making small Cameroonian French noises into the microphone. I avoided contact and swigged from a cardboard juice container. I still question whether this looks barbaric as it does when anyone else but you notices it. This could or could not be a sign of American upbringing. This question becomes a clout of worry that seems at a constant glandular drip on in the frontal lobe. This then makes it very hard to not be anonymous where ever you decide to place yourself.

Naoya is a Japanese student with loud camouflage and thick denim pants. His face looks rendered. His hair is buzzed and mowed with asymmetrical patterns across his temples, where his smile can reach when he laughs. But with a blink and a look back, his mouth is closed and stern. One day in class, after he spent the last night with his razor, he stood up to present to the class over Japanese religions in 15 minutes. Frau Paust sprang up and waddled over to grip his head and gaze at the two and half or so lighting bolts cut out of his thin whiskery head. She explained the dangers this symbol and the SS, which would possibly make him the wrong friends. Always in fun she has to explain, but being a German, she had to tell him to change it. After class he went home and made a few more cuts in with the same erratic gestures and it came out looking like bows, his head wrapped like a present. Naoya is now gone, having only stayed in Germany for one month. After visiting Berlin, all he could say about it was that is was very, very sad. I will remember the day I walked by the giant lawn in front of the palace, explaining to him in broken German the feelings of smoking pot, aided by the wobbling of my head, which he repeated and smiled to his temples.

The Cameroonians, Dany and Erik, may or may or may not live together in the same room. This has been a common question among the American girl across the hall and me. They walk in and out of the door at different times, are often together, and are often in the same room. These rooms are very small and built for one. If they do live together, an amazing sense of personal space these men must have. One is taller, smiley, and sings deeply throughout the halls. He sings Lady Gaga very deeply. I cannot escape a discussion over her, but my opinions are forever concealed and irrelevant to this man. The other never shows his teeth and speaks English with demand. They question why Americans learn another language. He does have a point. It is mostly in jest, why we are here. Sam from Michigan is having one big adventure just across the hall. I later learned that Erik studies mechanical engineering and left to go to Frankfurt to study. They were indeed living together. I danced at an small African club with him and other sturdy Cameroonians and Tunisians on the other side of the Rhein. Inside was a humble portal to world under think sand colored arches and mirror in which everyone saw themselves. Ben from Wisconsin was told, “You must show America your dancing.”

We arrived later that night a Turkish all-night restaurant, one of thousands across Germany that sells very cheap lamb or chicken sandwiches. When Americans pronounce this word is sounds like doner. After ordering we sat and watched Lady Gaga on the television screen. This lasted a time that does not matter to anyone any more. Behind me were two track jacket college students with their faces in the steaming lamb meet and onions. He yelled at me to see who we were, European exchange students or Americans.I told him who, and my friends walked out as I lingered around to see what he had to say. He seem to refuse to accept the Americans girls' hilarious surprise that when he studied in Albany, shit-town U.S.A, as he called it, he would tell girls to this hilarious surprise that he spoke more than one language. I told him it was a big country. His friend told me they were drunk. I told them I was here to study the German translation of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I asked his friend if he'd heard, and he said, "Yes! The new Dostoevsky!" I was missing my bus and quickly hurried out to the sight of the sloppier one, the one who studied in America, pumping his fist forward in the air and chanting "America!"

Before I left for Germany I pulled up a satellite’s eye view of Bonn and the surrounding area. At the same altitude, I then looked at Lawrence. Kansas City is in the Netherlands. This is also to where a students from Chicago, a neurosciences major who loves to write stuff, escaped during our first excursion, which was two busloads full of students. Soon the program will be over and the Americans will be let off a leash to wander this dense country with almost no room to spare. No room in the people’s head for curiosity, at least to anyone but the pretty American girl glasses across the hall. I have not been lost yet.

I am only a stray who only wishes to not cause a nuisance. I’ve spent time wanting to fit in but never sticking. My tactile nature has been reduced to stomach pains in the morning and mud on the paths around the lawns in front of the palace that is now the University’s main building. A Japanese girl whom I've not talked to besides a few greeting with is someone who I know I can identify with. Talking with Sam, the word she came up with was scared. She searched some more, but yes it was indeed scared.

I’ve seen four very old churches, two central shopping districts with the same cobble stone streets. The people cling in groups and remember silently, talking mostly of food.

Sarah, with her first blog post, put "settling-in" in those quotes.

I can't wait to see her.

A Safe Watershed



An old graveyard overlooked the highway that led across the river to the new airport. When it rained, the earth on the hill loosened and bodies rose gradually. So a team of three young men on the graveyard were there for doing the maintenance, keeping the buried down after summer rain.

A plane filled with young women flew over and the sound in the air was scorched for some very long seconds while Freedy let the new boy know what he signed up for: Recently, a filmy waste from bodies in the town’s watershed contaminated the river that divided the city and the airport.

“First things first. I haven’t had sex in three days on account of all this Spirtual Waste in the water,” Freedy said. “The science teachers at the school said it must be coming from this graveyard. It’s the oldest one in town.” As the new boy listened, he unearthed a body that had begun to rise. His hands slipped down his shovel and his head followed down to the body whose head had begun to expose a bit of brain.

“Smell that? That’s what happens when the brains get out,” Freedy said.

The film reeked of spirituality.

“Spirtual Waste?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t believe in it. It’s been trickling down to the watershed area.”

Freedy and the other worker named Bo came and patched the head using gauze and stitches as the new boy watched, trying not to believe what he saw.
Another plane filled with women took their voices, and they continued the maintenance.

Freedy called the science teachers, and he said that they had found another brain exposed. They still didn’t have a good answer about where it came from. So he hung up quickly.

“It was difficult for them to be accurate on whether it the waste they were finding in the river was the body odor from river bathers, vomit from a post-fasting period feast, or unused semen. But they were sure the brains of the bodies seemed to dam it.”

The three men continued to steadily place old limbs back into the half-rotted coffins. They did not find another loose brain, but Bo called Freedy over to the edge of the hill to witness the damage that had already been done. They sat to watch the girls on the highway to airport.

“Watch them, boy,” Bo said. “Mostly women, flying from the new airport as fast as they could, searching for a cure by starting careers.”

Freedy said the worst was that the waste had given the girls false hopes, that their brains were going to be gouged from their heads when their new lives out their ended. He looked at the new boy.

“What are you going to do with your body when you die?”

“Donate it to science.”

“That’s what I’m talking about, Bo, you see all these kids think its smart to donate their bodies to science, not even thinking how that makes the girls do the same thing. You know what that means, boy? All these planes?”

“That means the whole country would be infected.” Bo said.

“I don’t believe it.” The new boy said.

“I just need one of them.” Freedy said.

“For what?” The boy said.

“I’m looking for a girl to offload my complete history in, so I can free myself.”

“Memories.” Freedy’s memories were those of paralysis and vanity.

He said the memories weren’t really real in the first place. But now, Freedy’s fragmented history was now serialized in the ears of the many women he had brought up the hill. The last girl he brought up to the graveyard could not be objective about his history and ended up ejecting Freedy’s memories all over the graves.

“Last girl of yours, she must not have been white,” said Bo.

Freedy said that when he revealed his history as fact, her skin color turned from the glow of ocean froth into an inky red tide, and then she began squeeze and roll Freedy’s life in pictures out of the ear on the other side of her face. Next thing, she was on a flight to California to fulfill her duty as a woman and become a neurosurgeon. Only one explanation for that kind of hope: something spiritual had gotten to her.

He had not even begun to tell her about his method of keeping a whole world of Spiritual Waste from rising out of his mountain. As she ran, he yelled at her that they’d never get his brain from his head, and that he’d have to make his body suffer a very physical lethal blow, so it was obvious how he died. No science needed.

After she left, sprinkled over the loose ground were pieces of pictures, one of which showed a foreign airport and a deplaning girl with a stack of books crushing her head into the ground. But they buried that one.

“Tonight I’m gonna take my new girl up here. And she’s not contaminated. Heads screwed on straight. If she’s says she wants to be an engineer, she’ll be with me till I die. Girls who are engineers know how to lock their minds in their heads. Girls who are engineers don’t like California, anyway.”

He paused.

“Have you been burying those pictures, Bo?”

“Yes sir.”

“Where have your girls been?” Said the new boy.

Bo only pulled a framed picture of his mother out of his coat pocket.
Bo had had a girlfriend and had sex with her. Afterward, he said he loved her, and that he had finally figured out what good sex was. He said:

“It’s the phenomenal meeting of mental, physical, and rhythmic awareness. You have to do that all at the same time. And you can’t even think about it.”

After that, the girl screamed as a framed picture of his mother slid out of the ear on the other side of her face. Bo’s mother had died of the Spritual Waste when Bo was born, but in the picture, she looked like she did in the 60s, pregnant and dancing. She was tall and atmospheric with no signs of damages.

“But that can’t be it. It can’t only be the loose brains that are letting the girls go, can it?” The new boy said.

After he said that, a picture of the three men, each sailing their own Spanish galleon, rolled out of the new boy’s ear and glided into the river at the bottom of the hill. He screamed until he saw what the picture had done.

The three men on the hill watched the cars stop on the highway. Carloads of girls ran down to the bank. Each was very pretty and made each man love the world they watched from the hill. More women from the airport came to the foot and looked at the river. They gazed at the river and talked about memories, throwing water up in the air, and even acting out scenes of their lives: sneaking out of windows past curfew, going to college. A woman with the infant cried and dipped him in the water. Yes, the waste was surely stifled.

More reports of a decrease in Spiritual Waste in surrounding areas filled in on the radio as the men who had very forgiving jobs watched and thought about the many children they would bring into this world with the help of the woman, waiting until the day wives can mutilate their bodies so the cause of death is simple.

The sun was setting and the bodies were all tucked in. It was time to leave work.

“Where are you going now, new boy?” asked Bo.

“I’m going to go masturbate into your mom,” the new boy laughed with the relief of getting off work and then paused, remembering about Bo.

“His mom’s dead,” said Freedy.

“It’s okay,” said Bo. “I’m not emo about it.”

There is now a website you can visit on how to keep your watershed safe from anything that may turn up in the water of some middle america.

Fart Jokes

It's true; the internet can be suffocating sometimes.

But I think that's understandable, for it's as if popular internet culture is a small glass room with the spatial potential of a clown car, and the clowns inside swathe themselves in priceless works, resurrected after suffering the spiritual death of a commodity.

Then they fart, and the farts are incessant.

You might choose to laugh at the sounds, might smell it long enough to where the smell of other's farts discomforts you, or you might start to judge what they've eaten or how they ate it, and you might then choose not to breathe. Or you might exit the clown car and complete the joke, and go on farting over the hills.

Fish Lines

Dee felt sick inside the city crowds, binding her and declining her to her knees.The mayor mentioned, “high-fives for the fish inclined to wear fair doctor frocks!”Her eyes widened, and her knees sprung from the paved ground.Dee shined out of the leagues of men in the legal rooms to the seas. She was inclined to be a doctor, and lest she veered, the high-fives would be then inclined to her. When she came, the sea flowed in a forward religion. So she declined onto her knees and fished in order to be a doctor. Dee needed bait. To better he yet, she lacked and needed a net. She was resigned, but then again inclined to her religion, so she used her sock as a fish netter. Dee flaunted the sock, soaking it in the see and trying to make the fish inclined to it. The sock only became a soaking vault never to be broken. From her brow, Dee’s tears fell, hit, and splashed a mossed-over rock, lying.But again being inclined to be a doctor, she forever carried floss in her blue frock. The floss let the fish faster become her fowl. Dee hooked and lined five fish. She was now finally inclined to disguise herself and get those high fives from the mayor, being the doctor. She stuck her hand through the gutted fish like a mitt, giving new layers to her skin. When she was fully disguised inside the fish skin, she finned back to the amphitheater to be outfitted with the fair doctor fish frock, thus inclined to be the doctor and get those high-fives from the mayor. But when she arrived, she saw the city crowds in waves. Ousted from the buildings and theaters and legal rooms, there was no more order. The men and mares were finning out and in of their religions just like how soccer is ordered. Upon seeing the fifty layers all finning in and out of the field and sea in leagues and schools. She looked high into the sky. Someone called a foul. Everyone declined to their knees. But she stood as her fin on point, and proceeded to fish for the gutted, religion inclined, blue frock wearing city people, one by one, inclining them back to their socks, healing all with her fishing.

There are links if you can't already see them below. I can't tell. Visit them if you can.

The set used to be in Florida, where I'm at again. I hope its still there. Alfred Hitchcock and the Art of Making Movies has been gone for some time, too.
The Back to the Future ride has been replaced by the Simpsons Ride.




















When I was young I was scared of Kongfrontation.
The fire hurt my face. I wanted never to have inched my way through the miniature New York and meet that great half-ape machine, swaying in whining cringes as it screamed.

Cadence

Don't say a word
Don't say anything
Don't say a word
I'm not even listening
I read in the paper about their escape
They're just two bit of kids from a bunch of sour grapes
You better watch your step


Watch who's knocking on your front door
Now you know that they're watching
What are you waiting for?
Think you're young and original
Get out before...
They get to watch your step

Ev'ry day is full of fun
And family spies
They're making heroes out of fall guys
They say it's good for business
From Singapore to Widnes
You better watch your step

Broken noses hung up on the wall
Back slapping drinkers cheer the heavy weight brawl
So punch drunk they don't understand at all
You better watch your step

Ev'ry night
Go out full of carnival desires
End up in the closing time choirs

When you're kicking in the courtroom
And you're drinking down the Eau de Cologne
And you're spitting out the Kodachrome
You better watch your step

Bye
I send you all my regards
You're so tough
You're so hard
Listen to the hammers falling in the breaker's yard
You better watch your step
You better watch your step
Ooh, watch your step

Real Time

Centuries should go by before I crawl out of bed, and to witness the passing from glowing pages is a scrutinized wave of the fingers, weakly lifting sharp moods thought once on a rock by the river, now curved about the folds beneath by forehead, and they seep tightly and fasten in the flexible words that have yet to be said.

"The gown fell gauntly from her shoulders, across her fallen breasts, then tightened upon her paunch and fell again, ballooning a little above the nether garments which she would remove layer by layer as the spring accomplished and the warm days, in color regal and moribund. She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage and fortitude which the days or years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child's astonished dissappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door."
.
- First description of Disley from The Sound and the Fury - April Eight, 1928.