Rules or Some Such

Every place has its rules, whether you’re in America or elsewhere. Break the rules, and the penalties can vary. Fines. Judgmental stares from others. Maybe you don't even know you are living by a set of rules. “I live by my own rules,” you say. Wrong. You are a textbook nonconformist. Take a hike.

An Example:
I’m from The Crystal Coast, North Carolina, and we like our barbeque. It's got to be made with spicy vinegar. That's the rule. But see what happens when you go to South Carolina and try the barbecue. They like it with mustard. Maybe you don’t like it. Heaven forbid--maybe you do. What next? The rule says you move the family to South Carolina. Change your facebook status to “Barbecue Treason.” So long. Enjoy the fireworks. Don’t forget to send your mother a birthday card.

As you may know I am Caucasian. On time I asked an African-American woman how she was doing and she says “I’m blessed.” I made the mistake of interpreting this as a competition, and proceeded to seethe in anger."I'm blessed too, damnit!" Her answer had a strange affect on me. I'd never heard it before. Maybe this particular woman grew up saying this her whole life.Imagine that.
    My new rule is to think twice before jumping into a blind rage. Now I'm blessed, too.
 

• I live in Dusseldorf. I play by German rules, without full knowledge of societal rules. But I'm learning. Here are some mental notes:

When you go out to eat with a German, they tend to keep both hands above the table. Keep one hand below the table, and they will be suspicious as to what you are doing with that hand.

Don’t look around like a stargazer when you’re walking down the sidewalk. People have made a point of knocking me with their shoulder, as if to say “stay focused, pinhead. The answers are not in the stone garlands and naked nymphs peering down at you from the buildings.”

If you’re an old man, wear brown shoes and walk with your hands behind your back. If you’re an old lady, buy a dog that looks like you, then dye your hair to match.

• I used to live in China. I don’t know if I lived by their rules or not. As a white man, people stared at me. Basically my very existence was a spectacle. That's an exaggeration. Here is another.

Don't set the place on fire. Don't urinate on it to put it out. Fine. But who visited this scenic spot that made the sign necessary? Never mind. I know these people. Maybe this list started with 3, and gradually grew to 7. The problem, I believe, is that these restrictions are too specific. 

I'm going to put a sign on my bathroom door. These rules have not been violated. They are purely for my entertainment. Here's what it will say:

Three seems to be enough, although I could narrow this down to one:

Be respectful to the surroundings and try real hard to keep your pants on in public.

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read it here: Notes on Trying to be Famous

"I’d dream of performing to sold-out crowds. Because I was what music moguls called a “specialty singer,” my plan was to start small, singing backup for artists like Björk or Meredith Monk until being discovered."

Duck Hunting in America

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How to Shoot a Duck : ...Finding the juxtaposition between shotguns, camouflage, Larry the Cable Guy, and history....

"I didn’t notice the kick of the gun so much as the water rise up around him. When it settled, the duck was half submerged, floating like a ruined toupee."


     Thank you for reading, and big ups to David Miller for another fantastic layout...

NEW!! Published in Matador Network

 This is my new story published in Matador Nights. 

    You can read it right here How to Feed Your Lover in Spain

Big ups to David Miller for another great editing job, and thank you, dear reader, for the great comments.

Notes From My Travel Diary: Going Topless

On a summer afternoon in Düsseldorf, I went to the park and sat beside a willow tree with a steak sandwich and bottle of beer. An emerald lawn, a crushed brick walkway, hedges like walls -- no ultimate Frisbee tournaments happening here. After finishing my sandwich, I wanted to get some sun but was concerned about taking my shirt off. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after two years, it’s that Germans take their park-going very seriously.

There were an awful lot of stuffy pant / jacket combos and stern expressions. I could understand it if we were in a cemetery or locked in a conference room together, but this was a park. Who were these people? One woman was wearing black polyester pants and a quilted Chinese jacket. It looked like the sort of outfit Lady Mao might have worn while she typed up “The Little Red Book.” Which was worse -- enduring the critical stares from (mostly senior) passers-by or the shame of living with a farmer’s tan?

   
Fortunately the man sitting on a bench by the fountain made this decision easier. He was tanning, shirtless, but his belly spilled over his shorts in a way that made him look both naked and pregnant. A kinky tableau. As with most unfair comparisons, he made me feel better, not just about taking off my shirt, but basically about my existence. The sun felt good, and after taking off my shirt I decided to hike up my pants legs to my knees. But why stop there? Rest the beer bottle on your stomach, I thought. It’ll feel good.
   
And it did. Throw in a kitty pool, and you’d have a scene straight out the trailer park.

**

Notes From My Travel Diary: Kebab Allah

Suzhou, China: Every Friday I’d pay the equivalent of thirty cents and ride the bus to Shi Quan Jie. This was a street in the old district, where the walls where whitewashed, and the roofs had sweeping slopes, upturned eaves, and ceramic tiles. Few of the buildings reached over three stories high. Large birch trees lined the two lane road, flanked on either side by bubble tea stands, black market DVD shops, and boutiques showcasing China’s puzzling take on high fashion.


On my way to find a wok, I stopped at a Chinese Muslim restaurant where everyone, including the child waiters, wore tight knitted caps. The menu was in Chinese, with English translations beneath it.

Some dishes sounded peaceful: “The hashed meat meditates.”
Some sounded dangerous: “The palace explodes the diced chicken rice.”
And others were downright spooky: “Digs up the beef red.”

The sun was shining. I walked to the take-out shack attached to the restaurant. The griller was just standing around with a blue filter cigarette in his lips when I arrived. I told him how many curried lamb kebabs I wanted in Mandarin. “Sanga.” I then held up three fingers.


He screwed up his face at me. Then he held up his hand, outstretched his fingers and said “Wooga.” Five.

Was this his way of telling me that I was too skinny? Perhaps, but something told me this offer was non-negotiable. I waited for my five kebabs at an outside table. The legs might have been rat-gnawed. It stood on an open area of hardened clay between the sidewalk and a canal.


For the first two minutes, the kebab griller tapped the skewered sticks of meat above the coals. Then he stepped away from the embers to catcall a girl clicking down the sidewalk in high heels. It wasn’t subtle, whatever he said, but she turned up her nose and kept walking. Real cool. He leered at her and then turned to me, thumbing in her direction as if to say Women, go figure.


The griller brought over my kebabs and a flatbread in a plastic sleeve that read “crusty pancake.” He went back to the grill station, picked up an old copper kettle and came back to sit across from me. I’d watched his assistant – the boy baking crusty pancakes – use that same kettle to brew a cup of tea just moments earlier. Steam was still rising from the spout.

I tore off a piece of crusty pancake, and when I looked up, the griller was sucking on the spout. He was really gulping it down, and, just when I thought steam might billow out his ears, he set down the kettle and belched.

After lunch, I pulled out my notebook to make a few notes, referring to him not as “the kebab griller” but as “Kebab Allah.”


Kebab Allah burned his sleeve on a coal.


Kebab Allah threatened his assistant with a bamboo skewer again.


I’m not saying the man walked on water; however, in its own special way, watching him work did have a purifying effect on me. And he made a pretty mean kebab.

How I Came Up With My Blog Title

It wasn’t something we’d planned on, but after two years in China, my wife and I picked up and moved to Düsseldorf, Germany. It wasn’t the last place we thought we’d end up: Neither of us had ever heard of it. We arrived in Germany two months before our shipment. A microwave cooked our pizzas. Suitcases doubled as tables. At night we’d lie on the floor of our empty apartment, staring at the ceiling and wondering if the Universe had sent us here for a reason. Things could have been worse, but still, I was hoping for some sort of explanation.

A few months after settling in, Takayo and I attended a dinner party thrown by one of her colleagues. I sat across the table from Hans, a tightly-wound life coach from Berlin. He had arrived late, dressed from head to toe in Eddie Bauer, with a pair of Ray Bands dangling from his neck by a rubber tube. His gray moustache screamed 60, but he checked his phone with the enthusiasm of a teenage girl. We talked between incoming texts.

"Zo," he said, "do you have a favorite German dish?"

I told him “schweinshaxe,” or pork knuckle, cooked till crispy on a wall of fire. He seemed impressed, so I told him about Dan’s Old Farmhouse, a German restaurant in China, adorned with wagon wheels and thick-ankled waitresses.

            “It got out of control,” I continued. “Everything was ‘pork knuckle' this and ‘pork knuckle' that. I saw pork knuckles in my dreams.”

            He found this amusing. “You see what happened, don’t you?  It was NLP: Neuro-Linguistic Programming. You thought about the pork knuckle again and again until—well, here you are.”

Hans sat back in his chair, seeming very pleased with his elucidation. I liked how simple he made it sound, but as it stood, this whole “flying pork knuckle” theory was a bit airy-fairy.

“So,” I said, “are you telling me that pork knuckles caused the school to lay off my wife so we could end up in Germany?”

“You would be surprised at what powers the mind is capable of.”

There was a watercolor hanging on the wall above Hans, a splashy bouquet of flowers bursting from a melted vase. As he spoke, I pictured it falling down and smashing over his head. The sound of breaking glass fills the room, and everyone looks over and sees Hans’ head bursting through the frame like a daffodil. Again and again I imagined this until—of course nothing happened.

“I ate a Hawaiian pizza last Christmas,” I said. “Now, where’s my trip to Honolulu?”
He had to laugh like hell at that, but the conversation was shot.

Usually, I make a point of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Ask the right questions, and folks will generally surprise you. Hans, however, struck me as the type who read medical journals, then, whenever someone sneezed, mindlessly named off some corresponding disease. You might think now here’s a guy that loves to hear the sound of his own voice. And he might be. The problem is—in the back of your mind—you know there’s a slim chance that he might be right.
And, oh, did I hate him for that.

So, what if I was wrong? Perhaps what we think about most does help guide, in unforeseeable ways, our direction in life. We internalize food. But does it also internalize us?
At the time, my wife and I weren't ready to leave China. There was, we felt, still more to accomplish. The pork knuckle, however, had other ideas.
Anyway, life is good. But still, I wonder what would have happened if we'd obsessed over an Ethiopian or Siberian restaurant. I’m sure they’re nice-enough places, but let’s be honest: things could have turned a lot out worse.