My worktrip to Germany (4 of 7): So much meat.

It was absolutely astounding to me the sheer volumes of meat that seemed to be incorporated into everyday (German) life.

The hotel had this lovely breakfast buffet, one of the best I've ever seen, with cereal and muesli and scrambled eggs warmed up next to a thing of bacon, and there was a basket of rolls near these big jars of really good jams with huge pieces of fruit inside, and then they had this like total coldcut lineup, with pieces of salami-type stuff and cuts of liver and slices of ham, and even these like reddish-brown sausage bits that were quite chewy, that turned out to be a blood sausage, and maybe a few more slices of rotating stuff that they didn't have every morning that I can't quite think of right now.

(Those meats were next to some smoked salmon, and slices of cheese and a little jam jar full of horseradish; once there was also what they called an "egg creme," that was like an egg salad with a ton more mayonnaise than we'd use here, and some random-ass herbs mixed in.)

That shit was so good, to wake up to over coffee as you have like this ham and cheese and horseradish sandwich you made for yourself on a tasty tasty crusty bun, but still, it was a lot of meat.

When I got the newspaper, too, it was just astounding, like so many of the ads for supermarkets were all about specials on meat, a lot more than you'd expect compared to the specials on other food products.

Too, the bus stop ads had some giant prosciutto campaign going on, telling people that the way you could tell your family you loved them this holiday season was to serve them a giant tray of prosciutto, and there was a picture of like a three generation-family smiling as a (German) mom-type figure in an apron held out prosciutto to them and to you as well, the way the camera angle was shot for the ad.

This is above and beyond the doner kebab shawarma-type stuff that they have like everywhere, like gyros here, but just everywhere, like at shops that you'd run across pretty darn often, instead of some special shop that you make a special trip to.

Honestly, it was like everywhere you turned around in Germany, there was meat.

Their carbon footprint has got to be simply staggering.  I've never seen anything like it.

Halloween, Election Day.

 1) My landlord had some "Demon Slayer" costume from anime, and his wife was the counterpart. She wasn't a fan, but she went along with it anyways since she got to pick the anime costumes last year. Their little daughter was some cartoon character "Apple Blossom" who I didn't know, and their son was somehow some large cat where the costume was a blow-up figure like people put out on their lawns for Christmas, kind of, only you could wear it instead of putting it out on your lawn. I told him that he better be careful, because with that costume people might give him dead rats instead of candy.

2) Election Day I was sitting out on my chair on my stoop having coffee, and my (older) (Mexican) neighbor said he was glad to see me relaxing, since he sees me working and I work too much (I have my blinds open when I'm reading and writing in my living room, since I can focus better that way, with a connection to the outside world). I tell him that I actually don't work too much, since my jobs are active and social and that leaves me plenty of headspace for what I want to do on my time off, and at that he tapped his finger on his head and was like, "Smart, you learn from the people," and I stopped and I thought about it, and then I told him that yes, I do, especially when it comes to stuff I write about politics, I learn a lot from the older folks that I work with, and that I've actually asked people if I can quote phrases that they use. Later, I give myself a haircut over my bathroom sink, using my beard buzzer. My mom calls upset before she's going to bed since it doesn't look good for Biden, and I tell her that that's a factor of how the ballots have been counted, and that there's been articles about this for weeks. She says that she had been thinking that night about when she was a girl and they were discussing elections on TV, the commentators used a blackboard to illustrate their point. "A blackboard!", she was like, and I asked her if a passing stegosaurus ever interfered with the TV reception.

My worktrip to Germany (3 of 7): The people's personalities.

My limitations to talking with people was limited to English since my German is shit, but it was interesting to note (German) people's personalities.

It was like they were there and polite and nice and with you up until a certain point, and then they'd just stop and they'd look like a deer in the headlights and weren't sure what to do, especially in the presence of humor, which doesn't seem to be natural to them, and so they'd just laugh nervously instead.

Like, I was waiting at the hotel desk and was chit-chatting with the (young) (mid-20s) (German) clerk, and it turns out that the hotel was his family's business that his parents had started up years ago, and that he had gone to hotel school and then done an internship in Vienna and then come back to run the hotel, and his brother was the cook and did all of the work back in the kitchen at the attached restaurant.

"Why?", I was like, speaking in simple sentences and with basic vocabulary so that he could understand me instantly and without any problem at all. "Did your parents look at you and your brother..." - and at this point I put on a personality - "You, you look normal, you can work here, but you, you are ugly, go, go to the kitchen!"

At that, he just kind of laughed nervously and looked side to side, like he wasn't quite sure what was happening, though some small part of himself somewhere deep inside of him was maybe wanting to laugh, but he was struggling against it.

My worktrip to Germany (2 of 7): The people's looks.

So often when I was out and about in the cities on my trip to Germany last year, I'd be people-watching, and I'd keep seeing these very distinctive faces, like some young guy with a pig head and a big double- and triple-chin with huge fatrolls and stubble sticking out of it, and I'd realize that he looked like something out of an early modern woodcut.

My worktrip to Germany (1 of 7): Getting there.

Last year on my trip to Germany, I found myself taking a piss in the Munich airport, and something felt off, and then I realized that I was expecting more fat moustachioed guys in leather jackets malingering and furtively looking around.

That's when I realized that so much of what I expect from Germany, is shaped by watching Fassbinder movies.

Signs of academic morbidity.

So, my one animation professor friend from the art school where I used to work was saying that he's going to retire as early as possible, just eight more years to go.

He said that art school used to be more fun and people would put stuff up in the hallways, but now it's all weird and professionalized and it's just not as much fun as it used to be.

That's funny, him and both of the readers on my dissertation committee all feel the same way, and all want to retire as soon as they can.

For all of them, their profession has ceased to be pleasurable, and perhaps even tolerable.

That's certainly not a ringing endorsement for the health of a sector!

John Updike.

When I was out last month catching up with my one animation professor friend from the art school where I used to work, we somehow got on the subject of favorite authors, and and I began talking about how my favorite authors back in high school were John Updike and Margaret Atwood, both of whose work features a disproportionate amount of middle-aged people having languid affairs amidst feelings of social sterility and inner emptiness, just over and over and over in different variants, and I pretty much kept picking up one after another of their books, for like all of my teenage years.

We then started talking about the Rabbit series, and it was weird, he remembered major plot points, and I more remembered the weird little bits like a guy standing next to the stove and rubbing out a load into a pan of scrambled eggs his wife was cooking up on the morning after the night of their honeymoon, or barging in on your daughter-in-law in the bathtub and seeing her bright red pubes.

I haven't thought of that shit in years, and though I only read that stuff once way back when, it stuck with me, after all of these years.

It's funny, I've said for a while now that these 4 interests travel together:

1) Cults;

2) Weird sex;

3) The historical Jesus; and

4 Serial killers. 

Looking back, I got my cults and serial killers interest from pop culture shit, and my interest in the historical Jesus from my high school religion class, but the weird sex stuff I might have gotten from John Updike, and also the Thornbirds (my plot summary of it: "a woman f*cks a priest in the outback").

Life sure was different, back before the internet.

I also remember that in the Witches of Eastwick, the devil's penis curved downwards, not up.