I love these Germans and their festivals. We just celebrated Fasching last week. Basically, it has the same raison d'etre as Mardi Gras, but with a lot more substance. In my limited experience in the states it seems activities that involve heavy drinking, street dancing, and cross dressing typically exist for the entertainment of drunken frat boys tossing plastic beads and the bare boobied girls who gratefully recieve them. The good citizens stay at home and watch the spectacle from the comforts/confines of their lazy boy tv chair, nodding their head in silent wonder, thanking the good lord their generation never fell for the lure huffing.

Where as here in Germany the celebrations are attended by entire families, from grandpas with painted faces to babies in wicker strollers. No doubt, the alcohol and the frenzied air make for some hedonistic moments, but for the most part this is just good fun. dancing with strangers, arm and arm, grabbing wine from some girls hand and upending it without barly a "could I...?" Drinking beer by the half liter, out of a bottle no less. Imagine that, People drinking in the crowded streets and with glass bottles. No one threw them into the sea of people, no one brandished broken bottles. Just lovely stuff.
And it is a great excuse for an otherwise straight young man from Texas to wear fishnets, feathered boas, and eyemake-up.

American pathology
delusions
believing our own
self-righteous
bloody religious
nationalistic
propaganda
holy vomit
sacred shit
blind eyes to
our precious empire's
violence and greed
and the ignorance
and apathy
from which it springs

trampling Goodness
feeding the powerful
fucking the hungry

we dissent quietly
between grande caramel lattes
calm cool collected
numbified
good citizens.
how mushy
our American minds
so steeped in cynicsm
and twinkies
that horror and atrocity
are lost beneath
the gauze of doughnut glaze
t.v.'s too small
for proper outrage
flatline brainwave
never to rise
to rebuke
the evil
cast our name.


From Bob Herbert: "We know that people were kept in cells that in some cases were the equivalent of animal cages, and that some detainees, disoriented and despairing, have been shackled like slaves and left to soil themselves with their own urine and feces. Detainees are frequently kicked, punched, beaten and sexually humiliated. Extremely long periods of psychologically damaging isolation are routine.
This is all being done in the name of fighting terror. But the best evidence seems to show that many of the people rounded up and dumped without formal charges into Guant�namo had nothing to do with terror. They just happened to be unfortunate enough to get caught in one of Uncle Sam's depressingly indiscriminate sweeps. Which is what happened to Shafiq Rasul, who was released from Guant�namo about a year ago. His story is instructive, and has not been told widely enough."

Google Image Result for http://www.victorynewsmagazine.com/images/TalibanTransit.jpg
On the day that the defense rested in the military trial of Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, American television news had a much better story to tell: "The Trouble With Harry," as Brian Williams called it on NBC. The British prince had attended a fancy dress costume party in Wiltshire (theme: "native and colonial") wearing a uniform from Rommel's Afrika Korps complete with swastika armband. Even by the standards of this particular royal family, here was idiocy above and beyond the call of duty.

For those of us across the pond, it was heartening to feel morally superior to a world-class twit. But if you stood back for just a second and thought about what was happening in that courtroom in Fort Hood, Tex. - a task that could be accomplished only by reading newspapers, which provided the detailed coverage network TV didn't even attempt - you had to wonder if we had any more moral sense than Britain's widely reviled "clown prince." The lad had apparently managed to reach the age of 20 in blissful ignorance about World War II. Yet here we were in America, in the midst of a war that is going on right now, choosing to look the other way rather than confront the evil committed in our name in a prison we "liberated" from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. What happened in the Fort Hood courtroom this month was surely worthy of as much attention as Harry's re-enactment of "Springtime for Hitler": it was the latest installment in our government's cover up of war crimes.


But a not-so-funny thing happened to the Graner case on its way to trial. Since the early bombshells from Abu Ghraib last year, the torture story has all but vanished from television, even as there have been continued revelations in the major newspapers and magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. If a story isn't on TV in America, it doesn't exist in our culture.
The latest chapter unfolding in Texas during that pre-inaugural week in January was broadcast on the evening news almost exclusively in brief, mechanical summary, when it was broadcast at all. But it's not as if it lacked drama; it was "Judgment at Nuremberg" turned upside down. Specialist Graner's defense lawyer, Guy Womack, explained it this way in his closing courtroom statement: "In Nuremberg, it was the generals being prosecuted. We were going after the order-givers. Here the government is going after the order-takers." As T. R. Reid reported in The Washington Post, the trial's judge, Col. James L. Pohl of the Army, "refused to allow witnesses to discuss which officers were aware of events in cellblock One-Alpha, or what orders they had given." While Mr. Womack's client, the ringleader of the abuses seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs, deserved everything that was coming to him and then some, there have yet to be any criminal charges leveled against any of the prison's officers, let alone anyone higher up in the chain of command.

Nor are there likely to be any, given how little information about this story makes it to the truly mass commercial media and therefore to a public that, according to polls, disapproves of the prison abuses by a majority that hovers around 80 percent. What information does surface is usually so incomplete or perfunctorily presented that it leaves unchallenged the administration's line that, in President Bush's words, the story involves just "a few American troops" on the night shift.

The minimizing - and in some cases outright elimination - of Abu Ghraib and its aftermath from network news coverage is in part (but only in part) political. Fox News, needless to say, has trivialized the story from the get-go, as hallmarked by Bill O'Reilly's proud refusal to run the photos of Graner & Company after they first surfaced at CBS. (This is in keeping with the agenda of the entire Murdoch empire, whose flagship American paper, The New York Post, twice ran Prince Harry's Nazi costume as a Page 1 banner while relegating Specialist Graner's conviction a day later to the bottom of Page 9.) During the presidential campaign, John Kerry barely mentioned Abu Ghraib, giving TV another reason to let snarling dogs lie. Senator John Warner's initially vigilant Congressional hearings - which threatened to elevate the craggy Virginia Republican to a TV stardom akin to Sam Ervin's during Watergate - mysteriously petered out.

Since the election, some news operations, most conspicuously NBC, have seemed eager to rally around the winner and avoid discouraging words of any kind. A database search of network transcripts finds that NBC's various news operations, in conscious or unconscious emulation of Fox, dug deeper into the Prince Harry scandal than Specialist Graner's trial. "NBC Nightly News" was frequently turned over to a journalism-free "Road to the Inauguration" tour that allowed the new anchor to pose in a series of jus'-folks settings.

But not all explanations for the torture story's downsizing have to do with ideological positioning and craven branding at the networks. The role of pictures in TV news remains paramount, and there has been no fresh visual meat from the scene of the crime (or the others like it) in eight months. The advances in the story since then, many of which involve revelations of indisputably genuine Washington memos, are not telegenic. Meanwhile, the recycling of the original Abu Ghraib snapshots, complemented by the perp walks at Fort Hood, only hammers in the erroneous notion that the story ended there, with the uncovering of a few bad apples at the bottom of the Army's barrel.

There were no cameras at Specialist Graner's trial itself. What happened in the courtroom would thus have to be explained with words - possibly more than a few sentences of words - and that doesn't cut it on commercial television. It takes a televised judicial circus in the grand O. J. Simpson tradition or a huge crew of supporting players eager (or available) for their 15 minutes of TV fame to create a mediathon. When future historians try to figure out why a punk like Scott Peterson became the monster that gobbled up a mother lode of television time in a wartime election year, their roads of inquiry will all lead to Amber Frey.

A more sub rosa deterrent to TV coverage of torture is the chilling effect of this administration's campaign against "indecency" through its proxy, Michael Powell, at the Federal Communications Commission. If stations are fearful of airing "Saving Private Ryan" on Veterans Day, they are unlikely to go into much depth about war stories involving forced group masturbation, electric shock, rape committed with a phosphorescent stick, the burning of cigarettes in prisoners' ears, involuntary enemas and beatings that end in death. (At least 30 prisoner deaths have been under criminal investigation.) When one detainee witness at the Graner trial testified in a taped deposition that he had been forced to eat out of a toilet, that abuse was routinely cited in newspaper accounts but left unreported on network TV newscasts. It might, after all, upset viewers nearly as much as Bono's expletive at the 2003 Golden Globes.

Even so, and despite the dereliction of network news and the subterfuge of the Bush administration, the information is all there in black and white, if not in video or color, for those who want to read it, whether in the daily press or in books like Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command" and Mark Danner's "Torture and Truth." The operative word, however, may be "want."

Maybe we don't want to know that the abuses were widespread and systematic, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to unknown locales where "ghost detainees" are held. Or that they started a year before the incidents at Abu Ghraib. Or that they have been carried out by many branches of the war effort, not just Army grunts. Or that lawyers working for Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales gave these acts a legal rationale that is far more menacing to encounter in cold type than the photo of Prince Harry's costume-shop armband.

As Mr. Danner shows in his book, all this and more can be discerned from a close reading of the government's dense investigative reports and the documents that have been reluctantly released (or leaked). Read the record, and the Fort Hood charade is unmasked for what it was: the latest attempt to strictly quarantine the criminality to a few Abu Ghraib guards and, as Mr. Danner writes, to keep their actions "carefully insulated from any charge that they represent, or derived from, U.S. policy - a policy that permits torture."

The abuses may well be going on still. Even as the Graner trial unfolded, The New York Times reported that a secret August 2002 Justice Department memo authorized the use of some 20 specific interrogation practices, including "waterboarding," a form of simulated drowning that was a torture of choice for military regimes in Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970's. This revelation did not make it to network news.

"Nobody seems to be listening," Mr. Danner said last week, as he prepared to return to Iraq to continue reporting on the war for The New York Review. That so few want to listen may in part be a reflection of the country's growing disenchantment with the war as a whole. (In an inauguration-eve Washington Post-ABC News poll, only 44 percent said the war was worth fighting.) The practice of torture by Americans is not only ugly in itself. It conjures up the specter of defeat. We can't "win" the war in Iraq if we lose the battle for public opinion in the Middle East. At the gut level, Americans know that the revelations of Abu Ghraib coincided with - and very likely spurred - the ruthlessness of an insurgency that has since taken the lives of many brave United States troops who would never commit the lawless acts of a Charles Graner or seek some ruling out of Washington that might countenance them.

History tells us that in these cases a reckoning always arrives, and Mr. Danner imagines that "in five years, or maybe sooner, there will be a TV news special called 'Torture: How Did It Happen?' " Even though much of the script can be written now, we will all be sure to express great shock.

A beautiful woman has awoken and left for work. I am left with a cup of English tea, looking out across the snow-capped roofs of Schwabing, the blue oninion of St. Joseph's prodding the gray sky. Seven floors below, cyclists make there way carefully along the frozen terrain of Turkenstrasse. The plant, which recently has had a steady diet of weissbier, leans hopefully towards the open window. But there will be no rain today. The fresh air coming off the city is cold and dry. Somewhere a garbage truck grumbles in the streets below; it is Monday morning, but still sacred as any Sabbath.

I will catch a train in the next hour or so to the country. A friend which I have not yet seen this year awaits me. There in a garden that sits on a slow river, I will eat and drink and read and sleep and breathe mountain air.

What have I done? What I am doing? What are my dreams? Am traversing the distance that separates me from them? Is there even a distance; could this be my dream? What if I never move a stone from here to there, never punch a window through certain metaphysical walls, but am content with not having done so? Am I really free?
This tea is cold.

lighttext.jpg

i broke through. i am now a moblog.

An aside- my blog erased all the comments. If some one who loves me reads this could you please go through and leave some words so it doesn't look as though no one ever gave me a shout back. Cosmetics.

Speaking of products usually designed for womem, a girl gave me a pair of tights. I know I have seen well-packaged male dancers prancing about on stage with these things, but I can not help but feel I am delving into some deviant behavior here, that perhaps I am beginning the slow downward spiral into women's underwear.
However, they are warm beneath my pants in the dead of winter on my bike through the snow and so on.
Exasperrating the situation- I just received a copy of Robbie Williams greatest hits, and I like it. What is happening to me?

Discovered the joy of careening dead-on into snow banks. The bike sticks and you, the fun-loving rider go flying over the bars, into the snow of course, which is soft, seemingly. But mind the frozen manure and the buried stones. See nose, figure 1a.

Just thought this was interesting...

a writer writes. i am not a writer. i am some one who wants to write a best-selling book, but i can not even keep up this pathetic little blog.. am i a chronic underachiever? should i get a new hobby?
the answer is a resounding no. I will try harder. i will do better. so help me, god.

Today I lost my best friend in Munich to what I hope are the greener shores of Ireland.

He can not be replaced. I will miss you, brother man. Love.

Last week, I came across a semi-circle of construction vehicles surrounding Odeonsplatz. In the center was a stage floating on a sea of orange.

I parked the bike and headed in for a closer look. Over the P.A. a man gave a speech in an Eastern European accent, pausing occassionally for an audience member with a crackling microphone to shout back from the midsts of the crowd. He was no heckler. It was choreographed, like the canned responses of a catholic mass.

Above the crowd in the shadows of buildiings older than my country, banners sprayed with Russian troops go home or Viktor Yushchenko is the heart of the Ukraine swayed in the wind. Orange was the colour du jour. Most people held orange balloons, or atleast an orange itself. A man who I think must be famous in some village stood and gave a rousing rendition of the Ukrainian national anthem.

Then young girls dispersed wax torches throughout the crowd, who now huddled around common flames as we patiently waited for our torches to catch fire. Then we headed down the street shouting Russia go home, before breaking into a slow, moving, almost mournful song. The sun moved behind th earth, only torches now, a sea of orange, our faces aglow, we the people marching the cobbled streets, a moment of history that was not really mine.

Over the protests of a protectective mother, I gave my torch to an empty-handed Ukrainian boy.

This is for the public record:

I have in recent years exhausted much energy into the practice of misery and debauchery. I spent so much of myself wishing I lived not in a place called America, that to finally be free of its confines is simply bliss.

Everything is possible again. Work comes. New challenges come. New friends come. Fresh ideas come. Indeed, power itself comes. The creative forces swirl about. I do not know exactly why, but this is where the universe wants me, or this is where I want my universe to be- either way- i am happy. and that makes me happy. and so on.

Reagan sent me this link: http://www.metagifted.org/topics/metagifted/indigo/.

I have not gone through it yet, but it seems worth looking in to. If for no other reason than to have something interesting to discuss with Reagan if you are lucky enough to bump into her downtown sometime, you know what I'm saying.

As I said a long time ago, I would not discuss politics on these pages. However, I must say one thing: I truly hope you religious, fundamentalits are correct in your estimations of hell, because if you are then I have no doubt you zealots will suffer there, along the other mass-murdering nutcases.

If you honestly think a man was born of a virgin and died on a cross so you could build a temple to use as a soapbox to peddle a conservative politcal agenda, you are a damned fool.

You fundamentalists pulled through once again. This time around the number one issue for voters was "moral values", and for those voters eighty-six percent voted Bush. I welcome a considerstion of moral values, but in these considerations could we please include the cost of war.

How many of you Bible-thumpers even know how many innocent civilians have died in Iraq alone.

15,000 dead Iraqii civilians killed in the first five months of O.I.L.

Of course, you people would be so kind as to remind me of the historical insignifigance of this number in the light of say, Veitnam's 58,000 dead soldiers. You've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right?

Then I would remind you that 15,000 dead is the blood of five 9-11's.

I used to blame government. I used to blame media. After this election cycle, I blame the people. Not all people, but I do not need to qualify. You know who you are.

You folks make me sick. I am so ashamed to share my flag with you. As long as it stays it your hands, it burns in my heart.

This bit of energy. This bit of energy. And this bit of energy is the last I waste on these matters.

Where have I been?
Waiting for divine inspiration to fill my fingers with beauty and love.

...I've gotta run. I didn't pay for these muffins.

Just now a person on inline skates zipped past me, making way down the aisle so quickly I couldn't make out their sex, which is most unfortunate since the skater wore very short shorts and I would have appreciated the opportunity to let my mind drift.

Stranger than the asexual skater is that she (or possibly he) garnered no attention from the other train passengers. No one, not this business man, not that mother, nor her two children, even bothered to glance from their respective newspapers and teen magazines. (The business man reads the teen magazines.)


I think in most of America, mass transportation is a bit of a freakish activity in itself,
the sort best reserved for bums whose shopping carts provide insufficient shelter from occasional rain,
and for single, horny mothers, caught in a devil’s cycle of poverty too severe to allow the purchase of adequate numbers of rubbers,
and for overachievers who drink heavily with such regularity and precision, certain governments have, in the name of public good, revoked their license to drive.

Mass transportation is far from the main stream. Even mentioning you happened to use the front bumper of a cross-town bus to prop your foot while you tied your lace is cause for all manner of suspicion,
not the worst of which is that you are some sort of hippie communist type who refuses to keep body hair at moderate lengths.

In my limited experience in America, it is easier to be a man with one testicle than a man without car.

An aside:
I really don't know what it is like to have just one ball, really, but being uni-balled is the sort of erroneous fact (like claiming to be Jewish) that I like to let slip in rooms filled with complete strangers.
I think it helps people regard me in a sympathetic light, which is especially important when you drink from a flask.

But yes, without doubt, it is easier to be a man with one ball than with no car.

Consider the following:

A girl calls her mom and tells her she met this guy named…
“…‘Joey.’ he’s very sweet when he drinks, and he tells good jokes when he’s sober, Mom. I think I really like him.”

“Oh, yes, there is just one thing. He only has one ball. His sister shook him off a ladder when he was seven. He snagged his Sack of Mexican Candy on a rung.
They tried to save the ball. They put it on ice, but before they made it past the nurse station it had shrank so severely that the doctors feared disrupting the atom it was orbiting.
Mom, what should I do? Does, dad have both his balls?”

“Honey, honey. If he’s a nice boy, and he sounds just delightful, who cares how many balls he has. In college I dated Jim Hanson, and he had three balls.
Well, at least, that’s what he told me.
Of course, later I learned it was actually a malformed twin and broke it off immediately, but that was so different, Jenny.
I mean… twins!
In my day girls weren’t raised that way.

or…

“Oh yes, there is just one thing… He doesn’t drive.”

“Honey what kind of bum are you hauling around.
Now you listen here Jenny, we’ve been through this with your sisters and we are not going through this again. You girls bring any more of those darkies round here…”

“But mom, he’s Jewish.

“Let me talk to your father.”

At first it seemed I had just happened to pick the car that all the cool kids liked. But upon a closer inspection that involved little more than eerily, slowly spinning my head 360 degrees, I understood the train was packed, yes, to the gills, with school children behaving in a carefree manner afforded by a lack of adult interference. They laughed at jokes whose punch lines I could not quite make out, talked about this one’s new girlfriend, and what not . Three pretty, modish girls not more than fifteen stood below, right outside my window, smoking suspiciously and watching with silent awe a particularly chunky girl roll down the hill from Old Town, lumbering to catch the train, her scooter wedged in her chubby armpit.

Old women on bicycles. Skateboards in traffic. More to come. when I find a free wireless cafe.

What a grand universe. Here I am in a Texas town so small they don't even have a post office, and I recieved a job offer for a bar in Muenchen. My biggest source of stress (had I allowed) is now nonexistant. I knew was going to work somewhere in Munich. I knew that much. You don't see many headlines reading: Dumb yankee starves to death in Eurpean capital. But still, anyone who thinks you can just roll into town and fill an empty position in some bustling Irish pub has probably applied for the job the same day one of the employees broke both legs after falling off a ladder, which is convinient, but you can't keep bank that kind of fortune.

Now, once again, it seems that the gods have paved my path. It could fall through at some point, but in the mean time I am free to let my mind solve other problems, like how to burn wet leaves.

The rain has stopped, back to work.

I am officially on the road. Bags are packed. I have no home. I have no key chain. I have no pillow. I fly out the thirteenth of September, heading for Muenchen. I have been dreaming of my return to that continent for so long I suspect that upon arrival I shall be suddenly overcome with the feeling of being in a deep sleep.

You see what I did there, huh? See dreaming of Europe... in a deep sleep. That's good stuff folks, and it's that kind of light-hearted writing that you are going to find more of on this blog now. Those days of whining about this dead dog or this lost love or this smashed car or that mole on my lower back that I had removed but still itches- those days are over.

Each draws from life what he thinks into it.

The Thing cannot work for us but through us.

The more power one gives his thought,...the more power it will have.



earnest holmes, the science of mind

Each draws from life what he thinks into it.

The Thing cannot work for us but through us.

The more power one gives his though,...the more power it will have.



earnest holmes, the science of mind

He used to move mountains.
And now he can not even move his head from his hands.
He cries regularly.
Are these the same tears from long ago?
They taste the same.
He wondered...
If he took himself to a country church
and raised his hands above his head,
letting the tears flow freely down his gray puffy cheeks
would firery elders still gather round and marvel,
exclaiming quietly amongst themselves,
"What a sensitive soul this young man has."
"Yes, such a soft heart."
Could he yet package his sadness as
good old-fashioned righteousness?

An open mind makes way for imagination.

-Alexander MacDonald

A falling stone also follows a straight and narrow path.

"Could I bum a smoke off ya?"

"Yea, sure," she said. "I don't wanna die alone."

They rode the Holy Roller coaster with the best of them. It's a wild ride. For those of unfamiliar with the Pentecostal arena let me explain. It begins as a crisis moment when you feel utter joy, a feeling so high, of such elation, you would think the creator of the universe is giving your soul a bear hug.

As the intensity of the moment begins to fade in time, you must struggle to maintain the zeal, even while it dwindles into a mild contentment. If you lived in a vacuum, apart from the effects of time, insulated from the tapping hammer of reality, if you could remain beneath the juniper tree, locked inside the cloister, kneeling on the mat, praying to the east, you might be just fine.

Sure at first you approach the world with a zeal and boldness. But eventually, you must return to Monday morning, and there you we are forced to break the gaze, awake from the moment, and the hypnotist returns to his day job as you are left with the residue of bliss, which is not necessary a bad thing, but against the church's weight of personal guilt and eternal fear, it is not quite sufficient.

One reads the bible in the morning; one prays to start the day. Makes a conscious effort to watch one's thoughts, to watch less TV, devote more time and money to the church. But gas for the engine is always burning. Therefore, like a vampire craving virgin blood, the Pentecostal returns to the sacrificial altar to plead the blood of Mary’s son, like a junkie craving the New Wine. A fix to get you by until the next Sunday.

Sometimes these fixes are elusive. These are called ''dry spells". They are cured by what some country preachers refer to as ''gully washers."

My Fly


The first time I saw him, he was sunning his underbelly on one the window panes that line the front of a particular downtown coffee shop. Behind him traffic bustled through green lights and the sidewalk teemed with people working their way down sidewalks, beneath the glare of the city’s scape.

I thought the whole image worth capturing, set my newspaper down, and quickly put a lens onto my camera. I moved in close enough to get a good frame, but just before I clicked the shutter, the little guy took off.

No big loss. I settled back into my comfy chair, took a sip of coffee, and straightened my paper, which was when I saw the fly resting on my shoulder. Without thought, I brushed him off. He flew a foot into the air, then returned to my shoulder. Once again, I swatted, but, once again, he returned.

This exchange went on with increasing vigor until I exhausted all the energy that first cup of coffee had given and came close to giving up on ridding myself of him.

Then the barista walked past. Remembering women had enough difficulties with me,I saw no need to add “he has flies” to that list.

Nonchalantly, I shooed. Predictably, the fly returned, and just stared at me. I stared right back at him. Of course flies don’t blink, but I stared anyways.

He looked like your common fly, except for the tiny iridescent streaks of red and blue and green where light separated as it passed through his translucent wings.

The thing that really caught my eye was this fly’s behavior. He wasn’t all fidgety like most. He sat still as a tie tack, almost serene.

I decided to reason with him.

I want to point out that I didn’t think reason would be effectual really, but swatting hadn’t been either, and I just figured that before resigning myself to the filthy advances of the coffee shop’s only fly, I should at least talk him.

I leaned in real close so as to not arouse the concern of any of the other patrons and whispered, “What’s you’re problem, man?”

Unfazed by my breath on his back, he didn’t move a muscle, except for those that caused his little fly belly to expand and contract rapidly as he took his little fly breaths, something I hadn’t noticed in keeping my usual distances.

“I can’t just have you hanging around here. It’s not cool.”

He just stared at me with his little fly eyes. I leaned in closer and squinted. I thought for a second he was batting lashes at me, but, naturally, he had none.

“You’ve got a whole city here.”

He kept looking at me. And his eyes weren’t little, really, at least not for a fly.

“Alright. Whatever. Hang out.”

I sipped my coffee, read for a while, then went outside for some fresh air and a cigarette. I came back in, sat in my comfy chair, straightened the paper, and noticed the fly still sat still, there on my shoulder.

“You are a cool little fly, aren’t ya?”

Then the barista looked up from a mop: “Are you talking to yourself, Johnny?”

“Not anymore.”

But such is my life. I knew from early on it was a bit more than it was all cracked to be.
My mother always told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up. For a few years my grand ambition was to be a garbage man.
I’d run out to the end of the drive twice a week when I heard them rumbling down the street. I became somewhat friendly with them. They’d say hello to the curious gaping white boy.
I’d wave goodbye vigorously as they drove away, amazed that they were allowed to stand on the back of a moving truck.
My parents seemed supportive of my career, buying me a Tonka garbage truck for my third birthday.
They said I could be anything I wanted, and I believed them for a while.
I had my first inkling that life wasn’t so simple when I went to my mother and told her I wanted to be a puppy dog when I grew up.
You can’t be a puppy, Johnny.
I thought I could be whatever I wanted?
Well, you can’t be a puppy.
And that was just the beginning.

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.” -Thoreau

I settled in front of my trusty external frame backpack and begin to methodically, carefully fill it with rolls of clothes, filling the empty nooks with precious goods: the steak knife, the cork from that bottle of Chianti, a crumpled pack of Galois Bleus, those cheap disposable razors, my tattered Bible, and such.

I extinguished my cigarette, pressing the hot yellow butt into ground, burning a neat hole through the plastic floor of the tent.

I thought of taking the knife and cutting out the tent’s entire floor. I’d like to see the two of them shagging there then, slapping against the wet mud, arousing the interests of the German beetles and army ants that inhabit the underworld of the Thalkirchen Campingplatz.

Being out-numbered, tempered with fear, I resisted disemboweling the tent.

As I crawled from the tent, I could see, in the corner of my eye, a mass huddled around a camp fire, eight Irish blokes still sloshing Spaten even as the sun broke clear of the Eastern tree line. I could feel their moonshine eyes considering the final demise of the village demon, at last exorcised. If Isabel was among them, I could not make her out from the other blurry, flickering silhouettes, at least not without turning my head.

I strapped on my backpack, slung my broken-zipper sleeping bag over my shoulder, and started off, cool as I could, heading for the trail that leads to the river. Then, I walked the path that ran along the bank, through the forest, towards the Wawirtschaft Biergarten.

In the eye of a storm, I walked along with all my life at my back, on my back, hanging on my shoulders.

Slowly, the gray skies won over the clear morning sun,
The horizon stayed orange, but the clouds above gently defied and a soft rain fell, plucking the slow river, marking concentric circles that expanded on the water before disappearing into the current.

I observed the drizzle from beneath the eave of the forest's canopy, the branches stretching towards the sky like twisted roots towards an old river.

I walked along, considering the pain of losing my first love, and the rain against the dawn, and the river through the forest.

Never had I mourned a greater loss, and yet even this blind fool knew that moment was beautiful. Damned. Beautiful. Alive.

Soon, though, I’d forget this take. For, the storm soon blew me from its eye, and I found shelter in the Biergarten, washing dishes for minimum wage, room, and board.