Vatican Damage Control

The headlines on FOX News always strike me as great names for rock bands. I would buy every CD ever produced by a group called "Vatican Damage Control."

The weather has grown ingratiating, as though it were being played by Jack Lemmon in "Glengarry Glen Ross." It gets paradoxically quite cold sometimes--not necessarily at night, but rather just at random in intervals during a beautiful sunny day. I sat in the kitchen/living area estuary yesterday afternoon, watching the sun bleed down the face of building 7. Emma was chasing Benny around with a cigarette lighter. They're always falling out and trying to set one another on fire.
"We're all broken people," Robert said suddenly. He was shirtless, and he has a tattoo of the ace of spades over his heart. He was drinking the coffee I'd made that morning.

The Japanese party was a bust. It's gotten too cold at night for rooftop parties that aren't themed around nude snow-angels or ski bunny apparel. I spent some time talking to Klaus, Martin's friend, who is the Long-Screamer Guy.
Ah, it occurs to me I haven't explained the Flogsta Scream here as of yet. It's fairly straightforward--at 10:00 every night, all of the doors and windows in Flogsta fly open. People pour out onto balconies, and the buildings shake with the rhythm of feet running for exterior openings. And then the 2500-odd students in Flogsta scream their heads off. When I first moved here, it was pretty much just me and one other guy somewhere far away going "Ahhhhheehhhhhhhhscrew it." Now it goes on for a solid five minutes or more, due to two people. One is Emma--she who is known as The Pause Screamer. You see, at first everyone screams at once, then there's a beat while they all take a breath or decide whether or not to go back to watching football or screwing squidgy guys or what have you. And in that silence, Emma screams, alone.
Well, then everybody just has to scream back. And so it goes.
Klaus has a more Teutonic approach. His lung power is matched only by his rather peculiar haircut, and he is able to bellow for lengths of time previously reserved for water buffalo. The first time he demonstrated this, there was widespread applause from the constituency of Flogsta.
Anyway. I talked with him a while, and bumped into Duncan, who is a small redheaded Brit from Essex and who seems to wear cricket sweaters everywhere. He is one half of what I can only assume is a superhero/crimefighting duo--the other half is Jim, a big mohawked American. This was the first time I'd seen Duncan without Jim, and it struck me as mildly alarming, like seeing Dick Cheney in a clown suit.
We decided it was too cold up there so we left, our pockets full of nikujyaga. The Europeans promptly vanished, the way they always do when the going gets rough, and I wandered alone over to building 8, where I expected to find Piotr at his Pimps n' Hoes party, doing lines of coke off a hooker's ass or something. Instead I found four fat Hungarians playing Scrabble. I'd heard vague rumors about a good party at Varmlands nation...and "Varmlands" sounds kind of like "Warm lands," which seemed like a good plan right around then.
Unfortunately, the only other time I'd been to Varmlands was during the pub crawl. It was eighth or ninth, and my memory was hazy to say the least. But the bus pulled up to the Flogsta stop just as I passed it, and I took that as a sign from Bacchus that I was meant to find Varmlands, for good or for ill.
Of course, it took me an hour and a half of wandering Uppsala, drifting hopelessly into various nations and asking them where the hell Varmlands was. They each gave me wildly conflicting directions, many of which involved navigation based on the cathedral, which is great, except that you can't see it in the dark. I tried navigating by the stars, but I guess they're different here. Maybe it's the metric system.
At any rate, after forty days and forty nights of wandering the chilly Uppsalan desert, I crossed into the land of the Macabees, who reside in a place alarmingly called "Stabby." See photo. I found two Scots there who were looking for cigarettes. I was able to persuade them that the only smokes in town were at Varmlands, so they gladly showed me the way.
Varmlands was a party, like many others, except this one happened to be full of two hundred young nurses celebrating some sort of nursy thing. The night progressed and Europeans danced to cheesy disco, and I found Duncan and Jim and some people they knew. One of these newcomers was a profane Canadian with a distinctive Ulster accent. He and Jim got into a shouting match over the merits of Jerry Rice, exchanging the sort of insults the drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket" was good at thinking up. That was all well and entertaining until the Canadian said, "Well, at least we aren't getting our asses beat by Iraqis!"
Now, what I and Duncan and probably everybody but that Canadian knew was that Jim had lost a brother in Iraq. Maybe the Canadian did know. Whatever the case, Jim went over the table at him, Guinni flying, chairs overturning, and was punching the guy on the ground. The Canandian seemed to be trying to get his thumbs in Jim's eyes without success. Women made half-hearted screaming noises, drunken European guys looked at each other and tried to figure out what to do, and I, in the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity, hit Jim with a chair.
I was sort of expecting it to break apart and be all dramatic like in the movies. It was just a metal folding chair, though, so it just went Blaaang and bounced back up in the air. It was enough to shake Jim out of his punch-the-Canadian policy, though, and when he stood up to punch me instead, a bunch of guys were able to grab him and drag him out.
Security wanted to talk to us, of course, so the Canadian wiped the blood off his nose and pretended to speak only French. We got kicked out anyway, so we wandered to the Stora Torget where there's an Irish pub that's open till two in the morning. I bought the Canadian a Guinness and he started to explain how he hadn't meant anything by it, and he wasn't the one who'd sent Jim's brother to die, and the war never had to happen and so forth.
Which I thought brought up an interesting point. A strong argument could be (and has been) made that the war shouldn't have happened, but whether it had to happen is another idea entirely. I think it did have to happen. I think that oil had to be grabbed before the peak hits. I think bases had to be pulled out of Saudi Arabia before they sparked a civil war. I think Eisenhower's military-industrial complex and the Carlyle Group needed 87 billion dollars of defense spending. I think America had to have a war. I think it was decided years ago that the war had to happen, and even if the circumstances which made it necessary did not exist then, they have since been created. Does that make it excusable? Of course not. Any less morally, ethically, and legally repugnant? Not in the slightest. It's matter of degrees of causality. No, those thousands of people in Iraq didn't have to die for me...but they did have to die for General Electric and United Defense and Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown, and Root, and a thousand other corporations with a thousand other board members.
Anyway. We parted ways and I found Ashley and an Aussie named Sebastian. I rode on the back of Sebastian's bike halfway home, but it was cold and beastly uncomfortable, so I took to shouting abuse at him until he finally got fed up and made me get off. They both biked away, and I was left (rightly) to walk the rest of the way home. I stopped to pee on a tree and met a Frenchman who was lost. I helped him find his way back to Flogsta and stumbled home to have lengthy MSN conversations and to read a few chapters of a long biography of Ho Chi Minh.

Now the headline reads, "Low Grade Tuna." It never fails!