Postvacation Vacancy Syndrome

Warning (Achtung!):

I hereby declare sole copyright, ownership, and blogospheric citation privileges for the term Postvacation Vacancy Syndrome (PVS). PVS, often confused with jet lag, is characterized by the following symptoms (along with others that will be attached and codified hereunto vis-a-vis quid pro quo de minimis with the incorporation of your comments [and yours, too]):

• The inability to formulate common words, phrases, or gesticulations native to one's native tongue or culture (such as it is).
• The overwhelming urge to cease working (no matter the profession, vocation, or status) immediately and forever.
• An obsessive and compulsive desire to consult tram, train, airplane, bus, or subway schedules.
• Profusive sweating and rapid heartbeat brought on by: a) work tasks you were asked to complete in prevacation mode (but may not have completed and probably totally forgot), b) tasks newly revealed through multiple e-mails or voicemails greeting you upon arrival back at your "job," c) tasks requested in the minutes upon returning to your job -- and due immediately, d) any of the above, e) all of the above, or f) none of the above.
• A lassitude and lethargy toward anything not involving sightseeing, journaling, picture-taking, or sitting in a cafe reading the International Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, or a local newspaper. (Speaking of The New Yorker, reading about a dodo bird expedition to Mauritius consumed much of my reading time on the return trip to Amerika. Entertaining and informative, but doesn't one really want sleep inducement in such a situation? [And don't criticize me for having the introductory phrase of the preceding sentence modify the wrong subject. After all, I am suffering from PVS.])
• The persistent and recurring delusion that you can move to an exotic location (or mundane foreign location) and succeed financially, romantically, intellectually, artistically, and emotionally (perfectly).

Beware of PVS!

It lurks everywhere and masquerades as jet lag, exhaustion, immaturity, ADHD, midlife crisis, and angst.

Or else, embrace it fully and voluptuously.

Laugh. Or....

Else.

p.s. Sheeesh! After first posting this, I discovered that PVS also stands for "persistent vegetative state." Who knew?

Random(ly) House(d) Observations, Berliner Edition

Sometimes even I am amazed by my own recall. I just knew "Travel Is So Broadening" is the title of a work by the too-often-ignored Sinclair Lewis, but I had not read it in decades. I further recall this work (was it an essay or a short story? Sinclair Lewis experts are invited to chime in) was scathingly ironic, lampooning the small-mindedness of American provincials. It is an oft-repeated phrase, and it turns out travel typically broadens in ways we least expect it. So, here are some observations posted by a jet-lagged chronicler of the sundry and the not-quite-sun-dried (it was often cloudy and rainy in Berlin):

• If you are at a crosswalk in Berlin and the light for pedestrians is red, you wait. You wait until it is green. You might even do this if it is 1:30 a.m. (0130 hours) and there are no cars, trams, or other people passing by.
  
• Berlin is awash in, or littered by, or trashed by, or enlivened by graffiti. Take your pick as to how you describe it. The kindly and intelligent man who drove me in a taxi to Tegel airport attributed such wall writings to "the Americans." I doubt it. I'll take the blame for my countrymen for some of it, but there must be lots of copycats galore. Plus, I believe the Berlin Wall had graffiti on it almost from the start.
  
• I have a balancing act going on in my brain. Berlin the orderly versus Berlin the anarchic. And maybe both elements need each other.
• In Berlin there is no east or west. Isn't there an Easter hymn that goes something like that? (The link gives you a sample of the tune.)
  
• At rush hour people do not rush nearly as madly as they do in New York; they barely rush at all. In fact, during my taxi from the airport to Friedrichschain I wanted to scream, "Step on it, mach shnell, fraulein!"
• Smoking cigarettes is in, nearly everywhere. It didn't bother me nearly as much as I felt it might. I wanted to smoke a Cuban cigar. Never got around to it.
• It was hard for me to measure the weight of history or how it was viewed by those around me. For example, when I related to the taxi driver how I remembered when the Wall when up, and how I was afraid, and thought it was World War III, he glibly said something like, "That's what the Russians said." Hmmm. He might've been my age. He said he had lived in Berlin since 1960, I recall; born maybe 100 meters north of Berlin. I do not know how to read these verbal tea leaves. I liked him and shook his hand with both my hands when I departed. Yes, I tipped him.
  
• The unemployment rate there, he said, is 18%; my research supports him. It did not strike me as a depressed city economically but rather as a vibrant and creative hub.
• The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is compelling: blocky, harsh, somber, engaging, textural. At first, I was alarmed and rather horrified to see young people (ostensibly tourists in their teens or twenties) playing what resembled a casual game of "hide and seek" among its gravestone-like pillars. Were they being disrespectful? My gut feeling was, yes. I was tempted to lecture them, but how, and exactly why? Besides, maybe they would've declared that their response demonstrated a triumph of life. (Most likely, they hadn't thought that far.) To be honest, I don't know what they thought or felt. It was not a place of total silence or solemnity, but it was an eerie refuge amidst an urban din. You were drawn to it. A dark sense of place is evoked.
  
• Passing through the Brandenburg Gate was like passing through a time warp, though a Times Square atmosphere prevailed. It was cool.
• On the plane, in the toilet, a sign said "Toilet Paper Only." Man, I had to keep my legs crossed for nine hours! That was rough. I guess I took that "following the rules" bit a bit too literally for my own good.

"Lost in Translation" was one of the movies for the flight back. Perfect.

Laugh. Or....
Else!

p.s. As the day ends, my search of a fellow blogger's site summons me to find the luminous amidst the gore on this feast day of John the Baptist.

Smootheest Mystery

The Scene: Smoothees, a minimalist, white-walled place with 'fresh and healthy asian fusion food,' in the Prenzlauer Berg section of Berlin, on Kastanienalle (nunber 100 if you must know). Soothing female voices with minimal instrumentation as background music. Blond wood woodblocks to sit on at wooden tables. The menu whiteboard in back of the counter is mostly in English. 'smoothees your vitamin dealer' [all lowercase]. 'Create your menu!' Main + sauce + veggy [their spelling] + side. The short, kinky-haired, brown-eyed young lady at the counter speaks very little English, despite all this English, including menu items in English, such as teas (I order black tea but have to say 'schwarz tee'; my daughter orders the same with some milk and cinnamon (orders in broken Deutsch) but it comes out later looking more like a frappe [but I am getting ahead of the story]) and homemade brownie, those are the words, in English, and which I order. All this is right after a raucously wonderful time at the excellent Babel restaurant, a Middle Eastern place (meal for two with drinks, 12.90 euros), where we riotously conversed with Jim and Renee, Americans with whom I erupted into conversation with based upon correctly identifying a New Yawk accent (they are fresh here from Prague since November and their friend and colleague Dario (originally from Venezuela but fresh from Prague and en route to London tomorrow). (I had my first Turkish [Arabische] there; it wired me up; the man behind the counter nearly scolded me when I asked about milk; so no milk, but a dash of Kierkegaard.)

The Mystery: At the table in back of E. and me, as we first arrive, are a man and a woman. The man, handsome and professorial, is perhaps my age, late-50s-ish, to my eyes, all gray-haired, gangly, a face not unlike john Le Carre's, a courtly voice, a blue cardigan (was it blue? was it dark or light?). He is almost huddled with a woman quite a few years his junior, also attractive, blonde, stylishly dressed, silk scarf, gold earrings, red lipstick. Their conversation appears to be intimate, though dominated, in a solicitous sort of way, by the man. Off to the side a tall young man with a porkpie hat turned backwards is lying down in a bedlike area with candles, reading a magazine. Without warning or provocation, he gets up, tosses the magazine, and joins the man and woman at their wooden table. E. and I are intriqued. Who is who? The mystery begins to consume our conversation. Oh. Somewhere out of the blue (out of the fecking white walls?) another young man has appeared, and he sits facing the woman -- all of them have their backs to me, but E. can see them to observe. They begin to consume us, delightfully, in our conversation.

Where did Young Man Opposite Youngish Woman come from? When did he come in? What is thte relationship between Mr. Professorish and Youngish Woman? I assumed husband and wife at first, but the intimacies became shrouded. Her eyes were intent on Mr. P and on Young Man Opposite.

E. was studying them intently and reporting back to me, in increasingly hushed tones for fear they might be on to us: body language, cues, posture, emotional weather. I sneaked a look behind me when I could or upon going to or returning to the bathroom. E. posited that the two young men and the woman were all siblings. Hmmmm. I still held to husband and wife for Mr. P and her, because she sat angled toward him slightly while facing the two younger men; the two younger men were now directly opposite Mr. P and Youngish Woman. I objected to the sibling concept on the grounds I saw no rivalry betwen the woman and the two young men. At one point, Young Man With Cap got up, waved, left, and then returned. No conspiratorial caresses betrayed amorousness between Mr. P and Her.

I compared this to some sort of Beckett play.

Who was who? Why did we care? Why could we not sift it out? Why did we want to so much?

And were they thinking the same of us?!

The teas were in large glasses, very hot. E. did not care for hers. We switched. Then switched back. The 'homemade brownie' was not what I expected (not fudgelike and chewy as in Amerika), but excellent. Sprinkled with coconut and a slight trail of honey. Very good but somehow not oversweet. E. knew enough German to know that they were out of vanilla ice cream and Cute Kinky Hair kindly apologized to us, or so I was told.

Seven euros.

For an after-dinner dessert.

And a mystery theater.

Tschuss.

P.S. And, Dafathsdays, the ghost of Rudolf Hess was spotted yesterday among the tomblike, blocky mini-city of the Memorial to Europe's Jews, rattling in his rusty chains.

Ich bin tired Berliner

Something like 1.5 hrs sleep in the last 36 hrs, und so:

graffiti, Brandenburg gate, memorial to Europe's Jews, S-bahn, U-bahn, BLT mit chicken @ Einsteins, St Hedwig Kathedral, Unter den Linden, smoking in public places, Potsdamer Platz, sirens that go deeeee-doooo deee-doooooo rhythmically, portions of the Wall, slower pace than New York City, rain, sun, rain, wind, the Reichstag, Staatsoper Ballett, Miro, the bibliotheque, the Berliner Dom, Alexanderplatz, honor system.

G'night.

Sleep. Or....

Die.

Listing Listfully and Listlessly

My life is cluttered, and lists are part of the clutter. Lists reside on tiny pieces of paper that I carry in my pockets, with the left side used more than the right. Lists abound on my desk on sticky Post-its of neon colors. I have even taken lately to drawing up a list at the start of the workday. It's an exhaustive list inventorying all the anticipated tasks of the day: responses to calls, e-mails, queries, comments, asides, requests, deadlines, and stated or implicit demands of disparate pieces of paper on my glass desk, a desk as transparent as my orderly attempts to rein in my rampant disorder. (I am ending this paragraph right here in homage to Lenny Cohen.)

Then I numerically rank each task, perhaps stopping at ten. Then I cross off each completed task.

This list-ordered tasking seems to settle me down and focus my efforts. It works until intrusions of yet other tasks.

Or does it work at all? And will it last?

List last.

Last list.

Lost lust.

Lust lost list last.

List lost lust last.

I just love the lilt of those four words.

Et cetera. Inter alia. Age quod agis.

Where was I?

If am without lists, does that make me listless?

Or do the lists themselves make me listless, tricking me into thinking listing equals doing?

In consulting my Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, I am thrilled to find the deep and criss-crossed layers of listing and its variants and associated forms. (Yes, such a finding thrills me, and I make no apologies for it.) The word list offers a rich playground for any list maker.

(But I will be brief. I need to pack for Berlin -- and alas I have for now successfully avoided lapsing into all kinds of blatant Wall metaphors, analogies, and paradigms.)

My OED tells me that list in some associated form or other (to say nothing of Franz Liszt!) refers to:

hearing,
the ear,
a border,
a hem (as in [ahem!] a silken piece of ooh-la-la! cloth you know where),
an earlobe,
part of a head of hair, such as a beard,
a scar,
a ring around the foot of a column,
a place of combat,
a staked enclosure (plural = the starting point of a race),
joy,
delight,
appetite,
craving,
lust (you knew it would come to that),
the careening of a ship (such as the ship of state embarking on certain courses of action),
a roll or catalog of words (such as This parade of nouns),
to please,
to care for,
to listen (I've barely begun to touch the verb forms)

insert ellipsis points here

This is just for starters. (Does that make it UNjust for finishers? hahahar!)

The list goes on.

Or could,

But I am getting listless.

Laugh. Or....

Else.

The Door

I've heard it said "when one door closes, another opens." But what happens when one door closes, then opens, and then remains open? Such was my experience this morning. It was very cold, just a little bit above zero degrees Fahrenheit (a German word, if ever there was one; isn't their word for zero "null"? I'm boning up on meine Deutsch in preparation for my odyssey to Berlin, on Friday). This morning was crisply frigid with the sound of crunchy snow under my feet. Invigorating and lustrous. An incandescent beauty greeted me as I looked down from Tipperary Hill onto gleaming wood-frame houses, many -- like ours -- more than one hundred years old. White smoke rising straight up (as if the whole community were announcing "habemas papam") against a cerulean sky. A scene that could be more poetically and mystically described by The Secretary of Dawns. I brushed a veneer of snow off my car, holding my gloves in my hand (if I can remember back that far). (Why do I do that with my gloves? Is it laziness, impatience, or self-destructiveness?) I placed the key in the car door. It is not a car door that can be unlocked or locked electronically. The 1999 Ford Contour (listed on the registration as green but it strikes me as more olive-tan) is not paid off (technically, yes, but it was paid by borrowing money at a cheaper interest rate than the original loan), and sports very retro manually locking (or unlocking) doors. I turned the key right, left, then right again, then left, encountering frozen resistance, which I expected, since the lock had recently been sticking, largely owing, I felt, to the moist weather followed by sudden temperature plunges. Happily the door opened. (In that preceding use of the adverb happily, does it refer to the door or the act of opening? Well, if it is truly functioning as an adverb, it must refer to the verb opened. Admittedly, it is an adverb that squintingly tries to modify the whole sentence -- as does the word admittedly in this sentence.) But the door did not close. More accurately, it did not stay closed. (This was not a shock; the same thing happened earlier in the week.) I slammed it, figuring that a jarring thrust might do the trick, dislodging ice or frigidity, as if the door were an illuminating and glistening sexual metaphor. No luck. I lustily slammed it several times, and still the door would not latch closed. I sprayed WD-40 onto the keyhole, onto the door's locking mechanism, and onto the latch on the frame of the car. You might say I sprayed both the male and female lock components. I even sprayed the manual lock lever on the inside of the driver's (moi) car door, leaving an oily smell, but not nearly as much as I had expected, perhaps because of the cold. All the while, the car was running, defrosters going. I felt that perhaps the environmentally suspect act of warming up the car might generate a cumulative de-icing effect (I have a small de-icer spray device, but I didn't bother; it didn't work the other day). I even tried closing the door tenderly and gently, as if treating it thusly would coax it to surrender romantically into its rightful niche in the universe. No deal. I tried to lift the door up while closing it, imagining it may have been misaligned (as opposed to maligned, hence the slamming). Time was ticking away. I was already late for work (typical). The morning was still beautiful. Lambent. I pictured neighbors (neighbors are very close by; even a driveway is a treat; the house of our down-the-hill neighbors, renters, is maybe five feet from our house, a proximity that bestows upon one and all the obligation to refrain from loud arguments or boisterous carnality, especially in summer). After a few more futile slams of the door, I decided to drive to work. As is. After all, I had managed to drive my youngster to school like this the other day, and the situation ultimately cleared itself up after I arrived at the school. The drive to work is under three miles. It went well, if comically. Oh. Let me point out that I drive a standard shift. So, picture The Laughorist, true to his appellation, driving the car, shifting gears, and holding fast the door with his left hand (I am left-handed), and perhaps managing a self-effacing smile garnished with my new DKNY Euro-style hip frames and newly acquired (last night) progressive lenses. I refrained from listening to the Bob Dylan Modern Times CD because I did not want any distractions. Right turns were especially problematic. Physics dictated that a right turn hurled the door orbiting outward. I got a little tired out before even entering the hallowed temple of Labor. But I got there. And not too grouchily or miserably. I didn't especially feel as if This Is Happening To Me, Poor Me. (Okay, a little bit.) I call this grace. (For the record, a car repair place near work fixed it for thirty-eight dollars and change; cleaning, greasing, etc. They had to open the door up. We'll see. No guarantee it might not happen again.) The whole episode strikes me as a scene out of Haruki Murakami. What lessons can I draw about my encounter with the door? What have I learned, and what greater metaphor applies? What did my friend the door teach me, just for today?

One door opens, with difficulty, then stubbornly stays open, then (with help) closes. One driver smiles. What is the sound of one hand holding the door?

Laugh. Or....

Else.

Serial (Comma) Celebrity

Who would think a remark or two about the serial comma would elicit so much comma, comma commotion (sounds like the chorus of a Del Shannon or Boy George song)?

It turns out my post last week on this topic ventured headlong into one of the more contentious battlegrounds of the cultured wars. (Notice, I didn't say "grammar wars"; it really has to do with style and whether you adhere to a particular style, or solipsistically and sloppily ignore it. That was one of my key points.)

I installed a web counter for the first time last week, more out of curiosity than vanity (liar!). I discovered that James Wolcott of Vanity Fair and Emily Gordon of The New Yorker Between the Lines, also known Emdashes, made passing references to my serial comma post. Yikes! Well, Ms. Gordon did more than that. She said, "The continued existence of people like this is literally what makes me go on living."

Gulp.

You're welcome, Emily.

[Disclaimer: Neither The Laughorist, nor any of his dependents, codependents, or heirs, or accomplices, have or has [wasn't sure; didn't want to research it, ask David Grambs] ever knowingly met or spoken or before her post corresponded with said Emily Gordon; nor has any remuneration, be it financial, erotic, laudatory, literary, or otherwise, op. cit., loc. cit, oh shit, been offered to or given to said Ms. Gordon or her cohorts in exchange for or in any relation to comments on the serial comma, amen, ipso facto, ad nauseam, inter alia , solidus interruptus period full stop]

Speaking of existence, contined or otherwise, what if I were to declaim about the Kierkegaardian comma? Would I be flooded by posts from Denmark? I hereby proclaim the existential existence of the Kierkegaard, or Kierkegaardian, comma. The Kierkegaard comma has to do with the riddle of whether you use a comma or not, and whether you feel guilty either with the comma or without it. Either/Or. That says it all: An existential dilemma facing each of us every day, on some level or another.

Either I put in the comma, or I don't.

Either I get up, or I don't.

Either I live, or I do not.

Either the tragedy in Iraq gets better, or we impeach Bush.


Laugh. Or....

Else.

p.s. I think we should tell the maker of Alpha-Bits to put some commas in their cereal. Y'all with me?

p.p.s. You commenters who nastily said "use your goddamn head" last time around betrayed your own ignorance and infelicitous inattention to detail by misspelling the name of the famous recently deceased nun. Who could take you seriously? No one.