2006-08-16 NozUpdate - Why Do Welshmen Put Bells On Their Sheep? - Newtown Powys, Wales
Mood:  bright
Now Playing: Block - Machinehead
Topic: Noz Update

2006-06-02 NozUpdate Localisation World, Day2 - Barcelona, Spain
Mood:  bright
Topic: Noz Update

Thursday, 01 June 2006

I’m waiting in the hotel reception for the others in my little Barcelona Business Troop, boppin’ to Beyoncé on the MP3 player.  She loves to love me baby. 

We had a nice night last night.  They loaded us all into busses and drove us to one of Barcelona’s oldest Cava Distilleries (and vinyard’s, possibly, but we only saw the buildings themselves).  The architecture had than Barcelona quirkiness, even despite its age, and the main venue hall where they served dinner was very impressive.  We were all corralled into an area in front of the main building and served hors d’ouvres. Huge brick archways made up a long hall lined with hundreds of barrels, each of which had had a candle placed on it.  In the middle they laid out the tables and we had a unremarkable a la cart meal.

After the meal they cracked out the Latin band.  I wasn’t warmed up yet, so I didn’t start dancing until after midnight.  I figured we were in Spain so I wasn’t in a rush, but in fact after only two songs we all got hustled back in the busses and carted back to the hotel.  Meh.  Few drinks in the bar and some ridiculous jokes and we called it a night.

An Irishman goes into a doctor’s office with a steering wheel coming out of the zipper in his trousers.

The doctor says, “What’s that steering wheel doing there?”

The Irishman says, “Ach, Doc!  It’s drivin’ me nuts!”

There was more…

Love!

Noz

NozUpdate - Communication Breakdown, Birthday in Barcelona, Spain
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Noz Update

Tuesday, 30 May 2006

This will be my first NozUpdate for a while that actually makes it onto the internet.

It’s my birthday today. First of all, for all those that sent their love to me by text, email, fax, and whomever it was that sent that strip-a-gram mime, many thanks. For those that didn’t, that is totally cool too.

For months I’ve barely been communicating with those back home, or even those here, but outside my immediate spheres of routine. I have often wanted to communicate – individually, en masse, whatever – but I haven’t. I started a few NozUpdates full of reasons, explanations and the occasional excuse, but they never got posted.

As time went on, I started to feel more and more depressed about the fact I wasn’t communicating. I resolved to pen up a tremendous NozUpdate full of my most lucid illustrations and metaphors that would make everyone understand what I was going through.

Then I decided that wasn’t going to happen. First, it’s been SO long since I’ve had enjoyed the threesome of energy, inspiration and opportunity required to pen such a NozUpdate. Second, fuck it. I am going to write you about what I want to say now, not all the reasons I should have said things across the past few months.

I just got off the phone with Rox and Jeff. It was a bit of a weird moment because I was mid-order in the hotel bar (Hotel Plaza, of the Catalonia chain, on the Plaza Espanya. Very nice. Pool on the roof, well located, and actually not that expensive considering where it is), here in sunny and sumptuous Barcelona. I had so many things in my head that I think I said very little. This is in fact the topic I’m going to address in this Update.

Recently a few relationships I have in my life, of various levels of closeness, have suffered due to lack of communication in the social sense. This has depressed the crap out of me, and I’ve been pushing myself to fix it. It’s not easy. Few relationships can stand long periods of poor communication. Even no communication is often better than poor communication. I’m realising – at a new level, I guess – how much this effects the way our relationships work.

All my life I’ve had the pleasure of deep, constantly developing and frequent-contact relationships with many fantastic people. I’ve had the same friends for more than half my life, and have had the luck of meeting and befriending what I believe to be most of the best people in all the British Isles. Since I started life in the UK, I’ve been keeping in touch the best I could with people back home. I phoned, messengered, blogged, and I tried to let everyone know where I was in my life with as much detail and regularity as I could. They were all still in each other’s vicinity and I was the “odd one out”. Way out. If they chose not to keep up on each other’s lives, that’s their issue, and I’d hoped that they kept me informed of the major happenings in their’s as well.

With my friends here, ironically, it was harder to keep things ticking over. We were in the same country, but because of my various relocations and job changes, I’ve got a social network where few people actually live in the same city. Much like I did in Canada with Downtown Toronto, I try and convince everyone that they should all converge in Central London, because, duh… But shockingly, people seemed compelled to stay in their own city, even if that city quiet obviously is a) too far from London b) sucks.

So, I’ve been trying to manage most of my relationships as long distance relationships, with the exception of my relationship with my girlfriend Lo. Frequent NozUpdate readers will already know Lo by reputation by now, but she’ll be a new entity to newbies. Lo and I had our own communication issues for a while. Confined space, various intense stresses of relocation, employment, finance and us both being incredibly strong-willed means we’ve had an interesting time of it, but things move along in their quirky way, and we keep going because at the end of the day, we’re in love, we are happy and fascinated with each other, and that we are always meandering along together in the direction we want our relationship to go.

This Update could well be about Lo and I, but it’s not.

I’m writing as generally as I can about my latest batch of existential observations.

I was talking about the effect of poor communication in relationships. How does this manifest?

One of the most universal issues here is the handling of "The Update". "The Update" can be an update like this one - cast unto the ages - or it can be simply the answer to the question: “How are you?” I have been talking to people recently and getting a lot of instances of the universal answer, “I’m fine.” Which is alright, if you’re really going to tell me later how you really are and you’re just stalling. But really not knowing what is going on in person’s life, and more importantly, inside a person, is where things get difficult.

I’ve got a friend, right? He’s a wang when it comes to contacting people. We used to be quite close and see each other all the time, so it was easy for him to share with me. I use the term “easy” in the logistical sense only. He’s British, so it was as “easy” as it gets around here. I’ve made some attempts at communication I won’t outline, but basically, I’m not getting a lot of feedback.

I decided to write this Update entry when I hung up the phone with him for the third or fourth time, and Lo asked me, as she had a few times after previous conversations with him, “How is he?” I had to just say “I have no idea. He sounded fine.”

After that it dawned on me that I really knew so little about what was going on in the life of someone to whom I was talking. I wasn’t actually sharing anything. Communication, yes. Quality, no.

I was talking to someone else entirely a while before – another guy I used to live nearer to - and I’d mentioned a girl I thought he’d be interested in meeting, and he said “Dude, I’m going out with my ex girlfriend again. I have been for five months”. This was a big-deal girlfriend for him. They’d had a rocky drawn out break-up and he really was in deep over her. I’d talked to this person in the past five months many times, yet I had no idea. Again, poor communication...

These experiences waved alarm bells in front of my face (you catch that mixed metaphor there? I don’t do those often, but I liked that, so I’m gonna use it). I had to start writing my NozUpdates again. It was a New Year’s resolution to start writing them anyway and do at least one a month, but I didn’t keep it. I’ve varied progress on several of the others. Then I realised that NozUpdates aren’t just amusing vehicles to let the gang around the world know the latest and greatest adventures of Noz, they are the primary way that many people even know what is going on with me at all. They may not be perfect, but they keep me at least more real than I would be as a silent memory, or as a smattering of short and insignificant text or phone conversations, which is all that I’ve been able to manage since my life got turned upside down by leaving Blast Radius last year (uh… to those who missed out – I left Blast Radius last November).

I used to have a seemingly infinite string of plane and train rides around Europe to write my Updates to my heart’s content, and hopefully your hearts’ content. I used to work from home when I was in the UK, so I was able to use all of lunch to do whatever I wanted and all of my day before and after work. I could stay up late because I could afford to sleep in until eight forty-five and still be at work at five to nine.

Now, I get home around seven or seven thirty, after spending the day in Sutton Surrey (FYI, “Sutton (and to lesser degree Surrey generally)”, is to “fun”, as “towel slathered in cold dog shit” is to “face”), try to enjoy what little time I have to spend with Lo or do my own stuff, eat and do household stuff, and then I’m asleep usually in bed around eleven and have to get up at seven. Everyone else calls this “normal”. Which it is, but it is the first time it’s been normal for me. This isn’t an excuse and isn’t even an explanation, because given all this, I know for a fact I could’ve been writing Updates, but wasn’t. Yes, I’m writing this one in my hotel room in Barcelona in my birthday instead of walking around one of the world’s most beautiful cities, or at least swimming in the pool on the roof, but I can and will write these in the UK. What this is, is an analysis and an apology.

I am sorry I haven’t been keeping you up to date on what’s been going on, and not only that, I understand very deeply what it was that I did wrong and why it’s painful and damaging.

To those a bit more distant from the world of Noz who occasionally read my updates out of boredom and never really missed them – they’re back! Now at last the internet can be used for something besides work, maps, and productivity tools, eh? Amazing. What’s next? Electronic social bulletin board systems? Games, even?

Love,

Me

 

…Now.

 

 

 

 

This of course begets the questions: So, Noz, What's up? How's work? How was Barcelona? Did you get that raise? I'll get to that...

NozUpdate - Oh Mein Papa - Toronto, Canada
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: Come Fly with Me - Sinatra
Topic: Noz Update

For those of you who don't already know: I'm in Toronto. I have been for nearly two weeks, and I leave in just under one week more. I've not been getting in touch because I came here to spend time with my dad in the hospital, so I've been keeping some space for myself and time for my family.

I’ve already blogged about my Dad. The situation is improved. He is now in a rehabilitation center where he is getting settled into the life changes that follow such a major stroke. I think - I can't say for sure because I've been so wrapped up in my own recent dramas - that my family is also settling into a rhythm of living with the situation. My own emotional capacity to handle things is also leveling off. I don't call or email enough, but I do call and email. Lo, with her saint-like benevolence, thumps me on the head periodically to make contact. The situation is still very hard for me, and I have to live with the sort of emotional limbo imposed by being so far away.

I am now going about the long task of assimilating the new facts into my reality. Again, Lo's support and love have been key in reminding me which way is up, when so often I confuse it with counter-north-clockways.

Staying with him these last few days at the hospital has been intense. It’s an emotional gauntlet that I have to run to try process all the different things that it affects and changes practically, and all the things that it confronts me with emotionally. It’s not actually seeing him in the wheelchair, or the thinness, or the single-side paralysis that shocks me most, it’s the moments when he seems so totally and honestly him. His sense of humour is exactly the same, and he’s able to articulate his emotions much more clearly than he has in years. I think what’s happened him has short of forced him to accept a physical vulnerability, which has had a philosophical and emotional impact in kind. I’m also seeing this business they always talk about where the young gain new appreciation for experience when they actually sit down and listen.

The experiences of an 84-year-old man who’s traveled around the world more times than most people even dream of doing are something to be reckoned with. I usually think of “experienced” as “10 years in the automotive industry” or “15 years on the hard-core fetish scene of London”. My father has a whole lifetime behind him, and has a wealth of experience that is on a totally different plane. Fuck, for all I know, he did spend 10 years on the London fetish scene.

When I walked in to see him on Saturday he was in the common room listening to the four tenors. He was singing along and tapping out the beat on his wheelchair lunch tray. I walked in and said hello, and he looked up into my eyes and just said, “Hell must be a place with no music, no?” And in a single offhand phrase he made me feel more his son than he has in years. Yes, hell must be a place with no music... or maybe only country music. We share that as an inherent truth of the cosmos.

We talked that day about the time he spent growing up in Genova in the North of Italy, where he would spend each day playing on the beach all day long until they rang the dinner bell for the big evening meal. He said that at the time the celebrities of the day were the tenors. All the young fisherman would cross the bay to an island to drop their nets, and they’d sing their messages to each other across the peer or between the boats. The Ottolongi family, on my paternal Grandmother’s side, were part Italian and part Austrian. The family was only settled there for a generation before they started moving out of Italy again. Having come over from Peru to live with his Grandmother, he didn’t fully understand Italian, but with the similarity to Spanish, and the way that the fisherman reacted to each other’s songs, he could deduce that they were singing messages and instructions to each other.

He told me about being 15 years old and stealing port from his father’s wine cellar, and how the labels said on them “Bottled for the house of Don Luis Urbina”. The boys, at 14 years old, would make meringue of eggs of sugar, and slowly infuse in the port. He told me about how they would lick the bowl clean and then slam it briefly in a hot oven to caramelise the outside. As he spoke the rapture from these moments long past coloured his voice.

He told me, “I had a childhood full of freedom.” I thought on my own childhood of adventuring through the city on my bicycle or skateboard with my parents having only a dim notion of where the hell I was at any given moment. I remembered listening to music with my friends 90% of my waking hours, turning the stereo up to 11, and beating out rhythms against the furniture with sticks. I remember singing Metallica choruses on buses and making up huge vats of instant potatoes at 4 in the morning, stretching our basic cooking skills to the limits to make them taste at least non-toxic. I remembered fucking around doing god knows what mischief in the valleys and little forested parks in Toronto - Earl Bales, G Ross – and watching the sun come up over the horizon before we started the walk home.

I thought to myself, Christ, this man is my father; the soil in which I germinated and grew. I never really appreciated the gentle guidance that is the influence of a father’s own personality and ways, just by virtue of his being around and being my reference point for what was righteous, fun, decent, and great.

He’s still stubborn as hell. The nurses said that most people after 3 months of controlled diets, daily blood pressure tests, or taking medication twice a day would’ve resigned themselves to these things as parts of their day. My dad still tries to get out of it. He refers to all the other seniors and stroke victims as a “cripple convention” and occasionally is very inappropriately mocking, as he always would have been when he wasn’t one of the wheelchair posse.

We’re still not really “talking” about us or our feelings in the new age tv-drama sense of father-son talks. I have resigned myself to the fact that’s never going to happen. I also feel my need to have talks like that is waning with the months. I’m at present not sure why. Nevertheless, he is much more expressive than before – possibly than ever. He is a romantic at heart, and I know more now than ever that he loves me.

NozUpdate - Falling Down on Staesz - Teuge, Netherlands (with Munich Notes)
Now Playing: Far Beyond Driven - Pantera
Topic: Noz Update
Pw: P0pppers Ti: Dad, Thanks, Falling Down on Staesz, Teuge Netherlands (with notes from Munich) Tp: NozUpdate

I wrote this blog originally about two weeks ago, after leaving the Netherlands for London. I'm now flying in again to London, but from Munich, and I'm updating this blog about the Netherlands trip because this is the first blog since my last blog, which was significant, and I want people to know how I got from one state to another.

Also, and specifically, I want to thank everyone who reached out to me after my last blog; Especially those who I hadn't heard from in a while, or can't be bothered to actually click a link, so benefited from me copying the text into the message...

I'm better this week. Not in an, "I'm over it! False alarm!? sense, but in that a few things have happened since last week that have gotten me back on the right track, if not to a zone I'm happy with. Also, as you'll no doubt read in my next blog, I had a pretty damn sweet time in Germany, and got some of the distance and time to myself that I really needed.

I talked to my father a little while. That was pretty amazing. My father - who showed emotions subtlety, and selectively my whole life told me - directly, and in tears - about how much he loved me, and how I had always been so special to him because I was the son of the woman he'd loved most in the world. And to drop him a line, just to let him know how I'm doing, when I can. He said send a fax - which I thought was so cute and bizarre.

This was very difficult for me. I'm not being bitter or jaded here at all, just that I'm so unused to sharing with him, we don't have a common emotional language. I have my own strong feelings and conflicts, and I don't know how to tell him how I'm reacting to what he's telling me. I end up sounding like a dork. I'm usually pretty articulate about my feelings, but now, with this man who I'd so like to articulate them to, I'm mute.

Again, thank you all listened or responded. I'll get back to you individually as well, but connectivity has been sparse this week, and as you'll see in later blogs, so has sobriety.

And now back to your regularly scheduled Dutch blogging:

Listening to Far Beyond Driven - Pantera

9/12/2005 7:06:26 PM

So life is shit. Sometimes the best possible thing to do is push it all out ? far out ? for a while.

I just saw Kill Bill again, so I'm going to tell this story in inverse order. Also, I'll buy a tuna sandwich for the first person who names every music reference I slip into this blog.

Staesz Schedule

I find the idea of thinking about days in their 24hr sense, and not in their "today I woke up and stayed out until 3am? sense, is very interesting. Not when you slept, but when the clock - constant and immutable - ticked over the day.

While in Highschool, my friend Staesz, occasionally quite wise and innovative, and regularly somewhat crackpot, invented his own system for the division of time: The Staesz Schedule. Staesz Weeks were like the more popular weeks you're most probably familiar with, but instead of having 7 days of 24 hours, they had 6 days of 28 hours. This allowed him to still be at work 9-5, but sometimes, he'd show up to work having been awake already for 6 hours, because his days were out of synch with everyone else's. He'd then come home, and go immediately to sleep.

The system works really well actually, because it gives everyone what is most saught after in the First World: and extra 4 hours in the day. I'm one of the few people who really liked this idea. It had one key "flaw?: most people get up, go to work, give their most creative and potent hours away at some pre-agreed daily rate, then come home, live their own lives in the evenings, and wind down towards sleep with day-to-day stuff, meals with the family, and other such "down time? activities.

On Staesz Schedule, on Monday morning, because you've been up for hours before you show up, and you're going to bed at 6pm, you wind down with work. So instead of snapping back with intelligent responses in that management conference call, you've got the mental acuity you'd usually have while sitting on the couch, watching Everybody Loves Raymond, swilling back Miller Genuine Draft, and absently foraging for nerve endings in your (or your partner's) nether regions with a free hand (because I'm convinced that's what you do with your evenings).

The point of this is: I've started to think of my day from midnight to midnight, just for kicks, and it is thusly I'll tell you about "my day?.

Hanger Bangers

At the time of me writing this, it's a few hours to midnight. I'm on the train from Apeldoorn to Utretch, to catch my connection back to Amsterdam. At nearly 1am this morning I was half-asleep and 98.59% drunk slouching on a barstool in the Pilots' Bar in the Tuege airfield about a 100 clicks from the German border. Pilots are ? I've since been told ? generally a rowdy bunch with a tendency to destroy things. Like good Greeks (I've also been told), they pay for what they smash, but smash they do.

Anyway, I'm nearly dozing in this barstool and I'm woken up by a firecracker going off next to me. It was inside an ice bucket, whose lid sort of "jumped? momentarily, and was applauded and cheered around the room. I was more amused than anything that this would even occur to anyone to do this to a relative stranger (although, we had been drinking in the same small bar for the past few hours, and I was a colleague of someone they knew). Furthermore that they even had firecrackers handy when the inspiration struck! Whatta bucha weirdos.

And these weren't crop-dusting fly-boys, some of them flew for the airline that's getting me back to the UK on Saturday. Makes it harder to sleep at night...

The explosion did it, I was awake, so I had another beer. It's a Sunday, so we ? that is Bart Weijman of Blast Radius Amsterdam, and I - should have been getting to bead. We went to the sleeping quarters. They were locked. Go back to the bar. No one has a key.

Really, I couldn't've cared less, and went to sleep on one of the couches at the back of the bar. Bart somehow figured things out while downing several more rounds, and at 2:30am wakes me up and we go upstairs to sleep. 7:30am, Bart's phone alarm goes off about 5 times, and I go for the more civil selection on the ?smash his phone or pass it to him' decision-tree. 10:00am, my alarm goes off. I drag myself out of bed 20 minutes later and make my way, slowly, to the showers. Breakfast, and then off to a highly technical meeting in Hengelo, near the German border. I deliver two slide-deck presentations and two product demonstrations and get quizzed on so much crap I can't even remember. After two and a half hours of this I was ready to kill myself and the people we'd come to visit. Besides, the weather was great and we had to make it back to Teuge airfield as fast as possible if we were going to get airborne.

Monkey Business

Apelhuel is a brilliant, brilliant zoo near Apendoor. It's specialized on monkeys, and is open-concept. To the monkeys to which you are not dangerous, and vice-versa, you can get as close as luck permits. In our case, this meant we were able to hold South-American Squirrel monkeys, and feed acorns to Asian Wakis (or Makis, Tempuras? Sashimies? or whatever they were called), and pose for pictures at grooming distance while yet other monkeys searched for goodies in each other's fur. ? And there were prosimians, like the ever-popular Ring-tailed Lemur! Jeff, dude, you'd have loved it.

To have a Lion Tamarin run across your path while you're walking along through a forest is a truly amazing experience. The whole thing was a more intimate and immersive feeling than I've ever had at any zoo, I'm sorry it didn't have even more types of animals, but also I think it was wicked that it was specialized, and small enough to see in a few hours.

Game Called on Account of Fog

We were at the Apelheul that day because our little Blast Radius band - me; Bart; Chantal K and Fleure, her sister; Martijn C; Scott H and Marjian [last initial]; were all tired of waiting for the immensely thick grey fog over Teuge airfield to lift. Visibility was crap and we couldn't take off in those conditions.

After the Apelheul monkey-zoo, everyone but me went home. I went back to the airfield bar to meet Bart and commence getting tanked. Falling Down

From the meeting in Hengelo, we were able to get - yet again - back to the airfield with three hours of sunlight left on the clock. I got "called?. I snuck upstairs to change my clothes quickly, go to the washroom and had just enough time to get through one final song on my headphones. I'm born again, with snake's eyes. Becoming: God?sized. The only possible soundtrack for death-by-splatter is heavy metal. Duh?

I called and left a message on my Mother's voicemail telling my family that I loved them and sending them my best wishes, you know, just in case? I called Lo, we had a brief chat as lovers do ? I miss you a lot. I miss you even more. That's why I flew you out when we wuz on tour ? and I was off. As out little propeller plane started its climb to ten-thousand feet (a little over three thousand meters, for my metric readers), Paradise City by Guns n' Roses started playing on the radio. I was delighted. My luck was keeping up. The meeting meant that I got to stay at Teuge overnight, and now, the last guitar I might ever hear would be Slash ripping it in his prime. I felt very slightly nervous, but not nearly as much as I'd expected. I spent most of the climb playing air guitar, singing along to GnR and enjoying the view, if I was going to die, best go as I lived. Right before my tandem-jump-master started our awkward ? seeing as we were strapped together at the shoulders and hips ? butt-wiggle down towards the opening at the back of the plane, he gave me some instructions: head back, feet under the plane, hold on to the harness until he taps my shoulders, look at the camera-person. Deja-vu, but where was the body oil and midget?

So that was my "training?. Four instructions, repeated once, and out we go. Fuckin' bring it on: High Speed Dirt. Being Noz-of-the-1-second-memory, I kept repeating the instructions to myself over and over as we got to the opening. For a while I wasn't quite paying attention to anything except not screwing them up. There's this great moment in the video where my face goes from totally concentrated on head position and harness-gripping to total glee as suddenly someone packed the world into a cannon and fired it at my head. It takes one thousand feet of freefall for tandem jumpers to reach their terminal velocity of 200kph (120mph). A few of my friends have told me tales of doing 120mph along the ground in their cars/motorcycles/miscellaneous penis extensions. After a few seconds, I was doing 200kph at the ground.

Although driving I don't see as quite as exciting, from a certain perspective, it does make the car stories more impressive than they used to be. The extendees drive faster than I am physically able to fall without extra propulsion. That's pretty fast. (I actually just extended penises with this paragraph... doing my bit for penis fans everywhere).

My band is bigger than yours.

The pilot in the plane did a 90-degree nose-dive just when I jumped, making for some truly breathtaking video footage. I was trying to look at everything, but everything was going so fast. I've seen the clouds from the other side so many times, but there's always been an air mask in the overhead compartment, some 10 000 horsepower holding me up, and a drinks trolley close to hand. This was just me, some Dutch dude, a pair of goggles, and nothing was holding me up.

After what felt like both ages and a few brief seconds (in reality, it was approximately 35 seconds freefalling at 200kph) my jump-master pulled the shoot. The release was surprisingly gentle, and we sailed to earth at a comparative crawl. Because of the high winds that day he had to do some extra turns, and we got to do a few spins, which were some of my favourite moments. My dude gives a big yank on one steering thingy and everything starts to spin around in a crazy cork-screw motion.

I highly recommend leaping out of planes.

Falling Back on Staesz

So, in this particular 24 hour day, I got freaked out by a pilot blowing up a firecracker next to my head. Then I gave a demonstration on real-time collaborative document platforms (J2EE compliant server-client architecture that usess patent-pending technology to ditribute DOM nodes across HTTP). Then a different pilot took me up and dropped me out of a plane before driving it straight down alongside me.

So, the questions everyone's been asking: Q: Where you scared?

No. This is where the "However? kind of comes into my recommendation. I loved this, but I think that what I was lacking was the fear factor. Free-falling was fun, but, I really need to take it up a notch. Being strapped to some guy whose does it twice a day is a lot more like riding a ride than the freak-out terror that I was hoping for. At one point he grabbed my head to turn me to look up at the camera. In retrospect, I'm kind of glad he did because it would've been a shame to have two dozen shots of the top of my head as I looked down, but at the same time, it made me very aware of the other people around. I think what I wanted was more of a personal and emotionally challenging experience, and I think that with that much help, it was hard to get that. If you go to a horror or suspense movie and it doesn't quite buzz you like you'd hoped, there is an element of disappointment. The great thing here is, I can make my own movies. I'm signing up for a course, and I will jump out of a plane; On my own, I'm going to push myself out of a plane and the steer myself down without any help from anyone, besides the training they've given me.

Then of course, there's Wing Suits, which are an eventuality. Gotta do that shit. No life till leather.

Q: Does it feel like falling? Does it feel high?

Not really. Your brain computes distance based on reference points. It's like when you take a photo with no sense of scale, your brain can't compute the necessary relationships to make it make sense. Photograph a giant sea crab it looks like an appetizer at a fancy restaurant. Stick a can of coke next to it, it looks like a monster and you pull your children out of school lest they be eaten.

If you trip and do a face-plant, or fall off your bike or something, you have this sudden rotation, the ground becomes a wall, and whatever was next to you or above you all starts trading places in weird ways. When free falling, even though technically speaking you're describing a huge arc, it's too big for you to actually feel, there's nothing in any direction except air, and the ground is a flat expanse coming straight up at you. This all means you can't really feel the sense of height or falling because there's no reference points to give you the sensation. It's like the opposite of car-sickness, I guess. The most comparable feeling ? and it's not such a good comparison - I've ever experienced would say is riding my scooter at high speeds on an empty road in just a t-shirt and shorts. I guess it's like that times a billion, without the helmet.

Q: What went through your head?

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

? and I shouldn't have worn a collared shirt. It kept slapping me in the neck like a fan blade. Wear a T or a sweatshirt.

Q: What was the best part?

The speed and the corkscrew turns as we came down.

Q: Are you going to do it again?

Fuck yeah. I'm gonna run round your back, and come out your chest. I'm choosing schools to get my Free-Fall License and by 30 I want to fly a Wing Suit. My fantasy beyond that is to be the first guy to strap an engine of some kind to my butt to extend Wing Suit trips by a few minutes and learn to get back some altitude mid-flight.

Noz Update: Elephants Look Really Sleepy - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: Come Inside by the Chemical Brothers
Topic: Noz Update
Hey Y'all!

Just a quick word to say I'm in Amsterdam with Lolo this week. We're chillin' it up LARGE.

I've been working late every night, and each night we've been up much later. Monday and Tuesday we spent in, Weds was a failure to find anything cool, then things have picked up beautifully. Thursday we went to see strippers at the 5-Euro bar and the live sex shows at the Moulin Rouge in the Red Light, then met some friends from work and went drinking at the awful but fun "San Fransisco Night Bar" until the wee hours. Friday at work was fun... let me tell you...

Friday night we went clubbing with the beautiful people at "the most exclusive club" in Amsterdam with some great new friends from work. The Club was called "Jimmy Woo's", and is a japanese-themed house and hip-hop place (with a little pop) . The ceiling was done up in sequence controlled lights like the Justin Timberlake "Rock Your Body" video.

We spent Saturday in the Artis Zoo, which is a little pieice of paradise, just so mildy out of our skulls. Sunday we've spent recovering in the hotel and watching Sound of Music! Yay! Me Julie - Andrews. So good.

We're currently in intermission pigging out and jamming to the Chemical Brothers and taking the time to Blog to all you good people.

We wanted to weekend in Berlin next week, I already booked my tickets, but it turns out Lo's got work, so I'm going by myself and we'll meet up in England the next day. 7 more weeks and we're moving to the UK!

We've decided to make the Amsterdam Zoo a regular haunt, and we cordially invite all and sundry to join us, up to two can crash at my place, otherwise, get yourself a hotel, ya freeloader!

Lates!
Noz

Noz Update - Stuttgart, Germany - M1:The Epic Saga
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Hold Tight London by the Chemical Brothers
Topic: Noz Update

M1 Enters the Club-Night Hall of Fame
Friday, July 01, 2005

(Dialogue is slightly paraphrased)

“Hello. I’ve had a friend do some Googling for me and he’s texted me some clubs for tonight. I was wondering if I could have a map, please, and if could you tell me if you know where either Climax, on the… ah… Calwer Strasse, or the ‘Zap’ club on HauptSt-something-Strasse is?”

“Oh yes. I can mark them for you. Zap is down here. It’s pretty good and it’ll probably be open on a Thursday night.” Squiggles with a hotel pen from his reception desk.

“Well… Yeah… I had planned to get moving before midnight, but anyway... Do you know Climax”?

“I absolutely highly recommend it. Climax is one my favourite clubs for hard house. It’s right here.” Squiggles. Gives detailed verbal directions.

“Are there other clubs in the area in case I don’t like it?”

“Oh yes yes. You see this here? Theodor-Heuss Strasse is basically Stuttgart’s party mile. There’s lots of little clubs, like the Oasis lounge and stuff like that. They’re lots of bars, and little bars like little clubs, but where they have music and dancing.”

“I’m actually not so into House or Techno. Does Climax ever play Hip Hop or Top 40?”

“For that, you should go to M1 in the Bosch-Area. Paradiso is doing a special Hip Hop party.”

Bla bla. Bla-di-blee-blah. Blow-blee-bloo. Blay. Blah bla.

“Thanks! See you soon! But hopefully not too soon!”

“Don’t worry, in Stuttgart, you can always party all night.”

*** 6 hours later ***

Creamed christ on a cunting cracker – my feet hurt.

Ok, so, since I left you last, on the Dortmund-to-Stuttgart train, I resolved I was going to have some fun tonight, as tomorrow is the last day of the last week of the quarter, and I’ve been on the road for 3 straight weeks, and there’s shit all I’m going to do tomorrow that will effect anything, work can eat me with a side of potato.

As a brief aside (of potato) – I checked what Blast pays vs. other companies for similar job roles to mine (some with less responsibility). Basically, these people are stealthfully depositing electric eels up my anus and then agitating them with a stick. “Uncompetitive” or “screwing me” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Anyway, so, Climax was closing (seems it peaks early and then goes to sleep), and Oasis was dead (dried up). However, in Oasis, I found some very friendly very stoned people. One guy was from Iowa. He travels all over Europe with his landed-immigrant German-born wife. “Croatia’s wunder-bar, Dude! Jewel of the fuckin’ Nile!”

Is Croatia even on the Nile?

They were in town visiting her brother, who seconded the motion that M1 was the place to go. They invited me to stay with them for a drink, and said they could probably give me a lift there. I could see they weren’t even half-done their drinks, and it was approaching 1am, so I was reluctant to take the nice offer. Not to mention they were so stoned I worried if one of them might try to drive us up the side of a building instead of going around it. Driving a car up the side of a building is significantly more tricky while stoned.

Anyway, as it’s always sad to hurt the feelings of people on hallucinogenics, I hung out for a bit. After a polite effort, and realizing the conversation wasn’t going to get more interesting than, “You were just in Zurich? Lotta dope there, eh?” I took my leave.

Off I went. En route, I got directions from one of those 20-something uber-mensch couples that are always tottering around Germany. Both blonde, tall, and visual flawless victories, with big white-toothed smiles. They told me where M1 was, but told me there was also another place right around the corner which was good. They said better vibe and less tourists, so I tried it. We had a little laugh when they discovered I was Canadian.

“At M1 you will be able to find Americans”

“Uh… I don’t actually need to find Americans.”

“Oh, ok!”

“I’m Canadian, by the way.”

“OH! Much better!” Hearty pats on the shoulder. “Fuck Bush!”

Oh ho ho… It’s funny because he’s stupid…

This is why we sew our flag on everything.

Can’t remember the name of the place. Small, 70s and 80s disco music. The DJ didn’t speak English, and an agua ardiente with lime and sugar cost me 10 friggin’ euros. I gave the place a chance and had a little boogie to the Michael Jackson and a few others. Within 15 minutes a very sweet, but not at all interesting to me German lady (I say Lady, but she was probably only 3 to 5 years older than me) was trying to bag me like a deer-hunter. She was very Bambi-esque herself; all cuteness and rosey-cheeked with not a chance in hell. I was put in one of those awful situations where you only fully clue in that someone’s actually trying to pick you up, instead of just smiling and dancing with you, when it’s way too late to whip around and go, “WHOA! …YO! I gotta girlfriend! AND, you’re totally not hot anyway.” If you’re going to do that, timing’s important.

Aw… that was cruel. Actually, she gave me one of the most superlative compliments I’ve ever received. She told me, by way of repeating in English what she’d just told her friend in German, that I “dance like a god.” A god? That was really nice of her. She was sweet, just in sorta sad way.

I’m giggling my way to hell here. This is a new low in blogging evil for me. Poor thing… I am a bad, bad god-like Noz.

Anyway, I ditched that bear trap and went on to M1.

Here’s a critical juncture in the transcribing of my saga. It’s just after 6am. The hotel restaurant opens for breakfast now, I’ve had my shower, and I check out in less than 5 hours. Do I sit here blogging until the morning, or do I sleep?

We'll see in the next episode, won't we? HA!

Noz Update - M1:The Epic Saga Concluded - Stuttgart
Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: Believe by the Chemical Brothers
Topic: Noz Update

I can't seem to figure out why all my quotation marks are coming out as upsidedown question marks... Please forgive.

When we last left our hero (that's me), he was debating on sleeping before Blogging his latest adventure, or just staying up all night and then going to go prance about naked with the Germans in the Bathouses of Stuttgart...

*** 4.5 hours later ***

I slept. Turns out lying in bed blogging is way too much like doing nothing to keep me awake. Before sleeping I went for breakfast. T'was the day after clubbing, and all through the hotel, not a creature was stirring, except for the help. I found it funny that the staff kept cheerily saying "Good morning" to me, when I had already been up for 24 straight hours (not counting a nap on the train), delivered a talk in a city 400km away, and been to two bars and a club.

There was only one other guy in the restaurant. He was this 40-something, 1950s USA throwback army dude in FULL fatigues, complete with shaved head and a flag stitched on his arm. I wanted to launch into some serious "Hey, MAN! I won't be held down by The Man, Man! You man man, Man? I mean, you get me, Man?" but I refrained. "Maybe held down by a man, but the man? No way!

Anyway. 3.5 pages of Blog so far and I've not even gotten to the club!

So -- M1 is the kind of club the Lord goes to when he wants to shake his Almighty G(-d)-thang.

From their website:
"The M1 isn't just a club - it's a legend, a life-feeling, and a leading figure in the electronic music scene. This is where trends are born. The M1, a project, that works without hoopla. The M1 wants to be the best club in the world."

I walked in and expected Snoop Dogg, Christina Aguilera, David LeChapelle, or the GZA to turn a corner at any second. About 5 or 6 girls in there actually looked and dressed like Christina too. It was 70-80% guys, as it seemed that girls below a B-cup or carrying more than 10 pounds extra weight were driven away at the door with a shit-covered plank of wood... unless they had released a hit RnB single. This left the ratios slanted.

It was the most fo' real Hip Hop night I've ever seen. These were not the kids of Surrey out to hear Top-of-the-Pops hits. The outfits, the dancing, the grinding hips, the mad bounce-bouncing, the arm pumping, the posturing, the pouting -- everything was so "from da hood", or for me, just the stuff of music videos. Interesting enough, like the most modern hip hop videos, it was more cross-cultural, and came complete with the little Asian girls wearing next to nothing dancing in sunglasses on top of boxes, white guys who knew the words to every song and danced and posed as well as anyone else, and miscellaneous and sundry bad-asses. Where ma dogs at? At M1, apparently.

Turns out Snoop Dog is playing there soon.

Now I have to check out of the hotel, but when I get back to my PC, a little about how and why M1 made my European all-time top-ten clubs list.

Back.

So, at 4pm I'm in Dortmund delivering a speech about how a customizable, native-XML authoring tool will enable the market-demanded applications of content management and re-use, in-context collaboration, translation memory, and mutli-channel publishing. I walked through a case study of a Fortune 500 that leveraged structured content to re-engineer business processes, thus better integrating engineering with technical documentation and achieving significant return on investment and reduction of time-to-market. At 4am that night, in a building complex named after that same company (I was in "The Bosch Area"), I've got my shirt tied around my waist and I'm dancing to hard house on top of a booze and sweat slicked bar beneath the streets of Stuttgart.

Whattafuckinday...

So, the crowd! Wow! They were like party incarnate! Everyone was spraying vitality and beauty with every toss of their sweaty shoulders. Everyone knew the words, and just about everyone was out to sleep with everyone else, once they'd gotten a good 6 hours of dancing in. And they could dance! Dancing Germans!

The outfits were the best. 6-foot guys with t-shirts that went to their knees. Dog tags, backwards baseball caps and assorted sports gear, teeny tiny skirts, and chains, chains, chains. Where do they find this stuff?

I also witnessed a shocking ritual that I don't think many folks not from da hood get to see. I was recently in a heavy metal club, and I noticed that dancing to heavy metal has sort of evolved past the throwing of body checks and elbows to loud music. It's now a more martial-art-esque thing with actual moves. More like capoeira. I think this is due to the steady cross-polination in the last 10 years with hip hop beats, instruments, and vocal styles. Heavy metal has become more funky.

Here, I was on the other side. I was watching "proto-moshing". It was like people were dancing in the primordial ooze. Hip hop has become faster and harder, and the bouncing of yore has become body checking, and so, the elbows have come up, and the moshing begun. I watched a tiny thin little woman grab and shove another girl of similar size into some behemoth that was stomping about the floor trying to overbalance other guys. Someone nailed me backwards into an innocent bystander who caught me and threw me back into the pit.

I thought, "Wow. Thanks for the memories." Truly, this was no place for me to go, "Watch it, I get lower back pain!"

There is a variation though. At points, they bunch up and link arms, and bend at the knees, and in groups of 5-10, sway and jump such that they become one gigantic set of shoulders bounding up and down the beat. It's quite exciting to watch.

The crowd was incredibly diverse, representing all nations, gathered for the unifying purpose of gettin' down. Most were the definition of hip. Some were the definition of hip, but ensnarled in the youth-condition: So much sex-drive, so little time.

With the ratios of testosterone to girls being what it was, the evening was a fascinating look into the hell that is being a straight man in one of these places. I look at them, watching them watch these svelte, full-breasted, girls and young woman throw thighs over each other and grind into poles and railings, and I can see their anxiety. The frantic darting eyes darting around, and the body language that says, "Ok... ah... I can't just leap on them... um... fuck... What are my alternatives? Maybe I can... leap on them? Wait... no... shit!" They're enslaved. Either convince one of these girls you are in the top two percentile of the 300 men in this club, or no action for you! Penis go home! No birfday eggroll!

As one who does quite enjoy having sex with woman, I feel lucky to have a deep, deep, (deep) appreciation for silky breast and booty shaking, yet enough distance to not feel trapped by this "lock and key" relationship structure. Duh, having a girlfriend helps, but I always felt the do-or-die "Gotta get some" of straight-boy-land was a sad state of affairs. Also, I find the girl-on-girl thing totally lame and unappealing. I think it's the dancing equivalent of passing out cards that say, "Please, oh please, like me!" The worst is when pairs of them that aren't actually good dancers tail you around trying to upstage because they think that you're stealing their spotlight by having wigglier hips than they. Maybe try screwing some of these guys instead of just teasing them into a frenzy -- that'd loosen up your lumbar, Honey!

So, I'm in the Wu-Tang Clan's basement, and it's all good. I'm having a blast. Then, around 2am, I hear a pounding House beat, and I see across the club another room has opened up.

Valhalla.

I walked across the club into what looked like a chill-out area, but in fact had louder harder music playing than the main room. I found out later that the DJ was a regular at one of Ibiza's largest club venues. I hate House music, but this guy was amazing! It was like House, only, good! The songs built to these ridiculous pounding climaxes where there were no options except to scream your head off and jump around waving your arms in the air. The synthesizers shrieked with vicious low-res brutality, and the beat pumped through side-chained compressor units such that each kick seemed to punch out all other sounds from the mix, exist for a moment on its own, and then the entire song would flood back in to have its revenge. Repeat at 135bpm at play at volumes that inspire you to run around the room screaming "I'm suffering permanent hearing loss! I will never experience sound the same way again due to the damage that is occurring right now! WoOOoooOO!!" and you have a recipe for a par-tay.

In the House area, there were far more girls, and it seemed that they had all reached back through time and wrenched their outfits out of Bangles and Miami Sound Machine videos. They matched their off-the-shoulder tops and denim skirts with mangly, punky, hair-dos, big hoop earrings, and an array of bleach and dying options. Girls just wanna - they just wanna-ah-ah. They were all pretty seriously hot. The club seemed to have trolled Spain and Sweden collecting those hot chicks that hang around with gay men because they can't stand the constant stream of propositions they get in straight clubs. You know the ones I mean...

In the main area of M1, it was a Hip Hop night, in the House room, it was Sexually Ambiguous night. Immediately my Gaydometer started buzzing. After taking a better look around at the wife-beaters, tank-tops, cropped hair, mobile hips and rippling 6-packs, the needle snapped in half from the shearing force, and the dial burst in a super-nova of pink gaydometer transmission fluid. Still, the whole thing seemed so out of place that I assumed they must be straight.

Wait, as long as we're on the topic sexual ambiguity, the crowd in the main room was a bit funny too and I've got to tell you about this one guy. He was in head-to-toe sports/hip hop gear, in bright orange. He was the same hip-hopper kinda guy as the rest, but he seemed a bit too good looking, and his clothes a bit too bright and clean. On sight, my gaydar activated and began to hum contently. We were singing along to the same song doing the obligatory "Yee! I'm jammin' in da club, G!" faces at each other, and he invited me to come dance on the same platform as him (the platforms were pretty big and fit some 5 people each). I declined -- my platform had a pole on it, and you can't beat that with a bat.

I assumed he was being so friendly because he was impressed with the two twenty-something girls that were engaging me in a dance off. They were of the contrived nearly-naked girl-on-girl variety previously mentioned, so I just sort of danced by and found myself a new spot. I lost sight of Orange Dude until about 20 minutes later, when he passed by on the ground in front of my platform (his shoulders were at my knee height). Again, we exchanged the wordless communication of enthusiastic clubbers. He gave me the "Dude in the White Shirt!" gestures and I gave him the "Dude in the Stupid Hat!" reciprocations. Then he gave me the "I'm going to grab your penis!" gesture, and I thought, "Whoa! Dude, that wasn't in the manual!" He just reached up and in a playful footballer-smack-on-the-butt kind of way and decided to shake hands with Mr. Happy. Maybe this is normal in Germany?

This was the only mildly "pink" thing to happen to me until I was summoned by the thump-thump of House music. It was as if I'd walked into or Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto, or Heaven or G-A-Y (only with better music) in London. As I said, Gaydar was off the charts, yet logic and history dictated that faggy house nights and urban hip hop nights were mutually exclusive phenomenon. It's like finding a secret club where cats, dogs, lions and zebras all go to shake it until the sun comes up. So weird!

I spent quite a while here dancing with the beautiful people. I've opened many a dance floor in England, where they're all madly putting away alcohol and avoiding being the first one to start dancing. Here, everyone was dancing, and when it got so hot that in desperation I eventually took off my shirt, and it was like I'd started a tidal wave of cotton. Shirts started coming off guys all over the floor. I also discovered that there was a stairwell, sort of "hidden" at the far end of the bar in a corner. That led down to yet another room. Here there was much more fake smoke and much less light. People were dancing up on top of the bar. These two guys were madly making out with each other on top of the bar while one stood supporting himself with two dance-poles to keep himself upright, and the other basically tried to dislodge him with the aggression of his tongue and mouth. They had a girl with them at one point and I can't really remember if she got in on the action, but either way, on a tiny little bar, she had a front-row seat. It was so "highschool".

Now, Noz has seen some pretty shameless displays in his time, but these guys were really amazing. Not just the guys making out in between bouts of dancing on a 5-foot bar, but the guys who were jumping up on the couches and whistling, yelling, and grinding their hips at their friends to the music dancing in unison like a chorus line. There was one small group of friends that I remember in particular that were so free with their narcissism that they would seem to be trying to seduce themselves while dancing. They'd smile and wiggle at their reflections while they danced. It was a circus. One guy -- who admittedly had a body and face that made one want to pole-vault across the room and draw a heart shape across his pecs with semen -- was taking ice cubes out of champagne bucket on the bar and rubbing them on his and other peoples' nipples, perfectly aware that men and woman alike were swooning left and right in his muscle-bound wake. It was just those few who were so over the top, but in a place with 30 people, 10 of them being uber-party animals sets a tone of wickedness that would send George Bush running for his blankie.

So the dancing went on and on until the morn. Orange Penile Grabby Man made a brief but uneventful reappearance. The crowd eventually began to thin somewhat. The House room shut down, and since I could no longer ping-pong between rooms, and the music in the Hip Hop room wasn't consistent enough, I got a got a little bored. It was 5:30am and I had plans for the morning. I exchanged goodbyes with a few of my brothers and sisters in boogie I'd met along the way and collected my bag from the check-out.

I'd ruined a perfectly good t-shirt. I just got it the month before in Madrid, and now the decal on the front had its colour faded by that toxic combination of sweat and fake smoke, and the back had deep black lines in it from being rolled around on railings and poles. Sad, but worth it. On my way home it was cold and raining. I was a little lost for a while, but I had the general direction of my hotel and flew casual. Just around a corner, right in the middle of the sidewalk in front of a shop, I found a young woman -- 20-something, blonde, very pretty -- sitting on a guy's shoulders, reaching up into a tree for something, while two friends looked on. I couldn't quite see what it was, something small on a dark blue ribbon, but she seemed very intent on getting it. I asked, "You need any help?" and they didn't answer, or didn't answer with much more than a grunt. She kept swinging her arms up at it in visible distress. It was only just too high for her to reach, making for a pathetic sight.

The shop they were in front of had a metal overhang sticking out of it. It was just above and to the right of her and ran all the way to almost above where I was standing. There it ended at a doorway which had an iron grate security door. I was distinctly unimpressed with the chivalry (and inventiveness) of these three guys, and a bit unimpressed with the politeness of the lot when I offered help. But I thought, what would Jesus do?

So I let out a little martyr's sigh and scaled the iron door up to the overhang. It was recessed and had filled with rainwater, so I had to do a little beam-walk across the high-edge at the front. I should have taken off my backpack, but I didn't fully trust leaving it with these guys. With the off-center weight, I nearly slipped off the steel in the rainy weather and it suddenly occurred to me how funny it would be if I fell off and broke my leg, and left these people with still no precious tree-item and a crippled tourist writhing underneath it screaming and shrieking like a little girl (as you know I would). How embarrassing would that be! It would serve them right for being impolite.

When I got to the branch and reached across I found a set of keys hanging off the blue ribbon. I grabbed it, handed it down to the girl, and then made my way back down. When I was off the building, she was off the guy, and she tackled me. She hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks and looked like she was going to cry. Apparently a good deed goes a long way. She had gotten her friend's keys stuck in the try, and they'd been trying to get them for "a long time". Suddenly was the nicest person in the world, and helped me find my way home by helping me with my map. Her friends -- including the owner of the keys -- nodded at me in mild appreciation. She asked me what I do. I said, "I sell software in the day, and at night, I go clubbing."

I reflected on the little moments that happen "in the big city". It's funny how your life just bumps briefly into someone else's. Having recently lost a pair of keys and had to get a locksmith to drill my door and replace the lock (click for the story), I thought how differently their night could've ended up if I'd not walked down that sidewalk.

The Jedi Clubber

"Hello! Good morning! How was it?"

"Excellent. Truly fucking excellent."

"Where'd you go?"

"M1."

"Fantastic. That's the best party in Stuttgart! It's the fourth one, you know?"

"Fourth?"

"Fourth M1. The first was closed about 8 years ago. The second closed on [some unexpectedly precise date, even the day of the week]." Obvious moment of deep emotion... "That was my M1."

"You're a fan?"

"Oh yeah. M1 is the best party in Stuttgart. The best! We used to party. All night me and my friends would go out to M1, then an afterparty at [someplace] until 2pm. They played the hardest house music you'll ever here there. Then I'd go straight to work in the hotel the next day and work until the evening."

"Straight from work without sleeping?"

"Yeah. But I'm old now!"

"Wow. How old are you?"

"About 31."

"Not so old."

"No, not so old. I can still party all night, that's no problem! But I can't go to work the next day."

"Well, that's better than I've ever been I think."

Laughs.

"Well, thanks for the recommendation and all the help man."

"Pleasure!"

"When does the restaurant open?"

"6:30"

"Great. I'm going to go wash up. I smell like death!"

Noz Update - The GAS Show
Mood:  rushed
Topic: Noz Update

I'm waiting on writing anything on the recent events in London until I've formulated a real opinion. Right now I'm just pissed off.

Heidi Ho (that little minx),

I’m at the tail end of a road trip through what is affectionately if inappropriately named the “GAS” region of our market. GAS = Germany, Austria, Switzerland.

We (me and one of our partner companies from Berlin) have done three stops in three days: Zurich (my first time there), Stuttgart, and Dortmund (my first time there, but who cares, it's Dortmund). For me, it’s been a lot of sitting around in hot conference rooms listening to presentations in German. I did three performances of forty five minutes each, basically slam-dunking our product so far down the audiences’ throats that brochures clogged their colons.

It was about 25-35 people per stop. The Swiss were pleasant despite the fact we were crammed 35 into a non-air-conditioned room at it was 35 degrees out. I did a pretty good job, although I ran long (first time doing this particular presentation), they laughed at my jokes and willingly sat through me selling to them. All good. The Stuttgartians were much less warm, but I did ok. I told one little joke which I thought was cute during my presentation and got an interesting reaction. I got one of those surprised laughs, which was appropriate for the joke, and then when I was out having tea afterwards with one of my copresenters he said, “That was great. No German would ever make that joke. Ever.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “It’s just too… I don’t know. Cool… I guess.” I thought this was a very funny reaction.

Now you’re dying to know: I have a tendency to talk an eensy weensy bit fast. So, part way through my shtick, I asked, “Any questions? How’s my speed? S’good? How about me? Am I lookin’ good? How’s the shirt?” The other guy from the partner company said he could actually see the wheels in their brains turning for a moment before it dawned on them what I said. Fuck. I thought it was just cute… Despite the culture shock, they said it was a good gag.

The Dortmundites were just jerks. I was thinking, “For the love of GOD, someone just smile!” I was getting steadily faster and faster near the end in desperation to get it to be over. It warmed a bit, which was good, or I might have just mooned them and smashed my guitar… er… laptop, into the stage... um… overhead projector.

Besides sitting through hours of German, and the colonic clogging, it’s been a lot of chatting in bars with our partners. These are the same company with whom I was in Paris for week 2 of this month at the Air Show, but different guys. I’m friendly with them all, and we generally have a pleasant time trolling around restaurants and bars in the evenings and weekends.

One of my favourite parts of my pan-European lifestyle is listening to Europeans make fun of each other. I was just discussing before I started blogging this evening how I find German much easier and more sensible to pronounce than Dutch. My traveling companion – Klaus – said in that frank and simple way that Germans do: “I think Dutch is a throat disease”. On the other end, my colleague in Amsterdam does an impression of a German party animal. “Ha. Ha. Ve ah havink fun,” (checks watch…) “Now.” In Paris with Ze Germans we were in stitches when we found an advertisment in an event-related publication that said, (more or less), “British Pub! Home-style food!” So, you’re in Paris, and you’re so unhappy with all that crappy French food that you’ve just got to get some fine British cuisine in you or you’ll go crazy. It boggles the mind!

And then there’s the famous Groucho Marx bit: “I’m collecting the thinnest books of all time. So far I’ve got three: Italian War Heroes, Great Secrets of British Cooking, and A Thousand Years of German Humour." Little did Groucho know that that is funniest when delivered by a German guy.

It’s just after midnight, and I’ve still got a few hours to rock the night life of Stuttgart. I’ve got a few clubs to hit in hopes of given my booty a much needed shakin’.

Love to all.

N

Noz Update - Locked Out - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Now Playing: Will & Grace
Topic: Noz Update

Don't mock me...

As foreshadowing of a lost key story of my own 3 days later, here’s a little moment in Amsterdam.

The night before I flew out to Zurich, I was in the corporate apartments, I had a 5:30am cab arriving, and it was nearly midnight and I hadn’t eaten or packed. I ran out to get some food, and when I closed the door behind me and went to put my hotel keys in my pocket, I looked down to find my office keys in my hand! I flipped out. I didn’t have my phone on me, so I couldn’t call anyone, and even if I had a phone, it was nearly midnight and I didn’t know the numbers of anyone in Amsterdam.

I went downstairs to try to start knocking on random doors, and a Dutch girl in the apartment directly below mine eventually answered and let me in. Again, she was blonde 20-something kinda pretty, kinda plain – I think I’ve got some sort of weird cosmic pattern going. Too bad I’m neither single, nor into blondes in the first place. I crawled out of her window and scaled my way up to the floor above (giving my tum-tum a nasty scrape) and tried to get back in by slamming it from the outside while clinging to the railings without repelling myself backwards to my death or extreme discomfort. I’d have given my kingdom for a decent ledge to stand on.

When I gave up, she called the managers, made me dinner and a cup of tea, and sat with me while the lock-smith did his thing. We discussed yoga and meditation, culture and our careers. She did property law in Amsterdam and lived Thursday-Sunday in her real home in Freisland in the north. For dinner, she reheated me a vegetarian pasta dish.

When flipping out and totally berating myself for my own stupidity, fate would land me in the apartment of a new-age yoga chick who made me tea and said stuff like, “That kind of stress adds nothing, but takes away so much.”

“I have ahlways relahd on the kahndness of straynjahs”