There’s the route I like and there’s the route I take.
He said he started studying shiatsu. He is a twenty-eight year old Australian punk guitarist.
Deliberately annoyed but unaware of my own bigotry, I ask him as a half-joke why all white men are so obsessed with China.
He says it’s not about China it’s about touch.
Letter of request for compensation to the Deutsche Bahn
Dear DB,
Let’s start with the positive. I love your trains. I love the white outside and blue inside, I love how much cleaner the toilets are in comparison with French and Dutch trains. It’s nice. I like to splurge on a Curry Wurst and beer in the dining car. I like that it’s available to me. I like the uniform of your employees, again, great color combo. Direct, elegant.
Dear DB, my partner and I live in two different countries and are therefore very much dependent on your trains and your service. He lives in Frankfurt, where he studies Art at the prestigious Städelschule. I also study Art in Amsterdam, in the less prestigious, but maybe a bit more fun Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He does video animation, I write. We go back and forth.
In the last month only, whenever we purchased a ticket from your company, our train got cancelled. That’s four times in a row. On one occasion, I was two hours late for his show and got five euros in compensation.
But how can one indemnify FOMO? This is the object of my letter.
Obviously, from a statistical point of view, it is normal. We book a lot of trains, so the probability of them being late or cancelled is greater. I understand that. But it seems to me that what we’ve experienced over the last few weeks goes beyond any statistical estimation, and is perhaps a « glitch ». Not a real one but maybe a karmic one or something.
My boyfriend, in good German fashion, downloaded BahnBonus. It’s nice. We get free little vouchers and sometimes another five euro discount or a free drink.
I, on the other hand, am not satisfied with BahnBonus. I needed to express my frustration, which goes beyond the simple discomfort of a delayed train, by writing you this letter. I am hoping for adequate compensation.
You see, when a train is canceled, the awaited get-together is not just postponed but displaced. It mutates. Sometimes it mutates into violence, frustration, jealousy.
To the person reading this. If you have a spouse, or a partner, and if the train to meet them would always be cancelled or late, not only would you begin to resent the train, and the people responsible for the cancellation or delay, but above all you would begin – and here’s the worrying part – to consider the train as a third party to your relationship.
Truly, your trains, dear DB, have become a third person in our relationship. The one who unites us, the one who isolates us.
We often daydream, my partner and I, about a speculative, cosmic future, where we can choose whether or not to have threesomes with trains.
Thank you for your attention on this matter, I hope to hear back from you.
Sincerely,
Ballad 1
Stress at the time of encoding may affect and impair your memory at a later time.
He believes nothing will get in the way of his DJ career
And that’s when the second part comes in,
Storage
Storage can be spelled in several different ways
Woke up craving clafoutis.
Do you ever have that thing where you can project yourself, like picture what food you’d crave when pregnant. Usually it’s cause you crave it right now, don’t know why I’m making up this whole pregnant thing as an excuse. I made the clafoutis like the second-generation immigrant that I am, without a genealogical idea of its taste, following a recipe I had found on Reddit.
Last week I went to my favorite Chinese restaurant. I was sitting alone. They placed me in the back. Outrage for a second before relief because I remember that I don’t really qualify as someone who eats alone at a restaurant without feeling a whiff of shame.
The restaurant is carpeted with casino-worthy red rosaces and less casino-worthy middle-aged Dutch gay men. There is only one heterosexual couple, and me. Try saying middle-aged Dutch gay men three times in a row.
I spill my glass of water within five minutes of sitting down. When will it ever disappear the sacrificial reflex of soaking the unique paper napkin you’re given. Water is streaming down on the leather seats, I ask the waitress for another one. I use one that I fold on the edge of the table, I use the other to blow my nose. The waitress sees me, and she raises her eyebrows, because, and that’s my hypothesis, I’m not the worst kind of customer, but I’m definitely the kind that makes her hate her job the most, the kind that’s the hardest to bitch about, I’m the messy kind.
Das Haus
Don’t get me wrong it’s not a shitty house. It’s a nice house. With nice furniture and decoration magazines and an island in the kitchen. In the house lives a man. It’s not a bad man, it’s a man with decent oral hygiene and a race car. I told you I know men like him. This one lives in the house. There are long-haired carpets and an expensive-looking sofa. You know what it means an expensive looking sofa? I think you do. He uses orange envelopes as coasters. His girlfriend lives an hour away. He drives his silver Porsche to go see her. It’s not the destination it’s the journey.
The man wears an Issey Miyake after shave and a Porsche perfume. The Porsche perfume does not smell like the car. I thought in life it’s always either you own a Porsche or you own a Porsche perfume.
On the windowsill I go closer. The magazines there are fading. Some things fade grey some things fade yellow these magazines fade blue. The one on the top is Elle Decoration trends of 2010. He comes closer on the couch and says that is when my wife left. I know. I know. She took the car not the Porsche the other one. She woke up the son and asked the twelve year old where do you want to go and by miracle for the both of them the visionary twelve year old said Berlin, when, in a state of shock, any of us could have said Villingen-Schweningen or I don’t know what else.
The house has a beautiful view. There’s the ground floor with the magazines and the expensive sofa and the envelopes and the kitchen island. There’s a first floor which you can access through the fake marble spiral staircase. On the first floor to the left is the child’s room and the bathroom. The bathroom’s velux leaks into the bathtub. Luckily a bowl has been placed. There’s a basement as well. The man used to rent the apartment in the basement to guests but doesn’t anymore. Once he rented it to a Russian woman and her son and after a week the Russian husband came and shot both in the head. There’s also a sauna. It’s a nice sauna, you can lie on a long chair afterwards and read a F1 magazine under or over a Porsche beach towel. The man hung several framed posters on the walls. They’re quite cheap-looking colorized versions of black and white pictures of Glenn Gould looking real good leaned against a brick wall. The man seems to really like Woody Allen and Glenn Gould. When you go down to the sauna, don’t forget the foot bath. I built it myself, he says.
Ten headless chickens
The first time I went there it was on You Tube. Somewhere in 2010 American tourists made a house tour with a low quality camcorder. It’s a stone house with three buildings, the main house for them and two smaller ones for the guests, a garden, a cabanon for the gardener, and a swimming pool. There is a French word for that kind of house, and they use it to call the house by its last name, Mas Dagan. He grew up there and went to kindergarten in the closest neighboring city, and yet the German accent that has fled most English words (with some exceptions : peepple, probblem, kompletely…) curelessly colonized the childhood house to the new, Franco-german toponym, « Mass Daganne ».
His father lives here during the summer, and goes back to his German house, near Villingen-Schwenningen for the winter. He is a pianist. He drinks cacao in the morning, which is a tall glass of hot chocolate with a pink cardboard straw in it. During the day he listens to vinyls and plays the piano. He leaves the house to go buy vinyls at the Fnac in Avignon-Nord, or if he hears about a garage sale in the area, where he suspects to find more vinyls. He likes Sibelius, Miles Davis, Julie London, Schubert. I find a record of the Winterreise sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the shelf, and I ask Dieter, can we listen to this. He is pleased and upset and shrieks aber Nour Winterreise hören in der Provence!
And as in a film or a novel where the protagonist’s patronym anticipates his character before we as a spectator or reader get to know him, I got to know Dieter before meeting him, through his last name, Hörr.
His girlfriend Sabine is far less interesting. She drives an anchor-grey Volkswagen van that I call das Autobus and it doesn’t make her laugh. She cooked for us on the first day. She says she always makes tabouleh when she has guests in Germany, but today she made a parmigiana with eggs she brought from Baden-Württenberg. She says she went back there for a garden emergency. She is a working florist. Most tables in the mas are covered of small bowls half filled with pink roses floating on top.
She often wears long tie and dye black dresses that simultaneously hide and flatter her undeniable breast implants. She has bleached ashy blond hair that manages to be sensual when she puts it up in a « messy bun ». She is a thorough cleaner, and sometimes hands Dieter a rake to gather leaves in the garden.
I ask if they ever go to Marseille and Dieter promptly replies that he doesn’t really like Marseille, because of all the cloaked Arabs and their barbaric methods. He says once he was in the center, probably rue d’Aubagne, and he saw something that frightened him away from Marseille. There was all these Araber in their long cloaks threateningly standing in front of ten headless chickens.