your praises are better than nicotine. if i ever feel a dire need to quit
I’ll just ask you to send me a haiku whenever I want a cigarette

Singularity
Running from the painted cave
To shellac the soul

Tea reminds us of
Bitter sacrifice. And how
Grass is more humble
More than we will ever be
Ah, the taste of memories!

Art thou that thou art?
Maybe thou art that art thou.
You, synthesize me.

func(identity)
global values don’t exist
know thyself through me

OK, the second example is really a tanka, but that’s awesome. Does seem a little like bringing a gun to a knife fight, though.

I recently learned that one of my role models, upon waking, every single day—or so he claims—writes a sonnet. And these sonnets are often pure gold, from what I’ve read. So maybe I’ll make a habit out of fighting in haiku.

I’ll wake in sonnets, dream in ghazals, hunger in villanelle.

Naturally this list is quite skewed toward compliments that would work best if given to a personality similar to my own. Duh. That’s what makes a good compliment.

I’d love to hear how anyone else’s might differ.

1. You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.
2. Your mother must be a fine woman.
3. Maybe I don’t believe in you—but only because I know I don’t have to, and I can spend that energy elsewhere.
4. You always break even. If I believed in God, I would stop, because you always break even.
5. I curse that typo. Everything else, I want to embroider and pass down to my children.

A work in progress, I should like to think.

My favorite event of the day, though, was that an artist for the game had a table set up along the side of the rather sizable hall in which everyone was playing. In between games, I wandered over there, steeling myself to avoid eye contact with a starving artist, whose art couldn’t be at all impressive, and whose personality would more than likely be tantamount to Incremental Blight.

I was awed by what I saw.

Artwork for the Deft Duelist card

He had prints of the artwork for many different cards laid out, beside the originals he’d created.

Artwork for the Obelisk of Bant card

I was quite happy to meet the guy, and asked the politest questions I could without resorting to small talk, wanting to know more about how the industry functioned, but never press him to admit where he actually stood in it.

What I quickly noticed, however, was that he signed all his works “D. Palumbo.” I found this a cute coincidence, being vaguely familiar with the work of one Dr. Don Palumbo, namely his Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, Herbert’s Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction. After brief deliberation as to whether I should bother to mention the similarity, I decided that I would, as he was clearly a geek, and therefore likely to appreciate a science fictiony association with his name, obnoxiously obscure though the reference may be.

The artist Dave. Palumbo is Don Palumbo’s son. He says he has never in all his life had someone recognize him because of his father. He said he didn’t think anyone had even read his father’s book, and guessed his father felt the same.

I owe this chance recognition to professor Dr. Don Riggs, with whom I’ve taken many science fiction literature courses, and who is a good friend of Dr. Don Palumbo. So good, in fact, that Dr. Riggs posed for a tarot card which Dave illustrated:

Artwork for The Hermit tarot card

If that isn’t Dr. Riggs in the truest sense, I’ll eat my hat.

So, please, do yourself the favor of checking out Dave Palumbo’s site and browsing his works. I happily purchased a print of the art for the Deft Duelist, and he was happy to autograph it for me.

The fact that art of this caliber still exists is a monumental reassurance to me that, as I’ve long suspected, everything is indeed OK in the world. The fact that I came across it in natural pursuit of two loves, science fiction and Magic, tells me that I’ll be happy all my days.

Without even an acoustic, I almost went mad, so bereft shredding was I.

Now I’m back in the States in a small apartment, and I’ve so far only brought an acoustic guitar with me. It’s not at all how I envisioned my homecoming, which was way more like the duel from Crossroads.

Not having guitars doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about them, though. In fact, quite the opposite: I’ve been chatting with metal friends constantly about jamming, and an interesting fellow I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know via the wonders of the internet recently proposed that we work on a musical collaboration. He lives in Greece, but will be moving to Sweden in a few months, at which point I’m sure I’ll lose him to the babes and shredding for which that nation is so rightly famous. So I’d best make the most of it now!

Check out Hermes’s piece called “Time Dissection” available on the MySpace for his project Mandrache. He describes the music as “Metal / Minimalist / Progressive.” I like.

During our conversations today, we started talking about stagnation as a result of too much opportunity. My deprivation period, if you will, in Germany, has very much motivated me to write again, something I’ve always wanted to do but never really bothered with. I had to starve myself to make myself hungry, essentially. We talked about how hardcore sucks, and about experimenting with different tunings, just for the sake of making everything fresh again. After all, Mikael did it.

So today I scooped up my acoustic, tuned it to open D minor, and tried to find chord shapes. Here’s what I came up with, three layers of improvisation.

[audio:opendmjam.mp3]

My favorite part? At the end you can hear police sirens in the background, even though the windows of my apartment were shut when I recorded it. Ahh, Philadelphia. It’s good to be back!

Personally I’m not at all impressed with what came out during this improvisation, but the experience of playing was wonderful for me. I’ve always had a disease where I see music instead of hear it, which means that when I get a great riff idea, I usually experience it visually as a geometric pattern on the fretboard. Everything is shapes, not tone colors at all.

Playing in a new tuning, however, none of the shapes I knew and was familiar with made sense. For the first time since I can remember, I had to play based on how the chords sounded rather than how they felt in my hand. Groping my way awkwardly through oblique motion, I had to piece together melodic sense and rediscover tonality. It took about 40 seconds. I will never forget it.

The intervals between the higher strings, however, where the melody is played, were no different than standard tuning. Thus that melody was plodding and piecemeal, because I wasn’t trying anything new.

I am going to do more of this in the future.

A quick note about the title of this post: Hermes mentioned to me that in the outro to his “Time Dissection” (starts at 5:19, voiced by piano), he bases his phrasing on the Fibonacci sequence. Hopelessly nerdy, no? That’s why I love the guy. He also told me that Tool did something similar in Lateralus, which was completely believable to me, but certainly something I didn’t know. Unfortunately, I believe the guitarist from Tool used drop-D throughout that CD, and not open D or open D minor. So it’s not the best title. But it had a nice story to go along with it!

Update:

It should be noted that I was inspired to try this new tuning by my wonderful friend Sascha, whom I sorely miss. I was tired when I wrote this and never properly credited him for his influence in this. Wasn’t sure how to phrase it, then got distracted by tangents in my writing.

I miss you, man.

Today I had to head to campus for classes and meetings with various faculty and administrators. I received a new parcel of research work from my mentoring prof and discussed my upcoming trip to Taiwan with the coordinator of the program I’ll be taking part in there.

This evening I haven’t done much of anything productive. I sorted through some pictures of travels during the last few weeks I was in Europe, but nothing’s uploaded yet.

I miss my old life. But I guess that’s par for the course.

I likely will not post again for several days.

On Saturday I will be in Munich with friends, drinking myself out of sadness and staying up all night to catch my plane back to the States Sunday morning.

I don’t know what about my life here I’ll miss most, but I have a feeling I’m about to find out.

Until whenever.

First I had to read my feeds. Since I was gone all weekend, this was quite a lot of reading, all utterly inconsequential to my existence. I speak of lolcats and BBC News alike.

Then some friends who have guests from abroad wanted to go to Hofbräuhaus, which I absolutely was not in the mood for. After declining, I reconsidered, reasoning that I only have another week or two left in this country, and I should be spending every conceivable moment of consciousness with my bros. Picture sorting can wait, no?

But instead of beerhall ribaldry, a cake was baked, so the evening was spent unwinding in the kitchen. My metal friend Sascha dropped by, after hearing my persistent cackling from the balcony beneath his room, and we started talking. Opened a few beers. Kept talking. We drank all the beer we could find, so moseyed upstairs quick to scout for more.

We brought a guitar back, and had another beer together. It grew late, and the kitchen gradually disgorged its occupants, leaving Sascha and me out on the balcony, thumbing chords and mumbling about oblique motion.

We played songs to each other long into the night. The guy knows Omerta like the back of his hand, although he doesn’t like the range of the vocalist—which is actually quite comfortable for me. He can play Road Trippin’ immaculately. (His technique on acoustic guitar is far beyond what I can hope to achieve in even the next six months.) We of course played many renditions of Fiddler On The Green, which neither of us can sing, even after tuning down the halfstep that the song demands.

Windows all across the courtyard slammed shut as we sang into the night, and clanked bottles together, and laughed. After several hours, the guitar was set down, and we began to talk faster, yet more slowly. “What are you five favorite things?” I asked. Then he asked me. We argued about whether civilization is fighting against, serving, or merely operating within the grand structure of, biological evolution. We disagreed about the voicing of the G chord in the bridge to Omerta, and whether there’s a resolution for the minor second during that calculatedly laidback solo. Tits or ass? C++ or Java? Clapton or Iommi?

All the same shit as any night, but tonight with someone I deeply, truly respect. I’m not yet tired, but I really should get to bed.

The wisest person I’ve ever personally known, an ex-girlfriend named Julia, used to tell me that I am a “people pleaser.” I concern myself far too much with the happiness of others about whom I care little, and this can interfere with the happiness of those whom I love, perhaps myself included.

The slamming of those windows tonight was the heaviest riff I’ve ever heard. The windows that opened and stayed open were like the smile that creeps across one’s face while listening to the opening chords of Road Trippin’.

Baudolino answered: “Concern with pleasing humans causes the loss of all spiritual growth.”

Is it then too much to wish that the entire world sleeps tonight as smoothly and thickly as I already do?

We have a little saying around these parts. It started among the Americans, actually, but it’s since spread to the Germans. The saying is, as you can guess, “six Maßes later.”

If you don’t know what a Maß is, here’s a little help.

The Maß (“measure”) is an old Austro-Bavarian unit of volume, now typically used for measuring beer. Originally it measured 1.069 litres, equivalent to 2.259 US pints, or 1.881 UK pints. Nowadays, a Maß is defined as exactly 1 litre.

OK, so now we’re clear on that much, I hope.

This little ditty of a saying cropped up around the time of Oktoberfest, and has remained in the vernacular due to our would-be-alcoholic-in-any-part-of-the-world-except-Bavaria lifestyle. “Six Maßes later” pretty much means “fucked up beyond all belief,” that the world is in a completely different state, and the laws of the universe now longer necessarily hold true.

If you’ve somehow made a grave mistake, you can invoke this face-saving adage and all is well. I’ve relied upon it several times myself.

Theory in practice

As can be expected, there are some epic tales associated with this expression.

Tale the First: Craig astray

There was a night a while back, let’s say a Friday, when we decided to go drinking. Because a Maß at any beer hall will usually run you about €7, the standard protocol has become to buy a case at a beer store and pregame with that. (A case will be €15-20, for 10L. Hella cheaper.)

We had pregamed. Then, since there were a bunch of visitors in town that weekend, we decided it was an appropriate night for Hofbräuhaus. More Maßes were consumed, and although I didn’t make it to six myself, good ol’ Craig did.

Craig is a rugby player. Big guy. We didn’t realize how drunk he was until he tried to tell us a story on the tram on the way to Hofbräuhaus. Then, once there, he dumped in two more, and that made for six.

As we were all sitting around the table, laughing stupidly, clomping our glasses around and punching one another if any spilled, someone noticed that Craig was missing. We checked the bathrooms and everything, but he was nowhere to be found. We concluded that he’d had enough and had decided to go home, which was reasonable. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon on the following day that we heard the true story.

Poor, muscular, wasted Craig did indeed decide it was time to go home. He was able, even six Maßes later, to compute that in order to get home, he had to take public transportation. Unfortunately he selected the subway instead of the tram, which didn’t make a lot of sense for where we were in the city. He even got on the wrong subway line, one that didn’t lead in the direction of home at all.

As he explained to us, his reasoning went like this: He noticed that the stops on the subway weren’t ones he wanted. So he decided to stick it out until the train went somewhere he needed to be. This wasn’t such a good idea. He ends up at the end of the line, somewhere in south Munich, and has to get off. He starts walking around that area of town, looking for something he recognizes. Craig wasn’t wearing a coat, and as this happened in February, he gradually (once again, Craig is a big guy) grew cold. He decided to start jogging in order to keep warm.

While jogging, he of course covered ground more quickly. This only led to exasperation, as he realized that he had no idea where the hell he was, and couldn’t find a way back home. So he began to run. (See what I mean? This decision doesn’t make too much sense without the six Maßes.) He was drunk, so ended up slipping on wet cobblestone, fell hard, and cut up his hand.

He was still freezing at this point, and now a little sore, so he went up to an apartment building and pressed every single button until someone buzzed him in. He lumbered into the lobby and slept underneath the stairs there.

When he woke up, he was sober enough to find his way back home and relate his adventures to us.

Tale the Second: Conor goes whoomp

OK, so this one time I got utterly plastered and kinda sorta fell asleep in a weird section of a bar and woke up way past closing time and the bar was locked so I couldn’t leave so I just kinda went back to sleep and then when the owner came in at 6am to open up I scared the hell out of him and asked if I could go and he said yeah so I left.

I didn’t think anyone would believe this story so I took a picture of myself shortly after coming to.

Let us never speak of this again.

There is no escape

The motivation to write this post was last night’s shift at the pizza place. The shop owner is a great guy, OK? Just awesome. I really enjoy working for him, because he’s a total bro.

Last night my shift started at 6pm. When I got there, he seemed happy. He seemed like three Maßes worth of happy, and that’s exactly what he was. He called me over to the part of the kitchen where he prepares the pizzas, and he lifts up a tin foil container that had been resting on something. He wanted to show me the six empty beer bottles he’d been concealing.

Everyone in the kitchen knew Ben was buzzed, so we started egging him on. I told my story about the phrase “six Maßes later,” and after much disbelief (“You fucking American, you probably didn’t even taste beer until you were 14, and you’re telling us you can drink six Maßes?”), it was unanimously agreed that Ben had to go for 12 beers. (Bottles are 0.5L.)

Well, let it be known that before closing time, Ben made it to six. And he was gone. The deadline for employee orders is 10:30pm, a half hour before the shop is closed down, so I made sure to ask him to make me a pizza around that time. I had to repeat my order several times, even though it was the same pizza I order every freaking night (Odin Pizza). He said he would try.

I got stuck doing the last run, and when I was back at 11:15pm, the guys in the kitchen were dying with laughter, and asked me to try my pizza. That gustatory-archaeological expedition yielded the following pizza makeup, from bottom layer to top: dough, tomato sauce, cheese, potatoes au gratin, peanut butter, bacon, red onions, broccoli, and peppers.

And you know what? It was fucking great.

Only in Bavaria can one hope to see their boss six liters deep, tripping over invisible things, yet still pressing onward with work. God I love this place.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/10/six-mases-later/feed/ 6 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/08/finally-someone-who-gets-anthropology/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/08/finally-someone-who-gets-anthropology/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 22:57:31 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=545 At work tonight (how many entries can I possibly start with that line? I need a new intro!), there wasn’t much going on. I grabbed a pint of Cappuccino-and-Caramel-and-awesome Häagen-Dazs, which is super marked down because nobody buys it, pulled up a couple cases of beer to sit on, and chilled out.

Since there weren’t any orders coming in, no one in the whole place had anything to do. The boss had just left, and so things got crazy. Long story short, one of the cooks, who’s skinnier than I am, perched up on the metal counter, hands curled underneath his armpits, and squawked as loudly as he could. One of the drivers then picked him up and attempted to place him in a trash can.

But I am telling this story because the subject of “the American” came up, and the guys started grilling me about all the things they didn’t know. No one had ever asked me what I studied.

I said,

“Well, in America, mostly anthropology. Here in Germany, it’s pretty much just been computer science.”

That’s the standard answer for when I’m asked, which is rather often. What I received in return, however, was an absolutely epic answer.

“Anthropology… you mean, like, Stargate?”

I was floored. Yes. Yes, anthropology is exactly freaking like that. Well, I wish it were, anyway. But, I mean, he got the idea right!

I will never forget this conversation, and I hope you don’t, either.

This has been a very regular occurrence since I got to Germany. It’s legal for the cops to just frisk anyone on the street, for any reason, and I get that treatment a lot. If I’m meeting friends some place, they’ll often give me 20 minutes beyond the scheduled meeting time, because chances are, I’m going to get controlled somewhere along the way.

What happened yesterday was that I was on the tram, in the rearmost car, and I decided I was going to get off. Typical protocol is that everyone outside the tram waits for people to get off, then they pile in. I was at the back of the line to exit, and since it was a heavily trafficked stop (Munich Central Station), there was a risk the tram was going to start moving again, and I’d be stuck having to walk a stop back.

As I reach the door to exit, two police officers are trying to get onto the train. I figure whatever they have to do is somewhat important, so I want to make sure they get on before the doors close and seal everybody in. They were rudely getting on side-by-side, as well, meaning I couldn’t walk out next to them. I hestitate and motion them inwards, they don’t respond, so I move to get out, and then they try again to come on, together, blocking my exit.

The conversation went like this:

Me: “Are you getting on or not?”
Cop #1, with one foot on the tram: “Maybe. Would it be a problem if I did?”
Me: “What? Look, I was just waiting on you. Whatever.”

Then I shouldered by them, as I had maybe a second or two left before the doors locked me in, and they followed me back off the tram, Cop #1 already donning leather frisking gloves.

I heave a big sigh and roll my eyes.

Cop #1: “Identification, please. Are you carrying any illegal substances, such as drugs or weapons, on your person or in your bag?
Me: “Of course not. I think I might have a pretzel in my backpack, but that’s the worst you’re going to find.”
Cop #2: “Identification, please.”

I hand over my Pennsylvania driver’s license and begin emptying my pockets. (I definitely know the drill by now. It’s illegal for them to reach into my pockets, so I have to empty them myself and then turn them inside out, otherwise they have probable cause to take me down to the station.)

Cop #1: “Start with the front pockets, please. Everything out.”
Cop #2: “Identification, please.”
Me: “Are you really going to keep asking me?”
Cop #2: “This isn’t identification. This is a driver’s license.”
Me: “That’s government issued. It counts as ID.”
Cop #1: “No, all it does is prove that you can drive a car. We need identification.”
Me: “In America, you have to provide a social security number to receive a driver’s license. It’s used as ID. Very few Americans have a passport.”
Cop #1: “Did you use this driver’s license at the airport when you came to Germany?”
Me: “No, of course not. I used my passport. I don’t carry that with me because it’s too valuable.”
Cop #2: “You have to carry your passport with you at all times.”
Me: “No, I don’t. I have to carry ID. That’s ID.”
Cop #1: “Next pocket, please. Turn that one all the way inside-out.”
Cop #2: “So you’re not registered as living here, are you?”
Me: “Of course I am. I’ve lived here since September.”
Cop #2: “Under what name are you registered with the city?”
Me: [bored stare]
Cop #2: [looks at driver's license] “Where is your passport?”
Me: “Back at my place. I keep it there so it’s safe. Like, for example, if I go drinking or something. I don’t want to lose it. [I know that sounds like stiff, awkward English, but that's exactly what my German sounded like]

The frisking process was especially laborious because I’d just come from doing a tour. I had about ten thousand sets of keys for all the bike locks, I had tools like wrenches and multitools, a mini tire pump, and a large amount of cash in crumpled bills, which I had collected as payment and needed to get to my boss.

When Cop #1 began to search my backpack, she did indeed find half a massive pretzel I’d stuffed in there while drinking at the Chinese Tower with the tour group. (I couldn’t finish it because I’d been drinking heavily the night before and hadn’t gotten my appetite back.)

The best part was when she had me empty my cargo pockets, which is where all the tools were, and asked me to turn those inside out. Have you ever tried to turn cargo pockets on shorts inside out? It doesn’t really work. I kind of just rolled my shorts up, towards the inside, so it looked like I had been really hungover that morning and decided knickers were a good idea, but couldn’t quite nail the execution.

These poor officers did not want to give up. They were sure I had something. I’d gotten off the train at a weird time. I’d acted deferentially to them instead of ignoring them, which was suspicious. I had a death metal t-shirt on, and my hair down. I had a very bizarre looking backpack.

They eventually did give up. I got my pretzel back, but I still haven’t eaten it.

I know I’ve mentioned this doppelganger thing before, but i thought this bore repeating. It really is kind of odd.

A friend, Matt, has a little brother visiting at the moment, and the little bro arrived in Munich while Matt was still traveling over break. I—among others—made sure to treat the little bro right, and got him right drunk. The next morning, he was describing to Matt the hospitality of a certain lanky fellow with long hair and glasses, and who’s funny as hell. Matt said, “But wait, I thought Alex was working last night.”

Upon hearing this story, I considered terminating my friendship with Matt, but then realized that one of the listed qualities was not “ravishingly handsome,” so it’s understandable that he thought of Alex first.

Yes, I realize that as doppelgangers, people perceive us as pretty much identical. But give me a break here, we’re freaking gorgeous, and I’m funny as hell.

The date of the feast is occasionally moved by church authorities when March 17 falls during Holy Week; this happened in 1940 when Saint Patrick’s Day was observed on 3 April in order to avoid it coinciding with Palm Sunday, and is happening again in 2008, being observed on 15 March. March 17 will not fall during Holy Week again until 2160.

What the hell do I know? Munich is a weird place, and apparently the German-Irish here don’t give much of a damn about Palm Sunday, because St. Patty’s Day here happened on Sunday, March 16. So it goes.

I myself was working most of the evening, and didn’t end up getting home till around 11:30pm. I checked my phone and had some missed calls from friends out drinking, but since I’m a little strapped for cash at the moment, I figured screw it. But then I read a text from a Scotsman I’d met on Saturday, and borrow a friend’s phone to call him and check up on him.

I learn that Monk, as his friends call him, is of course completely wasted and got separated from all his bros at the Hofbräuhaus. He didn’t know where anyone was, but had made it back to his hostel, which has a bar on the ground floor. He was, in typical Celtic fashion, drowning his sorrow with strong beer. Seeing as this was his last night in Munich, I couldn’t leave him hanging like that. Cue Team America.

I rally Jesse and Alex to come out with me for just a single beer, just to bid farewell to Monk. I really hit it off with Monk on Saturday, when I met him while I was working, and I know figured he’d really get a kick out of our coming out to treat him to a round.

Things did not go as planned, however. It turns out Monk was so grateful that we came, he bought us all a round. And then another. All the way to five. Apparently the pound sterling is doing damn fine against the already rather spunky euro, and to Monk it was like buying candy—in more ways than one, I suppose. By about the fourth round or so, a few of his band of Scots come stumbling back to the hostel, and drinks are once again liberally distributed.

So Jesse, Alex, and I ended up limping back through the doorway to our own place at 6am. I had to be up at 9am to head to work today. To Scots!

For the record, that’s Jesse on the left.

Now, that’s all well and good, but the thing that really amazed me about this St. Patty’s Day was the augur I saw in the sky, after hearing that I had off work due to heavy rainfall. Behold.

Is that not the most gorgeous freaking rainbow you’ve ever seen? That sucker appeared and remained vibrant for about 20 minutes, I’m sure long enough for someone to snag the pot of gold or keg or Guinness or whatever the hell lives at the end of a rainbow.

I’ll be completely honest and say that I spent the rest of the day in a state of extreme anxiety, half-expecting to hear the Gjallerhorn ring out across Munich. I didn’t hear it, though.

I didn’t go, as on the return trip I was laden with spoils of fruit and grain, and had to bear ever onward to stash the bounty at home. But I did look them up on the information superhighway, and it appears that the Munich chapter of GUUG meets every second Monday of the month. Looks like I have plans for April already.

The German Unix User Group is a non-profit organization for professional computer users using any kind of Unix system.

Unix, in this case, includes the free Unix variants like Linux and the BSDs as well as commercial Unix systems. The important factors for us are openness of the systems, adherence to standards, and the chance to take a look behind the scenes.

Funny that this has me way more excited than a date with a pretty girl, but there you have it.

The Telegraph has an interesting, if utterly predictable, article up about this peculiar gentlemen.

“If the suit is too small, larger male crocs may see me as an aggressor and attack me. But if too big, I may scare off smaller crocs. So I want to look like an average sized croc – about four metres long.”

Barr then crawled on all fours towards the den, while enduring scorchingly high temperatures of up 60°C, the threat of being rumbled by the crocs and also the danger of attack by a family of neighbouring hippos.

On his lonely, exposed route to the river, Barr’s weird appearance attracted the curiosity of a herd of hippos.

“This may be just too dangerous,” he says as a hippo and her calf take an interest in him – but they turn away.

“That could have been a very hairy situation,” he says. “And that was before I’d even seen a croc.”

Oh, look at that! The man is batshit insane. If you ask me, designing a “croc-suit” should be grounds for having your PhD taken away.

To Dr. Barr I send my most steadfast salutation: “I wish you no hippos, and crocodiles of the number and dimensions you specify.”

For example, if she had been visiting her father in the hospital, how could he have presented her with his life savings on the spot? Had he been keeping it under the mattress of his hospital bed? It’s also so dramatic as to be unbelievable that he delivered his final words of “Then I can die” and did in fact die promptly thereafter.

At the same time, there were inaccuracies and embellishments in my version of her story, too, which I didn’t design to explain because I thought them too tangential to the overall arch of the narrative. I translated my awkward German into confident, clear English. I left out the numerous times I asked her for clarification, the frequency of which would have led the reader to understand why I did not seek more complete information over the blindness and death of the woman’s husband. I rendered her voice in educated, intelligible American English, rather than a thick Southern accent which might better have conveyed her Bavarian dialect.

I do not believe that these modifications to the story altered its original intent. While it was necessary to repackage it in form in order to post here (in English, for example), I did not have to change the content of any of part of the story. Perhaps this is how the old woman felt when telling me all this: a few superficial elements here and there might need to be modified, but the overall feel and purpose of the tale remain intact.

I think the most troublesome question I have even now about the story is whether she married the man she did because she knew he wouldn’t have to go fight in the war.

But does any of this matter at all?

I think that truth in historical accounts is rather inconsequential, for the same reasons it is inconsequential in faith. While the adage “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” calls for scrutiny of histories in order to afford informed prudence in future generations, and thus for a solid appreciation of what actually did take place at certain junctures in the past, it is easily just as beneficial for one to listen to the synthesis of experience in the form of advice and storytelling. It is indeed rather presumptuous to suppose that more can be learned from analyzing historical events oneself rather than deferring to the opinions and intimations of those who actually experienced them.

Toward this end, I ask you to take my tale of the old lady in the courtyard for what it is, despite its possible shortcomings and curious logical lacunae. Please understand I’ve done the same with her story of her life. After all, what else can one do?

While I was computing on a bench in the courtyard, softly headbanging with my headphones on, an old lady sidled up beside me and began to stare at me, almost imploringly. I popped off my headphones and smiled at her, said, “Good afternoon.” She ambled over to me and began to rebuke me for sitting outside in the cold.

“It’s freezing out here! Don’t you know you’re going to get sick?”
“Well, I wanted the fresh air. It’s a little chilly, but it beats sitting in my room. I’ll probably go back in soon.”
“You’re right you will. You should now. Here, take these.”

She handed me an unopened bag of menthol eucalyptus cough drops.

“Oh! Thank you, that’s really not necessary, I’m fine. I don’t feel sick at all! I’ll go in in just a minute.”
“Young man, take them. If you don’t, you’ll get sick. Go on, take them and then give some to your friends inside, too. I don’t want any of you getting sick this winter.”

I took them. She smiled and explained to me that she always looks out for young people, because they’re so much more interesting than old people. Man, did I have trouble coming up with something to say back to that! She nodded to me, wished me a good day, shushed my thank yous, and caned over to the place where the tree used to be.

I watched her stand there for a while, looking at where there is no tree. I called over to her, “I miss that tree.” She turned to face me. “I know I haven’t lived here long,” I went on, “but I really liked it.”

She walked back over to the bench I was sitting on and stood in front of me, just looking at me.

She began to tell me stories. As I’ve explained, the building complex our dorm is in is also known as a house for the seeing impaired—das Haus der Blinden. She lives here as a widow, her blind husband having died a long time ago. In recent years, the student housing agency in Munich bought out part of the building in order to use it as a dormitory. This meant that, practically overnight, a building whose halls were once draped with the quiet of unspoken sadnesses became bursting with youthful laughter and revelry. The building management repainted the walls.

She told me how the building had looked during the war, when the akido hall was still a massive bakery, which baked every day and shipped the food off to the soldiers, wherever they might have been at that time. There was a podiatrist’s office, too, and a provisions place for the elderly, infirm, or weak. She spoke of these things happily, as if to say she considered herself lucky to be so well taken care of. I’ve often noticed that Bavarians aren’t always looking over their shoulders at the revenant of the war, that they remember instead the cobalt blue of the Alps in the distance on that one day when autumn came so quickly.

How her husband went blind I’m not clear on. She had explained to me that many of the people living in the house were men who had lost their sight due to industrial accidents, working as machinists or some other type of manual labor. Her husband, though, could have been born blind: I know that she married him when he was blind.

Marrying a blind man wasn’t something her parents took lightly. Both were chronically hospitalized, but had remained bright and coherent, never suffering. One day while visiting her father in the hospital, she told him she was going to marry the blind man. “That’s a big decision to make,” her father said. “Marrying a blind man is no small thing. It will change the way you live.” She assured him that she knew that, and understood what it would mean to live with him. Her father began to express his concern that a blind man could not care for his daughter well enough. Apparently, the man didn’t earn very much money, and didn’t appear to be living well. She explained that this meager appearance was due to the fact that they had been saving money together, in order to buy a nice place with a lot of furniture.

The father realized there was no talking her out of it. He went and retrieved his money, his meager savings from what I can only assume had been a long life of rather grueling labor. He took his money and handed it to his daughter, looked her right in the eyes, and asked, “Do you still want to marry this man?” As if having money to call her own would change her mind. “Yes,” she said. “You will live with him and you will be happy?” “Yes,” she said. “Good. Then I can die.”

And he died. She with the money still in hand, her dead father lying next to her, a very lucky blind man waiting somewhere just for her.

She lived a very happy life with her blind husband. She regaled me with tales of his brilliance. In just two and half years, he got degrees in German, French, and Italian from the university. He worked as a telephone operator, and he was great at it. Everyone in the town talked about how smart he was. And he was handsome, too, he was tall, with broad shoulders and light eyes, which were a little differently colored—something to do with the blindness. When they would go out to eat, he would wear the nicest shirt and tie, have perfectly combed hair, brilliantly shining shoes (she was so proud of those shoes). She would get compliments from everyone about how handsomely he always presented himself, how lucky she was to have a husband like him.

She told me all these things with a conviction that bade me understand them and believe them not for her sake, so I would compliment and congratulate her, but so that I could understand her husband as the person he was. So that I would have a sense of how much I should respect him and the memory of him for all that he had been, with or without her.

I could not understand how he died. I think he fell from somewhere, and she was nearby when it happened. The doctor came and told her he was dead. She told me the story so calmly and matter-of-factly that at first I wasn’t even sure I understood the subject matter.

She said, “But that’s life. Here one minute, gone the next.” And she went back to the spot where there is no longer a tree.

I hope you enjoyed your cough drop.