Hooray hooray, the First of May, smashing capitalism starts today!

Dear all,

I don’t know, I’ve only been living here for 10 years, but will someone please explain to me this German fascination with fighting the last war? No no, not That War. That’s the one we’re not supposed to mention. I mean the Cold War. East vs West. Communism vs Capitalism. Trabant vs Triumph.

I ask this because the first of May is coming up again. As a Canadian, this date usually passed me by with no special meaning, because we along with the Americans have our Labour Day the first Monday in September. But in many countries of Europa it is a national holiday set aside for advancing the cause of workers’ rights, a worthy goal which as a voluntary dues-paying union member I do support.

But there are parts of it I just don’t get. Take this poster. A quickie Babelfish will tell you that under the slogan of “Destroy what’s destroying you,” they want everybody to rally against Wages, the State and Capital.

Okay….

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we try that already? The State pretended to pay everyone by handing them near-worthless money, so the workers turned around and pretended to be at work. Result: the Trabant, delivery in 11 years, give or take. Hundreds killed trying to escape the country’s borders. And enough material for a few good films illustrating just how bleak a life it must have been.

The far left is not alone in this endless display of long-spent political capital. The extreme right demonstrates whenever and wherever it can get a permit, usually a handful of peeled eggs in leather boots facing a much larger contingent of left-wing counter-demonstrators, with 10 times their number decked out in full police riot gear just to keep the two sides from tearing each other apart.

I’m not advocating people abandon their beliefs, or that they have no right to demonstrate for them, nor even set a tire or two on fire if that’s how they get their kicks, but please, get a grip people. If mental illness can also be defined as doing the same thing over and over, year in and year out, expecting results to be different every time, especially if history shows that what you’re screaming about has been tried and failed, time to face reality.

All for now,

Ian

PS: I can’t believe that in the States they gave that film a Restricted rating.  No wait - I can believe it.

Did the earth move for you too, dear?

A very British earthquake.

Taking for granted what can’t be replaced

Dear all,

I was clicking through a long list of expatriates in Germany the other day and came across a post that touched me deeply.

My mother-in-law had been visiting for a couple of weeks and I must admit we were all getting a bit frazzled with the extra workload someone pushing 90 can bring on.  Quite frankly, we were looking forward to her being picked up soon by a relative and brought back home to the countryside.  Besides, the inadvertent wheelchair acrobatics were getting to be a little more excitement than I could handle.

Most of the time I am interested in what she has to say, so much so that not too long ago I sat with her with my camcorder rolling and interviewed her, getting her to talk about her family, what it was like growing up, how she was forced to flee her home with a toddler in tow to go live like a refugee, the penury of the war and the years right after, the rebuilding of their lives.   I thought that one day, we all might want to have these stories to look back on.

But as with many older people, they get to recounting the same things over and over, and I must admit I have tuned her out a few times over the years.

If you haven’t stumbled upon it already, go and read the post I found.

I wanted to leave her a comment, but under the circumstances I guess she doesn’t much feel like blogging, because the comment are closed.

So this is my comment to you, island girl:

Your father-in-law sounds like a man whose heart was always in the right place, right to the very end: with the woman he so obviously adored, with the family he cherished.   Your writing this has made me think hard about my own family and how we sometimes take for granted what can’t be replaced.  Herzliches Beileid.

all for now,

Ian

Time before Tuesday: when we thought punk rock ruled the world

Something I hope to publish on every Tuesday to illustrate some time which came before and thank christ will never come again. This is all inspired by an email out of nowhere a few weeks ago from a former classmate inviting me to a 30-year High School reunion which I won’t be able to attend.

I went through a punk phase my first year of university.

We were a tight group of five living on the same dorm floor. We couldn’t get enough of the garbled, barking lyrics and fawk-you delivery local guys like Joey Shithead and the DOAs, the Pointed Sticks and of course the Clash and the Sex Pistols were throwing our way. We were actually on what was supposed to be a quiet floor reserved for the studious and reserved, but our disco-addicted downstairs neighbours got so fed up with us they called out the Campus Quasi-Cops to shut us down on more then one occasion, slamming the main power switch off usually at the high point of our screaming parties.

Another time those downstairs doorknobs were having yet another lame-o mixer and for some reason had invited along a man who later went on to become UBC President. Oh yeah, I remember now: sick of living midst hospital grey, they had painted their corridor in some sort of Dark Side of the Moon album cover motif, and our man in the suit was along to cut the ribbon. Gag. We were all ready for it, timing a gigawatt blast of DOA’s Disco Sucks down the stairwell just as they were half-way through another sloppy string of Heart of Glass, YMCA and Stayin’ Alive. Ah, but they were ready with plans of their own, leading Our Man in the Suit up the stairs through our wall of total harmonic distortion. He was really into it though, and pogoed along with the rest of us. I have scoured the online archives of The Ubyssey trying to find the picture of him I know is out there, but to no avail.

The live concerts were the highlight of course. On concert nights we’d all pile into somebody’s car the bus and head downtown to some dive I think was called The Windmill. Our arrival was usually greeted with a mixture of shock and derision. Shock because none of us had the guts to shave his head or gel it into anything even remotely resembling a Mohawk, derision because we were obviously just a bunch of dabbling KAWledge kids / punk wannabes who must have come off as if the only safety pins anywhere near our skin were still keeping our diapers together.

The concerts were - no surprise - very loud and sometimes violent places to be. The music was so distorted and the lyrics so incomprehensible, it was only fitting that everyone start slam-dancing, flailing, spitting at the band and swearing. If you weren’t prepared to go around with someone else’s gob in your hair, shove your neighbour or hork a loogie at the bass player, you might as well have stayed home.

Sometimes fights would break out, but they wouldn’t last long. I almost got into one myself after one of our group played a trick on me. Reaching past two punked-out women who were standing right behind me, he grabbed my ass and goosed me so hard I nearly did a pogo jump onto the stage. I turned around with a snarl and my fists clenched only to come face-o-face with both of them, who gave me this whadda YOU lookin’ at look before I saw my friend right behind them looking off into space and trying too hard to act like he didn’t know what was going on.

I like to think of that time as my contribution to that youthful tradition every generation has to go through of dressing funny, talking weird, and having music our parents think is just noise. Now that I’m pushing 50 and entering my early curmudgeon years, I can say the spirit lives on.

My parents used to call it load of crap. That’s not far from what I now call it:

Rap.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Screaming OH MY GOD while Granny does a backflip

Sunny Sunday, no real plans, just get out and enjoy the warmth and that special atmosphere that only a German Sunday can offer. So after cleaning my clock at Monopoly the little red-haired girl helps me bundle Granny - known as Oma around these parts - into her wheelchair so the three of us can all go out for a Sunday stroll. Our destination: down to the Elbe waterfront.

The bus comes, so we head inside after the friendly bus driver lowers the platform for Oma’s wheelchair. Carefully observing the sign on the wall, I turn the chair in the reverse direction as indicated and set the brakes.

At the central bus station we all pile off and do the same thing when our connecting bus comes, only this time while setting the brakes the little red-haired girl and I are already deep into a conversation about skunks.

We sit down facing Oma and the bus pulls out.

“Have you ever been sprayed by a skunk?” she asks me.

“Nope. I’ve been pretty lucky. But I did run over one once. It was with the first car I ever owned and it must have been cursed because I’d only had it for two days when I ran over it.

“What’s cursed?”

“It means something or someone that for some reason gives you nothing but problems from the start. Anyway, some friends were along for a spin and it was at night and I sort of saw the thing in front of me but by then it was too late and then we heard this THUNK and right away the whole car reeked to high heaven. It stank for two years. Well, it actually only smelled bad for about three months. But for a couple of years you’d catch a whiff of skunk every once in a while. By the way, do you know the only thing that works to get the smell off if you do get sprayed?”

“Yeah, tomato juice. You told me before.”

“Right. I think there’s some acid in it or something that dissolves whatever’s so bad in their spray.”

“Too bad you didn’t wash your car with tomato juice!”

“Nah, that would have been pretty hard. The thing was splattered all over the wheel housing - that’s the part that covers the wheel - and I sprayed it over and over again, but the smell like I said took a long time to

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!

By this time we’ve already made one stop and rounded a corner and gone through the light and turned another corner and we’re headed down to the Elbe waterfront, which is kinda steep. The bus driver for some reason hit the brakes and Oma, with nothing but fresh air behind her, was doing a slow-motion backflip onto the floor. Never changed expression, never said anything, just tipped backward until she was staring straight up at the ceiling.

So in the instant I’m lunging forward way too late to be of any use it flashes through my mind that somehow I’m going to have to explain to my wife that her mother - a woman who lived through the worst of the Second World War by having to abandon her ancestral home to flee the advancing Red Army and live like a refugee for four years with a small child while her husband wasted away in a prisoner of war camp never knowing for the longest time whether he was dead or alive and who scrimped and saved to bring up her family and made it almost to the start of her 10th decade - was finally done in by the negligence of some twit Canadian who may have set the brakes, but didn’t stand behind her wheelchair just in case.

But as I lean down I realise the reason she’s not the least bit upset is because her head is being cradled by two feet - two feet which are placed in the footrests of ANOTHER wheelchair placed it just so happens in exactly the right spot to catch her head as she fell backwards.

The other passengers and the bus driver are all over us at the same time, making sure everything’s OK and that she’ safe and sound, and demonstrating the best way to position the wheelchair to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  They suggested sideways, but basically any direction will do as long as you STAND BESIDE IT.

Oma later said she thought I was more rattled by the whole thing than she was. She’s right. We were going to start our walk along the Elbe straight away, but I needed time to let the shakes die down. We headed to the beach where she watched the little red-haired girl and I throw the football around and get sand in our shoes.

Note to self: Use your head. Don’t always pay attention to the instructions.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

The nurse who brings me my daily dose of laughter

Dear all,

One of the fun things about blogging is discovering who’s out there.  I always used to ignore bloggers because I considered them to be background noise to the main event.  There’s an element of truth to that, but since starting my own with wordpress and doing what they call tag surfing, I’ve found a few people who make my time online a little more fun, a little more interesting, a little more thought-provoking.

Take the good nursemyra at gimcrack hospital, who if you’ve been paying attention has been sitting quietly at the bottom of my blogroll for the last couple of weeks.  I found her by tag surfing, a wordpress function which basically matches tags you’ve put into your own blog with those which others have put into theirs.  Very simple, but with surprisingly satisfying results.  I don’t know nursemyra from a hole in the ground, but every time I read her blog, I laugh and think of my mother.

Mom used to come home with stuff like this.  She wasn’t at a psychogeriatric ward, so it was never as bent or twisted or borderline insane.  But as a night nurse at a large general hospital, she did her time in emergency and on the intensive care ward, seeing the worst of what car accidents and cancer can bring on, the worst of what cutbacks to healthcare funding did to her working conditions, plus the usual office politics and crap we all have to deal with.  But she never told us what she was going through by complaining.  It was mostly by passing on a wisecrack someone might have made during an operation to remove some foreign object out of an abdomen, or a dirty joke passed around during a break in the action.

Sometimes half-way into dinner she’d get into the nitty-gritty about some surgical procedure she’d had a close hand in and how they’d nearly lost the guy because they’d been forced to improvise and use a left-handed fritzleplucker to open up his duodenum when Dad, who’d be sitting there til he couldn’t stand it any longer, would change the subject with a sharp jeeezuschrist can’t we do this some other time?

But piece-by-piece over the years we got an idea of what it must have been like to work there.  I wouldn’t have wanted to have done her job if they’d paid me triple, but she managed to get through it with a mixture of dark humour and the occasional Amaretto with friends.  That she is still close friends with some of her former colleagues and even “the girls” with whom she went to nursing school in the latter years of World War Two says something about the bonding that goes on between people when they go through hell together.

I wouldn’t want to spend my working days surrounded by bewildered, incontinent old people with psychiatric problems either, but go check out the goings on at gimcrack hospital, where the nurses are pretty and the doctors are pissed.  I don’t think she’s making any of this up.

All for now,

Ian

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Senseless, shocking, gut-wrenching, mindless

In America,

So many dead - the world stops.

In Iraq?  Slow news day.

Twenty-four things about the last 24 hours

1. Our friends’s birthday party was a success.  Many people that I didn’t know, some of whom I now do.

2. I don’t remember any of their names.  I’m like that.

3. We copied out our Page 50 quotations and put them on a billboard covering an entire wall.

4. Mine was the only one in English.  It also ran the longest.  I like Paul Theroux very much.

5. I managed to copy down a few others.  I hope to translate them over the next day or so.

6. The evening flowed like the meanderings of a slow-moving river stretching back many years.

7. At one point, I came up behind a beautiful woman, put my arms around her, kissed her on the neck, told her she was beautiful and that I loved what she was wearing.

8.  That woman was my wife.

9. I started off with champagne and then shifted to beer.  Sometimes I’m downwardly mobile.

10. After we had dinner, some got up and started to play music.  Two were on guitar, another on electric piano, while two sang.

11.  All the songs were in English, but everyone knew the words.  I tried not to sing too loudly when they played the Beatles tunes.

12. We rode our bikes there.  On the way home, there was a minor earthquake.

13. As I was riding along, the ground shifted.  This made me lose my balance.

14. I was instantly reminded how much it hurts when flesh hits pavement.

15. My brand-new glasses got bent all out of shape, to boot.

16. K put on a band-aid when we got home to stop the bleeding.  I think my leather jacket needs dry cleaning now.

17. Sometimes I think I’m the world’s oldest teenager.

18. I learned back when I was 15 not to mix different types of booze, and never drink the last one no matter how much you want it.

19. Sometimes I wonder if I’m setting a good example for my 10-year-old.

20. Those last three are just musings, but I’m leaving them in anyway.

21. I just remembered that I wrote two haikus to Haikus yesterday morning and can be found at the bottom of this post’s comments list.  I hope he doesn’t think I’m a Canadian idiot.

22. I am dreading the sunrise, because that just means it will be closer to the time I have to head to work.

23. In the last 24 hours, I also had some content stolen from this blog.  The thief is a splogger.  They are nasty creatures.

24. I sent them a polite request to take my content down off their site.  Most Canadians are polite, and mean what they say.  Beware of exceptions.