The rising tide lifts all boats (4)

The rising tide lifts all boats (3)

(Our friend Glenn sends this picture) 

"Outside my favorite bar," he comments.

The rising tide lifts all boats (2)

Why the rich need more tax brakes

Connubial bliss

Chang and our new car.

The loss of Isolde, our ML SUV (she passed away in a typical death-choked scramble) is a real bummer, we got quite some literary mileage out of her.

She was 14 years old.

Here's a pertaining fragment from the GREEN EYES (context is a bit complicated, bear with us): John (the cum-squirrel) and Alex showed up belatedly (and smelling of/stained with cum) for the appointment with assistant DA Trevor Howard. Dr. Alice Sandeman, otherwise Alex's confidante, who arranged the meeting, got extremely upset, and the sit-down didn't go well. Howard has now left, and the Dr.s phone rings---a gallery in NY NY needs more of deceased Eleanor's art work---Eleanor, former lover of Sandeman, and inlaw of the Richard Wagner family (the composer). OK, here's more or less the entire chapter, Isolde will show up at some point, enjoy:



With an inquisitive look at Maurice, Alice gets up as well. She’s about to explode, explode at us, who have blown it, “completely.” We’re little boys who can’t hold their cum when the situation requires grown-up behavior. We’ve besmirched the hospital, and the medical profession, and ourselves, literally. And since she’s a medical doctor, she is going into details, and wants to know how many spermatozoa we’ve killed needlessly with our---she’ll have to look this up in a thesaurus, it’s not that she’s shy, she’s just too upset to find the right word---with our irresponsible behavior. “You thought you were sexy, right,” she says, “you were just feckless, harebrained, immature, undependable, untrustworthy, inexcusably, both of you,” and she means Alex in particular since she has given up on the cum-squirrel anyhow.

The rising tide lifts all boats

How to turn your truck into a phallic symbol

Meet the Trabbi

We're on our way to Switzerland, getting gas (diesel, to be precise) at the gas station of the Geant mall in Mandelieu, and there's a motorcade of alike-looking cars riding up to the pump next to ours. They are all from Germany, from Cologne, to be precise. They look antique. "These are Borgwards?" I ask one of the young men descending from the conveyances. "No," he says, "these are Trabbis."

Communism lives, folks, these Trabbis (Trabants) were the Volkswagens of East Germany. They didn't have a good reputation in my days. Production was soon discontinued after the fall of the Wall. Why do you do this, I ask another of the young men. He doesn't answer.

There's some galactic metaphysics at work...

The Mercedes ML 270 CDI

Yes, we're doing some maintenance work on the house, a friend of Chang was flown in from Korea to help us. And, as you may have noticed on other occasions, it's almost impossible not to find a pretext for dropping yet another quote from the Green Eyes so here it is, the quote, from Chapter 35, Two visible spots:

Godehart is not at home, we'll descend to the basement where Alice grabs three oils on canvas without much ado, although "grabs" is not the right word since there are too many paintings to choose from, not only dotted ones (several racks are filled with plain gray canvas-squares, other racks contain large French flags, or German ones, give and take a color here and there), plus, the paintings are large and require the input of two reasonably agile men. They barely fit into the truck, we have to lower the rear seats, but—-as you may have observed on other occasions—-there's a galactic metaphysics at work in that it’s almost impossible not to fit anything into an aging Mercedes ML.

When we arrive at the FedEx outfit in Lewes, the situation has changed significantly. Alice is in trouble now maintaining her anger—-let’s throw in a really tasteless, and completely misleading analogy here, think of maintaining an erection during a faculty meeting at my hippocampus—-Alice is in trouble, there are credibility problems with her indignation, and you only have to look at Alex to understand why. Save for his eyes, Alex has disappeared. While Alice negotiates the FedEx bureaucracy, Alex is standing next to her, but not like Ben. A ghost is standing there, his hands folded behind his back, and you can sense, feel, undergo how he's forcing himself to stay in place. Women are usually more sensitive than men, and Alice is very sensitive indeed, she has trouble getting her act together now with Alex in this state.

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Subliminal (Sacha)

This is us, folks, look at this picture, this is us...

...no, it's Sacha, actually, who sent this picture and writes: "Maybe just my homophobic look on things, but there is a hidden message in this image somewhere..." (he added this grinning emoticon that we can't reproduce here, sadly)

Connubial Bliss --- Korea (5)

By sheer serendipity we find ourselves climbing the road hugging Mount Halla, Korea's highest mountain at 1,900 meters, a somewhat listless volcano that hasn't harmed anybody in quite some time and defines Jeju Island in a sort of materialistic way, almost vulgar-marxistically so --- Jeju wouldn't be there without the volcano, Jeju in fact is the volcano in geological terms --- so we climb Road 1139 and have already reached an altitude of 1,000 m when Michael has the idea that Chang could get carsick on this sinuous path across the high altitude forest, and we U-turn and descend again. Mentioning car-sickness wasn't perhaps the best idea, Chang is starting to think about his stomach and the stomach thinks back and new, or slightly altered, thoughts feel provoked by each turn. Thought-provoking, that's what this road feels, thought-provoking.

Mount Halla

Anyhow, the worst is over when we hit a stretch of road marked by red cross-stripes. They are well-done, these stripes, each marking is slightly raised, creating a bump per mark and accentuating our downward glide in this floating American-suspension car in unmistakable ways, warning us of impending danger. We wonder which danger we're facing, no stripes mark the upward leg of the road. We cross perhaps 5-10 marks per second, thus reverberating downward in a three-dimensional alert space, visual (red stripes), proprioceptive (the position of our limbs) and auricular (vibratory humming). This goes on for a while. After two kilometers or so you would assume we've been warned enough, but the stripes won't go away, one stripe following the next with unrelenting stamina, stripe for stripe for stripe. Ever tried to count to 100,000?

"You could have invented these stripes," Michael finally says to Chang.

Car poetry

"You need one of these," a friend writes and sends this picture:

 "Perhaps you don't know," we write back, "but we've got a new car, well not so new, but it has a cool running board and sexy tires." He can't believe it, he needs to see a picture. Here it is:

And here's the cultural excuse for all this:

A car is a car
If it can ride you nearby or far

A car is a car
When it gets you in time to the bar.

Sylvia Chidi

(Editor's note: the poem continues for another 30 lines or so, which we edited out for obvious reasons)

Zurich Airport (3)

So, we are in Kloten, home of the airport (this must be the first time in creative writing that somebody attributed a "home" to an airport), and we are strolling through the lazy afternoon, and the weather improves.

We are not alone, a creek strolls through the lazy downtown setting, too.

What's wrong. What's this? In Switzerland. Something in the water, that doesn't belong there? No, it doesn't.


It's an Irish licence plate, and a fancy one at that, "en guerre" (at war). Euromess in Switzerland? What else.

Fortunately, a sense of order is quickly restored further downstream, at least in a geo-topological way:

Ditto (Siggi, Dirk)

Dirk sends this...



...and writes: "This has been around for a while but still. As the story goes, the guy that owns this house lives north of Cincinnati, Ohio .. Police were constantly being called for traffic jams and accidents in the neighborhood so they asked him to shut it down during certain hours. Instead he started charging by car load to pay off duty police to be there."

And while we are at it: