Dresden or Bust; or, Do These Come With Batteries

I like when I come off the train--eyes forward--keeping track of the people passing, crossing, pausing, etc. When I'm late or pushing it, I get assertive with an aftertaste of aggression. Single-minded. Having to cast glances to the side or even behind me in order to check the time is inefficient and unsafe. The major bahn stations would be providing a great service to its people by placing their clocks in the four corners and as distant from the center as possible at the height where the walls meet the ceiling.

I need to find articles on "Canonizations" of literature and how that whole process works. This kid in class asked why we read Of Mice and Men, and it wasn't that it was Of Mice and Men, it was any book. Why this book? To his credit, he wouldn't let me disregard his question. I think he expected that I would reply with some hyperbolic transcendent rationale typical of a rhetoric suitable for the sort of wind-baggery associated with most English teachers.

"It's on the book list here in JFK's English department," I said. He stared at me...not wholly disappointed but not impressed. "As well, a couple of students in class asked if we could read it," and I thanked them in front of the class and the two kids smiled ear to ear. "And, I like teaching things for th e first time. I make a lot of mistakes but learn a lot about teaching. It's a healthy experience for me because I'm visiting this moment for the first time. The first times of anything always teach us a lot."

Then he asked, "Why these though....this book, I mean, why not Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings?"

"That's the big question. And you've hit on a very dynamic argument in academia. You see," and I wrote, The Canon on the board and continued... "The Canon is something that is established in universities around the world and people decide what we'll read. Books that become canonized are usually representative of important and significant ideals...provoke strong reactions as well as evoke the most subtle and invisible emotions. The canon is definitely dominated by "old dead white guys," but in recent decades the cannon is opening up to the not dominant culture...er economic system...not sure which anymore....but this is one of those wonderful subversive phenomenon that contribute to the combine, in Cuckoo's Nest...." is what I wish't I'd said. But the truth is I never rant as a teacher. I save those insufferable, mis-informed, bombastic rants about the culture industry replacing our humanity for my friends, my right-leaning family members, and drunken nights...not necessarily in that order.

"It's really a question, why do we read this book? that can be best answered if  you look inward." Is what I really said and we moved on. Subsequently, I'm locating a few articles on the subject of canonizationing of literature and when we come back from break I'll do a couple of activities and give them some experience with this sort of discourse--maybe even generate interest. Kids are curious...and like good fiction, a little is a lot.

I got food-poisoning for the second time since moving to Berlin. Both times were street food. This time it was bratwurst at a weinachtmarkt after drinking gluewein and rum all night. It hit me at midnight. I lay in bed wondering why I'd had that last cup of wine, If I could stop the nausea or at least ride it out...but no amount of concentration helped. It was touch and go for a while, but by three AM I was certain it was the food. Yeah, three hours like that puts things into an existential perspective. I had to go to the doctor and felt like a gollom. My friend JJ, when he was in his early twenties, he got sick...some kind of flu/cough and he would hunch over and hobble around the place. We used to live in the same house next to this lake outside of Kent, Ohio with Dave and Beeje along with a handful of transient-vagrants. Our neighbor Pom would come over and he and Dave would start in on him.

"C'mon grandpa...." and "Ohhh, man, look at him...he looks just like an old guy." And then one or another would hunch over and hobble around, coughing and hacking into a clenched up fist, cursing like a crooked wildebeast. One time we were hanging out at the laundromat and we convinced JJ to just see if he could fit into the dryer. He got in and we pinned him inside and clunked enough quarters into the slot to start up the tumbler. He tossed around one time and was able to brace himself and keep from tumbling, but the second go around he lost  his foot-hold and dropped an elbow and soon he was tumbling like a thread-bare afgan and me and Dave were hooting like drunken owls.

I guess he's my oldest friend. In Mice and Men, the friendship between Lennie and George is really prominent...like a 3-D projection standing out, forcibly put there by Steinbeck. To some extent the literary critiques of the piece contribute to the mythology he's impregnated his story with by perpetuating and writing to the end of the earth about the sacred friendship between men. Steinbeck's not so subtle seed has evoked responses that are remarkably similar and like a painter uses paint Steinbeck uses words to the effect of a painter. He is an artist. Nonetheless, the friendship they have is based on their mutual fear of becoming cranky old loners with nobody to mind--George doesn't want to end up a bitter old man--and ultimately his is the only opinion that matters.

In my younger years I would say shit like, you're either with me or against me, or I'll trust anyone....once--a lot of this type of sanctimonious hogwash. I would never befriend--forgive a friend--or lower my standards in order to be friends out of any ideology other than both parties would do for the each other without expecting payment or reciprocation in some way. I was never friends with someone because I wanted to use them. And if you didn't follow the am I my brother's keeper, creed, then our friendship was not a significant one. These are good ideals and I still draw from these...allude to these old standards on occasion, but time has made them impossible to hold people accountable to.

The possible rationale for George and Lennie's friendship: They need each other...support, company, defending one another, collaborative budget, lounging, chatting, games.

Lennie's reasons: George treats him fairly and won't leave.

George's reasons: solicit friendships with others, inspire sympathy from others and to promote self-pity for his plight and what a great guy he is for his charity toward Lennie, he needs Lennie to defend him physically.

Looked at it in this way, you can go through and say well George gets more variety from the relationship. If each guy has a pie that represents his capacity for friendship, or simply put, each pie is the elements of the friendship. Lennie has a pie and George has a pie. Each pie contains the reasons why they are friends. Lennie's pie is the same size, but it's got fewer slices, one slice is George's dependability and another slice is the fairness with which George treats Lennie. George's pie is the same size as Lennie's but it's got many more slices. If Lennie couldn't say--beat to death anyone he pleased at George's say so--well, the pie would have less slices. In this way the reasons why these two men are friends are disparate.

George is friends with Lennie for many reasons and each reason is important but take any one of them away and George is still going to survive. Say Lennie didn't inspire sympathy from people toward George--for being such a great friend--George would go on fine, might even remain friends with Lennie, even without this quality. Or maybe Lennie twists an ankle and can't beat up the next guy who wants to tussle...well, George has to bite his tongue occasionally and not mouth off like he's prone to do. But, if George is no longer reliable...well that just leaves one thing to fill Lennie's pie...that George treats him fairly. The phrase, don't put all your eggs in one basket comes to mind. Should friendship supercede this axiom? The only thing left in Lennie's pie is George's fairness while George's pie is still maintained with many slices giving many reasons for him to remain friends with Lennie.

The hitch is Lennie doesn't know any better. Our neighbor at that old lake house outside of Kent, his name was Pom, used to say, If you get to be fifty years old and you haven't learned how to get along in the world on your own, you probably shouldn't bother. I always interpreted this idea as one may as well just end it, cause, I mean, what's the quality of your life. You can't be living a very interesting life if you have no more wit than to sit huddled up in a ball and absorb the swinging hammers of life over and over and over, never doing anything about it...I mean, right, ending it must be better. But, lately, I've begun to think maybe I'm not seeing what he may have meant. Like, by fifty, if you don't know yet, why bother? Why bother trying? The outcome is the same. If you stop trying then you only endure. Endurance on it's own must be like volunteering for animal testing or water-boarding--just because you got nothing better to do.

So while I had food poisoning a couple of friends helped me out. They brought me sprite when it was the only thing I could hold down. I am not so stringent in my dealings with people. Time and experience are excellent teachers if you listen. I thought between JJ and me, I must be Lennie, but it's a lot like these personality tests, Briggs and Stratton or Type-A personality...paying mind or reflecting on your life based on these standards must be like drawing still-lifes without any shading, geometric shapes on a page.

This time I learned something frightening while teaching product for the first time. Humans are remarkably similar when it comes to thinking. I took another look at my friendships and what I get from them and what I contribute to them. I thought of my buddy Andres--Oso, he calls himself. Oso is the kind of friend you make that reminds you of what friendship is. He reminds me of my friend Matt...MM, M-squared, double M, from Boston. This guy has fists the size of sledge hammers and a heart of gold. I met MM in Florida on an abandoned disc golf course, leaning on a tee-pad post that demarcated the hole and distance to the pin. He was wearing flip-flops, carrying a beer and a single disc. I felt embarrassed to have a whole bag slung over my shoulder. One time, after I'd known Matt for a few years, we were teeing off from six pad and he whizzed a low-flying zinger down the right fairway and where it hit, a little armadillo scampered off into the woods. When his disc hit the little armadillo everyone standing on the  pad jumped up and started screaming and laughing and after that happened I never again doubted anything he'd ever told me...and he told me some wiz-bangers.

For these reasons I closely associate my friendship with Andres with the one I have with Matt. They would both, for reasons unsolicited on my part, go down fighting for me because of our friendship. They both have kids now, so I suspect that dedication may waver due to larger considerations. Oso was one of my friends that brought me some sprite--two litres--at the breaking point...I was about to lose it. Drinking water when you have the stain of vomit and gluewein and rum in you mouth does nothing but reinforce the bad taste. He came to the door which I opened as a gothic butler might, and he stood in the doorway hoisting the two bottles as if he'd climbed a mountain pass to bring them and I took them unceremoniously. He was not deterred and assured me his services were at my disposal.

Students are like water and wind and pretty much all people, they take the path of least resistance and they've learned how to read their teachers and as a teacher it's difficult to discern between a genuine response to something like Mice and Men, and one that is canned. Students are good at doing things just to say They've done them. I do the same thing. I am given tasks at work and I do them as quickly as possible without much thought and put it in the outbox with a rubber stamp. If I ask the students to ask a question about the text they write down a question and rubber stamp it complete and this is a perfectly natural thing to do. My dad says it's "schemers scheming schemers." My buddy Fred says it's people just doing for their own. Nobody wants their kids to starve so one mechanical task leads to another and another and before you figured out what's going on you're 35 with a wife and two kids. This process begins in school because people have better things they imagine they might be doing--so, a seemingly simple task, like asking a question about a text--which is designed to elicit genuine responses, turns into just another thing to check off the list...mindlessly. Buddhists on a mountain in the middle of  China might not fall  prey to such devices...but I do.

ECIS

Mother/Partner tongue policy in the JFK English department

• A disapproving gasp
• suggested that being allowed to visit the familiarity of their mother tongue in order to decode what they see happening in English
• I have to agree based on my own experiences learning deutsch...if I'm allowed to use my own languages syntax or semantics in order to understand german's then it makes it easier. (i.e., subject verb, adj, adj, adj, infinitive)
• I asked about the best approach for correcting syntax in a writing sample. 
• (my process has been to underline the error and then "syntax" in the margin
• they suggested targeting "repeat offenders" i.e. "The americans felt the urge to make even more organizations to control the living of the japanese, which indirectly forbid them to live at the east coast."
• is changed to, "Americans were urged to make more organizations which directly restricted Japanese people, but these same tactics also indirectly affected where Japanese decided to live."
• which also reminded me that I'm compiling a list of "words we always mess up!" and I will put it in the drive for anyone who wants to add to it.
• the rest was promotional propaganda

Peter Dalglish: UN Habitat

• Vigilante Educator: sends volunteers to remote areas to help disseminate best practices
• results in an organic saturation of "IB" practices throughout a given region
• I've contacted him because of the responses I've gotten from the students in my AP/Leistenskurs to "the combine" and adorno's "Culture Industry."

Google sites: 

• private pages only accessible to you and student
• blogs that are done thru "announcements" tab on GS that are open to the class
• I post student blogs on my site too
• forms
• student foldres

Writing using evidence:

• The use of "I" in an essay. 
• common practice at university level is "you are the authority" of your thesis...follows the IB policy of "Student as Knower," thru the Theory of Knowledge aspect. 
• University first two years professors are assigning 3-5 page research essays with emphasis on depth and specificity
• 5 weeks working on getting a thesis (Specific and Narrow; Researchable Question) SNRQ
• thru a variety of FFW's (Focused Free Writes)

Derivations:

I struggle with helping kids design their own theses.

I realized....

• How much internalizing, digesting, examining marginalized aspects, I am doing while I read a text.
• I come with 44 years of life experiences
• I carry with me my own tools of deconstruction methods, i.e. the critical lens with which I examine a text is finely tuned via education, self-interest, and teaching for 6 years
• I have an agenda when I read and have a bank of "signifiers" that when I see them in texts I know seemingly instinctually how to develop a critique of the text...none of the above are instinctual they are learned....hence the problem a 12 to 18 year old kid has with coming up with a provocative thesis.
• Thesis is something that you have to craft thru introspective interactive prior knowledge experiences (experiences is a verb)
• Diane and Julia (what question do you have?
• FFW's
• Your predicted answer
• an imaginary interview with someone who might have the answer
• an argument you can imagine occurs between you and the interviewee
• an invented news story related to your question
• an invented dialogue in which you discuss your SNRQ at a coffee shop
• your proposal of your SNRQ to an organization for funding
• re-read
• use those insights to write a new SNRQ
• Rinse and repeat (Ideating)
• Should a thesis be polarizing?
• If kids are using the rubric as much as we are...what's the impact of them knowing that a strong thesis is only even considered as part of the score in two areas/aspects/boxes on the rubric?
• A good thesis is invaluable to.......(fill in the rest)

I should have gone to the costume party

I knew this guy Pete, from Austria, a little boxie, blonde haired....hobbit. I'd just moved out to LA in my Buick Regal. It was a sweet ride, and if the damn thing didn't leak oil I'd probably still have it. It was a sport edition of the Regal and had burgundy velour seats and matching carpet, a cool blue digital dash that spread across the entire front of the dashboard and down the middle to where the gear-shifter sat in-between the seats. When I was driving across country, I'd settle back, hit the cruise and prop one knee up listening to Miles Davis or Coltrane and at times it'd be like sitting in one of those IMax theatres...a panorama of the american landscape. Henry Miller called it the air-conditioned nightmare. Emerson painted the picture of an eye-ball overseeing it all. Kerouac watched it all receding from the back of a pick-up. I felt none of that.

At night it was like sitting in the cockpit of the space shuttle. A moonlit, early-winter night in the middle of the Rockies with Coltrane slow-dripping into the veins, makes a young man believe he is a king--and that's what it was like driving that old Buick 'cross country. When I came out of the Arizona desert it was hard to distinguish which impulse was stronger--getting the hell out of Arizona or getting to the Ocean.

I hit the 5 (I-5), right between San Diego and Los Angeles and pulled off at the first exit and stopped at a gas station. Bought an LA paper because the San Diego box was empty and called the first "room-for-rent" advert from a payphone and headed to Anahein where I was to meet Paul at one in the afternoon. The room I rented was one of two rooms converted from an add-on garage. It had a bed, a night-stand, a digital clock and a lamp. I hung a map on the wall...incidentally, every subsequent place I moved to I hung a map on the wall. I had my own private entrance and I'd have to walk over the drive-way and into the house thru the main door where the kitchen was located and down the hall was the bathroom...there were six additional rooms in the house, Paul's master-bedroom had its own bath. Paul didn't need to work, he was an ex-marine--and kind of an asshole, but justifiably so because his house was filled with nere-do-wells, rejects and perverts.

The first night there I was cooking up a bologna, fried-egg and grilled-cheese sandwich in the kitchen when I met Brock.

"I'm Brock," he said and stared at me with his face hanging out. "Wanna come see my big-screen TV?"

I scarfed my sandwich down and he took me into his room. It was dark, the room blacked out with curtains and a giant spacecraft of blue hovered and took up the entire room. His Lay-Z-Boy sat directly in front of the huge TV. Behind his chair was a large cardboard box. From what I could discern, nothing else existed in Brock's room...for that matter, at that time, nothing else in the universe existed.

"If you wanna borrow my porn you can," he said with his face hanging out pointing to the giant cardboard box. I went back to my room and cracked a Mickey's and tuned around on the digital clock radio listening for signs from aliens. A knock on the door and I slid the modified garage door open to my room and Pedro (not the Pete from above) stood there with his hands in his pockets. I didn't know what a sketcher was then, to me he just looked confused and shy and lacking self-confidence. After he explained that he was the tenant who previously occupied my room and that he thought he might have left his jacket here, I offered him a beer.

We drank my supply and I suggested we go get some more.

"Sure," Pedro said. "You like coke?"

That was a long time ago now and trying to convey what that night was like is impossible in this post-post-modern era without being cliched. Tom Waits said that when he writes a song he gives it to his wife so she can ferret out the cliches, which is why I like Waits' music so much.

Southern California in the mid-nineties didn't have cellphones or internet yet. I was typing on this old typewriter that my mom'd given me and had been carting it around with me since high school and it had a defective B and D--the letters would plant themselves slightly higher along the lines and I was writing and sending stuff I'd written to my friends in Ohio (   ) using this old typer. The look of the text was probably the most appealing aspect of the writing, but nonetheless I wrote about the San Pedro and Brock sagas and many more and that's where those things should remain...lodged in time, character flaws and all.

I met Pete, the hobbit dude from Austria shortly after all that madness on a Saturday morning. I'd got a job waiting tables at a family diner across from Disneyland--most of my early days of traveling were funded via this method. Decide a general area I wanted to live, save a few hundred dollars--enough to secure a room and eat for a few days until I could get a job waiting tables. Waiting tables in SoCal was easy pickings for a young white male. I'd walk in dressed nicely, hand my resume over...Kinko's was instrumental in those days, and present myself in the most humble form I could muster, which is quite servile...I have no qualms about being a stooge, and 9 times of 10, I had the job walking out the door. I was so confident in my ability to find work that once I went into a Friendly's restaraunt fresh out of bed, resume in hand, and dressed in sweats and a t-shirt and walked out employed.

I got the job, working the dinner hours. Dinner hours is as good as gold in the food industry...plus I didn't start till Monday. I was looking at the map on the wall figuring out where I wanted to go. I went to get another cup of coffee from the kitchen and ran into Pete.

I can't say enough good things about Pete. The image I have of him is this...us sitting in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment we'd eventually found together and moved into. Pete sitting in this wine-colored, Victorian chair, perched up and leaning forward, one hand grinding into the high arm of the chair, elbow cocked at ninety degrees, his other elbow pressed on his knee and his fist extended out in front of him and he is talking intently about something important. He's wearing his shorts that he probably bought in the '80's and his blonde hairy legs and chest bursting out of his clothes. On the table next to him is a forty of Mickey's and a small straight glass which he is continuously topping off with his beer. He's pinching a tiny joint between his sausage-like fingers and working like a coal-miner trying to keep it lit. We used to talk about anything and everything and we laughed all the time. One time we were in this heated discussion, he believed that the holocaust was a fake and never happened. He was pinching the tiny joint between his fat little fingers and failing to get a draw on it, he finally pulled the thing away from his lips giving up and stared at me.

I looked at him smiling.

"What the fuck are you smiling at?" Imagine that said with a thick Austrian accent.

"Nothing," I said innocently as possible, shrugging my shoulders. On his lower lip, smoldering and smoking the tiny joint was stuck and he was buzzed enough and crazy enough I guess he didn't notice it until it had started to burn and he jumped up, furiously slapping himself in the mouth to figure out what the hell was burning him. He looked at his empty finger tips and by this time I was on the floor laughing.

I had a girlfriend at the time, she was Jewish. I had no idea what was so appalling to her that Pete denied the holocaust. I mean on conscious level I knew...yes, this should be insulting to her, but on another level, a human one, I knew that people can think whatever they want, it won't keep me from being friends with them. This is somewhat robotic. I have a friend of mine who calls it being an alien. He's an alien though and tries to superimpose his experiences onto those he comes across...a perfectly natural thing to do...I wouldn't toss him out of bed because of it, just like I wouldn't un-friend Pete because he thinks the holocaust wasn't real. Besides he's dead now anyway, and what good would I have gotten out of it if I'd ended our friendship because my girlfriend at the time didn't approve. She's still alive and happily married and probably doesn't even remember who Pete was...once again, my case is made by virtue of circumstances.

That Saturday morning I wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo. I like zoos. I know that might piss some people off. I've been to some depressing zoos. The LA Zoo for instance. The elephants in the LA Zoo have this space of about 100 square meters, two or three of them stuffed into it, and the only thing resembling nature is a crooked old destroyed tree. The one time I was there, one elephant was out in this play area and he'd curled his trunk around the last remaining branch of this tree and was banging it repeatedly against the ground like a mental patient and I got depressed and left.

I went to a zoo in the Czech Republic once and they had goats and horses, and these two monkeys that sat unmoved for the entire time I watched them, which was quite a long time, and they had a couple llamas too, and a bunch of chickens and ducks and geese as well. The zoo had  a restaurant on site and the barns were all painted with scenes from children's fairy tales...like crazy images--witches standing over a kettle with two kids slowly cooking away, a wolf stalking a playground from behind a willow tree.

Pete and I went to the San Diego Zoo that Saturday, the first time I'd met him and we had a great time. He was around 50 years old I guess, but he was a fun guy and an interesting past. He'd sort of a fall-from-grace story and was still in love with his ex-wife, a hot little cougar who apparently drained him of self-confidence as well as finance. In the '80's he was an engineer and got into the coke scene, lived in Venice Beach and was flossing a red-corvette when he met his wife. I believed his stories--didn't have a reason not to.

His ex-would call him occasionally and on those days he'd sit in his chair and drink and eat this thick hearty bread. He'd put a layer of butter on the bread and on top of that a thick layer of Philly Cream Cheese and then he'd watch Ricky Lake or Montel and drink and eat. I'd come in and rouse his tail-feathers. He was like that...a peacock...proud and at the same time, he forgave me my youthful indiscretions and he talked with me as if I were a valuable friend. I know people in their fifties who hardly acknowledge your existence because their so wound up in their own worlds they hardly recognize anything else is going on. People who are talking themselves into a cave, people who, if you can get a word in, don't even notice you've said something. It's not like they don't notice you...it's like what you've just said only served as an interruption of what they were trying to say. These people are so weird, and not just relegated to 50 somethings, you see it in younger  people, but a lot of time in these cases it's recovering heroin or meth addicts...these people are so out of tune that in order to break off a conversation with them you need to just come right out and say something like...

"So, I have to go now."

And then they look at you and say ok and continue going on with what they were talking about...Pete was not like this.

We spent the whole day at the zoo, he had some good Cali-gold and we smoked a joint sitting in the butterfly terrarium, an amazing wet jungle of a place that seemed to go on forever, yet closed off from the world. Nobody was here and we sat under the California sun and watched all the butterflies. I was really happy at this moment and glad I'd never again heard from Pedro. I've had a long time love/hate relationship with drugs and I honestly believe fate has had its hand in my ability to stay relatively clean and sane. If I'd had less of a disciplined upbringing or an excess of funds I would have fallen prey to the demonic elements. My dad must have suffered raising me, and I only know this because of age and experience. There's a lot of value in experience...someone said an unexamined life is not worth living and that is a reflection of experience.

You can't have gotten an adequate picture of my friend Pete though. I used to carry around this hand-held tape recorder and record random stuff...conversations, spontaneous street scenes, vagrant ministerial rants, the usual stuff. Once, me and Pete were sitting out on the balcony. We lived in this four-plex and it faced another, identical four-plex and in between was a grass field, closer to what you could imagine, as I did, a courtyard. And in the summer time, 3 of the balconies were friendly and would sometimes convene on one or another's balcony, and it was good fun. Community. A community of the oddest mish-mash of people that sometimes we all laughed out loud about the absurdity of the combination.

Me and Pete'd been drinking the forties and smoking and I started laying out this gag we could do. Pete was such a crazy dude that he agreed to let me record him giving me permission to beat the shit out of him with a broom stick. I wanted it to be a kind of radio drama where this guy is so depressed and wants to kill himself, but his roommate gets this idea that because he gave permission to get beat the hell out of, his shifty lawyer could get the settlement for the assailant---pain and suffering...truth was I hadn't planned the entire scenario out and Pete...the crazy bastard played along and let me record him giving me permission.

Later that night I came rushing out onto the balcony from my room wielding a broom stick and Pete's immediate figurative....possibly literal, pooping of his pants, I couldn't go on for all the laughing I was doing.

One time my friend Dave came out to visit. Actually, it was more like stopped in for a visit on his way from Las Cruces to Tacoma. It was reminiscent of the electric kool-aid acid tests. Pete got just as much a row out of it as we did and it was good fun.

Pete and me'd get in these heated discussions. When he'd start going off on wild ideas like the holocaust was a fake, I'd start making up outlandish tales about shit..."Oh yeah man, they filmed the moon-landing outside Vegas."

Right, I know, the moon-landing was filmed outside Vegas...but the more preposterous my claims the more offended he'd become. We'd push each other's buttons, swilling back beers and the discussions turned to infuriating lashings of character and humanity were slandered onto the other and when he couldn't take it anymore he'd say, "You  know what man?" (again, austrian accent) "You are nothing but a verbal masturbator...you know that...you're verbally masturbating right now...that's all you're doing..."

Mittens are only a metaphor

This is my third autumn in Berlin. I work too much and don't get out much unless I'm on holiday. If I don't work as much as I do, I am not a very effective teacher. It takes me a long time to plan because I can't get in front of a class and pontificate and prattle on about stuff. I do have some texts that I'm better at simply because I've taught them more than twice and know how kids react and respond to them.

It's when I teach stuff for the first or second time that I suffer. I am not a quick thinker which is why I take so much time planning because I try and consider as many possible outcomes that might develop. I know this is futile but sometimes it pays off. I know that good teachers can superimpose and transmogrify content into any given situation and leap across material utilizing their powers of metaphor--applying point of view from text to text. This is not my forte.

I see all texts as unique--themes are limited for sure and cut across texts, but characters are all different and require the lens to be focused differently. Another problem I have is that I don't believe in analyzing literature through literary devices. In reality, the only time symbolism is relevant is in poetry. I see symbolism in fiction like Hemingway does, if you're putting symbols intentionally into your work, you're inauthentic. Or Flannery O'Connor suggests that teaching literature by deconstructing symbols is missing the point, sometimes the hat is just the style of the time period and that's why the guy's wearing one.

Read Dostoyevsky and it's clear he's not strategically dropping symbols around to get us to understand.

It's raining out but the sun is trying to find its way and I'm going to go for a ride and do some shopping for Halloween costume materials. I love autumn, always have. If you've ever flopped down exhausted in a pile of leaves and stared up at the sky and breathed in the peppery flavor of smoked earthen leaves, then you understand. Indian summer is one of the greatest gifts a kid can be granted...on the heels of fresh summer memories, an Indian summer is like getting a chance to do it all over again, make up for lost time, fix mistakes and make everything right in the world. I feel the same way now as that old excitement shimmers its way up from my belly and finishes off with a slight buzzing sensation that inspires me to brew coffee, fill my thermos and get out there and blow the leaves off the sidewalk with my speedy bike.

If you're looking for symbolism in that last little bit, in my humble opinion, you're missing the point.

I don't mean to besmirch figurative language, in life and language, metaphors and analogies connect us. They allow us to empathize and understand one another. But making concrete decisions about malleable content dilutes or streamlines, or commodifies it into something contrary to the beauty it should represent. I realize that criticism is necessary. But we should use the texts we have to analogize our experiences, not the other way around.

Freud uses Oedipus to examine why we behave certain ways because it creates a common point of understanding. Nietzsche alludes to Lessing's son's death to give us a shared experience. This is different than arguing the meaning of Big Nurse's orange colored lipstick. If I said that woman is my Big Nurse, then like Adorno alluding to Ford's assembly line to explain the film industry's marriage to advertising is enough to make a connection to how we've become products thru watching too much TV--and you would understand my perception of that woman--and I assure you it's not because she's wearing orange lipstick.

This is only relevant to me and the small number of teachers who I'm true friends with or poet friends, shout out to J-mack and JJ...but the fact is, I'm supposed to be a teacher of literature and because I don't believe in the fundamental element of teaching literature, like deconstructing a story until it's dead, then I reside in an ever-present state of conflict. I know that I should be telling the kids in my class to stop worrying about symbolism and metaphors and get to the point...why doesn't Nick nail Jordan, and who's your Big Nurse, and what hope are we supposed to have after reading "1984," but I know the next teacher they get is going to expect them to understand the symbolism in "The Pearl," and because of that I abandon my true nature for the greater agenda.

So I go out and ride my bike on a beautiful fall Berlin day and it's as if I'm traveling through time. I start to think about the books I've read and why I read and continue to read. I am searching. I read for the same reasons I go to museums and stare at art or learn about history. I talk to homeless people and people who are smarter than me or have had different experiences because I know there's so much more to learn. I do this with my teaching, I expect that I'm going to learn from my students, even the little 7th graders.

The fact is "rebellion" is dead--or more precisely, it's been commodified. You can drink poison but to what end, Socrates already did it and the effect is understood, assimilated and re-configured and now it's on a t-shirt and some kid spent fifty bucks for a cheap shirt made in china for fifty cents. When John threw off the shackles of Soma and society, he became a hero--he was--is a hero to me, but I am a relic. Now when John throws off the shackles of Soma, it's simply a symbol of a cautionary tale--a reminder to people to be-ware but don't get crazy about it and do something drastic, you'll ruin your credit, or mess up your permanent record and that shit stays with you for seven years and you'll never get into the college of your choosing.

When Holden loses his mind, it's ok and understandable because he was an archetype of a never-before-seen demographic of a consumer society that'd mass-produced itself into uber-supply...Holden loses his mind because he sees what's in store for him--vapid supply/demand, production/product, product/consumer. Holden is John the Savage--an American teenager who's parents are busy making money so their kids can get into good schools and get good jobs so they can raise kids of their own and they can get into good schools and have good jobs. Now--Holden's just so negative, is there nothing he can't find to complain about, why doesn't he care about his future or his education, he's never going to get into a school if he doesn't change his behavior...he's just making bad choices.

Bad choices, this is the response our society has come up with. Eventually you're expected to come 'round to our way of thinking...and if you don't, well, we can find an alternative program for you to go to. And that's it man. Socrates, Plato, Raphael, DaVinci, Shakespeare, Douglass, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Huxley, Miller, Keroauc, Burroughs, Kesey and Carver...they're all just bad choices. Shakespeare was writing to save his life and his material is reduced to the study of iambic pentameter...I didn't give a shit about iambic pentameter then and I don't now. Now Shakespeare's characters teach us what not to do, serve as warnings...I see them as mirrors. When I re-read Cuckoo's Nest I grow increasingly distraught. I see R.P. and Cheswick, Ol' Pete, and Big Chief reduced to symbols and the text commodified into lessons on how not to mis-understand the real issues of mental illness, and Kesey's done more harm than good by presuming these self-institutionalized ding-bats could just walk out and live lives as normal as any ol' asshole on the street.

This is the conflict that sits inside me...like an ancient ghost, or a recurring dream of which you only recall the same short snippet of...it's because I'm learning from being a teacher and I'm starting to doubt, not just my ability or quality of the teaching I'm doing..that's always been a concern, but to what end this "gig" will lead to. I used to think, well, I'll teach these kids how to think critically, to listen, read and watch the news with a critical lens and that will be enough. I try to do that. I gave out Adorno's "Culture Industry," essay as background information leading up to reading "Cuckoo's Nest," and the kids' perspective on it was that it was dated. When I read it almost 15 years ago, I was astounded and felt as if Morpheus had just woke me up, but now, Adorno's ideas are understood...like that goddamn gorilla in "Ishmael" keeps telling the narrator, mother culture has informed these kids about the culture industry...they know it inherently because it's been uncovered now for 50 years and BMW and Mercedes can actually produce commercials in which rebels and outsiders have become their target audience. Kids know so much about the way the world works and they know it when they see it. If you show them the origins, it's only confirmation of something they learned along the way. The really smart ones can put historical contexts to certain ideas and understand the value of history as well.

public transportation...or the royal baby.

Public Transportation; or, People Are People

The first time I moved a long distance from where I grew up, I thought people would somehow be different. Like going from suburbia Ohio to Chicago--nope Midwestern through and through. Go to a spendy restaurant in Chicago and the waitress/waiter looks just like the one off interstate 71 and route 18's Big Boy.

Ok, Midwest is Midwest...so California, here I come. The Romanian family downstairs and across the courtyard resembled my friend's family in Valley City whose dad could be seen in the neighborhood with a beat up old pick-up truck piled high with scrap metal. In Anaheim, the Romanian family, the Moise's, it was a beat up old mini-van and it was stuffed each weekend with scrap cardboard.

Growing up in Ohio people would drive by and hate on you—a finger or a scowl—demonstrated that it wasn't you they hated but their own lives. In Florida once, when I was riding over the Harbor Bridge on my bike, a guy in a pick-up threw a McDonald's medium sized soda at me. I flew the bird at him and as I crested the bridge and began coasting down the other side, I could see the guy in the pick-up who'd just hurled his drink at me standing in the parking lot at the bottom waiting. That's some typical mid-west shit, but instead this was "paradise," as I'd heard so many people refer to Florida.

The first time I saw a homeless person was in Toronto. I was like ten, our family was spending a couple days in town and it was our first night in the city. We'd just left a Chinese restaurant and walking back to our hotel and I was lagging behind everyone, generally being amazed by the Toronto night and saw a raggedy looking guy sitting against a building begging. I turned, flipped a quarter to him and he winked at me and smiled. When I lived in Long Beach I met and befriended a guy named Pedro. He had a dog and liked Popov Vodka. I used to get him a pint every weekend. I was poor, he was homeless. He was always just outside a drugstore every Friday night and every Friday night I'd get him a pint and we'd talk. In Portland, I knew Jimmy, he hung out in the Park Blocks and I'd smoke him out whenever I saw him. By the time I moved to Florida, I was becoming as old, or older than the homeless people I'd run across. I knew a couple guys who'd set up home behind a tiki-bar down the road from where I lived. I would go get a drink, stop by the liquor store and walk back behind the strip mall and sit under the stars with French and Bongo, like those two guys from Of Mice and Men.

This is one of the things I miss about speaking fluently, I can't indulge in my past-time of getting to know a guy. Here in Berlin, a guy sits on my street corner in a wheelchair with signs strategically placed on his person and chair, "bottles," "change," "cans," etc...I often wonder what he would do if I grabbed his change and ran. Most beggars kneel on a rug or mat, and hold out their hands in front of them in an ascetic and submissive pose. I don't get to talk to these people because I can’t convey subtleties. At the park where I read a lot, a guy comes by frequently and stops and talks to me in German and I try to understand him but it's an uphill struggle and despite my, "Ich weiss kein deutsch," he continues to talk to me, as if I'm not telling him the truth. I'm glad he persists—it helps us both.

In Prague they kneel and lean their upper bodies forward with their foreheads pressed upon the pavement in front of them, arms outstretched cupping a hat or cup in their hands, in a tortuous devotion to their unworthiness. In LA, they approach you aggressively. In Portland they are in packs and don't really ask for anything, the kids do, but they all have homes and family who love them. In New York and Chicago they always try to provide a service, wash your windows or shine your shoes. In Florida, they sell you crap, like bags of oranges. Everywhere though—they hold signs, people laugh and are more generous with the honest ones, "need a beer."

I've taken public transportation in every place I've lived. Public trans in America, with few exceptions, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and New York, is relegated to the people who can't afford their own car. In LA, if you're standing at a bus stop, you endure a stream of down cast and condescending glances and stares. You wait in the heat next to a pole that may or may not have a sign, likely doesn't have a bench, and almost certainly no shelter, and the schedule is more like a cruel hoax than a tool for punctuality. Waiting for a bus in LA should be approached in a Zen way. Having to rely on the bus means you have nothing to do that needs to be done on time. If you have a job and use the bus, you pretty much have to afford two hours each way for travel time because most of that will be spent waiting for a bus to arrive. And the people who are on the bus are miserable creatures and bat-shit crazy.

Portland was the first place I took public transportation with which people used and relied on as a form of transportation. They have buses, trains, and trams that all pretty much run according to schedule. I used to marvel at the number of conversations I would get into with people on the bus or train. Most definitely there are some loons on the bus here too. One time I saw this couple, a fat black mama was cuddling a small, a tiny little white man in a beard, he nuzzled her bosom and she cradled him as a mother does her child. She wore a spaghetti strap tank-top and Daisy Dukes—they looked, together as one, like a tube of soft cheese had burst at the seams.

I remember once waiting to catch the last line out of the Portland Bus Mall out to Southeast. It was fall, and the wind cut through the mall catching autumn leaves and trash alike. The marquee was flickering on and off and I couldn’t discern the time table. I waited and waited until finally I determined that I'd missed the last bus out for the night. It was two AM, I walked the 28 blocks and then some to my place.

I was living in Portland when they began the remodel of the Bus Mall, they were also adding a couple lines to the tram and train system. Everyone, no matter where you live, bitches about construction. By the time Portland was refurbishing its transportation I was fluent with the system so figuring out the detours was a matter of a slight, easy adjustment. I've visited Portland since the renovations and it's impressive. But in Berlin where construction is a way of life, reading the detours is considerably more challenging and frustrating. However, familiarity has made it relatively painless. Especially since I've realized that construction is less of a reaction to something broken and more a proactive approach resembling upkeep and maintenance. In Berlin, they don't "repair,” they maintain on a schedule. They don't wait for it to break, they keep it in good running condition on a rotating schedule and little spots are shut down and re-routed. In the major stations there are signs in English and German, even workers who speak both languages are standing around waiting to help, albeit, resentfully, should they have to speak English.

The resentment is tiring. Especially since most Germans are wearing American-style clothing, listening to American music, and saying American pop-signature idioms, like YOLO. One thing I find particularly disturbing is the Johnny Cash shirts sold at Primark...do they even know who Johnny Cash is?

German public transportation is amazing. I can get by train or bus to any location in Germany. Any small town or village anywhere in Germany is accessible by train or bus....anywhere! And, if you compare any public transportation system in any American city, or for that matter, any other country in Europe, the German system is remarkably dependable. And yet, all Germans bitch about it. They all hate it. You see it in their faces as they ride...and they all ride...everyday, everywhere.

And yet, it's as if they have no idea how it works. Some stations are busy, others not so busy, and in all of them it’s as if all the people are riding the train for the first time. You come to a stop and the people waiting to get off have to activate the doors, otherwise, if no one is getting on or off, the doors remain closed. At all stations, the people inside the train are generally the ones who press the button to open the door. People pile up at the doors upon approach and incessantly press the button until it opens, even before the train has come to a complete stop, and then rush out stepping on old and young in an effort to get to the stairs first. Meanwhile, the people waiting to get on the train are shoving into the cars. In busy stations it's a comedy to watch—an epic battle to be first...to where? god knows.

The thing that's most strange about this entire battle is that this is not an automated system. The doors need to be activated by people getting off or on, and the conductor, a human, is monitoring this back and forth. If the station is very busy, the conductor watches and waits for the transition and if you're standing there waiting to board, you really don't have to worry, the conductor will wait. Yes—if you are dashing down the stairs and the platform is clear, and you are hurling your body at a closing door, the conductor will laugh inwardly and watch as you curse and flail obscene gestures—and away the train will go. But, if the train is packed, and you’re lodged behind a stroller, a couple bikes and an old blind wizard, you will have to "entschuldigung" your way out of the train, and some people who are not intending to get off but are close to the door, will have to step out and let you through, and then those boarding will shove the people who generously stepped aside back into the train as the battle continues. But, this is not their first time on this trip. Everyone has been the person shoved away from the door—felt the desperation as they try to get out. So why, for god's sake, why doesn’t everyone just relax and let the system work. A pile of people standing on the platform, patiently waiting for off-loaders, will not go unseen by the conductor. He will wait. The people who want to get on—just wait until the off-loaders get out, so fear doesn’t strike their hearts every time they want to get out of a crowded car.

At times I find myself getting caught up in it, and it's embarrassing. There are stops that I am very familiar with and I know whether or not I should be at the front or back of the train in order to gain access to the best exit from the platform. I can tell if the train is short or long, which cars will have more people, and how to maneuver a bike on and off in Neukoln or Kreuzberg during rushour. I have a tremendous bell on my bike and when I'm in the mood I use this bell, and it sounds like that Dukes of Hazard horn muscle cars of my youth used to blow obnoxiously throughout the neighborhood. I smile broadly and people stare and scowl at me and I revel in my glory.

dark

I did a lot of camping last summer on my bike trip. Never anything primitive, people were generally around, except for France. I found this day camp for scouts and family affairs, large group outdoor activities, but open from dawn to dusk. So after dark I was alone, but the location I'd found, while off the beaten track, was still groomed and maintained by the french national park systems, far from primitive or wild.

The first time I ever went alone, into the wild, at least as wild as you can get in the west of America, which is still surprisingly wild, I will always remember. South of Tuscon, an hour maybe, Mount Lemon, a saguaro forest, a national forest I think. My car was the only one in the parking lot, it was late winter, but warm enough to camp, no snow, but I had a good sleeping bag and was warm easily at night. I hiked all day without seeing anyone, I was 23 or 24 and could hike easily with a pack, it was as if I carried nothing at all, it was all on my back.

Daylight was easy, lonely, but easy and I spent my time hounding for rocks, examining animal excrement, making up stories, visualizing my future, studying my past. As the sun set and the night air cooled the landscape I began looking for a place to camp. This was before internet, mobile phones, and electronic devices. I didn't have a walkman, so I looked for a stream to camp near.

I had a decent pack, carried a supply of dried foods, campstove, lantern, fuel, and a notebook and pen. I had camped my whole life. My dad instilled this in me, my friends all liked camping too, so camping wasn't a thing for me to be worried about. When I left my car behind in the parking lot and the sun shone in the sky I didn't consider the darkness.

I found a nice place, it was shaded, with a small clean stream that sort of hooked into a little nook and then back down into a bigger stream a few hundred feet away, it looked as if someone had used this place to camp before me. I set up my tent, threw my sleeping bag inside and opened up the vents and after starting a fire admired my little plot. I kept busy, gathering wood, reading, writing notes, imagining I was like Thoreau. It wasn't until years later that I learned that he was kind of a fraud and what I was about to experience was pretty unique.

Actually it wasn't until a few days ago, while reading Kafka on the Shore, that I recognized how special that moment was. Murakami, in his novel, makes a reference to Ben Franklin and lights and how prior to electricity man lived truly in the dark. That made me think about that camping trip back when I was 23. I had camped alone before, but always with other campers nearby or supplies, or a toilet or an outhouse or some form of civilization. This time was different. Nobody was around. I was alone. As darkness came I didn't think about the cavemen, or medieval times, or the Greeks, I thought about what I would do, who I was, where I was going, why I was here and my first instinct was to flee. Pack up my things and hike back to my car and go back home. I was afraid of the dark.

I'd always been afraid of the dark. As a child, if my mom told me to go down to the basement to get something, I'd rush down, grab what it was she wanted and with cold chills rushing up and down my spine speed back up the stairs imagining some hideous monster hot on my trail and burst thru the door and into the house before it could get me.

Now, in the darkness of the Arizona desert, there was no door to burst thru. I tried to cook some food and to eat but I was so overcome with loneliness and fear that eating just didn't suit me. I didn't know then what I was experiencing. I didn't make the connection to what Murakami was trying to express, that for most of human time people lived in this darkness and it was a part of them. Like the morning sun, like fresh dew on a field of grass, like a congregation on Sunday morning, like harvesting a bounteous crop or gathering wood from the forest--there was a life just as long and just as meaningful to us all, and it was in the dark.

People gathered with wooden bowls filled with tallow and lighted and they went into a hole in the ground and then painted walls and prayed. Not prayer as we know now, prayer more closely to paganism, as if drawing a picture of a bison would bring a promising hunt, or carving a figure of a woman with a big belly would bring a child, or placing a pile of grain on the temple of Neptune would bring a lusty rains and a good harvest.

Some people knew it was not real and they profited from the darkness. Maybe a shamen or a priest or a guardian of the temple, but most of us feared the darkness and we lived in it despite ourselves and when we woke and the sun was shining, and dew dripped from our crops we rejoiced and worked.

Darkness came, parents sent their children to bed and they stayed up long enough to get ready for the morning. Maybe they had company and drank wine or beer and they told stories or laughed into the moonlit night. Maybe they walked along together holding hands. Maybe they went straight to bed too. Maybe there wasn't enough wood to keep the fire going all night and they froze under layers of wool. Maybe their experiences haunted them and stood like spectral apparitions in the corners of their minds reminding them of the horrible things they'd done. But they had candles or lamps or fire, but before there was fire they didn't fear the dark...I don't think.

I think they transformed, like the ghosts they believed existed, they changed too. And that first night in Arizona, I transformed too. I had a dream, but I don't think I slept while I had this dream. It was a landscape similar to the one I'd hiked that day. Saguaro cactus peppered the mountains and flames shot up like some avant-garde light show, straight from the earth, and sounded like flames should sound when you are alone in the dark. I saw this dark landscape of fire and red and heard the sound of steel striking steel, and witnessed the swinging of hammers, of huge Orc-like monsters working their hammers upon anvils the size of VW Beetles. I walked along unnoticed thru this landscape and sweated in the cool Arizona night.

I think before electricity, before lamplight, before candles were prevalent, people lived in the darkness just like they lived in the sunlight and it created in us two sides that still exist in us today. How could it be any different. So long we lived like this, so long we were two different beings. In the morning sun in us we worked and in the moonless night we dreamt. And it was natural, pure, it was not something we questioned. These were not myths or fairy tales, it was simple, light and dark, and while I feared the dark on that first night, the second, third, and fourth nights I dreamed too, I still was afraid, but I grew familiar with how to deal with it. I hiked long hard days and in the mornings I felt invigorated and lusty and as the sun set over the next mountain I began to prepare for the darkness.

I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not sure I know now what I was doing, but I think I was getting close to living.

Darkness will come today but it will never be the same. Last summer, when I biked across Europe, I never once let my phone die, I always found a place, just before the nighttime came to charge the battery because I knew darkness would come and I am still afraid of it. In Slovakia and points east the wild returns to the earth. Last summer, in the west of Europe, I never saw true darkness, civilization is permanent, but I can imagine in parts of Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia, there is wild darkness again where people gather in caves for protection.

Slovakia, Michalovce, Mike's Sheep...

I like Slovakia. The people are nice, mid-western nice. I feel at home here. It feels like Poland in a lot of ways--the countryside, conditions--economically--both countries are poor financially.

My lung isn't healed completely and the long trip drains me but adrenaline and excitement and soon I've stopped listening to my body. I pay for it and sleep 18 hours over the next 36, that and I'm reading, Kafka on the Shore, Murakami. Sputnik Sweetheart  is a much better novel.

Mirka gave me perspective on Murakami that I didn't think about. She has a cautious optimism regarding Murakami that since our discussion have influenced how I perceive Murakami. For instance, before our discussion I was determined that I should make a pilgrimage to Japan and meet the writer who could write metaphors never before uncovered by humans, to after our discussion...well, now that you mention it, this does seem to have a pattern to it that could be formulaic and premeditated.

The stories have all been written, it is difficult to be original. Being Genuine is easy, once you've grown tired of trying to control your path and recognize that all you have to do is hop on board, like a train, then the story can be told in this newfound freedom.

I'm done with Murakami tho, but not because I'm disillusioned, I just need to move on. Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, says to read and examine what about the writing you admire and follow this path no matter what you read. I'm reading some canonized stuff that I have to get ready to teach. I'm going to trace my own experience in testing this hypothesis with notes and reflections and try to design my curriculum on my own practices I use in order to understand these texts.

Jason has given me some great reads lately. Every time I go to Prague, which has been frequently, he gives me something that blows my mind and gets me rollin'.

In Slovakia it is cheap. Round trip train ticket, in a sleeping cabin with first rate service, 75 eu, four night stay in a pretty nice hotel, 70 eu, food expenses for the same duration, less than hundred eu, including drinks. I was told by two people that my Slovak is good...you have to know me to know how hilarious that statement is.

The waitress I had was a gem. She was the waitress. The waitress, from morning to closing, and she was very good, I bet she does well in tips, which would be saying something because tips are insignificant and provides little if any motivation to be a good waiter or waitress. She is flying in the face of convention by being so good.

Jason, who's family I was "vacationing," with went to PSU with me, and we both postulate that we probably went to PCC Sylvania together but we never had occasion to meet. Having him and Mirka and their entourage of family has been a blessing. I'm lucky to have them so close and they put up with me and seem happy about it.

We get into some pretty wild conversations at times, there's an ebb and flow. For instance, the Murakami discussion was enlightening and a perspective on the other side of the spectrum or see-saw, I tend to rush headlong into things I like initially with abandon, like I said, I was ready to make a pilgrimage and all that carries with it. Another one was about discipline.

I was telling Jason that I thought the discipline that comes along with religion, when it meant something to "the people," kept the world in check. Even if the powers-that-be didn't adhere to them, the people did, hence "opium of the people," thing. But, in retrospect consciousness is expanding, opening, bursting, breaking, it's been let go from the reins.

He said, "You can't go back."

And I know this. "It's not going back, it's coming around, not a circle, they cannot touch on the go around. It's more like a spiral..."

I don't know if it's spiraling out or in toward a fine point, but half of half of half, and so on, the result provides no insights.

By now one of the kids has to go pishy-pishy and Jason and Mirka and Janna if she is there, are moving as a unit. It's beautiful to watch, Mirka seems to know Jason in some ways better than he does himself. She rolls her eyes sometimes without actually rolling them. They love and care for their kids and it is so clear, they are angels.

"Religion is hypocritical," he says.

"It is, but so what?" I ask, but he is glib and too quick to dismiss the question as a legitimate one. Why does it matter if it's hypocritical? if it serves a higher aspiration for existence? This is exactly what Marx predicted and it wasn't about communism, it was about capitalism. We've gotten there, it's slave and master, that's all there is now.

"Look," I try to organize..."We've already ran from religion. We did that when we became amoralists and chased the dollar, became full-on capitalists. We renounce religion or at least replace it with this new endeavor, the dollar. Then we get to a place were corruption is no longer a conspiracy but a way of life and figured into the budget. Well, a little cap on this, like discipline, rules to follow and live up to, to remind you to seek higher land."

"Who's going to make the rules? I have my rules, I don't want someone else making up my rules."

"That's the problem man," I am flailing my hands upward and jabbing the sky with pointed fingertips. "We make our own rules and then before you know it you're so far out of bounds that you forgot where you started."

The girls see a "crocodile," swing, you'd have to see it, it would take too many words to describe something that the essence is....the kids jump up and down and clap and laugh and rush toward it with incredible jubilance. Jason swings them and they laugh and look like they're having the time of their lives.

I say to him, "Sometimes I feel like adhering to something that is outside of my own sphere, is more beneficial, provides me more insight into who I am and what I'm capable of..." I pause and I realize how I must resemble the guy who takes the blue or red pill, in The Matrix, the one where he wants to go back in and pretend that he doesn't know the truth and be happy.

Between this year and last...

The distance from Dusseldorf, Germany to London is just about the same as going from Berlin to Michalovce, Slovakia. The major difference would be mountains and hills, the more significant difference would be if traveling by bike, the Dusseldorf to London route would be 75 percent bike friendly--i.e. bike paths. Neither Czech or Slovakia has bike paths and they're hilly and mountainous. 

Last summer i rode my bike 891 km thru Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and England on a whirl-wind discgolf/beer-tasting/camping adventure that left me broke metaphorically and financially. 

This year, i took a train from berlin to prague (108 eu, first class), and from Prague to Kosice (69 eu, in a sleeping cabin), and then caught a ride with Jason Mashak and his entourage from Kosice to Michalovce where we stayed on a small mountain lake near a currently-being-refurbished castle. 

As I looked out the window of the train as the landscape rushed by, I was certain, had I rode this by bike it would have taken me twice as long as last summer's trip, simply because of the hills. Last spring I biked into Poland and the landscape in the area of Poland I was traveling was very similar to the terrain I was watching fly by on the train. On the poland trip, i was lucky to get 30 km in a day, and traveling in poland with only a roaming connection with spotty gps map on my phone is a bit like standing on the edge of a high cliff overlooking a rough sea. I think Longinus used this same image to help describe, "sublime," to the casual reader. Longinus describing, "sublime," is a bit like Freud describing, "uncanny." Somewhere in between all these images is the lost feeling from which you never escape while biking thru Poland. And the landscape from Prague to Kosice is much the same...let's say that I'm glad I didn't bike this trip. 

The guy I shared the cabin with was from Kosice, Jan I think, and he was here for his grandma's 80th birthday with his wife who was flying into meet them. He lives in San Francisco now and is a commercial real estate agent. He was a hipster better than any NW Portlander could ever be. We had a couple of beers with the guy down two cabins and he was Italian, living in Prague working for Exxon and going to meet his wife at her family's place in Kosice. I'm from Ohio--lived in Chicago, Nebraska, South Dakota, Kent, Ohio, Anaheim, Long Beach, Portland, Punta Gorda, Fl, and now Berlin. 

The train out of Prague was Russian Railways. The old east-block countries had different gauged tracks or width between the rails, whatever the case is, the tracks were different and that's been a big reason for the slow progress in this part of Europe. the tracks or the trains themselves need to be retrofitted so that one universal system could be installed and hence utilized in a united Europe. I am not an historian or even claiming this to be true. these are things I've heard mostly from older German people I've met. I've done no research to confirm any of this. 

Either way, it's clear the Russian Railways train was from the old east-block era and riding on a train, in the dark thru old communist country is like stepping back into my first grade class and getting into position under our desks in the event that Russia decided to drop the bomb on us. An exhilarating buzz hums thru my spine as i search the night wizzing by.