Please Happy

I’ve purchased Moby Dick two times for myself, four if you count the unabridged CDs I listened to on a college road trip to the NCAA women’s ice hockey championships, and given it as a gift once (the recipient has yet to finish it).

Maybe it’s the comedy, the way Melville seems to make up his own language, the squeamish trance I felt while reading about men literally swimming in the warm spermaceti of the massive mammal or just the sheer research it took to make such a massive book, but I soon became as obsessed as my 19th Century American lit professor Pete Coviello had promised.

And, wandering the streets of damp drizzly Berlin, I felt compelled to buy another copy. I’m taking the tome with me to my two week retreat (where I will have nothing that plugs in).

Moby Dick is to me as the sea is to Ishmael.

I took this photograph of the hole left by Moby Dick on the English fiction shelf. I would say On the Road is a worthy neighbor to Melville’s masterpiece, but Unleash the Night? Haven’t read it, but I’d say that Queequeg could totally take the blue-eyed front cover Fabio. They’d wrestle, shirts off, on the head of a newly dead whale, and then Queequeg would likely toss Fabio into the vast milky Tun and wait until he was good and submerged before plunging in after him to deliver his Fabio foe – held by the hair – to safety.

If that doesn’t convince you, I just learned that Esquire lists MD as one of the Greatest 75 Books Every Man Should Read. I’m working on the list for women.

Haiku after seeing C|O Berlin’s Photographs of the Collection of Agnès b.

Photographed punks, boys.

Limbs vulnerable, naked.

Me lonely, looking.

After connecting with some of my brother’s fellow Shambhala Buddhists at a ceremony in Cologne, I find myself in Berlin at a practitioner’s home for two days before my own two-week retreat. I’ve known the woman for one day. She made me dinner (beet and cabbage soup with buttered bread), took me along to meditate at the Berlin Shambhala center for an hour and a half, translated the aprés-sitting tea party and gave me her sleeping bag, Internet connection and couch for the evening. Make that two evenings, possibly three.

As she and her boyfriend headed to bed, I expressed my thanks again for their generosity. She stuck her head out the door from their bedroom.

“Germans don’t like so many Thank-Yous,” she said.

“One or two maybe, but that’s it. We don’t do American friendliness.”

Ouch.

It’s two days before THANKSgiving and three days before a retreat where nuns will show me how to “bow in gratitude” on the earth.

With a lifetime of dad-enforced and society-rewarded manners, I can’t not say thank you.

But, no thank yous here.

The girl’s boyfriend did have one suggestion.

“Try saying ‘Fuck off.’ Works like a charm.”

Walking out of Mark’s work apartment tonight, we saw a father and son throwing snowballs in the cement courtyard of the apartment complex. I think they were the snowpeople builders. Then, as we left the cluster and walked toward the Rhine, we had to pass through a full-on snowball fight. Despite our attempts to take a detour through the wet, crunchy, snowy lawn, we got pummeled by the giggly throwers. I lamely threw one back before darting under the huge elms toward the subway. Heard from some locals that it rarely snows in Cologne, and when it does, the snow doesn’t stick and if it does, it soon turns brown. Tonight was extra ordinary then. Snow makes everything beautiful and everyone happy. And, besides tearing my ACL, every snow memory is magical.

My brother, sister and I have been eating milk products for every meal. Butter on baguettes. Cheese on butter on baguettes. Milk in coffee. Cheese on butter on bread dipped in milk in coffee. Yogurt. Then, our tummies hurt and we sit and drink milk in tea. Then, we get hungry again and mow chocolate cake with milk. Then, it’s lunch time and we eat butter on chocolate-filled croissants. We supplement our dairy consumption with thinly-sliced ham, salami, prosciutto. One of the only non-animal-based products we consume is Kölsch, Cologne’s famous beer.

En espanol, Got Milk is Toma Leche, which translates into Drink Milk. We decided that the German version should be Haben Sie Milch, as in, Have Milk?

From the taste of it, seems like Europe doesn’t need a fancy Flash site and a flock of gorgeous celebs* wearing milk mustaches to get people to drink the white stuff. It just tastes better over here.

*The celeb attached to this link is, uh, German. Oops.