It helps to believe you are, in fact, a pirate.

A combination of empty bottles, high prices, boredom, and a tradition of making very poor decisions led me to a bus stop in the wastelands of North Uppsala last Thursday afternoon. I had my hat, a change of clothes and a large book in my backpack, and three 21-year old girls in tow.
As virtually all of you have heard, I have become frustrated by the astronomical prices of Systembolaget, that den of godless communism, so I booked a ferry trip to Tallinn, which is the capital of Estonia, and is sort of straight south of Finland. You know, those three tiny little countries over by Russia.
The trouble was you can only book cabins for four, so I needed three others. These three girls (all of them from California, all of them studying "Media and Communications," whatever the gibbering fuck that is) were planning the same trip, and latched onto me like particularly locquacious remora eels.
They began talking at the bus stop, and continued for the two-hour trip to Stockholm without bothering to either listen to one another or even breathe. They were an unceasing flood of unpunctuated reports on homeostasis:
"Ohmygod I'm hungry I want bran flakes it makes me nervous."
"My feet itch I think my socks have a wrinkle in them ohmygod I'm nervous."
"Ohmygod its cold the road is so bumpy it's making me nervous."
Everything everywhere on the entire planet caused these women anxiety. They were nervous about the color of the carpets on the boat. They were nervous about whether their belongings had shifted about in their bags. They were nervous about the comparative advantages of the nine and a half trillion beauty products they had each brought. Was that girl looking at them funny? What about that guy? Oh my god. It makes me nervous.
By the time we'd boarded the ship (actually a rather impressive affair, with a sundeck, a sauna, a couple nightclubs, several restaurants, a piano bar, and like twenty-seven passengers total) their jabbering had coalesced in my mind (because women don't ever actually take turns when speaking or listen to what each other are saying) into one enormous run-on panic attack: "OhmygoditmakesmenervousIonlybroughtseventeenpairsofshoesandIcan'tpeewhileotherpeopleareinthezipcode"



It's about sixteen hours by ship to Tallinn, with a brief stop at Marienhamn, on the little island of Åland, which is between Sweden and Finland. For some reason, both countries have historic claims to the island, and its ownership is one of the very few things the League of Nations ever successfully resolved. It was evening by the time we disembarked, so there was nothing to see outside. We have neither a sun nor a moon here, you see.
The women immediately turned on the cabin's tiny television set to watch MTV. I caused a distraction (threw a piece of chocolate, which they all chased) and made a break for it.
So I spent most of the trip to Tallinn up in the piano bar. I bought a Cuban cigar and a double of Black Label on the rocks and read Richard Reeves' excellent biography of JFK. Did you know Kennedy was terminally ill? Yep, he had Addison's Disease, which is essentially kills the adrenal gland. The treatment is cortisone, which causes interesting side effects: a permanent appearance of a tan, increased sexual drive, and an enhanced sense of personal confidence. The failure of the adrenal gland stops production of adrenaline, so there is no fight/flight response. Explains a lot, eh?
Anyhow. After an interminable sleepless night during which I managed to come down with a miserable cold, we docked in Tallinn around 10 the next morning.
Tallinn looks pretty much like what you'd expect a quaint seaside town to look like once it's been occupied by the Soviets for seventy years and then abandoned to wither up and die. It has its charming rows of pastel buildings and little squares and old churches, but when you look closely, every other window is broken, every stone in every building and every cobbled street is cracked, and there are little pools of garbage and broken glass lurking in weedy corners of places. Still, once you wander your way up to the highest part of the city, it's not bad-looking:






And most importantly, everything's cheap. I had an entire pizza and a drink for about seven dollars, and picked up a whole lot of classly liquor for about a third what I'd have paid in Sweden. There was a little Christmas market in the main square, where bitter-looking old ladies sold pieces of dead sheep, jars of honey, candles, and lots of things with cats embroidered onto them. The girls loved it, although it made them a bit nervous.
We boarded the ship again in late afternoon, and the women went immediately to sleep, the way women seem to be able to do. I sat up, enjoying the quiet and my book, until they all awoke in unision and set about watching MTV and informing me about quite objectionable biological processes.
Then, just as their voices were approaching some sort of vapid event horizon, sounding only like "Blah blah blah shoes blah blah dancing blah blah ice cream blah" the gods of the sea and sky smiled upon me.
We ran into very heavy seas, and strong winds gusting from the northwest. The women were immediately laid low by seasickness, laying in their beds (MTV no quieter, mind you), clutching their stomachs, and whining loudly about "the rockiness."
I, however, have reason to believe I may in fact be a pirate. I immediately went out on deck, where I had a great time stomping around, suggesting quite loudly that my timbers be shivered or my wooden leg avasted. I may have called someone a lily-livered lubberly swab and indicated I was aware that his mother was a notorious Barbary courtesan.
I spent some hours after that watching the band in the nightclub--they were all Russian, dressed in zoot suits, and performing an odd blend of power ballads, Shania Twain, and Creedence. Hilarious with Russian accents, I assure you.
Nothing particularly eventful or amusing to report about the trip back, except that by the time we got back to Flogsta, the women had actually gotten on each other's nerves and now they all hate each other.
Soon as I work my way through my spoils of this trip, I will probably make another, this time to Riga, Latvia, and this time with a bunch of guys.

Itinerary

Am attending Nobel prize lectures tomorrow morning, then going to Estonia in the afternoon.

Apparently professors here never give out A's. Their grading scale is A, B, C, D, E, FX, and F, where everything E and above is passing. Which means I'm going to end up with a whole lot of B's, and that upsets me to no end, because I need to pull my GPA up at least two hundredths as it is. Fuckers.

And now my font changed because I copy/pasted the grading scale and I can't figure out how to change it back. Annoying!

Yesterday I ate something called "apple flops."

This post is mainly an excuse to tell you what I'm reading:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership
Arthur Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (I'm really surprised how impressed I am with this guy. His essay "America and Empire" completely destroys the new-Left, quasi-Leninist-Imperialism-As-Highest-State-of-Capitalism explanation of American expansion.)
G. R. Berridge, Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger
Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973.

I'm With the Kurd

Emma's been screwing a Dutchman for a while now. His name (which I am certainly not making up) is Tjis van Weinerstein, and he used to live in the opposite corridor on our floor. Astute readers will remember a party of his that I crashed back in late September.
Anyway, Emma came ranting and stumbling down the corridor yesterday afternoon somehow managing to smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, and scratch her ass simultaneously, and told me that Tjis was had just moved and was having a housewarming party. Among the guests would be his ex-girlfriend, so Emma demanded (in the name of proletarian solidarity, no less) that I go with her for moral support.
As far as I remember, Tjis has apparently moved to Guam. My bicycle is still languishing in traction somewhere, so I rode Fjarnt, the scooter we stole from some children back in August, for what seemed like hours across desolate moors and through ominous forests till we finally found this crazy little apartment complex surrounding a green gas station.
All of Tjis's friends are (like him) Ph.D. students working on obscure medical things, mostly involving properties of blood. They are a strange lot--among them, a Nigerian who introduced himself as "Stan. The MAN. With THE TAN." Also a German with a halfhearted beard who told me in excrutiating detail about his hobby of hiking from Narvik to Kiruna. For those of you fortunate enough to have no idea where they are, simply imagine the kind of place an Abominable Snowman might leave because of the windchill.
That German couple who offered me a threesome was there too. I have apparently agreed to spend New Years with them, and no doubt hilarity will ensue.
The point, though, is that I sat around with Emma, hammering beers and making faces behind the back of Tjis's ex, who reminded me of a toad who had been outcast from toad society for being too ugly. After several hours of this, Mandi showed up (a godsend, as we had just been cornered by someone explaining their research into genital warts). Mandi is an Iranian Kurd who moved into our corridor about a month ago. He had just broken up with his girlfriend of two years (and by "just" I mean "that evening") so he was more than happy to join us in our valiant effort to help Tjis solve his excess beer problem.
Important cultural note: Dutch people absolutely insist on providing all liquor when they throw a party. Keep this in mind.
By around 1 or so, everyone decided to head out to an overpriced dance club to stand around and awkwardly wish they were back home. Mandi and I said to hell with that, and took off back to Flogsta, which entailed gracing the world with a truly remarkable sight: myself and a Kurd balanced precariously on a scooter, weighted down with about eight cans of beer apiece, zipping down a wooded hill in the dark, singing "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am" at the top of our voices.
Epic.
It was a long ride back. We bonded. I heard all about his family, his theories on the Illuminati, and this girl he hooked up with on a ferry from Marienhamn once. We got back to Flogsta and decided that the night simply hadn't been surreal enough yet, so we headed out to a Hollywood-themed corridor party in building 3. The usual crowd was there, the way they usually are. Mandi picked up a girl dressed as Marilyn Monroe in about five minutes flat, and I wandered about talking Tom Waits to Germans, Propaganda Due to attentive Finns, rugby to Frenchmen who didn't understand a word, highfiving Mandi, and generally attempting to avoid the Italians. Quite late I went over to building 8 with a "lady" for a "snack," and while my side of this story would no doubt be more titillating (and I mean every inch of that pun), Mandi is the one who will deliver the punchline.
You see, when I came staggering home at about seven in the morning (which is actually about the middle of the night these days), I found Benny, Tove, a blonde girl, a police officer, a paramedic, and someone from the student housing office in the hallway, forcing Mandi's door open. Turned out Mandi's estranged girlfriend had been calling him all morning with no success, then called Benny to check on him, but after an hour of pounding on the door, Benny'd had no luck and became convinced Mandi was dead, so he called the appropriate authorities.
They got the door open and found Mandi, passed out and snoring quite loudly in a pool of his own vomit, stark naked, with the Marilyn Monroe lookalike asleep naked on his bed--at almost exactly the same instant as when I arrived, my right hand dripping blood from where I'd cut it opening a beer bottle, and carrying a bra in my left hand, which I had stuffed into my pocket back in building 8 and forgotten about.
Mandi struggled to his feet, blinking like a particularly offended mole, saw this crowd of people standing in his doorway gaping at him, saw me, grinned and waved.
Everyone turned around and looked at me. I shrugged, swinging blood and bra around in equal measures and said:
"Don't look at me. I'm with the Kurd."

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

I am one of those who stays late at the cafe.
I linger often at the overpriced and overstuffed cafes on the sidestreets off of St. Johannesgatan. They, like the world, close at ten and their underpaid but ruthlessly cheerful and attractive staff gets round to throwing me out, apologetic. I often spend time walking after that, enjoying the way the stippling of the rain through the yellow cones of the street lights.
I love the night culture. I always have. I loved it back East, where tired, broken people sat around splintering tables in their nicotine-stained work shirts and talked about television and each other. I loved working second shift, when my province of the back hallways and echoing ballrooms would be dark and empty but for those others who stayed late and wanted to talk about it. I loved the night culture even in Sacramento, where bums and scrawny guys in sleeveless jackets with silly hair and emaciated girlfriends wander around Cesar Chavez park, uncertain where to go now that the True Love cafe is closed.
There is no night culture here. I miss that sense of cameraderie I used to feel whenever I'd be out driving at four in the morning in the rain and I'd pass some other lonely pair of headlights going the opposite direction. It was the strongest sense of understanding I've ever felt. There is nothing like that here--nowhere for the rain dogs to congregate.
It is a difficult thing, being poor in Sweden. The country hasn't had a real underclass for fifty years, so there are none of the poor blue-collar areas you find in the United States, where Wal-Marts and convenience stores and other places with linoleum floors your feet stick to are open all the time, and you can always find a dive bar where desperate people sit around packing themselves full of depressants. There is nothing like that here--incomes are relatively high, so prices are high, and there is virtually no market for secondhand or used goods.
Should you ever find yourself in such a position, you can do no better than to seek out a Pole. The Poles know how to deal with poverty, and a Polish guy will be happy to teach you useful things, like how to layer newspaper between the lining of your coat to keep the wind from slicing you apart. You just have to remember to take it out and throw it away when you've been out in the rain.
Can you imagine this sort of life? Try.
Your biggest worry is your shoes. You only have the one pair, and replacing them would cost about two weeks worth of food. But you walk everywhere, since you are unwilling and unable to pay for the bus--and you're usually out later than the busses run anyway. You probably walk between six and eight miles a day, and since the snow a month ago, the world is covered in gravel which packs itself between the treads of your shoes and sets about tearing them apart. It is only a matter of time until the wet and the cold and the wear and the gravel tear your shoes to shreds--after all, you bought them three years ago in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. You're lucky you've gotten this far on them.
Your life consists of a stable routine. You eat when you wake up, because you wake up hungry. You slouch through the day, reading or sitting through classes, and get home in the early evening. By then your stomach sounds like the bassoon section of an orchestra tuning up, but you wait three more hours to cook your dinner because the kitchen will be full of Swedes skilling down the winding sentences of their slaaloming language, banging pots around and making noise, most of it directed at mocking you for the austerity of your meals. You eat slowly, trying to make it last, trying to fill your stomach at the last possible moment so that the full feeling will last until you go to sleep.
It never does, though, and it doesn't help that you've always been a bad sleeping person anyway. You've come to pride yourself on your self-discipline, though, the strength to make yourself stay in bed and continue reading when you get those grasping, growling hungers--this is how you sharpen yourself against the world.
You're tied to a cruel, damaged woman and your relationship is structured like the Cold War: two intractable opponents fighting bitter hidden skirmishes and staring each other down over an emotional wall of your own construction--your entire relationship is predicated on the principle of mutual assured destruction. You probably couldn't get out if you wanted to, but you feel that same strange loyalty to the misery it causes you that everyone feels to times of unhappiness: that it is where you truly belong.
Your thoughts and pleasures and company lie chiefly with dead men. You spend most of your time reading and thinking and writing about what they did and why; you come to know them like fixtures in your room or little landmarks you pass when you walk home.
In a certain manner, you collect them. You feel a strong affinity for those who tried and failed mainly through the intervention of forces far greater than they. After your walks, when you are tired of reading, you sit in front of the remorseless computer screen and write a story which you thought was breathtakingly original until you read Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things. You have populated it with these sad historical failures; you have breathed life back into them, into Kerensky and Cataline, into Kurt Eisner and Odovacer, even into Enver Pasha, brought them all back into a dying nighttime world to struggle and fail all over again. It is the way of things.
It is virtually impossible to go out socially--bus tickets (as people will think you unspeakably strange for walking home at 1:30 in the morning) and entry fees and alcohol tax means you cannot go out and have a couple beers on less than forty dollars. Still, though, there are some clean, well-lighted places you can go.


Johanna's is probably your best bet. They're open till three on weekends, and you can sit inside where its warm and full of unhappy old Asian women making hot dogs.




There are other pizza joints, and they are good, but they close at ten. Lilla Huset serves midget beer. For some reason, all Swedes must eat a small salad consisting entirely of sliced cabbage prior to eating any pizza.



This is the convenience store at the bottom of building 8. They're open till midnight and have a decent selection of decent things. The Turkish owner speaks English and will help you figure out the Swedish menus on your phone.



The Rosa Pantern is the only place in the city that's open twenty-four hours. It's all the way downtown, a good three miles from Flogsta, but it's your only option. I may be the only person in Sweden who knows about it, and I'm considering trying to get a job there from midnight till eight in the morning. Become the curator of my own clean, well-lighted place.


What I'm Reading
Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era
Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations
Jonathan Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China
Mehrdad Haghayeghi, Islam and Politics in Central Asia