things that can talk: an epilogue

the end, for real

2005-11-08T11:38:00.000-08:00

i am no longer in europe; ergo, this is the final entry of this blog. it's been a good run. thanks to rick, my mom, grace, joel, joanna, alex pasternack, matt's dad, matt himself, my dad masquerading as a cat, and everyone else who's read it.

embarrassingly, this is not the end of me blogging. the adventure continues in my new exciting american-style blog:

<http://superactionplant.blogspot.com>

a thousand huzzahs! awright i have to go write the first entry of aforementioned new blog.

besos y pesos,
le jesse

last call

2005-10-31T06:16:00.000-08:00

i just had my last falafel at mo's imbiß (the king of falafel), which is the falafel place near our apartment, and in true king form it took them an extremely long time to make it. the king and his wife (the queen; he is syrian, she is russian) are always confused by the falafel-making process. always. here is how it went this time:

1. the king repeats my order in the form of a question. "yup!" i say, in german. "what?!" blurts the king.
2. the king locates a pita and eyes it doubtfully.
3. see 1.
4. the king examines his bowls of vegetables and fishes out some tomatoes, cucumbers, and mint leaves. he puts them in the pita. then he rearranges them. at this point five minutes have elapsed. the king then goes to work on a syrian edible-paste plate that someone else ordered. this person is slumped face-first onto the imbiß's single table. the king is singing tunelessly to himself.
5. the queen emerges from the back and asks what i wanted. "i think he's having a falafel," says the king.
6. the queen constructs falafel balls and puts them into a pot of boiling oil. an argument ensues over which pots have the burner on under them, and which do not. the king says something dismissive in russian. the queen shrugs fatalistically, pulls the falafel out of the burning oil with her bare fingers, inspects them, and puts them back in.
7. the king asks if i've ordered yet.
8. i emit screams.

earlier today i put some clothes in a box, in order to bring more things home, and brought it to the post office, where there was a line; when i got to the front, the postal worker said it would cost 2,40 to send it to the u.s. sweet! i pulled out 2,40 in coins. the postal worker eyed me. "i said 42,00," he said. it's worth pointing out that these numbers sound similar in german, and also that the box was small. "2,40 would be kind of cheap," he added, by way of explanation. "42,00 would be kind of expensive," i rebutted, wittily. this did not get a reaction, so i softened the blow: "3,20," i offered, and shortly thereafter we were no longer on speaking terms.

later today is last-minute gift-shopping, and then tonight will be a night of one-last-beer-with-over-twenty-different-friends, so it should come as no surprise to you if the next blog entry is about how i missed my plane. ha ha! in fairness, some of you may find that ridiculous, specifically the assertion that i have over twenty different friends. this is sort of fair; a number of these "friends" are more along the lines of "brands of beer," such as "warsteiner," who is both a fellow tour guide and a clear, hoppy pilsener.

the leaves have fallen. the winter coats are out. the city is starting to feel very soviet again. it was like this when i came in december.

then: had no work permit
now: have work permit
then: starry-eyed, idealistic
now: pragmatic, battle-hardened
then: terrified of spiders
now: somewhat less terrified of spiders
then: had had no triste with danish girl
now: again, she was 29 years old; DAMN
then: cold
now: cold
then: unaware how to cook lentils
now: arguably more aware of above
then: had composed one song that could be classified as "rockin"
now: have composed twelve such songs
then: did not know how reservation software worked
now: still have no idea how said software works
then: did not know how to crash reservations computer
now: am comfortable causing any computer to crash at any time
then: virgo
now: still a virgo

fin.

j

different area codes

2005-10-29T05:03:00.000-07:00

i discovered, at some point giving tours, that i use the phrase "game over" a lot. generally it's to convey, in a story, that via a specific incident, this or that historical course has been definitively set, e.g., "the reichstag burns, hitler takes advantage of the constitution's article 44 and declares martial law: game over," or "i'm hungry, and i refuse to continue talking until someone purchases a pizza: game over."

now it's game over for me in europe. no more getting up at 1pm and playing mac brickout for three hours, no more wrangling with the german bureaucracy, no more professionally recommending places to get cheap and life-changing falafel, no more awkwardly ephemeral contacts with english-speakers who are leaving tomorrow but already think berlin is amazing, OMG, which is flagrant hypocrisy on my part because i felt exactly the same way within 24 hours when i first came here four years ago; no more stumbling home under the stars to admiralstr. 22, grimly determined not to pee on anything except the inside of a toilet; no more cute poignancy of being domestic and foreign, cooking and cleaning with german consumer products; no more loud internet cafes, no more cobblestone bridge; no more kaffee und kuchen, no more flucht nach vorn.

i realize this is kind of unbearably introspective, and will probably be again on monday, when i plan to write next, but there's little else i can write about right now.

"flucht nach vorn" was coined during germany's brief flirtation with colonialism, around the end of the 19th century, when the national feeling was that the country was bottled up by its own borders and needed to escape and expand via occupying other parts of the world. it was later appropriated to classify the post-war reaction of germans and germany to their recent, horrifying past; it means, roughly, "escape forward," and that is what germans did. they escaped nazi germany by creating another germany that came after it.

i was thinking of my grandfather while wandering around bavaria last week--among other places in the alps of berchtesgaden, which is heart-breakingly, tears-producingly beautiful, and which is also where hitler built his famous eagle's nest hideaway, which he also famously did not spend much time in. the inhabitants are quick to tell you about this. most visitors are aware of its existence before they come, i would think, but the locals like to make sure. the owner of the little pension where i stayed could barely contain himself, over breakfast--"there are hikes here, yes," he fulminated, a short outdoorsy man with a chaotic beard, "and there is also the kehlsteinhaus--and that is where adolf hitler had his headquarters." he said this in a tone suggesting disbelief. i only realized later that he must say it just about every day.

my grandfather's reaction to my interest in germany--and especially my powerful fondness for germany, as it quickly became--has always been skeptical. he is upfront about the job he had when he was my age, or younger: "kill germans," he told me when i was maybe 12 and doing a school project that required me to interview a war veteran, and then as a sort of afterthought, "as many as possible, each day, without getting killed." he was wounded in the ankle in the battle of the bulge and has a large, dark wooden box full of medals commemorating his bravery. i don't believe there is an argument that he wasn't fighting as noble a fight as anyone has ever had opportunity to join.

it's not difficult, at all, to imagine a wwii vet's continuing distaste for all things german, and especially a vet who is jewish, and especially a vet who toured concentration camps after the war's end. all i can say--and i accept if it doesn't change his mind--is absurdly, kind of pathetically, coming from an anything-but-worldly 23-year-old: thank you. what you did was worth it. it worked out the way it should have. the reasons for why i love germany are the results of its liberation. berlin epitomizes all of them, for me. you can generalize about a city: berlin is tolerant, liberal-minded, deeply and innately skeptical of ideology, goofily nonconformist, orderly without being boring, culturally rich to an almost paralyzing degree. thank you, over 60 years later. i hope there's no statute of limitations.

and so sometimes flucht nach vorn can be good. it depends on what one is escaping. my flucht nach vorn is over, because it turns out i had nothing to escape, and also because if i eat one more falafel i will be given an honorary lebanese passport, which would get me thrown into jail immediately after getting off the plane.

in a couple of days i'll write something less weepy. in the meantime, i'm coming back home. game over.

it must have been something other than love

2005-10-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

...but it's over now.

i said my goodbyes to camilla this morning. for those of you who have seen camilla's name mentioned and are wondering who she is, here is the lowdown:

- camilla is a girl from denmark.
- camilla turns 30 in august of next year. i did not know this until a week and a half ago. i thought she was, at oldest, 27. was my outward reaction to this one of admirable calm? yes, it was. on the inside, was i seriously freaking out? regrettably, i was.
- camilla and i had a humorously brief relationship--it really doesn't deserve the word "relationship"; perhaps "vaguely, fumblingly romantic acquaintanceship"--that ended when she returned to denmark in june or so to try to get a job and care for her dying cat.
- camilla returned to berlin for about three weeks this month.

this would have been okay, except that every time we hung out it was Unbearably Poignant Nostalgia Hour, and it wouldn't necessarily have been, except that every other comment out of her mouth was something like, "it is so strange to be back now. only to have to go once more." or "it is truly wonderful to see you again, and i imagine that it is the last time we will meet in this world or the next." we were conversing in german, too, which is a language in which i can order falafel with extreme fluency, but in which i have trouble expressing emotionally difficult concepts. for that matter, so is english.

camilla: o jesse! i have missed you.
me: on monday, the steelers were triumphant in a game of american football.
camilla: and then again, i am not sure that we were ever meant to be.
me: i wish i had more money. i would buy a hammock! and i would never work again, in the manner of: WEEEOWWH. [air guitar motions]
camilla: sigh.
me:
camilla, appraisingly: what are you thinking right now?

i'm thinking, i need to take a vacation. i work for the last time tonight--jared at the bar roped me into one final karaoke DJ gig, which will hopefully be more emotional and fitting as a farewell than the nightlife tour of last week, which was one of the most stressful things i have ever done--i don't want to talk about it, but suffice it to say that five people out of seventeen, in three separate instances, managed to get lost, and three other people vomited, not on purpose--i also want to point out that the tourgoers loved every minute of it; they were uniformly positive in their feedback on the tour: "THIS IS THE MOST AWESOME TOUR EVERRRGH; [falling down, perhaps also going to sleep]" was an observation made numerous times, to me, loudly--it should also testify to the unbelievable mind-killing inanity of the entire night that i am looking forward to karaoke DJing now.

then tomorrow i take a train to bavaria, where i will wander among the mountains and reflect upon how unbelievably rocking our band will be when i get back to boston in a week. this reflection will take the form of singing lyrics i have written, loudly, to passersby or free-range livestock. "when life gets to be / kind of a drag," i intend to bellow at them. "you gotta eat gummi candy / STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BAG."

which pretty much sums up everything i have learned during my time in europe.

more reflections later this week, or next week. it is also worth pointing out that after the discovery of coconut milk, i am the god of thai-style curry. last night i put on a clinic. jeremy and katherine can testify.

yours in unimaginable poignancy,
alf

nostalgie

2005-10-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

rick, in email to me: update your blog! you can't do this to your poor mother.

my mom, in phone conversation: also you haven't posted anything to the blog recently, and rick must be worried.

all right!

my mom again: also, you're coming back to boston to do what again?

start a rock band and try to get my novel published and now also perhaps attempt to get revenue from an online comic strip that jeremy and i used to do in college.

my mom: your father would like to talk to you.

my dad: i'm sorry! i didn't quite hear that! please try again.

[mumbling]

my dad: SAY IT.

my intentions are to seek a respectable career of some kind.

my dad: that is what i thought.

i have three more days of work in berlin, and then two weeks of trying to get paid for everything that i've done, and then i come home. today's work is undoubtedly the best: a (surprise!) nightlife tour that was thrust upon me last night, instead of the normal karaoke-djing adventure. apparently no one else is available. our nightlife tour is highly controversial, in that we charge €12 and don't offer the magical array of free-vodka-down-your-throat-until-you-beg-for-mercy-or-death that other tour companies provide. those are "pub crawls" and we have nothing but disdain for them. on our tour, you get:

- information about nightlife, both historical and contemporary!
- awesome uniquely berlin places to go and drink!
- "drink offers!"
- "free entry to bars and most clubs!"

no one contests our superiority with the first two, but the latter two are the sources of controversy. here's what tonight's tour was going to have:

- absinth shots are €2 at one of the five places we go to.
- um... also around midnight i give everyone a tiny bottle of kümmerling.
-
.-
- did i mention that the information is both historical... and contemporary?!!!
-
- also the only place on the tour that actually charges cover does not plan to make an exception for us.

this last thingy was too much for me, so i delivered an ultimatum to my boss: we pay the cover ourselves, or i announce mid-tour that it is No Pants Time. there is no way i am ending a 12-euro tour with a demand for cover, especially when it's something we can obviously afford. this happened last week and someone made the tour guide cry. no joke! you may imagine my hysterical laughter when a tourgoer suggests that i have the sweetest job in the entire world ("you get paid to drink with people!!!"). then again, it is kind of sweet.

long story short, i got my way, and so we'll see how my last tour ever turns out--i would love for it to be a nostalgic, god-we-will-miss-you kind of tour, but it's a nightlife tour and that is not how those end. they tend to be more like, YOUR [sic] THE GRETARETEST!!! BARFF

even if my last tour won't be a high note, i've gotten a few items of tour-related thank-you mail recently, some of it ego-boosting, some of it not in the greatest english. here is my favorite. i am completely for real about this.

Dear Jesse

Hi, it’s me, [name] who attended to your walking tour at the end of August. Tall Korean girl. J Do you still remember me? And did you enjoy photos that I sent the other day? I hope so.
Today I revisited your website (brewer’s Berlin tours) to remember good memories in Berlin (Berlin remains very impressive to me.) and I saw your picture next to your profile. That’s exactly what I really wanted to do! I regret what I didn’t take a photo with you, didn’t ask you to have dinner with beer and didn’t catch a chance to talk with you after the tour. Actually I regretted what I didn’t do at the tour during the rest of my trip (so stupid and shy girl!!), that’s why I sent email to you a month ago through this website’s email. I’m not that good at speaking and listening to English, maybe that’s why I was shy and spoke not so much(Do you remember that, everyone except for us(me and my friend) was native speakers. It made me feel like that much more)
Oh--, anyway, the fact is I lost many chances to be friends with you! I should have told how about drinking beer! Let’s take photos! not thinking my english — But it's just an excuse now. T.T
Even though I didn’t talk much conversation with you (actually I lost chances), you’re also so impressive to me like Berlin.

it continues in this vein for a while. i am touched, korea.

suddenly, berlin is filled with friends i have that aren't just inherited from nate: jane, calum, katherine, katherine's obnoxious boyfriend, camilla. camilla is back in town for a couple weeks. this is sweet but awkward. you can imagine how i am handling this. a number of adverbs come to mind; "well" is not one of them.

more later. sorry for long absence. i think about you daily. all/both of you.

besos y pesos,
jesse

i haven't washed my hair in months!

2005-09-26T09:42:00.002-07:00

jane is learning german. to that end, sometimes jane and i watch german television. sometimes, specifically, we watch children's shows, and i translate:

children's show: [rapid talking]
me: okay. the obnoxious little guy is angry because there is another dragon hunter in the land, and he is ruining their business. he says they are as poor as church mice.
jane: who's that guy.
me: that guy is... he is seeking a dragon hunter with a mustache. the obnoxious guy is angry because that other dragon hunter is knitting, and the new guy thinks that dragon hunters don't knit.
jane: understandable.
children's show: [stirring music, pronouncement by dragon hunter]
me: the one who is knitting says that the important thing is to be true to yourself.
jane, writing in notebook: dragon... hunter.

this is what i do on my days off. that, and cook meals involving potatoes. i have about forty potato recipes, and they do not vary much. sometimes i go through recipe books and think: hey! i should totally make this. then there are a series of poverty-related questions that need to be answered:

1. does it have meat or shrimp? those are expensive. perhaps we can replace them with rice.
2. are there more than two ingredients that we don't have in the house already? are either of them potatoes? i can get 11 lb. of potatoes for two euros. let's pretend that they're potatoes.
3. that sauce/broth looks complicated. perhaps it is just olive oil and garlic in disguise. perhaps salt, too, is involved, although NOT MUCH. that needs to last us until i get paid again. fuck, maybe i should put some of it back in the salt thingy.

yum! sometimes i go all out and purchase an onion.

i'm still not sure what to do with my last month. i'd travel, but i don't want to spend money. jeremy is coming to berlin in a few days and says we should start doing our <comic strip for the crimson> again. i'm like, jeremy, we graduated. jeremy's all, that strip was tha bomb. im like, jeremy, you livin in tha past and that shit is depressing. jeremy all, hey why dont u draw that strip 1 time. im like, this conversation is termin8d.

again, sorry for the delay in sending out the second draft. it's coming maybe tomorrow. also, sports are way stupid. that is all.

yours in perpetuity,
ruthless wainwright

setbacks

2005-09-20T06:53:00.000-07:00

so i bought my plane ticket for boston, and i arrive at 6:30pm on nov. 1. will there be a welcoming party at the airport?, you ask. i say: you have to show up to find out!!!. humorously, this makes YOU the welcoming party, and me a latter-day God of Almost Unimaginable Craftiness.

within 48 hours of buying my ticket, it was brought to my attention that:

- whereas i thought i had an apartment in boston, i do not
- whereas i thought i also had a way-sweet editing job lined up, i do not

the former is my fault. i was going to live with the other members of the taste explosion--you recall, undoubtedly, the inventive instrumental mostly-us-banging-on-stuff stylings of the taste explosion--but i failed to tell them that i was definitely interested in sharing the taste explosion house until recently, when they had already found someone else who wanted to stay there.

this is just as well, due to the latter: it turns out pearson, which has enticing jobs for battled-toughened career editors, doesn't take people on until january, if then. as it turns out, i'm going to spend the first few months in boston living in the taste explosion basement, next to the drumset, paying a somewhat more forgiving rent and doing laundry WHENEVER I WANT.

it's all good. i have plans. i have plans i can't even tell you about. we will see if they are successful; smart money is on "if like last time it involves a 'pet hotel,' probably not." the 2nd draft is now finished, although it's definitely not the final draft; i just want feedback on it. those of you who have requested copies will get one via email in the next few days. those of you who haven't may well get your credit rating altered online. the first 40-some pages of godspeed, aka novel #2, are also available to those of you who are huge fans and don't especially care for characters who are not identical to me.

now is also a decent time to point out that i have become disenchanted with work and am looking forward to life as a celebrity, which will happen when the band gets successful. doubters have but to listen to our demo, or me singing loudly at them for hours at a time. honestly, there is no way being an international rock star will be worse than what i've been doing recently. tour-guiding and receptioning have their problems.

1. tourists are dumb. there are a few classes of question that i deal with, as a tour guide, that fill me with rage, or occasionally just profound depression.
badly informed: "so... why did the nazis... i mean, why did they even build the berlin wall in the first place? it doesn't make any sense." sometimes they're not even questions. they're just assertions of stupidity. "prussia and russia are the same thing." please talk among yourselves for five minutes. i have to go take up heroin.
wrong-headedly editorial, as well as not a question: "it seems from all this that germans, like... i mean it seems like they don't like remembering, uh, what happened. can you, uh. can you answer that?" good. that's a really good, careful observation that (interpreted generously as insight into, succinctly put, the responsibilities of the son for the sins of the father, which it is not) in no way would take, at the very least, half an hour of respectful treatment from any responsible student of history. also, not a question. "would you say that berlin suffers from its past? or does it even, uh... does it even think about it." i'm glad that we're treating "berlin" as a single, coherent entity. you should be shot.
foreign: "I AM THINK, IS INCREDIBLE SO MANY THINGS! HAPPEN HERE ALL IN SAME CITY!" this may not seem like a question, but it is posed as one. "THIS MEMORIAL I THINK IS TERRIBLE, WHY YOU BUILD IT?!?!" good point.

2. no one says please. i counted once; at reception, people asked for things fifty-two times, in four hours. "please" was said twice. "i'll have a..." was said, please-lessly, fifteen times. here is a piece of advice to you, if you are planning to travel: learn how to say "please," or i will claw my initials into your face. frequently it's possible to say it in english. i can't believe no one does this. "i think i'll have a beer." that makes one of us. "i'll get a towel." here you go! i've been peeing on it, intermittently, since 8 in the morning.

there's more--there's a lot more (germans have no conception of how traffic lights work)--but i have to go. we will revisit this topic, because it is of great importance to me. so, good. in the meantime, may the steelers' holy season of dominance continue with a victory over the loathsome patriots next weekend.

i'm richard quest, and this has been "business traveller."

23 years later

2005-09-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

in honor of an ageless family tradition, i found it my responsibility today to visit a horoscope website. true facts:

1. i share my birthday with tommy lee jones, oliver stone, dan marino, and merlin olsen (whoa!!!), as well as two different prince harries.

2. i will be "torn between two plans this year," and i should not allow myself to "become a martyr."

3. are you "selfish enough to get in my way"? because if so i am supposed to question you.

today i turn 23. my 20s are 30% over. as my dad pointed out, 23 is a prime number, my first in four years and my last for another six. we contemplated this over the phone last night for five silent minutes, in what i believe is another family birthday tradition.

"lena turns 27 in december," said dad at length. "that's also a prime number."

"no it's not," i said. "it's three cubed."

"D'OH!!!!" emitted my dad, adding, "you still got it!" i really wish i was making this up.

midnight struck while i was DJing karaoke, which has become my steady wednesday night occupation; jared shut off the music and led everyone in a round of "happy birthday," and i was offered a shot of, i think, vodka and arsenic. three jack and cokes later, i received my first birthday present; someone had requested "american pie," but then rescinded after i vowed over the microphone that i would slash my eyeballs before putting that song in the dvd. also, somebody requested "jump around" by house of pain, and when it turned out we had it, he told me he "really respected what i was doing." i am arguably the best DJ in the entire city, if not world. my specialty is a sweet little mix i have called "michael jackson's 20 greatest hits." mostly i just play it on repeat.

i had another birthday first this afternoon, when i got my parents' gift in the mail: a "myron cope original terrible towel," some socks, a pretty dope sweater, and a note that read, cryptically, "all is forgiven." under that it said, "(health insurance $$)."

this is my first debt relief birthday present, and to be fair, i think i owe my parents somewhere in the low four figures for health insurance, so this is pretty major. thanks mom and dad! you guys are the best. right now i am also wearing all of the socks you gave me, because summer died in berlin yesterday.

the second draft, sadly, isn't done yet. i'm going home to work on it. thanks everyone who requested to get a copy--you will as soon as i'm done. the new draft is arguably the best DJ in the entire city, if not the world. the new draft is mostly the liner notes from "michael jackson's 20 greatest hits."

that's all i got. happy birthday! i am so old.

cleaning house

2005-09-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

"dogg, it's totally cool," says a stupid, stupid man. "don't even WORRY about it. just take the keys and go back to the apartment. check it: i ring the bell, you wake me up, you go back to sleep. hotness!!! i gotta get another beer!!! PEACE BIATCH"

ben margo, on an 18-hour visit to berlin, asks respectfully if he can stay at my apartment; i have an extra bed, so this works out perfectly. ben margo has slept badly on a train the night before, so as we are celebrating the first of two 30th birthdays (preston's, from walking tours, and willemien's, from reception) and it approaches midnight, ben confesses to sleepiness. i give him my keys and directions home, jubilantly gulping multiple beers at a time.

5am occurs. i am in front of my apartment, swaying perceptibly. i ring the bell. no response. i ring it thrice more, for up to 3 minutes at a time. no response.

there is a little bench in front of my apartment. it now knows me better than any human being ever can. i sit there for three hours, gradually sobering up and praying for sleep; every now and then, i slap myself in the face to retain wakefulness. at 8am, someone opens the door to the building and i dart in--as best one could dart, given the circumstances--"lunge multiple times in the direction of the door until i fail to smack into the wall" is perhaps more accurate--and slump against the door to my apartment, where i fall asleep. the door is opened twenty minutes later by ben, on his way out.

"there you are!" he marvels. "oh my god," he adds, in terror, because my face is the face of death itself.

"give jesse keys," i utter, with cold, bitter clarity. "jesse sleep now. jesse hope you like berlin real good."

i now have two sets of keys. one is going to jane, my new roommate, who shows up tomorrow and for whose sake i am about to go home and clean. this is good. i need a roommate. living by myself can be pleasant, but having someone else around encourages one to be more responsible with the disposal of toenail clippings, as well as makes one more likely not to subsist on four bowls of "mini zimtos" per day. in my defense, they were having a sale.

the second draft is near completion, so please email me again if you wanted to read it. i'm very excited about the second draft. less self-indulgent, WAY more ninjas. i hope to have it done by my birthday. my birthday is the 15th. send me pants! i am running out of pants.

in response to andrea--that is definitely my favorite part of the song, as well as the video, because until that point we are not totally sure how raw the #1 pussycat doll is being. the answer: RAWWWRGH. dammmn! somebody needs to apply soothing lotion to that, because that is way raw.

in response to thomas--"trapped in the closet" is the second-worst song in the entire world. it's fucking terrible. i don't want anyone to miss the sarcasm of last week. the only worse song is "american pie," sheerly because of its inexplicable attraction to the people at karaoke night. true fact: last wednesday i refused to start djing until the boss let me make a public service announcement about how no goddamned way were we playing that song, ever. this is true.

don'tcha

2005-08-31T02:41:00.000-07:00

i have to stop watching mtv. i don't even watch that much, but nevertheless it's enough that about two of my every three thoughts are:

don'tcha wish your girlfriend was HOT LIKE ME?!?!
don'tcha wish your girlfriend was a FREAK LIKE ME?!?!

that said, the pussycat dolls are probably the greatest band in existence; also, watching mtv means that occasionally you get to see one or another more-or-less-meaningless awards show, like the VMAs a few days ago, that everyone treats as if it is the greatest awards show of all time. green day--who would have guessed?--swept the VMAs, and this was apparently huge news, for the unspoken reason that green day is sort of old, especially for its lead singer to be wearing an entire bottle of mascara on his face. it was kind of awesome to see mtv reporters attempting to skirt the issue while really, really wanting to talk about it:

perky asian-american mtv reporter: i mean--wow, you guys must just be like--OH MY GOD!, you know? because you've done so many, uh, albums, and it's--i mean, you've been around... and done a bunch of albums. and then--well what are you thinking right now!!
billie joe: yeah, we're excited.
pa-amtvr: i mean did you EVER THINK... that this would happen. i mean, being around for--well, a while--and then coming out with, uh, i mean having a bunch of albums that came out before this one... and then coming out with another one. i mean that is just incredible.
"mike" or "tre": what?
pa-amtvr: i mean you guys have just had an amazing career... and we thought it was TOTALLY OVER LIKE FIVE YEARS AGO! because you are WAY OLD! i mean, fuck.

but mostly the #1 topic of the VMAs was how awesome the VMAs were. i have never before seen such a large group of people come to such a sweeping consensus, but the subject of virtually every interview was how the VMAs were probably the greatest award of all time. to be honest, it was a lot like watching CNN international. CNN international is about 50% commercials--five minutes of news, five minutes of ads--and a good 90% of those commercials are for CNN itself. if you flip on CNN, chances are good that it's going to be something like "TOP STORY: CNN IS TOTALLY SWEET" or a guy named "richard quest" bellowing at you about how he is the ultimate business traveler and if you don't watch his show, you will immediately lose $50,000.

as for the VMAs, i was skeptical as to their way-awesomeness until--and in hindsight, i am ashamed of not having anticipated this--r. kelly took the stage. r. kelly will probably be remembered as the voice of our times, a bard whose equal has never been known, the post-modern poet-king whose words--with or against our consent--govern our thoughts and define our days, whose mighty and immortal texts will consume the careers of thousands--millions--of future thinkers and writers, historians and artists alike, the cornerstone of western culture itself.

his song was called "trapped in the closet." i really wish i could transcribe all of it here, but it was about ten minutes long and none of it repeats. there is no chorus. it is one enormous narrative. also, the music itself has two chords, which alternate back and forth for the full ten minutes. they are the same chords from the ending section of "i believe i can fly." comparisons to shakespeare and wagner are unavoidable.

synopsis:
r. kelly wakes up next to an unfamiliar woman. almost immediately, her husband comes home and r. kelly runs into the closet. the husband goes straight for the closet and finds r. kelly there. r. kelly, of course, pulls out a gun. the husband and the wife have an argument about whether or not the wife is a bitch. the husband's phone rings and it turns out the husband was about to have his own illicit rendezvous... WITH A DUDE. the dude walks in the door and everyone gets upset. r. kelly notes that he was "sitting there like what the fuck." then r. kelly calls home and a man picks up the phone at his house, and he leaves.

right, so that part was in a video that was broadcast to the audience. the next chapter is debuted (!!!) on stage by r. kelly in person (!!!!!!!!!!!!!). this chapter is what happens between kathy (wife), rufus (husband), and chuck (gay boyfriend of husband). r. kelly refuses to use pronouns, which is a good call, because then shit would get complicated. i don't know if can do justice to it, but i'll try:

and kathy says RUFUS, who is that
and chuck says RUFUS, who is THAT
and rufus says KATHY, i thought you were not HOME
and kathy says is that the man who called you on the PHONE
and rufus says KATHY, this is CHUCK
and kathy is all, what the fuck i don't BELIEVE THIS--this shit is EGREGIOUS
and chuck says KATHY, i didn't know you had a WIFE
and rufus says, bitch you were cheating on me
and then kathy gets all upset at chuck and says i can't believe you got with my HUSBAND
and chuck is like bitch he doesn't LOVE YOU
and rufus is like don't call my wife a bitch
and kathy is like RUFUS... how could you DO THIS
and rufus is like, i don't know what to do-o-o, i am so confused... FUCK BOTH OF YOU-U-U-U
and kathy is like i am so ANGRY
and chuck is like that woman has to LEAVE
and kathy is like fuck that queer i LI-I-I-IVE HERE

that is maybe the first thirty seconds. this goes on for a very long time. bear in mind that r. kelly is also gesturing to indicate the extremes of emotion that are depicted in the scene, mostly by shutting his eyes and holding his fist to his forehead.

trapped in the closet. please download this song. it is truly magical.

my gig went all right. the sound system was bad and i broke a string. people seemed to like it though. the consensus was that no one could really hear what i was doing, but i looked "WAY rock 'mrgh' roll." these people may have been drunk.

karaoke djing tonite, and my patented private-request architectour 2morrow. the beat drops, the party don't stop.

lurv,
j

dresden

2005-08-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

it turns out krakow is seven hours away from berlin. this was news to me. i thought krakow was on berlin's suburban rail, somehow. susie and i were planning on taking a three-day trip to poland. then we discovered how long it takes to get there. basic geography, of course, suggests that this makes no sense, but my guess is that when dealing with countries of the former eastern bloc, we should throw out all assumptions predicated on sound infrastructure and ready ourselves, instead, to buy sturdy pack-goats at the border. i have reserved part of october to find out if this is true.

so instead we went to dresden for two days, then a nearby national park for the third, and now we're back. we have developed complementary daily routines: susie cooks dinner, and i work late and get home around midnight, at which point i make humorous observations about my day, shovel 2 or 3 bowls of pasta in my mouth, and then collapse on a bed or sofa, moaning loudly. susie regards me with unease. "i hope i never have a man," she pronounces.

in dresden we got to see angela merkel give a campaign speech in front of the cathedral. angela merkel is the chancellor candidate of the CDU, a party which is a bit more right-wing than the social democrats, who are currently in power. she's said she wants more friendly relations with the u.s., although i doubt this means german troops in iraq, which was the claim of a bunch of posters we saw. anyway, her party has the plurality in polls these days--about 42%--and it seems to be comfortingly middle-of-the-road. its politics are not insane. they have little to do with american neoconservatism.

nevertheless, it got WAY PROTESTED. about half of the audience was vocally anti-CDU, and there was whistling and booing the entire time. for about an hour. not once was there a point at which someone was not whistling or booing. and they were right up in her face. it was an interesting departure from american campaign rallies, to me. there is no way on earth the average american politician would give a 1-hour speech through what i got to see in dresden. but this seems to be normal in germany. no one seemed to think it was weird that angela merkel was being confronted by signs, bobbing above people's heads, screaming to the world that she was a liar and a hypocrite, or the occasional coordinated chant of "piss off" ("hau ab," which sounds particularly nasty and percussive--although to be fair, most german chants do, even those with themes like "peace is awesome" or "we are in favor of cute furry animals"). in america, that doesn't happen. right? that never happens, and maybe it should. no way does president bush handle a situation like that well. no way does ralph nader, for that matter.

the speech itself was boring, at least what i understood of it. it turns out angela merkel is in favor of democracy, as well as reducing unemployment. angela merkel also has many opinions regarding the economy. like: it should get stronger!!! angela merkel also has woman-jowls, and they are oddly becoming.

dresden has lots of attractive baroque buildings. the national park contained many trees. susie instructed me in the art of helping women to purchase shoes, and while i now feel qualified to do so, i devoutly hope the opportunity never arises.

my show is on friday, and i've been busy practicing and writing songs: recently i've been working on an awesome one called "british guy." the lyrics, they go a little something like this:

he shows up to class in those preppy clothes
and the girls all love his... ac-cent
well, i could talk stupid too--everybody knows
that he's just trying to be a little... diff-e-rent

please suppress the obvious comparisons to cole porter. unlike him, i will not be critically injured by falling off of a horse. why? because horses smell terrible.

the world's many horrible peoples

2005-08-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

do not give microphones to the irish. potatoes, yes. they need those. also any measure of respectful acknowledgment of their literary tradition. but if it is karaoke, you should either clear the irish from the room somehow ("BEER! FREE BEER OUT IN THE STREET! THICK WARM DISGUSTING BEER THAT TASTES LIKE MOSS" or "FUCK! OLIVER CROMWELL IS COMING" and then lock the door) or else just kill yourself.

that is more or less all i learned from karaoke DJing. that, plus What Happens At The End Of Karaoke, which is to say, the people who were ruthlessly bad--no one is good at karaoke, per se, but some are tolerable and some are just atrocious--those people stick around after everyone else leaves and demand to sing songs like "american pie," easily the worst song ever fucking written, because it is over twenty verses long, until one or more of them are forced to devote the majority of their time to barfing, and while they are thus occupied, you can furtively turn off the equipment and flee.

the next morning, when you are working reception behind the desk, they will be meek and small-voiced as they check out. one of them will have lost their train ticket and is in no way prepared to address his plight. a second will fail to register, for five minutes, that we are completely full tonight and can't extend his stay; sadly, desperately, quietly, he will ask if i'm sure that we have no space tonight... even for him.

revenge, she is sweet.

"HA HA HA HA HA HA HA," i say. "HA HA HA HA HA. NO SORRY. i'm so sorry, honestly."

we are extremely full these days. i spend much of my time telling this to woebegone walk-ins, in a tone i have perfected: stern, schoolmatronly, yet sympathetic, with an endearing twinkle of regretful humor in my eyes, twin wells of understanding. different people react differently to the idea that they should have made a reservation. also, here come stereotypes.

latin americans, for the most part, will stride up to the desk and shout something like, "I WILL TAKE TWO BEDS FOR A WEEK." this is my favorite, because you get to contradict them outright. "nope," i say sweetly, waggling a playful finger. "no, you will not."

italians, i have found, can barely speak their own language, let alone that of other countries. "you will repeat... slower?" they inform me, haltingly. "we do not have any rooms," i say slowly, deliberately. this one is my least favorite, because it takes an hour each time. "no beds tonight," i repeat, painstakingly, if necessary drawing a picture of a bed on some paper and then drawing a huge "X" through it. "tonight!" they exclaim eventually, beaming, as if they have understood. "so tonight... you have a bed. where is." "i've got a bed," i agree. "you, however, do not."

the japanese are hopeless. it is not worth it to try to tell them things. "no beds," i tell them flatly. "this isn't even a hostel. this is an investment bank." they nod, eagerly, utterly without comprehension, and push 50-euro notes into my hand. my boss elbows me aside, because it is his turn. "we take iPods," he announces. my boss has over 20 iPods.

the scandinavians who have reserved are well-behaved, physically attractive, and have no problems communicating in any language. the ones who haven't, though, belong to a bizarre underclass of bulging-eyed, dreadlocked, pathetic-over-sized-metallica-shirt-wearing deaf-mutes who will continue to stare at you long after you suggest that they leave. "okay," i peal brightly. "i have to help who's next." eventually, coldly, a response, croaked: "WHAT?"

australians are irksomely perky. "no worries!" they trumpet at me. "another night in the subway, mates," they announce, marching off into the night.

americans, by and large, enjoy acting as though traveling is the most difficult thing is the world. they stagger up to the desk, drop their bags on the ground, breathe heavily a few times for dramatic effect, and then mutter, glaring me in the eye, "i need a--fuck. um--DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH." "yes," i say, with an accent, because that is fun. "awesome," they say without conviction. "do you have a bed"--gesturing to communicate the idea of a bed--"or something." this, i think, is to indicate how flexible they are--this is a beloved concept among american backpackers, i've discovered, a mysteriously abstract and unverifiable claim to flexibility.

dropping the accent, i say, "um, it doesn't look good--one bed, one night?" "actually, no," they say, continuing to glare, wearily. "i need four for the next three nights." this is an absurd request to make in the summer, without a reservation. "the cheapest ones," they add, as if there is no way anyone else has requested those. i tell them sorry, it's not going to happen, and stifle a giggle. they sigh, slouch forward, run their hands through their hair self-consciously, and say something like: "is there ANY WAY I CAN STAY WITH YOU TONIGHT."

actually, in retrospect, in my experience, american backpackers are the worst people at travel in the world, because they both:
- fail to plan ahead, at all, and
- yet have absurd fixed plans that they are unable to deviate from
they don't make reservations, they don't book bus tickets in advance, they don't do anything smart. this is a generalization, but it is also always true. and yet: "i need to be in paris by 6pm," we hear, all the time, or something similarly dumb. "i have to see The Wall," they say. "do you know what The Wall is?" i ask. "no," they say, and fail to recognize how disturbingly void-of-meaning our exchange has been.

this is why i have no patience for most traveling americans who claim to be broke. you're broke because you spent €100 extra on a train seat that you booked at the last minute, or spent last night at a hotel because there are no hostels in towns that aren't totally full, at least within the .25-mile radius that you checked out. no one thinks you're special. also, we all want to punch you in the face because you can't shut up about it.

i have a cold. it is going away. nevertheless, it is a bummer.

that's all i got.

your continued support

2005-08-09T15:01:00.000-07:00

thanks everyone for the upwelling of support w/ regard to the most recent outburst of self-pity, especially because i was making most of it up. ha! actually, "most of it" really just corresponds to "the part where i said that i drink boxes of wine by myself every day, which i was hoping would be more obviously fictional to my friends and family."

revisions proceed apace. i have constructed a new first chapter entirely out of nouns, many of them plural. the second draft will be done by the beginning of september, or i will eat my hat. should this contingency occur, someone must buy me a hat, because i am BROKE. i don't get my paycheck until mid-month. i am not exaggerating when i say that i have begun rationing the potatoes in my apartment. also, the previous sentence is probably the saddest thing i will ever type.

it looks like i'm coming back to boston in november to start the band/renew my commitment to the taste explosion/get a job somehow/depress myself. it doesn't make much sense to stay in berlin, as there won't be nearly as much work for me, and now that i've written all these comprehension-defyingly dope songs, i believe it is time to rejoin with matt and unleash them on the world. you are not ready for this, i can assure you.

skeptics will say things like: isn't that an extremely bad idea? like in a time-tested sort of way? starting a band and actually being kind of serious about it? and aren't you squandering the capital of an ivy-league education by doing so?
here's what i say, skeptics: um... your mom. also, you're underestimating the marketing power of my band's awesomeness. please recall that a transylvanian whom we didn't even know made us a fan site this one time. yeah!!! i swear before the bleeding christ himself i will rain triumph on your petty parade of narcing on my good times.

on that note, i have my first solo singer-songwriter show ever at the end of august. friday the 26th, in goldman's bar, a bar which may or may not be run by the hostel that i work at. if you're in berlin, which you won't be, you should come, so i guess i won't see you there. hopefully, someone will tape it. i'm thinking about contacting octavian the transylvanian, but then again, that would be weird.

on that note, i am DJing karaoke tomorrow night, after a long day of tour-giving and pickup routes. i wasn't even aware that karaoke had DJs, but i got a call from the bar owner while cooking a delicious tomato sauce with sausage, and of course i couldn't turn him down. the sauce ended up being delicious, doubly so because i haven't treated myself to meat in a week.

on that note, i have to go pick through the compost heap before the neighborhood cats do.

so very, very alone

2005-08-05T04:15:00.000-07:00

nate is gone, but i have new roommates to take his place, and they are all insects. i think maybe they've always been around, but after nate left i did some cleaning and, apparently, deprived many of them of their homes, so now they hang out on the ceiling, where occasionally i smack them with the broom. they are winged and they subsist on blood. in the clinical parlance, we inhabit what is known as a biome.

the days, when not occupied by work, are spent working on the second draft of the novel, which task i've been trying, desperately, to conceptualize as the gnarly addition of superpowers to an otherwise flawed and mortal creation. however, it mostly feels like an autopsy. it should also go without saying that i consume a bottle of cheap riesling a day, occasionally at work. the label i purchase has a cartoon picture of merrily drunken woodland animals on it. also, when i say "bottle," i am meaning something more along the lines of "box."

songwriting has been productive, in that it has produced what i believe to be the saddest song in the entire world. it is called "copenhagen called." the chorus is:

copenhagen called, but not for me / c'est la vie, c'est la vie
you've got to be where you've got to be / because your piece of shit cat is dying, and apparently that's more important than ME, a GODDAMNED HUMAN BEING, JESUS GODDAMNED CHRIST

denmark / sucks so bad (repeat 16x)

at the very least, my german is improving, a development which lends credence to the idea that german is the mother tongue of the wretched and ill-fated of this earth--a theory first put forward by jeremy todd, i believe. anyway, i have to go attach magical, glorious appendages to my baby, and pray that it is not, in fact, dead. apologies for the melodrama. it's just that i want to KILL MYSELF ALL OF THE TIME.

i can't believe this actually happened

2005-07-29T03:40:00.000-07:00

i got my work permit.

it took four months, five day-long trips to the immigration office, many more trips to other offices around town, and the intervention of the super-boss. but i got it. it's in my passport. i have named it "female jesus" and applied fragrances to it, because it is a girl.

so now i get paid. i just had a humorous talk with the financial guy at the hostel about how much i'm getting paid, in german:

me: so now i get paid for the months! the all of the months! damn.
financial guy: yes--although first you will have to pay four kinds of insurance.
me: ha ha! what.
financial guy: also, because you're working more than one job, you get the maximum income tax on your second job.
me:
financial guy: it's going to be 60% or so.
me: WHAT THE FUCK.
financial guy: they may pay some of it back to you in february if you file an application.
me: but i need to buy the foods now! the foods and the clothes, you see. they are the butterflies of the field.
financial guy:
me:
financial guy: you need to stop using idioms.

apparently germany is something of a welfare state. anyway, i'm legal now, and i have to go do a tour. will the female jesus be on the tour? yes. will other things? no.

contentedly,
jesse

p.s. HOLY FUCKING CRAP. FUCK. awesome.

revisionism

2005-07-27T02:54:00.000-07:00

this morning, the first in a while i've gotten to sleep in, i was awoken by my phone. my phone's ring is unlistenable. i had been having a dream--a recurring one--that a friend of mine named john barth needed me to pretend to be him at a family gathering in tokyo, and the rest of the barths and i were lost in an airport. in real life i know no john barths.

"where's the terminal?" i cried into the phone, sweating. "I CAN'T BELIEVE WE CAN'T FIND IT."

"hello, jesse," responded the super-boss at the hostel, unruffled. "i have good news for you."

yesterday the super-boss and i had four encounters during my shift, most of them over the phone:

1: edifying. "[name of hostel], hello," i say into the phone, feigning a german accent. "who is this?" demands the super-boss. "jesse," i say. "jesse you must SAY YOUR NAME," says the super-boss. "done!" i reply gaily. "also it would not kill you i think if you would say something like, how may i help you," he adds. "you betcha!" i affirm. "so let's hear it again," he says. this is weird, but, "[name of hostel], jesse, hallo," i say; "how may i help you?" the boss pauses reverently, and then says: "jesse have i ever told you how happy i am you are working for us? because i truly am." i didn't know how to respond to this. "sweet," i offered.

2: peevish. one of the flyer boxes has a single flyer left in it, and the super-boss, while visiting reception to talk to the senior receptionist, whirls on me and said: "jesse open your fucking eyes already--there is ONE FLYER left in this flyer box." "i'm fixing the drinks cabinet," i respond, coolly, because i am. the super-boss shakes his head with disdain.

3: apologetic. the super-boss, having returned to his office, calls up and says, out of nowhere, "jesse i have been working on your work permit and they will not pick up the phone at the work office, it is fucking ridiculous. you will get paid by the end of the month at any rate. we will pay you black if you will need to be paid black. you should know i am taking care of this. they are so fucking disorganized it is unbelievable." again, i am at a loss for an appropriate response. "sweet!" i say again, ineffectually.

4: motivational. the phone rings: "jesse i have just gotten an email from the tour company about a really good tour you gave," announces the super-boss. this was a thank-you email from a group of 12 kids who really enjoyed one of my tours, which to be fair are probably the best this or any city has to offer. "keep up the good work!" cries the super-boss. "you are doing a great job i think. have you refilled the flyer box." "i took care of that shit like an hour ago," i confirm. "i am keeping my eye on you," says the super-boss, in what i think is supposed to be an encouraging tone of voice. "that's hot," i say, unsettled. "i have to go."

cut back to today: the hyper-lucid mid-morning light flooding my room, the bedsheets in disarray. "i finally got through to the work office," explained the super-boss, his voice tired and triumphant. "and you have been approved since mid-may." "word," i said, because i already knew that. "and they sent your approval to the immigration office," continued the super-boss. "hot diggity," i said. "so now i am going to call them and see what their fucking problem is," he finished. "i'm glad you're on my side," i said, more truthfully than i'd ever said anything before.

half an hour later, the phone rings in the middle of breakfast: chocolate müsli and a translation of bulgakov.

"it is all ready to go," says the super-boss. "that is the good news. your papers are all ready." "WOOT," i emit, or some facsimile thereto. "the bad news," he continues, "is that your appointment to pick up the papers is in mid-october." there is a silence as i register this. "woot," i repeat, sorrowfully.

so. what i have to do (as the super-boss went on to explain) is return, once more, to the immigration office, early in the morning, pick up a walk-in number, and hope to god they get to the number by the end of the day. this is the alternative to waiting for an appointment. if it fails, it is to be repeated the next day, and the day after that, and so forth, until successful. if it succeeds, i may have a work permit by the end of tomorrow. it's all ready to go. i trust the super-boss to be correct on this. if there is a match for the ineptitude of the bureaucracy in berlin, i have found it, and it is my super-boss's burning desire for the truth.

what's left?:

nate leaves on friday, so we are cherishing what time together we have. largely we do this by playing badminton, or by having nate cook delicious meals. last night was chicken in an unbelievable orange-chili-garlic-honey sauce over spätzle with sauteed mushrooms and onions. it was insane. the badminton is also excellent, particularly a new form of it which we invented: bad-assminton, wherein we stand 6 feet apart and whale the birdie at each other, back and forth. we have the reflexes of cats. hungover cats.
i have a new roommate for august through october, who is also coming to write a novel in berlin. sweet! if it's better than mine, and it may well be, i will kill myself. in the meantime i am working on my second draft; i have enough revisions now that i'm ready to go on it. so.

1. if you still have ideas/suggestions/revisions/effusions for the first draft, send them to me.
2. anyone who hasn't gotten a copy yet but wants one has to wait until i finish the second draft.
3. so send me an email about that.
4. much of the revisions may be done in the waiting room of the immigration office; thus, the second draft may contain a lot more violent death.

to andrea: yeah, i'm living near kotti. some people, when they hear that, react with astonishment--"but you don't have any visible knife wounds," etc.--but honestly, five minutes south of the station, on the landwehrkanal, life is beautiful. we live near a synagogue, anyway, so we have round-the-clock police protection.

hostel work is good. my german continues to improve. a tv crew was going to follow one of my tours around, for a show on berlin tourism, but they had to postpone. maybe next week. my stock is rising. buy now.

also on the topic of me being on the market: camilla is gone for good. i may never snuggle again.

dag.

belfast: not in scotland

2005-07-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

late shift at the hostel. windows closed to prevent neighbors from making noise complaints. no air-conditioning. faces glistening with rivulets of sweat. my senior receptionist has a stomach illness. the elevator opens and regurgitates two guests, brows arched and eyes wide with alarm.

"there is this guy," one of them says. "on the second floor. a scottish guy with a mohawk. he is really, really drunk, and he is punching things."

"things?" i ask.

"doors," they say. "people."

"can you handle this?" asks the senior receptionist. "get jön."

jön has just finished his shift in the cafe. he is prodigiously muscled and gentle as a lamb. his eyes are dollops of milk chocolate and his hair is painstakingly coiffed. his english: fair. perhaps 3 out of 5. anyway, jön is going to be my bluff in a little game of poker i call: Kicking An Alcohol- And Drug-Addled Scotsman Out Of A Hostel Where I Work.

he sits at the table outside. "jön," i say, trying to sound bad-ass. "we have to kick a guy out." jön looks nonplussed. "let's do it!!" i add, to get him fired up.

the elevator releases us, the forces of order and good, onto the 2nd floor. our scotsman--sans shirt, scrawny, tattooed and crazy-eyed, his mohawk a filthy dirt-blond, his face a vacant lot of undernourished facial hair and flushed, blotchy skin--is visible through the hallway door and is jawing energetically with another guy: northern english, big, bared-toothed, and fully clothed.

we enter. they regard us.

"reception," i explain, in the voice of a 13-year-old. "we hear there's a problem," i say, assuming what i hope to be an authoritative frown.

our scot makes a series of glottal noises, in what linguists refer to as a "brogue." i look at jön. jön is not about to take the initiative. jön, i notice suddenly with a pang, is holding and stroking an underfed kitten that he has adopted over the course of the day. i turn to the scot.

"have you been banging on doors?" i propose, reasonably. "have you been screaming at people?"

the scot sways. his eyes are red with alcohol and evil. also, he is clearly on some kind of gives-you-super-fighting-powers drug, like PCP. i am humorously unready for this.

"because you're not allowed to do that," i say.

"absolutely right," says the englishman, also sort of swaying a little bit. "i'll take care of this, sir," i say. the englishman plods into his room. the scotsman mutters some things and attempts to shake my hand, all the while drooling bile and vitriol from his jagged fangs. note: the scotsman may be a vampire of some kind.

"we've already had a complaint about you, sir," i say, which thankfully happens to be true. "we have to kick you out." behind me, jön folds his arms. we are soldiers of jesus.

probably due to our show of force--jön is built, and i look crafty--we enter not into gnarly street battle but into interminable drunken argument. you have no idea of the shouting and the whining and the lamentations that followed that: me having to all but drag his friends, whom he wanted to kill, down to the bar; him pushing a finger repeatedly into my chest and then thinking better of it, and me rehearsing various sweet ninja moves in my head; me standing outside and listening to him not packing his things, while jön went to get backup; the scotsman taking offense at there being five of us, and blearily, self-righteously demanding to speak to our manager; one of the owners, who is german, showing up and having this conversation:

scotsman: argh ye gettingh NASTY wit me then!! y'gettin NASTY wit mearggh
manager: no i am not getting to be an asshole, i am asking you to leave, i think.
scotsman: i doan't greargghly doarngh... i'm from BELFAST.
manager: this is my house, and i would greatly like it if you leave.

this went on for an hour. him screaming, muttering, crying. it was so fucked up. eventually we just pulled his bags onto the elevator and the manager escorted him out the door, just as the police arrived. i returned to the desk. my senior receptionist immediately went down to the bathroom and stayed there for about fifteen minutes. shortly thereafter, she left for good.

i guess i should stress that this was an anomaly: normally my job is much more banal and less personally threatening. at the very least, also, i now feel equipped to run my own low-rent motel somewhere in middle america. i could do this. with jön by my side, all things are possible.

oh, postscript: the scotsman wasn't arrested. he disappeared into the night. he is waiting somewhere for me.

ain't no sunshine

2005-07-08T04:27:00.000-07:00

camilla and i are exploring the topographies of each other's hands--hers soft, warm, their touch maddeningly sweet--feet dangling above the canal and three slices of congealing pizza welded by the post-rain chill to a paper plate nearby, accompanied by beer bottles on the damp stone. we murmur in german, the parlance of affection.

me: and for why is it you are returning to copenhagen again?
camilla: my cat is dying.
me: and for how long. i am remembering you should say two days.
camilla, forlornly: at least a week.
me, in english: ?!!!?
camilla: i am not sure if i will return.
me: FUCKDAMMIT.

in her absence, i have rediscovered the art of pining, which thankfully leaves me too morose to do housework. yesterday i also rediscovered my commitment to cnn, whose coverage of the london bombings was kind of stunningly inept; the lasting impression of the day, for me, was a ten-minute press conference on the bombings by an unnervingly LBJ-looking jacques chirac, the first eight minutes of which went untranslated from the french. for the last two, the anchorwoman stepped in and began translating herself:

"the... um, the global warming, yes: it is principally manmade, and... thus it is man, who is, urmm, responsible, man. and so we must... defile... defy, rather, efforts... efforts to, it seems, not respond... to her. IT. to it." then, cheerily: "jacques chirac on the london terror bombings."

there was also an entertaining 30 minutes of footage of a grounded helicopter that tony blair may or may not have been preparing to enter, plus maybe twenty interviews between cnn reporters and civic officials communicating exclusively through static. all in all, i give cnn a C-. cnn, what happened to you? you used to be cool.

work keeps happening, via alternating bouts of hostel work (me getting yelled at) and walking tours (me yelling at people). the most recent tour was my first private job ever: an architecture-themed four hours (which ran into five) for two english girls and their polish mother, and it was completely sweet. from now on i only want to do private tours. the mother had advice on quitting smoking (NOTE TO MY PARENTS: i already quit at least two years ago), and the daughters were fun and smart and, it turns out, had gotten each other the tour for their 18th and 19th birthdays, respectively. the next tax form i fill out will list occupation as "birthday present." also, my bosses seem to have disappeared and i don't believe i will ever get paid.

here is yet another exhortation to read my novel and send me comments, from (of all people!) jeremy todd:

I like your novel a lot, I think.

[irrelevant] I'll have more detailed notes in a while, but one big thing I can say now in [praise and not] criticism is that I, having read the novel and being incredibly smart, have no idea of the [superbly drawn character of] Alex and her [awesome and tremendously readable] qualities. I don't know the rules there, or [whether I can adequately express how much reading this novel makes me respect you as a human being and - yes - a friend]. The mechanics of the plot don't [not] tie together in a package - I realize you're "an artist" now, and thus don't want it to tie together too neatly - but I think as it stands its less "provocative" what the fuck than "what the fuck" what the fuck, if that makes any sense. [I have read the novel eight times now and its limitless depth and tightly-paced, compelling narrative have caused me to lose my job.]

[As many people should read your novel as possible and send you comments, and those who have already done so are kings and queens among men and women. Additionally, I am a looser [sic].]

happy anniversary

2005-07-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

quick note to my parents because i failed to call yesterday: happy anniversary! i think it's wonderful that you've been married for [a number in the vicinity of 30] years. anyway, i'm very happy about that and i'll call soon, i swear. while we're on things that i missed, happy father's day to dad, from earlier in june, and happy birthday also to dad, from april. it is sort of remarkable that you haven't excommunicated me yet.

yesterday i finally got paid, although any of you who assume that means that i now have a work permit have not really been following this blog, at all. i have no work permit and in fact my 3-month temporary visa has run out, so i need to get another one soon. nevertheless, the guys at the tour guide company paid me part of the money i've earned thus far as a kind of loan, for which i am grateful. so now i am totally flush with cash, and can afford commodities such as potatoes.

work continues apace at the hostel and giving tours; a woman recently gave me a mind-boggling €20 tip after laughing loudly and hysterically at everything that i said, including/especially things that were more depressing than funny, e.g., anything about nazis. at the end of this same tour, a team of three giggly, more-or-less-dumb canadian ex-schoolgirls, aged 18, asked me suggestively if i wanted to "meet up with them later."

"good god, no," i said.

"what?" they responded, unable to hear anything over their own raucous giggling.

"um, i have a shift tomorrow at 8 a.m.," i said. at this point the girls were intercepted by these three hawaiian guys from the tour, bespectacled, acne-scarred, and roughly the same age, and i fled.

anyway, time for work. have you read my novel yet? rick wants you to read it. me, i'm cool either way.

ikea furniture assembly

2005-06-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

today, i got my first junior shift in at the other circus hostel, which is a lot smaller than the main one and has absolutely no need for more than one receptionist behind the desk; after an hour or so of blearily and half-heartedly discussing what we (the head receptionist and i) thought about robbie williams and making sure i knew how the computer worked, we decided that as a resource, i was better made use of in the new dorm rooms, assembling ikea furniture. i made six night tables named "skyberg" and part of a chest of drawers named "raffe," or "rakke," or something similarly absurd. my hands are swollen and manly. i am now in love with ikea furniture, and i intend to buy way more of it than i need once i am a yuppie. i'm not even kidding.

doing this made me realize that you, the readers, have little to no sense of the enchanting world of caprice that is working as a junior hostel receptionist, at least where i work. the junior hostel receptionist is liable to be asked to do anything, due to frequent conversations that the bosses have with him:

boss: you are still wanting more hours, yes? more hours.
junior hostel receptionist, eagerly: that would enable multiple meals a day!

so today, where i was scheduled for an 8am-1pm shift, they worked me until 4pm assembling ikea furniture with a guy named jens, who is now part of my two-man ikea ass-kicking and furniture assembly team. our war-cry is "IKEA," pronounced in a german accent. we sound it on specific occasions:
- whenever someone gets to bang something with a hammer
- when i accidentally jab a screwdriver into myself

there was, of course, a memorable stint as security guard, too, and coming up is a new job which sounds crazy-awesome: updating the in-house guides to nightlife and daytrips. this is still being discussed, but one of my bosses is really hot on the idea, i think because it means less time for me in reception.

i'm good at reception, but i still get yelled at a lot. specifically, i get yelled at by the super-boss, who is the boss of the other bosses. he is probably the most german man i have ever met, right down to being gay. i think the yelling is intended to be motivational, but it is also terrifying. our daily tete-a-tete went like this about a week ago--i am not embellishing a single thing, this time:

boss (in heavy german accent, disapprovingly, eyes blazing): jesse, jesse, jesse.
me (brightly): yo!
boss: jesse i have told you a hundred times we cannot have this place looking this way. what do you expect me to with you.
me: uh.
boss: look at the drinks cabinet for example. they are all over the place. they are leaning on each other like drunken australians.
me: fuck, let me take care of that.
boss (agitated): we are german! and we must have good prussian soldiers in the drinks cabinet. we cannot have these drunken australians lunching around.
me: lunging around?
boss: they are LUNCHING. LOUNGING i mean.
me: fuck, i know.
boss: it is totally unacceptable.

this went on for a really long time. i want to stress that none of the above is fiction, including the bit about the prussian soldiers. so that, too, is a lot of my job.

as for tour-guiding, i get maybe three tours every two weeks now, which is a hoot.

as for novel-writing, i am on page 30 or so of "godspeed," which someone has already said reminds them of "godsmack," so now i have to change the title, and you who are responsible: you know who you are, and you know what you did. i will fuck you up ikea-style. i don't even know what means.

more sooner or later.

j

guests

2005-06-23T03:58:00.000-07:00

dear rick and my mom,

sorry for the lengthy delay since the last post--we've had guests, i've had a lot of work, and as if it bears repeating, i am grotesquely slothful.

june so far has been the Month of Guests, including:
- jen
- grace
- aoife, who just left yesterday
- nate's grandma, who is still with us

aoife and i had a blast. she went on my tour yesterday before leaving, as did nate's grandma, and was seriously impressed. "that was really long," she marvelled, as we rode the bahn to the train station. "REALLY long."

aoife and i also threw a dinner party, which was attended solely by annie from the tour guide company, and for the dinner party we made:
- gazpacho, which was UNBELIEVABLY GOOD and consisted mostly of garlic
- stuffed peppers embedded in shepherd's pie
- cherries in whipped cream

all in all, it was a terrific visit, marred only by going out to see The Saddest Movie In The World, which unsurprisingly comes from australia and is called somersault. i don't want to talk about it. also, we stepped out of the theater, red-eyed and snot-nosed, and were engulfed in the fearlessly shirt-not-having aftermath of fete de la musique, a berlin-wide music festival that got rained on. it was insane. no one was wearing a shirt, at all. we burst out crying anew and went home to eat ice cream.

we have more guests coming up: susie, i think jen again, and a girl named clara whom nate knows and who will be looking for an apartment in berlin while she stays with us. i have never met clara. nevertheless, giggling hysterically, i wrote her the following friendster message last night:

"dear clara,

"hi, i'm jesse. recently, nate dropped on me, out of nowhere, the idea that you were coming to stay with us. i said, literally, wtf?!?! nate said, she can't find an apartment. i said, are you shitting me. but he wasn't.

"okay, it's honestly not hard to find an apartment in berlin, but if you're coming to stay with us, fine. hopefully you're reasonably cool about things, and i'm pretty easy to live with, but before you arrive you have to know about a few things in our apartment:

"1) if you show up and there is cat dander on ANY of your belongings, such as clothes, toiletries, etc., it could kill me and i will hold you personally liable. it can't hurt to wipe all of your belongings down with a clean paper towel, moistened with vinegar or windex, before you leave for the airport.
"2) the kitchen is divided into Zones Of Use, and we are careful about respecting them. my zone of use has the stove/oven, the toaster, the spice rack, and half of the refrigerator, and you MAY NOT enter it. if you need to use the toaster, maybe you can buy your own. the stove is OFF-LIMITS because i need to keep it clean. your temporary Zone Of Use will be the sink, and i will expect you to do the dishes, because i won't be able to.
"3) between 8pm and 9pm according to my watch, i do yoga, and if there is not complete darkness and silence in the apartment during that time, i swear to G-d i will flip the fuck out. yoga is the only thing keeping me stable. you can do yoga with me if you like, although i'd prefer if you didn't.
"4) the tv is not off-limits, but only channel 3 is okay to watch--the other channels are EXTREMELY OFF-LIMITS.

"those are the main ones. looking forward to your visit.

"j"

now i feel only remorse. giggly remorse.

more soon,
me

zach braff is a homosexual and so is his movie

2005-06-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

i just saw "garden state." you may have seen it, when it came out in the states a year ago or so. you may even have recommended it to me. "it's like 'lost in translation,'" you said, perhaps, nodding vacantly, eyes glinting dully, like lead under fluorescent lights.

my favorite part of garden state was the part where i realized: "hey! despite loathing the cheap adolescent wisdom of this movie, and feeling nothing but scorn for the navel-gazing ass who was responsible for it, this music is making me weepy."

the ending was trite, the dialogue in the last twenty minutes managed to be both flaccid and overwrought, and the character development--with which, above all else, the movie seemed to claim to be preoccupied--was unconvincing and kind of pathetic. but then "iron and wine" came on, and i got weepy. plus plenty of other wimpy-yet-moving neo-/alt-folk songs. i honestly don't know. anyway, the first half of the movie was fine but led me to believe that something unpredictable and reasonably mature would happen in the second half, and that flagrantly did not happen. for example, the scene--which zach braff can't have written before graduating middle school--where the three main characters talk to the guy who lives in a boat-house above the quarry, and they talk about "plumbing the abyss," and then zach braff looks directly into the camera and shrieks, "METAPHOR!!! that was a METAPHOR ABOUT MY EXISTENCE." watching that was the worst moment of my life. also, zach braff's film company is named after that scene--"large's ark"--which i think is appalling, because that means he must be fairly proud of it. in thirty years, i see him alone in front of a tv, watching it over and over. then i see myself busting the door down and smacking him upside the head. in this vision, i am a successful novelist/actor/president of the united states. hail 2 tha chief!

i got back from england yesterday, after more filming for grace's movie. most of that was shot in a makeshift bluescreen studio we set up in a theater. this made me feel way important, needless to say. there was no conceivable way i could help set up, so i spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the seats, watching people do complicated things with lights and pulleys and pretending to get in character. in reality, my character is quiet and broods a lot, and getting in character takes about thirty seconds of thinking about the mortality of people i love, so i had to make up warmups: Primal Scream While Squatting, Pretending To Be A Motorcycle, Actually Sleeping On The Ground.

filming on bluescreen is both fun and a pain. it's fun because you can pretend you're actually in "star wars," but it's a pain because eventually the director tells you to fucking stop already and resume walking back and forth with a distressed expression on your face. anyway, now i just have to record my voiceover, and the film should be done at the beginning of july, i think. grace will correct me if i'm wrong. our movie should be fairly sweet.

i also got to be in this interesting abstract film grace's friend eric is doing about cctv, wherein a bunch of eric's friends and i acted out "normal" and "aberrant" street scenes. i was given the role of Designated Homeless Person. this was awesome, until eric told me to stop because it was freaking him out.

cambridge, where grace lives, was quaint. at first it was hilariously quaint, then upsettingly so. its roads and alleys don't seemed to be designed with people in mind, or for that matter any kind of traffic barring that of dwarves, and many of the doors are four feet high. three-lane roads there are about the width of me, yet determined englishmen try to drive trucks downs them. sudden and violent death seems assured at all times, yet magically isn't. i intend never to return.

in other news, aoife shows up in less than a week. aoife, when/how are you coming again? i am confused.

in conclusion, zach braff is that girl from high school that most people were friends with and thought was way cool, but since then it's been like eight years and she/zach braff still hasn't changed, and we're like, what's the deal.

the hardships of stardom

2005-06-06T05:19:00.000-07:00

at 10:40pm GMT, i arrive in england; am met shortly thereafter at a bus stop by my director; demand and receive, at minimum, a hazelnut latte (although if it has anything but coarse brown sugar in it, i throw it in someone's face); am coaxed to walk back and forth in front of a camera in a bluescreen studio; collapse in a chair, exhausted, and wail about my motivation and the padding of said chair; am brought more lattes, and possibly boxes of rare italian confections; repeat as desired.

grace is making another movie for school, loosely based on/inspired by the holy spirit of the times, and i get to star in it. it's 10 minutes long, and most of that is me walking in front of things and looking concerned. i am told this is how de niro got his start. this is very exciting, of course, and it's great to be working with grace again; we just had three fun-filled days in berlin, mostly occupied by standing in front of the reichstag waiting for tourists to get out of the shot. if you, too, are planning to shoot a film in berlin, here is some advice: all tourists must die. tourists are the most hideous species of human in the world, and when they see a camera, they instantly think, "hey! i should stare directly at that, for hours at a time." all of them. and there is nothing you can do about it, because some of them are loud, confrontational turks excited about the world cup qualifying match later that day with extreme rival-from-hell greece, which ended 0:0, which is yet another heart-rendingly eloquent demonstration that soccer is a dumb, dumb sport.

other scenes we already got to shoot: a shower scene; a scene in which i eat a bunch of chips and then pour salsa directly in my mouth from a jar; me sleeping and not knowing i was being filmed, which is creepy; me smoking roughly a bajillion times, and then coughing up something black and auto-ambulatory; another shower scene because grace claimed to have lost the first one; me in a magical fish elevator that actually exists.

work continues to be enjoyable and stressful; my bosses, and i have many, tend to appear unannounced at the desk and yell things like, "WHY HAVEN'T YOU FILLED OUT THE CLEANING LIST YET," and then i say, "I FILLED THAT SHIT OUT THIS MORNING" and then they yell, "YOU MUST TAKE FIVE MINUTES RIGHT NOW AND MEDITATE ON WAYS WE CAN IMPROVE THE HOSTEL." jen came back to berlin and then left this morning. last night jen and nate and i saw harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban, possibly the scariest movie in the history of film. recently i turned down a 52-day route in southern italy for let's go because it would have meant the end of berlin. this was an absurdly hard decision and i don't want to talk about it.

a number of wonderful people have written by now and given comments on the novel, and you guys are all awesome, except jeremy, who suggested that i get rid of the ninjas, whose allegorical value has clearly gone way over his petty, literal-minded head. i'll write you all back soon if i haven't done so already. i get back from england on the 9th.

oh, and the thieves? from last time? they never showed up. my reputation precedes me.

the dumb-eyed march of time

2005-05-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

i may have said earlier that i believed that my life has been evacuated of meaning, but back then i had no idea what i was talking about, because only a few hours ago did i realize how comprehensively devoid of rhyme and reason things have gotten. witness, beloved reader:

my new boss at hostel reception: jesse! what's up.
me: hi! hi there.
boss: look, um. how to put this. what are you doing tonight?
me: friend's birthday party--which is sort of a date, also, with this girl i really
boss: great! great, great. how about at midnight.
me: um.
boss:
me: so like i said
boss: well, here's the thing. we need someone in one of our hostels to walk around the halls every fifteen minutes between midnight and 5am and make sure there aren't any thieves.
me:
boss: don't actually confront the thieves, if you see them. we might give you a camera. try and take a picture or something.
me: this is so not for real.
boss: great! midnight it is. we'll give you the day off tomorrow. ta!

so now i am a security guard, armed with a camera and my innate powers of stealth. this is beyond preposterous. here are questions:

1. the hostel is filled with tourists. let's say one of them stumbles home late at night, which on a friday is not beyond the realm of the plausible. do i creepily watch this person in the shadows to make sure they're not stealing anything?
2. clutching a camera?
3. because the answer seems to be yes.
4. and i don't think that will benefit our hostel's reputation.

on the positive side, nate's girlfriend is back in town, and the cooking so far has been awesome, barring a cookie mishap that resulted in three uniquely flawed batches of cookies, including a batch that merged into what we have been treating as Cookie Dip, into which you can dip more self-bounded objects. everything else has been great. tonight is salmon and a tart. i get to be the sommelier, meaning all wines will be under €1,50/bottle. i am particularly excited for the "bulgarian goat merlot," which i am assuming is a euphemism.

also, reception yesterday (six hours of "on-the-job training") was more fun than expected. i thought i was going to be hanging out and watching the whole time. false! instead, i started work from the very beginning. within thirty minutes of showing up and about forty-five minutes of waking up, i got to deliver my first check-in speech, in german, despite not knowing it in english or ever having heard anyone give it in german before. here is a reasonably faithful translation of what i said:

"welcome to hostel! is nice. i tell you, we have the 24 hours, all the time. you have the questions, we answer you like: WAPOW!!! no more questions.
"in hostel is also cafe, bar, plenty of your friends. i hope! here is map of town. i draw little person where you live. person, person, okay, he walk around, find... THE BRANDENBURG DOOR!! i mean GATE!! okay?! is right there so close.
"you pay now, you pay later, it's cool. you pay now! have a beer, everything cool. two euros please for beer--so delicious i think!!!"

at that point the head receptionist cut in, which i think is a shame, because the guests checking in--these two flamboyantly gay thirtyish men, who were holding hands and wearing creatively deconstructed shirts--were visibly enjoying it. after that it got better. if you should ever want me to check you in to a hostel, in german, you have but to ask. passports now, you give.

the end for now. i have to go meditate, in the manner of the ninja, in preparation for my trials tonight. wish me luck. if you don't hear from me within 24 hours, assume the worst.

hai domo, children. hai domo.

personal nadirs revisited

2005-05-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

so now i'm a receptionist. SHIT YEAH!!!!

you might recall that we have overstaffing problems in the walking tour company, due to hiring too many people and then--ha ha!, ha--cutting tours. so my bosses have come up with a "temporary" solution for me: i can work reception at a hostel. this will continue until they have enough shifts to give me full-time work as a tour guide, which will never--unless my calculations are off, which they definitely are not, because i am god-like at math--happen. if they add the shifts they cut, they will give most of them to already-struggling tour guides, and the rest won't be enough to offer full-time work to anyone. this is true. i can give you numbers if you want.

i don't want to sound ungrateful--i'm happy to have been given a job, after all--but i would like to record here, for posterity, that this is totally fucked up. receptionist pays less than tour guiding--about €3-4 less per hour--and is comparatively much more of a soul-draining hassle and much less of a job that anyone would want to do. plus there's the fact of me training for months to be a tour guide, and reading a lot--i don't regret the reading, or the training, but this was a job i was promised, and excited for, and ready for, and because of the short-sightedness of the company's powers-that-be, and the gross fucking incompetence of german bureaucrats, who should be fucking shot, i hear the words, casually, at a meeting, "and as part of our plan to alleviate overstaffing problems, jesse will be transferred to a job working reception at the hostel," and that's that.

whatever, whatever, whatever. i shouldn't complain. i'm just a little bitter. i was never given a chance to prove that i'd be a good tour guide, and that's annoying.

also, this guy next to me, who doesn't smell awesome to begin with, decided about five minutes ago that we were both cool with him being seriously flatulent, and this is also coloring my mood, as is the guy two seats down with the "this is how we do" ringtone on his cell, which is obnoxious because:
1. it's the "this is how we do" ring, and someone, inexplicably, keeps calling him
2. it's evidence of the success of the thirty-minutes-per-hour advertising strategy employed by ringtone companies on MTV, which has all but destroyed my faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature--if you've seen these commercials, you know exactly what i mean

more out of rage than anything else, i'm working on--ha ha!--a second novel, and you may rest assured that i'll keep you posted on that. i'm on page 8. if you've read the holy spirit of the times, i'd love to hear from you, or even if you haven't. pretend you've read it, for my sake. talking points would be:
- [choose: jude/alex/johnny bangcock] is my favorite character, definitely
- i thought the imagery in chapters 8 and 10 was particularly [awesome/sweet]
- also, i found the [ending/all of it/most of it] to be very thought-provoking

see how easy that is? my life is an empty signifier, and the world is void of good.

dejectedly,
jesse

amateur pornographers at home

2005-05-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

grace is making another film, and i get to be in it again. it's 10 minutes long and loosely based on parts of my novel. or not. grace is hesitant to commit to any clear description of what the film is going to be about. she is, however, certain of one thing:

grace: how do you feel about nudity?
me: totally in favor.
grace: i mean, your nudity.
me: what?!
grace: great! [scribbling]

postpartum existence has been disorienting. i've been spending a lot of time on the internet emailing people and looking up baby names. as if this is even worth writing, there seems to be no progress on the work permit front. i asked andreas if he had called the work office yet; "it's on my desk!" he replied cheerily. i have no idea what this means.

also worthy of note: the company recently cut 8 tours per week and hired 2 new tour guides, and once i come on staff, there will be 1.6 tours per guide per week. this comes out to a monthly salary of about €320. i don't know, guys. i honestly don't know.

a guy is wandering around the internet cafe talking loudly to himself in what i can only assume is turkish--it sounds like italian, but with about double the saliva--and i'm the only other person in here, so i'm leaving right now. it's been real.

impoverishedly,
jesse

first draft done, finally

2005-05-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

so: the first draft of my novel is done. after page breaks for each chapter, it comes out to 203 pages long.

i can email you a copy if you want to read it. however, i'm only emailing it to you on a few conditions:
1) you have to read it in the near future (like within a couple of weeks)
2) and then give me comments

the reason being, there will be subsequent drafts that will be better than this one, and if you have don't have time to read right now, or intend to be lackadaisical and i'll-get-to-it-later-once-my-printer-magically-gets-more-ink-in-it about the most important artistic project of my entire life to date, you should wait until it's more finished.

be critical, be hysterically positive. which passages need work? which are less objectionable? which characters do i need to kill off faster because they're obnoxious? to what extent is this a pathetic, transparent attempt to redeem eight months of gadding about like a cretin by committing them to paper? what was your favorite chapter? mine was #12.

i have little for you other than that. email me if you have time to read right now. i love you all. if you don't love my novel, however, i will be forced to discontinue our friendship.

respectfully,
jesse

i had a dream

2005-05-13T01:56:00.000-07:00

about twenty minutes ago i met The Angriest Cat In The World, which is an aggressive baritone-voiced tortoiseshell cat that my brain made up while i was asleep; we were trapped in a television-set apartment together, to the raucous delight of a chinese studio audience numbering millions. then, on my bedroom door: a tapping, gentle, ethereal, like the babbling of a stream.

"do you still want me to wake you up?" asked nate.

"YAAAGGH," i said. i was still thinking about the cat.

"because it's 9:30," added nate.

relevance being to a walking tour pick-up i thought i had this morning, possibly at 9:15; several hysterical phone calls later, we all had a good laugh and then i came to the internet cafe. it is important that you know this.

so my parents left on wednesday morning, after staying with me in my apartment for six days. somehow, the day they came, they managed to bump into my east prussian (not dutch--i thought she was dutch) ex-aristocrat midwifing landlady, who offered them a room in my apartment that she owns, this being for free; and the rest, as we say, could easily have been the basis for a sitcom from my childhood. we ate together, we walked around together, we had earnest discussions together: about the paralyzing complexity of german history, my ongoing unemployment, my lack of romantic prospects, whether this has anything to do with what my hair looks like.

the main source of friction between us, i think--and i want to stress that it was a fun, happy visit all around--was a recurring debate we had while walking around the city, called "do we get to go in there."

me: the berliner dom! to see it is to love it. let's keep walking.
mom: ooh! do we get to go in there?
me:
mom:
dad: hiergeblieben.
me: if we keep going in places, we're not
mom: okay sorry!
me: i mean there's a wedding
mom: okay! okay! i was just
me: like right now, and it's blocking the steps
mom: it would be nice to go in there.
me:
dad: funkenwurstermacher.
me: YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS THAT IS FUNNY.

my mistake was thinking i could do the standard four-hour walking tour with my parents, who have wildly different interests than your standard tourgoing person. most of my dad's questions were about roofing, and they weren't so much questions as observations like, "geez! that roof must've cost a fortune," and "will you look at that roof." my mom was interested in getting coffee in places and stressing that we should do whatever i want.

the highlight, i think for all of us, was maria's birthday. maria is hungarian. i met her while i was living with the host family in zehlendorf back in january or december; her current husband is the father's childhood friend. they came over for dinner back when i was living there, and maria found out i was jewish, nominally, and she claimed loudly and with disproportionate delight that we had the same blood. which is more or less true. i am of 1/8 romanian stock. anyway, five or so bottles of wine and one of some kind of ouzo-but-worse-flavored liquor from eastern europe later, we were BFF (did i write about this at the time? i think maybe i did), and so she invited me to her 64th birthday, and i brought my parents. my parents speak no german (although they understand it eerily well--i would finish a phone call in german and my mom would say, brightly, "hmm! i didn't know you were suffering from herpes") so i had to translate. anyway, a fun, relaxed family time, in a smoking-and-wine-intensive european sort of way. i talked a lot with reiner about our mutual hatred of capitalism, as well as the time he stole a baseball bat from american soldiers as a kid. afterwards, my parents and i went for falafel to habibi, where my buddy iwar from iraq works.

"thank you for feeding our son!" they enthused.

"no problem," said iwar. then he and i executed a complicated handshake that we've been practicing. U-S-A!

with the work visa: my super-boss (who is the boss of the other bosses) has taken control of things, which is awesome. recently, after a visit to the arbeitsamt (work office), he took me aside and explained the following:

- there are two procedures that must take place after you file your application.
- the arbeitsamt must make sure you're not taking a job away from germans. this takes four weeks.
- the ausländerbehörde (immigration office) must make sure you're not a criminal, or "arab-looking." this takes about a week.
- the arbeitsamt process, for my case, has been successfully concluded.
- the ausländerbehörde process has not, and what is up with that.
- the arbeitsamt is waiting for them to finish.
- so you should take a german to the ausländerbehörde, like soon, and figure out what their whole deal is.

so we (me and camilla, who is danish, which is like german but more attractive) went to the ausländerbehörde yesterday, where after a mere three hours we got to talk to someone. here is what we found out:

- the ausländerbehörde process has also been successfully concluded.
- but, they haven't done anything because they're waiting to hear from the arbeitsamt.

you will recall that:

- the arbeitsamt is waiting to hear from the ausländerbehörde.

so both offices are waiting for each other to send something indicating their approval. this is really fucking stupid. but, at least now it looks like i'll get a work visa, and i can guarantee that within the next five minutes, having written that, i will get hit by a bus.

oh, also: i should note that my "arab-looking" comment above is a transparent fiction, because everyone at the immigration office is turkish. in addition, they have no idea how the take-a-number-and-wait system works. they get their number, and then they try to go in the door, and then they get kicked out. five, six at a time. and they just keep trying! turkey, you got something going on.

the novel is now 189 pages long, and i realize i say this a lot, but soon it will be done. yes!

my fingers hurt. that's all for now. dear "mosiah child": "suck my balls." zing!

seven days later

2005-05-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

i have plenty to write about, but you have to wait a few more days. reason: my parents are currently living in my apartment. this is even more hilarious than you are envisioning.

check back on wednesday or thursday. highlights include:
- my dad eating things and then falling asleep
- my mom proposing that she get to write a blog entry
- a hungarian woman's champagne-intensive 64th birthday party
- discussion of whether this blog is the dumbest or the awesomest, and the comical goings-on that would ensue were any relevant german bureaucrat to discover it

hurrah!

may day

2005-05-02T05:34:00.000-07:00

because today i'm writing about something actually newsworthy, i did a little research/news-checking in re: the may day riots last night and walpurgisnacht two nights ago, and i didn't find much. google "berlin may day" and you get articles from 2001. here is european news i missed, over the past two days:

Caterpillars Stop Giant Rave

Hitler Long Gone... BUT Legacy Haunts Germany

Cocaine Shame of Boules Champ

Greek Police Hand Out Folk Music

awesome!! anyway, the new york times had an article entitled "100 Held in May Day Unrest in 2 German Cities," which as far as i know is true. it was gnarly. thus, here are the may day riots from my perspective; please honor the pretense that i kept a running diary. all names are fictional. it doesn't really get interesting until the end. without further ado:

april 30, 2pm. nate and i venture to the canal to meet einar, marie, and brook, who have bloody mary mix and cups. we attempt to get celery on the way; all available celery is floppy, so to heck with that! we remove our shirts.
3. bloody mary mix is actually just tomato juice. um, great. i want to go to a flea market. brook is talking about ways to exploit the christian right. brook is kind of hammered.
3:30. marie somehow acquires a watermelon, and we fill it with vodka. nate and i are remorselessly sans shirts. we drink from the watermelon and then i spit it out, because: gross.
4. we go to friedrichshain. there are cops on the bridge, in green padded uniforms, to make sure we have no glass bottles or cobblestones. "are they selling bottles at the stores?," we ask, boldly challenging the logic of their actions. "fine," they concede, and let us pass.
5. no flea market in boxhagener platz; instead, vans of police driving around, and various counter-culture types sitting in the grass looking discontented. the police are driving slowly. they look ready to rock. they have these crazy gun-looking clubs.
apparently there's supposed to be a neo-nazi ("right-wing," say the papers) rally here today or tomorrow, but no one knows for sure, and any nazi rally in berlin is going to be attacked mercilessly by left-wing protestors. there's nothing going on right now, anyway. also, i want to buy a hat.
6. no flea market in treptow either. but the soviet cemetery is still there. great!
7. treptow is farther from my apartment than i have been led to believe.
8. nate and i commence cooking a delicious lasagna and series of garlic breads. a wok is involved. more you will never know.
9:30. reunion with einar, marie, and brook. brook, an american, is leaving berlin in two days. the lasagna is well-received. explosions in the distance. idly, we gaze out the window, sipping wine and laughing quietly about the transgressions of youth. the garlic bread? also a riot of the taste buds. einar keeps helping himself, and we're like: "you got to chill!!"!
11. brook lends me his bicycle so i can go out and see the walpurgisnacht riots in prenzlauer berg. nate and i ride up to mauerpark. the police have completely closed off mauerpark and a few surrounding blocks, but it's not really that hard to get in or out. the police told us, politely, to walk our bikes and searched us for glass bottles, failing to find one that we accidentally had.
11:30. this is the lamest protest i have ever seen. everyone is just sitting around smoking and drinking, and that's about it. this is all next to a stadium, floodlit, that we're not allowed to go near. no violence, no guy with a megaphone or anything. there's a drum circle, which i guess is just as subversive.
may 1, midnight. okay, this is illustrative. we found a pickup basketball game, dramatically illuminated by the nearby floodlights, and we decide whatever, we'll join. first of all, no one can make a shot. it's hilarious. not one shot is made, until nate finally gets the ball from someone and makes an attractive layup. not to be outdone, i strip a dude, in the process smacking him in the face. here's what he says: "sorry."
i mean, come on. i didn't mean to smack him in the face, and when directly confronted with violence i tend to get weepy/negotiative, but if it's a pickup basketball game, at night, when there are supposed to be riots, you don't apologize for your face getting in the way of my hand. here's what i said: "my biceps are weapons of the wrath of god."
anyway, i took one shot and (improbably) made it, nate made another--bear in mind that many other shots by germans and turks, meanwhile, are being attempted, none successfully--and then we left the court, because our presence there was embarrassing to both them and us.
1am. we bike back to kreuzberg, having found nothing of interest. on the way, we split a bottle of wine. some people will tell you it's easy, while riding bikes speedily down major urban traffic arteries, to pass an open bottle of wine back and forth. i am one of them, because nate and i pulled some smooth steve nash-esque wine bottle exchanges just now. goddamn! also, i said "HI!!" to more passersby than was advisable.
1:30. ringhild and cecilia know about a party. we are done "protesting" for the night. party!
5. we have been dancing like nonstop since we got here. for every nerve i have in my legs, i feel intense pain. nate says cecilia and i made out for a while, which i sort of remember. "do you need an escort home?" i ask chivalrously. she beams and shakes her head. "do i need an escort home?" i ask... suggestively. "i don't know," she says, confused: "only you can know that." her philosophy is impenetrable. i am overcome.
the police shut down the party, which is really, really loud. the police are pretty cool about it. cecilia and i exchange numbers; nate and i bike home. OW MY LEGS.
noon. OW JESUS CHRIST.
1pm. well, it's may day. brook is having a going-away barbecue later, but first nate and i want to see what sort of crazy shenanigans the berliners are up to. answer: nothing. the streets have been blocked off to automotive traffic, but aside from some peaceful and inane far-left speech-making, it's a city-organized street festival called MyFest. "My" sounds like the german "May," the month, so it's clever and demonstrates that germans are capable of english, in case you forgot.
many food stalls, many people--families, punks, punk families, high school kids--milling about. on a number of corners we witness kreuzberg's devotion to hip-hop, which is truly awful to see. this is a bunch of high school-age kids, equipped with powerful speakers, on a stage saying things (in german) like, "we are all niggaz! fuck tha police!"
i have a problem with this, because 1) berlin's police are friendly and reasonable, and it's not like there's been any recent history of police brutality, and 2) no one involved could reasonably be classified as "niggaz." also, no one is dancing, and i can't blame them, because the samples are awful and the rapping is inept. instead, everyone is just sort of watching quietly, drunkenly stuporous or soberly bemused.
4. rendezvous with brook and friends. to görlitzer park, where there may be less savory goings-on.
on our way, we see lots and lots of police, marching in military formations and full riot gear--riot helmets, shields, guns, clubs. surely something awesome is happening!
5. nope. peaceful picnicking and frisbees. we grill a number of things that have been tastily marinated. i text cecilia, who doesn't text back. some of us play pickup soccer, me barefoot. undermanned, my side loses 2-0, and i manage to lacerate my right heel. however, i gamely refuse to be oppressed by shoes. a kid comes with a guitar and a number of us play and sing. einar, nathan, the kid himself, occasionally me. my rendition of "every rose has its thorn," which took about fifteen minutes, left not a single eye dry. brook takes me aside later: "i felt that, seriously."
eddie, an indonesian drug addict i met previously at tacheles, comes by and appreciates our music really, really loudly. for a while it's fun; then it becomes irksome. "COME ON BABY!" he howls at us, laughing hysterically. "WHOOOOOO," he emits for five minutes at a time. at length he leaves.

11. okay. einar, nathan (another american), nate, and i decide to check out oranienstrasse one last time to see if any riots are going on. many, many police along the way. other people are walking in the same direction as us. the streets above kottbusser tor are liberally strewn with broken glass.
oranienstrasse is crowded, and there is a lot of noise. it's dark but the streets are well-lit, and both sidewalks are crowded with kids, most of whom are trying to see what's going on. think "the warriors." we migrate toward the noise, and sure enough, in the street, through the crowds, we make out a huge number of police.
now it gets kind of insane. a lot of kids are lobbing bottles at them, setting off firecrackers, etc. every so often the police will charge, sending people running straight at us, pamplona-esque; after a while we recognize that when they charge, it's down the street and not along the sidewalks, so we huddle in with the crowds against the doorways to take cover. screams, shattering noises, drums. it is literally impossible to take a step without hitting broken glass.
more kids arrive, more police arrive. along the sidewalk it gets very very crowded. some idiot near us aggravates the police so much that they charge us on the sidewalk to grab him, and the crush, for a few seconds, is insane; if anyone falls, they hit broken glass and probably get stepped on, so we all awkwardly hold each other up while hurrying out of the path of the police. they grab the kid and pull him away.
the kids are screaming things like, "fucking pigs" and i think "hau ab," which may mean "die." it's a total circus. kids climb up on traffic signs, shouting abuse. bottles continue to fly in and shatter among the police formations in the street. behind me, two kids are earnestly discussing whether all police are bad; both have taken the position that they're just people like you and me, yet it's still an argument somehow.
finally the police charge and grab a kid five feet away from me, meaning i'm right next to angry riot police with videocameras--about one in five had a videocamera--and i decide, that's it, and i totally tackle one of these fucking PIGS and take his fucking gun and smash his facemask and i SHOVE IT IN HIS FUCKING PIG MOUTH AND PULL THE GODDAMNED TRIGGER, and i'm writing this from jail, where they have free but time-limited internet access.
no, just kidding. that was when i left. on my way out, on adalberstrasse, about fifty meters from oranienstrasse, i got a falafel at maroush, which was doing great business. it was weird. i walked in, ordered, and that said, "this is pretty crazy, no?" the guy grinned and shrugged. "i wouldn't know," he said. "i've been in here since 6. i haven't seen anything."

i'm fine, my body kind of aches from all that activity, and that's about all i got. oranienstrasse, by the way, looks completely normal right now. no glass, no other debris, cars parked everywhere. germans are good at cleaning. i think that's the moral.

OMG OMG FUCK

2005-04-29T03:29:00.000-07:00

it is a measure, as i told nate last night, of the heights to which i have climbed, in terms of not-taking-things-for-granted, that this was, to me, what it was: at the staff meeting yesterday, my boss told me he had called the work office (this, alone, eliciting tears of rapture), and not only do they have me in their database, but the four-week advertising-my-job-to-germans period is over in seven to nine days, after which my boss will probably get a letter that instructs them to send me to an office of some kind and collect... a work visa.

what this was, to me, was
me: HOLY FUCK. HOLY FUCK. [wheezing]
boss:
me: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCK: GAAAAHHHHHHHHH
other boss: jesus, get him to stop.
boss: this is so fucked up.
me: BARF! BARF! I'M A KITTY.

not a work visa, mind you: the possibility that, in seven to nine days, a letter will be sent to my boss saying that if i go to a work office at a certain time on a certain day, i may get a work visa. well, that's fucking awesome, and consequently i spent the month of may's paycheck last night on drinks for me and a guy i found in the hostel bar named, i think, "blotto." it should come as no surprise to you that he is australian.

and today i start giving training tours, which is me giving real tours except that a senior tour guide is there to cut in and be all like, "bitch that aint tha reichstag," and im all like "u skeezy" and they all like "nuh uh" and i all like "the reichstag was completed in 1894, after the plans of paul wallot," and they all, "NO U DIDNT"

so things are finally looking up on the work visa situation. maybe. i don't even know any more. if you would like to make a contribution to the recovery of my much-battered ego, please do so. ex: "if you do not send me a draft of your amazing novel, i will kill myself," or "when i think about your body i get all bothered-like." it can even be vaguely insulting, as long as it's about me. on that note, lena on the phone was like, how come i never appear on your blog, and i was like, good point. so here goes:

lena

awesome.

novel excerpt

2005-04-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

dear readers:

since i haven't been doing much for the past few days but write and cook--right now i'm on page 162 and earlier today i created a new culinary delight i call "omelette 'n' a bowl"--here's an excerpt from the novel that none of you have read before. i have little else to offer that is interesting. one or more of my bosses are presumably working on my visa, so there you go. ross douthat remains a mind-defying homo, albeit to my knowledge strictly in the derogatory sense.

okay. here is about four pages of alex in rome in early spring or late winter:

The train ride took hours. At length they emerged at Fiumicino and took leave of each other, with smiles and blushes, and suddenly Alex was alone again, and hungry, and discontented. It was early in the afternoon.
She found it such a strange position to be in: encumbered by wants and needs, paralyzed by lack of preparation. This is how everyone lives, she reminded herself, but it did her no good. She had no idea where to find a place to stay or a place to eat. The sterile noises of the station--canned, blank-sounding announcements in multiple languages, echoes of hushed conversation--gave her no respite to think.
The food in the station looked generic and expensive and not really worth it so she walked outside and down the street to find a place to eat, keeping her bag close to her, suddenly and upsettingly aware of how commonplace and vulnerable she looked. Gangs of youths stared at her, unwavering, as she passed. Leather and slicked spiky hair, acne-scarred faces and plain-written blunt-edged lust and bravado. It wasn’t worry that she felt--they wouldn’t touch her, no one could touch her if she asserted herself properly--but rather a subtler feeling of having been in contact with something loathsome or having seen something unclean. A desecration of the good and beautiful in people.
Up one street, left onto another, past a church and fountain, right and down a hill, all the while overcome by the smoky, loud, wide-channeled urban grid. The buildings lining the street were massive and worn-looking, like ruins in progress, and the sidewalks were dominated by huge, twisting trees, writhing their tortuous way toward the sky, as if every inch higher took decades of relentless, draining effort. Motorcycle traffic was an unbearable, insectoid cacophony and pedestrian traffic was abundant and chaotic. Trucks blared paths through the crowds, slowly and with great groaning stops and starts.
She continued her way down the street. Her stomach felt as if it was closing in on itself. She only wanted a place that didn’t feel unclean, or fake, or hostile, and something she could afford, but the more she looked and the hungrier she got, perversely, the higher her standards became, until nothing was acceptable. It was almost three in the afternoon.
Something she could afford. This was also new and unpleasant. Being limited by money. She had stopped at an ATM in Brindisi, worried about credit card failures in the future, and had taken out fifty euros, but she didn’t want to spend any of it if possible.

Finally, at her wit’s end, she stopped in somewhere just off the main street. There were wine bottles in the windows and part of a family at one of the tables--a baby, a girl, a woman, two men. At least one of the men worked there. Possibly the entire family did.
Alex sat down at a little table in the corner and should have felt relief but didn’t. The man who definitely worked there--plump with kindly, crinkled-up eyes and white hair and mustache and a mole on his neck with a thick bristly tuft sticking out--brought her a menu. The baby was the beating heart of the room, and all attention was focused on it, explicit or not.
Alex forced herself into an artificial state of calm, hoping it would stick. She paged casually through the menu (most of it was for wine) and listened to the family talk, to the extent that they were. The girl was tending ineffectually to the baby; the second man was smoking and staring intently out of the window; the mother was knitting. Alex felt like she had interrupted something.
“Mom, the baby is hungry,” said the girl.
“He’s just been fed,” said the mother, not looking up.
The baby gurgled.
“Maybe the baby is thirsty,” wondered the girl aloud. “Beautiful little baby,” she told him. Then there was nothing for a while.
The waiter returned and Alex ordered in faltering Italian.
“Sorry?” he said.
She ordered again, slowly and painstakingly. She didn’t want to resort to pointing to things on the menu.
“Ah,” he said, or something to that effect, and scribbled some things.
Then, more waiting. The baby began crying eventually. The girl tried unsuccessfully to soothe it. The father, exasperated, planted half a cigarette in the ashtray, walked over to the baby, picked it up, and carried it around the room, muttering things to it and patting it on the back. His daughter watched him, wide-eyed. Grimly, her mother remained focused on her knitting.
From over his father’s shoulder, the baby stared at Alex. It was unremarkable-looking. Wispy hair, dark wet eyes, fat and round, a perpetual expression of surprise. He had stopped crying and was instead attempting to fit his entire hand, up to the wrist, in his mouth.
The food arrived. Bowl of pasta, bread basket, red wine. The waiter offered to grate parmesan into the bowl, and Alex declined. Pepper? No thank you. He smiled at her, eyes closing under wrinkly folds of skin, and turned and left.

The first bite--two penne on a fork, glistening saffron in a sauce with bacon, alla matriciana--set off something violent in her head. Everything disappeared except for the need for food. It was blindingly good. It was unbearable. She heard a roaring wash of noise in her ears that shut out everything else.
Alex gulped the two penne down and forked three more into her mouth before she knew what had happened. There was no spoon, so she tried using the fork as a shovel, but it seemed like drinking through a sieve. The pasta kept falling off. It was infuriating. Soon--oh God--she was swallowing directly out of the bowl, pouring the food in like soup. It gathered around the sides of her mouth so she used a free hand to guide it in. She couldn’t help herself. There was rapid, spasmodic chewing. The rush of eating filled her head. Finally, almost immediately, there was no more. Having emptied the bowl, she turned to the bread basket, took a slice of bread, and gulped it whole. Then she took another one. Soon the bread was gone and there was no food left on the table. She took her wine glass and meant to sip it but ended up pouring it right down her throat. She was pouring a second glass when she noticed that she was being watched.
The family looked uniformly horrified. Alex froze. They didn’t move either. She turned her eyes to each one--the father, mouth agape, the mother, brow knit in disgust, the daughter, more confused than anything else, the waiter, viewing her in shocked sadness through those soulful, warm eyes. Even the baby was silent.
No one said anything for a very long time. Finally Alex had to look down. She wiped her mouth carefully with a napkin. She could feel their eyes remain fixed on her, holding her in place. The baby began murmuring and warbling, which was worse than silence. No one tended to it.
And then, gradually and inevitably, she felt her stomach contracting and the food swimming back up to her throat. Relax, thought Alex desperately. Ignore it and relax. It had no effect. You can’t think your way out of being sick.
She closed her eyes and felt it reaching its arms into the back of her mouth. Everything inside of her was moving. There was no pain; it was worse. She was powerless to do anything.
Abruptly, Alex got up from the table, walked briskly to the door--trying not to panic, all the while, or breathe--and went outside and walked as far down the street as she could, away from the main road, where there would be no one to see her. She got about twenty steps when something took control of her body and made her kneel over and vomit everything at the base of a tree. It took a horrifically long time. There was so much. Everything was intact. Slices of bread, whole penne bouncing against the dirt and bark, rolling away flecked with black. She felt the taste leaving her mouth. Some of the bread was drenched in wine, and it was shrunken and sad-looking. The sight of it alone made her miserable. “Poor bread,” she almost said, when it was over. After it was over she was still, trying to disappear.
She didn’t see them but she felt passersby staring at her and she wanted to explode, with shame and anger. She could feel people stopping up and down the street to gawk at the mess she had made; children tugging at their parents’ sleeves, maybe, or boys laughing harder than they had to, to feel superior.
At length she felt two people behind her and stood up as quickly as she could, which was not very quickly. They were the waiter and the mother. On the doorstep down the street she saw the others watching.
The waiter was not quite sure what to say, but the mother was. “Are you sick?” she demanded, absurdly.
“No,” said Alex, shaking her head. “No.”
“You must pay for your meal,” the mother answered.
“Oh,” said Alex, reaching for her bag--why had she brought her bag with her, she thought, and no wonder they chased after her with the bill.
The waiter was somewhat more sympathetic. “Are you sure you are not sick,” he said slowly.
“No,” said Alex. “Yes. How much was it,” she said. The bill said eight. Alex gave the mother a ten.
“Here,” she said. “For the food. I’m very sorry.” She added: “I need a place to stay.”
The waiter looked puzzled.
“We don’t run a hotel,” said the mother, firmly.
“I know,” said Alex, having trouble articulating. “I know. But--if you need someone to work in the kitchen, I don’t know. I don’t have a place to stay.”
“There are many rooms available in town right now,” said the waiter, slowly so she could understand. She wanted to tell him to speak normally but didn’t. She felt like screaming with misery. “It is not yet the summer.”
“No, I know,” said Alex, struggling to keep control. “I know all that. But if you want me to work for you, I can. I can clean things if need be. I don’t want to stay in a hostel,” she managed.
“We don’t need any help,” said the mother, definitively. “We don’t have any room.”
“Please just listen to me,” Alex almost said. “Please listen.” But she had no idea what she was trying to say to them.
“Okay,” she finally said, as the mother said loudly, “Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Alex said, also loudly. “I’m sorry. It’s fine.” Her eyes stung a little bit. Her whole body felt like it was on fire.
The mother turned and walked away. The waiter--her brother? Ridiculously, as he turned, Alex caught a faint family resemblance between them, in the curve of the mouth and somewhere between the lip and the nose--the waiter followed without saying a word, taking only a forlorn glance at the splatter of uneaten food against the base of the tree. Alex thought at least he could apologize for his sister’s behavior.

Within half an hour, after walking at as moderate a pace as she could manage, Alex found herself in a square with an empty solitary bench waiting for her.
There were makeshift jewelry stands on tables lining one corner of the square. Scattered along all sides were restaurants and gelato stands with awnings and spaces out front for tables in the summer. In the center was a statue of some religious figure or another, on a pedestal protected by a fence. Behind the statue were houses and roofs and chimneys and clothing hung out to dry on lines above the street.
There was no one watching her, but she wasn’t alone for long. A tall, thin, dark-haired boy of uncertain nationality and age sat next to her on the bench and produced a pad of paper and an odd little gray knit bag, shaped like a sock, containing about twenty pens of different size and shape and make. He spent some time frowning at the statue and the buildings behind it and then selected a blue brush-tip pen and dragged an outline across the centre of the paper.
Alex couldn’t help herself; she watched him openly, without reserve. She felt herself calm down in a way that let her pulse and her breathing be suspended. It was only temporary, she knew, being able to withdraw like this and shut off the need for things, but it felt undeniably sweet.
He wasn’t a very good artist, but his pens were magic. They slurred and skittered across the page like rakes and leaves on the ground, leaving thick lines and thin, broken traces and round little dabs. The statue took shape in blue; the walls behind appeared in turquoise and brown. They looked nothing like their stone counterparts. They were wet and wispy and ethereal, and judging from his frown and wrinkled eyebrows, he was putting a lot of care into making them look exactly how they appeared in his mind’s eye. Red forms appeared in the foreground, probably an approximation of human figures. It wasn’t all that easy to tell what they were. They looked more like calligraphy.
Some children came up behind to watch, and they were unusually still and quiet. They regarded the drawing with solemn, dark eyes. The boy licked the little finger of his left hand and began to blur parts of the statue, presumably for shading; it came out looking unfocused and uncertain. The children wore skeptical expressions. He looked up at the closest one, leaning almost directly over his elbow, and gave a rueful little smile.
A teacher walked over, stepped in front of them, and signed that it was time to leave; only then did he realize that they were deaf and waved a goodbye, about as articulately as he would have said it in Italian.

ooh, look at me, i'm ross douthat; DIE

2005-04-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

something about our recent stretch of gorgeous weather--something like ten days of brilliant sun and cool breezes--has caused the many cats of our apartment building to become dramatically un-dormant. german cats are not like american cats. american cats tend to be mellow and diffident. german cats are high-strung and probable meth addicts. they spend a lot of their time running in terror from/toward inanimate objects and making noises that cats aren't supposed to make, like "BAAAAAARRGGGH" and "HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT." my family's cat would never do that. i'd have her shipped over, but apparently she's been vomiting like every day for the past three years. G-R-O-S-S!

went to three different government offices over the course of the past week, and frankly, i don't want to talk about it. these people have no idea what they're doing. every bureaucrat i've talked to (generally female, somewhat-to-morbidly overweight, dried-out bleached hair, gives subtle but distressing impression of physical and emotional sterility) has different and collectively contradictory instructions as to what i'm supposed to do next. am i lacking some kind of important paper that my employer needs to fill out? am i at the wrong office completely? should i wait until my june 28 appointment to do anything? i have learned not to ask questions, and instead to cry a lot, alone, in the company of this amazing €1,29 wine we found.

fortunately, i won a pair of world cup tickets (not the finals--"match 33," which is the ukraine versus itself) on behalf of my über-boss, who is so excited that he told me last night he'd get right to work on my visa problems. "my awesome work on the website may also serve as motivation," i suggested, deferentially. "world cup!!!," he answered, adding, "i kiss you." subsequently, this morning an under-boss called me and said he'd call some relevant people and hopefully get things sorted out. hooray! i work for criminals.

also, aoife offered to marry me and give me EU citizenship, and i'm like, why has this not been suggested sooner. jesus. seriously, can we do this right now? i'm not even joking. condolences to jackie. also joel, unless aoife is cool with a group marriage and a lot of quasi-ironic instances of guys holding hands in the kitchen while cooking elaborate dinners and talking about their feelings. also, jeremy is not invited to the wedding unless he submits to me joyously smacking him in the face.

on page 142 (SINGLE-SPACED!!!!!!!!; JESUS, I AM AWESOME) of my novel, which is going well. the first full draft may actually be finished within the next few weeks. everyone will be kept posted on this whether they like it or not. i'm still toying with different titles; currently i'm leaning toward "the sound and the fury ii," but i also like "ross douthat is a whiny little bitch." additionally, i'm not opposed to pejorative synonyms for "gay," or "gay" itself used pejoratively. "ross douthat: a study in being totally gay" would be a good title. if anyone steals these, i am going to cry.

that is all.

validate me

2005-04-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

no time to write today, but in the meantime, check out what i've been working on for the past four days: <the brewers berlin tour website>

some of the pictures have entertaining captions if you hold your mouse over them. ha ha! i will never get a visa, ever.

despondently,
jesse

tomatoyaki

2005-04-18T05:27:00.000-07:00

last night i cooked for the first time in over a week; jen and nate kept suggesting encouragingly, in the way you might to an eight-year-old with an easy-bake oven, that i should make dinner, and i'd go, "all right, i'm gonna make pasta with tomato sauce," and then they'd go, "ooh--you should do a thai curry sausage dish," and i would go, "i'm not really sure what that is," and then they'd go, "we'll help!!!," and then they would take over and i would chop ginger, or provide helpful sports-style commentary, or nap.

so last night (jen left yesterday morning--bye jen!, it was great having you) i decided to take things into my own hands. "i got dinner," i told nate. "pasta, tomato sauce. outta sight!!!" unfortunately, we were out of pasta. "sicilian rice casserole?" suggested nate. "i have no idea how to make that," i responded. "here, let me OOMPH," said nate, as i open-field-tackled him, in the manner of the shaolin night tiger.

so i used these fast-cooking chinese egg noodles we had, and to go with it, i invented the greatest sauce of all time, namely, tomato-yaki sauce. this is a standard tomato base with teriyaki sauce from a bottle instead of balsamic vinegar, and it tastes fucking great. holy mother of fuck! everyone needs to know about this. even nate kind of liked it.

no work visa still. tomorrow i do battle with my caseworker at the arbeitsamt. this is cool except one of my bosses, who i think actually used to like me until he found out i was straight, casually let it drop that there's a chance that i won't get a visa at all. like:

boss: you and canadian girl might not get work visas after all. how's the website coming?
me: wait, what? say that again about the visa.
boss: are we still talking about that?

of course we're still goddamned talking about it. the german process for americans, apparently, involves a four-week search period during which they advertise my job to all germans and EU citizens--i saw it on a billboard recently in prenzlauer berg, which i think is overdoing it--and at the end of which they present all applicants to my employers, who then have to make a case for why i'm better than all of them. sometimes, the case is not accepted. in the meantime, too, there have been ideas floated about hiring new people to solve our understaffing problem, so i'm starting to look into plane tickets for boston in the near future.

i'm pretty/extremely angry about this, so sorry if humor is missing here. the bright spots are that
1) i've been promised repeatedly that if i get the visa, i get the job, and
2) no one from the company has ever had a request turned down.

still, we're almost one month into the season, and i was expecting to be earning regular money (unofficial jobs like the website not included) right now, so fuck.

in the meantime, i've edited a lot of content for the tour website, adapted from our unsettlingly ill-written info packet, and written even more original material, which is mostly gratuitous/offensive. maybe you'll get to see it someday! before it goes live, one of my many bosses has to fix a bug that causes everything written for it to disappear periodically, which seems really unimaginative to me. like, if you're a bug, you should come up with something way more creative to do. "hi, i make content disappear randomly." great, i've never heard of that. "hi, i scrambled your page hierarchy and also put up this video of pandas humping things as your homepage intro." that's awesome!!!

shout-out to jackie thompson. can you support both of us in the near future? like with a high-paying job or inheritance of some kind? me, i can cook a pretty mean burger. i will also teach you the secrets of tomato-yaki, as well as love.

paid to drink?!?!?! YES

2005-04-13T06:27:00.000-07:00

to my right, a vietnamese youth of about 18 yammers loudly into his computer's microphone, despite an entreaty on behalf of the guy behind him to "please shut up." to my left, a turkish man smokes a cigarette he seems to have made out of rubber and wet dog hair. i am zen, child of peace and the early morning quiet. nevertheless, i am going to punch at least one of them in the face in like ten minutes.

it's been a while, no? rick wrote me a facebook message about how you've been waiting for an entire week, and if that weren't motivation enough, my dad recently wrote a comment on behalf of the family cat. in case you haven't been keeping track, the following family members have posted comments at this point:

- my mom, a number of times
- lena
- grandma
- my dad, pretending to be a cat that is also a family member

this is way too few. what about eve? what about uncles barton, herschel, and dimitrius? from now on, anyone posting anything has to at least pretend to be related to me.

no work visa yet. tomorrow night we have a staff meeting, at which i will try to verify whether or not my employers have been doing anything about that, or for that matter remember my name without prompting. however, i've been told that i'll be paid full wages (c. €12/hr) for any tour i go on as training, which is even more awesome than it sounds, as it applies to our very own nightlife tour. the nightlife tour (NOT a pub crawl--call it that and theo, czar of the nightlife tour, will force you to eat a beer glass) visits three bars and then a club. en route between stops, some history is disseminated by the tour guide. at the stops themselves, drinking is performed.

so--just to give you some idea of how much not having a work visa sucks--recently a big part of my job, for which i will eventually get paid a decent amount, has been to travel around to bars and drink at them and give less-than-sober "critiques" at the end, like "i thought--i liked the, uh, history part, with um... beer is totally awesome," or "I LOVE YOU!!!!! LOVE."

speaking of "love," nate's girlfriend jen [sic?] is in town, and the two of them together are too cute for boots. normally i would probably hate that--being both single and unlikely to become magically un-single any time soon--always the bridesmaid, never the bride, me! ha ha! my life is hell--except that they spend much of their time cooking for the three of us. and if nate is a better cook than me (i think we're both pretty good; nate's position is that he's pretty good and i would be better if my food didn't cause him to vomit explosively for hours, which is supported by some meager empirical study that i don't feel the need to talk about), the two of them are amazing. last night they made the most elaborate and delicious nachos i could ever hope to eat. they contained:

- chips and tortillas
- a number of cheeses, including goat
- a homemade beef chili
- pico de gallo except with corn
- a sauteed vegetable medley
- guacamole, also homemade
- sundry opiates

tonight there is talk of a grilled tuna steak. a few nights ago there was a stuffed pepper/shepherd's pie concoction which i continue to have dreams about. two days ago jen and i were shopping for food for a stirfry, and this happened:

me: awright! we got beef chunks, we got broccoli. let's roll.
jen [examining fennel]: i'm worried this fennel might overpower nate's fresh-squeezed coconut milk.
me:
jen: did you get cumin like i asked?
me: yeah.
jen [reading]: "cumin 'n' a bottle."
me: yeah!!
jen: normally cumin isn't a liquid.
me: um... easier to pour.
jen: i don't think we can be friends anymore.

training tours given independently of the company have been a success--nate, jen, nate's friend ringhild from language course, and ringhild's two beautiful friends from norway went on one recently, and to the extent that i could keep myself from spontaneously proposing marriage to the last two, it went really well. i'm at the point now where, by virtue of sheer repetition, i sound like i have an impressive command of historical names and dates. the girls were way impressed with this. "you know so many dates!" they would coo admiringly. "i'm awesome on dates," i would agree. "let's go on a date right now." then, face-slapping would occur.

what else. writing songs every now and then. on page 127 (single-spaced, as i like to remind people) of novel. planning to call the family tonight after two missed days, but between now and then, HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD! you're 54, i think. 54 = 2*3^3. how about that? you can take the math nerd out of nerd league, but you can't expect him to not reduce numbers to their prime factors in his head, even after long and merciless beatings.

work be 4 suckas

2005-04-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

all right all right all right. after two days and much hysterical running around, i finally got someone to take my papers and do something with them. synopsis, just to impress upon you the great enjoyability of all this:

- monday, ausländerbehörde. showed up at 6:45am, at which point there was already a line stretching out of the door. was told circa 9am that i was in fact supposed to be at an arbeitsamt. which one?, i asked. this provoked only giggles.
- office of my employer. we find out from calling a number obtained from the internet that i have to go way out to the western edge of the city, to reach the work office responsible for companies in the east. "we had to move," is the explanation. "i have to claw your face," i volunteer as a receipt of said explanation.
- arbeitsamt west. someone, visibly aghast at my stupidity, redirects me to the real arbeitsamt, which is ten minutes from my employer's office. i recount the humorous events of the day for the entertainment of this person, who receives them with stony silence and a trickle of steaming, acidic drool out of the left corner of the mouth.
- arbeitsamt mitte. it's closed! ha ha! it closes at 12.
- tuesday, arbeitsamt mitte. showed up at 9 because i slept in. am admitted to the office of frau böse (not her actual name), who looks at my papers and writes question marks all over them. "this will not work," she observes.
- office of my employer. i give him the papers with question marks on them. "what the fuck are these," he observes. a phone call clears things up, sort of. my employer writes some things and then waves me merrily on my way.
- arbeitsamt mitte. frau böse accepts the revised papers, then says, "i'll see you in four weeks." "har!" i say, winking spasmodically. "ow."
- company meeting. my boss promises to bribe a guy in order to expedite things.

the end! so maybe i'll work soon. meanwhile, some fool has entrusted me with the project of writing content for the official company webpage, which promises to end badly for all persons involved. i asked for all of the logistical information they want included in the content, and i got an email that looked like this:

history of terry brewer
british, b. london blah blah bla
1951? bombs
blah blah, bla

about us
(remember: professional!!!)

what. so i can't wait for this. just for kicks, i've also been invited to write (and do extensive research for) the nightlife tour packet, which will then be used to train those of us who are new in the company, for example, me. insert humorous breach of trust here. the sky is the goddamned limit, as my wacky aviator great-uncle louie used to say, after crashing a number of commercial aircraft, inexplicably, into the sky.

what else. it actually does seem like i'll be giving tours pretty soon, so get ready for that. i'm ready. i was born ready. i am way excited. i've been waiting months to do this. i am going to get fired in a hurry.

holla back,
j-bone

limbo

2005-04-02T08:17:00.001-08:00

first, as if i needed to drive home how unbearably picturesque berlin can be: our apartment is about four or five doors down from a little cobblestoned bridge (the admiralbrücke) crossing the landwehrkanal, where it runs east-west, so that you can lean on the railing and watch the sunrise or the sunset reflected in the water; the center of the bridge is blocked off to automotive traffic by means of stubby little concrete blocks that people sit on and chat to each other, when the weather's nice; and today, the first sunny and objectively warm day of the year, there was a harpist sitting and playing there for hours, and i sat there for a while, and then i went home to stick things in my eyeballs, just to relieve the absurdly all-permeating feeling of well-being you get from sitting on a little cobblestoned bridge in the sun in the proximity of a functioning harpist.

clearly i should not be allowed to complain about my life ever again. however, you will bear in mind my glinty-eyed, rebellious disposition regarding conventional norms and regulations, like the time i went to school in pajamas because they were comfortable (all of elementary school) or the time i refused to wash my clothing until someone else did it for me (ongoing). fuck tha police!!

so, i went to the ausländerbehörde on tuesday (sidenote; some of the kids in this internet cafe are playing "caught up" on a cell phone, loudly, which needless to say sounds awful--whatever) and it started out well; stood in a half-hour line, got some papers, went to an assigned waiting room, was called up fifteen minutes later, gave my papers to someone, was given a number and told i'd be called up again shortly. awesome! at that point it was 8am. then nothing happened for five and a half hours.

it was fucked up. we (the inhabitants of waiting room 7) couldn't leave for food or anything because we were given the impression that we could be called up at any time. so, we sat. i befriended a turkish medical student named deniz and three bosnian schoolchildren, who have been here for ten years ("here" meaning germany--also, in all probability, waiting room 7). the schoolchildren thought my german was comical, although they refused to tell me why. time passed. the bosnians wanted to know if i was into hip-hop. deniz and i discussed whether or not english was a difficult language to learn. more time passed. deniz and i exchanged humorous observations on our plight, like "i can no longer recall the faces of my family" and "every minute i compose a new prayer for my death." i asked the bosnians if they had ever heard of elvis costello, and they had not.

finally, at 1:30, half an hour before the office closed, i got called in, was given five minutes of attention with frau roßmy, and then received a bill for €80 and a slip of paper for my employer to fill out. she then refused to give me my passport and papers until i paid the bill.

"i have four euros on me," i said.

"there's an ATM about 20 minutes from here," she said.

again, this was half an hour before the office closed. what happened next was a lot of running and sweating. heroically, i made it back by 2pm, at which point i was given a number and told that someone would be with me shortly. it was then that i severed my own left arm from my body and started beating myself in the face with it.

amazingly, frau roßmy called me in at 2:30, at which point i paid, got my stuff back, and was allowed to leave. humorously, the next step in my work visa quest is: going back to the ausländerbehörde, so that they can take my papers and send them somewhere. do i get a work visa after that?, you ask. to you i say: please try not to be such an idiot.

anyway, updates to follow. more stuff happened this week (my first trial tour, an entire afternoon of driving around in a car and putting flyers in things that are/are not supposed to hold flyers, a number of ego-inflating encounters with germans who were under the impression i was german until i let it slip that i was not a huge fan of depeche mode), but i have to go cook dinner. after that, nate and i intend to lounge by the side of the river and drink margaritas. every so often we will scream good-natured abuse at the waitstaff. hoo-ray!

the unbearable lightness of peeing

2005-03-28T07:14:00.000-08:00

we're talking a few days ago about the humorous ponderousness and complexity of german bureaucracy, and i let it drop that i haven't gotten my work visa yet, and conversation ceases.

guy who's been tour-guiding in berlin for years, so why is he doing training, hereafter "rupert": whoa! it takes two months to get that--IF YOU'RE LUCKY!!! plus you have to wait in line for AN ENTIRE DAY HA HA HA HA.
me: what.
canadian girl: yeah, i applied a few weeks ago and i won't get mine until mid-may.
me:
boss: at least they've stopped doing full body cavity searches!
[five minutes of raucous laughter from boss and rupert]
boss: seriously, that used to happen.
me: this is so fucked up.

so am i going to start work on april 1? or will i have to wait for two months, which would be bad for all involved? we will find out tomorrow!, when i visit the German Department Of Giving Visas To You If You Manage To Charm Us Into It, Which Is Unlikely, Given That Collectively We Are A Grotesque, Robotic Commentary On The De-Humanizing Effects Of Bureaucracy, which is translated from a single german word that is over 200 letters long. in my defense, i only got my formal work offer a week ago, so there's no way i could have acted faster on this. which brings me to the question: that makes no sense.

in other news, i played a gig the other night at the ostzone, which sounds cool except that:
1) we were playing primarily for a tour group doing a heavily scheduled pub crawl organized by a rival tour company, and after they left, it was a couple of our friends listening and no one else. "woot!"
2) my guitarist, hereafter "thor," showed up pretty drunk and then slammed down no less than 8 tequila shots over the next half-hour. my first words to him were, "thor! okay, which tune should we do first," in reference to the 17 songs we had painstakingly rehearsed the day before. his first words were, "i don't want to do those; let's do one we haven't played before." then he drank the contents of a small bottle of vodka he was carrying in his coat.
3) 2), revisited. i cannot emphasize fully how hammered thor got. i'm not even going to try. to his credit, he still tried to play the guitar and sing. i think. it wasn't totally clear what he was trying to do, actually.

probably the best part of the gig was us playing the immortal "red house" made famous by jimi hendrix, during which thor abruptly ended his solo by throwing his guitar on the ground and going to the men's room. in retrospect, it was funny. at the time, i was fairly sure we would not both survive the night. the second-best part of the gig was nothing.

other recent social ventures: an american artist's party and an open-mike in friedrichshain at a bar whose logo is a picture of a semi-automatic and the words, "we do not serve tourists." the art party was entertaining because a lot of the people there were way too cool for everything that someone could possibly like, or for that matter had even heard of, ever, and if you made a reference to anything fitting that description, you got scorned. what kind of music are you into?, for example. oh, you're into brazilian 70s garage-band. yeah, i used to get down to that too--LIKE TEN YEARS AGO, when i was TWELVE YEARS OLD BECAUSE I'M SO GODDAMNED "RAD," A WORD WHICH I AM DEFINITELY USING IRONICALLY BUT MORE SO THAN YOU WHEN YOU USE IT. these were people who opposed president bush just to oppose those of his supporters who were just supporting him to oppose mainstream opposition to bush. a lot of shit like that. it made me want to claw my face.

recently completed 10 more pages of the novel, for those of you interested, which brings me to the top half of page 119. sweet! did i mention that these pages were single-spaced? good. those of you who keep asking me to send excerpts--you are the only thing keeping me afloat in a sea of pain and having to do things. i kiss you all on the lips. wait until i finish this chapter, or possibly the entire thing.

happy birthday, jeremy

2005-03-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

it's jeremy's birthday! i wonder how he's celebrating it RIGHT NOW!! cue dream sequence music.

jeremy: blah blah blah! adventure sports!! blah blah skydiving that i got to do and not pay for!!!! i'm like 30 years old.
joel: duh, duh, beard.
cannibals: new zealand is filled with rapacious cannibals.

berlin, in contrast, is filled with goats. nate and i were wandering around our neighborhood and i saw this interesting large circular building, in red brick, like circa 1880, and decided to check it out. then, nate says, "oh my god." behind the fence around the building are four goats. a sign says, "DO NOT TOUCH THE GOATS AND CHICKENS," so apparently there are also chickens. nearby is a box in which one can donate fruit and vegetables. some thoughtful civically-minded kreuzberger had evidently donated about twenty-odd dead christmas trees, which the goats were eating. seriously. also, in the name of scientific discovery, i feel that i should point out that one goat had an enormous complex appendage that i can only describe as "crotch-boobs." it was the grossest thing i have ever, ever seen.

training continues to intensify, with the boss putting me and the other trainees on the spot and then loudly decrying our many, many omissions and misquotes. i'm really looking forward to the day i start leading tours without the boss or anyone else around, because my game plan the entire time has pretty much been to make everything up. the tour becomes way more interesting. like: "here is the jewish girls' school, where the s.s. rounded everyone up on june 2, 1942, and took them away to a concentration camp." um, great. better: "here is the jewish girls' school, which hitler actually attended at the age of 15. hitler was a jewish girl! not a lot of people know that. over there is berlin's official Ministry of Kicking a Random Dude's Ass, which is an actual ministry that i didn't just make up."

in other news, nate continues to prove his inestimable worth as roommate by attending a class at the humboldt with crazy numbers of extremely hot girls. it's ridiculous. my social calendar is now completely at the mercy of whether or not nate plans to go hang out with people from class. all conversation is in german, which is sort of fun, sort of not. in german my game is limited to, "you are the beautiful-est. i kiss!," and "can we speak in english? good."

happy birthday, jeremy, if you read this at all. also, can you do me a favor and get me a new hoodie? my current one has fallen on hard times and i don't have a credit card. i'll totally pay you back. email forthcoming.

thanks--
j

st. patirck#s dayhj

2005-03-17T15:26:00.000-08:00

m HAMMERED11!! YOU GUYS ARRE THE GREARTEST.

just kidding. as rick points out, yesterday was the first day of spring, and after writing the blog entry below, i walked outside and was immediately overcome with warm, breezy deliciousness. today it rained and tomorrow is supposed to be cold and wet, but yesterday ended up being awesome. huzzah!! also, my ankle doesn't hurt anymore.

the only other thing i have to say--and i'd like to preface this by saying that i have nothing against the turks, whom i find to be an admirable culture--for example, i delight in their wondrous ability to lower property values--is that i realized, the other day, that the turkish language is totally the orc language from "lord of the rings." this epiphany came when i saw a sign near my apartment that said "GÜLÜK" on it. i mean, come on. that's just ridiculous. and all turkish words look like that. like: dear turkish people: what's the turkish for "pulse-quickening ephemera, along the lines of a warm spring breeze"? dear jesse: "HÄRJJ ZURK GLÜKGÖRK." turks, get it together!

now if you'll excuse me, i have to go pretend to be irish, not that that is at all hard, because any american can claim that they're part irish, and it doesn't matter if you've never been to ireland or can't tell an irish accent when you hear one, let alone have any understanding of the nuance and incredible poignancy of irish history, because you totally own a green shirt with a goddamned clover on it, and drinking is totally sweet!!, FUCK yeah, and you're 20 and from denver or something and it's like WHOA WE'RE IN EUROPE and OH MAN YOU CAN TOTALLY DRINK ON THE STREET and HI WHERE ARE YOU FROM OH NEW JERSEY I HAVE A FRIEND FROM THERE LET'S SLOPPILY MAKE OUT FROM OUR RESPECTIVE BAR STOOLS. great.

"soul-breaking pain" and "my life" are synonymous

2005-03-16T05:16:00.000-08:00

last night ted leo and the pharmacists played in berlin. today they are in köln. i thought they played berlin tonight. i was wrong. i was just online to check internet to see how to get to their venue, and it turns out that tonight it's on the other side of germany, meaning i would have to take a long and expensive train ride, which i might, because otherwise why not just end it all now.

christ, i am stupid. exhibit b is my ankle, which i think i broke last night leaping gaily down the stairs of a bahn station on my way home. it hurts like fuck. this morning i had pick-up duty for the walking tour, and of course nothing says "enjoyable 8-plus-hour walking tour" than an employee who is limping from place to place and gritting his teeth from the pain and muttering inane things about industrialization and civic politics, punctuated by "in the NAME OF THE BLEEDING SACRED CHRIST, ow" and "SLOW DOWN DAMMIT." fortunately, no one was at any of the pick-up spots, possibly because they heard me coming. my ankle actually isn't broken, i think, but it almost certainly is more painful than childbirth.

what else. today i saw possibly the most beautiful girl i have ever seen on a subway and blatantly failed to talk to her. however, i demonstrated to her and the rest of the subway's passengers that i had difficulty standing up, specifically by standing halfway up at my stop, squeaking in extreme discomfort (like: "GHEEEeeeegh," starting out more high-pitched than i would like), and then falling back down. this happened a few times. she wanted my bod.

check this, bitches: yesterday's tour had two tourgoers plus me and preston, so preston made me give a number of presentations in the name of training. my first two were hideous, the ones afterward were okay. the tourgoers were canadian and thus culturally incapable of saying anything confrontational/critical, so they were much more positive than was really justified, especially after my talk in front of the site of the hitler bunker, which is about hitler's suicide and is very bleak and death-oriented. they loved that one. later in the tour, during a quiet moment, one of them asked me to do it again. canada, you got to chill, because that shit is totally weird.

i have to go do things. if this post seems kind of down, it's because i've been listening to wilco and radiohead all day. i have decided that the guy from wilco is the most depressed man on earth. jesus. ordinarily i'd be listening to ted leo right now, but OH GOD, WANT THE PAIN TO END. "the pain" = my existence. thank you for your time.

training

2005-03-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

it would be hilarious (but bleakly so, in a life-is-a-chaotic-morass-of-meaningless-sensations way) if people got hit by trains a lot and that was called "getting trained," or "training," or something like that. like: "i hear gary totally got trained the other day, in his own living room, of all places." "yeah, he way experienced training. ho ho, ho! the world is void of good." santa is involved.

training for me, yesterday, meant going on a ten-hour walking tour in the freezing rain and little else. it was a reunion of sorts with terry, who was in fine/vindictive fettle due to the atrocious weather, and also with all-encompassing despair, caused by wearing socks that are wet. among our tour, per capita, there was less whining than you would expect, but in fairness about all of it came from me.

anyway, i'm learning a lot, and getting some great exercise, and getting up around 9am, and the whole thing is such a departure from my february existence that i can't really talk about it. it's just way too wholesome. yesterday i woke up, put on some jeans, walked into the kitchen, and then said aloud, "uh-oh--these jeans have holes in them. maybe i should change." nate stared at me, uncomprehending. i then slapped myself in the face for five minutes. regarding tours: i can get you a free tour if you come to berlin; in return, you must purchase me a falafel, or at least convince nate to do so.

also, i have an iPod now, and i doubt i can be accused of hyperbole when i say that the iPod has filled a void in my life that no human being ever could. "detachable penis!!!" i sing merrily to the cashier guy at the supermarket. "doo doo doo doo doo doo doo detachable penis!" the bvg woman on the bahn wants to know where my ticket is. "take my breath away," i croon to her, breathily, and then hum the bass line. this suffices, and we dance. i am fulfilled.

more soon. don't leave any comments or anything.

roommate from high school

2005-03-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

matt is gone. he caught a train at 5 in the morning yesterday to frankfurt, whence he flew back to boston; our last night together was characterized by the frantic recording of vocal tracks for our seven-song demo, which we finished about thirty seconds before our dutch midwifing landlady came down and threatened us with eviction (true). three hours of sleep and four bleary hours of waiting at an airport later, i got a new roommate named nate. we were on the schenley high school swim team together. "neffs!!"

training for my job starts tomorrow, and basically it means that i get up early each day and go on a walking tour, take notes, try not to complain about being sleepy, get asked pop quiz/socratic-type questions from the tour guide, accept good-natured abuse for getting things wrong, like:

tour guide: so here we are at the... JESSE! quick! who designed that building over there?
tourists: [excited muttering]
me: oh fuck. jesus, i dunno... the guy with the hat? that you were talking about like an hour ago?
tour guide:
me: you know, he had like a big wacky hat or some shit. fuck, i am so sleepy.
tour guide: ha ha! WRONG. hold still while i splash this scalding coffee in your eyes.
me: why do you need to OW FUCK

thus, a new and exciting chapter of my life unfolds. meanwhile, people have been asking me a bunch of questions about the blog, except they're basically all the same question, so here are some answers.

question about how many people visit, which is apparently really boring because the person asking it loses interest almost immediately
q. how many people actually visit the site?
a. you'd be surprised! i got this
q. it's like ten, right?
a. i got this thing where i can track who's
q. i'm guessing ten. actually, i don't really care.
a. it's an average of forty people a day, but the interesting thing is
q. hey what's for dinner? you got dinner tonight, yeah?
a. um, yes.
q. OOH PIMP MY RIDE IS ON

grace had this one question
q. the one thing I have to say about the "teen plant" website is this: why is it written as if matt and jesse put it up themselves? as in, the repeated use of the words "we" and "us" throughout-- "we have more shows coming up". "recent photos of us performing"... is anyone else suspicious? or confused?
a. octavian the transylvanian created the site with the intention that we would eventually start administering it. sadly, he greatly underestimated our sloth. there is no way the text will ever change, unless he changes it. speaking of which, i am sleepy.

accusatory question about the novel
q. what about the novel? you've just totally abandoned it, haven't you.
a. no way! i work on it like every day.
q. yeah right.
a. no seriously.
q. how many pages have you written since last time?
a. um. i mean i've been doing a lot of revising and stuff, and like, outlining, and so it's not so much writing, as like,
q. have you written any?
a. [inaudible]
q.
a. a paragraph.

question about my relatives
q. hey. so a bunch of your relatives read this, right? does that mean you have to censor things?
a. what? i think the line KKKSSHH is breaking up KKSSSSHHHSHHHSHH
q. but we're on instant messenger.
a. KKKKKSSSHHHHKHSHSSSSHHH cool talking to you! KKKKSKSSKKHSHSHH

ha ha! i am so funny i should be ARRESTED.

waking up is hard to do, plus the long-awaited...

2005-03-03T05:11:00.000-08:00

try--just try--to accuse me of lacking a poetic soul:

she's so political!
and her body is critical!
me, i'm more like mystical!
i just wanna get physical.

it's from a song i just wrote called "she's so political." matt and i are a veritable hit parade. we've also been getting into beatboxing and freestyling, with alternately acceptable (matt) and horrifying (me) results. last night, a swiss woman enjoyed our vocal stylings to the extent that she started yelling things as a means of supplementing the beat. first, she yelled, "DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!" about a hundred times. then, "DON'T DO IT! DON'T STOP IT!," presumably because she got confused. finally she settled on "PERFORMANCE! PERFORMANCE!," which i think was encouraging. we were also hanging out with remi, our favorite french dj in the entire world. remi turns 28 on saturday and has promised to take me skydiving this summer. he has jumped over 800 times and used to earn money by taking videos of other people skydiving, which is so absurdly sweet that i can't even wrap my mind around it. we've said it before and we'll say it again: remi is an animal.

"jason" just called and wants us to host open-mike tonight, and it's also matt's last time doing it, so i expect a bittersweet evening. swaying and hand-holding in the audience, panties poignantly festooning our heads. and speaking of which...

THE FAN SITE A ROMANIAN DEDICATED TO ME AND MATT PERFORMING AT THE OPEN-MIKE, WHICH IS NOT THE SAME AS "TEEN PLANT" BUT HAS THE SAME NAME
so matt and i intend to start/resume a band this fall, hopefully with mike ramos, called "teen plant," and the following is not teen plant. the following is a fan site created by octavian the transylvanian, who is probably our biggest fan in the world and who asked us what we were called. bemused, one of us said, "teen plant." "meat plan," the other concurred. hence, teen plant. if you want to know what team plan is all about, consult <this.>

as regards the video on the teen plant website, our excuses are flimsy and manifold. we had consumed some beverages that apparently had alcohol in them, i have this thing where performing makes me nasal, we didn't know we were being filmed, all of the other songs we do are like a million times better, &c. but when all is said and done, the truth must out: we are pretty awesome. take special note of my quick-witted banter with the audience at the end! even i want to punch myself.

<click here for the teen plant website, sort of>

amazing. that's all i got.

i purvey truths

2005-02-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

consider: the berlin winter is like a vicious, flesh-eating dog with an extremely limited short-term memory. it keeps forgetting that it's supposed to be ruthlessly savaging you, then remembering, then forgetting, etc., so that you have days where it's about 70°F outside, and then you have days where--surprise!!--it's 30 below and the wind keeps ripping off parts of your skin.

matt and i have been recording some of the songs i mentioned previously, as matt is due to leave soon, and we already have one or two pretty amazing tracks, which are heavy on the backup vocals and are so, so pop. so pop. at some point we may put them online, specifically at the undisclosed fan site a romanian guy designed for us whose URL i intend to withhold until we get an appropriate video for it, specifically a video that doesn't make me look and sound like i'm fourteen years old, and a young fourteen at that.

because not much else is happening, here, as if you had asked for them, are my opinions on these music videos:

jay-z vs. linkin park, "numb/encore." jesus. i'm not sure when whininess became a hot pop-cultural commodity, but whoever is responsible needs to be shot with a nail gun in the spine. linkin park has this bizarre, unsettling amalgam of pathetic adolescent self-pity and attempted bad-assness--self-serious, generically dire chord progressions, vague, indulgent lyrics referencing depression but leaving out any kind of compelling specifics. if you're going the self-pity route, at least give us a reason to buy it. "i'm so numb" = weak. "i'm so numb, because freikorps stormtroopers shot me in the head and dumped my body in a river; i am rosa luxemburg, early 20th-century german communist icon" = far superior. i forget what jay-z's deal is.

green day, "boulevard of broken dreams." the song is pretty good, but the lyrics have a similar problem to the one detailed above; also, it's clear from watching the video that the lead singer is about 5 feet tall, and the eye shadow isn't helping anyone. he looks like avril lavigne cut her hair and gained about twenty pounds, mostly in the cheeks.

rammstein, "keine lust." this video is totally awesome. everyone in rammstein is wearing an enormous fat suit, and they're rocking so hard. so hard! if you don't live in germany, you probably haven't seen this video. your loss!

good charlotte, "i just wanna live." last time i cared, good charlotte was an over-produced emo band, i think. anyway, they've apparently crossed over since then to "over-produced more normal pop with forgettable rap-influenced vocals," which i guess is a great call. i completely approve of everyone wearing vegetable costumes, but again, what is with the eye shadow on the lead singer? is it ironic? either way, i want to drop him off a cliff.

snoop dogg feat. pharrell williams, "drop it like it's hot." pharrell williams is annoying, but there's no way you will ever get this song out of your head, and the video is awesome--in my opinion, the best call it makes is the frequent shots, from behind, of women shaking it at completely random rhythmic intervals, so it looks both hot and eerie at the same time, like it's unclear whether they're trying to be lascivious or having some sort of complicated pelvic-based seizure. snoop dogg is a pimp, also.

anything done by sarah connor. i think sarah connor is foul. also, depressingly generic. here's the thing: if you're going to be basically indistinguishable from celine dion, you should at least be better-looking. sarah connor has what i call "fotis nose," which is when you have a long-ass nose that extends down over your mouth. all of her videos make me die inside. also, if you don't know who fotis is, you don't really know who i am.

schnappi das kleine krokodil. this is a children's song about schnappi, a small egyptian crocodile, sung by a five-year-old and accompanied by animated adventures of clumsy little schnappi chasing around an insect and trying to eat it. what?! this video appears frequently on all three music channels in berlin. what?! "put your hands together for 50 cent; next up, schnappi, tha small-ass crocodile." this is more confusing than good or bad.

max herre, "du weisst (bye bye baby)." german, so you don't know it. regardless, i think this song is fucking awesome, and once i'm done writing this i'm checking out max herre; also, the video is about him singing soulfully to this girl who hates him so much that she first hits him with her car, hard, then picks up and drives him around the city in the rain, then eventually throws him out of the car while it's doing 180kph, according to the odometer. the shot of the odometer is necessary, because otherwise the car is clearly doing about 10. anyway, it's totally rude.

that's all i got.

dirty, dirty rumors

2005-02-23T09:20:00.000-08:00

a few of you may or may not already know this. it may or may not be the case that a friend of ours, who comes from transylvania (i swear to god this is for real), has enjoyed the open-mike warblings of matt and me to the extent that he has created an extremely sick website for us, complete with pictures and video. a fan site. for two guys who have played an open-mike three times. holy mother of god. the URL may or may not be forthcoming in a subsequent blog entry. matt and i may or may not have gotten so excited about this that we exchanged about fifteen minutes of righteous chest-bumps in the internet cafe, and now i have a bruise.

also, who the fuck impersonates my mom in the comments sheet? that is so fucking weak, and when i think "weak," i think, "probably one of my blockmates." keith? jeremy? i will destroy you all, you feckless, quivering pieces of shit.

today, matt and i start recording versions of songs we have written over the past month or so, which is crazy exciting. so far we have the following:

"pretty girls": a song about how girls are the worst. lyrics and music by me.
"blow me": a song about how this one time, matt hit on a girl at a club and then got taken outside by a gang member or islamic militant and was shot to death for his courageous insolence. lyrics and music by matt.
"johnny game": a song about johnny, who is just sort of a mess but also gets mad play, and thus is basically joel. lyrics and music by me.
"backburner": a song about how girls are the worst, also. lyrics and music by matt.
"under the window": a song about the time at governor's school when i tried to woo a girl by playing an unplugged bass under her window at like 6am; it was unsuccessful. lyrics and music by me.
"han solo at the scene of his own personal deliverance: wasted rock, nevada, 1881": a song that kicks so much ass, i can't even talk about it. music by matt, lyrics by me.
"untitled": a song we wrote one morning where i sang some gibberish and matt transcribed it into words, the gist of which are, we're riding in a van and we keep her from the wolf... AND the keeper of the wolfman. but the wolfman himself is totally cool with us. this sort of makes sense if you think about it. music by matt, lyrics by both of us but mainly matt.

berlin is cold and snowy. also, we would like to take partial credit for the following:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505752

places i hang out that are not bars

2005-02-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

the sun? um, it's big... and bright... and orange. it has lines/uneven spikes indicating "sunlight" sticking out of it, if memory serves. sometimes it has a face? on average, i wake up around 5pm.

spaces represented in this text tend to be bars. but here are some that aren't!:

1. our apartment, which now has a functioning TV. the only channel we watch is german mtv, which we can't watch for more than fifteen minutes at a time because about 60% of it--no exaggeration--is advertisement for cell phone rings that you can download. also, THEY'RE ALL THE SAME COMMERCIAL. every single time. yet everyone is okay with this. first, you have these two bird things singing "twinkle twinkle little star," the techno version, followed by monkeys being musically flatulent (not a joke), followed by "this is how we do," followed by the monkeys again, followed by a number of clips of linkin park feat. jay-z (the point at which we most commonly turn off the tv) and eminem's cloying yet overwrought "like toy soldiers." however, sometimes we sit through it in order to see pimp my ride, a show that matt and i have become extremely passionate about. please tell me you've seen it. our favorite part is where they indicate how many TVs they've put in the car. "we put seven 15-inch lcd monitors in the floor, JUST BECAUSE WE CAN," exults x-zibit. magic.
2. a döner kebap place near our apartment. döner kebaps are so gross that i can't even talk about it. i eat about two a day.
3. internet cafe. speaking of which, the guy next to me is smoking a brand of cigarette that smells as if it's been steeping in urine for the past week, yet everyone is okay with this. kreuz to tha b!!!! WHAT
4. supermarket? um, i'll have more in a few days.

the end!

please do not insinuate that my mom has "got it going on"

2005-02-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

first i have some questions:
1. how many of you read this strictly for what my mom contributes? be honest. on second thought, don't.
2. why are people confused/alarmed about what i wrote on wednesday? it's pretty straightforward. i acted in a film, for which performance i was compensated with beers and a delicious pork schnitzel (true), and which consisted of wooing (via extreme charm) a japanese girl in a restaurant. the director loved it, i got inordinately excited about my hitherto undiscovered capacity for charm, i wrote an entry while caught up in said excitement, the end.

last night was pretty amazing. i will try to be succinct.

so a number of people came through the pub where we were hosting open-mike night, including a pub crawl sponsored by a rival walking tour company, whose leader was crazy hammered. he sang the everly brothers' immortal "bird dog" with us, except that he had no idea how it went. he also did a lot of swaying and closing his eyes. it was magical.

our performance went pretty well--a combination of beer (like two pints, mom, seriously) and inexplicable pubescent regression caused my vocal range to shift up an octave, so i had no trouble hitting triumphantly high notes. gauging from their silence, i would say that the audience was "moved." also, jason called me today and said that we played well enough that we should talk to the owner about getting a paying gig sometime soon. "i'm an animal," i informed him. "if this is about your ability to charm," he responded, "i am hanging up," which turned out to be not a bluff. also, is there a grosser word than "pubescent"? no.

octavian, a wacky romanian friend we made, may put up a film of us performing on his website. maybe. i'll keep you posted.

afterward, we ended up hanging out with some convivial scottish and irish architecture students who 1) thought we were a blast and 2) had accents that they were definitely making up, because no way does anyone actually sound like that. someone would tap us on the shoulder and speak complete gibberish, we would go, "ha ha! what?" they would laugh uproariously, and maybe thirty seconds later they would buy us both drinks. it was sort of awesome, sort of just weird.

remi, a french guy who is our best friend and who is an animal, brought a number of french girls who also thought we were too cute for boots. "too cute for boots" is a phrase i'm pretty sure i made up, so i'm going to be using it a lot. anyway, that was about as awesome as it sounds. their departure coincided with "hey jude"; again with the pub crawl leader, we performed a version that was literally half an hour long. there was nothing we could do. he had the guitar.

all right all right all right! that's all i got. please let me know if you're still freaked out for some reason.

a star continues to gestate

2005-02-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

this will be quick and kind of ridiculous.

1. last night, my boss calls. "you have paid work for me!" i ask, except sans question mark. "ha! don't be an ass," he retorts, and we both chuckle merrily. "a friend of mine wants to know if you can be in his film tomorrow," resumes my boss. "you had me at hello," i ooze, unctuously.

2. today, i act in a film shot by friendly strangers, wherein i play a character whose sole dramatic task is to charm the living bejesus out of a japanese girl he does not know, the girl acting whom does not speak much english. much cute joke-making and harmless physical schtick. anyway, i succeeded way too well for comfort. everyone was appalled. the director, at the end of one scene, said, "jesus christ. cut." "what am i doing wrong?" i said. "you were perfect," he said. "i have to go dry heave for about ten minutes."

2 redux. psych! they loved it. everyone thought i was too cute for boots. it was a blast!

3. tonight, i get back to the apartment, glowing with success, and matt, who has been recording with jason earlier, has interesting news. "jason's working tomorrow night," he says. "we have to host open-mic night." matt, unlike me, spells open-mike correctly. here's what i said: "I'M SO CHARMING!!!!! JESUS, SOMEONE GET ME TO STOP."

4. tomorrow, matt and i play probably an hour of music, unless an improbable number of musicians show up. also, we engage the crowd with casual banter and encourage them to give us money. enter: hilarity!

5. i am the most terrifyingly charming person in the world.

rumors of my awesomeness have been greatly exaggerated

2005-02-13T09:33:00.000-08:00

1. the highlight of friday was not this pretty awesome underground party matt and i attended, nor was it walking home from an unspecified apartment at 11am the morning prior, shouldering a guitar and stopping traffic with (dare i say) an effortless, rogueish sophistication. no, it was learning that my new job will provide me with health insurance. if i could personally become any less cool, i would like to know how.

my boss was like, bitch you have to chill. i was so happy. i had just talked him up in re my own unpracticed, rough-edged hipness, casually mentioning dope underground scenes i had uncovered (several, although to be fair matt uncovered them; my role was "wingman"), improbably pretty italian girls i had wooed via an old acoustic guitar and songs i wrote (one, and this will almost definitely never happen again), critiques of postmodern historical discourse i had authored (one, at which my boss was like, "huh, i never thought about that way," and then deftly changed the subject). then he dropped a bomb. he said, "by the way, we're changing our employment policy such that our tour guides will now be official full-time employees of the company." i freaked out.

"not subcontractors," i said.

"nope," he said.

"does that mean we get health insurance?" i proposed. my voice had roughly doubled in pitch.

"yeah," he said.

"HOLY FUCKING CRAP," i may or may not have said. then, for the next twenty minutes, we reiterated the following:

me: are you fucking serious.
boss: uh, yeah.
me: that's the best thing i've ever heard. i can't believe it. so my health insurance is totally, you know, taken care of? because that would be nuts.
boss: yes, it's definitely taken care of.
me: unbelievable. unbe-fucking-lievable. hey you! in the suit! WHO'S got health insurance?! I AM THE BLESSED MOTHERFUCKING SON OF THE ALMIGHTY WRATHFUL GOD HIMSELF.
suit: i am try to read newspaper, and you are shouting.
me: no way. no goddamned way. that's amazing. let me kiss you on the lips.
boss: look, i gotta go.

i am the least cool person in the entire world. i blame my dad, but at least he, in his wild excitement over things like the procurement of health insurance or the discovery of this or that competent family of plumbers, does not resort to obscenities. i have taken it to another level.

in other news:
- fat nate from high school may be my next roommate after matt leaves berlin. "phat!"
- matt and i are going to poland at some point. why? we still have no idea.
- jason from the oscar wilde wants us to record bass and keyboard tracks on his album. also, to protect the innocent, "jason" is a name i made up. to further protect the innocent, the character of "jason" in this blog is also something i made up, and "matt" is really my dutch midwifing landlady in disguise, who has not so much uncovered hot underground clubs as much as uncovered hot meat-intensive pies, formerly sheathed in foil.
- my computer is fixed, and i recently completed an entire page of my novel. the new page count is 107. in december, i believe it was at 103. the previous four pages have also been accomplished largely through adjustments in spacing. do i still tell pretty much everyone i meet, within five minutes of meeting them, that i'm a novelist? don't ask stupid questions.

finally, please don't tell me you don't know what this means:
mai-ia-hi! mai-ia-hu! mai-ia-ho! mai-ia-ha-ha!

europe is depraved. more on this later. i have to go.

a star is born

2005-02-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

"no one ever gets discovered at open mike night," you've said to me, adding, "don't be retarded." "that's offensive," i've said to you, quietly gesturing to the retarded kid, clearly within earshot, whose feelings have been injured by your baseness. also, you are so, so wrong. so wrong.

first, matt and i are sitting around a pretty sparsely populated bar, guitars in hand. this shifty-eyed irishman wants us to go on next, but we'd prefer to wait. a brit with shaggy hair and glasses gets up instead and announces, jovially and roughly fifty times, that he has ordered food and he's not playing any songs after his food arrives. shifty irishman immediately lays claim to the spot after shaggy is done. that's weird, we think, but okay.

long story short: shaggy finishes. shifty, who does not play an instrument and has a backing guitarist, makes a fuss of taking a while to set up. suddenly, about twenty girls enter the bar and start dancing around, and shifty launches into his set. matt perks up. i perk up. in unison, the girls squeal, "we are in heat! WE ARE IN HEAT!!!!" matt and i are not capable of coherent speech at this point.

so shifty sings, karaoke-style, and his dour, non-singing guitarist friend plays, while these girls writhe and gyrate suggestively. with or without you. roll over beethoven. sweet home alabama. this goes on for like an hour. then: shifty sings his last song, and the girls vanish into the night, and matt and i are up. who were they? where did they go? words cannot accurately describe our anguish, but here is an approximation: FUCK. FUCK.

at the nadir of our fortunes, then, we get onstage. i have a bass, matt has a guitar. we have one microphone and are both sort of jammed up next to it, john-and-paul-style. we engage the crowd with casual banter about how upset we are that the girls left and how our lives are the worst ever. then, we slam into please please me, and immediately i forget how basses work, as well as singing, and the next fifteen minutes are basically a blur. here's what i remember: grinning foolishly the entire time; audibly muttering "shit," or "fuck i'm an IDIOT," after this or that dramatic screw-up; a short but memorable scat solo i took during drive my car, with no prompting or rehearsal, that was met with respectful horror by the audience; my pants falling part of the way down upon my exit from the stage, due to a malfunctioning belt. other than that, i don't remember much. also, matt played and sung exceptionally well, for which i will always loathe him.

but here's the thing. the guy running open mike night, a garrulous englishman named jason, came over afterward to talk to us. jason had played some songs, and he was fine on guitar, but his voice was pretty unbelievable. he had this falsetto which, again, i can't describe without the aid of obscenities. he was very very good.

jason cuts right to it: he loved us. he wants us to jam with him and perhaps consider joining his band. that was our first time, we say. i add, "i actually play the bass good. i mean well. FUCK." fortuitously, i am ignored. matt wants to know what kind of music is it. the same kind of music, he says casually, that he did back when he was signed by RCA and put out an album that sold 150,000 copies. matt and i turn to each other and do a righteous high-five. jason adds: i'm not making this up. another high-five!

so now he's signed by some german record label and is compiling a band and has a budget for recording and touring and everything. and we're prospects. this is frankly ridiculous. anyway, we'll see how that all goes. nothing may likely come of it. it's also possible that it was all some kind of insecurity-induced hallucination, which is still going on, although it admittedly would be kind of pathetic if said hallucination were to include writing about it on a blog. whatever. my life is pain.

also, i am talent incarnate. the end!

p.s. thanks everyone who reads this. i didn't mean to imply that no one but my mom and rick reads this blog a few days ago when i said, "no one but my mom and rick reads this blog."

no comment? DIE

2005-02-02T13:39:00.000-08:00

a number of people have expressed to me the following: "duh, duh, duh." dutifully, i have responded with, "what?" then they say, "i wanted to leave a blog comment, but it was scary." "scary how?" i inquire, politely. "scary," they repeat. "boogity scared boogity."

people. get a clue and stop talking like you're five years old. first, it's fun and easy to register with the blogger website. second, pretty soon i will enable anonymous posting, so you can do that without registering.

i didn't intend for this entry to become an infomercial, but whatever. rick keeps making fun of me for the fact that he and my mom appear to be the only people who visit this page, which is more or less accurate, which begs the question of why i even do this. i don't know, rick and my mom and occasionally anthony gabriele. i really don't know.

meanwhile, my computer is in this computer shop called "SHAC," whose employees i enjoy continually antagonizing by asking if they were in the movie "shaq fu," or if they're thinking about making a movie called "shac fu," and so on. they love this. we're at the point where they claim that they've never met me, and i go, "ha ha! seriously, my computer has a novel on it," and they go, "perhaps these rapacious dogs can help you find your novel," and i go, "that's ridiculous; they can't even OW FUCK."

tomorrow night: matt and i perform a number of beatles songs at the open-mike at this bar in mitte. recipe for: talent!

low rent, high times

2005-01-30T13:03:00.000-08:00

goodbye, zehlendorf; goodbye, friendly german family; goodbye, hour-long double-transfer bahn ride from 4-5am to get home most nights; goodbye, free internet access and free board. hello, kreuzberg.

matt and i have an apartment in kreuzberg for february. we live near kottbusser tor, easily the funnest bahn station this side of bahnhof zoo, which is not really a fair comparison anyway by virtue of the zoo's abundant and winsome bears. i showed up today to give our landlady the deposit, and the station was evidently hosting some kind of Homeless/Insane Person Block Party. there were guys with hats they had made out of newspapers and food. there was one guy who was taking severe exception to something done by the automatic door at reisepunkt. one corner had a high-fiving session so intense that two participants collapsed on the ground and immediately went to sleep.

kreuzberg is low-rent and sort of trendy (many cool cheap little ethnic eateries, stores, bars). many, many turks. much energetic if under-conceived graffiti. great clubs. other currently/formerly low-rent districts in central berlin have managed to attain a certain brittle, chic glossiness, manifest most explicitly at restaurants and bars in black lacquered surfaces and asymmetrical signs with designer lower-case lettering and red-plush cushions and wavy dynamic wall sculptures and complicated lighting arrangements. but not here, as far as i can tell. here instead you have garish backlit plexiglass signs in bright orange advertising neski's anatolian delights. here, the word "entrepreneur" is synonymous with "guy equipped with rotating cone of meat."

so that's where i live now. it's exciting. our landlady, a dutchwoman with a long and bewildering name, has bequeathed us with a collage, in our hall, largely featuring her as a child in the nude. matt and i are basically bff, aeae. we've been learning beatles songs and writing our own songs also, and when we're back in the u.s., look out. we're coming to rock you. check this, bitches: we realized at some point, on our thirtieth or fortieth viewing of the "call on me" video (if you don't know what this means, that's probably good), that if you become a successful musician, you could make music videos with hot chicks, like all the time. magic! so, we are now on a mission to write and perform some rocking tunes, and so far we have some that are destructively catchy. to wit, this chorus:

johnny what a shame what a shame what a shame
oh johnny what a game what a game what a game
yeah johnny who's to blame who's to blame who's to blame
you're gonna get hurt! if you treat her like dirt!

amazing. look out for us, american music scene.

oh, this may be as good a place to put it as any: is anyone out there looking for a room in an apartment come march? matt's moving out and i'd sort of like to hang on to this place. there are two bedrooms, a pretty big kitchen, a really big bathroom, and a dining room/living room. one bedroom is large and has a TV in it. the other (currently my room) is more or less 100% bed. rent is €300/person. that's reasonable.

okay i have to go.

i achieve a personal nadir

2005-01-25T10:27:00.001-08:00

this is the last sports-related entry ever.

well, the steelers' season is over again. sports is the most horrible thing in the world for me. when the steelers lose, i feel my sense of self-worth decline. when they win, i feel like i have personally achieved something other than staring at a tv and consuming an entire bag of doritos. this is preposterous and sometimes dangerous, like the time the steelers beat the patriots in october and, in my exuberance, i became convinced i could leap over tall things (trees, the bouncer at a club). there is no more insidious force in this world or the next, save perhaps dan brown (see "literary reflections," below).

i saw the game at this irish pub. there were a few other guys there, all patriots fans. it was miserable. here they are, in no particular order:
- the greatest patriots fan of all time (tgpfoat), who was his usual shrill, bulging-eyed, incessantly yelping self. his favorite was a barrage of "JA WOHLS," delivered quickly and at increasing pitch. it was like a nuremberg rally. miraculously, i refrained from physically assaulting him, but i did loudly observe that he was a douchebag from time to time, and at one point (he was sitting behind me) i turned around, stared him down for about thirty seconds, and said, "i'm sorry. did you say something?" i am not a menacing person--old ladies frequently offer to help me cross the street--so it is a measure of my extreme loathing that he actually shut up for a good five minutes.
- ryan, a kid from worcester whom i met a few nights before and with whom i made an ill-advised bet on the game, the stakes being our collective bar tab. towards the end of the game, he purchased a beer merely to pour its contents onto the ground. "it's on you!" he exulted. he declined to go double-or-nothing on whether or not i would punch him in the face really hard.
- judas iscariot, a 30-something tallish gary sinise-looking patriots fan with a whining, strangled pittsburgh accent. he was given to offering us copious commentary along the lines of, "if pittsburgh fumbles here, new england will get the ball, so i'm rooting for pittsburgh to fumble." NO SHIT. "i hope pittsburgh doesn't get a first down." YOU'VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING. he made the mistake of pointing out to me that he used to be a steelers fan, then switched when he moved to new hampshire. we had a number of exchanges, acrimonious on my end and a delightful mixture of conciliatory and blundering on his part. for example:
judas: man! this is a hell of a good game. good game. close.
me: the score is 24-3.
judas: yeah, but. great game. steelers're a great team.
me: jesus, shut up.
judas: thing about the steelers is, they're like the yankees. resilient. i'm not happy until new england goes up four touchdowns, cause the steelers'll come back.
me: wait. did you just compare the steelers to the yankees?
jdas: yeah--
me: okay, shut up. just shut up. that's idiotic. for example: the yankees just choked, in october, harder than any team has ever choked before. against the red sox. that is the opposite of "resilient," you grotesque parody of human life.
judas: uh... resilient.
- foreign guy, who quickly sided with the patriots fans but also managed to offer me conciliatory tidbits such as, "is a lot of football left to play!" which he learned from judas and which tgpfoat also started yelping now and then, as a changeup.

in fact, on this conciliatory trend: there is a kind of odious magnanimity, on the part of a certain class of sports fan, when their team is winning, that they assume out of what they must believe to be great and classy tact. "steelers're a good team," they say, as on a crucial play the steelers manage to tackle themselves in unison. "worthy foe," they'll whine, as the steelers run shrieking and while wearing dresses away from patriots defenders. this was judas' big thing.

and i think the reason why is that in his warped and pitiable brain, he conflates team with fan. thus, telling him that the patriots suck is the equivalent of pushing a thumb into his eyeball. in an eminently unmanly attempt to avoid conflict, then, he pretends that it's an even contest before and after loudly celebrating big plays with unimaginative trumpetings along the lines of, "deion branch! DEION BRANCH! the position he plays is wide receiver!!!!"

and as per the first paragraph of this entry, i suffer from the same problem. but at least i'm not a gigantic tool.

the one bright spot from the whole affair was the following email excerpt from jack:

I want to tell you how much I want the steelers to win this game. I HATE the patriots. Football is for people from towns where you make things out of metal. Where there are factories and foundries and warehouses. Where you can tell what the product of the city is by ITS SMELL. Football isn't for consultants and Phish-loving pseudo-hippies. That's why New England is not worthy, and why every postseason football game they win kills me a little bit.

it made things a little better. because it's true.

so that's all for sports. i promise. i'm returning to my novel, plus matt and i are starting a two-man beatles tribute band. more on this in a few days. until then, stay strong.

the cinema: ruminations, plus i meet the greatest patriots fan of all time

2005-01-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

witness: eyes distant and dreamy, a guy in a red hoodie plays a guitar with a band at rehearsal. draped over the couch, his girlfriend, ignored and bereft, fails to get his attention and eventually leaves. this, the implication is clear, is because he is kind of an ass.

a scene from my life? probably. i forget! more to the point, it is also the opening scene of grace's movie, the finished version of which will be completed on jan. 21, at which point i will get to see the finished thing. as of yet it has no title, the default being, i believe, "all men are dicks: the movie." the movie is very good, although my influence in the making of it is perceptible pretty much only in the credits, where i am listed a number of times for no good reason. i am also responsible for an enthusiastic but wretchedly executed graffiti tag in a subway station. vote for us in venice!

in other news, i now have no job until the beginning of april, which is daunting. "but you'll totally get to lead tours in april," claims my boss, desperately trying not to snort beer out of his nose. "totally," he reiterates, adding: "SNORTTT." "plus," adds his opprobrious lackey, gerd, "we will let you DO OUR ACCOUNTING HA HA HA HA; HA." "accounting sucks," i riposte, wittily. so things are dicey there, but i think all will end up okay. also dicey: the upcoming steelers-pats matchup. regarding that, i will note only that i am nervous but also that i believe, in the end, the forces of justice will prevail. a.k.a. the steelers. vote for the steelers in venice!

i watched the colts-pats game in this bar with some friends from boston, who were pretty gratified by the terrifying ass-stomping that the pats administered; however, their joyous reactions were nothing compared to the delight of the greatest patriots fan of all time, who was also there. this guy--i didn't catch his name--first of all, he's german and doesn't seem to speak any english other than phrases he's memorized and belts out at inappropriate moments. he has really thick glasses and long kurt cobain hair, and he looks like a doofus. anyway, any time there was a play that could conceivably be favorable to the patriots, he went apeshit. he would throw up his arms as high as he could and scream, in german, "YES DAMMIT!!!" he would do this (in my opinion) under-utilized move wherein one sticks out one's index finger, then pretends that one's hand is still a fist and pumps it really hard. he would indicate first-down with both arms, all the while yelping hysterically. also, every single time he did any of those, he would then stare at us for as long as it took until we would acknowledge him. this is like every four or five minutes. oh and also: as a quiet and dejected (american) colts fan is leaving, this guy comes up to him and blurts, "I WILL SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!!!"

wow. this is like me suddenly claiming to like real madrid, hanging out with barcelona fans in some bar in the u.s., and then exulting loudly and ineptly, in english, when real madrid wins. so i think this guy is awesome. also, there is no doubt in my mind that this guy has been following the patriots since way before they won two super bowls and it became very easy to be a patriots fan. no doubt at all. anyway, i dare this guy to come back on sunday, which he told us he would do. i will give him the most time-consuming swirly ever administered. it may last for days.

prediction, because making one makes me feel big: steelers 21, patriots 16.

finally, i wouldn't feel right not letting you know that as a result of getting woefully wrecked two nights ago and then vomiting explosively in a bucket, all of the capillaries in my face have burst and i look sort of like i am now a freckled, generally ruddy irish person, or alternatively like all of my blood is trying to escape my body via the head. will aronson has pictures. maybe i will post them.

p.s. our film is getting shown in venice.

bart mitzvah plus i return to berlin

2005-01-13T08:27:00.000-08:00

all right all right all right. let me start off by saying that--i think in large part because of my mom, whom you may remember from her many comments to this blog about how i need to get a different profile picture (frankly, that will not happen) or how i need to write thank-you notes for something that was like, last year, and i'm like, "WEAK," and she's like, "also, you need to start paying your health insurance,' and i'm like, "I AM INVINCIBLE ALSO HEALTH INSURENCE IS 4 LOOSERS LOL [sic]," and she's like, "god your an idiot [sic]," because neither of us is all that good with spelling--let me start off by saying that at andrew's bart mitzvah in norfolk, a number of relatives became aware of my blog. this is fine as long as they are prepared to jettison their old impression of me, if it is at all positive, and develop a new and radically unsavory one. like: many of my paragraphs begin with "check this, bitches." also, i am irresponsible in my use of the word "like," as in the following: "so i'm like, what a douchebag." also, i think if you google "douchebag," this site is in the top ten. i do not recommend that you google "douchebag."

also, now i can't rag on my relatives. NOT THAT I WAS GOING TO! ha ha, ha! except i totally was. for example, here is a sample paragraph about the bart mitzvah, with censoring in capital letters.

god, what a fucking AWESOME BART MITZVAH. i don't even want to talk about THE JOY AND FILIAL CAMARADERIE I WOULD HAVE MISSED HAD I NOT GONE. it's like: uncle BARNEY WHO IS FICTIONAL. no one wants to hear about your wretched BATTLE WITH THE GOUT, WHICH I BELIEVE AND HOPE IS A BATTLE THAT IN REAL LIFE NO ONE IN MY ACTUAL FAMILY HAS ACTUALLY HAD TO WAGE. so shut the HECK up. also the FOOD was seriously, seriously AWESOME. i wanted to NOT DIE.

check this, bitches: it was actually pretty great. the cantor sounded like the caterpillar from alice in wonderland, and lena and i couldn't help ourselves from breaking into loud, hysterical laughter every single time he sang something, which was frequent. we were in the second row. also, there was this chocolate fountain that you could dip things in en route to eating them. this is about as amazing as it sounds. if my father achieves senility within the next few years, the chocolate fountain will have had a lot to do with it. "dad!" one of us would say, politely trying to get his attention. "um! you've been dipping your hand directly in the fountain and then licking it, and the caterers would sort of like for you to stop." "CHOCOLATE," dad would murmur, staring vacantly at his dripping, sticky digits. then he would put one in his mouth and try to bite it off. "OW," he would bleat. then: "FOUNTAIN." in retrospect, that was awesome.

other things:
- my grandfather now thinks i work for the CIA. this was sort of all we talked about. possibly he signed me up without telling me. possibly, he is just kind of weird. yes!
- dick and doris drove me up from norfolk to philly and then put me on the train to new york, which was awesome. i repaid them by sleeping pretty much the entire time. i am not proud.
- everyone in my family now seems to think i'm a chainsmoker. this is not true and makes me feel sort of weird. do i smoke? no, meaning "sometimes." does "sometimes" occasionally equate to "many, many times a day?" no, and let's change the subject. why do i want to change the subject? okay i'll be back in like five minutes.

oh yeah: i got back in berlin safely. yes!!!

oh yeah: rick and i talked about blogging the other day, and he said, "the problem is, it's completely about yourself," and i was like, "well, duh." but i've been thinking about that, and check it: this blog is not just about me. it's about all of us. okay, the end.

nostalgia

2005-01-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

well, it's 2005. this strikes me as terrifying, because this decade is now half-over, and the next decade is the one in which i'm 35 and own a home and frequently have to go to "home depot." i bring this up because grace sent fred brown and me to pick up things from home depot, and now i know why i've never seen my father smile. home depot is the worst place on earth. it's enormous and ill-maintained and all of the employees are either profoundly hostile or heavily sedated, the latter presumably to correct the former. it should also be noted that fred and i had no idea what we were doing. we had a list that looked like this:

hi guys! please get:
4x masonite 4 x 8 x .25"
double-prong basting laminate
12x squibs, really really big (not too big!!!)
1x house
kisses!, grace

p.s. also 20,000 sq ft of carpet, attractive

so we would wander around, staring blankly at implausible-looking, many-toothed appliances, and confront this or that baleful/dull-eyed employee along the lines of "what is masonite? um, hello? okay, peace" and "ow stop OW YOU'RE VOMITING ACID ON MY FACE."

it's been a while since i last posted something because we have been really, really busy. i had to write/perform some songs, with the help of crazy alan and pete kennedy, who incidentally now have a great ny-based band called A+P who are sort of a creed/nickelback tribute group. we also had to film in the new york subway a lot, which is illegal, and we had to convert grace's garage into a subway station, which involved abovementioned masonite and--you guessed it!--many, many, many 8.5 x 11" sheets of paper with tile pattern printed on them. are you in a room right now? i want you to imagine wallpapering the entire room with 8.5 x 11" sheets of paper. now imagine crying a lot. that was my week.

our lead actress, caroline, hereinafter "talent," demands that she get mentioned in this blog entry, so all right. grace appointed me in charge of Getting Talent A Latte and Making Frequent Appreciative And Flattering Comments Like "I Think If Anything You Need To Gain Weight" And "Surely We Can All Agree That Your Ass Is Radiant" and Getting Talent A Better Fucking Latte Before I Stab You, so we got to know each other pretty well. it was also my responsibility--this is true--to reflect gold light in the direction of her face with an enormous reflective golden circle. all in all, i give her an 8... out of 6! if i had to describe caroline in one word, it would be "talent," because whenever i use other words she gets angry and predisposed toward stabbing.

now i'm in cambridge for the day, which is snowy and wet and makes me feel very nostalgic. why?, you ask. that is a really good question, and frankly i don't have an answer to it. cambridge sucks. go steelers!!!.!

oh yeah, new year's. i was at this party in brooklyn with a lot of harvard alums. sweet, you are thinking. i do not remember a lot, but here are some highlights (hi mom! don't read this):

- hung out with joel, who wrote a song for me, entitled, "i'm pretty sure you're the one, except you're a dude"; also we talked about our feelings
- joel tells me i drunkenly made out with a girl named jessica; i have no memory of this whatsoever
- chatted with tom mercer, SMP's liaison with Let's Go, and amiably informed him that he was both taller than me and a giant douchebag, which for some reason he found acceptable
- told a number of people that i was in my first year at harvard business school, and then when they said, "yeah! me too," i said, "PSYCH! YOU ARE A TOOL" and threw the contents of my drink on their clothes and started singing "we are the champions" by queen
- did not get naked, for the first new year's since, i think, 2001

more later. i have to meet up with people in boston. if you're reading this today and are in boston and i forget to call you, my bad and please call me. okay, the end.

j

p.s. in a few days: my cousin's bart mitzvah! yes, bart.

producing, car ideas, novel

2004-12-26T22:11:00.000-08:00

if, like i was, you are a wide- and dreamy-eyed neophyte to the magical world of filmmaking, you might be wondering what it is that film producers do. well, we've been working hard on this project now for a few days, and producing goes a little something like this:

- i spend a lot of time taping things because grace tells me to. "taping," as in, "here is a roll of gaffer tape; use it to suspend this piano from the ceiling in the foyer." sometimes i take a towel and tape it over a window (this is for "lighting"). sometimes just for fun i apply tape to my skin and ask the actors to rip it off really hard, and then when they do i scream in pain and smack them upside the head.
- i carry heavy things around, roughly twice as much as i have to because for some reason carrying things makes me stupid. specifically, grace will tell me to take something to the second floor, and i accidentally take it to the basement. or the second floor of a completely different house. or down the road all the way to the freeway, staggering and breathing loudly out of my mouth, because i get really, really stupid. "ow this hurts i gotta put it down!" i blurt, failing to put it down. "ow, blood!" i bellow, not even bleeding or in pain.
- sometimes i also communicate things to grace on behalf of the "talent," which is our special word for the person we are filming. "grace!" i cry gaily. "the talent craves sandwiches! our darling little talent is simply famished from not having to carry tripods and the sound thingy and other heavy shit in and out of people's houses all day! maybe their head needs to get smacked upside it."
- grace also frequently solicits my artistic advice. not!!!
- no, she does, but i'm trying to put an end to that with insights like, "i'm feeling... i kind of want... how to put it. this is a great premise for a scene, don't get me wrong, but it's going to be insanely god-awful if i don't get the lead role, because this other guy--yeah, that guy, the one i'm pointing to and is looking to us--hi!--he's totally wrong for the part, whereas i am great for it. plus, i mean, look at him. he looks like a doofus."

i would be more useful if i could drive, but i can't. on that note, though, i have a great paradigm-altering idea: cars need a completely different user interface. right now you have pedals, knobs, a big intimidating wheel, buttons that light up, and so forth. no, no, no. all you should need is a keyboard and a mouse. or a playstation controller. anyone who has ever played grand theft auto can tell you that driving cars is exponentially better with computer or video game controls. you can put the car on autopilot and fire rocketlaunchers out of the window, you can do really sweet jumps. i would argue that everyone in my generation either is completely grand theft auto-literate or shouldn't be able to drive anyway, and my generation, according to this "60 MINUTES" episode we saw today, is the most powerful group of people on the planet. so why hasn't this happened already?

many of you have written to me requesting to read my novel/angrily pointing out that you have read it and provided me with helpful feedback. in response to the latter, you are entirely correct, i just really like whining. to the former, thank you so much!, and i'm waiting until i have a complete first draft before i send out any more copies. it's really incomplete and confusing right now. once i write it through to the end, it'll make much more sense for me to give it to you. also, yes it's incomplete and confusing, but that does not prevent it from being so, so good. you might well ask: best novel ever? um, yeah. don't be an idiot.

well, i have to go tape 112 pages of paper together to make an enormous poster. you think i am joking, but i am not.

deportation

2004-12-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

preliminary note: bolding. let's do more of it from now on.

new york. city of destiny; city of brotherly what-have-you; city of me getting deported to it.

tomorrow i leave berlin, possibly never to come back if germany decides that i've been staying here illegally. i intend to argue that i haven't. i anticipate the following:

customs: your passport is fucked up or something. look, this page has a stamp on it.
me: oh yeah? i have a job!
customs:
me: JOB MUTHAFUCKA
customs:
me: ahem! (here is 20 euros.)
customs: what.
me: (10 euros. it's all i have.)
customs: stop trying to give me that.
immigration: word
me: do you guys have jobs? i need a job.

anyway, expect incapacitatingly humorous accounts of my life as film producer/new york hipster over the following two weeks. also, if germany actually does not let me back to berlin, expect a number of entries comprised primarily of inarticulate rage, e.g., "WHAT THE FUCK GERMANY today was cold YOU DON'T WANT ME IN YOUR SHITTY COUNTRY FUCK YOU buses: they never come when you're waiting for them I GOT A GODDAMNED JOB, YOU MECHANICAL PIECES OF BUREAUCRATIC SHIT, AND I WILL BURY YOU"

the end!

literary reflections

2004-12-18T13:55:00.000-08:00

okay. you may have heard/read me complaining about this before, but now i'm going to do it again: dan brown is ruining my life.

granted, he is capable of writing a compelling, exciting plot. granted, he seems to have an interesting assemblage of facts and theories at his disposal, although many (all?) of them are BLATANTLY WRONG; please refer to <http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20041220_95307_95307>. yes!

also, he looks like an ass: <http://www.danbrown.com/meet_dan/gallery/index.html>

jenn, a friend i actually made in spain, points out that he is basically leaning at all times. why is that? is he attempting/failing to project "casual"? does he have a physical disability that i'm not allowed to ridicule? is he just kind of a dork? much like the da vinci code itself, dan brown is an enigma, specifically an enigma whose mind-annihilating literary bankruptcy makes me want to feed myself to wolves.

so, having granted some of the above (he writes books that are difficult to put down, his work is riddled with factual inaccuracies and elisions, his appearance is objectionable), i want to establish the following: he is a hilariously bad writer. his dialogue is a facile, screamingly hollow parody of human interaction. his characters are pathetic cardboard cutouts from an 80s mainstream television-inspired children's fantasy world. his use of italics to portray thought mocks the inadequacies of the word "hackneyed."

wait a minute, jesse thought. maybe i'm being a little harsh.

actually, i am not. anyone who uses italics to indicate "thinking" needs to check themselves before they wreck themselves. also, anyone who uses "thinking" to indicate something that has been previously alluded to, many times and clumsily, in the past five or six paragraphs, needs to be dragged out into the cold, wet streets and shot.

here's what you might be thinking: jesse. dan brown's magical books have made millions of people interested in religion and art and other european things. so what if his writing isn't very good? or subtle? in fact i would settle for "unobtrusive."

here's what i say: i don't care. i think it would be a lot better if somehow those millions of people could be made to enjoy good writing rather than learn about how jesus had some kind of awesome sex life and the knights templar were crazy or whatever. if you don't agree with this, maybe we shouldn't be friends any more.

and why does this make me so angry? it makes me angry because i am writing a novel which, in my opinion and hopefully yours, is the polar opposite of everything dan brown has written. i think the dialogue and the character development are outstanding. however, there is sort of no plot, and it's also extremely non-linear, and everyone to whom i've given a draft has not been able to get through it in a sitting, or for that matter five sittings. people frequently say, "yeah, it's great! it's um... i'm on page 3, i think, and so far it's really good. i mean i've been really busy recently with, um, with... my job. i have a job now."

it may never get published. if it does, it will never sell very many copies. why? because it is a literary gem, and most people who buy books are fools. odious fools. these are my thoughts on the state of today's literary world.

in other news, the steelers win but manage to make me nervous at the same time by not winning by a huge amount.

okay i have to go. dan brown sucks my balls.

steelers and job

2004-12-12T13:14:00.000-08:00

this entry addresses two topics:
1. i got a job!
2. my feelings about the steelers

right now the steelers are playing the jets, and i intend to chronicle my emotions over the course of this game. the steelers just went three and out on their opening drive. so, i feel: betrayed.

anyway, the best walking tour company in berlin, terry brewer's best of berlin, recently invited me to work for them, in the capacity of making sure hostels and hotels and tourist info centers have their flyers. if you don't know anything about terry brewer, try this on for size:
1. his tours average about 8 hours long
2. he is british and (i think) 70 years old, worked in many countries via the british foreign service, speaks absurd numbers of languages, has lots of extremely sweet stories that have actually happened, and knows more about berlin than is, frankly, possible
3. i had beers with him a few nights ago, and it was awesome

okay, the jets went three and out but now the steelers are at their own six somehow. this is when people talk about "field position," right? steelers. do this.

anyway, they're the best company in town, and are obsessed with historical veracity, so i've been given 1500 pages of berlin history to read over the next few days. that sounds like a lot, right? well, it is. and once i finish it, they'll probably just give me more. this job is so hard.

no team is managing to do much of anything. the jets have the ball. i have to go to the bathroom. i am also worried, because the jets keep getting the ball at midfield and the steelers get it at like the 1. i also have this nagging feeling that "chad pennington," the jets quarterback, is going to do something of importance. chad pennington. ooh i am so manly! ooh you are getting mud on my lapels! desist, for i am chad pennington, some kind of british douchebag.

chad pennington just threw an interception. ha!

field goal? try: touchdown!!! no, it was a field goal, and now i'm going to the bathroom. 3-0 steelers. if this turns into a "defensive battle," i am going to throw up, but it probably will, because it's the steelers. frequently the steelers are like, "hey, let's try to win this game 7-0," or, "field goals are sometimes awesomer than touchdowns." you gotta love it!!!

another upsetting trend: returning punts for a loss. they've done this twice now. why not just stand there? or, better yet, return punts for a gain? just throwing ideas out there.

...and another three and out. hopefully, once tourist season picks up, terry brewer & co. will hire me to start giving walking tours, which is what i really want to do. i already have some dope ideas for improving tours:
1. fewer buildings; more falafel
2. "story hour," where we all talk about wacky other places in europe we've been, like the louvre, or prague
3. "chillin with tha funk doktaz," which is where the tour hangs out in a basement while i rehearse with my band, once i get a band
4. less talk, more walk

the jets are driving, sort of. this makes me nervous. so right now i feel: nervous. this is the worst blog entry ever.

the jets just got penalized like twenty times in a row. they probably feel salty about that. does anyone say "salty" any more? this might be a vernacular term peculiar to my high school. actually, i'm probably thinking of "hot," which at my high school meant the same thing as "salty," as in:
teacher: you got a 12% on this test.
jon smith/michael angelo: ooh thats got me HOTT
meaning, it made jon smith or michael angelo from my physics class upset.

hilariously, the jets keep committing penalties, which is awesome because it's almost halftime and the steelers have successfully completed three passes. now jerome bettis is in. he's called "the bus." okay, they're at the 37 on 4th down. field goal? that might make the score too high. yeah, instead they punted it. sweet!

the jets now have 11 penalties. this is kind of amazing. their coach must be apoplectic right now. if it was our coach, he would bite someone's face off, with the superior leverage of his enormous lower chin. update: chad pennington completed some passes. chad pennington, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself. 2-minute warning.

jets still driving. time running out. so, i feel: apprehensive. chad pennington, see above in re: self-checking.

chad pennington just got intercepted again! i feel kind of bad for him, but that's awesome.

and now it's halftime. i think this blog entry has outlived its usefulness/ability to entertain, so let's end it here. after the game we may have another entry containing reflections by me, along the lines of, "steelers: best team ever?" or "steelers: would they beat everyone at basketball too if they wanted? how about trivial pursuit? yes."

okay, bye. i got a job!!!!!

j

success??!? no

2004-12-10T06:31:00.000-08:00

so i got a job! an unpaid, two-week job that takes place not in berlin. so far this is a feeble, desiccated mockery of a job hunt.

still, i'm excited. it's as a "production manager" for this extremely dope 5-minute film grace is doing. again, the job does not pay me anything, but grace claims that i will be reimbursed in sandwich form. i am skeptical. all i'm saying is, these sandwiches had better be made out of some kind of valuable metal, and i better be able to deposit them at a bank rather than eat them, and also i should get additional delicious sandwiches that are actually edible.

there are several upshots to this:

- if you are a musician and live in new york and are going to be there dec. 25-jan. 4, you could be in a film. please contact me about this. the film will be famous. keira knightley is prominently involved, in the sense that i really, really wish she was prominently involved.
- i'm in new york dec. 22-jan. 5. also, i will have my cell phone. call/write me if you want to be part of my entourage; otherwise, i will have to hire an entourage consisting strictly of homeless people and "crazy" jim fleming, who is totally fucking crazy and we're not sure why we have to put "crazy" in quotes, except that when we don't he claws our face.
- i might be in boston jan. 5-7. someone throw me a party! joel? joel is in charge of the party. please contact him for details. also, i kind of need someone to put me up for a couple of nights. who wants to do this?!?! i will sleep on anything, provided it is comfortable and i get my own room and the room is equipped with some sort of magical sandwich-purveying machine or sack.

my host family continues to be very hospitable and fun. i continue to pursue a job with this walking tour company. bratwurst continues to be tasty and my chief form of sustenance. yesterday i registered with the police, which you have to do basically immediately if you move to anywhere in germany. jesus.

i have a cell phone in berlin, also. write me if you want my number. the phone is small and terrifying and i can't figure it out. sometimes when you call it, it tells you you need a card; sometimes when i use it to call people, i get loud yet muffled recordings berating me in german. um, that's cool, phone. slash weak. it is totally weak.

okay i have to go.

no more spain

2004-12-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

the job hunt begins. i have accomplished the following:
- printed up resume
- distributed resume to four hostels, all of which have no positions open
- interviewed with a walking tour company, whose business manager told me resume-printing and -distributing was "totally weak," but who was otherwise a convivial and engaging person
- participated in quaint german dec. 5 tradition involving shoe-shining, eating roast goose, and getting hammered

berlin is cold and gray and gets dark around 4:30pm. this is not okay. otherwise, berlin is the best city in the entire world. everything is more or less where i remember it. the city looks a lot more soviet in the winter: people in heavy coats looking fatalistic and beset-upon, trees sans leaves, the sky overcast and drizzling rain as if mourning the drawn-out, anguished death of an ideal at the hands of the insane and the mustachioed. jesus. the falafel here is killer.

i'm living with lena's former host family in the suburb of zehlendorf, which is an extremely sweet setup. i pay no money, get to practice german, and sometimes members of the family steal my clothing so that they can wash it and apply fragrances to it. i really, really recommend this to anyone who visits berlin and is related to my older sister.

so, let's finish off spain. spain was a lot of fun. this was my daily schedule:
2pm: wake up; eat things at random in kitchen; shower
3pm: wander to internet cafe; verify that the steelers are still awesome; consume coffees
5pm: return home; construct sandwich
5:30pm: "write"
7pm: dinner? napping?
9pm: chris goes to work; "write"
11pm: hang out with chris; "drink"
["write" denotes turning on the computer; staring dumbly at the computer screen; pacing artistically around the apartment; getting distracted by whether or not i can fit an entire apple in my mouth; looking for inspiration by means of falling asleep on things; reading previous drafts and revising them by means of the comments "awesome!" and "this is totally awesome"; ultimately deciding to play MacBrickout]
["drink" denotes a lot of drinking]

in retrospect, it's a good thing that that is over. so, goodbye spain, for the last time. i will miss you. i will also miss the following people:
- chris starr, without whom none of this would have happened; chris is dominant and if you should ever have a beef with him, i will power-break your face with the quickness
- adam starr, who is a very funny, warm guy with terrific stories who also managed to physically harm me a number of times
- becky, who was exposed to many, many penis jokes and yet did not kill all of us, brutally, in our sleep
- matt tait, who is a playa, and for whom i tried to wingman this one time, and it totally didn't work, and we were bummed
- "kinker": kinker!!! this makes no sense
- jimmy fleming, who compared me with ted leo, for which i will always be inordinately stoked
- todd, who actually made us chicken cordon bleu and various other mind-blowing dishes, and also has extreme game
- katherine meyers: kinker!!! this makes even less sense; also katherine hung out with me on my birthday, when no one else did, and thus she will be the only person mentioned in my will
- inaki, juan, ramon, and a number of other spanish people; i don't speak spanish, otherwise they were awesome

all of these people are great. you should find them and buy them drinks.

j

¡the spain! reflections

2004-12-02T04:50:00.000-08:00

first, i want to point out that there is another blog called "El futbol de los miercoles," which means, i think, "The Football of the Wednesday." right? that's awesome.

so. about a year ago, chris mentions that he's going to spain. ooh i want to do that, i say. then somehow i acquire a plane ticket. months pass. suddenly, it's september and i'm in spain. now i am here.

we had a cute, cheap apartment. outside there was roadwork, which in spain connotes:
- sometimes, a bunch of dudes lifting up a huge piece of road with a crane, dropping it into a truck, and then lifting it back out of the truck, dropping it back in, and so forth, presumably to teach it a lesson
- most of the time, guys in loud noise-making construction vehicles just sort of hanging out
- protests

in spain, they protest shit. all the time. on a number of occasions, there were maybe fifty people blocking an intersection, holding signs and banging on drums, to protest this barrier on Gran Via that meant that they couldn't double-park any more. they were pissed. double-parking is illegal.

san sebastian, of course, likes to say that they're the basque country and not actually spain. basque, the language, is difficult to learn and looks very punk/metal. words have a lot of k, x, and z. like: "txakolizak"is probably a word, and all other words look exactly like that. if basque had umlauts, it would be more bad-ass then the mind could really comprehend. this is fitting, because basques love heavy metal and hang out at metal bars in old black t-shirts with faded pictures of gene simmons on them. it's like an entire city populated by the not-quite-goth kids from high school.

high school kids here are extremely lame. they are loud and ill-mannered. for some reason (and i owe this and other observations to the good and great chris starr), being macho in spain does not preclude being able to cry in public like a pathetic piece of shit. so half the time, you have gangs of fifteen-year-olds swaggering around on the beach and falling down or accidentally kicking people, because fifteen-year-olds are humorously awkward, and half the time you have some hair-gelled sports-jersey-clad acne parade bawling and moaning about some girl, and his buddies stand around and try to look tough, and it's difficult not to laugh in their faces.

we had no tv. this meant, among other things, that chris, katherine (friend), and i rented out a hotel room on election night to watch cnn international. it was the worst night, probably, ever. it lasted until 10am, and for reasons beyond all rational surmise it was all tucker carlson, all the time. tucker carlson is the most persuasive argument there is, i think, for why all young republicans should be rounded up and shot to death, in the face. you are nodding as you read this.

i don't remotely want to talk about the election, on this blog or ever. or politics. earnest political blogs appeal to me less than putting my hand in a blender. technical blogs are also out. any kind of debate in blog form is unacceptable. finally, "rants" are impermissible.

anyway. i have to catch a train to berlin now. more later.

the wonders of "next blog"

2004-12-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

so as if this particular blog weren't entertaining enough, you can amuse yourself until the end of time by hitting "next blog" in the upper right-hand corner of this page. and then by doing it again and again. a lot of these are amazing. i'm not saying mine is good, but it is awesome, and everyone else's makes me want to dry-heave endlessly and laugh mighty laughs of scorn at the same time.

i have a few minutes left at this internet cafe, so now i'm going to type all of the words i can remember to "la bamba":

la la la la, la bamba
la la la la, la bamba
hmm hmm hmm hmm, hmm hmm la bamba!
la la la la, la bamba
yo no soy marinero!
yo no soy marinero, hmm hmm capitan!
hmm hmm capitan hmm capitan
la, la bamba!
la, la bamba

i'm not even sure how the melody goes. it's something like "twist and shout," right? jesus, this is depressing.

unrelated: internet cafe culture is hilarious, because you can count on everyone being foreign and you get a lot of exchanges like:
girl: um... hello? you will help? how does work.
guy: [dutch]
german guy: I CAN SPEAK ENGLISH! YOU WILL LET ME HELP YOU.
girl:
german guy: HERE LET ME TYPE.

in conclusion, never travel.

what the title means

2004-12-01T06:20:00.000-08:00

"things that can talk" was the name of this comic strip i did when jeremy and i decided to take a break from doing sock full of quarters our senior spring. you might remember it. it ran daily for seven weeks or so and was artsy and consistently provocative, as in: "hey! i'm a huge talking muffin! that's kind of weird." or: "hey! i'm a smaller talking muffin! muffins are fun to draw. my deadline is in fifteen minutes." it also had no narrative consistency, except for the "what were we thinking" series, which lasted for a week and was seriously depressing. it was mostly re-drawn stills from old movies with captions about the banality of college life, like "last night we got drunk again in front of the tv again." every other strip, however, was new-pants-necessitating caliber funny. yes!!! maybe i will post some of them, as soon as i figure out how image-posting works.

um. so, this is an epilogue, in the sense that the strip already happened and is now over. sweet. also, jeremy would probably be upset if i called this "sock full of quarters: the epilogue," which it isn't anyway because it's not nearly offensive enough. but it's only a matter of time.

aforementioned hot picture

2004-12-01T06:13:00.000-08:00

you have probably already seen this. but here it is again!!! it gets better every time, no?

goodbye spain redux

2004-11-30T09:39:00.000-08:00

so tonight i'm leaving san sebastian for barcelona. oh, san sebastian. i will miss you. san sebastian has absurdly loud music in bars and probably the worst hair in the world. i understand that "worst hair in the world" isn't a classification to be thrown around lightly, but good god, so bad. sometimes people say things like, "cleveland is THE MULLET CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!" or "omg i saw three mullets this one time in greece or italy HOLY CRAP!!!" these people have no idea what they are talking about. there are so many goddamned mullets here i want to die. additionally, san sebastian has beautiful beaches and excellent food.

right now, my novel is 97 pages long. ask to read it! it is really, really, really good. it's so good. i'm also working on illustrations, which have nothing to do with the plot but which i think are pretty.
once i get to berlin, i promise to post something lengthy and rambling about my time in spain. also, maybe i will figure out how to put up a picture of myself and "friends" from my time here. until then, please find me a job or mail me some money. preferably, a lot, but every little bit counts. also, if you're rich and a girl, maybe we could get married. i will be so good to you.

goodbye, spain

2004-11-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

i'm leaving spain in a few days. pretty soon i will post something more substantive.

meanwhile, this picture of me is hot. yes!