Cash Rules Everything Around Me

Sometimes artistry just jumps out at you, when you’re totally not expecting it.

Such was the case today when I was on the way home after having gone on a run.

I was walking on the street that leads to my house listening to my iPod when the song “C.R.E.A.M” by Wu Tang Clan came on.

I had always liked this song and I always knew the lyrics were pretty good – I had always especially liked the second verse, which talks about the hell of having to go through the prison system and being caught up in a vicious circle – but never really appreciated the first verse.

Until today. Listening to the song today on my way home, I realized that, just like the second verse, the first verse of the song is also really good. I especially appreciated the imagery in it. Anyhow, I'm going to reproduce the first verse below. I hope you like it too. 

I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side
Staying alive was no jive
Had second hands, moms bounced on old man
So then we moved to Shaolin land
A young youth, yo rockin the gold tooth, 'Lo goose
Only way, I begin to G' off was drug loot
And let's start it like this son, rollin with this one
And that one, pullin out gats for fun
But it was just a dream for the teen, who was a fiend
Started smokin woolies at sixteen
And running up in gates, and doing hits for high stakes
Making my way on fire escapes
No question I would speed, for cracks and weed
The combination made my eyes bleed
No question I would flow off, and try to get the dough off
Sticking up white boys in ball courts
My life got no better, same damn 'Lo sweater
Times is rough and tough like leather
Figured out I went the wrong route
So I got with a sick tight clique and went all out
Catchin keys from across seas
Rollin in MPV's, every week we made forty G's
Yo brothas respect mine, or anger the tech nine
Ch-POW! Move from the gate now

All you got

Sometimes giving it all you've got is as good as succeeding.

Such was the case with me recently when I attempted to have a small preview story published in local newspaper.

This story was about an art auction whose proceeds were to go toward helping refugees in Hamburg. The auction was going to take place on Sunday, so the story needed to be in the paper before that day.

However, I had totally forgotten that I wanted to write this story and when I finally did remember, I was absolutely nowhere near a computer

I know it's hard to believe that in today's day and age there was no computer to be found, but it was true.

So I knew what I had to do. I had to turn up my game and try a new approach.

I got out a spiral notebook and started drafting the story. And I mean drafting. After writing the story one time and getting it pretty much down, I rewrote the piece on another piece of paper -- a true second draft.

Then I did a third draft and a fourth. Then, because the newspaper I was pitching the piece to was a German language publication, I translated the piece into German. Then, I asked a friend who is bilingual if she could edit my translation and she did, again by good old pen and ink.

The next day, I was getting ready to type the 250-word piece into my phone and send it when someone told me that there was actually a computer in the place I was staying.

So I went over to where this computer was, but when I got there, lo and behold I discovered that the "public" computer  was a money operated affair and I needed to have change to operate it. So I went to a store nearby, bought a cup of coffee, broke a 20 euro bill, came back to the computer and tapped out the piece.

Later that day, I got an email from the editor to whom I pitched the story. She said she liked the piece and thought she'd be able to squeeze it into the Saturday paper, but could I send a photo?

Because I was under the impression that I still had a tiny bit more time, I emailed my contact insteading of calling him to ask if he had a photo.

But it turned out that I probably should have called my contact. That's because by the time I got the photo, it was the next day, and by the time I got that photo to the editor, she told me I had missed the deadline for the Saturday paper.

As they say in German, "schade" --  "What a shame."

Yes, I was disappointed that the piece wouldn't be published,  but you know what? After the editor gave me the bad news, I still felt all right. I went over in my mind all the things I had done -- all the hoops that I had jumped through to try to get this thing published -- and I felt a sense of pride.

The story is below. I don't know how good your German is, but if you want to plug it into Google translate and kind of see what you get, be my guest.

 Eine Kunst-Auktion zugunsten der Flüchtlingshilfe wird am Sonntag den
19. Juni in Altona stattfinden. Das dadurch gesammelte Geld wird
verendet um syrischen und anderen Flüchtlingen in Hamburg zu helfen.

Die Auktion wird in der St. Petri Gemeinde Stattfinden und werden die
Gemälde von sechs lokalen Künstlern versteigert.

„Nachdem ich von freiwilligen Helfern der Flüchtlinge gehört hatte,
das jeder zusätzliche Euro gebraucht wird, wusste ich, dass ich etwas
machen wollte um zu helfen,“ sagte der Altonaer Künstler Volker Burk
(75), der die Idee zu der Auktion hatte.

Der Stil der Gemälde reicht von abstrakt über surrealistisch bis
minimalistisch. Die Gemälde werden voraussichtlich 150,- bis 200,-
euros pro Stück erzielen.

Die gesamten Erlöse der Auktion werden den Maltesern gespendet, einer
der vielen Organisation die den Flüchtlingen in Hamburg helfen.

Stefanie Langost, eine Mitarbeiterin der Malteser, sagte, dass das
gesammelte Geld aus der Auktion genutzt werden wird, um Kochkurse und
andere Kurse zur Verbesserung der Lebensqualität für rund 350
Flüchtlinge in Osdorf zu finanzieren.

Die Auktion am Sonntag beginnt um 17 Uhr. Die St. Petri Gemeinde liegt
in der Schmarjestraße 33.

Transmission

Someone recently asked me what I like about writing. Well, many things, I told him, but one thing in particular is the transmission. I like to write because in doing so you can transmit things – images, sounds, feelings – to people. You can bring people to places they wouldn’t or couldn’t otherwise go. I’m trying to do a little transmitting with this post. Enjoy.

*Look up into the clear blue sky. Do you see that propeller plane with a banner tied to its tail wing? Can you read the banner? Is it an advertisement or is the message personal? 

*Do me a favor and come over here to the kitchen table. See the candle burning in the small jar? Put your palm over the flame. Yes, of course, make sure your palm is at a safe distance from the flame. But do you feel the heat? You notice, of course, how the heat increases when you move your palm closer to the flame. Blow out the candle. Don’t you love how the smoke curls up like that? Look at the wick. Notice how the tip of it is still burning a tiny bit? Blow on it and it will glow a slightly more intense orange for a second.

*Check out this photo of John Lennon. It was taken in Hamburg in 1960. Lennon is 20 years old in it. Look at his leather jacket and rockabilly hairstyle. Look at that knowing expression on his face. Lennon is in “Heiligengeistfeld,” which is basically a massive concrete lot in the middle of Hamburg. The lot is usually used to host carnivals. Anyway, look behind John Lennon. Do you see that blurred figure holding a bass guitar? That’s Stuart Sutcliffe. He was a member of the Silver Beatles, the first incarnation of what would later become the Beatles. Do you see that huge concrete structure behind him, there all the way in the background? That’s a bunker from World War II. The Nazis erected hundreds of bunkers around Hamburg and the one in this picture still stands.

*Get on the bus. No, don’t go up front and show your ticket to the bus driver. Just enter one of the side doors. Don’t sit down. Just grab onto this overhead handle. Are you secure? Good. Now look down at the floor. Do you see that intact cigarette? How did it get there? Just one single cigarette that hasn’t been smoked. Cigarettes don’t come cheap these days. It must have fallen out of someone’s pack or pocket. And now it’s just lying there. What do you think, will someone pick it up and smoke it? My money is on someone will.

*What are you doing? Do you have time to listen to something cool? Come outside. Do you hear those bells? Yeah, there are bells fixed to that building right there on the corner, and every hour they play a tune. Yes, yes, that is “Yesterday.” I know, it sounds a little funky, maybe a little off or something, but that is “Yesterday.” You can hear it, right? I believe in yesterday. Isn’t it crazy that a song written by Paul McCartney in 1966 is played by a bunch of bells that have been affixed to a building in Hamburg and are programmed to play a song every hour? I mean, where else is that song played every day? In how many department stores and supermarkets? In how many elevators? Yes, that absolutely is "Yesterday." I believe in yesterday.

*Do you see that woman holding a baby? She’s walking into the supermarket right now. At first you didn’t notice that she was holding a baby, right? If you were like me, the first thing you noticed was her short shorts and those tattoos. You don’t see? She’s got a five pointed star tattooed on the back of each of her upper thighs. It’s like some kind of rock-n-roll sexy thing, I don’t know. But, yeah, she’s holding a baby. I think it's swaddled in some kind of wrap that's tied to her neck.

*Do you hear that warbling and chirping? Those are the birds that live in the trees that line the street. You don’t see those birds, but they are there, singing and chirping and twittering away. When can you expect to hear their tunes? Around sunrise and sunset.

A visitor in the gazebo

So my girlfriend and I had a very interesting interaction with a stranger today.

It all started when we went to the park to walk our dog. Because it was raining, we decided to head over to an area in the park where there was a gazebo.

We were sitting on a bench in the gazebo, just chatting — there was hardly anyone else in the park because it was coming down pretty hard — when a small guy with caramel skin entered our vicinity.

The guy was wearing a heavy coat and had a wine bottle in one hand, and the first thing I thought to myself when I saw him was “Oh no, here comes trouble.”

He walked into the gazebo and began talking to us, but it wasn’t in German. He was speaking French.

“Joli chien,” he said and pointed to our dog. I just nodded and smiled. My girlfriend knows a little French and is currently taking a French course, so she said something back to him.

Though I didn’t understand what he or she was saying, I was able to gather quickly that this guy didn’t mean any harm. And since I knew that he was going to be more interested in talking with my girlfriend, I figured I would just observe.

He put his wine bottle down on the gazebo’s cement floor and again took interest in my dog, a grey Weimaraner.

“Joli,” he said and petted the dog. He then said a few things that neither my girlfriend nor I understood. When my dog walked away and returned with a stick, he picked it up and made a gesture as if he would throw it.

“Puis-je jeter le bâton?”

We nodded and he threw the stick toward a childrens play area, which was nearby. The man then asked my girlfriend if she spoke French. Though she said, ‘juste un petit peu,’ he replied to her with a quick and abundant stream of words. Despite our inability to understand the majority of what he had said, we were able to gather at least that he was from Dijon.

He then said something that I was able to piece together, “Le monde entier sait Dijon à cause de notre senf.”

I knew that “le monde” meant “the world” and that in German “senf” meant mustard, so I was almost sure he had said something like, “The whole world knows Dijon because of our mustard.”

When the dog returned, he said, “Ceci est un bon chien.” My dog had dropped the stick right by his feet and was looking directly up at him, indicating that she wanted him to throw it again.

“Le chien a fait un nom français,” – the dog has a French name – my girlfriend said. Though the man didn’t seem to notice that she had said this, when she said, “Filou. Le nom du chien est Filou,” he snapped to attention. “Ah, Filou,” he said.

He then said a bunch of things that my girlfriend didn't understand. Miraculously, though, somewhere in the middle of all that he had said, I heard the words “pit bull.”

“Oh, pit bull!” I said. “Oui, oui, pit bull,” he replied and looked at me. He had a thick black beard made up of straight black hairs and his eyes were a shade lighter than his skin.

He then said something in French that I didn’t understand except for the word “malady.” Once I heard that word, though, I said, “Oh, sick, malady.” “Oui, oui," he said, "malady.”

He then held up four fingers and in German said, “ende.” We gathered that he was telling us that he once had a dog and that dog had died at age four from a sickness.

My girlfriend expressed her sympathy and then pointed down to Filou, who had rain drops on her forehead and was hunching her back, expectedly waiting for the guy to throw the stick again. “Trois,” she said.

“Ah, trois,” the man said, pointing to the dog. He then picked up the stick and with an excited and mischievous look in his eyes told my girlfriend to go pick up another stick. She complied and he then told her, or more like gestured to her, that on his signal she should run from him in the opposite direction.

When he gave the signal, Filou followed her and at this moment, the man took off with his stick and attempted to hide it from Filou. But the dog was too smart, noticed what was going on and immediately switched her course and ran toward him.

“Non!” he laughed when Filou caught up with him by the childrens play area. Filou tried to grab the stick but the moment she made a move for it, he threw it as far as he could. He and my girlfriend then came back to the gazebo.

“Ç’est froid,” it’s cold, my girlfriend said. “Oui, froid,” he replied. “But,” she said, “you’ve got your wine.” At this he took slight offence. He said that it wasn’t wine he was drinking but another kind of liquor. To me it looked like a bottle of white wine.

“Cette boisson est forte,” he said and then turned the bottle to show us the label, which said that the beverage was 11 percent alcohol by volume.

 He then opened the bottle and took a sip. After that, he said something in French that my girlfriend and I did not understand. When he saw we were lost, he pointed to the roof of the gazebo and then made a wagging gesture with his pointer finger to indicate “no.”

“You don’t have a home?” my girlfriend said in English. “No,” he said, “no home.” Then in French and a tiny bit of German, he told us that because he is French, the German government won’t give him any subsidies or benefits. “Ils me disent qu'ils ne peuvent pas me aider parce que je suis français.”

He then said something about being French and how he always has his French passport ready if the police harass him.

When Filou returned with the stick and dropped it on the gazebo floor, we all had to laugh at how consistent she was. When the man again threw the stick, he said something in French that sounded mirthful.

By this point, though, I was very cold — it was a cold, rainy day in Hamburg, after all — and when my girlfriend told me that she was cold, too, I asked her if she wanted to go. When she said that she did, I stood up and zipped my coat up all the way.

The guy saw that we wanted to leave but said he wanted to show us something first and it was at that point that I realized how difficult his situation must have been.

He unzipped that big coat of his and underneath it was another coat. And under that was a huge fleece zip up. And under that was yet another coat. And in the pocket of that last coat was his passport. He wanted to show us his passport, but I couldn’t help but notice that his attire was definitely consistent with someone who lives on the street.

“Je suis un Français,” he said. He then pointed to his name on his passport and we repeated it just to make sure that we got it right. As we were doing this, my girlfriend noticed that he had just had a birthday two days prior. “Oh, it was your birthday,” she said. “Oui, oui,” he replied.

“Herzlichen glückwunsch,” I said, thinking that maybe he would recognize those words. He didn’t and he didn’t understand “congratulations” either. But when I gave him a thumbs-up and pointed at his birth date on his passport, he smiled and rolled his eyes, like “of course!” “Je comprends,” he said.

We all began to walk out of the gazebo and as we did he said something to my girlfriend in a lower tone. “Oh, yes, OK,” she said. She then took out her wallet and gave him the rest of the change that she had. I looked in his hand after she gave him the money and saw that she had given him about one euro and 60 cents.

When we parted from the guy, I said to my girlfriend, “Geeze, a euro sixty. I don’t think you’ve ever given that much money to any person on the street before.”

“Yeah, what can I say,” she said. “He needs it. And he played with Filou all that time and I got to practice my French. It was worth it.”

I nodded. “Yeah," I said. "I liked that guy...There was something about his vibe that I liked.”

The nicest act of kindness

Here is something I wrote in my personal journal. Enjoy. 

I witnessed the nicest act of kindness a few minutes ago.

I was walking down a street here in Hamburg called Steintordamm when I witnessed this act of kindness.

Steintordamm is near the Hamburg Central Station. More specifically, it’s near the southern entrance of the central station, which is known as "Hauptbahnhof Süd."

Hauptbahnhof Süd, to be frank, is kind of seedy. Usually, one can find all kinds of "interesting" people there.

Anyway, as I was walking down Steintordamm near Hauptbahnhof Süd, I saw a man completely passed out on the sidewalk. As I approached him, I didn’t think much of what I was seeing. I mean, I did think that he was in pretty bad condition, as he was totally laid out on the pavement. But for the most part, I thought that what I was seeing fit the bill for this part of town.

I was ready just to pass this guy like it was any other day, and that’s when it happened – the nicest act of kindness.

A teenage girl who was approaching the man from the opposite direction that I was knelt down beside him and put some change near his hand. 

After the girl got back to a standing position, I tried to make eye contact with her to express my approval, but she didn’t make eye contact with me.

I thought she was very kind for giving the man money, but it was only until I actually walked past the man and saw how much she gave him that I was really impressed.

There, next to his dirt caked fingers were three euros.

The man was just lying there, completely passed out, not doing anything to try to earn the money, not giving any sob story, not even holding up a sign...and then this girl, a girl who for whatever reason found it in herself to shell out money to a man who would never know who she was and could not thank her for her generosity. 

It was the nicest act of kindness.

outsider

Recently someone asked me if I was accustomed to living in Germany. I told the person I was because for the most part, I am. But today I had an experience that made me realize that I really am an outsider, that this is not my country and Germany is something I can only try to understand.

I was lying in my bed around 7 a.m. when I suddenly heard the sound of my next-door neighbor’s TV. But instead of hearing something recognizable, something that I might hear on T.V. in the United States around 7 a.m., I heard something else. An old German ballad. See, my neighbor was watching what sounded like a classic German film and in it, an actor was crooning.

As I lied there and listened to the actor singing, I realized that I was listening to a song I had never before heard and that this song belonged to a movie I had never before seen. I also realized that even if I was told the name of the movie, I would probably have no idea what the significance of it was or why someone would want to watch it, or watch it again, at 7 a.m.

Now, if I would have heard “Casablanca” coming from my neighbor’s apartment, I might have thought to myself that my neighbor was nostalgic for movies that came out while America was in the grips of World War II, or if I would have heard the “Wizard of Oz," coming from his apartment, I might have thought that maybe my neighbor used watch to the “Wizard of Oz” with his parents or with a grandparent and he just wanted to watch it again.

But I had no idea why my neighbor wanted to watch the film he was watching because I had nothing to anchor onto. The actors’ voices were not familiar and neither was the song.

Which sort of brings me to my next point. Had the lyrics of the song that the actor was singing been in English, I might have been able to understand what the movie was generally about and why my neighbor wanted to watch it. But the actor was singing in German, and I didn’t understand the lyrics. 

And as I lied there and listened to that song, whose lyrics I didn’t understand, in a country that was not my own, I was humbled.

Objects from my childhood

I was walking in a park with my girlfriend the other day when she asked me a strange question: “Are there free water fountains in New York City?” she wanted to know.

For a second, I wasn’t sure. I have been living in Germany for so long now, it’s sometimes hard to remember such things. But eventually the answer came to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got free water fountains. But they’re usually in parks.”

“Oh, OK, that’s cool,” she said.  “I just wanted to know because my university is thinking of installing water fountains. I was just curious.”

I said that that was fine but for some reason didn’t drop the subject. “Yeah,” I continued, “the water fountains we had in our parks in New York City were rock solid. They were usually made of stone or concrete and looked like they could withstand a nuclear blast. I remember the one I used to drink out of at my old park. It was, like, a waist-high cement box with a cement footstool at the base.

“Really?” she said. “Yeah,” I replied, and then we both said nothing for a little bit. Eventually, I broke the silence.  “Jeez,” I said, “now you got me thinking of the water fountain that used to be in my old school yard!”

There was delight in my voice when I said this because I hadn’t thought of that water fountain in so long and thinking of it brought back a lot of memories.

After this conversation with my girlfriend, I began to think of other objects from my childhood, and I decided to write a post about them. Enjoy.

The Nintendo gun controller.

When I was about 4 years old, a family friend bought me a “Nintendo Entertainment System.” It came with two games, two controllers, some kind of robot – whose purpose totally baffled me at the time – and a gun shaped controller. This gun shaped controller, officially called a “Zapper,” was for shooting games like “Duck Hunt.” I remember thinking that this gun controller, which had a red trigger and a long gray muzzle, was the coolest thing ever. I still remember the clicking sound it made when you pulled the trigger.

The pennants on my wall.

In the very first apartment that I lived in, my mother and I shared a room. She slept in a king-size bed on one side of the room and I slept in a twin bed on the other side. My bed abutted a wall and I remember that I decorated that wall with pennants. One of the pennants was made to celebrate the Mets’ 1986 World Series victory, another had Epcot Center printed on it.

My mother’s silver cigarette case.

Until I was about 16 years old, my mom smoked one cigarette per day. Her brand was Marlboro Lights and she always got the soft pack. She would store the soft pack in a boxy silver case. The case, which I’m sure she acquired on one of her many trips, was embossed with a wavy pattern and was elegant looking.

The pack of nude women playing cards.

As far as I know, my mother is not gay and never has been gay. But for some reason, she kept a pack of nude women playing cards in her night stand. As a child, I remember looking at these cards with wonderment. The photos were not X-rated, but those were naked women all right. I remember wondering why my mom had these cards and thinking that maybe they belonged to my dad.

My Ivy League sweatshirts.

When I was in the third, fourth and maybe even the fifth grade, my goal was to go to Harvard or Yale. I told my mom about this – or was she the one who actually convinced me that I wanted to go to an Ivy League school? – and she subsequently bought me several Ivy League sweatshirts. I remember I would wear these Ivy League sweatshirts to school very often. I had Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Brown.

The swings at my old schoolyard.

Almost every day after elementary school, I would go down to the schoolyard that was behind the school and spend a couple hours there playing with my friends. We would usually play touch football or basketball, but sometimes we would just go down to the swings and hang out on them. I loved these swings because the seats were flat boards made of sturdy rubber, which meant you could stand and pump, too. I remember standing on one of these swings and pumping so hard and getting so high that my body was almost parallel to the ground.

My aviator sunglasses with the red frames.

One day when I was about 8 years old, I got it in my head that I was seeing “colors in front of my eyes.” Was I really seeing colors in front of my eyes? I’m not sure. What I think I might have been seeing were those color-fringed black spots that one seems to see after looking away from a bright light. Whatever the case, I thought sunglasses might make the color spots go away, so I asked my mom to buy me a pair of aviators -- these cool ones with red frames. I think I started to realize that maybe I was just being a little crazy after I went into class one day wearing these glasses and my teacher and classmates were like, “Uh...why are you wearing sunglasses inside?”

My boom box.

For my 7th birthday, I received the coolest present ever: A Panasonic boom box. Believe it or not, but right after I received the boom box, I walked around my neighborhood with it, blasting “La Bamba.” (I think I might have even worn cut-off L.A. Gear gloves while doing this.) Some other tunes that this stereo went on to play: “Ice Ice Baby” and “Hungry Eyes.”

The seats at the Baskin Robbins.

A main drag for shopping in Forest Hills, the Queens neighborhood I grew up in, was 108th Street between 63rd Road and 65th Ave. Among the supermarkets, fruit stores, drug stores, dry cleaners, pizza places and other establishments on this strip was a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop. I used to go to this Baskin Robbins often and I remember the seats that were inside the shop. The seats looked like something you might find in a classroom, as they had arm desks.

interesting dream

I had a very interesting dream the other night.

I was sitting in my mother’s living room and one of the two cats I grew up with was by my side.

Both cats I grew up with, Maya and Amber, have since died, but in the dream they were alive and Amber was the one next to me.

I’m not sure why, but as I was sitting there with Amber, I began to get the feeling that there was a monster behind the door to my boyhood room. And I even knew this monster’s name, Org.

Now, one would think that I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near my room, considering that I believed a monster to be in it. But I decided to investigate.

I started walking toward my room and once I was outside the door, I got down on my belly and through the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door I peered into my old digs.

And what I saw was no monster. Quite the opposite, in fact. Filling up my field of view were four small paws and four legs. Maya, my other cat, was standing immediately on the other side of the door. There was no monster named Org in there, just a cute little cat.

An interesting dream indeed.

You know, sometimes it pays to have a little faith.


The other day I was in a flower shop trying to decide which flowers I should buy for my girlfriend. She had told me that she likes lilies, but the only lilies in the shop hadn’t opened yet and didn’t look very appealing.


Surely, it was a better idea to just buy roses. After all, the roses had already opened and were quite beautiful.


But my girlfriend had said that she likes lilies, and even though I had no clue what the lilies would look like once they opened up – in the shop they just looked like green stalks with green buds on the end – I bought them anyway.


And I’m glad I did.


The lilies have since opened and every time I see them in my kitchen, I can’t help but think how beautiful they are. The petals are red with black tiger spots and the flowers themselves just have a very striking shape.

I’m sure my girlfriend would have been happy with the roses had I chosen to get them. But I’m glad I trusted my gut. The reward was much greater.

A while since I heard that one

Living in Germany, I always get the same question from people: Do you miss the United States?

And I always tell them the same thing: Not desperately, but sometimes I do, yes.

Well, something happened the other day that definitely made me miss the U.S.

I was in a class teaching English and one of my students — he was a clever guy, who I think had spent some time living in New York — said a phrase that I hadn’t heard in a long time.

See, for some reason, another student had asked me what would happen if she got caught cheating on a test in the United States. Would the teacher fail her automatically, she wanted to know, or would the teacher give her a second chance.

“Oh, you would definitely fail,” I told her. And that was when the student who had lived in New York spoke up, “Yeah, you would fail,” he said, “do not pass 'Go,' do not collect $200.”

And there it was. “Do not pass 'Go,' do not collect $200.” Wow, it had been so long since I had heard someone use that phrase, at least in a sarcastic way.

Now, don’t get me wrong, people in Germany speak English very well. They can hold normal conversations as well as sophisticated ones. But there are certain words and turns of phrases that only native speakers use or are aware of.

And “Do not pass 'Go,' do not collect $200” is definitely one of them.

Hearing the phrase after not having heard it for so long just made me miss being surrounded by people who really spoke my language, who I could communicate perfectly with, who really understand the humor behind certain sayings and the import of certain words.

After the student said the "Do not pass 'Go'" phrase, he looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, “You like how I know that, right?”

And I guess, in the end, I sort of did. Though the phrase made me miss home, it also, if just for a moment, brought me closer to it.

My morning

I'm not exactly sure how to describe the following post. Maybe one part writing exercise, one part diary entry? Whatever the case, enjoy.

I just felt like giving a rundown of my morning this Saturday, so here goes. Today I woke up at 7:45 a.m. For some reason, I have not been able to sleep past 8 a.m. for the last few weeks. In a way this is good, but sometimes it’s nice just to sleep late. After I woke up, I hung out in bed with Maya for a little bit, just talking. Maya and I often do this. We chat with each other about this or that before actually getting up. Today we chatted about where we might live one day. Maya said that maybe it would be a good idea to live in Montreal. After all, in Montreal, she said, she could speak French and still live in a European-like environment and I could write for an English-speaking publication. It’d be a win-win situation. I told Maya that Montreal wasn’t a bad idea and we discussed the possibly a little further. After that, we got up and had breakfast. It’s fun eating breakfast with Maya. We always get into pretty interesting discussions. Today we discussed how skilled the writers of the series "Suits" are at evoking pathos and how we can't help but feel bad for the show's bad guy sometimes. When breakfast was finished, we decided to take our dog, Filou, to the park for a walk. Although. . . I guess that’s not entirely true. At first I wanted nothing to do with walking Filou. It was raining outside and I just did not feel like subjecting myself to such weather. But then Maya said that she really didn’t want to go alone, and I caved. When we got to the park, we let Filou off the leash. Maya and I also usually have good chats when we're at the park with the dog and today was no different. As Filou pranced about in a wide open field, Maya and I talked about the importance of having strong relationships. I told Maya that I felt as though establishing strong relationships was a great way to fortify oneself against all the pain and heartache that exists in the world. Maya agreed but said that one has to be careful when in a relationship with another person. When I asked her what exactly she meant, she said, “In order to remain happy, you shouldn’t take on another person’s pain. You should feel bad for people when appropriate, but you shouldn’t take on their pain.” I told Maya I agreed with her but am not sure I really do. When we decided that Filou had had enough time off the leash, we called her back, put her on the leash and went home. 

Beating the winter blues

I’ll make this short. I sometimes write for a small newspaper here in Germany called the Eimsbüttler Nachrichten. Usually, I pitch stories to the editors at this newspaper. But a few days ago, an editor at the Eimsbüttler Nachrichten approached me with an idea. She wanted me to write about what winter in New York City is like and how it stacks up against winter in Hamburg. (We had been having some seriously cold weather in Hamburg, so the weather was sort of on everyone's mind.) 

I agreed to do the piece, and after I submitted it, the editor said she thought it would also be nice if I included a few paragraphs at the end about how to beat the winter blues. I said OK and did. Only there had been a misunderstanding between us. She had wanted me to write about how to beat the winter blues in Hamburg. I wrote tips about how to beat the winter blues in New York City. After the misunderstanding was cleared up, I rewrote the article according to her wishes.

But excising what I had written about New York made me kind of sad, because I liked what I had written.

Hence, this blog post. Below are my tips for beating the winter blues in New York City. I'm glad that I was able to pick up these scraps off the cutting room floor and use them here. I think they have value.

*

Stroll down Fifth Avenue and check out the decorations. Fifth Avenue, in Midtown, is considered a major shopping street, and during the winter, many of the shops that line it decorate their storefronts with beautiful lights and garlands. Some department stores even set up holiday-themed tableaus in their storefront windows. A walk down Fifth Avenue in the winter will surely lift spirits.

Find a nice, cozy bakery and eat something delicious. New York City is filled with fantastic bakeries, like the Magnolia Bakery, which sells cupcakes that are to die for, or Junior's, which is famous for its cheesecake. Visit one of these places or any other with a friend and let your spirits be revived by the warmth, the company and the yummy eats.

Take a walk through a place that’s not so populated. Usually, New York City is teeming with people. But during the winter, fewer people tend to be just out and about. This gives you the opportunity to freely explore a place of your choice, an experience that can be both invigorating and inspiring, especially in New York. Two places I recommend visiting under such circumstances: Central Park in Manhattan and the former World’s Fair grounds in Queens.

I can write like Hemingway!

Hemingway often spends a long time describing the orientation of the physical objects in his fiction. It may sound funny, but trees often "line roads" in Hemingway's works.

You know, it’s funny. As a writer, it’s very hard to turn off your writing brain. Even when you’re just reading for pleasure. For example, I’m currently rereading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and every time I pick it up, I can’t help but notice Hemingway’s writerly mannerisms. I mean, these mannerisms (if that’s what you want to call them; I almost think of them as tricks) are great. They're what make Hemingway Hemingway.

But they are very noticeable. For example, we all know that Hemingway’s sentences are often terse. But he also has a tendency to mention the things that are not there: “When I woke in the morning I went to the window and looked out. It had cleared and there were no clouds on the mountains.” He also often makes these sweeping generalizations using very simple words: “Bayonne is a nice town. It’s like a very clean Spanish town."And my favorite, he has these sentences in which a thing or feature of a thing being described leads into the description of another thing: “It was good to get out of the sun and under the shade of the arcade that runs all the way around the square.”

I decided to have some fun and write about an actual experience from my life as if I were Hemingway. The experience: on a recent trip to France, my girlfriend and I decided to drive the back roads to our destination instead of taking the highway because we wanted to avoid tolls. Now, just so you know, in this little exercise of mine, I'm going to embellish a little -- especially with parts where I mention alcohol. I hardly ever drink alcohol and I certainly wouldn't drink in a car! 

But let's see if we can pull this off. A real-life experience of mine, as told by "Hemingway." 

We decided to take the back roads to Annecy because we didn’t want to pay for tolls. Maya turned off the highway and started onto a road that had fields on either side. The day was warm and I had my window down. I looked out at the fields. In the distance was a small house and beyond the house were a few trees that gave shade to a barn that belonged to the house. I asked my girlfriend if I could turn the radio on but she said that she would prefer if it was left off because she had a headache from the beers we had had at the bar the night before and besides, she wanted to concentrate on the countryside.  

We kept on driving. At one point the road dipped down and then rose up before quickly dipping down again, but when we arrived at the small village that had been announced by the signs flanking the road, the road leveled. 

The village was very charming and it was very small and there were flower baskets hanging from the the street lamps along the main thoroughfare. After driving a little more we came to a fork in the road and there was a small stone church near the fork. Only a few people were in the streets and they were old or at least middle-aged or older. 

We didn’t know which road to choose so we took the one that led right and the moment we did I had the feeling that we had made the wrong decision and that we should have gone down the road that led left. But we took the road that led right. We drove down it slowly and on either side when you looked out the car windows were two-story houses like the kind you might see on the immediate outskirts of an industrial American city. The houses had stoops in front of them and a group of young kids were hanging around one of the stoops but they weren't looking at us. At the end of the road were large hedges and I think there were train tracks beyond the hedges but I’m not sure. I told my girlfriend to turn around and she did.

By this point the day had become very hot and I asked my girlfriend if she had packed the drinks and did she pack the ice in the cooler like I had requested and she told me that she had, so I got the ice out of the cooler and put it into a cup that I had with me in the front seat. As she drove back up the road I poured some soda and a little scotch into the cup with the ice and I mixed it and I waited for it to all settle before I took a sip. The drink was nice because the day had become so hot and I had been thinking for a pretty long while about how good it would be to have a drink, but not a drink with too much scotch. My girlfriend looked at me and asked why I had to have alcohol, but it is legal in France for the passenger of a car to drink alcohol and I told her that we weren’t breaking the law.

anecdote

Here's a funny little anecdote.

A few nights ago, I was at my mom’s apartment and she and I were on the balcony. It was a nice night with a nice warm breeze, I had my guitar, and we were just sitting out there chatting.

Eventually, the conversation began to peter out, and when it did, I suggested we play a game. We had played this game before, and it goes like this: I play a song on my guitar and my mom has to guess whether the song is mine — i.e., whether I wrote it — or if someone else did.

My mom agreed to play and said, “OK, go.”

And so I did. The song I chose was “Real Love,” off the Imagine soundtrack. I played the first verse:

"All the little boys and girls/living in this crazy world/all they really needed from you/is maybe some love."

“So what do you think?” I asked. “Did I write that song or did someone else?”

My mom grinned. “Publish it” was all she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked

“That's not yours.”

“Yes it is!” I said.

“Publish it then," she said. "If that's yours, that is, like, wow, beyond amazing."

I must say, at this point I was pretty impressed. After all, I had only played the first verse, though the chord progression was signature John Lennon: D, D major 7, B minor, A augmented.

“OK, it's not mine," I said.

“I didn't think so.”

“It's John Lennon.”

“Ya see; I could tell."

What can I say, the woman's got a good ear.

The penny drops

You know, it's funny how and when certain things just come to you.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, Great Neck, there’s this village called Thomaston. Thomaston is very residential, quiet and pretty. Anyway, when I was younger, I always used to notice that there were these stickers on the backs of many street signs in Thomaston. The stickers were white, square and had the letters "V.T." printed on them. 

Anyway, I used to always wonder what that "V.T." stood for. I had been very much into graffiti when I was younger, so for the longest time, I thought that "V.T." was a tagger and that these were his stickers. I had had some other guesses about what "V.T." possibly stood for, but for the most part, the meaning behind those letters just always puzzled me. 

Fast forward to today. On Tuesday, I arrived home from Germany after not having been in the United States for two and a half years. I didn't feel like doing much the first few days after my arrival, but today, I decided to go running. And I decided to go running in Thomaston. 

So there I was, running through Thomaston. I chose to run in Thomaston because, well, it's pretty and quiet, remember? 

On the last leg of my run, I looked at the back of a stop sign, and guess what I saw. Yup, one of those "V.T." stickers. Once I saw it, I said to myself, "Wow, they still have those mysterious stickers up." But then almost immediately after I thought that, I finally realized: "V.T." It’s not a tagger or anything mysterious. "V.T." means “Village of Thomaston.” Those stickers were placed on the backs of the signs to show that the signs are the village's property.

Incredible. It took, like, a childhood and not living in the United States for two and a half years for that penny to finally drop.

This is something I experienced today here in Hamburg, Germany.

I was riding the bus with my girlfriend around 11 a.m. We had just bought a small piece of furniture and were transporting it back to our apartment. The bus was pretty crowded. At one stop, a man in his 60s or 70s got on. As he was walking further into the bus for a seat, I heard him grumble something that had the word "Ausländer" in it. "Ausländer" means "foreigner" in German. I didn't know exactly what the man said, but I definitely heard the word "Ausländer," and it did not sound nice.

When the man made this comment, it created a tension in the bus. Already I saw in my girlfriend's eyes that she was not happy. She looked at me and said something like, "Did you hear that?" I said, "Yeah; is he crazy or something?" But because I hadn't fully understood the man or the situation fully, I didn't feel like pursuing it too much further.

But then, I noticed this other woman. She was probably in her mid 20s and she had a baby swaddled around her chest in a sling. She turned to this guy -- she must have been max four feet away from him -- and said in German, "A little ignorant, what you just said, don't you think?" And she had a really cold and strong look in her eye. A few other people sort of snapped to attention when she said this, and my girlfriend said something like, "Yeah, exactly."

The man, who by this time was seated, did not respond to her comment. Instead, he said, "What a cute baby." But the woman wasn't having it. "Yeah," she said, "wonderful. A baby. A little stupid what you said." The man, trying to diffuse the situation or just plain oblivious asked if the baby was a boy or a girl. The women, still with this very cold and strong look in her eye, completely undeterred, said, "It doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl. What you need to know is the baby is not a racist."

At this comment, which I initially didn't understand -- it was only later that my girlfriend translated for me -- several people on the bus laughed and nodded in agreement.

When my girlfriend and I got out at our stop, I asked her what had exactly happened in there. She said that what seemed to have happened was that there was an Indian woman sitting in one of the first few seats of the bus -- those reserved for the elderly and the disabled -- and when this man got on, he saw her in this seat and made a racist remark.

Hence, my having heard the word "Ausländer."

I gotta say, I'm sad that people still dare to make such remarks, but the reaction of that woman and the other people in the bus really impressed me.

Reflecting

A few pages from my personal journal: 

So it’s weird. I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood lately. Just two minutes ago, I was in the bathroom and the image of John Ritter popped into my mind. John Ritter and the sound of his voice and “Three’s Company.” The way that set looked. Watching that show on our 13-channel Zenith TV. Just me and my mom. Actually, we would never watch “Three’s Company” together.

You know, it’s funny. I remember watching all those shows from the '70s/early '80s and wondering about them. There always used to be something about them that was beyond my understanding. Those shows are ancient history now. But I suppose they were pretty much about the same things that today’s shows are: love, sex, dating, strife. But, Christ, "The Regal Beagle." I remember that the sound of that name, “The Regal Beagle,” had had a fantastic effect upon my ear. I had no idea what the name really meant or why it was funny; I simply liked the sound of it. Sort of like how I used to like the sound of the book title “The Borne Ultimatum” and the band name “Deaf Leopard” without really knowing what those things really were.  


But yeah . . . thinking about my childhood. Now that I’m in my 30s, my memory is not less clear. It’s still clear. But now things take on more of an understood significance. This was the era that I was living in. Cordless phones and shoulder pads, boom boxes and cars that looked very big and boxy. 


Tonight one of my friends and I watched “The Fly.” It’s from 1986. I remarked before the movie started how my mother didn't let me watch it when it came out. Funnily enough, while watching the movie,  I found myself nostalgic for the era in which it played and also in awe of the deep feelings the characters expressed toward each other. Here was passion. Here was lust. Here was unrequited love. All during a time when I was, what, 4 years old? People had these passions, these desires. People were actresses and were reaching a high point in their careers -- all when I was 4! 


Gina Davis was an absolute stunner in the movie: pouty lips, sexy, fit. And as I watched the film, I kept thinking, “What does Gina Davis look like today? Did she age? She must’ve aged. Maybe she didn’t age.” But of course she aged! The move was made 30 years ago! But I didn’t want her to have aged. I wanted things to be as they were. Why? 


Life is marching on, and I’m really starting to reflect, I guess. I’m starting to hear mortality click its nails on the desk. 


And so I think of my childhood. In flashes, it comes back to me: That time when my mom gave away my watch to the kid who ruined his because she thought I wouldn’t know the difference between a broken watch and a working one. Lying on the big red rug in the air-conditioned Queens apartment in the summer. The sound of the announcer on Channel 11 -- or was it Channel 9? -- when he would say, “And now back to [the Late Movie].” Watching my mom from my bedroom as she watched TV and as I tried to go to sleep. The sound of the thick rubber ball echoing off the hallway wall as I played catch with myself. 


Yes, there is a lot to remember. I don’t know, as I and the people around me get older, I find myself reaching for something. I can’t say exactly what it is.

Taylor Swift concert T-shirts made in Bangladesh -- a little hypocritical?

I’m not going to lie: I like Taylor Swift. I think her music is catchy and her lyrics are potent. I even like her as a person and think it was cool that she recently persuaded a huge corporation like Apple to pay artists their fair share of royalties.

So I was a little disappointed when I bought a Taylor Swift T-shirt at her concert in Amsterdam in late June and saw that the garment was made in Bangladesh.

It seemed a little hypocritical. We all know that Bangladesh’s garment workers are paid some of the lowest wages in the world. In 2013, a Bangladeshi garment factory that produced clothes for big Western labels collapsed, killing about 1,130 people.

Granted, just because catastrophes have occurred in Bangladesh’s garment industry does not mean the Bangladeshi factory used to produce Taylor Swift’s concert tees is a bad one. And since that 2013 factory collapse, a concerted effort has been made to improve safety in Bangladesh’s garment industry.

Still, looking at the label on Taylor Swift’s concert tee and seeing “Made in Bangladesh” just didn’t sit well with me, especially because she had just won so much praise for championing the rights of the underdog.

So I decided to send out a few emails with some questions in them to see if anyone could address my consternation.

The first email I sent was to Stoked PR, which handles public relations for Swift. The founder of the firm, Kate Head, actually wrote me back. She said, “The manufacturing company responsible for the [concert] shirts operates under a global code of conduct, which is one of the highest in the industry.”

OK, fair enough. But this is what I had expected. I didn’t think that Taylor Swift’s people were going to tell me that her clothes are produced in slums. Head also said in her email that someone from the company that produces the shirts would contact me in a business day with more information.

OK, that was nice, but I didn’t want to wait a business day. So I did the practical thing. I went over to my closet, got out the T-shirt and looked at the name of the company on the label. It said “Gildan.” I then went to my computer and emailed the Montreal-based company with some questions.

In a couple hours, I had a response from Geneviève Gosselin, Gildan’s director of PR, and I must admit, I found her email very informative.

Gildan, she wrote, is a global apparel producing company of 42,000 employees. The bulk of the company’s garment factories is in Central America -- places like Nicaragua and Honduras -- but Gildan also owns facilities in the United States, and in 2010 purchased a facility in Bangladesh to boost sales in Europe and Asia.

The Bangladeshi facility, she said, employs about 2,300 workers who earn “significantly more than the basic minimum wage” (though she wouldn’t say how much more). In addition, these employees receive healthcare from a medical team that the company employs. “In Bangladesh alone, our medical team provides more than 45,000 instances of medical attention to our employees per year.”

OK, I thought. Gildan does its part. Which of course is only right. The company, after all, has an $8.2 billion market capitalization.

More interesting to me was this: When Gildan purchased the Bangladeshi factory, Gosselin said, it hired a U.S. firm to inspect the structure’s integrity. As a result of that firm’s findings, “Considerable resources were allocated to reinforce the building structures with structural steel and reinforced concrete.” In addition, Gosselin said, the factory is continually inspected to make sure it is up to code.

Gosselin then went on to give a litany of other critical safety practices that are exercised at the facility, practices that the Fair Labor Association has approved.

OK, OK. But I still didn’t understand something. After that catastrophic factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, many well known brands, trade unions and nonprofits came together and created “The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh,” a legally binding agreement to maintain basic safety standards in the Bangladeshi textile industry.

Brands must pay a significant amount of money to join the Accord -- money that’s used to fund the Accord’s various safety initiatives. Though not a panacea, the Accord is one way that brands can show that they are willing to shell out the kind of cash needed to improve safety in the country’s garment industry.

Why, I wanted to know, hadn’t Gildan joined the Accord?

Gosselin had an answer. Most of the companies that signed the Accord, she said, only outsource labor to Bangladesh. But Gildan also owns the actual factory in which the clothes are made. Therefore, “We believe we have the ability to directly implement our own strict standards."

Even so, some of Gildan’s customers signed the Accord, so Accord inspectors recently inspected Gildan’s factory in Bangladesh. Gildan will publish the findings of that undertaking in its next corporate report.

OK, I thought. Pretty good. Of course, I’m not fully satisfied. Multinational companies are still reaping mega profits from the low cost of labor in Bangladesh; the minimum wage in the Bangladeshi garment industry, $68 a month, is still, according to a 2013 Bangladesh Institute of Labor Studies report, 32 percent less than the amount needed to make basic ends meet; and some of Gildan’s factories in Central America have been cited for serious workers rights abuses (though Gildan has worked to try to rectify those problems).

But I will admit that the issue is complicated. So complicated, in fact, I almost forgot about Taylor Swift and how she plays into all of this.

So let’s review. Swift champions the rights of people in one sector but makes big profits by participating in a type of business scheme not beyond reproach.

It’s a criticism. And yet I wonder. Is it even fair to criticize Swift? Do we live in a world that has become so globalized and so reliant on cheap labor -- so used to seeing “Made in Bangladesh” or “Made in Cambodia” on every label -- that reproaching Swift would be unfair?

Again, a difficult question. So I thought I’d pose it to Julie Irwin, a University of Texas business school professor who specializes in consumer behavior.

Her answer was very interesting.

“Whenever someone makes an effort to be ethical in any domain,” she said, “then people look carefully for inconsistencies and do not like it when they find any.”

As a separate example, she cited that of Whole Foods. People have criticized Whole Foods for overpricing and carrying items that have been genetically modified. However, she aptly noted: “You rarely hear people making the same sorts of complaints against grocery stores that do not try to be ethical (i.e., most every other player in the market).”

She did say, however, “Holding celebrities accountable, gently, might get a little focus on pervasive human rights abuses, if they actually are taking place.” All the same, she said, “I just strongly balk at the idea of focusing on someone who is already trying to do something good for workers in one area ... because doing so could ensure no one ever speaks out about anything.”

Fair enough. I guess one main point is that after weighing all the information I received, I at least feel comfortable enough to wear the T-shirt I bought. It cost 30 euros and says “I Love Taylor Swift.”

capitals, commas and ellipses: some good examples

Sometimes it's hard to know exactly how to punctuate a sentence. For example, does a sentence in which the speaker loses his train of thought end with an ellipsis and a period or just an ellipsis?

The answer: just an ellipsis.

"I was certain I left my keys here . . ."

In any event, I came across a sheet yesterday that offers a lot of nice examples of appropriate punctuation. And sometimes it's just better to learn by example. Enjoy.

Oh, one thing. The sheet is in British English. So you are going to see some periods outside of quotations marks. But other than that, it's cool.

And one other thing. The AP Stylebook says that an ellipsis is composed of three dots surrounded by a space on each side: [ ... ] The Chicago Manuel of Style says an ellipsis should have a space around it and between the dots, too: [ . . . ]

The authors who made the sheet, however, decided to ignore both AP and Chicago style. Their ellipsis looks like this: [...] No spaces around the dots or between them.

A JOURNALISM PROFESSOR of mine once said that he thought that similes and metaphors were proof that words fail. What he meant was, that we sometimes have to employ a simile or a metaphor to convey meaning is proof that a single word does not exist for the thing we are trying to express.

I must say that words certainly do fail when considering the crash of Germanwings 9525.

I have been keeping up with the crash, and must say that any time I've discussed it or thought about it, language really has fallen short. Not only are words missing to describe the horror that was that flight, similes and metaphors don't seem to do it justice either.

In fact, one of the only ways, if not the only way, I have been able to process the incident has been by comparing it to things that have happened in the realm of fiction.

For example, when I first heard that the co-pilot of the plane, Andreas Lubitz, locked the captain out of the cockpit and then steered the aircraft and all the people in it into a mountain, one of the first things that came to my mind was Freddy Krueger. In "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2," the movie opens with students on a yellow school bus being dropped off from school. It’s a cheery, cloudless day and the students are all horsing around in their seats as the bus rolls through a leafy suburban neighborhood.

Then, a few of the students -- the ones who are to be dropped off last -- notice that the bus driver has passed their stops. Suddenly, the bus takes a sharp turn off the main drag and heads into what looks like an open, desert-like area. The bus is being driven wildly, and the sky, which moments ago had been cloudless, has turned to black.

Finally, the bus stops. The students pound at the windows, trying to get out. As they do this, though, they see that the sand all around the bus is starting to drop out, almost as if a sinkhole were opening around them.  Before they know it, the ground around the bus has completely dropped out and the vehicle is teetering treacherously at the top of what looks a 200-foot-tall stalagmite. It is then that they see who was driving the bus all along: Freddy Krueger.

As the teens cower by the emergency exit at back of the bus, Freddy slowly gets out of the driver's seat. Laughing, he brandishes his glove and begins to walk to the back of the bus. As he slowly makes his way down the aisle, he scrapes the blades of his glove against the metal ceiling. The teens are trapped and Freddy is coming for them...


THE SECOND FICTIONAL sequence that came to my mind when I read about Flight 9525, especially when I read that the captain of the plane pleaded with Lubitz to be let back in, was a sequence from Edgar Allen Poe's “Cask of Amontillado.”

The story, which takes place during carnival season in an unnamed Italian city, perhaps Venice, opens with one character, Montresor, leading his “friend,” Fortunato, into a crypt under the city.

Fortunato is a wine lover and Montresor has promised to take him to a secret cask of rare Amontillado, which is stored underground in the city's catacombs.

Once the two men reach the bowels of the catacombs, Montresor, who has an unnamed grievance with Fortunato, tells Fortunato, who is already a little drunk, to go look inside a niche in the crypt wall -- that’s where the wine is, Montresor promises. When Fortunato walks into the niche, Montresor quickly shackles him to two thick metal staples protruding from a wall inside the niche. Fortunato is trapped. Montresor then begins to carefully brick up the hole through which Fortunato entered.

Montresor is flabbergasted. At first, he doesn't even understand what has happened to him. But as reality sets in, he frantically tries to reverse the situation any way he can: he begs, he pleads, he threatens.6

Finally, after letting out something akin to an animal-like scream, Fortunato says, "For the love of God, Montresor!"

The transcript of Flight 9525's inflight blackbox recording has not been officially released. But it has been reported that Lubitz, though he could still be heard breathing, never responded to the captain's pleas.

However, in "The Cask of Amontillado," Montresor does respond to Fortunato's final plea.

"Yes," he mockingly says, "for the love of God."

A definition of love

How can you not love YouTube? Nearly anything one wants to watch, one can watch. One thing I enjoy watching are John Lennon videos. I've loved John Lennon since I was 15 years old and purchased the album "Lennon Legend." Tonight I decided to search YouTube for covers of the Lennon song "Oh My Love," which is off the album "Imagine" (1971). After listening to several renditions of the song, I watched a video of Lennon singing it himself, at his home in Ascott, England. The video, which I think is just a clip from the movie "Imagine," shows the recording of the song and, at one point, cuts to John and Yoko talking with a journalist, discussing their definitions of love. Yoko's definition really struck me:

So, what is love then? I really think that love is something to do with relaxation, you know. When you’re guarded with somebody, you know, then you’re not relaxed. And when you’re guarded with somebody, you can’t love that person, you know. Love is when you understand it so well, that you relax finally, you know. And we have that kind of relaxation between us a lot. 

Think about it. Roll the idea over in your mind a few times. I think you'll see that it fits. Anyway, just something very positive and very nice. This is the video, if you're interested.

Call me crazy, but I recently got an urge to write about, or at least list, all the people I know who have died.

I think the source of this urge can be traced back to a conversation I had with my girlfriend a few weeks back.

We had been sitting at our kitchen table and I had made a remark about someone I knew who had died, and then I said, "I know a lot of people who have died....You also must know a lot of people who have died, right?" And she said, "No, not really actually."

And then I realized that I know more than a fair share of people who are now gone. Just as a disclaimer, I don't mean what I'm about to write to be a tribute or a memorial, even though it still sort of will be, in a way. All I'm saying with this post is this: I sometimes think about the people that I know who have died, and their deaths have made grooves in me. Some of those grooves are deeper than others, but despite that, I think about these people relatively often, and I just wanted to get this down.

Jessica, she was in my kindergarten class and she died of a heart problem during the summer of kindergarten to first grade; Eric's grandfather, Eric was a childhood friend of mine and his grandfather was run down by a car while attempting to cross 108th Street in Forest Hills, Queens; Lisette, she was a girl I knew from middle school, a girl I actually dated for just one day, believe it or not; Jason Butler, he was a super charismatic, athletically talented and really nice guy I knew in high school who was hit by a truck as he was attempting to cross a street; Christine, she was a girl who was sick with cancer when I was in high school and eventually succumbed to the disease; Billy, he was a guy who used to hang around Great Neck and I think he died of an aneurism; my ex-girlfriend's brother, Joseph; my grandmother, Anna, who died of pneumonia a few days shy of her 95th birthday; Muriel Klein, my great aunt, who had lived in Howard Beach, Queens, for many years and had loved crosswords; Peter Franzoni, a kid who I had known from middle school and high school; Jessica Mena, a friend of mine and my good friend Matt's sister; Ellen Harris, my good friend Andrew's mother and a person I saw almost every other day for years on end; Dave Fleetwood, a supervisor for Chestnuthill Township, Pa., who was killed when a disgruntled citizen went on a shooting rampage at a township meeting.

Crazy, when I look at this paragraph above, this block, if you will, of deaths and lives lived. There's just so much there -- so much compression in it all. Perhaps the the strangest part of this whole undertaking, for me at least, is that when I read the names of the people listed in the paragraph above, I can often imagine their voices as well. And when I do, when I imagine their voices, it's then that much of what I think to be true or false gets thrown into question.

catharsis

I want to be a little greedy right now. I say that because I'm interested in writing what I'm about to write only to achieve catharsis. I've always felt that writing in general is a form of catharsis, and a lot of my entries have been partially inspired by a need for a catharsis of sorts, but I've never really written just to "get it all out." I usually write to share something I think worth sharing or to explain something or to offer a fresh and provocative perspective on a difficult issue.

But not this time. This time I want to write because I sorta have to just get it out.

About five months ago, I learned that the mother of an acquaintance of mine had cancer of the spine. Upon hearing the news, I was concerned the way you are concerned when you hear that something bad has happened to someone you only indirectly know and have never even met. I was absolutely rooting for this woman, let's call her Linda, but in all honestly, I didn't think too much of it.

Still, I was kept aware of Linda's progress. Linda's daughter-in-law is my girlfriend's good friend, and the next update that I got was that Linda had undergone chemo and surgery and the surgery had gone well. But even so, the daughter-in-law, let's call her Julie, reported, Linda wasn't doing that great. She was depressed. She was depressed because she thought her life was over. The surgery, as successful as it was, had been pretty involved and Linda's recovery was not coming along easy, which made Linda believe that she wasn't going to make it.

But she did make it. And as the months went by, she started to get stronger. In fact, one night, two months or so after the surgery, Julie came over our house looking very cheerful, which was strange during this period because just how stressful the ordeal was for her and probably everyone else involved was often written on her face, and told my girlfriend and me that Linda was actually now doing a lot better. She was convalescing nicely and was feeling a lot happier in general. Julie said that Linda had gotten over the depression and seemed to have a new lease on life.

As I listened to Julie speak about Linda, I felt genuinely encouraged. I was happy Linda was doing much better -- perhaps she going to be even stronger than she had been -- and she now seemed ready to move on with her life.

Again, Linda and her condition slipped to the back of my mind. I really didn't think much more about her, until a month later when my girlfriend got a call on her cellphone from Julie. "What!" my girlfriend exclaimed into the phone. "Oh no…."

Oh no was right. Julie called to say that the cancer was back -- and with a vengeance. And to make matters worse, Linda was too weak to undergo any more chemo or surgery. The doctors said that the situation was so desperate that they thought it would be best if Julie and all Linda's relatives drop everything and come to the hospital to be with her.

Terrible news, of course, but honestly, I held out hope. I was sure that with all the medical miracles that are worked these days, the doctors would be able to help Linda in some way and that she would be OK. My girlfriend said that she thought I was being naive, but I didn't think I was, and I just chalked up my girlfriend's grave attitude to her being German -- "always" looking on the down side.

But two weeks after this phone call, my girlfriend got a brief Facebook message. Linda had died. The spinal cancer that had come back after her surgery truly was vicious, and it ultimately led to kidney failure and death. All I said upon hearing the news was one exasperated word, "No…" The news hit me hard. It hit me hard not only because it had all occurred so quickly but because even though I had never met Linda, over time I had become invested in her; I was sorta there with her. I was with her when she was down, but I was with her when she was up, too. I had really put, or had tried to put, myself in her shoes and feel with her when I had learned she was really down and I had really tried to feel with her when I had learned she was feeling up again, too.

But then to learn that the cancer came back with such a vengeance and that death came with what seemed like atavistic speed, it really shook me. Maybe I'm naive. Some people have called me that. But for what it's worth -- and I really don't know what it is worth -- the whole story still hurts me.