squirm

American Mallow

preparing for friday's blowout - wait...are they burning the flag?

everyone take a moment to look down

just to make sure yours are still attached.....

all the kids are doing it

summer brings

its own special kind of problems....

a perfect score

one this quiz means i have too much time on my hands...

birds, watching

cygnet committee

two words

muji. tomorrow.

wells done dried up

for those who care to think about such things CPR's This American Life has an excellent program tracing the rise and fall of collateralized debt obligations and their role in the near collapse of the global financial markets. go ahead and listen. yknow you wanna....

in the department

of things not to worry about - scientist finds germans must be careful not to smile too much!

oh my Aachen heart

arrived in aachen on thurday afternoon just a few hours after angie and sarko. the police presence at the station was noticeable but not extravagant and it wasn't until her beaming face appeared on the hotel television that i realized what all the fuss was about. the next day we traveled out to the mountains, marvelling at monschau's slate roofs and masses of wildflowers. i was also thrilled to spy sections of the westwall, pushing out of the green hills like the broken plates and spikes of a long backed stegosaurus. the legendary siegfried line proved no more effective than its french equivalent. the next day we hassled animals at the zoo and took the steam at the carolus thermen, afterwards wandering through the stadtpark and the notorious antoniusstrasse, where young women and men dressed for success make like rapunzel at the window and offer to let down much more than their hair...

there's an long, odd story behind it

but while my father and i write to each other often, and enjoy hanging out together at his home in florida, at my advanced age of forty-four, i have just spoken with him on the telephone for the first time ever!

a candidate

for my favorite headline this week - hopes fade for balloon stunt priest - which, as evidenced by the rather forlorn photo accompanying the story, is surprisingly accurate.

what passes for work around here

rather than approach anything more substantial i have just been scribbling clever 'tooltips' as commentary on all the links on the sidebars on either side here.
nice work if you can get it.

children and nurses

this morning i dreamt that i was pushing a stroller along a serpentine trail through a manicured park. but the stroller was a cat stroller and laying within was stogie, the older of my two hairy, four-footed companions. along this catwalk various feline amusements had been installed and i lifted him out of the stroller to disport himself on a lambswool rug which had been mounted over a wooden frame. a sort of junglegym for cats. we had only been amusing ourselves this way for a few minutes when a stern, white aproned matron strode across the lawn toward us, pointing out that we would have to clean the lambswool before leaving, as stogie had left a bit of stain - as cats inevitably do. i was a bit surprised and annoyed as we were out of doors, and this was, after all, a cat park - didn't they have some sort of cleaning crew? but i set about scrubbing nonetheless. frankly it is surprising that not all of my dreams include stogie in a starring role as he is quite faithful at harassing me awake each morning...

ear of squirm: Blondie's 11:59

those german classes sure are paying off

as i just had to enunciate my way through a german language voice driven customer service call to my bank. it was like being tested for pronunciation by a german robot. interestingly the system recognized my 'zwo' properly as a 'zwei' - the former often used over the phone to avoid confusion with 'drei'. sadly the robot spoke a sort of accent free high german, and not the berlinerisch i had hoped for.

Lunchin'

Happy New Year!

or vernal equinox as it is often called by the savages. and especially happy new year's greetings to those of you out there who are enjoying your new black mac books while piggybacking on the neighbors wlan!

for a addict like me

it is a measure of my self discipline and spiritual attunement that i have restrained from booking passage to this sleepy village (though i must confess to scanning the railway timetables...)

ear of squirm: (Radio NOVA) 's (Radio NOVA) -

i was thinking

of perhaps getting myself a new cellphone to keep up with the joneses, but with all their newfangled features these damn phones are just getting too complicated

just when

i felt i could safely say there is nothing more on which to spend my hard earned ducats - i come across THESE. i hope my little monsters weren't watching over my shoulder.

total eclipse of the mind

and also of the moon. tomorrow morning between 4 and 5 Berlin time - expect the natives to toss fitfully in their beds. the moon is looking good lately too. yesterday she hung full and seductive in the bruised predawn heaven as i made my way across the tarmac to the plane carrying me to Nürnberg. she floated silently above the jet noise and jerky movements of the specialized vehicles while i walked in gratitude at the strange and marvelous journey which has brought me thus far. up the steel staircase into cabin of the airbus 319, i then took my seat and fell back into the dreaming as we climbed to cruising altitude, clearing the misty chill to float beneath her now crisp blessings.

desperately seeking thinspiration

the chickens have come home to roost. around my midsection apparently. late autumn lounging due to my monomaniac sacroiliac and broken ribs combined with the usual holiday food storm has added three kilos to my bulk - a fact which i discovered last night upon my return to the gym. oh the humanity! on a more positive note, the go kart accident and resulting rib trauma has refreshed the listening pleasure found in the Normal's 'Warm Leatherette' and may yet inspire me to reread Ballard's 'Crash'....

back in black

back in the Haupstadt and getting over the jetlag. while in the states i indulged in our national pasttimes: driving, shopping, and eating in measures a bit more than healthful. returning like the prodigal son i was treated to more lunches and dinners than i deserved and so made up difference by lavishing gifts on the mother. i found a few iconic images of life in today's great satan - the 'no guns alllowed' notice at the entrance of the cinema, a shiny pickup truck whose rear windscreen was detailed with an epitaph for a soldier slain in iraq (perhaps the irony of inscribing his memory on an oil eater was not lost on the owner), and a 'toilet paper roll holder extender' with which the normal toiletside hardware can accommodate an extra large roll for those extra large fecal challenges. In general everything, the people, the cars, the houses, even the demagoguery, is supersized in the states, and it wouldn't surprise me if soon one might be forced to pay extra to purchase a small. When not driving, eating or shopping i could be found at the cinema or the nga - where i was able to check out respectable exhibitions devoted to turner, hopper, and the art of the american snapshot - of the last i couldn't help but notice, in the snapshots taken in the first half of the century, how simple and empty the american landscape appeared. The bedroom contained a bed, a dresser, and perhaps a washbasin; the dining room a table and a few chairs; and yet the subjects appeared content, some even joyful, at having their picture taken and certainly didn't seem to be pining away for lack of a fully networked home entertainment system.
the fools! what were they thinking?

midflight

have been killling time in brussels while waiting for a flight back to the Heimat.... december was a bore, stuck in dreieich, tortured by powerpoint, but i did gets some festivities in before leaving berlin. crowding in with the masses at Dussman and elbowing strangers and drinking kinderpunch at the Weinachtszauber am Gendarmenmarkt....

The Year of Living Dangerously

Stranded in Dreieich_Buchschlag, a small town outside Frankfurt, in which i must entertain myself through most of the month as i learn the intricacies of adaptable modular storage arrays. i am also recovering from my latest skeletal event - two broken ribs - the result of the impact of my torso against the extruded plastic seat of a go-kart which i broadsided into the wall as i shot around a left handed curve. this year has been an exciting one for the old skeleton - a sprained left ankle, an inflamed sacroiliac, and now actual fractures! Not to mention the assorted colds, fevers and flus which have outraged my delicate sensibilities. oh the humanity!
   meanwhile yesterday i was thrilled to see Ulmer's 1934 B-movie masterpiece The Black Cat at the Akademie der Kunst as part of their examination of the life and works of architect Hans Poelzig. The film pits Boris Karloff, as mad modernist Hjalmar Poelzig, against Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a Hungarian psychologist (Bela Lugosi) who seeks to revenge himself against the evil architect for the loss of his wife, his daughter and fifteen years of his life he spent a prisoner of war in a russian prison. The film was introduced by a professor of the Free University who managed to place the film deep within a cultural context made up of such figures as Theweleit, Crowley, Murnau, Romero, Lang, and Freud. Afterward our delectation of the film's dark design was furthered by an exquisite potato soup at the Academy's cafe. very tasty...

spam dreams

a few expressionist subject lines from the spam filter and their intended targets:

Foot Adult Sword School Ice-cream Chief Family
   for the classic rock family values crowd

Hat Dress Backpack Bottle Clown Dung Software
   ill smelling eclectic college girls who listen to Phish

Coffee-shop Sphere Album Plane Hose Rifle Horoscope
   would be intellectuals waiting for that next Wilco track

Plane Vampire Meteor Tiger Horoscope Meteor Bird
   tweener gothadelic hedonists with temporary tattoos

Swimming Pool School Game Dung Sword Elephant Spiral
   closeted overachievers with extensive loafer collections

Weapon Elephant Vampire Liquid Bee Clown Bee
   the distorted self image of the trenchcoat mafia

being of unsound mind and body

i have been sniffling and wheezing, drooling and blowing, groaning and sighing for a week now with a pernicious head slash chest cold. if in my tiny bathroom i had a bathtub i could have already filled it with varicolored snots and begun molding oversize busts of those two polish political teletubbies - that would be some art! galleries around town would eat it up (as unappetizing as the metaphor is). of course without a bathtub i have had to resort to blowing my brains out and coughing up chunks of lung on small scraps of paper which then litter the apartment like fallen leaves on a primeval forest floor, whereupon monkey and stogie should make like playful chipmunks and begin hoarding the scraps like walnuts in their tiny burrows. but actually they don't have any tiny burrows and so prefer to pass out on the sofa next to me, occasionally starting with alarm when i suddenly put forth a particularly energetic honking. moving to berlin has exposed me to a vast new microbial environment and all my immunity gathered over decades on the east coast amounts to naught as i must weather the biological storms of an entirely novel microscopic polity. thankfully suffering through has always been a particular talent - how else could one endure this tacky modern world?

extinct?

this weekend i was amazed to witness something i had thought long extinct, known only from the stories of old people or grainy newsreel footage. as it happened a friend found herself suffering from severe pain in her right arm and neck due to (as it turned out) a pinched nerve somewhere in her upper back. unable to sleep (particularly frustrating as this was the morning we gained an extra hour due the end of daylight savings time) she writhed and squirmed and moaned - and not in the good way...in desperation she turned to me and asked what she should do - in a reckless moment of spite due to being awakened at such an early hour i malevolently joked that she should 'call her doctor' knowing that said doctor was probably sleeping peacefully in his well appointed bedroom somewhere in berlin. not realizing i was being facetious she did just that - dialling a number and reaching a medical service (her health insurance i suppose) which immediately dispatched a doctor to look into her complaint. i was speechless and after the intervening minutes i would witness an event i had thought had long ago gone the way of the dodo...an actual doctor's housecall! amazing! once the doctor showed up and did a little prodding and poking and dropped off some painkillers conversation turned to romania. i was amazed when the doctor mentioned her favorite philosopher was romania's own e.m. cioran and i turned to pull down a biography to show her...we nodded in understanding and it wasn't until after she left that i began to question the wisdom of accepting medical treatment from a fan of the twentieth century's pre-eminent nihilist....

Back in the Saddle

or out of the saddle actually. back in berlin after a vacation down east. the overnight train to budapest, a night in the gellert (and a morning in her delightful thermalbad), then onward into romania on another overnight. arriving at the riding center on sunday (the day of rest) we recovered from the stresses of the romanian rail system and the following morning mounted the trusty steeds which would be our transport for the week. the general daily program began with a climb through the forest on logging roads, stream beds or sheep trails. occasionally passing through a rustic village, a tiny cluster of humble wooden houses surrounding by haystacks and sheepfolds, on our way up. the long, slow ascent, while sometimes steep, was a simple exercise for our stocky, surefooted huzuls. reaching the high mountain meadows we would ride a bit through the crisp oktober before halting at some scenic outcropping, tethering the horses and leaving them to their well earned rest while we munched oranges and ham & cheese sandwiches gazing out across the valley. thus the afternoon of my birthday found me galloping across the green carpathian ridges beneath a bright blue transylvanian sky. during the week we crossed an ancient roman road (still usable after eighteen centuries), rode along german trenches dating from WWII (the doomed soldiers put to the hopeless task of stopping the red army's advance up the valley), dozed next to a mountain lake, a silver disk upon the green meadows and sheltered from the wind in the barely recognizable ruins of a demolished austro-hungarian fortress. as the day wore on we would start our descent through the darkening forests, finding our way after hours into the lowlands and eventually to a guest house or hotel where, after a simple but satisfying supper we would drop exhausted into bed to sleep away the saddle soreness and dream of distant empires.... truly a birthday trip like none other... and to think it all started with a book lent by my friend david.....

important

Bastards!

i had the opportunity to see our cute-as-a-button mayor this week when i attended the opening of the neue heimat exhibition at the berlinische galerie. 29 artists contributed works to the show, framed as a meditation on the mobility and movement of artists and others who have made Berlin their home in the years since german re-unification. i found myself attuned to the exhibition's spirit, having made berlin my neue heimat as well. (In fact, today marks three years since i lowered the landing gear, touched down and taxied into the hangar. while being so far from family and loved ones has been difficult, my delight and enjoyment of life here in the hauptstadt only grows with passing time. if only my ability to jabber berlinerisch grew as rapidly!) wowi was on hand to open the festivities and to thank directress Ursula Prinz for her many years of service as she leaves for greener pastures, presenting her with the official white berlin bear. crowded with the usual mix of arty types, politicoes and cultural voyeurs the museum kept the exhibition open for us to peruse while waiting for the speakers to speak and the bar to open. much cleverness on display though it was soon too crowded to properly view, though i can recommend the large inflating tank and the spiky orb of plastic chairs, a return visit is necessitated to delve further into the subject. i was also pleased to wander upstairs to the grafik im licht exhibition, consisting of works on paper - usually kept under wraps - from the museum's graphic collection. due to the museum's limitied purview - art made in berlin - they have grown into geniuses of presentation, shuffling the same works into multiple combinations, like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.
   as the evening wore on i made my way through the milling kulturicrats outside to my waiting steed, planning to take my usual swim before returning home. to my horror i found that some degenerate had parked next to me and, mind fogged by entartete kunst, had actually locked their bicycle to mine! Bastards! or should i say - Buggery Fuck! it took but a moment to realize that, without an detachment of heavily armed gunmen, it would prove impossible to survey the crowd, find the miscreant, and force him to undo his doing before a summary execution would prove his own undoing! i stared in disbelief for a few moments, then walked away muttering in the direction of my gym. obsessive as i am, it was blocks before i could actually accept the incompetence of this wheeled stranger. thankfully my long swim and sauna routine wrung the hysteria out of me and pacing berlin's streets on a chill september night does have a charm of its own. as i approached the museum upon my return shortly before midnight i was disappointed to see the galerie glitterati still gabbing about, though it appeared they had already sucked the bar dry...and was that our mayor i spied, three sheets to the wind and strutting across the tables behind the coat check? ah berlin....happily my miscreant and his rude vehicle were nowhere to be found and so i mounted my trusty steed and drifted off into the nacht und nebel....

i'm not a morning person

beneath the planet of the naps

the past week has been an eye opening experience. one rheumy red eye opening bright and early every morning when the jackhammers and construction vehicles start plowing through the mud in the courtyard beneath my bedroom. what they are actually attempting to do is anyone's guess, they seem to just be pulling up the concrete walkways, doing doughnuts in the mud and running down surprised earthworms. i would like to think they are searching for bodies buried by one of my serial killing neighbors, or hauling away radioactive concrete sold to unsuspecting contractors by shady bulgarian middlemen, or maybe even putting in a olympic sized pool (it would be typical of my property management company to start construction on a pool in the closing days of summer). i suppose i'll just have to rough out the early morning racket to see what the hell the plan is. but i can still hope for comedic relief in the form of a few blindgänger

Relaxing on a Saturday Morning

ear of squirm: The Stranglers 's Meninblack

lunchin'

just returned to the office from my normal late lunch hour. i was born prematurely and have been making it up ever since by sleeping, eating and generally showing up - late. for today's mittagspause i headed off to find Levetzow Strasse 15. i recently came upon evidence suggesting this may have been the address of Prana-Film GmbH, the production company of Albin Grau, whose only film was Murnau's dark classic Nosferatu as they were sued by the estate of Bram Stoker after its release and driven into bankruptcy. Grau, an occultist involved with the Fraternitas Saturni, a german masonic society with links to Aleister Crowley's O.T.O., worked variously as an art director, costume designer and film producer during the Weimar, and was later murdered by the Nazis in Buchenwald. strangely (or not, given the decimation of Berlin by the Allied bombing campaign) Levetzow Strasse 15 no longer exists - the street numbers reach the Hansabrücke at number 14 and begin their return to the west with number 16. to distract myself from this tragic loss i made my way up and down the banks of the Spree peering at the willows and discovering an odd statue of a boy fisherman playing an accordion to the delight of a gathering of frogs. my hunger gnawing i made my way over to the arminius markthalle in search of a tasty helping of H5N1. the markthalle has taken to hosting a flea market in its unoccupied space - a dozen or so broken down stalls offering old records and cds, obsolete computers games, chipped coffee mugs, unsightly clothing and of course my personal weakness, books. though i stoically hid behind my half chicken and plastic cup of fanta the addiction soon got the better of me and i ended up turning over some ducats for das blau des engels, josef von sternberg's autobiography, and briefe und schriften penned by philipp otto runge, a contemporary of cdf and correspondent of goethe's...sweet surrender indeed....then a hurry back to the office to re-assume my position....

trapped in laptop land

tuesday morning stogie succeeded in batting me awake at five. cracking my eyes out the balcony door the sky was a glorious blood red as if the eastern half of the city had once again been set aflame by allied bombers. shuffling over to the cat bowls the wind shook the windows and i realized a storm was blowing up. forking out the foul smelling tin to my waiting beasts i thought of a friend who recently had his telephone and computer blown to bits by a "lightning event" and gave my laptop the hairy eyeball. i was burning the last hour of planet earth, bbc's extravagantly beautiful nature documentary, and could not power down. so, in my addled five in the morning mind, i did the next best thing and moved the laptop, plugging it in an outlet farther from the window and from nature (red in tooth and claw). none too soon it seemed, for as i tucked myself back between the sheets a sudden flash and crack threw the cats back beneath the bed. The clouds broke open and fat drops pelted down. Few things are as cozy as a warm bed during a thunderstorm and i was soon sawing logs in the brandenburger wald....
   things grew markedly less cozy when i awoke hours later and, making my way through my morning routine, cracked my laptop open while spooning my muesli. my stomach dropped as i read the cursed script....."Non-System disk or disk error. replace and strike any key when ready"

if they turned my life into a movie....

Strike!

my early morning train to Dresden sits idling at the platform in elsterwerda. leaving berlin before seven we made it this far before the Strike stopped our carriage on its tracks. GDL, the train conductor's union is not satisfied with the recent talks with management so while Transnet and GDBA are returning to work with their new contracts and 4.5% pay hike we are relaxing, gazing through the rain streaked windows as the citizens of this six hundred year old town at the southern edge of Brandenburg awake to a cool summer morning shower. our passengers sleep, wander the aisle or gaze out at the station, occasionally debarking in search of nonexistent taxis only to return after a few minutes looking a bit wetter and more dejected. Workers of the World - Relax!

after all - you can't take it with you!

$4425.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth

monday morning - with apologies

to the good Dr. Pangloss, i am beginning to wonder if we indeed do live in the best of all possible worlds. and if so, have we a rough sketch of how the outlines of these better, though admittedly impossible, worlds might yet appear?

if i must

to satisfy the monomaniacal Bowleserised - my responses to her cruel interrogation.
but don't expect me to rat out any of my friends. cause i ain't a rat and i have no friends!

Question #1 - Have you ever been in love? And if so, what was that experience like for you?

   oh quite a few times - a wonderful experience but its hard to get the blood out of the clown suit.

Question #2 - Aside from writing, what other talents or interests do you have?

   it is relatively easy for me to gather enough cigarette butts to get a proper smoke.

Question #3 - Why do you write?

   i grew tired of just reading "qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm" all day every day.

Question #4 - Do you have any sense of a 'spiritualism', or the like... anything apart from the physical/temporal plane?

   i did but TSA wouldn't allow me to bring it on board.

Question #5 - What inspires you?

   too many women and too many pills, yeah!

Question #6 - I want to know about your family. Are you close to them, # of siblings?

   two sisters, the standard number of parents. if we were any closer i'd be standing behind them.

Question #7 - What is your basic philosophy of life?

   don't be a fucking asshole!

Question #8 - If you had all the money in the world, where would you live and what would you be doing profession wise?

   i would be living on earth and you know, sniffing around and seeing whats up. and of course laughing at all those broke ass motherfuckers.

musical morning

i awoke from a dream in which i was attempting to steal a very long flute from the apartment of its owner. very long. a ten foot flute. ten feet long and the width of a finger. my plans were complicated when the tiny mouthpiece fell off andi found i had to climb a chair to fetch it from a thatched roof. slowly i came to the realization that i would never be able to smuggle it past the owner (how to hide a ten foot flute?) and i giving up, i drifted gently towards wakefulness. but just on the edge of consciousness i had the idea of secreting the flute into the bevelled ceiling of a train's passenger car and was tempted to swim deeper into sleep to execute this new foolproof plan. unfortunately i was also just awake enough that i realized the utter folly of trying to purloin a ten foot dream flute....

please allow me to introduce myself

a little work i have started doing, combining two of my greatest interests: berlin and cold hard cash. recently started contributing to gridskipper - a travel blog which is part of gawker media, an online publisher of gawker, defamer, wonkette and - my favorite - fleshbot. i am quite pleased as this is the first time i have gotten paid for creative work. i am writing brief snippets regarding things to do and places to see here in babylon on the spree and then they toss some pocket change in my cage - getting paid to blog - who da thunk it? i also recently 'arranged' for german press credentials and am finding out just how easy all those journalists have it - a land of milk and honey indeed! anyway you can check out my stuff here if you'd like - though the format is somewhat limiting it is still a good exercise for my writing skills - brevity being the soul of wit and all that...

globalized lunch

at the corner imbiss the khazaki cook and i discuss working conditions and healthcare in the usa in our twice broken german. afterwards into the kleine tiergarten to gobble down my falafel im brot while reading venetian ghost stories, surrounded by the turkish matrons and a gaggle of offspring and serenaded by one german giving another lessons on american bluesharp. it's a small world after all....

this morning we met our new sales director

he's tough but fair!

there are so many

remarkable things in a single day it is difficult to remember them all. but as i drop off to sleep tonight i will hold close today's most unique tactile experience. the delicate softness of the frog belly's thin skin cool against my palm, his breathing hard beneath a dark and drizzling grunewald sky, bulging eyes wild and webbed toes still moist from our first rain in several weeks.

Now I Know!

You Are Bad Girl Sexy

Girl, you are nothing but trouble. And that's hot. You've got the classic bad girl sexiness mojo going on. And your badass attitude makes men fear you - and crave you. Don't give into people who say to tone it down. You're perfect as is.

What Kind of Sexy Girl Are You? the survey questions are truly frightening #2   How can you tell if a guy is into you?       By the way he touches you "accidentally" (only if he is a priest...) #5   You're invited to a dinner party where there will be a ton of single, gorgeous men. What do you wear?       Cute black pants that show off your body with a tiny top (and a price tag) #6   Third date. You're having your sweetie over for wine, popcorn, and a movie. What DVD do you pop in?        Cruel Intentions or Dangerous Liasons (better yet Hostel 2) not much hope for the future of humanity....

they say the world looks different

when viewed from the back of a horse. true enough. the world looks harder, farther down and more like a place you could easily break your neck! despite all that this past weekend found me on the back of a black mare named persephone, riding in circles around the stables of the Uncle Tom's Cabin Riding Association while ester, my erstwhile riding teacher, harangued me with obscure german equestrian terminology. alls well that ends well however, and i escaped with my life - and my toes, despite persephone's attempting to crush them on a mad rush to the feeding trough in her stall....

look for the union label

thanks to RH for not just sitting around with his finger up his ass...

the yellow peril

caused my green to go from black to red! those chinese central bankers are the evil genii of the color palette. at this rate i may have to move my gold to pink!

today's best headline

but saddest news story - thus far - "Mutant cancer threatening devils"

is it a crime

to be sick, to be felled by some sort of microbe, and so to abandon one's responsibilities and lay about the house. falling back asleep after finishing Tarabas, waking only to wander off to the sofa and fall into the NYRB or reveries regarding possible optimal redeployments of furniture. is it a crime? and if so, how must i (like Roth's Colonel) atone?

ear of squirm: 's Le grand mix - (Radio Nova)

happy indeed

yesterday turned out to be a better valentine's day than expected - not due to any valentine's related endearments but to a few simple surprises. i awoke a moment or two earlier than usual and while prying open my eyelids with a caffeinated tire iron found that air berlin had located a few thousand air miles which i had feared were lost in some overworked office drone's inbox. since accumulating the damn things is one of the few benefits of all the travel i must endure as part of my job, i keep a close eye as they pile up. the rest of the day at the office passed quietly without anything burning to the ground and returning home i found a note in my postbox. One of my no good neighbors had a package for me - it turned out to be the lost xmas gift from my dear old mutti - a couple pairs of 501s, long johns and six jars of Deep Thought - the neuronutrients which have turned me into the poor man's charlie gordon. a few minutes later, just as i was heading off to the pool to swim my 2km and steam away the wrinkles, my work phone jangled to life, my boss on the other end wanting to present his latest theory regarding a tedious customer problem - rolling my eyes, i feigned interest - 'multitasking' i call it. I knew he was just bored since he was on the road (doing customer demos in Köln and München that should have been mine - along with the damn air miles!). my interest sharpened however, when he mentioned a conversation with our geschäftsführer regarding my desire to get paid enough to actually staunch the bleeding - apparently i'll be getting a 21% raise come next month! with more possibly to follow (depending on some obscure criteria which he wasn't fully able to elaborate). needless to say, i'm pleased, my banker is pleased, and my banker's banker is pleased - as well as the tax office which will probably gobble up about ten of that twenty one percent. finally, as a last colourful bow tying up the day's gifts, the pool and steam room were populated by a number of cuties in and out of their bikinis....

the weekend submerged

after taking in the collections of false eyes, hearing aids, pigs ventricles and titanium joints at Charite's medical history museum exhibit of Leben mit ersatz Teilen / Living with replacement parts sunday afternoon (followed by lunch - all those surgery videos gives a fella a powerful hunger!) we made our way down to the river to relax. To swim and sweat at the winter Badeschiff, which resembles nothing so much as a retrostyle spree bound space station. the usual naked people of all shapes, sizes and styles, wandering dazed between the saunas and the pools. monday i took off from work (because i got it like that yo!) and enjoyed a selection of italian divisionists at the Deutsche Guggenheim. These fellows seem to be the italian version of the french neo-impressionists, lots of nature scenes in pixelated paint strokes - the only familiar name was Camille Pisarro. I was so inspired by their colorful dot extravaganzas that i proceeded to the wash salon and did my laundry - to get my own dots out! Afterwards i made my way around the corner to the lichtblick kino to catch 'Berlin Ecke Schoenhauser' - an east german juvenile delinquent drama from the fifties which was filmed up the block. Strangely fascinating to see one's neighborhood fifty years earlier, in splendid black and white, with cool commie cats jazzing it up on the corner beneath the U-Bahn. The concerns of youth always transcend the bonds of time and political persuasion - girls, clothes and avoiding honest work!

my head is my only house unless it rains

not exactly true but...anyway. last night i was returning to my humble digs after having a tasty pizza romana at dui forne, the local sexy italian punkrock pizza joint. mounting my trusty steed in the damp chill i slipped on my leather gloves, stuffed my felt cap into my jacket pocket and pulled my hoodie up over my head. it was a brief journey, round the corner, down the block. locked the bike up in the hof, peeped a neighbor for a moment while she prepared her dinner, then up to greet my little monsters. as i kicked off my shoes and took off my gloves i reached into my pocket and found....nothing.... my brain quickly wrapped itself around the fact that my precious felt cap had dropped out of my pocket during my seven minute ride from the restaurant! torn between my hatred for the cold outside and my deep and abiding love for the cap, grumbingly - shoes back on and out the door. not in the stairway, not in the hof - i pedalled back the way i came, scanning the wet streets in the headlights of the oncoming traffic. sure enough around the corner and down the block i spied a familiar black heap between the tram tracks and the parked cars. reaching down i picked up my little friend, wet and a bit muddy. but - oh the outrage! oh the pain! my little felt cap friend had been mortally injured! a rip extended across the front, as if stabbed by a sociopath! i quickly determined that in the brief ten minute interval between falling from my pocket and being rescued from the night, my black felt friend had been run over by a streetcar! the sharp steel wheels of the tram had killed my little buddy! my cap - run over by the streetcar - have i somehow fallen back into the nineteenth century?

is it good luck

to see an albino on the first day of february?

sentenced to life

it has been weeks since i left the holy land. having offended the god of the hebrews by eating muesli and milk at the wrong table in the hotel cafeteria (don't even ask about my sick "kicks" mixing wool and flax), i figured it was a good time to make my way out of eden. little did i know that for my transgressions i would be condemned to wander the earth (or at least germany). In the past ten days i have made my way through stuttgart, nuernberg, paderborn, dresden, bielefeld, hamburg (twice), duesseldorf tonight and tomorrow, neuss. i am flying over more of the fatherland than a b-24 liberator!

on the edge of the red sea

the mountains burnt brown by the sun skimming across the water. i flew in this afternoon from tel aviv. trapped in this artificial beach resort environment for a week. the burden of leisure...

some people

don't believe in god. but i do - as he has shown me his mysterious ways. to be specific - just yesterday famed actor Peter Boyle died after a long battle with heart disease and multiple myeloma (not just one - multiple!). while all the coverage mentions his character on some show called 'everybody loves raymond' (wonder if raymond chafes as a result...), i don't watch tv so i knew Boyle from his excellent film portrayals in such films as Taxi Driver, The Candidate and Young Frankenstein. Now here is where it gets spooky. the same day that Boyle died at age 71, i noticed a bit of pain in my left big toe as i woke. checking it out as i stepped into the shower, i saw a reddening just behind the nail. A shiver round down my spine as i realized exactly what was causing the pain. I had a BOIL!!! on the same day that actor Boyle died (or should i say 'kicked the bucket') this boil appeared. coincidence? i think not. and just before christmas too! If that isn't evidence of a divine, all powerful, omniscient force in the universe i don't know what is!

ear of squirm: Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Bras's Jingle Bell Rock

surfing the doom

   Friday morning passing through Invaliden Friedhof I remembered that it was the anniversary of Ernst Udet's suicide. Though it had slipped my mind I had entertained the idea of leaving flowers on the grave of the aerial joy boy gone bad and was touched to see that someone had placed a few white blossoms on his ivy covered resting place. A few minutes later, at the foot of the Putlitzbrucke (upon which the annual floral remembrances of Kristallnacht still adorn the Jewish Deportation Memorial), i was stopped by the cops who had set up a bicycle traffic stop. The kindly bearded man in green informed me that riding with headphones could get me a 15 euro fine and that i was riding on the bike path on the wrong side of the street. These Germans seem to have constructed a very complex and multidimensional set of bike path regulations, for the best of all concerned no doubt. After walking my bike to the other side of the street and riding out of sight i popped my headphones back in to listen final moments of BBC's The World Today.
   Saturday I made my way across town to purchase a new suitcase as i must fly down to Munich tomorrow. Finding the address of the Kofferhaus Witt on the Rimowa website i noted that they were founded in 1923. To be in business in Berlin, through three successive governments over the course of eighty three years they must be doing something right (or something terribly, terribly wrong...). After a friendly greeting, the opening and shutting of various suitcases and much goldilocking on my part, I finally left, my new Bolero Cabin Trolley by my side. Later that evening - Diamanda Galas at the Passionskirche - clad in black, her voice inhabited by the doomed souls of centuries, she presented her 'Songs of Exile' as the closing event of the international women musicians festival. While it has been years since i had last been exposed to her aural exorcisms and diabolic decibels she has lost none of her ability to raise hairs on the back of one's neck like a snake charmer and the darkened apse of the Passionskirche was the perfect setting for her mournful moans and satanic screeching.
   finally, yesterday i finally made it to see 'An Inconvenient Truth', Al Gore's cinematic presentation of his global warming slide show. While i am familiar with many of the factoids which made up the presentation, seeing them assembled in one place accompanied by the effective graphical representation of the statistical data proved to be quite disturbing. glad that my apartment is on the highest hill in Berlin and i know how to swim....that should allow for an extra couple of days before the final cataclysm....

exactly what part

of that $8 billion is gonna pay for my missing luggage!

ah November...

the skies above Berlin grow grey(er), the trees round Zionskirchplatz shed their leaves of festive red and yellow, the drug dealing foxes in Volkspark am Weinsberg grow restive and, in preparation for the long winter's hibernation, my german coworkers stop taking showers or changing their underwear...

there's got to be a morning after

i woke before dawn. i knew what lay in store for me. during the wee hours i had heard the cat's antics. my first ten minutes of consciousness were spent wiping up cat puke and cat shit. seems the critters had quite a party last night. maybe they don't need that new box of catnip after all. i drank my coffee as the sun climbed above the horizon and contemplated my morning hassle. take the tram to the s-bahn to the u-bahn to my destination in deepest darkest west berlin. to the notary at the american embassy to have my claim for the luggage which US Airways so thoughtfully lost last month. i had made the trip once already, last friday, only to find the embassy closed for veteran's day (don't even get me started). time is running thin to file this claim and i was planning to go back to the embassy so as to get it into the mail to the airlines offices in arizona yesterday. sunday evening however, i found that my printer was inkfree and i wouldn't be able to print anything until i was back in the office. Hence the additional day of woe. To add insult to injury, upon my entrance to the embassy i was subjected the leering grimace of our idiot in chief as he gaped over the sordid doings from his photo hanging on the wooden panelling between the bullying head of cheney and the empty smile of condi. how ridiculous it seemed to swear to the truth of my claim in front of the notary republic while being watched by that group of lying scumbags. back in the office i prepare the requisite photocopies of my airline tickets and simplified explanation for the overworked baggage claim personnel laboring beneath the hot arizone sun. shuffling down to the deutsche post at lunchtime i expect to pay an outlandish sum to overnight my little package halfway around the world i find they are closed! Vertreibsversammlung - Staff Meeting! and they won't be open again until 17:00...sigh...it seems i am struggling against the very foundations of the universe in attempting to gain recompense for my last goods...but they don't know who they are fucking with...they don't call me the Doorslammer for nothing! (in fact they don't call me the Doorslammer at all....)

throw money

yesterday i passed my ARCH exam which completes my CCDP Certification (Cisco Certified Design Engineer). just squeaked by, not so bad considering I barely studied for the exam, having not read thoroughly either the formal exam preparation text or the additional course materials i purchased several years ago. my success thus rests on obsessively taking and retaking computerized practice exams (i love multiple choice questions!) and gobbling fistfuls of gummi bears just before sitting down at the testing center. i have been studying off and on over the past two years for this thing, hence the material was staler than a jelly filled doughnot at an anorexic's convention and i just couldn't work up the proper enthusiasm for designing multicast IP deployments or clustering call manager backup subscribers. Passing this exam also extends the validity of my other Cisco certifications for three more years, a comfortable margin for procrastination. of course now i will need to find another albatross since i am nothing if not a goal directed neurotic! (though some of my best friends are aimless failures....)

Happy Halloween!

to all you beautiful monsters still undead! keep up your evil work and light a candle tonight for those who passed this way before us. i am back in Berlin after leaving at dawn yesterday for wonderful Oerlinghausen, a stones throw outside Bielefeld. I would love to describe the sights for you, but all i saw was the inside of the train station and the data center, a few conference rooms and a cafeteria. oh yes, and the men's room! In Berlin our Goldener Oktober ends - each morning finding colourful farewell notes stuck to my bicycle by the chill morning dew. The trees show their long wooden bones in the sky, their fallen fingers heaping themselves at the curbs or creeping inside to perish, ground red and yellow into the carpets and wooden flooring.

if only

i had this handy visitor's guide when i first arrived in DC, life would have been much simpler...

today's witty banter

A sadist, a masochist, a murderer, a necrophile, a zoophile and a pyromaniac are all sitting on a bench in a mental institution, bored out of their minds.

"How about having sex with a cat?" asked the zoophile.

"Let's have sex with the cat and then torture it," says the sadist.

"Let's have sex with the cat, torture it and then kill it," shouted the murderer.

"Let's have sex with the cat, torture it, kill it and then have sex with it again," said the necrophile.

"Let's have sex with the cat, torture it, kill it, have sex with it again and then burn it," said the pyromaniac.

Silence took over... then everyone turned to the masochist and asked:

"So, what's it gonna be?"

To wh