Life or Something Like It: Misanthropic Michaels Mania

I’m up by 5:30am and walking two miles through town and I hold the phone into the frosty air to let Rebecca hear the birds singing what could almost pass for an American tune. A two hour bus ride brings me to one of the 20,000 castles the Germans built during the middle ages, the same old stones piled on the same old land. It’s perched on a cliff and I feel like I’m in a children’s fairy tale book but I'm no prince and my princess is across the ocean. This lasts for a couple hours and I sink further into my alienation from the life I remember and, while looking at a broken sunflower, self diagnose myself as manic depressive. Eventually I’m on a boat cruising down the Rein River for about three hours. The ship, with a capacity of 300 has all of 30 people on board and the other tourists, who I sneeringly call ‘Ztupid Emerikaners’ flock below deck to keep warm and nurse over priced hot chocolates. I sit on top, outside, shivering, dreaming, lost, disbelieving, until my eyes begin to water and I wrongly blame the wind. Deportation and transportation to a German restaurant in a sleepy town on the water, a schnitzel consumed along with 20 pages of Atlas Shrugged. I seriously consider objectivist philosophy and wonder if Sean and Dan are ‘into it.’ Reversal of my manic depressive self diagnosis occurs before my pudding dessert. I look around the restaurant and realize there is confetti beneath the tables and I unconsciously put some in my pocket. Then the group retreats underground to a wine cellar and we drink a few kinds, learn some pretentious ways of proper tasting, but I just smirk and say, “I’ll stick to my Irish spirits.” Another bus ride to another town, a gondola ride up a mountain to see a German monument commemorating their defeat of France a hundred something years ago and I feel happy they won something, sad it was one thing. On the ride back down it’s raining lightly and I finally realize I failed to develop as a painter in the fifth grade, something that’s been needing to happen for some time now. Visit a torture museum that is literally empty, medieval madrigals fill the cavernous space, and I look at all the evil ways our fellow man filled others with pain, mostly stemming from misguided religion, and I realize it’s the spring of misanthropy for Michael. I wander around, catch another two hour bus ride back, read Goethe, stop off at the jazz bar for a pizza loaded with boiled eggs to go, get home, crack open a Kostriker, catch the highlights of the Manchester United game on CNN International, and begin whistling Beethoven’s Fifth. The windows are open and the sky crackles with TV static grays, and the room feels electric. It’s like a bad Polanski film and none of the characters can find their emotional core.