Independence

Photo(s) by Jglo

I'm a part-time expatriate.

I am not an ex-patriot.  Just because I spend time abroad, and maintain a little Schloß looking out over Bavarian rooftops, doesn't mean I belong here ... or understand, particularly, the workings of the Bundestag.

I don't (yet) speak German, cannot tzpe things easilz ... Canät get through a newspaper, could not compose a blog or story ... Can't get past amenities, or pleasantries about das Wetter auf Deutsch.

But I'm not in München for conversation.

I'm here because need for change brought me here.  And business ... The Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG) is what started the whole solar power ball rolling ... and though planned reductions in government incentives and an overall energy market stabilization quelled the schnell reich dreams of many by the time I made my move to Germany ... still, I felt overdue for a change.

From the loud desperation, the quietly screaming ... the more and more frequently tipped boiling points; the embarrassing "news", the incessant "discussions", the swiping of credit cards and dignity ... which the United States, 'tis of me, has come to embody;

I needed respite, from upwards of €12.5 T ($17 trillion usd ... that's TWELVE ZEROS, folks!) in national debt ... and from the recently confirmed worst U.S. president since World War II ... Certainly, of my own lifetime.

... I remember being with Milf-y Vanily one night back in the day ... and we got around to discussing Richard Nixon, like you do .... I guess it was because I was coming out from the bathroom making a peace sign, and Milf-y laughed and said I looked like him (?).  Or something like that was going on ...

Anyway, she suddenly became embarrassed, like actually blushed ... and I looked down to make sure I wasn't trailing any toilet paper.  She finally, after some (not so ;-) gentle prodding, said, "I actually voted for Richard Nixon!"

I remember thinking at the time, how sweet it was that that mattered to her ... Was it really such a point of shame (or playful pride??)?

Nixon's flameout in real time was just at the cusp of my cultural awareness - I was only entering Kindergarten then.  I knew he did something, and he was being replaced, and it was a darkly newsworthy time in America ... but I had nothing to do with electing him myself, of course -- at two, I was only along for the ride -- and I don't recall my parents ever saying much about him, or politics in general, one way or another.

They were probably ashamed as well, come to think of it ... and being from an earlier time than Milf-y, didn't bother speaking too much about things they felt they couldn't control ... America's first presidential resignation being one of these.

So when Milf-y Vanily played all coy, I started to think how sweet that was ... but also how little her shame (or embarrassed pride) really mattered in the great scheme of things.  It was history, and Milf-y really was from another era ...

I quickly put on my pants and left!

I relate this now, having grown into a Milf myself ... I'm a FILF!  I'm FILF-y ... approaching fifty ... and I empathize with the embarrassment, playful or not, which my companion shared with me that night:  I actually voted for Barack Obama.

And change is needed.

 

Niemals (Again)!

"Dead to You", ©Jeff Glovsky

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Death (of) Comedy

In the foolish, early days of April, the offensive, 'there is no there there' coverage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 became subsumed (at last!) ... though sadly, by yet another American gun massacre.

The latest Fort Hood shooter, apparently miffed because he was told "no" about something, and catapulted into infamy on April 2nd of this year, is not even the most recent entry on this terrible "list of rampage killers" (also check out the workplace edition!) ... admittedly -- tragically -- in the words of Wikipedia's editors, "an incomplete list, which may NEVER be able to satisfy (!) particular standards for completeness (WTF!?!)" (... emphases mine).

Oh, and David Letterman announced his retirement.

A few sad doorknobs unhinge and fall off of life's frame, and late night television shuffles again ... Ah, normalcy!  A relief!  Welcome respite!  from wild-eyed theories, internet queries, emotions and directionless everything regarding the lost airplane ... from search efforts to public statements to misplaced anger ...

Directionless.  No pride or shame (a flight simulator??) ...

No happy landing.

I was thinking this on a trip last week ... At the airport, an announcement in accented but unbroken English:

"Do not let your baggage out of your sight.  If a stranger approaches you, and asks you to watch or hold baggage, or you are asked to carry an item or gift, you should not comply.  You should report all suspicious activity to uniformed personnel or the airport police."

I was struck by the innocence of this entreaty.  Simple strangers bearing gifts ... One should tell the police ... How 20th century!

It's high time the world's airports scale up their public service announcements to reflect the potentials of this day and age:

"If your plane disappears or falls out of the sky, or you see a passenger punching a flight attendant (or vice versa!) -- or a group of histrionics annoying other passengers -- please use your cell phone camera to share."

* * * 

No Love for 'Kindness'

I recently posted a piece I wrote here, a weird German thing which I happen to like, on Medium.

On Medium, I submitted Freundlichkeit (Human) Kindness as "A Time and Place", to a number of seemingly appropriate collections, but so far it hasn't found a home.*  Another tl;dr orphan, full of too many words.

"I hate words"

"Words suck."

"I don't like stuff that sucks!"

The Unparallelled Wisdom of Beavis and Butthead

... Mere words, pooled unread around the ankles of a "friend"-poked teen  - not at all caring what I do, post or have to say!

They're out there, my words, though.  Because they can be.  Herking and idiosyncratic and jerking, and lurking like shadows in need of some light.

*UPDATE:  A Time and Place in 1000 Stories on Medium.  Thanks @torbahax.

Olympic Darkness

"Nur Kinder und einfache Leute tragen lebhafte Farben." - Goethe

Only children and simpletons wear bright colors ...

February is the new April ... and in the black first days of this winterest month, I have been virtually stunned into silence.

First, there was a transit nightmare, as getting to and from the "Big Game" did not go (at all) as planned for tens of thousands of frustrated football fans, and millions of inconvenienced "New Yorkers".

Across the river that same Super Sunday -- actually in New York -- Philip Seymour Hoffman died, ingloriously, with a needle hanging out of his arm.  Hollywood couldn't have scripted a more evocative image of a heroin overdose.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman was an addict ... He died a junkie's death.

Also that same day, flying in the face of his own misguided logic that in some small way, an exit by overdose might be a good thing -- its transmitted "message" perhaps being taken to heart, as opposed to being ignored or simply not received at all by other nodding junkies suddenly waking up, saying, "You know what?  Philip Seymour Hoffman died.  Let me quit." --

Sadly, it's unlikely that this became the case anywhere.  Philip Seymour Hoffman just died.  Ingloriously.

But I was going to say, also on the same day that he died, that un-Super Sunday, there were considerably more drug overdoses than PSH once babbled to Aaron Sorkin lives would be "saved" in the event that one of those two suffered a fatal overdose ...

No, Phil:  your stupid and preventable death did not lead to "10 people who were about to" die, not dying.  You took a drug you knew could kill you, and it did.

That's what happened.  That's the message you left behind.  A message of despair, not hope.  In no way was it a "positive" thing.

It's going to take many decades -- and vast adjustments in profit motive, economies of scale and, most dauntingly, demand fueling supply -- for any acceptance of responsibility, let alone global behavioral shifts or awakenings of consciousness concerning illicit drug use, to occur.  If I were an addict, your sad death wouldn't do it for me, Big Guy (Sorry to be telling you this too late).

Thank God for the comic relief of Russia!  Between the knee-knocking toilets (and "no fishing"!! signs), the piss-colored tap water, the stray dogs, the unfinished hotel rooms, the nonetheless pride at a 'job well done' in Sochi, and the costumed police choir busting into "Get Lucky" ... I giggle aloud at my bushy-browed brethren, and my S-K-Y swells and bursts with delight ...

And then I read about Woody Allen.

Woody has long been a hero of mine ... His obnoxious Upper East Side phase notwithstanding, I think, and have always believed, the guy's comic gold.  When I was younger and trying to win friends, impress girls or dismiss various teachers, I'd absorb the absurdities of Without Feathers, for example, or Getting Even ...and too often spit them back out whole, unexpurgated.  Completely ripped off, at times word for word ...

I was really a loser!  But I thought Woody Allen was a genius ... and though I no longer plagiarize him, I still think he is.

All of which leads up to the new best thing I've ever read by Woody Allen, his matter-of-fact, supposedly (hopefully!) final response to the resurfaced claims by his daughter that she was sexually abused by him twenty years ago.  These disturbing and serious allegations were investigated at the time and found unsubstantiated.  No criminal charges were ever filed, and the matter became closed ... until somehow, it wasn't anymore.

Now it should be.  Together, with the wastedly talented Philip Seymour Hoffman, may things rest in peace.

Freundlichkeit (Human) Kindness

"(L)ife in itself is a chain of rainy days ... I think I'll go for a walk with my umbrella" - Sun-Young Park

'Kickin' it old school', as the kids say ... pen and an actual notebook, loaded with paper, not apps and icons, in hand ...

There's something to be said for people-watching -- Leute beobachten (or Schadenfreude, as the case may be) -- or spying, as the good people of the Gärtnerplatz in Munich keep saying.

A sort of equivalent to New York's Union Square, der Gärtnerplatz -- minus the nodding junkies, the smelly nutters, the ridiculous "protests" ... the homeless with pent-up, directionless anger ... directed toward themselves, at bottom; but then, at white people, black people, chess winners and losers ... People with hair, and wearing glasses.  Or not.

At the world and everyone, every thing in it.

... unlike Union Square, in fact.

Der Gärtnerplatz is not unpleasant.

November wird hundsmiserabel, I think rudimentally to myself - like I'd think to myself forty years ago, when English was a new language.  Then twenty years ago, when I first visited Munich, I instantly felt that I'd spend some time here.  Relatively quiet and small, i.e., liveable, compared to the ugly, pretentious slut, Berlin and that clenched New York pretender, Frankfurt.

"Franky-Boy!  Mr. Albert Sinatra!" the DJ'd announce giddily ... and the bar would erupt in a marble-mouthed chorus - like a room full of stroke victims, shouting heavily accented, tone-deaf English:  Ist!  Op!  Zum!  Du!  New-York, New-YORK!!! ... 

"Franky-Boy!  Albert Sinatra!" the DJ'd cry, and the Weissbiers would hoist to the sky and I'd sigh, and just know I at least had to try and get back here!

"Polizei!  Hilfe!  Polizei!"  A night cry ...

I slip out the door of my terrible pension, across from the station, and go down to see.

There's a guy on the ground, with a boot in his back:  "Release me!" the guy's yelling up, in English, to a man in green, one of Bavaria's Finest.  "Bullenschweine!" (the guy's switched to German) ... "Sofort!" he shouts to the boot in his back (and the cop's deaf ears).  "Release me!" he Englishes again, "Immediately!"

The Bavarian cop presses down in a Schuhplattler.

"Free sex!  She was giving him free sex!" the guy yelps.

And nobody is really quite sure what that means.

The next night, I spy the guy, Larry, rolling (for he'd had a chair, and been unceremoniously dumped from it the night before by the 'man in green', one of Bavaria's Finest) through the Gärtnerplatz.

I ask him what happened:  what he'd done, and why he was being arrested?

"Wasn't me," he avows.

"Yes it was," I avow back.

He asks me to wheel his chair "just up the street".

Well, I'm not sure what to do, really.  'Kindness breaks no bones', as they say here ... but I don't have time to be wheeling Larry!  The German autumn night is young, and I'm supposed to be meeting meine Frau ... Meine Frau ist stinksauer auf me mow ... er, now ... and I was going to bring her some Blumen flowers.

Eenie meenie meine Frau ...

Can't be wheeling Larry now!  But he's an American, like me, in Paris ... Larry, Gene Kelly and I ... start pushing, his weird German wheelchair across the Gärtnerplatz.

"That's it," he grunts, "just up here."  We get to the steps of the Staatstheater, and I start thinking Larry might have a date too.  Gonna meet up his love for a night at the opera ... but no.  Larry asks me to hang a right.

Then another ... We go around again ... Twenty minutes or so later, we're back at the steps of the Staatstheater!

So, "This is where we part, my friend ... "

"Oh, I'm your friend now," the strange(r) Larry snaps.

I leave him, sitting in his chair as it begins to rain, again, in autumn Munich ... ein Sauwetter!

Not getting better!

November wird hundsmiserabel ...

"The Shadow", ©Jeff Glovsky

September...Auf Deutsch

September... Auf Deutsch

I've begun reading, just for shits and giggles (as they say in the old country), Extrem Laut und Unglaublich Nah - which is Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close ... auf Deutsch.

Photo(s) by Jglo

Now the fact that I can't speak, read or fully comprehend Deutsch without a dictionary, or a drunk companion, does not deter me.  I am giving it the college try!   I started at the beginning of this summer.  I am already on page six.  I've found that if I skip around to the English bits -- words that I recognize, like "New York City" ... "Money Can't Buy Me Love" ... "Stephen Hawking" -- the pages turn faster.

Der Herbst, autumn -- in fact, life in general -- is all about the pages turning.  I approach fifty ... My parents, still living, are in their eighties.  My brother, still stuck in the '80's, is forty (Just kidding about my brother ... He isn't really forty!).

We're OLD, dude.  Alten Säcke!  And yet, though I still might rage (or flail) against the "machine" and show petulant, (sort of) tongue-in-cheek truculence toward Facebook and "its" generation, I still dig sounds I know Gen Y finds interesting ... can get up when I fall still, and have all my hair.

Beyond this, I have begun doing the same thing Gen Y is all doing:  putting my "work" out there ... unabashedly, shamelessly tiring you with it - my writing and imperfect photographs ... Words & Images, Random Poetix and Faction by Jeff Glovsky.

The key difference between me -- that is, my own generation, so aptly (nondescriptly) labeled X -- and the Facebook / Gen Y crowd -- the so-called millennials -- is that I leave the house.  While Gen Y hides behind its computers and smart phones and mixers and apps, I enjoy nothing more than walking, live music, fresh air and potential ... while still creating, doing, being, like Y does ...

It's not entirely Y's fault, though - the fear and feeling of What's the Point? that it has.  Gob-smacked with the Great Recession and trying to feed itself and excel in the worst economy in 80 years ... with guns creating daily havoc and so many jobs out there not worth the pennies (or "experience") they insultingly offer ... the running for the comforts of (mom's) home and "man caves" -- not to mention the support and opprobrium of vast "communities" of global strangers -- can be sweetly tempting ... in the same way I loved lying on my bed or sofa, "channel surfing" and talking to friends on my land line back in the day ... I get it.  I get the urge, almost the need, to stay home.

What I don't understand, and never will, is the eschewing of normal, everyday, whole life functioning.  Millennials seem to have collectively blown off driver's licenses, cars, homes, careers, marriages, children ... adulthood.  Intellectual curiosity ... anything with the faintest whiff of active participation.  They are a musical bunch, to be sure - capable of passively (aggressively) tuning out; but give them an instrument, or a book, it will languish untouched - unless it's an i-Something.  If it's a shimmering, vibrant keyboard graphic, or wildly animated guitar or drum kit ... That, they will pick up and click on, to "play"!

But I'm lumping now ... painting with broad strokes.  Like a racist or homophobe, I'm lazily generalizing.  Like every alter Furz (old fart) gone beyond 40, I'm trying to root for my own generation, and the certainties of the world I knew when I made the rules up while going along, and the paradigm shifted for my demographic.

I am over.

As the torch becomes past ... and the leaves of youth fade and fall like sex around my ankles, I can only watch, helplessly mixing metaphors ... hiding away inside a new world I wasn't born into, and don't (yet ;) fully comprehend.

"Verzauberung (Enchantment)", ©Jeff Glovsky