noch zwei Wochen ohne Zigaretten

They say a man's head is the clearest just after having sex. For me, it's when I finish running. It's been almost two weeks since I quit smoking, unceremoniously, quietly, with grace.  My two roommates smoke in the house.  This makes the 6th or 7th time I've quit in my decade of nicotine addiction.  I loved smoking in Europe.  It made me feel normal and balanced, like there was still something in my life that didn't change when I moved.  Here it seems pointless.  It doesn't make me feel cool, it makes me feel bogged down with dependence.  I love quitting smoking almost as much as I like starting up again.  Usually in the fall when it cools off when I can stand outside breathing the fresh cool air, drinking a beer early in the day and have nothing to do but smoke.  Now fall is coming and all I can think about is losing weight, paying off bills, and being able to run and run for as long as I want without getting tired.  

Something made me think about the last time I saw Rachel.  I was on the front door of her new apartment.  She was pissed off at Franz for being lazy and not taking care of the dog after she had just hurt her ankle earlier that day.  I remember her saying good-bye with a bit of a whimper.  Tears were already rolling down her face under her glasses.  I said, "there's no easy way to do this."  Gave her a hug and started walking the mile or so back to the Starnberg Nord train station, with seconds before the train arrived.  My last ride on the S-6.  

I've tried hard not to get nostalgic about Munich.  But in two days, it will be one year since I arrived in Munich.  My life is flying by, seemingly out of my control.  It's like those stop-motion movies of plants growing, dying, rotting and re-growing, over and over again.  I've been fortunate to experience every year in a different setting (at least for the past 6).  Roanoke College, Glen Mary, Munich.  People have come and gone through my life.  Some have stuck around to some degree and others faded completely away.  Now Munich, one of my best friends for the past year is miles and miles away and just seeing a picture of the city is enough to make me pause and contemplate (my equivalent to crying, I guess).  Will I ever go back?  I've thought seriously about getting a degree in German and go back there to live.  I think I'm going to make that a goal for the next five years.  Leah used to have these 5 year plans.  She had everything figured out and would tell me over bier and cigarettes at Andechs am Dom with the warming glow of the overhead heating lamps.  pause....One time it started pissing down rain and we watched the people scurry through the streets.

sigh....

Adults are only creative in their dreams, and how often do they even remember them?

Leah and I once had a conversation, or rather several about the public nature of writing, about how writers must be fearless in their writing, especially non-fiction. How could you write honestly about people you care about without offending someone you care about or revealing too much personal shit about friends and family that could potentially be read by a large amount of people? In the times of YouTube and blogs and camera phones, our lives are being perpetually published on the internet and sent out into the world for complete strangers to view or read. When print first came out, it took a machine the size of a house to make a book. Now "publishing" in the rough sense of the word is as easy as moving some fingers in the correct pattern on a machine that fits on your lap, warming it like a cat.

I learned recently that Brett and Jenny both have blogs and Brett is a bit more personal in his writing. It reminded me of the small writing assigned by pacifist professor Mike Heller. The only class Brett and I had together was a very revealing class. People wrote, occasionally, from their personal experiences. One girl wrote about coming down from cocaine addiction. I wrote once about the time day my mom told me she was leaving my dad. My pre-adolescent fredom cut short by the abrupt statement riding with my mom in her green Ford Astrostar mini-van on the deserted plains of a nature preserve somewhere in Pittsylvania County where my friend Jonathan lived. These stories feel personal, but once I sat in the class full of people who had read the story, hearing their compliments, I knew that it wasn't mine anymore. It existed in the 15 or so students and one teacher who had read it. How can a writer deal with that? What would my mom think if she knew that all of those people knew about one of the hardest moments for her? I was tempted after I had written it to give a copy of it to her. I could see her finishing it and crying. But I think I decided that she has enough to cry about without bringing up shit from the past.

I guess that's why authors hide behind fictional characters. They can ger away with being honest because it's not really them who has these thoughts, or does these things. I think that Brett, Jenny and I should continue the Heller tradion of doing small writings occasionally. I mean, we all have blogs. We could write them in our private time, post them, post comments about each others writings and talk about them. I realized from working a first grade classroom how much those kids create. Everyday of their lives, their asked to use their imaginations, using all media imaginable. Write a story about a trip to the north pole, draw a picture of a tiger in the jungle, write a play and create characters using different kinds of puppets. Adults are lucky to write even one sentence that causes them to use their imagination per week. The only time adults are creative is when they dream and how often do remember what our subconscious has created? What if adults made art as often as kids. how much more great art we would have and how much more imaginative would we be? I think at some point we just stop needing the praise from our teachers; we stopped trying to impress anyone with our creativity and started needing sex and acceptance from our peers more. Contrary to popular belief, creative writing and drawing pictures is not normally accepted as cool. But the praise of a teacher for a first grader is like having god give you a thumbs up.

I guess what I'm saying is that I want/need some kind of structure, or even feedback about my writing. I've been out of school for two years, after having been in school for the past 17 years of my life. I haven't gotten a grade for two years and it just feels weird. I feel like I'm letting my mind go to mush after writing hundreds of pages for professors and teachers and now I'm lucky if I can write two pages on a blog. But what if I just started writing all of the things I think? Fully aware of the fact that, chances are, nobody really cares and nobody is going to read it. Brett's blog posts read like an opinion column in a newspaper or magazine. Funny, topical, inciteful, personal, but not bleeding. He has a way of writing things more for an audience. I mean, I write for an audience, but while I was writing in Europe, I knew my audience was Reid, Brett, Jenny and Leah. But he didn't even give me his blog address. He's writing more for the masses. A way to pass the time at work, yes, but also a way of writing about all of the rediculous things he sees or reads about in the world in a way that he could never vocalize around anyone.

A resolve to take writng more seriously, do it more often and share it more with people. Maybe I'll type up my journals from Europe. In other words, Writing is Being. Well done, Mike. Thanks.

In America

I'm sitting in my new room in Roanoke, Virginia, USA smoking a cigarette and serenely pondering where I am and wondering if where I was wasn't some awesome drawn-out dream or maybe a book that I read that took too long to read. The smoky croon of Cat Power's Chan Marshall makes my eyelids heavy and my thoughts turn to heavier. I hung an American flag by my bed that predates the aquisition and purchase of Hawaii and Alaska giving it 6 rows of eight stars each representing the contintental states of the USA. I browsed through pictures from the photo CD that Anne had made for me of my photos of Paris. I clicked on one randomly and it happened to be the picture I took at the Lourve of the painting Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) by French painter Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830. I read excerpts from Leah's blog, a person I knew once who is somewhere lost in paradise. She's far away from the realities we all face as Americans such as getting pissed off at traffic lights, on-line shopping, TV, TiVo, iPods, iPhones, air conditioning, credit card debt and news about the Olympics in a country that supports genocidal dictators.

People have asked me since I've moved back if I'm "settling in." I usually answer with a question..."what do you mean by "settling in"? I mean, I didn't have the culture shock I thought I was going to get, I didn't get depressed or confused or nostalgic like I thought I might. Instead, I've settled into a routine of hanging out. Enjoying doing nothing but hanging out with my new roomates and old friends Brett and Jenny. Mostly, I've been trying to convince myself that this is my life. This is permanent and this isn't a vacation from whatever it was I was doing before. I'm not going to pack everything I can carry with me on a plane or fit in my car and head off to the next adventure guaranteed to last a week or so then back to the routine of working and going back to my apartment in Munich which has felt more permanent and more home-like that anything I've had in the past year or so.

Settling in includes accepting the past and reconciling with the future. Back in the Winter, I was starting to make long-term plans for what I wanted the future to include. I looked up jobs on Roanoke.com, I revised my resume, I even printed out an application for a grad school program at Radford. Nothing has come from any of that preparation. I'm back where I started. No job, no hope for a job, no desire to start working, but eventually the money I made in Germany will run out and I'll be forced to join the working world again. Doing something so I can have money to do other things. It's not so bad, I guess.

Reid and I went for a hike today and as we were driving down the rural route to the top of Catawba Mountain, I paused to look at the small log-cabin businesses, houses proudly sporting the former flag of the Confederate States of America, tractors, subsistence farms in front lawns, the Moose Lodge and mountains encompassed by Kudzu. I thought about how interesting this would all seem to a person from England or Germany or anywhere else in the world. America is truly unique. Looking at European cities and towns everywhere from Starnberg, Germany to Leuven, Brussels, you get the feel that it all fits the same kind of pattern. But what would a Münchener think of Catawba, VA?

These thoughts mostly prevail as I drink can after can of Budweiser and try to smile and wink to the west when I think too much about all of the things I grew to hate about America and Americans after living abroad. Then I hear the sweet twang of a Southern accent and I feel at home. I truly feel now that wherever you are, there are going to be ass-holes and there are going to be people that revive your faith in the potential of humanity. And wherever you are, there's always an escape from it all. Just put on your favorite album and drift away to another time or place. Right now I'm drifting away to the cold streets of Munich with Leah on my arm stopping in to see the Sunday night service at the AltesPeterskirche after drinking a bottle of white wine in the Rathauskeller. There was real magic in those moments. There's also something to be said about listening to old and new records, drinking buds and playing cards with two my favorite people in the world here in the Star City of the South, Roanoke, VA.