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children vicarious nostalgia

The Google Auto-complete

Jamal Introduced me to this. I can't get enough of it.

Another Celebrity Sighting

Ideally while you read this, you should also listen to this:




I saw Edward Norton on the subway the other day. Or was it Tyler Durden? In any case, he was standing there on the far end of the platform, motionless and isolated. A vacant look occupied his face. His arms hung limply at his sides. The sleeves of his tan trench-coat rippled slightly in the wind originating from the depths of the tunnel. I don't know what Tyler Durden was doing down there, but he almost certainly wouldn't want me writing about it on the internet. I may have to go into witness protection.

There are electronic boards hanging in the stations. They display information about incoming trains such as train length and estimated time of arrival. Sometimes there is no ETA, only the word: ARR. I assume this is because you can never tell when a pirate-train will arrive at the station.

This one time, David and I saw the most badass thing to ever happen on the metro.

A train pulls up to the station unannounced. All the windows are blacked out. Once the train stopped, three dudes (dressed in all black and carrying shotguns) step out simultaneously from three different cars. Then a guy, also dressed in black, pushes a large wheeled box from the front car to one of the middle cars. The three armed men step back in and the train moves on.

We had just witnessed an elaborate bank heist. The robbers had dug into a bank vault from a nearby subway tunnel and used a hijacked subway train to move the take, disguised as metro employees, through the metro system until they jumped the tracks onto an abandoned rail line and rode off into the post-apocalyptic sunset.

This is what we witnessed.

I really don't know if this bothers anyone else, but. Some of the time the speed of the escalator handrail is slightly more than that of the escalator stairs themselves! This bothers me to no end. It threatens to pull me off balance and drop me into the pit of elephant seals below. "Elephant Seals?!?" you say. I promise to record them one day.

Meta

For those of you (if there are any) that read this blog: I hope that you do so out of nothing more than idle curiosity. I use this thing mainly as a cathartic emotional outlet. I don't usually write about the things that are bothering me at the time, but I find that simply writing helps. I don't promise any quality of writing, nothing here is true until proven otherwise, and the content will be banal at best.

Part I

Shorty after Halley's Comet last banked round the sun, shooting back out of the plane of the solar system, a rather unremarkable event took place on the west coast of North America, in a town called Eugene. A small, squirmy little larval human was born. Well lots of them were, but one of them was me, or at least would become me at some point. I scored a 10/10 on the APGAR test and I probably fucking cheated.

I don't remember anything about Eugene, but I am told that it rained for months and months and there were many bums and many hippies. When I was around six months old, my father was offered a post-doctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology at Starnberg south of Munich. We all packed our bags (except me: I was a bag) and hopped the pond. My cat, Miss Kitty, had to stay in my aunt's basement in Waukesha, I wouldn't see her again until I was five. I don't think she ever really forgave us.

Erling (the village we lived in) is the first home I can remember. We lived in a few houses there but I'm fairly certain I can only really remember the last one. Here is the address:

Panoramastraße 6

82346 Andechs, Germany

I think that's it.

Some of my earliest/most pleasant memories revolved around the strawberry patch in our back yard. The strawberries must have been planted there for a long time because they were abnormally small and sweet, the way that strawberries that have been planted there for a long time sometimes get. I would sit on my ass and eat those things like candy right off the plants. One day, I waddled out to my strawberry patch to discover that it had been picked clean of all its berries. I guess my landlord must have been in the backyard too, because I remember asking him where all the strawberries went. He replied that an albatross had eaten them all. I accepted this as a plausible explanation. In retrospect, that motherfucker lied to me. What a lie to tell a child.

I'm not me.

The many parts are not self consistent.

Not quite right. A bit off.

I'm manic. I'm reeling. I'm not directionless. I'm omnidirectional.

I'm caught in loops that can't escape my mind. Spinning around; they cant get off the conveyor belt. They sit there with legs crossed and arms folded, a dull look in their eyes. Not quite human: malicious dolls waiting their turn in the uncanny valley. Chop chop chop.

chop.

Carve it down. Whittle and hew. Sculpt a place in the universe. Make it change. Tear it down.

Don't know what flipped the switch. Matters not. Switch got flipped. Bitch got tipped. Turned on.

Nothing is ever going to be the same again. Until it is.

Plugged in and passive. Consuming and excreting at a constant rate. Unfazed and content while the other half is screaming. Ultrasonic, unheard. Looking for the few brief moments of clarity.

There is a chance. An opening. In that time the words come flooding out rapidly and without order. Streaming out into a puddle on the floor. Its all there but its all wrong.

Try to scoop them up into piles but they just sink back together oozing and dripping and mixing. Diluted and devoid of meaning. Signal to noise ratio.

Night ride: panic and excitement. Branches grasping for the stars streaming by. Faster till blurred. Pothole. They are still streaming, I'm motionless.

Pretending to read. Words stare back, so many hieroglyphs spread about the page. Got to fit in, good at blending. He thinks he can blend with any medium. They have their suspicions: he's not quite right. Telltale signs and inconsistencies. Its all a bit off.

Humans like consistency across individuals. They like nothing more than to relate to something they thought was their own. I thought I was the only one who did that! wow.

All the same. Be the same. Behave. Beehive.

Apoptosis. Its autumn and you haven't changed a thing. Just another small part of the pile of leaves. Soon the tree will rot and the leaves will become fodder for a new tree. Meet the new tree, same as the old tree.

The fuzzy blue print of the mimeograph. The old cassette tape. Follow the instructions. You can be us too!

Its rude to tell people that their German last names are oddly fitting. Don't be rude to Andrew Klein.

Mobius.

Bike Ride

I went on a bike ride yesterday and it was fun. I went south from my house along the capital crescent trail. Stopped along the Potomac for a bagel:




After that, I meandered through Georgetown for a bit crossing over rock creek park. I wasn't really sure where I was going but I saw a cool TV antenna:


I crossed the Dumbarton bridge, which sucks compared to the Duke Ellington Memorial bridge, except that it is guarded by four of these rather impressive gents:


I liked the moon:


Thats all folks.