Went Swimming. Then Drinking.

About noon we headed here:

This is the Badegrund. It's an old gravel quarry that's been filled with water and is used as a nice getaway from the city hustle and bustle (and these days, the heat.) B.'s parents have a tiny plot of land here on which they've parked a trailer. During the summer months, the family comes here to cool off with a nice swim.

We arrived to find B.'s parents, her sister, and a family friend already there, in their swimsuits. Took a couple of swims, had nice snacks to gnosh on, had interesting talks. The family helped me with my German, which I appreciate. B tried to read her newspaper but we kept interrupting, me asking how to say something in German and her family asking how to say something in English. She should have told us to buy a fucking dictionary.

We stayed about five hours. Even though it wasn't as hot and stifling as yesterday was, it was still pretty hot.The water felt good.
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We dropped the family friend off at the subway station on our way home, then drove up into the vineyards behind the house to a Heuriger. Had a great view of Vienna in the light of the setting sun, and the breeze on top of the hill was fantastic---cooler than lower down, and no mosquitoes!

We had a glass of half white wine, half mineral water, and ate this:

A nice hard bread with three interesting spreads.

A leisurely day. Tomorrow evening: into the center of town to watch a big parade of gay folks, all dressed up in wild costumes. Stay tuned.

Vienna, Louisiana

B. had been telling me on the phone for about a week: "It's hot in Vienna."

Yep. It's been in the 90s here for several days. Unusually hot. Add to that the fact that air conditioning in vehicles and buildings isn't too common, and you get a sticky situation.

Add to that fact the fact that there were some big rains before the big heat and you get Vienna, Louisiana. Complete with hungry mosquitoes, as I found out when we strolled down to the Mayer for a drink and a couple of bottles of wine to take home. We sat outside in the beautiful patio with a hundred or so other people. The wine was fantastic (it wins lots of awards) and the food looked great (we didn't eat) but the air was dead and the mosquitoes weren't. I took a kind of delight in swatting them, insulting them as I did: "Motherfucker!" SWAT! "Asshole!" SWAT! "Taste death!" SWAT!

I told a woman friend once: "Only the female mosquito bites."

She said: "While the male mosquito stays at home watching the game and ignoring the kids."

Well, possibly.

We walked back home, me toting the four bottles of white. We poured a couple of glasses and B. turned on the TV to watch an opera, broadcast live on an elaborate outdoor stage on the shores of a big lake near the Hungarian border. Pretty impressive. A big production.

While I wrote the previous blog post and B watched the opera, a storm brewed up. Pretty soon the rain came and it was magical. The air cooled off immediately and the wine tasted even better. I joined B in the living room, stepped out on the balcony to feel the rain. We watched the rest of the opera and finished the first bottle of wine.

A good first evening back "home."

S. Plots His Next Move

I got here about 3 hours late. The plane from Houston to Frankfurt was delayed, which delayed my connection from Frankfurt to Vienna.

You know how it goes.

But pity my poor seatmate, who was on his way from Houston to India. The delay REALLY put him in Fucked Up Position #1, but that didn't stop him from being an interesting person and a delightful seatmate. Which is what you want when your ass is glued to the middle seat on a 9.5 hour flight.

S. works as a trader for a major international oil company. He lives and works in Houston. He came to the US just after college in India to pursue his post-graduate studies. He stayed and married and now has two kids, and he and his wife are US citizens now.

And he likes the US. The family visits India every so often, to connect with the grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc. but S.'s kids are AMERICANS and the idea of ever going back to India to live is pretty much unthinkable....

But as we talked, I saw obvious conflicts. It wasn't so much that India was pulling S., but he does miss his parents and feels a kind of guilt for leaving them behind---though they have no interest in leaving India. He feels bad that he can't see them as often as he'd like.

Mostly it seems that S. feels the conflicts that anyone in his position feels----the corporate culture giveth, but it also threatens to taketh away if you don't "perform." That means working weekends, and being tethered to your fucking Blackberry 24-7. And, hey----even though you've got six weeks of vacation saved up, how DARE you take 2.5 weeks of it to travel to INDIA when we need you HERE!?

That kind of bullshit.

We talked about modern life, how people are more and more expected to perform like machines. How the things that make us human seem less and less important to more and more people. I told him about my idea of hosting small dinners at my house every two weeks. I've done this five times so far and it's been fun.

"See, that's another thing," he said. "My family hardly ever gets together with our friends anymore. Everyone is so busy! And when we do see each other we complain about this, because being together reminds us that we're hardly EVER together." The feeling in our section of the plane was: Something has gone wrong with modern life. Seriously fucking wrong.

Bruce Lee was an innovator of martial arts training methodology. His big idea was to replace traditional outdated training methods and concepts of unarmed combat with modern, workable concepts. HIs observation was, the traditional methods try to turn you into a robot when what you need to be is a free-flowing thinker and mover. More like a dancer.

Bruce had a fake tombstone constructed and he displayed it in his school for his students to think about.

It said: "In memory of a once-fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess."

I thought of that tombstone as I listened to S.

But I also had the idea he was planning his escape.