Last weekend, I found myself hugged by many a bearded Italian. My housemate turned 30, and had invited his seven (!) best friends over from Italy to celebrate. And this we did in abundance. I realised too late that those mediterranean guys have a preference for tequila. But it was a lot of fun.
This does however not stop me from furthering my plans for world domination. Saturday I also met lovely NY blogger Melissa Bravermann, who is currently traveling Europe and writes about local dating experiences, interviewing single female women and dating bachelors. I had connected Melissa with a couple of interview partners and happily gave her a tour of the dirty old town I live in.
The sound of the surf in Zeeland. Screaming my lungs out on a small stage in a dirty club. The smell of skin on a Sunday morning. Drinking pastis on Cours Saleya in Nice. Playing chess in the Gellert Baths in Budapest. Drinking beer at the Fishmarkt in Hamburg after an all-nighter. Lying in the sun in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. The smell of the hair of my niece. Sitting on the stairs of the Sacre Coeur. Taking a cold shower after coming from the beach, washing away the mixture of sea salt, suncream and sweat. Walking through the woods in Autumn, with the heavy scents of fire, rotting leaves and rain in the air, all at the same time. Bruges at dusk. Being on tour with the band. My grandmother. The smell of the Metro. Hearing the rain drip from the trees on Brüsseler Platz in Cologne. You.
Yes, us bloggers and hobby-journalists can be a pest sometimes. Especially when we ask for a festival-pass or a place on your guest list, to write an article or a review for some obscure website you never heard of. But. You see, most of us do not earn any money with the writing we do, so we’re in for the fun and because we like it. And we also like the festival or artist you are representing, otherwise we would write about something else. With us, you can have the most unbiased and devoted writers covering your “product” – because no editor tells us to come to your show to earn money. So, if you respond to an email, promising an update at a certain date, you can expect me to ask for an update at that date. And if I get no response, I’ll write another mail. Or make another call. And another. And another.
The Kentucky Derby was decadent and depraved, but they gave him a press pass.
I appreciate that you have loads of work to do and your inboxes are filled to the brink every day. But if you don’t find the time to tell me in two short sentences that there are no more press passes available (after which I’d stop to mail and call), why not tell me so via the FAQ’s or press area on your website? After all I write for the interwebs, so you can be sure that I’ll visit these pages.
Just before I’m leaving for the weekend, to do some walking in the mountains, and the only writing will be in my dirty notebook – I thought it to be a good idea to remind you that my future wife has started blogging. Here she is, sitting in my future living room and playing a song. Laters!
Yes it is. And though I’m not superstitious, I’m a big fan of horror movies and a devoted reader of anything occult I can lay my hands on. So, here are Jason Vorhees’ best killing scenes from the movies that were named after this day. Obviously full of gore and untimely demises of the mechanical sort, and therefore NSFW and little children. Thanks, Miss Cakehead!
For the last 1,5 weeks I was down with the worst case of conjunctivitis I ever had. The pain in my left way could be compared to the dull, throbbing pain of a toothache, always slowly ebbing away and then intensifying again, keeping me awake most of the night. I spent the days in my darkened room, listening to audiobooks and pressing a cold towel on my face, cursing myself for not being able to do anything then lay there and wait for the antibiotics to work. I cursed myself because I realised of how much I depend on working online – at my 9-5 and else. Since I started writing more seriously, I have established at least one habit: to write every day. If not writing a blog post here, I’d at least scribble down something in my trusted Moleskine. And I couldn’t do that with the eye. All those strange thoughts and fractions of stories/articles/whatever, I could not write them down, so they trickled away again into my subconsciousness without ensuring me the Nobel Prize for literature. When I write, I just jot down the words as they come, sorting, reviewing and editing myself later. And I. Could. Not. Do. It.
Fittingly, I had read an article about the deaf and blind (!) author Helen Keller the week before, which made me also think about French author Jean-Dominique Bauby, who wrote an entire book with his eyelid, dictating one letter at a time. And compared to how these people worked and conducted whole books in their head before getting the words out, maybe I should stop moaning and be happy that I can type on the keyboard of my trusted Macbook again without crying.
It’s like every day at the Sacre Coeur. In between the tourists, professional womanizers are stalking ladies from all over the world, and on Place Saint Pierre men from the Senegal are selling plastic toys from China to Americans and Japanese, while others try to snatch the wallets from unwary foreign visitors. The sun is shining, and from the top of the stairs in front of the cathedral you can see the skyscrapers of La Defense.
There is one really beautiful woman among all those people. With long, shining red hair; and wearing only black. Black coat, black trousers, black sneakers. Apparently she’s alone, as three of the womanizers try to chat her up and no Rugby-playing boyfriend appears to beat them to pulp. But she keeps her appearance, and after a while the men leave her in peace, so she can take some pictures of Paris. If someone talked to her now, not acting as crude as the locals and maybe showing some wit, and as it’s a beautiful winters day in Paris, this might actually work. It could even be like in the movies. Stranger meets stranger in Paris, she’s from Vancouver and he’s from Dortmund, but they like each other and laugh about the same jokes, so they decide to have a coffee, and dinner later. It’s the evening of Valentines Day in the City of Lights, and later that night they sleep with each other in the small hotel at Montmatre were he is staying, where there’s PVC flooring in the room and it reeks of disinfectant. The day after her plane leaves from Charles-de-Gaulle, and his train is departing from Gare du Nord. Whatever happens next, if they make plans and will meet again, and in the end he moves from Germany to Canada; or if they never see each other again – those hours in Paris will always seem like a daydream, one of those strange but beautiful occurrences that life has in store, sometimes.
I ask her for a lighter, in English, and she answers in English. She looks in my face, her blue eyes wide open, looking interested. It seems she’s waiting for me to say something. But I don’t know what, so I thank her and go down the stairs towards the merry-go-round.
That evening I bought the cheapest red wine I could get, one with a plastic screw top.
