Omnes Elegiac

I went walking through Uppsala for the last time tonight.
The last straggling revelers were limping home from Stockholms Nation, the way they always are, and were waylaid by the cunning trap of Johanna's Grill Stand, where a line waits eternally for kebabs. I wandered the narrow streets of downtown, passed all the old places I kept meaning to go into and never did, and finally sat on a bench by the silent river, watching the sun go down and then come back up in the amount of time it took me to drink a cup of tea.
The wind was there too as I visited all the tired old places, but it was quiet; despondent. It used to make long speeches and shove me hatefully from behind during the long straight walk along the cemetary road, but tonight it just sighed through the trees, saying:
"This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a whimper,
But with a sigh."
For the last time I looked up at just the right time to see the high, lonely pinprick of light where a woman was putting her life in boxes in a bedroom in which I'd spent more time than I intended, but less than I'd have liked. The world has the feeling of those first amazing days where everything is new, but it is as though I am seeing a favorite old childhood film in which the characters have all aged and grown ugly and apart, dying slowly and alone.

I am told many people have strong links between smells and memories. I have never had much of a sense of smell and tend to be a fairly visual person...I equate places with memories. Memory for me has almost a tactile, physical aspect: a given time in my life brings with it a certain feeling, something which is made from but still more than the individual aspects that shaped what I was doing and why and who with. It often has a taste of the most often eaten food, a smell of new surroundings, a feel of the weather and the time of day (early Sweden, for instance, feels like chicken breaded and seasoned with lemon pepper, fried in vegetable oil, eaten at 1:30 on a warm but breezy afternoon). Those memories were everywhere tonight, reminding me that I will never be in those places or with those people again.

It is strange how goodbyes never tend to work quite right. As a former aspiring writer, I can always envision a brief, characteristically hardboiled account of the particulars, followed by a prose sucker-punch: "And they never saw each other again." I pass people on the street whom I know quite well and say hello, the way I always do, expecting to see them again soon, but chance and circumstance intervene, and it seems quite likely I will never see them again. My two corridormates came home stoned and made pasta as I went out for yet another goodbye...I wished them well with their food, as it seems likely I will never see them again. The same with my librarian friend, who I saw weeks ago and had a trivial conversation with, but who wasn't working when I dropped in for the last time. The same with so many people in so many places, from old hotels to school lunchrooms, to student housing common areas to squares in ancient cities. There is a parting, and a sense the credits should roll, but they never do.
Goodbyes too often take the shape of lonely, windy 4 AM partings, when my shirt is soaked with someone else's tears and the eloquence I know I have seems ugly and perverse in the face of such naked suffering which I so often seem to be unable to experience it myself.

What I wanted to say this morning as I packed a sobbing woman on a bus: "We knew the job was dangerous when we took it."

But I didn't, and I never do, and I never will.

This will most likely be my final post from Sweden. It is possible I will post a written account of my experiences while travelling 9,500 kilometers through seventeen cities in seven countries over the next thirty-nine days. I may instead just tell you these stories in person. This may be the end, and after sixty-odd posts and untold thousands of words, it just doesn't seem like I've said enough. You know that quote from Flaubert: "For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." Perhaps there will be more crude rhythms from me later. Perhaps the next time you hear from me will be in person.

Perhaps a lot of things.

You kids take care.

Stabbing Time to Death

Just a few things. I've been meaning to talk about Swedes in grocery stores for a while now and just have never gotten around to it. Figured since I have less than a week left, I'd better get crackin.

Swedes never use full-sized shopping carts, just the little hand-held ones and these special blue ones that you kind of drag after you on little wheels. They put their stuff up on the conveyor belt exactly one thing at a time in a neat row, and they are fanatical about using that little divider-thingy between people's groceries. If you don't put that thing on the belt after you've put all your stuff up there, the Swede after you will literally never put up their own groceries, no matter how much space has allotted between yours and theirs. They'll just stand there, twitching with silent welfare-state fury, showing absolutely no facial expression. If I ever wanted to take over Sweden, I'd just send agents to grocery stores to do this, and all of Sweden would grind to a halt.
Also, there's no bag-person and you have the choice between small, flimsy plastic bags for free and big, sturdy plastic bags that you have to put on the conveyor belt with your groceries (so you've gotta know how many you'll need) because they cost you like 1.5 kroner. They slide your stuff down one side of the metal table-thing that's after the cash register, each side separated by a retractable metal arm thing, which is controlled through some eldritch process by the cashier. In this way two people can be bagging their stuff at one time, but if both of them have a lot of stuff, there's nowhere for the next person's stuff to go, so the line backs up and people just stand around waiting for the damn old people to finish bagging. It can be an arduous experience.
Swedish grocery stores are filled with things in tubes. You can buy damn near anything in a tube: the usual condiments, but also meat and fish paste, pickled herring, fish eggs, all of which are scraped onto crackers and called "sandwiches." I know I've complained about this before, but it gets to a guy, you know?

I've started packing, and have made arrangements to loan out my room while I'm gone to a couple Polish girls I know. Spent the day wandering the city, returning the last set of library books and taking pictures of stuff (and further, realising there's nothing in this town to take pictures of except the cathedral, the river, and lots of trees) since I'm done with everything and have nothing left to do except make the rounds of goodbye parties, watching them dwindle down until finally there's just three or four inebriated Swedes and poor Sofie left.

Been thinking about it, and there's actually some things I'm looking forward to about going home. I mean, legitimately, I do want to go home...but only for a month or so, you know? Just to visit, really. But I am looking forward to seeing everyone, to getting my Netflix addiction back up and running (I already have a list of some seventy-odd films and three TV shows I'm aching to watch while munching on unhealthy food) and I'm looking forward to getting back into some sort of exercise routine. I really was looking forward to doing that this year, but then learned of the prices for gym memberships and consequently am in by far the worst shape of my life. Baseball will be good, and seeing my dog, going to San Francisco, and drinking iced tea. The year won't be bad at all, I expect.

Just...twiddling my thumbs here. Nothin doin. Nothin to see here. Go on about your business, folks.

Time is the Fire in Which We Burn

In great contrast to the last post, this one will consist entirely of me complaining angrily.

There are many things in the world which I acknowledge and accomodate but don't entirely understand. For instance, if someone says to me "It's really annoying that you know everything," I am aware that I am not allowed to reply "Yeah, well, it's really annoying that you don't know anything" but I don't entirely understand why not. I receive these complaints often! Sometimes I consider hiring someone for customer service purposes. I tell you, I am the eye of the goddamn storm.

Something else. Why is it that whenever I am about to make a transcontinental move, immediately legions of women emerge from the woodwork, suddenly quite hopelessly interested in me, each demanding my sole attention apparently for the purposes of engaging in soon-forgotten hystrionics? My last couple weeks here seem doomed to consist entirely of making frustrating, overpriced travel arrangements, and having pointless fights with angry women. Can't we just have a drink and then a manly handshake, like I do with guys? Why can't we deal with things like adults? Was there some sort of orientation class I missed? Is this mandatory? Do I actually need to be present, or could I just like put a bucket on a mop and draw kind of a frowning face on it, and they could shout and cry at that?

You know what else bothers me? Gender-segregated evenings. Always has. I have never understood the appeal of these things. I mean, I might go out with a few friends and realize that they're all guys and therefore we spend more time talking about interesting things rather than shoes, but the reason I went out with these friends wasn't simply because they're all guys. I have never understood the attraction in exclusion based on things outside of someone's control, I guess. I don't want to have a "Guys Night Out," and you know what? I also don't want to have a "White People's Night Out." All I ever really want to do is sit around, drink tasty things, eat unhealthy, greasy food, and talk to people I find interesting. I don't care in the slightest about virtually any other trait those people possess, so long as they're interesting. And if they're not interested in the conversation or want to do something else, then I trust them to be self-sufficient grown-ups and go off and do something they like instead, but the choice is theirs. This often seems to be linked to another thing I don't get: people who feel threatened by people who are smarter than they are. I love people who are smarter than me! They're almost always interesting, they have stuff I can learn (and thereby--gasp--become smarter, perhaps even as smart as they are) and I recognize that coddling myself is intellectual cowardice and isn't going to develop my personality or my intellect at all, so I try to seek out these smart people as best I can. I consider this a rational policy. Am I alone in this? Why do so many people like to hide in their insular little comfort-bubbles? I don't understand this!
Anyway. I got in trouble recently because I was sitting around drinking and chatting with these people I know and they told me to leave because more people were coming over and it was going to be a girl's-night thing, and I said something like, "You're probably right, I wouldn't want the stupendous weight of my intellect to shatter their frail minds like so many eggshells on the anvil of their own mediocrity." I maintain this statement was a paragon of rationality.

Yeah, so as I'm sure you can tell, I have nothing interesting to mention at all. Down to eight more days here. Actually getting to be about ready to be home for a while. Going to eat so much food, I tell you what.