Auslanders: When Medical Worlds Collide

A Detailed Examination of the German Medical System

I am but a visitor to these lands, a stranger in this culture, an Auslander, an interloper, an invader, a virus, if you will, infecting this host with my T cells or messenger RNA or something like that.

Viruses are very much on my mind currently, as my son is proving to be somewhat of a champion at finding them, welcoming them into his body, and then letting them invite all their friends over and tear the place apart with their wild parties.

When he was a baby, he always had a cold, then a fever and a cough, an earache and a slow climb to the relatively good health of his next cold, then a fever…

He got to a point where we thought he had grown out of all that, where he was finally resistant to enough crap that he could go for months at a time without being sick.

And then we came to Germany.

Apparently, the viruses here haven’t received the memo that Harrison was now officially immune.

This has caused us to take a few small steps into the unknown world of German health care, and it was an unknown world indeed.

Now that I have had some small amount of experience with it, I am tempted to make a chart in which I put Canada on one side and Germany on the other. You could then use your straight edge to line up the pros and cons of each and perhaps generate notes for a rough outline of a very interesting comparison and contrast essay.

But I have enough marking to do already, and you are the kind of student who isn’t interested in learning for its own sake, so I won’t assign anything of the sort. Instead, I will mourn the death of the liberal education and tell you what you would use as your key essay points in this potentially revealing and certainly rambling anecdote. If I may be so self-reflexive, and I may.

In Canada, when my wife throws a large ceramic crock at me and a piece of that crock sticks in my head until I pluck it out, I go to the hospital, get a few staples punched into my wound (without anesthesia, I might add) and walk out again without let or hindrance. I don’t think about the cost of the staples or the wages of the staple gunner and in fact, even if I was being handed a bill on the way out I might still have asked for a little something to dull my head before the doctor started trying to seal my wound with construction equipment.

In Germany, when you take your feverish son to the doctor’s office to be tested for strep throat, and when he tries to escape the exam room in shrieking terror to avoid a second throat swab after the botched first, you watch the clock and think about how much extra this is going to cost because you will be charged by the minute for your visit.

In Canada, if you are able to hold your son down for that second strep swab without dislocating his shoulder or feeling like the Abu Ghraib Employee of the Month, you wait a few days or more to find out the results of that swab, even though you have likely been given a prescription for antibiotics just in case, which most people will go ahead and use even though there is a good chance they have a virus, in which case the antibiotic is useless and contributes towards the kind of super bug that will one day create something like untreatable and fatally explosive gonorrhea.

In Germany, you wait five minutes for the test results. Exactly five minutes. You wait five minutes because that’s how long it takes for the nurse to test that swab in the office and walk back into the exam room and tell you if your son has strep.

“It costs more to do it this way,” the doctor says, “but it’s nice to know right away.”

You think?

In Canada if you get a cold, you go to that free, province-paid doctor’s office and complain about feeling crappy and you may or may not get a prescription for something, but you will certainly go to the pharmacy on the way home and fill your cart from the wall of products designed to shut you up.

You will find nothing in that pharmacy that will shorten the duration of your cold.

You will however find products that numb you to some of your symptoms because you are a North American and it is unbelievable that you should be expected to feel uncomfortable for seven to ten days for any reason!

You can choose from any one of countless nose sprays, sleepytime pain relievers, lozenges, knock out night drinks, antihistamines, decongestants and bottles and jars of unknown chemicals trucked out from hidden labs where mad scientists toil in white rooms for monstrously greedy corporations who feast on our miseries, big or small.

In Germany, you will walk out of the doctor’s office and see a sign on the door across the hall that offers Ayurvedic medicine. Look it up. I can’t be expected to explain Indian healing therapies! You’ve got to take some responsibility for your own education.

You will find Chinese medicine, acupuncture and massage offered to you, and in their pharmacies and department stores you will see rows of herbs and tinctures and extracts of this or that plant.

Sure, the same mad scientists are probably producing these natural products, and the same greedy corporations are behind all of it, but at least it’s something new. Or maybe something old.

It doesn’t matter what it is because the medical system here appears to be open to trying everything.

They don’t look down their noses at medical practices that have been effectively used in Asian countries for hundreds of years. They’re not suspicious of “alternative” therapies because here, they aren’t “alternative”.

All of that natural stuff is up front, recommended and endorsed in the same pharmacies that hide their chemicals behind the counter. In the grocery stores and quickie marts there are no chemical drugs that I have seen. It’s all herbs and roots and extracts.

If you have a cold, you can get lozenges, but they’re made of Vitamin C and zinc.

The nose spray is salt water and tinctures of some cactus root.

The cough medicine is made from the young shoots of a Swiss bush, the leaves picked by virginal blonde milkmaids by candlelight on Christmas Eve.

The single-mindedness that North American medicine has maintained for surgery, technology and chemistry, that hyperfocus on exclusively Western techniques that has only recently been opening up, that just isn’t as obvious here.

Now, of course, it’s all horseshit.

Everybody knows that chemicals and technology are good and good for you.

And surgery’s great too. Okay, it’s not exactly fun, but at least you’ve got confident experts digging in there and poking around and physically doing stuff and that looks like progress!

I don’t know about you, but I have two rotten hip joints and I need to get them replaced sooner than makes sense for a young and vibrant alpha dog like myself.

Given the choice between:

a)going to Toronto and having the best orthopedic surgeons in Canada cut me open, spread my business out on the table, chop out the rot and plant some titanium-ceramic alloy bionics in there or

b)mixing powdered grizzly bear penis into my green tea for three weeks, I don’t have to think very long. I’ll see you on the operating table.

Maybe I sound bitter. I’m not. Not really.

I’m not against alternative therapies. I’ve had my ears candled (didn’t work), been acupunctured (maybe worked), chiropracted (I think it worked), herbed (don’t think so), vitamined (no clue), NLPd (hard to even say what it is), Reiki’d (didn’t feel anything) and chewed on a big block of raw ginger after having a coughing fit in an Indian restaurant (far too much pain to cough), so I feel like I’m always ready to try something new.

I don’t think those alternative therapies are all horseshit, just some of them. But I do believe in the placebo power of the mind, and if you think the grizzly bear penis powder is going to work, it just might work.

To help you come to your own decision about these issues, I have gone through a catalogue of medicine and health products that came to our door and cut out a few products that I think are worthy of your attention.

Whether or not they are all used for the same affliction, I couldn’t say. To be honest, I’m not a hundred percent sure exactly what the problem is they’re designed for, but I have a really good idea where that problem is.

I think you’ll know too.( Note: These are actual, untreated ads from the flyer)

All I can think about is, what happened to the first 99?

It doesn’t matter how much Vitamin C you mix with it, it still tastes like Ass.

And finally:

No, Faktu!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nuge

The Nuge

When I was a kid I used to make up my own words. 

I’m sure that all kids do this, especially when they are first learning how to speak.

In my case, this wasn’t a phase. I learned how to speak a long time ago, but I’m still making up words. 

I made up words to explain concepts that I found difficult to describe in conventional terms, made up words to vent my feelings without swearing, made up words just for fun and used them as though I assumed everybody else would be able to figure out what I was saying.

If I was mocking something that somebody just said to me, rather than parrot back to them in a stupid voice the actual words they used, I would just say “moshtay bleu.” 

Why?

I don’t know. It sounds just as stupid to me now as it does to you, but when I was eight, it made a lot of sense. 

As far as I was concerned, my application of English wasn’t bound by any rules or governing structures regarding what was or wasn’t legitimate for common use. The supposed universality of language, or more correctly my refusal to knuckle under to the universality of language, didn’t deter me in any way.  I didn’t care if nobody else knew what I was saying because it looked to me like everybody else was doing the same thing I was doing: walking around a making up words whenever they wanted.

I got a lot of evidence for this by listening to pop music. There were a lot of songs on the radio that used words that I had never heard, words that were just like the made up words I used, and nobody complained about those ones being weird or incomprehensible. 

Sadly, it never occurred to me that I might simply be mishearing the lyrics.

It turns out that I was the only one who thought that the first lines in the Hot Chocolate song “I Believe In Miracles” were, “I believe in Malcolm. You came along, you said some things, you said some things.” Years later I learned that the singer was saying “I believe in miracles. You came along, you sexy thing, you sexy thing.” It seems much more logical now, but at the time I never questioned my misheard version. 

Did I think about what it meant to believe in Malcolm?

Did I wonder who Malcolm was? 

Was Malcolm mentioned anywhere else in the song?

Who was it that said some things, and what did those things have to do with Malcolm, anyway? 

None of that mattered.

Before you point your finger derisively and judge me to have been an impressively stupid kid, remember that the actual lyrics of songs that I didn’t mishear didn’t make much more sense. At a certain age, a very few people might consider exactly what different lyrics mean, but most music listeners just accept the song as a whole and never question stuff like, “Purple haze, all in my brain. Lately things they don’t seem the same. I have to think, but I don’t know why. Excuse me, while I kiss the sky.” 

You grow up with those lyrics being the norm and somehow you stop wondering what Malcolm might have been doing. Don’t even get me started on the name of the band. Hot Chocolate. If you had told me there was a racial aspect to that, I would have laughed in your face.

“It’s just a drink!”

And I would have been every bit as right.

There was this particular song for which I still don’t know the actual lyrics, or even the name of the song. I can hear part of it in my head, but it still has the same lyric that I heard back when I was a kid. “Juan cholito play, molabe jay.”

It’s a catchy tune and I used to walk around singing that all the time, out loud, especially the “molabe jay” part, as if it was just as valid a thing to say as “Pass the peas” or “I’m wearing tight shorts.”

Did I ever stop to wonder what that might have meant? Nope. Neither did anybody else.

The older I got, the more traction this bad wordmaking habit got, and it actually started to twist itself around until I was not only making up fake words and using them as common currency, but I was twisting real, universally agreed upon words around until they weren’t any good either.

The first word distortion I remember getting hooked on was reversals. Backwords.

It started with a STOP sign.

You walk past STOP signs every day and never pay them any attention. Maybe the first few times you saw them when you were a baby you glanced up and thought “red!” or “shape!” and then once you could read it was “stop!”

I started looking at them backwards because it was so obvious. POTS.

Once you see that one, you can’t help it. You start putting every sign backwards. I’m not exaggerating. I mean every sign.

And every label or every product in every store.

Everybody’s name.

Every short phrase or word you read anywhere.

Just reading them backwards wasn’t good enough, either. I started to have to say them out loud too.

There are probably people walking around Clinton who remember me as that strange little boy with some unknown brand of Tourette’s or something because I would have walked past them in the grocery store and choked out “Muclat Redwop”, howled at the yellow pages (Waldial Tropsnart) or went to the Park Theatre and fell over laughing before watching the movie.

I still do reversals, but it’s gotten a lot more complex than just reading everything backwards.

Once you get into this word shifting world, you end up in a mindbending zone of anti-language, where words aren’t words at all, just arbitrary combinations of letters that spin and fold and twirl around in recombinant patterns in your head, endlessly twisting upon themselves, eating their own tails whenever you read or talk or listen to someone, sucking the meaning out of everything.

It’s like existing on a separate plane simultaneously with the one you’re on when you’re communicating. You’re actually listening and talking, but while you’re listening and talking you’re also streaming the variations around on another channel, finding new combinations and meanings and rhymes and spoonerisms and palidromes and puns and back-words and jumbles and anything else that you can squeeze out of whatever is said.

In that other plane, every word and phrase is on the table, every word and phrase can means multiple somethings else, everything hooks into everything else, nothing is just what it is and nobody else knows what you’re doing.

If I hadn’t been doing it my whole life, I would be so tired from trying to maintain a normal conversation that I would have to stop part way through and have a lie down. But I don’t have to lie down, because its second nature to me. First nature, really. It’s automatic.

I know that this word thing makes me seem maybe a little bit of weird.

When your brain is always buzzing with infinite random associations between words, concepts and structures, it is difficult for other people to follow these seemingly unrelated and completely subjective jumps, and it doesn’t take very long before you are known as the guy who doesn’t make any sense.

If you are that guy, and if you were motivated to do so, you could try to argue that what you said does make sense in a certain way and then you could lead your accuser through the complex strands of the interweaving connections, pull them into your chain of sequential hooks and they might be able to see where you were and why you were there, but if you are that guy and if you tried to do that, you would be doing that every day, all the time.

Eventually you stop being motivated to explain why you connect the words niblet and truck and when someone tells you that you are weird you shrug and agree with them. It’s better than spending an hour trying to prove that these twists add a certain richness to one’s interaction with reality and inevitably coming up short.

I’m sure I haven’t explained this very well and I can imagine myself going back though this story and squinting myself into a compelling headache trying to figure out how to a) fix it and b) effectively explain all this, but it might be better simply to give a few examples.

A Select Few of My Words

Foy – Foy is a name that I used to call my wife all the time. I still call her Foy, but generally under a very specific condition that requires I say it loudly and with admonishment.

The roots of Foy come from an activity that I do a lot with one syllable words. I say them in my head over and over again to find out if they link together in such a way that I can lose the beginning and end of the word and find myself chanting a new word.

If that makes no sense, try it yourself. Try saying Wife over and over again in your head. Half way through saying Wife, which is what I used to call my wife Wife all the time, you might hear yourself saying a new word. See what I mean?

The Nuge – The Nuge is what I call the Y.M.C.A. in Goderich. I lift weights there when I’m not living in Germany. This complex has only been in town for a few years, and before I started lifting weights there, I used to lift weights at the East End Gym. It’s a much more industrial workout environment, the second floor of an old factory. Before that, I used to lift weights at Ray Garon’s Squash Club in Clinton. I should also point out that I now lift weights at the Life Gym in Osterath. So, we end up with this chain of gyms names:

• YMCA = The New Gym = The NewG = The Nuge (not to be confused with The Nuge who is Ted Nugent, 1970s gonzo Motor City Madman of rock).

• East End Gym = The Man Gym because hardly any females worked out there, so it seemed = The Mange (pronounce with a short “a”), also can be called The Oldge (Old Gym) or The Dirge (dirty gym, which some females called it).

• Ray Garon’s Squash Club = The RayGe = The Rage

• Life Gym = The NuNuge or The Gerge (German Gym)

Patterning! – this is something that you shout out whenever you are doing something out of sheer routine, without having to think. It’s something that you do automatically and usually it has a number of steps in the sequence. A good example would be when my wife comes home after we’ve been somewhere for any length of time and immediately heads to the computer to check email on all three of her accounts.

This comes from playing the computer game Day of Defeat: Source (called DoD) and was originally specific to the Anzio map. I would come out of the Axis spawn area and race to capture the flag in the alley, then leap down the stairs and run through the sewers to try and capture the bridge. When you do this, you have to semi-yell “Patterning!” several times into your headset mic in a robotic voice.

Note: Don’t yell this at your wife in that robot voice when she is going to check her email. She probably doesn’t play DoD.

Everybody gets a nickname: Okay, so this isn’t a word, but it is part of the same problem.

I grew up in Clinton, the details of which comprise an entirely separate book (which is enormously unpublished, I regret to inform you with no small amount of bitterness), but which lends to this story an unusual expectation. In Clinton in the 1970s, during The Nuge’s six string assault on rock and roll (not the Goderich YMCA Nuge), there was an extraordinary number of people in town with nicknames. Many of those people only had nicknames, by which I suggest to you that they had no actual names.

You know a town has a lot of people with nicknames when you can have an whole category of people that were named “fill-in-the-blank”head. Remember, Clinton had about 1500 people, yet this tiny town was somehow able to produce Diamond Head, Pan Head, Bag Head, Board Head, Knot Head, Fat Head, Wooden Head and at least fourteen Dick Heads that I can think of.

I lived near Bunny, Nibs, Shifter, Chungy, Tigs and Trapper, went to school with Snips, Boo, Fesh, Rutabega and The Ream, to name only a few.

Everybody got at least one nickname and some people had several, depending on how many different peer groups they fit into.

It is no surprise that I still call almost everybody by a nickname.

TB, TBC, TdotBdotC, TBdotcom, NtC, Nat le Chat, Nasty Cat, Jujifruit, Rock Lobbster, L’il Ricky, The Hustler, Johnny Hustle, TacoX, The Moodster, The Wilkster, The Lobbster, Phillipalooza, Kovarts, Foy, Monk, Mannlicher Carcano, Mannheim Steamroller, The Princess, Johnny Joe, Mr. Jenkins, Dr. Jones, Turdswallop, Jungle Nuts, and more and more and more.

I could go on forever.

I could talk about gription, relationshopping, Kresge, manginas, and breasticles, could run through Spoonerisms until we were all fun ducking around with this whole subject. I could tell you about all the emphasizing phrases I was certain would really catch on: crazy like a glove, hungry like the geese, sicker than two pounds of microwaved cheese in a plastic bag, and more.

But I won’t.

I can’t.

Think of all the words I would have to use to do it.

Then think of how bunged up I’d get spinning them around on the page.

I’m lucky I made it this far.

 

Found Objects 1

Found Objects:

In Which Our Adventuring Hero Encounters Bizarre and Impossibly Random Items Strewn Haphazardly Upon the Ground

Chapter 1: York, England

However tempting it is to describe to you in minute detail the various and entertaining aspects of our entire sojourn across the tiny home of The Britons, this is no place for such a thing.

I have a rather lengthy and powerful tale about the greater part of July’s England trip, the fullness of which I will expose to you at a later date. For now, I wish to begin what will be an ongoing series of brief vignettes about impossibly random items I have found.

By telling you of these things, I hope to allow you to come to some conclusions of your own as to what these items mean within the context that I found them.

I welcome your interpretation and here, offer you my own.

We had just been at the University of York, conspicuous tourists amongst freshly graduating students, revisiting what had been my wife’s home during that lonely scholarship year of 1989.

The grounds had not changed much, and she could find her way around much more easily than I would have expected.

We literally bumped into a contractor painting the walls and he allowed us to enter the closed residence where she had lived, where we went directly to her old room. It was a mirror image of the way I remembered it, which says something strange about my own recall. Do I remember everything in reverse? Am I really left handed?

The kids weren’t impressed at all, and Meryn announced that she would never move away from home under any circumstances. She will live with us forever. Harrison suggested that when he went off to university to learn to be a scientist, perhaps his mother would come and live with him. She agreed. I have written these words here mostly to remind him of that discussion when he turns 18.

Wandering through the school was interesting, and it got me thinking about a lot of things. One of the key things I thought about was chocolate milk.

Why isn’t more popular in England?

We had been traveling for many days by then, and I had tried a number of different incarnations of chocolate milk, with very little success.

Most of the milks were too thin or chalky and all were tainted with a sickly pall of caramel.

It was disgusting, but I wasn’t about to give up. Remember, chocolate milk is to me what a cold beer is to the rest of the world, only I am able to stop after having had one. Plus I don’t feel the urge to shoot it directly into my esophagus via a long plastic hose while my friends chant my name and make secret plans to shave my eyebrows once I am unconscious.

The temperature that day was the highest ever recorded in England, as had been screamed at every news stand, radio and TV broadcast every day that we were there. Even passersby would shout at odd intervals, “Agh! This is the highest temperature ever recorded in England,” then cry out for help, stuck in melting tar on the road.

I was also thinking about something Robertson Davies wrote: “You can never go home again.”

There we were, back at York, seeing the same sights, wandering through the Shambles, walking those Medieval walls, whispering in the cool dank of the Minster, but it wasn’t the same. It was good, certainly, but it was not the same as it had been. Not as good.

The oldest tea room in the city was now a Chinese takeout, there were more hawkers flogging cheap plastic trash, more chain stores and upscale boutiques, more tattooed women with mullets, pallid, fleshy tourists everywhere.

Neither of us was disappointed exactly, but I had slipped into a contemplative frame of mind as we walked across a park on the way to Clifford’s Tower. The city had changed, yes, but so had we, in ways we could never have imagined in our early 20s.

Tempus fugit indeed.

Those words flashed in my mind just as I saw something on the grass.

It was stark white in the dappled sunlight, impossible not to see.

A small piece of notepaper, just big enough to cover the palm of my hand.

It was covered with blue ink, a strange pattern or chart of some kind with what looked from a distance like cryptic writing in a spidery hand.

I snatched it up immediately, hoping it was more than just an oddly formatted grocery list, imagining coded instructions for some terrifying Masonic ritual.

There were three boxes of text on the upward side.

At the top, a horizontal block of five movie titles. James Bond movies. Old ones. Including Octopussy.

Under that, there was a pair of unevenly spaced columns, the left column about twice the width of the right. Listed on both sides were band names. The first name on the left side was Human League. The last name on the right column, KISS.

In between those names was a list of bands that had been popular years before, some bands I had listened to, some I really liked, a few I always hated.

Then some neuron fired at double speed, opened a dark little corner in my head, and I knew that I had to take that note, that it was for me.

It was a Message.

I don’t even believe in Messages like that, but there it was, too convincing to refute.

I believe that life is random, formless and chaotic, and we are like sculptors, chipping away at the chaos bit by bit, chopping and scraping and sanding the rough edges, carving something out that makes sense to us, an image of reality that we can understand.

But that note was different. It wasn’t random at all.

It was too much of a coincidence, too staged.

There in my hand was a note that I didn’t write, with a list of old bands that I knew very well, a few of which had been my favourites at one time or another. Bands from my past, from time that had gone by years before. Years that had passed and were gone forever.

Or were they?

In a park before a medieval tower in an ancient city in a country rich in history, at a moment when I had just felt the twist of nostalgia wring some of the pleasure out of my holiday visit to a favourite city, I found this particular note in the sun. A note from right now, from somebody else’s present, but made up of pieces from my past.

 

We wandered into a candy shop for drinks and I aimed out of habit for the dairy corner. There, hidden beside the clotted cream, stood a brand of chocolate milk I hadn’t seen before: Splendid Life.

I reached out reflexively, paused, thought about what I had found. My note.

I grabbed the plastic bottle. It was cold, colder than any of the others I had found. As cold as Canadian milk.

Outside the store, I cracked open my Splendid Life and took a swig.

It tasted like Grade Eight Poker Night.

It tasted just like I wanted it to.

Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard “Black Dog” on a car stereo.

Felt the sun beating down on my back, the cold milk in my throat, my girlfriend, now my wife, standing beside me as we walked through York.

Time flies, but maybe it doesn’t fly as high or as far as we fear.

Auslanders: Ich Spreche Nur Englisch Part 3

There are a lot of places to find funny words if you’re persistent, and immature enough.

One of my favourites is at the huge grocery store in the nearby city of Krefeld.

This huge superstore is called Real, not “real” in the sense of it being actual, although it is real in an actual sense as well. It is a great deal like a Loblaws crossed with Walmart. You could say it’s kind of a LobMart and in fact, I am trademarking that name right now, so don’t bother trying to beat me to it.

We went in there the first time just to get a few groceries and came out three hours later with a six foot mound of stuff wobbling the cart out of control with a bill that would probably have bought us plane tickets back home.

It turns out that it is enormously fun to buy groceries in a new country and for the first while I leaped at any opportunity to do so. I spent an inordinate amount of time wracking my brains for stuff that we might need. Drain cleaner? Rubber boots? Picture frames? Ointment? Hey, I don’t mind going to Real.

The first Real flyer I got gave me the a good indication that I would be finding some choice words at the store.

Of course, there was a schnitzload of pork in the first few pages.

Pork has a popularity here that is hard to imagine, and as a result, the poor old chickens, turkeys and beefs get pushed way back in all the advertising, and although I can’t help but feel bad for the other meats, it is fairly inspiring to crack open the first page of the flyer and see the word Hackepeter beside a picture of a huge sausage that looks exactly like a giant penis that, sure enough, looks just like it’s been hacked off. of somebody. Or creature.

And right beside the Hackepeter? Hackeballchen. Now you know for sure that they use every part of the pig.

Just when you thought I couldn’t get any more potty mouthed, imagine the kids and I sitting around by the cash register, hoping we would eventually reunite with Nisa (last seen poring exhaustively over European shoes) and there in front of us is a case of popsicles.

Kids being kids, they start in with the presentation of their case for gaily coloured frozen junk food.

I immediately object on the grounds that I am a mean old bastard and pull my son back out of the freezer. Of course, I happen to glance up at the legend for the freezery treats and to my intense delight, there is a picture of a bright pink popsicle called Bum Bum.

A Bum Bum is bright pink (pinker than a baboon’s, I have to tell you), round, and has a stick rammed up into its middle.

Yes it is Bum Bum on a stick, and honestly, how the heck else would you serve up a big haunch of Bum Bum?

Of course I overturned my previous ruling and told the kids they could each enjoy a Bum Bum of their own.

Of course, once he got his, Harrison repeatedly asked to go outside and lick his Bum Bum.

And of course, it tasted just like you’d imagine.

Just like Bum Bum.

Actually it tasted worse than bum bum. It tasted exactly like that pink antibiotic you get when you have a lung infection: a kind of metallic chemical bubblegum mixed with the inside of a doctor’s office. It should have come with a prostate exam.

Seconds after seeing the Bum Bum, we saw a little package of Dinkelchen, then more Dinkelstuff and then things got out of hand because Meryn suggested that we should look around until we found a breakfast cereal called Vageos. We didn’t find any.

We will have to be happy with what little Dinkels you get, as I always tell my wife.

We packed up our groceries, tried our best to clean up from the Bum Bum juice dripping all over everything, and headed out of the store.

Which brought me back to what was quickly becoming my favourite bit of unintentional German comedy (I have a suspicion that there is no other kind): the word fahrt.

Remember, in German, to fahrt is to drive.

And an Ausfahrt is literally an outdrive, an offramp from the autobahn.

Well, being English, and more to the point, being me, I take every opportunity to find the best fahrt combinations I can.

I am sad to report that I am usually denied. Somehow, the verb tenses and declensions never work out the way I want them to.

Like, wouldn’t it be awesome if a driving school was a farhtschule? It’s not, but it should be.

I went through a list - driving goggles, driving gloves, driving pants? Are there such a thing? I was trying to come up with driving everything, desperate to find the best fahrting thing. Could a bad driver be a bad fahrter? No. Foiled again. Nothing worked out correctly.

But then we were coming out of a parking garage in Krefield, and there it was.

Just as we got to the gate, to the place where you put your paid ticket in the machine to open the stoppy arm, there we saw a sign on the wall. Unlike all those other German signs we see everywhere with threatening instructions and angry exclamation marks, this sign had a friendly little message for everyone on their way out, two simple words that captured everything I was looking for:

Gute Fahrt.

And it was.

We had a gute fahrt on the way home, laughing all the way.

Auslanders: Ich Spreche Nur Englische Part 2

The other day we were driving back from Grevenbroich, where we are repeatedly forced to visit the Auslanders (it literally means outlanders or better yet, aliens) office to show this or that document and prove that we deserve to be in this country.

Apparently we don’t.

When we were first there, we showed up with all the correct documents and had Anja with us to talk to the office workers. Hours later she emerged from the office looking concerned and told us that we had to get new photos taken, ones in which we were unsmiling and lit flatly like we were in a 1950’s era Soviet secret police lineup.

If you have ever wanted to see photos of an entire family of captured serial killers after a five state spree, you need to get copies of these.

I feel compelled at this point to tell you about how the Auslanders office appears to be run by two teenage girls.

They look no more than seventeen, with that sighing, eye-rolling touchiness of teenagers everywhere who would rather be MSNing each other mindless chit chat about Panic! At the Disco or cyberbullying fat girls.

These teenaged office workers were the ones who told us that our passports and all the other documents that we were told by the German consulate were all we needed to bring were, in fact, insufficient, even though we were also told by the people at the German consulate that going to the Auslanders office was nothing more than a formality and we would get rubber stamped into the country without delay.

Not the case.

These bitter girls told us that we had to get photo I.D. cards and come back with new photos so that they could make us up a set of papers.

Initially I was thrilled. Who among us hasn’t wish at some point that they a) had papers at all and b) were asked by a man with a machine gun to show these papers?

I couldn’t wait to be confronted. I would produce my papers and look bored, perhaps chatting idly with the beautiful woman beside me who had no idea I was a spy, while the machine gun toter conferred with someone inside the checkpoint. He would come back and nod me through. Then, I would get into the restricted area and steal the plans through the implementation of a complex series of maneuvers. Oh yes, having papers was going to be amazing.

But when we came back with our photos they told us that we would have to leave them alone to examine our stuff and come back another day. They wanted to go over our insurance documents much more carefully. I kept trying to tell the Auslander girls that we weren’t planning any expensive surgeries (I could wait until I got back home to get my breast implants), but they didn’t care to get out the German-English dictionary to figure out what I was saying.

When we came back then next time, my good woman forgot Harrison’s passport, which we were told we had to have all over again, even though they had already seen and handled all the passports already and we already had submitted the photos we needed for the I.D. cards and they already knew who we were from the last time.

Didn’t matter.

“You must come back later, plus I refuse to show my teeth to you in any way that could be construed as a smile or even a small show of human warmth.”

So I went back to see these girls again by myself, just today, by the way, and this time I was told that, even though I had the passports, the correct insurance papers, a bank account and the I.D. card stuff, it wasn’t yet enough.

I needed more. New stuff.

This time I would have to get them a fax from home that showed exactly how much money I make each month, and this fax must come from my boss directly.

I look very much forward to my next visit to the Auslander’s buro when I will be told to piss no less than 500 ml worth of my best urine into an ertbeer yogurt container and papier mache the front of it with photocopies of my ass signed by the Prime Minister of Canada.

The Auslanders office in Grevenbroich is available to all foreigners seeking fun times and good life in Germany. Highly recommended.

Oh, and imagine this little twist.

Here they are, working at the office where all foreigners must go to get their papers, and every worker there acts like it’s a shocking breach of the public good and an incredible inconvenience if you have the hair to show up in the office not speaking German.

If I had been able to, I might have asked these people if they ever considered the meaning of the word Auslanders.

Isn’t an Auslander, by definition an “outlander” in the sense that the land from which we are “out” being Germany? And would it not be the case that an overwhelming number of the people who live outside Germany wouldn’t speak German?

Shouldn’t they therefore expect us to wander in all confused and disfluent, thumbing our way through dictionaries and trying to find out how to say “pay stub” or “cavity search”?

Anyway, the whole point I was trying to explain to you was that we were driving back from this office, all frustrated and stinking of cigarette smoke and refugee sweat and as we came up to the B222 that leads into our little village, we ended up behind this truck with the company name proudly stenciled across the back in big letters.

Take a good look at it. Go ahead, I don’t mind waiting…

 I would like to make a lot of good jokes about this company name, but it is only fair that I let you make up your own jokes about all the Fucken trucks you see driving around and those Fucken guys who show up in those Fucken trucks to fix the Fucken stuff you bought from that Fucken company in the first place.

Ok, maybe I’ll tell you one funny thing I thought of.

Wouldn’t it be great if I called this shop and asked for the owner’s name? Let’s say I found out his name was Dieter. Dieter Fucken.

Then, five minutes later I would call back and ask, “Is Dieter Fucken in his office today?”

The secretary would say that he was and then I would say “Really? With whom?”

But she wouldn’t laugh. She would say he was in there alone doing his taxes or something and then there would be an uncomfortable silence and I would hang up quietly and sneak downstairs before my wife caught me.

 

 

Auslanders: Ich Spreche Nur Englisch Part 1

Ich spreche nur Englisch.

I say this a lot. Probably seventy-eight times per day if I leave the house.

Or if I don’t leave the house. Because, perhaps sadly, I’ve even started saying it to myself.

You could call it practice, or you could call it clanging. Go ahead and look clanging up in the dictionary. It will get you a long way towards knowing me better.

Ich spreche nur Englisch means “I speak only English,” or more correctly, “I have no clue what you just said to me, and I hope it isn’t something I need to know in order to survive.”

After I say that, I usually add, “aber ich lerne Deutsch,” which  means “but I’m learning German”.

Of course, this is an open faced lie.

 I’m not learning German, not in any organized or concerted way, but I feel a powerful need to tell people I am in the hopes that will pat me on the head like I am not all there and therefore excuse me for all the potentially offensive cultural gaffes I will commit. You know, like wearing my backpack into an electronics store and not realizing that everyone else inside can read the sign that says something along the lines of “Don’t bring your backpack into this store, dumb ass” and has three exclamation marks. As if one isn’t making it clear enough.

I don’t know if the signs actually refer to a dumb ass, but I can tell you that a high percentage of the posters and tacked up sheets of paper I see in public places have aggressive looking instructions that make me think if you didn’t obey the instructions on that paper, being called a dumb ass would be the least of your worries.

In spite of appearing to be a shoplifter in the electronics store, not weighing my produce in grocery stores before I get to the cash, not putting towels on the equipment before I use it at the gym, and pretty much doing everything wrong in every public environment where there are clearly posted German instructions that I am completely ignoring, I have been finding it not at all challenging being in a country were I can’t communicate effectively. I realize now that is because:

1. I never communicate effectively with people even when I am in Canada.
2. I am socially retarded, content to live in the basement, staring at a computer screen, writing. Which, let’s be honest, is basically communicating with oneself.
3. I am well accustomed with being offensive to a vast majority of the general public, regardless of any language barriers.

My good woman is suffering from linguistic isolation in a way that I would never comprehend. She’s a social creature, and being trapped in this house with only her two incredibly sensitive children and a misanthropic troglodyte husband for company is exacting a heavy toll.

Even in her sleep her hands clench spasmodically, flipping the pages of a German-English dictionary, still looking for the right words to ask for measuring spoons. They don’t have them you know. None. All this bread, all these bakeries and they don’t have measuring spoons. They just guess. Not very German, if you ask me.

She takes all of her language instruction very seriously, studying her verb books, listening to her language tapes, talking to everyone in Deutsch as best she can and approaching every aspect of our situation in a methodical, mature manner.

Me? I like to drive on the Autobahn because the exits are called Ausfahrts and everyone knows that fahrts are funny. Even if they aren’t spelled correctly.

It turns out that, even though the Germans might not be well known for their humour, their language is literally filled with example after example of classic comedy. Everywhere I go it is a voyage of discovery, if by discovery I refer to seeing unintentionally naughty language and farty business, which I do.

(typical example)

 

You can see some of this for your own self just by cracking out your Google Maps. Check out Canada first. See how our street names are pretty much stolen whole hog from the U.K or are named after the last name of some guy who might have done something like build a subdivision or carry some general’s tea bags?

I live on Wilson Street in Goderich and when I was a kid I lived on Rattenbury Street. Both of these are standard, typical street names from standard, typical old British guys. Wilson was the builder, Rattenbury was the bag carrier.

But here in Germany I live on Auf dem Hahn, and you might think that maybe there was some old German soldier named Hahn, right? Wrong. Auf dem Hahn means “on the cock.”

On the cock.

I don’t know what kind of comedy you like, but for my money telling people you live on the cock is way funnier than telling them you live on Wilson St.

Auslanders: The Bicycle Trilogy: Third Movement

The Holland bike is an erotic masterpiece.

It appears to be specifically marketed to women.

It looks old fashioned to me, with big chunky wheels, a broad comfortable seat, and high, high handlebars. They are often called city bikes, and they certainly look like a bike you would see being ridden over a bridge in Amsterdam. In fact, they are the kind of bike you see being ridden over a bridge in Amsterdam.

Holland bikes are much more upright than any the bikes you would might see back home, more erect, you might even say in a saucy moment.

We weren’t in Europe very long before my wife began taking meaningful, envious looks at women riding Holland bikes. She was thinking about comfort, wasn’t a big fan of hunching over on a mountain bike all the time, and who am I to tell her that she should just get used to pedaling around with lower back pain like everybody else?

I didn’t notice them.

Oh, I saw them, and I thought they looked weird, too stodgy and slow moving, and you’d have to use a whole new configuration of muscles to ride them.

We had a lot of opportunities to see these bikes put to use.

We live on the main road that leads to my daughter’s high school, and every school day sees a parade of maybe hundreds of students traveling past our kitchen window from seven o’clock to eight.

Now, unlike the Canadian students with whom I am completely familiar, these exciting new German students are on bikes in shocking numbers. The bike racks at their school are just choked with bicycles. More than you have ever seen at any school ever. It’s strange to us because it seems that, as soon as they are able, teenagers in Canada want to drive to school even if they live twelve feet from the school.

You think I am exaggerating, but I’m not.

I have literally seen a girl drive to my high school back home from her house less than one block away.

Would she blame it on the cold wind or snow? Maybe. Would she consider deeply the psychology of her choice and admit that it was a desperate attempt to claim some kind of adulthood?

Perhaps she would rationalize that it was a statement of independence and freedom in a society where she was confused about her role and position. Or maybe she would simply admit flat out that she is the sworn Enemy of a flourishing Earth and wakes up each day plotting to wreak hell on future generations. She probably smokes vicious Turkish cigarettes and stores spent plutonium in her backyard too.

Sure, the odd time I might glance from my cereal bowl and remark on the sheer number of students on bikes because there were just so many it was hard to believe. It was like a parade. They should have been wearing clown outfits or Shriner’s hats.

Normally, I take very little notice of groups of students doing anything around me unless they’re on fire or something. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m not trying to say that adolescents are beneath my notice or that I see them as any less valuable than regular people, and I’m not suggesting that I actively want to see them on fire. That would be terrible, for the most part.

What I’m trying to say is that I am used to being around teenagers and seeing them going past my window isn’t something new, isn’t some kind of odd image that would attract any undue attention. To me, a bunch of kids walking past really doesn’t register. I don’t romanticize them, mythologize them, fetishize them, demonize them or incriminate them.

They’re just teenagers. And because I’m a teacher, they’re just another part of my life.

Then, one day I was out for a ride to Dusseldorf.

It was a beautiful day, cool and bright and early fall, so it was my favourite time of year, late in the afternoon when the sun is angled down from the west and everything looks about as good as it can look, amber and glowing.

I came into Strump with the righteous fury of a man possessed. I had screamed back from the city as fast as I could pedal my stumpy, arthritic little leggings, blasting Leo Laporte’s TWiT podcast, completely focused on getting home in time to make red sauce for pasta.

I smelled her first.

You are going to learn some things here that make you call bullshit. I know this because when I tell people things like what I am about to say, they say, “I call bullshit.”

But however you feel, you have to face the truth: I am no fake artist, and this is no bullshit. This is true, 100% homegrown real life.

I am basically a superhero.

No, I don’t have super strength, or even mediocre strength.

I am not resistant to injury. I am, in fact, more likely to get hurt than you are, even doing something as harmless as brushing my teeth. You know how you push hard with your toothbrush, and then you kind of slip and jam the hard plastic end of the brush into your gum and then you get a kind of blistered up bruise thing there? Well, I do that all the time.

I do fight crime though, although not in the conventional sense. I prefer to wage an internal war on crime. For example, thanks to my great powers, I am able to stop myself from stealing cool stuff from the electronics store no matter how nice I think it would look hidden in my backpack.

But my main power is enhanced senses. Or at least, I have the power of subjective perception of possessing enhanced senses, which in effect gives me enhanced senses even if I don’t have them, so therefore, I do anyway.

And my enhanced senses were in full effect on the particular day in question during this very tale.

Because I smelled her first.

It was the smell of clean, almost perfume, but not. Maybe shampoo and soap or lotion.

It was startling and sudden, like the wind had been loaded up with whatever it was and the whole shot got fired off at once, right at me.

I looked up immediately and there I thought I saw my wife.

She was riding a Holland bike, wearing a blue blazery looking jacket, sitting upright, perfectly postured, shoulders back and wide, trimming way in at the waist, hips flanging out beautifully onto the plush bike seat.

I could feel swirling eddies in the air shifting around me as her quads flexed and tensed against the taut fabric of her jeans, feel the moist heat of her breath puffing out slightly as she worked, hear the soft leathery squeak of the riding boots twisting around her calves.

Her hair was pulled back into that blonde ponytail you could just eat as she pedaled by.

That blonde ponytail, bobbing along in front of me reeled me in after her.

I was a like pack of wolves after an injured moose, only I was alone and I wasn’t a wolf, and she wasn’t injured or a moose.

She also wasn’t my wife.

I almost fell off my bike as I approached her at the stoplights at the centre of Strump, and that was a good thing because I had been just about to hurl myself bodily upon her before I snapped back into reality.

Of course she wasn’t my wife. My wife didn’t have a Hollandrad.

And my wife wasn’t nineteen. Not really, however much she’ll be forever that age in my mind.

This was just a girl. A plain old German girl just riding her bike, looking hardly at all like my wife aside from the cute little ponytail, smelling clean enough, but normal, not even glowing, not pulsing out invisible tractor beams or pulling unwary male cyclists to their doom. Just riding along, chewing gum. She wasn’t even wearing riding boots.

So what had I seen?

When it hit me, I jumped on my bike and launched across the road before the light was green.

I had seen the future. My future.

It wouldn’t have mattered if I had gotten hit by a car. It wouldn’t have been able to damage me anyway. I was too strong in that moment. Too powerful to fall to something as simple as a speeding Mercedes stationwagon.

At that moment, I knew that I would buy my wife a Hollandrad, no matter what.

I knew that she would be riding in the sun on winding paths through the verdant fields of Meerbusch, perched atop one of those city bikes and I knew that I would be riding behind her, and I would follow that blonde ponytail through the Gates of Hell itself.

I still don’t notice the high school kids riding their bikes to school every morning. Not even the upright girls with blonde ponytails.

Because now I have my very own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hair Clipper Incident Update #1

I could have posted this much earlier. To be honest, I could have posted it immediately after posting the first Hair Clipper Incident photo.

But I did not.

No, I will admit here and now (or, more accurately, there and then, because by the time anybody else reads this, it will be well after I’ve written it. Whoa. Wait a minute!

This question explodes in my brain - when is now?

Is now the now of my writing it, or is now the now of your reading it?

The enormity of this question completely shatters the original intention of this post. All I was going to do was make a few smartass comments and post a comical little thumbnail shot I took after the clipper situation, but now (which now? argh!) I have something far more serious to investigate.

If I write a document and include in that document a reference to now, and then you read that document two days later, when you see that word “now” you invariably interpret that word as being now, meaning the now that you are experiencing during your reading. It doesn’t matter when I wrote it, insofar as as you experience it only at the moment of your interaction with the writing. Therefore, our communication, the link between us exists in an entirely different frame of relevance and an entirely different frame of time.

In effect, by writing this, I am traveling through time, tearing myself out of the shackles of temporal existence and literally making my now happen at the time of your now, forcing myself into your now with my old now and renowing it.
If I write, right now, “I am not wearing pants”, which I just did, unless I did minutes ago and came back to edit this passage and added this bit (which I did!) you will picture me not wearing pants (perhaps with a certain saucy exuberance, I might imagine) during your hypothetical reading two days from now , when your now happens, and when in fact, I am wearing two or more pairs of pants. Possibly.

Does this create a discontinuity? Yes. And no. This situation creates nothing less than an asynchronously phased synchronicity that surpasses chronogical time, joining us in an externally created shared universe that happens simulataneously at those different times.

At that (those) moment(s) we are in our own universe, two days apart and together, joined intimately through these words you think in your head as you read, that I thought in my head as I wrote.

Of course, this is all monstrously apparent to everyone all the time, and when we read anyone’s writing, we know them and hear their voices and experience their thoughts and feelings as many as hundreds of years after they themselves have thought them and felt them, and we experience them as our own, in our own time, and we don’t think there is anything strange about it. Especially if you saw that movie with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, which I will never, ever see. I promise.

Oh, how I wish I could be there with you in our shared/apart asynchronously phased synchronous personal universe, me with my pants off, sitting there and here as you read this, maybe even perched upon your knee, my gnarled warmth suffusing through the thin material of your own pants. Don’t worry, it’s just body heat. I haven’t peed myself.

Right.

Here’s the picture.

Do I still have the Mohawk? No. But I still have my wife.

I think I made the right choice.

Hair Clipper Incident

I am slowly becoming one of those guys with a bald spot.

Maybe not that slowly.

I didn’t know, and I always figured I was one of those men who would have a thick bear pelt of matted black on my head for the full extent of my life.

Then, one day during a basketball game in the gym at GDCI, a student burst out shouting, “Mr. Lobb is going bald!” You would think that Jane would have had some sensitivity and perhaps would have put a subtle note in my mailbox, or would stage an intervention with a roomful of my closest friends. Instead, she screamed those words seven inches from my left ear in the middle of several hundred students crammed onto the bleachers for a home opener.

Needless to say, the game was cancelled.

It didn’t bother me, as I thought I didn’t need a thick head of hair. I have enough on my back to counterbalance what I would be losing.

But after some years, it became obvious that, even though I wasn’t bothered by the thought of being bald, I was bothered a great deal by the transition to baldness. There is a lot of patchy, thin, greasy, nasty looking business on the road to complete baldness.

I had the idea that I would simply shave it all off at the first sign, look eerily like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, and carry on as though I was somehow every bit as cool.

My wife wasn’t so sure.

She thought that a) I don’t look like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable or any other movie and b) I am not anywhere near as cool. She also thought that I shouldn’t shave my head until it was a moral imperative. Once I became so hideous, so mange-ridden and moulty that nobody could deny their repulsion , she would then give me the go ahead and I would become one of the shaved head guys. You know, the ones who often grow decoy goatees and wear a hat all the time.

Well, a few hours ago I thought I was closer to the mange than I have ever been, and although I wasn’t going to go down to the wood, I decided to treat myself to some special alone time with the clippers.

This is what happened.

I guess I should have used the mirror, but I thought if I did it bent over the floor of the bathroom, it would be easier to clean up.

It turns out, I had it on the wrong setting, and I also didn’t cut most of the hair except in that one spot. I was tempted to go the rest of the way and give myself the lobotomy it appears I had prepared myself for, but couldn’t quite muster up the guts to get the drill.

Auslanders: The Bike Trilogy: Second Movement

My bike over here is Mark’s mountain bike.

It took me a long time to get used to it, thanks to a few little biomechanical nags. You know how it is. The handlebars are at a slightly different angle even after you adjust them, the pitch feels a bit off, and the seat feels like it’s burrowing into your crotch like a rabid badger as you pedal, stuff like that.

I have never imagined that I would spend so much time noticing the angle of other people’s bike seats before, but around here, it is so bizarre that I can’t stop myself.

Mark’s seat was tilted such that the front of the seat, let’s call it “The Horn,” was almost at a 45 degree angle. It aimed up like a coyote testing the air currents for prey. And the prey was somewhere in my groinal area.

There used to be a well publicized concern about bike seats compressing some key artery that runs to the male sex organs, or “package”, if you will, and a new kind of bike seat came out with a hollow channel running front to back that would take that pressure off that fragile tributary.

Nobody wants to be fit and trim from biking all the time if it also means that you are forced to carrying around a numb assortment of limpid, bloodless genitals. Impotence is only funny until it happens to you.

I had no desire to play around on the edge of that envelope, so I have always had the correct type of bike seat. My arteries are wide open and running freely. Thanks for asking.

It didn’t occur to me, however, that I should have brought my seat with me on the plane. I guess I foolishly assumed that penile artery care wasn’t something restricted by North America.

The first time I mounted Mark’s bike, I knew immediately that I would either be a) getting a new bike seat or b) actually looking forward to checking my email and finding Viagra spam.

I was also on the hunt for an Allan wrench in order to reduce the angle of insertion being generated by The Horn.

The Horn (with simulated angle of insertion)

The Horn is what I called his bike seat, and it wasn’t something that any male rider I know would have knowingly hoisted himself onto, but it appeared that he had somehow inured himself to its effects. Not me. I dug around in the garage until I found some tools and went to work.

Once I had the seat adjusted, it was like a veil had been pulled away, and I began to notice that almost every other mountain bike I saw had a Horn.

Some of the seats I saw were pitched ninety degrees. That is no lie. I have seen bike seats that looked like the K2. It’s ridiculous to imagine anyone sitting on it, but there they were.

Just seeing them sitting like that forced me to take my crotch protection behaviours to greater heights.

If you were to break into the garage right now and find my bike, you would know which one it was because it is the one with the huge broad middle-aged lady seat, one that Uncle Bill was going to throw away because it was so wide he couldn’t sit on it and still pedal. And on that shelf of padding you would see I had also wrapped a gel cover to further enhance my Southern comfort.

Plush Replacement (without added gel cover)

I don’t care how crucial it is for serious riders to balance their tenders on a razor thin curve of sharpened plastic in order to get that much more speed or angle of attack on the downstroke, and I don’t care how funny it is that I am pedaling around on what looks like somebody’s Grandma’s overstuffed piano bench.

I don’t care about how much I stand out in a crowd of cyclists because dang it, I am going to be comfortable when I ride and I am going to do whatever it takes protect my stuff and things from gangrenous atrophy.

 If I have to use the big puffy seat that adds a little chafe spice to the bike riding stew, so be it.

Because Daddy is keeping his business in working order for the long term.

 

 

 

 

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