Auslanders: Breakfast Breakdown

I really like toast.

I also really like cereal.

I mean really. Like, really.

Every night when I go to bed, I am so excited about getting up the next morning to have toast and cereal that sometimes I can hardly get to sleep because I just can’t wait for breakfast.

Other nights I dream about waking up and having a huge bowl of Shreddies or Corn Bran or thick hot slabs of Dempster’s Prairie Bran smeared with Kraft Light Peanut Butter and iced off with a dripping skein of honey.

I really like breakfast. 

My wife thinks this is a most unbelievable scenario. She is convinced that I am faking it in a sad attempt to be more interesting than other people, but this is no pretentious breakfast love. This is the real thing. This is for life.

She can scarcely imagine that anybody would love to eat breakfast because she is one of those people who claims to force herself to eat food in the morning because she knows it is good for her.

“I wish I didn’t have to eat breakfast,” she says.

I would like to add that she also claims not to like sandwiches and thinks chili is only “okay” because she’s “not a big fan of beans.” It’s a good thing she’s cute.

Sadly, this rank foolishness appears to be the norm over here in Fortress Europe, and it’s done nothing but make my wife smugger than ever. She’s even started drinking coffee every day.

Normally, I wouldn’t care if an entire continent of people weren’t keen on delicious breakfast foods, but my situation over here has forced me to care. Of particular concern is the way that these people have turned peanut butter into a social misstep and therefore it is not easy to get. Eating peanut butter in public, or having people know you like it, makes you feel somewhat like a supermodel caught farting on the runway. The more I think about it, the more I feel like that anyway. I have always wanted to be a leggy, coltish teen possessed of awkward beauty and a bellyful of split pea soup. 

The Europeans have not done well at all in maintaining grocery parity with North American breakfast technologies. There simply is not the flourishing peanut butter culture that we thoughtlessly enjoy back home.

When I think of peanut butter, I think of a large tub of it. At least five kilograms.

Actually, I think of several five kilogram tubs, because we buy many at once.

There is very little as disturbing upon waking up as realizing that there is no more peanut butter in the house to spread on the toast that is still hot from the toaster. To combat the possibility of this crushing disappointment, a smart peanut butter eater needs backup tubs. I like to have three or four backup tubs prepared, lined up one behind the other like paratroopers before a jump.

When I think of peanut butter during a shopping expedition to a German grocery store however, I am forced to think of a tub that would barely give a reasonable coating over two healthy slabs of bread if used in the customary Canadian manner. If I can find it at all.

I also think of the expression on the check out girl’s face when she rings my tiny little cup of peanut butter through with the other groceries.

She will look at it with undisguised horror, then quickly glance up at me before looking away and I know what she’s thinking. She thinks I don’t speak German because I don’t want to. She thinks I have never traveled and when I do I want to take my culture with me wherever I go. She thinks I look down on every other country and walk around puffed out with delusion because I am convinced that I come from the greatest place in the history of civilization. She thinks I voted for George Bush and she thinks that I still like him.

If she understood enough English, I would enjoy announcing aloud and with vigour that I don’t like Nascar, I don’t support the war in Iraq and I spell vigour with a “u” no matter what the spell checker says because I am – and I would point aggressively at the Canadian flag pin stuck to my hat – a Canadian.

I bitterly resent the assumption that only the most boorish, culturally orphaned Americans eat peanut butter. It’s just not true. Boorish, culturally orphaned Canadians eat every bit as much as our terrifying, red-state brethren to the south, praise Jesus.

Before we came over here, I was scared about breakfast. Scared to lose it.

Without unfettered and free-flowing access to peanut butter, how would we live happily?

What would we feel in the mornings without it?     

What would we smear on our toast?

Would they even have toasters?

Because, if they didn’t use peanut butter, why even bother having a toaster? What good would it serve? All it would do is sit there as a mocking reminder of what we didn’t have and would never understand.

Would they have delicious enough cereal to compensate for the loss?

More specifically, did they have Shreddies?

That was my one glimmer of hope as I jumped out of bed on that first day and ran up to the kitchen.

Literally, jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen.  

As a rule, I have an intense need to pack my cereal in as quickly as possible, before anything else has a chance to happen and disrupt my pattern.

Of course, Nisa has very little respect for my pattern and she told me that I was not to be doing any of that patterning over here. There would be no pre-emptive eating before our hosts had a chance to get up and work us into their pattern.

This was a terrible feeling.

I need to run through my pattern. I have a lot of different ones actually, and each one is crucial to good life.

If I am going for a car ride, I need to be the driver.

If I am driving with a group, I need to play Name That Ipod Track, or I need to have no music at all and we have to chat. There have to be good topics, too. I usually have five or six good topics ready at any given time just in case I need to drive somewhere. Here are my top three for right now if we were driving:

1. What would you do with one billion dollars?

2. What exactly is funny about Christopher Walken?

3. What is the best flavour?

If I am eating at somebody else’s house, and if they are cooking chicken, I need to find a way to surreptitiously examine the interior of that chicken to ensure that it is cooked all the way through. I also need to carefully observe that there is a correct distance maintained at all times between raw meat touching objects and cooked meat touching objects, or then I will be forced to work my way to the sink so that I am able to wash the raw meat touching objects before they are rubbed liberally all over the cooked food. I do this for your own good.  

I need to lift weights at least three times per week, or ideally, four times a week. I also need to ride the exercise bike twice a day on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and then once each on Saturday and Sunday and I need to ride it in front of the computer.

If it’s sunny in the day, and the moon is down that night, I need to go to the Bush that night unless there are bugs and it is hot. If that’s not possible, say, because I am in Germany or something, I need to go for a Man Walk out Monkesweg and touch the railroad warning sign at Osterath.

I could continue, but then you would have all the information you needed to carefully manipulate me into doing your bidding. Plus, you would refer to me later as “that strange, picky little obsessive man” and you would assume I had some kind of personality disorder.

But I don’t.

These aren’t the compulsions of a diseased mind, they’re just handy little structures upon which all life is predicated.

The only problem with having such patterns is that other people don’t seem to understand the integral, foundational nature of them. Those people don’t want me to get up early and sneak my breakfast. 

If Nisa tells me that we’re invited to go out for breakfast to some restaurant, I am depressed. I don’t want to go to a restaurant. I don’t want bacon and eggs and pancakes and sausage and home fries and all that crap. I want cereal and toast. And they never have Shreddies at a restaurant.

If Nisa tells me that we’re going to live in Germany for a year in somebody else’s house and on the first morning there they will be making our breakfast, I am depressed. I don’t want somebody else to make my breakfast. I want cereal and toast.

I can’t bear all that hanging around waiting for somebody else to think about what we’re going to do.

We don’t need to think about anything or root through the cupboards. We don’t have to wonder what we’re going to have because we’re going to have breakfast and breakfast is cereal and toast, as I am pretty sure I have stated many times by now.

But we weren’t going to have cereal and toast.

On that first morning we were told that we would be having another kind of breakfast: a traditional German breakfast.

At first I was concerned.

Were they like the Japanese?

Would we be faced with fish soup and rice porridge? I like those things, but not as soon as I wake up.

Would it be like an Italian breakfast, which amounts to a tray of cookies, cakes and tarts? I couldn’t hold down that much sugar and refined pastry before eleven.

Then Anja walked out from the kitchen with a large platter of meat. 

By “meat”, I mean ham. Ham baloney and westphalian ham and mock chicken ham and turkey ham and black forest ham and ham ham and even salmon ham. An entire family of swine and one confused fish had been sacrificed for that mounded platter of cured meat.  

Then she placed out thick slabs of buttery white cheese and a pile of warm rolls.

I perked up for that.

Some of these rolls were like spheres of pretzel, some were healthy looking, studded with seeds and bits and others were just plain old crusty white ones like people get back home. 

Of course, the ham and cheese festival was great and I would eat it happily, love it even, but those perfect buns would be unbelievable sliced in half, with a fat layer of peanut butter melting into the warm texture of those rich, whole grains. I would have had honey and raspberry jam variations prepared, and huge glasses of ice cold Becker’s milk. One percent.  

I was fighting tears as Anja went back into the kitchen, and Nisa shot a fierce look at me across the table that clearly said: “Don’t you dare cry like a little bitch about not having peanut butter here for these delicious warm rolls!”

I turned away from her and grit my teeth. I would not cry. I wouldn’t give any of them the satisfaction of seeing me break down. Not here. Not yet.

I stared at the wall, didn’t want Anja to see my face when she came back with some other jarred substance that wouldn’t be peanut butter.

Whatever it was, she set it down right in front of me. It clanked on the table. Heavy. Glass.

“I know you love peanut butter, but maybe this will be okay for you.”

I turned slowly, afraid to look, afraid to see a joke ass jar of liverwurst or pickled red cabbage or anything else that would kick down the last bit of manly strength I had left.

A one kilogram jar of Nutella was sixteen inches from my face.

Nutella!

I had forgotten all about Nutella.

It was exactly like peanut butter, only made with hazelnuts. And it had chocolate.

I had to wipe my face, but not because of tears.

It was saliva.

I already couldn’t wait until tomorrow.  

 

 

The Sunday Newspaper

Here in Meerbusch there is a free local paper that comes in on Sundays.

It has a few stories about neighbourhood people who are doing stuff with different things, or at least they are holding things up and smiling at the camera while doing stuff.

This paper also has some excellent classified ads and of course, you know how I love the flyers.
This paper also allows me to check on the progress of a particularly attractive 19 year old blonde girl who appears each week in the small box of personal ads in the back. She is in there every week, offering up a relatively impressive head shot and some completely inoffensive personal information that forces to subsequently imagine what is wrong with her such that she is unable to meet a man in the conventional method. Which is to say, by simply walking around as an attractive blonde teenage girl. Does she have webbed fingers and toes? Hobbit feet? Is she just a head sitting on a pillow in a lab? What could possibly be wrong with this girl?

I must admit that I also enjoyed a recent ad for the Erotik Messe mit Live Pornstars! Admission was free, and I would probably still be there if I hadn’t told my wife about it. She grounded me so I couldn’t go.

That was in many ways unfortunate, but being grounded did give me lots of time to examine this paper today. I say examine because clearly I cannot read most of the words. Notice that I say most.

Today I saw the best ad that I have ever seen in the free weekly and it took some of the sting out of not being at the Erotik Messe mit Live Pornstars! It also made me proud because I was able to read a few of the words in this ad very well.

When I say that this was the best ad that I have yet seen in the free weekly, you might wonder why. I would then tell you that, instead of having the best production values, the best use of photography, the best artistic design or the best slogan or anything like that, this ad is the best because it is simple and honest in a way that most ads are not. The creator of this ad was not afraid to let his product speak for itself without a lot of excess baggage.

Here is the ad. I’m sure that you will enjoy its refreshing precision as much as I did.

I will let you know how the dvds are in a few days.

Auslanders: Chapter 3.1 – Random Observations

You can buy beer at any restaurant, highway gas station, yard sale or toy store. It is cheap, one Euro or something, and I think some places, they will even pay you to drink it. I don’t know this for sure, but I am pretty sure that this is the case.

I do know, however, that if you want water, you are a fool.

In a typical restaurant over here, the best way to guarantee bad service and a possible knife fight after your meal is to ask for water and then try to specify that you want “leitungswasser” which translates as “pipe water.”

It is only those damn North Americans who go around thinking they can barge into some innocent restaurant and guzzle down gallons of valuable pipe water, sucking it back like it grows on trees or comes from taps or something. They just drink it, as though it was beer or wine!

But the more discriminating European diner outer knows that the only socially and fiscally responsible way to drink this vile substance, if you are so disgusting as to put it into your mouth in the first place, is to order it in a beautifully labeled bottle that costs 5 Euro per liter and comes from France, where everything is better.

I know that there is some filthy toothless old man, pox-ridden, with dirty fingernails hunched over a sink in the skanky lunch room of some mineral water bottling plant on the Seine, filling up bottle after bottle with Paris tap water and chuckling around his Marlboro at those idiots who pay that much to drink it.

But I also know that old guy was good enough to wash the bottles first.

In spit.

I Have A Couple of Questions

Hello my supple little friends.

Now is the time when I ask a few questions, and I leave the responsibility for answering up to you entirely.

In order to answer my questions, you could leave a comment, you could email me, you could Skype me, or, when I roll over on my back you could rub my tummy until I tinkle with excitement. Maybe let’s just ignore that last one.

What I needs to know is whether or not I should post up in here any of the stories from my book, which has as its title the same title as this very blog.

When I started this blog, I thought that I would be posting those stories, but they are REALLY long, too interconnected and ultimately they are part of a book that I was hoping to sell in actual book form.

I know, it’s crazy, and it’s way too Victorian to work in this postliterary nightmare , but that’s just me. I’m one of those old fashioned writers you see in old pictures with a stovepipe hat and pants up to my titties, sitting at an ink-stained cubby desk with a feather quill, scratching my brains out on goat skin for the entirety of my meaningless little life, never to be published, never to be studied in the better universities, never to be clean enough to take anywhere nice.

Where was I going with this?

I think I was trying to figure out a few things about where I can take this blog without losing you, my closest friends. (And secret lovers)

So, do we likeses long storieses, my precious?

Would we actually read the stories from the book if I put them in here? And would we then promise to buy that book when it came out even though we had read those stories on this blog? Or would we walk past it in the store and laugh and say “What an ass! He gave away the milk for free! Why should we buy his cow?” and then tell the owner of the store that you read it already and it was the stank.

Or would we rather just have wacky pictures with bits of smart ass commentary?

What do we want out of this relationship?

How do we feel? I can tell you that I feel kind of mushy in places, with hair on the outer parts, but I don’t know how YOU feel, and that’s what I need to know. That’s why I’m reaching out to you through the magic of these cybernetic tubes.

Come on, help me help you. I want you to want me. I want you to show me the way. Every day. We should be dancing. I want to put on my my my my my boogie shoes. Just to boogie with you.

You see? There’s so much we need to say to each other. You need to give me a few of your thoughts, a few of your comments, and I will show you my new direction. Or maybe just my old direction.

In any case, I remain,

Your biggest fan,

thelabcoatguy

Two Kens: Some Kinds of Play Aren’t Fun

I go to bed late, when it’s dark upstairs.

The other night I stepped on something painful.

It was Ken.

It was The Ken pictured below.

At first I thought, hey look, Liberace Ken. Then I realized, wait, there is no way that this Ken would let his hair get like that. Something must be wrong with him. Yes he looks as happy as I’ve ever seen him, but there’s a discontinuity there. His posture, the wildly unstyled hairdo, the intensity of his smile - it’s a rictus of a grin that hides more than it shows, and these made me wonder: What is wrong with this Ken?

Then I saw Other Ken

And I knew.

Then the real question hit me:

What in the name of God kind of a game are my kids playing with these Kens?

And am I dreaming, or does Other Ken seem to like it?

Auslanders: Chapter 2 - I Don’t Get Jet Lag

I Don’t Get Jet Lag

I don’t think I would have made it to Meerbusch without the nav.

I would have taken the wrong road.

It turns out that in Germany there are way more wrong roads than right ones.

Let’s compare with the 401.

See? That’s the point.

You can’t compare it, because all there is is the 401!

There is nothing else in Canada. Okay, you’ve got the 400 or something and maybe some road going to British Columbia.

But in Germany, there are hundreds and hundreds of 401s, going everywhere, all the time, often side by side, criss-crossed or over and back, and if you get on the wrong one, which is really easy to do, it might not be obvious because they also don’t have north and south and all that over there.

Not as far as I can tell, anyway.

At home, I always know which direction I’m facing. I can feel it, even when the sun isn’t up.

Here, I have none of that North American earth power feeding into my body, so my brain magnets get confused.

I’m not the only one who’s confused, either.

Everybody has a nav. You can see the glowing screens in almost every other car, and they need it because there are no directions here.

A GPS nav unit is something we don’t need in Canada I guess partly because of all that earth power and then of course because of all those roads and cities and millions of people we don’t have. We simply don’t have that many places to go.

In Europe, I wouldn’t want to be without GPS. Not anymore. I’ve been spoiled.

Our rented Passat had a really good nav unit with a sexy British voice and, considering that it got us to Meerbusch even though I was sleep driving, you have to be amazed at the technology they have here.

After the flight and 2.5 hours of driving, getting to our destination was one of those moments where you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing, like what I would imagine people feel when they see the Mothman or the Florida skunk ape: a dislocating shiver of uncertainty that stops your pattern, forces you to get a new one on the spot.

I had to do that when we entered Meerbusch. I had to reconfigure everything.

We’d googled everything possible in advance, seen satellite images, pored over street maps of Dusseldorf, and it was pretty clear that we were moving from rural Canada into a suburb squatting just to one side of a major city in a giant conurbation of industries, autobahns and metropoli. This area is one of the most heavily populated parts of Europe.

Naturally, what I imagined was something along the lines of Scarborough, only bigger.

Think about it: Meerbusch is along the heavily developed Rhine, scant minutes from the airport, walking distance to a major train line, seconds from the autobahn and a 45 minute bike ride from the city center. All I could envision were strip mall massage parlors, row houses, beat down apartment buildings and crumbling shopping centers running down long roads capped with warehouses and roving gangs of feral children.

But when we turned off the A40, imagine my utter shock at finding myself driving through a place reminiscent of island from The Prisoner.

All the homes here actually look German, which means that they have white walls and red tiled roofs, all blocky concrete with big windows, everything surrounded with green. They’re studded through tight, efficient roads in cute little villages, or rather a series of villages, separated by fields of sugar beets and lots of trees. There are no strip malls, no tall buildings at all, hardly any stores even. Not the kind I recognize anyway.

It’s mostly quiet, save for the roar of jets taking off and the unending distant growl of the motorway and maybe even the odd police siren, but it’s one of those action movie Euro sirens that neener neeners into the Doppler distance in a way that makes you want to race your rented car at dangerously high speeds the wrong way down these winding cobbled roads, scraping the sides on historic landmarks and going up on two wheels.

I’m not sure why we hear the police either. The only crimes I’ve seen committed in this area are wearing dark socks with sandals or not picking up after the dog.

I don’t want to go so far as say we’re living in cute fantasy gingerbreadland over here, but it’s not that far off.

Our destination street was Auf dem Hahn, 24a. We pulled up and were immediately struck by how much bigger it was than we could have hoped, with a grand piano in a huge open concept living room, a real backyard and the availiability of 6 meg broadband service.

We could live here, no problem.

That feeling was cemented a few hours later, at our first meal out on the back deck.

We sat out and ate in the ridiculous heat and it took only a millisecond for me to realize that there were no mosquitoes. Not one. Sure they had a few flies and a wasp or two, but there were no mosquitoes at all. Add to that no raspberry bugs, no deerflies or eyebugs or anything like the clouds of tormenting bloodsuckers that hover over our heads in Goderich.

It was ridiculous. No wonder we hear so much about naked Germans. I have long assumed that the only thing stopping us from being naked all the time is bug bites. And winter. And obesity. But other than that, there’s nothing. I guess it would pretty uncomfortable riding a bike naked too…

It turns out that there a lot of reasons why we aren’t naked all the time, but there aren’t many bugs in the backyard in Germany and that is a good thing.

I sat out there testing that theory as long into the night as I could stand it, and even at eleventy one, I still didn’t feel tired.

Perhaps some people are so strong that jet lag can’t affect them, I thought as I crept into our temporary room in the basement, and clearly, I am one of those people.

That next morning I woke up early and crept out of our temporary room to taste my legs on those cobbled streets I had seen.

I couldn’t wait to get there in this foreign country and really feel the foerignity. I was hungry for the differences, desperate to feel displaced and disoriented.

I really wanted to feel know that I was somewhere else, a long way from home. I was hoping that the air would taste odd, or the sun would spark some unimagined galvanic response on my skin and give me a mild rash, or that maybe that I would smell something I had never before smelled and get a chance to lick it if I had the guts.

I wasn’t expecting that different something to come clanking in the mail slot before I had a chance to go anywhere.

It was a flyer.

I had to catch my breath.

A flyer!

Who hasn’t felt the quickening of the heart that comes with the new Future Shop insert in the Friday paper?

Who among us can resist the excitement that comes from learning out about the latest President’s Choice Argentinian dipping sauce?

Certainly I’m not the only one who held a moment’s silence when the Radio Shack was replaced by The Source, but then broke that moment’s silence with a breathy exhalation of joy at the enhanced thickness of their new ads?

I know I’m not. We all feel that thrill, whether we get it from the Canadian Tire, Sear’s, Food Basics or Mark’s Work Warehouse ads. We all know the intense satisfaction that comes from knowing you have something to read while you eat your cereal.

This would be my first watershed moment.

I could almost taste the quintessentially German food products available for me to experiment with. There would be a host of exciting new meats and cheeses, canned goods with mysterious names. I would be driven to buy them all, gorge myself on mystery animal bits and plant matter of uncertain origin.

I sat down at the table and gingerly pried the pages apart.

It was German, that was for sure. It was filled with words I’d never seen, perhaps even colours I’d never seen. We were far from home, weren’t we? This was already an adventure and I hadn’t even left the house!

“Trinkt gut!” this flyer blared in red and yellow. Drink good? Even I could read that.

I kept on flipping through, waiting for something you eat or play or wear. But there was nothing like that. Every ad on every page was another kind of beer or wine or vodka or who knows what other kind of booze crap junk garbage stuff a desperate juicer will pour down their maw to feed their thirst for oblivion.

Noooooooo!

I was so disappointed.

I had even poured my cereal.

What would be next after this? A one-pager insert trumpeting the hot new crack for summer? What about the children? My god, think of the children!

I spent the next hour on the floor, my face pressed up against the mail slot, sniffing the currents for signs of a mailman, delivery girl, anyone who could bring me some kind of papery advertisement I could leaf through. Anything!

At that moment, I would had read the Avon catalogue.

But then, something struck me , and I had to laugh through my tears.

I remembered back to what brother had said when he picked me up after my first Euro trip the year before. He told me that on the drive home I was insane, rambling, a hallucinating madman having bizarre two second dreams, basically freaking out from jet lag.

At that moment I felt calm as I pressed my fingers out through the slot to wiggle them at people walking past. Think how weird I might have been acting about this flyer thing if I’d had jet lag.

I shivered with relief and wished my tongue was longer.

 

 

Tasteful p0rn0 pics #1

Normally I would never stoop to this level, but Richard Fitoussie is so far away, so deep in the heart of Cambodia working on the Landmine Museum, that I feel I have to provide him with something to keep him warm on those cold jungle nights.

Saucy!

Auslanders: Chapter 1 - Night Flight

I was not frazzled.

I was not exhausted, nor was I full of rage. Strangely enough, I felt none of the above during the journeying portion of our journey.

We did have to stand in a long line at the Air Transat counter, but it moved much more efficiently than I could have hoped and there was enough excitement in us all at that point for waiting in a pack of sweaty unknowns to be fun rather than tooth grinding.

Once we checked in, paid the overage for all of our extra baggage and redistributed our carry-ons, we proceeded to the flight deck. I don’t know if it’s called the flight deck, but I would imagine if we were fighter jocks, that’s exactly where we were.

Sitting on the formed plastic were the exact same people you see in every airport all over North America. How it is that they end up going everywhere I’m going at the exact same time beggars my imagination, but once again, there they were.

The same screaming baby, the single mom with too many kids, the soulful college boy with a guitar, the small cluster of fleshy post-teen girls smacking gum, and you know the rest.

We wrestled through the crowd until we found an uninhabited corner and flopped down in a ragged pile.

Being a good mother, my wife started playing cards with the kids. They needed the distraction. Nervous about flying, nervous about leaving home for a year, nervous about being up so late into the night, nervous about being nervous, they were both spun way tighter than normal, and that’s saying something.

Being a good father, I immediately went on the hunt for an unused AC outlet.

Pioneers thought they had it tough traveling across the Great Plains? Please.

They never had to consider all the adaptors, chargers, plugs, hard drives, accessories and elements the modern traveler has to bring in order to function successfully. Cable management? Running over the list of files backed up at the last minute? Did all the podcasts get put into the Ipod? DS games in the pouch? Headphone splitter there? Sleepytime mix ready to go? Did they have to deal with any of that?

Nothing of the sort. All the pioneers had to worry about is where to store all the lard. Oh yeah, and the struggling to survive. I guess that’s something.

Anyway, I found a free outlet. In fact they were all free. Obviously, nobody else thought of charging up before the flight. Certainly, I would have the last laugh when everyone else ran out of juice partway through Stairway to Heaven or Nintendogs. Me? I would have piles of juice. I would be so juicy I would have to sit in a bucket.

I buttocked my way in beside an old lady sleep-reading a People magazine, and began to drain the Toronto-Mississauga grid for my own fiendish enjoyment.

It didn’t take long before they were calling the first ticket holders on our flight to board.

I leaped into action.

By this, I mean, I got ready to intercept my kids if either of them bolted for the exit.

My good woman and I had gone through enough trouble with both our kids that you can hardly blame us if we dosed them.

Don’t worry, we never gave them enough to cause them permanent damage. I don’t think your average Gravol bottle holds enough medication to do that. Especially not with Meryn.

On the day that she had to get two of her baby teeth removed, I had a front row tickets to see what happens when Meryn is given sedatives. It is not pretty. Nor does it work.

She refused to allow our regular dentist to take two rotten baby teeth out (yes, she brushed, yes, we checked, no, it didn’t work) so we were recommended to try this pediatric dentist in the city who specialized in making “difficult” children, well, barely conscious.

He used a drink that I remember was linked to Fentanyl, which I think is a kind of Valium. It is also the stuff that the Russian police pumped into that movie theatre during a hostage crisis and which killed all the wrong people.

I sat on a bench beside Meryn in a room with coloured elephants painted on the walls and argued with her about drinking the tiny cup of fluid. Threats, promises, complete lies, I used everything in the parent’s toolkit and nothing worked. Eventually, she realized that we were going to be there a long time if she didn’t drink it, so she pounded the drug back and threw eye daggers at me.

A few minutes later, I had the distressing opportunity to see my little girl staggering around drunk. Drunkish, maybe.

She kept laughing and flopping over onto me, pointing at the floor with amusement at how many layers there were.

“They go up this high!” she said, holding a hand at her chest.

I didn’t laugh along with her, because I knew that, any minute, a nurse would walk in and drag her off to have those teeth yanked out, and I had no idea what this drug-crazed child would do in response.

The nurse came and assured me that she had done this a thousand times, and every kid was completely tractable.

“They’re basically drunk,” she said.

“No kidding,” I said, struggling to hold Meryn upright.

“So she won’t mind walking right in there and we’ll get them out and it’ll be over in a few seconds.”

The nurse took Meryn’s other hand and we towed her into an empty bay.

As soon as Meryn saw the array of shiny, pointy equipment around the chair, she snapped.

Yeah, she was drunk all right, the kind of drunk that beats up a bouncer and kicks the back window out of the cruiser on the way to lockup.

It only took the dentist literally a few seconds to get those teeth out, but before that, it took us almost ten minutes to strap her into the chair and I hope I never have to do that again.

It looked, and felt, exactly like we were putting her in a straightjacket, crazed eye-rolling madness and all. I thought she was going to bite somebody’s arm off.

And here we were, years later, drugging her up again, and then we were going to drag this sometimes impossibly nervous child into eight hours of confinement at 35,000 feet followed by one year of dislocation. I wondered, if she did make a run for it, would I be chasing her, or following her?

She walked on the plane.

You can still sort of see her fingerprints on Nisa’s arm.

Did Harrison get nervous? Yes.

Did he try to back out at the last minute? Yes.

What made him forget his nerves and enjoy flying?

Well, Harrison ended up sitting beside a frighteningly slender young woman named Anna who was going overseas to volunteer for this strange archaelogical dig in Romania (Hungary?) that I had read about some weeks ago on the Net.

The theory is that some construction workers dug into some Egyptian pyramids, which is not only amazing, but gives me hope for any gardening I might have to do in the back yard in Meerbusch. You never know.

There is something vaguely romantic and Victorian about spending a summer in Europe, volunteering on an archaeological expedition and riding around on elephants and shooting things, but Anna looked like she would rather be somewhere else.

Harrison forgot about his nerves because he immediately started working his magic on Anna, flirting outrageously with this tremulously fragile young woman until his own Gravol kicked in somewhere over Montreal.

Once he dropped off, I turned around to tell the girls and there they were, out.

It was the first time that I have ever seen Meryn asleep where she didn’t open one eye and say “Where’s Mom?”

Our trip across the Atlantic was made much easier for my tense little family thanks to the miracles of modern pharmacy, but for me, it was eight hours of shuffling around in my tiny seat, seized up and miserable, trying to pretend that my audiobook was compelling enough to make me forget that every time I moved I groaned out loud and scared the old lady two seats ahead.

“Was that the wing?” she kept asking her husband.

I couldn’t hear his response.

It turns out there has been made by all Mankind no underwear comfortable enough for a long ride in economy class. Bunching was just the tip of the iceberg.

Note to self: No boxers unless flying First Class.

Note to people in power in the airline industry: I need to fly First Class.

Once we flew over Fortress Europe, the sights out the window were sufficient to clear the grit from eyes and I had a sudden rush of pleasure at the prospect of being abroad.

I suddenly realized what I was doing.

I was going to become one of those people who meet who has been places and done things.

I would be that interesting guy who frequents cafes and has startlingly original thoughts that would delight any curious passersby lucky enough to snatch a look in my journal, which I would have decorated casually but impressively on the front cover with esoteric and hilarious caricatures and doodles.

I would be that guy who named dropped cities and streets in cities and even restaurants on streets in cities that other people only wished they could visit.

How much more appealing I was already! I couldn’t wait to land and get started on my goatee.

After a textbook descent and some of that desperate applause that greets every landing -

(is it desperation to get out and stretch the clots out of one’s legs or stunned relief that this was one of those very few planes that managed to land safely? I mean, come on, people, thousands of planes land all over the world every minute of every day. It’s like clapping after urinating. It’s completely unnecessary.)

- we disembarked from the plane and wandered around to find the car rental agency, upon which we were given a free upgrade from crappy little box of poo that wouldn’t even hold half of our luggage to a VW Passat with a huge sat-nav GPS screen that would make turgid even the least car-interested driver. Which is myself.

I jammed our year’s belongings into the back and tore gleeful ass up the A3 at legally German highway speeds having had no sleep since 6:00am the day before.

Dangerous? Maybe, but I was too tired to notice.

I was also too tired to be excited, or scared or tense, or glad that we made it without anybody freaking out or throwing up or crying or anything.

We had planned this, prepared for it, packed up and done it. Now we were in Germany, rocketing north into uncertainty and all I could think about was how everything felt the same, almost like we hadn’t gone anywhere. It felt just like being back home.

I was wrong.

What If The Hustler and I Had An Industrial Accident?

We would look something like this:

(Note: We would not become a villain in Gotham City and try to kill Batman.)

Auslanders: Backstory

My wife hasn’t always been my wife. We weren’t born together, although I certainly would have loved to have had her around, particularly during early puberty. If you had told me when I was thirteen that someday I would have a beautiful blonde girl of my own, I would have never have believed you, although I would have feverishly dreamed about those words for months after.

My wife used to just be my girlfriend, although I prefer think of her in those days as being in the larval-wife phase. She hadn’t gone through metamorphosis yet.

This larval-wife stage happened a long time ago in a place known as the 80s.

Back then, I wasn’t the miserably crusted over middle-aged high school teacher I am now. No, back then I was a miserably crusted over twenty three year old who worked for a company run by a pair of vicious coke-fiends, where I was forced by circumstances to make TV commercials and have an outrageously curly mullet.

Plus I was fat. Maybe not fat, exactly. Husky. Or dumpy.

Something like that.

Lucky for me, my lovely blonde larval-wife was exactly the same as she is now: Ruthlessly efficient, shockingly attractive, gregarious, intelligent, and as a result of this uberness, one day she was accepted into some kind of program for proto-human students that would allow her to attend a full year of university in York, England on some kind of scholarship.

I found it somewhat difficult to be overly happy for her, because I was fairly certain that whatever strange hypnoses I had achieved over her better judgment would crumble as soon as she was out of clutching range, whereupon she would realize that, not only could she do a lot better than me, but that she damn well should do better than me.

She is the kind of woman who could have sat around all day eating dill pickle chips and wearing cool ranch stained gray sweat pants while watching game shows and laughing in the face of hygiene and still snap up some eminently cute alpha male in pre-med with a Jag and a trust fund.

It is a known fact that beautiful blonde exchange students rank much higher on the evolutionary dating scale than cynical, army panted production troglodytes with insane working hours and back hair.

I looked forward to a very trying year until I managed to fall semi-upright into teachers college at Queens University, succeed there against all odds, and graduate into a guaranteed teaching job for the next September.

In 365 days I went from wretched film industry bottom feeder to respectable young professional with a socially responsible career, thus hugely increasing my boyfriend profile in spite of the back hair.

I imagined my larval-wife flouncing around in English pubs, giggling naïve shandy breath at the ogling of ruddy cheeked upper class twats. She would assume they were just being “nice” and consider them “friends.” They would assume she was blissfully free of male entanglement. And maybe she was, as long as I wasn’t around.

That summer, I found myself back at my parents’ house in Clinton, waiting out the summer, hunched, catatonic in front of an ancient PC, playing a game that had more load time than play time, effectively killing minutes, hours and days until my larval-wife came back from England and I could reveal to her the amazing change I had undergone.

Then one day I stood up, walked away from the keyboard, rode my bike to the travel agent in Clinton, and told her that I wanted to go England.

She smiled, “When?”

“Now.”

She stopped smiling. “That will be difficult.”

I emptied my wallet on the table.

“OSAP screwed up and gave me two loans this year. Does that make it any easier?”

I was on the airbus in just under two hours.

Having never been a traveler, and having never wanted to be a traveler, I had not been in a jet and I had serious concerns about what I would do if I was forced into one. But in order to get to England, I would have to sit in a jet for eight hours.

Would I get nauseous?

Would I freak out?

Would the high altitude cause my eardrum to explode in a shower of blood and spinal fluid?

I was certain that I would be the first discover acroclaustrophobia – the fear of tightly enclosed heights.

I envisioned myself sitting in that cramped seat for eight hours, almost certainly wracked with abdominal cramps, dry-swallowing Gravol that just wouldn’t go down, cow-eyed, staring out the window.

It wasn’t completely ridiculous. I had a precedent.

At the age of 16 I was invited to visit my cousins non-Lobb grandparents in Toronto. It was my first time in the city, and I was literally dizzy with sensory overload just walking down Eglinton to a movie theatre.

I felt like I was on a planet with different gravity and oxygen levels, like a visiting alien exposed to some new virus that was rewriting my DNA, and it had only been two hours away from home.

If Toronto was challenging, going to England was outside of the comprehensible. I didn’t have a place for something like that in my head and as such, it had to find its own space in there.

This wasn’t a good feeling.

It turned out that I was fine on the plane, although I wasn’t able to sleep, even with repeated doses of Tom Clancy. I just sat there, counting out little math patterns in my head and trying to manipulate the time-space continuum with only the power of my mind. It didn’t work, but it did terrify the girl beside me. She glanced over every few seconds, apparently unused to such an intense level of concentration. Or maybe she just didn’t like the way I was muttering the same numbers over and over again and staring past her out the window to see if the wings were still flapping.

I hadn’t slept well for weeks, and having not slept on the airbus, the plane, the train to York, the bus to the school or on the steps of Langwith College, once I finally got to the correct residence and bluffed my way into the common kitchen on her floor, I was probably only hallucinating when I saw her looking up in what I took to be an overly familiar way at one of those very scrubbed and proper looking English boys.

I stumbled into the tiny galley and the little prat facing me jumped and reddened, like he wondered if I was going to take a hostage. If I hadn’t been exhausted, I might have, but in the state I was in, all I could do with any kind of strong intention was mumble “Hey baby.”

My larval-wife turned and her mouth dropped open like she had lost control of her face muscles and perhaps even her bladder. She stared at me in abject horror, and for a minute I was worried that I had died somewhere on the trip and was standing there all decayed like a zombie, making guttural moans that only sounded like talking to my putrefied ears.

I was almost relieved when she finally spoke.

“Oh my God! What are YOU doing here?”

At least she knew who I was.

I think she hugged me after a few minutes of choking back her last meal, and I’m pretty sure there was a kiss, but what I mostly remember is her repeating “Oh my God!” over and over again and making this face that I have only since seen her make when she has strep throat.

For days afterward, whenever I said or did anything, she kept shaking her head and saying that she had forgotten how “different” I was and then would quickly stutter that it was “nice different”, but I am pretty sure she didn’t really think it was nice.

Not at first, anyway.

However, it didn’t take too long before she remembered all over again how delightful it was to be with someone who worships you and was introducing me to her friends without cradling her face in her hands or gritting her teeth. Clearly, my unintended hypnoses was once again taking effect.

During this reacquainting process I met Nisa’s closest friend during that year. Her name was, and still is, Anja and she was, and still is, from Germany. Yes, THAT Germany. The Germany where I will be going for the duration of these stories.

Anja was one in this small circle of people who had become quite close, going on weekend hiking excursions, playing intramural sports and bonding in that intense way lost little lambs always do at university.

And although this group of friends never really accepted me as one of their own, I think they realized I was mostly harmless and soon I came to know them all pretty well and joined in on their activities almost as though I was a real person.

After several weeks of this, and after watching my larval-wife study more in a few days than I had in my entire life, we finally made our goodbyes, rented a car and took the scenic route back down to London, shortly to leave for home.

When that flight to Canada was announced on the boards, I was ready to leave.

Nisa not so much. She is one of those people who, when she makes friends, makes them for real. If she says she will stay in contact with someone, actually does it. She didn’t want to leave all her English friends, especially Anja. They had spent enough time together to get used to it, and that is always a tough thing to walk away from. Or fly.

So, even though we did get on that flight and go back home and get engaged and get married and have kids together, we never went very long without hearing from Anja.

She even ended up marrying one of the guys from that group of York U. friends (Volleyball Mark, if you’re asking), having kids of her own and coming over to visit us several times.

Each time she ended her stay by demanding in that polite European way that we had to come over to visit her some day.

I always nodded and said “absolutely” but I said it in that way. As in, “yes, of course we should visit you in Germany, and although we never, ever will, I will nod and smile throughout this entire conversation as though it is the truth.”

My wife, however, smiled and nodded with conviction. Piles of conviction.

On Mark and Anja’s last trip over to see us in the summer of 2005, they brought their children, thus handily negating my strongest trump card for our not visiting them - “Well, we really can’t go over to Germany with little kids,” and thereby convincing Nisa that as of summer 2006, we would be going to Germany, whether I wanted to go or not.

We began making plans to visit shortly after school was out, but then Anja called to announce that we might not be able to visit them after all.

Volleyball Mark was being transferred to Australia for one year, with everything paid for by the evil corporation for whom he toils on ancient mainframe computers, so our friends weren’t going to be home when we had planned to come over.

“Hmmm,” I said, conjecturing harmlessly, without any actual meaning whatsoever. “We should house-sit for them.”

Thunder cracked in the distance as my wife’s pupils dilated.

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