cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paris and What Now? So, Paris. This will be disjointed and out of order. Paris was fun to look at and listen to. I didn't get as good a sense of the people and the culture as I did in Munich. We met up with Melinda on the steps of the Opera House, coming directly from the airport. Melinda was a completely awesome guide to Paris. In fact, she might have been too good, because I never quite mastered the art of transferring from one line to another on the Paris Metro with her generally there to keep me from doing anything stupid. Melinda is good for bumming around a city with. She has about the same tolerance for extensive walking as I do, and possesses the same balance of caution and spontenaity. How the fuck do you spell that word? I forget. Anyway, she is perhaps a bit more shy than I am about doing weird shit in public or asking retarded-looking kids what exactly is keeping their pants up. But she did show up at the gates to the catacombs in a blue bob wig that *everyone* was staring at on our last day, so nobody can accuse her of shyness. We found a place that is randomly seared into my memory from childhood. A series of sort of terraces going down a set of stairs. As it turns out, this place was right in front of the Eiffel Tower. I'd totally failed to notice the tower when I was a kid, thus that was not part of the memory. So there I was, standing on this exact same spot in Paris that I'd been when I was 4 years old and I remembered it all so vividly. I had this strange sense of fulfillment and even a sort of 'closure.' You know what it reminded me of? The last scene in '12 Monkeys.' Where (spoiler ahead) the time-travelling main character is shot in the airport and realizes that the person he saw being shot in an airport as a child was himself. I feel like something has been wrapped up. And there was no trauma associated with that trip to Paris as a child. Just a place where I was on a nice day. It is so hard to explain this. I feel like having been back to that spot, I can let go of all sorts of things. Old plaque. I feel like throwing away old clothes and shoes, getting a hair cut and giving up a harmless habit. Changing from smooth peanut butter to chunky style. That sort of thing. Another good thing about travelling with Melinda; she can be ultra-chatty when called for, while also putting up with the opposite. Like sometimes the thing to do is to just sit in a cafe and sip one's drink and stare at passers by. And a lot of people just cannot deal with that and will talk just to talk with nothing to say, or get really uncomfortable with the idea that nothing is being said. She also has a nice ass. Paris is comparatively dirty. Compared to Munich, that is. Which is a natural comparison for me to make. Paris is like a slower version of New York. We went through the catacombs under Montparnasse. I kept stopping to stare at the skulls as Trish and Melinda were in danger of leaving me behind. I wanted to understand what each of these people looked like. But I couldn't really tell. Only a few of them had teeth and I didn't see any skulls that still had a lower jaw bone. They looked like skulls. It was people's faces only I couldn't see the face. No name, no face, no clue whatsoever as to who any of these people were. I didn't like what they'd done, stacking all of those bones in heaps like that, with all the femurs in one pile and all the skulls an another row. No telling even how tall anyone was. No sense of identity whatsoever for any of them. I don't want to be dead. Paris was expensive. At the cafes it cost 8 Euros for a beer. Fucking ridiculous. I like Paris, but I don't think I will go back any time sooner unless I can figure out how to do it for less money. Leaving Paris was a thing that I did. I wasn't so sad to leave it as I was to leave Munich. I gave half of the remaining euros in my pocket to a woman begging near the Opera House. Paris is nice that early in the morning. We arrived in Atlanta for our 3 hour layover like getting a bucket of cold water dumped over our heads. The fat, dull-eyed dipshit employees at the airport restaurant. The plentiful, shitty food on the plates. The fat couples with their fat children waddling around in packs. And everywhere televisions sets demanding our attention and bombarding us with asinine versions of stupid news, most of which nobody needed to know in the first place. The other people in the airport stared at the screens and said stupid things about what they were watching. For a day or 2, I hated America. But the America that I saw in the Atlanta airport is an America that I have lived comfortably away from for years anyway. I do my job, I drive home in a car with BBC news on the radio and I arrive to a house that has no cable TV or TV reception of any kind. I have nothing to do with the sort of people I dislike. The dull waddlers of the Atlanta airport are practically speaking almost as far away from me right now as they were when I was in Munich. So I am home now. And what does it say about me that I still have euros in my pocket? So now what. Now what? What do I do with all of this? Part of me wishes that I could move to Munich. Once upon a time I would have started scrambling to find a job and set things in motion. But now I have grown accustomed to seeing experiences or possible lives that I want and just letting it be a sort of dull ache that I shrug at and block off. Well, I don't want to block this off exactly. I want to compromise. I have decided that I need to start travelling again. Airfare is so cheap now. Trish and I talked about it today and decided that its not practical for us to go on another trip like that together this year, on account of having someone look after the kids. But I have the all-clear to go somewhere myself. Trouble is I don't know if I would have much fun going alone. I am contemplating either a trip back to Munich for a week or a trip to Merida, Mexico. September seems like a good time for either. Meanwhile, I am who I choose to be wherever I am. I can throw shit away and redecorate my house to resemble the things I liked about Munich. I can cook Bavarian food and generally make things be the way I want them to be. In all honesty, if I actually lived in Munich then I would soon settle back into my habit of going from work to home and spending all of my time with my kids and a few friends. Does it matter all that much where I am, in that sense? 4:06 p.m. - 2009-05-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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