Letters Home

Whatever happened to that floaty feeling?

ian in hamburg — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:59:59 +0000

You know you’re reading a great book when all of a sudden you’ll want to reach out through the pages to the author and say: YES! I know what you mean! That’s happened to me!

The passage I was reading is from What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and it deals with a father talking to his 11-year-old son before he goes to bed. They’ve just been to a baseball game.

“You know Dad, I’m always thinking about how many people there are in the world. I was thinking about it between innings at the game, and I got this funny feeling, you know, how everybody is thinking thoughts at the same time, billions of thoughts.

“…And then I got this weird idea about how all those different people see what they see just a little different from everybody else.”

“You mean that every person has a different way of seeing the world?”

“No, Dad, I mean really and truly. I mean that because we were sitting where we were sitting tonight, we saw a game that was a little different from those guys with the beer next to us. It was the same game, but I could’ve noticed something those guys didn’t. And then I thought, if I was sitting over there, I’d see something else. And not just the game. I mean they saw me and I saw them, but I didn’t see myself and they didn’t see themselves. Do you get what I mean?”

“I know just what you mean. I’ve thought about it a lot, Matt. The place where I am is missing from my view. It’s like that for everybody. We don’t see ourselves in the picture, do we? It’s kind of a hole.”

“And then when I put that together with people thinking their zillions of thoughts - right now they’re out there thinking and thinking - I get this floaty feeling.”

This floaty feeling.

Yes! I gripped both sides of the book and shook it, as if doing so would somehow get the message across to the writer that I used to get that too.

Sometimes at night after lights were out, sometimes all alone in the forest, I could almost will it to happen. I didn’t even have to have my eyes closed. All I had to do was think of the world and everything that’s in it, every detail and that again on the moon, and the planets, and our galaxy and the clusters of galaxies beyond, and the outer reaches of the universe and all the dust motes in the infinity of space, and ask myself this: what if, instead of all this, there were nothing? What if right now, there were abolutely nothing? What if there were absolutely nothing at all, what if there never had been anything at all, and could there ever be nothing at all, and what if by defining this nothing as something, there were actually something anyway?

And while thinking this, I’d get this floaty feeling as if my body were drifting along in a current I couldn’t control. Sometimes it was accompanied by sounds, like rushing water or wind, other times it was like a piece of music, a string passage perhaps. Exactly what, I can’t recall, I just remember having the feeling.

I told some people about it over the years, but very few said they knew what I meant or had experienced it themselves.

Many years later, a girlfriend - a new-agey type who believed in chakras and energy fields and mysticism - said I was astral travelling, and that I was having an out-of-body experience.

Then again, she also spun tales of being on a mafia hit-list because she’d given the RCMP information that led to their busting a long-running heroin-smuggling operation out of Bangkok into Canada in the late 1980s and that’s why she had to leave Vancouver and go live in Montreal… Yeah right…

I hadn’t thought about it for ages before coming across that passage this morning, because by the time I was 13, I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d try to will it, I’d try to make that feeling come back, but it’s gone.

What was it? What killed it in me, and could I ever get it back again?

PS: Taking that book to Paris. See you in 10 days or so.

Into the ghosts of 1968

ian in hamburg — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:02:29 +0000

I’ve never been one to hit the streets with enough guts and grit to throw paving stones and firebombs, overturn cars and land in jail for a night or two.

Not a rebel, about the only thing I ever did to resist the deep-channel path my parents had laid out before me - of course you’ll go on to university - was to say Fuck It one day in Spring 1980, use the money I’d earned over the Winter to buy a backpack, a ticket to London, Let’s Go Europe and a Eurail pass, putting off for the second year in a row a university program I had no interest in continuing.

Arriving home a year later to begin a different program, I soon got restless again and started looking for a way to get back to Europe. Since I was now majoring in French, it made sense to go to France to learn it there for a year.

By the time I arrived in Grenoble in 1982, the flame and fury of the May 1968 Paris riots were already ancient history. Landing in the wrong place at the wrong time, this is about all the mischief in France I ever got up to:

When my wife and I get to Paris in a few days for a week of revisiting old friends, old haunts and old memories, it will be tempting to wander down a street or two which 40 years before was barricaded with burning cars and strewn with debris, but I doubt we’ll actually do so.

Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Chicago, Paris, Prague: I started paying attention to the news in 1968 after taking over my brother’s Vancouver Sun paper route. I was amazed to learn how the world outside our quiet, isolated little burg dug out of a corner of a still-undiscovered fjord on the West Coast of Canada could be roiling in such chaos, but I was only eight years old and too young to grasp much of anything, especially why the world was going through what it was.

Just an object of derision to my brothers’ friends, one of whom pointed and laughed at me from the back of a car one day and said: he still thinks his prick’s just for pissing!

Vive la révolution? Vive l’amour!

I can’t wait. Did I mention it’s going to be just the two of us?

if facebook were real life

ian in hamburg — Sat, 03 May 2008 09:17:26 +0000

My Facebook usage has followed a path typical of millions:

Curiosity.

Sign-up.

Enthusiasm.

Disappointment.

Boredom.

Scrabulous.

Yep. After eight months, all I ever use it for is to play Scrabulous. Why? This will give you a clue. Enjoy.

ipod mini discovery stuns archaeologists

ian in hamburg — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:28:36 +0000

This Definitely Not the Daily News special report is dedicated to Azahar of casa az fame, who is today celebrating the start of her third year of blogging and who a few weeks back in the midst of a tech consumption frenzy stopped to ask me, “What’s an iPod mini?”

by Elmer Schmedlapp
Seattle (DNTN) A team of archaeologists is attempting to decipher the contents of a recently discovered iPod mini to see if knowledge contained on the ancient device can give scientists insights into lost technologies and long-forgotten music listening practices.

The mini, which apparently fell behind the bookshelf of Walla Walla, Washington resident Wanda Woodsworth while Woodsworth was out walking one wet Wednesday in winter, 2005, had been given up for lost ever since.

Woodsworth recovered the long-dead Apple product last week while moving furniture.

“It had been so long, I didn’t recognise it for what it was at first” said Wordsworth, “so I phoned the university. They got really excited, told me not to touch it until experts could identify it, then evaluate its contents. “

The mini was a sleek, brushed-metal device which first appeard in January, 2004. It was suddenly pulled from the market 20 months later by iPod maker Apple because its relatively small 4 or 6GB size and miniature hard drive storage system was deemed “so last Thursday” by a bunch of 20-something shitheads sitting around a table at Silicon Valley focus group session.

“It was like, meh, whatever, get rid of it, you know?” said Charles “Chuck” Biscuits, a group member. “We thought, hey, like, you know. Yeah.”

Apple abandoned the mini barely six months after releasing a second-generation model amid cries of protest from Apple store salespeople, who this reporter can assure you once told him the mini was the best iPod ever produced.

“It was such a perfect design, easy to read display, great heft to it in the palm of your hand,” said Apple store owner Filbert McNutt. “Sure their battery life sucked, but if it died, you still had one great-looking paperweight. We were selling them so fast, we couldn’t stock ‘em, and then - Bang! Gone. I forget what they even looked like.”

One scientist at the university lab where the mini is being dissected said her team is excited at what they might find on the ancient personal audio player.

“The world has just so moved on since 2004,” said researcher Marla Baverstock. “To think that the ancients were actually willing to pay good money for iPods with monochrome displays, no video capability, and a spinning hard drive! How utterly desperate those times must have been.”

Cultural anthropologists are also looking forward to analysing the song selection stored on the mini’s drive. They say it’s an artefact which will give clues as to how the world might have been enjoying some down time while contemplating the horror of another four years of the George W. Bush administration.

“It was a unique time for music, pop culture, and world history in general,” said ET cultural and sexual deviations beat reporter Adda Dictomy.

“The number of people with a close-up view of Britney Spears’ and Paris Hilton’s crotch was still in the low four figures instead of the billions now thanks to the Internet, Anna Nicole Smith was still trying to convince everybody that her years of wiping the bum of a billionaire 70 years her senior was out of sheer love, SUV drivers were bitching about gas prices half the level they’re at now and people living in trailer parks and working at Burger King were being flim-flammed into half-million dollar mortgages so they could live in their dream home for a few months, then have it pulled out from under them.

Gosh, those were the days.”

Learning English the Calvin and Hobbes way

ian in hamburg — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:06:06 +0000

I never get any peace and quiet anymore between the time the little red-haired girl goes to bed and her falling asleep, but I don’t mind at all.

“Daaa-deee,” she’ll call from her bedroom five minutes after bedding down. “What does philanthropic mean?”

So I get up out of my chair and go in to tell her.

“Well, philanthropic is being nice to other people, but in a way that benefits everybody. Like you donate a lot of money to support a hospital for sick children, or for buying space for young artists to work in. That’s being philanthropic. It has two root words in one - philo- meaning love of, and anthropos- meaning human being.

Forfeiture

Epiphany

Sophisticated

Pandemonium

Euphoric

Voyeurism

Subjugate

Co-dependent dysfunctionality

I’ve always spoken English with her, but she’s only 11, been taking English in her German high school for all of eight months, and I’ve never used such vocabulary in my conversations with her, so where does it come from?

Calvin and Hobbes. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1400 pages spread over three volumes in a boxed set covering 10 years’ worth of colour and black-and-white comics.

She’d already dog-eared the two Calvin compilations I’d given her, books from my younger days when I too was a fan of the little guy with the big ideas and his imaginary tiger. She bought another one herself a few months ago, but after also reading through that one several times over, went on a hunt for more. After discovering the three-volume set up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up, using her own allowance and birthday money.

I know she’ll probably not retain half of the new words she comes across this way, but that’s not important right now. Expat parents are always trying to make sure their native language gets passed on to their kids in the face of the constant bombardment of the majority language and culture they swim in.

If she’s found something in English she not only loves to read but can’t seem to get enough of, my job is that much easier.

Possibly related posts definitely not for everyone

ian in hamburg — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:29:25 +0000

It seems to be a WordPress habit. Friday afternoon rolls around, time to spring another feature on a million unsuspecting bloggers just in time for support to high-tail it to the dude ranch for the weekend.

Latest addition hard on the heels of the wildly successful upgrade of early April is the addition of Possibly Related Posts. It’s being billed as a way of leading readers elsewhere to posts that might be about the same thing you have written.

The operative word you have to keep in mind is Possibly.

A quick survey of the links now inserted at the bottom of a couple of my posts include:

A link to a crime story set in Indonesia on a post about the strange language I speak with my brother Gordon.
A link to a story about some guy whose dad was a tv repairman in the same post
And three well-meaning but somehow not-at-all-related posts about shift work tacked on to my most recent post about being refused a ride in a taxi in the middle of the night.

Other bloggers have had the ultimate creep-out: one complained in the forum of links to porn inappropriate content, for example.

If you’re not happy with links appearing on your blog you never chose and have no control over, there is fortunately a way to disable it. Go into your dashboard and click on Design, then Extras. A page will pop up. Check the box marked: Hide related links on this blog.

But to give WordPress credit, they are saying that over the coming days we’ll be allowed to tweak the results to our liking. Hopefully that will include the ability to filter out the crap. Not a bad idea, but one that should have been there from the beginning.

Taxi driver refuses midnight fare to broken-down cyclist

ian in hamburg — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:08:29 +0000

The last two posts combine into one as my love of cycling to work clashed early this morning with the usual crappy German customer service.

About twice a month I have to get up in the middle of the night and work the hell shift. It’s tough on the system to blast your body into night shift mode and back again so quickly, but I do it because I like my job; it supplements my blogging income.

Anyway at about 3:20 this morning I’m wheeling along enjoying the cool air and stillness on the way to the office when suddenly I get this scraping, crunching and banging from the back wheel. I can’t shift gears anymore and the chain’s not catching on the rear sprocket set.

I stop to look and realise that one of those two little sprockets that keep the tension on the chain derailler had popped out.

Excellent. Middle of the night and only half-way to work.

Luckily I’m right close to a hotel, so I walk into the lobby and ask the friendly night shift guy to order me a taxi so I could at least make it to work on time.

The taxi arrives and it’s the usual boat - a station wagon. Great, I say. I can take the wheels off and bring the bike with me.

The driver looks at me with suspicion.

“Is it OK if I put the bike in the back?” I ask him. “I’ll pay you extra.”

“Well… only if it fits.”

I take the wheels off and he lifts the back door. Taking extra care not to scrape anything, I slowly try to edge the frame in, but although it passes the back door, it doesn’t fit inside by a couple of inches. Then I notice the rear seat backs are split to fold down to make a huge space.

“Can we fold the wider one down to make room?”

“Geht nicht,” he tells me. Can’t do it.

“Really, it’s just a flip of that lever. We have the same thing on our car.”

“Geht nicht,” he tells me again. “Why don’t you lock the bike to that pole and pick it up later?”

Well, I’d thought of that, but the last time I left my bike out overnight in Hamburg, thieves had stolen my derailler. I didn’t want to come back to find just my frame attached to a post.

But rather than get into an argument with this guy over why he can’t just flip the damn lever so I’d have lots of room to put the bike in, I tell him forget it, pack my stuff up and trot off.

Another typical day in Germany: the customer is never right

ian in hamburg — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:42:49 +0000

This is about what happened this morning, but first we have to back up six months. Last fall I took the beast in to get the winter tires put on. As usual, I stopped in first beforehand on my bike to make an appointment.

Oh, sorry. We don’t take appointments anymore.

Why not?

We found that too many customers weren’t showing up, so we had mechanics sitting around idle.

Well how am I supposed to plan for anything? My wife needs the car on some days to drive to work. I can’t just show up and hope for the best.

Well, sorry. You can leave the keys with us tomorrow morning, and we’ll try to get to it during the day.

Fine, I say.

Fast-forward six months to this morning. I stuff the car with four summer tires and head to the same place to get them mounted. I walk in and get served right away.

Do you have an appointment?

… moment of stunned silence….

But I was here yesterday. I talked to the guy who said I should just drop in this morning with the keys. He didn’t say anything about making an appointment, and I didn’t ask because six months ago I was told you didn’t take appointments anymore.

Well, you should have made an appointment.

But that’s just the thing, I tell him. I was told by you people when I brought the winter tires in last fall that I couldn’t, and besides, nobody told me that when I dropped by yesterday.

Who did you speak with?

(As if I know their names) Well, it was a guy with a beard, older fellow.

Naw, couldn’t have been him.

Well anyway, I don’t understand how I’m supposed to guess whether or not I can make an appointment or not.

Well, maybe it was just a temporary thing due to certain conditions back then, I don’t know. Just leave us the keys and we’ll try to squeeze you in today, but you probably won’t get the car until tomorrow night.