Or that 'love' conquers all, and for better and for worse and all that.....
I'd still take the 'till death do us part' vow in it... and boy, I've done the 'in sickness and health' to the very best of my ability.
There is a difference between taking 'love' to such an extreme you lose everything and land on the sreeets so never bought the 'for richer or poorer'.
I don't mean in the sense that he got poor so I dumped him... nothing further from the truth. We were poor at the beginning. And for a while he was rich. I didn't like the rich part. It drove a huge wedge into our relationship, and he wasn't to be restrained. But then again, he thought he only had seven years to live, thanks to the media. So I didn't like that part. Except for maybe making a few people I love happy..
So not really.... too much to worry about.
I liked the middle part where we were getting along famously, and there was 'just enough'.
Relationships are so fragile. Horrendous things like illness really change you both in a relationship. One the patient, one the care-giver.
To love and to cherish? Well, gawwd knows, whoever she is, the love part was never a problem.
It's so easy if you 'fit'. The 'cherish' part? That is a bit more difficult.
We so often do not live up to one another's expectations, and then you can't really 'cherish' them... You want to send them to the Blue Blazes.
Everyone has their relationships, is what I'm trying to say, I guess. They get more complicated the longer you have one.
'To have and to hold'?
Oh that is the easiest part of all....
And I still wouldn't have gotten married, which is possible here for a year or so now.
It would have meant having unlimited trust. Maybe they should put THAT in marriage vows... and I wouldn't have been able to do it. Then, when things were good... Or now.
And it was never about economics. It was about basic honesty about EVERYTHING.
You'll probably think I am very selfish from the post below
Dunno, was just cogitating... which is never good...
I hate Sundays....
And a memory popped back, a sad one. It's about the post on Rudolf Brazda post below.
It was in the early 70's, I was in the Munich train station and sort of crowded, but they had a nice custom. If there was a table for four and one person sat there, you could go over and ask, 'Excuse me, is this seat taken?' And they would invariably say, 'Of course, sit.' So I had an hour, got a mug of beer. And we chatted a bit, and he was really down.
He was 'old' to me, grey-haired, and looked morose. We chatted a little, and then I saw it... the inside of his left forearm. A tatoo.
And my heart sank.
And I said, 'Excuse me, but is THAT what I THINK it is???'
He said, 'Yes, Buchenwald.' It was his tatooed concentration camp number, hey...
'Are you going home?'
'No, I just come here.'
'WHY???' ( I was 26 and naive....)
'I hate being alone.'
He told me a little bit about his experience, and it was horrible, was young and more than impressionable....
And it was awful. And I was speechless. Of course I knew generally but hearing it from a real person was pretty devastating.
I just listened.
So seemingly, he just went up to the train station café and find someone to talk to and tell his story. It was horrible and frightening, but he never got past it.
And I asked the stupidest question of my LIFE... 'Once you got freed, how could you STAY here, why didn't you get OUT?' (I'd have high-tailed it out of there, but he had roots.)
The answer was crushing. 'I had nowhere to GO...'
He was German born, generations in the country, they wiped his family out, but he still felt Germany was his 'homeland'. And so crushed, and decimated... he couldn't move one way or the other, but just feel sad and reach out to strangers in transit in a train station.
And that is what fascist regimes do in the end.
Ok, am connecting dots. Big industrialists, like Bush's grandfather and others supported the Nazis financially, that is no secret and open. And others. And the Krupps (steel industry) were way in with 'Adi' and his gang, but too stupid to see where it would lead, G0ebbels was a genius at communication, and this idjit.... from Alaska, I think, (or Tennessee) wants to put poor people into camps to be 're-instructed'????
WHY do alarm bells go off in my head?
It'll probably be the end of the world, who knows.... But if those tools get in, oh man are you all in for a big ride to nowhere.
And there will be lots of people crushed and sitting around train station cafés or the Greyhound bus ones, destroyed.... And not Starbucks.
I got into a discussion on another blog.....
I know, I know, it's a re-post from three years ago. It was about the World Cup. I am not so crazy about sports, and was going on about how I find it too nationalistic. But I said the Olympics were better somehow, and there wasn't such craziness attached to it. I was there in 1972. In the Village, working... Nothing is ever what it seems in the media, you know? I rarely tell anyone about what I saw when that ended, and will not here.
However.... it was still a long way from the fanatacism that developed afterward. Obama's people owe me a quarter for every time they used my rhetoric, or I will get Tony Hayward to shake him down... as revenge....
Change
You know... we all get SO FUCKING bent out of shape about terrorism, since 2001. Turn on any sort of media since then, and boy howdy, aren't they painting the canvas to make everyone so frightened you end up having to put your undies on the cold wash SOAK program to get the skid marks out before doing the regular cycle, right? And before anyone wants to take a hit on me for not knowing what I'm talking about, being long gone from NH---on that day? The husband of a very close cousin of mine was near the WTC, and another in the Pentagon. So yeah, I came home from work, it being afternoon here, and for no reason at all turned on the teevee, which I usually do not do, and thought: WTF stupid horror film is THIS? It took minutes to realise it was real. And it took hours to get through trans-atlantic per telephone and ascertain that MY family was ok, and they were---how fucking selfish.
No, this is not yet another my-god-how-horrible-it-was piece. Done to death. It's in our collective consciousness.
But life is sorta perverse, as we all know. I happened to be working at the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972. In the cafeteria where the athletes ate. 1400 university students from all over the world. That hit was the granddaddy of terrorism, if not so 'grandiös' and massivly deadly. In that whole clusterfuck I ended up standing on a balcony watching nice, engaging people being herded, tied up like cattle, into helicopters by masked men, and later heard them being blown up via the radio at work. It was a long time ago, we didn't have instant teevee and helicopters filming, AND NO. I would NOT have wanted to have seen it, looking back. What I saw was ENOUGH, thenk you... It wasn't like it was a choice or something. Which is the point of this. You don't get asked.
I'd seen them all summer. They engaged people in the most wonderful dialogues , and were exceptional.
I've probably never gotten over it, not really, but in my repressive stage, I wrote this about what went before, engaging and establishing dialogue with so many people from all over the world. Unlike so many people, who tend to be insular, when I first came here, I always wanted to be a good ambassador....
Sometimes I think I failed....
My first reaction, and it took me years to deal with, was 'Change'. It dealt with the Other part of that wonderful summer and the hope. Which got crushed.
You could be anywhere, and get blown up. There were terrorists being looked for where I worked when I first came here to Austria for good. I missed a bomb at a train station in Italy once. By one day. AND a devastating earthquake in the south of that country. But you go on, hey. And you know what? You just have to fucking DEAL with it. You don't need the gubmint to make the rules. And it never occurred to me to be SCARED all the time. Y'all have something that USED to be called a Constitution. Gonna sit on your ass and be 'skeered'? Well be my guest. Am not gonna join you on the bench in the waiting room, hey.
So this is about the good stuff, and the anger I felt that the world wasn't what I wanted it to be when I was 23 years old and naive: And the saddest part? It was more than thirty-five years ago, and not much changed. Depressing. The stick pins referred to were lapel buttons, and were something everyone was eager to collect...
"What reverence is rightly paid to a Divinity so odd
He lets the Adam whom he made perform the acts of God?"
W. H. Auden (Friday's Child)
AND EVERYONE CRYING 'CHANGE!'
In the narrow corridor
Between Forum and Chapel
The atheletes are milling about.
It's an open Bazaar
Where the West meets the East.
(or is it perhaps
a miniature Big Apple??)
The reporters write for the evening news,
That here is a love feast
Where humanity is spoken
But to me it is Babel:
And behind their smiles
I see thirty-two tooth salutes of contempt..
They trade national tokens
When their training is over
And the August sun is on the wane.
And everyone's crying 'Change!
Some of their stick-pins are, of course
More in demand---
Depending on reknown and supply-
(For who wants a Poland
When one can acquire
A token of Russia---
or Japan, by and by?)
The Olympic ideal does not exclude
the desire for personal prestige and fame.
And so here the capitalist ethic reigns,
And everyone's crying 'Change!'
Most stay in their groups;
They're like gaggles of geese
And they casually size up their opponents.
The Belgians won't speak with the Germans,
And the French look down with noblesse oblige
On the rest of this city's components.
And the Indians are wary of the Pakistanis.
The Nigerians hate the Rhodesians....
Still, they are anxious to trade
So they swallow
Their pride and political allegiance.
The friendliest are from the smallest countries;
From barely visible dots on the atlas.
They compete with the best and have no face to lose.
And their names tie the tongue, are exceedingly strange...
And EVERYONE'S crying 'Change!'
And we watch them, amused....
We foreign 'guest workers'
Try not to compete, but try
To understand what we're all about,
To conquer the predjudices
Our leaders have taught us
And try to discover their lies.
(We find sinister reasons for political deeds.
Can most of them be really due
To something so mundane as greed?)
We grow national guilts for the actions of others,
Attempt to solve problems,
And the grounds our talks cover
Range from politics to jokes,
to religion and pollution.....
And we can only agree that our world is insane.
And everyone's crying 'Change'
CHANGE cry disillusioned Americans
as George Meany offers millions to dump George McGovern.
Change! cry the Irish
who are weary of blood-shed, still demand to be self-governed.
Change! cry Rhodesia's majority blacks,
while their whites promenade and acknowledge no guilt.
Change! cry the Greeks
who have lost their Democracy,
and blame the American military bloc.
Change! cry the people of the Middle East
While the world sits in judgement
To the ticking of a nuclear clock.
Change! cry the people trapped in the suburbs,
in anonymous houses, sleazily built.
Change! cry defenders of the Earth's environment,
while in factory accidents, their neighbors are killed.
Change! cry the starving and the world's minorities,
who live on hate, while others grow fat.
Change! cry the young, as they champ at the bit,
while the Establishment sees they're held back.
Change! cry the conservatives who want power and control,
and tremble at thought of a reverse in the order of things.
Change! cry the liberals who shout out for justice
So all have a chance to grasp the brass ring.
Yes!, they shout, Change!
On the day of departure
the action is frenzied,
and the shouting reaches fever pitch,
trading sneakers and track suits,
And their laughter and smiles
no longer seem stretched,
are real, and their owners fit.
Competition is over,
and now they are grinning,
no longer concerned
with who will be winning.
Koreans wear Russian warm-up pants;
Belgians wear French warm-up jackets.
We smile and fight down the urge to gloat,
For we long know what they're finding out,
Have the experience and memories to back it.
The September wind blows yesterday's news
Through the passage-way. Then it rains.
And the athletes take refuge in the Chapel's pews
To a dying last echo of 'Change'
Change! For the world is shrinking fast,
On yourself you can no longer rely.
Change! And drop tribal habits at last....
Or like the dinasaurs.... We WILL die...
Whelp.... looks like we haven't, doesn't it....
This makes me want to go to Greece....
The dreaded Eurovision song contest is coming up. Eye candy... Opa!
Have been busy .... with the Telly-com
Well hallelujah!
From the fucking Saturday before Christmas till NOW... I have been fucking Don Quixote on a donkey with a lance fighting damned windmills....
I got so desperate, I wrote to an Ombudsman in a local paper, per Internet... An Ombudsman is a lawyer, and they supposedly help people with problems like I was having.
I have never written to a newspaper before. Where I grew up, you fight and help yourselves. I got an immediate answer per mail, like ten minutes later. (Isn't the internets wonderful???) And she said, 'Fax us the receipt that the bill is paid, and we will go AFTER them.'
Well that was the day I was at the end of my art, as we say, and so I called the telly-com again (Just one last time... uh-huh), and heard, they had reactivated his connection. ON JAN 14th! A month later from the initial intervention..... Way to go, Tellys...
And it was cold, and snowing, if I recall correctly, so I didn't go out because I don't see so well in the twilight any more, and thought, ok, tomorrow....
Called and did not get a message, 'This number is unknown to us' message. And it rang and it rang....
Got to Peter's, sleeping like the dead. Phone? No tone... tee-vee? Forget it. Internet... ditto.
If you want to see cold fury... well, let's leave that, ok?
So I called, and I called and I called, and got insulting people, nice people, it's like playing russian roulette.... Except the nice ones couldn't DO anything.
This afternoon, the Ombudsfrau from the paper mailed me about faxing the paid bill.
So I was explaining what had happened meanwhile, thanking her.... and EXPLAINING, Peter has fallen out of bed so often meanwhile, knocking things over, he got the thing you plug in all the components into probably destroyed.
NORMALLY, they are supposed to be affixed to the wall, you plug them in and forget about it, your telly-phone, fax, modem, whatever.
Well this thing was on the floor near his bed, and half buried under a very heavy brass stand lamp after a fall, so I was 'hopeful' and thought, 'Ok, let's just plug them out, plug them back in, and maybe it will work.' Nada. And that is when I knew.... 'Oh, we got troubles....'
And I am a technical idjit.
Certified.
(Peter is worse... His toaster kept blowing fuses he can't reach on his own, so he unplugged the stove and the refrigerator two days ago. And wondered why the fuses were still blowin. Trying to use the defective toaster... That was FUN...)
Whatever, I was too busy to write the Ombudsfrau... because nothing was all right any more.
Today I get a mail from her... I should fax the receipt so she can go AFTER them....
I thought that was more than cool....
So I explained what was going on, and in the middle of writing.... the )))Telly-com((( called, and said they would send a technician down and fix it tomorrow morning.
But in all this hecticness... I DID have a pertinent question.
HOW... and with WHAT RIGHT, can you send out a bill demanding €40.00 for your television service, which you cut off and they never provided? I think it is illegal. I was so enraged, and the person I was talking to was so inept, I ended up yelling at him.
So snotty... 'If you keep talking to me like that, I will have to end this conversation.' I hope he has fucking nightmares for weeks. Incompetent git....
So I asked her....
I wonder what she will say.....
With luck he will have his connections back tomorrow again.
And I am STILL waiting to hear from social services again tomorrow, because the person I talked to is only in office Tuesdays and Thursdays, and otherwise 'on the road'. I got up this morning feeling so optimistic....
Ya' think...
You know, two birds with one stone, and all that junk...
And I 'think'.... I'm getting just too old for all this stuff. I could just pass it off like water off a duck... Now? There are days I feel like 'Grumpy Old Men'. Eeewwwww...
But still do what I can.
Now this is getting into scary territory....
Who the hell thinks up laws like they have in Wisconsin? So glad I never grew up there.... And Dad... as much as you love the Green Bay Packers, and have been there.... Not to mention what they did to you when you wanted to fly there... don't you think those people are sorta kinda weird?
Al Bundy and Co....
Two days ago I was crossing the square, and someone behind me referred to a local person as 'your typical Al Bundy.'
Upon which I shuddered inwardly.
And then remembered, my father enjoys watching 'Two and a half Men', and was doubtful it was on the programming here....
And yes, have seen a couple of episodes, but it loses in the translation. The series are always dubbed.
The first time I saw 'Married With Children' was a year before the Berlin Wall fell. Was visiting there, and it was running on the Air Force AFN network. My friend said, 'You have GOT to see this!' I was horrified.
'Married With Children' went into German programming, and was and is still a hit. The German title is 'A Terribly Nice Family'. And they repeat all seven seasons Over and Over and Over, and I am not always sure what that does for the perceptions of what people here think the average US family is like, you know? When Peter first saw the series, he kept asking me, 'are they really LIKE that????' (This after having met many of my family and friends.... ouch.) And I would snap at him: 'It's SATIRE, Peter, SATIRE! And leave me alone.'
He gets it now during it's n'th re-run.
'Roseanne' is another series that some people seemingly can't get enough of. I found it wonderful. Peter hates it. She is too fat, and vulgar. He said. But he laughs. I think it was a series that was all of one piece, about a normal, struggling family, with some hilarious stuff in it. It wass daring in its' themes, it reeked of truth, and was wonderful. They told it like it is, if you are trying to struggle from the lower middle class. I could identify. The final season puzzled me, but the last episode was so wonderful, tying up all the story lines, and that last camera shot brought me to tears. It runs and runs and runs.
Malcolm in the Middle is another hit. But so crazy.
'The King of Queens' is Peter's favorite. I don't get it. He thinks Kevin James is hilarious. (Whaaa?) Also running forever.
And then there is 'The Nanny'. Running longer than any of them. The day I realised that the grandmother was Carol Channing, I nearly fell out of my chair for shock.
'Home Improvement' is a staple. Bill Cosby is a staple.
Not to worry, we get a lot of other series also, but just once.
The ones above have been running for nearly a decade.
They are the staples, and people seem to want to see them over and over and OVER.
And 'Al Bundy' becomes a code word for a terrible American?
That one hurt.
Most people do not UNDERSTAND satire... This I know for sure.
But the fact is... most Americans are sort of boring. Most. Not all. The 'majority' abhor 'culture', for instance. They think it is faggy. Or something. Oh well, do not want to get off on a rant.
What I am trying to impart is: I think that the success of these series have contributed to a very distorted view of what America is like, because they have no reference to what it is really about. Oh, they are not so stupid, but if you rinse and repeat, it leaves a lasting impression.
All in all, I can't do anything about it. But the effect doesn't make me happy when all it leads to is a distorted view of what Americans are like.
So the US send us distorted versions of how we perceive them and that is not goood.
It bothers me muchly....
