A Fleeting Moment of Existential Bliss Part 1: Prelude When I was young and full of beans, I was staunchly Anti-Religion, Anti-God, Anti-Catholic, Anti-Protestant, Anti-Judaism (not anti-semitic mind you, but hugely prosemitic as I lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and all my friends growing up were Jewish), Anti-Hindu, Anti-Muslim, Anti-Buddhist... Hell, I was just Anti-any established Religion. And it wasn’t just organized religion that I couldn’t stomach, I couldn’t take flower children, vegans, crunchy granola types, free-lovin’ hippees, Ghanja smoking space-heads, retro-beatnicks, Punks, Beatlemaniacs, Trekkies, Preppies, Jocks, gangbangers, “Mean Girls,” Young Republicans, Yupsters. Gluten-free free-range organo- poopheads. Safe to say I hated them all. It’s not that I hated everyone and everything, but it was that everyone tried to fit in by conforming to some label. Maybe if I lived in a different neighborhood… Maybe not. Who knows. All I know is that I enjoyed school, but the people? Not so much. Oh, I had friends, but to be honest they were more like friendly acquaintances. My real friends then I would only start getting to know. These guys had exotic names. They were Odysseus, Bill Shakespeare (who introduced me to Pr. Hamlet, Miss Juliet, Lady Macbeth, the Moor Othello and many other fines persons), Mr. Melville and of course Mr. Hemmingway. Later I would meet them along with other fine men and women even beyond the English speaking realm as I would find Latin and German quite handy to start discovering Europeans in their own element. It was a great stroke of Luck that I received a Congressional scholarship at the age of 17 to go to Germany to study. My family was poor and had this random event not happened I wouldn’t have realized how thirsty by young brain was for language. With just a few words of German I was shipped off to a small city in the northwest of Germany close to the Dutch border. It was called Achim and wasn’t known for anything… but being close to things that were of mild to moderate cultural or historical significance. For instance, Achim is about a stone’s sthrow away from the key port city of Bremen, the second-largest port-city of the then Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Hamburg being the 1st and largest city in the contiguous FRG. Bremen is also home to the fable of the farm animal-musicians. They are a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster—all stacked up each on each—and I guess they play music? (cont.)
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 22:48:38 +0000
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