Now I have walked the river feeling envious of people laughing and eating and canoodling on blankets. Lax or no prohibition against open containers, apparently. Danish flags are everywhere, I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s National Denmark Day? I am sitting on some benchy step-type things above the canal in Christianhavn and watching a raven tear at the shredded lettuce and whatever else is inside some crumpled sandwich paper left by a trio of thuggish Danes who were supping here until recently, when they left without first becoming my friends.
I think I’ll take a walk over to Freetown Christiania, maybe buy a joint, see if that’ll help me sleep during a time more broadly regarded here as night. Yes. And on the way I will scan the ground for generous bits of remaindered cigarettes with which to roll a spliff.
One fellow in a clump of drunken others still eating sandwiches and getting drunker in the vicinity is singing Destiny’s Child.
I went to Chabad House of København for Shabbos Mincha, et cetera, tonight. Unsure how to get in, wary of the utterly unmarked door and the apparently-armed possibly-Politi loitering outside to lend an air if not the reality of security, I rang the bell — surely a faux pas, disruptive of ritual, to say nothing of engaging electricity on Shabbos, but no one said anything about it to me. Not that the man who opened the door, muttering along to the liturgy through his teeth, could’ve said anything less. Le sigh.
I wasn’t thrilled with the service. To the upper balcony, we women were sent, not to one half of the downstairs pews demarcated with mechitzah for the pseudo-egalitarianism I prefer to accept. Most of my balconymates were dowdy, dowdy teenagers (or maybe early-twenties femmelets) paying me no mind and children playing too loudly while the men, below, raced through. Afterward, the lean middle aged woman in a white head scarf — Orit! — asked if I’m Israeli.
I’m American, I said, omitted the US, and she said, You sing like you are Israeli.
On the walk through the courtyards to supper I chatted with the rabbi, who invited me to give a Shavouos talk tomorrow night, and I said yes without knowing how I will.
I sat to eat beside the man-boy who I’d guessed, from above, from his polo shirt, conspicuous for its gay chartreuse in the somber sea of black and white and how it bared his arms, would alone among them be willing to shake my hand. Alon is his name — Danish-Israeli — studying finance and working in programming — and he told me that what I’m doing is brave and exciting and asked, if I’m around long enough, whether I’ll help him with a writing problem.
Orit and I talked across the table about the difficulty of taking the sort of leap that I am, of the necessity of changing one’s status quo, of not prolonging some numbing stasis, about how the United States embodies this sinister intersection of populousness and widespread sense of entitlement: the consumption, the emission, the imperative to put everything in evermore disposable packaging, to get an even bigger car. I noticed her declining the fish, the chicken soup, the salads with mayo, and asked about her veganism. She told me that in olden times all Danish housewives brewed their own beer at home, always in the same nook reserved for washing, and to this day any Danish laundry room is called the brygghaus.
She talked about how her daughter and son-in-law are expecting a boy and won’t circumcise him. It’s like beating your child, she said they’d said, which hurt her. It’s their choice not to, she said, but to put it like this… She did not finish the sentence, and I talked about what I’m hoping to do with this journey and in life, hoping to help people isolate which parts of what they say are a constructive sharing of fears and which are something that will hurt.
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.
ONE (1) manuel has an excellent folding ruler — is it called that here or anywhere anymore? — and he suggests i try to fold it into a swastika. jain or nazi? i ask, ever testing the waters of too-soon and not-soon-enough, and he says, they’re the same, and i say, no! the directionality differs, and he says, then you just turn it around, and that is when i realize i don’t know which is which. anyway, the limits of the thing leave us two segments short of either TWO (2) we can, however, make something pertaining to south africa, although i am not listening well enough to retain what THREE (3) also this FOUR (4) also an asterisk, if only the kind with only five legs FIVE (5) ~ the thing at rest ~ SIX (6) now manuel is preparing the feta — between 20/80 and 30/70 goat/sheep — with olive oil and oregano, all of which he imported himself, and i am pushing the medium while relics turns on the table #pinkfloyd#bauhaus
Brady, Cooper, Ferdinand <— name tags on some German actors posing as USAmerican soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie, so I suppose that’s how they suppose we are called, although unclear to me how I fit into this “we.”
