four days back

I'm pretending I'm not still jetlagged, my mom asked me if I felt any warm patriotic feelings upon reentering the united states and I said no, because I had to go through customs and TSA and Bloomberg's Fiefdom. But I'm glad to be back here, because despite the insatiable curiosity, I'm still a bit of a midwestern provincial homebody who misses the conversations that I've come to love and the camaraderie of the familiar.

I fell back into the routine quickly, because ultimately I like structure with wiggle room. My apartment's still in need of some rearranging which probably won't happen for another month thanks to housesitting and wanting to use the hours post-work for way more enjoyable things like catching up with folks and taking advantage of free soccer tickets to watch Team America get schooled by Belgium, somewhat enjoying the beauty of sheer athleticism coupled with the enjoyment of watching red-white-and-bros get bummed, because the USA! USA! chants just make me depressed, just like I don't sing the national anthem because I don't see the need to make a small deity out of a piece of cloth made in China. So I wasn't bummed when the score was 4-2 Belgium at the end of the night, if only because it deflated that microcosm of ego and exceptionalism that I don't subscribe to.

Despite my plans of wheeliebussing it back to the west side, one of my friends picked me up and and we chilled at K's new place around the corner from me. With the exception of her five months in Niger after our stint as roommates, we've since lived within a few streets of each other for the last five years after meeting a decade ago as next-door dorm neighbors. I was tired but I haven't seen him in too long and there's such a comfortable familiarity there as we slack together in the first warm summer night. These are the things that I miss when I'm away.

Anyways, here's a few pictures. I had a giant memory card in my dinky pointandclick, so I ended up with something like 700 pictures, mostly of cathedrals and whatnot but here.

Nuremberg

 St. Sebald's Church

Former rally grounds next to the stadium. Now a locale for tourist photos, tailgating Ultras, and Antifa activists with spray paint cans.

Green smoke from the Werder Bremen side. They lost 3-2.

Unfinished Congresshalle, this massive colusseum-looking thing now houses the local orchestra and a museum.

Olympic Park in Munich, the rolling hills are rubble now covered with grass and trees.

Nymphenburg Palace was pretty absurd in its ostentation.

Town Hall in Munich, which had loads of awesome gothic architecture buttresses and steeples and such.

Sunset over Prague.

portion of the Mucha window at St. Vitus.

The very cool Astronomical Clock in Old Town that every tourist has a picture of.

St. George's Basilica is almost a thousand years old.

 

Vysehrad was the favorite haunt of the expats, locals, and grade school field trips, a huge park where a giant fortress complex once stood, ancient fortification walls, with a church whose interior reminded me of an Ivan Bilibin painting inside, a cemetery full of national heroes enshrined beautifully, and some pretty badass Slavic statuary.  

Strahov Monastery's library made me jealous of Jesuit monks who could hang out with 10th century tomes and swank items of science and whatnot. 

Alchemy Museum tourist trap ruled, if only to go down into some spooky noochie tunnels. 

The Spanish Synagogue was gorgeous, oh my goodness.

I took a ton more pictures but I don't want to bore you and all. Every building in Prague was gorgeous, Nuremberg was lovely, I would have liked to see more of Munich, but here is where I always need to come home to. 

carnivalesque

Summer in Clevelandia officially begins with the first of the street fairs and festivals all over the city and last night, me and one of my fellow Parmastanis made a pilgrimage out to the Hessler fair to meet up with sundry folk and mingle with the tiedyed masses fighting the conformity of The Man by engaging in overpriced capitalism of another kind, as we observed the sartorial performance art of art school kids and boomers clinging to their glory days, busking musicians, and the kind of beat-writer inspired poetry that will be eternally terrible. It's strange to me that the more "leftward" I've swung politically (as far as being fed up with the whole perpetual warfare goonsquadery both at home and abroad), the less patience I have for the Lennonistas and their ilk.

It was hard to not openly chortle at the Che Guevara crepe paper festooning one of the booths, considering that the jerkface who got iconic by being good-looking had no use for arty folk or gay people in his concept of revolucion and what's more capitalistic ultimately than $10 parking (we parked down the street and walked), overpriced (vegan) fair food and $40 batik skirts? But I digress. After all, I've sold out as it is and was disappointed in the lack of Jamaican chicken and rice and ended up eating one of my friends' couscous plate because he didn't like it.

I'm also convinced that afrobeat will eventually undergo the transformation into cracker party music the way ska did in the 1980's and especially the 90's, because it takes a legitimate and often political black music form with an intense sociopolitical history that you can co-opt to make party music with all of your nerdy friends from marching band. Mark my words, you heard it here first.
 

That being said, I had a good time hanging out and such, drove back through Parmastan to drop off my traveling companion and continue the conversations that we usually have, and then drove home under sunsetting skies, made peace in the garden with relevant parties, drank tea and watched Buffy with the cat.  It was a good weekend, and much harder to come back to the routine when the sun and the breeze just feels so perfect.

nowhere fast

It feels like May outside, and I drop off my car, noticing that the gas prices keep rising and remembering what life was like before transportation. I got my license late in life, only when I really had to, since the bus line only went so far and my idealistic dreams died in the wake of student loans and other adult-world concerns that didn't preclude me from getting rides from other people with bigger carbon footprints.

I've realized recently that I've forgotten what it's like to be car-less, to set aside a block of time to do things, to slow down one's pace. There's a restless part within my soul that's been there as long as I was old enough to wander, when I'd spend my teens ambling through Parmastan on trips to the library, the goodwill, and the record store, those days and nights when I just had to get out of my dorm room or apartment and go somewhere, seeking small shards of the sublime in the most mundane of surroundings that suddenly became more beautiful or interesting and kept my sanity on the days when I felt like I was cracking up.

When one walks and actually looks, there is way more to see than what's passed at 25 miles an hour. The shadowy desolate figurines in a shop window, the way the light falls across an empty storefront, green-eyed cats staring out the windows of basement apartments, the five-minute dramas of cigarette breaks outside of corner stores. There are others out too, and I find that I avoid eye contact much more than I used to, but my eyes eternally thirsty take in every small detail of these familiar streets on the way to the library or the drugstore as if I'm seeing them for the first time.


Some who lived in supposedly better times would say my generation goes nowhere and does nothing, because we're too busy being on the Internet, and while I think I might be one of the last cohorts of kids who played outside unsupervised for hours on a regular basis, building forts in trees and riding my bike up to the pool in cutoffs and swimsuit without much fear of abduction, I think our lack of movement has something to do with technology but also more to do with the lack of economic power that previous generations took for granted. We have to find our beauty here, in case we never get to see elsewhere.

I get the feeling that if one looked into the past, for everyone who took to the open road and started fresh, there were others who had neither the means nor the lack of ties that make it easy or desirable to do so. The mythos of new beginnings is a microcosm of manifest destiny dressed in the garb of rebellion, of trust fund kids and people with nothing to lose, while others of us cling to our roots and branch out towards the sun when we can.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.