Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I Was in a Prematurely Air-Conditioned Supermarket

I’m not sure what the difference between the two activities are, but for whatever reason, walking myself to the Volkspark am Weinberg in Southwest Prenzlauer Berg-Berlin to read in the evening—the park faces West and gradually slopes down towards the South, making it more or less perfect for evening-to-late-evening sitting—is nothing like my biking myself to the beach in the late morning in Miami to do more or less the same thing plus swimming. Especially since what I read is still the sort of thing which makes me unnecessarily aware of the public nature of my context when reading such things (currently reading: auf Deutsch, Hesses Siddhartha; in English, Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography – the last time I was at the beach I was reading one of Heidegger’s essays about science (is there ever a way to admit this sort of thing without coming off as self-congratulatory?)). I think I’ve mentioned this before – since Berlin doesn’t have any beaches, people here tend to treat their public patches of grass like a beach, which is nice (depending on the demographic and the related folkways for acceptible states of disrobement).

With only four full days left in Berlin, I found myself deciding between acting like normal or trying to seek out other destinations that I still haven’t seen here—there are plenty (a friend of mine was just in Berlin visiting for only 3 days, and though we didn’t actually manage to meet up (it turns out that my no-cellphone-abroad policy can interfere with social activities with out-of-towners as well as in-towners), I was immediately struck by the fact that there’s no way she and her boyfriend could have really seen that much of Berlin in 3 days, if my own map of the place feels as incomplete as it does after having lived here for 4 months (two two-month visits)). As is already evident, I opted for normal.

While I was sitting in the park, I noticed two young women, one of whom was trying to open bottles of beer for both of them (it being, of course, more-than-common to drink beer in the park at sunset) by levering the cap of one bottle of the cap of another. This is something I’ve discussed before with other friends – we know that it can be done, but have never succeeded ourselves. My initial reaction, when first hearing about such a “trick” was to exclaim that such an action would defy the laws of Physics, but was quickly corrected that actually such a trick very much confirms the laws of Physics—or Newtonian Mechanics, at any rate (equal and opposite reactions and all that). Then my brain, being what it is, figured that if one could actually open one bottle of beer with another, then the energies would just cancel each other out, thereby sparking a singularity and opening a black hole. Have I mentioned that I am not a scientist? I am not. However, that still seems awesome to me. Our mother, once upon a time, and mostly (entirely) facetiously, anecdoted her concern for Mikey while he was in China, since they’re trying to make an artificial sun over there, and that’s really dangerous. I, personally, think that I could be in at least as much danger here from double-bottlecap-leveragings in Germany sparking blackholes and rifts in the time-space. Or maybe that’s just my middle-child syndrome talking (“Look Mom! I’m in danger too!”).

At any rate, not only did this woman fail to fuck up time-space, she also couldn’t get the bottles open, but as soon as she looked around to bum a bottle opener from someone, quickly noticed that I had been observing her the whole time. Which luckily didn’t trigger any kind of “Hey! You’re creepy!” reaction, rather a more appropriate, “Hey! Do you have a bottle opener?” reaction (I wasn’t being creepy – maybe nerdy, but definitely not creepy (by the time I was thinking about black holes I probably wasn’t “looking” at anything).) I did have a bottle opener. I’m quite proud,actually, of my bottle-opener keychain (which I transferred from my actual keys to my German keys about 30 seconds after I shattered my Gastgeberin’s plastic keychain trying to open a bottle of beer with t). Flung it to them. Bottles were opened. The Universe remained intact.

Maybe it’s simply the lack of opportunity for such interactions to occur on the beach in Miami that makes it different—the fact that I have never, ever, interacted with a stranger at a beach (except maybe one time when I was little at Cape Cod and digging a hole in the sand and some random old woman said “Fill in that hole. People run here, you know.” to me). And I don’t take my keys to the beach in Miami – or, I take keys, but the smaller, lighter, bottle-openerless, totable set. Or maybe, in Zeno-esque fashion, simply having written (blogged) about my “beach problem” twice (or thrice) now, will have cured me of it (though, then, perhaps next time that I get myself to the beach, alone, in Miami, I will think to myself, inevitably, about how I can’t help but think about writing about the possibility that I might think about having gotten myself to the beach.

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