Prostitution: my wife doesn’t understand me (by providing herself as a slave to my sexual needs) Terrorism: the world doesn’t provide me with slaves to my sexual needs. All the pretty girls in high school never looked at me. I will martyr myself and be attended to by virgins. Hollywood: a girl catches my eye. […]
Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. […]
Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me. It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old […]
I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his […]
Does god want us to live in a cage? Doesn’t god want us to be good because we’re free? A very respected and dear friend of mine just got asked to pull down a photograph she had posted, of the blood vessels and nervous system of the human body. The request came from someone who […]
Yesterday walking down a very Turkish street I saw four groups of boys, one after the other, carrying large, menacing, (plastic) bazookas. One held his fake sub-machine gun to his friend’s head as the friend squirmed and several times tried to bat it away. An eight-year old carrying the Ramadan bread tucked it under his […]
On my last day in Berlin I visited at last the Museuminsel, Island of Museums. It feels strange to ride an arched bridge onto an island on your bike. The island being castled with stately buildings filled with treasures only makes it the stranger. My favourite was the first, which holds treasures rescued or stolen […]
Bizarre visit to the local physiotherapist today. For one thing, we speak different languages, and the overlap (in creaking German) was slim. It took us a while to understand each other. At the top of his full-length consulting room mirror was a Post-It note with a downward arrow, which said, “This is what a person […]
I’ve cycled past this jazz club in town maybe half a dozen times & never had the nerve to go in. Today in the afternoon sunlight both the doors were standing open and, oddly, two tables with bottles of soft drink stood at the entrance guarded by ribbed plastic cups. A handsome-looking man was pouring. […]
Went to a museum of ornate Islamic art and have finally learned the difference between Sunni and Shia. They began wrangling as soon as Muhammed was dead. Sunni say, the head of the church should be elected. Shi’ites say, it must be a direct descendent of Mohammed. Meantime the streets are quiet as people close […]
Tonight I saved somebody’s life. I cycled past a table on the mall where Scientologists were practising Scientology, just right out in the open as though it were nothing, were not based on shame & rooted in a foul, deliberate dismaying of the self. A beautiful, sumptuous, exquisite black woman sat paying attention and nodding […]
The longing for a messiah is understandable, but dangerous I think. Individual responsibility – that is, individual freedom of action – is for me one of the most joyous lessons life teaches.
