october 22what awaits you reader below, is an extra salty tale of travelling through the veritable tundra of midwestern progenitors, and ditching the knife and fork to eat with your hands.by the end of this page, you will sit slackjawed as both you and the protagonist have reexamined your entire bedroom technique in light of an unrelated text.
wake and scour svante's fridge. more food in a tube than i'm used to - tomatoes, salty pink caviar. juice in boxes. extra salty butter. man that's something i've never heard of svante - in the US we're all excited about light butter, unsalted butter. yeah, you got all that crazy stuff, but so many people there are so fat.
svante on the left, his bro po on the right.
i ate brownish goat cheese that was pretty hard and had good texture, on some sweet wheat crackers. and yogurt i bought at the shell last night. the shell gas station here sells ham, sausage, caviar in a tube, decent cheese. all this stuff that would be gourmet in the US - deli only. gas was like 4 dollars a gallon. (no dollar sign i can see on this keyboard)
svante puts pomade in his hair.
we head to the tire shop - before we head into the colder, harsher north we're getting the summer tires taken off, put into storage, and the metal studded winter tires from last year put back on the car.
sitting in the little lounge, a table inside the office with coffee and literature, i'm flipping through a swedish accordian enthusiast magazine, and there's a half page ad with the fellow changing the tires with an accordian strapped to his chest, looking happy out in front of his shop, luring the accordian lover market share to purchase some winter tires from a fellow squeeze boxer.
pimping in a land of maximum efficiency. riding around this old european city with svante in his maroon 1979 pontiac grand prix, amidst all the tiny cars and narrow streets, and remembering sime 97 with howard cruising stockholm by night in urban's gold cadillac convertible, i realize i know two young swedish internet studs who drive fat old american cars. with gas at 4 dollars a gallon, that's one way to be a yuppie. conspicuous consumption. it has style right, these fly cars. pimping in a land of maximum efficiency.
while mcdonald's is incredibly omnipresent, and respected by some hipsters, around stockholm, mcdonald's has not quite caught on in the north. svante reports experiencing "good burgers" at stockholm mickey D's and he eats there probably once a week. so why no explosion of mcdonald's in the north? they just can't compete with Max Burger.they have cars here i've never seen - totally compact mercedes benz four door hatchback a140 - like some subaru or something. the ambulances and taxis are volvos and mercedes. there's the volkswagon "polo" and more opels and renaults than i've seen since france. i noticed all this at svante and he said america, you have cars that we don't have. oh yeah? like what? saturns.
snoop dogg is playing here november 8th, with members of the no limit posse. it's funny to think about them dudes rolling down the street smokin' indo sippin' on glög.
what's to say about Max Burger? far less wet/juicy (read: less mayo) than giant burger. they have innovated the nugget sauce beyond american restaurants - "hot creole" was pretty good, and "green & garlic" was good and extremely strange looking.
less mayo than giant burger.
svante boasted his max burger tradition as the waitron placed a pair of plastic knives and forks on our burgeoning tray. gazing around the room full of philistines, he pronounced here they don't know how to eat - in the north we eat it with a knife and a fork. (svante lasted two bites maybe with a knife and fork before he got primal with that shit and picked it up and stuffed it in his face with his hands like a good human.)
at Max, like the tire shop, and many other restaurants, coffee is free - off to the side, ready in dispensors. why svante why? swedes love coffee, he pauses a moment, and then he adds, it's a reason for swedes to get together - 4let's have coffee' and then we can be social. which may be true but he may also be posing it as a jibe at his relatively caffeine free friend justin.
home again home again, zippedy zip we arrive at svante's parents house. the place itself deserves, and will recieve, its own web page. it's old, isolated, extremely homey, well crafted and delightful for reading and staying up past your host in the extralarge kitchen typing on an old wooden table on this goddamn !ðþ#ßöXøå omnibook swedish keyboard.
no really, i love it. there's something really incredible about making web pages all over the world at borrowed terminals late at night while my hosts sleep. four years of this ritual sharing.
and since the last entry posted last night, helpful writeback, including caleb sent me a quote correction (cicero, not pascal on the needing more time in letterwriting to make it short quote), carli and fish sent me recipes for elk fondue and marinated elk in warcestire sauce respectively, and dinah sent me some links to advice about game making.
and yes, nokia is finnish, and i used their phone on my swedish cellphone page. this is personal jounalismo! i only claimed to be honest not accurate!
so besides this,
it's easy if you try...
imagine there was a way to communicate, one on one, with select youth all over the world. imagine that skill easily traverses languages, races, cultures. imagine an activity you can practice on your own, and share with old friends or new acquaintences.yesterday i said i was going to describe my daze, and today i found that someone else has for me:
i've found it - it's called tekken. i can play, okay, and that means i can engage swedish kids honduran kids japanese kids, american kids with home video game console fighting simulators. and what does my skill say about me? as svante calls it, "crazy fingers," it will only get you so far. i don't practice enough.
tekken is only the latest successor in the war to dominate the friendly onscreen shared bludgeoning experience - think mortal combat, think street fighter, whatever. skills do translate. special moves? ehhhh....
from robert mckee's story:
the rhythm of a typical day, for example: You wake up full of energy, meet your gaze in the morning mirror, and say: "Today I'm going to get something done. No, I mean it for a change. Today I'm definitely getting something done." Off you go to "get something done" through a minefield of missed appointments, unreturned calls, pointless errands, and unrelenting hassle until you take a welcome midday lunch with friends to chat, sip wine, relocate your sanity, relax and gather your energies so you can go off to do battle with the demons of the afternoon, hoping to get done all the things you didn't get done in the morning - more missed calls, more useless tasks, and never, never enough time.he goes on, and sometimes, so do i:
Finally you hit the highway home, a road packed with cars with only one person in each. Do you car pool? No. After a hard day on the job, the last thing you want is to jump into a car with three other jerks from work. You escape into your car, snap on the radio and get in the proper lane according to the music. If classical, you hug the right; if pop, down the middle of the road; if rock, head left. We moan about traffic but never do anything about it because, in truth, we secretly enjoy rush hour; drive time is the only time most of us are ever alone. You relax, scratch what needs scratching, and add a primal scream to the music.there he's speaking about the pacing of life, as it applies to moviewriting - never should movies just action action action, there should be moments of humour, moments of relaxation, before returning to the major theme of the story.
i think that in part describes my problem with sex, with amy. and probably with chandra, maybe ayla, rya? carew perhaps, megan? oy.
rather than appreciate that sex flows and you can get excited and fall back, caress a little and finish making dinner, i more often consider the act in its entirity, judge it to be something beyond propriety in time or mood, and focus instead on the mundane task at hand. similarly, and i've heard this from coast to coast, once incited to the act, i dive for a pussy like my body odour qualifies as foreplay enough.
recently, probably a reaction to amy's sexlessrestlessness, i've been wondering if i wouldn't get more late night writing done if i lived alone. if amy and i were part time lovers or if i somehow became a desolate crank hermit and did nothing but make web pages, then i could truly come into my own as a genius artist creative genius unsapped by the needs of another being who just doesn't appreciate that links.net comes before sex in the universal resource locator everytime.
but i waste so much of my time doing dumb shit, everyday. hello, sixdegrees? counting carl's contacts? hello mpeg hunting? hello version tracker more than once a day? after i don't even have a mac?earlier i wrote this:
and what would these web pages be, or what would this life be, for any matter, without the love of a valiant woman who puts up with such an unromantic lout?
and sex is fun, amy's great to have sex with. she makes me relax and feel comfortable - once i'm in bed. she licks my ear and totally drives me nuts when i'm at the computer too long! like a cat.
love, sex, they should be in everything. and they often are.
svante's working up some sundried tomato garlic elk pasta sauce.
he showed me a leonard cohen signed cd "fraternal greetings" to his parents.
2.30, i need his dialin password. this house just erupted with noises - i think the elk is trying to escape from svante's stomach in his sleep. i grabbed a nearby handmade knife to take with me upstairs in case.
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justin hall | <justin at bud dot com>