Errata

1) Just returned from my first day of real class. It was a small room in a big white castle, where a dour Swede showed us maps of Sweden and assigned us a textbook I've already read. The class meets five times this month, then we get assigned the "exam" and an "essay," both of which we have two weeks to do at home. I remember writing that my next set of classes last November-December, but only yesterday did I recall that there is in fact an entire other month in there, which the natives refer to as "Oktober." I will apparently have nothing to do in this month, so I guess I'd better start making some vague travel plans which can go hilariously awry.

2) There has been a certain degree of hubub--nay, even furor--over the recent change in my historically rather puritanical policy towards controlled substances. This is due to a combination of factors which I will now generously illuminate, mostly because I find myself and my own Escherian dementia endlessly fascinating to write about. First of all, I find the American college scene to be boring and boorish beyond belief--there is nothing less interesting to me than a frat boys and keg stands and empty-headed girls with red plastic cups. They congregate in shitty apartments or their parents' houses, stinking of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) desperation. Out here, though, an Irish Beat poet sings a Finnish drinking song with a guy from Shanghai while Polish anarcho-syndicalists, like smelly relics of the past, debate Captain Beefheart with a kinky British biomedical student. Not just that, but I never, ever have to drive anywhere here. I walk a lot, but I find that rather enjoyable while intoxicated--I think just sitting around while drunk is boring, unless I'm with people who are already fascinating. Most of the time, though, the idea that people get drunk and have wild, brilliant, philosophical discussions has proven to be a myth. Most people just try to list to one another what they've had to drink, and (like watching our simian President attempt to give a speech), it ceases being amusing and gets really disgusting and really tedious really fast.
ALSO I've had a sort of strange revelation recently. It occurred to me that essentially, much of human construction consists of a holy triumvirate of drugs actual, political, and spiritual, all existing for the same purpose: to distract everyone from the fact that you're essentially born fucked, that life is a terminal illness and everyone who has it eventually dies of it, and that you will work your entire life at something you hate without knowing why in order to make someone else very rich, and that when you are dead and your children are dead, no one will remember you and your life will have been as meaningless as a sneeze in a hurricane.
As I already am have a strong (though creative) habit with one of the three, through an elaborate system of moral alcohol relativism which I developed after an extensive half hour of ijtihad, I see no reason not to indulge in others which suit my fancy.

3. A week or so ago Benny told me a story. It was long and involved a trip to the emergency room, an unrelated forceful eviction of an unwanted guest in the corridor, public stripping, and bad decisions made under the influence of cheap supermarket beer. It was a roller coaster ride with a surprise ending that will leave you breathless, and the moral was that it's important not to use the kitchen cabinet with the picture of the bison on it because someone shit in there back in April.

4. The only alcohol it's legal to sell in supermarkets in Sweden is beer with less than 3.5% alcohol by volume. They translate the Swedish word into either "small beer" or "people's beer," but I have decided to combine the two and refer to it either as "the beer of the midgets" or, when in exceptionally nerdy company, "[Dwarven Beer of Wallet-Raping +1]."

5. I have recently, against both probability and my better judgment, embarked on what you "humans" refer to as a "relationship" with "Sarah," who is (unflatteringly) pictured "below." The irony that I have travelled eight thousand miles to get involved with an American who once lived in Sacramento is not lost on me, I assure you. However, she's nearly as far to the left as I am, and is double-majoring in International Media (with a focus on corporate domination and hegemony) and physics. I do recognize the danger inherent in the situation, so like a midget at a urinal, I'm going to keep on my toes.

6. A problem has presented itself. Namely, I am poor. It is difficult to work in Sweden, and I am lazy. I beat my head against the brick wall of this predicament for a few weeks, until the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, and Joe Pesci came to me in a vision the other day and applauded as I came up with the following brilliant plan:
- there are nearly one thousand female exchange students in Uppsala who need work and can't find it.
- there are forty thousand college students in Uppsala altogether.
- there is no strip club in Uppsala.
I think the solution is clear here. I was explaining this to an Australian at a party (when he heard it, he clapped me on the shoulder and said "Leave it to a German to come up with that!") and he mentioned the regulations about bringing alcohol into the country. See, you can bring in 500 liters of wine, 400 liters of beer, and 100 liters of hard alcohol....at the same time. Therefore a lot of people get trucks, drive to Copenhagen, stock up, and come home. Whenever I tell this to someone, they always say, "Dude! We should totally do that!"
No, fools. We should have someone else do that. And we should have them sell their liquor in our stripclub/speakeasy, and take a cut. As well as free liquor off the top.
So what I'm proposing essentially is that I become the crime lord of Sweden, running the vast spider web of my illicit empire from my tiny room in Flogsta. Perhaps then I'd be able to afford a working bicycle.

7. In one of the worst decisions I've ever made, when I moved in I bought a large package of the cheapest toilet paper I could find. It's called "Ekonomi Toa," but I've begun mentally referring to it as "Bismarck Toilet Paper," as it forges its path with blood and iron. It is a bitter, disillusioned sort of toilet paper, a toilet paper of the proles, the sort you only are willing to use after anaesthetizing yourself with a heavy slug of bitter Victory Gin.