i am quitting my life for something new in europe.
the one-way ticket is to copenhagen, but i think i will not stay there.
the hope is to get work under the table if not over (visa?), and looking at the little mermaid statue does not present the kind of learning curve i seek in a professional undertaking.
also it’s starting to be baloney that i’m not proficient in a second language, and danish is probably not the one to invest in.
also i have been cold for fifteen years, more or less, since shortly after the arrival of that great letter from princeton, so probably i will make my way south to somewhere sweatier.
somewhere less prevailingly white.
somewhere that it’s okay for me to have a mustache.
took my inaugural european poop by skylight in a room that is also itself a shower stall. the airbnb host purports by profile to speak english and hindi (no danish, i guess), and we haven’t met but i believe him. i took a fitful nap on sheets that smelled like maybe they hadn’t been prewashed for me per se but who cares?? it’s inevitably cleaner by volume than the airliner seat that was my last place of rest and fully reclined, too. whoever’s room it usually is is a smoker, i’m sure, and reads books with titles like FINANCE FOR NON-FINANCIAL MANAGERS. later i wandered the brickyard and took this photograph of a mirror in some ivy under a window from which spilled music i once was regularly acquainted with, back when i almost had an indian mother in law.
The apartment where I will be cat-sitting for the next few days is fabulous, too fabulous, such that now that the owner has left me and it for Paris, instead of exiting into greater Denmark I am hanging out, eating whatever meal-like arrangements I can make from the contents of her larder and being soothed by the Scandinavian design and unimpeachable blondness in every one of the portraits and watching “Friends” with Danish subtitles, trying to pick up a pronoun or two.
Today I made some friends named Katrine and Hakim — she a native of Denmark, him, of Morocco — who were on their third date and also at the craft beer and food truck festival on the Carlsberg brewery grounds that a brewer here who grew up in Durham like me and is a friend of my old friend got me into.
We sat together on a curb outside the event, passing two spliffs among the three of us and talking about world affairs and national shame.
I told them about Anthony Weiner and Huma and Hillary and about my idea for a shirt featuring the USAmerican flag and the words I’M SORRY in as many languages as possible.
The Danish is undskyld, they told me back, adding that I personally needn’t apologize, and I wrote it all down to remember.
Katrine photographed me deep in my international, ineffectual coin purse, fighting through the mis-math of trying to convert inadequate euro plus some rogue Antillean guilder into adequate beer fest tokens for buying Cambodian hot rock ’n’ rolls to share with my fest friends, two of three of whom would turn out to be vegetarian anyway.
Later I looked at how I also wrote the words tissekone and fisse, Danish slang for parts of a woman, and too drew a crude likeness of the Nike swoosh. No telling why. America, maybe.
Iʼve been thinking a lot about this thing you said that night back in Brooklyn when I went off to maybe have sex with Redford (I didnʼt, by the way — he just stretched my hamstrings for me and showed me several drawings heʼd done of different breeds of dog pooping), the thing about desiring some alternative category of togetherness for us
Because I feel that, too
And I was thinking that we could slit our wrists together
She said,
A suicide pact. I never even thought of that and here I thought I was more involved in the dark arts than you.
I said,
Well
Iʼm trying to be psyched about continuing to live this life so maybe thatʼs not quite the one I want
Itʼs just, like, this is all so BURDENSOME
But
I guess Iʼm choosing to gamble on the premise that thereʼs an answer
If only one in the form of some formula for survival
She said,
I donʼt feel very close to death. Let’s keep at it; we can do better.
I said,
Iʼm sorry living is so much work
I wish I could magic it away for you
Although I guess if you were someone who could be fooled by magic I wouldnʼt have nearly as much use for you
Use, admiration, appetite
Need.
She said,
Thank you for offering a vague sense of possibility that doesnʼt feel dumb or like lies.
I said,
I guess Iʼm going to keep trying to pack
Iʼm petrified of Berlin
I canʼt even figure out how to say “Iʼm sorry, I donʼt speak German” in German.
She said,
Berlin is amazing and everyone speaks English, they are ashamed of everything too. You will love it there I suspect.
I said,
Iʼm looking forward to some public toplessness, I think.
