Postcard from an Alien
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
An Alien Summer
"Feeling hot, hot, hot; Feeling hot, hot, hot" What a stupid song! What's so great about feeling hot? Fancy that Frankfurt S-Bahn Experience without the inconvenience of travel? Simply park your car in the sun, engine running, heater on full-blast for an hour or two then get in, wearing a suit, long underwear, a fleece and an overcoat and stay there for the rest of the afternoon. The effect is enhanced by making sure that most of the exhaust fumes are trapped inside the vehicle and happening to have a cassette of "Volksmusik" with you. If you don't own a car, a similar effect can be achieved if you have a large, humid oven.
Europe really doesn't seem to be able to get things right. Whatever happened to Spring and Autumn? You know the picture book ideals of warm breezes and fresh air? Is it really necessary to go from Arctic to Amazon with no pleasant break in between? Why do I only seem to get hayfever on this continent?
Hayfever
I suppose that's what it all boils down to in the end, hayfever. I mean, what a stupid allergy. You spend the "Best Months of the Year" sniffing like a cocaine addict and in a mood similar to Milosovic coming home to find a Kosovar family had moved into the spare bedroom. Sympathy with a 'flu patient runs thin towards the end of the illness, imagine living with a partner suffering from a kind of sinusitic cold and chronic PMS the whole Summer. It's probably all part of The Great Conspiracy: "OK, so what shall we plant to make a large proportion of the population's life miserable for 3 or 4 months of the year? Just think of the increase in sales of paper tissues!". At least it looks like I have too much money and an over-indulgent penchant for cocaine. Sometimes I envy fish.
Bank Holiday Blues
It's another bank holiday here this Thursday. Corpus Christi or "Fronleichnamstag" in German (Lit. "Happy Cadaver Day"). I decided we should take advantage of the long weekend (Our daughter, Becky, has a another day off on Friday) and go to any pollen-free place, preferably with a beach. Nothing. Not a sausage... well OK, sausages are in abundance here, but not a single holiday left to be had. How come everybody does the same thing at the same time... all the time (excepting when you want to spend a lazy day on the balcony and the local chapter of the area's motorbike club decides to use your road as a drag-strip while the neighbour takes the opportunity to put in the new kitchen and spends the day knocking the old one out with a sledgehammer? I think I'm turning into a sociophobe: "I'm sorry M'lud, I realise it was a heinous crime but I've got hayfever."- I wonder if that would work.
Becky has spent the last week or two walking in the forest "hugging trees to hear their hearts beating". I don't know what they're on, but I want some! I'm sure school was never like this.
Pray we don't melt in the meantime (would be a devil to get out of the carpet!). When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
"Here comes the bus"
There was a nutter on the bus this morning. One of the disturbing kind, you know, look just-not-quite-sane but difficult to pin-point yet a good few coupons short of a pop-up toaster. He kept trying to start conversations (already a sure sign of insanity here) by proclaiming the bloody obvious in a loud voice. OK, so we're all prone to playing the "State the Bloody Obvious" game: "Oh, it's raining"; "We're late"; "The train's crowded today"; "You've got a cold"; "You've broken your leg"- you know the kind of thing. But he had a way of saying "Ah, here comes the bus at last." in a way that made it sound like a line from King Lear learned by an auditionee with a near to zero chance of getting the role.
He got on the train full of business people, the fact that he wasn't "dialling with a full key-pad" was not in itself the problem. What I don't get is the way everyone else seemed able to ignore him, whilst I got deeply embarrassed and had to suppress the urge to say something like: "Oh yes, and it's a green one!" or "That's good because it's starting to rain." and therefore be damned to spend the rest of the journey, at 6.30am, unable to escape from a conversation that I really don't want to be having.
I knew someone in Oxford who was a manic depressive, another who used to come and watch us setting up exhibitions who was a paranoid schizophrenic and a girl with repetitive behaviour syndrome. Maybe they know my failing, or there again, maybe I'm simply a nutter-magnet. Whatever it is, why wasn't I taught to ignore disability? Why do I feel guilty for not getting involved? How come they seem to know? Are they just figments of my imagination? Just because I'm not paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get me. Ho hum, "Ah, here comes the bus at last".
There was a nutter on the way back too. This one was in full combat uniform, with all its Bundeswehr regalia. A shaven-headed soldier, about 40-45 years old. He kept telling everybody how tired he was. I was wondering whether that meant "of work", "of life" or "of civilians cluttering up the place and ruining the 'Ordnung'". If he's that tired, does it mean he won't have the energy to pull the trigger or simply that his aim will be off?
Colour? Me? Beautiful!
The walls by the station are covered in graffiti. "Hierarchy is brown" announces one. I always thought it was a kind of off-yellow.
La Condition Humane
I have a theory (well actually I have several, such as: "If everybody stopped eating pork, we wouldn't need pigs". But more of those later) that the line between the A and B that we call "sanity" and "insanity" is being pushed, slowly but surely towards B. I see more and more people happily chatting away to themselves, drivers seem to be possessed on the roads and facial twitches are the norm. Perhaps we're experiencing the "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers", only they're not advanced life forms but aliens, a few flashing lights short of a starship. "Revenge of the Looney", "The Day the Earth went Mad", "They came from Bedlam", "When Heads Collide", this is just the prequel.
The German police found two babies, cut up and wrapped in their parents' freezer on Tuesday 8 June. So it goes.
Paranoia
Nutter alert!...stop... Man on platform reading Frankfurter Allgemein Zeitung...stop... Aloud...stop... Very aloud...stop... Looks like he would like to say...stop... "Here comes the train"...stop... Has crutches...stop... Chances of catching up with me minimal...stop... At ease...stop...
The unspeakable in search of the unplayable
I've decided it's time I filled my obligations as a man. I want to get interested in football. I tried it once before, when I was about 12 years old. The motivation was different in those days though, I just wanted to fit in, join the lunchtime conversation, and have some heroes. I didn't want to choose a team at random, so I did some careful study. I didn't want to simply choose a team by virtue that they never lost on the pretext that it might not look like an authentic interest. I decided that Watford would be a safe bet. What was more, Elton John was the manager. It didn't last long however, about two weeks, as far as I remember. I'm not sure, but it may have been something to do with the release of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" that he did with Kiki Dee. Come to think of it, it may have had something to do with the fact that he chose to do a song with someone with a name like "Kiki Dee" in the first place. Still, 23 years on, renewing my interest (in football, not Elton John) seems to be the answer to all my problems. Apart from the obvious advantages of being able to chat freely to the barber or make small talk with taxi drivers, it would make my distain of motor racing and hatred of boxing more excusable. The biggest and possibly most important revelation, however, is the permissible xenophobia inherent in international sport. Even better than this is that you are allowed to hate anyone who doesn't support your team. You can even disagree with those who do. Just think, you can go out on a Saturday and legitimately beat the living daylights out of other people just for the hell of it. What a way of relieving the pressure of the human condition! In fact, presumably, if one chooses a team that nobody else wants to support, you can hit just about anyone. Your team doesn't even have to be the best, you just have to say it is and then lay into anyone who says otherwise.
We were in a furniture store restaurant on Saturday. A man in his mid-fifties threatened to "beat (me) around the ears" because we were waiting for our food and that meant he'd have to walk around us. I tried to tell him we were British and that as such we had invented politeness in the hopes of getting into an acceptable nationalistic slanging match but it went unnoticed. I didn't feel able to justify getting into a fight over a potato gratin, so we simply sat afterwards in shocked semi-silence trying to ignore our sudden lack of appetite. Now if it had been about football!
"Get your tray out of the way!"
"Get lost! And by the way, Bayern-Munchen sucks."
"Right, put 'em up..."
Spend, spend, spend
Damn, even the British have caught it, whatever it may be. They don't seem to be able to enjoy themselves unless they're paying for it.
"Wanna go to the beach?"
"Wossat then?"
"Oh it's this place where the sea crashes around, the seagulls dip and dive in the surf, you can jump about in the waves, swim, dig in the sand, catch crabs in rock pools, make channels for the water to follow, build castles and feed the moat or just laze around watching a little piece of the World go by."
"Sounds good, what does it cost?"
"Nothing, it's free!"
"Oh, well not really"
...
"Wanna go to the beach?"
"Wossit cost?"
" Five pounds per head, seven fifty with lunch?"
"Yeah, sounds great, do I save money on a season ticket?"
Weird.
If you can't buy it, it's no good. If it doesn't flash, beep or tell the time in 5 different zones, it's not worth having. The more wrappers, the more desirable; the less biodegradable, the better.
Perhaps that's what always put me off football in the end. I was, am, never will be averse to kicking a ball around on the grass, it's just that that's not where it ends; it's hardly even where it begins. You have to buy the shirt, the boots (must be the ones with inflatable laces, gold plated eyelets or whatever the current sport-kitsch dictates), the scarf, the video, the satellite TV, even the bloody players are bought and sold for crying out loud. I'd run away with Nel and Becks and join a commune if only the hygiene was better and you didn't have to share a bath with 20 or more New Agers. I don't know, perhaps people would start taking an interest in their surroundings again if they carried a designer label: "Tree by Hugo Boss, Rock by DKNY, Sky by Versace." but even then there would be cheap copies flooding the environment before you could say "Pax Vert": "Trii by Cortier, Rok by Hilficker, Skie by Ray Bon". Generally speaking, people suck. If ignorance is bliss, 95% of the "Free World" must be ecstatic.
A bad bout of Weirditis
Suffering post-flu depression today. At last a chance to get wrapped up in feeling sorry for myself instead of being freaked by the rest of the World. Suddenly things don't seem quite as bad. Which makes me wonder. Maybe the majority of the World has contracted a virus, one that makes them selfish, greedy, inconsiderate and weird. Maybe the minority of us is immune, or only prone to short attacks while our system readjusts to new, more virulent strains. Lauri Andersen said, "Language is a Virus", they say love could be, then why not weirdness?
"So why did you kick the foreigner/invade the neighbouring country/drive like an a*sh*le?"
"Well M'Lud, I was suffering from a bad bout of Weirditis at the time."
It would sure explain a lot of things.
No, wait, it's the World that is sick. I take it all back, people don't have a virus, they are the virus.
They swarm in multitudes, creating vast colonies in their wake, infesting the skin of the planet, feeding off it and leaving it to dry up and flake off. A parasite of the worst sort, one that believes itself to be a symbiote, whilst all the time destroying its host. It all falls into place suddenly, cancer is a condition, scabies and eczema too. The Earth is simply suffering from "The Human Condition". Maybe there's no life on other planets because they have better pest control. Here comes the bus.
What is it good for?
News: World War III has broken out. It must have. This time though it's every man, woman and child for themselves, each of them fighting their own little battles, each of them trying to gain as much territory as possible by any means possible. That must be the explanation for people's behaviour. We are at war, all of us, with each other.
The troops are on the move again. It's a difficult war. Nobody is on your side. Everyone is against you. It's a difficult war.
SMS me Darlink!
I've just realised how I've been wasting my time on the train. I mean, I sit there, simply pondering life's minor mysteries. Life's more major ones, such as where do single socks go when they're washed or why is "abbreviation" such a long word, have already been pondered to death by many, it's the minor ones that have suffered a distinct dearth of pondering, that remain ponderless, screaming silently under the weight of ponderlessness. While I sit there, I read books that ponder the greater mysteries (see, told you), catching up on correspondence or timetabling problems. This morning I experienced what the real world does. Two girls were sat opposite one another, sending messages between themselves via their mobile telephones. One really has to admire this progressive step in the art of non-verbal communication, one square removed from the telepathic dreams of science fiction writers through the ages. Fascinating, most definitely ponderworthy.
Honesty is the best policer
Made a big bad mistake yesterday. Caused a sleepless night. Walking down the back stairs of the bank, I found an IBM Notebook leaning against the cigarette machine. I picked it up and carefully put it in my bag, where it fitted so perfectly. Nobody saw me do it. I walked to my room, closed the door, turned it on and found it to be working perfectly. I replaced it in my bag and headed for the exit, stopping only to hand it in... HAND IT IN! I HANDED IT IN! 10000 marks worth of IBM Notebook and I HANDED IT IN! A moment of weakness your honour, I realise now that I should have walked right on out of there but I wasn't thinking clearly! I plead insanity M'Lud. They thanked me profusely but I know they were as shocked as me. Dear gods, don't let me become an upright citizen, tell me this was just a lapse, I'm too young to be honest.
Got off the train at Neu Anspach to find it crawling with the unpleasant green of the "Kripo" and 2 teenagers handcuffed to the platform shelter. OK, I got the message.
The Brain-Drain
It's started. The unthinkable has begun. OK, so it was pretty inevitable but everyone believes it won't happen to them, oh no, not me sonny boy! Then suddenly you notice it, notice the way it's been slowly infiltrating, crawling through your very being, eating away at supposedly ingrained inscrutable behaviour patterns; seeping in through every pore, wound, orifice, deleting what has gone before, corrupting the read only files held in password protected Zip archives, like a Trojan PC virus. That's what a foreign culture can do to you, yes, YOU! Beware, it is unforgiving in it's degradation of existing memories, and sly to boot. You begin with excitement at the New, then loathing of the Difference and finally it over takes you and you are left with only false memories, nostalgia for things that never were. Catch it before it's too late and you find yourself sitting in an over-stuffed "Rusticale" armchair, "currywurst" in hand, watching "Heimatmelody" and enjoying it! You may look back occasionally to those balmy Blighty beach days; fish, chips and mushy peas; John Craven's Newsround, but suddenly you realise you missed Hallowe'en!
No Trick or Treat, no lanterns, no pumpkin pie, no satanic rituals... you see, false nostalgia at work. Who really gives a damn? Yet somehow it hurts.
Happy Holiday.
It's worse than I thought... The more observant of you may have noticed the date of the last entry: 5 October, a full 27 days before All Saints Day. OK, so you were wondering, but it only goes to prove what I was saying. Whether you think you miss something or actually do, it's all down to the same thing in the end: "The Brain-Drain".
It has long been thought that "The Brain-Drain" was an outflux of scientists, doctors, engineers and other qualified people, but, as I can bear witness, "The Brain-Drain" is nothing more than a condition suffered by those of us who live abroad. "TBD" is responsible for many, many problems seen throughout history. It was "TBD" that made that syphilitic Austrian believe himself to be God, the British believe they could colonise at will and David Hasslehof believe he could make hit records. An ugly thing is "TBD", it must be something in the water.
Feminism is alive and well (but has just taken some time off for good behaviour)
A Discussion between three students (of varying ages and social standing), brought on by an attempt to encourage them to open their mouths, developed as follows:
Me: "Doesn't it bother you that, despite so-called equality, men are still discriminating against women through sexual harassment?"
Student A: "Yes, I know what you mean... there's a bar in Hanau, called 'Shooters' (no joke!) where the waitresses have to wear really short hot-pants and daringly cropped T-shirts!"
Student B: "That's dreadful! What were the managers thinking when they make the girls wear such provocative clothing?!"
Student C: "Yes, it's disgusting! I mean, you have to have the right body for clothes like that!"
Here comes the bus.
Tuesday 26 October
Still haven't missed Hallowe'en yet! I've got my costume sorted out though. I'm going as an Urban Polluter. Yes, I finally own a car... well half a car... the half that's all seats, airbags, radio and important little lights you understand. Nel owns the politically incorrect bits. I mean, I didn't want that dirty engine bit, that was her idea... the aircon too, and the exhaust.
M.A.U., S.i.G.?
It's a 2l "Rennow Skenik" as an overheard comment would have it. It's 21/2 years old, so it's a bit like an old fur coat, dreadful that it was made in the first place but since it was, shouldn't be wasted. And anyway, there's lots of storage for hunt sabotage equipment, placards and anti-establishment propaganda leaflets... Yeah! Not so much a gas-guzzling pollution monster as mobile activist unit or maybe armoured proletariat carrier. And anyway, it's other people who cause environmental damage, not us (at least that's what most seem to think).
Purity and Paranoia
Mailed Proctor and Gamble last night to comment on their latest advertising campaign for the "Swiffer". The main train station and the S-Bahn stations are plastered with relatively cleverly designed 2'*2' stickers showing "The Swiffer" dealing with dirt the likes of which infrequently enter the home. Blazing proudly across the bottom is:
"Der Tag den Deutschen Reinheit"
A cheeky pun on "Der Tag den Deutschen Einheit", the national holiday celebrating "The Day of German Unity", the word "Reinheit" having a possible translation of "Cleanliness". Sadly, this is also an unfortunate "pun" for this country's history, as a dictionary translation would come out as "The Day of German Purity". Hmmm.
Disposable Outcome
Saw a woman on the telly last night who is unable to throw anything away. She lives with her two children in a 60m2 flat surrounded by everything that ever entered the door: milk cartons; fast food packaging (they can no longer reach the cooker) and a variety of detritus, including old plasters stuck on the bathroom wall. I'm not sure why I mention it, there's nothing I can really add to it, except maybe to tell you she's having therapy and is now able to part with small amounts of plastic and carefully selected wrappings. Hopefully she'll be completely cured soon and able to chuck whole heaps of rubbish out of her car window, like the rest of us do.
Paranoia, part 2
7:47- Score so far:
a) People mumbling to selves: 3
b) Drunks: 2
c) People crying 2
d) Excessively fat people 4
e) Unconscious junkies 2
f) Men with nervous twitches 1
g) Men rubbing penis openly 1
(F and G count as one choice)
h) Ugly people 100s
Looks like it's going to be one of those days!
Later:
It was. If all the World's a stage, then who is the make-up artist?
Comfortable Over-stuffed Gentleman
Back to the World of Dreams. I'm sitting on the S-Bahn, which is stuck on the "Saalburg", and, my travel companions and myself have been informed, will be for the next ½ hour or so. Thank goodness I got up early, otherwise I would have missed being squashed on the corner of an under-stuffed uncomfortable seat by a comfortable over-stuffed gentleman.
I found out the other day that German Railway's slogan is "Der Bahn Kommt" (The train is coming). Unfortunately they didn't say when. Personally, I think a better translation would be "Here comes the train" then we'd know whom we were dealing with!
