The Muenster Mash

Describing Muenster as “the historic city of Muenster” doesn’t make it seem all that special considering that pretty much every city around here is historic with plaques and everything.

Everything in Europe is hundreds of years old or made to look like it is, including some of the crocodile cowboy boot-like tanned women you see wandering around, but Muenster probably deserves its place in the history books for specifically religious reasons, some of which have to do with hanging dead Ana-Baptists’ rotting bodies in cages on the steeple of the main church in the centre of town.

Those cages are still affixed to the spire, but they’re up high enough that I couldn’t smell whether it was true or not. I’m sure these death cages do look pretty at Christmas, however, when they put lights in them.

According to Anja, the good Christians of Muenster don’t enact religious persecution upon those poor Ana-Baptists anymore, but I don’t think I saw any of them wandering around, and I was looking for them, so I couldn’t say for sure.

Which got me thinking.

How would an angry, intolerant Muensterian church-goer recognize these Ana-Baptists back in the glory days?

It’s something that must have been difficult for the torturers, trying to figure out handy ways to identify heretics. If you and your thirty-five torch carrying buddies grabbed a passerby and asked, “Hey, are you an Ana-Baptist?” that passerby would probably say, “No. Sorry.”

Do this enough times in a busy town, and you can see how frustrating it would be.

But that doesn’t matter anymore. We’re more enlightened now and thee is no more religious intolerance. God Loves Us All Equally, in spite of those crusted iron death baskets hanging up on top of the church.

Which takes me back to those glorious old days of intense religious intolerance, when, after some 300 years of vigorous war, a treaty was signed in the Muenster Rathaus.

We stood outside this crucial building and although we didn’t go inside because it was closed and I still have no idea what is actually in there, you could feel the weight of history, coupled with a certain amount of disappointment because you just know that a rathaus wouldn’t have anything to do with rats.

I have to admit that in a small, stupid part of my lizard brain I had, against all logic, hoped that going we allow us to see something like that movie Ratopolis that Mr. Addison showed in Grade Eight.

If you remember the scientific experiment revealed in that documentary, you will recall that a team of crazed scientists put a set number of rats into an enclosed environment and let them breed unchecked until they overran the place, I guess to “see what happened.”

Of course what eventually happened in Ratopolis was wholesale slaughter and close-up rat-on-rat cannibalism, all recorded in scratchy 16mm educational film for maximum student horror.

The meaning I took away from that nightmare movie and the gruesome lesson that followed on Malthusian equations and the imminent overpopulation of the Earth was that it was only a matter of time until I too would be feasting on the flesh of my aging neighbours in the oncoming juggernaught of complete world collapse.

Soylent Green is people! It’s people!

And they said it was just a movie.

I was never able to see kindly Mr. Archibald the same way after that. Not without feeling a little nauseous. Or hungry. It was hard to be sure.

The less historic aspect of Muenster, but the reason that we drove down there, is that Anja’s parents live there, and they had kindly included us in a family party that was scheduled for Saturday night. I guess when you are going to live in somebody’s house for a full year, sleeping in their beds and using their towels, you might as well go to their family parties too.

Lucky for us, Anja’s family is generous enough to make me stagger under waves of unworthiness the second I walk into their house.

It was because of my wife and the Shotgun Theory.

They love my wife. Like real actual love. Not greeting card love. The kind of love that you see on a sitcom at the end where they’ve all learned a valuable lesson in togetherness.

I can’t fault them for it, either. It’s damn easy to love my wife. I’ve loved her since I first saw her and I’m an emotionless husk of a shell of a human being. She’s impossibly nice and smiles a lot and remembers your birthday and thinks of just the right thing to say in just the right situation and always hugs people. And she cares what you think. She cares about you.

Accordingly, if you knew her and if you knew about just how fricking great she was, you would naturally assume that any husbands she had would be exactly like her, or at least close enough in nature so as to have earned the right to be married to her. Like, if she married a guy, it only makes sense that he must be equally nice and smile a lot and remember all those social things and care about what people think and he must be equally physically demonstrative with a rich and complex emotional gravy just like she has.

But she married me.

WIFE                                                                         ME

Optimistic	Cynical
Smiling	Featureless deadpan
Remembers Your Birthday	Doesn’t even remember his own
Hugs and Touches People	Feels faintly nauseous reading the words “Hugs and Touches People”
Cries Easily	Cried when he was born and then that time he had a fever and watched Sling Blade
Feels Intense Feelings, Shares Them With Others	Thinks Intense Thoughts, Observes Feelings With Concern
Is A Wonderful Person	I think I made my point.

We stand at the door to their house, my wife and I, light and dark, yin and yang, fair and foul and Anja’s parents see her and they pull out all their positive feelings for her and fire them off at my wife but, it’s not a surgical strike, it’s a shotgun and I get caught in the blast.

During my stay I was kissed, hugged, mauled and knee dandled like I was the Gerber baby. And that was just by the other men.

There was an interesting period of time during which we played a little game of catch up.

You know, those minutes of describing what you have been doing since people saw you last.

My wife showed off the kids, talked about how we ended up in The Germ, and described a few of the nicer events we had been involved in over the years since she had seen them.

Then they started talking about when exactly it was that she was last at their house.

This is when things got interesting.

One her last visit, just before our daughter was born, my wife came to Europe without me.

She left me in the squalor of our modest starter home, slumped over before a mid-90s computer writing unappreciated screenplays and wishing somebody would invent World of Warcraft, while she scooched off to attend Anja’s sister’s wedding.

When they mentioned this wedding, Anja’s family got strange looks on their faces, secretive smiles. They looked at my wife as if she might be in on the joke even though it was clearly somehow on her.

My first thought was that my daughter was not my daughter at all. She was picking up German very quickly. But then I realized it was impossible. My daughter is an Avenging Spirit designed by the universe to show me what it was like having me for a child.

It turned out that the secret they were smirking around was linked to Big Joe from Ohio.

I am not going to explain why Big Joe from Ohio was at a wedding in Muenster, but there he was and it turned out that Anja’s family remembers a drinking content between my wife and this large Joe.

It sounds implausible, considering my wife’s current drinking habits and the legendary Bigness of Joe. She denies any involvement in such a competition, and even denies meeting any Joes, Big or not. Luckily, Anja’s family had a photo album.

They pulled it out like the glove at the O.J. trial and held it up for everyone to see.

To her credit, my wife didn’t look worried. She honestly had no idea what anyone was talking about.

We opened the photo book and there indeed was a picture of Joe and I guess he was kind of big in that Budweiser and red meat American way, but he wasn’t that big. And there wasn’t any smoking gun of my wife slumped over in a puddle of her own sick.

I looked very carefully at a group photo, trying to see if her eyes were bleary. They weren’t.

“I wasn’t drunk!” she said. “There was no drinking contest with Big Joe! I’ve never been in a drinking contest! I don’t even know Big Joe! What’s a Joe?”

She picked up the photo album.

“This doesn’t prove anything! It’s just a bunch of photos of random people sitting around a table. That’s not evidence! You can’t prove anything. You can’t even prove that anybody got legally married that day!”

She leaped up from the table, kicking over her deck chair and chucking a handful of German Skittles (they’re sharp) at Anja’s niece and nephew. “And that makes them bastards! The both of them!”

I made that last part up, but it would have been pretty intense.

That potentially drunken wedding party story was germane to Anja’s family because we were attending a wedding party on the very evening in question. I guess they were concerned that my wife would get into the booze again and cut somebody up. Again.

They didn’t have to worry. This was a much more sedate affair.

It was a low key second wedding party held at a very nice inn outside of Muenster, nestled into rolling fields of countryside dotted with small woodlots.

In general, countryside is a misleading concept in Germany.

People in Canada who say “I live out in the country” would be, if they lived in Germany, forced instead to say, “I live in in the country” because the country is right there” and then they would point to the country and sure enough, there it is. Right over there.

“What about farms?” you would ask me. “Aren’t they out in the country?

I would then answer your question by telling you of the time I was riding my bike in Krefield, on the bike lane beside the main road, and almost ran into a horse. Two horses, actually, with teenage girls on top of them. With blonde ponytails…

It is true that average people ride horses through town in these parts. Often. Clearly, the line between town and country is blurred. It is not out of the realm of possibility that a man could be attacked by a family of geese in the checkout line at the grocery store. The farm and its attendant animals are very well integrated into the urban landscape.

After driving six minutes from the historic city centre of Muenster, we parked along the side of a dangerously narrow road with what appeared to be hundreds of other cars, and made our way to what looked like the kind of German inn you would picture upon reading the words “German inn.” You know, with white walls, dark timbers, flowers around it and the name in that crazy Medieval font you can’t read even when the words are in English.

We walked up the long lane and into a large crowd of nicely dressed people where I keenly experienced that awkward feeling I get where everybody can tell that I don’t belong so they stare at me as if I had not quite healed up from a botched face transplant.

In this case that awkward feeling lasted almost all night, which I kept trying to fool myself into believing was because my wife and kids are extraordinarily good looking. Maybe people were just looking at them.

But then I remembered the first family dinner my wife attended back in 1986 when my mom saw this beautiful new girlfriend for the first time and said, “How did you get a girl like that?” Sadly, my mom was the seventh person there who had asked me that. Including my Grandma.

I would like to describe the wedding party in an interlocking series of vignettes that you can imagine being played out in the same kind of way a Robert Altman movie unspools. For those of you who don’t know Robert Altman or his films, I am sorry for my film snobbish description, but that is what this was like.

If you want to play along at home, go rent Nashville, M.A.S.H. and Gosford Park and then come back and read this. It will seem way cooler, and so will you.

Party Observations in No Specific Order:

1. Smokers, pack your bags for Germany.

Smokers in North America feel unappreciated, and that is because they are. We are disgusted by them because they smell bad and drain our social safety net with their myriad self-inflicted, preventable diseases. Cast out into the streets, they feed their nasty habits in the most brutal weather conditions. Forget about the very real dangers of lung cancer, hypothermia becomes their primary threat in the harsh wilds of Canada.

Germany, on the other hand, appears to demand that a certain number of smokers must attend every public event to the degree that they give tax breaks and free product samples to those who show up. It was like a blacksmith had set up shop behind the wine bar. You think secondhand smoke is bad? Try fourth-hand. It was so thick it still had lipstick on it from that leathery old frau in the corner.

I felt like a blue whale cruising through a school of krill to feed, only instead of getting delicious tiny shrimp-like creatures, I was trapping toxic chemicals and carcinogenics in my baleen. And instead of baleen I had lungs. And instead of being a blue whale I was a disgusted, self-righteous non-smoking Canadian guy.

2. The German people love to partay and by partay I mean disco dance.

You know how you go to a party where there is incidental background music that nobody is paying much attention to and there are those few brave and most likely hammered people who get up and dance like they just escaped from a repressive religious cult? All of those people were at this party. No unappreciated North American D.J. has ever been so loved as was the greasy faux-hawked teenager spinning cds at this party.

Enthusiastic whooing.

Jazz hands.

White man’s overbite.

Somebody’s Grandma shaking her ass.

Full crowd German singalongs.

Organized group dancing.

Sweaty grandpa/cute little girl in a dress dancing.

All of that typical wedding reception stuff was there and it was all happening at the same time.

They even had an endless marathon of organized group dances performed by faintly smiling young people all dressed the same and somehow these dances referred to the World Cup and everybody thought it was about the best thing they had ever seen, except that I couldn’t figure out why. Watching the dances reminded me of watching the Carry-On Cloggers who dance to country music on a flatbed trailer and get towed around every parade in Huron County, except with rosy cheeked, drunken kids instead of middle-aged ladies.

Everybody knew every song and danced like they were getting paid for it.

Forget the lame old stereotypes about black people, it’s the Germans who have the natural rhythm. Oh, and they also have techno. Lots and lots of techno. Hey, if you like that one beat, you should have been there ‘cause you could have heard it all night long.

Bottom line: They lied to us back in 1979. Disco never died. It emigrated to Europe, got a good job, settled down and had babies and those babies like to clog.

3. The German people put on a fine buffet.

I had a few expectations for this dinner, all of them based on the most obvious clichés available to your well-educated consumer of mass media, and much of what I expected was delivered.

Sure enough, there were schnitzels and sauerkraut and potatoes and much freshly roasted testimony to the glories of pork, but all of these things surpass any stereotypes because these things are fricking awesome. I had to ask a frail old lady to put down her nine liter beer bottle long enough to help me carry my mounded plate back to the table, and although enlisting her aid wasn’t easy with sign language, once I started eating, the language barrier was destroyed. It turns out that once our cheeks are jammed full with pork chops, we all sound exactly the same.

Another thing is that there are no buffet table rules beyond lining up. If you want to skip first course, grab nine chocolate mousses and suck them up through your nose with a straw, that’s your business. If you want to try that other dessert and you don’t like it, just drop it. Nobody cares. Maybe they draw the line at putting gravy ass prints on the wedding cake, but I have some doubts. As long as you lined up, you could get away with anything once you got to the food. And I did. Over and over again.

4. The German people love to partay and by partay I mean drink. And by drink I mean drink alcohol. And by alcohol I mean lots.

The following is my half of a Real Conversation where a kindly English speaking gentleman offered to get me a glass of beer:

No thanks.

Uh, well no, it’s just that I don’t drink.

Really.

No thanks, I don’t drink wine.

No, I don’t drink. No, I never did. Really. No alcohol of any sort. Not even beer. No. Honest. That’s right. Never, I swear.

Yes I am telling the truth.

A Mormon? No, I just don’t drink.

(embarrassed, stunned silence… the German looks away. I feel somehow as though I have soiled myself in public. I am left alone in the centre of the room. Nobody looks at me directly in the eyes for the rest of the night.)

Exeunt.

5. Kegelbahn Eins.

The party was held at an inn that also had bowling.

Kind of.

From what I understand, there is German bowling that looks like the kind of bowling we have in North America and then there is German bowling called Kegeln that looks like the kind of bowling that you would see dwarves playing backwards in a David Lynch movie.

All I could think of when first started watching the kids play Kegel bowling was about how I was capable of vigorously holding my urine.

Nobody in Germany appears to know about their great doctor Kegel who discovered those special muscles in the “down there” place, but they sure know about his brother the confused bowler who decided to shrink the lane down to about eighteen inches wide.

It has never been so certain that you would get a gutter ball, expecially considering the size of the balls. They are somewhere in between a five pin and ten pin ball, have no holes, and you have to roll them, not toss them like we do, so that they go under a marker string that is only as high off the ground as they are. I could hardly bend down that low, let alone roll a ball once I got there.

And if by some stroke of freakish luck you don’t roll a gutter ball off that tiny lane, the pins are set up in a such a way as to pretty much guarantee that there is no way that you can get a strike. They’re just too far apart, and they don’t overlap enough to knock each other down.

I asked Anja’s brother if he had ever seen anyone get a strike ever and he just laughed.

Did he laugh at the possibility of getting a strike or at my lack of Kegel skills?

It sure wasn’t my Kegel muscles he was laughing at. Those were working fine.

More than fine.

I could have probably have picked up one of those bowling balls and thrown it without using my hands.

You will just have to take my word for it.

The Mysterious Effects of Aging?

Just for fun, when I shaved last week, I decided that I wouldn’t shave again for a few weeks. I’m talking about my face here, by the way.

“Hey, why not grow a beard,” I thought to myself in the second person, “and completely disgust your wife?”

I didn’t grow it specifically to disgust her. It grows on its own, whether she’s disgusted or not. It’s not a fashion choice, it’s the way God made me, and God don’t make no junk.

She doesn’t agree.

She could probably point out a lot of junk that God is reported to have made, like serial killers, the Ebola virus, country music and my facial hair, but I repeat, I did not let my face hairs grow simply to repulse my beloved wife.

I allowed the unchecked growth of these hairs because sometimes a Man needs to things that Men do, and I don’t do a lot of those things in my daily life.

I am unable to hunt over here. I didn’t think they would allow me to bring my spearfishing equipment on the plane (I was right and yes, there was a bit of a kerfuffle at the check in).

I don’t watch sports. It doesn’t interest me. I always feel like it’s a complete waste of time supporting this or that team because who cares if they win or lose? I don’t have anything at stake. My pay stays the same no matter who wins. You want me to care about sports? Tie me up over a pool of irradiated wolf eels and threaten to release the chains if the Raptors lose, and then you’ve got me. I’m a fan. Or have the teams actively solicit my support. Hey Leafs, you want my fandom? Get your checkbook out. Make me care.

I don’t drink beer. I don’t care about the engines on cars. I don’t like to wrestle Graeco-Roman in the nude with other males and test myself against my friends with nude feats of strength.

I’m not good at fixing mechanical things and I don’t take pride in my lawn. It’s just grass.

I’m a good cook, I do the dishes and I am not threatened by gay men.

I listen to women when they talk and I usually let them get what they want.

I don’t have much of an ego and don’t care if I’m wrong about anything. You can always blame me, because it’s probably my fault. It’s okay, I can take it and I don’t pout.

I don’t have affairs, don’t put in long hours of overtime and I don’t go out to strip clubs with the boys.

Golf bores me, I don’t want a big truck and I don’t like Top Gun.

But I’m still a Man, you know.

I have to do something that women don’t like.

I can’t live my whole life like a little piece of lady catnip, getting cuddled and chewed on and batted around. I have to make a stand somewhere.

I make that stand on my face.

Right now.

Finally, I come to the point.

I have this scruffy multi-day growth, well past rugged cool and a long ways yet from Grizzly Adams, and I look in the mirror to chart my progress as I like to do, and what do I see.

All of the longest hairs in my pre-beard are white.

Shock white.

Zombie belly white.

The beautiful black hairs are in the vast majority. They rule the beard, have the biggest voting block, they’re what you see when you take a quick glance at the beard, but those hideous white hairs, they refuse to nestle in with the blacks.

They seem to be leaping out of my face as if desperate to escape it. Kind of a… whoa. This sounds way more like racism than I could ever have predicted.

The real question here is: why do the white hairs grow so quickly?

Aren’t they supposed to show up when I’m old?

I’m supposed get them when I’m done growing and prospering and start degenerating.

Shouldn’t they be thin and sickly? Why are these hairs so powerful and so white? It almost seems like some kind of bizarre magic.

I mention this because I also recently noticed that I’ve been putting on weight, eating a lot of cookies and drinking warm milk that was left out on the kitchen table.

My eyes are twinklier than they used to be and my belly is rounder, kind of like a bowlful of jelly.

My cheeks are reddening strangely and I think I’ve got a button nose that I never used to have.

I laugh a lot more than normal. You could say I have almost become quite jolly, in an elfish way.

As I jot down these mysterious observations, I am sitting in my red long johns, a big bag of laundry slung over my shoulder. I was just about to climb up on the roof to hang it up on the chimney like I normally do and – well, I’d better stop writing and get back to work. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do before the holidays.

A LOT of stuff.

 

The Evidence

 

Go Ahead and Say Merry Christmas

I just can’t see how there is anything wrong with saying Merry Christmas to someone whether they celebrate Christmas or not, just the same as I don’t think it’s wrong to say Happy or Merry anything to someone whether or not they are feeling Happy or Merry.

Don’t you think we are living in a time when we are taking cultural sensitivity to a degree that is far beyond its usefulness? In fact, the kind of exaggerated sensitivity that pervades the West right now is a backhanded form of racism.

If you wish someone a Merry Christmas and they are Hindu or Shinto or Wiccan or whatever, that isn’t to suggest to them that there is anything wrong with their choice of religion, and I don’t think you should feel guilty or inappropriate for simply wishing for them an extension of something that you are feeling and celebrating. In effect, you are sharing your happiness with the season with them, reaching out with your nice, warm Christmas happiness to them. There is no implicit direction from you that they are expected to experience that season in the same way you do, and no aspect of judgment or negative implication, and I think any reasonable human being would see in your kind words exactly what you meant.

We have been schooled by the media and by a certain kind of politician to assume that cultures and cultural mores are in some way mutually exclusive, that they can’t coexist within a wider framework without very carefully delineating the differences between them, and as far as I can see, it is this kind of thinking that creates intolerance.

If a Muslim wishes me a Joyous Ramadan, I gladly accept her kind wishes and understand fully that she extends goodwill towards me during this important time. I will take all the goodwill from those around me that I can and if she wants to invite me to a sundown feast, I would love to go. Learning about and enjoying different aspects of another culture is a great thing, especially if there’s good food there.

To assume that a Muslim person in a similar situation wouldn’t be able to accept the kind wishes of my Merry Christmas, and have in her own mind the same understanding and acceptance that I had, is assuming the worst in that person, and, I suggest, buying into a stereotypical, very negative depiction of others.

There is an unwritten prescript to all of this kind of political and cultural correctness that implies that we think we in the West are the only ones “big” enough, magnanimous and mature enough to be tolerant. We are the only ones willing to say that it’s okay for other people to be other people and do other things and accordingly, we bend our behaviour around trying to make that as clear as possible to everybody else. But if we think this way we are selling everybody else short.

I would say that you should wish people a Merry Christmas if that’s what you feel and if they don’t like it then the problem is theirs, not yours.

So Merry Christmas.

Even to you pagan sons of bitches.

Note: the author is a cynical agnostic bastard who thinks Intelligent Design is anything but, and yet finds himself perfectly willing to celebrate and enjoy Christmas. He even loves Vince Guaraldi’s “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” album. Feel free to wish him a Happy Chanukah.

Auslanders” Spaghetti Eis Capades

I don’t feel that I can adequately convey to you the enormity of the difference between the way that the German women appear to deal with their children and their children’s ice cream (and by extension, their very lives) and the way that I deal with mine, but I am going to try.

Let me preface this by saying that I am not an abusive parent.

I just went back and read that sentence, and I’m pretty sure that now everybody thinks I beat my kids. It’s one of those things like when you are mistakenly put into an insane asylum and when you try to explain to the psychiatrist that you’re not insane.

But I’m not insane and I am not an abusive parent.

Sure, sometimes I have these mini-daydreams about administering an old fashioned spank when I get a lot of lip, but I don’t think it’s worth the hassle. It wouldn’t work anyway. My kids would take their spanking like lifers on lockdown. They’d just get slitty eyes and a scary expressionless face that would give me problems sleeping. I’d always wonder which kid would wake up in the night and take revenge. Actually I do know and that’s the scariest part because she’s normally so cute and innocent.

That is not to say that I don’t discipline my children. I have no choice in this. When you are a teacher, you have a front row seat for some of the most heinous behaviours that young people are able to drag up out of their primeval little brains, and on a very deep level, you live in fear of your beautiful little babies turning into the kind of people you tow out of a high school dance with freshly pissed pants and cherry whiskey puke dribbling down the front of their cleavage shirts.

I need my heart pills just thinking about this happening to my kids, especially the idea of my son having cleavage, and if that means that I have to initiate a series of rigorous disciplinary programs, I will initiate and enact those rigorous programs with impunity.

And clearly, I am one of only two parents in Germany who subscribes to this policy. The other person is my wife.

We had been in town about 24 hours when I was informed that we would nip out and meet some of the neighbourhood mothers and children at an ice cream shop in Lank, one of the nearby villages in this cluster of cute little villages, couldn’t you just pinch their cheeks!

Once at the place, we were greeted by a thick cloud of Camel smoke spiraling from the downturned lips of one of those carefully errant-haired twenty-something males in Capri pants that seem to find us no matter where we go.

I have nothing against these guys except for their fashion, their attitudes, their cigarettes and their taste in music, which I assume without any concrete evidence at all to be offensively electronic technospew with that one beat and some repeated phrase sung by that one girl. Either they listen to that or to David Hasselhof’s extensive back catalogue of solo recordings.

I am aware that is a cheap shot as The Hoff (The Hass?) hasn’t been popular in Germany for years, but he was at one point in the Top 10 here. That alone is enough to soil the musical pants of the German peoples for all eternity, Beethoven notwithstanding. And Bach. And Wagner. Okay, maybe not for all eternity, but for some of it.

Whoa, wait a minute, you say.

You probably just went back in that earlier paragraph to read in shock that a young man was smoking vile American cigarettes in a jolly little ice cream shop filled with children and… now that I think back to that scene myself I have to admit that the jury is out on whether that smoker was male or female, and I don’t just say that because of the Capri pants.

In one of my many careful examinations of the local flyers I came upon an advertisement revealing the smiling, prettified head shot of someone so cleverly possessing none and yet all of the attributes of either sex that nobody in my family could tell if the model was a human or CGI let alone whether it was male or female.

Since that day I have seen an inordinate number of these hermaphroditic creatures wandering around over here. It’s as though hundreds of the more extravagant attendees from the 1972 Ziggy Stardust tour had been randomly teleported into the future and planted in key locations throughout Europe just for me to discover.

And there was one of them right there, an artfully tousled club lizard with a bright orange spray on tan smoking Camels in the ice cream shop, not two feet away from the neighbourhood mothers we came to meet and all of their kids, and not a one of these mothers seemed the least bit bothered by the plume of foul smoke.

I am certain that this teenaged ladyboy Camel smoker will probably have a long, healthy life, as it appeared that he/she was taking none of the smoke into his/her body whatsoever. If anything, judging by the massive cloud he/she was generating, he/she was somehow actually adding to the measurement by volume of the secondhand smoke with his own internally generated particulate. He couldn’t have expelled more of the stuff if he had been on fire, and on in some vicious part of my lizard brain, I wished he was.

“Maybe we can go outside under the umbrellas,” Anja suggested kindly.

I imagined that she wanted to keep us away from the smoker, certain we would create a situation with either our self-righteous North American outrage at flagrant indoor smoking, or the fire extinguisher I had ripped from its sconce on the wall.

She needn’t have worried.

We have had to get reacquaint ourselves with that very much old fashioned kind of bad living. I say old fashioned because I keep walking into buildings and having powerful olfactory déjà vu (I guess could we call it deja pew?) of my life in 1976.

They say that scent is the first of our senses that is formed, and is therefore the most primal. When you smell the perfume of your first girlfriend, there is a powerful firing of dormant neurons and you are flooded with vivid memories of every detail of your first date. Especially that part where you woke up smelling of chloroform, duct taped to an ironing board behind the water heater in a dingy basement wearing granny panties and a ball gag.

I am getting those scent-memories here, and I am back in Chungy’s, as back as when I was there for the first time.

Both of his parents smoked, and we used to go there after school to play cards, read the comics of Hustler mags he had reincarnated from the dump, and punish our ears with Kiss records. We obediently followed the instructions written on the album sticker: PLAY LOUD.

We also sat in a thick haze of cigarette smoke from the moment we entered until we left again, oxygen starved and doped up on hand-me-down nicotine.

Everything he had, all of his clothes, his food, his bed, his hair, probably his blood if I had taken a sample and smelled it, everything smelled like rank, stale smoke. It is that distinctive smell that causes me to have these overwhelming visions of wood paneling when I walk into these smoky buildings. I can feel my toes curling into thick shag through my wet sock feet, sing along with “God Of Thunder.” Die-hard hippies aren’t having as many flashbacks as me, and I’ve never taken acid.

It’s all thanks to the fact that so many Germans still love to smoke, especially if there is food somewhere nearby.

I am not now, nor have I ever been a smoker, so I can’t say for sure, but it appears that the very concept of generous portions of food openly laid out on display for public sale generates in the committed German smoker a powerful urge to enact ruin unto the atmosphere as quickly as possible with the most evil smelling tobacco possible.

In the airport, in the food court of a shopping centre, in an ice cream shop full of vulnerable youngsters who may or may not have asthma (I never asked, but it is entirely possible that they had asthma), in all of these places and more, I have see the enemy and he sucks butts.

Big time.

The ice cream shop in question was of a seemingly common format that serves up what I take to be a very popular treat called “spaghetti eis.” This is ice cream run through a meat grind, resulting in extruded tubules of multi-coloured stuff that could be described as looking vaguely like spaghetti. Of course, there are a variety of toppings, some of which are red and you now understand the gimmick.

It didn’t appeal to my kids at all.

They regarded the menu, and then every successively delivered bowl of spaghetti eis with not so much open suspicion as rank horror.

It didn’t matter that I explained that the name was just a clever marketing ploy and the spaghetti sauce was strawberry, raspberry or chocolate and bananas, because they couldn’t seem to get past the idea of combining spaghetti and ice cream and this disgusted them on a level that surpassed logic.

Whilst everyone else enjoyed a massive pail of spaghetti eis, my children hovered by my side, dipping baby spoons into their sensible shokolade eis that they had requested in a sensible plastic cup (baby size), glancing frequently at the German kids they were supposed to befriend and looking back at me with wide eyes as if to say, “Can you believe these people aren’t vomiting blood?”

Even under the familiar spell of chocolate ice cream, neither of my children could stop themselves from reflexively eyeing the contents of their spoons before every bite, wary of hidden meatballs.

The German kids spent no time observing their treats. Or anything else.

After bolting their enormous buckets of eis, seemingly immune to boulderhead (you do know that that’s what ice cream headaches are called, right?) those German kids leaped up and began careening around the patio like they’d just been given tubs of amphetamine instead of sugared fat.

They almost seemed to be playing tag, but they called it “chase” and even when taking into consideration the added feature of a high pitched soundtrack of mindless squealing, it was impossible for me to see an actual point to the game. Everybody ran everywhere all the time, in random, patternless loops, howling like they were covered in fire ants.

Our postcard cute European town square was transformed into a rabid chimpanzee habitat. And the chimps were on crystal meth.

I stared, slipping into shock as these rabid kids tore the place up, dodging eis-toting senior citizens picking their way to nearby tables, leaping over the café’s furniture like Marines at boot camp.

None of the other customers looked like they were thinking about grumping or complaining. They never even glanced up from their own heavily laden eis tubs.

The mothers sat happily chatting as though they didn’t even know they had kids, as if they couldn’t hear the screaming. As if they could hear each other’s voices over the shrieking cacophony around us.

My children watched their future friends with what I can only imagine was the exact same expression I was wearing.

Even my wife was taken aback.

She turned to Anja,

“Are they allowed to do this?”

Anja paused a moment. “Do what?”

Nisa angled her head towards a child swinging off a flaming chandelier into the abdomen of an old woman, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“That.”

Anja took what appeared to be her first notice of the children flailing around in every direction. “You mean playing in the square? Of course, it’s no problem.”

Nisa nodded thoughtfully.

I ducked flying cobblestones ripped from the road and thought about the children of my homeland.

Kids acting like maniacs in a public place in Canada would be burned alive, but here in the land we have been trained to see as a land of restrained culture, elaborate manners and carefully moderated behaviour, it was A Clockwork Orange.

It took a long while before Meryn and Harrison could be convinced to join in with the others, but they eventually forced themselves to take part in, perhaps more from a sense of anthropological curiosity than anything else.

The language barrier fell aside for a few moments, and whether it was a combination of peer pressure, stark terror at the unhinged anarchy exhibited by their peers, or the sharp whispers I shot at them about hanging on to me when they should be meeting people, I can’t say for sure, but they eventually joined in and were running around red-faced with exertion. My son even asked for another cup of ice cream and my wife, clearly inspired by the example the other mothers had set, let him have it without complaint, and it was supper time!

The next day one of the mothers, an exceptionally kind and friendly woman named Sonja explained to us what she called “the problem with German children”.

“Rabies?” I suggested.

“Verwohnen,” I think she called it. (I might have spelled it wrong and you’ll have to imagine the umlauts over the o, but there it is) and described it thusly, and I am paraphrasing, so bear that in mind:

“Children here are spoiled. They expect that their mothers will be servants to them. They act like they know that they will get whatever they want.”

I nodded as Sonja’s daughter ran up and demanded a drink, the pout dripping from her mouth, perfectly understandable in any language.

Behind her, my daughter watched carefully.

We had told her that she would need to do that, to pay attention to the German kids so that she could learn from them.

We had told her it wouldn’t take her very long because she was such a quick learner. She would fit in with them in no time.

My eyelid twitched as she listened to her new friend. Listened and learned.

It might be a difficult year.

Fun With Translation

One of the most frustrating things about these people is that they persist in, not only speaking German most of the time, but in writing German everywhere. I mean everywhere. They seem to really like it and they will keep at it no matter how much it messes people up.

Here’s a typical example: Imagine an entire newspaper that looks like a real newspaper with pictures and columns and borders and all that, only it’s literally filled with German words. They’re all over the place in the free paper that I get.

It’s outrageous! How can anybody be expected to read a newspaper in this condition?

I am starting to suspect that it’s an elaborate joke being played on me, that I’m the only one getting this crazy, realistic looking newspaper. I think that everybody else around here is getting a readable paper, with real, actual English words that people can read and understand. You know, a paper with words like “gumption” and “calipers” and “marbled” stuff like that.

Every time that crazy German paper comes, I run upstairs from my subterranean lair, snatch it up out of the mail slot and do my double damn best to read it, but every time it’s loaded with the same amount of German.

Interestingly, I have recently begun to notice the repeated usage of certain words and phrases and I’m wondering if they might just be re-using the same articles over and over again and mixing up the word order.

Another place where we see a lot of this German being utilized is in all of the letters and emails sent home from school.

My son’s school here is one of these schools where they are always trying to get the parents involved. They do this in Canada too, only thing that they mostly want you to get involved with back home is giving them money. You will get bake sale, pizza day or silent auction newsletters and then you will drag your family over to the school and buy some squares or watch a talent show. It will be winter and you will be crammed into a tiny gym with hundreds of other families and everything will smell like wet dogs and that elementary school stink.

You will be wearing your coat the whole time you are in the school and sweat will be running in tickling streams down your back and sides, and your feet will be so hot in your boots that they get pins and needles and make you itchy all over.

Then you have to wonder, will you eat the squares or will you remember that twenty nine kids were absent due to bloody diarrhea and you will think about the last person who touched those squares.

Even if you buy them and don’t think about the awesome power of the Norovirus, you will feel that acid pang of disappointment when you find out that it isn’t chocolate in there, it’s date filling.

Again.

Why do they even make date filling? It’s like one of those bugs that looks exactly like a stick, only in reverse. Instead of a juicy, delicious bug looking like an inedible stick, it’s an inedible stick looking like a juicy, delicious bug and then you fly down to eat it and get splinters in your beak.

The kind of newsletter that we get sent home from my son’s school is not like the ones from home. They don’t appear to have the same frequency of talent shows or money grabs.

What they do is send out a schedule for all the stay at home moms to take turns on crossing guard duties (way hotter than it sounds), or they inform you about the weekend biking trip to the Rhine to have a picnic, or what time to show up for the St. Martin’s Night giant bonfire and effigy burning. I think it was an effigy. We weren’t there in time to see what went into the flames. Probably because the time was given in German.

We also receive occasional news about the parents’ council meetings. These are very much unlike the ones from home because they are held in a local bar. Better than a crack house, I guess, but not the kind of meeting you would ever see a school advocating in rural Canada. There, attendees do all their serious drinking alone at home before the parents’ council meeting. Perhaps in the garage.

You might wonder how it is that we know what the newsletters from school say, since they, like the newspaper, are written in this so-called “German.”

Well, I would like to tell you that my wife’s laborious efforts to learn this “language” have already paid off and she just tells me what they say, but I can’t. I guess I could, really. I could write anything here whether it’s true or not. Watch.

After Jessica Alba and I got back from the pool, we found that Scarlett Johansson had eaten all of our eggs and we were unable to make post-workout omelettes.

“Oh, you’re in for it now!” Jessica Alba said, dropping her gym bag and racing after the squealing Scarlett Johansson, whose mouth was full of hard boileds.

Jessica Alba caught Scarlett Johansson in the conservatory, where they fell onto the settee and began to wrestle, giggling like schoolgirls.

They stopped their playful tussling as I entered the room and looked up at me as one.

“We’ve both been bad,” Scarlett said, “naughty, naughty girls.”

Her eyes gleamed as I showed her my open hand.

“You know what that means,” I didn’t even try to hold back my fiendish smile. “Spanky time.”

See? I can tell you anything I like, so I guess the point is that I wouldn’t like to tell you that my wife’s efforts have paid off. Instead I would like to tell you that we use the magic of the Internet to tell us what the school newsletters say.

You maybe don’t know about this site, but you would if you lived here:

Babelfish is our Rosetta Stone.

Just re-type any confusing Germanic newsletters into Babelfish, choose your source and target language, click on “translate,” and watch as the magic of technology turns the arcane letter combinations of German into simple, easily understood English.

Like this letter, which was sent home last week and that, at first, really confused and intimidated me.

Loves parents,

School lives on going through - and, you suspect it surely already, it are again once supporting parents in demand… Mrs. (name excised), the school maintaining shank chairman, asked to step me with you because of the daily of the open door into contact.

Each class should donate three cakes on Saturday, 9 December, for the Cafeteria. Since I assume in our class many bake-joyful families are united, we however only three cakes need, would have I gladly a feedback, who in principle ready is to bake for such opportunities. (there are always according to experience opportunities…).

I will note myself the names and will inquire in each case then at three families. Thus comes jede/r, those/that would like, times and it to become not always the same addressed. Thus please not directly loose-bake. The cakes must be delivered on Saturday tomorrow in the Cafeteria. The cake plate should be marked by a name and the class.

Proceeds of the action probably go - as usual - to the promotion association and the orphan home promoted by the school. Already now thank you and cordial greetings,

(name excised)

It turned out that this letter had a lot of valuable information that I needed to know.

1. The school maintaining shank chairman isn’t getting enough support from home. My son and I have begun working out some of the sashing from the bathroom window with a spoon from the commissary and we should have that sashing completely sharpened by tomorrow. Truly, parently involvement in all shank activities is crucial.
2. Yes! Her assumption is completely true. I can’t believe how bake-joyful our family is united since we’ve come here.
3. I think she’s out of line towards the end of the letter. Her comment about not directly loose-baking is unnecessary. Everybody indirectly tight-bakes all their cakes and to suggest otherwise is just offensive.

You see? I was mixed up, but now I’m not. Going back over this letter again, thanks to the miracle of technology, and seeing all that big scary German turned into good old, easy to understand English makes me feel a lot better about what’s going on over here.

Gee, maybe I’ll even go back and check out that newspaper again.

I am sick and tired of Britney’s crotch.

Being as I live in a far-away land of gingerbread houses, chocolate trees and PVC underpants (the chafe is unbelievable), I am unable to read my valuable world news from the local newspaper.

As a result, I have no idea which relatives are visiting Edna Sloan in Dungannon this weekend or who won Lowest Points in the Euchre tournament. Why yes, I live in a small town. How did you know?

Since I am currently not in that small town, I am forced by circumstances to extract my news and information about the current state of the world from the Internet.

But lately, I haven’t been able to get the kind of news that I want.

Something is blocking the very Internets that bring me my information.

You see, the news I like is big news, headline stuff. I also like science and tech news and I like weird news.

I want to read about wars, crimes, political upheavals and tragedy.

I am interested in medical advances, alternative fuel discoveries and new dinosaur bones.

I actively want to see a Cyclops kitten.

These are my stock-in-trade, the kinds of stories that appeal to me. If a Deputy Sheriff in Montana calls in a Bigfoot sighting, I want to read about it. Especially if there’s grainy, shaky video of an indistinct blob crouching behind some bushes.

Lately, I haven’t been able to get as much of my news. Something has been blocking my news, bunging up the Internet like a busted stump in a little creek.

It’s Britney’s crotch.

I just can’t understand why Britney’s crotch is so popular.

Anybody’s first response to this is to blurt out that it’s obvious, that it’s clearly some kind of sexual appeal, but that simply cannot be the case.

I think I speak for millions of discriminating men the world over who would agree that “Britney’s Crotch” sounds more like a virulent fungal STD than anything else. As in, “my buddy got rotated out of Iraq on a medical. He had the meanest case of Britney’s Crotch the doctors had ever seen,” or, “They just don’t make ointment strong enough for Britney’s Crotch.”

Thinking back, I can remember that it wasn’t always like this.

She used to be more appealing.

I’m not going to say that she wasn’t cute back when she was being dangled out there on the creepy borderline between illegal and hot, and she bit into it like a pro. Britney hit all the right target markets: teener girls, lusting boys and middle-aged Japanese businessmen.

But then, one look at a picture of Kevin Federline was all it took for me to realize that Britney was not what we thought she was. She couldn’t be. Not with that thing hanging off her neck.

She went off the rails, allowed herself to be exposed in every conceivable form of media as a gin-swilling dirtbag who got knocked up by a skeevy cokehead. Not a very original story.

And it doesn’t matter if it that was what really happened or not, that was how it got played, and she let it happen, even contributed to it with a terrifying reality show on cable. She had become, at least functionally, Anna-Nicole Smith minus twenty pounds of silicon.

I thought it was all over for Britney, that she had hit rock bottom.

I was wrong.

Getting rid of Federline (albeit years too late) was a brilliant career move and she capitalized perfectly (at first) with freshly dyed hair and well ironed clothes on a late night talk show. If she had kept that goodwill going, if she had stayed on the high road obviously laid out by wisely hired PR flacks, she would have been able to land that long term Vegas contract and lip synched her way into comfortable millions.

But no.

Now we get to watch her burn it all down again as Britney attaches herself to one of those very few people in the public eye that could be described as even skeevier than Federline:

Paris Hilton.

Thanks to Paris, we can watch Britney freeballing her way out of limousines, running commando behind America’s dirtiest export to the entertainment world as they stagger in and out of clubs, and I can’t log into Wordpress to post a new blog without facing headlines about it.

In response, I have my own headline about it, my own big question about this whole issue, and it’s a lot more important than considering any pathetic morality with regard to privacy, nudity, celebrity and the confluence of all three.

My question is much more logical, much more important.

 

What about my crotch?

That’s the real issue here.

What about my crotch?

What about your crotch?

What about all those crotches out there getting no press, no candid shots on celebrity gossip blogs, no public attention whatsoever?

What about them?

Those are the real victims in this tragedy.

The untold masses of unknown crotches, ignored, undervalued, overworked and underpaid, all hiding in the shadows while Britney’s crotch gets all the love.

It’s time that we stood up for the little crotch, banded together and let all those celebrity crotches know how we feel about them.

Who’s with me!