Abfahrt Von Gedanken...Going Up...Bad Fries And Fremdenfeindlichkeit

THE WOODS ARE BURNING! Yes. And if I don’t at least try and regurgitate this filth onto something civilised, like a keyboard, it’s just going to ferment in my brain until I start foaming at the mouth and somebody gets shivved. Probably me. I’ve got a maggot in my brain for each hour of sleep that I lost last night, a monstrous debacle of jet clouds, turbulence and cold, empty hotel rooms. Frankfurt airport is Hell. No questions asked.


I should probably get some sleep, but this needs must raus. I’ve still got that weird, out of town feeling, driving like an asshole, pushing the car up to over one hundred on the drive into town, and watching other people being watched in traffic. Someone grinded past playing Lady Ga Ga – no one plays that out of their own free will, I thought, and gave the poor girl a poor sympathetic grimace. But what the hell was I doing? Where the hell was I? Goddamn these useless tangents.

Let’s start from the beginning, that would be the most rational place to commence. My diary notes are hazy at best, barely spilling over a single page of A5 but the few scraps I can salvage from it will have to do:

It’s not a binge if it doesn’t give you cardiac arrest, and then, scrawled into the corner, The Mountains....Jonny’s in America.

I’d left town on a high and was dreading the possibility that sometime, sometime soon, I would crash down suddenly and unexpectedly, in a most inconvenient place, such as up the mountain, or something, Yes, I’m afraid of Americans, I’m afraid of the worst...

But time out of town seemed almost synonymous with recuperation and the opportunity, greatly overdue, after all this forgetfulness and arrogance and gnashing of teeth, to finally just chill the fuck out. Enough shaking. There is good beer in Austria, and good people, and they know it. There were no malicious sideways glances or glares as we exited the Terminal at Graz, no pallid veils of tolerance. Those would come later, when we met the other countries. It was hot in the city and I was sweating like a pig, but that was OK.

(The author, bemused, sleep deprived, pissing away the time before climate change fear-mongering)

The others were friendly – and then some. We rolled up to a hotel in Judenberg, considerably more salubrious than the hellholes pasted over tourism leaflets in the airport, and the staff had faces made from real skin. No fakes grins and thick clumps of foundation to hide the xenophobic turmoil of their brains. Excellent good. Hours later, perhaps many hours, I strike up a conversation with one of the employees at the bar and the ice breaks easily thanks for a few somewhat endearing grammatical errors on my part. Austrian German was tougher than it looked, and the host on the plane had taken to my attempts at all kindly. But this was different – I was instantly adopted as her little pet, something to stroke and coo at when the job got dull as hell. It suited me fine, as did the extra beer and cigarettes.

Heavens forfend – twenty minutes of frantic typing and all I produce is mush. The relevant content, you couldn’t stretch it over the eye of a needle. Very poor indeed. The cider can is getting low and my keyboard’s groaning with the strain.

NB: My companion for the week has been HS Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and there is a lurking fears in the sleep deprived fibres of my brain that, sub-consciously, this will into some pathetic, sick, contrived work of pseudo-plagiarism. Hideous. But words are words and I’m out of brain cells.