A Man

 Was a boy just last week or so,

Rude, pale flesh, hairy dong,

Perfect, but for torn flag of leg, or throat, or gut,

Interrupted by fire engine red of gore, a flower of exit wound,

All else about the man is sheathed in dun,

Dedicated dust, engineered earthtones,

Mimicry of soil,

And the man’s frantic attendants.

New Terms in German

From my 2024 trip there. I began noting these on my phone, and it became quite a list.

Talahon- quasi gang member, immigrant background, rap fan, often Muslim (learned of this before the Germany trip)

      Visiting Gabriela

bodenständig- down to earth

Adipositas- obesity

Legasteniker- dyslexic person

     Visiting Coffey

Hyrox— indoor track-and-field-type sport

Pfortader- portal vein. ??? Something to do w the organs on the right lower abdomen

Wasen- Kerwe

Kutteln- beef stomach

Herrgottsbscheißerle-Maultaschen: uh… a bakery item?

Kloster Maulbronn ??

     At Eva and Martin’s

Kirrle- durcheinander: mixed up, disorderly

Untergewand— undershirt

den Bach runter— bergab

Fibel- secondary meaning: brooch: learned  at karlsruher Schlossmuseum?

Rampensau- glory hog? Attention seeker, said of a performer

Spinalkananalstenose- pinched spinal nerve

Jostabeeren- Kreuzung zw Stachelbeeren und schwarze Johannesbeeren: cross between gooseberry and (red or black?) currants, I think

Hexenspiel— ein Kinderspiel: something easy to do?

Hausbrauerei- brewpub

Fimmel— a soft spot for something

verstaatlicht- nationalized

Hausnummer: starting price/ real estate

Wasserstandsmeldung: same thing

     At Malaika and Torsten’s

Maulbeere— mulberry

Jacke wie  Hose— same thing either way.

Bio-Bike— not an E-bike

Forellenpuff— recreational trout farm for fishing

Schlehen— urpflaume: blackthorn

Klöntsche— platt: kandiszucker

lauschig— gemütlich

Insektenhotel: log with bore holes which provides habitat

Engerling- larva of large insect: june bug, potato bug. Lives underground.

Römertopf - ceramic casserole

pedativ— said of an after school-program, not nec. v good??

linke Bazile— mean person

falscher Fuffziger— ??

langhorriger Bombeleger— left wing extremist

Schäpperle— latch

Rindspimmel— insult: bull’s penis, right?

Förderklasse— special ed

bildungsnah/ bzw. -fern— proper teem for uneducated/ better educated

     Visiting Walter, Peggy and Alex

Befindlichkeiten— facts?

Havarie-shipwreck

Henkelmann— WWII German mess  kit

Affe: German mil backpack used in pre-NS time, still used by some Boy Scouts. Note: marching song still used by German troops because it is not an NSDAP song.

des Teufelsküche— devil’s kitchen: locus of chaos, disorder, error, I think

Kontrollsucht— OCD

Befehlsnotstand— when you are forced by circumstances to follow illegal orders?

unleidlich— unausstehlich? Impossible to get along with?

Speckgürtel: suburbs of a city that benefit from it by extraction of wages and taxes

      With Claudia, DW, and Ulli. New terms most likely all from Ulli

Persianer— some kind of rug?

Geysir— geyser

Pantau— Cz Kinderserie

Hast du Hummeln im Arsch?— are you in a hurry, nervous, etc.

Bedarfshalt—??

Schotter: Geld

     Back visiting Gabriela

Mahonia— a kind of berry

befegen—??

linker [linke?] Socke— left winger

Bisamratte— nutria?

 

Kitty Update

 "You can't just let your cat dominate your life" -a friend, watching as our cat dominates aspects of our life

     There was some response when I shared a very long description of our odd cat's very odd behavior 2 summers ago. She started spending inordinate amounts of time outdoors. Then, summer before last, my son and his most excellent partner stayed in our house while we were away for a month, and she acted out again in some way that I can no longer describe well., but was well short of, say, pooping in our shoes. She did go back to her usual oddness, to wit, insistence on one indoor spot and one spot only to curl up in. Cooler weather will apparently bring her back in to us again, but she has not set foot in our house of her own accord since about March.

     If we leave town these days with a neighbor, something of a cat whisperer, looking in on Zou-Zou, then we can't really justify if for more than 1 night. When she was indoors and we left for 2 nights or so, she sometimes had very _minor_ potty problems, an anomaly for such a Good Kitty. We interpret this as a manifestation of her emotional state. We have no intention of making our kitty sad. Poor kitty!

     I'm having a hard time hitting my stride, narrative-wise, so I'll give a brief description of where she's at and leave it at that.

     Canned food please. We are a kitty of a Certain Age [17 or so] and we have certain tastes. No, not that can. Wait- that's yesterday's food fluffed up. No thank you.

     She will come to within 10 feet of the door to eat. No closer.

     No laps unless she chooses to jump up after significant amounts of foreplay, making it a commitment by the human of half an hour at least. For about 10 minutes of serious lap-sitting.

     Kitty was not blessed with a particularly dulcet-toned meow. I wonder if the neighbors flinch when she goes into her act at 5 and 5. That's morning and evening. It's OK. That's when I wake up.

     Litter box is right out. Now, she prefers to dig a hole in the soil of the garden, poop next to it, and leave it unburied. 

    Kitty Safe Places, a feature of kitty's peculiarity all her life, have included a comfy chair, one part of a carpet, a window overwatch, one spot on the couch-- NOT another, thank you very much. Oh, you wanted to watch TV? Claudia's work desk has been a favorite for all concerned parties. Now, she has moved on from the outdoors spot on the dirt where she can watch for intruding quadripeds to a place on the concrete, the wrought iron chair [there is not enough wreaking of iron these days], more dirt spots, and a cozy bit of rocks and sod. Don't ask me why.

      Claudia says kitty suffered a stroke at some point, making parallels with her late mother's troubles in her dotage. That might explain kitty's departure from the warm and cozy domestic life she had settled on. In all of this, she has stayed a handsome feline, but under her fairly luxuriant fur she is just a little bag o' bones. 

     We really hope that she is still here when Claudia returns from her vacation, but we just never know. 

     Yes, that's right. Claudia takes her vacation, and I take mine. We wouldn' wanna leave kitty All By Herself, now. Poooor kitty!!

This is not a Genealogy Story

    Nigel has begun to ask genealogical questions, starting with, "You say the girl in the painting is buried in Oakland. Let's go see the grave." The girl is a curly haired boy in the early 1800s, age 8 maybe, curly hair, Francesco Cerini. We go. I walk straight to the pillar in Oakland's old Catholic cemetery. We stop off at the office for a xerox of the names of the other 8 or 9 folks there interred.

     Oakland has 3 cemeteries close together at the end of Piedmont Ave. Catholic, Jewish, and one for Normal People [I intend this with irony: default/ protestant, not marked religious sets.] 

     The latter is mmmmassive and wondrous. 

     I've been to the grave of my Oaktown anchor before. He is Robert Holmes of the Holmes Book Store, which closed in 1995. He died in 1931, and was born in Lincolnshire. I knew the orientation and location of the grave, but there is just no way to find an ordinary gravestone at Mountain View Cemetery on your own, so I used Find A Grave online and then Google maps in a game of warmer/colder/red hot.

     When we located the stone, I saw it was angled backward about 25 degrees. Thinking it might be on a bent pin between gravestone and base, I went to right it and it fell flat.

     Great. Vandalizing graves in broad daylight. No one was around, but still.

     Turns out an 8" thick slab o' stone is right heavy. Nigel used some creative lift-with-your-back geometry and gained purchase. I got in under the stone and was able to help him actually raise it.

    I'll tell you the ending now: we placed it upright on its pins, and even wiped it off, leaving it in much better shape than when we arrived.

     Thing is, between raising it and placing it, there was quite a lot of hunching and grunting and positioning. There we were, 2 grown men humping a gravestone right there in front of gOD and ever'body.

     And laughing.

Riffing on a Name: Hawk Aircraft

                  Curtis-Wright Corporation

Hawk: Curtis fighter planes P-1 and P-3, 1923

Superhawk: P-5: same but, well, super.

Japan Hawk: P-6S exported to you guessed it.

Cuban Hawk: same.

Turkey Hawk: unable to find references. Not sure if a model exported to Turkey, or named for a raptor that ostensibly preys on turkeys.

Seahawk: naval fighter plane S7C. Term refers to an osprey.

Sparrowhawk: absolutely fascinating US Navy dirigible-based fighter that landed by matching speed with a hook below the mother ship and being hoisted within. Refers to an actual bird.

Goshawk: naval F11C fighter. Name is coterminous with “sparrowhawk”.

Hawk: fighter plane P-36, 1935

Mohawk: export version of the P-36. Not a name of a raptor, rather to an indigenous people, a recurring theme here.

Tomahawk: P-40, 1935: an improvement on the P-36 using a different engine. Name is more indigenous tomfoolery: not raptor-related, but a type of indigenous battle hatchet.

Warhawk:  P-40 in USAAF service. Marketing term, I suppose. 

Kittyhawk: same plane, cutesy name given by the UK: does not refer to any kind of hawk.

                       

Sikorsky Aircraft

 

Black Hawk: Sikorsky utility helicopter UH-60, 1974: named for an indigenous military leader. At least the US mil didn’t name this particular chopper for a vanquished indigenous people, as had been their convention before this.

Seahawk: Navy version: all one word.

Jayhawk: Coast Guard version: all one word. What precisely coastal search and rescue has to do with Kansas Jayhawk[er]s, anti-slavery guerrillas in the 1800s, I do not know.

Pave Hawk: USAF search and rescue version. “Pave” seems to be a USAF code-word applied to many suffixes, some  nonsensical, some topical such as “Hawk” in this case.

Night Hawk: UH-60 for executive transport: 2 words, as opposed to the real bird nighthawk. 

White Hawk: same: It’s painted fancy-- white on top.

Gold Hawk: same.

Battle Hawk: export gunship model. Pretty obvious.

Desert Hawk: export version for Saudi Arabia. Which is a desert.

Naval Hawk: export naval version. Seahawk wasn’t good enough?

Firehawk: firefighter version: my personal favorite, and the inspiration for this list. May refer to a comic book character or to an Australian indigenous term for birds which purposefully propagate fires, rather than fight them, in order to flush out game.

Revenge Tour Chat

 I biked around Germany in summer 2025 to avenge my 2024 summer lost to cancer treatment. I had given up Facebook, so I made a WhatsApp chat to chronicle my travels. It was not easy to preserve the chat in its original format, so I laboriously edited what I was able to download, inserting photos in, hopefully, the relevant place in the comment thread. Then I discovered that I could not upload the edited chat with photos here, so here is a link to the Google doc. Hope it works.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ePsO0VGu4UlgV1rGogjb1vno_lCC_5Ib2GR9_0kMijs/edit?usp=sharing

The Blue and the Grey

When I grew up, we used to sing "Two Brothers" ("One Wore Blue and One Wore Grey") in the living room on music nights. It was actually discussed that if we wanted to have a kepi in the costume box, it could be blue, but grey was right out. We had this graphically excellent beach towel with a Union Jack (yes, I know, 6 counties, Bengal Famine, Mau-Mau suppression), but the towel from the same company with the equally impressive Stars and Bars was not something we ever would own. 

 

I had ancestors on both sides of the American Civil War: a maternal great-great-grandfather in the New Jersey infantry, probably drafted right off the boat from Hamburg, and someone or other a unit from Mississippi. We still remember which ancestor called which other ancestor a "danged ol' Reb" on the school yard. 

 

At any rate, blue was OK, grey was not.

 

Thing is, whenever I hear the name of a state in the Midwest-- Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana-- I think of the blunt chauvinism with which men from these states prosecuted the War Between the States. I think of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Whatever you call the Civil War, whatever you think its cause (freedom for the slaves or Federal supremacy?) or its effect (national unity, or the obliteration of a heritage somehow thought to be deserving of existence?) was, it’s pretty difficult to find the happy in the whole affair.

 

Now, when I hear those same states named, I remember my feelings about the civil war. The news I hear is about their role as the places left out of the flowering of civil liberties led by the urban elites of the coastal Northeast and the West Coast in the decades following McCarthyism. I hear about how desperate, ignorant people with far too many weapons for even their own good fear a USA increasingly friendly to people of various skintones, various identities, various languages, various spiritual outlooks, various genders and various preferences of what to do with their minds and their bodies.

 

I don’t know who will achieve their goal-- those who seek freedom of existence, or those who wish to return to social oppression. As we move along, though, I keep remembering the link between the states of the Union Army and their sad, perverted descendants. 

 

Note: I wrote this in October 2020.