from NYE '06

Oohhh baby. Mountains.

It's the dawn of a new year, so it's time to get the hell out of town. I took my little streetwise car on a long overdue 1200 mile air-out east in order to find my brother and sister and nephew in their small alley-filled prairie town in Montana in time for Christmas. Haven't been on an American road trip since 2000, and I looked forward to the early morning wakeup in a hotel room, wandering the city I would choose for the evening, and a long long road with CDs.

I pulled out of SF and was in Sacramento by sunrise, shooting past Schwartzenegger's villa and just up to the edge of the national forest where I slid between two parked semi trucks and slept before climbing up through unknown weather to the state line with Nevada. Air horns woke me and the blue sky above was good news, and the roads were good to me and I climbed up and over into Reno without problems. The only real problem after that was the road across Nevada, a flat two lane jobbie that offered no climbs, shorn trees, few views, endless casinos and countless places to buy sugar-filled energy drinks that make my pee fluorescent. Also very bad, the Christian rock and country music radio stations, and even worse those stations that played bad country Christian rock for Christmas. i could barely hear the classical music CDs I brought over the rumble of the cold asphalt, so I was left to hearing songs like "Me and God" while sipping sugar bombs and focusing on the perpetual perpendicular angle of the road meeting the horizon, for ten hours.

My intended destination of Jackpot, Nevada, was more a blip of dreck than a bounty of boon, and I accidentally drove out of the town as I looked for a hotel, which led me to Twin Falls and its Motel 6, a smelly room in the freezing cold of Idaho. It's not what I had planned on but with only my quick one night stand with this town I realize I cannot say much about Twin Falls. But the best thing happened the next morning when I left and drove on a bridge over a 1/4 mile deep gorge carved by the Snake River on my way out of town. It was the day of the winter solstice so the sun darted up and down and soon I was on a dark road in Montana with a few hundred more miles to go and more Christian and country on the radio. Luckily I had consumed about 6 cans of sugar-robusto and my face tingled enough to keep me awake.

Winter in Montana now. New Year's Eve 2006. Heavy snowfall brought us a white post-Christmas, complete with skidding tires and slipping people, animal tracks leading to and from my car, now buried a week by a foot of powder. We are planning a quite night tonight, though we wanted to land in Denver for three nights of bluegrass with new and old friends which the snow decided we could not do, so here we are. Tonight will be different from last year when I sat with a recovering Dotty in a pair of recliners sipping schnapps and watching the ball slide down the pole (the ball just doesn't 'drop' anymore... safety issue?) I trust that Dot is staying away from emergency rooms, but I liked our quiet celebration last year. I can't say 2006 was a good year for me, it had sporadic joys, sad passings, and some deep frustrations. But these last few months I have learned more about myself and how close I am to making 2007 a year for the ages, at least in terms of what I can control and create. So I can resolve to be resolute in my resolutions, which are simple: to learn, to listen, to work hard and well. That will set me up in every part of my life as I enter my 33rd year on the planet. New Year's Eve is the one night we all feel the same anticipation, that moment when (if we are coherent) we feel the clock in our veins ticking toward something unknown and full of hope, and we know that everyone around us is feeling something the same. We're all part of it. I hope we all can feel that anticipation more than just one night of 365, maybe once a week, once a day, just more often.

So hang down your head, Tom Dooley. Listen to good music, fall in love a couple times, sing, walk, wrestle, relax, and love and know yourself. Happy New Year.

Friends, Links, and Friend's Links

To be back in the Bay Area, land of the cold and the heated, minus snow and plus earthquakes, with a smattering of disappointing sports teams which are causing me to be totally disillusioned with whatever obsessive rooting interest I had nurtured, there remains to be celebrated: the beer.

My Only-and-Therefore-Top 5 Breweries I've Had Wireless Internet and Good Beers at since returning to the Motherland:

1) The Park Chalet on Ocean Beach on edge of Golden Gate Park has the closest thing to a biergarten I have found, tall beers with your strong wireless signals, and $1 beer Monday evenings under tall ceilings and a huge fireplace. Its neighbor, the Beach Chalet is an old favorite, surf and sunset with your garlic fries, bartenders have 24-hour view of ocean, but I would choose the Park Chalet because it tends to treat you like a friend rather than a customer. Beach Chalet likes to make money off its view.
2) Magnolia Pub - hiding in the heart of hippiedom on Haight Street, can't beat the view out the large windows of the neo-grunge strolling by, nor the beer list or the murals memorializing the 60s and 70s. Food is sparse and hearty, but what else would you need in the Haight-Ashbury?
3) 21st Amendment - a nice balance of 1) and 2) in the warehouse district of San Francisco, destined to be the center of life when and if this area of the city becomes what it thinks it will become.
4) Cato's Ale House - not a brewery, not in San Francisco, without a website, but many good beers on tap, small, old tables with knife carvings, live folk bands each night, a bartender who really couldn't care about making you feel warm and fuzzy...
5) Gordon Biersch - too chainy for me, too many people speaking loudly about very little, but easy to lose yourself in its pair of wireless networks and its vast shallowness.

There are links to cute/important/lively distractions, and then there are links to actual friends with a point to write about. Announcing quickly a few bloglinks to read:
Nat Kent Post-Oxford & Post-Munich writes some highly thought-provoking words with the fine vocabulary that he exhibited Pre-Oxford & Mid-Munich when I knew him, and
Ben Salles old pal old friend needs to write a book someday with his imagination and verbiage and new family and his dogs,
while my 3 brothers in Holden Village arms show their skin:
Kent Gustavson seems to live 36-hour days of music, words and Adobe Products, just as
J. A. Blyth, playwright and monkey, continues to pen daily observances of life from Guyana with wife Miriam Adelaide, and
Jeshua Erickson's guitar hums his civil thoughts along with personal lyrics from his own treehouse in Minnesota.
All are good people and have good places to visit, read, browse, move on from, and revisit again. And more links will come!

Lots of technology at our fingertips, but I still need to take 35mm photos and wait for their development, and write in my journal and hope to read it someday and learn something. The instantaneousness of our communication moves faster than the river I wish I could fish on and write from. Do you get busy livin' or get busy faxin'? (sharktank redemtion!)... can you smell the roses and text message that experience as well? I hope to keep a nice balance of tech and treehouse and thought. The surf rocks the beaches here, the people wear too little clothing for this weather, and in the mountains there are people sleeping tonight with heaven pushing down on them. Lucky bastards. Hope you are all well.

One more for the Vault.

Taking into account some preordained need to write with a beverage, I can’t say I know what I am doing typing on my cute Mac or penning within a leather journal on such a consistent basis from brew pubs with a free wireless connection. I wish everywhere here was filled with huts and strangers drinking tropical dandies with umbrellies and conversation taking itself out for a walk among locals and new faces, if everything around me had an air of wellness with a breeze and time on your hands, then I think you may understand why I do it, but this is San Francisco, the same place which dulled my senses for a good few years, a place where there still is no biergarten nor chestnut trees above and gravel underfoot, where folks tend to speak much louder than necessary. Yet for now I feel like I’m in a little Shangri La. Magnolia is a brewpub on Haight Street that subtly memorializes in fresco and watercolor a culture that is giving way to what I can only see as a cleaner version of dirty hippiedom. In short, things are more intentionally odd than randomly strange here. But I’m not a hippie so what do I know. I’ve also typed and written at the Beach Chalet, a metrosexual/surfer brewery joint with fantastic garlic fries and deep-fried calamari and the sunset-on-the-ocean each evening, or at the Java Joint coffee house that looks like a beach bungalow set under a five story apartment building across from the ocean. And once I went to Gordon Biersch’s brewery on the Bay Embarcadero but the people there were far too proud of their business-talk and I didn’t get the point of the expensive beer. I am making the rounds of breweries and am actually getting work done all at the same time. How not like me is that?

I’m also realizing how quickly customers feel the need to get up and out of a restaurant here in San Francisco < California < perhaps the entire USA. What I notice: the VISA card is thrown down or the wallet is reached for, on average, when at least half of the group is finished eating; this of course makes the eating-stragglers feel they need to wolf their remaining food or leave it, and in around five minutes of the wallet’s appearance they are up and leaving. And this is totally OK; the average meal for four lasts about 30 minutes, and the average meal for 2 people about the same. In and out – WHAT??? Do we have someplace to go? I have nursed two beers for 2 hours here and I feel like I own my seat, perhaps can call this my Norm-spot (from TV’s Cheers). The waitstaff are partially to blame, but customers can just as easily display a total lack of hurry as much as they play along and feel rushed by an urgency of service. Why do Europeans tend to take time out for eating? So very few people there come and go so quickly as USA-ans. Are Americans so much busier, or do they feel some guilt at spending their time allowing someone else to cook for and serve them, or do restaurants just generally turn US people off, to the point where they just can’t wait to get back to their cats, their satellite TV, their families, onto something else... I mean, single people leave just as quickly as married people, unless I have the whole wedding-ring-finger thing wrong, which I don’t. Do certain people just plan about 5 things to do each night, in order to feel like they are keeping their promises to a busy lifestyle? Can you just simply commit to sitting and hanging out, or is everything so UNplanned that we can never plan to stay long enough to hang with people we are eating with?

The sun is setting once again in a brewpub on the water’s edge, only this one has a view of the sunset against the sky, water, hills and houses to the east, so the real magic is behind me. Here’s to harmony.

I will try to add some audio to these links... Aural hints of my senses.

A little ramble for the rumble

Putting together now the pieces of a recent move, I’m thinking about significance and what constitutes a journal and a blog, and where do the routes meet and diverge, and why? You don’t need me to write about politics, yet I can say that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco has a lot of work to do to fight with the mandate of what we all have desired a voice for – change; however, if change does not come then it’s our responsibility to declare the honeymoon over and to start cracking even our Democratic Party’s skulls. You don’t need me to discuss the idea of Quality, an all-too-Pirsig-esque notion, yet a notion which continues to articulate itself from every nook of my surroundings on every part of the globe, never mind the fact that it’s not the best conversation starter on biergarten nights in Munich though talk inevitably arrives at the idea of quality when deciding where the best ribs are and how the lighting best makes our faces glow to the people across the table. But I digress.

I was part of the exclamation point on Ocean Beach a few weeks ago and I didn’t even know if I wanted the dude impeached, but it also had to do with walking a few weeks prior in Toronto for the 2006 Gulu Walk and standing up (and walking) for the need to understand Africa even a little better, a continent which continues to baffle and entrance me. If this is the year of change in this country… after so many years of sad reluctance of the unchangeable political heads screwing this country in its solitary place, and thus causing a massive shaking of heads, then of fists… we need to be less passive in our actions, but more importantly we must be less passive with our knowledge and with how we gather information to support that knowledge.

Informed awareness. Another good word(s) for 2007.

Drifts of Perspective and a word

The sun shines pretty hard these days as it works to fight off the cold that has gripped the Pacific Coast. Cold always wins, and all heat fleets, thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore. I took a drive up to Ashland Oregon on the weekend to visit some good friends and meet new ones at a coastal house with a hot tub on a bluff, a journey that was decided upon one minute and began the next minute. Two cars left at the same time from two different states, planning to meet at a bar on a Christmas-lit street in the middle, in Ashland, sometime after midnight (Q: At what speed was car A moving?). Turned out it was a ridiculously quick drive in the end, which makes this entire country seem smaller and distances between friends far less, thank goodness for that. But we did hit snow in the high passes, a fact that brought out the SHIT HOLY SHIT YES's from my co-pilot the snowboarder, and instilled slight fear in me because the roads rode like mashed potato beds and the sky filled with shooting stars of white aimed directly at our windshield. Yes, snow certainly is exciting.

It will be a long December. There is much to say at the end of this year that I will never post in a blog, though my mind swells with thoughts and realizations, explanations and words that rise and fall like the wind or the tides. Only with action will better words come that move forward and take all the good of the worst of life into an unknown future. I'm thankful this thanksgiving for an 83 year old father who hears his son coughing from a few late nights in a row and silently lays a shot glass of schnapps next to the laptop, "for the cough." I'm thankful for friends and family who love me no matter how much I screw up and continually tell them about it. I'm thankful for perspective and the knowledge that it won't be the last time I screw things up, but also for the lessons that keep me from making the same mistake again. And I am thankful for hope and love which are all that stand once those words of emotion ebb and flow. I know hope and love in my heart, and no matter what the future holds I will have nothing else but that regarding her. Lots to say. Lots to be thankful for today.

I hope that December and 2007 to follow bring one thing to all of us - community - including but not limited to the neighborhood/political variety, more the wide variety of people that surround you in some form, in multiple forms. What else is there when you break down your joys and sorrows, and who is it that you most want to share these with? What keeps you from being alone whether you want it or not? What keeps you from destroying yourself? What is renewable, and what swells and shrinks yet is always there in some form? When you land somewhere on a lonely patch, what is the first thing you search for, and which searches for you? And if you were to comment on this and leave a one word answer, I know there would be about 100 funny and intriguing words, and only a few of them would be community. So go ahead, post 'em. (Yes, even you, Neil).

But for now, here's to our individual communities, and may you each be enriched and emboldened by the mere fact that people love and support you without having to tell you nor you asking for it.

Seriously...

Been too long a while since I blogged it up, but the treehouse is being remodeled inside and out.

I understand that there are serious and highly important issues to choose to write about, and with just some minimal thought and attention to the morning paper, your favorite under-the-radar information service, or your own inquisitive mind one can’t help but be stirred to act upon or at least write on one of the many pertinent, sad, hilarious, horrific, passionate, significant, triumphant occurrences of today and yesterday, with the hope to put another voice out there for the readers of tomorrow. Yet… I have to say that Tide with Febreze is a fantastic detergent.

As is Persil! But you can only get Persil in Europe, or maybe just Germany. And knowing how even the pungent odor of mildew reminds me of a few of my happiest childhood memories in rural northern California, there’s something to be said for this. My clothes offered up the most pleasant smell to any room after they were bathed in Persil, the green liquid kind, offering a smell that gently permeated the air around my clothing, even (EVEN!) when my shirts were tucked away in a drawer in Toronto a few weeks later! That’s some good pungent-ness. And while I couldn’t get Persil in Toronto, I found Tide with Febreze to be the next best thing, and my clothes made the apartment, the elevator, and even the TTC subway cars reek with clean. So now that I am back in San Francisco I have a problem, and I think it’s found in the dryer. My clothes, though washed with Tide with Febreze, continually smell like a clothes dryer motor, the same scent they always had when I lived in San Francisco, using the same clothes dryer. After the heat turns cool, the Tide with Febreze has been, well, erased.

We use scent to contact our memories. I remember smelling the blanket that Dorothy laid on the first night she came over to my place in 2002 to watch a movies, and it had her lovely scented perfume on it when she left, subtle but ever-present. The next evening a good friend came to spend the night and I purposely hid that blanket from his patchouli-laden body, but even the hiding place was eventually infiltrated with this hippie oil effervescence, yet I hoarded that Dorothy-scent for as long as it could last, until it seemed to be gone, though it would definitely not be the last time I would have her over.

But now, the Tide with Febreze is another scent with an attached memory, and I have been robbed of it by the motor of an ancient clothes dryer. For to have that simple smell around me over the course of a day makes me happy, in the car, in a room, just below my nose and chin, whenever I need it. It just feels like it fades faster than it should, and the dryer is the thief.

Flavor, scent, color, harmony and texture. Thankfully, the senses shoot an unfiltered direct line to the memory when it comes to importance and significance. And thankfully, there is nothing we can do about it.

Vino

Back to Slovenia for a long weekend, land of nothing but wine as far as I have written, and happy people drinking it and celebrating with it. Celebrating what? Oh nothing more than their view on the hill, one another, and their fortune in living here. Many of these smiling and sturdy people are staying for the long haul (January 1 2007 = conversion to the Euro). They like the tourists, who are few for now, and the feeling is likewise.

But if you have family in Slovenia then you are in for a whole other experience. And if you are hosted by the Slovenian family of my friend Margaret, then you are in for a very long and good ride (see … and a Wedding below). Luckily she has friends who can roll with even the most indigenous of her Slovenian bloodline.

We can talk about the first night when our two cars arrived at the border and the border police refused one of us for not having a passport. Then we can mention the ride over to the other border, which from our view in the rear car looked something like this: first car eases up to open border patrol window, slows to a stop, momentary flashing of brake lights and then 0-10 mph in .01 seconds, us gasping and our car lurching to follow, us seeing a thermos of coffee and cigarettes in the window where the nasty guard is supposed to stand looming, us continuing to glide into second and third gear with no lights or flashings or guns or dogs behind, and then stopping with the first car about 10 miles later at an old train station in the middle of the night to do a spirited dance and boogie celebrating our alleged border jumping. But we won’t mention that, and this blog will be posted long after we have made our return escape. We can also talk about how beautiful our apartment was that night at 2am, seven people comfortably nestled on another hillside filled with wine, and a refrigerator stocked full of the same stuff in bottles.

But when we arrived for breakfast the next morning at 8am at the vineyard of Margaret’s uncle, we had no clue. Or perhaps the skinned goat wrapped in blue plastic next to the unassembled spit and the growing wood fire was our first clue. Second clue might have been the filled white wine pitchers next to the piles of sausages and salami for breakfast. A few were shocked. I was giddy.

The morning took off as soon as the third wine glass was emptied, fittingly since the wine we had just drunk was being replaced by the wine we were about the pick. But as I now know, wine doesn’t grow on trees, sweet and lovely white and light purple grapes do. As we were enjoying breakfast with very young and very old family members under the tressle, more and more people had arrived, so that the orchard below had turned into a parking lot around the now be-spitted skinned goat. Then buckets large and small appeared and a wooden press was pulled out of the wine cellar below the house along with massive plastic drums. The oldest women began peeling potatoes and hauling red meat for lunch into the kitchen, and I was given a shot of plum brandy before a large old bucket was slung to my back and everyone walked to the vineyard top about 300 feet up a small hill.

There were about 25 pickers and 6 haulers, and I was the happiest hauler of all time. Tim and I walked next to each other with a vine row between us like a picket fence, 50 pounds of grapes on our backs as we trudged down the uneven land and sidestepped piles of juiceless grape detritus from last year. Waiting for us at the bottom of the hill at that picnic table under the tressle was a clear jug of wine and a few green bottles of sparkling water, and as a hauler emptied the heavy grapes into the red electric mulcher and then into the massive wet drum below, he would turn to face the hill as another hauler would come down the hill, and there would be a meeting at the wine table. One full clear glass of wine per haul became the norm as the sun baked us and the wine sat in the shade. The pickers, roasting in the sun and moving slowly down the hill with their latex gloves and little vine snippers, thought they had the easy job. But as the day wore on, the haulers had less and less ground to cover, thus increasing the frequency of the meetings at the wine table. By noon, there was no need for haulers, the pickers could just empty their buckets into the mulcher and the drum themselves only 20 feet awa from the vineyard base. Good thing too, because the haulers were very happy - four Slovenians, an American and a New Zealander - all sitting at the picnic table, sweaty and reddened, feeling very, very refreshed. The process a few feet below at the press was old world. The grapes, once mulched, were poured into a barrel press and capped with a nice sturdy piece of wood which was topped with larger ancient blackened 2X4’s and a car jack all squeezed under the top of a hand-made steel frame. The jack would be cranked and the grapes would be pressed down so that the barrel would bulge and juice would seep out the slats down into a reservoir and drain into a bucket, where a pump would be waiting to send the juice through a hose down into the cellar and into a wooden keg, where it would wait to become wine. Magic. As the new juice makes its way to the keg through the cellar it passes a collection of its juice ancestors’ exploits, including older presses with 100 year old wood, kegs full of hundreds of liters of Chardonnay and Riesling, aluminum kegs with wine ready to drink, empty glasses, half full jugs, blackened wine residue. Among all this are crackers, a radio, a crate of beer, a few books and some dirty ashtrays. As he leaned upon his cane, Margaret’s uncle proudly told us with hand gestures and a smile that this cellar is where he comes to get away from it all.

The vineyard houses are not real houses, they are like ice fishing shacks times ten, each one called a gorice. They are there to accommodate harvest time living because they hold a large indoor room for eating and a large kitchen for cooking and that’s it, except for the cellars below which range from the cemented dingy fermented-smelling holds to brick-inlaid modern-drained recessed-lighted secret bungalows. But all hold kegs of old wood and fine wine within. And you would be crazy if you didn’t come to your family gorice in the winter, fire up the wooden stove, drink wine and dance with a beautiful woman all day. This is also what Margaret’s uncle did to get away from it all, before he broke his back working and the cane became his constant companion.

When we had finished this plot of land we had another plot of land to sweep about 15 minutes away, a smaller plot on a steeper hill with the rows once more lined up and down but this time we began at the bottom and worked our way to the top. The grapes larger, the stalks heavier, the calls for hauls came quickly. Calls to the other pickers sounded as yodels, responses echoing up the hill in cackles like pig calls or Bavarian beer-laden cheers. We were told that in some gorices the pickers are made to whistle while they worked to keep them from eating the grapes. We were asked to eat them to our content. Sun high and hot, no telling if your stomach pain was muscular or wine-related, the 80 gallon drums were filled three times in less than an hour. The uncle, our host, sat in the shade, pulled up his baseball cap, and thought of dancing with beautiful women as he stared at the grass.

Another 15 minute ride back to the first gorice and there was a feast waiting in the shade of umbrellas and the tressle. The goat was a shade of its former self, chicken and beef on massive platters, warm noodle soup, and peppers from the garden dotted the parts of the tables not holding jugs of wine and bottles of that lovely sparkling water. Roasted chestnuts in a pot were handed out, picked from the trees above us and warmed on the goat fire. Different wines were carried over to the table, the men worked into the night to squeeze every dram of future wine out of the grapes, and the moon came up slowly in a haze to tell us that perhaps it was time to think about going home. No aching muscles, no aching heads, a few ripped shirts, some sunburned faces, and everything on us covered in dirt and smelling sticky and sweet. Once back at the apartment overlooking the lovely valley and in the distance a humming power plant, I tried to spend as much time outside to catch my breath in the growing wind. Windmills, designed to spin small blocks of wood around to scare away grape-eating birds, could be heard all around the valley like walking ghosts clanging pots in the night. We uncorked one final bottle of Riesling on the wooden benches outside, and listened.

Munchin

Like any place, Munich is hard to leave but even harder to stay while you watch someone else leave. That’s the beauty of how it feels to be there, and anything less than the full compliment of your friends and you feel as if something is missing. After the wedding a few didn’t make it back to Munich at all, went back to their ports of call, but luckily a few had some extra days in Bayern, unthreading the ball of string a little longer, until I left to back to work, and then the ball didn’t exist anymore, perhaps becoming a partially drunken beer. An open bottle of Bavarian beer keeps for a day, you can still drink it later, but if you refrigerate and re-cap it, you can swig that baby a week or more later. Been there.

I’m on a train back to my day job from Munich, starting the last round trip I’ll have to make this summer. Munich is a pleasure palace to return to, because its red city trains you begin to see as soon as you get about 5 kilometers from the city. It means you are home, you could get on one of them, forget everything and be in the middle of the city, needing only to write a sign saying “Hauptbahnhof” and hold it while falling asleep and someone will wake you when you are there. I haven’t done this, yet. Once in the city you take the varied colored underground train lines to shoot through and around the city, and above ground you can take the blue colored electric trams or Mercedes buses to link you to within a ½ kilometer of every possible destination you could desire, and not desire. Add to these the trains’ comfortability, cheapness, and timeliness factors and you have a public transportation system that rocks not only your casbah but the original Casbah itself.

Alone on a train with a bag full of your necessary unmentionables is the essential European adventure. Being on this one now floods my memory banks with the varied and sundry train experiences of the past: midnight train from Milan, sleeping in the luggage hold with Ben, hiding from the polizi; tired feet stinking but relaxing on the seat across after a hike in the Alps; watching my family and their heads wobble comfortably on our way to Denmark for the first time. It’s so easy to sit here and be taken somewhere, my seat low on the train so my butt rides just above the tracks below, four seats to myself and this laptop and a few jelly-filled donuts with a cappuccino. The sun rising on the opposite side of the train, occasional trees saluting from within a field of corn, cars stopped on a Saturday morning waiting for me to pass before they drive over to the next village’s bakery.

For 18 Euro there is a train ticket - called the Bayern Ticket of course - with which one can spend the entire day on the trains of Bavaria, moving across the entire region through countless villages, stopping to explore that church or eat at the gasthaus or check out the beer selection in that gas station, and when you get back to Munich you ride all public transportation that day for free. 18 bucks. Baby. This is why teaching and summer vacations are so lovely. And if you don’t teach and only have your weekends off, you can use the Happy Weekend ticket, which does the same thing for 25 Euro but for two days and with parts of Austria included. Can’t lose.

My point? Yeah, I have none. Just that this city, if there was a competition or a brawl or a Survivor show that pitted city against city, is a place that I just might be forced to fight for.

Am I drunk? Of course not. I just get intoxicated by simple things here. Then, you drink beer and you realize that you must not keep writing in your blog unless you explain to those not savvy that beer is a very large part of the culture here, that it is similar to smoothies or soda fountains or McDonald's. All of them give you a high of some kind, that's why we go there - to feel good - and beer in Bavaria has been around for more than four times as long as America has existed. It feels good, just like my blog.

Me and my Cornfields

What I’ve come to learn from nearly 50 days in east southern Germany I can relate in terms of the greatest natural resource here. It’s all about corn. I’ve realized that the depth of a cornfield and its growth are deceiving, I respect the orderly nature of its planting, and the fact that they stand up to numerous peltings of rain and mud. Taken as a whole, cornfields are beautiful, slightly ubiquitous, and you should not allow yourself get too caught up in one, lest you get a wee lost.

I want to remind myself, for the last time please, that every unknown situation will become known in time. All that is foreign will become familiar. It changes. It can’t help it. While the remote strangeness of the rolling hills and small villages no longer makes me wince, the daily confusion of work has passed into grudging acquiescence of a helpless situation, so now I am proficient in waiting and able to use small amounts of time for good use. Then of course there are still the times when I sit and have no idea what I am doing teaching in the middle of a forest.

The trees are some tall naked variety, platinum stalks shooting for the same thing from different angles, and all of the rest of us playing beneath their lowest foliage. Some guy told me yesterday we were Ewoks, and we are everywhere just like the wind and rain storming around and through them. More lightening and thunder in one summer than in an entire lifetime of Midwest Illinois farmland summers.

Perhaps it’s the corn. If only the movie people looked up a little more often out here. Unfortunately, the mud everywhere forces you to look down most of the time. The heat during the first two weeks of shooting was unbearable, but now ice packs have given way to hand warmers, sunscreen off and parkas on, and the shorts have been shipped or packed away for weeks. Food continues to be plentiful, and the drink truck is full, the food truck re-filling daily, and the kitchen trailer is our hearth with warm soupy smells. The camera truck has a crate of beer in it, the sound truck too. But the construction and lighting trucks are both dry. The costume and makeup trailers are always filled with cigarette smoke, and the trailers that house the kids and their distractions are filled with heaters roaring unnecessarily at full blast, making children and their smells a little steamier. So I have a classroom, it’s a tent with a table and a couch in it, and when I am here alone I turn off the gas heater, and when I leave and come back someone has put it on full blast again. The kids like to hang out and listen to Johnny Depp on my iTunes, just not be in the steamy trailer with the dozen other smelly kids. I leave one flap open for ventilation and quick escape into the woods behind, where I like to pee. I don’t go number 2 on the job, it seems to have turned off until the evening when I am back in my hotel room with a couch and balcony, over at the Wellness Center and Health Spa that I have called home for something like a month now.

In the evenings here I leave my nook and walk down the road 200 meters and to the triumphant Disneyland of Spas, where two restaurants and a massive buffet are open till 11pm, with a crappy nightclub, a large rurally decorated hall adjoining to a smaller hall, and a very civilized dining room for all the guests, those who are staying in the 1200 person spa and health center. Germans are healthy people, they go to places like this to sauna, relax, swim, get massages, do absolutely nothing, and then go eat tons of food and drink great beer and dance till they get sweaty in the evening, then go to sleep and do it all over again. Of course, in the middle of this sprawling healthopolis lay the spark plug of the wellness engine - a fairly large biergarten with padded benches and live accordion music every night, played to the background of a Korg keyboard and its pre-programmed Deutsche Volkslieder. Here you can find many people of the older persuasion in tight-fitting hot pants or sweaters tied around their necks, whooping it up to the sounds of slightly flat singers. And naturally, everyone is smoking. It’s pretty sweet to have this only 200 meters from the quiet and gentrified place I am calling home. A walk past (or through) yet another cornfield and you are there, which makes the rollicking rolling return walk all too easy. Oh, and all the food and beer is cheap, far cheaper than anyone of you can imagine coming out of a place which I just called a Disneyland. A biergarten in a wellness center. Me in a wellness center. Both very funny.

… and a Wedding.

If you are already married and therefore rightfully partial to the backdrop of your own ceremony, let me say that a close second will have to be the remote winey hills of eastern Slovenia. It’s shocking and worth so many words and photos and more words just because I had no idea that this existed where it exists. Bam upside your head gorgeous, and right feeling.

Every good wedding calls for scotch, even at 10am. So after breakfast the men of the village (well, about 5 of us) went to the groom’s room and sat with him, a finger of Bowmore in each glass. And there was much rejoicing. Suits were hung on the doortops with care, while the smell of lip balm and makeup filled the air. There was bustling and clicking, shaving and spraying, but not by anyone in our room. We had scotch, 15 year old scotch, and we had no intention of getting dressed too soon, just to seep sweat into nice suits on a hot, still Slovenian day. Besides, there was a groom to take care of.

I shaved my beard off eventually and raked the mole on my chin open, so I had another scotch while holding a reddening tissue to my lower jaw, smooth move baby. It stopped by the time everyone gathered downstairs in the bar hall around a monstrous table filled with meats and cheeses and twisted baked bread. Good thing. Tissue on the chin is a conversation killer.

Slovenian tradition calls for a wedding to occur on a Saturday, to have dinner and party, and for the guests to not leave the party until Sunday morning at sunrise. You do the math. Have you ever been to one of these?

I mean, there was the wedding, so lovely in the church. Then there was the procession along the road to our hotel, with a horse and buggy for the couple, led by a pair of slightly sloshed but good folk musicians, the accordian player especially swaying more than he needed. Once we arrived at the hotel a civil ceremony was performed outside, so both God and The Man had given their blessings. Oh and there was post-ceremonial wine passed around to all by the priest and then later by the justice of the peace. Then everyone walked upstairs to the hall for the great reception. To the background sounds of the increasingly sloshed accordian player in his dual role of verbose MC, we sat in lovely groups and began to eat, and this is where legends are made. We began with soup, then sliced elk meat, then a big salad, then a HUGE PLATTER of veal, chicken, elk, pork, and beef, enough for 8 people but intended for only the four people within reach, and we are talking massive platters, so four for a table of 16 people. Then we rested and out came the cake and deserts, and did I mention the cookies that were always there, and the water and the wine? Oh there were cookies, and oh there was wine. And after the dessert there came ANOTHER platter of schnitzel, baked and schnitzelled chicken and potatoes, and after that another soup, and finally, a wafer thin mint. We were like hobbits, with second dinner coming around 2am.

Basically, you eat in order to drink, and you drink to dance, you dance to eat, and all of it works in a circle until you realize the sun is rising and you are wide awake, and maybe even a little hungry again. At least one person failed to do the eating part of the circle and was a total mess. The rest of us were damn fine, and had a glass of wine at 6am to celebrate how cool we thought we were for pulling it off. We outlasted the entire Slovenian side of the family, but come to think of it, they had to drive home.

…Reunions…

I have carried precious cargo, but rarely the father of a bride in a rented car, and I didn’t break him nor try to, though I did stall the car a few times which he thought very funny, and asked if I knew what I was doing and offered to help. We needed a guide to get us to the city of Ptuj (pi-too-ey, yes, just like that) and John was born in a town just over those mountains over there, and perhaps we could also go there today he probed several times (but we didn’t, something about a wedding rehearsal at 5pm or whatever). He proved to be as much a tourist as the rest of us. So, I spent my first Slovenian day after my first Slovenian night (song cue) rummaging around a surprisingly perusable castle once the home of monks, then Romans, and finally an absurdly dressed line of German princes sent to look over their territory and collect cold cash from the poor, and to this I say PTUJ!

But by word of mouth all our party from the night before came to the same castle at different times, and soon the whole place was crawling with English-speaking people taking pictures, some of which were where one person will take a digital photo and then five other people will want the same photo taken on their own cameras, meaning five-times everything from the first photo. I understand why, but really, we all should get used to scheduling those photo-sharing parties for after the event.

That evening was the wedding rehearsal at the church 300 meters away from our hotel, with its magic aged tower endlessly peaking over a small chapel that can barely hold its artifacts and treasures let alone a wedding audience. All was normal until a few people quietly walked in on the rehearsal. It seems a well-known relic painting rests above the chapel altar, just behind the bride and groom now, and this painting attracts pilgrims in long caravans and large buses, part of a Relic Review if I may be so not-clever. The work is placed just perfectly so that, when the crowd of about 50 people finished trickling into the oh-so-very-small chapel, they seemed to turn to the bride and groom, gaze upon them with smiles, and sing lovely four-part harmony to them. They were far enough away, you couldn’t really see that their gaze and thier voices were focused just a millimeter above the heads of the priest and Margaret and Tim, and on the painting behind. So I stood at the door, checked for any stragglers, closed the church door again and quietly assumed that these were the all of Margaret’s Slovenian family members who couldn’t come to the wedding the next day, and just popped in to sing to them, and all of this made me and many of us smile. Tradition? Close family? No, after the song they all just left.

Back at our hotel, there was a very large room with a very small bar and several long tables. Stairs led to the level above it, a balcony ringing the lower room and sharing the tall wooden-beamed ceiling, the balcony running by the huge kitchen and ending at the entrance to a large hall that was already being decorated with flowers in white and soft green for the wedding reception the following day. Directly below this room, back on the first floor and opposite the tables and bar, lay a sunken room with brick ceilings resembling a wine cellar, except it was filled with solid old wood tables set upon old upright barrels or notched into booths lined with equally old wood. Along the walls were shelves, and on the shelves were various implements of farming that were as old as the land. Throughout our time in Slovenia we would be told the uses of every one of the tools or devices, which resembled tools of torture more than of the land, especially highlighted along the walls of this cold brick cave. But this night, our widening wedding party once again slowly gathered to fill the room and all the tables, with the last of the new arrivals dropping their bags and grabbing a seat, the bartenders busily shuttling into the cavern, the kitchen working late. Plates of pizza with a sunnyside egg on top, steaming buckwheat porridge in a heated crock, hearty brown goulash with mystery meat, wild boar with polenta, mushroom soup, long phallic sausages, and so much more came out and went down, to make room for more and more wine (again, from the hill across the patio) provided to us by the bride’s mom and dad, whose generosity to her daughter’s guests deserves more than just a mention in a blog. They flat-out took great care of us, thanked us way too much for making the long trip to Slovenia, and smiled at our satisfaction with everything in and around us. Tim’s mom, she was always smiling and stayed up way past her bedtime smiling every night to keep us “young people” company and out of trouble.

As the night continued, we realized that this was the first time so many of us had been in the same room in over a year, marked by an increase in the fluttering flashes of digital cameras, some with the ability to take movies, and all with red-eye reduction turned ON. The movies have been rated T, for teachers only. And with all the next morning to awake, eat breakfast, shower, shave (women too), lounge, drink whiskey, and try to relax the groom, with the wedding only a short walk down and up the vine-lined road, we all meandered to our various receptacles of sleep. Except for those few who had to call a taxi 20km away into our pitch-black heaven to drive them to the other two hotels just a few kilometers away. For those of us walking to our rooms, it was oddly OK to pass the taxi driver at the bar waiting patiently for his passengers, drinking his second beer.

Roadtrips…

My week and a half in Slovenia and then Munich was freedom, a great pause in the Great Film Project and a sweet and sturdy wedge filled with friends, plus a nice continuation of the life I had left exactly a year ago. It’s best said with picture accompaniment.

The autobahn was not as lovingly fast as usual, Germany rolling slowly by in raining grey from top to bottom, until we crossed over into Austria where the road signs turned a lighter blue and we entered the mountains. We met long tunnels south of Salzburg and all the way through the country, a highway contained in tunnels burrowed into the feet of tall hills, one after the other each no shorter than half a kilometer. The end of one left a half minute of daylight before the next hill towered above you, with fog falling from the top down its sides and through tall thick trees and lush untouched greenery, evaporating as the tunnel’s mouth opened and the VW glided safely through the mountain’s side and beneath its belly for another few minutes. This went on for a few hours and until we came across the signs for Graz, a city I thought may be in Slovenia, but it would be another few hours before we pulled up to a muddy wet river and into a gully that was the Slovenian border. No strip search, but definitely a passport check and our one word, “Jeruzalem” before we dipped into first gear, second and third gear, up over a bridge and into the former Communist territory previously called Yugoslavia.

The signs showed towns whose names we couldn’t help but butcher and we laughed at our naïve ignorance in the confines of our German auto, four Americans on their first drive into the heart of Eastern Slovenia, listening to Cher and U2 (aka, the BonoRail) on the radio. We won’t talk about starting in the wrong direction, because we never were lost. We will talk about finding ourselves creeping up a road pointed straight for our destination, then turning off the road at the sign we gloriously and triumphantly discovered pointed us to our own promised land (Jeruzalem), and then driving up a slow road arched by tall trees straight out of Marin county California. We crested the hill, emerged from the trees and saw a great sprawling valley before us stretched to the horizon miles around, a valley literally filled with vineyards terracing in all directions from the bushy green trees at the valley base and up uneven rolling hills to the top, meeting our road and the few old houses built next to it. This one road dove and rose up every hill we could see, one ancient path now paved with a few tributaries connecting everyone, the view on both sides showed only more vineyards, more hills, houses. Infinite flowers, natural and not pristine, everywhere, green lushness in every direction.
Where on earth did this come from? In moments we rose up a hill and drove past the church where Tim and Margaret would be married, and past the place we would eat that night. We came to one of the hotels and finally up and over around and down we arrived - via a hairpin turn that almost sent us tumbling (happily?) into another vineyard - at our hotel, settled also at the crest of a hill. All of this would be our environment and our home for five days, with all our old friends from Munich coming by this same road to this same rolling valley. And as we pulled up, Margaret’s mom came out with a big smile to welcome us to her country, and there wasn’t a sound outside the car except familiar voices laughing and the scrap of gravel beneath feet.

Dinner was a long table with many plates filled with bacon, pork, sausage, lard, bacon fat, veggies with spicy peppers, local mild onions and pickled artichokes, and bread, all home-made, home-grown, or home-cured. The wine in unlabeled bottles came from the kitchen in waves, homemade from the vines outside the window (“This wine comes from over there”) accompanied by natural sparkling water that came with its own carbonation from the ground an hour away, at a spring that Margaret’s dad wanted to take us to, badly. As long as you kept eating, you could keep drinking and mixing your sweet Muscat with the sparkling spring water. Eating is essential in Slovenia, because drinking is essential in Slovenia. Therefore, the food tends to be the kind that sticks to you, so you can unstick it again, with something nice like good wine. Highly scientific, highly civilized.

The house itself was a maze of oldness, with old wood lining every angle and crevice, an old bar in a nook and the opposite staircase that turned round behind the old stove which they still use to bake their bread. The other side of the stove was ceramic and heated the room behind it where we were told stories of how children would sit on it as the bread was kept warm below. The staircase rose higher into levels of small eating areas, all contained under an old wood roof with hatch windows that showed us the starry night and the quiet valley of wine dark and silent. A room off the highest level was a bedroom renovated but with a corner that still preserved its centuries old natural ground, with a natural dirt mound for a bed, and a sparrow that had gotten in through the window and was content to rest on the dirt. I refused to look for the bathroom and chose the edge of the vineyard, standing with a very principal character at my former job, acquiring a mound of teenie bugs on my back that I returned to the group with.  They appreciated the relieving story but killed the bugs.

Back down in the dining room, the cook / owner kept bringing more wine and the people kept getting louder and the music changed from the traditional to the inane to the radio to German drinking songs to nothing. Conversation. The table went from pristine and orderly to a slew of empty bottles and mounds of meat and bread. And digital cameras. Around it sat friends from Denmark and England, New Zealand and Ireland, the US and Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Slovenia, all connected not only by this marriage but from past encounters and old friendships. It was a night that made even the most subtle connections stronger just by our seats around this common table, in this small old room in this house which had stood for centuries on a hill above terraces of vineyards with a moon hidden behind clouds above. I couldn’t help but keep saying, “How cool is this?” and “Life is so f***ing good…”, or “I’m going to go pee again… no outside… I’m serious, c’mon..”

About one hundred hours later we realized that some very important people were not really wanting to drink or eat anymore, nor could they, so they were whisked away the 2 kilometers up and down hills in the dark to the three hotels, headlights working overtime in the pitch darkness to catch the details of slowly passing crops and hedges where animals might lurk, illuminating the road just a little late around the hairpin turns, all the way home. Safe.

Day 3 and Beyond

I can’t complain. I am being paid to work on a film set over the summer, a behind the scenes look at the making of a kidz movie, German style. I know that TON is sound, DREHEN means the cameras are rolling, PROBE is rehearsal, and the kids have to go though GARTEROBE and MASK before they sit around waiting for a few PROBE before beginning to DREHEN, at which time everyone should be LEISE, BITTE or else you will be shhshed at, perhaps even in English. It’s all interesting but takes a lot of waiting around on my part, waiting for the chance hour when I can drag one or both boys over to a table and sit them down in front of a Biology book. They are so overjoyed. And the fact that the other kid actors don’t have schoolwork to do sometimes kills these two kids. Too bad. I’m not here to watch you twerps work, I’d rather be knitting. Get over here and tell me about photosynthesis. And you ask me, Matt, do you know anything about Chemistry or higher maths or exothermic reactions, or um ANYTHING outside of English? And I say yes, because I read the books the night before and I look up the big words.

My first weekend in Germany had me moving hotels from the dorm in Isolatedville to join the young cast and their caregivers in a large Guest House 2 km outside a small village which itself is 4 km from the closest thing to a commercial village (read: has a train station with service to Munich, and a bank and a grocery store). The best things about this place were their functional international phone service and the lovely setting in the fields of nowhere. I made long, cheap calls to Munich, and in the evening to Canada and to mom and dad. With two days at the hotel alone and two days on the set (14 hour days), I had taught a total of only 2 hours, which stinks and drives a working man crazy, but it allowed me to settle into what I could expect in life both on the set and off. I found my bearings enough to borrow a car, remember how to drive stick, and get the business end of my movie job sorted out at another gorgeous small farm also in the middle of a corn field, complete with wireless internet and chickens running around, cats nursing kittens and a full production studio occupying the barns and stables. When in the middle of nowhere, the movie business finds a way.

I came to enjoy walking out of the hotel in the evening to see the deer grazing in the pen, flowers folded wildly into the front of farm houses, and the kind family that ran the farm and the restaurant/hotel. They would take their own time serving you, so eating became a ritual of listening for the door to creak open in the backroom, which meant someone was home, and then hoping not to hear it creaked closed again without them noticing that you were there in their restaurant with a menu in hand, waiting.

On set, I became accustomed to being inconspicuous and innocuous, moving in the shadows, trying not to get in the way or eating too much food. I did quickly meet some set people eager to speak English to me, camera and sound and costume people wondering what I was doing there, and I answered Teaching even though I was making sandwiches or wandering aimlessly or asking someone if I could help, in any way, please, because I was so bored.

I had a weekend off after 10 days, and I took the first train 2 hours to Munich, having packed the night before in total excitement of getting the hell back to my people and be reunited with all of our old friends loosely scattered all over the world to celebrate our friends’ wedding in the exquisite wine region of Slovenia. Our weekend in Munich was full of bike riding, our shrunken stomachs being stretched by lovely meat and beer and cheese, and memories around every corner, though we avoided going to our old neighborhoods for fear of tears and tight throats. Every day new people would arrive in Munich for the wedding, every night was another dinner with the bride and groom and their family, and every late night was back to the comfort of my friends’ empty house to rest my aching, out-of-shape North American body, sit with their cats, and realize, over and over, how much I loved Munich.

Now, the only reason I was even available to take this tutoring job was because I had a ticket to Munich for this wedding, so I changed my ticket to give me two months of paid work in Germany instead of just the two weeks of money-dropping vacation. So, after this weekend off I worked 1 ½ days on the set to earn some extra cash, and oh was I a restless, grumpy, demanding and ruthless teacher. Then, I giddily hopped onto an evening train to Munich with a beer in my belly and spent one night with cats on my head, the apartment now heavy with friends heading to the wedding, camping out on the floors. Thursday morning, as the rain poured and the fine couture carefully packed, I plopped behind the wheel of a rented VW Golf, directions in hand, and sped on the rainy autobahn past Salzburg through the mountains of Austria and into the winding unknown roads meandering through sparse and beautiful flat villages into Slovenia. 

Destination: Jeruzalem.

From a Pacific beach to a farm in Lower Bavaria, via Toronto and Montreal…The Bad News Bears Begins

Last time you found me here I claimed that I never rode the Giant Ferris Wheel though I did eat at the Wendy’s and poured tokens into all the driving games at the Marvel Comics arcade (complete with Incredible Hulk Black Light Mini-Golf, only $10 a round!), all on the sunny slopes of Niagara. But what of Toronto? And shall I say it was hot there? The fans were on overtime, the cats sat in strangely warm places, curled into a chair tucked under a table or perched on the tallest cabinet (they are so cool they can stand the heat). Maximilliam von der Stadt and Gretl von Boondocks only appeared in the apartment for one daily cuddle session, and then back to their hiding places. The mornings were good for cat wrestling. The humidity I could stand, this Californian had made enough trips to western Illinois in the summer to know humidity, but without AC, the great balancer, Toronto heat was rough, rough enough to force us into sleeping positions and places that afforded even the slightest breeze, and sometimes all the breeze was from our collective snoring. There were movies watched, bad TV laughed at, friends seen and stories unearthed, cold good food made (stove is off limits, except for desperation nachos), and lots of conversation between the two of us over wine and beer and water (the first two are pretty expensive in Canadia, but that doesn’t stop you).

Before too long Montreal was our destination, via Union Station. The cottage brought relaxation, and the company, jubilation. (endation) Nothing like sinking into a paddle boat on a quiet lake with friends lazily sitting on the floating dock behind you, to feel the lake beneath your body, nothing to do but pass the copious magazines and books, the suntan lotion, and the next beer, and engage in backgammon wars while shirtless and wondering what time it is may be. There were Wonder Woman flashbacks and various takes on Jenga which involved forgetting about building a stupid tower and just firing your spare blocks at another person’s spare blocks in hopes of breaking up their mess of blocks. And do you know Suger Pie? We do now. Best had with a good Islay whiskey. Poutin? Oh yes. Unibroue beer and “the white wheat beer with the white horsie on it”? Oh my, this is part of Montreal. All that and more, plus a family dog named Early (with the fat splayed-leg gait), as well as that great and growing feeling that you will be coming to this home and this family for a long time – that is Montreal for us, for me. We had been looking forward to meeting our friends there and at their cottage since last summer when we did the same thing for the first time. Isn’t it nice when expectations are totally blown out of the water?

And not long after, too short for this writer, he had to board a plane for the old land once called home, Germany, even though he had left that home to return to his oldest home only to giddily move to a new home, and now had to leave that home for a less-old home. So why leave home for another home only to come home? To work on the set of a great and powerful movie in the middle of the forest among people you don’t know who speak a foreign language and who know what is expected of them, and you don’t! Oh Yes! I can only tell you that we are working on a movie that I will call the Lord of the Flies, or as my friend Aimee suggested, in bad German, “Die Schlecht Nachrichten Bernen” and I am in charge of teaching two of the Lords (or are they flies, or bears) all the subjects they will miss in school as a result of a summer’s worth of starring in this movie in the middle of nowhere, etc…

I can tell you how it began, with the plane ride, beginning at midnight and ending six hours later, noon in Munich. My seat mate, some dude all in red next to me who didn’t know the meaning of shared space, arm rest and leg room included, but the poor guy looked more nervous than rude, so I let him have some of my legroom and while he spaciously dozed I would push him back to his side in his sleep. But opposite the aisle I saw a six-man heavy metal band from Toronto, each with a different version of bad hair, who were totally stoked to be heading to Munich and to France and to be getting the whole thing paid for and yeah-shit-ohmygod-dude yes, like where are we playing again? All night. And they watched all three movies, The Shaggy Dog, The Pink Panther, AND The Jennifer Aniston Latest, and yes I tried to sleep through all of them and couldn’t.

In Munich, I began to see all those memories of living there and my heart began to ache just as my head and body were sore from the night’s adventures. I didn’t have time to hang out and think about it all, I had much to do before sundown, including finding friends, downing a liter of beer and a having a lovely swim. When you leave a place you love via a certain route, and then come back to the place with good memory and the route totally set in reverse, it’s quite an experience for the heart and mind. Except that you are not with the people you were with the first time. The people change, not the place. It’s the people that now make my heart ache. Some are missing from this tableau, and I wish they were here.

The next morning I hauled all my baggage in the sun to a spot to await the driver to take me to the far east side of Germany, where the film crew and sets and children awaited, about a 2 hour drive through small villages, rolling grassy hills and rows of wheat and corn. Then I was tossed with luggage in the smallest of all villages, the car drove away, I was showed my dorm-like room and small television, and I was alone in the German language.

So began the survival skills. First, work. I tried the room phone, it didn’t work and needed someone at the front desk to connect me, so I follow instructions and the line goes dead. Go to front desk and there is no one there, no one in the hotel. Go onto the streets, still no people among the quaint European village surroundings. Grabbing handwritten map of town in the room under the phone, I go in search of Phone and Food. Find phone, call the film company for instructions on what to do, and call back again when money runs out. Then I find from my boss (first time I’ve ever talked to her) that I am free for the day. Second: I call Dot, and I run out of money again. So, now to find change. The town seems to be closed, and as I explore the cobblestone streets that turn around old homes and a church and a few businesses, I discover that the whole town is closed. The map says there is a gas station, which must be open, so I wander out of town and find it, where two small girls are running the front desk. Third: supplies, I buy a phone card because my German is so bad that I am informed that this may help me make phone calls (you need a cell phone first), but buying this useless card gets me the most small change possible. Quickly in the heat I am off into another far little corner of the village and into its closing supermarket to search barren shelves for bread and cheese, my dinner. Finally it’s back across village to the hotel to take a long awaited shower, eat, and to notice that Once Again It’s Only CNN, damn, but I wonder where in the world I am and where everyone else could be… the people I left in Toronto and the people I am to work with in the movie bizz. At this point the sky is darkening, and still no one on the streets, and my loneliness is pretty harsh, and damn I am tired. But I arise to get back to my new routine of walking to the dimly lit pay phone booth, which greedily eats my accumulated pocket change as I count down the time left in another phone call to Dot…hang up sadly, and then… all is dark, the phone is dead, and I am broke. I wander to the hotel, no one is there still. I walk down a different street, and I get out of the town hoping to find SOMETHING open to get more small change to call someone on the pay phone to ease my loneliness and find to my lovely surprise a little restaurant whose outside garden still looks open, illumined by Christmas lights left up all year. I ask the mysterious waitress in German if the kitchen is still open, and she answers in English that I can have only (my old favorite) a brotzeit teller, so I go WHEE! and I get to sit down with beer from the tap in the cool night under dim lights. But still, all alone. Did you see 28 Days Later? And after Toronto, I didn’t want to be alone like this. Anyway, just like me, after my first Bavarian meal, when I had paid up and the colored lights of the open garden had gone off behind me as I was walking the moonlit streets, I checked my pocket and forgot to get small change money for the phone. I could talk to everyone in North America now, but I forgot to get kleine geld. Just so you know, to paint the picture even worse, I couldn’t sleep, and walked the streets for a sign of life and small change. I remember purposely standing under the stars in the center of town, no one around me but large lit buildings, the cobble stones beneath me are foreign beauty but damn them! and I felt as flat as the crushed pidgeon roadkill buzzing with flies a few feet from my feet.

Ejector Seat

It could be worse, I might be writing you from a prison cell on P.E.I....no, not I.M. Pei. As far as I know, Prince Edward Island is not Canada's answer to Alcatraz, but I have much to learn about this land up north of the USA, where I landed on Thursday June 22 with enough baggage to move here, a suspicion that got me in trouble at the border.

Nice Border Agent: "So, 173 days in Canada, what brings you here for so long, eh?"
Me: "To visit my girlfriend for a very long time...eh?!"
Perhaps Nice B.A.: "Do you have a job?"
Me: "I just quit one."
Rigid B.A.: "So, are you moving here?"
Me: (yes, but I know I need a job first, but I will do that while I am here, but do I tell YOU that, or just lie, can't lie, what IS the truth at this point?...need water...) "Oh nooooo."
Scowling B.A.: "Then why does it say here that you are sending two boxes of personal items?"
Me with massive drymouth: "Well, 173 dayth ith a long thime, I wanted to have my perthonal affecth....(oh boy)..."

The Border Agent then took my customs card and scribbled numbers in red, my eyes grew wider as he highlighted a few lines in fluorescent yellow, and the final mark of a huge diagonal line across both sides of the card in hot pink made my stomach turn. I had never seen so much writing on ANY customs card, ever. The dagger came as he pointed me down a long hallway and to a set of empty cubicles, in the complete opposite direction of where everyone else was walking. I had, indeed, not passed through customs.

After a lengthy interview with a pair of nice guys who asked me all the right rhetorical questions about work, how to get it, what I can and can't do while here, what I was going to do and had been doing before, and also at the end if I knew if Siemens sold its German phones here in the west or were they just sold 'over there,' I made it into a taxi and found my way to the Toronto.

So Canada, I have nothing to hide, but I can't answer all your questions without sitting down. You don't know that I shipped my "personal items" so I could fill my suitcases with my work, credentials, books, and notes on everything I know about getting here and staying here. But thinking about all of it while alone in California provided me my own answers to my own questions until I came face-to-face with real answers from real people, and to ask far more real questions in real-time. 

The Corps of Discovery

"This day I have completed my 31st year, and in all probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this world. I reflected that I had, as yet, done but little - very little indeed - to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation.

"I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of the information which those hours would have given me, had they been judiciously expended. But since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolve to redouble my exertions, or in future to live for mankind as I have heretofore lived for myself."

- Meriwether Lewis, born 8/18/1774,
shortly after being the first American to stride the North American continental divide
and he was born 200 years to the day before me.
Serendipity seems to have some strident notions of its own irony.

Curious, George.

I know I'm not the only one who felt like my intelligence had been spanked during and after watching the movie Syriana. I was walking down the wet street after the movie and I felt vacant, like I had just been slapped and had $11 stolen from me. Because it all began at a point early in the film, when I saw the first scene with Christopher Plummer and my inquiring mind simply wandered back to his days as Dr. Doolitle and his great performances in the Music Man and My Fair Lady and good lord I really hope he really WAS in those last two musicals but I'm pretty sure he was, and I had just finished this meandering with the idea, "Yeah, and look at you now you old Dr. Doolittle" when I realized I had just missed some serious information about his character in the movie, and I immediately was forced to play catch-up for a good hour! Add to that the 400 different geographic locations everyone goes to, and you see that Syriana commands all of your brain all of the time to piece all of everything together, and gives you the sense that if you weren't paying attention 100% of the time, if you had stopped to pluck popcorn off your lap or think about just how they got that shot or ask "Where have I seen that guy before... Ah! That's Basquiat!" then you obviously checked out and have been lost to the whole point of the movie and, man you just didn't get it, did you?! Give me a break George Clooney and stop yelling at me with your skillzz! You forgot that people like me enjoy a mental meander in a movie theater, to listen to the moron behind me who was too stoned to hear the 'no cell phone' announcement, or to just think a little about 76 Trombones or aging actors, or whatever pops up.

Yeesss I did like seeing several mini movies all at once and perhaps it's not important to link everything together into a Eureka!-moment package, so I'll consider the silence of the people leaving the theater more a sign of shellshock than a lack of smarts. But still, George, take your damn Golden Globe back to your Lago d' Como villa and hump it dry, Morbid Batman!



And if you bring your crap into the treehouse we have a hoop below to slam infidel suckahs like this poor trash!

In reality, I am just a passive perimeter shooter who sometimes is forced into post-play because someone's just phoned-in the defense without actually manning up; you know, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes, well, the bear...he eats you.

Tradition!

A fiddler on the roof, a most unlikely sight! It might not be a thing...but then again, it might.
There isn't much going on in the treehouse today, but the views are beautiful. In a city of hills, there is always something unexpected around the next corner, whether it's bathed in a different light than before or the backdrop of sky alters what is seen. The clouds are buttermilk these days, gathering only at the end of a long day of clear and cold blue sky. And as the sun drops, the buttermilk forms in streams of hot pink and lavender, pulled cotton brushed only over a small patch of sky where the sun fell. They are there to catch the colors you can't see otherwise. The lower the sun gets, the more empty sky the buttermilk and pulled cotton stretch across, so that sunset looks as if the buttermilk and cotton families called all their friends in to watch, and nearly half the sky turns deep rich clear colors, more gathering all the time and nearing the darkest of the spectrum. There's a stillness as you watch all the color rung out of the cotton and buttermilk, and you turn around to see that every piece of sky is now been pulled over with the buttermilk and pulled cotton, and all has turned bleached white and absent of all color like ghosts in the presence of a new full moon, the eye of the night show. And this is the light that reflects all night over the lit cathedral and behind the sturdy bare oak trees, the quiet light that pushes down onto the unlit moss and clover which push up to meet it through the gaps between cold wet stones.

And on the third day, there were...

WORDS! Let there be words. And there were. Juuuuust look at 'em. I've mastered the help menu and we are now on our way, but only after another photo taken today.

I can't help but think how music and landscape are essentially linked, at least for me. To have one and not the other for too long is akin to enjoying only the outside of roasted marshmallows or never having lime juice for your gin n'tonic. Today, seeing the ocean roll endlessly into cove after gorgeous coastal cove, and then this evening hearing anything by C.V. Stanford or John Sheppard and JS Bach or WA Mozart, or Bruckner or Gounoud along with that memory brings a rightness, when you light a righteous bonfire on the beach, the unexpected perfect compliment is this pastoral choral music. Some polyphonic vocals give a nice balance of harmony to chaos that everyone really can enjoy, whether you agree with me now or not, you can only try to remember or, having tried say, yeah... you liked it didn't you? And if you, upon such a moment at a warm fire on the water's edge, happened to instead decide to bring in the noise and/or bring in the funk, you knew it would be OK, and it was, wasn't it?... This is music. It provides for all more than we all can control... we relent, for music truly is nature embodied. I don't know anyone who would rather sing in an incensed-cathedral than in a spacious starlit/moonlit clearing among evergreens in the middle of somewhere. Would we have that all the time...

Happy third day of the year - I stop counting on the 10th.

This is just the beginning...